A young woman asked me for directions in Chennai. And I knew the place :)

Over the past few weeks, one of the most fascinating sights has been that of women riding scooters.  Quite a few of them, however, do not wear helmets.

But, most of the non-helmeted women, unlike the woman in this photo, protect their faces from the dust and the smoke in a very exciting way: they wrap the scarf (dupatta) around their heads in such a manner that only their eyes are exposed.  When I see them, I am reminded of photographs of Arab men and women in the sandy deserts.

When I walk around with my camera, none ever passes by.  When I am without a camera, these "dupatta scooterists" are everywhere!

I was walking to the store the other day when I saw a "dupatta scooterist."  Of course, no camera!  I was walking by the side of the road, directionally against the flow of traffic, and I sensed this scooter coming towards me.

I moved further off the road, worried that I might be run over.

The scooter stopped next to me.

She slowly undid her dupatta.  Perhaps a college student, I thought to myself, when I saw her face.

I have gotten to a stage in life that when a young woman looks at me or seems to wave at me, I know for sure I am merely in her line of sight and there is a young, handsome man behind me.  So, when she stopped, I moved to the side a tad more.

"Hi" she said.

Now I was on alert.  Is this a cousin or a niece that I am supposed to recognize?  Is my selective amnesia that bad?

"Yes?"

"Where is Dhandapani Street?"

Finally, all the walking around paid off.  "This is Dhandapani Street" I replied.  I was proud of myself, that I know this much!

"Oh. My friend is at a hair salon somewhere here."

I know the place really well--I mean, we are talking about right around the corner from where my parents live.

"Skip this upcoming left" I told her. "Then soon after the second left, you will see two hair places."

I should know; only a couple of weeks ago, I got my hair trimmed there.  I was so worried when the hairdresser took out a shaving blade.  "No shave" I hurriedly told him.  Turned out that the blade was for the post-haircut cleanup :)

"My friend said it is opposite to Hotel Ilakkiya" the scooter girl added.

"Yes, it is right there."

She thanked me and we went our ways.

All I could think was, "dammit, I didn't have my camera."  Well, maybe another time.

I remember now: Saha was my boss at Adyar Gate Hotel

A month ago, after a meeting, "G" suggested to a few of us that we go have dinner.  "S" and I thought it was a great suggestion. 

It was only the three of us, and "G" drove us to Park Sheraton.  As we walked in, I told them how that hotel was my employer for a grand total of three weeks, twenty-six years ago.

Of course, back then it had a different name: Adyar Park.  By the time I spotted the advertisement for a management-level maintenance engineer position, I was already unemployed for more than four or five months.  I had quit my job at Calcutta, and had had enough with loafing around and going to interviews. 

The worst decision I ever made was to take up an interview offer in Rajasthan, during the peak of the summer months.  The idea was to collect the first class train fare from them, travel by second class, and use the difference for more travels.  Well, stupid is as stupid does! 

When I told "G" and "S" about me having worked there as a maintenance engineer, I am sure it sounded impossible to believe, when by now they are used to thinking about me as a geographer. What a wandering life I have had in more ways than one!

As I was telling them about this, I tried my best to recall my boss' name.  I knew it was not any uncommon last name, by which I addressed him.  Try as I did, my memory simply failed me.

That was a month ago.  A couple of days ago, thanks to the cricket match in the television and conversational background, it came back to me: my Adyar Park boss' last name was the same as the wicketkeeper's: Saha.

Mr. Saha had spent quite a few years as an engineer in the commercial shipping industry and, if I recall correctly, Adyar Park was his first assignment on land.  One of his first orders/advice to me was this: do not ever run through the hotel, unless it is an emergency of the utmost urgency.  He said we had to walk in a way that did not cause any concern in the guests' minds.  It made sense after he said that.

As managers, Saha and I could eat with other managers in the special lunch room.  That was a decadent experience.  Some days we ate at the regular lunch room too.  I quickly connected with a technician, Dominic.  He was a lot of fun, and I am sure privately he wondered why I was his boss!

After a couple of weeks, I told Mr. Saha that I was not cut out for a job at Adyar Park.  He understood.  I completed the week, and was off the hotel for good.  Until a month ago, that is.

It appears that I might be there again in a few days, with "G" and "M." 

I wonder now whatever happened to Mr. Saha.

