Sunday 30 August 2020
An Aatmanirbhar Musalman could be the pride of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
Muslims love Hindu liberals conditionally, and together they hate the microscopic Muslim liberals unconditionally writes NAJMUL HODA in The Print
India’s Muslims and liberals are withering in each other’s embrace. The liberal discourse in India has come in for sharp criticism not only from the Right-wing but also the non-partisan centrists for being unprincipled in its tacit indulgence of minorityism, which might have widened the chasm between the majority and minority communities where the former is always a bully and the latter always has its back to the wall.
It has been often said that despite mouthing the platitude of mainstreaming the minority, liberals helped in institutionalising minorityism. It cocooned liberals in a paternalistic aura.
The situation was further exacerbated when the middle caste’s electoral assertion piggybacked on the Muslim vote. OBCs and minority politics were found cosying up in the bed of secularism. This was a marriage of convenience.
How did liberalism come to this when it had been the byword for everything progressive, humanistic, secular, democratic, reformative and transformative; and a default opposite of obscurantism, regression and totalitarianism? It is for these reasons that Indian Muslims’ relationship with so-called liberals has started yielding diminishing returns in politics today. Either liberalism gets a makeover, or the relationship is re-invented, or the Muslim community begins to invest in its own liberals.
Different trajectories
But how could the ascendant Hindutva politics blame liberals of political opportunism and cultural deracination? It’s another surprise that these accusations also began to stick. To understand this, let’s trace its trajectory.
A dialectic tussle between the agents of change and the votaries of status quo is the hallmark of a living society. As the colonial impetus stirred India into a new life, the first generation of Hindus in modern education devoted themselves to religious and social reformation. This laid the foundation for a liberal nationalist politics in India.
The Muslim trajectory was different. They were latecomers to modern education which, again, had come at the cost of abandoning religious critique and social reform. A superficial modernity without its moral and intellectual values could be the right instrument for revivalism. The two politics, Hindu and Muslim, because of the different preparatory grounds they stood on, went in different directions. While one aimed at forming India into a nation and winning independence for it, the other wanted to make the Muslim community into a separate nation.
However, the intrinsic sincerity of the liberal political class and the exigency to put up a united front against colonialism made it accommodate the separatist tendencies in order to forge a composite territorial nationalism. This template endured for a century. It had some quaint tropes, which left no urge among Muslims to liberalise.
Century-old tropes
The first instance of mollycoddling was to sanitise the history of Muslim rule. In the history books, the testimony of contemporary chroniclers such as Ziauddin Barani, Abdul Malik Isami and Ferishta, etc. was ignored in order to paint an idyllic picture of cultural confluence. In a travesty of secularisation, acts of temple destruction, Jizya tax imposition, and forced conversion would be presented as inspired by political exigency, not religious fanaticism. It was as if desecration for political reasons would be less obnoxious. It gave a clean chit to the principle of statecraft that would permit such a sacrilege even if it were actually a pretext.
Although done with the good intention of not letting the bad blood of the past spill onto the present, a total whitewashing didn’t let the people develop the maturity to face up the past and recognise its wrongs. One is not answerable for what their real or adopted ancestors did, but they shape their own attitude towards the past. If one sees glories in the good of it, they would have to partake of its bad too.
The second trope was the romanticisation of Islam as an egalitarian religion and Muslims as a casteless society. Conversion to Islam was credited to the equality in Muslim society. The fact, however, was that people carried their caste into the new religion and remained at the same level as earlier. The Muslim ruling class adopted the caste system and placed itself at the apex. In fact, their emphasis on foreign lineage as a mark of superiority infused a fresh racial element into it.
Besides caste, gender issue was the main area of social reform in Hindu society. True, Muslims didn’t have a Sati system, but they had all other patriarchal discriminations. In fact, purdah among the Hindu upper class was an influence of Muslims.
It became conventional wisdom that Muslims didn’t need to introspect, reform or liberalise. And so, when independent India’s most ambitious social reform programme was undertaken, and Hindu Code Bills were introduced, the Muslim Personal Law was left untouched on the plea that the push for reform had to come from within the community. It never came, and instead became the basis of identitarian politics as was seen during the Shah Bano and triple talaq cases.
Mere tactical allies
The sanitised history repeated itself first as a tragedy and next as a farce. The tragedy was the liberal argument in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case that there was no proof that the mosque in Ayodhya was built on a demolished temple. Its implication for such mosques as were clearly built on demolished temples was not weighed in. And, the farce was in the revisionist historiography of Partition, which invisibilised the fact that, in the end, it was the Muslim League that demanded Pakistan, and had it. Such historiography helped in reviving the same old pernicious narrative.
The dictum that minority communalism was a lesser evil was myopic inasmuch as it ignored its ability to inflame majoritarian. The paternalistic minorityism of liberals made them equivocate on burning issues. So, in one kind of bomb blast, terror had no religion; but in another, it did. The discourse of ‘hurt sentiment’ became normalised as demands to ban now a book and now a movie became the norm. The Right-wing learnt fast, and how.
In spite of all this, no organic relationship could develop between liberals and Muslims. Both treated each other as tactical allies rather than ideological kin. In the Muslim repertoire of grievances against the present dispensation, there is hardly one that has not been levelled against liberals since the late 19th century (Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s speech at Meerut, 16 March 1888 ). The Islam-in-danger rhetoric, paranoia of subjugation by Hindus, neglect of Urdu, under-representation in services, bias in the behaviour of state machinery, particularly that of police during riots, and myriad other complaints of discriminations are century-old tropes.
Aatmanirbhar Musalman
Muslims love Hindu liberals conditionally, and together they hate the microscopic Muslim liberals unconditionally. Muslims love liberals because the latter don’t question their narratives, and liberals value Muslims because they are their only support left. In an India where two kinds of Hindus are debating how to engage with Muslims, the liberals represent them without questioning why Muslims are unable to represent themselves, and whether the 200-year-long liberal hegemony of public discourse has any responsibility for it.
There is no redemption for Muslims unless they develop their own liberal intelligentsia, and no comeback for liberals unless they become more scrupulous about their avowed principles. True, Muslims are not represented in all sectors of the national life in proportion to their population. It not only reflects their lag in modern education but also the lack of drive and initiative in their corporate life.
At about 20 crore, the Muslim population is so huge that even a minuscule percentage of its educated and affluent would be humongous enough to constitute the critical mass for a big social change. One reason why this has not happened is the community’s utter dependence on the liberal establishment for representing them. Muslims could represent themselves in the idiom of the modern nation state only if they had crafted their own discourse and coined their own vocabulary. It’s very much doable. An Aatmanirbhar Musalman could be the pride of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
India’s Muslims and liberals are withering in each other’s embrace. The liberal discourse in India has come in for sharp criticism not only from the Right-wing but also the non-partisan centrists for being unprincipled in its tacit indulgence of minorityism, which might have widened the chasm between the majority and minority communities where the former is always a bully and the latter always has its back to the wall.
It has been often said that despite mouthing the platitude of mainstreaming the minority, liberals helped in institutionalising minorityism. It cocooned liberals in a paternalistic aura.
The situation was further exacerbated when the middle caste’s electoral assertion piggybacked on the Muslim vote. OBCs and minority politics were found cosying up in the bed of secularism. This was a marriage of convenience.
How did liberalism come to this when it had been the byword for everything progressive, humanistic, secular, democratic, reformative and transformative; and a default opposite of obscurantism, regression and totalitarianism? It is for these reasons that Indian Muslims’ relationship with so-called liberals has started yielding diminishing returns in politics today. Either liberalism gets a makeover, or the relationship is re-invented, or the Muslim community begins to invest in its own liberals.
Different trajectories
But how could the ascendant Hindutva politics blame liberals of political opportunism and cultural deracination? It’s another surprise that these accusations also began to stick. To understand this, let’s trace its trajectory.
A dialectic tussle between the agents of change and the votaries of status quo is the hallmark of a living society. As the colonial impetus stirred India into a new life, the first generation of Hindus in modern education devoted themselves to religious and social reformation. This laid the foundation for a liberal nationalist politics in India.
The Muslim trajectory was different. They were latecomers to modern education which, again, had come at the cost of abandoning religious critique and social reform. A superficial modernity without its moral and intellectual values could be the right instrument for revivalism. The two politics, Hindu and Muslim, because of the different preparatory grounds they stood on, went in different directions. While one aimed at forming India into a nation and winning independence for it, the other wanted to make the Muslim community into a separate nation.
However, the intrinsic sincerity of the liberal political class and the exigency to put up a united front against colonialism made it accommodate the separatist tendencies in order to forge a composite territorial nationalism. This template endured for a century. It had some quaint tropes, which left no urge among Muslims to liberalise.
Century-old tropes
The first instance of mollycoddling was to sanitise the history of Muslim rule. In the history books, the testimony of contemporary chroniclers such as Ziauddin Barani, Abdul Malik Isami and Ferishta, etc. was ignored in order to paint an idyllic picture of cultural confluence. In a travesty of secularisation, acts of temple destruction, Jizya tax imposition, and forced conversion would be presented as inspired by political exigency, not religious fanaticism. It was as if desecration for political reasons would be less obnoxious. It gave a clean chit to the principle of statecraft that would permit such a sacrilege even if it were actually a pretext.
Although done with the good intention of not letting the bad blood of the past spill onto the present, a total whitewashing didn’t let the people develop the maturity to face up the past and recognise its wrongs. One is not answerable for what their real or adopted ancestors did, but they shape their own attitude towards the past. If one sees glories in the good of it, they would have to partake of its bad too.
The second trope was the romanticisation of Islam as an egalitarian religion and Muslims as a casteless society. Conversion to Islam was credited to the equality in Muslim society. The fact, however, was that people carried their caste into the new religion and remained at the same level as earlier. The Muslim ruling class adopted the caste system and placed itself at the apex. In fact, their emphasis on foreign lineage as a mark of superiority infused a fresh racial element into it.
Besides caste, gender issue was the main area of social reform in Hindu society. True, Muslims didn’t have a Sati system, but they had all other patriarchal discriminations. In fact, purdah among the Hindu upper class was an influence of Muslims.
It became conventional wisdom that Muslims didn’t need to introspect, reform or liberalise. And so, when independent India’s most ambitious social reform programme was undertaken, and Hindu Code Bills were introduced, the Muslim Personal Law was left untouched on the plea that the push for reform had to come from within the community. It never came, and instead became the basis of identitarian politics as was seen during the Shah Bano and triple talaq cases.
Mere tactical allies
The sanitised history repeated itself first as a tragedy and next as a farce. The tragedy was the liberal argument in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case that there was no proof that the mosque in Ayodhya was built on a demolished temple. Its implication for such mosques as were clearly built on demolished temples was not weighed in. And, the farce was in the revisionist historiography of Partition, which invisibilised the fact that, in the end, it was the Muslim League that demanded Pakistan, and had it. Such historiography helped in reviving the same old pernicious narrative.
The dictum that minority communalism was a lesser evil was myopic inasmuch as it ignored its ability to inflame majoritarian. The paternalistic minorityism of liberals made them equivocate on burning issues. So, in one kind of bomb blast, terror had no religion; but in another, it did. The discourse of ‘hurt sentiment’ became normalised as demands to ban now a book and now a movie became the norm. The Right-wing learnt fast, and how.
In spite of all this, no organic relationship could develop between liberals and Muslims. Both treated each other as tactical allies rather than ideological kin. In the Muslim repertoire of grievances against the present dispensation, there is hardly one that has not been levelled against liberals since the late 19th century (Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s speech at Meerut, 16 March 1888 ). The Islam-in-danger rhetoric, paranoia of subjugation by Hindus, neglect of Urdu, under-representation in services, bias in the behaviour of state machinery, particularly that of police during riots, and myriad other complaints of discriminations are century-old tropes.
Aatmanirbhar Musalman
Muslims love Hindu liberals conditionally, and together they hate the microscopic Muslim liberals unconditionally. Muslims love liberals because the latter don’t question their narratives, and liberals value Muslims because they are their only support left. In an India where two kinds of Hindus are debating how to engage with Muslims, the liberals represent them without questioning why Muslims are unable to represent themselves, and whether the 200-year-long liberal hegemony of public discourse has any responsibility for it.
