We're Digging It!

Most people assume that the government is excellent at corruption, very good at digging up roads and terrible at everything else – but this is only part of the picture. We may curse the government each time we pass by a road that has been dug up for the last 6 months, but the reality is that a dug up road is like a new year’s resolution gone wrong. It’s like the gym that you’ve stopped going to a month into the new year, the cakes that you’ve started eating after a fortnight of conscientious abstinence and the pair of jogging shoes that you used precisely twice and that’s now making you avoid the shoe rack in fear of being consumed by an overwhelming sense of guilt.

You know how it is. Each New Year begins with a significant proportion of the population making a resolution to make their neighborhood gyms richer. Well, alright…the resolution is to lose weight and get fit in the New Year, but the reality is it’s the gyms that get richer. To their credit, though, the people at least tried. It’s the same with the government – a dug up road is like the government ebulliently committing to a new infrastructure project, beginning work with fresh-faced enthusiasm and promptly losing interest midway through. Which is why the road remains dug up until the next time an election is round the corner.

So while most people were cheering the government’s announcement that it’ll allocate several thousands of crores for infrastructure investment in Bangalore at the Global Investors’ Meet last week, I wasn’t quite so enthusiastic. It just meant that there would be many more roads dug up all over the city before promptly being forgotten in the eager rush to do some fresh digging up.

For those of you wondering, the Global Investors’ Meet is one of those annual shindigs that are increasingly popular in India these days. It’s the sort of event that gets the newspapers frothing in excitement because it includes high ranking politicians as well as corporate leaders who are so senior that they cannot afford to be seen doing any actual work and hence spend all their time networking. It’s one of those events that most governments can fall back on to bail them out of a crisis situation and buy them a few weeks of goodwill. “Rising racial intolerance? Collapsing infrastructure? Power crisis looming? Let’s have a Global Investors’ Meet before this gets out of hand!”

A big sign of the success of any of these Global Investors’ Meets is the value of the MoU’s signed at the meet. And you know it’s always a spectacular success because every year it’s a new record number that ushers in a sense of unmitigated optimism for the state in question. The newspapers eagerly lap this up with reports stating that “Investors signed MoU’s worth Rs 60,000 crores with the Karnataka Government which could lead to the creation of up to 6 lakh jobs in the state. To address industry concerns about excessive paperwork that scuppers most investments, the state government has promised that it would hire origami enthusiasts to make all that paperwork a lot more interesting. Ratan Tata has also praised Karnataka claiming that it’s one of the few states that he actually enjoys investing in, while Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, who had twice threatened to leave Karnataka, has once again changed her mind and decided to stick around and invest some more.”

Each year, everyone goes back thinking that the state is well and truly on the way to being an oasis of development and prosperity, only to come back for the next Global Investors’ Meet with everything still being the same. Any reasonable person would be well within his rights to wonder why this is so. The chief culprit for this is the MoU. In essence, an MoU is like a non-committal, no-strings-attached version of the IoU. While it officially stands for Memorandum of Understanding, it's meaning is closer to “Might Owe You”. According to its definition, MoUs are “not legally binding but they carry a degree of seriousness and mutual respect, stronger than a gentlemen's agreement”. I’m no Sherlock, but that does sound very suspicious, doesn’t it? Even if an MoU carries the highest degree of seriousness and respect, it still means that a company may invest a certain amount in a state, but it just as well might not do so if it doesn’t feel like it. So you’ll have legal teams as well as government and corporate big shots spend months and months agonising over the fine print and meticulously poring over the details of a document that finally looks something like this:

In short, major investment decisions that could impact the future of a state are made on documents that hold less legal water than your average rental agreement. Which means that you’re more likely to get your rental deposit back than the Global Investors’ meet resulting in any actual investment – now that’s a headline worth reading!

To Sue or Not to Sue

A couple of weeks back, the Supreme Court announced that it would seriously consider the matter of banning Santa-Banta jokes on the grounds that they’re racist and offensive to Sikhs and insensitive to the feelings of that particular community and belittles them in the eyes of the public and other such mumbo-jumbo that is generally the case whenever people are outraged. Something that, surprise surprise, tends to happen with an inordinate degree of frequency in this country.

