Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy New What?

Remember that big lie that came out in 2000?  That the new millennium was being born on January 1st?  How easily the world bought this nonsense, even though the truth was that the millennium was actually born one year later on January 1st, 2001!

How does the world lose its senses on New Years Eve?

How is a New Year Day any more important or worth celebrating than any other day?  Why should January 1st mark the New Year?  If a "year" marks a full revolution of the earth around the sun, why can't the universal New Year begin on one of the solstice days, when the earth's axis begins a new angle of tilt?  Would that not be precise and natural?  Now we not only have various people celebrating various New Year Days, but also idiots that want to, in the same calendar, change it from one to the other, based on some whim, like they have tried to do in Tamilnadu and failed.

More importantly to me, what is the celebration all about?  It is not like 1st January 2011 is going to be any better in ANY way compared to 31st December 2010!  In fact, it is going to be much worse, since a lot of people will be drunk, inefficient, driving badly and slow in thinking.  The most unproductive of days in the year has to be the 1st of January.  How can the rest of the year be any good if we get to such bad starts?

We have several different calendars in India, and indeed, several different New Years.  So, if Sundays are the beginning of weeks, why not have a New Week Day every Sunday?  In any case, we're pretty slow on Mondays, and also have the most number of heart attacks on Mondays!  So, why not celebrate a little bit before taking on the danger of the dreaded Monday?

Anything different we can do this time?

Enough of resolutions we cannot honour, promises we cannot keep, and beginnings to new ideas that go nowhere.

Our lives must be really boring if we have to wait for a date on a calendar to celebrate, party, have a good time for whatever reason.  Still, New Years is really NO reason to celebrate.  Especially if we are leading such dull dreary lives that the mere arrival of a date should get us all excited.

If we were to bring some quality to our lives, we'd be doing whatever it takes to make our lives worthwhile every second we are alive, grateful for the opportunity each moment brings to us, and we'd lead healthy lives, without stress, going into a sound sleep every night, waking up without the pressure of routine life, enjoying clean air, great food, great friends, and have plenty of energy for a lot of activity.  We would not have any negative thoughts and no unclean emotions.  We'd be excited about every moment of our lives yet to unfold, and we'd be fulfilled in every way.

Instead, most of us choose rather stupidly, to be sold on the rigour of ordinary life, sacrificing quality of life to improve our standard of living, and when we do get to a higher standard of living, remain so scared of lowering it that we never get to a better quality of life.

So, how about, this NEW YEAR, since we are so adamant about celebrating this great celestial event that doesn't even fall on the same day for all humans, do something to improve our lives, individually and collectively?  How about taking the whole day off thinking about "what" it is that can actually make each of our lives better, and doing that not just today but for the rest of our lives?  After all, if the world might end in 2012, the least we can do is spend some time with our "selves".

Welcome 2011!

Cheers.

Saturday, December 11, 2010

Are we a Two Notion Nation?

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh returned from Cancun having taken his due part in a relatively successful international climate conference.  Now some of us want to gut him for "compromising" India's position by accepting binding conditions that will force us to pollute less!  Truth is, he did not.  He played his hand professionally, making progress where it matters most in his ministry - at the global level.

Mr. Ramesh is thankfully, intelligent enough to know we as a nation have fought anything binding for a long time, and he therefore presented a "nuanced" stance that allowed for some progress to be made - something a lot many climate summits before this could not claim.  So, what's up with us?  Why these reactions now, going far enough to call his deeds a "U-Turn" in the media?  How do we send a representative to a global summit, to stand up for this "billion strong" mass of humanity that we are so proud of, without knowing exactly what he is going to do there?

Strangely, while we never make any news of preparing anything other than our cricket team before a big event, we are very happy to beat every other piece of information into a controversy, raking up every opportunity for a confrontation.  We must either like something or hate it!  We're angry against Australia for a few Indians getting beaten up in rough neighbourhoods, angry against the USA for them calling us "self appointed front runners" for new permanent seats on the UN Security Council, and yet extremely weak when one of our airliners gets hijacked by terrorists.  We're proud about the silliest achievements like putting a toy on the moon, and get very miserable when we are told we are #147 on the Human Development Index.

Are we as a nation, either arrogant or apologetic, and very little else, in between or beyond?  How about stoic, pragmatic, nuanced, intelligent, innovative, mature, clairvoyant, sophisticated, assertive, visionary, evolved, shrewd, or just plain cool?  Aren't these options available to us as a people?  The danger of subscribing to an over simplistic range of attitudes is that we will not be able to succeed as much as we would like to.  We may just not have the negotiating tools with which to garner advantages in this global world.

Every single one of our institutions, cultural or governmental, administrative or social, are dangerously cloaked in this rather simplistic and archaic construct of right and wrong.  Why do we have to reduce Mr. Jairam Ramesh's stance at Cancun to anything other than his own description of "nuanced"?  Why do we have to enter debates leading to a legislation about gay sex being simply, criminal or not criminal?  Why does the debate not go into our very understanding of the word "criminal"?  Clearly, that is where we should go to understand ourselves!

As long as we have this "right" or "wrong" black and white perspective about everything we do in a complex world, we will desist from understanding anything of even a mildly complex nature.  Opinions we have so many of, but very few world changing perspectives.  This should be very strange for a culture heavily influenced by Hinduism's inclusive fundamentals, for we know that in order to embrace Krishna, I should not have to give up on Christ.  For a culture that has hardly been instructed about anything mutually exclusive, sexual poses in temple carvings included, are we in danger of becoming, in the age of the internet and the information revolution, a rather unsophisticated nation of people not willing to consider anything long enough or leave some things inconclusive in judgement?

Why is it that we have to stoop to define our laws based on "legal" or "illegal" for instance?  It is no secret that policemen frequently gun down extremely hardened criminals, who have not been deterred by the consequences of the judicial system.  If someone is unruly enough to not worry about a jail term, and if he has scant respect for other people's lives, chances are, it will take some stern action to throw him in jail.  If that doesn't work and the threat looms large again, chances are, some policeman or any other individual will take action to neutralize this threat.  Now, we have a Human Rights Commission to investigate these incidences of "encounter deaths", and God bless them for the work they do, and we have armed policemen who actually deal with dangerous criminals - at loggerheads with each other, while both are working towards the same goal - keep society clean!

By putting down a set of laws, do we automatically assume that all situations can be judged by this set of principles we have all sworn to adhere by?  Aren't we limiting ourselves?  Or do we want to avoid complex debates just so life moves along, and hence, we're willing to sacrifice some clarity for some expediency?  Either way, I'd like to see a judge declare someone "guilty according to this trial", but "not guilty" because of some other moral consideration.  Will we be able to handle that?

Something along these lines came up with the Babri Masjid land issue.  The Court decided on a three way split, never going into the verdict of the title at all!  This "extra legal" handling of the matter was a bit of a news for the nation, and as a country, we were appreciated for not losing control.  No riots?  Thank you very much, folks!  But, in hindsight, it was a sophisticated turn of the court system, who did us a favour by not sticking to the book and declaring who the land belongs to.  Clearly, if there was a title dispute, the same land which had never been split before could not have belonged to all three parties in contention?  And yet, this was a sophisticated solution that has gone down rather well.  Perhaps this is the way in the future.

Specific to the environment, Mr. Jairam Ramesh's department, we will eventually have to deal with extremely complicated equations, because we cannot apply our laws to fishermen in Bolivia who will lose a fair bit of their catch if we burn coal to melt iron.  Humanity was never designed to be split into nation states, even though this sort of splitting has ensured we have many different experiments in the way we want to do things collectively.  We will have to ensure, however, that we grow up as a race, that we try and understand and apply ourselves well beyond the limitations of black and white constructs, and slowly make ourselves capable of handling many unique challenges.

As people of India, as a very culturally, socially and intellectually diverse collective, we have a better chance than most people in the world, of training ourselves for multifaceted solution finding, conflict resolution, and visionary, inclusive leadership.  I hope this will not be lost upon us.  Let's give Mr. Jairam Ramesh a fair hearing, and let's not jump to any conclusion.  How about this for a start?

