This post is an opinion. It is important that I state this upfront given the probability that its likely to be taken badly. This post is an opinion. Re-Stated. Opinion. Period.

Lately, I’ve become a big fan of saying things ‘upfront’ along with becoming a fan of ’staying in the loop’, ‘re-defining impact’, ‘being on the same page’ and the like, but all that is a story for a different day.

TEDIndia is happening. TED has been ‘happening’, in a better way – for longer. Years ago, when TED found me – I spent several days downloading mp4 (s) to my Ipod. Qualitatively, what made the videos/talks different, was the fact that they celebrated the ’small fry’, voices that haven’t been heard before.

Now take a look at the TEDIndia’s speakers list.

If you work with development in India – almost all those names are familiar to you. Where are the new ideas? Where is the innovation? A huge percentage of the potential speakers represent the ’social enterprise’ space, there are also the ‘microfinance guys’, the ‘development economists’ and all then some more.

Some of these guys have done great work in the past. They’ve shaped the development space into what it currently is. They’ve also run out of ideas. Not to mention the ‘legendary-ness” of Usha Uthup.

Clearly, many of these people are established ‘greats’ with good reason. They’re excellent speakers and ,yes, maybe those of in this niche ‘development’ sector do know them – but this is about Global Recognition (with G and R in CAPITALS).

I beg to differ – clearly this is about fund raising and hobnobbing. Nothing wrong with that, just state it upfront.

So here’s my quibble — the idea was for TED bring ‘inspired’ thinking to the rest of us. On this front, TEDIndia – well you’ve failed me.

PS: This post, of course, has nothing to do with the fact that boss(es) are also on the speakers list.

A friend who works with ‘Education’ (as we in the third sector often like to put it) once told me ” In India its difficult enough to obtain an education without having to worry about its quality too”.

I like to believe in the potential of private enterprise to do do wonders for education, professor James Tooley’s new book – the beautiful tree, does a great job of pointing how this might be plausible with primary education.

I’m also a long seasoned advocate of the Friedman argument that the Government has no business being in business. In India there is no business quite as complicated (both on the regulatory scenario front and on the potential impact front) as the business of higher education.

The argument against the utility of certification and regulatory roadblocks to offering and receiving higher education more common sense than anything else.

Sadly though, when one takes sides one often (and I am guilty of this in more ways than one) — one forgets to account for the losers in the short-run. Take the ICFAI mess in the cities of Hyderabad and Jaipur for instance.

So what can you do, as a student – while the rest of us sit and pontificate about the merits and demerits of who should be in the business of education or who shouldn’t?

Take a look at this article which suggests that students’ check the following four things before committing a good year or more of their lives to an ‘institution’ -

a. Is the Institution awarding the degree, either a valid University or Deemed to be University? If yes, is it operating within its authorized jurisdiction?

b. Does the course/ programme have the approval of the relevant professional council?

c. Does the institution have valid accreditation?

d. Is the institution awarding the degree a member of the Association of Indian Universities?

I recommend everyone who is contemplating any sort of higher education (in India) read this piece thouroughly!

As the author points out towards the end:

“…it is important that students know the regulatory environment in the field of higher education in India. Knowing the legal requirements and taking reasonable care in these matters can help the youth of this country avoid losing money and precious years to well marketed, money-oriented educational business empires. It is certainly better to be careful than to be sorry!”

Working has managed to take me away from blogging as often as I once used to.

Its done other things to0 – like rekindle my interest in building, keeping and growing social networks, figuring out a GTD like system that actually works for me both at work and at home.

I call this phase of my existence the “networking-productivity MashUp” phase.

Central to this phase has been reconciling myself to use two separate laptops one for work and the other for my techie misadventures.

The two set-ups have much in common sans the OS and documents.

One of the things that maintains seamless similarity across any laptop/computer I am assigned to for a fairly reasonable length of time is my browser.

My Wakoopa usage tells me I spend a lot of my time in a ‘browser’ (combined for work and home use) and so I try to get it to work the way I like.

Firefox is still my favourite browser despite the existence and obviously faster performance of Chrome (which I use solely for GMail, GReader and so on…), the reason is its extensibility.

