Author Archives: vinod

More Edumacation

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A great OpEd quoted (in full?) at the IndianEconomy blog talks about the “Unknown Education Revolution” in India –

Ain’t IIT But It Gets the Job Done

Walking around the hot summer streets of Sangam Vihar–Delhi’s largest slum colony sprawled over 150 acres and home to 4 lakh people–in 2005, Aditi Bhargava noticed that almost every street had a school…These schools were often just holes in the wall or a room with a few benches populated by eager children.

And in case you’re wondering if these schools are any good –

Studies carried out in India all share the common conclusion that private-school students outperform their government-school counterparts. For example, in a 2005 Delhi study [11], James Tooley found that children in low-budget unrecognized private schools did 246% better than government school children on a standardized English test, with around 80% higher average marks in mathematics and Hindi…more than 80% of government-school teachers send their own children to a private school…

As noted in an earlier post about private education in India, when it comes to capitalism the poor often have much to teach the rich. In this particular case, the lessons from the piece seem directly targeted at some of the biggest dogmas which dominate education reform debates here in the US. Continue reading →

Fencing Out The Other

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The ever-interesting Stratpage has a summary of the next generation of Berlin Walls’ being built all over the world.

Good Fences = Good Neighbors

Of course, unlike the last go around, these walls revert to old skool role of keeping undesirables out rather than locking your citizenry in –

March 4, 2007: There a lot of large scale barrier systems going up in the world…

…Israel is building a 700 kilometers barrier between itself and the Palestinian West Bank.

…Pakistan is building a barrier along its 2,400 kilometer border with Afghanistan .

…Kuwait is upgrading its 215 kilometers of barrier along its Iraq border.

…Spain is building barriers around its two enclaves in Morocco

And so on. But the biggest wall of them all is actually being built by India –

India is building a 4,000 kilometer barrier along its border with Bangladesh. Various Indian rebel groups have been using bases in Bangladesh, and the local government has been reluctant to shut them down. That’s partly because of the large number of illegal migrants moving from Bangladesh to India.

For comparison, the oft-talked about, but never really implemented, US-Mexico border fence would be a full 1000km shorter than India’s Great Wall . And appropriately, the debate surrounding India’s wall echoes familiar arguments and issues from south of the US border.

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I’m not a Cop, I Just Play One on TV

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In the annals of teaching, there’s an old saying that things start getting twisted when the metric becomes the goal rather than simply the metric. Sadly the warning holds in both the classroom and the field of conflict with tragic results. Stratpage reports on the bizarre case of a staged Islamic militant sting operation in Kashmir –

February 6, 2007: In Kashmir, police investigators uncovered a strange incident of murder and resume building by ambitious, and amoral, police. Two police commanders have been arrested for killing innocent Kashmiri Moslems, and claiming that the dead men were Islamic militants. The policemen enhance their promotion prospects as a result of successful encounters with Islamic militants. But new security measures on the border (Israeli night vision equipment, new sensors, UAVs) have made it much more difficult for the Islamic terrorists to get from their training camps in Pakistan, into Kashmir. The shortage of terrorists to kill led some police to go after innocent civilians. This is a publicity disaster for India, which had been gaining more support from most Kashmiris for a peace deal. The accused police will have to be prosecuted honestly and vigorously in order to calm down Kashmiri public opinion. So far, four police, including two commanders, have been arrested for three murders. There may have been many more.

Other press accounts color in more of the details –

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Friedman on India, II

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A few months before “Uncle Milt” passed away, he granted an interview with the WSJ’s ever-excellent Tunku Varadarajan.. While the interview overall is pretty short, there are a couple good India nuggets –

India–how do you assess its prospects?

Friedman: Fifty years ago, as a consultant to the Indian minister of finance, I wrote a memo in which I said that India had a great potential but was stagnating because of collectivist economic policies. India has finally started to disband those collectivist policies and is reaping its reward. If they can continue dismantling the collectivist policies, their prospects are very bright.

Any thoughts on a China versus India comparison?

Friedman: Yes. Note the contrast. China has maintained political and human collectivism while gradually freeing the economic market. This has so far been very successful but is heading for a clash, since economic freedom and political collectivism are not compatible. India maintained political democracy while running a collectivist economy. It is now unwinding the latter, which will strengthen freedom of all kinds, so in that respect it is in a better position than China.

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p>Color me cautiously optimistic. While in the long run I tend to agree with Mr. Friedman that political freedom and economic freedom go hand in hand, in the short term, there’s no shortage of demagoguery that readily attacks both.