The Inquisition ignited the modern police state

One of the best habits I got into a very long time ago was to read Lingua Franca.  The magazine began about the time I was growing up as a graduate student.  It was something like an inside-baseball version of intellectual discussions.  From Lingua Franca, which didn't last long, I transitioned to a life of a daily dose of aldaily.com.

Today, aldaily.com serves me this essay about how all our awful waterboarding and torture and censorship and everything else have their origins in the Inquisition.  But then,

[Why] did the Inquisition come into being when it did? Intolerance, hatred and suspicion of one group by another had always existed. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution – to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life – did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those embers of hatred did not exist. Once the tools do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well. The targets can be large or small. An inquisition impulse can quietly take root in the very systems of government and civil society that order our lives.

Yeah, why, and how?

The tools are these: there needs to be a system of law, and the means to administer it with a certain amount of uniformity. Techniques must be developed for conducting interrogations and extracting information. Procedures must exist for record-keeping, and for retrieving information after records have been compiled and stored. An administrative mechanism – a bureaucracy – is required, along with a cadre of trained people to staff it. There must be an ability to send messages across significant distances, and also an ability to restrict the communications of others – in a word, censorship.
The Inquisition was built on all of these capabilities. The new universities brought order to canon law, defining heresy with precision and therefore defining who was “inside” and who was “outside”. The Church bureaucracy became professional; papal chanceries turned out perhaps 300 letters in 1200 and 50,000 a century later. Inquisitors learned how to organise their documents and make them searchable; a person’s testimony to one tribunal could be known to another tribunal decades later. Interrogation manuals, like the famous Practica written by Bernard Gui, were drawn up to instruct inquisitors on how to question the accused – the tricks to use, the psychology to employ. The resemblance to the modern manuals for military personnel and intelligence operatives is hard to miss. As a supplement to interrogation, torture became systematic – subject to rules, perhaps, but rules that proved elastic, as they always do.

What an institutional support, eh that took intolerance to awful depths! 

Every once in a while, I ask students in my classes about the Spanish Inquisition.  Simple questions like if they know what it was about.  The approximate time when it happened.  And then I share with them the Mel Brooks version of the history of the world in which he presents the Inquisition :)

Photo of the day: the world's oldest locomotive

Caption at the source:AGE NO BAR: The EIR 21 steam locomotive being cheered during the heritage run to mark the Republic Day, in Chennai on Thursday. Photo: S.R. Raghunathan

The paper notes:

 The 157-year-old steam engine, the world's oldest locomotive, remained true to form during a heritage run organised by Southern Railway here to mark the Republic Day on Thursday.

Should China lose for the US to win?

I cannot even remember the last time I watched the President's State of the Union address.  All the fake applause, and the monarchical settings just don't agree with me.  So, I know for sure that I would not have watched Obama's address, but would have read about it.

And that is what I did even while here on the other side of the planet from the US.

The first time I read anything about the SOTU was at a Facebook status message; my "cousin-in-law" (yes, I invented this relationship!) had a note that read:

"Lets not allow other countries to win the fight for the future"...really?? I did not expect this BS from BO.

And then I read a few more, and was particularly attracted to this blog post by an Economist correspondent:

Perhaps more distressing, he implied in several places that the reason to become more like China was that only by doing so could America defeat China, and others, at economics. Consider the line:

Our workers are the most productive on Earth, and if the playing field is level, I promise you – America will always win.

Leaving others, one is forced to conclude, to lose—not once, not occasionally, but always. And what is likely to be the outcome of unending defeat? Destitution? Are we to hope that other countries are left with no gainful employment opportunities at all? If that means dreadful poverty, then Mr Obama ought to be dragged before an international tribunal. But maybe it's not so bad, in which case we have to wonder why it's so damned important to "win" whatever contest it is we're having. Is the implication that it's possible to get by all right, to not be poor, without having lots of demanding manufacturing jobs? That doesn't sound so bad, actually; are we sure America doesn't want to sign up for that? Of course, if this is the nature of economic activity, and if America is determined to defeat other countries, it's worth asking whether it wouldn't make sense to deliberately sabotage other places, or bomb them; after all, it's hard to lose to a country whose people are dead. 

 He is bloody pissed, isn't he?  I think he is damn right to comment that way.

I concede that this is election year, when rhetoric heats up beyond the stratosphere.  But, come on. Really? This is the argument the professor-in-chief wants to provide?