Here are my favourite Firefox add-ons with a description of why I like them.

Some are still ‘experimental’ so you’ll need to create an account to make them show up on the add-ons website.

- Adblock Plus

Just the most effective way to get rid of ads on the net.

- Better Flickr
- Better GCal
- Better Gmail 2
- Better GReader
- Better Lifehacker
- Better YouTube

I like this set by Gina of lifehacker – and because I read Lifehacker every single day the ‘Better Lifehacker’ add on too is extraordinarily useful.

To use any or all of these you need to get GreaseMonkey.

- bit.ly Preview
A little pop up overlay over all shortened url’s (not just Bitly) which is great, if you, ever need to discover what website that great nugget of knowledge came from while you stumbled along the net.

- Brief’

A feed reading extension which is probably the simplest one to use!

- Calvin and Hobbes

This one puts a new strip of the ‘greatest political philosopher ever’ in your status bar, comic relief is important!

- Clean And Close

Adds a Clean And Close button to your download manager, which is useful if you download a lot and the long list bothers you.

- CoLT

Makes it easy to copy link text and locations, especially useful for research where you want text and link sources.

- Cooliris

The best description is the official one — “Cooliris (formerly PicLens) transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D Wall for searching, viewing and sharing the Web.” Very pretty indeed!

- CyberSearch

I like how this adds to the ‘awesomeness’ of the awesome bar – search results directly from keywords. Cool.

- Dafizilla Table2Clipboard

If you ever have had to copy a table from a web-page you will be very happy you found this!

- Delicious Bookmarks

Doesn’t require a description does it this one!

- Extension List Dumper

“Dumps a list of the installed extensions.” – very useful if you ever wanted to write your own “my favourite Firefox extensions” type blog post.

- Fasterfox Lite

“Performance and network tweaks for Firefox but without the Pre-fetching”, which really wasn’t that useful.

- FindThatBand

Sorry!, but Google for this one. It lets you – “Search for a music artist or band on MySpace, LastFM, or Pandora”.

- Fire.fm

Get your daily music fix from Last.fm.

- FlashGot

Want downloads? Get FlashGot.
- Google Gears

At the minimum you’ll need it to enable gmail offline and a faster loading version of word press.

- Google Shortcuts

For keyboard shortcut junkies.

- GoogleEnhancer

Adds numbers, highlighting, favicons and ’search by date’ to Google searches

- Image Toolbar

“Provides easy access to common image functions”, IE Style.

- Intense Debate in Google Reader

Enables the Intense Debate comment system in Google Reader.

- Link Alert

Changes the cursor to indicate the target of a link.

- Linky

Converts text links into genuine, clickable links.

- LiveClick

Adds feed reading and notifications to Live Bookmarks.

- Morning Coffee
Keeps track of daily routine websites and opens them in tabs.

- MovieRating

Lets you view the RottenTomatoes rating for a movie.

- Net Notes

Store Notes on Websites in your Bookmarks.

- No Squint

Manage site-specific full page and text zoom levels

- Open in Google Docs
Open web documents directly in Google Docs

- PDF Download

Allows you to choose what to do with a PDF file: download it, view it with an external viewer or view it as HTML.

- Previewr

Allows “Easy link previewing”

- QuickJava

Allows quick enable and disable of Java and Javascript from statusbar.

- ReminderFox

Displays and manages reminders and ToDo’s

- Search Cloudlet
More powerful Google search with context-aware tag clouds

- Select-n-Go by Cleeki

Select, search, and preview instantly.

- Site Launcher

Open websites using special keyboard shortcuts, like Launchy for Firefox

- Smarter Wikipedia

Adds a “related articles” box to Wikipedia and allows searching of selected text from context menu

- TwittyTunes

Post your tunes to Twitter using FoxyTunes, and more…

- Ubiquity

An extension that allows for the use of dynamic commands in Firefox.

- Unread Tabs Supreme

“Unread tabs are displayed in italics to indicate that you haven’t read them.

