How watertight can we be ?

Was reading a book that I previously mentioned, about an introduction to the notable sociologists from when the term was coined. Among one of the greatest among these was undoubtedly Max Weber, and a small section of the chapter devoted to him talks about his prophecies of doom, that social organisation would tend to more and more rational organisation in terms of efficiency, run by a scientifically guided bureaucracy.

Thankfully, we do not yet live in an age where managers rule every aspect of our lives, from what we eat to who we sleep with. Though it is obvious that an efficient bureaucracy will lead to maximally efficient organisation of human productive output, it is far from obvious that that is what people want, and far less obvious whether it can really be implemented.

An incident narrated by a friend working in a company in Bangalore comes to mind. A romantically involved couple, both working for the same company, were said to be seen smooching in the office. Now, the reaction was one of complete disbelief and shock at how unprofessional people can be. Looking at it from the other side, can one not question as to why a person in love (with what/who ever) cannot show her/his affection where and when one feels ? The answer would be that the office is a place to act in a certain way, and there are unwritten codes of conduct which govern osculatory behaviour here. Why are certain modes of behaviour permissible and others unprofessional ? Because they cause a disturbance, a distraction from the normal activity of efficient production ? While it definitely not my intention to condone smooching in corridors and cubicles, it is definitely my intention to question why any person is required to curb certain parts of her personality. It is hard to see how such an environment would help in formation of a well rounded personality. Also, one finds a tinge of hypocrisy in such attitudes. One is told not to bring home worries into work and vice versa, but one never hears about people told to leave their happiness at home and wear a surly mask at the workplace. Certain things which are beneficial to production are always welcome, the rest, please excuse, please.

Romantic escapades apart, there are many instances of companies cutting employees off the Internet, and similar restrictions in the name of 'distractions'. But employees find creative ways to overcome such things where possible, and a purely machine-like worker will hardly ever surface. To the horror of the top brass, people seem to want to waste time in idle chatting, gossip, tales of woe, trip discussions and many other such uneconomic behavior (I almost forgot the coffee machine ;). Nowadays, many companies seem to have recognized (or resigned to) the fact that people do not enter the office in the morning just to work continuously for 8 hours and then get back to their normal lives, and provide a much more liberal atmosphere, where one gets an opportunity to explore other aspects of social behavior and grouping. Far from Max Weber's tight bureaucratic dystopia, bureaucracy now seems to recognize human inability to divide space and time into watertight compartments, each requiring a kind of behavior that provides maximum efficiency to the task at hand.

Similar to the managerial expectations and frustrations, are our own wishes that sometimes go unfulfilled. We would like a park to be neat and clean and we end up seeing beggars and homeless bums in them. We would like our roads to be clean and free from disturbances but find religious processions and bales of ragi put out for drying. We wish to watch movies undisturbed but end up covering our ears against the cat calls as soon as Bipasha comes onscreen. We want our footpaths wide and safe, but end up walking on the road due to the sudden appearance of a temple overnight on the footpath. Just like human behavior, his cultural creations overflow and confound the best laid plans of the urban planners and middle class.

Just as we want to do things 'our way', so do so many others. About time we recognized and respect the non-watertightness that is so natural in the world.

Interesting comic

This comic caught the eye, coming coincidentally at round the same time I was griping about scientific method :)

Degeneration or Democratization ?

Hardly can one day pass by without reports from nostalgic and dreamy eyed commentators regarding the degeneration of the 'culture', be it in music, cinema or any of the other arts. They pine for the days of Raj Kapoor, Satyajit Ray, M. S. Subbulakshmi and wonder what is happening to the quality of the arts today. 'Commercialisation', they scream, is moving artists to seek money rather than concentrate on the quality of their art. How true can one say such a situation is ?

Looking back, the patrons of the high arts even in the mid-20th century were largely urban, middle-class, educated people. Brought up seeing and listening to music and cinema which was made by artists patronized by people largely like themselves. One required an acquired taste, a certain erudition to appreciate what had largely become 'elite' art. It would be too much to ask of an average citizen to be put through the torture of listening or seeing something that she cannot comprehend just as it would be too much to ask of even the erudite Carnatic connoisseur to appreciate the nuances of HipHop (assuming, of course, that HipHop can claim to contain such nuances).

