Managing the silver tsunami- technology and ageing

This so called silver tsunami stems from a seemingly unstoppable increase in longevity, driven in part by improvements in medical technology. American demographer James Vaupel has shown that human life expectancy in most advanced nations has increased in a linear pattern, rising by about three months a year for the past 170 years. The life expectancy in India, which was about 45 years at independence, has now grown to about 70 and the problems of ageing are slowly but inexorably rising here as well.


The real problem is that ageing is about all of us, and how we keep people productive for as long as possible. In essence ageing well is about living in an environment that has the intensity and the density of activities that keep one engaged and healthy right through our golden years.


In the west, the normal cycle of living as one gets older is to move from the home to a retirement home and then to the hospital as the fraility of old age slowly requires help in every day activities that one can no longer do for one self. But this system is costly- for example nursing homes in the US range from $78000 for an average nursing home to $ 194,000 for full time home based care.  And worse this is a system no one actually wants to use -a 2005 study from the Association of Retired Persons (AARP) found that around nine in 10 of those shortly to retire expressed a strong preference to stay in their existing homes during their retirement.


In the Indian context, the joint family structure used to provide the necessary infrastructure for its aged family members. But this has slowly frayed with urbanization and some of the same problems now dog the ageing here as well. But efforts to focus on these issues and find solutions are still in their infancy. As Coughlin, the director of an ageing lab at MIT, puts it the real issue in ageing is the longevity paradox: “We spend billions of dollars trying to live longer, but no one puts any thought or any investment into how to live longer, better.”


The Age Lab at MIT has come up with some interesting solutions to help the elderly cope with life in their declining years. Among them:

• Agnes (or Age Gain Now Empathy System)-a specially designed suit to mimic the physical restrictions of old age and helpA plastic inner harness and elastic bands attached to the feet and hands imitate the businesses adapt their products for elderly consumers;
• a set of two-way monitors allowing distant children to check in remotely on elderly parents;
• a sensor-enabled “smart trash can” to measure how much food is being eaten;  
• Paro: a furry white robot seal, designed to provide stimulation for a dementia sufferer which responds to touch and sound, waking up and getting sleepy depending on the frequency with which a user interacts with him

But the director of the lab is the first to admit that technology is only part of the solution and that what is required is a comprehensive approach to helping the elderly navigate the difficult years of their lives. The advent of civilization has brought its own particular kinds of problems and we need to integrate technology with political and social institutions in our search for solutions.


With urbanisation, for example, has come an issue that is really modern in its origins- transport. With economic growth, people in the west tend to live in bigger houses that houses are further apart, shopping malls have replaced the neighbouring mom and pop stores, the vegetable vendors that came to your house are gradually being replaced by large malls. In the absence of any public transport, most elderly people have no alternative to cars. Taxis are expensive, or unsuitable. There are few rules to stop you driving. Faced with a choice between giving up either their cars or their freedom, most elderly people drive for longer than they should. And, as a consequence, older drivers have the highest accident rates of any group apart from teenagers. One solution under trial is ITNAmerica, an innovative not-for-profit organisation that brings together volunteers, vehicles and clever computer software to provide around 50,000 subsidised car rides a year to elderly people across the US. The organisation is, in effect, a cheap, community-run taxi service staffed by a mix of paid and volunteer drivers.


Living alone elderly couples now face problems in doing even routine jobs by themselves. While external help may be available, it is expensive. Hiring a plumber or electrician for a minor repair can cost anywhere from $ 75 t0 $200 per hour.  Another experiment in Beacon Hill Village thus seeks to add community services, discounts at local stores and medical facilities and a programme of social and political activities to transportation. Here too a range of volunteers and paid professionals provide help from odd jobs to more formal care services thus providing an infrastructure of help for the aged living in their own houses.


Yet another experiment Elder Power focuses primarily on health care and was launched in 2008. This offers different packages of care, ranging from $100 to $600 a month, for which customers receive a mixture of visits and daily phone calls, along with cameras and motion sensors to monitor their wellbeing. More personal support – including transportation, help with meals and bathing – is provided too, although some of it costs extra.

