Rapiscan systems - the Other Corruption

Usually when we say a politician is corrupt, we think about money exchanging hands. Not a lot of thought goes to other forms of corruption - such as power-brokering or abuse of power.
The central government in India is enormously powerful - the simple edicts that bureaucrats pass from their desks actually have consequences.
When we suffer a major erosion in our rights, it is fair to question the motivation of those powerful people in the center.
One such step is coming our way - in the form of the Full Body scanning machines, the Secure 1000 created by Rapiscan Systems.

The news story in Economic Times is here.

The article takes a kind of positive line with the "Indian-born" Deepak Chopra, owner of Rapiscan Systems. Economic Times is usually deferential to big corporations.

But what the article is really saying is that the Indian government is all set to unveil full body scanners in Indian airports. There has not been any debate or news about this (except for the fawning coverage of ET).
In a country that is now seeing major abuses of power by government officials, the LAST thing we need is airport officials videotaping passengers' "near-naked" walk-throughs and publishing it in the internet or threatening passengers with such images.

A few passages from an informative commentary on the "Secure 1000" scanner from Rapiscan:

Scientists from the University of California have publicly challenged the safety of the devices. The U.S. Airline Pilots Association, warns the TSA that they have offered no credible specifications for the radiation emitted by these machines. The USAPA has determined that frequent exposure to TSA-operated scanner devices may subject pilots to significant health risks. The long term health effects of these technologies remains unknown.

However, The Food and Drug Administration has responded to concerns by announcing that the potential health risks from the Naked Body Scanners are "minuscule."
A Matter of Privacy

A full naked body image is produced by the Backscatter x-ray producing virtual strip searches without probable cause which opponents claim are illegal and violate basic human rights, arguing that the scans are a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano ensured passenger privacy and affirms that the images are permanently deleted immediately once viewed and are never stored, transmitted or printed. However, TSA officials admitted that the scanners are required to be capable of saving images for the purpose of evaluation, training and testing. Concern over the possibility of leaked images was further stressed when leaked photos documented by gizmodo.com were made public on their site. The images were from a Florida courthouse scanner that may have illegally saved 35,000 images.

So, the Indian government, which faces no comparable threat as the USA; whose officials and elected leaders are abusers of power; is now contemplating getting a machine that will show naked anyone who tries to fly.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this purchase (and the resulting windfall for Rapiscan) happens not just because of the absolute need for it; but because someone up there has been perfectly lobbied by Rapiscan. It is one of our "industry-friendly" masters who has taken this awful decision.

As I said, there is corruption and then there are power abuses. Installing full body scanners in airports is a complete power abuse by the Indian government.

Geeking out with Endhiran

I saw the Tamil movie "Endhiran" a couple of days back. I liked it a lot, mainly because of Rajnikanth's excellent acting, the screenplay's internal consistency, dialog, and, of course, the beauty and stylishness of the special effects. I want to see it again.
The movie is impressive because, after a long time, you can keep thinking about the technical discussions about AI and Robotics in the movie. There is a consistent theme to it.

Asimov's Laws
When Dr.Vasi appears before the approval board, one of them asks if the robot obeys Asimov's laws. I was wondering about this during most of the fights before that scene. If the robot obeys Asimov's laws, it will not be fighting at all.
Asimov's laws were used in many of his Robot series. I read them in the novel "I, Robot". There are three laws and the whole novel is a series of situations structured around the contradictions between the three laws.
The laws are:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

In the final story of "I, Robot", a man runs for political office. But there is a suspicion that he is not a human at all, that he is a robot. There is no real way to prove it - until a situation based on the First Law comes up. Robots cannot hurt humans - and therefore if the candidate hits a human, he cannot be a robot. How this resolves itself I cannot reveal. You can read the novel.
So, Chitti is created for military applications - and therefore he is designed without the three laws.
The whole movie, thus, can be seen as a demonstration of what happens when a robot is designed without the three laws. But I don't think Shankar had that angle in mind. Dr.Vasi is shown as a noble person, who wants to help his nation by creating fighting robots. But there is a problem there - when you create machines which cause harm, they can be used by your opponents too. The "flipping" of Chitti (or his clones) to the dark side is actually inevitable if you mass produce robots for fighting.
In fact, we see such a phenomenon CURRENTLY. In personal computers, the original Terminate and Save Routines (TSRs) were intended for background processing. They were quickly adapted as the early viruses. Now, the virtual world is awash with computer worms and viruses. We have no control over the malicious use of programming. There is an escalating fight between unethical and criminal hackers on the one side and government and private security agencies on the other.
There are other ethical arguments against using Robots in combat.


The Military Application of Robots
The original reason that militaries offered for using robots was mine-sweeping. Such robots will comply with Asimov's laws above. They won't harm humans. That was the original reason offered.
But, right now many militaries around the world are researching on robots for combat applications. The US military, right now, has drones (or unmanned aerial vehicles) deployed in Pakistan and Afghanistan. These are armed with missiles and have caused much damage in both countries.
To keep in line with Geneva Conventions, the drones require human input before firing. There have already been ethical questions about such uses. Let me address one angle of the drone controversy:
When a country goes to war, the assumption is that there will be checks for deployment of their citizens - atleast in democracies. Because there will be a loss of life on THEIR side, the decision to go to war is not taken lightly by countries, in theory.
But if you deploy drones which are operated by civilian contractors sitting thousands of miles away, you have removed one major reason which may deter countries from launching agressive war. Without loss of life, and facing no pressure from their citizens, a democracy can sustain a war purely through money and technology.

For this problem, a few people have argued back and said that war is a bad choice, but once a war is launched, a country is justified in using its technical might to win.
Thus, robots for warfare is being increasing seen as a technically brilliant advancement. It is also seen as inevitable.
This means that we will likely see a new kind of "arms" race similar to the nuclear era. It is no surprise that terrorists will seek to use robots in combat too - after all the same argument about winning applies to them too.
It is in this context that Enthiran raises questions.

Enthiran and Military Robots
If you think about it, a humanoid robot is NOT necessary for the conventional military. A conventional military may use complex machines, with a narrow range of purposes. They don't need Chitti.
The movie shows arms dealers and terrorists interested in robots. To me, that seems completely natural and inevitable. In fact, because Dr.Vasi designed the robot without the in-built (non-overridable) three laws, the entire sequence of events, from the interest of arms dealers to the hostile takeover of Chitti by Dr.Bora is unavoidable.
There are no international laws currently in place to govern use of robots in combat. Let us say that a robot brigade in a future war with Pakistan malfunctions and ends up killing a lot of innocent civilians. Who do you blame? Who will be punished?


Some random notes
1. Neural Schema Architecture is a kind of AI architecture that supplies "schemas" for different behaviors. These are the ones that Dr.Vasi says cannot be shared until the patent is obtained.
2. An Inference Engine is the core of an "expert system". It has a rule list, and it takes actions based on applicable rules. It also has a knowledge base. A kind of Inference Engine called Fuzzy-Inference can make decisions in uncertain situations.
Dr.Bora calls Chitti "just an inference engine". What he is saying is that it just evaluates rules and takes actions. He seems to be saying it is not "intelligent". 3. Contrary to what the movie says, Dr.Bora did not provide a contradictory command to Chitti in the approval meeting. He asks Chitti to stab Dr.Vasi and the robot attempts to do it. That command does not seem to contradict any other command (unless I am missing something).
4. Dr.Vasi works on Chitti for 10 years. What was he doing at that time?
The major portion of his work would have been the representation of knowledge. In the initial scenes, Chitti is fed martial arts, dancing programs and so on. Creating the knowledge of such expertise and representing it in storage is a major problem for expert systems. That part of it is much more complex than creating the physical body.

Incredible India advertisements

or the idea that the problem for tourists in India is Indians.

I have below two videos from the Incredible India series featuring Aamir Khan:







There was also a recent ad that shows tourists disgusted at a kid peeing in the road, and other such "bad behavior" deemed by the tourism ministry.

First of all, almost every Incredible India ad I have seen features white people only - either young white women or young white men. I saw one ad with a Japanese person. I can understand that Bollywood stars won't feature in anything without white people, but this is not a song and dance feature after all.
The Incredible India campaign is commissioned by the tourism ministry. Someone up there in the ministry is approving these; so we have to wonder about the attitudes expressed in these ads. I AM taking them seriously as attitudes in the ministry and among our elite.

