Why is Modi trying to become Chairman Mao, instead of Deng Xiaoping?

A recent poll showed that more and more Indians think that Totalitarian Government can grow economy faster than Democratic one,
ref: http://www.pewglobal.org/2017/10/16/democracy-widely-supported-little-backing-for-rule-by-strong-leader-or-military/
https://scroll.in/article/854479/why-does-india-the-worlds-largest-democracy-love-the-idea-of-dictatorship

I believe the reason behind the fondness of Totalitarian government is due to comparisons to China, which in recent past was able to quickly improve its economy despite the population and illiteracy challenge like India.
Using GDP per capita as a measure for economic progress, And using the data only till 2000 to show the major drift we can see the difference.

https://data.worldbank.org/share/widget?end=2000&indicators=NY.GDP.PCAP.CD&locations=CN-IN&start=1960&view=chart

Since BJP got the historic mandate in 2014 in Lok Sabha elections, it has managed to consolidate power in many states, it seems we are moving closer to single party ruling most of the country. People can’t stop comparing and hoping the BJP to be able to achieve the same growth that China has achieved. Small freedoms curtailed as a price for growth by a Strong Totalitarian Government is growing more and more acceptable to the people. However there are more reasons to fear the strong central government than to celebrate it.

But if you read the above graph, we can clearly see that China’s explosive economic growth didn’t started until 1978, with an exception of 1985-87 (Also discussed briefly below.)
What changed? China had got a new leader, Deng Xiaoping who had been slowly grown in the ranks of CPC (Communist Party of China). The sad part is that most people around the world have never heard about him.
Why? The story is not spicy enough.

This is why I fear, that Narendra Modi is trying to achieve the mix of work and spice,
Everybody knows about Mao, and his basic philosophies, and end up thinking China today is because of Mao’s established Communist party.
However, all Economist and Political students around the world know about Deng Xiaoping, for his reforms that turned around the fate of China.

It is easy for me to appreciate Deng Xiaoping while sitting in Suzhou Industrial Park, one of the Industrial Parks established by China in collaboration with Singapore, as an example of reforms during the last 25 years of China’s history.
I would first like to frame the distinctions between the 2 Chinese leaders, and China under them and let you decide for yourself how it relates to India.

Chairman Mao,
One of the founding members of Communist Party of China (CPC), and chairman of the party (1943-76)
He developed Five year plans to implement Soviet style central planning,
He started Giant Leap forward, for aggressive Community driven projects, and started top down application of large number of untested and unscientific techniques which caused agricultural production to fall, and led to mass famines, where millions starved to death. However, his image was never tarnished because people argued that due to top down policy structure, the figures of bad implementation on the ground never reached him and he was not informed of the extent of famines. Many lower ranking officials over reported the production numbers, that caused central planners to not allocate enough produce to the region and cause mass starvation.
In order to prevent a bad face, anyone who reported or criticized the policies impact was marked right wing populist, and sent to labor camps in rural areas.
He Started Cultural Revolution, and removed all forms of past inequalities, by aggressively removing Intelligentsia, Forcing them to work in fields and learn from the peasants. In a way he admonished the old system as a failure, to start a new system, a new china from the ground up.
Though there were a lot of bright sides to his rule,
Under him the economic inequalities of the past were largely dissolved, everyone had to start from the ground, as Government owned all property.
Position of women in China was elevated to be equal with men in all forms.
People were forced to shed past orthodox approaches.
He spent a lot of effort and creating and maintaining his public image, he published quotations from Chairman Mao, in Little Red Book, and everyone was encouraged to carry it with them.
His ideology was published widely and taught in school etc.
His body is preserved in Mao Mausoleum in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. On visiting the place, it looked similar to a Temple visit in India, and outside the Mausoleum, are shops with Statues, photos and necklaces of Mao, along with pictures of his writings. His image is of a larger than life leader in China’s history.

Deng Xiaoping.
He was the Paramount leader of CPC for 1978-1992.
He is considered one of the central pillars of economic reform in China which led to the double digit economic growth of China for many years, He is credited for economic liberalization.

https://data.worldbank.org/share/widget?end=2016&indicators=NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG&locations=CN-IN&start=1962
As soon as he came to power, one of the first steps he took were to launch so called Beijing Spring that allowed open criticism for the excesses and suffering during the previous period.
Deng personally commented that Mao was “seven parts good, three parts bad.” acknowledging his legacy, and importance in China’s History, while acknowledging shortcomings.
He moved from centrally planned Commune models (i.e. Community based industries), to market oriented model, opened up china to global standards, and allowed greater flexibility to local entrepreneurs.
He launched the ideology of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. He famously said “it doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat”.
He favored experimented driven approach, and much of the reforms in his time, did not originate from him, but were supported by him by expanding successful experiments to larger areas.
One famous one is the Household responsibility System, where instead of Agriculture produce completely handled by the Commune, the land was divided into 18 households that were assigned minimum quota’s to meet, and any excess could be sold in the market. The arrangement was first developed in secret in a village, but it led to great gains in productivity of farms. On finding out about this, it was openly praised by Deng Xiaoping, and was later expanded nationwide.
In 1987-89, the government had planned major price reform, where they deregulated price controls in major areas of economy, and move them to market driven price rates. The fast paced reforms caused a market run, where people started to buy in advance the products whose price was expected to increase in the future, this caused high inflation, and Government was forced to ration few items. The major impact was seen from March 1988. By October 1988 Government had acknowledged the failure of the reform, and brought back the price controls on major commodities, (30% of agriculture output was subject to price controls).
Ref:http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/582991468015853321/Price-reform-in-China
Ref: https://www.amazon.com/Chinas-Megatrends-Pillars-New-Society/dp/0061859443

