ISI Paradox

Russell's Paradox

Pakistan's former ISI chief, General Ashfaq Kayani made some loud noises a while back when situation was on boil and the two neighbors were having a war of words. Dr. Manmohan Singh had replied that war was not an option.

Then we heard a well known columnist of Newsweek that "the Pakistani military can only be reined in by itself. No civilian govt. has ever had the ability to tell the military in Pakistan to rein in itself".

Perhaps, Mr. Zakaria was pointing towards one of the biggest paradoxes of formal logic. It was first discovered by Mr. Bertrand Russell long time back.

In its simplest form paradox is this: if the village barber shaves only those villagers who do not shave themselves, who shaves the barber? That is, if a barber shaves only those who don't shave themselves, he can't shave himself.

A Problem of Logic

There are many such examples but the point is clear. If you follow the rule that a set can be member of itself, if and only if, it is not a member of itself, you get a paradox.

Now apply this to ISI.

Pakistan's sovereignty means that no other country can rein in its army, and the ISI's self made charter ensures that it will not rein it itself. This is where Russell's paradox becomes evident.

If the only reason for the ISI's existence is to create problems for everyone else in the belief that it serves Pakistan's national interest, how will it rein in itself. Why would it, for then it would belong to the set that doesn't want to create problems for the world and that is not logically possible.

Solution of Sorts

Well, after much struggle mathematicians found an answer to the above paradox, is that the only way it can be done is that such a barber did not exist.

Or, maybe the barber was a woman. Substitute 'ISI' for 'barber' and 'civilian government ' for the woman in the previous sentences and you will get the answer.

This essentially means that if the categories listed above are o live in pace, the ISI must cease to exist in its present form, or even better, entirely.

This is an adaptation
Written by T.C.A. Srinivas-Raghavan
Appeared in Business Line on 27.12.08

Oscars and India

A.R. Rahman nominated

Its national pride that A.R. Rahman has been nominated at Oscars for Original Song twice for his songs "Jai Ho" and "O Saya" and also for Best Original Score. However, there is a deeper view needed here.

No doubt 'Slumdog Millionaire' is an outstanding movie and is an eye-glued experience. The way the script has been put into existence on screen is amazing and shows a unique way to present the same form of rag-to-riches story delivered hundreds of times by other forms. This one is surely the one which we are going to remember.

There is a common misconception that movies of these sorts are Indian Films. Like the trio of Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta and Gurinder Chadhha make movies having scripts based on Indian people/culture having Indian cast and crew. But its not true, and these are foreign films. They have producers from outside and most of their Back-stage crew are foreigners. Their collections are mainly from outside. Their primary audience is the place where the producers are from which is in most of the cases not India. They are released at different dates internationally and in India. They are not made keeping in mind Indians, that's why most of the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire have a Hollywood touch and feel and many of them are performed by foreign artists.

Coming on to the Oscars

Academy Awards are respected world over and known for awarding excellence in world cinema. For a long time India has stayed away from these awards or maybe could not compete at the level to be recognised internationally for their work and nominated for the same. Over the years only three Indian movies have been nominated in Foreign Language Film category namely- 'Mother India, Salaam Bombay and Lagaan'. However, none of them have won an Oscar. Amir Khan was of the view that Indian films are not designed to win an Oscar. Films usually nominated there are films of duration 90-150 mins (exception Titanic). Lagaan being more than 3.5 hours long might not have fancied the jury.

Now coming back to the oscar nomination of A.R. Rahman. We have all heard his music in more than 100 films that he has given music to,(which includes many south Indian films also). Most of his work is phenomenal and Slumdog being no exception to it. However, I believe that maybe even his other work is worth a nomination at Oscars if so Slumdog Millionaire's music has been hailed so much. 'Jai Ho' is a marvellous song but even his compositions in 'Guru', 'Rang de Basanti' etc deserve attention. Even other artists in the Indian Cinema are worth talking about which includes work of the likes Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy etc. And of course the golden period of 60's,70's and 80's ruled by Kishore Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar etc.

But these songs/music are not screened in the Oscars as they do not meet the eligibility, which is that these songs should serve a motion picture and written specifically for it, and that these movies should be produced in the United States. Therefore, the work which I have talked about in the above paragraph is not eligible for nomination.

Conclusion

But the underlying point here is that Indian Music is very rich and diversified and it does not need the stamp of an Oscar to reaffirm its place and its beauty. Indian musicians, directors, singers, lyricists and many others involved in delivering music are truly of a high quality performance background and Oscar should not mean more than a feather in the golden cap they have. We should have our own music awards which are genuine and voted by a powerful jury. The biased award ceremonies in place today have created a joke of Indian Cinema and the awards system. These awards should recognise talent and not brand or popularity as it is done today.