- UrlbarExt

“Extends the Location Bar with set of commands to (Make Tiny URL,Copy URL,Search site,Go up,Tag pages easily ,Navigate through sequential URL’s,Unblock filtered websites and Surf anonymously using online phproxy servers)

- YouTube Cinema

Play YouTube videos in cinema style.

Unless you are a qualified professional or an IT person in India; chances are you can identify with what I am just about to say.

You begin job hunting –  you’ve spent a fair sum of money obtaining a higher education, a bunch of degrees, you’ve been a good and dedicated student and an active participant in extra-curricular activities. By no means are you a blithering idiot or a fool and therefore you feel entitled to a well paying job.

Now here’s the problem- every job you look for and feel qualified for will state minimum requirements along the lines of “5 to 8 years experience”.  If students are busy getting qualified how are they supposed to have that kind of full-time experience? Unless of course they are expected to also work while studying, which is against collegiate law in most full-time university courses.

Higher education is supposed to qualify you to handle jobs that simple graduates cannot- which I gather is why people spend time and money doing it. If you emerge from a higher degree and still find the job market biased towards a decade of experience how are you supposed to deal with it? Simply put, where do students get this decade of experience? If no one wants to pay or hire articulate, young and bright yet inexperienced people – how do they become the ‘experienced’ people these companies want?

One solution is the ‘internship’ idea which works remarkably well in some cultural and national contexts, for example, in America. The only reason it works is because potential employers are willing to consider internships in lieu of full-time working experience. Most times they do; they also carefully consider waitress experience, window-washer experience and even the experience of planning a wedding!

A career counselor in Washington asked me rather quizzically why the  ‘internships’ on my resume were simply not put-down as ‘work-experience’. I had a hard time explaining that in India internships are not generally acceptable as quasi work-experience qualifications; at least employers don’t see it that way. In my lifetime – I am yet to see an Indian company hire a data quality person who has McDonald’s on their resume.

So we have a problem. One plausible explanation is that Indian internships, except at premiere institutions, are simply not ‘good enough’. Employers demand such exorbitant years of experience because candidates with lesser experience are simply not good enough.

This however seems like a fairly poor explanation to me two counts; the first one is best explained by an analogy to Indian sports (think Beijing Olympics) — how is it that a billion people seem to be able to produce only three world-class sportsmen? In a similar vein, what is it about the Indian education system or the job market that makes the vast majority of college graduates unemployable? The second reason for my skepticism is simply that the explanation is not intuitive enough to be true.

The truth seems to be mid-way and is really an economic phenomenon. Increasing the ‘experience required’ section narrows the pool of applicants which makes an HR person’s job much simpler. Just as most of the hiring in any company is done first through network exploration and lastly through the Internet.

Understanding this simple truth is like crossing a huge ice filled river with deep dangerous crevices to arrive upon a gigantic smoking sausage and a cup of hot chocolate. Strangely enough most job seekers begin their job searches on the Internet and turn to their networks last. In my case which I suspect is rather ‘normal’ this has more to do with self-esteem than extreme stupidity.

In India reducing the HR executive’s load is a vital exercise mostly because we turn out a huge number of potential employees from educational institutions, who are at the very least ‘formally qualified’. Reducing the number of applicants is therefore one way of reducing huge transaction costs and makes things easier.

Unhappily for a job-seeker, the incentives too are designed to make this system work and sustain itself. Because people are seldom paid what they deserve and even less so in response to the amount they actually work; there is a fairly large pool of people with a decade plus of experience who will work for peanuts. My network mostly consists of such people, which, explains the bit about self-esteem.

There are other powerful incentive structures in place to skew the job market and the economics of hire-and-fire. One of the more apparent of these is the simple fact that by hiring people with ‘at least half a decade or more of experience’ companies bypass training costs for their employees. A new recruit is almost always more costly than a more experienced one, especially in a situation where jobs are fewer and farther in between than there are people to claim them. By increasing the amount of experience required of potential candidates employers offset training costs to themselves at the expense of a prior company who actually invested in the recruit when he/she was new.

This, of course, is of no consequence whatsoever to the average job-seeker who jumps at the opportunity of a marginal pay raise in a new company. There is nothing surprising about this sort of behavior. Indeed a systematic study of the resumes of people ‘forty and above’ versus ‘thirty or below’ will reveal similar truths.

