The origin of creativity

The economist Albert O. Hirschman, who died last December, loved paradoxes. He was a “planner,” the kind of economist who conceives of grand infrastructure projects and bold schemes. But his eye was also drawn to the many ways in which plans did not turn out the way they were supposed to—and to unintended consequences and perverse outcomes. He pored over the puzzling fact that often the shortest line between two points was a dead end. 

Hirschman had studied the enormous Karnaphuli Paper Mills, in what was then East Pakistan. The mill was built to exploit the vast bamboo forests of the Chittagong Hill Tracts. But not long after the mill came online the bamboo unexpectedly flowered and then died, a phenomenon now known to recur every fifty years or so. Dead bamboo was useless for pulping; it fell apart as it was floated down the river. Because of ignorance and bad planning, a new, multimillion-dollar industrial plant was suddenly without the raw material it needed to function. But what impressed Hirschman was the response to the crisis. The mill’s operators quickly found ways to bring in bamboo from villages throughout East Pakistan, building a new supply chain using the country’s many waterways. They started a research program to find faster-growing species of bamboo to replace the dead forests, and planted an experimental tract. They found other kinds of lumber that worked just as well. The result was that the plant was blessed with a far more diversified base of raw materials than had ever been imagined. And here is the paradox - if bad planning hadn’t led to the crisis at the Karnaphuli plant, the mill’s operators would never have been forced to be creative. And the plant would not have been nearly as valuable as it became.

“We may be dealing here with a general principle of action,” Hirschman wrote: "Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. In other words, we would not consciously engage upon tasks whose success clearly requires that creativity be forthcoming. Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple,  and undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be."

And from there Hirschman’s analysis took flight. "People don’t seek out challenges", he went on. "They are apt to take on and plunge into new tasks because of the erroneously presumed absence of a challenge—because the task looks easier and more manageable than it will turn out to be.”  

This was the famous "Hiding Hand" principle—a play on Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand : the entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.

“We have ended up here with an economic argument strikingly paralleling Christianity’s oft expressed preference for the repentant sinner over the righteous man who never strays from the path,” Hirschman wrote in this essay from 1967. Success grew from failure. 

And essentially the same idea, even though formulated, as one might expect, in a vastly different spirit, is found in Nietzsche’s famous maxim, “That which does not destroy me, makes me stronger.” 

Doubt is creative because it allowed for alternative ways to see the world, and seeing alternatives could steer people out of intractable circles and self-feeding despondency. Doubt, in fact, could motivate. Freedom from ideological constraints can open up political strategies, and accepting the limits of what one could know liberated agents from their dependence on the belief that one had to know everything before acting, that conviction was a precondition for action.

As he wrote in a follow-up essay to “The Strategy of Economic Development”: Law and order and the absence of civil strife seem to be obvious preconditions for the gradual and patient accumulation of skills, capital and investors’ confidence that must be the foundation for economic progress. But developing countries required more than capital. They needed practice in making difficult economic decisions. Economic progress was the product of successful habits—and there is no better teacher, Hirschman felt, than a little adversity. He would rather encourage settlers and entrepreneurs at the grass-roots level—and make them learn how to cope with those impediments themselves—than run the risk that aid might infantilize its recipient. 

In short, creativity almost requires that you fail in order to finally succeed!

The story of protests

In today's news, there was a report about the Turkish protestors who choose to express their opposition to the government by standing still and keeping quiet in a novel form of protest. Turkish anti-government demonstrators adopted a new type of protest Tuesday - silence. Hundreds of people joined performance artist Erdem Gunduz, who stood still and silent in Istanbul's Taksim Square for hours. 

Nonviolent resistance (or nonviolent action) is the practice of achieving goals through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation,satyagaha, and other methods, without using violence. The modern form of non-violent resistance was popularised and proven to be effective by the Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi in his efforts to gain independence from the British. Major nonviolent resistance advocates include Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King, Jr, James Bevel, Václav Havel, Andrei Sakharov, and Lech Wałęsa. From 1966 to 1999 nonviolent civic resistance has played a critical role in 50 of 67 transitions from authoritarianism. Recently, nonviolent resistance has led to the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. Current nonviolent resistance includes the Jeans Revolution in Belarus, the "Jasmine" Revolution in Tunisia, and the fight of the Cuban dissidents. Many movements which promote philosophies of nonviolence or pacifism have pragmatically adopted the methods of nonviolent action as an effective way to achieve social or political goals. 

They employ nonviolent resistance tactics such as: information warfare, picketing, vigils, leafletting, samizdat, magnitizdat, satyagraha, protest art, protest music and poetry, community education and consciousness raising, lobbying, tax resistance, civil disobedience, boycotts or sanctions, legal/diplomatic wrestling, sabotage, underground railroads, principled refusal of awards/honours, and general strikes. Nonviolent action differs from pacifism by potentially being proactive and interventionist.