He voluntarily resigning from top party positions in 1992, and established a new norm of 2 term presidents.
He continued to use his public image when he toured the South China to encourage entrepreneurship.
There were also many controversial decisions taken during Deng’s leadership including
One Child Policy, where massive fine was levied on people with more than 1 child, with exceptions to ethnic minorities and 1st girl child in some regions,
Strike Hard Anti-Crime campaign, where quotas were set for executions of criminals say 50,000 per year etc.
And Tiananmen Square protest.

 

So, is the China model good for India? depends on the leader.
Although the policies of Modi Government are mostly reform oriented, the Branding and Structure around it, is not.
Here is why I think Narendra Modi is trying to be more like Mao (Downsides of China Model), the Deng Xiaoping (Reason for Economic Progress)

1- Branding and Image: Like Chairman Mao, BJP had focused largely on branding a single person as the source of all that is good, with stories being planted in the news, to anchors praising Modi, and publication of Bal Narendra, Man Ki Baat, Making his speeches compulsory for school students etc. making Modi a larger than life figure to be celebrated.
This approach is dangerous because any criticism, however well intentioned makes Modi’s image human. Which doesn’t meet the overall grand picture, hence needs to be avoided at all cost.

2- Us vs Them mentality: To protect the Modi Brand, any criticism is being branded by the Media as Anti-National to alienate the critic from the reader’s psyche. This has great similarities to the Cultural Revolution, where any Anti-Mao sentiment was declared Capitalist.

3- Revolution vs Reform: Statements like there had been no development in last 60 years match more like a first time revolutionary regime, than a continuation of Reformist regime.
This however false gives a narrative as a Savior, as compared to another Soldier in the ongoing fight.
This is dangerous because Revolution allows breaking old structures with impunity, as this is the new India, anything that government changes is okay.
Reform is a more careful process, where there is a requirement for progress, hence scrutiny.

4- Making Top Down decision, rather than Bottom up experimentation with results: This gives the order from top as unquestionable commandment, and setting blanket quotas to achieve, creates a bad framework for reform.
E.g. Enforcement of using toilets by setting quotas increased toilet use but was enforced using questionable methods by officials like taking photo and shaming people doing toilet in the open, to not providing ration for those who don’t follow the directive.
The worst case scenarios are of course Demonetization and GST.

6- Not accepting Mistakes: This is one of the key issue for BJP, and biggest sources of Opposition rhetoric. Actions like Demonetization, and Applying GST within 1 month of initial experimentation with the software. There is a lot of good implications of the reform policies, but the failure to accept issues/mistakes and rolling back order is problematic.
The corrections kept happening on the fly, which caused huge confusion, loss to economy, many Small and medium scale industries were closed causing loss of employment, and of course, Loss of Life.

“Acknowledging a mistake is a commitment to not repeat it.”
If a reform oriented government fails in a reform, which is bound to happen with experimentation, accepting the failure gives the people a hope that they consider themselves accountable, and won’t repeat the same, As done by Deng Xiaoping.
Not accepting the mistake, and keeping the Rhetoric, brings the fear in people’s minds that they will do more such experiments with impunity.

The BJP government had won the mandate, on many reasons, but I think the primary reason was to bring economic progress using Gujrat Model.
The Demonetization exercise, and failing to admit its mistake seems to have eroded that confidence in the government. And now, 2019 doesn’t seems to be comfortable win for BJP as it was expected. The new Budget shows the nervousness of the government for more reforms.

One of the main benefits of Single party rule in China, is long term strategy that doesn’t change due to change in leadership.
Modi Government could have achieved that stability with the mandate it had got, had it followed the Deng’s Model of development,
It seems like a lost opportunity for growth.

 

Sole Bread Winner

Sole Bread winner for the family,

I hear terms like that and I think this is a final argument.
If a person who is a sole bread winner in the family has died, or is injured, the family life goes into chaos,
It becomes the prerogative of the government to ensure that the person is well compensated, sure,
But a handout is required for the family, because the sole bread winner is lost.

As far as the goals of small essential government goes, these handouts create uneven playing field for jobs, and causes less than optimal hires by the government.

The first and foremost thing a government should focus on, is to avoid scenarios of sole bread winner.
There is a famous term the economist use, Diversification of assets, to reduce risk liability,
We need to embrace the term, in a democracy sole bread winner, or state planned life for the family doesn’t exists.
We need to ensure every family is risk averse by design, not by chance.

