Masters of War

Back during the Cold War,the people of the West feared nuclear annihilation. These days they worry about the coming loss of affluence and the need to share power with East. Very soon now the powerful and the establishment in the West will arrive at a solution. War. An industry they still dominate. Sooner then we think we might stop talking about the greedy bankers and financial skullduggery and get our focus back on those who really pull the strings. The Masters of War.
To get a get a sample of what you will feel then, pull out this Bob Dylan classic song titiled Masters of War (Bob Dylan, I think, is the poet that eternity will record as the chronicler of hi age even while transceding it)from the Cold War days when the memory of the World Wars still had bite, and give it a spin:

Come you masters of war
You that build the big guns
You that build the death planes
You that build all the bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks.

You that never done nothin'
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it's your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly.

Like Judas of old
You lie and deceive
A world war can be won
You want me to believe
But I see through your eyes
And I see through your brain
Like I see through the water
That runs down my drain.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion'
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud.

You've thrown the worst fear
That can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You ain't worth the blood
That runs in your veins.

How much do I know
To talk out of turn
You might say that I'm young
You might say I'm unlearned
But there's one thing I know
Though I'm younger than you
That even Jesus would never
Forgive what you do.

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul.

And I hope that you die
And your death'll come soon
I will follow your casket
In the pale afternoon
And I'll watch while you're lowered
Down to your deathbed
And I'll stand over your grave
'Til I'm sure that you're dead.

Ten Commandments for the Corrupt and the Crooked

1. Thou shall deny meritocracy with every fiber of your being, so that when the time comes to picking the fall guys from among your juniors, every poor sod seems equally deserving
2. Thou shall hate art, music and culture while loudly professing your passion for them. Because if you start really enjoying stuff that does not cost much what will you do with all the millions you are going to stash away? You can’t risk the fading of your amazing appetite for money, can you? At the same time remember the culture scene, the art market and show business are full of your kind and so you must pretend conviviality
3. Thou shall not stint on buying your children a business degree or two from abroad. Helps in creating front companies. And hopefully the nincompoops will learn a thing or two besides finding boring, wasteful ways of spending your ill-gotten wealth
4. Thou shall pretend to be pious. Besides being good for the image among the gullible, religious institutions and seers are, 9 out of 10 times, good and reliable partners for people like you. Moreover there is no evidence yet that God, if he exists, cannot be fooled
5. If you made the mistake of getting a good education thou shall strive to wash away its debilitating effects by dipping into every pool of inequity, crudeness and lasciviousness that you can find. This of course does not mean that you cannot preen at all the alumni gatherings that you can get to in your latest SUV. If you haven’t got an education, congratulations on your good sense. And remember that you can always get a honorary doctorate or two for a quid or a quid pro quo
6. Thou shall kiss-arse the rich and the powerful as often as you can and to compensate for the consequent hurt to your ego, kick-arse every one dependent on you, as often as you can
7. Thou shall banish love and passion (because they are the enemy of greed) from your life and make do with lust and emotional dependencies
8. Thou shall not worry about your inner ugliness showing because money can always buy cosmetic surgery, soft lighting, airbrushing, arm candy and fawning hanger-ons
9. Thou shall cultivate a high-order of stinginess when it comes to charity or spending on others because you know nobody, except perhaps your mother, really loves you, so why should you care?
10. You shall steal the tenth commandment because you are the quintessential 10% guy, aren't you?

