On the life sucking bureaucracy in India!

At his blog, Ramesh has an ongoing series in which he discusses India's bizarre and byzantine bureaucratic bumblings.  Like in this one, for instance.  This post might add to Ramesh's frustrations!

Writing about the bureaucracy, Shikha Dalmia, argues that India is a long, long way from kicking America's economic butt, thanks to its babus:

India, I am quite confident, ain’t going to perch its tricolored flag atop the globe anytime soon. Not until it does something about its soul-sapping bureaucracy. The world’s largest democracy doesn’t have rule of law — it has the rule of babus, the local term for petty bureaucrats. And so long as they keep challenging India’s entrepreneurs, there isn’t much chance that India will challenge the West.
... India’s horrendous bureaucracy systematically thwarts its citizens, killing productivity, often for no apparent reason but to exercise its powers over them.  

Dalmia goes on to describe the ordeal she and her family faced with bean-counting babus.  I bet every Indian has more than a few horror stories to tell, and they might even think her story is nothing to write about!

Dalmia makes an important point:

[A] routine matter that shouldn’t have taken more than 10 minutes swallowed 30 hours of our lives. Yet, by Indian standards, ours was a happy ending. Episodes even more Kafkaesque than ours are replayed daily across the country. We had time, resources and the savvy to devote to a matter that, ultimately, didn’t have existential stakes for us. But what about, say, a poor rickshaw driver who needs a license to earn his meager income? Or a farmer who needs the title to his land (something that can take 240 to 400 days in some parts of the country)?

Yes, yes, and yes. 

It is the gross inefficiency at these everyday levels that make life so cumbersome in India.  Even opening a bank account is a ten-minute affair in the US, in contrast to the day(s)-consuming operation it can be in India, as my niece recently found out.  A bank account where we go to entrust the bank with our money!

In Poor Economics, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo often point out how the everyday small things, about which we don't even think twice, are awfully time and energy sucking activities for the poor.  In India's case, the babus make it worse, when their job is to, ironically, make things easier for the public they serve.  So, yes, a rickshaw driver or a farmer is screwed, many times over, by the bureaucracy.

Kafkaesque bureaucrats, indeed!

Obama v. Romney: which elite do you prefer?

James Surowiecki neatly summarizes Romney's issues related to Bain:

What Romney’s career shows, after all, is that once you’re at the top, you can keep being called C.E.O. even if you’re not even working at the company. You can get paid a hundred grand a year—chump change for Romney, to be sure, but twice the U.S. median income—while doing, by your own account, nothing at all for the company. You can build up an I.R.A. worth tens of millions of dollars when the maximum annual contribution is four thousand dollars. (Henry Blodget suggests here that Romney’s ownership of Bain Capital shares may explain how that I.R.A. could have legally gotten so big.) And, above all, if you manage a private-equity firm, you can reap the benefit of the carried-interest tax loophole and pay a much lower tax rate on your income than the vast majority of Americans, and you can continue to reap the benefit of that loophole even after you stop working for the firm. None of these things is illegal, but none of them are things that ordinary Americans can benefit from, and that’s the real scandal of Romney’s career at Bain.

It is different world that Romney comes from.

Not that Obama's world is all to familiar either.  The two candidates are both elitists in their own ways.  Their shared Ivy League elitism, for one; no wonder even the crooked Richard Nixon wanted to kick them in the nuts--he knew what that (lack of) elitist cred means.

The election, therefore, comes down to which kind of elitism voters prefer.  Strange, eh!

[While] you might think one or the other group more preferable or more offensive for reasons of politics, culture, or taste, you certainly cannot argue that either one of them is in close touch with "average" or "ordinary" or even "middle-class" people, however those terms might be defined. And although both they and their supporters may shout about "radical left-wing professors” on the one hand or "Gordon Gekko" on the other, neither Obama nor Romney can plausibly claim to be leading a populist revolution against the "elites" who are allegedly destroying America.

Cartoon of the Day: Faux News

Remembrance of things past--Kati Patang

A long time ago, in early high school years, I watched a KB movie--it was a black/white Tamil movie, whose title and plot completely escapes me.  I kind of recall a scene in which an important letter lies on the ground, like in the veranda of the home or something, and the inked lettering gets washed out by the falling raindrops.

For whatever reason, the lead female character in that movie--a young woman--often hummed a Hindi song, which is how I came to know about the song here:



To this day, I have no clue whatsoever as to the meaning of the song's lyrics--it just sounds awesome, and that is all I care about!

