Carbon footprint

Of all the ways we perceive, & change according to, the world around us, one of the important measures to know & care about is your carbon footprint. It is all very well to know about global warming, though I'm personally unsure how much of the global warming debate is driven by scientists as opposed to activists (or alarmists...), however, I think that it is important to know how much each one of us contributes to carbon dioxide content, & see if there are ways to reduce it.

The good thing about reducing carbon footprint is that it is not not only an environment friendly thing to do, but it is also good economics. So if you use CFL in your households, you're at the same time saving money & energy. Unlike many other problems we face today, reducing carbon footprint means a saving of money & not a spending of it. So much so that the CFL commercials just talk about how much you'll save on your energy bill, without saying how much more efficient it is compared to incandescents. This is the implicit however; but I think it'll help to emphasize this.

Again, car pooling/mass transport is good economics (Kilometers per passenger, fuel litres per passenger), good for the traffic, & good for the environment. That is why trains are so much better than flights - though you could argue the macro-economic costs of business travel over rails are enough to offset any gains in reduced spending.

In any case, since a society is after all an assimilation of people that live in it, it will help to know what your carbon footprint is & see what you can do, if you want to, to reduce is. Here is a carbon footprint calculator.

The breakneck pace of India's global ambitions should, I feel, be equally complimented by the sensitivity & awareness of her people - people who are driving this growth, the income appreciation, & probably looking to drive the latest Sports Utility Vehicles, & the gradually replacing once manual chores to appliances as much as they can.

I do not know what the right balance to all of this is, but a start is probably more important than the right strategy.

Being Purushottam

As far as I know, Lord Ram had a rather trying training as a child - living in jungles & reading deep, fat books when other children his age were playing cricket. He had the abysmal bad luck of running into Parashuram once as well. And then he gets himself exiled, has to start living in the woods, gets his wife kidnapped by some weirdo, uncool king & manages to befriend a few apes for conversation & tea in the evening.

I mean, that's not so great.

And yet, as far as I know, notwithstanding his treatment of his wife later in the epic, he was a rather nice chap. In his time, there were actually just wars - which he fought & won, & reinstated the right rulers for the kingdom. He ruled his kingdom well & apparently people could go to the nightclubs without locking their houses. He was the original proponent of the 'no-first-strike' policy & there was no collateral damage in the wars he fought. Rather a sophisticated bloke, I am not sure that he ever said even so much as "oh shit!" once.

And we forget all this & forget that the Ram Setu was built on perseverance & strife, that Lord Ram was more about building bridges, forging friendships & getting things done right.

What are you doing about Purushottam's legacy?

This I believe

This I believe is a show on NPR. National Public radio is one of the best parts of being in the US. While we extrapolate an anti-Bush & anti-aggressive-foreign-policy stance to anti-America in general, NPR is one of the many glorious contradictions to such generalizations. While you may read my thoughts on NPR here, I took on the subject of one of it's programs to say this:

"How we behave in unmanned traffic signals says a lot about who we are."

- This I believe

News

Benazir Bhutto has now been buried. In a certain way, the media coverage of that story is the perfect example of media coverage in general lately. While the concerns over Pakistan sliding down to civil war & the safety of the nuclear arsenal at it's disposal are genuine & have indeed received a good amount of attention, the assassination of Bhutto has also led to needless glorification of Benazir. Having said that, it is not necessarily impossible to find some critical stuff on her. See article by Dalrymple in Outlook.

Yet again, the fact that the half of the Nobel Peace Prize this year went to IPCC, & not to R. K. Pachauri (Chair of IPCC) received factually accurate but perhaps selective-in-importance reporting. IPCC has since vanished from the Indian mind.

International coverage, unless it involved India in a certain way - hopefully glorious - , continued in its by-the-way manner with Sarkozy's divorce getting as much space as the French Transport strike & probably a lot more than what Sarkozy had achieved since his election.

Yet between all of this whining & complaining, what really is sometimes not noticed as often is that the Indian media has just exploded & that while sensationalism/populist coverage may be something that mars its content, all of our media can cry hoarse against the government & actually thrive on it, & that if you tried just a little, it is not at all difficult to get through to more non-partisan & objective news.

