Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Simple Living

The other day I was at a dinner with folks who are clearly well heeled, if not very rich. They have a tastefully furnished home, a music system for the discerning listener and a high technology kitchen. The main protagonist of my story, a lady with some pretentions to minimalism, was mulling over how important money was to her. “It has its place,” she sniffed delicately, “I live within what we earn. Basically, I am a very simple person.” This argument is decidedly specious : indeed, ‘simple’ may just be the most abused word in the English language.

This got me thinking quite a bit about what simple living means to the middle and upper economic strata; in essence, it means living with just what you need, not with what you can afford. The more I think about it, the more I realise that the difference between these terms is the difference between night and day.
The Mahatma would have approved.

Monday, December 7, 2009

On the Opening Day at Copenhagen, December 2009

This morning’s newspaper is a fascinating contradiction. The front page editorial of The Hindu, and many pieces on other pages, revolves around the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, that will debate on an issue as important as our future and the future of our children. Across the newspaper, though, are advertisements, enticing, cajoling ones, pushing the sale of 2009 model cars of every auto company, as car makers want to empty their stock out before the year ends.

You could believe, with some justification, that, as Governments across the World meet to address the single biggest challenge humanity has faced, that of catastrophic climate alteration as a result of excessive carbon in the atmosphere, the Corporate sector continues to address the only challenge it has ever faced, viz., that of increasing sales, at any cost, even if such sales was only to add carbon to the atmosphere. This is so accepted now that no one could see the contradiction, if it was served on a plate with a salad dressing around it.
Yet, we should begin to. The Corporate sector, to which all of us are dutifully attached in some capacity or the other, is the largest force in society today and the impact of, say, Toyota effecting a 25% reduction in its carbon emissions can equal that of a country. Indeed, as Paul Hawken noted, of the top 100 economies in the World today, over 51% are corporations.

The problem arises because corporations are considered to be amoral in some sense, and need not have values that are necessary for every individual to live in society. Just how this has happened beats me, yet it is true. Therefore, most of us have begun to accept that asking a company, the company you work with, for example, to reduce its pollution impact, is violating principles of a working relationship. Like many things assumed, this is never questioned or, when questioned, dismissed as heretical.

The Hindu’s editorial has a brilliant end note: The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgement on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. Are we, all members of an educated, ‘elite’, intelligent group, aware of the calamity ahead and what it means for each of us? Are we clinging to those dubious pieces of science fiction that deny that our climate is in inexorable alteration, because such prose is convenient to read and a feel-good story?

Are we willing instead, to change things around us towards a sustainable future, to make a substantial alteration to our standard of living and to become the catalyst, using the influence each of us has?

I do not have great aspirations from Copenhagen. Yet, in asking you to examine your own lifestyle, the consumptive and unsustainable way in which your business is run, as well as the future of our planet, and to disassociate all this reflection from business imperative, I am making a request, a sincere and heartfelt one, to do the right thing. As the many leaders debate and negotiate with, contradict and annoy each other, please use your circle of influence within your corporation to make a real, tangible difference to the planet, devoid of political agenda and, more likely than not, in contradiction to short term profit objectives. If the process of climate change is to be arrested, the first step will have to be taken by each one of us, not by the jesters at the court of Copenhagen.

In other words, its your problem.

Sunday, November 15, 2009

The problem with solar energy

The more I look closely at things, the murkier they seem to be. Take solar power, for instance, now much touted as the energy source of the future. The Indian Government itself has set a target, under the National Solar Energy Mission, of 20,000 megawatts (for Heaven’s sake!).
Solar energy is clean, no doubt. The problem is in the manufacture of solar cells.

Currently, much of the production comes from a process in which a chemical called cadmium telluride is used, a highly toxic compound known to be a carcinogen and now being actively chastised by many groups working on toxics. Since the life of a solar cell is about two decades (practically speaking), just where are the cells going to go, once their life is done? There is no recycling plant that I know of, in India at least, and the manufacturers of solar panels aren’t exactly lining up to receive toxic waste.

Nanosolar, a Silicon Valley ‘clean technology’ start up says it has the answer to cadmium telluride, an answer it calls CIGS. This is a combination of copper, indium, gallium and selenium, which will be less toxic and perhaps cheaper, if produced on a large scale. The issue here will be just how these metals will be extracted. Copper mines, for example, have an absymal record of toxic waste in spillage, from India to Malaysia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Mexico and parts of Africa, including Zambia, where copper virtually supports the export economy and Congo. If anything can be said in its favour, it is that copper mines have been impartial in their record of destruction. Indium is a rare metal & its extraction promises to be messy as well.

For the moment, however, we must take away two messages : the first that the cheapest form of solar power is solar thermal power, which involves heating water with sunlight to make steam, using good ol’ lenses. The second that, the only sustainable solution for all of us is to reduce our consumption of resources.
Many intelligent, educated people believe that our species will innovate its way out of this energy and climate change crisis, because we have worked ourselves out of crises, such as the food shortages of the ‘60s that led to the Green Revolution. This is silly optimism, backed by no data to support it.
There is no ‘clean’, unlimited party on this planet. Reduction, I believe, is the immediate answer.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Kumaran

When I first saw Kumaran, I must have been four or five years old and I immediately took a liking to him, a fondness that lasted many years. The reason was simple: he would shower me with chocolates and toffees, despite (unnecessary) protestations from my parents. 

