The notice is a microcosm of Indianness. If you get past the English (hey, its a foreign tongue, so stop being so fussy) it really is a reflection of our relationship with predictability.

There are three kinds of Indians:

- Those that are unpredictable and don’t care.
- Those that are unpredictable, but would like you to expect, and perhaps accept, their unpredictability. The store owner who put this notice up belongs to this set.
- The predictable kind. Within India, this is a very small set.

Indians are not brought up to be predictable in their behavior. The environment (Bangalore traffic for instance) doesn’t allow us to be. But this is certainly a phenotype issue not a genotype one. Because somehow, when Indians leave India they leave their unpredictability behind.

The great achievement of the IT Services industry has been to extract predictable outcomes for clients out of this morass of unpredictability. They erect these boundary walls around the company. Within these figurative walls there are no power cuts and meetings start on time. Defects are measured and deadlines are met. Because that’s what clients in the developed world expect. It’s gotten easier and easier over time, but in the early days the pioneers did the equivalent of moulding square pegs to fit into round holes.

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The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

Texas textbooks are important not just because Texas is a big state, but also because many small states just go with the Texas version of the textbooks because it costs less than commissioning their own versions.

Around this time last year the Texas Board voted to change science text books. Evolution, which is always in the spotlight when such matters are discussed, was saved by the skin of its teeth from being relegated to “one of many alternate theories”. However,

Failing to overhaul the curriculum broadly, conservatives instead attached a series of measures specific to subjects like biology, where teachers would be newly required to “analyze and evaluate the sufficiency or insufficiency of natural selection to explain the complexity of the cell.”

Christian Conservatives in American politics have recently been tripping over each other in their eagerness to denounce evolution. Bradley Byrne, candidate for Governor of Alabama was recently attacked in a TV ad which claimed that he believed in evolution. Byrne denied the “despicable lies”

“As a Christian and as a public servant, I have never wavered in my belief that this world and everything in it is a masterpiece created by the hands of God,” he said. “As a member of the Alabama Board of Education, the record clearly shows that I fought to ensure the teaching of creationism in our school text books. Those who attack me have distorted, twisted and misrepresented my comments and are spewing utter lies to the people of this state.”

Evolution and to some extent the Big Bang are the flash points in the battle between organized religion and science. They both inject serious doubt into the belief that god created the world and all its creatures, or Creationism. Sure, Intelligent Design can sort of fit the facts into a new theory that preserves the role of god, but that’s not good enough because the Bible doesn’t talk about ID. It vividly describes how god created the world.

This allergy to evolution is to be seen in Islam as well. Turkey, which is the most liberal Muslim country, has very little support for evolution. From the Washington Post

A recent survey, quoted in a 2008 article in the American journal Science, found that fewer than 25 percent of Turks accepted evolution as an explanation of how modern life came to be — by far the lowest percentage of any developed nation.

In the same article

The Discovery Institute of Seattle, which researches and promotes intelligent design as an alternative to creationism and evolution, also sent speakers to Turkey after being invited by the Istanbul municipal government in 2007. President Bruce Chapman said the institute helped bring Turkish evolution critic Mustafa Akyol to a 2005 Kansas school board hearing on teaching critiques of evolution.

A battle against as formidable a foe as science can bring together the two faiths. Somewhat like how Delhi High Court’s verdict allowing consensual gay sex brought together the BJP and All India Muslim Personal Board for the first time on any issue.

Are all religions opposed to evolution? Buddhism and Hinduism are the two other great religions of the world. Do devout Hindus view evolution as a threat to their beliefs? I haven’t heard of any attempts to mess around with science text books in India based upon ideology. Although the BJP did try to change history text books when Murli Manhor Joshi had charge of the HRD ministry.

In my view, other things being equal, Hinduism will be friendlier to evolution. The “other things being equal” being mostly about education. A high school education that teaches science and evolution well, will matter more to people’s acceptance of evolution than their religion or religiosity.