Models like Beacon Hill Village, ITNAmerica and Elder Power show glimpses of a future in which more elderly people can stay in their homes for longer. All three use innovative technology, make use of assets in their local community and bring together the resources of local businesses, volunteers and the state to solve problems none could have solved individually, at reasonable cost.


Some other interesting attempts to grapple with this problem come from around the world:

• Mensheds ( Australia) targets those at risk of loneliness or isolation by building or renovating a local shed in which men of all ages can come together and work. 
• Fureai Kippu (Japan) translated as “elderly care units” or, more charmingly, “kindness tickets”, is a nationwide Japanese system of local alternative currencies to help care for elderly people. 
• Senior Co-Housing ( Netherlands) Sometimes known as “lifetime neighbourhoods”, is a system of mixed-age residential developments designed to allow young and old to live together and support each other. 
• Circles, (UK) is an innovative programme of social services for elderly people, which operates by creating local “circles” of support using a mix of concierge-style phone and internet help services and local volunteer “neighbourhood helpers” to augment traditional social care. 
• Aconchego,( Portugal) finds elderly people at risk of loneliness and isolation but with a spare room to offer, and matches them with local university students in need of inexpensive housing. 
• Tyze, (Canada) allows elderly people to share private information with their family, friends, care-givers and health providers. 
• Norcs, (US) or “naturally occurring retirement communities”, are buildings or neighbourhoods that have been retro-fitted to provide services for elderly people. 

It is an irony that what all these efforts are really trying to replicate is what the Indian joint family system used to provide in the past!

Can elephants solve the debt ceiling debate ?

The ongoing debate on the plans to raise the debt ceiling in Washington has stimulated interesting ideas on how this can be resolved. One of the more innovative ideas comes from watching rogue elephants- yes indeed!

In the animal world, it seems that male elephants,  to achieve their mating goals, will sometimes play games of chicken, with one individual essentially giving the impression that he is crazy and has become an irrational player in a game premised on shared rationality and predictability. 


According to Barash, this is " a tactic that works surprisingly well, because male elephants can in fact become temporarily “crazy.” One of the most terrifying sights in the animal world is an elephant in a state of must : huge bulls, oozing a weird, foul-smelling, greenish glop from glands near their eyes, behave with violent abandon, taking risks and defying the basic rules of pachyderm propriety. " If they remind you of the tea party fanatics in the Republican party today, it is merely a coincidence !


Normally facing an elephant in must, other elephants — not to mention people — are well advised to get out of the way. But what you really need to do: stop playing the game.  In the 1983 movie “WarGames,” an errant military supercomputer has a final moment of lucidity in which it notes, “The only winning move is not to play.” 


The president is best advised to do the same: declare that the other side has foregone all pretense at rational legitimacy, and simply proceed to govern as best he can for the good of the country.

The tyranny of technology

With increasing sophistication and availablity of new technology come some unintended consequences. Sometimes we assume that technology will always work when needed and when it does not, we are at a loss having forgotten how life was before the advent of the latest version of a technology.

Two recent incidents in my life come to mind which illustrate this dilemna of the tyranny of technology and how it tends to control our lives and how we have slowly but surely handed over our brains to automation.

A few months ago my wife and I were to travel to Hyderabad to fulfill a lecture committment. We had everything organized when a freak snow storm hit our area and flooded the power generator backup. Since the roads were impassable, the replacement generator could not be brought in. And when the electric transmission lines went down -- yes in the most advanced country in the world, the lines are held up with old wooden poles - which often break and fall in a storm. Since the electric power went off in our condominium on a Wednesday and our journey was scheduled for the next day, we paid it no heed, assuming that the power breakdown could not last more than a few hours. Except of course it did. Even more importantly the power breakdown made certain that the sole elevator in our five storey condominium was no longer working. The state of the roads meant that an external elevator system could not be brought in. So there we were stuck in our flat on the fifth floor with no way of coming down with our luggage to take a taxi to the airport. ( Of course, if we had known of these possible failures, we would have packed smaller bags, organized a friend to help us bring them down and changed our flight plans). But we were sure that technology would work as it was intended to- for elevators, road cleaning and for power generation. So there we were - the airplanes were taking off in the air, taxis to the airport were able to drive to the airport but we could not come down five floors to the ground! As it happened a few friendly neighbours helped us navigate the darkened stairs and we did make our flight but for a few hours technology had dominated our lives.

