With A Grain of Salt!

Bhagwat Purana Skandha Three, Part One – The Beginning of Creation

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 07:30:00 +0000

The third Skandha begins with Krishna sitting next to the sea, all the Yadavas having had died. Krishna’s cousin, Uddhava finds Krishna there and knows that Krishna is planning to leave this mortal world. Krishna teaches Uddhava the Brahma Vidya and then Bddhava left to travel to Badarik Ashram on the Gandhamadana mountan. While travelling to the Badarisk Ashram, Uddhava realises that Krishna has also died from Jara’s arrow shot which hits the sole of Krishna’s foot. The arrow was cursed and it was destiny otherwise how else can a Vishnu incarnation die? Vidura happens to meet Uddhava and hears about the end of the Yadavas and upon knowing that he is now in possession of the Brahma Vidya, begs to learn it. But Uddhava demurs, suggests that Vidura go learn the Brahma Vidya from Sage Maitreya.

Vidura reaches Sage Maitreya’s Ashram and begs him to give him the Brahma Vidya starting with the story of how creation began and Vishnu’s incarnations. A brief overview was given in Skhanda two but this is much more detailed. And then began a fascinating story about the beginning of creation. A Mahapralaya happens. A mahapralaya is a fascinating event. Thinking more about it, it is philosophically challenging to even imagine. Think of a situation or an event where the entire known and unknown universe is annihilated. Existence of time, space, consciousness, all dimensions vanish. Physical matter, memory, Dark Matter, souls everything is no longer in existence. You might well as inquire if that is mahapralaya, then what is pralaya. Well, if I understood it correctly, this roughly corresponds to significant cosmic events such as a star / nova / super nova explosion or the destruction of a solar system. A maharalaya is the mother of all pralayas so to say. This event marks the end of one and the beginning of another cycle of a mahamanvantara, a cosmic cycle.

Now take a step back and imagine this kind of philosophy being discussed thousands of years back. I find it difficult to comprehend and hold the concept in my mind, much less visualise this and these fellows were not only discussing the concept, they were describing a whole mythology around it. So after the mahapralaya happens, all creation is now dissolved into the primordial sea, Naara. Now this is where I am a bit confused. If all creation is annihilated, then where is this sea coming from? It might be primordial but this means that the sea is outside the realms of creation. Is this in some other dimension that Vishnu has? Something to think about, eh?

The reason why I think it is another dimension is because the Purana now talks about a serpent, Adisesha, which is floating on this sea upon which Vishnu is sleeping. It says that all creation has now been withdrawn into Vishnu. Ah! Ha!, so my guess was right, Vishnu exists outside of creation. For a long unbroken moment, everything was perfectly balanced and nothing stirred. The three gunas, sattva, rajas and tamas were in equilibrium till Kaala, the spirit of time, disturbed the balance.

Before I go on with the story, here is another incongruous statement. How can something external disturb something that is inside Vishnu? If Vishnu is the lord of all including time, how is it that Kaala (which isn’t time itself, but it is the spirit of time) can disturb the balance? The only way this can happen is if there is method in the madness. In other words, this disturbance was part of Vishnu’s design. So time is really not external to Vishnu at all.

Following this, a lotus stalk emerged from Vishnu’s navel and then an immense lotus flower bloomed. Vishnu’s spirit rose in the stalk and emerged in the flower in the form of Brahma. He thought of himself as Svayambhuva, born of himself, knowing all the Vedas, and looking at four directions through his four heads. The waters of the infinite sea whispered to him “tapa, tapa, tapa”, which lead him to tapasya, or deep meditation. After hundred cosmic years, he suddenly saw Vishnu, immediately attained enlightenment and knew the purpose of his existence, to be the creator.

Brahma created the four Kumara Rishis from his mind, Sanaka, Sananda, Sanatkumara and Sanatana, and told them go forth and multiply. Typically, the kids refused to do work and wanted to go in search of Moksha. The Rishis said, we want to attain enlightenment as well while you are asking us to work to create the universe. I have to admit I had a bit of a chuckle. Even the gods have problems with their kids. I feel better now.

But guess what? Even Brahma feels anger. He was utterly furious. Well, I am not surprised, it is not like he is asking for a cup of tea, you really cannot get any more important than the task of creation. So while he controlled himself, his anger was seething. This anger of his manifested himself in the form of a howling child. Brahma named him Rudra and asks him to go dwell in the heart, senses, life, sky, air, fire, water, earth, sun, moon and tapasya. Quite an interesting time, those few moments when Brahma was getting on with his work of creation. I am a project manager and while I also create a project starting with a project plan or business plan, it’s a tad different from what Brahma goes through. At least no children spawn off my forehead even though some veils might pop.

Brahma created ten more sons from his body, Atri, Angiras, Pulastya, Pulaha, Kratu, Bhrigu, Daksha, Marichi, Vasista and Narad. Not just sons, but metaphysical concepts such as Dharma, Adharma, Desire and Anger were born from his body, soul, heart and brow. His shadow became another son called as Kardama.

Then he really got down to the nitty gritty by issuing all the physical matter in the universe, the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the cosmic dust, etc. The four Vedas emerged from each of his faces and merged into one. Brahma divided himself into two genders, male and female called as Svayambhuva Manu and Satarupa who in tern produced Akuti, Prasuti and Devahuti (daughters) and two sons, Priyavrata and Uttanapada. People of tender dispositions look away now, because Brahma gave Akuti to Ruchi (who seems to appear out of nowhere, who is he? Where did he come from?), Devahuti was given to Kardama Muni (I guess her uncle) while Prasuti was married off to Daksha Prajapati. These six people, three couples, are the ancestors of mankind.

A rather simple straight forward tale but truly cosmic in conception and imagination. While I had read that Brahma had created creation, I did not know about the details. Some of the relationships are a bit fruity, eh? But then again, from a metaphysical basis, when everything is part of Vishnu, you really do not worry about mere aspects such as Incest or genetic problems of consanguineous marriages. Good start, made me wish to keep on going. In the next part, I will be talking about Varaha, the cosmic boar who brought the Earth to Humans, Rishis and Gods.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Bhagwat Purana Skandha Two, Part Three – The main reincarnations of Vishnu

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 07:42:00 +0000

I always thought that Vishnu reincarnated only for 10-12 times, depending upon whom you ask, but the Bhagwat Purana clearly says that he was incarnated countless times. After listening to his father, Brahma, Narada Muni about the path to Moksha and the story of creation, he asks Brahma about the incarnations. As it so happens, if one listens to the stories of Vishnu’s reincarnations, then one’s sins are removed. Brahma then started narrating the stories of the main reincarnations of Vishnu.

Bhumidevi, the Earth, was sinking into the Ekarnava, the first primordial sea and Vishnu appeared as Varaha, the great boar, whose body is made up of Yagnas to dive into the sea to save the earth. The first Asura Demon Hiranyaksha challenged him and Varaha destroyed him and saved Earth byraising her using his tusks.

His next reincarnation was when mankind peopled the earth and he appears as Suyagna, who liberates earth from another disaster. His grandfather Svayambhuva Manu calls him as Hari, the saviour. His next incarnation was as Kapila Deva, who provided guidance on Atman to his mother, who found Nivana. Muni Atri wanted a son and carried out deep meditation to the lord to provide him with this boon, so Vishnu was pleased by his devotion and then was born as Muni Atri’s son, called as Datta, the given one.

Brahma created the world via Vishnu’s guidance. Narayan has a lotus sprouting from his navel and thus is called as Padmanabha, incarnated himself as the four Kumaras, Sanatkumara, Sanaka, Sananda and Sanatana, taught them Dharma and set them free. From Dharma Deva and Brahma’s grand daughter Murti Devi, Vishnu was born as Nara and Narayana. Vishnu was reincarnated as the son of Veena, who abandoned the Dharmic path and thus was cursed. Vishnu saved her soul. When the deluge happened, (Dp you see the interesting links? Almost all ancient books of humankind have this deluge myth), earth was drowning and Vishnu, in his incarnation as the Matsya, the fish, saved the Earth.

Vishnu came as Koorma, the tortoise, who supported the Mandara mountain on his back, which was used as the mixer to carry out the Samudra Manthan (ocean churning) between the Devas and Asuras. He came again as the Narasimha, half man half lion, to save his devotee from Hiranyakashyapu the Demon. He did not just save humans, but he also saved the king of Elephants when he was attacked by a giant crocodile. One might recall this scene as quite a popular painting in current day India. He appeared as Dhanvantari, the original physician, who brought Amrita to humankind, chanting his name can help cure every sickness as he gifted the gift of Ayurveda to men.

As Parasurama, he slaughtered all the Kshatriyas, who had become Adharmic, as Rama, he got rid of Ravana, as Dwaipaynana he divided the Veda for men to understand it easily, as Krishna he got rid of Kansa and other tasks and finally he will appear as Kalki, when the Kali Yuga ends to get rid of evil from this world.

Parikshit is by now quite excited to know more about the Lord and asks Suka Muni about the soul, differences between man and God, the location of the Divine Man, how time is measured, dimensions of the cosmic egg, the details of Bhakti and a host of other questions. I am not writing down all the questions, because I think I will end up spending one essay on each of these questions and have to leave something to the reader and these questions are answered in the later Skandhas.

Suka Muni talks about how Brahma was worshiping the Paramatman, the Supreme Lord manifested himself and explained the difference between the Atman and the Brahman. Brahma then meditated on the type of creation, what would emerge, but could not do so till a voice murmured in his ear, “Tapa” (penance). So Brahma executed penance for 100 godly years till the Supreme Lord was pleased by him and showed him his own abode, Vaikuntha, the place without fear. It is without fear because the five miseries, ignorance, selfhood, attachment, hatred and death-fear have been banished. He saw the gods and goddesses, the views of Vishnu in his physical form. Vishnu explained to Brahma, who was in ecstasy from seeing the divine lord, that by his penance, the Lord is happy and the task of creation can begin. After giving more instructions, Vishnu disappears and thus Brahma begins the task of creating ‘creation’.

Suka Muni states that the Bhagwat Purana is the answer to all his questions. He further explains the ten characteristics of the Lord, which are described within the Purana. These ten characteristics or statements relate to the creation of the universe, the secondary creation, the different worlds created by the Lord, support via granting of boons or reincarnation, the creative drive, the changes of Manus, how to follow the Lord’s instructions, how to revert back to the supreme being, how to attain perfect liberty and Moksha and finally an exposition of what Lord Krishna did. The last two chapters of the second Skandha were very difficult for me. I am not sure if I have understood all and that is why I am perhaps summarising to a degree which is not borne out by the text. For example, in this chapter, eight elements are mentioned instead of five, earth, water, fire, air, ether, mind, intelligence and false ego. I was not sure where the last three elements came from or what is their connection with the Lord.

The creation story and the demographics of creation are curiously numerical, a specific number of elements, number of worlds, ascribed to specific parts of the body of the Supreme Being, locations, etc. Was this because having concrete numbers and locations assists in the logical formation of the story? Is it because it makes it easier for people to remember? What is the philosophical angle behind this? Personally speaking, it made sense to me, although the mathematician inside my cranium was trying to draw up a taxonomy of the various worlds, a flow chart of the process of creation and I was constantly finding areas (like the elements mentioned above) where things were not clear, they were not typing up. Hair hurt time!

It’s just the second Skanda that I have finished now and there are still ten more to go. This is perhaps the most complicated and difficult things I have ever attempted and it shows. I find myself curiously incompetent to explain basic concepts. I can see the words in Sanskrit and in English, explained in various versions, but I struggle to explain them and put them down on this review. Is this why people tend to say that it is easier to talk verbally about the Bhagwata Purana rather than write about it? I feel insignificant. Onwards and upwards in the service of the Lord to the third Skanda, which talks about teachings and lessons using stories.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Bhagwat Purana Skandha Two, Part Two.

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 21:22:00 +0000

How do you get on the path of moksha, the inner path to Bhawan, the path to liberate your soul? This is one of the most ancient of questions and something that people have tried to answer for time immemorial. This is where a guru or a teacher comes in. A teacher describes to you how to find and how to walk on this path and then how to reach the goal.

Parikshit is waiting out the seven days till his death takes place and Suka is reciting the Bhagwat Purana (BP) to him. Parikshit asks about this path, so Suka starts by saying that one has to renounce all attachments, all desires before one even comes to the path. Once in this no attachment state, one meditates and awakens the kundalini shakti, which sleeps at the base of one’s spine. This shakti or power rises through six chakras along the spine, from the base to the navel to the heart to the breath to tongue to eyebrows to the top of the head in the brain. At this point the person is one with the Brahman.

But this is not the end, but just the beginning of the journey. He passes through a realm of divine fire called as Vaisvanara, where all impurity is burnt out of him. Then he arrives at the Saisumara chakra where the links to a thousand previous lives is cut out from him. Then he goes on a world where other beings who know the Brahman live. The yogi lives here for a kalpa (and that is a seriously long period to live).

Once the kalpa ends, the universe is consumed in the cosmic apocalypse and then he migrates to the next world of Paramesthin, where the greatest yogis and munis meditate for two parardhas, sitting in great flying platforms. By the way, each parardha is 100,000,000,000,000,000 human calendar years each. That left me fairly shell-shocked, because I like to put my arms around numbers, but these kinds of numbers are beyond my comprehension. Either these are there to impress people, or are actually meant to teach devotees that they should not really count days and years, but look at the end result. It is a way to show that time moves differently in those realms, for those who are on the path of Bhakti. Suka says that these realms do not have any old age or death, no sorrow and no nothing, except for compassion for those who are on the lower wheels of life and death.

The next stage for the yogi is to unite the spirit body with the five cosmic elements including earth, water, fire, air and then merge into ether. After this merge, the yogi transcends the senses of smell, taste, sight, touch and sound and finally merges with the vital breath, Prana. Then the yogi arrives at the core of the Ahamkara, the sense of self after having merged with the elements and transcended the senses. Crucially, he also transcendent the deities who rule over these elements and senses.

Past Ahmkara, he moves into Mahat and then into Prakriti, which is primal and original. He now transcends the self and is absorbed into the supreme soul, the Paramatman and finds perfect bliss. This is the first of two paths. The second path is to worship particular deities,for particular purposes as a starting point. For example, Suka Muni says that one should worship Brahma if one wants the wisdom and power of the Vedas; worship Indra if one wants power and skill in his body. For children, Prajapatis, for prosperity worship Devi Durga, for brilliance appeal to Agni, for wealth meditate on the eight Vasus and for strength worship Rudras. Similarly the list goes on including worshiping Shiva for learning, Vishnu for justice etc.

There are more than one god to worship for the same thing, like for the treasures, one worships Varuna, but for prosperity, one can also worship Ma Durga; while for wealth, the eight Vasus. The flip side also applies, such as appealing to and worshipping Brahma for wisdom of the Vedas; you can worship him as well if you want to be an emperor. There were many gods mentioned in the Purana whom I did not even recognise, but given that there are tens of millions of Gods, that is not surprising. But all these are manifestations of the same godhead, Vishnu or Krishna. This is the gradual path and this is not wrong, because Krishna is supposed to be the beginning, middle and end of every step on the step. All you are doing is doing Bhakti for Vishnu.

After this, Parikshit asked Suka Muni about how the universe was created by the Lord Vishnu? Suka says that Narada Muni had asked the same question of his father Brahma. Brahma described the process as such: He said that there is one beyond Brahma himself, Narayana (another name for Vishnu). He is formless but has assumed three Gunas or attributes or abilities, namely Sattva, Rajas and Tamas. These create, sustain and destroy the world of reality. The five elements (earth, water, fire, air and ether) plus Gyana (knowledge) and Karma (deeds) are founded on these three gunas. As one can make out, the human soul is bound by these three Gunas, five elements and Gyana and Karma, which sheathe the body in ignorance and illusion, or Maya.

That is the underlying concept. Formless Vishnu then desired to be many and have forms. The balance of the three Gunas was therefore disturbed and Mahat came in existence permeated with Sattva and Rajas, but with an additional dimension dominated by Tamas. In this Tamas dominated dimension came the five elements, the senses and the gods of them. These all came together to give rise to Ahamkara, the true self.

Ahamkara then modified itself into Sattvika, Rajasika and Tamasika. Tamasa gave rise to Akasa, the cosmic ether whose essence is sound and gives rise to the knowledge of seers. Akasa then transformed into Vayu or air, whose essence is touch, which gives rise to life. Vayu gave rise to Tejas, fire/brilliance/heat which then became Agni. At the same time, the evolution of Tejas threw out water, whose essence is taste. Out of water evolved earth, whose essence was smell. Thus the five elements were born.

From Sattvika, the mind was born whose God is Soma Deva and the other ten Devas who rule over the five senses and five who rule over the organs. They are Vayu, Surya, Varuna, Aswin twins ruling over the ears, skin, eyes, tongue and nose. Then you have Agni, Indra, Upendra, Mitra and Ka, who rule over speech, hands, feet, anus and genital reproductive organs. From Tamasika the five organs and five senses were born and finally from Rajasika emerged intelligence, the ability to know, the vital breath and the power to act emerged. This, when acted upon by the will of Vishnu, are combined as the body in the shape of a golden egg and after many Kalpas had passed, he breathed life into the golden egg. He himself came bursting out of this egg with thousands of legs, arms, mouths, faces and heads. This is the Virata Purusha, the Cosmic Man having seven worlds below his loins and seven above. The Brahman was born from the cosmic man’s mouth, the Kshatriya from his arms, the Vaisya from the thighs and Sudra from his feet.

The cosmic man defines the universe and the worlds. Bhurloka from his feet, Maharloka from his chest, etc. His nostrils are the abodes of Prana, the vital airs. His tongue is the font of taste. His body hairs are the trees and plants, while the hair on his head, beard and nails cause rocks, metals, clouds and lightening. His three paces provide Bhur, Bhuvar aAns Svar, they provide protection. His feet are the sanctuary of all seekers, which makes the Sudra the first port of call, so to say. The description goes on, such as his buttocks being the source of defeat, godlessness and ignorance, his heart being the source of the spirit body,is arteries and veins the sources of rivers and streams.

When you worship any god, you are doing so using parts of his own body, the water, the food-grains, the fruits, the wood, the ghee, the gold, the clay, the earth, the Vedas, the vows, the Dakshina, all emanate from him and revert back to him. As Brahma carried out the first Yagna, the nine Prajapatis joined Brahma in worshipping the Cosmic Person and this gave rise to Vishnu manifesting himself as Indra and the other Devas. He is the first man, the unborn one who creates time out of himself. He is the truth, perfect, whole without beginning or end, with and without change, eternal and alone. So this is the story of how creation happened.

I come to the end of the second part of the second Skanda. As I was reading and rereading the Skanda, I kept going back to the other books and trying to decipher the Sanskrit shlokas, trying to cross correlate with the English translations. It was ok, but once it was written down, I felt absolutely tiny, miniscule, infinitesimally minute in front of this awe inspiring story of creation. I felt empty of anything other than sheer awe. “Big Bang” theory? Sure, bring it on, you can see the links between the theory and this theory of creation. Call it intelligent design if you will. Actually, it’s up to you what you call it, but I am not going to call it anything. It just is.

This exercise is perhaps one of the most difficult I have undertaken in my life. The actual logistics of the review was fairly complex anyway, but the philosophical elements have seriously made my hair hurt and I can feel my brain expanding and pressing in my tiny cranium. This is going to be painful, but in a good way. In the next part of this Skanda, we will explore the other incarnations of Vishnu and finally end with the complex and searching questions that Parikshit asks of Suka.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

The Blinkered Strategists

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:35:00 +0000

When waging wars, the powers that be are driven by strategic preconceptions. In each of the Indo-Pakistani wars, whether 1948, 1965, 1971, 1984 or 1999, both sides had strategic preconceptions. Unfortunately, preconceptions for the aggressor are tortured by two aspects. The first relates to the old saw, “never over-estimate yourself and never under-estimate the enemy”, and the second is the “law of un-intended consequences”. In this essay, we explore these fascinating aspects of the Pakistani military mind.

I wrote these while reading about the 1965 Indo Pakistan War. Needless to say, there is no point in rehashing the details of the actual battles; the winners and losers; the history behind the war and its repercussions; heroes and cowards; the innumerable and frankly pointless loss of life; etc. These aspects were either already thrashed half to death or better military historians than me will be able to shed better light on them. I, therefore, decided to look at the 1965 war as a strong way-point on the path on which the Pakistani strategic mind works, jump forward to 2006, and see what lessons can be drawn. This analysis, coming from a layman, may well be far too airy fairy for many and my apologies for this.

These preconceptions relate to both sides, their own side and the enemy side. This is but natural and deeply rooted in human nature itself. These preconceptions emerge due to very high level factors such as national culture, education systems, national ideology, and extend to mid level factors such as military training, political structure present at that time, quality of the military / economic capabilities, facilities and infrastructure, etc.

In the case of Pakistan, what were and are the preconceptions? The first and foremost is the underestimation of India and its capabilities. Whether it be Indian economics, its people, its military force, its international stature, the quality of its diplomatic corps, the secularity of its body politic, the very strong institutional framework of parliament, judiciary and the executive, the strange but workable (like the proverbial bumblebee) centre-state-regional stresses and strains, all combine to give a completely wrong preconception to the generals, that India is weak and a “strong” shove will make it crumple, shatter into pieces, beaten and defeated. Like General Ayub Khan believed "as a general rule Hindu morale would not stand more than a couple of hard blows at the right time and place."

This is expressed in many ways – such as “the Hindu Bania mentality”, Hindu's were never warriors, Pakistani soldiers are better than Hindu soldiers, Indians are sneaky and underhanded and will never be able to stand up to a forceful reply, their secularism is a sham, the Hindu religion itself does not lend itself to a strong state, so on and so forth. That is on the under-estimation side.

On the over-estimation side, one can see the flip side of the above. A Pakistani soldier is worth three Indian soldiers and other expressions along this ilk. Since the military has ruled over Pakistan (covertly and/or overtly) for most of its history, the predominant view of the strategists is necessarily military focused. Consequently, Pakistan is often seen as an army with a country, unlike India which is a country with an army. Therefore, the feedback mechanism, the strength which comes from a populace which is strongly behind the military, the check on military adventurism, the militarization of society, etc. is different. Hence, the strategists frequently over-estimate their own capabilities.

The second side of the over-estimation comes from the judgment of the military rules as to their worth as a client state to others, whether it be China or USA. Needless to say, that Pakistan acts like a client, but there is a significant difference in expectations between what Pakistan would like to have and what China/USA will let them have. This preconception that their “friends” will step in to help means a significant over-estimation of their own strength when going head to head with the enemy.

The last preconception, which could potentially be the most damaging, is their view of civilians. Because of various well known reasons, the Pakistani military thinks that the civilians are a bunch of nincompoops and blithering idiots, who cannot be relied upon to arrange for the proverbial piss-up in a brewery. Consequently, any and all recommendations which may emanate from the civilian side (foreign ministry, economics ministry, public think tanks, the press, etc) are airily waved away as inconsequential. This leaves the military mind purely focused on the war effort, disregarding the hugely important battles in the international diplomatic arena, the economic arena, the domestic public arena, etc. But it is this lack of respect for anything civilian which also affects their military performance. When there is no accountability to nobody, the military will not live up to its responsibility and will not learn from its mistakes. This chrysalises in the words of Col S. G. Mehdi, MC commanding the SSG until just before the 1965 war: “Had our Government initiated a probe into concept, conduct and consequences of 1965 War', and raised the curtain from the acts of gross omission or that of the criminal commission, the ignominy of 1971 could have been avoided.”

Law of unintended consequences is where these preconceptions come home to roost (if you don’t mind me mangling proverbs). A good planning department will consider various alternatives and have what we call as a decision tree, where each alternative has a series of potential results, with sub decisions, which again have a series of results. Unfortunately if preconceptions are embedded in this process, the range of alternatives will simply not be there. Hence the surprise when the Indians attacked after Operation Gibraltar. Or that the 1965 war will remain a covert war in Kashmir. Or that the Rann of Kutch spat proved that India was a pushover. Or the shock at the lack of support given by US and China to Pakistan’s strong requests for aid.

As I mentioned, being the aggressor means that planning and estimation have to be spot on, after all it is the aggressor, who is trying to change the status quo. Accordingly, (and assuming that victory and the achievement of objectives is the main goal), one has to be prepared for potentially all eventualities. For that, an open mind is necessary, a disciplined validation of basic assumptions is crucial and a balanced estimation of costs/benefits is required. Having preconceptions means that one limits one’s ability at the very start. Consequently, the bravery of the Pakistani soldier or pilots and the sufferings of the civilians are of no avail if the strategists put them into inconclusive or losing battles.

In 2006, having the luxury of looking back, we can but see that the preconceptions, which drove the Pakistani military minds are still there, although (and you can call me an optimist) I see signs of improvement. Not much, but it is happening. The offer for peace talks, the burial of the strategic depth shibboleth, the fact that the Kashmiri militant camps are now an open secret, the fact that the military has seen the need for a “civilian” fig leaf for its rule, the freer press. Ok, ok, so I will not go overboard and all these may wash away with the next general in power. All the above-mentioned mis-conceptions have within them the implicit cure, but before this columns turns into a tome, let me close with a quote, “we judge ourselves by what we THINK we are capable of doing, people judge us by what we have DONE.”

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

(Note: this was written in 2006, but never published as the outlet went bust.., just found it now)

Bhagwata Purana, Skandha Two, Part One.

