End of Land Cruiser Accident Case?

HEARING// The hearing for Salman Khan’s 2002 hit-and-run case, which was expected to be held on August 19, has been delayed. A Mumbai sessions court had framed charges against the popular Bollywood actor on July 24, 2013. The court had said that the actor will now be tried under Section 304(III) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). If found guilty, Salman could face 10 years in prison. Earlier, Salman had been tried by a metropolitan magistrate under the less severe Section 304A of the IPC relating to rash and negligent driving, which stipulates a maximum of two years in prison. However, the metropolitan magistrate, after examining 17 witnesses in the case, had invoked the more serious charge under Section 304(III) of the IPC against the actor. Salman had challenged this order in the sessions court. One person was killed and four others were injured when a Land Cruiser allegedly driven by Salman in an inebriated state ran over a group of footpath dwellers in Mumbai's Bandra suburb in the early hours of September 28, 2002.

I HAVE seen many American institutions from the inside both as a student and as a faculty member. I often asked myself—Why is it that they are so good? If you look at any of the rankings of universities you will find American universities at the top. I looked at Shanghai Jiao Tong and found that 17 of the top 20 were American. If you look at the top 100, two-thirds of them are Americans. This is simply out of proportion, so, I asked myself: Why is it that this is the case?

And the one thing that I noticed that was different from India, or England, where I had also studied, was the deep involvement of alumni. They were very active on the board of trustees and constantly in touch with the university. They would come back for home coming, games and convocations and the ties were very strong. The conjecture that I had was: may be this had something to do with it. I started to look at the literature and the research on this and it turned out that nobody had explored that angle. It took me a year to reach out to all the top 100 universities and collect the data on the governance because not all of this data is public.

When I started analysing it the pattern became very clear. Even after controlling for other factors like age, public or private status, religious or non-religious status etc, the percentage of the alumni on the board was a huge predictor of success defined in any of three ways: in terms of rank on the various lists, endowment or selectivity. In all three measures the link was pretty striking.

When I started studying Harvard, I went about looking at the origins of alumni governance and the striking thing that I found out was that until 1865 Harvard was a government university—a sarkari college as it were. But, even before 1865, it was run by the alumni because it was controlled by the legislation of the state of Massachusetts and Harvard alumni were very prominent in the legislature. So from roughly early 1700 to early 1800 Harvard was alumni governed. It was not under law or de jure as they say but it was entirely a coincidence that Harvard alumni were so prominent in the legislature. But then immigration started specially after the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s. So suddenly Harvard alumni were not in control of the legislature. The new people who came in were very populist and the kinds of pressures that they started putting on the university were: you are too elitist, you charge too much, you admit too few, you teach the wrong things. This was exactly what institutions of excellence in India were charged with some years ago.

What it did was that for 20 years there was a sort of paralysis in terms of governance because there was this tussle between the university and the state. In the end things became so bad that government money for the university stopped. Private donations were also sequestered by the state—essentially people were contributing money but the state would not let the university use it. Because of this alumni also started to withhold their contributions. State started to intervene in the appointment of faculty. The final straw was in 1862 when they stopped the appointment of the President—so you can imagine the entire administration was becoming paralysed. At that point Harvard went to the legislature and said : Look if you want to kill us, kill us. But if you want us to be successful give control back to us and our alumni. It took three years to make this lobbying effort to go through. Interestingly in 1864 the US Civil War ended and many Harvard alumni had served in a very distinguished capacity in the war. There was a lot of goodwill in the environment for Harvard alumni which helped the bill to go through. But it was an uphill battle and even after three years of lobbying in the end it passed by just two votes in the senate and by one in the court (equivalent of the house in Massachusetts)—so it passed narrowly. But since 29th April 1865 which is when the bill passed, Harvard’s control has been given entirely to the Alumni. So, of the 30 members of the Board of Overseers every single one is selected by alumni. So I argue that the reason that Harvard is so good is that for its entire history—except for a small period in the beginning and a small period in the middle—it has been controlled by the alumni. Most universities take centuries to become world class. But many American universities like Duke, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins and Chicago became very famous very fast and that was also because very quickly after their founding they were turned over to the alumni.

There are three main reasons as to why the faculty is so good. 1) Throughout your life, even after you are 70 or 80 you are known as the graduate of a particular university. The prestige of the university is tied very closely to the warm glow that individuals feel about themselves. No set of individuals has more interest of the institution at heart than its alumni. By transferring control to alumni you give the control to those who value the reputation of the university the most. 2) Normally boards have problems with asymmetric information. It’s difficult for them to get information on what’s happening on the ground. Even here, alumni have double advantage: having studied there they know how the system works and through their own alumni networks they can get access to information very quickly. 3) Then of course it’s only the alumni who feel for the institution and act from their heart giving money for art appreciation, languages or films—which would be difficult to fund otherwise.

Apart from the governance there are many other reasons as to why India needs time to catch up. There are many government committees looking into this. There are hundreds of little things that need to be improved. But my point is that you can fix a 100 little problems or you can fix one big problem. The one big problem that you can fix of course is governance. We must get the governance right. At this point most of the elite institutions tend to be public—either the central government or the state government has control. And that control is with a very heavy hand. Yes they fund them but they also smother them.

The point that I am socialising through India and also across the world now is that transferring governance to the alumni maybe a good way to quickly take universities from where they are to a higher level. This is not just an issue for India but also for European universities— the German and the French universities in particular suffer from many of the same problems. Too much government interference, not enough autonomy and inability to raise money. When alumni are in charge other alumni know that the money will be well spent so they also give a lot more. In fact, the moment Harvard was formally transferred to the alumni within 10 years its endowment tripled and in the next 10 years it tripled again. So within 20 years its endowment increased ten times. Interestingly there are only a few institutions which have had a lot of interaction with the alumni. Not in a formal sense but more in an informal involvement. Presidency College which is now the Presidency University has a very active alumni advisory board—not a governing board. The other interesting case is Institute of Chemical Technology which used to be the University Department of Chemical Technology. Most people may not know this but it has alumni such as Mukesh Ambani, Kallam Anji Reddy, Narotam Sekhsaria and others and they are the ones who have been very actively involved. My suggestion is to make this involvement which is informal at this point, formal by inducting these people in the board and formally saying that look this university is yours: you take it forward.

