Neutral Observer

War and Peace

2012-01-22T19:34:00.000-08:00

It took me about one and a half months to read Warand Peace. Tolstoy's magnum opus, first published in the 1860s, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest novels everwritten, though the popular perception is that it is a very difficult book to finish reading. The length of the novel is clearly a hugebarrier to reading it, though unfamiliarity with the historicalcontext adds to the difficulties.

To appreciate the book fully, it is useful to recallthe historical context. The story is set in the early nineteenthcentury, spanning the period from 1805 to 1820. Its main charactersall come from the Russian nobility, and the narrative arc followstheir fortunes, set against the backdrop of the tumultuous eventssurrounding Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

During the preceding century, Russia had emerged frombeing a relatively isolated country to being one of the foremostpowers of Europe. During the reigns of Peter the Great (1696-1725)and Catherine the Great (1762-1796), decisive turns had been madetowards Western European culture. Catherine the great consideredherself to be an Enlightenment figure, and corresponded with theFrench philosophes such as Voltaire and Diderot. Diderot was presentat her court (and drew a salary) for some time during the 1770s. Theinfluence of the French language was so strong that it became the languageof the nobility, some of whose members could not speak Russian.

Alexander I, grandson of Catherine the Great, became Tsar of Russia in 1801. In 1805,Russia went to war with Napoleon and lost at the famous battleof Austerlitz. After more battles with Napoleon's armies in 1806and 1807, the Treaty of Tilsit was signed and there was an uneasy peace for 5years. Russia was reluctant to comply with the demands of Napoleon's Continental System, by which he attempted to impose a European trade embargo on Britain. The peace was ended by Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812.

The French invasion of Russia began in June 1812, with over 400,000 troops. The Russians did not immediately give battle and kept withdrawing until they were in the vicinity of Moscow. The battle finally took place at the village of Borodino (near Moscow) in early September 1812, and tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides lost their lives. Though the French won the battle and went on to occupy Moscow, it was an incomplete and pyrrhic victory. Much of Moscow was set on fire, most likely on the orders of the city governor. This was a continuation of the scorched earth policy of the Russians. Tsar Alexander I refused to negotiate with Napoleon.

In October 1812, Napoleon began a retreat from Moscow. The retreat, by all accounts, was horrific. Supply lines, quite inadequate to begin with, were disrupted by Russian guerrilla attacks. The bitter Russian winter claimed many lives. Fodder for horses was scarce. Weak horses either died or were slaughtered for food by the starving soldiers. This led to the abandoning of cannons and wagons, further weakening the ability of the French army to fight the Russians. In early November, Napoleon learned of a coup attempt in Paris. He promptly abandoned the army and raced ahead to Paris. In the end, only about a tenth of the original troops actually made it back to France, all others having died or been taken prisoner by the Russians. Russian casualties were no less tragic. About two hundred thousand soldiers died, with the death toll of civilians perhaps just as large. Death and destruction on a massive scale were the results of Napoelon's Russian campaign.

Given this background, one can easily imagine why this period must have loomed large in the imagination of Russian intellectuals throughout the later parts of the nineteenth century. Tolstoy's decision to choose this period as the setting of War and Peace was determined ultimately by his realization of the central importance of this phase of his country's history.

War and Peace can be regarded as several books combined into one. In its most novel-like parts, it is an absorbing story of the fluctuating fortunes of its main characters, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, Natasha Rostova and her brother Nikolai, and Count Pierre Bezukhov. Struggling with their desires and aspirations, buffeted by the storms of dramatic historical events and by their own missteps, they try to make the best of their lives. On the other hand, viewed as historical fiction, the book is an unparalleled description of warfare in general and of the various battles of the Napoleonic campaigns in particular.

Parts of the book, the ones where Tolstoy tends to be repetitious, are devoted to military history, especially to debunking much of war strategy and the "great man" approach to history. These could easily be separated from the book to form a treatise on nineteenth century history writing. Tolstoy's emphasis on contingency in history and his debunking of Napoleon's greatness, or his much celebrated "military genius", are all quite persuasive. He is also very dismissive of the elaborate battle strategies of the generals and their adoration by (military) historians. His version of events relies more on the unexpected happenings in the thick of battle. However, his alternative explanations of Russian victories, which include waves of spirit sweeping through the Russians or the decline in morale among the French, are vague and dissatisfying.

Ultimately though, the parts of the book that I recall with pleasure are the characters and their lives and fortunes. Tolstoy devotes considerable time and space to develop many of the characters we meet in the book, even though not all of them are central to the main story line. In particular, I was surprised by how well etched the women characters were. Apart from his heroine, Natasha, he devotes considerable time to Maria Bolkonsky, Prince Andrei's deeply religious sister, Natasha's mother, the Countess Rostova , Natasha's poor cousin Sonya, and the old Princess Anna Mikhaylovna, who is so keen on promoting her son Boris Drubetskoy's career. This attention to the women characters was perhaps the influence of Tolstoy's own wife Sonia, who had a major role in the plot development, writing, and publication of War and Peace.

Tolstoy's great success lies in creating characters who are instantly recognizable, even by readers separated from early nineteenth century Russia by two hundred years. While they belong to the nobility, their striving is not uncommon. Natasha, the heroine, initially depicted as a spirited, if somewhat flighty young girl, ages and matures through the novel as circumstances and her own errors complicate her life.

The intelligent and ambitious Andrei Bolkonsky, whose wife dies in childbirth, is disillusioned by war and by his own life, after being injured in the battle of Austerlitz. He is revived by meeting Natasha and falling in love with her. During his absence, Natasha is swept off her feet by the sleazy Anatole Kuragin, and she breaks off her engagement with Andrei. Pierre Bezukhov, friend to Andrei and Natasha, informs her that Anatole is already married. Only much later is Natasha re-united with a dying Andrei.

Pierre is himself a complex character. Illegitimate son and fabulously wealthy heir, he struggles with his attempts to understand the meaning and purpose of his life. Maneuvred into a joyless marriage with Helene Kuragin, he joins the Freemasons, tries to make the lives of serfs easier, joins the army, and is taken prisoner. Ultimately, he finds wisdom in Platon Karatayev, a fellow prisoner and peasant. This is Tolstoy's tribute to the earthy wisdom of native Russians, as opposed to the sophisticated and convoluted thought of the French.

The version of War and Peace I read is a 2005 Penguin Classics translation by Anthony Briggs. The translation is remarkably easy to read. According to Briggs, the smooth flow of the writing is a characteristic of Tolstoy's Russian prose. The text is also accompanied by footnotes, appendices giving us a chapter-wise summary, brief explanations of the battles, schematic maps, and a dramatis personae. I have to confess that I have tended to look down upon such aids to the reader, but in this instance, found them extremely useful. In addition, there are two essays, one in the beginning by the historian Orlando Figes serving as an introduction and one at the end by the translator. I found Briggs' essay very interesting, since he carefully outlines and justifies his approach to translation. I had no quibbles with his thoughts on translation, but somehow I still found his choice of a British dialect to render nineteenth century colloquial Russian into English to be jarring.

Tolstoy himself was insistent that War and Peaceshould not be regarded as a novel, and perhaps he was right. Thedebate about whether certain works of literature fit into neatcategories or not is futile. I think it is easy to agree that War and Peace is a great work of literature. I have felt deeply enriched by reading it, and the fact that it can produce that feeling in a reader nearly one hundred and fifty years after it was written is a tribute to Tolstoy's genius.

The horrors of Sierra Leone

2009-02-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

Ishmael Beah's book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, recounts his experiences as a child soldier in Sierra Leone's civil war during the 1990s. He was twelve years old when the war engulfed him in 1993. He was away at a town called Mattru Jong with his brother and a few friends when his village was attacked by the rebel forces. Unable to return to his village, he was on the run for months. He had to eat whatever he could find in abandoned villages or rely on raw cassava and coconuts. When they reached occupied villages, he and his companions were often suspected of being killers, since both the rebels and the government troops were regularly recruiting children and turning them into killing machines. During those months, he endured horrors most of us can barely imagine. Beah saw a lot of the aftermath of rebel attacks, in addition to barely escaping them several times. Severed heads, hands chopped off, a baby shot while on her mother's back - these are some of the sights he chooses to mention. He keeps the descriptions to a minimum, but does not shy away from the blood, gore and horror.

After a few months and several providential escapes, Beah finally made it to a village called Yele, held at the time by government forces. A few days of calm resulted. Those days were short-lived, since the government soldiers in the town were battling rebels. Soon, Beah and other boys were conscripted. They were given automatic weapons and very rudimentary training. They were pressed into battle almost immediately. Having already endured sustained fear, violence and death, the boys were barely cognizant of what they were doing. As Beah describes it, they were further desensitized by watching Rambo movies and doses of drugs - "white tablets", marijuana, and "brown brown" (supposedly a mixture of cocaine and gunpowder). The result was that they turned into deadly killers. The description leaves little doubt that the boys had no choice - they would be dead if they hadn't become killers themselves.

After being a child soldier for about two years, Beah was turned over by his lieutenant to a UN program aiming to redeem children like him. What followed was a long and painful process of being weaned away from the violence and drugs. After almost one year, Beah's Uncle took him to live with him in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone. He interviewed for a trip to be a representative at a UN conference in New York. There, he met a sympathetic American lady named Laura Simms, who was to later become his foster mother when he emigrated to the US.

In May 1997, the war that Beah had left behind in the countryside came to Freetown. His Uncle died. Knowing that he could not take this any longer, in late 1997, he made his escape to Conakry, capital of the neighboring country of Guinea. His book ends there, but he made it to the US eventually. He finished high school and obtained a college degree. He is now a member of an advisory committee for children's rights for Human Rights Watch and regularly speaks out on issues concerning child soldiers.

In the book, Beah is able to present the horror of the civil war graphically, without making it appear dramatic. Nevertheless, the descriptions are revolting. Much to my surprise, I found that I was able to stomach the violent episodes more easily as I progressed further into the book. Either I was getting inured, or my mind was prepared for the shock, having encountered similar shocks earlier. Perhaps that mechanism reflects, in a small way, how people in the middle of it all managed to cope without losing their minds.

There is some controversy, raised by Australian journalists, about how autobiographical the book is. Beah has strenuously defended his account of events. This may not be unlike what happened with Rigoberta Menchu. To me, it is not terribly relevant that Beah may have incorporated the experiences of others into what he claims to be an account of his own life. The horror that he and others endured needs to be told as a story. News accounts, reports by the UN, and human rights groups have also done a great deal to document the horros of the civil war in Sierra Leone. Somehow, a personal narrative such as the one written by Ishmael Beah brings home the reality in a much more powerful way.

The civil war in Sierra Leone continued after Beah left the country in 1997. The capital Freetown experienced terrible atrocities in 1999. The war was symptomatic of the chaos of the post cold war decade, with all sorts of groups from around the world being involved. Among these were mining companies, diamond traders, mercenaries and weapons dealers. Indeed, the mercenaries and gunrunners were involved in other conflicts during the decade as well. The diamonds from Sierra Leone were used by the RUF rebels to buy weapons and supplies. In this, they were helped greatly by Charles Taylor of Liberia, who was a friend and sponsor of the RUF leader Foday Sankoh. For more than a decade, Taylor and Sankoh managed to make parts of West Africa a living hell for its people. Sankoh died before he could be tried and convicted, while Taylor is being tried by an international tribunal.

Sierra Leone's civil war ended in 2002, and the country has seen peace for the last few years. According to this report, Ishmael Beah managed to revisit Sierra Leone in 2006.

Understanding the financial crisis - Risky Assets

2008-11-15T11:36:00.000-08:00

In order to achieve returns, financial firms have to take risks. Over the last several years, securities firms and hedge funds have traded heavily in investments known as mortgage-backed securities. Let us try and understand how these instruments work.

Mortgages are familiar to people the world over. Buyers take a loan in order to buy a home and pledge the home as collateral. They also agree to make regular payments of interest and/or principal on the loan. If they fail to make payments, they are considered to be in default and the lender can repossess the home. Now look at this transaction from the point of view of the lender. A loan is an asset for a lender, because it yields periodic cash flows. Just as other assets can be bought and sold, loans can be bought and sold as well. The widespread availability of home loans in the US has been facilitated by the existence of an excellent secondary market for loans.

The secondary market in the US had its beginnings in the setting up of the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA or “Fannie Mae”), the Government National Mortgage Association (GNMA or “Ginnie Mae”), and the Federal Home Loan Corporation (“Freddie Mac”). These organizations have functioned quite well for decades, providing a secondary market for mortgage loans originated by banks and other depository institutions.

The secondary markets have worked well due to the securitization of loans. The concept of securitization is quite clever. A pool of mortgage loans is assembled and claims to the cash flows generated by the pool are sold. These claims, or securities, are like bonds: there is a promised interest paid on the principal amount. Buyers of these securities are protected from losses by guarantees provided by the agencies, Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. To understand the mechanism in some detail, let us borrow the following example from the Wikipedia article on Ginnie Mae:

For example, a mortgage lender may sign up 100 home mortgages in which each buyer agreed to pay a fixed interest rate of 6% for a 30-year term. The lender (who must be an approved issuer of GNMA certificates) obtains a guarantee from the GNMA and then sells the entire pool of mortgages to a bond dealer in the form of a "GNMA certificate". The bond dealer then sells GNMA mortgage-backed securities, paying 5.5% in this case, and backed by these mortgages, to investors. The original lender continues to collect payments from the home buyers, and forwards the money to a paying agent who pays the holders of the bonds. As these payments come in, the paying agent pays the principal which the home owners pay (or the amount that they are scheduled to pay, if some home owners fail to make the scheduled payment), and the 5.5% bond coupon payments to the investors. The difference between the 6% interest rate paid by the home owner and the 5.5% interest rate received by the investors consists of two components. Part of it is a guarantee fee (which GNMA gets) and part is a "servicing" fee, meaning a fee for collecting the monthly payments and dealing with the homeowner. If a home buyer defaults on payments, GNMA pays the bond coupon, as well as the scheduled principal payment each month, until the property is foreclosed. If (as is often the case) there is a shortfall (meaning a loss) after a foreclosure, GNMA still makes a full payment to the investor. If a home buyer prematurely pays off all or part of his loan, that portion of the bond is retired, or "called", the investor is paid accordingly, and no longer earns interest on that proportion of his bond.
The GNMA said in its 2003 annual report that over its history, it had guaranteed securities on the mortgages for over 30 million homes totaling over $2 trillion. It guaranteed $215.8 billion in these securities for the purchase or refinance of 2.4 million homes in 2003.

