Category Archives: Essays and Op-Eds

Quizzing is Not Just a Trivial Pursuit

This piece of mine was published on Sunday (June 29) in Mail Today.

It’s Sunday, and you’ve had enough of boring op-eds and opinion pieces all week. So let me start this piece with a quiz question about cards: In Texas Hold’em Poker, which hand is known as ‘six tits’? 

If you don’t know the answer, I encourage you not to shift your eyes to the end of the piece, where I reveal all. Just look at the question one more time: as the Beatles would say, you can work it out. 

Every two Sundays, a diverse group of people meet in an office in a Mumbai suburb and ask each other questions like this. They are the Bombay Quiz Club (BQC), a group I co-founded on April Fool’s Day, 2006. Most Indian cities have clubs with a much older pedigree – the Karnataka Quiz Association of Bangalore celebrates its 25th anniversary today, and the K Circle of Hyderabad predates that by a decade. But the kind of quizzing all these clubs do is rather different from what most Indians understand of the term.

Workoutable

To most Indians, quizzing is about knowledge. You are asked a question: you either know it or you don’t. If you don’t, the quiz is terribly boring. There might be drama about who is winning or losing, but beyond that narrative, your brain isn’t being made to work. You might as well watch a soap opera.

But attend a quiz by the BQC or by any of these other quizzing clubs and you’ll find a different dynamic at play. You will find that the quizzing they do is not so much about knowledge but about problem solving. Even if you don’t know a question, you can still work it out by clues given in the question. Sure, you still need to know things: but if you’re intelligent and have a basic interest in the world, you have a crack at solving any question. A 100-question quiz then becomes not a boring event where you know some things and are clueless about others, but a challenge in which you try to solve 100 brainteasers, often with the help of team-mates in a collaborative process that is immense fun.

For example, here’s a question I asked in a quiz last year: “X is a unit of hype. One kiloX is equal to 10.42 days. One MegaX is equal to 28.5 years. What is X, and why is it so called?”

When I asked this question, I also advised the teams to use their calculators. The team that cracked it was the one that figured out that X was equal to 15 minutes. The answer, then, was obviously Warhol, who had famously said: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Now think of what a boring question this would have been if I had simply asked: “What is the unit of hype?”

Eureka!

Every well-framed quiz question should lead to a Eureka moment. You are asked a question, you search it for clues, one teammate suggests one strand of thought, another suggests an alternative, you rack your brains and suddenly it all falls into place. My friend J Ramanand, the last man to win Mastermind India, expressed it beautifully when he wrote: “Working out answers is sometimes like tugging at the loose thread in a sweater. A decent yank & the whole thing unravels magically.”

To illustrate this, here’s a question framed by the quizzer Arun Simha: “H0H 0H0” is a postal code used by Canada Post for routing letters sent in Canada to which person?”

The question is bewildering – until one notices that H0H 0H0 can also be read as Ho Ho Ho. Yank that and you come to Santa Claus. (Jabba the Hutt is also associated with that laugh, but any reasonable quizzer would eliminate that option, for why would Canada Post care about Jabba the Hutt?)

Here’s another question, framed by a BQC quizzer, Sumant Srivathsan: “If ‘three short - three long - three short’ (. . . - - - . . .) is Morse code for SOS, where would you be most likely to come across ‘three short - two long - three short’?”

The ‘three-shorts’ are the clue. Clearly the second code stands for S-something-S, and when you work that out, you start thinking of what the missing letter could be. M? SMS? And then you remember the default Nokia ringtone for incoming messages (“beep-beep-beep, beeeep-beeeep, beep-beep-beep”) and the answer falls into place.

Imagine how boring the question would be if it was framed thus: “In morse code, which letter does ‘two long’ stand for?” Or “What is the default Nokia ringtone for incoming messages inspired by?”

I was recently asked by a friend, whose only acquaintance with quizzing is via Kaun Banega Crorepati, how I prepare for a quiz. The answer, of course, is that one can’t prepare for this kind of quizzing. Schoolkids may buy Malayalam Manorama and learn capitals and currencies, but the best quizzers are simply people who live life fully. They show an interest in the world around them; they read a lot; they watch films and listen to music; they are culturally aware; they keep in touch with the news. And when quiz questions pop up that touch on any of those areas, they have a chance at cracking it, even if they don’t know the funda behind the question.

Ah, fundas! Quizzers use that term a lot. What does it mean? Loosely speaking, a funda is an interesting fact at the heart of a question. Every good question contains a little nugget that tells you something you didn’t know already. Sometimes this is trivial, sometimes not. But the net effect of a good quiz with solid fundas is that you end the quiz not just entertained by it, but also more knowledgeable about the world in a meaningful way.

Connect

A connect question in a quiz is one in which you are asked to find the common thread running between a few different elements: four visuals, say, or a video, an audio and a picture, and so on. But, in a way, all of quizzing is about connecting. We look for something in the question that we are asked that we can connect with the world we know. And when a funda is new to us, it expands that world. If it’s interesting, it might even increase out interest in a particular area of knowledge. We might finish a quiz wanting to see a certain film or read a particular book, or simply looking at something in an entirely new way. To extend Ramanand’s analogy, after we yank the thread and the sweater unravels, we find other uses for that wool. 

So the next time you’re playing poker on a Sunday and your opponent beats you with a hand that has three queens in it, congratulate him (or her) for holding six tits. Then walk right out and find a good quiz to take part in. It’ll be worth your while.

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I’ve earlier written on this subject here: The Joys of Quizzing. Also check out this three part primer by J Ramanand and Niranjan Pednekar: 1, 2, 3.

More more essays and op-eds by me, click here.

Posted by Amit Varma on 02 July, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Personal

What’s Consolation For An Atheist?

This piece of mine was published this Sunday (June 15) in Mail Today.

Even an atheist is tempted to believe sometimes. My mother died about three weeks ago, losing a long battle to cancer, and I found myself faced with false consolations. Ma had been a believer, and the others in my family also tend that way. They could console themselves with the thought that there might be an afterlife, that perhaps she was now in “a better place.” Friends who came to see us told us that they were praying for her soul, and that God had been merciful to her, and that it could have been worse. All this was useful for others – but not believing in God or souls, I had to deal with death as death.

I’ll come to terms with my mother’s death – with some sorrow, one moves on. But I think about my own, and that is harder. If I cast aside the existence of a higher being, I have to accept my own insignificance in the world, and that when I die, that will be that: no soul, no heaven or rebirth, no greater purpose to my mundane life. At low moments, it makes everything seem pointless. 

And yet, being an atheist is not a choice I have made, choosing one belief system over another. This is because atheism is not about belief at all: it is about the absence of belief.

Nonbelief

Some people think that atheism means believing that there is no God. This is a flawed perception. The primary meaning of atheism that most dictionaries will give you, though there are secondary meanings that have evolved from bad usage, is of “disbelief” in God or a deity. That means that atheists are not people who believe that there is no God, but people who do not believe that there is God. The difference is huge.

The conviction that there is no God is irrational because one cannot prove a negative. (How do you prove that something does not exist?) However, it is entirely rational to not believe in something whose existence has not been demonstrated. I don’t believe in dragons or fairies because no one has yet proved to me that they exist. Ditto God. I am not asserting that God does not exist, but simply saying that I don’t believe in the existence of God because I see no evidence of Him (or Her, or It). This is not a dogmatic position: if you can prove to me tomorrow that God or dragons exist, I will start to believe in them. Until then, I remain in disbelief. That’s atheism.

People often speak of atheism as if it is a movement or an organised belief system – or even a religion of sorts. That is not true. The Economist published a letter from Chad English of Ottawa a few months ago that summed it up well: “Atheism is a religion in the same way that not collecting stamps is a hobby. When you understand why there are no ‘aphilatelist’ conventions, you will understand why atheists don’t congregate.”

Agnosticism

It is a common mistake to view belief in God as running along a continuum in which we have theists (who believe), agnostics (who are undecided) and atheists (who don’t believe). This is based on a misunderstanding of agnosticism, which doesn’t deal with belief at all, but with knowledge. The word ‘agnostic’ is a combination of the Greek α (without) and gnōsis (knowledge), and refers to a person who believes that the truth about something, in this case the existence of God, is unknowable. It has nothing to do with believing or not believing.

Indeed, it is possible to combine agnosticism with either theism or atheism. A believer may choose to believe in God while accepting that some things are fundamentally unknowable. An atheist may agree with that view. I see myself as both an atheist and an agnostic: an atheist because I do not believe in God, as His/Her/Its existence has not been proved; an agnostic because I believe that on this matter, we may never know the truth for sure.

