How many years does it take a change a light bulb?

Laaton ke bhoot baaton se nahi mante.
(Donkeys wont be persuaded with words [qualitative translation])
-Hindi proverb

A committee in the California legislature passed a measure this week which mandates that incandescent light bulbs are to be phased out and replaced by compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) as an energy-saving measure, given the fact that the latter are far more efficient.

In a society where one-carSUV-per-person is the norm and most buildings are centrally heated and cooled throughout the year regardless of outside temperatures, how can one not sneer at this as a case of misplaced priorities? What adds insult to the injury is this: the proposed legislation gives manufacturers and users more than four years to make the change and it is not until 2012 that this change will be complete. How long does it take for a state to change its light bulbs? Seriously, if this is how long it takes for this society to change its light bulbs, those who dream of cutting global carbon emissions by 2020 should slap themselves awake.

Sadly, the snail's pace on energy-saving and environmental prudence is not restricted to light bulbs. Last month, President Bush met the CEOs of GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler, to discuss flexible fuel vehicles which can run on petrol as well as alternatives like E-85 (ethanol based). Ethanol is the poster child of Bush's newly-found passion for energy independence, but is increasingly being criticized as being the wrong way to go, for various reasons. The auto-makers promised that 50% of their vehicles manufactured by 2012 would be flex fuel (hey, whats with 2012?) and urged Bush to ensure that production of bio-fuels is bumped up in return. What the auto-makers obstinately refused to talk about is fuel efficiency standards and the president would make them either. Unfortunately, there is little criticism of this attitude, nearly none in the popular media.

I respect American resolve and their ability to get things done fast when they want them, which makes this reluctance for action stand out like a sore thumb. Where is the political will and popular resolve now that it desperately needed? Lee Iacocca put it quite well:

It seems to me we need something like the Manhattan Project. We need some urgency saying, 'Here's what we should be doing. We've got to get off fossil fuels'.

Others have a more pessimistic view of the state of affairs:

The U.S. is desperately dependent on the availability of cheap, plentiful oil and natural gas, and addicted to economic growth. Once oil and gas become expensive (as they already have) and in ever-shorter supply (a matter of one or two years at most), economic growth will stop, and the U.S. economy will collapse.

I do not agree with the latter. America is capable of much more, but given the powerful interests vested in its profligate energy ways, this society is going to need a hard kick to the balls to make a run for it. If some natural or geophysical disaster were to throttle the US' oil supply abruptly, then, take my word for it, all cars will be running 80 mpg (33 kmpl) in a matter of months, and none of the car-makers would be whining and begging for more time. Oh, and light bulbs would be replaced in a matter of minutes.

Rasgullas in Amethi

Rahul Gandhi has been in the news lately following a loud misadventure campaign in Uttar Pradesh. I have been following his trail on the news, and reading names like Amethi, Rae-Barelli, and Sultanpur again and again has evoked some warm (sweaty and torpid, actually) memories from the past.

The year is 2000, I am barely out of my graduation gown, but have already begun to feel like an old hand at the environmental think-tank in Delhi where I work. It is summer, a drought is looming, and I am buried till my eyelids trying to work the drought to our benefit (everybody loves a good drought, remember?). The last thing I want to do right now is travel, and the last place I would go to is sultry Uttar Pradesh. Alas, if only Sonia Gandhi would sympathize.

My boss, who is politically close to the state and national Congress establishment, has been personally requested by Soniaji to assess the water resource/agricultural situation in her constituency of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh and script a plan for her to work on. To his credit, my boss is an environmentalist second and a pragmatist first, who knows that any talk about policy change is just fart unless it is addressed to politicians. Some colleagues whisper his political savviness comes from him being a diehard Congressy; I believe the hobnobing is but a tool for a brilliant environmental lobbyist.

