blog@Yantrajaal

The demon of demonetisation has scared the living daylights out of India’s cash-based economy. Whether the aam-aadmi is indeed suffering or whether the quantity of black money unearthed justifies the collateral discomfort is best debated on the sterile but bloody timelines of social media, but what we need right now is a way to facilitate payments -- small, ad-hoc payments -- that keep the engines of commerce running. Can technology play a role here? It certainly can. Let us see how. First we need to popularise software, app-based wallets like SBI Buddy and PayTM with which people can transfer money to each other merely on the basis of their phone numbers. While prima facie these are good options there are some drawbacks. First these are closed-systems, which means that one can only transfer money to someone who already has an identical wallet software. This means, for example, that a person can transfer money from his SBI buddy to someone who has SBI Buddy but not to someon...

Saleem Shahzad's book ("Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban", Pluto Press, 260 pages, available at Flipkart ) is a must read for anyone who is concerned about Islamist terrorism and an eye opener for the student of the murky politics beyond our western border. Going beyond the wealth of information that it presents, what is most remarkable about the book is the frank, no-holds-barred candour with which he presents his point of view from a near first person perspective and had he not been killed after the publication it may have been difficult to believe all that he has said. But his unfortunate murder – in the hands of those whom he had talked about – puts a seal of authenticity on the events, dates and characters that are described in the text. Most of us in India believe that Islamist terrorism – from Kashmir to Mumbai and elsewhere – is the handiwork of  the all powerful Inter Services Intelligence unit, the ISI, of Pakistan and is nurtured in and unleashed from terror...

Given the current confrontational mood between industry and agriculture in the matter of acquisition of scarce land for industrial development it is imperative that we look at totally new or untried models. But before we do so let us first define some boundary conditions -- the Lakshman Rekha -- that cannot be transgressed. No land must be taken by force even by invoking the principle of Eminent Domain by the State unless it is to  be used for a clear public purpose. Land for industry does not fall into the category of public purpose. Land owners, farmers or otherwise, must be paid fair market rates and must be allowed to benefit from the appreciation of prices Industry must not be penalised by extortionary, black mail practices when they decide to move into a region and seek to acquire land for legitimate economic purposes. The role of the Government is to kept to a very minimum since there is no guarantee against a move by politicians and bureaucrats to bend rules and make m...

When Kalyani Chaudhuri, the retired IAS officer from West Bengal started to write a book on the death of bureaucracy and governance, she thought that the Left Front Government would rule the state till the end of eternity. Her book -- When the Pendulum Stops -- recounts the depths of depravity to which a state can sink when it is ruled by one political party for a very long time. We are aware of one party dictatorships in the erstwhile USSR and in China but how is it that West Bengal with its periodic elections have had to share this fate ? Let us go back in time and look through a bit of history. The communist parties came into power on the basis of the general mis-governance perpetuated by the ruling Congress party in the 1970s and the first thing that they did to ensure their permanence in power was "Land Reforms". We have been told ad nauseum that because of these reforms the economic structure of rural Bengal was revitalised to such an extent that the generations ...

Ever since I have had a chance to read the series of books on the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov I have had a great curiosity about and fascination for the imaginary science of psychohistory . But is psychohistory really imaginary ? Can we not use statistical simulation tools to model the behaviour of large human populations. Having toyed with this idea for a while, I thought of publishing it here [ since no journal will ever accept such heresy ]. Take a look  If anyone has an interest in this "science" let us collaborate !

Now that I have grabbed your attention with a couple of big and high sounding words let me justify their use in the title of this post. In any discussion of the Indian State, the first image that pops into our mind is that of the parade with which our armed forces salute the State -- through the person of the President -- on Republic Day. The spectacular nature of this parade, the precision with which the contingents -- both military and civilian ones -- walk, move, act and enact various scenarios is of course something to be proud of but the tragedy of the parade lies in the fact that it has no relation to the way the State actually works outside the parade route. Were we to move away from Rajpath and step into the dungeons of any sarkari daftar , the reality that will confront us is terrifying. Decrepit and stained with betel juice and with piles of dusty files covering innumerable empty desks, government offices -- whether central, state, municipal, panchayat or public sector ...

Maureen Dowd in her op-ed article -- Blue is the new Black -- published in the New York Times has referred to a survey that, if really true, should force us to seriously rethink the outcome of the War of Civilisations. But first what is this survey all about ? " According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier " .... First there is no further reference to this General Social Survey and to the five other major studies ... but we shall let that pass and focus what appears to be the core of Dowd's hypothesis. The reason that women are getting gloomier is because they have more choice today ! In the past, before feminist activism unshackled women from petty domesticity, women lived lives that were tightly controlled by the men in the family -- father, husband, father-in-law and son. They basically did what they were told to do ... and tha...