The problem of plagiarism is infinite and those indulging in it should be pilloried. It should be supported by lawsuits and law actions which helps clean the image of Indian Music in the world which otherwise today is dotted with copyright violations and other issues.

Avoid visiting songs.pk

Indian Intelligence has warned that Pakistani hackers are launching cyber attacks at Indian web-sites. They have done that in the past and several govt. websites being victimised by it. This unnecessary creates problems and hinders growth which has been the objective of anti-India forces.

A popular Pakistani site songs.pk is full of Indian content like bollywood songs, videos, trailers etc which has over 12 million Indian subscribers visiting it daily. The site is infested with worms and viruses. Some of them can be easily detected with anti-virus softwares. With a large no. of Indian subscribers, they can easily affect many computers whose effect will be multiplied by the distributive ability of viruses. This may be a test run maybe for a large scale attack later on which will leave our networks orphaned. Also the viruses which they will deploy in case of a mass attack will be of new and modern design previously not encountered by anti-virus firms and thus not detected by anti-virus.

So I urge you all, not to visit that site. (songs.pk) And after the Mumbai terror attacks, its also common sense to boycott all Pakistan related activities and entities. You are falling at their strategies and contributing to the menace.

Moreover, the content which you are downloading is pirated, so its unethical as well as illegal. It is advised that either you buy original DVDs/CDs or use other sites on the web or torrents (illegal) which don't make you vulnerable to attacks and in turn Indian networks as you are part of it. This is for your safety and this post is of very sensitive nature and take it with absolute seriousness.

The truth about NITAT

NIIT conducted a nationwide IT Aptitude test today (18.1.09) to test the industry readiness of the various graduating students in IT sector. It was a widely advertised event with many IT companies as its partners. The paper was a multiple choice questions having three categories- Mental Ability, Mathematics and Decision Making. The application cost was 100 INR.

I appeared for the test. The test was of 100 minutes. The test began on 1:10 PM instead of its scheduled 1:00 PM after much confusion. The test was surprisingly not an OCR evaluated test, and we had to write the option number by hand. The supervisors changed every 15 minutes or so, and we were invigilated by 4-5 different teachers. The initial invigilator gave all the wrong instructions regarding the test code, paper code etc, later corrected by other member. During the test, the teachers started talking amongst themselves which seemed like bitching to me. The last faculty to supervise us had some calculation problems and announced the finish time at 1:40 PM against the correct 1:50 PM. Few minutes of persuasion and mistake realisation took her to correct her mistake.

Upon finishing the test I found myself to be a guinea pig giving the test and falling to clever marketing strategy. The answer sheets were evaluated in the test center itself and of course the high probability of incorrect evaluation loomed large. This is the reason they left out negative marking so that papers can be easily and quickly evaluated, the reason that the results will be declared so soon (By Jan 24). The more serious problem however, is that answer sheets can easily be manipulated and even the question papers can be leaked easily.

Hence, the examination was a mere eyewash. The more important strategy behind this is more clear than ever, marketing NIIT's name. They managed to get industry partners like Microsoft, Sun etc. to make it feel genuine. Partners in crime I guess, and why not its a wonderful time to get group publicity. Test takers are being given free MSDN and SDN subscription.

Hence, the conclusion is that it was an unethical timepass, to take the test. Rather I would prefer blogging away.

Mental Harassment for NIIT on web. (not related)
http://www.consumercomplaints.in/complaints/mental-harassment-c69505.html

I too faced some mental harassment few years back when I subscribed to one of their programs. It is a long story, so I'll leave it for now.

What an Idea!! (Highly profitable ideas)

I marveled at some of the ideas that some great thinkers in recent past thought of and made windfall profits. 'Windfall'- the phrase used for ultra high profits is making way for Indian businesses. These ideas were unconventional, properly planned and well executed. They had guaranteed profits. Lets look at some of the ideas I came across.

1. Telenor buying 60% stake at Unitech

What began as a haphazard exercise to auction off precious spectrum to telecom companies, (later changed to licensing under a fixed fee, )did marvels for this company.

It applied for spectrum in 22 circles and got spectrum in 6 circles at 1650 crores. Later Finnish telecom company Telenor bought 60% stake at Unitech Wireless at 6120 crores, six times the company bought its license for operations. Now that's a massive profit and without even spending any money on infrastructure, branding, marketing, costing etc. Everything is on paper, and you still manage to get close to four times profit.

Now lets take a look at the series of events. Very first, Unitech decides to venture into telecommunications, applies for a license in all circles. Manages to raise 1650 crores for spectrum and much more, close to 8000 crores for infrastructure through banks. Govt. allocates spectrum in 6 circles. Telenor approaches Unitech for equity, later buys 60% stake in Unitech Wireless for 6120 crores.

