The real danger in Pakistan

The last few days have seen headlines of the Pakistan army’s attacks on the Taliban strongholds in Swat valley. The danger is that the army will succeed in taking over Mingora. This is a danger for the Pakistan polity because this military success will likely divert attention away from what really is the real danger to the country- the spread of Talibanization. For at heart the real danger in Pakistan is not the attacks of the drones or the shady antics of the ISI nor even the Al Queda cells spreading into Punjab and other parts of Pakistan. The real danger- the real cancer eating the society - which will lead Pakistan to being a failed state are the Madrassas. These madrassas are spawning millions of young people who are brain washed into a belief system that is not only medieval but even worse- it is violent and justifies the use of murder in the name of religion.

Here is a country of 180 million where over 37 % of the population is below the age of 15. According to the Pakistani ambassador, only 50 % of the young go to school and the literacy rate is less than 50%. It is not that the young are not going to schools, it is just that they are going to madrassas and not the government run secular schools. During the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, madrassas provided the US-Saudi-Pakistani alliance the cannon fodder they needed to fight a holy war. The Americans and Saudis, helped by a more-than-willing General Zia, funded new madrassas across the length and breadth of Pakistan. Their own ministry of education estimated that about 1.5 million students are acquiring religious education in the 13,000 madrassas in 2005. By 2008 the number of madrassas had doubled with the number of students being correspondingly larger.

It is true that not all madrasas in the country are active centres of jihadi militancy but even those without direct links to violence promote an ideology that provides religious justification for such attacks. Given the government’s half-hearted reform efforts, these unregulated madrasas contribute to country’s climate of lawlessness in numerous ways – from illegal land encroachment and criminality to violent clashes between rival militant groups and use of the pulpit to spread calls for sectarian and jihadi violence. The Pakistan government has yet to take any of the overdue and necessary steps to control religious extremism in the country. These madrassas may be called religious schools but they are in reality the heart of the Pakistan long term dilemma because in essence these are breeding grounds for jihadists with a few exceptions. Exploiting the military government’s weakness, the religious parties and madrasa unions have countered all attempts to regulate the madrasa sector. Do the math in your head- these madrassas have been around for the past 15 years and so have spawned a large number—counted in millions- of young people who have no skills other than knowing Koran and building bombs to kill their enemies. This is the real cancer at the heart of the problem.

But what needs to be done?

The first step has to be a clear eyed diagnosis of the problem. Exactly three decades ago, in the spring of 1979, an uprising against Afghanistan’s then-Soviet-backed regime drew the US into discussions about how to assist the region’s Islamist rebels. Ever since, the United States has been struggling to grasp the patterns of cause and effect in its own policymaking. The miscalculations across five Administrations are by now generally understood: near-unequivocal support for anti-American militias during the nineteen-eighties; averted eyes as Pakistan pursued its covert nuclear ambitions; the abandonment of Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal; the failure to recognize the menace of Al Qaeda during the nineteen-nineties; erratic investments in Pakistan’s democracy, economy, and civil society; and, most recently, a war in Afghanistan after 9/11 which did not defeat Al Qaeda or the Taliban but chased them into Pakistan, where they regrouped and have proceeded to destabilize a country now endowed with atomic bombs. While this recognition of foreign culpability has been finally recognized, the intelligentsia in Pakistan itself has been slow to accept the internal impact of the growth of the jihadi culture and the madrasas that have perpetuated it. In the past few weeks, however, a number of Pakistani journalists have courageously pointed out the monster that the madrassas have created. Nasir Abbas Mirza, a free lance Pakistani journalist in a perceptive piece titled, A monstrous experiment, lays out the long term dangers of neglect. “ At full steam ahead in Pakistan” he writes, “ this is a monstrous experiment in brainwashing and it is on a par with, if not worse than, Nazi Germany’s eugenics. They did it in the name of science; here, it is being done in the name of God and religion”. Recent editorials in Pakistani newspapers have finally started realizing the long term danger these Taliban represent to their dream of an independent, modern state.

The army attack on the few major known eruptions after a decade of denial has to be the next step. But it is important to understand that taking back the Swat valley is only a small part of the problem. Because as the latest missives from the Jihadists point out, these attacks will continue in other population centers including Lahore, Multan and Karachi. Ultimately the country will realize that there is no way this war is going to be won militarily. You simply cannot kill your way to peace so long as the system that produces the jihadists is allowed to continue. The fact is that the madrassa system provides the main fodder for the jihadists and so the lifeline of these madrassas, money needs to be brutally cut off. But choking off the flow of funds to these madrassas has been made more difficult since these contributions from abroad are now disguised as charity. But the control of these external funds is essential to any strategy. The government could clamp down on these flows- both through the banking system and the havvala- by declaring that all money flows to the madrassas must be routed through a government agency specially set up and that any madrassa that receives these contributions must comply with the minimum educational curricula of the government. The International Crisis group provides specific recommendations on what the government can do

Pakistan needs to adopt an effective, mandatory and madrasa-specific registration law that bars jihadi and violent sectarian teachings from madrasa syllabi; requires the disclosure and documentation of income and expenditure based on an annual, independent and external financial audit; requires the documentation of students and their areas of origin and monitors living conditions of students in madrasas; and establishes controls over financing from domestic and foreign sources, accompanied by regular and proactive monitoring. It could also establish a single Madrasa Regulatory Authority, headed by the interior minister, operating under parliamentary oversight and with the necessary resources and powers to: suspend registration of madrasas until such a new law is in force that also includes a new, mandatory registration regime and contains meaningful financial and curricular regulations; and commission an independent, comprehensive survey to obtain authentic data on the number of madrasas and the size of the student body. It certainly needs to close all madrasas affiliated with banned organisations or with other sectarian and jihadi organisations; take legal action against the administration of any mosque or madrasa whose leader calls for internal or external jihad; take legal action against the administration of any mosque or madrasa or religious leader responsible for issuing an apostasy fatwa, whether verbal or written; and enforce existing laws against hate-speech and incitement of communal violence. Finally it needs to reform the public education system by purging material that promotes religious hatred, sectarian bias or historical accounts that justify jihad.

