Foreign Policy Paralysis

They say that when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade. This is one of those positive, life-affirming statements that, when put together with an inspiring, Hallmark-esque picture of a kitten or a baby could make for a very annoying forward. This is, however, not enough for people who aren’t merely life affirming but rather life-seizing / life’s throat grabbers, the sort that are always ‘high on life’. For them, the statement was appropriated and modified to “When life gives you lemons, bring out the salt and tequila”. Personally, though, I always thought I’d fall into the more cynical category – that if life ever gave me lemons, I’d confront life and grumble “Seriously? A citrus fruit is the best you could do???” However, the only time that life did give me a lemon, I was simply puzzled and wondered why. This was a few years ago, at the end of an ex-colleague’s wedding lunch in Kerala – everyone was handed a lemon while they were leaving. Why?

This whole business of life handing lemons left, right and centre did, however, give me an idea to look at countries’ foreign policies through the lemon lens:

USA: When life gives you lemons, befriend life, find out where the lemons are grown and invade that territory in the name of democracy.

India: When life gives you lemons, thank life for the lemons but also complain about the fact that life hyphenated you with Pakistan by clubbing the both of you together in its South Asian tour and giving lemons to both.

Pakistan: When life gives you lemons, go to China and complain that life gave India extra lemons and ask for a few more lemons.

Germany: When life gives you lemons, lecture the Eurozone on why they’re in the mess they’re in because they wastefully squandered away the lemons that life gave them.

Great Britain: When life gives you lemons, help the US when they invade the place where the lemons are grown.

France: When life gives you lemons, just to be on the safe side, surrender.

Japan: When life gives you lemons, take them to your state-of-the-art lab, reverse engineer the shit out of them and then turn them into square lemons and tell life “How about that, eh?”

Ok, that last one really had nothing to do with foreign policy, so I should stop here. On a metaphorical level, though, life did give Hong Kong a big, juicy lemon in the form of Edward Snowden recently, so it was interesting to see how the Hong Kong government reacted to it:

“Mr Edward Snowden left Hong Kong today (June 23) on his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel.

The US Government earlier on made a request to the HKSAR Government for the issue of a provisional warrant of arrest against Mr Snowden. Since the documents provided by the US Government did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law, the HKSAR Government has requested the US Government to provide additional information so that the Department of Justice could consider whether the US Government's request can meet the relevant legal conditions. As the HKSAR Government has yet to have sufficient information to process the request for provisional warrant of arrest, there is no legal basis to restrict Mr Snowden from leaving Hong Kong.

The HKSAR Government has already informed the US Government of Mr Snowden's departure.” 

In the world of politics and governments, people don’t go about telling “Fuck You” to each other. Not officially, at any rate. So for those of you who’ve ever wondered how one government would express the general sentiment behind “Fuck You” to another government, this is a very good, if rather long, example. In Bollywood terms, this is more the cool, insouciant and self-assured, “Tujhe jo karna hain kar le. Dekhte hain kyaa bigaad lega tu mera.” sort of “Fuck You” as opposed to the more rabid, hysterical but hollow, “Bahut galat kiyaa yeh tu nein! Tujhe chhodoonga nahin main! Tera pura khaandaan barbaad kar doonga, dekh lena! Samajhta kyaa hain apne aap ko? Tu jaanta nahin hain mein kaun hu!” The latter is probably closer to what the US reaction has been when they learned that Hong Kong had allowed Snowden to leave the country.

With Hong Kong, you could still understand though – it is now part of China, which is one few the few countries that can stand up to the US. What was more surprising, though, was the role of Ecuador in the whole saga. Here was little Ecuador, a mountainous country named after an imaginary line and filled with Llamas and Alpacas, that was standing up to the might of the US. Being neither Communist nor Islamic, and at the same time not harbouring any ambitions for a clandestine nuclear program, you did wonder why Ecuador of all countries thrust itself into the spotlight to take on the US. Sure, many countries would have justifiable grievances against the US, but common sense dictated that they didn’t mess with a country whose foreign policy could be summed up by the statement “When push comes to shove, we’d rather pummel, bulldoze and pulverize.” Even if you tried to steer clear of the US hit list, there was still the fear that you’d wake up one day to find yourself falsely accused of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and be invaded anyway – so to willingly annoy that country smacked of an overtly suicidal streak.