A nation develops when our people spend their time productively.
How productive, as productive as we can, while maintaining a healthy work life balance.
But there is not work life balance if there is no work, or productive work.
Every adult family member should have the means to be able to work, irrespective of their class, gender, and physical challenges.
It is the society’s responsibility to provide the opportunities to everyone.

I first want to lay down an essential principle of city/town/locality economics that I have understood,
A unit of economy have 2 kinds of jobs, a production jobs, which is basically producing something to be consumed outside the unit.
A service job, which is servicing the people inside the unit. As a society achieves higher standard of living, people start to pay for experiences, and productivity.
That is where the service sector blooms, but what happens when a society doesn’t grow production jobs, it stagnates the people.

The production jobs are slightly different than service jobs in terms of whom they answer to, Production jobs answer to the state, national and international markets, and adding burden on those makes the unit of government less competitive,
The service jobs however answer to the unit, and providing enough incentives to ensure better lives of the unit, doesn’t impact the competitiveness of the unit.

I therefore propose the following.
1- All adult members of the family should spend some time in the workplace, start small, and see where the work life balance fits,
Obviously, there are many tasks at the house that need attendance, that includes caring for children, getting grocery, preparing food, taking care for the elderly,
Usually this job is given to the ladies in the house, who perform a lot of work during the day, but their productivity is low, because they are serving a much smaller unit of people at a time. On the alternate, having services for children day care, online grocery shopping and delivery, online food delivery, elder care etc., that can provide much better service when done much more professionally, obviously at a charge.
This is not something that is only done in higher income countries, and is not suited for Indian culture by any means, on the contrary, the Indian cities have these services available, but there is a taboo attached to use of these services, and due to lack of demand, the services are costly and out of reach of the working class.
I want to make these services cheaper, by increasing demand, allowing more players to come to the market, and offer competitive services for all price ranges.

2- Publicize the rates for services, or at least the initial quotes
In India, we don’t have fixed prices, not even quoted prices that is why it is called an informal economy. As an engineer I think from a production side and not from the sales side, and making a profit is a right of the company, but swindling uninformed clients is not.
When the clients are swindled, either by theft, loss of property etc., they don’t report it anywhere, our economy doesn’t support that. This leads to lack of trust in the market, and people only do business based on information provided by contacts, In an informal economy, information is the key, whoever has it, can end up paying a fraction of the cost for much better service from the same vendor. This has to stop, in order to bring up trust in the services, we need to enforce public prices of services, at least the initial quotes, a good rating mechanism that can compare the quality of the service provided. Those services are already provided by some private companies, but their use is meager at best. We want a better economy, we need to bring more trust in the system.

3- Reduce the conflict resolution cost and time for the consumer complaints,
We need to reduce the litigation time for those who have been swindled, increase the processing speed of cases in the system, and make people aware of the procedures and the costs involved, make them transparent. The people should not be afraid of filing cases, either because of costs involved, or because of the time they spend in the litigation. Increase the liability of the company who are found cheating their customers, a successful market economy cannot be formed if there are no losers.
I propose improving the infrastructure of the consumer courts, and public awareness campaign on the cost involved, and time taken for making sure the guilty are punished.

4- Increase urbanization,
There are many reasons why the net cost of products is low in the cities, one of the main reason is fixed costs per capita is low. This is because the people a single service company serves is much higher in the Cities and townships, than in the villages. The SDGs or Sustainable Development Goals of the UN, highlights among its major goals, the goal to increase urbanization, and to do it sustainably. There is no coincidence that the urbanization percentage of a country directly correlate its GDP per capita, People are more productive together then they are alone.
The Urbanization % of all developed countries is above 75%, this allows higher productivity, and more productive land per capita in the rural areas.
China increased its Urbanization from 18% to 60% in a span of 30 years, South Korea did it better, 27% to 75% in 30 years. We need to follow with similar zeal.
We need the same, this will allow more people to have access to cheap services, and increase the consumer base for these service, increase demand, increase the supply, i.e. services themselves, and hence spur the economy.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locations=US-1W-IN-CN-KR-GB
https://data.worldbank.org/share/widget?indicators=SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS&locations=US-1W-IN-CN-KR-GB
5- Provide an alternate source of employment to people in rural areas, Farmer Cooperatives
It’s not easy for a person to leave their life in the village and head for the cities, there are too many risk factors involved. People are tied to their relatives, because they are their support systems. People are tied to their lands, because they provide however unpredictable, a source of income, a source of employment. Over time the land holdings of individual farmers have reduced, they are nowhere close to the productivity levels seems across the globe.
Lower land holdings also causes another problem, too many suppliers. The agrarian market is way too fragile, with prices fluctuating sharply, and producers not even getting their investment back. The large farmer base use the same market indicators to plan for the next year, without much planning/pre ordering, this leads to chaos in the market. Many yields of onion and basic pulses see yearly fluctuations as the farmer react to prices, this is unsustainable.
Also the large number of suppliers reduce the bargaining power of the uninformed farmers, with the middle layer taking majority of the profits. The Farmer Producer Organizations have done a great deal in addressing this problem, but the solution is still not enough.
These small land units need to be combined to diversify crops, reduce risk. Have pre-orders for crops, basic floor and ceiling prices set to protect both farmers and the market, and the supply of crops.
I want to propose here Farmer cooperatives, that share profits and loss based on land holdings submitted to the cooperative, The cooperative to run like business, with its own employees (mostly among the land owners or other landless laborers) tilling the fields productively, hence at better wages. Skill full CEOs and sales teams to negotiate prices in the market.
The obvious scare for these farmers would be if their rights will be protected, as compared to the people with larger land holdings, Protections can be added for maximum percentage a single farmer can hold in the cooperative, that will ensure the board and the company is responsible to the shareholders (read land owners).
This would leave a lot of the farmers in need to alternate work, where migration to cities is an option,
They have a safety net of regular income from their land holdings, and they can provide better education and services to their family in the cities.