The other interesting entity which is alumni governed and as a result excels is Doon School. I believe its 100 per cent alumni controlled at the moment. The three older IIMs and five older IITs have well-established alumni bodies. Nobody cares about them more than the alumni. If you think about it, they are the flowers of India, the very best of what the Indian education system has produced—who better to take this forward than the alumni of these institutions? I am now in the process of socialising this idea in the government, corporate, academia and in the research world, worldwide. There really should not be any difference. In the US, whether they are public or private, both have found a way to involve their alumni in governance. However, Indians institutions of excellence are public. The ones which are private tend to be at the college level or specialised medical schools or similar entities. For instance St Stephens College, Hindu College, St Xaviers College in Mumbai are private but tend to be small. Nonetheless alumni involvement can help even there.

A forum for all, that's Reddit for you

It is the biggest social phenomenon most folks just don’t know about. Yet, when the social news and entertainment website Reddit bills itself as “The front page of the Internet”, it isn’t some hyperbolic startup vision statement. Founded in 2005, Reddit really only saw an explosion of traffic in 2011, and that’s been rising ever since. Last year alone, Reddit averaged more than three billion page views a month and in excess of 34 million unique visitors! Heck, it even got US President Obama’s attention, who conducted a ‘Ask Me Anything’ interview on a Reddit forum last year where the Internet populace grilled him on everything from Internet freedom to his favorite basketball player. So, what is Reddit really?

Possibly the best way to answer that question is to tell you what it isn’t. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, which focus heavily on who you are and what you have to say, Reddit is all about the content. Simply put, Reddit is the largest aggregator of user submitted content on the Internet. Any Reddit user (a Redditor, for short) can submit text, image, video and link posts, and other users from the community then either ‘upvote’ or ‘downvote’ the content. This ensures that good content buoys to the top of the page (and the really popular and fast-rising content goes to the coveted front page), and everything else gets pushed down. Comments and responses to the content are allowed, and these too can be upvoted or downvoted. The result is a potpourri of the web’s most interesting, weird and controversial content, a human-voted mosaic of “what’s more interesting on the web right now”, if you will.

To make sense of all this content, Reddit is organized into several tens of thousands of categories or ‘subreddits’, each of which is a community unto itself comprised of folks who share a common interest. Take a walk down subreddit lane, and you’ll be amazed by how different one subreddit is from another, both in terms of tone and quality of content (and conversation). You can subscribe to as many or as few subreddits as you like, and should you not find one for your interest area, creating a new one takes just a matter of minutes. Like other social networks, you can friend other Redditors, and users have publicly visible profiles where all their comments and submitted posts are listed. Best of all, you can use Reddit without leaving a trace of your real life online—Reddit allows for truly anonymous conversations, and no real names or even email addresses are required!

While this undeniably leads to vicious personal diatribe and ad hominem attacks, the Reddit moderator system (the people who maintain each subreddit) and the selfpolicing voting mechanism ensures that meaningless vitriol gets downvoted into obscurity, effectively neutralizing the primary hazards of anonymity. What it does allow for is remarkably candid expression of opinion, where quality conversation thrives and the value of words, rather than who is expressing them, is seen. Think about it—when was the last time you saw quality conversation on real-name networks like Facebook? Many Redditors I’ve spoken to profess to being closest to their real self on Reddit when expressing opinion on anything even remotely controversial, and farthest from that on Facebook where friends from school, family and colleagues all collectively congregate to pass judgment on contrarian opinions. Redditors can speak their mind without fear of offline retribution, and the worst they have to see is a few embarrassing downvotes!

One could surely ask—why should teem- Momma ing masses of anonymous users grouped only by their interests matter to brands and marketers? Conventional wisdom drives marketing and branding investments into communities that can result in lead generation and eventual sales. If history is anything to go by, Redditors are fiercely protective of their subreddits from brands invading their conversations, and are thus notoriously resistant to self-promotion. If anyone tells you that Reddit is an effective way to inexpensively market a product, there’s a high likelihood they’re abandoning your brand’s best interests in favor of a short-lived Reddit engagement that’ll be filled with keywords like vote-buying services, using paid shills and bots – stuff that’s extremely risky to try on Reddit given the punishing nature of its inhabitants! In the worst cases, Redditors have been known to actively attack brands that have been seen as having betrayed them on other platforms such as Amazon and Yelp, damaging the brand’s reputation far beyond just Reddit.

So, what’s a honest marketer to do to leverage the power of Reddit for his/her brand? Rule number one is to be a Redditor first, and a marketer second. Promote less, listen more. Interact with the Reddit community by encouraging discussions around complaints about your current products, future product or feature releases, and service quality. If you run your own brand’s subreddit, encourage user submissions and link the top voted results in your other marketing collateral. Or you could use the subreddit for Redditors to ‘ask me anything’ – and funnel the questions into product development and customer channels for appropriate action. Learn from the collective intelligence of the community—you will be missing a large opportunity by not taking advantage of it.

Is language enough of an adhesive?

FOLLOWING THE TELANGANA protests and the pressure they have placed on the Congress, a number of demands for new states are being heard. From Gorkhaland in north Bengal to Vidarbha in the heart of Maharashtra, a call for new states and new political geographies is being heard. The decision, of course, will be taken on the basis on political calculations in a distant national capital.

Things never change, do they? Just short of 70 years ago, Sir Cyril Radcliffe arrived in New Delhi in the middle of a north Indian summer, was given a few maps and four assistants and told to divide the Indian subcontinent into two successor states. The tragedy that followed— the bloodbath of Partition—is well known but is not the issue here. What is truly astonishing, especially from the rear-view mirror of history, is the absolute arrogance with which a small ruling elite gave itself powers of cartography and map-making without any care for local cultures, popular aspirations and historical conditions.