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 05:35:00 +0000

You know my great idea about writing one essay on each Skandha? Well, I am afraid that it became impossible for me to stick to my original plan in the second Skandha itself, as there are far too many concepts and ideas that I want to try and do justice to. The Skandha starts with the story of how Vyasa Muni first composed the Bhagwata Purana (BP).
You might already know that Vyasa Muni was the original compositor of the Vedas, but the Purana is silent on when exactly he wrote it in Hindu cosmological terms, although we know it was written after Krishna’s death, which is tentatively given as 3228 BCE (according to the wiki entry). The Purana, on the other hand, says that Vyasa was born in the Dwapara Yuga. Take a look at this calculation which talks about some seriously huge time frames. Time is defined in the top level as Brahma Years. We are in the first day of the 51^st year of Brahma (he is a middle aged God right now). Each day and night in an year comprises of a Kalpa, which is further divided into 28 manvantaras and we are in the 7^th day manvantara. Each Manvantara is made up of 71 mahayuga’s and we are in the 28^th mahayuga. Each Mahayuga comprises of four yugas namely Satya Yuga, Treta Yuga, Dwapara Yuga and Kali Yuga. We are currently in Kali Yuga. The time in human Christian Gregorian Years is roughly 432,000 solar years.
So extrapolating from this (and bear with me, I have no way of confirming this), Vyasa was born before 3228 BCE. Given that the average human life span in the Dwapara Yuga was considered to be approximately 1,000 years, he could have been born and actually composed the BP any time between 3228 BCE to 4228 BCE, but the actual book took shape in the 3^rd millennium BCE. For the longest time, this kind of thinking about time blows my mind, but I have that down as a potential research project to think about. Take a look at this article by Ramesh Rao for an interesting perspective on time.
But let’s get back to the BP and its origins. The above is from a mythological perspective that is; the real truth is much more complicated. As of the current state of historiographical research, there is simply no evidence of when it was originally written and by whom. The wiki entry for the Vedas is a good example of the confusion about the dates on the origins of the Vedas, but it’s aimed at a date of 1,000 BCE. This sort of conflicts with the reputed death of Krishna around 3228 BCE, so what happened in the middle 2 millennia?
However, I am not writing an analytical paper here, I am talking philosophy and mythology. Hindu philosophy (if this kind of a formulation can even be said) simply has too many strands to worry about exact timing or authenticity of the author, unlike say the fact that Gabriel taught Mohammad the Quran or there is a gospel by Mark. How about the philosophy that time is essentially an illusion (maya)? If it’s maya, then is it really important to know the author or the time? We also need to know that if we start ascribing the authorship to a particular person and time, we run the risk of it sounding fallible, which really cannot be done now, can it? The other way of looking at this is that there is simply no origin or that the Vedas and the Puranas were and are: unauthored, unreal and eternal at the same time. When the (atma) soul can be pure consciousness without content, then extending that analysis to the Vedas and Purana can mean content without consciousness relating to temporal aspects such as authors or time.
The BP talks about how Vyasa Muni divided the original single Veda into the four Vedas that we know now, mainly because he realised that in the Kali Yuga, mankind cannot handle the full weight of God’s word, so had to be fed in small broken down chunks. He then gave each Veda to one of his disciples and asked them to further teach humans. As women, sudras and other impure members of the Brahman class were not eligible to read and hear the Vedas (don’t go there yet, I will return to this topic sometime in the future), he also wrote the Mahabharata so that even the women, sudras and impure people could attain moksha. But Vyasa Muni was not happy and less than satisfied with his work on the Vedas and Mahabharata. Narada Muni came around and identified his cause of dissatisfaction. Narada Muni said that he has not described the Lord Vishnu in detail and that is the reason why his work does not satisfy him. Narada Muni then proceeds to tell Vyasa his own life story and how he became a Vishnu devotee. In one of his past lives in another Kalpa, he wandered the earth in search of God and finally he sat to meditate for eons. Finally, Vishnu manifested himself to him and Narada was enlightened. Vishnu said that Narada will find the Lord when all desires have been quelled, but he will be with Narada all the time. Saying this, Narada departed leaving behind Vyasa full of determination to explore and compose the story of Lord Vishnu. Upon completion of the BP, Vyasa Muni taught the secret Purana to his son, Suka.
Then there is a bit of a jump and the third section talks about the life history of Pariskshit, son of Abhimanyu, who is the ruler of Hastinapur. Remember the story about how he was saved in his mother Uttara’s womb, by Krishna when Ashwathama tried to kill him using the brahmastra? Anyway, moving on, the BP talks about how righteous he was, how he banished the demon Kali (not the Goddess Kali) and saved one legged Dharma Deva, the God of Truth and Bhumi Devi, Mother Earth from Kali’s depredations. Interestingly enough, the four legs of Dharma Deva, who manifested himself as a Bull, represent austerity, purity, compassion and honesty, but Kali Yuga broke three of them by pride, lasciviousness and inebriation. Only honesty was left and even that was being destroyed by the Demon Kali. So Parikshit banishes the Demon Kali to the gambling dens, whorehouses, and in houses of slaughter. By doing so, Parikshit kept the demons of the Kali yuga at bay, but then disaster befell him.
He was hunting and reached an ashram thirsty and hungry. Looking around, he could only see a rishi deep in meditation and despite Parikshit’s entreaties; the rishi would not wake up to give him water or food. Becoming furious, Parikshit draped a dead snake around the rishi’s neck and rode away angrily. Then the rishi’s son came back, saw the snake, learnt the background and cursed Parikshit with death in seven days from snakebite. On his return to the palace, Parikshit was beset with sorrow and regret at his treatment of the rishi and then learning of the curse, decided to renounce his kingdom, go to the banks of the Ganga river, meditate on Vishnu for the remainder of his days while fasting.
When he sat down, a whole host of other great rishis came to him. Atri, Vasistha, Chyvana, Shardavana, Arishtanemi, Bhrigu, Angirasas, Parasara, Viswamitra, Parasurama, Utathya, Indrapramada, Indhmavaha, Medhatithi, Devala, Arishtisena, Bharadvaja, Gautama, Pippalada, Maitreya, Aurva, Kavasha, Agastya, Dwaipayna Vyasa and Narada all joined him. There is a reason why I am repeating all these names. These names are our greats. They have, in effect, given us our religion. They were the first teachers and telling their names again is a way of worshiping them, paying obeisance to them and recognising our debt to them.
Finally Suka Muni arrives and Parikshit asks him how best to purify himself before death, to which Suka Muni replies referring to the BP as the best way to purify the body and soul. Parikshit asks about the form of Vishnu that he would meditate on and Suka describes the Lord to him. This was a stunning description and I was seriously taken aback. I am not going to give the full description, but it involves patala, the soles of his feet, bhumi his hips, and the sky as his navel. Indra and other Devas are his arms, agni his tongue, the sun and moon are his eyes, Yama is his teeth, his laughter is Maya, modesty is his upper lip, while greed is his lower. Prajapati is his penis, while Mitra Deva and Varuna Deva are his testicles. Vayu is his breath, time is his movement. Twilight is the garment he wears, brahmana his mouth, kshatriya his arms, vaisya his thighs and sudra is his feet. This is whom Parikshit should visualise.
The formulation of the Lord’s description took my breath away. With my puny mind, I simply could not comprehend this vast assemblage at all, which is why I am quite envious of those who can. Can you imagine somebody being able to visualise this wondrous image? What an imagination one would require! What a breadth of vision, what faith! I felt so insignificant at just the description of the Lord Vishnu.
But now I have to draw this exercise to an end. In the next part, I will be talking about how Suka explained the way of the Dhyana, the route to Moksha. This is not an esoteric description, but something with concrete details which man can grasp. This will follow with a description of how Brahma created this universe and a description of the incarnations of Vishnu and ending with the numerous questions that Parikshi asks of Suka.
All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt

The Eagle has landed again and again and …

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 18:24:00 +0000

Prometheus was sentenced by Zeus to have his liver eaten by a giant eagle (think Garuda), while being chained to a rock. The liver would be eaten, then re-grow, and again be eaten by this eagle. Poor sod, and poor eagle (think about the monotonous diet!). The point I am making here is a bit of an obscure one. After each Indo-Pakistan war, commissions were created to understand / audit the war, its reasons and results and how to avoid the errors and better oneself next time. However, it is something like Prometheus, if you do not listen or learn the lessons, your liver will be, with great precision and enjoyment, ceremoniously eaten on a regular basis. Did Pakistan learn its lessons? For that matter, did India learn its lessons? Let us take a look, shall we?

There have been quite a litany of wars between India and Pakistan starting from 1948, going over 1965, 1971, 1984 and finally 1999. After each war, Pakistani commissions of inquiry were established. They were mostly military in nature although (and I am sure in a fit of absentmindedness) some civilian commissions were also set up. As is with our part of the world (again, this is thankfully changing now – which reminded me of a quote by Malcom X saying: “Don't stick a knife in me ten inches, pull it out six, and tell me we've made progress." – but I digress), the reports were kept secret and it is very difficult to estimate the lessons learnt.

Taking a step back, inquiries or commissions on wars usually aim to fulfil the following objectives:

(1) To understand the reasons behind the war;

(2) To understand the way the various parties performed during the war;

(3) To identify any shortfall or lacunae in the conduct of the war;

(4) To recommend ways to obviate any issues identified either in the geo-political situation or domestic political setup or in the broad military getup.

How the commission/inquiry performs its duties and whether the lessons have been learnt depends upon whether the war was a success or failure. It also depends on whether it is an independent inquiry or not; whether the inquiry is a military commission or a civilian one; whether the powers that be have agreed and accepted its recommendations when establishing the commission; so on and so forth. Some inquiries become witch-hunts, some are dry audits, some are hidden away and some are really useful and lessons are indeed learnt.

The advantage of sitting outside and the disadvantage of being an Indian (in terms of bias) notwithstanding allow for the ability that we can compare and contrast between India and Pakistan, which is quite edifying. First a bit of comparative list making: the official Indian histories of the 1948 and 1999 wars are the only ones, which were publicly made available (that too in a truncated manner – on grounds of national security). The 1962, 1965 and 1971 war histories were never officially released, but have been leaked and can be found here http://tinyurl.com/9heoq and here http://tinyurl.com/bsya8. I find this secrecy very puzzling, because having an open public report (besides keeping operational matters secret) provides so many advantages that it smacks of dunderheadness or plain and simple stupidity to keep these reports secret.

Because India won most of the wars, except for 1962 with China, I would advise readers to read the 1962 history as well as the seminal book on this topic: “Himalayan Blunder” by Brig. J. P. Dalvi. It brings one down to earth. That said, the official inquiry report helped in a massive rebuilding effort of the Indian armed forces and in many ways, helped in the 1965 victory. Once you read the 1965 review and then follow it up with the 1971 report, you will see how the Indian army, and to a lesser extent the politicians, took lessons to heart. If you want further corroboration, read the memoirs of the Indian generals of the 1971 war. It is startling how many of them learnt the lessons of 1965 in terms of armour deployment, infantry mobilisation, use of territory, communications, political backing, clear-cut political objectives, etc. etc.

If one observes the Indian Army and with due apologies to the eminent military historians, it can be claimed with due justification, that generally, the core armed forces infrastructure and personnel are good. Equipment, training, logistics et. al. are smoothly humming or appear to be at least. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and as the Kargil report points out, the basic architecture and infrastructure was good. What went wrong was the intelligence aspect and the initial indications are that the intelligence services have been reorganized and recalibrated. The other big lacunae – counter terror operations are being improved as well, with the help of other countries (such as Israel, UK, USA etc.). This is not to say that everything is hunky dory, there are issues with corruption, training, lack of officer material, problems with some weapons platforms, lack of clarity over the nuclear doctrine, strategy and posture, inter services cooperation, etc. but they are getting there.

That said, once we turn our beady eyes on Pakistan, and with an admittedly indirect exposure to what one gets by just reading memoirs of Pakistani Army Officers of varied ranks, foreign experts, the media and the surprising release of the Hamdoor Rahman Report, it seems like Pakistan has not been able to learn its lessons. In the previous article, we talked about how preconceptions can destroy reality and make defeat at worst and stalemate at best a possibility. The only way to handle preconceptions is to study one’s mistakes and put into place action plans and review/feedback mechanisms to resolve these issues.

Looking at the history of Indo Pakistan wars dispassionately and putting myself in a Pakistani historian’s shoes, I would see the 1948 war as a trial ball. Let me be charitable and say that the huge mistakes made by the Pakistani Army and the civilians can be written down to inexperience and the trauma of Partition. 1965 would be the first time that a serious attempt was made to grab Kashmir by force (both covert as well as overt). Sadly, the lessons of 1965 were not learnt. An internal army inquiry was set up, but it was very tightly restricted to improvements in the intelligence-gathering infrastructure. As one can see, this was so small a scope that no lesson could seriously have been learnt. I quote Col. S. G. Mehdi, MC Commandant, Pakistan SSG till just before the 1965 war, “had our Government initiated a probe into concept, conduct and consequences of 1965 War', and raised the curtain from the acts of gross omission or that of the criminal commission, the ignominy of 1971 could have been avoided.” Some more quotes on this war are pretty much conclusive evidence that there were no serious attempts to understand the issue. On the other hand, it was pitched as a victory and Pakistan even now does victory dances around this war effort.

Maj (Retd) Agha Humayun Amin, “The Grand Slam and Gibraltar controversy instead of being handled like a military failure unfortunately degenerated into a highly personalised affair. As a result instead of dispassionate and constructive analysis, the real reasons for failure of the 1965 war were substituted for analysis of minor tactics and in settling personal scores.” The good Major talks about massive intelligence failure, command breakdown, no concentration of resources, inter service rivalries, failure to create strategic dislocation, bad deployment, and use of armour, organisational failures, etc. Needless to say, the even higher-level issue of military rule, which itself was the biggest problem, is not addressed. Brig. (Retd) Shaukat Qadir saying that the 1965 war was a comedy of errors on both sides has also addressed these military issues.

One can easily get scores of such reports from retired Pakistani Army officers, who are banging on and on about the 1965 war and the litany of errors. One general theme, which one will notice, if one peruses these Pakistani memories of these wars, is how uni-dimensional they are. I mean, gosh, each and every one of these generals and colonels are pitching themselves as paragons of military thought (move over Clausewitz), and they have been betrayed by (take your pick here), the USA, the civilians, the politicians, the venal Hindu Bania’s, brother officers, etc. etc. This is what I would call as CYA books (and no, I am not going to tell you what CYA stands for, this is a family publication). Strangely enough, another country with such a marked phenomena of officers trying to paint themselves in glory is Egypt (perhaps the commonality is the startling difference between the loud bombastic words and military defeats?)

As they say, you can take a horse to the water but you cannot make it drink and these horses do not seem to have learnt from their mistakes, with the result, that they keep on getting their liver eaten by Garud. After 1965, 1971 was a defeat. General Zia Ul Haq was a smart cookie and avoided any issue with India (who can forget his Cricket diplomacy?) Say what you wish about him, he was a smart fellow. As rumoured, he was presented with the Kargil plan and he scotched it firmly. Then again came Siachin and they again got their liver handed back to them on a plate. Then came Kargil and despite achieving initial surprise, they again got their posterior regions paddled back across the LoC and the aforementioned liver was again gnawed upon by Garuda.

And if you look now at the pathetic performance of the Pakistani Army against the irregular warfare in Baluchistan, Swat and other NWFP regions, it is clear that none of the lessons have been learnt. Despite getting armaments by the shiploads and massive support from the USA, the performance of the military has been dire! They have lost control over their own territory; have been surrendering without a fight, letting militants go even after losing their own soldiers to capture them, starting to be a target for suicide bombing, and so on and so forth.

You may well ask me, will the Pakistani Military ever learn by themselves, instead of being forced to learn by the Chinese or Americans? The answer is no. The current Kakul Military Academy’s syllabus is a case in point. A critical strategic analysis of the previous wars is apparently frowned upon and tactical aspects are emphasised. Like Jack Higgins wrote in his book, The Eagle Has Landed, tactics can only take you so far. When the officer corps is being trained without having a good idea about why they lost their wars, it is not surprising that they keep on making the same mistakes, again and again and again. They did not learn the lessons of 1948, so they made the same mistakes again in 1965, and then again in 1971. Then they lost more territory and yet more of their reputation. The same thing was repeated again in 1999. No land lost thankfully, but the reputation lost again. Now in 2007, land is lost and reputation is also lost again. I guess they will keep on going till the only bit of Pakistan left is the Army cantonment in Punjab! Lots of liver to go yet.

All this to be taken with a piquant grain of salt!

Bhagvata Purana-Skandha 1

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:42:00 +0000

I have to admit that I did not even know about this book till somebody told me that the Bhagvata Purana is also known as the fifth veda. I further saw references to this Purana in the Dharmasahastra book by Kane and then figured, it is high time that I actually take a look at this book praised by so many, but not discussed enough. And once I actually got my hands on a couple of copies, I think I figured out why this is relatively obscure (compared to the Vedas, Upanishads, Shruti’s and Smritis). Depending upon the version, the books range from 1500 to 2240 pages in length, containing north of thirteen thousand Sanskrit verses. One needs to be very dedicated or locked up for some serious time to really go through this. Nevertheless it is a beautiful book with lovely tales and I thought of reviewing it, as I really could not find any good reviews elsewhere.

Before I start, first some background and logistical points. I used the following books:
1. The Bhagavata Purana: v. 7 (Ancient Indian Tradition and Mythology) by J.L. Shastri and Ganesh Vasudeo Tagare (1994)
2. Bhagavat Purana by Ramesh Menon (2007)
3. A Study of the Bhagavata Purana or Esoteric Hinduism by Purnendu Narayana Sinha, 1901.
4. Srimad Bhagavata Puranam, Sanskrit, 2004.
5. Bhagavata Puranam, Sanskrit, 2006 (under revision)
6. Srimad Bhagavatam (Bhagavata Purana) by Swami A. C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupâda.

Quite a lot of the versions are different in formulation, usage of English and the so on. If one wants to be true to the Sanskrit versions (which themselves differ a bit), then the Prabhupada version is good, as it has the original Sanskrit, a word by word translation and a summary. In any case, my knowledge of Sanskrit is barely intermediate and I wouldn't be comfortable in dealing with a review based upon that language based book. Reading Sanskrit is one thing, but reviewing in pure ancient Sanskrit? No Sir. If one wants to have a bit more colloquial English usage and more understanding as per modern usage, then I suggest the Menon version. Rest of them use a bit of archaic English and can be a bit difficult to digest. So this review uses the Menon version.

So how do you review such a monumental book? I was struggling with the answer. I could have reviewed the full book down in one long essay but then this would have missed out on giant parts. Doing a translation is simply out of the question. So after discussing it a bit, I hit upon the idea of writing a summary per Skandha (canto or book) and then highlighting any interesting points that popped up in my mind. This means twelve rather long essays, but I think I can live with that on my conscience that one has done justice to it. If you want to rather get a quick overview of the purana, then the wiki entry is a good place to start. Without further ado, lets crack on.

My first impression after I finished the book was that it was mainly about love, very very intense love. Extremely emotional love. Something that makes you weep uncontrollably. Not bawl, but weep. Not sure if you have experienced this, but it's like none of your emotions (speech, sight, touch, smell…) are able to express it and tears are the only way to do so. I felt like this when I first held my kids in my arms. Or when I used to dance in front of Ma Durga during Durga Puja back home with the Dhunuchis. This book is an expression of very intense love towards Vishnu or his incarnation Krishna. Have you read Rumi? The feeling I got was a bit like what I felt when I read Rumi. Rumi, though, is a bit more earthy and this is a bit more esoteric, although some parts of the purana are quite earthy. It is Bhakti personified.

The purana is roughly dated to between 500 to 1000 AD, but it has gone through so many changes, accretions, embellishments, etc. that it is tough to date it correctly. Plus let us not forget that these are stories and generations of scholars and teachers in a vast land have told these stories in a variety of locales and to a huge number of people. It is a miracle that we actually get to a version in the first place.

The first Skandha introduces the purana, which written by Veda Vyasa, who writes this after completing the vedas and Mahabharat. The main reason behind writing this was that the Vedas and Mahabharat do not satisfactorily deal with the highest goal of knowledge and that is devotion to God (Bhakti). Another reason for for writing it, is to assist us in handling the Kali Yug, which came into being when Krishna died. When people begged him to leave something of him behind so that they can cope with the Kali Yug, Krishna poured his essence into the Bhagwat Purana.

Narada Muni is a key participant in the beginnings of the BP. An interesting story is said about him. Narada is disconsolate, because he is wandering around in Kali Yug and is observing the breakdown of divine order. While wandering on the banks of the Yamuna, he notices a young woman sitting next to two very old sick men, while being surrounded with many other young women. The young woman turns out to be Bhakti and the two old sick men are Gyan (knowledge) and Vairagya (detachment or renunciation). The other young women are the sacred rivers such as Ganga, etc. who are trying to provide comfort to Bhakti. The Kali Yug has devastated her two sons even though it spared her. Narada blesses her by saying that Bhakti will be the only way to salvation and then tries to rescue her two sons by chanting the Vedas and Upanishads in their ears, singing the Bhagvad Gita to them. They improved, but not completely. On beseeching the Lord to provide him with some guidance, a voice from the skies tells him to go speak to certain Munis. On searching and leter finding them, Narada asks the Munis about how to cure the two sons of Bhakti? The Munis state that he has to recite the BP to them and since it contains the essence of Lord Vishnu, it will revive them. So he does and Bhakti and her two sons are also revived.

But this was not the first time that the BP had been recited. Thirty years after Krishna died, Vyasa’s son Suka recited the BP to King Parikshit, grandson of Arjuna, son of Abhimanyu, who succeeded Yudhistra to the throne of Hastinapur. But this story is for later. The second great recitation of the BP happened two hundred years after the Kali Yug had started by Gokarna Muni.

The BP then embarks on a long tale of how a childless Brahman begged for a boon of a child from a Sanyasi. The Sanyasi gives a blessed fruit to him and asks his wife to eat it, keeping a vow of truthfullness, kindness and charity for an entire year, not eating more than one meal per day, and if that is done, then a pure golden hearted pious son will be born. But his wife did not want to ruin her figure or go through the pain of childbirth so she hatched a plan with her sister. The fruit was given over to their cow while her sister’s new born baby was smuggled in to be shown as the Brahman’s son called as Dhundhukari. Three months later, the cow gave birth to a human child with golden skin and eyes like lotus petals, but with cow ears. Hence his name, Gokarna (or Cow Ears). Both grow up together, but Dhundhukari turns out to be a devil in disguise, a disgusting sinner, while Gokarna is pure as the snow on Mount Kailash. The Brahman is at his wits end and Gokarna advices him to cultivate dispassion and renounce the world, which he does. Gokarna also leaves on a pilgrimage. Dhundhukari commits terrible crimes, beats up his own mother, steals, whores and lies and at the end, the whores decide to kill him and they do. Unfortunately, Dhundhukari remains behind on earth after death as a spirit. Gokarna senses Dhundhukari’s death and the fact that he is not truly dead, but is still a tortured spirit. Gokurna performs a shraddha at every holy spot, but it does not release Dhundhukari from the earth and finally he returns to his hometown. Dhundhukari begs him for help to be released and Gokurna then embarks on a deep dhyan (meditation) to Surya Deva (Sun God) to learn how to address this. The Sun God advices him to recite the BP as that is the only way Dhundhukari’s soul will be released. So Gokurna starts the recitation with many many people attending the week’s worth of recitation and when he ends, Dhundhukari is released from his earthly bounds.

The others who were listening, though, do not get their sins washed away. Gokurna is told by the sages that Dhundhukari fasted for seven days and he listened to Gokurna’s recitation with all his faculties and might. This is the reason why Dhundhukari was released and not the others. When the others learnt this, they begged Gokurna to recite the BP again which he did. This allowed all the listeners to also be washed free of their sins by Vishnu who appeared after a great conch shell boom in a blaze of light.

Thus ends the first book. I had to consciously lay aside my erupting cynicism. The first book tries hard to explain why the BP is so important and how it helps to wash away the sins. I thought about self praise? However, as I kept on reading, I realised that I was reading it as perhaps a professor wanting to write a book review and not as a worshipper or a person of faith wanting to learn. That switch was not easy and I found myself slipping back into the cynical, doubting persona many times. The apparent inconsistencies about the origins of the purana bothered me as well till I spoke to my father. He told me, if Vishnu is indeed the world, then how does it matter if one manifestation or another wrote or spoke what? What matters is the content. And that made perfect sense.

What was also a bit frightening for a grown man like me was the underlying concept of letting go. Letting go of everything and with tan, man and dhan (body, mind and wealth) and concentrate on the pursuit of Bhakti, devotion to God. I am not sure if I have achieved that and am very far away from the ideal. It felt quite strange reading about people who can be so dispassionate that they are able to walk away from everything that they hold dear (for me it would be my family, my iPhone, my books, etc.) and devote their all and everything to being in love with Krishna. I am not sure if I can ever do that and it was very humbling to find that I do not have the courage or guts to do so.

What a fascinating journey into a wonderful book which is raising more questions than answering them.

It takes intelligence to review & deliver intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 05:39:00 +0000

This is the most amazing and honest report I have read. This Major General (U.S. Major General Michael Flynn) has shown huge courage to be brutally honest about the intelligence failings in the Afghan campaign and typically the press reports and the Pentagon have dumped on him. This is one reason the USA and its allies will win, because they learn (at least I hope they do). I would also hope that his maverick behaviour does not end up harming him, but given the courage and intelligence shown by General Petraeus and General McChrystal, his two respective bosses, I think not. But let us get back to the report and what a report it is! It is brutally honest. It cuts across the fog of organisational chaos by the ton and homes in directly, in a few short pages, on exactly where the problem is, giving some examples of where they are going right now and what they need to do.

But first the background. This report was written by the Head of Military Intelligence of the US forces in Afghanistan as a review report on how intelligence gathering is happening, what the objectives are, what the drawbacks are, and how to improve the procedures so it benefits the senior military leaders and the political masters.

Reading this report will also help the generals and ministers of any other country currently facing an insurgency or dealing with a terrorist campaign. If you look at Thailand, India, Pakistan, China, etc., they all need to read this report.

However, it is not only a must read for those, but actually also for those who are also facing not just direct insurgency campaigns. Are the people in the United Kingdom who are being faced with a domestic British Muslim terrorist campaign reading this? Are they adapting the lessons learnt from Afghanistan in this intelligence evaluation report with respect to the Islamic societies in British Universities and the mosques in the UK? The quiet neighbourhood doctor or engineer who is secretly planning to blow up a building or nightclub? How are the links between the society, the mosques, the press, the NGOs, the charities, the police, MI5 & MI6 and the ministers being managed?

