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The list of reasons for financial crisis – Reasons For a Layman by a Layman

03-Jul-09

My list of the reasons for the financial crisis is as follows:

  1. The Global Pool of Money – There was a global savings glut and the money was seeking the best returns to be found.
  2. Investment Banks
  3. Commercial Banks
  4. Glass-Steagall Act (and it’s Repeal)
  5. Community Re-Investment Act
  6. Greenspan’s Put
  7. The Housing Bubble and the Politics of Housing
  8. Monetary Policy and Interest rates
  9. The (Neo)liberalism ideology
  10. Debt(Credit?) Instruments (and associated leveraging)
  11. CDS
  12. CDO
  13. Hedge Funds
  14. Compensation
  15. Greed
  16. Hubris
  17. Tail Events
  18. Regulation
  19. Easy Credit (NINA/NINJA loans)
  20. Changing nature from Private Partnership to Public Companies – Playing with other people’s money encourages more risk taking.
  21. Fat tail events were not factored in.
  22. The great moderation was not – it seems business cycles were never really tamed.

Barry Ritzholtz’s list from Bailout Nation (Chapter 19) goes something like this:

  1. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
  2. The Federal Reserve (in its role of setting monetary policy)
  3. Senator Phil Gramm
  4. Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch Ratings (rating agencies)
  5. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
  6. Mortgage originators and lending banks
  7. Congress
  8. The Federal Reserve again (in its role as bank regulator)
  9. Borrowers and home buyers
  10. The five biggest Wall Street firms (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch,Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs) and their CEOs
  11. President George W. Bush
  12. President Bill Clinton
  13. President Ronald Reagan
  14. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson
  15. Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers
  16. FOMC Chief Ben Bernanke
  17. Mortgage brokers
  18. Appraisers (the dishonest ones)
  19. Collateralized debt obligation (CDO) managers (who produced the junk)
  20. Institutional investors (pensions, insurance firms, banks, etc.) for buying the junk
  21. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC); Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS)
  22. State regulatory agencies
  23. Structured investment vehicles (SIVs)/hedge funds for buying the junk
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Daron Acemoglu on EconTalk on 02/08/2009.

03-Jul-09
  • The great moderation – It has been wrongly assumed that aggregate volatility declined in the US economy and other developed economics in the OECD and business cycles were conquered.
  • Economics started believing that we mastered the crafts of monetary policy or new tech changed the way firms respond to demand changes or supply or production opportunity.
  • Note quite a softening of creative destruction. Finance if more available and economy is more dynamic ans so resources go more easily from firms with less opp to ones with more opp.
  • Financial sector is better able to diversity idiosyncratic risks. Firms can better exploit their comparative advantage quite quickly.
  • Labor and capital markets are so dynamic.
  • WalMart epitomizes very effective use of technology. so it’s able to respond to shocks much better. They are respond to able to low/high demands in areas quick, flexible supplu chain, inventory control.
  • beneficial role of technology.
  • Monetary policy has become much wiser so it softens the impact of a variety of shocks.
  • BUT, decline in aggregate demand.
  • Nothing in social life is independent of human agency.
  • Financial innovations leads to diversification benefits and reduction of idiosyncratic risks.
  • Web of counter-party relations risks was not appreciated. Financial system of IOUs . If one set of IOUs failed the next set was also bought in trouble.
  • We have diversified a lot of regular risks but system is fragile to real tail-event.
  • Russ Roberts believes that the 25 years monetary policy success principles were left by Alan Greenspan.
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Economics basics – Macroeconomics, Microeconomics & Fiscal and Monetary Policy

18-May-09

From Basic of Economics by David E O’Connor.

Macroeconomics

Microeconomics is the branch of economics that focuses on the inter-
actions among the individual decision-making units within an economy

…

The most important partici-
pants in the microeconomy are households, business firms, and the government.
The private sector, or nongovernmental sector of the economy, consists of
households and firms. Households, for example, consume the lion’s share of all
goods and services produced in the U.S. economy. Hence, one important micro-
economic topic analyzes consumer demand, why people choose to buy certain
goods or services and not others. The behaviors and decisions of other house-
hold units including savers, investors, workers, and entrepreneurs are also criti-
cal elements in this study. Businesses, the other decision makers in the private
sector, supply goods and services in an economy. Economists who study the mi-
croeconomy are concerned with how firms make pricing, output, hiring, and
other production decisions. These business decisions are guided by the desire to
maximize profits in a market economy—another major topic in the field of mi-
croeconomics.

…

Macroeconomics

Macroeconomics is the branch of economics that deals with the eco-
nomic performance of the entire economy.

…

Macroeconomics focuses on economic growth and eco-
nomic stability in a nation. Economic growth is often measured by tracking a
nation’s real gross domestic product over time. The real gross domestic prod-
uct (GDP) is the dollar value of all newly produced goods and services in an
economy in a given year, adjusted for inflation. Economic stability refers to
maintaining stable price levels for consumer and producer goods, and a fully em-
ployed labor force. In short, macroeconomics is concerned with aggregates such
as national output, national income, national savings rates, and the national un-
employment rate, rather than with the behaviors of individuals or firms.