Why is Hinduism friendlier to evolution? It is not because religiosity amongst Hindus is less. Razib Khan analyzes religiosity amongst South Asians in developed countries. It turns out that South Asians are very religious. Being a large majority Hindus must also be very religious.

So there must be other reasons.

Many scriptures, not one Book – Islam and Christianity both have The Book which is the word of god, the ultimate truth. If that book says that god created the earth, then there can be no negotiation on that. Hinduism on the other hand has many scriptures – Bhagvad Gita, Vedas, Puranas, Upanishads, Ramayana. None of them to my knowledge are considered to be the word of god.

Many gods – For millennia, Hindus have had many gods. Personally you might worship just one god, but the people around you worship different gods. In a Hindu’s world view there is no one god and no one truth. Acceptance of alternate gods was in fact a design criteria in the Hindu faith. It was how the Aryans assimilated the tribes in India. This flexibility continued. As far back as the 15th century Hinduism tolerated an atheist school of philosophy.

No organized religion – Organizations perpetuate themselves. The conditions for organized religion to thrive are just not there in Hinduism. As a consequence there is very little, if any, religious education. Faith is a family or personal matter (Here I’m talking about faith rather than ritual).

Bizarre mythology – In Hinduism, scripture, literature and mythology weave a seamless fabric that every Hindu grows up with. From Ram Leela to Grandma’s stories to Amar Chitra Katha we are immersed in this sea of lore and mythology where individual stories can be evocative and powerful, but together they don’t make a cohesive whole. There are miracles in all religious texts, but Indian mythology can get so bizarre that really nobody will ever think it to be possible. The gods are depicted to be flawed, with unpredictable behavior (Why doesn’t Indra just use his thunderbolt and get it over with?). They are more like the DC comics of ancient Hindus than the Bible.

This tolerance for internal inconsistency makes it easier for Hinduism to accept a new idea like evolution. In fact if you look hard enough you will be able to find support in the scriptures or elsewhere in ancient texts for almost any idea. One might, for instance, see the Dashavatara as a metaphor for evolution.

I am not a devout Hindu. I am more Hindu by culture than religion, if there is in fact, a line separating them. I am sure many readers are though. It would be very interesting to get your views on how do you think Hinduism will respond to challenges from science in the years to come and specifically, evolution.

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Mr Walk said a recent Indian Premier League cricket series had notched up 55m views on YouTube – more in the US than in India – and it found a market for Bollywood in Estonia by offering Striker, a Bollywood film, either on a pay-per-stream basis or free with advertising support outside India.

I watched the IPL on Willow.tv for $60 for all matches. That sounds like a high hurdle for ad supported YouTube, but it isn’t. To pay $60 for Willow.tv is actually foolish. I paid $60 for the T20 World Cup and watched 15 minutes of cricket (the India-Australia match, if you must know). Granted IPL will be different because you won’t be that wedded to any team that you won’t watch the other matches. But even so, there is the matter of the quality of the video, which is consistent but average.

YouTube being free will attract an audience that could be 100 times larger. The asking average revenue from each viewer therefore is much, much lower. The opportunity for advertising is greatly underleveraged. There were banner ads around the video frame this time from some money transfer service but I’ll bet the inventory was sold super cheap, since those were the only ads I saw. But what about the interleaved ads between overs and during drinks? Why do folks in the US have to see an Indian cellphone ad? All this can add up to much more than what Willow.tv is taking in.

My guess is that IPL will be free next year on YouTube.

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Now one could write a book on this subject (not me, I’ve already got a gig going but someone, I’m sure) but here’s a short blog post.

Whether you have an Indian passport or not is a terrible way to look at it. From the Husain media circus, it appears that surrendering the passport was really the event that made him unIndian. In spite of his protestations to the contrary, Barkha Dutt (link to NDTV above) seemed to think that was the case. It so happens that India does not permit dual citizenship. The OCI is not the same as citizenship. If like many other countries like the US, India did permit dual citizenship then Husain could have added the Qatari passport and no one would have cared.