It happened elsewhere as well. In 1916, two diplomats – Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Francois Georges-Picot of France – signed what came to be called the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into French and Arab zones of influence and essentially drew lines in the sand. In the years to come, these lines became international boundaries and created new nations. Arabs and Kurds were clubbed together and told they were Iraq, rather than given separate territories. Kuwait was cut away from southern Iraq for no logical reason other than imperial politics. The First Gulf War of 1990-91 was as much a reflection of Saddam Hussein’s belligerence as of the still-contested nature of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

India is a composite nation, a work in progress perhaps, but a nation nevertheless. Redrawing internal boundaries and creating new states is scarcely akin to threatening the integrity of the Republic of India. Indeed a case can be made for smaller states on administrative, economic and sociological grounds. Nevertheless the manner in which the UPA government and sections of the Congress sought to hammer out a solution to the Telangana problem over the past few days did have at least this writer harking back to Auden and Radcliffe, to Sykes and Picot. Was it objective conditions on the ground that motivated this mapmaking exercise—or was the principal idea an attempt at gerrymandering? As the proposal for a clumsy Rayala Telangana— an entity that nobody had demanded— began to come from the Congress, it was worth asking if the cabinet in New Delhi was acting any differently from Radcliffe or Sykes and Picot. In 1956, disparate regions, with recent histories and socio-economic experiences, were lumped together to form Andhra Pradesh. There was Telangana, which comprised Telugu-speaking areas of the Nizam of Hyderabad’s empire, the Marathi and Kannada speaking areas having gone to other states. There was Rayalaseema, essentially the areas ceded by the Nizam to the British Raj. Finally, there was Coastal Andhra, made up of the Telugu-speaking areas of the old Madras State. The northern part of Coastal Andhra was a sub-region within a sub-region, incorporating former Rajput kingdoms such as Vizianagram. What did these societies share? The Telugu language. In the 1950s, the logic of linguistic states was accepted as valid. As such, Andhra Pradesh was born. Later the former kingdoms of Kathiawar were united with Gujarati-speaking areas of Bombay state, Haryana was cut out of Punjab and so on.

The argument made by proponents of Telangana is that language is not enough of an adhesive. They say Telangana, a land-locked region, needs to be liberated from the rest of Andhra Pradesh. Advocates of a united Andhra state argue the case for Telangana is outdated. Whatever may have been the degree of oppression in the time of the Nizam, modern politics has acted as an equaliser. They suggest Telangana has not been neglected by the rest of Andhra Pradesh but has benefited from investments by farming and business elites from Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra. To be fair, the debate is an old one. It acquired ferocity in the winter of 2009, when K Chandrashekar Rao, leader of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), demanded creation of a new state. A few months earlier, the TRS had been routed in assembly and Lok Sabha elections and it seemed the Telangana cause had been nullified for the foreseeable future. Suddenly, YS Rajashekhara Reddy, the strongman Congress chief minister, died in an air accident. Mr Rao exploited the political vacuum, the Congress’ internal confusion and the absence of an authoritative successor to Reddy to revive his politics. He was helped by a panicky Union government, which dramatically conceded the Telangana demand only to get Mr Rao to end his fast and the unrest in Hyderabad to stop. Over the next four years, the Congress has been trying to backtrack from, tweak or otherwise mitigate that surrender of 2009. In the past fortnight, that process reached a new milestone when the Congress proposed the creation of Rayala Telangana, by lopping off Anantpur and Kurnool districts from the traditional Rayalaseema area and merging them with Telangana to create a new state. This flummoxed everybody because Telangana partisans have never claimed Anantpur and Kurnool. The reasoning offered was this would amount to a neat bifurcation and give Telangana and rump Andhra Pradesh 21 Lok Sabha seats each. Otherwise Telangana would end up with only 17 of the mother state’s 42 seats. Other arguments, including the stake that certain powerful Congress politicians from the two Ralayaseema districts have in the property market in Hyderabad (the heart of Telangana) were also cited. It was felt the Congress would be electorally more powerful if the Reddy bastions of Kurnool and Anantpur were added to Telangana and would be able to bargain better with potential allies in the new state. Quite apart from the rejection or absence of any objective criteria, including economic viability, for state formation— subjects that must be entrusted to a new States Reorganisation Commission, which is now a national necessity— what does the Congress’ Telangana or Rayala Telangana experiment tell us? The party won 33 of Andhra Pradesh’s 42 Lok Sabha seats in 2009. In the normal course, it is facing a defeat in 2014. Does it believe it can force the TRS to merge with it, claim credit for fulfilling Telangana aspiration, sweep a potential Rayala Telangana’s 21 seats and cut its losses even if it is wiped out in the rest of the old Andhra Pradesh? This is not politics. It is delusion.

Nandita Lakshmanan, the founder and CEO of PR firm The PRactice, finds work titles embarrassing. It’s why none of the business cards in her company carry a designation

