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!”

Everyday in the morning I wake up at 07:00 a.m to the constant beeping of my cellphone. I then press ’snooze’ and get back under my sheet.

I do this at least three times on average and end up waking up at 07:30 a.m. I then rush through a bath, put on a thoroughly unmatched Kurta over ancient jeans and walk through a mini-swamp, a pile of stones, huge piles of cow-dung and some lousy construction to reach the famous ECR road.

By this time it is usually exactly 08:20 a.m.

At this point I slowly melt into the motley bunch of fisher women, harried mothers’ with school bags and children in tow, men looking for casual labour, the day-shift call center executive and the proverbial IT kid. We all then compete with each other to stuff ourselves into already over crowded share-autos.

Share autos are just larger three wheelers with open sides that make up for the fact that they are not quite large enough.

Once I succeed at getting into one of these I make my honking journey across ECR to Thiruvanmiyur bus stand. This entire painful routine usually ends up guaranteeing me a seat in my all-time favourite bus – the 29C AC special.

The AC specials are ultra-modern ‘low-floor, high-seat, music-blaring, air-conditioned, automated-swinging-door, uniformed conductor and polite driver’ specials. They are lovely.  They are also white with huge advertisements painted in bold colours across them. And there are just two leaving every hour.

I have a favourite seat, its in the back half of the bus. Second from the front, near the windows that the 29C occupants can see out of but that people on the road can’t see through. I wait to pay the conductor my 23 rupees and then listen to my iPod till I get to Sterling road.

The 29C community is a small bunch of people. A retired army officer who does strategic consulting at some shady Nungambakkam firm, a real well meaning middle-aged aunty who has a bad leg and requests an unscheduled stop at the Chola Sheraton, the three college girls who talk about the ‘worst lectures’ ever who get off at Stella and the quirky young chap with a stubble like Abhishek Bacchan — carrying a pink bag and reading a book on fashion design.

We see each other every day. Some of us smile, some of us even say good morning. Most of us know we are in this bus together sharing a journey. We wait together when our beloved bus is later and express surprise if even one us misses a day in the week. The 29C effect calmed me, prepared me for office and battles of the day, made me belong to a bunch of comfort-seeking yet poor members of the ‘middle-class’.

From 6th of March i will cease to be a part of these people’s lives and their stories. I will never know if the effeminate guy won his art competition, if the aunty managed to get her sons to fix the fuse, if the girls managed to bunk their classes or if the tired wage worker managed to save up to recharge his phone to tell his son in Perambur that he now uses an AC bus.

Another two days and the inexplicably comforting 29C effect will be history. No wait, it will go on to write histories that no one will ever read.  I will no longer be a character on its stage. Stop the bus, I want to get off…

I fail to understand why nobody has ever created a bus-route map of Chennai.

Creating a map should be a fairly straightforward business. Chennai buses do operate on time schedules — approximate time schedules yes, but still, time-schedules nevertheless.

Some 72% of Chennai’s population travels by bus thanks to obnoxiously high auto prices and yet first-time travelers or simply unseasoned bus users have no access to the simplest of all transportation information – which bus goes where and where does it stop.

Guaranteed, this is a difficult task and not one that can necessarily remain up to date, Chennai bus routes are plagued with way too many passengers and new diversions every now and then. Despite this, it ought not to be impossible to create a map with bus-stops and common bus numbers! Even if the effort turned out to be only an approximate representation of reality.

Common sense suggests that most rational people need a starting point, a reference or a flag-post of sorts from which they can extrapolate. This is how most decision making works. A proximate guide is as good an indicator as any in this case.

The lack of bus-route maps has nothing to do with the success of spontaneous order, it has to with a market failure of sorts; this is exactly what Hernando De Soto talked about- information is available and stored collectively (say in the minds of daily bus users) and yet for some odd reason there doesn’t seem to be any way to fix this information into a useful form; a map!

In the meantime, I appeared to have picked up one ‘American’ habit- listening to my i-pod on long lonely bus and train journeys to Kanchipuram and Nungambakkam occasionally amused by a cow, goat or a peculiar blade of grass.

PS: Here’s an excellent piece on Reason explaining the connection (actually, the lack of) between the bailout and free markets.

I now have a new shiny passport with a really strange picture.

