With A Grain of Salt!

Walk like an Egyptian or an Indian in Cairo

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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 (BD) — 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

The CFO-CIO Cross-over, Part I

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 04:48:00 +0000

The CFO and CIO roles are interesting roles when compared from various dimensions. As it so happens, I just moved from supporting a CIO to supporting a CFO in a bank, so I thought of shedding light on some aspects of these two roles. The two roles are simple, one looks after the financial matters and the other looks after the information technology of a firm. One would expect the twain would not meet other than the CIO is supporting the CFO's technology and the CFO seeing the CIO as a supplier and a cost line, but life is much more complicated. In a small way, a good CFO-CIO relationship especially in financial institutions, can lead to massive competitive advantage.

Where does one start? One way would be to talk about the past and present of the technology/financial relationship and then my thoughts about the future. As there is a lot of information and facts about these two roles, this will be a series rather than an essay. But before delving into the prosaic matters of organizational structures and strategic alignment, there is the small matter of philosophy to be handled. And that is the philosophy of technology to the CFO herself. And this is where I see the crucial issue.

Accounting and finance, by their nature, are backward-looking and are oriented towards making sense of disorder according to strict rules. There is nothing wrong with that, because that is how you come up with a normative view of the world, something that you can compare and contrast with a fair degree of accuracy and consistency across the world. The field and thus the people working in it are also fairly predictive and reactive in nature. Their remuneration patterns are high and consistent in nature, job descriptions are standardised. This world handles change rather slowly, systematically and gradually, with due consideration and with controls - Salt of the (business) earth so to say. But that sits uneasily with the broader technology world.

The technology area, whether on the web 2.0, the applications, the networks, the technology people, their remuneration, the IC chips, the massively online multiplayer worlds, virtual worlds, ERM systems, virtual reality, Offshoring and outsourcing, SOA, you name it, are almost like the anti-thesis of what I described above. Change is something that is constant; it is creative destruction all the time. The basic foundations of what you believe in change so rapidly, skills become obsolete quickly, and so on and so forth.

You might want to ask, how does that matter to me as a CFO? Here is precisely where it hits the CFO, because technology is redefining our customers, our employees, our ways of doing business, our ways of valuing assets, the question of governance, the communication channels, the people interaction, the coverage of events, and so on and so forth. In other words, just when the CFO is desperately trying to make things simple, explain everything and keep things under control, technology is making things agile, mobile and hostile. You do not believe me? Well, here’s something that you can see for yourself. In a finance department, more and more people are non-financial or accounting people. More and more, the regulators are finding it difficult to just rely on accounting data and demand further information to control the business. And internally, the business also demands much more than just accounting data, it demands commentary which allows the business to be agile, mobile and hostile. Customers walk in and demand information which we cannot provide. Can you imagine trying to provide bank account level information as rich as what you can get from a web page counter software application?

How does the idea of a going concern relate to a website originated business which can be fully automated, dealing in virtual assets such as songs or coding applets with payment in Linden dollars and the possibility of doing a gift exchange within the World of Warcraft? How do you handle a customer who has no conception of paying for assets because he has spent his lifetime getting his songs, films, phone calls, entertainment, software, assets etc. for free or through swapping them online?

What is the role of an intermediary - like a financial institution - when the concept of assets themselves is changing and everybody is running like mad after Intellectual Property and Virtual Assets? How do you account for depreciation of assets which have no discernible way of judging decay or usage? I can put aside 33% every year for a machine because I guess it has a three-year life, but how much should I put aside for an online constantly regenerating random number generator which theoretically has an infinite life? Actually, most software online technology assets have infinite lives. And if the value addition is happening by a group of enthusiasts based on a free open source model, then what do you say to the tax man?

Lest you assume I am just talking about software, how about virtualization of servers? If the asset based was dependent upon a number of servers, then it has just been virtualized, and if you want to go for the virtualized servers, then they have just gone into the Google or Amazon cloud. It is not like everything is moving 100% into the technology world, but every bit of interest to the CFO is being impacted by technology and is making structural changes. Take the example of resource planning. Previously, if your business grew, you would simply increase the number of analysts and accountants you had and kept on supporting the business, but now you cannot do that. You have to have technology to preserve history, run the rules, generate the reports, do the regulatory stuff.

Basel II taught a deep lesson to the world of finance, namely that if a CFO ignores what’s happening in the business, then satisfying requirements such as Basel II will not be possible. This is so, because the front office business and their systems are simply unable to provide the information in the right fashion which the CFO wants, and mostly, it is because the CFO did not specify or demand the front office business and systems to be transparent and fungible as far as accounting and financial information are concerned. This very same point also applies to the CRO by the way. While there is a surprisingly large number of CFOs who are forward-looking and technology literate, CFOs should recognise that there is a philosophical tension between their profession and technology.

While you might differ, my gut feel is that a CFO has to have a very firm control over the technology that she/he has, what’s coming down the pipeline and what’s generally happening around the technical world. In other words, she/he has to be clued-up and work closely with the CIO to manage the business going forward. Now what does this “manage the business” mean? And what does “work very closely” mean? All these questions are strictly with reference to banking because the relationship between IT and Finance is industry and to a lesser extent size, specific. This is what we will find out in the next part.

Technorati Tags: technology,finance,financial institutions,management

The value of sustainability to business – some thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 04:35:00 +0000

I firmly believe in the virtues of sustainable development. Forget about the green open-toed sandal brigade, it simply makes economic sense. Resources are limited and if you are not being optimal with your resources now and for the future, what kind of a manager would that make you? Looking around the world, I am seeing some enlightened global businesses heavily involved in sustainable businesses, and it makes perfect business sense too.

Who would like to pay more for electricity usage, or for recruitment costs, or waste an opportunity to be with loved ones rather than struggle through Heathrow, that gateway to hell? Who would actually want to be on the front pages of the tabloids as someone who committed unethical behaviour? There are economic upsides on the revenue side (you can sell more to this emerging sustainable consumer, taxpayer, citizen and shareholder) and on the cost side (your costs are reduced on the manpower, capital, materials, machines etc). But many firms and managers still think of sustainability as "green stuff" which is a shame. One way to remove this doubt is to define sustainability.

At a business dinner with the great and good of the British and the international industry, we were discussing the issue of sustainability. An interesting survey was presented by EIU and BT on this issue. The most prominent sustainability activities carried out in the company are environmental guidelines, PR matters, engagement in community investment projects, corporate charitable donations, employee volunteering, ethical trading and sourcing, supplier code of conduct, etc. Quite interesting, isn’t it? A very wide range of activities and all they think of is that "green stuff", but when asked about what sustainability should contain in the context of their organisation, a totally different picture appears:

It should contain environmental impacts, ethical corporate behaviour and corporate values, carbon footprint, long term financial health / competitiveness of an organisation, product responsibility, regulatory compliance, social impact, good governance, community relations, workforce diversity and inclusion. Can you see any difference from what the C-Suite people said about what sustainability should contain and normal business practice? I don’t. So while you might seriously consider it to be a fad, but work with people's luddite behaviour. Do not say it is to do with sustainability. Say that it is simply normal business practice. For example, I was briefed by our brilliant sustainability chaps on how we can deploy a simple piece of code on the network which will automatically put monitors on standby after 10-20 minutes and switch it off after 30-60 minutes. When you come back, just move the mouse or hit the monitor on/off button. Guess what that will do to the power consumption of that particular monitor? It will reduce the yearly wattage consumption by over three times. Now you tell me, why on earth will you say no to saving two-thirds of your power costs? If you do, then I have a nice bridge to sell to you.
There is much more to this. Think about ethical behaviour. It is vital for people to behave ethically and it is not really that complicated either. You might spend millions on consultants to come up with ethical rules, but actually it is much simpler. Remember what your mother and father taught you? Be good, be nice, don’t do bad things to people, don’t steal, don't lie, don't bribe, don't break laws, and so on and so forth. I do not really care much about exclusions and lawyerly behaviour. And if you are going to argue with me about ethical behaviour, then let me ask you something. Is this what you will do to your child? Will you teach him/her to look at rules of behaviour and think they are to be broken and give them no moral compass? Then why on earth would you do the same in the office? Please don't come into the office drunk. Please do not steal from the company. Please do not be violent towards the staff, do not swear or abuse people. See what I mean? I was told once in a class of reputational risk management, "Don’t do anything that you would not like to read about in the tabloids tomorrow morning". Pretty simple, isn’t it? Because if you do, then your stock price will take a hit (if you aren't fired, that is) and you can’t have a more compelling economic argument than that. Remember, pulling up the stock price is much harder than pulling it down.

Think about diversity. It simply makes sense, more so in this day and age of tight resources (check out some of the industry turnover figures, it can go up as high as 20-25%). Secondly, it takes about six months to a year to really make an employee effective. Now why on earth would you not put in policies to keep your resources happy and with you? If you have to spend 25% of your time annually in dealing with resignations, hiring, negotiations, etc, then you are a masochist. That is such a waste of time! One could be using that time to develop more business and earn more money. So make an extra effort to manage your workforce smartly, get your employees’ daughters and sons into work to see what their parents do. Nothing like increasing loyalty than to have family in the same firm. Pull in more LGBT people. Make sure there are more women engaged in the firm. Make sure that people find working in the firm a good experience. Not only will you not keep your attrition rate low, you will attract better candidates. Who on earth wants to go and work in a firm which is full of Neanderthals? Well, only another Neanderthal, but then, if that is the case, you wouldn't be reading this essay anyway!

