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Now that we know for sure how much A.Raja, our erstwhile not-so-honourable Union Cabinet Minister for Communications and Information Technology, got to take home as bribe off the 2G spectrum allocation, it is time for some number crunching. OK, well, so it alleged that Raja took home approx Rs.3000 Crore and this is only an approximation. With numbers of these magnitude, does it really matter?

During my teens, once me and my friend in Malaysia, we discussed prices of stuff in each other’s country. It got confusing, so we used the cost of a bottle of coke as a currency. You know, like, an hour of Internet would cost me 3 bottles of coke here. It was a horrible way of understanding economics but it gave me a good enough idea of things. It can be overwhelming, with all those numbers that give identity to scandals. To get an idea of the magnitude, we need already set benchmarks. It makes more sense to us when we see things relative to one another.

So here is something I worked on with my morning tea. It could be the most unimaginative post ever, coming from me, but I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves:

1. If I do not pay my tax, I take home a salary that would be 0.0001333% of what Raja got as bribe.

2. India’s Gross Domestic Product, as per 2010, was Rs. 64350000000000. Raja got 0.04662% of that as a bribe. Of course, my take home salary, I will reinstate, was 0.0001333% of Raja’s 0.04662%. I did not even bother compare my salary to India’s GDP.

3. Raja’s bribe is approximately 46.875% of the cost of Bangalore Metro Phase I. Going by proportion, assuming only half of Banaglore’s Metro Phase I is up and running, would Raja piggy-back us to where we want, to make up for the other half?

4. Raja’s bribe is almost 41.40% of what a single unit of a Su-30 MKI costs. In the time of War, can we depend on Raja to cause the amount of destruction 2.5 (OK, 2) Sukhoi 30s can cause to the enemy?

5. OK, I should not venture into the Tata connection to all this, but I can’t resist, so here goes: According to Forbes, Ratan Tata’s salary for 2010 was Rs.13,059,000.00. Impressed? It all looks minuscule, when you will hear that Ratan Tata would have to work 2297 years and 2 months (approx) to earn what Raja got as bribe (allegedly, approximately, blah, blah, do-we-care), going by his current salary.

6. You might (or not) know about Admiral Gorshkov. No, not the man (Sergey Gorshkov) but the Soviet Aircraft Carrier India is buying from Russia. They will rename it to Vikramaditya and soon it will be the pride of Indian Navy. Because our Raja is a rich man now, we can compare him to this deal too. Raja’s bribe is 28.98% of what we are paying for the ship.

7. Here’s one more and this might interest Mamta Didi: Indian Railways, one of the world’s largest employers, reported a net income of Rs. 951 crore for 2009-10. That was 31.7% of what Raja earned, allegedly of course, in the same time.

8. Here’s more and this should really make sense if the last 7 haven’t. The average salary of an IPL player (for a year) is Rs.172800000. With Rs.30000000000 in his wallet, our Raja can do wonders at IPL. He can have 173.6 IPL players on his payroll for a year! He could float what, 11 teams with 15 players each. We can’t call them Raja XI because they aren’t XI. According to Romans, we need to call them Raja’s CLXXIII. Or rather, if Raja has any business sense, he could float a parallel league – He could call it, well, RPL (No prizes for guessing what the initials stand for).

(thanks D, for the idea!)

I hope things are more clear. Meanwhile, keep in mind that these figures, Raja’s bribe to say the least of it, are approximate figures.

I sometimes wonder what makes the leadership of our country adopt double standards.

Because when we are dealing with China, we always blow the trumpet of democracy. When our leaders stand at the world podium, we call ourselves the slow but stable democratic republic that will reach “there”. We even (rightly) send our ambassador to the Noble prize ceremony applauding Liu Xiaobo while China threatened us of consequences.

On the other hand, we have this man been given the red carpet in New Delhi. It is stale news but that is not the point. If you did not bother to click on the link I gave you a couple of sentences ago, you should know that, that link points to a list of the world’s worst dictators. He is called Than Shwe and he is the man responsible for everything wrong that has happened in Burma. A few months ago, he visited the Taj Mahal and got a picture clicked (Interested? here, that’s another world’s worst dictators countdown list, by the way).

The same man was also responsible for house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi. She, until recently, was in house arrest, for 24 years.

