Kleptocracy

The Karnataka election is a sampler of the big national show coming up next year (or later this year, if some overexcited pundits are to be believed). I have roots in Karnataka. So I get news about the elections that go somewhat deeper than what we get the daily gargles and the 24x7 vituperation of the Indian news media. Well they are it again. Bigger, better and more shameless. So what one or two mining barons are in jail. So what most of the iron mining sector in Bellary is under lock down. There are always plenty of others who want to play the game and it does not stop at Indian money bags. No I am not talking about the Indian money in Swiss banks (or some such dank corners). India is now truly on the global map if the global military-industrial complex thinks it worth their while to raise stakes in a regional election. And the goons? Well thank the demographic dividend there is no shortage of young, muscle-bound yes men. Make no mistake. The political class in India loves elections. Think of it as the ritual that renews their lease. Their lease to untrammeled loot. Does not matter which individual or political party wins or loses, the political class wins. I have been in the drawing rooms of drunk politicians with their guards down."These xxxxx,xxxxx jholawalas, judges, anchors, bureaucrats, policewallahs think they can tell us what to do or not to do? Can they ever fight an election let alone win? We will rule because we are elected to rule" Democracy? Of the people, by the people for the people? Really? Raise 10 crores of black money,feed and tolerate hundreds of goons before you can be "of the people". Like this friend of mine rather pithily put it - "More like kleptocracy"

Bonfire of the Vanities - Revisited

I have smiled at shallow triumphs

And long mourned the loss of what I did not own

I have dwelt long in the shadow of my desires

I have constructed an ego built of my senses

And with foolish bravado fought the chimera of misery

I have looked for God in vain meditations

And reserved action for the pursuit of Mammon

I have sought love in the cravings of flesh

When love was within and all around manifest

I have played to weakness when strength beckoned

And belittled myself to myself

Enough say I, enough this night

This Holi night, as I go back millennia

People hunched around an ancient hearth

A primeval force, pure and cleansing

This bonfire of the vanities

Enlightenment and Arnab Goswami

Immanuel Kant in his monograph "An Answer to The Question : What is Enlightenment" argues that maturity - the ability to use one's own understanding of the world to lead one's life - is the key to enlightenment. He then goes further to make a distinction between the private and public use of reason. The private use of reason is when we as individuals perform our given function in a society. In that context we must obey the rules and framework of reason that govern our function as a teacher, manager etc. The public use of reason is when we are exercising reason to question the verities and foundations of everything around us including our profession. In this public use of reason we must explore without hindrance and let. I have often wondered about the sphere of reasoning that the daily spectacle of talking heads on our 24x7 news channels belong to. Listen to CNN, BBC World or even the lately minted AlJazeera and you will probably get the impression that these international news channels seem to believe that what they put out as news and analysis belongs to the private reasoning sphere, in that there are discernible rules of engagement and analysis proscribed by a sense of responsibility. Can one say that about the mushrooming horde of Indian news channels? Are the daily vituperation of Arnab Goswami and his ilk governed by any rules of engagement with the news and the talking heads they harangue? Is there any discernible sense of responsibility except to the compulsions of TRPs? I have nothing against Arnab Goswami. He is a brilliant man, courageous and glib. And on the occasions I watch his show, I must confess, I quite enjoy it. However it is clear to me that Arnab is not playing by any rules. He is not engaging in a private use of reason, as defined by Kant. Then perhaps he is engaging, day in and day out, in the high flight of public reasoning as defined by Kant? Decades from now will Arnab be recognized as an enlightened, free thinker who contributed copiously and well to the public discourse in India? That is some food for thought. However as I chew on this delectable morsel, a quiet voice in the corner of my mind raises an alternative viewpoint - "On the other hand, is Arnab beyond all reason?"

Follow up on "The Big Bucks School of Advertising's Coming Big Test"

In August I wrote in a post about how the US Presidential elections are going to be a test of how the power of advertising is correlated to advertising budgets (reproduced below for easy reference). Well the results are now out and happily the right man, in my opinion, is once again in the White House. Mitt Romney and friends (the super PACs) out spent Obama and friends roughly 3.5 to 2 in terms of television advertising. Every post-election analysis has attributed Obama's success to two factors. Obama's appeal to key demographics - women, younger people, Hispanics and Asians- and Obama campaign's "ground game" - a micro-analytics driven micro-marketing effort to get out the vote. The lessons for marketers are clear. Ensure your product answers felt consumer needs and get out there and get in touch with the consumer where the consumer lives, works and shops. Yes advertising works but not beyond a threshold. Too much advertising, in today's world,is the sign of a lazy marketer caught up in yesterday's paradigm.