Peaceful protest has not always been so quietly accepted by those in power, however. For most of human history, any form of protest against the status quo, including peaceful protest, was likely to be met with violence of one sort or another. For this reason, public demonstrations have only recently become common ways of registering disagreement with the government. In the past, overthrowing or radically changing a government was almost certain to involve bloodshed, so those opposed to the existing powers made sure to arm themselves in advance to prepare for revolutionary war.

One of the first examples of a successful peaceful demonstration with wide-ranging effects is the March 1st Movement, which took place in Korea in 1919. At that time, Korea was occupied by imperialistic Japan. The Japanese regime treated the Korean people with brutality and widespread injustice. In 1919, a group of Korean nationalists drafted a declaration of Korean independence, citing a number of grievances with the Japanese occupation. After the declaration was read, crowds of Koreans marched through Seoul, and soon demonstrations spread throughout the country. Although the Japanese had no compunctions about massacring a large number of Korean protesters, the protesters themselves remained nonviolent, and as a result of the March 1st Movement, the situation in Korea vastly improved.

The March 1st Movement is frequently cited as having inspired one of the most famous nonviolent demonstrators of all time: Mohandas Gandhi. Gandhi led a nonviolent resistance movement in India, which was occupied by imperial Britain at the time. The Dandi March of 1930 is the quintessential event of this movement. During the march, Gandhi and nearly 100 of his followers marched to Dandi, one place where salt makers were being oppressed by the Empire. They were greeted by a crowd of 100,000 people, and thus began a long trend of civil disobedience. This movement is important in the history of nonviolent revolution because it was one of the first times that, in order to maintain its public image, the government adopted a noninterference policy with the protesters, refusing to meet their peaceful demonstration with massacre or violence. 

Although Gandhi's civil disobedience movement, called the Salt Satyagraha, did not have much of a lasting effect on the status of India or its treatment by the British Empire, it set a precedent that allowed nonviolent protests and revolutions to occur more frequently and with greater success around the world. Nonviolent protest movements such as that led by Martin Luther King, Jr., as well as wholesale revolutions such as the Velvet Revolution, owe much, both conceptually and tactically, to the March 1st Movement and to the Salt Satyagraha. 

One particular method of nonviolent action action – the strike, in all its many varieties – has been the classic weapon of labour and socialist movements. Typically, of course, the strike has been used against employers for economic ends, but overtly political strikes have a long history. And one particular school of socialism, syndicalism, developed the notion that socialism would be achieved by a general strike, in the course of which the workers would take over the factories, mines and workshops, dispossessing the capitalists. The essentially nonviolent character of this notion is conveyed by the syndicalist symbol of the study proletarian standing upright but with folded arms; and also by the name originally given to the general strike by its Owenite inventor, William Benbow, 'The Grand National Holiday'.

It is only in very recent years, however, that academic researchers have begun to make a serious study of nonviolent action as an unconventional political technique intermediate between constitutional action, on the one hand, and violent revolutionary action, on the other. They are now classified in three broad categories:

(i) nonviolent protest and persuasion
(ii) nonviolent noncooperation, and
(iii) nonviolent intervention.

The first includes actions which are mainly symbolic in character, such as mass demonstrations, marches, vigils, and teach-ins. The second includes actions which involve the withdrawal of particular types of cooperation with the opponent. Examples, in addition to strikes and boycotts, are mass voluntary emigration, tax refusal, and abstention from elections. In the third category fall those methods which intervene in the situation either, negatively, by disrupting established patterns of behaviour or, positively, by creating new ones. Actions of this kind are the most radical of all and are exemplified by fasts, sit-ins, work-ins, and the establishment of alternative or parallel governments.

Tapasya plays an important role in the mechanism of satyagraha. First, it demonstrates to the opponent one's seriousness of purpose, indicating that one's opposition is not frivolous, and constituting a guarantee of one's sincerity. Secondly, it shows the opponent that one is completely fearless. Since the sayagrahi is prepared to suffer even unto death, this nonviolence cannot be dismissed as the act of a weak and cowardly person. In this way, the opponent is reluctantly compelled to respect the person. And, thirdly, in Gandhi's words, 'it open the eyes of understanding'. It constitutes a way of reaching the opponent's heart when appeals to his head (rational argument) have failed. It is an element in what Gregg has called 'moral jiu-jitsu'. The act of not striking back, turning the other cheek, accepting injury without retaliation, has the effect – so it is claimed – of pulling up the opponent sharply in his tracks, leading him to reconsider his position as a prelude to joining the satyagrahi in a common pursuit of truth. 