Take a deep breath and think about this. Santa Banta jokes and the Supreme Court – you never thought you’d hear them mentioned in the same sentence, did you? Imagine being a Supreme Court judge. You’ve been the brightest one in your class back in school and were always earmarked for big things. As you grew up, instead of squandering away that early promise like Vinod Kambli, you put in the hard yards and lived up to the expectations. You got into law school and graduated top of the class. You thrived in the high-pressure environment of a ruthless law firm/government law department and acquired a reputation for being among the best in your profession. You won high profile cases and rose rapidly through the ranks before finally being a judge in the highest court the country had to offer. Not for you making a living doing the usual banal jobs like convincing people why one TV is better than the other or investing another person’s money in dodgy financial instruments while getting paid for it.

No sir, you were a Supreme Court judge and would decide on matters of grave national importance. Like, um, whether to ban Santa Banta jokes. Well, ok, to be fair, those aren’t the only type of cases that come up in the Supreme Court – there are enough landmark judgments made that have changed the face of the justice system in the country. Still, it must be an odd sort of job when you go from deciding on gay rights one day to deciding on whether Santa Banta jokes should be banned another day. You’d probably go into office having no clue what’s coming your way.

Supreme Court Judge: So what matters do I have to preside on this week?
Supreme Court Judge’s Intern: Well, the matter of the 2G scam is up for hearing today.

Supreme Court Judge: That case is still pending? How dreadfully boring.

Supreme Court Judge’s Intern: Cheer up! Tomorrow you have to announce your verdict on the matter of banning Santa Banta jokes.

In some ways, this probably mirrors the bipolar nature of the Indian judicial system. Ordinarily, our judicial system is not the sort to encourage people to sue each other willy-nilly. If anything, it’s quite the opposite. Men of fierce determination and indomitable spirit, who bestride the worlds of their respective fields like a colossus; would sport a resigned, haunted look when it came to taking a matter to court. It mattered little that they had an ironclad, open and shut case to back them up. “What’s the point? It’ll go on for years and it’ll only end up being too much of a hassle – it’s just not worth it”, they’ll say in a tone of abject defeat. That their judgment was unmistakably sound could not be disputed. Even in cases where someone emerges victorious, it would hardly seem worth the trouble when you’d cast your eyes upon such headlines in the Indian papers:

Court Orders Nestle to Pay Rs 10,000 to Consumer

A consumer court has ordered Nestle to pay Rs 9,877 to a consumer who found a dead rat's tail in his packet of Maggi noodles. The consumer, a vegetarian, had not noticed the rat's tail while cooking due to a power cut and was midway through his meal when the power returned. As a result he was ostracized by his family and community and also suffered considerable emotional trauma. The verdict was announced after a protracted legal battle that lasted six and a half years; during which the man lost all his life savings, was deserted by his family, suffered an accident on his way to court one day and was even pecked in the eye by an irate pigeon in a courtroom one day.

This is quite the opposite of the scenario in the US, where you’d routinely come across articles that look like this:

Burglars Sue Home Owners for ‘On-the-Job’ Injuries

Two burglars attempting to rob a home have sued the owners for sustaining injuries over the course of the burglary. The burglars were rummaging through the closet when a bowling ball kept on the top shelf slid down and hit one of them on the head before falling and hitting the other burglar on his foot. The burglars insist that the top shelves should only be used to store lightweight objects and the botched attempt has made them the laughing stock of the criminal community. They say that the only earnings they can expect now are comparisons to Laurel & Hardy, and sought compensation to help them tide over the bleak future prospect in their line of work.

The above might make you think that our courts have at least got something right, even though most cases would take at least half a decade to be resolved. Sadly, though, this no-nonsense spirit of the Indian courts does not extend to matters concerning ‘the greater good’. The Public Interest Litigation may have started as a fanciful socialist whim or may have simply been a hankering for some diversionary frivolity. But it was just that little window of opportunity that has been burst open by misguided altruists, easily offended religious zealots and assorted jobless busybodies.

On the bright side, it has finally brought me back to write something on this blog!

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.