links for 2009-07-03

• The Quiet Coup – The Atlantic (May 2009)
  The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.
  (tags: economics politics finance economy government banking money crisis)
• The Newsweekly’s Last Stand – The Atlantic (July/August 2009)
  In the digital age, with its overabundance of information, the modern newsweekly is in a particularly poignant position…it Chaplin-esquely tries to straddle thousands of rapidly fragmenting micro-niches, a mainframe in an iTouch world. The audience it was created to serve—middlebrow; curious, but not too curious; engaged, but only to a point—no longer exists. Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers, back when we were drowning in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity. Now, in response to accelerating news cycles, the newspapers have effectively become newsweekly-style digests themselves, resorting to muddy “news analysis” now that the actual news has hit us on multiple platforms before we even open our front door in the morning.
  Given that even these daily digests are faltering, how is it that a notionally similar weekly news digest—The Economist—is not only surviving, but thriving?
  (tags: media journalism magazines news business publishing economist)
• What Makes Us Happy? – The Atlantic (June 2009)
  Is there a formula—some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation—for a good life? For 72 years, researchers at Harvard have been examining this question, following 268 men who entered college in the late 1930s through war, career, marriage and divorce, parenthood and grandparenthood, and old age. Here, for the first time, a journalist gains access to the archive of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies in history. Its contents, as much literature as science, offer profound insight into the human condition
  (tags: happiness Psychology Health Science research)
• James A. Michener – Wikiquote
  * Character consists of what you do on the third and fourth tries.
  * If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay home.
  (tags: quotes quote michener travel)
• How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have? – Project MUSE – Philosophy and Literature
  f the best shortest story, we have only tales. According to one of them, Ernest Hemingway was proud of being the author of a story written in merely six words: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." He considered this as his best story…
  there is not a single superfluous word or, even, a letter or punctuation mark; each word, each mark must be there, each is necessary for the story. Hemingway's six words create or initiate a whole story, actually a universe, of sorrow, bereavement, mourning, solitude, silence, untimely death, despair, loss, and tragedy. Thus, each word in this story gets the utmost meaningfulness or significance that a word may have…
  To choose the most common words, to use them with the possible greatest restraint, yet to reveal a huge world by means of them or to create one out of them is the gift of a great artist…
  The closer that words approach silence, the greater the effect that they can convey.
  (tags: story stories storytelling words)
• Reading Dickens Four Ways – ChronicleReview.com
  That's the worst accusation: that I am not a serious reader. Not guilty! I love books as much as anybody. But I love reading more. It is the sustained and individual encounter with ideas and stories that is so bewitching. If new formats allow us to have more of those, let us welcome and learn from them.
  I spent my graduate-school summers at the Berg Collection of English and American Literature at the New York Public Library, working just a few feet away from Dickens's actual desk. Surely Dickens — the most successful author of his day — would be experimenting now with the form of this novel, seeking ways to expand his impact on readers. Regardless of format, Little Dorrit seized me no less forcefully today in its indictment of society's ability to destroy through greed and crushing self-interest.
  (tags: books reading technology kindle ebooks publishing ebook iphone)

links for 2009-07-02

• India Uncut – The India Uncut Blog
  If the government takes any action against an individual or an entity, there should be due process. If the government wants to ban a website, it should clearly state why it is doing so, and what provisions of the law make it possible. And the owners of that website should have a right of appeal.
  (tags: blog india freedom free_speech offense)
• Death Bells Ring For India's Dissident Websites By Sevanti Ninan
  If you plough through all the citizen-friendly sounding stuff that this team is supposed to do, you will hit upon this clause: “For carrying out its functions prescribed in section 70 (B) of the Act, CERT-IN may seek information and give directions for compliance to the service providers, intermediaries, data centres, body corporate and any other person, as may be necessary.” This innocuous body can order your service provider to cough up any data it wants. And what level of officer can do this? Any officer of CERT-IN, not below the rank of Deputy Secretary to the Government of India. Again, the defence is that this clause only relates to cyber security. The rules empowering CERT-IN are drafted by the organisation itself. Talk of giving yourself powers because you are making the rules!
  (tags: security privacy laws india freedom free_speech)

Salil on Offence

Salil Tripathi has written a marvellous new book, “Offence: The Hindu Case.”, as part of a series that examines the growing intolerance around us in the name of religion: Kamila Shamsie looks at the Muslim case, Brian Klug at Judaism and Irena Maryniak at Christianity.