BTW, "remembrance" is a long-running series here.  Click here for the entire collection

A prostitute vouches for Romney's sexual charisma

The Onion's quality seems to be slipping ... this ain't one of the funniest from America's Finest News Source, but will do for now, especially when The Daily Show is on vacation :)

The closing of the American mind, through students' diction & grammar

A few years ago, soon after I moved to Oregon, I got an appreciatory email from a student.  But, I simply could not broadcast that email because the student had erroneously written there how much he "had taken for granite" the things I did and said.

Such errors are no mere slip, like how me might end up with the word "pubic" when we meant "public."  These errors are way more than mere laugh lines and are indicative of something seriously wrong.  A selective listing of errors in this essay might make you smile and chuckle, but should simultaneously worry you.

To their credit, students are often frank when it comes to admitting their shortcomings and attitude problems. Like the guy who owned up to doing "halfhazard work." Or the one who admitted that he wasn't smart enough to go to an "Ivory League school." Another lamented not being astute enough to follow the lecture on "Taco Bell's Canon" in music-appreciation class.

Given the ivory tower of higher education, well, Ivory League School sounds right to me :)

All the more important then Allan Bloom's work becomes.  Sean Collins writes that Allan Bloom and his seminal work cannot be simply pigeonholed; the debate has become that way only because the left and the right are both being selective in how they (ab)use The Closing of the American Mind.  Bloom, he writes, wants to:

uphold liberal education, and yet our modern notion of such an education was the product of the Enlightenment, of which he is highly suspicious.

That, in a nutshell, has been my complex relationship with higher education. 

Collins further notes:

Bloom writes that openness is an essential feature of the academy: ‘The university is the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own. It is intended to encourage the non-instrumental use of reason for its own sake, to provide the atmosphere where the moral and physical superiority of the dominant will not intimidate philosophic doubt.’ However, over time openness was transformed into a mindless relativism: ‘Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power.’ If the university preaches that all truths are relative, what’s the point of searching for truth? Openness, ironically, leads to the ‘closing’ of the American mind. 

The closing of the mind gets reflected even in the casual attitudes we adopt when students do not display the levels of thinking and writing.   Perhaps we are taking higher education "for granite" :(

Geography of crime intersects with philosophy and law

Sometimes, no, make that often, I wonder and worry that academics often ignore understanding and debating the potential ethical and legal issues even as they relentlessly and zealously pursue intellectual inquiry.  The analytical and reasoning brain, to an extent, is a curse for our species.  Of course, I would never, ever, argue for censoring intellectual pursuit.  But, can we at least pay a little bit of attention to issues larger than the intellectual puzzle itself, even as we keep moving forward?

At a couple of meetings of the Association of American Geographers, I was curious about the sessions devoted to the geography of crime.  This is pretty much what I do when I go these meetings--I attend more sessions outside my areas of familiarity compared to the sessions related to the topics I usually read, write, and teach about.  To me, such sessions are wonderful opportunities to know something about topics that I otherwise would have no clue.  Further, the geography of crime struck me as something a tad creepy, but I couldn't quite identify why it felt so.

Having been a "student" at those sessions, it turns out, came in handy when the university where I teach decided to launch an academic program in "crime analysis."  After initially contributing my two-cents worth, I rapidly pulled back.  On top of my typical unwillingness to participate in moneymaking ponzi schemes that increasingly universities develop, it was that lingering creepy feeling that pulled me back even more.  By then, I knew what was beginning to worry me: focusing on developing technical approaches to crime analysis and prevention without paying enough attention to the numerous philosophical and legal issues.

I decided not to engage my fellow faculty and administrators on this troubling notion because, over the years, I have come to understand that raising such questions mean that they are ignored or brushed off or, worse, become the reasons for me to end up in even more trouble.  There was at least one conversation with one faculty member, "B," where I shared some of my concerns.  But then "B," like me, is an outlaw most of the times, and I knew that we were not going to achieve anything, other than elevating our blood pressure!

Ronald Bailey articulates well that creepy feeling I continue to have:

[We] should always keep in mind that any new technology that helps the police to better protect citizens can also be used to better oppress them.

The worry about police oppression might be strange, given my personal life that is nothing but worse than plain vanilla.  But, hey, this is not about me :)

Bailey writes that researchers claim:

to have developed computer programs that can predict not who will commit a crime, but at what locations they are likely to occur. Welcome to the brave new world of predictive policing.

