A modified version of a “Manifesto” on Anna Hazare currently being circulated in social networking sites

1. I am not anti-corruption. I don’t know how to define “corruption”. It is injustice and not corruption which is the biggest problem in a class and caste-ridden society. Honesty and injustice can perfectly co-exist.

2. Janlokpal Bill is of little use to us; in fact, there are fundamental problems with the proposed bill which makes it inherently dangerous.

3. Anna-Hazare has a right-wing history and many of his supporters either have right-wing intentions or represent an elite social class interested in depoliticization. HOWEVER….

4. This government is clearly leading us towards fascism. Its current handling of Anna Hazare and his supporters represent one of the many examples of its fascist tendencies, albeit not the most blatant (but certainly the most widely publicized) example.

5. A fetishism with institutions like elections and law is usually the last refuge of a fascist. These institutions primarily exist to defend the interests of the ruling privileged social class.

6. This fascist regime needs to be resisted. Those who are out on the streets resisting this fascist regime must be encouraged. Our disagreement with them must not be a reason for us to turn away or to discredit them. Instead, the solution lies in strengthening the resistance by politicizing it, and expanding its ambit from a narrow depoliticized view on corruption to a wider view on injustice in a class and caste-ridden society. To quote from a May 1968 slogan: “The politics is in the streets”.

7. No matter how much anti-Anna Hazare you are, to prioritize that at the moment is to be a party to a ride to fascism well-piloted by the current regime. At the current moment in history, to take such an ahistorical position would be objectively reactionary.

Also read my earlier post on this issue.

[This is a modified version of a short note / manifesto being widely circulated in the social networking sites. The original version is believed to have been first posted by Peter Griffin and might be found here.]

Of Spectacles, Farce & Anna Hazare’s Fast

One of the interesting aspects of the discourse around the spectacle involving Anna Hazare & Lokpal Bill is a universalization and depoliticization of the term “corruption”. Forget those eulogizing or joining this farce, even those critical of this spectacle typically begin with a clarification that corruption indeed is a “problem” that needs to be prioritized, perhaps at the cost of other “problems”. Such universalization is indeed surprising and defies logic. Given that even organizations like the Transparency International are yet to arrive at a consensus on how to define, let alone measure “corruption”, obviously such universalization of the term “corruption” involves an abstraction that we are missing out in this discourse.

Let us put this in context. Consider a society with a prior arbitrarily specified assignment of endowment of resources. Further, assume that this endowment is protected by a legal provision of property rights. Obviously, as anyone who has studied even a basic course in economic theory will tell you, members of such a society are likely to enter into a series of voluntary mutually beneficial exchanges. Such mutually beneficial exchanges would typically be legally permitted in a society with property rights, until one reaches a limit of such transactions. Any re-allocation or redistribution of resources beyond this limit would require subverting the legal framework accompanying the existing arrangements of property rights. Further, assuming as most standard economic theorists do, that individuals in this society are selfish and care only about their own welfare, it would follow that most members of this society would actually desire to subvert the legal framework in order to achieve such a re-allocation or redistribution. Fear of punitive legal measures would be the only reason preventing them from actually executing such a desire. In other words, ultimately it would be a balance of the expected benefits from a redistribution and the expected costs of legal punitive measures which will, in the ultimate analysis determine how many individuals in such a society would respect the “rule of law”.

Let us now be more specific. Assume that the initial assignment of property rights is unequal and vastly favors a small section of the society. Further, assume a political structure where the balance of political power resembles the balance of economic power, i.e. the individuals or the group benefitting from the initial endowment of property rights are also the ones who enjoy greater political power. One can think of three possible responses from individuals in this society with regard to their prior assigned property rights. Firstly, there would be a (rebel) group wanting a re-allocation towards a more equitable distribution of resources and wealth. Secondly, there would be a group which would want a re-allocation to a more inequitable distribution in their favor. Thirdly, there would be a law-abiding group whose balance of costs and benefits from an attempt to subvert law would make them favor status quo.

Focusing on the first two groups, let us next look at the specific form that such an attempt at redistribution of resources through subversion of law might take. Such attempts might take the form of (a) physically attempting to redistribute resources (stealing, robbery, dacoity etc.) (b) attempts to change the balance of political power so that a large-scale redistribution can be undertaken (political mobilization, activism, terrorism, coup etc.) and (c) attempts at using existing distribution of political power to undertake redistribution of resources in their favor. It is clear that the rebel group attempting a more equitable distribution would adopt (a) and/or (b), whereas the group attempting a more inequitable distribution would, under normal circumstances, adopt (c) (though an adoption of (a) or (b) also might not be ruled out). It is also obvious that it is (c) which would typically correspond to what we normally understand as “corruption”. The point to note is that (c), in some sense, represents an unfinished project of sorts. In other words, we should expect (c) to be prevalent in societies where the dominant political group has not yet finished reallocating economic resources to itself to the extent justified by its political clout. The unfinished project would come to an end only when the ruling elite has undertaken the task of consolidation through suitably controlling the political structure. A classic case of such a corruption-free society would be a dictatorship – the ultimate dream of anti-corruption brigade. However, experience shows that even a political democracy with appropriate institutional arrangements to prevent a democratic uprising from below can do the job pretty well.

