Non conventional power

Ben Harder explores a fascinating new world of piezo-electrics and finds a wealth of possibilities to solve our energy problems. Read on...

" Wind, water, solar . . . Who needs the tired, old elements? Each of those energy sources has had its proverbial day in the sun. It's time to move aside, ye olde renewables, and make way for a truly abundant and unceasing power source: our limbs, our clothes, our cars.

The world is a frenetic, kinetic kaleidoscope that hums with the constant motion of 6 billion people and their accouterments. Take a good look at the crushing multitudes on K Street at rush hour or at the vehicles rumbling around the Beltway. There's energy in them thar commuters. All that motion might well hold a key to much-sought energy independence. We just need to bottle some of that juice.

Certain materials produce an electrical current whenever they're flexed, bent or otherwise deformed. This occurs because these so-called piezoelectric materials -- which are as diverse as quartz crystals, leaded ceramics and bone -- contain pockets of positive and negative charge. When the material is flexed, those charges shift around, creating the potential for electrical current. Thanks to this piezoelectric effect, such materials can be used to convert the motion that distorts them into electricity.

A few piezoelectric-based devices have been around for years, including pedal-powered bicycle lights and hand-held and flintless gas-grill lighters. The science behind them dates back to 1880, when 21-year-old Pierre Curie, who would later share a Nobel Prize in physics with his wife, Marie, co-discovered the piezoelectric effect with the help of his older brother.

But engineers are only now beginning to see piezoelectricity as a source of abundant energy. They're using novel materials and techniques to harvest the "free" (i.e., untapped) energy that people generate when they move. Think of it as a giant energy recycling program. And it literally uses flex fuel.

A journey of a million kilowatt-hours begins with simple footsteps. Engineering teams worldwide are embedding piezoelectric materials in flooring and paving materials so the ground can absorb the energy from our moving feet. One company claims that five hours of busy pedestrian traffic over a portion of sidewalk could power a dim streetlight all night.

Some engineers have designed backpacks, shoes and other wearables that draw energy from the wearer's motions. Two years ago, in the journal Science, Canadian researchers described a modified knee brace that produced five watts when worn walking. That's enough to power several cellphones. Before long, though, phones may effectively charge themselves.

This year, Nokia filed a patent for a piezoelectric device that could let a phone battery draw a small charge each time it gets jostled in your pocket. If your phone still somehow conks out? In theory, just shake it and dial.

Engineers are also weaving piezoelectric fibers into clothing and other textiles. Some are experimenting with microscopic piezoelectric wires of zinc oxide. When flexed, these wires generate currents that could charge a battery or power portable electronics connected to the garment. Other researchers have embedded piezoelectric materials in silicone rubber that can be stretched, say, across someone's chest to draw power from the rise-and-fall motion of his lungs.

You don't have to get all out of breath about it, either. Even couch potatotes like me produce free energy. It's called body heat. Thermoelectric materials, which are akin to piezoelectric ones, can produce electricity in response to temperature changes within the material rather than from shape changes. That means the radiant warmth of my skin is a potential source of power.

Perpetua Power Source Technologies, for instance, is working to create garments that use such heat to support a "wireless body area network" capable of, for example, monitoring a sick person's vital signs. By the time I develop hypertension from sitting around too much, my clothing may be capable of alerting me to my high blood pressure.

Of course, my body heat is nothing compared with the furnace that is a car's engine. That's one place where thermoelectric power could really come into its own. Some experts estimate that only a quarter of the fuel a typical car consumes is utilized to power the vehicle. (Hybrids do a bit better in this department, thanks to their electrodynamic regenerative braking, which produces energy when vehicles slow down, a form of energy harvesting.) Researchers are testing systems that could salvage some of that heat emitted by the engine and convert it back into usable energy.

A particularly interesting breakthrough was reported last month when Zhong Lin Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology published a study of two tiny piezoelectric generators that they had created. Each is about the size of a paper clip. When squeezed, one produces roughly the same voltage as an AA battery. The other does the same when it's bent. Together, these devices are the first that engineers have been able to create that can pack so much voltage in such a small package. Such generators could be used to operate small sensors powered by sources as simple, Wang said, as sound waves, vibrations or even the flutter of a flag.

In other words, there's free energy in the brave wave of the Star-Spangled Banner. When it comes to energy independence, you can't get more patriotic than that."

Is Marriage good for your health?

In 1858, a British epidemiologist named William Farr set out to study what he called the “conjugal condition” of the people of France. He divided the adult population into three distinct categories: the “married,” consisting of husbands and wives; the “celibate,” defined as the bachelors and spinsters who had never married; and finally the “widowed,” those who had experienced the death of a spouse. Farr found that married people weathered diseases far better than their unmarried counterparts but the worst affected were the widowed partners.

We have always known this intuitively but this new research reassures us that these observations were no “old wives tales”. In the 150 years since Farr’s work, scientists have continued to document the “marriage advantage”: the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and live longer than unmarried people. Contemporary studies, for instance, have shown that married people are less likely to get pneumonia, have surgery, develop cancer or have heart attacks. A group of Swedish researchers has found that being married or cohabiting at midlife is associated with a lower risk for dementia.

But before many of you rush off to get married in order to live longer, pay need to new research that says that a stressful marriage can be as bad for the heart as a regular smoking habit! The “drip, drip” of negativity can erode not only a marriage itself but also a couple’s physical health. A number of epidemiological studies suggest that unhappily married couples are at higher risk for heart attacks and cardiovascular disease than happily married couples. The women who were at highest risk for signs of heart disease were those whose marital battles lacked any signs of warmth, not even a stray term of endearment during a hostile discussion (“Honey, you’re driving me crazy!”) or a minor pat on the back or squeeze of the hand, all of which can signal affection in the midst of anger.

Last year, The Journal of Health and Social Behavior published a study tracking the marital history and health of nearly 9,000 men and women in their 50s and 60 which found that when the married people became single again — either by divorce or because of the death of a spouse — they suffered a decline in physical health from which they never fully recovered. These men and women had 20 percent more chronic health issues, like heart disease and diabetes, than those who were still married to their first husband or wife by middle age. The divorced and widowed also had aged less gracefully, reporting more problems going up and down stairs or walking longer distances.

Some research now says that single people who have never married have better health than those who married and then divorced. So just because you are married is not enough: you have to be happily married, your fights have to be full of warmth even when angry and you need to remain married - to enjoy a long and healthy life.

A new approach to terrorists

A new article in the financial times has an interesting approach to dealing with young terrorists.

"First, demystify terrorist lives and deaths. The average day in the life of an Islamic extremist is similar to that of a petty criminal: tedious, lonely and punctuated by fear. Terrorists’ incompetence and narcissism must be highlighted. There is no shortage of material. One cell could not remember the name of the prime minister they were planning to kill; intelligence services report that many are avid consumers of pornography. Humour is a potent weapon here; remember how the British Fascist party in the 1930s was undermined by satire, not least by P.G. Wodehouse. Chris Morris’s forthcoming film satire of British jihadis, Four Lions, will be worth a dozen official anti-terrorism messages.

Second, expose al-Qaeda’s ideology as thin and unable to withstand sustained criticism. Far from being afraid of radical messages, we should let them circulate freely. Young people will be drawn to them regardless; better that it is in the open. Young Muslims who turn to violence tend to be less well-read than those who remain peaceful. Liberal values of free speech and dissent are central to the destruction of the al-Qaeda brand.

Finally, western governments should welcome non-violent forms of radicalism. Young people need to vent their frustrations, and participation in demonstrations is much higher among the non-violent. Young radicals can be drawn away from violent activity by the chance to work on charity programmes in Palestine or Afghanistan: a real Peace Corps."

The death of outrage

The past few months have seen a level of vitroil, smears and outright lies from senior politicians in the US which has come as a total surprise. But even more astonishing has been the lack of outrage at this descent into a culture of hate and calumny. There was always a level of courtsey in discourse at even the most difficult of times in the US but the past few months have shaken that belief in civility.