Attitudes in the ad
1. Tourists are white people, period; "internal" tourism, which counts for majority of tourists do not count. The Japanese, Korean and other eastern people don't generally count (even though they form a good percent of tourism targets anywhere in the world).
Africans! Don't even dare to show Aamir Khan with an African person. Darkies don't count.
2. The ads seem to mainly teach behavior - in front of white tourists. You better not have your kid pee in the road because white people may be watching. Thus, the ads seem to be (incredibly) suggest that individual people and their behavior may be a problem - more than (for example) the absence of clean public toilets.
By making such a suggestion, the ads present another way for Indians to judge other Indians. We behave a certain way because we are a developing country - a country still in the "Third World".
3. The ads always show white people "repulsed" by the bad behavior of Indians (such as throwing a banana peel from the bus). In that way, it assumes that they are judges of such behavior. On the contrary, I have personally seen Western tourists misbehaving in THAT SAME WAY. The reason is, of course, not difficult to find out - trash cans do not magically show up for them to drop trash in. Toilets don't magically show up for them alone. Given the Indian public systems's constraints, they behave the same way. They are in no position to judge.

Misguided Ads

More than anything, WHAT is the purpose of these ads? That is something I have a hard time figuring out - the ones that feature Aamir Khan and teach behavior - what exactly are they trying to do? They seem to take a sneering attitude at the guy spitting Paan, or the guy dropping a banana peel from a bus. But why is that a problem that the TOURISM ministry is concerned with? Are they going to provide decent public toilets throughout the country or trash cans in all public places? No. That is not their job. So why are they even preaching to people about this?
You could say the same thing about the eve teasing of the white women in the ad. What, is that exclusive to white women? Otherwise everything is fine with women in this country?

It seems suspiciously that the tourism ministry considers Indians in public places (behaving within the constraints and nature of our system) as a really bad nuisance.

But this fits in with my overall theme over the past couple of years - there is a tendency in India to blame people for systemic faults. These ads show that tendency.
Think about this for a minute - we all have heard of how Indians behave very well abroad, but not when they land in India. I have heard that from when I was young. The assumption is that the problem is with Indians. But in reality, the problem is with India, the system here - not with Indians. Like any other people around the world, Indians respond to incentives.
The proof of this, is that tourists or other people on business here from abroad (including white tourists) misbehave too! I have seen this personally in beach resorts. In fact they behave worse because they know that they are courted no matter what.
The ads show the thinking within the tourism ministry - and they are a pathetic lot.

Allahabad Verdict - Comments

Summary of Issues and Judgement
The court has weighed on a number of issues in five different CIVIL suits filed between 1949 and 1971. Of these, Suit-4 was filed by the Sunni Waqf Board. This is the only suit in which Muslims are the plaintiffs. In the rest of the suits, the Hindu parties are the plaintiffs.
The suits have nothing to do with the Masjid demolition - that is a criminal suit. Therefore the judgement has nothing to do with Sangh Parivar's acts.
The judgements were delivered by justices S.U.Khan, Sudhir Agarwal and Dharam Veer Sharma. Justice Khan's verdict is sympathetic to the Muslims; while the majority opinion (Agarwal and Sharma) is sympathetic to the Hindus.
The judgements have covered a lot of issues - but most notably the majority opinion says:
- that a temple may have existed in the site in which Babar or his commander built the mosque.
- that the mosque is not built by Sharia and therefore is not legitimate
- that Ram Janma Bhoomi as beleived by Hindus, is at the site in dispute

and then the judges proceeded to partition the site between the Hindus parties and the Muslim parties in detail.
Please note that the judges expressed the above opinions because the Suits asked for opinions on these, not because they wanted to. The judges did skip a couple of issues as irrelevant.
Contrary to media reports, the judges did not say explicitly that "Ram was born at the site". Justice Agarwal says:
"It is held that the place of birth, as believed and worshipped by Hindus, is the area covered under the central dome of the three-domed structure.."
Justice Sharma simply decided the issue in favor for the plaintiffs (Hindus).

My opinion
1. I think the court overstepped its authority when it partitioned the site. If two parties are fighting for a title, the court cannot just go in and partition the site of dispute - that is not what courts are for. That is an administrative or arbitration settlement. The court,if it could not establish title, should have just dismissed the suits and allowed it to be settled through arbitration.
This issue (if the court overstepped) will probably be decided by the Supreme Court.
Reading the judgements, it seems that the judges felt the need to defuse the situation, irrespective of their authority. But this sets up a bad model.
We repeatedly see in this case (from 1949) that people have taken the wrong approach in this dispute because of fear of public (read majority) opinion. After all one of the core reasons for the suits is that the sneaky installation of the deities was not reversed for fear of popular backlash.

2. From a purely moral perspective, the judges' decision does not make sense (even if they had the authority). For anyone reviewing the issue, it is obvious that the masjid had been target of Hindu mobilisation and attacks for some time. This was true in 1934 when it was damaged. This was also true in 1949 when the deities were sneaked in.
Now, the motives of the people who brought the deities is clear - they had a wedge issue that administrators will be afraid to deal with. Getting the deities in such a manner was a work of incitement.
60 years later, the court has rewarded the inciters.
Now, the court has argued that this is a matter of faith. But it is also clear that this was an act of minority-baiting. The court addressed the faith part, but not the "protection of weak" part. If the majority's faith is against a weaker party, it is the court's role to protect the weak - not emphasize the faith.
Even otherwise, this "faith" is more manufactured. We all know that.

3. I also think the court has set a bad precedent based on faith. Note this - the verdict basically says Muslims have no right to the mosque because Hindus believe it is Ram Janma Bhoomi and the Muslims have no title. They do not directly say that, but that is the implication of their findings on the issues.
That is a very dangerous precedent. It leaves religious parties to create many more wedge issues. There are plenty of temples and mosques out there without titles. They are all now vulnerable.

The court summaries are publicly available - reading them, I was surprised by the judges' complete denial of issues to the Muslim parties. Almost every issue is decided against the Muslim parties. I feel sorry for them.

The issue of banning Tamil speech in schools

I had a chance to interview my esteemed nephew, Arjun - he was transitioning from 8th std to 9th std. In the middle of his very busy schedule of watching TV and listening to "Singh is King" songs, he allocated ten minutes for me. I will write the detailed interview later, but for now, I wanted to highlight something. The interview started with him asking me a question about writing in Tamil.
"Why would you write in Tamil? Write in English and a lot of people will read it", he said.
I said, "I have tried writing in English. It is not my native language and I write Indian stories, which sound stilted in English. My English is not fit enough for first class writing."
He understood this to mean that I had scored low in English. He said, "I get lots of marks in English."
I said,"But think about it...by your logic everyone around the world should be writing in English. There should not be any Spanish, French or Turkish writing at all. That is not the case, right? There are enough people to read those languages and that is so in Tamil too. There is no real first or last in languages. Every language is equally good."
He responded with this: "If what you are saying is true, why does our school prevent us from talking in Tamil, ever?"
I was stumped.

A couple of days after this discussion the school near my home had announcements. It was the opening day and the principal gave a long, rambling talk as usual (in bad English - I have written about this here). This was the person who had banned facebook and promised to put cameras in every classroom.
In the middle of her talk she said this:"I don't want my students engaging in bad activities, such as talking in Tamil. I don't want that."
There were many parents standing at the door, since it was the first day of school.I wondered what they thought of this.

Where does this come from? Why is this not called fanaticism? How could any sane society tolerate that its schools ban its own native language?
I have wondered about this, but failed to come up with any good reason. It requires a bunch of sociologists to figure out what is going on here.

Fixing the Fanaticism
There is an important issue in balance here. You see, schools have a right, as private entities to fix any rules they deem necessary, as long as they submit to the education departments' requirements. The government cannot directly go ahead and legislate out Tamil hatred from schools.
There are two questions:
1. Why did we reach this stage?
2. How can we fix the underlying reasons?
It is easy to call the school principal an idiot. She is ignorant, sure, but she is responding to some kind of pressure or confirming to some social tradition, when she bans Tamil.
Where exactly is that pressure coming from? Is it coming from the parents? They are the demand side, the "buyers" of education. Are they expecting that schools completely ban Tamil within the campus?
May be to a certain extent, but education is a seller's market. A parent is constrained a lot in shopping for a good school - it is not like shopping for a product in a store. Your school has to be close to home, for example. It is not as if a parent would seek out a school and then can AFFORD to decide, "No, this school bans Tamil. I won't admit my child here." They can't, that is why there are long lines in front of every school.
Sure, we have reached this stage starting from colonial times. Knowing English was no doubt an advantage then. But what happened after independence? In particular what has happened in the past 40 years when ostensible Tamil lovers have ruled this state?

