Two Minutes with Amartya Sen

For those who don't have the distinct pleasure of being my Facebook friend, you may not have noticed how I recently trumpeted my meeting with my intellectual hero, Amartya Sen. Some of you who do have the distinct pleasure (and have not been rude enough to suggest I merely posed with him!), have asked me what we spoke about. Well, wait no further.

So, Prof. Sen had come to Chicago to talk about his recent book, the Idea of Justice, which in itself is quite abstract but has interesting implications for international politics. One of its central ideas is that given the capacity to prevent manifest injustice, we shouldn't get deadlocked in arguments about what the most just institution to address injustice is. When I heard this argument, one of my first thoughts was humanitarian interventions and I asked him what should countries which have little capacity to act internationally, do? For some reason, he assumed I had India in mind when I asked the question and immediately replied that India should do more in Burma and Sudan (to promote democratization and prevent genocide respectively).

I was quite surprised because a) I hadn't heard that from him publicly, and b) despite that economics training, he had little patience for cost-benefit accounting in these two scenarios. While there is plenty to disagree about in this particular application of his idea, I think in general, it has a lot of merit in arguments about economics, law and social justice.

In any case, the meeting was definitely the highlight of my year and one I will treasure for a long time to come.

Thoughts on Faisal Shahzad: Lone Wolves Are Also Bad Omens

The failed Times Square car bomb attempt which came to light this weekend is tough to analyze because the investigation is not yet complete and there is still uncertainty about the facts. Gen. Petraeus has recently ruled out Pakistani Taliban’s involvement, describing Faisal Shahzad, the individual arrested for attempting the attack, as a “lone wolf”. At the same time, Pakistani officials have hinted that Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), a group with a Kashmir centered agenda, might have been responsible for his training. Meanwhile, Pakistani Taliban has denied any role as well, after initial YouTube videos which seemed to suggest otherwise.

While it will take a while for the facts to emerge, let us assume that Shahzad did not belong to the rank and file of a terror group but simply acquired the training to make and detonate a bomb during a short stint in Pakistan (most likely scenario – check out Steve Coll’s post on how Pakistani terror groups treat US based volunteers as “freebies”). This is troubling in two respects:

1) It hints at possible radicalization of young Pakistani-Americans, a phenomenon previously seen in the UK (London Underground bombings being the most infamous attack by British-born Pakistanis trained in Pakistan), but not in the US. It is noteworthy that in early 2009, the CIA had advised President Obama that British Islamists were the biggest threat to the US. While one of the key reasons for radicalization of British-born Pakistanis was the UK’s involvement in Iraq, high joblessness and discrimination were other underlying factors as well. In comparison, the Pakistani-American community is more prosperous and socially integrated into the mainstream.

2) It emphasizes that while terrorist organizations mainly recruit from the poor and marginalized, their ability to attack the U.S. depends upon individuals who are often wealthy, educated and integrated in the West. Faisal Shahzad’s higher education was in Connecticut and his father was Air Vice-Marshal in the Pakistan Army. The underwear bomber studied in London and his father was the chairman of a Nigerian bank. This is significant because it indicates the limits to effectiveness of US aid to Pakistan, even if it successfully reduces poverty and promotes economic development in targeted regions of the country.

There are other things to look out for in the days to come. Pakistan’s arrests of Shahzad’s associates in Karachi is being touted as evidence of the ISI’s (Pakistan’s intelligence agency) increasing cooperation with the U.S., but such enthusiasm needs to be tempered given Pakistan’s spotty track record with keeping suspects under arrest. The real bone of contention between the U.S. and Pakistan is the Pakistani Army’s refusal to undertake a large-scale offensive in North Waziristan, the home of the Haqqani network (which targets US forces in Afghanistan) and Pakistani Taliban. There is little to suggest that the failed Times Square bomb plot will change that.

This post was first published at kevinslaten.blogspot.com on May 7, 2010.

Marjah - Strategic Success or Useful Distraction?

In statistics, you need at least three data points to find the line of best fit. At the risk of future ridicule, I proclaim that with my third blog entry in March, my output is once a month. Which is not prolific by any standards, but is at least a benchmark which creates expectations for you and me!

Anyhow, on March 9th, I tore myself from the prep for a Political Economy final to check out a talk by Gilles Dorronsoro on the recent escalation of the War in Afghanistan, as part of UChicago's excellent "World Beyond the Headlines" series. The video from his lecture is not up yet, but keep a lookout for it (older ones include Stiglitz and Thurrow).

Preemptory conflict of interest note here: I worked with Gilles last year at the Carnegie Endowment. Which in this case was one of the reasons I have immense respect for his analyses -I know for a fact that he is one of the few scholars/commentators who travels frequently to Afghanistan (and not on govt/army orchestrated trips) and has spent significant chunks of time there since the 1980s.

In any case, Gilles' talk was insightful in that it challenged a lot of what has been written about the recent US offensive in Marjah and supposed turning of the tide in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some of his key myth-busters were:

The lack of strategic importance of Marjah - Marjah is not a city (as is often reported) but a collection of towns. It is neither close to the border nor linked to Afghanistan's main highway, Ring Road, making it irrelevant from the point of securing US supply lines. It is also not a Taliban stronghold like the city of Kandahar, which is not being targeted. Lastly, while it is located in Helmand, where the majority of Afghanistan's poppy is grown, opium is just one among the Taliban's many sources of income. Taking Marjah does not weaken the Taliban's finances significantly.

The Pakistan Army has not changed its priorities - Much has been made of Pakistan's capture of Taliban's second-in-command Mullah Ghani Baradar, with Fareed Zakaria even arguing that Pakistan's new cooperation represents a foreign policy victory for President Obama. Gilles claimed, and next week a Karzai advisor confirmed, that the Afghanistan government was in negotiations with Baradar. In essence, Baradar's capture was not a changing of Pakistan Army and ISI's basic strategy, but a reminder that they would prefer a future Afghan dispensation which includes the Taliban members they control, rather than those of the Karzai government's choosing.

Negotiations, not escalation is the way forward - An argument that has been the theme of much of Gilles' writings is that the US and its allies simply do not have the resources (165,000 troops are nowhere close to enough) and time (decreasing public support) to pursue an escalation in Afghanistan. Given this tough context, the way forward are negotiations with the Taliban. Getting the timing right is important though - if a talismanic figure like Mullah Omar survives, he will acquire the same legendary status that Ahmed Shah Massoud, who helped drive out the Soviets in the 1980s, did. And that will decrease his, and in turn, the Taliban's incentives to negotiate. While this adds unpredictability to negotiation, in Gilles opinion, it was still a better option than escalation.

While there is room for disagreement with Gilles' policy recommendation, his analysis is useful in that it presents a cogent explanation of recent events apart from the easiest one - that the international coalition is now winning in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The next few months would provide more clues about whether the tide has indeed turned in AfPak.

The Great Expectations from India

I write this post after 3 weeks of getting clobbered by midterms and shellacked by assignments. The experience was made worse, knowing fully well that my commitment to blogging was becoming less credible by the day. Anyhow, the only vent to my thoughts I managed last week was a response to my friend Dan Michaeli's post about Indian foreign policy. In it, Dan argues that India's domestic politics often prevent it from working closely with the U.S., thus leading to a situation where it often makes demands but rarely reciprocates in the India-U.S. relationship. Here's my response:

Dan, I disagree with the premise that only domestic politics prevents India from a closer relationship with the U.S.

On trade and climate, India’s interests are very much those of a developing country, with 60% of the population engaged in agriculture (explaining being at loggerheads with the US at Doha) and 45% extremely poor (making it hard to accept legally binding emission cuts).

