A brief critique of the movie "War and Peace" by Anand Patwardhan

Film Director Anand Patwardhan came to TIFR to screen his film ``War and Peace" I watched the film and the panel discussions before and after it and also watched the tape of the discussion on a Pakistani channel about the film with the director and some guests.

Sometimes it becomes necessary to prevent naivety from leading the pursuit of otherwise correct paths and this movie provoked me to reflect on that.

Firstly let me make a basic thing clear that I am strongly against all uses of nuclear energy. I oppose making of nuclear reactors even if it is for "peaceful" uses like generation of electricity or for nuclear weapons. Elementary undergraduate physics education and passing level knowledge of school history books would be sufficient to convince people of why nuclear energy is one of the greatest mistakes of mankind. Let there be no doubt that there is nothing called "peaceful" use of nuclear energy. The entire process of generation of nuclear power whether in controlled or in an uncontrolled way, in many steps causes some harm to the humankind. It is sad that in Nuclear Physics courses this most important thing is not taught!

But then I suppose whatever I said till now was obvious and it will take truthful professional scientists in that field to explain the nitty-gritties of the issue and to be able to frame a convincing document which can stop all pursuits of nuclear energy. And I am not knowledgeable enough to do that.

But this writing is not about nuclear energy but about the interesting movie "War and Peace" by Anand Patwardhan and how he missed the point.

The "discussion" post the movie was equally forgettable for Anand's ability of sarcasm that came to the forefront. I would refrain from debating with people who would quickly resort to such "Smart Alex" kind of attitude that Anand was prompt to adopt whenever questions got tricky. (experience with public debating has taught me to judge a forum for its ability to sustain debates and then deciding whether to join!) His answers to most questions were more of street-smart thinking coupled with a sharp tongue than answer full of insightful thinking or research. After a first few questions it was probably clear that this discussion is going nowhere and asking questions can only lead to that person getting laughed at by Anand.

Not a great way to lead such a complicated movement like nuclear disarmament!

Hence I decided to keep shut during the entire show.
And I also know my inability to engage well in verbal debates but I am more comfortable through the writing.

The essential difficulty with all nuclear debates is the lack of knowledgeable and intelligent debaters on either side of the line. It doesn't take much intelligence to fence-sit in most of such discussions and have fun poking both the sides. The people who really understand what is going on have either bequeathed their freedom of expression to some regulatory body or have taken a laid back style of life. Hence the debate left to the limited imagination of the common man can only at most hope to produce movies like "War and Peace" by Anand.

On the other end of the scale I would like to refer the reader to the article on nuclear disarmament by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in his book "The Argumentative Indian". He definitely gives a better example of leading such discussions. Not that Amartya Sen's approach is fool-proof either.



The 6 basic pit-falls of this attempt of Anand are the following,




1. Completely de-focused.




Had there not been that tiny little almost apologetic mention of the Bofors scandal at the end of the movie, I was beginning to believe that this movie has nothing to do with nuclear power but is an anti-BJP propaganda. Atleast the director was capable of main ting a semblance of political neutrality by his trump card of Bofors Scandal at the end. Although I am not affiliated to any party and have little sense of belongingness to any party, but I have strong objections to movies going around in the public which talk of every other thing in the world except for what they claim to talk about. Like the movie spent so much time on the Tehelka issue that again the audience was dragged into memories of India's sad narrow political imbroglio far away from the bigger issues of possible nuclear annihilation and need for disarmament. But then yes freedom of speech and expression is essential. How else would people get to learn how not to make a movie like "War and Peace" and how else would I get the chance of writing this blog about it! :P



2. The complete lack of research!



I was left hunting after sometime in the movie waiting for it to say at least one new fact about the issue or even at least one interview with a nuclear physicists or an international affairs experts who will explain the details! Not a single one! The movie seemed to too focused on lambasting the politicians and bureaucrats that it completely forgot to give at least a few minutes on the technicalities of nuclear energy and about all the million laws and conferences held around the world to understand the consequences of nuclear power.

The movie seemed to have no place for the many deep thinkers and experts and researchers around the world in the issue of nuclear power. It seemed to have more place for stupid statements by politicians than for research backed analysis of experts.




3. Naive look at deterrence.




The entire complicated issue of nuclear deterrence was thoroughly mishandled by the movie. The movie or the director's explanations after the movie completely failed to move even an inch beyond the common-sense understanding of nuclear deterrence that every lay man on the street seems to have. Nuclear deterrence is much more than just the idea of each country having nuclear stock-piles with a "no first strike" policy or M.A.D (Mutually Assured Destruction). Understanding of nuclear deterrence and whether or not it works requires quite a deep understanding of game theory which is a very sophisticated branch of mathematics.

The movie or the director seemed to have no clue about all the heaps of research available on understanding of nuclear deterrence and the subtle mathematics behind it. Like the documentary could have say interviewed experts in this field for analysis like Robin Powell of Harvard University or Martin Shubik at Yale University.

The movie briefly went to the US but again got lost filming the mass rather than getting hold of experts to add insight to the film.



4. Tremendous focus on mass hysteria.



The movie seemed to spend frames after frames on displaying all sorts of hype that gets pursued by the people about nuclear energy and its consequences. It spent inordinate amount of time filming the multitude of stupid comments by people in both India and Pakistan about how they feel they have become the "superpower" after their country testing an atom bomb. I was left pulling my hair as to when is Anand going to show some non-trivial stuff focusing away from the uninformed comments by lay men on the street each more hilarious than the other. If good movies have a sense of purpose about leading the society in a better direction then why spend so much time showing all the useless things that we anyway know the religious nuts on either side of the border have to say?

Much of the movie looked like a comedy show when they filmed people in Pakistan showing maps of the world where each country is coloured in green demarcating complete conversion to Islam under the title of "United States of Islam" (or something like that) or in India VHP selling maps of the world where each country is coloured orange and a VHP flag posted on each of them.

Such unintended humour content of movie completely distracted from the core debate about pros and cons of nuclear power.



5. Emotional arguments!



This is one of the biggest problems I see with many of the attempts that try to address such deep social issues. Very soon after some shabby attempt at scientific thought the movie moved fast into showing pictures of devastation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and nightmarish footage of heavily injured people of Hiroshima getting treated at the make-shift hospitals post the atomic bomb-blast. No doubt such footage is painful to watch the first time and can give night mares for days afterwards. But then why show them when they actually serve no purpose to any side of the debate!

Showing a horrifying picture is not a substitute for a reasoned argument.

