Why does the universal become the peculiar in India?

An article in today’s FT (Search for a workable solution by Amy Kazmin) says, “Not every Indian company looks to the state to churn out the skilled manpower it requires. Larsen & Toubro, India’s largest engineering and contracting compnay, tries to bridge the skills gap with seven Construction Skills Training Institutes it runs across India… Yet L&T has struggled to find enough recruits, given the deep disdain for manual labour embedded in Hinduism’s hierarchical caste system. ‘It is not attractive because of the physical content of the job,’ says Mr Jayakumar. ‘There is a social aspect also; this will take time to change.’”

In a country where people carry human excreta for a living, why is Jayakumar feeding this rubbish and why is Kazmin swallowing it?

Anyway, I am yet to hear of any society that (as a whole) prefers manual labour to desk jobs. So why blame Hinduism for something universal?

And is there no chance that L&T’s curriculum or marketing is at fault?

Elsewhere, the article says, “In reality (…) corporate executives have quickly found that progress depends on the attitude of the training centre’s principals – most of whom are risk-averse career civil servants who still report to a sclerotic state bureaucracy.

Ms Gautam acknowledges that ‘there are teething problems’. At her training institute, for example, she has proposed letting hair and beauty students take commercial customers in their training salon, which would generate revenue to cover ongoing expenditure, such as hiring a technician to maintain the centre’s 100 computers. However, the idea has met with fierce resistance. ‘The principals are scared,’ she says. ‘For them, commerce is a very dirty word.’”

Kazmin obviously doesn’t think anything may be learnt by talking to any of those principles. For example, the principle in that particular school may have been reluctant to start commercial activities because that would mean competing with the very parlours that employ her students after they pass out. Or she may be plain lazy and not want any extra work.

Or she may believe, as other academics do, that places of learning should not get into commerce because there are potential conflicts of interest. There is nothing utopian in this. Many businesses would want the status quo and want academics to approve, if not praise, whatever they are doing; yet business as a whole benefits when research breaks the status quo, doesn’t it?

Anyway, why can’t the students simply be apprentices in regular parlours and pay more fees? Doesn’t that happen in many schools, including business schools? Why does the school have to be a shop?

My problem is not with this particular institute, of course, but with this type of one-sided reporting about the Third World, which by giving half or quarter of the picture only harms business. But somehow business likes it, or market forces should have brought in better journalism.

Broken families and rich individuals

In the video RSA Animate - Crises of Capitalism, David Harvey, a Marxist says that the present crisis has everything to do with fall in real income per family in the Western world; in this one, Crisis of Capitalism, The Critique,  someone debunks Harvey by pointing out that income per capita has increased and that the fall in income per family is simply because there are more families now, that is, if a population of 100 were split into 25 families of average size 4 (persons per family) 30 years ago, now that same population is divided into, say, 50 families of average size 2.

I have heard the same explanation from the Kublai Khan of capitalism, Jack Welch.

It looks too easy to be right.

First, where is the data? Let’s say fewer people are getting married in the West these days. Does that also mean that the size or nature of the family unit, on average, has changed drastically?

Second, if the income per family has dropped, why should one not worry about it? Doesn’t the amount a person spends, and saves, depend enormously on whether he or she is in a family?

Just take rent or mortgage. Suppose a family of four spends x by living under one roof (average spend per person = 0.25x); and a pair of divorced parents with the two children living with their mother spend 1.2x (father’s rent = 0.4x; mother and children’s rent = 0.8x; average spend per person = 0.3x, 20% more than the average for a 4-member family). Does that not make a significant difference?

Plus, the mother’s income may be less than her married counterpart’s because she has more on her plate (no-one to share her load with).

The father, on the other hand, may be spending more on conspicuous consumption than his married counterpart does.

In fact, both parents may be spending more on sex (wining, dining, gifting, grooming to entice mates, or straight cash) than they would have had they been in a family, where sex it is essentially a bonus (free gift?) of family life.

And while married parents (or parents who operate as a family in spite of not being married) may save to provide for the future, parents who do not operate as a family may, for financial and psychological reasons, save little.  

I mean, the word income has very different meaning when applied to a person than when it is applied to a company (where it means profit). So why don’t Western commentators take that into account?

Public sector hotels and private hospitals

What are more important, hotels or hospitals? I’d say hospitals. But the government, which is supposedly incapable of efficiency or honesty, should be in defence, education and health and leave everything else to the private sector, whereby market forces will ensure efficiency and fairness.

But if we had to choose, wouldn’t we take efficient hospitals over efficient hotels every time?

Well, we use hotels every year, but hospitals very seldom. So maybe… Besides, if I die, it won’t matter if the operation succeeded or not. But I will probably survive dinner and so it does matter that it is good.

