The Indian way, No way

by Dinesh Thakur in The Hindu

The national culture of unquestioned obedience to authority along with an acceptance of shoddiness must not be used as an excuse to overlook violations of corporate ethics, says the Ranbaxy whistle-blower

During my tenure at Ranbaxy, I was surprised by the unchallenged conformity to the poor decisions of senior leadership. Ranbaxy was my first Indian employer following my tenure at two different American corporations. Reflecting on this experience from cultural and comparative perspectives highlights the organizational peril of such behaviour.

It is in our culture to respect authority. We are taught from childhood to listen and obey our elders. We grow up with the notion that our managers, the function heads and business heads within our respective organisations, know more than anyone else. Hierarchy is revered, authority is seldom questioned. Those who dare to ask questions are renegades.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Also Read
Sreesanth - A modern day Valmiki?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Asking questions

My investigation into the discrepancies between Ranbaxy’s records and the data filed with regulatory agencies in 2004 showed me how wide the questionable behaviour was within the organisation. It was systematic. It had penetrated the DNA of the organisation.

I often asked myself how was it that smart, well-intentioned people tolerated systematic fraudulent behaviour? This question led me to the Milgram Experiment, which was conducted by the Yale University psychologist, Stanley Milgram, in 1961. In the 1971 paper summarising its results, he stated:

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Why is this important? In my view, as much as we value and respect our traditions, it is imperative that we not lose sight that being a “renegade” — a nonconformist — is acceptable when motivated by honourable intentions. It is acceptable to think that managers possess neither omniscience nor omnipotence. Our colleagues who are at the lowest rung of the corporate ladder sometimes know more than we do about an issue. It is important to encourage them to question authority, even if we find it uncomfortable and disconcerting.

The other aspect of my search for answers led me to introspection. What kind of society have we become? D.G. Shah, the secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance, recently penned an elegant op-ed that called out our culture for tolerating corruption, even with needs as basic as drinking water, personal hygiene, food and medicine. Why is it that we have come to accept poor governance, corruption, incompetence and entitlement as facts of life?

Compromise

I think it has a lot to do with how we lead our daily lives. Despite an exhaustive search, I have not been able to find proper translation for the concept of jugaad. It seems to exist only within our society. While Wikipedia describes it as a term applied to a creative or innovative idea providing a quick, alternative way of solving or fixing a problem, I think it misses two important aspects that I have experienced during my tenure working in India. First, there is an implicit understanding that because the solution needs to be quick and creative, it is acceptable to make a compromise on the quality of what is produced. Second, because we focus on making “it” work just-in-time, we never think of making the solution last. That leads to poor quality.

Not 100 per cent

The other pervasive attitude is the notion of chalta-hai. It is very hard to describe this attitude to someone who has not experienced life in India, but to those of us who have lived here, we know what it is. We have come to accept that if it is 80 per cent good, works 80 per cent of the time, and does 80 per cent of what it needs to do, it is acceptable. This attitude manifests itself in almost every facet of common life in India.

Clearly, we are now beginning to see the results of our approach with jugaad and our attitude with chalta-hai. They are not pleasant. Recent events hold a mirror to our face and ask us whether we like what we see. I certainly don’t.

As Jayson Blair, the disgraced former reporter at The New York Times, said, “Rarely are our choices in life presented as a major dramatic question. One step at a time, [they come as] minor choices, that may not even seem related to the ultimate outcome. Once that fear [of getting caught] disappears with the minor choices, it is easier to cross that big ethical line.”

It is not the big ethical line that we need to worry about. Rather, we need to worry about all the thousands of little situations we are presented with in our daily lives, to which the easy answer seems to be jugaad or the attitude of chalta-hai.

Unless we develop an attitude of “do it right the first time” and inculcate this expectation into our daily life, we will continue to see the same image in the mirror every time an event like the one on May 13 holds it up to our face.

Unravelling the Narine mystery

How does the KKR offspinner continue to bamboozle batsmen? Because he knows when to bowl what

Aakash Chopra

April 13, 2013

	Sunil Narine believes in the less-is-more philosophy © AFP  Enlarge

It's hard to remain a mystery today, what with all the footage available for replays in slow-motion and every player painstakingly scrutinised. The action has shifted from the 22 yards to the editing table.