He used to visit us once a month on a weekend and it was a regularity that I particularly appreciated. The procedure would be the same every month: he would stand hesitantly, just outside our large two-storeyed home, Bungalow 75, in Digboi and clear his throat with a low cough. The servants, who had seen him walk up the driveway, would let my parents know of course and my father would come down, with a resigned air, me behind him in eager anticipation. He would hand over the goodies to me with a warm smile and a somewhat pedestrian conversation with Dad in Malayalam would ensue, about the journey from Duliajan, which was an hour away from our home. 

Dad would ask the mandatory questions: how’s the family, is the job going well, any changes in the organisation, while Kumaran enquired about my brothers, then studying in Rishi Valley.  He always spoke with hesitation and deference; I never actually saw Kumaran sit down, certainly not inside a room, for he saw himself as many levels below us in a hierarchy of native definition. They would talk in that lovely sit-out outside the living room, with its views of roses and dahlias and the beautiful old tree at the edge of the large garden.  

There was a story, of course, a history of kindness and return.  Many years before I was born, my father, whose generous nature found particular inspiration in helping his brethren from Kerala, had secured a permanent low-end job for Kumaran at the Duliajan oil refinery, supported him financially in the early days and played a role in his promotion to supervisor (nepotism wasn't invented then). 

Most people - well, almost everyone really - would have expressed their gratitude at these moments, brought a box of sweets for the benefactor and then forgotten all about it. Kumaran was different. His monthly visit had just a single message: thank you, he would say, often with eyes moist, a gentle smile and that hint of apology that I could never really understand. The somewhat forced conversation - and a cup of tea - over, Kumaran would leave with a promise to return a month later, while my father entreated him to not trouble himself – a trip to Digboi took the better part of a day for the man. 

A month would pass and there he would be again. With my chocolates. 

Then he stopped coming home and, of course, I asked Dad what had happened. He’s got a job in the Gulf, he said, a place far away which, in the early 1970s, it certainly was. I recall him telling Mum that Kumaran would now make a good deal of money. “He will never forget us,” Mum said in her dramatic way and she was right, of course. 

Kumaran would write regular letters to Dad - he spoke of his family back in Kerala, enquired about everyone and asserted that he was saving money well.  It was indeed apparent at some point that he was making more money than Dad did in his last job before retirement as a Chief Internal Auditor but the tone of the letters - the deference and gratitude - never changed. 

When we moved to Bangalore in 1977, Kumaran began visiting us while on his annual holiday, taking a train up from his home town in Kerala. Some things were now different: the chocolates were imported ones, and he brought my parents small gifts - an after-shave, a perfume, a can opener - with a reiteration in the ensuing conversation: it’s because of both of you that I am what I am. Years later, he retired and returned home to Kerala. 

When he came to see Mum after Dad’s demise, he was inconsolable and I saw him some years later at our place again, that low cough, gentle smile, now on a wrinkled countenance. As he hugged me, I found it hard to relate to him, for memories - and the emotions that they kindle - aren't fungible, often they aren't even real and kindness and its payback are within.  I had never seen his family or known him and the connection - kids and teens have a long rope of Excuse  - was primarily through the goodie bag. He sat down this time in the living room and I shortly excused myself. It was the last time I saw him. 

Kumaran was, in the 1950s, just another young man from Kerala, escaping poverty by moving to a strange land called Assam.  A kind man from his home land lent him a hand and it was a clasp that never released.  Oscar Wilde once said: if you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you, but that is the principal difference between dog and man. Kumaran, that unassuming man, now a part of forgotten oral history, proved Oscar Wilde wrong, at least for a child who was watching.  And learning.....  

What made Kumaran different?  It is a question I will never know the answer to.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

The media's single obsession

The transformation of the media into a money machine is a price that India has had to pay for our economic mutation (one can’t call the post – 1991 phenomenon ‘development’ without a shudder). Consider the latest issue of Outlook Business, the cover story being on small town tycoons, who have grown businesses working out of Class C towns, without ever considering a migration to the Big City. One such entrepreneur featured grew his business – manufacturing and selling pan masala and gutka – exponentially to list among the wealthiest in the country today. The issue celebrates his success, with an article that speaks of sales, profits, diversification plans and more profits.

Instead, it should have ignored his story, for he is a merchant of death, a man who has made his millions by selling an addiction, by poisoning people, by driving to poverty, families that incur huge hospital bills on a gutka addict with oral mucous fibrosis, the precursor to cancer. By placing the onus on the Indian consumer (‘we don’t force anyone to eat anything; it is the consumer’s right to choose’), these merchants of death - for there are many like him - fool no one. The gutka consumer is largely illiterate, a victim of peer pressure and hopelessly inept at understanding the implication of his consumption, instead placing trust on a brand that betrays him with vicious regularity.

Yet, for the media, such considerations don’t matter. There is no other denominator in which business can be understood by them or by their readers, other than the cold definition of profits. This is not just regressive, it is macabre.

In GK Chesterton’s quaint story, The Man in Green, the President of a country speaks with a character named Lambert about another person named Quin.

