The Localised Dilution of Resources: A look at Paul Romer's 'Charter City' Concept

This is a TED Talk by Paul Romer, a professor who left his job at Stanford to pursue his very revolutionary idea of the ‘Charter City’. In this talk, he emphasises on the power of rules, and how they guide the technology which it needs to actualise ideas. This he conveys with the following image.

Ideas

Now, rules are the little builders that erect walls within a system, the walls that will bring to life guiding paths for data to move in and out. They specify what can happen and what can’t. With the right technology, what rules can do is not only bring to life ideas – which they make possible because they bring to life the goals that the idea has in mind – but also behave as administrative interfaces between the intelligence that has put them in place and the machinery that will do the manufacturing. For example, in a car, the gearbox behaves like a rule that creates smaller rules. The engine of the car produces power which is conveyed to the wheels by means of a crankshaft. By bringing in the gearbox, I am able to enforce a set of rules in the system. If I now set the gear to ‘R’, the system will deliver outputs of a different kind by moving the car backwards.

CAR = ENGINE + GEARBOX + WHEELS

Similarly,

RULES = BEHAVIOR + INTERFACE

In essence, they govern systems by enabling the incorporation of ideas in the working machinery.

When Romer talks about the good rules and the bad rules, I believe that he is talking about the behavior of any rule in general. A good rule is that which makes the car move backwards when the gear is set to ‘R’ and forward when set to anything else. A bad rule can either be a car that doesn’t move when a gear is changed or that which behaves in opposing manners.

That being said, I was thinking of my ocuntry, India, and how these good rules and bad rules can be identified within its administrative cogs, and how those Charter Cities can be brought to life. Because, just as much as Romer points out to the examples of North and South Korea, and Cuba and Canada, he is essentially pointing to regions in the world where neighboring populations have access to disproportionate amounts of resources because of a change in leadership.

Let me establish the analogy to India here. In India, the nation is divided into little states (on a linguistic basis) each of which has its own little government and a Chief Minister at the helms. Therefore, different states have different policies of governance. This means that they have different rules. This disparity, to note, is lessened by the fact that the central government is usually a coalition of these smaller state parties. But that doesn’t change the fact that when I cross the border from Tamil Nadu into Kerala, I’m exposed to (possibly) the same resources but in different amounts because of a change in leadership.

Let me question myself at this stage.

1. What are the problems I see? To answer this, imagine a vector field that illustrates the policies of the different states. Extrapolated on the India map, they would be a set of arrows pointing in different directions, some similar, representing their individual goals. If two arrows point in opposite directions, they don’t necessarily different goals, but different target groups. For example, Gujarat may target the farmer more than Rajasthan, which will eye the urban crowd. Although they do aid the nation from different directions, this fragmented governing as I see it has one pro and one con.
   1. Pro: With leaders governing smaller and smaller pieces of land, they are able to manage resources better than just one person and one party at the top.
   2. Con: Sometimes, resources are spread across borders and it may be beneficial for a region in particular to be governed in a specific way.
2. What are the bad rules? The bad rules I choose to see are with respect to this fragmented government policy of the nation.
3. What are the outcomes of these bad rules? As Romer says in his talk, villages are too small to experience the benefits of a good business and nations are too big. What is of just the right size is the city. In the Indian political context, when a state assumes the administrative parenthood of a city, it gives rise to a mismanagement of resources. Let me elucidate thorugh some points.
   1. Imagine a state that has a political capital and a commercial capital. Now, suppose that the state is so large that close to 95% of its population resides in small villages.
   2. A party gets elected to govern the state by a mostly rural turnout. Therefore, it is possible that the party that has come to power would have promised benefits for the farmer more than the software engineer.
   3. Now, the state can either be aligned with the central government’s interests or opposed to it.
      1. If aligned, then a nationalised subsidy for the farmer will be compounded by the state’s interests.
      2. If opposed, then the state will turn down the nationalised subsidy and bring into picture its own. Result? The state is wasting its resources.
   4. This localised policy shift will have two outcomes of its own.
      1. If aligned, the farmer will be receiving twice as many benefits as the software engineer.
      2. If opposed, the software engineer in the state will be moving at a pace different from a software engineer elsewhere in the nation.
   5. This particular scenario is quite relevant I would say to the current Indian sociopolitical scenario. Therefore, what the fragmented governance is giving rise to is an uneven utilisation of resources that in a region throughout which the resources are spread out – a localised resource concentration/dilution.
   6. The ultimate loser is the city. Since it is a collection of humans, the value of the city itself is derived from the capabilities of these people. When Romer says that the land value increases because the city’s inhabitants are earning more, it actually means that the city – through its location and other properties – has enabled its people to be like that. In the scenario I detailed out, the urban population is either exposed to a disparate quantity and quality of resources or does not avail them at all.
4. What is my solution? The set of bad rules that I attributed this problem to was the usage of a fragmented governing system. My solution is to fragment the already existing pieces into even smaller ones. And before you think I’m an idiot, let me tell you why that solve some problems.