Laid Low by Kindle

I live a secret life.
A normal person’s life is lived as a web of relationships with real people. I live a normal life of that sort. But in addition and almost as important to me is my secret life. A secret life lived with an ever-changing cast of fascinating minds and people. A Russian mafia don planning to spill the beans in exchange for a promise of protection and asylum by Britain. ( John Le Carre). Einstein explaining his theory of relativity. A neurotic genius revealing his inner life, no holds barred (Henry Miller ). A Yankee from the nineteenth century transported to King Arthur’s Court (Mark Twain). Amartya Sen gently expounding an idea of justice. And so on.
At any given point in time I am at various stages of reading five or six books. I read them at varied pace. Some take me as much as a fortnight to complete. Some spend themselves on me in a one-night stand. And the characters that inhabit these books I am reading and the writers who write them become, for that period of time, an integral part of my life. I have relationships with them and emotions engendered by them which are as real as anything else in my life.
My secret life however had an in-built governor preventing it from overwhelming me. The books and hence the characters and the writers were scattered around various places in my home and office and at any time and place only a couple vied from my attention. Beyond my library of a thousand books or so, if I had to acquaint myself with a new one meant making a trip to the bookshop that could happen about once a week.
Over the past month there has been an upheaval in my secret life. I resisted the Kindle for many months because I sensed in some corner of my mind the danger. But the latest generation Kindle got so many rave reviews that I gave in to the temptation.
It arrived a month ago. Bound in an authentic leather jacket it sat in the palm like an incredibly light well-produced hardbound book. Open the book and a small screen etched with a tasteful picture nods at you. Put it on and the screen changes to the very page you last were reading. It looks 100% like a well printed page using a magical technology called e-ink (it can only handle black-and-white but then who needs color- we shall leave such frills to that darling of the infantile and the philistine- iPad). But that’s where the likeness of the Kindle to the book ends. As you read a book, on hand literally at the flick of a switch are a hundred thousand or more of them. The result is a permanent invitation to promiscuity, a promiscuity of the mind and the soul, immeasurably more inveigling then that of the body. On the positive side I have one more reason to thank the Almighty for not making me filthy rich. Just imagine my troubles if I had an unlimited book budget!
So here I am joining the ranks of those laid low with technology. I empathize now with the couch potatoes, the mobile fries and the Facebook rats.
So why don’t I, you might say just put away my Kindle, give it away and get back to my previous well-ordered existence?
Are you mad!?

Whine and cheese

My social life these days is shot.
Not that it was very hectic at anytime.
That said, I used to socially meet many more people than I do now.
There is one type I remember fondly, mostly because I don’t meet any these days.
The type who wore their commitment to liberal causes on the sleeves of their Fab India kurtas and kurtis.
It was fun listening to them for about fifteen minutes. After which the first signs of gastric trouble would cloud my horizon. Perhaps because my constitution could take only that much whine and cheese. Though, I must admit, some of them served indubitably fine whine.
May I apologize, through this somewhat widely read blog, to all those whose whine, over the years, I have not done justice to. My constitution is sturdier now and they perhaps will give me another chance. After all whines get better with age don’t they? As long as methinks, it is not new whine in old bottle. So please feel free to write or call.
Shall we then move on to Waisty and Soda? Then perhaps I should abstain. Because a pun stretched is no fun at all.

“The least important most important thing there is”

I have worked in advertising for many, many years. However it has been a year or more now since I last worked on a campaign. I do other stuff now, stuff which is deeper, more rounded you could say but I do miss advertising.
I make up by watching Mad Men (for those of you who don’t know, Mad Men is a TV show in the US centered on a Creative Director- Don Draper- on Madison Avenue in the 60’s. Mad Men is among the most acclaimed TV serials of the past few decades. It has won Emmys for consecutive years and is currently running in its fourth season- the 12th episode was telecast last week).
In the latest episode, Don is rattled watching the agency in which he is a partner fall apart. Ruing the fact that he seems to be able not do much his rant to his second in command in creative is: “We are supposed to just sit writing on our typewriters as the walls around us fall down We are after all creative- the least important most important thing there is”
A brilliant piece of self-awareness don't you think? And then Don Draper does a startling thing. His agency is going down because American Tobacco took away Lucky Strike, an account that accounts for more than half on his agency’s billing. Don takes a full page ad in the New York Times headlined “Why I Quit Tobacco” pithily decrying cigarettes as a product, swearing of ever working on a tobacco account again. The cat is now among the pigeons. Don believes this ad will attract new clients to his agency and save it. His partners think he is wrong and are furious at him. Will the agency be rescued? Will Don be proven right? Hold your breath for the next episode (to be telecast in the US on Monday and to be in my hands by Wednesday).
The fictional Don Draper’s fictional full page ad is brilliantly written. The kind of copy that one doesn’t see any more in real life as all the real talent in advertising is now creating television commercials. Advertising in it’s hey days of creative work in the press has seen some of the most effective writing in the world. Forced to be brief, forced to work to a brief, brilliant writers after brilliant writers have produced work that I know will not be celebrated or remembered but, in my belief, should, in all fairness, find a niche in the annals of creative work that lasts. But it was all done by hired hands working as handmaidens to crass commerce, so put it in that trash bin with yesterday’s newspaper. Now let’s move on to the important important things, shall we?