Previous SM coverage on Friedman and India here.

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DJ Rekha Rocks CES

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Last week, the never ending drumbeat of biz travel took me to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. The show was, to put it mildy, a zoo – even by Vegas standards. If you aren’t a fan of the teeming throngs of humanity (over 150K in this case), then CES probably isn’t your schtick. First, take the surrealness that’s Vegas any other time of the year. Then, crank it up by putting a substantial portion of the export sales of East Asia on the line. Sprinkle in “kick off the year” business frenzy and you end up with the pomp and circumstance that’s CES.

While the show itself borders on obscene with the high end electronics, walls o’ plasmas, booth babes, audio equipment, cars, cellphones, computers and so on…. the real craziness happens after convention hours. There, Fortune 100 companies revert to playground one-upsmanship but on a multi-million dollar scale with dinner banquets, parties, concerts and the sorts of gala’s you can only have in Las Vegas. Like many things related to biz travel, it sounds like it might be sorta fun — and it is, at first — but the whole thing becomes a little numbing after a while.

As I’ve mentioned in previous blogposts, my company is heavily involved in the nascent “mobile broadcast” space — put simply, it’s where television and mobile phones intersect. And the CES-highlight for our space was Verizon’s announcment that their MobileTV service will launch in late 1Q / 2007.

To celebrate this & a few other announcements, Verizon rented out the world famous Nobu restaurant at the Hard Rock. Their party was first class all the way with Nobu’s reknowned sushi chefs taking guests’ orders in realtime and hand filling them on the spot — ensuring no more than a few precious seconds from when the roll is expertly patted closed to landing in your convention starved mouth.

So, in the midst of all this mass market, Vegas-kitsch tinged, first-class-ness, imagine how cool it was to discover they had hired DJ Rekha to lay down the beat in the main tent…

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Turnaround at the IAF

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For folks who follow these sorts of things, one depressing, ongoing set of statistics from the Indian Air Force (IAF) has been it’s horrible, almost Soviet safety record. For example, back in 1999, Rediff headlined –

IAF has one of the highest accident rates in the world

The staggeringly high number of crashes involving Indian Air Force planes, especially the MiG variant fighters, is due to the lack of advance jet trainers, inadequate maintenance and inefficient technical upgradation of the fighters, say senior air force officials. The air force has lost at least 20 fighters in the last nine months, most of them being MiG-21s flown by young officers just out of the Air Force Academy.

…Air force sources admitted that IAF has one of the highest accident rates in the world and that most of the ill-fated pilots – it has lost over 85 pilots in the last one decade – were very young officers.

When it comes to the complex relationship between a military and the underlying society & culture that support it, I’m a classicist — I don’t necessarily believe the trite aphorism that Might makes Right. And I certainly don’t agree with the reverse, victim-glorifying post-modern formulation – Might makes Wrong. But I do contend that the Right can build physical Might.

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Desi’s Got Back (updated!)

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One upside of my relentless biz travel is airplane time to catch up on reading. Coming back from Hong Kong, I started digging into Niall Ferguson’s controversial Empire – a work previously covered on SM here. I personally find the book fascinating, well written, thoroughly researched and, dare I say, a balanced portrait of the whys, hows, and modern effects of British colonialism – warts, accomplishments, and all.

But, rather than dive into yet another post-colonial-legacy debate, I thought mutineers might be interested in one specific internal difference between the Brits in India vs. elsewhere in the empire – they had a much higher tendency to “go native” –

Until the first decades of the nineteenth century, the British in India had not the slightest notion of trying to Anglicize India and certainly not to Christianize it. On the contrary, it was the British themselves who often took pleasure in being orientalized. [Empire, pg 133]

Later chapters explore how this Prime Directive of sorts would change dramatically – in part leading to and following the Sepoy Mutiny. But, in the mean time, what explains the “orientalized” Brits? Ferguson identifies one culprit – the irresistible allure of our desi sista’s. Many a Brit discovered, apparently, that once you go brown, you stop foolin’ around–

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Capitalism: Gujus vs. Bengalis

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Prashant points us at yet another interesting, Desi economic history piece by Gautam Bastian. In it, Gautam quotes a provocative Telegraph OpEd that discusses a surprising diversity in the Desi Intellegentsia’s attitudes towards the market. Instead of the uniform, Pavlovian rejection Uncle Milt experienced, the Telegraph’s Ramachandra Guha points at a specific braindrain of Guju econ knowledge –

Back in the Sixties, it used to be said that India’s most successful export were economists. Our economy was resolutely insulated from the rest of the world, but our economists occupied high posts in famous universities in Europe and America. Later, the joke was amended to say that the reason India’s economy was mediocre was because its economists were world-class. No South Korean was a professor of political economy at Cambridge; no Malaysian had been awarded the Nobel Prize. But their economies grew at an impressive 8 per cent, whereas ours stayed stuck at 3.5 per cent, also known as the “Hindu” rate of growth.