There is no redemption for Muslims unless they develop their own liberal intelligentsia, and no comeback for liberals unless they become more scrupulous about their avowed principles. True, Muslims are not represented in all sectors of the national life in proportion to their population. It not only reflects their lag in modern education but also the lack of drive and initiative in their corporate life.
At about 20 crore, the Muslim population is so huge that even a minuscule percentage of its educated and affluent would be humongous enough to constitute the critical mass for a big social change. One reason why this has not happened is the community’s utter dependence on the liberal establishment for representing them. Muslims could represent themselves in the idiom of the modern nation state only if they had crafted their own discourse and coined their own vocabulary. It’s very much doable. An Aatmanirbhar Musalman could be the pride of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat.
Saturday 29 August 2020
Wednesday 26 August 2020
Prashant Bhushan and Rahul Gandhi - A Dream Ticket for 2024
‘PRASHANT’ means pacific. Prashant Bhushan is anything but. ‘Rahul’, according to early Upanishads, means conqueror of all miseries. Rahul Gandhi knows he doesn’t fit the bill though he does deserve applause as the rare opposition leader who dares to stand up to Prime Minister Modi’s wilful rule. Prashant and Rahul thus strangely share a destiny. Should they unite their enormous energies, they may well save Indian democracy from getting crushed by a strident right-wing state. Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn
Let’s figure out if indeed there’s a meeting ground for the two. The Congress though reduced to less than 10 per cent of seats in the Lok Sabha remains the only party with reach from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.
The Congress also represents a history of things that have gone wrong with India over the last several decades, which in turn have paved the way for right-wing demagogues to seize power. Congress governments gave oxygen to crony capitalism and simultaneously created room for a socially divisive lobby that hijacked the Indian state.
Prashant represents the quest to set things right on both counts, the first step being the killing of the nexus between moneybags and the political class. He has spoken up for Kashmir’s democratic rights, for Dalits and Muslims too.
The lawyer activist lends his voice to myriad votaries of dissent and radical change. He admires Arundhati Roy and she him, to see where he stands on the canvas of political ideas. Roy has served a jail term for contempt of court, and it is his turn now. She refused to apologise to the supreme court judges who charged her with contempt, so has Bhushan. He told the court, which postponed his sentencing on Monday, that rowing back from his views, which have offended some judges with tweets old and recent would be contempt of his own conscience.
Prashant’s range of politics is wide. He helped form the Aam Aadmi Party that stalled the Modi juggernaut in 2015, but left Arvind Kejriwal who he thought had begun to imitate those they together once criticised. However, his main targets are the corporate moneybags that run the country’s politics, and, according to well-regarded former judges, may have wormed their way into the hallowed precincts of the higher judiciary.
Prashant Bhushan knows he cannot fight the fight alone. Who then could be his allies to cover the flanks? Theoretically, Prashant represents every earnest politician’s dream by speaking for the common man and against the most powerful. He has targeted corruption during the Congress party rule as forcefully as he has probed shady deals during the Modi era.
How and what does Rahul Gandhi bring to the political field to complement Prashant Bhushan’s fight? The young Gandhi knows that he is maligned by opponents as a Johnny-come-lately. He is called names by the prime minister and at his behest by the media. The prime minister has sworn to evict the Congress party from India’s political arena.
Put two and two together. He wants a Congress without the Gandhis. Why? Rahul has spoken up on the government’s mishandling of China. He has called out the government over the secret Rafale warplanes deal. He has taken on Modi on the apparent incompetence with which the coronavirus pandemic has been approached. He has expressed his dismay at the way the Ayodhya temple project has been hijacked by the party in power.
When most TV channels show Rahul as mentally ill-equipped to lead the party, they are warming the cockles of the hearts of the very tycoons he has named in parliament and outside — as did his grandfather Feroze Gandhi — as beneficiaries of corruption.
Strikingly close to Prashant’s stand in the supreme court, Rahul has said it openly: he would continue to slam the government’s anti-people policies even if it costs him his political career. One can’t think of another current politician ready to put his career on the line as Rahul Gandhi is ready to do. There are other reasons why many in the press hate his guts. We need to go into the background a bit.
When P.V. Narasimha Rao demitted office in 1996, Congress treasurer Sitaram Kesri was elected the party president. He was a backward caste Hindu from Bihar who spoke well of the Gandhi family, a family that was still recovering from the trauma of losing Rajiv Gandhi to a suicide bomber during an election rally in 1991.
The Congress had shrunk in seats and prestige, and Kesri was busy stitching up alliances, something that the Congress needs to do more fervently today. Dalit leader Mayawati, the Left Front and other backward caste leaders were being approached. The Bombay business lobby resented this. That’s when Pranab Mukherjee led the charge against Kesri. The Congress president was locked up in the toilet and his board removed, all in the name of Sonia Gandhi.
Kesri told people close to him that Sonia had nothing to do with his ouster. It was a move to use her shoulder to instal a candidate loyal to the business club. They used Sonia Gandhi to shore up pro-market Manmohan Singh but they also resented it when she set up the National Advisory Council to counter the fallout of Singh’s pro-market economic policies on the poor. It was not surprising that the second tenure of Manmohan Singh became a melee with senior journalists advising the government on who to appoint ministers with which portfolio, and they were doing it on behalf of sponsors in Mumbai.
One of the names that figured as the conduit in the media-politicians-business club at the time was of a Congress leader who also authored a letter that prompted Sonia Gandhi to offer to resign on Monday. How does an interim president resign though? No Gandhi wants to be party president, anyway. And they call the family feudal. Hopefully, Prashant Bhushan and Rahul Gandhi will seize the moment that destiny has thrown at them, and not quibble over their misleading names.
Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW): The rise of a toxic male separatist movement
The men of the MGTOW movement aim to live their lives with no female contact. The idea began on the fringes of the internet – so how has it made it all the way to the White House? Laura Bates in The Guardian
‘There has been an awakening … changing the world … one man at a time.” These are the dramatic words that appear when you visit mgtow.com. In a video that looks a lot like an action-movie trailer, the words are soon followed by five more that appear to smash through the screen, smouldering fiery red: “Men … going … their … own way.”
If you stumbled across this website and had never heard of “men going their own way” (MGTOW) before, you would probably assume this was a tiny, extreme movement. But you would be only half right.
The views of MGTOW are indeed unorthodox, even within the sprawling web of groups, lifestyles and cults known as the “manosphere”, where women-haters mobilise against a supposed gynocratic conspiracy. While incels plot violent revenge on women, and pickup artists (PUAs) deploy predatory tactics to “game” women into having sex with them, the men of the MGTOW attempt to eschew relationships with women altogether. They are, literally, going their own way. Far, far away from any women. At all.
Although some MGTOW maintain platonic relationships with women and others have one-night stands or visit sex workers, many prefer to abstain from sex, a process referred to as “going monk”. This is too much for some members of the wider manosphere. The blogger Matt Forney, notorious for posts such as “Why fat girls don’t deserve to be loved” and “The necessity of domestic violence”, wrote that “men going their own way is no way for men to go” and mocked MGTOW as “a cult for lonely virgins”.
But this isn’t an obscure internet cul-de-sac; mgtow.com alone has almost 33,000 members. Its forums (“for men only”) contain conversations on more than 50,000 topics, with more than 790,000 replies, which range from advice on divorcing as cheaply as possible to lurid stories about women who have found particularly inventive ways to murder their husbands. The site also lists 25 video channels; between them, these have more than 730,000 followers, and their videos have been viewed a total of 130m times.
Over on YouTube, one of the best-known MGTOW vloggers, who goes by the name of Sandman, has racked up more 90m views for videos with titles ranging from “Smart men don’t get married” to “Criticise her and she will destroy your career”.
The MGTOW philosophy is elaborately laid out on the mgtow.com website, which summarises it as “a statement of self-ownership, where the modern man preserves and protects his own sovereignty above all else”. Drawing on snippets of quotes and newspaper clippings, the site claims that MGTOW dates back to great men, including Schopenhauer, Beethoven, Galileo and “even Jesus Christ”.
Women are essentially portrayed as parasites riding on the coattails of men, who have, throughout history, been responsible for “far greater miracles of science, discovery and human endeavour”. By shaking women off, it is explained, men will be free to pursue ever higher achievements.
“I love this! I feel like I found the secret to the universe,” a user comments in mgtow.com’s testimonials section. Another writes that his city has become so “ultra-feminised” that things are “mind-blowingly bad for men here, especially straight white men”.
Elsewhere, philosophy and opinion are mixed with a heavy dose of often deeply misogynistic advice, such as this from the FAQs section of a different MGTOW website: “My girlfriend is pregnant. What do I do?” “Whatever you do, do NOT invite her into the hot tub with champagne to ‘celebrate’. This can cause a miscarriage and she could lose the baby! Repeat: You should not under any circumstances do that … as quickly as possible.”
It is impossible to know how seriously a comment like this is meant. But whether the original writer intended simply to shock or entertain, it is also impossible to know how it might be interpreted.
MGTOW (pronounced “mig-tau” by adherents) are unlikely to meet in person, instead sharing their techniques, successes and failures online. Throughout the manosphere, it is common to see members expressing paranoia about “normies” who could be out to expose them, often leading to forum users accusing each other of being moles or spies. Nowhere is this fear more prevalent than among MGTOW, with any suggestion of meeting in real life usually receiving a swift and scornful rebuttal.
Once you have “taken the red pill” (ie, opened your eyes to the “reality” that, as a man, the whole world is stacked against you) there are four main levels of MGTOW, according to many websites. Level one involves rejecting long-term relationships, while level two extends this to short-term relationships. Level three requires economic disengagement (reducing taxation as far as possible, in order to avoid paying towards the support of other groups, from “elite alphas” to “single mothers”). As one MGTOW manifesto puts it, as well as fighting to “instil masculinity in men”, MGTOW must “work toward limited government”.
Level four is described as “social rejection”. “The MGTOW drops out of society altogether,” says the MGTOW blogger the Observer Watches. “For all intents and purposes, he does not exist. A urbanite might keep to his own apartment, while someone further out may simply head into the wilderness and go off-grid.”
Those who achieve this ultimate isolation are known as “ghosts” and treated as legends within the community. But most MGTOW seem happy hovering somewhere around level two. Discussions tend to centre on classic manosphere complaints such as the evils of women and misandry (hatred of men). Most of all, they focus on the dangers of interacting with women.
“There is a lot of risk,” David Sherratt, an 18-year-old Cardiff University student and then dedicated member of the MGTOW community, noted in 2015. “We do not know how many false accusations there are. They could be the majority or they could be the minority.” The implication was that there are so many women ready to lie about rape that any contact with them is simply too dangerous to risk. In reality, a man in the UK is 230 times more likely to be raped himself than falsely accused of rape.
In this, MGTOW resemble men’s rights activists (MRAs) more than incels or PUAs. Both groups believe that women pose an immediate threat to all men. MRAs believe that women are so unfaithful and untruthful that they often force men to raise other men’s children, thus financially “cuckolding” them. MGTOW believe that women are extremely likely to make false accusations of sexual or domestic violence, in order to damage men socially, steal their money or even have them jailed.
Sherratt also went on to cite a list of concerns that would resonate particularly closely with MRAs, including: “Men are supposed to pay for dates and bow down to women … anything less than worship is hate” and: “When it comes to marriage, the system is so stacked against men, it does not make sense.” MGTOW and MRAs alike see divorce as deeply one-sided, allowing women to rob innocent men of money, property and, in some cases, children.
Unable to stop thinking about Sherratt, I tracked him down to ask about his experience of becoming involved in the community. Now 22, Sherratt is an engineering apprentice and says he has left MGTOW and other manosphere groups behind. At first, he says, they were “legitimately fun … I had lots of friends, which was new to me, lots of fans and positive reinforcement. As we started to grow and build, it honestly felt like we were eventually going to start making some positive change. It wasn’t just a community, but a new, growing movement that I got into ‘before it was cool’, so, in a way, I felt like I was part of something progressive.”