The above point would be clearer if we consider the wide divergence in the legal framework which governs the definition of corruption across space and time. For instance, in an era of license raj, the elite would need to be “corrupt” in order to satisfy consumeristic aspirations which would be considered “legal” elsewhere. A dismantling of this license raj structure, therefore, reduce “corruption” in such a society through a process of consolidation by the dominant political class, so that they would no longer need to break a law to satisfy consumerist aspirations. Similarly, the erstwhile “communist” countries represented a classic case of such “unfinished project” – where the ruling elite (for instance, leaders of communist parties under the Leninist vanguard model) was yet to consolidate, making these regions some of the most “corrupt” in the world. The developed countries, on the other hand, where such a consolidation has already taken place a long time back, are also some of the least “corrupt”.

The current discourse on corruption need to be seen in this context. Existence of rampant “corruption” in India represents an unfinished project by the ruling elites to consolidate, and to re-allocate economic resources in a fashion that better represents their political clout. It is an unfinished project that started with post-independence state-led industrialization, continued with dismantling this very structure created in the first phase with the process of liberalization and economic reforms. Calls to “end corruption”, in this sense, must be looked upon as a ruling class demand which is impatient with the unfinished project. The fact that the much publicized “Jan Lokpal Bill” takes clear steps of taking India towards fascism comes as no surprise. After all, fascism is a logical culmination of the unfinished project, leading to ultimate elitist dream of a “corruption-free”, in fact all vice-free society where the rule of law prevails, because the law is framed by those in control of the political structure which is able to suppress any defiance with an iron hand. The fact that such a discourse should occupy so much of popular imagination also represents a triumph of this social class. Both the “corrupt” and “anti-corrupt” emerges from the same social class with the same objective, making a spectacle out of the shadow-boxing match.

One might, however, pose a question as a counter-argument to above: is it not a fact that the poor also does get affected by corruption? Is it not the case that in a corrupt society, the poor also needs to pay bribes to get work done, and where the impact of many pro-poor policies are reduced due to existence of corruption? Such an argument, however, is misleading on several counts. Firstly, while it is true that the poor is often forced to pay bribes out of meagre income, it is also equally true that the same poor is also forced to pay a price in the market for almost anything else he/she buys. Emphasizing the first component (bribe) while finding nothing immoral or wrong about the second involves a value judgement that, with little justification, places a moral superiority in fairness of the markets. An unbiased analysis demands that one is as critical of existence of markets as one is with the existence of corruption. In fact, to the extent that a poor spends a greater fraction of income in market rather than in paying bribes, abolition of markets should take precedence over abolition of corruption. Secondly, to the extent that the poor does get affected by corruption, it represents a balance of political and economic power for which the anti-corruption brigade has little solution. Detaching “corruption” out of this whole package would mean very little, and offers very little to the poor victims. The only section of the society which would benefit from such an end to “corruption” would be the ruling elite, which would be able to consolidate in a way that it no longer needs to be corrupt.

Making a spectacle out of this shadow-boxing match, however, also has a few additional significance. It would be worthwhile to recall that, while a farce is created out of a 98-hour hunger strike in the heart of the capital under the glare of media and celebrities, in the same country another brave woman still continues with a decade long hunger-strike against one of the most oppressive laws of this country – the Armed Forces Special Power Act 1956. There are also powerful and very real forces of resistance against injustice taking place at this very moment around the country. In other words, in term of our earlier classification, there is a lot of (a) and (b) happening around the country. In the midst of these very real struggles emanating from below, making a spectacle out of Anna Hazare’s fast has an important significance. By fetishizing corruption, it detaches the broader exploitative system from the misery of our existence, while the spectacle itself provides an outlet for alienation. The irrationality of the farce of mobilization around such a spectacle eventually succeeds in reducing the credibility of all mobilizations, including more legitimate ones. Anna Hazare’s 98-hour farce of a fast for a cause that is essentially anti-democratic occupies the space that might have belonged, for instance, to the far more legitimate eleven-year long fast of Irom Sharmila. It is this aspect of spectacle that one needs to keep in mind while making an appraisal of the unfolding drama at Jantar Mantar. It would be apt here, to remember an old situationist slogan: “Irrationality of the spectacle spectacularizes rationality.” It is this spectacularization that we need to pay careful attention to stay away from.