These arrangements, especially the guarantees provided by the agencies, allowed a vast market in mortgage-backed securities to develop. In fact, Fannie Mae guaranteed securities were bought even by foreign governments such as China.

Before loans could be packaged into pools and obtain a guarantee from the agencies such as Fannie Mae, they had to meet certain criteria set by the agencies. These were basically designed to limit potential defaults and ranged from a limit on loan size, a minimum credit score for the borrower, documentation of income, a maximum loan-to-property-value ratio etc. There were always some loans that did not meet the criteria laid down by the agencies. These loans were securitized by private companies. The resulting securities are known as non-agency or private-label mortgage-backed securities or as residential asset-backed securities. These securities are based on pools of loans which had

high loan amounts, such as the ones common in California (known as jumbo loans),
were issued to borrowers who had good credit scores, but did not meet other criteria such as verifiable steady income levels (known as Alt-A or Alternative-A loans),
were issued to borrowers who had low credit scores (“subprime” loans).

[In the US, creditworthiness for individuals is measured by a score which is calculated by consumer credit measuring companies. A “prime” borrower is generally one who has a credit score of 660 or higher and usually is able to borrow at the lowest prevailing interest rate at a given time. Hence the terminology of “subprime” borrowers and “subprime” mortgages].

Starting in the early years of this decade, interest rates in the US have been at historic lows. In 2003 and 2004, individuals with good credit scores could get home loans for an annual interest rate of about 4.5%. Since many buyers tend to look at home buying purely in terms of the affordability of monthly payments rather than in terms of the size of the loan, the low interest rates meant that they could get bigger loans and bid up the prices of the houses in the market. What followed was a remarkable real estate boom.

The boom was fuelled by the easy availability of credit, and it in turn justified further lending by the financial firms. Many people were able to obtain several loans in order to buy second and third homes as investments. Some of the most astounding loans made were the so-called “stated income” or the “no documentation” loans. This meant that in order to meet whatever minimal lending standards the lenders required, the borrower could invent any income level and claim any assets. This practice was rubber-stamped by mortgage brokers and lending institutions alike. Because securitization allowed lenders to offload loans, they had little incentive to make sure that good lending practices were being followed.

You might justifiably ask why the buyers of mortgage-backed securities were not insisting on stricter lending standards. One major factor was that non-agency securities (the ones based on pools of Alt-A or subprime loans) were given good ratings by credit-rating agencies such as S&P, Moody's and Fitch. This was in turn possible because the non-agency sponsor would provide credit enhancements or buy insurance to guarantee that the principal would be paid back. In other words, inherently risky investments were dressed up to look acceptable by referring to dubious guarantees.

This kind of game, if played by a few players at a low level, can go on for a while. However, when many firms start doing this, it sets up the system for a major failure.

Understanding the financial crisis - Leverage

2008-11-04T17:50:00.000-08:00

The financial crisis currently sweeping the United States and much of the world for more than a year now has claimed many innocent victims. Many people unconnected with the crisis have suffered losses of 40-50 % on their investments. The magnitude of the crisis can be judged from the fact that governments around the world have had to intervene with massive infusions of money, with the $700 billion intervention by the US leading the pack. Many financial institutions and agencies from around the world are tangled up in this mess. Among these are banks in the UK, continental Europe and Asia, sovereign wealth funds from the middle east, Singapore and Korea and governments with large foreign exchange reserves, such as China.

I have been frustrated by the reporting on this crisis, especially by the implication that the whole crisis is too complicated for anyone except the experts to understand. This I hold to be untrue. There is complexity, but most of it lies in the myriad linkages between participants in the world financial system. Part of it also arises from some unusually involved financial instruments. I believe however, that it is possible to get a pretty good grasp of the situation by abstracting those details. Thus, while you may not be able to predict which institution will fail next or which country will be jolted by the still evolving crisis, you should be able to understand why this crisis is taking place at all. Secondly, when you hear competing assertions about this one thing or that other thing being responsible for the problems, you can make your own judgements. Finally, you should be able to see the pros and cons of the proposed intervention schemes.

Leverage and its effects.
Let us first make up a model of how a financial firm works. Our firm starts with initial capital C. It then borrows money. Let us call the amount borrowed D, for debt. It then buys assets, worth A. Initially, C = A – D, or, owners' capital is the difference between assets and debt. After the initial stage, as the assets rise and fall in value, the difference between the assets and debt is referred to as owners' equity, E. So, in general, E = A – D. If the value of assets goes down enough, E can become zero or negative. If this happens, we say that the firm is insolvent. If, as in good times, the value of assets goes up, E can be greater than C, which means that the owners' equity has increased through profits.

All of this is simple enough. In fact, it applies to any entity, including households. What then is specific to financial firms ? Financial firms borrow a lot of money relative to their capital. This is known as leverage (or gearing). Leverage can be measured using A/E, or the assets-to-equity ratio. Leverage has the property of magnifying returns. For our model firm, the initial leverage is A/C. After some time passes, the assets appreciate or depreciate, yielding a percentage return (profit or loss) R. From the firm's point of view, its initial investment was C = A/L. The firm's return, therefore is

Leveraged return = (Amount of return)/(Initial investment)

= (R x A) / (A/L) = L x R

So, if the leverage ratio is 5, an asset value appreciation of 10% becomes a spectacular return of 50% on the firm's investment. The unfortunate part of this is that any losses are also magnified. Continuing with our example, a leverage ratio of 5 means that the initial capital is only a fifth (or 20%) of the initial value of the assets. If the assets fall in value by 20%, the firm becomes insolvent (the return is 5 x -20% or -100%). The creditors then take over the firm in order to try and recoup their money.

[My example of a leverage ratio of 5 is somewhat deliberate. This leverage is common in homebuying, where the buyer makes a 20% down payment. It is interesting to note that historically, real estate returns have been similar to stock returns. It is the leverage effect that makes homebuying such an enticing investment].

This simple principle of magnifying returns through leverage is employed by many financial entities, from banks to hedge funds. The difference lies in the kinds of assets they purchase and in how they borrow money. Commercial banks “borrow” by inviting deposits. Their assets (predominantly) consist of the loans they make to businesses, companies and individuals. The source of funds for insurance companies are policyholder premiums. Securities firms such as Bear Stearns or Lehman Brothers borrow from the capital markets by issuing securities of their own. Many hedge funds borrow from banks or from the established securities firms.

The creditors of a firm see equity capital as a cushion against losses and thus a buffer before their money is at risk. When the assets fall significantly in value, creditors demand that the firm raise additional capital or turn over its assets. If a firm is unable to raise capital, it files for bankruptcy in a court, seeking protection from creditors. Bankruptcy resolution takes a long time, and creditors inevitably lose a significant chunk of their money.

Banks and other financial institutions in the US have usually kept their leverage ratios at about 10. International standards usually specify a maximum leverage ratio for financial institutions of about 12. During the boom years, large securities firms in the US had much higher leverage ratios. In 2004, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which supervises these firms, approved a waiver for five large securities firms – Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns. They promptly took advantage of the waiver. Leverage ratios of 30 and more were not uncommon. At these levels of leverage, a fall in asset values of about 3 – 4 % makes a firm insolvent. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

Sacred Games: a review

2008-09-21T18:09:00.000-07:00

Sacred Games is Vikram Chandra's third work of fiction, published in early 2007. It is a large novel, both physically as well as in scope and ambition. Judging by its 900 pages, it doesn't appear that the author was slacking off during the seven years that it took him to complete it . The book is set in turn-of -the-century Bombay and has as its central characters a mafia don, Ganesh Gaitonde, and a police inspector, Sartaj Singh. The broad plot could be straight out of a thousand thrillers: a nuclear device is about to be set off in Bombay. The intention is to make it appear to be the handiwork of Muslims, in order to ensure all manner of mayhem. The don Gaitonde has unwittingly helped in the importation of nuclear material, but panics after realizing this. He builds a bunker in the middle of Bombay to try and survive the nuclear explosions. For some reason, he then commits suicide, but not before tipping off the police inspector to his presence there.

The book has the police procedural and popular detective fiction as its templates, but these are merely structural frames. Chandra's real skill is as a weaver of stories. Much of the book is devoted to the career of Ganesh Gaitonde, narrated in the first person: his rise from a small-time crook to a major don, his criminal exploits, his going international, his living on a yacht in Thailand, and his spiritual awakening and involvement with a guru. This narrative is interleaved with the present, where Sartaj Singh is involved in other police work. In addition, there are so-called “insets” in which Chandra brings in additional stories, of characters who impinge upon the lives of Gaitonde and Sartaj Singh. Here is where Chandra's remarkable skill as a teller of stories is revealed. In particular, his account of the traumas of Sartaj Singh's mother's family during the partition of India is very well done. This inset has little to do with the main plot, but adds immeasurably to the reader's experience. Indeed, this kind of loving attention is lavished upon almost all of the characters in the book. This is really what sets this book apart. Even if you are not particularly impressed with the detective work or titillated by the Pulp Fiction type of gangster narrative, you can soak in the warmth of knowing the characters intimately.

The characters themselves are swept up by circumstances beyond their control. While their stories begin very far apart from each other, they are eventually linked with each other. In one inset, we are told about K. D. Yadav, the intelligence operative, who kills two people involved in the Naxalite movement in the late 1960s or early 1970s somewhere in eastern India. In another inset very late in the book, the son of one of these people recruits a struggling but educated Muslim youth called Adil. After a career as a revolutionary, Adil becomes disillusioned and escapes to Bombay, where he organizes small robberies. We then realize that this ties up with an encounter described earlier in the book, where Sartaj Singh's partner, constable Katekar, is killed. Sartaj Singh has to report upon his progress in the Gaitonde suicide investigation to Anjali Mathur, K. D. Yadav's protege in the intelligence establishment. This is but one of the intricate connections in the book. This common literary conceit, of stories tied together, runs the risk of becoming too obvious and predictable. Chandra's success can be gauged by the fact that the reader never loses interest in the characters or their stories. His dexterity at tying the various strands together is remarkable – the metaphor of a delicately woven carpet comes to mind.

While Mumbai is the setting for much of the action in the book, this novel is not about the city. Nevertheless, it does capture much of the ambience and the lingo, down to the mandatory cussing in Hindi. As far as the cussing goes (and it does go quite far), one does not expect any less in a gangsters-and-policemen saga. I do think though that Chandra's experiment integrating Hindi cuss-words with English is largely successful. The words are not italicised, some of them are used in their verb forms, and the glossary at the end, while reasonable, is not exhaustive. Judging by reader reactions on Amazon.com, this does not seem to be much of a stumbling block for people unfamiliar with Hindi or with the Mumbai variant of it.

Although the tale is told from several perspectives, Chandra is quite sympathetic to the enforcers of the law, be they lowly constables and police inspectors or the cloak-and-dagger types from RAW or IB, India's spy agencies. The regular violence and the petty and middling corruption of the police are depicted in a very matter-of-fact manner. Yet, the policemen turn out to be quite competent, street smart, and on the whole, good guys. The intelligence agencies are shown to be on top of everything. These are the parts that strain credulity, but do not detract much from the book. As with most fiction, we have to allow the author his or her premises, and watch what he or she builds from them. Vikram Chandra builds a very readable novel, but what stays with the reader long after the lurid details are forgotten, are the embedded nuggets of the smaller stories.

Prejudice in Pennsylvania

2008-09-11T20:35:00.000-07:00

Today, while driving home from the train station, I heard a segment on the radio that was interesting to begin with, but ended up being deeply disturbing. The segment was from All Things Considered, a tolerable evening program from NPR. The segment aimed to investigate race consciousness in the upcoming US presidential election. For this, they assembled a set of potential voters in the town of York, Pennsylvania. Of the thirteen people, seven were whites. The voters discussed the race of the candidates, denying that it had anything to do with who they were going to vote for. A tally at the end showed that a mjaority of the white voters were planning to vote for McCain and that all the non-white voters (Blacks and Latinos) were going to vote for Obama.

I will let the transcript tell its own tale:

Leah Moreland, a widow and former factory worker, says she grew up on a farm and was very sheltered.

"I really was totally unaware of prejudice," Moreland says.

...............................................................................................

Leah Moreland, the woman who said she grew up sheltered from prejudice, plans to vote for McCain. Party loyalty is also part of her decision. But her cultural compass also comes into play. She says her gut tells her not to trust Obama.

"I look at Obama, and I have a question in my mind," she says. "Years ago, was he taken into the Muslim faith? And my concern is the only way you are no longer a Muslim is if you are dead, killed. So in my mind, he's still alive."

Although Barack Obama has said repeatedly he is not a Muslim and has never been a Muslim, Moreland is still unconvinced.

"There is something about him I don't trust," she says. "I don't care how good a speaker he is, I just can't trust him."

It staggers my mind that in such an ostensibly enlightened discussion about prejudice against Blacks, prejudice against Muslims is accepted so easily. Cultural compass indeed.

Small thrills

2008-02-27T20:13:00.000-08:00

As I grow older, I seem to get an unusual kick out of small discoveries - something I remember from my childhood. Maybe it is because I have become cynical about grand insights and world-changing ideas.