Yet Sunil Narine continues to beat technology and stay ahead of most analyses. Even though he has been scanned time and again, he manages to get the better of batsmen and fascinate spectators.

He's not the first mystery spinner; there have been quite a few who batsmen couldn't decipher immediately, if at all. Yet there's something about this lad from the West Indies, with a peculiar hairdo and an equally peculiar action that has enthralled aficionados worldwide.

In his debut IPL season, last year, Narine took 24 wickets and helped Kolkata Knight Riders win the trophy for the first time. But it isn't just his ability to take wickets that makes everyone sit up and take note, it's the way he spins around hapless batsmen.

One particular over that he bowled to his fellow West Indian, Andre Russell, in the opening match of this season's IPL comes to mind, because it looked like Russell had no idea which way the ball would turn after pitching. Each time almost, he played down one way when the ball was heading the other.

It's not too hard to decipher a doosra or a carrom ball from an offspinner while watching on TV, when the camera gives us the view from the back, but Narine's variations are hard to pick even for viewers sitting at home. So what chance did Russell have?

By bowling even his offspinners with a scrambled seam, Narine manages to keep the batsman guessing which one will head the other way. And since he bowls both his variations from the front of the hand (the doosra is usually bowled from the back of the hand), you have to look very closely at which way his fingers are turning at the point of release - not an easy job.

But it isn't just the variations or his ability to disguise them that make Narine a difficult bowler to bat against in T20. There are many bowlers who have more variations up their sleeve. All good legspinners have three deliveries (legspin, googly and a flipper), and most offspinners these days also possess more than a couple variations (offspin, doosra and a carrom ball), but it isn't about the quantity, it's about the quality of execution. Having different types of deliveries won't mean much unless you know when to use them.

In fact, Narine has only two variations in his bag - a regular offspinner and the one that goes away after pitching. But unlike other spinners, he is a master when it comes to using his subtle variations, and he rarely overdoes them.

In his first over in this year's IPL, he did not bowl a single away-going delivery. He realised that there was some turn and bounce on the Eden Gardens pitch, so he was better off bowling offbreaks. In fact, in the entire game, he didn't bowl a single away-going delivery to the well-set Mahela Jayawardene, having arranged a leg-side field for him. If Jayawardene had picked the variation, Narine would have run the risk of leaking runs. But against Russell, Narine strengthened the off-side field, with a slip as an attacking option, and bowled the other one repeatedly. His ability to judge the demands of the situation and then move from being smart and defensive to brave and aggressive sets him apart.

In addition to his game sense and variety, Narine's pace and his effective stock ball make it very tough to score off him. He bowls really flat and slightly quicker but without compromising on turn off the surface. If there's something in the pitch for the spinners, he really rips them across the right-handers and away from the left-handers.

The delivery that got David Warner in the first match was an example of his ability to turn the ball with bounce at reasonably high speed. His pace and flat trajectory take away the batsman's crucial attacking strategy - stepping down the track to play the lofted shot. There aren't many who can hit the long ball without coming out of the crease.

If you can't come down the track, you look to either slog-sweep towards cow corner or go deep into the crease to pull the slightly shorter deliveries. Narine's extra turn and bounce on pitches like the one at the Eden Gardens make both these shots tough to execute. The turn ensures the ball misses the bat's sweet spot. If that fails, the bounce ensures the ball's impact on the bat is higher than the batsman is comfortable with. Either way the batsman rarely gets the intended height or distance.

If batsmen look for five or six runs off a Narine over instead of going after him, he might not turn out to be such a prolific wicket-taker. Unfortunately for all IPL teams, Knight Riders' captain, Gautam Gambhir, brings Narine on either in the Powerplay or during the death overs. That forces batsmen to go after Narine and increases his chances of picking up wickets. I won't be surprised if he finishes as one of the top wicket-takers this season as well
.

