(This was written in the aftermath of Virginia Tech and proved prophetical in light of such unfortunate incidents in India as well.) 

It takes a hell of a lot to put the thinking cap on and unfortunately the present case, metaphorically speaking, is one hell of a case. The numbing, horrifying and senseless killings in Virginia Tech must force us to rethink our options, priorities and technological interface in personal life. Or else, mind my words, we are sitting on a timebomb of disoriented youth which will erupt sporadically for next few decades and continuously thereafter.

I am so sorry for being so blunt. But this is the best way to tell it as per my perspective from which readers are welcome to disagree.

The metamorphosis of Learning Centres of the West into the Killing Fields has been slowly but surely evolving for which family, society, Gun Control laws, and technology are collectively to be blamed. No one party is singularly to be blamed but my own instincts tell me that we are apportioning blame onto Gun Control Laws:- something which is atbest peripheral and incidental rather than central to the issue. Let me try to explain why.

Family/Parents: With the break up of joint family system, the avenues of quality emotional support has diminished a great deal. And with Both Parents Working System, it has spelt disaster in the making whose trailer we are seeing now. Earlier there were multi-layered emotional support available for the kids during their growth phases- fathers' support, mothers support when fathers were away, grand-parents and uncles and aunts and nieces. The growth of kids took place under the watchful eyes of more trusted sources than the present ones. Notwithstanding the odd instances of abuses, the system was more oriented towards collective wellbeing rather than individual well being and inculcation of a sense of duty and respect towards others. Life is but a continuation process of give and take and one cannot expect to just take and take. Hence the earlier system was suited to social harmony by cutting on some individual freedoms much in the same way in a Housing Society everybody surrenders some land for development of green space or community hall etc. It is a proven psychological fact that kids who have had more emotional warmth and physical contacts (hugs, games etc.) with parents at tender age tend to have more confidence and well rounded personality than the ones who were not so fortunate. Moreover with a close-knit family, any predisposition towards violence or personality disorders are detected very early in life leading to proper rehabilitation. In all these instances of killings in the schools and colleges of USA, parents were not even aware what their kids were upto or watchful of what the kids were doing, which as per my own standards is an abnegation of ones' own responsibility.

Society: By society, I only mean to say thattoo much and disproportionate stress on  individual rights will have its own distressing and disastrous consequences on collective rights. There is a fine balance between these two rights and individuals who happen to be on the Indifference Curve drawn of these two competing Rights are the best lot.

Media: Media is a double edged sword which will cut both ways. And more so in these times of overdose of information. This information overflow has given rise to copycat incidents which tend to give the perpetrators a sense of warped achievement, even though ephemeral. Kids with personality flaws (disorders?) or ones with lack of self esteem and confidence often take to destructive ways after seeing the same in print or video. Remember that a study says that incidence of suicide is less in those areas where the media reports these incidents lesser. But once these kinds of things start getting reported, an easier way out is shown to those guys on the edge and even though they would not have contemplated something like that on their own, the idea germinates due to media coverage.

Gun Control Laws: A liberal gun control law is not a license to kill! I am forgetting, but in South India there is a place where the custom is to worship arms. And an inhabitant of that area doesnot need license to own arms. (Somebody please tell me the name of that place.) But we don't find people from that area killing everybody else! We should understand that guns are an instrument, much like a knife which can be used by a rogue to kill somebody or a surgeon to save somebody. And remember, Canada doesnot have such liberal gun control laws still this kind of incident (campus shooting) has taken place in Canada as well!)

Technology: When I talk of the technology, I talk about some senseless aspects of technology which is seemingly harmless from outside but might be wreaking havoc inside. Here I am hinting at Violent Videogames doing the rounds the world over which seems to be desensitizing the youth and making them triggerhappy. Once again, these technologies can be used for Virtual Pilot Training or simulations but when our kids are killing on their video screens daily without any adverse reactions or admonishments, what prevents them from continuing the same inside the classrooms?

Having given my diagnosis, I would like to submit my solutions for the criticism of the netizens at Sulekha.