The Taliban on their part have long realized the importance of the madrassas to their long term ambitions and have sought to attack any competitor. Thus the attacks and razing down of 400 government run schools in swat valley. They have also realized that education of girls will in long term upend their brand of religion and hence the attacks in particular on girls schools. It is for the government to take a hard line on these attacks by laying down that for every government schools razed by the Taliban, the government will take over two madrassas removing the teachers and principals. In addition of course the government will have to massively accelerate its own education program. Pakistan today spends less than 2.5 % of its GDP on education while other countries spend twice as much. Pakistan has not seen the mushrooming of Teach Pakistan or Each one teach one movements but it is time for the civil society to move towards this. The example of Indonesia with its myriad islands and multiple languages in the fifties provides an inspiring model how literacy can be brought to large Islamic countries in a relatively short period of time.

And there is yet one more issue that will tend to get lost and that is the reeducation of the talibs who have already gone through the madrassa system. Left alone these could continue to provide an uneasy underbelly of violence in the country. As Mirza points out “remote madrassas may be turning boys into drones but then there are thousands of madrassas spread all over Pakistan’s urban centres that are producing millions of neo-drones who may not become suicide bombers but are totally unfit to live in this world. These kids need to be rescued”. Pakistan will have to systematically track down these budding jihadists and re educate them.

The fact is that this cancer has already taken root in the body politic of Pakistan. The real danger is that people of Pakistan will move too late or do too little to root it out.

The sixth sense

One of those discoveries that you want to own instantly.

'SixthSense' is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information made by Pranav Mistry.

We've evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online. Although the miniaturization of computing devices allows us to carry computers in our pockets, keeping us continually connected to the digital world, there is no link between our digital devices and our interactions with the physical world. Information is confined traditionally on paper or digitally on a screen. SixthSense bridges this gap, bringing intangible, digital information out into the tangible world, and allowing us to interact with this information via natural hand gestures. ‘SixthSense’ frees information from its confines by seamlessly integrating it with reality, and thus making the entire world your computer.

The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a pendant like mobile wearable device. Both the projector and the camera are connected to the mobile computing device in the user’s pocket. The projector projects visual information enabling surfaces, walls and physical objects around us to be used as interfaces; while the camera recognizes and tracks user's hand gestures and physical objects using computer-vision based techniques. The software program processes the video stream data captured by the camera and tracks the locations of the colored markers (visual tracking fiducials) at the tip of the user’s fingers using simple computer-vision techniques. The movements and arrangements of these fiducials are interpreted into gestures that act as interaction instructions for the projected application interfaces. The maximum number of tracked fingers is only constrained by the number of unique fiducials, thus SixthSense also supports multi-touch and multi-user interaction.

The SixthSense prototype implements several applications that demonstrate the usefulness, viability and flexibility of the system. The map application lets the user navigate a map displayed on a nearby surface using hand gestures, similar to gestures supported by Multi-Touch based systems, letting the user zoom in, zoom out or pan using intuitive hand movements. The drawing application lets the user draw on any surface by tracking the fingertip movements of the user’s index finger. SixthSense also recognizes user’s freehand gestures (postures). For example, the SixthSense system implements a gestural camera that takes photos of the scene the user is looking at by detecting the ‘framing’ gesture. The user can stop by any surface or wall and flick through the photos he/she has taken. SixthSense also lets the user draw icons or symbols in the air using the movement of the index finger and recognizes those symbols as interaction instructions. For example, drawing a magnifying glass symbol takes the user to the map application or drawing an ‘@’ symbol lets the user check his mail. The SixthSense system also augments physical objects the user is interacting with by projecting more information about these objects projected on them. For example, a newspaper can show live video news or dynamic information can be provided on a regular piece of paper. The gesture of drawing a circle on the user’s wrist projects an analog watch.

The current prototype system costs approximate $350 to build. Wow indeed !!

The new datarati

It has been said that data is not information, information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.We are today flooded with data-- from polls on all subjects to human development indices and world bank statistics. It has become increasingly harder to make sense out of this flood of data even if we can access only ten percent of it. Looking at tables in UN statistics or the back pages of the Economist does little to clarify the facts underlying these data much less provide either information or knowledge.

Now comes the chief economist of Google, Varian,who believes that a new era is dawning for what you might call the datarati. "What's ubiquitous and cheap?" Varian asks. "Data." And what is scarce? The analytic ability to utilize that data.

Here is an example of how massive data can be analyzed and presented to convey information and wisdom. Rosling, a Swedish professor has developed a unique software that takes raw boring data and converts it into wisdom. Rosling’s presentations are grounded in solid statistics (often drawn from United Nations data), illustrated by the visualization software he developed. The animations transform development statistics into moving bubbles and flowing curves that make global trends clear, intuitive and even playful.What sets Rosling apart isn’t just his apt observations of broad social and economic trends, but the stunning way he presents them. Guaranteed: You’ve never seen data presented like this. By any logic, a presentation that tracks global health and poverty trends should be, in a word: boring. But in Rosling’s hands, data sings. Trends come to life. And the big picture — usually hazy at best — snaps into sharp focus.

