A few honorable men

In any major crisis in which passions run high and the future seems too grim to accept, there are two streams within the population- one which embraces and indeed leads the movement and the other a few- an honorable few - that emerge as voices of calm and reason. 


Last year saw the rise of the so called Tea party movement in the US. This was accompanied with angry words and vitroil that really were beyond any reasonable discourse. That they covered a subtle racism was a given but that it took over some of the moderates in its ugly wake was even more distressing. In fact at times it looked as if it was what Yeats spoke of:


   "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity."


In recent weeks the world has seen emergence of the Occupy the Wall Street (OWS) movement and its rapid spread throughout the world. This voice from below comes close on the heels of the Arab spring in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria as well as the populist movement against corruption in India. In all these cases the spirit and the stimulus came from ordinary men and women railing against an unjust system and an unfair distribution of power and pelf. It pitted itself against recalicitrant governments as well an authority ( the Wall street epitomized the financial elite) that was neither honest nor accountable. These untidy movements will inevitable wind through their way as they have  in the past with their heroes and villains. In all these cases we have seen ordinary men being transformed into spearholders of change and in many cases leaders have left their comfortable perches to praise these revolutionary movements.


In the US however, the one element that has been missing even till now has been the unaccountalbe absence of any honorable men standing openly against the tide of hate and disguised racism during the tea pary days. It is so disheartening to see both the republican leadership and the main stream media willingness to tolerate the kind of hatred for their president that has now become commonplace. One group argues that this has always been the case and cite incidents of worst occourennces in the past, the other seeks shelter behind a cowardly plea of objectivity. Here there are no leaders or media editors who will take out one page ads to denounce these descents into hatred as was the case a few years ago in india when the muslim massacres in Gujarat led to a countrywide outcry. Here in the US there has been only silence  broken by the Fox channels anchors and commentators wantonly encouraging hatred. No one but no one dared to challenge the drug induced paranoi of Beck or Rush Limbaugh, certainly no one from the main stream, with a few honorable exceptions in MSNBC, took a stand and there was no one from the elders of the republican party who challenged the birther movement or worse epithets flung at the president of the country. 


The real question in my mind is where were the doyens of the republican party - the senior Bush, the last president, Dole, Danforth? Did they not see the damage these movements were and doing to the party of Lincoln and to the country. Why is it that they did not speak out and still refuse to? And what about the leaders of the various churches - do they think it is all right that the public discourse is now in the gutter? 


The words of Dante spring to mind“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality”.

Merging cultures through music

A famous Gujarati bhajan, favorite of Mahatma Gandhiji has been put in Qawwali format by Riyaaz Qawwali.

The slow decay of a once great newspaper

People who read newspapers have started noticing the slow but inexorable decay of a once great newspaper - The Washington Post. The Post has become a surreptitious mouthpiece of the right wing in recent times and the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein has become almost undistinuishable from a Murdoch newspaper- albeit its conversion is more subtle. On a typical day last week, it had three cover stories - two touting the Republican candidates and one condemning the Obama presidency. The problem is not so much in the editorials - which somehow continue to be relatively sane- but in the way the news is slanted and the headlines chosen.


The rot has really spread deep. Last week a Post writer was given two pages to talk about a book on Obama which he admitted he had not even read, but he still waxed eloquent on how they were received in the media and how it showed Obama's team disfunction ! Another Post reporter managed to write a piece on the Job Act without mentioning the reason for its failure - the republican filibuster. It took a respected journalist to point out the "false equivalence"in the piece-- which is really a code word for blatant misrepresentation by the Post. In any other placed, the editor of the paper would have tarred and feathered and driven out of town for his papers continued bias. 


Here is James Fallows "I heard angrily from a number of reporters in the last few days. They are objecting to my claims that mainstream journalism is "enabling" Senate dysfunction by describing it as dysfunction plain and simple, rather than as the result of deliberate and extremely effective Republican strategy. That strategy, over the past four-plus years, has been to apply the once-rare threat of a filibuster to virtually everything the Administration proposes. This means that when the Democrats can't get 60 votes for something, which they almost never can, they can't get nominations confirmed, bills enacted, or most of what they want done.

You can consider this strategy brilliant and nation-saving, if you are a Republican. You can consider it destructive and nation-wrecking, if you are a Democrat. You can view it as just what the Founders had in mind, as Justice Scalia asserted recently at an Atlantic forum. You can view it as another step down the road to collapse, since the Democrats would have no reason not to turn the same nihilist approach against the next Republican administration. But you shouldn't pretend that it doesn't exist. 