Whatever his motivation may be, I find myself on the Shatabdi (?) to Lucknow, accompanying two gurus of this sector who work as consultants for us - one a geophysist and the other a rural developer - with whom I am about to make a "whirlwind tour of Amethi constituency" (to borrow the phrase from TOI). Make no mistake, my role is simply as a scribe and facilitator, a lackey to the gurus (I explain to my friends that I am a groupie). Within the first two hours on the train, the scientist wins my admiration and starts a friendship that lasts ever since, but I fail to be impressed by the social worker (two years later, the latter wins a Magsaysay award which helps to solidify my poor opinion about the credibility of the award).

Word must have gotten out that we are out on "Madam's" personal errand, because we are received in Lucknow by a flock of middling Congress leaders with bowed namastayz. They are all pot-bellied, in white kurtas, and sporting gold chains and rings; it takes me a few minutes to realize that they arent fancy dressing as filmy politicians, it is the other way round. After treating us to what is described as a customary Lucknowi breakfast of jalebis and dahi (yes it is delicious!), they go back to their exciting lives while delegating us to a bunch of local ICAR scientists who are going to lead us around the villages, rivers, and irrigation ditches of the constituency.

We spend the next few days zipping across Sultanpur and Rae Bareilly districts in a couple of white Ambassadors (with miniature Congress party tricolours flying on the hoods), visiting scores of villages, farms, irrigation projects, and talking to farmers and village-level Congress workers. Most people, taking us to be harbingers of goodies from Delhi, are only too eager to talk. Village after village, we were amazed to see the shamelessness with which our respondents overstate their problems and the arrogance with which they demand solutions without volunteering any efforts on their part. I have worked with farmers in Gujarat and Rajasthan before but I've never seen anything like this. In one village, a reflective party worker senses our feelings and privately englightens us, "fiNys ipkl lky esa xkaaa/kh ifjokjus ges cgqr dqN fn;k gSA ge yksxks dks jlxqYys [kkus fd vknr gks xbZ gS] de ls dke ugh pysxkA (We have been well-provided for by the Gandhi family over the past 50 years. We are used to eating rasgullas, nothing else will do now.)", reminding us that Amethi is one of the most pampered and previleged constituencies in the country. My scientist friend is so stuck by this little political insight that he makes me quote it verbatim when I report our findings!

We end up making quite a few observations about the mechanics of water resource challenges in the constituency, not least the problem of usar (salt-laden) agricultural soils that plagues the area, but our most memorable moments on the tour come from the very significance of the ground we tread on (for instance, the night we spend at the guest house of the Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Hospital in Amethi where the housekeeper informs me with ill-concealed pride how Madam had once rested in the room across the hall from mine). A few weeks after getting back to Delhi, I end up going back by myself to follow up on our work, when I spend three psychedelic days and nights at the KVK (Krishi Vigyan Kendra) in Sultanpur. But I will stop here; that trip (pun not intended) deserves a dedicated post for itself.

Thank you Rahulbaba, for taking me down memory lane. But go easy on the sops, bro, I dont want to hear about rasgullas the next time I am there.

Colonise it

Read the second line of the first comment on this post on The Acorn. It reads thus: "Chaap-lucy, flattery and fawning....."

Recognize the first word? pkiywlh. While Indians have evolved a smooth hybrid spoken English ("its so hot, na?"), we are generally reluctant to translate that into prose. I love it when someone does.

English has a long tradition of borrowing words from us (pundit, juggernaut, karma etc) , but most of these have been adapted by angrez exposed to Indian languages. Thats surely changing with the growing presence of desibhaiz on the internet; they can start planting words themselves now.

Cant wait for the day Snoop Dogg swaps homie for mamu.

Fidda and the blade - 2

Fidda, the condemned,
(mind you, Fidda with "n" not "M")
Had a chance encounter with Bhagwan, who,
For no particular reason, granted to Fidda
That he'd be what he'd want to be in his next life.
Whereupon Fidda spouted, within a divine eyelid bat,
"I'd like to be an inanimate object in a lady's closet,"
And continued, in response to the puzzled gaze,
"Better hanger than hung".

Review: The World is Flat - A Brief History of the 21st Century by Thomas Friedman

This book has been so widely read lately (much talked about, at least) that writing this is like reviewing Hum Aapke Hai Kaun...nearly everyone seems to have seen it and liked it which makes reviewing it a purely pedantic exercise. But hey, pedantics is what this blog is all about.