Not surprisingly, the NSA revelations showed that it was the other big countries that were a target of US spying – the Europeans, Brazil, Russia, India, etc. But apart from a few small, socialist-leaning Latin American countries no one else seemed to be standing up to the US. Sure, it is the most powerful country in the world right now, but you’d still think the other countries would be fairly displeased to know that they’re being spied upon pretty much all the time. So it was pretty baffling too see barely a word of protest being registered. Unfortunately, this means that the US holds the ‘He’s got compromising pictures’ advantage over the rest of the world. For those unfamiliar, the “He’s got compromising pictures” advantage is the most popular form of blackmail in use these days, and can be described as follows:

You’ve seen them everywhere – if you’ve ever worked for or with any large organization, you’re bound to have come across one of them. The employee whose sole purpose of existence seems to be to waste some valuable space in an already overpopulated world; the employee whose IQ would be lesser than a turnip, a plank of wood and Paris Hilton put together. At first you might give him the benefit of the doubt – you might even go one step further and extend this to the benefit of uncertainty, ambiguity, perplexity, enigma and confusion – but after a while you’d realize that there’s simply no getting around his utter incompetence. Yet, he's in a senior position and wielding great power! You have no choice but to wonder – here is a big, prestigious organization full of clever people with big degrees working for them, and they have the most advanced psychometric tests and rigorous interview processes in place to recruit their employees – so what gives? You start questioning if there is any point to Human Resources as a discipline, or at least the recruiting part of it. Is it all just a sham? How does someone so obviously incapable manage to get into such a high position?

According to one popular theory called The Peter Principle, people keep getting promoted until they reach their level of incompetence, so that after a while all of senior management is essentially incompetent. But this still assumes there was some level of competence to begin with. I have come to the conclusion that there is something far more sinister at play – that there is only one possible explanation for such an employee – which is that he has compromising pictures of someone big and powerful. Earlier, it was probably much tougher to get hold of compromising pictures of someone – you’d have to hire a detective and wait for months. But with the advent of cellphone cameras anyone can have compromising pictures of big, powerful people with some amateur snooping. And once you have these pictures, you can just blackmail your way into senior positions in most organisations.

This, then, explains the silence of most of the world powers over the NSA revelations – why else would you be so nonchalant about the US spying on you? The Americans now have compromising pictures of most government officials across the world! And this blackmail would form the cornerstone of their foreign policy and consequently guide geopolitical decisions across the world.

Scary, isn’t it?

iSpy

For a long time, cyber-crime seemed like one of those harmless things that would only affect someone with the IQ of a plank of wood. Sure, someone somewhere in this world was diligently cooking up an elaborate new scheme to make you part with your money every week, but it essentially served the purpose of filler entertainment on slow work days. A doctor in the UK was looking for a “reliable and trustworthy” partner for an exciting new business opportunity and had magically narrowed down on you, you’d just won the Coca Cola lottery and were entitled to half a million dollars, a Nigerian prince wished to donate all his property to you and the Income Tax Department wished to refund you an amount greater than what you’d ever earned, out of the goodness of their hearts. You’d have to be a really gullible sort to fall for any of that – the sort who’d accept life-affirming advice dispensed by a suicide bomber, or be willing to pay Sreesanth to bowl badly when he would have done that anyway. It’s not something perfectly reasonable that you’d believe right away – like someone telling you about an omnipotent bearded fellow in the sky who controls everything that happens in this world.