If you have a powerful sustainability policy and execution, then you protect your reputational risk. You get to be proud of your firm, when (not if, be prepared for some things happening which are going to impact your reputation), some bad event happens, then you can say: "look, we are good corporate citizens, we are sustainable folks, and mistakes were made, we apologise, we will make sure it does not happen again", and move on. If you do not show evidence that you are consistently sustainable, then nobody will believe you and your share price will tank, but otherwise, you can protect your job, bonus and stock price!

And one final thing, keep a beady eye out on what governments are doing. Normally, I would have said that governments impact about 30-40% of your business via laws, rules and regulations. It is my belief that sustainable regulations will jump massively and we will end up with almost 60-70% of our business being driven or influenced in some way by government regulations. Now government regulations are usually meant for protection or guidance. So just pre-empt the guidance and protection as far as possible, but not too much. No point in putting in scrubbers on your chimneys when the rest of your industry has not, as that will simply drive you out of business. However you can surf this regulatory wave by pushing for industry wide scrubber regulations, trying to get cheap scrubbers, use the fact that you have scrubbers to differentiate your products from your competitors, reduce environmental penalty costs by installing scrubbers, and so on and so forth. It just needs intelligence and smartness to surf and manage the regulatory tsunami which is bearing down on us. And no point in moaning about red-tape, it will remain. Well, do moan, it’s good for the soul!

So overall, while there are many more exclusions and issues, I firmly believe that better management of resources is simply better management. Those who get it will make more money, those who don't, will pay for the first lot. Which lot are you with?

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

Technorati Tags: Management

Who speaks for Muslims?

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 04:36:00 +0000

Book Review: Who Speaks For Islam?

Since 9/11, there’s been a desire from all ends of the world to know what Muslims think and who speaks for Islam. And as it so happened, I came across a book, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think, by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, which claimed to report on a six-year study of what hundreds and thousands of Muslims said. I also found a research paper on what a few Canadian Muslims said and thought. Here are my thoughts about the book and paper and my thoughts about the question itself.

Let me get one thing out straight. This book by Esposito and Mogahed is one of the most useless pieces of analysis that I have ever read. To top it all, a whole host of other luminaries have praised the book and its findings. This worries me for reasons which I will explain. The two authors made such basic analytical mistakes that I am frankly bewildered. The book could very well have been written by some zonked out undergraduates and these two senior academicians must have been busy or something when the book went to print. Also, all these various senior people praising it, like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Deepak Chopra, Karen Armstrong, Vali Nasr, Jessica Stern, Robert Pape, and Ambassador Edward P. Djerejian etc. seem to have had their press people give a statement on their behalf without reading through the book.

This book was so bad that I gave up after page 139 and the ironic part is the book starts with a premise that it is scientific and based on data. But still, there are some good and interesting points which in all fairness I should mention first:

The authors do mention that most Muslims live in Asia and Africa and that Muslims are wonderfully diverse in terms of language, ethnicity, customs, dress, location, nationality, and what have you. So lumping all Muslims into one bloc is as appropriate as to lump all Christians into one or all the “west” into one chunk (mind you, while saying that, they go on to make the very same mistake, for example on page 97)
Page 47 talks about how significant majorities in all Muslim countries have pushed for freedom of speech. This is a good thing indeed, although it sits uneasily with the demonstrations against theDanish cartoon seen across the world.
A 2006 Gallup poll talked about how most Americans want the Bible as a source of legislation. This was not surprising to me, but if they add in the West and all countries which have a liberal democratic framework such as Japan, India and others, the results will be utterly different. The numbers from Iran are similar to that of the USA. Curious, no?
Countries like Iran and Indonesia did not seem to like Sharia in their legal systems before, even if that changed with Khomeini in Iran – who made it part of the constitution and with the recent developments in Indnesia establishing the first Sharia court in Aceh. But countries such as Egypt and Jordan want it, when their legal system only uses parts of it in the family law section. Curious, no? Is this because the latter two countries are Arab?
Page 66 talks about a reasonably good point, namely that the USA does not know what the enemy wanted or thought about. Presumably the reference is to Al Qaeda. Well, from the perspective of intelligence agents, yes, the Americans knew what Al Qaeda wanted. OBL’s sermons and speeches were very well-known to them. And as I have also found out, I am not sure if that knowledge would have helped anyway.
Interference by America and other countries in the business of Muslim (and frankly many other) countries is not something that I condone. They poke their noses into far too many places and this is a classic example of imperial overstretch. So yes, good point that USA is interventionist and it should stop doing that.
Chapter 4 on women, was good and provided a nice coverage of women’s issues, how they work and behave, what they wish for and what their current situation is. While the data and issues mentioned were useful, the chapter was a bit confused as it did not draw out the basic issues facing Muslim women. How do they reconcile their religion with modern life? Unfortunately, when one looks to religious books on women related issue resolution, one should remember that others will do the same. So while one might argue using Sharia that women should be liberated such as on page 118, one can also argue using the same Sharia that female genital mutilation is allowable (it is debatable, but there is a case for it, when quoting certain strict schools of jurisprudence, which is against what they say on page 117).

The serious mistakes that this book makes are legion. It is not scientific and it is not based on what one would understand as standard social science data. The analysis is frankly horrible and the report seems to have been written by a drunk undergraduate. It is clear that this book, the Gallup research and the analysis is not written for the American populace, but for the international non-American public in a polemical, biased and rather ignorant shallow manner. What is curious is why did all the other luminaries get all excited about it and admire something like this?

Now let me mention some issues I had with the book:

How come India as a source of Muslim thought was ignored? That is indeed curious and a big lacunae in the study, as I would posit that those results would have made a substantial contribution to this study.
Why was Francis Fukuyama called a former neoconservative theorist on page 29? There is no reference to political theories before or after that, and no reference to realism, conservatism or liberalism. But mention it they did, and this started to turn me off, because it was obviously meant as a personal slur.
And from page 32 onwards, the book shows one of its biggest flaws. The severe and serious ignorance and confusion between Arabs and Muslims. After spending the first chapter talking about the fact that the overall Muslims includes only about 20% Arabs and the fact that Arabs are Christians, Druze and many other types of people as well and not just Muslims, the authors promptly forget it. Being an Arab is being part of a linguistic group, not a religious group. And because of this basic mistake, every conclusion and recommendation they draw is miserably wrong.
The authors also confuse the terms west, USA, the Iraqi coalition, the neoconservative movement and the like. This confusion means the authors often rely on references to “some”, “they”, as the strawman (for example on page 95 and 99). So the authors pick up one comment by a right-wing commentator, extrapolate it variously to the entire West, USA, United Kingdom, the Western Press, you name it, and then try to answer it based on some vague formula.
On Page 36, the authors talk about there being no difference between Islamic Law and human rights. I found it curious that they did not mention the fact the Islamic world pushed for their own declaration of human rights saying that the universal declaration of human rights was not “appropriate” in all its points.
The authors also seem to be confused about what Democracy means. Democracy not only means that governments are elected by the people and sovereignty rests with the people, but also the people draw up the laws and they can change it. When laws emerge from a religious book formulated by clerics, it is called as a theocracy, not a democracy. So when people say that they love democracy but want Sharia as a source of laws and legislation, there is a certain inconsistency which has not been explored fully.
Their basic problem with Arabs and Muslims shows up again in the next section and then continuously onwards. Why is democracy absent in so much of the Muslim world? And despite pointing to South Asia, the authors forget that India, Pakistan, Bangladesh were all beset by imperialism equally. But India, Nepal and Sri Lanka have managed to hold on to democratic standards, while Pakistan and Bangladesh have not. So just pointing to Imperialism as the main reason for democracy not holding ground in Muslim countries is far too simplistic, which blows their arguments to bits.
Page 41 shows another fascinating confusion in the minds of the authors. This time it’s the conflating of the “west” and “secularism”. Secularism as an idea has a long history and it is not just from the West. I am not sure the authors have understood what secularism means and the philosophy behind it. It is the only way to handle heterogeneous populations.
While talking about imperialism, there are some big problems with their argument. The authors did not mention the Ottoman, Mughal or other Muslim imperialistic empires. They do not mention the fact that imperialism with respect to Muslim countries has been mainly European rather than American, but let us not confuse matters there. How about the fact that Japanese imperialism overran many Muslim countries as well in the east, but let us not go there either.
While saying that Sharia should be a source of law and then saying that they do not want religious figures to influence laws or the constitution. Erm, who will be the people working on Sharia then? Non-religious people? And how will that work? And then on page 93, a theoretical construct is made up about how Sharia protects citizens from the depredations of rulers. Well, it has never worked before in a millennium, has it? So what makes one think that it will ever work? And why would the mullahs be advisors to the rulers? See the confusion?
Around page 56-57, the authors again talk about Islam and democracy in a confused sense. And this is another example of their total ignorance of what Secularism means. They give the example of France and state funding of churches, but do not talk about the concept of “lacite’”. Plus this debate is strange. In Islam, sovereignty is with God, the Quran (plus Sunnah, Hadith, etc.) form the Sharia which is part of the legal system. How on earth are they even trying to draw any equivalence here?
Huge clangers of mistakes are made in the analysis of political radicals starting from page 67. Very confusing. They refer to many experts without actually giving any concrete references. The authors assume things, such as terrorism is due to poverty and unemployment. This is a theory that I have rarely read from any expert. And after talking about a badly and wrongly drafted expert opinion, they slip into another badly drafted argument based on media reports. There is no consistency and very badly framed strawman arguments. And then on page 70, they compound the mistake by devoting a full section to this type of strawman argument which might be fine in polemics and email lists but not in what is purportedly a serious academic book. For example, while they spent much time talking about how the 9/11 attackers were not religious Muslims, they do not talk about the obvious next step. So what DID bring these attackers together? I am not going to talk about the obvious answer, but the fact the authors did not even understand the next step is symptomatic of the poor and rather shallow analysis in this book.
In the next section, they gathered a few comments from some far right commentators and build up a huge counter argument based on those foamy arguments. This sounded childish to me and disjointedly argued.
On page 77, the old chestnut of the Pape’s Suicide Terrorism is dug up. Well, I do not have to say this again, because I already wrote about this study here and here but trying to give me references to that silly study does not fill me with confidence that this particular book and what it purports to study is any good either. But they go on to make more mistakes like trying to say the Tamil Tigers appeal to Hindus and link to the Indian Tamils.
Page 81 throws up more issues. While the authors talk about anti-Americanism and talk about radicals, they stop there. But hey, here’s the issue. You don’t hear about anti-Germanism or Anti-Spanishism, but they both have terrorism issues. So is that anti-westernism? The authors again refer to far right commentators, but do not mention that George Bush has clearly said the war on terror is not a war against Islam. But then, that does not fit in neatly with the author’s biases.
Again on page 85, there is another confusion between Muslim states and Arab states. And yet again they ignore the glaring counter-example of Pakistan and Bangladesh compared to India as Muslim states. Frankly, again a poor argument.
On page 87, “the war against Islam and Muslims” is nothing new. That slogan has been raised since time immemorial I am afraid. For example, one of the big things that Mughal Aurangzeb or any of the Ottoman pashas did when faced with challenges was to raise this same slogan or words to that effect. And guess what? The open-ended question of what do you resent most about the west, the answers were “sexual and cultural promiscuity”, “ethical and moral corruption” and “hatred of Muslims”. Pretty undefined, no? And no further analysis of it either.
Outright inconsistencies emerge, for example on page 92. Yes, I agree with the fact that Western countries should stop interfering in Muslim countries. While saying that, I did not notice any mention of Lebanon, where other Muslim countries (Syria, Iran) interfere with both hands and legs. And this is where the issue comes up, because if you don’t have a clear idea that you will always find countries interfering with others, you are living in cloud cookoo land.
Also, curiously, they continuously confuse Sharia with Fiqh. This is not the place to go deeply into it, and it is a commonly made mistake. But for them not to make that distinction (such as on pages 92-93) is worrying. Because of this, they tend to make some basic mistakes, such as for example, saying that what restricted Muslim rulers from acting like tyrants was Sharia. Erm, that is wrong on both formulation as well as knowledge of history. It’s fiqh rather and secondly, Sharia never stopped Muslim rulers from being tyrants. This also leads to a massive confusion around what the mullahs can do about government and legal society. Are they the rulers? Advisers? Lawyers? Senior House of parliament? What? And the authors do not address this point and just leave it dangling at “advisers”.

