Frustrations of a modern Indian

The frustrations of being a "modern" India have been piling on me.
The more I read about India's achievements and successes earlier, the sadder I become. In fact, sometimes the despair is so strong that I want to stop reading about it. Ignorance surely is bliss.
The decline of India started with the turn of the last millennium with the advent of the Persian and Arab conquerors from the north-west border. It culminated in the British.
While direct physical domination is thankfully over, I do wonder if the "Indian plunder" or the massive exploitation of India is over. It seems not at all, especially with multi-national companies destroying indigenous industries in the name of free market. The politician-businessman-police-judiciary nexus is still a big, if not a worse, problem for our country. Almost no institution has changed its basic structure from the exploitative set-up of the colonial era. And almost no attempt is made to change them!
While in one hand, probably more and more Indians are realizing these predicaments, on the other hand, more and more people are falling in the trap of crass capitalism and cultural destruction. Now everyone wants a smart phone, a car, a home. There is nothing wrong on wanting these; what is wrong is wanting these at any cost. Greed is not good -- no matter what US business schools want us to believe.
Coming to this point, India has traditionally been rich always. By rich, I do not simply mean spiritually, philosophically and culturally, but also economically. It is well documented in history how India had a large share of the world's GDP till it declined sharply with colonialism. In spite of that, India rarely showed the greed and capitalism so rampant today.
Modern economic data and theories suggest that it was India's plunder that fuelled the industrial revolution in England. In return, we were tagged as the white man's burden! But then, history is always written by the conquerors.
And this is where it really hurts! We, modern Indians, are so ignorant of our own history. Our history books are what colonialists wrote for us -- full of mistakes, even in simple raw data! Do I see a course correction? No! What is undertaken by some governments is the other extreme -- an attempt to again re-write wrong history that suits the then rulers.
Yet, India, as a country, did so much in the past. It is still contributing; but, compared to the ancient world, our contributions now are almost negligible.

I can only hope that our decline has bottomed out and we can only improve from here. Philosophically speaking, all civilizations experience cycles of prosperity and poverty, and ours certainly is the oldest continuously standing civilization.
I end by invoking Rabindranath's words "Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake!"
"ভারতেরে সেই স্বর্গে করো জাগরিত!"

Shinde comment solves Pakistan terrorism problem

In what has been hailed as probably the largest masterpiece of the whole free world, Shinde has solved the entire Pakistan terrorism problem by his single comment.  With no need to send any army, no need to call any ambassador, and not even a need to sit down across the discussion table, the method adopted by Shinde has stunned the practitioners and followers of political science alike.

His comment that BJP is promoting "Hindu terrorism" has demeaned and hurt the Pakistani terrorist groups so much that they have decided to call it quits. First, it was Hafiz Saeed who quit.  The reason this is coming to news only now is because of the extreme numbness, pain and shock that Hafiz-ji felt.  Only today he could rue from his ICU bed in a private hospital, "I have worked all my life in promoting terrorism. I prided myself in preparing my boys to perpetrate terror. And I thought I was held in high regard in India for the insurmountable damage I have been causing to the country. But, this is too much. To be compared with a political party, that too which cannot even raise a proper voice against the country's most corrupt government ever, is, is ..." He was at a loss of words to describe the insult.  The only sane thing he could think of was to disband his army of terrorists.

Apparently, the event triggered a ripple effect on similar terrorist outfits in Pakistan.  Till news last came in, more than 100 such outfits have given up their arms, and are reportedly crossing the border to reach Dharamsala, where they plan to spend the rest of their lives trying to overcome grief and pain, not to talk of rage and insult.

How to use the right word?

Even though Indians are regarded world-wide as the best speakers of English outside the, er, English-speaking world, when it comes to the business end, we really are lagging a long way behind.

Take a simple example, one that excites everyone -- corruption. Let us say a businessman goes to a politician a day before tenders are opened and "gifts" a box full of cash. That is corruption.
But then, let us learn from the Americans.
Let us create a fund for the politician called "re-election fund". Let the same businessman now "donates" the box full of cash to this fund. This "donation" is legal, and of course, there is no corruption.

The trick was to use the right word -- "donation" -- instead of the wrong word -- "gifting", and corruption in the country is reduced by leaps and bounds.

Another example: "oppression" of downtrodden castes by the upper castes. When a higher caste man denies a lower caste man food, water and shelter, that is oppression, but when the same man "teaches" the lower caste man how to survive without food, water and shelter, then that is "education".

And to drive home the point, this is what the white man's (er, upper caste man's) burden is all about -- raising the standard of the brown and black (I mean, lower caste) man.