The three elements of Gandhi's philosophy of action - Truth, Nonviolence and Self-suffering – enable us to pinpoint his contribution to nonviolent action considered as a political technique. From the perspective of political thought, Gandhi may be seen as the polar opposite of Machiavelli, the thinker who ushers in the period of modern politics. With his conception of real politik and his notion of raison d'état, with the end justifying the means, Machiavelli insisted that the realm of politics must be separated from the realm of ethics. Gandhi explicitly refused to make such a separation, insisting that there is only one realm of reality, and that 'what is morally right cannot be pragmatically wrong or politically wrong or invalidated on grounds of apparent futility' . Beneath the stark difference in the thinking of the two men, there is an underlying common thought: the practice of power politics cannot by any logic be reconciled with the precepts of ethics. To this Machiavelli responds: So much for the ethics! But Gandhi responds: So much the worse for power politics! And he proceeds to attempt to transcend power politics and to pioneer a new kind of politics – the politics of truth and love. 

To tough-minded politicians, Gandhi's attempt appears absurd, an impossible enterprise. But to such people Gandhi had an answer which may contain more insight than the trite formula 'politics is the art of the possible'. 'Our task', he said, 'is to make the impossible possible by an ocular demonstration in our own conduct'.

Is this the new face of education ?

There was a time when a professor was happy to have his class filled. But not now? Now he wants not to teach the class in the room but also the world. 

With the advent of the internet, many universities have ventured into the realm of online courses offering their best professors and so is born the MOOC- massive open, online course, a new type of college class based on Internet lecture videos. Harvard’s has started its first massive open online courses, or moocs— a mooc is “massive” because it’s designed to enroll tens of thousands of students. It’s “open” because, in theory, anybody with an Internet connection can sign up. “Online” refers not just to the delivery mode but to the style of communication: much, if not all, of it is on the Web. And “course,” of course, means that assessment is involved—assignments, tests, an ultimate credential. When you take moocs, you’re expected to keep pace. Your work gets regular evaluation. In the end, you’ll pass or fail or, like the vast majority of enrollees, just stop showing up.

Many people think that moocs are the future of higher education in America. In the past two years, Harvard, M.I.T., Caltech, and the University of Texas have together pledged tens of millions of dollars to mooc development. Many other élite schools, from U.C. Berkeley to Princeton, have similarly climbed aboard. Their stated goal is democratic reach. “I expect that there will be lots of free, or nearly free, offerings available,” John L. Hennessy, the president of Stanford, explained in a recent editorial. “While the gold standard of small in-person classes led by great instructors will remain, online courses will be shown to be an effective learning environment, especially in comparison with large lecture-style courses.”

But moocs are controversial, and debate has grown louder in recent weeks. At Harvard, as in most large universities, big lecture courses are generally taught with help from graduate students, who lead discussion sessions and grade papers. None of that is possible at massive scales in the MOOCS. Instead, participants will enroll in online discussion forums (like message boards),  annotate the assigned material with responses and rather than writing papers, they will take a series of multiple-choice quizzes. 

For decades, élite educators were preoccupied with “faculty-to-student ratio”: the best classroom was the one where everybody knew your name. Now top schools are broadcast networks. New problems result. How do you foster meaningful discussion in a class containing tens of thousands? How do you grade work? At one extreme, edX has been developing a software tool to computer-grade essays, so that students can immediately revise their work, for use at schools that want it. Harvard may not be one of those schools. “I’m concerned about electronic approaches to grading writing,” Drew Gilpin Faust, the president of the university and a former history professor, recently told me. “I think they are ill-equipped to consider irony, elegance, and . . . I don’t know how you get a computer to decide if there’s something there it hasn’t been programmed to see.”

Lecturing can seem a rote endeavor even at its best—so much so that one wonders why the system has survived so long. Actors, musicians, and even standup comedians record their best performances for broadcast and posterity. Why shouldn’t college teachers do the same? So the MOOCs offer the best lecturers through the internet. moocs are a different and heartier species. Rather than broadcasting a professor’s lectures out into the ether, to be watched or not, moocs are designed to insure that students are keeping up, by peppering them with comprehension and discussion tasks. And the online courses are expected to have decent production values, more “Nova” than “NewsHour.” 

On campuses now, the pedagogic ideal is the “flipped classroom”—a model in which teachers preassign whatever lecture-type material is needed, as homework, and use the classroom time for peer and interactive learning. “Students, if all you’re going to do is lecture at them, no longer see any reason to show up to be lectured at,” Harry R. Lewis, a former dean of Harvard College, who teaches computer science, told me. “Most of our classes are video-recorded, so they’ll watch the recording if your class is taught before eleven o’clock.”