Yes, Virginia, we are quickly, and unthinkingly, morphing into the futuristic times of Minority Report!

How might predictive policing interfere with the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment guarantee that Americans are to be free unreasonable searches and seizures? Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia notes in an article, "Predictive Policing: The Future of Reasonable Suspicion," forthcoming in the Emory Law Journal, that police must have either “probable cause” to search or “reasonable suspicion” to seize an individual. Such determinations are actually predictions by law enforcement officials about the likelihood they will find evidence of a crime when they search a premise or detain a suspect. Can computer programs improve these predictions and thus help police identify would-be perpetrators while excluding the innocent?

Ah, yes, the Constitution. The Bill of Rights.

These are the kind of issues that further highlight the importance of liberal education.  Not the liberal education where we offer bizarre courses on Lady Gaga or about Rock Music.  But, a rigorous liberal education where we actively and seriously engage with students on weighty content.

Instead, academe is increasingly focused on how to make the content more sexy for students.  And, sometimes, the focus is on the "sex" of the word sexy.  More than once, I have joked with students that I should include the word "sex" in all my course titles and that will draw more students in.  A dull boring course title of "Urban Geography" will then be "Sex and Urban Geography."  Then, a simple bait and switch and students are trapped in a class from which they cannot withdraw :)

Oh well.  I keep thinking and blogging along these lines while the Criminal Justice department itself is perhaps the fastest growing departments on campus, with all its various majors, minors, and certificate programs, including "crime analysis."  But then, I have always argued with vigor that I am the global village idiot!

Wondering how to live your life? Like so!

दृष्टिपूतं न्यसेत्पादं पस्त्रपूतं जलं पिबेत् ।
सत्यपूतां वदेद्वाचं मनःपूतं समाचरेत् ॥

- मनुस्मृति

One must set foot only after seeing (cleared after an inspection by the eye).
One must drink water only after passing through a cloth.
One must utter words that pass through the truth filter.
One's actions must pass the conscience test.

- Manu Smriti

Truth filter.  Conscience test.  If only!

Or, how about the following one?

प्रथमे नार्जिता विद्या द्वितीये नार्जितं धनम् ।
तृतीये नार्जितं पुण्यं चतुर्थे किं करिष्यसि ॥

- सुभाषितरत्नभाण्डागार

If you did not:
    Study in your early life,
    Earn wealth in your youth,
    Do noble deeds during old age –
then how are you going to face death honorably?

- Subhashitaratnabhandagara

Of course, I select only the secular ones, and leave out the religious from this wonderful collection. (I have reformatted the translations.)

Why am I such a skirt-chaser?

The older I get, I seem to miss, even more than before, cultural practices that have practically become discontinued.  When I am in India, I miss seeing half-saris.  To quite an extent, I agree with Shashi Tharoor for his comments on women in India increasingly shunning the traditional sari in favor of other attires:

I have begun to notice fewer and fewer saris in our public places, and practically none in the workplace. The salwar kameez, the trouser and even the Western dress-suit have begun to supplant it everywhere.

Of course, it is crazy for me or Tharoor to wax nostalgia like this when we are so far removed from the traditional Indian outfits for men.  It is bizarre, as I noted in my Ecuador experiences, that we men quickly adopt clothes that are not traditional, while simultaneously missing a great deal of the tradition when women, too, quit wearing traditional clothes.  

Here in the US, as summer heat has picked up even in the Pacific Northwest, I miss the sight of women wearing summery skirts.  Young women and girls prefer to walk around in shorts, while the older ones seem to vote for full-length trousers and jeans, or capris.  Of course, capris always remind me of this wonderfully talented beauty!

I wonder why American females have abandoned skirts!

Earlier today, in the local mall, I saw a young woman in a summery pastel full-length dress skirt, arm in arm with, I suppose, her boyfriend, and they made a lovely couple.  

Women in skirts weren't rare in France or Italy or Germany.  I was in those countries in the summer months, and there were skirt-clad women of all ages.  Come to think of it, I would venture that more American girls walk around in shorty-shorts than did girls of comparable ages in those countries, when we would expect less display of naked legs in the supposedly puritanical society that the US is.

