No mean achievement!

I was in Hyderabad for the whole of last year. Working at Deloitte was an absolutely amazing experience. What this also meant is that for the whole of last year I was living at a place that is culturally very different from the part of the country that I hail from. Having spent a couple of decades in the eastern part of India I was pretty used to red tape and a slow-paced life. You always expected that your work would never get done on time. Deadlines were never met - neither by you nor by the people that you dealt with. Promises were never kept and no one ever put a premium on anyone's time. Things, however, turned out to be very different in Hyderabad and especially in a firm like Deloitte. Meetings always started on time and people expected that when you made a commitment, you would keep it! So when I quit my job at Hyderabad to head off to IIM Lucknow, I decided to spend a couple of weeks at home. And that's where I am right now.

So yesterday, I had to pay a visit to a government office in order to get a certificate which I need during the admission process at IIM. The official that I visited is called the 'Civil Surgeon' and it seems it really is a big deal to be a 'Civil Surgeon' in this part of the country. The eastern part of India has a huge obsession with government jobs. These jobs are certainly the most sought after. Probably because the private sector is not very active in this region. Also because a government job translates into millions in bribes that these officials pocket while making an example of the inefficiency and nepotism that the innards of India are known for. So off I went into the hellish confines of this dingy government office, hardly aware that the 'Civil Surgeon' in Jamshedpur would turn out to be anything but civil.

What i needed was a fitness certificate which stated that I am fit and healthy enough to be admitted into IIM. So I came armed with all my medical reports, brandishing them like an accomplishment that I was mighty proud of. Being used to getting things done super quick at a private firm, I thought the whole process would take me no longer than a few minutes. I was in for a rude shock. Well as soon as I went in, I realized that there was an army of subordinates sitting around and guarding the holy office of the big official. To my surprise I was told that the Civil Surgeon was a woman. I was happy to hear that, since I had heard a lot about how women in administration are far more efficient and far less corrupt. Little did I know that this view was to change.

So I was asked, rather curtly, by one of the many 'peons' at her majesty's beck and call what I was doing lingering around the office of his boss. I politely replied that I had come to get a certificate of fitness that was needed at IIM for the admission process. While I am pretty sure he did not understand 'IIM', the word 'certificate' thankfully registered with the blockhead and he ushered me into an ante room to speak with a certain clerk who transacted all the paperwork for her highness. The clerk examined my documents, contorted his dumb face into the most bewildering expression and then asked me to wait in front of the office to speak to 'madam'.

It's interesting how time slows down in these places. And time really is at a standstill in the millions of government offices in our great nation. While I testily waited for my turn to be called in, I ran my eyes around the office - stacks of papers and files everywhere, their pages gone yellow and the dog's ears at their corners bearing testimony to the decades they had spent within the sacred walls of this 'Sarkari' office. A number of trunks and rickety cupboards fit for the antique shop punctutated the rather depressing scene before me. There was no sign of a computer anywhere and the only electric equipment around the place was a bulb and a rusty ceiling fan that made a din as it miraculously rotated overhead without falling off. I was finally called in. Madam was busy scrutinizing papers related to God-knows-what. She didn't even look up through her glasses as the peon introduced me by mentioning the reason why I had ventured into her sacrosanct premises. Without flinching for a split-second she banished me back to her clerk. I had no idea why. Being used to treated with dignity and respect at a 'foreign' firm, I was visibly disappointed at being accorded this stepmotherly treatment.

However, I made my way back to the clerk and asked him what on earth I was supposed to do now. After endless prodding and pleading he revealed to me that I was supposed to write an application stating that I needed a fitness certificate. I was also to mention the purpose for which I required it and I needed to attach the documents that would support my (now failing) case. Of course. The application! How did I even expect to get anything done at The Government of India without a darned application! I cursed my naivete and sat down to do the needful. Then I waited.

After an hour of waiting and fretting, I finally decided to speak to the clerk. He frowned, probably amused by my impatience. I mean, who did I think I was, blundering into a holy government office expecting work to get done on time? Huh! After another round of prodding and pleading, he finally said something that made things a little clearer to me. Obviously I hadn't been watching enough of 'Office Office'. Her highness' hands needed lubrication. A crisp 500 Rs note always does the trick I was told. I was stumped.