I am now tired of listing the flaws of this book even if I am not finished. It is useless and frankly a waste of time. No basic data is presented nor is the analysis rigorous. As I said, what was worrying me most was the legions of congratulatory messages on this book. I do not think any of the so-called great and good have read the book and if they have, they have not understood it. More curiously, why on earth are these two so-called respected academics writing such drivel? Shame on Gallup, a respected organization, for producing pap like this. So in the end, this book does not tell me what Muslims really think, nor does it tell me who speaks for Islam. And the fault lies solely with the authors, not with the people who they interviewed. (Here’s something which I wrote earlier on who actually speaks for Islam and who influences Muslims). The biggest problem with the book is the underlying theme that every American who reads the book is an idiot and has this patronising theme running through it. As a public policy book, this is pathetic and I am deeply disappointed with the authors. These authors have contributed more to the civilisational schism than they tried to help cover it.

This brings me to the other paper, which was published in a peer reviewed journal called as ‘Government Information Quarterly’ in 2008. The paper was written by Nadia Caidi and Susan MacDonald of the University of Toronto. The paper is entitled, ‘Information practises of Canadian Muslims post 9/11’. Now this is what a good research should look like. The paper presented a scientifically rigorous treatment of how Muslims think and what they do. While the area of investigation is different (however equally important and interesting), the methods that these researchers used, the analysis they came up with, all are fascinating and much more believable than the pap that Esposito and Mogahed have come up with.

It was a good sensitive study, asking intelligent literate Canadian Muslims, about their information practices, use of information sources, attitudes and opinions about information rights in a post 9/11 world. What the authors found is that Canadian Muslims hold a deep mistrust of the media, but they think that knowledge of media and information literacy is important. They also feel there is a need for far greater introspection within Muslim societies.

Fascinating public policy recommendations drop out, about how multiculturalism can help or hinder. Some issues with the study related to the fact that they did not consider another society like the United Kingdom for example, which has seen home-grown Muslim terrorism in 7/7. Also, they did not consider Canadian Sikh immigrant terrorism either. Both of which would have provided a much richer analysis of this factor of multiculturalism and nationalism, but that can well be done in another piece of research. What about the information media sources in themselves? Would it help to have public advisory councils which will help improve these fellow citizens’ trust in the media? What can be done?

Both pieces of work are interesting from many perspectives. The first one because it shows how not to do research and put across public policy recommendations on such politically and religiously sensitive issues. The second one shows how to utilise information and information practices for Muslims, who are definitely facing Islamophobia and feeling targeted. Very thought-provoking indeed and much needs to be done to address these issues (but please, not in the way Esposito and Mogahed do it). So while we still do not know what the billion Muslims think, we can do something about making sure that the information channels are better managed and transparently dealt with in order for us to draw the poison of Islamophobia and support for terrorism.

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

What next for the Kashmir Conflict?

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:22:00 +0000

The Kashmir conflict is one of the most stubborn geopolitical challenges in the world, akin to the Israeli–Palestinian crisis. The conflict has antecedents going back sixty years, with roots of the issue planted hundreds of years ago. While it would have been difficult to resolve in 1947, each subsequent political and military step by the various parties has pushed the issue into even more stubborn territory. Though the background to the conflict is public, it is useful to review some key points before we can explore some short and medium term initiatives which can possibly decrease the severity of the conflict if not offer a resolution.

Background to the conflict

It is difficult to generalise the background to the Kashmir conflict because of the bitterness of the fight and the deep divisions among the various parties involved. A cause which may be trivial to a particular party is of importance to another. But most parties agree on the following:

· Kashmir, a Muslim majority state ruled by Hindu kings, contains: Gilgit and Baltistan in the north; a block of land ceded to China in the north-east; Leh and Kargil in the east; Kashmir Valley and Jammu.

· The principle behind the post partition division of geographical units to India or Pakistan was based on the religious majority in geographical areas and will of the state ruler. That said there were princely states where this principle did not hold, such as Junagarh, Hyderabad and of course, Kashmir. A promised plebiscite on the future of the state never took place. India claims the Jammu Kashmir State Parliament voted on this issue, so a plebiscite was needless, while Pakistan does not believe the state parliament vote adheres to the spirit/letter of the original plebiscite. Some Kashmiris say the original plebiscite is wrong, as it only offers accession to India and Pakistan without mention of independence.

· Major ethnic units in Kashmir are Shia and Sunni Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and tiny minorities of other ethnicities (Christians and Sikhs).

· India and Pakistan have fought three wars (1948, 1965, and 1999) over this territory.

· Kashmir was an indirect reason for the 1971 war.

· A militant campaign has been raging in the state since 1989.

· Since 2002, a ceasefire between India and Pakistan has held, although terrorism has not ended. Intermittent talks took place between the three main groups, India, Pakistan and Kashmiri groups with some Confidence Building Measures (CBM) performed.

What do the main stakeholders want?

Given the long history of the conflict, a polarisation and fragmentation of the various groups (with a direct or indirect stake) in the conflict happened. Before we talk about various solutions, it is important to know the direct groups involved:

· Pakistan: Created as a homeland for Muslims, distinct from that of Hindu Majority and Secular India. Kashmir is the last unfinished business of the Partition. Until Kashmir is part of Pakistan, Pakistan’s raison d’être is incomplete. The letter K in Pakistan stands for Kashmir, so attainment of Kashmir is core to the identity and ideology of Pakistan. The Kashmiri cause gives the army reason to grab disproportionate state resources. In addition, because of the religious based foundation of the state, non-state actors, namely the religious parties, are a major and vocal stakeholder in the Kashmir issue.

· India: A strongly democratic secular country, the presence of a Muslim majority state within the ambit of the Indian constitution gives strength to the secular state (both the central government and the local Jammu and Kashmir state government) ideology. The central and state government are not always 100% aligned in their objectives, but both work together. A big security force is present in the state, comprising of regular army troops, paramilitary forces, counter–terrorist forces, state police forces and a myriad of intelligence agencies. The security forces are accused of many human right abuses, but the situation is slowly improving.

