The Laundry Bag

If we divide people into categories based on their socio-economic status and observe how many people move into other categories during their lifetime or in the span of a generation, it makes an interesting study. In fact, it’s a powerful indicator of equality to opportunity, and yet another useful indicator that is conveniently ignored. But nonetheless, some sensibles are still studying this, and call this Social Mobility.


Where are we?

A high upwards social mobility equals having more opportunities to climb the socio-economic ladder. US, the seat of capitalism, unsurprisingly has the lowest social mobility. Ironically this is in the face of the ‘American Dream’ (while practical economics’ whisper ‘I told you so’ is drowned in the capitalistic cacophony). The probability of upward mobility in India is also very low, and in fact many face high risk of downward mobility. Indians however, are the strongest believers of upward mobility.

The American 'Dream' was aptly named

To understand how hollow that belief is, here’s a fact: American confidence in upward mobility is also increasing despite mobility is declining sharply specially since the 80s. Confidence here is thus as valuable as a condo in the housing crisis.

It takes 7 generations for a low income Indian to get into average income strata. Bollywood dialogues like "ye karz tumhaari 7 pushtein nai chuka payengi" now make sense.

So what can be done?

In the chandelier-champagne-chauffer elitist pinnacle of polite speaking, you can’t do shit. It turns out, the biggest drivers to social mobility are education and parental status (birth lottery). And a lot (and I mean a lot) of level of education depends again, eventually on the family you are born in.

Before you get all hopeful with education being the turning stone, be cognizant of the fact that cost of decent education is obscenely high. Worst, the rate of increase in cost of education has by far outpaced the rate of wage increase  among middle class, let alone the lower economic strata. With education (and similarly healthcare) getting rapidly costlier, not much of ‘spare change’ is left with the non-rich to invest in improving their condition. The lesser proportional ‘spare change’, the worse it is. If I have a crore, I will be clearing 4 lakhs yearly even with a savings account for just keeping it in the bank. Not enough, but I can give up my job and still survive. I just freed 5 days a week for my lifetime. I can surely use it to move from rags to, well, less rags. See how 1 crore ‘spare change’ just lying unused can change my life?

As a welfare state, the role of governments (as against blaming catastrophic economic decline on millennials’ app usage behaviour) is to maximize people’s spare change by keeping healthcare and education cost in control, so that people can invest on their improvement. But with powers shifting from of governments across the globe to capitalist corporations, we are clearly headed the wrong way. And with capitalism's capacity to shift money from the poor to the rich, it's a slippery slope we are on – sliding towards an abyss of extremely disproportionate wealth distribution. That begs the question - what exactly is wealth? Too deep a question? As Heisenberg said, ‘you are goddamn right!’ But then where’s the fun in figuring something as mundane as how to make your selfie look happier than you actually are.

But first, let’s look at the clock.

Time is something (almost) everyone has in equal quantity. Jeff Bezos and I get the same 24 hours in a day. While he spends it creating the next market disruption, I spend it doing laundry and such. Thus it comes to making most of that time – and utilizing the time by doing what gives you maximum ‘return’ (which should be happiness, but then it’s easier to count notes).  The productive time is maximized by not doing things that create no productive outcome - like laundry (yes, I hate it). You can achieve that by paying someone else to do it (what a utopia would it be where people just do things for each other), someone who feels that the money you will pay is equally or more than worth the time he/she spends doing my laundry. Since everyone has equal time, the intrinsic value of time is same for everyone. So why the difference in value of time among different people?

There's a popular theory in economics: the law of diminishing returns. The more of something you have, the lesser utility will an additional unit of that thing will give you. Getting a second burger after having one will make you more happier than getting an 11th after the 10 (and get some digestive pills while you are at it). Similarly, getting 5 more dollars will get a $20/day person more happiness, than one making 2000 a day. The value of five dollars is much lesser for the more affluent. Surprise, surprise! The richer will spare lesser thought to dishing out five dollars, while the less fortunate will be willing to do more to get it. Essentially, more willing to spend his/her time doing something you find not worthy of your time. Enter the laundry bag.

