Sunday 18 June 2006

The Premium on Life

When I was in London for around 8 months in 2001-2002 I used to marvel at the content of their news. An ordinary person like me being kidnapped or going missing would typically occupy the headlines on all news broadcasts for weeks at a stretch. But back in India a similar incident would have to really stand out to even merit a mention. Maybe it is due to the burgeoning population of India, but somehow the life of a person doesn't seem to hold much value in the greater scheme of things. People get shot dead and the culprits walk free because they have managed to buy the witnesses out. Ask Jessica Lal or Priyadarshini Mattoo's relatives. Or the relatives of the BMW hit and run victims. Vermin like Manu Sharma, Santosh Kumar Singh and Sanjeev Nanda are murderers walking free.

I had just started work on my first job in the erstwhile WebTek in Bangalore. Typically the first couple of months of one's professional life are spent in finding one's bearings. Things were no different for me: I used to sample different places to eat every evening (I did not know how to cook), I was saving up for buying a two-wheeler and I was trying to make new friends.

My friend Rohit Khandekar was visiting Bangalore for a couple of weeks for a conference in IISc. Along with my housemates Abhishek Saxena and Umesh Batra we made plans to do a day-long trip to Mysore. Roughly at the same time that we were returning from Mysore at night a veteran Kannadiga thespian called Rajkumar was kidnapped along the same route by the notorious sandalwood smuggler Veerappan.

The next day office closed early. The reason was that fans of Rajkumar had started rioting in parts of the city and our company's management did not want to put us in a situation where we would have to brave riots to go home. Those days I was finalising the purchase of my motorbike. The bike was decided, registration was done and the balance amount needed to be paid. While I would have the entire balance amount when my salary came in, pay-day was still a few days away. So I had decided to take a loan from Abhishek for a few days to speed up the process. Taking advantage of the fact that office was out I decided to visit the HSBC ATM in Manipal Centre on Dickenson Road with Abhishek.

Abhishek put in his ATM card and withdrew Rs. 1000/-. After closing the transaction he realised that he was supposed to withdraw Rs. 5000/-. So he put his card into the ATM machine again. And then a mob appeared at the end of the road opposite Manipal Centre. And the machine started taking very long to process his transaction. As the mob drew closer we started to panic. The card was still stuck!!! The mob was around 30m away now. The card came out. We took the card and the money and fled the scene from another exit of Manipal Centre. That evening we learnt that the mob had torn down the ATM. We counted our blessings.

This kind of a tale has, I am sure, happened to quite a few people. Hell, I remember sitting in an autorickshaw as a 12-year-old not 20m away from a burning bus in Hyderabad during the Ram Janmabhoomi - Babri Masjid flare-up in 1990-1991 (when L. K. Advani was arrested during V. P. Singh's regime). I also remember sitting in London when not far from my parents' home in Baroda there was communal carnage instigated by Narenda Modi.

People talk of India's diversity in glowing terms. Indeed there is no other country anywhere in the world that has such a rich blend of culture, tradition and people. Ironically it is this diversity that gets India into trouble every now and then. Just consider:

  • It is ridiculously simple to cause a riot between Hindus and Muslims. All it needs is a few miscreants.
  • The esteemed elected body of India managed to cause mass upheaval and subsequent massacre of the otherwise communally peaceful Sikhs.
  • You can give special privileges to one section of society (and be assured of its fealty) and make the other sections of society completely hostile to this one.
  • You can board a train from Delhi to Calcutta and be sure of a fight happening between people of UP and Bihar.
The diversity gets exploited by random freaks like Arjun Singh or zealots of the Sang Parivaar or bigots like Narendra Modi for reasons that rational thinking humans would have found to point solely to vote banks. It is indeed interesting that the politicians strive to keep people backward and divided just to cash in on their misery and differences. Sounds very much like anti-virus companies wanting Microsoft to have virus attacks so that they can fix them and make money!
Paschatey rekhechho jaarey se tomarey paschatey tanibe
- Rabindranath Tagore
It is indeed ironic that Tagore's quote about people whom we are leaving behind pulling us back should continue to bite us 60 years after our independence. An Indian's life seems to be just as valuable as its rulers deem fit!

Tuesday 6 June 2006

Consumption of Income

My dear friend Vivek Haldar has often talked to me about how a country should have a consumption tax instead of an income tax, arguing about the merits of the former. His contention is simple - why be taxed for something that you have earned? Taxes, he argues, should be levied upon people when they are trying to purchase something. Or when they are using a means of transport like a road. That way people earning more will not feel shortchanged by income tax. Also, people with moral objections to supporting unknown people via schemes like social security will have reason to be happy about.

Savvy? Not so. Well-intentioned though the plan may be, it is fraught with difficulties. How will a country pay for things like defence if there is no income tax? Ok. So we can have a flat tax for defence. And how will people whose job doesn't involve generating any profits (like the President?) get paid? Well, there could be another flat tax for all administrative and judiciary management, which will cover things like law and order etc.