Time and again the director seemed to have lost his train of logical thoughts and seemed to use such emotional crutches of horrifying pictures to move the audience. The same happened when he showed pictures of brutally handicapped children being born to families of mine workers in Jaduguda near the uranium refineries of the Uranium Corporation of India Limited. I agree it is a horrifying story and one of the many reasons why I don't sanction even use of nuclear energy for power generation.

But then again showing these pictures is not an argument for the cause but only makes the director look logically weak who is trying to use such crutches to further his cause as if he has run out of points. The pictures would me meaningful if they were backed by research on their background correlation.

I would very much like to see a movie which promotes nuclear disarmament though research and various other means and doesn't step into the conventional trap of showing gruesome footage of Hiroshima victims.

The use of such cheap methods of furthering a cause send out wrong signals about the director as if he is trying to cut-short reasoned debates by using painful photographs as a short-cut to impose his view on the audience. There is very little room for thinking with the audience once it is so emotionally overwhelmed by horrifyingly painful pictures.

Emotions are not the way to argue a point and can only lead to further quagmires.

Let me illustrate my point by playing the devil's advocate here.

Especially with the Jaduguda photographs one could have easily picked holes saying that he never shows an evidence that the children being born handicapped are due to the radiation damage from the UCIL plant. (except of him showing the Geiger counter readings in the houses and roads but that is far from enough) That children are being born handicapped is a fact and that the UCIL plant is nearby is another fact and just from the statement of the two facts one CANNOT conclude that one is the reason for the other. How do you know that this very child born elsewhere to the same parents wouldn't have contracted the same disease? This cause-effect relationship has to be established through research to be convincing. (keeping up with his tradition at various other fronts in the movie Anand here too missed the necessary element of research!) And only such kinds of arguments can be used to present a case with the authorities when asking for closure of nuclear power plants.



6. Knee-jerk anti-Americanism



This was one more disturbing feature of the movie which blatantly failed to understand the natural diversion that can happen between the opinions of a government and the feelings of the people. It would be a great injustice to the large plethora of people who inhabit USA if they are collectively blamed for war-mongering and weapon-selling that American government is very often perceived to be doing. It is just so wrong! We have so many times heard of mass protests in the US itself against the government's foreign military policies. Now it is just so stupid on the part of the film to keep portraying USA as the devilish nuclear threat on the world as if there is some essentially unifying theme that binds and identifies each and every American!

We all know of the one million stupid things that the US government has been doing over the past decade but to think of them as the identity of the US would be a narrowly reductionist view of US (or for that matter of any country). As a science student I benefit so much from the scientific literature and products produced in the US universities and these are the first things that come to my mind when I think of the US. And I am sure many people have interactions with many other facets of US and it is an injustice to all of them if US is portrayed only as source of nuclear threat.

There are so many different some deeply fruitful ways of Indo-American interaction (like the recent example of Prof.Venkatraman getting Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research done in the US where he went after completing his undergraduate education in India) but the movie bent upon driving its own dogmas set out to video tape some stupid party by some stupid Indo-American ``Club" in Delhi which seemed to understand the only version of Indo-American interaction to be some Indian people doing stupid dances on the stage. I have definitely seen much more elegant and beautiful dance shows from both the Indians and the Americans!

Such reductionist view of any country is dangerous to the world. Like many times I have seen in European literature India being always associated to issues of poverty and malnutrition. That is again another example of narrow perception of a country.




With such non-intelligently made films the cause of nuclear disarmament seems only further weakened. When one has such a daunting task ahead of getting nuclear weapons and establishments removed from all countries one cannot risk even a single weak step or an attempt in which even school children can pick holes.

Nuclear disarmament is the need of the hour and it needs far more intelligent and thoughtful attempts than what one finds in "War and Peace" by Anand Patwardhan. We need more thoughtful people to lead this march who come backed up with more critical research. Thankfully probably not many a looking up to "War and Peace" for leadership!

A discussion with Vipul on education systems

After we watched the video of the discussion on education between Hillary Clinton and Aamir Khan on education, Vipul and I had this email discussion. As usual to most of our discussions (most of which are technical discussions in mathematics and some are of this kind) between us over the past 4 years of knowing each other it was highly multi-layered and non-linear, convoluted, cross-referenced and self-referenced and hence this is merely an attempt in releasing to the world an approximately linearized version of that discussion,

To get the obvious legal questions out of the way, when I put up the proposal of making these discussions public Vipul said

"You can feel free to put up the content in this email and previous emails online"

Vipul:
Hillary Clinton shows that she's good at acting. Aamir Khan comes out as a reasonably good politician, but he could do with some improvement. It's interesting to note how Bollywood actors are getting so Anglified in their accent. c'mon, the average issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education is more substantive.


Me:
Aamir Khan very importantly mentions the importance of cooperative learning versus competitive learning.


Vipul:
This cliche about the importance of cooperative learning versus
competitive learning is like a hundred years old.

When the skill differential between educated and uneducated people
translates to a higher earnings differential, and seats in educational
institutions that train for those "high-skilled jobs" are limited,
competitive learning is a natural outcome. When there is a large
number of job opportunities that depend on education of different
sorts, this "competitive" aspect will reduce.


Me:
I agree that given the current scenario competitive learning is the natural outcome.
But I can't agree that competitive learning is the optimal situation.

It is of utmost importance to create job opportunities which harnesses different capabilities and hence will give an incentive to cooperative learning. But to start off the schools can encourage cooperative learing in hope for a better world.

Today the schools since kindergarten tell you day in and out only 1 thing "prepare for the rat race","compete". This destructive education is probably doing more damage to India than Mayawati's building statues or Lalu's scams.

(Especially in Kolkata and why I am apprehensive of getting my sister back to Kolkata's schools whereas the schools in Wardha encourage a more liberal attitude letting the students hone their personal skills)

Competitive learning is definitely is channelizing useful energies into useless activities.

{Like the average amount of time wasted per day in just travelling to the coaching institutes in the life of a normal high school student. I am sure, I could have spent my energies better in high school if I had better opportunities and more information regarding the opportunities and a more sensitive society around me. I used to be too fatigued to do any useful work, by the time I came back home at 8:30Pm having gone out of home at 9AM. 1 month after all my stupid entrance exams were over, I took to a self-training in mathematics for the ISI exam and that time I think I was most productive working on my own at home and not travelling anywhere. For one thing I was enjoying the process of solving challenging mathematical problems and learning advanced mathematics on my own and more importantly I was more focussed because I was doing only 1 subject mathematics day in and out. I learnt and did more useful science in that time than during all my 2 years before that travelling regularly across the ganga to go to those stupid coaching centers. {And I think it is completely because of mental comfort with the format of the exam and the comfortable self-training that I had done that helped me smoothly sail through the ISI exam and interview.}


Me:
Aamir also emphasizes on the importance of making teaching a lucrative profession and a socially enviable job and the most respected job. To create an environment where the best of minds want to become teachers. He clearly mentions the reverse scenario happenning in India where people uninterested in teaching but land up in this job because of failure in their wanted job.


