Fall in IT, or Rise

The Hindu recently published a somewhat provocative article titled "Are IT people the fall guys?" written by one who has been working in the IT sector for seven years.

The article, and the many comments and subsequent "Letters to the Editor" (here, here and here), express varied viewpoints about the Knowledge Industry versus traditional occupations.

The IT and private Services sector, just like the salaried government workers of the last century, is the new middle class of India. It was easy to predict the worldview of the middle class then, and it is easy to do so now. The parameters have changed slightly, but as before, success for a middle class person is achieved by hard work, listening to the boss, subservience, patience, and following the rules. Thrift is no longer a virtue, though.

The parents of most people in the IT sector belong to the salaried and middle classes. Such parents tried to make sure their children studied hard, did not indulge in immorality, got a degree from a college, and understood the value of money. Risk-taking was not encouraged.

Here is my unsolicited advice to the frustrated IT employee, the author of the above article being one.

• Read something other than popular fiction and popular non-fiction. Read the classics, or the Nobel winners. Harry Potter is not a book for adults.
  
• Travel to small nondescript towns and villages for a vacation, or to a famous university town, not all the time to Goa or Disneyland.
• Take the stairs in the office. All the time.
  
• Shun cheap beer, company party or no company party.
• Keep a dumb phone.
• Fuckin' boycott mainstream cinema, fast food, red bull, IPL and assorted drugs.
  
• Throw out the telly.
• Cook something simple everyday. And walk a mile after dinner.
  
• Be a seven-eleven person. Wake up by seven, and go to bed by eleven. Let it be something worthy, or beautiful which keeps you awake at night, not a bad routine.
  
• Drink lots of water, green tea, unsweetened juice. Regard Coke as a load of cock, and Sprite as shite.
  
• Learn investing and money management.
• On a free day, visit a police station or a hospital or a court. It will be much more memorable and insightful than visiting the same stores in the mall.
• Subscribe to a proper magazine, not Flimfare or Cosmo or some other ad-infested joke.
• Create something. Write, even if just a review. Photograph. Paint. Play.
• If you have nothing to do on a rainy day, do nothing. Watch the rain. Don't log on to facebook and start chatting, for fuck's sake. Show your middle finger to Zuckerberg and Zinga and ZooZoos.
  
• Vote: Local, State and Nation. Know your representatives at all levels. Most don't even know their MP.
• Spell, and punctuate. Diss dis'ing.
  
• If you don't know enough about an issue, then study. First learn, and then form an opinion. Be it global warming, GM foods, vanishing tigers or turtles, Pakistan, Corruption, Reservations, Feminism. These are complex issues, and your uninformed opinion doesn't count.
• Be politically incorrect at times. Say something authentic which drops a bomb on a pretentious polite conversation. Question deeply, and don't just troll.
  
• Understand that your boss is as much a victim of you, as you are a victim of him. Both of you are victims of economic forces much beyond your control. Stop whining and start understanding.
  
• Look at the faces of your housekeeping staff, the security guards, the waiters, the auto-wallahs, the beggars, the vegetable sellers, the checkout clerks, the drivers. You don't have to respond, or to smile. But look! Don't remain in your cocoon.
  
• Simplify your gadget and media heavy life.
• Be a man, or a woman. Not a kid or an adolescent or worse. Let not working in the service industry make you facile or servile or infantile.
• Know your heritage, history and heretics.
  

In short, take back your life from all the brainwashers, time hijackers, dope-pushers, health-hazards, leisure-sappers, money-grubbers and their ilk. Stand tall amongst the ruins. To hell with mediocrity and conformity AND non-conformity. Non-conformity is just another form of conformity if you don't know why you are rebelling.

Make the Gods proud that you inhabit the earth.

The Value of Money

The concept of money is one of the most important inventions in humanity. It is hard to overstate what money enables by virtue of its near-universal acceptability.

Money is a valid claim only insofar its acceptability is mandated by law. It is an institution.

Money extends a trade in time. You hand over something of real value, and in return, you are given money, a claim on humanity for the future.

To hand over money to someone and expect something of value in return is an implicit celebration of this institution.

Money is the true "sanchit karma": the accumulated value, in hard numbers, of your past deeds or pedigree.

Money enables, in future. And its enable-ability is guaranteed. And therein lies the key to its charm. It is a lasso to overwhelm time. To have a million in the bank is as good as walking with an army of bodyguards, slaves, doctors, lawyers, and so on.

To have money in one's pocket is to have a command over one's environment.