Claiming to take a leaf out of the Islamic book, Hindu nationalists are no longer prepared to suffer insult, denigration or offence, past and present, in silence. And offence is found everywhere—in art galleries, schools and universities, books, films, music and online. Hindu nationalists have targeted all these, attacking art galleries and driving artists into exile, tearing down posters they consider obscene, demanding bans on books that don’t conform to their version of history, vandalising research institutes and threatening its academics, forcing film studios to change scripts or musicians to alter lyrics, destroying mosques and abusing Muslims. In the process, they have plunged India into chaos and alienated many sectors of this multicultural society. Most seriously, they threaten the secular India of its founding fathers.

This is a timely effort. The point needs to be made, and made with some force. The recent rise of intolerance across the world is disturbing. And of all the people I know, Salil is uniquely qualified to write this book.

The book will be available in India soon, but can be pre-ordered from here or here.

Amit Varma wrote about the book recently, quoting a poem Salil wrote for his mother, Harsha Tripathi, dedicating the book to her. Do read. I believe the poem alone would be worth it!

Delhi HC and Sec 377

So, someone has seen sense in this great nation of ours! Read the entire judgement here.

The judgement is beautifully written. I’ll quote the parts that I think have far-reaching implications here:

Pg 26:
Dignity as observed by L’Heureux-Dube, J is a difficult concept to capture in precise terms [Egan v. Canada,
(1995) 29 CRR (2nd) 79 at 106]. At its least, it is clear that the constitutional protection of dignity requires us to acknowledge the value and worth of all individuals as members of our society. It recognises a person as a free being who develops his or her body and mind as he or she sees fit. At the root of the dignity is the autonomy of the private will and a person’s freedom of choice and of action. Human dignity rests on recognition of the physical and spiritual integrity of the human being, his or her humanity, and his value as a person, irrespective of the utility he can provide to others. The expression “dignity of the individual” finds specific mention in the Preamble to the Constitution of India.

Pg 61:
enforcement of public morality does not amount to a “compelling state interest” to justify invasion of the zone of privacy of adult homosexuals engaged in consensual sex in private without intending to cause harm to each other or others.

Pg 62:
Further, Justice O’Connor while concurring in the majority judgment added that:
“Indeed, we have never held that moral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest, is a sufficient rationale under the Equal Protection Clause to justify a law that discriminates among groups of persons.”[page 582]

Pg 64:
Thus popular morality or public disapproval of certain acts is not a valid justification for restriction of the fundamental rights under Article 21. Popular morality, as distinct from a constitutional morality derived from constitutional values, is based on shifting and subjecting notions of right and wrong. If there is any type of “morality” that can pass the test of compelling state interest, it must be “constitutional” morality and not public morality.

Pg 86:
At the outset, the Court observed that the Act in question is a preconstitutional legislation and although it is saved in terms of Article 372 of the Constitution, challenge to its validity on the touchstone of Articles 14, 15 and 19 of the Constitution of India, is permissible in law. There is thus no presumption of constitutionality of a colonial legislation. Therefore, though the statute could have been held to be a valid piece of legislation keeping in view the societal condition of those times, but with the changes occurring therein both in the domestic as also international arena, such a law can also be declared invalid.

Pg 96:
Respect for human rights requires that certain basic rights of individuals should not be capable in any circumstances of being overridden by the majority, even if they think that the public interest so requires. Other rights should be capable of being overridden only in very restricted circumstances. These are rights which belong to individuals simply by virtue of their humanity, independently of any utilitarian calculation.