For that reason, I am not militant about my atheism. What other people choose to believe in is none of my business, and I respect their right to their beliefs. But the right to religion does not imply the right to force it on others. I object when people try to coerce others into conforming with their beliefs, believing that their religion gives them the license to infringe on the rights of others. Religion in the private domain and in community settings can be useful, and a force for good, but too often in recent times, it has been used to justify the worst excesses: genocides, riots, terrorism, and all kinds of coercion. We have seen deplorable instances of this from every major religion in the last 100 years (including communism, which relies as much on faith as any God-based belief system). 

Thus, it is not religion per se that is a problem, but our attitudes towards it. The right to religion is a human right that should be contingent, like all other rights, on respecting the corresponding rights of others. But many ‘religious’ people have the arrogance to believe that they, the enlightened, are due special privileges that would otherwise be unjustifiable; and many ‘secular’ people are inexplicably keen to pander to them. This endangers the basis of a free society, where artists have been terrorized into thinking twice before drawing a cartoon of another man’s god or painting another man’s goddess, not by the alleged power of those gods and goddesses, but by the primitive fury of their followers.

Consolation

I may not believe in God, but I have no doubt that belief in God serves a purpose for many people. In primitive times, before we understood what the sun was or why there were eclipses and storms, the world must have appeared a terrifying, bewildering place. Religion offered an explanation for everything, and made us believe that we weren’t as small and insignificant as, well, as we are. Besides rendering the world explicable, it made mortality bearable. When someone close to us died, we could tell ourselves that they were in a better place.

As science has gradually filled up the gaps in our knowledge, the God of the Gaps has shrunk, almost becoming redundant. And while the consolations of belief are useful, I would rather reject those false certainties and look for consolation in smaller, surer things. As Austin Cline once wrote: “A person who truly enjoys and appreciates their life will take pleasure in it and enjoy it regardless of whether any sort of afterlife exists. They might believe in an afterlife and even in some sort of wonderful heaven, but they won’t depend upon the existence of such a heaven in order for their lives to have meaning or purpose.”

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I’ve written on this subject a fair bit on my blog; a few posts: 1, 2, 3, 4. If you want to read more about atheism, I can’t think of a better site than About.com’s section on atheism, written by Austin Cline. The left sidebar there has some links to some fine pieces by Cline.

And for more essays and Op-Eds by me, click here.

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 June, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Personal

Some Things I’ll Remember From This IPL

Here’s the latest installment of Over the Wicket, my column for NDTV: The best and worst of the IPL.

The column’s supposed to be fortnightly, but as the IPL just got over, we figured we’d finish off this month’s quota with one burst—thus the two pieces this week. 

Posted by Amit Varma on 05 June, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Journalism | Media | Sport | WTF

An IPL XI To Outplay Mars

I’m a huge fan of lists, and there’s one in the latest installment of Over the Wicket, my cricket column for NDTV: An IPL XI To Outplay Mars.

Now I’m going to get withdrawal syndrome. 

Posted by Amit Varma on 02 June, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Sport

Accountability and the IPL

Here’s the second edition of Over the Wicket, my fortnightly column for NDTV Convergence: Yes, the IPL really is about accountability.

Related pieces:

The IPL reveals India’s bench strength (May 8, 2008)
Celebrating Twenty20 Cricket (April 20, 2008)
Opportunity, choice and the IPL (March 13, 2008)
There’s Nothing Wrong In Being ‘Commercial’ (Feb 24, 2008)
The Twenty20 Age Begins (Aug 8, 2007)

Posted by Amit Varma on 21 May, 2008 in Economics | Essays and Op-Eds | Sport

We Should Celebrate Rising Divorce Rates

This piece of mine was published this Sunday in Mail Today (pdf link).

We live in times when progress is often denoted in statistical terms: the Sensex rises by this much, the economy grows by that much, inflation is so much, poverty is that much, and so on. In a complex world, any single piece of data always tells just part of the story. So which statistics do a good job of illustrating India’s progress? One very good one, in my view, is the divorce rate.

Divorce rates are going up across India. The figures that exist for our cities and towns show a sharp increase in the last decade or so. Many commentators bemoan this trend, speaking of the breakdown of families, the loss of family values and the influence of the West. But to me, the rising rate of divorces is a trend to celebrate. It is the single best statistical indicator we have of the empowerment of women.

Rising divorce rates tell us one thing for sure: that more and more women are finding the means, and the independence, to walk out of bad marriages and live life on their own terms. If we judge ourselves as a society on the state of our women – and surely that must be a parameter – then this is good news. We do not need to credit either feminism or Western culture for this – the emancipation of women in real terms, across the world, has been enabled by technology, and can be explained most easily with economics.

Economics

In economic terms, the biggest factor behind human progress is the division of labour. If we all hunted our own meat and grew our own food, we’d still be hunter-gatherers. Adam Smith used the example of a pin factory to illustrate how division of labour improves productivity: if one man attempts to make pins all by himself, he might make about one pin a day; but his productivity can increase by as much as five thousand times if every person in the factory focuses on just one aspect of the pin production. This is true of everything in our lives, such as this newspaper you are holding: if every employee of Mail Today set out to write, design and produce the whole newspaper, it would take weeks for each person to put together a single issue, and they would all be substandard in one way or another. Instead, they specialise, and the result is in your hands every day.

Well, in the words of Tim Harford, who devotes an excellent chapter to this subject in his book The Logic of Life, the family is “the oldest pin factory of all.” In old days, before the advent of modern technology, for a single man or woman to earn a living and look after the household all by himself or herself was immensely difficult. It became a little easier if two people came together and split both tasks half and half. But it became exponentially easier if they specialised. For evolutionary reasons, and because women were stuck with child-bearing, it so happened that men traditionally got the role of earning a living while women raised kids and looked after the house. 

These gender roles evolved out of circumstance, and not necessarily because women weren’t capable of earning a living. Indeed, in cases where the wife was better at both earning a living and keeping house, the traditional role allocation would still make sense for them as a unit if the husband was especially bad at housekeeping. (Economists call this “comparative advantage”.) Thus, the incompetence of men at keeping house might have played a greater role in the perpetuation of gender stereotypes than any shortcoming women might have had in the workplace.

These gender roles got reinforced culturally. If men earned a living and women looked after the house, it made economic sense to bring up children to specialise in those areas. Thus, the boys got a better vocational education while the girls were taught to cook. This also reinforced prejudices in the workplace, intimidating women from taking up a profession. Women thus became dependent on men, unable to break out of bad marriages because they simply didn’t have choices available to them. No wonder divorce was so rare.

All this changed in the 20th century. The catalyst for these changes was technology.

Technology

Technology freed women in two ways in the last century. One, household technology made it possible for women to finish off household work quickly, while it was otherwise enormously time-consuming. The cooking range, the microwave, the mixer-grinder, the pressure cooker are all commonplace kitchen items today, but imagine how arduous preparing a meal was before they existed. (It still is in poorer parts of the world and our country, which partly explains why the oppression of women varies with class.) Once these gadgets entered the kitchen, women found themselves with more free time at their disposal, which they could use to take up a job or to get an education.

Two, the pill allowed women to delay child-bearing and plan parenthood. This meant that they could be sexually active without the risk of pregnancy, and thus delay marriage. That allowed them to study further and be as qualified as men for the workforce. And, most importantly, it gave them options.

A qualified woman who chose family over work is much better placed than a woman who hasn’t got any skills to help her earn a living. She has more leverage within the relationship. One, it is easier for her to quit the marriage if she feels unhappy with it. Two, because that option is open to her, her husband cannot take her for granted, and has to treat her better than he otherwise would.

Harford, in his book, points to a study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers that showed that as states across America passed ‘no fault’ divorce laws, allowing women easier routes to divorce, “domestic violence fell by almost a third.” When incentives were in place for men to behave better, men tended to behave better. Thus, technology not only enabled women to walk out of bad marriages, it also made them more powerful within a marriage.

In India affluence acts, in some cases, as a substitute for technology. In Mumbai, for examples, the typical middle-class house is too small for household devices like washing machines and dishcleaners. But in families that can afford household help, maids take care of those functions, freeing up women’s time in ways that technology does in the West.

Tradition

Families have such sanctity in Indian tradition because until recently, people needed the division of labour that a family provides. Indeed, joint families used to be common here because, when we were a poorer country, they made economic sense. (A common kitchen for 20 people provided economies of scale.) But times have changed, incentives have changed, and to value these things for the sake of tradition alone is irrational. 

As a society, our highest value should be to ensure that every individual has the maximum opportunities possible to find happiness. This means educating our daughters to be independent and removing the stigma that comes from a broken marriage. Every divorce means that two people have a better chance at finding fulfillment than they did in the marriage, and that is surely cause for celebration. In America, divorce rates climbed back down after the surge of the 1970s, mainly because young people took greater care in getting married, and premarital relationships were not considered sinful. Change is happening at different rates across classes in India, and the divorce rate will continue to rise for many, many years. That is a sign of progress, and we should be happy about it.