1. The Government should pay one of the parents to be just that-parent. So either the father or the mother should be paid to stay at home and look after the kids till they are, say, 16 years old. This is a small price to pay for a future where we wont be scared of getting killed in school or raped at home. (A recent lawsuit filed in USA has said that incest should be made legal as it infringes on the individuals' rights!) This expenditure should be seen by the governments the world over as Social Sector spending and most advanced form of Affirmative Action.
2. There always have to be a trade off between competing demands and whenever there is a clash between individual good and collective good, collective good should prevail. Keeping this in view, society has to play more assertive role in bringing up their children in conformity with social customs. A concerned and accommodating society would be much better than a detached yet stern law.
3. Guns are just an instruments and these cannot be viified for the folly of their holders. It is the same gun whether wielded by a saviour or a savage. There is a legal maxim that the fear of abuse cannot do away with the use. Hence we cannot say that guns or the lax gun control laws are bad. In India sharp kitchen knives are available all over but we don't hear kids killing a few with those knives. At leat not yet.
4. Technology needs to be guided and directed. It is the same technology that gives energy or does a Hiroshima. But technology which seems to remove from us the fear of ‘real' due to our association with the ‘virtual' needs to be moderated. Or else we would have our youths who would not even know if killing somebody will really bleed them or not! 

If we don't take care of these things now, we would be waiting for a Virginia Tech in India later. The fault lines are already there, and are getting firmed up. And these might erupt in their own sweet time.

Virginia Tech in India? Not Just Yet.  

PrideOfMatchingham

17.04.2007

(This piece was written last year and the same is reproduced here.) 

In his sensational book Freakonomics, Levitt and Dubner have successfully and quite revealingly argued and proved with statistics that the reason for drop in crime in New York from a peak of 1980s to a decline in the 1990s was NOT because any of the following reason  

1. Innovative Policing
2. Increased reliance on Prisons
3. Changes in Crack and other Drug
4. Aging of Population
5. Tougher Gun Control Laws
6. Strong  Economy
7. Increased Number of Police
8. Others (Gun buy back, capital punishment etc.)

But it was because of the landmark Supreme Court judgment in Roe VS Wade in January 1973 extending legalized abortion to the whole of country that the crime graph declined steeply during the 1990s! Stumped?? Well, read on.

When a woman doesnot want a child, she usually has a very good reason.She may be unmarried or in bad marriage, too poor to raise a child or too unstable, unhappy, alchoholic or drug addict. She might be too young or might not have had eucation. For any number of reasons, she can feel that she cannot provide a home environment that is conducive to raising a healthy and productive child.

Studies have proved that childhood poverty, single parent household, teenage mother and low maternal education raises the propensity to commit crime Hence the very factors that drove millions of American women to have abortion also seemed to predict that their children, had they been born, would have led unhappy and possibly criminal lives!

In the first year after Roe VS Wade, some 750000 women had abortion in USA (1 for every 4 live births). But by 1980, the number of abortion had reached 1.6 million (1 for every 2.25 live births!) where it leveled off. The most dramatic effect of legalized abortion was that in the early 1990s, just as the first cohort of children born after Roe VS Wade was hitting its late teens years- the years during which young men enter their criminal prime- the rate of crime began to fall.What this cohort was missing were the children who stood the greatest chance of becoming criminal. And the crime rate continued to fall as an entire generation came of age minus the children whose mothers had not wanted the child. Thus legalized abortion led to less unwantedness, unwantedness leads to high crime;legalized abortion, therefore, led to less crime!

Now my surmise is on the similar lines.

I had argued in my post ‘Virginia Tech in India: No, Not Yet' that more the younger generation is fed on violent videogames, the more they get disjoint from reality and thus the distinction gets blurred leading to regrettable violence. After all these kinds of violent behaviors were not witnessed during the 1980s when such kind of games were not available and computer was not as developed as it is now. A virtual practice of killing removes whatever rudimentary reservations one might have had about it and thus these are the ones who might be more prone to violent behavior which has become the bane of some of the American Universities. Hence we need to take a view (ban?) on these videogames. The immediate effect might not be perceptible, but the long term effect would be just as profound as legalized abortion had on crime!

With the break up of joint family system, the avenues of quality emotional support has diminished a great deal. Earlier there were multi-layered emotional support available for the kids during their growth phases. The growth of kids took place under the watchful eyes of more trusted sources than the present ones. Notwithstanding the odd instances of abuses, the system was more oriented towards collective wellbeing rather than individual well being and inculcation of a sense of duty and respect towards others. The earlier system was suited to social harmony by cutting on some individual freedoms. It is a proven psychological fact that kids who have had more emotional warmth and physical contacts with parents at tender age tend to have more confidence and well rounded personality than the ones who were not so fortunate. Moreover with a close-knit family, any predisposition towards violence or personality disorders are detected very early in life leading to proper rehabilitation. In all these instances of killings in the schools and colleges of USA, parents did not seem to have any clue about their kids.