24 years.

The lady won the Nobel Peace prize, just like Liu Xiaobo, for her pro-democracy movement in Burma. In fact, she also won the Jawahar Lal Nehru Award back in 1992, an year after she won the Nobel. Then, ideologically, the Government of India should snap ties with any country that treats pro-democracy leaders like this, let alone spread the red carpet.

Exactly the opposite happened. Why?

Gas, most probably.

India is eyeing the vast Gas reserves Burma has and thus this stand. But hasn’t a country that once stood for principles and what was right has deviated because of interests of world power and economy? The same is happening with the Tibet policy (I am not even sure if one exists). Ultimately, issues like these have become ace cards and bargaining chips. It is this attitude that made President Obama make the startling statement of “India has shied away from Human rights abuses in Myanmar”.

These are no signs of a matured democracy. In fact, far from it.

I am tempted to quote Shashi Tharoor here. The man who was ridiculed for his short stay in the Indian Cabinet has a keen eye as far as India’s foreign policy is concerned. While criticizing India’s stand on Myanmar and The Lady, he said: India opted for national interests over democracy. It was a policy of the head ruling over the heart but it also lost its soul.

It’s a very strong statement from a man who understands the nature of Democracy too well. And it is a sad state of affairs as far as India’s foreign policy is concerned.

PS: Suggested reading-

1. From Sri Lanka, this article: here
2. The Shashi Tharoor article here.

“What I don’t understand is”, Steve asked me, “How do you guys leave (jobs) like that”.

We were at the waterfront on the Jersey shore. What started as a warm summer morning hid in itself an unplanned visit to the beach and an unexpected meeting with Steve. I worked with Steve when I joined the company I work for now, back in 2007. We were in two different parts of the world. Steve was (and still is) the Primary contact for a group of applications that I was too a part of. Being constantly at the helm of managing these applications and not a big fan of the job he was handling made Steve lose his temper very often, over the phone, with the team in India. I had worked closely with Steve for more than a year before I changed my project. At times, I had cursed him silently and was astonished at his insensitivity and insanity that I thought he possessed.

And I had never met him.

Then at the waterfront the other day, in a company get-together, out of nowhere, I thought I saw him, eating a hamburger and corn, alone. The self-made name tag on his shirt confirmed my finding and I was stuck somewhat in disbelief.

“How do you guys leave like that? The same year, I think it was 2007, three guys came to US and we trained them for 3 months. They went back to India and they quit! We had two guys replacing them and we had to train those two guys again — this time from India of course!”, Steve complained, getting down to business as if we were never out of it.

Oh, I know what it is. I did not know who those three guys were but I know why they left. And why the management let them leave.

Those three guys left because they came back from US and they knew they won’t get to go to US anymore. They left because most likely another company offered them a good pay package and they needed the money. Why did the management let them leave? Because theoretically, you can’t ask them to stay if the responsibilities they carry could be transferred to another bunch of people. But could those job roles be transferred just like that? Again, theoretically yes. Knowledge Transfer (KT) allows you to do that. Just like they were KT’ed by their American counterparts, these fellows KT’ed to the new guys. Maybe they spent 3 days imparting education that originally came to them in 3 months, but they did it anyway.

Practically, is it possible that one is even eligible to give a KT session on some enterprise application that he has hardly even worked upon? No. Would the management understand this concept? Absolutely not. So they left.

So, in the end, we have:

1. Those three guys, who came back happy and dandy after a trip to America and left happier and dandier to another job, grabbing their fatter pay packages.

2. The two guys who must have recently joined the organization and would be flourishing under the relatively fatter paychecks, KT’ed apps notwithstanding.

3. The management who would be patting its own back for a job well done (organizing KT and all).

4. Steve, in front of the Atlantic shore, whining about it all, 3 years after it happened.

The sad part is that within all this, the management does not question itself. That it is believed that jobs and responsibilities can be transferred like that. In the long run, those two guys would have struggled getting hold of that application and after being subjected to late night calls and Steve’s wrath, would have looked for new jobs. In between all this, there would have been a phase when the production issues of that application would have hit sky high and these guys would not have delivered, so Steve’s anger is justified. The Software Managers do not understand that part. They are unable to map this problem to the anomaly occurred during the 3 day KT. Good programmers develop a need for clarity as they grow in their profession and they are expected to carry that trait while they manage teams later in their career. But what percentage of today’s managers would have been good programmers? Forget that — what percentage of today’s managers would have even had careers as programmers?