The travel guru, Rick Steves, suggests to women travelers:

Some women bring one or two skirts because they're as cool and breathable as shorts, but dressier. And skirts make life easier than pants when you're faced with a squat toilet! A lightweight skirt made with a blended fabric will pack compactly. Make sure it has a comfy waistband or drawstring. Tilley (listed above) makes expensive but great skirts (and other items) from blended fabric that feels like cotton. Skirts go with everything, and can easily be dressed up or down.

I wonder if the functionality of easily dressing up is why European women prefer skirts?  After all, my own experience is that most of us Americans--men and women--don't care enough to dress up, whether we are in the US or outside the country!

Too bad I am not a cross-dresser to keep alive the tradition of wearing skirts :)

Me and a pickup artist at Stabrucks!

For all the coffee drinker that I am, I rarely ever go to Starbucks.

Because, the dark roast there kills all the subtle flavors that are otherwise present if the beans are not burnt down to charcoal.  Neither am I a fan of all the different concoctions they produce with coffee as the base--as I often remark to people, with all the cream and sugar, those are desserts not coffee!

Yet, I have a Starbucks gift card in my wallet.  I have had it for two years, actually.  A graduating student, who was moving to Wales with his Welsh wife, gave me that Starbucks card as his gift--because he, like most students in my classes, knew all too well that I even have a coffeemaker in my office.  One student told me that whenever she came to my office, the aroma made her feel that she was entering a café. 

So, anyway, I retained the gift card more as a trophy.  A reminder that a student thought I was worth having as a professor.  Thus, I never used it.

Until very recently.

I got myself a cappuccino and sat outside the Starbucks store, at a table right outside the door.  It was a gorgeous sunny day, just the right temperature for me sit half in the shade of the parasol while enjoying the sun's rays partially on my body.

At the table to my left were three young adults having a good time, though it looked like they were frequently forcing themselves to do real work.

To my right was a solitary young woman, sipping her coffee and reading.

A solitary young woman, and me.  This is where the pickup happens, you are probably thinking. 

Think again.

A huge pickup, with remarkably over-sized tires and one of the loudest possible engine roars pulled up.  The driver, a woman, was holding a cellphone on one hand, and at the same time trying to park it into a spot that clearly was not intended for vehicle sizes like this one.  I wondered why she didn't want to drive towards the many other vacant parking spots a couple of cars away.

Then, even while holding the cellphone, she started backing into the spot.  Visualize this: huge pickup, driver holding a cellphone on one hand, squeezing into a regular-sized parking spot in between two small cars.

I looked at the solitary woman--she had stopped reading and, like me, was following this action.  And she slowly shook her head, as if to mean, "I cannot believe this!"

Meanwhile, one of the cars was getting ready to pull out, and the driver wisely decided to stay put until this action ended.  The pickup driver expertly eased into the spot.

The license plate says a lot about the driver's attitude, I suppose!

She climbed out of the pickup, continuing her cellphone conversation as she entered the store.  A petite woman she was, in total contrast to the huge pickup.

The solitary woman went back to her reading.  I was practically done with my cappuccino, which was not all that exciting.  After taking a couple of photos, I walked towards my vehicle.

Soon, I was back on the road, looking forward to going home where I can brew coffee to my tastes, and enjoy it in peace.

Spontaneous aggregation of the like-minded and exclusion of "others"

Every visit to India, I worry that most interactions amongst people are defined by the "in group" and "others" criteria.  In the non-work social space, there appears to be a great deal of conscious and subconscious decision-making based on various "in group" attributes, especially religion, language, and caste and sub-caste.

It worries me even more than that this gets spatially reflected: neighborhoods with dominant "in group" demographics.  Worry is an understatement, though--it freaks me out quite a bit.

Such a geographic separation of "in group" and "others" was not uncommon here in the US, too.  After all, even the history of "white flight" as a response to racial integration is not easily forgettable.  Fair housing laws and a lot more inter-racial and inter-cultural mixing, along with education and understanding, has decreased a great deal of geographic exclusion of the "others."  Thankfully!

Sometimes, I think of the geographic exclusion in India as non-violent and passive-aggressive "ethnic cleansing" of neighborhoods.  It freaks me out even more.

India, with its long history of the awful caste system, has a terrible history of geographic separation of people.  My grandmothers' villages were classic examples of these.  In the small village of Pattamadai, the brahmins, for instance, lived in "agraharams" while Muslims lived in a different part of town, and the non-brahmins in yet another part of town.

In my other grandmother's place, in Sengottai, it was no different.