Imagine two governors of US states stating that slavery did not matter "diddly" or that the Civil war was fought for states rights. This from the party of Lincoln and in the year 2010. Or take a senator who says he never said he was a maverick while standing next to his published biography whose title is my life as a maverick. Or the leader of the opposition, Mitch McConnell, blandly lieing about the import of a financial regulation bill. Or the tea partiers still demanding Obamas birth certificate and hanging him in effigy. Or people spitting on black congressmen or calling some faggots in the House.

That there will always be fringe elements that will go beyond the bounds of decency occurs in every country. But the fact that it arouses so little outrage or revulsion is the real surprise. The main stream media cover it as if it was a soap opera and they were mere onlookers recording the event for posterity. They are afraid to label these efforts for what they are - disguised racism and bigotry. If many of these media were to cover the Nazi pogroms, I presume they would still manage to hide their real feelings and be objective and dispassionate.

But there are a few brave souls who do speak out : Paul Krugman is not afraid to call McConnell an ignorant liar; Friedman is willing to challenge Bibi Netanyu; Frank Rich is not afraid to call the tea partiers by their real name - racists and bigots; David Brooks is willing to make an objective evaluation of Obama's first year in power. Yes, these are the few left with any integrity in their public professions. For the rest, it seems like profiles in cowardice seeking shelter behind a non existent press objectivity.

The ones who are really missing in action is this ugly period of american life are the elders in the Republican party. After all do GW Bush, ex senators Warner and Danforth really approve of their party allying itself with the worse elements of the racist south? Do they not feel any obligation to speak out against challenges to the legitimacy of the President or the hanging of nooses or labelling slavery "diddly"? Should they not speak out?

The fact is that just as Pakistanis had to realize the dangers Taliban posed to their country before they finally moved to action to isolate and eliminate them, so it will have to be with the republicans. Only they can move to remove this tea party led cancer now gnawing at their party. But until they are willing to realize and accept the danger this racism poses to their party and their country, it is futile to expect any lowering of temperature or any future rise in civility in public discourse. Surely the republicans must realize that it is the soul of their party that is at stake.

Mandela's Way: Fifteen Lessons on Life, Love, and Courage

In Africa there is a concept known as ubuntu—the profound sense that we are human only through the humanity of others; that if we are to accomplish anything in this world, it will in equal measure be due to the work and achievements of others. Ubuntu sees people less as individuals than as part of an infinitely complex web of other human beings. It is the idea that we are all bound up with one another, that me is always subordinate to we, that no man is an island.

Richard Stengel spent two years with Mandela and has now published a book on the fifteen lessons on life, love and courage that he gleaned from the great man’s life. The book itself is worth reading but the few snippets below give a glimpse of the greatness of the man. First the lessons:

Courage is not the absence of fear

Be measured and calm at all times

Lead from the front and the back

Look the part

Have a core principle

See the good in others

Know your enemy

Keep your rivals close

Know when to say no

It’s a long game

Love makes the difference

Quitting is leading too

Its always the both

Find your own garden

Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s learning to overcome it. None of us is born courageous, he would say; it is all in how we react to different situations. He loved to quote Shakespeare: “Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard It seems to me most strange that men should fear, Seeing that death, a necessary end, Will come when it will come.” A coward might select that passage to give the impression that he was courageous, but for Mandela the passage is not bravado, but a simple statement of reality. Pretend to be brave and you not only become brave, you are brave.

Mandela sees almost everyone as virtuous until proven otherwise. He starts with an assumption that you are dealing with him in good faith. He believes that, just as pretending to be brave can lead to acts of real bravery, seeing the good in other people improves the chances that they will reveal their better selves. It is extraordinary that a man who was ill-treated for most of his life can see so much good in others. In fact, it was sometimes frustrating to talk with him because he almost never had a bad word to say about anyone. He would not even say a disapproving word about the man who tried to have him hanged. It is not that Mandela does not see the dark side of someone like John Vorster; it is that he is unwilling to see only that.

He knows that no one is purely good or purely evil. We were talking one day about a prisoner who had been a rival of Mandela’s on Robben Island and who had actually put together a list of grievances about Mandela. When I asked him about the fellow, Mandela did not address the man’s hostility but said, “What I took from him was his ability to work.”

He chooses to look past the negative. He does this for two reasons: because he instinctively sees the good in people and because he intellectually believes that seeing the good in others might actually make them better.

By behaving honorably, even to people who may not deserve it, he believes you can influence them to behave more honorably than they otherwise would

But Mandela believes in and takes emotional risks. He goes out on a limb and makes himself vulnerable by trusting others. We sometimes do that by confiding in others we don’t know well. Yet we rarely equate risk with trying to see what is decent, honest, and good in the people in our daily lives.

He had always appealed to people’s minds, but he knew that his ultimate victory would only come when he won over their hearts.

“The liberation struggle was not so much about liberating blacks from bondage, it was about liberating white people from fear.”

The time of your greatest triumph is the time when you should be most merciful.

Mandela would say we need to do a better job of expecting the expected, that we often do not prepare for those things we know are likely to be coming.

Mandela is not a man of maybes. He may be silent. He may be evasive. He will sometimes delay and postpone and try to avoid you. But in the end, he will not tell you what you want to hear just because you want to.

He almost always saw both sides of every issue, and his default position was to find some course in between, some way of reconciling both sides. In part this came from his deep-seated need to persuade and win people over, but mostly it came from having a nonideological view of the world and an appreciation for the intricate spider’s web of human motives..

Trust is a foundation of leadership. We trust that a leader is honest, able, and has a vision of where to go.

As he would say, you must reflect the goal in the way you seek it. He would sometimes quote Gandhi: “Be the change that you seek.” Mandela was tolerant of everything but intolerance. He would never discriminate in his goal to end discrimination. A noble goal should not be pursued by ignoble means.

Mandela’s example shows the value of forming as complete a picture as possible before taking action. Most of the mistakes he has made in his life came from acting too hastily rather than too slowly. Don’t hurry, he would say; think, analyze, then act.

“It is absolutely necessary at times for the leader to take on independent action without consulting anybody and to present what he has done to the organization.”

In his life, Mandela has often changed his mind when circumstances change. To him, that is simple common sense. When he sees what he regards as the inevitable, he will alter his point of view.

When Mandela became president, he presided over cabinet meetings in the same way. He did his best to see that opposing views were aired, if not always adhered to. He almost always spoke last, and more briefly than anyone else.

He was impressed by the way Lincoln used persuasion rather than force in managing his cabinet. He once told me an anecdote he recalled about Lincoln talking someone out of being in his cabinet and ended by saying, “It is wise to persuade people to do things and make them think it is their own idea.”

Since boyhood he had understood that collective leadership was about two things: the greater wisdom of the group compared to the individual, and the greater investment of the group in any result achieved by consensus. It was a double win.

Samuel Johnson once said there was nothing more relaxing than concentrating on a pleasant task that engages the mind but does not tax it too much. For Mandela it was his love of gardening.

In many ways, Mandela’s greatest act of leadership was the renunciation of it.

The Last Mile

Rural electrification in Vietnam

This video, produced by the World Bank, documents the success story in rural electrification over the last decade where access improved from 55% in 1998 to over 95 % in 2008. But the real interesting story lies in how it was done and what lessons other developing countries can draw from this work.

As the primary author of this work, I was recently asked by the World Bank to examine the reasons for the success and also to delineate the lessons that may be of more universal relevance. Here are my preliminary findings:

Investment in preparation before designing a project is essential. This implies spending considerable time in the field talking and discussing with those who the project purports to help. We visited over 100 communes in 30 provinces over a period of nine months before finalizing the design of the project.

Participation of the local people needs to encompass all elements of the project - from design to operations. We required all communes to provide written commitments from the households in regard to bearing their share of initial investments and in regular payments of the operating costs.

Local commitment is the sina qua non of any work and it should be enshrined in some form of cost sharing. A basic principle of the work was that nothing would be given free though some amount of subsidies would be provided for the initial investments.