Sherratt could not, however, claim to be a pioneer. It is generally accepted within the MGTOW community that the movement was started in the mid-00s by two men going by the pseudonyms Solaris (an Australian) and Ragnar (a Scandinavian, who describes himself as “an old guy” and a former pilot), both of whom had been previously active in what they described as the “online men’s movement”. “A sense of alienation is where this whole thing starts,” Solaris claimed in a 2012 YouTube interview. “You realise, simply because you’re a man, that you are considered a legitimate target for being the butt of jokes or being considered a class enemy.”
‘There has been an awakening … changing the world … one man at a time.” These are the dramatic words that appear when you visit mgtow.com. In a video that looks a lot like an action-movie trailer, the words are soon followed by five more that appear to smash through the screen, smouldering fiery red: “Men … going … their … own way.”
If you stumbled across this website and had never heard of “men going their own way” (MGTOW) before, you would probably assume this was a tiny, extreme movement. But you would be only half right.
The views of MGTOW are indeed unorthodox, even within the sprawling web of groups, lifestyles and cults known as the “manosphere”, where women-haters mobilise against a supposed gynocratic conspiracy. While incels plot violent revenge on women, and pickup artists (PUAs) deploy predatory tactics to “game” women into having sex with them, the men of the MGTOW attempt to eschew relationships with women altogether. They are, literally, going their own way. Far, far away from any women. At all.
Although some MGTOW maintain platonic relationships with women and others have one-night stands or visit sex workers, many prefer to abstain from sex, a process referred to as “going monk”. This is too much for some members of the wider manosphere. The blogger Matt Forney, notorious for posts such as “Why fat girls don’t deserve to be loved” and “The necessity of domestic violence”, wrote that “men going their own way is no way for men to go” and mocked MGTOW as “a cult for lonely virgins”.
But this isn’t an obscure internet cul-de-sac; mgtow.com alone has almost 33,000 members. Its forums (“for men only”) contain conversations on more than 50,000 topics, with more than 790,000 replies, which range from advice on divorcing as cheaply as possible to lurid stories about women who have found particularly inventive ways to murder their husbands. The site also lists 25 video channels; between them, these have more than 730,000 followers, and their videos have been viewed a total of 130m times.
Over on YouTube, one of the best-known MGTOW vloggers, who goes by the name of Sandman, has racked up more 90m views for videos with titles ranging from “Smart men don’t get married” to “Criticise her and she will destroy your career”.
The MGTOW philosophy is elaborately laid out on the mgtow.com website, which summarises it as “a statement of self-ownership, where the modern man preserves and protects his own sovereignty above all else”. Drawing on snippets of quotes and newspaper clippings, the site claims that MGTOW dates back to great men, including Schopenhauer, Beethoven, Galileo and “even Jesus Christ”.
Women are essentially portrayed as parasites riding on the coattails of men, who have, throughout history, been responsible for “far greater miracles of science, discovery and human endeavour”. By shaking women off, it is explained, men will be free to pursue ever higher achievements.
“I love this! I feel like I found the secret to the universe,” a user comments in mgtow.com’s testimonials section. Another writes that his city has become so “ultra-feminised” that things are “mind-blowingly bad for men here, especially straight white men”.
Elsewhere, philosophy and opinion are mixed with a heavy dose of often deeply misogynistic advice, such as this from the FAQs section of a different MGTOW website: “My girlfriend is pregnant. What do I do?” “Whatever you do, do NOT invite her into the hot tub with champagne to ‘celebrate’. This can cause a miscarriage and she could lose the baby! Repeat: You should not under any circumstances do that … as quickly as possible.”
It is impossible to know how seriously a comment like this is meant. But whether the original writer intended simply to shock or entertain, it is also impossible to know how it might be interpreted.
MGTOW (pronounced “mig-tau” by adherents) are unlikely to meet in person, instead sharing their techniques, successes and failures online. Throughout the manosphere, it is common to see members expressing paranoia about “normies” who could be out to expose them, often leading to forum users accusing each other of being moles or spies. Nowhere is this fear more prevalent than among MGTOW, with any suggestion of meeting in real life usually receiving a swift and scornful rebuttal.
Once you have “taken the red pill” (ie, opened your eyes to the “reality” that, as a man, the whole world is stacked against you) there are four main levels of MGTOW, according to many websites. Level one involves rejecting long-term relationships, while level two extends this to short-term relationships. Level three requires economic disengagement (reducing taxation as far as possible, in order to avoid paying towards the support of other groups, from “elite alphas” to “single mothers”). As one MGTOW manifesto puts it, as well as fighting to “instil masculinity in men”, MGTOW must “work toward limited government”.
Level four is described as “social rejection”. “The MGTOW drops out of society altogether,” says the MGTOW blogger the Observer Watches. “For all intents and purposes, he does not exist. A urbanite might keep to his own apartment, while someone further out may simply head into the wilderness and go off-grid.”
Those who achieve this ultimate isolation are known as “ghosts” and treated as legends within the community. But most MGTOW seem happy hovering somewhere around level two. Discussions tend to centre on classic manosphere complaints such as the evils of women and misandry (hatred of men). Most of all, they focus on the dangers of interacting with women.
“There is a lot of risk,” David Sherratt, an 18-year-old Cardiff University student and then dedicated member of the MGTOW community, noted in 2015. “We do not know how many false accusations there are. They could be the majority or they could be the minority.” The implication was that there are so many women ready to lie about rape that any contact with them is simply too dangerous to risk. In reality, a man in the UK is 230 times more likely to be raped himself than falsely accused of rape.
In this, MGTOW resemble men’s rights activists (MRAs) more than incels or PUAs. Both groups believe that women pose an immediate threat to all men. MRAs believe that women are so unfaithful and untruthful that they often force men to raise other men’s children, thus financially “cuckolding” them. MGTOW believe that women are extremely likely to make false accusations of sexual or domestic violence, in order to damage men socially, steal their money or even have them jailed.
Sherratt also went on to cite a list of concerns that would resonate particularly closely with MRAs, including: “Men are supposed to pay for dates and bow down to women … anything less than worship is hate” and: “When it comes to marriage, the system is so stacked against men, it does not make sense.” MGTOW and MRAs alike see divorce as deeply one-sided, allowing women to rob innocent men of money, property and, in some cases, children.
Unable to stop thinking about Sherratt, I tracked him down to ask about his experience of becoming involved in the community. Now 22, Sherratt is an engineering apprentice and says he has left MGTOW and other manosphere groups behind. At first, he says, they were “legitimately fun … I had lots of friends, which was new to me, lots of fans and positive reinforcement. As we started to grow and build, it honestly felt like we were eventually going to start making some positive change. It wasn’t just a community, but a new, growing movement that I got into ‘before it was cool’, so, in a way, I felt like I was part of something progressive.”
Sherratt could not, however, claim to be a pioneer. It is generally accepted within the MGTOW community that the movement was started in the mid-00s by two men going by the pseudonyms Solaris (an Australian) and Ragnar (a Scandinavian, who describes himself as “an old guy” and a former pilot), both of whom had been previously active in what they described as the “online men’s movement”. “A sense of alienation is where this whole thing starts,” Solaris claimed in a 2012 YouTube interview. “You realise, simply because you’re a man, that you are considered a legitimate target for being the butt of jokes or being considered a class enemy.”
With the backlash to #MeToo, MGTOW found wider acceptance. Illustration: Gym Class/The Guardian
As with many areas of the manosphere, it is difficult to know where most users of MGTOW forums and communities are based, though the majority communicate in English, and comments and user names suggest that the US, Canada and the UK are common locations. An mgtow.com post entitled Hello From the UK draws enthusiastic replies from “fellow Brits”, who claim to be writing from areas including the Midlands, Sussex and Salford. They revel in their shared ideology as much as their shared location, heartily agreeing with the participant’s opening salvo: “Fucking women, they are all snakes with tits.”
There is also a website called British MGTOW, which rails against what it describes as the “Nazi-like behaviour” of the British state in silencing and censoring non-PC views, claiming: “The UK is sick and it needs healing. The laws are in desperate need of a revamp but all I see around me are docile willing men led to the slaughter.”
It is, one imagines, very difficult for a man to release himself completely from the toxic impact of women while entangled within a community feverishly obsessed with, well, women. This was apparent even to the teenage Sherratt, who says: “I understood the scepticism of marriage and stuff, but, for men who were talking about trying to live lives that didn’t centre around women, they were talking about them an awful lot.” When he tried to voice his disagreements with various elements of MGTOW ideology, he was accused of being “mind-controlled by a girl”. Soon afterwards, he left the community, having met a girl who (rather unsurprisingly) shared his criticisms. “So I guess the joke’s on them,” he muses.
It is easy to write off MGTOW as a weird group of goofy celibates. Yet it has, in some ways, quietly penetrated mainstream culture more successfully than any other segment of the manosphere.
In the immediate wake of the #MeToo movement, which saw millions of women worldwide standing up to sexual harassment and assault by sharing their own stories, there was a swift and severe backlash. Critics claimed that the movement was a pitchfork mob: a “witch-hunt” designed to topple men from their jobs and lives, without so much as an attempt at due process. Some commentators settled for hounding women who had dared to share their stories, or denigrating the movement as a whole. But gradually another response emerged, borrowing its ideology directly from MGTOW: avoiding women at all costs.
It started with rumours: women reporting that men in their offices had suddenly started declining meetings with them or were insisting on leaving the door open. A human resources consultant reported executives telling her that they would no longer get into an elevator alone with a woman. Suddenly, it began to snowball – story after story of men abruptly cancelling business lunches or avoiding women they had previously mentored.
In the same way that the MGTOW movement turns the structural oppression of women on its head, claiming men are the true victims of gender bias, this spate of mainstream examples sought to cast men as the real victims of the #MeToo movement. Men, it argued, had little choice but to protect themselves from the all-powerful cabal of rampaging, vindictive women making false accusations. Even if the solution was as extreme as total isolation.
An orthopaedic surgeon in Chicago told the New York Times that he had ceased ever to be alone with female colleagues, saying: ‘I’m very cautious about it because my livelihood is on the line … If someone in your hospital says you had inappropriate contact with this woman, you get suspended for an investigation, and your life is over. Does that ever leave you?” His apparent implication that such accusations are simply random, based on no wrongdoing whatsoever, went unchallenged in the piece.
The woman-shunning has even penetrated as far as the White House, where the vice-president, Mike Pence, spawned what is now known as the Pence Rule after he remarked that he would never eat a meal alone with a woman who is not his wife.
Reporting on such an idea might have once been seen as inflammatory or biased, requiring careful and robust presentation of opposing arguments. But, as soon as it was attached to Pence, it became respectable fodder for widespread coverage. “THINK,” tweeted Sebastian Gorka, a former deputy assistant to Donald Trump. “If Weinstein had obeyed @VP Pence’s rules for meeting with the opposite sex, none of those poor women would ever have been abused.” Of course, if Weinstein hadn’t been an abusive predator, the same outcome could have been achieved, too. Just a thought.
Before long, a book had been published to spread the word. As the Amazon listing for The Pence Principle, by Randall Bentwick, puts it: “Every man in America could stand to learn a lesson or two from our vice-president. Be smart … Defend yourself, your career, your family and your life from the false accusations of women today and into the future.”
This did not go unnoticed by the MGTOW, whose celebrations were evident in gloating Reddit threads (“Why feminists fear the Mike Pence Rule”) and YouTube videos (“We invented the Pence Rule”). Nor does it remain a niche idea: a 2019 study found that 27% of American men now avoid one-on-one meetings with female colleagues. So the ideas we might think of as the shadowy, ridiculous concerns of the extreme internet fringes are actually being waved under our very noses from the White House front lawn.
As with many areas of the manosphere, it is difficult to know where most users of MGTOW forums and communities are based, though the majority communicate in English, and comments and user names suggest that the US, Canada and the UK are common locations. An mgtow.com post entitled Hello From the UK draws enthusiastic replies from “fellow Brits”, who claim to be writing from areas including the Midlands, Sussex and Salford. They revel in their shared ideology as much as their shared location, heartily agreeing with the participant’s opening salvo: “Fucking women, they are all snakes with tits.”
