Response to “The Acorn – FAQ: Why Anna Hazare is wrong and Lok Pal a bad idea”

There are clearly two camps: one says Lokpal is the right way, another says we should restructure the existing organizations. Whichever way you go, you need structural changes. They both will have pros and cons and no approach is going to be perfect. At the same time, I don’t see how Lok Pal proposal is a bad idea. It just has different pros and cons.

If I get into the specifics of points made by “The Acorn” in its “faq”:

Adding one more, huge, powerful layer to an already complex system will make the system even more complicated. Complexity creates the incentives for corruption; both on art of the bribe giver and the bribe taker.

Anyone who has designed systems knows that complexity arises not because of layers but because of interfaces that you design. It’s upto the design of the Lokpal (or any other layer for that matter) which will determine the efficacy of the same.

In fact, data show that perceptions of corruption are lower in some sectors of the economy, usually those that have been liberalised.

I don’t know the source of this data and how the survey was conducted. Of course, there are areas where things have improved as a result of liberalization but not everything (like land records) is going to be liberalized. You can’t register a property in Bangalore unless you pay 0.5% of property price as bribe. Period.

We have not really demanded them at all, actually. If we did, they are bound to register in the national political agenda. We should persuade politicians that their political future is linked to implementing economic reforms.

This is a fallacy. The current battle started with a demand to remove corruption but it has turned into a battle to be heard by the government.

Easy to say, but how can we do this? By voting.

Another fallacy. This is a variation to the “Everyone should be honest” line of thinking. Moreover, voting requires options. While you & me can vote, what are the options in front of us as of today? There is no data to show that middle class doesn’t vote. Ensuring that a good candidate wins is far more complicated in this country than what can be influenced by a single person.

Does anyone seriously think we can hire tens of thousands of absolutely honest officials who will constitute the Lok Pal? Who will keep watch on them?

The same question holds for other structural changes proposed by the author in the beginning (i.e. make other agencies independent). The way you ensure honesty in those agencies is the way you ensure it here.

Pilots don’t design aircraft. Practicing doctors don’t discover new drugs and treatments. These jobs are usually done by armchair inte

Should I laugh at this? Armchair intellectuals don’t design aircrafts or discover new drugs. There are practitioners and there are designers. And well, there are armchair intellectuals who are neither practitioners nor designers.

The “Everybody should be honest” solution

I keep seeing this “Everybody should be honest” solution being promoted by friends & colleagues to solve the corruption problems in India. My personal assessment is that they have never tried to be honest in India otherwise, they wouldn’t be promoting this solution.

In response to someone, somewhere, I wrote the following which I decided to share here.

There are 3 parts to it:

a) I don’t want any inconvenience for being honest. I have always paid full penalty whenever caught by traffic cops but there were times when I had to fight with the cop to get a receipt for penalty and was finally punished by double the penalty because I dared ask for a receipt. I took the matter upto DCP who asked me to go to the court. Finally, I wasted more money, a lot of time & energy for being honest. And this is one of the many things on a long list of items. And I don’t want that.

b) I want punishment for the guy who is corrupt. “Everybody should be honest” doesn’t mean anything because I am only I and not Everybody. Ultimately, wherever there is corruption, I am paying for it in one form or the other. And I want right systems in place so that the corrupts can be booked.

c) There are some corruptions (like 2G scam, CWG scam) which are not prompted by general public. These are cases of pure abuse of power. It’s my tax money that has gone into making people rich. That same money could have gone in making better roads etc which would make my life better. I need a check on that.

I have seen many people giving this “Everybody should be honest” solution but frankly, I am yet to see anybody providing an execution plan for the same. There has never been a time in the history of mankind when everybody was honest.

Some people are honest and some have honesty thrust upon them.

Disconnected thoughts on Baba Ramdev, Jan Lokpal, Congress, Corruption & Democracy

I have been watching from far all the activities that are happening recently and I have been having a lot of random thoughts on this subject. Since, they are now bursting through my mind, I need to vent them out. So, here are my thoughts in random order…

We are talking about wrong issues. Baba Ramdev is not the issue. He may be a clown or a social reformist, I don’t care. I care about the corruption in the government machinery and that the corruption is open and that nothing is being done about that corruption. Baba Ramdev being opportunist (if he is an opportunist) is inconsequential. Though I would have had more respect for him had he not broken his fast like this but that’s fine. Corruption in government machinery is more important for mind-share.

If you don’t believe in Jan Lokpal and don’t want to support it for that reason, fine. Then support something that you believe in. But don’t say that you don’t believe in anything. Please *do* believe in something and support it. Corruption is at a very high scale, something needs to be done. Different people need to take the route that suits their value system and their way of operating. That’s fine. In freedom struggle, some people went with non-violence and some with violence. They both made an impact. The ones who didn’t do either didn’t make any impact. Please believe in something, do it and make an impact. That’s much more important than finding faults with what others are doing. And by the way, if you believe that bribing traffic cops is the root of all corruption, please stop doing that. At least do your part.

