“The biggest fear that people in a cannibal society would harbor would be that of sleeping. One could never be sure that one would wake up if one slept soundly. “Are you hungry, I know the look in your eye, you are hungry, stay away from me”. – Jerry Seinfeld.
Hi All,
It has become warmer here with temperatures between 10 to 15 degrees which means no thermals and single jackets. So wondrous the human body is – if it was this cold in India, we would have been shivering – like Einstein said, everything is relative. Anyway, hope the last Wide Angle stirred something in you – didn’t hear from too many people. This week I write about this fantastic book that I read over a period of 5 weeks. It is 600 page long but very interesting which meant I was able to finish it – been quite a while since I have read such a long book. The book is called “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” and is written by Simon Sebag Montefiore. The author is a British historian and has travelled extensively through the ex Soviet empire in the nineties after it collapsed. He also did an extensive study of the Stalinist times through interviews with different people associated with that period and studying recently opened archives of the key players of Stalin’s regime. From these, he has constructed a fascinating inner world of Stalin’s court and the narration of the major historical events through the eyes of this court.
I had briefly touched upon Stalin in Wide Angle 5 i.e. Animal Farm where I had written that Animal Farm was an allegory for what turn the Communist revolution took under Stalin. When I finished reading this book, I can almost relate everything that is described in Animal Farm to events in the book that I am writing about. Wonder how George Orwell was so well informed. For the communists, Stalin is God, the Karats and Yechurys and Achutanandans of the world have pictures of Stalin in their offices. Karunanidhi has even named his name after Stalin. However, for most accounts, Stalin is placed up there with Hitler in terms of deaths caused (20 million deaths directly caused excluding WW2). I really wonder how ideology can blind people so much that they worship a mass murderer – after reading this book, I was mostly disgusted by Stalin and co but I was also impressed the way he led the Soviets to victory in WW2. In today’s column, I will touch upon a few aspects of Stalin’s life from this book and while doing so highlight what an unbelievable world these people lived in and what havoc they caused to so many lives while building a great empire.
Beginnings:
Stalin was born in 1878 in a vassal state of the Tsarist Russian empire called Georgia. This state is distinctly un-Russian with historically being a different kingdom with its own culture. People from Georgia are more like Sicilians with vengeful attitudes, quirky natures and emotional cores. Born to a cobbler, Stalin became associated with the Bolveshiks (Communism started in Russia with this name) around 1905 and steadily climbed up its ranks through repeated imprisonments and exiles by the Tsarist forces during the long struggle for the Revolution. He became Lenin’s close confidant along with Trotsky and after capture of power, became a member of the government. On Lenin’s death, Trotsky was named as his successor but it was Stalin with his ruthless drive and partnerships who managed to become Premier in 1924.
The initial years of power:
In his initial years as Premier, Stalin was more of a first among equals rather than being the complete dictator he later became. He had many close buddies who were his partners during the revolutionary struggle – Molotov who later became PM and then foreign minister during WW2, Kaganovich (Jewish) who ran railways and was Stalin’s Deputy, Sergo Ordzhonikidze who was his close friend and Heavy Industries Minister, Bulganin who was Defense minister, Voroshilov who was a defense commissar, Yagoda who was his secret police chief and ran the NKVD (predecessor of KGB) and Andrei Zhdanov who was his friend and a fellow intellectual of caliber equal to Stalin. I have named all these people because what follows next is what happened to them. These were magical times for the friends and the book describes these folks as the Magnates of the empire. The revolution was new and they all were building up a country with the newest dogma around which was a religious creed to them – Bolshevism. Life was about working hard and partying hard with Stalin often leaning on them for advice and support. These magnates worked feverishly planning the five year plans, executing them, then holidaying for weeks in country houses (Dachas in Russian) with Stalin.
Stalin was married to Nadya Alliluyeva at that time though this marriage was rocky with both being unable to connect to each other. The wives of the magnates were also very strong during this phase with each boasting of personal connect with Stalin and joining in the court as well as parties. Most of the wives were also important post holders in the Communist Party as well as Government.
Turning point:
Something snapped in Stalin when his wife Nadya committed suicide, she was depressed due to which she took this step. She was survived by three children with Svetlana being the youngest and most favorite of Stalin. From this point, Stalin became the ruthless person inside which led to so much havoc. He considered many of the wives being instrumental or at least not having prevented this suicide which was to have an effect later.
Collectivization/anti Kulak drive:
Before the death of Nadya and during the sweet years of co-existence with the magnates, the Communist party had started with something called “Collectivized farming”. This meant that there was going to be no private property from now on and all farmers had to collect on a communal farm where they would raise crops together and be paid accordingly. This was resisted by the Kulaks (term used for the relatively affluent farmers in Russia). This resistance was met by tremendous force by the party which resulted in deportation and massacre of hundreds of thousands of farmers. In their zeal to collect the targeted quotas of grains, the party workers squeezed every grain out of reluctant farmers often branding even a small farmer as a “kulak”. Public trials of kulaks were common and so were executions. This brought about a tremendous famine in the countryside due to botched up farming production which emptied villages and towns and killed a few million people. The book describes the total apathy and denial shown by Stalin and his magnates who thought the negative reports were simply fabrications by the enemies and ordered even stringent measures.
The Terror:
Around 1933, the behavior of Stalin towards his court started changing with his patience for opposition running thin. This is where Yezov (Blackberry) stepped in, he was a bisexual dwarf who was also a sadist. The terror officially started around 1936 when they first arrested a couple of “rightist” peers of Stalin - Rykov and Bukharin and arranged show trials for them. Both of them were executed with their families also sent to slave labor camps. Yezov was relentless in his pursuit of “enemies of the people” and soon turned his attention to liquidating the regional bosses of the party along with their families. Then they turned their attention to the Army where most of the top generals were arrested. One of the most brilliant generals and Chief of Staff Tukhachevsky was arrested, tortured and executed for being a Trotskyite and this was followed with a purging of the Army off its top generals. Through this period, Stalin kept ticking and signing off lists of people who were to be arrested and liquidated. The chain was such that the arrested people were tortured brutally and made to denounce others who were in turn arrested and tortured to reveal other names.
After this, Stalin turned his attention to the wives of his closest comrades and many of them were arrested and killed. The wife of his closest confidant Poskrebyshev called Bronka was arrested and Poskrebyshev never got out of this shock though he continued to serve Stalin with the same intensity. In most of the cases, Stalin encouraged the comrades whose wives were arrested to remarry. The Terror also touched his own family wherein his brothers in law Stanislav Redens and Alyosha Svanidze were arrested and tortured and then sent to slave camps. The terror of course ended by taking the life of the person who had caused most of it – Yezov. This coincided with the rise of a remarkable secret policeman Lavrenti Beria who arrested Yezov and took over his role and became Stalin’s closest confidante.
It was during this time that Sergo who was Stalin’s closest friend was so harassed by the Party that he committed suicide.
The War:
Stalin knew that he was no match for Hitler in a fight since the army was recently purged off its best generals so he got Molotov to negotiate a non-aggression pact with Germany. Of course, Hitler betrayed them and attacked Russia in Operation Barbarossa in 1941. The book describes the moments before the invasion when Stalin was getting detailed reports of German troop mobilization on his borders but chose to ignore them and threatened anyone who tried to show it up. When the attack happened, Stalin went into a depression for a day when the magnates seriously thought of replacing him. He was back though and was soon directing operations. The first year was disastrous for the Soviets with defeats everywhere and German tanks in sight of the Kremlin. These disasters were primarily caused because of the amateurish magnates leading troops on the front and making a hash of it. Soon Stalin realized his folly and handed the war effort over to Marshal Zukov and other professional Generals who reversed the war first at Stalingrad and then at Kursk (the biggest tank battle in history). However, he took a momentous decision before this when they were in two minds whether to evacuate Moscow or not – Stalin stayed put working from an underground railway station while bombings happened overhead.
The strategy of throwing in millions of men (not caring for lost lives) into the effort along with breakneck production of armaments at gun point worked and the Russians drove back the Germans out of their territory and eventually captured Berlin. This is where Stalin was at his most glorious and became a world statesman along with Roosevelt and Churchill. It was at this point that the Terror had also stopped. It was soon to restart.
The Jew Massacre:
After the war started the Cold War with America. In Stalin’s mind, the Jews who were omnipresent in his party and government as well as arts and society were potentially American agents and this belief led to disaster. Many Jewish intellectuals, artists, scientists were arrested by Beria, tortured and murdered. This terror also touched Molotov’s very talented wife Polina who was accused of being a “Jew spy” and arrested and sentenced to slave labor. At this point around 1948-49, Stalin was fatigued due to the stresses of the war and was increasingly becoming senile and paranoid. This helped Beria who played up these fears and had many more people killed. Even Zhdanov who was Stalin’s peer and a gifted intellectual fell out of favor and died of severe disease ignored by his friend.
The Doctor’s plot:
The most ridiculous episode of this entire show was the Doctor’s plot which happened from 1951 up to Stalin’s death in 1953. Stalin suspected that the top doctors of his regime were involved in a plot to kill his magnates (Zhdanov’s death was pinned on them) and this led to arrest, torture and execution of many a top doctors in the state. His closest doctor who was also the family doctor of the entire cabinet Vinogradov was arrested and tortured simply because he had suggested that Stalin take it easy due to his health and age. The architect of this all was Beria and his people especially Abekumov who was another rising star of NKVD. This drama continued up to Stalin’s death.
Death:
Before his death, the magnates and their lifestyles had become very depraved. There used to be drinking sessions every night that lasted till dawn where Stalin made everyone drink till they puked or passed out. Beria had a special office where he brought and raped women. Most of the magnates had looted priceless articles from all over the world. Some months before Stalin’s death, his attention had now turned to Molotov and Mikoyan who were being excluded from meetings and it was almost certain that they were next in line to be arrested. Suddenly, Stalin suffered a stroke. His bodyguards called the magnates who came in and saw but did not have the courage to call a doctor since if Stalin woke up, he would nix them for trying to challenge him. Nothing happened for 12 hours after which they called doctors. Stalin had lost a lot of faculty by then and eventually died. Beria was most likely to succeed him but Molotov and Khruschev had him arrested through General Zukov and he was shot soon after. As all know, Khruschev succeeded Stalin and opened up the regime for the better till it got closed back under Brezhnev.
This is where the book ends and the prologue states where all the prime actors and their descendants are today.
Analysis:
Don’t have much to analyze here, I am more amazed about how someone can cause so much damage to multitudes and still live with a clear conscience not to mention strut around. How can people go about normally - the magnates that - is knowing what they were doing to their closest comrades. How can the suffering of so many not affect the people in charge who continued to inflict it? I believe that ideology (which includes religion as well) does this to people where nothing can come in the way of achieving that glorious utopia which really is nothing but the satisfaction of fantasies and egos of a few people who are at the helm of it – ideology is nothing but a tool for use by these people. The strangest part is that children of Zhdanov, Molotov, Beria all respect Stalin till date despite knowing what he did to them and others. Most of the people he executed cried “Long live Stalin, long live Bolshevism” before they were shot. I thank God that these ugly regimes were destroyed along with the eclipse of the ideology as well. Their remnants still lurk around in India, hope they continue to remain scantly relevant the way they are.
I know it was a long write up, it was very painful for me to write because there was so much content and I didn’t know what to keep and exclude. This was the best I could do in terms of brevity. Hope you enjoyed reading.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Wide Angle 25 - Thoughts on 3 Idiots
Yes!! Yes!! Yes!!
25th column, silver jubilee it is!! Never thought that I could reach this far when I started this little affair. Like my mum said the other day “This is your first achievement in life”. Certainly seems like it. Hope I have been able to entertain you all and provide a wider angle to the world from my view. Please write back with your comments on what you felt reading my work (that is if you were reading them at all ) and what else you would like to read. Apart from this milestone, last week has been rather stressful with 14 hours of work, illness for me, my family and the extended Infosys family here as well. But, things are alright now as they say “All is well”. Back to today’s Wide Angle. Since it is the silver jubilee, I thought I’d write my own thoughts and also write on something more mainstream and popular. I hope everyone has seen 3 Idiots by now and has enjoyed it I presume. The movie has become a cult and has led to introspection amongst many on the scheme of things. I’d like to present my point of view on the movie and link it to the bigger picture. To do that, I am going to analyze the different characters in the movie that are most certainly metaphorical and represent a point of view on the big load called Indian Education system as well as competition in general.
To Begin With:
Everyone has felt good about this movie – firstly, it is entertaining to the core with lots of laughs and a core message so you can’t go wrong there. It also stands for the underdog which considering human nature, everyone thinks he is. The reason why it has done so well is because it has appealed to the “critical mass” which generally doesn’t stand first in class and has been made to feel guilty about it. I have also heard contrary views from a few columnists/people saying that it encourages people to run away from competition and “hard work”. I would rather state the obvious that the movie stands for – follow your passion instead of only running behind success – excel at what you do and you will b successful. I don’t think it reviles hard work but they could have gone easy on painting black and whites (Bollywood won’t be itself without it right) with the characters and also condoning simply unacceptable behavior like peeing on your principal’s door. Let me analyze the different characters now and let us see what this comes up with. Before I do that, I’d like to state one thought that came up when we were discussing the movie in the pub the other day. Aamir Khan is like the “Rancho” of Bollywood and Mr. Shahrukh is like the “Chatur” of the industry – both have their own ways but they are both successful (hope I haven’t antagonized the lady population by saying this).