There is also a website called British MGTOW, which rails against what it describes as the “Nazi-like behaviour” of the British state in silencing and censoring non-PC views, claiming: “The UK is sick and it needs healing. The laws are in desperate need of a revamp but all I see around me are docile willing men led to the slaughter.”
It is, one imagines, very difficult for a man to release himself completely from the toxic impact of women while entangled within a community feverishly obsessed with, well, women. This was apparent even to the teenage Sherratt, who says: “I understood the scepticism of marriage and stuff, but, for men who were talking about trying to live lives that didn’t centre around women, they were talking about them an awful lot.” When he tried to voice his disagreements with various elements of MGTOW ideology, he was accused of being “mind-controlled by a girl”. Soon afterwards, he left the community, having met a girl who (rather unsurprisingly) shared his criticisms. “So I guess the joke’s on them,” he muses.
It is easy to write off MGTOW as a weird group of goofy celibates. Yet it has, in some ways, quietly penetrated mainstream culture more successfully than any other segment of the manosphere.
In the immediate wake of the #MeToo movement, which saw millions of women worldwide standing up to sexual harassment and assault by sharing their own stories, there was a swift and severe backlash. Critics claimed that the movement was a pitchfork mob: a “witch-hunt” designed to topple men from their jobs and lives, without so much as an attempt at due process. Some commentators settled for hounding women who had dared to share their stories, or denigrating the movement as a whole. But gradually another response emerged, borrowing its ideology directly from MGTOW: avoiding women at all costs.
It started with rumours: women reporting that men in their offices had suddenly started declining meetings with them or were insisting on leaving the door open. A human resources consultant reported executives telling her that they would no longer get into an elevator alone with a woman. Suddenly, it began to snowball – story after story of men abruptly cancelling business lunches or avoiding women they had previously mentored.
In the same way that the MGTOW movement turns the structural oppression of women on its head, claiming men are the true victims of gender bias, this spate of mainstream examples sought to cast men as the real victims of the #MeToo movement. Men, it argued, had little choice but to protect themselves from the all-powerful cabal of rampaging, vindictive women making false accusations. Even if the solution was as extreme as total isolation.
An orthopaedic surgeon in Chicago told the New York Times that he had ceased ever to be alone with female colleagues, saying: ‘I’m very cautious about it because my livelihood is on the line … If someone in your hospital says you had inappropriate contact with this woman, you get suspended for an investigation, and your life is over. Does that ever leave you?” His apparent implication that such accusations are simply random, based on no wrongdoing whatsoever, went unchallenged in the piece.
The woman-shunning has even penetrated as far as the White House, where the vice-president, Mike Pence, spawned what is now known as the Pence Rule after he remarked that he would never eat a meal alone with a woman who is not his wife.
Reporting on such an idea might have once been seen as inflammatory or biased, requiring careful and robust presentation of opposing arguments. But, as soon as it was attached to Pence, it became respectable fodder for widespread coverage. “THINK,” tweeted Sebastian Gorka, a former deputy assistant to Donald Trump. “If Weinstein had obeyed @VP Pence’s rules for meeting with the opposite sex, none of those poor women would ever have been abused.” Of course, if Weinstein hadn’t been an abusive predator, the same outcome could have been achieved, too. Just a thought.
Before long, a book had been published to spread the word. As the Amazon listing for The Pence Principle, by Randall Bentwick, puts it: “Every man in America could stand to learn a lesson or two from our vice-president. Be smart … Defend yourself, your career, your family and your life from the false accusations of women today and into the future.”
This did not go unnoticed by the MGTOW, whose celebrations were evident in gloating Reddit threads (“Why feminists fear the Mike Pence Rule”) and YouTube videos (“We invented the Pence Rule”). Nor does it remain a niche idea: a 2019 study found that 27% of American men now avoid one-on-one meetings with female colleagues. So the ideas we might think of as the shadowy, ridiculous concerns of the extreme internet fringes are actually being waved under our very noses from the White House front lawn.
Monday 24 August 2020
Friday 21 August 2020
Adult children are straining the generosity of parents
Families have been stretched into strange shapes these past few months. Parents have welcomed back adult children in lockdown; kids have missed granny; singletons have forged “pods” with random housemates, wishing for that most unfashionable thing — the nuclear family.
Even before Covid-19, multigenerational living was on the rise in many countries, such as the US and UK. Now, a landmark ruling by Italy’s Supreme Court has exposed the extraordinary extent to which some Italians have been clinging on to mamma, her lasagne and her washing machine, into their thirties and forties.
The case concerned a 35-year-old man who has spent the past five years suing his parents for money to supplement his job as a part-time musician. Lower courts had forced his parents to pay maintenance, and backed his claim that he could not be expected to take work beneath his talents. In a blow for common sense, a female judge has told him to grow up. She ruled that he should “reduce his adolescent ambitions”, and that his parents should not be expected to take whatever work was going just so that he didn’t have to compromise.
The ruling is a watershed for a country that has seen hundreds of thousands of such cases, and in which two-thirds of adult children between 18 and 34 still live at home. Four years ago, a middle-aged father was ordered to keep paying for the education of his 28-year-old son who had dallied over a degree in literature and then enrolled on a course in experimental film. The court ruled that the father must pay for the film course because it was in line with the son’s “personal aspirations”.
Where does this sense of entitlement come from? In the days when every generation did better than the one before, there might have been an argument that the young should have the luxury of finding themselves. But to make this a right to parental support is absurd.
Some families have been willing co-conspirators in dependency: one friend in Florence attended a recent wedding where the mother-in-law cut the cake with the bride and groom. But we should think twice about remaining centre stage in our kids’ lives. The Italian Association of Matrimonial Lawyers says one in three divorce claims are related to the financial support of adult children.
The coddling of the group dubbed “bamboccioni”, big babies who are reluctant to leave home, may seem hilarious. But Italy is also an extreme example of the diminished financial prospects of younger generations. The Bank of Mum and Dad is working overtime in many countries — and not always on a voluntary basis.
I recently met a British father who had put down a hefty deposit on a flat for his two “boomerang” daughters, after repeatedly coming home from work to find their live-in boyfriends had drunk all his beer. Having initially embraced them after university, he was now bribing them to leave.
So the fact that Bomad is the UK’s tenth biggest mortgage lender is not as heart-warming as it may appear. It’s an elegant way to say arrivederci.
Nations that have failed to stem youth unemployment, or curb generational wealth gaps, have also brought this upon themselves. Student debt is a major factor in the decision not to fly the nest, with almost half of young millennials in America last year saying they planned to return home after college. But there seems to be a weakening of the drive for independence. One survey of American millennials found that the age at which they regard it as embarrassing to live with one’s parents is 28. That’s 10 years older than I was when my divorcing parents told me I had to stand on my own two feet.
All this suggests that our concept of adolescence is out of date. Far from the traditional five-year window spanned by the “teens”, some academics argue that the period of growing from child to adult should be redefined as running from the age of 10, when some girls hit puberty, to 24, the average age of leaving home in Australia, the US and UK. Indeed, this fits with longer education spans, and uncertain job markets.
Paradoxically, one side-effect of Italian coddling has been to undermine the family. With so many adult offspring hanging on to the apron strings, Italy now has one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Just at the moment when it feels as though family is resurgent, it could be sowing the seeds of its own collapse. In 2019, 28 per cent of Italy’s 20- to 34-year-olds were not in education, employment or training — the highest proportion in the EU. Unless this is fixed, the young will not carry the burden of an ageing population.
There are many good things to be said for la famiglia. The conventional family unit is often derided. But since the crisis, families have been quietly and stolidly making up for failures of welfare states. While academics point to the risk that older generations will sit on their growing relative wealth, many couples have been shovelling their love, pension money and housing wealth towards the young. That’s as it should be: just as long as the young don’t take it for granted.
Don’t rely on algorithms to make life-changing decisions
The shambles of UK exam grading caused distress to pupils and has a lesson to be learnt writesTim Harford in The FT
The governments of England and Scotland have fed the hopes and dreams of students into a paper shredder, yanked out the tatters and handed them to university administrators with instructions to tape everything back together.
The fiasco of algorithmically assigned exam grades is a nightmare for pupils, a huge embarrassment for those in charge and should be a cautionary tale for the rest of the world. With all too many classes cancelled in recent months, here, at least, is a teachable moment, with lessons that go far beyond education.
To summarise the train wreck: with schools closed and exams cancelled, but grades needed to assign places at university, pupils were promised that results would be forthcoming. The final grades were assigned by a data-driven view of each school’s historical record. No student, no matter how outstanding, would be awarded top marks if the algorithm concluded that her or his school was not a top-grade-sort-of-place. Countless individual injustices resulted.
To add insult, students sitting niche subjects in small classes were spared the harsh discipline of the algorithm. Because private schools benefited disproportionately from this selective indulgence it looked as though a government full of over-privileged dimwits was using an algorithm to favour the over-privileged dimwits of the future.
The U-turn part of the algoshambles was to wait until universities had reassigned their offers and only then cancel the downgrades in favour of the original school predictions, which were significantly higher. With many students suddenly entitled to university places that no longer existed, the entire rolling dumpster fire has now been pushed at university admissions offices.
The injustice and the incompetence here is palpable enough. But there is a deeper point about the intoxicating charm of algorithms. In March, when the government faced agonising choices about schools and exams, the algorithm promised fast, effective pain relief through the miracle of modern technology.
“When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution,” writes the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking, Fast and Slow.
The difficult question here was: could we give students the grades they would have earned in the exams? The easier substitute was: could we make the overall pattern of exam results this year look the same as usual?
That’s not hard. An algorithm could mimic any historical pattern you like — or ensure equality (within the limits of arithmetic) based on gender or race. But note the substitution of the easy question for hard. It is impossible to give students the right grades for exams they never sat — one would have to be infatuated with algorithmic miracles not to realise that.
But infatuation with algorithmic miracles is not new. One of the first computer dating services was called Operation Match. In the mid-1960s, it promised that the computer would “scientifically find the right date for you”. In fact it mostly matching people who lived near each other.
An algorithm might try to predict romantic compatibility, but a wise couple would not marry on that basis without meeting. An algorithm might try to predict who will commit crime, and we might focus support on that basis. But I hope we will never dare to jail people for algorithmically predicted pre-crimes.
Neither should we make the life-changing decision to deny a university place for the pre-crime of presumptively missing a grade in a hypothetical exam. Perhaps the least bad option this year was to focus on maximising access to jobs, apprenticeships and higher education, cramming more students into universities rather than playing the game of fantasy grades.
Regardless, we would all be in a better position now if back in March the government had faced the truth rather than being dazzled by the sparkling promise of the algorithm.
Cartoon sourced from The Telegraph
Thursday 20 August 2020
Economics for Non Economists 6 - The link between share price and true value of a company
by Girish Menon
Anandi, you have asked a fundamental question and my views will be like one of the blind men stating that an elephant is like a snake. In other words, it will be a partial truth and there maybe many parts of the elephant that I am missing.
The share price represents the money value at which an owner of a share is willing to give it to another person.
The true value of a share, if it can be determined at all, is what is universally acknowledged to be a ‘fair’ price for a share.
Let me start with a story which I use to start such a discussion. Suppose say that you find yourself in a situation where you are so dehydrated that if you don’t get some water to drink in the next few minutes you will die of thirst. At the time let’s say you pray to Laxmi and offer say Rs 1 lac (Rs. 100,000) for a bottle of water. Hearing your prayers Laxmi propitiates herself as an itinerant saleswoman who offers you a litre of water for Rs. 1 lac. You pay cash and after drinking the water you are now back to full form. At the time the true value of a litre of water to you was Rs. 1 lac.
The water bottle seller is like the seller of shares in that she is trying to get the best price for her goods. Your willingness to pay Rs. 1 lac for the bottle of water is the price a share buyer pays for the share. So the share price will go up when there are more buyers bidding up the price of a scarce share and vice versa.
Suppose say you reach home and narrate this incident to your family. Ashish, your CA brother immediately pulls out his calculator and computes the costs the water producer would have incurred in supplying the bottle of water to you. He informs you that at the most you should have paid maximum Rs. 1000 for the bottle of water. In other words he tells you that you have been ripped of by Rs. 99,000.