Someone who shuns money, or regards its pursuit as mistaken, usually does not produce something of value for the others. Such a person has an unjustified sense of entitlement over others. Beware of the man who seeks to pick your pocket by calling its contents worthless.

Since it is a bulwark against the vagaries of time, there is no limit to how much more money one wants. As long as immortality cannot be bought, no amount of money is ever going to be enough.

The difference between greed and ambition is simple: Greed involves seeking unjust rewards. To want to steal, rob, manipulate, hoodwink, is to be greedy. To work hard, plan carefully, to want to grow, to produce something of value to others, is ambition.

Money is a form of power over others which others cannot wriggle out of. Influence, reputation, beauty are also forms of power, in that they lead to (mostly) a willing subservience. But non-monetary forms of power are neither easy to possess, nor easy to maintain.

There is the valid criticism that the pursuit of money can become self-serving, an end in itself. I find that criticism naive. Money is obviously an end in itself till it is spent. Castigating someone for only collecting money and not spending it all within the month, is to berate him for thinking further ahead than most people. Maybe he is more afraid of mortality than others, maybe he wishes to do something great for society or enable a grand sense of security for his family.

To shun money (ref Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa) because greed is a base instinct, is to throw out the baby with the bath water. But this is a general trait, more pronounced in the East. To forget ambition, love and belonging, to see the negatives of lust, greed, attachment, and to thereby condemn women, money, relationships, and to then exhort celibacy, poverty and detachment. Humanity continues and flourishes not because of the renunciates, but because of those who struggle with, and try to balance, the rewards and sorrows of their instincts.

Of course the institution of money is corrupt, like any other institution. Of course inflation is a bit of a fraud, of course there is manipulation in commodities and in the stock markets, but the battle between greed and law will continue as long as we are human. What is the alternative? Money is here to stay. Only a progressive evolution of our institutions is our choice.

Since it is such an important institution, there is a class of industry which deals solely with the management of money and associated paper. The Financial Services Industry. It is a complex question whether they add real value to society. Certainly there are a lot of very rich people in this sector, with nary an accomplishment against their name except having made good bets due to privileged access to information, more efficient processing of money-related information, having found arbitrage opportunities, and having found interesting loopholes in the system.

Are the money-experts the baron-robbers of modern times who go away laughing from plundered cities? There is a general agreement that many of them need to be firmly reined in. But one of the strangest conundrums is: anyone who knows or understands enough about money to rein them in, joins hands with them. To thwart this very real nexus of regulators, state, financiers, requires a person of Jesus' moral strength who has memorized and understood the scriptures of Mammon and who has the warfare skills of Clausewitz. The best and the brightest join the gang, and one can easily pacify the rest with some soap opera or sport on TV.

Money, like any dopamine trigger, has diminishing psychological returns as one grows richer and richer. But even its tangible returns diminish in comparative value. In the struggle against disease and death, to have a dollar to buy an antibiotic is a far bigger leap from a position of absolute vulnerability, than for a rich man to afford another high-priced specialist in Japan.

Who doesn't struggle with the stress introduced by the pursuit of money versus the need to convince oneself that it is worth it? That convincing can, these days, take the form of media madness, "shopping" for useless junkets or fancy clothes, and outsourced pampering. To at least numb the mind somehow.

But I guess even the most distracted of money-makers would wonder at times whether it is "worth it" to do hard time in order to gain an easier time later. There is no one, or right, answer to this question.

If you are directly going bald and heart-sick in your indirect pursuit of joy and health via money, there is perhaps something wrong. It is facile to say: "live for the moment" rather than "save for the future". Both need attention. Too much of a focus on the future, and the present becomes a punishment. Too much of a focus on the present with nary a thought for the future, and may god bless you with good fortune.

The big question that seems to fox many is: "Can money buy happiness?" One is asked to observe the unhappy rich and the occasional happy poor, cleverly glossing over the luxuriating rich and the vast numbers of the unhappy poor. There are parables galore (ref the fisherman resting on the beach). It is a question which the poor are rhetorically asked, the middle classes torture themselves with, and the rich have to disregard.

The merely conceptual/tautological analysis would yield the unsatisfactory reply: Insofar as happiness can be arranged, it can be arranged better with the help of a generic enabler that money is.

Another equally unsatisfactory answer is: Having money can prevent hardship. And it can certainly lead to pleasures. Happiness, we don't know. That's your problem. Even the gurus haven't figured it out yet.