And opinions - in Usha's blog. :)

Have a great 2008.

Come on now

Or as they say in English, on Television, & in newspapers "Chak de!" Its everywhere; ubiquitous & refusing to go away. Cricket, football (the recent Nehru cup), hockey (the Asia cup & the Indian team's laudable performances) - there are just two words that we have to talk about all of this. Wikipedia has an entry on the film "Chak de, India" & the literal translation of this phrase is "Come on, India". Or, as I was told, it is more representative of the spirit of the Nike punchline, "just do it".

There are some people who are not all wrapped up in this monosyllabic, all-encompassing, charged up message that seems to describe everything from a Tendulkar ton (hasn't happened lately) to a 9% Q1 GDP growth; these are the CPM. Nothing ever makes them happy. In fact, it is far easier to say what the CPM are against than it is to say what they are for. They are against "operationalizing" the nuclear deal with a detailed understanding of exactly what it entails, they're against the the communal BJP, & they're against pulling out of the government, as they're against joining it. After a while, it reads like something of a corollary of the famous Holmes axiom "When you've factored in all that you're against , whatever remains, however improbable, must be what you stand for".

What remains though, unfortunately, is underdevelopment. Stability, yes but no industries. Or nothing at least to reckon with.

The CPM is the last-party standing in the way of a mass-hysteria of Chak De India. They're not going away without a fight. How dare you replace all the fancy "isms", ethics & revolutionary stuff? The common man must remain so. Always.

Of all the Presidents

Now, with the presidential elections over a year away, & public memory being typically short (Whatever happened to the outrage over Saddam's execution?) it is very difficult for anybody to hazard a guess as to who would be the next US President.

However, how can you really resist a political position? :) Well, the fact is you probably cannot. The CNN & YouTube debate today was quite outstanding both in terms of the variety of topics that were talked about as well as manner in which the questions were framed. In different areas of the country, there were different reactions to who really won the day, & though, it appeared to me, the media experts took the safe position of rallying behind Clinton, the New Hampshire focus group put her in the 4th position behind Obama, Biden & such.

So beyond what I know & believe about each candidate, I really wish it is Obama who emerges a winner just to prove my own philosophy that History has a way of favouring the improbable. So much for political acumen.

Clinton is doing pretty well herself, but ever so often she answers as the fore-runner. While media experts constantly call this 'showing leadership', I think that it is a bit uncalled for.

I like Richardson & find him fairly precise as well as detail-oriented, someone who draws well from the past without necessarily coming across as blowing his horn. But then again, I might have thought differently if he was the fore-runner. Also, if ever there is a compromise in the future, 7 richardson decides to join either Obama or Clinton as the vice-Presidential candidate, i think that'd really make a winning pair.

I feel sorry for John Edwards. He has constantly tried to take on the front-runners with little success, & even in the way of stirring up controversy, he has done little resorting as he does to often-repeated rhetorical stances.

I guess we'll see.

S!

Whatever...

Obviously, you've encountered that expression before. And probably with an alarming regularity. But no, I'm not writing this to accentuate the difference between types of English, spoken or rolled.

I got into this conversation with a colleague over lunch & talked about gun control, & the state of creationism & the religious right here in the US - you know, the kind of juicy "isms" that make me salivate.

We had many commonalities in our opinions though these were borne out of different experiences;well, I should say that Joe's were experiences that involved real people & mine were accumulated from print & electronic media. What did you expect anyway?

The course of the conversation led JB & me to talk about how religious texts need to be examined in the social context of their origin. I was tactless enough to throw in how all religions really had tribal, pagan origins & assorted ramifications. This, though, isn't correct of all religions, particularly of Jainism, & Buddhism.

The two further extrapolations I had in mind coming from this thread were that pagan, tribal societies had hard, well-defined,value systems (if you're not with us, you're against us etc), & that ambivalence/intellectual honesty is really a modern thing - particularly characteristic, in the US at least, of the generation X - another topic of conversation with JB.

