Why didn't I see this item in the Indian media?

 India moved one step closer to the completion of the world's highest bridge. It's being built over the Chenab:

The Chenab Bridge is part of India’s Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla rail link project (USBRL). The 1,315-meter-long bridge is being built at a height of 359 meters. Once completed, it will be the highest rail bridge in the world, and 35 meters higher than the Eiffel Tower.

I came across this item in Russia Today of all places, complete with a gripping video of the work that's going on and a tweet from Railways minister Piyush Goyal. I wondered why I had to see item in Russia Today and not in an Indian paper. A google search shows it's there at Indian news sites on the Net. But I'm afraid I didn't see in any of the print versions I get at home. If it was carried, it wasn't carried prominently enough.

Makes me wonder why it is that there is so  much negativity and gloom in the media and so little of celebration? The Chenab Rail Bridge deserved front page treatment in my view, along with photos. Is it all about man bites dog alone constituting news?

Management "lessons" from Brisbane test

 This may sound cliched but cliches are often true and worth repeating. So, here are some management "lessons" from India's great win at Brisbane.

It is said that India won the Brisbane test despite the absence of  many stalwarts- Kohli, Shami, Jadeja, Ashwin, Bumrah, Yadav, Rahul. A badly depleted side managed to pull off a fantastic victory. It's worth asking: was it despite their absence or because of it?

Stars don't have to go all out. They don't have that much to lose if they don't play well. Not so with debutants or novices such as Siraj, Natarajan, Sundar. They have to go all out, make the most of an opportunity. They have so much at stake. 

Stars don't easily make good team players- and this is not with reference to our senior cricketers, it's  a general statement. And yet performance is more  about team performance than about stars.Team performance is more than the aggregation of solo effort- cooperation, collaboration, mutual support, give and take, all these matter.

Above all, nobody is indispensable. It may appear that, sans the stars, an organisation will be nowhere. However, there is always talent that can be found and the collective team effort can compensate for lack of individual greatness. Indeed, the test of an organisation is whether it can perform once a star or stars have departed.

In light of the above, I see merit in the suggestion, gathering steam, that Ajinkya Rahane should be retained as captain for tests:

Rahane collected the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, held it aloft, called his team-mates, handed over the trophy to T Natarajan and left the scene. On ABC Grandstand radio commentary, legendary former Australia captain Ian Chappell was impressed.

“That’s Rahane for you. When the BCCI will hang a picture of this at its office, the captain will be missing from the group photo. His team mates love him and respect him. They are playing for him,” Chappell said.

I think I would have really considered keeping @ajinkyarahane88 as Captain for @BCCI !!! Allowing @imVkohli to be the Batsman only would make India even more dangerous & Rahane has an incredible presence & tactical nous about him,” former England captain Michael Vaughan wrote on Twitter.

The team leader does not have to be the best player in the team. He has to be a competent player who can get the best out of his team- by motivating them, by involving them in decision-making, maintaining good relationships. Rahane appears to meet these requirements in ample measure. Besides, Kohli may be able to focus more on his batting, as Vaughan points out.

It's interesting that while many people warm to the idea, they seem to think the selectors will find it difficult to put it to it Kohli, given that he's a superstar. There, you have the familiar Board of directors syndrome- the board not wanting to annoy a star CEO. Let the selectors make bold to try. They must know that the principles of managing for the long run are behind them.

How intelligence agencies use businesses as a cover

America suspects that Huawei, the Chinese telecom firm, could be used for espionage. It has good reason to do so, given that it has a long history of using businesses as a cover for its operations.

Schumpeter has a piece on the links between intelligence agencies and the world of business. The classic example he gives is of a CIA-owned company that produced cipher machines. Governments bought the machines not knowing that their secret communications would be read by America's spying agencies:

By the 1990s it was apparent that the firm (Crypto AG)was in bed with the National Security Agency (NSA), America’s eavesdroppers. The truth, it turns out, was even more remarkable. From 1970 to the 2000s, at least, Crypto AG was wholly owned by the CIA and, until 1993, the BND, Germany’s spy agency, according to the Washington Post. “It was the intelligence coup of the century,” crowed a CIA report. “Foreign governments were paying good money…for the privilege of having their most secret communications read.”

 Schumpeter cites other instances:

In the 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, the British Army established a brothel and launderette in Belfast. Not only could soldiers use laundry vans to move around discreetly, but IRA suspects’ clothes could be tested for explosive residue (both operations were eventually exposed and shot up). MI6 similarly operated a bogus travel agency that would lure republicans to Spain with free holidays, where they could be recruited as double agents. In the 1980s Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, ran a Sudanese beach resort that was used to smuggle out thousands of Jews from neighbouring Ethiopia.