We will increasingly need datarati like Professor Rosling to explain the world we live in- using the data that is now readily available on the internet but converting it into knowledge through its intelligent interpretation.

Indicator of success

From the time they are born, to the time they leave for college, all parents only have one concern-- will my child be successful in the world? Of course, this worry for some parents starts even earlier and they do their best to give their offspring the best start they can including playing Mozart or self improvement tapes during the child bearing months! But the intensity increases from the time when the offspring arrives and his or her first first words are awaited with bated breath.Even as most parents enjoy their children, they are also keenly aware that the first few years of life is when the future character of the child will be formulated. There is at least one theory which states that the lifelong character is formed in the first five years.

So it is no wonder that some of the modern research seeks to find if they can determine what will make a particular child a success when he or she grows up. One of these experiments postulates that if the child is able to abstain from instant gratification when he is less than five years old and is able to show some self disciploine in face of temptation, it is an indicator of likely success. And they formulated a test-- yes a test - for four year olds to determine this.

Watch Joachim de Posada demonstrate the indicator of success in this charming video

Why woment dont have old age blues?

The fact is that the art of growing older is one honed mostly by women.

But the real issue is why and how have they managed to navigate these treacherous waters with such success?

One of the major reasons women age more successfully than men is their creation and cultivation of a network of friends and acquaintances. Women at all stages of life just have a larger web of relationships that they call on more regularly than men do. They are simply better at patching together a social network that helps them through the process of growing older.

Also as they grow older, women are more apt than men to plug into activities — social, religious, community and family — that keep them busier and for the most part happier late into their lives. This emerges from the fact that women generally have a network of friends and family that they have nourished throughout their lives.

The transition from professional work to retirement and then in retirement to old age too does not catch them with as much surprise because for them the change is not that drastic in their daily lives as it is for men. With some exceptions, they are not so deeply involved in their work lives that it takes over their total lives even if they are professional women.

Even when a spouse or loved one dies or is incapacitated, women are able to cope with these tragedies much more successfully than men. In the US almost half of women over age 65 are widows and will be widows for an average of 14 years. Since women outlive men by nearly six years, there are 4-5 times more widows than widowers but they tend to live longer after the death of a spouse. According to gerontologists, widowers struggle more than widows to live without a spouse. Growing up during an era when men relied on their wives to be housekeeper, caretaker, and their main source of emotional support, an expanding generation of elderly widowers find they've lost both their best friend and their social planner, leaving them isolated. ''For women, it's a seamless thing. For men, it can be a big change. The ability to connect with others is almost intuitive for women, but not for men. Men are more likely to turn inward and to founder. The caretaker, caregiver, nurturer role is one we expect of women until the day they die. The expectation for women of all ages is that they are expected to meet the needs of those around them. And they do this almost instinctively a lot of the time without even noticing that they are doing it.

Aging, in part, is about declining powers and men seem to take it harder -- and more personally -- than women. It is true that aging is often a painful process in which one needs to come to terms with increasingly diminished capacities. The people who do the best with aging aren't thinking that much about getting older. They're not really focusing on what's not working anymore. Aging changes everyone and to age gracefully, one needs to anticipate the changes that are inevitable. Part of the challenge of aging gracefully is that you have to continue to find things that are important to you which can include travel, spiritual pursuits, hobbies, new social groups, lifelong learning, or recapturing time with family if one lacked the chance during the career years.

In my experience, however, how one ages depends on a couple of factors, none of which is gender specific. First and foremost is: Have you kept yourself fresh? Have you kept exposing yourself to new challenges and new discoveries? If you haven't, your brain will slowly congeal, and you'll become a parody of your younger self. Second is: Have you kept alive a healthy network of friends? Men and women who have invested in personal friendships throughout their lives will not find themselves wanting for friends when they are old. Conversely, men and women who have let family life impose a hermetically sealed barrier between them and anyone outside their family life will find themselves suddenly lonely and friendless, which will increase their sense of fear and grumpiness. Thirdly, are you able to cede centrality to the younger generation; are you able to give up whatever power you held uniquely over others. Men and women who have invested in being the most powerful person in their world will have a very difficult time adjusting to the young turks who take over from them. Men and women who have invested in their attractiveness as the main center of their being will quickly find themselves at odds with the younger generation, who possess a level of attractiveness they can no longer match.

One other thing: much of what we attribute to aging has nothing to do with getting old, and everything to do with having nothing to do.

It almost seems that what a man needs to do to get over the old age blues is to become more like a woman!

The long view

Empirical studies are fundamental to the scientific tradition. “As a means of uncovering truth, some believe, the experimental method is superior to intuition.During the past few weeks, I have read of two studies that both intrigued and surprised me. Intrigued, because these longitudinal studies were carried out over decades-- yes- decades and surprised, because these were in area of human knowledge where the general approach has been to look to philosophers and religious seers rather than empirical studies for answers. One was a study on how to enjoy life carried out over 70 years and the other on how we die, which started in 1958, and is still being carried on.Both required a vision and commitment on the part of both the researchers and the volunteers that is truly amazing.