My own theory about Indian economists is more specific and hopefully less facetious. It runs as follows; Gujarati economists place faith in the market, while Bengali economists are prone to trust the state. In the Fifties, when P.C. Mahalonobis drafted the Soviet-inspired second five year plan, A.D. Shroff responded by starting the Forum of Free Enterprise. In the Sixties and the Seventies, about the only economist of pedigree advocating Indian integration with the world economy was the Gujarati, Jagdish Bhagwati. He was opposed by an array of Marxists, many of whom (naturally) were Bengali.

As Gautam notes, several prominent thinkers have attacked the the broad question of “if intellectuals are so smart, how come so many have been so wrong about markets?” (Heck, little old me, in my blogging youth tried to add on to Nozick). But by slicing and dicing across socio-cultural lines within India, Guha takes the question in a different direction. While I’d heard the stereotype of Bengali Marxists (keep in mind that my homestate – Kerala – has its fair share as well) I wasn’t aware that Guju’s were responsible for the counter pole. Biz friendly Gujus, eh? I suppose many stereotypes start with a grain of truth somewhere….

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Friedman on India

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It should be no surprise to most here that I’m a strident fan of Milton Friedman and that his passing was quite a bit more than a garden variety celeb obit for me. While I’m a geek of rather high proportions, there are quite a few of us for whom the loss left an almost personal hollowness.

“The current danger is that India will stretch into centuries what took other countries only decades” – Milton Friedman, 1963Because he called San Francisco home, I actually had the honor of seeing Uncle Milt speak in person about 2 years ago at a benefit gala for a thinktank I’m a contributor to.

And earlier this spring, I had another opportunity to see Milton & Rose Friedman in person at the unveiling of a PBS documentary on his life and times. At the time, I implored several friends to join me with the argument that “at 94, homey ain’t gonna be around too much longer – see him while you can.” Unfortunately, a bout of flu kept Friedman from joining us that evening (Rose did, however make it) and alas, my words were sadly prophetic.

Interestingly, at that event, Gary Becker was on tap for Milton & Rose’s intro. In nearly any other context, Becker’s own Nobel Prize would have garnered him a headline act. But given Friedman’s ginormous stature, Becker’s intro speech was instead somewhat rudely met with idle chatter from the back of the banquet hall. You’d think scoring a Nobel prize would earn a little more respect – apparently not so when you’re between an audience and the Friedman’s.

‘Tis the curse of the passage of a generation that we take for granted previous, hard fought accomplishments – both material and intellectual. In its extreme, we just assume that he world we see around us had to be rather than recgonize the role of volition, creativity, and intellectual accomplishment which enabled it to be.

In Friedman, India, and recent economic history, we see all this wrapped up in a neat tidy little package. So much that seems obvious now was contrarian then. And so many of the arguments we use to excuse and ignore the outcome of disastrous policy was plainly predicted and evident decades ago.

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I’m Not Vinod But I Play Him on TV

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For folks outside of the tech biz, my job is a little hard to explain… but one way of summarizing it is that my startup (www.roundbox.com) is involved in next generation delivery technology for television to cellphones. To use one of my oft-invoked phrases, the gig’s a little bit geek (there have been multiple physics / EE / CS PhD’s minted in the devilish minutae here) and a little bit glam (it’s TV afterall). One interesting aspect is that I end up rubbing shoulders with folks around the globe who spend way more time watching TV than I do….

Twins Separated At Birth?

So… I’m at an international TV conference this week in NYC (hence the scheduled meetup on Saturday) and a guy from the Canadian Broadcast Corp (CBC) comes up to me in a sheepish, “I’m honored to meet you” sort of way and asks if I’m “Shaun Majumder.”

Since he’s now directly in front of me, the guy has a chance to read my name tag and can clearly see that I’m not Shaun. And despite being one of the guys who’s “in the know” when it comes to arcane tech specs & industry consortia, I’d never even heard the name…. My new Canuck colleague was taken aback and said “Man, my friend and I back there could have sworn that you were this big TV star in Canada named Shaun Majumder…”

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