That was my objection to a recent big Washington Post storyon what is wrong with the Senate, which did not contain the word "filibuster." And there is an example again this very day. I wish to Heaven that the item had appeared somewhere else, but it happens that it's also in the Post. A  story on what happened to Obama's jobs-bill proposal in the Senate concentrates on the two Plains States Democrats, Ben Nelson and Jon Tester, who defected during the cloture vote -- and not on the 100% Republican opposition to even bringing this bill up for consideration. .. I will point out these features:

- Like the previous one, it manages not to use the word "filibuster" while describing why the Administration's programs have not gotten through a Senate that the Democrats "control." The Democrats would actually "control" the Senate if a 51-vote majority were enough to pass most measures. But they don't control it, with 53 Dem+Indep seats, when the 60-vote standard becomes routine. This is too important a fact to be left out of accounts of what is happening in the Senate.

- It reflects so thorough an absorption of the idea that the filibuster-threat is normal business that it describes the latest cloture vote as a vote on the bill itself: "Democratic Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.) and Jon Tester (Mont.), who are both up for reelection next year, took to the Senate floor and delivered a sizeable blow to the bill's prospects by voting against it."  No, they voted against the cloture measure, which they knew had zero chance of getting the necessary 60 votes. .And the story has this virtuoso suggestion that Democratic wavering really explains why the Republicans don't vote for Administration proposals."

It should "come as no surprise" that all the Republicans end up voting against the bill, because that is the Republican strategy. You don't have to present this as some inside-dope subtle game-theory problem, with wavering Republicans watching Nelson and Tester for cues. The explanation is simpler: Mitch McConnell's Senate Republicans have been rock-ribbed in enforcing their strategic choice that opposing the Administration makes policy and political sense. "

The sad fact is that the Post has started hiring reporters who have little regard for truth or objectivity. In truth they are becoming the Fox news of the print media - "fair and balanced" trope included.

A billionaires advises the Wall Street protesters

We have all heard advise from various pundits and professors on the fact that the protesters around the world dont have an agenda, that they are just hippie agitators out for a good time and that these demonstrations will peter out with the onset of colder weather.

So it was refreshing to find a billionaire, Mark Cuban, providing advise to these demonstrators “what I would do if the OWS movement asked for my advice” and he goes on to lay out a few provocative ideas

1. Expose the Great Lie of Wall Street.

Every CEO tells the same great white lie. It is at the heart of every communication. It is at the heart of every financial decision. It is, at it’s very base, the reason why you all are in the 99pct and they are in the 1pct. The Lie ?

Great CEO  White Lie = “We are acting in the best interests of shareholders.”

OWS needs to move really change the prevailing corporate structure and impact the economy, it needs to engage with and talk to the shareholders. Talk to your parents, uncles/aunts, cousins, friends who own shares of stocks either directly or indirectly and have them state loudly and clearly that they would rather have. Even better why not buy a share of stock. Just 1. Maybe you can all pitch in and then go to a shareholders meeting and let them know how you feel about the “best interests of shareholders.”

2.  Push to Make All Financial Institutions Partnerships

We should make all investment banks become reporting partnerships. Those personal guarantees would change everything in the banking industry. It would change the decision making process across the board.  There would be a moral hazard to every decision and it would be the purest having “skin in the game”

3.  Limit the Size of Student Loans to $2,000 per year

If the size of student loans are capped at a low level, you know what will happen to the price of going to a college or university ? It will plummet.  Colleges and universities will have to completely rethink what they are, what purpose they serve and who their customers will be. Will some go out of business? Absolutely. That is real world. Will the quality of education suffer? Given that TAs will still work for cheap, I doubt it. But the impact on the overall economy will be enormous. There is more student loan debt than credit card debt outstanding today. By relieving this burden at graduation, students will be able to participate in the economy

4.  Levy a simple share per share tax on every transaction.

The simplest way to change this is to place a very simple per share tax on every transaction. 10 cents a trade. Every share. Every option. Every Bond. Every currency transaction.  Every trade. It might just put the market back to the basics of what the stock and bond markets are supposed to be, a means of raising capital to support corporate growth and not a casino that it has now become.  