Then there is a question of quantisation. Are these flat taxes we are talking about going to be fixed values or percentages of income? A fixed value tax might completely wipe out the income of a person earning little and the tax will be for things that probably concern him very little. And a percentage of income tax essentially means going back to square 1 - you are looking at the capability of a person to pay and then you are making that person pay accordingly.

Can a compromise be struck? The more I think about it the more sense it makes to have the plain old income tax as opposed to a consumption tax, simply because the number of things where it is difficult to define consumption is simply overwhelming. Here are examples:

  • Space research, or for that matter, any kind of research that is funded by the government. None of us is a consumer of research, but we all agree that we are benefited by it in some way or the other.
  • Use of intangible resources. It is possible to track how much of the country's roads we are using by simply tracking the mileage on our vehicles and taxing us accordingly. But what about cases like using manpower for work. Let's say you own a company and employ a fairly large number of people. You are, by virtue of using these people to attain your profits, using resources of the country. But how are you going to pay taxes for them? And to whom?
A lot of similar examples can be advanced in this regard.

Now let us approach the problem from a different angle. Let us assume that we have handled the complex issues of defining consumption and thereby put together a taxation structure in place. Now let us look at some numbers. An average single person in the US pays a certain amount of tax each year. If we were to get rid of income tax and make the entire system consumption based, then extracting the same amount of money in taxes could result in a phenomenal amount of taxation on what you consume. You might be paying 3 times the cost of fuel in taxes for the distance you travel.

One of the contentions of taxpayers is, why pay taxes for social security benefits when all you are doing is creating a safety net for yourself and paying for other people of your age to get along in life. Point taken, but again, with a pinch of salt. The fact is that if unemployed or homeless people aren't given a helping hand they soon resort to catastrophic means with disastrous consequences.
Of course. Over the ages our weapons have grown more sophisticated. With Gotham we tried a new one. Economics. But we underestimated certain of Gotham's citizens, such as your parents. Gunned down by one of the very people they were trying to help. Create enough hunger and everyone becomes a criminal. Their deaths galvanized the city into saving itself, and Gotham has limped on ever since. We are back to finish the job. And this time no misguided idealists will get in the way. Like your father, you lack the courage to do all that is necessary. If someone stands in the way of true justice, you simply walk up behind them and stab them in the heart.
- Ra's Al Ghul to Batman in Batman Begins
The upshot - while income tax is not the nicest way to spend one's hard-earned money it is a tried and tested method of moving a society forward. Unless we come up with answers to the various issues that plague the assessment of consumption and how to tax it, we are better off with income tax.

Monday 5 June 2006

Googly for Google

Though the Google Watch site has been around for quite some time now it was only recently that I came upon it. The site kicked quite a few thoughts into action, not because it is accurate, which it is quite often not, but because it set off the whole line of thinking around Eloi and Morlocks.

Google Watch's Daniel Brandt talks about Gmail being creepy, how Google is a privacy hazard, how its caching is a copyright violation and how Google Print is potentially depriving authors of royalties. Naturally, given the popularity of Google, the site has a fairly large number of detractors and takers.

But the one thing they love more than a hero is to see a hero fail
- Green Goblin to Spider-Man in Spider-Man
Well, Google is not a hero of the society, but it certainly is its darling. And while I come off as a person with a bias towards Google:
  1. I don't work for Google.
  2. I don't own their stock.
  3. I wish I could do at least one of the two above.
  4. I do believe that a lot of things that come out of Google's stables could use an overhaul, like the accuracy of Google Maps and the polish of Google Talk.
Daniel Brandt's crusade is laudable. He points out a lot of shortcomings of the PageRank algorithm, like how easy it is to fool, how "Back Links" often play truant when it comes to deciding the relevance of a page and so on. And these are indeed true. But I believe that in most other aspects Mr. Brandt gets it wrong.

One thing that piqued my interest when Gmail made its entry in the market was how and why would people kick up such a big fuss about targetted advertising. Most people aren't averse to having spam filters and virus checkers on their email accounts. Yahoo, Microsoft and every other email provider worth its name provides these facilities. And these are automated tools that go through each of your mails before deciding if something has a virus or is from a suspect source. So why complain with Gmail, when all it is doing in addition to checking for junk in your mail is putting in some ads in context of your original mail? In any case, the negative publicity seems to have paid off and most lay people shy away from opening Gmail accounts.

The privacy hazard accusation is another thing altogether. It is also something that I am least equipped to address, coming from a place where privacy is probably among the last of people's concerns. Hence I will defer to Mr. Brandt's comments regarding the easily available information about a person, though I must say that the only way cookies will cause you harm is if someone very adept at extracting information from cookies has access to the computer you use to access the internet, particularly to the folders where your browser stores the cookies for you. Google is not that villain.