Even though close to 64% of the Indian population is engaged in agrarian activities most of which falls into the rural category, it is the cities that make a difference. With the amount of data that is sent in and out of them, a city makes itself relevant by making sure the data comes from and reaches the right group of people. For starters, think of the two technologies that have substantially increased the nation’s crop output over the last 10 years.

The first was the launch of the INSAT weather satellite. A look at the following table will give you an idea of the benefits of the launch – which was a very important outcome of the utilisation of urban solutions.

Economic Benefits		Rs. Millions
	Program	Nature of Benefit	Estimate from Case Studies	Potential Benefit to the country in the Long-run
1.	National Drinking Water Technology Mission	Cost saving due to increase in success rate	2,560 (5 States)	5,000 – 8,000
2.	Urban Area Perspective / Development / Zonal / Amenities Plan for Cities / Towns	Cost saving in mapping	50.4 (6 Cities)	16,000 – 20,000
3.	Forest Working Plan	Cost saving in mapping	2,000 (200 Divisions)	11,860
4.	Potential Fishing Zone Advisories	Cost saving due to avoidance of trips in non-PFZ advisories	5,450	16,350
5.	Wasteland Mapping: Solid Land Reclamation	Productivity gain	990 (UP)	24,690
6.	Integrated Mission for Sustainable Development: Horticultural Development in Land With and Without Shrub	Gross income	Rs.0.20 to 0.40 (per hectare)	13,000 – 26,000
7.	Bio-prospecting for Medicinal Herbs	Value of Indian life saving drugs		800

(From http://epress.anu.edu.au/narayanan/mobile_devices/ch10s06.html)

The second technology that came to the aid of the farmer was the combined harvester-thresher, which reduced the duration of labor that was required to harvest and thresh a piece of land by substantial amounts.

In this fragmentation process, the nation could be divided down to form clearly discernible urban and rural regions. As I said earlier, it is important for the cities to be governed similar so that all cities in a particular region are availed similar qualities of the similar quantities of resources. Does this look like Communism on a broader scale? Perhaps. But what it ensures is that, with the democratization of information exchange through urban areas, there can be greater coordination towards acheiving common goals. At the same time, rural areas, specifically the agrarian ones, will receive greater and greater concentrations of useful information instead of what just the state has decided to give them.

In this fragmentation, which I call the second-degree fragmentation (SDF), the danger of there arising a difference in policies as a result of the installation of different state governments is eliminated. Secondly, the Charter Cities that Paul Romer suggested could be translated into this SDF picture in that all cities work as one super-city in terms of resource management and policy establishment.

I have two concerns at the end of this post.