This was, of course, until the Chinese came along. Suddenly, the Chinese weren’t just making bad products that you’d buy cheap but still regret when you realized it stopped working after the first week. The Chinese could now hack into your country’s central defence systems and scrawl upon the Ministry of Defence website “China wuz here” or “You no leave Arunachal? We attack! Last warning.” Cyber crime suddenly seemed to be the warfare of choice among the leading countries now that everyone had a nuclear bomb and could not physically attack each other. It turned out that China had trained thousands of hackers who’d sit all day and hack into their enemies’ defence secrets while watching YouTube videos of a tap-dancing cat wearing a bowler hat – and this was how wars would now be fought in the future.

Just as Barack Obama was getting ready with the final draft of his note “Rip into the Chinese PM and tear him to shreds over this whole cyber crime thing”, the NSA revelations came to light. Obama would’ve dejectedly recalled the famous quote cautioning people against enumerating their poultry before the onset of the hatching process, while China, which had so far been reduced to playing the meek Clarke Kent role, had now got its telephone booth. It turned out that the US had been cyber spying on the world all along, and here was conclusive proof that it had engaged in all the dirty, despicable, malicious, loathsome, repulsive, malevolent, depraved, nefarious, sordid, vile, low-life, reprehensible cyber stuff it was accusing China of, plus some more! It’s a bit like getting scared about being caught while stealing from the cookie jar, only for it to turn out that the person catching you was actually stealing the entire jar!

As is usually the case when something big happens with the USA, questions about US dominance were being raised. Would American hegemony & preeminence in world affairs finally come to an end? Had the US taken one step too far even for them to get away with it? Was the US finally a victim of its own hubris? Was this the beginning of the end for the greatest country in the world? Tune in at the same time next week to find out what REALLY happens. A lot of commentators felt that this might be the case, and came up with a number of well-reasoned arguments to bolster the case.

There was, however, one crucial thing that they missed out on. It seems that the US cyber spying included all mails, phone calls, text messages, Skype calls, Apple/Google data and Facebook, among others.

Facebook!

Think about it – as a citizen, even if I were to accept my government’s argument that all this spying was of utmost necessity to keep me safe, I’d still be mighty pissed if my tax money were being utilized to spy on people through Facebook. Facebook intelligence sounds like an oxymoronic term – after five years on Facebook I’ve yet to come across any information that comes close to qualifying as ‘intelligence’! I can understand that maybe they’d glean some important information through emails or phone calls – but Facebook? It’s not like you’d accidentally stumble upon a post on Osama’s wall that says:

“Ayman al Zawahiri has invited you to the event: Serial Blasts in Tokyo.

Date: 13^th June 2013. Time: 12:30 p.m. Venue: In & Around Tokyo Tower, Tokyo.

RSVP – Yes, I will attend; Maybe; Sorry, can’t make it”

Mullah Omar – Osama, costs are going up, we need to downsize. Organize suicide missions ASAP to trim workforce by 10%.

Osama’s Status: New Jihadist track is totally inspiring. All set for my next big plan to teach the infidels a lesson – storm the Engineering college in Bristol!

[Ayman al Zawahiri, Ahmed Awlaki, Hafeez Saeed, Mohammed Atta and 133,654 others like this]

The weekly status meetings must be pretty depressing for the spy in charge of Facebook spying. Every Monday morning, when the NSA is taking stock of the situation, he’d probably be wishing for some terrorists to storm the building and take everyone hostage instead of being subject to this weekly ritual of humiliation.

NSA Chief: All right folks, what have y’all got for me this week?

E-Mail Spy: We have credible intelligence that a hostage attack is being planned in the heart of Rome.

Phone Calls Spy: There is reason to believe that a plane flying from a Texas airport could be hijacked in the next 2 weeks.

Text Messages Spy: We need to intercept an arms shipment that could be used for a terror attack – they’re likely to try and ship it in off the coast of Southern Florida.

Facebook Spy: Alice got wasted at the last party and kissed Doug. Josh went to Mexico for his holidays. Fallon put up pictures of his cat playing the piano.

Another fallout of this whole saga is that those looking at spying as an exciting, glamorous and jet setting career opportunity would need to do a bit of a rethink. The NSA activities should now replace James Bond movies as the point of reference for the life of a spy. Or, the James Bond movies could change to reflect the new age, sinister-but-boring reality of a spy’s life.