Even though I am an entrepreneur who is passionate about her business and work, I don’t like my life to be overwhelmed by work, with no time for me or my family. I get up at about six every morning as my 11-year-old son Aryaman has a pretty early start to school, and I like to spend time with him at breakfast. He takes about 15 minutes to get ready and those 15 minutes are very precious to me because that is the only quiet time I get for myself in the whole day. I like to enjoy it with a cup of tea. I see him off to the bus stand at 7.20am and then it’s time to feed my son’s Golden Retriever Krypto and spend some time with him. I also have to do pilates at a neighbourhood studio for 45 minutes before I have a very heavy breakfast and head to work. So it may seem that my mornings are pretty packed to an outsider but I feel an easy rhythm to it all. I like to drive to work myself because it gives me the time to keep my mind away from work and listen to some music. Otherwise, your hands are always busy responding to an e-mail or a text. It takes me anywhere between 15 to 45 minutes to get to work. When I reach office, sometimes there are immediate meetings lined up with clients or my team mates or else, I catch up on my e-mails. My favourite work of the day anyway is to interact with my teams in our three offices and listen to what they are doing. The larger the team, the better. We have a unique structure in our organisation because we don’t have any official headquarters. If the headquarters are by virtue of where the CEO sits, you could say it is in Bengaluru. But otherwise, we have a vertical structure with offices in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. While our consumer head sits in Delhi, our technology head sits in Bengaluru. We all work seamlessly through phone calls and Skype across these offices and the respective heads meet face to face once a quarter for business review meetings. Even though I am using the words “heads” and “CEO”, we don’t really carry these designations on our business cards because I don’t like hierarchy. Well, internally we do use them sometimes because this generation likes to have titles and because it is required of us as a part of a formal corporate structure. But I personally believe that a hierarchical structure could kill an organisation. Such structures create boundaries about what role each person in the organisation has. As a manager, if I start looking at my team members’ roles and what they should be doing according to those roles instead of looking at their talent and potential, I would be shutting down some great opportunities. And, as a team member, if I believe in hierarchy and constantly submit to the demands of my manager without understanding or responding to the needs of my clients because I am supposedly ‘junior’, it would create boundaries. I often tell my team that a person is only constrained by their own boundaries. So I really admire those who go beyond their roles and job profiles and not restrict themselves. At The PRactice, I make sure we only get self-starters; people who don’t have to be hand-held. In today’s corporate world, people sometimes go ra-ra about things that are basic expectations of people. For instance, if a press conference goes well, people would make a rockstar out of the person responsible. You are a PR professional. That is your job! If you, however, manage to get great press after a tough news conference attended by the entire beat of telecom journalists, then it’s worth going ga-ga over. So, it’s important to learn to differentiate between what is expected of you and what you’ve done exceptionally well. Having said that, I believe it is important to acknowledge when a colleague does great work. We are a team of about 100-odd people and many of them are people with two to three years of experience. I’ve learnt that age and experience play very little role in this industry. The confidence to convince a client about a certain idea or a thought process along with taking initiative to get a job done is infinitely more important. What I have observed about several great leaders I have had the opportunity to work with is that they know when it is the right time to let experts decide what’s best. No matter how high on the corporate ladder you get, there will be some people in the organisation who are more adept at something than you are. As a good leader, it’s important to acknowledge that you do not have all the answers. This recognition will always keep you open to ideas from people within the organisation and you will listen to them. I love working with clients that do not have a hierarchical structure. Any client that encourages our team to be a part of their team is a delight to work with. Normally, we spend about two to three weeks to prepare our pitch for a client. We never take a pitch lightly. When we get a brief, we first figure out which of us will work on the business if we get it. Once that is decided, all those who will, get involved in the process of building the pitch, even if they’ve never been a part of client servicing or brainstorming before. By assigning everyone an important segment of the work and constantly highlighting how important that certain task is for delivering the complete service, we build the team’s confidence and motivation. Even after more than a decade in the industry, it really annoys me when people ask questions about what a PR professional does or when they narrow down its definition to media relations and this includes clients as well as competition. As you go up the managerial ladder in business, you tend to focus on the big picture; building the strategy etc. But I have realised that focusing on execution even if you’re the most senior-level person in the organisation is important. One should be willing to roll up her sleeves and do everything. Most of my time is also spent on strategising and planning with clients but I also make sure I am on top of things everyday. I have a memory of an elephant. I don’t depend on to-do lists or even pen and paper to remember what I need to do. Thankfully, I don’t even have to rely on phone apps to drive my work. The only things I use actively on my phone are the calendar and answering e-mails. I feel very uncomfortable if an e-mail or call goes unanswered. I have to answer every single e-mail I get on that very day and answering doesn’t mean simply responding with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ but a more detailed response where I know what the next plan of action is going to be. This habit has kept me really efficient at work as well, and as a result, I have tried to drill it within the organisation as well. There isn’t a lot of direct communication that goes from me to the rest of the teams but responsiveness is one thing I am very particular about. Do not leave anything for tomorrow. When you answer an e-mail, don’t just say you will revert, mention the exact date you will revert by. I don’t like having our clients chase my team members for anything. One of the perks that I have allowed myself as the owner of this company is to be able to pick up my son from the bus stand when he’s back from school and walk him home, and be home when he’s home. It is a practise that I have opted for. So I leave office at about 4pm as my son arrives at 4.30pm and I complete the rest of my work at home. I tell him I am doing my homework when he’s doing his. I also learn semi-classical music, two to three classes a week. I love my time with myself and my son and I do like to make that distinction between personal and professional life very clearly. I think I am a tough boss but I am a fair boss too. I don’t believe in having a fun atmosphere in the office. Fun in the frivolous or cool and casual way, that is. You could have a lot of fun even when you’re engaged in work. I believe in building a healthy workplace instead where the focus is on meritocracy, recognising talent, giving people the right exposure and an environment which is not marred by office politics or hierarchy. We are not dependent on our work colleagues to make life interesting for us. So, I encourage my team members to have a life outside work. If they are working from 9am to 6pm, they are being productive and they shouldn’t be working beyond eight to nine hours in the office, unless there is that one-off client or job that requires a quick turnaround. It’s essential to expand your horizons beyond work. Since I am at home by 4.30pm or so, I go to bed by 11pm at the latest. Sometimes, it could even be as early as 8pm or 9pm. I don’t believe in keeping full-time help at home. Doing the usual house chores keeps me away from work and I enjoy that. I cannot have work overwhelm my personal space. I need my space and time and thankfully, I am fortunate enough to run a business that hasn’t given me a sleepless night.

The proposal to create the 29th state of India, Telangana, from the current Andhra Pradesh state was ratified by the Congress Working Committee in July 2013. Though the roots of this devolution are political in nature—that is, the fulfillment of a campaign promise—the identity of those agitating for Telangana have roots in a shared history, geography and economic circumstance.