6- Provide cheap training services to people
The service or production economy need trained employees, the government should not be in the business of training these people, however it should be regulating/certifying the services to ensure the weak are protected. The government’s current Skill India plan didn’t achieved the desired goals because the government was providing money for each person trained. The facilitation of enforceable contracts to the training service providers to offer percentage of salary after employment and some initial investment can help in reducing the fears of training institutes for training unskilled labors at low cost, and enforce quality of training by design, because payment is based on successful placement of the trainees.

7- Provide Safety net for the people.
As Indian economy is informal, so are its safety nets, its entitlements,
Worldwide people tend to not buy insurance, unless compelled to by the government. In United States, the government enforces the employers to provide medical insurance to the employees, which is additional paperwork, and cost for businesses. In India, Motor insurance is required by law, and the police often inspects the papers to ensure that the insurance is available.
In India people rely on their savings and relatives as their safety nets. Not having medical insurance is not a big concern, because the wealthy can bear the burden, others don’t have the time or the money to pay the premiums. This leads to low demand, low poor quality supply.
The government have invested a lot in these schemes, however the knowledge of these schemes is still limited.
https://www.businessinsider.in/8-Insurance-Schemes-Modi-launched-and-how-they-benefit-you/articleshow/47418104.cms

8- Reduce discrimination for people in job sector.
Many people in the job sector are discriminated against. The government should introduce a rating system, with minimum liabilities like say tax benefit for employers scoring higher at the rating system. This system should include indexes like gender ratio of the company, accessibility in the offices for disabled, percentage of marginal workers employed, including transgender, handicapped, etc. This will allow overall inclusive job market.

A middle class Indian person doesn’t spend on services today, they would rather try to fix things themselves. Some call this ‘Jugaad’, others being the jack of all trades, however the jack of all trades is a master of none. In order to increase the standard of living of the people in the country we need more masters, increase the productivity of the people, this alternatively increases the value of people’s time.
Today a person may feel the need to work on their bike on their own, because either the service company is charging too much, or have in the past replaced some original part with a duplicate, or just asked for more parts to be replaced then necessary. The equation here is the extra money spent by the person, vs the value of his time. By increasing the trust in the system, we reduce the extra money spend by the person, by having a productive employment, we increase the value of his time.

Coming back to the original concern, Sole bread winner,
There are 2 sides to the concern, 1st was lack of jobs.
2nd one was the lack of safety nets in the society, and discrimination.

There are obviously way more to go for creating a just, sustainable, and happy society, I hope my above proposals can serve as good push in the direction.

The Price of our Silence

My entry to FWBA‘s Flash Fiction contest for the topic The Price of our Silence.

……………..

It was a dark morning, the sun took its time to come out of the clouds. Everyone expected the clouds to unburden themselves anytime now. The darkness would be over soon, but it was taking too long for the cloud cover to go away.

Shayna Brahm was still in bed. The blanket felt too heavy on her troubled soul and she found it hard to get up. It was a tough time for her, both personally and professionally. The young charismatic but divisive leader of the Nazi Party had been appointed as the Chancellor of Germany. The youth leaders of the Nazi party, who used to spread rumors about Jewish heritage and culture so far, now came out in the open and were threatening her way of life. Just yesterday, she had heard about the attack on their synagogue by a group of rowdy Nazis. They broke all the windows and wrote slogans on the doors asking the Jews to leave Germany. They declared that the synagogue was constructed illegally on the land. When the police arrived, the policemen registered a case against the synagogue for violation of land use agreement. They justified themselves because a small portion of the stairs came onto the road.

The phone rang and Shayna was forced to get up to pick the phone. After a few minutes of hearing her brother’s voice, she muttered “Sure” and hung up. She staggered to the corner of the room and slumped on the floor. Hugging her knees, she rested her head on them. Things were spinning out of control. Tobias Wood Works, her brother’s workshop was set ablaze last night because of the name on the board. He was asking her if he could send his wife and 2 daughters to her house while he tried to fix things there. They weren’t safe in his house anymore. Tobias had been marked by the local Nazi group to set an example for the rest of the community. Now he will have to leave the town, otherwise they would be come for his home next.

