Uber - the story of Technology Terrorism

Socially disruptive Technology?

    In India, we have seen the tragedy of a woman assaulted by an Uber taxi driver, and it has saddened all of us. We want society, the government, to do everything to prevent its happening again.
    Uber however is unrepentant. It is stating that it is not a taxi service at all. It asserts that it is only a web app. According to Uber, it is only a 'platform', the app only 'connects' the driver to the passenger.
    So even though it advertises and promotes its taxi service aggressively, it claims it is not a 'transportation company' and therefore is not responsible for what a normal taxi service would be accountable for.
    For Uber, our sister in Delhi is not a 'passenger' or 'customer'; she is just another data entry in their web app. As far as they are concerned, one data packet had a glitch; they claim no other relationship with the raped woman.
    One can sense strongly that something is terribly wrong in this whole buisness of web cabs. And in investigating this 'thing' called Uber, we discover a deeper and more worrying story - that of Technology Terrorism, which is the emerging face of free market liberal economy..

Will you apologise, Mr Modi?

Is her village her problem, Mr Modi?

    Amidst the uproar in Parliament over the abusive language used by a BJP minister, what has slipped unnoticed is a statement of grave significance by the Prime Minister of the country.
    Faced wtih protests over the behaviour of his intemperate colleague Niranjan Jyoti, Narendra Modi sought to excuse her on the grounds that she is 'from a village'. In one stroke, he has exposed his own gross ignorance, as well as done a great injustice to 70 per cent of Indians living in villages.
    The Indian villager already suffers from the stereotype of being ignorant, or a fool - Modi's statement now multiplies that untruth and suggests that she is also foul-mouthed and abusive.
    Actually, the truth is quite the opposite. Having watched village life closely for the last five years, I can say with certainty that it is the villagers who move out to towns who, on return home, come with a variety of bad habits, including the use of vulgar language. A second source of depravation is tourists, again from the cities, who apart from the material filth that they throw out of their cars, also 'educate' villagers through their own behaviour of drinking and gambling and the use of foul language. A third source is television, and movies, again produced by those in the metros, which introduce the villager to previously unheard of and unimagined ways of (mis)behaviour.
  So, will you apologise now, Mr Modi?

Open Letter to Aamir Khan

Dear Shri Aamir Khan,
    For a nation faced with a largely incompetent and irresponsible media, your production and presentation of Satyameva Jayate comes as a breath of fresh air. Indeed, I feel that the only three groups doing real journalism in the nation today are RTI activitists, Whistleblowers, and the Satyameva Jayate team.
    I write this letter mainly in response to the episode on mental disorders which was aired a few weeks ago. I feel that, unknowingly, you may have caused much harm to those suffering such illnesses. Let me elaborate.
    A key point that emerged during your discussion was the very persuasive advise to the viewers to go in for medication, with a strongly hinted assurance that mental illnesses could actually be cured with psychotropic drugs.
    Nothing can be further from the truth..

Chacha Modi

Did Nehru create a Modi?

Our first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was enthusiastic about 'developing' India. Present Prime Minister Narendra Modi too is showing great enthusiasm for 'development'. So is Modi a new avatar of Nehru?
I feel there is an important distinction which motivates their development dream, but also a significant common-ness among these two leaders. The latter is a cause for concern.
Not much should be made of the fact that Nehru fancied state-dominated enterprises, while Modi fancies a private capital dominated enterprise. Actually, both prime ministers are following the popular trend of their times.
The 1950s and 60s were a period of humane, welfare state thinking - even western capitalist nations in Europe developed strong state welfare programmes during that time. Today's political climate is quite the reverse; it is dominated so much by a mercenary capitalistic thinking that even communist China is developing capitalist expertise..

How to Self-Destruct a Second Time

Naidu brings in the Colonisers - again

Shri Chandrababu Naidu has done it again.

Nineteen years ago, he became Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh and spent 9 years on the job. But he made a mess of it because he believed blindly in what the foreign management experts told him. In the process, he nearly sent the state to economic ruin.

Four months ago, Naidu once more took over as Chief Minister of a truncated Andhra Pradesh. And he is taking exactly the same steps as he did 15 years ago. He has hired McKinsey as his economic advisor. They are preparing a 'vision' document to liberally develop the state. State assets and resources are being prepared to be given to private corporations. Millions of farmers may lost their land and forced to migrate.

Did we say he is doing all this for the second time? A little recap may be useful.