THE PROPOSAL to mutate the borders of Andhra Pradesh follows a long history of reorganisation of state boundaries in India. The first major round began with the appointment of the State Reorganisation Commission in 1953, which (in 1956) effectively segmented much of India on linguistic lines. Thus, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan, among other states, were created on a linguistic basis. More importantly, the commission also had the effect of combining the erstwhile Hyderabad under the Nizam (modern day Telangana) with the coastal Andhra region (now referred to as Seemandhra) since both the regions spoke the same language (Telugu). Because of the simmering distrust for the merger within the Telangana region, Nehru disapproved of the merger; he called it a “tint in expansionist imperialism”. Soon after, language became less of a reason to break up (or merge) states as difficulties of excessive size and population took precedent in the creation of Chhattisgarh (2000) and Jharkhand (2000) from Madhya Pradesh and Bihar respectively.

The existence of such centuries-old social cleavages in Andhra Pradesh is quite evident amidst the current round of celebrations or protests, on either side of the political divide. Telangana has two key factors that render it a distinct sociopolitical entity. The first is its history. As the success of Telangana Rashtra Samiti (political party) shows, the Nizam’s former kingdom still considers itself a distinct community with a separate history from Seemandhra, which was directly colonised by the British (and thus has a varied history of administration). Secondly, the general lead in educational and economic attainments by the Seemandhra region over the Telangana has further exacerbated the cleavages because of claims of bias in government and industrial opportunities. In fact, journalist Chandrashekhar Rao has claimed that the bias most exhibits in the Telugu film industry, where by protagonists speak the Andhra dialect and the villains speak the Telangana dialect.

SANJEER ALAM// Though one may or may not choose to agree with the need for smaller states or the breaking up of the larger states, whose populations often rival that of entire nations, the Centre’s approach towards the partition of Andhra Pradesh is condemnable and extremely unhealthy in the long-term. The issue here is not so much the creation of a new state, but its timing, its uses and what such a precedent portends for the future.

Ideally the redrawing of state boundaries should be left to non-political commissions, who would do a good job of surveying ground opinion and holistically assessing the economic, political and social factors. This was done in an excellent manner back in 1956, when a States Reorganisation Commission led to the States Reorganisation Act. The latter linguistically aligned populations and in the process quelled much of dissent in the newly independent India. Its stabilising effect can be felt till this day. However, it is clear that politics underpins UPA’s division of Andhra Pradesh. UPA, and in particular, the INC look for political dividends they may receive, from the region that supplies most of their MPs, if they accede to the Telangana demand. This should also help in reviving the fortunes of a party whose reputation, thanks to low growth and a slew of corruption scandals, is at an all time low. But such important decision made solely for scoring political points has consequences.

The first is that the UPA now has no basis or criteria to mediate other demands for regional autonomy. It performed little formal analysis of the consequences or causes of partition, unlike the States’ Reorganisation Commission of 1956. The sole basis was the political gain from Telangana. This sends the wrong signal to other movements for regional autonomy, and may lead to political instability as other movements decide to opt for more drastic measures than simple agitation. Why? Because they may conclude that arm-twisting the government is the only way to gain attention and results. Given the indefinite bandh in Darjeeling, the state of the movement for Gorkhaland points towards such behaviour.

Second, since such a decision has been taken mostly for political purposes, without any institutions or structures for the mediation and examination of the demands for autonomy, it is likely to lead to political reprisals. In other words, one may expect repeated bandhs in Darjeeling or forcible removal of those from Andhra Pradesh from the city of Hyderabad. If the local administration is not careful—which it often is not when it comes political mobilisation for local causes—such a situation could degenerate into ugly mobs rioting. Indeed, the partition of Andhra Pradesh is fairly analogous to the partition of India.

And lastly, the manner of Telangana’s creation has set a dangerous precedent for other political parties. The issue of carving up new states should have been in the domain of autonomous and politically neutral bodies like some Boards or Commissions. But with the decision of the Congress, the question of new states has been thoroughly politicised. Parties shall now make this issue a bait during election time. And this may make the advent of non-political decision-making all the more difficult. Mohd. Sanjeer Alam is trained in social geography and social demography from the Centre for the Study of Regional Development (CSRD), Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, from where he received his Ph.D in 2005. He joined Lokniti/ CSDS towards the end of 2005.

BG VERGHESE// Let us look at the statistics; in this Telangana issue the key political players are expected to be Indian National Congress, Telangana Rashtra Samiti, and All Indian Majlis-e-Itehaad-ul Muslimeen (mostly focused around Hyderabad area). Hyderabad, responsible for service exports worth `59,000 crore yearly, shall be shared by the both the states as the capital for the next 10 years. According to the current estimates, gross domestic product for Andhra Pradesh is around `6.7 lakh crore. If Telangana were to eventually gain total control over Hyderabad and adjoining area (since it lies within its territory), then it shall understandably get the lion’s share of both the GDP and the revenue. India with a population of over 1.2 billion, has 28 states, whereas the United States with a population of 300 million has 50 states. This means that many states, in terms of population, in India are larger than entire nations. In fact, the population of most large states in India is larger than that of France, whereas Uttar Pradesh’s population trumps Brazil’s. This shows in the massively skewed constituents to MP ratio, whereby in India a Member of Parliament from the Lower House represents up to 2,000,000 constituents as opposed to 60,000 in the United Kingdom.

Therefore, the first argument for any direction towards smaller units of administration has to rest on administrative efficiency itself. Smaller states make governance more participatory and more manageable. Let me give you an example. In my career as a journalist and an adviser to politicians, I was often told by Chief Secretaries and top bureaucrats of large states like Maharashtra that it was virtually impossible for them to seriously monitor all the districts (because of their sheer number) in a span of five years. Thus, no effective work could get done in one-term.

In this respect, the division of Andhra Pradesh, which has a population of 85 million— well over Germany’s population—is a step in the right direction. It shall allow the local schemes to be more fine-tuned to local conditions, whereas the top bureaucrats can (with almost half the workload) achieve something of significance.