As Brooks’s law goes, “Nine women can’t deliver a baby in a month”. You see, code delivery is something similar. But they still expect that. And they continue to think that a KT Session is a magic wand that can work wonders even in the hands of the most mediocre software guys. Management in Software can never be thought as a offshoot branch of traditional shop-floor management. And exactly the opposite is happening – even with software companies in the west. But its a different topic altogether.

Going back, it begs us the question — why this run for the fat paycheck? For that, I had to dwell in some basic economics to Steve. The answer would be in two parts.

When I buy an iPod nano in India, I end up spending 1/3rd of my monthly salary. When I buy that here in USA, I end up spending 1/20th of my monthly paycheck. You could do that calculations for a pair of Reebok shoes, a bottle of Head and Shoulders shampoo or a McDonald’s burger and find the same disparity. Believe me, I have done the math. That is the first part.

If the Indian economy had an inflation rate that most economists would term as ideal, it would be around 2-3%. Sadly, that is not the case. As of June 2010, Indian economy was inflating at 13%. It gets worse – Since 2008, the cooking gas price has increased by 20% in India. A rise in the price of cooking gas shows a similar upward trend for Petroleum. So, While the Americans have experienced a 2-3% inflation for the most part of the last two decades, their Indian counterparts have seen (and continue to experience) much worse. The Americans should not find much to complain about when their employer gives a 5% annual raise but the Indians choose to look away and search for higher paying jobs. And why shouldn’t they? That is the second part.

And somewhere there, with Steve looking convinced and mumbling, “makes sense, makes sense”, ended my lecture on Software Economics.

Months ago, I came across an article written by Col Athale(retd) at rediff.com. I have read Athale’s writings earlier and I have always found myself disagreeing with most of what he has to say. This article too, had a conclusion in the title itself — Peace with Pakistan: Chasing a mirage. But it did raise a very important point which made a very lasting impression about what the future could hold with regard to our western neighbor.

Colonel Anil Athale, in his article, indirectly points out that it was under Zia-ul-haq that Pakistan took a stance of radical Islam as a state policy. As a part of Zia’s adoption of Wahhabism, a very conservative and almost radical form of Islam, textbooks were changed in schools to accommodate religion as the basis of the state’s existence. In effect, what Zia’s textbooks of social studies, speculated to be still in effect, are seeking is “to create practicing Muslims rather than democratic citizens” (2), to put it mildly.

The author of the article should also be credited to taking this up with Prof. Abdul Hameed Nayyar, a prominent Pakistani physicist who is probably more famous as Pakistan’s man of peace. Professor Nayyar was, at that time in 1998, working on what was being preached out of Pakistani schoolbooks. In 2003, Nayyar went on to author a paper that created ripples in the country. “The Subtle Subversion: The State of Curricula and Textbooks in Pakistan” (1) clearly stated that what Pakistan was offering to its school going children was a very flawed version of history, among other things and facts, which were conveniently changed to nurture hatred for any non-Muslim, specially Hindus.

Not only that, the report mentioned that in the post-Independence days of Pakistan, the textbooks offered a much “real” version of history and even had admiration for Hindus. Chapters on MK Gandhi were a part of the curriculum while teachings of Ramayana and Mahabharata were also mentioned. This was contrasting because this text existed after the bloody experience of partition that both the countries went through and two gory wars.

What happened after Zia took over was a very systematic conversion of Pakistan from a democratic state to a country that based everything on religion. There have been many papers published since Nayyar’s, authored by Pakistani nationals and others, who have confirmed and validated the claims made by Prof. Nayyar. The textbooks have time and again mentioned the western powers and India specifically as sworn enemies of the state while endorsing the involvement of military forces in day to day governance of the state.

In his paper titled: “Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Education: An Examination of the Social Studies Curriculum in Pakistan”, professor Iftekhar Ahmad of Long Island University raises another important point that could very well be another branch of the concerns raised by Colonel Anil Athale: Could it be that it is this model of civic and citizenship education that is now hurting Pakistan the most?