Just as Ashish computed the costs of supplying a water bottle to you, stock market analysts who focus on fundamentals use the firm’s balance sheets, P&L accounts and quarterly public statements to estimate the ‘true value’ of a share. However, this method also has its drawbacks in that it is like driving a car by looking at the rear view mirror. It assumes that the past performance of a business is an accurate predictor of the firm’s future prospects. Of course, there is the added risk of trusting the financial statements of any business. The list of auditing scandals will have raised sufficient questions in your mind on the reliability of financial statements. To quote my teacher, ‘It’s not the figures lying, but the liars figuring’.
Let me end with a story. Two learned friends were arguing in the presence of a third, when the third suggested that we go to Confucius to resolve the issue. The first man went in and Confucius told him that he was right. The second man who narrated his version also got the same Confucian reply. The third friend now went in and told Confucius how can it be that both are right and Confucius told him ‘You are also right’.
Anandi, you have asked a fundamental question and my views will be like one of the blind men stating that an elephant is like a snake. In other words, it will be a partial truth and there maybe many parts of the elephant that I am missing.
The share price represents the money value at which an owner of a share is willing to give it to another person.
The true value of a share, if it can be determined at all, is what is universally acknowledged to be a ‘fair’ price for a share.
Let me start with a story which I use to start such a discussion. Suppose say that you find yourself in a situation where you are so dehydrated that if you don’t get some water to drink in the next few minutes you will die of thirst. At the time let’s say you pray to Laxmi and offer say Rs 1 lac (Rs. 100,000) for a bottle of water. Hearing your prayers Laxmi propitiates herself as an itinerant saleswoman who offers you a litre of water for Rs. 1 lac. You pay cash and after drinking the water you are now back to full form. At the time the true value of a litre of water to you was Rs. 1 lac.
The water bottle seller is like the seller of shares in that she is trying to get the best price for her goods. Your willingness to pay Rs. 1 lac for the bottle of water is the price a share buyer pays for the share. So the share price will go up when there are more buyers bidding up the price of a scarce share and vice versa.
Suppose say you reach home and narrate this incident to your family. Ashish, your CA brother immediately pulls out his calculator and computes the costs the water producer would have incurred in supplying the bottle of water to you. He informs you that at the most you should have paid maximum Rs. 1000 for the bottle of water. In other words he tells you that you have been ripped of by Rs. 99,000.
Just as Ashish computed the costs of supplying a water bottle to you, stock market analysts who focus on fundamentals use the firm’s balance sheets, P&L accounts and quarterly public statements to estimate the ‘true value’ of a share. However, this method also has its drawbacks in that it is like driving a car by looking at the rear view mirror. It assumes that the past performance of a business is an accurate predictor of the firm’s future prospects. Of course, there is the added risk of trusting the financial statements of any business. The list of auditing scandals will have raised sufficient questions in your mind on the reliability of financial statements. To quote my teacher, ‘It’s not the figures lying, but the liars figuring’.
Let me end with a story. Two learned friends were arguing in the presence of a third, when the third suggested that we go to Confucius to resolve the issue. The first man went in and Confucius told him that he was right. The second man who narrated his version also got the same Confucian reply. The third friend now went in and told Confucius how can it be that both are right and Confucius told him ‘You are also right’.
In other words there is no true value of a company, it is based on individual and often irrational perceptions of value.
--For other articles in this series
Wednesday 19 August 2020
Algorithms have a nightmarish new power over our lives
The problems with this kind of decision-making are clear, yet such methods are increasingly used in opaque and frightening ways writes Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian
Living the nightmare ... A-level students protest outside the Department for Education in London this month. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters
Have you ever had a dream in which you are about to sit your final exams and you suddenly realise you did not do any prep and are going to fail? I have that anxiety dream a lot (it is always a maths exam), despite having left school a million years ago. And I am not the only one: it is a surprisingly common phenomenon.
While that dream is disturbing, it is nothing compared with the nightmare British students have just lived through. The pandemic meant school-leavers did not get to sit their Highers or A-levels; instead, algorithms determined their grades – and their futures. A lot of kids from poorer backgrounds had their final results dramatically downgraded from teachers’ predictions; pupils at private schools, meanwhile, were treated remarkably well by the algorithms. After enormous controversy, the Scottish and UK governments performed U-turns, saying exam results would be based on teacher-assessed grades.
This is not the first time the UK government has suffered embarrassment by algorithm. Earlier this year, the Home Office decided to scrap a “racist algorithm” for visa applicants that was accused of creating “speedy boarding for white people” while making things harder for everyone else. And a security thinktank warned last year that predictive policing algorithms could amplify human bias and make it more likely that young black men would get disproportionately stopped and searched compared with people from other demographics.
Mysterious algorithms control increasingly large parts of our lives. They recommend what we should watch next on YouTube; they help employers recruit staff; they decide if you deserve a loan; they help landlords calculate rent. You and I may have aged beyond school exams, but it does not matter how old you are – these days, it is almost guaranteed that an opaque algorithm is grading and influencing your every move. If that does not give you nightmares, I am not sure what will.
Have you ever had a dream in which you are about to sit your final exams and you suddenly realise you did not do any prep and are going to fail? I have that anxiety dream a lot (it is always a maths exam), despite having left school a million years ago. And I am not the only one: it is a surprisingly common phenomenon.
While that dream is disturbing, it is nothing compared with the nightmare British students have just lived through. The pandemic meant school-leavers did not get to sit their Highers or A-levels; instead, algorithms determined their grades – and their futures. A lot of kids from poorer backgrounds had their final results dramatically downgraded from teachers’ predictions; pupils at private schools, meanwhile, were treated remarkably well by the algorithms. After enormous controversy, the Scottish and UK governments performed U-turns, saying exam results would be based on teacher-assessed grades.
This is not the first time the UK government has suffered embarrassment by algorithm. Earlier this year, the Home Office decided to scrap a “racist algorithm” for visa applicants that was accused of creating “speedy boarding for white people” while making things harder for everyone else. And a security thinktank warned last year that predictive policing algorithms could amplify human bias and make it more likely that young black men would get disproportionately stopped and searched compared with people from other demographics.
Mysterious algorithms control increasingly large parts of our lives. They recommend what we should watch next on YouTube; they help employers recruit staff; they decide if you deserve a loan; they help landlords calculate rent. You and I may have aged beyond school exams, but it does not matter how old you are – these days, it is almost guaranteed that an opaque algorithm is grading and influencing your every move. If that does not give you nightmares, I am not sure what will.
I often have this dream - You’re at the final exam and never attended class
It’s an astonishingly common dream. Many of us have it, with numerous reruns throughout our lives writes Marlene Cimons in The Washington Post
“I never went to class. I never did the work. I never studied. Final is tomorrow. Terrible anxiety,” says Susie Drucker Hirshfield, 71, of Stockbridge, Mass., a friend from college. “Or, I’m a freshman. The campus is huge. I’m lost. I can’t find my classroom building. Seems like I walk around forever, and never find it. Or I find it, and the class is over.’’
Ben Goldberg, 28, a lawyer who was an A student of mine in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, has his own version. “I wake up the morning of a final and realize I am completely unprepared for the exam,” he says. “I spend the day frantically trying to learn the material, but still walk into the exam hopelessly unprepared. Or I wake on the day of the final and realize that I’ve cut the class all year.”
It’s a dream that apparently spans the generations and usually involves high school or college, sometimes both. And, oddly, it seems to haunt us decades after we last sat in a classroom.
For most people, including me, it goes like this: We’ve signed up for a course that we never attend, or we forget we enrolled in it. When final-exam day approaches, we are panic-stricken because we never went to any of the lectures, never took notes and never did the readings or assignments. (In one bizarre twist, some people report that they show up on final exam day naked — perhaps feeling vulnerable?)
For some, the course is one in which we did poorly in real life. Others dream of a subject in which they actually did well but had worried about failing.
“I’ve had these dreams during and since college,” Hirshfield says. “I even have them when I am not anxious about anything. It’s one of those universal dreams. I think everybody has them.”
I think she’s right. But why is the dream so common? I couldn’t find any research on the topic — surprising, because the dream seems like natural fodder for psychologists. I talked to a few experts who also were unaware of studies examining this dream. In the absence of peer-reviewed findings, however, they were willing to offer a few thoughts, stressing that their ideas were nothing more than opinion and speculation.
“I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students,” says Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and who wrote about the dream in a 2009 Psychology Today blog post. “These are people who have demanded a high performance from themselves. The recurrence of the dream correlates with times of stress and pressure, when people feel they have a challenge to achieve.’’
Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, an Austin psychoanalyst, agrees. The final exam, she says, “is likely representative of an occasion when the dreamer feels he or she will be tested or measured, and the anxiety is about not measuring up. The dreamer’s task in ‘awake life’ is to translate the final exam to a situation he or she is facing that stirs up concerns about potential failure.”
But why school? Why don’t we dream about current pressures — grant proposals that are due, impending legal briefs or oral arguments, or newspaper deadlines?
“Emotional memories and impressions made during high-stress experiences are particularly strong, and are further strengthened each time they are recalled and become the place the brain goes when the emotion is evoked,” Willis wrote in an email. “Since each new stress in the current day is ‘new,’ there is not a strong memory circuit that would hook to it in a dream. But there is that strong neural network of previous, similar ‘achievement’ stress. Since tests are the highest stressors. . . [it] makes sense as the ‘go-to’ memory when stressed about something equally high stakes in the ‘now.’ ’’
Ainslie theorizes that most of us have these dreams “as an attempt to disguise what it’s really about,” she says. “The part of yourself that is distressed wants to disguise it, and the easiest way to disguise it is to move backwards.”
Ainslie says the school dream is a common one, although it’s not the only one that reflects anxiety. “Another common one is being in a car and not being able to put the brakes on,” she says. “This one isn’t about not measuring up. It’s about not being in control, a matter of not being the driver in your life.”
Alma Bond, a retired New York psychoanalyst and writer, describes the school dream as a response to “an unconscious memory of an experience for which we were totally unprepared,” adding that it’s possible “we unconsciously remember a time when we did fail some test or other, and are afraid we will repeat the failure.”
My son, 26, is the only person I know who claims never to have had this dream, and he has a plausible explanation as to why. A serial class-cutter in high school, he says that “skipping classes has always seemed normal to me.”
But those of us who are Type A personalities — as well as anyone else with achievement-related stress — may be fated to have this anxiety-producing dream over and over.
Ed Hershey, 72, of Portland, Ore., who spent most of his career in academic communications, recently posted on Facebook of yet another “vividly familiar,” periodic, “I-won’t-graduate-from-high-school-on-time” anxiety dream. He noted that it struck just a few weeks before his 55th high school reunion.
Forty-seven “friends’’ responded, and a dozen of them posted examples of their own variations on the dream. “I guess they [the dreams] never stop, do they?” he says, adding: “At least I know I am not alone.”
Monday 17 August 2020
Soon there won't be anyone left for this government to blame
As their troubles mount, bungling ministers will point the finger at minorities, migrants, teachers … anyone but themselves writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian
‘A source “close to Gavin Williamson” has said that teachers were “not to be trusted on grading”.’ Students protest in London on Saturday. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/Rex/Shutterstock
As a second peak of Covid-19 infections looms, one thing is certain: the Conservative party is dedicating itself to what it does best – crafting a narrative that blames everyone else for its mistakes.
Brace for it. After six months of catastrophic mismanagement, from delaying lockdown to the A-level marking fiasco, this autumn is sure to bring even more diversion, distraction and brazen victim-blaming.
Led by a shallow prime minister, populated by careerists and directed by a grandiose and sophomoric special adviser, the government at present is fashioned towards ruling – not governing. But it’s not lack of qualification alone that has produced its incompetence. The defining feature of today’s Conservative party is indifference to the outcomes of its failed policies – none of which it has been seriously punished for.
These aren’t new tactics. The poor were blamed for borrowing beyond their means in the wake of the financial crisis
The gutting of the state, the impoverishment and deaths caused by austerity, the chaos of Brexit and the global embarrassment that has been its pandemic response are failures that should have brought an end to its tenure. But the party has developed one skill: avoiding consequences by way of constructing false enemies – immigrants, welfare scroungers, the European Union. It has achieved this herd impunity with the help of a credulous and oftentimes knowingly complicit media.