Many years ago, I had heard this song, from the Hindi film Ek Musafir Ek Hasina. The song is unremarkable, except for this refrain in Asha Bhonsle's voice:

zaban-e-yaar man turki, man turki namidanum

I never knew what it meant. It was clearly in some foreign language, but it nevertheless stuck in my head. Recently, I was reading a book about the history and culture of the Mughals by Annemarie Schimmel. Imagine my delight when I read that the strange sounding line was a lament first penned by Amir Khusro, the great poet, musician and scholar who lived from 1253 to 1325 CE. He lived during the first century of Turkic rule in Delhi and its environs. Though his ancestors were of Turkic origin, he himself was unfamiliar with the Turkish language as it was spoken by the Turks in India at that time. He wrote this line in Persian, the literary language of northern India from the thirteenth through the eighteenth century. Translated, I believe it means:

The tongue of my friend is Turkish, but I know no Turkish.

I have no idea why Shewan Rizvi, the lyricist, included this line in the Hindi film song. It has absolutely no connection that I can fathom with the rest of the song.

So, Amir Khusro wrote the line sometime in the 13th or early 14th century, Rizvi incorporated it into a ditty in 1962, I heard it for the first time in the 1980s, and finally discovered the meaning in 2008. Thanks to the internet, you can listen to the song (the audio is not great), read the lyrics, and speculate on the beauty of it all.

Just not cricket

2008-01-22T20:17:00.000-08:00

In a recent cricket match played between India and Australia in Sydney, the Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh was accused of hurling a racist insult at Andrew Symonds, an Australian player who, I learnt recently, is of Caribbean descent. Symonds had been the subject of insulting taunts and gestures by some spectators in the stadiums of India where the Australian team had toured a few months ago. On January 4, 2008, in the middle of a tense game situation in Sydney, there was an exchange between Symonds and Harbhajan, after which Symonds accused Harbhajan of calling him a 'monkey'. This was backed up by two of his Australian team-mates, Matthew Hayden and Michael Clarke. Harbhajan Singh denied using any racist insults. The two umpires did not hear anything and the microphones attached to the stumps did not pick up the insult either. Harbhajan's batting partner and cricketing legend Sachin Tendulkar also said later that Harbhajan had not used any racist language. The matter was reported to the umpires, who eventually brought it to the attention of the off-field match referee. A hearing was held by the referee after the match was over; he found Harbhajan guilty as accused and handed out a three-match ban.

The ban unleashed a furore in India. The TV channels were outraged. Predictably, a few effigies were burnt for the benefit of the cameras. Websites were flooded with the outbursts of Indian cricket fans. Everybody and his uncle weighed in on the matter. The Indian cricket board, by far the wealthiest and most influential of such boards in the cricket playing countries, made threatening noises about calling off the tour if the ban were not lifted. An appeals process exists in cases such as these, so an appeal was filed. The international body that manages cricket, the International Cricket Council (ICC), decided to postpone the appeal hearing till the end of the month in order to salvage the two remaining matches in the test series. On Tuesday, January 29th, the appeal was heard by a commissioner of the ICC who also happens to be a judge from New Zealand. He found that the charge was not proven. Harbhajan was however convicted of a lesser charge of using abusive language.

This bare summary hardly does justice to the story. In order to get a fuller picture, we have to recall some background. Cricket is played extensively in very few countries - all of whom were formerly part of the British empire. Introduced by the British into the colonies of the empire, it was initially meant for and played by the elites. From the start of the 20th century, international games were run by the English and the Australians via a body called the ICC - the Imperial Cricket Conference. An Indian team, usually captained by a maharaja, started playing international games in 1932. After the departure of the British, cricket steadily gained popularity in the countries of the subcontinent. Pakistan started playing international cricket soon after 1947, Sri Lanka did so in the 1980s, as did Bangladesh in the 1990s.

The way that the game is played in India has no resemblance to the genteel version of it imagined fondly by the Victorians who played it and built up its mythology and cliches - cricket was 'a gentleman's game'; whatever was not fair was 'just not cricket'. Today, the game is played by large numbers of people in the streets of the subcontinent, most often with barely any equipment save for a bat and a ball and with scant regard for obscure rules, leave alone codes of behavior. Television has taken cricket to rural India as well. The game is easily understood, does not require great athleticism, and captivates people thanks to the many fluctuations in fortune during a typical game. In addition, since international contests are between national teams, there is a great deal of nationalist pride and posturing involved - India-Pakistan games during the 1980s and 1990s were more or less treated as wars by other means. All of this has led the sociologist Ashis Nandy to remark only half-jocularly that cricket is an Indian game accidentally invented by the British.

In the last couple of decades or so, fuelled by the television revolution in India, cricket has meant big money. Players for the national cricket team sign lucrative advertising contracts and become stars in the process. Their record of successes in the game is mixed at best, but the celebrity-obsession of the 24-hour TV channels and most of the print media ensures that they are never out of the limelight. The Indian cricket team also carries the misplaced burden of national pride with it. This has been toned down a little bit in the last year or two, but the players do risk their effigies being burnt or their houses being attacked if they lose particularly badly.

The rivalry between the Indian and Australian teams has been quite intense for the last several years. While the Indian team has many talented players, Australia has quite clearly been the best team in the world for many years. During the last decade, it has won the 1999, 2003 and 2007 world cup one-day cricket championships and has twice had long strings of victories (16 matches in a row) in the five-day version of the game. Yet, India has challenged this supremacy several times. The two long victory strings were broken by India. India was the losing finalist in the 2003 world cup. In 2007, India won the world championship in Twenty20 cricket - the newest, most exciting, and shortest form of the game. It beat Australia in the semi-finals.

A tour of India by Australia in September-October 2007 saw a lot of bitterness. Verbal clashes between players on the field were magnified by the ugly behavior of spectators. Australia won the series of one-day games easily, but lost the only Twenty20 encounter, allowing India to claim that their victory in the world cup clash was not a fluke. It was during the course of this series that Symonds was called a monkey by some spectators. At first, the Indian board denied that such a thing could happen, but upon being confronted with photographic evidence from an enterprising Aussie journalist, belatedly issued condemnations and asked authorities to prosecute the culprits.

The Australian team is notorious in cricketing circles for being utterly and completely obnoxious - several years ago, they elevated the dubious practice of 'sledging' to a regular feature of their game. Sledging refers to insults, abuse and harangues directed by a team's players against an opposing team's player on the field. This is supposed to unsettle the opponent and get him out - and it very often does. Over the years, other teams have also adopted this practice, leading to a great deal of unpleasantness. In the last year or so, some of the Indian cricketers are dishing it out just as well as they are receiving it - in fact, perhaps way more than necessary. Harbhajan Singh is one of them. In October 2007, after the bitter series with India, the Australian captain was surprised by this new found aggression among the Indians, whom he called "fairly passive sort of people".

All of this helps us understand why the reaction in India to one of their players being labeled a racist is so strong. The reaction that I see on the web, in user comments on Cricinfo (an encyclopedic cricket website) and, to take one example, on the Guardian's website, makes for interesting reading after you eliminate the obviously idiotic comments. I think that much of the difference in opinions comes from being unable to recognize that several things are simultaneously true:

Protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, Indians can be quite racist.

Just like any group of people, Indians are capable of enormous amounts of prejudice - on the basis of religion, caste, language, appearance, skin color and nationality. At one extreme, the horrendous mob violence unleashed against minorities every now and then in India is the ugliest manifestation of prejudice. At the other, on a relatively more harmless scale, is the preference for 'fair' skin and 'fairness' creams.

The in-built prejudice is strong and does not evaporate with exposure to greater numbers of people of diverse appearance - I have met many Indians in the US who use the terms kallu for black people and chinku for Asian-Americans.

Of course, this does not mean that all Indians are racists or that Harbhajan is a racist. On the contrary, I think that most Indians are actually very comfortable with differences and actually seek out and love diversity. And many of them are militantly anti-racist. Nevertheless, the point is that just because we are brown-skinned, or that a fair number of Indians are themselves dark-skinned, or that we have a legacy of fighting against colonialism/racism- does not mean that we are immune as a group to racism.

Australian cricket players have been obnoxious for many years.

A famous incident from 5 years ago, involving the now-retired Glenn McGrath sledging Ramnaresh Sarwan of the West Indies, showed that on-field provocation could spiral out of control. Cricket folk lore has added dialogue to the incident which remains unconfirmed, but is probably not far from the truth. Curiously, there was considerable support for McGrath in Australia, despite the fact that he started the whole thing with what was a patently offensive remark - even the Aussie Prime Minister jumped in to defend McGrath.

And just a few months before that, Australia's very own Darren Lehmann became the first player to be suspended for 5 games for a racist outburst in which he reportedly called Sri Lanka's players "black c***s".

The word 'monkey' may not be very offensive in India but carries strong racist overtones in the English speaking world.

It is true, as many Indians have pointed out, that Indians often call their kids 'little monkey' fondly. In addition, Michael Holding, the great bowler of the 1980s and of Caribbean origin like Andrew Symonds, was quite dismissive of the term being racist. This means that context and intent are critical when deciding if something is racist. Nevertheless, I suspect that Harbhajan was aware that calling someone a 'monkey' was racially offensive - it had already caused controversy earlier. Also, he is familiar enough with English (as this interview shows) to have realized that.
Even though context and intent are critical, the Indian team's counter-complaint against Brad Hogg (later withdrawn) calling them 'bastards' seems a bit disingenuous to me. Among the English-speaking urban crowd in India, from which a majority of its cricket players are still drawn, 'bastard' is used frequently. I remember it being used more or less as a filler among students when I was in college. On the other hand though, you could easily get roundly thrashed for calling someone 'harami' in Hindi.

There is one likely explanation that reconciles different versions of the event.

Harbhajan Singh may very likely have said 'Teri Maan ki ****' - a common, though harsh, gaali (abusive phrase) in northern India, not unlike the 'Tu Madre' in Spanish. This could easily have been misheard by the Australians as 'monkey'. This is one explanation that squares with all the available evidence - nothing caught on the mikes, nothing heard by the umpires, the strong accusations of the Australians, and the vehement denials by Harbhajan. It is apparently also the version of events given by Sachin Tendulkar in the appeal hearing.

This swearing in Hindi and/or Punjabi is not uncommon on the cricket field - especially in India-Pakistan games. The generously provided voice-over for a video of this clash between Gautam Gambhir of India and Shahid Afridi of Pakistan may have been imagined, but is very close to the truth, as the lip movements synchronize perfectly with very well-known gaalis in India and Pakistan.

The end result is that the Australian team and public are utterly convinced that Harbhajan did call Symonds a 'monkey' and then got away with a rap on the knuckles, thanks to the financial muscle of the Indian cricket board and the small-mindedness of the ICC and Australian boards. Most Indians are equally convinced that Harbhajan is being victimised, and is at most guilty of abuse under provocation. Adding to their sense of injustice is the fact that at the first hearing, the burden of proof was not demanded of the Australians by Mike Procter, a white, former South African player, who has generally been harsh on subcontinental players and lenient with Australians.

What Harbhajan said to Symonds on that day will perhaps remain a mystery, but I am intrigued by how slippery the truth can be. Faced with imperfect knowledge, we imagine what must have happened. This imagination is overwhelmingly based on cultural steroetypes, our experiences in life and our perceptions of the people involved.

The Pakistan puzzle

2007-10-19T14:10:00.000-07:00

On August 14th this year, Pakistan completed 60 years as an independent country. In these 60 years, the state of Pakistan has endured, but doubts about it still persist - it has been called a failed state and a rogue state. For its own people, the state has done precious little. Small groups of individuals, however, have enriched themselves. Constitutional democracy has yet to find a foothold in Pakistan. Indeed, the constitution itself has not found a foothold yet. The Pakistani state has fomented and supported insurgencies and terrorism, both of which now pose serious dangers to Pakistani society. Its rulers have flirted with Islamic fundamentalism to various degrees, with the ill effects on society becoming increasingly obvious in recent years.

Is Pakistan really a failed state ? In what form do Pakistan's failures manifest themselves ? What are the reasons for these failures ? What are the possible remedies ? What are the criteria for defining the failure of states?

While thinking about these issues, it struck me that it is far more interesting to analyze the politics of third world countries than it is to think about the historical provenance of liberal Western democracies. In third world countries, external manifestations of democracy such as elections are prominently visible. Political power though, is unevenly distributed. Rhetorical tributes to democracy are frequent. The structure of government looks like that of modern Western nations on paper but reality is quite different. Pakistan offers a good case study.

Take for example the separation of powers between the three branches of government so dear to Western political theory. In Pakistan, there are four branches of government:

The executive: the President (quite often) , the Prime minister (some times), or the Chief Martial Law Administrator (several times)
The Army
The Judiciary
The Legislature

No matter what the current constitution says, this is the reality. Secondly, the powers are not always separated. The chief of the army has been the president several times. When the president or the prime minister is not from the army, he or she survives on the sufferance of the army. Thirdly, there are no checks and balances, since the legislature and the judiciary have proved to be rubber stamps for most of Pakistan's history - with the recent notable exception of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry.

Pakistan's politicians come from its land-owning elites (the Bhutto family) or its business classes (the Sharif clan). Their privileged background has unfortunately proved to be no guarantee against venality. Benazir ('the incomparable') is rumored to have stashed away more than a billion dollars in foreign bank accounts.

Pakistan has had long stretches of military rule, during 1958-71 under Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan, from 1977 to 1988 under Zia ul-Haq and from 1999 until now under Pervez Musharraf. While all of these generals are clearly guilty of cornering all political power, they don't fit the standard stereotypes of despotic dictators. Under Ayub and Yahya Khan, while life may not have been a bed of roses, large scale tyranny was not the norm. Under Musharraf, the press has considerable freedom, with TV channels such as Geo TV being allowed almost as much freedom as the media enjoy in Western countries. In fact, this very freedom might ultimately prove to be Musharraf's undoing.

The prospects for Pakistan's emergence as the secular state imagined by Jinnah were dealt a catastrophic blow under Zia ul-haq. Under his rule, the Pakistani state took a clear turn towards Islamic fundamentalism. Zia had already introduced medieval punishments (such as the chopping of hands for theft) in Pakistan by late 1978, before the Iranian revolution brought Ayatollah Khomeini and Sharia-based law to the world's attention. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the US decided to fight a proxy war. The recruits for this war were fundamentalist muslims, recruited from the madrasas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Saudis contributed generously to the founding and upkeep of the madrasas. The Americans provided the money for the weapons, to the tune of several billions of dollars. The money was funneled through the Pakistani intelligence agency, the ISI (Inter Services Intelligence). Some of the weapons and money were also used to fund deadly insurgencies in India - in Punjab in the early 1980s and in Kashmir in the later part of the decade.