Celebrities are disgusting. And I find them even more disgusting now. Most of the people debating about Janlokpal Bill have not done any social work in their life. They have not stood up with people for the cause of those people. Everybody has a right to debate on this bill but not everybody has a right to try and mould public opinion. If media is not mature enough to bring right set of people on debate like platforms, try self-restraint.

Democracy in India is a failure so far. Let’s accept that. From time & again, people have voted for wrong government. So much so that there is no incentive left for a party to have good intentions. People of India have not created an incentive for the government to be just and uncorrupt. And we are still not doing that. And it’s not just about the masses but also about the classes. Democracy has failed because people have failed to understand the conditions under which Democracy works. Democracy puts a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of people (remember: by the people), however, people in India want to shy away from that responsibility. The government should do this, corporation should do that, a leader should come blah blah.

Congress has failed again & again. Oh wait, I think they have succeeded again & again. They are pretty good at keeping the government stable. BJP had so much problem with the coalition government but Congress seems to be so much at ease. On the other hand, BJP has failed. It has failed to provide an alternative. With so much corruption erupting everywhere, BJP is not able to mobilize people against the incumbents.

JanLokpal is not a long term solution. It cannot be. What we need is a bottom up governance and not top-down governance. Top-down governance can work in a democracy only if there is a bottom-up pressure to make it work. JanLokpal is one more form of top-down governance. However, it’s an urgent need of our times. At this point of time, any bottom-up effort for governance is so easy to suppress (is suppressed) that people need some kind of support. That’s where JanLokpal fits. Over a period of time, it’s likely to get as corrupt as any other institution unless the reasons that have created corruption in the first place are rooted out. However, to root out those reasons, for the time being, something is required to ensure that bottom up movements reach some positive conclusion in a reasonable amount of time.

Democracy is not about electing a government. Or to put it better, Democracy is not only about electing a government. It’s about participating in the governance. Especially when the governance is lacking. If we limit the meaning of democracy to just electing the government, we’ll end up in a mess like this. A mess where all that matters to the political parties is to win election and not providing good governance. And when winning is all that matters, there are many ways to accomplish it. Ways which are probably far easier than showing good governance. In fact, winning always requires manipulation regardless of the quality of work that you have done in the past. Elections today are won by manipulation and that’s not democracy. So, in a way, Democracy has not failed in India, India has failed to truly adopt democracy.

So, where do you think the issue is? Baba Ramdev’s frivolity OR non-democratic nature of JanLokpal Bill OR the shamelessness with which Congress has allowed the propagation of corruption OR our lack of participation in governance? And once you have identified the real issue (as per your evaluation), what’s the first step you are going to take?

Thoughts on “About Me”

One thing that has always made me uncomfortable is writing “About Me”. And being present on multiple social platforms has meant that I do it way more than I would like to.

So, I sat down to understand why I feel so uncomfortable in writing “About Me” whether it is in the form of a personal blurb or a professional headline. And finally, the conclusion that I reached was that there are two ways to write “About Me”: a) how I see myself, and b) how I want others to see me. And the right one would be the one that harmonizes both. That also explained why I’ve always liked this one.

Why age matters less

It was never about age. It was always about experience. It’s just that, in the days of yore, the way to gain more experience was to live more. There were very few avenues to gain different experiences, and I am not sure if people were particularly interested in gaining more and more experiences. There was a class of people that was more inclined to learn and they were respected even before they aged.

In the new world, there are lots of opportunities to learn and in general, there is a peer pressure to know more and more. The economic structure that rewards experience and knowledge in disproportionate (arguably) manner has created an atmosphere where people strive to gain experiences and knowledge.

Well, that’s why age matters less and less in the new age. It was never about age anyways.

Memories from the past

It seems to me that when you are unwell, the memories from yesteryears tend to fill your mind more than usual. I am just recovering from an episode of Malaria. During last 2 days, everything that I’ve looked at has reminded me of some incident from the past.

Is it because illness pulls you out of the world of future plans and your mind suddenly gets more space?

Finally!

So, finally, I have a blog once again. I started my blogging journey with blogspot, followed by LiveJournal which was followed by self-hosted insightstory.net.

And then, the server hosting insightstory.net crashed. LiveJournal, as a place, was rotting. And I was blog-less for a long time.

Thanks to my friend Janar, I got the motivation to setup by blog again. Just to settle a debate with him, I pulled up a few blog entries from the past and then I read more and more of what I had written in 2008, 2007, 2006 and even earlier. And I suddenly realized how good it was to write once in a while. There was no point in not-blogging.

So, I decided to bring my wordpress account to life. Thankfully, I could easily import my blogspot and livejournal blogs with a single click. And whatever I had lost at insightstory.net could be recovered from waybackmachine.org.

Not sure how much I’ll write given that soch.la keeps me busy and Facebook + Twitter provide good channels for a quickly giving vents to your thoughts. Anyway, it’s good to have an option for that just-in-case moment.