Fiscal and Monetary Policy [emphasis mine]

Government is also a major player in the realm of macroeconomics. This
is because the federal government devises policies that affect the economy as a
whole. The two most important government policies that influence a nation’s
economic performance are fiscal policy and monetary policy. Fiscal policy in-
volves changes in taxes and government spending, while monetary policy in-
volves changes in the money supply and cost of credit. For example, if the
government wants to jump-start a sluggish economy, it could lower taxes and in-
crease government spending. The government could also increase the money
supply and make credit easier to come by. Combined, these policies would in-
crease aggregate (total) demand in the economy and thus stimulate production,
create jobs, and encourage new investment. In the U.S. economy, Congress and
the president are mainly responsible for forming an effective fiscal policy for the
nation, while an independent Federal Reserve System (the Fed) devises the na-
tion’s monetary policy (see chapter 10 for more on monetary and fiscal policy).

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Economics thought of the day – 05/16/09

16-May-09

Stefan Collignon in the journal Social Europe.

Since World War II, three paradigms have dominated political and economic thinking in the world. In the East, Marxism rejected markets and democracy; in the West, Keynesianism laid the foundations for social democracy and political liberalism, while Friedman’s counter-revolution developed a neoliberal ideology from the theories of monetarism.

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The Global Poverty Trap

02-May-09

I just came across this article from the Washington Post. In the context of India, I find that the sentiments expressed here are rather relevant. The failure of India to either reduce the levels of poverty or generate sustainable growth in the country is a failure of ingenuity, innovativeness. India has a intelligence capital and culture capital but we have not utilized it in any way to keep it vital to the current age or to leverage it to move the populace forward for it to be of any meaningful use to the society as a whole. Indeed, there’s a very under-developed realization of “society” as such. Therefore all concerns and then solutions are very individual. There’s a startling intellectual bankruptcy in the society where everyone is so risk-averse that everyone treads the same worn path of disource, habit and vocation. China is offered as a counter example in this article but then it’s probably the exception to the rule and also who’s to say that their model of limited capitalism by decree is sustainable. Emphasis is mine.

The Global Poverty Trap

By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, October 31, 2007; A19

It’s nature vs. nurture. One of the big debates of our time involves the causes of economic growth. Why is North America richer than South America? Why is Africa poor and Europe wealthy? Is it possible to eliminate global poverty? The World Bank estimates that 2.5 billion people still live on $2 a day or less. On one side are economists who argue that societies can nurture economic growth by adopting sound policies. Not so, say other scholars such as Lawrence Harrison of Tufts University. Culture (a.k.a. “nature”) predisposes some societies to rapid growth and others to poverty or meager growth.

Comes now Gregory Clark, an economist who interestingly takes the side of culture. In an important new book, ” A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World,” Clark suggests that much of the world’s remaining poverty is semi-permanent. Modern technology and management are widely available, but many societies can’t take advantage because their values and social organization are antagonistic. Prescribing economically sensible policies (open markets, secure property rights, sound money) can’t overcome this bedrock resistance.

“There is no simple economic medicine that will guarantee growth, and even complicated economic surgery offers no clear prospect of relief for societies afflicted with poverty,” he writes. Various forms of foreign assistance “may disappear into the pockets of Western consultants and the corrupt rulers of these societies.” Because some societies encourage growth and some don’t, the gap between the richest nations and the poorest is actually greater today (50 to 1) than in 1800 (4 to 1), Clark estimates.

All this disputes the notion that relentless globalization will inevitably defeat global poverty. To Clark, who teaches at the University of California at Davis, history’s most important event was the Industrial Revolution — more important than the emergence of monotheism, which produced Judaism, Christianity and Islam; or the invention of the printing press around 1450, which spread knowledge; or the American Revolution, which promoted democracy.

Before 1800, says Clark, most societies were stagnant. With some exceptions, people lived no better than their ancestors in the Stone Age. Economic growth was virtually nonexistent. Then England broke the pattern, as textile, iron and food production increased dramatically. Since 1800, English income per person has risen by a factor of 10. Much of Europe and the United States followed.

Almost everything that differentiates the modern era from the preceding millennia dates from this point: the virtual end of hunger in advanced societies; the expectation that living standards will constantly rise; the creation of the welfare state to redistribute income; the destructiveness of contemporary warfare; industry’s environmental spoilage. But why did the Industrial Revolution start in England?

It’s Clark’s answer that convinces him of the supremacy of culture in explaining economic growth. Traditional theories have emphasized the importance of the Scientific Revolution and England’s favorable climate: political stability, low taxes, open markets. Clark retorts that both China and Japan around 1800 were about as technically advanced as Europe, had stable societies, open markets and low taxes. But their industrial revolutions came later.

What distinguished England, he says, was the widespread emergence of middle-class values of “patience, hard work, ingenuity, innovativeness, education” that favored economic growth. After examining birth and death records, he concludes that in England — unlike many other societies — the most successful men had more surviving children than the less fortunate. Slowly, the attributes of success that children learned from parents became part of the common culture. Biology drove economics. He rejects the well-known theory of German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) that Protestantism fostered these values.

Clark’s theory is controversial and, at best, needs to be qualified. Scholars do not universally accept his explanation of the Industrial Revolution. More important, China’s recent, astonishing expansion (a fact that he barely mentions) demonstrates that economic policies and institutions matter. Bad policies and institutions can suppress growth in a willing population; better policies can release it. All poverty is not preordained. Still, Clark’s broader point seems incontestable: Culture counts.

Capitalism in its many variants has been shown, he notes, to be a prodigious generator of wealth. But it will not spring forth magically from a few big industrial projects or cookie-cutter policies imposed by outside experts. It’s culture that nourishes productive policies and behavior.