The vast majority of those who started working before higher-education exploded (which is vaguely linked to the arrival of the computer generation in India and the persistent presence of the government in higher education) have changed as few as three companies in their entire career spans, the more eccentric of these get to five. Contrast this with the BPO happy crowd and you will see a plethora of companies all over their resumes, a vast majority of these companies don’t even make it to the candidate’s CV thanks to space concerns and a ‘job-hippy’ tag.

Why does this happen? I reckon this has to do with the fact that job loyalty has hardly any benefits in India. This too is a consequence of the large pool of candidates companies can choose from. The costs of re-hiring, conventionally known as ‘menu-costs’ in economics, in the whole scheme of things are now negligible.

Little wonder then that more and more young people desperate to beat the ‘experience barrier’ fake everything from degree divisions to references and now increasingly ‘experience’ on their fancy templated resumes written on pirated versions of Microsoft Word. You have to admit the temptation to do so is strong – so strong in fact that there is unlikely to be a better man-made designed incentive structure to get people out of their beds and to work every single day of the week.

Companies are now moving towards investigative firms that do ‘background checks’ – which is all rather pointless given the incentives for these companies to ‘fake’ background reports themselves is astronomically high.  India will have yet another informal information market functioning in the blink of an eye and it will be perhaps be one of the most effecient prototypes the world has seen so far.

A man on a wheelchair, no half a man really- he had no legs. His wife stood beside him at the Domestic Airport in Washington.

The woman wore a tee that read thus “Army-Wife”, the man wore a shirt that said ” We were winning when I left”.

Photo Credit: Luciana  Braga.

The chap must have been younger than I am, and I am only twenty three. I am speechless.

Check out Reason.tv’s latest interview with Mark Bauerlein discussing his latest book the ‘The Dumbest Generation’.

From the YouTube Description

Mark Bauerlein argues that “the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future” by turning out hyper-networked kids who can track each other’s every move with ease but are largely ignorant of history, economics, culture, and other subjects he believes are prerequisites for meaningful civic participation.

Its a rather revealing exercise to be involved in policy formulation in a different country. I’ve learnt for example that a lot of policy ‘advocacy’ we take for granted in terms of methods in India work entirely differently in America.

Sample the fact that writing for a policy journal here means that you are essentially reporting to the converted. All jargon and theory has to be eschewed in favour of facts that stand on their own and speak fairly loudly towards a policy prescription on their own. This approach has its merits, for example, it makes the not so obvious seem rather obvious.

The trouble is that one has to learn not to make connections and leading arguments in ones writing. For example; the connection between property rights, eminent domain, privatization and a law that seeks to expand federal control of public utilities cannot be communicated together.

The local context also matters a whole lot more.  You make connections as a policy advocate between only those things that members of the public perceive as connected. I call this the “soft incremental policy push” phenomenon. Certainly, while it is tougher to take a stand — it also makes policy perceptions more fungible and palatable in smaller even-sized chunks.

It never is pleasant to wear your political stance on your sleeve. I started this morning with a diatribe from someone (not named for the sake of civility) who I am sure has not even an iota worth of political clarity.  What could possibly prompt this? Most likely the fact that I am spending the summer working for an organization that ostensibly ‘Mr. Diatribe’ disagrees with.

This is what I was told in response to my ‘libertarian leanings’:

just checked on xxxxx foundation. am amazed. people like you work for free market shit in and for america and still wanna call urself indians and pretend to be theatre lovers and major book readers and god knows what other. really sad. human rights activism? u must be joking. you shud be in irag then – or palestine. but then u need the american breast to suck. sorry for this.

Spellings retained as in original!

Its taken me a while to stop laughing at this, but I have succeeded. Tearing these arguments apart is not really the focus of this post- though I shall say this:

Working at an ‘American’ think-tank is not the same as working for America. In fact, I’m not even sure what someone ever means by the phrase  “working for America”. Is a country just one giant monolith? What was the allusion to? – All capitalists in general, the entire population of Americans (who I assure you, hold a wide variety of conflicting views on most subjects- just as entire populations do in any country), the government of America? Now this is what a political philosopher would describe as a classical example of the ‘methodological individualism’ fallacy. I, of course, do not  work for any of these groups- I work to advance the cause of liberty.