Now all those Moral Science classes and long lectures by the morality brigade came flooding back into my mind. Wasn't I supposed to be an ideal citizen of this country and stop the bribe culture? For a moment I thought, who cares! Let all those high ideals go for a toss as long as I got my work done. In any case, I had waited enough. What difference could a single righteous action by a midget in the system like myself make? But then I thought, why not? What is the worst that could happen? These people could make me wait for an obscenely long time? I am jobless in any case. They can't beat me on patience. So I politely stepped away from the clerk's office and waited outside the surgeon's.

After another hour of cribbing, cursing and staring at the ceiling, I was finally invited inside. This time Madam had the grace to look me in the face. She got down to business immediately. She pointed out 10 different loopholes in my application and the supporting documents. She almost made me feel like a fraudster who was out to dupe her holy office. Then she said something to the effect of - 'Standing like a fool outside my office won't help'. Obviously I could do better. I could offer her a bribe. A bribe that she had almost asked for directly now. I was castled. Her highness had said it herself now. So I did the best thing that I could have done in that hellbender of a situation that I had been put into. I smiled.

I think that put her off really bad. Because then she signed my documents immediately. The dismayed clerk then had no option but to stamp the seal of the Civil Surgeon's office on my documents. I felt like a hero. I had got my work done. The Government of India had functioned without a bribe, albeit a little late. No mean achievement.

A question for democracy

As the country goes into the 15th Lok Sabha elections, I am musing about a rather fundamental question about voter behaviour: In the General Elections, should one vote on local issues or national issues. I have thought about this long and hard and found arguments in support of either case. It is really difficult to decide which option is right. I hope someone is able to enlighten me by offering the right logic. 

On the one hand, there is the case where you vote for a large national party keeping in mind the government that you want to see at the centre. You would vote based on macro-issues such as inflation, unemployment, trade, new investments, education, defence et al. On the other hand there is the case where you vote on local issues keeping in mind the performance of your local MP and the record of the other candidates for your constituency. Here it boils down to more local issues such as local infrastructure, local schoools and colleges, local investments and the like. 

There are plausible arguments in favour of either option. Let's take the first case first - Voting on national issues: In a multi-party democracy like India where there are a large number of regional players, it is difficult to keep track of the agenda of each party. The smaller the players, the narrower the issues that they fight elections on. So when you're voting to put a government up at the centre, shouldn't you vote for parties which contest on national issues and possess the wherewithal to run a nation? Also, if you're voting for a local party or an independent, you are more likely than not to be contributing to a fractured mandate and a hung parliament at the centre.

The second option - Voting on local issues: After all, it's your local leader who is responsible for your development. He/She is the individual who is allocated the funds for your constituency. It is the local MP who has more hands-on knowledge about the problems that you face at the local level and can represent your voice accurately at the national level in the lower house. Local investments and infrastructure projects may be initiated by this individual. Moreover, there is the 'Wisdom of crowds' theory of James Surowiecki which states that for the decisions of a large group of people to be accurate it is important for those individual decisions to be independent. Hence, every constituent of a crowd should vote based on his needs and interests, without considering how the rest of the crowd behaves or in this case votes. 

I have been racking my brains over this issue and have found no definitive argument that would tip the contest in favour of either of these choices. I need to come across a sound rational logic that would convince me of the superiority of either of these cases. It is an important question - one that deserves to be mused upon and answered. Even if I do not ultimately find an answer to this question, I am sure I will be wiser at the end of the day. I will have understood the nature of  democracy and the importance of having a representative government. Being a part of the largest democracy in the world, this is the bare minimum I owe the nation - and more importantly, myself. 

A chance to discard the old

Every threat is also almost always an opportunity. Nowhere could this be more relevant than in current conditions. The global economy is in the doldrums and experts worldwide have been proposing stimulus package after ineffective stimulus package to jumpstart the stalling economic machines of the world. What if we're following an incorrect approach in the first place? What if were are simplistically trying to treat the symptom instead of treating the disease? 

The current economic crisis is the result of impaired financial assets, which were overvalued due to complex speculations by greedy and obtuse bankers. Now we are happily trying to correct the problem by bailing out these bankers. What we are NOT doing is trying to understand what they were doing. They were, in a very rudimentary sense, betting on the cash flows from risky financial instruments. But money or wealth should be based on an underlying commodity or product or service. What if these underlying entities themselves are not sound? Maybe we should rethink the origins of our wealth. 