Vipul:
Yeah, right. Why should the best of minds want to become teachers? Obviously teachers help society, but so do doctors, engineers, and even particle physicists. It isn't clear that the net benefit that a person generates for society through teaching is greater than through choosing one of the other professions. AK offers no comparison of the
benefits to society between teaching and any other profession.

Second, if learning is so valuable for children, schools should have no problems charging children much higher rates and paying their teachers enough for teaching to be as lucrative a profession as medicine or engineering. In fact, governments have maintained control over both the fees charged by institutions and salaries that teachers can draw, even at such "premier" institutes like the IITs.


Me:
I agree with the point that teacher's salaries across India is very low and it needs to be increased. The teaching salaries aren't competitive enough.

It is not just about salary. In India there is absolutely no incentive to learn or share knowledge, sadly even so in the research institutes. The society has to learn to value knowledge and its dispensers. A nation en route development has to first become a strong "knowledge society".

Increasing salaries may be one of the million steps required to achive the above social change.

But I can't agree that the fees across the colleges need to be increased.

Anyway, IITs charge their students quite a high fee which many students coming from various socio-economic backgrounds find hard to pay. And in myriad of colleges that I know there is so much of black-money around that it is apalling! The "cost" of seats in MD courses in some Indian medical colleges in the lucrative subjects like physiotherapy etc is near 20-30 crores! People pay the colleges in 10's of crores to secure a seat for their ward in these departments whereas the students in the merit list don't get the seats.

With so much of disproportionate amount of money floating around in the education system, I can't see a logic to support a further hike in the student fees.

On intuitive grounds I would agree that paying the employed people handsomely might lower the corruption but is there a study which shows that raising the student's fees will have any effect on the black-money floating in the education system?

On more basic grounds we should agree that many students in the IITs find already find it very difficult to pay the fees. I wonder whether this encourages people to go in for MBA after an IIT degree, so that they can "recover" the huge money spent in the entrance process and durng study at IIT!

Atleast I am aware of such thinking in the medical circuit. People who way 20crores for the seat in the medical college. invariably open up posh nursing homes in the big cities targetted at the elite and charge exorbitant rates completely inaccessible to even the upper middle class. These "doctors" are basically trying to recover the money spent in getting the medical degree.

Now the other doctors also want to "compete" with them and start moving into the bigger hospitals which pay more.

At the end of the day there are no doctors who cater to the lower sections of the socity.

Obviously the problem starts at the deeper level that the government is too busy helping AIIMS but hasn't made efforts to open equivalents of AIIMS in the remore corners of India.


Vipul:
One could make a more complicated argument involving social benefits not directly captured by the student ("positive externalities to society") but there isn't anything that special about teaching that generates such positive externalities. Everything does.


Me:
It would be foolish to expect that the "positive externalities to society" out of cultivation and sharing of knowledge will be obvious. Had it been so easy to see then 2 Indians 60 years after independence would not have to write these emails to each other!

I can conjecture that a huge positive externality exists but it definitely needs to be rigorously established to be convincing to the larger population.

And please don't say that the doctors and engineers and the MBA's and the IT sector people and the financial sector people are anyway contributing towards the aim of a knowledge society! They are not! Many of them ideally could have but are not. Most of them haven't probably learnt or created a single new concept in their field after their college and what they did in their college is also highly dubious given that we know/hear of the lackadaisical and the corrupt attitude taken even in the best institutes towards education.

Its actually sad that most potential contributors to knowledge and its sharing are NOT in the teaching profession but are in the above fields.

I am not saying that we can dispense with doctors and engineers and the MBA's and the IT sector people and the financial sector people, but we can probably do with a lesser number of them whereas we need to hugely multiply the reach and quality of education in India.


Me:
Hillary's mention of the famous research by Howard Gardner of Harvard University on the theory of multiple intelligences and modes of reception. Why the conventional education system is biased towards only 1 form of communication, an approach proven to be hugely ineffective by Howard's research.

Howard's research was pivotal in illuminating the importance of what in psychology is called "kinesthetic teaching"

You can read about it here: http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Theory_of_multiple_intelligences#encyclopedia


Vipul:
The theory of multiple intelligences is _not_ a widely accepted
theory. For instance:

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i39/39ferguson.htm

Smooth-talkers in politics have exploited this theory to somehow argue that different people are "differently abled" (rather than "less abled") and so people who "aren't good at academics" may be "good at
other activities". But the evidence for a number of totally _uncorrelated_ intelligences is non-existent.


Me:
It is very difficult to judge whether a person is really incapable in a given particular field or is this person actually grossly less abled in all fields.

This raises the controversial issue as to why should the government spend resources on mentally challenged people. What is the incentive? I had raised this topic once in my blog and I had gotten harsh responses privately and publcily. Ravitej had screamed at me for proposing such a thing!

I am aware of these criticisms. Especially of the lack of data regarding uncorreralated intelligence.

Analysis of standardized tests like GRE,SAT etc have repeatedly shown high degree of correlation (generally >0.6) across the various areas of testing.

Even in my personal experiences I have many times seen that the best students in school in the language subjects is also the same student who does best in mathematics. But not so probably with the sports and performing arts. There is lot of room for debate.

But definitely it is plausible that Ronaldinho is as intelligent with the football as Andrew Wiles is with number theory.

Variation in the manifestation of abilities is definitely completely ignored by the schooling system which is perpetually harping on a unidimensioanl set of skills but again that may be the result of a social pressure to produce employable people where opportunities are less.


Me:
She crucially mentioned the importance of bilingual teaching given the multi-ethnic reality of our modern world.
{For a reverse scenario, I am completely incapable of communicating anything non-trivial in my mother tongue . Though I have taken efforts to learn enough of my mother togue to read the best literary works in that language but to explain it to someone, I will have to shift to english. Even when I am teaching my sister, I very soon shift to english as a mode of communication!}


Vipul:
Bilingual has many pluses (and some minuses).