I have many friends who live in India but hold a US passport. I think they would consider themselves Indian.

What about residency? Is that a good criterion? But then there are all kinds of Non Resident Indians. Short stays, long stays, those that are waiting for the kids to go to college to return. And then there are those who don’t intend to go back but still feel very connected to India.

I think that its just silly to try to draw these boundaries, and affix labels. Let’s just celebrate a shared culture with great diversity within it and fuzzy boundaries at the edges.

And it is downright hypocritical to celebrate Sunita Williams as one of our own, but decry M F Husain surrendering his passport as abandoning his country.

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Siddharth Varadarajan writes

When confronted by the mob power of the Shiv Sena, MNS or other right-wing groups, the police in India invariably give in to their demands, no matter how irrational or unreasonable, and force the targets of their illegal pressure to give up their rights. So art galleries anywhere in India think once, twice and a hundred times before exhibiting a single painting by M.F. Hussain, movie hall owners agonise over whether to show ‘controversial’ films or not, screenplay writers and movie directors allow politicians, pundits, granthis and maulvis to vet their projects before they are launched, scholarly works of history are banned because their contents do not conform with the cherished hagiography of some group or sect, writers like Taslima Nasrin are hounded out of the country by mobs who claim to have been offended by books they have never read, shops fear to stock Valentine cards because of threats by self-appointed guardians of morality and ‘Indian culture’.

To me this is a law and order issue. Regardless of whether the protesters are right or wrong, if they go from protesting to rioting and arson, the police must act swiftly and decisively.

In India this is not as simple an issue as it might seem like. There are too many people, typically unemployed youth, who will gladly participate in a riot for the money. If the risk of being injured in a lathi charge goes up, all that will change is the asking rate for a rioter.

But letting the rioters destroy public and private property is just not an option. It subverts our freedoms and creates an alternate extra-governmental power center. Don’t feed the beast.

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That said, the arithmetic in the Senate hasn’t changed. You still need 60 votes in the senate to prevent a filibuster and the Democrats don’t have them. So the stalemate continues.

The use of the filibuster has increased over time to where getting anything passed in a Senate with 100 seats requires 60 votes. Ezra Klein writes about how a supermajority of 60 votes is now a necessity for anything significant to pass in the Senate.

For someone who was educated in India (Civics used to be a separate subject in school) the filibuster and its evolution into a supermajority requirement in the Senate, seems odd. In fact there are many things about the system of government in the US that are odd and like the filibuster don’t really serve the purpose of furthering either democracy or good governance.

Start with the role of the President. There was a time in India when as impatient young people with ideas, my friends and I would look at the American Presidential form of government admiringly. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a Presidential form of government that elected a President directly and then he or she would be able to rule wisely and justly and do what was right instead of being beholden to the party apparatchiks or coalition partners?

Wrong. The American President is the head of the Executive, but any significant change involves legislation, which is what the US Congress does. And the US Congress can oppose or stymie the President, or just tie itself up in knots trying to pass legislation. When it does, it is full of compromises and earmarks. And the President, as you can see, can do almost nothing about it.

The Indian Parliamentary system actually is dead simple in comparison. The majority party or coalition in the Lok Sabha gets to rule. Their leader becomes the Prime Minister who is the head of the government. Bills from the government, may be opposed vehemently by the opposition, but they need only a majority to pass which the ruling party already has. If a bill is defeated on the floor of the Lok Sabha, a no-confidence vote might follow which could bring down the government. Something that happens only rarely.

The Rajya Sabha, the other house, is involved in law-making but doesn’t have any teeth. Neither does the President of India. In general, if you are elected into a majority, you can rule unhampered. Now that doesn’t mean there aren’t other challenges – coalition politics does weaken the government – but that is more related to the politics of the moment, where regional parties are much stronger than they have been in the past, than a structural issue with the functioning of the legislative process.