Its anyone's guess that how many companies manage to make such profits with so little spending in so little time.

2. The new 7 wonders of the world

This was a great eye-catching concept, where the entire world would vote for the ancient monuments to decide the new 7 wonders of the world. The idea was simple. It required an initial investment to setup the polling systems viainternet and phone. The founder Weber was a smart man. for every call and sms , some small proportion of money went to him. Considering the amount of votes and that this was the largest poll in terms of participation, he had a huge amount in doing just about nothing.

The competition gathered momentum and millions of votes were counted. In many countries, the competition was supported by telecom operators like Brazil and made it free of cost to cast a vote. In India, we had plenty of news channels, radio and celebrities coming out to pledge people to vote and many million votes poured in.

No check was put into place to check multiple casting and was declared null and void by some countries and institutions. The founder got huge sums and people acted in frenzy to vote for their country's monument.

So the idea was a very clever one and guaranteed profits, just the initial branding and advertising is required and you have huge profits. It may be counted as one of the largest money-making venture in which general people were involved with no public purpose.2.

3. Hotmail

Hotmail's name is always going to count whenever the history of internet is talked about. It was one of the major inventions of the internet and changed the scenario forever. In 1997 Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith co-founded Hotmail. There business strategy was simple "make it free".
At that time, only paid email service existed in the form of ISP's giving out email accounts and MS doing some business. It was so restricted that it was only used for business purpose.

Hotmail came as a big boost to advertising industry which was beginning to grow as dot com business was booming at that time. The second reason why hotmail become popular and so widely used is the fact that you need another person to have a hotmail account to send email to. Therefore, you create an account, urge your friends and family to get one so that both of you can communicate. So the word of mouth specially works here and it is the best marketing strategy.

Later Hotmail went to microsoft and large sum of money in their founder's kitty, enough to survive them for their lifetime and for future generations as well. This idea has inspired and created so much out of the Internet. Its contribution has been phenomenal.

Why a blog?

This question has crossed my mind many times. The answer was yes which is the reason you are getting to know the answer to it. Bakchodi aside, I had seen many blogs earlier and had an urge to write something of my own and get reactions from the audience and also have a habit of writing something since the good old days of having English as a subject are gone. Oh, man it was my favorite subject. For one reason it was easy and secondly the sufficiently high probability of having a sexy teacher teaching you English. So that's ethical timepass - learning English from a sexy teacher.

Some times you have no one to communicate to or bad days of sulking with nothing to get that anger out of you. So internet serves as pretty useful medium in such times, though this rarely happens to me.

I have many things to say about, actually this is an inherent Indian quality. We are always ready to give advice to everyone. We feel that we can clear everyone's problem in the world. We are born counsellors, (the very reason you see the dearth of them in our country). So look left, look right and you have a counsellor, so why waste time, instead do ethical timepass if you have so much of it. So those moments will be cherished in this blog by me.

There is a sense of competition in blogs, since you have so many of them and so few serious blog readers/followers. So the competition really makes me feel like digging my hands into it.

I want to draw important points to people's notice, which I fail to do for a large no. of people otherwise. Call it awareness or just something which makes it ethical to spend time on and read.

It has sort of become mandatory these days to have a blog.

-Hey, man you have a blog?
-Hmm, not really
-Man, go get it, its for free
-No time man
-Have it, one day somebody important might just ask the same question from you
-Ya, oops I remember

And already I had an interview in which the professors asked me about blogging and ending with the question "Do you have one?". The answer sounding like 'yes' sounds good sometimes, it would have, at that time if I had one which I posted in regularly.

Why this name?

Perhaps the question Why a blog? should come first, but it will be the second post, simply because I feel about answering the first one first. At least I have choices in this one, unlike the really pathetic scheduling of our university exams in which I have no say, leaving me with fewer holidays at the end of the semester.

Please ignore the above line as it may make you feel left out or out of place but its difficult to control strong desires. So coming on to the question and really justifying the title.

What's in a name? and hence why this post. This is for sharing my thoughts on how I came with this title which I feel is a good one as far as my creativity goes. Leave aside Shakespeare now, well actually blogspot has become so huge that the probability of getting the address you want are similar to that of India qualifying for world cup soccer. So I had to really shake my thinking buds, to come up with this. So this is about ethical timepass- "Timepass which society permits you or is seen as a gesture of goodness". So this blog might as well stand up to society's expectation and give justice to the amount of time you readers spend in reading my blog. So its kind of ethical if you do your daily/weekly (I might not update my blog frequently) timepass here which will in addition get you some plus points (refer Thora Pyaar Thora Magic. God, pardon me the tragic day I saw it in theatre) if you incorporate this in your routine.

Now how that will be done is a complex question and unthought of presently. Well, at least I know what to write in my next post. Yes, the question Why a blog?