A message for the masses and for financial elites

In recent weeks "occupy the Wall Street" (OWS) protests have captured the public imagination but the punditry is still behind times cavilling at the lack of a clear message.

" What do these protesters want?" they wail. 

The simple answer is less corruption and more accountability among the elites particularly the financial elites. 

But that message seems to not get through to the media coverage which lazily ( in case of the main street media) and deliberately ( in the case of Fox news) refuses to acknowledge the explicit and implicit message of the OWS. Take the case of recent coverage of events: After a decade of unparalleled thievery and corruption, with tens of millions entering the ranks of the hungry thanks to artificially inflated commodity prices, and millions more displaced from their homes by corruption in the mortgage markets, the headline from the first week of protests against the financial-services sector was an old cop macing a quartet of college girls !

As Matt Taibbi points out in an elegant article in the Rolling Stones, “This reveals the primary challenge of opposing the 50-headed hydra of Wall Street corruption, which is that it's extremely difficult to explain the crimes of the modern financial elite in a simple visual. The essence of this particular sort of oligarchic power is its complexity and day-to-day invisibility: Its worst crimes, from bribery and insider trading and market manipulation, to backroom dominance of government and the usurping of the regulatory structure from within, simply can't be seen by the public or put on TV. There just isn't going to be an iconic "Running Girl" photo with Goldman Sachs, Citigroup or Bank of America – just 62 million Americans with zero or negative net worth, scratching their heads and wondering where the hell all their money went and why their votes seem to count less and less each and every year.”

It is true that the OWS needs to have a clear and cogent message, one that resonates with the people. Some suggestions for these few messages:

1. Make Wall Street pay for its own bailouts. A tax of 0.1 percent on all trades of stocks and bonds and a 0.01 percent tax on all trades of derivatives would generate enough revenue to pay for the bailouts. (As an added benefit, it would also deter the endless chase for instant profits through computerized insider-trading schemes like High Frequency Trading, and force Wall Street to go back to the job it's supposed to be doing, i.e., making sober investments in job-creating businesses and watching them grow.)

2. Provide incentives to billionaires and Banks to invest in infrastructure. The millionaire surtax of 5 % should be temporary and could be removed as the economy recovers. With every 1% increase in GDP growth, the surtax could be reduced from 5% to an equivalent amount.

3. If Corporations are people, they should be taxed accordingly. Remove the preposterous and indefensible carried-interest tax break, which allows hedge-fund titans like Stevie Cohen and John Paulson to pay taxes of only 15 percent on their billions in gambling income, while ordinary Americans pay twice that for teaching kids and putting out fires.

4. Break up the monopolies. There are about 20 such firms in America, and they need to be dismantled by mandating the separation of insurance companies, investment banks and commercial banks.

5. No public money for private lobbying. A company that receives a public bailout should not be allowed to use the taxpayer's own money to lobby against him.

6. No upfront bonuses or exorbitant parachutes for Wall Street titans. These should be directly tied to the performance of the company in creating jobs and shareholder value over the long term.

What brothers and sisters can teach you

In his new book, “The Sibling Effect,” Jeffrey Kluger, explores relationships among brothers and sisters.

It is these relationships, which form the core of our being though they are not as often studied. Which is strange since from the time we’re born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and co-conspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales. They are our scolds, protectors, goads, tormentors, playmates, counselors, and sources of envy, objects of pride. They help us learn how to resolve conflicts and how not to; how to conduct friendships and when to walk away from them. Sisters teach brothers about the mysteries of girls; brothers teach sisters about the puzzle of boys. Bigger sibs learn to nurture by mentoring little ones; little sibs learn about wisdom by heeding older ones.

Kluger, a Time magazine science writer, talks about what years of research have taught him about sibling relationships in general. The interesting part is trying to use this research to make some sense of our own relationships. Did mom really love your eldest brother the best? Was your only sister the apple of your dad’s eye? Are the youngest kids more empathetic and funny? Are only children selfish but adult from an early age? Read on and see if you agree with all this research!

On the rules of birth order. Conventional wisdom is that older siblings are usually conservative, striving, competent and authoritative; youngest siblings are often iconoclasts, artists and comedians; and middle siblings tend to get lost in the thicket.