· The Kashmiri’s. There are many groups involved and while it is impossible to mention all of them, broadly speaking, we can classify them as follows:

o The militants belong to three groups: the secular independence seeking terrorists (rapidly dwindling in number and influence); the native Kashmiri militants (slowly reducing under diminished Pakistani support and better Indian counter-terror measures) and the foreign militants (usually Pakistani but also from the international jehadi brigades). These militants are not aligned to the Kashmiri political parties and the Pakistani state shows strong yet sporadic control over them.

o The Kashmiri Hindu’s are the largest state minority, despite ethnic cleansing from Kashmir proper since the latest uprising. They are either in refugee camps in India, the Jammu region or have subsumed themselves in India proper. They have little political power and suffer from the flip side of secular India’s objectives (Secular India cannot be seen to provide any major relief to Hindus for fear of being seen as partial to the Hindu majority)

o The Muslims in Kashmir consist of Shia Muslims in Pakistan Kashmir, who resent the pogroms by the hardline Sunni militia and the Sunni Muslims in Indian Kashmir, who criticise Indian rule.

o The Buddhists, a small but significant minority, are mostly present in north-east Kashmir in Laddakh and Leh. Despite their usual non-involvement in the issue, tensions are rising between them and the Muslim population as their sympathies lie with Secular India.

o The Political parties (in Indian Kashmir only, as the political parties in Pakistani Kashmir are not real political parties as we know them, but rather nebulous Pakistani state sponsored groups) include the Indian aligned groups such as the Congress I, National Conference (and variants), People Democratic Party, the secular groupings such as the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front and the Pakistani aligned breakaway grouping of the Hurriyat Conference, such as headed by Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Though they have a following within the Valley itself, it is difficult to know their support base, as only the Indian aligned political parties have contested municipal, state and central elections.

o The general populace is, of course, tired of the decade’s long fight and yearns for normality and economic growth. The local state economy is growing (but not as much as it should) after huge central government funding, the India-Pakistan ceasefire and increasingly efficient counter-terror measures.

The external indirect stakeholders are a motley collection of organisations and countries noted for their ineffectual role in resolving this crisis. For example, while the United Nations was present in Kashmir since the first ceasefire in 1948, it is, for all practical purposes useless and ignored by all. Similarly, Pakistan uses the Organisation of Islamic Countries to raise the Kashmir issue regularly and is repeatedly ignored or diplomatically managed away by India. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation cannot resolve bilateral issues.

The United Kingdom retains a role by dint of its colonial history, the presence of large number of Kashmiri origin immigrants and groups in the UK itself and London being one of the world’s diplomatic capitals. America, on the other hand, has kept a low-profile in Kashmir, although it has much more influence and depth inside Pakistan (witness the role of President Clinton during the aftermath of the Kargil War). China is another strange participant. On one hand, it controls Kashmiri territory as well as supports Pakistan’s Army. It has provided funding and materials to build the Karakorum Highway connecting Pakistan with China. While difficult to draw independent conclusions about the influence coefficient of all these organisations and countries, clearly international organisations will simply never be able to play a big role in resolving the Kashmiri issue. The only two countries which have some influence on Pakistan are the USA and China. India, on the other hand, is prickly about its international standing and has not and never will accept any form of public intervention by any other country.

What is the solution?

The BBC (http://tinyurl.com/pys26) has put together a set of pages with various solutions such as Kashmir accedes to Pakistan; Kashmir accedes to India, Kashmir becomes independent and variants of the status quo by adjusting the Line of Control (the 1948 ceasefire line) up and down, etc. The site briefly explains each proposed solution and mentions the challenges and difficulties of each. An interested and independent observer would note that none of the solutions are palatable to all direct stakeholders and the important point is that none of the stakeholders will agree to compromise on the key issues.

In other words, it has become a question of “izzat” (honour) and of a perception of identity and survival to the various parties involved. If India accepts a plebiscite, then it is certain that it will lose and no Indian central government can accept that, in addition, it will violate the secular ideology of India. If Pakistan accepts the LoC as the international border that means denying the core ideology of Pakistan. For the Kashmiri jehadi’s to accept political control by India over Kashmir (in any form) is to violate their religious precepts. Given the identification of the other competing stakeholders as the enemy, any compromise is simply not possible. Once you factor in the degree of militancy and the possibility of murders of leaders who dare even suggest a compromise, talk of a solution is plainly impossible as compromise is labelled as selling out to the enemy and leading to the extinction of national/group identity.

A political solution involving territory between two parties is usually only reached after a war, where one party is defeated and thus has to accept the solution, or else, a third-party or parties force/mediate between the two to accept some territorial swaps. Kashmir, as we have seen, does not have a defeated party and no external party has enough leverage to force neither Pakistan nor India into a political solution. Once we include existential reasons such as national survival/identity, religious or secular ideologies, the chances of a lasting political solution are near zero if not negative. Negative in the sense there is a strong chance the current peace process (if the desultory talks and halting steps can be considered as such) can get derailed after some dramatic terrorist attack on a high-profile target or a serious and public human rights violation.

Pushing for a solution now will be useless due to deeply entrenched political positions based on maximalist objectives of all the parties involved. A solution has to be a win-win one, but because of this maximalist perspective, no party is willing to give up any positions/points for the greater good. In other words, everybody is out to get all they can get and damn the rest. None of the solutions will be acceptable because of the intransigence of all the parties involved in the current climate.

If no solutions are acceptable, then what?

One looks at the entrenched positions, the history of the conflict and simply fails to think of a good, reasonable solution acceptable to all concerned. For sake of brevity, one can lessen the challenge to trying to reconcile three mutually incompatible objectives, wish for independence by the Kashmiris, wish to keep Kashmir within India for secular reasons and wish to get Kashmir for Pakistan for religious reasons. Given a limited territorial space and incompatibility of the objectives, there can be no solution. But if no solutions are acceptable to all parties right now, that does not mean there can be no mutually acceptable solutions in the future. So the ground rules have to change.

How can we change ground rules?

When a state gets subsumed into a supranational state, then territorial conflicts change character and become more diffuse, examples such as Northern Ireland, Scotland and Cyprus within supranational European State spring to mind. These conflicts have lost much potency once the idea of states fighting over territory got included into the overarching European identity. They have not been resolved, but the maximalist positions became much less. Another example is to convert hard, fenced, land mined borders into soft ones. When men, material, money and machines can move freely over borders, then hard nationalistic or identity politics lose much of their edge. There is, of course, the violent alternative of having an all-out war, where one party defeats the other and essentially removes it from the equation, but no sane person would agree to the last alternative. Irrespective of which option is selected, the objective remains the same, namely to try moving people and parties away from their entrenched positions into fertile soil to allow a solution to emerge in time.

This means that instead of just aiming for a final solution, slow interim steps should be taken to change the ground rules. Of course, for communication and public appetite, a constant reassuring stream of high-quality messages must be transmitted by all senior leaders. Some of the Confidence Building Measures (CBMs) that can be launched:

1. Economic measures: A Free trade agreement between India and Pakistan would be valuable. Special attention can be given to Kashmir, so Kashmiri made products can be given tax exceptions, for purchase and sale in both India and Pakistan as well as for export. Tourism also provides great optimism, as Indians going to Kashmir for tourism can be allowed access to say the northern areas for extending their stay. Subsidies and tax exemptions can be given to foreign investors.

2. Social measures: Allowing greater movement of citizens across the border will be worthwhile. The bus, truck and train CBMs notwithstanding, greater openness is suggested. Security can be a concern, but the movement (not only for Kashmiris) has to be intensified. In addition, cross regional marriages should be encouraged, educational opportunities – such as reserved seats, scholarships, etc. opened to people from both sides of the border.

3. Cultural measures: Exchange of music, drama, film and other mediums should be strongly encouraged to highlight the overarching theme of a common identity and Kashmiriat..

4. Politics and Governance: Political parties should be governed under a code of conduct which stresses peaceful resolution of issues, renounces violence, etc. On both sides of the border, true local governance has to be set up. For example, on the Indian side, other than the border areas, all security forces should be brought under local political control. On the Pakistani side, a true local Kashmiri polity should be allowed to develop rather than being led from Islamabad.

5. Law & Order: The judiciary on both sides should be strengthened. An independent body will review reported human rights crimes by all parties (security forces and militants). An independent Kashmir wide Human Rights Council (with possible observer status to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International etc.) granted powers and wide participation from both sides of the border.

6. The media: The media must play a big role, and open transparency is essential. Allowing private channels in radio, TV and internet will help to provide a diversity of opinions. Internet and mobile communications to be increased in penetration and improved.

7. International Relations between India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan can take many steps on the diplomatic side to allow commonalities to rule rather than differences to divide. Such as a public announcement that both India and Pakistan’s WTO working groups will work together. Or announce that India and Pakistan will work on commonalities such as a joint UN peacekeeping force (perhaps not peace enforcement initially); technical aid to poor countries; law of the sea, environmental issues and the Kyoto treaty; water management; etc.

What are the risks and how to mitigate them?

As mentioned earlier, even these small interim ground rule changing steps can be threatened by many events. There are three major possible events (with a reasonably high probability of happening over the next 3-5 years) which can seriously put the peace process into reverse.

1. A big terrorist strike in Kashmir or India

As noted before, the militant groups in Pakistan are not under the full control of the Pakistani Army and intelligence services. In other words, for this peace process to work, the militants have to be reined in to allow social and economic life to begin. This is not easy as the jehadi toothpaste, once squeezed out, is difficult to return into the tube. While not impossible, the Pakistani Army will have to increase the pressure on these militant groups to reduce their activities. It is, of course, impossible to imagine the groups can be made to disband; dialing down their activities will allow the CBMs to launch and take root.