A Pedagogical Comment on Teaching Macroeconomics at the Undergraduate Level

I spent my last few days grading scripts of undergraduate students. Two of the papers I teach use popular contemporary textbooks written by prominent writers in the field, including more than one Nobel laureates. Some of the more difficult topics in these textbooks, and also the ones where the students are most prone to making mistakes in exams, include among other things, an analysis of determination of the rate of interest from an interaction of a demand for money function with an exogenously given stock of money supplied by the central bank.

It has been nearly two decades that bulk of macroeconomists and policymakers arrived at a consensus to conduct monetary policy by directly administering the rate of interest. The other alternative, of conducting monetary policy by controlling the level of monetary aggregates, critically depended for its success on the existence of a stable demand function for money – a matter of considerable debate in the discipline. Direct administration of the rate of interest bypasses all these contentious issues, and hence, is a lot more reliable policy instrument. Most of the contemporary literature on monetary policy attributes this idea to this oft-quoted 1993 paper by John Taylor, though the history of such a policy prescription goes at least as far back as Wicksell in 1907. A very successful implementation of such direct administration of the rate of interest by the Swedish Riksbank in the 1930s is reported, among others, by Jonung and Woodford. A series of studies by Clarida, Galí & Gertler showed that the monetary policy followed by the US Federal Reserve during the Volcker & Greenspan era actually involved a direct administration of the rate of interest. In fact, with the exception of the German Bundesbank, central banks in almost all major developed countries around the world are reported to be targeting the rate of interest rather than the level of monetary aggregates.

The pertinent question which arises, therefore, is why major textbooks, especially macroeconomics textbooks, still persist with using money markets, with a stable demand function for money, as the primary tool for analyzing monetary policy. As someone teaching macroeconomics to the undergraduate students over the years, I have personally witnessed the students struggling with the rather complicated (and I dare add, far-fetched) concept of demand functions and exogenously given supply of money leading to a change in the rate of interest. The textbook explanation of this varies from one textbook to another: from the simplistic demand-supply equilibrium to more evolved fairy tales involving portfolio imbalance, the bond markets, liquidity preference schedule etc. The serious problems with all these explanations are now well-known in the literature. What does it say about the academic integrity of our profession that we gloss over all these serious problems and continue to teach these models to generation after generation of students? Especially when, at the stage of evaluation, we note that this is an area where the students are most prone to making mistakes (a fact admitted even by some of the authors of these textbooks), perhaps because we ourselves are not convinced with what we teach?

Sure enough, there is no lack of pedagogical alternative. These issues have been raised by several prominent people in the discipline, including by Taylor himself, as well as a series of other contributions (see for instance, these contributions by David Colander, David Romer and Paul Turner) – all these contributions offer pedagogical alternatives. At the post-graduate level, there are at least two popular textbooks, by Michael Woodford and Jordí Galí, which dispenses with the discussion on money markets altogether in favor of interest rate rules. I myself have dabbled with a (slightly) more complex pedagogical alternative in a contribution included in a forthcoming edited collection from OUP. Why do we still continue to teach the complicated money market analysis to the undergraduate students nearly two decades since there was an apparent consensus in the profession against these models? Why do even latest editions of popular textbooks written by Nobel laureates persist with obsolete complicated models to the agony of teachers and students? There exists few excuses for doing so, except blaming it on the conservative and arrogant nature of our professional field itself.

Alienation & Free Riders in water-logged Delhi

Yesterday, two hours of heavy showers brought Delhi to a standstill. Roads turned into rivers, with areas under flyovers and railway overbridges waterlogged enough to submerge entire buses. Like many other Delhites, I spent several hours on Delhi roads returning home from my workplace, in what should have been half-an-hour’s journey. While enough has been written and commented about the crumbling state of Delhi’s infrastructure, especially in light of upcoming Commonwealth Games in Delhi, this post is about another related issue which emerged from yesterday’s experience.

Trouble started minutes after we drove out from my workplace into the main Shahdara crossing in north-east Delhi. For returning home, we need to take a left turn to the main arterial road connecting north-east Delhi to east Delhi towards Patparganj, which passes under a railway bridge. This stretch is frequently flooded during rains. We tentatively took the left turn, wondering whether this stretch was still motorable. Soon we realized that it was not. Water was accumulating fast under the bridge and I perhaps missed my opportunity to drive through this stretch by a few minutes. My immediate response was to turn back, but once again, I realized I was a bit late and a substantial traffic had already gathered behind me. So there we were, facing the bridge that by now resembled a fiery river, with no way back and the level of water rising scarily fast.