Pg 100:
The role of the judiciary is to protect the fundamental rights. A modern democracy while based on the principle of majority rule implicitly recognizes the need to protect the fundamental rights of those who may dissent or deviate from the majoritarian view. It is the job of the judiciary to balance the principles ensuring that the government on the basis of number does not override fundamental rights.

Pg 104:
If there is one constitutional tenet that can be said to be underlying theme of the Indian Constitution, it is that of ‘inclusiveness’. This Court believes that Indian Constitution reflects this value deeply ingrained in Indian society, nurtured over several generations. The inclusiveness that Indian society traditionally displayed, literally in every aspect of life, is manifest in recognising a role in society for everyone. Those perceived by the majority as “deviants’ or ‘different’ are not on that score excluded or ostracised.

Read the whole thing. It’s fabulous. And mark my words, this is a landmark judgement!

links for 2009-07-01

• A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture – Peter Bregman – HarvardBusiness.org
  "You change a culture with stories. Right now your stories are about how hard you work people. Like the woman you forced to work on her wedding day. You may not be proud of it, but it's the story you tell. That story conveys your culture simply and reliably. And I'm certain you're not the only one who tells it. You can be sure the bride tells it. And all her friends. If you want to change the culture, you have to change the stories."
  …To start a culture change all we need to do is two simple things:
  1. Do dramatic story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then let other people tell stories about it.
  2. Find other people who do story-worthy things that represent the culture we want to create. Then tell stories about them…
  We live by stories. We tell them, repeat them, listen to them carefully, and act in accordance with them.
  We can change our stories and be changed by them.
  (tags: culture leadership business management change storytelling organization changemanagement)
• The Irascible Professor-commentary of the day 06-26-09.  Education's new angle.
  Unfortunately, without deep knowledge, the best you can have is a shallow understanding. Without any knowledge, meaning facts, any understanding you think you have is illusory, baseless, and void. The "new angle" on teaching continues the bankrupt reform tradition of replacing specific content knowledge with vague attitudinal goals, where social studies curricula are more concerned with how students feel about history than what they know about it.
  You can't attain understanding without knowledge, and you can't acquire knowledge without mastering facts. You can't skip the grunt work, even if it's often dull and painstaking. That's true in any discipline. Our children need to realize and accept this. So do the experts who mastermind our schools. So do we all. That's the new angle on teaching and learning that we desperately need. More gimmicks won’t help.
  True, grappling with facts and turning them into knowledge can be hard work.
  But reckoning with ignorance is even harder.
  (tags: Education facts analysis history)
• The Asian Age – Enjoy the difference
  Since the notion of spying on prisoners through the night was ridiculous, the IG said it was better to discontinue the condom project, and pretend there was no homosexuality — and no criminal activity — in the prison in the first place. Ignorance was bliss, damn the public health consequences.
  The story above is instructive and in some respects uniquely Indian. It reveals the extremes to which the Indian bureaucratic mind can go…It leaves one wondering: does the law exist to make life easier for society, or does society exist as a useful framework within which to test whimsical law?
  The issue of legalising homosexuality and removing or amending Section 377 is typical of this conundrum…
  Is liberalisation not also about the expansion of individual freedom, about the citizen’s liberty from the tyranny of bad laws, behaviour inspectors and a nanny state that wants to know how people live their lives?
  …the gay/lesbian issue is a compelling examination of the quality of our democracy.
  (tags: homosexuality laws india discrimination)

links for 2009-06-30

• Amazon Taps Its Inner Apple | Fast Company
  Jeff Bezos is trying to do to book publishers what Steve Jobs of Apple did to the music industry. With its iPod and iTunes Store, Apple carved out a largely virgin market so fast that it was able to wrest control of the digital-music distribution system and thus dictate what the record labels could do. With Amazon jamming (its latest earnings are sky-high even as other online retailers are in a state of malaise), Bezos may sense similar opportunity, a moment when he, in true Jobs-like fashion, could colonize this growing niche for the Amazon ecosystem. Should that happen, book publishers would have more to fear than just being squeezed. Amazon could phase them out completely, treating them as the ultimate middlemen orphaned by a new technology.
  (tags: kindle apple books innovation ebooks business amazon bezos)