Once the project is completed, it should be clear that subsequent management would be the fundamental responsibility of the local people.

A design which ensure some form of early returns to the local community has a greater chance of success. This may be by providing opportunity for participation in construction contracts or making sure that adequate number of people join the project immediately after completion etc.

Training of local participants to take over management and operations needs to start early in the project work.

In rural electrification, it is essential also to focus on productive uses of power so that there are long term returns on the investments made by the local participants.

A more detailed note is under preparation ie after I have revisited Vietnam to talk directly to those whom this project benefitted!

Profiles in cowardice

Every year Profile in Courage Awards are given to recognize individuals who, by acting in accord with their conscience, risked their careers or lives by pursuing a larger vision of the national, state or local interest in opposition to popular opinion or pressure from constituents or other local interests. This award was created in 1989 to recognize and celebrate the quality of political courage and sought to make Americans aware of the conscientious and courageous acts of their public servants, and to encourage elected officials to choose principles over partisanship – to do what is right, rather than what is expedient

In recent days, though, one is increasingly forced to conclude that the present times require instead a different kind of award—a profile in cowardice award. This award needs to be given to politicians and public servants who betray the public trust, who refuse to stand up for their own beliefs, who cower behind platitudes and lies, and who find truth to be too uncomfortable to embrace.

It is not difficult to select them today—in the US it is the republican leadership who have been unable to stand up to the worst instincts of their followers, who have declined to uncover lies about death panels and health care and who have dragged the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt to an abyss of nihilism and know-nothingness. Recent events have only further bared their cowardice as they refused to condemn their party representatives who called their President a liar and another member “ a baby killer”. By refusing to stand up and condemn these incidents as soon as they occurred they have become complicit in them, and indeed implicitly encouraged the environment of hate that seems to be enveloping the country today.

Despite their avowed commitment to the truth, media journalists recently have also fallen into the category of possible award winners. Under the guise of objectivity and “on the one hand and on the other hand” type of discourse, they have hewed so far away from the facts and truth, that they more resemble the journalists of the gutter press than a national newspaper. Indeed nothing has degraded the public discourse in the US than the TV networks- FOX TV and newspapers (even the Wall Street Journal) spawned by Rupert Murdoch. Yet main stream media are, with a few rare exceptions, afraid of calling these channels out on their outrageous assertions and instead cower under the flimsy pretext of being objective and presenting both sides of an issue. These too are deserving of the profiles in cowardice awards.

The fact is that as Dante once said that “the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality”.

In these times, it is also well to remember what Abe Lincoln said, and who President Obama quoted in his very eloquent address to his party of the eve of the vote on health care reform: “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.”

For the rest, his speech is a reminder of what it should mean to be a public servant and is worth listening to as well.

A Unique volunteerism

When my wife dialed 911 two weeks at midnight, our building was soon surrounded by fire engines with lights flashing and an ambulance from whence emergency medical technicians rushed to our apartment. These first emergency responders were there within ten minutes of the call. They were all young and they were all volunteers.

US is one of few countries that has volunteerism as an integral part of its social fabric. It was Alex Tocqueville, visiting the US in 1830, who concluded that "Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations." There are not only commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but others of a thousand different types–religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very limited, immensely large, and very minute. These associations, according to him, formed bonds between people and helped people solve local problems locally. A volunteer garden club, for example, could plant flowers in public parks which helped beautify towns without costing the town money; it was a form of civic participation, in a sense, since it was related to the task of governing in a tangential way. Tocqueville thought town meetings were a "marvel of municipal freedom" and he was impressed how people could settle their affairs "with no distinction of rank”.

This tradition of civic participation still survives and indeed flourishes even today.According to Volunteering in America 2009, the most comprehensive data ever assembled on volunteer trends and demographics, a total of 61.8 million Americans volunteered through an organization in 2008, up one million from the previous year. America’s volunteers dedicated more than 8 billion hours of service in 2008, worth an estimated $162 billion. While the formal volunteering rate in America remained relatively stable at 26.4 percent, other less-formal ways of serving in communities have dramatically increased. The number of people who worked with their neighbors to fix a community problem rose by 31 percent, from 15.2 million in 2007 to 19.9 million in 2008, suggesting an emerging trend of self-organized ‘do-it-yourself’ service. More surprisingly the report also found an increase in volunteering by young adults (age 16-24), rising from 7.8 million in 2007 to 8.2 million in 2008. The volunteer rate of women increased from 29.4 percent in 2008 to 30.1 percent in 2009, while the volunteer rate for men, at 23.3 percent, was essentially unchanged. By age, 35- to 54-year olds were the most likely to volunteer with their volunteer rates hovering at about 31 percent. Volunteer rates were lowest among persons in their early twenties (18.8 percent) and those age 65 and over (23.9 percent). Among the major race and ethnicity groups, whites continued to volunteer at a higher rate (28.3 percent) than did blacks (20.2 percent), Asians (19.0 per- cent), and Hispanics (14.7 percent). Volunteer rates were higher among married persons (32.3 percent) than those who had never married (20.6 percent). Parents with children under age 18 were substantially more likely to volunteer than were persons without children under 18 years of age, 34.4 per-cent compared with 23.9 percent. Individuals with higher levels of educational attainment were also more likely to volunteer than were those with less education. Among persons age 25 and over, 42.8 percent of college graduates volunteered, compared with 18.8 percent of high school graduates and 8.6 percent of those with less than a high school diploma.

But the most intriguing part is that volunteers in the US man an overwhelming majority of fire fighting and emergency medical services. This is indeed unique. In most countries, these critical emergency services are considered to be part of the obligations of the state as much as defense services are. It is rather strange to find that the first responders in a crisis of a fire or medical emergency are all people who may live next door and have another profession by day! A prime example of this is the rescue squad that came to my residence two weeks ago.

The Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad was founded in 1937 and has evolved into one of the nations most advanced and best trained volunteer rescue squads. What began as a one-ambulance department operating out of a tiny garage in Northwest Washington, D.C. some seven decades ago, has now grown into one of the best-trained, best-equipped rescue squads in the nation, providing compassionate, life-saving services to the community. A tradition of “Answering the Call” was born that continues to this day.

Today this squad serves about 100,000 households in the area and it responded to about 10,000 calls last year, including heart attacks, illnesses, vehicle collisions, house fires, and many other emergencies. The Squad’s 150 professionally-trained volunteers, a daytime staff, and two Montgomery County Paramedics respond to over 30 calls for help every day. What is even more interesting is that the squad is not funded by the government. Instead it derives almost all of its operating funds from generous community donations and occasional state and federal grants. Last year it had total expenses of $1.9 million of which individual contributions made up $1.2 million or almost two thirds of the total. Yet through the use of volunteers, this squad saved taxpayers $3.6 million in personnel costs.

It is not that these volunteers are not professional or well trained. They are, and quite rigorously. The squad takes in those who are at least 18 years old and have a high school diploma, and are willing to spend at least one day a week for three years working in rescue operations. Once accepted, and having passed the mandatory physical, the volunteers can also be given training to become an Emergency Medical Technician. This training program consists of over 131 hours of classroom time coupled with additional in-hospital clinical requirements and countless hours spent riding Rescue Squad ambulances on actual emergency calls. The volunteers learn about patient assessment; CPR; bleeding control; fracture management; and medical, environmental, and obstetrical emergencies. They also learn how to use an Automated External Defibrillator (AED) to restart a heart. Some volunteers can go on to become Firefighters and/or Paramedics by taking additional instructions. Paramedics are required to take a 532-hour EMT-I class which leads to a higher level of medical training for pre-hospital care providers at the Rescue Squad. This advanced training prepares them to administer drugs, offer intravenous therapy, and interpret EKGs using a cardiac monitor. The 120-hour firefighter's course consists of extensive classroom instruction as well as physically demanding practical training, including live firefighting exercises. Training includes not just how to extinguish fires, but also skills needed to address a variety of emergency situations involving hazardous materials, electrical equipment, fire alarm and sprinkler systems, and many others. The training and rewarding life experiences one gains--as well as the value to the community--make the Rescue Squad an organization that can change ones life and certainly save others lives.