And then I read this.

I was wrong. Again. The rigveda, for a document that predates most known bodies of knowledge, actually is ambivalent about the creation of the universe. Yes, the Vedas talk about Gods before the "trinity" culture became mainstream Hinduism. But even so, for a book that old, if that wasn't ambivalence & intellectual honesty, then.... whatever (ambivalence etc)

S!

The subcontinental

Invariably, it appears that when Americans are thinking of India, they're really thinking of Chicken Tikka Masala. Or, Tandoori chicken. And some of them think, I'm told, that the Tandoori chicken , owing to its crimson complexion, must be very hot. I've been asked if we eat Tandoori Chicken everyday. I did not have the heart to tell the person that my resources back home are too limited to build out a Tandoor at home. So, I said something to the effect of "Oh no, just on Sundays or some such special occasions!"

Then, one time, I had to explain this whole thing about how usually in a family with both a daughter & son, customarily the daughter gets married first. This led to many hypothetical questions about many-children-families & the associated ramifications about age differences & the like.

And then, making sense of arranged marriage was about the hardest thing to do. Admittedly, it works & has worked for a while & there are possibly good cultural reasons for it. My problem was actually more about explaining the set up process in the process of which I, perhaps injudiciously, mentioned the word "pageant"... needless to say; I could not rescue my explanations from that point onwards.

Americans think of Indian food, Indian traditions & Indian IT.

Indians, to the contrary, think of the Punjabi Tandoor, the Tamil Pongal, the Bangalore IT scene, the power corridors of Delhi, the ever-prospering Gujaratis & do not think at all of the North-Eastern states.

The whole, it appears, could not be farther, in our hearts & minds, from the parts.

To Die For - III

Recently, a gentleman mailed me about campaigning to redeem Hinduism from the clutches of rising Islamic clout - the protection it gets from apologists, the secularists, & the government in the name of welfare. As always, when somebody asks me to actually do something, I begin to shift my weight uncomfortably knowing that this'll require me to make up my mind about the issues, & the mind is the last thing I like made up.

I pointed out that I'm an atheist & feel uncomfortable campaigning for purely religious issues; however, I understood that his position was really against political manifestations of religious protectionisms prevalent in our country primarily as a means of electoral strategy. And some forms of these protections & allowances are outrageous & I'm against these just as I'm against reservations in jobs & graduate schools while maintaining that the scope of education should be improved so that it enables people enough so that reservations are not needed.

At the same time, the increasing clout of political Islam is certainly obvious & dangerous to the extent it stems from Wahabism, is reactionary, is exclusive & is intolerant, & this will continue to be the case as long as there is Saudi money flowing into Mecca & being dissipated to the rest of the Muslim world preaching Wahabism.

So that is my limited knowledge on the subject. I know next to nothing about Hinduism. I do not know even how to define a Hindu. I know that people have killed in the name of religion for centuries & we're the only species capable of killing or giving up our own lives for an idea.

I think that reform, neither propaganda nor protective laws, is the answer. And it has to come from within. It is at these times we can look back & appreciate why the Renaissance was an event of such colossal importance.

It is time for heroes.

Racy thoughts

So why so much on the issue of race & gender? All people are a product of their geography, if you're to believe my oversimplified summary of Jared Diamond's book. Well, while at a macro-level Diamond's book is very well argued, I'm not sure what to make of it if we try to extrapolate or bend. For example, I perceive that while over time geographic factors might have been the most regulatory, as Diamond seems to argue, I find it difficult to believe that all groups of men will have evolved the same way in identical conditions - kind of a corollary to Diamond's thesis. However, that's a thought-experiment I cannot conduct.

Besides, that question cannot be raised. Simply because there were no different groups of men. There are men who have been differentiated because of their environments. So currently there are societies that are differentiated from other societies not because of their intrinsic intelligence but that's just as important as the fact that these differences exist. While Diamond's book shows a case for how societies came to be the way they are, it certainly does not say that all societies/people are, by any means, equal in the present day world.