The first of these studies , also known as the Grant Study is about trying to discover if there is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? What makes us happy ? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grand parenthood, and old age. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years. The originators of the study believed that medical research paid too much attention to sick people; that dividing the body up into symptoms and diseases—and viewing it through the lenses of a hundred micro-specialties—could never shed light on the urgent question of how, on the whole, to live well. This study would draw on undergraduates who could “paddle their own canoe,” and would “attempt to analyze the forces that have produced normal young men.” Normal was defined as “that combination of sentiments and physiological factors which in toto is commonly interpreted as successful living."This study of successful men was pitched at easing “the disharmony of the world at large.”

Bock assembled a team that spanned medicine, physiology, anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, and social work, and was advised by such luminaries as the psychiatrist Adolf Meyer and the psychologist Henry Murray. Combing through health data, academic records, and recommendations from the Harvard dean, they chose 268 students—mostly from the classes of 1942, ’43, and ’44—including John Kennedy, Ben Bradley and a few who later became senators, and measured them from every conceivable angle and with every available scientific tool.

One of the results the study sought was to answer the question " What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old?" The Grant Study men identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically. Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. What factors don’t matter? The study identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 had nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time. The predictive importance of childhood temperament also diminishes over time: shy, anxious kids tend to do poorly in young adulthood, but by age 70, are just as likely as the outgoing kids to be “happy-well.” Vaillant sums up: “If you follow lives long enough, the risk factors for healthy life adjustment change. There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it.”“It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors. “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

There is another study ,also carried out over 50 years, in Maryland on aging. Here individuals -- homemakers, retirees, doctors and myriad others -- are participants in the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging (BLSA), the country's longest-running study of aging. Since 1958, a total of more than 1,400 volunteers have agreed to regularly undergo in-depth physicals and memory and other screenings conducted by the study's physicians. The resulting data thus span more than half a century and are a gold mine for researchers interested in the aging process. Because of the BLSA,for example, scientists now know that signs indicating that a person could be at risk for dementia and other cognitive diseases may appear 20 years before symptoms emerge.

The real surprise of the study are the volunteers, who are devoted to helping researchers fulfill the study's goals and spend three days every year working with the researchers. One person has been enrolled for 47 years. The oldest participant is 102 and has made the required pilgrimage to Baltimore regularly for 38 years. They feel they are making a contribution to science, and they feel like aging is such an important and under-studied issue, anything they can do to help, they want to do.'' Participants come from as far as Norway. Some even donate their bodies to the BLSA autopsy study. "It's a chance to make a unique contribution to research on aging,'' said Richard Sprott of Potomac, one of the participants, "since this is the only research project of its kind in the world."

Some gems from this ongoing study: BLSA researchers were able to disprove the long-held belief that people get crankier as they age. Using data collected from the study's participants, they found that personality traits don't generally change much after age 30: People who were cranky at 27 were likely to be cranky at 87. Also that older people were better able to handle stress than their younger counterparts, who tended to cope by becoming hostile or retreating into fantasy worlds. And in another finding, which I point out to my children, 50 BLSA men were given the equivalent of three martinis over the course of an hour to find out whether age influenced a person's ability to metabolize alcohol. Turns out the older participants were able to metabolize the alcohol just as well as their younger counterparts. However, older men did show greater impairment as a result of their consumption.

What struck me was that there were such long term investments in empirical studies lasting over decades and even more there were so many people willing to donate their time in the cause of science.

I wondered if there were similar studies in India.

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A longitudinal study is a correlational research study that involves repeated observations of the same items over long periods of time — often many decades. It is a type of observational study. Longitudinal studies are often used in psychology to study developmental trends across the life span, and in sociology to study life events throughout lifetimes or generations. The reason for this is that unlike cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies track the same people, and therefore the differences observed in those people are less likely to be the result of cultural differences across generations. Because of this benefit, longitudinal studies make observing changes more accurate and they are applied in various other fields. In medicine, the design is used to uncover predictors of certain diseases.

Unintended consequences

We often take it for granted that progress is inevitable and that it is inevitably good and that there are no downsides. Thus it has been for the internet. No one but no one doubts that the internet has connected the world and provided the world with information and knowledge in unprecedented quantity, that it has enriched our lives and made possible myriad discoveries in science and technology. So what is to dislike. Now come some interesting insights that examine some of the unintended consequences of the rapid spread of the internet.

Clearly the internet and Google have dealt a mortal blow to the print newspaper industry. There is neither the money nor the persistence, they say, for uncovering of corruption at local and national levels or for the diligent research that underlies the Watergate or Pentagon Papers type scoops. Print journalists decry the bloggers who have replaced them and the internet newspapers sites like Huffington Post for trivializing news and for severely curtailing any investigative journalism. Worse these sites encourage skimming so that the readers barely read the headlines and rarely spend time in delving deeply into any subject. Yet the number of readers of news has increased manifold. But the readers, it is claimed, are sacrificing depth for width.

Have people who love reading books started reading less as a side effect of the internet? It seems to many that people have less patience with the written word and tend to read less deeply. Nicholas Carr opines “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle”.

We no longer remember key dates and places and facts anymore. Since nowadays there is so much information, it’s no longer terribly efficient to use our brains to store information. Why memorize the content of a poem or a play when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we can now store it digitally and just remember what we stored and where. I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge- who could do this job for us. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves. In this system we can " outsource the brain" and as David Brooks points out: ” we won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored”. The price we will pay for this outsourcing is that we will know a bit about a lot of things but only a bit in depth of any of these things.