‘Is he really off his chump, do you think?’ asked Lambert.
The old President looked after him with queerly vigilant eyes.
‘He is a man, I think,’ he said, ‘ who cares for nothing but a joke. He is a dangerous man.’
Lambert laughed. ‘Dangerous!’ he said. ‘You don’t know little Quin, Sir!’
‘Every man is dangerous,’ said the old man without moving, ‘who cares only for one thing. I was once dangerous myself.’

Saturday, September 26, 2009

banker.in.trouble @ gmail. com

A friend of mine – I will call him Alex (not his real name, I re-emphasise) - was one of the earliest Indian adopters of gmail, which advantage gave him a ‘generic’ mail address: his email id is, simply, alex @ gmail.com. This initially was quite a bother, since he ended up with a number of mails offering propositions of marriage. Indeed, as he says, while some offered him loans, one mail offered him a transplanted heart, many combined the two to offer lonely hearts. As you can see, Alex is not without a sense of humour, and he has put it to good use.

Sometime ago, he received a cryptic email from a relationship manager at a foreign bank Alex has no connection with. “Please find enclosed your mutual fund statement and let me know if you want me to do anything.” Quite obviously, this banker had the wrong guy. When Alex clicked on the PDF file that had the statement, he got quite a shock. There were about two million dollars of savings in there, invested (wisely, no doubt), by an adroit man of the same name as he, in a set of mutual fund schemes.

Well, Alex thought a bit and sent a reply to the banker. “Please sell everything and transfer the proceeds to my account. Don’t tell my wife,” he added for good measure.

For some days there was no return mail. You can well visualise an assiduous banker, burning the midnight oil (and catalysing his ubiquitous ulcer) in carrying out the instruction from a wealthy client who was going through some active turbulence at home. About a week later, the banker sent Alex a terse mail that read: “Please delete all mail communication from this mail id. Do not respond to this mail.” One can only imagine the spanking that he must have got from his client, whose carefully built portfolio of gilt edged funds was now liquidated into a savings account.

I am sure there is a lesson here somewhere (other than, be careful of Alex)………

Monday, September 21, 2009

Wait Loss

I read, recently, this most useful bit from a book called ‘Complications’ by Atul Gawande, a surgeon.
Quote
Human beings are subject to what scientists call a ‘fat paradox’. When food enters your stomach and duodenum (the upper portion of the small intestine), it triggers stretch receptors, protein receptors and fat receptors that signal “I am full”. Nothing stimulates the reaction more quickly than fat. Even a small amount, once it reaches the duodenum will cause a person to stop eating. Yet, we eat too much fat. How can this be?

The reason is speed. Foods can trigger receptors in the mouth to accelerate our intake – and, again, the most potent stimulant is fat. A little bit on the tongue, and the receptors push us to eat fast, before the gut signals shut us down. We eat fast not by chewing faster, but by chewing less. In other words, we gulp.
Unquote.

The lesson that I took away from Complications was to mimic the bovine: eat slowly, chew your food and enjoy your meal (have you ever seen a dissatisfied cow?).

Any benefits other than keeping your weight in check ? Yes, eating less apparently means living longer as well.

The first evidence that mammalian longevity could be increased came in 1935; restricting calories (without malnutrition) in rodents could delay the onset of diseases and extend life. In the July 2009 issue of Science, scientists reported that a 20 year study on rhesus monkeys showed substantially reducing caloric intake leads to longer lifespans in primates. An interesting lesson in this study was also that a low calorie diet started at any point in adulthood brings rewards of a longer lifespan, complete prevention of diabetes and, indeed, remarkable brain health. While humans live longer than primates and are (allegedly) more capable, the conclusions are obvious. Poetically put:

Fend off potent yellow fat
Keep the carbs far way
Chew in
deliberate circular motion
Prolong your stay.

(with apologies for some poetic licence)

Monday, September 14, 2009

A tribute to someone I never knew

Being an agricultural scientist is infra dig, of course. Yet, for Norman Borlaug - who died yesterday at the age of 95 - his work was his mission. If there was one man who helped the World beat the gloomy prophecy of Malthus - a prediction that population would outrun food supply for it - it was Borlaug. I owe my existence, my full stomach, my absence of anxiety about my next meal to him. So do you.

If there is a flip side to this, it is in the excesses of the Green Revolution that we see today - the salinity of fertile land, the leaching of pesticides and fertiliser into ground water, the poisoning of animal populations (including our own species), yet none of this is due to Borlaug's work. It is the greed of those who took his work away from its foundation of values and into a world of production, distribution and profitability who have caused these excesses to occur.

We are now entering an age, hopefully, of a return to organic agriculture, based on a combination of science and tradition. We need Borlaug again (version 2.0) to help feed the future population of 8 billion.
An excellent note on this extraordinary human being, written by Justin Gillis for The New York Times News Service, was published in The Hindu today

Wednesday, September 2, 2009

In 1989, twenty years ago, Vikram Seth wrote, with deep anguish, on the Tiananmen massacre. A few days ago, I came across the cutting that I had made of that poem, a remarkable verse, for its depth of feeling.

No miracle will ever clean
The memory, brutal and obscene,
Of those who, having fouled their trust,
Grew warped with dread and powerlust -
And order fire on the Square,
On unarmed people everywhere,
Brave people seeking to be free,
Of rottenness, of tyranny.