I don’t think this is only applicable to terrorism or the military. I think this is equally applicable to big firms and financial institutions. Here’s a question you can ask any grand poobah of strategy or CEO or head of planning. Do they have a strategy for collecting product, customer, market, country, regulator, and other types of information which is relevant to what head of the business needs to know? Have they ever run a review akin to what this report does? How do they know the mass of information being produced at the coalface (and believe you me, there is a whole load of information that is produced - ranging from product information, customer details, trading details, supply chain information, contact reports and emails, etc. )? How are they aggregated, distributed, sliced, fed up, sideways and down the chain? I quote from the report:

“Creating effective intelligence is an inherent and essential responsibility of command. Intelligence failures are failures of command – [just] as operations failures are command failures.”

In other words, if you as a senior manager are not getting sufficient information, then the responsibility of getting that information is yours, not somebody else’s and you need to take responsibility for this The execution, however, can be done by your head of MI, sales, COO, etc. etc.

There are absolute gems hidden in this report, which again have implications for both the military and civilian businesses. I am going to quote them and try to comment on them to clarify what I mean.

The second inescapable truth asserts that merely killing insurgents usually serves to multiply enemies rather than subtract them. This counterintuitive dynamic is common in many guerrilla conflicts and is especially relevant in the revenge-prone Pashtun communities whose cooperation military forces seek to earn and maintain. The Soviets experienced this reality in the 1980s, when despite killing hundreds of thousands of Afghans, they faced a larger insurgency near the end of the war than they did at the beginning.

This is far too common. Just measure the number of body bags (as was done in Vietnam), or the number of meetings held with customers or the revenue per customer, etc, these are often metrics that are used to judge progress or performance. But is that really what the military or corporate strategy is? No, that’s not it. The military strategy is to provide security and allow or support a fairly stable governance in Afghanistan so the Taliban’s bent of ideology and governance backed by their rage boys cannot take root. Yes, there are other requirements as well, but the objective is not to kill the Taliban, but to take the moral, civil, economic and military ground away from them. This might mean (and does mean) popping off the relevant commanders and does include having fire-fights, but you don’t measure by this metric. One needs intelligence and analysis to supports decision making. Similarly on the business front, far too often metrics drive management and strategy. We need to grab customer loyalty. No, we want customers to not only give us their business, but help us get more business by recommending us to other customers. That cannot be achieved, managed and delivered by measuring the number of calls you make to the customer, it needs a much broader sense of information. Otherwise, what you will end with is a huge body count or a huge list of contact reports, but lose the war or the business.

What are the barriers in getting this information?

“The barriers to maximizing available intelligence are surprisingly few. The deficit of data needed by high-level analysts does not arise from a lack of reporting in the field. There are literally terabytes of unclassified and classified information typed up at the grassroots level. Nor, remarkably, is the often-assumed unwillingness to share information the core of the problem. On the contrary, military officers and civilians working with ISAF allies, and even many NGOs, are eager to exchange information. True, there are severe technological hurdles, such as the lack of a common database and digital network available to all partners, but they are not insurmountable.

People often think that they need a giant new CRM system, network, or a database or that they have to establish big hairy governance bodies aligned with massive organisational transformation or dual / triple reporting lines. Not really, frankly that is rarely the problem. But it’s an easy solution, mind you, because it provides a concrete “something” that you can touch and deliver. Why do most of the business intelligence projects fail? They do because the fixation is on the damn system, database, network and not on the information or the culture or the strategy. An example where many of these issues have been resolved and fixed is the investment banking business, which is perhaps one of the most efficient legal sustainable moneymaking organisations known to man, with the exception of loan sharking or drug running or Ponzi trading. Data is always there, people LOVE to talk and give you information. But one needs to listen, read, review, pass up and down and sideways. See what the report says further:

The most salient problems are attitudinal, cultural, and human. The intelligence community’s standard mode of operation is surprisingly passive about aggregating information that is not enemy-related and relaying it to decision-makers or fellow analysts further up the chain. It is a culture that is strangely oblivious of how little its analytical products, as they now exist, actually influence commanders.
It is also a culture that is emphatic about secrecy but regrettably less concerned about mission effectiveness.1 To quote General McChrystal in a recent meeting, “Our senior leaders – the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of Defense, Congress, the President of the United States – are not getting the right information to make decisions with. We must get this right. The media is driving the issues. We need to build a process from the sensor all the way to the political decision makers.”

I would add another factor when discussing the impact on commercial firms. We have lost layers of middle management in the previous few decades, which has had an impact on the organisational ability to aggregate. I have nothing much further to add to the points above. Pretty self explanatory, no?

Nowhere does our group suggest that there is not a significant role for intelligence to play in finding, fixing, and finishing off enemy leaders. What we conclude is there must be a concurrent effort under the ISAF commander’s strategy to acquire and provide knowledge about the population, the economy, the government, and other aspects of the dynamic environment we are trying to shape, secure, and successfully leave behind. Until now, intelligence efforts in this area have been token and ineffectual, particularly at the regional command level. Simply put, the stakes are too high for the stability of Afghanistan and Pakistan, for NATO’s credibility, and for U.S. national security for us to fail in our intelligence mission. The urgent task before us is to make our intelligence community not only stronger but, in a word, “relevant.”

We are now faced with a set of very challenging, complex economic, social and political conditions across the world. This will require intelligence, information and data to be provided to managers - up and down the chain - in a significantly different manner. The firms which manage to crack this will win. I don’t have to tell you the changes that we are going to face in the next 3-5 years, but how to react to them? Well, a good management information, business intelligence, strategy and planning function can assist in doing this much better. In other words, yes, deal with the tactical bits, but don’t forget the strategy and the broader basis for analysis.

The example of Nawa was brilliant. Within the British area of operations, they were getting killed day in and day out. And the British thought the Americans knew nothing about COIN. Now look at what the Americans did. This might well be conflicting information and may be counted as national chest thumping, but by heck, the 1st Btn, 5th Marines gave an example of how to wage broad war. He quotes an example of how they avoided the issue of logistical problems.

The battalion intelligence officers refused to allow the absence of a data network to impede the flow of information. Each night, the deputy intelligence officer hosted what he called “fireside chats,” during which each analyst radioed in from his remote position at a designated time and read aloud everything learned over the last 24 hours. Using this approach, daily reports incorporated a wide variety of sources: unclassified patrol debriefs; the notes of officers who had met with local leaders; the observations of civil affairs officers; and classified HUMINT reports. The deputy intelligence officer typed up a master report of everything called in by analysts and closed each “chat session” by providing them with an updated list of questions – called “intelligence requirements” – for the companies to attempt to answer.
In the earliest days of the operation, many of these questions dealt with basic logistical matters, such as the location and conditions of roads, bridges, mosques, markets, wells, and other key terrain. Once these were answered, however, the focus shifted to local residents and their perceptions. What do locals think about the insurgents? Do they feel safer or less safe with us around? What disputes exist between villages or tribes? As the picture sharpened, the focus honed in on identifying what the battalion called “anchor points” – local personalities and local grievances that, if skillfully exploited, could drive a wedge between insurgents and the greater population. In other words, anchor points represented the enemy’s critical vulnerabilities.

Please note the second paragraph above. This shows that a smart intelligence officer (or a BI person in a corporation) understand the value of time. The same questions will not be asked all the time, there is an element of time, and things move on, questions change, the environment changes, you build on what you have got, evolve your strategy and questions. This means that it’s a learning organisation. It’s an important point which is often forgotten, that just when you have found the answer to the question, somebody goes and changes the question. Your organisation should have the ability to understand this, crack this an be able to handle these changes and then evolve to answer the changed question.

The report then moves into a detailed discussion of how the recommendations will work out in the Afghan theatre, which is very much unique to Afghanistan, presuming he knows more than I on the situation on the ground and will not comment more on this part. However, the organisation that he is suggesting is eerily similar to how commercial organisations are also setup. It might be an idea for commercial analysts to check back or back-test their MI or BI organisation and operating model against this. It might give them some ideas.

Like the NGO’s mentioned on page 20, the investor relations department and the corporate communications department could benefit from these organisational and operating model recommendations. They frequently need this information for the analysts, the shareholders, the regulators, press, etc. etc. Good information like this will almost certainly have a definite impact on the stock price and on the reputational risk of the firm.

So what do you do? I loved this quote:

Doing so will require important cultural changes. Analysts must absorb information with the thoroughness of historians, organize it with the skill of librarians, and disseminate it with the zeal of journalists.

Brilliant! This is an absolutely stonking formulation. It’s pretty straightforward and you know immediately what you need to do. We know what historians, librarians and journalists do and we can relate to that function.

There’s another great comment:

The format of intelligence products matters. Commanders who think PowerPoint storyboards and colour-coded spreadsheets are satisfactory for describing the Afghan conflict and its complexities have some soul-searching to do. Sufficient knowledge will not come from slides with little more text than a comic strip. Commanders must demand substantive written narratives and analyses from their intel shops and make the time to read them. There are no shortcuts. Microsoft Word, rather than PowerPoint, should be the tool of choice for intelligence professionals in a counterinsurgency

I was perhaps one of the worst offenders for PowerPoint use, but over the past 4-5 years, I have realised the value of a word document. It forces people to think about what they are writing and arguing about, especially for senior management. People spend hours and days mucking around with graphics and fancy animation when a short summary of one-page distils things down. This forces people to think about what are they trying to achieve, what decision they want their audience to take and whether the information they are providing is enough to help them take that decision?

Here’s another interesting point:

Historical lessons run the risk of sounding portentous, but disregarding them comes at a high price. History is replete with examples of powerful military forces that lost wars to much weaker opponents because they were inattentive to nuances in their environment. A Russian general who fought for years in Afghanistan cited this as a primary reason for the Soviet Union’s failures in the 1980s

History is indeed a vast early warning system and people who forget the lessons of history are condemned to repeat them. I know, I know, you are going to tell me that nobody has ever won in Afghanistan, not in any war, at any time, but hey, guess what? They didn't do the nuances either. Think about how the Mughal Empire managed to rule over Afghanistan for such a long time. They were not locals, they were invaders as well, so if pointing to the British and Soviets as a reason for saying that NATO will lose in Afghanistan, one should realise that the Mughals did win.

While we are not adopting the Mughal way of conquest and rule, the reason I think we will win is because we have Generals who have the courage to write reports like this, others who have the patience to read it, the confidence to realise that we are going down a wrong route and the humility to make changes. As it so happens, the US Secretary of Defence has now stated that he loves the report and would like to see the recommendations implemented. Sometimes being a maverick helps.

All this to be taken with a grain of salt.

The Tree of Wishes

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:32:00 +0000

A long time ago, in the dim and distant past, 1984, while I was very near pushing up daisies, my mum went off to the Chisti tomb and tied a thread to the marble window, like many other pilgrims, to beg for my life. Well, as you can see it worked and since then, this idea of asking for a wish to be granted from a saint has been resonating with me for obvious reasons. So when I read in the book I got as a Christmas gift, called "The Blue Manuscript" by Sabiha Al Khemir, that there was a tree of wishes, where people would tie a ribbon torn off from their clothes when asking for a wish. This tree of wishes was on top of a saint’s tomb. When the ribbon springs free and flies off with the wind, then the supplicant would know that his/her wish has been granted.

Coming from India and being a Sufi myself, that spoke to me, very loudly even. But I am jumping ahead, let's get back to the book.. There are two separate stories that are linked together through a blue manuscript, written and illustrated by the Court Calligrapher, ironically called Ibn Warraq, to the court of the Fatimid Caliph al Muizz in Egypt. He dreams and thinks about how best to write his masterpiece. He looks up into the sky and prays and begs for divine guidance and at the end, he feels that God speaks to him in his heart and guides his pen and he sees what the manuscript should look like in a vision.The manuscript is a copy of the Quran commissioned for the Caliph’s mother, in two volumes. It is the calligraphers crowning glory, his best and last work. He lavishly writes it in letters of gold, using a feather pen on vellum dyed with Lapis Lazuli brought all the way from Afghanistan. He becomes one with the letters, having taken a vow of silence for 6 years, during which he slaves over the creation of this masterpiece. One volume is buried with the mother of the Caliph and the other volume is to be buried with him, as a reward for his excellence and ultimately is lost.

The first volume is found sometime in the 20th century and the dealer divides it and sells individual pages of it for the horrendous sum £100,000 per page, thereby putting a very high value on whoever can find the undamaged second volume.

Some dealers get together and fund an academic international archaeological dig in a tiny village near Cairo in Lower Egypt to find this second manuscript. Some scholars join the dig for other purposes, related to exquisite rare Fatimid pottery and other reasons that I do not want to divulge, so as not to give away the plot. The second story is primarily of this dig, the archaeologists and their interaction with the villagers, with some flashbacks to the first story at the time of the Fatimid Caliph, which details the work of the calligrapher, the Caliph's mother interwoven with some history.

In the village there is a blind mysterious man who remains in the shadow of the book, emerging once in a while to tell a story to the Tree of Wishes, because the villagers have long ago ceased to listen to him. His stories are lovely, like stories out of the 1001 Nights. He speaks to the tree and the tree is listening. I loved that imagery.

Do you remember the story behind the shrieking tree? The idea that you go and embrace a tree and then shriek out your sorrows and pains into its rough gnarled bark and trunk. The tree absorbs your pains and leaves you limp, but happier an d relieved. I envisioned the Tree of Wishes to have a trunk like this one below, a big thick solid tree which has been on this earth for centuries, burrowing deep into mother earth, having seen hundreds of thousands or even millions of pilgrims move underneath its leaves, going on tiptoe to tie a ribbon, sometimes touching the bark and wishing from their hearts.

So this tree of wishes reminded me of a tree that I had seen in Sanchi with prayer flags. Here is a picture that I took then and it is the same concept like the one in the book.

But this is far too much like India. Here are two pictures which sort of show the dusty rather barren nature of the area.

The dry dusty stony land, almost exactly like the area where the excavation is being held. Instead of Saqqara, imagine an earthen mound with a small shrine on top.

Ignore the fat bloke in the middle (damn fella keeps on popping up in the strangest of places), but imagine another view of a rather barren stony, sandy land, interspersed with isolated hardy trees, in the middle of a very poor village and then you are there, where the story is set.

The author describes the heat, the relationships between the villagers and the scientific team, the bureaucracy, the permits to dig, and even the cook and his apprentice, the bumpy dusty ride daily to and from from their camp in the half finished school to the dig. She also talks about onions, about mangy dogs, the dishdiba, smoking, the oligeneous eyes of the Egyptians, the religious element, the slow going nature of the village combined with blind unreasoning violent action.

The tree of wishes is planted on the mound with the grave of a woman. As the blind story teller tells it, a man accompanied by his heavily pregnant wife were travelling the desert in this location many many moons ago. The wife then suddenly goes into labour and the man finds a small cave in which she gives birth to his son ,but dies in childbirth shortly after. Knowing that his son will also die, as there is no way of feeding him till he reaches the next civilised outpost, he puts the baby at his dead wife’s right breast, and with a heavy heart walls up the cave to protect them from the animals and leaves weeping bitterly. Several years later, he happens to return to the area with a caravan and notices with great surprise that the wall he had built has been broken open and the ground was covered with the footprints of a child. He finds his son and the dried desiccated body of his wife. The amazing thing however is that her right breast is still weeping breast milk. He rescues his son and gives his wife a proper burial. This becomes the shrine, for the miracle provides the saint and since then, people have been coming to the grave of the mother and asking for wishes to be fulfilled, wombs to be quickened, marriages to be held and so on and so forth.

The author treats each character with their national characteristics, the difficult to understand Irishman, the inscrutable Japanese, the reserved Englishman, the exuberant Italian, the secretive but open Egyptian, the confused mixed race British Tunisian translator, the organised German, the natives and so on and so forth. She writes very well. You can almost taste the dust, feel the oily roll of the riverside waves, hear the biting insects flit about in the dark heavy almost oppressing hot night under the mosquito nets, feel the thud of the pickaxe in the archaeological trenches and the susurration of the sieves which are checking the dust and mud for any piece of archaeological value.

But while the above bits spoke to me, I found some of the passages of writing too abrupt, almost like staccato. To me it felt wrong. This is Egypt she is writing about and there nothing happens abruptly. Everything takes its time, there, where millennia have passed slowly and gently like the flow of the Nile.

In some of the passages her writing is also very dark, and there is no brightness to it. I like some of the nobility of the spirit to show, like for example in The Sunbird by Wilbur Smith. That showed nobility of spirit, despite the protagonist being a hunchback. He had a soaring vision and ideas. This book also had a similar soaring vision, but instead of going up in the sky as a glorious huge condor or a giant eagle, it became like a furtive magpie, skittering around in the shadows.

I was also bit disappointed at the rather limited historical information provided. She talks a bit about the Caliph’s court, some very basic archaeological techniques, some bits about pottery but nothing much there. It was like layman historical writing about. If you are writing historical fiction, I would have liked to have felt that you have more command over that period and more details to make the experience of the flight of fantasy deeper. I didn't get that feeling. Finally, not giving away the end, but I found it to be a very limp ending. Here I was hoping that the end would be akin to flying Pegasus to the skies and instead I ended up with being savaged by a dyspeptic sheep.

I was a bit disappointed and not very impressed, but I suppose it's alright. To her credit I have to say that she handles language very well. She definitely has a flair for using words and she describes the translator's work with a passion. To the translator in the book, words are alive and build bridges or walls, and change with the development of the plot, but I don't want to give away too much. Wait for the next essay where I review another book which is a bit similar but boy-oh-boy did that one knock my socks off....

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

Walk like an Egyptian or an Indian in Cairo

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:21:00 +0000

While comfortably sitting down for a coffee at the pool side of the Mena House, the idea burst upon me. My editor wanted me to write about something relating to international affairs, history or culture from an Indian angle for a high class glossy magazine aimed at American-Indians and I was racking my brains on what to write about? It was like the muse suddenly descended upon me and I got my Eureka moment. I will write about Indians in Cairo. Now that is globalization for you. An Indian origin British citizen, living in London, working then for a Dutch bank, writing about Egypt (Cairo) for an American magazine, while staying in an old British colonial era hotel, which is now managed by an Indian firm, while being served Turkish coffee by an Egyptian waiter. Funny or what? These are my impressions, disjointed, ranging widely across time and space. But let us start at the beginning.

Having to come to Cairo on business, I asked my assistant to book me one of those modern hotels which are in the middle of Cairo’s city centre. One of my colleagues overheard her speaking to me and he suggested another hotel, Mena House. I didn’t pay any attention and absent-mindedly agreed; not realizing that it was about 20 kilometres outside the city, right next door to the pyramids. I did grumble when I found out while suffering through heavy Cairo traffic to get there, but as it turns out, it was the right choice after all. Mena House has its antecedents in old British colonial history when an old hunting lodge of the then Khedive was converted into a hotel by a British couple. Many moons later, many international conferences (World War I, World War II, the Israeli-Arab conflict), many celebrities (Nick Faldo, Jimmy Carter, Julio Iglesias, Barbara Bush, Pierre Balmain, Grateful Dead band members, Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, Anwar Sadat, Charlie Chaplain, Montgomery of Alamein, Richard Nixon and other assorted presidents kings, queens, emperors and princes) later, it was nationalized by the Egyptian Government in 1953. In 1971, it was handed over to the Oberoi Hotel group of India to be its managing agent, and if you excuse the pun, the rest is history.

I love the Oberoi Hotels, having stayed at them in Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore and Mumbai. They have this wonderfully evocative old charm and perfect service. The rooms are big enough for a large man like me to walk about without feeling like an elephant in a porcelain shop, the bathrooms are large, well lit and decorated nicely. Plus, they usually are in old properties, with high ceilings, arched doorways and long well decorated corridors. They have excellent landscaped gardens, and you don’t feel like a sardine. So they come very highly recommended. No, they aren’t your cheap and cheerful hotels, but if you can afford it, you get a sense that you are finally home. Here’s a related quote, “its amazing how people want hotel service at home and home feelings at hotels”, while I dare not say anything about the former, but Oberoi Hotels, very uniquely, manage to carry that off. It is indeed a pleasure to walk inside any one of their wonderful hotels. Having had experience of hotels in more than fifty countries around the world, give me one of these any time. So it was with pleasure that I walked in and I have to admit that I was not disappointed at all. So started my little journey.

Sitting in the breakfast room the next day, I could see the Great Pyramid through the bead curtains. It is a short ten minute walk away. The Great Pyramid is something which can be read about, but it has to be experienced to feel the immensity of this structure. Standing next to it makes you feel tiny and insignificant but at the same time, feel wonder and awe at how the ancient Egyptians created this edifice. I wouldn’t bore you with the statistics and check out the national geographic site for more details. There are three big pyramids, countless smaller ones, and then there is the Sphinx. If you can manage to keep away the innumerable offers for horses, camels and donkey rides, kitsch tourist statues and avoid stepping into one of the animal offerings, you have a wonderful time.

One has to consciously remember that these are tombs; they are monuments to the Pharaoh’s desire to attain immortality.

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817

These are thousands of years old, and took decades and armies of workers to put together. And for a person born as an Indian, the feeling is faintly comforting. Two cultures whose origins are steeped in ancient times, two cultures which rose next to rivers, two cultures which are separated by thousands of miles, but both have mysteries galore, countless gods and wonderful monuments. While the ancient Egyptian culture has died away unlike in India where it still lives on, the signs of Ancient Egypt are all around us: on the Egyptian currency notes, in the large murals which you see lining the road from the airport, the driver of tourism – the major economic sector in the country, the hordes of tourists who are busy clicking away with their digital cameras, etc. etc.

So here I was, the quintessential globalised Indian, sitting in an Indian managed hotel, sipping Karkade, a dark burgundy drink made out of hibiscus flowers (wonderful stuff, very nourishing and soothing not to forget its calming effect), speaking with the Executive Housekeeper, Ms. Veneeta Rikhy, a very polished lady, who came over to Cairo in 2003, after long years of experience in Oberoi Hotels in India. She said that after the commercialized, hustle bustle, rush-rush of working in Mumbai, the Mena House in Cairo came as a soothing palliative. Although she had some reservations at the start, about moving away from India to a third world country, she found that life in Egypt is as slow, deep and steady as the Nile. The Egyptians were very warm, patient and laid-back and very welcoming to her and her family. While she only knows a few words in Arabic, just about enough to get along, her daughter speaks Arabic fluently. She and her family have settled down and integrated well, with an extensive social network of friends.

She mentioned that quite a lot of Indians from India, Europe and America have now started coming to Egypt. They do so primarily for two reasons, first is if they love history (and Indians do love history), and second is if they love sea sports and diving. While I have never been to the Egyptian part of the Red Sea, I have dived in the Saudi part of it, and I can easily say that the Red Sea is the most beautiful of them all, even better than the Great Barrier Reef. The main reason I loved the Red Sea is that it has corals, a living breathing wall of colour, unlike other places like the West Indies, Mauritius, Hawaii or Australia. But I digress; obviously you cannot dive in Cairo. Well, you can dive into the lovely Mena House Swimming pool, but you won’t find corals or groupers gaping at you.

The swimming pool is very nice, one of the largest Hotel pools in the country, surrounded by very well kept grounds and lawns and with very good service too. I would highly recommend taking a good book and ordering either Karkade or their lovely ice cold mint tea. It just hits the spot. The only problem was that the fertilizer they use on that lovely lawn is organic and when they watered the lawns and the wind was right (or wrong), you did get a bad whiff. But now I am quibbling. A lovely way to spend a lazy afternoon, with the Great Pyramid as a backdrop, the turquoise water of the swimming pool, the hum of insects.

I asked Veneeta about other Indians working in the hotel and there are a few senior personnel, but one gentleman caught my attention, Mr. Rais Ahmed, the head Chef, who has been here ruling over his domain every since the Oberoi took over the Mena House. A stripling of 23 years of age back then, he has been producing divine Indian meals ever since. The Moghul Restaurant is considered to be the best Indian restaurant in the Middle East, and I have to admit that his food is par excellence. Even though I have been spoilt by my recent trips back home, his Mughlai food is excellent. Have a taste of his Murgh Makhani, Shahjani and if you are particularly adventurous, try his Murgh Vindaloo (woof, blew my head off, I tell you). The desserts are divine as well, and his Kulfi is also excellent, the piquant taste of the spices is just the perfect end to a magical night. To get to eat such wonderful food west of Mumbai, in such a great location was perfect.

Rais speaks Hindi, Arabic, English and Bengali fluently, and it was with pleasure I spoke to him in Hindi and Bengali. We talked about spices, the right heat of the tandoor, the fact that he has trained almost 30 other Egyptians into very well qualified chefs who are in great demand in the other hotels, restaurants and cruise ships of Egypt and the Middle East. Taking a peek at the kitchen, it was large, very well equipped, lots of space and surprise surprise, smiling under chefs and staff. A very genial and polite man, Mr. Rais, who personally understands his guests coming for meals, finds out their nationality and then freshly cooks to suit their respective palates. For example, he said that Americans and the British like their food very hot and spicy, while the Japanese prefer it delicately spiced. I asked him about what Indian visitors thought about his food, and he hummed and hawed. But I persisted and with a very enduring shy modesty, he said in a strangled tone, they said that it’s better than in India!!!! And this Indian agrees! A man truly in love with his job and happiest when his clients are replete with excellent food. For a man to do this for over 36 years, day in - day out, is a monument which is comparable to the Great Pyramid. It was indeed a pleasure to meet him.

While bumbling around in the lobby, which, according to my feelings, is a tad bit overdone with gold paint (I suppose it is made to resemble ancient Egyptian palaces), I bumped into Mohamed Eiweida, the Lobby Manager, who is Egyptian. He took me around and showed me many photographs of the celebrities, part hidden in an alcove behind an imposing statue of Ismail Pasha, the Khedive (Viceroy) of Egypt. Guess what? Brooke Shields also stayed here! Interesting enough, Mohamed studied hotel management in India. Go figure, but an Oberoi Graduate can be seen from afar. A very smart, professional and genial man, full of tidbits of fascinating factoids.

