India's March into the light and the great lie of the golden bird

Sherif! As long as you Arabs are a bunch of small tribes, you are a small people, a silly people: greedy, barbarous, and cruel.

Lawrence of Arabia

  A 5 trillion economy, that was the original promise. They started with 2022 and then went to 2025. To be fair, I buy it. A 5 trillion economy is viable. In the absence of an ex machina as we are now seeing, a 5 trillion economy is a certainty. A 10 trillion economy is a certainty. So is a 20 trillion economy. I daresay a 30 trillion economy too. It's a matter of inertia. In the presence of stability, prosperity will flourish. Growth is certainty from a low base as long as no one's rioting and nobody is burning buildings and nobody is firebombing towns. And as long as those things don't happen and the government doesn't actively mess with things, the country will grow. Emphasis on that final part. More often than not some moron in power with good intentions will interfere. It's in the nature of humanity to interfere. To want to do better. Whether it is with Mugabe and his relentless printing of notes or Maduro and his thieving from the rich to give to the even more rich (himself). And more often than not as with our dear PM and his demonetization scheme it is with good intentions. It was a wise move, unfortunately, directed at the wrong people. The problem with it is that ignores the fundamental issue with wealth. Most wealth is fundamentally today stored in human skill, not heaps of cash or steel. Human capital as it is called. And what human capital needs most is opportunity and education along with a host of other things important among which is the lack of being hectored and bothered while doing good work. That is the type of corruption that truly hurts this nation. Functional corruption that acts as constant spanner in the works of India's burgeoning business ecosystem. It is not a shortage of tax revenue caused by presence of black money that is a threat. Fundamentally Black money isn't even that much of a problem. I mean it hurts that taxes are not paid on it, but as long as it is spent and moved around, it is still contributing to the economy. It might even better serve us away from a government that is likely to fritter it away on some scheme or the other. I'd rather go hacking at the bureaucracy that's busy holding goods hostage in ports and causing delays in projects by denying one or the other clearance.

 

  But back to the original point of human capital. In a fundamental sense, there is more money in what we can do with things than there is in those things themselves. This has not always been true. For much of history, we could do little from what providence provided us. We took from the earth, consumed, and discarded. Sometimes reused but that was the limit. Metal raised from the earth was at best refined and forged into a sword or a farm implement or armor. Fairly valuable an addition in value, but unlikely to be too much more valuable than the steel in the sword itself. In the right hands, a hunk of steel could do a solid fraction of the damage that the sword could cause on its own. Maybe doubling in the forging the value of materials therein. Maybe more, depending on the nature of supply and demand. But the actual use-value has not risen much. But the Industrial Revolution changed everything. If ever there was an event that we owe the most to, for all the wealth of the world we live in, it is the industrial revolution. The Industrial Revolution changed the rules. No more was the money in the extraction of metals but in their utility. A car is worth tens of times the value of the materials put into it. The entire modern world order of stability is borne from this fundamental truth.  No more must the deprived hordes of Mongolia, join together to launch a grand conquest of the world to fuel their great ambitions of great wealth. There is more wealth in processing the oil in Iran than actually pulling it out of the earth or owning it outright. Why waste precious blood on a conquest when it could be working in the factories making money. As long as this fundamental truth remains true, the larger world will remain at peace. The second world war was the last war of the old kind we will have fought for a long time. The Germans don't need more land to feed their starving populace as they did at the outbreak of WW2. The amount you can squeeze from the soil is now far more dependent on how you squeeze it from it than how much soil you have in the first place. And the how is far better thought of in peaceful conditions. The value of a car is vastly greater than the thunk of metal it was cleaved from. Wealth is no longer hard-capped as it once was.

 

THE GOLDEN LIE

 Much is made of the great glorious land of India, that India was pre-British arrival. And that is true to an extent. We were sort of rich. As a portion of GDP, India commanded a quarter of the world's wealth. Alexander would have cowered before the great might of the Nanda's that faced him a few miles deeper into India.  But make no mistake we held a comparable number of people. We always have. India has always been populous, because of the Ganga delta being so conducive to farming, a large population could be supported. And that meant more total wealth. But a man can only be as rich as the wealth he can yield. He can only make as much money as he provides to the world in value. And that remains constant across the world. So a farmer in India was about as rich as a farmer in Italia under the auspices of the Roman Republic. So was every place equally rich? Not precisely. A farmer in Londonium at the edges of the Roman Empire was likely to struggle. The soil was simply not as productive there. And so the wealth was in what the world gave us in the soil, the rivers, the livestock, and the metals. And we revered them and we prayed to them and treated them as gods as that was what they were to us. The source of all sustenance. The source and essence of wealth. We fought over them, and that was what conquest was fundamentally about. When the British arrived we had a lot of the raw materials they needed. India was wealthy, so to say. But nowhere as rich as we are today. But to the British that sailed from their wretched frozen lands, it was paradise. And so we thought. That we were the stronger one in that bond. The British bent and jostled before the Mughal Emperor, and begged for trades rights. They had no idea. Unbeknownst to all involved, the rules were about to change. 