All this pandering to India ("best education in the world") with a straight face just highlights her political skills.

And all this talk about disparity and inequality! For God's sake! Carping about inequality makes it sounds like the better schools and the worse schools are to blame equally for the disparity.


Me:
I agree. Thats why I said "looking beyond the media glitz" :)



Vipul:
I don't agree with many of the statements you've made, but I don't have the time right now to air my views. Perhaps I will do so at a later stage. Let me just talk about one point.

You say that fees at the IITs are extraordinarily high and many people find it difficult to pay these fees. This is not true. The annual fees at IITs, if my estimates are correct, are less than what a typical IIT graduate can earn in one month (and what almost all IIT graduates can earn in two months) after graduation, even with a job in India.

Most people from upper middle-class backgrounds can pay these fees easily. But your concern about people from lower middle-class backgrounds and poorer backgrounds is valid. Which is why I suggest that people from lower middle class backgrounds, as well as historically disadvantaged/discriminated against groups be given a combination of tuition discounts and loans, while poor people and those from severely disadvantaged groups be given a tuition waiver. In fact, loan availability should not be a problem for people getting admission in the IITs because the IITs open up so many future educational opportunities.

It is ridiculous that the government subsidizes an IIT education to the tune of more than 60% for people coming from rich backgrounds.

Most private nonprofit institutions in the US, suhc as the University of Chicago, charge tuition rates that are 30-40 times those at the IITs (and 10 times those at the IITs even after adjusting for purchasing power parity). The U of C's annual tuition+compulsory fees come to around $42K. However, they offer complete tuition waivers to people whose parents earn less than $60K and substantial discounts to people earning between $60 K and $100 K. In addition, there are merit-based discounts. In addition, there is ready availability of loans. Despite what you might hear about the "burden of college debt"
in the media in the US, most people pay off their college deby comfortably over the next few years. This includes people who take up relatively low-paying jobs such as teaching and working for NGOs.



Me:
You talked of scholarships for the needy in IITs and accessibility of educational loans. I think it is a very subtle point and some of the realities of its implementation needs to be taken into account like

a) I have no objections to scholarships for the needy and its a great idea in parallel to what you said happens in UChicago but then what really happens in the IITs (as I hear from many of my acquaintances there) is that most of the scholarships in the IITs are merit based and hence most of the good students in the batch get them who are rarely ever the needy ones!

It will be politically incorrect to say so but I will stick my neck out so say this that most often the really economically needy ones are not the top performers in the class. It necessarily does not reflect a lack of ability but a lack of exposure and resourcefullness.

We have to ensure that the scholarships retain their meaning by being given to them who are in need of it.

If I take a hard look at it, then I think I was never in really need of the KVPY scholarship. In some sense the govt. wasted its money by giving it to me and that 2.5lakhs could have been better used by giving to one of those many children who can't go to school because of lack of money. At some level I feel guilty.

The part of KVPY that I really needed was that it gave me a ticket into India's best LASER labs and the summer program with Shiraz and the bangalore camp where I met you! The money part of it could have been better used instead of wasting on me.

I think the entire concept of meit based scholarship is non-sense. They will always be gotten by the top students of the big schools in the big cities who anyway don't need it.



Vipul:
Your arguments against black money in colleges confuses the issue of an increase in fees with black money. It is only natural that colleges that keep fees low for most people charge exorbitant fees from people with less merit and more willingness to pay. This is called "price discrimination" and it is often the most efficient way for colleges to make the most money that in turn allows them to provide substantially subsidized service to people with greater merit/need. Priec discrimination is common in the US in many private nonprofit institutions.

I have no opinion per se on the increase in fees in private for-profit colleges. They are only responding to a heavy increase in demand. The solution to the problem is to open new private institutions that compete with them. However, I do strongly feel that the government should allow the IITs to set higher tuition rates, provided that adequate provisions are made for low-income and discriminated-against sections.

Also, your belief that high college tuition forces people into taking jobs that are lucrative to the detriment of the national welfare gets the issue backward. Ricardo, a nineteenth century economist, said, "It is not that the price of corn is high because the rent is high; rather, the rent is high because the price of corn is high." It is not that engineers demand higher salaries because they paid more to get through engineering colleges; rather, it is that parents and students are willing to pay more to get through engineering colleges because of the prospect of higher salaries.

My opinion is that heavy government regulation of teaching institutions has been a major factor in limiting growth in the
education sector. Recently I read a fascinating book by James Tooley, a British person who came to study schooling in Hyderabad, describing the growth of private schools for the poor. Despite running completely as private for-profit schools, lacking any government subsidies, and having to deal with painful regulators, these private schools offered
a consistently superior education to poor children. You can read more of the research in the book "The Beautiful Tree" which is available from The Cato Store as a PDF (http://www.catostore.org). Interestingly, these schools for the poor
_still_ manage to provide scholarships to the poorest of the poor, so the richer poor end up subsidizing the poorer poor. If private schools on top of a shop can do that, surely the IITs can do it too.

Your detestation of the value provided by doctors and engineers speaks of your affiliation with academia. Doctors provide valuable services to patients and get paid accordingly. Coaching institutes often do a better job at teaching stuff than schools. Engineers do a lot of valuable stuff too. It is not at all obvious whether India "needs" more or less of these people. I am rather amused that, sitting in TIFR, you are able to make these pronouncements.


Me:
About your opinion regarding the value added to the society by the doctors and engineers etc, I have one thing to say. Yours seems to be a text-book opinion written about an idealist society.

How many medical or engineering innovations have happened in India?
Why are all the equipments in the hospitals and most physics labs in India imported?
Why can't India make a single microchip?
Why can't India make a tera-hertz CRO which would revolutionize experimental physics research in India? (and thanks to US sanctions India can't buy it even)
Why can't India make indigenous equivalents of Intel Pentium processors?
(again US sanctions prohibit India from using them in its satellites which hugely hampers the efficiency of the Indian space missions)
Why can't India make a single cell-phone?
Why can't India even not make a single wireless data tranfer system?
(what is used in India in the cell-phones is far inferior in quality than what is used in Europe. Again due to US sanctions)
Why can't India make a single tera-hertz laser or a spin polarized STM which would revolutionize condensed matter research in India?
Why can't India get its sole synchrotron source at Indore working even after all these years? (India has to pay heavily to european labs to buy "time slots" in their machines)

I hold thousands of the engineers and doctors produced in India responsible for this situation. They have surely made good of themselves but with no foresight about the future of Indian science!