And then it happened again. Our daughter decided to take a holiday from her hectic work schedule and flew off to St Maarten. Since she was on holiday, she decided to switch off her Blackberry phone, not take her Macbook but took only the latest IPad 2 with its latest fanciest gadget of Facetime. Now Facetime was a new addition on the iPad 2 which allows one to not only talk to someone far away who is connected to the internet but also to see them. We were thrilled to see her on the small screen as she described her daily adventures. Till one day last week we did not hear from her. So we called her from our iPad2 but still no reply. Her cellphone we knew was turned off and so would automatically divert us to her voicemail. We thought maybe she is out for dinner, then for supper and then perhaps at a bar and then perhaps a nightclub. Or she could be taking a midnight walk on the beach. But as evening wore on and there was still no reply on the iPad2 phone, we gradually started panicking especially when calls to her phone in the room at the hotel were also not answered. So there we were 4000 miles away unable to contact her to ensure that she was safe. Till finally in the early hours of morning, her mother who had kept an anxious vigil all night, decided to call the hotel front desk to go to her room and check that she was all right and well. Some five minutes later, the front desk clerk came down and told us that she had answered the door and was all right. Of course minutes later she called herself a little peeved that we had woken her up from her restful sleep! What had happended was really quite simple- we had assumed that technology would work as in the past. But her cellphone was turned off, the ringer in the new iPad2 was too low in volume to awaken her and the hotel phone system, it turned out was defective! We had spent a sleepless night for nothing.

The moral of all of this - don't rely too much on technology working all the time everywhere. After all before there were cellphones or phones, we would send off our children to the far ends of the earth only with a lot of advice and warnings and hope for an occasional postcard, which more often than not only asked for more money to be sent to a post office somewhere in the boondocks! Now technology had made contact so easy and we had become so reliant on its working, that any failure was a major catastrophe.

Ah the tyranny of technology!

New ways to meet the challenges for the future

Here is an object lesson on how to turn an apparent misfortune into an exciting opportunity. 


For the past few days, the press in the US has been crying about the death of their space program and how NASA has no more opportunities in the future and the great space adventure in dead. But now a new approach to this lack of public funds for Nasa has emerged. Spurred by a $30 million purse, put up by Google, 29 teams have signed up for a competition to become the first private venture to land on the Moon. 


Like the aviation prizes that jump-started airplane technology a century ago, the Google Lunar X Prize is meant to rally the enthusiasm of technologists and entrepreneurs around the world. It is administered by the X Prize Foundation, which in 2004 handed out $10 million to the first private team to build a spacecraft that could carry people 60 miles above the Earth’s surface. (The winner, SpaceShipOne, was built by the aerospace designer Burt Rutan with backing from Paul Allen, the software magnate.)

For the Moon competition, Google put up $30 million. Of that, $20 million will go to the first team to land a spacecraft on the Moon, explore 500 meters and send back high-definition video and photos by 2015. The second team will win $5 million, and the remaining $5 million will pay for bonus prizes like surviving a frigid lunar night or traveling more than 5,000 meters on the surface. 


Twenty nine teams have signed up till date for this competion. Among them Naveen Jain, an Internet billionaire and a founder of Moon Express, who says his company will spend $70 million to $100 million to try to win the Google Lunar X Prize, but could recoup its investment on its first flight. He envisions selling exclusive broadcast rights for video from the Moon, as well as sponsorships, á la Nascar, for companies to put their logos on the lander.

This approach to solving problems, bypassing the government and in some cases using the government infrastructure in a innovative way,  is something that we need to encourage in our own societies. Take another example: the US government's new approach to improving education by creating a competition for "Race to the top". Here the states are encouraged to compete annually for a pot of money, provided by the US government, for plans to improve education in the state which requires all parties to agree to work together. The "Race to the moon" follows the same approach -finding innovative approaches to problem solving by mobilizing external groups and communities. Who knows what new ideas may emerge?