As the purchasing power of the lower classes increased, and they started flocking to cinema theatres and music concerts expecting to be entertained, they would obviously want something interesting, understandable, and that made way for the present range of films and music. One can definitely see a rise in number of films made and albums produced as more and more people joined the ranks of a exploding middle class. Even though most of these artistic endeavours were complete disasters from any point of view, the point was that the entertainers had to respond to the needs of a people with different idioms, different tastes from their earlier patrons. How can changing with the times be called a degeneration of art cannot be comprehended. Most people do not have the motivation nor the patience to finish a B.A in Music to appreciate their music. One can hardly find a Hindustani music listener gyrating to the rhythms of the tabla, just as it is extremely hard to find a person not jumping out of his seat (if rock concert organisers provide one!) when Iron Maiden takes the stage.

The rise of new genres of music and cinema, with their attractive rhythms, loud and colorful sets, unimaginative storylines, shorter and shorter durations, reflect the fact that more and more tastes which do not belong to the elite are being given due consideration. It is hard not to identify the distinct workings of a democracy in such changes. Showing the struggling, poor hero rising and challenging a large businesshouse may echo the dreams of a people who see inequality paraded in front of them, not being able to do anything about it.

Therefore, what some perceive to be a degeneration in the quality of art in the recent times due to commercialization or westernization appears to me to be a failure to understand a form of cultural expression, being far too removed from the roots of its inspirations and aspirations. This works the other way as well, with Classical music being derided as too boring.
So, before you go about shooting your mouth off about philistine Punjabi pop or old man's Carnatic music, remember that you don't understand the other well enough to do so!

Eulogy

My paternal grandmother passed away on Wednesday, after a brief illness, of adrenal cancer. Bringing up 9 children from a state of abject poverty as a wage labourer in a small village and making sure that they reach a position of relative comfort is an achievement, a quantum leap that can hardly be matched by any of us, regardless. Knowing people capable of such a feat surely is a humbling experience, and puts many of my own 'achievements' into proper perspective.

Never one to raise her voice or beat anyone, she was a very patient person, a quality which unfortunately very few of us care to cultivate. Like I mentioned to my family members, if we place on a weighing scale the good and bad things she has done, it would tilt in the favor of the good. Not that she was philanthrophic, all she had (or not) money for was bring up her children and keep body and soul together, but that she never was one to hurt others. This is a characteristic most of us cannot claim to have, and therefore the scales will always be on the negative side for us, forget about even balancing the two sides. Things that came naturally to her, we cannot dream of achieving after years of labour. For this, she will be a role model to me, I don't need to start looking at Gods until Im sure I have reached atleast her level of non-violence. RIP.

In Memoriam.

Another day to remind us of the Mahatma, though in Karnataka today is less of a day to pay homage to the Man and more of a day of expectation to see whether our Chief Minister stabs his Deputy in the back, or the other way round, tomorrow. The politics of expediency rarely gets more obvious and vulgar, and has a peculiar characteristic of abstracting away and de-linking what happens in Bangalore with the fate of millions of residents of this unfortunate State (unless, of course, they are residents of Bangalore). Let the game in Vidhana Soudha continue, and on with the post.

Thousand people have thousand opinions, and one can hardly say that these opinions are unequivocal. M. K. Gandhi occupies the whole spectrum of the moral rainbow, from saint to demon, depending on whose viewpoint you look at him from. Subjectivities aside, the main contribution of any person to the unidirectional flow of history has and always will be only ideas. Ideas in the form of doctrines, rituals, technology, music are the only lasting contributions that survive the temporal flux that one calls history. One of the best documented persons in the world is probably Gandhi, and his ideas are available for one and all to see in the Collected works of Gandhi.

With such a large body of data available, obviously every part of his life has been studied with a fine toothed comb. What interests us today is the question as to the relevance of what Gandhi wrote and thought about almost a century ago. Ideas usually survive the test of time when either of the following characteristics are true : The object of thought is something that is presumed to be unchanging, like gravity or the color of oranges, or the idea itself is so abstract as to apply in any situation one might find herself in. The second usually ends up being identified with the first, since abstraction tries to capture unchanging attributes of a continuously changing phenomena.