On Iran, while India does not support sanctions against it, it did vote against it at three IAEA resolutions between 2005 and 2009. These were significant moves for India, which has had warm relations with Iran since the heydays of nonalignment. In fact, this vote was criticized in many quarters as a test set up by the US for India during the nuke deal negotiations.

Also, the unwillingness to have a closer relationship is reciprocated by the US on an issue like Afghanistan. Both countries have a convergence of interest there, with India even more leery of any reconciliation with the Taliban (it was the only country to express dissent against negotiation with the Taliban at the recent London Conference). While it is unlikely to send troops there, it could have contributed to US efforts by supplying military trainers. But the idea was shot down during the US strategy review because of Pakistan’s apprehensions.

Finally, I take the point that there is a reflexive distrust of US geopolitical motives in certain Indian political circles. It was a significant political cost during the nuke deal negotiations as well. But it does not explain the divergence between India and the US on many issues. Divergence of interests does.

On a related note, Dan's post reminded me of a beautiful review that George Perkovich had written for Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi in 2007. In it, he placed U.S. expectations of India into historical perspective:

"To comprehend India's achievement, imagine if Mexico became the 51st of the United States, followed by Brazil, Argentina and the rest of Central and South America. Add Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain to give this union the Sunni-Shia mix of India. The population then represented in Congress would still be smaller and less diverse linguistically, religiously, culturally and economically than India's. If such a state could democratically manage the interests and conflicts swirling within it, and not threaten its neighbors, the world should ask little else from it. If we were such a state, we would feel that our humane progress contributes so much to global well-being that smaller, richer, easier-to-manage states should not presume to tell us what to do."

Winner’s Curse and the IPL Auction

So, as January nearly comes to an end, I have found my new year resolution – I resolve to blog at least once a week more frequently this year. As you will notice, my previous blogging attempts have come in spurts interspersed by long periods of hibernation. I’ve decided to set the record straight, partly due to peer pressure (some of my friends, Kevin,Andrew, Ali, Dan and Rohit are extremely prolific bloggers) but mostly because of selfish reasons – blogging crystallizes my own random observations into more random theorizing about how the world works. Or doesn’t.

To kick things off, I’m going to write about this week’s player auction in the IPL. For the uninitiated and Americans, that’s the Indian Premier League, the biggest, bestest sporting extravaganza on the planet. Okay, I exaggerate. It is a professional cricket league started in India in 2008 which revolutionized the sport from being a somewhat indulgent, five day (Test Matches) or eight-hour affair (One-Day Cricket) to a glitzy three hour entertainment package, with city based franchises owned by corporate honchos and Bollywood stars.

Much ink and cyberspace has been devoted to dissecting the IPL’s commercializing, corrupting effect on cricket. That is NOT the subject of this post. What struck me this year was the auction for players, specifically Kieron Pollard. Now, the way this year’s auction was set up, all teams were allowed to spend a maximum of $750,000 to buy players. If they spent it all on a single player and more than one team bid their maximum for that player, there would be a tie breaker. The tie breaker would be a single-price, sealed bid auction, where teams would write their secret bids on a sheet of paper. The highest bid would win the player and the amount would remain undisclosed. The above scenario played out for Pollard, who was then snapped up by Mumbai.

Now, the question which immediately comes to mind is, why keep the final bid amount ($750,000 + X) secret? My guess is a phenomenon known as winner’s curse. Winner’s curse is the idea that in auctions like the single-price, sealed bid auction and the English auction, the winner ends up paying more than the actual value of the asset. Essentially, the asset has the same value for all teams, but their estimates are different, because of uncertainty about the value of the asset. This uncertainty leads to different bids, but the highest bid is always higher than the common value of the asset.

I believe Kieron Pollard is a winner’s curse for Mumbai. And the uncertainty around his value wasn’t because any team had privileged information about him, but because they had so little information about him. This is a man who has played 20 international innings (ODIs and T20s combined) and faced 235 balls in total. To give you some perspective, that’s 1% of the number of balls Sachin Tendulkar has faced, and Sachin's “icon value” to Mumbai was $1.035 million. All that Pollard had going for him was one explosive 18 ball 54 in the T20 Champions League in October 2009. Incidentally, that match was played in India, which raises an interesting point about the disproportionate value of good performances in India for foreign players.

If this post leads you to think winner’s curse is a just an academic curiosity which has no real insight for the real world, think again. After the grand financial collapse in the US in 2008, the Treasury’s “Bank Plan” was to auction toxic assets to private investors, and get them off banks’ books. Of course, the problem was private investors did not know what the toxic assets were worth and were likely to suffer the winners’ curse if they made the winning bid. And that is why the Administration had to offer to subsidize the purchases.

Mumbai had no such subsidies. And that’s why I think they will regret winning the bid for Pollard.

Dollar Reserve System: Too Much of a Good Thing

Last week, Chicago Policy Review, whose editorial team I'm on, unveiled its brand new blog. Happily, I posted one of the first few articles on one of my old bugbears - the Dollar Reserve System. Enjoy!

Chak De India

"A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a cricket team, long suppressed, finds utterance."

I can almost feel Nehru turning in his grave after my shameless use of his historic 1947 speech to describe a cricket win, but there are times when lofty prose is needed to aptly describe monumental achievements, and this is one of them. India won the Pataudi trophy, defeating England in England, 1-0. For the cricket dabblers, statistically minded and perennial cynics, it is a result which merits little attention - India had just about pipped an opposition that wasn't the evil hegemon Australia or the old enemy Pakistan (even though no one had given India a ghost of a hope before the series). Yet for the acculuturated cricket lover, a test cricket romantic, and an Indian team follower, the magnitude of this victory cannot be dimmed. To understand these layered feelings, one has to have lived the hopes, some successes and many failures of the Indian teams of the 1990s and 2000s.

My love affair with cricket began with the '92 World Cup, all of which I watched snuggled up in blankets during a chilly winter vacation spent in Patna (like all of my vacations, really). It was a forgettable world cup for India, who lost to everyone except Zimbabwe and eventual winners, Pakistan. Yet it was also the arrival of a short, scrawny and curly haired Sachin on the One Day stage - the sight of a little 19 year old boy taking on and dominating tall, strapping, fast bowlers, beamed into millions of TV viewing homes, pan dukans, restaurants and villages brought him instant fame and celebrity. It was the simultaneous birth of the television fuelled One Day cricket as we know it (colored clothing, white balls et al) and the cult of Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. As the great man once modestly said, "I'm the child of the one day game".

In all this razzmatazz, what was lost was India's love for Test cricket. The wham-bam-thank you-ma'am kind of instant entertainment that one day cricket provided had captured the imagination of a generation (my generation) but had also made the coquettish joys of the Test cricket format appear quaint and an anachronism. Where Pa would rave about the crease occupation prowess of Gavaskar and Vishwanath, I would sing praises of the stylish Azhar and the maverick Jadeja's hitting. Even though the rise of One-dayers are identified as cause and decline of Tests as effect, there is another mechanism at work encapsulated by an inversion of the Latin saying, "'Quod me nutrit me destruit" (What nourishes me also destroys me). One-Day cricket hasnt just destroyed Test cricket as it was known, it has also nourished Test cricket. Apart from subsidizing Tests with the millions that it rakes in (check out the difference in stadium crowds in the two forms) , it has also created a more result oriented Test match culture where 400 runs in a day has moved from the realm of the impossible to eminently probable (incidentally, one of the reasons why Dravid chose to play safe at Oval).