If you asnwered yes, welcome to the Middle Class. And thank you for participating in this lifelong experiment

Its all about Money 'Laundering'

However, does it mean doing laundry is a productive use of the launderer's time? Keeping aside my hate, laundry is a ginormous waste of all of humanity’s time. Anyways, the launderer is deprived of time he could have used to acquire skills, do another or additional work, spend time with his family, or simply not do laundry for a while. On the other hand, the $1000 person is freed of a chunk of time while shelling out only 0.5% of his money. And with this freed time, he can earn more, learn more, become even more valuable and be able to earn increasingly more, quite the opposite of the $10 person.

Wealth is thus essentially the access to time. Time is, thus not money, money is Time.

The unrewarding veil

If you deconstruct the education system (it would be easy – its’ already in ruins, all you need is to sneeze at it and it will come down crashing) among the others, you fill find the two key elements that make up the keep up the structure: the pedagogy and the system of rewarding. Here’s to the latter.

For a child, the notion of academic target (which shouldn’t exist in the first place) is to excel in the upcoming exam. For the ambitious, star-spangled ones, it’s to stay at the top and for the visionary gems, it’s to get the best student award. Either ways, the focus is on the next exam, instead of the next learning opportunity. The actual input as effort and thus ultimately interest in the topic and the output as practical and applicable learning has been buried deep under the layers of mark-sheets and class ranks.

In a study analysing the impact of student incentives [1], various monetary rewards  were used. The ones that incentivised class grades or interim assessment didn’t result in any gain in students’ achievement. The ones that focussed on the inputs like reading books or doing homework, rather than the outputs, resulted in statistically significant gains. It would be worth noting, however, that further insights into the research revealed that the gains from reading books was also up for debate, as the students were now reading smaller books to get paid more. It was because reading the book isn’t the input either, actually being interested to read is – and that wasn’t incentivised.

The misplaced method of rewarding and its reaffirmation creates a veil of short sightedness – pushing from one goal to the next, without a clear vision on where it’s leading to, let alone why. The same veil continues throughout the career. In higher education, the incentive shifts slowly from getting good grades to getting a good job. Once in the job, it’s getting good appraisals from one quarter to the next.

The same veil is prevalent in businesses too. In one among the many similar surveys, this one on CFOs, it was revealed that firms frequently cut on long term profitable investments for short-term earnings targets [2]. This sacrifice of long term value creation for the quarterly gains has been debated to be one of the reasons for the financial crisis of 2008.

Governments too arguably have long been suffering from such short termism. With so much focus on the upcoming election, governments would rather take populist measures instead of investing thought, action and resources on initiatives that bears fruit much beyond the voting horizon, sometimes even when the opposition has come to power instead. Pleasing citizens instead of benefiting them, bitten by short termism is often considered one of the biggest weaknesses of a democracy.

The same veil also makes our targets for long term investing blurred in order to get instant gratification. Multiple studies have revealed that people would choose to have $100 now than $120 at the end of year. A 20% return thrown out of the window! This short sightedness resulting in low saving tendencies was also studied to be prevalent among primates in an extremely interesting study on monkey economy. [3]

Coming back home after a long digression, what is to be done to rip apart the veil that’s structurally thrust onto our faces to wear throughout our lives? And if we are evolutionarily meant for short termism (case in point: monkey economy), how to get over it? One way possibly would be to reward the actual, ultimate roots of the input. Reward the effort and process of learning, not the result [4]. Make sure the child has a smile when a chapter starts, so that it’s not a frown when an exam does.

Karm karo, par fal ki apeksha mat rakho

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[1] http://edlabs.harvard.edu/analyzing-impact-student-incentives

[2] https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Research/Published_Papers/P89_The_economic_implications.pdf

[3] http://www.forbes.com/2006/02/11/monkey-economics-money_cz_df_money06_0214monkeys.html

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X0mgOOSpLU

Education?