By and large, nations have either lifted themselves or have stayed down. Societies dominated by tribal, religious, ideological or political values that disparage the qualities needed for broad-based growth will not get growth. Economic success requires a tolerance for change and inequality, some minimum level of trust — an essential for much commerce — and risk-taking. There are many plausible combinations of government and market power; but without the proper cultural catalysts, all face long odds.

© 2009 The Washington Post Company
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Running as a limited user in Windows XP

11-Mar-09

Introduction

I am writing this document to facilitate Windows users switching from running from an administrator account to a restricted user account. Most Windows users run as an administrator. Though this insures hassle free computing, it is not a secure practice to follow. This is because in case your computer gets infected with a piece of malware, that malware will run in the context of the current user. If you are running as an administrator, then the malware will be able to install itself and gain complete control of the computer. All other operating systems run regular users as restricted users. Most things that people need to do such as e-mail; word processing and surfing the Internet do not need administrative user privileges. These privileges are usually required to carry out operating system level activities such as updating components of the operating system, setting operating system level settings such as security related settings or updating device drivers.

Despite what you may read in the popular press, Windows from Windows 2000 onwards is very secure especially when a user runs under a limited user account. The trouble is most of us by default are set up to run as an administrator when we think about switching to running as a limited user, we find that the process can be intimidating and perhaps complex. What if a particular application does not work? Usually, the answer of experts would be that the application has been badly written. This indeed may be the case but, just because of that, we really cannot stop using a given application. It would be nice to find alternatives but, we may not have the time or the inclination to do so. This document will show you how to start running as a restricted user.

The challenges of running as a restricted user

The primary challenge of running as a restricted user is to identify what special access a given program needs to run effectively. There is no easy way to do this except monitoring the event logs in Windows. You need to use the group policy editor to ensure that you have set the correct audit privileges to monitor access to different objects in Windows. An object could be a running process or a file. Once you launch an application under a limited user account, it will bring up an error message. Or, if it is really badly written, it will crash. Immediately after this crash, you must log back on as the administrator, review the security and or application logs and, make relevant changes to Windows permissions.

Another challenge is to migrate settings from one user profile to another. Settings would include both operating system settings and application level settings. For example, you could have a number of e-mail accounts and message rules set up in Microsoft Outlook. You need to ensure that the transition from the administrator account is as painless and seamless as is possible.

My computer is currently running Windows XP professional, all updates applied as of this writing, Microsoft Office 2007, Dragon naturally speaking and a host of other applications. I’m going to be outlining how I carried out the migration to another profile and will also tell you a little about the challenges I faced with some of the utilities and applications I use regularly. This list of course is not complete but I will add to it as and when I encounter anything new.

How to migrate to a limited user

In an ideal world, the best way to do this is actually not to have to migrate at all. You must start running as a limited user. Given that this is not possible for most of us, there are a few ways that this can be accomplished.

1. |Copy the administrators profile to that of the limited user,
2. Create the user account; configure the applications individually in that account and then export whatever data is required from the administrator’s profile.

I’m going to follow the second approach. I did try copying my user profiles but, this method was not very successful. This is because some applications such as Abbey fine reader had their program data corrupted.

Steps to migrate to the limited user account

1. Creating the restricted user’s

account

To create the restricted user’s account, you log in to the account you are currently using. You then navigate to the users applet in the Windows control panel. This applet looks something like a web page. All you need to now do is choose the relevant options. You need to select “restricted user” when you are asked about the type of the account you want to create. Once you have created this account, you can then close the applet and navigate to the “users and groups” item under the “computer browser.” The computer browser is found in the administrative tools applet of the Windows control panel. Here, you can right click the user that you have created and set its password. While you are here, navigate to the “groups” item and create a group. This group can be called anything. In my case, I have called it “regular users). We will use this group to give our user relevant permissions.

2. Assigning permissions

The crucial thing to remember is that your limited user is not the owner of the files that have been created on your computer. It is the administrative user who owns the files. Of course, if you create documents under the limited user account, then that limited user will be the owner of those documents. The result of all this is that when you try and delete or modify the files that have been created under the administrative user’s login, you would be unable to do so from the limited user login. Therefore, you create a group and allow full access to the relevant files and folders that you have created under the administrative user’s login. Please ensure that these files and folders are only documents such as word processing files, spreadsheets and in some cases media. I usually keep all my data outside the “my documents” folder. Therefore, I had to give full permission to the group to manipulate the folders where I had stored the documents I had created. This folder in fact was on a separate partition. The advantage of creating a group is that you can add as many users as you like and, they will all have the same set of permissions.

3. Exporting settings

It is now time to export your bookmarks or favorites and any RSS feeds you may be having in Internet Explorer. You carry out the export using the “import export wizard). This is accessed from within the file menu of Internet Explorer. Do ensure that when you are saving the favorites and feeds, save them to a location other than the default location suggested by the wizard. Otherwise, you will have to launch Windows Explorer using administrative credentials from your limited user account and then copy them into the limited user’s profile. Also be warned, the favorites will be organized alphabetically once you import them into Internet Explorer.