George Santayana once said: Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. This piece of history – belonging to our generation – must never be forgotten.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The Great Divide


I spent a couple of days at Kabini last weekend, facilitating a workshop for a team. We stayed at a resort that could only be classified as seven star and, at the edge of India's finest national park, it stuck out like a sore thumb with its lap pools, jacuzzi and multi-cuisine breakfast. I have always been uncomfortable in luxury, perhaps because it is my nature to be contrarian, and this was certainly no exception. There was far greater beauty outside the resort than in it and Ravi, a friend, and I spent a few idle moments in capturing this beauty. This hut, for instance, represents the maxim of eco-consciousness, even as its inhabitants are unaware of the label. They were displaced, unceremoniously I might add, from the forest when the Kabini reservoir was created in 1974 in the interests of 'the greater common good', just another family, amongst those in 117 villages who were informed that they were in the way of progress. Thirty five years and two generations later, they seethe with bitterness at the raw deal they received in compensation. A family that has moved from the status of the landed to seeking Government dole and possibly a job for a family member in the resort that I stayed in.

A few hundred yards before the reservoir is a lovely old temple, alongside which is a bilpatre tree, the fruit of which had the peculiar fermented smell that had me asking for more...... This combination, temple and tree, belongs to another era, an era in which religion and conservation worked hand-in-hand, a symphony of synergy.



...and by the tree, we met Puttuswamy, an old man who farms groundnuts with the same passion that he reserves for a commentary on the breathtaking banyan tree in his field, bigger than the biggest I have ever seen. Did some other banyan giants sink in the reservoir in 1974? What did we lose then for the gain?
What we do know is that hundreds of hectares of priceless forest were drowned in the cacophony of development. In many parts of the Kabini, the branches of trees stand out in the water, mute testimony to an outage of reason.
As I spoke to the local people, the image of a paradise lost is unmistakeable. The Kabini reservoir is now a tourist attraction for those who carry a whistle-stop checklist and need to tick this one off. Yet, the locals, the ones who have stayed and borne the brunt of brutal change ask the question: Which thought-deprived, senseless, asinine system designed this blunder that robbed them off a livelihood and future security ?
The tourists in the resort will never understand these questions. They need just the right water pressure in their jacuzzi.......

Monday, August 10, 2009

Hemant - the candle in the wind

I heard today that Hemant was gone. A candle, in the brightest moment of its life, extinguished by an unexplained calamity that modern medicine had no answer to. Hemant was not my best friend; indeed, I knew him only to a marginal extent, for he kept to himself. He was an outdoor support instructor for my training programs at Wonder Valley and I oftened marvelled at his ability to stay silent for hours on end, as participants played games and made predictable asses of themselves in pursuit of mythical team goals. In his quiet way, Hemant was a special guy, gentle to a fault, a contrast to his boisterous colleagues and I reflected this evening on the many days I spent at Wonder Valley, under the stars, making idle banter in his company.

Why? Why did he have to go, when others who are bad and nasty live to a ripe old age, leaving unhappiness in their wake? Hemant deserved to live more than most people I know and his smile - with its inherent simplicity that is the hallmark of the Pahadi - will be with me for a long long time.
What does someone's death do to us? You fret a bit, ponder as you potter around during the day, think of the times together, lament for one now gone and then ? Life goes on. As the World becomes busier by the day, there is little time for idyllic or sorrowful reflection or indeed expression. In the olden days, much time was spent in mourning, an activity so despised that professional mourners were often employed to do the job. Today, there is instead the escape that activity provides us, the sheer force of which compels us to look at the here and now, rather than to reflect.
Is there a larger purpose that we don't know about ?

Sunday, July 26, 2009

We, the Peepal

There is something magical about the rustling of the leaves of the peepal. Many years ago, when we moved in to Reach for the Sky, where our apartment is on the first floor, I noticed a small peepal sapling growing in a corner in the plot behind us. This plot had a small house, long since abandoned, and plenty of land around it The peepal is a hardy tree – it can even grow out of a crack in sheer concrete, because it gets its moisture, and nourishment, from the air. I knew that, in the course of time, it would dominate the landscape and provide beauty, shade and fruit, in addition, naturally, to the hypnotic sound of its leaves rustling in the wind. It was a rustle that The Buddha must have had inspiration from, as he meditated under it at Bodh Gaya.

The sound of the leaves on a dark night can be eerie. If you aren’t conscious of the Peepal nearby, if you are dreaming, as I often do, of nothing in particular or of everything in general, the sound can jerk you back to awareness, indeed heightened awareness, as you look around you in apprehension. Is it an animal ? you ask in that instant before the realisation.

By mid 2002, about a year after I had first seen the peepal from my backyard, the tree had grown well and a year later, it had reached the height, where its branches were at about eye level from my first floor perch. But it was in 2004 and the succeeding year, that the tree displayed its potential, as a possible transit point for the many mynas, tailor birds and crows that populate the area. On a lovely evening, we all watched a spotted owlet, its distinct call resonating in the stillness of a summer night, and it stared back at us with a touch of insolence. I hesitantly switched a torch on and it flew away, to be back the next day, and the next, with its equally vociferous mate. Now in its fifth year, the tree was tall, attired well and confident. I couldn’t have asked for a more distinguished neighbour.

