Speaking in (on?) tongues in Chennai

Towards the end of the term, a student, "G," came to my office to chat. Yes, to simply chat.  "I don't know anything about you" he said, consistent with his excited and curious nature in the classroom.

When chatting, I told him about my Ecuador trip, and he asked me whether I knew Spanish, which, of course, I don't.

"It is that much more exciting to go to a place where I don't know the language" I told him. 

Here in Chennai in India, often I feel like I don't know the language. 

Even the Tamil language I know seems to be dated--there are newer expressions and cultural references about which I don't have a clue.  To complicate things, people seem to talk way too fast.  Well, speed is all relative, said Einstein; I suppose I talk way too slowly, much to the frustration of the local folks :)

But, it is not merely the Tamil language.  As I noted before, overhearing people converse in Sanskrit was quite a serendipitous moment. 

However, it doesn't even have to exotic as Sanskrit.  The morning brisk walks in the neighborhood park provides me with enough sounds to humble me about how much I don't know.

A couple of days ago, while walking in the park, I was stuck behind a group of four men, who were clearly not there for the physical activity as much to talk and have a friendly time. 

For a second, I was pissed off--they had blocked off the entire path, and they seemed not to care about those of us who were there for some serious walking.

In my mind, I contrasted this with how we behave on the bike path back in Eugene.  We typically walk maybe two abreast, and three or more means that the group splits up with some in front and the rest behind. 

Anyway, here I was stuck behind them.  Turned out that it was a neat experience as well.

The four of them were talking not only in Tamil.  They were casually mixing in English, Hindi, and Telugu. 

I am always impressed with that kind of casual mixing in of different languages--perhaps all the more because I am language-challenged :)

Many of the old high school classmates, too, are fluent in speaking more than a couple of languages.  Learning by the good old immersion approach, I suppose. 

That kind of language learning through a combination of schooling and cultural immersion is one wonderful advantage that India and Europe offer their peoples.

Now, if only I could at least learn English, eh!

iPhone: Made by Apple or Samsung?

Adds The Economist, which is the source of this graphic:

This puts Samsung in the somewhat unusual position of supplying a significant proportion of one of its main rival's products, since Samsung also makes smartphones and tablet computers of its own. Apple is one of Samsung's largest customers, and Samsung is one of Apple's biggest suppliers. This is actually part of Samsung's business model: acting as a supplier of components for others gives it the scale to produce its own products more cheaply. For its part, Apple is happy to let other firms handle component production and assembly, because that leaves it free to concentrate on its strengths: designing elegant, easy-to-use combinations of hardware, software and services.

It is complicated!

Silent Night

Slowly, the days will start getting longer in the northern hemisphere ... to everything, turn, turn, turn

Iraq War ends. So, condemn it to history classes and exams?

Main Bazaar, Pondy Bazaar, Big Bazaar, and the stalled retail revolution in India

A few weeks ago, a friend in Eugene reminded me about the bazaar at her church, for fundraising activities.

"You owe the British for having imported the word "bazaar" into the English language, thanks to their adventures in India and the Middle East" I commented with my half-baked understanding of the etymology in this context. 

Well, perhaps whatever I know is half-baked, eh!

In the small industrial town where I grew up, the Main Bazaar was the commercial part of town. From clothes to electronics to bakery, it had them in a bazaar-styled layout.  It is the bazaar air that the pedestrian single-story mall of contemporary new urbanism tries to capture too.

With the high school reunion only a few days away, I suppose I will soon find out how much that old Main Bazaar has changed, and how much of that old layout remains.

Here in Chennai, I went with my sister to a multi-level store that is like a Wal-Mart Superstore in Pondy Bazaar.  This fancy new place is called "Big Bazaar" and is one happening place in the evenings. 

Turns out that as is the case with the Wal-Mart kind of big box stores, this Big Bazaar also offers products at prices that are lower than those charged by the smaller stores.  At least, that was the case with the few things we purchased at Big Bazaar.