When faced with the actual task of governing during a real crisis, not a confected one, the government has flailed, U-turned and contradicted itself. Throughout it has stuck competently and consistently to its one principle – never apologise, never explain, always blame someone else.
The political and cultural infrastructure that makes it so easy for the powerful to shift responsibility on to others while refusing to show humility or acknowledge mistakes encourages a limited range of public responses to political crises. When an issue arises, the government launches into dramatic displays of action for the benefit of the watching public, and the media follows its cue, inflating the scale of the problem. Any legitimate demands for rational analysis of a situation are trivialised as liberal hand-wringing. Calls for accountability are dismissed as a “politicising” of events, as Boris Johnson has repeatedly characterised Labour questions about its handling of the pandemic, or the result of media “agendas”, such as when journalists sought answers about Dominic Cummings defying lockdown rules.
When immigrants are spotted crossing the Channel, we are presented with the grossly disproportionate response of appointing a chillingly named “clandestine Channel threat commander”. The journalists ignoring the distress of a man in a dinghy bailing out water with a plastic bucket are likely not doing so out of a studied xenophobia, but this callous way of reporting is so entrenched that it’s become habit.
And everything is about to get worse. What lies ahead is the diversionary plan to make the British public accountable for the government’s failures. The seeds for this deception were planted during the pandemic’s first act. We were to “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives”, and then later “stay alert, control the virus and save lives”. Cabinet ministers rolled out these staccato orders to us whenever they were cornered on the detail of their policies, as if the entire success or failure of the pandemic response hinged only on public observance and not the government’s decisions.
The seeds are flourishing. The Conservatives want us to believe that their efforts were thwarted by a mass exercise in national sabotage by irresponsible individuals, by black and ethnic minority communities allegedly not observing its rules, by badly run old people’s homes, even by the poor advice of its own scientists.
At crucial junctures the Tories will anticipate public anger and earmark a convenient target to be subjected to public scrutiny. As A-level students saw their futures dissolve, a source “close to Gavin Williamson”, the education secretary, was mobilised to the Daily Telegraph to say that teachers were “not to be trusted on grading”, and it was they who gave students an unreasonable expectation of their results.
Round two of the fight between teachers’ unions and local governments is brewing, as they object to schools re-opening in September without a robust test, track and trace system. Perpetually locked in a fight with professional bodies and their own civil service, ministers bully people whose sense of vocational duty will not allow them to warp reality to suit government propaganda.
These aren’t new tactics. The poor were blamed for borrowing beyond their means in the wake of the financial crisis, and the bankers got away with it. Immigrants, not government austerity, were blamed for the shrinking of the welfare state. After a decade of gutting public services and growing its media patronage, the Conservative party has become very good at making people fight for the scraps of resources it leaves behind. Its efforts will add one more test to the trials facing the British public in the autumn – will we turn against the government, or each other?
As a second peak of Covid-19 infections looms, one thing is certain: the Conservative party is dedicating itself to what it does best – crafting a narrative that blames everyone else for its mistakes.
Brace for it. After six months of catastrophic mismanagement, from delaying lockdown to the A-level marking fiasco, this autumn is sure to bring even more diversion, distraction and brazen victim-blaming.
Led by a shallow prime minister, populated by careerists and directed by a grandiose and sophomoric special adviser, the government at present is fashioned towards ruling – not governing. But it’s not lack of qualification alone that has produced its incompetence. The defining feature of today’s Conservative party is indifference to the outcomes of its failed policies – none of which it has been seriously punished for.
These aren’t new tactics. The poor were blamed for borrowing beyond their means in the wake of the financial crisis
The gutting of the state, the impoverishment and deaths caused by austerity, the chaos of Brexit and the global embarrassment that has been its pandemic response are failures that should have brought an end to its tenure. But the party has developed one skill: avoiding consequences by way of constructing false enemies – immigrants, welfare scroungers, the European Union. It has achieved this herd impunity with the help of a credulous and oftentimes knowingly complicit media.
When faced with the actual task of governing during a real crisis, not a confected one, the government has flailed, U-turned and contradicted itself. Throughout it has stuck competently and consistently to its one principle – never apologise, never explain, always blame someone else.
The political and cultural infrastructure that makes it so easy for the powerful to shift responsibility on to others while refusing to show humility or acknowledge mistakes encourages a limited range of public responses to political crises. When an issue arises, the government launches into dramatic displays of action for the benefit of the watching public, and the media follows its cue, inflating the scale of the problem. Any legitimate demands for rational analysis of a situation are trivialised as liberal hand-wringing. Calls for accountability are dismissed as a “politicising” of events, as Boris Johnson has repeatedly characterised Labour questions about its handling of the pandemic, or the result of media “agendas”, such as when journalists sought answers about Dominic Cummings defying lockdown rules.
When immigrants are spotted crossing the Channel, we are presented with the grossly disproportionate response of appointing a chillingly named “clandestine Channel threat commander”. The journalists ignoring the distress of a man in a dinghy bailing out water with a plastic bucket are likely not doing so out of a studied xenophobia, but this callous way of reporting is so entrenched that it’s become habit.
And everything is about to get worse. What lies ahead is the diversionary plan to make the British public accountable for the government’s failures. The seeds for this deception were planted during the pandemic’s first act. We were to “stay at home, protect the NHS, save lives”, and then later “stay alert, control the virus and save lives”. Cabinet ministers rolled out these staccato orders to us whenever they were cornered on the detail of their policies, as if the entire success or failure of the pandemic response hinged only on public observance and not the government’s decisions.
The seeds are flourishing. The Conservatives want us to believe that their efforts were thwarted by a mass exercise in national sabotage by irresponsible individuals, by black and ethnic minority communities allegedly not observing its rules, by badly run old people’s homes, even by the poor advice of its own scientists.
At crucial junctures the Tories will anticipate public anger and earmark a convenient target to be subjected to public scrutiny. As A-level students saw their futures dissolve, a source “close to Gavin Williamson”, the education secretary, was mobilised to the Daily Telegraph to say that teachers were “not to be trusted on grading”, and it was they who gave students an unreasonable expectation of their results.
Round two of the fight between teachers’ unions and local governments is brewing, as they object to schools re-opening in September without a robust test, track and trace system. Perpetually locked in a fight with professional bodies and their own civil service, ministers bully people whose sense of vocational duty will not allow them to warp reality to suit government propaganda.
These aren’t new tactics. The poor were blamed for borrowing beyond their means in the wake of the financial crisis, and the bankers got away with it. Immigrants, not government austerity, were blamed for the shrinking of the welfare state. After a decade of gutting public services and growing its media patronage, the Conservative party has become very good at making people fight for the scraps of resources it leaves behind. Its efforts will add one more test to the trials facing the British public in the autumn – will we turn against the government, or each other?
Sunday 16 August 2020
Friday 14 August 2020
Wednesday 12 August 2020
Tuesday 11 August 2020
Economics for Non Economists 5 – Inflation - Why is the government’s inflation rate lower than my personal experience?
By Girish Menon
Some of you would have realised that in the China virus season the supermarkets have raised prices and stopped offering discounts on many goods. As a result you would have experienced rising food bills which according to layman knowledge should translate into inflation*. At the same time, you may have read many economists predict a period of recession, deflation** and high levels of unemployment. So how is it that when you are experiencing inflation personally, economists predict the existence of deflation?
It all depends on the way the inflation rate is calculated.
The UK government uses the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to estimate the inflation rate in the British economy. It works like this:
1. Every year a few thousand families are asked to record their expenditure for a month. From this data the indexers estimate the types of goods and services bought by an average household and the quantity of their income spent on these goods.
2. With this information, surveyors are sent out each month to record prices for the above mix of goods. Prices are recorded in different areas of the country as well as in different types of retail outlets. These results are averaged out to find the average price of goods and this is converted into index numbers.
3. Changes in the price of some goods are considered more important than others based on the proportion of the income spent by the average household. This means that the above numbers have to be weighted before the final index is calculated.
Consider this example:
Assume that there are only two goods in the economy, food and cars. The average household spends 75% of their income on food and 25 % on cars. Suppose there is an increase in the price of food by 8% and of cars by 4% annually.
In a normal average calculation, the 8% and 4% would be added together and divided by 2 to arrive at an average inflation of 6%
However, this provides an inaccurate figure because spending on food is more important in the household than spending on cars. Food is given a weight of 75% and cars are given a weight of 25%. So the price increase of food is multiplied by ¾ (8*3/4 = 6) and added to the price increase of cars which is multiplied by ¼ (4*1/4 =1) which will result in an inflation of 7%.
Therefore if the inflation index was 100 at the start of the year then it will read 107 at the end of the year.
The accuracy of inflation calculations
Some of you would have realised that in the China virus season the supermarkets have raised prices and stopped offering discounts on many goods. As a result you would have experienced rising food bills which according to layman knowledge should translate into inflation*. At the same time, you may have read many economists predict a period of recession, deflation** and high levels of unemployment. So how is it that when you are experiencing inflation personally, economists predict the existence of deflation?
It all depends on the way the inflation rate is calculated.
The UK government uses the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to estimate the inflation rate in the British economy. It works like this:
1. Every year a few thousand families are asked to record their expenditure for a month. From this data the indexers estimate the types of goods and services bought by an average household and the quantity of their income spent on these goods.
2. With this information, surveyors are sent out each month to record prices for the above mix of goods. Prices are recorded in different areas of the country as well as in different types of retail outlets. These results are averaged out to find the average price of goods and this is converted into index numbers.
3. Changes in the price of some goods are considered more important than others based on the proportion of the income spent by the average household. This means that the above numbers have to be weighted before the final index is calculated.
---Topics covered earlier
---
Consider this example:
Assume that there are only two goods in the economy, food and cars. The average household spends 75% of their income on food and 25 % on cars. Suppose there is an increase in the price of food by 8% and of cars by 4% annually.
In a normal average calculation, the 8% and 4% would be added together and divided by 2 to arrive at an average inflation of 6%
However, this provides an inaccurate figure because spending on food is more important in the household than spending on cars. Food is given a weight of 75% and cars are given a weight of 25%. So the price increase of food is multiplied by ¾ (8*3/4 = 6) and added to the price increase of cars which is multiplied by ¼ (4*1/4 =1) which will result in an inflation of 7%.
Therefore if the inflation index was 100 at the start of the year then it will read 107 at the end of the year.
The accuracy of inflation calculations
As the example makes clear this calculation is based on an imagined average family’s spending patterns. There maybe only a few families in the UK that have the exact same spending patterns as imagined by the government.
Theoretically, different rates of inflation could be calculated within an economy by changing the consumption patterns or weightings in the index. This will explain why the inflation that you experience may be higher or lower than the government’s inflation rate.
* Inflation is an average increase in price level compared over a previous period.
** Deflation is an average decrease in price level compared over a previous period.
Disinflation means the inflation in the current period is lower than the earlier period.
Monday 10 August 2020
The Supreme Court must remember: It is supreme because it’s final not because it’s infallible
Whilst justice is important, judges must not take themselves too seriously. Even if their amour propre is offended, it does not mean the institution has been questioned or justice brought into disrepute writes Karan Thapar in The Indian Express.
Are judges special or is justice special? It’s an interesting question and not because it’s a tricky one. Actually, it’s the issue at the heart of the debate around the Law of Contempt. It’s been discussed before but two cases of contempt against the human rights lawyer Prashant Bhushan in the Supreme Court have brought it back into sharp focus.
The first contempt case, called the Tehelka case, dates back to 2009 and hasn’t been heard for the last eight years. Why in the middle of a COVID crisis, when the Supreme Court is only functioning virtually and many cases are rejected because there is “no extreme urgency”, has this case been given priority? When the Court cannot find time for the Citizenship Amendment Act or habeas corpus petitions from Jammu and Kashmir, are we to believe this case is more important?