"Hypocrisy"? Wrong again, it is called "discretion".

Ranking

In general, humans have an obsession with ranking. Everything, and more frighteningly, everyone needs to be ranked. How to rank? On what criteria? Don't ask. Everything is justified as long as you can cite some scores, some ranks - all in the name of "objectivity". The newspapers and the magazines are obsessed with it, and the growing trend is the administrators (even in academia) are getting used to it.

Let us for a moment ponder how to rank two educational institutes or two universities. Apparently, the belief is that Inst-A is better than Inst-B since its students get better jobs (what is better - probably more salary), more companies come for campus placement, higher ranked (in what - well, a multiple-choice-question-type pan-India exam, what else?) students join there, and so on.

Now, we know the universities are supposed to impart "total" education. Without going in to the debate of what that means, it at least should include some social factors and some human angles, and not just money or companies. Even for jobs, who measures what happens later in those jobs. In the most high-paying jobs, people get frustrated earlier, and leave or change jobs, or change the entire career path as well. Shouldn't this stress be counted as a negative "score" for that job? But no, that is after the students have left the institutes, and why should an institute worry about it?

Again, this tendency of pushing the problem to someone else is very disturbing. A little joke is on order now. Due to the previous tatkal rail ticket timing, the website and the booking offices were clogged at 8am. The government solved it remarkably well. How? By shifting the tatkal time to 10am. Now, of course, there is no rush at 8am. What about the rush at 10am? Well, that's a different problem, and for someone else to solve.

Coming back to institutes, I personally will always prefer a campus with more vibrancy, more seminars of dignitaries from different walks of life (especially outside the set curriculum), a social awareness, more equality in gender, caste, religion, etc. However, no magazine, no agency considers this. Considering one aspect (jobs, etc.), and not considering others (social awareness, etc.) - isn't that subjectivity? Why do we think of objectivity in only numbers, and not the parameters?

Now, even more disconcertingly, compare two academicians. How to do that? Some will say, simple enough - just count the number of publications, the number of PhD students, the number of times one was a chair, the number of times one got awards, the number of times one organized a conference/workshop, etc. and map it to a nice little "score" in the end. This will solve the problem of who to promote, etc. without "subjectivity" as it produces a nice total ordering of all academicians in the institute.

I am not saying these measures are bad. In fact, some of them are good, and probably needs to be tracked. However, my point is by fixing only some of these, others are ignored, which ultimately will turn out to be very very costly. An example will be easier to understand. Nowhere in these measures is mentioned the number of times one works in a doctoral committee. Moreover, an unusual project or a tough course is counted the same as a run-off-the-mill project or a course - everything is made equivalent by the number "1".

Also, since there is an objective function to maximize, over the course of time, people will do just that. People will stop teaching esoteric courses, people will stop spending time in doctoral committees, etc. as these are deemed "unproductive" and time is limited.

In an academic institute, and to think more widely, in a society, it is best to let people evolve in their own ways, and not rank them. Of course, there should be checks and balances, but we all know when something or someone is abnormally bad or abnormally good, don't we? It is the middle section that matters, and ranking, at least in my opinion, only worsens the situation.

Human society is based upon trust, cooperation and fellow feeling. Unnecessary ranking measures promote mistrust, unhealthy competition and back-stabbing. That can never be desirable.

How to find good faculty members and post-graduate students?

How to find good faculty members? Although this question is faced by all institutions across the world, I am discussing here the Indian academia.
Probably a more important question is how to find good graduate students motivated for research?

Here are some of my thoughts.

I believe there is a huge potential in the so-called "next-level" colleges in India. May be the best is to tap them, go to their institutes, invite them to spend a summer or the last year with the "top-level" institutes, and hopefully show them and convince them the advantages of pursuing research in India.

How to retain the bachelor students of the "top-level" institutes themselves? May be money in the foreign universities is not the only concern. May be our curriculum is too rigid, too fixed with rules and bureaucratic, and in the process not so interesting. May be the colonialism has left us to derive a system where we don't believe anyone and try to guard against all possible mis-actions.
If we believe the graduate students more in letting them choose what they really want, the faculty members more in letting them design courses and conduct classes the way they want, things will only change towards better.

In any case, it cannot become much worse.

Reverse colonization

Now an European president is seeking to meet an Indian businessman to decide how the Indian company will operate in the European country! The tables have turned, is it?
However, I fail to get satisfaction as much as I would have wanted.
In the end, this is still humans portraying their ultimate greed.