It was a short visit, but I can just see myself coming back here again with my kids. My son would enjoy the history, while my little munchkin would most certainly prefer to frolic in the pool. The wonder of this place is that it appeals and can cater for all kinds of tourists, whether they are interested in history, or are just wanting a calm peaceful family holiday away from the bustle of daily life or just vegging out next to the pool, the Mena House has it all. The place just cocoons you with its ambience, its history, the play of lights and shadows borne out of the intricately carved chandeliers, the excellent food and above all, the majestic backdrop of the Pyramids. As the local saying goes, anybody who has drunk the water of the Nile will return, and I most certainly WILL.

Further information

It was a business trip and i didn't remember to take my camera. So had to rely on one of those dinky disposable ones.

The breakfast room.

Lovely view, no? to see the great pyramid while having your breakfast?

In the hotel garden

This part of the garden was a bit manky, but who cares…

Next to the pool having dinner

The pool was lovely. The water was a bit cold, but still lovely. And then they had a wedding in the main hotel ballroom. I heard a haunting local wedding song with a very lilting rhythm. I have been trying to find that song on YouTube for many moons but without knowing the lyrics, its very difficult. I have asked couple of friends, so if I find out, will post it.

The Bar

I had many glasses of karkade, a hibiscus flower drink, in this lovely place, very nice comfortable chairs., but the gold paint was a bit too much.

The main restaurant

Quite a nice restaurant. Can you imagine seeing a painting of Krishna in Egypt in a public restaurant? With very traditional Mughal oriented architecture and arches and stuff? Weird or what? But the food was great.

The Kitchen

Out and About. Had a few hours before catching the flight so decided to go check out the mouldy old buildings.

Old Scarface himself.

Then went over to see Saqqara, the step pyramid

Here is the painting which got the GBLT folks quite excited, apparently this showed 2 boys kissing. The chap who was there got very excited as well and said, it was certainly not 2 gay men kissing but 2 brothers, twins in fact. This was inside one of the tombs near Saqqara.

Here’s the Bent Pyramid. Looks a bit sad, no?

Yours truly totally like a male model, no? I know, I know, modelling trucks.

I went down the bent Pyramid. I was severely bent out of shape, if you ask me.

Full Slide show here.

The African Union’s African Standby Force Resolving and aligning threat assessment fault-lines

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 18:08:00 +0000

Introduction

One of the advantages of setting up an international or multilateral organisation these days is that one can understand and learn from the mistakes of the past. For example, because of the Cold War, ideological and religious differences, linguistic and imperialistic backgrounds, bureaucratic tensions, etc., the United Nations never managed to acquire its own security force. The result? Avoidable genocide, massacres and killings. As it is a joint responsibility, nobody loses their sleep over a few million Africans killed. But the African Union has learnt from the mistakes of the United Nations and has decided to set up a permanent African Standby Force (ASF), reporting to the Peace and Security Council (PSC) of the African Union (AU). While this is a very good step, it is crucial that the African Union members understand the issues around the political fault lines in Africa. An Army or armed force, after all, is a political technique (a blood-spattered and terrifying technique, but a technique none the less) and the usage as well as the success of this technique is heavily dependent upon an understanding of the political fault lines inherent in Africa. Without this understanding, the setup, use and deployment of the ASF will be a regrettable non-starter, because the early warning system, as well as the mandate process, will not work.

What is the African standby force and what is it supposed to do?

It is early days as yet, but the contours and shape of the ASF are emerging. It is a permanent force, under the control of the PSC, which will be used for a variety of missions (explained below) as mandated by the PSC. The force is expected to be a combination of a core element as well as additional mission specific element, which can be requested depending upon the requirements at the time. The core element is to provide advice to the political missions of the PSC or AU; participate in observer type missions (either separately or jointly with NATO, EU, UN, or other multilateral organisations); provide peacekeeping operations and the final one, peace enforcement operations. More formally, these are the functions which an ASF will do:[1]

a. Observation and monitoring missions.

b. Other types of peace support missions.

c. Intervention in a Member State in respect of grave circumstances or at the request of a Member State in order to restore peace and security, in accordance with Article 4(h) and (j) of the Constitutive Act of the African Union (CAAU).

d. Preventive deployment.

e. Peace-building, including post-conflict disarmament and demobilisation.

f. Humanitarian assistance to alleviate the suffering of civilian population in conflict areas and support efforts to address major natural disasters; and

g. Any other functions as may be mandated by the PSC or the Assembly.

There is a crying need for this force. Much of the recent history of Africa has been a continuous litany of killings, disasters, external interventions and dashed hopes. There is a long and sad tendency of well meaning outsiders imposing their views and actions on Africa, ranging from the old colonial mindset of the “white man’s burden” to the current, “Africa cannot develop without aid and our help”. What is more, this habit of relying on outsiders means that Africa is unable to help itself. More importantly, when humanitarian and/or military help is really needed, Africa is then at the mercy of these outsiders, whose work is motivated by other incentives. This is the reason why over the past few decades, we have had minimal help, to say the least, when major disasters such as floods, drought, famine, desertification and locust swarms struck. There has been genocide, for example in Sudan, Rwanda and the Congo, with no effective interventions. There have been kleptocratic tendencies in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe and nobody has raised a hue/cry. There have been civil wars in Sudan and the Ivory Coast and nobody much cared. Zimbabwe, the bread basket of Africa, is undergoing a slow death and nobody seems to be bothered.

Given these problems and the lack of continent or even international institutions willing and able to help, it is impossible for even one country to lend a hand, even if they are able to do so. Nigeria, South Africa and Egypt come to mind, but there is no structure in place, no institutional ability and frankly, up until recently, no desire to help others. Given a very good desire for Africans to help themselves and push for better transparency and governance, etc., a good strong African police force will seriously facilitate if not assist in avoiding many of the issues mentioned above. If there had been an ASF in existence with political backing, then quite a lot of the tragic events could be, at best avoided and at worst, have a reduced impact.

But why didn’t the external world intervene sooner if at all? Well, the main reason why the external world didn’t respond was because of political fault lines (such as issues around communist USSR and capitalist USA, Christian West and Arab Sudan, weak liberal ‘unable-to-take-casualties’ West and non-intervention in third world countries etc.). While having an ASF can address the last issue, the first issue is important. If the political fault-lines are not understood and managed, then the ASF will be less than effective and five years from now, we might again see a PSC press release about genocide, massacres, deaths and killings in Africa.

There is another reason which is lesser than the political will, and that is the rather regrettable issue that the powers that be simply didn’t know what was going on. In other words, the early warning system didn’t work in a way that was conducive to a quick deployment of forces, which could help avoid massacres, for example in Rwanda.

What are the current fault lines?

Before we talk about how to handle African political fault lines, we need to understand the types of these fault lines. At an initial glance, one can identify five major types of fault lines.

Geographic: (North Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and West Africa). While these are arbitrary divisions and one may indeed question or even suggest alternative geographical sets, this is still an important fault line. For example, we have existing geographical organisations such as the Economic Community Of West African States (ECOWAS) and Southern African Development Community (SADC). The European Union looks at the North African region (more broadly defined than just the Arabic speaking region) as a bloc from an immigration perspective. The francophone community, while not formally established, does exist with discreet management from France. USA’s State Department has a completely different way of splitting up Africa in terms of its desks, such as West Africa, Southern Africa, and Central Africa. For example, northern Africa is not handled by the Bureau of African Affairs, but is handled elsewhere in the Middle East Desk. So if there is an issue which transcends these regional groupings, there can be challenges in getting the political wind behind any mandate. For example, if there is another civil war, something along the lines of what we saw in Ivory Coast, would one expect the French to intervene, while the AU troops from say Southern Africa stand by? Say the French troops do take the side of a francophone country involved in a political issue with say a non francophone country? How does the ASF react or handle it? How would the PSC and AU handle it and what mandate does it give to the ASF?

Religious: Imported religions (Islam and Christianity) and Native religions. Some of the biggest massacres and stress points within Africa relate to religions. Whether we are talking about the eruptions between imported religions such as Christianity and Islam versus native religions, or between Islam and Christianity, this is a huge political stress point. Take again the main troop and equipment contributors to a potential ASF, Egypt, Libya, Nigeria and South Africa. Egypt and Nigeria suffer from serious religious sectarianism. South Africa has also been known to have this. So an ASF will have tiny seeds of religious divisions inside it. So if it needs to be deployed, say for example in Ethiopia or Somalia, it will invariably be faced with a political fault line because of religion. Would a Southern African force, mostly comprised of Christians, be considered to be deployed in Muslim Somalia? Look at what happened when the AU force was going to be deployed in Sudan, there were harsh and strong words uttered by various Sudanese religious leaders on how Christian crusaders were coming to break up a Muslim country.

Imperialism: The colonised and independent kingdoms, the sub-fault lines from the colonisers: Belgium, Germany, United Kingdom and France. For some reason, some of the old colonisers get very excited about what’s happening in their former colonies. To state an example, you will have the United Kingdom ready to intervene in Sierra Leone, but will hold back if an issue blew up in a francophone country and same with France which won’t mind Nigeria having issues, but will be ready to deploy immediately if a francophone country is in danger. The United Kingdom criticises Zimbabwe, but the same level of interest isn’t shown by Germany or Belgium or the UK on any of the francophone countries. So the colonial history is very important, especially when an ASF might need legal, political, military etc. help.

The ideological fault line (and the hangover from the cold war): Capitalism and Socialism. While the idea of free markets and capitalism is relatively well established across the world, there is still a fault line running down this ideological divide. Many of the African states are headed by leaders who implemented policies in the socialist era of the 1960’s and 1970’s.Many states suffer from inefficient public sectors, state control over economies, bureaucracy and corruption etc. While by itself this should not be an issue, when we are talking about the deployment of an external armed force, then that force needs to work with public institutions. And generally, if it is a socialist economy, reconstruction is weak. Capitalist societies have the human stock of people accustomed to getting up and fixing problems themselves, rather than relying on the state to do things for them.

The cultural fault line: This is more difficult to explain, but could perhaps suffice with a couple of examples. Africa is a continent and the AU is based upon a geographically based identity. When there is another grouping which transcends this geographical grouping, then you have the emergence of a fault line. For example, the Arab identity amongst the Arab speaking North African countries is stronger than the African identity. Say there is an attack on or a situation in a clear African country such as say Chad or Ethiopia, due to say an Arab country’s intervention and the ASF is asked to intervene. As one can see, the political mandate for the ASF will be very difficult to achieve, as the PSC will be split internally between the North African Arab members and the others.

There can be other fault lines as well, but the above adequately show that there are indeed existing fault lines. So how does this matter? The main reason is that these fault lines will cause the political mandate for the ASF to be less than efficient. While advisory or observer missions for the ASF are comparatively less reliant on a clear political mandate, the lack thereof will definitely impact peace keeping and peace enforcement missions.

To have a clear political mandate, the PSC needs to know that there is a problem. The PSC has established a Continental Early Warning System (EWS) according to Article 12 of the Protocol establishing the PSC as adopted on 9^th July 2002. This EWS is expected to avoid issues around unclear directions, information and delayed information as was evidenced in the case of Rwanda, where the UNSC did not even know that there was genocide in progress, until it was too late to stop it and hundreds of thousands had already died.

How do the political fault lines impact the EWS? This is because the EWS findings are directly related to the political mandate, which in turn is directly related to what the ASF will do on the ground. To a lesser extent, the EWS findings also influence and drive what the world understands about a particular conflict situation. Again, it is usually via the media that the world gets its information. The media reports on the intelligence reports tabled or submitted to the various international bodies such as European Union, United Nations Security Council, US Congress, etc. To understand why this is so important, see the innumerable drafts made of any submission to the UNSC, with various members spending long days and hours on drafting such a submission. And this is not even a resolution. This delay in having the right words for a submission can be deadly in case of fast moving events.

This is, of course, assuming that there is a continent wide structure which gathers and processes information and then feeds it into the PSC’s EWS. Once the EWS acquires the information, political fault lines of the type mentioned above can, in the best of times, delay the submission to the PSC and in the worst of times; degrade the severity or urgency of the issue under submission. This will mean that the ASF will have a wrong mandate, if at all and will therefore not be able to address the issue.

This brings us to the issue of the political will. Again taking the Rwandan matter, which was analysed by Touko Pipparinen[2], where Kofi Annan, the then Under Secretary-General of Peacekeeping said, “If there was a problem, it was not one of information or intelligence. The problem was lack of political will”. The then UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali is reported to have said that, “member states were opposed to intervention in Rwanda, with early warning and without early warning. So the real problem is this: if there is no political will among the major actors in the Security Council, any UN system which we try to improve will be useless”. Besides serious disagreements over the comments about the problem being solely due to political will (or rather the lack thereof) and not caused by faulty or insufficient intelligence shows what the heads of multilateral institutions think of their major political stakeholders and bosses with respect to their political will to resolve issues.

Recommendations:

The main issue comes from the fact that very few countries are willing to put their soldiers in harm’s way if there is no direct national interest involved. Even when there is altruism involved, such as with Canada, when it became clear that genocide was planned and was being executed in Rwanda, the Canadian troops were not used to stop it. So the establishment of an ASF is a very good step, as it removes the need for asking for troops. But the issue around the EWS and its political mandate being affected by these fault lines remain.

Starting with the EWS, there are three issues. One is the reporting line to the PSC chairperson, second is the lack of formal mechanisms for incorporating external bodies into the intelligence gathering exercise and finally is the lack of transparency.

Unfortunately, the PSC protocol has set up the EWS to report directly to the Chairperson of the PSC. While this might be done for organisational reasons, this assigns far too much power to the chairperson and allows the chairperson’s personal biases and allegiances to influence the intelligence sifting, summarising, prioritisation and reporting. The reporting of the intelligence should be done to a sub-committee of the PSC (from different countries and geographical locations within Africa) and the reports / minutes of the meetings published regularly after a suitable time delay (if appropriate).

The second issue is the explicit non inclusion of the media and secondly the NGO sector. Ostensibly and by and large, both these types of organisations are independent. The media is obviously interested in uncovering issues and transmitting them. If sufficient numbers of different media outlets (TV, Bloggers, newspapers, Radio, etc.) are consolidated, then issues around independence, bias and other aspects can be averaged out and can provide a very important counter-weight to formal military and governmental information channels. The second sector, the Non-Governmental Organisations, is frequently providing services on the ground where the government is unwilling or unable to do so. A framework which brings this NGO sector into the intelligence gathering framework would be useful.

This does not mean that the information is taken from the media and NGOs and not used. These bodies are - and should be - incorporated into some mechanism for the drafting of a weekly or monthly (or some periodic) intelligence report. This brings us to the third point, namely transparency. When there is a transparent and public report, backed by independent multiple sources of information and intelligence, political fault lines are covered because the argument moves from being defined by narrow nationalistic, linguistic, cultural or geographical factors to purely humanitarian grounds.

Given reasonable operationalisation of the above points, we will end up with a situation where there are multiple sources of independent information, an open debate around current and emerging issues, and a joint public and transparent recommendation from the EWS to the PSC. Once this recommendation is tabled on the PSC chamber, one would expect the political fault lines to engage, depending upon the location and type of the issue. Again, it is vital that the debates and discussions of the PSC are open and transparent.

Conclusions

In the protocol which established the PSC of the AU, the participants were clearly concerned about the “variety of conflicts on the continent and realised that these conflicts have killed millions and have forced millions of their countrymen into becoming refugees and unable to pursue happiness”. And they voted overwhelmingly to be “determined to address the scourge of conflicts on the continent by setting up and use the ASF”[3].

While saying that, amongst the multiple active current conflicts on the continent, three are of particular interest. These are having the biggest impact on ordinary Africans. Sudan and Somalia, because African Union troops are currently deployed there under a less than efficient mandate. The third example is Zimbabwe. While relatively speaking, the political fissures mentioned above have been resolved to a certain extent in Sudan and Somalia, political fault lines have made sure that millions of Zimbabweans are in dire straits. It will be a reflection of the capacity of the AU/PSC to see how it improves situations such as Darfur and Somalia and actually engages in Zimbabwe, overcoming narrow nationalistic, religious or kleptocratic tendencies which have bedevilled Africa for so long.

The End

[1] Policy Framework for the Establishment of the African Standby Force and the Military Staff Committee, Document adopted by the Third Meeting of African Chiefs of Defense Staff 15-16 May 2003, Addis Ababa, www.africa-union.org

[2] Piiparinen, T, 2006, “Beyond the mystery of the Rwanda ‘Black Box’: Political Will and Early Warning”, International Peacekeeping, Vol 13, No. 3, 334-249

[3] Protocol establishing the PSC as adopted on 9^th July 2002, page 2-5

Here’s the devilishly sweaty angle to regulation

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 10:45:00 +0000

The past few months saw the financial and economic hills coming alive with the call to regulate financial institutions. There is a very good reason for this, as the financial institutions are blamed for leading us all into recession, making awful decisions, lending badly, being greedy and so on and so forth. So as usual, the public squeals and the sundry governments reach for the regulations. And in many cases, these new regulatory proposals are ingenious. But very rarely do you hear about the implementation side. I am reminded of two quotes, (1) Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and (2) the devil is in the detail. So here is a perspiring salty devil on the joys of actually implementing these proposals.

First of all, I want to give a bit of a background about my experience and then talk about the limitations of this essay, then delve deeper into the joys of implementation from the technical perspective, operationalisation, implementation, cost of implementing these proposals, impact and influence on executive remuneration, actual interface with and influence on trading, market risk, impact on counterparties and credit risk, links with other regulatory regimes all around the special case of international banks. Finally, this is strictly my own opinion, nothing to do with my current and future employers. If you point to me, I will blame my sister for this.

Over the past 15 odd years, I have seen many regulatory initiatives come and go into production, whether it is Basel 1; CAD; MiFID; Basel II; Y2K; transaction and trade reporting; initial and variation margin; and so on and so forth, and these from the perspective of trading, risk management, technical, operational (actually running the sausage machine which produces the reports and deals with the fallout with regulators and compliance). These initiatives are normally just from the perspective of international global banks of various ilk's. So this essay would perhaps offer a very limited, tiny dimensional view of a gigantic universe, hence should be taken with an equivalent grain of salt.

But first let us look at the regulatory impulses. I had the privilege of listening to senior members of the Financial Services Authority of the UK talk about how they see the regulation of liquidity risk. If you check their website, they have a whole section relating to liquidity risk, provide discussion papers and show that they are working heavily on it. The proposals boil down to a very firm specific approach (rather than a purely model based approach) which combines quantitative models, a clear measure of the risk appetite, a review of senior management, a seriously upgraded stress testing system and very aggressively tested contingency funding plans.

There are other regulatory initiatives relating to either tweaking or enhancing or even discontinuing Basel II, to establish a common contingency / liquidity funding pool (almost akin to the mother of all deposit insurance schemes); to firmly fix the executive remuneration to something which approximates the actual risk born by the institution over a different time period; to actually go and make the regulator’s pay being market and risk aligned; control bank asset growth and tie the Tiered capital to some function of that bank asset growth; control the trading books much better; put in punitive capital and transparency measures on banks warehousing instruments for internal liquidity pools or for future sale; look after the financial system rather than concentrate on the individual financial institutions; and finally fix the way the regulators work themselves.

I am a firm believer that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and in this case, the road to regulatory gridlock is paved with requests for information. The problem I have is this. The underlying concept behind all these proposed solutions is that if more information was given to the regulators, then the regulators would have been better able to control the risk and could have headed it off before the crash happened. Now I am not convinced that it is clear to the regulators that they know what they are asking for.

At this current moment, financial institutions produce a gigantic amount of reports and information for a bewildering variety of regulators, examiners, auditors, reviewers, exchanges and other bodies. Ranging from trade and transaction information to cash information, from accounting information to capital information, a huge amount of information is collated and collected and shipped over to the regulator. While it is difficult to prove a negative, I am beginning to wonder what they did with the existing information. Was it used or filed away and forgotten or what? And if the data provided was not useful to provide information on proper regulation, then what is the mechanism to fix it? A word to the wise, as they say, generals are always prepared to fight the last war. Asking for more information just to fix the last crash might indeed not be very useful.

But let us get back to the implementation details. Let us start with the obvious one and get everything under one umbrella, none of these off balance sheet vehicles or faffing around with regulatory arbitrage. If the off balance sheet vehicles and special purpose vehicles are brought back on the books of the financial institutions and their clients, they will be creaking at the seams if not bursting at them. So if I had to show all these vehicles under one umbrella, which is tatty, the next question would be, where all do I report to and in which manner? Software, technology, people, process and places are already under an intolerable strain to produce sufficiently robust and accurate information (such as under SOX), and to stress it even further will mean a mass of incomprehensible information which is very difficult to produce much less comprehend.

Do I report a British SIV created in Switzerland for an Indian client under US rules or what? And how do they link in with any derivative transactions carried out under its rubric in Milan with some hedging done in Yen? You will get an answer to this question if you go to a tax advisor or a corporate lawyer. But once you pile hundreds of thousands of millions of transactions, products, SIVs, regulators, trades, hedges, etc. on top of each other, the pile becomes so complex that it is very difficult to structure and report. It is like flying the space shuttle perched on top of a Boeing 747 transport. It can be done, but is very difficult. So my question would be, you might want to go back to basics and wonder why you wanted the information in the first place. Surely that will not help so much rather than understand the motives (sell automobile stocks, buy credit, lend to car buyers…) behind the transaction in the first place. So going after the motive rather than the end result might actually provide better protection. And motives can be summed up rather neatly on a qualitative basis, and human beings are much better in dealing with complexity on a qualitative basis rather than a quantitative basis.

Ok, no worries, let's say that you do manage to report this entire structure to one person. Leaving aside the fact that I do not believe that it will be possible for one person or even one team to understand the full structure, you will tell me, ok then, now come up with sufficient capital to protect against this entire or part of this structure failing. When things are going fine, I can reasonably predict the future trajectory of this structure. So while the weather is fair, I can tell how the Space Shuttle on the Boeing 747 will fly but if there are gusts of wind, I will find it very difficult to predict what will happen to the combined structure. Now if you want 100% certainty, ground the plane and make sure it does not fly at all. In other words, make sure that the banks hold 100% of capital for any exposure at all. That will make you very cushiony, but not very attractive as an economic model. People have to realise that risk has to play a role and will live on.

So what is a good level of capital? Well, you do have Basel II which is trying to come up with a good way of describing the capital required, and by and large, it seems to be giving good results. But the mechanism to collect and report that capital required is done on a monthly basis. And by the time the entire sausage machine gets into full gear into the top of the corporate food chain, and then to the various regulators, it can take quite a lot of time to know if capital changes are required. And when you do know if capital changes are required (usually increase in capital), it will take another few months before that can actually happen. How long do you think the markets are going to stay put and do nothing while this juggernaut is trying to calculate the capital required? Not long, firms can go belly up in a matter of days, not months and years. Perhaps a simple question to the bank chiefs will suffice, once a mathematical level of capital has been established. Are you comfortable with betting your pension on that level of capital? If yes, then fine. If not, then top it up, mate.

And what of liquid assets or liquidity risk management? I heard the regulator say that liquidity risk management is poorly understood. Yes, it is poorly understood because of very good reasons. It is like you are a salmon looking up a white water rafting river and estimating what is the best way to go up stream while being able to breathe, avoid bears and fishermen, as well as not get bashed against rocks. Every salmon does not survive, but the species does. Similarly, liquidity risk is so difficult to comprehend, because it is beset with so many factors that it is perhaps humanly impossible to comprehend and calculate all the factors together. One indicator could be that every time there has been a liquidity crash, nobody saw it coming. Well, that should tell us something. The number of data points, transactions and dimensions which can potentially lead to a bad liquidity eddy in the water which will bash your head against a bankruptcy rock are just too many to model with any exactitude and I am not sure one can achieve it. Best case scenario, it will lead to over confidence and worst case scenario, it will not catch anything at a very high implementation cost.

Let us not forget the problem for the regulators. By asking for more and more information and more and more oversight, their responsibilities are increasing as well. In other words, if they do get all this information and are again not able to prevent the next crash, will their salaries and bonuses be docked? The bankers who were paid munificent sums in bonuses are being asked to return their money, well, at least control the sums of money going forward. But does this relationship cut both ways? Will the regulators resign if their regulated markets do not behave in the way they asked the market to behave? Say the business cycle is five years, will the regulators and bankers enter into a pact to say that their bonuses and a proportion of their pensions will be linked directly to the performance of the financial system and the financial institutions, which will only be paid after six years? I can hear the gasps, but hey, it can be done. We already do it over one year, so why not over six years or 10 years?

One hears that instead of independent private rating agencies, there should be a government one. This is specially coming from the Europeans. Yes, the crop of private rating agencies do have problems, but here’s a question, how independent will the government rating agency be when some of the largest participants in the financial markets are the governments themselves? And if there is a conflict, who judges?

So here are just some thoughts about the regulatory pressures and the joys of the implementation of it. People are asking for more data and more models to fix problems that came up because of more data and more models existing. Perhaps I am getting old and cranky, but piling yet more models on top of more models does not seem to be the right way forward for me. What it ends up doing is to produce loads of perspiration but no inspiration.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Sniping in the crosshairs

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:45:00 +0000

Hunting is an atavistic human activity which is now falling into disfavour. One can understand why it is so, because one cannot hunt animals that have been over-hunted, food does not need to be hunted any more. The view, that the only reason why one would hunt an animal is because it is posing a danger to humans, is increasing now. However, there is still one animal which is hunted these days and that is man. You might very well ask why I talk about hunting men? Well, in a particular case, hunting men is no different from hunting animals. I refer to the art of sniping. Let us take a look!

First the usual disclaimer! I love hunting although I haven’t done so for a long time now. It goes back to those old halcyon pre-teenage and teenage days of hunting with a slingshot and pebbles/marbles and then graduating to a pop air gun and then to a rifle and the very rare shotgun/high powered rifle. Mainly I went after large birds, squirrels, rabbits and the rare boar or antelope. Quite a lot of the shooting was to do with target shooting and practice. I have even managed to shoot couple of humans as well, but with a dinky air rifle. The chances of actually doing big damage with that are fairly well limited. I got one in the calf, which was an accident and one was by design and I got the boy in the patootie. But I have had experience of shooting off the big rifles as well and using scopes. Those are big men’s toys and you can see a man being brought down. Not that I have bought a man down, mind you, but I can see the similarities.