Leader’s fall from grace: From Belief To Pride

From the book “One Hundred Years of Solitude”

One night, Army General Aureliano asked Colonel Gerineldo Marquez:

“Tell me something, old friend: why are you fighting?”

“What other reason could there be, old friend?” Colonel Gerineldo Marquez answered. “For the great Liberal Party.”

“You’re lucky you know,” he answered. “As far as I’m concerned, I’ve only just realized that I am fighting out of pride.”

How many times has it happened with you that you took up a project or a challenge because you believed in a cause but ended up just fighting for your pride?

Be it a college election where you start out with a dream to improve faculty-student relations but you end up fighting with the focus that you don’t want to be a loser.

Or you may start a venture now because you believe that your idea can impact the world in a positive way but you end up dragging it along because you don’t want to accept defeat.

Or you may take up an assignment in your company because it will make your product better. But as you struggle with the inertia of other teams, you take it onto your pride to see the assignment through.

Examples are plenty, the net result is one. You start something because you believe in the cause and you just end up fighting out of your pride.

Why? Because as a leader, you struggle with several opposing forces. As an agent of change, you’ll face resistance, offense, and insult. People will come and praise you which will bloat your ego. People will also come and offend you which will hurt your ego. At times, you’ll try to move things and they’ll move,  bloating your ego. And at other times, you’ll try to move things and they’ll notmove, leaving you frustrated.

When things oscillate between appeasing your ego to hurting your ego, you develop a sense of higher self-esteem as well as a strong urge to protect it at all costs. Well, there you go. You started with the goal of making the world a better place and ended up with a self-centered life.

But fighting for your pride will not take you far. People will not support you. People don’t support leaders. People support a cause, a belief, a dream.

People didn’t support Mahatama Gandhi, they supported movement for independence; they supported method of non-violence. Imagine Gandhi fasting for several days not because he believed atrocities on the poor must be stopped; but because he was up against the district magistrate and wanted to teach him a lesson. Would he have got the support from people the way he did? No. People wouldn’t have even noticed him. Or would’ve laughed at him.

What made the difference for Gandhi? The fact that he was just fighting for the cause and not for his pride.

So, as a leader, stay focused on the cause. If you stop believing in it, just quit and walk away. There is no point in fighting for the pride. You’ll fail anyways…

Your top priority is just another errand for others

Finishing any sizable work always takes more time than expected, more than estimated, more than it should. Why?

Because for every work that you do, you have external dependencies. There are small bits of things that need to be done by others for you to complete your work. And those small bits of work are as important for the whole work as the big chunks are. Just as a small needle in a sewing machine is as important as the big motor driving the machine.

And those small bits of work need to be done by others. And even though these small things hold the highest priority for you, for others, it may be just a side thing; an errand to be run once in a while or when there is a mood.

And surprisingly, there are just too many of these small bits of work in any sizable amount of work. And unsurprisingly, because of their size (or rather lack of it), these bits are never visible when you make your grand plan. When you make the grand plan, you see big things and budget for them. But small things? Because they are invisible, they won’t be budgeted for. And they’ll take longer to finish because of external dependencies! After all, your highest priority item is just another errand for others 

Caught ya!

Anyway, there is no point in holding a magnifying glass and looking for small bits when estimating time. It’s too much of effort and you won’t be able to do it anyways (remember, these are too small to be seen when your mind is occupied with big items).

Just go by the rule of thumb – it takes twice the time, twice the money and will give you half the returns than what you expect.

Defendability of a Social App

While talking to Atul today afternoon over lunch, the issue of defendability of social apps came up. His comment was that in the web 2.0 paradigm, the biggest challenge is the defendability. Someone else can pick up your idea and execute and you can’t do anything about it. There are three main things here – a) Everything is pretty much open so there are mostly no trade secrets, b) There is no rocket science involved in the technology, so, it’s very easy to replicate it, c) Most of the stuff is built on top of open source code, so, anyone can mimic your functionality in no-time.

So, how do you defend the leadership of your social application? What barriers-to-entry can you create for others?

While thinking more about it, I realized that the real defendability of social applications is not to be found in technology but in something that’s at the core of social applications – i.e. social. Yes. What’s there in the name of technology for Wikipedia? In fact, most of the other wiki softwares are better than MediaWiki. Yet, can we have another Wikipedia? What’s there in Facebook? What’s there in LinkedIn? In any of the popular social applications on the web today, technology is neither a barrier, nor an advantage. It’s all social.

Earlier, if you were to build a product, you’ll build some fancy technology. Building that technology will be the real challenge and also the real asset later on. That technology will put the barrier to entry of other players.

However, in the social application world (or the web 2.0 world), the real challenge when building the application is social, and when that challenge is solved, the real asset is also social.

For Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace and others like them, the challenge was not to develop any fancy technology. It was rather to develop a social system in which their users could do something useful and also mobilising those potential users around their concept. Once it was done, their success cannot be replicated by anyone else.

So, when we think social apps, we have to think really social. For challenges that we solve and for the competitive advantages that we build.