The intelligence agencies also work closely with genuine businesses, often planting their people as employees.  This enables spies to travel freely as corporate executives instead of having to produce fake covers. Schumpeter makes the astonishing disclosure that Soviet double agent Kim Philby worked as a correspondent for the Economist in the Middle East shortly before his defection.

Businesses get paid for cooperating with the intelligence agencies. Schumpeter notes that America's telecom firms have been paid hundreds of millions of dollars for cooperating with the government. Intelligence agencies also provide useful information to companies for their help, information that could given them an edge over competition.

The links between intelligence agencies and the media have been well documented.Government departments are, of course, penetrated. One wonders now about their links with academia.

The bombing of Dresden

On February 13, 1945, as war against Germany was nearing its end, 800 Allied bombers mounted a raid on the Germany city of Dresden at around 10 pm.The next wave came at mid-night. The third one came the next morning. Three raids in the space of fourteen hours. The city was reduced to rubble. A firestorm swept through the city.

The casualties are a matter of dispute. The controversial British historian David Irving  claimed that as many as 200,000 could have died. Official estimates are closer to 25,000. It was hard to estimate casualties because the city had had an enormous influx of refugees who were fleeing the Soviet  army advance to the East.

Dresden was thought to have little importance as a military or industrial centre. Its claim to fame was more as a cultural centre. Many writers have contended that the intention was to terrorise the German population and force a surrender on the Hitler regime that was still putting up a tenacious fight. Some have called it a war crime. Others say that there was military objective, which was to disrupt communications in the region and prevent the flow of troops to the Eastern front.

Dresden was not unique in the savage treatment it had received. Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo and other cities were severely bombed.  Then, we have the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, the bombing of Dresden will be forever remembered as a symbol of the savagery of World War II. Here is one appraisal of the event and here is another.

Stalingrad anniversary

February 2 marked the 75th anniversary of the fall of Stalingrad. This was a big event in Russia, of course, with President Putin flying over to Volgograd (as the city is now named) to commemorate the event. But we heard nothing of this epochal event in India, partly, I guess, on account of the media's preoccupation with trivia.

Stalingrad was, perhaps, the decisive turning point of World War II. It showed that the Wehrmacht, the Germany army, was not invincible and that Hitler's opening an Eastern front could pave the way for his defeat. Following Stalingrad, the Wehrmacht lost the initiative and was mostly on the defensive on the Soviet front.

In Stalingrad, the elite Sixth Army of the Wehrmacht came to be decimated. Of around 300,000 soldiers in the city, 100,000 were captured and only around 9,000 made it back after the end of the war, the majority perishing as prisoners of war.

Much has been written about Hitler's conduct of operations in Stalingrad, whether he was right to take the city in the first place, whether the Sixth Army should have hung on after it was encircled by Soviet troops and so on.

Well, Hitler's plan was to seize the oil riches of the Caucus south of Stalingrad. The city was a key junction and supply point and hence needed to be held in order to safeguard the armies that had ventured south.

Hitler's strategy was right but it came unstuck because he had underestimated the strength of the Soviet Union. Hitler thought that once his armies tore into the Soviet Union, the government and its army would simply collapse. This did not happen. Stalin was able to throw endless numbers of troops at the Germans and Soviet industrial capacity was far greater than German intelligence had supposed.
These fundamentals could not be altered and were bound to assert themselves no matter what particular tactics Hitler followed in respect of operations in Stalingrad. The whole controversy about Hitler's ignoring the advice of his professional generals and allowing the Sixth Army to perish is  secondary to the fundamentals.

Russia Today has an interesting article on the subject.

Quote of the day

"Ratlike cunning, a plausible manner and a little literary ability".

Qualities of a successful journalist, according to Nicholas Tomalin, a member of the breed. (The Economist, September 20, 2016)

Terrorism has little economic impact

The attacks on Paris in recent days have raised concerns about the potential impact of such acts on economies and markets. Don't take the prophets of gloom seriously. Terrorism has little impact on the economy.  I have always argued thus and was happy to see an article in the FT corroborating my view.

Terrorism involves attacks on some places in a city. The city may shut down for a few days, some economic centres may suffer damage, there could some loss of output. However, this is an insignificant fraction of national output and registers merely as a blip. Terrorism could have some impact on tourism and it could affect foreign investment. But for this to happen, it has to be sustained and widespread. This is not common.