The American Congress is bicameral. Both houses are powerful and actively involved in shaping legislation. Districts that elect the House of Representatives are drawn based upon population, just like the Lok Sabha. But the Senate is a completely different animal. There are two senators per state. Wyoming with a population of half a million sends two senators to the senate and so does California with 37 million people. Because of this, the composition of the Senate is not really representative of the American people.

At the state level things can get even weirder. The symmetry in how democracy functions in India at the state and national levels is absent in the US. A state like California whose finances are in shambles is unable to do much about it because every important piece of legislation can be forced to a referendum. This law was inflicted upon California by Californians themselves. To change this law you need a 2/3rd majority in the Assembly. Till that time, you can’t raise taxes and you can’t take on the public employee unions. The result is deficits galore.

Matt Yglesias has another problem with American elections. It is with the number of officials that people need to elect.

Consider, for example, America’s staggering quantity of elected officials. If you live in Toronto, you vote for a member of the Toronto City Council, you vote for a member of the Ontario Parliament, and you vote for a member of the Canadian Parliament. That’s one large Anglophone city in North America.

What happens in New York City? Well, you’ve got a city council member, a borough president, a mayor, a public advocate, a comptroller, and a district attorney. You’ve also got a state assembly member, a state senator, an attorney-general, a state comptroller, and a governor. Then at the federal level, there’s a member of congress, two senators, and the president. That’s sixteen legislative and elected officials rather than Toronto’s three. New Yorkers don’t have three times as much time in their day to monitor the performance of elected officials. Instead, New Yorker elected officials simply aren’t monitored as closely.

So the next time you feel like we should seek a different form of government in India, count your blessings. It could have been much worse. We could have adopted the US form of government instead of British parliamentary democracy in 1950.

Photo by thecnote

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The first thing to ponder is if Indian business practices are less modern. They may be technologically behind the best in the world and they might suffer on account of the creaky infrastructure that supports them. But is it also true that even in the context that they find themselves in, their business practices leave much to be desired?

The paper implies that this is indeed the case. I tend to agree with its conclusion. This is not to say that there aren’t well managed Indian firms – the research focused on mid-sized family owned businesses. But I think that it is safe to say that like technological innovation, management innovation is largely centered in the western world. A lot of it is applicable even to the Indian context, but it’s penetration is not too deep.

The authors then go on to say that the reason why Indian firms are not well managed is because management is not well informed about modern management techniques. They distrust outsiders and rarely use management consultants and so leave themselves in a low information cocoon. They don’t hire business school grads and there isn’t much mobility within the industry that could disseminate best practices.

One of the recommendations of the authors is that a robust management consulting industry could solve some of these problems. The research was supported and partly financed by a management consulting firm, Accenture. So this conclusion is somewhat self-serving, but not necessarily incorrect because of that.

After employee mobility in the industry, management consulting is perhaps the most successful way of disseminating new business practices. My sense is that Indian companies are not very open to management consulting in general. The cost is perceived to be very high. The change they bring about is thought to be too disruptive. And the improvement in the business, too chancy.

Maybe its management consultants who need to look at themselves to see if they are responsible for the underuse of their services in India.

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One that English medium education can lead to “poor educational outcomes”

“It is now well established that when a child begins learning in his or her first language that child is more likely to succeed academically and is better able to learn additional languages.”

I blogged about this in my post More English and More Non-English.

But the other interesting point made is that English medium education can lead to general “language impoverishment”. (L2 here is English and L1 is the mother tongue.)

Starting L2 as early as possible, and teaching as much of the curriculum as possible through the L2 does not result in effective or widespread L2 acquisition. At best, this results in “subtractive bilingualism”: an L2 acquired at the expense of L1. Most often, the result is simply language impoverishment; not being able to use either L1 or L2 adequately.

The essay cites many references. Please go read it if you can.