But to answer this question in earnest, one has to investigate what happiness is. In most cases, it will be found, happiness is harmony with one's surroundings, fulfilling associations with other human beings, and good mental and physical health. It is easy to see that (the pursuit of) money can be counter-productive in all three of the above aspects. Its pursuit can lead to pollution and devastation, suspicion and lack of trust, and neuroses and illnesses. And it would be ironical to then try to solve these problems which the pursuit of money introduced, with the rewards of that pursuit.

It is perhaps healthiest to consider the journey as well as the eventual pot of gold as important. To buy happiness at the mileposts as one journeys to get richer. And to continue to enjoy what doesn't cost anything. Urination and watching the stars, for example.

The Three Slaves

In an unknown mountain region, on a plantation, there lived three slaves. They were enslaved to toil from morning till night. Sometimes to level a field, sometimes to clear a path, sometimes to lift heavy stones.

Being human, they could not help but reflect on their daily lives every once in a while.

The first slave was an obedient one. He did what he was told, and enjoyed the meals, the shelter and the bonds of his family. He knew that if he rebelled, his family would suffer from hardship. He wanted to become a more privileged slave, an overseer. He always saw the "silver lining" in every cloud, and was the eternal optimist. A day of heavy work, and he would look forward to an easy one. An easy day, and he would play with his children.

The second slave was a rebel. He thought that rebellion was a necessity, given their fate. He knew that his family would face difficulties, but he thought for the next generation, and did not want his children to have the same master, who he thought was unjust and cruel at times. He wanted them to travel, to seek their destiny, and to choose a kinder master. He even had wishful thoughts of a master elected from a community of slaves.

The third slave was in the habit of asking "Why?" and "For what?". For any outcome, particularly a happy one, he thought for a second longer than either of his slave friends, and commented: "But death awaits in the end," and ruefully lamented his mortal fate. He frequently thought of suicide, but even that he concluded to be a meaningless gesture and not worth the drama.

One hot summer day, all three slaves were resting in the afternoon in the shade of a large tree. Their backs resting on the earth, their faces upturned to the view of sunlight shimmering through the leaves, their legs aching from the long march of the forenoon.



The first slave was deep in the thoughts of his wife who he imagined was waiting for him in the evening. He did not mind the tiredness much. He knew that the other two slaves called him a buffoon and a simpleton and a lackey, but since his wife loved him, he was happy.

The second slave was engrossed in thinking of ways to escape the plantation. He thought that any place must be better than this, where he had little choice in how he spent his day. He regarded his wife at home as a weary and sad creature, a conformist and a seeker of certainty, who prevented him from being a true revolutionary.

The third slave was tossing and turning. He could not imagine a worse place to be, but he could not also imagine that another place would be better. He had still not finished his meal, as every morsel reminded him of the death of the living thing which was now his food. He had had a wife once, but she had left him.

An old man, himself a slave of yore, was passing through the plantation and stopped to rest near that large tree. He looked at the faces of the three slaves and casually asked all three: "So how's life?"

The first slave: "It is nice to rest for a while, innit?"

The second slave: "How is life over there, beyond the hill?"

The third slave remained silent and turned his face away.

The Law, part 2

First part here.

(Before the Law by Franz Kafka)

The Law is esoteric, and its practice is a matter for experts. It is said that "Ignorance of Law is no excuse", but who knows the law completely?

The Law can never treat people equally because people's recourse to law differs, their power to defend themselves differs, their power to engage others to defend themselves differs.

Law is impersonal. The judge has to regard a criminal as well as an aggrieved person without subjectivity. In normal life, we judge people from their faces, stature, clothing, mannerisms, body language, tone of voice, warmth, vibe, tears, smirks... To all that, Law is (and perhaps should be) blind.

The ideal judge would be a computer which through sheer formal analysis decides the matter. Ideally, laws would be specified in formal language. But then, they would be opaque to who they impact.

Are there undecidable matters, impervious to rigorous analysis? On what basis are they decided in the real world? The judge's mood, the lawyer's energy, the regularity of the plaintiff's jaw?

In civil suits, there is always someone trying to gain unjustly. If they lose, the courts rarely if ever punish them for the harassment caused to the winner. Their loss of the lawsuit is deemed sufficient penalty. Costs are rarely imposed. "Dragging" someone to court, if concluded in a loss for the plaintiff, must be considered a criminal offense. It is not very different from dragging someone to a wrestling pit and then raining blows on them, forcing them to defend themselves.

Most people disregard the extent to which the economic disparities are conserved at the point of guns. If you see massive disparity in a society, but no guns, look closer.