A few brave souls attempted to move on and try to beat the rising waters by driving through, while goading others to do the same. None of them managed to reach the other end. They were soon forced to abandon their vehicles midway and swim back to the shore to join a rather substantial crowd of onlookers watching these vehicles slowly getting submerged under water.

Right from the beginning, it was clear that there was only one way out of the mess – and that was to get all the vehicles reverse a few metres (I repeat – just a few metres), putting them onto another perpendicular road towards Kashmiri Gate. While there was a slow and heavy traffic on that road, at least the road was motorable. All we needed was to make about a dozen vehicles reverse and change course. Since our vehicle was one of the first ones to get stuck, our way out depended on all the other vehicles doing the same.

Yet, we all stayed put, ruing our condition, and just watching the water level rise steadily – by now touching the floor of our car – with no one having the faintest of idea what they were waiting for. Clearly, it would not be possible to move ahead for next many hours, so what the hell was everyone waiting for? Why on earth would the vehicles behind me not reverse and try an alternative route? Even assuming that the last vehicle in the queue did not realize this (which was the case, I found out later), why would the other persons ahead of him not realize this and bring some sense into this fellow? Yet, almost everyone caught up in this mess displayed a strange sense of stoic helplessness. In fact, in an absolutely innate display of irrationality, some drivers got into meaningless altercations and brawls which soon took the shape of fisticuffs.

How we got out of the mess is not germane to my point here. (In fact, finally some people did manage to find a way to open up a small lane so that some cars could reverse, after several hours) What I found remarkable was a complete inability of a group of strangers to undertake even a basic minimum collective action, which at that time seemed to be the only solution to a problem we all were collectively caught in.

A failure for a group of strangers to undertake collective action should not come across as either unexpected or problematic for many people living in developed world, where an institutional setup is expected to provide solutions to civic problems. In fact, this reminded me of a personal experience a few years back while I was traveling along the coastline of Southern Spain. While waiting for a bus in a crowded bus stop, I was accosted by two small time thugs turned robbers. Growing up in India, we are too accustomed to seek safety in the crowd. Traditionally the crowd has always worked as a credible threat for miscreants in India because of it’s ability to take collective action – after all who would want to risk getting beaten up by a mob? The lesson that I learnt from my experience in Spain, however, is that in the absence of this credible threat, the crowd offers little safety. Despite an entire crowd watching me being attacked by two robbers, with many in the crowd wanting to be of some help, they had no idea how to provide help. Without the ability to act collectively, a crowd of more than hundred people were helpless in front of two small time thugs, and I was unsafe till I could access institutional help. In other words, an institutional network had not only replaced the need for collective action, it had erased such possibilities from collective memory.

Inability to act collectively is one of the direct outcomes of the alienation of working class under advanced capitalism. Capitalism alienates the working class not only from the act of production, but also from the social relationship between individuals of working class by replacing collective rationality with individual rationality. A simple exposition of this alienation is demonstrated in the classic ‘Free Rider’ problem, emerging from a non-cooperative solution to a game of prisoner’s dilemma. Put simply, this widely discussed game describes how two rational individuals, acting independently, would choose a non-cooperative solution as equilibrium strategy, even though choosing a cooperative solution is mutually beneficial to both. As a result, ‘rational’ individuals would act as ‘Free Riders’, like our fellow travelers stuck under the Shahdara railway bridge. Everyone would ‘rationally’ want to free ride on someone else taking an initiative, with the result that the initiative would never be taken. Collective action, in other words, would be ‘irrational’. Acting as free riders would be ‘rational’, never mind the fact that such ‘rational’ behavior generates absolutely irrational and stupid outcomes, like sinking or watching fellow travelers sink in water when the problem has a simple solution involving collective action of reversing a dozen cars out of the way.

Such individually ‘rational’ action involving an absence of collective action, however, critically requires lack of consciousness of individual players from aggregate or social outcome of their decisions. In other words, it presumes a destruction of social consciousness. After all, a non-cooperative solution can never be a rational equilibrium strategy for socially conscious individuals. If each player could see the social outcome of their decisions, then only a collective action would be a rational equilibrium behavior. This is evident even from the way the basic prisoner’s dilemma game is set-up. Remember the first course in game theory: the two prisoners in ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ are always locked in separate cells and not allowed to interact with each other. In Marxian terminology, we could say that the two prisoners are ‘alienated’. Such alienation is crucial to prevent a cooperative solution. Since cooperative solution might lead to collective action, including collective resistance to capitalism itself, alienation is also crucial for efficient functioning of advanced capitalism.