Secondly, in a country as plural and culturally diverse as India, all sorts of identities, be they constructed around a language, geography or a shared past, must be respected. Therefore, the people of Telangana have every right to demand autonomy on the basis of a shared past. Indeed, I feel this should, through a nonpolitical commission, be extended to many other regions of the country— including, Gorkhaland, Vidarbha and maybe Saurashtra.

Moreover, the cost argument—that forming a new state bolsters gratuitous expenditure because it leads to the creation of new cities—is a facetious one. India is a rapidly urbanising nation and faces immense shortage of infrastructure. The amount spent on building more cities would have been spent anyway (on other infrastructure projects). Additionally, India needs more cities to ensure that development does not get restricted to a handful of urban conglomerations.

Some also say that creation of more states may lead to disputes over river basins. But I don’t see why this cannot be managed by autonomous but centrally sponsored institutionalised structures of political negotiation. In fact, provisions for such measures exist in the States Reorganisation Act of 1956. Zonal Councils (which have largely been forgotten today) were set up to ensure cooperation amongst states on matters of resource-sharing, culture and language, amongst other things.

Finally, with respect to the question of missed economic opportunity for those left out of Hyderabad in the longrun, the partition of the state in no way prevents those living in Seemandhra from benefiting off Hyderabad through rental income, jobs or investment. India is a free country, you are welcome to settle wherever you like.

…And the search for exemplary leaders

IN AN IDEAL world, one would expect political parties to welcome opportunities to showcase their commitment to transparency for the greater public good. After all, they are the pillars of India’s democratic framework. Those elected as MPs and MLAs represent political parties that—in turn—are expected to uphold values enshrined in the Constitution and manifestos they put forth. Political parties and elected representatives should embody ideals that a polity stands for and adopt institutional processes rooted in ideals. But has this abstract democratic ideal ever been put into practice? Specifically is this sort of arrangement practical, indeed viable? In the present context of political atrophy and paralysis in the corridors of power, should the citizenry tamper its expectations on issues of public accountability (therefore, morality)? Do inhabitants of our political establishment today have what it takes to rise above the self-serving travesty that our democratic processes have descended to? In short, do our political leaders have the capacity to rise above their self-interest to serve the needs of the public good? On how to understand the moral core of public life, Akeel Bilgrami’s observations on Mahatma Gandhi’s approach are especially illuminating. In an essay entitled Gandhi, the Philosopher (Economic and Political Weekly in September 2003), he says Gandhi’s ideas contain an implicit proposal: “When one chooses for oneself, one sets an example to everyone.” For Gandhi, a satyagrahi was required to live an exemplary life. As an exemplar, she embodied, or as Erik Erikson put it, actualised, the ideals that she stood for in the pursuit of her ends, the most glorious of which was the truth. How does this notion of the satyagrahi (or for our purposes, the figure of the “politician”) as exemplar play out in real life? To punctuate his interpretation of the issue, Bilgrami recounts an episode that occurred when as a young boy he went out walking with his father: One day, walking on a path alongside a beach we came across a wallet with some rupees sticking visibly out of it. …My father said: “Akeel, why should we not take that?” Flustered at first, I then said something like, “… I think we should take it.” My father looked most irritated, and asked, “Why?” And I am pretty sure I remember saying words more or less amounting to the classic response: “Because if we don’t take it then I suppose someone else will.” My father, looking as if he were going to mount to great heights of denunciation, suddenly changed his expression, and he said magnificently, but without logic (or so it seemed to me then): “If we don’t take it, nobody else will.” Bilgrami says that as a satyagrahi, Gandhi does not treat the truth as a cognitive notion at all, but as an experiential notion, woven into everyday practices, stretching from how to treat a wallet lying on the curbside, to debating principles of public interest enshrined in the Constitution. In all of his writings, Gandhi recoiled from static notions of truth that intellectualised the relationship of people with their world, because such cerebral intellectualising alienated people from their moral experience of life in all of its glory. What does this notion of the satyagrahi as exemplar have to offer today’s politician? As the institutional embodiment of public life, politicians know that their everyday actions must exemplify— for the citizenry to have faith in them—the kind of moral turpitude that transcends institutional processes and political machinations. For the political establishment to meet its responsibilities it needs to not only function transparently but also with accountability, and be perceived to function in such a manner for the public to have faith in it. Political parties have to be exemplars of what they represent. Should they choose to hide behind labyrinthine bureaucratic processes and legal sophistry to protect their self-interest, they will have failed the citizenry. On whether our politicians come close to embodying the high standards outlined by the Gandhian ideal, the prognosis, I’m afraid, does not look good. This conclusion emerges from the disappointing way in which the country’s political establishment has chosen to respond to a landmark judgment of the Chief Information Commissioner (CIC) of India. In June 2013, the CIC ruled in favor of bringing India’s political parties under the ambit of the Right to Information Act (RTI). Under Section 2(h)(d)(ii) of the Constitution, a public authority is a “non-governmental organisation substantially financed, directly or indirectly by funds provided by the appropriate government.” The government provides political parties a range of benefits, such as land allotments, tax breaks, and free airtime on Doordarshan and All India Radio. The rationale for these, as stated in the CIC’s order, lies in the public character of the political party as an institution. The government does not regulate political parties in any significant way; and the current order by the CIC places no limits of any kind on their functioning. All it asks for is a disclosure of where parties get their money from, how they use it, and in this sense, that they function in a publicly transparent manner like all public authorities that are beneficiaries of public largesse. The CIC’s judgment relies on the logic that public institutions that receive public benefits because they serve a public good should be subject to public scrutiny. A party is not a private institution. Independent legal minds applauded the CIC’s judgement, and, it should be welcomed because if implemented, it has the potential to increase levels of transparency. Even as this article goes to press, virtually all parties assembled in the Parliament are in the process of overturning the CIC’s judgement by amending the Right to Information Act. This isn’t bad, it also looks bad, and will do little to restore the dwindling faith of the citizenry. Political parties are the most visible organisational manifestation of the country’s political processes, and in spirit, they are the organic link between the institutions of the state on the one hand, and the people, on the other. Gestures like the ongoing attempts to kill the CIC’s judgment are undermining this fragile link. Worse, such conduct demonstrates the degree to which the country’s political establishment has fallen.