Adapting the framework that I have laid out to the specific case of India, certain observations about this victory come to mind. The young architects of India's win, Karthik, Dhoni, RP Singh, Sreesanth are all between 21-25 years old, about my age or older. They must have watched the '92 World Cup sunggled in their own blankets, whether in Bangalore, Ranchi, Lucknow or Kothamanglam. Their imagination must have been fired by the same SRT, whose images must have been beamed from the same Doordarshan. This, in itself, was the biggest contribution of the TV fuelled One Day game - the democratisation and spread of a sport dominated by the Bombay Boys and Delhi Dons to cricketing backwaters of Jharkhand, Kerala and Uttar Pradesh. If you include current discards Sehwag, Pathan, Raina and Kaif to this lot, what you get is a demographically more dispersed Indian team. And the long term success of Indian cricket will be built on this wide platform.

Now, coming to the second significance of this win: As a part of a long farewell year or two for the Galacticos of Sachin, Dravid, Ganguly and Kumble, this win on English soil after 21 years is a culmination of a golden generation who have been part of many almost there moments together. There have been the memorable ODI successes like the 93 Hero Cup, 97 Titan Cup, 98 Sharjah Coca Cola Cup, Mini World Cup win in Dhaka, reaching the finals of 2003 WC but the disappointments are too many: 12 ODI tournament finals without a win, 96 WC semi-final, 03 WC final whitewash and the biggest of them all, the 07 WC disaster. If the ODI record is chequered, the Test record has recently become better, without the success that should have accompanied it. On nearly every occasion when India were poised on the brink of an overseas Test win in the 1990s, they were thwarted - by the weather (Wanderers '97 against South Africa), or by their own tendency to crumble (Barbados '97, chasing 120), winning a solitary Test against Sri Lanka in the 39 Tests they played. In the 2000s, this trend was reversed, with India's wins abroad being only second to Australia yet they caught an even worse affliction: of losing the next Test after a win (against England, Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, South Africa and even West Indies) resulting in the only outside the subcontinent win last year in West Indies.

Even though India's golden generation has achieved a lot - a WC final, stopping the Aussie juggernaut in Tests and nearly beating them at home, defeating Pakistan in Pakistan, what it has finally done is convincingly beat a good non-Asian team in foreign conditions. The nation had achieved Independence from the foreign domination 60 years back. The cricket team has taken its time.

P.S. Check out Sachin's pic to know what I mean.

Globalization and the 'New Bollywood'

My new fangled tendency to theorize about Bollywood seems to have finally caught some attention as I realised when asked to write an article on it for The Beaver, LSE's student newspaper (if you can call the back page trash that regularly appears in it, 'news'). The occasion is India Week, an annual event on the LSE itinerary when everyone who ever had a brown ancestor suddenly discovers their Indianness (okay, maybe the other occasion is when Shilpa is called "Shilpa poppadum" on Big Brother). I guess I'm being unfair to the whole jamboree - it does have after all have sessions like 'How to wear a Sari'.... Anyway, not to digress further, The Beaver decided to have an India specific issue and yours truly wrote an article for it. Here it is:



“I don’t like the term Bollywood. We are the only surviving industry to Hollywood.….If you’re the only survivor to say Goliath, its nicer to be called David instead of lets say Boliath”
- Shah Rukh Khan

The adjective ‘arrogant’ is often used for Shah Rukh Khan. Yet, as Baadshah of Bollywood, he often finds himself in an ambassadorial role and tends to be more measured in his responses when they are representative of Bollywood or India. The comment in question, apart from being inaccurate (Latin American, Hong Kong and Chinese film industries are still flourishing) is, in many ways emblematic of the new confidence that a bold, young, consumerist, middle class India now possesses. In fact, if anything is a barometer of this confidence, it is the changing character of Bombay films from 2000 onwards.
It has been a longstanding criticism of Bombay films that they are genre ambiguous ‘masala’ films which are a potpourri of action, romance, drama, comedy. To see the character of a hoodlum involved in a street fight break out into song in the next scene may appear jarring to a new watcher of Bollywood films but is normal for a viewer acculturated to these movies. Add to the mix unnecessary songs and litany of characters and Bombay films begin to appear positively bewildering for a recent convert. When questioned about this aspect of Indian cinema, famous script writer, Sutanu Gupta said:

“(Indian) audiences have a very set belief in the kind of entertainment provided by cinema – they should see part of family life, romance, songs; they want everything. At the same time, they hate hodge podge films. They want to know whether it is an action film, a thriller, revenge or a ghost story or love story. It’s amazing!”

Despite this strong sense of what Indian audiences want, there has been a noticeable evolution in every aspect of Bombay films in the past decade or so. Where this trend has been the most noticeable is with the themes of recent movies. The run-of-the-mill boy meets girl, dances around trees and bashes up the bad guys routine has given way to more mature and thought provoking subject matter. Symbolic of this change was Rang De Basanti (2006), with its unsettling story about the political awakening and radicalization of jaded urban youth. Another lesser known 2006 film, Being Cyrus, completely in English and boasting of an A list star cast was a bizarre black comedy which defied convention and shocked audiences bred on morality tales. Ab Tak Chappan (2004), armed with the tagline “Doctors cure, engineers build, I kill” was a songless (yes, the unthinkable has happened!) film inspired by a real life Mumbai cop who, as an ‘encounter’ specialist shot dead 56 criminals. Omkara (2006), an adaptation of Othello to Uttar Pradesh’s rural milieu continued the process set in place by the same director in his equally brilliant Maqbool (2003), which adapted Macbeth to the setting of a Muslim gangster’s home. Raincoat (2005), inspired by O. Henry’s short story Gift of the Magi broke down the doors of screenplay structure in Bombay films by limiting the action of the whole movie to just one room of a dilapidated house where the two protagonists, once lovers, discuss the trajectory of their separate married lives.

It can be safely said that Bollywood is undergoing a period of experimentation when its filmstars, directors and musicians are no longer afraid of their own audiences. The cause for this new found boldness is pure economics. The purchasing power of young, urban, middle class Indians has increased quite dramatically in the last decade. This is the class which seeks to wear the same clothes, own the same gadgets and demands entertainment in the same manner as their counterparts anywhere else in the world. Cashing in on this phenomenon are sprawling urban multi-screen theatres with ticket prices starting at five – ten times their single-screen country cousins. This has meant that films no longer need to have universal appeal to recover costs of filmmaking or even make profits. Add to that the even higher spending capacity of the burgeoning Indian diaspora and its willingness to lap up all that Bollywood has to offer and then one begins to understand why Bombay films are changing. To put it simply, Bollywood no longer needs the India which cannot pay for it. It has 2 billion viewers from Morocco to Malaysia who more than make up for that.

Perhaps it is inaccurate to say that Bollywood has changed. To say that it has globalized is closer to the truth. And with this globalization, have come stories which are localized. It is a strange dichotomy which needs to be preserved if David has any chance of slaying Goliath.

Umrao Jaan Ada

Bollywood movies have a way of creating mass hysteria among the Indian media. Some would claim even 'international' media pointing to Aishwarya's appearance on Oprah and 60 minutes - its another matter that questions asked of her ranged from 'Why cant you kiss in Bollywood movies?' to 'Do you have a boyfriend?', all of which were responded to with the practised coy giggle (no words mind you) which won Ash the Miss World crown and many hearts. Having said that my sympathies are with her because of the ambassadorial role she inevitably finds herself in - often criticised for whatever replies she gives because of the way it doesnt represent the true India. Whatever that is.

Anyway, this mindless ramble was meant to be a prelude to this piece I had written two years back about Mirza Hadi Ruswa's beautifully nostalgic novel, Umrao Jaan Ada which is the subject of the new movie which is coming out in December. The trailors show a bemused Ash prancing about in a swimming pool (thankfully not in a bikini), a jarring image somewhat different to what I had in my mind after I read the book. Penning them down so you and I can later compare the movie.