Principles of Economics, Governance and Education

     In an earlier post 'The present disorder in the nation', I ended with a question as what could be an alternative to modern-day chaos. This post tries to answer that question, with a proposal listing fundamental principles of economics, governance and education. 
     Basis 1: Economics

     A large society, or nation, is a collection of sustainable communities. Economically, it is important that every community be sustainable in itself, in as much as it produces a large number of its needed goods. Every citizen is assured of a livelihood in that community itself. When we don't have this, then we see the sorrow of migration, exploitation and poverty.

     A community is a socio-economic-ecologic unit; a sustainable community implies that social concerns, economic concerns and environmental concerns are all effectively addressed within the system. This underscores the fact that livelihood is not just about 'making money' – it is a socio-economic-ecologic action. Every family is provided opportunity to be industrious – it works to produce goods needed by itself and its community, it derives satisfaction from that action and result, the work is done in social harmony, strengthening the social fabric, and that work, done on and using natural resources, ensures ecological balance.

Season of Immaturity

     We had three immature people hogging television last week - displaying various degrees of narcissism.

     Narendra Modi finally came before the media. For months now, he has been constantly taunted for not facing questions, and he had to do something about it. Last week, he gave three interviews, to ANI, to IBN network and to ETV.

     In all three meetings, the interviewers were hesitant and nervous, Modi was uncomfortable but autocratic, and the questions were soft and superficial. Yes, it is a fact that ETV is owned by Ambani, and that TV18, which runs the IBN network, is also mortgaged to Ambani. But let us not get distracted by that.

  I have seen journalists get overawed by great statesmen or great philosophers, it happens. But this was not that. The journalists here were nervous, they were careful that they should not offend him, when all their lives, they do nothing but offend guests in their studios. So either the conditions were laid out carefully by the BJP and the 'right' journalists selected, or we must face the fact that it is not only Muslims and small children who are scared of Modi, but also Hindu adults in the media.

The 100-city Madness

     P.Chidambaram and N. Modi are closer to one another than what their statements on media make it appear. Both share a common economic strategy for the nation. Even though they are at each other's throats - with Chidu naming Modi a brute, and Modi calling Chidu an artificial sophisticate, the two share a common dream for the nation - to build one hundred more cities.
     We may call this the  'modimbaram' strategy. What it underlines is a significant fact - that whether we get a Congress or BJP government, the act of copying economic policy of the USA is going to continue. This portents a tremendous upheaval which will tear out the heart of this country, but I am afraid that such a vital issue has been left untouched, unexplored, by media and intellectuals.
     What does this imply - this building of a hundred more cities? What will be the population of each city? Say, 30 lakhs, which is a small-to-medium city size. Who will populate these cities? Not the residents of Mumbai and Chennai and New Delhi; neither Modi nor Chidambaram will shift there - these new cities will be created out of a massive disturbance to the Indian rural environment.

What has the Media achieved?

Misleading the voter?

As a large section of Indian voters begin to exercise their franchise for Lok Sabha elections 2014, one wonders what has our national television media achieved in the crucial last two weeks, which can influence voting behaviour?
     1. They have quietly allowed the removal of the most important issue: that of corruption.
     2. To do so, they have loudly brought in the issue of communalism - the Hindu-Muslim question.
     3. They have allowed nationalistic jingoism to mix with communalism - the India-Pakistan question.
     4. They have tried to pre-empt voter's thinking by offering 'election opinion polls'.
     In effect, the media has taken the focus away from the Anna Hazare-led and Kejriwal-driven Jan Lokpal anti-corruption movement. What I have seen in the last two weeks is a kind of information blitzkrieg that Goebbels (Hitler's media man) was famous for. Our media has used, abused, and sensationalised communal statements day after day, they have hosted loud and vulgar slanging matches in their so-called 'debates'.

Attack on Arvind Kejriwal

"Why is this happening to him," the media woman was asking, with a wry smile on the corner of her mouth. She knew her cameraperson had got a clean shot of the devilish act of a man first garlanding and then aiming a slap at Arvind Kejriwal. Her channel had already rewound and shown it 30 times. The TRPs were soaring. "Is this conduct right," she continued artificially, trying to sound concerned, while occupying only half the screen - the other half again showed the act of violence, five times in quick succession even as she spoke her sentence.
     One misguided man acted rashly for a moment. A hundred voyeuristic media channels acted deliberately and re-telecast the ugly scene a thousand times. The way they took a five-second shot and went back-and-forth, and back-and-forth, it was an act of violation - the media was brutalising Arvind Kejriwal.
     The camera also followed the criminal as he was escorted out by the police, and they repeatedly telecast his swear words, ending with, 'Kejriwal is a betrayer'. Back in the studio, the woman with the fake concern was at it again - every time she reported that Kejriwal was attacked, she immediately added, "but the attacker says Kejriwal is a betrayer". What is this? Is this what the media reckons as 'showing both sides of the story?'