If the prices in the sampling of merchandise are not any outliers, and are more typical in terms of lower prices than the smaller "mom and pop stores" then I have ground-level evidence on why the stalled openness in retailing might not be advantageous to the consumer.  

While the Government is still hesitant about the next step, it's wrong to assume that global retailers will wait forever, say retail experts. “The Government is sending the wrong signals to global players. While they are wary of the policymaking process in the country, these retailers also now realise it will be a challenging task to tackle each State Government on APMC rules if FDI is ever allowed,” says Mr Arvind Singhal, Chairman, Technopak Advisors.

Global retailer Walmart has indicated that India allowing 51 per cent FDI in retail had actually exceeded its expectations. In view of the political sensitivity, the company was comfortable with a 49 per cent FDI.

Mr Raj Jain, Managing Director and CEO, Bharti Walmart, had said in November that while the FDI nod was welcome, the company will need to study the conditions and the finer details of the new policy and the impact it will have on its ability to do business in India.

I worry that the problem is not merely about India opening up to a Tesco or Walmart.  But that this is a serious symptom of acute problems in India.  Fareed Zakaria also seems to worry about the same:

Last week marked exactly 10 years since the term BRIC was coined. The catchy acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China used to describe the new powerhouse emerging markets. But the man who invented the moniker now says one of the four has been a great disappointment. No, not Russia, with all its recent troubles; not Brazil, whose economy contracted in the last quarter; and certainly not China, which continues to power on.
Goldman Sachs' Jim O'Neill says that the country that has been the biggest letdown has been India. He pointed out last week that India's inability to attract foreign investment could actually lead to a balance of payments crisis. From BRIC to basket case, "What in the World?" is going on?
Well, some numbers tell a troubling story. Growth has dipped below 7% for the first time in two years. The Indian rupee is Asia's worst performing currency this year, falling to a historic low against the dollar.
India's deficits are soaring and funding is drying up. India received less than $20 billion in foreign direct investment in the first six months of 2011. China got three times that amount. Even Russia, with the smaller GDP, took in more.
Why is India struggling? Sadly, the real problem isn't economics. India has a very dynamic private sector - probably the most dynamic in the emerging markets. But it has a government that simply doesn't work.

I hope India will soon correct its course; else, Indians might have to worry a lot about the Mayan prophesy!

Coal, Santa Claus, and the environment ... in cartoons :)

The Durban Debacle having ended only recently, in time for Christmas, means that editorial cartoonists have so many variations of the theme:

and this:

(Nerd) joke of the day: Yes, Virginia, he is ... a professor :)

ht

Maybe I should not chit-chat at the sales counters in India?

Blog readers--yes, I am talking to you--know well about my penchant for conversations with the personnel at checkout counters, back in the US.  Continuing with that personality might not do me good here in India!

The Depression-era mentality of my parents, though they are not that old to have been brought up during those dreadful years, means that there is a whole lot of old stuff being used at home.  Maybe keeping useless things is also how they tolerate me, eh!  And, those not being used are tucked away in lofts, boxes, nooks, and crannies.

Today's battle was over the old cordless phone that is quite a pain to use.  It should have been tossed into the bin (not on the street) oh, a couple of years ago.  After a few years, I finally won that battle, with my sister providing additional ammo :)

So, off we went to the electronics superstore, Croma.  It felt like India's version of the Best Buy kind of American stores.

My sister picked up a Panasonic model, as the sales woman approached us.

"Hey, any deals today?  Buy this and get 5,000 rupees off, or something?" I asked the sales person. 

She looked at me as if I had stepped off an alien aircraft. Perhaps I am an alien in India now, as much as I was one in the US until naturalization.

The sales person shifted her attention back to my sister.  I backed away.

As we exited, I had to stop to pick up the bag that I had left at the counter.  I told the security guard that there was no deal, and I needed my bag back.  He couldn't care any less.