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For more on this subject, I highly recommend checking out the chapter on divorce in Tim Harford’s The Logic of Life. It’s written in an American context but its insights are universal, and it cites a number of studies that you can Google and read for yourself. My review of Harford’s book is here. I’ve also briefly touched on this subject in these two old posts: 1, 2.

For more essays and Op-Eds by me, click here.

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 May, 2008 in Economics | Essays and Op-Eds | Freedom | India | Science and Technology

The IPL reveals India’s Bench Strength

I begin a fortnightly column on cricket today for NDTV Convergence called Over the Wicket. Here’s the first installment: The IPL reveals India’s bench strength.

Related pieces:

Celebrating Twenty20 Cricket (April 20, 2008)
Opportunity, choice and the IPL (March 13, 2008)
There’s Nothing Wrong In Being ‘Commercial’ (Feb 24, 2008)
The Twenty20 Age Begins (Aug 8, 2007)

Posted by Amit Varma on 08 May, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Sport

Laws Against Victimless Crimes Should Be Scrapped

This piece of mine was published in today’s edition of Mail Today.

DC Madam is dead. 

Three days ago, Deborah Jeane Palfrey’s body was found in a shed outside her mother’s home in Tarpon Springs, one of Florida’s top tourist destinations. Palfrey had earlier been convicted of running a “high-priced call girl ring”. She was awaiting sentencing. She did not want to go to jail. A nylon rope was handy.

It’s easy to imagine the emotions that must have run through Palfrey’s mind in her final moments: despair, fear, loneliness. It would be ironic if remorse was one of them. For Palfrey hadn’t harmed anyone. The tragedy of her case is that she was the victim.

The purpose of laws, I think you’d agree, is to protect the rights of individuals, and to punish those who infringe them. Every law that exists should serve these ends. But there is a category of laws, not just in the US but in India and everywhere else, that punish what are called “victimless crimes.” They are used to prosecute people who have harmed no one. They come about because of the universal human tendency to impose our preferences on others. And there is nothing we try to impose as much as our morality. 

Read more...

Posted by Amit Varma on 04 May, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Freedom

Celebrating Twenty20 Cricket

This piece of mine was published in today’s edition of Mail Today.

A few hours before writing this, I tuned in to watch the live telecast of the first match of the Indian Premier League. The Bangalore Royal Challengers took on the Kolkata Knight Riders. The stadium was full. The crowds were screaming. Imported cheerleaders danced. Some young men in the crowd, in their enthusiasm, held up their posters with ‘6’ written on them upside down, so that it now read ‘9’. That was apt. Twenty20 is cricket on steroids.

Purists – and I used to think of myself as one – often speak of Twenty20 cricket disparagingly, as if it has reduced the fine game of cricket to something absurdly simplistic, where sloggers rule, hand-eye co-ordination matters more than finely honed technique, and bowlers are irrelevant. If you’ve been watching, you’ll know that isn’t true. Twenty20 is not a dilution of the game but an intensification of it. 

Read more...

Posted by Amit Varma on 20 April, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Sport

There’s No Drama Like American Politics

This piece was published today in Mail Today. Here’s a PDF.

All pundits know that political commentary is best done in hindsight. The ongoing primaries to pick presidential candidates in the USA bear that out. For more than 60 days now, the political stage has been beset by twists and turns that no writer of thrillers would dare use in a novel -which reader could keep track of so much? - and commentators have consistently read the tea leaves wrong, for no fault of their own. The real world is so complicated, with so much happening, that political analysis, when it is not safely in the past tense, is like predicting the weather by doing a survey of how flags are blowing. 

Consider the primaries last week in Ohio and Texas. Hillary Clinton won those two states, thus keeping her campaign alive, and pundits are unanimous in agreement that this is significant for John McCain, who was confirmed as the Republican nominee on that day. But in what way?

It is possible that Clinton’s wins boost McCain’s chances. It ensures that Clinton and Barack Obama stay at each other’s throats for the next few weeks, damaging each other, as the Democratic Party gets more and more polarised internally. If Clinton is the nominee, many Obama followers, disgusted by the tactics of her campaign, won’t vote for her. If Obama is the candidate, many Clinton fans, who have been convinced that he is not worthy of being president, will withhold their vote. Even if they don’t vote for McCain, they do enough damage by not voting at all—such elections often come down to mobilizing the base. 

This holds even if Clinton and Obama are somehow persuaded to come together on the ticket. After projecting himself as a harbinger of change, Obama will lose his campaign’s raison d’etre if he agrees to serve as the vice presidential nominee under someone he has painted as a Washington insider, representative of the same-old same-old. And after banging on for weeks about how Obama isn’t ready to be president, what pitiful rationalisation can Clinton trot out to be his vice-president? 

There is also a view that the ongoing Democratic battle hurts McCain by denying him media attention. All the drama is now in the Clinton-Obama brawl, and that’s what the press will focus on, with McCain delegated to the inside pages. Also, by the time the Democratic nominee emerges, he or she will be battle-tested rather than damaged. 

Both views could be wishful thinking, depending on which camp you’re in. Or they could be sage prognoses. We’ll know later.

Unforeseen

Only a high dose of a potent hallucinogen could have prompted a pundit to predict this scenario just two months ago. McCain, for one, had been out of the reckoning for months. His campaign had imploded around the middle of last year, and Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney had led the polls since. Thompson had fallen off a bit, but was the only credible conservative left in the race, while Mike Huckabee made a strong surge in the Iowa polls just before voting season began. Then the planets, no doubt with eyebrows raised, aligned themselves.

As the Economist wrote - in hindsight, of course - for McCain to win the Republican nomination, “Mike Huckabee had to beat Mitt Romney in Iowa, Rudy Giuliani had to pursue a deranged strategy, Fred Thompson had to contract narcolepsy, and the ‘surge’ had to go well.” Check, check, check, check. Send a Hollywood suit such a script and he will reply, “This is too far out, make it real.”

On the Democratic side, Clinton was inevitable before Iowa, and history after she came third there. But then she baffled commentators by winning New Hampshire, which some pundits ascribed to her tears on the campaign trail when asked about how she copes with the rigours of lusting for power. (Well, not those exact words, but you get the drift.) Apparently, she was ‘humanised’ by that.

It had been forecast that Bill Clinton would be Hillary’s biggest strength, but he charged onto the scene and cost her votes. He referred to Obama’s opposition to the Iraq War as a “fairy tale”, and by comparing Obama’s win in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s wins there, insinuated that like Jackson, Obama’s appeal was restricted to African-American voters. Condescending to Obama’s supporters wasn’t the smartest thing to do; neither was failing to plan after Super Tuesday, assuming that Clinton would be the nominee by then.

Brawling

Obama won eleven in a row after Super Tuesday, as Clinton became more and more desperate. But Obama was no more an unstoppable force than Clinton had been an immovable object. Clinton needed to win in both Ohio and Texas to stay in the hunt, and a series of events gave her an opening.

First, Obama was caught pandering, which should be as routine for a politician as swimming is for a fish - but voters mind when it is transparent. Free-market supporters had been worried at Obama’s anti-NAFTA rhetoric, and had hoped that he was just pandering to the base, and would shift to more sensible policy talk after he won the nomination. Well, his chief economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, was revealed to have told a group of Canadian officials exactly this, to assuage their concerns. When the news became public, Obama’s campaign mismanaged it, at first denying that such a meeting took place, which was proven to be false. 

At around this time, Obama’s controversial friendship with a shady Chicago real-estate dealer, Tony Rezko, resurfaced in the media as Rezko went on trial. And Clinton released a rather Republican commercial, claiming that if your kids were asleep at 3am and the phone rang in the White House, you’d want Clinton to pick it up, because she had the experience to deal with it. Obama’s campaign created a brilliant counter to this, pointing out that you’d want the phone to be picked up by someone who had made the right call on the Iraq War - but apparently that wasn’t enough.

Did Clinton win Ohio and Texas because of her negative campaigning, the Obama goof-ups regarding Goolsbee and Rezko, or because of the demographics, which favoured Clinton? Even in retrospect, it is hard to say - and the Obama camp is painting those losses as a victory for him, because he cut Clinton’s double-digit losses to much smaller margins. Still, one thing is clear - barring a miracle, or some seriously mischievous planets, Obama will have won more pledged delegates than Clinton at the end of this. So why is she still in the race?

