Abhinav Agarwal

Tuesday, September 27, 2005

RK Laxman on Traffic

Reposted to this blog Dec, 2012
© 2005, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

RK Laxman on Science

Timeless cartoon.

Reposted to this blog, Nov 01, 2012
© 2012, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Governance and the Sclerosis That Has Set In, by Arun Shourie
(Kindle Edition, Rupa book page, Flipkart.com)
I wanted to briefly mention Arun Shourie's previous book, 'Governance', that was published last year. This book is not as long as some of his earlier works, but follows the pattern of his previous work, 'Courts and Their Judgments'. The chapters, the initial ones at least, are episodic, and each one serves to illustrate a particular idiosyncrasy of Indian bureaucracy or the consequences of some age-old policy being followed to its absurd conclusion.

There are many reviews available on the net of the book, and while almost all of them are very positive, the criticisms fall into two categories: those who complain that the book gets a bit tedious because of the never ending examples of lethargy, incompetence, and buck-passing in government, and those who complain because they cannot rid themselves of their prejudices against Shourie (because he was a minister in the NDA government and because they see him as belonging to the 'Hindutva' brigade)

Some of the reviews are listed below:

From the IMF web site. The reviewer is Deena Khatkhate, Former Assistant Director of the IMF’s Monetary andFinancial Systems Department. "The insights of the transaction cost theorists are exceedingly well captured in Arun Shourie’s terse and episodic narrative of India’s transition from controlled to market economy. Shourie’s multidimensional personality as academic, international civil servant, passionate pro bono crusader, and idealistic disinvestment and planning minister makes this book instructive reading. He shows how first-best economic policies often fail for want of effective governance. Shourie’s book contains chastening lessons for international financial institutions that blithely put the cart of well-chiseled macroeconomic policies before the horse of indispensable microeconomic preconditions (including those related to appropriate institutions and good governance)..."
The Deccan Herald carried this on Oct 31 2004: "Improving governance is the reform India needs now. With a wealth of primary material , Shourie argues that the only way ahead is to revolutionalise the nature of the Indian State - from the principal ‘Engine of Growth’ it was taken to be in the ‘50s and ‘60s, from ‘The Great Monitor’ it became in the ‘70s and ‘80s, to an enabling State, a State that clears the way so that others may do their best for the country... A rare glimpse into what has become of governance."
Jason Overdorf reviewed this book in the Dec 13 2004 issue of Newsweek. "Arun Shourie, who has captained a half-dozen different ministries, knows what ails India's government. But reading his latest book, "Governance, and the Sclerosis That Has Set In" ( 262 pages. Rupa & Co. ), one gets the feeling that it was his experience as minister of Disinvestment--charged with selling off India's sick state-owned companies--that motivated the journalist turned politician to pick up his pen. Resistance to the sale of state companies ran deep, even though none of the ailing firms had made a profit for years. In the end, political infighting guaranteed the minister would fail. But he realized that it wasn't ideological disputes that tied government after government into knots of inaction: it was the system of governance itself. As he puts it, a sclerosis had set in.... This is an admirable exercise in truth-telling. But it's hard to share Shourie's cautious optimism that the disease can be cured by "wielding the axe" to limbs of government that don't function. The patient won't lie down on the table. Whose responsibility is it to decide which table and which axe? And should it be an axe or a scalpel? That, too, is a matter for careful consideration."
Lord Meghnad Desai reviewed it for Outlook India with these words; "A sharp, witty excoriation of babudom, but the bite's sting robbed by excessive detail"
Gurcharan Das mentions it in a couple of different articles he wrote for the Times of India.