The Riff-raffs who own Media

     While traveling in Madhya Pradesh last week, I came across a Bansal TV through cable network, whose reporting integrity left much to be desired. I wondered who owned it, and did a little research. It is owned by a Bansal Group of Bhopal which runs Coaching Institutes and an MBA college, and which owns the Ayushman Hospital Group, and which also markets a certain Bansal Edible Oil.
     The research also revealed that the Bansal Group was raided a few years ago by the Income Tax department which recovered Rs 300 crores of undeclared money, much of it in cash!
     How come such a riff-raff is allowed to own a media company?

Who will Speak for the Farmer?

On a news channel last week, Amit Shah represented the BJP party and tried to answer questions from journalists. When asked pointedly about farmers losing their land to business corporations, he began to show his irritation, and finally sneered, "If you are so interested in farming, why don't you raze down this building and do kheti?".
     I recall teachers in rural schools demeaning children by saying, "So, do you want to keep cutting grass? Do you want to be a farmer all your life?". I feel Amit Shah too may have faced such teachers in his school days, and therefore has developed this deep feeling of humiliation and a contempt for anything to do with 'village' and 'farmer'.
     At a Garhwal-based NGO, I have seen an entire generation of village school-going children growing up with this psychological inferiority complex. This is indicative of what is happening all over rural India. When these children grow up and migrate to urban centres, their feeling of inferiority is converted into a contempt for farming and village life, and they cultivate an outer veneer of superiority. In due course, some among them join politics, some bureaucracy, some NGOs, and some become journalists in the media.

Jaitley's Tragedy

Uncomfortable in the open?

   In the late 1980s, when satellite television was being demonstrated as a possibility, a senior journalist friend told me with a smug satisfaction, "Just wait till we have live coverage... the camera will expose all these chaps, it will show the expression on their faces". Sadly, he is no more, but I recalled his clairvoyance during the recent coverage of Amritsar and Chandigarh in all TV channels.

    Television can indeed expose things for what they are, specially outdoors during election time, when politicians have no place to run or hide. Take for example, Arun Jaitley, the BJP candidate from Amritsar. The camera showed him on his road show waving here and there - that established his credentials as a candidate. Then the camera went mid-shot and showed him standing cheek-by-jowl with other party personnel. They weren't his regular Delhi club pals, these were the local Amritsar cadre, who were pressing their sweaty kurtas against his, and Arun Jaitley looked distinctly out of place. Then the camera went closer up, and it showed a face held in steady grimace; it was the face of a man in pain, caught by circumstances in a wrong place. The camera will speak, my late friend had predicted, and last week, I saw that the camera did speak, quite clearly.

Aap, Media & Us

   Is Aam Aadmi Party's accusation of deliberate misreporting by television media valid?
   Over the last fortnight, I have watched all Hindi and English news channels regularly, and have seen consistent evidence of a clear and pronounced slant in reporting against AAP.
   Arvind Kejriwal says the turnaround happened with his Gujarat visit, and I can testify on the strength of the evidence I saw that he is right about the timing. At the beginning of the Gujarat roadshow, all important channels were covering it as they should because the public support was visible and it was certainly 'news'. They even showed footage of Kejriwal's Ahmedabad rally which questioned Modi directly, but after that, something seems to have changed. Was it because Kejriwal went to Narendra Modi's office, demanding answers to questions about Gujarat's so-called development?
     Whether this timing is only coincidence, I do not know, because in the interim came the AAP protest outside BJP's office at Delhi which showed both party workers in poor light. Did the media cool off to AAP after this event? May be. But even so, not one media channel questioned why the police did not question even one BJP worker while they booked 14 AAP workers and took two of their leaders to police stations for questioning. This is a valid journalistic question, especially on the strength of TV visuals which showed that the stoning began from the BJP office, and it was much later that both were equally culpable.

Modi Serves Tasteless Tea

   I watched Narendra Modi on his ‘chai pe charcha’ in New Delhi. He tried his best to hide his discomfort, but it was visible. Modi is clearly not a ‘people person’, but that is not by itself any big negative point. I have come across so-called ‘people-friendly’ socialists who whiled away their time in coffee shops, gossiping their way through life, coming to no good (for eg. Convict Laloo Yadav)
     But this inability to relax before people is, I feel, a sign of a lack of social fulfillment which is also a larger problem in society. Working in hierarchical reward and punishment structures, we only know how to behave with those ‘above’ or ‘below’ us. This system saps us of our instinctive need to relate with a oneness and getting fulfillment, a quality of sahajta, a natural acceptance of the other.