Endgame

To win the nomination, Clinton will have to convince the superdelegates - Democratic Party officials who will effectively decide the nominee - to ignore the results of the primaries. She can give a number of reasons for this: If she manages to win the popular vote by then, which is possible if she wins the remaining races heavily, she can cite that as a reflection of the popular will; or she can point to the fact that she’s won the bigger states; or she can argue that the states that will be crucial in November are the ones which she has won; or she can point out that many of Obama’s wins came not in the primaries but in the caucuses, which attract a lower turnout and are, thus, ‘less democratic’; or she could ask them to vote with their conscience and select who they personally prefer; or, if push comes to shove, she could speak her mind and point out that she is a Clinton, she’s entitled to power, and anyone who stops her is part of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Meanwhile, in the midst of the drama of last week, George W Bush endorsed John McCain for president, and no one noticed. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I’m sure the pundits are divided on the matter.

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Click here for my posts on politics.

You can read my essays and Op-Eds here.

Posted by Amit Varma on 09 March, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Politics

Politics and the Role of a Lifetime

This piece of mine was published today in the Indian Express.

This year’s Oscars were quite good, weren’t they? For a change, some excellent films got nominated and actually won, with directors taking risks and actors pulling off difficult roles. But the finest acting, the most elaborately constructed show business, was taking place in other parts of America, as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain hit the campaign trail.

The most important political skill of all is acting. Politics is not about public service, as some people naively think, but about power. All of us lust for power to varying degrees, but politicians are more driven by it than others, by the very nature of their chosen calling. In a democracy, the only way to get power is by appealing to others, to pretend to be what they would like to see in a leader. This requires acting of the highest standards.

I don’t mean that all politicians are necessarily insincere. But there is deception at the heart of the political process, for politicians have to pretend that they want to serve the people, while what they really want is to rule them. Also, the right course of action may not always be the popular one, and to get into a position to do the right thing, politicians have to promise to do the popular thing first. How politicians project themselves in public can never, over the course of a career, be the same as who they truly are.

The American presidential elections are particularly demanding for the thespians who choose to stand. First, in the primaries, they have to appeal to the extreme left and right of the Democratic and Republican parties respectively; then, if they win their party’s nomination, they have to swing to the centre in the main election to appeal to independent voters. Throughout this process, they have to make sure that the roles they adopt don’t clash with things they might have done in the past — their whole lives become, retrospectively, an audition.

There are three ways of failing in a political campaign. One, the block of voters that you choose to appeal to may not be influential enough to win the elections for you. (Think Mike Huckabee, Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.) Two, you may not act well enough — or someone may play a part that appeals more to the voters you are targeting. (Fred Thompson and John Edwards.) Three, you may not suit the role you choose to play, as it may be inconsistent with your past actions, and would thus lose credibility. (Mitt Romney.)

The survivors at this stage of the elections are politicians who happened to make the right choices, and played their parts exceedingly well. John McCain, a few months ago, seemed to have chosen the wrong strategy. The persona and positions he chose would appeal to independents in the main elections, but seemed certain to hurt him in the primaries. He upset the conservative base of the Republican Party with his positions on immigration and torture. He was lucky that the other candidates were flawed in different ways, and a credible Reaganite conservative never emerged. Also, McCain’s refusal to pander earned him the reputation of being a man of principle and character, which will help him in November.

Barack Obama is now the favourite for the Democratic nomination after a brilliant campaign. He knew that he could not out-wonk Hillary Clinton on issues, so he focussed on persona. His background made him an embodiment of the American Dream, and he projected himself as someone who would transcend the divisive, partisan politics of the last few years. A country tired of political bickering took to him. Obama’s oratory is outstanding, and his consistent refusal to engage in the dirty, negative tactics that typify presidential elections has earned him respect.

Obama also fired up the base with populist rhetoric and leftist policy proposals that had only minor differences with Clinton. She couldn’t take him on when it came to issues, so she projected herself as an experienced warrior, in contrast with the callow Obama. He pointed to her support of the Iraq war, arguing that she might have experience, but he had consistently showed better judgment. He made her seem old, the kind of establishment figure the country was tired of.

If Obama wins the nomination, he may not find the main elections quite so easy. McCain will be shrewd enough to know that he can’t win in a battle of personalities, so he’ll divert attention to the issues. Having pandered to the base with template leftism, Obama will have to convince independent voters at the centre that he is their man. He is such a good performer that he might just pull it off.

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Posted by Amit Varma on 01 March, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Politics

There’s Nothing Wrong In Being ‘Commercial’

This piece of mine was published today in Mail Today (pdf link).

Wherever there’s big money floating around, politicians emerge and start squealing. The recent auctions at the Indian Premier League have roused the ire of both the Left and the Right of Indian politics. On the right, the inimitable Balasaheb Thackeray has described the IPL auctions as the “gambling of industrialists”. On the Left, Gurudas Dasgupta is complaining that this will make “every youngster not a good sportsman but a man hungry for money.”

Sundry politicians and commentators are telling us that this obscene spending will corrupt the spirit of the game, that these players are selling their soul, and so on. They behave as if “commercialization”, a term used repeatedly by shocked observers, is The Great Indian Sin. I have a question:

What, precisely, is wrong with commercialisation?

If Thackeray and Dasgupta pondered the history of human affairs, they would note that human progress is possible only because of the profit motive. The only way to make a profit is to fulfill the desire of fellow humans, by manufacturing goods or providing services that they need. The search for profit fuels innovation and enterprise. It leads to new technologies and better service. People trade to their comparative advantage, they specialize, and this makes economies more productive, and raises everyone’s standard of living.

Without such “commercialisation”, we’d be stuck in the stone age.

Profit

If Thackeray really has a problem with industry - for that is what the industrialists he condemns are all about - then he should step wearing clothes. All the clothes he wears are produced for profit, by industrialists, who clothe him not because they care for him or want to defend Hindu culture, but because he pays them money. How vulgar!

If Dasgupta has a problem with people “hungry for money”, he should immediately go on a fast. The people he gets his groceries from provide it in exchange for money, as do the restaurants that serve him food. There is only one appropriate response to this shocking commercialisation and rampant consumerism: Stop eating.

One blogger bizarrely compared the cricketers up on auction to prostitutes. Firstly, in the absence of coercion, I don’t see what is wrong with prostitution, or why we should look down on prostitutes. Secondly, if selling a service makes one a prostitute, then I am unquestionably a lady of the night, and this is my short, black, leather skirt that you’re reading. We are all whores in our own ways - and there is nothing wrong with that.

Back to the cricket. Besides the mere fact that money is involved, many people are also complaining about the amount of money the cricketers are getting. Some say cricketers should not be so well paid when other sportspeople in this country are so poorly paid. Other say that it is an outrage that Ishant Sharma should get more than Chaminda Vaas, and Rohit Sharma more than Ricky Ponting.

Look, who determines these prices? In the long run, you and I do. The businessmen putting that cash on the table do so because they estimate that those are the returns they’ll get on their investment. Those returns will come from us: We’ll buy the merchandise, we’ll watch the matches - which determine the value of TV rights - and their appeal to us will determine the value of the endorsements that flood in.

What if the team owners are wrong, and overpay for some players? Well, then they’ll duly learn their lessons when their team’s performance doesn’t justify the investment, and their bottomline suffers. What if some players are underpaid? Well, if they perform beyond their renumeration, they’ll receive their rightful value when the transfer season begins.

Twenty20 is a new form of the game, and the IPL is a new venture. It will take some time for the market to start functioning smoothly, and getting the values right. Until then, there is no point begrudging these cricketers their earnings.

The argument that this money would be better spent on other sports is bogus. If you feel Indian football should get more attention than Indian cricket, then here’s what you should do about it: Go out there and watch some local football games. Put your money where your mouth is. If you contribute your eyeballs, advertisers will open their chequebooks. If other sports don’t have a following in India, it is not because people don’t put money into them - it is the other way around.

Competition

Back to the IPL. Despite the BCCI bungling up sp much of the process, I think the IPL, if it succeeds, will be revolutionary. The reason for that is that it introduces into cricket the best guarantee of quality and efficiency: Competition.

The market for cricket has so far been a monopsony: There has been only buyer for a cricketer’s services. An Indian cricketer who wants to play cricket at the highest level can only sell his services to the BCCI, and is dependent of its selectors picking him - an imperfect process open to politics and the whims and fancies of individuals. That will change if the IPL takes off. A young, talented cricketer will have a number of people he can sell his services to, from the Bangalore Royal Challengers to the Delhi Daredevils to the Chennai Super Kings. If he is good, they will compete for him, thus guaranteeing him his true market value.

The BCCI, when it comes to cricket in India, has essentially had a captive market. The IPL teams will have to compete. The competition will threaten their existence, and they will have all the right incentives to excel. They will eschew the local politics of selection. They will search for differentiators in terms of training and scouting new talent. Like some football clubs do in Europe, they might establish youth academies to find and hone new talent. They will do so not out of love or duty to the game, but with regard to their bottomline. Cricket will benefit, as its machinery will flow that much smoother. 

Tests?