This is an excerpt from Arun Shourie's book, 'GOVERNANCE AND THE SCLEROSIS THAT HAS SET IN', ASA/Rupa, Price: Rs 395; Pages: 262

Sometime in early 1999-I was unable to fix the precise date-two officers in the Ministry of Steel made some notings on the files that passed through their desks. What caught the eye of their colleagues and superiors was not anything they had written, but the fact that they had used red and green ink. Accordingly, on 13 April 1999, the Ministry of Steel wrote a "D.O. letter" to the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances. Can officers use ink other than blue or black, the Ministry wanted to know. Are there guidelines on the question? If so could these please be forwarded to the undersigned.
The letter arrived at the Department of Administrative Reforms six days later though the buildings of the two organizations are less than a kilometer away.
Research began. Consultations commenced. Ultimately it was decided that, as the matter concerned ink and as the Directorate of Printing had the requisite expertise on ink-related matters, the opinion of the Directorate had to be obtained.
Accordingly an "O.M."-an Office Memorandum-was sent on 3 May 1999 to the Directorate of Printing. Will the Directorate kindly clarify whether any effort is authorized to use any ink other than blue or black for noting, drafting and correspondence in the Secretariat?
Deliberations, consultations, cogitation now began in the Directorate of Printing. After three weeks of thought, on 21 May 1999, the Directorate wrote to the Department of Administrative Reforms. There are no orders/instructions/guidelines in respect of use of different colours of ink, they noted.... The Department of Personnel and Training, Ministry of Home Affairs, may, however, be consulted, they concluded....
On 6 July 1999, the Department of Personnel and Training wrote to the Department of Administrative Reforms. The question as to which ink may be used in notings/draftings/ correspondence pertains essentially to the Manual of Office Procedure, the Department of Personnel noted, and, under the Allocation of Business Rules, the Manual of Office Procedure is regulated by the Department of Administrative Reforms. Hence, the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances may take a view in this matter.
A perfect answer, as you can see. Throw the ball back.
On 28 July 1999 the officer concerned in the Department of Administrative Reforms recorded that as the decision on the use of different colours of ink has to be taken by the Department itself, the criterion for adjudging the issue should first be settled. He proposed that the matter be judged in terms of the longevity of the notings in inks of different colours. When a file is closed, he noted, it is recorded as "A", "B" or "C" category. In case it has been designated as an "A" or "B" category file, it has to be kept permanently. Hence, the colour of the ink that is used for noting and correspondence in the file should be long lasting, and it should not fade with the passage of time. The matter, went the concluding recommendation, may be taken up for discussion at the Senior Officers Meeting.
The next level of officer to whom the file went reasoned that the matter was not as simple as that. Accordingly, he recorded that the longevity would also be affected by the quality of the ink that had been used, as well as on whether ball-point pens or ink pens had been used. So, these factors needed to be decided along with the question of the colour of the ink.
In view of the criterion that had been agreed upon-the durability of the noting-and the multiplicity of factors that were likely to affect it-the colour of the ink, the quality of the ink as well as the type of the writing instrument that had been used, it was felt that views of the National Archives of India had to be ascertained. After all, they are the ultimate custodians of Government records....
And so, a letter was sent to the Director General, National Archives of India, on 12 August 1999. It sought comments of the National Archives on the longevity of notings made in different colours of ink.
The Deputy Director of National Archives replied on 27 August 1999. Every record creating agency, he wrote, in creating records of permanent nature should use fountain pen inks and ball point pen inks of permanent nature prescribed by the Bureau of Indian Standards as is: 221-1962, is: 220-1988, and is 1581-1975 in respect of fountain pen inks of blue/ black colour; and is: 8505-1993 in respect of ball point pen ink. So far as fountain pen ink of permanent nature is concerned, the National Archives declared, the prescribed colour is blue-black, while for ball point pens the colours are blue, black, red or green. Longevity clearly was not a sufficient criterion to clinch the question.
The letter from the National Archives was accordingly placed before the Senior Officers' Meeting on 22 September 1999 .... Consequent on the decision taken, as the phrase goes, in the Senior Officers Meeting, a D.O. was addressed on 4 October 1999 to the Joint Secretary (O&M) in the Ministry of Defence seeking a copy of the instructions contained in the relevant manual of the armed forces/ Army so as to finalise the implementation of a Uniform Ink Colour Code in the Central Secretariat. The same day another communication was sent to the Department of Personnel and Training seeking instructions on the subject. Incidentally, such instructions are available in printed form.
The Ministry of Defence replied on 22 December 1999. It stated that red ink is used by the Chief of Army Staff/ Chief of Naval Staff/ Chief of Air Staff; green ink is used by the Principal Staff Officers; and blue or black ink is used by all other officers ....
The Department of Personnel and Training reiterated that the matter is essentially a part of official procedure, and would accordingly be the concern of the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances... A reply was finalized on 5 April 2000 for the Ministry of Steel, the original querist, so to say....
But there was a much more consequential outcome. Two additions were made in the Manual of Office Procedure-a singular achievement. The bureaucratic equivalent of getting a new word into the Oxford Dictionary. Chapter 6 of the Manual deals with "Action on Receipts". It was enlarged to include para 32, sub-para 9 which now reads:
"Notes and orders will normally be recorded in note sheets in the Notes Portion of the file and will be serially numbered. Black or blue ink will be used by all category of staff and officers. Only an officer of the level of Joint Secretary to the Government of India and above may use green or red ink in rare cases."
A good bureaucratic solution, as you would have noticed: discretion allowed but not circumscribed!
And Para 68, sub-para 5 of the Manual of Office Procedures now reads:
"Initial drafting will be done in black or blue ink. Modifications in the draft at the subsequent levels may be made in green or red ink by the offices so as to distinguish the corrections made."
Another good solution, as you would have noticed: neither option ruled out; a proper function for each option. Some ambiguity, of course. Para 32(9) says that only officers of Joint Secretary level and above may use red or green ink, and that too only in rare cases. Para 68(5), on the other hand, does not limit the use of these colours to any particular rank; and it does not say that the corrections and amendments for which the colours are used have to be of an especially rare kind.
Solution? The two sub-paras are to be, as the courts remind us, "read harmoniously"! Even then, not all problems have been solved, I am cons- trained to record. After all, in view of what the Deputy Director of the National Archives had pointed out, may it not be that the ink that is being used by officers does not bear that ISI mark?

