104 days to TEDIndia2009!

Ever since I’d been introduced to TEDGlobal, I was hooked on to it. It’s possible that this one idea to bring together intellectuals from all over the world could top all the other ideas being presented at their tremendously impacting conferences in the fields of technology, environment and design. Although every such conference includes a lot of interaction between the layman and the laureate, it is the famous 18-minute talk of theirs that makes the difference. The TEBGlobal, a series of such conferences usually held in Oxford, UK, attracts thousands of attendees who travel there just to bear proud witness to these talks. As such each intellectual comes on stage and demonstrates, in varying manners, how innovation by the minute could defeat orthodoxy of thought and the oft bureaucratic methods of science, it gradually becomes apparent that some fields of thought, especially those which we had earlier perceived as too theoretical and therefore not fit for further development, are capable of having impacts on humanity much greater than the others. Take the example of Zeresenay Alemseged, the Ethiopian paleoanthropologist, who discovered the 3.3 million years old fossil of the girl Selam (of the species Australopethicus afarensis). In studying her tiny bones, Alemseged sees the points in time at which man began to differ from apes; in studying the hyoid bone in her throat, he sees the beginning of human languages. The study of both these will provide significant insights into how we, as humans, understand language, and why it is the way it is. This is in turn will aid linguists, and that in turn will aid psychologists, and so on and so forth.

With many such personalities in their arsenal, TED is now beginning to focus on the East, where the economic downturn has had the least impact. Countries like India and China have ridden the slowdown like none else, with many industries still showing massive profits. There is a rising consensus that this cannot be just due to the cheap outsourcing options the region offers or even the low-cost jobs, but due to the diligence of the Indian. TEDIndia2009, the Indian chapter of the TEDGlobal conferences, is now coming to Mysore and will be held between November 1-4 at the advanced training center run by Infosys there. Why I’m excited about this conference is because of the expected topics TED is going to try to handle:

• Which local innovations are destined for global impact?
• Who are the young thinkers and doers capable of shaping the future?
• Can there be economic advancement without environmental destruction?
• Can a pluralistic democracy survive in the face of rising fundamentalism?
• Can we make money and be good? Really?
• What should we learn – or fear? — from China’s investment in Africa?
• Do we have enough water for everyone?
• How do we keep our youth challenged and our aged healthy?
• How can anti-poverty solutions be brought to scale?
• Is there wisdom to be found in traditional medicine??
• Which other ancient traditions can illuminate modern life?

All of this, coupled by the fact that the speakers usually don’t hail from a purely scientific background but also from a partly managerial one, makes it an interesting event to look out for since the answers to the questions above could mean a lot for India as a whole, including its people and the vision it has set out for itself. For further information, check out http://conferences.ted.com/TEDIndia/.

Welcome to the city

When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.

– Hugh Newell Jacobsen

There are two opposing schools of thought popular amongst philosophers called teleology and metaphysical naturalism. While the former dictates that we have eyes just to we can fulfill the purpose of sight, the latter has us believe that we can see because we have eyes. If one were to disregard both and instead notice the importance paid to the relationship between cause of effect, one will consequently observe that cannot exist without the occurrence of the other. It is the same with the wishes of mind and the desire it manifests in out actions. Whether or not we choose to understand it, has been present for eons and will inevitably persist. This has been evident ever since mankind, as we understand it be in form and function today, began to group itself into small communities that soon proved to be the fundamental and formative units of civilization. In what can only be termed as a systemic progression that involved man utilizing the natural resources around him, similar communities, which evidenced the possibility (or, to be more optimistic, the presence) of a common purpose of humanity itself, began to get drawn toward each other because of a few reasons. One of these included the fact that since each community had its own set of requirements in terms of the quantity and quality of those natural resources, those with similar demands had similar patterns of migration and settlement. This pattern was also the basis of the formation of little villages, towns and, eventually, large cities.

