...make it even better!

The football world cup is round the corner and there are a few final slots to be booked yet. One of them was going to Ireland or France. I didnt see the match live but heard so much about it that I had to see the videos on youtube. All the talk was about how Henry, the captain of the French national team used his hand quite deliberately to control the ball before passing it to gallas to score the all crucial goal.



As shocking as this was for Ireland, it really isn't shocking that incidents like this go unnoticed on a football field. Most sports today use technology, some more than others, to keep the game fair and controversy free. Will technology ensure zero controversy? Of course not, but it will dramatically reduce the number of absolute insults to the game. During football discussions at office and we have some very passionate discussions, I have heard of how the intervention of technology will slow down the game. Well, my counter argument to that is, the number of fake injuries, dives and unsporting conduct already eat a lot more time than technology could. And once the players know that the cameras all over the place are tracking not just their deft footwork but also their deft fakework, and foulwork, the number of actual minutes of "football" will only increase. There is another argument which says that technology will kill the charm of the game. While this could be true in a very minuscule manner, the way the game gets played these days, there is more cheating skills on display than football skills. And there is no charm in cheating!

Another way to look at this would be, these kind of controversies keep us talking about the game longer and this only helps the game get more popular. :-)

Pushing it...

Google is at it... again. We were today welcomed to watch the first glimpses of the Google Chrome OS or simply Chrome OS.



I have used the Chrome browser on and off. It is quick, it is more secure, it is not as customizable as firefox (yet), but in my experience it does hog a lot of memory incrementally. But none the less, it is a good attempt at a browser with certain clear innovations.

Now, the Chrome OS seems to be pushing the envelope even more considering the paradigm shift that we are expected to take compared to our regular OS use. This is probably the reason why they are releasing it more for the smart phones and netbook market rather than make it mainstream. The one thing about Chrome OS which sucks (at least for us poor souls in India) is that the whole OS is built on the assumption that you have a super fast net connection, which in India costs a bomb.

Anyway, we can be spectators watching the spectacle unfold and waiting for when our ISPs can offer us world class broadband at world beating price (like the telecom industry has). :-)

Irritated!

I don't follow cricket like I used to, but still something like this really irks me!

What did Dravid do wrong in the champions trophy that he is being dropped from the team? He was the top scorer and possibly the only guy who looks like he did his best to get India to a win! What did Raina do right that he is in the team? Who sees talent in Virat Kohli compared to Badrinath or Manoj Tewari or even Abhishek Nayar.

No wonder cricket (probably Indian cricket) no longer holds the special place in my day to day life. :-(

Reality beckons

The "startup days" of Linux seem to be behind it. Saw this interesting article come by and I couldn't agree more.

The more popular linux becomes, the more user friendly it becomes, the more it looks and feels like Windoze.

For the conscious...

I intentionally left out "health" from the title... ;-)

Its been a year...

Google surprised the world with its entry into the browser war when it released Chrome. It has now been a year since and Chrome has reached 2.0 w.r.t stable releases and 4.0 w.r.t developer releases. I have used Chrome on and off over the year and one thing that is going for it is, well, its fast... speedy gonsalves fast!! But for the add-ons I am so used to on firefox, I would have moved to Chrome. Another thing that Chrome touts is security and sandboxing. It would be good to see some benchmarking done along these lines (i.e most secure browser) than along the same old lines of speed, speed and more speed.

Here is a comic book (old one) that was released by Google when introducing Chrome to the world. The comic book, though geeky, tries to explain in as layman terms as possible the ideology behind the Chrome browser. A good read...

Interesting...

An interesting article...

Why Indians don’t give back to society

Some characteristics unite Indians. The most visible is our opportunism



Why don’t we worship Brahma? We know he’s part of the Hindu trinity as the creator, but we worship Vishnu, manager of the cosmos, and Shiva, its eventual destroyer. The answer lies not in religion, but in culture. But in what way does our religion shape our culture?



Max Weber explained the success of capitalism in the US, Germany and Britain as coming from their populations’ Protestant faith. This ethic, or culture, was missing from the Catholic populations of South America, Italy and Spain. Protestants, Weber said, extended Christianity’s message of doing good deeds, to doing work well. Industry and enterprise had an ultimate motive: public good. That explains the philanthropists of the US, from John D.Rockefeller to Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates. What explains the behaviour of Indians? What explains the anarchy of our cities? To find out, we must ask how our behaviour is different.Some characteristics unite Indians. The most visible is our opportunism. One good way to judge a society is to see it in motion. On the road, we observe the opportunism in the behaviour of the Indian driver. Where traffic halts on one side of the road in India, motorists will encroach the oncoming side because there is space available there. If that leads to both sides being blocked, that is fine, as long as we maintain our advantage over people behind us or next to us. This is because the other man cannot be trusted to stay in his place.