1. With the current system set so firmly in its ways, bring in such a massive change is quite impossible. Therefore, if anyone has any such comments to put forth, please don’t do so. Instead, what I’d like to hear about is its theoretical validity.
2. I have not studied this subject (yet). There’s still a long time to go for me to be there. But before then, if you have anything to suggest or criticise (constructively), let me know.

K.T. Thomas on the 'controversial frisking' of Dr. Kalam

(This particular article appeared in The Hindu, Chennai ed., July 25, as an op-ed. It details the opinions of the former judge of the Supreme Court of India, K. T. Thomas, on the controversial frisking of Dr. Kalam at the New Delhi airport before boarding a Continental Airlines aircraft.)

The news that A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a former President of India, was recently subjected to security-checks by the staff of Continental Airlines at the New Delhi airport as he was leaving on an overseas trip has evoked a sharp reaction in India. Barring Mr. Kalam himself, there appears to be near-unanimity of opinion that the frisking of a former President amounted to humiliation. Mr. Kalam has not come out with a statement that he personally considered it a humiliation.

Security-checks for air-travellers were initially confined to international sectors. As incidents of hijacking escalated over the years, pre-embarkation security-checks were extended to domestic flights. There was a time when security officers had the discretion to exempt from security-check those passengers whom they did not deem it necessary to check.

Frisking was imposed with extreme rigour in the U.S. after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre.

For passengers, such pre-embarkation inspection often leads to a harrowing experience. Yet, after that monstrous man-made catastrophe in the U.S., nobody is exempt from such pre-emptive scrutiny — not even the U.S. President. (I am told that for security reasons the U.S. President is being checked by a separate set of personnel). In India also security- checks became rigorous. Still, exemption is given to VVIPs. Should they be exempted from it?

In 2004 I was in the Cairo airport as one among 32 passengers waiting for an onward flight. The security-check involved the frisking of each passenger and the examination of cabin baggage apart from X-ray scrutiny of the check-in baggage. It took six hours to complete the pre-embarkation checking of 32 passengers.

When my turn came, the chaperoning senior officer was heard murmuring to the security staff a plea to exempt me from elaborate checking on the ground that I was a former Judge of the Supreme Court of India. A senior staff-member came and asked me: “Sir, we can trust you. But can you trust that none would have stamped a button type bomb in your trouser pockets?” I said I cannot. Next he asked: “Can you trust that none would have surreptitiously inserted a nail-type bomb in your baggage?” I said I cannot. Then he said: “Sir, this checking is not only for our security, it is for your security also.” I explained to him that I never wanted exemption from the security-check.

The remonstration that the former President should have been exempted from checking is over a non-issue. When Zia-ul Haq was President of Pakistan, he and his baggage were exempted from security-checks. His weakness for ripe mangoes was well-known. It has been reliably theorised that his adversaries managed to have a small packet of mangoes to be included in his cabin baggage, that one of the “mangoes” was in fact a small bomb and that it exploded when the aircraft was air-borne. All the crew-members and passengers in the flight, including the General, were killed in a trice.

What is disquieting is the criticism that a security-check amounted to insulting or humiliating the former President. In an egalitarian society like India, if something is insulting or humiliating to a VIP or VVIP, it is equally insulting to other citizens.

It is indeed an agonising exercise for the security staff of airlines and the security agencies to subject every passenger to pre-embarkation frisking, and scrutinising minutely all baggage, whether it is cabin baggage or checked-in baggage. It is a monotonous and weary job when each day thousands of passengers and their baggage are to be individually checked. Some of the passengers put on a long face.

Yet, by and large the security staff do it with dedication because they know they are thus ensuring the safety of the air-borne passengers.

To exempt some persons from security-checks by categorising them as VVIPs is but the consequence of a hangover of a feudal and colonial culture. Let Mr. Kalam stand out as model to our ruling elite and other VIP-VVIPs to persuade them to willingly yield to security-checks in the same manner as any other citizen of India.

(K.T. Thomas is a former Judge of the Supreme Court of India.)