Such alienation and destruction of social consciousness, however, also breeds problems like the free rider problem. In order to display capitalism as a well-functioning system, these problems need to be resolved, at least at its core (read developed countries). So the capitalist state moves in, to provide institutional arrangements which take the place of collective action. Such institutional arrangements, by masking the social outcomes of individual rationality, contribute to further alienation of the working class. With institutional arrangements in place, the working class now remains happily alienated at the core without facing the social outcomes of alienation (or more precisely, without facing the problems of a free rider), while the periphery (read developing countries) can remain happy aspiring to join the happily alienated working class at the core. The alienation at the periphery, however, unlike the one at the core, takes place without the backup of institutional arrangements. Demonstration effect from the working class at the core, along with a destruction of social consciousness, prevents possibilities of collective action emerging at the periphery. Never mind the crumbling infrastructure, once alienated, people in waterlogged streets of Delhi (periphery) would fail to undertake even the most basic collective action even though there is no institutional arrangement to take care of their woes.

Indeed, as we managed to get out of the mess at Shahdara, and managed to crawl through the rush hour traffic towards central Delhi, the familiar problem of water-logging reappeared several times. However, there was an institutional backup this time, in the form of traffic police managing traffic, preventing the development of a Shahdara-type mess. As we moved somewhat towards the core, some semblance of institutional arrangements appeared.

A lot has been written and discussed about the destruction of the traditional social support system and social consciousness in modern, and especially urban India. This issue, however, has been unnecessarily mystified. Marx’s concept of alienation in capitalism provides a simple explanation of this phenomenon. How far such alienation is sustainable at the periphery, without the institutional backup present at the core, however, remains to be seen. One might well interpret this to be a revolutionary potential (or a return to collective action) beginning from the periphery.

Trip to North Kerala

Just back from an interesting trip to North Kerala, which, thankfully, has largely remained outside the main tourist circuit of Kerala so far. Stay tuned for a detailed write-up and photographs from the trip.

My recipe for Chicken quorma

Starting a new category, in an attempt to spell out some of the recipes that I have tried and tested overtime (and which worked). Here is a recipe which I attempted to reconstruct on request from a friend, after she tasted and liked the end product
[Note: I do not follow a professional format of writing recipes, so you have to do the hard work of making a list of ingredients as you go through the recipe!]

Process:

1. Dry roast each of the following separately:
a) Garlic: the quantity depends on you. Since I am fond of garlic, I go liberally on this: about a cupful of garlic cloves for about 750 gms of chicken [Note: you can skip roasting garlic and use raw garlic instead. The final result will be very different. You can make a judgement depending on your preferences.]
b) Dry red chillies : De-seeded if you prefer color, with seeds if you want heat, or some combination of the two. Quantity depends on how hot you want your quorma to be!
c) Small quantity of cumin seeds. (If you have shahi zeera, you can skip roasting and use them raw)
d) Assortment of spices: About a handful, of cloves, cinnamon, javitri, black pepper. Optional: also add a bit of crushed black cardamoms, jaiphal & kababchini. Roast them till they start crackling, but remove them before they burn.

2. Fry some onions in oil till they are golden brown and release their juices into the oil.

3. Take all the above ingredients, along with some salt to taste, two-three green cardamoms and a bit of ginger and grind them along with some hung curd to a fine paste. Optional: You can also add a pinch of turmeric powder and red chilly powder and/or green chillies at this stage.

4. Make small cuts into the chicken pieces with a knife, put them in this mixture above and mix it thoroughly, preferably with hand. Marinade this mixture for about one-and-half hours (in fridge if the weather is hot, but NOT in the freezer.) The chicken would have acquired some color, released some juices and soften a bit at the end of this stage.

5. Take some oil/ghee (quantity depends on you. A traditional recipe calls for desi ghee, but I generally use a lighter oil like sunflower oil.) heat it till smoking point.

6. Flavor the oil with a very small pinch of crushed hing. Once they start bubbling, quickly put a very small amount of saunf. (take care with both hing and saunf, else they can be overpowering) Optional: You can also add a small amount of whole dry red chillies at this stage.

7. Take the marinated chicken out of the mixture and braise/brown the chicken in this oil. The chicken would release some further juices and flavor at this stage. Optional: you can also add a very small pinch of sugar and caramelize it in hot oil before adding the chicken.

8. Once browned, now add the rest of the spice mixture from the marinate to the chicken. Fry the entire mixture till oil separates and starts floating at the top. (This is an important step, particularly if you are cooking with a small amount of oil to begin with.)

9. Now add some water and let the chicken cook. This step can be done either in a pressure cooker (which is what I generally do), or in a covered vessel. Take care not to overcook: since chicken is already marinated, it will take comparatively less time to cook.

10. Take about a half a cup of toned milk in a flat pan and put a pinch of saffron in it. (Kashmiri saffron works the best, but Iranian/Spanish saffron will also do) Set this aside for about 10-15 minutes.