I wonder if some Indian company can sponsor competitions of this nature for the various problems we face- from space travel to curbing local corruption, from improving poorly funded schools in villages to cleaning urban concentrations, from accelerating local innovation to improving science education.. Certainly the business houses can spend their money more productively than building $ 1 billion multistoried building to house four people!

Why Pakistanis hate Indians

In a recent piece,  Taseer, the son the assasinated Punjab governor of Pakistan, gives his take on why Pakistanis hate Indians. According to him " The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness .... It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness"


 I do not agree with his rather simplistic conclusions, but the article does touch on some of the underlying reasons of the inability of Pakistan to live with its neighbour. Many of my friends have completely opposite views on the love/hatred between the two neighbours- in this view the common man on each side loves the other and the cause of this hatred is the manipulation of the masses by the leadership on both sides of the border. But you need to read the complete piece:

" Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet      about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools   of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness."

For the tea lovers among us

The first cup moistens my lips and throat

The second cup breaks my loneliness.

The third cup searches my barren entrail,

          but to find therein some thousand volumes of odd ideographs.

The fourth cup raises a slight perspiration;

          all the wrongs of life pass out through my pores.

At the fifth cup I am purified.

The sixth cup calls me to the realms of the immortals.

The seventh cup - ah, but I could take no more!

          I only feel the breath of the cool wind that raises in my sleeves.

          Where is Paradise? Let me ride on this sweet breeze and waft away thither.


( from Song of Tea by Lu Tung)

Facing life and death

Dudley Clendinen has a splendid essay, “The Good Short Life,” where he defines what life is. According to him “ Life is not just breathing and existing as a self-enclosed skin bag. It’s doing the activities with others you were put on earth to do.”

Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. If he uses all the available medical technology, it will leave him, in a few years’ time, “a conscious but motionless, mute, withered, incontinent mummy of my former self.” But instead of choosing that long, dehumanizing, expensive course, he decided to face death as one of life’s “most absorbing thrills and challenges.”

“We obsess in this country about how to eat and dress and drink, about finding a job and a mate. About having sex and children. About how to live. But we don’t talk about how to die. We act as if facing death weren’t one of life’s greatest, most absorbing thrills and challenges. Believe me, it is. This is not dull. But we have to be able to see doctors and machines, medical and insurance systems, family and friends and religions as informative — not governing — in order to be free.

And that’s the point. This is not about one particular disease or even about Death. It’s about Life, when you know there’s not much left.”

"I respect the wishes of people who want to live as long as they can. But I would like the same respect for those of us who decide — rationally — not to. I’ve done my homework. I have a plan. ..I have found the way. Not a gun. A way that’s quiet and calm.Knowing that comforts me. I don’t worry about fatty foods anymore. I don’t worry about having enough money to grow old. I’m not going to grow old."

He concludes this touching article saying “I’m having a wonderful time…I’m dancing, spinning around, happy in the last rhythms of the life I love. When the music stops — when I can’t tie my bow tie, tell a funny story, walk my dog, talk with Whitney, kiss someone special, or tap out lines like this — I’ll know that Life is over.

It’s time to be gone.”

-------------------------------------

*Here are links to three other essays, which offer other perspectives on why we should accept the finitude of life and the naturalness of death. They are: “Born Toward Dying,” by Richard John Neuhaus, “L’Chaim and Its Limits: Why Not Immortality?” by Leon Kass and “Thinking About Aging,” by Gilbert Meilaender.

The seamy side of US life

In every society there are seamy and dark sides of life which often go unnoticed. Yet they impact often the most vulnerable member of that society. And as they tend to be small they go under the radar though they make daily life a constant struggle and contribute to the unnecessary stress.

Here are three such strains in the US

Cramming: “Cramming” is the practice of placing unauthorized, misleading or deceptive charges on your telephone bill. Crammers rely on confusing telephone bills in an attempt to trick consumers into paying for services they did not authorize or receive, or that cost more than the consumer was led to believe. About 15-20 million households end up paying for services they neither wanted nor asked for but do so through their telephone bills. Less than 5 % even know that they are paying these charges which range to an average of about $ 20 per month. Since the telephone companies include these unauthorized charges in their bills- claiming that they are required to do so by FEC to allow equal access to all new comers- they too make a hefty profit perhaps as much as $ 1 billion per year! Here we have a perfect situation- the crammers make a killing perhaps $ 2-3 billion per year, the enablers the land line telephone companies piously condemn these practices yet continue to pocket $ 1 billion in extra profits a year while the consumers who pay only $ 20 extra per month often forget to raise this as an issue and consider the hassle of recovering these costs worth less than the cost!