The need for the 1960s counterrevolution

Click image to enlarge

For the flowchart depicted above, you can realise I have taken up the United States of America as an example. After World War II, the rise of Marxism, primarily in the Soviet Union and the Carribean, alarmed the USA enough to ponder on some of the possibilities of quelling this new threat to the capitalist ideology.It is perceived as a threat in the first place because of the measures taken to comfortably outlast the phase. If the USA had not behaved in such and such a manner in response to the Communist stimulus, the world might not have been made aware of the problems being faced in the American administrative circles. After World War II, the nuclear race began with massive spawning and hoarding of nuclear weapons; with a seemingly juvenile tit-for-tat behaviour observed in the policies of both nations, the nuclear stockpiles became larger and larger, until finally culminating with their impotence that was brought on by the formation of the United Nations. However, in this period, capitalism did not scare Marxism as much as the other way round. The freedom even then prevalent amongst the elite intelligentsia in the West became the primary threat to the success of a new weapon, that of ideological control. What the government wanted was a gradual phasing out of any skepticism directed at the state’s (obviously highly questionable) foreign policies. To this end, the US government employed the reach of the mass media in order to twist the truth. During the Cold War period, and especially in the 1960s, Marxism and socialism were no longer permissible even as topics of discussion in universities. The other sector of business, which also the government wanted to dominate over by controlling investment decisions, was but easily taken care of by appropriate budget reallocations. Subsequently, there arose a group of orthodox reporters, journalists and editors who, to take up an important and defining example, excused the state’s aggression towards the Soviets by, instead, condemning the insurgence of the reds and playing down the US’s behaviour to a simple defense. The ‘THOUGHT CONTROL’ box at the bottom of the flowchart is the concept behind this take. With succesful thought control came succesful ideological, by which I mean the state’s overwhelming ability to unostentatiously define what it’s subjects thought and concluded. This ‘propaganda manufacturing’ continues even to this day, and could be seen with great contrast during the Bush, Jr. regime.

There was, however, a brief and welcome respite in the 1960s with the emergence and collapse of the student movement. Books on Marxism continued to be published in that period, and when students who read these books came together, they demanded the reopening of discussions on the subject. Although it was inevitable that this feeble front would soon fall (owing to insufficient support and widespread opposition), it’s effect on the populace as such was visible with the rise of the revisionists,who demanded that everyone, including people like themselves as well as the orthodox, face the facts of the world in the face. These revisionists, who included reporters like Gar Alperovitz, did indeed face heavy criticism in the beginning, but when coupled with the demands of the student movement, some discussion circles began to take them seriously. What aided them greatly was that the subject of the ideological orthodoxy, in terms of exempting the United States from sharing the blame for the mindless stockpiling and slandering, vaporised in mere weeks: analysts discovered that what they had speaking about for days was, in fact, based upon baseless assumptions that the state had driven them to consider them in the first place.

The shameful immunity of Unit 731

“After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation. MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological warfare.

The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the Allies had never publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion. The United States also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research.”

– Wikipedia page on Unit 731

The excerpt is about the infamous Unit 731, a covert chemical and biological warfare research and development unit in Japan that was run by the Imperial Japanese army. The unit was responsible for some of the most horrendous Japanese war crimes committed during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) and WWII (1939-1945).

What is even more alarming about the above excerpt is the secret immunity granted by MacArthur to the perpetrators of the violation, instead of having them persecuted as should have been the case, just so the United States of America gained a significant edge over the Soviet Union. Does this mean that if Oppenheimer had decided to stay back in Germany, that if Adolf Hitler had built the nuclear missile before Roosevelt or Truman, MacArthur would have granted him immunity in exchange for the nuclear tecchnology? Further, to quote: “The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the Allies had never publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion.” Is that the only basis for the non-performance of such activities? Mustn’t the abhorrence toward the very idea be based upon the much more empathetic viewpoint of respecting humanity as a whole? In fact, in the same article, it has been mentioned that the only trials involving the staff at Unit 731 were conducted by the Soviet Union, whose soldiers had been captured for the sole purpose of being guinea pigs in the unit.