I arrived from work one day to see it being chopped down. The old house itself was to be demolished, to be substituted with a much larger, modern city dwelling. The peepal was the first to go. I stood by the grill, upset and angry in equal measure, yet this was about as much as I could do. Architects are the ones who can truly prevent such idiocy, for their standing with their client gives them the credibility to propose options. Yet, architects are taught to build, never to preserve and those who do protect ecology, do so from the goodness of their heart, not from the practice of their curriculum; in a ‘professional’ course, trees are, well, unprofessional, if they don’t add to some standard measure of aesthetic appeal. …but that’s enough of discourse.

The owlets went away as well; the chopping of the peepal wasn’t the reason, for I heard them for some months after. When the new house was complete – a concrete castle, with not an inch of space for Nature – its new owners did a puja invoking blessings, no doubt, for selfish prosperity. It probably never crossed their conditioned minds that, had the peepal remained, their joy would have been infinite, beyond any measure that prosperity can define.
Last year, on our small farm at Javalagiri, we planted five peepals, and followed up with a couple of saplings in mid July this year. Maybe its the only way I know of getting back at the ignoramuses who own the house behind mine. Or perhaps, I yearn to hear the spotted owlet call out to us, from amidst the leaves of the peepal.......

Friday, July 24, 2009

The Truly Great

My father, who passed away a quarter century ago, was a study in contrasts. He had the method of an accountant (which he was by profession), yet the heart and soul of a romantic. Rummaging through his papers and clippings, I came across Keynes and Keats and his own collection of thoughts often. I seem to have got his proclivity for method for much of his own writing and clippings have been carefully preserved.
Last month, as I opened an old diary of his - which now is a hiding place for my daughter's pocket money - a little piece of paper fell out, yellowed with age. I picked it up carefully; it had the smell and the feel of another age, and the neat trimming of the paper could only have been from my Dad's sure hand. The paper had a short poem printed on it, written, alas, by an unknown author, whose style is most unusual, yet brilliantly maverick. The poem reads:
This I have learned at last
That gentleness
Is bred within the strong of heart
Those who possess
It wholly are not weak, but brave
Seeing life clear
They understand that arrogance
Is hidden fear.

My years have shown me that
Compassion mends
Wounds graven deep upon the soul
And comprehends
That valour is an empty thing
When born of hate;
And only those with tenderness
Are truly great.

I have read this many times since and it has helped me understand my father a little more. A quarter century after him, I can only label this better late than never.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Just how people choose their email ids is fascinating to observe. A number of them begin with their age or year of birth in the mail id – such as something like i-promise-i-am-not-a-moron_37@yahoo.com or shutterbug1985@bigshitnochief.com . Soon, this makes people self conscious. Every time they send a mail they worry if the truth will hurt them. “Will it get around that I am 37?” They then send out a mail to all those who have still kept in touch with them, despite their advancing years. The mail reads like this: “Please direct all communication (irrelevant spam, gossip, corny jokes, puzzles that add upto purple and the rest) to moron_halifax_texas@yahoo.com, a courageous attempt to get others to believe that the place they live in is a pleasing qualification to have on a CV. Sometime later, of course, when the downturn hits, they move to Hyderabad or Bangalore, necessitating yet another mail notifying change of identity. Why, you ask? Well, they do not wish to appear to be false, of course. When you live in Harohalli, you cannot have a Halifax mail id. The problem is that you cannot have a Harohalli, after the underscore, in your mail id as well. Its just not cool and the Yanks might think that you ain’t a comeback kid no more. This apparently complex problem is now solved: people simply appropriate the Harohalli onto their surname. So a Vinayak Harihar Rao in school (‘yuck’ to all the boys who knew him well, ‘Vinayak’ to his parents, ‘Rao’ to the PT Master, ‘Nose-digger’ to the girl sitting on the first bench), would morph into a US-returned Hari Harohalli, with an email id such as hari.harohalli@i-still-promise-i-am-not-a-moron.com . The full stop in mail ids is very powerful, much better than the underscore, more definitive than a dash. You will be amazed at just how many of India’s villages have thus entered mail ids. The defensive e-mailer always argues, with a weak smile, that the 'harohalli' is the result of the US Immigration Surname law - an argument that is now as old as the hills and rather strained.

This evolution of the email sapien carries considerable baggage. I have had, for a while now, a spreadsheet that I do not update every week, often sending mails to the original mail id. Now, I also know that these fellows checks their original mail ids at least once a week, so no doubt their year of birth or past age is still a matter of public knowledge. Perhaps, some academic type should write a paper on this matter.

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Cabin Pressure at Air India

Air India is a frustrating airline to fly, work for, read about or own. Ask me. As a flyer, I flew quite a bit on its planes, I have a friend who works for it and as a tax payer, I own a bit of it. Over the years, as the losses have grown, my shareholding has only increased as more money is sunk into digging a bigger hole. Now, airlines never make money. Richard Branson was once asked just how one could become a millionaire. “First become a billionaire, he said, “and then set up an airline!” Imagine a truly pathetic, poorly maintained airline service operating in an intensely competitive market, with a high fixed cost structure, amidst a global recession and the only thought that should hit you is “ Please, please shut this down, pay the salaries for a year to all, ground the planes and sell them at about $ 100 a kilo.”