The Characters:
Rancho – This is most certainly an ideal character but I have seen very few such people in my life especially in India simply because the system/culture does not encourage such behavior. When I say such people, I mean it to the degree shown in the movie, there are many such people at differing levels of “Rancho-ness” and more often than not, these are successful. I’d say that to get into an IIT, you need to be a Chatur, but those who make it to IIMs are often more “Rancho” plus “Chatur”. The concept behind this is simple, if you are studying something, “learn” it after “understanding” it rather than simply “learn” it – by heart I mean. During our engineering days, people did very well at the written papers but used to be shit scared of orals because that’s where you were probed on “fundas”. One of my friend believed in “fundas”, he often used to get the same marks in both orals and theory – 45/50 in orals and 45/100 in theory. Needless to say, he is very successful today. There were a couple of other folks who were very intelligent and designed their own crosswords – both went to IIMs. A word comes to mind here “Auto-didactic” which means self taught. I think if everyone has this attitude, no matter which school/college you go to, you will always look to excel and success will follow as Rancho says.
Chatur – I believe this character has become more popular than Rancho. The anti-Rancho – the other way to success. Possibly the easier way – simply rote it, butter up, trip the competition and count success by the numbers. Everyone has seen such characters in their lives and those who were not Chaturs almost disliked this guy. However, from Chatur’s point of view, what wrong did he do? He was simply driven to succeed, he wasn’t super brilliant like Rancho – he had to mug. If we examine closely, there is more of a Chatur in everyone than a Rancho. It is very hard to stand out and be different, one rather follow the tried and tested methods and simply excel at that. In the movie, they showed him mugging up at exams but if it was the US where they do more projects than concentrate on theory, Chatur would anyway have done all the projects with zeal probably taking dad’s help etc. He represents conformity and playing the game instead of breaking the rules. He also represents mindless participation in the “race” but honestly, would an average guy with no super human intelligence afford to not participate in the “race”. All said and done, it is very easy to castigate Chatur and it has been done with abandon (with the accent and showing him being “different”) but more often than not, Chaturs become CEOs and COOs. The scene when Chatur challenges Rancho after the “speech” especially shows the soft side when he asks “Maine tumhara kya bighada hai?” – it is here that he has been shown up as a normal human being who is simply looking to “get ahead”.
Virus – I believe this represents despotic behavior that a person slips into. It all started for Virus with his personal brilliance because of which his American professor gave him the “pen”. To add to that, he is competitive and successful. To such people, understanding lack of superlative ability or mediocrity is very difficult. Why did Sachin not make a brilliant captain – it is very difficult to look at things from the point of view of a person less capable than you and get him on board and performing because you never “understand” what it means to be not as brilliant. More often than not, the John Wrights of the world become better coaches than the Greg Chappells. Then Virus takes over the institute and takes it to #1. To brilliance, success and competitiveness gets added pride and then hubris. It is an institute he has created with its rules and for such people, nothing can be greater than their creation. If you look closely, Virus is more closer to Rancho than Chatur – it is a Rancho who has turned over to the “Dark Side” by his own success. Like I repeatedly say, leaders can often slip into being “Virus” if they are not too careful about their vehemence regarding what they believe in. This often happens to religious, political leaders who stand for an ideology and sacrifice their families for it.
Farhan’s father –they have got this one exactly right without any exaggeration. Most of us are engineers and this movie got everyone wondering why they became one. The answer to that question is also the reasoning behind Farhan’s father’s aspirations for his son. When most of us old folks became engineers, there were really only two options for middle class students – doctor or engineering. The reason why this was so was simple – it is only in these two fields especially engineering that you could make a decent income without being the best or the luckiest. It is not a zero/one situation like let’s say the acting profession where if you are not successful, you are a loser. Here, losers could also make decent money to feed themselves hence parents wanted “engineering” for their sons. This was also the feature of a “poor” economy where there were only few careers because there was very less economic activity. A lot has changed for us since then – with a growing economy and a richer society, more and more specialized professions are and will become “honorable” e.g. “hair stylists” or “Anchors” and people will get to follow what they like. This is what happens in the West – when every job starts to pay enough money and the economy is stable enough to make sure that the enough money is really “enough”, fathers of Farhans would not say this when they are born “Mera beta engineer banega”.
Raju/Farhan – very obvious characters, they stand for the supposed “losers” who are often at the back but have sparks nevertheless. I have been there during my Boston’s Computer Course where I was amongst the bottom two. In Blue Star, I was put in a “non-prestigious” project because of my bottom rank. No sweat – I simply worked harder and have not done too bad for myself. If you are a Farhan and your father can afford it, simply do what you like because you will do that well and will succeed at it. If your father/mother cannot afford it and you are stuck with a profession you don’t like, try and be the father/mother who can afford his kid to do anything he wants – my theory is that one generation has to work very hard and save/create lot of money so that the forthcoming generations can be secure and happy. The first generation has to make that “sacrifice” though. If you are the first generation – recognize the fact and get to work. If you are a Raju, then you are already the first generation and he knows it, his only problem is that he has not reconciled himself to the “last” position. My take is this – life is a marathon, you have to work for 35 years or more and then live for another 25. If you are towards the bottom of the academic ladder, it just means you have to run a little harder later on to catch up but it doesn’t mean you are out of the race. Moment Raju recognizes this, he is free and succeeds on his own terms.
ICE – When I write about the college, I take it as a metaphor for the education system. Why are marks/placements/rote learning so important in ICE? It is the same as getting into IIT/IIM etc. is for us in India. It is because of “shortage”. This also links back to the reservation issue which most of us are so distraught about. There are two aspects to the working life – one education and the other a job. Both were in short supply, jobs have now become liberated and are in some abundance because of the economic reforms. Education is still in shackles. Someday I will write about small government but as an example – suppose potatoes are produced by one farmer and sold by only one shop in the town, these two can make enormous profits by raising prices the way they want by creating artificial shortages . The same is applicable for education in India. It is not about the rat race or rote learning or over-ambitious parents – it is a demand and supply thing – economics 101. The demand for education is huge because of the population and aspirations in addition to education being a ticket to good life. The supply is limited because the government i.e. politicians + bureaucrat nexus controls it. Why do we have only 5-6 IITs and 5-6 IIMS. For 1 billion people, we should have at least 10000. If the government cannot build them, let private players do it with proper regulation to guard against unfair fees. The day education becomes abundantly available, the mad race will also stop because everyone will be able to get a proper education. But the government won’t let go of this golden goose because they are able to buy votes (by reservations), make money (by donations), extort (by harassing the few private institutes that run) and most of all controlling the supply of the one valuable commodity in India – education.
To conclude, this is a great entertaining movie with a good message but we need to recognize the underlying facts in the movie that I just highlighted. There is a very real danger of people taking the characters literally and start shirking competition or losing their edge, it will only lead to disastrous results. The fact is that competition never leaves one – it is present in socialist countries too so better be ready for it. The only thing you can do well is to take the Rancho method to success i.e. really understand what you learn and take it forward.
25th column, silver jubilee it is!! Never thought that I could reach this far when I started this little affair. Like my mum said the other day “This is your first achievement in life”. Certainly seems like it. Hope I have been able to entertain you all and provide a wider angle to the world from my view. Please write back with your comments on what you felt reading my work (that is if you were reading them at all ) and what else you would like to read. Apart from this milestone, last week has been rather stressful with 14 hours of work, illness for me, my family and the extended Infosys family here as well. But, things are alright now as they say “All is well”. Back to today’s Wide Angle. Since it is the silver jubilee, I thought I’d write my own thoughts and also write on something more mainstream and popular. I hope everyone has seen 3 Idiots by now and has enjoyed it I presume. The movie has become a cult and has led to introspection amongst many on the scheme of things. I’d like to present my point of view on the movie and link it to the bigger picture. To do that, I am going to analyze the different characters in the movie that are most certainly metaphorical and represent a point of view on the big load called Indian Education system as well as competition in general.
To Begin With:
Everyone has felt good about this movie – firstly, it is entertaining to the core with lots of laughs and a core message so you can’t go wrong there. It also stands for the underdog which considering human nature, everyone thinks he is. The reason why it has done so well is because it has appealed to the “critical mass” which generally doesn’t stand first in class and has been made to feel guilty about it. I have also heard contrary views from a few columnists/people saying that it encourages people to run away from competition and “hard work”. I would rather state the obvious that the movie stands for – follow your passion instead of only running behind success – excel at what you do and you will b successful. I don’t think it reviles hard work but they could have gone easy on painting black and whites (Bollywood won’t be itself without it right) with the characters and also condoning simply unacceptable behavior like peeing on your principal’s door. Let me analyze the different characters now and let us see what this comes up with. Before I do that, I’d like to state one thought that came up when we were discussing the movie in the pub the other day. Aamir Khan is like the “Rancho” of Bollywood and Mr. Shahrukh is like the “Chatur” of the industry – both have their own ways but they are both successful (hope I haven’t antagonized the lady population by saying this).
The Characters:
Rancho – This is most certainly an ideal character but I have seen very few such people in my life especially in India simply because the system/culture does not encourage such behavior. When I say such people, I mean it to the degree shown in the movie, there are many such people at differing levels of “Rancho-ness” and more often than not, these are successful. I’d say that to get into an IIT, you need to be a Chatur, but those who make it to IIMs are often more “Rancho” plus “Chatur”. The concept behind this is simple, if you are studying something, “learn” it after “understanding” it rather than simply “learn” it – by heart I mean. During our engineering days, people did very well at the written papers but used to be shit scared of orals because that’s where you were probed on “fundas”. One of my friend believed in “fundas”, he often used to get the same marks in both orals and theory – 45/50 in orals and 45/100 in theory. Needless to say, he is very successful today. There were a couple of other folks who were very intelligent and designed their own crosswords – both went to IIMs. A word comes to mind here “Auto-didactic” which means self taught. I think if everyone has this attitude, no matter which school/college you go to, you will always look to excel and success will follow as Rancho says.
Chatur – I believe this character has become more popular than Rancho. The anti-Rancho – the other way to success. Possibly the easier way – simply rote it, butter up, trip the competition and count success by the numbers. Everyone has seen such characters in their lives and those who were not Chaturs almost disliked this guy. However, from Chatur’s point of view, what wrong did he do? He was simply driven to succeed, he wasn’t super brilliant like Rancho – he had to mug. If we examine closely, there is more of a Chatur in everyone than a Rancho. It is very hard to stand out and be different, one rather follow the tried and tested methods and simply excel at that. In the movie, they showed him mugging up at exams but if it was the US where they do more projects than concentrate on theory, Chatur would anyway have done all the projects with zeal probably taking dad’s help etc. He represents conformity and playing the game instead of breaking the rules. He also represents mindless participation in the “race” but honestly, would an average guy with no super human intelligence afford to not participate in the “race”. All said and done, it is very easy to castigate Chatur and it has been done with abandon (with the accent and showing him being “different”) but more often than not, Chaturs become CEOs and COOs. The scene when Chatur challenges Rancho after the “speech” especially shows the soft side when he asks “Maine tumhara kya bighada hai?” – it is here that he has been shown up as a normal human being who is simply looking to “get ahead”.
Virus – I believe this represents despotic behavior that a person slips into. It all started for Virus with his personal brilliance because of which his American professor gave him the “pen”. To add to that, he is competitive and successful. To such people, understanding lack of superlative ability or mediocrity is very difficult. Why did Sachin not make a brilliant captain – it is very difficult to look at things from the point of view of a person less capable than you and get him on board and performing because you never “understand” what it means to be not as brilliant. More often than not, the John Wrights of the world become better coaches than the Greg Chappells. Then Virus takes over the institute and takes it to #1. To brilliance, success and competitiveness gets added pride and then hubris. It is an institute he has created with its rules and for such people, nothing can be greater than their creation. If you look closely, Virus is more closer to Rancho than Chatur – it is a Rancho who has turned over to the “Dark Side” by his own success. Like I repeatedly say, leaders can often slip into being “Virus” if they are not too careful about their vehemence regarding what they believe in. This often happens to religious, political leaders who stand for an ideology and sacrifice their families for it.
Farhan’s father –they have got this one exactly right without any exaggeration. Most of us are engineers and this movie got everyone wondering why they became one. The answer to that question is also the reasoning behind Farhan’s father’s aspirations for his son. When most of us old folks became engineers, there were really only two options for middle class students – doctor or engineering. The reason why this was so was simple – it is only in these two fields especially engineering that you could make a decent income without being the best or the luckiest. It is not a zero/one situation like let’s say the acting profession where if you are not successful, you are a loser. Here, losers could also make decent money to feed themselves hence parents wanted “engineering” for their sons. This was also the feature of a “poor” economy where there were only few careers because there was very less economic activity. A lot has changed for us since then – with a growing economy and a richer society, more and more specialized professions are and will become “honorable” e.g. “hair stylists” or “Anchors” and people will get to follow what they like. This is what happens in the West – when every job starts to pay enough money and the economy is stable enough to make sure that the enough money is really “enough”, fathers of Farhans would not say this when they are born “Mera beta engineer banega”.