Generic drugs vs patents

Phishing is a way of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public. Phishing is typically carried out by e-mail spoofing or instant messaging,^[1] and it often directs users to enter details at a fake website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one. Phishing is an example of social engineering techniques used to deceive users,^[2] and exploits the poor usability of current web security technologies.^[3] Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, public awareness, and technical security measures.

A phishing technique was described in detail in 1987, and the first recorded use of the term "phishing" was made in 1996. The term is a variant of fishing,^[4] probably influenced by phreaking,^{[5] [6]} and alludes to "baits" used in hopes that the potential victim will "bite" by clicking a malicious link or opening a malicious attachment, in which case their financial information and passwords may then be stolen.

Advice for the newly weds

We recently celebrated the wedding of our son and I was asked to speak as the father of the groom and to advise my son on his marriage. David, one of my dearest friends and favourite writer, came up to me after the speech and insisted that I put this down in my next blog. So here it is, in slightly abbreviated form..

"It is said that of all the things which wisdom provides to make life entirely happy, the greatest is friendship. So it is with great pleasure that we welcome all of you- our dearest friends- to this happy occasion…

I have been asked to distill my years of wisdom and provide some advise to my newly wedded son:

Though of course it has been said that a man listens to his father only when he has a son who does-not. It was Mark Twain who put it best when he said, “ When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years."

And it is a form of poetic justice that by the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he’s wrong.

But here are some words of wisdom anyway!

It’s been said that said that a man is not complete until he is married --and then he’s well and truly finished.

For a happy marriage, and based on my lifetime of experience, it is always a good strategy to wake up every morning and apologize to your wife. You may not know why but, hey, during the day you will commit some boo boo or the other and you might as well get the apologies out of the way early in the day.

For the fact is that your wife will always be right, everything will always be your fault and you will never win an argument.

Just remember that a man who gives in when he is wrong is a wise man. But a man who gives in when he is right..he is married!

In a more serious vein, always be respectful of each other, particularly in public, and always fight for each other and not against each other!

A friend of mine thinks everyone should get married because no one deserves to be happy their entire life.

But I hope that you two will prove him wrong and that fifty, sixty, seventy years from now, you will be just as happy and as much in love with each other as you are today."

The ultimate cookbook

The chief technology officer of Microsoft has created the ultimate cookbook.

Modernist Cuisine's five volumes comprise 1,522 recipes and 1,150,000 words of text on 2,438 pages, almost every one of them illustrated with color photography and charts, with dozens of gee-whiz, never-before-seen photographs of beautiful free-form color swirls that could be textile designs but turn out to be life-threatening pathogens; or sculptural objects that could be outdoor art installations but are mussels suspended in clear gelatin.. It weighs 40 pounds, four of them just ink.

Within its five volumes (six, actually, including a spiral-bound book of recipes for the professional kitchen) are several long chapters that are as comprehensive and readable and valuable as any book on cooking.The first volume alone contains a long, definitive introduction to food pathogens and food safety, a subject cooks ignore at their peril. The other volumes give basic information on science, ingredients, and techniques common to all cooking, not only "modernist" cuisine. And, of course, the book is a guide to the avant-garde—one far more comprehensive and usable than anything else yet written. As for the food, there are 1,522 recipes. So knock yourself out. And of course, you will never need another cookbook again!!

The rot around us

There are two elements which underlie the disaster that faces Pakistan today. The first is the duplicity of the Pakistan's army and ISI, well chronicled by the New York Times interview with a retired militant.

The second element continues to be the funding of schools in Pakistan by Saudi Arabia- a story which has attained less traction but which is a far more potent long term threat and which the US and India ignore at its own peril. According to the best statistics there are at least 28,000 madrassas in Pakistand today which turn out ill educated but motivated Jihadis a year. This is the canon fodder being tended and grown by the Pakistan establishment.