M: James, the terrorists have stolen the codes to detonate a nuclear device that could destroy the world. Our sources tell us that they’re currently on a train from Cairo to Alexandria.

James: Don’t worry, M – I’m on it. I’ll get into a helicopter and then climb down from the helicopter into that train and have an elaborate chase sequence after which I’ll jump off at the station and run after them through a crowded, exotic marketplace and then they’ll get into a taxi and a car will appear for me and there’ll be a long car chase ending in a crash after which I’ll again chase them on foot while showing off my parkour skills jumping from one building to another and then…

M: You’ll do none of that, James. What is this, 1980?

James (taken aback): Then what do you want me to do, M?

M: Nothing. You’ll log in to Facebook and click “Like” on the terrorist’s new status message. Then you keep your eyes on his Facebook page at all times. Inform me the minute there’s an update.

Ok. Maybe writing scripts for James Bond movies isn’t my thing. But one cant help shake off the feeling that you can’t be productive if you’re on Facebook all the time – even if it’s massive, global-scale spying that you’re doing. And if that’s what the US spying machinery shall be devoted to, the future indeed doesn't look very promising for American hegemony in world affairs.

Chequered Sport

Cars. Ever since Henry Ford’s legendary quote about the Ford Model T, telling people to bugger off if they didn’t like the car in black, cars have been the stuff of legend. Over the years, people have devoted their heart and souls to cars – writing about cars, making cars, fixing cars, reading about cars and driving cars. The thrill of the wind blowing in your hair as you zoom around in an open-top convertible, the sudden surge of raw adrenaline coursing through your veins as you hit pedal-to-the-metal and let the engine take over, the feeling of freedom as you power that beast down an inviting highway away from civilization – this is the sort of stuff that has driven people to heights of orgasmic delight. People wait in anticipation, drool dripping down their tongues, as Bugatti unveils its latest supercar. Debates punctuated with apoplectic rage do the rounds of the media and online circuits regarding Porsche’s latest off-roader. National pride gets linked with cars, personal self-worth is intrinsically connected to the type of car your own, entire eras have been defined by the kind of cars made…ah, the joy of cars. 

Sadly, though, I’m not much of a car person. This means that:

• My car is not an extension or a reflection of my personality (to be fair, I suppose small, functional and Korean would not be an extension of too many people’s personalities!).
• My car is not something I use to make a grand statement to reinforce my machismo.
• My car is not something I use to make a grand statement to offset any perceived lack of machismo.

Don’t get me wrong, I do get excited and exclaim “Whoa!” at the sight of a two-door convertible that just zipped by – but it’s more of a distant appreciation, along the lines of “Sure, that’s a cool car – but it’s not like I’m going to give up an arm and a leg to own it. And neither will I feel like I haven’t amounted to anything in life if I don’t end up owning that car”. If one fine day it turns out that junk mails don’t lie and an obscure person from a strife-torn African country deposits a truckload of money in my bank account, there are probably a lot of expenditures that would make the list above “buy a super-fancy car”.

Which brings me to Formula 1. I’m not exactly sure what to make of Formula 1. Even though I’m not much of a car person, I do follow a lot of sports, and Formula 1 happens to be one of them. I have absolutely no idea why. I’ve always had a complex relationship with Formula 1 – love-hate would be too simplistic a term to describe it. There’s something very odd about Formula 1. It combines the primal, unadulterated thrill of racing with the robotic, mechanized dullness of technology to create an utterly perplexing proposition. Five minutes after a frantic, incident-strewn start where 20 cars almost crash into each other, a typical Formula 1 race degenerates into lap after lap of mind-numbing monotonicity. Yes, there are pit stops where a clumsy mechanic might add a touch of excitement, or the odd spectacular car-crash – but beyond that there’s very little to hold your attention. In essence, a Formula 1 race is 2 hours of excruciating dullness interspersed with judiciously rationed portions of edge-of-the-seat action. Rarely do 20 people putting their lives at risk contrive to look as tedious as they do in Formula 1.