She held her head in her hands and tugged at her hair as memories came flooding in. She could still remember her colleague’s words clearly as if everything had happened just yesterday.

Raymond’s voice had risen further when he added, “But Shayna, you can’t ignore the role of Jewish anti-nationals in the loss of Germany in the World War. If Germany didn’t have any Jewish anti-nationals, then the country would have won the World War.”

Shayna had countered back, “The role was of anti-nationals, which included both Jewish and Christians that led to loss. You are no different than the other anti-Semites out there.”

“They were not Germans. Those people did not followed German ideologies of truth and hard work. They took bribes. They were all Jews, taking bribes and collecting money,” Raymond had said.

“I don’t want to talk to an Anti-Semite who has no sense,” Shayna had declared. “You are blinded by the Nazi propaganda.”

“You can’t call it propaganda if it’s the truth. Jews were responsible for the loss of Germany,” Raymond had concluded.

The conversation was from 7 years ago when Shayna was talking to her colleague, Raymond, in her office before the talk show began. They had invited a member of the Nazi party for an interview. Although he was clearly an anti-Semite, she was forced to interview him if she wanted to retain her slot. If she had denied it, someone else would have done the interview in her place.

“It’s not fair!” She shouted in her empty room now, staring at the now-silent phone. “We are just 1% of the population. Where will we go?”

She recalled what her brother told her after the interview years back. “Don’t worry about him. These are just some fringe elements. German values have always tolerated such nonsense. We would be fine once their party is defeated in the elections. This is just propaganda to please the party base. Keep quiet for now and wait for things to get better.”

The silent wait had proved lethal for her community.

Shayna went back to bed hoping the nightmare would end soon.

Outside, the clouds had finally unburdened themselves, but it was too late. A lot of farmers had lost their crop, the land had dried up and would need a lot of manpower to prepare for the next sowing season. Most farmers didn’t have the required money, so they will have to leave their villages in search for jobs in the city. God was against them right now, they should have done more, should have planted drought resistant varieties. But it was all lost now. Debt-ridden, a farmer looked towards the city. It will take many years before he can pay back his debt.

Change is beautiful

October is the main month on Autumn in Seattle, this is the first time I noticed the changes in the trees nearby as the autumn proceeded.
At first some leaves start turning Yellow,
then some starts falling and more leaves turn yellow, and some start turning orange.
Then some orange leaves start turning red,

Although the autumn, which signals the tree leaves to fall happens at the same time for all the trees, and leaves, they don’t react in the same way or at the same time.
The reaction and timing are based on various reasons, the amount of sunlight it receives in general, the nutrients, water had earlier or presently.
Some are evergreen trees, and they don’t fall in autumn at all.

Change is the only constant thing in life.

Change happens at varied speeds, day to night in a day, to evolution, millions of years.
Every change needs a time to react, some react too slow, and don’t survive the change, some react to fast and become the pioneers of change.

I am interested in change in the state of a nation, Below is the GDP (PPP) of India, China and US.

Source

There are two types of change,
Authoritarian enforced change like China, China was able to transform its economy from 1990 to 2015 at a very fast phase.
This was done by an authoritarian govt, which do not accept dissent, and do not care for the rights of the few when looking at benefit of the country. This was a country run similar to a company with very stable govt, and constant focus.

Then there is the Indian example, a democratic government, we had comparatively slower progress, and comparatively fairer elections, and regime change when trust in the govt was down.
Democracy has its benefits and flaws. The challenge is public opinion, any change in public opinion can impact the stability of the govt. The challenge is to keep public opinion on common economic progress, and prevent being distracted by things dividing us.
Change is inevitable, just like the season, some trees adopt quickly and the nature waits for the others to adjust. It takes time, but slowly and independently all the trees adapt to the change.
You don’t cut the branches if they are not shedding leaves fast enough, its not efficient, we have to clean the leaves every day, but it has respect for each tree, the right to accept the new season at their own pace.

Imagine if a fish was dropped onto the beach and asked to walk by seeing the success of the snake.

Change is beautiful, and the beauty lies in the diversity.

Exception Handling

A computer program is essentially a group of components executing with each other with a predefined set of Interface.
Lot of times in computer programming, an unexpected input/race condition (scenario in a general term) occurs, which the component does not support, in those cases the component raises an exception, and hopes the appropriate method in the stack is going to handle it.
If an exception is left unhandled, it crashes the process.

I like looking at similarities between life and programming, and this was one case where I thought the safety nets in life are more like exception handlers, they are designed to handle a specific type of exception, and do an appropriate action in response. Because if no one handles the exception, it will end up crashing the process.

In general there are 2 school of thoughts on unhandled exceptions,
One, that a process should be quickly recoverable. In case of an unhandled exception, the process should crash, and restart from scratch. It will reallocate memory and CPU from the system and start afresh. This approach is considered good if we don’t want to hide exceptions, and we want to enforce the system administrators to look at exceptions as they happen with urgency, otherwise the process will no longer run at all.