It is argued that another casualty of the internet may be individual creativity. The proponents of internet argue that it has freed them from having to memorize anything since all facts are only a click away on an Iphone or a laptop. Why remember anything when you can call it up on the screen when required? But memorization is not the antithesis of creativity; it is absolutely indispensable to creativity. Creative insights come at odd and unpredictable moments, not when you have all the references spread out on the table in front of you. You can’t possibly hope to have creative insights unless you have memorized all the relevant information. And you can’t hope to have creative insights unless you have memorized a vast amount of information, because you have no way of knowing what might turn out to be useful. So internet and access to Google, while they provide access to a great deal of information at your finger tips, they can also paradoxically reduce your creativity.

So is Google making us stupid? Will digitized books and e-readers devalue the written word? Does reading on the web harm human thinking? Do technologies like Tweet and Twitter simply provide too much too fast? Can you compress knowledge in 140 letters? Are we all about to drown in a informational tidal wave? Don’t get me wrong-- there is so much that the internet and Google have provided us but there are unintended consequences too of all this power.

Ideas about India's future

Here is a brief summary of Nandan Nilekhani talks about ideas for India's future but you should see his whole presentation. He divides his presentation, which is also a summary of his book " Imagining India: Ideas for the new century", into ideas that have been accepted, still under execution, unresolved and in conflict and those about the future.

It is instructive to see his presentation alongside a defense against the charge that Pakistan is now a "failed state" by Manan Ahmed.

But first Nandan's optimistic view of India.

According to him, there are certain big ideas that India has now generally accepted that: people are not a burden but a resource; entrepreneurs are not villains but a role models; English is not a language of colonizers but of aspiration and jobs; technology is not the enemy but a friend; globalization is to be embraced not contested; and the deepening of democracy even though it means shifting fr one party rule to 13 party rule is to be embraced.

Then there are ideas which have been accepted by the polity but have not fully managed to execute: in education a lack of universal access to primary schools; infrastructure which is still to fully connect the nation; cities need to become engines of growth; and a single market growing for a smooth seamless flow of goods across states is essential for internal globalization benefits.

But there are still ideas which are unresolved: Conflicting political ideologies which are leading to policy making gridlock; lack of labor reform where job protection is hampering job creation; and higher education where state control is barring private funding.

Then there are ideas for the future which India needs to learn from abroad and apply in its governance : E-governance about democracy,technology,efficiency and transparency; health care and how to avoid the diseases of prosperity while still battling diseases of poverty; managing pensions and entitlements; handling environmental issues and creating a new energy model.

India is well on its way to proving that democracy and growth are compatible. But our next door neighbour who started on this journedy at the same time, is rapidly becoming a " failed state". Or is it?

Manan Ahmed,a historian of Islam in South Asia at the University of Chicago,in a contrarian view, argues that the " decades-long tendency to reduce Pakistan’s complexity to either “failure” or “stability” reflects, above all, a glaring poverty of knowledge about the real lives of 175 million Pakistanis today. Since 2007 alone, they removed a dictator from military and civilian power without firing a single shot, held the first national election since 1997 – in which right-wing radical parties were soundly rejected – and launched a secular movement for justice.

None of this matters, we are told, because Pakistan is facing “an existential threat” from “violent extremists”, as a State Department spokesman said on Monday. US generals and media commentators are hinting that a military takeover may be the only way to arrest the imminent “failure” – to combat the “Talibanisation” of Pakistan and keep the dreaded nukes from “falling into the hands” of terrorist groups.

A comically exaggerated version of reality underpins such concerns. There are roughly 400 to 500 Pakistani Taliban fighters in the Buner region (the area deemed to threateningly close to Islamabad) and 15,000 to 20,000 operating in the region between Peshawar and the north-west borders of Pakistan. Meanwhile, the number of active Pakistani army personnel ranges around 500,000, supported by an annual budget of approximately $4 billion. In comparison, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan make an estimated yearly revenue of around $400 million from the heroin trade – only a fraction of which makes it to the Pakistani wing in the rural north-west of the country. As a threat to a large and diverse nation-state, 40 per cent of whose population lives in urban centers like Karachi (with its 18 million residents) the rural Taliban fighters are not terribly intimidating.

Pakistan is neither Somalia nor Sudan, nor even Iraq or Afghanistan. It is a thoroughly modern state with vast infrastructure, a fiercely critical and diverse media, an active, global economy and strong ties with regional powers such as China and Iran. It is not a “failed state” – it even has met its debt payments to the World Bank and IMF at the expense of providing electricity to its citizens. It has a deeply entrenched civil bureaucracy. The “failed state” rhetoric obscures these realities. It hides the fact that religious-based parties have never garnered more than 10 per cent of the seats in any election. According to its 1973 constitution Pakistan is an Islamic state, but it is home to multiple forms of religious expression, and the majority of Muslims in Pakistan embrace a model of Islam more syncretic than the Deobandi Salafism of the Taliban. The majority province of Punjab is ethnically, linguistically, politically and economically far more diverse than the northwestern valley of Swat – and it is home to a well-entrenched landed elite unlikely to cede authority to the Taliban. Sindh has its own landed elite – as well as a powerful urban political party, MQM – neither of whom show any inclination to welcome the Taliban.