The Morris Theorem, Hard Ceilings and the Dead Cat Bounce

Ian Morris, a Stanford University professor of classics and history, in his path breaking book “Why the West Rules- For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future”, postulates what he, rather immodestly calls the Morris Theorem: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer way of doing things. And they rarely know what they are doing”
Morris also postulates that every civilization climbs the ladder of progress until it hits a “hard ceiling” of social development. The units of time that underpin Morris’s analysis of the relative rise and fall of the East and the West are in hundreds and thousands of years. Morris’s analysis is in the same league as that put forward by Arnold Toynbee in his “A Study of History” and Paul Kennedy in his more recent book “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers”.
When I think about what Morris is saying I find myself mulling over a couple of points.
The first point is in the context of what regular readers of this blog would have noticed: my disgust at the current state of the Indian establishment and my avid, if armchair bound, search for means to change it.
Does the Morris Theorem provide insights in this regard? Does the establishment continue to flourish because us the “greedy and lazy” people find it easier, more profitable and safer to not just overlook the faults of the establishment but, in most cases, strive to be accepted as a part of it? Are violent revolutions successful when they create conditions when it is no longer safe to be part of the establishment? Is there any other way?
The second point is where in the cycle of ascent and descent is the Indian civilization. Did we hit the hard ceiling around the times the Vedas were created? Is the past century showing signs of an upturn?
Or are we just experiencing a “Dead Cat Bounce”? The “Dead Cat Bounce” is a stock market term. When a share falls precipitously it experiences a tiny resurgence at the bottom of its fall, a resurgence that is known as a “Dead Cat Bounce”. Many a clever stock market operator has profited from a Dead Cat Bounce by recognizing it for what it is. However disaster awaits those who, out of Irrational Exuberance, mistake a Dead Cat Bounce for something else. Irrational Exuberance? That is another story.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

Go together,
You precious winners all; your exultation
Partake to everyone. I, an old turtle,
Will wing to some withered bough, and there
My mate, that’s never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.
- Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
A civilization as old as India ought to measure achievement differently from shiny new ones.
Instead we want to strut on the world stage to the rhythm of other people’s drums.
The result can only be the kind of farce that Delhi has been witnessing over the past two months (some would say the past sixty three years). It would be hilarious if it was not so tragic.
What about China you would say. An old civilization that stuns the Western world in most things it does including Beijing 2008.
But China discovered itself again when it started walking, about three decades ago, to its own drums. Going beyond the labels of communism and democracy, it discovered a system and an engine of prosperity that is entirely of its own making.
India’s Westminster style of democracy is a borrowed idea. In sixty three years we have not innovated one bit in the way we govern ourselves. Indian business and the Indian people in the meantime have, with no help from the State, reinvented themselves. Today, I believe, there are extant, Indian business and cultural ethos that are original and rooted in quintessentially Indian values. And this is the principle reason why India has finally found its voice.
It is urgent that we the Indian people, use this new found voice and vigour, to find ways and means to reinvent the Indian State. Otherwise this behemoth, cannibalizing the hard-won prosperity of the Indian people, will continue to strut on the world stage, in garbs that can only disgust. And more menacingly threaten ours and the well being of our children.
The alternative is the escapism of the old, so wonderful captured in the Shakespearean verse reproduced above.