But, the Economist's correspondent has more to say, and that is about the very sentence that PO'ed my "cousin-in-law"

Later, the president added:

Don’t let other countries win the race for the future.

The context, innocuously enough, was in calling for greater support for American research and development efforts. But the language of this statement is either daft or ghastly, depending on how charitably one is willing to read it. Is Mr Obama so dense as to miss that when America invents things other countries benefit, and vice versa? If a German discovers a cure for cancer, shouldn't we be ecstatic about that, rather than angry? Indeed, shouldn't we be quite happy and interested in ensuring that Germans and Britons and Indians have the capability and opportunity to develop fantastic new technologies? In the more nefarious reading, Mr Obama seems to accept that only relative standing really matters. A sick, poor world in which America always triumphs is preferable in all cases to one in which America maybe doesn't "win" the race to discover every last little thing that's out there to be discovered. And hell, one has to ask again whether the easiest way to prevent other countries from winning the race for the future isn't simply to blow up their labs.
... People who live outside of America are people just like Americans, and we should all rejoice in their rising prosperity, the more so when it occurs through additions to the stock of human knowledge that will benefit people everywhere. If an American president can't communicate that simple idea to his citizenry, out of fear that he'll be drummed out of office on a wave of nationalistic outrage, then he doesn't deserve to be president and his country doesn't deserve to win a damned thing, least of all the right to call itself "exceptional", a beacon of hope and freedom. A zero-sum world is a world without hope, and if Mr Obama is convinced that's what we're in then I don't see much need for him to stick around.

Ouch, ouch, ouch!

I agree with everything there, except that final sentence.  I want Obama to stick around only because the emerging set of alternatives are incredibly worse than him.

Greg Mankiw, too, didn't like them:

I was disappointed, and even a bit surprised, that the President adopted the xenophobic approach to outsourcing and international trade.  Usually, on issues of international trade, the President plays the role of grown-up and leaves it up to Congress to gin up populist ire.  That is true of both parties.  Recall that President Clinton pushed NAFTA through.

 But, Obama is not the only zero-sum game guy in town.

In Foreign Policy, Gideon Rachman (an Economist alum) writes about the end of the win-win world:

In my book Zero-Sum Future, written in 2009, I attempted to predict how the global economic crisis would change international politics. As the rather bleak title implied, I argued that relations between the major powers were likely to become increasingly tense and conflict-ridden. In a worsening economic climate, it would be harder for the big economies to see their relationships as mutually beneficial -- as a win-win. Instead, they would increasingly judge their relationships in zero-sum terms. What was good for China would be seen as bad for America. What was good for Germany would be bad for Italy, Spain, and Greece.
Now, as the paperback edition of my book comes out, the prediction is being borne out -- which is gratifying as an author, although slightly worrying as a member of the human race. The rise of zero-sum logic is the common thread, tying together seemingly disparate strands in international politics: the crisis inside the European Union, deteriorating U.S.-Chinese relations, and the deadlock in global governance.

Rachman seems to be analyzing the Euro Zone chaos, in which the northerners have to bail out the southerners, as somehow an example of the end of win-win. But, the Euro common currency and its related macroeconomic problems now is very different a situation from, say, the US-China trade issue that Obama views as a zero-sum game.  Reading Rachman, I am, like, WTF!  Rachman is all confused about the win-win or win-lose of globalization, depending on one's interpretation, and the international geopolitics in which he sees a non-zero-sum situation.  The only place where he seems to make sense is when he writes:

[WTO officials] dread the prospect of being asked to adjudicate a U.S.-Chinese dispute over currency -- fearing that any such case would be so politically charged that it could blow apart the world trading system.

Oh well ...

Why a sababtical? To be a stranger!

I thought this advice for a sabbatical was neat.  But, Freeman Dyson does it better, of course (ht):

As my friend the physicist Leo Szilard said (number nine in his list of ten commandments): “Do your work for six years; but in the seventh, go into solitude or among strangers, so that the memory of your friends does not hinder you from being what you have become.”

Ok!

People look to the US, again. And, "China is rising, but it is not catching up"

The Foreign Policy interview with Nouriel Roubini and Ian Bremmer re-affirms my own views, like this one :)

FP: Ian, what's the biggest winner of the coming year?
IB: United States.
FP: Really?
IB: Oh, absolutely. First of all, it's all a relative game. If you're concerned about the euro, the dollar looks really good, and that gives us a lot more flexibility in this country. I'm a believer in American entrepreneurship. I'm also a believer in quality of life, and when things start falling apart, people look to the U.S. more.