Germany once admired British workmanship – but that was a long time ago

Over the North Sea lies the richest country in Europe, its success built on the manufacturing industry that Britain has spurned

• 
• • Ian Jack
  • guardian.co.uk, Friday 6 January 2012 19.44 GMT
  • larger | smaller

'The war hadn't been over 10 years and somehow Germany was making model trains more convincing than our own'

We all want to be Germans now: to make, to sell and not to yield. We would like to earn some respect, not least self-respect, and have some idea of our national future. The UK will never replace Germany as the world's second largest exporter, but we can surely manage to manufacture a few more things and "rebalance the economy", as the saying goes, to shrink the influence of the City of London.

So many people have had this dream recently – Vince Cable, of course, and Lord Glasman, no doubt, but also George Osborne when he made his fatuous speech about the "march of the makers". And there over the North Sea is the richest country in Europe: exemplary Germany, with its technical schools and apprenticeships, its respect for engineers, and its layer of family businesses known as the Mittelstand that puts long-term reputation above short-term profit by making the specialised parts that industry everywhere needs. How foolish we were to imagine that national prosperity could be spun from figures on a computer screen, out of thin air. How silly to despise the making of three-dimensional objects as a lowly process that had quit the west for the east. And how wise it would be (so the dream goes) to take a leaf from Germany's book and make manufacturing a much larger slice of the economy, therefore returning Britain to an earlier and possibly more solid version of itself.
That self is a long time ago. I remember watching Edgar Reitz's long and haunting film Heimat in the mid 1980s. Through the life of one family, the history of Germany in the 20th century was related in all its difficulty. At one point in the second world war, two characters find part of an aircraft or a bomb (I can't recall which) in a field. "Look," says one to the other as he handles the object, "such fine English workmanship." There was no irony, though it seemed hardly credible that British engineering could have been prized in Germany only 40 years before, given that at that Thatcher moment the typical British workshop was being sold abroad as scrap.

Germany's technical superiority was plain to see by the 1960s, but my own enlightenment came rather earlier, when I was eight or nine and the recipient of German gifts at Christmas. These came from two sources. In 1945, my family had befriended a prisoner-of-war and stayed in touch with him when he went home to Hamburg. We sent parcels of coffee beans, while a small box of marzipan or a bottle of eau-de-cologne came in the other direction. But as the years passed, the German presents grew more sophisticated. For me, a toy fire engine with a working water pump; for my parents, topographical books of black and white photographs printed on cream paper that felt like velvet. Perhaps these luxuries could also be found in Britain, but we had never seen them.

These were portents. The epiphany – not that I thought of it like that at the time – arrived when my older brother came home on leave from national service in Germany. He was the second source of gifts, and once, from his kitbag, produced two model railway coaches, gauge 00 to match my Hornby set but made by the German toymakers, Marklin. Their detail was superb. My tinplate Hornby carriages relied on painting to produce an effect of windows and door handles, but on their Marklin equivalents the windows really were transparent and the pattern of rivets below them stood out in relief. The war hadn't been over 10 years, and somehow Germany was making things as inconsequential as model trains that were more convincing than our own. Suddenly "Made in England" no longer suggested a singularly high quality, not that in 1954 it was easy in Britain to find goods made anywhere else.

Fear and envy of German manufacturing prowess began a long time before, as any economic history will tell you. Together with the US, Germany began to displace Britain as the world's foremost industrial nation well before the close of the 19th century. Books and newspaper articles sounded the alarm ("American furniture in England – a further indictment of the trade unions," read a Daily Mail headline in 1900), but did little to prevent Britain falling further behind in the new industries that became so important in the 20th century. Germany established a clear lead in chemicals, electrical engineering, optics and instrument-making. At the outbreak of war in 1914, the British government found that every magnet in the country came from Stuttgart, while German chemical works supplied all the khaki dye for British military uniforms.

To a large extent, British decline was inevitable: other nations had learned how to make things and export markets would naturally shrink. But the particular contrast with Germany was instructive when it came to scientific education and the social position of manufacturers and engineers. According to Peter Mathias's classic economic history, The First Industrial Nation, only a dozen students were reading for a degree in natural sciences at Cambridge in 1872. Germany, meanwhile, had 11 entire universities devoted to science and technology. Its educational system embraced the idea of manufacturing, while England's public schools and ancient universities held it at arm's length.
Finance became the acceptable business profession for gentlemen. In the words of another historian, Martin Wiener, finance "involved the extraction of wealth by associating with people of one's own class in fashionable surroundings, not by dealing with … the working and lower-middle classes". In this way, the City became part of the elite and "could call upon government much more effectively than could industry to favour and support its interests".