Raju/Farhan – very obvious characters, they stand for the supposed “losers” who are often at the back but have sparks nevertheless. I have been there during my Boston’s Computer Course where I was amongst the bottom two. In Blue Star, I was put in a “non-prestigious” project because of my bottom rank. No sweat – I simply worked harder and have not done too bad for myself. If you are a Farhan and your father can afford it, simply do what you like because you will do that well and will succeed at it. If your father/mother cannot afford it and you are stuck with a profession you don’t like, try and be the father/mother who can afford his kid to do anything he wants – my theory is that one generation has to work very hard and save/create lot of money so that the forthcoming generations can be secure and happy. The first generation has to make that “sacrifice” though. If you are the first generation – recognize the fact and get to work. If you are a Raju, then you are already the first generation and he knows it, his only problem is that he has not reconciled himself to the “last” position. My take is this – life is a marathon, you have to work for 35 years or more and then live for another 25. If you are towards the bottom of the academic ladder, it just means you have to run a little harder later on to catch up but it doesn’t mean you are out of the race. Moment Raju recognizes this, he is free and succeeds on his own terms.
ICE – When I write about the college, I take it as a metaphor for the education system. Why are marks/placements/rote learning so important in ICE? It is the same as getting into IIT/IIM etc. is for us in India. It is because of “shortage”. This also links back to the reservation issue which most of us are so distraught about. There are two aspects to the working life – one education and the other a job. Both were in short supply, jobs have now become liberated and are in some abundance because of the economic reforms. Education is still in shackles. Someday I will write about small government but as an example – suppose potatoes are produced by one farmer and sold by only one shop in the town, these two can make enormous profits by raising prices the way they want by creating artificial shortages . The same is applicable for education in India. It is not about the rat race or rote learning or over-ambitious parents – it is a demand and supply thing – economics 101. The demand for education is huge because of the population and aspirations in addition to education being a ticket to good life. The supply is limited because the government i.e. politicians + bureaucrat nexus controls it. Why do we have only 5-6 IITs and 5-6 IIMS. For 1 billion people, we should have at least 10000. If the government cannot build them, let private players do it with proper regulation to guard against unfair fees. The day education becomes abundantly available, the mad race will also stop because everyone will be able to get a proper education. But the government won’t let go of this golden goose because they are able to buy votes (by reservations), make money (by donations), extort (by harassing the few private institutes that run) and most of all controlling the supply of the one valuable commodity in India – education.
To conclude, this is a great entertaining movie with a good message but we need to recognize the underlying facts in the movie that I just highlighted. There is a very real danger of people taking the characters literally and start shirking competition or losing their edge, it will only lead to disastrous results. The fact is that competition never leaves one – it is present in socialist countries too so better be ready for it. The only thing you can do well is to take the Rancho method to success i.e. really understand what you learn and take it forward.
Wide Angle 23 - Dubai
"The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities -- that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future -- will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands."
Chairman of Berkshire Hathway during the course of a different market boom
Hello All,
The quote above is regarding stock market or any such bubbles and their subsequent crashes. Everyone knows who the Chairman of Berkshire Hathway is – the legendary Warren Buffet. The principles that apply to stock markets or Enrons or Satyams or Housing bubbles are essentially the same – relentless greed that makes everyone crazy and hampers their capacity to know when to stop. This results in over capacities or unrealistic valuations and investment based purely on “hope” and not on “substance” which then lead to it all coming crashing down when “reality” sinks in. This is also true of national economies and nations as well. I just came across a very well researched and written article by a journalist/columnist for the Independent called Johann Hari. The article is called “The Dark Side of Dubai” and is written on his experiences and observations after spending time in Dubai and meeting all sorts of people there. We have read about Dubai and its slave ways in relation to the way Indian workers are treated there but this article shows the picture from all angles and that is what impressed me and prompted me to write about it.
Dubai, the name invokes images of the “Burj-Al-Dubai” the boat shaped hotel, the Palm shaped islands, the artificial ski ranges, artificial beaches, swanky malls, duty free shopping festivals. To many it is a Disneyland where all dreams come true. This city is a marvelous achievement – thirty years back, it was a desert, tribes roamed there with no water to speak of. People lived primitive lives. The city was founded as a small village in the mid 18th century and it served as a trading post for people from all over. It was named after a local locust called “Daba”. The British controlled it till 1971 post which they gave up control of it. As the British were leaving, Dubai the town decided to align itself with six neighboring states like Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates was created. A dribble of oil was discovered there around that time though it was nothing much compared to neighboring Abu Dhabi. Sheikh Makhtoom who took charge was perplexed as to what to do since most of the population there was of tribal nomads and there was very little oil.
The solution that he devised was brilliant as well as ingenious – he decided to build something that would be ever-lasting and keep generating revenue long after the oil was gone. He decided to open Dubai’s arms to the world – a city of tourism and financial services. The companies all over the world were invited to invest in Dubai with very low taxes, friendly policies and superb infrastructure. Millions of dollars, pounds poured in along with talented people and almost swamped the local populace – which forms only 5 percent of the population of Dubai now. The city almost fell from the sky in three decades and Dubai went from the 18th century to the 21st century in a generation. It is a shining model of Arab enterprise and is looked at as an enlightened society as compared to the fundamentalist region around it. Behind this success story are some very inconvenient truths which Hari has exposed in his article which I will now portray and will conclude with my thoughts on the subject which will tie in with the opening quote.
Essentially Dubai consists of three classes in its population – the expatriates i.e. mostly Westerners who form the upper class of the city, the local Emiratis – headed by Sheikh Makhtoom and then the huge foreign underclass that has and continues to build the city and are trapped there. The third class is hidden from plain view though being omnipresent in blue overalls. Hari tells tales of all the three classes by talking to them and living amongst them. He also tells the tale of the economy and the facilities built at ridiculous costs that are now unused due to recession. Finally he talks about the environmental degradation that the enormous growth is causing to the city. Let us look at the tale of the three classes first:
Expats – This word is mostly used to describe people from the Western/Rich Asian countries coming to Asian/African companies and serving in high positions. It always amuses me that when these people leave their countries and take up a job with us, they are “Expatriates”, whereas when we leave our country and take up a job with them, we are called “Immigrants”. Double standards anyone? Anyway, these expats are offered fantastic salaries as CEOs, COOs, CFOs of the Dubai branches of multinationals o the tune of 40,0000 pounds per month etc. They often do now work which is done by the Asians under them. There are virtually no taxes to speak of which means life is one big party for them. They frequent malls where they can blow their money on 24 million $ diamonds or a 10000 $ fur coat and go to specialty restaurants and hotels – it is like they are enjoying their first world pleasures at astronomical salaries and having a ball. However, the thing that pleases them the most is the availability of a large servant class. It is like they have to do nothing since they are surrounded by maids (mostly Fillipino but with the recession they have become expensive so it is Ethiopian maids who are in demand now).
Hari met an English couple who were laughing and were thrilled that they had to do “nothing” since the servants would do “anything” for them. The gentleman said, these folks would even follow you into the bathroom and help you pee if you asked them to. The expats don’t get this back home and so they love it. The slavery of the underclass doesn’t bother them, they have learnt to ignore it. However, there are countless people like Karen who are stuck in Dubai with no money and survive on the charity of strangers. Karen is a Canadian who came to Dubai with her husband who got offered a big post in a MNC. Life was a party for them until her husband got in debt. In Dubai, if you are in debt and can’t pay it off, you are arrested and have to serve prison time. This is what happened to her husband and she is now waiting for him to be released from prison and spends time sleeping in cars in parking lots at the mercy of Bangladeshi attendants.
The slave class – This is the world of the people who have built the fancy buildings of Dubai. This also consists of the countless maids and other workers in the country. The story is similar – they are all brought to Dubai by agents who promise them much more money than they earn at home (e.g. one Bangladeshi was offered 400$ a month). The moment they land here, their passports are taken away by their employers and they are paid a fraction of what they were promised (the same Bangladeshi is paid 90$). Most of them take loans to come over so the first few years go in collecting money to repay the loans. Working conditions for the construction workers are horrible with them having to work hard for 12 hours in 50 degrees heat. The living conditions are even worse with them being housed in cramped tin rooms which become extremely hot during days and are equally hot during night. Water given to them is not properly desalinated so they drink it salty. At that heat, all the fluids of the body are let out through sweat which makes it impossible to urinate for days. It is the same heat in which the expats and locals don’t spend more than a few minutes out in the open – the slave class works in it till their back breaks.
Pay is held up many times and strikes are brutally broken with water cannons and imprisonment. For the maids life is even worse. When they start employment with the Expats or locals, the practice is to take away their passports. They are made to work from 6 am to 1 am in the night with little food. Many of them are beaten and tortured if they make mistakes. This is where the hypocrisy of the Western world is exposed isn’t it – they preach to us about human rights but their own citizens do the same to others in other countries which is never mentioned. The labor class is housed in shanty towns away from the city and they are ferreted in metal buses which roast them inside.
The Emiratis – These are the locals who are completely pampered by the government. Their income is tax free and education up to PHD level is free. Employment is guaranteed in government positions and you are almost never fired. They have a gala time in the malls and cafes. There are many who feel that the populace is too molly cuddled and that makes them lazy but no one is really complaining. The one thing no one has is political freedom but not many people mind that since the argument is “My mother used to carry pots with water over miles in the desert and look where we are now, the Sheikh has given us everything, why should we complain?”. The clincher argument given to Westerners if anyone points out the slave class is “Do you want Dubai to go the Iran or Saudi way? We are the modern face of Arabs and everyone in this region aspires to be like us so you have to support us!”
Recession, environment and impact – The recession has pulled the rug under Dubai’s feet though. Most of the ambitious construction projects have stopped. The posh hotels e.g. Atlantis run empty where they used to be packed pre-recession. Most of the malls are deserted these days with traders in a state of panic. We all know what happened to Dubai World with its debt problems. Debt is what Dubai was built on and its debt is 107% of its GDP. The economy was rescued by Abu Dhabi’s oil money and to keep them happy, lot more restrictions have been put in place in the society now.
The environmental impact of this colossal building activity is huge. There is virtually no water in Dubai since it is in the desert (its next to the sea of course on one side which makes it a tourist attraction) with scanty rainfall. They however have large golf courses that need four million gallons of water to be pumped on the grounds every day, they have lawns that have to be sprinkled with water all day, they have mountain sized freezers where they have built a ski slope with real snow. How is this water provided for? It is desalinated from the sea – there are large desalination plants across the gulf which belch out more smoke than factories put together. The water they produce is the most expensive in the world which is when wasted on frivolous expenses like swimming pools in rooms and shark tanks looking onto hotel suites etc. The city has expanded so much that the sewage is simply dumped into the sea which then washes on to the beaches and makes everything unsafe. Journalists writing about this as banned or put in prison and foreigners talking about it are threatened with deportation.
Conclusion:
What Johann Hari sees is a city built with reckless abandon and which is in a real danger of being overtaken by its debt, the desert, the sea and unrest from its slave class. He leaves the article at that and leaves everything for the future to decide whether things will continue the same way or whether there will be a fast decline. Since the world is not spending now, who is going to buy those fancy islands, the lavish apartments, stay in the fancy hotels, shop at the swanky malls. And worst of all, this has been built with borrowed money. Will this Shangri-la last, no one knows. The facts are quite eye opening and prove the adage that “All that glitters is not gold”.
My two cents – Dubai is simply a super-projection of what happened in Enron, Satyam or anywhere else. You have a good idea and are initially successful. Then you start making money and ostensibly start getting creative with it trying to be rich faster – the slippery slope begins here. This is when you don’t know when to stop and you continue to slide further till the point of no return passes and then boom – one day it all comes crashing down. At a microcosmic level, it happens to individuals who invest in stocks, or gamble or bet on something – taking risks is good but taking foolish risks and not knowing when to stop is suicidal. The successful countries/organizations are those that base their wealth on something concrete and productive and always stay in touch with the ground realities and never go “over the top”. There is also a danger that an organization becomes only number-focused which makes them lose sight of their real “business” and the focus starts shifting towards what is on paper – this is what happened with Andy Fastow coming up with crazy financial models in Enron or the bizarre credit packages that the investment bankers designed on Wall Street. This is what shifts you away from ground reality and ultimately destroys you.
Enough gloom for the day – hope Dubai doesn’t really go down and we all visit it and enjoy it someday but it is really a sobering thought that even such successes have a dark side. This is what I wanted to highlight - hope I was also able to make my analysis clear. There will be some more thoughts on the last paragraph in later Wide Angles. Till then, Cheerio.