Umrao Jaan Ada is the memoirs of a courtesan of the same name who, in the sunset of her life, takes a poignant look back on her extraordinary life gone by and the characters who played their parts in it. Suitably, the author adopts the same romantic style of narration, with a flavor of longing for the past seeping into the story. Bitter-sweet memories are filtered through the sepia tinted lens of nostalgia, glorifying and almost a pining for the golden epoch of Lucknow.The story begins with the abduction of the nine year old Umrao by arogue, Dilawar Khan and then her being sold to a woman, Khanum who buys her and begins the long process of refining and sophistication interms of academic, musical and cultural education required to mould her into a courtesan. Inculcated with these qualities, Umrao soonbecomes the most sought after courtesan, starting a journey on whichher paths cross with Bandits, Maulvis, Nawabs, Kings and even her mother and brother, each association being temporary but seminal.I n the midst of it all, the Mutiny of 1857 against the East IndiaCompany takes place and disrupts the idyllic and hedonistic world surrounding the courtesans, bringing the stark force of history into the narrative.

After the mutiny, when Umrao returns to her beloved Lucknow, a sea change has taken place, encompassing everything from society to culture to her own profession itself. In fact, the author describes physical changes in the urban landscape etc to convey the metaphor of change in the social landscape. This paper endeavors totake a look at each of those changes and explore their meanings in the historical context.The most prominent effect of the Mutiny was a complete loss of livelihood for the courtesans. It is not difficult to understand thecause for this development because the institution of courtesanshipwas funded by the social elites, the creme de la creme of Indian society.

This phenomenon has to be seen in light of the fact that thiswas the era when the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar was just anominal figurehead and the dynasty itself existed in an extremely attenuated form. Due to the lack of a strong, centralized rule, small regional princely states had come into their own and local rulers who had neither the finances nor the military strength to defendthemselves from other small states depended on the British for'protection' and legitimacy. Nawabs or Rajahs were adopted titles to signify their status even though their power itself was contingent upon British power. Before and after the mutiny, when the British used policies like Doctrine of Lapse and annexed Awadh and Jhansi, thepower of such rulers eroded to a great extent. The financial wherewithal of these and other small rulers also decreased drastically due to the confiscation and in effect, the last remaining vestige oftheir power also crumbled. Once the sentinels of high culture, these patrons of courtesans now found themselves leading an existence in abject penury. Numerous such instances (Nawab Chabban being disinherited from his uncle's will) arementioned in the story, giving an idea of the strong hierarchy present in Indian society. Even though there is a great degree of fluctuation in the persons occupying rungs of the pecking order, the order remains intact. This fluidity in social mobility also gives the character ofthe courtesan a paradox; she, who is supposed to be just a slave to the affluence of a patron, manages to have affections for the fallen individuals who lose their economic and social standing.

After the Mutiny, this class falls by the wayside. Once this clientele was lost,courtesanship degenerated into a form of prostitution, similar to the sex workers of today, far removed from the paraphernalia of education and high culture which courtesans ironically were provided with. The practice moved to seedy basement of society in search of patrons and existence, albeit a wretched one.Another class of patrons which never had the social standing of Nawabsbut nevertheless were frequent visitors of courtesans was bandits (asenunciated by the character Faiz Ali, who facilitates Umrao's escapefrom her apartment). These bandits, who often looted passengers,British and Indian, found themselves at the receiving end of a major crackdown on thuggee post 1857 by a rejuvenated British administration. This ensured the loss of their livelihood and as aconsequence, loss of patronage for the courtesans. Combined with the loss in clientele among the elites, this acted as one of the primaryreasons for the decline of the institution. In spite of the loss ofthis section of clientele, there were those Indian patrons who werepart of the British administration, yet had sympathies with the subject of their affections.
This fact throws light upon the emotional churning that would have taken place in the minds of the Indian servants of the Raj in carrying out the repressive measures of the Company. The tussle between the dual identities of a British servantor soldier and an Indian 'nationality' is not restricted to thisparticular instance. At many points during the Raj, they had to arrive at temporary compromises regarding their conceptions of Self and Other. As proved by the Mutiny itself, sometimes these conclusions were even unfavorable for the British.

Umrao Jaan, inspite of being a book whose protagonist is a courtesan,does not fall prey to victimization of it's character and there is no overt sympathy or effort to justify Umrao. It is here that it achieves a different purpose: the one of humanizing a 'barbaric' institution's participants. The British had sought to do exactly the opposite. To justify the colonization of a land, a colonizer always needs todemonize and dehumanize the natives as a lower form of civilization. The British had sought to do this with their amplification of marginal customs and phenomena like Sati, Banditry and Coutesanship as symbols of India and its people. Combined with theories of racial superiority and application of classical dichotomies of the East and West, they had come up with a rationale for their actions. The abolition of Sati,crackdown on banditry and legalization of prostitution were portrayed as the acts required to rid a lower society of it's evils. What was conveniently forgotten was that these practices were never of the magnitude of 'epidemics' that they were made out to be. All in all,Umrao Jaan serves to give a panoramic view of a society and aninstitution in transition and deserves its place in the highestechelons of Urdu literature.

For those who got to the end of this monograph, here's a bonus...a clip of Umaro Jaan's 'grave' in Lucknow

http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/25182/mystery-of-the-real-umrao-jaan.html

Diwali and My Sweet Lord

Its been a fortnight since Diwali and even by Indian standards of punctuality, I'm fashionably late in writing about it. Yet I will do it in a bid to satisfy the insatiable demand of my enthralled readers. After the 'White Diwalis' in Connecticut in the last two years, I was determined to make this one in London count. Before I could place my shameless self-invitation phone calls to the relatives I had unearthed, manna dropped from the heaven above. Pradeep Uncle and Meera Aunty requested the pleasure of my august company for the festival. It is noteworthy that Pradeep Uncle is a doctor by profession but because of his interdisciplinary knowledge and his constant claims to lack of recognition, has been gifted a car with the number plate VIDWAN (Knowledgable one) by his gracious wife. Of couse, she herself can make a legitimate claim to the car itself, being a professor of Development Economics at University of London.

After long discussions ranging from the distinction between spirituality and religiosity, Amartya Sen and Meghnad Desai's views (thats the kind of exciting stuff Development Economists' discuss!), the differences between US and UK, we got down to the business of the day - thanking Goddess Laxmi for her magnamity (American Express giving me a credit definitely counts). With divinity satisfied, it was time for us mortals to feed ourselved. Apart from the scrumptious dinner on the table, what I was looking forward to were the roshogollas. Now these were the authentic ones which I had 'fished out' - from Brick Lane (subject of the the Monica Ali novel by the same name), a street famous for its Bangladeshi restaurants and fortutiously located 2 blocks from my residence. A Bihari belch later, we got to my favourite bit of the evening - lighting the rockets and bombs after 3 years. Of course, so much as uttering those words would probably land you at Guantanamo Bay if you're in the US, explaining why yours truly was deprived of 'having a blast' during those Diwalis. For the environmentalists out there, it would be comforting to know that these fireworks were remarkably less polluting than our Indian variety. Before you ask, they were Chinese.