Recently, the the judiciary in Pakistan has asserted itself against Musharraf. Musharraf's attempted dismissal of the Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry failed spectacularly. Chaudhry was reinstated by a panel of judges after months of public protest in many cities by lawyers. This protest was unusual and led many optimistic commentators to believe that civil society was finally confronting military rule. The reinstated Chaudhry is reversing the Musharraf regime's decisions with a vengeance. First, Javed Hashmi, an opposition leader who was arrested in 2003 for criticising the military was released. Hashmi's appeal against his detention had been rejected just a few months ago by a bench headed by Chaudhry. But that was before Chaudhry had been dismissed and reinstated. Since his reinstatement, Chaudhry has rediscovered judicial wisdom. Or maybe he is just getting back at Musharraf.

The court moved with lightning speed to let Nawaz Sharif, the ex-prime minister who was deposed by Musharraf and exiled to Saudi Arabia, return to Pakistan. Nevertheless, Sharif was sent back to Saudi Arabia upon landing at Lahore, amid high drama for a few hours. The whole idea of exile to Saudi Arabia has fascinating historical parallels: pre-modern Muslim rulers of the subcontinent often banished troublemakers to Arabia, with the offender being forced to proclaim that he was performing the religious duty of the Haj.

Meanwhile, there have been persistent rumors of an understanding between Benazir Bhutto and Musharraf. Benazir is believed to have told Musharraf that he cannot be president and army chief simultaneously and that he should give up the army chief's post. This would seem to be a deal-breaker. If you want to hang on to power in Pakistan, the last thing you would do is abandon the army.

Musharraf is under considerable pressure, no doubt. He contemplated imposing an emergency and suspending constitutional rights and the elections, but backed off. A couple of weeks ago, Musharraf passed an ordinance granting Benazir amnesty from corruption charges and got himself elected president by a pliant parliament. In what is a surprising move, he is promising to resign from the army chief's post, if his election as the president is not invalidated by the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, he did reshuffle the army top brass in anticipation of having to resign as army chief.

If past history in Pakistan is any guide, many scenarios are possible from this point onwards, starting with legitimate elections and a civilian government, a clampdown and emergency rule by Musharraf, a coup by disaffected elements in the military or some compromise between Musharraf and Benazir.

Whatever the outcome of these moves and countermoves, the Western world need not worry. Pakistan's military calls the shots with regard to all aspects of the state and while the basic players may change, it is the institution of the military that persists. And the military knows which side of its bread is buttered. Having been addicted to the millions of dollars in US aid and arms for years, the Pakistani military is unlikely to let anything contrary to US interests happen in Pakistan.

The drama continues, with tragedy being added to political farce. Yesterday, Benazir made a triumphant return to Karachi, only to witness the deaths of over a hundred people when bombs went off in her procession.

Death of a Colonel

2007-08-04T22:40:00.000-07:00

Col. Vasanth V, commanding officer of the 9th Maratha light infantry battalion, died on Tuesday, July 31st. He was injured while battling a group of militants who were trying to cross the India-Pakistan Line of Control (LOC) in the Uri sector in Kashmir.

I had met Col. Vasanth briefly in 1991 when I was on vacation in India. He was a soft-spoken man with a good sense of humor. He had surprised me with his knowledge of obscure things by asking whether the culture of the Cajuns in Louisiana was still alive. I hadn't known about the Cajuns before coming to the US, and hadn't expected that someone in India would know about them. So I naturally asked him how he even knew of their existence. Though he couldn't recall exactly where he had read about them, he brushed off my surprise by saying "We used to read a lot of things, including the newspaper the samosas came wrapped in"! I could immediately sense a kindred soul, having been book and library-starved during my childhood. For some reason, that moment of resonance came back to me today, when I heard about his death.

I have often wondered if the chaos of the world of political violence, either within countries or between them, is going to affect me directly. There are so many conflicts in the world that I must count myself incredibly fortunate never to have come within sniffing distance of any. This time though, the violence has come quite close. Col. Vasanth and I had only one degree of separation. He was a long-time colleague and a good friend of my brother.

I wonder if the planners of violence like the generals and spy agencies pursuing "strategic depth" or "balance of power" ever pause to think of the misery they are inflicting upon people. Scratch that. It is quite obvious that they don't. For them, the jihadi groups are pawns in a broader chess game.

We read of the deaths of people in the news reports so often. Yet, when a person we know dies, we are forced to pause and reflect on the tragedy. Our own sorrows, frustrations and hassles start looking trivial by comparison. A death you reflect upon forces you to evaluate life again.

The tragedy of the Congo

2007-07-09T01:02:00.000-07:00

The history of European colonialism is replete with examples of extreme cruelty. The decimation of the American Indians in South America and the United States is but one example. What was done to the natives of Africa is no less barbarous. The British, the French and the Germans were all guilty of slaughtering native populations. Among the less well-known examples is what the Belgians and their King did to the people who lived in the Congo river basin.

Adam Hochschild wrote a book in 1999 describing the rape of the Congo. King Leopold's Ghost is his attempt to document the atrocities of Belgian rule over the Congo, starting from about 1875 to 1908. Among other things, the book is a remarkable account of the chicanery of Belgium's monarch. However, its most disturbing aspects are the stark descriptions of the inhuman brutality of European rule. It is also startling in its revelation of the magnitude of the inhumanity - Hochschild estimates that nearly 10 million people died due to unnatural causes during the period ranging from the 1880s to about 1920. The Congo basically underwent a holocaust in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century.

It all started with European penetration of the interior of Africa through the famous geographical expeditions of Livingstone and others. The crowning glory of these expeditions was Henry Morton Stanley's charting the course of the Congo. Leopold II, the constitutional monarch of the small country of Belgium, was desperate for a colony. He found the ideal opportunity in the Congo. He swindled the Europeans into believing that he was merely heading an International Africa Association with philanthropic aims, among which were the laudable ones of bringing civilization and Christianity to the natives - aims that no one in Europe could find fault with.

With Stanley acting as his agent, Leopold convinced European nations into accepting the "Congo Free State" as being a territory under his control. The European powers were more interested in carving up Africa than in ensuring legitimate government in the Congo. There was, in fact, no government to speak of. Leopold's soldiers, known as the Force Publique, unleashed a regime of extreme brutality. From the very beginning, forced labor was the order of the day, with the Congolese being led in gangs with chains around their necks. Brutal whippings with a hippopotamus-hide whip called the chicotte were commonplace. Any resistance was met with the full force of European weaponry, with entire villages being burnt down for minor offenses.

Leopold's goal was to exploit the Congo's natural wealth as much as possible. First, it was ivory. Then when the demand for rubber exploded in the 1890s, the Force Publique wreaked havoc. Villagers were assigned fixed quotas of rubber, to be collected from vines growing in the wild. Punishments for failing to meet one's quota were severe. In addition to the whipping, killing of children and rape were also used to terrorize the population. It was during this time that the innovation of chopping off hands began to be used widely. The casual, inhuman brutality was sustained by a monetary incentive. Leopold's soldiers were paid commissions by the pound for the rubber collected.

The world was not entirely unaware of what was going on. Missionaries, among them African Americans like George Washington Williams, began writing about the barbarism starting in the 1890s. Unfortunately, this had no effect until the early years of the twentieth century, when E. D. Morel and Roger Casement in Britain highlighted the continuing cruelty in the Congo in a campaign that lasted several years. Finally, in 1908, the Belgian government took over the colony from Leopold. By that time rubber from plantations in Asia was plentiful and the easily available wild rubber in the Congo was nearly exhausted. Nevertheless, Belgian rule in the Congo lasted until 1960.

Hochschild's book is a remarkable piece of investigative journalism and narrative history. There is still a strong desire in Belgium to suppress this history. Given the lack of historical material from the Congolese side, Belgium has had a monopoly on the history of the Congo Free State. Despite that monopoly, Hochschild's book is destined to become the preeminent history of Belgium's depredations in Africa.

Unfortunately, the tragedy of the Congo has continued into our times. After independence from Belgium in 1960, the country has not known much peace or development. The nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba, a target of the CIA due to his "mad dog" ideas of wanting to use the country's resources for its people, was assassinated in early 1961 after being deposed in a coup. The coup leader, Joseph Mobutu, became president in 1965. Propped by the US as an anti-communist dictator, he renamed the country Zaire, stole several billions of dollars over the years and survived into the 1990s. In 1997, Mobutu fled from the Congo, to be replaced by the rebel leader Laurent Kabila. Kabila had sought assistance from Rwanda and Uganda to oust Mobutu, who agreed to help with the ostensible motive of breaking up the Hutu militias that had assembled in the Congo after the Rwandan genocide of 1994. After becoming president, Kabila tried to get rid of the Rwandan and Ugandan troops, but they refused to leave, having become addicted to the gold, diamonds and coltan. Kabila then enrolled Angola, Namibia and Zimbabwe on his side, leading to a multinational war.

Laurent Kabila was assassinated in 2001 and was succeeded by his son Joseph. Joseph Kabila entered into a set of partially successful peace agreements, including one in 2003 that seems to have held. The neighbors' interest in the country has also declined along with the price of coltan. Most foreign troops seem to have withdrawn substantially, though Rwandan troops were reported in the eastern provinces in 2005 as well. There are estimates that about 4 million people died as a result of the conflict.

While the intensity of conflict has diminished somewhat since the 2003 peace agreement , there still are several well-armed militias in operation in the country, so the outbreak of wider war and conflict is always a distinct possibility. The cruelties perpetrated by the militias are beyond belief. As this stomach-churning account reveals, the mineral wealth of the country has been the main motivation for many of the sponsors of the fighting.

"Continue reading" in Blogger

2007-07-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

It is pretty amazing that Blogger doesn't have this as a feature yet. You can find various solutions on the web, all of them involving mucking around with HTML.
I have found one solution that works with what is known as a "classic template". Your mileage, as usual with all such things, will vary.

Infrequent posting

2007-07-01T09:46:00.000-07:00

For the last month or so, my blogging has been more infrequent than usual, which wasn't very frequent to begin with. Part of it was that I was a bit busy. The major reason though is that I have a new gig in a group blog. The group blog is run by my friend Shunya, though he has now given up his nom de plume and blogs under his real name.

The group blog has a fairly interesting set of contributors, so I invite you to check it out. I haven't decided what I will be doing with this one, but it is most likely that I will be cross-posting on both blogs.

Oil: a story in numbers and pictures

2007-05-11T20:06:00.000-07:00

Price I paid at the pump for Regular Unleaded: $ 3.62 / gallon.

Oil company profits (sources: Reuters and firm financial reports):

	$, billion
Company	2006	2005	2004	2003	2002
Exxon	39.5	36.13	25.33	20.96	11.01
Chevron	17.138	14.099	13.328	7.23	1.132
Conoco Phillips	15.55	13.529	8.129	4.735	0.698
BP	22.29	22.63	17.26	12.62	6.87
Royal Dutch Shell	26.31	26.26	18.18	12.31	9.66

The price of crude oil over the last 20+ years:

Who's got the stuff:

Who consumes it the most:

Region/Country	2004 Consumption (million barrels per day)
United States	20.7
Europe	16.2
China	6.4
Middle East	5.6
Central & South America	5.3
Japan	5.3
Eurasia	4.0
Africa	2.8
Russia	2.8
Germany	2.7
India	2.4
Canada	2.3
Korea, South	2.2
Brazil	2.1
France	2.0
Mexico	2.0

Military bases of the largest consumer, in the region which has most of the stuff:

Maximum Bombay

2007-04-15T18:59:00.000-07:00

Before I came to the US in 1989, I had been to Bombay only once, for four days. It rained the whole time. Buckets of water poured down in sheets. I was marooned on the IIT campus where I was staying. The only sights I saw were the campus buildings and those visible from the local train that took me to and from Dadar railway station. The much-celebrated city of dreams was a stranger to me when I was living in India.

I have visited Bombay several times since then, staying for a week or ten days in New Bombay, where residents repeatedly tell you that it's much cleaner than Bombay. I took the local train to VT from the Vashi railway station on the harbour line several times. In the 1990s, the Vashi railway station, quite amazingly for an Indian railway station, used to be spotlessly clean. From there, the cleanliness went downhill on the one hour ride to VT. You couldn't avoid the horrors of Bombay even if you wanted to. About half way to VT, the slums begin to appear. For kilometers on end, shanties line the tracks. The rudimentary dwellings of mud, brick, tin and tarpaulin are barely a few yards away from the rushing trains. Mounds of garbage and open drains abound. The extent of the slums, the number of people who live there and the dire living conditions are overwhelming. There is no alternative but to block it out of your mind.

I have been wary of the common stereotypes of slums, poverty and ugliness tagged on to the cities of India (and the rest of the country by extension). I used to live in the middle of the country, away from the cities, in a government-built township for employees of a public sector firm. While living in India, I had rarely encountered the dire poverty and sheer ugliness of the cities that travel writers described. Unfortunately, my visits to Bombay in the 1990s convinced me that there wasn't much exaggeration in these accounts.

And then there is the other Bombay. A city of wealth. A city of glamour. A city of gangsters. People in the rest of India read about the outrageous lifestyles of the rich and the beautiful. With awe and fascination, they hear about the exploits of the dons of the underworld. Back in the 1980s, the now defunct Illustrated Weekly of India featured regular reports on the dons - I recall in particular a picture of Varadarajan Mudaliar, a somewhat unlikely Tamil don, gazing out to sea.

Suketu Mehta's Maximum City is an attempt to record and capture many of these aspects of the city. His book is unlike any other book featuring Bombay. It is not a work of fiction, but many parts of it are far more fascinating than fiction. It has been described as a travel narrative, but Mehta does not travel much. In as much as a city can be said to possess a character, Mehta exposes it. And what he exposes is not pretty.

