Kerala: No country for young men

One of the greatest of all hushed-up stories is this: forty-five years ago, when Neil Armstrong opened the Eagle's door and climbed down on to the surface of the moon, he was welcomed by a Keralite who also offered him a glass of hot tea.

Of course, that did not happen.  But, it is a tired-old joke from the old country that easily highlights the presence of Keralites (as in a person from Kerala, which is a state in southern India) seemingly in every corner of this planet--and on the moon too.

According to a recent survey, these expatriates number 1,625,653.  Where are they?

Among them, 1426740 are in the Gulf countries.

As in the countries by the Persian Gulf.  Other estimates place the number even higher.

These expatriates send quite a lot of money back to their homeland:

Kerala has set a new record in remittances this year by already reporting a whopping 36 per cent year-on-year spike in inflows as of June-end at Rs 75,883 crore.

The 75,883 crores of rupees are the equivalent of about 12 billion US dollars, which perhaps makes the expatriates the state's single largest export.

Kerala is, of course, only one example in a world where there are many of us who live in countries that are different from where we were born:

There are more than 230 million international migrants worldwide, which is more than the population of the world’s fifth most populous country, Brazil.

Out of those 230 million, 1.6 million are from Kerala.  The twelve billion dollars from these expat Keralites were about a sixth of what India earned through its diaspora:

India received $70 billion, more than the value of its exports of information-technology services.

More than the IT exports!

The Kerala, and India, stories might be big in the magnitude, but there are others with more impressive numbers:

In Tajikistan, as we have previously reported, migrant workers send home the equivalent of 47% of the country's GDP, and as many as half of the Tajik men in working-age are now believed to be living abroad. Similarly, an estimated 40% of Somalia’s population depend on remittances and need the cash to buy food and medicine.

All these lead to an interesting question: how much do these remittances help with local economic development?  

I noted in this post, from more than four years ago, that the international remittances--and remittances from Keralites who work in other states in India--have not transformed Kerala into an economic powerhouse.  Instead, Kerala has become a money-order economy.  Kerala ranks high, even in the world, on various social development indicators, yes, but could that have been achieved without these international and domestic remittances?

While Sen gave credit to the numerous state-initiated welfare programmes, Bhagwati and Panagariya said that the state's achievement on both the counts was mostly due to the globalisation of the state's economy in the 1990s and the huge inflow of remittance from its large non-resident community.

So, what are the effects of remittances on economic development?  The Economist quotes from an IMF study:

decades of private income transfers—remittances—have contributed little to economic growth in remittance-receiving economies...the most persuasive evidence in support of this finding is the lack of a single example of a remittances success story: a country in which remittances-led growth contributed significantly to its development...no nation can credibly claim that remittances have funded or catalyzed significant economic development.

And notes:

The cash may flow back but the human capital has left. If those who emigrated were not working anyway then the flow of remittances will have a positive effect, but if they were already working in the home economy then the impact will be more nuanced. Inward flows of remittances may boost national income, but GDP measures the output of a country. The effect of remittances on GDP growth therefore depends upon how the money is spent by the recipients.

The export of human capital means that a Keralite scientist might have even worked for NASA and helped send Armstrong to the moon, and could have sent quite a few dollars back to Kerala.  And the leftist politics in the state has certainly achieved remarkable social indicators, largely thanks to the money from elsewhere. But, after all these decades, does the state have a robust domestic economy, or are the youth from god's own country doomed to emigrate in order earn their livelihood, even if means setting up a chai stall on the moon?

Young. Not merely young at heart, trust me!

It happened.
Again!

What happened, you ask?  Ok, let me tell you about it.

I figured that I would get myself, or get for my vehicle, a one-year pass that would allow me to park the vehicle at the national forest spots without having to pay each and every time.  A simple thing, right?  You ask for it, they tell you how much it is, you pay, and it is all over.

Not so.

"May I help you?" asked the guy in the ranger uniform, who looked like he was close to retirement age.  As I walked up to his counter, I noticed a fracture-cast on his right arm.  But, I did not sense that he was a small-talk guy, and I chose not to ask him about the arm.

"I want to buy an annual pass, the parking thing" I told him.