After a contended nights' sleep, and a round of garden cricket with the other Apratim (son of Pradeep Uncle and Meera Aunty), we went to this ISKON temple called Bhaktivedanta Manor today morning. The bizzare juxtaposition in its name is explained by the fact that this was a manor owned by George Harrison of the Beatles' fame. After his dabblings with the Sitar, Pt Ravi Shankar, Krishna and everything Indian, he decided to donate this sprawling property to the ISKON group. The fields on either side of the pathway leading to the temple is populated by cows idly grazing about without a care in the world. In a true homage to Krishna and the Yadav clan, the same cows are milked for the prashad given out at the temple. The temple itself is a well organised affair with many Gujarati women voluntarily contributing their cooking skills in the preparation of food given to everyone. I'm not a man given to hyperbole in matters related to food, yet I have to recommend this food to any hungry college students out there. Like all good blog entries end, I found myself resolutely hitting the road to home after the hearty meal. Or wait, there is an epilogue to the story: I found this George Harrison song dedicated to Krishna called 'My Sweet Lord' with pretty corny lyrics - Give it a hear if you can...

http://www.krishnatemple.com/manor/harrison.shtm

Sack Parliament Protest

Sunday night, my flatmate and I were cleaning dishes when I suddenly noticed a red cup with Karl Marx's visage printed on it. "Brendan, are you a Marxist?", I quizzed him. Brendan, wearing a Rage Against the Machine t-shirt replied, "No mate, but I am sort of radical - interested in the revolution, you know. In fact, if you are as well, come by ... there is this huge protest outside the Parliament tomorrow." Now, being the sort who labels his political views on Facebook as Left-liberal, I decided it was my primary duty to protest. But protest what, I quietly asked him. "The War, old chap, what else?" pat came Brendan's reply.

So there I was, protesting outside the British Parliament the next day, well attired for the occasion in a Che Guevara t-shirt (Lets not get into the irony of commodification of the poor guy as part of capitalist production) with Brendan in tow. Correction, we were watching the protest because we arrived late and this whole demonstration was already encircled by the police. Now, I must mention here that there seemed to be five times the number of fluorescent jacket wearing policemen than punks with fluorescent colored hair engaging in the protest. The situation's seriousness was done no favours by Chinese tourists who were merrily clicking away pictures on their mobile phones, digital cameras and whatever new Chinese device which takes pictures. Yet, in the midst of all this absurdity which would have done Beckett and Camus proud, was some startling imagery. Baby clothes with blood stains on them hung on a line. A black man covered in a black sheet, with his duct tape sealing his mouth. A huge banner which said, "100,000 Iraqis murdered by us" (or US, if you're virulently anti-American). And an Iraqi man speaking to those who cared to listen about how his country had been devastated.

Yes, this was laughable compared to the crowd of a million which took to the London streets on 16 February, 2003 with slogans like 'Make Tea, Not War'. But this was also a sheer indictment of how run-of-the-mill, mundane and normal the War has become. The death toll in Iraq, Darfur and Lebanon competes (and often loses out) for inch and eyeball space with stock market indices on TV news channels. But who cares - leave it to seminars on World Peace in Washington to solve our problems. Maybe the 40 odd teenagers protesting outside the British parliament would not solve the world's protracted conflicts, but at least they remind us that there is something drastically wronf with it. While the rest of us stand outside the circle (literally and metaphorically) and write blog entries about them.

Photographs: http://www.flickr.com/photos/james_2005/265301770/in/set-72157594320314605/

Sunday Bazaar at Liverpool Street

So this Sunday morning, I was taking a random stroll down Bishopsgate. I would love to call it a morning jog, but self deception has its limits and in this particular activity, very precisely mathematical speed limits within which my locomotion did not qualify. Not to digress further (slightly ironic - that phrase - since I am about to describe its exact opposite), I spotted what looked like a motley cluster of stalls in the normally staid and dignified Middlesex Street. Strolling towards the stalls, my ears began to detect the intoxicating strains of regga combining with boisterous beats of Bhangra (I wonder if the mix has been tried at any nightclub yet). Intrigued, I delved further into a concentration of humanity (that motley cluster bit was just my foggy morning vision I suppose) comparable to the stifling crowds in the bylanes of Chandni Chowk. The cause for such dhakkam - dhukki soon became obvious - a temporary Sunday haat had magically sprouted on the same street which was the preserve of bored investment bankers in dark suits, downing pints in bars which lined the street, every other day of the week.

Strangely enough, the same dark suits were being sold for the price of those same pints in front of the same bars today! Okay, the bit about the same price as pints was my imagination - but you get the idea. Salesmen advertising consisted of nuggets like, "Suits for 10 pounds, suits for 10 pounds...This is not the stuff you get from India and China. This is designer stuff, straight from Bangladesh!". Moving further, I realised there were shirts, jeans, kurtis, skirts, shoes, belts, football jerseys, London memorabilia, jewellery, electronics, mobile phones, bed sheets - all up for sale at a small fraction of the loot which is branded 'Sale' at Marks & Spencer. Not to mention the atmosphere of this global marketplace - Rastafarian types exhibiting their eponymous hats under a huge cannabis poster, Egyptian movie DVDs being sold under the watchful gaze of a stern looking Nasser portrait, Jodhpuri chappals being haggled for alongside Italian shoes, Gujarati lehengas being sold cheek to jowl with bohemian skirts. If anything deserves that hackneyed term, 'free market', this was it. And I was loving it! (contrary to what perceptive readers might believe, that last bit is not an example of subliminal advertising for a certain food corporation which I will henceforth refer to as McShit).

At the end of a good two hours and 2 pounds spent in the Bazaar (for those wondering, I bought a shirt which said "When I read about the evils of drinking, I stopped ... reading!"). Realising that morning had glided into noon, I decided that it was high time I started my assignment from the spectacularly hair-raising subject of Econometrics. Bidding good-bye (a temporary one, that is - I'm sure I'll be there next week), I trudged off towards my Hall thinking about a potential correlation between jogging and shopping...

London Diaries

Bumming around has an uncanny knack of popping existentialist questions in your head - After wading in the sublime, Who am I? Does my Life have any meaning? I soon found myself gasping for breath with the inane, Will I get into grad school? Do I know if I want to go to grad school? Do I know what I do know is not incorrect information? I decided there have to be better time-killing methods than this. Then it flashed across my mind - my BLOG!!! It has been a while since I satiated the desires of its readers - at last count, it consisted of a bored yours truly - with my profound insights on life, the universe and everything else. So here it is, a revamped avtar which shall document my meaningless meanderings through the streets of London...

Krishna's divinity in the Gita

At the end of an era (kalpa) all creatures disintegrate into my nature and at the beginning of another era I manifest them again. Such it is my nature (prakriti) to follow again and again the pattern of the Infinite manifestations and disintegrations (9,7-8).

The Bhagavad Gita can be, and has often been, summarized as God Krishna’s spiritual sermon to the reluctant warrior Arjuna to resolve the ethical dilemma of killing his relatives. Like all summaries, this too conceals more than it reveals about the text and cannot be blamed for this deficiency. It is only on closer scrutiny of the text that deeper questions begin to surface; why does an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God take human form to bring order to the world? If he is Time, who has killed all those that are killed ultimately in battle, why does he need Arjuna as an instrument? This paper seeks to analyze the nature of Krishna’s divinity, and hence prove that despite the deterministic nature of Gita’s doctrine, His intervention is necessary to grant humans any moral responsibility.

A useful beginning point for the analysis of Krishna’s actions is Chapter 3 of the Gita when its most famous message, “Act without attachment to its fruits” is expounded. Krishna explains this doctrine to Arjuna by citing his own example. Being the Creator of the universe and as he later claims, the universe itself, Krishna has no reason to act like most humans motivated by desire to gain something. Yet, he chooses to act, this choice born out of his own duty as Preserver of the Universe. As God, Krishna is above human law, nevertheless subject to his own law; Preservation of order in the world of humans is their duty, but human failure wrests this responsibility on him. The equilibrium that Krishna has to achieve is not just between good and evil, order and chaos; it is between His action and human action, determinism and free will.
Later in the chapter, Krishna explains to Arjuna how actions are caused by ‘forces of Nature’ and humans are not the agents of their choices. Assuming that nature of a human in indicated by caste, which in itself is determined through past karma, the Gita seems to degenerate into a kind of fatalism which is salvaged only by the qualifier which grants humans the choice of their attitude while acting. This is the balance between human action and God’s actions which Krishna sets out to define by prescribing the motivations of right action. Demanding intense devotion, he tells Arjuna that all actions, if committed as an offering to Him, lead one to God (4,24). The immediate, worldly results of the action are irrelevant, and as propounded earlier, should not be the motivation for the action. At surface value, it seems that this ethical system distances the performer of actions from the positive or negative effects of his actions, effectively making him immune from judgment. Yet, the essence of the ethic lies in the assumption that Krishna too acts; and when He acts, no one escapes judgment.