This brings me to sniping. If my memory serves me right, the first time I read about sniping was when I read ‘Dogs of War’ by Fredrik Forsyth. In that book, the hero talks about how it would have been so much easier to get a mercenary with a sniper rifle to expend a bullet costing ½ a shilling to take out Adolph Hitler rather than go through the whole headache that was World War II. That piqued my interest and it has become more and more of an interest since then. I read with deep concentration how Navy SEAL snipers took out three Somali pirates with three shots. Now those were absolutely great shots. Can you imagine taking a pot shot from the pitching and unstable USS Bainbridge’s stern at a tiny target, where only the head and shoulders were exposed, and that also rather hazy and wavering in the dark, at least 300 meters away, in a pitching lifeboat? Not touching the captive at all - but just pops – pop-pop-pop, and the captive was free. And totally coordinated, all three pirates had to be brought down at the same time; otherwise the captive’s life was in danger. I simply cannot imagine the skill and ability of the snipers and I suspect that a vast majority of people on this planet cannot get that done either. I hope the SEAL’s get due recognition for totalling those pirates. Down through the ages starting from Julius Caesar and Cicero all the way to now, that has unfortunately been the only way to deal with pirates.

By and large, people are very uncomfortable about sniping as a weapon of war. The main objection seems to be that it offends the rules of fair play. I suppose it’s the same feeling that the samurai or the Red Indians were faced with in the 17^th century when being confronted with rifles and guns. These would smell, stink and kill without honour. But killing is killing, I guess. That said the feeling that if you do want to kill and fight, then you do it face to face. We still use terms such as “back stabber” or “sneak up behind”, all sounding very bad and dishonourable. We do not like anonymous strangers and we think it’s a sign of courage and morality that fighting should be like fencing, one to one. So the idea that somebody can be a kilometre away and using a high powered rifle to kill a target, who does not even have a chance to react, is sort of anathema to normal folks. You don’t give a warning, you don’t allow any chance of defence, you don’t provide any retreat clause, and you just kill. But life is brutal and sniping is a way of life. When humans would sneak up on animals to kill them, hundreds of thousands of years ago, they were doing the same. But then, it was for food, now it’s for “war”. I can understand this, I still do not have a good explanation why this would be so, but I can see the military need for it.

If you can, from long distance, avoid the need to engage with the enemy and just quietly and safely take out an enemy leader who is directing his men to fight against you, why wouldn’t you do that? Take for example this book ‘Sniper One: The Blistering True Story of a British Battle Group Under Siege’ (ISBN-10: 0141029013) by Sergeant Dan Mills of the 1^st Battalion, Princess of Wales Royal Regiment. Sergeant Dan Mills lead a group of British Army Snipers deployed in the field in Al Amarah, Iraq with Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, the first Victoria Cross holder in the Iraq War. But the book is not about Lance Corporal Beharry, it’s about the group of men whom Sergeant Mills lead for months. They were snipers, based on the top of a low building, for months on end.

And what they would be doing is taking out suicide bombers, jihadis, various Shia militiamen, assorted RPG and mortar holders, men planting IEDs on the road side, and so on and so forth. All of them were using their British Army sniper rifles and in some instances a 50 calibre rifle. By safely dispatching these assorted fundos out from a kilometre or more distance, they literally saved their fellow soldiers’ lives - hundreds if not thousands of times. They fired over 33,000 rounds and are credited with 200 kills (that they know of, very difficult to confirm kills in urban conditions). It is a very good book, highly recommended. The author was mentioned in dispatches even. Very brave man and very brave soldiers. It feels pretty good to read about it as well. Yeah, I know, I am being childish now!

What about counter sniper operations? This is something that people engaged in urban warfare face all the time and it was and is currently happening in large areas in Iraq. What do you do with enemy snipers who are going to pick your tank, APC or other commanders off while they are on patrol? (Please keep in mind that this isn’t the place to talk about whether or not they should be in Iraq in the first place!) Then rules of engagement come in. Rules of engagement are in place to define how, where, why and when etc. of how soldiers should fight. The rules differ from place to place, time to time, regiment to regiment, commander to commander, etc. Basically, the bottom line is, that it depends upon how risky you want the battle to be. If you are very risk averse, then you will have stringent rules of engagement. So in this case you will say to your counter sniper teams, you cannot shoot an enemy sniper till the enemy sniper has actually fired.

Now as you can imagine, that means that you can only fire in self defence or fire after a fellow soldier has already been killed, wounded or targeted. What if the enemy soldier is just doing reconnaissance? Can you still kill him? How about a commander or a Colonel? What about an unarmed, not in uniform mullah who is ordering his men to commit suicide attacks? What about a sniper nest up in the minaret of a mosque? Can you fire at the sniper nest in a minaret? You know that if you fire at the minaret, the uglies and the idiots will come out boiling and create more problems. What if the shot is worth it?

What about you having just observed a group of men triggering a roadside bomb in a heavily built up area and then suddenly you have a whole bunch of people running away from the explosion? The perpetrators aren’t nicely sign posted, you have dust, blood, smoke, debris and body parts flying all over the place resulting from the explosion and you hear the screams of the wounded all around you. Then you are asked to take out the chap who triggered the explosion, despite the fact that there are usually two men in each sniper team, you are both still looking through a very narrow telescope or binoculars. How do you decide whom to kill and whom to spare? It is such a difficult decision, but you know that you better take the chaps out because they are also carrying the triggering device which will trigger additional IEDs to take out the follow up ambulances or APCs which are going to come to check on the first ambulance. What a tough decision to make!

What about you taking out a man you know is an insurgent leader, has been seen and known to be a master bomber? You have now found out where he lives and have been informed that he is plotting an attack. You also know that there is no court in Afghanistan or Iraq which will ever convict him or any prosecutor brave enough to prosecute him and no policeman brave enough to arrest him? But you know he is alive and he is directing operations which are killing your men and other innocent civilians. Well, a real life case such as that has happened when Green Beret Master Sgt. Troy Anderson took out Nawab Buntangyar and was prosecuted for unlawful killing. He was acquitted of the charges on the grounds that it was justifiable homicide, which is a good thing in my humble opinion. But now you see the problem for snipers. They have to be very careful. You don’t have hotheads in the sniper teams, at least not in the professional armies. You cannot say much about this for the snipers in militant and terrorist groups.

Sniping is more of an art than a science. The entire exercise of getting to a place, settling down there for ages, having almost inhuman patience to stalk, to keep zillions of things in mind, and then, phut, the target is pushing up daisies. The ingress and egress from the ultimate shooting position would be nerve wracking. You will need to be very careful; you cannot just stand anywhere and shoot. You need to think about getting in, taking the shot and then getting safely out. And once you are in situ, can you imagine the patience it requires? You cannot move, cannot just take a break at any time, cannot eat properly, cannot do the bodily functions easily And all that for hours and in some cases, days on end, where the sniper team just sits there and waits.

All that can end up only for one chance which might exist for 10 seconds. In those 10 seconds you have to make a judgement call on whether or not it is legal or ethical, whether the situation is under the rules of engagement and then worry about the physical act of taking the shot. Just one shot from hundreds of meters away, relying on a controlled explosion inside your barrel which will propel the bullet over hundreds of meters, battling smoke, wind, heat waves and then hitting the head or a vital part of the body for a proper kill. Bloody hell, that’s one hell of a difficult way to top somebody.

But I have rambled on long enough and the best way to close this essay is to write four quotes which encapsulate this secretive and strange world of sniping.

Reporter to sniper in Iraq. "What do you feel when you shoot an insurgent?" Sniper to reporter, "Just a little recoil."

Another one is, I am a whisper, a shadow, I don't exist. By the time you realize I'm there it's already too late and by then I'm long gone.

Then you have the "one man’s fate comes from another man’s wait" and the final rather gallows humour one, "a sniper is the worst romancer, they never make the first move."

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

No man should ever have to see his child die!

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 10 May 2009 08:01:00 +0000

I believe that one of the most poignant emotions that are evoked inside of one is when one reads or hears about a parent facing the death of his/her child. Whether it is burying his child, or lighting the funeral pyre or laying the child out for a vigil or wrapping the child in a shroud, the feeling is perhaps much more powerful than any other death. Compared to the deaths of any of other relatives and family members, the death of your child might be the most heart wrenching one. But why on earth am I talking about this? This topic came from a strange source and made me think about it, so as usual I jotted down some thoughts on this.

First, I have to explain that I am a bit of a science-fiction geek and have been reading this particular genre for the best part of 30 years now, starting way back when I got my little hands on HG Wells' books, like ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Time Machine’, ‘Island of Doctor Moreau’, ‘War of the Worlds’, ‘God The Invisible King’, ‘Wheels of Chance’, ‘Research Magnificent’, etc. Second, I usually haunt charity shops, flea markets and websites such as abebooks, Alibris, eBay and other places where second hand books are sold. The idea being, just because it’s a second hand book that doesn’t mean that the book is bad. Words are amazing things whose worth does not diminish with frequent use. Just because it’s a bit yellowing or has a broken spine, that doesn’t mean that it cannot be read again or anymore. But more importantly, second hand books come with an idea already built in that somebody found it good enough to put it back into circulation. Generally, you always win that way.

So now we get back on the topic. It was surprising that I have not come across this book anywhere else before other than when I saw it in one of those charity shops I mentioned. This book, ‘Hyperion’ by Dan Simmons, was originally published in 1990 and won a whole bunch of awards, like the Hugo and Locus Awards for the best science fiction novel). Naturally, I scooped it up and finally got to reading it and found its basic premise to be quite interesting. The story deals with a group of seven travelers, who have joined to go together on a pilgrimage to another planet, which seems to have a God like creature in residence called as Shrike. The pilgrimage is embarked on to beg for Shrike’s assistance to save mankind’s galactic civilisation. Never you mind the overall structure of this galactic civilisations under threat which is rather popular, but not what I want to get into in this essay. What made this book very interesting is the fact that the story is actually not just one story, but it comprises the individual stories of the seven pilgrims.

I am not going to say much about the other six sub-stories except to say that each of them was fascinatingly imaginative and amazingly creative and uniquely different. But it was one of those seven stories which really tugged my heart strings and made me want to write about it. It is the story of one of the pilgrims mentioned above, who is carrying a baby of about 6 months of age. And that bewildered me at the beginning. What on earth is this? Did you ever hear of a hero going off on a galactic quest carting a baby around along with the essential nappies and vital baby formula milk, favourite blanket and other assorted vital accessories?

The story of that baby is amazing. As it so happens, a young woman was trained as a scientist and went off to research Shrike. But then something happens to her that is not really explained very well (nor am I going to try to explain it here), but the effect of that event or happening is that she starts regressing in age rather than growing older. Every day, she loses one day’s worth of life and memory attached to it or knowledge gained during it. The doctors cannot figure out neither the illness, nor a cure for it and so she finally ends up with her parents. Physically she is doing just fine, but she grows young and younger every single day instead of growing old.

You might say that this sounds brilliant, to grow young again! But I don’t think we have really thought this through properly. In popular fiction, you would have somebody who is old and then grows younger for some reason till they reach an ideal age and then they stick to that age. This ideal age is say around 25 or so, when people are at the prime of their lives. Shades of “She” by Haggard, no? But you don’t really believe that this is good, do you? There is this recent movie now: ‘The curious case of Benjamin Button’, which has a similar theme, but that still doesn’t talk to me the way this particular story does.

I refer, obviously (or perhaps it is still not that obvious) to the feelings of the parent, in this case here the father, which is precisely what I was thinking about and what pulled so violently on my heart strings. As somebody once said, the worst experience in human life is to have a father bury his child. In other words, no parent should have to outlive his children.

I have a young daughter of my own and while I obviously cannot (and hope to hell not) imagine to ever go through this, but reading about how this father managed to go through each day shook me. Every single day that father was teaching his daughter everything all over again starting from zero or square one, knowing that tomorrow, they will still have to do everything all over again, because she would have forgotten all that she had learnt the previous day.

Still, going back from an age of 25 to 24 is bearable, despite it being 365 days of utter pain and enormous loss. From 24 to 23 is also ok, and perhaps it’s acceptable untill you reach say 12 or 10 years of age. 15 long years of seeing your child shrink, lose maturity and knowing that the end is inexorably coming. Yet still rushing about, trying everything and anything to get her cured and failing miserably.

And then childhood comes, where some of the basic human functions start failing. And then finally the dreaded day comes, when your daughter forgets language and the ability to speak and she also can no longer walk, but moves into helpless babyhood again, which is where the story ends. It was a frightening read for me and Scared the bejesus out of me. It sort of gave me a better appreciation of what your children really are. Emotional? Too crazy? Allowing what is science-fiction to become kind of real in my mind? You bet your bottom dollar On all of the above!

It did impact me and despite it being just a story, I was ended up putting myself in that father’s shoes. I am not sure if I would have the discipline and courage it definitely would take to live my life all over again, but this time in reverse. What do I do with the photographs that I had taken? The toys that she played with? How about the sleepless nights I spent walking up and down in the hallway with her in my arms trying to get her to sleep? Or the days I spent out in the garden with her, playing with her dolls or on the trampoline? Or reading a book with her? I can do it now, because we have a bright future in front of us together. It’s a joyful time. But would I be able to do the exact same thing knowing that there is no real future for her, because she is not progressing but is actually regressing and heading inevitably towards her death?

I know I will have to do it, but can I? I do not know, so I thought of asking you who also have children about what you think. Could you?

PS: This book was brilliant, a good read and comes highly recommended. There is a second part to the book also, but more on that one perhaps later…

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

Technorati Tags: Personal,Bibliophilia

The British National Party – its not British, its not National and its certainly not a party

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 07:12:00 +0000

The BNP (British National Party) is a curious old animal in the British political landscape. It is an out and out racist party, associating with some very dubious characters across Europe. Its fascination with fascism is also well known. I do not have to say much about why it is so reprehensible. My basic problem with them is not that they are racist but that they are stupid. Any political party which bases its policies on the amount / type of melanin in the skin HAS to be, by its very definition, stupid.

But this party is slowly gaining ground because of the existing Labour party’s policies.

Immigration. The open mass immigration allowed under the Labour government causes angst. When you have an open door policy and others are just faffing around makes it very difficult. Take a look at this think tank, which keeps track of migrations to know that it is a serious issue. And constantly, the Labour government has done sweet sod about it all, despite the warnings all over the political spectrum and down the ages. Consequently, the worry has not been managed and by and large, it is now a bona fide political problem.
The rabid 1984 type of centralisation of all powers into Whitehall means that local democracy has been eviscerated. So when there are no local powers, then it is but natural that extremist wings see a chink in the local dissatisfaction with politics.
The Scottish Mafia which is running the UK despite having given local government of a kind to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. This leaves England as the only nation within the United Kingdom without local representative bodies. So if there is a local highly nationalistic party which bangs on about being English, then it will get support.
Ignoring English needs such as having its own national day. (St. George’s Day is not considered to be a national holiday unlike in Scotland or Wales.)
The open trade policy and the resultant losses due to globalisation is hurting the libertarians and the free traders. People get upset when their jobs go or are taken over by migrants. It does not even have to be true, it just needs to be thought or said that it is so. When the government fights to keep the trade borders open, then it provides an open door to protectionist economic illiterates such as the BNP to enter from.

Be that as it may, because it does not allow non-white people as members, it creates some major political issues. How can a member of a political party elected to government and then required to support everybody be exclusive? So the first problem I have is that the British State is being stupid in allowing this party to go ahead and allowing its people to stand for public office. If you are secular and non discriminatory, you have to stand by that principle - very hard!

Which brought it home to me because of a certain candidate for public office that I have crossed words with on a public mailing list. For some extremely bizarre reason, this lady seems to think that Islam (to be precise, the Qur'an) provides all that you need to create and run a modern state. The state of the actual intellectual discussion and knowledge is abysmal. Anyway, that’s not the problem (well, it is in a small way, but read on).

This lady seems to have ended up on a Jury Team initial MEP candidate list. The idea being that people need to vote for her via sms and the person with the greatest votes goes forward to the proper ballot. So far so good. She was asked to sign up to this agreement which clearly states right at the beginning that:

I agree not to support any policies discriminating on the basis of race, colour, gender, sexual orientation, disability or religious or other belief.

And guess what? she says in public that she wants to horse trade with the BNP and vote for it. So she got chucked out of the Jury Team. This is what I found bewildering (especially considering that the lady concerned is a Malaysian Chinese legal immigrant:

Why would you vote for a party that will not allow you to join it?
Why would you vote for a party that would, if it can, send you right back to your original country?
Why would you vote for a party that would, if it could, chuck your UK born children (don't know if she has any but I think she does) back to your original domicile which they have never seen?
Why would you complain that a party that DID let you in now throws you out for violating the basic agreement?
Why would Muslims like her ideas about Islam being the good system (based only on the Quran mind you) specially after knowing that she supported and voted for the BNP which wants to eradicate at worst and expel at best from the country?
And finally, why on earth would a BNP MEP candidate support you when all his support is based upon not supporting people like you?

Inconsistencies galore, but do you see what is happening to the country? This is causing even ordinary politics to get distorted simply because of the presence of this party. But why did I describe this situation? The reason is that the presence of the BNP causes normal politics to have major issues as they tend to redefine what the political centre is.

Because there is a small but significant population (In the 2004 European elections, the BNP polled 4.9 % of the vote, and 4.3 % in the 2005 general election, or roughly 1 in 20 supports / votes for this party) which supports the BNP, politics are getting dirtied. Some time back, a list of BNP members was leaked to the press. Here’s a graphical representation of where all these racists live:

Here’s a zoomed in version of the map in London and the South East.

The BNP obviously went into a huge tizzy and tried to stop the publication of the list, but once its out on the internet, its out there. In case you want to see that, here is the link to it. The sheer banality of the names, occupations and locations is frightening. You could very well imagine living on these pretty streets or bumping into them in the local supermarket.

But what exactly are the BNP doing to make themselves into a force that even so called level headed people want to vote for them? (as explained above?)

An interesting paper came my way. The abstract states the following:

The BNP obviously went into a huge tizzy and tried to stop the publication of the list, but once it is out on the internet, it's out there. In case you want to see that, here is the link to it. The sheer banality of the names, occupations and locations is frightening.
But what exactly are the BNP doing to turn themselves into a force that even so called level-headed people want to vote for them?
An interesting paper came my way. The abstract states the following:
Since the turn of the twenty-first century, the far right in Britain, under the auspices of the British National Party (BNP), has made noteworthy electoral gains. Under the leadership of Nick Griffin, the party has placed great emphasis on modernization. The concentration of BNP electoral gains within specific areas such as Burnley, Barking and Dagenham, Epping Forest, and Stoke-on-Trent has meant that academic enquiries into the party's activities have a more localized emphasis.
As well as examining the ideological shifts within the BNP, an emergent body of literature has sought to focus on the means by which the party has been able to assume greater levels of legitimacy within particular locales. This focus on the party apparatus has yielded some interesting insights into the way in which the BNP has sought to embed itself within particular communities. Great stock has been placed on traditional forms of community-based politics. By tapping into everyday concerns and by selecting local residents as candidates, it appears that the BNP has been able to deflect charges of racism and extremism.
Drawing on qualitative interviews with BNP voters and ex-candidates in Burnley, Rhodes suggests that it is the banality of the party, its discourses and its candidates at a local level that has enabled the BNP to acquire a degree of 'respectability'. The party and its supporters have seemingly been able to exploit traditional conceptions of racism and nationalism as something out of the ordinary or 'other'. There appears to have been a recognition that it is everyday articulations and representations of white racism that seem able to escape the label of extremism, appearing as more 'legitimate' forms of expression. Similarly, the way in which BNP voters, as well as the party itself, have been able to locate powerful tales of identity and entitlement within routine narratives will be explored in relation to the reconfiguration of the 'local' and the 'global' in the contemporary period.

This research paper is quite interesting and illustrates some worrying themes. For example, in Burnley, the BNP voters are

Factory workers, healthcare workers, retired accountants, self-employed tradesman. In fact, research on the profile of BNP supporters suggests that the majority are drawn from the lower middle classes and the upper working classes

That’s the core body of support for the Labour Party actually. So what are they doing voting for a racist party such as the BNP? The reason is that the BNP adopt a policy of actually having people who are banal, normal, common, unremarkable, not the loutish, skin head thugs. People like you and I (well besides the skin colour that is) and concentrate on hyper local issues. So how do they manage to link global and national issues and aims to hyper local issues?

See how they link through? And they are severely Islamophobic in nature and the UK terrorist attacks are not helping either. The BNP are becoming respectable, because their candidates are now respectable, ordinary folks. There is nothing wrong with normal folks, and you give them respect as much as you would give to any other fellow law abiding citizen.

It is this respectability that people have to attack. The very idea that a party which has clear directions to be a white only party and hates minorities cannot simply be allowed to function in a secular non-discriminatory country. So why isn’t the Government acting against it? It is acting in some ways against individual members, such as this case. But why not against the entire party? Because it is now respectable. And also because the Labour government will be acting against its own supporters. This is what happens when governments become too controlling and centrist, they lose sight of the peripheries and all kinds of uglies start emerging. As it so happens, I just got pointed to an interesting story by my friend Larry Schwartz. If you don't clamp down on these neo-Nazi racists, then you have a very strong possibility that another Holocaust might take place. I quote the director of the Holocaust Museum:

“In many cases, locals played a key role in the murders, probably by a ratio of 10 locals to every one German. We are trying to understand the man who played soccer with his Jewish neighbour one day and turned to kill him the next. This provides material for research on genocide elsewhere, like in Africa.”

These locals are the people who enthusiastically assisted the Germans in killing Jews. These locals were what I would call as respectable, normal people. Just like the BNP voters and candidates. And to paraphrase Voltaire who said that the Holy Roman Empire was not Holy, it wasn’t Roman and it certainly wasn’t an Empire, the British National Party is not British (it's English, another example of the geographic illiteracy of the party heads), it's not National (the British aren’t a nation, nor is the BNP anywhere near having any presence in other parts of Britain) and finally I wouldn’t call it a party or anywhere near it. Can you imagine being with illiterate incoherent racists? If you are known by the company you keep, I would strongly advise all to stay away from them.

An interesting discussion with some good comments can be found here.

Technorati Tags: United Kingdom,Racism

The challenge of suicide

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 17:59:00 +0000

Suicide is a strange human phenomenon. After all, given our physiological imperatives to live, the whole push to live longer, the desire to cling to life, our resource allocations to making life safer, more risk free and allocate more funding to medical research, chasing after immortality, one would have expected that people would actually like to live rather than explicitly die. So ignoring the admittedly rare phenomena such as suicide terrorism, what explains the bog standard suicide phenomena? So off I trotted to see what gets caught on a wide net.

As by now usual, several things came together for this essay. The first was watching the movie 300 again. Then I was listening to Dharmendra threatening to commit suicide from top of the water tower in the cult Indian film Sholay, and after that reading about the current trial of the British airline bottled drink suicide bombers and their martyrdom videos. This was followed by watching some clips on YouTube showing old kamikaze attacks on American carriers in WW2 and the USS Cole attack, the recent British case over the MS sufferer and her request for assisted suicide. I also read an interesting study on suicide in Hong Kong and finally found a rather interesting econometric study on OECD suicide rates with a particular inquiry about why Japanese rates are the highest.

But first things first! 300 was an excellent film. It had sufficient blood, gore, splattering guts, muscles and the lot for me, and even if you ignore the rather startling historical inaccuracies, what becomes clear, is that king Leonidas was on a suicide mission. Pure and simple! That's almost equivalent to the chaps who blew up the airliners, they were on a suicide mission as well. Just like the Kamikaze pilots or the guy who drove a zodiac boat filled with explosives into the USS Cole. I am sure there will be outraged protests and I will be asked to understand the difference between the motives, but I am just talking about suicide. That's the bottom line; the perpetrators willingly went into a situation where the loss of their lives was clearly forfeit on a preordained basis.

You might consider that suicide is a human phenomenon, but take the tiny Aphid. As it so happens, a particular Aphid species has soldiers who willingly die in the process of repairing damage to their plant hosts. They create holes and then by forcing themselves into the hole, create a fluid comprised of their own body mass and mix it into a scab which covers the hole. Interestingly enough, once the hole in the plant is plugged, the plant survived, but plants which did not have the aphid treatment died. How about the spider family? The death of the black widow male spider after mating or the fact that female spiders of certain species willingly allow their bodies to be eaten by their young to give them a headstart? But I digress.

Now for the motives and believe you me, there is a huge variety of them. One can kill one’s self over a loved one, this can be over the presence or the absence of one. One can do one’s self in for the motherland or fatherland. one can blow one’s self up or proselytise to become a martyr to please one’s God. One is very ill and cannot take the pain. One is facing financial ruin. One is stuck in a room with the TV permanently tuned to Big Brother. So on and so forth.

But take a look at Japan. In this study titled “How is Suicide different in Japan”, by Joe Chen, Yun Jeong Choi, Yasuyuki Sawada published in the ‘Japan and the World Economy Journal’ in 2009, the authors investigate suicide rates in OECD countries to find out why Japan is indeed so different. The authors come up with some interesting insights on suicide rates across the OECD countries. First, one cannot easily generalise across various socio-economic variables as applied to ages and genders, as each have different impacts and statistical significance. In other words, if you are a female in your 20s, then the potential reasons for your death will be significantly different from that of a male in his 50s. That’s understandable as different age/gender groupings have different pressures which could lead to suicide.

The second finding was that better economic conditions, higher incomes and higher economic growth reduce suicide rates, but if income inequality increases, then suicide rates shoot up as well. Again, it’s logical and coherent to understand the former, but not so much the latter. Inequality seems to drive suicide, but is that because we do not like others doing well or better than us? Is jealousy and envy driving us so much, that we commit suicide? This is assuming that the inequality is not as bad as to cause one to have medical problems. After all, the study was done in OECD countries, where there is a welfare state and starvation is not an occurrence. There is much to think about on that, and I must admit it is not in a good way either.

