Mulayam Singh Yadav does not want the CBI to carry out the probe in the case of his alleged disproportionate assets. His fear of the CBI is, by itself, a sharp comment on the efficiency of the agency.
And what is that comment? I suppose that depends on which party you support.
The BJP has done well in the Punjab and Uttarakhand elections, and already people are calling it “a saffron wave.” That is as much rubbish as all that talk about the UPA having got a mandate from the last elections. (As I mentioned here, one look at the constitution of this Lok Sabha should disabuse notions of a “collective will.”) Individuals vote in elections for their own individual reasons, and much of the time, in an age of a fractured electorate and hung parliaments, huge amounts of luck determines who gets into power.
It is, of course, typical of us to try to discern patterns in all of this. But these patterns, these mandates, they’re illusory things. No point celebrating or mourning yet, depending on which party you support. Flip-flop hota rahega.
Also read: my essay from last week, Don’t Think in Categories. It’s relevant.
Niranjan Rajadhyaksha, in a piece titled “Parable of the Shopkeeper,” offer us this mind game:
Suppose you plan to open a shop on a street that is lined with houses. These houses are evenly distributed along the street. There are two things you know at this point of time. There is a competitor who is patiently waiting to open a shop just next to yours. And the customers who live along this street will walk into the shop that is nearest to their homes.
So, where will you build your store?
Well, if you build it at the corner, your competitor will simply build one next to yours but closer to the center, so more people will end up going there. The logical thing, therefore, is to build one close to the center. And that, indeed, is what politicians do. As Niranjan writes:
Dick Cheney landed in Pakistan a couple of days ago to urge Pervez Musharraf to get serious about fighting al Qaeda. About time. This acknowledges that Pakistan wasn’t doing enough to wipe out al Qaeda to begin with, and no sensible man would expect otherwise. As I wrote here and here, it is not in Musharraf’s interest to end the battle with al Qaeda by winning it. Pakistan’s economy has flourished after 9/11 because it is the USA’s main ally in the War on Terror, and an end to the War on Terror means an end to aid and preferential treatment.
So the carrot was never likely to work. Will the stick fare better?
Kunal Sawardekar writes about how Douglas Adams’s description of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation fits socialism as well:
Their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.
Kunal expands:
Whenever a Socialist policy fails, the blame falls on some minor (in the greater scheme of things) deviation from the Socialist Golden Path. For example, the National Rural Employment Scheme is a brilliant solution to rural poverty, it will only fail because the bureaucrats have weakened the Employment Guarantee Act. Forcing banks to give farmers in Vidharba low-interest loans in a good idea, the problem is that the interest is not low enough. Five-year-plans are a great idea, its just that our planners sucked. And so on.
Indeed. Always blame the execution—or order one, if it comes to that. That’s the way of socialism.
(Link via email from Ravikiran. And here’s an old Op-Ed by me on the REGB.)
… is really just wishful thinking. No?
So says Peggy Noonan about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
I have just one thing to add: The browser I’m using right now is Firefox, and its automatic spellcheck puts a red underline under ‘Barack’ and ‘Obama’, but not under ‘Hillary’ and ‘Clinton’. How soon do you think it will take for that to change?
… can be condensed into one observation: American politicians often write books; Indian ones mostly don’t.
Indeed, I wonder if Indian politicians even read them.
This piece is the third installment of my weekly column for Mint, Thinking It Through.
As a blogger, I often get phone calls from journalists who have been instructed to write a story on blogging. Generally, all they know about it is that it is some new kind of buzzword, and they have often not read any blogs. Their questions invariably include the phrase “blogging community.”
Oh how they generalise. “What does the blogging community feel about the new KBC?” they ask, or “What do bloggers write about?” I try to be polite and say that I can only speak for myself, but I won’t deny that the image of hanging a journalist upside down just above a vat of boiling oil gives me great glee at such times.
Bloggers have a community as much as drivers have a community. Would you ask a random person in a car, “So sir, what do drivers feel about abortion?” You wouldn’t dream of doing that, because you know that drivers are just individuals who happen to drive cars. And yet, we lump all bloggers under one convenient label.
And we have many convenient labels like that. Imagine someone saying, “Some Indian bloggers have been seen cheering for Pakistan during cricket matches. Therefore, all Indian bloggers are anti-national.” Or “Some bloggers burnt a train full of drivers, therefore we drivers will slaughter all the bloggers we can find.” Or “Bloggers have been discriminated against in the days before the internet, when they didn’t have access to any readership, therefore we will reserve a set amount of newspaper space for them.”
Would it not be equally ridiculous to take a poll of bloggers, find out that the majority prefer to use the blogging service Blogspot, and then force all bloggers to use only that service? “This is the will of the bloggers,” you could say, or “the bloggers have given their mandate.”
The above examples sound ridiculous, but you would have recognised the references. We tend to think in categories, and ignore individuals in the process. We are pattern-seeking creatures, and this can be a useful cognitive shortcut: classifying things into groups of things helps us make sense of the world. But it has its perils when we take it too far.
And we do. Millions have been killed citing the good of ‘nation’ and ‘race’ and so on. Every day, individual rights are trampled upon under the guise of the good of ‘society’ or ‘community’. This is a mistake committed on both extremes of the political spectrum, both by ‘pseudo-secularists’ and those who have coined that term.
The Hindutva parties in India and their supporters do this all the time when it comes to terms like ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ and ‘Pakistan’ and so on. Claiming to speak for all Hindus, as if that is even possible, they whip up hatred against Muslims in general citing the acts of particular Muslims. They demonise Pakistan and Pakistanis because of the acts of its government, as if that government is a representative one. They oppose globalisation in the name of ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’, as if those two things lie preserved in a glass case.
The Left parties aren’t behind. How much generalising do they do against ‘multinationals,’ ‘imperialists,’ ‘upper castes,’ ‘the middle class’ and so on? They praise democracy but speak darkly of ‘free markets’ as if they represent anything other than individuals being empowered to make their own choices. They claim to speak for some mythical beast called ‘workers’, though all their policies harm individual workers, and as if workers aren’t also ‘consumers,’ a kind of beast that they don’t quite like.
The classic example of thinking in categories gone wrong is our reservations policy. Under the pretext of clearing up historical wrongs done to one group of people by another, we effectively redistribute opportunities and resources by taking them from one bunch of individuals and handing them to another. Some individuals suffer, others get lucky, and that’s all there is to it. What is worse, they actually perpetuate such thinking in categories instead of bringing an end to it, and make the problem worse instead of solving it.
It reminds me of Ayn Rand’s famous quote, “The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.” But do we really care about individual rights, and personal freedom, in India?
Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal about the US presidential elections:
You remember the story, from Genesis, of the famished brother who gave up his birthright for food. “He sold his soul for a mess of pottage.” The problem in national politics this year is the number of candidates of whom it could plausibly said, “He sold his soul for a pot of message.” He became something else, adopted new views, took stands the opposite of what he’d taken in the past, because he thought that if he didn’t he could not win a base in the base. (“He” here includes “she.”) Candidates take new views to create a new message. You “sell your soul” to put on the policy skin media professionals fashion for you. In this way you make yourself into someone else. […]