The second approach is a more compromising, here we have a handle all exception scenario, and we do not let the process crash, at all. If there are unhandled exceptions, we will eat up those exceptions and continue the process. The exceptions can still be logged for the administrators to look at, but there is no urgency in fixing them.

The advantage of the first approach, is that the process always remains clean, we know any unexpected issues will cause the process to crash, so by definition it should be clean, and handle all scenarios. The disadvantage, if at the time the process crashes, the system has High CPU or Low memory, the system will not be able to accommodate the crashed process, and it wont be able to come up after crashing.

On the other hand, in the second approach, the process never trusts the system, and always handles exceptions for itself. By doing some dirty workarounds, it keeps itself up no matter what, which lead to over time many dangling threads, handles and mismanaged components that remain in the bad state, as long as the process is up.

I personally found the first approach more desirable, its clean, idealistic and robust. But it only works if everyone on the system is behaving the same way. If only 1 process follows the first approach, and rest follow the second, only looking after themselves, the first process will not find enough memory/CPU to rise up again after crash.

Local Maxima

The science has concerned itself with solving many problems of the world, there is a reason why mathematics is considered as the purest science,
Because it finds a solution so generic that it can be applied to solve problems of all derived sciences, from physics, chemistry, biology to the extremes of sociology,
psychiatry, psychology and even faith. We just have to find a construction of our problem into mathematics.

I did a similar exercise to re-look at a life problem with mathematics, Local Maxima.
In pursuit of finding maxima, using basic human probe analysis, one often comes across a local maxima, and he is not able to proceed further.
The issue is not that he is not probing at all the directions, the issue is just that he is only looking at the immediate turns, which seems to go down hill in any direction it takes.

Dilemma:A dilemma (Greek: δίλημμα “double proposition”) is a problem offering two possibilities, neither of which is unambiguously acceptable or preferable. One in this position has been traditionally described as “being on the horns of a dilemma”, neither horn being comfortable. This is sometimes more colorfully described as “Finding oneself impaled upon the horns of a dilemma”, referring to the sharp points of a bull’s horns, equally uncomfortable (and dangerous).

There are multiple ways to find the path towards global maximum, I have tried to list 2 of my applied ones,
1- Genetic Algorithm approach, Introducing a mutation from the current set, and let it compete in the playing field. Having enough variables that mutations can occur, we chose a variable change at random. This helps us identify if there is a chance of getting any better results by changing few things in our current state.

The solution is statistical, We keep mutating, in hope of finding a better solution, and if luck may be so, we will after some rounds.

2- Calculus, Analyze your function, and find its derivative function, see where it gets Grounded to zero. Any place where the derivative function gets grounded is a local minima or maxima. The problem however is how do we know the number of places our derivative gets grounded?
You keep looking at the deriving function, till you reach at the root one, whose derivative is already Zero (Ground). And there is nothing beyond.
Using this, you find the maxima you are looking for, at least the path to it.

The solution is deterministic, but it needs exact formulation of our Maximizing function, which is usually difficult to obtain.

There is no one way to solve a problem, neither is there 1 solution to a problem,
Just a lot of problems for us to try to control in life.

Here is a reference to the image copied from,(Seemed like a good post)

Self Eulogy

My sister had suggested to play a little game, Writing a self eulogy within 5 minutes after which you are not allowed to edit it. You are not allowed to read the self eulogy of someone else before you have written your own.

Its an interesting game, on showing your state of mind at the current time, What will you have to say to the world if you had died today, The 5 minute limit tries to stop us from polishing the content indefinitely.

Lets play the game, I am pasting below the Eulogy I wrote, I hope you will honor the rules of the game and write your own before reading mine :). Also do share link to your own eulogy if you feel comfortable ,

 

Life is short, it was meant to be,
We need to live it to the fullest,
enjoy, contribute to the society, science, art, literature
It is easy to think 1 idea is correct or better than the other, its not
Every idea, however insane has some usefull roots,
and these roots are what makes us human
Life is short, our presence in the world is short,
No amount of greatness or power is big enough to extend it beyond a period
accept it and see what we can make of it
I have spent my early life persuing science as the spear head of society,
but later I realized inequality is the chains holding it back
Inequality in finance, Knowlege, authority and freedom
We can imagine 2 people living today such different lives that they seem centuries apart
Thats why social science is important,
We all have a role to play,
I had tried to play mine,
you still have some time left, play it.

Threading.

The industrial revolution that changed the world occurred because of automation. We were able to make machines, very specific machines that were able to do jobs quickly, which might otherwise take multiple men to complete. I witnessed an example in a automated bakery in the outskirts of Riyadh. First manually added the flour and ingredients to the mixture. There was a huge machine to mix everything, create a dough, and pour it in the containers. The manual part again was to put the containers in oven, and then empty the containers to an assembly line, which dropped 1 cup cake (without cup) to the assembly line at regular intervals, which later wrapped A printed plastic sheet around the assembly line, and sealed the top. Next was a cutter, that stamped at each gap between cakes, to pack them into separate pieces. and then manually a person was assigned to collect the falling packets to cartons, and pass it further for sealing.