Chairman of Berkshire Hathway during the course of a different market boom
Hello All,
The quote above is regarding stock market or any such bubbles and their subsequent crashes. Everyone knows who the Chairman of Berkshire Hathway is – the legendary Warren Buffet. The principles that apply to stock markets or Enrons or Satyams or Housing bubbles are essentially the same – relentless greed that makes everyone crazy and hampers their capacity to know when to stop. This results in over capacities or unrealistic valuations and investment based purely on “hope” and not on “substance” which then lead to it all coming crashing down when “reality” sinks in. This is also true of national economies and nations as well. I just came across a very well researched and written article by a journalist/columnist for the Independent called Johann Hari. The article is called “The Dark Side of Dubai” and is written on his experiences and observations after spending time in Dubai and meeting all sorts of people there. We have read about Dubai and its slave ways in relation to the way Indian workers are treated there but this article shows the picture from all angles and that is what impressed me and prompted me to write about it.
Dubai, the name invokes images of the “Burj-Al-Dubai” the boat shaped hotel, the Palm shaped islands, the artificial ski ranges, artificial beaches, swanky malls, duty free shopping festivals. To many it is a Disneyland where all dreams come true. This city is a marvelous achievement – thirty years back, it was a desert, tribes roamed there with no water to speak of. People lived primitive lives. The city was founded as a small village in the mid 18th century and it served as a trading post for people from all over. It was named after a local locust called “Daba”. The British controlled it till 1971 post which they gave up control of it. As the British were leaving, Dubai the town decided to align itself with six neighboring states like Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates was created. A dribble of oil was discovered there around that time though it was nothing much compared to neighboring Abu Dhabi. Sheikh Makhtoom who took charge was perplexed as to what to do since most of the population there was of tribal nomads and there was very little oil.
The solution that he devised was brilliant as well as ingenious – he decided to build something that would be ever-lasting and keep generating revenue long after the oil was gone. He decided to open Dubai’s arms to the world – a city of tourism and financial services. The companies all over the world were invited to invest in Dubai with very low taxes, friendly policies and superb infrastructure. Millions of dollars, pounds poured in along with talented people and almost swamped the local populace – which forms only 5 percent of the population of Dubai now. The city almost fell from the sky in three decades and Dubai went from the 18th century to the 21st century in a generation. It is a shining model of Arab enterprise and is looked at as an enlightened society as compared to the fundamentalist region around it. Behind this success story are some very inconvenient truths which Hari has exposed in his article which I will now portray and will conclude with my thoughts on the subject which will tie in with the opening quote.
Essentially Dubai consists of three classes in its population – the expatriates i.e. mostly Westerners who form the upper class of the city, the local Emiratis – headed by Sheikh Makhtoom and then the huge foreign underclass that has and continues to build the city and are trapped there. The third class is hidden from plain view though being omnipresent in blue overalls. Hari tells tales of all the three classes by talking to them and living amongst them. He also tells the tale of the economy and the facilities built at ridiculous costs that are now unused due to recession. Finally he talks about the environmental degradation that the enormous growth is causing to the city. Let us look at the tale of the three classes first:
Expats – This word is mostly used to describe people from the Western/Rich Asian countries coming to Asian/African companies and serving in high positions. It always amuses me that when these people leave their countries and take up a job with us, they are “Expatriates”, whereas when we leave our country and take up a job with them, we are called “Immigrants”. Double standards anyone? Anyway, these expats are offered fantastic salaries as CEOs, COOs, CFOs of the Dubai branches of multinationals o the tune of 40,0000 pounds per month etc. They often do now work which is done by the Asians under them. There are virtually no taxes to speak of which means life is one big party for them. They frequent malls where they can blow their money on 24 million $ diamonds or a 10000 $ fur coat and go to specialty restaurants and hotels – it is like they are enjoying their first world pleasures at astronomical salaries and having a ball. However, the thing that pleases them the most is the availability of a large servant class. It is like they have to do nothing since they are surrounded by maids (mostly Fillipino but with the recession they have become expensive so it is Ethiopian maids who are in demand now).
Hari met an English couple who were laughing and were thrilled that they had to do “nothing” since the servants would do “anything” for them. The gentleman said, these folks would even follow you into the bathroom and help you pee if you asked them to. The expats don’t get this back home and so they love it. The slavery of the underclass doesn’t bother them, they have learnt to ignore it. However, there are countless people like Karen who are stuck in Dubai with no money and survive on the charity of strangers. Karen is a Canadian who came to Dubai with her husband who got offered a big post in a MNC. Life was a party for them until her husband got in debt. In Dubai, if you are in debt and can’t pay it off, you are arrested and have to serve prison time. This is what happened to her husband and she is now waiting for him to be released from prison and spends time sleeping in cars in parking lots at the mercy of Bangladeshi attendants.
The slave class – This is the world of the people who have built the fancy buildings of Dubai. This also consists of the countless maids and other workers in the country. The story is similar – they are all brought to Dubai by agents who promise them much more money than they earn at home (e.g. one Bangladeshi was offered 400$ a month). The moment they land here, their passports are taken away by their employers and they are paid a fraction of what they were promised (the same Bangladeshi is paid 90$). Most of them take loans to come over so the first few years go in collecting money to repay the loans. Working conditions for the construction workers are horrible with them having to work hard for 12 hours in 50 degrees heat. The living conditions are even worse with them being housed in cramped tin rooms which become extremely hot during days and are equally hot during night. Water given to them is not properly desalinated so they drink it salty. At that heat, all the fluids of the body are let out through sweat which makes it impossible to urinate for days. It is the same heat in which the expats and locals don’t spend more than a few minutes out in the open – the slave class works in it till their back breaks.
Pay is held up many times and strikes are brutally broken with water cannons and imprisonment. For the maids life is even worse. When they start employment with the Expats or locals, the practice is to take away their passports. They are made to work from 6 am to 1 am in the night with little food. Many of them are beaten and tortured if they make mistakes. This is where the hypocrisy of the Western world is exposed isn’t it – they preach to us about human rights but their own citizens do the same to others in other countries which is never mentioned. The labor class is housed in shanty towns away from the city and they are ferreted in metal buses which roast them inside.
The Emiratis – These are the locals who are completely pampered by the government. Their income is tax free and education up to PHD level is free. Employment is guaranteed in government positions and you are almost never fired. They have a gala time in the malls and cafes. There are many who feel that the populace is too molly cuddled and that makes them lazy but no one is really complaining. The one thing no one has is political freedom but not many people mind that since the argument is “My mother used to carry pots with water over miles in the desert and look where we are now, the Sheikh has given us everything, why should we complain?”. The clincher argument given to Westerners if anyone points out the slave class is “Do you want Dubai to go the Iran or Saudi way? We are the modern face of Arabs and everyone in this region aspires to be like us so you have to support us!”
Recession, environment and impact – The recession has pulled the rug under Dubai’s feet though. Most of the ambitious construction projects have stopped. The posh hotels e.g. Atlantis run empty where they used to be packed pre-recession. Most of the malls are deserted these days with traders in a state of panic. We all know what happened to Dubai World with its debt problems. Debt is what Dubai was built on and its debt is 107% of its GDP. The economy was rescued by Abu Dhabi’s oil money and to keep them happy, lot more restrictions have been put in place in the society now.
The environmental impact of this colossal building activity is huge. There is virtually no water in Dubai since it is in the desert (its next to the sea of course on one side which makes it a tourist attraction) with scanty rainfall. They however have large golf courses that need four million gallons of water to be pumped on the grounds every day, they have lawns that have to be sprinkled with water all day, they have mountain sized freezers where they have built a ski slope with real snow. How is this water provided for? It is desalinated from the sea – there are large desalination plants across the gulf which belch out more smoke than factories put together. The water they produce is the most expensive in the world which is when wasted on frivolous expenses like swimming pools in rooms and shark tanks looking onto hotel suites etc. The city has expanded so much that the sewage is simply dumped into the sea which then washes on to the beaches and makes everything unsafe. Journalists writing about this as banned or put in prison and foreigners talking about it are threatened with deportation.
Conclusion:
What Johann Hari sees is a city built with reckless abandon and which is in a real danger of being overtaken by its debt, the desert, the sea and unrest from its slave class. He leaves the article at that and leaves everything for the future to decide whether things will continue the same way or whether there will be a fast decline. Since the world is not spending now, who is going to buy those fancy islands, the lavish apartments, stay in the fancy hotels, shop at the swanky malls. And worst of all, this has been built with borrowed money. Will this Shangri-la last, no one knows. The facts are quite eye opening and prove the adage that “All that glitters is not gold”.
My two cents – Dubai is simply a super-projection of what happened in Enron, Satyam or anywhere else. You have a good idea and are initially successful. Then you start making money and ostensibly start getting creative with it trying to be rich faster – the slippery slope begins here. This is when you don’t know when to stop and you continue to slide further till the point of no return passes and then boom – one day it all comes crashing down. At a microcosmic level, it happens to individuals who invest in stocks, or gamble or bet on something – taking risks is good but taking foolish risks and not knowing when to stop is suicidal. The successful countries/organizations are those that base their wealth on something concrete and productive and always stay in touch with the ground realities and never go “over the top”. There is also a danger that an organization becomes only number-focused which makes them lose sight of their real “business” and the focus starts shifting towards what is on paper – this is what happened with Andy Fastow coming up with crazy financial models in Enron or the bizarre credit packages that the investment bankers designed on Wall Street. This is what shifts you away from ground reality and ultimately destroys you.
Enough gloom for the day – hope Dubai doesn’t really go down and we all visit it and enjoy it someday but it is really a sobering thought that even such successes have a dark side. This is what I wanted to highlight - hope I was also able to make my analysis clear. There will be some more thoughts on the last paragraph in later Wide Angles. Till then, Cheerio.
Wide Angle 21 - Plane Crashes and Power Distance
The cold seems to have eased just a bit here. This week was pretty busy and Friday is here again. Time for another Wide Angle. This time it is about something very interesting that I had read sometime back, it will be slightly long but quite interesting. This is from a book called Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. He is one of my favorite reads because he does much more of what I do on a little scale – analyzes lives, situations and comes up with theories. His first book was called “The Tipping Point” which I am sure most have heard about and many have read. His second book was “Blink” and “Outliers” is his third book. The book is about people who are “outliers” in any field and what it is that contributes to them being so – I will write a detailed Wide Angle on the book itself some day. Today’s write up is about a chapter from that book called “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes”.
The chapter primarily focuses on plane crashes that happen around the world but specifically about Korean Air. Korean Air had a notorious record of plane crashes and beginning from 1997 where a major air crash on a flight from Seoul to Guam in the South Pacific. This plane crash happened because of the plane not being able to spot the runway during its landing due to extremely bad weather and hence crashing into a nearby hill – the crash killed 228 out of the 254 people on board. Twenty years prior to this, a Korean Air Boeing 707 wandered into Russian airspace and was shot down. Two years after that, a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul. Three years after that, the airline lost another 747 near Sakhalin Island in Russia, followed by a Boeing 707 that crashed over the Andaman sea in 1987 and then another in Cheju, South Korea. If compared with other airlines, the “loss rate” of Korean airline was 4.79 crashes per million departures while that of an American carrier United Airlines was 0.27 per million departures.
The problem continued with another 747 crashing a year after the Guam crash, a jetliner overran a runway at Korea’s Ulsan airport eight weeks after that, a Korean McDonnell Douglas 83 that rammed into an embankment at Pohang airport the following March and then a month after that, a Korean Air passenger jet crashed in a residential area of Shanghai. After a few months, a Korean Air cargo plane crashed just after takeoff from London’s Stansted airport despite the fact that a warning bell went off in the cockpit fourteen times. In April 1999, Delta Airlines and Air France suspended their flying partnership with Korean Air. There were videos circulated of Korean Air crew slacking off and it was a major PR disaster as much that the Korean President had to speak up to shore up confidence in it. But then a small miracle happened with Korean Air turning around and today it is a member of the prestigious SkyTeam alliance. Its safety record since 1999 is spotless and experts will tell you that KA is the safest airline in the world. What happened that changed this…intriguing isn’t it?
The chapter that goes into details of what is common in plane crashes – in general, it is not one big thing that goes wrong like they show in movies but a series of small things going wrong that add up to an accident. In a typical crash – the weather is poor, not terrible but bad enough to stress the pilot more than usual. In many crashes, the plane is behind schedule so the pilot is hurried. In 52 percent of the crashes, the pilot has been flying and awake for more than 12 hours at a stretch, meaning he is tired and not thinking sharply. 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they are not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start – a typical accident involves seven consecutive errors. They may be conducted by the first pilot who tends to do something which is compounded by the co-pilot making another mistake, which may lead to another and so on. The errors are not problems of knowledge or flying skill. The kind of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication (Sounds familiar?). One pilot knows something important and doesn’t tell the other. One pilot does something wrong and the other doesn’t catch the error. An airplane operates best when the two pilots work in tandem and it is much safer than when a single pilot is flying the plane and another person simply is there when the first person is not in a position to pilot anymore.