The Big Bucks School of Advertising's Coming Big Test A US Supreme Court judgement has opened the doors for Big Money to spend big on political advertising (albeit marginally disguised) leading up to November's election of the US President. Groups supporting Romney,the Republican nominee, are likely to outspend groups supporting Obama by a very large margin. I think of Romney as Retroactive Romney given his penchant to re-arrange everything in his past to suit the present and his notion of the future. And I am thunderstruck on how the Republicans are trying to sell a blatantly pro-rich agenda to the toiling masses. There is no guarantee that the groups supporting Romney will come up with good advertising but the bucks will definitely be big. This will put the Big Bucks school of advertising to real test. The Big Bucks school believes that advertising works mainly through media pressure. Whether or not the advertising is good matters only marginally. Even if the product is bad, high-pressure advertising can get a very large number of people to try the product. Therefore when movie studios feel that a movie is a dud they increase the pre-release advertising pressure. The Big Bucks school of advertising has come to dominate advertising circles. Does it work? The ones who know are not telling. Advertising and media people have, quite obviously, much invested in this school and will not admit to the inconvenient truth even if they know it. The marketing and corporate bosses will not own up to mistakes that have cost them big bucks. The US Presidential campaign grips me for various reasons. One among them is that it will be a very public, undeniable test of the Big Bucks School of Advertising. If Romney wins the Big Bucks school of advertising wins and we can all spend the next four years watching a really bad movie unfold. If he loses will marketing and advertising circles reconsider and re-evaluate? Let's wait and see.

Being Digital

The human soul. It is a meme that for centuries has driven philosophy, spirituality and religion. In science, along with the concept of quantum uncertainty has entered the concept of a human consciousness that collapses probability into a state of existence. And if human consciousness has entered science, the soul in all probability will follow. Is the soul explainable in terms of our everyday reality? In the Bhagwad Gita, the soul is the indestructible entity that incarnates in various forms. Advait Vedanta goes a step further. There is just one soul that incarnates into all things. On the other hand religions like Christianity and Islam believe that every individual in this world remains a distinct entity. That is I will remain I and will be rewarded with heaven or punished with purgatory or hell. In perpetuity, one has to suppose, in the absence of the possibility of reincarnation. I believe in the power of the metaphor to explain the seemingly inexpiable. And here is, I think, a neat metaphor for the concept of the soul that could tie everything together. Think of the soul as a piece of code - a digital entity so to speak. Now think of this digital entity that is the soul as an operating system that supports the creation of various applications. You are just an application created on top of the operating system that is your soul. Simple enough. But the metaphor goes far, I think, in resolving seemingly conflicting requirements. The essence of being digital is that a digital entity can be copied endlessly and there is no distinction between the original and the copies. For the Advaitists, the original digital entity is the Brahman, manifesting endlessly as the operating system of the collection of countless applications that is the universe. When a person dies, a "copy" of the application that he was goes into heaven, purgatory or hell satisfying one sort of theology while to satisfy another theological conception, another copy of the application system undergoes a transformation, governed by the "karma" (the accumulated usage history of the application), into another application sitting on top of the same operating system. And for believers in the Matrix, that entirely digital Universe as conceived by the Wachowski Brothers,the concept of the soul as a piece of code is digital manna for a digital heaven. I strongly suspect that the metaphor of the digital soul can explain, without contradiction, all existing theological or metaphysical stream of thought. Try me. Happy new year. Remember humanity's way of accounting for time - seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years are essentially digital. Does that indicate that deep down time itself is just a digital stream? Now that is another thought.

Mythos and Logos

My friend Rahul Kalia writes a very popular blog (www.coachrahul.com). His posts are lucid anecdotes about stuff that happens to him, delivering sharp insights into the business of everyday life. Besides his posts being better written than mine, there is a fundamental difference in the outlook of his blog and that of mine. Rahul's blog takes the "logos" view of life - "here and now", "what, where and how" while mine tends to take the "mythos" view - "past and future", "why and why not". The relationship between the "logos" and the "mythos" views of life is illustrated by the following anecdote. A husband when asked about who takes the decisions in his household replied "My wife takes all the decisions about the small things - for example on what to spend to money, the upbringing of our children, where we take our holidays et. etc. while I concentrate on the big decisions - for example whether Greece should quit the Euro Zone, when Sachin should retire, whether India should attempt a manned moon shot etc. etc."

My Father's Son. My Son's Father.

As yet another year of my life draws to a close, it is time for some self-contemplation. It has been a "comme si comme sa" kind of life in terms of fame and fortune. More "si" than "sa", to be honest. But in essence, I feel it had been a good journey thus far. Last evening as I sat ruminating, this side of substance abuse, it occurred to me that the journey has been good because it has been at a gradual reconciliation of my idea of my past and my future. Our concept of our past and our future, I believe, is a product of the culture we live in interacting with our personal growth. A culture's concept of the past and the future has deep, almost atavistic, roots. The Tuvan tribe that inhabits a region in the Siberian steppes at the edges of the Russian Federation have a unique way of looking at the future which is codified in their language. In the Tuvan language the word "songgaar" means both "the future" and "go back" and the word "burungaar" means both "the past" and "go forward". The Tuvans believe that while the past is ahead of them the future lies behind them!Did Spielberg know this when he titled his movie "Back To The Future" or was he just being kind of clever. But seriously the Tuvan's concept of time governs and produces a unique culture and world-view. To read more about it see the July 2012 issue of the National Geographic. So what does my own language and culture say about the past and the future. "Kal" is both the future (tomorrow) and the past (yesterday)! It has been taken me more than five decades to understand, absorb and,over the past couple of years,celebrate this concept of time. In the past Indian culture was signified to me by things outside me. Philosophy, religion, literature, music, dance, dress and so on. Over the past couple of years the true locus of the culture that I live in has shifted inside me. And that is a very happy place to be because it allows me a vantage point that submerges disappointments and triumphs, fears and hopes,into one encompassing sense of being. I can go on but blogs are not the best place for excessive navel gazing, so I will stop here. Perhaps I will indulge myself a a little bit more, same time next year and file a fresh report from the battleground.