2. A big human rights issue emerges in India because of the security forces

While the Indian armed forces are improving their control over human right abuses, there is indeed a chance that a serious incident might happen which can seriously risk the CBMs. The militants could take up arms again, rebelling against the Pakistani Army authority, and ordinary folks turn off the entire peace process. The current human rights management process within the Indian security forces has to be strengthened and made transparent to the public.

3. Change of government in India

Although both the BJP and the Congress led coalitions are committed to the peace process and are determined to find a solution, it is not inconceivable that a hardline government takes power after the current one. This new government may roll back the peace process, halt it or even embark on a full war, especially if a big terrorist strike happens (or for example, a high-profile political leader is assassinated). While mitigating actions against such an eventuality are difficult to note, the best defence against it is to let a thousand CBMs flower. More CBMs will lessen the chance of all of them being rolled back. Also, the more of India is involved (by greater tourism, economic links, educational links, etc.), the more difficult it would be for the hardline government to roll back the process.

4. Change of government in Pakistan

While currently General Musharraf is in charge of the Pakistani Army, there is a possibility of an internal army revolt/coup where a hard-line officer takes over. Or there is a national movement by the Pakistani religious parties which forces the army to hand-over power to the civilians as has happened before. In either case, the peace process can be rolled back and the jehadi reins loosened. Given the democratic deficit and tradition of autocratic rule in Pakistan, even an increase in the number of CBMs is no defence against all of them being stopped. The only possible mitigation is American pressure and for this, USA can be asked to be a discreet and unofficial guarantor of these CBMs.

Conclusion

It will take political will, persistence and mainly dedication to seek a true peace and stability across all sections of the stakeholders. It will require patience and understanding to deal with mistakes and mistakes will be made. Given the current leadership of Pakistan and India, there is hope that by carrying out some or all of these CBMs, the first faltering steps towards resolving the horrendous Kashmir Conflict can be taken.

Technorati Tags: Kashmir,India,Pakistan

We can make a difference

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 07:19:00 +0000

Anybody who has been on railway platforms in a reasonably big Indian city might have noticed a surprisingly large number of unaccompanied children. They are the children who have been abandoned, have run away from abusive homes, were orphaned or simply got lost. And as it is when children fall through the cracks, these kids have become drug addicts, are abused, sexually or otherwise. They have no future and simply have become the jetsam and flotsam of modern society, condemned to be on the garbage heap. Unknown, and uncared for, they sink to the bottom and simply fade away. But not for a tiny institution in Bhopal, which has given the most valuable of all things to them. It gave them hope.

I have noticed one thing common between refugees, orphans, drug addicts and prostitutes. Their eyes are dead. They do not sparkle anymore, are dead to the world, incurious, and they do not shine with life. They might be alive, but frankly, for all practical purposes, their souls are dead. And I think it’s primarily because of the fact that they have lost all hope. What is there to put sparkles in your eyes if there is no longer any hope?

One of the everlasting regrets of my life is that I was not able to adopt an orphan. A combination of government apathy and obstruction, plus other circumstances made it impossible for me to adopt and fulfil the pledge and promise I made to myself all those years ago when I visited the Missionaries of Charity home in Indore, India. The eyes of those orphans would light up when visitors came and I wanted to do something about it. But in the absence of that, I was trying to do my little bit for these unfortunate children just to give them a bit of hope and to put some sparkle back into their eyes.

While I was in Amsterdam, I spotted a news item in an Indian newspaper RSS feed about a small institution that has opened in Bhopal, India, which helps orphans, street children and children on the Bhopal Railway Station Platform. My sister and I decided to do a little bit to help them by giving each of them their individual lockers, a small place to call their own. My parents, being there in Bhopal, went over to the charity, asked about their space, got the lockers built and installed. This was over four months ago and it is only now that I finally managed to get to Bhopal to see for myself.

This story is a story of the worst and at the same time the best of human behaviour ladled on to the people who can least withstand it, as well as most need it. I saw three small girls , aged 1, 3 and 7 years of age. They do not seem to have any place to stay, their parents squabble, and it is unclear where they live. This one hall provides them with a temporary measure during the day when they can come in from the rain and get some education. The 7 year old girl is apparently extremely intelligent and she is testing at 3 levels above her age related education levels. There is another boy of 5 years of age, who got lost on a train. He is from south India and speaks Tamil, but he does not know where he is from, or anything else. Since they know nothing about him, he is a lost soul. A mother and father would be grieving somewhere for their lost son, but there you are.

I saw a recovering drug addict, a boy of only 10. These boys sell bits and bobs, such as tea or biscuits, on the trains which pass through the railway station. And with the little money they earn, they go purchase a bottle of whitener (the fluid used to correct typing mistakes) which is very cheap at Rupees 15. This is then poured into a cloth which they will sniff all day long. And for some reason, they would also cut themselves on the arms, thighs, chest, anywhere, deeply with a rusty razor blade to let the blood flow. Apparently, it makes them feel like flying. They are not violent, but just go into a deep somnolent daze. This particular boy had scars up and down his body. I saw another boy outside the school, about 13-14 years of age, who wanted to come in and have lunch. He was zonked out of his brains. He is my son’s age.

There are three boys that I was introduced to, who were beaten so badly by their parents and families that their bones were broken. So they ran away from home when they were 4-5 years of age. Because they do not know where they came from, (unlettered, illiterate children), now they cannot go back. My mother told me about how she saw this woman speaking to a child in the corner of a school. On inquiring, it turned out that this was his mother who had abandoned her child at the school because she could neither feed nor clothe him. But she comes back once every few months after earning some money, to bring some sweets. Mother and child get together for about 10-15 minutes.

Read about this young lady, Ms. Deepika Suri (read were? Link?), who kicked this entire thing off. She is a high ranking police officer and she noticed these children running riot. Now we all know the challenges anybody would face to get any government to do anything out of the ordinary. But she is perhaps one of the real heroines of India. A quiet, lovely young lady, who saw a need, and swung into action. She found an abandoned building and had it fixed up to become a school cum residential hall cum orphanage for thirty odd children. She linked it with a government school to provide education, got political cover and basically got it up and running.

She did not get anything out of it. She is, by all accounts, very retiring and quiet. I have not met her and have only heard about her from the children and the teachers who think of her as a veritable goddess. And so she is. She gave these children hope. She fought against the apathy that is so endemic in society. She did not give up and she made a dream happen for these children. After it was up and running, the building fixed up, food and clothing arranged, bedding fixed, teachers and helpers in place, to get political cover, she got the chief minister of the state to inaugurate the centre called as “Disha” (a Hindi word meaning direction). And when the Chief Minister asked, what they needed, they said, can we please have lockers for the children? My father said that eight people volunteered to provide them.

As it so happened, there is many a slip between the cup and the lip and many months later, nothing happened so we decided to get those lockers for them. Why lockers, you might ask? Why not clothes, or food, or money? Well, there was a lot of thinking behind it.

These children, in my opinion, do not have anything personal and individual, no assets, no home, not even a toothbrush, nothing. It is a totally transient existence. And it is horrible, not to have anything to call your own.

But the idea was, that if they have a locker, with their own locks and keys, it becomes their little piece of home. And that is what we saw, there were thirty lockers and each had been decorated individually by their owners. The key was hung around their necks with a piece of sturdy twine, but some had put up photographs, some had arranged their clothes in pleasing manners, one even had managed to put in a tiny curtain in that locker.

The children put on a show for us, and I was very impressed by their range of abilities. Whether it was singing, dancing, poetry recital, drumming, recitation of multiplication tables or the 3 R’s, they were pretty good. One tiny dervish of a small boy was so enthusiastic, he wanted to volunteer for everything and he danced for us. Apparently, before coming to the centre, he would earn money for food by dancing for train passengers. And now he danced just for the sheer joy of it, the blooming smile on his face, the shining teeth (yes, they now have tooth brushes and tooth paste nicely kept in their lockers), well kept clothes and groomed hair all pointed to a happy boy.

A boy of 15 odd years posed as a radio commentator and gave a full five minutes of a radio news announcement. It was very impressive. The kids knew Sanskrit shlokas and hymns; they would worship religiously every evening. The teachers would ask each boy to think about what they did well and what they did wrong, to learn from their mistakes. The teachers and the associated NGO try to place these orphans with families.

One boy was from West Bengal and he had tuberculosis. He liked to eat fish curry and rice, which were his traditional diet, but for some reason he landed in Bhopal, many many miles away. So the NGO spent quite a lot of money and then managed to place him with a family in West Bengal where he can now get a proper diet and medical care in a good middle class family. Guess what? The boy ran away from there and came back to the centre in Bhopal, apparently he missed them so much.

I can talk so much about this, but this is a series of disjointed thoughts about a frankly tear jerker of an experience. I was telling my old friend about it and he offered to do some construction work at the institution, by building up the boundary wall (to keep the drug addict, junkies and thieves away) and refurbishing the toilets.

Small things, but that is the power of feeling and caring. Think back about Ms. Suri who kicked off the start, and now 170 children have passed through these halls of this school. It gave them direction and it gave them hope. It was a humbling experience to see this.

I end with a plea; do something for the poor children or orphans of your city. Nothing much, you rally do not have to do much. And you do not have to go far from your city. Why don’t you just purchase some cheap and cheerful dictionaries or colouring books for them? What about getting them some board games? Give them something, anything, go sing a song to them or just talk to them. Just show them that somebody cares, and that they have not been abandoned. After having faced the world that we humans have brought down on their tiny innocent heads, show them that they can have a direction to a better life, they can hope, the dead eyes can sparkle again. It can and has been done.