This is where the ethnic theory of plane crashes comes in to play. It has been observed that most of the plane crashes have been in Asian or South American airlines. Let me explain a concept called Power Distance Index (PDI) which is quite prevalent amongst many studies. It simply refers to cultures and the premium that is placed on hierarchies in that culture - how much the individual matters more than the collective (e.g. Americans have a very low PDI and the individual there matters more than the collective i.e.society). This concept is based on some outstanding work done by a Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede who worked for IBM HR in Europe. The Hofstede’s dimensions are amongst most widely used paradigms in cross-cultural psychology – they essentially differentiate cultures based on how well they tolerate ambiguity. It is worth noting that the cultures with high tolerance of ambiguity are also ones with a high PDI which means that there is a great deal of layering in communication between people. In low PDI countries, power is something that power holders almost ashamed of and they try to underplay it. In high PDI countries, power is a status symbol and everyone is expected to kowtow to people in power. When a study was done on pilots across the world, imagine which country was at the top of the PDI ratings in terms of its pilots – South Korea.
Put simply, it means that there was a very unequal power balance between the pilot and the co-pilot in the cockpit of Korean Air. This meant that the co-pilot and first engineer simply didn’t speak clearly if they saw something going wrong or their pilot making a mistake. Here is a brief transcript of the final thirty minutes of the Guam flight before it went down. The situation was that the light beacon that showed the way to planes in Guam was in disrepair so the pilot decided to go for a visual landing. He had flown 12 hours straight and was quite tired. For a visual landing, clear weather would have helped but they were going straight into a storm and eventually they couldn’t come out of it soon enough before landing to see where they were going and crashed into a hill. The captain said “This flight is too long, they make us work to maximum.”. After a minute he says,”Eh…really…sleepy”. The first officer replies “Of course”. Then comes one of the most critical moments in the flight when the first officer decides to speak up: “Don’t you think it rains more in this area?”. What he meant to say was “Captain, you have committed us to a visual approach, with no backup plan and the weather is terrible. You think that we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway, what if we don’t. Its pitch black outside and pouring rain and the gliding beacon is down.” He can’t say that because of the PDI so he only hints.
The next moment, the plane breaks out of the clouds and the flight engineer says “Is it Guam, yes it is”. The pilot says “Good”. But it is not good, they have simply come out of clouds for a moment. They are still twenty miles from the airport and there is enormous amount of bad weather ahead which the flight engineer can see on his radar so now he decides to speak up. “Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot”, he says. A second hint from the flight deck, what he really meant was “This is not a night where you can rely on eyes to land the plane. Look at what the weather radar is telling us: there’s trouble ahead”. The captain says “Yes, they are very useful.” He isn’t listening. The plane is flying toward a VOR beacon which is on the side of the mountain and they don’t see it. At 1:41:48, “Wiper on” and the flight engineer turns the wiper on.
At 1:41:59, the first officer asks, ”Not in sight?”. He is looking for the runway and he can’t see it. He has had a sinking feeling in his stomach for some time now. One second later, the Ground Proximity Warning System calls out “Five hundred feet”. The plane is five hundred feet off the ground. The ground in this case is the Nimitz hill but the crew thinks that the ground is the runway but they can’t see it. At 1:42:19, the first officer finally says “Let us make a missed approach”. 1:42:20 First Engineer: “Not in sight”. But it is too late, the plane crashes in the next 20 seconds. As you can see, if the first officer had simply said what he meant to say when he said “Don’t you think it rains more?”, things would have been much different. This is what happens in a high PDI culture where the distance between the boss and subordinates is so high that the subordinates simply leave everything to the boss to run and merely follow orders and are very subtle when it comes to giving bad news.
How did the miraculous turnaround happen for Korean Air then? They hired an outsider from Delta Airlines, David Greenberg to run their flight operations. He evaluated the English language skills of the crews and found that they were very poor. What he essentially did was to dictate that the lingua franca of Korean Air was going to be English from then on. Everyone was trained in English and it was mandated that only English be spoken in the cockpit. It also gelled well with the fact that the language of aviation world over is English. English is a very low PDI language where the only way of addressing someone is “You”. Compare that with our languages where there is an “aap”, “tum” and a “tu”. This worked wonders for KA with the cultural baggage and the PDI suddenly being left at the door of the cockpit and crashes came down to nil. Straight communication between members of the cockpit and the captain being one of the “team” simply changed the game here.
I hope I was able to clearly explain the concept to you. My take is that the best running sectors in India e.g. the IT industry are because the language of transactions is English which also means a lower PDI. More often than not, we leave our cultural baggage outside the office door when we enter. The situation in government and other industries is not as happy where the higher you go, more insulated you become. Politics is the worst example where there are numerous sycophants and hangers-on for a minister. I had seen an example of this. We were leaving our rented house in Bangalore. A very well educated and dressed man came to see it in the afternoon and then said he will come back in the evening with his “sahib” . He was the manager of some Manufacturing company and his Saheb was a senior manager. The Saheb came in the evening with this same guy and was like a mini-minister with everyone making way for him etc. Kind of explains the whole story.
To conclude, higher PDI often leads to leaders living in unreal worlds because no one tells them the bad news, in fact those who do are persecuted. However, a good leader always needs to have his ears to the ground and look for bad news because that can often be the true picture. This goes back to Wide Angle 5 – Animal Farm where I had said that a leader had to guard against the “I am always right” feeling. If not, any entity, a team, a division, an organization or a government would go the way of Korean Air Flight 801.
Please let me know what you thought of this article. Apologize for the length – there was just so much to say.
The chapter primarily focuses on plane crashes that happen around the world but specifically about Korean Air. Korean Air had a notorious record of plane crashes and beginning from 1997 where a major air crash on a flight from Seoul to Guam in the South Pacific. This plane crash happened because of the plane not being able to spot the runway during its landing due to extremely bad weather and hence crashing into a nearby hill – the crash killed 228 out of the 254 people on board. Twenty years prior to this, a Korean Air Boeing 707 wandered into Russian airspace and was shot down. Two years after that, a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul. Three years after that, the airline lost another 747 near Sakhalin Island in Russia, followed by a Boeing 707 that crashed over the Andaman sea in 1987 and then another in Cheju, South Korea. If compared with other airlines, the “loss rate” of Korean airline was 4.79 crashes per million departures while that of an American carrier United Airlines was 0.27 per million departures.
The problem continued with another 747 crashing a year after the Guam crash, a jetliner overran a runway at Korea’s Ulsan airport eight weeks after that, a Korean McDonnell Douglas 83 that rammed into an embankment at Pohang airport the following March and then a month after that, a Korean Air passenger jet crashed in a residential area of Shanghai. After a few months, a Korean Air cargo plane crashed just after takeoff from London’s Stansted airport despite the fact that a warning bell went off in the cockpit fourteen times. In April 1999, Delta Airlines and Air France suspended their flying partnership with Korean Air. There were videos circulated of Korean Air crew slacking off and it was a major PR disaster as much that the Korean President had to speak up to shore up confidence in it. But then a small miracle happened with Korean Air turning around and today it is a member of the prestigious SkyTeam alliance. Its safety record since 1999 is spotless and experts will tell you that KA is the safest airline in the world. What happened that changed this…intriguing isn’t it?
The chapter that goes into details of what is common in plane crashes – in general, it is not one big thing that goes wrong like they show in movies but a series of small things going wrong that add up to an accident. In a typical crash – the weather is poor, not terrible but bad enough to stress the pilot more than usual. In many crashes, the plane is behind schedule so the pilot is hurried. In 52 percent of the crashes, the pilot has been flying and awake for more than 12 hours at a stretch, meaning he is tired and not thinking sharply. 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they are not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start – a typical accident involves seven consecutive errors. They may be conducted by the first pilot who tends to do something which is compounded by the co-pilot making another mistake, which may lead to another and so on. The errors are not problems of knowledge or flying skill. The kind of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication (Sounds familiar?). One pilot knows something important and doesn’t tell the other. One pilot does something wrong and the other doesn’t catch the error. An airplane operates best when the two pilots work in tandem and it is much safer than when a single pilot is flying the plane and another person simply is there when the first person is not in a position to pilot anymore.
This is where the ethnic theory of plane crashes comes in to play. It has been observed that most of the plane crashes have been in Asian or South American airlines. Let me explain a concept called Power Distance Index (PDI) which is quite prevalent amongst many studies. It simply refers to cultures and the premium that is placed on hierarchies in that culture - how much the individual matters more than the collective (e.g. Americans have a very low PDI and the individual there matters more than the collective i.e.society). This concept is based on some outstanding work done by a Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede who worked for IBM HR in Europe. The Hofstede’s dimensions are amongst most widely used paradigms in cross-cultural psychology – they essentially differentiate cultures based on how well they tolerate ambiguity. It is worth noting that the cultures with high tolerance of ambiguity are also ones with a high PDI which means that there is a great deal of layering in communication between people. In low PDI countries, power is something that power holders almost ashamed of and they try to underplay it. In high PDI countries, power is a status symbol and everyone is expected to kowtow to people in power. When a study was done on pilots across the world, imagine which country was at the top of the PDI ratings in terms of its pilots – South Korea.
Put simply, it means that there was a very unequal power balance between the pilot and the co-pilot in the cockpit of Korean Air. This meant that the co-pilot and first engineer simply didn’t speak clearly if they saw something going wrong or their pilot making a mistake. Here is a brief transcript of the final thirty minutes of the Guam flight before it went down. The situation was that the light beacon that showed the way to planes in Guam was in disrepair so the pilot decided to go for a visual landing. He had flown 12 hours straight and was quite tired. For a visual landing, clear weather would have helped but they were going straight into a storm and eventually they couldn’t come out of it soon enough before landing to see where they were going and crashed into a hill. The captain said “This flight is too long, they make us work to maximum.”. After a minute he says,”Eh…really…sleepy”. The first officer replies “Of course”. Then comes one of the most critical moments in the flight when the first officer decides to speak up: “Don’t you think it rains more in this area?”. What he meant to say was “Captain, you have committed us to a visual approach, with no backup plan and the weather is terrible. You think that we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway, what if we don’t. Its pitch black outside and pouring rain and the gliding beacon is down.” He can’t say that because of the PDI so he only hints.
The next moment, the plane breaks out of the clouds and the flight engineer says “Is it Guam, yes it is”. The pilot says “Good”. But it is not good, they have simply come out of clouds for a moment. They are still twenty miles from the airport and there is enormous amount of bad weather ahead which the flight engineer can see on his radar so now he decides to speak up. “Captain, the weather radar has helped us a lot”, he says. A second hint from the flight deck, what he really meant was “This is not a night where you can rely on eyes to land the plane. Look at what the weather radar is telling us: there’s trouble ahead”. The captain says “Yes, they are very useful.” He isn’t listening. The plane is flying toward a VOR beacon which is on the side of the mountain and they don’t see it. At 1:41:48, “Wiper on” and the flight engineer turns the wiper on.
At 1:41:59, the first officer asks, ”Not in sight?”. He is looking for the runway and he can’t see it. He has had a sinking feeling in his stomach for some time now. One second later, the Ground Proximity Warning System calls out “Five hundred feet”. The plane is five hundred feet off the ground. The ground in this case is the Nimitz hill but the crew thinks that the ground is the runway but they can’t see it. At 1:42:19, the first officer finally says “Let us make a missed approach”. 1:42:20 First Engineer: “Not in sight”. But it is too late, the plane crashes in the next 20 seconds. As you can see, if the first officer had simply said what he meant to say when he said “Don’t you think it rains more?”, things would have been much different. This is what happens in a high PDI culture where the distance between the boss and subordinates is so high that the subordinates simply leave everything to the boss to run and merely follow orders and are very subtle when it comes to giving bad news.
How did the miraculous turnaround happen for Korean Air then? They hired an outsider from Delta Airlines, David Greenberg to run their flight operations. He evaluated the English language skills of the crews and found that they were very poor. What he essentially did was to dictate that the lingua franca of Korean Air was going to be English from then on. Everyone was trained in English and it was mandated that only English be spoken in the cockpit. It also gelled well with the fact that the language of aviation world over is English. English is a very low PDI language where the only way of addressing someone is “You”. Compare that with our languages where there is an “aap”, “tum” and a “tu”. This worked wonders for KA with the cultural baggage and the PDI suddenly being left at the door of the cockpit and crashes came down to nil. Straight communication between members of the cockpit and the captain being one of the “team” simply changed the game here.
I hope I was able to clearly explain the concept to you. My take is that the best running sectors in India e.g. the IT industry are because the language of transactions is English which also means a lower PDI. More often than not, we leave our cultural baggage outside the office door when we enter. The situation in government and other industries is not as happy where the higher you go, more insulated you become. Politics is the worst example where there are numerous sycophants and hangers-on for a minister. I had seen an example of this. We were leaving our rented house in Bangalore. A very well educated and dressed man came to see it in the afternoon and then said he will come back in the evening with his “sahib” . He was the manager of some Manufacturing company and his Saheb was a senior manager. The Saheb came in the evening with this same guy and was like a mini-minister with everyone making way for him etc. Kind of explains the whole story.
To conclude, higher PDI often leads to leaders living in unreal worlds because no one tells them the bad news, in fact those who do are persecuted. However, a good leader always needs to have his ears to the ground and look for bad news because that can often be the true picture. This goes back to Wide Angle 5 – Animal Farm where I had said that a leader had to guard against the “I am always right” feeling. If not, any entity, a team, a division, an organization or a government would go the way of Korean Air Flight 801.