Older siblings get more total-immersion mentoring with their parents before younger siblings come along. As a result, they get an IQ and linguistic advantage because they are the exclusive focus of their parents’ attention. The idea of what businesses call “sunk costs” comes into play here, which means that by the time an older child is 2 or 3 years old, the parents have sunk a great deal of money, time, and physical and emotional energy into them. When a younger child comes along, evolutionarily speaking, it’s like a product that is not as far down the creation and assembly process. So, you put more energy into the product that is further along because that one has the greatest chance of success to thrive in life. There is a lot of parental focus on the older child, even if they’re not aware they’re doing it.

The youngest child has a valedictory quality because he or she is the parents’ final shot. Youngest kids tend to develop a greater ability to use low-power strategies, like getting inside the minds of and charming other people, because they’re the smallest child in the house. When you can’t thump your older siblings to get what you need, you learn to disarm them by being funny, or you learn to have a better intuitive sense.

The middle child seems to get the worst of both worlds. Being neither the oldest of the youngest, they neither get the attention nor do they feel the urge to develop specific strategies to charm other people. The youngest child does eventually become an only child and gets to experience the uniqueness of being the focus of parents’

attention that the firstborn had, if only for a little while, because they’re the last one left in the house. The middle child gets none of this. That’s why they tend to invest in greater ways in friendships outside the home and be much less connected to the family.

On the effects of parental favoritism. Parents do have favorites, Kluger says, but they should deny it with their dying breaths. It's not helpful, he says, and it might be especially harmful for the parental pet. It's what goes on with professional athletes and why they get into so much trouble. They think the rules don't apply to them. No one ever told them 'no.' 

On siblings and risky behavior. The smaller the age differences between siblings, the more likely they are to share friends and bad habits. All things being equal, the younger sib is inclined to pick up the habit. The older brother or sister is the closest model you have to what approaches adult or cool behavior."

On life as a singleton. As only children know, Kluger says, life ain't so bad. In fact, it's just fine. Singletons tend to learn at daycare or camp or school what brothers and sisters learn from each other at home. Indeed studies show that singletons grow up with better vocabularies, more sophisticated humor and a better knowledge of how the world operates.  In the early 20th century, some scientists said things like being an only child is a disease and the world would be better if only children didn’t exist. The idea was that only children learn self-absorption and selfishness when they should learn sharing. They learn entitlement when they should learn earned favors. When you think of an only child, the stereotypical image that comes to mind is of a forlorn figure in a silent house whose parents are occupied by adult chores and who doesn’t know how to play with cousins at Thanksgiving. Yet study after study has found that none of this is true.

Only children tend to exceed other kids in terms of academic accomplishments, sophistication, vocabulary, and often, social skills as well. They have a great ability to make and maintain friends, and to resolve conflict, because they have to be nimble about learning skills outside the home, like in daycare, play groups, and school. One of the advantages of being an only child in the home is that the conversations you hear and participate in, the TV shows you watch, and the vacations you go on tend to skew older. All these things become food for the developing brain, and by the time the child is in first grade, he or she has a background in adult thinking and abstract concepts that children with siblings just don’t get.

On sibling fights. There are so many reasons for sibling fights The most common is, yes, you guessed it, property.  It’s a powerful symbol for kids, since property is a critical way of establishing authority and control over a world in which they have virtually no power. You’re physically little. You don’t have any resources beyond what your parents can and are willing to give you. So, when something is yours, it becomes a real totem of the little bit of authority you have, which is one of the reasons little kids are so terrible about sharing. With very young kids, when researchers look at what the causes of fights are, some 80 percent of all fights in the playroom break out over property disputes. Unfortunately too often this carries on into their adult lives as well. One of the major reasons for family disputes at least in India is property.

Situational fairness. Kids also fight over what Kluger calls "situational fairness." For example, Molly has a fever so she gets to stay home from school and watch cartoons. Betty, her sister, doesn't want to be sick, but she does want to miss school and watch cartoons. What is the first word out of Betty's mouth? "Unfair!"

Our spouses and children arrive comparatively late in our lives; our parents leave us too early. But our brothers and sisters are with us for the whole journey. And so learning about these relationships and nurturing them should be important for all of us.

A clash of cultures ( part 3)

Even as I was explaining the clash of cultures in India, my attention was drawn to a new book that attempted to explain the present vitroilic standoffs in US public life. According to Colin Woodard, Americans have never agreed on anything, and that’s not about to change. 