These volunteers are a tight, elite group that makes a valuable contribution to the community. This volunteer tradition saves lives. It certainly did mine.

Fighting corruption- some new tools

While corruption has always been with us, the corrosive effects on development have only been begun to be recognized in the past few years in any consistent way.International agencies like the World Bank, afraid of the word corruption, simply talked about governance. Other agencies like Transparency International sprang up to essentially shame public servants in different countries by providing an annual scorecard of " who is most corrupt".

I remember discussing this issue with senior ministers in Vietnam a decade ago where I argued that there were two levels of corruption in poor countries- one I called "retail" corruption which was the tea money bribes to low level functionaries to move files or get appointments, and the second, "wholesale" corruption which was about large government contracts that were awarded to selected contractors on payment of monies in the swiss bank accounts of politicians. As far as retail corruption was concerned, while it was irritating to deal with and lowered the morale and image of the public sector, it was not something that could be controlled easily if the economic level of the functionary was too low. With economic development, so the argument went, this would actually decline. However it was the wholesale corruption that really harmed the country but which was paradoxically easier to control if the political elite were so inclined through transparency and competitive bidding.

We are now seeing an outpouring of new stategies to tackle this age old problem. Here are some of some interest:

Some of the world's most baffling social problems, says Peter Eigen, can be traced to systematic, pervasive government corruption, hand-in-glove with global companies. At TEDxBerlin, Eigen describes the thrilling counter-attack led by his organization Transparency International.

Here is another approach
In another approach,5th Pillar,has developed a unique initiative to mobilize citizens to fight corruption. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. The idea was first conceived by an Indian physics professor at the University of Maryland, who, in his travels around India, realized how widespread bribery was and wanted to do something about it. He came up with the idea of printing zero-denomination notes and handing them out to officials whenever he was asked for kickbacks as a way to show his resistance. 5th Pillar took this idea further: to print them en masse, widely publicize them, and give them out to the Indian people to get people to show their disapproval of public service delivery dependent on bribes. The first batch of 25,000 notes were met with such demand that 5th Pillar has ended up distributing one million zero-rupee notes to date since it began this initiative.

It seems that a number of factors contribute to the success of the zero rupee notes in fighting corruption in India. First, bribery is a crime in India punishable with jail time. Corrupt officials seldom encounter resistance by ordinary people that they become scared when people have the courage to show their zero rupee notes, effectively making a strong statement condemning bribery. In addition, officials want to keep their jobs and are fearful about setting off disciplinary proceedings, not to mention risking going to jail. More importantly the success of the notes lies in the willingness of the people to use them. People are willing to stand up against the practice that has become so commonplace because they are no longer afraid: first, they have nothing to lose, and secondly, they know that this initiative is being backed up by an organization—that is, they are not alone in this fight.

This last point—people knowing that they are not alone in the fight—seems to be the biggest hurdle when it comes to transforming norms vis-à-vis corruption. For people to speak up against corruption that has become institutionalized within society, they must know that there are others who are just as fed up and frustrated with the system. Once they realize that they are not alone, they also realize that this battle is not unbeatable. Then, a path opens up—a path that can pave the way for relatively simple ideas like the zero rupee notes to turn into a powerful social statement against petty corruption.

Who is Barack Obama?

Readers of my blogs will remember a piece I did on Obama in January arguing that it was premature to judge his achievements and that there was more to the man than the caricature shown in the main stream media around the world. Now I find that David Brooks, one of the most respected conservative columnist, makes essentially the same arguments in his recent piece in the New York Times

" If you ask a conservative Republican" he writes" you are likely to hear that Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.
If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.

You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.
The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market.
He has tried to find this balance in a town without an organized center — in a town in which liberals chair the main committees and small-government conservatives lead the opposition. He has tried to do it in a context maximally inhospitable to his aims.

But he has done it with tremendous tenacity. Readers of this column know that I’ve been critical on health care and other matters. Obama is four clicks to my left on most issues. He is inadequate on the greatest moral challenge of our day: the $9.7 trillion in new debt being created this decade. He has misread the country, imagining a hunger for federal activism that doesn’t exist. But he is still the most realistic and reasonable major player in Washington.

Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.
Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform.

Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency.

Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term. Obama conducted a long review of the Afghan policy and was genuinely moved by the evidence. He has emerged as a liberal hawk, pursuing victory in Iraq and adopting an Afghan surge that has already utterly transformed the momentum in that war. The Taliban is now in retreat and its leaders are being assassinated or captured at a steady rate.

Take finance. Obama and Tim Geithner are vilified on the left as craven to Wall Street and on the right as clueless bureaucrats who know nothing about how markets function. But they have tried with halting success to find a center-left set of restraints to provide some stability to market operations.

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office."

How slums can save the planet

Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living. In Bangkok’s slums, most homes have a colour television—the average number is 1.6 per household. Almost all have fridges, and two-thirds have a CD player, washing machine and a mobile phone. Half of them have a home telephone, video player and motorcycle. Residents of Rio’s favelas are more likely to have computers and microwaves than the city’s middle classes.In the slums of Medellín, Colombia, people raise pigs on the third-floor roofs and grow vegetables in used bleach bottles hung from windowsills.

The 4bn people at the base of the economic pyramid—all those with [annual] incomes below $3,000 in local purchasing power—live in relative poverty. Their incomes are less than $3.35 a day in Brazil, $2.11 in China, $1.89 in Ghana, and $1.56 in India. Yet they have substantial purchasing power and constitute a $5 trillion global consumer market.

Author Stewart Brand states in this provocative article that “Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.”

In 1983, architect Peter Calthorpe gave up on San Francisco, where he had tried and failed to organize neighborhood communities, and moved to a houseboat in Sausalito, a town on the San Francisco Bay. He ended up on South 40 Dock, where I also live, part of a community of 400 houseboats and a place with the densest housing in California. Without trying, it was an intense, proud community, in which no one locked their doors. Calthorpe looked for the element of design magic that made it work, and concluded it was the dock itself and the density. Everyone who lived in the houseboats on South 40 Dock passed each other on foot daily, trundling to and from the parking lot on shore. All the residents knew each other’s faces and voices and cats. It was a community, Calthorpe decided, because it was walkable.

Building on that insight, Calthorpe became one of the founders of the new urbanism, along with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and others. In 1985 he introduced the concept of walkability in “Redefining Cities,” an article in the Whole Earth Review, an American counterculture magazine that focused on technology, community building and the environment. Since then, new urbanism has become the dominant force in city planning, promoting high density, mixed use, walkability, mass transit, eclectic design and regionalism. It drew one of its main ideas from the houseboat community.

There are plenty more ideas to be discovered in the squatter cities of the developing world, the conurbations made up of people who do not legally occupy the land they live on—more commonly known as slums. One billion people live in these cities and, according to the UN, this number will double in the next 25 years. There are thousands of them and their mainly young populations test out new ideas unfettered by law or tradition. Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services—one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas. “Allow the informal sector to take over downtown areas after 6pm,” suggests Jaime Lerner, the former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil. “That will inject life into the city.”

The reversal of opinion about fast-growing cities, previously considered bad news, began with The Challenge of Slums, a 2003 UN-Habitat report. The book’s optimism derived from its groundbreaking fieldwork: 37 case studies in slums worldwide. Instead of just compiling numbers and filtering them through theory, researchers hung out in the slums and talked to people. They came back with an unexpected observation: “Cities are so much more successful in promoting new forms of income generation, and it is so much cheaper to provide services in urban areas, that some experts have actually suggested that the only realistic poverty reduction strategy is to get as many people as possible to move to the city.”
The magic of squatter cities is that they are improved steadily and gradually by their residents. To a planner’s eye, these cities look chaotic. I trained as a biologist and to my eye, they look organic. Squatter cities are also unexpectedly green. They have maximum density—1m people per square mile in some areas of Mumbai—and have minimum energy and material use. People get around by foot, bicycle, rickshaw, or the universal shared taxi.