    

     The Industrial Revolution had arrived and Britannia was the factory of the world. All the Cotton we could raise we could do little with. Weave it with effort into quality clothing as in Bengal. It was called the proto-industrialization. It was impressive and it made Bengal one of the Richest provinces in the world for a while. The Mughals were rich off it. But the British factories could do so much more with the cotton. And more importantly so much faster. Their clothing was cheaper if a little worse in quality. The coffee had cooked and no one was awake to smell it. 

  Not exactly nobody. If you've ever wondered why Japan is so rich, you have your answer in this very revolution. The answer to what would happen to India, if the British had not played their tricks and let the Marathas consolidate India is Japan. A country united can look outwards. And if it has the humility to acknowledge it's own shortcomings all the better for it. If the Marathas were victorious and had this humility, we would be Japan. If they didn't we'd be China circa 1940s. A country leaving their famed century of humiliation. This is the consequence of vanity. To be used as China was for a century. The worst thing the British ever did to India was to tie it up and blindfold it just when the world finally hit it's stride. All of human history had led up to this glorious period. And one frontrunner was tied up and blindfolded while the other one (China) refused to look and learn out of stubbornness. It was a period where anyone could rise, a true era of opportunity where any free nation could rise into its own, and the wealth of a nation had little to nothing to do with what mother nature endowed its soil and hills, but rather what the creator placed between the ears and under the heads of its men and women. 

   The Japanese were watching. Quietly. And their humility was to yield results. And when they were united under one ruler they had the stability to look outwards and see the world as it was, and as it could be. They saw an opportunity. And they were desperate for it. And they were willing to learn. The Meiji Restoration stands out as a prodigious move in the grander scale of history. A nation humble enough to know it was blind. And to be willing to see, even if it meant learning from another nation, however oppressive. It takes a certain kind of resilient humility for a good man to learn from the devil as he sees him. Personal dislike put aside. To acknowledge that the states that they hoped to defeat were indeed more capable, and to have the humility and wisdom to learn and study from them. To bring the technology back home. It remains the only way for a nation to rise into the light. And all the way back in the 1880s too. By 1940, Japan was going toe to toe in battle with the greatest economy in the world in the US. In the 1980s Deng Xiaoping showed similar brilliance and humility in accepting western capitalism in his country while he led the communist party of China. This humility tempered with the utilitarianism to know what would help and what would hurt built the great edifice that is China today. A nation that can bully and mock India with impunity and we must push with great care not to offend the great dragon too much. In India, it took a complete disaster before we could be dragged, kicking and screaming into the light. We never had the humility to accept that we were not equals in the global order. We had not the humility to watch and learn. We still aren't equals in the great world order. The narrative of India is that of a fallen nation fighting for redemption. No nation that has ever tried to rise using that narrative has ever made it out of the past. This is the narrative that has wracked Africa for decades and locked it in inter-community and inter tribal strife. After all, those are the institutions of the glorious past. When you think the past holds all the answers, it makes little sense to look anywhere else. In Turkey Kemal Pasha had the same humility and courage to push for modernisation. And he raised Turkey into a great modern developed nation from the declining Ottoman Empire that had been declining for centuries. A nation that looks to it's past rather than to it's future with pride is a nation likely to keep to that configuration for long. Tradition to such a nation is sacred. After all it is the one vestige of our greatness. It is the one thing we have from the good ol' days. Ideas and social structures ossify and remain constant. It is challenging to abolish a system while you glorify the era of it's inception. To the modern Indian consciousness, India is a temporarily humiliated nation. Stolen from and now trying to take back it's old wealth. This is similarly shown in the declining United States call for Make America Great Again. From Obama's optimistic idea of Change to looking backward to an older era, the Americans face a similar threat in the form of a regressive culture. As with the Americans, the future for India is not in its past. To those who say that the greatest thing stolen from us by the British is wealth in hard terms and other things like diamonds, the truth is far from it.

 The greatest thing stolen from us was our choice. The greatest loss from the British rule is in opportunity cost. What is opportunity cost? It is the cost in terms of things that could have been ours if things had gone differently. And the opportunity has been back in our hands for 60 years now. Do we have the humility to accept that there is at least a solid failure on our part to make use of it? The Chinese had the century of humiliation to teach them through hard labor and insult their own shortcomings, but in India, the pride of the Indian state is it's greatest downfall.

We must instead adopt the Ideals of Enlightenment Europe. Those of a nation rising from the darkness into the light. A constant eternal march into the light. Each day better than the last. I have often mocked it. Even on this blog (This post on the nature of evil). That human nature remains constant. That the people of a century ago are no more wretched or corrupt than ourselves in all their troubling traits and acts. But the truth is that this is an ideal. It is humility. To accept that we are not a perfect society. That the answer lies in tomorrow and not yesterday. To a society built on such ideals, no idea or tradition is sacred. The world is suddenly open and rife with fresh ideas and innovations waiting to be adopted. And like the Romans that built a great empire from a disparate part of the world, let us adopt and steal ideas from all and sundry and build us a new culture based on progress and growth. A new India divorced from its old community conflicts, castes, patriarchal ideas, and other vestiges. Let some traditions remain ceremonially as a form of national pride as the British foist their Monarchy. But the British queen doesn't veto and pass law. Because if the greatest capital a society can have is it's human capital the only things that can trap human capital are culture and ignorance. And so only on the ideas of a society rising into the new world, shedding the chains of the past, a nation willing to introduce both western and eastern ideas into its society can we rise into the new world. Not as fallen heroes rising yet again, or sleeping dragons rising from their slumber, but a wounded capable nation of great potential fighting it's way into the light. 