Text books define history in terms of events and individuals. Hari Sheldon -- the epicentre of thought in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series -- posits an alternate perspective where the ebb and tide of the human saga is independent of both events and individuals and follows what others call the flow of destiny -- the inevitable. But what sets Asimov's interpretation stand apart from those of others is that he packages destiny in the garb of statistical inevitability. What does this mean ? It means that even if specific individual were not present, or specific events did not happen, the tide of history will -- by and large -- be the same. If Hitler was not born then the circumstances in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century would still have resulted in something like the Second World War. If Isaac Newton was not around and the apple did not fall on his head, it is very unlikely that we would still not have known about gravitation. Some one else would have figured t...

Mamata Banerjee should send a big bouquet of red roses to Komrade Karat because it is to him and his arrogant intransigence that she owes the 19+ Lok Sabha seats that she has won yesterday. The Communist Party of Bengal ( and Kerala and Tripura, if you please ) came to power in 1977 and has since been stuck leach-like to this state. While its intial entry was on the basis of certain ideologies, its uninterrupted continuance has been because of (a) its proprietary process of scientific rigging, that I explained in an earlier post and (b) its skillful division of the anti-left vote between the Congress and its offshoot, the Trinamool Congress. This second policy was perpetuated first by supporting the Congress at the centre and second by planting watermelons" in the Congress party in the state -- watermelons being fruits that are are green, the Congress colour, on the outside and RED at heart ! Trapped between the distant machinations in Delhi and the activities of saboteurs in Cal...

When we talk of India under seige, who do we usually think of as our beseigers ? The obvious culprit are the various terrorist outfits operating out of Pakistan, next in line is the Peoples Liberation Army in Tibet and then you have the various terrorist outfits operating from Myanmar, Bangladesh and of course the LTTE in Sri Lanka -- who were the first to create a maniacal cadre of suicide bombers of whom one was used with devastating effect against Rajiv Gandhi .... But if we think again, we will find the real culprits lurking -- or actually not lurking, but parading proudly in our legislative assemblies and in our administrative structure ! This has been reiterated once again with deadly effect in the murder of Uttar Pradesh PWD Engineer M K Gupta by the MLA of the Bahujan Samaj Party, the ruling party in the state ! And why ? because he could not provide Rs 50 lakhs for the birthday party of the state Chief Minister. With such enemies residing in our bosom who needs Kasav & P...

Not one, but TWO of India's formidable enemies were in the newspapers today even though the Islamic terrorists and their assault on Mumbai were by far the most prominent. Politically correct readers would of course take offense at my reference to Islamic terrorists and would point out that Hindu terror also exists and that is precisely the point made most loudly by our pseudo-secularists that I want to debunk first. For the past couple of weeks the Anti Terror Squad is being used by the UPA government in a vain attempt to find these elusive Hindu terrorists who are claimed to be the most dangerous people in the country. I have no doubt that anyone who bursts a bomb and kills people is a criminal and should be punished. But when resources are limited the focus should be on the bigger problem !! Despite all claims to the contrary it is an indisputable fact that if you exclude the Naxalites-Maoists, then 95% all terrorist attacks in the country are carried out by Muslims with the acti...

Politics in Tamil Nadu has taken an unparalleled and unprincipled turn towards hypocrisy with the naked espousal of terrorism. For years India has been crying hoarse about Pakistan and its overt and covert support for the insurgents in Kashmir -- first of the indigenous JKLF variety and then the imported Jihadis of the Taliban, and just when the world has started to listen to us ... the Dravidian parties want us to do what we have been criticising Pakistan about !! The LTTE represents the most venal and vicious brand of terrorism that has menaced the planet -- they were the first to deploy a human bomb and have devalued the concept of motherhood by having their lady cadres conceive a child so that they can take advantage of their pregnancy to elude security checks while carrying bombs strapped to their bodies !!! Whether such depraved terrorists have a genuine cause to fight for or not is none of our concern. There is a democratically elected government in Sri Lanka and they are ...

The news that the Supreme Court is planning to introduce a fast track court for corporates who can afford steep judicial fees -- and in the process earn windfall income -- raises some very disturbing questions. Profiteering from the sale -- at high prices -- of scarce goods and services is referred to as ' blackmarketing ' and in India both the administration as well as civil society views it as crime. Jawaharlal Nehru had in fact wanted blackmarketeers to be hanged from lampposts and even today the government threatens to crack down on hoarders and blackmarketeers every now and then. Unfortunately, if not paradoxically, the Indian state is no stranger to this tendency towards blackmarketing when it comes to the delivery of its own goods and services. " Tatkal " schemes -- in telephones, rail tickets and gas connections -- are nothing but blackmarketing in disguise where those who are willing to pay a premium are delivered scarce goods and services ahead of t...