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

Technorati Tags: Charity,India,Children

Malaysia – truly Asia but not fully Asia

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 11:04:00 +0000

It was a very pleasant surprise when I was invited to speak at a conference in Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia. I have been to that neighbourhood so many times, but never to Malaysia. While I have blogged about the conference, this essay is about my impressions about the country. It is based on a very scientific and detailed analysis of reading the daily newspapers and observing the city and talking with some people. So yes, these are very facile observations on the national infrastructure, the people, history, cuisine, politics, economics and will end trying to predict the future of this extraordinary country.

Also, please remember that it was just a trip of 6 days in very urban setting speaking to the professional, technocratic and political class of Malaysians. To give you a comparison, it would be like trying to explain India or China based on a 5-day conference visit to Delhi or Beijing.

As you land in Kuala Lumpur airport, walk out to whiz down the highway to the city looking at the surroundings, check into your hotel and then stand on the 30^th floor looking out over the twin towers, you get a sense of surprise and are impressed. The entire corridor between the airport and the city is landscaped as far as the eye can see. The neat townships, the wide highway, the tall skyscrapers, the hotels, the cars, the shops, the advertisements, nothing that you would see out of place in a European setting. And from what I understand, this infrastructure development has taken place in all the Malaysian states, by and large. So just by looking at the infrastructure, you would say this is a developed country. Extremely impressive indeed and something that my father said when I was talking to him. He visited Malaysia 40 years ago and we were comparing notes.

But what they still do not have is the developed country people, and thank God for that. By and large, the developed countries tend to end up having people who do not smile as much (how is that for a sheer generalisation?). The sheer warmth of everybody I met was astounding and simply amazing. Smiles galore, great big blooming smiles all over the place. And this is whether you are talking about your shop assistant to the driver of the coach to the chap who was watering the plants to the lady who was crossing the street. Very warm, helpful and warm people and that is what I found on every level, from the Prime Minister down to the ordinary bloke on the street. I didn’t get a chance to speak to the Sultan at the dinner but I have no doubt he would be the same. I just hope they keep this national characteristic.

I noticed a general and curious lack of history. A broad based observation here, but I went trawling through two large bookstores in KL, saw the Sunday editions of the newspapers, asked the concierge of the hotel about historic sites, looked around in the admittedly limited trips, and poked my nose into the colonial buildings, but, I did not get a sense that history existed or even exists for ordinary Malaysians. This is going to be difficult to explain, but it is a strange mixture of old mouldy buildings and monuments, loads of historical books, names of houses/streets referring to ages old dead people, frequent referrals in speech to old history, and so on and so forth. Was the rush to technology and modernity accompanied by the loss of history? Picked up some books written by their first political leaders and they also refer mostly to their current and not the past. Rather surprising and curious, especially when you see countries like Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines etc. where I did not get this feeling.

But that did not stop them from having the most amazing cuisine. I was interviewing a lady and on the spur of the moment, offered to do this over lunch at the hotel itself. And the sheer range of food that was available, just blew me away. I regretted I was on appetite suppressant medication, but still managed to put away some serious amounts of food AND lost weight. The combination of Japanese, continental, Malay, Indian, Chinese, yummy, wonderful, absolutely delicious. How on earth do they manage to keep their weight under control despite this wonderful gastronomic spread? The food court in the twin towers shopping mall had 30 different shops selling different kinds of food. I went around thrice before settling on Nasi Goreng from the Malay shop. Just great.

The corruption was unfortunately fairly typical of a developing nation. Again, no direct evidence, but only from what I heard from people. For example, when the father of Modern Malaysia, Tun Dr. Mahatir Mohammad, resigned from the ruling party while I was there, I was quite certain that a whole bunch of others will follow him. But no, almost nobody did. I was puzzled and after inquiring, the common response was, who on earth would be stupid enough to get out of the patronage party? Am I surprised? No, political parties are the same all over the world.

The economy is doing well, well diversified, not that much about of concentration in any one sector, not much government interference in the economy as shown by the low 12% of public consumption in the economy compared with about 20% for the USA and 22% for the UK. Nicely galloping along at 5-6% per year GDP growth, but subsidies are a worry. These range from industrial, agricultural, fuel, service and a whole load of them. If the government is not careful, the debt servicing could be an issue. But again, nothing that worried me terribly.

The last observation before my summing-up would be to point to a far more dangerous factor which is brewing in Malaysia. And that is the race factor. The sheer casualness with which race plays a part in politics, business and normal society is shocking for a person coming in from outside. To further complicate matters, this has a religious overtone and is getting worse day by day. I see the blog site of Dr. Mahatir Mohammad and am frankly horrified to read some of his pronouncements on race and religion. And that is wrong, public policy should never be established based on religion or race, because it will simply end up with angst. Especially when you have multiple religions and races in the country. Can you imagine a Prime Minister of any other country clearly stating racist views nowadays?

Take the emotion out of the arguments, help all Malaysians, such as all poor Malays. Do impose the national language for all Malaysians. Malays are ethnically and historically a combination of Indian and Chinese ancestry but now there is a strong but still controllable difference between the Indian Tamils, Indian Punjabi/Sikhs, the Chinese, the Malays, the mainlander and islander Malaysian etc. etc. In the list of the top richest Malaysians, only one was Malay. And this is after decades of affirmative action. On the other hand, the Indian Tamils are bottom of the pile and after they saw the success of the use of religion by Malays, they have also climbed on the Hindu religion bandwagon. This can still be controlled, stop that sucking up to the OIC, think of all Malaysians independently and uniquely. Malays look to Mecca, Chinese look to China and Indians look to India. Who or where is the lookout for Malaysia? But it is not that bad, I think the political class would understand this and can stuff the racist/religious monster inside the cage.

Bottom line and by and large, I think Malaysians can be proud of what they have achieved in their country. The emphasis on information technology, the way they have had a systematic plan to drag their country into the developed country status. I am also impressed by how well joined up the government, industry and bureaucracy is to push for Malaysian interests. This bill of guarantees for foreign investors is absolutely amazing and provides evidence that Malaysia is serious. This is something that other countries can only dream about but the way this kind of national will and drive for months, years and decades is good and creditable. All political parties are on-board with respect to national development and this country will improve dramatically indeed provided it manages to take all its citizens along with this national drive. Salamat Datang (welcome guest) indeed.

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

Technorati Tags: Malaysia

RATS!

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Sat, 31 May 2008 19:48:00 +0000

Are rats cute? Just look at Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse. They have an entire carnival of their own and a worldwide business around them! Theme parks galore! We have movies about a rat that turns into the amazing chef in the 2007 film Ratatouille. They are holy and auspicious as well. The Hindu God Ganesh’s favourite animal is a rat (or is it a mouse?). And this year is the Chinese Year of the Rat and in Chinese terms, a rat is supposed to represent protection and prosperity. But rats are actually not cuddly creatures and can legitimately be said to be a fully paid up member of the team of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (Plague, Death, War, Conquest)

In a recent news report, the leading exterminator company in the UK talked about how the population of rats is increasing rapidly and has nearly doubled over the past few years. Not only doubled, but even more. This is because more and more of the British lands are being concreted over, so the rats do not have space to dig and create their burrows. Also because of the recent floods, they had to evacuate their burrows and move to higher ground. Hundreds of tons of food grains have been eaten by these furry creatures, but then, thousands and thousands tons more of food grains are eaten by these disgusting creatures across the world.

I don’t like rats (mice, bandicoots, every disgusting type of vermin), miserable creatures. I hate their beady eyes and how they scuttle across the rooms, good chef or cute mouse notwithstanding. My association to them goes back to my school days when one of my teachers used to regularly abuse us by calling us as station rats. Now, I don’t know if you have seen Indian railway station rats, but they are huge, scurry around in the excreta and muck and look absolutely filthy. So I am afraid they are not my cup of tea at all.

They are nasty things. They carry germs, disease and infection and god knows what else? There is a very good reason that food inspectors hate seeing rats in a kitchen, and when I saw that rat in Ratatouille actually clutch a piece of cheese to its plague ridden fur, I couldn’t stop shuddering. That went into the food that they were feeding their customers? Foul. It is the rats who also carry the fleas which transmitted the plague virus. It was because of their germ carrying capacity that tens of millions of humans died in the ravages of the black plague which have regularly swept through the world down the ages. This huge decimation of the population caused major dislocations to kingdoms, lead to wars, changed the path of the Christian Church and caused huge and brutal persecutions of minorities such as Jews (who were said to have caused the plague).

Rats also have been the cause of terrorism (near war) breaking out. In the misty mountains of Northeast India is a forgotten state called Mizoram. Almost forty years ago, a special type of bamboo flowered hugely across certain areas across the Mizoram and Bangladesh border. Its flowers are delicious and full of goodness. Well, because they are so good and nutritious, the rats eat them and grow huge. Not only that, they nearly double their breeding rate (from four to eight times in one year). Considering that you can end with about ten baby-rats in a litter, and female rats become fertile in a matter of months, you can see how the rat population can explode, and so it did!

When it did, they ravaged through the bamboo forests eating everything in sight. When there was no bamboo left, they went for the crops and soon, there was widespread famine in these parts of the land. Typically, and contrary to what Amartya Sen says, famines do occur in democracies, especially weak and corrupt ones such as India. This famine and lack of government support can be directly attributable to the rise of Mizo nationalism, the bitter Mizo terrorist campaign, the one and only bombing by the Indian Air Force on Indian citizens and eventual peace after thousands of deaths and decades of fighting.