For a cricket purist like me, there is a flip side to this: What will happen to Test cricket? If the IPL succeeds, Test cricket will surely suffer. Already, one hears rumours of the ICC schedule being subject to the demands of Lalit Modi and his men. Given the amount of investment, in terms of time, that Test cricket requires from its viewers, it is possible that Test cricket will slowly die out.

Hordes of commentators and politicians will then start squealing about how the demands of the market have killed Test cricket, and how the market is a cruel, malign force.

Personally, I believe that Test cricket will have enough of an audience to survive—even if it ends up being a niche audience. But if it doesn’t, here’s my question: Should people who don’t watch Test cricket be forced to subsidize it? Remember, commerce is all about giving you what you want. If Test cricket dies, the killer won’t be commercialisation, or the IPL, or the greed of businessmen - it will be us.

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Also read:

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Posted by Amit Varma on 24 February, 2008 in Economics | Essays and Op-Eds | India | Sport

Welcome to the Free World

This piece of mine was published in the Indian Express today.

“Where in the world are truly free markets?” a friend asked me the other day. “The kind of economic freedom you libertarians dream of just doesn’t work. Freedom leads to chaos. All markets need to be regulated by the government, which alone can safeguard the interests of the people.”

“Have you been online recently,” I asked.

“Don’t change the subject,” he said.

“I’m not,” I replied.

A couple of years ago, the libertarian blogger Warren Meyer was asked why there were so many, well, libertarian bloggers. His reply, in a nutshell, was that the internet is a libertarian space. “Libertarianism resists organization,” he wrote. Libertarians tend to be “suspicious of top-down organization in and of itself.  Blogging is therefore tailor made for us - many diverse bottom-up messages rather than one official top-down one.”

In many ways, the online world is like the beautifully functioning free market that governments have never allowed in meatspace (the ‘real’ world). To begin with, the government does not pose an entry barrier to individuals who wish to have a presence online. You want to start a blog? It’ll take you three clicks to set one up. You don’t need a license for it, and you won’t have inspectors coming over and scrutinising your methods of work.

The blogosphere is a meritocratic space. Each blog finds the audience it deserves. If you like economics, you’ll find tons of good economics blogs, often much better than anything you’ll see in the mainstream media, because they’re written by specialists, not generalists. You want gardening? Literature? Technology? You’ll find content in any niche you can think of.

There is a lot of junk on the internet, but readers navigate through it easily, and soon settle on a few sites they regularly visit. Information percolates so quickly that a good new blog doesn’t take much time to build a readership. You write something nice, people who like it link to you, their readers check you out, and so it grows. Marketing and hype are generally wasted, and everything is viral. If you provide compelling content, readers come. If you write rubbish, readers go. Competition is the best regulation.

The blogger Ravikiran Rao once speculated on what would happen if the government decided to protect users from “bad blogs”, and regulate blogging. If government babus started deciding what content was appropriate for audiences, good bloggers would be intimidated away, not bothering to enter a space where there were so many hassles. Established bloggers would lobby for regulation to protect them from pesky newcomers. The quality of blogging would go down, not up - and readers would be shortchanged.

Far-fetched? Well, it works that way in many fields - such as, as Rao pointed out in his post, “private schools and educational institutions.” Indeed, in India at least, it is pervasive.

If only our government understood the power of free markets. I wish our bureaucrats read “I, Pencil” by Leonard Read, one of my favourite essays. It is a first-person account by a pencil of its genealogy – and by the end of it, you realise that a mere pencil is such a thing of wonder that no government could have put it together. It takes legions of people, possibly across continents, doing disparate things without knowledge of one another to make sure that when you need a pencil, and go to the shop to pick it up, it’s there. It’s a miracle, almost beyond comprehension, and certainly beyond planning or oversight. It takes a free market, not a benevolent central planner - economists call this process spontaneous order.

The internet benefits from this freedom. Consider Wikipedia, for example. It once used to be laughed at - how can a few volunteers produce better content than experts? - but is now a classic example of what spontaneous order can achieve. It is much broader than the Encyclopedia Britannica, and often deeper as well. It has its own self-correcting mechanisms, and its rules of use have evolved from the bottom up, and not been enforced from the top down. It shows that the voluntary actions of people working towards their self-interest is a far more powerful force than the self-important and sanctimonious supervision of governments. Online, we’re all free.

Supporters of free markets stress on the importance of the rule of law - and the internet is not a lawless zone. The laws of the real world apply to what we do online - sometimes to worrisome effect, as jailed bloggers in countries like Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia have discovered. But on the whole, the internet is free of the kind of needless, suffocating government regulation and barriers to trade that bedevil the rest of the world. Long may it stay that way.

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Also read: In Defence of Blogging.

You can browse through more of my essays and Op-Eds here.

Posted by Amit Varma on 23 February, 2008 in Blogging | Economics | Essays and Op-Eds

Where is Inner-Party Democracy in India?

This piece of mine was published today in Mail Today (pdf link).

The US primaries have been so much fun to follow over the last couple of months. The candidates of each party have gone from state to state mingling with people, answering questions, making the same speeches over and over again, revealing themselves, attacking others, trying to project themselves as something they aren’t even as 24-hour coverage allows them no time away from the flashbulbs, talking policy, spewing spin, and sometimes, rarely, letting the mask slip to reveal the man or woman behind the brand. There has been heartbreak and drama and tears and bravado and raw, naked ambition. All this to elect, not the president of the United States of America, but the candidates of the two main political parties, which are as democratic as the nation they aim to serve.

Contrast that with India. 

When the time comes to select the leader of the Congress Party, can you imagine Sonia Gandhi going from town to town trying to persuade Congress workers why she is the best person to lead them? Can you imagine LK Advani in a televised debate against Narendra Modi and Uma Bharati? Can you imagine the elite Politburo putting Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechuri in front of Communist Party workers and saying, “right, choose now.”

There is a cliché that India is the world’s largest democracy. Technically, that is true - there are more voters here than anywhere else in the world. But none of the parties we have to choose from are democratic within. They are feudal beasts. 

History

Ironically, it began thus. Just before India became independent, the Congress Party had to choose a president who would then go on to become India’s first prime minister. That leader was not elected from the bottom, but appointed from the top - Mahatma Gandhi chose Jawaharlal Nehru, and got the other possible contenders, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, to endorse his choice.

In India’s early decades, the Congress enjoyed a large majority by virtue of being a driving force behind India’s independence. Meanwhile, within the Congress, Nehru consolidated his power. Patel died in 1950, C Rajagopalachari, a dissenter when it came to Nehru’s economic policies, was marginalised, and Nehru faced no challenges while he was alive. 

When Nehru died in 1964, no one could have foretold that the Congress would become a feudal party. The main contenders for the prime ministership, K Kamaraj, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Morarji Desai, were all popular leaders in their own right. Shastri got the job, but didn’t live long. Indira Gandhi was appointed prime minister by a group of party heavyweights who thought they could control her. Heh.

A sycophant of Indira Gandhi, DK Barooah, would say years later, “Indira is India and India is Indira.” Well, Indira certainly was the Congress. She took over the party, filled the key positions with her sycophants, and even ran a dictatorship for a couple of years, aided by her son, Sanjay. The Congress became dependent on the charisma of her family and the brand value of her family name. After she died, Rajiv Gandhi took over. After he died, his Italian non-politician widow, Sonia Gandhi refused the job. She eventually returned to it, and her son Rahul is being groomed to take over.

India, meanwhile, has moved on from the Congress. For such a heterogenous country to be so dominated by one party was an aberration, and it will never happen again. Politics in India is now local. People choose their MPs based on local considerations, sometimes at the constituency level, and sometimes at the level of the state. National trends have ceased to matter. The coalitions that come to power after an election may change, but all talk of “the will of the people” is naïve generalization. 

There is no more something like a national mandate. Hundreds of millions of voters vote for hundreds of millions of different reasons. You can spin these reasons, but your spin affects nothing but the gossip of the chattering classes and newspaper columns by pundits.

Fragmentation

One would imagine that if all politics is local, parties are forced to be democratic. Well, here’s an exercise: Go out and try to be a member of the Congress Party. Or the BJP. Or the Shiv Sena. See what happens.

Our political parties are still ruled by closed elites, driving policies from the top rather than having their ear to the ground and listening to the people. Yes, the Congress has lost and lost and lost in the time that Rahul Gandhi has been active. But it is hard to say that the cause of this is the absence of inner-party democracy. Which party is democratic today?

All our politics is identity politics. Politicians go out there claiming to represent different minority groups - for all groups are minority groups in our countries, even Hindus, split by caste and region and language - and get people to vote for them for visceral, emotional reasons. The loyalties they evoke are tribal ones. I am a Dalit and I will look after all Dalits. Or I am a Yadav and I will look after the interest of all Yadavs. Or I am not a Muslim, but I will fight the BJP on the behalf of Muslims, and am the most viable alternative to the BJP out there.