The next finding is an interesting one. It seems like economic factors (GDP per capita, growth rate of GDP per capita and Gini index) are more important than social factors (such as divorce rate, birth rate, female labour force participation rate and alcohol consumption). I am quietly satisfied in a way. Humans are some kind of economic animals, but I am a bit surprised as well. I would have thought that the social factors would drive humans to commit suicide much more than economic factors. The last common OECD factor is that female and elderly suicides are not as easy to statistically analyse or even get information on compared to the young and male suicides. The authors do not give much information unfortunately to back this assertion up, nor do the statistical tables show much guidance on this.

Japan is a puzzling place, an advanced country which has the world’s longest life expectancy, but also one of the highest rates of suicide. What gives? We know of kamikaze pilots who willingly went to their deaths by crashing their flying bombs into USN ships in World War II but civilian deaths now? Japan is significantly different to rest of the OECD countries with rates being consistently at the top, but converging towards the weighted OECD average. The researchers find that the suicide rates in Japan are much more sensitive to economic factors. Also, female labour participation seems to be statistical significant (positively correlated) to suicide rates, the birth date is significantly negative, the divorce rate is positively associated with suicide only for middle aged men, alcohol consumption only for males - mainly elderly males.

The answers tell me that it shows Japan as being in the thrall of wrenching economic and social changes with women participation in the workforce increasing rapidly, birth rates falling and that in some way shows that men are unable to cope, thus leading to higher suicide rates. The lack of a proper bankruptcy law or the relative shabbiness of the welfare state in Japan seems to be further driving more men to suicide. It’s obvious that improving the economic base will assist in reducing suicide values, but not if your society is going through severe socio-economic wrenching change.

Its not just in OECD countries that one observes this behaviour. For example, take India. Hundreds if not thousands of farmers have committed suicide after their crops have failed or they have been unable to get credit or something economic in nature hurt them badly. You think this is only for the barely literate agricultural farmers only? I am afraid not, given the downturn and the consequently hideous drop in demand for diamonds, the highly qualified diamond polishers in Gujarat are committing suicide left right and centre because they are being made redundant from their jobs and they cannot see a future. So many people have committed suicide because their portfolios have tanked.

While I was digging deeper into this, I came across quite a lot of research on suicide notes. Did you know that only 4% of people who commit suicide on (or rather under) London tubes write suicide notes? The percentage is about 30% in Japan and goes up to 43% for elderly people in rural Cheshire, in England? Whether or not you leave a suicide note is not dependent upon the fact that you are going to commit suicide, but rather on your education level and whether or not you are actually able to read/write. Curious, no? Nothing to comment on here, but I found it rather interesting, because I would have thought that writing a note would be done irrespective of education.

I also thought that the way of committing suicide (decapitation, gas, poisoning, shooting, etc.) would have something to do with the suicide notes, but no, it doesn’t. As it so happens, in West Berlin, 45% of those who die by overdosing on medication will leave suicide notes, 40% of people who choose to ingest gas will, but only 13% of those who jump off some high building or bridge etc will do so and only 10% of those who decide on committing suicide under a train will leave a note. So the more immediate the method, the less the chance of writing some kind of final epistle.
Did you know that there is a dedicated academic journal to death? It is called ‘Death Studies’ and in that journal, an interesting paper caught my eye. It’s by Paul W. C. Wong, April W. M. Yeung; Wincy S. C. Chan; Paul S. F. Yip and Arthur K. H. Tang and is titled “Suicide Notes in Hong Kong in 2000” and was published in 2009. This study differs from the other studies, where the method of dying actually has a relationship with writing suicide notes. The method usually chosen is to die by charcoal fire burning in a closed room. As this requires quite a lot of preparation, the poor souls preparing to die get a chance to write notes. And second, it seems like more women than men prefer this gentler way of committing suicide. Comments by the researchers show a fascinating dichotomy. People prefer painless non-violent ways to die over violent ways to carry out the ultimate violence of removing one’s own life.

Once I completed writing this essay, I sat back and felt a bit strange for the first time in all these years of writing these essays. It felt strange in many ways. First it was almost like I was being a dirty old voyeur, delving into extremely private aspects of other people’s lives, rather other people’s deaths. It was almost like I was scolding myself saying: these people are dead, why are you mucking about with them? But I guess the idea was to write about this research so that one can celebrate life. At the end of this essay, I still went and hugged the children and celebrated life by dancing with them to a nice bopping song.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Technorati Tags: Japan,India

The Cryptic Doctor

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 20:32:00 +0000

1812 AD, somewhere near the Battle of New Orleans

I am sitting at this rickety wooden table with a guttering tallow candle for company writing in this diary. All I can hear around me are the moans of the suffering, the bubbling torturous breaths of the lung shot and the screams of the shocked and mentally distressed men. My nose is enduring the all pervasive smell of rotten flesh and carbolic soap. There are hundreds of men lying on the ground and the demons of typhus, dysentery, measles, small pox and yellow fever are gleefully feasting on their flesh and here I am sitting here in this freezing weather trying to fight the demons off.

The carnage has reached a barely imaginable scale. It is difficult to describe without monotony, for it varies so little. The graves on the little plain and on the hillsides are marked with small plank crosses if lucky and if not, with a hastily thrust in rifle. There is no symmetry to the graves, no neat lines of preparation. They are scattered across the landscape as if by a demented evil spirit, one of death. The howling wet wind makes an eerie sound as it whistles across that forest of rifles and crosses. The trees are leafless, shattered by cannon shots and burnt, all standing in a moonscape of filthy water filled shell-holes, dead horse and mule bodies and deep gun carriage tracks.

Now, I am a bitter man, damning myself for being a doctor and looking over the rotting stinky detritus of the battlefield without being able to help. A far cry from the day the militia came to Carthage, Tennessee in those halcyon days of 1814. I was overwhelmed by the patriotic feeling and signed up leaving Nancy, my darling wife, behind. My dearest wife, whom I miss so much, has by now given birth to our twin daughters. I have never seen them, but what is the point of bringing them into this devastated dirty rotten world?

There is nothing much to say about the Battle of New Orleans of January 8, 1815. Surgeons like me, rarely if ever, see the cannon firing. We just hear the battle cries invading our tent, the makeshift hospital. All we see are shattered arms and legs, voiding bowels, faceless creatures bubbling cries of mercy, men bawling in pain and a lucky few who are beyond needing any of our services. The front-line trenches, wherever they lie, are only gashes in the earth, fenced by wire, beside a greenish strip of ground, pitted with shell-holes. At night, from every part around, one saw a lightning winking over the high ground from the ever-ceasing flashes of guns and shells. There was no quiet moment, but roaring, crashing, hissing and screaming from guns, shells bursting or passing in the air. And now the battles have ended, the treaties have been signed and the grand brass clad men are off to their mansions, leaving me, a poor disillusioned doctor, behind to look after these thousands of men abandoned by their leaders. Extraordinary men and incompetent tyrants served on both sides. Their power to fascinate, inspire, or exasperate, remains undimmed.

I remember reading the story of Emperor Ashoka in Ancient India, looking over the detritus of the Battle of Kalinga. He was horrified with the devastation he had wrought and was so overcome with grief and horror that he became one of the foremost disciples of Buddha and took up non-violence as a creed with a vengeance. That took courage and is the reason why he is considered to be one of the greatest men who have ever walked the earth. But the commanders and generals in our armies are far lesser men. And those men led these lions who now lie diseased, ill and injured in the tents. Lions led by donkeys indeed.

How I wish I was back home, eating hot food, clasping Nancy in my arms at night, playing with my two little angles. How I wish I had a warm surgery to look after my patients in, medicines to dull their pain and the time to tend to them properly. How I wish I was back in Carthage - that lovely city, those wonderful autumn woods and those lovely long walks. I am a big man with big appetites and big opinions, but here I have to be careful. Yet I have to speak out my mind; and say what I feel out loud otherwise I will go mad. But perforce some items have to remain hidden.

Today was a bad day. There are no medical supplies whatsoever. I simply have no more medicines, no pain relievers, no syrups - nothing. I have no clean bandages left at all. The water is filthy for miles around, because of the corpses and rotting animals who have fallen into the wells and streams. The ground is foul with excrement, due to the lack of privies. I do not have sufficient nurses to care for the wounded. I watch helplessly as men just die where they lie. And the brave lions that they are, most - who are conscious - do not complain.

There is that great tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte. Remember what he did on the great retreat from Moscow? What was left of his Grand Armée, over 500,000 men strong, withdrew from Russia with its tail between its legs. Napoleon had lost about 80,000 men altogether from diseases alone. While he was nicely ensconced inside his carriage during the retreat and only suffered a mild flu, he kept on leaving thousands of men behind at every stop, men who were injured, diseased, hungry, frostbitten suffering from typhus, diarrhoea and dysentery. The road from Moscow to Paris was signposted by the frozen bodies of hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen. What curses did the widows and children of those dead Frenchmen rain down on Bonaparte?

But what rips my heart out are the cries of the young delirious men. They came to fight with dreams of glory and battle cries of patriotism ringing in their ears. They are left with shattered legs or arms, never ending pain, lying in their own filth, with nobody to listen to them and before slipping into blessed death, they cry out for their mothers. Who is responsible for this? I am tired; I have been operating for three days and have barely managed to grab two hours of sleep. There isn't much I can do anyway, all I can do is to operate the saw to hack off the injured limbs or use the needle and thread to sew the injuries together. My hands are shaking now. My fury is more powerful than my fatigue, but still tempered by the need to be careful. I pick up the quill and pen my first cryptic note.

123dwfkdsfa asd asdlkj asldase09qwelk aq saqlidsjqpowue09q3 qsd asldksaldj asidq qwe109283 qwdea alsdj asd9aqew098qwe aqdsi alskdj alskdj alkdj alskdj q

Yet another day

Why is it that when one is depressed and tired, one's dreams are as bad if not worse? Surely dreamland is where you go to dream wonderful things and see magnificent instances? Somewhere you can escape to from this horrible stinking diseased battlefield? I look at these young men, almost children, who are lying all around me moaning in pain. What kind of a world are we creating? I just had twin daughters. What am I bringing them into? One day they will be mothers, or wives of men like those I see in front of me. They will be crying and screaming, pained at the loss of their men. How I wish I could wrap my little girls in my arms and protect them from every hurt, but I cannot even fulfil my duty as a doctor here. How can I protect them as a father? I am crushed under the sheer hopelessness of it all, the depressing reality of the cold winter and the constant cries of pain and terror which have surrounded me for the past three months.

I fell asleep on my chair last night and woke up with a nightmare going in full flight through my mind. Typically, the day and night before were a blur of ice-covered ground, men dying with their steaming entrails exposed in the icy air, the blood flaking off on my hands, frozen fingers unable to clench around my surgical instruments. No firewood available or corpsmen to go far to get wood to heat water so we are forced to operate and wash men using the filthy rainwater.

When I first arrived at the battlefield, I used to keep myself going with the thoughts of my Nancy and the twins in my mind. That would sustain me for the first few days of the war. And I would think about the day I would return home after weeks and months of being in the middle of the war. The carriage would stop on the road in front of our white wooden house in the evening. I could see the windows softly lit by the warm inviting light of the fires burning in the fireplaces of the two front rooms. And then the door would open with my darling showing her lovely face to me. I would stand there and drink her beautiful face in. I miss her so much. She would be wearing a dark blue wraparound tiny white polka dotted dress with white leather high heeled sandals. Her lovely little toes, coloured red, would be peeking out from the white leather sandals. She must have picked that up from the Indian mehendi night she was invited to once and has grown to like since. Her long tresses would be piled up high on her head and combined with her long neck, it would make her look like one of the lithographs I saw of a statue of Athena, the Greek goddess. I would simply gaze at her and then rush up the drive way to embrace her.

She would shed tears while we kiss deeply. I would just bury my face in her neck and sniff and inhale and breathe in her absolutely bewitching perfume. She has an absolutely unique fragrance around her, a deep mystical and dreamlike combination of coconut, ivory, silk, mother of pearl, chocolate covered dates, Hibiscus flowers and Amarula. So many times I had wished for a tiny Nancy whom I could keep around my neck and go around my day surrounded by her fragrance. She would laugh and complain about my bushy beard reddening her skin and that all the neighbours would know that her husband has now come home. For the past many months, her silky skin was unblemished but now she will have these red splotches. How on earth will she ever explain it, she would laugh while nuzzling into my beard.

And then she would draw me into the drawing room where I would finally look at my two tiny little angels in their bassinets, their shining wispy curls cradling two angelic sleepy faces. I look at my hands, which confidently destroy and exorcise demons of disease deep inside delicate bodies and organs, my hands which can wield a scalpel with consummate ease and delicacy, and they look like giant shovels compared to these two tiny perfect angels in their bassinets. I would reach down and Nancy would gasp in horror, exclaiming that she has just about managed to get the twins to sleep and for me not to disturb them. She then would wrinkle her fine patrician nose at my odorous smell (not surprising, I have been unable to take a hot bath for the past two months) and then would threaten me with dire curses if I touch the twins with my dirty hands.

She would take me to the warm kitchen where I would get a hair cut, a beard trim, my nails cut, all while I would be gorging on this thick stew and warm bread. What a difference food makes. I could spend hours in the kitchen just watching Nancy cook her wonderful meals. She has this amazing ability to pinch, sniff, grab, spin and then out pops an amazing meal. It is like she is handling a philharmonic orchestra of gastronomic delights. Absolutely wonderful! And then, barbered, fed, bathed and cleaned, we would repair to somewhere else to finally be close as two people can be and let our passions take us over.

But those are dreams or perhaps memories of the good and early days if one could say that. Those days, I was flush with motivation and patriotism. I was like a tiger after every wounded soldier, not letting them die. I was doing it for my country first and for my commanders second. I trusted them and still believed in the flag. But now? After months of loneliness and surrounded by constant pain, tears, blood, death and cries of dying men, my vision has been taken away and some evil spirit has taken over even my dreams.

“I dreamt consistant that I will record it. . . . I went home and was met by Nancy who appeared very serious and I think cried. I look’d for the little

Twin Girls she told me the oldest was dead and that it died of the same footsore she wrote about. The other babe she showed to me it was very small. Though three months old, I thought – I thought no so very small so small as I expected Its features more expressively course {sic} and I think it was the ugliest face I ever saw – I did not like it and did not take it in my arms, I had Nancy a little while of evening in my arms”

I see what I have written in my diary and give a twisted smile at the page. It obviously came from the time that we lost our other baby. Our first baby was conceived when we were visiting Charleston to see the sights of that lovely city. It was a lovely trip and we left the city with memories enough to last our lifetimes. A city full of lovely buildings, cemeteries, churches, the first museum in America and beautiful promenades. Little did we know that our happiness will be doubled immediately as soon as we got home when Nancy announced that she was with child. We were giddily happy - but then it was not to happen, because God unmercifully tore our baby away from Nancy. She suffered a bad miscarriage and other than tears; I could not do anything to help. It must have been that memory of Nancy losing her baby which lodged inside my mind and caused me to relive those horrible days.

But that was then, now I am in a different mood. I have not been with Nancy for months on end. I look around and see savagery, blood, wounds, rotten flesh and all surrounded with a miasma of corruption bathed in disgusting smells. And this is perfect the breeding ground for demons of bad memories and lust. All elements of tenderness, love, adoration and softness have been driven out by lust and desire. Me, who was well known to be a gentleman have become a barbarian, but I cannot explain what I saw myself doing in my dream. I pick up my pen and code

123dwfkdsfa asd asdlkj asldase09qwelk aq saqlidsjqpowue09q3 qsd asldksaldj asidq qwe109283 qwdea alsdj asd9aqew098qwe aqdsi alskdj alskdj alkdj alskdj q

and then finish by:

Behold it was a dream and well it was as I was, and was as she would not do . . . I do not know what evil Genius should Thus excite my fancy my waking thoughts . . ..

I slam the diary shut and throw the book inside my trunk, reach for the rum bottle and then let the mists of time and sleep take me….

2007 AD, City University of New York

Dr. Kent Boklan peered closely at the photocopies of the four pages of the diary of Dr. William Pitt sent over to him by the Tennessee State Library and tried to make out the writing. He raised his eyes and thought back on his long career in cryptography. He had never seen something so personal yet evocative in his life. He started doodling to try to understand the coding that Dr. Pitt had used.

Many days of complex calculations later.

Dr. Boklan looked with pleasure and also profound sadness at the decoded text. Pleasure because he had managed to decode a very complex cryptographic code and sadness because of what was revealed. He looked at the first block of decoded text which he had written on a clean sheet of paper:

O, I WISH I WAS AT HOME. I AM TIRD OF SEEING WRETCHEDNESS. CAROLL, AS GREAT TYRANT AS {Bonaparte}. {He}’S TO ANSWER {for 500} LIVES. HE MUST BE {great} ONLY {with} BARBARIANS. {No Literature. No erudition. The Lord have mercy on liturg(illegible) subject to nigh a} [CIPHER]. {The} CRIES {of the} WIDOW AND ORPHAN {will} PERSUE {him to his} GRAVE. {History a knowledge of and Literature are indispensably necessary to constitute a commanding Officer.}.

And the second one

IN BED, I EAGERLY URGED [NANCY] [spectacles symbol] [FROM] [SEX]. NANCY WAS ICY COLD, UNWILLING, I [WITH] FORCE HELD HER [spectacles], PRESSD [double box] INTO [NANCY’S] GROTTO, PAST AND EXQUISITE PORTAL, AND ABOUT [WITH] TASTE AND EXTACY AND DIE [WITH] BLISS WHEN SHE TORE HERSELF [FROM] ME, I TURND [FROM] HER WITH DISGUST AND, IN EXECRATING, AWOKE AND.

He slipped the two pages into an envelope along with the four photocopied ones of Dr. Pitt’s diary, sealed it and sat back in his chair staring at the envelope but thinking about a desolate man in a medical tent two centuries ago.

Note: This story has been inspired by the paper in which Dr. Kent Boklan describes how he broke a complex code (“How I Broke an Encrypted Diary from the War of 1812” published in the journal Cryptologia, 32:4,299 — 310)

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Technorati Tags: War,USA

The God who was lost!

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 21:57:00 +0000

Buddhism and I have a strange relationship. I grew up listening to the stories of Emperor Ashok and later on when I could, reading about Gautam Buddha in the old Amar Chitra Katha books. Reading about Ambedkar’s conversion to Buddhism and how Buddha was actually considered to be part of the Hindu Gods' pantheon, because the 'Enlightened One' was considered to be a reincarnation of Vishnu. Growing up in Bhopal, I was also exposed to Buddhist artefacts in various tourist locations, as our local area has an ancient history of Buddhist kingdoms and pilgrimage sites (more on this later). But this was a strange journey for me and this essay is another weird combination of a book review, a photo essay and some thoughts about Buddhist history.

But typically, history in India is not taught from the perspective of the historians, the archaeologists, numismatics, the linguistic experts and so on and so forth. There are many reasons for this. For one, for most of India’s history, history has been a battle ground (if you excuse the pun). What the war of independence is for somebody, is the great mutiny for another (a previous essay on this). Then the fact that for a very long period of time, India was ruled by foreigners and history is usually written by the rulers, for the rulers. So if you wanted to know about Buddhism, it was a bit difficult.

But some aspects have rekindled the interest I have in Buddhism. The Dalai Lama is obviously somebody who is the apostle of non-violence and a hero to me (not least for his enchanting giggle) which obviously has emerged out of Buddhism. Second was another hero, namely Ambedkar.Ffor all his faults, he was a brilliant man who created a constitution which all Indians can be proud of. We do not give sufficient credit to that document. In my opinion, it is much more important than all the religious books. He obviously converted to Buddhism as a reaction against the Hindu Caste System (a previous essay here). But there is now a strand of Dalitism. This is not the place to go into the rights or wrongs of this, but it primarily is against Hinduism and its caste system (dont worry, it is seriously incoherent and I have never read anything that makes any less logical sense). But for example, many Dalit intellectuals have relied on colonial historians such as Arnold Toynbee to make their argument that Hinduism is bad (see here, here and here).

This concept that Hinduism is a civilisation and is doomed to failure is wrong on both counts. The concept of civilisation as a social identity construct is seriously flawed. Man draws his identity based upon several strands (see Amartya Sen's argument here), gender, language, religion, region, country, sports club, and so on and so forth. So for somebody to even think that there is something called as a Hindu civilisation is seriously one dimensional. Second, think about the 5000 odd years of history of this religion, one of the oldest religions. It has evolved so much that one would be hard pressed to identify today’s Hinduism with what was there in say 2000 BC or 1000 BC. And finally, even if you do consider that it is one and the same, the fact that Hinduism has survived for 5000 years tells you that its actually in no danger of collapse, so this basic intellectual framework of Toynbee is not really advisable for the Buddhists to rely on.

But there were a bunch of other British and Colonial historians, linguists, archeologists, military personnel and the like, who from the 1700’s, have been poking around in India to determine where and how Buddhism emerged. For a very long period of time, the west and India as it so happens (with the incorporation of Buddha into the pantheon of Hindu Gods) there was no distinction between Buddhism and Hinduism. On the western front, the great Buddhist Kingdoms of Afghanistan were overpowered by the arrival of Islam and now its rubble (remember the dynamiting of the Bamiyan Buddha’s by the Taliban and the persecution of the Hazaras who were reputed to be Buddhists before converting to Shia Islam?)

Anyway, between the Muslim invasions and the Hindu resurgence, nothing was heard or known about Buddhism in the west. Charles Allen, in his lovely book, The Buddha and the Sahibs, describes how a band of often lonely white men (and a couple of females), over 250 odd years, started to dig, decipher, investigate and uncover the history of Buddism lost in the mists of time. From Afghanistan to Sri Lanka, to Burma to Nepal to Tibet and all inside, Charles Allen writes a fascinating story about these orientalists, their associations (The Asiatic Society and the Theosophical Society) and how their struggles gave the world so much information about Buddha and Buddhism. Taking a well deserved potshot at that incomprehensible tome, Orientalism, it has seriously rejuvenated a body of work which is currently very popular. Mind you, the large sections of corpus of western scholarship in this area is totally aghast. The very idea of somebody actually claiming that it took orientalists to actually study and bring forth knowledge of the orient is shocking to them. Hence this book is not reviewed to that extent nor referred to that much.

Anyway, not that important, because besides arcane corners of the academic world, these worshippers of Edward Said are ignored. For anybody who wants to break out of that stultifying cult, you can't do better than to read this book. For one, it supports my argument that all history, science and knowledge is open to all, without worrying about the age, sex, religion, race of the researcher. Moaning about Orientalism is about as stupid as moaning about Jewish Intelligence or the fact that Hindus had invented Zero or it was a Christian who first noticed gravity.

Now returning to the book/ It is very good. It talks about how these white men struggled to piece together this giant multi-dimensional mystery, taking clues from old sanskrit books, talking to religious leaders in various temples and monasteries, deciphering and then translating old sanskrit and pali books to make them available to the wider public. They decoded and cracked the variants of the Brahmi language, one of the oldest languages in India, dating back to the 6th century BC. Don't get me wrong, this is not about Buddhism the religion, but its about the men who investigated the history of its birthplace. While I found his assertion that the Gita was part of the Ramayana rather than the Mahabharat a bit confusing, the book has lots of wonderful photographs and descriptions to make those little issues immaterial.

But reading it finally gave me another view of how widespread Emperor Ashok’s empire was. Absolutely massive and wide ranging. In some ways, it was even bigger than the Mughal Empire.

Can you see the bottom-most text called as Sanchi? That’s just next to my hometown of Bhopal. A couple of years back, we were enjoying a winter vacation there. As you would appreciate, if you are in your hometown, you end up visiting the local attractions hundreds of times and you never end up appreciate them. It's like my mother in law, she grew up in Agra and for her, the Taj Mahal is very commonplace, as she has visited it literally hundreds of times. It was the same for me with Sanchi.

It's perhaps when you get older, that you get a chance to appreciate those local attractions more. I whined and moaned till the family decided to humour me and we all piled into two cars and off we went. It's about a 50 km drive on a pretty good road actually. Quite surprising as it happens. On the way, we crossed the Tropic of Cancer which is signposted.

On the way, one of the main north-south railway lines are crossed and the railway crossing was closed. So we were forced to wait. And one of the most typical Indian sights was on the left. Here’s a gentleman, having a nice nap on one of the Milestones on the State Highway. I just find this image so evocative. Welcome to India!

The actual stupas are up on a hillock. At the bottom between the town and the hillock, there is a neat little museum with a nice small park. Here’s a pipal tree with a sign in front, called as Creation in time wheel. Obviously, the connection is that Gautam Buddha attained enlightenment while meditating under a pipal tree. We were not allowed to take photographs of the museum artefacts so that was a bit of a shame. Also, it was disappointing, why on earth can't the Museum authorities put in more explanation of the various sculptures, ornaments and other nice pieces?

But as you come out of the museum, you can see the tip of the stupa in the background in the middle.

Also, on the side of the road, guess what I found? spicy chanas. Before anybody could tell me off, my hand was inside my pocket, money exchanged hands and I quaffed a rather large quantity of chana. Ah! Heaven! Beyond this is a papad seller and across the road was a guava seller. Needless to say, I checked out ALL of them. (oink oink). There is something just brilliant about eating road side food, it's the awesome combination of dust, dirty oil, smoke and spices. Nowhere else, does it taste anything like it, I tell you.

Anyway, we piled back inside the cars and drove up the hillock and parked.

Right outside, you can see a memorial temple made by pilgrims from Colombo and on the right, you can see another pipal tree, surrounded with the typical Buddhist railings and with prayer flags fluttering in the wind. Did you know that the prayer flags are not meant to carry prayers up to the Gods? But they are meant to use the wind horses to scatter the printed mantras and prayers for goodwill and compassion across the surrounding place. Interesting, no? And as it so happens, this concept of prayer flags is very Tibetan, not Indian nor Sri Lankan at all.