Not everything is efficient in the slums, though. In the Brazilian favelas where electricity is stolen and therefore free, people leave their lights on all day. But in most slums recycling is literally a way of life. The Dharavi slum in Mumbai has 400 recycling units and 30,000 ragpickers. Six thousand tons of rubbish are sorted every day. In 2007, the Economist reported that in Vietnam and Mozambique, “Waves of gleaners sift the sweepings of Hanoi’s streets, just as Mozambiquan children pick over the rubbish of Maputo’s main tip. Every city in Asia and Latin America has an industry based on gathering up old cardboard boxes.” There’s even a book on the subject: The World’s Scavengers (2007) by Martin Medina. Lagos, Nigeria, widely considered the world’s most chaotic city, has an environment day on the last Saturday of every month. From 7am to 10am nobody drives, and the city tidies itself up.

In his 1985 article, Calthorpe made a statement that still jars with most people: “The city is the most environmentally benign form of human settlement. Each city dweller consumes less land, less energy, less water, and produces less pollution than his counterpart in settlements of lower densities.” “Green Manhattan” was the inflammatory title of a 2004 New Yorker article by David Owen. “By the most significant measures,” he wrote, “New York is the greenest community in the United States, and one of the greenest cities in the world…The key to New York’s relative environmental benignity is its extreme compactness. Manhattan’s population density is more than 800 times that of the nation as a whole. Placing one and a half million people on a twenty-three-square-mile island sharply reduces their opportunities to be wasteful.” He went on to note that this very compactness forces people to live in the world’s most energy-efficient apartment buildings.

The idea of measuring environmental impact in notional acres was first introduced by Mathis Wackernagel and William Rees in Our Ecological Footprint (1996) as a way to estimate the resource efficiency of cities and to condemn suburban sprawl. The concept has been very useful in shaming cities into better environmental behaviour, but comparable studies have yet to be made of rural populations, whose environmental impact per person is much higher than city dwellers. Nor has footprint analysis yet been properly applied to urban squatters and slum dwellers, which score as the greenest of all.

Urban density allows half of humanity to live on 2.8 per cent of the land. Demographers expect developing countries to stabilise at 80 per cent urban, as nearly all developed countries have. On that basis, 80 per cent of humanity may live on 3 per cent of the land by 2050. Consider just the infrastructure efficiencies. According to a 2004 UN report: “The concentration of population and enterprises in urban areas greatly reduces the unit cost of piped water, sewers, drains, roads, electricity, garbage collection, transport, health care, and schools.” In the developed world, cities are green because they cut energy use; in the developing world, their greenness lies in how they take the pressure off rural waste.
The Last Forest (2007), a book by Mark London and Brian Kelly on the crisis in the Amazon rainforest, suggests that the nationally subsidised city of Manaus in northern Brazil “answers the question” of how to stop deforestation: give people decent jobs. Then they can afford houses, and gain security. One hundred thousand people who would otherwise be deforesting the jungle around Manaus are now prospering in town making such things as mobile phones and televisions.

The point is clear: environmentalists have yet to seize the opportunity offered by urbanisation. Two major campaigns should be mounted: one to protect the newly-emptied countryside, the other to green the hell out of the growing cities.

***
More than any other political entity, cities learn from each other. News of best practices spreads fast. Mayors travel, cruising for ideas in the cities deemed the world’s greenest—from Reykjavik to Portland, Oregon, and my hometown of San Francisco. But what we need is a new profession of active urban ecology, which figures out how to fix the problems of urban living (cockroach predation, waste from markets or sanitation, a persistent cause of disease in slums) and helps cities engage natural infrastructure (rivers and coastlines play a role similar to highways and sewer lines) with the same level of sophistication brought to built infrastructure.

One idea that could be transferred from squatter cities is urban farming. An article by Gretchen Vogel in Science in 2008 enthused: “In a high-tech answer to the ‘local food’ movement, some experts want to transport the whole farm shoots, roots, and all to the city. They predict that future cities could grow most of their food inside city limits, in ultraefficient greenhouses… A farm on one city block could feed 50,000 people with vegetables, fruit, eggs, and meat. Upper floors would grow hydroponic crops; lower floors would house chickens and fish that consume plant waste.”

Urban roofs offer no end of opportunities for energy saving and “reconciliation ecology.” Planting a green roof with its own ecological community is well-established. For food, add an “ultraefficient greenhouse”; for extra power, add solar collectors. And the most dramatic gains can come from simply making everything white. According to a 2008 study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, if the world’s 100 largest cities replaced their dark roofs in this way, it could offset 44 metric gigatonnes of greenhouse gases.

Some environmentalists already are proponents of urban compactness. New zoning rules can be used to allow people to live and work closer together. Taxes can cut car use. Child-friendly policies and subsidised housing could bring down the high cost of city centre living, which drives families to the suburbs (and good schools follow them).
Finally, it is better infrastructure that makes cities possible—so what would infrastructure rethought in green terms look like? Some of it will surely look like the new mass transit systems being built in China, or the high-speed rail that is finally coming to the US. And all of this should be powered by smart and micro grids—allowing local generation and the distribution of electricity. The new generation of small, modular nuclear reactors being developed in the US and elsewhere, which provide less than 125 megawatts and are built offsite, could have an important role.

Of course, fast-growing cities are far from an unmitigated good. They concentrate crime, pollution, disease and injustice as much as business, innovation, education and entertainment. The recent earthquake in Haiti demonstrates the danger of slum buildings. But if they are overall a net good for those who move there, it is because cities offer more than just jobs. They are transformative: in the slums, as well as the office towers and leafy suburbs, the progress is from hick to metropolitan to cosmopolitan, and with it everything the dictionary says that cosmopolitan means: multicultural, multiracial, global, worldly-wise, well travelled, experienced, unprovincial, cultivated, cultured, sophisticated, suave, urbane.
And just as this was true during the industrial revolution, so the take-off of cities will be the dominant economic event of the first half of this century too. It will involve huge infrastructural stresses on energy and food supply. Vast numbers of people will begin climbing the energy ladder from smoky firewood and dung cooking fires to diesel-driven generators for charging batteries, then to 24/7 grid electricity. They are also climbing the food ladder, from subsistence farms to cash crops of staples like rice, corn, wheat and soy to meat—and doing so in a global marketplace. Environmentalists who try to talk people out of it will find the effort works about as well as trying to convince them to stay in their villages. Peasant life is over, unless catastrophic climate change drives us back to it. For humanity, the green city is our future.
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Near death experiences

I had always heard of people having near death experiences. Some said that they saw a light, others that they felt as if they were floating, still others that they were filled with ineffable peace. When Deb Foster died in a La Jolla hospital, she found herself on a stairway surrounded by cats and dogs and mesmerized by a celestial blue sky, the likes of which she had never seen on earth. Mary Clare Schlesinger hovered above her bed in the intensive-care unit, watching her husband and daughter react in shock and fathomless grief at the thought of her passing. Beverly Brodsky said she went on a spectacular journey through a tunnel of intense light, a magic ride with angels and a shapeless God to a place of perfect knowledge, wisdom, truth and justice. Many patients -- a notable study says nearly one in five -- who are revived following cardiac arrest, report memories of their brief time at death's door. They undergo lucid, often indelible experiences, even though they were unconscious, which could be an acute awareness; or moving through a void or tunnel toward bright light; or meeting deceased relatives; or a life review; or feelings of intense joy, profound peace -- a feeling so blissful they longed to remain; and seeing a point of no return.