After all this I can't buy your argument that the engineers and doctors are adding a great value to the society! Many of them are working for MNC's with very little thought about how India's dependence on imported technology and crippling sanctions is harming work here.

Definitely some people of these professions are adding to the society but then again they are affecting locally without making any big difference to the national scenario!


Vipul:
It is interesting to note that you lambast the "competitive spirit". But at the same time you detest it when your batchmates "cooperate" to solve homework problems.


Me:
I knew you would retalliate about the competitive spirit thing regarding my objection to collaboration in the homeworks. This is again a 2 step reasoning which you missed.

I appreciate collaborative work but my objection was that the evaluation system works independently of the reality that there is collaboration!

You can't have the cake and eat it too!

If at the end of the day there is going to be a numerical evaluation then I am going to stick my neck out to say that I deserve 5 times more marks than them who also did the assignment with 5 people collaborating and I did it alone.

If the system really wants to encourage collaborative work then why not show the guts to get into a system of evaluation which Prof.Sanjeev Arora at Princeton University uses? I really appreciate his stand point about collaboration in homeworks and assignments in his couses

The problems lies somewhere else:

Very often when such problems arise, the prof is incapable of setting classy assignments where they can have the confidence of publicly encouraging collaboration like Prof.Sanjeev Arora does. The profs most often know that a collaborative work will locate the internet resources from where the solutions can be downloaded. As we are all aware in Indian colleges what happens in the garb of collaboration is not cooperative learning but mass copying and internet source locating.

As an instructor of the course, first you need to have a strong knowledge of the subject yourself to allow the merits of collaboration to bloom among your course students without the slip-side of it taking over.

When I become a prof, I plan to adopt Prof.Sanjeev Arora's model.

A lunch with Manjul Bhargava

Dear Reader. If you always thought that my writings are childish then probably this writing won't come as a surprise. If you didn't have any such opinions then let me warn you of a pretty childish writing.

Imagine you were a young teenage tennis player practicing in the court and one fine day Federer walks into the court sees you playing and says that you play really well. What would you do?

I blog!
And childishly so after being given a compliment from a legend!

So Manjul Bhargava ultimately turned up today in TIFR after Arul waitng for him for the last 1 week. Manjul was sick in Jaipur. Arul was a student in the Mathematics department of my alma mater CMI (Chennai Mathematical Institute). He is currently a graduate student in Mathematics at Princeton University under Prof.Manjul Bhargav.

To understand why I am writing this blog you should know something about Manjul Bhargava. In case you have never heard of him then I suggest you do some Google search about him before you read the following.

Because of Arul's waiting here for the last 1 week we spent quite some time regularly discussing Representation Theory of Lie Groups which I have been pursuing off late and in which Arul has gained a lot of computational expertise lately. Given that it is Arul and me we had quite a few heated arguments over dinner about social issues starting from ethics in medical research and Hinduism and Caste-System and obviously Nazism! (details of such controversial discussions shall be known only to select people :P) Inspite of my repeated insistence to the converse Arul paid for both our lunches and dinners while at TIFR.

Arul asked Manjul if he could ask me to join them in lunch and Manjul agreed. Hence I had this interesting lunch with Arul and Manjul Bhargava and Manjul's mother!
What a company to be with!

Manjul while introducing me to his mother pointed at Arul and me and said ``2 CMI-ites from 2 different departments". Manjul's mother also seemed to have a pretty high opinion about CMI and hence by benefit of doubt probably I was also momentarily considered as a brilliant student!

Manjul had met me earlier last year and I had given him my article on torsion free connections on Riemannian Manifolds as way of introduction. {You can see the article here } But this interaction with Manjul Bhargava was an year ago.

Today during lunch Manjul suddenly remembered of that article of an year ago when he saw me at lunch! He said that he liked it!

I never believed that Manjul Bhargav has even read what I wrote!

I was stunned for a few seconds when of all people on earth Manjul Bhargava said that he thinks the article has a very new flavour of writing about geometry. and that I had written it very differently from how it is generally thought of.

I was flattened by the time Manjul said that he thinks I should try to get it published. He said that my students will definitely gain a lot if I teach from these ways of thinking.

I just kept gazing at Manjul with probably a stupid smile as he said all this.
I couldn't believe my ears!

Then Manjul asked me about with whom I am working with and I told him that I am trying to learn QFT with Shiraz and Representation Theory from Dipendra Prasad. Manjul asked me if I had talked with Atish and I said no.

{Prof.Atish Dhabolkar is a prof. at DTP,TIFR and was formerly a grad student at Princeton}

Manjul and Atish seem to have been great friends since their Princeton days and his mother also added "Atish is just brilliant"

I informed them that Atish has taken up a post with University at Paris, Orsay and hence he comes to DTP only rarely.

Then Manjul made an intriguing comment that he wonders I will find people here in TIFR who will share my interests. He said that he isn't aware of anyone here who thinks along these lines.

Then Manjul was telling how Atish has recently shown some number theory results in something called "Mock Modular Forms" to be useful in string theory. Manjul made the comment that almost anything that was ever interesting in Mathematics finds a way into String Theory and also the reverse is hapenning.

Eventually the discussion spanned a million things starting from the highway that Manjul has been on which connects Mumbai to Pune and how Swine Flu is overhyped in the US and Manul's mother thinks the bulk of Indian girls in their 20's are hopeless. How they adjust their cosmetic without washing their hands just after coming out of the toilet. Manjul's mother is a fun lady even at this age!

As a result fo living in the US for so many years her english has become heavily accented but her Hindi is surprisingly good and she talks with her son in very correct Hindi.

She was telling me how she is such a nocturnal character and Manjul also agreed that its great to sleep during the daytime and its best to work at night when there are less distractions and people around. Manjul's mother was telling us how Indians are forgetting to take pride in their own heritage of learning and she wonders why the nation which cradled the best universities in the world Nalanda and Takshashila now can't keep that level. How most Princeton and Harvard students are non-Americans and Manjul said that only recently there is a slightly non-trivial number of Americans in Princeton. And how when he was an undergrad at Harvard all the bright people in his batch were Indian or Chinese or Koreans.

It was a memorable lunch!

Poignant Mumbai

Its 12:30Am in the night and I am on top of the Malabar hills, completely fatigued with a 6x2 geared cycle in my first three-quarter pants. Probably not the Anirbit that most people know of.

