USA Russia Nuclear Arms Reduction

From what seemed like centuries in blogosphere, today I suddenly had impulse to write again.

So the headline today is that USA and Russia decided to reduce their nuclear stockpiles. Both the powers still have enough firepower to burn down the entire globe several times over. So the world is not fully out of the shadow of nuclear annihilation possibility. Nonetheless reading news about reduction of nuclear weapons feels better than reading news about more weapons and missiles.

However the prospectus of the nuclear arms free world remain as dim as always. Let me allow to explain why. Just like the nuclear explosion is a chain reaction, nuclear proliferation is a chain reaction as well. Since USA had nuclear bomb, Russia and China got one. Since China had nuclear weapons, India got them. Since India had them, Pakistan felt it was necessary to have nuclear weapons.

If two nations have had some kind of serious animosity between them, and if one nation gets nuclear weapons, another nation feels utterly exposed without them and feels compelled to go nuclear. So we can be pretty much sure that this reaction will continue downstream.

If we ever have to achieve nuclear disarmament, someone has to come up with a foolproof defense to nuclear attack, that will reduce the value of nuclear weapons as strategic counter-measure to nuclear attack. Or someone has to come up with an attack as harmful as nuclear one.

Biological weapons immediately come to mind. And they can be far more dangerous.

Without these two, there is no hope for nuclear free world. Tomorrow, even if USA drops all the N weapons it has, still Russia might decide to keep them. So the reverse of the proliferation  might not be a chain reaction.

Mohalla Committee- An Interface to Object Oriented Police Station

On my recent trip to India, I visited a police station. I had heard about Mohalla Committee and I wanted to find out more about it. The information I got was truly eye opening.

Mohalla Committee concept was a brainchild of police officer Mr. Khopade, who first-hand witnessed the Hindu Muslim riots in Bhivandi. He witnessed how rumors spread, how people with malicious self-interest took advantage of the situation, how the communities segregated and how it all evantually lead to complete breakdown of law and order.

And then he came up with an excellent idea. Mohalla Committee. A group of citizen closely working with cops on continuous basis.

This group meets regularly, every month or so. The main emphasis is on proactive activities to diffuse tension and keep communication. This helps reduce rumors spreading. This prevents people with vested interests from taking advantage of the situation. Since the establishment of Mohalla Committee, the Hindu Muslim tension in Bhivandi has reduced considerably.

Today Mohalla Committees exist all over Mumbai. These groups meet regularly with local police. They keep track of crime statistics. They keep track of local miscreants. They have a record of emergency services in the area, doctors, hospitals, ambulances. They organize joint petrols in the sensitive areas.

What I find most interesting is how a instution, Police in this case, has become more proactive, more connected, and as a result a lot more effective in solving the problems of the community.

Some time back, I was discussion object oriented programming with a friend of mine and we were talking about importance of Interfaces. He explained me how if the interfaces are not designed properly, evantually it results in the whole system becoming dysfunctional.

What we have here is an excellent example of rebuilding interface of an institution. The regular interface for interaction of police and citizen was police station. This interface was extremely insufficient and narrow. Problems like communal riots could never be effectively addressed by this interface.

So Mr. Khopade created a new interface, Mohalla Committee. With help of this inteface, police could spot potential flash points a lot earlier. They had people from community on their side and as a result they now had wide array of tactics available to them that was not available before. This resulted in vast improvement in effectiveness of an object called police station.

Perhaps it’s time for all of us to re-engineer our institutions like this. Take a dysfunctional system, brain storm over what’s the failure and come up with a new interface to address the shortcoming. The solution may require a social system like Mohalla Committee or it may require a technological solution like sending SMS warning of flooding.

So if the garbage in the area is not being picked up, form a mohalla committee with municipality officials, investigate what is the real problem, take continuous and proactive action to see to it that the problem is either solved or minimized enough to become tolerable.

In short term, it should be focused on problems. In long term it will lead to rethinking of institution, its purpose, its capabilities and resources and its realistic goals (not value based assesments of what should ideally happen).

To begin with we have to start assessing our real failures. We have to acknowledge that we have failed to create effective instutions at several places.

We must stop playing the blame game and understand that several best players can come together and can form a bad team. A team where the players strengths and weaknesses don’t complement each other. Instead coming together as a team undermines their strengths and amplifies their weaknesses. We are a team where individual Indian is not less intelligent than individual American or Chinese person. But one billion Indians, together as a country, still fall behind America or China. We need to stop improving the players and start improving the team.

Is a country of millions of software engineers upto this challenge of system redesign? For sure, Mr. Khopade has shown that it can be done.

A Fable Of Economic Crisis- II

Now assume that the story took a slightly different turn in the middle. The prosperity of three fishermen and the weaver continued. Then a fourth person came to the village. He was good at teaching kids. So he told the fishermen, why don’t you give me some fish and I will teach your kids. They agree. Soon another person comes who has a freezer so fish stay good for longer time.

All wanted to help each other and get help in return, but it became difficult to do the transactions using fish. So the weaver came out with a different idea. He showed all of them one particular rare to get sea shells which only he knew where to get. He said “You guys just give each other these shells. If you ever need fish, just come to me with shells and I will give you fish in return for shells. I will give you two fish for each shell.”