11. Once the chicken is almost cooked, pour the saffron milk into the gravy. Also add a few drops of kewra (rose essence) at this stage. Simmer this for about a minute or so.

12. Once the quorma is ready to be served, you can garnish it at the end. This is optional: you can use some chopped green corianders, chopped green chillies, very finely sliced ginger etc. You can also add about a teaspoon of desi ghee for flavor if you have not used desi ghee earlier for cooking at stage 5.

Note: The optimum size of the chicken should be about 1.25 kg (out of which you use about 750 gms in the above recipe), de-skinned but without removing the fat. Works better with either a country or free-range chicken.

Symbolic Computation using Open Source Software

Economists often hesitate to use frontline mathematical techniques, partly because economic modeling usually entails symbolic computation, which is understandably more difficult than numerical computation techniques usually employed in natural sciences. A computer algebra system would be a great help in this context; however, most of the commercial computer algebra systems are prohibitively expensive and/or are more suitable for numerical computation techniques.

In this context, the computer algebra system, Maxima, freely distributed under GNU public license offers an excellent option. This can be looked upon as a very good alternative to proprietary computer algebra systems for symbolic computation, notably maple. I recently used it to implement an algorithm to symbolically reduce a dynamical system to it’s topological normal form and determine the stability of the limit cycles emerging from an Andronov-Hopf bifurcation.

While Maxima is available on most operating systems, including Windows, linux & MacOS X, for ubuntu linux users, the latest version is not available in the repositories. However, Istvan Blahota has kindly compiled for us the the .deb packages for version 5.17.1 of Maxima as well as version 0.8.1 for wxmaxima, arguably the best maxima editor. You can freely download them from his website. Further, for Maxima 5.17.1, you will find i386 and amd64 packages for Maxima compiled using both CLisp and SBCL. The .deb i386 and amd64 packages based on SBCL, though larger in size, happen to be quicker than the CLisp based .deb packages.

Being an open source software, further development and customization would depend on contribution from users, in all forms, including in the form of development of packages, as well as report of bugs etc. Social scientists in general, and economists in particular are urged to take interest in this project, so that conventional mathematical techniques in economics can move beyond more than a century-old optimization techniques to more frontline tools used in other fields, especially in natural sciences.

Plagiarism of online creative content

Due to a number of personal and professional reasons, this blog has been lying dormant for over two years. However, the following event shook me out of my slumber and made me resume my sleeping blog after a long long time.

Let me straight get into the facts of this case. “Eating out in Delhi”, a community I am associated with, represents an excellent attempt to discover and share offbeat (and sometimes, not so offbeat) eating joints in Delhi. Founded about three years back, today this represents a large community of food enthusiasists, functioning through various social networking sites as well as periodic “field trips” to various eating joints. The fruits of this research (and a little hard work ) can be found in the website, http://eoid.org, owned by Hemanshu Kumar, the person who played the biggest role in getting this community together. Right now, it can safely be regarded as one of the best guides to offbeat eating joints in Delhi. Apart from this website, there exists a huge amount of information on the food scene in Delhi on our community pages in some of the social networking sites like orkut.

Many of our members, who are passionately involved in this project, were understandably quite peeved when they saw an article appearing in the August 2009 issue of Spice Route, the in-flight magazine of the Spice Jet Airlines. The author of this article, Hirak Gautam, claimed to have visited a wide array of eating joints within the space of a few days. The entire article, however, is completely based on a plagiarization of various posts in http://eoid.org, as well from independent blogs maintained by some of our members. Not only it lifts entire sections out of the blog, it does not even bother to do a bit of research and go and check out some of these places. The prices mentioned in the article are actually prices mentioned on EOiD blog, many of which are outdated by several years (basically, prices mentioned are the prices at the time of the field trip) and have seen several price revisions. The ignorance of the writer is almost comical, to the extent that he claims to have eaten Daulat ki Chaat, an early morning winter delicacy, on a “muggy afternoon”, after having Kallu’s nihari (which opens only in the evening). One of our expatriate members, newly introduced to Chholey Bhaturey, a staple streetfood in many parts of India, commented on her blog that prior to this she used to associate chickpeas with hummous. Needless to say, the same association of chickpeas with hummous finds it’s way into Hirak Gautam’s masterpiece.