BSK.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Wikileaks! Bring it on baby!

Wikileaks is going to drop some bombshells upon us.

The fact that the US State Department is going far enough to warn us about the impending leaks means that it is guaranteed to embarrass us, the USA, and is guaranteed to damage our relationship with them.  I couldn't wait!  I could not wait for our worshippers of white skin to be told in no uncertain terms that the USA's decision makers think of us as scumbags!  I could not wait indeed for the clandestine bastards in the US State and other departments to tell us what we should always have known but have avoided thinking about - The USA's foreign policy has always been based on opportunity, never on principle.

All this Obama's rushing to India to lick some of our economic ass notwithstanding, India and the USA differ in one fundamental way.  India takes a long time to give up its principles, collectively, in the international arena.  The USA has none, except on paper.  Does that make me proud as an Indian?  Most certainly not!  Simply because the USA is not my fucking gold standard!  No country is.  My conscience should suffice and I have never seen my country live up to the standards my conscience has let me set.

Now, Wikileaks is causing serious worry on many fronts.  The Pakistanis are worried, New Delhi is making fussy noises about what might come out, going on record stating we would like to "work this out" with the USA since we value that freaking relationship!  How the fuck can we value this relationship if it clearly cannot be built on mutual trust?  We can if we are honest.  For example, if Manmohan Singh were to say to Obama, "Barack, you're a good guy and I like you, but you filthy bastards in Washington have always treated us like shit, never took us seriously, and continue to fund Pakistan while they train their arms against us.  So, we're going to wait and watch, for we'd really like to see how you behave when China calls in your enormous debt to them.  Till then, let me focus on building MY country please".

It would even work if Obama were to see beyond his eloquent prose and say, "Please don't put me in with the whores in Washington.  I really mean to do some good work here, okay?  Please give me a chance to look good!"  That would be fair enough.

Our leaders are not beyond cutting shady deals with US companies.  All that is going to come out in these leaks, one hopes.  Clearly we will see some high handed attitude from US officials, that will show us truly what they think of our leaders.  We have some cheap bastards in politics, and the US communications will make no bones about treating them as such. We have to know who can be bought and at what price.  It is the way effective lobbying is carried out.   It is the way countries move to positions of strength, even before negotiations begin on any front.

American politicians are also equally capable of corruption, cronyism, and outright thievery.  But we do not make the efforts to know them that well.  It won't take much to find out things about US politicians.  But our politicians are probably too overwhelmed by the thought of spying on white people running a powerful country.  Our slave mentality will come to the fore through this expose.  I cannot wait.

This is going to be super embarrassing most for the USA, because their hypocrisy is bound to come out brilliantly.  If they are already making noises about how these "leaks" can hurt their relationships with countries, it means their ally building exercises are all mired in lies.  It means to the simplest of minds that the USA is not capable of true friendship, and to the complex minds, it means that the USA does not mind taking others for a ride if the circumstances justify that sort of game.  The USA does not give a shit!  But now, it is being forced to eat its own shit.

As always, the people who have the most to hide will look the ugliest when the shit hits the fan.  This is fun!  Let the games begin!

 www.wikileaks.org

- BSK.

Friday, August 27, 2010

Less Indian More Human.

This is in response to a message I received, pointing out a major problem with India: criminals in politics:

I have long since moved beyond the concepts of "nation state" and "country" in my heart, mind and spirit.  To me, we are a species on this planet, and that's it.  Every equation we have with every other member of this species in my view, therefore, should not be tainted by our perceptions of identity based on invisible or visible lines drawn to separate us into various collectives.  Even more fundamentally, I tend to question the need for a sense of ownership, entitlement, and belonging.  And when did any of us agree to belong to any of these collectives?

I do take note however, that some of these collectives have flourished while others have failed, and I recognize that this collective called "India" is an idea just like the others. Some of us may have an exaggerated sense of belonging with this idea, and some of us may not.  I, personally, look upon it as an accident that I am "Indian", and hence, for reasons I have no interest in fighting against, I accept that fact.  It should suffice that I am a human with a name to boot, and apparently fingerprints and DNA that can identify me incredibly well, but for some reason, I am loaded with all these other definitions.  Whatever.

We have been conditioned to imagine that it is somehow important that we care for this country, or any country.  I simply ask "why"?  I mean, what in the essence of a human being makes us care for one country more than say, another one?  Why this divide amongst us?  Why this unquestioning signing up to belong to just ONE country?  Why do we need borders and divisions that no other species seems to need, and then argue for "open" borders that augment more co-operation between countries?  That sounds crazy to me.

In fact, by agreeing mutely to this bizarre alienation, and the ensuing sense of competition, we have all but forgotten everything about confluence and coexistence, and now, we have a direct interest in other countries being less well off than ours!  How much in tune can this possibly be with the journey of the human soul and our most natural existence as humans within humanity?  We are out of tune, and the enemy is patriotism which really is another word for separatism.  To hell with all the other 194 countries, I will wave ONLY my flag!

The result is that on many occasions, we have under the influence of an imagined need to belong to some country, and even worse, under the heady umbrella of patriotism, sworn to be proud of even what should be questioned, condemned, punished and put to shame for millions of reasons.  The problem with these fractionalized collectives is that our standards of performance, excellence and indeed development are limited by the best that we can do "within" this collective.  However, our perceptions need not be.

I don't think it is natural for us to care about an artificial concept.  "Country" is most definitely an artificial concept, brought upon by fear, the need to control, and the need to intimidate and deceive.  The time for all this may soon pass.  There are things we care about instinctively as human beings, and we genuinely care about the welfare of our species, so that we may survive within it and help proliferate it.  We can be in love with anyone, and would rush to help another human in distress regardless of what nationality that person is.  That is the essential nature of being a human.  This essential nature deserves a canvas much much bigger in scope than what a nation possibly can provide.

So, what does this "nation" provide?  If something threatens our survival, we will naturally defend ourselves.  But for the nation, we have the armed forces.  But within this artificially imposed border called India, we have no natural, instinctive, honest response to the decay of this collective from any other perspective.  We do not have to feel ashamed of this.  In the true sense, we are all the more human for not caring up until the point where our survival may be threatened.

This is where I see the biggest dichotomy.  Some human beings, namely, our ancestors, "chose" to define what is now called "India".  But many of us that are Indians today did not choose to be Indians.  So, why would we automatically want to belong to this club and work for its well being?  From a culture that has been around for thousands of years, somewhere, perhaps in our infinite wisdom, we choose not to take this artificial collective so seriously!  We have God to protect us from all the ills of the "world", which in many cases are the ills of just this very country!  But why is it suddenly God's job, when we proudly proclaim on the Vidhana Soudha, that "Government Work is God's Work!"?  So, it must be God doing a really bad job!

Jokes apart, our crisis within this collective is right now, is not one of having too few people to do good - we have millions of them, but one of having next to nobody to question and strongly fight all that is wrong.  Because when it comes to fighting wrong, our survival might be in jeopardy.  Evil has a way of hitting back in unpleasant ways when threatened!  We believe nonsense like "Satyameva Jayate" even when truth doesn't win!  But believing in it completely absolves us of the responsibility of having to fight against evil.

We are bombarded with lies, day in and day out.  But we accept some of these lies, purely because it takes too much effort to yell back, "Hey, that's a bunch of sh**!".  Evolution is essentially a search for truth, and all the truth that I have so far found is that we, as Indians, are all running from it all the time, sometimes just to stay sane!  The greatness of any society as I see it, is the ability of its members to live closest to the truths that guide them.  To this end, I dare say, we in India collectively live the most unspiritual, cowardly, selfish lives, and we have every justification for doing so, no doubt.  How else could we ruin so much in a mere 63 years?

We have also been fed this nonsense that we are a great country, but if only we stopped to understand that a great country doesn't automatically translate to a great nation, we would not have all these murderers and rapists and crooks and other shenanigans in Parliament!  Above them all still stands a meticulously maintained engraving screaming "Satyameva Jayate" isn't there?  What could be a bigger insult to our collective?  And for those of us who care - what are we going to do about it?  Can we atleast now, in all honesty, agree to change that to "Jhootameva Jayate" or whatever stands for "Untruth alone triumphs"?