Now all happy again, on their way. Soon more people come and more businesses take off. People needed more shells. Initially the weaver was hesitant to just give out shells for transaction. Because if everybody one day turned up for claiming their fish in return of shell, he would not have enough fish. But people losing business opportunities for the lack of shells. So he came up with an idea. He sent everyone a letter with a bunch of nice words but at the bottom, in small letters he wrote “Now on you will get only one fish for one shell instead of two.”

But people were using shells mostly for schools, medicine, etc. (i.e. the service industry). So they did not notice that they are getting less fish for their shells. In fact now more shells were in circulation and people were able to do more stuff. So they did not complain.

Even then the demand for shells outstripped the supply. So the weaver issues another notice saying that no fish will be issued if you go to him with shells. Also because he could not find shells, he started issuing picture of the shells.

People came up with lots of things they could sell. People came up with lots of things they could buy. People came up with all kinds of games to put in some shells and get more shells. Two things they never doubted. One – if they have enough shells, somehow they can always convert them to the things they want. Two – if they loaned shells to someone, somehow they will always get back more shells in future.

One fine day, one person did not return the shells , or pictures of shells, he/she borrowed. So the person from whom they were borrowed got scared and stopped loaning his shells. These two persons were big enough for everyone to notice. When people saw them failing, everyone got scared.

And people just stopped trusting each other and doing stuff that was in common mutual interest. Everyone tried to cover their own ass first even if it meant paying heavy premium. Going back to the fishermen, they noticed that the man they rented nets from did not really have nets to cater everyone if everyone showed at the same time. So each fisherman kept the net for longer and longer even if it was idle and even if it meant paying more rent for the net.

Thus resources were being used extremely poor way and wealth was being destroyed in paying risk premium on each person’s part. Eventually all that was built on assumption that others can be easily trusted, failed and all that was left was three fishermen with two nets.

Every business transaction is banking transaction. Every party in the transaction plays two person prisoner dilemma game. Sometimes the prisoners agree together not to confess and walk out of jail early. Sometimes the prisoners screw each other,  assuming the other person will not co-operate.

So when people trust each other blindly, they come together to loot nature, as the amount of natural resources becomes the constraint to grow. When people lose that trust, the trust itself becomes costly commodity and increases prices of everything else.

The Meditation Experience

So a couple of days back, I sat down for meditation. Not for religious reasons, just to make my mind a bit quiet. And here is a realization I had that I would like to share.

I was laying in chair, relaxed, focusing on my breath. My brain was busy creating pictures and images in front of my eyes. Time to time I was realizing that I am not focusing on my breath any more and I would again try to focus. But soon again the train of thoughts began rushing in my head.

Have you noticed how the thoughts are always related? Like one thought has something to do with the next one? And for some reason every attempt of me taking my attention back to my breath was creating a new chain of thoughts that somehow had to do with me dragging my attention and trying to focus on my breath.

Then suddenly I realized one thing. It was my mind that was making something out of a meaningless, consequence-less, monotonous, repetitive,  simple activity like breathing. It was my mind that was cooking up thoughts and emotions from where there were none. The thoughts seemingly came out of nowhere, but somehow my mind tricked me in believing that they have something to do with breathing.

I opened my eyes and looked around. Then , for a short moment, I realized what all the Zen fuss of emptiness is all about. All the shapes and forms around me, the chair, the table, the computer on table, the window panes and the trees outside, existed in a world devoid of any significance. It was in my mind they had relations with each other and had consequences and had purpose and attributes and good/bad characteristics. By themselves, they were just that, shapes and forms. silent ,peaceful and in harmony.

It was like two parallel universes. One in which all these things existed. And one in which my mind made up a story using these objects.

By themselves they were empty. Mind filled them up with meaning.

Categories and Tags

Recently while I was editing the categories and tags of my blog posts, I suddenly had a realization about what is the purpose of both.

Once I state it, it’s going to sound too obvious. And I am not claiming that I must be the first one to think about this. But hey, this is my blog, right?

This is what I think. Categories are used for top down search that leads to my article. The tags are used for bottom up search leading to my article.  Categories are more abstract grouping terms. Tags are concrete entities that appear in the blog post.

So an article about recent a particular event in US politics that involved President Obama, the category will be politics. But the tag will be Obama, President, USA and so on. If we were arranging the movie DVDs, then the genre of the movie, like horror, comedy, etc. will be category and the actors, director, etc. will be tags.

When the search engine looks for a articles related to certain term,  I am sure they begin the filtering with tags. The ancient search engines purely weighed articles based on number of times the tags appear in the article. Thus in the days before Google, if you wanted your article about rockets to come first in search, all you had to make sure was the word rocket came a few thousand times in your metatags and content.

With google and onwards, the search engine somehow figure out how relevant the tags are to main article. So in short, they calculate “category”. If you have given the correct category, it will help a lot at this stage. Because your blogging site will list your blog in correct category, thus agreeing with the search engine, and thus increasing your chances of being seen by random search engine audience.

Many times people just add same words in category and tags. It leads to less efficient search for the whole blogosphere. By doing that, they are temporarily advancing their blog in the short run, but killing the overall blogging activity in the long run.