Imagine yourself in a place that’s unknown to you, say, a jungle you’ve never been inside. Take it like you were blindfolded and put in the middle of a jungle. When you remove the blindfold, you find you have no idea of the way out. It’s not dangerous, just that getting out isn’t very easy. Now two scenarios happen.

One, you find someone, a ‘jungle veteran’ who knows the place inside out. She/he tells you the way out, or even walks you to the edge of the forest and shows you the direction to the nearest village.

Two, you are alone, so you start exploring. After some days, getting lost on some days, discovering a beautiful creek on another, you finally reach the end of the forest. You have some bruises, you got some memories.

Think of it, in which scenario will you come out wiser. Even keeping aside wisdom gained, which one would you prefer?

Once my friend, seeing me trying to solve a Rubik’s cube to some extent, asked me what is the procedure to get all the elements of one colour on one face (for at least one colour). I gave him the cube and said ‘just try’. After some time, and moments before he would lose his temper over my unconcern and thrash me to telling the procedure, my friend got it right. He explored his way to knowing the procedure, and in the process learned other tricks that were useful in the 3x3x3 puzzle. Had I told him the process, he would not have explored into knowing the other moves. He said this and thanked me for not helping.

Once it was considered that atom could not be divided further. The word atom itself came from the root ‘atma’ (the Sanskrit one, as in mahatma and that ghost ‘atma’), meaning indestructible. So once it was declared and announced that it was indivisible, people moved on to finding other properties of atom. No one gave another thought over the division of atom, as it was made like a thumb rule that it is not possible. Like we now have one that nothing can exceed the speed of light.

It was only when some people came along who gave a thumbs down to the thumb rule, that proton, neutron and electrons were discovered, disrupting every research that had been done on atomic properties and behaviour to the extent of rewriting them. Next wave came with quantum theory, and later with the discovery of quarks.

Why would it take decades to find out that atom can be divided. It was not technological incapability that hindered discovery of sub-atomic particles, it was a theoretical hurdle. If you teach a child from the days of school that atom cannot be divided, she/he wouldn't give a thought on dividing it. It would take a fool to think that all of the world’s scientists are saying wrong, and she/he is right. And such fools are rare. Thus the delay in the discovery of nucleus, quarks.

Why it is that a book gives more vividness and life to a story than an adaptation by even the best directors into a movie? When you read a book, your brain imagines and creates scenes and scenarios. While in a movie, it is pre-created for you. You don’t have to apply your imagination. Making a visual of the imagined scene by the director itself limits and kills the creativity and imagination of the scene. It restricts the thought process to the scenes we see. In that context, even paraphrasing some idea by writing makes it less imaginative and creative. Just by reading this, you are limiting your thoughts now to what is written. If I were to somehow infuse this idea directly to your mind, you could have imagined it and get a better sense out of it. It may seem like a mad concept, but just by expressing something, we limit our ability to express the idea.

Now connecting all the points I've put forth above in a horribly unstructured way. If you show someone a way, give him a direction of thought, or put your thoughts, you can significantly reduce the capability of the person to think the other way. And that is what education is doing, though it was meant to be otherwise.

A Discriminant Analysis

There have been debates on net neutrality. Net, that has an abysmally low penetration in India. This article is not about the digital divide, but an artificial, deeper and more critical demographic divide.

Following are two articles of the Indian Constitution:

[Art. 29(2)] – There shall be no discrimination against any citizen on the ground of religion, caste race or language, in matter of admission into educational institutes maintained or aided by the State.

[Art. 16(2)] – There shall be no discrimination against any citizen on the ground of religion, caste race or language, in matter of public employment.

Doesn’t it then become clear that the unreserved category is being clearly discriminated against, when they are being given very limited opportunities for education and employment in the name of upliftment of the reserved classes? A very contradicting and illogical article can be found in the constitution, which supposedly ‘takes care’ of this issue.

[Art. 15(4)] – If special provisions are made by the State in favour of members of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, other citizens shall not be entitled to impeach the validity of such provisions on the ground that such provisions are discriminatory against them.

So isn’t it quite self-contradictory and dictatorial? You are biased against and you can’t even oppose! Had the people of India been fond of such restrictions, we would all have chosen dictatorship!