Recently I too had a near death experience. But I must confess I heard no heavenly choirs or bursts of light during the period I was lost to the world. Actually I felt nothing. From the moment when I was sitting on the edge of my bed wanting to go greet my daughter, who had just returned to our apartment after visiting her friends, to when I found myself lying next to my bed with an anxious para medic peering at me, the intervening period was a complete blank. When I woke up I found my wife and daughter hovering in the back of the room while a team of paramedics from the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue squad noted my blood pressure, stuck an intravenous needle in my arm, and repeatedly measured my blood sugar levels, trying to figure out what was wrong. They had responded within minutes of the call. But it had been well over fifteen minutes during which, I was told, I was not responding to any stimuli and was completely out of it; while the hands and eyes were moving, there was no reaction to any questions. It also seemed that my breathing had stopped a number of times and the para medics were preparing to do a last ditch CPR when I woke up. Those fifteen minutes were a complete blank! No bright lights or moving through a void or having my life flash before my eyes.

After a few minutes of dizziness, I was back to normal, quizzing them all about what had happened and why. “Low blood sugar”, I was told was the culprit. A measurement of 30 was a sure sign of hypoglycemia and was due either to an overdose of insulin or a lack of adequate carbohydrates in the day’s meals preceding that night.

Anyway it all ended well as these four very competent young professionals insisted that I go to the nearby hospital to make assurance doubly sure, and where their initial diagnosis of hypoglycemic shock was confirmed by various measurements, and I was released after a few hours of observation. Alas, though, I had no near death experience of mine own to report!

Dealing with young people

Time was that dealing with children was limited to debates about " spare the rod and spoil the child". But now things have changed radically and the state has started coming out with recommendations and strategies for controlling the young. But the most bizarre practices seem to originate in Britain, the cradle of democracy.

In recent years Britain has been churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace.

An estimated 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK, a remarkable achievement for an island that occupies only 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitable landmass. While the ostensible object is surveillance for terrorists, it too often is also used to monitor the young - hooligans or others.

A few years ago some local authorities introduced the Mosquito, a gadget that emits a noise that sounds like a faint buzz to people over the age of 20 but which is so high-pitched, so piercing, and so unbearable to the delicate ear drums of anyone under 20 that they cannot remain in earshot. It’s designed to drive away unruly youth from public spaces, yet is so brutally indiscriminate that it also drives away good kids, terrifies toddlers, and wakes sleeping babes.

Police in the West of England recently started using super-bright halogen lights to temporarily blind misbehaving youngsters. From helicopters, the cops beamed spotlights at youths drinking or loitering in parks, in the hope that they will become so bamboozled that (when they recover their eyesight) they will stagger home.

And recently police in Liverpool boasted about making Britain’s first-ever arrest by unmanned flying drone. Inspired, it seems, by Britain and America’s robot planes in Afghanistan, the Liverpool cops used a remote-control helicopter fitted with CCTV (of course) to catch a car thief.

And now classical music, which was once taught to young people as a way of elevating their minds and tingling their souls, is being mined for its potential as a deterrent against bad behavior.

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children were forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claimed it calmed them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)One news report says some of the children who have endured this Mozart authoritarianism now find classical music unbearable.

It seems that now all across the UK, local councils and other public institutions play recorded classical music through speakers at bus-stops, in parking lots, outside department stores, and elsewhere. No, not because they think the public will appreciate these sweet sounds (they think we are uncultured grunts), but because they hope it will make naughty youngsters flee.Tyne and Wear in the north of England was one of the first parts of the UK to weaponize classical music. In the early 2000s, the local railway company decided to do something about the “problem” of “youths hanging around” its train stations. The young people were “not getting up to criminal activities,” admitted Tyne and Wear Metro, but they were “swearing, smoking at stations and harassing passengers.” So the railway company unleashed “blasts of Mozart and Vivaldi.” Apparently it was a roaring success. The youth fled. “They seem to loathe [the music],” said the proud railway guy. “It’s pretty uncool to be seen hanging around somewhere when Mozart is playing.” He said the most successful deterrent music included the Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 by Rachmaninov, and Piano Concerto No. 2 by Shostakovich.

In many communities,local businesspeople encouraged the council to pipe classical music as a way of getting rid of youngsters who were spitting in the street and doing graffiti. And apparently classical music defeats street art: The graffiti levels fell.

Anthony Burgess’s nightmare vision of an elite using high culture as a “punitive slap on the chops” for low youth has come true. In Burgess’s 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, famously filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, the unruly youngster Alex is subjected to “the Ludovico Technique” by the crazed authorities. Forced to take drugs that induce nausea and to watch graphically violent movies for two weeks, while simultaneously listening to Beethoven, Alex is slowly rewired and re-moulded. But he rebels, especially against the use of classical music as punishment. Pleading with his therapists to turn the music off, he tells them that “Ludwig van” did nothing wrong, he “only made music.” He tells the doctors it’s a sin to turn him against Beethoven and take away his love of music. But they ignore him. At the end of it all, Alex is no longer able to listen to his favorite music without feeling distressed. A bit like that schoolboy in Derby who now sticks his fingers in his ears when he hears Mozart.

The weaponization of classical music speaks volumes about the British elite’s authoritarianism and cultural backwardness. They’re so desperate to control youth—but from a distance, without actually having to engage with them—that they will film their every move, fire high-pitched noises in their ears, shine lights in their eyes, and bombard them with Mozart. And they have so little faith in young people’s intellectual abilities, in their capacity and their willingness to engage with humanity’s highest forms of art, that they imagine Beethoven and Mozart and others will be repugnant to young ears.

Scams

It was Barnum Bailey who is reputed to have said that “there is a sucker born every minute.” Today’s scam artists operate on the basis of that old wisdom. Scams have really proliferated in the last few years both in numbers and the variety of approaches.

Let us start with the “soft scams” of the TV ads. Here the sucker is drawn in by the tall claims made in the ad be it for high returns on investments or longer endowments. You just need to put down your credit card number and you will soon be on your way to a lovely body or be the proud owner of the latest doodad which does less than it promises in the ad when you actually hold it in your hand. At least in the US there is a modicum of regulation which requires these ad makers to also broadcast the various caveats to the unsuspecting buyers. Of course most of these caveats are in extremely small print or spoken at three times the normal speed during the TV ad. But these caveats do exist for the wary.

At altogether another level are the scams which have brought Nigeria some prominence.Here is how this famous scam works: letters (or, nowadays, e-mail messages) postmarked from Nigeria (or Sierra Leone, or the Ivory Coast, or almost any other foreign nation) are sent to addresses taken from large mailing lists. The letters promise rich rewards for helping officials of that government (or bank, or quasi-government agency or sometimes just members of a particular family) out of an embarrassment or a legal problem. Typically, the pitch includes mention of multi-million dollar sums, with the open promise that you will be permitted to keep a startling percentage of the funds you're going to aid in squirreling away for these disadvantaged foreigners. But when you agree to participate in this international bail-out, you soon find that something is always going wrong: paperwork will be delayed, new questions are being asked, officials will need to be bribed. All of them require money from you — an insignificant sum, really, in light of the windfall about to land in your lap — to get things back on track. You pay, you wait for the transfer ... and all you'll get in return are more excuses about why the funds are being held up and assurances that everything can be straightened out if you'll just send a bit more cash to help the process along. Once your bank account has been sucked dry or you start making threats, you'll never hear from these Nigerians again. As for the money you've thrown at this, it's gone forever.

In another form taken by the Nigerian scam, a church or religious organization is contacted by a wealthy foreigner who says he desires nothing more than to leave his considerable fortune to that particular group. Maybe he says he's led a life of sin and is now trying to make good, or maybe he claims that as a devout Christian he heard about their good works and wants to leave his money to help continue them, but whatever the backstory, it's just a tale. Once again, there will be delays, each of them necessitating the "beneficiary" to spend a few thousand here and a few thousand there in an effort to collect money that never materializes.

In an earlier version of the same con, the victim is informed that he has just won an important prize in a foreign lottery he doesn't remember entering. Only when he tries to collect the money is he approached for payment of facilitation fees to get his winnings to him. Of course, it's the same con, with just a few elements unimportant to the execution of the thievery changed about. This Nigerian Scam has been emptying the pockets of victims for decades — first through letters, then with faxes, and now via e-mail.