Of course, the Court’s concerns are allegations regarding the judiciary and corruption, made by Prashant Bhushan and published by Tehelka. But if this has really scandalised the Court how come it didn’t act for 11 years? The second contempt case is mystifying. It arises out of one of Bhushan’s tweets commenting on a photograph of the present Chief Justice. The Court claims his tweet “brought the administration of justice in disrepute … undermining the dignity and authority of the institution of Supreme Court in general and the office of the Chief Justice of India in particular”.
These two cases have brought contempt of court back into focus and that’s the reason why the question I started with is important. As regards the cases themselves, they were heard on consecutive days last week (the 4th and 5th) and in both cases a three-judge bench presided over by Justice Arun Mishra reserved judgement. It’s expected in a week or 10 days. If good sense prevails he ought not to be sentenced. I now want to turn to what ought to constitute good sense in this matter. The answer to the question at the very start hinges upon it.
The concept of contempt is a centuries old British law abolished in 2013. At the time the British Law Commission said the purpose was not just “preventing the public from getting the wrong idea of judges … but where there are shortcomings it’s equally important to prevent the public from getting the right idea”. In other words, one intention was to hide judicial corruption. The concept, therefore, clashed with the need for transparency but also freedom of speech.
As far back as 1968, Lord Denning, Britain’s former Master of the Rolls, had this to say of the Law of Contempt: “Let me say at once that we will never use this jurisdiction as a means to uphold our own dignity … nor will we use it to suppress those who speak against us. We do not fear criticism, nor do we resent it. For there is something far more important at stake. It is no less than freedom of speech itself. It’s the right of every man, in parliament or out of it, in the press or over the broadcast, to make fair comment, even outspoken comment, on matters of public interest … we must rely on our own conduct itself to be its own vindication.”
In 1987, after the Spycatcher judgement, when the Daily Mirror called British Law Lords “You Old Fools” or, in 2016, after the Brexit ruling, when the Daily Mail called three judges “Enemies of the People” the British judiciary consciously and sensibly ignored the headlines and did not consider contempt prosecution. In fact, Lord Templeton’s comment on the Spycatcher headline is worth recalling: “I cannot deny that I am old; it’s the truth. Whether I am a fool or not is a matter of perception of someone else … there is no need to invoke the powers of contempt.”
A similar position was adopted in a 2008 lecture by Justice Markandey Katju: “If a person calls me a fool, whether inside court or outside it, I for one would not take action as it does not prevent me from functioning, and I would simply ignore the comment or else say that everyone is entitled to his opinion. After all words break no bones”.
More importantly, Justice Katju added: “The test to determine whether an act amounts to contempt of court or not is this: Does it make the functioning of judges impossible or extremely difficult? If it does not, then it does not amount to contempt of court even if it’s harsh criticism … the only situation where I would have to take some action was if my functioning as a judge was made impossible … after all I have to function if I wish to justify my salary.”
I think that answers the question I began with. Whilst justice is important, judges must not take themselves too seriously. Even if their amour propre is offended, it does not mean the institution has been questioned or justice brought into disrepute. Judges deliver justice, they do not embody it. They should never forget their Court is supreme because it’s final not because it’s infallible. When they lapse they can be criticised, but of course, politely and fairly.
I hope the Supreme Court will bear this in mind when it pronounces on Bhushan’s two cases.
Are judges special or is justice special? It’s an interesting question and not because it’s a tricky one. Actually, it’s the issue at the heart of the debate around the Law of Contempt. It’s been discussed before but two cases of contempt against the human rights lawyer Prashant Bhushan in the Supreme Court have brought it back into sharp focus.
The first contempt case, called the Tehelka case, dates back to 2009 and hasn’t been heard for the last eight years. Why in the middle of a COVID crisis, when the Supreme Court is only functioning virtually and many cases are rejected because there is “no extreme urgency”, has this case been given priority? When the Court cannot find time for the Citizenship Amendment Act or habeas corpus petitions from Jammu and Kashmir, are we to believe this case is more important?
Of course, the Court’s concerns are allegations regarding the judiciary and corruption, made by Prashant Bhushan and published by Tehelka. But if this has really scandalised the Court how come it didn’t act for 11 years? The second contempt case is mystifying. It arises out of one of Bhushan’s tweets commenting on a photograph of the present Chief Justice. The Court claims his tweet “brought the administration of justice in disrepute … undermining the dignity and authority of the institution of Supreme Court in general and the office of the Chief Justice of India in particular”.
These two cases have brought contempt of court back into focus and that’s the reason why the question I started with is important. As regards the cases themselves, they were heard on consecutive days last week (the 4th and 5th) and in both cases a three-judge bench presided over by Justice Arun Mishra reserved judgement. It’s expected in a week or 10 days. If good sense prevails he ought not to be sentenced. I now want to turn to what ought to constitute good sense in this matter. The answer to the question at the very start hinges upon it.
The concept of contempt is a centuries old British law abolished in 2013. At the time the British Law Commission said the purpose was not just “preventing the public from getting the wrong idea of judges … but where there are shortcomings it’s equally important to prevent the public from getting the right idea”. In other words, one intention was to hide judicial corruption. The concept, therefore, clashed with the need for transparency but also freedom of speech.
As far back as 1968, Lord Denning, Britain’s former Master of the Rolls, had this to say of the Law of Contempt: “Let me say at once that we will never use this jurisdiction as a means to uphold our own dignity … nor will we use it to suppress those who speak against us. We do not fear criticism, nor do we resent it. For there is something far more important at stake. It is no less than freedom of speech itself. It’s the right of every man, in parliament or out of it, in the press or over the broadcast, to make fair comment, even outspoken comment, on matters of public interest … we must rely on our own conduct itself to be its own vindication.”
In 1987, after the Spycatcher judgement, when the Daily Mirror called British Law Lords “You Old Fools” or, in 2016, after the Brexit ruling, when the Daily Mail called three judges “Enemies of the People” the British judiciary consciously and sensibly ignored the headlines and did not consider contempt prosecution. In fact, Lord Templeton’s comment on the Spycatcher headline is worth recalling: “I cannot deny that I am old; it’s the truth. Whether I am a fool or not is a matter of perception of someone else … there is no need to invoke the powers of contempt.”
A similar position was adopted in a 2008 lecture by Justice Markandey Katju: “If a person calls me a fool, whether inside court or outside it, I for one would not take action as it does not prevent me from functioning, and I would simply ignore the comment or else say that everyone is entitled to his opinion. After all words break no bones”.
More importantly, Justice Katju added: “The test to determine whether an act amounts to contempt of court or not is this: Does it make the functioning of judges impossible or extremely difficult? If it does not, then it does not amount to contempt of court even if it’s harsh criticism … the only situation where I would have to take some action was if my functioning as a judge was made impossible … after all I have to function if I wish to justify my salary.”
I think that answers the question I began with. Whilst justice is important, judges must not take themselves too seriously. Even if their amour propre is offended, it does not mean the institution has been questioned or justice brought into disrepute. Judges deliver justice, they do not embody it. They should never forget their Court is supreme because it’s final not because it’s infallible. When they lapse they can be criticised, but of course, politely and fairly.
I hope the Supreme Court will bear this in mind when it pronounces on Bhushan’s two cases.
Wilburton walkout ends exciting game
by Girish Menon
CamKerala 3s (CK3) were around 162 runs for 6 chasing Wilburton’s 208 with 14 overs left. A partnership of over 6 overs and 40 runs had developed between Fabio and this writer when Fabio cross bats their spinner over midwicket. The ball is caught but the fielder was standing on the boundary line. Umpire Adarsh signals a six but Wilburton walkout ending an exciting game that appeared to be once again moving towards CK3.
For scorecard please click here
Wilburton turned up for this game at Comberton with a mood to right the wrongs they suffered against TAC in a friendly last week. Their 16-17 year old betrayed this view as he was the first arrival on the ground and told this writer that in the last match TAC had been liberal in calling wides and no balls. This lad righted TAC’s wrongs by being unduly harsh on CK3’s wides, no balls and lbw appeals. That set the tone for the game and this writer had to indicate to Saheer the harshness of the wides and the no balls. Another notable incident was during CK3’s run chase. The same lad denied CK3 a four by claiming the ball did not cross the line. Some CK3 players watching the incident began protesting this decision while a Wilburton spectator joined the argument on the other side. A pregnant Martha (Savio’s wife) was so convinced the ball had crossed the line that she was seen expressing her view.
The game began on a disappointing note for CK3 who were denied the chance to bat first (despite having a 75% probability of doing so according to captain Saheer). After a couple of early wickets Wilburton consolidated their innings with a couple of mature gentlemen, one of who later played as the wicketkeeper and was the agent provocateur of the walkout. This man swatted a few full tosses and egged on the lad to be harsh on no balls etc. This pair put on a good partnership and Wilburton edged towards a good score. The other partner scored a 70 and shepherded the rest of their batting which was not poor. In a late flourish CK3 took a flurry of wickets and Wilburton were all out in the 40th over. Debutant Herald bowled an excellent spell of offspin, with Saheer and Himanshu helping to wind up the innings.
CK3 started tennis ball style trying to hit boundaries. This was epitomised by Freddy who hit a six and trying to repeat the action was bowled in the next delivery. So, the run rate was high but wickets kept tumbling. Arun tried to calm things down and he had a good partnership with Saheer before Saheer was declared run out. Herald also declared Arun out lbw which brought Fabio and this writer to the crease. Fabio and this writer operated on the principle that if CK3 batted the full 40 overs then a win would follow. It was decided that one boundary and 1-2 singles was what would be attempted each over and good balls defended. What happened thereafter has already been highlighted in the introduction and will go down in CK3 folklore.
Wilburton players followed the script of the pigs in Animal Farm with their dictum " Our Umpires Good, Theirs Cheats". Also, revenging the TAC game against CK3 because of 'similar looking people' may be considered racist. They also ensured a continuous flow of sledges while CK3 were batting.
CK3, after last week's start with its main players declared lbw, may have seen the writing on the wall as far as lbws go in self umpired village cricket leagues. And Captain Saheer’s Cornwall holiday mood may have ended quickly due to above events at Comberton.
Sunday 9 August 2020
Saturday 8 August 2020
Economics for Non Economists 4 - The Marriage of Debt and Profit in Capitalism
by Girish Menon (Adapted from: Talking to my Daughter about the Economy by Yanis Varoufakis)
How does a new
entrepreneur start?
---For earlier articles
Explaining GDP and Economic Growth
---
Positive Multiplier
As the economy grows, banks will lend even larger amounts of loans until it reaches a point when the loans they have made are so vast that the economy cannot keep pace. At this point realization dawns that the large loans will not be repaid and the economy crashes.
Debt, Profits and Crashes
Thus debt is indispensable in capitalism. There can be no profit without debt. However, the very same process that generates profits and wealth also generates financial crashes and economic crises.
Modi redefined secularism with Ram Mandir as Hindu voters were fed up of Sonia-Left version
Assumptions that Indian secularism died with Ram Mandir bhoomi pujan are bunk. It is enshrined in the Constitution, and is worth preserving writes SHEKHAR GUPTA in The Print
Did Indian secularism die on 5 August in Ayodhya? It follows, then, that a new Indian Republic would have been invented, a Hindu Rashtra.
If you accept those two arguments, a third becomes inevitable. Any Indian with a belief in our secular Constitution can then say this isn’t the country I was born in. And, I am going away. To America, where else, but only once Donald Trump goes this winter and immigration eases up.
To be upfront, we dismiss all of these assumptions as bunk. First of all, the rumours of the death of secularism are just that, rumours, and vastly exaggerated too. Sorry, Mark Twain, to drag you into the messiest side of our politics. Second, the death of secularism has been announced several times before; on a rough count, about as often as our commando comic TV channels declare Dawood Ibrahim dead.
Sorry for that odd comparison. But a rumour is a rumour is a rumour. Of course, it is fun if you are a masochist and relish self-flagellation.
A very vast majority, in fact almost all of the 138-plus crore of us here, have no green cards or benevolent uncles or foundations waiting to take us to America. Or Europe. Or that new destination with sex appeal for some, Turkey. We have to live in an India governed by whoever the people choose, based on the same Constitution we hold so dear.
