Friday, November 30, 2007

Best-est thing I read today

“If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100m, that's the bank's problem.”
Link

One of my friends is a true patriot who hates the Chinese, spends sleepless nights over America's huge external debt ($ 14 tn.?), and then hates the Chinese some more for being America's second biggest debtee. Hehe, I know who I am sharing this quip with.

Sunday, November 18, 2007

The hunter conundrum

When the number of hunters in a forest decreases, is it good or bad for the animals living therein? In the United States, the answer may not be what it seems. A recent drop in interest in recreational hunting is actually leading to concern in wildlife and conservation circles about its detrimental effect on wildlife.

Let us start from the beginning. Hunting has traditionally been a widely embraced recreational activity in the US; I quote from a report 'Economic Importance of Hunting in America':
Like baseball and apple pie, hunting is an American tradition shared by young and old, rich and poor, regardless of social or economic status. Hunting...knows no geographic or congressional boundaries. Its history and heritage crosses all racial and ethnic boundaries.
This report comes from the AFWA, a cheerleader for the hunting industry, which explains the gooey adulatory tone. There is, nevertheless, some truth in the claim about the popularity of hunting in the country. This popularity brings political reckoning - hunting is as much a poster-child for gun-friendly conservatism, as abortions are for pro-choice liberalism. The Economist noted in a recent article:
Hunters, who are mostly male and often from rural areas, have also been a potent and conservative political force, and the core of the National Rifle Association (NRA)...their status (is that of) one of the Republican Party's most dependable battalions...
Hunters are as much an economic force as a political one. According to one estimate, game seekers spent $75 billion over the past year, which is more than 1/2 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. This includes money spent on purchases of hunting hardware to fees paid for game licenses. Many hunters are associated with hunting clubs or associations which spend large sums of money directly on programs for conservation of habitat ('conservation' being the cheeky term they use for the activity of managing wildlife numbers plentiful enough to sustain continued hunting) or indirectly through political lobbying.

It is this political and economic clout of the hunting community that makes it an important player when it comes to conservation of wildlife and open spaces. All hunters pay for a hunting license from states, and this money is funneled back into upkeep of the states' forests and wildlife habitat. For instance, in the state of Wyoming, as in other states, licence fees comprise 90% of the Fish and Game Department's $50m budget, which pays for scores of wildlife biologists and game wardens. Hunting retailers also chip in - if you buy a hunting jacket or shoes at a big sports chain, there is some chance that a portion of the proceeds will go towards conservation programs.

Thus the concern for wildlife as hunters decline in number. Recent years have seen a drastic decrease in the size of the hunting community. There were 14.1 million hunters in 1991, 13 million in 2001, and 12.5 million in 2006. The National Geographic quips:
The great irony is that many species might not survive at all were it not for hunters trying to kill them.
Let me end with an personal anecdote to press home this irony:

One of the clients of the company I work for is a rich and powerful nationwide organization that promotes the interests of duck hunters. One day, I gave our office secretary a report to be mailed to this particular client. The front page of the report had the client's logo, a duck. The secretary, who happened to be a temp filling in for a regular employee, looked at the logo and crooned: "Aww, are we helping these people save the little duckies?". I didn't want to break her heart, but the truth had to be told. I cleared my throat: "No, actually we help them protect wetland habitats so they can kill more ducks". She stopped what she was doing and gave me a look that was somewhere between "WTF!" and "WTF!!!". Then she looked away and never spoke to me again (as if it was ME killing the little duckies). To this day, I don't know if she mailed my report or put it through the shredder.

Moral of the story: Never break your secretary's heart.

Sunday, November 11, 2007

A heritage worth preserving

I often marvel at the fact that today's young Indians who were born in the 1990s and later will have grown up in a radically different environment compared to my contemporaries or our earlier generation (it is true for urban Indians, at least). The differences are marked as much in access to physically manifest things - 24 hour cable, cell phones, internet - as in the understanding of their own place in the world.

I was born in the 70s and, like the rest of my generation, had a 'socialist childhood' in a manner of speaking. Growing up, I used to read about the then-prevalent license raj but never really understood its full significance or thought it had any bearing at all on my life...not until a decade later when the consequences of dismantling the raj were becoming apparent. Indeed, I feel rather fortunate to have been at the right stage of life when the change was happening; I was neither too young to not understand it nor too old to feel left out.

However, the anachronist in me sometimes feel sad at the loss of an era. There was a whole way of life associated with living in the supposedly planned economy of Mera Bharat Mahan that none of my younger co-patriots will ever fully comprehend. Aside from milestone historic events during that era which will of course be recorded, there were innumerable irrelevant and subtler aspects of life then (the subaltern history, if you will) that will forever be lost. For better or worse, a particular way of life is heritage for three generations of post-independence Indians, and that is the only heritage they have. As a newer and freer life slowly erodes society's earlier avatar, both the agreeable and disagreeable aspects of it, I wonder :Who will tell the story of the past that I have lived?

I always feel unsettled by the idea of untold stories, especially when the stories are of a collective, not individual, past. That is one reason why I have great respect for certain authors who take great pains to render the life and times around them to the smallest details, allowing the ordinary rather than the extraordinary to live on forever. It is thanks to these greats that I have been able to live, without leaving my armchair, in P L Deshpande's Pune, in Marquez's fantasized Colombia, in Sholokhov's Don river valley, and in Faulkner's Mississippi.

An untold story is history denied, and there is adequate recognition of this in politics and academics, evident in the fortunes spent on documenting the specific histories of various communities, for instance, of the Jews, Armenians, Cambodians, or the Sikhs.

In the same vein, I may some day launch a Socialist Heritage Project, which will document life under the benevolent raj, every little mushy or bizarre detail. Here are some placeholders for study areas:

Waiting lists (for telephones, scooters, houses, loans, everything)
State media (choosing between Doordarshan and nothing)
Ration cards (still around, but no longer as potent)
Gold regulation, gold biscuits and smugglers (stuff of legends)
Careers (only to be made with PSUs or the government)

You may find the idea funny, but don't laugh yet. Who knows, one day there might be a endowed Chair for India's Socialist Heritage Studies at Harvard or somesuch.
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