4. Your first login as a limited user

When you log on for the first time as a limited user, you might be forgiven for thinking that you have actually re-installed Windows. A number of the prompts you get this time round are those that come when Windows is being installed. This is because the new user is being created and certain settings need to be customized. Answer the prompts as best as you can. You now need to import your favorites and feeds. You can do so from Internet Explorer.
Note:
At the time of this writing, Internet Explorer version 7 has a bug. The menu bar does not display when you are running under a limited user account. You need to click on the “links” toolbar to enable it. Once you’ve enabled that, the menu bar comes up automatically. You can then check the “menu bar) item under the “toolbars” menu item which is under the “view” menu of Internet Explorer version 7. You can then disable the “links) toolbar.

5. Configuring various programs

as a limited user
1. One of the most tedious things you will need to do once you have logged in as a limited user is to configure the rest of your programs. The only easy way to do this than I have found is to launch every program and set it up afresh.

\Programs and their behavior under limited user credentials

Abbey find reader version 9

This program works seamlessly even under accounts that have limited user credentials. However, if you try and copy user profiles, then the program will warn you stating that “program data has been corrupted”.

The Microsoft office suite

If you are using Microsoft Office 2003, you can use the files and settings transfer wizard to transfer your office settings to your newly created account. If you are using Microsoft office 2007, you will need to re-customize Microsoft Office. Having said that, there is a way to import settings from your account with administrative privileges to your limited user account especially for Outlook 2007. Be warned that this method does not import the passwords that belong to your e-mail accounts. You will need to re-type those passwords. See the following link for details. Exporting Outlook 2007 settings

Note:
As a general rule, it is advisable to store your outlook e-mail in a separate folder. This way, you will be able to use Outlook in both profiles.

The FileZilla FTP client

You will need to re-customize this application. Alternatively, you can copy the FileZilla settings from the relevant folder under the administrator account. See the FileZilla project Wiki for more information on where the FileZilla settings are stored.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking along

With J-say and Jaws for Windows

You will need to customize your settings for Jaws for Windows. By settings I mean settings related to speech rate, pitch, the reading of graphics and so on. Dragon NaturallySpeaking does indeed work seamlessly even under limited user credentials. However, you need to ensure that you have backed up your user profile. This is so because Dragon NaturallySpeaking will be unable to access your user profile if it is stored in the default location. The default location is user specific and will be mapped to your initial user who has administrative credentials. Another way around this is to export your vocabulary and commands and then create a fresh profile under limited user credentials. This is what I chose to do. J-say for the most part is also working seamlessly. I am unable to create text notes when running as a limited user.

The vOICe

You will need to reconfigure and also reregister this application.

Adobe Acrobat Reader

You will need to reconfigure this application. When you launch it for the first time, it will install itself in your currently active user profile.

Windows Media Player version 11

You will need to reconfigure this application. When you launch it for the first time, it will install itself in your currently active user profile.

<h4The Opendns client for Windows

You will be able to install this application. However, I was unable to install it is a service while running from my limited user account. I could however do so when I logged in using my account with administrative privileges.

Apcupsd

This program works seamlessly under a limited user account. No action was required on my part. It was just there in the system tray. I still need to test it’s kill power functionality. It is able to send e-mail notifications without any difficulty even when running under a limited account.

Carrying out administrative tasks when running as a limited user

when running as a limited user, you use the “runas” utility to carry out administrative tasks. See the following Microsoft knowledge base article for details.
kb294676

Installing and removing programs

one of the biggest headaches you will encounter when running as a limited user is that it is difficult to install or remove programs. Many programmes right to the “program files” folder. You could either redirect these or, ideally, run the installation as an administrator. Always try installing a programme from the limited account first unless of course the programme explicitly states that it needs administrative credentials for installation. be warned that you will encounter several programs that do not state this explicitly but still require those credentials based on the locations they write to in Windows.

The account titled “administrator”

When Windows XP displays a list of possible accounts you can run from, in some situations, you may encounter an account called “administrator”. This is a hidden account which is usually visible only in safe mode. It is not password protected. You should login into safe mode and set a password for this account to maximise your computer security. See the following link for more information on how to do this.
Windows XP Administrator Account Passwords

Coping with scheduled tasks

If you use the scheduled tasks feature of Windows, you would need to recreate the tasks that you have created under the administrative account. Alternatively, you can set those tasks from the administrative account to run under the credentials of the limited user account. If you do this, be aware that you may have to set special permissions for files and folders to allow these tasks to run successfully. In some cases, if your scheduled tasks do not require any user intervention, you would have to make no changes except that you must ensure that the option to allow the tasks to run without that user being logged on is checked.

Creative Commons License
Migrating to a restricted user account from an administrator account by Pranav Lal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Norway License.
See the below links to older downloadable versions of this post.
Click here to download migrating to a restricted user account from an administrator account in Word 2003 (*.doc) format
Click here to download migrating to a restricted user account from an administrator account in PDF
Click here to download migrating to a restricted user account from an administrator account in RTF
Note
My Thanks to Wayne Johnson for creating the initial tagged PDF version of this document.

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The gulf dream is over?

06-Feb-09

The times has this report of people leaving in droves from Dubai. Another article in the Times of India says this.

In India, this might hit the Kerela economy the most. Kerela exports an absurd amount of it’s people to the gulf. A couple of years back I had to take a transit stop for a day in Dubai and I was surprised to see how many of the ground staff at the Airport and at the hotel was staffed by Malayalees.

The bad economic climate might have an adverse affect on Dubai’s  amazing and bewlidering construction boom.