The cost of keeping a person in jail is about $ 25000 per annum in USA. Even in Indian situation, the cost must be somewhere about Rs. 25000 pa. Add to this the cost of policing. If per capita cost of policing is Rs. 10000, then we are likely to save Rs. 35,000 pa by preventing a child from turning a criminal. If the government were to pay, say, Rs. 30,000 (just a figure) to one of the parents to stay at home (till s/he comes of age) and be a good parent and a policeman-at-home, then we are not only producing productive and sound future generation but also reducing expenditure on policing and concomitant monetary cost of criminality, violence and disruption on society. In that case police will spend their time, energy and resources on hardcore criminals and terrorists. One Godra costs us hundreds of crores, one Gujrat Riot costs us many hundreds of crores, one Mumbai Blast costs us thousands of crores. Given the fragile social condition here, payback time for our investment in our own future might not be long.

Time to think, is it?  

PrideOfMatchingham

31.07.2007

One of the most celebrated scientists of this century Watson of the famed Watson & Crick duo who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double helical structure of DNA seemed to have put his foot or rather both his feet in his mouth when, while promoting his autobiographical memoir ‘Avoid Boring People and Other Lessons From a Life in Science' in London he suggested genetic reasons for lesser intelligence of Blacks. Expectedly, it created the storm leading to public opprobrium for the scientist who, till his faux pass, was a sought after speaker in any scientific gathering and after his interview became an outcaste, lost Chancellorship of Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory!

Let us read his exact words to form our own opinions.

In an interview with the Sunday Times, London, he was quoted as saying that he was gloomy about Africa's prospects because "all our policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours whereas all the testing says not really."  He further said that he hoped that everybody was equal, but that "people who had to deal with black employees find this is not true." Subsequently in an interview with The Independent he said:" The overwhelming desire of society today is to assume that equal powers of reason are a universal heritage of humanity. It may well be. But simply wanting this to be the case is not enough. This is not science. To question this is not to give into racism."

Needless to say, the intersect of race and intelligence is a veritable minefield capable of destroying many a careers. But has the reaction of international community been proper and proportionate or it has been an over the top reaction with too much focus on being ‘politically correct' rather than ‘scientifically cautious'?

Watson's first comments to The Sunday Times did seem uncharitable towards a race  but a life of 85 years devoted to science and devoid of controversies cannot all of a sudden transform into an yearning for newsprint space and negative publicity unless the scientist knew what he was talking about. And his subsequent comments to The Independent does show his sincerity that merely wanting equality is not enough. So what if he had reasons to say what he said?

Vilification of Watson may have been right if he had advocated ‘cleansing' but if he was stating a ‘vague' premise about race and its effect on intelligence from a scientific perspective then in my opinion he deserves our kudos not only for stating such an unpleasant truth but also because it will force us to have a relook at our policies framed at weaker sections.

Forgetting the social niceties and the wordings of his comments, people should look at his line ‘all our policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours whereas all the testing says not really'. ( I am aware that later he retracted his statement but my own take is that his retraction was more due to pressure than anything else.) If he is talking about tests scientifically done observing the rigors of scientific analysis then his comments need to be looked at not from the coloured (pun intended) perspectives of racism but from the perspectives of illumination.

Any scientific investigation should keep us ready that the result of science may not come to our liking. Science has no perspectives. It is right or wrong, factual or factless, revealing or revolting. Science is Boolean. It cannot be this as well as that. Our obsession with ‘political correctness' has brought us to a stage where certain things have almost become a taboo. This boundary needs to be broken if we want to reach out further in our quest for knowledge. And if atall there does exist a relationship between race and intelligence and it is incorrect to talk about it then we need to build a new lowest common denominator of human ingenuity which would be universal to all humans regardless of race and which would not be called ‘intelligence'.

And as the Professor of Bioethics at Princeton wrote ‘No matter what the facts on race and intelligence turn out to be, they will not justify racial hatred, nor disrespect for people of other race.' It should just be one more factoid like the Asians being genetically more prone to having coronary diseases.

In scientific investigations, many premises are built on informed inquisitiveness which are tested and discarded or otherwise after careful research. Let this be one such premise needing unbiased scrutiny. World would be richer for the knowledge, one way or the other.

After all it is always better to be even vaguely right than exactly wrong.

PrideOfMatchingham

PS: With all the sincerity at my command, I want to submit that I donot consider myself a racist. I am a desciple of Learned Buddha and try to walk the path advocated by him. My emphasis is only to appeal to scientific temper rather than to social temper.