Please let me know what you thought of this article. Apologize for the length – there was just so much to say.
Wide Angle 20 - Daughters Of Shame
This is about a fantastic book I read a couple of weeks by a lady called Jasvinder Sanghera (Jas) titled “Daughters Of Shame”. I had known that something like this existed in Britain but this book really shocked me into the whole concept of “Honor Killings” and “Forced Marriages”. Jas is a Sikh lady who grew up in the UK and who runs a charity called “Karma Nirvana” for the help of South Asian Women in UK. Her first book called “Shame” was a best seller which told her own story, through Daughters of Shame she has brought out the stories of many other girls who shaped Karma Nirvana and freed themselves.
The issue at heart of all this is the concept of Honor or Shame that is the cornerstone of every Asian household, the very old “Log Kya Kahenge” (What will people say?). And as is the wont, it is the daughter of the house who has to bear the burden of the Honor. The book is about many girls in the UK who though being raised in the West are totally kept away from that culture at home because their parents don’t want the “Evil/corrupt” ways of the Whites to influence their girls. The girls are only allowed to go to school and once they are home, they change into an Asian attire, watch only Bollywood movies and are encouraged to learn cooking and sewing. The moment they are of a marriageable age i.e. thirteen and above, they are forced into marriage with a boy they don’t know at all, mostly from the mother country (so that the boy can get a residence in UK) and left stranded in unhappy marriages or end up committing suicide.
Jas’s own sister Robina was forced into an unhappy marriage and she became so miserable that she committed suicide by burning herself. Jas grew up knowing that she would be forced to marry someone like her sister had and when she resisted, she was beaten and abused. Jas had the courage to walk out of her home and begin a new life and eventually formed Karma Nirvana where she helps such girls who are stranded escape and start a new life. Karma Nirvana has been so successful that it has rescued hundreds of girls from being forced into marriage, has forced public opinion against forced marriage thus helping to pass a legislation in UK against it and has started several education programs for the police force and teachers to identify signs of forced marriage and act with compassion for the girls. Jas even won the Woman Of the Year award in the UK for these efforts.
I have already described the pattern that gets followed when the girl becomes of a marriageable age and parents start planning trips to their homeland for marrying off their girls. What also compounds the problems is that crimes carried out due to this (I will cite examples below) for e.g. Honor Killing or kidnapping of the girl by her family once she has left home are treated with kid gloves by policemen or judges on the pretext of being “culturally sensitive”. The white society fails to understand the importance of honor in the Asian community and extent to which people would go to preserve it many times resorting to crime (e.g. murdering the daughter for having an affair”). Many a times, policemen turn away girls who have come to ask for help against a forced marriage or if they see a threat to their lives thinking that it is a family problem and “How can parents threaten their own children”. Jas has tirelessly through the years reached out to hundreds of police precincts explaining this concept thus succeeding in getting a better response for the girls from the policemen. Another factor that works against the girls is the so called “Asian Network”. Asians on the police force more often than not tend to side with the families since they understand the Honor concept and most of the times, they are sent to help the girl by superiors since they are seen to understand the “culture”.
The routine in cases where the girl manages to get away from such a situation is that she calls up Karma Nirvana and Jas or someone else calls up the local policemen who then reach the girls house and escort her out of the house and to a Women’s refuge while her parents and family are screaming their hearts out at her. From here, the journey of loneliness for the girl begins. So far, she has had financial security, a warm family environment which is suddenly denied to her and to top that she has to move around lest her family finds her and brings her back. Many girls are unable to cope with the pressure of it all and go back to their families and what they escaped from. To tackle this, Jas formed a support group with the help of many volunteers called the “Honor Network” which now counsels and helps such girls like a family or friends would.
I will now cite some bone chilling examples of what has happened to the girls (and boys too) she has quoted in the book, many a times the story is repetitive but that just reinforces the message and the horrid truth that this is such a widespread problem in UK.
Uzma – She was a Pakistani girl who got married to a UK boy of Pakistani origin. She took to the Western ways immediately like cutting her hair, wearing western dresses, being well groomed, getting a job. Soon a rumor went out that she was having an affair. Her husband threw her out of the house with her three kids. After a while, they were reunited by the family, but one fine day, her husband got into a fit of rage and killed her with 32 blows of a baseball bat. He then called her three children one by one and beat them to death with the same bat.
Fozia – Another Pakistani girl who ran away from home when she found out she was going to be married. A year before, her three sisters were taken to Pakistan and married off. One of the sisters, Raveeda was protesting to her father that she did not want to marry. Her father who was usually a mild man, pinned her to the wall and held a knife to her throat and said if she didn’t marry he would kill her. The youngest sister who was only 16 protested to her father that her husband had raped her, to which her father said, “This is not rape, it is a husband’s right”.
Heshu Yones – She was a 16 year old Kurdish Muslim. Her father stabbed her 17 times – reason, she had a Christian boyfriend. Her father used to beat her several times every day. She told this to her teachers many times but they ignored it. Her father was sentenced to only 8 years prison since the judge thought he “understood” the pain of the father and his frame of mind. The father was given a hero’s welcome in his community when he came back after jail was over.
Shazia – She is Jas’s right hand person. She ran away from home after being to forced to marry a Pakistani boy who got citizenship because of her and the moment he got it, he started mistreating her. Shazia remembers her friend Shahin who was killed by her father along with her mother, her sister and himself. That day, she and her friend were sitting on a swing in the park since it was a day off school due to teachers’ training. Her father found her there, got very angry and dragged her by her from the swing and did the killings there.
Shabana – She had an affair with a white boy John Henderson. When she revealed this at home, there was shock, dismay at home, her father kept beating her and kicked her in the ribs. Her mother stared blankly at the wall and kept screaming “Oh the Shame! The Shame”. After being beaten up every day with such scenes, she ran away.
Imran – This is not limited to girls. Imran a Pakistani boy who had a very dominating mother was also forced into a marriage with a Pakistani girl. At the age of 14, he had become very rebellious and got into a lot of trouble. His mother sent her to Pakistan to her brother in law’s place to “discipline” him. They took him to a remote village and placed him in custody of a maulvi who taught him the holy book every day. The cruelty was that they tied chains around his ankles with a heavy metal ball which bit into his skin when he tried to walk. He somehow ran away from there after a few days and reached England. Then one day he got the “call” from home that his mother was seriously ill and of course, he had to get married. He finally walked out of the marriage after a few years and now works for Karma Nirvana as a volunteer.
And the stories go on. I was glad that there were not many Indian names in this book apart from a couple of Sikh girls which goes to show that we may have evolved slightly more than our neighbors. Right opposite to my apartment is a house where a Bangladeshi family lives. The mother wears a head scarf and the younger girls don’t, the older girl wears it. The boys are of course, free to do what they like. When we look at them, we now remember characters from this book, I am sure they are going to end up in the same place.
ANALYSIS:
The first thing I’d like to say here is that when people move away from their homeland and culture, they tend to carry a frozen picture of their origin with them. The mother country and its culture moves on but these people still tend to stick to their old ways. I have seen this in many places. Another reason this happens is because a minority feels insecure about their young ones being swept away by the host country’s ways and tend to hold on tightly to their ways to stem the “pollution”. That is how ghettoes are created. Even now, the first question that people ask a person who has reached onsite is “Are there Indians around?”.
The second point that I’d like to make which is slightly controversial but I have been believing and saying this for a long time – the so called “Culture” of ours which we always tom-tom is completely resting on the sacrifice of women. If we say our family system is great, it is because the women hold it together by suffering in silence – eating after everyone has eaten is a prime example, spending least on themselves, leaving their jobs to look after kids etc. This has changed in our generation with a lot more women working and having financial independence but it is still the woman that makes the sacrifice and that is how the family and the “culture” survives (as managers, we have seen many girls asking us for a specific town or country at onsite because her husband is there, how many boys have asked for a specific onsite location because his wife is there, not many). If we are so proud of having less divorces in our country (and this is changing now), it is because women did not have too many options of support (families simply advised them to stay in the husband’s place and adjust to the “abuse”) outside. In the Western world, this was a common scenario in the 40s and 50s, it was after that the women started working in equal measure and government stepped in with lot of help for the single woman – essentially the state has taken the place of the family. Hence, divorces are common and so are re-marriages. Quite often, a couple has “your kid”, “my kid” and “our kid”, but there is a very sound reason behind this as mentioned above. With greater financial independence and even dominance, our “culture” is going to go this way as well though not as sharply. I am not supporting divorce or condoning a family-less society, merely mentioning the facts.
The issue at heart of all this is the concept of Honor or Shame that is the cornerstone of every Asian household, the very old “Log Kya Kahenge” (What will people say?). And as is the wont, it is the daughter of the house who has to bear the burden of the Honor. The book is about many girls in the UK who though being raised in the West are totally kept away from that culture at home because their parents don’t want the “Evil/corrupt” ways of the Whites to influence their girls. The girls are only allowed to go to school and once they are home, they change into an Asian attire, watch only Bollywood movies and are encouraged to learn cooking and sewing. The moment they are of a marriageable age i.e. thirteen and above, they are forced into marriage with a boy they don’t know at all, mostly from the mother country (so that the boy can get a residence in UK) and left stranded in unhappy marriages or end up committing suicide.
Jas’s own sister Robina was forced into an unhappy marriage and she became so miserable that she committed suicide by burning herself. Jas grew up knowing that she would be forced to marry someone like her sister had and when she resisted, she was beaten and abused. Jas had the courage to walk out of her home and begin a new life and eventually formed Karma Nirvana where she helps such girls who are stranded escape and start a new life. Karma Nirvana has been so successful that it has rescued hundreds of girls from being forced into marriage, has forced public opinion against forced marriage thus helping to pass a legislation in UK against it and has started several education programs for the police force and teachers to identify signs of forced marriage and act with compassion for the girls. Jas even won the Woman Of the Year award in the UK for these efforts.
I have already described the pattern that gets followed when the girl becomes of a marriageable age and parents start planning trips to their homeland for marrying off their girls. What also compounds the problems is that crimes carried out due to this (I will cite examples below) for e.g. Honor Killing or kidnapping of the girl by her family once she has left home are treated with kid gloves by policemen or judges on the pretext of being “culturally sensitive”. The white society fails to understand the importance of honor in the Asian community and extent to which people would go to preserve it many times resorting to crime (e.g. murdering the daughter for having an affair”). Many a times, policemen turn away girls who have come to ask for help against a forced marriage or if they see a threat to their lives thinking that it is a family problem and “How can parents threaten their own children”. Jas has tirelessly through the years reached out to hundreds of police precincts explaining this concept thus succeeding in getting a better response for the girls from the policemen. Another factor that works against the girls is the so called “Asian Network”. Asians on the police force more often than not tend to side with the families since they understand the Honor concept and most of the times, they are sent to help the girl by superiors since they are seen to understand the “culture”.
The routine in cases where the girl manages to get away from such a situation is that she calls up Karma Nirvana and Jas or someone else calls up the local policemen who then reach the girls house and escort her out of the house and to a Women’s refuge while her parents and family are screaming their hearts out at her. From here, the journey of loneliness for the girl begins. So far, she has had financial security, a warm family environment which is suddenly denied to her and to top that she has to move around lest her family finds her and brings her back. Many girls are unable to cope with the pressure of it all and go back to their families and what they escaped from. To tackle this, Jas formed a support group with the help of many volunteers called the “Honor Network” which now counsels and helps such girls like a family or friends would.
I will now cite some bone chilling examples of what has happened to the girls (and boys too) she has quoted in the book, many a times the story is repetitive but that just reinforces the message and the horrid truth that this is such a widespread problem in UK.
Uzma – She was a Pakistani girl who got married to a UK boy of Pakistani origin. She took to the Western ways immediately like cutting her hair, wearing western dresses, being well groomed, getting a job. Soon a rumor went out that she was having an affair. Her husband threw her out of the house with her three kids. After a while, they were reunited by the family, but one fine day, her husband got into a fit of rage and killed her with 32 blows of a baseball bat. He then called her three children one by one and beat them to death with the same bat.
Fozia – Another Pakistani girl who ran away from home when she found out she was going to be married. A year before, her three sisters were taken to Pakistan and married off. One of the sisters, Raveeda was protesting to her father that she did not want to marry. Her father who was usually a mild man, pinned her to the wall and held a knife to her throat and said if she didn’t marry he would kill her. The youngest sister who was only 16 protested to her father that her husband had raped her, to which her father said, “This is not rape, it is a husband’s right”.
Heshu Yones – She was a 16 year old Kurdish Muslim. Her father stabbed her 17 times – reason, she had a Christian boyfriend. Her father used to beat her several times every day. She told this to her teachers many times but they ignored it. Her father was sentenced to only 8 years prison since the judge thought he “understood” the pain of the father and his frame of mind. The father was given a hero’s welcome in his community when he came back after jail was over.