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World GDP growth rates

05-Feb-09

gdp_year_2007

Since 1965 to 2007 – the period for which GDP statistics were available from the World Bank, GDP has steadily grown from 1.9 trillion in 165 to 54.3 trillion in 2007. Economic data for 2008 is not available but it will be interesting to see what effect the great economic collapse of 2008 had on the figures.

Year GDP in trillion US$
1965 1.938818
1966 2.103919
1967 2.236767
1968 2.413022
1969 2.654999
1970 2.885661
1971 3.184812
1972 3.679795
1973 4.498639
1974 5.2009
1975 5.807548
1976 6.288514
1977 7.12038
1978 8.413227
1979 9.758992
1980 10.971373
1981 11.247393
1982 11.1386
1983 11.380263
1984 11.812916
1985 12.416678
1986 14.658274
1987 16.690223
1988 18.654726
1989 19.584769
1990 21.877261
1991 22.964342
1992 24.53357
1993 24.906424
1994 26.724241
1995 29.667204
1996 30.293513
1997 30.193688
1998 29.952634
1999 31.025816
2000 31.949175
2001 31.720021
2002 32.967025
2003 37.023214
2004 41.73243
2005 45.053893
2006 48.626696
2007 54.34703

[Source]: The World Bank Group.

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The Mangalore pub incident

04-Feb-09

The great Indian guardians of morality strike again, valiantly protecting our  “sabhyata”. This incident is getting a lot of attention primarily because part of it was caught on camera. What you see is a bone-chilling indictment of the health of our society. I’ll leave aside my revulsion and hatred of such acts, my anger and frustration at the logic presented to justify such incidents and still try to analyze it objectively. It’s hard, but I have realized that hatred and anger simply begets more hatred and anger and never solves the problem and hinders meaningful analysis.

The most alarming aspect of this incident (and there are many, many, alarming aspects to this incident) is how a group of people with absolutely no authority of the state behind them – they are not the police – can take the law into their own hands and expect to get away with it. This is happening all over the country. Most recently we saw it in Mumbai with the MNS frothing at the mouth at the supposed injustice of the large presence of people from North-Indian in the state of Maharashtra, a state that was later relieved of a siege by terrorists by troops that would be most likely be comprised of those very North-Indians (they were stationed in Hindi-speaking Delhi so that’s a reasonable assumption). No people can function, far less thrive and create, in a society without adequate protection for the individual and his property. Without order there is chaos and without law there is no justice and no order. A fair, reasonable system of laws is the bedrock of civilization. A functioning law and order system guarantees people that their rights and property will be protected and their movement
safe. The ideals of democracy need the foundation of law and order to survive too.

Then there is this common straw man argument of the undue influence of the (decadent/morally corrupt/women-molesting/lawless – take your pick) “west”. The west is a very amorphous word and does not tell us exactly what is meant by it or who is it supposed to include. Does it include the Eastern-Europeans?, the Russians?, the Japanese?, the Australians? I ask this because there are a lot of similarities in the cultural mores of these nations that are not all geographically west of us. For the sake of argument let’s assume that west is the countries with dominant race being Caucasian and then restrict ourselves to the United States and Western Europe because that’s what people mean when the say “the west”.  People who blame the west should realize that their arguments are largely influenced by the programming that comes out from the US (which is in “the west”). What they see on television is not the nation and not an adequate representation of the culture either. Far from it. Sitcom and drama, by their very nature to titillate, incite, and amuse, turn up the degrees of erotica, drama, and generally outrageous behavior to exaggerated degrees.. You really have to live in the west to realize what west is. The western civilization is an entirely different animal. There’s a big difference between their system of living and ours. The rules of mating and the rules of engagement in public are vastly different from that in India. For example, take the pub and club culture (and for the record a pub and a club are two entirely different venues). In the United States there is no system of arranged marriages and no strong extended families to recommend eligible brides for eligible grooms and vice versa. The task of finding a mate is almost always up to the individual himself. The clubs, discs and pubs are then a necessary tool in the arsenal of an individual to find a mate. Besides, what’s harmful in an occasional beer at a local pub? In Australia – where I lived for a year – there’s such a strong pub culture that people sometime saunter off for a pint in the middle of the day with a group of friends or colleagues. It’s a regular communal event with people chatting over a glass of beer.

Let’s take the western family structure. There’s no shortage of families in the US where parents are working as hard as they do in India to secure a future for their children. We can take exception to how they treat their elderly and leave them to the mercy of a retirement home, how the culture prices individualism often at the cost of insecurity and loneliness. But then we too do not have a functionally ideal family structure in India, with our incidents of dowry-related deaths, children neglecting and often mistreating their parents in joint-family homes and others. And then.. before the western influences are bashed again and blamed for corrupting us, please also realize that practically every single modern convenience that you enjoy today came from the west. The United States was where Edison invented the light bulb, where Henry Ford developed mass production of cars, where the locomotive was developed, where flight was invented by the Wright brothers and where both the AC and DC transmission system was developed. Trust me, these are the very big and obvious examples. A comprehensive list would be very long one indeed. A culture that fosters such innovation and entrepreneurship is surely doing something right. You cannot pick and choose aspects of a culture, that you barely understand in the first place, to pass a verdict on it. A culture is an organic whole. You either understand it and take it’s good aspects or you simply leave it alone because it’s a system of living for a large part of our planet.

