aditya kumar's weblog

Sneha’s spirited travel blog (tra-well.blogspot.com), carries a writeup I wrote specifically for the blog, here. I am crossposting it here, below. I call it, “Chinese Buses and tough questions”.

Chinese buses and tough questions

I do not know, how much is the Chinese presence in the transport services sector in this country but the two long distance bus journeys I have done, were all operated by the Chinese (and mostly used by Indians, but that’s another story). I went to Baltimore and it was a 3.5 hours ride, one way. The plan was impromptu so I had to run around between the various avenues of 34th street, in Manhattan. I had lost almost all hopes of getting a bus until the man at Starbucks told me to go to 34th Street, between 7th avenue and Broadway, for the buses to Baltimore. Turned out, even the locals call it the “Chinese buses”. Why did I go to Starbucks when I was short on time? Free wi-fi. Caf, Decaf, tall or grande, latte or black, flavored or not– tough questions to answer at the Starbucks counter when all you need is to know the bus stop you should be on, in the next 5 minutes.

For whats it worth, Baltimore was a coming of sorts. I used to work for a Baltimore based company, my first American clients at work. We worked for more than 2 years, nurturing a product that was very dear to us only to be told, one fine morning in India, that the company had gone bankrupt. Before that, our folks from India (not me) had been there, worked from that location and sent pictures and videos of the place. The office overlooked the harbor and it was a beautiful sight. Today, with the same colleagues, I went there and had coffee (Starbucks, again) and stared at the magnificent World Trade Center Building that once had our office (the one I had never been to). Its funny, how life comes a full circle. Here I am, I thought, 5 years after a debacle that almost derailed my career, staring at a building and trying to locate the 17th floor, where I got instructions from, for such a long and important part of my career as a software fresher. Who would have thought I’d do this one day? Not me.

Coming back from the same Chinese bus, a middle aged man (possibly Indian, I thought), chose to sit next to me. Turned out, he was from Pakistan. For the most part of the journey, he chatted about how the politicians have rotted his country (and mine), his hatred for Mountbatten and Bhutto and teachings of Mao Zedong. Apart from a brief while when he gave me a mini lecture suggesting me to embrace Islam, talking with him was very insightful and even interesting. For the very little while that it was not, I have learnt to politely nod my head to talks about religion and the propaganda. This is not the first time and this won’t be the last, but I can only hope that I am not subjected to talks of these kind on a bus journey. I have heard the Church’s propaganda at Madison Square when Korean teenage kids came to me and explained how Christ is the answer to all my problems and I have this man, on the left now, who is telling me, point blank, what I should be doing to avoid getting my handsome face burnt in Hell. I find it strange that people think it is okay to propagate on something as sensitive as religion despite being aware (?) that at least for the past few centuries religion, as we know it, has poised more difficult questions than given explanatory answers. Questions at Starbucks, ah, they were easy.

My wife’s maternal grandfather was once the Vice Chancellor of Jammu University. It was a long time ago but recently, exercising his capacity as a retired educationalist, he wrote an open letter to the Kashmiri separatist leader, Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Obviously, it is an outcome of the pain he has experienced because of what the Kashmir valley has gone through in the past few months. I am reproducing the letter here, as is.

An open letter to Mr Geelani

Sir,

Geelani Sahib, I have to say with anguish that your rigid political posture is doing more harm than good to the peace-loving people of Kashmir. I think Pakistan played the most cruel joke with the people of Kashmir by foisting a proxy war on them and now you are shooting your darts. Instead of placing computers and loptops in the hands of the youth of Kashmir to prosper, you are placing stones in their hands to perish.

When you came out of your detention from Chashmashahi hut, you advised the people not to resort to violence. You said to them, ‘‘If you have taken out a procession and you are stopped by the police, you adopt the strategy of the sit-down protest in the Gandhian way without having a violent confrontation with the police. ’’ Everybody welcomed this change in the mode of protests. But, unfortunately, this change did not last long. Again, there was the vicious circle of stone-pelting, firing, loss of a valuable life, a funeral procession, again stone pelting….

If you swore by Gandhian ways of non-violent struggle, you should have halted your agitation at this juncture. The moment there was violence, Gandhiji would withdraw his agitation. He would not wait for 100 youth to die to take this decision. Starting an agitation is easy, but withdrawing an agitation when it is going in a wrong direction, needs courage.

Why are you asking for azadi so passionately ? The dignity and honour of the people of Kashmir are safe in India. Moreover, a Muslim majority State becoming a willing part of India will strengthen the secular character of Indian Democracy which is in the interest of the Indian Muslims. Your stance of azadi gives the impression that Indian Muslims are in India on account of compulsion because they have no other choice. Where they have a choice, they want to opt out of India.

The greatest casualty of the disturbed situation in Kashmir has been the education of the children. And as an educationist I feel concerned about it. During militancy in 1994 I went to Srinagar once. As I passed through Lal Chowk on my way to the Secretariat, I saw children going to schools in their uniforms with bags on their backs. I thought Pakistan had not been able to kill the spirit of the people of Kashmir. What Pakistan could not achieve, you have achieved. The schools and colleges are closed and studies of the students are suffering. Many of them are roaming about in Jammu with their parents and knocking at the doors of local educational institutions seeking permission to attend the classes. What a pity !

And now, Geelani Sahib, I seek a personal favour from you. When I was Director of Colleges from 1973 to 1975, you were an MLA you used to come to me to seek favours for your voters. Now, in turn, I seek one favour from you.

I am told Assalam-o-Alaikum means ‘peace be upon you’. I request you to just say Assalam-o-Alaikum to the people of Kashmir.

Yours etc…
Prof M R Puri
Vice Chancellor (Retd)
Jammu University

Perfect example of making a newspaper website/portal unreadable and drive loyal readers away:

Someone tell these guys at timesofindia.com, money is not everything.

“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.

Out here in America, I have started to long to go back. Clearly a case of a trip gone bad. Who would expect a software company to sponsor a leisure trip but we sure could have done better than a 16-18 hour work day with 5 hours of sleep, going on and on, in an endless spiral.

One of the things that I had hoped to work upon here was to take care of my ever shortening attention span. With not much distractions of the materialistic kind, I had hoped to live a minimal life and spend my free time reading some books, something that I have always enjoyed and also something that could help in building my attention span. But, on the other hand, it has gone shorter — there’s always a lookout for the window flashing on the Windows taskbar. Or a phone vibrating.

A bunch of people who you work with ask you to join a online chat room. The initiating factor is that a high complexity, highly critical issue needs attention. Two hours later, the conclusion is that a high complexity, highly critical issue needs attention. A group of people makes you believe that the problem at hand is highly critical and not finding a resolution would be the end of the world. They think so because there is another group of people who has made them believe it.

In the end its all make believe. But the attention span is sure getting shorter.

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.