The modern economy has two great strengths. First, it is greatly decentralised. Secondly, growth depends more on knowledge capital, embodied in people and published work, than on physical capital. Both these make for enormous resilience in economies.

The effect of decentralised production was best exemplified in the ability of Germany to maintain production in the face of savage bombing in the dying months of World War II. By spreading out production and thanks to the genius of Albert Speer, the armaments minister in the Third Reich, Germany war production remained not very far from its peak despite daily bombing raids mounted by the Allies. It was not aerial bombing but boots on the ground- and mostly Russian boots- that brought Hitler's Germany to its knees.

In the more modern period, Sri Lanka's economy grew at a brisk pace even when the LTTE's ability to strike was formidable. India itself has known insurgencies in various parts for long spells but this has had little impact on the economy. The 9/11 attack in the US was shrugged off by the markets despite the large damage it caused. The fear at that time was that global economic integration brought about by the spreading out of the production chain would be imperilled. This did not happen. Any risk of terrorism simply gets priced into costs and the premium is not large.

The current bout of militancy is bound to impact migration into the west. But world labour flows have been largely controlled, so the incremental impact will not be much. Over a long time frame, adverse demographics makes greater migration into the west inevitable. The west will be selective about whom it lets in, screening will be tighter but, finally, large flows of people will happen.

More importantly, growth is driven overwhelmingly by increases in efficiency brought about knowledge capital as economist Solow showed decades ago. The destruction of physical capital and even the deaths of large numbers of people does little to degrade the availability of knowledge capital. This was true even in past centuries when marauding conquerors burnt down cities - only for these cities to rise from the ashes. Think also of Somnath being rebuilt umpteen times after the raids by Mohammed Ghazni. If this could happen in the past when knowledge was largely embodied in peiopel, think of the possibilities today when knowledge is diffuse and universally accessible at the click of a mouse.

If wars waged on a titanic scale could not stop the growth of economies, terrorist acts are no more than mosquito bites on the surface of the world economy. We will live in fear, human rights will be encroached upon, the quality of life may suffer. But material well being will not be affected by terrorism. There is, of course, one exception. That is terrorists getting hold of a seriously dirty bomb. We must fear terrorism because of that one possibility. Random attacks, with all the sorrow they cause, the world can take in its stride.

RETHINC wins Business Book of the Year award

I'm pleased to share with you that Rethinc was named joint winner of the Best Business Book of the Year award along with Mihir Sharma's Restart.

The jury for the Tata Literature Live! Business Book of the Year comprised R Gopalakrishnan, author, speaker and director, Tata Sons; Arun Maira, author, management consultant and erstwhile member of the planning commission; James Crabtree, senior correspondent, Financial Times, and Fulbright Scholar; Abheek Singhi, bestselling author and senior partner at The Boston Consulting Group, and Rama Bijapurkar, market strategist, management consultant and author.

Here's a snap of the award being given. 

1965 war: a Pakistani view

I read and re-read this assessment of the 1965 war in Pakistan's Dawn newspaper with some amazement. It is scathing in its comments on the handling as well as the outcome of the war on the Pakistani side:

In fact, the war was started when we launched Operation Gibraltar in early July 1965, infiltrating thousands of Pakistani soldiers into India-occupied Kashmir under the assumption that Kashmiris would rise in revolt against the Indian forces. That never happened and within weeks the entire operation had collapsed. Meanwhile, the Indian forces launched a counteroffensive occupying parts of Azad Kashmir.
Subsequently on Aug 30, we launched Operation Grand Slam that was meant to capture the strategic town of Akhnur and to cut off held Kashmir from India. But it was too late. Another disaster happened when halfway through Grand Slam, the command was changed giving more time to the Indians to recoup and gather reinforcements. As a result this operation too ended in a fiasco.

About the Indian offensive on the Lahore front, the writer says:

...the persons most surprised were the president and the army chief when the Indians launched the attack on Sept 6. Ayub was woken up at four in the morning and given the news of Indian advances towards Lahore by an officer of the air force on reconnaissance duty. Ayub telephoned Gen Musa who said he had also heard the news but was waiting for confirmation!

 The author concludes:

Air Marshal Nur Khan, who led the air force, achieving complete superiority over the Indian air force, called it a wrong war that was planned “for self-glory rather than in the national interest”. History has to be put straight so that the mistakes are not repeated.

On the 1967 war, have you come across anything half as self-critical and objective in the Indian media? If the leading newspaper of a country can carry such an article, I would submit that there is something very right about that country. It cannot be a failed state, indeed, it is a country steadfastly battling any descent in that direction.