As we exited the store, I thought that either the culture is different, or my delivery is accented, or both.  In any case, maybe I should simply shut up :(

It is a tough audience here :)

From within, the Indian economy seems even less rosy

If and when students ask me about the prospects for the US, I tell them that my long-term bets are always on my adopted country.

The USSR came and went. The Sun briefly rose in Japan, and then sank really fast.  China is only a powder-keg away from the Communist party unraveling and, in any case, the country is far from ready to deal with the coming demographic implosion. 

The "native" country?

I quote the title of Amartya Sen's book, The Argumentative Indian, and tell students that the virtue of all-talk all the time on any topic will continue to constrain its economic progress. (Though, such a take on the title is not what the book is about.)

Thus, the US wins one of two ways: either it genuinely is creative and gets ahead, or it simply waits for others to fall and then be the last one standing.  Like with the case of the Eurozone now.

A few days into the India trip, and I see no evidence to the contrary.  The data points suggest to me that India's success might have been oversold, too.

There is a huge increase in consumption, yes.  Everything from chocolates and chips to computers and cars.  But, long-term investments that could propel continuous productivity enhancements seem to be severely lacking.  From the physical manifestations in roads and power supply to education and health.

Only a few days, and this is rather depressing.

A number of areas where in the US market and non-profit ventures kick in to meet demand are through the government, here in India.  There is, in fact, an expectation that government ought to do certain things, and that it is not delivering those goods and services.

Government is thought of as the default option. And that is what bothers me.  As much as I am far from being a maniacal Republican, and with enormous sympathies coming from the left of the political center, I find it troublesome when people casually sit back expecting the government to do things.

Government, meanwhile, at the federal and state levels, is severely paralyzed--not any surprise given that the best (worst?) of the "argumentative Indians" go on to politics.  The Economist picks up on this point of paralysis:

Investors and others lament policy paralysis. Ministers shy away from big decisions, fearing accusations of graft—though Mr Singh this week urged them at least to get on with infrastructure spending. Meanwhile an obstructive opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has caused gridlock in parliament for much of the year, hoping to tap public fury over corruption.
As a result, the current parliament has done the least work of any in a quarter of a century.  

It is a similar story of paralyzed and incompetent governance at the state level--at least in Tamil Nadu, where I currently am.

The piece in the Economist was jarring for another reason: it refers to the government as "rulers."  In a democracy, leaders do not rule but govern.  In the US, we don't think of the President or a governor as a "ruler."  While the usage in the Indian context could have resulted from a lack of editing, perhaps it was intentional: referring to how much the people are "ruled" by state and federal governments.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the economic health of India is not looking good:

Local and foreign investors are already unnerved by a global slowdown. Political intransigence, continuing corruption, high inflation and the possibility that India will miss its fiscal targets all add to the government’s woes.

Another metric of the economic outlook is the exchange rate, where the rupee seems set to fall even further:

International investors are boosting bets that India’s rupee will extend the worst slide since 2008 as an economic slump deepens, suggesting a lack of confidence in the central bank’s steps to curb exchange-rate volatility. ...
The rupee, the worst performer against the dollar among Asian currencies and of the so-called BRIC nations in 2011, plunged to a record low of 54.305 per dollar on Dec. 15, poised for a third straight quarter of declines, data compiled by Bloomberg show.  

All is not well. I am all the more convinced that the US politicos should stop playing the "compete against India" card.

On the other side of the planet, back home in the US, things are picking up.  Yep, my long-term bets are always on the US.

If only Indians were a little less argumentative :(

Hitler in Chennai's Pondy Bazaar :(

If only I had the camera with me!

Back in the USA, I didn't pack my nail cutter--damn the TSA for messing me up!  And so I ventured out for a casual walk up to Pondy Bazaar, confident that I will have plenty to choose from.

So, there I was slowly walking, trying to simultaneously look at the storefronts and the path ahead of me.