It’s rather easy to identify the real trigger of these incidents here. It’s almost always those devilish politicians who have made an art-form out of exploiting gullible, directionless group of people with no economic prospect (show me a spontaneous mob expression and I will show you Yeti). But they are just the trigger and just that. The real problem is the malaise running through our nation. Let’s us realize what these incidents of moral outrage are really about. It’s about lost youth with no employment prospects and no future. It’s about a society that has no respect for law and order or any other institutions for that matter. It’s about a misguided group of people who really believe that the only way to protect our culture is through expressions of such hollow moral outrage. Apologists of this kind of incident – the kind that do not take part in the actual violence but justify the violent outrage with the usual arguments of western influence and moral corruption – are reactionary people who are genuinely afraid of winds of changes blowing through their region or culture.

The solution here is to do many things at once. India is a democracy and the rule of law is one of the pillars of a functioning democracy. Without law and order there is chaos and what we have in India is really chaos. It’s the law of the jungle and everybody in the jungle feels free to act out as he pleases. We need to give these people something productive to do and incentives for them to be swayed into joining these mobs would disappear. This is a problem of economic mobility. We need a better education system and then we need to educate ourselves to what’s going on in the world. We need to create employment opportunity for these youth and give them better tools to understand the world around us and it’s drivers and manipulators. People who genuinely fear for our culture need to realize that preservation can never ever be through coercion. Culture thrives in freedom and in free expression. Culture will thrive when people are free to breath, free to create, free to express and free to act (albeit within the confines of reasonable laws). There’s a peripheral issue here too. We need to have a reasoned and informed debate on these ideas of what exactly our “sanskriti” really is and what ideals should the people derive from it. But those are intellectual arguments that can be carried out in academia or in personal venues where such issues are in context. There arguments cannot be carried out in the streets. Cultural arguments should not have any bearing on how law is dispensed and on how order is maintained. These mobs are not agents that can preserve your way of living. Violence begets violence. It’s a tear in the very fabric of culture that these mobs are supposedly trying to protect. It’s not how India will prosper, or it’s culture preserved. Culture cannot be rammed down eveybody’s throat. Culture grows and thrives where people freely nurture it, analyze it, criticize it and celebrate it.

PS: There’s this hilarious post by the (always great) greatbong on this issue and this thread at churmuri.com.

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Felix Salmon excoriates Ben Stein

02-Feb-09

…here. Perhaps a little unfairly? I had blogged about a talk by Ben Stein at the Commonwealth Club a while back. I found him to be quite reasonable and the concerns about the economy that he raised and his mention of the importance of friends and family and community had a ring of sincerity and made sense.

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Songs of the week (Wk. 06 / 09) or The awesome soundtracks of Delhi-6, Lucky By Chance and Dev-D

01-Feb-09

I cannot stop talking about these three new Hindi movie soundtracks that were all released recently. If you have not already done so, please buy the CD’s, like now. They are all excellent and do a great service in restoring the health of popular India music (read related post here). Dev-D has a song called “Emotional Atyachar”, in two versions. One is called a “Brass-band Version” and the other is the “Rock Version”. Both are a work of mad, riotous genius. It’s so much fun that I have it on repeat since the last two days. The “brass-band” version of the song is a off-the-hook sonic mash-up with hilariously over-the-top, loud and cacophonous Indian wedding bass-band sounds. Unfortunately, you will only “get” the song’s lyrical cleverness if you are a native Hindi speaker and you really have to be a native North-Indian at that to derive much fun out of the brass-band craziness. For additional fun, check out the video of this song. It two fake fake Elvis, and the protagonist exaggeratedly drunk and lurching around comically in a wedding.

Delhi-6 has two numbers that stand out. One is “Dil Hua Dafatan” and the other is “Masakali”. “Dil Hua Dafatan” has simple, beautiful and delicate banjo in the backgound and a small section with a plainative instrument that sounds vaguely Chinese in origin (can someone identify it for me?). The lyrics of “Masakali”, by Prasoon Joshi, are brilliant. Delhi-6 should cement Rahman’s status as one of the best composers in India. It’s a beautiful musical journey that will reward the listener after multiple listens, as is usually the case with his music. In “Lucky By Chance“, there are echos of Shankar-Ehsan-Loy’s previous work but it’s still a very good album. Standout tracks are “Yeh Zindagi Bhi” and “Baawre”.

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A. R. Rahman and Modern India Music – Jagjit Singh vs. A. R. Rahman

30-Jan-09

The dreary and monotonous Jagjit Singh had this to say about A. R. Rahman and his compositions. It’s really sad that an accomplished singer such as Jagjit Singh made this comment. That’s a sign of someone who’s essentially cemented himself in his own musical concrete. Any contemporary phenomenon requires you to get out of your comfort zone and try to see beyond your own blinkered world-view. Jagjit’s Singh’s rigid immobility has perhaps rendered this option impossible for him. So he has decided to take the easy way out and declare “They don’t know what ghazals are all about and they lack good taste in music. What does AR Rahman know about ghazals? He will never use a ghazal in his films. All they do is pick up tunes from the West“.

Rahman does not “lack good taste”. Excuse me, but the man that created modern Indian contemporary soundtrack masterpieces such as “Yuva“, “Rang De Basanti” and “Swades” does not lack nor not lack taste, he defines taste. Musicians like Rahman and Vishal Dadlani are at the vanguard of new music. They create taste. They are defining new Indian music and establishing a new era. So what if he does not use ghazals in his films. Since when did ghazals become the only cultural touchstones? To his comment about picking about tunes from the west, what on earth is that supposed to even mean? Rahman is one of the most original artists on the landscape. He surely cannot be accused of lifting tunes. So maybe Jagjit Singh is talking about Rahman incorporating a lot of instruments of non-Indian origin in his compositions. Is that somehow supposed to lessen his creations?