  

 

The pull of forward and backwardness and the paradoxes of life

How does culture affect the success of capitalism?

 The common charge levelled at communism often is that it fails to account for human nature. That it operates at a utopian idealist level. That most people would rather take the free stuff and not do any work or do the minimal work required for lack of incentives. It is one of the main reason why slavery fails in the modern economy too. You can whip a slave into doing the minimum, but he'll move a bone unless he's compelled, not out of mean spirit or laziness, but sheer logic. The more skill and quality work demands the more incentives become essential to motivate humans. And incentives remain a goldmine of possibilities in economics. That is why slaves were so often offered freedom in Ancient Rome and other societies where slavery survived long. Unlike the far more barbaric and racially based American. Even skilled work was done by slaves in the case of Rome. Anything that were too low to be done by the elites or the citizens. Even something lucrative like accounting. An escape from servitude made for good motivation. That your children would be citizens, even better. As the generations went each generation would gain opportunities from the last. Families would connive to unite land so as to build wealth across generations, living as living pieces of a great machinery. That's probably where the arranged marriage concept came from. And the opposition to love marriages. You were shirking your duties by marrying for love. In a world where wealth was scarce, building wealth was the difference between back breaking about and living off others back breaking labour.

  But that is a topic for another time. The more interesting question then is, does capitalism really account for human nature. It has a record for prosperity, but a century is hardly a great show of reliability in the big picture. Not in the species that received a perfect century of world-class rule under the five good emperors of Rome and then watched it fall apart for 2 centuries afterward. (Check it out if you haven't, it's fascinating. Would you condemn your screw up of a son to death to save the empire and it's future? It would be a hard choice, and t would define the next 2 centuries) So that is what we explore here.

The merits of protectionism. It's fascinating how a beacon of capitalist success might be the perfect example of such an uncapitalist concept. China is famed for it's private business revolution. Protectionism is an idea, that has long been derided as a great source of stagnation. Protect, the local business i.e ban foreign business, or protect local labour, like Andhra Pradesh with it's hundred percent local employees reservation (That's a real thing) All these measures have come to hold the stink of socialism. And yes, a stench indeed is how I would describe socialism is perceived by much of modern India. Without competition the argument goes, there can be no innovation. And thus there will be stagnation. In a purely capitalist world, the consumer knows best, and all is served to him as he pleases. The internal dealings of any buyer and seller are none of our concerns. Let them do as they please. Free them to produce, bring in foreign investment. We rant and rave (at least I do) at each act of regulation, and each restriction placed upon foreign businesses. Us Capitalists, we look at the government as they place regulation upon regulation upon Amazon, trying to find ways to ban their business as Amazon dances around the whip modifying it's business structure over and over until the government gives up. (This ones fascinating if you care to read about it) All there seems to be is a desperate attempt at pulling us back to the old days, before the liberalisation and the new India, that we seem to see today. Business is the lifeblood of this country. It has been for all the powers that have risen and stayed risen since the 20th century. When traders go and complain to the government about their business getting hit by ecommerce, they seem to sticking to an old antiquated order doomed to fail. Adapt or die is the mantra in an ever evolving world. Can't handle the change Deal with it. There is no mercy for the modern businessman. And maybe there shouldn't be. If you are entitled to all the upside (Save some frankly ridiculously high tax) you should probably accept a potential hit on the the downside. Capitalism taketh as it giveth. And for the most part, I've stuck by these ideas. That the long period of socialism that seemingly lost us many a game changing opportunity was a great tragedy wrought by the people, for the people and on the people. God bless Manmohan Singh's Soul and the soul of the western world and everybody in the government that fucked up so bad we practically were forced to open up the economy. It took a near knockout punch, but it got done.

   And the Indian economy revelled in the fresh flow of freedom. As the economy opened the country saw a fresh lease of growth. My parents generations great sadness over the lack of Coca Cola and Pepsi, would now be sated with a whole host of goodies, noone in India had ever scene. From one TV channel to hundred and eventually to thousands. 2-3 cars to global brands and ferrari showrooms. The dough flowed in. Ever since then we've been tought in all sources of information that the path wrought for us that year is the optimal one. Captitalism and free markets shall be our saviour. We must attract foreign investment. This is the narrative of modern India. Of of forward lookers and optimists. To capitalists and free marketers it was a constant source of frustration under Manmohan singh to watch a certain socialist politician from West Bengal rip through every liberalisation attempt our PM brought up. FDI, GST, everything that could be blocked was blocked. Goodbye Walmart, I suppose. While socialist schemes like the food security bill, designed to win elections got passed left and right. 1.2 lack crore per year in expenses, pass it right up! We have a very small set of voters paying the taxes. And when the resentment of the people reached a boil, the current disposition pushed into power, promising growth and development, a welcome change to the narrative. When Deng Xiaoping, visited the United States under Nixon he made a point to visit the space centre and other scientific establishment. On returning he openly supported capitalism. Saying a 'It doesnt matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice'

 And that became the operating philosophy of Communist Party China. If it works we do it. Too many people? Stop having kids. Communism not working. Capitalism working in your neighbours house? Capitalism it is. Roll open the economy. Let us all bow in wonder at the immensity of brilliance it must have taken to successfuly open up the economy as you lead the Communist Party of China. There is far more danger there from rigid idealists than most would consider. An absolute rule is rarely absolute at that scale. All governments operate on systems. And systems give vast amounts of power to the bearecarcy. A beaurecracy that gains and loses from such big bang reforms. A beaurecracty you rely on to get stuff done. Not only do you not get shot and declared a traitor (And let no man use that term on so great a man lightly) you pull together the start of the single greatest growth spree in human history. A half billion people pulled from poverty. Not too many resumes that good in human history.