Below are some photographs of the very intricately carved gates. The Great Stupa, the big one, was made by the great Emperor Ashoka way back in 250 BCE (approximately). This amazing emperor is supposed to have built about 86,000 temples and stupas across the country. One of the greatest men of India indeed. Somebody was joking when I said that India owns Afghanistan. As it so happens, Ashoka ruled over a kingdom which extended up from Afghanistan down to deep Deccan and as far east as Bangladesh. But anyway, the carvings show the history of Buddha and lots of carved jataka tales

If you observe the central pillar closely, you will see an inscription on it in a strange language, Ashoka Brahmi. Most of the horizontal or vertical pillars have these inscriptions. They are nothing profound, but are in fact donor cards. Just state who gifted that bit. And check out the sculptures on the right, they resemble me - rather my potbelly.

The above and below photographs show the intricate carvings. One has to remember that these are well over 2 millenea old and are still crisp and clear. They have been restored a bit, but still. Amazing work!

Here’s a story of the tree (the tree stands for Buddha) and even monkeys worshipping the sacred tree. Remember the monkey tale from the Jatakas? I was not able to take a photograph, but here’s the story with another photograph of the particular panel.

On the left, one can see the second Stupa with its solitary gate (the Great Stupa has 4) and on the right, a load of smaller stupas.

But this completely bewildered me. It was the first time I ever heard about Buddhists worshipping the Naga Gods. Can you see the statue of the Naga God in the left photograph? The temple itself is of Buddha, as can be seen from the right hand side photograph. So what’s the connection between Nagas and Buddhists? That too in the middle of the country? As it so happens, Nagas were considered to be the guarantors of adequate rainfall and agricultural productivity. Hence, the Buddhists would go about merrily worshipping them. Here’s a good reference site if you wanted to check out dams, irrigation, Nagas and the rest in Sanchi

Two more temple ruins, faintly Grecian in nature, but I did not find sufficient background to really investigate.

As you enter any gate, you are faced with a statue, well a headless one. Somebody got very upset sometime in history and lopped off all the heads. Bloody vandals.

And finally, you have the middle corridor and one of the staircases to climb up to the middle corridor which encircles the stupa.

Then you move up the hillock where there is a monastery which is practically in ruins. They have stacked up the stone work columns in rows. Can you see the checkerboard pattern on the right? Pretty impressive, no?

There is a temple up in the monastery, also pretty much a ruin, but one can still see some exquisite carvings on the doorways and columns.

Can you see the notches on the flagstones? Those were for iron staples which would lock the flagstones together to make it into a pucca floor. On the right, you can see a stone work window and a narrow passageway which would allow one to circum-perambulate the temple. There is also a little imp trying to hide from Baba.

There were two statues of Buddha, an outside statue, which had lost its head and the second one inside the sanctum sanctorum which was better preserved. Unlike the first statue, which was made out of sandstone, the second one was made out of granite.

I am not sure if you can see the carvings on one of the flagstones but it's supposed to be ancient graffiti. Apparently this part of the monastery was for the trainee monks and they, the little rascals, would spend their time carving into the stone floors. Glad to see that things do not change, eh?

Here is an example of a doorway to one of the side shrines. The guide told us that those two figurines at the bottom were of Ganga and Jamuna, the two sacred rivers of Hinduism. When I gave him a sceptical look and asked, why on earth would you have river goddesses from Hinduism being depicted in a Buddhist temple? I did not get a good answer. Also, I have to admit that the smaller carvings were quite risqué. The guide said that they were offering and accepting votive offerings, but hey, I can identify a couple in love and flirting when I see one. Anyway, we headed back down to the mid layer.

Here’s the Great Stupa. The archaeological department has done a good piece of work to maintain the surroundings, I must admit. It is well maintained with a broad pavement around the stupa. Here’s grandpa the engineer who suddenly decided to calculate the amount of materials required to construct the Stupa with his grand-daughter assistant.

Heading down to the Stupa 3, you can see a rock hewn water tank on the left and another monastery in the distance. Also one of the monastery cells on the right hand side.

Heading down, there is a strange boulder on the way. It is cut in half and hollowed out. Apparently, with a very straight face, the guide said that this was Buddha’s cup. Some cup and some lips, eh? Anyway, belting down a rocky path, we soon spotted the third stupa.

And here’s the famous Ashoka insignia. Can you recognise the images shown? The circle on the top with the 24 spokes is the Ashoka Chakra. While the Ashok Pillar below it is topped by the Emblem of India. That is how well India respects one of its most illustrious ancestors. This stupa is not as richly decorated as the previous two, mind you. It also does not have any gates.

There is a modern Buddhist temple just outside the fence which surrounds the Stupas. I found it deeply ironical. The temple architecture, its detailing, the scupltures, the paintings were like comparing chalk and cheese. The modern architecture was simply unsuitable for the surroundings. It felt awkward, as it was shabby, manky, and really very disappointing. To consider that this Chetiyagiri Vihara actually contains the remains of Buddha’s two disciples, Sariputra and Mahamoggallana, is rather shocking. But as a factoid, do you know that certain elements of Buddhism believe that Sariputra was reborn as Laxman to Buddha’s rebirth as Ram? Now that’s an interesting turn for the books. So the next time, a Buddhist complains that the Bhagwat Purana is claiming Buddha as an incarnation of Vishnu, you can comment mildly that it is difficult to keep track of incarnations and you are simply following Buddhist tradition :)

Anyway, looking back across the valley, its a very peaceful place. You can see a train haring down to Bhopal. One can really imagine to be actually back in Ashoka’s time, sitting on the blocks and meditating, while overseeing the peaceful work of God. It is indeed a beautiful place.

But all good things come to an end and just like the birds in the sky, we were following the power lines back home in the evening. And that’s where the rumination started. What a wonderful place this is. I could sit back and think of the white men digging through the dirt to uncover our history. The hundreds of thousands of men who built the tens of thousands of Buddhist monuments across this country. How ideological battles have been fought between Hinduism and Buddhism, between Orientalism and Occidentalism, between Dalitism and (not sure what…). In the end, you end up with such wonders in front of your eyes. If you can, do visit Sanchi and read Charles Allen’s book. Gives you such peace of mind.

Full slide show here.

Technorati Tags: India,History,Buddhism

How to make a small fortune?

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:37:00 +0000

There is a joke which you will appreciate, especially in these days of plunging asset prices. The joke goes something like this: how do you make a small fortune? You start with a large one. As the newspapers mentioned in a recent item, Russian multi-billionaires are actually just ordinary billionaires because of the sheer drop in stock and other financial markets around the world. But then there was the original billionaire, when there were no other billionaires. I am referring to the Nizam of Hyderabad, the erstwhile richest man in the world, the last living Caliph of Islam, a man, who is currently living in a seedy anonymous seedy two bedroom apartment somewhere in Istanbul, Turkey. This essay is not about him, but is about my frustration and regret and bout the sheer waste of it all.

First, here are the bald facts. Of course, there are no official kings and queens in India any more. The last living Nizam was His Exalted Highness Rustam-i-Dauran, Arustu-i-Zaman, Wal Mamaluk, Asaf Jah VII, Muzaffarul- Mulk-Wal-Mumilak, Nizam-ul- Mulk, Nizam ud Daula Nawab Mir Sir Osman Ali Khan Bahadur, Sipah Saula, Fateh Jung, Nizam of Hyderabad and of Berar, Knight Grand Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Honourable General in the Army, Faithful Ally of the British Government who died in 1967. He was reputed to be worth roughly $2 billion in the 1940s. Despite him being divested of much of his kingdom and properties by circumstances and the Government of India, he still died a billionaire. I quote from Wikipedia:

Adjusting for inflation, however, he today ranks as the 5th richest person in the history of the world, the wealthiest-ever Asian, the wealthiest-ever Indian and the second-wealthiest monarch in world history, with a fortune that at its high point was $225 billion (in 2008 US dollars).

Asaf Jah’s eldest son got married to Durrushehvar, daughter of Abdul Mejid II, the last Ottoman Caliph. Abdul Mejid left a will stating that his grandson, Mukarram Jah, should be the next Caliph. Can you imagine the ancestry? Three of the most powerful empires all rested and ended on Mukarram’s shoulders. One of the most powerful and richest empires in the world, the Mughal Empire, which gave rise to the Nizam’s empire of Hyderabad, perhaps the richest empire in the world (arguably exceeding the Inca or any other empires in history) and finally the third empire, namely the Ottoman Empire.

And what did Mukarram Jah do? He literally pissed away his inheritance by way of an unholy mixture of incompetence, corruption, five marriages, legal battles and basically being a silly sod. He is still alive today, the man who would never think twice about ordering a charter flight or thousands of Tattinger champagne bottles is now restricted in a tiny seedy apartment in Turkey. Abandoned by all - family, courtiers, jewellery, friends, lawyers, everyone, with nothing is left other than some mouldering palaces and buildings; a pile of rotting and decaying furniture; hundreds of civil and criminal court cases in various courts across the world ranging from London to Delhi to Hyderabad; hundreds of blood sucking relatives and hangers on and so on and so forth.

I have lots of connections to Hyderabad and have been there many times in my childhood. It was fascinating to go around the Salar Jung Museum. I have gone there on Ma’s shopping trips to purchase pearls and now I have recently been there several times, as one of my offices is based in Hyderabad. While I am quite impressed and proud of seeing those lovely collections of jewels, artefacts, buildings and works of art, something burns inside me whenever I see these.

Recently reading a recent book, ‘The Last Nizam’, by John Zubrzycki, bought it to the fore. The author has written a biography of Mukarram Jah. And I think Mr. Zubrzycki lets off Jah far too easily. He skates over his faults and does not talk much about the basic tragedy of India, namely to have rulers such as Jah and his ancestors.

India was called as the golden bird of antiquity. Its fields were so verdant and fertile, its people so industrious, the metals/gems/mining so bountiful, that it kept a huge motley crew of royals well fed and watered over hundreds and thousands of years. Not only that, all this wealth called those thieves and buzzards over from all over the world ranging from Central Asia and Persia to the United Kingdom, Netherlands, France etc. to come rob India. And how they robbed India! You go to Lucknow and find that it was considered to be one of the richest nation states in the world. Where and how did these Nawabs spend their money? They send the money to Karbala in Iraq to build canals and hostels ignoring the crying need to build even a single canal in Lucknow. What about tiny Bhopal? The Begums of Bhopal sent millions of rupees to Mecca to make pilgrimage hostels and ignored building up Bhopal. What about the Nizams? They owned hundreds and thousands of jewellery pieces, massive buildings and automobiles but gave nothing to their peasants and citizens.

Nothing for the peasants! They spent their countless generations toiling away for their kings, queens, Nawabs, Maharaja’s, Nizams who were bloodsuckers. They sucked out the life of so many Indian citizens. I know you can accuse me of judging them by today’s standards, but that is not really true. Every religion that they followed, whether Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Islam, Hinduism, nothing influenced them to rule justly. Maybe one ruler in a thousand would be just and do something for his or her people. And not that these rulers were driven by love for their country either! And this is not a communist/socialist polemic against the rich, if you have earned your dough by virtue of business or inventions, have fun with it. But this wealth was based on coercion and to make things worse, it was used purely for their own individual pleasure, almost nothing went back to the poor peasants.

Think back to the first war of independence. Some war - where most of the rulers rushed to the assistance of the British. See the titles given to the Nizam: Knight Grand Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, Honourable General in the Army, Faithful Ally of the British Government. You don’t get these titles for revolting against the British. Heck, most of the rulers who actually fought against the British were fighting for their own gaddis and rights, the idea of fighting for their people/country was totally foreign to them.

All these countless diamonds, all those huge opulent palaces, those shimmering silks and expensive clothes, those hunting trips, the vast fleets of automobiles Were for what? Can you see the tragedy of lost opportunities? All that wealth, amassed out of the blood and sweat of the common Indian peasants, went to the maintenance of an inefficient and ruinously expensive Australian sheep farm, a huge boat, jewellery, travel, banquets and massively expensive parties.

Can you imagine what Hyderabad could have been like if a fraction of all this wealth had been invested in developing the agriculture, mining, factories in the state? But no, the Nizam stood on the top of a pyramid of blood sucking royals, courtiers and hangers on, who were simply rent seeking. No development, just keep on giving me tax/rent and I will simply spend my time in enjoyment. In a way, the fact that the last Caliph and Nizam ended up in genteel penury, coughing his lungs away, unloved and hated by his friends, relatives and other assorted cockroaches, might seem to be poetic justice.

But what I really regret are the missed opportunities. Just imagine what could have been done by an enlightened ruler with all that wealth and opportunities? And reading the book constantly reiterated that Jah, the last Nizam did not find anything surprising in his behaviour or the fact that nothing was done. It was simply his right and his money to do what he wished. It was not like he was uneducated or did not know what was happening. He has been very well educated in the best Indian and British educational institutions. Presumably he has seen and read about his people. But no, nothing. This is what I find frustrating. So he not only ended up with a tiny fortune, he has also made sure that couple of generations of Hyderabadi’s missed out on a chance to improve themselves. And finally, if he still thinks that it’s a god given right, then I can only quote two quotes, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away” Bible, Job 1:20-21 and “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to” – Dorothy Parker.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Technorati Tags: History,India

The two sides of innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:25:00 +0000

It was an interesting email that I got from Google Alerts. I have an alert setup for “innovation” as a keyword. The interesting thing is that I get the most interesting and curious hits on that keyword. As it so happens, on the same email, I got referred to a business week article on innovation and another business week article on how Nortel could not save itself from bankruptcy despite investing heavily in innovation.

Innovation is a tough thing. What exactly is it? Something to do with new things? Ok, lets run with it for now. But everybody and his dog wants to be known as innovative. Nothing wrong with it at all. But just like every buzz word, it needs to be treated carefully. People can get into all this innovation business too much and then forget about the basics of business. The two articles given above are interesting examples of this phenomena.

My son plays on World of Warcraft for the past 4 years now and has a good little business running there. So I have a fair idea of what is happening there. He has also managed to rope in my little princess as a magic maid, so that promises to be a good story one day. Anyway, I do appreciate the points made in the article about how WoW has managed to incorporate basic principles of innovation into its game so that it is doing brilliantly. I quote some of the main principles that the authors quote as lessons from the game:

Reduce barriers to entry and to early advancement
Provide clear and rich metrics to assess performance
Keep raising the bar
Don't neglect intrinsic motivations
Provide opportunities to develop tacit knowledge, but do not neglect broader knowledge exchange
Create opportunities for teams to self-organize around challenging performance targets
Encourage frequent and rigorous performance feedback
Create an environment that rewards new dispositions

But I have a bit of an issue here, and that is that the principles seems to be driven from the story and then generalised. To put it in another way, if I had to pick up these principles and plonk it into any other business, i can, very easily, but does that mean that my old business has suddenly become innovative? Or that innovation starts gushing from each pore? No, obviously not. None of these principles are wrong at all. But at end of the day, people have to keep a a laser eye out on the main business of selling profitably.

Which brings us to the second example, that of Nortel. Nortel did everything that these principles said should be done. It turned its attention to new products, it brought in imaginative thinkers, changed its investment policy, new products were gushing out, strategy was changed, people were let go and new people hired, and so on and so forth. But does this mean that they did wrong? No, just that their basic idea of migrating the firm into a new world of web 2.0 was simply not good enough. It just bombed. As a matter of fact, you could point towards its debt load but then again, they already had $2.6 billion in cash. That again was not enough to save it from going under provided its products were good enough to provide a good cashflow. Which it didn't.

Depending upon which product category you refer to, innovative products have a very high failure rate, ranging from 40% to 90% (as reported in the HBR – June 2006 edition). When you are talking about such a high failure rate, to maintain innovative capability is paramount. You have to dust yourself off and keep on working. In a recent research paper where innovation was studied with respect to Sun, what is normally held to be an innovative company. After one of their products bombed, the researchers coin what is called as Innovation Trauma. This manifests itself by disillusionment, cynicism and contagious demotivation.

So what do you do to improve matters? The researchers suggest that individuals who were championing and pushing innovative products should be given time to disengage from their previous work. Second, they need to conduct post-mortems on the failure to find out why that happened and if they can learn from the results. Third, this postmortem is best if its done collaboratively by the original team or a team of some sort, an innovation anonymous, if you will. Fourth, seed the failure aspects into a new project so that the old failure is uplifted by the excitement of the new project while the new project is calibrated downwards by the caution of the old failed project. Expectations management.

So what do you do? Here’s something that we are trying to do. The British Political system is pushing heavily on the idea that Britain has to become an innovative idea. Pretty good stuff, but how do you deal with innovation? I have recently been invited to join a group on Innovation which will assist in coming up with strategies to improve the UK innovation footprint. It is not easy. Actually, anybody can come up with a good idea. Ideas are dime a dozen, but to get from the idea stage to a company which is stand alone, has some cash in the bank, has a good order book with some good client companies, ah!, now that’s the holy grail.

So what we are hoping to do is to provide that bit of a helping hand from the corporate and government sides. If a small firm does have a good idea, we will get together and try to do two things, (1) try to assist in framing the new idea as something that is innovative in terms of resolving a business problem and (2) try to assist by championing it inside our firms. Obviously no money and all that stuff, but in my experience, innovators fall in love with the idea rather than how it will resolve the problem.

They forget that we are in business to sell (anything, potatoes, widgets, credit cards, etc.) to somebody who can pay for it. Do not want to go into detail, but the idea has to be something that somebody is willing to push his hands into his back pocket and put out money. So despite having great ideas, if you forget the basic elements of selling and making products that will sell, all those innovative ideas will be useless.

Technorati Tags: innovation

How firms react to major crisis events

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:31:00 +0000

The infamous Mohammad cartoons crisis had reached global proportions. One of the most common reactions by Muslims was to embark on a consumer goods boycott against firms which were primarily Danish, but other firms were involved as well, all the way from New Zealand. Similar situations like these keep coming up, whether it relates to boycotts of Israeli made/associated firms/products, or environmental disasters, or religiously oriented issues, corporate firms keep on getting in the crossfire. Unfortunately and unlike nation-states, they are not organised to handle political, religious and other crisis like this. So it was instructive to read how various firms reacted in different ways to the Cartoon crisis.

The paper was quite interesting indeed. Crisis management of this scale is not something that firms do very well. Take for example the recent news story that Lehman Brothers so totally mismanaged their bankruptcy and demise that it cost creditors up to $75 billion US Dollars. The authors quote some interesting events such as:

Environmental catastrophes such as the Union Carbide/Bhopal industrial accident and the Exxon Valdez oil spill had long-term ramifications for the companies involved. Criminal and terrorist acts such as the Tylenol poisonings, the Lockerbie/Pan American disaster and the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks have sensitised the public to a world of intense danger. Some crises, such as the Perrier water contamination crisis, seem largely of the company's own making through quality control failure.4 Others, such as the Belgian Coca-Cola crisis, seem to have arisen out of nowhere, apparently attributable to mass hysteria triggered by the previous dioxin scare, but intensified by corporate mismanagement. According to Johnson & Peppas: “A senior Coca-Cola Enterprises official, Phillippe Lenfant, did state that the scare had been mishandled, that communication was inadequate, and that the company was unprepared for a crisis of this magnitude

But religion is perhaps the one which is most difficult to deal with. Usually religion is the furthest from the minds of corporate executives (with perhaps the exception of praying for divine intervention when sales tank or losses mount) and the authors point to some events:

In 1994, the McDonald's fast-food restaurant chain, during its promotion of the Soccer World Cup, printed the flags of participating nations on its disposable bags. Included was that of Saudi Arabia, which bears the Shahada (Islamic creed) including the name of Allah. Muslims were outraged that the name of God was printed on material to be crumpled up and thrown away.18 A similar situation arose when Amstel, the Dutch brewer, printed the flags under the caps of beer bottles, in contact with alcoholic beverage. In India, Reebok encountered huge controversy over its brand champion, Indian cricket captain Mohammed Azharuddin, autographing footwear – including on the sole – resulting in the name Mohammed being trampled in the dirt, which was seen by some as particularly offensive.

The authors have given a nice timeline for the Mohammad Cartoons crisis.

30 September 2005: Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten publishes editorial cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad.

12 Oct: Eleven ambassadors from Islamic countries complain to Danish prime minister and request a meeting with him.

17 Oct: Egyptian newspaper El Fagr reprints six of the cartoons together with an article strongly condemning them.

21 Oct: Danish PM replies to the ambassadors, indicating that freedom of expression is the foundation of Danish democracy and the Danish government has no means of influencing the press. (Refusal to meet the ambassadors has been subsequently condemned by 22 Danish former ambassadors).

28 Oct: Coalition of Danish Muslim groups files criminal complaint. A regional prosecutor investigates but decides against prosecution.

10 January 2006: Norwegian Christian newspaper Magazinet reprints the cartoons, greatly inflaming the situation.

26 Jan: Saudi ambassador to Denmark recalled; retaliatory boycotts against Danish products initiated in Saudi Arabia with supermarkets displaying signs indicating that Danish products have been removed. Norwegian foreign minister condemns publication of the cartoons in a Norwegian newspaper, on the grounds that they incite hatred or hateful expressions.

30 Jan: Jyllands-Posten publishes open letters in Danish and Arabic: “In our opinion, the 12 drawings were sober. They were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims for which we apologise.”

31 Jan: Danish Muslim group says the apology is “ambiguous” and demands a clearer one.

1-2 Feb: Media in many European countries (France, Germany, Spain, Iceland, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland etc) and in Jordan reprint the cartoons.

2 Feb: Boycott again mentioned in Friday prayers in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait; in Qatar, the Grand Mufti calls for boycotts of Danish products; in Yemen, posters of Danish PM set alight; in Lebanon, the boycott situation “has worsened significantly”; in Morocco, “the affair continues to run in the media”; in Egypt, “the controversy is the main topic in the media and Danish products have been removed from all Egyptian supermarkets”; in Sudan, “the president has issued a statement forbidding buying or trading in Danish products.”

3 Feb: Wellington NZ newspaper Dominion Post indicates an intention to republish the cartoons in spite of the outrage in the Middle East and the already-significant losses reported by Danish dairy giant Arla.

4 Feb: New Zealand ministers warn that the decision by New Zealand newspapers to publish the cartoons is irresponsible and could threaten NZ trade. Specific mention is made of Fonterra which “sells much of its product in Muslim countries”. NZ meat industry officials lambast the media for placing trade at risk. Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Danish embassy in Beirut torched.

6 Feb: Supermarkets across the Middle East remove Danish products from their shelves. Arla is losing €1.3m a day in sales.

7 Feb: The Iranian government sets up a committee to look at possibly annulling trade deals with countries that have published the cartoons, threatening more than NZ$100m-worth of New Zealand exports.

8 Feb: Politicians in Jordan call for cancellation of trade worth NZ$70m. Prime Minister Helen Clark condemns the publishing of the cartoons and refers to New Zealand's reputation as a “peaceful and understanding nation”. Arla – Fonterra's partner in the UK butter market – closes its factory in Riyadh as the boycott bites. Fonterra publishes advertisements in Middle Eastern newspapers emphasising the NZ origins of its Anchor brand milk powders. NZ diplomatic posts are placed on high alert.

By April 2006: retailers across the Middle East were beginning to restock Arla's products, although uptake was slow, with only 20 per cent of pre-boycott sales being recorded by the end of May. Market recovery proved slow in spite of Arla investing heavily in advertising campaigns in selected markets such as Algeria.

Dec 2006: The cost to Arla Foods of the boycott of Danish products in the Middle East amounts to approx. DKr400m for 2006. This equates to a loss of DKr40,000 for each of Arla's 10,000 Danish and Swedish co-operative members. “It's a relief that the boycott has come to an end … many products have been sold at discounted prices.” According to Finn Hansen (divisional director, Arla), “the boycott will have pushed back Arla's development in the Middle East two years.”

March 2007: Arla chairman Knud Erik Jensen was able to say: “We're back in the Middle East and expect to return to previous levels of sales by the end of 2007.”

What I found amusing was the last line, all that outrage and foaming and what was the result? Not much and not for long. But time heals all wounds, so to say, and all it needed was a bit of courage and lots of communications to heal those wounds. Arla went after the crisis with a perspective of doing something is better than doing nothing. They tried to communicate the fact that freedom of speech was part and parcel of western life and supporting the Danish stance. This did not work, and then Arla tried to distance itself. On the other hand, the New Zealand firms simply refused comment or tried to comment as little as possible, keeping heads down hoping that it blows over.

I have certain issues with this. Letting things blow over, especially when you are talking about quarterly financial reporting cycles, free flow of capital, footloose capital, fast changing credit ratings and the like is just not possible. Firms cannot absorb losses over such a long period of time. So one thing which corporates should remember is whenever governmental or Societal related boycotts hit you, you should immediately ask you’re your government’s support so that the firm can endure the boycott or survive the event. Public memory is short and as they say, a week is a long time in politics. It might take longer when we are talking about religion, specially considering that religion is the opium of the masses, but pass it will. You just need capital to ride over the issue.

Second is that corporates should not tie themselves to government or political stances. That is dangerous. Firms are not organised to handle political issues nor can they spin news as is required in today’s 24 hour news and media management. So they will simply stumble and cause issues for themselves. Keeping the head down is a good idea indeed.

Third is the use of gatekeepers. The authors recommend using gatekeepers to link into the populace. Looking at this cartoon issue itself, who would be the gatekeepers? I wrote some essays on this issue.

So go to Al Azhar or to Qum? Or start debates on Al Jazeera or MBC? Or get some fatwas in your favour? Or start dealing with the famed Muslim / Arab Street? And how do you keep them listening to the message? This area is highly emotional, charged with religious symbolism, prone to minefields, subject to linguistic interpretations, full of politics, in short, everything that a corporate executive will never have had handled before in his life. So how on earth would the executive or the corporate communications team know how to handle such aspects? I mean, they themselves make heavy weather of investor relations with bog standard corporate disasters such as losses. Can you imagine them working with a religiously sensitive topic such as this? That said, there is nothing like getting some discreet conversations underway with the gatekeepers and opinion formers directly (and be prepared to pay out of your nose, as these opinion formers are not going to be cheap), but put them on retainer and see what comes up.