And so on.

So naturally our politics is then feudal. Kanshi Ram becomes larger than life within his party and the groups that feel such tribal loyalty towards him, so his chosen successor Mayawati inherits that mantle. Their parties are their fiefdoms. You will never, I guarantee you, see Mayawati standing for elections within her party.

Obsolescence

India has among the oldest active politicians in the world. Manmohan Singh - nominated to his post by Congress owner Sonia, and not elected to it, for all practical purposes - leads the government at 75; LK Advani, the leader of the opposition, is 80. Contrast these leaders with Gordon Brown (56), Nicolas Sarkozy (53) and Angela Merkel (53). Barack Obama (46) is an embryo compared to our leaders.

The reason for this is obvious. In the absence of robust, inner-party democracy, young leaders find it hard to rise within the system - unless, like Rahul Gandhi, Sachin Pilot, Manvendra Singh, Akhilesh Yadav, Omar Abdullah and Jyotiraditya Scindia, they’re some bigwig’s son taking charge of an inheritance. The old fogeys stay in charge, consolidate their positions, and promote their sycophants. Is there hope for change, then?

I would say there is. We are a maturing democracy, and we are also a growing economy. As we open up to the world, we will become less insecure about our place in it, and more inclusive of new ideas and values. Identity politics will slowly become less pervasive, and people will demand more from their politicians. Their politicians will have to adapt to them.

The political parties who don’t listen to market signals will wither away. The ones that do will profit. And one day, I wishfully think, Indian parties will have elections as vibrant and democractic as the two large parties in America. Would you like to see that? 

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Check out more essays by me in my essays and Op-Eds archive.

Posted by Amit Varma on 10 February, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | India | Politics

Profit’s No Longer a Dirty Word

The Library of Economics and Liberty (or econlib.org) is one of my favourite websites, and has many superb essays on economics. I’m happy to say that an essay I’ve written for them has been published today: Profit’s No Longer a Dirty Word: The Transformation of India. Do read.

Posted by Amit Varma on 05 February, 2008 in Economics | Essays and Op-Eds | Freedom | India | Politics

India’s New Role Models

This piece of mine was published today in the Wall Street Journal Asia.

Twenty years ago, no one could have imagined that four of the 10 richest chief executives in the world could be Indian. But Forbes recently released a top-10 list showing how much India has changed. Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, was ranked second, followed by Mukesh Ambani (sixth), Anil Ambani (seventh) and Azim Premji (ninth); Warren Buffett came in first.

One can quibble with how the list was compiled, but there is no doubt that India has become a force in the world of business. The leading bidders for Jaguar and Land Rover are the Indian automobile companies Tata Motors on one hand, and Mahindra and Mahindra on the other. In 2006, Mr. Mittal brought the European steel behemoth, Arcelor, into his empire. Last year, the Tata Group took over Britain’s Corus, another large producer of steel.

Just as significant as the success of Indian businessmen abroad is a shift in the way they are viewed at home: The biggest names in Indian business are among the biggest heroes of India. The society pages of newspapers show them at parties, the gossip columns feature them, and young men and women name them as their icons, even as those youths prepare for their own MBA entrance exams.

It wasn’t always like this. In the early decades of our independence, businessmen were not looked upon highly. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, famously once told the business tycoon J.R.D. Tata that “profit” was “a dirty word.” Indian films routinely portrayed businessmen as evil capitalists out to exploit the poor. Ironically for a country that was so poor, the pursuit of wealth was looked upon with suspicion.

Mr. Mittal had to leave India to build his empire. Dhirubhai Ambani, Mukesh and Anil’s father, built his business by manipulating the system in the finest traditions of cronyism. The businesses that did exist were protected from competition by the high entry barriers placed by the government, at the cost of consumers.

All this changed when India liberalized in 1991. As India opened up to the world, its entrepreneurs sprang into action. The middle class grew, the quality of life in cities improved, and tens of thousands of young men and women went abroad as the software industry boomed. Indians realized that free enterprise was providing them with the opportunities they had lacked in the socialist years.

Consider that earlier this year, Ratan Tata, the successor to J.R.D. Tata’s empire and the chief of Tata Motors, unveiled the Nano—a car expected to retail for approximately $2,500. Some complained about the increase in pollution that it might cause, and other worried that it would add to traffic congestion in big cities. But most of India applauded.

Mr. Tata’s ingenuity and vision will bring vehicle ownership within reach of millions of people who could otherwise have never dreamed of it, and it demonstrates what business does best—improve the lives of people, and help them fulfill their dreams, all in the quest of that “dirty word,” profit.

The heroes of the old India were film stars, cricket players and, perhaps, freedom fighters and politicians. The heroes of the new India include businessmen. In 2003, when MTV India held a poll among its predominantly young viewers to pick the Icon of the Year, Anil Ambani won. The people he beat included filmstar Shah Rukh Khan and cricket hero Sachin Tendulkar.

India’s successful businessmen, even as they enter lists such as the one compiled by Forbes, embody the hopes of their country more than their elected government possibly can. India is finally beginning to give them their due.

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For more such pieces by me, check out my Essays and Op-Eds archive.

Posted by Amit Varma on 01 February, 2008 in Economics | Essays and Op-Eds | India | WSJ Pieces

We Indians Are Proud Of All The Wrong Things

This piece of mine appeared today in Mail Today.

Sometimes satire simply cannot keep up with real life. A few days ago I read a piece in the Indian Express about a 28-year-old gentleman based in Bhopal named Prakash Kumar Thakur. Thakur specialises in persecuting those who ‘insult’ India’s national flag. He recently filed a court case against Sania Mirza because she was photographed with her feet on a table on which the Indian flag was also kept. The case was filed under something called - I’m not making this up - the Prevention of Insult to the National Honour Act.

The maximum sentence under this act is three years in jail. A distraught Mirza reported that she considered quitting her sport. Thakur reacted to that response by calling it “emotional blackmail.”

Thakur, the report tells us, had earlier filed cases against Sachin Tendulkar and Mandira Bedi. Tendulkar had cut a cake designed like the tricolour. Bedi had worn a sari with the flags of various countries, including India, on it. 

Thakur’s advocate, RK Pandey, had filed a similar case against MF Husain. They recently also sued a publisher of a class VI textbook for not printing the tricolour properly.

In the best line of the report, Thakur is quoted as saying: “Me and my friends will move around the city from 2 pm onwards on Republic Day collecting flags lying everywhere and destroy them in private with full dignity.”

Yes, even flags have dignity. And, presumably, feelings. I hope Thakur and his friends had a good time yesterday.

Patriotism

The national flag is not the only symbol of national pride that patriots like Thakur worry about. There’s also the national anthem, which was allegedly “insulted” last April by NR Narayana Murthy. Indeed, in Mumbai, it is played in cinema theatres before the start of every film, and it is compulsory to stand. 

This is what we’ve reduced patriotism to.

In my view, there are two kinds of patriotism. The first kind involves feeling that your country is, in some way or the other, greater than others. Often, self-esteem is involved. Patriots of this kind will want others to share their feelings about their country. They might feel offended if someone suggests that their country is not all they imagine it to be.

The other kind of patriotism involves loving certain things about one’s country. This is a personal love, different in each individual’s case, and patriots of this sort will enjoy their patriotism without demanding that others share it.

If we were to be flippant about such grave matters, we could call these kinds of patriotism Mera Bharat Mahaan and Mera Bharat Mujhe Pasand. 

I see myself as the second kind of patriot. When I think of the things I love about India, I think of concrete things in the real world, such as its food, its music, the languages that I’m fortunate to know. These don’t blind me from the many things wrong with the country - nor do I have any desire to impose my preferences on others.

The Mera Bharat Mahaan kind of patriot, on the other hand, is involved with a narrative of greatness. A key part of his identity is his Indianness. For this reason, he needs to believe that India is a great country, superior to others. 

Symbols like the flag and the anthem are, thus, important to him. They represent his nationalistic fervour. Equally, a display like the Republic Day parade makes him feel proud. Its purpose is validation.

Pride

This need for validation was understandable in our early years as an independent country. We’d just gained independence after decades of being humiliatingly colonised. It was a mini-miracle that we existed, bridging such linguistic, religious and cultural divides. We needed to believe in ourselves as a nation. 

And, let’s face it, there was a bit of a collective inferiority complex running through the country.

Sadly, even after 60 years of independence, that craving for validation remains. Why else do we make such a hue and cry every year about India’s entry to the Oscars, and ignore our own national awards? Why else do we rush to claim any foreign achiever with an Indian background as a national hero? (Sunita Williams, born in Ohio and raised in America, has been awarded the Padma Bhushan this year.) Why else do we go gaga with excitement when we hear of Madonna practising yoga or Gwen Stefani putting a Bindi on her head? Why else do we celebrate when Shilpa Shetty wins Big Brother, and ignore poor Rahul Roy, who won the desi version?