I don't fall for any of the jingoistic feel good nonsense that people spew out on a daily basis either.  Like - "We stand in solidarity with the victims of this terrorist attack!".  What exactly does that mean?  The next time, we will jump in the line of fire and take the bullets?  Why're we so afraid to really say what goes on in our minds, like "Thank God that wasn't me!"?  This "feel good" nonsense is actually up to "no good".  This is not grace under pressure, it is lying under pressure to say something good, even if it is not true.  Our patriotism and the need to belong to this imagined collective force us to ugly places like this.

By subscribing to this incomplete and flawed idea of Country, we may also have voluntarily surrendered to this escapist notion that we in India live in a "beautiful chaos" that miraculously survives as a country, ably aided by the power of God.  This is the romantic notion that is pushed upon us, and many of us, including the dubious "Bollywood" film industry help promote it.  We're actually proud of this.

And then, despite having a government working under the Indian flag, consisting mostly of crooks with nothing but looting and pillaging on their minds, look at the number of flag waving ads. shamelessly promoting something as stupid as motorcycle sales!  Dhak Dhak Go!  India Go!  Go where?  To #143 on the Human Development Index?  That's where we are, and there aren't 10,000 countries on that list either.

I do not have hope in this idea called India.  I have some optimism for some elements of what constitutes India, but that is miniscule.  The search for reasons, and the blame game only serves to exacerbate the pain of existing on this land mass defined by the boundaries we have in our mind for this "nation" and "notion" called India.

Each time we invest ourselves in this idea called India or just about any other "nation", we limit ourselves and we limit the power of our potential.

However, I think some of us can apply ourselves to the uplifting of humanity as a whole, and hopefully, no nation will be left out.

I personally simply don't have to be less human to be more Indian.

BSK

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Goodwill Monkeys.

DO NOT DRINK COLD WATER AFTER A MEAL - YOU COULD DIE OF CANCER!

This was the message of an e mail I got earlier today, for the second time in six months or so.  Apparently "A Cardiologist" concurs with this pearl of wisdom, too.  Indeed, he wouldn't be courageous enough to reveal his name, for he would be soundly thrashed in the realms of reality and truth.

I am inclined to believe the internet has now reached millions of people with too much time on their hands, and many of them simply want to reach out.  If they wrote to us that they were bored and just wanted to say hello, it might be hard to get this kind of mileage, so they come up with some utter crap, cloaked as a gem of knowledge, that can "save lives"!  Notice how many of these messages do not have the author owning up to it!?

There are some genuine gems out there, for sure, but those are few and far between.  I wonder why a lot of people fall for this kind of pop culture "good will" that needs to for some reason be shared now, but wasn't worth our time before we got our broadband connections.  It's because the internet doesn't spew back.  It doesn't ask us the questions normal humans would ask, usually starting with "And who the *^@k are you?".  If you are a fat slob sending out an e mail on how to stay healthy by drinking tea with a spot of yak urine, nobody really gets super annoyed, but if you showed up in real life, that would be a hoot, wouldn't it?  You freaking wouldn't dare.

A couple of months ago I got this stupid message extolling the virtues of letting one's hair down, eating that tasty piece of chocolate, ignoring an extra round of flab, not exercising, and sleeping longer.  How much guilt should you carry before you need to justify any of this to yourself?  What a pathetic pop culture parasite must have come up with this nonsense!  And what mindless broadcasting of this shit is carried out by millions of "good" people who want to spread the goodwill and score brownie points with their friends.  Sorry fools, it irks some of us.

I don't want to hear how nice it is to finally be lazy, sloppy and uncaring.  It doesn't apply to me so I don't want to read this.  But it arrived in my inbox from a trusted friend, so now I am forced to.  Seconly, I don't know you, the bloody original author of this shit, so I don't give a shit what makes you feel nice either.  That's not to say I wish you bad.  Clearly you are fully capable of doing that to yourself with your love of slob.  But I just don't give a shit about ANY lazy slob.  You eat your freaking ice cream, don't shower, sleep, fart, booze, that's all your freaking business, not mine.  That's all there is to it.

Now, what about the fools who spread this shit?  What makes them do it?  If something brought a smile to your face, you want to share it - THIS I get.  But would every single person on your mailing list get the same smile reading the same shit?  Some of us get frowns, duh!

I have lived long enough and travelled far enough to know there is no magic pill that can keep us healthy and happy.  We need to invest in being healthy and happy, and then we can reap the benefits of that investment.  Eating properly, getting exercise, learning stuff, being productive - these are things we should do and do every day.  None of this is a luxury, and some of us have to work harder than others, since we're not created equal, no matter what you hear to the contrary.  If you think everybody is equal, why the fuck are you not able to run as fast as Usain Bolt?  Even if the whole world had EQUAL opportunity, EQUAL motivation, EQUAL everything, there would still be only ONE fastest runner.  That's just the way it is.

The internet, unfortunately provides a mirage of equality.  I can spew as much as anybody else.  Fools can show up as much as intelligent people, liars as much as truth seekers, quacks as much as doctors, and saints cannot be any holier than pedophiles in this whacky space.  We're all freaking "equal" somehow.  While some of us have had normal lives and know our places, the internet is to some of our monkeys, the ONLY space where they can be fully expressive, scratch their asses in full public view, and get really creative!

To a monkey, anything that can kill boredom is creative.  Sending out these freaking "goodwill" messages makes the lazy feel like they are doing something good, the empty ones probably feel like their lives are actually worth something, and the dumb ones even have a chance of feeling intelligent by getting appreciation for messages they had nothing to do with in the first place.

So, all you goodwill monkeys out there, do the rest of us a big favour.  The next time you get one of these freaking "good" saving the world messages, ask yourselves if you would print out the message, put that in an envelope and stick a stamp and mail it to a dear friend.  If you wouldn't do that, the message is either not important, or you wouldn't take the pains for your friend.  THAT is the measure of your character and your judgment.  Please don't hit "forward".  If you would indeed do all this for a friend, great!  Connect that printer and get to work.  It would be nice to get some real mail too.  Heck, it might even get read!

BSK.

Monday, April 26, 2010

The joy of winning, without losing any of it!

For a while I have been watching the IPL, edition 3, enjoying quite a bit of it, annoyed with some parts, disgusted with some parts, amused by some, and plain irritated with shit like the fucking MRF Blimp.

Watching my team CSK win the final yesterday was great.  CSK aren't my team because I live in Chennai, and since I don't, why would I pick them over the other teams?  They just seem like a relaxed, happy bunch that doesn't play for anything other than the fun of the game itself.  The Rajasthan Royals I like for a similar reason - they play well when they really don't have a chance, and especially when they don't have a chance.

I don't understand why some teams get so much more attention than the others, like the bloody Kolkata Knight Riders.  I believe they were the "most watched" team.  As if that counts for something, other than TV ratings.  How can a bunch of losers be the most watched bunch?  Are their supporters so big in number?  Statistically impossible.  Shah Rukh Khan is a draw but simply seeing him in the stands and occasionally humping a Shoaib Akhtar in a presentation cannot be reason enough to watch a disgruntled bunch of losers turn it off game after game.  There is artificial juicing up of KKR games, and it comes from television - like an invisible hand pushing them to be prominent, spoken about, written about, and even win if possible.

Could it be Lalit Modi's proxy stakes in KKR doing their stink job?  So what?  That's to be expected, but the way the asshole took the microphone and started addressing "the world" during the post match presentation took something away from the joy of Chennai Super Kings winning the trophy.  Somehow, if Mumbai had won it, the people who had cheered for Mumbai all along would not have left those lovely stands empty, and Modi's emotional address would have seemed absurd at such a happy time.  But, the badly delivered address from Modi, clearly written by his ghost writer, served to reinforce how nobody really seemed to care that much about CSK's win.  Shit, they're not KKR!