As an aside, this bamboo flowering happens once every fifty-odd years and it is happening again now. Rats have already devoured all the flowers and have already eaten a huge amount of crops in the Mizoram state and Bangladesh side. Almost forty thousand tons of food has been destroyed in the Indian side itself, while some Bangladeshi districts are reporting up to 100% food stock destruction. The Mizoram government has a bounty out on them and is paying about 2.5 pence or 2 Rupees for each rat tail delivered (see a fascinating picture here). And the last time a huge famine hit Bangladesh, war broke out.

Strangely enough, while rats were the cause of terrorism, other RATS are being formed to fight terrorism. A very interesting grouping, called as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which comprises of the central Asian republics, Russia, China and some others, signed the “Shanghai Convention on Combating Terrorism, Separatism, and Extremism” in 2001. As part of this convention, a Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) was set up in Tashkent. While it is difficult to analyse its performance, it claims to have prevented more than 250 acts of terrorism so far. And heaven knows - that area is full of those terror rats. Ranging from the Uyghur’s in China to the Chechnyans in Russia, Kurds in Iran to Islamists everywhere else, all these terror rats need to be flushed out, and what better way than to set a RAT to catch a rat?

Not only that, the US military research arm, DARPA, is turning rats into remote controlled animals who can go up ladders, sneak into ruins, under the ground, etc. on commands which electronically manipulate their pleasure centres. So they can be used for land mine clearance, for reconnaissance, for earthquake rescue under collapsed buildings, and generally be good. Nothing wrong with it, the rats love being pleasured and if in return for pleasure, they do something nice for us, I am all for it.

As a matter of fact, there is a pretty nice cocktail called as a Sewer Rat, made of Vodka, Peach schnapps, Kahlua and Orange juice. It is an acquired taste, I am afraid. And so is eating them, rat meat is considered to be a delicacy across quite a large swathe of the world and here’s a good site with some recipes (if you can stomach that!). Do you remember the scene in the Demolition Man, where Sylvester Stallone wakes up in the future and gets all weird rabbit/processed food to eat. He is dying for some “proper” American food and then he spots this tiny dingy place selling burgers and he dives into the shop and starts to eat burgers with huge big bites. Idly asking about the burger, he learns that it is made of rat meat. But despite a moment of hesitation, he crams the burger down while saying, “This is a rat burger? Good burger!"

I suppose I can agree with that quote, “I eat meat not because I like meat but because I hate animals”, so perhaps I will try a rat burger one of these days. Meanwhile, the impact of rats on food grains is much more important, and the loss of food to rats, the scarcity of food grains, the rapidly rising food inflation can well lead to war and terrorism all again.

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!

Technorati Tags: Healthcare,Agriculture,Inflation,Terrorism

Sisyphus would have complained about the Israeli Palestinian Crisis

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Wed, 14 May 2008 20:40:00 +0000

Personally, I was happy with the Israeli Palestinian crisis, as it has saved me few quid. You see, using software developed in Israel for counter terrorist purposes, the local council has saved hundreds of thousands of pounds by implementing a lie detection system over the phone. So when you call up our council to claim benefits, the operator says that you are being evaluated by this lie detection system, you would either not go ahead with the claim or would have the claim rejected because the system thinks you are telling ‘porkies’. The amount of porkies that are told in the aftermath of the Israeli Palestinian Crisis is monumental.

I have a morbid fascination with this crisis. It’s like a horrific car accident. You know you shouldn’t see the accident, but still you slow down as you pass the accident site, crane your neck and peer at the gruesome details. You know it’s a rather uncivilised behaviour and something that your mum would scold you for, but still you cannot avoid it. It’s the same with this crisis. You know that whenever you pick up this topic, you get hammered because you simply cannot be neutral and unemotional at all about it. Even if you are, then for some participant on one side, you will be biased. As simple as that, there is no independent observer on this issue. Ever!

Which is the reason why this book, ‘The Israel – Arab Reader, A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict’, edited by Walter Laqueur and Barry Rubin, should be an indispensible part of your reference library. These two well known authors have done a great job in collecting some vital historical documents, which can be used - at least - to establish some facts on the ground when debating or arguing this issue. The documents are a treasure trove in a very convenient volume broken up into five parts. The first part relates to the time from 1882 to the end of the British Mandate. This part explains the roots of the problem. After this, the remaining parts four are from 1947 – 1973, Camp David to the Madrid Conference, the peace process from 1992 onwards till the intifada started and the peace process dried up.

This book is now in the seventh edition, and once you see it, you can understand why this is so. It contains manifestos, speeches, documents, interviews, memorandums, laws, declarations, reports, statements, parliamentary documents and speeches, United Nations speeches and resolutions, White Papers and the like. The editors have collected documents from Arabs, Israelis, British, United Nations, United States, Germans, Russians, etc. Once I started, I made it a point to read one document or section per day, and I finally managed to complete it. By this time, my hair was hurting so badly, that it had curled up like a Velcro mat. You know why? Because when one reads this, one is torn between two feelings, one – this is a car accident, drive away and two – it’s a car accident, bloody hell, what happened.

This is not the place to review who is right or who is wrong. Who is right or wrong is no longer the argument; it has gone way beyond that. The thousands of millions of words and pages which have been written, the millions of people killed, tortured, wounded, exiled, the decades of anger, hatred and war, the deep religious entwining, the ancient history of this blood drenched land, all those frankly preclude any rational and objective discussion of this issue.

Mind you, there have been thousands of solutions, such as the Two State Solution, Jordanian Solution, the One State Solution, the Ugandan Solution, the Madagascar Solution, and so on and so forth. The current state is a variant of the Two State Solution, which was established in 1948. There would be a Palestinian state and an Israeli state. There is no point in going for what-if’s, we are where we are. The One State solution is now slowly gaining credence. A recent and reasonably well argued book from the Palestinian perspective is written by my colleague, Ghada Karmi, called as Married to Another Man, Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine. If you keep these two books in front of you, you will see what I mean by the great difficulty of trying to be independent and unemotional about this issue. The latter book is something that clearly Israel can never live with, as it is very emotive. But then, being the son of a refugee myself, I can empathise with Ghada about her feelings for her homeland which clearly show up in her work. Unfortunately, that emotional approach to this problem means that the book is more of an op-ed than a balanced and reasoned argument for a One State Solution.

The Two State Solution, unfortunately will be the only way forward for the foreseeable future, the only outstanding questions relate to the boundaries, the state of Jerusalem, refugees and security. But then, I definitely have no suggestions as to how this can be resolved, other than the fact that Israel should speak to Hamas and come to some sort of agreement. But I am also doubtful that this solution would be that easy. You see, this conflict has now reached civilisational levels, with the entire Muslim nation officially seeing the Palestinian cause as its own, while the majority of liberal democracies, broadly defined, are lined up with Israel. Conflicts at these levels are breathtakingly huge in concept, think about the crusades, the final solution, the English – Boer War and so on and so forth. The historical record is not good; solutions are generally imposed when one party is utterly exhausted or eradicated. But the core issue does not go away. Hundreds of years after the crusades were over, the issue still flares up in strange and weird places (witness the reaction of the Muslim nation when George Bush said that he was launching a crusade against terrorism.) But if it will be solved, it will be solved by the efforts of people like Laqueur and Rubin, who try to be independent and clearly want to resolve the issue without taking extreme positions such as what Karmi does.

But for what it’s worth, Israel and Palestine have been facing an existential problem for its sixty years and every year, like Sisyphus, they have been trying to resolve it. I can but look upon this train crash of a problem with deep despair and worry but still I think, at least my council tax bill will be reduced by two quid because of this problem. Now that’s not a silver lining on a planetary sized cloud. It is perhaps a silver molecule on a solar system sized typhoon, but hey, straws are straws. In the meantime, happy reading and lets hope Sisyphus keeps on banging away at this task.

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

Technorati Tags: Israel,Palestine,Diplomacy,Politics

Why don’t you manage your company’s discretionary spend as you manage your pension?

noreply@blogger.com (BD) — Mon, 05 May 2008 08:57:00 +0000

Companies generate funds for investments from various sources. These investments are again allocated to various purposes, such as business expansion, for improving processes, for purchasing new businesses, or what have you. When you invest in a new business, you usually track the revenue generation or the new business that it has generated and if it has not brought in anything near what you originally thought it would, then you re-evaluate it and then leave it or digest it. Investments can be measured easily by revenues or costs, but when one is talking about operational changes, technology investments, purchase or implementation of patents and other intellectual property or say buildings, it suddenly becomes extremely tough to evaluate whether your investments are doing well. In this essay I try to shed some light on how one can help manage discretionary investments.

In my short experience, I was continuously surprised at how lazy people are in terms of managing their investments, in other words their capital. I asked the same question when I was at a conference some months ago, namely how many people actively check their internal firm investments in the same manner they do their pension fund investments? Hardly any hand went up in the hall, where numerous senior managers were sitting. And this is why so many firms have less than efficient internal investments.

Portfolio management has existed for many decades, since Harry Markowitz proposed his portfolio management theory way back in 1952 (here’s something for the conspiracy theorists, his major work was done in the RAND Corporation…). Since then, three generations of investment managers have grown up and applied the principles of portfolio management to their investments. Portfolio Management is applicable to any form of investments and the basic concepts are the same: diversify your investments, make sure you know what you are investing in, the effective and efficient capacity to disinvest is more important than to invest, the objectives for the overall portfolio might be different from the subcomponent objectives, do regular reviews of your investment and finally, be as transparent as possible, etc.