But somewhere along the line, I seem to feel that we live or try to live in denial of this simple fact. The egalitarian approach is merely a noble approach; it does not reflect reality. In fact, the egalitarian approach is actually in conflict with the innate human desire to categorize & classify.

Using race, ethnicity or gender to classify & categorize may just be full of biases & prejudices, & it can be ugly when it receives political or wide societal sanction - but it is terribly foolish to negate these influences altogether from all that is of any importance. Our biological identity - where we are all equal - is not our strongest sense of identity after all.

All men are created equal. Nope. All men were created equal.

Winter conversations

Emigration has come up repetitively in my conversations recently. Sometimes, depending on age & familiarity, the question is rather direct & at others, it is arrived at slowly. And there are far too many obvious pluses about the USA that I've already experienced during my short stay here, that it really becomes difficult to justify anything thing other than "I'd love to sometime soon" or words to that effect.

What is not often discussed, for it appears that reason & convenience are the only things we live by, is that our lives are perhaps a little more than a sum total of opportunities we may or may not explore. Unfortunately, without sufficient eloquence, this point of view might come across as the USA not being "good enough" by some people. Looking at all the aspects of a problem is not undermining the US or being sentimental about issues, I feel as I write this.

India is an emerging economy plagued as it is by corruption & beaurocracy. Things are vastly improved from what they were 10 years back or even more. The US is an excellent system, the richest country in the world & the like. The pluses & minues discussion is an endless one & I do not intend to go into that. I want to, rather, say how you might decide on this - just my own personal view - & not how you analyze.

In the end, when you weigh it all together you'll have to decide for yourself what is best for you. And you'll also have to decide if what is best for you is indeed the best you could do.

S!

Ritualization

Oftentimes, we talk of processes & improving them in the project management space. In fact, a seamlessly integration of teams & its various processes is the state that every project manager wishes to take her team to & make it stay there. As frequently stated in many PM books, teams go through typical stages of the formative, the storming or conflicting, normative or the settlement & appearance of coherence, & finally performing.

I'm not sure how to measure the maturity of a process, or indeed if there are metrics that can be captured or surveys that can be conducted to capture this kind of information - which, for all you know, might just be little more than opinions - but there is a part of me which tends to relate process maturity to a ritual.

Now, firstly by ritual I do not mean blind compliance. By ritual, I mean a stage of process evolution which has more or less perfected the process, i.e. it has answered all doubts & concerns. The term ritual is useful then in describing what follows, for in that stage of maturity there is a comprehensive buy-in of the process by all parties concerned & there is a degree of automation in the way the process is followed - without reminders or any assertions.

Like a ritual then, process compliance becomes a part of a larger, collective conscience.

The devotee

Recently, there was an editorial in TOI about the Islamic world & a very short historical analysis by Murad Ali Baig on why certain aspects of Islam are the way they are today. Particularly, there was a note on how there was one consolidated Medina version of the Qu'ran compiled in 665 A.D. & how the various other versions of the holy book were burnt.

Now, it is very possible that such a representation of history is totally inaccurate. It is possible that Mr. Baig had done no research of any sort at all & there were never versions of the Holy book which were burnt. It is possible, also, that his research is indeed accurate.

I asked an Islamic friend of mine to read the article & tell me if he agreed to Baig's points of view. At the time, my motive was to understand Baig's representations, analysis, interpretations & conclusion & I did not really mean to question the authenticity of his historical research.

My friend told me that he did not agree that the book burning incident ever happened. When I asked him why, he said, almost choking himself with passion, that it is by Allah's dictate that the Qu'ran cannot be changed in any way imaginable, & so there could not have been any versions of it.

While I sat still half-apologetic, & not a little annoyed at his faith-based reply, that I ever brought this topic up; it was, in a way, the stark encounter with raw faith which was an absolute first.

Even if I were to discount this as a thought process borne out of a minority complex, I perceive that there is a general rise in staunch religiosity in the world in general, & that makes me very very uncomfortable.