When people refer to “higher education” in this country, they are talking about two systems. One is élite. It’s made up of selective schools that people can apply to—schools like Harvard, and also like U.C. Santa Cruz, Northeastern, Penn State, and Kenyon. All these institutions turn most applicants away, and all pursue a common, if vague, notion of what universities are meant to strive for. But that is not the kind of higher education most Americans know. The vast majority of people who get education beyond high school do so at community colleges and other regional and nonselective schools. Most who apply are accepted. The teachers there, not all of whom have doctorates or get research support, may seem restless and harried. Students may, too. Some attend school part time, juggling their academic work with family or full-time jobs, and so the dropout rate, and time-to-degree, runs higher than at élite institutions. Many campuses are funded on fumes, or are on thin ice with accreditation boards; there are few quadrangles involved. The coursework often prepares students for specific professions or required skills. If you want to be trained as a medical assistant, there is a track for that. If you want to learn to operate an infrared spectrometer, there is a course to show you how. This is the populist arm of higher education. It accounts for about eighty per cent of colleges in the United States. And MOOCS are not all that different in the academic environment they offer the students. In fact they may well provide opportunities for students that even the community colleges cant if you live in remote area of the country.

Two features that can be found in most of this recent wave of online courses are: first, what could be described variously as the ‘guru on the mountaintop,’ or the ‘broadcast model,’ or the ‘one-to-many model,’ or the ‘TV model. The basic idea here is that an expert in the field speaks to the masses, who absorb his or her wisdom. The second feature is that, to the extent that learning requires some degree of interactivity, that interactivity is channelled into formats that require automated or right-and-wrong answers.

For the moment, however, data about how well moocs work are diffuse and scant. A cornerstone of the case for them is a randomized study that Bowen helped plan, through the Ithaka organization, a Mellon Foundation spinoff. It showed no significant difference in educational outcomes between online learning and traditional classroom learning. 

moocs are also thought to offer enticing business opportunities. Last year, two major mooc producers, Coursera and Udacity, launched as for-profit companies. Today, amid a growing constellation of online-education providers, they act as go-betweens, packaging university courses and offering them to students and other schools. How these schools will make money remains a little murky. Courses in the HarvardX program are now free. That will change this fall, as Harvard starts conducting what it calls “revenue experiments.” One idea for generating revenue is licensing: when the California State University system, for instance, used HarvardX courses, it would pay a fee to Harvard, through edX. Another idea, geared toward the individual home user, is a basic per-course fee: you’d pay to enroll in a course you liked. 

For the professors involved, too, the financial details remain vague. Should you get paid extra for conducting online classes? There are gnarly intellectual-property issues: if a professor launches a mooc class at Harvard and then takes a job at Princeton, who keeps the online course? Will untenured professors, who may have to find jobs elsewhere, be discouraged from mooc-making? While nonselective institutions winnow staffs and pay licensing tithes to the élite powers, moocs offer substantial opportunities to academic stars, who might aspire to have their work reach a huge international audience. 

But the really fundamental question is: How do you take what you’re teaching to a very small group and make it accessible to a large group, and do it successfully ? Education is a curiously alchemic process. Its vicissitudes are hard to isolate. Why do some students retain what they learned in a course for years, while others lose it through the other ear over their summer breaks? Is the fact that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard to revolutionize the tech industry a sign that their Harvard educations worked, or that they failed? 

The answer matters, because the mechanism by which conveyed knowledge blooms into an education is the standard by which moocs will either enrich teaching in this country or deplete it.

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The men who would rule India

India is on the verge of a new general election in 2014 and two men have emerged as their party's standard bearer and likely prime ministers. These two vignettes of the contenders gives us a deeper look on what makes them tick and where they are likely to take the country in the future.

In a penetrating profile of Narendar Mody, Ramchandra Guha, one of our preeminent historians, he describes Mody as an ambitious person who has sought in the past five years to remake himself as a man who gets things done, a man who gets the economy moving, who will place " India  smoothly on the 8 per cent to 10 per cent growth trajectory, bureaucrats will clear files overnight, there will be no administrative and political corruption, poverty levels will sink rapidly towards zero and — lest we forget — trains and aeroplanes shall run on time."

The truth is that of all Indian politicians past and present, the person Gujarat Chief Minister most resembles is Indira Gandhi of the period 1971-77. Like Mrs. Gandhi once did, Mr. Modi seeks to make his party, his government, his administration and his country an extension of his personality. The political practice of both demonstrates the psychological truth that inside every political authoritarian lies a desperately paranoid human being.There is something of Indira Gandhi in Narendra Modi, and perhaps just a touch of Sanjay Gandhi too — as in the brash, bullying, hyper-masculine style, the suspicion (and occasional targeting) of Muslims. 