Americans’ fundamental differences go way back, Woodard explains; the original North American colonies were settled by people from completely distinct regions of Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands. They were middle-class Calvinists with a missionary zeal to improve the world through education and good government; Scots and Irish rednecks who hated authority in any form; aristocratic slave lords with no use for democracy; English Quakers; Spanish missionaries; northern French peasants. They had no time for each other and they founded very different regional cultures – the “American nations” of Woodard’s title, which don't map exactly onto either the colonies or the early states – that are very much with us today and whose distinctive cultural DNA goes a long way toward explaining why we're still at each others' throats.

Yankeedom was founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists seeking to remake earthly society in accord with God's plan, but over time it spread to Midwestern frontier and even, by ship, to the Pacific coast. Yankees have always had a faith in government to improve the world and a drive to improve the world, with the community perfecting itself through individual self-denial – which, when you think about it, is a very un-American idea! Yankeedom has been at the center of many of America’s great moral crusades, from the fight to abolish slavery to Prohibition to the environmental movement. The religious zeal has gone down for various reasons over the years, but not the secular puritan zeal behind it and the drive to somehow improve the world through public institutions.

The Deep South was founded a few generations after Yankeedom around Charleston and the lowlands of South Carolina by English slave lords from the island of Barbados. It was actually referred to as "Carolina in the West Indies," as if it was a Caribbean slave island that just happened to be on the mainland. It was a slave state backed by a racial caste system. The system was extremely authoritarian and marked by staggering differences in wealth and privilege and rights. Its founders considered the slave state to be virtuous; they abhorred democracy and saw themselves as aristocrats and society as being created to serve their interests. They thought that regular people's participation in politics should be limited or nonexistent.

The clash of cultures that we see today is the result of this basic DNA.

Most Yankees, New Netherlanders and Left Coasters simply won’t accept an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or nonexistent social, labor or environmental protections, public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics.

Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite a public health-insurance system; a universal network of generously funded, unionized and avowedly secular public schools; tuition-free public universities; government-subsidized transportation, high-speed rail and renewable energy projects; or strict regulations on financial services, food safety, environmental pollution and campaign finance.

Hence the vitroil and lack of compromise.

A clash of culture -(contd.)

A reader wrote in after my latest blog on ‘ A clash of cultures” saying that he found the piece “a little confusing. In case of US we are clear you would prefer the idealistic over the mean minded.:  But in case of India one is not clear  whom you prefer: in case of US you give us a blunt black and white divide; in case of India you say the  cultural divide is generational and speak of  strengths and weaknesses  of both. “

If I am not clear which vision or culture I prefer in the case of India, it is because I am genuinely confused. Having been brought up in the western traditions of universality of values and fairness, the present day turn to crass materialism and commercialization jars. Yet the power of capitalism to rapidly erode boundaries of caste and class, bringing in greater societal equality and providing an avenue for innovation and experimentation are sorely welcome in a society that seemed to be decaying. There are two cultures in conflict in modern day India their differences perhaps best captured in their distinct visions of morality.

The first vision, espoused by the older generations who came to power after independence and also by my generation, is more concerned with a universal fairness, no matter who the person, no matter what the context. It has echoes of the Western Judeo-Christian tradition of thought, a society of propriety and principles and ideals. It had clear ideas of right and wrong and the summons to uphold universal principles at any cost. It is true that this morality was not the only, or even the dominant, Indian morality, or that it really was confined to the elite who possessed a disproportionate influence in years since independence, but it was the ethos I grew up in. Public service was a sacred trust, integrity and honesty was to be prized over material wealth and that was the respected Indian way. But the abstraction of these ideals, their universal and civic nature, may have given them an alien and borrowed quality, and in time the indigenous soil below had begun to assert its claims, leading to the emergence in prominence of the second vision of morality.

This second vision is the ethics of dharma and duty, not of abstract rules. Its emphasis is on applying such norms in family situations more than in the public square.  It is more rooted in the Hindu worldview. It is an alternative morality, a context-sensitive morality, and a pattern of moral reasoning in which the calculus of right and wrong is made based on the effect of one’s choices on those one cared about. The universal has given way to the familial. Another aspect of the new morality seems to be its disproportionate emphasis on money and success. The new society has stopped lying to itself and to the world about its ascetic otherworldliness. Rupee had thus finally emerged as God in India, an instant substitute for so many other forms of meaning. Consumption—condemned as futile by the religious texts and strenuously resisted by the older generation, is now paramount. There is a sense now, absent from an earlier generation, that money could solve all problems. If you were wealthy in today’s India, there were no problems that could not be overcome- power outages, land approvals, foreign deals, anything was possible. Capitalism has transfixed the Indian imagination. But this has come at a cost- in the form of rampant corruption at all levels of life, breakdown of family ties, crudeness in political behavior and a general lack of integrity in public life. 