The book is peopled by a diverse cast of characters - along with the vicious murderers and political goons are gangsters and brutal cops, bar-room dancers, movie stars and directors. You have to keep telling yourself that all of this is real. Mehta spends a considerable amount of time with each of these people and soon we get to know them as well as it is possible to know any literary character. Many of these people are despicable. Others, like the bar-room dancer, are not wholly admirable either. Even someone Mehta paints with some sympathy, like the police commissioner Ajay Lal, comes across as a tyrant who lets his underlings do the dirty work for him. There is hope, however, in the form of the naive teenage runaway from Bihar, an aspiring poet with a delicate sensibility.

What is remarkable in all of this is Mehta's ability to report things without pronouncing judgement. His powers of observation are acute, but he lets his characters do all the talking. But because he chooses what to write about and what to tell us, his voice is unmistakably present throughout. Mehta's stupendous achievement is thus ultimately journalistic. He shows us aspects of life and human behavior that we suspected all along did exist, but had no means of knowing anything about.

Most of the book is set in the late 1990s. It seems to have been in production for many years, finally being published in 2004. I remember having read an early excerpt in Granta back in 1997, in which he described a Shiv Sena goon's account of burning another human being alive. This is perhaps the most ghastly thing you will encounter in the book, but other depravities come close.

Maximum City is a truly Dickensian book. It is unlikely to be surpassed as a picture of late 20th-century Bombay.

La Bataille d'Alger

2007-04-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

The Pentagon, demonstrating unusual prescience, screened this movie for its educational value in August 2003 for Americans about to descend into a morass of insurgency, counterinsurgency and civil war in Iraq. The historical parallel between Iraq today and Algeria in the 1950s is far from perfect, but a Western occupying power in a third world country facing violent uprisings was not all that uncommon in the 20th century. It is an enduring tragedy that Western powers continue to delude themselves about occupations.

The Battle of Algiers is a captivating film due to its historical authenticity. It is based on a book by a member of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), who also acted in the film. [The FLN, in its pre-independence role, was a revolutionary organization fighting the French during the Algerian war of independence from 1954-1962.]

The movie is fair in the sense that it depicts violence both by the insurgents as well as the French, though it seemed clear to me that the sympathies of the script are with the Algerians. The characters are well-etched, despite the shortness of the film. On the Algerian side, there is the organizer of the insurgency Jafar, the common criminal turned revolutionary Ali La Pointe, and the ideologue Ben M'Hidi explaining the goals of terrorism. The French response to the insurgency is articulated through the character of Colonel Mathieu. The scenes of his press conferences for the Parisian press are striking - especially when he tells them that the success of the counterinsurgency depends on the support of the press and the public back in France.

The film is black and white, in conforming to the film-making canon that this somehow makes the narrative more authentic. I first encountered this belief when Schindler's List was released, but I have found it difficult to agree with it. My argument is simply that reality happens in color, so a film aiming to be realistic ought to use color.

In terms of technique, the quality of the film-making is quite good. The performances are controlled, the violence is no more gory than necessary, and the melodrama is kept to a minimum. The film has a very sure-footed script and screenplay and the viewer's interest does not flag.

There are a couple of scenes of torture. The extent of the torture was probably underreported at the time and is consequently underplayed in the film. Despite this, in keeping with the great traditions of Western culture and support for free speech, this movie was banned in France for five years and had its torture scenes deleted before being released in Britain and in the US.

The French have only recently begun to acknowledge some of what went on during the Algerian war of independence. Unfortunately, the Algerians have not covered themselves in glory, either during the war of independence, or in the massacres of collaborators after it, or during the ensuing power struggles, or during the civil war of the 1990s. Adam Shatz covers the historical ground very well in a November 2002 essay in the New York Review of Books, reproduced here.

The French connection with Algeria was extraordinarily brutal, going back to the 1840s, after their involvement in Algeria began with the initial capture of Algiers in 1830. From this article in Le Monde Diplomatique, we learn that Alexis de Tocqueville, he of Democracy in America fame, felt that the French were entitled to "ravage the country" in order to suppress the rebellion in the 1840s. The ravaging is estimated to have killed around 500,000 people out of a population of about 3 million.

Al Mamlakah

2007-03-29T20:55:00.000-07:00

I recently finished reading a book by As'ad Abukhalil about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (which has the resounding Arabic name Al-Mamlakah al-'Arabiyya as-Sa'ūdiyya). My knowledge of the middle east is sketchy and has been focused on Israel and Palestine, thanks to persistent arguments I had with Jewish and Israeli friends some years ago. I have been meaning to find out more about the other countries in the region and broad histories such as the popular one by Arthur Goldschmidt and the relatively obscure one by Yahya Armajani helped a little. Abukhalil's book, titled 'The Battle for Saudi Arabia' is more narrowly focused and is about the modern history of Saudi Arabia. Abukhalil, a professor of political science in the US, is a modern, progressive thinker. He has very little sympathy for the Saudi monarchy, the Wahabbiyah brand of Islam, or for the political setup of the kingdom. He makes no attempt to feign the air of neutrality so favored by academics. In fact, his blog, Angry Arab, says it all. It's a pity that its comments sections are destroyed by hateful bigots.

The book provides a short and succinct history and explains the connections between the monarchy and the religious establishment. In addition, it has many interesting bits of information. A family tree of the ruling clan helped me sort out the Sauds, the Faisals and the Fahds. As the note at the bottom of the tree states, it is incomplete, since Abd Al Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of the modern kingdom, had 39 sons and many daughters. Abukhalil quotes a source to tell us that Abd Al Aziz married "no fewer than 135 virgins" and kept a large number of concubines, though he decided "to limit himself" to two new wives a year after some point. [ A chronic wed-better, as a joke I heard a long time ago had it. ] Apparently his son and successor, Saud, outdid him in the matter of progeny by fathering 53 sons and 54 daughters.

According to this Al Jazeera story, the royal family has about 25,000 members, with thousands of princes though only 200 of them are considered influential. Abukhalil notes that one of the princes revealed to the New York Times in 2001 that the men in the royal family are given an annual salary of $180,000 for their entire lives. The family considers the entire kingdom and its resources to be its patrimony. A substantial chunk of the oil revenue is cornered by the princes.

The Saudi kingdom was established following World War I, thanks to much help from Britain over the years, whose strategic calculus at that time made it expedient for it to support Abd Al Aziz Ibn Saud. The discovery of oil in the 1930s allowed the pre-modern political arrangement to survive. The critical dependence of the world on oil allowed it to get stronger. Today, the monarchy is as entrenched as ever. Its military expenditure is of the order of $ 25 billion per year.

Today's Saudi Arabia has a strong fundamentalist culture, with harsh punishments, the oppression of women and the religious police enforcing virtue and preventing vice. There are hints of dissatisfaction and dissent, from tribal groups, the Shia minority, and from religious extremists. This does not get much world attention for various reasons. The media in Saudi Arabia are of course all officially controlled, but Abukhalil maintains that the Saudis have bought or co-opted most of the Arabic press and writers. Negative references to the monarchy or to Wahabbiyyah are apparently hard to find. No wonder Al Jazeera is banned in Saudi Arabia.

This book has helped me to think about the Arab world with some more clarity. I was aware that thinking of it as a monolith was a big mistake, but the ways of making distinctions was a bit unclear to me. Here is how I look at it now. The phrase "Arab world" is a poor description, since it merely refers to the vast area where people speak Arabic. The Arabian peninsula is quite distinct in its religious culture and in its social and political arrangements from the Levant (Syria and Lebanon) or from Egypt. Indeed, it is not similar to Iraq either. Even on the peninsula, Yemen is clearly quite different from Saudi Arabia. The Gulf kingdoms are similar to Saudi Arabia politically, in that they are monarchies supported by oil wealth, but their societies and cultures are much more relaxed. Dubai is looking more and more like Las Vegas on steroids, as I discovered during a brief stay in the UAE in December 2005.

Just realizing (a) that most Saudi oilfields are in the east and (b) that the Gulf sheikhs all have very similar cosy political setups helps explain why the US is keen and able to keep a big military foothold in the Persian Gulf. This also explains the membership of the Gulf Cooperation Council (which excludes Yemen), its fear of its big Shia neighbor from across the water and the recent report of a defense spending binge, where it was claimed that member states had a "shopping list of arms worth more than $60 bn".

India's budget

2007-03-01T20:58:00.000-08:00

Until fairly recently, India's annual budget exercise used to be anticipated eagerly. The Indian government had a big role to play in the economy and the budget could often make life more (or less) unpleasant for millions of Indians. The impact of the budget on the economy is not as dramatic as it used to be, both in perception and reality. Reporting conventions though, have not changed very much: an arbitrary list of new taxes, sops, subsidies and measures are reported, with barely any context or overall picture. Here is an extract from such a list published under the headline "Highlights of Union Budget":

* Employee Stock Options brought under Fringe Benefit Tax

* Excise duty on petrol, diesel reduced from 8% to 6%

* Specific duty on cigarettes increased by 5%;

* Specific duty on beedis raised from Rs 7 to 11 per Thousand for non-machine made and from Rs 17 to 24 per Thousand for machine made

* Duty on pan-masala not containing tobacco reduced from 66 to 45 per cent

You can of course go to the source of all the budget data for India if you want more information. This very useful one-page summary is the best place to find some overall context. The following table uses a little bit of additional data as well:

(Rs., billion)	2005-06 (Actual)	2006-07 (Est.)	2007-08 (Budgeted)

Receipts	3597	4293	5296
Expenditure	5061	5816	6805
Deficit	1464	1523	1509

Interest payments	1326.3	1461.92	1589.95
	26%	25%	23%
Defence	817	860	960
	16%	15%	14%

At an exchange rate of Rs. 45 to the US dollar, government expenditure in 2005-06 was $112 billion and the deficit was $33 billion (about 5.6% of GDP).

The big ticket items are interest payments and defense allocations. Interest payments account about 25% of the expenditure and defense for about 15%. About 90% of the deficit for 2005-2006 arose from interest payments. In fact, if projections turn out to be correct, the Indian government would experience a surplus in 2007-08 in the so-called "primary deficit"- the deficit if it did not have to make any interest payments.

The scenario in which interest payments are insignificant is not as far-fetched and wishful as it might seem at first sight. India's total external debt is around $135 billion and its forex reserves are around $180 billion. If India decides to payoff its external debt (like Brazil and Argentina, who paid off some of theirs last year), it would make no difference to the net position, but it could save a substantial amount of money that goes annually to servicing this debt. Of course, there is the small matter of internal debt, but that is not such a bad thing, economically speaking.

The size of the defense budget is large for an emerging country like India. A fair amount of it goes to assorted countries in the world among whom are Britain, France, Russia, Israel and somewhat surprisingly, the Czech republic. This has generated a constant stream of scandals, with well-connected middlemen and politicians skimming off large commissions. According to this newspaper report, as many as 48 defense contracts are under investigation, with former defense minister George Fernandes being a target of at least one investigation. One ubiquitous wheeler-dealer, son a former Admiral and himself an ex-navy man, was the subject of income tax raids yesterday.

The military-industrial beast

2007-02-26T22:47:00.000-08:00

The US defense budget continues to reach astounding heights. The Bush administration's request for fiscal 2008, made in early February, has topped $600 billion. This uncontrolled expenditure, already at 48% of world defense spending in 2005, has probably breached the 50% barrier. Think about what that means: the US spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined.

Historically, the US has been big on defense budgets, at least since the cold war began. As the chart below demonstrates, the fall of the Berlin wall and the implosion of the Soviet Union, courtesy of Mikhail Gorbachev, had a fairly small effect on US military spending. The military-industrial beast must be fed, cold war or no cold war.
(Picture from slide 2 of presentation by Winslow Wheeler of the Straus Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information. Click on the picture to see it a bit more clearly.)

The table below, created with data from one of the White House's budget documents, shows that about 25% (or less) of the government's largesse is spent on military personnel and housing for their families. Even those who are fond of the empty slogan "support our troops" cannot fail to see that the troops and their families get very little of this taxpayer funded bonanza. The giant procurement and R&D budget is what goes to feed the military-industrial complex. Note that this amount is not used for "Operations and maintenance", for which additional money upwards of $200 billion is spent.

	2006	2007 (Est.)	2008 (Est.)
Total ($, billion)	522	572	607
Military personnel, housing ($, billion)	129	131	137
(as % of total)	25%	23%	23%
R&D, Procurement ($, billion)	158	337	295
(as % of total)	30%	59%	49%

Of the amount requested for fiscal year 2008, $481 billion is for expenditure on things other than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A chunk of this absurdly large amount, to the tune of $60 billion, is being spent on obsolete cold war weapons - this according to an assistant secretary of defense from the Reagan era.

I find it hard to believe that any sensible person fails to see that this is corporate welfare at its worst. Nevertheless, there will be the occasional op-ed column in the national newspapers by paid shills claiming that the correct way to view the defense budget is to see it as a percentage of GDP. This has been one of my pet peeves for the last few years. The GDP is the total amount of spending by every entity in the economy - the government, businesses as well as the entire population of the country. It is a large number. Dividing a large number (the defense budget) by a much larger number (the GDP) is obviously going to yield a comfortingly small number. What is more relevant is the ratio of defense spending to total government spending. This number hovers around 25%. If you use discretionary government spending as the denominator (i.e., spending that excludes mandated expenditure such as social security and medicare), the number jumps to around 50%. Add to this the fact that the consistently large size of the defense budget is the primary reason for the growing US public debt, which stands at $8.9 trillion. For fiscal year 2006, the interest expense on this mountain of debt was $406 billion.

The military industrial beast and the parasites it brings along are feasting on American taxpayers.

The Afghanistan spiral

2007-01-27T01:02:00.000-08:00

For a couple of years or so now, I have been peripherally aware of the state of affairs in Afghanistan - the Taliban not yet routed, Karzai's authority being limited to Kabul, the occasional bombings and deaths of civilians, reconstruction going nowhere, promises of international aid remaining unfulfilled and the opium crop and trade booming.