This is a familiar and by now hardly controversial diagnosis of the British malaise, and every so often a government or a politician promises a fundamental reform in political attitudes, praising the country's long tradition of scientific discovery and technical invention. A few television programmes endorse the same point; Sir James Dyson appears with his vacuum cleaner. But, beyond that, nothing much happens. Look around the frontbenches on both sides of the Commons. Who there dares upset the City? Who there ever made anything three-dimensional, or even had a parent who did? Which of them would risk the chamber pot of failed hopes being emptied over their heads by calling for a national industrial strategy?

It would be lovely to emulate the industrial success of the Germans, but so much history is very hard to undo. The one cheerful note (or perhaps more a vengeful one) is that Marklin, which made my memorable little carriages, is now owned by a private equity company based in London.

Socrates - Requiem for a wise man!

 

Nirmal Shekar

AP Former Brazil's soccer player Socrates

The Socrates persona was as contradictory as it was compelling

HE was a hard-drinking, chain-smoking free thinker grappling with the higher reaches of truth passed on to posterity by Friedrich Nietzsche and Karl Marx in an awesome Victorian auditorium of a Rio de Janerio University.

He was a head-banded, flamboyant young man with curly brown locks unlocking the splendour of Brazilian country music to an entranced audience.

He was a fiery-eyed left-wing activist, a Che Guevara-type radical spouting slogans while leading a student march to restore democracy in his country.

He was a professional paediatrician hugging sick children at a UNICEF health camp with the missionary zeal of a Mother Teresa.

Socrates Brasilero Sampio de Souza de Oliviera, who passed away on Sunday in Brazil, was all of these…and more. He was one of the most gifted players produced by the greatest of soccer-playing nations, Brazil, in the post-Pele era.

Rebel with a cause

A rebel with a cause, Socrates had a stupendous ability to combine stardom with creative ability on the field. His one-two passing symphony with his team-mate and friend Zico had a Mozartian magnificence.

As the eldest of a middle-rung government official's 10 sons, as a brilliant young medical student, Socrates was intensely in search of an identity in the fragmented world of the late 1970s.

“I am not a footballer. I am a human being,” he screamed at mediapersons early in his career, apparently fed up with their one-track line of questioning. It was the cry of a man trying to free himself from the chains of a media-manufactured image, the struggle of a very intelligent human being trying to shake off a straitjacket.

It is this protean quality that set Socrates apart from some of the most brilliant players of his era. Deeply rebellious against the over-ordering of life, on and off the football field, he was quintessential nonconformist.

“He would sing a song and all of us wound enjoy it. Then, almost suddenly, Socrates would go into a shell, an impenetrable shell of his own. We knew him, yet we did not know him,” said a team-mate of his when Socrates was playing for the Sao Paulo giant Corinthians.

 

Multi-faceted persona

To be sure, it would take more than an average footballer to have come to terms with Socrates' multi-faceted personality. For, the Socrates persona was as contradictory as it was compelling. He was a man in search of individual freedom in an age ruled by conformity and organisation, both in and out of football.

If you ever saw a cold-blooded master of life's capriciousness — someone with knowledge of Nietzsche's amor fati — then you can picture Socrates striding back nonchalantly after missing a crucial penalty in a World Cup semifinal against France in Mexico.

It is not as if Socrates was an incurable eccentric with a finger on the self-destruct button. He loved the game as much as he loved anything else in life. But he knew sport was just sport, not a matter of life or death. He would have been more devastated by the death of a child in a Rio health facility than a missed World Cup penalty.

 

Doctor for the poor

Never one to beat around the bush, Socrates admitted early in his career that it was for big money that he temporarily abandoned his life as a doctor to become a footballer. “As a footballer, I get much quicker to the financial stability I need to be what I want to be: a doctor for the poor,” he said.