Either way, Mr. Modi is conspicuously unfitted to be the reconciling, accommodating, plural, democratic Prime Minister that India needs and deserves. He loves power far too much. On the other hand, his presumed rival, Rahul Gandhi, shirks responsibility entirely (as in his reluctance, even now, to assume a ministerial position). Indian democracy must, and shall in time, see off both.

Rahul Gandhi has officially been promoted to the number two position in India's ruling Congress party, making it clear that he remains the heir apparent of the powerful Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty. Mr Gandhi, who was appointed as the party's vice-president at a conclave on 20 January, said he would work to transform the country by "decentralizing" power.

Despite his "dark horse" image, he is said by some analysts to have a detailed political knowledge and to be a practiced backroom operator. Critics have often described him as the "reluctant prince" who has been the de facto number two in the party for long, wielding the power, but shying away from responsibility. What kind of prime minister Rahul will be is unclear. Since winning his father's old seat, Amethi, in Uttar Pradesh, and entering the Lok Sabha, he has promoted a cautious, managerial image, making few public comments, while touring India's states to energise the Congress Party's youth and student wings. In private he appears guarded and distant. He doesn't like Bollywood films, does not appear to be romantically attached and reads economics books to relax, he once said. There's something of the spreadsheet and the powerpoint about him, with a little of Gordon Brown's austerity thrown in for good measure.He says his priorities are to improve education and living standards among India's poor, and to challenge the country's caste system which he believes restricts India from achieving its full potential. He wants to make India a meritocratic country where people are given jobs because of what they can do rather than who they are. 

His challenge is to shake off his image as the son of privilege and a 'yuvraj' (prince) of India's 'first family'. But it won't be easy in a country where 'fate' and 'destiny' are taken so seriously.

So Indians will face their choice- the authoritarian Mody or the reclusive Rahul. No Obama either one.

Fathers day

Father's Day is a celebration honoring fathers and celebrating fatherhood, paternal bonds, and the influence of fathers in society. It is also the day that we should remember the myriad lessons they have taught us during their lifetime and the values they have lived by for us to emulate.

I was reminded of my own dad and the place he had in my life. Most people remember their parents or close friends through some vignettes which have remained  in their memories for ever and ever. It is an accumulation of such memories that seems to define our view of their entire life. Rarely if ever do we sit down to think about placing these memories in some context to obtain a coherent and complete view of their entire life. It is these vignettes that define them for us. So it is for fathers.

When asked about their earliest memories of their fathers, many of us would have difficulty in defining them in some details. But ask us if we remember some action or thought that has defined our relationship with them, most would easily find quite few incidents from their lives. So as I reflected on my fathers life- he has now been gone almost fifteen years- a few vignettes stand out which in a certain sense define him for me.

 Of them the earliest was when I asked why he became an economist. We were at that time discussing the profession I would soon choose for myself. It then came out that when he was a young student, he heard Pandit Nehru, the charismatic leader of the Indian National Congress urge all Indians to fight for complete independence on the banks of the Ravi river in 1930. He urged students to help rebuild the country and said that the country would need economists and engineers to lay the foundation for the future.That speech inspired the deep idealism in him to chose economics as his profession. 

Another defining incident was when I found that he chose to resign from his job as the editor of the premier economic magazine in the country, The Eastern Economist, rather than bow to the wishes of the proprietors to push the preferred policies of the industrialist who also owned the magazine. He was willing to lose his job rather than compromise on his principles.Since we had a comfortable house close to his office and we had to shift to hutments built for soldiers during the war, the change was a considerable downgrade at that time even though he found a job with the government. That defined for me his strict adherence to a life of integrity.

A third incident occurred when I led a student movement against the powerful professor and head of the hostel at IIT, Kharagpur in the first year of my engineering course.Dr Muthanna was a tough as nails administrator who tolerated no dissent and when a group of students organized to challenge his policies and his executive abilities, he was not only outraged but he took action. Unbeknownst to me, he wrote a strong letter to my father threatening that he may be forced to expel me from the institute for my union efforts. My father sent him an equally uncompromising reply pointing out that Dr Muthana needed to deal with the students more sympathetically and that in any case it was unlikely that his son would be participating in any activities that were not right and justified. He had complete faith in my judgment and sense of responsibility. My father did not send me a copy of this letter -- indeed I found out about it only years later when I was going through his papers. But his unqualified trust in his young son was to inspire me throughout my life.

A few years later I won a scholarship to go to Berkeley but found that I had not enough money for the air ticket. I was busy selling off all my possessions in order to raise the necessary funds when I received a letter from my father containing a check for the air fare. I knew then that I would never be alone in my life's ventures.