Here’s what I learnt through the process:

1) Never ever lose your passport! Do not carry it with you for identification purposes, lest some evil soul steals your bag – ’cause the mountain of pain to follow is so excruciating that it might well be termed a ‘life changing’ process; you’ll be marred, scarred, irritable and exhausted beyond measure.

2) If you do end up having to apply for a new passport be prepared to encounter the holy trinity of Ps in the A ; the passport office, the police station and the post office.

3) Do not assume that there is anything such as a ‘Tatkal’ service, things are only relatively tatkal – meaning instead of one month, if you really really tried your passport might reach you in ten days time; but wait; the fee you paid was for ‘3′ days delivery – yes sir!  Well it did take three days – three days to make, another three days to dispatch, another three days to travel from post office A to post office B (four km apart!) and another three days to reach in all probability, except they forget that really ‘determined’ people have voices that can shout.

4) Be prepared to discover that the climate consistently conspires to make you perspire; also be prepared to discover that all vendors conveniently located near the passport office will only sell thirst enhancing fizzy drinks, not thirst-quenching water or juice.

5) Discover the joy of bribing police men to write down a complaint and blame the bribe on ‘the boys’ who will get the job done.

5) Learn how to keep your patience with impolite passport officials who express surprise at your ignorance about passport procedures that change once every ten-days without any public announcement.

6) Meet Mr. PIS-ON (yes, that is gross), the ‘Passport Information System On Net’ – which is accessible only to the holy passport officials. Further, discover how the inefficiency of the PISON can help you in unfathomable ways- for example, solve a complicated issue with a non-expired passport that is wrongly declared expired!

7) Discover how absurd regulations like a photo copy of a lost passport is required to apply for a fresh one, or how an under secretary is required to vouch for your character, or how affidavits are prepared with ruthless efficiency in the informal market or better still how you have to self-attest the authenticity of your own documents!

Be prepared for an unpleasant three days between which you will have no clue where your passport is – the undocumented journey of the local post across four kilometres.

9) Understand that applying for a passport is a valuable experience because its the closest you’ll ever get to living a cross between a Salvador Dali painting and a Kafkaesque nightmare.

10) Be prepared to let out delighted whoops of joy when you dash across dusty roads in a rickety vehicle (with a poised pen-tip) to reach home and sign for your passport finally, where an unwilling post man is held hostage by a family member dangling currency notes.

This is what hell must be like, no?

The web has had a lot of interesting stuff floating around this week- or maybe its just that I have had more time to sit up and take notice lately.

Web Worker daily has a fascinating post about a positive web presence and getting a good job. Green technology just got a thumbs up with Tesla Roadster, a 100-percent electric car inspired by PC technology that is clean, green and the ultra-cool machine.

More exciting stuff on the PC front- Yahoo is doling out unlimited e-mail storage to its mail users– one could now consider forgiving them for the awful YahooMail Beta interface. PC Mag has a nice article on Web 3.0 and an even nicer one on customizing Vista if you’ve made the Vista transition.

CSE (although I disagree with most of what it says most times) has some interesting analysis of social sector spending in the union budget. It is also offering an opportunity to work with NREGA evaluation, if anyone is looking for voluntary work in the summer. The CSE controversy on pesticides has also reached a resolution of sorts- read about it here.

Happy reading!

Sometime ago, I wrote a post entitled ‘Praying to Trees‘, the point I was trying to make then was about turning environmental protection into a religion. Environmental fanaticism is neither new nor pretty, in fact sometimes its clearly off-putting, even for those who are inherently sympathetic to the green cause. Take a look at PC Format’s report on Antony Lewis.

For those of you, who don’t know Antony Lewis is the architect of the rather brilliant and extraordinarily useful freeware utility- WordWeb.  I’ve used WordWeb for a long time and quite happily. Perhaps that is why the attempt to sing the green tune by its maker is painful.

Lewis in an interview says, “Climate change is an international crisis. By linking prices to customers’ carbon footprint we can provide an incentive for people to cut down. WordWeb is used worldwide, including in many countries such as India with rapidly expanding economies where awareness of climate change is growing only slowly. Software developers and Internet companies can reach an international audience consisting precisely of those people who are most likely to have unsustainable lifestyles. We hope the new licensing model will increase awareness of the high environmental cost of air travel and encourage people to fly less.”