In India, the four largest cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata are prime examples of such regionalistic concentrations. The population within these cities is very high, especially since the last three are coastal settlements. But once you step outside their limits, the density drops drastically. Although this drop in numbers could have been more gradual earlier on, the high slope indicates that people settling in such hotspots began to fare better economically and, thus, socially, which in turn led to a steady migration from rural to such urban settlements, which in turn led to an unnatural distribution of natural resources. For example, suppose a 1,000 nomads are looking for a suitable place to settle, when they chance upon a large lake. They decide to settle at one point, say Point A. At another point B, at the opposite side of the lake, there is a mountain range at the feet of which flourishes a herd of cows. The community chief decides to send a group of 200 people to B to hunt down the animals, skin them and put them up for trade. The 200 then proceed to settle down at B since it is a more convenient option. Now, there is a possibility of there emerging a propensity amongst those at B to trade their valuables from B itself instead of sending them down to A and then waiting for the return of the caravans. Such a decision seeming a logistically enhanced one, the settlement at B will now exhibit greater and perhaps accelerated growth rates. At this point, those from A will abandon their homes in favor of moving to B. As the settlement grows larger, the group will now, as a second step, seek to minimize the amount of inconvenience tolerated in the procurement of resources. Sitting at B, the people will now travel a particular distance from B, gather the resources and then return home. Since traveling longer distances entailed a greater number of inconveniences, the density of a particular resource will decrease exponentially along a radially outward direction beginning from the heart of the settlement.

Graph depicting density of resources

(The curve will climb up again, exponentially or not, once the distance from a particular settlement is large enough to ensure that no inhabitant will have ventured in those parts.)

Now, points A and B can be compared in real life to any one of the following pairs:

1. Rural and urban settlements: With the onset of industrialization, almost everything that man used – from the tools in manufacturing to the vehicles in procurement – leaped a giant leap from singular primitivism to a point where he could now put together different tools to make one ‘supertool’ that handled more than one job. With the forerunners being the automotive and shipping industries, other smaller manufacturers and, subsequently, their competitors were forced to switch to machine-labor. In the example above, the lake can be compared to the factories and warehouses that enhanced the availability of these machine parts.
2. Developing and developed nations: Similar to the first case, a developed nation has more resources – whether in terms of money or otherwise – to offer anyone who wants a shot at them. One good example would be how skilled software engineers from south India migrate to the Silicon Valley: the Indian has the skill, and the US has the resource.
3. At a simpler level, points A and B can be alternatively compared to summer and winter capitals of some states.

Now, at this point, cities employ the basis they have in the availability of resources and begin to flourish as economic hotbeds. By this, I mean that cities as a whole begin to realize the fluency its people will begin to have in terms of trading in resources other than the ones with which they established themselves. Up until this point in time, the inhabitants will have concentrated on developmental activities. Once it becomes evident that the resources circulating within the city have become self-sustainable, the limits of the settlement will begin to expand – in terms of size, population and, most importantly, as a new source of resources. Now, what will happen is something like ripples on water. This city will now behave like the lake, drawing skilled people towards it, simultaneously rejecting those who seem incapable of surviving in its environs (like the abandonment of A).

So, we have seen how a community is born, how it grows to become a city, and how a city itself begins to attract people from different parts of the nation. However, ultimately, what does a city represent in a non-utilitarian sense? How does it contribute to humanity as a whole instead of just to the nation that harbors it? If you go through the previous paragraph, you will find that the answer is simple. A city contributes to humanity as a whole not by giving away something that belongs to itself, but by manifesting the triumph that nestles silently in the nudges that it gives us when we think we have lost. In other words, a city is the first image that comes to mind when you might speak to me of humanity as a whole. When you might tell me that there are always some people who will find it in them to help me selflessly, I will think of a city first. In fact, when you live in a city, you will realize that it is just more than the shelter it first took form as. It transforms itself, blind to the eye and shielded from the piercing gaze of the mind, gradually consuming our sorrows for nutrition and purifying the air around us. We ignore it as it speaks of a mind of its own, and we shun it when it rains the day we leave for a different city, when the roads are bad, when we almost miss the flight we’ve to catch, when we finally board the flight and find that the journey has been delayed for an hour due to bad weather, when we land in a strange place later to find no friendliness lingering the air as it once did…

On service & duty

One needs to be slow to form convictions, but once formed they must be defended against the heaviest odds.