Eliminating errors is the key to success

WHEN POPE Julius II asked one of the greatest artists of our world, Michelangelo: “Tell me the secret to your genius. How did you create David, the masterpiece of all masterpieces?” Michelangelo’s answer was a simple: “I removed everything else that was not David.” In his book, Rolf Dobelli, a Swiss novelist and entrepreneur, writes about exactly that. He presents a series of short, cogent articles that illustrate fallacies and shortcomings in the modern thought process. By supporting them with real-life examples, he provides the reader with new ammunition in cutting through some of the fluff that defines modern communications. Say for example; do you know what makes you successful? Probably not clearly enough. Dobelli points out that people often do not know what makes them successful. It is equally hard to point out what make us truly happy. However, everyone knows what makes them miserable, what kills success and destroys happiness. The realisation highlights the fundamental basis of our thought and decision making processes. Negative Knowledge (what not to do) is more potent than Positive Knowledge (what to do). Dobelli’s book, spreading over 99 smallish chapters, tells his readers to adopt Michelangelo's method; basically focus on everything that is not David. Greeks, Romans and other medieval thinkers gave this process a term; Via Negativa—eliminate errors, processes, and stuff that destroys happiness and kills success, to have a clear and better understanding of life and its meaning. Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor, accepted the importance of Via Negativa in building his successful empire. While writing about himself and his partner, Charlie Munger, Buffett wrote: “Charlie and I have not learnt how to solve difficult business problems. What we have learnt is how best to avoid them.” What Dobelli presents is a list of 99 fallacies and biases which influence people’s thought processes (for example; personification, confirmation bias, hindsight bias, etc.). One of the finer things about Dobelli’s book is that the author illustrates some of his points through personal experience. One of his chapters—Why you should not read the news—he writes that modern “news” is to the common mind what sugar is to the body: appetising, even easy to digest, but destructive in the long run. As an experiment Dobelli allegedly stopped reading and listening to news for three years. The first few weeks were difficult, however, he writes, after a while he allegedly had a fresh outlook, clearer thoughts, and valuable insights into the world surrounding him, and better decision making ability. Despite not reading or listening to the news, he remained informed of most world developments through social circles, which acted as a news filter. Instead of the daily news, Dobelli suggests to his readers to read long background articles and books to understand their worlds better. Dobelli argues that real insight is never instant. It takes time to piece together complex causality, and the global news machine of bite-sized nuggets does not do complexity. The Art Of Thinking Clearly started as a series of notes and personal anecdotes, which Dobelli took for himself. Later, it turned into newspaper columns, and finally, a book. In one of the discussions in his book, Dobelli writes that the majority of errors which he mentions in the book are related to each other. Though he is not a social scientist, however, Dobelli's wealth of knowledge about entrepreneurship and his capacity as a novelist, makes this book an interesting read. What the book does not do is guarantee success. What it does is to help eliminate the smaller stuff. This is not a how-to book. There are not many seven steps to an error-free life. Though this book may not hold the key to happiness, at the very least it acts as insurance against too much self-induced unhappiness. If we could learn to recognise and evade the biggest errors in thinking we might experience a leap in prosperity—that is how the introduction starts. Fortunately, it stays true to this ideal. It is not a book that shoves morsels of what to do down the readers’ throats. It is rather a true self-help book that helps focus on the self first.

Full of energy and delicious turn of phrase...

THE YEAR is 1740 and young Louise Fletcher leaves the humdrum routine of an Essex farm for the hustle and bustle of the naval port of Harwich, swapping her life as a dairymaid for service in a wealthy captain’s townhouse. Louise has been raised on her landlocked mother’s cautionary tales of the allure of the sea—both Louise’s father and brother abandoned their womenfolk for adventure on the choppy waves. “Men always leave,” her mother warns, “and the sea never gives them up, once she’s got them”. Louise’s new mistress is like nobody she has ever met. The widowed captain's beautiful daughter, Rebecca Handley, is untutored in womanly ways, does not know how to manage a household, number linen, keep track of the wine cellar, or even get a stain out of fine cambric. One minute she plays the respectable young lady, the next her coarse language rivals that of the port’s liveliest tars. A 15-year old Luke is drinking in a Harwich tavern when it is raided by His Majesty’s Navy. Unable to escape, Luke is beaten and press ganged and sent to sea on board the warship Essex. He must learn fast and choose his friends well if he is to survive the brutal hardships of a sailor's life and its many dangers, both up high in the rigging and in the dark below decks. Louise navigates her new life among the streets and crooked alleys of Harwich, where fine houses concealing smugglers' tunnels are flooded by the Spring tides, and love burns brightly in the shadows. And Luke, aching for the girl he left behind and determined to one day find his way back to her, embarks on a long and perilous journey across the ocean. Worsley’s is a generous novel, concerned with the vulnerability of human life (female life in particular) and the cost of freedom to characters so thoroughly beset by cruelty and limitation. She Rises is a story of love, adventure, identity and secrets and all of this in a world that lives and breathes. The houses and the streets of a harbour town. The taverns and the docks. The ships that set sail into the wider world. The stories are effectively told, the prose style distinctive and suiting it perfectly. Like the sea, it had quiet times, but there other time when waves rose and fell, and those moments are quite breathtaking. The way in which Luke’s and Louise’s narratives came together was unexpectedly wonderful and, though the change of gear was a little clunky, but it raised the story to greater heights.