Sigh. I have several questions, of which the pertinent ones are these: How on Earth are frequent fliers going to be told apart from other users? Unless of course you intend to illegally monitor surfing habits and draw correlation, in which case I would rather unhappily call WordWeb Spyware now. 

I’m all for green incentives, but this really is not one of them! Now if Microsoft were to do something about dirty manufacturing I would understand–but targeting Indian’s who have just about started off with low-cost airlines is a bit much! Here’s the problem, the idea of free software is a commitment to free as in freedom and not a space to push ideology that not all people necessarily buy!

More importantly, daft things like this takes away from the seriousness of environmental movements, that have in the third world much more to do with marginalised communities and subsistence livelihoods as opposed to over-consumption. Skewed incentives, is what it is. Sigh.

Another day, another law. The UPA government has just passed legislation on child labour- banning it, as expected. There are several things to be said about this; the first being that this legislation is a huge victory for human rights. Secondly, much of its success depends upon implementation– which has in the past been far from perfect. The third and perhaps the most important aspect is that this bit of legislation is incomplete.

The new legislation creates lots of problems. To begin with– who or what will fill the domestic help gap for the middle class? What could be as efficient and yes as cheap as young domestic help? In India, banning is as good as offering the police the opportunity to slip in bribes and turn a blind eye yet again. The reason the legislation is incomplete is precisely this. Assume for a moment that implementation takes place. Scared middle class households and small shops throw out their young domestic labour, where do these children go? Where do they earn alternate employment? Who is to make them go to school? In effect, where Mr. Prime Minister is the back up plan?

The government estimates that, overall, India has 12.6 million child workers (unofficial estimates place the figures closer to 40 million), of whom somewhere around a million may be employed in homes and restaurants. It seems rather absurd to believe that India will manage to implement its new law for such large numbers when it is still struggling with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in about two-hundred districts.

As Harjot Kaur, director of child labour within the Ministry of Labor and Employment said, “Child labour is not a problem that you can resolve overnight. It is not that today you come up with an act and tomorrow it is eradicated. This is a gradual process.”. So now, child labour is illegal, but what about the roof and the bit of food that has been taken away too?

This is what it has come to… three bits of luggage, a new town every now and then and me plodding along. Like the chap who wears a rosary and tucks a bottle of whisky under his tunic, or the girl who bats her eyelashes and pockets money, the communist who sold out or like the unfinished apple now turning a deep shade of brown.

I tend to think in metaphors these days. One of the most powerful metaphors is of course hangman. When I think about it what does a hung man represent? To you, to me and to the Indian democracy?  Imagine; a hung man against a hinged door. I see democracy unhinged.  

Take Afzal for example. Here, in India we have the right wing that believes Afzal should be hung.The left believes he shouldn’t mercifully– the tragedy with the left in this country though is that they never take a strong stand when they should. The left remains entirely ambivalent on whether capital punishment is acceptable or not.

It clarifies that it is not being soft in the context of terrorists– hanging Afzal is merely inappropriate because it would stall the peace process in Kashmir. Indeed it would, but here’s what the real question is: If it didn’t would it be OK to hang a man? Is revenge really what a criminal justice system is built on?

Pause for a moment. For the sake of argument let me say the moral questions surrounding capital punishment are irrelevant, what about outcomes? What would Afzal’s hanging mean for India and Indian politics? As far as I can tell hanging Afzal would turn India into a wee bit more of a police run state, kill whatever little democratic dissent this country still has, undermine the peace process in Kashmir and of course give strength to the saffron bandwagon.

Look at the facts for a moment. While the attack on Parliament (several people believe the attack was orchestrated) was one of the most vicious attacks on Indian democracy it did not quite succeed. Ideally any investigation that followed ought to have been stringent and transparent to say the least. That is not quite what happened though. It is public knowledge that the police created most of its evidence, elicited confessions through torture and lied for most part through this particular investigation.

The three people who claimed responsibility for the attack– Ghazi Baba, Masood Ahzar and Tariq Ahmad were not investigated, confused with the Afghanistan hijackers and amazingly because all the five attackers were shot we have no clue they really were. Afzal was made to incriminate himself in the national media at a media conference which a senor police official later denied under oath in court.

 What happened was that two of the three accused (Sandhu and Geelani) were acquitted.  Afzal, said the supreme court, had no evidence that pointed to him belonging to any terrorist outfit. Interesting then that a man acquitted under POTA due to lack of evidence should suddenly have to pay the price all over again.