We came to a parting of ways for a brief while when I got married and he refused to accept the choice I had made. We remained distant and silent for almost seven years- you see he had passed on his uncompromising attitude to me as well. He was a man of strong and rigid convictions. It took my children to bring him around finally which he did. One day after seven years, at the urgings of my wife, Ena, we decided to visit him. We knocked on his door. He opened the door and graciously invited us in. For the rest of the two hours that we were there, he talked with Shibani and Akhil sat happily gurgling in his lap. Strange! He never raised the issue that had parted us and was just adoring of his grandchildren. And we were to spend his last years as close as we had been all our lives before the break.

And then a few years later, he was diagnosed with colon cancer requiring a major operation. I was then posted in Bombay and would fly down to be with him after the operation while my brother looked after him. He was to live with this for almost fifteen years till he died. But during this period I rarely heard him complain about the pain or the restrictions that these operations placed on him. We would discuss everything under the sun except his medical pains and problems. His courage and stoicism remained with him till the end and he refused to give up.

When I look back, it is these vignettes which define for me his life--his idealism, his courage of his convictions, his stoicism in face of pain, his love for his family and his willingness to confront life without compromise.

And the values he lived by all his life - integrity, industry, innovation, idealism and kindness. My wish for this fathers day is to pass on these values to my son and to his son, and of course, my daughter.

My father in 1943. I am the one on the left.

     

 The malhotra men today- Anil, Akhil and Nikhil

My daughter and me

Dealing with doctors

A recent event in the family where my brother had a brain haemmorage and was rushed to the hospital turned my thoughts to the way we deal with doctors. In the East, doctors occupy a place almost close to God and most of us are unwilling to question their diagnosis or indeed even ask probing questions.

Most doctors that I know would, on the other hand, welcome patients who have done at least a little modicum of research about their afflictions and are indeed willing to discuss the possible paths to a cure with them in some detail. My own experience with this fraternity over the past decade has been uniformly of this nature and these encounters have taught me a lot about dealing with them in critical situations.

A few years ago, a toe infection landed me in the local hospital. My cardiologist was concerned that the infection could spread and my weakened heart would not be able to handle the infection. At the hospital, they summoned their top most expert who took one look at my toe and diagnosed that the only solution was to amputate it to prevent the threat to my life. I appealed to my cardiologist to have another opinion on this rather cavalier assessment. She called in a colleague of hers, who was also the head of the department. His assessment was rather more hopeful and opined that perhaps a prolonged course of antibiotics with some strong medicines, could avert the amputation. Here I was stuck between the diagnosis of an expert- who I later found was a Nobel prize winner in medicine- and the head of the department. I finally decided to go against the recommendations of the Nobel Prize winner and opted for a slower and more careful, graduated program of medicine. I still retain my toe.

Most good doctors recognize their own frailties as well. Dr Jerome Groopman wrote a book " What doctors think" in which he reports on a conversation with a world-renowned cardiologist about the times in his career when he made mistakes in patient treatment.To the query, Dr. Lock gives the cryptic response, "All my mistakes have the same things in common" elaborating thus :

"Impeccable logic doesn't always suffice. My mistake was that I reasoned from first principles when there was no prior experience. I turned out to be wrong because there are variables that you can't factor in until you actually do it. And you make the wrong recommendation.... There are aspects to human biology and human physiology that you just can't predict. Deductive reasoning doesn't work for every case. Sherlock Holmes is a model detective, but human biology is not a theft or a murder where all the cues can add up neatly".

My personal encounters have  taught me some lessons: one, even the most renowned of experts can be wrong, two, always obtain a second opinion and finally learn enough about your condition to make a reasoned judgement about what the doctors are telling you.

Gluckschmerz- or delight in the misfortune of others

We have all heard of schaudenfraude - or delight in the misfortune of others- but few of us have heard of Gluckschmerz.  Gluckschmerz means the unhappiness one feels due to the success of others. We move from enjoying the suffering of others to the loathsome feelings we have for ourselves when others succeed. An example of gluckschmerz which comes to mind almost immediately is the “beauty queen syndrome.” A pretty girl wins some beauty pageant, and then the girls cry, “Oh Lord, why can’t I look like her.” They cannot seem to find a way to be happy for the girl who won the most recent pageant, but instead, it makes them unhappy to see the other girl win. Perhaps Gore Vidal captures it best in his aphorism:  "Whenever a friend succeeds a little something in me dies." Most pundits of the modern era seem to wallow in Gluckschmerz especially when talking about politicians.

Very few politicians have been as heavily criticized as President Obama. His ancestory  has been challenged, his intelligence questioned, his integrity  called into question, his appearance and ears derided. It seems the right wing press in the US can find nothing good in their president. Yet should this really surprise us? Obama is the first black president of the US in a country that is over three fourths white and which is still recovering from the stain of slavery. So to have a black president is for many, a cup too bitter to swallow or even sip. Success it seems has always bred jealousy and resentment...