Even if Pakistan is not going to capitulate to the Taliban, it does face grave dangers, and the “failed state” rhetoric – dangerous in its own right – forces our attention away from them. In Baluchistan, as a direct result of Musharraf’s heavy-handed military policies, a civil war has been brewing since 2005, and there is no military solution to that unrest. At the same time, anti-Americanism is rising across the country in reaction to the campaign of missile strikes from unmanned US drones, which have killed nearly 1000 civilians since August 2008. The drones have emboldened religious conservatives who decry “US imperialism” at work in Pakistan, and they are gaining strength with every tally of civilian casualties. The Tehrik Taliban-e Pakistan control in Swat is less a victory for that ragtag militia than a demonstration of the Army’s unwillingness to fully engage them.

The monotonous drone of “failure” implies that the fragile democracy currently in place is not worth preserving. It encourages the marginalisation of the civilian government and boosts the claims of both the military and the militants. Pakistan’s salvation has never been and will never be in the military’s hands. The country’s future lies with the millions of Pakistanis who are working to sustain democracy – and what must be defended is their resilience and strength, to prevent the self-fulfilling prophecies of failure."

The demographic dividend

Tucked away on the last page of the latest Economist was a table on Old Age Dependency Ratios that caught my eye. I had been hearing about the “demographic dividend" and had never really understood it till I saw this little table.

This table showed the number of elderly people (65 and over) as a share of those of working age (15-64 years)- or the old age dependency ratio- in a country in 2010 and projected in 2050. “Continued increases in longevity” according to this European Commission report, “will ensure that the number of elderly people as a share of those of working age will rise sharply in most countries over the next forty years. The biggest absolute increase will be in Japan, where the ratios of 35.1% in 2010, already the world’s highest, will more than double, to 73.8% by 2050. At that point, the number of pensioners in China will be equivalent to 38.8% of its labor force, up from 11.6% in 2010.” In the same period, however, in India the number of old age pensioners will only be 21% up from about 9% in 2010.

How do these changes really affect anything?

The basic idea of a demographic dividend is straightforward enough. In the year 2004 India had a population of 1,080 million, of whom 672 million people were in the age-group 15 to 64 years which is called the "working age population". Since outside of this age group very few people work, it is reasonable to think of the remainder, that is, 408 million people, as the "dependent population". A nation's "age dependency ratio" is the ratio of the dependent population to the working-age population. In the case of India this turns out to be 0.6 or that there are 60 dependants for every 100 working age people. On the dependency ratios India does not look too different from many other developing countries. Bangladesh's dependency ratio is 0.7, Pakistan's 0.8, Brazil's 0.5.

What is different about India is the prediction that it will see a sharp decline in this ratio over the next 30 years or so. This is what constitutes the demographic dividend for India.

India's fertility rate - that is, the average number of children a woman expects to have in her life time - used to be 3.8 in 1990. This has fallen to 2.9 and is expected to fall further. Since women had high fertility earlier we now have a sizable number of people in the age-group 0-15 years. But since fertility is falling, some 10 or 15 years down the road, this bulge of young people would have moved into the working-age category. And, since, at that time, the relative number of children will be small (thanks to the lowered fertility), India's dependency ratio would be lower. It is expected that, in 2020, the average age of an Indian will be 29 years, compared to 37 for China and 48 for Japan; and, by 2030, India's dependency ratio should be just over 0.4.

This can potentially confer many benefits.

First is the direct benefit of there being a rise in the relative number of bread-winners. Moreover, with fewer children being born, more women can now join the work force; so this can give a further fillip to the bread-winner ratio.

A more indirect but vital benefit for the economy is the effect this can have on savings. Human beings save most during the working years of their lives. When they are children, they clearly consume more than they earn, and the situation is the same during old age. Hence, a decline in the nation's dependency ratio is usually associated with a rise in the average savings rate. India's savings rate as a percentage of GDP has been rising since 2003. It now stands at 33% which is comparable to the Asian super-performers, all of whom save at above 30%, with China saving at an astonishing near 40% rate. This savings growth is driven by improvements in the government's fiscal health and a sharp rise in corporate savings. But even if these factors disappear, the decline in the dependency ratio should enable India to hold its savings and investment rate above the 30% mark for the next 25 years.

Another factor is the number of dependents that the working people need to support in a country. The World Bank computes a metric called the “age dependency ratio” which is the ratio of dependents--people younger than 15 or older than 64--to the working-age population--those of age 15-64. For example, 0.7 means there are 70 dependents for every 100 working-age people. According to the Bank’s projection, in India in 2010, there will be 55 dependents/100 working age people but by 2050, the ratio will move to 49 ie the relative number of dependents will decrease. Compare this with say Japan where the figures in 2010 were the same as in India, 55, but by 2050 they are projected to rise to 91 dependents for every 100 working age people. Thus in Japan, the savings of a 100 working age people will need to provide for 91 dependents while in India they will need to provide for only about half of that number.

This theory of demographic advantage has been challenged by some as just that - theory. One way of evaluating this in reality is to look at the actual experience of other nations. The most striking example of economic growth being spurred by demography is the case of Ireland. Ireland's legalization of contraception in 1979 caused a decline in the birth rate, from 22 (per 1000 population) in 1980 to 13 in 1994. This caused a rapid decline in the dependency ratio. The phenomenal economic boom in Ireland thereafter, earning it the sobriquet "Celtic Tiger", is very likely founded in this fertility decline. As David Bloom explains “ in Ireland the ratio of workers to dependents improved due to lower fertility but was raised further by increased female labor market participation and a reversal from outward migration of working age population to a net inflow. Africa, on the other hand continues to have high fertility and youth dependency rates, which contribute to its economic stagnation”. “The magnitude of the demographic dividend appears to be dependent on the ability of the economy to absorb and productively employ the extra workers” he warns, “rather than be a pure demographic gift”. One has seen a similar sequence of changes in demographics and the economy in Japan in the 1950s and China in the 1980s.