Krishna provides the reason for his incarnations in Chapter 4 Verse 12 when he says “When righteousness is weak and unrighteousness exults in pride, then my Spirit arises on Earth.” Keeping this context in mind, Chapter 2 of the Gita seems like an exercise in futility. After all, if it is Krishna himself who has to vanquish Adharma, why does he provide arguments for Arjuna to fight the war? In fact, Krishna’s prophetic command (“Through the fate of their karma I have already doomed them to die: be thou merely the means of his work”) in Chapter 11 complicates the question further with the introduction of Karma. The natural question which arises is about the relationship between Krishna and the Karmic law: Does the law of Karma take its own course, independent of Krishna or does he control the forces of destiny? The Gita does not answer the question and any reading between the lines would be more in the realm of speculation rather than analysis. What can be safely asserted is that the question is irrelevant to Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna. Even if the law of karma decided the fate of Arjuna’s enemies, he wasn’t aware of it and needed divine intervention to know his purpose in human history. It is to be understood that Krishna’s objective is not merely the killing of the Kauravas but to make Arjuna conscious of his duty’s importance in the restoration of Dharma. Krishna’s deliberate refusal to be the dispenser of justice despite Arjuna’s reluctance to fight is an indicator of the self-imposed limits of his duty as an avatar. Krishna’s duty is to slay the doubts in the battleground of Arjuna’s soul and not to deprive him of his duty to fight for righteousness on the actual battleground of Kurukshetra. Even though Krishna is God, He has defined his role merely as a facilitator, placing the onus of acting on human Arjuna.

It is in Chapters 7,8 and 9 of the Gita that Krishna’s characterization undergoes a great change. The failure of his arguments as charioteer, friend and guide force him to reveal to Arjuna his true nature and form. His slow elevation from a fellow human being to God whose scope of action is nothing short of the spectacular and serves to create the feelings of intimidation, love and devotion in Arjuna. The numerous qualities ascribed to Krishna in these three chapters only serve to highlight the severe constraints that language creates for the kind of entity that the Gita tries to describe. Krishna is portrayed as a God that subsumes and defies all other ontological conceptions of God. The doctrines of Monism, Dualism and Pantheism seem to dissolve in the all-encompassing nature of Krishna’s divinity. The neat categories of Self and Other begin to hold no meaning in Krishna’s presence. All pervasive, he becomes the Observer, the Observed as well as the frame of reference.

In Chapter 11, the verbal imagery of the previous three chapters culminates into a stunning darshan of Krishna’s virat form for Arjuna. The dazzling view of the Infinite Divinity that Arjun saw was a confirmation of everything that Krishna had been telling him from the beginning. Apart from the numerous Gods and forces of nature that resided in Krishna’s body, Arjuna saw one sight which completely changed his mindset. Seeing Krishna’s bloody fangs which had the Kauravas trapped between them, Arjuna, for one moment, became privy to the future and the past (“I have already killed them’). The change in perspective from linear to circular time made him realize his own insignificance as well as importance in carrying out what was pre-ordained. Expanding the sphere of his choice and action to centuries forward and backward, Krishna struck a double blow. It emphasized not just his own greatness, but also gave Arjuna an assured place in his infinite divine form, giving his future actions a new meaning. The vision of Chapter 11 is as much about Krishna’s divinity as it is about Arjuna’s. Ultimately, this vision serves to motivate Arjuna much more than Krishna’s arguments, even though the vision corroborates them quite nicely. In fact, such an expansive view of divinity lends itself particularly well to the initial argument that Krishna had made to Arjuna about killing, (2,19) according to which the Eternal in man cannot kill or die.

In the light of the earlier paragraphs observations about Arjuna’s divine role, it is interesting to note his comment when Krishna reverts back to his human form. Arjuna says, “When I see thy gentle human face, Krishna, I return to my own nature, and my heart has peace.” (11, 51) Arjuna, in the beginning of the Gita, was a conflicted character whose behavior was anomalous to his position in the karma-dharma system. He is a character who rebels against the dictates of his ‘nature’ as a warrior, because of the attachments to his kin. His rebellion is the first signs of a revolution that Krishna seeks to quell through his discourse in the Gita. As preserver of the existing order, Krishna rises to the occasion to defend the structures created by Him. Yet, Krishna chooses not to intrude into the circumscribed sphere of Arjuna’s actions. This is because Arjuna carries out Krishna’s duty on Earth. As a defender of righteousness, Arjuna is Krishna’s first line of defense against evil in the world of human beings. Aware that a conflict within him was a precursor to much larger conflicts, Krishna chooses to focus on Arjuna’s enlightenment rather than obliterate the forces of adharma. Restoration of peace within him after Krishna’s vision made the restoration of order in the world an inevitable byproduct.

It is to be understood that Krishna’s reliance on Arjuna is not because He himself is incapable of achieving the task of destroying evil. His exhortation to Arjuna to act is born out of a much deeper reason, that of granting humans the right to chart the course of their lives, however misdirected they may be. Krishna is not a God who revels in self-inflicted human miseries and waits for an opportune moment to eradicate them; He is a God who prods and urges his imperfect creations to follow their duty. Like a parent, He allows his human children to make mistakes because the essence of their existence depends on their perceived ability to choose. The veil of Maya which envelops human memories is but a useful device to grant ‘free will’. When the system is on the verge of breaking down because of the materialism and hedonism resulting from Maya, Krishna lifts the veil off agents like Arjuna who display a predisposition to faith in God. Later, as these memories fade away, the system moves inexorably towards the state of disequilibrium. Krishna’s intervention through Arjuna is not a sign of the failure of the cyclical system. It is how the system works – providing at each step, room for humans to choose, not their actions, but the attitude with which they act. In conclusion, it can then be claimed that the doctrine of the Gita does reconcile determinism and free will, but a faith in Krishna’s intercession is critical to its particular solution.