Of the two visions, I would greatly prefer the Tata industrialists than the Ambanis, the BARC  set up by Tata than the $1 billion house of Ambanis. But perhaps there is some middle ground somewhere.

A clash of cultures

It was the autumn of 2008 a few weeks ago before the momentous American election. I was visiting India and I got into a bitter word fight with one of my best friends wives. We were discussing the possible election of Obama as America’s first black president.

“It will never happen”, she said with great certainty, “ I have lived in the U.S and the hatred of the blacks among the whites is so deep that none of them will ever vote for Obama.” She went on to cite chapter and verse to make her point. In a way she was echoing a view that Anand Girdhardas, a reported for the International Herald Tribune, observed about the present day U.S that there is “a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own…Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. ..What is creeping into the culture is simple dehumanization, a failure to imagine the lives others lead. Fellow citizens become caricatures. People retreat into their own safe realms. And decency, that great American virtue,” has fallen away.

I argued that Obama would win because the country had changed, that I had been visiting the U.S since 1961 and never had I seen a more tolerant, more charitable and more optimistic people in the world. John Kennedy epitomized the spirit of the country from the creation of the Peace Corps to the harnessing of its innovative genius in  for the moon landing. In the past forty odd years I had travelled all over but had never encountered anything but courteous treatment even in the deep south- albeit their knowledge of the world beyond their county was shaky at best. I was sure that the better angels far dominated the few KKK sympathizers and that the fact that Obama was a candidate of a major party only proved my point.

Three years on, I find that both of us were, tragically, right. While Obama won the election, the hate and bile that followed in the years later were astounding in its intensity and passion. It seems that there were two cultures in the country – one dominated by KKK, racial prejudice, small minded meanness, easily swayed by the braying of Rush Limbaugh and the round the clock drivel peddled by Rupert Murdoch through the Fox channel – and the other which still remained idealistic, optimistic ( though increasingly less so), internationally minded, willing to help others, charitable and altruistic. What we were seeing was a clash of two cultures and which prevailed in the years to come would determine the fate of the country.

In a similar vein, the Anna Hazare campaign against corruption has exposed a clash of cultures in India as well. But here the clash is more dominated by different generations rather than any ideological conflicts. The older generation hangs on to power convinced that it is their right as part of the generation that fought for freedom of the country. In the last two decades, the prime ministers have invariably been in their seventies in country where the average age is less than half that. They still yearn for the time when age was revered and seniority was all-important. There’s was the age when you joined the government service and thought of it as the ultimate public service. In every sphere, you waited your turn and eventually reached the top of the pyramid in due time. The popular saying was that “ to reach the top, you must not do anything”. Doing something exposes you to some risk but if you nothing nobody can fault you. This was the prevailing culture for almost for four decades after independence.

The opening of the economy in the 1990’s however started radically changing this culture. Now the young had other avenues to pursue. Government service fell into disfavour and the best and the brightest went into the private sector. Coupled with this unshackling came others changes in cultural mores – money became the most important indicator of growth, honesty became a game for mugs, business magazines lauded the wealthy and rarely questioned the corrupt, respect for age was still given lip service but. in sotto voices, sons starting mocking their honest parents for their simplicity and naïveté. The heroes of the day changed from freedom fighters like Nehru or scientists like Bhabha or industrialists like Tata to cricketers and film stars.

Here too we are observing a clash of cultures – one pining for the simplicity and honesty of the old ways and the other impatient with the slow pace of change and filled with a willingness to take risks and to cut corners to get to the Holy Grail. The old values are now seen as obstacles to be shunted aside in the race to the top. The older generation has meanwhile forgotten that in their time, the leaders they followed were all young- Nehru was in his early thirties, Subhash Bose was yet to reach forty when he became the Congress President, Jay Prakash Narain too was in his thirties. And with the advent of freedom, the then older generation of Mahatama Gandhi chose to stay away from power but only provided guidance from outside seeking to preserve the values that had won us our freedom.

Which culture will prevail finally in the U.S and India I do not know. I only know which one I would like to prevail and which we should all pull for.