The Failure of English Education
Here is my shot at an explanation:
You start out first with the fact that your range of jobs immediately expands if you learn science and technology in English. We are a developing country and not at the forefront of research and development in most fields. The words that we use at work (Kalai Chorkal in Tamil) are generally in English. The process of translating Kalai Chorkal to Tamil is slow (although it continues to be done by admirable people). You are a better hire if you know learn technical subjects in English. This explains why schools offer two streams, Tamil and English medium, with English medium charging more. That is just Economics at work.
The next step is to speak English fluently - not just knowing technical terms or understanding documents. Ideally, (think about this carefully), your school education would be SUFFICIENT for this purpose. That is, if you took English as a language in your school, then that class education should make you fluent in English.
We all know that is not the case - just as that is not the case with any subject in our system.

If English is to be taught as a foreign language, then it should be taught right - with practice sessions and interactive classes - not as you would teach any other subject like History. If English was taught correct, it will be enough to learn it in the English class.


My point is that the school principal near my home forces kids to talk all the time in English because she KNOWS that her own school curriculum is INEFFECTIVE in teaching good English. If her school was effective, she won't care what language the kids speak outside of English class.

Thus, the myth has taken root, that you can talk English fluently ONLY if you talk in English all the time. That is what the schools are attempting and they do seem to make it a selling point.

So, my theory (I could be wrong) is that schools force kids to speak in English all the time because they have no faith in their own English teaching system. But you can't blame them. They are probably right in their belief. As I have explained before (in this article), the examination system decides how you educate students. I believe the examinations are all wrong. So that is what you get in your education.
How then, can we go about correcting this situation?

One way is simply a blanket ban by the government on such rules by schools. But it would be thrown out of court, at least for minority institutions to whom the government has no right to dictate. I believe that such a ban would also be an infringement on the rights of private institutions - who knows what else the government will ban next?

Second is to focus a lot on English education - this is completely paradoxical. But if you had excellent resources and require good English education standards at the English SUBJECT level, schools simply may not feel the need to ban Tamil. I realize this sounds very contrarian.


I also think that the Tamil Nadu government should do a LOT more to save the language from extinction. It IS the government's responsibility in this country. But that is for a separate post. Two related points here:
1. Modernise Tamil education too - stop the stupid "Manappaada paattu".
2. Teach some post-modernist thoughts at school. There is a common view that languages (or music or art, for that matter) are hierarchical and that there is a single path to modernity. The past forty years of post-modernist thought has completely broken this view, but it is not yet taught - as a concept - in our schools.

PS: Tamil society, in the world outside school, has fought against such school bans. There is a reason words such as "Peter" or "Mary" entered popular Tamil lexicon. In school and college the kids who spoke in English all the time (without reason) were thought to be uncool, when I was growing up. I don't know how it is now.

Perceptions of Indian developers in the West

I landed in the USA in late 1999. We were to take over maintenance and further development of a travel website. Me and a couple of colleagues were excited and awestruck by the skyline of Boston.
One day were discussing finding an apartment at work when one of the American consultants said, "You guys are going back - don't bother looking for apartments".
We actually became crucial for taking over the website and two years later the same person told me that he had never believed that offshoring or bringing in Indian consultants would work. He said he had no idea if we would even speak English. And he said he had been proved wrong (not just about the English).
Cut to the present - I was talking with one of my friends (a swedish guy) who is used to complaining about "the Indian way" of doing anything. He said he was discussing with a department head of a Fortune 500 company about offshoring when the head guy started complaining about not being able to understand Indians or whatever.

Twenty years after the software outsourcing boom started, it is obvious that the Indian developer, whether onsite or offshore generates a lot of hostility in the West. Just for a sample, read this article and its comment thread.

The question is why does this happen? We call this hostility "racism" but I dont believe in using imprecise, general terms. There are other issues at play here. The both sides of the offshoring game have to understand certain undercurrents:

1. For Indians - Offshore outsourcing is not a preference of middle managers in the USA - middle managers want control. The directives come from executive management and middle managers are meant to cede control and make it work and show results by cutting costs.

Digression:In many cases outsourcing is about more than cutting costs. The truth is that Indian companies present a very attractive package to enterprise customers in the developed countries. The degree of expertise that even medium-sized companies in India offer to such customers is high (this is from my experience for 11 years in the services industry). Even in terms of sheer process methodology Indian companies offer a lot more as compared to Western equivalents.
There are systemic reasons why this is the case: it is just that a considerable portion of the Indian economy is invested in the success of IT and therefore has spent a lot more time specializing in the services industry.I have worked in American services companies as a consultant - they are excellent, but they are simply rolled by bigger Indian companies.

The middle managers are actually led kicking and screaming to offshore work. They, therefore, are resentful and not much hopeful of success.
The resident developers, of course, have their jobs threatened.
Therefore much of the "racism" is not racism at all - it is simply hostility and fear of change.

2. For the Client - One frequent issue is the power that some clients feel about offshoring. This took several forms including making fun of Indian names in India itself. The idea seems to be that you can generally get away with saying anything at Indian managers or developers.
Let me give an example:
A developer in my old company had a normal Indian name. The clients were in a room meeting and asked him to come over. One of them (he thought he was funny), tried to pronounce the developer's name but could not. He then announced that he would call the developer "Sam". Everyone had a good laughover it - but they actually implemented it by calling him Sam every time.
A variation of the above scenario occurs in some offshore companies - the main reason it occurs is twofold:
- The degree of power a western client has over a small offshore company is enormous. He can cut off the spigot at any time. This level of power exists even if you outsource to a different company within the US or UK - but socially there is a taboo to exercising power in those societies. Thus the average American client would be very loathe to make such comments publicly about other people in their social setting.
When these people land in India, they basically feel free from such taboo. They do not think that appearing like a jerk before other humans matters. They let this liberation get to their heads and end up sounding like jerks. Not all of them, mind you, just a small minority.
- when a western client makes a comment like this or exercises power in such unusual ways, we do not know how to respond. Is it just normal humor in their countries? Or is this specific guy being an idiot? This is not surprising - after all the fault is not ours if a client behaves like an idiot. This non-response enables the client and leads him to try more such idiocy.
My advice to Western clients is to not be stupid and say something you won't dare say in your own home country. In short, don't be a dumbass.

3. For the West
The biggest issue, I feel, that lets Western technical people comment about the competence of Indian developers is this - they romanticise coding too much.
I have noticed that American developers, working even in the IT departments of crappy companies, have a very romanticised image of coding. I can understand the developers at IBM or Microsoft feeling this way.
Mind you, this is just an image - these develpers are not particularly competent. They just have a self-image of Ninja coders toiling away at solving the Turing Test.
They are convinced that only the superior education offered by their system prepares people for the tough challenge of building an Access based inventory list.
Again, this has nothing to do with racism. It is merely what they have been told from childhood.
The contradiction between this self-image and the discovery that their jobs could be taken away by a $5 worker shocks them. That, I believe, is the reason for much of
the animosity at Indian developers.

"Does offshore outsourcing work?" - this question has been answered in the affirmative for some time now. The particular experience for different companies may vary - as it should - but in the aggregate, it is like any other work outsourcing. There is nothing system specific that prevents it from working when Indian developers are involved.

By the way, there ARE specific examples of generalization and racism; I will close with a last episode that I faced:
A developer at my employer was onsite. There was some dispute between him and my employer, but he was well liked by the client. The employer decided to bring him back. They lied to the client saying the dev's father was sick.
The client came to know about the lie through rumors. At that time on of them was at Chennai. I was talking to him generally, when he narrates this lie and says: "Is it a cultural thing to lie like this?"
Get that? The evil brown people lie as a cultural trait. Pure white culture does not lie.

Disclaimer:
I hope I have managed to avoid writing some generalizations myself. I do not, of course, believe that most Western clients are prone to exercising their power in unprofessional ways. Some do. The vast majority are pretty decent. My goal was simply to point out that there are specific reasons why some may face hostility and that the hostility has little to do with racism.
And I do sympathize with the social cost of outsourcing - but I always think restrictions on immigration should be done away with. A lot of our problems will go away if we do not restrict human beings from travelling anywhere they want to.