India has advanced leaps and bounds in the last couple of decades, but we still haven’t acquired the self-confidence that a mature democracy should have. Too many of us are still sensitive about symbols of our nationhood, and that’s a pity. We are proud, I believe, of entirely the wrong things.

As a nation that won its independence with such difficulty, if there is one thing we should be proud of, and should continue to aspire towards, it is freedom. Not just the freedom to vote, but freedom in every social and economic sense. As long as we don’t infringe on the freedom of others, we should be free to express our sexual preferences, to trade with others, to watch the films we want, to read the books we want, to say what we want. And yes, free to disrespect a flag or refuse to stand up when the anthem is played. 

What’s the point of being a free country otherwise?

Freedom

The main issue involved in all the cases that Thakur has filed is not patriotism - Thakur has the right to feel warmly towards the national flag. But he does not have the right to impose his feelings and his preferences on others. The issue here is freedom.

India, sadly, has never given freedom of expression the level of protection it deserves. Article 19 (1) (a) of our constitution speaks of protecting free speech, but Article 19 (2) immediately limits it by making it contingent on concepts like “public order” and “decency and morality”, which are open to interpretation by bureaucrats, judges and mobs. The Indian Penal Code (IPC) has a number of laws which effectively make it a crime to give offence. 

Section 295 (a), a non-bailable act, is particularly notorious: It punishes actions “intended to outrage religious feelings”, and has been used against Ravi Shastri when he said he liked eating beef, and against a publisher for publishing a Santa and Banta jokebook. 

The IPC, of course, was drafted in the 19th century. It needs an overhaul - as does the attitude towards national pride that many of us have. We are a vibrant democracy now, and the idea of India cannot be harmed any more by a few displays of disrespect towards emblems and symbols. We should stop insulting our country by behaving otherwise.

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My thanks to Himanshu for pointing me to the IE story. Some related pieces by me: The Anthem and the Flag. Don’t Insult Pasta. Indian Idolatry.

You can check out more essays by me in my essays and Op-Eds archive.

Posted by Amit Varma on 27 January, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Freedom | India

Cracking the Logic of Life

This review of The Logic of Life by Tim Harford has appeared in today’s edition of Lounge, the Saturday edition of Mint.

If Tim Harford was born 150 years ago, he would have provided strong competition to Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes, Doyle’s creation, unveiled the mysteries of human behaviour using nothing but cold logic and immaculate observation. Harford’s undercover economist does the same in his two books, The Undercover Economist (2005) and his new release, The Logic of Life. But there is one difference between the two: While we ordinary mortals can never hope to match Holmes’s skills, we can all aspire to be like Harford’s invisible alter ego.

Harford uses the tools of economics to crack some of the mysteries of life. Those tools are available to us as well, and are easy to use. Indeed, by the time you finish reading The Logic of Life, you might feel equipped to do a little sleuthing yourself.

The engine at the heart of The Logic of Life is rational choice theory. “If you do not understand the rational choices that underlie much of our behaviour,” Harford writes, “you cannot understand the world in which we live.” His basic premise: “Rational people respond to trade-offs and incentives.” Using this as a starting point, he then demonstrates how drug addicts, teenage muggers, suburban sprawl, inner-city decay and endless meetings at the office are all rational.

It is not Harford’s point that “people are always and everywhere rational”. They obviously aren’t. But, he writes, “[P]eople are rational nearly enough and often enough to make the assumption of rational choice a very useful one.” He elaborates: “In the hands of economists, ‘rational choice theory’ produces an x-ray image of human life. Like the x-ray, rational choice theory does not show everything. Nor is the picture necessarily very pretty. But it shows you something important, and something that you could not see before.”

This might appear to rest on a picture of us as “consciously calculating beings.” But rational behaviour doesn’t always arise out of a conscious process. Harford writes: “We often aren’t conscious of the calculations of costs and benefits that we make when we act rationally—just as, when someone throws a baseball for us to catch, we aren’t conscious of our brain solving differential equations to work out where it’s going to land.”

Another objection to this focus on rational behaviour might be that much of our behaviour is driven by our emotions. Harford writes: “[O]f course we feel passionately about sex, love, crime, and all sorts of other things… The whole purpose of acting rationally is to maximize our emotional pay-offs.”

Is there an issue that involves our emotions more than love, or the mates we choose? In my favourite chapter of the book, “Is divorce underrated?”, Harford demonstrates how economics can unveil the mysteries of love and mating.

“Lovers plan, strategise, negotiate and deal with the harsh realities of supply and demand,” Harford writes. He recaps how men and women are hard-wired differently by evolution, and how women are more attracted to high-earning men than the other way around (he presents data to back this up.) This explains why there are more women in most cities than men—men are more likely to respond to rising rents by moving out, while women have more reason to stay, because they are more likely to meet desirable mates. This also explains why “unskilled urban jobs [like waitressing and secretarial work] that could easily be done by either sex would tend to be done by women.”

“[I]n places where men are scarce,” Harford writes, “women respond by staying in school longer. In cities where men are particularly rich, women are particularly plentiful.” Harford writes about how the contraceptive pill has changed society by changing our incentives. Because the pill makes it “easier for men to get sex outside of marriage”, there are fewer marriages.

Women respond to this by studying harder: “four US women [graduate] from college for every three men.” Being able to delay having babies also enables women to make income gains because of “the economies of scale in education and work which reward those who spend a long time in college and then work long hours early in their careers.”

This also explains the “divorce revolution”. The family has always been a powerful unit, and a rational one, because of the economic forces of the division of labour, economies of scale and comparative advantage. But the contraceptive pill changed the equations within a marriage, as women became “more highly educated, career-minded and employer-friendly”. They were also aided by household technology, which vastly reduced the time that household chores took up. As the incentives changed, so did the need to be married, or to stay inside a bad marriage. All these trends, of course, were entirely rational—but this rationality was hardly a conscious process.

The Logic of Life is so compelling not just because of Harford’s sleuthing, but because he is such a powerful storyteller. Writers of popular thrillers would be proud of the narrative momentum he maintains in his chapter on game theory, “Las Vegas: The Edge of Reason”, which brings to life fascinating people like John Von Neumann, Chris ‘Jesus’ Ferguson and Thomas Schelling. But it is packed with insight as well—it explains how addiction can be a rational thing, how it involves warring parts of our brain, and how I can explain my coffee addiction to my partner—hopefully without altering her incentives too much.

It also uncovers minor mysteries along the way, such as why advertising for nicotine patches and gum seems to lead to an increase in teenagers taking up smoking: “The advertisements tell them that there are new ways to help them quit, so rationally it is less risky to start the habit.”

Throughout the book, Harford doesn’t merely speculate, but uses research and empirical data to reveal the rational thread running through our behaviour. The economics and the writing are first class, and The Logic of Life is both entertaining and enlightening. Picking it up, I assure you, is quite the rational course of action.

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Also read: My review of Harford’s earlier book, The Undercover Economist: Economics as a guide to human behaviour.

Slate has published a couple of excerpts from The Logic of Life: 1, 2.

Also check out Harford’s website and blog—the latter is one of my favourite blogs.

Posted by Amit Varma on 19 January, 2008 in Economics | Essays and Op-Eds

How To Save The Hapless Cricket Umpire

This piece of mine was published today in Mail Today under the headline “High tech input can give better umpiring”.You can download a pdf here.

I feel sorry for Steve Bucknor. In 2004, he had a horrid Test at Sydney, making a series of errors that prevented India from winning the series. A few months ago, he had a lousy World Cup final, displaying a shocking ignorance of the rules. And now, after another Sydney Test full of blunders, his career is close to winding up. It’s been tough, but my pity isn’t based on the brickbats flung his way being undeserved – he has long been an incompetent and arrogant umpire. I feel sorry for him because all this is really the ICC’s fault.

In 1988, Bucknor was a FIFA referee at a World Cup qualifier between El Salvador and the Netherlands Antilles. Why isn’t he still a FIFA referee today? Well, FIFA has a compulsory retirement age of 45 for its umpires. They feel that a referee’s job imposes physical demands that make it hard for someone above that age to do the job effectively. So they say, “Thank you, you were good, but run along now.”

The physical demands on a cricket umpire don’t seem to be so great. He may be on the field of play longer, but has no running around to do. Nevertheless, it is my contention that umpiring requires an extensive use of physical faculties that decline with age. And for a man is his 60s to be doing the job is ludicrous.