In the past 35 years, secularism has been pronounced dead by the Right after Rajiv Gandhi’s action on the Shah Bano case (1986), the proactive ban on Satanic Verses (1988), the unlocking of the gates of Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi, Shilanyas and the launch of the national election campaign from Ayodhya with the promise of Ram Rajya (1989).
Then, in 1992, with the destruction of the mosque, followed by widespread communal riots. What else could you expect from a prime minister who “wore khaki chaddi (RSS shorts) under his dhoti?” Arjun Singh drafted Sonia Gandhi to come in with Sanjivani Booti, but that had short-lived effect in Kaliyuga. Indian secularism was again pronounced dead in 1996, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee put together India’s first BJP-led government, even if it lasted just 13 days. It was three more than what Congress party’s affable spokesman then, V.N. Gadgil, had predicted it to be, a “ten-day wonder”.
The next time Indian secularism died was in the Gujarat killings of 2002, and then died again and again as Modi kept winning there. It was then that we could foresee May 2014, May 2019 and now 5 August 2020, being scripted. I wrote two National Interest pieces, in the wake of the 2002 and 2007 Gujarat elections, anticipating the inevitable and unstoppable rise of Narendra Modi as a dominant national leader (‘The Modi Magnifier’, and ‘If Modi wins on Sunday’). The second even said Modi’s short-sleeved kurtas would become a political fashion statement.
Am I a Modi fan, or to use that expression fashionable these days, a ‘bhakt’? Not even Modi will accuse me of that. But I am a journalist with eyes and ears open. Indian secularism was pronounced dead in 2014 and again in 2019. But on 5 August, that is earlier this week, it was still alive to be killed yet again. But hang on, you might say, this time I have seen its corpse. You would be right.
Something did indeed die this 5 August in Ayodhya. It is just that it wasn’t our constitutional secularism, but a version of it confected after December 1992.
That the Babri demolition and the riots that followed angered a lot of middle-of-the-road Hindus also is a fact proven by election results that followed. This was especially so in the Hindi heartland, particularly Uttar Pradesh. After Kalyan Singh’s BJP government was dismissed, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s SP and Mayawati’s BSP took turns in power.
Both built their new politics around the redefined ‘secular’ vote. In Bihar, Lalu Yadav had already perfected the formula. The secular vote now came to be seen as Muslim vote.
It was around this new notion that old enemies came together in unlikely coalitions to keep the BJP out of power. The two United Front coalitions on daily wages, under H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral, were both an arrogant negation of the popular will. The only time this new post-1992 “anybody but the BJP” secular formulation won a genuine mandate was in 2009.
The reason we call the post-1992 secularism a new formulation is because of how strongly Left politics and intelligentsia got involved in it. They rewrote the Ayodhya binary as: Did Ram even exist or not? This ran contrary to the Congress party’s cautious approach where minorities were patronised, but Hinduism never mocked.
If the new BJP was dyed deeper saffron, the Congress-led alliance’s secularism was now much redder. It led to a series of blunders: The abolition of POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act), as a pre-condition to the formation of UPA-1, because the ‘Muslims’ felt victimised. Never mind that the same government, not soft on terror, simultaneously amended UAPA. Is it much softer? Ask Dr Kafeel Khan.
The Sachar Committee, which raised a question like the count of Muslims in the Army, and serial announcements of Muslim job reservations (which did nothing for Muslims), followed. The UPA government gave the nation’s highest peacetime gallantry award to a police officer killed in the Batla House encounter, and its top leadership then began raising doubts on it, to ‘assuage’ the Muslim sentiment. There were other missteps like Manmohan Singh’s statement on why he thought the minorities should have the first right on the nation’s resources.
Pre-Sonia, you would have never heard a Congress prime minister say such a thing. SP, BSP and RJD were winning power simply by hyphenating the Muslim vote with one or two other large castes, and then providing lousy governance.
At some point the voter, especially the Hindu voter, had enough of it. It is that secularism which finally died this week. Its beneficiaries had seen it coming. Or you wouldn’t have seen Rahul Gandhi’s new Dattatreya Brahmin avatar in janeu, and the big temple visits. Too little, too late.
Narendra Modi would argue that all he has done is redefine Indian secularism according to the will of the people. He speaks with the strength of a repeat mandate. You can blame the people.
Irrespective of what the Constitution says, in a genuine republic, if enough people do not like something, they will reject it. Kamal Ataturk declared Hagia Sophia to be neither a church (which it was for almost a millennium until 1453), nor a mosque, which it had been since. He made it a museum. He was no democrat, but a benevolent dictator, albeit secular. He wanted religion out of politics.
Last month, Erdogan reversed it. Unlike Ataturk, he is democratically elected. Is his decision popular in Turkey or not? Does this, then, reflect the true will of the people? What was secular wasn’t democratic, what is democratic isn’t secular. Politics is a funny game.
You can’t elect a new people. Nor are the people of India such a lost cause. Enough Hindus still vote against Modi, in spite of his massive appeal. What they need is a better proposition.
I take you back to the summer of 1996, the Lok Sabha debate on the vote of confidence that the 13-day Vajpayee government lost. Ram Vilas Paswan, ‘secular’ then, made a brilliant speech. Babur brought only 40 Muslims, he said. They then became crores because you (upper castes) did not let us in to your temples, but the mosques were open, so we went there instead, he said.
Indian secularism is enshrined in the basic structure of our Constitution, further strengthened by the Supreme Court judgment on Ayodhya that shrewdly located the 1993 law protecting all other shrines in India within it. This is worth preserving. Indian secularism doesn’t deserve a tombstone. It needs a new shrine, in the manner that Paswan put it.
Did Indian secularism die on 5 August in Ayodhya? It follows, then, that a new Indian Republic would have been invented, a Hindu Rashtra.
If you accept those two arguments, a third becomes inevitable. Any Indian with a belief in our secular Constitution can then say this isn’t the country I was born in. And, I am going away. To America, where else, but only once Donald Trump goes this winter and immigration eases up.
To be upfront, we dismiss all of these assumptions as bunk. First of all, the rumours of the death of secularism are just that, rumours, and vastly exaggerated too. Sorry, Mark Twain, to drag you into the messiest side of our politics. Second, the death of secularism has been announced several times before; on a rough count, about as often as our commando comic TV channels declare Dawood Ibrahim dead.
Sorry for that odd comparison. But a rumour is a rumour is a rumour. Of course, it is fun if you are a masochist and relish self-flagellation.
A very vast majority, in fact almost all of the 138-plus crore of us here, have no green cards or benevolent uncles or foundations waiting to take us to America. Or Europe. Or that new destination with sex appeal for some, Turkey. We have to live in an India governed by whoever the people choose, based on the same Constitution we hold so dear.
In the past 35 years, secularism has been pronounced dead by the Right after Rajiv Gandhi’s action on the Shah Bano case (1986), the proactive ban on Satanic Verses (1988), the unlocking of the gates of Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi, Shilanyas and the launch of the national election campaign from Ayodhya with the promise of Ram Rajya (1989).
Then, in 1992, with the destruction of the mosque, followed by widespread communal riots. What else could you expect from a prime minister who “wore khaki chaddi (RSS shorts) under his dhoti?” Arjun Singh drafted Sonia Gandhi to come in with Sanjivani Booti, but that had short-lived effect in Kaliyuga. Indian secularism was again pronounced dead in 1996, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee put together India’s first BJP-led government, even if it lasted just 13 days. It was three more than what Congress party’s affable spokesman then, V.N. Gadgil, had predicted it to be, a “ten-day wonder”.
The next time Indian secularism died was in the Gujarat killings of 2002, and then died again and again as Modi kept winning there. It was then that we could foresee May 2014, May 2019 and now 5 August 2020, being scripted. I wrote two National Interest pieces, in the wake of the 2002 and 2007 Gujarat elections, anticipating the inevitable and unstoppable rise of Narendra Modi as a dominant national leader (‘The Modi Magnifier’, and ‘If Modi wins on Sunday’). The second even said Modi’s short-sleeved kurtas would become a political fashion statement.
Am I a Modi fan, or to use that expression fashionable these days, a ‘bhakt’? Not even Modi will accuse me of that. But I am a journalist with eyes and ears open. Indian secularism was pronounced dead in 2014 and again in 2019. But on 5 August, that is earlier this week, it was still alive to be killed yet again. But hang on, you might say, this time I have seen its corpse. You would be right.
Something did indeed die this 5 August in Ayodhya. It is just that it wasn’t our constitutional secularism, but a version of it confected after December 1992.
That the Babri demolition and the riots that followed angered a lot of middle-of-the-road Hindus also is a fact proven by election results that followed. This was especially so in the Hindi heartland, particularly Uttar Pradesh. After Kalyan Singh’s BJP government was dismissed, Mulayam Singh Yadav’s SP and Mayawati’s BSP took turns in power.
Both built their new politics around the redefined ‘secular’ vote. In Bihar, Lalu Yadav had already perfected the formula. The secular vote now came to be seen as Muslim vote.
It was around this new notion that old enemies came together in unlikely coalitions to keep the BJP out of power. The two United Front coalitions on daily wages, under H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral, were both an arrogant negation of the popular will. The only time this new post-1992 “anybody but the BJP” secular formulation won a genuine mandate was in 2009.
The reason we call the post-1992 secularism a new formulation is because of how strongly Left politics and intelligentsia got involved in it. They rewrote the Ayodhya binary as: Did Ram even exist or not? This ran contrary to the Congress party’s cautious approach where minorities were patronised, but Hinduism never mocked.
If the new BJP was dyed deeper saffron, the Congress-led alliance’s secularism was now much redder. It led to a series of blunders: The abolition of POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act), as a pre-condition to the formation of UPA-1, because the ‘Muslims’ felt victimised. Never mind that the same government, not soft on terror, simultaneously amended UAPA. Is it much softer? Ask Dr Kafeel Khan.
The Sachar Committee, which raised a question like the count of Muslims in the Army, and serial announcements of Muslim job reservations (which did nothing for Muslims), followed. The UPA government gave the nation’s highest peacetime gallantry award to a police officer killed in the Batla House encounter, and its top leadership then began raising doubts on it, to ‘assuage’ the Muslim sentiment. There were other missteps like Manmohan Singh’s statement on why he thought the minorities should have the first right on the nation’s resources.
Pre-Sonia, you would have never heard a Congress prime minister say such a thing. SP, BSP and RJD were winning power simply by hyphenating the Muslim vote with one or two other large castes, and then providing lousy governance.
At some point the voter, especially the Hindu voter, had enough of it. It is that secularism which finally died this week. Its beneficiaries had seen it coming. Or you wouldn’t have seen Rahul Gandhi’s new Dattatreya Brahmin avatar in janeu, and the big temple visits. Too little, too late.
Narendra Modi would argue that all he has done is redefine Indian secularism according to the will of the people. He speaks with the strength of a repeat mandate. You can blame the people.
Irrespective of what the Constitution says, in a genuine republic, if enough people do not like something, they will reject it. Kamal Ataturk declared Hagia Sophia to be neither a church (which it was for almost a millennium until 1453), nor a mosque, which it had been since. He made it a museum. He was no democrat, but a benevolent dictator, albeit secular. He wanted religion out of politics.
Last month, Erdogan reversed it. Unlike Ataturk, he is democratically elected. Is his decision popular in Turkey or not? Does this, then, reflect the true will of the people? What was secular wasn’t democratic, what is democratic isn’t secular. Politics is a funny game.
You can’t elect a new people. Nor are the people of India such a lost cause. Enough Hindus still vote against Modi, in spite of his massive appeal. What they need is a better proposition.
I take you back to the summer of 1996, the Lok Sabha debate on the vote of confidence that the 13-day Vajpayee government lost. Ram Vilas Paswan, ‘secular’ then, made a brilliant speech. Babur brought only 40 Muslims, he said. They then became crores because you (upper castes) did not let us in to your temples, but the mosques were open, so we went there instead, he said.
Indian secularism is enshrined in the basic structure of our Constitution, further strengthened by the Supreme Court judgment on Ayodhya that shrewdly located the 1993 law protecting all other shrines in India within it. This is worth preserving. Indian secularism doesn’t deserve a tombstone. It needs a new shrine, in the manner that Paswan put it.
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