The Nithyananda Affair

(updated below)
I had a facebook conversation on this and I wanted to summarise my thoughts here:
1. The dumbest argument I have seen about this is that Nithyanada "cheated" people by engaging in false propaganda. I watched Sun TV for a half hour yesterday and I saw several advertisements for fairness creams, nutrition products that make your kids grow taller and claims about how Coca Cola makes you cool. ALL of that is false propaganda. Should we prosecute all of those companies and Sun TV for engaging in false propaganda?
We should realize that there is a religious industry out there; there is a market for their products. You may disagree with that - but the people who are gurus, devotees and followers have RIGHTS. You may think them delusional, but I think all "followers" and "devotees" of Jayalalitha or Karunanidhi are delusional.
Should we then arrest Jayalalitha or Karunanidhi, because they are engaged in "false propaganda"?
Whatever individuals think about other people's beliefs has no relevance to the law. Most people do not like other people in India. That does not mean we should go about prosecuting each other.
2. So, Sun TV telecast this video; and then police is obviously struggling to justify the completely unreasonable "popular" anger. If we had to prosecute people for their private affairs, most of us will be in jail. There is NO law by which a self-proclaimed holy man cannot have sex in private.
So we see the utterly ridiculous spectacle of a set of charges filed that make no sense. For example, Nithyananda has been charged with offending religious sensibilities! That law (more on section 295-A here) is so overly broad that anyone can be charged and noone can be convicted in a sane court.
The idea that holy men now better not have sex or otherwise they will be LEGALLY prosecuted is just hilarious. This is a moral issue, not for courts. The case will be thrown out of court and rightly so.

3. Let us consider the following cases:
- a politician declares in a party meeting that he/she will go in a bicycle to work every day. After he/she comes to power, can they be sued if they take a car to work? Can the police file charges? No
- a product says that consuming it makes people strong. Can the people who consume it then sue the product for not making them strong? No.
- a holy man says he is celibate. People follow him. Can the police sue him if he is proved to be not celibate? No (apart from the impossibility of proving whether someone violated celibacy. Masturbation violates celibacy - so I bet Sun TV is going to have a video of this guy's bathroom coming out soon)

4. I have not touched upon Sun TV's utter arrogance in telecasting this in prime time. In a sane country, their license will be revoked. I do not know if the newsroom guys consulted with their lawyers.
We are now entering a new age of "proto-fascism" in Tamil Nadu.
Sun TV and the Karunanidhi family now control television, cable distribution, movie production, FM radio, and newspapers. I think this is their first demonstration that they are not answerable to anyone and can manipulate Tamil people as they want to.
We have a long fight ahead to rid ourselves of this family's control.

5. One of the factors that surprises me is the contempt that people express for followers of such "godmen" as the media calls them. I have seen a bunch of people shaking their heads (on television) and talking about the followers as if they are sheep.
In the modern era, we are ALL sheep. We either worship digital products, celebrities, businessmen, politicians or godmen. I don't know why we pretend that followers of religious gurus are uniquely dumb. The average DMK, ADMK or Congress worker worships at politicians' altar. Why are they better than devotees?

6. More than anything I want to highlight a subtle problem in Tamil politics. For a long time the Kazhagams (DK, DMK, PMK and ADMK) have been calling themselves rationalist. The truth is these guys are far removed from any rationality or scientific approach to anything. A rational movement will not have made such a nasty issue of Kushboo's statement about women a few years back.
But this guise of a rational base has twisted popular culture in Tamil Nadu and taken it towards such unreasonable response to the Nithyananda scandal. I have seen NO public or media figure come out and call this affair for what it is - a violation of privacy by Sun TV is the core issue here. That a corporation can telecast the private affairs of an individual is shocking. This means that you and I are not protected from such violations either. Sun TV is not just the press - it is a media corporation that has stepped in forcefully into a citizen's privacy.
THAT is the chilling aspect of this "scandal". yet, I don't see ANY media or public figure come out and call a spade a spade.
The reason is that lynching Nithyananda (a religious figure) gives people the impression that it is a very rational thing to do.
That is, the narrative has become:
A public person was cheating people. The brave Sun TV folks exposed his true face. they performed the role of a true press.

The above story is appealing, but is FALSE. I am all for Sun TV exposing public corruption such as by the political parties. But I have never seen such coverage by Sun TV. Instead here they have violated the law and broken the privacy of a private citizen. As I explained above, I can be a god man, say anything and people are free to believe or disbelieve me. That does not violate the law. IF THAT violates the law, then every politician, banker, and most businessmen will be in jail.
The function of society is a balance between private rights, freedom of speech, government powers and press freedom. In this particular case the violator of this balance is Sun TV NOT Nithyananda.
But (I may be wrong), most people are unaware of such distinctions in India. They confuse morality and legality.
Sun TV has now moved one step more in getting into our lives. Being the most powerful network, the above perspective will not even make it into any media coverage.
No one is going to talk about the absurdity of prosecuting a person under section 295-A for having sex.

Update:
I missed another aspect of this issue. One of the reasons why everyone sounds enraged about this issue (but secretly enjoys it) is the sexual starvation in this country. This is a state in which women cannot travel freely in buses because of the constant groping by sex-starved men. Slowly the TV media have been ratcheting up the levels of sex and violence in reality shows, television serials, movies and advertisements. The public has been told that we are "modernising"; but no modern society tolerates this level of objectification of women in their media. I know that the US media constantly gets pushback from parents and consumer organizations. Their society is not as sex-starved as we are.
The Nithyananda affair is probably less about any exposure of wrong-doing; it seems to be more about pushing the boundaries of such sexual exposure. Anyone in advertising knows that the cheapest and easiest way to be "creative" is to go directly to sex appeal.
By showing such sick voyeuristic images, Sun TV has reserved the option to push the sex envelope to the extreme. They now know they have their audience captured and unable to fight back. Now, our kids and family will be sitting and watching news when they will be shown naked images of Sun TV's choice. We will all be told that these are features of a modern society. Every other media house will follow through.
Kalanidhi Maran owns us.

I am proud of Indian Software Services

I am generally proud of the Indian software services industry - there was a business model that the pioneers caught on and developed into a mega money-making, and value delivering exercise. I have been in services since 1999 and I do NOT believe that:
- the services industry does not serve Indian society
- the services business itself is non-innovative compared to creating products
- the work that services companies do is uniteresting or boiler-plate.

I believe that all of the above are myths; many of these opinions - including calling IT employees as coolies - arise out of plain resentment than any substantive reason.
For example, one claim is that cost differences beween India and the USA have been the sole reason for the dominance of Indian services industry. People who say this seem to think cost differences are somehow not the right reason for doing business. That is absurd, of course. The whole idea of competition is the ability to gain an advantage by showing better value - and lower cost is a HUGE value.
I also see nothing wrong with "body-shopping". It is pure propaganda that selling labor is "low" compared to selling products. The reason why we think that way is simple - that way leads us to accept free trade in products and not free trade in labor.
Let me explain better - for the past 50 years since the founding of the GATT and later WTO, developed countries have gone around preaching free trade and in many cases succeeding in opening up borders so that their products can compete with local products (and many times decimate them). They have justified this pointing to consumer choice and lower prices.
How can business in a country like India compete with this? We found our own competitive advantage - we have plenty of cheaper labor and we have managed to turn that into a business model.
I don't see how this makes Indian services industry "lower" in the hierarchy.
In fact, logically, we should have free movement of labor across borders (just as we have for products). That is the logical and fair conclusion of free trade. But guess what? Politicians in the West (who preached free trade to everybody all these years), have suddenly discovered the virtues of tight immigration policies. So you find the Democrats in the USA threatening to abolish the H1B work visa (while simultaneously calling for legalizing illegal immigrants).
Trading labor is equally valid as trading products. The only reason we think otherwise is because the West benefits one way and not the other.

The IT Industry is Built by IT Workers
The truth is also that this industry has been built not just by business founders - but by the individual employees all across India. Since the business model is built using labor, the model's success is a vindication of the quality of this labor.
This is why I always thought it weird that the average IT worker is never congratulated or appreciated in the media. They celebrate Ramalinga Raju or Subrato Bagchi or Narayana Murthy. Actually most of the credit in IT organizations should go to the IT workers, developers, leads, architects. managers - all of them.