But even if this happened in some places, will it happen in India? Will India get benefit from higher savings and investment rates will this continue to fire India's high growth rate? Will India be able to develop the primary and secondary education so as to make sure that the larger working-age population conferred by the demographic dividend is an educated lot? And will the manufacturing sector which is needed to create job opportunities for the larger labor force be able to absorb these skilled laborers?

What is important to remember is that the demographic dividend is a population bulge in the working-age category. Like a pig in a python's stomach it will eventually move up, causing a rise in the old-age dependency ratio some three to four decades from now. The doubling of the old age dependency ratio from 9 % to 20 % in 2050 is thus the obverse of the dependency ratio. That is, every demographic dividend comes with an accompanying "demographic echo".

It is in the nation's interest to reap as much as possible from the dividend so that it is robust enough and not stymied later by the echo.

How underdogs win

The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong- the Goliaths- and weak – the David’s- combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. But when the underdogs chose an unconventional strategy, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6.

But how exactly does an underdog like David win against the more powerful Goliath? There seem to be three major elements in these victories: one, alter the terms, rules and terrain of the conflict in your favor, two, develop superior energy and enthusiasm for results and finally, mobilize unique and unconventional approaches.

These have been known for a long time under the rubric of asymmetric warfare, where the tactical success of asymmetric warfare is dependent on at least some of the following assumptions:

• One side has a technological advantage which outweighs the numerical advantage of the enemy,
• Training and tactics which allow a smaller force to overcome a much larger one,
• unconventional tactics in which the superior power is weaker,
• using prohibited tactics to its advantage.

The genius of Gladwell is to show how these can strategies and tactics can work for underdogs everywhere, from a girl’s basketball team in California to the Viet Minh in the Vietnam War. Gladwell theorizes why Davids beat Goliaths: “Insurgents work harder than Goliath. But their other advantage is that they will do what is “socially horrifying”—they will challenge the conventions about how battles are supposed to be fought. All the things that distinguish the ideal basketball player are acts of skill and coördination. When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment.”
He describes in some detail the approach that Ranadive, the coach of a junior girl’s basketball team, took in taking this team to the finals- changing the conventional approach of using only half the basketball court by applying a full court press, understanding the time elements of the game and motivating his young charges with energy and enthusiasm.

The Viet Minh in Vietnam similarly defined the battle on their terms by avoiding full front attacks against a far superior equipped enemy by moving to guerilla tactics of attack and disappear. Their leadership shaped the conflict as one of national liberation thus mobilizing the entire country. And they designed tactics that constantly surprised the US forces ranging from the underground tunnels of Cu Chi to the Tet offensive. And they were willing to fight for ever against an opponent tired of the conflict ten thousand miles from their country.
In more recent times, the primary election campaign of Obama to win the nomination from the clear front runner Hillary Clinton is another example of an underdog using asymmetric warfare tactics for success. As a matter of fact, it is classic David Goliath story and the tactics teach us a lot. Clinton had the establishment support - so Obama never fought for their endorsements but went around them directly to the state level organizations. He doubted that he could win the big states without the democratic establishment support so he went to the small caucus states. He had no major donors so he went to the internet and sought small donations from those who had never participated in elections before. Since he did not have support of the big unions, he used social sites on the internet to mobilize volunteers for his effort. In short his was a brilliant strategy to win against a tougher, better known and better financed candidate with an insurgent candidacy.

In summary, what are the winning tactics of the underdog: The weaker power can only win if it aggressively defines the rules of the conflict in a way that disadvantages the stronger power. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, according to Ivan Arreguín-Toft, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t”. Insurgents must work harder, much harder, than the Goliaths. Davids can beat Goliaths by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life. The biggest shaft in the underdogs arsenal is their ability to try completely different surprising tactics sometimes even sometimes doing what is “socially horrifying” to win. By refusing to be bound by conventional rule of conflict, they can obtain that crucial edge essential for success.

The Power of One

There was a time when we heard about the great achievements of the day only from the newspapers and came to know of outstanding explorers, scientists or others only when they were given awards. Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, Nelson Mandela were all distant but haloed names when we were growing up but we knew little of their work in any detail. In the past fifteen years with the internet, now you can google almost any name to find out the latest discoveries and breakthroughs and those making them and also read their latest papers. This change I thought was drastic in that it made it possible for people all over the globe to know the latest breakthroughs in real time. That was till a few days ago when, Kit, a friend of mine, sent me an audio clip of Swami Vivekananda made more than a century ago speaking at the World Religion Congress in Chicago in 1895. I had been reading Vivekanda since my childhood, since he was a particular hero of mine, but I must confess that hearing his voice in this audio starting with " Brother and sister of America" was an exhilarating experience.

But even this has been surpassed in the past five years when you can hear and see the greatest minds of the day talk about their work on the internet youtube videos. The power of one person to change the world of science, technology, medicine, politics can now be seen in real time. The impact of this new reality on the world has yet to be fully grasped. But the wonder of being able to listen to and see the greatest minds of the day talking about their passionate discoveries and endeavours is immense. For we are no longer talking about the past but of the future since in many cases their journey is not yet complete.

Here are a few of these modern day visionaries and explorers of the mind and spirit speaking themselves of where they are in their efforts.