Capital punishment

The hanging of Ajmal Kasab is a welcome news.
If he along with his mates dared to do this to our country, it is only right that he is hanged. Yes, this is revenge, but then what is wrong in it?
Why should we be chicken-hearted about ending the life of a hard-core terrorist? Why should we keep on feeding him from the state exchequer, filled from our taxes, when we are killed by him mercilessly? For than 100 deaths happened on that day, and the media is only worried about the human rights angle to the capital punishment!
Should we wait for another terrorist attack that hijacks a plane and demands Ajmal to be freed, only for him to return and create more havoc?
These kind of people have no right to live in our society, especially when it has been proved beyond doubt that he was responsible for his actions.
The only thing I dislike about the whole thing is that it took 4 years.

Facebook

Whatever is going on in this country in the name of governance is too obnoxious. How can police arrest a girl for posting on facebook? More ridiculously, how can they arrest some other girl for "liking" that post? The morality of the law-keepers in this country has never been highly thought of, but this is too much to ignore, too much to not condemn in the strictest possible words.
The post was way too innocuous and is very very reasonable. Holding up an entire city is not worthwhile; but the more important point is hunting down someone for a perfectly nice post in the cyber world, and claiming it incites hatred, etc. is a perfect example of what wrong is.

My country

The situation in this country is just way too depressing. I don't even know where to start, what to say. Too many events -- CWG, 2G, CAG shunning, Coal Allocation, Petroleum Ministry, Education, Law and Order, Khap -- the list is too depressing and too endless.
It is easy to blame the Congress or the UPA-II for this, but what about the Opposition -- BJP or NDA? They give some press conferences and that's all. I guess the whole political system is just rotten from the core.
However, this is not the most frustrating part. It is the failure of the entire country in either individual capacities or NGO-level or some group level to fight this wide-spread corruption. In fact, it seems that no body really hates corruption. They hate it when they can't do it themselves, and when the chance comes, they just scrape the cream as well. And I am one of them.

Faculty member caught posing as R-1 officer

In a startling revelation, one of the faculty members of an IIT near a remote village has been caught masquerading as an R-1 officer.  He was exposed while setting up a coaching center for IIT-JEE exam where he put up a hoarding mentioning himself as a faculty member.

When our reporter caught up with him, Dr. Robin Vada (real name changed only a bit) put up a brave face, and said this is to protect himself and his family against discrimination.  He argued, "Who wants to be a faculty member from an R-1 officer? While it seems a promotion, it actually is quite the reverse," and after adding an expletive towards one of his uncles who advised him for this, went on, "Look at all the things a faculty member has to go through -- taking regular classes, conducting exams, grading large number of papers, explaining to authorities why his/her students did not work, etc., etc.  And on top of it, they get houses that have been rejected by all R-1 officers, even those who are around 10 years junior.  On the other hand, we, R-1 officers, enjoy all the perks, and have much less responsibilities.  It was a grave mistake to apply for a faculty position.  And while I was offered a position, I never accepted it." While our reporter pointed out that 'no communication' means an acceptance and he had to send a formal rejection letter, Dr. Vada broke into another feat, "You journalists don't understand the situation of the aam aadmi in this country.  We need to worry about gas cylinders and banana prices every day and not some official bureaucratic rejection letter."

The IIT authorities has also decided to pass on the buck to, well, it is not clear whom, as they are still deciding.  However, one of the faculty members, on conditions of anonymity, told us that he is sure that the buck will be passed to the faculty community, "I am waiting for an office order that will reprimand us for not welcoming a new member of our community.  Sadly, the truth remains that we had no idea he was part of us.  In fact, we felt jealous looking at his big house, big car, etc."

Dr. Vada's wife, Mrs. Sonali, refused to talk to our reporter.  One of the neighbors, however, was gracious enough to pitch in, "How can she now come out? She always called us to her house on one pretext or another to show how good and how big it was.  Her nagging about what to do with so many rooms and so much garden space was becoming intolerable.  Now that she will be forced to stay in a two-room apartment like us and wait for 5-7 years for a bigger house, she is simply heart-broken."

The faculty members in Dr. Vada's department were also morose about this development, "This now means our average class size will go down from 76 to 74. With a cut-off of 75 students, we could have got one more extra day of grading."

Some members even saw a sinister motive in revealing Dr. Vada as a faculty member just when the IIT senate passed the rule of allowing one less day for grading with courses less than 75 students.  "You have to question the timing of this.  I mean, this guy has been enjoying this house for more than a year now. Why have the authorities woken up so late?"

The whole matter has been referred to the ministry of human resources and development.  Apparently, the reaction from there is that a little dishonesty doesn't hurt anyone.  In fact, it has helped the country by distorting the statistics of available faculty members in IIT, thereby paving the way for setting up foreign institutes.