I have only heard complaints about IT workers - that they push up rents; that they are all showing off; that they are working and creating value for foreigners, not India. Then within the industry itself people blame them for job hopping; fake certificates; asking for too much salary and so on.

The average IT guy in this industry comes from a rural or urban poor/middle class background. He/she does not know much English. He/she has a family dependent on their paycheck almost entirely. He/she has to work insane hours and weekends. Most of these men and women did not learn about the industry-specific skills until college or after leaving college.
I recently met a fresher who passed out in 2009. He is from a lower middle-class family. He was offered a job in campus by an IT company. Then they got wind of the recession and so just suspended him from joining indefinitely (I am not blaming them for this; just that if the employee had done that kind of thing, he will be accused of disloyalty). His degree in computer engineering only gave him skills in C and C++.
So he learnt Oracle and cleared Oracle certification. He learnt Java and cleared certification in that too.
He has got job offers from every interview he attended. But, they all have caveats:
Company A wanted him to sign a 3 year bond.
Company B wanted him to sign a 2 year bond and give a check for Rs. 2,00,000 at the time of joining. If he left in between, they would take that money.
Company C asked for a 2 year bond and all his original certificates.

All of the above is against labor law and would be overturned in court - but who is going to approach courts?
This fresher and many hunderds of thousands like him join this industry every year. They work hard. They learn the technologies at stake even though those can change from project to project. I have seen 21-23 year old programmers learn the Facebook API in 2 weeks and create excellent applications. I have seen these guys struggle balancing work pressure and family requirements and deliver again and again.

If they had NOT delivered, we would not be holding 60% of the world's offshore outsourcing market share in software.

The idea that, instead, these guys have to be blamed for not "innovating" or not taking risks or having bad attitude is absurd.

Is Entrepreneurship a Cultural trait?

A friend of mine sent this New York Times article a few days back.
The article discussed the lack of entrepreneurship (it took me two minutes to type that) culture in India. It discusses the lack of venture funds and angel investors.
It starts out by saying:

Innovation is hard to measure, but academics who study it say India has the potential to create trend-setting products but is not yet doing so. Indians are granted about half as many American patents for inventions as people and firms in Israel and China. The country’s corporate and government spending on research and development significantly lags behind that of other nations. And venture capitalists finance far fewer companies here than they do elsewhere.

More later:

Mr. Raghavan and others say India is held back by a financial system that is reluctant to invest in unproven ideas, an education system that emphasizes rote learning over problem solving, and a culture that looks down on failure and unconventional career choices.

I found the article informative. But the friend who spoke to me about it seemed to focus on the last line above - the cultural angle. In fact, I think most people who read that article would find the cultural angle more easier to understand than the financial or educational.
Most of the people who talk about innovation in public also seem to prefer trying to influence this "cultural" factor. There are conferences and seminars focussed exclusively on innovation and the need for inspiration for innovators.
Unsurprisingly, this coincides with a slew of management books about innovation in the corporation.
The narrative seems to run as follows: India has a culture that looks down on investing in new products. Failure is not an option. Therefore Indians do not start companies that create new products. To change this, we have to motivate Indian future entrepreneurs with a lot of seminars and conferences which charge a minimum of Rs.1000 only.
I am completely prepared to believe that entrepreneurship is low in India and that India is not a source of many patents. What I do NOT trust is that there is a cultural angle to it.That is, I believe that there are perfectly rational economic reasons for Indians not to get involved in creating products - I don't think you have to bring culture into the mix.
I also believe (cynical bastard that I am) that the only reason culture is touted as a prime factor is this: that is the only way a lot of people can easily make money, offering to change the culture. If we were to go after the root causes, we may be required to fight the battle on the political, policy making front. That is truly in public interest and there is not a lot of money to make in that direction.

The Cult of the Entrepreneur

I think entrepreneurship is being elevated as something equivalent to superstardom by management gurus. To start a company, and to create a product - the decision is usually made based on evaluating marginal benefits, not based on good intentions.
Let me take the case of the software industry:
(By the way, The Indian Patent Act does not apply to software! That is, you cannot patent a software algorithm in India. Software is protected by copyright - not by Patent Law in India. )
If you start a software company in India, you have two choices - start a company that creates an innovative product (remember, you cannot patent software innovations in India); or perform coding services for American, Japanese or European clients. Which option would you choose?
Purely going by marginal benefits, I would prefer a services company unless I am rich already. This is because with no outside investment, getting a software services company up and running is easy in India. Not only that, if I had just a couple of clients, I can break even pretty fast. The market for software services is high and has stayed high for the past fifteen years. Even under a bad recession, the market has been able to accomodate thousands of small companies.
Now, you may ask me, why would I do this? There are a thousand small and medium services companies - wouldn't I rather start a product company that I feel passionate about?
But people run businesses not just out of nobility. They run businesses because they want to make a lot of money as fast as possible. I know that we are all supposed to believe in passion, innovation and all that - but has anyone considered the true state of the Indian economy?

1. Our healthcare costs are skyrocketing
2. IT workers have no government mandated pension
3. There is no real social security net - unemployment benefits are abysmal and difficult to secure.
4. The public education system is bad and private education costs are soaring.
5. It is not easy to go into bankruptcy and come out of it.

Let me highlight the final point - the European Corporate Governance Institute had a paper out (pdf can be downloaded here)on Bankruptcy law and Entrepreneurship in 2008. The authors, John Armour and Douglas Cumming found a link between countries that support a "fresh start" through personal bankruptcy laws and entrepreneurship. The USA, for example, enables such a fresh start through Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Countries that allow such fresh starts have significantly more entrepreneurial activity.
What is the status of Indian law on this? The Indian Insolvency laws are dated. But more than anything, going to the a court managed bankruptcy in India will drain all your energy and time away.

Unlike Western countries, a person living in India cannot depend on government if he gets sick, for his children's education or for his retirement. Meanwhile it is obvious that all our costs are increasing exponentially. Would I be trying to make as much money as possible or would I be passionate about a product that may never work? The answer is clear.
So, my question is why don't all the innovation gurus turn their attention to a better bankruptcy law that actually works? Why don't they focus on a social security net? Why don't they focus on pension schemes?
Well, there is no money in such fights. You will likely lose over and over fighting policy changes.
Therefore, we are all back to wondering what the devil is in the Indian culture preventing risk taking. We are back to organizing seminars and conferences on innovation.

(By the way, I believe that people who create products also use the same marginal benefits analysis. They are not guided by nobility or pure passion either. They may see a niche market opening or a way to get funding. My point is that we can discuss innovation and entrepreneurship purely as economic decisions, without bringing in cultural angles.)

Those of you who find this article interesting may also read more about its background here.

The left-behind majority

I hear often that racism or casteism cuts both ways. That is, it affects the perpetrators as much as the victims. I have often wondered about that - how does majoritarianism affect the majority and how does casteism affect the forward castes?
Some clarity came when I was reading this excellent series of blogs by Joe Bageant, the American author of the book "Deer Hunting with Jesus". Going through the letters in his site makes it clear how assumptions of white superiority affects whites themselves.

You see, the majority of American poor are white people. The majority of social security recipients in America are white people. Yet, whenever people in the United States talk of a "welfare queen" what they typically mean is a reckless black single mother. At least that is the image they conjure up.
This has come to mean that debate about health care reform or "entitlement" programs have sought to revolve around subtle racial messages. When Republican voters in America protest "socialism", what they are protesting is really their money benefitting black people.
Yet, blacks are not the major recipients of welfare.
Thus liberals and conservatives in the United States are locked really in a fight about benefits to black people and Hispanics - with liberals accusing of racism and conservatives of socialism.
Meanwhile the white poor in America receive no attention.
You see my point here? It is as if the myths of racial superiority of the white people actually end up making poor white people INVISIBLE to the media and activists. While debating back and forth over racism, people have forgotten that not every white person is an investment banker with an Ivy League degree. For example, the trade policies of the past 20 years in America have devastated manufacturing jobs held by whites as well.

Back to my first statement above, THIS is how racism, casteism and cultural hegemony affect the perpetrators' cultures themselves. Racism ends up hiding the poverty of white people. Untouchability practiced in India hides the plight of middle and forward caste members with little or no land. It makes such members subservient to their own rich caste members.

That is, racism and casteism rarely benefit anyone other than the creepy people who directly make money out of such antagonisms.