• "Can we create new life out of our digital universe?" Craig Venter asks. His answer is "yes" -- and pretty soon. He walks through his latest research and promises that we'll soon be able to build and boot up a synthetic chromosome.
• Alan Russell studies regenerative medicine -- a breakthrough way of thinking about disease and injury, using a process that can signal the body to rebuild itself.
• Juan Enriquez thinks and writes about the profound changes that genomics and other life sciences will cause in business, technology, politics and society.
• Shai Agassi has a bold plan for electric cars and to make countries oil free by 2020.
• Dr. Larry Brilliant talks about how smallpox was eradicated from the planet, and calls for a new global system that can identify and contain pandemics before they spread.
• Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Laboratory, describes how the One Laptop Per Child project will build and distribute the "$100 laptop."
  
• A call to service by Obama. Speaking at a commencement ceremony on a college campus during his campaign, Obama spoke passionately about a call to service to the young.
• Nandan Nilekhani's optimistic book "Imagining India: The idea of a renewed nation " which lays out the achievements and challenges facing the country and how technology can be mobilized for development.
  

As Bobby Kennedy once said "few will have the greatness to bend history itself" but I am certain that a few will certainly come from the group above.

I would welcome my readers contributing their own views on who they see as an explorer and visionary based on their knowledge.

The ten thousand hour rule

When I was growing up, we were continually being told that success was 90 % perspiration and 10 % inspiration. Nobody told us how much perspiration. Till now. Now we know -- it is ten thousand hours worth.

According to a new book, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell argues that raw talent without hours of practice and preparation is not going to lead to success. In fact researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. " Ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world class expert- in anything". He adduces examples of this ranging from the Beetles to Bill Gates. Lennon and McCartney of the Beatles started playing together in 1957 but their greatest hit came ten years later. And the real reason for their success- preparation and practice. The Beatles spent years playing at Indra, a strip club in Hamburg eight hours a day seven days a week. By the time they had their first burst of success, they had performed alive an estimated twelve hundred times. Bill Gates started doing real time programming as an eighth grader in 1968 because the Mothers Club at his school had started a computer club. For the next five years, Bill Gates spent a great deal of time on computers- sometimes eight hours a day for seven days a week for months on end. By the time he dropped out of Harvard, he had been programming practically non stop for seven consecutive years-- way beyond the ten thousand hours mark. Even Mozart ( whose father made him practice and whose best work came after the age of twenty one, had been composing for ten years).

What about our own Mozart of Madras- the Oscar winner A R Rehman? Rehman's father was a composer and musician who inspired Rehman to learn music from the early age of four. But he died when Rehman was only 9 making him the breadwinner of the family. For the next 8-9 years Rehman worked as an assistant to a number of music directors in the south while selling musical instruments as the family business. In 1987 he turned his hand to advertising, writing over 300 jingles over the five year period from 1987. " Working in ads", he now says, " contributed to the precision in my music. In jingles, you only have a few seconds to create a mood, or convey a message or emotion. Jingles taught me discipline". Rehman finally got his breakthrough in Mani Ratnam's Roja at the age of 25. Yes, by that time he had put in his ten thousand hours of practice and hard work to complement his innate genius!

What about another icon- Sachin Tendulkar widely regarded as one of the greatest batsmen in the history of cricket. Tendulkar began his cricketing career under the guidance of his coach and mentor, Ramakant Achrekar . When he was young, Tendulkar would practice for hours on end in the nets. If he became exhausted, Achrekar would put a one rupee coin the top of the stumps the bowler who dismissed Tendulkar would get the coin. If Tendulkar passed the whole session without getting dismissed, the coach would give him the coin. Tendulkar contributes this technique in being instrumental for enhancing his concentration. He still treasures the 13 coins earned by him during the practice sessions. On December 11, 1988, aged just 15 years and 232 days, Tendulkar scored 100 not-out in his debut first-class match him the youngest cricketer to score a century on his first-class debut. By that time he had been playing and practising for - yes- ten years.

But according to Gladwell, there are other elements too besides inborn talent that lead to the creation of what we call genius which we often ignore-- the family they are born into, the cultural environment of the day, even the structure of society. He argues that the outliers in a particular field reach their lofty status not only base on their innate talent but through a combination of ability, opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage. Intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated. Thus higher IQ does not correlate with success. With intelligence you also need practical intelligence. And you need others- parent, mentors- when you are young and averse to harsh discipline of practice. Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard over a long period of time. But still no one it seems clear ever makes it alone. Gladwell concludes that the outliers are "products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy..their success is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritance..all critical to making them who they are."

In a recent newspaper article, David Brooks points out the modern view of genius which takes a somewhat similar and yet different tack. According to him " the key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It’s not I.Q. .. Instead, it’s deliberate practice...and the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father ( or mentor) intent on improving his skills."

Based on the latest research, he tries gamely to design a genius thus " take a girl who possessed a slightly above average verbal ability". Let her meet a famous author when young to "to create a sense of affinity" and would give her a vision of her future self. "It would also help if one of her parents died when she was 12, infusing her with a profound sense of insecurity and fueling a desperate need for success." Then she would practice writing under a mentor who would provide a constant stream of feedback, viewing her performance from the outside, correcting the smallest errors, pushing her to take on tougher challenges. And our genius is on the way!

A common refrain emerges from all of these studies. Innate ability is fine but true genius requires hard work and practice of your craft for almost two to three hours a day for ten years. Yes ten thousand hours worth !