In a book Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008), Michael Burlingame, the professor of Lincoln studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield, demonstrates how Lincoln was attacked viciously by his contemporaries and that in terms which make the present attacks on Obama look tame. By nearly any measure—personal, political, even literary—Abraham Lincoln set a standard of success that few in history can match, but in his lifetime the bile poured on him from every quarter. His ancestry was routinely impugned, his lack of formal learning ridiculed, his appearance maligned, and his morality assailed.

His sure-footed leadership during this country’s most-difficult days was accompanied by a fair amount of praise, but also by a steady stream of abuse—in editorials, speeches, journals, and private letters—from those on his own side, those dedicated to the very causes he so ably championed. George Templeton Strong, a prominent New York lawyer and diarist, wrote that Lincoln was “a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla.” Henry Ward Beecher rebuked him for his lack of refinement and called him “an unshapely man.” Other Northern newspapers openly called for his assassination long before John Wilkes Booth pulled the trigger. He was called a coward, “an idiot,” and “the original gorilla” by none other than the commanding general of his armies, George McClellan.

Lincoln ended American slavery yet Elizabeth Cady Stanton called Lincoln “Dishonest Abe”and bemoaned the “incapacity and rottenness” of his administration, worked to deny him renomination, and swore that if he “is reelected I shall immediately leave the country for the Fijee Islands.” In the days after Lincoln’s assassination, William Lloyd Garrison Jr. called the murder “providential” because it meant Vice President Andrew Johnson would assume leadership.

Lincoln masterfully led the North through the Civil War. Yet he was denounced for his leadership throughout. A Republican newspaper editor in Wisconsin wrote, “The President and the Cabinet,—as a whole,—are not equal to the occasion.” William P. Fessenden, the Maine Republican, called Lincoln “weak as water.”

For anyone who struggles to do well; to be honest, wise, eloquent, and kind; to be dignified without being aloof; to be humble without being a pushover, who affords a better example than Lincoln? And yet the calumny he received in his own lifetime far surpasses anything that the right wing press has thrown at Obama.

Of course, Lincoln was elected twice to the presidency, and was revered by millions. History records more grief and mourning upon his death than for any other American president. But the past gets simplified in our memory, in our textbooks, and in our popular culture. This process of distillation obscures how Lincoln was perceived in his own time, and, by comparison, it diminishes our own age. Where is the political giant of our era? Where is the timeless oratory? Where is the bold resolve, the moral courage, the vision? Now imagine all those critical voices from the 19th century as talking heads on cable television today. Imagine the snap judgments, the slurs and put-downs that beset Lincoln magnified a million times over on social media. How many of us, in that din, would be able to keep an even keel and provide balanced judgement? 

His story illustrates that even greatness—let alone humbler qualities like skill, decency, good judgment, and courage—rarely goes unpunished. It is a lesson that Obama and his team need to absorb and learn from. 

An attack on democracy

The US has just gone through its presidential election where Obama won a thumping victory over the Republican party. But lost in all the festivities is the emergence of a particularly vicious strain of political thinking and strategy that reared its head during the campaign. It was the systemmatic and well financed campaign to nullify the  basic tenets of a democratic government- the right of its citizens to vote.

In a book recently released, Jonathen Alter lays out the framework and the plans of this campaign funded not only by the republican party but also a few well healed individuals seeking personal gain in the defeat of Obama. This attack is sinister and has profound long term implications for the country.

Voter suppression is a strategy to influence the outcome of an election by discouraging or preventing people from exercising their right to vote. It is distinguished from political campaigning in that campaigning attempts to change likely voting behavior by changing the opinions of potential voters through persuasion and organization. Voter suppression instead attempts to reduce the number of voters who might vote against the candidate or proposition advocated by the suppressors.

The tactics of voter suppression can range from minor "dirty tricks" that make voting inconvenient, up to blatantly illegal activities that physically intimidate prospective voters to prevent them from casting ballots. Voter suppression could be particularly effective if a significant amount of voters are intimidated individually because the voter might not consider his or her single vote important.

In the 2012 election, republicans orchestrated a country wide campaign using all these tactics.

Laws or administrative practices in 41 states of which 16 actually passed the legislation made it more difficult for people to register to vote. ALEC circulated a model bill to the states urging them to adopt restrictive voting practices.

Florida imposed a short deadline for the submission of voter registration forms in 2011, with stiff penalties for late filing. The bill led to the end of voter registration work by one organization, the League of Women Voters, whose spokesperson said, "Despite the fact that the League of Women Voters is one of the nation’s most respected civic organizations, with a 91-year history of registering and educating voters, we will be unable to comply with the egregious provisions contained in [this bill]."