I would not go into any further details. Check out this brazen piece of plagiarism yourselves: here are the scanned images of the Spice Route article:

http://eoid.org/images/SpiceJet-1-small.JPG

http://eoid.org/images/SpiceJet-2-small.JPG

Here is an excellent rebuttal by Hemanshu on the blog, with blow-by-blow details:

http://eoid.org/2009/08/19/spicejets-magazine-a-study-in-plagiarism/

This brings me to my next topic: these days many of us maintain online work in some form or other, either on a blog or independent website. Stealing your intellectual property has become easy: after all GIYF So it is important that you add some sort of license to your work, even if your blog/website is lying dormant for years (like mine) and you do not have enough time to maintain it regularly. If your content is licensed, like http://eoid.org is, legal recourse becomes possible. Adding a license is easy. Choose a form of license that offers some flexibility, for instance Creative Commons, and add it to your website/blog. If you do not know how to do this, remember, google is your friend

Finally, the “personal and professional reasons” I referred to in the first paragraph of this post is not over yet, and this was not the way I had planned to resume my blog. However, since the hard part is done, now expect more regular (and more esoteric ) posts on this blog in near future!

Hello world!

Hi everyone!

There’s a whole range of feelings and emotions, often muddled up, which led to the birth of this blog. On one hand, I intend this blog to be one with a purpose, with certain pre-decided objectives that will impart certain amount of objectivity and preciseness to this blog. At another level, I probably want this to be a place to dump random images, views and comments that I have about people and the world around me… things that probably very few people around me have the time or patience for…

At the end of the day, I guess, let me just allow this blog to take shape on it’s own, and wait and watch what comes out of it. This whole process will probably take time, as I am pretty time-constrained at the moment to maintain a full-fledged blog. In fact, I guess quite a few people around me will faint with shock if they get to know that I now have the time to start a blog!!! But as I said.. let the things come on their own, and let us see what develops!

Anyway, this post is turning out to be pretty chatty, and that’s not what I intend my blog to be. Just hope this turns out to be the chattiest post in my blog…

Dreadlock Rasta in an Age of Trivialities

Sometime back, tucked away in the corners of newspapers was a news item that probably deserved a little more attention from social scientists than it did. Nearly 25 years after his death, Bob Marley, the legendary musician from Jamaica and one of the founders of reggae music, has become the center of an international row that is both ironical as well as puzzling. It started when Rita Marley, wife of the fiercely anti-establishment singer Bob Marley, recently announced her plans to shift the remains of her husband from his native town of Nine Miles in Jamaica to Ethiopia, the spiritual resting place of the Rastafarian sect that Bob Marley belonged to.

Here, probably a few words of explanation is needed for the uninitiated. The massive forced transfer of population from Africa to the New World of North and South Americas was historically one of the most decisive and significant events of colonialism, both culturally and socially. Most of them were shifted to the New World by the European colonizers under disgusting conditions (with many of them packed in sacks in the luggage compartment of ships and dying on the way) and made to work as slaves under inhuman conditions in the plantations of the West Indies. While this cruel exploitation of African slaves laid foundations for modern capitalism, it has also been the source of some of the most popular musical traditions that provided a vent for the pain and anger of these slaves. Many of the currently popular musical genres, including blues (which provided the pentatonic scale and the blues fourth note as the base for rock and metal), jazz, reggae and rap owe their origins to this phase of history.

The Rastafarian sect or “rasta” is an offshoot of this cruel phase of human history. In brief, the Rastafarians, members of a spiritual and anti-establishment political sect from Jamaica, considered Ethiopia as their spiritual homeland, and emperor Haile Selassie (who ruled Ethiopia from 1930s till the 1970s) as the last prophet. In recognition of the history of Afro-Americans, they felt a need for African Americans to go back to Africa in search of their roots. Dreadlocks and marijuana were some of the most visible symbols of their rebel African identity. Bob Marley was probably one of the most well known Rastafarians, whose music inspired a whole generation of resistance movements all around the world, including the Jamaican nationalist and anti-imperialist movement of the fifties and the sixties.

Many of Bob Marley’s Jamaican fans, however, were shocked when his wife recently claimed that Bob Marley’s life had “nothing to do with Jamaica”. In her words, “Bob’s whole life is about Africa, it is not about Jamaica. How can you give up a continent for an island?” Hence, she expressed her desire to shift her husband’s remains from Nine Miles in Jamaica to Shashemene, a small colony of Rastafarians in Ethiopia. However, her announcement led to angry protests from Jamaicans, who always considered Bob Marley a symbol of their national pride. They pointed out that many of the Bob Marley’s songs (for instance, No woman no cry, Trenchtown rock etc) actually expressed his link to Jamaica. This is ironical – a person who had always emphasized a unity of people of African origin during his lifetime suddenly became a source of tension between Jamaicans and Rastafarians.