Well, the Government is doing exactly the opposite: pumping Rs. 4000 crores into it, buying up all the new planes they can find, launching new, thoroughly unprofitable services to destinations that are well serviced by existing bleeding carriers. The Minister for Aviation is a businessman – his family owns one of India’s largest beedi brands, and he should know the rudiments of profitability. Just what could happen if Air India is not bailed out? The Aircraft unions will go on strike and a couple of airports will be besieged by staff who aren’t employable elsewhere, yet that is a small price to pay for the perpetuation of a myth. Keeping Air India alive is not compassionate capitalism (on which subject I hope to dwell, in a later note) – it is rank stupidity. So why is this asininity on display? The answer: because it is our money – yours and mine, and others, who have no accountability to us, are managing it.
Just imagine what we could do with a fraction of this money: how many trees we could plant, maintain and protect, how many villages we could install water purifiers in, how many lakes we could desilt, how many forest guards we could employ to protect our oxygen and water sources, how many energy saving bulbs we could distribute at a subsidised price. The lesson: in human development, common sense, not money, has been in short supply. Will the Government have the courage to do the right thing ?

Monday, June 15, 2009

The Selfish Gene - a twist in our tail ?

In 2007, Felix Warneken and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology found compelling evidence that chimps behave altruistically in a very human way. They help out unrelated strangers without expectation of reward, and even go to great lengths to do so. Most humans, the vast majority of them, do not.
Just why are humans so selfish ? If a community or a nation is selfish this can be explained by getting a couple of anthropologists or historians, as well as psychologists into a huddle and thereby, a coherent conclusion, if a Corporation is selfish, it can be explained away by saying that so-and-so owns 83% of it and he is selfish, so, well, the Corporation is selfish. But all (or substantially all) of humanity ?
While we are forced to conclude that the streak of selfishness exists amongst humans at a gene level (else it simply couldn't be this universal), what strikes me as remarkable is that the animal life that comes closest to humans are utterly selfless amongst their own. Three examples of gregarious species with big brains (and bigger hearts) are chimps, elephants and dolphins. Its astonishing that we have evolved (allegedly) from them, and have left the quality of selflessness behind. I read a true story the other day, of a man who would have drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, but for a couple of dolphins who actually took him on their backs close to shore. Would the human ever do this service to a predator ?
And take the chimp. We - you and I - are 97% chimpanzee. We inherited some of its bad qualities, male chauvinism being a resplendent example, and ignored its selfless nature. My question is, just how did selfishness find its way into the other 3% of our gene pool ?

Monday, June 8, 2009

Calling names

My parents' generation had a rather peculiar proclivity - that of appending professions to one's name. It was a habit that one grew up with to distinguish the million Nairs, Menons, Raghavans and Georges who circled Planet Earth. My earliest such memory is of the Honourable Pipelines Kutty, whose chief occupation, as you may possibly conjecture, was to maintain pipelines carrying crude oil in Upper Assam, where we lived. And then there was Naga Nair, a gentleman so named because of his misfortune, about fifty years ago, in being coerced to marry a Naga bride and thence spend his productive, waking moments to bringing her into the mainstream - but that's a story for another day.
I first thought that this profession-as-name habit was limited to the North East, but was mistaken. As we moved to Bangalore, there was Pesticide Radhakrishnan and Mysodet Gopinath (in the business of selling fertilizer), Vaporub Unni and Woodways Jacob (running a furniture store), Homeopathy Menon, Commander Nair and Planting Mathews. I once, at my loudest voice, bought my Dad's attention with "Dad, there's Pesticide Radhakrishnan Uncle" much to my father's amusement and my mum's embarrassment, who later admonished me. Having an inadequate appreciation of things, I then asked her if I should address this gentleman as "Pesticide Uncle" instead, upon which my mother decided that, she would let sleeping dogs - and ignorant sons - lie.

Yet, there was no better name that one given to a Mr. George Mathew, a Chartered Accountant, long since dead now. No one was really sure of his full name. Syrian Christians tend to have various combinations of George, Mathew, Abraham and Thomas, so it was agreed by all who knew him well that the best name for him would be one that incorporated them all - hence, GMAT was a born again name for the Rt Hon Mr. Mathew. He never got to know of it though, absorbed as he was, in his brief lifetime on the Planet, with racehorses and a ready wager.

This habit of profession-as-name has significantly changed, alas. Today, men with not uncommon names are known by a prefix as well: their wives' names. Hence, you have a name such as Radha Ravi, the first being the name of the wife of the latter, whose profession will always remain a mystery to the bystander in a gossip drenched conversation.
Life, as a result of this important, hiterto unheralded sociological transformation, has become just a bit more uninteresting.
This absence of spice has only been partly addressed by my dear friend Doc Verghese, the prefix for whose name is necessitated by the indisputable truth that he is Verghese Samuel, the son of Samuel Verghese.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Milking the Tender Cow

Quite unexpectedly, I came across a tender notice of The Erode District Cooperative Milk Producers Union. Now, this is exactly what a jobless fellow like me would read - its not racy, has little feminity about it and is normally on the second last page of the least read business newspaper.
I read it with morbid curiosity - it was a tender for the supply of a number of items that go into the production of mineral mixture that is fed to the cow. The materials were as follows:
1. Dicalcium phosphate
2. Sodium thio Sulphate
3. Magnesium Oxide
4. Calcite Powder
5. Ferrous Sulphate (anhydrous, whatever this means)
6. Copper Sulphate
7. Manganese Sulphate
8. Cobalt Sulphate
9. Zinc Sulphate
10. Potassium Iodide
11. Trivalent Chromium Chelate
I wonder just how much of this a cow gets every day in her diet. I wonder, further, just how much of this I get everyday in my diet.
Thankfully, I have never been a big fan of milk, despite being reading, on many occasions, of the shortage of Vitamin B12 in a vegan's diet. Maybe my tastebuds found the trivalent chromium chelate a tad sour......