The Non Free Market Argument
But the interesting bit, and this is the part that fascinates me, is that the move wasn't absolute. Chinese protectionism clamped down on the internet in China, blocking foreign services from operating. No Whatsapp, or Facebook or Google. And contrary to expected stagnation like Indias case pre 1990 it led to innovation. The lack of foreign interference has led to quality apps build by vast companies often comparable to their western counterparts. In the absence of Google came Baidu, without Whatsapp there was WeChat, and so on. Even as China thrived on foreign investment, by manufacturing for the world, it parallelly leveraged closed markets in another sector. To leverage globalisation even as you spit on it at the same time. And it worked. It's fascinating, and repeatable. Nationalising banks is another case. Not usually popular in free market circles. Present changes in sentiment notwithstanding, sarkari has rarely ever been a compliment. More Sarkari is usually not a good thing. But in 1969 when Indira Gandhi nationalised 14 banks, deposits rapidly went up 800 percent. A vast increase. Despite switching to a seemingly less efficient system of control, the result was a game changer, regarded by the RBI as the greatest single most important economic decision since 1947, greater even than the liberalisation of 1991. It was a game changer, resulting in vast increases in the number of bank branches, including the proportion of rural branches. It increased the involvement of the Indian populace in banking. And the reason, heavily was trust. People did not trust bankers. They were a disliked class, and not very well regarded. At least partly with reason. Unintuively sometimes, liberalisation isn't the answer. It should be. As a lover of freedom and the free market, it's fascinating how often backward seeming moves with bandage instead of medicing, type implications tend to pay off. The India of that era needed it. It doesn't need it now. It would hurt from it now. Terribly. In a system with a degree of stability, trust and enough freedom and optimism to grow the free markets work wonders. Wealth if nothing else is likely to flood in. But to all that call socialism evil and a great failure in the great human experiment that is civilisation. It's interesting to see the parts where it works. What may seem like a wasted period of Indian history may not completely be so. The land reforms, land holding limits that were enforced and nationalisation all reek of a bygone era. And let it remain so. But perhaps not with so much distaste. We might find  that some good came from it. Socially the country that got freedom in 1947 needed socialist measures. It needed the land reforms that can legitimately be called theft in modern India, it needed the breaches of freedom that were the blatant nationalisation that took place seemingly at will, like with oil companies, banks and the premier Indian car company today.


   This part will be scrubbed from history eventually. I don't see a friendly disposition to out socialist past arriving soon. I pray infact that it doesn't. But let us not purely willify the people who led it. It was the will of the people after all the voted in the socialists time and again. And the will of the people that encouraged them if not compelled them to act as they did. Even in 1980 when Indira Gandhi pushed forward with a liberalisation with the forward plan, she took a lot of backlash. It isn't always obvious the way that is likely to be looked upon well by those who judge us. But if the past reveals anything to us, let it be that the ends that we seek are not always optimally seeked upon rigid principles. No system is entirely perfect. Not democracy, socialism or fascism. No system adapts perfectly to human nature. Some do better than others. But none perfectly. Because the trick isn't as much to adapt to nature, which is constant, but who we are at that place in time. And that is a function of more than nature, but also place and time. A country with bonded labour does not turn into Europe through liberalisation but instead Somalia. And yet a stable country may yet do well with a fair bit more freedom as history has shown us time and again. It all depends on the people. Who they are. How strongly they are influenced by an idea. The people that are to work the system we develop. Sometimes it's best to just focus on getting the rat, rather than focussing how we get it.