The reaction from the Board of Governors of the IIT is awaited.

The frightening pace of destruction

What is the real price of the coal allocation scam?

Can it just be measured in monetary terms? What about the destruction that it will lead to -- the destruction of forests, the destruction of habitat, the destruction of indigenous culture, the destruction of wildlife?

Can everything be justified simply in the name of "development"?

And who will really benefit from that? The big companies, their CEOs, the industrial giants, but never the people who will be displaced, never the flora and fauna that will be destroyed and possibly made extinct, never the local simple art and craft that will make way to "made in china" stuff.

The argument that this is the only alternative is just not debated enough.


And this is where as modern humans, we have failed. We just don't realise, we just don't question, we just don't care. We have failed collectively on a basis that is becoming too important to circumscribe, too large to ignore.


Frightening, disturbing, depressing?

Doesn't matter -- we are too happy to kick-start our daily journey with a different type of "colgate".

Violence and SMS curfew

The Indian government's latest move to not allow more than 5 sms per person per day to arrest the violence against North-East Indians is a nuisance at best.

It not only fringes on the citizens' right to communicate, but also squarely puts the blame on to interactions through sms. This is a law-and-order situation and should be treated as such.

Instead of focusing attention on sms and social networks, the government should rather spend its energy on stopping the riots in Assam in the first place and then curbing the violence in the South Indian cities.


As Einstein once pithily remarked, "I've little sympathy for all those who find the thinnest part of the wood and then proceed to make a great many holes in it."

Happy Independence Day

"Happy Independence Day" -- this phrase has been hitting us more and more in recent years. This is more like happy mother's day, happy valentine's day, happy new year, etc. Indeed, consumerism has brought everything down to the same level.However, there is a more important issue about happy independence day.

What is so "happy" about it? Have we forgotten our history completely? Don't we remember anything about the circumstances in which our country gainedher independence? Don't we remember the partition? The breaking up of our country, for the sole benefit of some foreigners and some-worse-than-foreigners-businessmen-and-politicians? The riots that followed? The millions that died? The more-than-millions that were forced to flee their homes overnight without so much as even a paise or a change of clothes?

No, we don't. We only remember a footnote of history that India got its first Indian prime minister? Note that still Mountbatten was in the country. And instead of booting the British out, we welcomed them.
But what is it to us, a generation far removed from the practicalities of hardship and nation building. We have inherited a free country and a more-than-useful holiday. Let it be that.

Jai Hind!

Mahan Maharaj

Mahan Maharaj (Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar award winner for Mathematics in 2011) is simply one of the great wonders of this world. A student, so brilliant, with a chance to stay back in foreign countries, not only returns but embraces monkhood! However, his love and sense of duty for what he is good at (i.e., mathematics) leads him to continue doing research at the highest level.

Indeed, I feel one of his comments to be so apt -- when asked why he chose to be a monk, he replies "Perhaps because I wanted to find the peace to work away at mathematical problems!"

With this fast world around, are we giving yourselves enough time and peace to work towards what we are good at?

E-filing of income tax

While the Indian government's effort to get all income taxes over ₹10 lakhs to be filed online compulsorily must be lauded, we are still really myopic about the way to do it.

The website requires one to first create an account (a regulation step), and then submit an XML file as the tax return. The use of XML is a great step as (i) it is really just a text format, (ii) it is free and not under any copyright, etc.

However, as soon as one starts thinking of how to create the XML file, trouble ensues. The website asks one to use a spreadsheet file (that also after unzipping). Note that while spreadsheet is an open (and free) format, the file that the website provides issues macros and ActiveX controls which, unfortunately, cannot be run without Microsoft Excel. I have tried different Openoffice versions and confirmed this.

This is where my real complaint is. Why force an entire population to use a paid (and if I may add, quite heavily so) software? Does the Indian government assume that all users have access to such a pricey software? Or as is the current wisdom, have access to one with such a privilege or worse have access to a pirated version? Is this really promoting piracy?

I must re-emphasize the fact that the final output is just an XML file. Some other software (not a spreadsheet) could have been used to generate it only if the website also provided the document structure for it. But why bother when the open secret is that M$Office is freely pirated.