– Mahatma Gandhi

To begin nonchalantly on such a broad issue is a momentous task. To spare myself the trouble and the reader all the verbal nimiety, let me begin by asking myself: what is service? A service is work done by the individual as substitution for the duty that is due another individual. When you exercise your right or perform your duty, it does not constitute service because both of them are for you to do so. It is when you offer to help someone or to give up some time of your own in order to do someone else’s work does it become service. At a restaurant, the waiters perform a service when they deliver the food to your tables. The price it comes at is money. On the warfront, when a soldier fires his gun and kills a terrorist, he performs a service for his nation. In both cases, it is not their duty to do so. The waiter earns money in the bargain, and the soldier does it out of either the need for survival or in gratitude of his nation’s gifts. The world around you and me would indeed be drab and devoid of any humanity were it not for the services of those around us. Self-sustenance in this scenario is a highly impossible state of living. We can hope to progress only by standing on the shoulders of giants.

As a 20 year-old, service does not usually take on such magnified proportions for me. I live in a small world around me. My duties, from day to night, include washing the plate I have eaten in and dusting the mattress I have lept on. The food I eat is prepared in the kitchen by my mother. the water I drink seems ready available when I open the taps. However, what I do does not seem like any service to me. It seems a frail triviality as soon as I step outside my door and begin to walk the busy streets outside my house. The either sides of the streets are lined with tens of shops and what seem like small malls, and the floating population on the road at any time of day stand between 5,000-10,000. With no regard for, at the very least, the cleaners who sweep the road at night, garbage lies strewn all over the place. Now, would you imagine me walking up to a stranger outside a saree shop who just threw down a plastic bag full of emptied food packets, and asking her to pick the bag up and put it in the garbage bin? That is what I did, and the woman turned around and ran. She thought I was mad.

Suppose 5,000 such men, and 5,000 such women. Petitions to the local municipal councils don’t help – all I did was ask for them to impose a fine upon those who littered. Their reply: “All that garbage is inevitable. Do you expect each and every one of them to find a garbage bin and throw their stuff in there?” Yes, I do. I replied so, and the counselor looked away. What is wrong in expecting such behaviour? If I can do it, why can’t you? If I could wake up to the day when each and every one of those individuals on the street uses the garbage bins provided, I will be a happy man, for that will be true service. The support you can provide the nation with does not stop at finding work within the country and boosting up its economy. In fact, that is not service at all if you don’t live in gratitude of what the country seems capable of giving you day after day, free of charge. It is like your house; rather, it is your house. Keep it clean. Would you litter your bedroom with rotten vegetables just because the maid cleans it for a fee everyday? I am sure you wouldn’t. It is for this reason that I would, if given the chance, enter into politics. I would like to impart this objectivity in thought, this simplicity of cause, to everyone around me. When Mahatma Gandhi called out for all “brothers and sisters to enter politics, to better this nation”, our nation, the likes of Lal Bahadur Shastri and Chakravarti Rajagopalachari came together. Of course, I can go on about corruption in the form of bribes and what not, but what I want to stress is the dereliction of duty. Glaring in contrast to the glory of days past, what irks me most is that, today, the performance of one’s duty happens to be the rendition of a service. That is a shame.