I have been an admirer of Dawn for many years now. Its liberalism is not confined to India-Pakistan relations. It has a thoroughly modern and reformist view on matters internal to Pakistan as well. Those who want Pakistan to be a vibrant democracy, free from the taint of terrorism, and also want that India and Pakistan should live together in peace must make it a point to read Dawn.

I spy

James Bond is passe. The spy of the 21st century is more likely to be software secretly smuggled into your computer which enables somebody to know exactly what you are doing with your PC or laptop. Or it could be a drone drifting into a cave harbouring Afghan militia.

The Economist has  a fascinating article on how spying has evolved.  In the old days, the thing to do was to smuggle in a smart guy- preferably from an elite institution, such as Oxbridge- into the target country with a fake identity, visiting cards and plenty of cash. Today, with biometric identification, this has become difficult. The other form of 'humint' - or human intelligence- is simply paying people on the other side for passing on information. This is, of course, alive and well. But, targeting the right people who will spy for you is becoming more sophisticated- it's no longer a matter of accosting people at clubs or parties.

The thing to do is to get data on a whole lot of people and look for weaknesses- medical problems, financial problems, hints of scandal. That's what the people who hacked the site of America's Office of Personnel Management were looking for. I am surprised people didn't think of hacking Ashley Maddison for this reason.

This gives us an idea of what the focus of spying game will be: electronic communications and materials stored on PCs and laptops. One begins to understand why the NSA and other intelligence agencies are so keen on scrutinising email and related traffic. By combing through this, one can lead a treasure of information. The equivalent of this is listening into phone conversations, including mobile conversations.

One problem for spy agencies, the Economist mentions, is encrypted messages. Since it is the receiver and the sender who hold the keys- and not the channel that allows them- spy agencies want the channels to insist that users give them the keys. But this may not be necessary. You don't have to crack an encrypted message. It's enough if you can track what the sender is typing or what the receiver is typing- and there's plenty of spyware available for this.

The flip side is that spy agencies that store information are themselves vulnerable- as the Snowden episode highlighted in a big way. How to steal somebody's else data while safeguarding your own is the central challenge of modern spying.

All of this seems pretty clear. Still, some doubts remain. Electronic spying may be effective when it comes to spying on official agencies. Will it work with terrorists or criminal groups? Such groups are more likely to rely on passing messages on a slip of paper or by word of mouth. Electronic spying can't help here. Since, James Bonds can no longer be smuggled in to mingle with such groups, it's just possible that spying on terrorists and the like has been weakened in recent years.

Helsinki Diary- I

As I await the Air Finland flight to Helsinki at the boarding gate in Delhi, I am in for a big surprise. The flight is full - and most of the passengers are Indian, mostly middle-class people on a group tour. 

The flight departs half an hour late (and lands half an hour late), so India's airlines take heart. The economy section is cramped and uncomfortable and it's warm inside as the plane readies to depart. The airline doesn't provide a bottle of mineral water. You are supposed to trudge up to the flight crew's section and help yourself to a cup of water. Since this means having to disturb the person next to you, it's not pleasant at all. Lunch is frugal and nothing to write home about. There are announcements in Hindi and English, the airline mindful of the large complement of Indians on the flight.

                                                              *****
Helsinki airport is quite small and the immigration counter courteous and quick to clear. I am out in about half an hour or so. It's cold and drizzling outside,14 degrees- and this is supposed to be summer in the Arctic region. I'm glad I have my jacket on and have brought along a sweater. I get into a large-sized cab. It turns out to be a BMW (and yet the fare is no different from that for other cabs). The driver is from Somalia. He landed decades ago and hasn't thought it necessary to ever go back. "It's rather tough out there", he says. It's hard to disagree.

The sights alone the drive from the airport to downtown Helsinki, where my hotel is located, remind me of London, with lots of brickwork-like buildings along the route and plenty of greenery. It's a Sunday, so traffic is scanty. We do the 20 km distance in about 20 minutes. The cab fare is around 50 Euro. As I arrive at the hotel, a seafront and several large liners loom into view. Helsinki has five ports and this one comes right into the city. There are plenty of cruises from here to Stockholm, St Petersburg and elsewhere.

Scandic Grand Marina is a four-star hotel. It wouldn't compare with Taj Vivanta although the tariff is comparable to that at Taj Colaba. There is a flight of steps to climb from the road into the hotel. No attendant comes rushing nor is there a doorman. I have to lug my bag up the stairs up myself. There is a smallish lobby leading to the only restaurant. Just two people at the counter to do the check-in and check-out. You understand what it is to be in a high-wage country (Finland has a per capita income of around $30,000).