I’m not well versed in policy formation and conflict research and what not, but I don’t think it takes a scholar here to see that the USA betrayed the whole world when it pardoned those criminals, that the USA granted immunity that was not its to grant at all.

Silver Screen Sorrows

The film industry is one of the world’s most dominant audio-visual media, and spearheads the information and awareness hegemony against ignorance of common social issues as well as important political ones. It is no wonder that some of the fastest growing nations on earth derive a considerable fraction of their GDP from them. Ever since the advent of the television, and its encroachment into the spaces of print and audio media, the movies have been able to spawn greater audiences as well as critics. Messages that they come to convey are easy to understand and comprehend, and their availability in various languages defies the probability of information localisation amongst major groups of the population. More over, owing to their inherent style of dramatics and character play, it is entertainment on the house if only you can pay up for the theatre tickets. They seem to breed even a fashion conscious worldly wise generation as the years progress!

India, as one of those fastest growing nations, has a dominant film industry thriving in mainly two regions of the nation: the central region, the home of Bollywood, and the southern region, home to the Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu industries. Together, they form the largest filmdom in the world in terms of number of movies produced and ticket sales. The Central Board of Film Certification has stated that “every three months an audience as large as India’s billion-strong population visits cinema halls”. There were a record number of movies, 877, produced in the year 2003 alone. Considering the magnanimity of the bosses behind this movies, it is only common that we face such statistics. However, amongst these regional industries, Bollywood, the Hindi film industry, is the largest branch, with an approximated annual collection of USD 1 – 1.5 billion through tickets. Funding for these movies comes from a few large studios as well as private contributors. Earlier, Indian banks and financial institutions were forbidden from lending money to these production houses; this ban has now been lifted. Owing to the inadequate regulation of monetary influx, some of the movies are also partly, or sometimes wholly, funded by the Mumbai underworld (for ex. Chori Chori Chupke Chupke).

The industry seemed to have been firmly established in the Indian soil by 1931, when Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara, India’s first sound film, was released. Earlier, in 1913, Raja Harishchandra by Dadasaheb Phalke was the first Indian film. Over the next 20-30 years, most of the regional film industries shifted over to sound filming, and by the 1940s, around 200 films were being produced annually. Colour crept into Bollywood in the early 1950s, but were a commonality only in the late 1960s. Around this period, the genre of the films tended noticeably towards romantic musicals and melodramas. As the 1990s dawned, the films swung back to family centric romances, making stars out of a new generation of actors such as Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Kajol and Madhuri Dixit. Comedies were also widespread, spearheaded by actors like Govinda, Akshay Kumar, Karishma Kapoor and Raveena Tandon. Incidentally, this decade also marked the successful creation of art and independent movies, which were hailed by fans and critics alike.

At the start of the 21st century, Bollywood saw a new and immense surge in the popularity of its films with the utilisation of better equipment, improved cinematography and innovative story lines. With the construction of multiplexes around the globe, and also a growingly predominant Indian community overseas, Indian cinema expanded its reaches to greater audiences spanning a plethora of cultures and backgrounds. As the returns grew, so did the investments, luring in foreign businessmen to spend their money on this lucrative trade. And around this time of sconomic boom was planted the sapling that is today known as the concept of globalisation.