Shazia – She is Jas’s right hand person. She ran away from home after being to forced to marry a Pakistani boy who got citizenship because of her and the moment he got it, he started mistreating her. Shazia remembers her friend Shahin who was killed by her father along with her mother, her sister and himself. That day, she and her friend were sitting on a swing in the park since it was a day off school due to teachers’ training. Her father found her there, got very angry and dragged her by her from the swing and did the killings there.
Shabana – She had an affair with a white boy John Henderson. When she revealed this at home, there was shock, dismay at home, her father kept beating her and kicked her in the ribs. Her mother stared blankly at the wall and kept screaming “Oh the Shame! The Shame”. After being beaten up every day with such scenes, she ran away.
Imran – This is not limited to girls. Imran a Pakistani boy who had a very dominating mother was also forced into a marriage with a Pakistani girl. At the age of 14, he had become very rebellious and got into a lot of trouble. His mother sent her to Pakistan to her brother in law’s place to “discipline” him. They took him to a remote village and placed him in custody of a maulvi who taught him the holy book every day. The cruelty was that they tied chains around his ankles with a heavy metal ball which bit into his skin when he tried to walk. He somehow ran away from there after a few days and reached England. Then one day he got the “call” from home that his mother was seriously ill and of course, he had to get married. He finally walked out of the marriage after a few years and now works for Karma Nirvana as a volunteer.
And the stories go on. I was glad that there were not many Indian names in this book apart from a couple of Sikh girls which goes to show that we may have evolved slightly more than our neighbors. Right opposite to my apartment is a house where a Bangladeshi family lives. The mother wears a head scarf and the younger girls don’t, the older girl wears it. The boys are of course, free to do what they like. When we look at them, we now remember characters from this book, I am sure they are going to end up in the same place.
ANALYSIS:
The first thing I’d like to say here is that when people move away from their homeland and culture, they tend to carry a frozen picture of their origin with them. The mother country and its culture moves on but these people still tend to stick to their old ways. I have seen this in many places. Another reason this happens is because a minority feels insecure about their young ones being swept away by the host country’s ways and tend to hold on tightly to their ways to stem the “pollution”. That is how ghettoes are created. Even now, the first question that people ask a person who has reached onsite is “Are there Indians around?”.
The second point that I’d like to make which is slightly controversial but I have been believing and saying this for a long time – the so called “Culture” of ours which we always tom-tom is completely resting on the sacrifice of women. If we say our family system is great, it is because the women hold it together by suffering in silence – eating after everyone has eaten is a prime example, spending least on themselves, leaving their jobs to look after kids etc. This has changed in our generation with a lot more women working and having financial independence but it is still the woman that makes the sacrifice and that is how the family and the “culture” survives (as managers, we have seen many girls asking us for a specific town or country at onsite because her husband is there, how many boys have asked for a specific onsite location because his wife is there, not many). If we are so proud of having less divorces in our country (and this is changing now), it is because women did not have too many options of support (families simply advised them to stay in the husband’s place and adjust to the “abuse”) outside. In the Western world, this was a common scenario in the 40s and 50s, it was after that the women started working in equal measure and government stepped in with lot of help for the single woman – essentially the state has taken the place of the family. Hence, divorces are common and so are re-marriages. Quite often, a couple has “your kid”, “my kid” and “our kid”, but there is a very sound reason behind this as mentioned above. With greater financial independence and even dominance, our “culture” is going to go this way as well though not as sharply. I am not supporting divorce or condoning a family-less society, merely mentioning the facts.
Wide Angle 17 - Great Powers
This week’s Wide Angle is going to be different. It is not going to be about a movie or a book or an event. My writing is always piggy backed on some entity like a book or a movie so this time I have decided to take a position of sorts and put forth my thoughts on a subject in this column. I am going to write about Great Powers – what it takes to make one and where we stand in terms of being one. This is a carry forward from the thread in last week’s Wide Angle where at the end I had quoted the American Secretary of State. This aspect of the world always fascinates me so I have done a little bit of reading on why some powers are big and some who deserve to be are also-rans (any example come to mind?). So here goes.
First things first – what is a Great Power. A Great Power in the world is like a rich and influential person in a family or society who tends to call the shots but is also a benefactor for others. If you remember the patriarchs of old times who lived in big houses and who looked after not just their families but had many other relatives fobbing off them. Often in communities, the richest or most powerful (if it’s a feudal setup) person or family tends to rise above others and is feared/respected by the others – sort of a first among equals. The same logic applies to international relations where certain countries rise above others in terms of power and influence and start dominating politics and economics and others become either their supporters or bitter irritating opponents. Recent example is the US. The basic fulcrum of a Great Power is that its influence and writ runs far beyond its domain and the world looks at it through aspiration-filled eyes. The citizens of these countries are coveted visitors to any country in the world and these countries value them heavily. An American or a British doesn’t need visa to go to most countries in the world while an Indian needs one.
Second point – why should one want to become a Great Power – answer is Why Not? This mostly applies to India. Again it is my personal view but I would want us to become a Great Power. If one is big and has talent and resources, why should one not aspire to be a big power. If you are big and not good enough, all you end up being is a laughing stock. For example – those big kids in school who could beat around and dominate would be feared and respected but those who were big and mild in nature often were poked at and made fun of as “Motu” or whatever. Therefore, if one has the makings of a Great Power, one should aspire to be so and do all that it takes to be one. We had been growing at 3% rate of growth for 40 years and preached to the world about values etc. and we were looked at as whiners and laughed at. It is only with the reforms and the robust economic growth that we achieved that we have gained some respect outside. So bottom line – we should become a Great Power.
Now, what does it take to be a Great Power – like said before – being rich and strong is definitely one thing. You cannot go out and win in the football field if you are not healthy yourself. The first thing that is essential for the making of a Great Power is economic might. This can only be achieved when the people in the country are secure with both internal and external threats in control. This also means that people are free to make money i.e. the enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit of people is not curbed but encouraged. This also means that there is a strong government that takes care of its citizens in terms of security and allows them the freedom to produce, trade and prosper without being predatory. This also means the country has a strong rule of law so that anyone coming in the way of these freedoms is punished quickly. This also means that there is a strong educational system that churns out brilliant minds with useful skills and also funnels research that take the country forward. When all these things converge, a country becomes economically strong.
The period at the end of eighteenth century and whole of nineteenth century was when England dominated the world and had an empire “where the sun never set”. This was also the period when the British had the maximum number of scientists producing path breaking discoveries, a strong merchant class that modernized production, a parliament that was vibrant, a strong educational system, a population that was dynamic and went on to conquer the world. Of course, lot of their wealth was directly “picked” from their colonies but this was always invested in the funding of the Industrial Revolution. The twentieth century was dominated by the US which almost has everything that is described in the previous paragraph which led to it being a strong economy.
The second essential for a Great Power is might which is military might – both in terms of software (people) and hardware (technology). Both the dominant powers were militarily strong in their age. Britain was the primary naval power during the time when conquest was mostly sea based. US dominated when conquest became dependent on the military-industrial complex. Merely investing in a big military doesn’t help as we have seen in the case of Pakistan or Soviet Union. Both UK and US were rich so they had enough spare cash to invest, had lot of technological brains that fuelled inventions and the population had a can-do spirit which led to them being dominant.
The third essential thing is to be able to project this hard power on to the world i.e. to be able to use it effectively to be dominant. To do that, one has to believe in oneself and go the whole hog. Then projecting hard power becomes a series of interventions in disputes, resolving crisis in the world, funding major world agencies, targeting aid to win over good will, arm twisting to win contracts for your corporations etc. You may end up burning your fingers in many places but you also tend to be respected and looked on as the big brother and can shape the world according to your views. Look at the rise of China which might end up dominating the 21st century -they first became rich through 30 years of economic reforms, they slowly built up and modernized their military and also hooked up with many countries through giving aids, donations and increasing influence to become a great power. As an example, for the World Cup in West Indies, Chinese companies built stadiums there for a much lower cost as a goodwill gesture. And now they have bought up so many American treasury bills that the American President went and kowtowed before them.
The last thing that is also very important is soft power. This is the attractiveness of your culture and other softer aspects for e.g. universities or industries that attracts people to you. Look at the US – Hollywood is a great export of the US and this endears them to lot of folks in the world. The American universities and campuses inspire people and invite them and therefore US is such an influence in the world except for the Arab World maybe. This was also the case with Britain where people would die to get into Oxford and Cambridge in the nineteenth century. The Chinese have started to market themselves to the world this way, did you notice how they pulled out all stops to make the Olympics in Beijing a big success. They may soon end up being the next US.
So that is what makes a Great Power – this is really a nutshell of the whole topic but I assume you get the idea. So what will it take for India to be a Great Power. Well, first of all the “I am a victim and I am poor but morally superior” mindset needs to go. Second – all Indians should be aligned to make our country the greatest (I assume this is not going to happen but what’s the harm in dreaming). Third – make the economy even stronger, once you are rich, you have more money to do other things. Fourth and very important –modernize the internal security apparatus because a populace needs to be secure before it can be productive. Fifth – build a solid infrastructure and good rule of law. And the list goes on – the most important thing is to want to be a Great Power and start working towards it – a lot of spin offs will come in and benefit.
This was a short summary of a rather big topic – I am sure the mandarins of the Indian government are striving towards this goal, we as the little guys should do our bit to take our country places so that tomorrow, when your son produces his blue passport at an immigration abroad, he is politely waved in with a smile and a “visa-on-arrival”.
First things first – what is a Great Power. A Great Power in the world is like a rich and influential person in a family or society who tends to call the shots but is also a benefactor for others. If you remember the patriarchs of old times who lived in big houses and who looked after not just their families but had many other relatives fobbing off them. Often in communities, the richest or most powerful (if it’s a feudal setup) person or family tends to rise above others and is feared/respected by the others – sort of a first among equals. The same logic applies to international relations where certain countries rise above others in terms of power and influence and start dominating politics and economics and others become either their supporters or bitter irritating opponents. Recent example is the US. The basic fulcrum of a Great Power is that its influence and writ runs far beyond its domain and the world looks at it through aspiration-filled eyes. The citizens of these countries are coveted visitors to any country in the world and these countries value them heavily. An American or a British doesn’t need visa to go to most countries in the world while an Indian needs one.
Second point – why should one want to become a Great Power – answer is Why Not? This mostly applies to India. Again it is my personal view but I would want us to become a Great Power. If one is big and has talent and resources, why should one not aspire to be a big power. If you are big and not good enough, all you end up being is a laughing stock. For example – those big kids in school who could beat around and dominate would be feared and respected but those who were big and mild in nature often were poked at and made fun of as “Motu” or whatever. Therefore, if one has the makings of a Great Power, one should aspire to be so and do all that it takes to be one. We had been growing at 3% rate of growth for 40 years and preached to the world about values etc. and we were looked at as whiners and laughed at. It is only with the reforms and the robust economic growth that we achieved that we have gained some respect outside. So bottom line – we should become a Great Power.
Now, what does it take to be a Great Power – like said before – being rich and strong is definitely one thing. You cannot go out and win in the football field if you are not healthy yourself. The first thing that is essential for the making of a Great Power is economic might. This can only be achieved when the people in the country are secure with both internal and external threats in control. This also means that people are free to make money i.e. the enterprising and entrepreneurial spirit of people is not curbed but encouraged. This also means that there is a strong government that takes care of its citizens in terms of security and allows them the freedom to produce, trade and prosper without being predatory. This also means the country has a strong rule of law so that anyone coming in the way of these freedoms is punished quickly. This also means that there is a strong educational system that churns out brilliant minds with useful skills and also funnels research that take the country forward. When all these things converge, a country becomes economically strong.
The period at the end of eighteenth century and whole of nineteenth century was when England dominated the world and had an empire “where the sun never set”. This was also the period when the British had the maximum number of scientists producing path breaking discoveries, a strong merchant class that modernized production, a parliament that was vibrant, a strong educational system, a population that was dynamic and went on to conquer the world. Of course, lot of their wealth was directly “picked” from their colonies but this was always invested in the funding of the Industrial Revolution. The twentieth century was dominated by the US which almost has everything that is described in the previous paragraph which led to it being a strong economy.
The second essential for a Great Power is might which is military might – both in terms of software (people) and hardware (technology). Both the dominant powers were militarily strong in their age. Britain was the primary naval power during the time when conquest was mostly sea based. US dominated when conquest became dependent on the military-industrial complex. Merely investing in a big military doesn’t help as we have seen in the case of Pakistan or Soviet Union. Both UK and US were rich so they had enough spare cash to invest, had lot of technological brains that fuelled inventions and the population had a can-do spirit which led to them being dominant.
The third essential thing is to be able to project this hard power on to the world i.e. to be able to use it effectively to be dominant. To do that, one has to believe in oneself and go the whole hog. Then projecting hard power becomes a series of interventions in disputes, resolving crisis in the world, funding major world agencies, targeting aid to win over good will, arm twisting to win contracts for your corporations etc. You may end up burning your fingers in many places but you also tend to be respected and looked on as the big brother and can shape the world according to your views. Look at the rise of China which might end up dominating the 21st century -they first became rich through 30 years of economic reforms, they slowly built up and modernized their military and also hooked up with many countries through giving aids, donations and increasing influence to become a great power. As an example, for the World Cup in West Indies, Chinese companies built stadiums there for a much lower cost as a goodwill gesture. And now they have bought up so many American treasury bills that the American President went and kowtowed before them.