Anyway, Nehru was a fool. that much is sure. So if he got the satte into anything, it shouldn’t have been there. Because no fool can do wise things.

It doesn’t matter where India started from. It doesn’t matter where it reached under him and how much his daughter and grandson screwed up. It doesn’t matter that there are no parallels with which we can make a comparison. If India 1962 wasn’t UK 1962 or even China 2010, Nehru’s stupidity is self-evident.

The point isn’t whether Nehru was a fool or not. The point is getting the diagnosis right, because while Nehru is dead, I’m alive, and my future depends on fixing what’s wrong, not propaganda.

Western Democracy?

Salazar, Franco, Mussolini, Zog, Metaxas, Horthy, Piłsudski, Antonescu, Hitler, Dollfuss, Stalin... plus two enormous empires, French and British, with zero rights for darkies and yellows. So what is the democracy we must learn from them? 

Hindus won in India

Subramanium Swamy says here that Hindus did not lose to Muslims because in spite of 1,000 years of Muslim rule, India is still 80% Hindu. He also says Indian heritage is mainly Hindu. 

First, you’d need a very special reading of history to get those 1,ooo years because it forgets all Hindu and Sikh kingdoms existent when the British created their Indian empire. Those 1,000 years should be in mad heads like Zaid Hamid’s and Pravin Tagodia’s. Strangely, it is in almost all our heads’. In this video, a medieval historian repeats it, and I suppose he is typical. I have heard it more times than I can count.

Second, Dr Swamy gets his demographics wrong, which is strange and perhaps not an altogether innocent mistake considering he teaches economics. While my country is 4/5 Hindu, the Indian subcontinent (India + Pakistan + Bangladesh) is 3/5 Muslim. So, Hindus can still be ‘congratulated’, if they must be, but the ‘margin’ doesn’t look so impressive any more.

If we could wish away religion, I wouldn’t care about the margin either ways. We can’t. Also, we cannot wish away the role of religion in shaping our thinking, even if we may be atheists. 

Which means whether it is 4/5 or 3/5 perhaps does matter in understanding ourselves. To use Indian as synonymous for Hindu is not only dangerous but stupid (unless one is doing it deliberately to incite hate).

I would be very surprised if you found only Hindu beliefs if you somehow dag into my mind; and not at all surprised if you found Muslim and Christian beliefs as well.  If our language, clothes, architecture and food were ‘polluted’, should we not expect that our minds were polluted too?

I am not saying Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai or that the Christian English civilised us or that everyone except Communist historians are communalists . I am saying we Indians have at least three religions in our heads. That’s all.

But do Swamy & Co mean that since Hinduism has been around much longer than Islam and Christianity, India is mainly Hindu? By that logic, Western Europe must look for all answers in Athens and Rome and none in Jerusalem. And Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia must find their history in Ajodhya. Can they?    

One word definition

India = corrupt; China = communism; Africa = cannibals; Muslims = terrorists. 

How far do we want to go with definitions like this? “These people don’t integrate.” How will they? People integrate with people. Words can’t.

And by the way, do you integrate? Or do you live by yourself, in white expat communities. And believe wholeheartedly that you should not be subject to laws of brown people’s countries.

Let’s get human, man. Please.    

Why education is no good

I start seeing this lecture on Religion & Violence. 

Nehru tried secularism, which failed; and was replaced by BJP or Hindutva which was very successful in politics. They wanted to go back to the vedas, which gave all the Hindus an  identity after years of foreign rule.

! 

When? We had a BJP led coalition, but at no time was BJP a dominant party in the sense the Congress was after the 1984 elections. In fact, we haven’t had a dominant party in the Lok Sabha since 89. What is she talking about?

And which veda was Vajpai, Advani & Co taking us to? Which Hindu rightist is the vedic scholar? What's in those vedas anyways that would make the Hindu's bosom swell with pride, assuming he gets along to reading some.  

Of course, she prefaces this with the British taking over after 500 years of Mogul rule. I recently heard an Indian medieval history processor say something like that (700 years of Muslim rule). Are there people deliberately bending history to spread hate? Or why do they not recognise that vast areas of India were not ruled by Muslims by the time the British expanded their empire?

And, while we are on it, why isn’t British rule Christian rule and the British invasion (conquest) a Christian conquest or Crusade? 

Then, Tamils were favoured in Sri Lanka and Sinhalese were marginalised before its independence. Tamil coolies were the favoured race!  

With scholars like this, what will we learn? That white people don’t give a damn about us darkies? 

Revising god

Dr Zakir Naik is a very dangerous man. He knows the Koran by heart and spends his days quoting it to prove that (a) Allah is all-knowing and (b) Islam is the best religion.