Sunday, September 25, 2005

RK Laxman on Sadhus

Sunday irony from R.K. Laxman - of sadhus and bugs.

Reposted to this blog, Nov 01, 2012

Friday, September 23, 2005

Akamai, Bangalore

Akamai's office in Bangalore, off Hosur Road. It seems to have come up only in the last few months.

Monday, September 19, 2005

Adarsh Vihar, Bangalore

Bannerghatta Road, Adarsh Vihar can be seen on the right.

Thursday, September 15, 2005

Sun Ads and Dell

Sun has turned the heat on Dell in recent times, and they are certainly not pulling any punches! Look at some of their recent blogs as well as marketing campaigns and you get the idea that Sun has decided that Dell may be a most vulnerable target for their x86 servers.

Here is a sampling:

Johnathan Schwartz's blog calls Dell "Slow, hot, and huge" in his blog.
Schartz again, using the recent high oil prices, takes a dig at Dell, insinuating that Dell is close to big oil companies and therefore may not have a real incentive to turn out less power hungry servers.
Marc Hamilton has a detailed analysis of why the power outages faced by the University of Buffalo can be attributed, partly, to their decision to go with Dell servers.
And finally, Sun has a list of comparative ads against Dell that they could not run in print as magazines deemed them too provocative.

Reposted to this blog, Dec 2013

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

The Elephant on the Road

More on elephants. As an Indian, I am used to seeing all creatures great and small share the same road and habitat as us humans. Dogs, cows, buffaloes, sheep, goats, cats, elephants, camels, monkeys, rodents, and what have you. Elephants are a little rarer than others, but I have been lucky enough to spot them a couple of different times. This was a few months back, again on Bannerghatta Road.
In the photo below the building on the right is the Javadeva Institute of Cardiology.

The oval shaped building in the background is the Jal Bhavan, offices of the water supply board. About a hundred yards behind the elephant are the offices of IBM and EMC.

Monday, September 12, 2005

I Don't Miss Elephants in Bangalore

This picture says a lot. Maybe not a thousand words, but pretty close.