Suffering

A time comes when you do everything, listen to everyone, attend every detail, find every joy, feel every pain, but yet you feel something missing, something not right. You can't pinpoint, or worse, you can't correct it.
What can you do then? Your ego won't let you apologize to people you have hurt, your selfishness won't let you stop manipulating the world for yourself, your humanity won't let you go evil without remorse, your fellow-feeling pains you when you hurt people -- in a sense, you are the most confused creature. You wish you break a few barriers, take a few bold decisions, blurt out some truth, bleed, cry, run crazy. But alas, there are so many conflicting emotions that you just don't do anything, you just let yourself rot -- rot to the point when there's no coming back, rot in a way where even the most rotten state doesn't seem to matter.
And then? You don't know -- you're not yet there, but as is said, "worse than war is the fear of war" -- you're pretty scared of what to come, you're not even sure it's coming, you just suffer! Mind you, this suffering is not like your daily dose of pains and depressions, this is different. This is rotting of the soul, disintegration of yourself, where there is no sympathy, no reason even -- just the suffering!

Corruption

From childhood, I have been hearing stories of how corrupt our country is -- the police is corrupt, the bureaucrats are corrupt, the businessmen are corrupt, and the politicians are even more corrupt. As I grew up, I started asking myself the question "What about the common people? What about you and ME?" Are we feeding into this?
We surely are. I need a passport for studying abroad -- I happily bribe the local policeman for hurrying it up. I need a driving license -- I pay a middleman for doing it without even knowing where the motor vehicles office is. There is a simple counter-argument to all this. You cannot get your passport if do not bribe, you cannot get your license if do not pay a middleman, and so on and so forth. Fair enough!
I have grown up more (at least in terms of years spent on this earth). I have become an academician, a teacher. In old days, people of our category was held in high regard. Even today, the respect is still there. What is our role in weeding out corruption? Is it enough to be honest yourself and turn a blind eye to the rest of the world? There is a famous quote from Rabindranath Thakur "অন্যায় যে করে আর অন্যায় যে সহে, তব ঘৃণা যেন তারে তৃণসম দহে!" The spirit roughly translates to "tolerating a wrong is equally heinous as committing it".
Here's a situation. Think of an important exam. You are entrusted with organising it. You catch a person impersonating a candidate. The impersonator even accepts that. What do you do? Do you take the easy way, note the candidate's registration number, etc. in a form meant for "doubtful" identities, and let the impersonator walk away? Or, do you hand over the impersonator to the police? The decision is not easy as it seems.
Everyone around you quickly enlightens you about the danger of the second option? There must be a gang operating, you fall in their eyes, you jeopardize the school's security, etc. etc., and anyway, the police is only going to extort money from the candidate's family and let the matter bury. This is social pressure -- this is what it does to a common man too used to corruption. The corruption seeps through your blood and ultimately your genes. Future generations will be born with this sense and will find absolutely nothing wrong in the society-wide corruption.

Solar eclipse

Is it good to watch the solar eclipse? Can one get "physically" harmed by watching it? Do "special" rays come out of sun during an eclipse? The answer is NO. Let me explain it.
From every school textbook, we know that the solar eclipse happens when the moon casts its shadow on the sun. The only role the poor sun plays in this fantastic celestial phenomenon is to place itself at the path of the straight line connecting the earth and the moon. As a result, the moon blocks the sun from the viewers on the earth, and we "experience" a solar eclipse.
Now, there are 8 (or 7) other planets in the solar systems and numerous other satellites. To think that the sun behaves differently and sends "special" rays only when the earth is blocked by its satellite is a highly anthropocentric view, and can only satisfy the ego of the most intelligent and selfish species of the earth. To sum up, there is no different kind (or amount) of rays that come out of the sun during an eclipse; the UV rays, etc. always strike the earth, be it an eclipse or not.
All the advisories blurted out by doctors---are they all false then? Interestingly, even though many of the doctors speak without any scientific knowledge, there is a case for precaution.
Ordinarily, it is impossible to look at the sun for more than a couple of seconds. As a result, the amount of sunshine (or solar energy) entering one's eyes is minimal. However, during an eclipse, it is possible to look at the sun for an extended period of time as there is less brightness. This, in turn, allows more radiation to enter the eyes. The enhanced amount of energy may be harmful for the retina. The process is analogous to over-exposure in a camera. Hence, it is advisable to use some kind of filter when looking at the sun during an eclipse.

Good students

Should more be expected from better students? Or should grading of projects, etc. be uniform?
My feeling is everyone should work to her/his potential, and that should be guiding criterion.

Students

The academia in India is blessed with brilliant undergraduate students. What happens to them afterwards? They go abroad and never return. The problem is very severe in engineering streams.
The natural question is why -- why can we as academicians cannot hold our own students here? The lure of lucre is surely there, but is it the only explanation? If it is, then that is it -- there is no point anymore in the Indian academia.
I will continue on some thoughts later.