Pennsylvania passed a photo ID law requiring voters to present a government-approved photo ID before they may cast their ballots. But  photo ID requirements disproportionately affect minority, handicapped and elderly voters who don't normally maintain driver's licenses, and therefore that requiring such groups to obtain and keep track of photo IDs that are otherwise unneeded is a suppression tactic aimed at those groups.

In Wisconsin voters were given false information about when and how to vote, leading them to fail to cast valid ballots. In 2011, Americans for Prosperity (a conservative organization that was supporting Republican candidates) sent many Democratic voters a mailing that gave an incorrect deadline for absentee ballots. Voters who relied on the deadline in the mailing would have sent in their ballots too late for them to be counted.

Florida reduced voting days from 14 to 8. Michigan required training before any registration drives, Ohio reduced voting on sundays and Colarado sent letters to Latinos challenging their citizenship status.

The full-scale assault on voting rights that followed the 2010 midterm elections many movement veterans off-guard. More than a dozen states, including critical battlegrounds like Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, adopted new laws to restrict access to the ballot—all of which disproportionately affected communities of color. “I was naïve to think voting rights were untouchable,” says Bond, former chair of the NAACP. “I didn’t dream that Republicans would be as bold and as racist as they are.”  Lewis saw the restrictions as an obvious ploy to suppress the power of the young and minority voters who formed the core of Obama’s “coalition of the ascendant” in 2008. “It was a deliberate, well-greased and organized attempt to stop this progress,” he says. “They saw all these people getting registered as a threat to power.” 

“Voting rights are under attack in America,” said Lewis and “There’s a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.” He called voter-ID laws a poll tax and recalled how blacks who attempted to register in the South were required to guess the number of bubbles in a bar of soap or the number of jellybeans in a jar. “We must not step backward to another dark period in our history,” Lewis warned. “The vote is the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in a democratic society.”

Lewis had it right- this full scale assault is not only a threat to voting rights but indeed to democracy and it needs to be fought by all citizens.

Telling lies and the truth

I remembered a play that we as children used to act decades ago when I read this piece about Forrest Gump sent by a friend.

As I remember it the name of the play was " I want my money back". It was about a man, let us call him Al, going back to his school after many years and telling the Principal that he did not learn anything in the school and, therefore, all the fees he had paid should be refunded. 

The Principal said " OK, we shall take your test and then decide". 

The Principal then called  the teachers of various subjects who asked the man simplest of questions to all of which the man deliberately gave wrong answers. I unfortunately dont remember the questions or the answers. But only that the respective teachers outsmarted him by convincing him that the answers he gave, were correct and ultimately the man had to go emptyhanded. 


And here is the story about Forrest Gump.  Forrest Gump dies and goes to Heaven. He is at the Pearly Gates, met by St. Peter himself.   However, the gates are closed, and Forrest approaches the gatekeeper.

St. Peter said, 'Well, Forrest, it is certainly good to see you.  We have heard a lot about you. I must tell you, though, that the place is filling up fast, and we have been administering an entrance examination for everyone.  The test is short, but you have to pass it before you can get into Heaven."

St. Peter continued, "the test is only three questions.

•  What two days of the week begin with the letter T?
•  How many seconds are there in a year?
•  What is God's first name?"

 Forrest replied, 'Well , the first one -- which two days in the week begins with the letter 'T'? Shucks, that one is easy.   That would be Today and Tomorrow.' 

The Saint's eyes opened wide and he exclaimed, 'Forrest, that is not what I was thinking, but you do have a point, and I guess I did not specify, so I will give you credit for that answer.

 How about the next one?' asked St. Peter.
 'How many seconds in a year?

 Now that one is harder,' replied Forrest, but I thunk and thunk about that, and I guess the only answer can be twelve.

Astounded, St. Peter said, 'Twelve? Twelve?  Forrest, how in Heaven's name could you come up with twelve seconds in a year?'

 Forrest replied, 'Shucks, there's got to be twelve: January 2nd, February 2nd, March 2nd... '

 'Hold it,' interrupts St. Peter.   'I see where you are going with this, and I see your point, though that was not quite what I had in mind....but I will have to give you credit for that one, too.  Let us go on with the third and final question.

Can you tell me God's first name'?

 'it's Andy.'

'Andy?' exclaimed an exasperated and frustrated St Peter.  'Ok, I can understand how you came up with your answers to my first two questions, but just how in the world did you come up with the name Andy as the first name of God?'

Shucks, that was the easiest one of all,' Forrest replied.  'I learnt it from the song, 'ANDY WALKS WITH ME, ANDY TALKS WITH ME, ANDY TELLS ME I AM HIS OWN.'

 St. Peter had no choice but to open the Pearly Gates!

So Al told lies in answer to his questions and go no money, while Forrest told the truth and went to heaven! Theres the moral for you.