The next argument is the ‘free market’ problem. This is definitely the result of misguided thinking, a corporate monopoly is NOT an example of the free market! The free market is about choice, liberty and competition- it is not about one large corporation taking over! More importantly free markets are not the same thing as ‘privatization’ (which also gets unfairly abused by quasi-uninformed- fashionable-activist cum socialists) or even liberalization or globalization – its more like a blend of all three that works in the best interests of everyone. Its a commitment to freedom.

The next argument is my favorite argument; its called the ‘Let’s kill all the Non-Resident Indians’ argument. Of all Mr Diatribe’s arguments this is probably what disturbed me the most, and that is so not just because it is completely out of context or because as a tiny aside I am not an NRI. The problem is two-fold I think. Actually manifold – but i think I will stick to two.

My first response to this is that nation-state boundaries are human constructs and human society has spent  millennia in war trying to defend them. War is probably the most counter-productive phenomenon that has plagued human productivity. I’m not sure I appreciate a sense of ‘nationalism’ that arises out of being ‘Indian’ because I was born within the boundaries of a geographical territory I had no choice about. Also globalization and free trade is probably the surest path to peace, nothing is more obvious to people: “I am better off making money as opposed to killing you”.

At a lower level of argumentation; what does being ‘Indian’ mean, and what on Earth does my place of residence have to do with being ‘Indian’?! There is a more serious objection I have to this however- prosperity spreads through voluntary exchange and therefore trade. Anyone who has even in the passing read about comparative advantage knows that. One of the reasons why India, for example, prospered through the golden ages was because we have had a history of immigrations. Immigrants brought opportunities to trade, therefore immigration is a good thing for everybody.

Why can’t we understand the NRI phenomenon the same way? NRIs (though I do have a problem with this kind of classification of people) add value to the economic system, both the Indian system and the American system and doing so ensure that their existence is a positive sum game! NRIs are not an example of capital flight. Farmers in India will not be better off if NRIs did not do business abroad and farmed instead. Bastiat is far better at explaining the phenomenon of What is Seen and What is Unseen, than I am, and this is a classical example of how that effect works.

Productivity stems from being employed in or engaged at doing what an individual is best at doing- and if that is entrepreneurship so be it! This is probably why I am not in Iraq or Palestine (though I would love to be) yet! To illustrate Mr Diatribe’s line of argumentation a little better: If you love ice cream you better only be employed at Baskin & Robbins. Hell no! Just because I love ice cream it does not mean I should narrow down my options in terms of career choices to working with ice cream firms all my life.

Here is another argument that a uninformed quasi-socialist can throw at you.  They will yell at you saying thus “someone who believes in markets is necessarily anti-human rights”. Not true. This to me represents the pinnacle of ignorance. Markets are super-efficient mechanisms that work for everyone’s benefit, if and when, they exist for everyone! The problem, as most development economists know, is not that we have too much market- but far too little.

For example, in India the formal credit market is terribly under-developed. Witness the fact that women are not a part of the formal banking system, neither are several millions of the poor. These people are also incidentally thwarted by the government in every effort towards entrepreneurship through yards and yards of regulation. Also notice that these people are called ‘pre-bankable’ in micro finance parlance (which all the uninformed quasi-socialists love), they are ‘pre-bankable’ because they hope to build up a credit history through micro finance that allows them to get into the formal credit market. But why?, yells the uniformed quasi-socialist, because micro finance loans are costly, they have higher interest rates than regular credit markets that rely on markets! What is micro finance really achieving? Its creating a market where none existed earlier, and people want to move onto more developed markets.

Markets are good, being excluded from them is bad. Markets are not mean for fairness, justice and equity- that is for the uniformed quasi-socialists. Why? Because people who understand markets know that every policy helps one group at the expense of another- we know fairness is a subjective value. We also know that efficiency works, we know prices are great signaling devices unless distorted by taxes or subsidies, we know that there is no such thing as a free lunch because opportunity costs exist and we know incentives matter. We therefore believe that the only ideological position one can legitimately take is to not justify waste (read inefficiency, not consumption waste!), so why should an ‘Indian’ with so many starving hungry people work in America for free markets? Because such Indians care about poverty, they care about allowing people to empower themselves through new markets, better trading opportunities, lesser regulation to do trade!