The Indian’s instinct is to jump the traffic light if he is convinced that the signal is not policed. If he gets flagged down by the police, his instinct is to bolt. In an accident, his instinct is to flee. Fatal motoring cases in India are a grim record of how the driver ran over people and drove away.We show the pattern of what is called a Hobbesian society: one in which there is low trust between people. This instinct of me-versus-the-world leads to irrational behaviour, demonstrated when Indians board flights. We form a mob at the entrance, and as the flight is announced, scramble for the plane even though all tickets are numbered. Airlines modify their boarding announcements for Indians taking international flights.



Our opportunism necessarily means that we do not understand collective good. Indians will litter if they are not policed. Someone else will always pick up the rubbish we throw. Thailand’s toilets are used by as many people as India’s toilets are, but they are likely to be not just clean but spotless. This is because that’s how the users leave them, not the cleaners.



The Indian’s reluctance to embrace collective good hurts his state. A study of income-tax compliance between 1965 and 1993 in India (Elsevier Science Das- Gupta, Lahiri and Mookherjee) concluded that “declining assessment intensity had a significant negative effect” on compliance, while “traditional enforcement tools (searches, penalties and prosecution activity) had only a limited effect” on Indians. The authors puzzled over the fact that “India’s income tax performance (was) below the average of countries with similar GDP per capita”.



We do not think stealing from the state is a bad thing, and our ambiguity extends to corruption, which also we do not view in absolute terms. Political parties in India understand this and corruption is not an issue in Indian politics. Politicians who are demonstrably corrupt, recorded on camera taking a bribe or saying appalling things, or convicted by a court, can hold legitimate hope of a comeback—unthinkable in the West.



The opportunist is necessarily good at adapting, and that explains the success of Indians abroad. We can follow someone else’s rules well, even if we can’t enforce them at home ourselves. The Indian in the US is peerless at the Spelling Bee because the formula of committing things to memory, which in India passes for knowledge, comes naturally to him. But this talent for adapting and memorizing is not the same as a talent for creation.



The question is: Why are we opportunists?

In his great work Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti observed that the rewards religions promised their faithful were all far off, in the afterlife. This is because a short goal would demand demonstration from god and create skeptics instead of believers. There is an exception to this in Hinduism. Hinduism is not about the other world. There is no afterlife in Hinduism and rebirth is always on earth. The goal is to be released entirely and our death rites and beliefs—funeral in Kashi—seek freedom from rebirth. Christianity and Islam are about how to enter heaven; Hinduism is about how not to return to earth, because it’s a rotten place. Naipaul opens his finest novel with the words “The world is what it is”, and Wittgenstein ( “The world is all that is the case”) opens his Tractatus similarly.



Hinduism recognizes that the world is irredeemable: It is what it is. Perhaps this is where the Hindu gets his world view—which is zero-sum—from. We might say that he takes the pessimistic view of society and of his fellow man. But why? The Hindu devotee’s relationship with god is transactional: I give you this, you give me that. God must be petitioned and placated to swing the universe’s blessings towards you. God gives you something not through the miracle, and this is what makes Hinduism different, but by swinging that something away from someone else. This is the primary lesson of the Vedic fire sacrifice. There is no benefit to one without loss to another. Religion is about bending god’s influence towards you through pleas, and appeasement, through offerings.



Society has no role in your advancement and there is no reason to give back to it (in any way, including leaving the toilets clean behind you) because it hasn’t given you anything in the first place. That is why Indian industrialists are not philanthropists. Rockefeller always gave a tenth of his earnings to the Church, and then donated hundreds of millions, fighting hookworm and educating black women. Bill Gates gave $25 billion (around Rs 1.2 trillion), and his cause is fighting malaria, which does not even affect Americans. Warren Buffett gave away $30 billion, almost his entire fortune. Andrew Carnegie built 2,500 libraries. Dhirubhai Ambani International School has annual fees starting at Rs 47,500 (with a Rs 24,000 admission fee) and Mukesh Ambani’s daughter was made head girl. An interesting thing to know is this: Has our culture shaped our faith or has our faith shaped our culture? I cannot say. To return to the question we started with: Why is Brahma not worshipped? The answer is obvious: He has nothing to offer us. What he could do for us, create the universe, he already has. There is no gain in petitioning him now.

Aakar Patel is a director of Hill Road Media. Write to Aakar at

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