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Means and Ends

When I saw, on TV, the news of the death of Prabhakaran and of his diabolical organisation, the first thought that came to my mind was a visual image of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
No man could be more different from Prabhakaran than the Dalai Lama, yet no cause, ab initio, could have been as similar as his. The Dalai Lama, over the last half century, has fought to regain his homeland, and, for his people, respect, equality and honour. The ethnic battle in Sri Lanka had a similar genesis, interestingly enough, much after the Tibetan conquest by the Chinese and the Dalai Lama's flight to India. Therefore, Prabhakaran and his ilk had a number of role models to emulate, and two primary paths - the violent and the non-violent - from which he could choose only one really. He chose the path most travelled.

The Dalai Lama, on the other hand, has traversed a long and lonely path of non-violence and gentility. This hardly guarantees result; however, there is nothing that can claim to consistently do so. I am told that Mahatma Gandhi once said, "I agree that non-violence is a bad idea. The only worse idea is violence."
Many months ago, I sat transfixed outside the Dalai Lama's residence in McLeod Ganj as he walked past the waiting gathering, his warm smile lighting the way to people's hearts. I am not a Buddhist, of course, but with the Dalai Lama this is an immaterial issue. Some months after McLeod Ganj, I met Wangchuk Fargo, a gentleman from Leh, in New Delhi in late February. He told me a story about the Dalai Lama: in the late 1990s, on a trip to a remote village in the mountains, the Dalai Lama reached a village where the population was entirely Muslim and very poor.
"Why is there no mosque in the village?" he asked
"We have no money," a villager replied, adding that the residents prayed in their homes.
Two years later, the Dalai Lama attended the inauguration of a small mosque in the village built from donations made by Tibetans and others he knew well all over the World, whom he had gently prodded to contribute. To repeat, the fact that I am not a Buddhist is, to the Dalai Lama, an irrelevant issue.

The real issue is of the means to an end. If he is a hero, a real hero, it is because he believes that the means are as important as the end and that all humans, the Chinese included, must be respected and treated with honour. If there must be a true definition of success, it must include the quality of the effort, the rectitude of the means as much as the achievement of the Goal. There is much to learn from him.

Monday, May 18, 2009

A Bag of Tools

Don't we sometimes read something that makes us think? Perhaps a paragraph, a poem, or some prose? Many years ago, I came across a short poem in my father's collection of snippets, by an unknown poet called R.L. Sharpe. 

Isn't it strange that princes and kings
And clowns that caper in sawdust rings
And common people like you and me
Are builders for eternity ?
 
Each is given a bag of tools
A shapeless mass
A book of rules
And each must make ere time has flown
A stumbling block or a stepping stone.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Of Bala Rao and other termites

My first job, after the MBA, was with a company in Kolkata that is in the business of cigarettes - need we say more? Bala Rao, the chap I reported to on the first day of my career, is now thankfully retired, but presumably still a nuisance to someone, somewhere. When I joined this company in 1991, he had already been put out to pasture at a place in one of the company's offices in Tollygunge. This was Bala's private fiefdom; he was the king and the management trainees, all eight of us, were slaves to his wishes.
I was the first to report to work and spent the large part of my initial month doing his personal work for him such as delivering his share certificates to some decrepit building that housed his broker or writing out a precis of a book that he would never read. He had an opinion on everything I did and was particularly nasty in a caustic, British sort of way; he would say something acerbic and laugh in a series of short coughs, much like a leopard with a hernia. Having been a Wodehouse fan myself, I often rehearsed my repartee in my mind, but was too scared to have a go at him - those days jobs weren't exactly easy to come by and my financial condition was far from secure. What remains a million dollar question is just how he had got into IIM Calcutta - he had the intelligence of a cabbage and emotional development of a termite, without unduly seeming to insult the biological spectrum to which they both belong.

But then that was much before I learnt about how organisations, and the rules of political alignment within them, work. Many organisations actually reward fellows like Bala for being loyal, despite widespread proof of their incompetence. Look around you, irrespective of the nature of the organisation you are associated with, and you will see doctors, managers, civil engineers, artistes and sportsmen comfortably snuggled into a corner of the organisation marked "for idiots only".
Let's come back to Bala. He once told me (and he was dead serious), "There are two ways to do things in this place. There's my way and there's the wrong way."
Possibly the only redeeming feature about Bala is that he gave me enough stuff to fill this blog!

Post Script:
In early March, I went back to Kolkata, after 18 years. I was tempted to meet Bala, to tell him what a worm he had been and how, in the many months that I worked for him, I had had a sick feeling in the stomach that I had never felt before. I let a second thought prevail; drinking a chilled beer on my first evening with a dear classmate of mine, one could think of many things that were pleasanter to contemplate. The need for retribution was past.