Part 1: The soul of a civilization

 "German Engineering, Japanese Productivity, American Ingenuity and Obesity, European Decadence, French Romance and rudeness, the terms are common. But what do they mean?" The professor is an old man, prodigious by years and achievement.
  "What is it that builds the soul that we so often refer to? Man is infinitely variable, he changes like the wind, blowing hot and cold, generous and selfish, an asshole a moment and a beloved friend the next. The great brutal drug lord Escobar that ran wild nearly a century ago was a renowned family man. Napoleon was hopeless in bed, and Ceasar lived in eternal fear of balding, if at least for political reasons. Man is discrete in his traits, jagged in their combinations. A mishmash of pieces pulled together to certain affect. At scale, you would imagine this would yield a great mass. Amorphous in nature, with no specific traits but the physical ones that seemingly define them." His accent, worn with a little bit of french as he rails and roams the stage, exploring and splattering concepts freely like paint on a blackboard. He carries with him a stick of polished wood that taps the ground with a clack every time he steps anywhere he steps.
 "They say the world makes us. That the deserts made the Inuit and the forests the aborigines. Or is it the other way around? But do we not affect the world around us? Are we not at least partly our own product. The world makes the man, and the man makes the world. A great game of chicken and egg. An eternal cycle." He stares at the class before him. His eyes covered in brown semi-transparent framed glasses.
 "It is tempting" he inflects the world with force. "It is tempting to think that we have agency in all this. That a civilization has an inherent personality. That it was Japanese bravery and ingenuity that aided their reconstruction after the second world war and not the perfect storm of an educated, nationalist populace formed from the Meiji restoration, we talked about last class and a shortage of extractable resources combined with globalization in the '60s that would yield those resources without significant exploitation of the people and encouraging entrepreneurship to produce and process those materials in an era where that would yield far greater profit. That the jew proclivity for banking and mercantile enterprise is a result of some supernatural capability or conspiracy and not a result of mass ostracisation from any and all classical fields, like farming, and really primarily farming. Ban a people from doing all but lending and trading and ban all other people from lending as the church declared at one point and what else would result but a culture that masters and dominates banking. And not just masters as some would tastelessly imply, but also pioneers it. But as those variables disappear so do the warpages. And sooner or later every damn hippy is out collecting interest" He swings his stick pointing at the class.
  "As individuals we are free and people of agency. An individual is unpredictable, a pawn can kill a queen without any regard for position or power. Blood spills the same either way. People evolve and change, warp, intimidate, and cower. But as a group you are influenceable. Your reactions are predictable. You are like a mimosa. A plant that closes to the touch. You respond to stimuli. And quite effectively and to the right eye and arm, predictably. The world can be engineered to you're taste. And society always yields. But never against its nature. You must weaponize the nature of mankind to control it. Understand what they desire, and give it to them, But for a price. The dictator of Albania in the '50s, the 1950s mind you, nearly a century ago spent considerable effort to exterminate religion. He jailed the priest and clergy, appropriated temple and church property and arrested people for following their religion in peace. For years he put his entire weight into it." He smirks, shaking his head as if humored by the failed attempt. As if he could do better. And he probably could, as he had, in his time. Repression 101 as the class was called with a little humor, and sometimes by the professor himself,  for this was not an ordinary professor to deal with. For where do tyrants go to retire if not in bespectacled universities where all is forgiven but never forgotten in the name of objectivity.
 "Human nature, of course, outlasted him. Albania today remains strongly religious. Islam is the biggest religion, with more than 50 percent of the populace, and Christianity also continues strong. No effort of man is ever as wasted as that which goes against his nature. The competent dictator is as much a construction of the people, as they are of him. If you notice, keen students, that that is more religion than much of Europe and America. Prosperity achieved more in decades than Repression ever could. Statistically, the easiest way to make man forget god is to make him rich and idle. A society of 30 hour work weeks and olive oil with toast is hard to keep religious. The nature of Humanity brought to bear. And that's how you bend the populace. With chocolates and cheese and plenty of bread to spare. But never too much lest they might think too much of themselves" He smiles at the class.
 "Questions?"

An hour Later
 Harold smiles to himself as he looks at the door at the students shuffling out of the class. He uncaps the top of his stick and looks over at the one oncoming student as he takes a swig from the stick. Always wise to be a little buzzed for these interactions. The warm rum runs down his throat burning slightly, his throat. "Yes Franklin" He smirks. "What question do you have for me today?"
 "No question, sir. That was a fascinating lecture" He stares at the professor, a little trepidated.
 "I have your results sir. The coroners office gave me a right tight fight on it, but I got it. They were wondering what it was I wanted to do with it?" He looks at him. "I told them I'm doing a project on death rates by ethnicity, location and age." He smirks. "It would be very hard to do that with these" Harold grabs the sheets smiling at the kid, "Your help is appreciated." He nods slightly, hobbling a bit towards the door. Then turns, sensing the kid's hesitance. "I'll get you that 'A' kiddo." The kid nods, smiling slightly, "Thank you sir" he nods and walks past the old man. Harold smirks. The perks of making friends outside the department. Every once in a while they can be useful. And hard to track.

Harold
 In a 117AD when Trajan stood upon his ship surveying the Persian gulf, I wonder if he knew he'd be the last emperor to ever walk those shores? Harold smirks as rolls his palms through the paperwork, I'll find what that fucker did, and have him nailed by morning. On the TV, the errant entrepreneur jibbers and jabbers, about one construction and the next. Great plans that speak of decades unseen, of golden towers and streets of paved silver, or so he'd imply. I know what you did, you motherfucker.