All this is thanks to the spirits of Prof.Pranab Sen of the Theoretical Computer Science department of TIFR. My association with Prof.Pranab Sen started when I heard a coffee table discussion of his about Vitalli Sets and Cantor Sets and later a seminar of his about testing polynomial identities. I was pretty impressed by his fine knowledge of measure theory (something that I am currently trying to learn). Later I found out about his deep contributions to the still open-problem called the "Hidden Subgroup Problem". {Wikipedia article about this mention his contributions}. All in all this lanky bespectacled energetic below-30years absolutely precise thinking professor almost instantaneously gained my respect.

Soon I found out that Pranab Sen was a cycling freak and knows as much about cycles as he knows about Quantum Computing. And I joined him on one of his frequent cycling trips. A decision taken almost at the spur of the moment at 11Pm. I haven't cycled for at least 4 years and suddenly at midnight I decided to embark on this cycling adventure to Malabar Hills from TIFR. As I have always said except non-take-home examinations, I am not afraid of anything in life.

Pranab Sen told me with great enthusiasm that it is going to be a "short" trip of "only" 20 kilometers since I am a first-timer! All my previous cycling experiences have never been more than 30 minutes long at a stretch at moderate speeds through the lanes of congested town of Howrah. For a split-second I had this fear emerging in me as to whether I can take this 20km adventure and in a second I squashed it with my tenacity which can be infinity for many purposes. {People who have had regular academic interactions with me will definitely know of this sole ability of mine, to stick to something to achieve it till the end.}

The cycling process was definitely not easy even with the emptiness of the mid-night roads of Mumbai. Apart from the sheer physical stress (which I haven't subjected my body to in recent times except through sleepless nights!) and dehydration it was the problem of speed that made a lot of difference. My top-speed happened to be may be 1/3rd the speed of Prof.Pranab Sen and since I didn't know the roads, it was quite a worry whenever I lost sight of him, which always very soon. But then Prof.Pnab Sen was very nice. He stopped at all the bifurcations to ensure I took the right turn and he also stopped at various points in Mumbai to explain its historical significance if any.

The first exciting cycling stretch was along the Marine Drive when we were cruising on our cycles along the Arabian Sea with the full "golden necklace" of Mumbai visible in front. There Pranab Sen stopped to explain me some errors in my cycling techniques like I should paddle with the ball of my feet and not through the center. Magically enough this change of position instantaneously vanquished all the pain in the feet! And of course along the Marine Drive in the middle of the night, one can conspicuously observe the love-birds coupling along the beach either on the rocks or along the benches. (Who would ant to miss this romantic setting?) Hand-in-hand couples walking down the beach at midnight probably dreaming of a romantic love life in store definitely makes for a nice back-drop. I looked. I sighed. I cruised along.

The second excitement was cycling up the Malabar Hill. Helpfully enough just at the foot of the uphill road I found Pranab Sen waiting for me and he asked me if I have ever used a geared cycle. I said no. And there on the road he gave me a basic lecture on what are gears and what they do and how to use them efficiently. I was surprised that when I was sweating profusely thanks to the trip till then Pranab Sen had the energy to explain me on the road that the gear number is the ratio of the radii of the front crank to the back crank and how lower gear generates larger torque. And after that my first uphill cycling on a geared cycle was pretty exciting. It was a weird feeling of suspended animation since at the lowest gear up the incline my legs were paddling pretty fast but the cycle was moving slowly. The apparent disjoint feeling between the two motions gave a floating sensation. As if I was floating up the hill but still losing energy.

When we reached the top of the Malabar Hill at 12:30Am, we were near the Hanging Garden and could get a bird's eye view of the Mumbai and Arabian Sea beneath us. Pranab Sen explained that this is the highest point in South Mumbai and thats why here is the water-tank which supplies water to the region.

Then the down-hill ride was awesomely exciting!
First one had to take a hair-pin turn at top-speed to get down.
Then the cycle just shot down like a bullet. All I had to do was to keep the cycle steady as it was shooting down. It was a miraculous sight. On my left the Malabar Hills was shifting up and on my right the Arabian Sea was shifting up with the full arc of Mumbai visible from there. The landscape was enigmatic and the lightening speed of the cycle downhill added to the scene. Gravity rewards with high-adrenaline experiences after the killing uphill ride.

On another day I cycled with the same group from TIFR till the Taj (the hotel where the 26/11 Mumbai attack happened) and India gate and back via the marine drive. It was my first glimpse of the Taj Hotel. The thing that I noticed is that even if I am walking quite a few meters away from it the air there is full of smell of some of the costliest perfumes. The smell has the typical mild intoxicating tinge that one wouldn't find in most perfumes that people use. It is definitely of some much higher cost. A glance at the people around in the neighborhood would tell that it is the hang out of the absolute upper economic class of Mumbai. A good indicator of the economic class of a person is probably the watch that the person is wearing (mine is the simple lookng TITAN Exacta with replaced black bands and my black hands). I could clearly see people there wearing watches that I had seen in one of the poshest showrooms in Bonn,Germany. The crowd there wasn't the crowd that I interact with on a daily basis and not the crowd I even see regularly.

Infact the cycle rides through innards of Mumbai open up a new face of Mumbai that I don't see during my usual wanderings in the theoretical departments of TIFR and worrying whether a given field is causal or the topological space is compact. I see that post-midnight there are regions in Mumbai which become hangouts for the rich kids of Mumbai smoking away hundreds of rupees on an expensive cigar and very near by a half-clad child might be crying unfed.

It was 1Am and along with Prof.Pranab Sen and the other friend of mine I walk into a posh bar called the "Mocha" and for the first time I saw a "Seesha bar" People tell me it is the only one around here. Apparently all others have been banned by the govt. So this is a glass enclosure in which I saw people in the age-group of 20s and 30s lounging along sofas and smoking from long pipes of Hookahs which were bubbling through jars of coloured water. Apparently the colour signifies the flavour of the Hookah as to whether it is apple flavoured or mint flavoured. There were many types and they cost something like Rs.250 per pipe!

The people included were very apparently representative of the same upper economic class of India which thronged the neighborhood of The Taj. The same accented english and the same artificial talks of vacuous topics about which is a better cosmetic. The same antics of conversation and ways of expression of emotions which seem so unfamiliar to me. I have never talked/email interacted with any girl in my life who would fit the kind I could see in the Seesha Bar. I am sure that all of the five or six girls I know or have ever known in my magnificient history of 22 years of existence would give me a straight and sharp "No!" if I ask any of them to come with me to a bar and that too at 1Am at night! (and also probably ensure that it is the last interaction I had :P) I remember how one of the girls I was crazily in love with at one point of time freaked out when I called her up at her home at 2Am. Interesting how the academic world gets you to meet only extremely conservative typically Indian women who would be mentally made of steel and be extremely intelligent and would shoot-off otherwise. Atleast that has been the case till now.