Music is not just poetic lyrics. Music is not just classical form. Music is not ghazals. Music is not table or guitar. Music is Music. It encompasses all of these and much much more. Good music is not just poetic or beautiful lyrics, it’s also creative, original, virtuoso instrumentation. Instrumental arrangement that soar, uplift, touch your heart and transport you to soci heaven. Jagjit Singh has been singing in the same tone with the same inflections since forever. To me all his ghazals sound musically inert. He might as well just sit down and recite them without any instrument because it surely is perfunctory that form. There might be creativity, poetry and beauty in the written word of ghazals, but there’s surely nothing creative in his music. Rahman’s creations are not just pure fun, they are genius. If Jagjit Singh were not too set in his way he would recognize how good it really is. In my books, Rahman is even a better singer than Jagit Singh.

About those lyrics too, for which he says – “Today, there’s no poetry phrasing, it’s all Western and the language is tapori — a mix of English and Hindi. What kind of lyrics are Pappu can’t dance saala?“. To that I say – “So?”. What’s exactly wrong with non-poetic? What’s wrong with mixing a little English in Hindi? For that matter what’s poetic? Do we not use English heavily in our day-to-day lives? Even non-rhyming verses without a defined meter or other classical elements of poetry might serve well in the context of a song that’s designed to evoke some emotion. When Anupama, Benny Dayal, Blaze, Tanvi, Darshana, Satish Subramanium & Aslam sing “Pappu can’t dance saala” it registers in your system in a way that can only perhaps register with someone who was not born when dinosaurs like Lata Mangeshkar, Kumar Sanu, Udit Narayan, Anu Malik, the duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal etc. roamed this earth and throttled any and all talent that might dare to peek out of that collective colossal edifice that was the music scene of that era. It’s an upbeat emotional call-to-arms to go to the dance floor, to lose yourself in the beat and the rhythm, lyrical poetry be damned. Incidentally, there’s other merit in that song, but I’ll get to that in a later post. All of this is not to bash any of these performers. I acknowledge their obvious talent. What frustrates is how these people got embedded into the whole nation and literally sucked the life out of contemporary music. The 60′s to late 90′s might have been the golden age of the lyric but it’s was the absolute pits for music as a whole.

Culture is not static and if it is, it should not be. A culture that’s rigid and does not learn to bend and twist and even sprout new branches, will just snap one day under the winds of change and cease to exists. Jagit Singh’s comment actually point to a larger malasie in the Indian society. We are just to dammned calcified with notion of supposed superiority of our culture and our ways. If you dig a little deeper we are actually stagnating as a society and as a nation. We are stifling creativity and entrepreneurship and most importantly, change. But I’ll address this point in another post.

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A. R. Rahman’s Delhi-6

30-Jan-09

Listening to A. R. Rahamn’s Delhi-6 (more here and trailer here) and from whatever I have heard so far, it’s awesome. This is Rahman’s first soundtrack after his accolade-gathering effort Slumdog Millionaire. A detailed analysis to follow….

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Those NYC women

28-Jan-09

Zubin Jelveh on Portfolio has an interesting piece on why such a small percentage (~47%) of married women are in the workforce in New York City. One word reason – traffic. Minneapolis is at the other end of the specturm with 87% of married women in the working population.

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The role of quants

26-Jan-09

Sam Gustin has an illuminating piece at Portfolio on the role of quantative analysts in the current financial collapose.

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A Grim Parade

26-Jan-09

… and the layoffs continue.

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Aziz Ansari At Punch Line in SFO

25-Jan-09

Saw Aziz Ansari at the Punchline Comedy Club in SFO on Saturday. His act was very good and I would readily recommend it to anyone who would like a fun weekend evening. Beware though, his humor is blunt and vulgar at times but that’s de rigueur for most standup acts. He is an American by birth and Indian by ethnicity.  What I found refreshing though, was that his material did not revolve around the ethno-centric wellspring of humor that guys like Russell Peters and others exploit all the time. In fact, there were none of those jokes to be found., barring one about the built of people from India (and how they are supposed to be skinny and all that). Aziz is working on a Judd Apatow file called Funny People and he did a segment, in-character, as a character called Randy that he’s developing for that project. Other hillarious bits included his imitation of that old staple, the redneck southerner. It stood out for me because there was a certain freshness to how he setup and constructed that whole piece. His style is very animated and he moves around the stage a lot using his whole body as a tool to deliver the jokes. Good Stuff.

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Layoffs

24-Jan-09

Techcrunch has a neat little layoff tracker. Things are getting scarier and scarier.

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My Ahmedabad trip

26-Sep-08

I visited Ahmedabad to attend a couple of conferences. Namely, the National Conference On Information And Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Access India Convention
This time, I decided to travel by train since the air fair was too expensive. There were a lot of us going to Ahmedabad but most people were going to the convention rather than the CSI conference. I teamed up with Manish and Aman for the journey.

My first challenge was booking the ticket. Manish did the actual leg work. I wanted to avail of the discount for persons with disabilities so I had to get a medical certificate. That in itself is matter for a separate blog post. The certificate did not work so I had to pay the full price. That was not too much though.