That brings me to caching and Google Print. Google keeps obvious copies of pages in its cache. As of today so do Yahoo and MSN, but not Windows Live or Ask.com. By obvious what I mean is that it is difficult, if not impossible to fetch results from the web fast without actually having a copy of the pages on an instance local to you. So even though Windows Live Search or Ask.com don't display their cache to you, it doesn't mean they don't have one. They simply choose not to show it. Now, if you don't want your page to be available and available fast for any web-search, why would you want a webpage at all? Having search engines throw up your page at the top of a heap is good advertisement for your site and caching certainly attains that goal. As for Google Print, it aims at scanning all books in a library and making them available through a search. A search on Google Print, besides showing a few pages of the book does nothing else. You certainly cannot read the entire book without having to pay the author any royalty. As I see it Google Print is one way of representing a library online. When you have a membership to a library you still get to read the books there, or at least excerpts from them without having to buy them. Is that a copyright violation? Google, by bringing the library online is, I believe, simplifying things to a great extent.

The entire policy of policing Google puts a curious spin on things. Sites like Google Watch would have us believe that Google has only one interest - information on our lives for its money. In this way an analogy can be drawn between Google and the Morlocks of our title - Google provides us information, while secretly harvesting information on us and setting us up for slaughter. Google Watch indeed says that people matter nought to Google.
Pointy Haired Boss: I've been saying for years that "Employees are our most valuable asset"... It turns out that I was wrong. Money is our most valuable asset. Employees are ninth.

Wally: I'm afraid to ask what came in eighth.

Pointy Haired Boss: Carbon Paper.

- Dilbert's Still Pumped From Using the Mouse by Scott Adams
I am, however, not so sure. Google prides itself on good search results, but most people at Google itself consider it an advertising company. They also know that they are only going to be this rich as long as they manage to stay ahead of the curve with their core competency - search. The key rule of advertising is to not rub people the wrong way. When people find out that a company is scamming them, they boycott the company of their own volition. Google, by dishing up innovation through technology and not actually charging any of its users for anything will manage to stay the people's favourtie for long, or at least until something better comes by.

Enough said. The intent of this page is not to sell itself by advertisement of Google or Google Watch: I have deliberately tried to avoid any "Search Engine Optimisation" here, apart from having written this in my blog. I do believe that not only does Mr. Brandt make a lot of good points, but also that quite a lot of his statements that I don't agree with provide healthy food for thought. The issue here is not whether a company is getting fascinatingly rich, but whether the contributors to its wealth get anything in return. I believe I get a decent return out of using Google's products (I also get a lot out of using Microsoft and Yahoo's products) and I don't believe my privacy is compromised. I consider myself satisfied.

My very first post after restarting my blog and I already seem to have violated the objective of being objective. But then, perhaps one of the most biased statements possible is, "This statement is unbiased", by means of which the statement automatically biases itself in its favour.

I will sign off by pointing out a classic paper, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson. Whom will you trust?

Sunday 4 June 2006

The First Post ... Again

I used to have a blog called Cockroach Cluster. Actually I still have it. Considering that the last post to that was more than 2 years back I decided to start one afresh rather than continue with the old one.

Why did I call my previous blog "Cockroach Cluster"? A slight familiarity with Harry Potter will tell you that "Cockroach Cluster" is a kind of candy that the kids of the series have. That blog was created in April 2004, long before the release of "Half Blood Prince". Had it been written after "Half Blood Prince", I would probably have picked up the title "Kreacher Rocks", simply on the basis of the following dialog:

"No, of course I didn't," said Harry quickly. "Dobby, you can sleep, all right? But has either of you found out anything?" he hastened to ask, before Hermione could intervene again.

"Master Malfoy moves with a nobility that befits his pure blood," croaked Kreacher at once. "His features recall the fine bones of my mistress and his manners are those of—"

"Draco Malfoy is a bad boy!" squeaked Dobby angrily. "A bad boy who — who —" He shuddered from the tassel of his tea cozy to the toes of his socks and then ran at the fire, as though about to dive into it. Harry, to whom this was not entirely unexpected, caught him around the middle and held him fast. For a few seconds Dobby struggled, then went limp.

- Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling

And a few paragraphs later:
"Yeah, we don't need to hear about you being in love with Malfoy," Harry told Kreacher. "Let's fast forward to where he's actually been going."

Kreacher bowed again, looking furious, and then said, "Master Malfoy eats in the Great Hall, he sleeps in a dormitory in the dungeons, he attends his classes in a variety of—"

"Dobby, you tell me," said Harry, cutting across Kreacher. "Has he been going anywhere he shouldn't have?"

- Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling

Needless to say, Kreacher had me in splits.

Back to the point. What is this blog supposed to have? I am not particularly sure of that, but I guess I will fill it up as I go on. From the title I would have you believe that the intent is to analyse two sides of issues discussed. From H. G. Wells' "The Time Machine" the Eloi and the Morlocks are two races that the humans have evolved to. The races have contrasting characteristics, hence the allusion. But analysing contrasting sides of every issue is very much of a challenge and it is difficult to prevent an element of bias from creeping in. Nevertheless I shall try. Whether I succeed or not can only be assessed in the months to come.