War of Nerves

A little known German lance corporal recounted his traumatic experience of near-blindness caused by mustard gas in World War I - “My eyes were transformed into glowing coals and the world had grown dark around me”. He was to later oversee the Zyklon B gassing of 6 million Jews and the scientific production of the most deadly nerve gases in the world – Sarin and Tabun. Yet, Hitler (if you hadn’t guessed already) never actually unleashed the deadly gases on the Allies – even when they invaded Germany. Why? It is questions like these, and their answers, which make Jonathan Tucker’s book, ‘War of Nerves’ a must read.
Armed with a Yale degree in Biology and a Ph.D. in Political Science from MIT, Tucker is a chemical and biological weapons specialist and it shows in his meticulously detailed and dense book. War of Nerves traces the trajectory of modern chemical warfare from the French-German treaty of 1675 outlawing poisoned bullets to the Sarin attack in the Tokyo Subway incident of 1995 by a Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shinrikyo. Running through this narrative is the theme of utility and morality of chemical weapons. It becomes quite clear that countries have never shied away from development, production and stockpiling of these weapons despite a long standing tradition of international laws banning their military use The story begins in the 1930s at the pharmaceutical firm, IG Farben, where brilliant German chemists first manufactured Tabun and Sarin for Hitler’s war machine. Labeled the ‘perverted science’ by Churchill, the development and production of nerve gases was shrouded in secrecy on both sides, making the fear of retaliation a deterrent for Hitler. Among the spoils of war, scientists and manufacturing plants found to be engaged in nerve gas production were the biggest prize. Hived off to the Soviet Union, US, UK and France for help on the development of the respective countries’ chemical warfare programs, they were to prove critical in the balance of power in the post WWII, Cold War paradigm.
Tucker’s story then moves to the Middle East which was the battleground for proxy wars between the US and Soviet Union. In 1962, Egypt staged a coup in Yemen to replace the monarchy with a republican government. In the bitter conflict that followed, Egyptian forces dropped bombs with Cyrillic markings containing phosgene, mustard and later even V-agent gases, on royalist Yemeni forces. Even as Egypt’s patron, the Soviet Union’s complicity was being debated, Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s ally, filed a complaint with the UN only to be met by a muted world reaction. The deafening American silence to this flagrant violation by the Soviet Union was explained by its own use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. By 1967, Egypt had the capacity to indigenously manufacture nerve agents; it also used them to devastating effect in Yemeni villages. Chemical proliferation had begun, and the West wasn’t going to war to save a few Arab tribesmen. When the 1967 Arab-Israeli war came along, this was taken one step further with Israel’s own scramble for chemical weapons to counter Egypt.
Chemical warfare was to raise its ugly head once again in the Middle East – this time in the Iran-Iraq conflict of the 1980s. In the turmoil following Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iranian Revolution, Saddam Hussein attacked Iran in a bid for regional hegemony. Iran’s “human wave” counterattack meant that Saddam considered the use of chemical weapons to over come the numerical disadvantage of his infantry. Tucker, in painstaking detail points out that Iraq’s chemical weapons were born out of a development program which received technical assistance from Egypt and foreign supplies from West German, Dutch, Swiss, French and US firms – Iraq’s chemical weapons were very much the West’s own creation. When Iran went to the UN protesting Iraq’s violation of the Geneva convention, it received the same muted response that Yemen had received. Believing that a militant Islamic Iranian regime presented greater threat to US interests, Reagan chose to side with the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. Convinced that an Iranian victory meant endangering the oil interests in the Middle East, US sent a certain Donald Rumsfeld to speak to Saddam and assure him that its public posturing against its chemical warfare was just a matter of principle. Using Egyptian assistance, Iraq concentrated on Tabun manufacture, which was later used on the Kurdish village of Halabja – the same incident of genocide for which Saddam stands in the dock today.
War of Nerves identifies the thread running through Nazi Germany to Bush’s America. The multi-layered complicity of nations on this disturbing path of human progress leaves one with the rankling conclusion that there are no innocents in this dangerous game. The labels of ‘victims’ and ‘aggressors’ can be applied to any country depending only on the historical timeframe one chooses as reference. Tucker’s expertly woven history of chemical warfare is a chilling tale, which leaves a reader frustrated and cynical of the world’s governments’ vocal resolutions to abolish these weapons. Faced with global terrorism and the relative ease with which groups like the al-Qaeda could obtain these weapons, the choice is not an easy one. And it would require nerves of steel to make it.

The Problem of Rationality and Choice

The study of Economics was famously drubbed as a ‘dismal science’ by Thomas Carlyle, and perhaps for good reason. Most of traditional economics is rooted in the idea that markets are the most efficient mechanisms to allocate scarce resources among members of society. It is not difficult to understand that this is a direct critique of the State as a body which could be relied upon to distribute resources. So much so, that Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations advocated the policy of laissez-faire (no governmental intervention) with immense faith in ‘the invisible hand’ which would get rid of all inefficiencies, if left to its own devices. It would be useful to remember the basic assumption for this argument - the economic man: a rational, self-interested, utility maximizing individual with known endogenous preferences. In recent times, each of those characteristics has come under serious attack from economists and non-economists. One of them is the notion of rationality; this paper seeks to prove how rationality of humans is an economic construct, which serves to hide reality, if not completely distort it. Also, this paper seeks to explore the various ways in which, the State can intervene, to prevent or at least mitigate the effects of “market failure”.

The concept of Rationality, as defined for firms, is the objective of maximizing profits. In the realm of householders or consumers, this term is much more difficult to define. The problem lies in the fact that consumers are humans and not abstract ‘economic units’. If the conventional definition ‘maximization of utility with a given income’ is used, a certain idea is evaded - ‘To err is human’. The fact is, we as humans have a certain subjectivity to us which prevents the recognition and discernment of ‘right choices’ on any uniform basis and often we live to regret our choices. As Neo in The Matrix: Reloaded put it, “Choice. The problem is choice”. So, how does economics come to terms with this problem? Simple. It creates this concept called ‘utility’ and supposedly each one of us is a perpetual utility calculating machine which solves single utility functions every moment of our existence. The utility calculus was complicated further with the introduction of another variable – “rational expectations” (the belief that agents know everything there is to know about their choices). A reasonable amount of thought reveals that such a single-dimensional view of human beings conceals many other motivations which do not fall under the ambit of ‘purposeful decisions based on considerations of means and ends’. Even if one momentarily silences the likes of Amartya Sen who termed such agents of economic theory “rational fools” and believe that there is no such thing as altruism or commitment, the problem of rationality refuses to go away. The following critique of rationality is on two fronts – 1) information problems and bounded rationality make it impossible for “rational expectations” to exist and 2) “market failures” because of the failure of rationality and the case for governmental intervention.

In standard optimizing theory, agents act as if they perform all exhaustive searches over all possible decisions and then make the optimal one. Anyone who has ever shopped for that ubiquitous product, a widget, will know that this is hardly possible. As Simon hypothesized, instead of exhaustive searches, agents perform limited searches, accepting the first satisfactory decision. This ‘satisficing’ hypothesis provides an insight to decision making processes undertaken by consumers. The simplest explanation for this phenomenon comes from the most traditional economic tool – a cost-benefit analysis. The marginal cost of a search beyond the first satisficing widget far exceeds the marginal benefit as perceived by the consumer. This explanation is further strengthened by the empirical claim that as the Price or Benefit of a product increases, the tendency towards exhaustive searches increases. Consider the purchase of a digital camera, a laptop, a car and a house, and in the same order. An increasing order of willingness to expend time will be noticed among the products in question. Coming back to the question of rationality, an interesting hypothesis comes to the fore: Rationality of choice is directly proportional to value of goods and services in question. The popular notion of rationality being a constant within individuals and a variable across them is open to question. A more feasible proposition is that rationality is variable within individuals and its existence in all of us is the only constant. Another consequence of this kind of thinking is that there aren’t ‘irrational’ individuals, just that their rationality is based on a different preference set. The rational criminal hypothesis is a good example of this line of thought.

An idea related to satisficing is sub-optimization: a decision maker who finds optimization impossible or unduly costly may solve a simpler or more approximate optimization problem. Because errors due to sub-optimization in one period may call for adjustment in the next, it is natural to embed sub-optimization in a dynamic context which generates feedback. This feedback leads to an action yielding greater benefits the being the choice, the next time a similar situation arises. Also known as “recursive programming”, this theory was formalized by the John Cross and (1973,1983) and Susan Himmelweit models of stochastic choice. In these models, an agent chooses at random among a list of possible actions, where the choice probabilities evolve according to the historical evolution of the performances of the choices.[1] Such a theory seems demeaning to the discerning faculties of consumers and it may be one end of the spectrum of decision making processes which the human behavior exhibits. Many more theories from psychology seem to reinforce this apparent incapability of human behavior – whether it be cognitive dissonance, refusal to take risk and susceptibility to external influence (here is where the Salesman of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point comes in). Based on these idiosyncrasies of human behavior, other models like the interacting agent model argued for by Paul Ormerod in his book Butterfly Economics have come to the fore. If nothing else, these alternate models present a more complete picture of reality than the distorted version often presented by economists.