In one sentence, The World is Flat is about how technology is profoundly changing the way people do business and interact, thereby making more people across the globe connect to each other than ever before. Sounds boring? Yes, but this is where the biggest strength of the book is - Friedman manages to keep up a racy narrative filled with references picked up from his personal experience as well as from popular media, spiced with quipy titles for chapters and the book itself. Be forewarned though - where raciness is the strength of a book, dont look for academic or theoretical intensity. I was amused reading buyers' feedback about this book on Amazon - some seemed genuinely dissapointed by the fact that the book had no "depth" and was far from other economic treatises they have read. Economic treatise? Huh, did they confuse Thomas Friedman with Milton Friedman or what? The book is surely an important piece of work (not because it proposes anything new, but because of the way it has propogated the idea), but dont confuse it with a textbook of economics or history.

The first half of the book talks about the mechanics of flattening of the world, the factors that caused it and the individuals and firms who made it happen. This is the most (and only) interesting section of the book. Friedman lists 10 "flatteners" - significant events that abetted the process starting from the blooming of Netscape to outsourcing. I suppose that people in the know of the technology business would be find this a bit boring. But to someone like me who was out in the woods, literally and figuratively, when the spring of the flattening process was happening, this is fascinating stuff. If Mr Friedman would have stopped at this point and called it a book, it would earned a perfect 10 from me. Unfortunately, he didnt. Reminds me of the eternal soul classic:

If you'd have stopped right then, Simon
You would have been mine, Simon.

The rest of the book is crammed with half-truths about the effects that this flattening has on business, people, and politics around the world and what traditional economies need to do to deal with the change. As with this author's other writings, over-simplifications seems to be a virtue as well as vice. To the thousands of blue-collar workers in America losing their jobs to cheaper workers elsewhere, the book has this advice - ADAPT. But adapt to what degree, how, and will it be enough?? My hometown of Ahmedabad had a booming textile industry which collapsed in the 1980s, rendering thousands of workers jobless. One of my most touching memories from childhood is that of seeing tears in the eyes and bitterness in the voice of a poor, weary ex-millworker with a tattered handbag making the rounds in my neighborhood selling toffees to kids. Once a healthy member of the industrial workforce earning many times the minimum wage, he was reduced to making a living off the handful of rupees earned from the sparse sales he made. If only I knew then, I would have asked him to adapt...

It seems that it is easier to jet around the world looking for examples of the "new globalisation", but far more difficult to put it in perspective. Globalisation is a complex and delicate subject because of its far-reaching economic and cultural impacts, and Friedman barely even describes it completely, let alone analyse its impacts. Apparently, he is not impressed by the protesters in Seattle, and nor was I; but I expected in vain that he would acknowledge that at least a few of the concerns projected by the anti-globalisation movement around are for real. Denial is hardly the way towards understanding.

Nowhere else is the book's Maggi-noodles approach to universal understanding more apparent than the part where it discusses international conflicts and what flattening does to them. According to Friedman, the tense situation between India and Pakistan after the Parliament attack was diffused, at least in part, by the intervention of industry leaders who pleaded with and pacified political leaders by arguing that a war would deal a terrible blow to the country's business-worthiness. There might be a grain of truth in that, but what is hard to believe is that Friedman quotes this to support the hypothesis that flattening will usher in peace and understanding across the world (because cross-border businesses will suffer and nobody wants that). For those not aware, our friend Friedman has avidly supported the Iraq war and has advocated a strike against Iran (at least till recently, when he seems to have adjusted his position to a more moderate one). Hmmm, how is it that the flattening of the globe does stop India and Pakistan from going to war, but doesnt do the same to the US?

All that said, the book deserves a read simply because it presents a topic that is of great relevance today, and is significantly reshaping the world (at least some parts of it) as we speak. Regardless of whether you agree with the book or not, it is certainly an eye-opener.

Pussy soldiers

The episode involving the British soldiers captured by Iran has been a pathetic tamasha of giant proportions, more so after the release of the soldiers.