The cult

Jeffrey Sach's book "The end of poverty" talks about, among other things, how developing poor countries is in the social & economic interests of developed countries. At the time when I read it, it looked like a very plausible & no less noble idea. He built his case around, very convincingly with well-argued cases, that economic development & opportunities will definitely eat away at the roots of criminalism, & make the world, including developed nations, a very safe place.

While this may be true in a large & general sense, I'm currently disposed to think that economics does not apply to terrorism or nations/organizations that seem to propagate it - which right now is the problem of many states, developed or otherwise. I think that Sen's book "Identity & violence" is very pertinent in helping explain certain aspects of the matter. While the case of plural identities & the choice of an individual's identity among all the identities that she can choose is central to the theme of the book, it is one idea that, for me, explains terrorism - not from the perspective of a Bin Laden, but rather from the perspective of those who wrap themselves up with explosives or navigate airplanes into buildings, or, for that matter, shoot children through the eye.

A recent programme on the National geographic looked at these men & women. And you can clearly see what their chosen identity is, & you cannot see any economic reasons for it. And the cult of the jehadi is celebrated all along so much so that instead of hunting for folks who would blow themselves up, these groups regularly reject plentiful aspirant martyrs. Apparently in one such organization, photographs of jehadis who kill themselves are framed on the wall next to a staircase leading to the open skies, or heaven. And there is the internet & the propaganda - all of it to sustain this cult, complete with rituals & rites.

Unfortunately, all this is done in the name of Allah - the all merciful...

In a General way

The Hindu today published a review of Pervez Musharraf's autobiographical work called "In the line of fire". You can also read a rather insipid review here. The book is out on Monday, 9/27, in New York. As you'd expect, there is no dearth of dramatic material; & from an Indian perspective, some of the colouring that has been used to represent certain incidents is blatantly polemic, to fight the urge of using stronger language in a public site.

Here is one example:

In defence of his oft-repeated definition of terrorists in Kashmir as freedom fighters, General Musharraf declares: "The west rejects militant freedom struggles too broadly. The U.S. and Europe too often equate all militancy with terrorism, in particular equating Kashmir's struggle for freedom in Indian Held Kashmir with terrorism. Pakistan has always rejected this broad brush treatment."

While there may be great differences between militancy & terrorism, like in a dictionary, & while the western view may indeed be reductionist & simplistic, the Kashmiri story is a decades-old tug of war between three peoples - the Indians, the Pakistanis, & the Kashmiris. The political complexities are immense & treacherous acts abound. The history is laced with blood. Describing Kashmir merely as freedom struggle is just as blatantly reductionist & a position-based point of view as any.

State sponsorship of terrorism is a political gambit & particularly in the case of Pakistan, has saved it from an economic collapse, more than once. While the General may be a good story-teller, I wonder how many are really riveted.

The decision maker

Usually, it is believed that a logical decision maker & an emotional decision maker cannot co-exist. That is not to say that any person cannot be either at different times, but that is to say that you have to choose between a value-system based decision & a rationality/logic based decision when both systems offer you an viable alternative in a typical right vs. right situation. For example, your surplus income could be a contribution to charity (Value-based, small good for lot of people) or invested away with financial institutions (rationality based, or in this case, a non-traditional-value-based decision alternative). Both decisions are right, but you can't take both decisions & thus the exclusivity of the two models.

Interestingly, it appears to me that logic itself has emotional strings attached. Those of us who swear by rationality & are its biggest advocates belong to the cult of logicism - for rights & wrongs are both human creations subject to opinion & debate.

So what makes sense depends on where your sensibilities are.

The adjective

Probably because of the sheer volume of it, all historical representations are bound to be selective. So while a high school history student reads about the Indian freedom struggle, she studies the most limited references to the revolutionary period of our struggle for freedom. She learns what Gandhi did, she does not learn what he did not do or what he could have done or if our history post M. K. Gandhi would have been any different if he did different things. She does not learn what those different things might have been & which leaders - no more consequential in our current historical spectrum - thought of these different things & could not agree to the Gandhian way.