If you come to think of it, the current global economy is constituted, mostly, by old world wealth - fossil fuels, obsolete manufacturing and aging technology. The only relatively new source of wealth in the economy is the internet firms which have truly innovated to create wealth. Maybe we should focus our efforts on creating new wealth instead of trying to fix the old sources of wealth. Maybe the General Motors and Fords of the world ought to be allowed to fail in order to make way for new firms and new sources of wealth which are based on new ideas which are relevant to our times. It will be a more painful and drawn out recovery. But we wont have an encore of the current crisis for a long time to come. 

All major periods of wealth creation in our history have been based on real innovation and new thinking. Be it the industrial revolution, the space race or the internet. New technology leads the way for wealth creation as a natural progression. Any other way of tinkering with wealth is simply playing with the controls without fixing the circuitry. Maybe we need another revolution in technology which is driven by new ideas - green energy, affordable public healthcare, for that matter any new idea with the potential to transform the economy by driving out the obsolete. 

World leaders are myopic by compulsion. They have vote banks to anwer to. But academics are independent. What has surprised me over the last few months as this crisis has unfolded is that every Ivy League B-School professor has simply gone on record to speculate on the duration of the crisis and the origins of it. No one has proposed a concrete plan for recovery based on anything which is different from a rehashing of the old-world thinking. 

Now, I believe is our big chance to discard the old. If change has come, then let it come big. Let us go the distance and fix things once and for all instead of prescribing lame measures. Let us alter the patient's lifestyle instead of supporting his failing heart with yet another bypass surgery. I don't think crises of such magnitude deserve to be tackled with half measures. I hope someone is listening.

What is wrong with America

It's such a pity that the whole world is in a mess. It was created by a singe nation. America. The greatest country in the world has led the world into a mess that was completely uncalled for. For decades we have revered America and aped everything American. Now suddenly the whole world wakes up to realize that most of what they so proudly espoused was actually a pile of filth. A hell of a lot was wrong with America and no one ever realized it.

There is no denying that Americans have been pioneers in a vast majority of fields. Their values of individualism and enterprise have given the world a lot of what it holds dear in terms of true advancement. But that doesn't give a nation the licence to engineer disaster. And that is what America has repeatedly done during the course of its dominance of the world. It has created unprecedented crises time and again.

America, for all its cries about being the champion of democracy and responsible leadership was the first and only nation to use a nuclear weapon against the civilians of another nation. The Atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the origin of the nuclear arms race. Then came Vietnam where America conclusively proved that it doesn't deserve to be the self-righteous leader of the free world that it claims it is. Iraq and Abu Ghraib were shameful corroborations of the irresponsibility of the Americans.

The current financial crisis is America's doing. A nation that doesn't save and spends what the rest of the world invests in it is also the same nation that claims it has the right business lessons for us. America is a nation founded as much on credit as it claims to be on 'liberty and justice for all'. Borrow to spend is the philosophy that the Americans have followed for so long and so shamelessly while driving the world into an economic cesspool. If we claim that an economy is booming just because people are borrowing more to spend more, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the Economics that the world has taught itself.

BIG is a synonym for America. Because Americans want everything big in their lives. They drive obscenely large inefficient fuel guzzling cars, eat unhealthily large meals, carry extra-large bodies and do just about everything on a big, albeit unsustainable scale. This is what they have taught the rest of the world through their capitalist corporations and their political dominance. Even the most staunch capitalist would admit that capitalism is founded on the twin emotions of greed and fear. The interplay of greed and fear is what fuels the economic cycles in the world today. But the scale on which these interactions have been affecting the world order in current times is simply appalling. Screw ups of the magnitude that we are witnessing today would never have been possible without the "BIG" thinking that Americans typically bring to the table.

Every culture has its own unique traditions that get ingrained in its psyche over a period of time. A distinct identity of a race evolves from the experiences that the race collectively participates in and the reactions of people from that race to what happens to them. America has thus developed a culture of free-thinking individualism. Americans, through their historical upbringing have a sense of unbridled ambition that is fuelled by a desire to do more for themselves. No holds barred consumerism is only a by-product of this tendency that Americans have developed over the decades.

I do not dispute the fact that there is much to learn from our American friends. They are probably the only civilization that truly respects the sanctity of the individual and holds his rights to be sacrosanct. Americans respect enterprise and risk-taking more than any other people in the world. That having been said, one would do well to remember that no single model of living would fit the whole world today. We are all distinctly diverse in our own ways and socio-economic models can never be imposed on any race without disturbing results. We need to come up with our own models of living and working based on the cultural identity and values of our own race. There are things that we are certainly better at that we must seek to leverage in order to hold our own and excel as a nation or a civilization.

Last, but not the least: God seriously bless America.