Christopher Hitchens rips the shame of the Pakistan posturing in his latest broadside in Vanity Fair. The facts about the cannon fodder being assiduously developed by the country are less well known but in my view far more dangerous.

"Madrassa is an Islamic school that teaches Islam and Qoraan studies only. The students of the Madrrassas are in the ages of 8 up to the late 20s’, they live in dorms attached to the Madrassas and study in age groups of 20 up to 40 students under an Islamic teacher which in places likePakistan or Afghanistan are titled ‘Maulana’ – our teacher.

In Pakistan there are about 28,000 Madrassas with the total number of about 4 millions students. Most of the Madrassas in Pakistan are not preaching radical interpretations of Islam but still there are few thousands Madrassas that are teaching the radical doctrine of Wahhabismand, in many cases, are funded by Saudi Arabia.

The Madrassas all over the Islamic World and especially in Pakistan were the breading ground and recruiting centers for all kinds of Islamic militant organizations, primarily Al Qaeda. The Maulanas detect the most devoted and talented students for the recruiters of the Global Jihad. For two decades many thousands were recruited, under the close supervision of the Pakistani notorious intelligence service – ISI to fight against India for the divided Kashmir cause. Despite The 9/11 and the War on Terror the Madrassas recruiting system is still functioning almost undisturbed and is still the main source for young devoted Muslims recruits. It is also most likely that ISI is still involved in the recruiting system for his own needs.

There five major governing bodies of Pakistani Madrassas and their corresponding schools of thought are: Tanzim-ul-Madaras (Barelwi), Wafaq-ul-Madaras (Deobandi), Wafaq-ul-Madaras (Shia), Wafaq-ul-Madaras (Ahle Hadith) and Rabita-ul-Madaris (Jamaat-e-Islami)

The madaris rose as colleges of learning in the Islamic world in the 11th century, though there were institutions of learning earlier. They catered not only to the religious establishment, though that was the dominant influence over them, but also the secular one. To the latter they supplied physicians, administrative officials, judges and teachers.

In 1947 there were only 189 madrassas in Pakistan. In 2002 the country had 10,000-13,000 unregistered madrassas with an estimated 1.7 to 1.9 million students. A 2008 estimate puts this figure at "over 40,000". Most madrassas in Pakistan cater to the dominant Sunni sect, with an estimated 14-20% madrassas serving the minority Shia population." And there has been major effort to curb the growth of these jihadi factories.

The sad fact is that the US has been complicit in this shameful deceit and continues to fund the army and ISI and indirectly the madrassas. The latest development of holding up $ 900 million of payments to the Pakistan army is a modest first step but it is time for India to develop a strategy to curb the rot around us before it engulfes us all.

Managing the information overload

The 18th and 19th centuries are remembered for the industrial revolution. The 20th and 21st centuries may be remembered for the information revolution. There is an abundance of content around us. Never before have humans had such easy access to as much information as they do today. An ocean of content is just a click away. However, not all this content is good. In fact, most of it is very poor in quality, and there is a tremendous amount of noise around us. And this dramatic rise in content found online, and the incredible ease of finding it, has, in turn, created a culture of “clickers, stumblers, and jaded spectators.

We now no longer have the time, or the resources, to keep up with the ever-growing amount of new stuff that is all around us. When I need to buy a new phone I have no desire to spend 2 weeks researching hundreds of different models. I want to talk to an expert who would recommend the best model for my needs. When there is a debate on the debt ceiling, I want to read knowledgeable persons who can explain the issues in understandable terms. When there is conflict in Syria, I want to know the historical context and political ramifications by someone who actually understands the issues. All this information overload has led to a parallel search for such experts – or gatekeepers-or what some have taken to calling the new “curators” of the information age. Of course being a curator or a gatekeeper is not an easy job, but in this world of overwhelming choices someone has to do it. And we need to find these gatekeepers or curators in our daily lives if we are to survive the onslaught of the information age with any degree of sanity.