CSK seem to mind their own business.  Nobody even saw their owner in public until they had won the trophy, and his wife didn't run out and get her ass grabbed by the players either.  And yet, they not only won the trophy, they also won the "Fairplay Award" with a perfect score - which means, good natured guys with no negative attitude to show can also win, and win handsomely.  Not once during the whole season did CSK put on grim faces, show disrespect, or play the blame game when they lost.  And lose they did, quite a few.  They had won only 2 out of their first 7 games!  But Dhoni and his boys did exactly what was needed WHEN it was needed.  And they didn't make a fuss out of it either.  They gave their supporters a lot of joy.  Not one negative vibe.  Dhoni did catch Tendulkar and Tendulkar didn't walk when the umpire missed that one.  Dhoni didn't lose his cool, or the cup.  Sachin didn't lose his temper that much, but under pressure, he captained Mumbai like a moron - scared to death and making amateurish mistakes.

It just looked like one side was playing to win, and the other was playing to not lose.  Nightmares do come true, and never mind the dreams.  This is what happens to those that are groomed for greatness and those that know how to steal it and seal it when the opportunity comes.  Sachin was magnanimous in his praise for CSK and I'm sure Dhoni would have been no less had his side been humbled.  But the entire Mumbai Indians show was prepared for one thing - a Mumbai Indians victory, not a great cricket match!  That's why it became a Bollywood type of flop show for most people who came to watch Mumbai Indians win.  The CSK victory was not even an option in their fairytale run to the cup.  Alas, Dhoni doesn't court fairies.  He lets them run after  his mighty heart.

It would be one thing to simply be happy that CSK won, but I rather prefer to give the middle finger to the miserable losers who left the field without waiting for the presentation to be done with.  It had the Under 23 success of the tournament to be declared, it had the Purple Cap, the Orange Cap, and so many wonderful awards to be dispensed.  But none of that was good enough for the Mumbai crowd.  They just wanted to see Mumbai Indians win the IPL.  Many started leaving when there were four balls and 27 to get.  Sachin's team may have a few winners in it, but his staunch Mumbai supporters are all bloody sore losers.  They're not cricket fans, they're just bloodthirsty for one result.  But, it takes more than blowing horns and wearing blue to make your team win.  Your team needs to have the brains to get close and the balls to grab it when the opportunity comes.  Too bad your team had neither, fools!  Sachin's a great player no doubt, but he is no match for Dhoni tactically.  Mukesh Ambani might buy all the big names with big money, but Meiyappan's boys know how to make the merry charge to the top of the hill.  So fuck you unhappy bastards.

And what was all that Bollywood shit all about during the closing ceremony?  It was so foolishly uncreative and uninspiring, we could have been watching the Teleshopping network trying to sell us used cinema set furniture.  That big incredibly tall batsman was a great entrant, but he didn't do shit!  He just stood, while all the Bollywood fools did their shit and pushed the match into a late start.  How tardy.  It is clear A R Rahman doesn't have anything to offer, for if he did, and if any of the other pricks behind this pathetic non show had any ideas, we wouldn't have meaningless numbers, stupid actors cavorting and Rahman's horrible rendition of Vande Mataram for the n+10th time in his uniquely boring and sincerely empty way.  Fuck you Bollywood - stay out of our faces for a while, please.

A few words for Royal Challengers Bangalore, the other grim faced bums in red that made a pretense of a lot of shit before they got blown away.  You assholes look like you swallowed a can of decaying worms no matter how things are going on the field.  This IPL is supposed to be entertainment, and that means, happiness.  If Mallya and Kingfisher stand for "good times", you bastards stand for something like a plague outbreak.  I mean, what the fuck is up with your non smiling fuckfaces?  Kumble, you son of a constipated bitch, keep your team this unhappy and I wish you taxation and torture on your way to hell.  How dare you even mention you lost a game because Kallis batted slow?  Kallis was the one pillar you built your limited success on.  If he batted slow, it was your business to send him a message to get on with it!  How many fucking dot balls do you have to see before you can tell he is batting slow?  Thirty seven?  And what's up with showing so much anger towards your younger players.  We know how miserable you were as a fielder while playing for India, so what's up with this attitude?

And what's up with all that "go green" shit you thought we'd swallow?  Your owner flies in his own jet, and we're supposed to believe you are all going green, because of that piece of green pantyhose on your shoulders and pouring water on some plants in the stadium.  What do you take us for?  Your only job is to bloody entertain, fools, and you're miserable at it.  Now, fuck off.  Learn how to be happy.  Show some appreciation for the life that lets you play a game and make a good living out of it.  Show some appreciation for all the hard work people put in to pay for the tickets to come watch you play.  Winning is fun, but it must be fun to watch you play as well.  You don't have to be grim all the time and you certainly don't have to act professional when you're not good enough to win with your method.

This is just a game, and it's called cricket.  No matter how much science comes to it, and no matter how much management comes to help you focus on winning, it is still fundamentally a contest that should bring its own joy.  What's the worst you're going to face if you lose?  Certainly not a shooting squad!  So, what's your problem, assholes?  The least you can do is carry yourselves with some dignity and some lightness of being.  Ravi Shankar too lives in your town.  Consult him on how to relieve your constant constipation.  Heck, he might even tell you how to go green without being so flimsy about it.  Wouldn't hurt to get a chant a little better than R C B, a drummer who can actually beat a few rhythms and not look like he just cut loose after getting half a hair cut three years ago.  Get your police force to find those who planted bombs in your stadium, especially if they say it was the "betting mafia".  Looks like they know each other rather intimately.  Oh, yeah, we know you were trying hard to avoid playing Mumbai in the semi finals!  A fat lot that helped.

Now, you fucking Mumbai Indians, just in case you thought I'd let you go - why are you blaming your strategic errors so much for losing to CSK?  Why can't you just accept that you just couldn't beat Dhoni and his team?  If Pollard had come in earlier, for instance, Dhoni might have had him in knots with his spin trio and made him lose his timing.  In any case, saw how he shut him down with his clever field placing?  No fine leg, no third man, one deep mid off, one long off, and what does Pollard do?  Drill straight to Hayden at deep mid off!  It wasn't just Dhoni celebrating.  This was brains celebrating and stupidity disintegrating.  So, please accept that on this given night, CSK got it right, and your guys didn't.  It is as simple as that.

I'd be called a sore loser if CSK had not won even though I'd stand by everything I said so far.  But it's nice to be a winner and see how sore some losers can actually be.  Pretty sore by the look of it.  Deccan Chargers, you guys aren't sore at all, and I totally understand you just weren't mentally in it in the 3rd place playoff.  Thanks for the entertainment - what a magnificent charge you guys made!  I heard Ray Jennings say true winners are those who come back after being defeated.  No thanks, fool.  I think true winners are those who take the cup and run with joy, all the way.

Also, if you heard Matthew Hayden's interview, about how strong a tradition they are proud to represent, of Tamilnadu, both in cricket and culturally, and how it was a privilege and an honour to win this for their fans - it wasn't about tactics, strategy or competition.  It was bigger than the cricket, all right, and truly acknowledging some very real, well grounded facts about some very real people.  If this game had been played in Chennai, and CSK lost, the stadium would not have emptied out before the entire cerermony was over.  Saurabh Tiwary would have been cheered as much as any under 23 success of the league should have been, and Sachin would have been celebrated along with Dhoni, and the entire show would have been packed off with plenty of positive energy for the World T20.

You lousy Mumbaikars showed your disgust at your own team - a team that had entertained you for so long and topped the table, no less - you left them at the moment of reckoning - something Chennai would never do.  If winning is all important to you, how come you motherfuckers lost?  It's because you have small hearts, you bastards.  It's because you couldn't embrace your team and love them all the way, no matter what.  You wanted them to "deliver" something to you, because you "paid" for it.  Fuck you bloodsuckers and that damned attitude.  Life isn't a fucking formula, fools.  Now, stop analyzing all things MI did wrong that led to the defeat.  Mukesh Ambani can pump in a lot of money, but he can't guarantee victory against a side like the CSK that is just too happy to show up exactly when it matters.  Learn to respect that sort of positive energy.