But interestingly I know quite a few guys who would agree to such a proposal notwithstanding that they might have a heart-attack if they hear such a proposal coming from me in the first place. :P

Interestingly I realize how orthogonal are the worlds that I live in and they live in.

The entire glass room was filled with smoke and people were apparently enjoying the smoke. I could smell nothing since I was outside the glass enclosure.

Prof.Pranab Sen ordered some fine quality of beer and I ordered a tall glass of cranberry and lime juice. The cranberry was't even one-hundredth as sour as the plates of raw cranberry paste that I ate in Germany. Here it was highly diluted. The prof tried to motivate me to have beer and explained me the nuances of beer taste and explained me the orgins of the names and tastes. Mocha had a list of "Today's Special" beer on the menu and each was from a different country.

After the drink I came out of the bar and saw the stark other image of Mumbai in front of it. Rows and rows of half-clad and malnutrition affected people sleeping along the footpath that went along the bar.

All of them were clear images telling a story of life lived at the bottom of the economic and social ladder. A life lived in the lands of nothingness.
Nothing to wear. Nothing to eat. Nowhere to stay.

"Slumdog Millionaire" The story begins.

I saw the same picture of Mumbai when I cycled through the backside of the Mumbai dockyards. Rows and rows of people living a life in the islands of nothingness inside the heart of Indian commerce. On the other side of the dockyards lies the glistering ports which probably unloads the costly wines into the Taj Hotel.

Tomorrow the sun will rise and all these people will rise up again for another day of struggle to find food to live. In turn they will keep the rickshaws running and the drains clean for Mumbai to keep ticking. The hidden force behind the metro whose source of force recedes into hiding at nightfall.

And I return mentally and physically fatigued after the 20km cycling. I return to the safe air-conditioned cocoons of academia as the other half has nothing to return to.

I can't sleep. I have questions to answer. Answer to myself.

Is the gap natural to any developing country?

Who is "developing" when we say India is developing. The guys/girls who are smoking pipes for Rs250 each in the Seesha Bar or the half-clad half-fed children infront of the bar or me who bought a 120GBiPod a few months ago whereas 6 years ago it was a big thing when my mother bought me a Phillips walk-man?

Am I guilty?

Reactive Self-Perception

I sometimes do just love these long train journeys where I get to sit 30hrs in one position and just look around and think. It just lets you introspect. It lets me analyse the world around like never before and observe the ocean humanity flow by as if I am not a part of it. Watch everything from a distance and yet not feel a part of it. Look at the world around as if I am looking from outside but with as much proximity as anybody living in it but letting a larger picture sink in unrestrained by all personal affiliations and identifications.

This state of mind lets in thoughts which I have never thought and lets me think about non-academic things at a greater depth than usual when I don't even remember the very possibility that I can have a non-academic life. Given my recent mental disposition sprouting from some recent emotional and relationship adventures (which generated the last 2 blog posts) every little human interaction was seeming like hitting back at me with greater force than ever before. But I have this ability to detach myself from such issues so that I can quickly get back to logical thinking, my natural state of mind.

And in these times reading or thinking about Economics provides something intellectually challenging to pursue while crammed in half-a-seat in an Indian train. It just looks so relevant.
Hence sharing here the thought and insights developed in those lonely hours.

Hence I started reading about this idea of "Reactive self-perception".

I was reading how some countries in the post-colonial period have failed to take full advantage of the globalization leading to the opening up of markets. It has lead to an unfair distribution of the advantages of globalization and this stems as much from the faults in the implementation of market economy in a globalized manner (like super-powers maintaining an upper-hand in terms of patent rights etc) and also because of these colonized people unable to recover in some sense from the age of empires. The countries which have been severely hit by this are the African ones and India to some extent but India has somehow escaped the terrible situation of Africa thanks to its active intellectual movement and powerful press and media which has championed the Indian identity in a very assertive way. India at least didn't see the severe internal collapse leading to civil strife and famines and blood pools which Africa has seen since the end of the colonial period. Unlike most South-Asian countries they are yet to see the fruits of democracy.
Not that south-asia has been any paragon of democracy but the implementation has definitely been much better than in Africa.

Now the interesting thing is that this has serious roots in the subject of psychology (interesting how psychology helps understand global economics!) in what is called the "reactive self-perception" .

Reactive self-perception is the state of the mind when one decides one's identity NOT as a result of an analysis of one's own self but as a response to what OTHERs think about him/her. If for centuries a set of people are ill-treated and humiliated and told that "you are all idiots" then the first generation takes it as an insult and might revolt but if the revolt is crushed then the next generations believe that their identity is of an underdog. After a century these people start seeing themselves as the "natural" underdogs and suffer from what Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen calls the "illussion of destiny". They start thinking that their natural place is at the receiving end of the world and are not supposed to be the agents of change but can only be the receivers of whatever the powerful gives them.

This reactive identity can lead to mis-utilization and under-utilization of resources and also fatalism. It can lead to a complete failure of all the goods to be achieved out of globalization. There is a market where people are ready to buy and sell but the people with the products aren't there to bargain the prices since they don't realize that they have the power to bargain! The producers coming from underprivileged backgrounds are not even psychologically prepared to challenge the buyer into giving a better price! Again even in an open market economy the advantages of fair dealings is lost because of internal psychological barriers.

I think even in day to day life and in our social life this feature shows up where lots of voices and talents are unheard and unused simply because the voice and talent belongs to someone who has been collectively ostracized by the society and hence has been implicitly led into believing that he/she is incapable or wrong!

Further this kind of Reactive Self-Perception can also become the roots of terrorism where one starts defining one's identity as a reaction to some certain set of ideas. Like even though any well-reasoned person will understand that it is hard to distinguish between what exactly is a "western idea" and what exactly is an "eastern idea" given the amount of mixed global heritage we inherit, unfortunately much of Islamic fundamentalism relies on this "reactive identity" where one starts defining as "Islamic" everything that is in contradiction to whatever is commonly called "western"! This can lead to devastating effects as the world is aware of like the recent declaration of Talibans in the SWAT valley that "democracy is un-Islamic"!

Islamic fundamentalists have unfortunately looked as "Islam" as not a philosophy stemming from certain geographic regions but as a symbol of being "anti-western"! Islam as an answer to everything that the west seems to stand for. Its roots are probably not far to seek when the west at one point did pump this Islamic identity to counter the Russian.