Box office bosses looked to maximise their profits, and the most convinient solution happened to be the targeting of mass audiences. This move resulted in Bollywood resisting investment in movies that targeted narrower audiences, thereby no longer representing the face of Indian entertainment and Indian education per se. The doors were shut to small-time investors and prospective producers and actors. The band wagon had to continue to roll, and it seemed that if you couldn’t beat them, you eventually joined them. Further, the increasing investments saw the clout of those at the top also rise. Now, with the localisation of power, the delocalisation of interests was neglected: movies were made if only they were appealing to these bosses. Smaller industries were confined to their parent regions and were unable to move out of their cocoons as the markets grew more and more dominant. This era spearheaded a hegemony of sorts with Hindi cinema stealing the limelight away from movies that had greater potential if only they had people watching them. The new techniques available for movie making, coupled with the paraphernalia that went with it, drew on a large number of talented movie-makers, only to put them down in favour of those who seemed capable of drawing in the bills. It is as if you pinch a sleeping baby to wake up, and then rock the cradle to send the baby back to sleep again.

Bollywood is a portmanteau of Bombay, now Mumbai and the capital of the Hindi state of Maharashtra, and Hollywood, its American cousin. Owing to the development of each state in a different manner, and also due to their classification on a lingual basis back in 1950, the northern regions of India now reflect a greater cosmopolitanism than the south, which is more conservative and abiding with its root cultures. Owing to insufficient segmentation at the box office and the drive for a greater output-to-input monetary value, Bollywood, in its move to target broader audiences by the year, has increasingly integrated the values of the Western cultures. India being dominated by a large middle-class community, a loss of identity streaming from entertainment with which you find hard to establish a connection becomes gradually unavoidable. The need to stay in line with your cultures and traditions is not mandatory, I agree, but to retain them in at least a few aspects of the movies you are producing is necessary. Women bearing all on the big screen is sensationalistic enough, but is this who we are?

Furthermore, owing to the large (monetary) volume of this market, the impeding recession in global economies spelled the sudden shrinking of it. The reliability that Bollywood had generated in its founding years now seemed overbearing, consequently giving birth to investment concerns. Due to the variational dependencies of India’s economic growth with this industry, the lack of safeguarding measures against such mishaps was reflected in an increased inflation rate (up to 14% as opposed to the critical 12%) within the country. This tempted the Mumbai underworld to get involved, who began to provide funding for some of the productions – the result? Black money disappearing into the maze of the market, worsening the economic recession.

Now, the allowable infrastructure, freedom and flexible for the regional industries is dependent on the local government to a great extent. The volume of money floating in the market, being sufficiently regulated, is pinched at the top before it can cascade to the bottom, leading to a monetary localisation. The markets up north may not have realised this, but since it does h
appen, there is an indirect regulation of money in the southern circles also. Finally, Bollywood has continued to be the most lucrative of industries in India, but only a representative de facto. The post of representative de jure has been regained by those businesses that equiprioritatively dealt with money as well as the needs of the people who made use of them.

Why Blog?

Blogging has come a long way. I think you’ll notice that when you have a look at the numbers: WordPress alone hosts some 5,000,000 blogs. I could just as easily have said five million, but no. You should be able to see the number of people out there who take to blogging as a hobby, as a legitimate way to spend time. It’s not just about earning money here. It’s about telling the world that you exist – on your own terms. It’s a way of letting the world know such perceptions also exist, and you are always welcome to agree or disagree. Blogging is not just adding content of your own to the web: it’s a way of conducting politics in peace. Interests are brought forth in harmony, and in no way where it can conflict with that of others’. Blogging has breached commercialism in that the only benefits that bloggers get on putting up a home video or writing an article on lifestyle are a silent but overwhelming happiness on being able to share. Blogs come free of cost, you just need to pay up for the internet time. Services like Digg, Technorati and StumbleUpon help you for free when it comes to being discovered, and companies like Google and WordPress take it upon themselves to enhance this simple experience, and to make it more and more enriching by the day. Just take a deep breath, sit back, and imagine: a customised slot for your personality to fit into the digital world, and again, on your own terms. If you’re to break through the perspex ceiling above your office with flying colours, you’ll realise you can do that only on your own terms. If you have to make an impression on others as a person who till that moment has lived only in your dreams, you’ll realise you can do that only by being who you are. So much said, why not do it on a larger, more extrvagant, and much, much cheaper scale? Don’t you think that’s hard to resist?