CSK, you made the whole thing worth it, and if I may add - as always!  I have many wonderful memories - Vijay's sparkling century, Bollinger's fantastic bowling, and then holding his scalp so Raina wouldn't pull his hair a second time when he got a wicket, Dhoni clubbing Pathan, and Raina's screaming, free flowing strokes.  Oh yes, our catching was brilliant, including the one Jakati had to hop after taking clean as a whistle.

Thank you for so many lovely moments, your brand of cricket, your spirit of being, and for smiling so much, for playing so fair, and making us cricket fans all truly happy!  Now Mahi, time to get Team India to play like this in the Caribbean, and make even more of us very, very happy.

BSK.

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Fuck Earth Hour.

Earth Hour.  One hour out of 24, one day out of 365.  Lights out!  Fans on, stoves on, air conditioners on, trains running, buses running, factories running, planes flying, ships chugging on crude oil, power plants still burning dirty coal, but lights out.  The man who started this movement called it just "symbolic".  Problem is, it's the wrong symbol.

Not only does it send the message out that putting out lights somehow helps the earth, it also eases some guilt out of our collective ecological consciousness.  It somehow sends out the message that by just putting ourselves in darkness, we are somehow, symbolically, at the very least, reflecting upon how life would be if we didn't have to burn any energy at all.  All this, while a lot of people lit candles to show their ubiquitous support of anything these days, ostensibly however, leaving a bigger carbon deposit into the atmosphere from burning wax!

The message going out has more to do with becoming unproductive than becoming efficient.  Cutting off power to devices doesn't stop thermal power plants, which are the majority in the world today, from burning fuel.  Lights are a very small percentage of our power consumption anyway, and indeed a very, very small percentage of our energy consumption.  What we actually achieved is a whole bunch of people in the world were less productive for an hour than they would normally be. 

Why do we love the symbols more than making actual lifestyle changes?  For example - one acre of land can support twenty vegetarians but only one and a half meat eating humans.  Bottomline, being vegetarian is enormously beneficial to the planet - by a factor of 5 at the very least, over being non-vegetarian.  Why aren't we giving up meat eating for the right reasons?  Because there is no convenience factor there!  There is no lazy gesture that we can sign on to, like the new fancy hogwash of buying carbon credits.  How it makes a difference to the atmosphere if money exchanges hands is mind boggling!

If we want a symbolic ritual, we could give up meat for a week.  Call it Earth Week.  No meat.  God, that ought to send some businesses scrambling for cover!  Imagine the animals that won't have to be killed, the meat that won't have to be refrigerated, or transported.  Oh, wait a minute!  What about the animals having to be fed until the feast the week after?  See?  If it isn't long term, it isn't going to work at all.

Let's look at this from a very Indian perspective.  Where I live, we've had a regular two hour power outage for over two years, so we're already way, way ahead of all the clowns out there celebrating this stupid Earth Day.  If I took the symbol seriously, I'd say I wouldn't have to participate in this Earth Day for another two generations and I'd still have less guilt!  So, let's leave the symbolism aside and consider what the real messages going out are.

This Earth Day was first thought about and started in Australia - today the single largest exporter of coal to the single largest consumer, China.  In other words, the one country that is going to feed the energy hungry beast called China, with the most polluting of all fuels, is the one that came up with this retarded idea of an Earth Day!  And why the heck are we celebrating this, when we are already much more environmentally friendly with hours of power outage all over the country?  Shouldn't we emulate perhaps Nepal, which has 16 hours of power outage a day?  What kind of environmentally conservative mindset wants to emulate countries that have reliable (read overproduced) power supplies?

The USA and China have the two biggest carbon footprints in the world.  India is languishing way behind in that department, and for once, we can be thankful.  But there are fashionable idiots all over the world who are busy sending out wrong messages.  And our idiots are grabbing them and really thinking it makes a bloody difference!  We apparently saved 916 megawatts of power during the Earth Hour according to some estimate.  With just lights, if we managed so much of a saving, how come this will never reflect in any power production budget?  It won't because we didn't produce any less, we just consumed less!  If we actually produced less, the environmental ministry simply has to cut a deal with the energy ministry!  India would shut everything down and be the most environmentally friendly.... yuk, India would be the "most green" country in the world!

If this doesn't make sense, think about this - our power plants, mostly coal fired thermal units cannot run below capacity just because we anticipate all our fashionable clowns switching off their lights for an hour.  Hydroelectric plants never run below capacity, for there is nothing to save except stored water, in some cases.  Lights are less than 15% of our power consumption, remember?  So, we continue to pump out as much electricity through the generators at the thermal power plants, and we'll be damned if some idiot downstream switches off his lights or not!  Now, let's look at the numbers this symbol actually stands for - 1 hour out of 24 is 4.16% of a day's consumption.  Assuming we had ALL lights off during this period across the country, that is, that would be 15% of 4.16% of a day's consumption - or 0.625% in a day.  Divided over the number of hours in a year, that was a royal saving of 0.0000171% of our annual production.  When was the last time you were happy saving 0.0000171% of anything?  No wonder no power plant around the world takes this Earth Day with even a symbolic reduction in production.

Saving the environment must be the same as saving money - not until we figure out how to do this, do we actually have any chance of building a lasting interest in saving anything.  Coal and oil are doing very well, because they are still very cheap, considering how much it costs for us to mine as a percentage of how much money we can make from the mining.  Until solar power and wind power and all the other sources of energy come down in cost, we don't have any chance of realistically bringing about a change in usage habits.

For some reason, it was fashionable for the White Man to destroy entire continents in his search for a comfortable life.  It was okay for him to dig out all the world's resources and burn as he wished.  Now, all of a sudden, he wants to sell us new technologies since he realizes he ultimately doesn't control too much of the world's oil.  Up came this great suggestion from none other than the foxes in the USA - let's bring all the world's forests under a global management system.  Well sorry White Massa!  In fact, fuck you.  That didn't work out very well, so now we have this widespread media onslaught that the environment is really important and that we cannot poke holes in the ozone layer, but only since the White Man is the one who is first going to get skin cancer by the dozen!

Sadly for Whitey, the rest of the world is pretty savvy when it comes to alternative technologies - there is no breakthrough infinite energy source for whitey or anybody to control.  And a very brown Arab community still has plenty of oil, and the Venezuelans aren't likely to hand over their big oil resources to the Yanks or the Brits either.  Nor are the Kazakhs or the Iranians. And many OPEC countries are considering switching from the US Dollar to the Euro to peg their oil and gas on!  Not the British Pound!  With so many countries in the EU, we don't have to worry about any controlling interest in the currency itself.  In other words, Whitey's control of oil has eroded bloody fast.  So he's looking for something new to control, but we must first be made to fear that shit that looms in the unknown future.  Disaster is easy to subscribe to.  Well guess what?  If we had no power and no oil, we in India will simply ride our bullock carts and ride out the disaster.  Whitey cannot.

But Whitey can scare the shit out of us.  Because we have idiots who believe everything Whitey tells us.  Their freaking press looks so classy, they can't possibly lie, can they?  Yes, they can.  And we're falling like ninepins for the bullshit they spin out.  Their lies are all geared towards feeding some industry or the other.  They've even invented diseases and told the whole world to get vaccinations for diseases that don't even exist!  Look at our poultry industry!  Crushed by thousands of vested interests.  Luckily we have realized that broiler chicken is no good and are back to raising free range chicken.  Same with genetically modified foods and brand new diseases like ADD!  How come the new generation suddenly has a disease, a disorder, that none of our ancestors had, well up into this century, this generation of parents!?  Whitey lies.

So fuck Whitey when he tells us to use resources carefully.  All of a sudden, those are global resources, huh?  Every culture uses whatever it can afford to use.  We don't have to sacrifice anything for anybody.  We are already very judicious with our decisions and look at how well our regulated banking system did not flinch with this global crisis Whitey had to endure with crashing, burning and pain!  We may be terrible in many ways, but we know how to take care of our shit when we really have to.  We don't need to add to the pain we already have without enough electric power.  We have done enough.  To hell with Whitey.  Fuck Earth Hour.