Oh! Also pray.

John G. Knight, Bradley S. Mitchell, Hongzhi Gao, Riding out the Muhammad Cartoons Crisis: Contrasting Strategies and Outcomes, Long Range Planning, In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 27 December 2008, ISSN 0024-6301, DOI: 10.1016/j.lrp.2008.11.002.

(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V6K-4V7S8T6-1/2/e5d8eab3b06b88116dd15eab05800385)

Abstract:

This article examines different approaches adopted by firms that were innocent bystanders embroiled in the 2005-06 Muhammad Cartoons controversy in Middle Eastern markets. The publication in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad had international ramifications far beyond anything anticipated. Consumer boycotts in Middle Eastern markets of everything associated with Denmark caused massive losses for Arla Foods, the Danish dairy company, which attempted an active public relations campaign aimed at distancing itself from the inciting episode. Boycotts also threatened companies of other countries, including New Zealand. In contrast to Arla, some New Zealand companies adopted a different strategy - hiding from the storm and quietly seeking support from gatekeepers. This article examines options and likely outcomes from attempting to intervene in such a volatile and uncontrollable crisis. Implications for managers and academics are discussed.

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!

Technorati Tags: operational risk management,political risk,Islam,Globalisation

The Economics of Prayer

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 06:50:00 +0000

As it has been a long time since I got my hands dirty with a good solid economic paper, I went rooting about to see what I could find which was interesting and stimulating. It seems that I was divinely guided, there is just no other explanation, because what popped into my search results was a paper entitled “Rational Praying: The Economics of Prayer” by Timothy Tyler Brown, published in the Journal of Socio-Economics (2007). Bluntly and simply put, this brilliant fellow, takes a physical health economics model, mathematically converts it into a model for spiritual health, ties it to the frequency of prayer (assuming that higher frequency means better spiritual health), and then tries to see if that actually makes sense in terms of age, earnings, education, environmental factors, opportunity cost, gender, etc. The model he comes up with is supported for females but only partially for males.

For those who are interested, this is the final reduced form solution for the demand for prayer:

lnCi(t) = β12 + β11 + γlnλi(0) – 2(1 – β5)γlnwi(t) + β3(1- γ)t + β9γt - (ρ – r)γt – (1 - β5(1+γ))lnP i ^R (t, A)+ β3t + β6(1- γ)Ei + β4(1- γ)Xi + u4i

The variables relate to earnings per hour, non-wage income, religious community-level social capital, age, raised as a Catholic, raised as a Protestant, raised Jewish, raised other religion, raised fundamentalist, raised moderate, raised liberal, lives in same state as when aged 16, employed, female, married, widowed, divorced/separated, black, other race/ethnicity, High School graduate, Associate’s degree, Bachelor’s degree, and Graduate degree.

This is a pretty smorgasbord of variables and I started to chuckle as I read through the paper at the sheer brilliance of the thought process of the author. Each progressive formulation of the equation, each assumption, each derivation was making me go “hmmm”, absolutely fascinating. But I have to address something first which I am sure somebody will moan about. I bet somebody will turn around and say, how dare you apply mathematical techniques to something as pure as prayer? Well, why not? When the prophets themselves can say that you don’t have to pray as much when you are travelling or when you are sick or when you are spying, they have obviously analysed the utility of making war or doing business as greater than performing the full complement of prayers. So if they can do quantitative analysis on prayers, we can so as well.

Also, let’s not forget that we are talking about religious human behaviour, not faith. You cannot measure faith, but one can measure religions, more so in form of rituals. After all, haven’t we heard about the clash of civilisations, or the fastest growing religion in the world, or nations formed on the basis of religion, or what have you? If humans can measure religion, I can do that as well. And at end of the day, I am doing it because I can. So there!

More importantly, some studies have indicated that in many parts of the world, religiosity at best and outer manifestations of piety at worst are increasing. This can be measured in terms of the increased number of women veiling, increase in religious charitable contributions, increase in number of religious buildings, increase in people self identifying as religious, and so on and so forth. So, from a macro-economic perspective, if my population is spending more time kissing the hem of the statue of Epona or singing hymns to the great spaghetti monster in the sky and less on creating tables or growing crops, then the economic growth of the country will be impacted. And anything that impacts the economic growth, I need to know about. Anyway, back to the paper.

The paper basically posits the following: With regard to the frequency of prayer, wages are predicted to correlate negatively, education is predicted to correlate positively, environmental factors that are supportive of prayer are predicted to correlate positively, and the expected “price” for participation in religious activity (the tithe in Judaism and Christianity and the Zakat in Islam) is predicted to correlate negatively. The author uses American data from 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys and selected individuals who self identified as religious persons. The author compared the sample size to a reference group which was defined as “The reference group includes individuals who are male, white, unemployed, not raised in any particular religious faith or raised in a liberal fashion with regard to religion, do not live in the same state as they did at age 16, are unmarried, have less than a high school education, and are responding in the year 1996.”

Ok, let us first look at the downsides and issues. There was no mention about the total number of respondents, so I am unable to judge if the proportions of the variables make sense. The author also did not report any linearity tests despite the fact that he is finding linear curved graphs (more on this later). I would think (actually am very sure) that behaviour of this kind would be non-linear in nature and exploration of the residuals would have thrown up some interesting answers (again, provided we have a good and reasonably large dataset), many assumptions were interesting if debatable (you are spiritually sick if you do not pray enough), eastern religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism were excluded (as they are not rule hidebound), its correlation and not causation so that has to be remembered, and so on and so forth. But hey, what the heck, this is fun.

I am only going to discuss 3-4 of the most interesting points that were identified. The first was that a statistical test said that the results are going to be different for females versus males. Now that I found to be very interesting indeed. Assuming prayers by themselves are purely fungible irrespective of the gender of the throat/mind/arms/voice of the prayeree (can I make up this word please?), then obviously God treats women and men differently. This is further assuming that God has an influence on things like earnings (I presume he does otherwise how come most prayers relate to a desire for greater wealth?). Now that opens up zillions of questions. Remember what a religious leader had said once? He said: “if the bodies are different, how can rights be the same?” Is this economic corroboration of the reason why females and males are treated differently in the three Western monotheistic religions? Is this why women inherit differently from men? What does that mean for equality of sexes? Will the rise in religiosity thus mean that the battle for equal rights will now be lost? So many questions, too little number of answers!

The next interesting result is that the more you pray, the less you earn. Hmmm, curious result, no? If most prayers are for more wealth, then it seems like more prayers do not translate into more wealth. Does this mean that God gets irritated with people who pray more and punishes them with less wealth? Or is the answer more prosaic? That the more you pray, the less time you end up with to do productive and economic work? But then, surely spiritual health should not automatically mean financial sickness or at least reduced health? Why would that be the case? Does this mean that prayers for wealth should be judicious and not overdone?

Interestingly enough, the author finds that if you earn more than $1.9 million as a female and $1.1 million as a male, more prayers do lead to more wealth. Hmmm, so all that gumpf about rich men, heaven, camels and eye of the needle is not strictly correct? If you are rich (and despite heavy inflation, a dollar millionaire IS rich), the more you pray, the more likely it is that you will become richer? When they say blessed are the poor, the blessings are definitely not of the monetary kind. Not good at all. The author explores the flip side of what will be the earnings level at which the frequency of prayer is reduced by one per week? The result is $87,160 for females and $90,700 for males. This is most unfair. Here you are earning more money and praying less? Do people know this? Or is it that God is a utilitarian and thinks of rewarding people who “do” more than they “pray” compared to who “pray” more than they “do”? Gosh, it seems that God is a Vulcan! And feminist sexist to boot, he has a lower threshold for women, while he wants men to keep on earning more and more before he allows them to reduce the prayer level?

Age was also an important factor, but only for females. the older you are, the more you will pray, roughly a prayer per week increment per five years jump, but not for males. Say what? Why? Females become more religious as they age but men do not? Why not? Is it because men’s relationship with God is simple? Female relationships with the Divine are more complex and thus require more prayers for spiritual health compared to men? I do not understand this result. It is very strange.

How about education? This depends upon where you are coming from. One way of looking at it would be that more education would lead to less religiosity and less prayers. On the other hand, you could well argue that more education can lead to more religiosity and more prayers. In either case, what you would expect is a linear progression. More prayers more education or more prayers less education. Guess what the results showed? An inverted U shaped curve for females compared to females with less than a high school education. For males, it was a U shaped curve. I quote: Relative to those with less than a high school education, females with an associate’s degree pray approximately one more time per week, females with a bachelor’s degree pray approximately two more times per week, and females with a graduate degree pray approximately one more time per week

I am writing this on the way back after delivering a lecture at Leicester University and it is 2300 hours. I am dog tired and the old noggin is not working properly nor is it firing on all cylinders. Now I could not make sense of that curve result. So the more you pray the educational level increases up to a point and despite the educational levels going up, the prayer level drops for females. Graduate females have a prayer tipping point? And the behaviour is dramatically different for men? My respect for God has gone up tremendously. This male-female business versus prayers is obviously much more complex than what I figured. What do you think?

But the next and last interesting selected result made perfect sense to me. Married and widowed females and males prayed more than unmarried males and females. Divorced or separated males and females did not pray more than unmarried folks. This is absolutely in your face. If you marry, you need divine assistance! Anybody who has been married would immediately and instinctively know that the number of times that one can hear “Oh! My God!” Or “Oh! God” in married households is vastly higher than in unmarried households. And the reason is marriage, because as soon as you remove the marriage factor, the prayer levels drops to unmarried levels. How amusing, God obviously knows that that apple eating in the Garden of Eden will lead to greater spiritual effort. No wonder he got pissed off and kicked Adam and Eve out. What a disaster for Him.

But now I am done with this fascinating stuff. I do not think I have ever written an essay with this strange smile on my face, a mixture of fascination, wonder, amusement, bewilderment and frankly a renewed sense of faith in the Divine. I can apply the most complex econometric model and She still manages to surprise me. Hail Epona …

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

Technorati Tags: Religion,Economics

White Gold

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 07:23:00 +0000

Slavery was - and still is - a world wide phenomena, but I best know it to have happened in the USA in the past, not least because it was a country which went to war with itself over many reasons and slavery was one of them. It recognised the gigantic crime it had committed and is still making restitution for it. It produced literary giants such as Samuel Clements and Alex Haley who wrote about slavery. That said, while I knew slavery existed elsewhere, I did not really know much about the incidence of European slaves till I read a very interesting story about Thomas Pellow. I am sure he will be as famous as Kunta Kinte and Spartacus, the other two famous slaves.

Thomas Pellow was a young lad from a coastal village in England, who was seized by Moorish pirates off his ship in 1715 and was enslaved. His story and that of the slave Sultan of Morocco, the forcible conversions, the attempts of the Europeans to buy back the slaves or to wage war to stop slavery are all quite well described in the book called “White Gold” by Giles Milton (ISBN: 0340794704). Do remember that I am not judging them that much. What’s the point of judging long dead people on the basis of today’s morality? Would you want to be judged on the basis of the morals existing in 2500 AD or 2500 BC? While the book itself is very highly recommended, I would like to extract a few aspects from the book which I found thought provoking and run them past you.

The first was the cost of slaves. While it is tough to estimate the price of slaves based upon local costs, I can do the mark to market based upon the price of slaves which the British government paid at that time. In 1646, the cost of a white Christian slave (let’s not mention the black slaves here) was averaging £38 per slave. That’s male slaves, mind you. Female slaves were brood mares, of course, and their redemption costs in 1646 ranged from £800 to £1392. I think there might be an element of ransom involved but well, that’s neither here nor there.

Considering that wealthy London merchants would hardly earn £40 per year, which was a gigantic sum of money for that time. In today’s terms, a very conservative solely inflation adjusted value would be £4,930 for the male slaves and £104,000-£180,600 for the female slaves. The average annual wage today is about £26,000. So you could perhaps get the male slave, but you will think twice about purchasing a female slave. Quite a turnaround, eh? Now, women are paid less than men, but back then, if you were a female slave, you would be worth 38 times that of men.

The second item brings me to the moral hazard question. You see, this is a classic example of moral hazards. The varied assorted Sultans had it great. They would go and grab Europeans from all over the European seaboard. Bring them back and make slaves out of them. Then get the boys working as slaves, turn the girls into brood mares. So you get work out of them and beat and torture them to convert them so that you get theological brownie points. When the Europeans come around bleating about slaves, ask them for very expensive gifts and then sell their own citizens back to them for huge sums of money. Repeat till they get tired and they wage war. Then sign a treaty and as soon as possible, break it and get the pirates pirating and slaving again. Repeat.

It is a brilliant conveyor belt of money, resources, sex and theological brownie points. If it did not rely on slavery and some very weird thinking, I would admire the sheer economic brilliance of it. And think about it, this system lasted for more than 300 years, longer than the United States of America’s history. It took the combined efforts of many navies, many decades and hundreds of thousands of people before slavery in the North African Arab states was stopped. But it could have been brought to an end earlier if they had stopped buying back slaves and used the money to invest in their respective navies to stop the pirates or to thump the assorted Sultans hard. Just one Sultan of Morocco, Moulay Ismail, is estimated to have had up to a million European Slaves during his admittedly long regime (not counting the Black African slaves).

Third, conversions to Islam. This is what was shocking to read. The fact that Christianity did exactly the same did not obviate my surprise to read the lengths to which the Sultan’s guards went to convert these slaves. Not that conversion would change their situation materially. And they were tortured in very gruesome ways (starting from the bastinado to actually sawing the person into pieces) and only stop when the person would agree to turn moor. If you were beaten every day for years on end, most will agree to be converted, if only to avoid the beatings and torture.

Now this was a problem because when the European politicians and ambassadors came around to ransom you, if you had turned moor, then you would not be ransomed. This is the reason why so many white Europeans were left behind and also the reason why so many European slaves did not convert despite torture. A possible reason for their resistance could also be attributed to their faith as evidenced by the example of the Saint Berard of Carbio and his four companions, who were the Franciscan Martyrs of Morocco in 1220. But again tragically ironic, you save yourself by converting, but you cannot be ransomed because you have converted. A medieval catch 22, if you know what I mean!

Fourth, I always thought that Arabs themselves never did the slaving, but only did the trading bit. But no, there were full fledged slaving expeditions. And perhaps “expeditions” is too weak a word for what happened as described. Thomas Pellow was a guard (he moved up the ranks after “gone Moor”, had a public circumcision and all…) in a slaving expedition and the numbers which are mentioned in the book are absolutely amazing. We are talking hundreds of thousands of camels and people who take off from Morocco and travel hundreds of miles across the western edge of the Sahara and then come back with hundreds and thousands of slaves. Now I did read about how the American, British and European slavers would pick up hundreds and thousands of slaves from the African ports and would have slaving expeditions brokered by the Arabs and other African tribes, but I never heard about Arab slaving expeditions. Well, it was quite interesting how they checked teeth, preferred children, and so on and so forth. But now the image of the stinking American slaving ship has been complemented by the image of a miles long Arab slaving camel caravan.

Lastly, and this is the crucial aspect. Back in those medieval times, nobody batted an eyelid at the fact that slaves were captured, mistreated, tortured, forced to convert, bought and sold etc. It was a fact of life and most importantly, it was theologically permitted. So everything was fine. But if you look around the world today, beyond some very limited circumstances (sexual prostitution, domestic servants and the like), slavery has largely vanished. More importantly, while slavery remains in the theology, nobody actually supports slavery any more. That reform has happened and people have accepted it, the Druze abolished slavery way back in the 11^th century itself. So for people despairing of reform, do not give up your faith and hope.

I have spoken before about piracy and how the Americans stomped hard on it. This story of Thomas Pellow is before that time, but is quite interesting indeed to see how the Europeans approached this case of slavery in Morocco. During my research, I came across another slave, Ibrahim Pasha, who was Suleyman the Magnificent's first appointed Grand Vizier in the Ottoman Empire. I will be writing a further essay on him, but in the meantime, have a think about Thomas Pellow and his amazing if heartrending story of slavery. Perhaps this quote by Abraham Lincoln might help: "Slavery is founded on the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it on his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks and throes and convulsions must ceaselessly follow."

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

Technorati Tags: Arabs,Islam,Piracy,Slavery,Shipping,History

The CFO-CIO cross-over III

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:51:00 +0000

We spoke about the interesting roles of CFO and CIO and about the development of both roles in the past and the present. In this essay we will look at the future and make some predictions about the cooperation between them.

1. What developments will occur in IT in the next three to five years? If one looks at a standard finance function, then these are the broadly the main chunks: Product Control, Financial Control, Finance Administration, Operations, Mandatory Reporting, Management Reporting, Taxation, ALM, Risk etc. All these areas are going to get impacted by improvements to workflow systems, communication applications, business intelligence systems, reconciliation systems, fraud detection and exception management systems, product control systems, spreadsheet management applications, better reporting cube / data warehouses / data marts, ERM systems, better cost analysis applications, and so on and so forth. One can write a full book on just this question, but those are the application facing bits. There will be huge numbers of finance related changes coming from the internet, the client aspects, the hardware bits, the database bits, the networking parts, the communication channels, the IT people, the service delivery model, and so on and so forth, which is too much to go into now.

2. What issues will arise for finance and accounting in the next three to five years? The main issues which will arise can be divided into the following categories:

(a) future regulatory driven change such as liquidity risk management proposals, contingency funding modelling etc. – this will cause a significant impact, best case scenario – a new regulatory report, worst case scenario – a full-blown Basel II type implementation;

(b) feeding old regulatory changes into BAU such as Basel II – Basel II has been rolled out but it will need more time to bed down and impact BAU aspects such as risk weighted capital allocation and performance evaluation;

(c) hitting barriers to service delivery such as human capacity or process architecture / issues;

(d) sharply increased demands for aggressive capital control and management;

(e) increasing demand for better quality financial intelligence and MIS by the business;

(f) little appetite for errors or operational risk or high emphasis on reputational risk management emanating from financial misstatements or mispricing,

(g) continuing and increasing M&A activity etc.

3. How will these issues and developments impact the CFO/CIO relationship? From a generic basis, as can be seen from the above, the level of technical and technology impact on the CFO is just going to grow and grow and grow. So CFO’s will become much more demanding. Not only that, they will expect CIO’s to take responsibility of BAU activities, something that is not commonly understood and accepted. SOXA approvals by CIO’s have caused a severe issue in terms of how CIO’s see their roles, but if this is going to be extended to other parts of the Finance business, then the CIO will become much more embedded in the BAU Finance Change function. So the impact will be from both sides, pushing each other into each other’s arms. Whether it is a hug or a squish depends upon how open-minded the two executives are.

4. How will the issues change the way IT aligns with business strategy? IT will move up the decision making value chain. Before any changes come down the pipeline, IT will start getting involved, because financial institutions have started to understand the benefit of including IT earlier in the decision making process. The business has started to realise that while they define the strategy, delivery is most often dependent upon IT. So the more they involve IT, the more delivery is improved in lock step. IT has to become proactive as well, in terms of analysing its service delivery model to become far more agile and mobile; in terms of analysing its technology M&A methodology; in terms of its reporting data warehouses; etc.

5. Will IT drive changes in business strategy? Will business strategy changes and external factors (e.g. globalisation) drive changes within IT? Will both occur simultaneously? Will IT drive changes in business strategy? On a corporate level we will see very little of that, but on a line of business level yes we will. I can see and have seen business strategy change because new technology has come forth, such as in trading. For example, expansion of product coverage within the FIX protocol can trigger changes in business strategy by suddenly opening new markets or changing existing markets. Changes in technical market infrastructure, such as addition of a new stock trading platform can trigger and driver changes in strategy. Better risk management and fraud detection technologies can give confidence to managers that they can extend personal loans or credit cards to new customer bases. Will business strategy and external factors drive changes in IT? Of course, completely. And yes, both can and do occur simultaneously.

6. How will these changes play out? Let me bring my tarot card deck, crystal ball and tea leaves cup out. That is to say that anything might be possible.

7. Will these changes have an impact on IT’s influence on the integrity of the financials? Anything that changes IT has a 30-50% chance to impact the integrity of the financials (based very roughly on the proportion of systems impacted by SOXA compared to the non-impacted systems). So that will indicate where we have an issue if any external factor impacts technology.

8. What does the future look like for finance and accounting technology? Very bright. And that is primarily because the finance and accounting arena is and will be hit by a tidal wave of changes from its business clients, regulators, professional bodies (IASB..), and so on and so forth. And massive, rapid and huge change like this is perfect breeding grounds for that perfect storm for technology, it will provide mandatory driven investments, fear, ambition, vagueness, and dreams for results/order where technology loves to breed and innovate

We have spoken about the interesting roles of CFO and about the development of both roles in the past and the present. We have also made some predictions about the developments in the future. One aspect is certain, technology is here to stay. While before a CFO would worry about the professional standards, rules and processes versus the humans who would operationalise them, the CFO has to worry about the technology as well. In many structural ways, technology itself is changing the finance profession and vice versa. The future not only promises to be bright, it promises to be entwined like the proverbial double helix.

Technorati Tags: technology,management,financial institutions

The CFO-CIO cross-over II

noreply@blogger.com (Bhaskar Dasgupta) — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 06:29:00 +0000

We earlier spoke about the interesting roles of CFO and CIO and what it means to “manage the business” and to “work very closely”? Before we can answer these questions though we have to take a look at the development of both roles. These questions were taken from a workshop arrangement from New Zealand, the answers are mine.

Part A: The past and the present

1. What influence has IT had in getting business to where it is now? Hugely important, technology has changed the character of financial services, but then, financial services was always at the forefront of adopting technical innovation, whether it was the idea of using wax and clay tablets in Sumerian times to pigeon post in Europe during the middle ages to telegraph during the Victorian and European wars or fax machines or now in terms of global private banking websites, international stock trading electronic gateways, automated insurance quoting engines, offshore call centres linked by CRM systems, intelligent credit risk scoring engines, and so on and so forth.

Technology has allowed firms to gain scale without needing human investment, it has allowed firms to concentrate on their core competitive advantage factor while disposing of all non-core functions and assets.

2. What is the relationship between CFO/CIO at present?

a. What are the positive and negative consequences of the CFO having responsibility for IT? The main negative consequence is that the CFO, if he is not smart, sees IT as a cost line rather than something that is as important to the bank as the human resources function. Frankly, you wouldn’t put the HR function under the control of the CFO, would you? Then why IT? So the entire IT function starts and stays defensive if treated as a barely tolerated and often thumped cost line. On the positive side, if the CFO is smart and can see technology as a business enabler, then the synergy that the combination of CFO + IT is world beating. IT can benefit from the discipline that a CFO can bring to the table such as demanding business cases for technology investments, driving strategic change, improving technology and delivery sourcing, etc.

b. What are the consequences of having two specific reporting lines into the CEO? Are there any advantages to two distinct reporting lines? At that level at a big bank, it far too heavily depends upon the three individuals concerned and not on the functions themselves. Because, at that level, the nitty-gritty details of actually running the technology or financial function rarely appears on the radar screen. What does matter at that level is the autonomy given to the two functions, the level to which the finance function is challenging and managing the business to the level to which the technology function has provided value addition to the business. So whether it is good or bad depends upon the three people concerned.

c. How can the relationship between the two be bridged? Usually it can be bridged with difficulty, because for a good relationship, it requires the CFO to have a forward-looking, change oriented and risk taking frame of mind, while it requires the CIO to be disciplined, talking business, structured, stabilising and think long-term. But some ways that can be useful is for both to write their own visions of where the business will be in five years, then translate that into what it will require their functions to be (people, technology, process, places, etc.) and then get together to dovetail these two plans. Then operationalise by dumping a dollop of agreed governance and investment. Some questions are below which can help you determine if a bridge is needed or some improvements need to be put in:

i. Do the CFO and CIO meet regularly with a set agenda?

ii. Does the CFO challenge the technology plan? And on what basis? Is that besides a cost basis?

iii. Does portfolio management of IT discretionary spend happen? And is that overseen or controlled by the CFO?

iv. Does the IT function provide rigorous business cases which are tracked and followed up?

v. Are there productivity improvement measures which the CFO and CIO agree on the business as usual side of technology?

vi. How involved is the CFO function in the technology sourcing side?

vii. Do you look at purchasing as a stationary and paper purchasing function or is there a strategic sourcing function which has both technology and finance participation?

3. How successful is IT in aligning with business strategy both on an organisational level and specific to the finance department? Is it always complementary or can it end up being at cross purposes? Generally in financial institutions, IT is well clued-up and successful in aligning with the tactical business strategy, but not the very high-level business strategy levels for obvious reasons. Technology is an enabler of business, not a primary driver of business. You rarely go into a country because your technology allows you to do so, however, you go because of revenue, cost or other strategic drivers and technology makes it happen. On the finance department side, I am afraid IT and Finance are rarely aligned. Reasons are many, because many technology folks are scared spit-less of the finance folks. So the bare minimum is provided and initiative/innovation is frowned upon. Consequently, at best the finance and accounting technology function is outsourced in many industries or ignored at worst. The bright side is there is rarely at cross purposes but that is a poisoned chalice, an ignored function is more dangerous to a firm than a contested function because at least there is more chance of somebody actually noticing that contestation and doing something about it.

4. What influence does IT have on the integrity of financials? A huge, literally earth-shattering influence. It is a direct relationship, because good IT means good financial integrity. This is the reason SOXA has a deep IT element as well. When I had to sign off SOXA compliance previously, it was clear that the impact was huge and any changes made to the relevant technology systems and processes would have a significant impact on the financials of the firm. Let us put it in another way, 90% of all changes that will hit our finance functions will have some kind of an IT component, and a crucial part of the success of the project will be dependent upon the IT performance and delivery.

We spoke about the interesting roles of CFO and CIO and about the development of both roles in the past and the present. In the last essay we will look at the future and make some predictions about the cooperation between the CFO and CIO.

Technorati Tags: technology,finance,financial institutions,management