In its earliest incarnation, which dates to at least the 1920s, it was known as 'The Spanish Prisoner' con. In that long-ago version, businessmen were contacted by someone trying to smuggle the scion of a wealthy family out of a prison in Spain. But of course the wealthy family would shower with riches those who helped secure the release of the boy. Those who were suckered into this paid for one failed rescue attempt after another, with the fictitious prisoner continuing to languish in his non-existent dungeon, always just one more bribe, one more scheme, one more try, away from being released. These days it's trapped funds not errant sons of well-to-do families that are the objects of these global wild goose chases, but the con is the same.

Then there is Bernie Madoff, who ran the latest version of a Ponzi scheme for people who wanted high returns on safe investments during good times and bad. A Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment operation that pays returns to separate investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors, rather than from any actual profit earned. The Ponzi scheme usually entices new investors by offering returns other investments cannot guarantee, in the form of short-term returns that are either abnormally high or unusually consistent. The perpetuation of the returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors to keep the scheme going. Of course the system is destined to collapse because the earnings, if any, are less than the payments to investors. While the system eventually will collapse under its own weight, the example of Bernard Madoff illustrates the ability of a Ponzi scheme to delude both individual and institutional investors as well as securities authorities for long periods. Madoff's variant of the Ponzi Scheme stands as the largest financial investor fraud in history committed by a single person and prosecutors estimate losses at Madoff's hand totaling about $64.8 billion.

Finally there are the scams that affect the innocent bystanders. I was subject to one recently when I examined my telephone bill from Verizon. Here a company called Mindsprings had been charging me $ 20 a month for some services that I had not asked for and had never used. Verizon pointed out in the bill that if I did not pay these charges, my phone would not be cut almost asking me to not pay these charges. When I called them and asked them why they allowed these very obvious scammers and why they were becoming their collection agents, I was told that FEC required them to permit competition and to collect these charges if the company provided at least two identification for each member. Clearly the company had stolen some of these identities hoping to make a bonanza before enough people cottoned on to their chicanery. Verizon did offer to return the money and also to place a ban on such third party collection efforts if I so requested.

At the heart of a scam- except the last one- is the desire to obtain returns without effort or work. Scams normally take in people who have a touch of larceny in them. They want to take short cuts and feel that they can outwit the scammer. Sad to say, that rarely happens.

“It's Not Fair”

How often have we heard the words “But it’s not fair”. We hear it from children who are denied a treat. We hear it from adults when they fail in a venture due to reasons beyond their control. We hear it from everyone who works with the poor, the disadvantaged and the sick in developing countries. Yet few people stop to analyze what these words really mean or imply.

The fact is that if by "fair" you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. It has not been fair even within the same family. For example, among children born to the same parents and raised under the same roof, the firstborns on average have higher IQs than their brothers and sisters, and usually achieve more in life. And despite all the sound and fury generated in controversies over whether different groups have different genetic potential, even if they all have identical genetic potential, the outcomes can still differ. There is no question that the accident of birth is a huge factor in the fate of people.

But Nature's own discrimination completely dwarfs man's discrimination. Geography alone makes equal chances virtually impossible. The geographic advantages of Western Europe over Eastern Europe – in climate and navigable waterways, among other things – have led to centuries of differences in income levels that were greater than income differences between blacks and whites in America today. A child born in sub Saharan Africa certainly has a completely different life prospect than one born in modern day Canada.

But many people fail to see the fundamental difference between saying that a particular thing – whether a mental test or an institution – is conveying a difference that already exists or is creating a difference that would not exist otherwise. Creating a difference that would not exist otherwise is discrimination, and something can and should be done about that.

But, in recent times, virtually any disparity in outcomes is almost automatically blamed on discrimination, despite the incredible range of other reasons for disparities between individuals and groups. The really serious question is what can be done to reduce disparities without creating other, and often worse, problems. Providing free public education, scholarships to colleges and other opportunities for achievement are fine as far as they go, but there should be no illusion that they can undo all the differences in priorities, attitudes and efforts among different individuals and groups.

Most of us want to be fair, in the sense of treating everyone equally. We want laws to be applied the same to everyone. We want educational, economic or other criteria for rewards to be the same as well. But redistribution of material resources has a very poor track record when it comes to actually helping those who are lagging, whether in education, in the economy or elsewhere. What they need are the attitudes, priorities and behavior which produce the outcomes desired.

A more hands-on concept of fairness gives third parties a much bigger role to play. But whether any human being has ever had the omniscience to determine and undo the many differences among people born into different families and cultures – with different priorities, attitudes and behavior – is a very big question. Trying to change whole cultures and subcultures in which different individuals are raised would be a staggering task. But changing anyone's attitudes, priorities and behavior is a lot harder than taking a stance as defenders of the oppressed and crusaders against the forces of evil. To the extent that doing the latter misdiagnoses the problem, it makes solving the problem even harder. That does no good for those who are lagging, however much it exalts those who pose as their defenders.
Whatever the innate capacity of any race, class or other group, what pays off in the real world are developed capabilities, and these have never been the same – or even close to being the same – for individuals or groups. Unfortunately fairness as equal treatment does not produce fairness as equal outcomes. The confusion between the two meanings of the same word has created enormous mischief, much of it at the expense of lagging groups, who have been distracted from the things that would enable them to catch up. And whole societies have been kept in a turmoil pursing a will o' the wisp in the name of "fairness."

But where did the attitude, “It's not fair” come from? For some reason we live with an expectation that life is supposed to be fair. Therefore, when we encounter a situation that appears not to be going the way we believe it should be going, we believe that its outcome is not fair. Children and adults appear to have similar definitions for what is not fair. These seem to be issues related to personal relationships, the equity of assigning responsibilities and expectations, and the distribution of gifts.

It appears that this attitude almost always arises whenever someone perceives or feels threatened that someone else may be getting something that she or he believes should be her or his. The perceived right to consider that something should go to me instead of another leads to the attitude that something is not fair when it does not go the way I desire. When this attitude is perceived, perhaps a consideration of one's selfishness scale should be considered.

Why do we believe things are not fair? This attitude seems to have developed from our first interactions with others and our observations of other people's activities and lives. These attitudes can be developed from watching television and seeing how other peoples' lives are lived – although fictitious. Often in TV Land and Movie Land we see personal encounters always work out and it appears that the main characters lives work out fairly. In many of the stories children are read, the stories end with happy endings. Perhaps these expectations of happy endings lead us to believe that our life incidents should all have happy endings. When our real-world lives do not always end with happy endings, then we may believe things are not fair.

Can we really change the attitude of “It's not fair”? Perhaps taking time to reflect on the fact that no one ever stated or proved that life was to be fair might help us to change our attitude. Also, if we develop an attitude of gratefulness for what we have and are not always looking at what other people have, we may stop evaluating our lives by what might be fair and be thankful for what we have. Perhaps by forming a more positive attitude towards our personal lives and the world around us we will be more satisfied with our lives and will not be so quick to look at another person's life and compare it with ours. By finding satisfaction in our own lives we might find that judging whether something is fair or not is no longer important. Finding fairness in life might be found in doing something to help one another.

"Life is unfair," John Kennedy observed at a press conference one day in 1962. The thought had a certain stoic grace about it. Bill Gates amplified it further when he said “Life is not fair: get used to it.”

Raging old men....

We live so long now that we have not one but two crisis in our lives – a mid life crisis at forty and a late life crisis at seventy!

Everyone knows what a mid life crisis is. In 1965, the Canadian psychologist Elliott Jaques coined the term midlife crisis to describe the trauma many individuals in the developed world felt around the age of 40, when they faced the imminence of old age and, eventually, death. In the traditional narrative of the crisis, individuals — mostly men — panic and make extreme compensations for this reality. Everyone also knows that the solution that is common to this crisis varies from a drastic change in lifestyle- a new, young blonde wife or a red racing car.