There are two dead giveaways that Formula 1 is actually rather boring:

1. Presence of hot women: While I’m not complaining about this, the presence of hot women in Formula 1 betrays a lack of confidence shown by the organizers of the sport – they’re worried that enough people may not bother with the sport and so they feel the need to bring in loads of hot women to just stand around and look pretty. Think about it – the only other sports that use hot women are American sports, which are packaged as this ultimate male fantasy extravaganza and geared towards boosting TV ratings with all their timeouts, or the IPL that is anyway made-for-TV and tries too hard.
2. Fake excitement displayed by commentators: If you ever listen to an F1 commentator speaking, it always sounds like he’s right at the edge of his seat. You’d think he might fall off any minute, but he manages to stay at the edge of his seat for 60 laps without falling off. At first, this might fool you into thinking that there IS actually something happening, until you realize that what he’s saying is something fairly mundane like “Ooh, Fernando really needs to look after his tyres. Sure, there’s no one within 20 seconds of him, but with the sun beating down on the tracks there’s always the chance that his tyres will turn to jelly. Maybe that’ll happen in another 20 laps, but we’ll keep saying it every two laps so that you think this is all very exciting and his tyres will turn to jelly any minute.” It just feels like they’re trying to overcompensate. Even in the case of cricket, which is another sport that has its fair share of boring passages, this doesn’t happen. Cricket commentary is infused with generous doses of complete gibberish such as “You can tell that Praveen Kumar is serious about his bowling whenever his shirt is no longer tucked in”. This immediately indicates that there’s absolutely NOTHING in the match worth talking about; the commentator simply picked out a card from a hat that said “Random comments to spew that cannot be proved or disproved in any way and is too innocuous to result in any controversy” and read what was written on the card.

Another problem with Formula 1 are the teams – the teams are all named after car companies (or an energy drink company). How can you cheer for a company? In which other sport would you say, “Oh, I’m cheering for Accenture. I’m a big fan of theirs!” or “How could you cheer for Coca Cola? Unilever is so much better!” It just makes you sound like a complete sell-out.

Perhaps that’s the problem. Even though we’ve jettisoned our college dreams of never being a sell-out and changing the world for the practical reality of paying the rent, it’s not something we like to be reminded of. And when racing is turned into an elaborately complex, big-companies-spending-millions spectacle, a little bit of that simplicity that we’d like to cling on to is lost.

Atlas Shrugged. But I Stayed Firm.

Whether you’re a teenager feeling alienated about the world not appreciating you, a senior Republican seeking to curb government spending in the economy, or somewhere in between, Ayn Rand is quite likely to pop up in conversation. Champion of libertarianism, ardent advocate of individualistic thought and action, cheerleader of capitalism taken to its free-market extreme – it’s hard to ignore Ayn Rand. Over 50 years after the publication of her masterpiece “Atlas Shrugged”, Ayn Rand’s books still sell in the millions every year. Which is quite normal, if you’re one of the best-selling and most influential authors of all time. What’s not very normal, though, is the fact that there are even dating sites exclusively meant for the followers of Ayn Rand.

Now that would be decidedly odd – two objectivists dating each other. Would the rules of dating be twisted in their case? Think about it – objectivists despise altruism and regard selfishness as the ultimate virtue. So if an objectivist girl tries to break up with her boyfriend, what would she do? Would she shower him with acts of altruism until he can’t take it any longer?

“Honey, you’ve been cooking all my meals for me. You’ve been granting all my wishes in the bedroom. Last weekend you whisked me away on a surprise trip. You’ve been cleaning up after me every single time. I can’t take this anymore!!! Just break up with me already, will you, instead of subjecting me to such extreme levels of relentless altruism???”

Or imagine two objectivists that meet online, start chatting and fall in love with each other. But when they finally meet, the guy decides that he wants nothing to do with the girl.

Girl (visibly hurt and disappointed): But why do you want to break up? You said I always reminded you of Ayn Rand – the way I spoke and expressed my thoughts. Do I not remind you of Ayn Rand any longer?