Daniel Drezer excerpts the following from this study:

The widespread misperception that China is catching up to the United States stems from a number of analytical flaws, the most common of which is the tendency to draw conclusions about the U.S.-China power balance from data that compare China only to its former self. For example, many studies note that the growth rates of China’s per capita income, value added in hightechnology industries, and military spending exceed those of the United States and then conclude that China is catching up. This focus on growth rates, however, obscures China’s decline relative to the United States in all of these categories. China’s growth rates are high because its starting point was low. China is rising, but it is not catching up.

The challenge will be to figure out how to make the US' economic might more inclusive than it is now.

How smart is your elementary school teacher?

One taboo subject on campus, perhaps on any university campus: anything to do with comparing intellectual abilities of students across majors.  We are expected to pretend that all students are equally capable.  (Plus, of course, pretentious faculty, even at teaching universities like mine, walking around as if they are geniuses!) 

And then comes the GPA issue.  We are suddenly faced with a situation where we find plenty of students with perfect or near-perfect GPAs in some majors, and far-from-perfect GPAs in others.  But, of course, academia being nothing but politics anymore where honest discussions are not allowed, we never openly engage in discussions.

So, we whisper in hallways, and might complain to colleagues we trust.  In my case, not having a colleague to trust makes it all the easier to blog about all these :)

In my second year as a graduate student, when I was a teaching assistant, one undergraduate student, who was in my discussion section, referred to the very course that I was TAing for as a "mickey mouse" course and that she had no problems earning high grades in many similar university courses.  I was amazed at such an honest and open admission from a student. (BTW, she was a contender, that year, to be in the "Royal Court" at the Rose Parade.)

What a terrible contrast it has been since I became a faculty, only to discover that most faculty, unlike that student, do not want to engage in honest and open discussions.

Worse, they are ready to throw out idiots like me who cling on to seemingly antiquated notions that education and university are about honest pursuits of truths!

It will be awesome if, for instance, a faculty meeting were devoted to the following graph (ht):

Fat chance!

There are places I remember ... or, stairway to heaven?

A standard argument in urban economics/geography is that residential use of land is a residual use--only if commercial use of it is not viable.  Similarly, if money is to be made, then homes in an area can be bought, demolished, and the land will be converted to commercial uses.

My parents lived through this textbook explanation of urban land use.

For twenty-five years, they made themselves home and it looked like this before they moved out:

And that stairway to home has become the stairway to a store :)

The coconut trees are long gone.  No retailer wants coconuts to drop on customer's heads or cars!

Am mighty glad, however, that the trees by the road, which have grown even more, have not been cut down, but have been only pruned.

But, I don't seem to have any particular emotions attached to this old house.

It was Madras when I was a visitor from Coimbatore, and it was Madras when I was a visitor from the US.  It has been years since the city became Chennai.  Having always been a visitor to Chennai, I feel a lot more nostalgic about Neyveli and Sengottai, which stir a lot more memories of "home," than I do about the city where my parents and sister live.

Home is what we individually make of the spaces where we live, and where we create memories.

Which is why we do not talk about homes in economic geography.  They are only houses.  It is only the housing market. 

For now, as I type this post, home is far, far away, in Eugene.

If a rose is a rose, then a college degree from anywhere smells the same? :)

I am homesick :)

Comment of the day: On Hemingway, Franco, and war

If ever I need evidence for how the world is full of crazies, I need not go very far.  I have to merely look at myself in the mirror :)

No, seriously, the following is a comment that somebody had left, in response to my post a while ago about Hemingway's A farewell to Arms:

Hemingway:
BORRACHO PAYASO.
OUR LAST CIVIL WAR NEVER WAS OF YOUR FUCKING BUSSINESS, AS NEITHER FOR AT LEAST ALL OF THOSE NUNS AND PRIESTS KILLERS CALLED BRIGADAS INTERNACIONALE AND ALSO THE JEWISH LINCONL BRIGADE.

VIVA FRANCO FOREVER.