The late life crisis is different yet similar. At seventy most men have completed a successful career, amassed a modest fortune, built their dream house, married off their children, played enough golf and dandled umpteen grandchildren on their knees. Now as they contemplate the years ahead they ask themselves “Now what?”

This dilemma that afflicts a few in my generation was brought home to me when a friend of five decades dropped by to see me a few days ago. Here he was a technocrat who had had a successful career, made some creative contributions to the country, amassed adequate wealth, lived in an affluent suburb and was quoted often—but now not often enough- by the press as an elder statesman of his profession. He was relatively healthy but of course heir, like most men of his age, to varying afflictions. He had no major problems that I could discern. Yet..

“Honestly”, he confided in me, “some days I get up and ask myself why? What’s left?”

Looking around I found the late life crisis had caught many of my contemporaries by surprise. Yet some had found ways to cope with it. They had found their red racing cars or young blondes too. Of course, they were different at seventy than at forty! One had turned to spirituality and religious learning and now spent time teaching Gita to avid listeners; another had retreated to a bucolic retreat near the sea to a life of contemplation and reflection; one had found a new burst of energy and enthusiasm and now travelled the world helping volunteers teach the young and yet another had immersed himself in political activism and a renewed interest in old hobbies. They all seemed to have weathered this late life crisis.

But there was a common thread running through their lives too. It seemed to me that all of them had refused to go “gentle into the night”! They all refused to give up. Each day still brought new challenges, new ideas, new inspirations. In the past they had looked for results of their efforts, now they simply did what they enjoyed or felt deeply about.

And the advice they followed was what Dylan Thomas addressed to his octogenarian father, whose eyesight and general health were failing, where he urges his father to "burn and rave at close of day"--rather than surrendering meekly to it.

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Marching backwards

It was not too long ago that Indian weddings lasted for over 5-10 days with hordes of friends and family descending on the hapless parents as they prepared to give their daughters hand away in marriage. Not only were the festivities long drawn and expensive, the parents of the bride also had to find adequate resources for the dowry that was then, explicitly and now implicitly, demanded by the bridegrooms family.That was then but now these wasteful ways are making an unfortunate comeback..

There have always been many many rituals in an Indian wedding. There were the ones before the marriage: the engagement, Barni Bandhwana, Mamara, Sangeet Sandhya, Tilak ceremony and Mehendi Lagwana. During the marriage festivities, there were the Barat Nikase, VarMala,Aart,Baasi Jawari, Kanya daan, Panigrahana Hathlewa,Gathabandhan,Laja Homa, Saptapadi and Vidaai. At the new home , there was the darshan, Dwar Rokai, Grihas Pravesh, Mook Dikhai and Pheri. All these rituals had one thing in common- they all required the expenditure of considerable sums of money by the bride’s parents. A daughter’s wedding was thus a crushing burden and many a parent had to go deep in debt to pay for these traditions

Of course defenders of these expensive traditions, and there were many, argued that the Indian shastras demanded these rituals, that this was once in a lifetime occurrence, that it provided the far flung family an occasion to meet—and they could hardly stay for a day after having travelled thousands of miles—that it was a marriage to two families not of two people etc. These arguments held sway for many years till dowry deaths in rural areas and the increasing debt burdens became a national disgrace

It was the national independence movement- and Pandit Nehru in particular—who took up the cause of reforming the Hindu marriage practices against considerable opposition form within his own party. The Hindu Code Bill, which intended to provide a civil code in place of the body of Hindu personal law, was presented to the Constituent Assembly on 9 April 1948. But it caused such a great deal of controversy that it was subsequently broke down to three more specialized bills: the Hindu Marriage Bill which outlawed polygamy and contained provisions dealing with inter caste marriages and divorce procedures; the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Bill had as its main thrust the adoption of girls, which till then had been little practiced; and the Hindu Succession Bill which placed daughters on the same footing as widows and sons where the inheritance of family property was concerned.


Dowry was and remains a social evil but continues to be a common practice in almost every part of India. Women at the time of marriage are expected to bring with them jewellery, cash and even consumer durables as part of dowry to the in-laws and they are subsequently ill-treated, often violently, if they fail to do so. Anti-dowry laws in India, enacted in 1961, prohibit the request, payment or acceptance of a dowry, "as consideration for the marriage". where "dowry" is defined as a gift demanded or given as a precondition for a marriage. Gifts given without a precondition are not considered dowry, and are legal. Asking or giving of dowry can be punished by an imprisonment of up to six months, or a fine of up to Rs. 5000. But the laws themselves have done nothing to halt dowry transactions. Many of the victims are burnt to death - they are doused in kerosene and set fire to. Routinely the in-laws claim that the death happened simply due to an accident. According to data complied by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a total of 2,276 female suicides due to dowry disputes were reported in 2006, that is six a day on an average. A total of 7,618 cases were registered under Dowry Death in 2006, while 6,787 cases were registered in 2005, showing a gradual increase in this sad statistic

The original concept of streedhan was based on providing a newly wed girl with some things that she could cherish and call her own. Today this concept has been vulgarized to symbolize all the things that not even the bridegroom, but his family wants to have as their own. India’s burgeoning middle class - now 300 million strong - are turning weddings into showcases of their growing disposable incomes and newfound appetites for the goodies of the global marketplace. The largesse has spawned an $11 billion wedding industry, growing at 25 percent annually and beginning to rival the US industry valued at $50 billion. It is estimated that the average budget for a middle class wedding ceremony in India today is $34,000 while the upper-middle and rich classes are known to spend upward of $2 million. This doesn’t include cash and valuables given as part of a dowry. Thus on average people earning a total of $6,000 / yr spend about $34,000 on a wedding. In contrast, the average wedding costs in the US are around $27,000, with a range of $25,000 to $30,000 generally accepted as accurate.

What has changed from the 1970s is the kind of demands being made on the bride's parents. Apart from "gifts" that are nothing short of extortion, the demands now involve the kind of wedding that will take place. There is a kind of pan-Indian wedding that is emerging that is dominated by the north Indian Punjabi style of celebration. Thus sangeet and mehndi are now a must at every wedding. Ostentation is in, regardless of what you can afford. You don't have to be a Mittal or a Chatwal to imagine that you are a prince or princess for that one day. Wedding organizers have everything ready from faux palaces to exotic locations. And ostensibly sensible young people are agreeing to these tamashas in the belief that there is nothing wrong with "living it up" for that one day. Gaudy displays of wealth and going one better than the neighbors seems to be the main motivation of these noveau- riche. Some few get dragged into these displays- their original intent of a simple wedding is soon expanded as family and friends suggest additions and rituals till it becomes a “tamasha” with the poor parents footing the bill and often going deep into debt. If it was only them, one could dismiss their antics as being driven by the lunatic fringe of show offs, but unfortunately these practices are slowly creeping back into rest of the country as well. Dowry demands are rising even though they are illegal and ostentatious displays of wealth in weddings are making a comeback with paid dancers and performers. In one case, the parents even organized rehearsals to imitate a wedding in a bollywood movie.

Customs like dowry can end only when the people involved, the young men and women, decide to go against the tide, demand simpler weddings and say a firm "no" to the vulgar demands that constitute a dowry. But today all these reforms seem to have fallen by the wayside and the reformers everywhere are in retreat. And worse, the charge to go backwards to the past is being led by the more educated and the better off. It is the NRIs around the world who are reverting back to these old rituals and customs- many times without understanding them at all. The modern Indian at home too is not a reformer. If anything he is a retrograde traditionalist.

But the real tragedy of the increasingly consumerist culture in which we live today is that young people, who one would expect are capable of thinking outside the box, who should have the courage to assert what they want, are either going on unquestioningly with wasteful traditions, or are even endorsing them. As a result, any desire to curb expenditure that existed in a generation that came out of the National Movement is now so thoroughly buried that one wonders whether it will ever surface again.

Marriages may not be made in heaven, but they should not end up sending people into the hellhole of lifelong debt and misery. Perhaps it is time for another reform movement starting with ones refusal to participate in these ostentatious displays.