I had asked for a sea-facing room. What I get is a room facing the conference centre. Standing at the window and viewing the outside from a sharp angle, I get a glimpse of the sea. The room itself is quite utilitarian. Surprisingly, there's no indoor heating. I'm told a room heater can be available on request. I had seen the menu card put up at reception and my heart sank. There is a very limited number of items on offer (quite unlike the multi-page menu you get at an upmarket hotel in India) and, except for one item of salad, no vegetarian food.

                                               *****************

The next morning, I head for Aalto business school where the conference is to kick off. I'm there for the European Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis. Helsinki has free wi-fi in most places in the city. I look up Google Maps and know which tram to take and where.

I step out of the hotel and make way to the tram stop. The narrow road from the hotel gives way to a broader one about 100 metres away. I walk pass Market Square where fresh vegetable, fruit and other foods are on offer. This is a typical downtown location of an European city. Broad avenues with parks and other greenery at regular intervals at the centre. Cafes and other restaurants on either side, along with upmarket shops selling clothes, jewellery, hand bags and what have you.

I have to stop and ask for directions every now and then. I am to find over the next few days that people are uniformly courteous helpful. This is probably the friendliest country I've ever been to.
Finland has a population of just five million. It was ruled for nearly 150 years by Sweden and then by Russia, becoming free, I am told, in 1917. It is part of the Nordic states and its economy conforms to the Nordic model- high taxes (43% at its highest in Finland) and free provision of education at all levels and high-quality medical care. It also has an excellent public transport system, comprising buses, trams and a metro, and cycling paths all over the city.

                                                    ****************
I board the tram. Most drivers, I notice over the stay, are female. There's no conductor, you pay the driver as you enter. (Doubt that this would work in India). I know from Google Maps that the ride is about 20 minutes long. I keep glancing at my watch. It turns out that there is a lady next to me who is also headed for the conference. Twenty minutes later, we ask somebody if we are close to Aalto. We learn we are and hop off. It's a good ten minutes from the tram stop to the business school.

There's not much of a formal inauguration. The first day is spent on workshops for students. I head for the finance department. Some of the offices are open. I knock on a door titled, 'Director of finance'- I guess it must be the head of the department. A professor with his back turned to me and bent over a PC wheels around on his chair and looks up. I ask,"Do you have few minutes"? He breaks into a grin. "Of course".

I walk in and take a chair. I introduce myself. I tell him I want to know something about the school. He chats with me for a while and then puts me on to a colleague. Aalto is Finland's leading business school. Both students and faculty are overwhelmingly from Finland but that's changing of late.There is a huge effort to recruit faculty from outside by offering competitive pay. A business school degree is not part of the mainstream university courses, so Aalto charges a fee for its undergrad and MBA programmes. I am surprised to learn that placement- which is really the whole point about a business school- is not very active at Aalto. Not many companies come to the campus  to recruit. Students have to apply on their own. If this happened in India, b-schools would lose their clientele.

I ask about Finland's high school education model of which I have heard so much. Kids go to school only when they are seven.There are no exams until the final stage. The teacher to student ratio is amongst the best. School teachers are well paid, well-educated and highly respected in society. The prof remarks, "This system is good for bringing everybody up to a certain level but it's not good enough to achieve excellence". I guess that could pass for a comment on socialism in general. What he omits to mention is that it may be difficult to achieve excellence until society as a whole first reaches a certain level. Ask the Russians and the Chinese.

Aalto b-school is part of Aalto university. The university itself is split across three campuses, one of which is close to my hotel. The b-school has another building, called the main building, which houses mostly the administrative staff. I am put in touch with the international exchange coordinator. I'm pleasantly surprised to learn that IIMA has an exchange arrangement with the b-school and a couple of students on either side have been going over for the past several years.

Not far from the B-school is one of the best-known sights of Helsinki, the Rock Church, a whole church burrowed into a natural rock formation. I enter the cavernous structure and am amazed to see a beautifully lit church inside swarming with tourists. There's a lady playing the piano. I sit on the one of the benches and take in the mellifluous notes.
 

Piku

I saw a movie at a theatre after a long, long time. And it turned out to be worthwhile. Piku is a thoroughly enjoyable movie.

A whole movie centred on an aged man's bowel movements? Sounds incredible but Piku pulls it off. Amitabh Bachchan's constipation problem is only a means for exploring relationships- between an old man and his only daughter, the daughter and the people who make up her daily life, and the Bachhan-Deepika duo and their extended family.