Now, I hold that all religions are bad for us. So Islam being the best of the lot, assuming it is, doesn’t help or hurt matters much.

But the proofs of Allah being omniscient  worries me, because they go unchallenged. 

Well, there are two obvious problems with his proofs. First, it does seem rather strange of Allah to know everything but to tell us so little. I mean, if he knew the cure of, say, cancer, why did he not tell Muhammad that? One may say, “If he did that, cancer would no longer be a punishment.”

(I assume that we get inflicted by cancer and other nasties because that’s Allah’s will, because everything is his will, isn’t it?)

But men, including Muslim men, have discovered cures for other diseases and presumably taken away these diseases’ power to punish.  So why did he give them the power to heal? And what about the poor guys who popped of before scientists came out with the cures? How were their sins different from ours?

The second problem also deals with the progress of science. In one lecture – or tirade – Naik imagines a dialogue between a scientist and a true Muslim (His idea of a true Muslim, not my). The latter asks the former questions about the solar system, then shows that all that we have learnt in the last five centuries or so (for instance, the earth is spherical; the moon has no light of its own) was in the Koran 1400 years ago.

This, according to him, is proof of that Allah created everything because the designer knows from the beginning what others may discover later.

It does seem however that the Koran doesn’t say much explicitly. It doesn’t say, “The moon reflects the sun’s light.” It’s not an astronomy textbook. It says something that can be interpreted as meaning that the moon reflects the sun’s light, or at least does not contradict that. (I may be wrong about this particular thing, but that’s more or less how Niak goes.)

In other words, the Muslim is sure to find something in the Koran that matches current knowledge.

Which puts us in a fix. We know that current knowledge is limited. We will know tomorrow more than we know today, including, in many instances, that we were wrong. Science will have to be revised accordingly. Does that mean the Muslim will reinterpret the Koran too?

If we were to discover that, say, the moon has its own light, will Naik & Co find some verse in the Koran supporting that?

It’s all very strange. But then it’s religion. And “God moves in a mysterious way.”

The most mysterious question is why doesn’t someone expose Naik and get him to shut up?

Indians are obsessed with saving face

How many times have you heard that? Many times? It’s true, isn’t it?

But my last nine months with Westerners and many years of reading Westerners’ accounts, about themselves and about us, tells me that there is another way of looking at it.

Everyone wants to save face. Them, us, everyone. But they don’t notice it when they do it. It’s normal.

But is a darkie argues back or refuses to do exactly as told, they can’t take it. It can’t be because he has a point, or his interests are different from theirs. It must be because he’s stupid. Or, if he isn’t, it’s because he can see the Westerners’ logic and his mistakes, but wants to save face.

A few days back, I read an article in which an Englishman argued that the UK should withdraw aid to India because (a) we do not import from them as much as we used to (in relative terms) (b) we have a huge defence spend and © young Indians do not have fond memories of Empire. He acknowledged that millions of Indians are desperately poor, but he put British trade first. 

I can’t see how the two are related. Should we trade inefficiently to buy British? Should we be defenceless because we are poor? Should help be dependent on commerce? If so, doesn’t it, to some extent, become a subsidy for the donor’s goods?

In short, I found the writer illogical and mean.

I’m sure an Englishmen sees the whole thing very differently. And I’m just as sure I feel this way because I’m obsessed with saving face, not because I have a different point of view.  

Palestines and Poles

When one read the FT’s reports and editorials on Israel’s attack on the high seas on the Turkish ships headed for Gaza, one is reminded of another mercy mission to a besieged population: The airdrop of arms and supplies to Warsaw when the city rose against the Nazis in the final months of the Second World War.

The Red Army was, as every Western commentator faithfully repeats, at the doorsteps of city, but did nothing to help the Poles. Nor did it allow the Americans and English to use airfields under its control to drop supplies.

In fact, one account has a Red fighter attacking an English plane, flying all the way from Africa to help the Poles.

The obvious is never mentioned. Like, being on the doors of a city is not the same as having it. Now knew the difference better than the Reds. The Nazis were on the doors of Leningrad for 900 days. And were kept out of Moscow and Stalingrad too.

Like, the Russians were at the end of their tether and were in no position to attack an entrenched German citadel.

Like, they had refused help to the Poles before they rose.

Like, everyone knew those airdrops were worth only propaganda, which the Russians could not have wanted.

Like, no matter how despotic and terrible Stalin & Co were morally, they were militarily right on this one.

The parallels with Gaza are obvious (the Reds are the Israelis, Hamas the Nazis, the Palestines are the Poles and the English speaking nations, Turks), except the ready sympathy and pragmatism the Israelis enjoy has been conspicuous by its absence on Warsaw over the last 70 years.