On the field, he was a master. With Zico and Falcao, he was part of a midfield that was rarely matched in the entire history of the game. So confident were these men about their own skills that they ignored their defensive weaknesses as a resurgent Paolo Rossi of Italy claimed a hat-trick to dump them from the 1982 World Cup.

He made his presence felt in the 1986 World Cup too, but soon the game was up for Doc. But another one, perhaps more rewarding — serving the poor as a doctor and becoming a sagacious commentator on television — began.

“Life is not about quantity. It is about quality,” Socrates said over 30 years ago. By modern standards, he died young.

He drank his way to his grave, like so many other sportspersons. But the difference is, he was a wise man who did know exactly what he was doing. It was his hemlock.

The relentless pursuit of productivity is socially divisive, environmentally destructive and doesn't make us any happier

Happiness: the price of economic growth

• 
• • Andrew Simms
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 August 2011 21.00 BST
  • larger | smaller

Family and friends ranked highest in a survey of what mattered most to people. Photograph: Alamy
Last week, on the same day that we learned economic growth in the UK was running at a miserly 0.2%, the Office for National Statistics launched a new programme of work on measuring human well-being. The latter was the result of a month-long survey in which the public were asked what mattered to them. To barely disguised yawns, the answers that came back were, "family, friends, health, financial security, equality and fairness in determining well-being", according to national statistician Jill Matheson. So we were caught on one hand between a low-grade, generalised fear that people weren't buying enough stuff to keep the economy going, and being told on the other hand something we already knew deep down: that a better quality of life stems not from consuming more, but from a range of mostly immaterial things. Crucially, in a society like the UK, enjoyment of these does not correlate in any positive, straightforward manner with economic growth. On the contrary, some policies used to promote growth can directly undermine a range of the factors that do contribute to well-being, such as the time we need to spend with family, health, equality and fairness. Depending on how it is pursued, economic growth can be jobless, socially divisive and environmentally destructive. It can, in other words, be "uneconomic growth". In a quite extraordinary intervention, as part of the government's desire to cut spending on public services, Oliver Letwin, the coalition's policy minister, recently suggested that "fear" of losing your job should be used to increase the productivity of workers. This approach appears to be wrong on so many levels that I first thought it had to be a spoof. It will do nothing for growth; it chronically misunderstands how to get the best out of people; it contradicts the prime minister's own public conversion to the importance of well-being at work and, perhaps most importantly, it misunderstands real productivity. In professions like health and education, if you drive out costs (ie people) you get a worse service. Quality of care and nurturing depends to a huge degree on attentive human contact in a convivial context. Subject people to old-fashioned Taylorist production-line management, coupled with the intimidation of a threatened job loss, and nobody wins. It is wrong, also, because buried in this conundrum, may also be the secret of how, in the long term, we align our livelihoods and lifestyles with the limited planet on which we depend. This is about designing an economy of better, not more. And that suggests fundamentally rethinking what we mean by efficiency and productivity. An economy that is more based on services, and in which we are sharing, repairing, recycling, reusing, learning, collaborating and coproducing services (that's the jargon, at any rate – it just means give and take) is one in which, ultimately, we may have more people doing fewer things in formal paid employment. In that context, we might have more time for "family, friends, health", and all the things that do add to our well-being. The big objection is that growth is needed for jobs, and that these are what we need for financial security. On one level, yes, of course. However, financial security is also a function of equality and fairness, and given other economic problems (such as that many of the jobs created in a push for growth alone do not deliver financial security) as well as environmental constraints, there may be more reliable paths to find security. Inequality both creates insecurity and raises a society's costs in relation to health problems, crime and almost everything else. Redistribution of income and access to employment, therefore, compared with generalised, unequal and resource-hungry growth, can be quicker, less destructive and a more effective way of delivering security. A sensible approach to enhance economic activity in a way that met many needs would be to take Vince Cable's suggestion of another round of quantitative easing, but instead of just spraying a general injection of cash via the banks (who take a cut) into the economy, to channel it into the productive low-carbon economy – a sort of green easing. Sadly, that doesn't look likely to happen any time soon. For now the captain of this ship insists we're all heading south, when there are all kind of indicators telling us that our real needs can only be met by going north.

• guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011