What an assembly line consisted of was a series of some what generic sealers, rotors, wrappers, mixers, assembled in a specific order to create the automated process. But the assembly and standardization of these individual pieces was hard. Every automation had a huge setup cost.

When the computer revolution occurred, We ended up making a common compute(r) that can process instructions. A generic, standardized, automated process. The biggest advantage was, this digital, precise machine can be connected to analog devices, and can be used to make any machine work, Robots, scanners, etc. The generic nature of this machine allowed it to raise the efficiency bar, (already raised by the industrial revolution). Then Moore’s law came into action. We will see the power of computation double every 2 year, with decrease in costs. A comparison made by many was that had such a revolution occurred in transport industry, we would all be using personal jet ski’s for travel now.

Anyway, even though a single assembly line (or computational core) can process a lot of stuff, the speed of other components didn’t increased as fast as the speed of processing increased.
So a lot of time was getting wasted in waiting for these smaller components, like accessing data from a memory storage, or accessing information from some other server. Seeing this wastage of precious computation resource, the same line could be used for other process, while waiting for this outside interaction to complete, Threads were introduced. Each thread is an assembly line, passing through the same processor, and whenever some one is waiting for a slower component to complete, the next thread gets a chance to use to processor, increasing the overall efficiency of the processor.

Hence the name Multi-Threading, processing multiple threads at the same time. Now even though these threads were doing potentially different work, their overall goals were related, and they were dependent on each other to complete some requirement for them. This led to another great concept of Thread synchronization. This allowed these threads (or assembly lines) to take a hard dependency on another thread to complete its job. Say I need to get information from another server, before I can proceed using the information.
The thread synchronization was achieved using what we call locks. One thread takes a lock of a marker, saying I am using this marker. The other thread waits till the marker is released by that thread, signalling the second thread that the first thread has finished processing. If the locks had been taken for minutes, it would have been easier for the marker to inform the second thread. However if the lock was taken for sub seconds, the locks time would be wasted more by informing, rather the second thread can keep asking if the lock is free now.

This is called spin locking. The next question is of the interval of asking. How much to wait before you ask again. If the interval is small, (sub- seconds), and the lock is processing a task for minutes, a lot of processing will be wasted. The thread will be waiting for the information and keep asking without doing anything else. A lot of useful time will be wasted. If the interval is large, say multiple seconds, and the lock is processing a task for sub-second, there would be unnecessary penalty for using locks.

The scientists agreed on the exponential growth model. the thread should keep doubling its interval of waiting. So it starts with 1ms, 2ms, 4ms, 8ms, and so on. This provides a balance between waiting and not disturbing.

This whole process was generic, and completely dependent on the program that uses it. So the question comes on optimization. How smaller can you break the tasks, so that they remain efficient, and the interaction cost is not more than the improvement obtained by splitting the task. As each task was split to smaller tasks, the thread processing it can be optimized for its specific task, and made the task efficient and exact.

So here is the final comparison.
If a single person works to complete the assembly line, it is going to take time, and its going to be unique. It will be called a unique art.
If a lot of persons contribution goes into the assembly of the common work, each working on independent tasks efficiently, and similarly, It will be called a generic product.

My old watch

I was sitting in a conference room in a meeting one day, when someone asked how much time was left, and people started looking, some looked into their laptop screens at the bottom right corner, others took out their mobile phones to check the time, some other were searching for the LED displayed somewhere near the door of our room the time. I simply glanced at my hand and was able to tell the time.

Yes, I was wearing a wrist watch, a pretty old looking, rugged, slightly rusted wrist watch. One of them commented “how old school are you to be still wearing that. At least tell me it is battery powered.” And the group smiled,

There was a time when the biggest marvel of the world was a watch. a mechanical watch, that was functioning purely using energy stored in a spring. Yes, it seems to be a stretch today, how much energy can be stored in a spring, well apparently the one needed to run a watch, for a very long time. My own first watch was mechanical, I needed to wind it up every day, and the watch ran for a whole day.

Some of the most intelligent people of the generation were watch makers, Just open up a mechanical watch and see all the intricate fine design, and do know that these designs were not created on some fancy computer software, these were made on paper. The watches existed before the industrial revolution, so each tiny piece of the watch was created and assembled by direct human labor. There were innovations in the watch, so that some watches function without a spring, but by movement of wearer’s hand. If he walked with moving hands, the spring got wound automatically. etc..

The watch that was tied around my hand was a representation of contribution of some extremely smart people around the world, who came together to build something so incredible, that even today if you try to design one from scratch you can see how hard it would have been. It was a representation of how so many small pieces of metal that were nearly useless separately come  together to run something so effectively and accurately that people can rely on them almost blindly. And if small parts become faulty, worn out, the other parts supported the functioning, so that the watch never stop. But if any small part broke or was removed, some critical function of the watch will stop functioning indefinitely, until the part is replaced.