"Let me get my wife and she'll help you" he said as he wandered off to find her.

Now a female voice beckoned.  Also in uniform, and also about retirement age, she called us over to another counter.

"For the annual pass.  It is thirty dollars, right?" I asked her.

She nodded her head.

Now, if the transaction had ended right there with me paying for it as the next step, there would not have been a blog post about it.

She decided to be uber-helpful, and try to save me some money.

"There is one even better, for only ten dollars" she said and asked for my credit card.

Noticing that I hadn't signed on the back of the card, she asked for my ID.

As I handed my ID, there was a momentary pause from which she quickly recovered.  "So, in about twelve years, when you turn 62, you will be able to buy this for only ten dollars."

You see, ladies and gentlemen, until she saw my ID, she was merrily working with what she thought was an obvious fact--that I was an old fart, at least 62 years old, if not older than that.  Which is why she was all set to get me that ten-dollar deal.

Hey, stop laughing. This is not funny!

It is strange that a clerk at a store wanted to give me senior-citizen discount because of her logic: "You have all this white hair all over."  And that was three years ago--you do the math on how young I was!
Then there was that barber who was convinced that I am retired.
A few days ago, when chatting with a neighbor on the bike-path, he asked me, "how close are you to retirement, Sriram?"  He perhaps thought he was asking me very politely!

What the hell!

Anyway, I ended up paying for the thirty-dollar pass.

After a day spent hiking and sweating, in the evening I checked my mailbox.  Apparently the joke continued, for this was in the day's mail:

Stop laughing, will ya!

Sports: The reason you're like this

A fresh off the boat immigrant I was quite some years ago, and with no prior exposure to the uniquely American sports of football and baseball.  No athlete I ever was, nor pretended to be one, yet, practically from the first day, I took to baseball and football, as the proverbial fish to water, which is a hilarious metaphor to employ given that I swim like a rock!

To follow baseball without ever having played it perhaps fits in well with how the game appeals to nerds.  As I would find later in the essays by Stephen Jay Gould--ah, I miss his writings--there was quite some poetry in the game and in the statistics.  Lord Kelvin famously declared that to measure is to know and anything that could not be measured was not worth knowing.  Baseball offered a gazillion measurements, but the beauty of the sport was how all that measurement often meant nothing.

I fell in love with baseball (A dangerous sport characterized by long periods of daydreaming, punctuated by intense bursts of unmanageable violence, panic, and people screaming at you.)   The love was cemented because the worthlessness of all those measurements was spectacularly demonstrated in my early, early years as a green graduate student.

source

I had picked up enough about baseball to follow the box scores in the Los Angeles Times as a daily ritual.  Even more exciting it was to scan through the detailed numbers in the Sunday edition.

And then came the 1988 season.  What glorious inning after inning! (The amount of time left before afternoon snack, divided by nine.)

Kirk Gibson was the story from the beginning.  The Dodgers signed him on and commentators worried that his attitude would not resonate with the team.  Surely enough, he had problems with his new teammates from the get go.

As the season progressed, the Dodgers  weren't picked by many to win it all.  The statistics did not favor them.

But, there was something happening.  Like Orel Hershiser's unhittable pitching.

The Dodgers won the division title.
The statistics favored the Mets in the league championship. Again, all the numbers pointing to the Mets' superiority became irrelevant.
And thus it was the ultimate all-California final, with that famous hitting duo, whose later drug-enhanced performances at the plate produced some towering home runs. (Something that you genuinely believe will happen when you swing. Every single time you swing. Even though it has never happened, you still think it will. You are so funny sometimes.)

All the numbers made it clear that the Dodgers were the underdogs among underdogs.

It couldn't have been any more of a Hollywood storytelling than that.  Nobody could have predicted that there was more Hollywood drama to come.

It was the bottom of the ninth.
The Dodgers were trailing with two outs.
One more out and the teams would meet again.
The injured and hobbling Gibson was sent in as a pinch-hitter.  (Something that you and your teammates request for you but cannot have.)

The rest, as they say, was history.



(The title of this post and the italics in parenthesis are all from this wonderfully humorous piece in the New Yorker on a glossary of baseball terms.)