Athale continues to say that If the texts of these books were changed for the better, it would still take a good two decades before we see any change coming out. There is no doubt in my mind about the validity of his statement.

Just a day ago, the Indian diplomat, SM Krishna, on his visit to Islamabad raised the issue of anti-India speeches made by LeT chief there in Pakistan. There is no doubt that the hate rhetoric coming out on the streets when Hafiz Saeed gives his speech should be objectionable to people in the Indian Government. What worries me is that the Textbooks of Pakistan, with their unending tirade against India, do not appear to be bothering much to the Indian administration.

References:
1. Islamisation of Curricula – A. H. Nayyar, link here.
2. Islam, Democracy and Citizenship Education – An Examination of the Social Studies Curriculum in Pakistan – Iftikhar Ahmad, link here.
3. Peace with Pakistan: Chasing a Mirage – Anil K Athale, link here.

In what was thought to be a verdict of far reaching consequence, back in 1997, the Supreme Court of India had upheld the verdict of the Kerala high court which said that bandhs are illegal and violate the Indian constitution. It was of the view, just like the bench in the Kerala High Court, that bandhs basically “interfere with the exercise of the fundamental freedoms of (other) citizens” while causing economical loss to the nation. If you are interested, you can read the judgment, here.

There was more to come. In 2002, hartals were declared illegal by the Supreme Court of India. In 2004, Shiv Sena was asked to pay a fine for organizing a bandh protesting the Bombay blasts. In 2004 the Calcutta High Court, in 2006 the Kerala High Court and in 2007 the Supreme Court again, have reiterated the verdict that these bandhs are illegal and not constitutional.

Yet, our political parties continue to organize bandhs from time to time. Today being the latest one. It is 9 am as I write this and Shiv Sena has already pelted stones to buses in Mumbai. 84 flights from Mumbai alone stand canceled. Calcutta airport is shut down. Bangalore is shut down. Shiv Sainiks are beating the auto drivers in the streets of Mumbai.

And these are the people who aspire to lead us.

To think that all this has been done to protest against the fuel price hike just does not add up. You do not need to be an economist to figure out that if the demands exceeds the supply, the price will rise. So, it is not congress that is responsible for the price increase in Petrol but the overall demand supply equation. The concept comes into play regardless of the party in power. But from where I see, our politicians cannot be made to understand this.

Thousands of crores of rupees are lost when a bandh like this cripples the country. Buses are stoned, rail coaches are torched. There is no regard for the law. These political figures who take constitutional oaths should be ashamed of themselves.

This is an exploitation of democracy. Its like raping the idea of it. And you know whats worse? These people could be leading us tomorrow.

And that reminds me of something. A few years ago, a journalist friend of mine (a reader of this blog) who is not from India asked me a question which meant something like- In India, do you vote and hope for a better leadership or do you vote for the less worse political party. The question came out of the blue but the answer was clear.

And this is the exact problem with our Democracy. Or whatever it is anyway.

First few days in a new country still and with my work, I have reached a stage where it does not matter which geographic location I am in because it is a work desk where I end up being most of the day (and night). So while I try and make it matter, here’s one message that my wife came across, in Mysore Zoo. I promise you I am not joking here but this is a message so blunt, you’d say its almost atrocious:

“Do not stand, sit, climb or lean on zoo barriers. If you fall, animals could eat you and that might make them sick. Please co-operate.”

It ends up with a mild “Thank you” but also has a stringent warning: “Offenders will be punished”.

Tell you what, next time I visit Mysore, this is the place I want to be at.

At timesofindia.com, a report that is carried by many other Indian news sources, about Pakistan troops opening fire in Pooch, a sector along the Line of Control (LoC) in Kashmir — Violation of cease fire by firing mortar bombs and rockets. Also mentioned is a jawan on the Indian side who was critically injured.

Dawn, Pakistan’s premier newspaper reports a very similar story at its website dawn.com — There was fire yes, but “due to unprovoked firing by Indians”. In fact, a Pakistani soldier “embraced martyrdom” in all this.

Both highly respected publications in their own part of the world, reporting the same incident with two entirely different versions.

Who were these soldiers, one who “embraced martyrdom” on the other side of the fence and the Indian jawan who was “critically injured”? What is the truth? When will this stop? We will never know.