The second point, that an early start or transition to English medium education, can actually lead to communicating in all languages poorly, including English, is counter intuitive and some of you may disagree with it just based upon your own personal experience or the people you know. But I would argue that the readers of this blog likely had a privileged environment – exposure to English at home and with friends early on etc. – or may have been gifted enough to overcome the disadvantage. So you are not exactly a random sample of India’s population.

Across the cross section of India, I think English medium education works to disperse educational outcomes. For a small minority, it results in better English skills but no better general educational outcomes. This small minority, who have an “English friendly” environment, an English medium education poses no hurdle, or a very small one. But the rewards are linked to opportunities in the global marketplace for higher education and jobs, including the export oriented service industries in India.

For the large majority, however, according to the research, English medium education works differently and leads to poorer educational outcomes and poorer language skills. If this is the case, it must be a matter of great concern to education administrators.

Whether there is language impoverishment in India compared to other countries, is a tough question to answer. In the companies I have worked in, American employees in the same role have uniformly had better English skills than Indian employees. But language impoverishment would imply that the English skills of the American employees were better than the Mother Tongue skills of Indian employees, which I wouldn’t know. My guess is they are.

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It’s hard to argue against this point of view. Expanding E1 or for that matter E2 as well is good. Spoken English skills are what have enabled India to create the huge offshore services sector. English is also the common language that links India and is therefore the de facto language of big business. Better English skills – spoken, written or really at any level – enhances a person’s employability and opens higher paying job opportunities.

But is more and better English the only dimension there is to language in education? I see two problems with this.

One, English is a self-perpetuating advantage that creates haves and have nots across generations. If your parents can speak in English, if their friends and their children speak in English, you are much likelier to grow up to speak English. This self-perpetuation is true about education in general (if your parents are educated you are likelier…) but while better access to books, schools and teachers can, to a large extent, break the cycle for general education, this is really hard to do when it comes to speaking a non-native language.

Two, an English medium instruction may actually be detrimental to a child’s education. There must be millions of children who sit through say, a History class in English, not understanding much of what is being taught. Giridhar Rao writes often about this often at his blog Bolii. A couple of posts here and here are illuminating. Apparently, this problem is not unique to India.

The answer is certainly not to turn the clock back on English and English medium education in the country. Yet, I would say that the focus should be elsewhere. Market forces are taking care of English skills. Parents know that their children will have a better future if they go to an English medium school. They are all voting with their wallets for English. Even the MBA school that Bhagat speaks of that hired ten English teachers to upgrade the students’ conversational English, is a product of the market responding to demand for English.

So English doesn’t need any help. What does need work is creating a lot more employment opportunities in the organized sector for non-English speakers. If non-English speakers could see good job opportunities in manufacturing or even the service sectors, some may avoid the sisyphean task of becoming an E1 and yet make a good life for themselves. And perhaps even understand what’s going on in History class.

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The amount of money spent is, of course, a key determinant of electoral victory. We will cover that in a later article on Corruption and Campaign Finance. In this article we will discuss the state of the art in actually getting the bribes into the hands of the voters.

The most important method of delivering voter bribes is cash. Its advantage lies in the fact that it is uncomplicated. Voters understand exactly how much they are getting and can readily compare it with the going rate of a vote. Most will give immediate feedback to the politician on whether it is adequate or not, and how it compares with what the other candidate is giving out. This allows the politician to do another round of bribes, if the need be.

Operationally also it is simple. Party funds are typically warehoused in paper currency itself. In the event that funds have to be retrieved from offshore accounts, havala transactions can readily convert them into rupees. Gunny sacks are then used to transport them to the point of distribution.

There are some disadvantages with using cash as well. The big problem, in one word, is corruption. Leakages – into the pockets of party workers – can be as high as 30 to 40%. Politicians have tried their best to get party workers to run a clean bribe distribution system, but to no avail.