This is a far cry from the uninformed quasi-socialist who believes that government failures for 60 years of independence is forgivable, but not market inefficiencies (which by the way are the result of too little market, not too much!), who sits and yells about the environment degradation and rising food prices in the same breath without understanding that underpricing natural capital might actually be the cause. It is also a far cry from the uninformed quasi-socialist who for the lack of brains resorts to rhetoric and more often to abuse. Free markets are for free people who believe in liberty, for everyone. Not forced equality or a subjective standard of equity- but the opportunity for everyone to be prosperous through free trade.

Finally, the jab about culture, theater and books. I suppose it might hurt Mr. Diatribe to look at history and tell me the why the most ‘bourgeois’ nations of Europe are home to some of the world’s greatest art? Hungry people do not really make good artists, do they?  Sub-altern art in communities even in Africa and India was the result of well-fed people.  There are similar trends in history for theater and literature.

Strangely enough, I am hard-pressed to find any member of the ‘uninformed quasi-socialists’ tribe who have actually read the Das Kapital in original! Activists like Mr Diatribe above, are the torch bearers of the new pretentious half-baked hand-me-down socialist tradition who base their perceptions on doctored summaries and the most horrifically prolific Vandana Shiva. Small wonder though, considering how disastrous state-monopolized education systems are.

All this brings me to the point of this post which is rather simple. Deciding to be nasty in conversation with someone especially about political issues is probably the most unhelpful thing to do. To begin with it prompts nastiness in response, or complete silence or in some cases– a patient detailed response, like this one, which is highly unlikely. Two it is extraordinarily presumptuous to assume that one knows everything, and far worse to assume that the other person is poorly-read, stupid or just plain wrong. In my experience, I find most people have very good reasons to believe what they do- its usually ‘us’ on the other side who decide to be aggressive and nasty that need to learn common courtesy and therefore need to attempt to figure out the rationale behind the other individual’s thought process.

The writer of the diatribe of course, would attribute ‘motive’ to such a suggestion and he would be absolutely right- after all I too get to do well in a nation, country and world where most people are prosperous!

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Two days ago I was in Bangalore giving an interview. One of the many questions I was asked was about relocation , I was also asked if I liked my ‘hometown’ Chennai. I remember answering in the affirmative; sure Chennai has terribly hot climate and it could be a little boring at times, but on the whole its safe and has the sea and well I generally like it. After today I think I like Chennai much less.

This evening my mom and I went in search of the i-pill, of course had I been a little less ignorant I wouldn’t have tried despite the circumstances. So this is what we did; we called our regular medical store and were told the i-pill was unavailable, so we then enquired about Norlevo, Pill 72, Ovral G and several other varieties of the ‘morning-after’ pill and found they were unavailable too. About an hour later we had set out on a walk, enquired at six different medical stores and came to naught, so we unhappily drew the conclusion that the ‘morning after’ was simply unavailable.

This struck me as absurd, Chennai – touted as the ‘medical capital’ of India had no medicines of a particular variety?, that was not all nor the the scariest part. In attempt to fill the gap, qualified chemists kept trying to convince me that ‘Mifepristone‘ a MTP Pill available usually only on prescription was the same thing. The fact is, Mifepristone is used in conjunction with other abortive pills (an abortificant) to induce an abortion below five weeks of pregnancy and is positively dangerous if taken in the place of an emergency contraceptive pill, ‘Levonorgestrel’, on the other hand, is used as part of combination oral contraceptive pill and in high doses can be used to prevent pregnancy after unprotected intercourse. Unintended consequences in a situation of information asymmetry and really nasty plausible outcomes playing out.