BSK.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

The Convenient Absence of Quality

Vinnaithandi Varuvaya, a film by Gautham Vasudev Menon, is being hailed as a work of "class" in The Hindu by an ostensibly reputed reviewer. Karan Johar's My Name is Khan received 5 out of 5 stars in the Times of India.

What stands out is that both are mediocre films but have been released in an ocean of trash, making the ordinary seem exaggeratedly noteworthy. Thankfully, some of us have reference points that are wider than the collection of movies infesting our A city theatres at this given time, we are exposed to better fare than the reviewers that reputed newspapers seem to be able to get these days, and we can continue to have our honest opinions about mediocrity that comes packed in glitz - from pictures to pizza, literature to music. We don't have to be fooled. But "we" are in the minority and getting smaller.

This is the age of the salesperson, the consummate professional who can lie through her teeth, in complete ignorance or in complete shamelessness, and make it sound like a million bucks. There is a whole generation of consumers out there who can't tell the difference, and even worse, don't want to make the effort to see the difference. All they know is trash. But they can tell glitzy trash from dull trash. The marketing machine is here to add glitz to anything we want to sell, so if you can afford the glitz, you can produce trash and absolutely hope to get away with it.

An extended vaccuum in quality can actually lower standards, push down expectations, and finally result in a worse quality of life. Reviewers can be bought by the dozen today, a few crores of money spent in bending opinions doesn't seem to be money badly spent. Every advantage is to be had commercially by dumbing us down, homogenizing our viewpoints, and reducing the average level of knowledge and questioning of what we see, hear and are willing to be sold. The number one sellable after sex is "Freedom"! As soon as we're ready to measure our freedom in what we can afford to buy, we are suckers by the million. And we're being had royally.

Look at the number of times AR Rahman has done something ostensibly "patriotic" and it is easy to see why some wise men have opined that patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels. Even a lousily rendered "Vande Mataram" cannot be questioned for quality, because it is about something that is supposedly above reproach - his patriotism! Holy cow, YOUR patriotism! It is just like our inability to tell a lousy singer in a temple to stop torturing our devotion with the snarling effort of religious hysteria. We don't have a smoking chance against the power of stupidity, noise, and overwhelming ignorance. Patriotism takes advantage of all of these. All reason can be drowned by anything patriotic, especially if it sounds like an iceberg humping a mountain full of tin boxes.

India is headed towards a quality oblivion, quite simply because we are becoming a culture of reducing effort. We want to strive less, ignore more and be blissfully happy. The traps are all here - we truly belong in our own illusion of a great country when we obey, and only when we obey the machine that tells us so. After all, when all of your friends tell you My Name is Khan is a great movie, isn't it just cool to go along? Maybe they are right! Of course, this line of thinking is easy when you know only as much as they do, and all of you collectively know very little anyway. Our mob mentality is geared perfectly for dumbing down. Win over a part of the mob, and the whole mob will be yours! This is how the British took over the whole country! In any case, we're proud to belong to the Indian mob waving the same flag that some other rather original people held aloft not that long ago.

Access to information has not translated to access to knowledge as far as India is concerned. Our youngsters live in a deluge of information, dished out by other youngsters working for mindless media outlets that man the stations sending out SMS messages, advertisements, promotions, and a whole host of hideous, tasteless, unchallenged overtures of nonsense, juvenile sexuality, and sheer lies. We are also sold this constant message that India is on the "march forward" and our young clowns need only hear that they are as good as any in the world! It is a turnout of gargantuan amounts of ignorance.

We have the USA to look up to, for any reference we need on the level of dumbing down we are happy to subscribe to. If something is good enough for the Americans, we're okay with reaching anywhere near that. Why else would Vinnaithandi Varuvaya have whites and blacks dancing together behind our hero? This is our director not wanting to be politically inferior to any American film maker, as if anybody would notice this fool's film in a world panorama! But still Gautham Menon wouldn't want to hurt Tarantino's feelings, would he?! This disease is so deep rooted, he wouldn't even know if it was pointed out to him.

Coming from the new age Indian upper middle class family is the bane of all originality - it is not encouraged at all. Parents who have "set up" their children for the future have no chance of producing any offspring that are capable of any truly original thought processes. Protection from all the insecurities of life can only lead to dead emotional intelligence. That is where most of our mediocre crap comes from. But then, that is where the reviewers of that crap come from as well - get a good school education, get a good college education, get a half decent hold of your English language presentation, and guess what!? YOU decide what everybody like you should be watching! The market is full of fools like you, so who can question your abject ignorance?! When we're adding forty million people to our middle class each year, and are being taken aim at as one of the most reliable "growth" markets, we are ripe for this sort of dumbing down.

We have enough arrogance to think this sheer game of numbers actually gives us a right to feel powerful in some way. We are, but we are not empowered. We're simply "available" to dumbing down and being sold stuff to. The easiest thing to sell to us is the absolute right to be lazy, in thought and action, or thought and inaction! Everything is justified since we have collectively registered some undeniable "progress" on some global scale. But how have we grown when we have managed to put agriculture out of whack as a self sustaining industry, but are happy that we can call Dominos Pizza any time of the week in any Indian city? Dominos isn't even the best pizza we can make for half the money we pay those monkeys, and the lunatics they hire to deliver their crap ride their bikes on the wrong side of the street! What investment would the franchise owner make in the quality of work they put in, as long as they can ring their numbers in. This is India for us. And we're proud of this?

It is HARD to build a quality country, so we're doing what we know very well - build a quantity country. It is all about quantity. From our population to the measure of accomplishment. 99% of the money we have made through software development for the computer industry is about slave labour - doing other people's grunge work. Our creative content industry is busy making copies of movies made by other film makers in other countries - and not high concept action films either, but family drama! This is supposed to be our strength, our family system and our values and what not., but we don't have one thing any more - sincerity! We don't have a quest for truth that is at the core of all art! We are liars and thieves and crooks in the world of art and we won't be coming out any time soon, especially in cinema.

The absence of quality is pronounced and upon us, but it is not going to go away anytime soon. No producer is going to bet his balls or his money on a film that asks us to be intelligent, sophisticated, or even remotely thoughtful. We all have no chance but to actively contribute to more dumbing down. After all, when stupidity is conveniently available to everyone and it can be sold and made money from, why shouldn't we celebrate the convenient absence of quality!?

Saturday, January 16, 2010

The Electric Car Myth.

It's been known for a very, very long time that energy can neither be
created nor destroyed. It can only be converted from one form to
another. The same goes for matter - we can neither create matter not
make it vanish, no matter what it consists of, pun intended, with what
we know .

In humanity's unending search for convenient solutions, we're being
pushed this idea that electric cars are better than those driven by
fossil fuels. If you want to only look at how much smoke is coming
out of YOUR car, then yes, an electric car would indeed be a good
choice. But if you have any concern for how much less your electric
car might pollute the earth as compared to your petrol or diesel beast
- not much.

The question to ask is - where does the electricity to charge your
electric car come from? If it comes from a hydroelectric or nuclear
power plant, you won't pollute the earth any more by charging your
car. The percentage of the world's electricity generated by nuclear
power and hydroelectric power is small compared to thermal. Thermal
energy accounts for nearly 70% of the world's electric power. That
means - coal or gas is burning to provide the thermal energy.

Nuclear power generation and hydroelectric power generation have
something in common - you can't step up the power output at will. In
fact, hydroelectric power is woefully dependent on rainfall and
natural water flow, and is fast becoming unpopular because of its
unpredictability. Nuclear power on the other hand, is incredibly
clean, very reliable, but has a very long set up time and several
other factors to consider and hurdles to overcome.

Solar and wind power are still too small in contributions to really
make a difference yet. So, we're left with thermal power and its
production is on the increase worldwide. If any new demand is to be
quickly met, chances are, we will be burning more coal or gas. There
goes any chance of buying an electric car to help the planet! In
fact, if you and I buy an electric car today, we have a great chance
of putting that entire demand for extra power on a thermal plant. It
will have to be cranked up and we will be forcing more pollution upon
ourselves!