I noticed a small book stall.  I have this Pavlovian reaction when I see books: I have to scan the titles.  Especially at small stalls on the pavement.

And, there in that stall it was: Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler.

It was a jolt to see Hitler's book on display.

But, I was equally delighted that India is free enough a country that such a book can be sold openly.

Now completely under the spell of curiosity, I stopped to take a look at other titles next to it.

I don't think the book stall owner had any editorial message in how he had organized the display, but it was quite creepy that on one side of Mein Kampf was some book by Rajneesh (Osho) with a portrait oh his on the cover.  And on the other was Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India.

Anyway, lesson learnt: my camera is my American Express card and I should never leave home without it!

Oh, yeah, I got myself a nail cutter.  I asked the guy if it is a good one.

"Yes, sir.  Good brand. From Korea."

Thankfully, it is not from North Korea :)

Will North Korea ever emerge from the darkness?

A couple of years ago, when discussing energy consumption patterns, I showed the class the widely discussed image in which North Korea looks completely dark, to the north of South Korea.  It was one of those images that was worth more than a few thousand words.

More recently, I had students read this essay.  When it came to discussing it in class, a couple of students jumped in right away with the 1984 comparisons.  I can still remember "J" remarking that he always thought 1984 was fictional, and never, ever imagined that it could be a reality.

What a messed up situation there!  The economic effect alone is staggering:

Back in 1970, the two countries were roughly comparable — in fact, AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt argues that, at the time of Mao Zedong’s death, North Korea’s workers were more productive and better educated than China’s. But, as you can see from the graph below, North and South Korea’s economies massively diverged around 1976, as North Korea’s rigid central-planning economy failed to keep up:

Data from the Historical Statistics for the World Economy.

During the early 1970s, North Korea’s economy stagnated, with GDP per capita flatlining until Kim Il Sung’s death. Then, in 1994, after Kim Jong Il took over, the economy started shrinking noticeably, per capita incomes fell, and the country became dependent on emergency U.N. food aid to stave off famines that had already killed as many as 3 million people. North Korea became, as Eberstadt puts it, “the world’s first and only industrialized economy to lose the capacity to feed itself.” (That said, there’s evidence that North Korea was growing weakly in the last few years of Kim Jong Il’s rule).
At the moment, North Korea’s per capita income is less than 5 percent of the South’s. As the Atlantic Council’s Peter Beck puts it, “Each year the dollar value of South Korea’s GDP expansion equals the entire North Korean economy.” 

And that is merely on the economic front.

I noted in an opinion piece a few years ago about a graduate school classmate, who was from South Korea.  When the war broke out, his parents apparently left their toddler daughter with the grandparents and fled south, with the idea that the war would end within a couple of weeks and they would all reunite.  The parents never saw their parents and the daughter since then.  In fact, they didn't even know whether the daughter was even alive. 

I am reminded of a student's remark in the context of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe because, I bet she would say the same here too: "if suicide bombers want to kill people, why don't they go near these dictators and blow themselves up? It will be a win-win-win situation."

"Will the teacher who slapped you be there?"

That was my dad's question when I updated my parents on the latest about the reunion.  Obviously, he was referring to how I was slapped silly for no fault of mine--something that he came to know about only a few years ago, and a long time since high school ended.

"No, our reunion is only about the classmates.  No teachers or anybody else" I replied.

I visualized dad at his 82 years of age walking up to the teacher, who is perhaps sixty years old by now, and slapping him. 

One of my favorite jokes about this "slapper," which makes me practically laugh loudly is this: we were getting ready to line up for the assembly and this "slapper" was my class teacher as well. (The "home room teacher" in the American parlance.)  The "slapper" was not around.  So, a classmate whispered that perhaps he forgot his wristwatch and, therefore, didn't know what time it was.

I quipped that given his size, "slapper" didn't wear a wristwatch but wore a big wall clock around his wrist.