One day this is likely to hit-back the social memory of Africa that when the world was agog with Obama being elected in the USA, millions died in Zimbawe in famines. Its likely that the world will eventually pay for this grave error.

Linking to what was being said earlier, there are reasons to believe that eventually this sense of "reactive identity" coupled with the implementation errors of globalization and open-market economy it will lead the neglected Africans into becoming a base for terrorism in the coming years. Today they are physically weak because of the famines, tomorrow they will be psychologoically suicidal and the mortal pains will become irrelevant. We are very likely to see a rise of another Osama Bin-Laden in Africa in the next half-century mimicking the Islamic terrorism that sprung from the middle east and has wrecked havoc in the last half-century.

African terrorism might be just round the corner.

And the next day after being candid.

I wake up the next day and I tell to myself

"Its all useless. Chalo forget it. Lots of work left to do"

I thank for the existence of this subject called Maths and Physics which look like infinitely deep holes to me where I have dived in and more I sink into it more seems to exist down there. And thankfully so!

Otherwise what else other than Representation Theory and Quantum Fields could help forget such things?

Another day. Newer things to learn. Newer roads to walk.

But the destinations never change just that I carve out new untrammeled paths in this wilderness.

The paradox of commerce

The other day I was eating in a shop in the Indian Navy campus and I was impressed by the shopkeeper who was selling jalebis and refused money for his jalebis since they had gone cold and were broken. Some people might say that he was not thinking economically but I think he is only being more efficient by ensuring that because of this attitude I will come back to his shop again when he would have hot jalebis which would taste better and he can then have the full right to charge me the cost.

This is probably the biggest effect years of scientific training has on you is its ability to make you capable of going through various situations in life without emotional involvement. Gives you the ability to observe subtle aspects without being touched by them. Can't say much about Physics but mathematics education definitely gives me this powerful ability.

Of course scientific training if gotten into the blood also has interesting social and personal consequences! Most innocuous of them is probably the sensation of solace and deep happiness when I can cocoon into the cubicles of the academic institutions with connectivity to the web far away from the hustle-bustle of million people outside apparently enjoying their lives. Gives me that detached perspective where I feel far away from the party outside and seem to see grander visions of universal features through the regular struggles of other people's lives.

A state of mind when you start thinking like an AI without emotional edges or ripples of human bonding or binding. A state of mind where the amorphous existence of the human race seems to crystallize into bare essentials. A state of liberation from all local identities of caste,state,religion,language,party and elevation into the state of being an observer and a thinker.

And many people see it as my fundamental inability to feel associated to anything, feel a sense of belongingness to any particular sect. And this misunderstanding leads them to think that I am an hypocrite. What they can't see is my feeling of association with the human identity. This is an identity which makes you humble at the thought that apparently we are the only one around who can think deductively. In many cases I am an unapologetic reductionist.

Its a feeling of being a global citizen minus any sense of local identification.

I don't see why people host huge parties etc on their marriages with rituals going on for days! I see the bare essential to be 2 people signing a legal paper that the Indian constitution wants them to. If the 2 people are mutually compatible then anyway they will live happily and if they are not then no amount of grandeur of parties and rituals will keep them together. If I ever ever decide to marry then she and I will one fine morning go to the marriage registration office and sign the papers. Of course we would have lived together for quite some time before doing this.

Why am I suddenly thinking of these things?

It probably stems from a sense of betrayal I felt from my visit to a restaurant in Mumbai called "Calcutta Club" which specializes in Bengal cuisines (West Bengal is a state in the eastern part of India). When in the company of people not from West Bengal I have always defended Bengal whenever people from other states start poking fun at Bengal along the same old stereotyped issues. I generally have an publicly unacknowledged advantage in such discussions since most of these stereotypical features are missing from me and many people before initial introduction thought I was from the southern states of India! But this restaurant, notwithstanding the fact that the food was good seemed to put up a weirdly hypocritical show about being a representative of Bengal in the middle of Mumbai.

This restaurant had put up posters all around of Amartya Sen, Rabindranath, Soumitro Chattopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Mother Teresa and what not. The photographs didn't seem to have any apparent reason for being there except for the fact that all of them had something to do with Bengal. The set of photographs on the wall were completely thoughtless to say the least and seemed to be screaming out with a sense of cheap "selling" Bengal to Mumbai.

I wonder whether Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen would approve of his photograph being hung by the tables of a restaurant!

And more deplorably there were customers in the restaurant who seemed to think that this was a great thing to do since this "Brings a sense of being in Bengal" ! I was struck at the lowly levels of thinking to which people can fall to and at the gullibility of the average customer.

I am sure many customers in that restaurant would happily walk out of the resturant full of photographs of Rabindranath and Satyajit Ray and drink like a hog in some nearby bar and return home drunk in a totterring state. Wonder if that also makes them feel like a Bengali!

While I was wondering about these things people around were busy wondering what a long time it has been since they ate proper Bengali food and debating over apparently irrelevant questions like whether item X should be had before Y or vice-versa. I have eaten a hell lot of different kinds of foods in my life and I have learnt to appreciate culinary skills of the human population without a sense of attachment to any particular type. Again a scope for the cynics to attack me.



This situation reminded me of a dialogue by Amitabh Bachchan in the movie "Cheeni Kum" where he as the chef of an Indian restaurant in London proclaims that

"We are not like other cheat "Indian" restaurants in London which put up posters of elephants and tigers and sell anything in the name of Indian food to ignorant english people"

Unlike Tabu in that movie, I was in the company of people who were highly appreciative of "bengal" atmosphere of the restaurant and hence because of social restrains had to control my bursting rage at the misuse of these great people and walk out of the restaurant immediately.

No wonder I run into so many social conflicts since when other people around were appreciating the food, I was feeling a sense of betrayal. I couldn't get my mind off the fact that this restaurant was downright immoral by misusing the names of these people.

I wonder when or if ever India is going to come out of such cheap business models which try to sell by rousing cheap local sentiments. Why go and blame the politicians for making hollow speeches if we keep patronizing such restaurants which adopt such hypocritical business models?

Of course this attitude of trying to "sell" doesn't restrict itself only to restaurants but also penetrate deep into the society and disastrously reflects in the way Indian education is compromised. I am scared of the day when corporate sector shall start determinig syllabuses in colleges so that they can "produce" efficient workers.

I am already seeing such trends in the Physics education scenario.