Tension over such trivialities – whether Bob Marley was a Jamaican or African – hides an important aspect about his life and music – its universal appeal. Although he used his African identity and the forced dislocation of Africans as a starting point, what made him an icon was not its specificity but its universality – in the common values of political resistance and search for justice. His music, by relating to the shared experiences of injustice and exploitation, appealed not just to Jamaicans or Africans, but also to a whole generation of people fighting any establishment for justice – whether in Latin America, Palestine or in Vietnam (“Rasta don’t work for no C.I.A.” from Rat Race), transcending all kinds of geographic, ethnic, linguistic or racial boundaries. The key factor was his remarkable ability to take on specific contexts and translate them to universal themes. Consider, for instance, Redemption Song, where he starts with a very specific context:

“Old pirates, yes, they rob I, sold I to the merchant ships,

And minutes after they took I from the bottomless pit.”

And then translates this to a universal theme:

“Won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom?

‘Coz all I ever have – redemption songs.”

Similarly in War he starts off with a universal theme:

“Until the philosophy which hold one race superior and another inferior

Is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned

Everywhere is war, me say war.

That until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation,

That until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all, without regard to race

Me say war.

That until that day the dream of lasting peace

Will remain in but a fleeting illusion

To be pursued, but never attained

Now everywhere is war, war.”

And then relates it to a specific context:

“And until that day, the African continent

Will not know peace, we Africans will fight

We find it necessary and we know we shall win

As we are confident in the victory.”

Obviously, such injustices have not ended. Thus, his music (with lyrics like “Get up, stand up: stand up for your rights!”) should have been equally appealing to today’s resistance movements around the world – whether in Iraq, Palestine, Nepal, Chechnya, Basque or in our very own backyard – people fighting for justice and political rights in Bihar, Jharkhand, Andhra Pradesh, Kashmir or North East. Yet, such universalities have now given way to specificities, giving rise to a bitter fight over the legacy of a man who symbolized common values of political resistance. These are signs of changing times and should have caught the attention of social scientists (instead of being preoccupied with dissecting and deconstructing juvenile experiments of school kids caught on mobile cameras) – after all what changed in last thirty years or so that led to such a situation?

At the heart of the problem lies an important development of last three decades – the success of the international dominant political establishment in depoliticization of resistance movements, detaching them from class-consciousness by giving them ethnic, racial or religious identities that are often divisive. Thus, we are suddenly informed by the pro-establishment media that the resistance movements in Palestine, Iraq, Chechnya or Kashmir are not anti-imperialist but “Islamic”, similarly those in certain other places are “Christian”, “ethnic” or ‘tribal” ones (stemming from some “clash of civilizations”) – effectively stripping these resistance movements of their universal appeal. The success of the establishment in this exercise, however, has much wider connotations than disputes over a musical legend.

A look at the political institutions of some of the major ‘democracies’ would bring home this point. Consider, for instance, US – where the powerful and fiercely pro-establishment mainstream media has managed to penetrate the most and has succeeded in almost completely depoliticizing the electorate. A look at the websites of the two major political parties would reveal the lack of choice it offers to the voters. With almost identical political and economic agendas, the pre-election hype preceding any presidential election almost always turns into a farce with debates over such trivialities as whether a candidate cheated on his wife or smoked grass in his youth – and in case he did smoke grass, whether he inhaled the smoke all the way. Closer home, in India, the depoliticization exercise has had a much more modest success, affecting only certain sections of the society which now take pride in being ‘apolitical’. As any analysis of elections would show, large sections of Indian electorate have largely voted as per their class interests despite attempts by the establishment to trivialize it. The watershed general elections of 2004 would be a case in point – where the ruling far-right fascist alliance lost despite having bulk of the visible elite and the media behind it. The elections effectively became a platform for class struggle (though the establishment would have alternative explanations). It is a different matter, however, that the center-‘left’ coalition that replaced the far-right harbored similar fascist and neo-liberal intentions, sugarcoated in a different package. There has been a far greater success in depoliticization of the polity in India – where different political parties lose their class character once elected, and start putting in place an almost identical set of regressive, fascist and neo-liberal policies. While this reveals the inappropriateness of elections as a sole medium for class struggle and highlights the need for more effective and, possibly, more violent engagements, it also calls for a realization of universal appeal of resistance based on class struggle, stemming from a shared experience of injustice from almost all over the world – experiences which occurred in different time and space (specificities) but with almost similar impacts (universalities). It is this realization which links, say, a landless laborer in Bihar or Nepal with a displaced Palestinian – they might speak different languages and have different cultures, but share a common experience of pain of injustice and a common anger against its perpetrators. It is here that we need another dreadlock rasta like Bob Marley, who could take these specific contexts and translate them to universal themes that could appeal and inspire a new language of political resistance.

Until then, however, we can sit back and enjoy watching our world being reduced to trivialities on our televisions screens. So get ready for another round of endless and meaningless debates and discussions over such trivialities as family feuds within corporate houses, swings of stock markets, juvenile experiments of schoolkids caught on mobile cameras and nations fighting for ownership and property rights over pieces of uninhabited mountain peaks or mortal remains of a musical legend.