In my own (although limited) experience, Casteism also forces forward caste members to confirm to social rules and career paths and peer pressures that they can neither ignore nor meet adequately. I have seen this in school and college - forward caste students were expected to perform extremely well by their families; expectations that these students could not meet most of the time.
Holding up caste based or race based differences does not help anyone.

In another view of this, take the majoritarian views of the Hindu nationalists or Hindi nationalists. Both these views end up covering substantial cultural differences in North India. Telugu actor Chiranjeevi once said that entire sub-cultures in North India (such as Bhojpuri) were being disappeared by the domination of Hindi. What Hindu nationalists are attempting is not a secret - their goal is to create a lockstep mono-culture throughout India. In such efforts, they end up causing the numerous sub-cultures that make up Hinduism to disappear - thus making Hinduism itself a colorless religion.

Myths on Careers

My nephew is doing post-grad in Aerospace. We were recently chatting, when he said that from the age of five, Astronomy had been his dream and he wanted to be an astronaut all his life.
I was somewhat skeptical - you see, I knew him from the time he was a baby. He does not even own a telescope at home (they can afford it). I have never heard him talking about astronomy; nor seen him read books related to that subject.
I think my nephew was falling into a trap laid by popular culture - which is the idea that people have "dreams" about their careers from very early in life and that they should "follow their dreams".
I know the message sounds all optimistic - but it makes no practical sense. Yet, in advertisements, Disney movies and media we find this meme - that we all have some kind of destiny and that we should strive to fulfill it.

Can We Decide When Young?2.
Increasingly, we are also told that we have to decide our careers very early in life. This is a repeated theme in Hollywood movies. Our advertisements nakedly exploit this - with children spouting lines about becoming a pilot or a computer programmer.
The idea that we have talents, I agree with. But those talents are more at the abstract level - it is impossible to decide very early on in life if you are going to be a computer programmer. Just as you cannot decide if you are going to be a lawyer or an auditor or an archaeologist.
At some level we all understand this when it comes to a career like law or accounting. But when it comes to "engineering" and other such romantic careers, we are told that we should "dream" and "follow our dreams".
There is an effort to make us believe that our dreams as children matter. I think that effort is simply putting more pressure on parents and children - on parents to "discover" their kid's talents very early on; and for children to decide their talents early and then stick to it, even though they may be completely wrong about it.
In one way, this is the age old game of trying to maintain a competitive advantage in our society - it has nothing to do with dreams or following those dreams.

The Truth about Career Dreams
The truth is this: most people decide their career based on financial reasons. This is true both in India and abroad. I know plenty of American programmers who are from finance, medicine, chemistry and other backgrounds. There is NOTHING wrong with deciding your career based on financial considerations.
Let us say, in spite of this, that we should follow our dreams. The question is, practically, for the majority of the population, at what point would you even know what your "dream" career is.
This is why I believe popular culture is sending the wrong message. I think it takes a long time, even into adulthood before you can understand what you are REALLY good at. And that is fine. Most people will end up working on something we are average at. That is fine too.
One of my cousins said she decided to be in the media very early on in life. Maybe. Did she even know what role she would play in the media? Doubtful. I mean, media includes roles from project management, production design, writing to several on-stage and off-stage roles. I think, instead, she decided to specialize in media when she entered adulthood, but then re-invented her passion for it and projected it to her childhood.

My Career
When I was in fifth standard I wanted to be an archaeologist. Then I wanted to be an astronomer, bus driver, wandering sanyasi, temple poojari, writer, reader (if someone would pay for it) and countless other professions.
It is obvious that I had no idea what a "profession" meant. I did have a talent for writing. But it was not very well-honed then.
Now, it would be absurd for me to say that I wanted to be in computers from when I was young. Why? Because I did not know what a computer was till my second year in college.
A bunch of my classmates were studying in NIIT at that time. Me and some friends were into Physics. We thought the guys studying computers were betraying Physics. We wouldn't talk to them.
This hatred for computers continued into engineering college. When it was time to choose what jobs we were interested in, I chose Elecronics and then Communications. I did not select computer software as a campus interview choice.
Then in my final year in engineering college, I realized something fundamental - I was an Electronics engineer, but I could not even solder two wires together. In fact, I sucked at building anything using electronics. Some of my classmates were building their own transistor radios and even micro computers. But I was a "theoretical electronics" guy.
This inability to handle anything mechanical must be an inherited bug in my genes. But as luck would have it, this bug pushed me into software.
When we had to choose our final year project, I had two choices. One was building some kind of electronic triggering system for cars or something. The other was a "simulation" project in which I had to program a communication system in a computer.
Since I knew that if I created any electronice triggering system, it would likely blow up when the car started, I decided to go for the simulation project.
Well, 15 years later, I am still programming.
Do I like it? Of course. I am free to make and break things while building them - without any cost consequences (atleast not compared to the real world). I like what I am doing.
But it took me many years to like it.
My point is that my story is far more typical. Getting a job you like is rare. The idea that you can "dream" about a specific career when you are young is just a myth. It takes well into adulthood to figure out what we like and why we like it.

Speaking "Indian" at work and public

When the Australian race attacks happened, as I noted here, commenters said that Austalians did not like Indians talking in their native languages in public.
In India itself, there is an uniquely Indian aspect to this controversy that refuses to die. This post is about that controversy and what it means for our society.

The Stereotype
When I left for the United States back in 1999, one of my HR briefers in India told me not to talk in Tamil at work. At that time I did not question that. I just accepted it.
In the States, some of my colleagues were from North India, and we fell into the habit of talking in Hindi when together(I learnt Hindi from them).
But I was surprised that in the online forums and chatrooms there was always an accusation that if a group of people speaking Indian language X got together they were very rude and continued to speak in language X at work (where X could be Tamil, Telugu, Hindi or Malayalam). That is, almost every Indian group was accusing other groups of talking in their own language at work.
When I came back to India I myself had an argument with a drunk guy who made the general accusation at Tamil speakers and I wrote about that here.
It was obvious to me, then, that like several other derogatory stereotypes about the diferent ethnic groups (such as North Indians smell or South Indians speak bad English), this was simply another stereotype. No particular ethnic group "uniquely" misbehaved at work and nor was any other ethnic group "well-behaved". Just as Telugu people are unfairly accused of faking resumes (everyone does it; it is a competitive country) similarly the stereotype is that when a bunch of Tamils or Bengalis get together at work, they talk in their native languages.
But stereotypes have consequences.

The English-Only company
Recently a company I know passed a HR "policy" that all conversations other than water-cooler types or at lunch time, should be in English. I have no idea how they would implement this in practice, without imposing a kinder-garten like atmosphere. But this post is not about that.
The question I have is this. Who decided that talking in your native language among other people who speak that same language is somehow "rude"?
India has 200 different languages and within every three or four hundred kilometers you encounter a new language. When we were growing up, there were people speaking different languages all around us. And this is definitely true in this day.
When you went to public places or in school, you always came across people who speak in different languages among themselves. It never "offended" anybody.
On the other hand countries like America and Australia have a "melting-pot" metaphor. In these countries racism takes different forms - ONE of those forms is the anger against people speaking in different languages among themselves.
That is, the INTOLERANCE that Americans, the British or Australians show to linguistic diversity is not a GOOD feature of their society. It is actually profoundly insensitive and xenophobic.
My point is that we have taken this remarkably stupid insensitivity and then tried to develop the same insensitivity in INDIA - which is against any common sense. This is a country which should be celebrating linguistic diversity. Instead, the modern Indian at work and in public is encouraged to frown on people speaking a different language among themselves. Why? Because they do so in the West.
So, now we have people turning up their collective noses when a few developers talk in Tamil or Telugu or Hindi.
What is the result? As I explained in this post, it is not as if we are all trained by super English teachers. Most of us talk bad English anyway. So we end up talking butler English at work just to prove someone's point and power.

PS:
If you are in a meeting and a bunch of people are talking in a language you don't know, then why not simply let them know you don't know the language? Why is that such a bad option?