Deepika is thoroughly modern in every way but, when it comes to her widower father, she cannot shake off her deep-rooted sense of responsibility. Not just her work but her personal life comes to be subordinated to what she perceives as her duty to minister to her father.

It takes a taxi ride all the while from Delhi to Kolkata- the taxi  ride happens because the father won't think of travelling by air or rail- to lay bare the father-daughter relationship. And it requires the taxi owner-driver Irfan to tell Deepika that her father is being thoroughly selfish and that if she carries on the way she is doing, she will be 50 before she can think of her own life- and then, of course, it will be too late. Irfan and Deepika get close towards the end but we are spared the banal tying of the knot....there is just a telling shot at the end of their playing a game of badminton in front of Deepika's house.

I don't want to read to too much into the movie but it does seem that, amidst much that is modern in India today, the heavy hand of tradition is very much in evidence. There isn't much of a story line but the dialogues and the acting ensure that the movie unfolds smoothly. And the absence of blood and gore and the usual dance routines are a relief. The point about a good movie is that it takes up a simple theme and keeps you absorbed for a couple of hours. It's refreshing to see a Bollywood movie at least once in a while that measures up to the better standards of Hollywood.

Presenting Hinduism: striking a balance

Much of the discourse on Hinduism in the west tends to be biased. It is equated with Hindutva, which, in turn, is equated with right-wing Hinduism.

An NRI prof, Vamsee Juluri, has attempted to right this discourse in a recent book which is intended partly as a riposte to Wendy Doniger, whose own book on Hinduism came to be banned in India.

Rediff carries an interesting interview. Here's part one and here's part two.

Hindu obscurantism?

On TV yesterday, I saw a panel discussion involving Dina Nath Batra whose books claim that ancient Hindus had knowledge of television, stem cell research etc. Karan Thapar was asking his guests whether there was any historical basis for these views. The historians on the panel scoffed at the suggestion and Thapar himself was ridiculing Batra's contentions.

This morning, I stumbled across a quote from Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb at a website about aspects of Hinduism:

While he was giving a lecture at Rochester University, during the question and answer period a student asked a question to which Oppenheimer gave a strangely qualified answer:
Student: “Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to be detonated?
Dr. Oppenheimer: “Well — yes. In modern times, of course.
Some people suggest that Oppenheimer was referring to the Brahmāstra weapon mentioned in the Mahabharata.The appreciation didn’t stop there. So much so he always gave the book (Bhagavad Gita) as a present to his friends and kept a copy on the shelf closest to his desk.

As is well known, watching the first ever atomic explosion at Los Alamos  in the Nevada desert, Oppenheimer was moved to quote from the Viswaroopa scene of the Gita, Brighter than a thousand suns, the splendour that is me. As the mushroom cloud reached its peak and the enormity of the destruction it wrought became evident, Oppenheimer was reminder of another line from the Gita, I am become death, destroyer of all worlds. 

Let I should be misunderstood, this is not an endorsement of Batra's works, I am not qualified to speak on the subject. I give the quote from Oppenheimer as it is of more than passing interest. 

I return to IIMC

I was over at IIMC for a conference a couple of days ago. I was returning to the campus long years after I had graduated. It was, as you might expect, an emotional moment, if not exactly in the same league as General Douglas McArthur's triumphant return to the Philippines in World War II.

Kolkata has changed although not as much as you would have thought. The airport is thoroughly modern and pleasing. From the airport to Joka (where IIMC is located), there is now a road that bypasses the city initially and  joins at Park Street. The  ride for the first thirty minutes or so via Rajarhat is exhilarating. It's a two-lane road dotted with greenery on the divider and a pleasing mix of empty spaces and buildings on both sides. There are the exquisite buildings one would associate with the IT sector and even a Finance Centre along the route. Open spaces are making way for mutli-storied apartment complexes. Hmmm, you tell yourself, Kolkata has changed for the better.

Park Street pulls you up short. The buildings and eating joints, rickety and worn, might belong to the time I spent in the city as a student. Alipore, the locality of the old aristocracy, retains its majesty with plenty of greenery, imposing mansions and the National Library. Further down at Behala, you return to the past. There are more buildings and the odd attractive one but the locality as a whole remains as rundown as it used to be. Next come Behala Chowrasta, Shakar Bazar and Thakurpukur. Again, the years seem to have largely passed them by. I pass buses with see people hanging to the straps. I recall my days on these crowded buses (mostly, 12 C) but, in those days, one thought it fun.