To overcome this problem, many politicians distribute gifts instead of cash. Saris, liquor and when desperate, mixie-grinders are commonly used bribes. While this increases the operational complexity in procurement and managing the supply chain, leakage is considerably reduced. When very large sums of money need to be distributed – for a statewide bribery program or where the bribe per voter needs to be very high, typically for a completely hopeless candidate – using gifts instead of cash is the method of choice.

Several innovations in the business of buying votes have been made in recent times. One such innovation is to use utility bills to pay the bribes. When funds available are limited, politicians prefer to target neighbourhoods where they are weak instead of spreading the money thin across everyone. But the practical problem with this is that when bribes are being distributed, news spreads quickly over cellphones and then in the resulting crowds there is no way to ascertain where the voters come from. Also, many unscrupulous voters will sometimes take advantage of the crowds and present themselves to be bribed multiple times.

Using utility bills is a brilliant solution because they all carry a residential address. And by requiring voters to present original bills for the last month only, multiple bribe collectors are almost eliminated. The bills need to be retained by the bribe distributors for audit purposes, which makes this method unpopular amongst party workers. Politicians’ search for honest party workers to run this process has not yielded much success. Consequently, in spite of its advantages, this method has not spread widely.

Another innovation that has been used very successfully, is to promise a very large bribe to be paid if elected. This works very well for the political party making the promise because a) it is conditional to being elected and b) the bribe is paid out of public funds. This allows them to ratchet up the size of the bribe greatly. In the last state elections in Tamil Nadu, for example, the DMK promised every family a color TV and then made good on their promise after they were elected.

The only downside to this is that voters in the past have tended to be cynical about election promises. However, surveys indicate that a high percentage of voters are able to distinguish an election promise of good governance, which is unlikely to be kept, from the promise of a future, conditional bribe of a tangible product. This is understandable since good governance is ‘in the eye of the beholder’ while a color TV either is or isn’t.

There is a great tradition of voter bribery in India. There are legends about it dating back to the 1950s. Once such legend concerning voter bribery apparently occurred in the 1950s in Orissa. Biju Patnaik, who was the front-runner to be Chief Minister, as expected by voters, had distributed cash to ensure his party’s victory. His opponent Hare Krishna Mahtab, who did not have the resources that Patnaik had, needed to do something to counter. According to legend, Mahtab’s party workers spread the rumour that Biju Patnaik had distributed fake currency notes. Then they generously offered to exchange the fake notes with real notes! Needless to say the Mahtab camp greatly underestimated the sophistication of Oriya voters, and lost the election.

Today, bribing voters has become so common that all serious candidates must spend a good chunk of their election funds on it. Since other issues matter little (fomenting communal hatred being an important exception), candidates must compete with each other on the quantum of bribes per voter. This is good for the economy as it redistributes wealth from industrial houses and foreign corporations to the aam aadmi. Also, almost all the money distributed as voter bribes is spent immediately which gives a boost to local businesses like country liquor distilleries. In total, the voter bribes industry now accounts for an estimated 2 percent of GDP and about 50 basis points of annual GDP growth. At the G-20 summit later this week, as world leaders discuss what each country is doing to restart the global economy, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will argue that voter bribes in the runup to the general election should be treated as India’s ‘stimulus package’.

In order to encourage more spending on voter bribery, the election commission recently took the important step of releasing two promotional videos on prime time TV. In these videos, Mulayam Singh Yadav and Jaswant Singh, senior leaders of two important political parties were shown distributing cash to voters. It is hoped that this will accelerate election spending by candidates in the last few weeks before the elections. In the current weak economic environment, the election commission must be commended for this bold, creative step.

I would now like to invite comments from readers on how we can take voter bribery to new heights.

[Disclaimer: From the first couple of comments it appears that my attempt at satire did not quite work. So, for the record, the facts and figures in this post could be grossly exaggerated or just plain wrong. Like Bollywood movies, to enjoy this post, you must suspend your disbelief.]

Photo Credit: Wen-Yan King

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