The natural next step is to ask whether Gandhi's doctrines of non-violence and satyagraha have something like the second characteristic. One cannot seriously argue that his ideas deal with unchanging properties of the universe, and therefore we have to accept that his ideas are of the second kind.

However, abstractions about the nature of Man or Society are bound to end up like the blind men describing the Elephant, relying mainly on intuitive generalisations of one's own experiences. Hence, they cannot claim to be of a lasting character. But the fact remains that people still read the Upanishads and Aristotle and the Bible. How is it, that these treasuries of human ideas claim relevance for themselves after thousands of years ? Could it really be possible that there is something unchanging in all humans from the time immemorial ? Or can it be explained away by understanding the fact that human personality is shaped by what it gleans from other's opinions, speeches, writings and example ?

My opinion is partial towards the latter explanation. Ideas are propagated by translating them from their mental forms to more material forms. For example, temples, churches, governments, constitutions, penal codes, treatises on philosophy, cultures, all aim toward the propagation of certain ideas, certain world-views. Their relevance, of course, is contingent upon whether we consider ourselves to be the kind of person that they describe, or aim toward being such a person. And this is where Gandhi's doctrine's can be said to be highly relevant in today's world.
Decades of Mega-, Ultra-, Global-, World-plans have not done as much good as they have managed to dismantle. Megalomanical schemes to redeem the world have forgotten the basic tenet of 'Live and let live'.

As our civilization looks down the abyss of a major environmental disaster, for which we seem to be largely responsible, Gandhi's views regarding Man as part of the environment - as opposed to most Western thinkers who placed Man in opposition with Nature - seem to be gaining relevance, even by scientific standards. Notwithstanding the many critiques that one hears about Gandhi, no one can sensibly deny that his sense of man's place in Nature, and to do so would only highlight our mass suicidal tendencies.

Review: Imperial Nature

The subtitle reads "The World Bank and struggles for social justice in the age of globalization". This, along with the highly suggestive title, should hint as to the intellectual direction of the book.

Imperial Nature is critical look at the extant relations between the 'developed' North and the 'underdeveloped' South, with the myriad aid agencies that mediate these relations, especially in the spheres of development. The World Bank has emerged as a highly influential global actor in these relations (or networks), and the book analyses how the Bank got to the enviable (and equally notorious) position that it finds itself in.

The book revolves around a concept called 'Green Neoliberalism', which essentially is how neoliberalism has been promoted using the necessity for 'sustainable' development and protecting the environment from 'indiscriminate' and 'rapacious' forces of poverty in developing countries.

We begin with a history of the Bank, from its roots as an instrument to rebuild the devastated economies of Western Europe after WWII, to its present mandate to develop the underdeveloped Southern half of the Globe. In the beginning, most of the money that the Bank lent came from National Treasuries and Government institutions of various countries. It was run like an orthodox, risk averse bank, lending only to countries which had a positive chance of repaying the money, like France and Japan. However, when certain political changes made World Bank aid in Europe irrelevant, it had to look at other sources to lend money as well as raise capital, since it was still dependent on US Treasury handouts for capital inflows.

Therefore, the Bank looked towards Wall Street to raise money for its ventures. However, since investors are squeamish about how secure their investment is, the World Bank had to gain credibility by showing that their bonds (floated on Wall Street) were indeed secure and gave attractive returns. Now, one cannot give money to a recalcitrant dictator and expect him to repay in full running the State as he likes. Therefore, the Bank had to make sure that its money was being spent in the 'right way', which simply implies that it would go into money making big dams, power and other infrastructure projects rather than schooling, healthcare and so on. This is not to say that no Bank money went to such social sectors, but it was never it major thrust. In fact, there have been instances where public spending in social sectors was cut due to Bank pressure.

Next, the book looks at how the Bank innovates in the face of crisis. In the early 90's, large scale protests against the Bank sponsored Narmada Valley project and Arun 3 in Nepal forced the Bank to back out of both. Faced with a crisis of legitimacy (which is crucial for its working, since it is a bank, after all), the Bank began it new environmental sensitivity phase. The author investigates how the processes by which the World Bank's stand on environmentally conscious projects, which involves valuation of forests, rivers as economic goods which need to be partly conserved (to keep the environmentalists happy), and opened up for commercial use (to keep the logging industry happy), has become the dominant mode of thought in every forum where development has been discussed.