Finally, the IIMC campus. Near the main entrance is an unsettling sight, an open sewer on either side of the pathway leading into the campus. I experience a thrill as I cross the arched entrance with the Institute's name inscribed on it. Once you enter the campus, the transformation is real and substantial. In my student days, you had  a set of four hostels separated from the main building by a lake, barracks that served as a library and a some staff quarters in the distance. Otherwise, the entire campus was open and wild.

Now, you are first greeted by an executive complex called Tata Hall. Then comes our set of hostels, now called Ramanujam Hostel. H1 and H2 are entirely for girls (in our time, it was just the top floor of H1). Further on, more hostels (including a Tagore Hall) and a cafeteria. You keep going past wild shrubbery and then you begin to see the real development. A whole set of spanking new hostels and another executive complex (where I stayed), all overlooking the lake. The executive building is still under construction and the mess is yet to come up.

I check in and head for Tata Hall for lunch. Then, I make my way to the main building via the narrow road that skirts the lake. The lake itself is ringed by trees now, which is a pleasing sight but you no longer have an unobstructed view of the lake. I cross an imposing white-coloured building, the new library building and am soon face to face with a multi-storied building. Our 'main building' is no longer that. Classes are held in the new building, which also has faculty rooms.

I search for our 'main building'. I have difficulty in getting my bearings. On the road from the hostel, you turned right, as I recall. I think I have located the 'main building' of our time- it's now called L1, L2, L3 (somebody please correct me if I got it wrong). There is also a Computer Science Center. Behind the office buildings are a complex for the PGP Executive programme and faculty and staff housing quarters. I feel  a surge of pride. Unlike much of the city I just passed through, IIMC shows visible and substantial change.

After the conference, I retrace my steps. Tata Hall is not up to scratch. It's run down, the dining room is dingy and depressing, there are signs of peeling plaster, the building is standard PWD stuff, not something one associates with a top business school. The food was mediocre (and I say this as somebody who is hardly a foodie).

One thing is striking. The employees look emaciated and are poorly dressed. They are helpful, almost eager to please. Suffering is writ large on their faces. That is the impression I carried away from my student days. I'm distressed that this too has not changed. How come? Are these contract employees who are under-paid? They should do a lot better on current government pay scales.

I head for my old hostel. It's exactly as it was. The low entrance, the hostel office to the left, the dining room right ahead, the common room to the right. There are a couple of changes. To the left as you enter is a table with a watchman sitting behind it. The common room has shrunk and has only the table-tennis and billiards tables. The sofas with papers and magazines- they don't seem to be around. At the mess itself, time has stood still. Two rows of tables, about 14 or so in all. The cafeteria outside, run in the old days by the reliable Keshavan, has changed but very slightly. More beverages than before. I ask for a bottle of rose milk. "Shaab, change ho ga?". I cough up most of the coins I have.

I wind my way through the corridors to H-4. I climb up the staircase (I recall I used to scamper up and down at least half a dozen times every day, now it's a measured tread). At the landing of H-4, I turn left and head towards the end. Ah,there's my room. It used to be 207, now it's labelled 309.

I lean against the railing and survey the floor. Right ahead to the right were Mohan Krishnan and Talwar. At the landing itself, Sanjiv Vaidya. At the opposite end was H K Patel. I let the memories surge for a while, take a few snaps and head for the staircase. Almost reflexively, I look straight ahead at the top floor of H1, where the girls had their rooms. Sure enough, a young thing in shorts steps out. She sees me and seems faintly startled. Clearly, an unfamiliar face.

I introduce myself to the watchman. He, in turn, introduces me to a fresh entrant, a boy from IIT Chennai. The PGP-I batch has just started coming in. Several vehicles drive up unloading their passengers. Even the boys seem to be accompanied by one or both parents. I guess that was a luxury in our time.

I park myself in the seating space around a tree outside the hostel and take in the buildings slowly. I recall the innumerable hours had we spent there. Stepping out with a cup of tea was almost mandatory after breakfast and at tea-time. After dinner, there was the post-prandial walk, followed by a session in those seating places. Boy, am I glad I went to IIMC, which gave you the time and the space for these indulgences. At IIMA, life in the first year is a grim struggle for survival. After the torture I went through at IIT Bombay, that's the thing I liked most about IIMC: it was a place for gentlemen. They didn't believe in silly things like compulsory attendance.

I allow the memories to float by and feel a sharp pang. There was a lightness to living then, which is the quality of youth itself. As time goes by, life begins to seem more and more of a burden with endless chores, rigid time-tables and nameless worries. I leave, heavy at heart.