Consider what an umpire has to go through. He has to stand on the field and concentrate hard for six hours of play – this sometimes for five days in a row. His eyesight has to be perfect. He has to be quick – the shift in focus from the bowling crease, which he needs to watch for a no-ball, to the batsman isn’t easy. He has to evaluate what he sees within split seconds, factoring in all the optical illusions that typically come into play, such as the parallax error. (Because the umpire stands at a height above the stumps, balls that would go over the stumps appear to be hitting.) His depth perception has to be perfect, and his brain has to process all these multiple inputs to come up with a correct decision.

Age

The faculties required for all this diminish with age. You wouldn’t put a 60-year-old man in a Formula One race, because he could kill others, and himself. (Besides, he would be no good.) A 60-year-old man umpiring a cricket game can end careers, or decide matches, and series. (Besides, he would be no good.)

What is happening to Bucknor is not new. We saw this happen to David Shepherd as well. Shepherd, one of the great umpires of the game, declined rapidly towards the start of this century, making a series of infamous howlers in the 2001 England-Pakistan series. It was all downhill from there – and what a pity it was.

Should the ICC have a mandatory retirement age, like FIFA does? While it would act as a safeguard, I will be perfectly happy if they don’t. While Bucknor and Shepherd felt the ravages of age, some remarkably well-preserved umpire might not. But what ICC does need to do is recognise that a good umpire isn’t good forever, and have regular tests and evaluations carried out. The ones it has in place are obviously not good enough.

And it should also pay attention to the feedback that captains are required to give on umpires at the end of every series. Sourav Ganguly, India’s captain in the 2003-2004 series against Australia, gave Bucknor an extremely negative report. The ICC should have paid attention to it then. I wonder why they didn’t.

Technology

Let us consider the role of umpires in cricket. Are they participants in the game of cricket? Do the crowds come to see them at work?

My answers are no and no.

Umpires are nothing more than facilitators. Eleven men take on 11 other men, and the sport is about them. Umpires are there to enforce the rules of the game, so that the result is fair, and the team that plays better wins.

So when the attention of the commentators or the crowds is on the umpires, something is wrong. It means they made a mistake. It is an aberration, something that should not happen. The ICC should do everything within its power to prevent it.

The ICC should recognise that umpires are just the means to an end. They are not the point of the game. It should also recognise that they need help. And the technology exists to help them.

How do we know when umpires make mistakes? Some mistakes are visible to the naked eye. But for others, we go to technology. We see a ball hitting middle-stump on Hawk-Eye and exclaim, “That’s plumb, how could he not give that?” We see a snick via the Snickometer, or notice via the tram lines on the screen that the ball pitched outside leg, and we go, “What lousy umpiring.”

We judge the umpires using technology. Would it not be fair, then, to make that same technology available to them?

Critics have created a false dichotomy between umpires and technology. Using technology does not mean doing away with umpires or having androids on the field. It simply means giving umpires the tools to do his job better. We make his life easier, and ensure more accurate decisions. Isn’t that the whole purpose of umpiring to begin with?

Hawk-Eye

But is some of the technology out there accurate enough? Some of it – using TV replays for line calls, for example – is non-controversial. Some isn’t. Hawk-Eye has been at the center of much controversy, and is mocked by many who then, ironically, use it to point out umpiring errors. Many of the objections against it, though, are based on misconceptions. I think Hawk-Eye would be a fantastic tool for umpires, and would make contentious lbw decisions a thing of the past.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Cricinfo, which was owned by Wisden, who acquired Hawk-Eye in 2006. I’m no longer associated with Cricinfo, which was sold to ESPN last year and is no longer associated with Hawk-Eye.)

The predictive technology behind Hawk-Eye is similar to that used in missile-guidance systems and instrument guidance for brain surgeons – it’s designed for extreme accuracy. To answer the objections against it in detail would require a full piece, but suffice it to say that whatever the umpire can do, Hawk-Eye can do with greater accuracy. Experts of the game implicitly acknowledge this by turning to Hawk-Eye whenever lbw decisions need to be evaluated.

The most popular misconception about Hawk-Eye is that it would take time to get a decision, as one goes to the third umpire for a replay, and so on. This is not true. What we see on television is a just a graphical representation of Hawk-Eye, and Hawk-Eye’s decision would actually be delivered within a second or two to the umpire, via a handheld device: out or not out, pitching outside leg or on line, and so on. At the click of a button, umpires would save themselves much embarrassment.

And contrary to an old canard, technology does not take “the human touch” out of anything. People like “maa ke haath ka khana” even when she uses a microwave. Umpires who use technology will remain human – but they will get more decisions right. We should give them the tools to make that happen.

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I wrote a piece on exactly the same subject four years ago after the last Sydney Test: “On age and technology.” Such hopes of change I had…

You can read more essays and Op-Eds by me here.

Posted by Amit Varma on 13 January, 2008 in Essays and Op-Eds | Sport

Our Unlucky Children

This is the 48th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through.

Last weekend, I went through the typical routine of watching a film and then doing a week’s worth of shopping. First I watched the beautiful Taare Zameen Par. Then I spent an hour inside the nearest hypermarket.

The amount of choice inside the hypermart was staggering. I counted more than 30 kinds of cheese, 60 kinds of biscuits, 50 types of papad, and quite as much variety across soaps, soft drinks, farsaan, cooking oil, pickles and so on. I needed shampoo, and I walked past two shelves of it before finding something for “normal hair.”

Some people complain that there is too much choice on offer, but I find the variety wonderful. It caters to individual taste. For example, there is shampoo available for people with “dry, rough, sensitized hair”, “dry or damaged hair”, and “weak, fragile, difficult to grow long hair”. To those of us who do not fall into these categories, these might seem excessive, but clearly they exist because they sell —and fulfil someone’s needs.

Isn’t it wonderful how the free market does this? Instead of shoving one or two types of each product down people’s throats, it effectively treats us as individuals. Entrepreneurs, seeking to find market niches to make a profit, end up empowering us as consumers. Without knowing anything about me, the market caters to my personal needs to a degree my grandparents would have found unbelievable.

Watching Taare Zameen Par, however, reminded me that in the area where it matters most, our children don’t have the same choices open to them.

Aamir Khan’s film is about a dyslexic boy let down by his school. His teachers do not recognize what makes him different and treat him as if he is stupid, shattering his self-esteem. Then Khan comes in as a sensitive teacher and turns things around.

This only happens in films, of course, and most kids in that situation would not be so lucky. They would be able to buy potato chips in the precise flavour they might desire—“classic salted”, “sour cream and onion” or 40 others—but would be denied of an education tailored to their needs.

This is not just something that applies to dyslexic kids. All children are unique. Some are better at languages than in math, some have short attentions spans, some have high learning curves, and so on and on. And yet, when it comes to education, they are treated as if their needs and abilities are identical.

This rigidity applies not just to schools but also to higher education. “Arts”, “science” and “commerce” are segregated streams, and a young man who wishes to study both physics and 19th century English literature would have a problem doing so.

You might argue that when it comes to education, it is logistically impossible to cater to individual needs. After all, schools and colleges have limited resources, and a teacher-student ratio can only go so far. Individual attention seems an impossible pipe dream.

I would argue, though, that our failure to imagine a way forward does not mean that none exists. All successful innovations work precisely because no one thought of them before, and they fulfil a need somewhere. If we give entrepreneurs the scope to innovate, they will find solutions. The problem with our education system is that the government has a stranglehold on it, and severely restricts private participation.

For example, it takes 14 licences from four authorities to open a private school in New Delhi, which could take years. There are all kinds of bizarre parameters schools have to fulfil to open a school—such as playgrounds of a specified size—and, most absurdly, they aren’t allowed to operate for a profit. They get around this by opening trusts and suchlike, which restrict their scope for further investment.

When will our government learn that the profit motive is a good thing? It spurs innovation and benefits fellow human beings, for that is the only way to make a profit.

Besides these entry barriers, there are other restrictions on what these schools must work towards. If they are not affiliated to a government-approved board with a government-approved syllabus, such as ICSE or CBSE, their students are going to find it hard to get into government-approved colleges down the line. Everything has to be government-approved, which stifles innovation.

I can barely imagine what products my hypermart would contain if all the industries that produced them were run by the government as education in India is. There would be fewer product categories, virtually no choice within those categories, and everything would be more expensive. Thanks to competition and relatively free markets, that is not the case.

When it comes to trivial things such as potato chips and garlic sev, we have been empowered with choice. When it comes to something as important as education, we have not. Isn’t that a disgrace?

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Also read: My piece on school choice in India, Fund Schooling, Not Schools.

You can browse through all my columns for Mint in my Thinking it Through archives.

Posted by Amit Varma on 10 January, 2008 in Economics | Essays and Op-Eds | Freedom | India | Thinking it Through

Some Saxy Resolutions

This is the 47th installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking it Through. <