An act to violate someone's rights is one kind of a crime. I think it is also a crime, perhaps a greater one, to put someone in a situation of peril where he has to break the law in order to uphold his rights and his peace. It is a greater crime because one has created a criminal from a righteous man, and then the might of State is turned onto him. From then on, he will not trust the machinery of law to protect him, and will regard it as foolishness to be law abiding.

Creating a just Law is one of the most solemn tasks given to man. The Bill of Rights is a paean to the American notion of freedom, and limits to what extent the State shall govern the citizens of that country. "The congress shall make no law ..." On the other hand, consider the language of the Fundamental Rights of a slavish country like India:

Freedom of speech and expression, which enable an individual to participate in public activities. The phrase, "freedom of press" has not been used in Article 19, but freedom of expression includes freedom of press. Reasonable restrictions can be imposed in the interest of public order, security of State, decency or morality.

Freedom to assemble peacefully without arms, on which the State can impose reasonable restrictions in the interest of public order and the sovereignty and integrity of India.

Freedom to form associations or unions on which the State can impose reasonable restrictions on this freedom in the interest of public order, morality and the sovereignty and integrity of India.

Freedom to move freely throughout the territory of India though reasonable restrictions can be imposed on this right in the interest of the general public, for example, restrictions may be imposed on movement and travelling, so as to control epidemics.

Freedom to reside and settle in any part of the territory of India which is also subject to reasonable restrictions by the State in the interest of the general public or for the protection of the scheduled tribes because certain safeguards as are envisaged here seem to be justified to protect indigenous and tribal peoples from exploitation and coercion.

Freedom to practice any profession or to carry on any occupation, trade or business on which the State may impose reasonable restrictions in the interest of the general public.

While in the US Bill of Rights, the State is prohibited from infringing on a certain right, in the Fundamental Rights in India, the State is given discretion to violate those rights.

When the lawmakers are non-representative, then the duty of a citizen to abide by those laws is not a given.

Civil Disobedience is today a crime.

The Law

One frequently hears: "Do not take law into your own hands." It is worth asking: "Why not?"

The truthful answer has to be: "Because you cannot be trusted to be just."

The law is a surjective mapping of states of anguish and outrage to procedural remedies.

If somebody does you "wrong", then you file a complaint, and watch as the circus unfolds.

Since the Law takes care, your masculinity, or bravery, or courage, or cowardice are irrelevant.

The law is meant to protect the weak, and thereby weakens the strong. It is a move towards equality. An effective law-enforcement system is essential to social equality.

The Western genre of films and fiction is a celebration of masculinity precisely because law has not been delegated to institutions.

The Hero exists because he directs (or resists) his fate. If the tools of engaging with fate are relegated to others, then heroism is going to become extinct.

There are no heroes in a metropolitan city. There are only those who know the process well, and others who are relatively ignorant.

The nerd is the future of man. The nerd is not an actor, but a twiddler.

"The opposite of manliness isn't cowardice; it's technology." (N N Taleb)

"Knowledge is power", but when it replaces "Will power" then it leads to emptiness and psychological impotence.

War is the absence of Law. There have been efforts to internationalize law, but to little effect. Countries fight with their neighbors using all the means at their disposal, but criminalize the same activity between two individuals within the nation. Even shouting at your spouse is a criminal act in many modern societies.

Some say, and I agree, that modernity is the dominance of the intellect over the emotional. Intellect is procedure, and procedure is by its very nature a wet blanket for the fire of emotion.

The Law can be considered a further step in the same direction. To not only relegate to reason, but to relegate to others whose job it is then to work within reason to address a wrong.

Unless it consists of psychologically neutered individuals, a law-abiding society is an alienating one.

The more law-abiding a society, the more it will need faux outlets for fulfillment.

The tribal does not need enlightenment. The city-dweller does. What the city-dweller seeks nostalgically is a feeling of aliveness, which has been usurped by the machinery of the city.

Consider (simplistically) the three levels of living: physical, emotional and intellectual. The city values only the third, with the first two being artifacts instead of being natural, spontaneous parts of one's day. How can it be a fulfilling life?

The Law is institutionalized and formalized conflict-resolution. What people seek is revenge and to hurt the other and to see tears on the other's face, what Law cares about is written argument and whether the affidavit is notarized. It is not nearly the same thing.

It is an interesting question to ask whether an advanced and evolved society will have more laws or less. Whether it will be able to trust its citizenry to be just and therefore take law into their own hands.

Gun control laws are opposed by "conservative" men unwilling to become applicants to the state to redress their wrongs, but are advocated by "progressive" feminists, leftists and believers in democracy and its institutions.

(to be continued)