 In the map on the right, which is of the eastern half of Sengottai, the brahmin neighborhoods were clustered about the center.  (Click on the figure for a clearer image.)  As is typical of the "agraharams," temples were the focus of the neighborhoods. 

The Muslim part of town was across on the west side.  In between are the traditional non-brahmin neighborhoods, including the one where the my high school friend's grandfather's home is located.

During my childhood, I have spent many summer vacations in Sengottai and Pattamadai.  But, never had I even remotely wandered into the Muslim areas.  It was much later, did I walk around these places and get a sense of the lay of the land.  Graduate schooling, which helped me better understand these issues, furthered my intellectual and personal curiosities. 

The good news is that even these small towns are beginning to change.  A few years ago, during Christmas time, I was pleasantly surprised to see a lit up decorative star hanging outside one home in a agraharam.  A Christian family had moved in to the neighborhood, I was told, when I casually asked my uncle.  Of course, it was at the end of the street, far away from the temple.  To me, it was progress.  A huge progress.  Over the years, I see that many non-brahmins have also moved into those agraharams.

I never saw a Muslim household though.

Now, it could be that I had not taken any systematic census, and could have overlooked a Muslim-occupied home or two.  But, my sense is that Muslims hadn't moved in.

I thought about all these even as I started reading this report about Muslims in the city of Hyderabad:

Ghettoisation of Muslims in a city boasting a long 700-year-old history of ‘their’ rule? Quite ironic but it does exist, mainly owing to periodic bouts of communal riots and a media-created image of the city as ‘terrorist hub’, though not as virulent a form as seen in Mumbai and Delhi.

It generally fits into the patterns I have seen in India.  For Hindus, there is a lot more uneasiness when it comes to Muslims than with any other religious group. This was the case even before 9/11, since when dirty politics often employs Muslims and terrorists as synonyms.  Since 9/11, and since the attacks in Delhi and Mumbai by Pakistan-based outfits, and the horrific events in Gujarat, I would think that the geographic exclusion of Muslims might have increased in many parts of India.

[There] are apartments where some fastidious Hindu residents would not allow Muslims to stay “especially for their cultural practices like sacrificing sheep on Bakrid.” It’s not just Muslims but lower caste Hindus too who face this problem when they encounter “vegetarian only” boards, a euphemism to bar those from “other castes” in places like Himayatnagar, Nallakunta and Chikkadpally in the new city. Fortunately such instances are very few in Hyderabad.

 In a related story, the same paper reports:

Finding a home to rent in India's national capital is an arduous task for anyone - but, an investigation by The Hindu has found, almost impossible for citizens who happen to be Muslim. Homeowners and property dealers contacted by reporters often firmed up deals, only to be disqualified as soon as they revealed their religion.

Housing apartheid was at its worst in New Delhi’s most affluent and educated neighbourhoods: New Friends Colony, Vasant Kunj, Jangpura and Rohini. By contrast, in areas such as Mukherjee Nagar, Karol Bagh, Janakpuri and Ashok Vihar the responses were mixed.

In one case, a property agent representing a homeowner in New Friends Colony flatly told The Hindu's reporters, “The landlords want only Indians, not Muslims.” 

Ouch! Muslims become non-Indians?  How awful :(

Property dealers seemed to operate an informal network of religious segregation, often pointing The Hindu's reporters to supposedly Muslim-appropriate neighbourhoods. More often that not, they were told to look for houses in the fringes of posh colonies. Property dealers in Rohini suggested Rithala, one in Jangpura proposed Bhogal, famous for its Kashmiri population and Afghanistani refugees, a broker in New Friends Colony suggested Sukhdeo Vihar and Jasola both of which are close to another Muslim ‘ghetto’ Jamia Nagar, and one in Vasant Kunj suggested Munirka and Kishangadh.

Neighbourhoods like these appear to be emerging as enclaves for the growing Muslim middle class in Delhi, which despite its education and economic achievements is denied access to neighbourhoods preferred by Hindus from similar backgrounds.

On the travails of finding a house, Prof. Rizwan Qaisar, an academician at Jamia Millia Islamia, said while looking for a house in Saket and Munirka DDA Flats he came across instances where his name mattered a lot. “Every thing was fine till I revealed my name. After facing ‘no’ from several property dealers, I had to finally shift to Noor Nagar in Jamia Nagar.” “Several social groups face discrimination in housing but for Muslims the edge is sharper,” Mr. Qaisar said.

It is terrible.