I have been blogging for close to 30 months now. I hitched my wagon to Google’s Blogspot blogging service soon after it cropped up on the web. Of course, I did it then only because I wanted to do something; I was terribly bored. Eventually, it’s come from being a tool to just pass time to being a compelling hobby that keeps me writing at least once in two days. Well, since it’s my blog, I don’t have to worry about what I write: I can write about anything. So you can add freedom to that list of “Why You Should Blog Just Because You Can“. Further, as my skills in writing became more sharpened and developed more clarity as each week of posts passed, I decided to advertise them. Not for money, but because more people might like to read them. If I’m spending an hour or two on researching for an article on, say, anorexia, and if I believe that the post has come out well, then maybe more people would like to read it. And this is where I stumbled upon connectivity. The ability to stay in touch. The speed with which you can get information across from your desk in Bombay to your friend’s in Chicago. How fast you can let the world know how you’re on to something that might help improve their lives. If you can stay in touch, then you can make it. I came across Del.icio.us, Flickr, Deviantart, and so many more services out there. Even better, because of this growing need to stay in touch, concepts like RSS, XML updates and Feeds came to life.

Don’t you think that being able to sit in one place and be heard across five continents (yes, they have internet at the South Pole) is amazing?

I think blogging receives more than three cheers!

Blog on!

India: A Cultural Coalition

The famous philosopher and post-modernist Michael Foucault said “language is oppression”. This may be partially true, since it allows only those who do know the language to communicate, shunning all those who don’t to a section of the society that gradually and inevitably disintegrates. Communication is a very central aspect of who we are, and our ability to communicate ‘in harmony’ reflects our togetherness, or rather, integrity, as a people and our capability of being able to establish a nation that stands strong. Although a national language would be hard to establish as such, an official language should do. A national language has far more severe consequences as opposed to official ones. This is because the official languages serve only to formalise business communication; the national language would attempt to unify the people of the nation. For a predominantly English-speaking nation, this is easy. For a nation like India, this is not. We have official languages in double digits, fine, but since all of her 30 or so states have been formed on a lingual basis, the inclusion of a provision for a national language in the constitution would invoke chaos within the nation. India is a coalition of different cultures: having a national language would be having a bias. It is not easy in India to conflict the values of the peoples of one culture while you try to side with another. It is a delicate balance, and the best solution would be to just stick to officialising business communication. The south Indians, especially the Tamilians and the Malayalis, don’t take as easily to Hindi as do the Telugu and the Kannadigas. On the other hand, the Hindi-speaking peoples are exposed to a different kind of lingual characterisation than the southern languages, and adaptation is again difficult. There are, of course, many more problems beside these, but I think you get the point.

However, my point in this post is that how only your mother tongue seems to be able to deliver the style of communication you need. No other language you could learn will come to serve you as finely as your mother tongue. If everyone observed this, a possibility of a nation language in the offing would seem even more bleak. Your mother tongue is your native language, it is something you have been listening to being spoken since birth, and it is something you have been speaking yourself. Many of the necessary habits of life taught to children are during their younger ages, when they learn without questioning and also follow it blindly. Even thought they may come to realise the purpose of it all later on, that time period when their mind is ripe is a rarity. And when you the child learns a language in this period, it is difficult to forget it wholly, and later on, it is also difficult to let go of it. It is as if the language has been mixed into your blood. This nativity in language is present among all the peoples of India, and those asking for the establishment of a national language should take into consideration these factors also. Apart from the commercial aspect of it all, India’s existence as a cultural coalition is a very important factor in the determination of such matters. No other nation is like India, and we can’t come to a conclusion derived from a comparative study. If we can’t have a national language, then we don’t need a national language. That’s all.