The information problem is not one particular to the consumers only – the problem exists, in perhaps even more frightening proportions on the Supply side as well.
It is quite meaningless to talk of a businessman’s expectations without explicit consideration for information. In fact, it is here that the importance of information as a cost factor comes back. We may regard an entrepreneur who knows everything about costs, prices and demands to be completely informed, even though he knows nothing about say, oriental art. The very small chance that an advertising idea based upon oriental art may change the demand conditions in the trade can be regarded as an effect of the second order magnitude.[2]

While on the point about advertising, a number of troublesome examples crop up. A relatively recent controversy involved soft drinks in India – Pollution Monitoring Laboratory of the Centre for Science and Environment, a prominent environmental organization based in New Delhi released shocking results of toxic pesticides in concentrations up to thirty-six times higher than those permitted by the European Economic Commission being found in twelve soft drink brands. To add to the conundrum was the fact that the Pollution Monitoring Laboratory found no pesticide residues in bottles of the two soft drink brands, Pepsi and Coke, sold in the United States[3]. As sales dipped and protests grew, both multinational giants adopted the strategy of ‘reassurance’ ad campaigns to win back their consumers. In fact, the companies took the pains of explaining in full page ads the purification process which they undertook before releasing their products into the market. A similar exercise was carried out by Cadbury India, when reports of worms being found in the chocolate began to affect sales[4]. Using the image of the sixty year old legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan handing these chocolates to his grandchildren, the brand sought to win back the trust of its consumers (children). Needless to say, the sales of Cadbury chocolates, Pepsi and Coke were back to pre- Together, these two examples serve to establish the direct ling between information and demand for a product, already emphasized earlier.

Some different results were achieved by food advertisers in US during the ‘80s. The strategy of targeting kids as consumers spawned a whole slew of advertisements during the Saturday morning time slots meant for children’s programming. Moreover, 95% of the 10,000 food commercials children saw each year were for foods high in sugar and/or fat, as total advertising expenditures tend to be highest for convenience food, confectioneries, snacks, and soft drinks. Health experts believe that constant promotion of high-calorie food have and are still contributing to the epidemic of childhood obesity in the United States by encouraging preferences for junk food and contributing to poor eating habits. The effect of this creation of preferences for high-calorie food can be gauged from the fact that kids influence an estimated 72% of family food and beverage purchases. So the resulting obesity is not just limited to the kids but their parents as well. National figures indicate that 25% of children and adolescents are overweight and that 50% have a chance of becoming overweight during their lifetimes. Greg Critser explains this phenomenon in his book Fat Land and pegs this as one of the many reasons because of which ‘Americans becoming the fattest people in the world’.

Today’s advertising agencies have taken their cue from their predecessors and have used the fact that parents’ preferences could be changed through advertising for children to devastating effect. The best example is the seemingly mindless advertisement for cars during children’s programming. So profound is the influence of these ads on nine year olds that parents been found to bend not just to their choice of the car color, but the brand of the car itself – so much for endogenous preferences and single utility functions.

Several other studies also link children’s beliefs about drinking to alcohol advertising. One study found that alcohol advertising can actually shape the drinking expectations of children by the time they are ten years old. Children who are more aware of television beer commercials have more favorable attitudes toward drinking, greater knowledge of beer brands, and an increased intention to drink as adults. Alcohol advertising seeks to associate drinking with desirable qualities or pleasurable experiences, frequently portraying alcohol consumption as a common—if not necessary—part of recreational activities and sporting events. These messages may encourage underage drinking by appealing to young people.

Aside from teenagers and young adults, alcohol advertising can appeal to very young children. For instance, the Budweiser frog campaign introduced in 1995 during the Super Bowl was highly recognizable among children. In just over a year, children’s familiarity with the frogs’ “Bud-weis-er” slogan nearly equaled their recognition of Bugs Bunny’s signature greeting (“What’s up, Doc?”). The children could also recall the Budweiser slogan more frequently than slogans from commercials shown during children’s programming, which feature characters such as Tony the Tiger and the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. In 1996, children named Budweiser beer commercials as among their favorite advertisements. Although recognition disparity between the Budweiser frogs and Saturday morning characters may come as a surprise, most children watch television during the hours of 7 and 8pm, illustrating how easily alcohol advertising reaches underage television audiences. This does not include the involuntary exposure they get from billboards, magazine ads, and promotional materials, such as clothing and novelty items. [5]
Tobacco advertising, even though banned on television seems to be quite successful in reaching children, considering that 90% of all young smokers choose the three most heavily advertised brands.24 A 1993 survey revealed that Marlboro decreased in adolescent popularity by almost 9%, while Camel gained more than 5%, fluctuations directly coinciding with the respective companies’ brand-specific advertising expenditures. This shift in preference also coincided with the introduction of Old Joe Camel’s cartoon image, which has become widely familiar among young children. Studies have found more than 90% of six-year-olds can match Joe Camel with pictures of a cigarette, making him as well known as Disney’s mascot, Mickey Mouse.

When statistics such as the one stated above start to blip on the social radar, it can be safely concluded that there has been a market failure and the equilibrium produced is sub-socially optimum. In the haste to take corrective measures, the link between lack of information, irresponsible advertising and market failure cannot be forgotten. It is the vacuum created due to the inability of human cognition to process the plethora of information, and the resulting tendency to satisfice which is filled in, by advertising. In fact, it is probably unfair to lay the blame at the human mind’s doorstep. The sheer impracticality of being able to sift through the sea of choices in the market is heightened by the premium modern man places on time. And to queer the pitch further, profit maximizing businesses seek to create new markets, namely children, in spite of the cognizance of the spillover costs.

In light of all these factors and conditions, it is but obvious that the State needs to step in, and bring about changes to the allocation of goods so that a social optimum is achieved. Often that translates economically to taxes being imposed and the market itself being forced to pay for the externalities. For all the hue and cry that proponents of a free market make, it is ultimately the State which bears the costs of an unhealthy society. For a country where 25% of the population is overweight, and 3000 kids below the age of 18 start smoking every day, it would be suicidal to suggest that the State should stay out of the picture. After all, it is the smokers, drinkers and obese who are indirectly raising taxes, costs of healthcare and insurance. Taxation of these markets serves a dual purpose – that of being a disincentive to teenagers who are not financially capable of sustaining the high costs as well as the retrieval of costs necessary for the purposes of healthcare during old age. The goal which taxation does not solve is one of bridging the lack of information or disinformation. For this goal, the government needs to adopt a different role. For advertising agencies and the like, it has to be a watchdog, instituting checks and balances to ensure that the target audience does not include children. For the consumers, it needs to act as an education dispenser, allowing access to critical information which could affect the decision making process of the agent. The conclusion of all these suggestions is that reliance on human rationality and the “invisible hand” can at best, provide outcomes which are sub-optimal and at worst, ones which are devastating. Either way, the onus is on us, members of a society, to come up with better solutions – Our lives are on the line.

[1] Conlisk, John. Why Bounded Rationality Journal of Economic Literature, Vol.34 No. 2 (June, 1996) 669-700

[2] Gerard, Bill, Beyond Rational Expectations: A constructive Interpretation of Keynes’ analysis of behavior under certainty The Economic Journal Vol 104 No. 423 (Mar 1994) 327-337

[3] http://www.newfarm.org/international/news/080103/081103/in_pest_drinks.shtml

[4]http://www.domain-b.com/companies/companies_c/cadbury_india/20031128_worm.html
[5]http://www.mediascope.org/pubs/ibriefs/cha.htm