These are the facts, then there is perspective. Law tells me that death sentence is an option only in the rarest of rare cases. I have two questions: What makes an attack on the parliament so sacrosanct that it merits the death penalty, especially without adequate evidence against the accused, without the accused even being allowed access to a lawyer during interrogation? Secondly, why does Afzal’s crime (if at all) deserve death penalty when corrupt officialdom deserves pardon or worse still– overlooking?

The sad fact is that the rising ‘Nationalism’ in the Indian citizenry is what the court feels it must pay attention to. Consider this: When Afzal a poor man who could not hire a lawyer asked for a lawyer, he was refused by all four arguably because they were scared that they would suddenly become ‘anti-national’.  When Ram Jethmalani offered his counsel, Hindutva forces ransacked his office– the nationalism-democracy trade-off playing itself out. But wait, India is not all that undemocratic and the justice system isn’t all that despicable. So  on July 12, 2002 the judge in question appointed a junior lawyer as his amicus curiae and gave Afzal the right to cross examine the witnesses.

Writing a blog entry about Afzal is of course far far easier than practising criminal law without training (read Afzal’s letter to the AIDC and to his supreme court lawyer). In this country, members of the media who always do it right and several other proud citizens of India– think that hanging Afzal without giving him the right to defend himself is the vindication of nationalism and the preservation of the human rights of others in the nation. They wish to tell us, that it is fair to ignore Afzal’s story, his history and that of of the Kashmiri people.

How long before the authority in India understands the lessons that Gandhi left for us decades ago? How long until they open their eyes and see that state sanctioned murder is the last thing that will cause flowers to bloom in Kashmir instead of rivers of blood.

As Nandita Haksar said: “The fight for Mohammad Afzal’s life is a fight for all that is good and meaningful in Indian democracy; the cry for revenge and his death represents the dehumanized and authoritarian aspects of the Indian State and civil society.“

Update: Please do sign the petition against Afzal’s Death Sentence.

Couple of days ago I was called to participate in a discussion on reservations. Reservation in general, is a subject that causes much argument and such. By virtue of this it is particularly important to maintain what I like to call a semblance of objectivity. There were several things that made me particularly unhappy that afternoon. Importantly my stand on reservations or anyone else’s for that matter turns out to be irrelevant with regard to this.

To engage in meaningful conversation one first must make a commitment to intellectual honesty. This implies a) Knowing the facts 2) Not choosing to adopt a stance merely because everyone else has 3) Understanding that not all things are subjective and that some objective truths and objective rights and wrongs exist.

Now this discussion that I was a part of consisted of what was called the enlightened ‘youth’ of today. They were aspiring civil servants, aspiring lawyers, aspiring public policy makers and so on. Then there was a moderator. That man perhaps requires a line or two more for a description. Soap box orator, art of living guru, management guru and throw a couple of other fake disciplines in for good measure.

Here is what I heard at the discussion:

1) Reservation is bad because my dad, mom, sister, friend and NDTV say so. What facts do you have to back it up? “Hey, I’m well informed I have Wikipedia”!

2) Forward castes don’t have quotas… Ever heard of the management quota?

3) Alternatives? Silence.

4) Backward castes are not really discriminated against in India. Hallelujah!

5) Only we deserve the IITs and the IIMs and such…. hmmm, self interest.

Wait a minute, didn’t I say a couple of posts ago that I was anti-reservation too. Nope. I said I was anti-reservation the way it is enacted now. There is a subtle difference. Somehow in the whole discussion nobody seem to question the budgetary priorities of the country, nobody seemed to ask how we can create incentives in primary education for the so called ‘lower-classes’.

To top it all, the moderater in question was apalled when I said “dalit” and a friend said “shudra”. This discussion was so elite that we were supposed to thrash out solutions in twenty minutes to misplaced reservation outcomes without mentioning castes.

Pause for a minute and think why. To my mind it is because these words are now the new ‘un-unmentionables’ just like untouchables. Linguistic discrimination however is a powerful method of exploitation– take a look at how “Harijan” is now a casteist abuse.     

There are several reasons why this kind of thing is problematic. The top reason is this: What if these people get through the IAS or become policy makers? Where does India go then?