The last thing that is also very important is soft power. This is the attractiveness of your culture and other softer aspects for e.g. universities or industries that attracts people to you. Look at the US – Hollywood is a great export of the US and this endears them to lot of folks in the world. The American universities and campuses inspire people and invite them and therefore US is such an influence in the world except for the Arab World maybe. This was also the case with Britain where people would die to get into Oxford and Cambridge in the nineteenth century. The Chinese have started to market themselves to the world this way, did you notice how they pulled out all stops to make the Olympics in Beijing a big success. They may soon end up being the next US.
So that is what makes a Great Power – this is really a nutshell of the whole topic but I assume you get the idea. So what will it take for India to be a Great Power. Well, first of all the “I am a victim and I am poor but morally superior” mindset needs to go. Second – all Indians should be aligned to make our country the greatest (I assume this is not going to happen but what’s the harm in dreaming). Third – make the economy even stronger, once you are rich, you have more money to do other things. Fourth and very important –modernize the internal security apparatus because a populace needs to be secure before it can be productive. Fifth – build a solid infrastructure and good rule of law. And the list goes on – the most important thing is to want to be a Great Power and start working towards it – a lot of spin offs will come in and benefit.
This was a short summary of a rather big topic – I am sure the mandarins of the Indian government are striving towards this goal, we as the little guys should do our bit to take our country places so that tomorrow, when your son produces his blue passport at an immigration abroad, he is politely waved in with a smile and a “visa-on-arrival”.
Wide Angle 16 - Body of Lies
Anyway, today’s Wide Angle is right off the frying pan. Saw this fantastic movie yesterday called “Body of Lies”. It is directed by Ridley Scott (American Gangster fame) and has a strong star cast of Leonardo Decaprio (another sizzling role – no limits to what he can do) and Russell Crowe (simply outstanding in this role). The movie is primarily about spies and the games they play and is set in the modern context of terrorism and the associated geo politics. The setup is the Middle East and it almost completely plays out there with very real characterizations and locales. I really enjoyed this movie which is about 2 and half hours long and I am assuming this would be available on DVDs everywhere because it was released in 2008. Let us look at the movie now.
The central character in the movie is CIA agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo) who is fluent in Arabic and other mid eastern languages. He is a very daring and tough agent who relies more on human intelligence in the field and also in developing strong relationships. The other character in this movie is Ferris’s handler and veteran agent Ed Hoffmann (brilliant depiction by Russell Crowe). He is a more cerebral spy using gizmos, tactics and technology to control and maneuver his way in the spy world. There is constant cooperation and tussle between these two regarding handling of operations and resources. The third character in this movie who makes an impression is the head of Jordanian Intelligence Hani Salaam.
The movie begins with a bomb blast in Manchester, UK where some terrorists blow themselves up during a police raid on them. The thread leads back to a very powerful terrorist chief called Al-Saleem who inspires and manages terrorists in the West. Hoffmann and Ferris are both chasing Al-Saleem. The terrorists have shun all modern forms of communication by not using cell phones, mail etc.. They only communicate via verbal exchanges and manually exchanging CDs etc. Ferris raids a safe house in Iraq of Saleem’s group and retrieves some CDs. These show that the terrorists are holed up in a safe house in a busy marketplace in Amman, Jordan. Hoffmann directs Ferris to go to Amman and take up the Intelligence operations there.
Ferris takes over the operations of the Amman unit by chucking out the ineffectual chief there and starts his play. He gets in touch with Hani Salaam and establishes a link with him asking him to provide surveillance through his agents around the safe house. Hani is a very strong and effective intelligence chief and has tight control over everything that goes on in his country. He tells off Hoffmann in one scene when Hoffmann says he will have to speak to the King of Jordan (it is a monarchy) and Hani says “In the matters of intelligence, I am the King in Jordan”. Hani agrees to help Ferris in return for his word that he will not lie to Hani ever.
Ferris has the operation of surveillance going when suddenly Hoffmann sends his man and the operation is about to get busted. Ferris gets bitten by dogs in this process and has to go to hospital for rabies injections. There he meets a local nurse and falls for her. He starts seeing her and develops a romantic relation with her (all without touching her since this is the Middle East). The exchanges between them are very delicate but loaded with meaning for e.g. Ferris asks her for a date this way ,”How would you like to have a conversation with me outside of this hospital?”. Later on, she tells him that he should meet her sister so that they can continue conversations with her approval. The sister is unhappy with American policy and openly taunts him on that. After the lunch, they both go down and he extends his hand for shaking with her but she says no because the entire neighborhood is watching.
Back to the main narrative, Hani develops an asset in the Saleem group in the safe house in a very ingenious way thus getting an informant. Hoffmann tries to kidnap this guy for information (Americans as always are in a hurry) who escapes and tells the group who then escape the safe house by burning everything. Hani is furious on Ferris and asks him to leave the country in 12 hours. Ferris goes to Langley and confronts Hoffmann and abuses him a lot. He says that Hoffmann is a desk guy and doesn’t know anything about intelligence on ground. He cools down and tells his new plan to Hoffmann. The plan is to stage manage an attack on American forces and show as if it is by another powerful terrorist group. This would prompt Saleem to break radio silence and come out. Using ingenuity and technology, the CIA manage to frame a Jordanian architect called Omar Sadiqui and show as if he is heading a terrorist group.
An attack on American forces is stage managed in Turkey and on the net, Sadiqui is shown as taking the credit. Sadiqui is bombarded with congratulatory messages and even Al-Saleem calls him. The CIA is a step closer to Al-Saleem. In the meanwhile, the terrorists kidnap Sadiqui and get it out from him that Ferris had met him etc. Ferris is now in trouble and to get to him, the terrorists kidnap the nurse and her family. Ferris is asked to travel in a van across the Syrian border into the desert. The Americans are watching all this via satellite with Hoffmann watching over. Three vans come to fetch Ferris and they raise a cloud of dust around Ferris. He is then put in a van and the three vans go in opposite directions when they come out from under the cloud. Hoffmann cannot make out which one to follow – goes to show how human intelligence can beat technology.
Finally, Ferris is tortured by Saleem and his men and just when he is about to be killed, Hani and his soldiers burst in and kill all terrorists and arrest Saleem. Ferris is fed up with the games and leaves the CIA and settles down in the Middle East.
The movie has excellent characterizations – Ferris I already described, Hoffmann is excellent as a Machiavellian spymaster. He is a potbellied slouch with spectacles and speaks from below the rim of his specs. He wears a sweater and has a family with wife and two kids. He mostly speaks on hands-free phone and devises devious plans and gives cold blooded murderous directions while doing the simplest tasks like dropping his daughter to school, watching her soccer game, taking his son to the bathroom etc. He is always unruffled and a touch arrogant because of his power as an American spymaster.
The second powerful and interesting character is Hani – he exudes authority and fear. Always dressed in immaculate suits, handsome and tall with piercing eyes, he is a man in absolute control. He is the embodiment of Eastern values where trust, friendship etc. play a role in every transaction and which is what Ferris has come to know and respect but Hoffmann with his very Western sensibilities does not care about.
There is not much I learnt from the movie except that spy games are very complex and no country is right or wrong in what they do. Generally, in International relations, it is not friends or enemies that count but self interest i.e. your country’s interests that should matter. For example, an American Secretary of State said this about their Foreign Policy “United States has 5% of the world’s population and has access to 50% of the World’s resources, and our policy should be to keep it that way”. This is what Great Powers do, we have a long way to go before we reach that level but slowly we seem to be getting there. Go and watch this movie when you get a chance, nice thriller and some very good acting.
The central character in the movie is CIA agent Roger Ferris (Leonardo) who is fluent in Arabic and other mid eastern languages. He is a very daring and tough agent who relies more on human intelligence in the field and also in developing strong relationships. The other character in this movie is Ferris’s handler and veteran agent Ed Hoffmann (brilliant depiction by Russell Crowe). He is a more cerebral spy using gizmos, tactics and technology to control and maneuver his way in the spy world. There is constant cooperation and tussle between these two regarding handling of operations and resources. The third character in this movie who makes an impression is the head of Jordanian Intelligence Hani Salaam.
The movie begins with a bomb blast in Manchester, UK where some terrorists blow themselves up during a police raid on them. The thread leads back to a very powerful terrorist chief called Al-Saleem who inspires and manages terrorists in the West. Hoffmann and Ferris are both chasing Al-Saleem. The terrorists have shun all modern forms of communication by not using cell phones, mail etc.. They only communicate via verbal exchanges and manually exchanging CDs etc. Ferris raids a safe house in Iraq of Saleem’s group and retrieves some CDs. These show that the terrorists are holed up in a safe house in a busy marketplace in Amman, Jordan. Hoffmann directs Ferris to go to Amman and take up the Intelligence operations there.
Ferris takes over the operations of the Amman unit by chucking out the ineffectual chief there and starts his play. He gets in touch with Hani Salaam and establishes a link with him asking him to provide surveillance through his agents around the safe house. Hani is a very strong and effective intelligence chief and has tight control over everything that goes on in his country. He tells off Hoffmann in one scene when Hoffmann says he will have to speak to the King of Jordan (it is a monarchy) and Hani says “In the matters of intelligence, I am the King in Jordan”. Hani agrees to help Ferris in return for his word that he will not lie to Hani ever.
Ferris has the operation of surveillance going when suddenly Hoffmann sends his man and the operation is about to get busted. Ferris gets bitten by dogs in this process and has to go to hospital for rabies injections. There he meets a local nurse and falls for her. He starts seeing her and develops a romantic relation with her (all without touching her since this is the Middle East). The exchanges between them are very delicate but loaded with meaning for e.g. Ferris asks her for a date this way ,”How would you like to have a conversation with me outside of this hospital?”. Later on, she tells him that he should meet her sister so that they can continue conversations with her approval. The sister is unhappy with American policy and openly taunts him on that. After the lunch, they both go down and he extends his hand for shaking with her but she says no because the entire neighborhood is watching.
Back to the main narrative, Hani develops an asset in the Saleem group in the safe house in a very ingenious way thus getting an informant. Hoffmann tries to kidnap this guy for information (Americans as always are in a hurry) who escapes and tells the group who then escape the safe house by burning everything. Hani is furious on Ferris and asks him to leave the country in 12 hours. Ferris goes to Langley and confronts Hoffmann and abuses him a lot. He says that Hoffmann is a desk guy and doesn’t know anything about intelligence on ground. He cools down and tells his new plan to Hoffmann. The plan is to stage manage an attack on American forces and show as if it is by another powerful terrorist group. This would prompt Saleem to break radio silence and come out. Using ingenuity and technology, the CIA manage to frame a Jordanian architect called Omar Sadiqui and show as if he is heading a terrorist group.
An attack on American forces is stage managed in Turkey and on the net, Sadiqui is shown as taking the credit. Sadiqui is bombarded with congratulatory messages and even Al-Saleem calls him. The CIA is a step closer to Al-Saleem. In the meanwhile, the terrorists kidnap Sadiqui and get it out from him that Ferris had met him etc. Ferris is now in trouble and to get to him, the terrorists kidnap the nurse and her family. Ferris is asked to travel in a van across the Syrian border into the desert. The Americans are watching all this via satellite with Hoffmann watching over. Three vans come to fetch Ferris and they raise a cloud of dust around Ferris. He is then put in a van and the three vans go in opposite directions when they come out from under the cloud. Hoffmann cannot make out which one to follow – goes to show how human intelligence can beat technology.
Finally, Ferris is tortured by Saleem and his men and just when he is about to be killed, Hani and his soldiers burst in and kill all terrorists and arrest Saleem. Ferris is fed up with the games and leaves the CIA and settles down in the Middle East.
The movie has excellent characterizations – Ferris I already described, Hoffmann is excellent as a Machiavellian spymaster. He is a potbellied slouch with spectacles and speaks from below the rim of his specs. He wears a sweater and has a family with wife and two kids. He mostly speaks on hands-free phone and devises devious plans and gives cold blooded murderous directions while doing the simplest tasks like dropping his daughter to school, watching her soccer game, taking his son to the bathroom etc. He is always unruffled and a touch arrogant because of his power as an American spymaster.
The second powerful and interesting character is Hani – he exudes authority and fear. Always dressed in immaculate suits, handsome and tall with piercing eyes, he is a man in absolute control. He is the embodiment of Eastern values where trust, friendship etc. play a role in every transaction and which is what Ferris has come to know and respect but Hoffmann with his very Western sensibilities does not care about.
There is not much I learnt from the movie except that spy games are very complex and no country is right or wrong in what they do. Generally, in International relations, it is not friends or enemies that count but self interest i.e. your country’s interests that should matter. For example, an American Secretary of State said this about their Foreign Policy “United States has 5% of the world’s population and has access to 50% of the World’s resources, and our policy should be to keep it that way”. This is what Great Powers do, we have a long way to go before we reach that level but slowly we seem to be getting there. Go and watch this movie when you get a chance, nice thriller and some very good acting.
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