This dominance, the author argues, is due to the incredible network built by the Bank, which involves training locals in its ideologies so that they can legitimize Bank policy in their native countries, generating large amounts of (not very scholarly) research which all sing consensual policy tunes, and the good old carrot-and-stick approach which forces highly indebted countries to accept and internalize Bank policies or else.

The example of the State of Laos is taken and the major structural changes the Bank intervention caused, especially in the Government ministries (which are dominated by experts from elite organisations of the North), policies (which promote indiscriminate privatization without having a competitive domestic industry, which results in killing of the domestic players), and environmental outlooks (which promote eco-tourism over rights of indigenous people, and throws natives out of their homelands to 'resettle' and become 'productive' citizens of the nation). The solutions proposed are typically capital intensive and require large amounts of equipment and expertise from Northern contractors and consultants. It has been calculated that for every dollar of loan, around seven dollars goes back to corporates in the form of contracts and profits from running previously public sector services bought at cheap prices.

The book finally looks at the case of water supply privatisation and how the Bank, within a span of few years managed to convert this issue from a laughable non-starter to something that is a precondition to most Bank loans(yes, even the ones India takes), and how it is presented as the solution to supply quality water to the poorest but ends up becoming too expensive for them to afford, defeating the whole logic of privatisation in the first place. In highly indebted countries, privatisation of social services is said to be good as the public sector is highly 'inefficient' and privatization can only improve matters. The author argues against such a simplistic logic and shows how delivery of services can depend on so many factors ( The Bank forced cutting down of social expenditure one among them) and privatization usually ends up being control of a public good by Western corporates, with an indigenous face.

Though it is unlikely that the Bank will ever close down (too many people have built careers around it), such arguments against Bank policies and high-handedness may help to bring more transparency into the murky world of the development industry (yes, it is probably one of the most profitable industries!).

The Hijack

The Indian Cricket Team finally managed to win something at the highest level, after decades of no trophies but plenty of skeletons in the cupboard, they have managed to work as a team and not rely on individual brilliance too much to do what they did. Accolades. Notwithstanding the fact that the industry most happy with this is undoubtedly the advertising industry, the brilliant turn of events which ended in "The Hijack", as I would put it, cannot be attributed totally to them. Instead, one has to rely on the creativity of the Indian Cricket Fan to account for it.

A month or so earlier, a motley group of girls appeared on to silver screen, led by a charismatic coach whose previous achievements include chopping up girls (Baazigar) and uncontrollable stuttering (forgot ): , to show, or rather, remind us of an obscure game that is supposedly our National Game, which is presently in the shadow of another game which the egoistic Briyanshu plays. In the movie, hockey is put down quite crudely by Briyanshu and the Hockey Board elites,unlike the India's Cricket fans, who use more refined methods.

A month ago, anyone shouting Chak de India! would have automatically been recognised
as a passionate hockey fan, and maybe even a women's hockey supporter. From the past fifteen days, the hijack started, and culminated with India winning the T20 cup. Now, Chak de India! refers only to the glorious, history making cricket team. We have come a long way from when the actresses from the movie were giving press conferences to encourage women using the the movie as a platform, to the present where large gatherings of male cricket fans shout out the slogan the movie popularized to achieve the exact same ends that it speaks out against : The average Indian's preoccupation with cricket, and the male dominated sports scene. SRK did not make things better by turning out to hug each and every cricketer, whereas I doubt he did the same when India won the Asia Cup in hockey. The very equality that he so eloquently vocalizes for in the movie can hardly be seen in his own actions. The hijack is complete! The method of the Indian Cricket Fan is clear now : acknowledge all sports to be equally important when asked to, but in the normal day-to-day life, elegantly ignore their existence.

That the hockey team had to go on a hunger strike to be noticed shows how far behind hockey is in the race to capture the common man's imagination. Why we still persist in calling it our National Game is quite a mystery. Maybe some kind of sense of duty, or a lack of common sense to correct past mistakes. One has to face the fact that hockey, in the discernible future atleast, will be given the stepmotherly treatment that a true hockey fan would deplore. Cricket is what binds more Indians together, and hence should sensibly be our National Game. Not that I'm a great fan of cricket, but just that it seems reflect the Indian passions more correctly as opposed to the present state of affairs.