Now there has been frequent additions of more and more ‘castes’ into the list of ‘backward’ category. How many have been removed from this list? Didn’t get to hear any community coming out? So either it’s the fact that reservation isn’t helping at all, or it’s an irreversible step taken under political motives to increase vote share. If you remove a community, there goes your vote!

The reservation quota percentage is also, in a similar fashion increasing with the passage of time.

The above two increments: number of communities falling into backward category and the reservation percentage begs the answer to the question: is India becoming increasingly backward that more of it requires more of reservation to thrive?

As it is the skill development and deployment structure on India is on life support, these provisions are only slowly pulling the plug. It’s not saying that certain castes perform lower. Not at all. But it is quite logical, and let’s face it: whenever a reservation system is put into place, the performance benchmark will be lowered. A very visible example is the lowered eligibility cut off scores for employment in public sector or admissions to government colleges and institutes for the reserved categories. Output levels for such organisations are bound to fall.

According to the latest economic data from NSSO, despite more access to education, better household amenities and increased incomes, the economic gap between upper castes and tribal communities continue unchanged. So what purpose is the preferential treatment trying to achieve?

The only feasible and seemingly logical way out is to identify the financially weak and provide financial support to these individuals, not the entire category of people. If a person is say BPL, no matter which category, he/she should be provided education at lower rates. After completing his education, he/she is at an equal level as others, so he/she should not need any quotas for job.

Let there be level playing ground for everyone, irrespective of their caste, race, religion or language. Doesn’t it correspond with what the fundamental principle of equality speaks of?

Unhealed wounds

Finally she is at peace. After more than four decades.

Aruna Shanbaugh was another victim of rape and the terrible state of people’s mentality. The worst wasn’t over, the society had planned out more for her. Her family abandoned her when she needed them the most. For a person who had always loved the idea of caring and helping others and for the very reason became a nurse had no one left to care for her, except the other nurses.

Her death, though is a sad shock, has highlighted a lot of questions that has laid in our midst since long, and have been chose to be conveniently ignored. We have bigger issues like invention of selfie sticks, and the detrimental impact of the court proceedings on our beloved‘Bhai’. So for once ignoring these critical issues, let us look at the ‘trivial’ ones.

Rape: Too much has been said (including girls should pray to not get raped), lot has been analysed and suggested, and nothing has been executed. Hope that happens someday soon.

The victim led a terrible life for 42 years and died recently, while the perpetrator served a two concurrent seven year sentences. The case filed was not even of rape, it was of mere robbery and attempted murder. (At present, this person is living a normal life, working for a Delhi hospital).

Euthanasia: More of a GD topic, only sometimes the members of the GD may not be the usual students, but from a panel of experts on NDTV.

“On behalf of Aruna, her friend Pinki Virani, a social activist, filed a petition in the Supreme Court arguing that the "continued existence of Aruna is in violation of her right to live in dignity". The Supreme Court made its decision on 7 March 2011. The court rejected the plea to discontinue Aruna's life support”.

The court, which made passive euthanasia legal in India, did not do so in Aruna’s case. (Passive euthanasia involves removal of life support systems for the affected. Active euthanasia, which involves use of a lethal injection to end life, is still illegal.)

The “right to die”, when put very roughly, is in direct reciprocation to right to live. The life Aruna had after the incident was no life at all. She lost most of her senses, couldn’t eat or even move herself. Every person has a right to live with dignity and die with dignity.

Wasn’t it something practiced by people dependent on animal meat to kill the prey if it was still alive and struggling? Wasn’t it the practice even among warriors to kill the enemy with a clean stroke to end their pain? It was a simple gesture of being human (don’t go by the now diluted meaning of ‘being human’ here). Why can’t we do the same to ourselves, what we do even for the enemy?

They right to die is very pronounced in the case of Aruna.  Why, or for whom would she have loved to live? Taking even the most optimistic scenario that she would have come out of her coma (although she was there permanently), who would she have liked to see when she recovered? Her family, who chose to forget her? The patients whom she once took care of, but who never came to see her? The country, which was busy worshipping Ammas and praising Aam Aadmis while she struggled day after day for 42 years with numerous ailments?