(This letter was written in response to the letter by Mr. Paul White, President and CEO of Oriental Express Hotel where he had rebuffed the initiatives of Indian Hotel Group to increase partnership and cooperation between these two brands as Indian Hotels own 11.5% stake in Orient Express. Mr. White had written:

"We donot believe that there is a strategic fit between your predominanty domestic Indian hotel chain and our global portfolio of luxury hotels and unique travel experiences and we donot wish to be involved in an attempt to improve the performance of your non-Indian properties. We believe any association of our luxury brands and properties with your brands and properties would result in a reduction in the value of our brands and of our business and would likely lead to erosion in the RevPar premiums currently achieved by our properties. (emphasis mine)" )

Dear Sri Ratan Tata

The racially loaded, colonially inclined and contemptuously worded letter of the President and CEO of Orient Express Hotels Mr. Paul White has stirred feelings in me the existence and intensity of which I was not aware of till now! If this expression of colonially and racially inclined business could hurt me so much as an Indian then the pain and anguish of our business pioneers during the colonial times, whose shadows it seems still loom large on sub-continental business, can only be guessed.

Sir, everybody says that you are a nice guy. That you do not go for hostile takeover. That you are a sensitive rather than sensational businessman. That you create opportunity rather than opposition. That you are humane rather than hard boiled. And I agree with them. But your nicety should not be mistaken for your weakness. Your opposition to hostile take over should not be mistaken for lack of killer instinct. Your sensitive nature should not be mistaken for squeamishness. Your creation of opportunity should not be mistaken for your dread of opposition. And your humanism should not be taken as a sign of oesteoporotic invertebracy.

The defining moments of the world have been preceded by insults to the pioneers. The perfume and eau-de-cologne insult by Arcelor's chief, Guy Dolle to Mittal in not too distant a past to a very historic insult to your own grand father and an iconic name Jamshetji Nusserwanji Tata by Sir Frederick Upcott, the then chief commissioner of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, who promised to "eat every pound of steel rail [the Tatas] succeed in making" come to mind immediately. It is a different matter that Sir Upcott did not keep his words and ate not ‘every pound of steel rail' but only his own words.

But after these slurs come the sweet and satisfying scent of success which only an abject surrender of an otherwise belligerent and aggressive adversary can bring. And therein lies the true motto of enterprises-a silent win is better than a rhetorical defeat.

Sir, for long we have suffered these racial slurs and colonial mindsets. But no more. The time has come to tell the world in a voice ringing with the cool confidence of a resurgent India that when the US economy suffered from an anaemia of exchequer due to haemophilic subprime blues, the Citi Bank did not consider their brand value getting eroded when they turned to an Indian to guide it safely to the shores. Or that the Vodafone or the PepsiCo did not consider it infra dig to be stewarded by Sarin or Nooyi. Or that Ford will not consider their value eroded if it sells its Jaguar and Land Rovers to Tatas as Corus did not consider their value being eroded before marrying into Tata Empire or Novelis into Birla Empire.

There comes a time in the history of big enterprises- political or business- when defining decisions, often at variance with the cultural bequeath and heritage of that enterprise, are taken. If Sri Nusserwanji had not broken the mould and traversed the path he chose to, he would also have joined priesthood like many before him in his family. But that one decision by Nusserwanji changed the business map of India and the world. Tata Group is at one such critical point of history when a path-breaking decision needs to be taken- a decision which has the potential of defining the course of this group for the next 200 years as it has been defined by a decision of Nusserwanji to venture into business some 200 years ago. This is the time to break one more mould- of allergy to hostile takeovers.  And at this historic juncture my appeal to you would be to be ruthless in your pursuit of Orient Express Hotels once an initiative has been taken so that history is served a timely reminder of the fate of arrogance at the hands of elegance. And let us disregard the judgemental trivialities about being typecast as a predatory entrepreneur when in effect it is just furthering the national causes and identity.

Sir, legend has it that Jamsetji set his mind on building The Taj in Mumbai (completed in 1903 at the cost of Rs. 4.21 Crores) after being denied entry into one of the city's hotels for being an Indian. It seems divinely ordained and appropriate that another Tata should be spurred on to build on the present insult 100 years after his grand father made the most of that incident. And this time nothing less than takeover -hostile or otherwise- of Orient Express Hotels would do. One insult 100 years back gave us The Taj in Mumbai, one insult now would give us the Orient Express Hotels!

Once the take over is done, in keeping with the great Indian tradition of compassion, we would request you to retain Mr. Paul White, president and CEO of Orient Express Hotel and writer of that libellous letter as one of the functionaries of Indian Hotels so that he understands that whiteness is in deed and not in name. And this gesture of poetic justice would indicate that the wheel had turned full circle.

Sir, take your call. History is waiting to be made. And your signature is needed. Nice guys need not finish second. Not any more.