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

An Experiment in Public Transport

April is the first month in the last 25 years when my usage of public transport within the city will exceed my driving. Over the last year, the transition to Bangalore's bus system has been a humbling & delightful experience. On the bus from Indiranagar to Koramangala, for instance, or on the way back, one sees the microcosm of humanity that, in traffic, hides behind the ubiquitous helmet or dark-tinted screen. The air in the bus is heavy with the sweet smell of gutka, the killer substance I have elsewhere referred to as Branded Cocaine, the odd string of jasmine on a lady's hair adding to the existing heady perfume. A number of young men and women from the North East are regulars, leaving the lazy comforts of their lovely, verdant homes to labour in an alien city as watchmen, gym instructors and retail store staff. They - both men and women - are still the subject of some distasteful attention from the 'locals', despite Bangalore's cross-cultural, cosmopolitan history - the attention being entirely due to skin colour, the other Indian obsession (other than gold, that is). The odd foreigner is always interesting company for he (or she) has a most perplexed expression while conversing with the conductor, whose genetic absence of courtesy, combined with a rough, ready wit, is displayed in full splendour to the amusement of those around this odd couple. And then, there are the eunuchs.

Well, eunuchs need to travel, you know. What was most interesting for me was to learn that they were particularly well behaved with the conductor and with other passengers on the bus, in sharp contrast to the exaggerated displays of crudity that we see increasingly at traffic signals on main roads. One vocal pair sat behind me (a few anxious moments, I agree) and spoke in animated Tamil on domestic issues that we would otherwise ascribe to others, not as engendered (my childhood propensity for puns must be excused).
And finally, there are the mofussil commuters - the men and women who travel to and from the city everyday. If I had the lamp with a genie, I did wish that he gave them the opportunity to have a bath at shorter intervals. Thus, when I do take the mofussil bus, it is often with a heavy heart and a close examination of the carbon I am keeping out of the atmosphere by doing so.
A brief word on the Bangalore bus network: a huge improvement over the last decade, excellent connectivity, niche products for different price points and an army of drivers who would gladly slaughter the population to be on time, if their driving is to be witnessed from an inside-out view.
Here's the crux though: I don't find enough of 'us' on the bus. The definition of 'us'? Those who have the economic power to pollute - the middle & the upper middle strata of economic distribution. We are the problem. Just as in Mumbai, the problem is not the Bihari, but the rich Mumbaiya, who sees consumption of finite resources as his birthright, in Bangalore, the problem is the lifestyle - seeking software engineer, buying his SUV-cum-truck-cum dining-hall-in-the-back-seat, not the man from the North East. I am convinced that the tipping point for the environment will be when people who can afford something learn to not have it, rather than when people who do not have something get it.

Yes, we need more of 'us' in the bus, and not just in the air-conditioned Volvos that ply restricted routes.
The Volvo has its own charm, a subject that I shall keep for another day.

Thursday, April 23, 2009

MacKhanna's Gold

I just do not understand the Indian craze for gold - the 'festival' Akshaya Tritiya is around the corner and the marketing of gold has reached a frenzy. Gold is the cause of much distress in our country - witness the grief it brings to the millions who are the victims of unreasonable demand for it: the aged father-in-law and the young bride being two entrenched examples. Yet, no one, least of all the jewellery maker, learns. New ways are found to perpetuate this demand and the 'festival' is one such way.
Here's the odd part: gold has really no use; the bulk of it being used as an investment, the rest as jewellery that spends most of its time in a bank locker. Its investment record - if we were to 'normalise' the price trends of the last few years and look at a larger time frame - is, at best, average.
Here's the worst part: gold is a metal that kills. It is mined either by large corporations that move 250 tonnes of rock for just enough gold for a ring and then process this rock with cyanide or by artisans who use mercury @ 2-5 grams for every gram of gold recovered. Gold is an environmental catastrophe. Three additional sources of information are given below:
1. National Geographic - issue of January 2009
2. www.rootcause.in/gold.html
3. www.nodirtygold.org

The best thing we can do for the planet is to avoid buying gold. Being a responsible consumer is the single best way to drive change.

Dishing out advice to those who want to save water

An old subject, but worth a visit. I have been experimenting with a number of ways of conserving water at home and the results are surprisingly reassuring.
For starters, I learnt to wash dishes, providing many moments of mirth and relief to my wife. If you are slow to open the tap and get just the right amount of water flowing from it, the saving is enormous, a factor that I find frustrating to explain to the house maid. In addition, I have also tried to wash dishes (other than the one used to boil milk) with used lime peels. I first rinse under a tap and get the food bits off, after which lime peels are used to scrub the vessel clean, followed by a rinse.
This has a number of benefits (in addition to the lime juice, that is)
1. the phosphates in detergents are not released into the environment - phosphates are bad for plants and the worms in the soil and do not degrade, leaching instead into the groundwater.
2. its better on your hands
3. the second rinse water is best collected in a vessel and used to water the garden. Of course, if your drain leads to a backyard garden, the water from the first rinse is excellent as well for plants.

If you want to go completely organic, use coconut fibre to scrub the vessels - its great for your biceps......