The good thing about your petrol or diesel beast is that it drinks
fuel only when it has to do some work. The horrible thing about your
electric car is that if you charge it fully and don't drive it, it
will get discharged! That's right. The batteries will simply waste
away all the energy in a useless internal reaction. So, you're more
likely to be charging it even when it is not going to be used - tring,
tring, tring - more electricity consumed and more thermal energy in
some distant plant wasted.

It would be great if you could run your electric car by charging it
with your own windmill, but we're not quite there yet. Or solar
power. Every house could have its own solar panel to charge our
electric cars. We're not there yet. The least we could do is to put
solar panels on our cars to at the very least, keep up with the
natural non-use discharge of the electric car's batteries, and
charging them to some extent when the car's parked in the sun. But we
won't do that anytime soon, because electric cars are already
expensive and solar panels will push their prices up some more.

Moreover, petrol and diesel car engines and body structures are made
of metal - one hundred percent recyclable. Electric cars contain
batteries - NOT one hundred percent recyclable, yet. It costs
electricity to make batteries, and digging up chemicals, like lithium,
is also environmental damage. We don't know to what extent we need to
rape this planet to get some efficiency.

Ah, that's the catchword - efficiency. Our cars weigh anywhere
between 700 kilos and 2000 kilos. That's an awful lot of weight to
move a measly 200 to 400 kilos of human weight. Clearly, we need our
cars to become lighter. Motorcycles are brilliant at this. They
carry a significantly higher weight as a ratio of their own weight.
No wonder some of them turn out astronomical fuel efficiency figures,
even in regular usage.

In terms of fuel mileage, hybrid cars are showing up as the best bets
without having to sacrifice range or performance. Essentially, except
for "plug-in" hybrids, these are driven by entirely by fossil fuel
engines, and really cannot claim to be less impactful on the
environment, especially when they carry such enormous batteries as
well. Hybrid cars also have two technologies built into them - the
internal combustion engine and the electric drive mechanisms, so they
are inherently heavier than their single technology counterparts.

The Reva, India's fully electric midget of a car looks so ugly you'd
have to be masochistic to buy it. The team behind that monstrosity
should be out of their minds. to imagine we would put up with that
level of ugliness. That thing better be cheaper than a bicycle to run
if it looks that bad. It isn't. No respite anywhere!

Now, reality. Every manufacturer in India seems intent on putting out
more and more cars, many of them making bigger and faster,
comfortable, luxurious, even ostentatious. Nobody seems to really
worry about what impact this will eventually have on our environment.
I am always amused when news of a new "launch" comes out. What the
hell is there to launch? And whatever happens to the cars that are
launched into orbit? Plenty of amusement is in store in the year to
come.

The Toyota Prius hybrid is priced at Rs. 27 lakhs. Most certainly,
Indian money of that size should not be locked up in one car, no
matter how great. Luckily, not many of us will want to spend so much
on just one car. One of the most successful car models in the world,
the Prius, is about to realize its first marketplace mistake. While
it is priced at close to or just higher than the average car prices in
other countries, it is priced way above most cars in our market. If
you have 27 lakhs, buy a lovely car for 7 lakhs, drop 20 lakhs in a
fixed deposit, get ten percent a year or two lakh rupees a year in
interest, and you will have about 8,000 rupees a month that you can
burn 200 litres of petrol with! At the end of a few years, you will
have almost your entire investment left! How could the Japanese have
missed this simple equation?

If we get more nuclear, wind and solar power, we will actually clean
up the air, but we must also do away with batteries. We simply
haven't figured out how to do that, and in fact, we will be digging up
the earth for all its lithium soon enough. No matter what we do, we
will impact the planet. Breathing included. However, we can turn
vegetarian and help enormously, since one acre of land can support 20
vegetarians but only 1.5 non vegetarians. No wonder livestock farming
is much more damaging to the planet than all the planes, cars, and
ships put together. This would demand a change in lifestyle for a lot
of people, and the food industry is definitely not going to discourage
meat consumption anytime soon. There are no products to be sold by
industries to a renewed interest in being vegetarian. It is also
cheaper to be vegetarian.

So, what can you and I do practically, to show our concern for the
environment? Simple - just do whatever gives us the most value for
money spent. Per person, buses are cheaper than cars only because so
many of us travel in a single bus. It is also the most
environmentally sensible thing to do - take public transport whenever
possible. Anytime we're willing to drag along a thousand kilos of
metal and rubber to transport ourselves, we're killing the
environment. It is really that simple. It is the same with
vegetarianism - it is the more efficient AND economically sensible
choice.

But our lifestyles demand much more from us than to be ecologically
sensitive. We'd really not benefit from slowing our lives down to
protect the environment. But there's a natural order to even this
mayhem. It is commerce that is driving new technologies, not some
fear of disaster. So, even when electric cars eventually get to make
sense to us, they will first have to make economic sense. For now,
let's not get conned into any consciousness or activism that our
wallets don't agree with.

BSK.

Friday, January 8, 2010

The Copenhagen Copout.

All the world's leaders showed up in Copenhagen, agreed on all the problems, disagreed on all the solutions, and left. Let's forget for the moment the complete unnecessity of these summits where nothing gets done, and let's forgive for the moment the stupendously bad example of polluting the earth for summits like this, when all communications and negotiations could have been held via satellite and even allowed for an innovative interactive round the clock worldwide television debate that could have brought the peoples of the world together in an epochal electronic gathering. It could have been amazing. Sponsors would have flocked to be part of this mega television event, and money made from the program could have been earmarked for a symbollic investment in carbon footprint reduction.

Copenhagen, instead, turned out to be a bureaucratic bungle, a diplomatic dilemma, and a circus of clowns who got nothing done. In fact, there was a spectacular amount of nothing that came out of it. It was aptly called COP, and sure enough, everyone copped out. None of the issues were new, none of the arguments came as a surprise, and none of the failures were so difficult to foresee. The intent was to take a chance on this summit, and we can appreciate that, but for the
leaders of all the countries to have to put on such a poor show when the fiasco was completely avoidable puts us in a bigger quandary - "Can the decisions on climate change wait for the world to come to agreement?".

While we ponder upon the solutions to the gravest problems to our existence and survival as a race, and allow for Mother Nature to play her own hand in many ways, we really should take an amused look at the clearest specifics.

The USA is the world's biggest polluter. People in the USA have finally taken to driving smaller cars, but more driven by high fuel prices than any real concern for global warming. It also helped that their economy was on the squeeze. However, the biggest pollution they cause is from electricity generation and that hasn't changed dramatically, althought there is plenty of incentive now under Obama, to change their ways. God bless their optimism, and trust them for being enterprising. Obama is headed in the right direction when he says that the next big economic boom could come out of building environmentally important industries while coming out of dependence on oil. Great! But they're not going nuclear anytime soon, and the country is so big in every perspective that when you consider 4% of the world's population hogging 25% of the world's energy, any change the USA makes will be significant but slow. Let's wish them well, but
not expect too much to happen very soon.

The next biggest polluter is China. China is power hungry at the moment, and who can blame a giant who has just woken up. The problem with China, however, is that its pollution is on an increase! All its new power plants are coal fired thermal power generation units, and they are all massive. Could they have opted for nuclear power? Sure, but they didn't. China needs power today, and it is not likely to hamper the speed of its progress for any environmental goodwill.
China has never been too bothered about brownie points. So, they cannot be stopped.

Now, in terms of solutions, there is no way we can allow the rainforests of Brazil to vanish. It is the biggest heat sink in the world, and we are pretty much doomed without that. A lot of poor
Brazilians are dependent on these forests and they are depleting rather fast. Vanishing, really. So, just as unimaginatively as this COP summit was held, President Obama has suggested the band aid to solve this problem - Let's pay the poorest people money so they don't cut their forests. In other words, if your forest gives you two cents for cutting a tree, we will give you three for not cutting it. Okay, great!