Day 1

The journey to Ahmedabad was an “experience” thanks to our fellow passenger who is a marketing executive with a large Japanese firm. He was a fat man who had his own assumptions about the world. For instance:
A. IT professionals do no work, have no pressure and are well paid.
B. Everyone likes answering his questions and is his best friend.
C. He is superb at making relationships.
D. A man’s worth is measured by the number of phone calls he recieves on his mobile phone.

Needless to say, he was a frustrated man and had apparantly never been tought to keep quiet. I wonder how he managed in school.

Thanks to our fellow passenger, we went to bed at 20:00 after an excellent dinner. I managed to finish a novel since it was on my mp3 player.

Day 2

We reached on time and our hostess sent a friend’s son to recieve us. He was an example of the typical Indian yuth who is trying to find his feet. In due course, we reached our destination.

The Ritz

Our hostess had more than laid out the welcome mat. No red carpet but the wooden floor was unique and we could not ask for anything more. Towels, soaps etc., were plentyful so was privacy and anything else we wanted. Breakfast that day was of south Indian food. Ouch! However, it was well made so I did not have a problem.

The conference was good though the first half could have been better spent having some more sessions instead of multiple inogeration events. Aman had carried food / snaks so we were able to cope effectively with some of the yon inducing sessions. The evening was action packed consisting of a visit to Gujarat university where we had excellent coco and a “maska bun” and then dinner with a friend. Along the way, Aman tried shopping for clothes in a streat market with Manish and me in toe. That attempt, for no fault of ours failed.

Day 3

The second day of the conference was fascinating with presentations from the National Institute of Design, the Centre For Developing of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Manish and yours truely. There were several other presenters of course. We left the conference early and eventually landed up at a place that served Saurashtran cuisine. It was not sweet for one though I can’t quite remember anything distinctive about the taste. The setting though was interesting since we were in a open air restaurant with bamboo structures. We had to assent a cross between a staircase and a ladder to get to the top of the structure. We were seated on rugs around a stone table. Ug, anyone remember the second book in the Narnia series?

Day 4

The Access India convention was enogurated with a fanfair of access technology. My favorite session was the one with Tina, the image consultant. The agenda was varied but the majority of the sessions were very useful. I had my own demonstration of J-Say in the afternoon from where, I was promptly kidnapped by my uncle and his charming daughter.

Day 5

We packed at night and we were all ready much before time. Shanti Raghavan of href=”http://www.enable-india.org/”>Enable India was undoubtly the star of the morning.

Day 6

The trip back was uneventful except for a fellow deligate being left behind at Alwar. There were a lot of us in the coach and there was a lot of stimulating conversation.

Conclusion

I would repeat this experience anytime. Manish and Aman are excellent friends and traveling companions. The speakers at the CSI conference were varied so one’s interest did not have much of a chance to flag. The Access India conventtion was one of those rare conferences where one is glad that there is no choice of what session to attend. A few points though;
1. The Access India convention must have been the only conference where deligates had to be asked to keep quiet. If the Indian blind cannot behave in a conference, then the corporate world is indeed far away for them.

2. The local organization could have been better and from what I hear, could have provided better residential facilities.

3. We should have made better recording arrangements.

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The immersion of ashes

12-Sep-08

We set out this morning for immersing my grandmother’s ashes in the Ganges. We had to get to the river which was about a 2 hour drive. Before that though, we had to visit the crematorium to collect the ashes. Mind you, those are not ashes in the technical sense of the term. They are actually bones and, in my grandmother’s case, they were very recognizable. By recognizable, I mean that the remnants of the cremation were recognizable as bones. I do not know enough anatomy to decipher which part of the body they belonged to. The drive was uneventful and we got the car to the riverbank without incident. The only thing worthy of note was the amount of told boots we had to cross. The last one charged us 7 1/2 rupees for a dirt track. To be more precise, the road was not really a dirt track. Idle construction machinery was everywhere. My uncle and my father and uncle, who accompanied me, are seasoned civil engineers and project managers. They spent a happy 10 minutes speculating on what could have happened and, reached the same conclusion; namely, that some kind of dispute had risen and the contractor had walked away.

Once we were out of the car, we were besieged by priests and other hangers on. We had to buy some cans to take holy water in and of course try to haggle for the cost of the boat. This was not successful. The rowboat was quite large and, no ores were being used. The boatman was using a long bamboo pole to propel the boat. The priest who came on board performed a small ceremony where, we had to throw flowers into the Ganges and repeat some words he said. He of course try to find out how influential weaver, our connections and in turn, he listed his own connections. My dad had the most physically demanding task of actually scooping my grandmother’s remains out of the earthenware pitcher they were in and pitching them into the river. He had to do a thorough job and, it is difficult to do given the weight of the remains, the picture and the awkward angle at which one has to lean to over the gunwale of the boat. I cannot tell if there was an emotional component to the whole exercise.

Once we were back at the bank, we will once more besieged by crowds asking for money. Apparently, you need to feed people at the bank so; one had to shell out more cash. Just when we reached the car, the local sweepers asked us for money. We finally got away.

The drive back was smooth and, we felt it took less time than the drive to the river. This particular place, he situated in the sugar belt of India. We passed a number of sugarcane fields and sugar mills with several bullock carts standing outside their gates.

So I guess that’s that… My grandmother’s room is almost empty so, by virtue of echolocation, I am able to feel the emptiness. That however is something I will get used to in time. The healing process may have already begun.

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