On the left in the photo is an underpass.
In the top left corners are the offices of Accenture and Oracle.
The Oracle building houses close to 1,500 people
The Accenture office houses close to 5,000.
In the center, on the road, is an auto-rickshaw, with a steering wheel of a cycle, and a suspension that does not exist, and an engine that delivers less than one horsepower.
And on the right you have an Asian elephant. On top of which you have the mahout (the elephant trainer).

Bangalore crumbling - 2

Pavement on Bannerghatta Road.

The apartment complex to the right of this photo is Adarsh Vihar, on Bannerghatta Road.

Sunday, February 10, 2002

How I got online in Fredericton

This is the first full weekend that I am spending in Fredericton, and today I had the chance to experience the city a little bit more. I am staying at the Fredericton Inn, which is adjacent to the Regent Mall, which is on Regent Street.

Regent Mall has two big anchor stores - a WalMart, and a Sears. Fredericton is a place where almost everything remains closed on Sundays, with the exception of traffic lights and the pharmacies. Fredericton is the first place in North America that I have seen where the Walmart closes on Sundays, and on the remaining days closes at 10PM. Even in Waukesha (try and locate that place on a map) the Walmart remains open till midnight, every single day. And this nugget is for Indians - I saw a Bata store in Regent Mall!!! The first Bata store in North America I have come across! Can you imagine a more heartachingly lachrymose reminder of India? Bata - where almost everyone of us has bought his/her school shoes, the canvas shoes for sports day, the black shoes for the other days, the socks, the shoe horns, sigh! I wanted to go in the store, hug the store clerks (mostly young and very pretty Canadian girls), fall down on the floor weeping and walk out with a pair of shoes or two in my hand. I wisely desisted from this temptation because firstly I have to be in this town for at least another couple of months, secondly this is one of the few malls in Fredericton and I like malling on weekends, and thirdly I am perhaps the first Indian a lot of Frederictonites have ever seen in their lifetimes (Mowgli doesn't count) and I didn't want to go and ruin any chance there might still be of those people forming a good impression of Indians (Bay area residents think Lakireddy).

I digress. The main reason I was in the mall was to locate the local telephone company's store, where I wanted to sign up for internet access. See, mind-numbingly mystifying as it may seem to most of us in the technology profession, the New Brunswick Telcom company (that is also the largest provider of dial-up internet service here in the province) is helpful enough to provide a list of plans, dial-up numbers, and store locations on their web site, it does not however provide you with the option of signing up online. So I went to this store, and the lady asked me for a contact number, driver's license (don't ask me why, neither did I - word can spread that there is this difficult Indian in town), an address, and a credit card. She then gave me a CD (like the AOL CD) and sent me on my way. Like a puppy who has just received its first bone, I scampered back to the hotel, all awash with excitement and trembling with the anticipation of finally being able to go online at the hotel, started up the computer, inserted the CD, and waited. And waited. Till I realized that the CD software worked with Windows 95, 98, ME, XP - but not Windows 2000, that I have on my computer. This was a major letdown. Big letdown. HUGE letdown. Back to square one. That's where I was. And my detestation of this place had just gone up by a few more notches. I solved the connection problem anyway, the next day. There is another company that provides internet access - Brunnet. This company also has a web site, but again (maybe this is a cultural thing) no dial-up numbers or any other way to sign up online. Just a local number for me to call. Which I did. And the gentleman at the other end of the line asked me for a credit card, a sign up user id, and a password (and what kind of a sick person would I be, to not want to give out my dial up password to this nice gentleman. Huh? What do I have to hide?!!), and he gave me a dial up number to dial. Yup. One number, no more no less. With the promise that this number would work, most of the time. This time I was lucky - setting up a new dial up connection in Windows 2000 took about a minute, setting it up to dial from the hotel took another minute. And I dialed.

And it worked! It worked!!!!!!! And this is how I got online in Canada.
More later, to follow!