     Anyway, the important point here is that Narendra Modi is a politician and prime ministerial candidate; he will have the eyes of the nation on him all the time. A political leader affects and influences the mood of the nation with his very demeanour. The nation has suffered a despairing and listless mood because of Manmohan Singh’s wimpish demeanour. When Rahul Gandhi comes on television, he muddles his way through interactions with people, and creates a mood of dullness in the whole drawing room. Modi, in his interactions at ‘chai pe charcha’, was stiff and bureaucratic – he gave standard babu-like answers to issues, there was no creative spark in him. He spread his own discomfort into our drawing room.
     Remember how Shri Anna Hazare moved and inspired a whole nation? Such a demeanour is not cultivated, it cannot be practiced or imitated, I feel it comes from an inner confidence, from an inner clarity, from an inner simplicity.

     A Different Bedi:
     Kiran Bedi’s performance at the ‘chai pe charcha’ is also note-worthy. She was obviously bowled over by Modi’s presence, she was so shaken up she addressed him as ‘sir’ more than ten times in one minute. She was like a nervous constable in front of a DSP, and it was indeed strange to see this transformation in her behaviour, which is usually so dominant and in-your-face. I wondered if the word ‘servile’ could describe her demeanour, so I looked it up in the dictionary. It said:

Servile: adjective : having or showing an excessive willingness to serve or please others;

            Synonyms: obsequious, sychophantic, excessively deferential, subservient, fawning.

     Yes, that’s it.

     It is sad that our politics and bureaucracy, and indeed our private corporations, are so colonial in their structure. It is so mercilessly hierarchical that you are a brute and dominate those under you, and at the same time you are servile and subservient to those above you; such a system itself begs to be transformed.

Re-colonization of India

There is a lot of news in recent months about foreigners increasing their control in Indian companies, both private as well as public sector companies, in some cases even buying them fully. You may recall some of the following news items:

:- Vodafone has applied for, and got permission, to increase its holding to 100 per cent.
:- Nestle is buying back its shares from the market to increase its holding from 62 to 75 per cent.
:- Cairn India is spending Rs 5,725 crore to increase its stake from 65 to nearly 75 per cent.
:- British pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline Plc is increasing stake in its Indian subsidiary from 50.7 per cent to up to 75 per cent, spending Rs 6,400 crore.
:- Anglo-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever Plc has just completed increasing its stake in Hindustan Unilever Ltd upto 67.28 per cent.
:- Walmart has bought Airtel's complete share in their newly formed joint venture Indian company to launch retail malls. Walmart is now a 100 per cent owner of the Indian company.
:- The government is selling 100 per cent of public sector company Hindustan Zinc Ltd to controversial mining company Vedanta Resources Plc.
:- The government cabinet committee has also decided to sell 100 per cent of the public sector aluminium maker Balco. Vedanta already owns 49 per cent stake in this PSU - now it wants total control of Balco.

I wanted to investigate this trend further, in order to find out the full extent of: 1) total foreign holdings in Indian companies, 2) total foreign investment + debt exposure of the nation, and 3) government policy on this issue. Here is the summary:

On the present disorder in the nation

1. Three facts about the present state of the nation:
1. The economy is in crisis.
2. Our political leadership is powerful, but clueless.
3. Our educated class has failed us
2. On the economic crisis:
1. A depreciating rupee, a widening fiscal deficit, a serious current account deficit - all these are only technical indicators of an economic system which itself is false.
2. The actual crisis is that the economic system we have adopted is flawed at the core. It stands isolated without sharing the concerns and goals of the social system and ecological system; indeed, we can say that the present economic theory shows no understanding of human beings and human communities.
3. Real life is lived with people, real life is lived with nature, so social harmony and ecological harmony are natural goals for a human community. It is a reality that living involves livelihood. The action of livelihood is not outside society and nature, it is within this field. 
4. The aggressive action of modern economics is directly related to the development of modern technology. Today's economic energy is drunk on the power of science and technology - it has gone out of control and separated itself from society and ecology. Indeed, it is a fact now that economic growth and development is claimed even when social structures like villages, community and family are being fractured, and even when ecological systems of soil and forests and rivers are being destroyed. We, therefore, say that such a growth and development is false.