Many of us look to a service as optional. It is not, but neither is it obligatory. Today, it is required. Like in a game that involves no luck, when a point is lost to the opponent, a lead can only be established when all players put in some extra effort. Similarly, looking at the state of the nation in terms of one’s recognition of one’s duties and responsibilities, a difference can be effected only when we step out of our way, only when we put in some extra effort. The preparedness to do so manifests as true hope, and the will of action manifests as the vision. As a 20 year-old, I believe I should hope, and this is one of the many paths that seem to readily open its gates. Switch off all unnecessary electronic appliances when you leave a room. We don’t need a ‘World Earth Day’ or a ‘World Energy Day’ to make us do that for one hour in a year. They do that to make us aware. If you want to respond, don’t mimick. Act. When you walk the streets, don’t litter. If you see someone littering, do not ignore. That is where you make the real difference. With all the intelligence we boast of at the places where we study and work, we don’t seem to have to put any of it into action. We look to win the Nobel, we look to make money. If that is what you ultimately seek above all else, then you will have come into this world and left without a sign of gratitude.

The Right Side Of The Line

I grew up in incredible India, or so the tag line of the advertisement (that advertises the nation) says. It’s a nation of more than a billion people, which makes it the world’s largest democracy. But all that doesn’t seem to inspire anyone in India to adhere to a path of honesty and austerity. It’s not whether there exists the necessity of a need to, but it is because it is impossible to. Following after the British structure of government, the quantity of paperwork involved with anything is massive and predictably inefficient. But more than anything else, it is the way we take to it that marks the spot: we take to them as necessary evil. I don’t think anyone in India has ever really understood the importance of each piece of paper they sign, each bill of value they pass around – whether over the table or under it. We just do because of two simple reasons: we don’t know what it does because we don’t have the time to, and we do it anyway because someone else who can make things happen wants it done. Adherence to a politicial cause, in other words, is limited to the upper echelons of power. When you decide to get into politics, you have to be politically motivated. You don’t have to be patriotic – you only have to emboss the impression on other people that you can’t be knocked down, and if you are, then you can get back up in no time. You need to lick ass, you need to touch feet, you need to be the one all the others need to bribe to get things done. As much as you say it’s a roadblock to national prosperity, corruption is inevitable. 

And in such a country as this, if one is truly inspired to espouse a political cause so much as to stand up and speak for it, then one is jeered at, shouted at and spat until one decides to see it for what it is, or seldom for what others have made it to be. For example, in a nation of approximately 1.5 billion people (that’s around 20% of the world’s population), 240 million live on less that Rs. 20 a day – that’s a sign of abject poverty. If you were to stand up for them, you have to embrace a political cause, and here’s why: all causes have been embraced by the number of people on a money-minting campaign in the Indian political scenario, and if you pick a side of the wall, you’re on the political side. Even the top of the wall. Or under it. So anyway, standing up for them or banishing them: you’re rooting for someone. Forget being politically correct, you can’t be non-aligned anymore. Although no one seems to care for this thought, I do because it constrains development. I can’t seem to be able to do anything without donning political connections as a perpetual garb. Furthermore, the need to pass around as much money leads to the obvious localisation of resources, but that’s an economic residue, and I don’t want to spend time on that now. Political belief, as it used to be in the 1940s and ’50s when Mahatma Gandhi called out to the good of the nation to join political parties, has collapsed in the face of blatant distrust with and outright rejection of the state of affairs. And this has also cascaded into a siphon effect, resulting in something resembling a sewage pipeline network. Those who truly seek to do something are shoved to the sidelines. The only thing that can save us now is an abrupt and wholly miraculous change of heart within those on the thrones.

They have to begin to listen rather than speak all the time. They forget that we permit them to be there only so our voice is heard in the Hall of Power, not theirs. You promise land, you promise water, you promise homes. But what is it that we truly ask for? Have you promised to listen?

With the issue of every cause being commoditised as a tool to draw crowds and manufacture emotions, free speech is a luxury that has to be paid for – and it doesn’t come cheap. The only fact that has our nation clinging on to the frail strand of democratic nobility is that we all vote to elect our leaders (on Electronic Voting Machines). I’m sorry to say this Dr. Kalam, but Vision 2020 will only serve to be a bait. We will plod towards it with enough measures of luck and strategy, but Vision 2200 is more realistic. It’s not that I’m being pessimistic – I’m only being, again, realistic. I have my hopes too that India become a nation to be looked up at by others, but prefixing the word ‘incredible’ in an advertisement is only alliteration styled after the ideas of others. 