In mood for a quiet break? Head to Jaipur

If you will excuse me, I would like to start with a rant. Must Jaipur be called the Pink City? The last couple of trips I’ve made to it have led me to believe that Green City would be an equally apt name for it. On my last trip, after I had driven up in the amethyst light of breaking dawn to Nahargarh Fort and taken the regulation pictures of the sunlit-suffused lake 50ft below, I sent an image to a friend in Srinagar, Kashmir. Back came the startled reply “Gosh. There’s more greenery in Jaipur than in Srinagar.” That’s what I mean. In all the pictures that I have of my trip in July, there’s scarcely a square inch of desert sand: it’s all a forest of verdant green. It was the same case when I looked out of my window in March. There was a decided nip in the air. The low hills were covered with lush green scrub. After nightfall, we could hear the lions roaring seemingly from a few feet away (about which more later) and the next morning, the only pink we could spot was that of bougainvillea bushes. Now that I’ve aired my grouse about the so-called Pink City, let me tell you about Jaipur. There’s no doubt that the centre of the city is a wondrous sight. It has been made on a grid pattern, is neatly laid out and contained the most perfect living arrangements that any ancient city could have had. There are mithai shops, tailors, barbers, dyers and jewellers right by the vegetable vendors, temples and spice sellers. And all these swarm around houses of varying standards of grandeur, from humble dwellings to palatial havelis, all neatly arranged in rows. Add to that colourful handicrafts, king’s palaces and royal museums, and you have a dream city. There’s only one problem: there was no place for nature within the walled city of Jaipur. Fairmont Jaipur is a sprawling fort-like structure that is just over 5km away from Amber Fort. It is admittedly far away from the centre of the city for locals and tourists alike: you cannot walk across to the shops after lunch and be back for tea. So, the location has determined the type of tourism that it fosters. When I visited, the lobby lounge used to be crowded with families. Not just any ordinary, fun-seeking families mind you, but adults with notepads in their hands and a business-like air about them. They were all booking weddings in the hotel! Not all of them were from the city: the fairytale-like spread of the resort, the antique door that had to be assembled in 300 parts, the enormous chandelier in the banquet section—all these details were examined with the eye of a connoisseur. Most important was food. What menus could be made keeping in mind the guests’ preferences? And that was when the trump card of the hotel would be called in. Chef Lloyd D’Souza is a pastry chef in this life, but he was very likely an artist in a previous birth. His creations include wearable jewellery: they look like polki chokers and silver earrings but they’re actually Valrhona chocolate moulded lovingly and sprayed over with the appropriate colour. I was in the hotel to interview him, but was reduced to waiting endlessly as wedding customers cooed incredulously over charming little boxes with trinkets inside. Everything was edible, from the box to the trinkets. It was very clever, tasted like a dream and never failed to clinch a deal. I venture to say that even if you are in the mood for a quiet break from the world (with industrial quantities of great chocolate thrown in) it is a good idea to book yourself at one of the hotels just outside Jaipur. If the lure of shopping proves too much, you can always make a trip into town. Though, in the case of Fairmont, you need just go to nearby Amber Fort, 7km away, where the shops inside have an array of handicrafts, including miniature paintings. Lebua Lodge was the one property that stole my heart away. It was as offbeat as it was possible for a hotel to get. What I loved about it was the fact that every preconceived notion about the “average customer” had been laid to rest while planning it. Being right in the green belt of Jaipur, in actual forest land, the hotel could not construct any concrete structure in the area. Hence, they contented themselves by building tented rooms for guests. There was space around each tent and in the time I was there (all too brief, sadly) I never did hear the blare of television emanating from adjoining tents, so either my co-guests were evolved enough not to watch soap operas in a forest or they had the sense to keep the volume down! Loud parties, loud music, the serving of alcohol openly were all services that the hotel had to forgo in order to operate inside a forest, and I’d say it was a fair trade-off. You could not tell that you were in a tent while you were inside it. The off-white fabric looked like wallpaper covering a concrete wall. It was only when you walked around the resort and saw only cube-shaped canvas structures without windows that gave the game away. “The government has rehabilitated some lions nearby,” said the young lady who showed us to our tent. Her poker faced expression gave nothing away and we didn’t think to quiz her about government projects. It was only when night fell and we sat in the stylish patio in front of our tent that we heard the roar. Or should that be roars. Layla, our Iranian friend for whom the trip was being undertaken in the first place, blanched visibly. She didn’t think much of wild animals roaring in her ear at dead of night. A quick call to reception elicited the information that the lions were safely caged. But the area around Amber Fort (Lebua Lodge is approximately 2km from the fort and has an ancient wall running through it) teemed with wildlife. Amber Village, said to house the descendants of the workers and craftsmen who worked on the fort, has no fewer than 200 elephants. All tame of course, but not confined to cages like the lions. It is these pachyderms that famously go up to Amber Fort all day long, with tourists on their backs. Even elephants have trade unions that dictate their times of work and enforce breaks during the day, so it is a fair bet that you will see one or two elephants making their way along Amber village. And then there are the peacocks. Get up before dawn breaks, drive to Nahargarh Fort (together with Jaigarh and Amber, they are triumvirate that guard the entrance to the city) and the only sound you’ll hear is the cry of peacocks. If you’re lucky, you’ll be able to take a picture of one from close range. Inside the fort itself is the finest restaurant in all of Jaipur: it would be tempting to say that it is the best restaurant in the whole of Rajasthan. It is all of a piece with Lebua Lodge and Fairmont Jaipur, which is to say, the owner saw an opportunity, thought out of the box and built something magnificent on it that would embody the surroundings. Called AD 1135 after the year that Amber was built, it is a disused part of the fort next to the Sheela Devi Temple. Inside, craftsmen have been employed to create sheesh mahals and charming western-style drawing rooms that are actually parts of a restaurant. In fine weather, couples can sit out on secluded terraces and be serenaded by Rajasthani musicians. If the food was poor, you could have overlooked it, but the Rajasthani thali in AD 1135 has been put together by the cooks of the royal families of Jaipur, Udaipur and Jodhpur, and include lesser-known dishes from the royal repertoire. With surroundings like those, I promise, you won’t miss the shops of the Pink City.