Suicide bombings in Afghanistan have jumped sharply in the last couple of years. In 2002, there was one failed attempt. In 2005 there were 21 incidents of suicide bombings. In the first 8 months of 2006 there were 43. The Taliban (and perhaps Al Qaeda) have found this method of mayhem to be quite effective.

Syed Saleem Shahzad, who is supposed to have spent a few days in Taliban captivity, has recently written a series of articles at Asia Times which speak of a coming spring offensive by the Taliban as an inevitability. The articles contain, among other interesting details, descriptions of "logistics experts" gathering supplies, a field commander discussing how the occupation is unifying disparate groups and notorious warlord Gulbudin Hekmatyar jockeying for more power. None of these is a good sign.

Perhaps as a response to this, the Bush administration is seeking $10.6 billion for its efforts in Afghanistan. The money is for two years, but $8.6 billion of it is to be spent on "security". At 81%, the ratio of the money spent on security to the money spent on other activities (reconstruction/development/infrastructure/social services) is too high. Even this high a ratio is actually an improvement on the Bush administration's track record in Afghanistan and Iraq. Included in this extremely informative report by the Congressional Research Service is the fact that of the nearly $88 billion spent on Afghanistan since 9/11, only about $6 billion has gone towards reconstruction and aid.

I think that this is a consistent and tragic mistake. The only way that the Taliban can be ultimately rooted out is if the current administration is able to show that people are better off under it. Given that the country has been a ruin for a long time, thanks first to the Soviets, then to the civil war and finally to the American bombing campaigns, basic things like roads, electricity and medical facilities are extremely important. Lacking an economic base, the government has to rely on foreign aid. Unfortunately, therein lies the rub.

Foreign aid is notorious for being administered extremely poorly and aid to Afghanistan is no exception. Most US foreign aid ends up as payments to American companies who work on horrendously expensive projects that are shoddily executed. Take the case of the Louis Berger group for example. This company had received contracts worth $665 million to build clinics, schools roads etc. in Afghanistan. According to Ann Jones, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, the company built a two-lane shoulder-less road that cost about a million dollars a mile, when other groups could have built it for about 40% of the cost. The clinics that the company built are crumbling. This detailed report tells the long, sad story of Afghan reconstruction.

Multi-lateral aid is not very much better. Over the four-year period from May 2002 to September 2006, 25 donor countries had ponied up $1.4 billion (of the $1.7 billion pledged) to the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. This fund is overseen by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Islamic Development Bank and the UNDP. Of the $1.4 billion, $860 million has gone towards the expenses of the Afghan government (salaries and maintenance) while only $214 million has gone for investment projects.

All of this is fairly well-recognized and documented. Nevertheless, it is galling to see headlines talk of the money being requested and spent as "aid". Firstly, most of the money is for military operations. It does not aid anybody. Secondly, whatever small fraction is for development or reconstruction makes its way to American companies or corrupt officials in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the end, the people in those countries are left without regular electricity or decent roads. All they have are the token schools and the crumbling clinics. These are then listed as proud achievements by local and American bureaucrats who don't ever distinguish between progress and the mere appearance of activity. No wonder the public in Afghanistan fails to see the benefits of American largesse.

American contractors, bless their souls, are generously rewarded for their devotion to duty. For its successes, the Louis Berger group has been awarded an additional five-year contract worth $1.4 billion.

I don't see things improving much in Afghanistan. And if Shahzad is right, a major confrontation between NATO forces and the Taliban is looming. Again, a lot of misery will be heaped upon the long-suffering population. For this at least, I would be very happy to be proved wrong by events.

More translation

2007-01-24T21:12:00.000-08:00

This nazm was written by Rajendra Nath 'Rehbar' . I transcribed the lyrics from the version sung by Jagjit Singh, which seems to skip one stanza from the original.

जिनको दुनिया की निगाहों से छुपाए रखा
जिनको इक उम्र कलेजे से लगाए रखा
दीन जिनको जिन्हें ईमान बनाए रखा

तूने दुनिया की निगाहों से जो बचकर लिखे
साल हा साल मेरे नाम बराबर लिखे
कभी दिन में तो कभी रात को उठकर लिखे

तेरे खु़शबू में बसे ख़त मैं जलाता कैसे
प्यार में डूबे हुए ख़त मैं जलाता कैसे
तेरे हाथों के लिखे ख़त मैं जलाता कैसे

तेरे ख़त आज मैं गंगा में बहा आया हूँ
आग बहते हुए पानी में लगा आया हूँ

[ Jin ko duniya ki nigaahon se chhupaye rakha
Jin ko ik umr kaleje se lagaaye rakha
Deen jin ko jinhen eemaan banaye rakha

Tune duniya ki nigaahon se jo bachkar likhe
Saal ha saal mere naam baraabar likhe
Kabhi dine mein to kabhi raat ko uthkar likhe

Tere khushboo mein base khat main jalaata kaise
Pyaar mein doobe huye khat main jalaata kaise
Tere haathon ke likhe khat main jalaata kaise

Tere khat aaj main Ganga mein baha aaya hoon
Aag behte huye paani mein laga aaya hoon]

My translation:

Hidden from the eyes of the world, they were kept
Close to my heart for an age, they were kept
As my faith and conscience, they were kept

Concealed from the world, you wrote them
Year after year, in my name, you wrote them
During the day, sometimes at night you wrote them

Steeped in your fragrance, these letters how could I burn
Immersed in love, these letters how could I burn
Written by your hands, these letters how could I burn

Your letters afloat in the Ganga I have set
On fire, the flowing waters I have set

This has been rendered beautifully by Jagjit Singh. Listen to it here.

The Nobel prize for parsing

2007-01-23T21:09:00.000-08:00

My nominee for this year is the Honorable Attorney General of the United States. Clause 2, Section 9, Article 1 of the US Constitution reads:

The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

In testimony before the Senate judiciary committee on January 18, 2007, Mr. Gonzalez averred that this actually means that

"... the Constitution doesn’t say, “Every individual in the United States or every citizen is hereby granted or assured the right to habeas.” It doesn’t say that. It simply says the right of habeas corpus shall not be suspended except by — ..."

A transcript of his deeply thoughtful remarks is available here.

A finer example of a legal mind in the service of freedom I am yet to find.

Translation

2007-01-18T21:58:00.000-08:00

The main reason for the resurgence of the ghazal genre in India from the 1980s onwards has been its popularization by singers. As with other things subcontinental, popular ghazal music is often kitschy. Nevertheless, it has helped to keep Urdu poetry alive in public consciousness in India. The singers usually choose lyrics in which the Urdu has been kept simple. The main part of the poetry package is the surprise element in each sher (couplet). Most popular ghazals are about ishq, husn and nasha (love, beauty and intoxication) - themes that are long-lived staples of poetry in that part of the world. Deeper thought, if there is much of it, has not been popularized by the singers. Nor has the listening public demanded it.

Ghulam Ali, a Pakistani ghazal singer, is very popular in India as well. Here is one ghazal where he plays to the gallery. On this track, you can also hear the intrusive vaah-vaahi (loud audience approval) that is considered an essential ingredient of proper appreciation. Here are the lyrics:

हमको किसके ग़म ने मारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही
किसने तोड़ा दिल हमारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही

दिल के लुटने का सबब पूछो न सबके सामने
नाम आएगा तुम्हारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही

नफ़रतों के तीर खाकर दोस्तों के शहर में
हमने किस किस को पुकारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही

क्या बताएँ प्यार की बाज़ी वफ़ा की राह में
कौन जीता कौन हारा ये कहानी फ़िर सही

[ Ham ko kis ke gham ne maara, yeh kahani phir sahi
Kis ne toda dil hamaara, yeh kahani phir sahi

Dil ke lutne ka sabab poochcho na sab ke saamne
Naam aayega tumhaara, yeh kahani phir sahi

Nafraton ke teer khaakar doston ke shahar mein
Ham ne kis kis ko pukaara, yeh kahani phir sahi

Kyaa bataayen pyaar ki baazi, vafa ki raah mein
Kaun jeeta kaun haara, yeh kahani phir sahi ]

Here is my translation:

Whose sorrow was it that struck me; that story some other time
Who was it that broke my heart; that story some other time

Do not ask openly for the reason my heart was plundered
Your name will come up; that story some other time

Suffering the arrows of hate, in the city of friends
Who was it I called for; that story some other time

What can I say, the gamble of love in the path of fidelity
Who won, who lost; that story some other time

The trouble with translation is trying to be faithful to the original. If you get the rhyme right, you have to mess with the word order. If you manage to get those elements right, it will screw up the meter. If by some miracle, you manage to get past those hurdles, the idiom sounds outlandish or the lines seem to drip with sentimentality. Sometimes, there is no option but to give up the entire effort. Thanks to my limited attempts, I am beginning to develop great respect for Shahriar Shahriari, who has translated some Omar Khayyam verses in multiple and elegant ways.

Costa Rica

2007-01-06T15:22:00.000-08:00

I visited Costa Rica for a short vacation in the last week of December. We spent 4 days in Manuel Antonio, book-ending our visit by a night and a day in San Jose, the capital. Costa Rica is a beautiful, peaceful country with the unique distinction of having abolished its military in 1949. It thrives today on eco-tourism, which attracts a large number of visitors from North America and Europe.

Manuel Antonio is a small town catering to the tourists coming to Parque Nacional Manuel Antonio, a rainforest preserve at the very edge of the Pacific Ocean. The beaches are some of the best in Costa Rica and the scenery is spectacular. We stayed at Hotel Coco Beach in Manuel Antonio. The hotel is functional at best, but is only a five minute walk from the beach and the national park. Being on a hill, it offers some good views. I managed to catch some dramatic orange hues one evening:

At the park itself, I got the feeling that there were very few animals. Perhaps they stay away from the well-trodden tourist trails. Perhaps the park authorities herd tourists through a stretch where the animals won't be disturbed. You also need a park guide with his telescope to point out the monkeys, sloths and birds high up in the trees. While pointing out the three-toed sloth, the guide told us that Costa Ricans believe that it is a close relative of their bureaucrats.

We got our best view of the sloth that night, when we noticed it making its slow progress while hanging upside down from an electrical wire by the roadside. This roadside sighting is not unusual, as we noticed another sloth the next day on a fence.

The highlight of our trip was the zip-line canopy tour at a forest in Quepos, about 10 km or so from Manuel Antonio. They use a harness and pulley system to suspend you from a steel cable set up between two tall trees. The cables are usually about 100 feet above the ground. Once you jump off the tree platform, you are literally flying above the forest canopy at a pretty decent speed. It is an exhilarating experience. And of course, the views are spectacular. The tour can be taken by most people; the guides usually ride along with children five and under. In our group, we had a 55-year-old woman and a 4-year-old girl. Don't miss it if you ever get a chance.

The people of Costa Rica are quite laid back and incredibly friendly and helpful. Enough people speak English, though we did have a couple of occasions where we wished we had some translation help.

Thanks to a colleague at work, I also had a list of fruits and fruit juices to try when I was there. Among the drinks I sampled were cas, mora en leche (blackberries in milk) and agua dulce (warm drink with sugarcane juice).

If you go to Manuel Antonio, make sure you visit the El Avion restaurant and bar. It is set up in and around a C-123 US cargo plane abandoned during the 1980s just when the Iran-Contra scandal came to light. You can enjoy the superb views while sipping some delicious fruit juice and pondering the ethics of US intervention in Latin America.

And now for some music

2006-12-13T22:08:00.000-08:00

I have enjoyed listening to ghazals for many years now. Here is one that I have liked a lot, back since I first heard it around 1982.

Film: Arth
Lyrics: Kaifi Azmi
Singer: Jagjit Singh
Music: Jagjit Singh

झुकी झुकी सी नज़र बेक़रार है कि नहीं
दबा दबा सा सही दिल में प्यार है कि नहीं

तू अपने दिल की जवाँ धड़कनों को गिन के बता
मेरी तरह तेरा दिल बेक़रार है कि नहीं

वो पल कि जिस में मुहब्बत जवान होती है
उस एक पल का तुझे इंतज़ार है कि नहीं

तेरी उम्मीद पे ठुकरा रहा हूँ दुनिया को
तुझे भी अपने पे ये एतबार है कि नहीं

[

Jhuki Jhuki si nazar bekarar hai ki nahin
daba daba sa sahi dil mein pyar hai ki nahin

Tu apne dil ki jawan dhadkanon ko gin ke bata
meri tarah tera dil bekarar hai ki nahin

Vo pal ki jis mein muhabbat jawan hoti hai
Us ek pal ka tujhe intezaar hai ki nahin

Teri ummeed pe thukra raha hoon duniya ko
Tujhe bhi apne pe ye aitbaar hai ki nahin

]

My attempt at a translation:

Is the gaze, lowered, restive or not
Is the love, muffled, in your heart or not

Count your callow heartbeats and tell
Is your heart restless like me or not

The instant in which love attains youth
Do you await that instant or not

Hoping for you, I spurn the world
Do you believe in yourself as much, or not

I think I would have been unable to appreciate poetry were it not for ghazal singers like Jagjit Singh. It's not that every one of his songs is great, but sometimes, everything is just right and the result is a masterpiece.

This song qualifies as a masterpiece, in my opinion. By itself, there is nothing spectacular about the lyrics, but the melody, the music, and the words fit in perfect harmony with the gentle melancholic mood. The result is magical. Listen to it here.

Martin Lee Anderson

2006-11-29T21:00:00.000-08:00

In June 2005, Martin Lee Anderson, a Florida teenager, took a joyride with his sister, a cousin and two friends in his grandmother's jeep. They had an accident. The grandmother had to press charges in order to receive money for the vehicle. Martin was put on probation. A few months later, he was charged with violating the terms of his probation for trespassing at a school. His parents had to choose between a distant detention center and a boot camp nearby. They chose the boot camp. (Narrative drawn from this account).