The thought flashes through his head. You didn't just pop out of the womb on that pedestal. It's the tyrant's lesson, if you've made it somewhere, you know what it takes to get there. If blood were as adhesive as in Shakespeare's play Hamlet, his hands would be painted red. Or perhaps those of his goons. It's a rare man who does his own dirty work. A rarer one who gets there without ever doing so. The document is a large one, a file with thousands and thousands of names, printed in paper form so as to be unsearchable. Nasty bastard, if only I weren't your match. He works through the pages, pushing date by date, location by location. It's designed not to be scannable. Text that undulates ever so slightly, it's unreadable to the computer. Of course, that's bullshit. That shit would fly in the 20' and maybe the '30s but the truth here is far more simple. There's no way a few warps in the text can confuse a computer that can read bad handwriting as if it were cooked on a typewriter. The truth is, he's messed with the software companies to make sure no software comes out that will cut out his little loops, to read the text. A good way to enforce control. Since most people never run across documents with such text, no major open source solution has been attempted. Why solve something that doesn't affect you? Controlling the variables. He hasn't learnt the first lesson of control yet, the entrepreneur. But he will. Harold will make sure of that, if painfully. He thumbs through files pushing, date by date, place by place. The info is in here somewhere. He knows it. The first farms were located in North India, somewhere in Bihar. A perfect place, fit for exploitation. And the entrepreneur had really dug in. The more Harold had read, all those years ago, he'd been fascinated. The entrepreneur leased the land for peanuts and mechanized the farms at vast scale, building a tax free business empire that over the years rivaled the best. Like all good businesses, he'd integrated vertically, controlling the supply chain, leveraging a great waterways network along the Ganga and Brahmaputra to move goods rapidly and across India. Controlling the manufacturing for the requisite massive farm machinery. Even occasionally selling to competitors. Never at quite the same quality though. That should have been a hint. Most businessmen would have taken the short term gain. Plowing money from every means possible. The plans here were bigger. The margins he was making were unheard off, undercutting all other farms and still swimming in profits. The benefits of unprecedented scale and efficiency. The next thing he knew he had a business that commanded 20 percent of the food flowing into Kolkata and Delhi. He hedged against the weather by spreading his farms along the network and cut his costs to peanuts by leveraging the scale of his network. Nobody could compete. It was surprisingly simple, not easy mind you, but simple on the surface. Underneath, it was all sorts of complicated, with logistics networks so vast, the government would have struggled to build them. The wonders of private enterprise. He found it on the map, Harold. Tapping his fingers upon the paper at the location. A village that no longer existed. In fact, none of them did, for miles and miles now. Factories and factories, spinning up goods, farms, weaving food in the fields and the occasional tenement for the small corps of engineers required to run them. Turns out the city business had turned out to be more lucrative than the farm business. Though less tax-free. But who cares about taxes when you're making money hand over fist. Everybody cares. The thought flashes by as he smirks. Not a man he has seen in all his years with a deep love for those beloved taxes. It had been an elegant idea, and the next thing it was everywhere. Cities so high they would touch the sky. Clumps of towers all interconnecting, capable of housing more people than had ever lived together. The first megacity built in all of human history of even comparable size was Tokyo. And upon that model came even larger constructions than that which once stood out as the gold standard. Where Tokyo housed 40 million people the first great Megacities the entrepreneur would build would grow up to 50-60 million people. Chewing upon the hungry masses that dotted the Indian subcontinent. And soon it was Africa and the middle east too that was engulfed. Wherever there were villages, and a sparsely spread populace living in poverty, there was a megacity, ready to hoover them up and stack them sky-high. Saturating and concentrating opportunities, and building a culture of hope and mobility as he proudly called it. If the country was to ever grow into anything as great as the west ever had, more people had to live in cities, a bright future was almost certain to have more cites, and possibly bigger ones. It was a sharp insight, that drove the entrepreneur driving him to sink all that he could and more into these constructions. It was obvious, an inevitability, but not certain to work. Mistimed brilliance works out to little more than folly. Almost but no cigar is no cigar. And possibly more. But it worked. It would have been a disaster to get the timing wrong. But he got it right. And maybe he aided in making it so. And so did others. Harold's fingers press the buttons on his remote to build up the volume. He looks at the tv. And as he looks at that smug, proud, face expositing away, he smiles. Not over yet Buddy. Not over yet.

The power of distractions: The forces that drive the world around us

    

    Distractions in politics are a fascinating concept. For the longest time, I've seen them as the purest form of Realpolitik. An act carried out purely for the maintenance and the propagation of power. It's easy to mask it under guises, but at their heart distractions, misdirections and manipulations work on the same principles of smoke and mirrors that drive most moves carried out to gain power. There is, however, real value in them for the greater good. Like the proverbial placebo, sometimes the belief that things are likely to get better does make things get better. In the economic context of politics (as shockingly underrated context), uninvested money held in reserve flows back into the market, the courageous see enough opportunity to build businesses, the established see better chances of expansion and start hiring driving towards greater risk and with that, potential reward. Hope drives commitment. And commitment drives progress. You cannot produce without at the fundamental level setting resources into action. In a conceptual sense to progress as an economy is to produce more and possibly to produce more efficiently. And that takes resources, whether it is oil or cement or salt or manpower. And what is money if not the correlated representation of resources? A dollar is at once a few kilos of Cement, a few litres of petrol and possibly a few grams of gold at once but only ever one of them. Depending on your needs, wants and tastes. That's all it is and conversely that's exactly what it is. To be more precise hovewer it is the ability to command those resources. At its heart a dollar is a license to command 1/80 trillion (The global gdp) of the world's resources as we value them. The value of something may vary by location but the net value of everything as valued by the people who trade in it on the net (Because price varies ever so slightly from place to place and person to person) and use it sits at that princely figure.         
     The reason why then, that the placebo works is because it encourages people to do things they wouldn't do if they saw the truth. If we need to get a stuck wheel moving in a stagnant economy it often takes a few lemmings jumping off the cliff to start things off before one or the other business built in the bad economy takes off, setting things in motions. Of course, nobody wants to be the lemming (A creature famed for its apparently suicidal behavior) in business. If the people don't have jobs and don't have the money to buy the product the factory is likely to fail, making little sense for investment. But without investment, you cannot have growth. It is a vicious cycle. Money uninvested is the equivalent of resources hoarded. Cement in a warehouse and Oil in a refinery stored in drums does no good for the world if no cars are driven and bought and buildings and factories built. Without these things we don't produce more and end up with no growth, irrelevant of the money we print. When you lose money, it is these resources that you're losing, if the factory is run into the ground, all that iron ore for the machines and concrete for the construction are now worthless and rotting. To reuse some of that would take even more resources like heat to melt the iron to reshape it in the form of coal or other incendiary materials. As such then we have lost value, what we built is worth less to the world than it could have been in say a better run factory.