For this and similar tragic events, It’s time we put to task people responsible– oursleves.

The Complete Man

People today are quickly and blindly adopting western attitudes, those that are not in many ways apt for our society. And for the actually imitable attributes, there is resistance.

We have pubs where young people of both sexes meet and drink but we haven’t accepted sex education. We have the big shot foreign companies here to exploit the domestic market, but no job-ready workforce, owing to the still ‘unpractical’ education system. Knowledge is being quickly replaced with data. We change the Facebook cover picture to the national flag on one day of the year, and forget the country for the rest of it. We have guided missiles and misguided men. We are readily sharing our selfies taken in malls and multiplexes on Instagram, but are still bound by caste marriages.

The lack of understanding on sensitive issues like the concept of religion, faith, modernity and social setup is still stark, as India struggles to achieve its 2020 goals. A lot of effort is required to take the social framework to the next level. Anyone working towards this goal in any field deserves appreciation. Someone who did this when faith was misguided and intense, and social work wasn't a trending hashtag, deserves a lot more.

Imagine the scenario more than half a century ago. Let’s go back to that time.

Bacchu Singh is another youth among the many despising the foreign rule. What makes him different from the others is that he acts to bring about the change, and the fiery passion to achieve that in his eyes. He joins the extremists in their untiring efforts to uproot the alien rule. In the process, he faces all the hurdles that the colonialists could erect to stop him and his co-revolutionists. He has to disguise himself, carry secret information against the rules and avoid arrests that could lead to severe punishments.

One day, he gets arrested. He is penalized with the infamous ‘Kaala Paani’, and sent to the cellular jail in Andaman. The cells are of such size that you can’t lie down straight in it to maximize the discomfort, among the many other inhuman restrictions. There, in the company of other revolutionaries who are from different backgrounds, he gets insight into the society outside.

Upon release, he comes out a wiser man.

He soon picks up social causes, and enters into married life. He is equally open in encouraging his wife, another revolutionary person, to pursue further studies, and letting her go away for the same in times when communication was a major issue. Later he motivates her to go for a job. Women, even today, are expected to be on the move along with their husbands, take up transferable or non-permanent jobs, and focus on the family. He has the rationality to give her all the freedom a woman deserves.

When the couple is blessed with a daughter, people come to him say that the girl would cause his downfall. They suggest him to throw the child away. He becomes furious and throws these people out. He takes his daughter into his arms and names her ‘Kranti’, or ‘revolution’. Not only does he keep her, but also stays a caring father to her, educates her. He is delighted to have a son and another daughter a few years later. He infuses his values and rationality into his children. After all, change begins at home.

He read a lot of books, which gave him immense knowledge in fields like sociology and religion. Being a BHU graduate awarded with the title of ‘Shastri’ (the most coveted title at that time, given to very select people), and endowed with the knowledge from the books, he set upon the task of penning down his own perception of the world. He wrote few books deep on insight and reflecting upon the thinking of people at that time, what it was, and what it ought to be. He shared his perception on social relations, religion, politics and socialism among others in these books.

Here’s what Ramvriksha Benipuri, a Hindi literature virtuoso, had to say about him and his work ‘Ab manzil door nahi’:

“My friend Bachchu Shastri had actively participated in the do or die movement of 1942 and I am happy that he has given his experiences a form of a play. Not only this, he has also shown us the direction in which society will move in future based on the incidents of the movement. There is a poem by Rabindra – the sun was setting, world was stunned, who will now give light; even stars and moon were afraid. The small ‘diya’ then came up – till then this burden on my small shoulders. This creation of friend Bachchu jee must be seen in this way.”

Despite the lack of government’s support to freedom fighters and of the society to social workers, he got some accolades under his name. The most recent being felicitated by the CM of Jharkhand for his dedicated and valuable support to the freedom struggle. However, the best reward he got was the smile on faces of people he helped and seeing small changes taking place in the society for the better.