Boy: That’s the trouble – you do! It was fine as long as you spoke like Ayn Rand – but you also look like Ayn Rand!

I’ve always had a strange equation with Ayn Rand. It all started back in the days of school when I managed to garner an unjustified reputation for being a voracious reader. Don’t get me wrong – I do like reading and I think it’s far more enriching than all of TV and most of the movies – but I’ve never been a voracious reader. I wish I was – but a combination of a short attention span, other avenues of distraction, lack of patience, etc. has meant that I really don’t read as much as I would like to.

And you know how it is in school – it’s easy to get stereotyped. You tend to get placed into one of the buckets that are so prevalent – the geeky type, the athletic type, the hoodlum type, and so on.  And because I came across as a quiet type and was competent at English, people assumed that all I did with my spare time was read. Maybe it was also because I enjoyed writing and didn’t have any other claim to fame – in terms of being a supreme athlete, or playing a guitar and being all musical, or getting involved in an infamous scandal involving drugs or alcohol, or being a ladies man – that I was bracketed as an intellectual that spent all his time reading. Well, ok…I exaggerate – no one really thought of me as an intellectual. But yes, the reading reputation stuck.

And you know how it is with Ayn Rand – anyone who reads books would most likely have read Ayn Rand, or claimed to, at any rate. So the minute I told someone that I hadn’t read Ayn Rand, their jaw would drop and they would exclaim in a state of shock, “What??? You HAVEN’T read AYN RAND??? But I thought you read a lot!!!” And I’d look away apologetically and mumble something about meaning to get around to it. And the truth is, I did get around to it – more than once. Or maybe it was only once. But it was just too intimidating – a thousand-page book written in really tiny font – it just scared the pants off me. Plus it was supposed to be philosophical – and even though I didn’t think of myself as having soap-dish levels of shallowness – I generally steered clear of philosophical books. I liked reading for fun – this did not seem like fun at all. It always felt easier to just look sheepish and put up with the shocked proclamations rather than to read Ayn Rand. So yes…I figured that was the end of that. Life rolled on and I started working and reading even lesser than in the student days.

But this year, I resolved (even though I’m not generally a New Year’s Resolution sort of chap) to read more. So far, I’ve stuck to the resolution – having managed to finish off three books since the beginning of the year. And that’s when this thought suddenly crept into my head and has refused to let go ever since – why don’t I give Ayn Rand another crack? I didn’t know if it was just false bravado fuelled by the misplaced confidence of having read three books within a month – but it was one of those thoughts that you just knew would not go away until you actually went ahead and did something about it. So I checked with a Rand fan for further encouragement, and with that little bit of push, I finally summoned the courage to take on Ayn Rand.

I dropped in at a bookstore on my way back from work. When I reached the bookstore, it was among the first books I could see. They even had a sale going on – a 20% discount. This was it – all the stars were aligned, the entire universe was conspiring towards me picking up “Atlas Shrugged”. Except, when I actually picked it up, I could feel all the confidence just draining away from me, the way a foot soldier might feel when he suddenly discovers that he’s going into battle against cavalrymen. Or the way a sheep might feel when it accidentally stumbles into an abattoir. Or the way Income Tax officials might feel when facing Nitin Gadkari if the BJP comes to power. Or the way a recently quit alcoholic might feel if you handed him a bottle of 40-year-old single malt. Or the way Narendra Modi might feel if he’s stranded on a desert island with a dozen of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s most promising new recruits. Well, you get the picture.

It really does look terribly scary – there is an inverse relation between the size of the font and the thickness of the book. And it’s not a favorable inverse relation like in a children’s storybook – it’s the inverse relation exploited to such good effect by the people who draft the terms and conditions so that no one would read them. How could I read a thousand pages of terms & conditions? Once again, I felt like I just wouldn’t be able to do it – but eventually I managed to pull myself together by remembering tales of heroic inspiration and went ahead and bought the book.

Now, if only I could get around to actually reading it, rather than writing about it!