Wednesday, February 6, 2002

Fredericton - 1

(Note: I had written this travelogue in an e-mail to friends and family in 2002 to record my first impressions of the lovely town of Fredericton - the capital of the province of New Brunswick in Canada. Since I wrote it in the days of Hotmail and Yahoo, where users of the free email service got only 2MB of storage quota, and where these email providers deleted all emails from your account if you did not log in frequently enough, the only record I had of this email was a printout I had taken several years ago. Thankfully, I had not thrown away the printout, and while cleaning out paperwork, I stumbled across the printout. I scanned the printout and then used OCR - Optical Character Recognition - software to convert the scanned image into words. After that I pasted the text into this blog post and cleaned out the remaining errors of the OCR process. This is then the email I wrote on the sixth of February 2002, posted to a wider audience for the first time, in June 2013).

Now that I have been in Fredericton for 4 days, here are a few first impressions.

I landed at Fredericton airport on Saturday night, just after 11 PM. Well, at the airport, there are no frills like walkways to the plane - you use good old stairs to climb down from the airplane, and walk to the terminal, which by the way is about 15 feet from the plane. A nice gentleman was busy spraying the ground with salt to prevent the passengers from slipping and falling. On entering the terminal, used to as I am to walking a good distance to get to the baggage claim area, I almost walked out of the airport, before realizing that most of the people had stayed back. The baggage conveyor belt is all of 10 feet long, and runs very closely to a wall right next to the entrance of the terminal. Well, the conveyor belt ran for all of 5 minutes before a guy came along, switched it off and told us that the airline had forgotten to put any of the checked baggage on the plane from Toronto. The next flight from Toronto would get in only at 11 AM the next morning, so now it was off to the baggage claim office, which is another 15 yards away, pardon me, 45 feet away from the baggage belt. See everyone in Canada uses the metric system, like the rest of the world, only after living in the US for 6 years, it just seemed unnatural.

And after this small thing was taken care of I went over to the car rental counters, which are located between the baggage belt (yes, belt, as in the singular, as opposed to the plural, which would imply the existence of more than one belt) and the baggage claim desk, which puts it at about 22.5 feet from either. The lady at the Avis counter was very helpful, and gave me a map of Fredericton to help me find my way around the town. The map is another story.

Getting out of the airport, the feeling was, well, how shall I put it? Like a scene out of Fargo the movie, or something like one would expect from a Stephen King movie, say The Shining ... The airport is small, with a parking lot about one-tenth the size of San Jose's temporary parking lot, which by the way is a small airport. Hardly any lighting outside the airport; actually the airport facade reminded me of Jabalpur railway station, I dunno why. The Avis parking lot contained, what, about 5 cars, the Hertz lot something like 6 cars, and a total of about 10 other cars in the entire parking lot of the airport.

So anyway, I got in my car, started it up, waited for about 5 minutes for it to warm up, because the temperature outside was -10C (14F) and then exited the parking lot. Exit is perhaps too strong a word as it implies a drivable distance from the parking lot to the main road. KMart parking lots take a longer time to exit from. The road I took was NB102 West, which would take me to the city of Fredericton. Under the impression that NB102 is a state (or provincial) highway I expected some sort of a divided highway, which it is not. The road is for the most part a one lane road in either direction where the speed limit varies from mostly 50kph to 90-100kph for about a 100 meters or so before coming down to a more sedate 50kph (that is 30mph mind you). After driving some 15 minutes (I was slowed down because of the snow on the roads, Fredericton had been hit by a snowstorm a day earlier) I entered what I guessed to be Fredericton downtown, which is prime example of urban sprawl, occupying a grotesquely huge area of 4x4 blocks. Driving through the maze of downtown roads (another 3 1/2 minutes spent there) I was out of the town, and into what can best be described as pristine wilderness, marred only by the occasional fish hatchery, and a hydro-electric power plant. I had now driven some 20 km from the airport, and I had gone from outside the eastern city limits of Fredericton to outside the western city limits of Fredericton. The Holiday Inn is just off the highway, no road, and reminded me of the hotel in The Shining that Jack Nicholson goes to for the winters, only on a smaller scale. Very picturesque, and just as deathly quiet. I checked in, and fell asleep some 2 hours later.

More to follow - on Fredericton 'downtown' and the city in general.

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© 2013, Abhinav Agarwal (अभिनव अग्रवाल). All rights reserved.