Will America abolish the death penalty?

When it comes to the death penalty, the US is in truly dubious company in terms of the number of it people it executes every year: China, Saudi Arabia and Iran. This is in stark contrast to Western Europe which has abolished the death penalty.

The Economist notes that pendulum has slowly swung towards abolition for a number of reasons:

•  Support for the death penalty has dropped from 80% in 1994 to 60% last year.
• The number of executions has fallen from 98 to 39
• The empirical evidence is that the US has a higher murder rate than the EU despite the latter having abolished the death penalty. The murder rate is higher in American states that have the penalty than those that don't
• Executing somebody is three times more expensive than locking him up for life, thanks the long-winding appeals process.  

As somebody who is opposed to the death penalty, I welcome the trend.

The probability of getting murdered

Well, it was one in 16,000 in 2012 according to a UN report quoted in an article in the Economist. How to shorten the odds? The Economist offers useful tips:

First, don’t live in the Americas or Africa, where murder rates (one in 6,100 and one in 8,000 respectively) are more than four times as high as the rest of the world. Western Europe and East Asia are the safest regions....Next, be a woman. Your chance of being murdered will be barely a quarter what it would be were you a man. In fact, steer clear of men altogether: nearly half of all female murder-victims are killed by their partner or another (usually male) family member. Then, sit back and grow older. From the age of 30 onwards, murder rates fall steadily in most places. But not everywhere. Europeans are more at risk in middle age than in youth.

Surprisingly, when it comes to murder, crime pays. Only 43% of murders result in convictions. In the Americas, you can literally get away with murder: the probability that you will escape justice is 0.75.

Academic research is still US-centric

It used to be said that there is not much research in the top journals (which are mostly American) coming out of Asia, including India, because those journals still focus on issues related to the US. Well, that remains the case today, the Economist reports:

....a sample of 76,000 papers published between 1985 and 2005 shows that econo-nerds are infatuated with the “land of the free”.

There were more papers focused on the United States than on Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa combined (see chart). And for the world’s top-five economics journals—where publication of a paper can push a young researcher towards a full professorship—the imbalance is yet more marked. Even accounting for the fact that lots of economic research (and often the best) comes from American universities, the bias persists.

 

The world’s poorest countries are effectively ignored by the profession. From 1985 to 2005 Burundi was the subject of just four papers. The American Economic Review, the holy grail for many academics, published one paper on India, by some measures the world’s third-largest economy, every two years.

Indian academics are asked to increase research quality as judged by publications in the top journals. This may not be much of a problem in the pure sciences and engineering where problems may not be location-specific. In the social sciences, including management, however, it does pose problems.

It is not just that the problem has to be US-related. There are tremendous advantages to being located in the US, advantages related to networking as well as to having the benefit of feedback on working papers in the US seminar circuit. Researchers based elsewhere are undoubtedly disadvantaged.

How do we reconcile the need for quality research with the disadvantages faced by researchers outside the US? One way would be for Asian schools to produce their own journals. These journals would take a long time, however, in catching up with international rankings. Besides, individual schools setting up their own journals does not work; we need a set of institutions to pool their resources to bring out a journal, say, the IIMs indeed getting together for such an initiative. (The HRD ministry has been pushing the IIMs to bring out such a management journal but without luck).


These journals must have the benefit of access to top quality refereeing so that it is accepted- at least within the Asian region- that a paper published in such journals passes the test of quality. It's a tall order. Unless the effort is made, however, in nurturing top journals outside the US, it will be hard to reconcile the need for quality output with the issue of getting US journals interested in non-US issues.

Economist's Aam admi politician of the year

The Economist selects its country of the year based on the way Paraguay's president conducts himself. Here is one politician at the top who actually lives up to the ideas professed by Aap here:

President José Mujica (of Paraguay), is admirably self-effacing. With unusual frankness for a politician, he referred to the new law as an experiment. He lives in a humble cottage, drives himself to work in a Volkswagen Beetle and flies economy class. Modest yet bold, liberal and fun-loving, Uruguay is our country of the year.

Where India's financial sector is truly world class

India's financial sector is truly world class on one dimension- gender equality. Female-led lending institutions control 40% of assets, a figure not matched, perhaps, by any other economy's financial sector, says a report in FT. Some of the institutions that have female heads: SBI, Axis Bank, ICICI, JP Morgan, HSBC, Morgan Stanley and NSE. At one point, two out of the four deputy governors at RBI were women. Whew!