Before you think that this was why I was slapped, well, no ma'am.  It was a long time after this joke, if one can call it thus, that I was slapped for I know not why :)

Or, maybe he slapped me because quite some time prior to that, he had asked us in the class which teacher we feared the most.  I said I was afraid of the chemistry teacher, because the word was that he would even take tubing used in the lab to beat the crap out of boys.  So, was it the "slapper" teaching me a lesson on why he ought to have been feared more?

The other day, while I was waiting for my bag to arrive at the carousel at the airport, a mother and two kids were standing immediately to my left.  One kid, perhaps about eight or ten, leaned over the carousel and the mother whacked him on his head almost instantaneously.  The kid turned around and looked at the mom perhaps wondering, as much as I did, at the senselessness of the whack. 

Slapping just ain't funny!

It is violence.

It is, however, hysterically funny, when Groucho Marx slaps in "Duck Soup," which makes me smile even as I type here :) 



So, yes, I am mighty glad, and so is dad, that the teacher who slapped me won't be at the reunion.

To pick and choose ... from the stinking garbage heap :(

After a few days of walking around, I see that there are three reasons for rotting garbage piling up on the streets of Chennai:

• People casually toss them away, especially after eating fast foods at cafes and mobile stands
• Even when they responsibly throw them in the corporation bins, the dogs have a field day digging through the scrap and, in the process, a whole lot of trash ends up on the streets
• The rag pickers toss things out of the bins in their search for anything salvageable.

The net result: there seems to be a permanent putrefied stink in the air.

From a public policy perspective, the rotting garbage is a public health menace.  One can easily imagine that the public health implications are not that far away from the London of the old, where a single water pump turned out to be the source of a deadly cholera. 

Now, we could go after those who litter--the ones who casually toss away the trash.  That might be the easiest one.

However, that won't do a damn thing given the other two possible ways in trash gets scattered: the dogs and rag pickers. 

The rag pickers are not at fault either--after all, their livelihoods/life depends on other people's trash.  In an earlier context, I noted this news report:

Ms. Bhadakwad had come 18,000 kilometres to the annual U.N. climate conference in Cancun on behalf of 6,000 organised landfill recyclers in her hometown Pune, to demand access to the waste now trucked instead to a new incinerator. Without their dump, they’re trying to survive by going door to door for trash in a community 20 kilometres away.
“We have a right to the waste that can be recycled,” Ms. Bhadakwad told a reporter.

The lack of economic opportunities mean that the poor do have a right to the garbage.   The problem then is to figure out how to provide productive economic opportunities at that level.  The piles of garbage are, therefore, reminders of the enormous challenges facing the country.

I am once again ticked off thinking about American politicians, including President Obama, who frequently talk about the US having to compete against India.  I wonder if any of them see this kind of a ground-level reality.

As for the dogs, I wish the locals would elect dogcatchers instead of politicians who are only out to swindle.

How much has life changed? Like so :)

Ah, the New Yorker cartoons! 

When following pretty young girls can be good

Even in the small town where I grew up, I never liked to be in the middle of crowds.  It was the dislike for the crowds, on top of the agnosticism then,  that kept me away from the local temple where the annual celebrations brought the world's population--well, it seemed that way to me!

In the US, after living in small cities except during five of the nearly twenty-five years there, the only reason I mix in with crowds is when I am a tourist.

Which is how I ended up at the busy intersection across from the T-Nagar bus terminus in Chennai.

I had gone for a walk from home, and it seemed like with every step that I was taking, there were a hundred people coming from nowhere.

By the time I reached the insanely crowded and commercial Usman Road, I had to dodge my way through narrow gaps that I needed to aim for among the people.

These are the kind of crowds that some of the students in my classes simply cannot even imagine--after all, they come from towns with populations that are in the hundreds, not even in the thousands.

When I reached the bus terminus, I wanted to cross the road.

Now, I was stuck.  I do not have the street smarts to simultaneously watch for traffic that could come from any direction at any given time, and to make sure that I would not step anything that I would not want to.