What do you do with your investments in your pension funds? You check them regularly, no? You invest in your pension with the expectation of future gain or benefits. Depending on your personal circumstances, you decide your investment profile and target areas and then monitor the risk-return profile regularly, you replace badly performing funds with better performing funds if required, etc. In other words, you do Portfolio Management. And frankly, that is what you do within firms as well. Or rather, this is what you should do (this relates mainly to financial institutions, although the concept will apply equally to any firm).

The support areas within the companies also invest, but not in bonds or shares. Instead, they invest a certain discretionary sum in technology, in improving and running those processes, in offshoring and outsourcing, in satisfying regulatory and compliance demands, in revenue generation activities, in setting up branch offices, etc. By their very name and nature of being support areas, they provide some business benefit, either by allowing us to operate as a firm, or reducing cost or satisfying regulatory requirements or increasing revenue or a combination of some or all of them.

In a firm, there are two types of spend: “Business as Usual” versus “Discretionary” spend. The former relates to the spend you have to do to support your existing business, while the latter relates to “new” spend, designed to support growth and explore new opportunities. This second type is that which we would call investment. Bearing this definition in mind, there are some key questions to consider. For instance: Do you analyse your discretionary spend for suitability? Do you know what you are spending the money on? Do you check whether it is providing value? Do you stop investments? Can you respond to ad hoc information requests from the business on the return on investment footprint for the investments? Often, the answer may be ‘no’. So, if you do that analysis with your own pension, why not do so with your technology or operations investment? And if you wanted to do so, what do you do?

The level to which you will go to analyse your investments obviously depends on the size of the firm, how you run your financial systems, what kind of financial governance do you impose internally etc. But for a large global financial institution, what you do is to get a small team of senior chaps together and get initial agreement on what you want to achieve, what will be the methodology, logistics and how will this portfolio management function be governed.

The data that you need is simple such as the name of the programme or project or investment, start and end date of the projects, which business unit is paying for it, which unit will be involved in the implementation, the status of the spend (committed, authorised, approved, spent…), the purpose of that investment (regulatory, revenue generation, enhancements…), when will the benefits arise and so on and so forth.. Don’t complicate matters, a simple excel spreadsheet is just fine. There is much benefit in keeping things simple but mind you, it would be worthwhile to invest in some good technical expertise in reports, graphs and business intelligence to present the data. But I am getting ahead of myself.

There are two problems which are crucial to manage. The first is the process to get the data and second is the data itself. Senior management engagement is vital for this, but then, anything of this nature will require senior management engagement anyway. If you don’t have senior management approval and push, then you might as well stop, because your life will be hell. Nobody likes their spending to be made transparent and if you do not have backing, you will get trashed, ignored or worse, actively banned. You see, transparency means performance matching. If your head of operations has got $10 million to invest, the business can legitimately ask him, where are you spending that money and how do you justify that investment? Also, show your productivity gains (as in return on investment…). But if transparency is not achieved, then the head of operations can merrily go about spending money without any care for performance or improvement. But even if they are all above board, how do you know where the money is going? Is it going into unproductive causes? How much is left in the kitty? How much of the money is tied up on multi-year spend? So to answer all those questions, senior management support is vital.

But senior management cannot, by themselves, sit in on every meeting with the spending divisions. This requires the second solution, and that is to have relationship managers. Whether you are doing this at the technology level, the operational level, the business unit level or whichever level you are aiming at, you need senior relationship managers who can talk to the business managers at their level of expertise and experience. If you do not have serious relationship managers who can understand the spend patterns, the business that is being supported etc., the process and data will not be good. In other words, you cannot have a fixed income trading background relationship manager talking about investments with the chief infrastructure officer, they simply cannot relate to each other.

The third solution is to invest an indecently huge amount of time and money in the pre-training, communications, workshops, conference calls, etc. BEFORE the process starts off. This portfolio management process has the capacity to seriously influence your entire organisation, from top to bottom, from trading to procurement, from regulatory reporting to market data. So before you actually kick this process off, make sure you have talked, discussed, debated, argued with as many stakeholders as possible and then document the agreements and then talk, discuss, debate and argue again. It is easy to go wrong once underway and difficult to change direction when started, so front load all the push, training, motivation, and discussions.

Then come the data challenges. Even though you have a good simple data model, you will be surprised how difficult it is to get the data. Simple concepts become horrendously complicated when seen across national boundaries, cultures, ages, sexes, languages, charts of accounts, etc.. For example, a simple question like, what is the difference between a programme and a project becomes exceedingly complicated (go for a more than 10 million budget as an example, and it’s a programme with sub projects, and anything below 100 K has to be a task which has to be rolled up into a project).

What do you mean by project / investment start? Does start mean that some steering committee somewhere has given the go-ahead or the capital allocation committee has said yes or the CFO has signed off or the money has actually been transferred to your cost code? Or does it just mean the project / programme initiation document has been signed? So a data dictionary should be written and training has to be given, regular training, communications, etc. should be the lot of the life of the relationship managers. One has to beware that this portfolio management process might conflict with local financial governance, so having a word with the local or functional CFO before rolling this out would be better. For example, the standardisation of the “start” of a project across the globe and all units could require all CFOs to adopt the same sort of financial governance in terms of signing off and transference of funds to cost codes. So keep it simple. Remember what Einstein said, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler’.

Once the data starts rolling in, then get your business analysts and reporting gurus to work on it. A short sharp presentation with some smart graphics showing the spend, its type and shape etc. is great, but add commentary to this analysis. If you find out that 40% of your funds are spent on regulatory aspects which are multiyear in nature, consider asking the business COO and / or the CFO to ring-fence those sums into an SIV or in special codes which do not belong to the business or function. This has huge advantages. You do not have the temptation to dip into that pot. That pot of money is not something that you can influence, so you concentrate on value additive aspects of your investments, etc. It’s like the difference between spending your money on electricity versus spending your money on an iPod. Over the course of a year, both amounts would be the same, but you manage each investment differently and the same goes for mandatory spending.

Analyse when spend happens. The number of times I have seen people forget the yearly cycle is amazing. Spending behaviour changes over the year. The months just before accounting close change as vendors and clients change behaviour, so that costs/revenues hit their books differently. People forget there is something called as committed spend, especially in these days of outsourcing and offshoring. So if you want to cut costs, it is not that simple. If you were planning to put in gated funding, it does not work properly with outsourcing contracts. So commentary around that will help.

If you can get figures for return on investment, then there is nothing like it. That will make you the darling of the firm. You can turn around and ask (well, request…) the business owners: “You invested 100 million in that business, show that it returned the funds you said it would in the business case.” This commentary and visibility on the numbers is absolutely golden for senior management.

So what do you end up having? You have a process which is providing you with investment information which ends up giving management information on the investments. Now what? Well, now you use this information in various management areas. Budgeting should be one. Performance evaluation should be another. Cash flow planning is another area where this can be used. Human Resource Planning is an area which is begging for good portfolio resource planning. Across the firm, you will have very few good change managers and on the back of this process, you can hang a strategic resource plan. This structure also allows you to make investment changes with the greatest efficiency. This takes the emotion out of decision making. If you have to cut your costs, then you can home into the areas where they are exactly possible, rather than areas where people “think” and “emotionally” believe costs can be cut. That is not good for the firm.

This structure also allows you to rejig investments, if a strategic project is overrunning, then this structure and data allows you to make unemotional scientific decisions to take money from another project and give it to the project which is running under a shortfall. Another advantage of this process is that it forces the entire firm to start talking the same language. Never underestimate the benefit of the firm using the same functional language and this is very useful indeed. Think about it, your mergers and acquisitions will go much more smoothly if you have a clear-cut way to handle investments, both the old and new employees are clear about their business functions and their future. Again, the emotion is removed from the argument.

One way to get the language bit right is to use a methodology. No point in hiring expensive consultants to tell you how to run your business. Industry firms such as HP, IBM, Accenture and other firms release pretty good white papers on project portfolio management. If you want to go for a good book, then select this one by Shan Rajegopal, Philip McGuin and James Waller, titled Project Portfolio Management (ISBN:0-230-50716-6, Palgrave MacMillian). The book comes highly recommended, it is written by authors who have obviously implemented project portfolio management and they have written an excellent manual based on their experience with their clients. The only couple of criticisms one might have with the book is that they do not consider discretionary spend more widely, but rather take a perspective of technology spend only. However, that complaint is perhaps unique to Banking and Financial Services compared to other industries. Secondly, some more case studies might have been useful, but I suspect this kind of data would be very difficult to get. Still, you can do much worse than to keep this book on your reference shelf.

It is not an easy exercise. It needs much senior management attention and support, months and quarters of work and talk. You need to overcome a lot of cynicism and you have to work against the inertia of rest. But at end of the day, the data that you will get will be rich and will definitely be worth it. Don’t think that this is only for senior management; this can be done by any manager who is in charge of investments. But how do you know if you have done your job of portfolio management well? If your presentation to your management is received by raised eyebrows and the sentence, “this is interesting”, then you know that you have done a good job of it. But treat your investments as you would treat your pension, and your future life will be much safer, smoother and exciting.

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

Technorati Tags: management,financial institutions