Ahem, it is absolutely my f*g business!  And will continue to be my f*g business :)

Ps: Google helped me out with translating BORRACHO PAYASO.  The translator is quite funny as well.  Because I had copied and pasted into the translator the comments, which are in uppercase, the translation in English was also in uppercase: DRUNK CLOWN :)

Cartoon of the day: Newt Gingrich's open marriage :)

Slate explains why Gingrich's deal was nothing but back to the traditions--the ultimate conservative he is then?

Hyundai and Foxconn buses. Near Chennai, not in China

"I will be back in a minute, sir" the autorickshaw driver, "L," said as he stopped the vehicle in the shade. 

Right from the first minute of the drive, I engaged him in conversations--in Tamil, of course--about Kanchipuram and other topics.

The first question I had for him was whether the name on the vehicle, "S," was his.  "No, sir, it is my son's."  Which is also when he told me his name was "L."

I would never have guessed that he was a father of a kid; he seemed way too young for fatherhood.  I suppose this is better than the Tony Randall route to becoming a father at an age when quite a few would have become great-grandfathers!

"L" drove me from one old temple to another.  As we were driving, I spotted two large white buses with "Hyundai" written on them.  A number of companies--multinationals and Indian alike--run their own buses to transport employees.  Thus, it was not the bus itself that caught my attention, but the fact that these two buses were in Kanchipuram.  Perhaps a few employees were on a tour?  Or, perhaps visiting Hyundai managers were on a sightseeing trip?

"What is the Hyundai bus doing here?" I asked "L."

When he didn't reply, I thought he probably didn't hear me.  I asked him again.

"I don't know what is written on the bus, sir.  I don't know to read much."

"Oh ... how many years did you go to school?"

He answered with three fingers for three years.  The manner in which he responded makes me wonder whether that was an exaggeration--perhaps he is barely literate and that is it?

Later, on my bus ride back to Chennai, I spotted two white buses with the words Foxconn.  While I am all too familiar with Hyundai, Ford and the automobile industry in Chennai (hmmm ... my sabbatical work!) I had no idea that Foxconn has operations in India, and that too in Chennai.

Back in Oregon, I routinely require students to read this essay about Foxconn.  It always shocks most of them.  It troubles them that a workplace has nets around the buildings in order to minimize employee suicides.  I am hoping that Foxconn employees in India get a better deal--after all, at least on the books there are labor laws that Foxconn has to follow, which is a step above China's situation.

Drag racing at the beach. Not in Miami, but in Chennai?

So, there I was walking along the beach enjoying the pleasant afternoon sun and breeze, after quite some time at the art exhibit, when the sounds of screeching vehicle brakes jolted me into the world around me. 

The culprit was a white BMW X1.  With boom-boom music to boot.

And then a black BMW X1 sidled up next to it. 

Two expensive cars, on a road by the beach, and with young adults as drivers.  The drivers could have been anywhere between in their late teens to early twenties.

The drivers talked with each other.  And then as they both revved up their engines, I wondered if they were drag racing.  In Chennai's Besant Nagar beach. When everything else was quiet by the homes that looked far from Indian.

Yep. It was a drag race, all right!

Must be some rich kids, I thought to myself.  I wondered if I would have done that, if I were rich.  Nah! I am way too boring a personality, who delights in eating oatmeal for breakfast :)

A few minutes later, they were back, and then turned into left into the street and stopped. 

Again, engines revved, and off they went.  Thankfully, they didn't return.

But, another drag race took over: two bikes.  Boy were they loud.  A driver alone on one, and the other bike had a second on the back seat.  Even scarier?  Only the solo-driving guy had his helmet on.  What the hell is wrong with people these days?  Or, am I beginning to turn into a Andy Rooney? :)

I didn't have to worry about the (b)rash youth anymore--a police constable stood in the middle of the road and started reading a newspaper.  I suppose the rich kids didn't want to test their machines or the police!

I slowly walked towards the inviting waters.  To my left was a father and a son sharing a good moment in their lives, while the mother stood back watching them through her purdah.
 

On my right was a father with his daughter, who was making it loud and clear, through her yells and screams, how much she was enjoying the waves.  The mother in her churidar was happily clicking away.

I could sense a feeling of loneliness getting into my system along with the refreshingly clean salty air.  I walked away that feeling, which is when I spotted another lonely soul by a boat.  We are all in the same metaphorical boat, I told him silently.  Some day, the drag-racing youngsters, too, will understand this.