To begin with, during the crisis many western journalists started branding the episode as a "hostage" crisis. Oh, for the love of Ganpati, from what tortuous path of logic were those sailors hostages? Apparently, Iran had made it clear that there were no plans to use those sailors as bargaining chips, which precludes the use of the term. Even if there was a swap going on behind the scenes that these journalists knew about, they never reported it, which makes the use of the term incongruous. Also, whether or not the sailors did indeed stray in Irani waters is far from being a foregone conclusion, thus whether the event was a 'capture' or a 'kidnapping' remains an open question. It is as if the English language has suddenly evolved over the past few days, such that "imprisoned" and "held hostage" have come to mean the same thing.

As for the sailors themselves....when news of the capture first broke, I was relieved there wasnt an armed engagement that would have foreborne what seems inevitable; but now, given the sailors' desperate wiggling, I wish for their own sake that there had been an engagement so they could have faced their grandchildren without shame. If you remember seeing the shit-scared faces of the first five US POWs of the Iraq war who were paraded on Iraqi TV, if you have seen the faces of Al-Qaeda's about-to-die hostages, you will know what "being under duress in captivity" is. But these pussies, who happily squaked their guts out, smiled like Daffy Duck for the camera, and warmly shook hands with the Iranian president, are now covering their behinds by arguing that all of the above was done under "psychological pressure". And what was the worst treatment they received? They were "blindfolded, bound and...slept in stone cells on piles of blankets". The British Navy's Admiral Jonathon Band actually upped the idiocy by calling these sailors "a brave bunch of youngsters".

The day of the release, all the sailors were seen standing in their newly tailored suits to shake hands with the Iranian president, obviously in a relaxed state, flashing jubiliant smiles normally seen on brave children who are paraded down Rajpath on Republic day on the back of elephants. All they had to do at that point was to suppress the juvenile smiles and act like soldiers, not Boy Scouts, on their way home. Under such distressing circumstances (oh, the discomfort of a hastily tailored suit...), the suppressed smile was the very least act of defiance (apologies for defiling the word by association) to be expected from the Queen's warriors. But there wasnt any defiance in the air that day.

Journalists in the west report all this with a straight face. Why am I not surprised? The brave youngsters who did not have the conviction to give the middle finger to their captors, now dont have the conviction to stand up for what they did; yet, every butterfly that floats down Fleet Street seems to take them for their word, and has the audacity to announce without second guess that all the sailors' actions were because of their ill-treatment on part of the Iranians.

This charade would have been just that - a laughable charade - had there not been the "significance" attached to it...the significance that WMDs had....the significance that going to war needs.

Update: Newspapers all over the world are going ga-ga about the fact that Sailor Faye Turney was measured and she thought it was for her coffin, and they take it as a symbol of the psychological pressure being imposed on her. Ask me, I think she was being measured for the new dress that the world saw her wearing on TV.

Painting Paul

The New Yorker has an engaging profile of Paul Wolfowitz in the current issue. Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank, isnt normally given a fair hearing in media, ostensibly because of the media's "liberal tilt", but this profile provides a surprisingly balanced view. I can already hear my leftist conspiratorial friends saying "You know, 31.5% stake in the New Yorker is owned by Bloomberg....." or something to that effect.

Fidda and the blade

Fidda,
Pronounced with the “n”, not the “M”,
Walked with his regular swagger
Into a roomful of hypochondriacs,
Whom he normally irritated
By wishing them good health.
But today he felt generous
For he richly sneezed
And declared confidently,
"It is contagious".

Coalition of the billing!

Jeremy Scahill, author of 'Blackwater', was on C-Span2's Book TV being interviewed about his book on Blackwater, a military contractor that is working for the US government in the war in Iraq.

According to him, 40 cents in every dollar spent in the operation in Iraq go to war contractors. Describing how Blackwater and other military contractors have hired mercenaries from around the world to fight for them, Scahill called the war a "coalition of the billing", parodizing the expression "coalition of the willing" marketed by Washington. Haha, fits the bill!