A Profile of Eve Teasers

When I was living in Nungambakkam, around 1992, an incident happened in the road behind our house. A college girl was driving a scooter. Two guys saw her driving and decided to harass her. They drove near her and kept aggressively pushing her off the road. At one point, the girl lost balance and fell down. A passing bus hit and crushed her.
The guys were nowhere to be found and I am guessing nobody got caught.
This incident was one of the earliest incidents of "eve-teasing" (a very benign term describing a horrible murderous affliction in Indian cities) that burst into news. It was following this incident and the death of another girl near Ethiraj college that police started deploying women's brigades in plain clothes. Every year brought its own outrages - including the incident at Satyam theater a few years back - the daughter of an army officer was hit repeatedly in full public view; an intervening police man beaten up. In that incident the girl's family decided to drop all charges because the guy involved was a politician's son.
The problem of eve-teasing, is, of course, not specific to Chennai. Jammu and Delhi are said to be the worst in India.
Now, our society has dealt with this problem in different ways - the usual suspects have shown up and blamed the women themselves. Police, in their typical clueless way started harassing lovers sitting in parks and beaches. All these are known.
What is also known is that "star" dumb asses such as actors Vijay and Surya started justifying and promoting violence against women in their movies. They have hidden behind the usual excuse of "oh, the story writer wrote it - I just acted in the movie" while taking all praise and money for "their" movie successes. Whether movies influence society or it is the other way around is a separate topic. But there is no doubt that these guys tried to make money by appealing to chauvinism in "their" fans. I also have no doubt that the classic Indian rich guy defense of "I-can-do-anything-for-money" will be taken by these star clowns. I sometimes wish for militant feminism so that women chase these guys down the road with chappals and broomsticks.
Before I go on to the main purpose of this post, please take your time and read through the Blank Noise website. It has some of the most moving accounts of the victims of eveteasing. They are also trying to get something done about it. All help to them.

The Profiles of Eve-Teasers
You see, when I was in high school at Madurai, I had a few friends with whom I used to hang out. Generally we used to commute to school together. Some of these guys were interested in "eve-teasing". Because we were in the same class, I knew a lot about them.
I again came in contact with such guys in Chennai when I was in college.
In our media, just as "terrorist" (Theeviravaadhi) has become a term without any meaning, eve-teasing also has becme detached from the actual meaning. For example, an eve-teaser is treated as if he is a separate species (like a terrorist in a Vijaykanth movie). The true motives and psychology of such a person is not probed. This allows movie stars to harass women in their movies but at the same time punish "eve-teasers". The hypocrisy does not bother them. If a "good" guy, with "love" in his mind harasses "his" woman that is fine. It is just not proper for those eve-teaser bastards to do it.
In my contact with classmates and neighborhood little guys who engaged in eve-teasing, this is what I found:
1. First of all, the eve-teaser was extremely afraid of his parents. All these brave guys who whistle at women and yell at them - they usually had a father who would beat them in circles OUTSIDE their homes if the fathers found out what was going on.
2. The eve-teaser did not like to be alone. He was at his bravest when there were 10 big guys around him from his own college or school to protect him. If there were a lot of people, he would scream, whistle and "have fun". Instead if he was alone, all his bravery left him. He would sneak around with eyes averted. His courage comes from anonymity and the mob.
This is why you see guys who yell at women from a passing bus or motorbike.
3. What the eve-teaser values (from my observation and hindsight) is not really feminine contact. He values two things:
a. He wants desperately to be respected by his friends. His self-worth springs from his friends' approval. This is probably because his parents have not given enough self-worth to him. The female, in this case, is simply a tool - she is the best shortcut to win approval from his friends. Movies get this completely wrong - a guy who loves a woman does not go about whistling at her in public. In most cases, the eve-teaser's hope is to do something dangerous and win approval from his gang-brothers.
There were guys among my classmates who would dream up something new to impress friends every day. They would cackle loudly in public without having said anything remotely funny. In short, they were pathetic.
b. The second thing, in order, that some of them have, is a fear of women. It is hard to explain this - our society being very conservative, kids are brought up in boys-only or girls-only schools and colleges. For these guys (not all of them), women are a completely scary mystery. They get annoyed by women behaving normally in public places - somehow they see an unconnected woman laughing at a joke in a busstand as a threat to themselves.
I don't know what causes this great insecurity - but it is tragic for the guys and for the women who end up getting harassed.
I have seen some of my classmates show anger at something as simple as a woman walking confidently. It is an extreme resentment.
Again, this has nothing to do with the women themselves. Most of the time they are unaware that they are provoking this resentment just by being themselves.

Thus you see that BOTH the reasons why guys indulge in eve-teasing have little to do with sex, love or with the women's dress (as some magazines keep insinuating). It has to do with the inner demons in a teen-aged or even adult man in our society. It is very much a psychological issue.
Thus this problem can never be solved by compartmentalizing men and women further. In fact eve-teasing has somewhat gone down recently in Chennai mainly because men and women are working together more and more.
The only way to solve it is through education, particularly sex-education, and encouraging co-education schools. The more you are self-aware, the less you would engage in a mob-activity.

4. Now, from the above description, it may seem that the eve-teaser is a pathetic little guy. But we hear all the time (as in the Satyam complex incident) about powerful politicians' sons engaging in this "sport". How do we explain that?
From my observation, I would say 95% of guys who engage in eve-teasing have NO political or any other connection. What they are HOPING though, is that you would THINK they had such connections. As I said, a single call to one of their fathers would have them crapping in their pants.
But their approach seems to work. A couple of years back, my wife beat the hell out of a guy in a Chennai road. When we were narrating this to a woman colleague, she said, "what if he had come back with some goons?". This happens only in movies. Almost all the time the eve-teaser has no support from anyone. He is hoping that you would be scared of him, thinking he has political connections. But he has none.

5. What movies provide in the case of eve-teasing, is not (as some people think) a direct encouragement. By showing women in a belittled fashion and spouting comments about women's dresses, what "actors" like Vijay and Surya provide is a MORAL justification for guys who may feel squeamish about it. What they provide is a moral framework in which a random person can assault a woman and harass her. Eve-teasing will not stop if these movie actors stopped doing it - but at least society will not have to engage in these stupid arguments about women's dresses in a problem that has nothing to do with women.

Again, this problem is not going to go away with deterrence or punishment. It needs a systemic approach.

Are Indians system-blind?

(Updated below) Update II
This is going to be a long post.
Let me mention a few incidents:
1.In Vijay TV talk show Neeya Naana, they were discussing government staff behavior in the passport office. A lady said that the staff are very rude and abuse public all the time. The host Gopinath said that Indians accuse Indian government staff of rudness; but will stand in line silently if they are abroad. I have heard this before - that the same public who drive badly and are impatient in India, will behave well and be patient abroad.
Gopinath was implying that the public were to blame for this - that we have two standards of behavior.
But, if Indians behave well abroad and not so well in India, does it mean that something is wrong with Indians? Or does it mean that something is wrong with India?

2. In every campus interview students ask a standard question - why is your company not creating products for India? Why are you in IT services business? Why are you not serving India? This common complaint is asked in different ways by many people.
The assumption is that the way Indian companies behave has something to do with the NATURE of the business owners (they are not sufficiently patriotic).
It does not seem to occur to anyone that if companies all the time rush towards IT services, it must be because the commerce system is PUSHING them in that direction. That is, a set of tariff laws, calculations of profit margin and the way international capital is mobile, pushes IT companies in India to operate in a certain business model. It has nothing to do with the NATURE or personality of business owners.

3. A few days back, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine - he operates an electronic dealership. He mentioned that his staff keeps switching jobs; and that they expect a payscale in parallel with IT industry payscales. He thought this was because of the "attitude" of Indian labor. He said they were too arrogant and expected the moon.
I explained to him that if labor expected a suddenly increased payscale, it was because we have an IT industry that operates on very good margins and is on a boom cycle. Since this industry is in booming in the same city, It is easy for employees to learn software programming from some training centres and quickly double their salaries. That is, labor was being pushed towards IT because of the inflow of IT business to India. That meant that employers like my friend were facing the same pressure from the market.
That is, it was not the "attitude" of Indian employees that needs to be blamed - there is a perfect systematic reason for that "attitude".

In each of the above examples, and in many other scenarios, Indian opinion seems to tend towards blaming people and attitudes than the interacting systems that operate on people and cause certain behavior. It seems, as a whole, Indians are system-blind.