Martin arrived at the boot camp on January 5, 2006, his "intake day". On an intake day, boys were made to run 16 laps and do multiple push-ups and sit-ups. Martin fell while on his last lap. Nine Guards beat, kneed, and kicked him, in addition to applying pressure-points behind his ears several times, while a nurse watched. They forced him to inhale ammonia while closing his mouth. After about half-an-hour of this, when the boy did not respond, they called in medical help. The boy died at a hospital a day later. He was 14 years old.

The county medical examiner later said in an autopsy report that Martin died from internal bleeding arising from "sickle cell trait".

In February 2006, the Miami Herald (and CNN) obtained a video of the beating recorded at the boot camp. The ensuing furore led to a tortuous investigation which ended yesterday with the guards and the nurse who played onlooker being charged.

Florida now has a law which closed its boot camps and replaced them with facilities focused more on education and counseling.

I will leave it to you to guess Martin's race.

More on the Indian economy

2006-11-21T20:52:00.000-08:00

Shunya has made a few interesting points about my previous post on the Indian economy. My response was getting a bit long, so I have elevated it to an independent post by itself.

The Gini coefficient tends to magnify small differences between Lorenz curves. I speak from experience with ROC curves, which are close cousins of Lorenz curves. I would be wary of reading a great deal into small Gini index differences.

In any case, income inequality is a bit more tolerable if the lowest income levels are well above subsistence levels. To visualize this, imagine two histograms of income, A and B. Distribution A is relatively compact, but its left tail extends almost to zero. Distribution B is more spread out (more inequality) but its left tail is at a much higher value than that of A. (In other words, B is shifted substantially to the right and is wider). I think most people would agree that distribution B would be better for a country than distribution A.

To make this point concrete, consider poverty levels in the US and India. In the US, the threshold is set at an annual income of about $20,000 for a family of four and the percentage of the population below the threshold is about 12.6%. In India, a very low level of income is used for the poverty threshold (the better to get a good number for the fraction of the population below it). Using numbers from this report for reference, a threshold of Rs. 500 per person per month in 2005 seems to be an appropriate definition of the official Indian poverty line. About 23.6 % of Indians are below this poverty line. This amounts to an annual income of Rs. 24000 for a family of four. Conversion to US dollars (at an exchange rate of Rs. 45 to the dollar) and multiplication by a PPP factor of about 5 brings the poverty level to about $2700. To summarize:

	Poverty line	Fraction below
India	$2,700	23.60%
US	$20,000	12.60%

A heck of a lot of people are a heck of a lot poorer in India.

The last point about India's democratic freedoms is very important, but tangential to the issue I am addressing. Economic performance may be measured and evaluated on its own. Adding political freedom to the criteria for deciding which country is more admirable is a personal preference, one that coincides completely with my own. Nevertheless, it is a personal preference and, speaking in economic terms, changes the utility function altogether.

Shunya's defense of the urban middle-class Indian's celebratory mood is a defense of the mindset I described in my previous post. Having come 10 m from the starting line in a 100 m race is certainly an achievement. You only have to agree not to look at how others are doing. Bring the champagne along. I would be more than happy to raise a toast.

(Robber) Baron Clive of Plassey

2006-11-20T21:19:00.000-08:00

On June 23, 1757, Robert Clive, a Lieutenant Colonel in the King's Army, led the East India Company's troops to victory against Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah at Palashi . It was less a battle and more of a skirmish, what with the English having ensured the non-participation of about two-thirds of Siraj-ud-Daulah's army through a conspiracy. In the immediate aftermath of the victory, Clive arm-twisted his puppet Mir Jafar into paying huge sums of money to the British. He helped himself to about 20,80,000 rupees, an amount that is quoted in several places as £234,000.

I have always been frustrated at not being able to fathom the scale of the looting. Here are some indicators of scale that I have come across recently:

According to this account of historical money and prices in the 18th century, the upper limit of a nobleman's annual income was about £25,000. Clive's take from Palashi was nearly ten times the annual income of perhaps the richest people in England.
This House of Commons Library research paper tells us that the 1750 £ was worth about 150 times the 2005 £. This means that Clive's earnings amounted to £35.1 million, when expressed in modern terms. I suspect that this would be hard to beat in terms of remuneration for a day's work.

The total amount that the British extracted from the Murshidabad treasury was about £3 million. That would work out to £450 million today.

Time for the champagne

2006-11-11T02:16:00.001-08:00

I kept reading about the booming Indian economy doing very well, so I decided to check out some of the data:

World Bank measures of economic size (2005 data):

GDP in US dollars: India ranks 12th, with a GDP of $785 billion. The US tops the list, with a GDP of $12.5 trillion. China is 4th, with a GDP of $2.2 trillion.

GNP in US dollars: India ranks 10th with $ 793 billion, China is 4th with $2.6 trillion and the US is 1st with $13 trillion.

GDP with Purchasing Power Parity: India ranks 4th, with a PPP GDP of $3.82 trillion, China is 2nd ($8.6 trillion) and the US is first ($12.4 trillion).

Per capita PPP GDP:

US: $43,000

China: $6615

India: $3473

(The populations are, roughly, China: 1.3 billion, India 1.1 billion and the US 300 million).

In PPP terms, the pie in India is large, but unfortunately so is the population. Even if we make the totally unreal assumption that everyone gets an equal share of the pie, the slice is very very small. If we look at the size of the 2005 pie slice relative to other countries, we find that India ranks 144th and China is 107th. The US is 3rd.

Of course, income distribution is extremely unequal in both India and China, so poverty is widespread. Rural-urban disparities are huge. However, China is doing much better than India on a variety of fronts, both in terms of infrastructure as well as in terms of basic human development. This article provides the details.

In India, people revel in the media hype about growth rates and celebrate how economic reforms undertaken in 1991 (or liberalization/globalization) have worked wonders. As this paper points out, a look at the data makes it apparent that the high growth period started at least a decade earlier. This makes India's growth period roughly coincident with China's. China is already far ahead of India and pulling away even further.

One more indicator of China's rapidly increasing economic power is the astounding level of its foreign exchange reserves. These are now close to the $1 trillion mark, growing at about $20 billion a month. India's forex reserves are at a mere $167 billion.

I have an analogy for the Indian frame of mind. Imagine you are running a 100 m race. When you reach the 10 m mark, you turn around, look back, and say: "Look at how wonderful I am! I have come so far from the starting line!" Most of the other runners are beyond the 60 m mark. The only other runner comparable to you is at the 40 m mark and gathering speed. You pat yourself on the shoulder and start looking for the champagne.

Men in black

2006-09-20T21:52:00.000-07:00

Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, was arrested in the US in September 2002 and later sent to Syria to be tortured. He was released after 10 months in confinement. Now, a Canadian commission, after a two-and-a-half year enquiry, has found that he was completely innocent. According to the Washington Post, "U.S. officials refused to cooperate with the Canadian inquiry". Arar's lawsuit in the US has been dismissed by a judge, citing "national security". Try and recall this the next time you watch "Law and Order" and marvel at the intricacies of the American justice system.

The Washington Post, with an eye for telling detail, claims: "Those renditions are often carried out by CIA agents dressed head to toe in black, wearing masks, who blindfold their subjects and dress them in black."

Black deeds they might be, but who says they have to be carried out in unfashionable attire ?

Omkara

2006-09-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

I recently watched Omkara on DVD. This hyped film is the second in a series of adaptations of Shakespeare plays by director Vishal Bharadwaj, who continues to be a very competent music composer for Hindi films. Omkara is based on Othello, and is a fairly successful transplant to an Indian context. The plot stays true to the original story line. The casting is quite good and the characters are well-etched. Saif Ali Khan is absolutely brilliant as Langda Tyagi, the movie's version of Iago. There are only two other comparably outstanding portrayals of villainy in the last 30 odd years of Hindi films that I can recall: Amjad Khan's Gabbar from Sholay and Sadashiv Amrapurkar's Rama Shetty from Ardha Satya.

One of the highlights of the film is its dialogue. It is carefully crafted, idiomatic, harsh and funny. It freely uses the Western U.P. dialect, which is close to Haryanvi. It is not easy to follow unless you know Hindi quite well. Cuss words, which have been taboo for so long in Hindi films, abound in Omkara. Gaalis referring to maa, behen and beti are aplenty. (If you are unfamiliar with Hindi, a gaali is a swear word and maa, behen and beti mean mother, sister and daughter respectively).

Strangely though, the script writers for this film (and others as well) suddenly turn coy for certain words. The ass is referred to, somewhat weakly, as the pichchwada. At one point, Langda Tyagi, in conversation with his sidekick, bemoans his fate by saying : "Teri aur meri kismat gadhe ke ling se likhi gayi hai" (Our fate has been written with a donkey's dick). Hundreds of millions of men who live in India and speak Hindi will readily be able to supply the correct words. I am not sure why this misplaced concession to good taste was made.

An interesting sidelight that caught my eye is that the main characters are all Brahmans, as is obvious from their last names - Shukla, Tyagi, Tiwari, Upadhyaya etc. My knowledge of Western UP is limited to recognizing it as the preserve of Jats and so the Brahman gangsters struck me as being unusual. A quick Google search reveals that gangsterism in western Uttar Pradesh is an equal opportunity employment scheme. I was worried there for a moment that the Brahmans were grabbing yet another coveted profession.

Gangster or Mafia backdrops are becoming quite common in Hindi films now. The first few of these were interesting for being realistic. Nowadays, the main point of the Mafia setting is to allow the director to show some gratuitous violence and to create a sense of menace. I generally found the earlier Mafia films (for example, Company) interesting for their reputed realism. Despite the highly competent performances and all round good film-making, somehow the Mafia goons in Omkara didn't feel as menacing and murderous as the ones in reality are.

Watch the movie if you get a chance. Saif Ali Khan's performance makes it worthwhile.

Simple things

2006-09-12T21:49:00.000-07:00

The 5th anniversary of September 11, 2001 has resulted in a lot of deep thought on the web and elsewhere about terrorism. Much American writing perceives this as a unique evil, a successor to fascism, nazism and communism. As America battled the great evils of the 20th century, so shall it win this "struggle for civilization", Bush said, and "lead the 21st century into a shining age of human liberty".

In all the noise about terrorism, I believe some simple things remain unsaid. I offer some here:

Terrorism is not a uniquley American problem. Defining terrorism as violence against randomly targeted civilians by non-state groups, we can identify several countries that have suffered for long: Israel, India, Sri Lanka and Colombia are examples. People in other countries like Turkey, Pakistan, Russia, Britain and Spain have been victims of occasional, albeit brutal, incidents. If it is not a uniquely American problem, it is unlikely to have a uniquely American solution.

In almost every case of terrorist violence, there is a political context. This does not mean that the political context justifies the terrorism. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand the underlying political problem in order to solve it. Good police action will likely mitigate the problem but will not solve it. Terrorism is the symptom of an underlying disease. Treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease is a bad idea.

The elephant in the room is the unacknowledged political context of terrorism against Americans. The context has many dimensions, but one common underlying thread: the use and abuse of military and economic muscle to project power and earn profits around the world. In the middle east, what started with Iran in the 1950s is still continuing in Iraq today.

Terrorism is not an ideology. It may well be a tactic adopted by some ideologues, but that does not make it an ideology. Most often it is employed in the service of some political aims - Palestine, Punjab and Kashmir are good examples. Any particular strand of terrorism dies out only when adherents to its underlying cause dwindle in number.

Terrorism is too broad a category. Wanting to defeat terrorism is somewhat like wanting to end all violence. We may be able to curb violence (and control terrorism) but it is not likely that we will eradicate either of the two.

A good analogy for terrorism is cancer. Cancers are of many different kinds and depend a lot on context and individual circumstances. There is no panacea for cancer. Prevention and careful disease management are the keys to prolonging life. There are no guarantees that a particular regimen of treatment will be successful. (It is surprising how far the analogy goes. Radiation therapy is like the often brutal action by security forces. It damages healthy tissue without necessarily curing the sickness).

In the 1970s, the Nixon administration had declared a war on cancer. After about 35 years, even with the best scientific talent that the world has had to offer, cancer is not completely understood, let alone vanquished. I don't foresee the current war on terror faring that much better.

Brand strategy

2006-08-15T22:41:00.000-07:00

So much of American consciousness is dominated by advertising and marketing that it is no surprise that the serious business of regime change, war and democracy promotion in the middle east has to be branded exactly right. First, we had the GWOT (global war on terror). Since that wasn't really catching on, a rebranding was ordered. Unimaginative Pentagon types came up with G-SAVE (global struggle against violent extremism). This time around, with the civil war raging in Iraq, poll numbers stubbornly stuck in the 30s and with elections looming, it is time to roll out a new brand. What better way to revive the flagging fortunes of the glorious struggle (and, incidentally, the poll numbers) than to sneak in a new term ?

The occasion for the launch was the discovery of the alleged plot in the UK to blow up airliners traveling to the US. From now on, the believers will faithfully replace "terrorists" with "Islamic fascists" and claim that the US/Western Civilization/the world is locked in a bitter struggle with the totalitarian ideology of Islamic fascism.

The term has been used, mostly in its variant form of Islamofascism, by the clash-of-civilization brigade for a few years. It is freely employed to describe the supposed ideology of a motley crew which includes the Taliban, Al Qaeda , Hamas, Hezbollah and any other member of the axis-of-the-generally-disagreeable.

Being an advocate of truth in advertising, I feel compelled to protest the inaccuracy of the description. Fascism, my trusted Oxford English Reference Dictionary tells me, means

1. the principles and organization of the extreme right-wing nationalist movement, prevailing in Italy under Mussolini (1922-43).
2. any similar nationalist and authoritarian movement.

A further note adds:

.... Although there is no coherent body of political doctrine associated with Fascism, it tends to include a belief in the supremacy of one national or ethnic group over others .....

The Taliban were clearly medieval, misogynistic and puritanical brutes. Al Qaeda phrases its ideology in terms of injustices wreaked upon the Muslim ummah. Hamas and Hezbollah cast themselves as resistance movements. Hezbollah is a Shia organization while the other three are Sunni. The Taliban are Pushtuns who speak a different language than the other three groups. In other words, they are all quite different from each other.