He was a freedom fighter, a social worker, a writer, a revolutionary, a patriot and an inspiration.

In the month of November, 2012, the revolutionary breathed his last. The family mourned, the society suffered a loss. He was put on the pyre covered in national flag, honored in his death, as in his life.

I am fortunate to have grown up under his aegis. I had the opportunity to see his legacy at work. I am lucky to have his blessings with me. I am proud that I had such a grandfather.

For a ‘Jharkhand shining’

Long before Telangana, Jharkhand was cut out from Bihar, with the justified expectation that an area geographically and demographically different would be administered and served better if separated. Now, years on, the state of both the parent state and the new one is the same. Jharkhand, just as Bihar, has limped on ever since. Rampant corruption and backwardness has plagued the state bestowed with resources, as development and growth stands stymied. Tending to one problem alone is neither sufficient nor entirely possible. What is needed is a multi-level solution spanning across different sectors.

Naxalism and literacy

These are two things that need prime and undivided attention, and are highly interlinked. These two problems need to be attended simultaneously. The most pressing concern for the state of Jharkhand is naxalism, which is affecting more than 75% of the districts it has among a host of other vital activities. One of the prime reason for new entrants into naxalism is improper or no education and lack of employment opportunities. Both the problems can be diluted to a good extent through education to the marginalized section of the society, a section whose plight is very conveniently concealed in the average literacy level of the entire state. And of course, educating people without tackling naxalism is evidently failing. Thus, a holistic and dedicated effort is required at this juncture.

Employment and opportunities

To prevent people from returning to anti-social career alternatives, employment opportunities needs to be provided. This can be done by allowing some of the private sector industries who are willing to capitalize and invest in the remote areas to do so. Allocation of resources to the correct people on the basis of efficiency and optimum utilization instead of lobbying would be the first step here. The plants and offices set up would provide remunerative sources of income, thus pouring in money (liquidity thus achieved at the base of the income pyramid would go a long way in feeding back returns to the state). Tourism, a major potential sector for Jharkhand might also be helpful in providing opportunities to the locals.

Financial inclusion

Bringing everybody under the umbrella of banking and fiscal policies quickly by removing implementation bottlenecks will be very fruitful. It would help in micro-credit financing, putting money into the right hands, and in this way pulling them out of the vicious cycle of poverty. It would also ensure proven advantageous measures like micro-saving, micro-insurance, and so on. Using technology to leverage an efficient execution will ensure that money comes directly to the poor and doesn’t pass and gets retained in the hands of middlemen. The bank-at-your-doorstep plan of the Govt. is proving to be quite helpful in this aspect, apart from generating employment in banking.

Distributed growth

Generally, rural people move to the cities either for job opportunities, or when they get better-off, and hope to live the urban life. If proper employment is provided in the rural areas itself, along with all basic amenities like good education and healthcare, the problem of cramming and overpopulated cities would be resolved. Growth in rural areas would also be an obvious by-product. As for primary education, the government’s effort will be bearing fruit in the long run, but for healthcare, some amount of strategy revamping is required. Registered doctors could be made to go to a rural area of their choice for a month every two years. There, they would train the local medical personnel and paramedics. This would ensure that the locals are under more professional care even in the absence of the visiting doctor (the doctor will be needed to be aptly remunerated for this task). Tourism would also be helpful in distributed growth, as most of the untapped, natural and attractive tourist hot-spots are in the rural areas, and focusing on tourism in these areas will not only provide income generating jobs to the locals, but also generate local revenue to be reinvested there.

The road ahead

For this, the government needs to focus less on populist measures and more so on growth-oriented measures. For this to happen in turn, people need to favor the political agenda of development instead of merely voting for the divisive politics and short term or personal gains. And here again, actual and proper education would help, for example people should be aware that non-merit subsidies have a negative impact on the economy and its members, the people. Jharkhand has 40% of the mineral resources in India and is home to the most hard-working tribes apart from peace loving people. Shouldn’t development be obvious in the long run?