Even today, some extremely smart friends of my father are watch makers of watch repairmen. They don’t earn the most handsome salaries around the town, nor are they involved in the political and social movements occurring in the town. But they knew their role, as a watch maker, as insignificant as they might seem, without them the society will cease to do some of its most important functions. Everyone had their place in the society.

As the science progressed, we removed the spring and used a battery powered watch, then the dials were removed and we replaced it with a digital display, and so many intricate small components were replaced by a handful of bigger components. These components were standardized, so they became easy to replace, easy to understand, and no longer had the requirement for them to be designed and made together, specially for each other, and the watch repairmen were not needed to be so smart anymore.

I am not complaining because the glory and need for intellectuals have reduced, but the small piece of history tied to my hand tells me the marvels that were achieved, and slowly and slowly how standardization is removing the glory of the craft.

 

 

Political party system in a democracy.

My frustration comes from recent incidents like Dadri Lynching, Beef Ban, and complete non-response from the top BJP members to stop this.

I have been a great fan of AAP, up till some of its core democratic principles were sidelined in order to speed the progress, I am of course referring to expulsion of Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan from the party. Removal of Lokpal Admiral Ramdas, and most recently dissolution of AAP’s Maharashtra’s branches, and getting a new head for Maharashtra unit. There have been many other critical steps taken by AAP that I disagree with, but the for me the most troubling ones had been the above mentioned ones.

That brings to question, what exactly could have been done differently. I was recently pointed out that every system has its positives when introduced, but slowly issues creep up, and we have make changes. These issues were not even considered when originally planned.(Illustrated very nicely in book Series Shiva Trilogy, by Amish Tripathy, though I haven’t read it yet, I trust the judgement of the person who informed me.)

First individual selfish gatherings, then community, then elderly group, then monarchy, then democracy. There have been various forms of governments, each improving on some aspects of the past ones, Which points out one thing very clearly, there is no perfect solution yet.

Now coming to current discussion, the democracy in India, Being one of the largest democracies, India has a massive scale to test democratic ideas and principles, and find out vulnerabilities in a system, and hence a massive challenge to address them in time to improve.

Ill try to list down some major concerns I have with the current system.

• 2014 election and BJP’s win on a single persons (Narendra Modi) image and propaganda. The concern is, that due to what was termed as Modi Wave, a wide range of people got into elected positions, just because they got a ticket to contest for BJP in the area. Their affiliation to a political party got them their MP seat. Their individual characterstics, criminal background, Educational background was not considered.
• Post 2014 election, the inability for people in the highest chairs, PM and MP’s to be held accountable to events like ‘ghar wapsi’, ‘beef ban’, ‘church vandalization’, etc, where the execution of Parliament was blocked to just get a comment out of PM. Which never came.
• Post 2015 Delhi election, AAP leaders could not be held accountable for removing Yogendra Yadav, Prashant Bhushan, and Admiral Ramdas. Many changes were against party constitution, but still. A case against them would take years to resolve, just to turn the decision of removal.
• The fact that people have to wait for another 4 years after which they can hold MP’s accountable again. Which would be sidelined by placing Pigs in Mosques and Beef in Temples, (See Bihar election), so the important questions are forgotten, and only current topics are discussed.
• Slow Judicial system, and its inability to prosecute the people, who polarise the community before elections.
• MP’s from a political party cannot disagree to the proposal raised by their party, cannot support the CM of another party (unless its 1/3rd in strength). and so on.

I believe the major issue that we are seeing is the lack of individuality in the elections, and after the elections. So Here is a thought experiment.

Consider a democracy, where there are no political parties, just individuals.Where elections are fought and won on individual names, not their associations. CMs are decided by voting among the selected MLAs and PMs from voting by MPs. Just a representational electoral chain. People well in advance can declare their consideration for CM/PM hood, and others claim their support to them. So say I want Modi to be the PM, I can chose among many people contesting for MP, who support Modi for their vote. And the house is not made by trading support of political parties, but by people, after declaring an agenda. If the PM/CM sidelines from the agenda, or do not respond to a concern of the citizens, a No-Confidence motion can considered to re-asses the majority of the PM. Which is how he can be held accountable to the MPs.

Next the MPs can be held accountable by the lower level of elected representatives, and so on till the individual community, whose leader can be accountable by votes in that community.

This system seem to be very hard to implement, and seem to be very unstable as people do not have a fixed term, to work independently. So to address that, we can add No-Confidence motion can only be raised when Parliament is in session, which may give a gap of 6 months stability, and a total of 5 years before complete re-election.

Now in this complete system, if a group of individuals want to come together under a common ideological umbrella, and name it something, let it be, but that cannot be a restriction later.

And as always the judicial system need to be improved. Which is in a very bad state today.

After feeling down for so long, I came across Javed Akhtar’s interview.

Lets all hope India comes out of these incidents stronger, and resilient.

Jai Hind.