What they have in common is that they are Islamic. It can probably be said that they endorse fundamentalist interpretations of religion and society, though Hezbollah and Hamas are not emphasizing that very much. It is also likely that many of them believe in the inevitability of the restoration of a universal caliphate, just as many fundamentalist Christians believe in the rapture.

I don't see fascism in evidence here. The crucial ingredients of aggressive nationalism and assumptions of racial/ethnic superirority are missing.

Maybe a slightly more descriptive term for the common features of these groups is Islamic fundamentalism. However, that still ignores the political contexts in which these movements flourish. Of course, nuanced understanding is no match for snappy slogans. And then, fundamentalism as the evil of our times is so retro, having had its day during the Reagan era.

Onwards, then, in the glorious struggle with the Islamic fascists who hate our freedoms.

And justice for all

2006-08-10T22:11:00.000-07:00

I have come to regard the Guantanamo bay detentions as being the most despicable example of blatant injustice in the modern world. Arbitrary detention without recourse to the courts or due process is an utter disgrace for any civilized society.

The detentions are now almost into their fifth year with barely a whimper of protest. It is perhaps true that worse injustices have occurred and continue to occur all over the world. However, the detentions by the US government are particularly despicable because they are such blatant violations of justice taking place in a country with a long tradition of emphasis on individual rights. That this can happen so easily in an open society such as the US is chilling.

The mythology of the US justice system is a long-standing staple of books, movies and TV dramas . We all know that defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Despite this, Bush, Cheney and other administration officials keep repeating that the prisoners are all terrorists, without it being proven. In fact, these frequent assertions are contradicted by some simple facts:

The number of prisoners has gone down over the years from over 650 to 450, due to many people being released or being handed over to their home countries. A further 120 are scheduled to be transferred or released. If they were all terrorists, why were so many of them released ?
According to this report based on US government conclusions, 55% of the detainees have not committed any hostile act against the US. 86% of the prisoners were originally picked up by the Northern Alliance or Pakistan and exchanged for bounties. This makes it very likely that many of them were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If indeed some of the prisoners are terrorists, they should be tried, convicted and punished duly. The US justice system, never shy of handing out death penalties, has a full range of harsh punishments available to it. The aim of detaining dangerous terrorists can be easily achieved through the normal judicial system.

The various contortions started by being merely bizarre . Consider, for example:

the creation of the new category, "enemy combatants" in order to dodge the Geneva conventions,
the "military commissions", "administrative review boards" and "combatant status review tribunals", all designed to bypass the courts,
the arguments claiming that US courts had no jurisdiction over Guantanamo bay.
the scornful response to allegations of torture by claims that prisoners are fed honey-glazed chicken and lemon fish.

They have now gone over into the surreal. We recently had six sigma examples of moral obtuseness. Three detainees committed suicide by hanging themselves with clothing and bedsheets. The camp commander called it asymmetric warfare waged against the US. Another official called the suicides a good PR move. I actually felt physically dizzy when I read about it. I doubt if even Kafka could have dreamed up characters such as these.

The recent Supreme Court decision gives me some hope that this executive absolutism may be reversed. I am not holding my breath for any prosecutions though. Fine legal minds such as "Geneva-conventions-are-quaint" Gonzales and "torture memo" Yoo have surely figured out by now that:

(a) breaking the Geneva conventions is illegal according to the war crimes law and
(b) the Supreme Court agrees with this.

That is why they are seeking changes to the law itself.

Air power

2006-07-31T22:05:00.000-07:00

Tom Engelhardt, whose site has been an island of sanity in the cacophony that is commentary on the web, has a superbly crafted essay on the brutality of Air wars. He expresses what I have felt for a long time. Qana provides yet more evidence of the horrific consequences of the ultimate in asymmetrical warfare. I urge you to read this essay and visit the site often.

Next time you are enjoying a quiet suburban evening and an aircraft flies by, imagine what it would be like for it to rain 500 pound bombs down on where you are. Imagine what happens to the kids you see around you. And then think about 'shock and awe' and ponder the varieties of barbarism.

D. D. Kosambi

2006-07-28T21:30:00.000-07:00

I have just finished reading a book I have been planning to read for a long time: An introduction to the study of Indian History by D. D. Kosambi. It is one of the most unusual books I have ever read. The innocuous title is a bit misleading - the book is a how-to manual for anthropological field work and numismatics in addition to being a radical approach to Indian History. It is not easy reading for the casual reader, and I also suspect that a scientist or an engineer would appreciate the rigor of the methods more than a traditional historian. After all, not very many books on Indian history will have a note telling you that the distribution of weights in a hoard of coins (deposited in the Prince of Wales museum in Bombay) is skew-negative and platykurtic, with a weight standard of 3.51 g and variance 0.0307 ! (If you have to know, this is from note 37 of the commentary to the illustrations, 1956 edition, Popular Book Depot, Bombay).

Damodar Dharmanad Kosambi (1907-1966) was perhaps exposed to rigorous scholarship early on, being the son of a renowned Buddhist scholar who had to move his family to Cambridge, MA after accepting a teaching position at Harvard. Kosambi studied Mathematics, History and languages at Harvard and returned to India in the late 1920s. He taught for short periods at Banaras Hindu University, Aligarh Muslim University and for over a decade at Fergusson College in Pune. From 1946 onwards, he held a chair for mathematics at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Bombay. He lived in Pune and commuted to Bombay every day on the train called the 'Deccan Queen'. The preface to the book is datelined 'Deccan Queen, December 7, 1956'.

A list of Kosambi's works spanning different fields is given at the end of this brief biography, from where I obtained the details for the short sketch above. His father seems to have been a polymath and a remarkable personality in his own respect, according to this online account.

Kosambi is a master of all he surveys in this book - his dexterity, scholarship and decisive judgments reminded me of Eric Hobsbawm. The book is fascinating in many respects - the choice of photographs, the detailed endnotes, the insistence on deducing historical information from observing ritual and practice among the various castes and tribes in India, the obvious comfort with the ancient history of Iran and the near east, the deep knowledge of Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature, Kosambi's scientific studies of coin hoards etc. His contempt for poor scholarship is expressed without reservation and with caustic precision. His writing is terse and elegant. It often rises to the eminently quotable:

Chapter 1, Note 11, on sources of information about castes and tribes:

The Indian decennial Census reports are useful before 1951, when the whole idea of classification by caste was officially abandoned as a Canutian method of abolishing caste distinctions.

Chapter 3, Section 3.1, p.51, describing the blocks of 12' x 20' two-room tenements discovered during excavations at Mohenjodaro and Harappa:

These were called 'coolie lines' by the excavators, whose ingenuity had found modern names for the streets, but rarely any explanation beyond the mental reach of an Imperial Briton.

Unfortunately, this does not mean the book is well-written. The organization of the material is unintuitive and the flow from one section to another is not obvious. My guess is that the book arose from a set of notes which were later woven together. In many places, I got the feeling that either too much was being made of thin evidence (something which Kosambi accuses others of doing) or that I was being rail-roaded into some conclusion based on current anthropological observations.

Kosambi's offers his definition of history early on: it is "the presentation, in chronological order, of the successive developments in the means and relations of production". He goes on to show that given the conspicuous absence of any chronologies or historical narratives for the ancient period, this is the best that a historian can do. He also implies that in any case, this is exactly what a historian ought to be doing. I am not convinced that this is all one ought to do, especially for later periods in Indian history.

Standard talking points

2006-07-24T21:29:00.000-07:00

The Israel Hezbollah clash continues to claim more civilians. As of yesterday, about 350 Lebanese and 20 Israeli civilians were dead. Israel's ground invasion is not going as smoothly as , say, the 1967 war, which lasted all of 6 days. Fighting is reportedly heavy. Hezbollah seems to have anticipated the ground invasion much as Israel did.

I got sucked into a water cooler discussion with a few colleagues yet again. The most striking thing is the consistency of the talking points used in defense of Israeli actions. The faithful parroting of these talking points by the ever compliant American media has had the desired effect - people who are otherwise perfectly reasonable have internalized them.

The first rhetorical question that gets asked is: who started it ? The schoolyard logic is that if we are able to establish that Israel did not start the conflict, that would absolve it of blame for all subsequent actions. While it is clear that Hezbollah triggered this round of fighting, both sides seem to have planned for it for a while. My problem though, is not with the fact that Israel responded, but with the exact nature of that response. I can't see how Hezbollah's having started the whole thing this time around justifies large scale bombing of civilian areas and infrastructure, such as a dairy farm.

In any case, Gideon Levy tackles the rhetorical question far better than I can. The man restores my faith in humanity.

When I make this point about civilian casualties and suffering, I find that people refuse to acknowledge it. The most I can get is the canned response: "it is unfortunate, but hey, what are you gonna do ?". One of my interlocutors exclaimed, "it happens in every single conflict!", somehow implying that it was nothing to get worked up about.

The second question is almost always "So what do you think is the solution ?". The burden is now upon me to suggest solutions to an intricate set of knotty problems which have persisted for decades. In a futile gesture, I suggest that the root of the problems is ultimately political. That doesn't wash. I then say that in the short term, it is better to tackle militancy with police action such as arrests and trials than by firing missiles into apartment buildings. I am then told that I am naive and that such action is not possible, despite the fact that precisely such action has resulted in about 9000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli custody.

The clincher I find most puzzling is "We can't talk about what is happening while sitting here in America" or a variant thereof. Somehow, we forfeit the right to discuss or criticize anything that Israel is involved in because we are not in Israel. By the same token, we can't discuss any problems anywhere in the world, whether they be the horror that is Iraq, the inevitable disaster that is Afghanistan or the plight of the Darfuri people. The injunction is perhaps a way of saying that unless one has been at the receiving end of terrorism, one is forbidden from discussing responses to it. I don't buy that argument either, because other countries have had problems with persistent terrorism as well.

One major ethical escape hatch is to refuse to contemplate the numbers of civilian deaths. Casualty counts are not considered admissible evidence. No reason is ever given, of course, but "you can't think like that !" is thrown at me. My guess is that word has gone out that the moral high ground is impossible to achieve in the face of large casualty counts, so they should not be allowed in to the debate. This tactic is of course not new. It has been repeatedly used by the "we don't do body counts" hyperpower as well.

The use of these talking points by professional purveyors of propaganda (journalists, op-ed writers, think tank experts) is not surprising. Their livelihood depends on their ethical blindness. What is astonishing is that a lot of ordinary people have been completely bought the sophistry. I guess this is what willful blindness looks like.

Israel Hezbollah conflict

2006-07-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

The Israel-Hezbollah war is into its sixth day. More than 200 people are dead in Lebanon and about 15 in Israel. The magnitude of Israel's reaction was a bit of a surprise, since skirmishes with Hezbollah are presumably not unusual and hostage/prisoner swaps have taken place in the past. The reasons may have to do with Ehud Olmert wanting to appear tough domestically. While that may be so, the military or strategic aim of the attacks remains a bit unclear. However, support for the Israeli reaction is widespread, with dissenting voices being in the minority.

This won't last long, for several reasons. First, there are not that many targets in Lebanon. Secondly and perhaps more importantly, citizens of western countries are beginning to suffer. Some have been killed. Now, we can't have that happening for too long, can we ? Indeed, there seem to be some noises from Israel which indicate that a search for a quick way out is on. The indispensable hyperpower itself is reportedly setting a deadline .

The comments sections of online news sites are teeming with people supporting Israel's right to "defend" itself. The suggestion that perhaps the Lebanese people have little control of Hezbollah and thus do not deserve to die is not entertained. The debate is in terms of entities ("state of Israel", "Lebanon", "Hezbollah") and notions of crime, punishment, fault and retaliation applied to them. Human casualties rarely enter the picture, if ever.

In any case, for the inside angle on Hezbollah, check out what Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke learned first hand. Robin Wright of the Washington Post has done something similar, though she feels compelled to strive for the obligatory neutrality so dear to American journalism. If you are looking for a quick primer, this serves quite well.

Mumbai

2006-07-16T19:18:00.000-07:00

The train blasts in Mumbai on July 7th have left 200 dead and scores injured in their wake. As Prem Shankar Jha points out, this is but one more attack in a series that seems deliberately designed to unleash communal killing in India. I was immensely surprised when the Varanasi attacks did not lead to riots and killing. Varanasi is a deeply religious town and is not exactly renowned for liberal cosmopolitanism. It has a sizeable Muslim population living cheek-by-jowl with Hindus in a very densely populated city. That there were no riots is close to a modern miracle. Riots in India occur with far less provocation.

What worries me is that this may not last. The fact that these attacks are carried out by Muslims (albeit jihadi psychopaths) is not lost on anyone. At some point soon, the tendency to lash out against Muslims in general will be impossible to control.

Some of my recent conversations with expatriate Indian acquaintances about these happenings have been a bit distressing. Along with the justifiable denunciations of Pakistan and the ISI, I heard the regulation stereotyping of Indian Muslims as well: they never support India in cricket matches, they have too many wives and too many children, they never condemn terrorist acts in India, they are anti-national etc. The alarming new development is the admiration my acquaintances had for Israeli tactics in the middle east. When I argued that Israeli collective punishment is usually disproportionate and morally wrong, I found that I was making no headway. Basically, people are fairly comfortable with the killing of innocent civilians in retaliation for terrorist attacks.

When I responded to the rhetorical question: "So, what is the solution ?" by saying that there is no easy solution, the dissatisfaction was evident. People seem to prefer the simplicity of violent retaliation. The bombing of Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir and some major Pakistani cities was thought to be a good idea.

I was bothered by the fact that people I was talking to were utterly oblivious to the death and suffering their suggested retaliation would cause. These are people who are living in comfortable circumstances in the US and most likely do not know anyone who would be harmed in the least bit by the purported bombing.

I have often wondered what aspect of the personality allows otherwise reasonable people to endorse large-scale violence - is it the inability to imagine and empathize with other people's agony, the remoteness of the ultimate victim or just plain, raw hatred ?