For some reason, this sounds too good to be true, and sure enough it is. Obama is unwittingly shining a bright light on his ignorance of the other factors. Whenever money changes hands, some work has to get done. It is one of the most basic tenets of economies. Getting paid to NOT
do something is not going to be sustainable. If a farmer gets money for NOT farming, he will stop producing whatever he produces. An entire economic subculture that is currently dependent on wood, gum, rubber and a myriad other products coming out of these rainforests
cannot be stopped because America and China would like to piss away their carbon into the leaves of Brazil. Imagine what a black market in carbon credits this will open up under the auspices of controlled laziness!

This isn't that far away from our own reality, right here in Tamilnadu, in the wake of Chief Minister Karunanidhi's Re.1/kg rice scheme. Nobody asked for this rice, and nobody wanted it. Now, what is happening is that an entire black market has opened up for this rice, which is bought, polished and sold at higher prices by the people who are eligible for it. Now that they are finding a way to make money without doing much, our agricultural lands have no labourers. We have a new culture of laziness that has brought decay to our well established system of working for money.

We are seeing a whole generation of poor people suddenly incentivized to be lazy, to seek easy money working for minimum wages doing light physical work like digging for local road projects for a few hours and getting paid a lot more than agricultural wages paid them for generations. The big difference is that agriculture sustained them for generations, while a whole generation with no skills that is coming out of myopic government programs won't be able to sustain
anything but the vote banks. Farmers in Tamilnadu have to depend on migrant labour from Bihar to rescue their crops, and with agriculture becoming less and less worth it, why do we wonder why grain prices are going through the roof? Yet another bubble waiting to burst.

Artificial injections of money to change cultures, lifestyles, and mindsets have never worked. It isn't that hard to see poor Brazilians losing all their forest dependent skills, becoming lazy and
unproductive, taking to illicit trades to boost their incomes, and frittering their lives away. There is simply no cause for optimism when an entire populace is given incentive to be lazy. No subculture of laziness has ever gone unpunished. We are about to witness chaos in Brazil unfold over the next decade, if this monkey of a scheme finds its way out of the cage.

Let's see if we can actually fix the problem with this logic. How about giving Australia its twelve billion dollars a year instead of having to export its coal to China? That would put the world out of its misery from China's coal burning power plants, the Australians would be happy to get money for not mining, and China would... wait a minute! That's not going to work too well for the Chinese! They would go to war to get their coal, and since they hold the world's greatest reserves of the US dollar, nobody wants to piss them off just yet.

So, if every country in the world could get endless amounts of money for NOT exploiting something they have, we would put an end to global warming, but we would also put an end to all commerce as we know it. In any case, what is the world going to buy if nothing gets made
anywhere? The money we pay for people to laze around will eventually become meaningless, since there won't be anything to buy with it! Every currency being printed is roughly equivalent to the GDP of the country or region, but this is where the US dollar has been playing the monkey. It isn't based on the USA's GDP! It isn't based on its gold reserves either! It is based on this grand assumption that a great deal of the world's very important resource reserves are pegged
to the US dollar and that the world will continue to grow infinitely in abundant hunger for the same currency in order to buy from the same resource reserves of - mostly oil! It is also based on the assumption that the USA will be around as the world's most robust economy for a very long time.

Question the stupidity of these assumptions, promoted by and subscribed by people that graduated from the best business schools in the world, and question the connection between California real estate loan defaulters and people losing jobs in Chennai, and what we can do
to really save the world, and all economists will tell you in many complicated ways what we already know - we don't know what the heck to do! But it's all clearly suddenly less important than global warming? Why? Because the game is up and a great deal of the US dollar's strength is going to depend heavily on new technologies coming out of the USA! That's why!

A country like Canada, on the other hand, actually benefits from global warming. With a one degree C rise in average temperatures, it stands to get a substantially higher portion of its land more agriculturally productive, a fair amount of it to come under new agriculture, and what better way for Canada than to hold a bigger stake in the USA's food consumption while the USA edges towards becoming a bigger desert? A country with a 30 million population feeding a giant in the neighbourhood with a 300 million population that eats too much. Brilliant economic sense. They have enough land mass to not worry about a few islands of theirs vanishing either. So we will never hear anything about global warming coming out of Canada, anytime soon.

It's still about timing, and while the rest of the world sweats for survival, for no fault other than teaming up with speculative American financial shenanigans dressed as geniuses, many countries will still look with bated breath at economic recovery of that same country! Quite simply because it isn't easy to build another 330 million behemoth that can provide so much - yo guessed it, consumption. The bad news is, when the USA's current band aid of building infrastructure to spur local economic growth runs out, it will wonder how to refinance its $2trillion debt.

The rest of the world, including China, will not want to buy any more into the USA's debt trap, since it hasn't repaid anything substantial debt for a long, long time. It is no longer a manufacturing powerhouse and while still the innovation leader, it cannot expect to make a booming global business out of technologies that can take people to Mars, for instance, just yet. There won't be so much betting on the next real estate bubble either. Automatically, interest rates will rise and Americans will be choking on their wake up calls. The US Dollar is going to decline and one can expect that countries like India, that have substantial US Dollar reserves will
diversify, further accelerating the panic.

A country like Australia that is building its economic reserves on the export of billions of dollars worth of coal to power China's powerplants, will hope that nothing comes in the way of their growth. With the drop of the US Dollar in value, all of a sudden, Australia might have to quickly rethink the currency they want to have. It won't take long for a few OPEC countries to peg their oil reserves to the Euro, since the Euro is at the very least backed by gold. The US Dollar is not backed by anything that has everlasting value.

In the middle of this mess, small countries are likely to be submerged by rising waters and their refugee populations will rush to the nearest safe havens. By virtue of its distance from many vulnerable islands, the USA is not in the greatest danger of receiving many of these environmental refugees, but by moral responsibility, it should pay for causing so much damage over the years. The other side of the argument is that the USA spurred economic growth around the world for so long, so where is the gratitude?

Money may not be a solution to many problems we face today. It is important to realize the big mistake the USA for example, commits often, in thinking the world would be a "better place" if the rest of the world lived and thought like it! What could be further from the truth? It is this perception that has led the USA to "throw money" at every problem, and hope that a solution will magically arrive. It is one of the reasons the War On Terror isn't going anywhere.

A lot of solutions will come from investing human capital, in actions that show our will to be involved, our readiness to give ourselves to the need at hand. We may continue to get hit by Katrinas and Ailas and earthquakes and fires, but now we're faced with the spectre of entire countries being submerged, gone forever! We can't really throw money to aliens to give us the technology to clean up our planet. We can, however, get out of our myopic, hoarding oriented mindsets and examine the virtues of an unspeculative present, our immediate availability to tell the truth, and our collective intent to take sincere action.

Put simply, it is time to stop thinking about PROFIT at any cost. It isn't about philanthropy either, but it is about working without expecting a proportionate reward. All for one, and one for all. Resources must be set aside from wherever possible, in whichever form possible, to reverse global warming. The results and findings of all scientific studies can and will actually deliver a phenomenal amount of business opportunity. If there is one thing we can learn from history, it is that our greatest progress and prosperity came from periods when we were industrious. It is simply time to go to work again, not try to buy laziness.

The doors are opening for a more holistic understanding of the earth as OUR planet, and doesn't matter what we do or don't, we're in this together. It might be the time to give the spiritually evolved voices of united humanity a bigger stage, for the political expertise exercises haven't got us very far as a race. We're running out of some resources, but that doesn't mean we need to run out of ideas as well. After all, we didn't come out of the stone age because we ran
out of stones. We survived without the wheel, and we did quite okay even before we found oil. We must believe the best of us lies ahead, because we have no choice! We better come up with our best performance yet, this time just to survive! We simply cannot waste time looking back. We don't have any examples from our past that can save us now! We need to figure out in the present how to have some kind of a future. What fun!

Yes, it is a fact that livestock farming has a greater environmental negative impact than all the cars, planes, and ships put together. Anybody turning vegetarian because of this? Did anybody in Copenhagen even talk about this? We still haven't learned how to make it our business to think beyond business, have we?