Apparently sometime in 2006, Tamil Nadu’s state Directorate of Drug Control (DDC) decided to take all ‘pills’ of the ‘morning after’ variety of the shelves. The provocation? Apparently the Chennai-based ‘Responsible Parents Forum’ and ‘Satvika Samuga Sevakar Sangam’ felt that the drug induces abortion (and is not a contraceptive); therefore its sale without prescription is illegal, additionally the two protesting groups claimed that there was no public debate before it was included in the Schedule M of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act (DCA), 1940 which makes the drug available over the counter.

I’m not sure whether I should be shocked about how regressive people can be or stand in awe of the stupidity involved. To begin with ‘emergency contraceptive pills’ are not the same thing as abortive pills, the text of any ‘morning after pill’ explains that they are ineffective once ‘implantation’ has taken place in the womb or in other words once fertilization has happened, which is why they are termed levonorgestrel-based ECs! Abortive pills on the other hand are designed to work after this fertilization has taken place, the methods then are very different.

Chemical analysis and indeed any minimum degree of bio-chemistry knowledge easily proves that any ‘morning after’ pill contains Levonorgestrel and not Mifepristone (which is what is being sold as replacement, GASP!) as suggested by the hair-brained protesters. What is interesting is that the TN DDC has the right to seize ‘drugs; of a particular kind only if they do not adhere to prescribed standards, or are mis-branded, adulterated or spurious, I really wonder which one of these conditions apply to the ‘mornign after’? As far as is known, in the case of emergency contraceptives such as the ‘morning after’ the dosage is 0.75 mg (recommended by the Drug Controller of India) and sold as a Schedule M drug under a ready licence!

Even more absurd is this quotation from one of the women by name of Ajeetha (sigh!) who was at the forefront of the protests, she says: “the text is objectionable and promotes ‘free sex’. Words such as ‘..when one becomes careless, or things get out of control‘, It takes away responsibility from the act of sexual intercourse. And the branding (Mis-take) is also not so subtle insinuation that pre-marital sex is alright…”.

One of the biggest things to learn about patriarchy is that women themselves are the biggest perpetrators of it! Its been a long time since I have seen or heard of a more vivid example than this. Its fascinating how regressive laws can become in a country that is supposed to be swaggering down the road to development.

Consider capital punishment for rape, in India capital punishment is given in the ‘rarest of rare instances’ for the ‘most heinous of crimes’ which are often such crimes that render their victims in some sense ‘irreparable’. For a moment lets forget the argument that most people who have studied ‘law and economics’ draw – which suggests that at the margin the cost of committing rape+murder for a rapist becomes zero if capital punishment is announced for rapists thereby creating an incentive to additionally rape and kill their victims in fear of evidence coming out for a harsher punishment and so…

But consider this, is this the message we want to give out in society about our women? Ought rape to be a crime that makes no women live a normal life again? Ought we to attach such stigma to a woman who has been ‘raped’ to make her feel that the most ‘heinous and irrepairable’ damage has been done to her? Is chastity all there is to woman? Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying rape is OK, I’m asking if we really want to make women believe that their chastity being lost is something that should make them feel guilty life-long? But I digress.

One thing that is obvious is this, the SS Co. (which sounds dangerously RSS like) and the ‘Responsible Parents Forum’ probably consists of the most irresponsible bunch of people ever known- people who oppose freedom of choice, liberty in action and the access to technology all together. A formidable coalition of fools who believe that Chennai streets are better overrun with teenage mothers and scared teenage fathers, with dustbins littered with unwanted infants and people with closeted minds who will silently engage in marital rape while the law turns a blind eye and proclaims all is fine.

Never mind that Chennai has one of the highest incidence of AIDS in the country, never mind that domestic violence is spiralling in Tamil Nadu and never mind that the un-natural separation between growing girls and boys in this academic ‘temple’ of the south causes more and more roadblocks to conjugal bliss. After all who will ever find out?, we will keep sweeping it under the carpet as long the vermilion stays bright and the sacred threads sparkle along our broad backs!

The tragedy is that its been nearly two years since emergency contraception has been available freely in Chennai, and I am yet to hear of a protest! Tragically Chennai is the same place where the global campaign for microbicides (a form of contraception) began and is still head-quartered. What happened to science and reason or is it only prejudice that matters now?