   In a sense then it makes sense to manipulate perceptions to drive optimism. In the greater picture, the greater commitment you drive the better it is for the economy. Or is it? If there is a fundamental disease at the heart of the beast it might take more than a jog to fix it. The more you commit, the more you are vulnerable. There is a reason reserves are maintained in war. As the great German general Carl Von Clausewitz theorized there are no certainties in war, merely probabilities. As such there are no certainties in economics either, merely possibilities and their probabilities. If the business is really likely to fail, then you have put all those resources in harm's way by encouraging the investment. You end up setting risk calculations off a fair bit. In the big picture, this means more businesses will fail than expected. When they fail, and enough of them are likely to fail if the situation is dire enough at the fundamental level due to some truly fundamental problem, (Inefficiencies in governance, excessive corruption, threat of violence and social discord as some possibilities) then all those failing resources are likely to drag you down.
 
     It is a prevailing theory that the '08 crisis was less devastating to some extent in India partly by the widespread spendthriftiness of the Indian populace and their investments in gold. A relatively stable if slow-growing investment which is known to weather recessions well. This, if true is a classic example of the benefits of not committing and the values of committing. The west was leveraged and committed to the hilt, with a large percentage of the populace and even the governments in Europe and the US in deep debt on housing loans and the like, driving aggressive growth and prosperity. But the growth was built on a rotting core of inefficient lending. Nobody was producing enough value to exchange it for buying those houses. They were built, priced and paid for on a lie. If you're not producing as much as you're receiving, someone is paying for it. And they're eventually gonna stop or run out. And so when it fell apart, all those inefficiently committed resources were worth shite. In India, a lot of people it seems had a reserve of uncommitted resources in the form of gold. They were sitting around doing nothing. As such they could do no good for the economy when we were growing. All that value in the form of cash could have been sitting in our companies as investments or our banks who would have further invested it or even government bonds to build roads. But instead, the gold bars and necklaces and the occasional bangles sat in lockers doing for the most part nothing. But for all the good they did, they were unlikely to disappear in there. Considering that there was a rotten core at the heart of the economy the optimism, then was misplaced and it was best to pull back resources and carry out emergency surgery (Regulations, arrests, taxes variations and the like) on the economy before declaring it safe to further commit. The Indians in their general emotional love for gold seemed to have carried out this wise measure (Without the surgery bit it would seem) holding back resources from what it turned out was a toxic bet. Hovewer a toxic bet is a toxic bet and it eventually pays off. We didn't exactly go scot-free on the crisis and the fundamental issues in the economy would bite us in 2011 as growth would take a hit. Nonetheless, gold made for a strong shield for the Indian economy and also a great deadweight. Better deadweight than a bomb, I guess.
 

    In recent times we have seen little dearth of distractions, whether it be the boorish behavior of Trump and his glorious tweets (History shall remember them, for better or for worse) or the suspiciously timed CAA crapshoot. The law itself I have no interest in, but the timing is fascinating. The Modi government has carried out every distraction in the playbook all the way to manipulating the numbers (Changing the GDP metrics for better or worse but definitely raising the numbers on the net) and passing laws that if nothing else acts definitely as a distraction. It is a ploy right out of the Chinese playbook (Heavily accused of manipulating numbers among other things) and by that, I mean that only as a compliment. If done right, the Chinese have proven that controlling perceptions can drive aggressive growth. That among a slew of measures. Of course controlling information only goes so far. The Chinese economy is a beast built on far more legs than one. But it seems to help considering their absolute obsession with controlling the flow of information and the perceptions it builds. Going back some time the Chinese attack on India in the war of 1962 was carried out under the cover of the Cuban Missile Crisis with the US too deeply engaged in a near deathmatch with the Soviet Union to bother with non-client states like India. Conveniently ending the war in a unilateral ceasefire and pullback at the conclusion of the crisis.

    It's fascinating because Nehru is always accused of short-sightedness in the assumption that the Chinese wouldn't attack. On the other hand the attack was truly a foolish thing to do under any but the most precise circumstances. The assumption that those circumstances would never arrive was the real flaw in thought process, and that is a far more common flaw for a person to have. It's almost defensible, perhaps. Especially when you consider the inefficiency of money spent on an idle defensive military that brings no plunder or loot. Especially in a poor country. The Romans would learn that lesson to the extent that it would bring their civilization down almost all on its own. Perhaps there is wisdom to be had even in wrong decisions.
 