PrideOfMatchingham 
31.01.2008

The first time I set my eyes upon her, my heart skipped a beat. A feeling hitherto unknown to me overwhelmed me. I was engulfed by a tsunami of emotions about which I had only heard but not experienced. Was it what they call the euphoria of the highest order? Was it an affair about which much has been written and little understood? Was it one of the barometers of purest emotions? Was it what would make any loving and caring human being gladly give his heart and soul without batting an eyelid? Was it what made life worth giving up for but living many times over? Was it what made a slave out of a beast? As I confessed right in the beginning, the whole gamut of emotions I underwent at the time when I had my first look at her were unknown to me. I just vaguely remember thinking that here she was and she was mine. She had to be mine. As simple as that!

I madly and unabashedly fell in love with her or rather rose in love with her. An unlikely example of love at first sight. Unlikely because I was the person smitten. That was 27th march 2003.

Plato (isn't it him?) said that "love transmogrifies people into romantic idiocy". And how true he was! Here I was. A person known in his peer group to be cynical almost to the extent of being branded an anti-social. A person who was widely known to be averse to display of emotions. A person who used to think it was not worth giving much ‘bhao' (credence/attention) to girls. A person who thought that his analytical bent of mind made him impervious to any emotions. A person who thought reason alone is supreme and emotion subsidiary. And a person who thought that any relationship is a function of material and quantifiable things. That person was behaving in a sheer brilliance of lunacy just after one glance at her! Indulging in public display of emotions. Giving exaggerated importance to the fairer sex. Acknowledging the influence of love on personality. Plato almost wrote about me when he penned the above lines.

Her arrival in my life was not so much of a landmark in her life as it was in mine. Those first few glances were enough to relegate analyticism to the hinterlands of my mind where no thought processes ever traveled. When my friends ask me what made me jelly-spined and pea-brained after looking at her for the first time, I tell them, almost as a cliché, that it was her eyes and hair. After all, you don't expect to get those searching looks from someone who has seen you for the first time or whom you are seeing for the first time. But those inquiring eyes pierced my heart through and through. As if she was wanting to get into my heart and see if I was the right sort of guy and if it was the right place to be in for all times to come. To reassure herself before she became mine. And those tufts of hair so carelessly tossed all over her head in some oily-jelly-fluid. ‘Carefully-done-for-the-careless-effect' kind of a thing, if you know what I mean. I looked at her, she kept looking at me and then she went inside with others. Those few moments redefined my life, my perspectives and my attitudes.

I called up all my friends and relatives. I firmly believed in myself breaking news to my own people before they get to hear about it from other sources. Their reactions ranged from genuine happiness to cultivated circumspection to false euphoria to considered sympathy to abject derision. My social duty over, I set about contemplating the course of action to win my beauty to my side. Completely. Afterall, being the first time, I wasn't aware of the social mores. And the expectations. My only advantage was that I was willing to goto any extent for her.

My efforts paid rich dividends.  She started reciprocating my gestures. She even gave me a friendly smile in just a few weeks of my courtship. Or was it pursuit. May be she played hard to get in the beginning but slowly and slowly she had started liking me to the extent that her eyes used to lit up on seeing me. And mind you, this when I am no great looker! And I knew I was on the winning path when she fidgetedly started waiting for me outside when it was time for me to call it a day in office. And I knew I had done it when she started recognizing my car's horn and come to the gate to give me that 10000 watt smile which I am sure was reserved only for me and which could have done wonders for the infrastructure sector of even developed countries. I had done it! Voila Pappu pass ho gaya!

All this was also time for me to experience new kinds of feelings and newer kinds of joys. Feelings and joys that for me had hitherto existed only in the poets' hearts' or writers' imagination. A whole new ‘me' was created which was almost antithetical to the old ‘me'. Here I was ready to worship the earth she walked on in contrast to the earlier ‘me' who would have wanted to cleanse the earth a girl walked on!

Soulful togetherness and joyous companionship went on even higher pedestal when after fourteen months from that C-day of March the 27th, we bathed together. It was a joy which is beyond my literary skills and I wanted it to continue for eons. That soft and gentle rubbing of soap on her pristine skin and cute bums and her failed effort at trying to extricate herself from me is etched in my heart and mind for ever. The giggle which escaped her mouth whenever I tickled her during bathing and the consequent twinkle in her eyes were worth dying for many times over.

Whenever my friends ask me what made me change my attitude and perspectives so much, I always attribute it to my continuing love affair. Then, like a fool, they ask me if my love affair has given me anything tangible (as if there has to be material manifestations of sublime things)!!?

I reply that whenever I ask her," Whose darling you are?" she always replies," I am your darling, daddy."

Do I or will I ever need anything more in this world or the world beyond?

PrideOfMatchingham

19.08.2006