I have been trying to access the article on Nandigram at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nandigram but have not been able to go past the wikipedia home page and into ANY of the articles. I am from Calcutta and this has been going for the past two days .. My brother-in-law however is able to access the same pages from Ahmedabad .. which I thought was funny. What is even more funny is that even in Calcutta, if I dial into my office LAN and then access the internet through the company firewall ( which happens to be outside Calcutta ) then I have no problems in accessing the same pages. I do know that wikipedia is banned ( or rather blocked ) in China .. by the Great Firewall of China. Is something similar happening here as well.

Today is the 250th anniversary of the Battle of Plassey , where on the banks of the Hooghly River, near the town of Murshidabad, Robert Clive and his Indian allies, defeated the Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal and laid the foundation of British Rule. There will be events to commemorate this Battle and the overwhelming tone and tenor of these events will be that of regretful nostalgia .. to commiserate with the subjugation of India and its loss of independence to a foreign military power. But is this really correct ? Should we not celebrate this event as the dawn of the Indian Renaissance ? Politically correct historians and semi-literate bards and dramatists have given this event an emotional tone that is quite out of sync with the real emotions that were felt by the common people who lived in those tumultuous times. I believe that the population was actually quite jubilant at the fall of the tyrannical Nawab -- and the utter lawlessness that his rule symbolised -- and a direct ec...

After all the murder and mayhem around SEZ and the obnoxious quota regime, there is a ray of hope that things can improve for the better in India. First of course the news Infosys and its 50% growth in quarterly profits. More than Infosys, it is a great sign that things are going well for outsourcing industry in general and the IT industry in particular. But IT adds only 5% to the GDP and touches perhaps 3% people in the country. For the other 97% there is a bigger ray of hope as well thanks to two initiatives taken by the Supreme Court. First : They have tried to free the police from the tyranny of the local party bosses. Policemen are corrupt but not all ... there are some honest law enforcers still left but the moment they do anything good, they are transferred out of the jurisdiction by party bosses whose toes have been tread on. With the formation of the police board in each state, this should be minimised to a large extent. The Home Minister and his cronies will not be able to ...

The SEZ policy is a prime example of the crony-capitalism that hides behind the pseudo-socialistic facade that hangs over India. However it is not something that can be wished away. How can we make the make best use of it. But before that, a quick analysis of the genesis of the current mess. Special Economic Zones were dreamt up by the Indian bureaucracy as a way to emulate China's success story and had two design points. (a) India's notoriously rigid, inflexible and anti-market labour laws will be relaxed so that the nation could compete with China's manufacturing muscle. (b) Tax exemptions will be allowed to make India's companies more competitive. However, bureacrats propose and politicians dispose and so the first casualty of the policy was the labour laws. Faced with the implacable ire of the miniscule, but politically significant organised labour lobby ... the idea of relaxing the labour laws was summarily thrown out of the first available window. That ...

China lovers in India, who can see no wrong with what the Chinese leadership does - whether brutal suppression in Tibet or staking claim to Indian territory in NE -- should please take note of the kind of repression that the Chinese government has unleashed on its own population. Grabbing land from villagers for a song and reselling it to urban realtors and industrialists is big business in India, but the Indian scams pale into insignificance compared to what is happening in China. Follow this link to get the latest update. What makes it even more easy in China is the complete lack of political and press freedom. While Indian politicians -- given that they do have to wear the figleaf of the Indian constitution -- have to allow a motley crowd led by Mamata Banerjee or Medha Patkar to have their say and the media has the right to talk about, no such luxuries is allowed in China. If you dare to protest, first you are shot and then that news is wiped off the face of the earth ... ex...

The communist government in Bengal is facing intense resistance from farmers in their attempt to convert prime agricultural land for industrial use. Allegations of scams and an unholy nexus between party activists and unscrupulous realtors are being flung around every day. Such conflicts however are very common in China but news of such conflicts are generally suppressed by the media there. One such incident has happened recently in Guandong province and has been reported by the BBC

All students and enthusiasts of the History of the Motor Car are aware of the Red Flag law that was in effect in England in the closing years of the 19th century. This was the time when engineers were making the first hesitant attempts to put a steam engine on a horse carriage to see if they could make a self-propelled vehicle that was both light enough to move and yet safe enough for the passengers ... and there were many ideas that were explored. Engineers in England, as well as in France, Germany and other industrialised nations were carrying out various experiments to study different options ... with different degrees of technical and commercial success. But England was the only country where the legislature -- that is Parliament -- had unilaterally and ignorantly mandated that self-propelled vehicles were a danger to the population and hence should they venture out on public roads, they had to be preceded by a man, walking in front, with a red flag. This arbitrary piece of ...