System Blindness and the Indian Psyche
Sudhir Kakar, in his landmark work, "The Inner World", linking anthropology and Indian psychology, says this:

Hindus share the belief that the legitimacy of social institutions lies in the dharma they incorporate rather than in utilitarian contractual agreements and obligations. ....
Moreover, it is generally believed that social conflict, oppression and unrest do not stem from the organization of social relations, but originate in the adharma (not dharma) of those in positions of power. Institutions in India are thus personalized to an extent inconceivable in the West; individuals who head them are believed to be the sole repository of the virtues and vices of the institutions. ....
Many are the poignant stories of simple farmers in the early days of British rule who responded to an act of injustice by government officials by spending their all in the vain hope of reaching the Queen and gaining her ear, at Windsor.
Any tendency towards social reform in India moves not to abolish hierarchical institutions or to reject the values on which they are based, but to remove or "change" the individuals in positions of authority in them. When an institution is not working, it is taken for granted that the power-wielders have veered from the path of dharma.

The quote talks about Hindu world view, but applies to Indians as a whole (because it is a cultural than a religious world view).
So, when faced with some social structure that is broken, or when faced with a certain group of individuals who behave a certain way, as Indians, our first tendency is to blame the individuals themselves than look for systematic reasons for such behavior.
This explains each one of the items I described above. It also explains why, when faced with a broken system like our incredibly bad driving in Indian roads, we look to blame the drivers themselves, rather than look for systematic reasons why people drive badly.

System-blindness in Driving
In the case of driving, we can see that the Regional Transport Offices (RTO) are not monitoring driving schools closely, nor are they applying very strict criteria for proof of learning from the public. We learn to drive mainly from an utility point of view and do not learn that driving has a social dimension. This fault squarely falls on the RTOs. Note that I am not saying that RTOs give licenses to wrong people - almost anyone can learn responsible driving, provided there is someone to teach them and there is time to learn.
The other side of this equation is the regulatory system - we do not have enough traffio police and the police available are overworked. They also tend towards corruption.
Instead what are the consequences of blaming the individuals who drive in our roads, and not looking at systemic reasons?

The Consequences of System-Blindness
Most of the time, blaming individuals means that we can never correct the situation - unless everyone in India becomes a saint, we cannot have a good society. Thus, right away, we have blocked an effort to correct the situation.
Secondly, blaming individuals all the time,means we OVEREMPHASIZE punishment for deviation from our laws - but not enough emphasis is placed on learning. As we saw in the above example, the learning angle of RTOs is entirely lost - we instead concentrate exclusively on regulation by Traffic police.
Thirdly, blaming individuals in the Indian context implies a kind of self-loathing. Most of us must be familiar with this - when you blame a politician (as I did in my post on Rahul Gandhi and the Mumbai Attacks), the instant response is that we have to blame ourselves (one of the comments says that).
I think we are all familiar with this pattern - when Ramalinga Raju was arrested, rediff published an "open letter" from some moron, (the article is here) - in which the guy compared Ramalinga Raju's crimes with people who were not swiping ID cards properly at Satyam. The article ended up saying we all have ourselves to blame.
After the current spate of attacks on Indians in Australia, Outlook has published a highly confused feature article saying "Aren't we racists too?".
The tendency is to spread blame around so generally that we cannot take any action to correct anything.
This "blame ourselves" cry usually comes because people do not differentiate actual crimes against the law from individual moral issues. But it also happens because people fail to realize the interlocking systems we live in and instead focus on individual behavior.

An Example of System Blindness - Indian Politics
One example of system blindness caused the exclusive focus on voting in last parliamentary elections.
There were heavy drives in the English media to go out and vote. Aamir Khan spoke about the importance of voting. When just 45% of Mumbai voted, there were castigations of the public.
What is the logic behind such focus on voting? The prevailing idea, as explained by the movie "Yuva" ("Aayutha Ezhuthu" in Tamil) is this: if we distinguish between good and bad politicians and elect only candidates based on "merit" then we can change the system.
I have a fundamental issue with this idea - it assumes that the current crop of politicians are bad. It thus blames our ills on a group of people's nature.
Most of our politcians are well educated - some of them are lawyers. Do we know if the constituencies of such ostensibly "good" candidates are well developed?
The answer is, of course, that there seems to be uniform ineffectiveness from our legislature, irrespective of the education or sincerity of the representatives.
Why is that?
Secondly, it is close to impossible to fight an entrenched political party's candidate. We think it is possible if everyone votes for the "good" candidate. But it is not easy to figure out a good candidate for anyone. This whole idea may have worked if we were in a community of a hundred people. It will not work in the current scenario.
So, let us take a step back and see what is wrong with the election system:
1. Political parties have zero inner party democracy and have managed to circumvent such democracy requirements. It should be upto political parties to figure out the good candidate - not just the general public.
2. The election process SHOULD FORCE public financing for campaigns - that is the only way to level the playing field so that entrenched parties do not dominate.

Both of the above are NOT going to be solved just by voting. It requires a campaign to change the system. Thus, it is neither the public's fault that we elect "bad" candidates not is it the politicians' fault that they are ineffective. We need to change certain aspects of the political system for any meaningful change.

Why are We System-Blind?
From the reason for Indian IT's focus on services to the emergence of South India as an IT destination to the collapse of Indian sports in the Olympics, everything can generally be explained by looking for systemic faults.
But in this article I seem to be blaming Indians in general for system-blindness - isn't that itself wrong?
There are certain reasons for our overlooking systemic faults. These are:
1. We are a conservative society, till now. One of the hallmarks of a conservative society is assigning blame to individuals for systemic issues. It is a way of looking at the world.
When the current credit crisis started in the United States, American conservatives explained the crisis by blaming it on black and Hispanic households, who could not repay housing loans. That is, they blamed the minorities for overreaching and being greedy.
On the other hand, liberals, who looked at the same crisis, explained it by tracing it from the credit default swap mechanism initiated back in 2000. They linked it to the complex derivative trading rules in Wall Street and even on the way compensation packages worked in the finance industry.
You see the difference? Conservatives blamed individual "attitudes" and liberals blamed ceratin features of the system.
In India, we, as a conservative society, blame individuals more than systems.

2. The second is the cultural reason that I quoted earlier in the article (from Sudhir Kakar). The way the concept of dharma works in Indian society, we are tuned to see individuals operating in dharmic or adharmic mode than systems that offer incentives or disincentives.

There are perfectly rational explanations for the reasons we focus on indviduals - but it is a weakness in our society.
One of the ways to change this focus will be through education. In the long run, if we guide our educational systems towards civic lessons and explain the interlocking economic and political systems that govern us,then we can expect future generations not to play the "blame ourselves" game.
Implementing the 30-year old recommendations of the Police Commission Report or Education Commission report; and cleaning up campaign financing will go longer to establish a sane society.

Update I
When I talk about a "system", I am talking about a set of procedures, laws and other mechanisms that offer incentives and disincentives for people to behave in certain ways. Such an idea of a system is used by economists all the time. The market is one such system. These incentives and disincentives need careful consideration and are not obvious all the time.
A few years back a law was introduced to make Rape punishable by death. Women's activists objected to this law. At first sight, it seems like they should support it because the law would act as a deterrent against rape and hopefully reduce it.
But there is a hidden effect of such a law - it means that a rapist is more likely to kill his victim for fear of exposure. This is the reason why women's groups objected to this law.
Almost all the time, we ARE operating under a set of interlocking systems. We are just blind to this process. I am NOT talking about creating a NEW system, or even a SINGLE system.
Many times what we require are policy tunings to get a desired behavior. Those policy tunings in the public sphere can be effective only if we understand what is being done.
The National Police Comission report was released 30 years back. It talks about separating the state police departments from under the state government (and thus, the ruling party). It talks about creating a separate governing body (like the US Department of Justice). One of the recommendations is that the governing body be a council involving a couple of Opposition party members and retired judges.
Such a tuning would have effectively prevented the abuses we see now from ruling parties. It is obvious, in Tamil Nadu, that Jayalalitha's dragging Karunanidhi from his home at midnight would never have happened if the police was under a separate governing body.
This is what I mean by a systemic knowledge. There is so much analysis done in television and the media during election time; it all focusses on personalities. If going out to vote is important, I think agitating for the implementation of the Police Commission report is more important and will change the system faster.

Update II
One of the main reasons to emphasize systems is that the alternative explanation - that Indian middle class is bad is just a cop-out. That just avoids argument. The explanation is also contrary to common sense - why should Indians behave well abroad and not in India? Further, why do we think that Indians are somehow uniquely corrupt?
It makes more sense that we behave the way we do and our politicians and businesses behave a certain way because that is the way incentives lie.