It is an immense practical problem to be complete in one's representation of history & then completely remove any bias of any kind in the selection of what goes into 'Official History'. However, this is not stated. No historian claims that his is only a version of the truth. And students do not learn their history with this practical caveat in mind. Then comes the final shaping of opinion depending on which version of truth you're sold on. So Gandhi is both renegade & a Mahatma, a national hero & a luddite in a way.

We have to start acknowledging the inadequacies that we cannot cure our history of. And we can start by ridding history of adjectives.

Personality tests

I'm sure from time to time all of have taken some kind of personality tests. It is 'most inescapable with the net being so full of them & the amount of unsolicited mails one possibly gets from these sites. They judge everything from your ability to turn an omelette to your expertise on leaving a peck on the neck.

However, some are, if not exactly informative, generally accepted to be of value or definitive of some kind of a benchmark. For example, the classic IQ test. The Intelligence Quotient has been believed to be a reliable indicator of a person's intelligence - for a while now - & in some really dubious studies, has been used to prove the superiority of one 'race' over the other. And this in spite of the fact that there is no scientific definition of race.

The Myers Briggs test is an interesting one. It is based on the psychological types defined by C. G. Jung & tries to arrive at the psychological type of the person taking the test by having her answer a series of questions. You can take a free online version of the test here.

It might sound like a far-fetched idea, & my own knowledge on the subject is very limited, but it appears that the test score has implications for your everyday life & career. In fact, this project management book recommends that teams be formed in the light of MBTI scores of the candidate team members.

I also believe that the online version is prone to errors of judgment & your online score is only indicative of your desired or perceived psychological type & it is only after working with MBTI consultants can you get an idea of your true type.

Also, with 16 MBTI types, assuming that people are distributed with equal probability across all types, the average % of people in any type is about 6%. So before you get glorious ideas & muse on the rarity of your psychology, laugh!

The paradox

It is generally accepted that of the following three options, only two can be satisfied at a time:

• To do something well
• To do something fast
• To do something cheap
  

We can combine the three & say that doing something well takes time or money, sometimes both. While money is the external market factor, taking time to achieve a goal & achieve it well, more often than not, translates into time taken to gather knowledge, time taken to generate alternatives, time taken to evaluate alternatives, time taken to implement the solution & so on. It is one of the goals of technology to reduce this time factor. So you have spreadsheet packages to organize data & produce, say, some kind of reports to help you decide faster & better. Note that

• The spreadsheet package example does not reduce the knowledge gathering time, for one.
  
• While it makes evaluation simpler, it does not entirely erase the need for human intervention.
  

It is then probably reasonable enough to deduce, in general, that the use of technology reduces the time taken for a process. Therefore, the more we use technology the faster we can do things. Hidden behind this otherwise benign fact, is the human bottleneck. We need technology because we're slow. Moreover, we're destined to be this way because of the way we're designed, the way we learn & retain knowledge, the way we process information, the way we can't learn easily what is already known, & the total amount of data we remember.

Machines of course have none of these problems.

The Age of Spiritual Machines seems to indicate a future where human existence is slowly enhanced & then slowly replaced by machines.
I'm just wondering that while technology lends itself very well to the solution domain, it is humans & their institutions that constitute the problem domain. Therefore, unless you have/perceive problems, you do not need to do solve it. However, if robots are to be problematic, why make them? And if humans are to continue, then the idea of perfection will continue with it.

And as always, it'll just be on the horizon.

The Reservation Debate - the good part

I'm sure all of us have been following the reservation debate, like it or not, for the TV channels are full of it. No doubt, we have our own opinion on it, probably a strong one at that. For most readers of this post, it is not very difficult to guess what that opinion is.

In addition, the same debate has had many political ramifications. Manmohan Singh has a tough job balancing out demands of coalition politics & good governance.

So much for all the bad news, for all that seems wrong & unjust.

However, if this were China, those students protesting on the streets would have been killed. If this were China, you could not see full front-page reports on National newspapers crying themselves hoarse against the Government. There would be no Tehelka, no Jessica Lal investigation. There would be no Supreme courts ordering reinvestigation of Godhra.

We remain a poor country & there is injustice all around.

But hey, we have a voice.

S!