The term “curator” stems from traditional museum curation: museum curators collect art and artifacts and identify the most relevant or important to be displayed in an exhibit for the public. Museum curators are subject-matter experts with higher levels of education that guide an organization’s overall art collection. Curation has also, historically, referred to overseeing the care and preservation of precious collectibles. In the information age, the term curator takes on a wholly new meaning. For with the overwhelming amount of content available on the Internet today, it is difficult for anyone to efficiently manage their daily reading activities, as well as separate useful and accurate content from the dross. This is where the information curator comes in, allowing individuals or businesses to provide a valuable service to their audiences by addressing their need for quality content and the lack of available time to find it. Further, by sharing the most relevant, thought-provoking online content, curation can also establish individuals and companies as authorities and thought leaders. A content curator is thus someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.

But sadly we have arrived where everyone is a content creator- witness the explosive growth of online bloggers. Every magazine seems to have directed their staff to start a blog online and to pretend to become a content curator. Not since Gutenberg have we seen such a significant change in who's able to use the tools of content creation to engage in a public dialog. We, of course, go to trusted sources in order to raise the signal, and lessen the noise and here are some ways that people on the Internet are trying to do this:

Editorial: these are individuals that make decisions about what is worthwhile to promote. Examples include: sophisticated sites like Huffington Post, with millions of page views per month, that run with a similar hierarchy to magazines – and where there are layers of editing, concept vetting, story pitches, etc.

Crowd sourcing: this uses the audience to help guide decision-making about what is important. Examples include: social sharing sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, and Reddit, where the audience can vote on what is important or relevant to the community.

Algorithms: this is when the coders assign importance based on rules that are written into the system themselves. Decisions about implementation, spam control and how to prevent gaming the system have an impact on all users. Examples include: Google, Bing and other search providers – where the heart of search is about filtering content for relevance

The Social Graph: which uses your social connections in combination with one of the above methods. Examples include: Facebook for news and links – this is the purest form since it uses your friends to help show you what’s important.

Improving all four of these “curation” methods will be the biggest challenge of the next ten years of the web – in particular, because so much more content will be coming online.

But it is the individual curators of information that can really help you in your daily lives in handling the information overload. They are like your personal advisers in navigating the complex and complicated world out there in an intelligent and confident manner. You know who they are and what they represent and so trust and reliability become the key words in all your searches. They are not so much curators as your information advisers. There are four types of curators of information that I have encountered:

First is the “forwarder” of information and not really a curator. They will send you a link or a cutting to something that they found interesting or bizarre. This content tends to be generally from your friends and can vary – at least in my case- from the precepts of St Augustine to pandas learning to dance, from home remedies to babies and orangutan friendships. Many of them are a waste of time but some are funny, entertaining and educative. Since they come from my friends, they are at least worth a look – and it helps to have friends with an amazing range of outlandish and interesting tastes. And these forwarders provide a unique function – it is like skimming a newspaper and spotting an unusual news item that you were not really looking for but is nevertheless enthralling as it oftentimes takes you into a completely new world.

In the second category are those who forward views and comments that bolster their own preconceived ideas. These people tend to be generally political activists and those who are outraged by the goings on in the world. I have received links to various sites that single out the corruption fighters in India to the perennial hypocrisy of the American right wing nuts.

But the real curation really starts with the serious bloggers. These are individuals who have a distinctive point of view but write with a purpose, martialling data to carry on their public discourse. In this category are bloggers like the economist Paul Krugman, writer Tom Friedman, sociologist David Brooks or commentators like Gurcharandas. The originator of this approach is Andrew Sullivan, who now writes for the Daily Beast. He has a brilliant description of what a modern day blogger is.

The final category is the true definition of an information curator. These would be found in the serious literary journals where each reference would be religiously quoted and footnoted. These would be found on websites like the Browser or Arts and Letters Daily.

Godin explains: "if we live in a world where information drives what we do, the information we get becomes the most important thing. The person who chooses that information has power…" In the future the economics of the information infrastructure will indeed be curators, but not curators with buildings or newspapers but individuals. From Godin's point of view, we need a middleman, a curator, to help us find what's important. That's where the true value lies. And he says that person will become the linchpin in the information age.

But what will really power curation is a really strong, clear, interesting, unique, distinctive, creative innovative point of view.