Care For A Poem?

Hello. I am a writer, or at least aspire to be one. I wear glasses, I think I am very verbose, use big words and dream of sitting lakeside, somewhere in Spain one day, with a Remington typewriter in front of me and a Lucky Strike burning away a few centimetres from my teeth. I day dream about winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, although I never see that happening with the way I am going.

Howdy! I am a blogger. I have more than one blog, but choose to publicise just one because the others didn’t turn out well, and let’s face it, this one’s not that good either. But even though I know that, I wear a mask of indifference and think what I write is the new shit – and that keeps me wondering as to why my name doesn’t appear on the “Top Posts from around WordPress” list. I spend half of my day ogling at the stats page, and jump around in my lonely room when there is a jump in the number of viewers.

Hey! I’m a software programmer, although I’ve never sold anything. I have my name in the market by word of mouth, and if do land an order, I never meet the deadlines. My room has a computer, a fully equipped Alienware system with oil-cooled processors! I also have an X-Box, some old newspapers, a picture of my ex-girlfriend, and some porno videotapes. I get paid on an order-basis, and that’s usually between $1,500 to $2,000. Most of this goes away on food and rent, and other miscellaneous expenses. Oh, and I get together with my other friends on week  ends and have some beer while watching a ‘Star Wars’ marathon for entertainment. Yes, always the same movie. Why do you ask?

Hey! I’m a stock broker, and my job is to make money. But of course, with the recent recession and everything, I’ve lost a lot. I couldn’t even afford rent and my kids’ schooling. The wife left, of course. What could she do? I’m happy the kids are fine at her parents’ place. Oh, it was my birthday yesterday! Yeah! Me, Ronnie and Chuck spent some time together in the evening, they threw me a party at the local, and then we headed for some fun at Missy Margaret’s. I hope the wife doesn’t find out, though. But what can I do? I’m fifty, for God’s sakes! Sometimes, you know, I have these moments in the evenings when I’m bored… I just feel like pulling my hair out – if I had any! Life sucks!

Who’s yo daddy?! Yo man, I’m a rapper for the Numb Nuts. We fire up the gangster scene, yo! Me? I live with my mom. How the **** is that funny?! Get outta ma sight before I thump ya, ya ******f****r! What did you say?! So what if I’m white?! Yo man, you gettin’ on ma nerves now, you racist ***-**-*-*****! Get outta ma sight!

Hee! I work at Wal Mart’s; I’m a counter clerk. Yeah, I know the work’s a little too much, but I enjoy it. You know what I do after work? I go that gasoline station right over there, yeah that’s the one, and me and my boy hook up for some fun! And then we go and have some ice cream together. He knows my favourite flavour, oh he does! He’s so sweet, you know? He gets me all kinds of toys, you know! Oh! He’s so sweet. But now he wants to leave me! Can you believe that?! But I’m gonna wait for him right here. I know he’ll come back one of these days. Maybe you should come over to my place some time! We can have some coffee and then some ice creams! What do you think? Wait! Where are you going?!

Hello there! I’m the Chief Statistician here! You can call me Whiney around here, you can call me that! Weird name right, ‘Whiney’? They always laugh when I ask them what it means! See, they all know I’m funny! I always knew I was funny, you know! <Giggle> My mom used to always stifle me when I was a kid, and I never really had the chance to open up when I felt like it. So I went to my friends and told them all about my problems at home… it all seemed so trivial then that I laughed about them. They used to call me Whiney’ too, you know! Argh! I love being funny! <Giggle> Oh, please, yes, sit down! What? I’ve been served?! But today’s Christmas! What?!

(My greatest fears in life.)