I spotted three young girls--perhaps in their late teens--who were casually walking as if there were no crowds nor traffic.  And giggling away!  It seemed like they would cross the street where I wanted to. I tagged along.

They stepped on to the road when I would not have dared to--right in front of two autorickshaws.  I followed two steps behind, worried that the auto would dodge the girls and knock me.

The whole thing, now as I replay it in my mind, could be straight from a Road Runner cartoon, or from a Tom and Jerry chase.  The girls didn't even pause to consider the monstrous transit bus that was coming our way, similar to how the roadrunner wouldn't even care for the contraptions that Wile E Coyote would set up along the road.

I had found my leaders and I faithfully followed them.  The monster bus came nowhere close to me!

After reaching the other side, I quickly overtook them and kept walking.  Soon I was stuck behind a wall of humanity that wasn't moving.

I then spotted the girls once again ahead of me.  How could that have been possible?

Alfred Hitchcock made "The Birds" in Tamil?

So, there I was in front of the good ol' telly, with my mother flicking the channels, and I literally--I mean, literally--shouted "that is the Hitchcock movie, "The Birds.""

It sure was.  Mom said she watched it when they visited the US years ago.

But, surprise, surprise, it was dubbed in Tamil.

Quite a surreal experience for me, to watch a classic Hitchcock movie, with my mother, and the movie's dialogs in Tamil.  The blonde Melanie speaking Tamil was one for the ages.

It seemed like I was watching "Whose line is it anyway" where those funny guys mouth hilarious lines to random movie clips. Or, like when Drew Carey pretends to speak Chinese when all he does is talk mumbo-jumbo.

This experience tops the one from yesterday, when I spotted in a channel one of my favorite movies ever: Harold and Kumar go to White Castle. 

Now, that movie was in English but had English subtitles as well.  After a a while, I realized that I had stopped listening to the awesome lines and was merely reading the subtitles.

Dubbing and subtitling can seriously affect the movie experience.  But, there is one particular downside to dubbing: it takes away a wonderful opportunity for the non-native viewer to learn English.

A few years ago, the visiting Swedish students who stayed with us always impressed me with their command of the English language.  They said that in addition to learning the language in school, they watched a whole lot of American movies and television shows.  Even shows like Jerry Springer! 

This was possible for them in Sweden only because the imports were (are?) not dubbed into Swedish, while most other European countries routinely dubbed the American shows into local languages.

Given such an opportunity to learn English, one would think that there would be no dubbing in India.  After all, to begin with, there is a huge population that has more than a basic idea of the language. 

Even more than that, wouldn't India stand to gain if people watched the shows without them being dubbed into Tamil or any other local language, when so much of India's economic growth is tied to global outsourcing where knowledge of English is a phenomenal competitive advantage?   

Is any learning taking place in schools?

So, here I am half way around the world from my home, and it is fascinating to read two pieces on the same question, one in the US and the other in India.

They both tell us that there is something seriously wrong with education.

The paper here has a piece on education, in which the author--Suman Bhattacharjea--summarizes a recent study completed by her and two others:

Over 96 per cent of all children are now enrolled in school. Yet very often, we forget that children go to school in order to learn. Increasingly, empirical evidence suggests that enrolment in school does not automatically ensure learning....
This study indicates that neither higher educational qualifications nor more teacher training are associated with better student learning. What does matter is a teachers' ability to teach.

Aha, doesn't that sound familiar?  Like this argument of mine that in the US, we over-invest and overpay teachers with graduate degrees when there is no strong evidence that those graduate degrees contribute to higher student learning outcomes!

Meanwhile, from the US is this report:

Nearly half of America's public schools didn't meet federal achievement standards this year, marking the largest failure rate since the much-criticized No Child Left Behind Law took effect a decade ago, according to a national report released Thursday.

 Now, I am no fan of the NCLB Act. and for the manner in which tests become the focus.  But, we do need to constantly ask ourselves whether our students are learning, right?