      Nonetheless, can you blame a man for not preparing for the impossible? The Cuban Missile Crisis was after all a once in a generation event. A statistical anomaly. Give it enough time however and by the very laws of probability that deem it improbable, a statistical anomaly becomes a virtual certainty. Throw enough dice and every combination is a certainty. With every moment being the equivalent of a fresh die being thrown into the works, it starts to stack up pretty quick. Nonetheless here again we see the power of a distraction done right (Quite fortuitously for the Chinese). So if we are to look at the recent set of events we have seen and the reaction to the economic downturn from the lens of a distraction from other troubles far more prevalent, you start to see a fascinating problem.

  If the condition of the economy is cyclical (A bunch of bad decisions made in the good times paying off in good time. The classical arc of history) and not something systemic (Say a certain cash suction act carried out in the recent past massacring businesses like chickens at the poultry farm) Then this makes great sense. A placebo is what we need. If however, it is a systemic problem then we are throwing money into the incinerator. Potentially good money joining bad money in an unholy purging of the economy. The government has been pushing an image of goodwill, barely acknowledging the downturn and if they were more competent at it we'd believe them. But claiming Ola and Uber are killing car sales has only so much mileage. And claiming onion prices don't matter cos you don't buy them, well the less said the better. That itself is sad. Even the propaganda here sucks. The CAA then rides in like a horse-mounted knight in (very) shining armor distracting us from a growth rate that might be as low as 1.5 percent (Improbable that that number holds up to serious scrutiny, but when the official facts are manipulated anything seems to go, even the words of an often inaccurate Subramaniam Swamy)  which is developed country levels. They might have bitten more than they can chew on this one with the protests but it sure is effective. Like killing a fly with a flamethrower. It's not wise to kill bad news with more bad news. The one thing worse than an anemic economy is an unstable and arbitrary one. Then we're right into Afghanistan, Iran and Iraq territory (A purely economic point). By the time we're out of this crapshoot, the economy should hopefully be turning around. But then what is the fascinating problem I was talking about? Well, it goes down to the fundamental problem with lies. For it is the level I've found most effective to operate at. What is the greatest threat that comes with a lie?

 Remember the last lie you've told. Could be a white lie, a perfectly decent one. But it must have been believed. Remember the last effective lie you told. The bigger the better. There is a mechanic to it. The best way to tell a lie is to absorb it. To let it flow through you as if it were the absolute truth. As if you were convinced of it. And for the moment you are convinced of it. I remember the moment I had the epiphany as clear as day. I remember stating to someone I had so much work done when I had done none. I remember smiling to myself thinking about all the work that I had done and that the position I was in was tenable on ending that call. And then I remember catching myself. It was jarring. No work had been done. All of it was left. The greatest threat in a lie has nothing to do with the act itself. For all the threats that that may bring the greatest threat is that one may believe it oneself.

 It remains the most puzzling of human phenomena, so much of history driven by irrational foolish acts that from even the objective perspective of only known information at the time were carried out foolishly. Delusion remains the most fascinating and underrated of human phenomena. We never consider it because we cannot perceive it. It seems so unnatural to be blind to the truth. Especially when it stares us right in the face dancing around with pom-poms and with loud music playing in the background. It's easy to ignore something one has no interest in, especially when there are images of glory and victory beyond. The possibility that things will remain as they always have been or as they currently seem to be. The assumption of Homeostasis as it is called is intoxicating. And yet it is tempting, tugging at us constantly. Did the CEO of WeWork not see that he was making foolish deals that simply could not pay off. That there was no profitable endgame to his business plan. Maybe he could, maybe he was malicious in his attempt to steal from investors, but I have come to prefer the alternate perspective. It would take something to fool that many people. But to believe in it oneself, that makes all sorts of lies easy. In effective conmanship the first man you have to con is yourself. It's the sort of victory that comes with a ticking bomb. Like Napoleon and his blustering confidence. The same confidence that drove him to challenge all of Europe drove him to march into Russia. Tick Tick Tick Boom. Bernie Madoff should've known that his investors would come calling someday. That was a bomb, that simply had to go off. But in all the money and the sex and the occasional gold chains, it's a hard thing to see. It's easier to see only what you like. To turn the lie into reality, until it comes crashing down, and it very often does. But in Modi's case, that lie he talks about is our reality. When the leader falls to that common sickness that is delusion, it is the people who suffer. It is the men who serve under his command that often take the blow. It might be the greatest threat we face. The lies are all good, and the tricks and the smoke and the mirrors all decent and acceptable maneuvers but never forget the pulsing truth underneath all the shimmer. The country isn't doing well. Spread optimism and hope but work underneath the hood in silence, lest the car may blow up while you rev on the accelerator. A torn gasket is probably better fixed than ignored. Who knows what the truth may be. Perhaps we truly have a master at the helm. I certainly used to think so. I thought we finally had someone who could see what mattered. The big picture leader that long term growth often requires. And everything seems to line up but nothing seems to work. And it does well then to remember under these circumstances that it is a man that is at the helm. With all the flaws and strengths and tendencies that come with it. It's not a symbol or a character or a set of ideas on an agenda as we chose to or want to see it. Or rather as we're tempted to see it. It's a complete person with all the creaking mechanisms and beauties that come with it. And he might be a damn good one, perhaps the greatest man in the nation for that role, but I doubt he is anything more than that. And that's something, isn't it?