Trevor Noah. Who?

Yesterday was a “Trevor Noah. Who?” moment for me as I followed this persons Bangalore visit and the fiasco around it on Twitter. Angry feeds showed up with a lot of traction.

I recognise the face and know that he does comedy but haven’t consumed any of his shows and was surprised to see that people are willing to pay Rs. 3000-12500 for a ticket to attend his show?!

Exactly a month back I had another Bangalore discussion. At our first Community Walk under Walking Project one of the participants had just moved to Mumbai from Bangalore.

Even as we dove deep into discussions on Mumbai, pedestrian infrastructure and BMC and everything, this young professional shared that he was amused with the fuss, because in Bangalore the situation is so bad that he is very happy being in Mumbai and seeing the priority to pedestrians and other conveniences. None of the road department engineers in Bangalore have pedestrians anywhere on their mind when thinking and working on roads.

How and why will the Bangalore road dept engineers pay heed to pedestrians or traffic for that matter? Do people take such a keen interest in those matters as they do in Trevor Noah? Are they paying anywhere close to those ticket amounts to any of the local groups working for a better governed Bangalore?

These are highly educated, well earning young professionals mostly. They have earning power and purchasing power. What interests them in life and what are they willing to pay for? These are moot questions for me as someone involved with improving quality of life and governance in Indian cities. If people who are well earning and well educated do not take interest in efforts to improve cities then who will?

The threat from parenting

Even as we worry about threats from climate change, nuclear apocalypse, accelerated loss of biodiversity and AI it seems the more insidious of challenges is not getting the same high voltage recognition.

What kind of threats do we like to give attention to? The ones which create dystopian imagery, stark and visible breakdown or those where everything is kind of normal, you are going about life with all its visible comforts and while not exactly utopia, not dystopia either; and yet you are not experiencing well being at all.

You are in a comfortable house and an office, you aren’t swimming on a raft in a flooded street or seen your house burnt to the ground in an uncontrolled ‘climate’ induced fire and yet you are not well. You are hurt and affected by your upbringing, have major issues with how your mother or father or both engaged with you and your life choices, the sparring has not stopped deep into adulthood and life seems a daily grind. The wounds run deep and have no visibility like the raft or the burnt house.

Confidence destroyed, robbed of vitality, seeing the present moment slip by unlived or without vitality, millions of people are being robbed of well being here and now as compared to the more stark effects of climate change or AI a decade or two down the line. The number of people affected with strained through relations with their parents far outnumber that by any of the other concerns and the damage is far more serious and pervasive.

If we are so serious about the human race and the planet then the UN should be setting up a separate task force on this. Parents need help with parenting. They cannot let their children become a vehicle for their aspirations, which they could not fulfill, or forward some social code or justify as some form of love and concern. Affected children (adults) need coping support and transition.

Indo French relations

The Indo French relations have in the past decade been reduced to France humouring India with its shallow fantasies and vanity in order to facilitate the sale of its nuclear reactors and Rafael aircraft. These are the real big ticket items, other businesses are able to take care of themselves or even if not then they are expendable.

Towards this end the French establishment, consisting of all the wings of the government primarily will ensure the right photo ops for the Indian Prime Minister and also throw in the highest civilian order if need be. The outposts in India, engage the Indian elite in rich ceremonies and keep track of the sentiments and all that diplomats are supposed to do. And frankly, why should someone outside care about India’s core issues if they themselves are not.

Somewhere around the Paris climate summit I could put the pattern together, seeing how France would accommodate India’s regressive climate stance and was using the summit to provide India an ego massage and boost. Which civil society organisations were active, provided prominence and what they real background and interests were was quite evident.

The Indian market is a fairly lucrative one for European business interests and the first and foremost job that politicians see for themselves is to safeguard and forward business interests and anything which safeguards jobs in Europe. They are installed by those interests. Everything else is good rhetoric for the gallery. And Macron has been good at that. The deep state collaboration at both ends has been fantastic. What is, is not what is.

I do not see any meaningful partnership happening on cultural or environmental issues and no real meaningful civil society collaborations. The two nations could work so much on deepening democracy and improving governance, the foremost requirement to address issues like poverty and climate change. Democracy in India has gone for a toss and I don’t get inspired by what I see in France.

Yes the more affluent sections of the Indian middle class and the top rung rich are there in France but that is pure hedonism and opportunism. Nothing spectacularly intellectual or on a higher consciousness plane. The few who get educated at the elite educational institutions are rarely deepening any meaningful ties. Most are pursuing high ticket jobs or status.

And now we are talking the next 25 years.

What we are doing to our cities

I stay away from the papers for reasons like the article below

Time of India, Mumbai Edition, 18th July 2023

Urban issues and especially Mumbai have been all my adult life. By now I am desperately trying to erase my identity and live a new and different life but while I am still at it articles like the above can be a trigger.

What we are doing to Indian cities is beyond sad. And then to read headlines like that is to feel humiliated for one’s own life time of work but a shameful swipe at the lived reality of millions of Indians who cannot read or write English and go through a degraded urban experience while members of Kant’s ilk take car centric decisions.

I remember March 2006 and my first interaction with O P Agarwal, IAS who came out with the National Urban Transport Policy. The first ever Transport Demand Management seminar we organised in May of the same year. So much work for a decade after that.

Its nice for a glowy Amitabh Kant to keep spouting the same rhetoric every few years and be unmoved with how things are falling apart in the real world because he will never get to first hand experience any of that. He made the right decisions early in life and got himself a nice bubble for life.

Nobody in the Connect Karo audience will hold him or any of the positions he has held accountable. Everyone’s got to safeguard their business.

In Mumbai we are seeing a deliberate sabotage of one of the finest public bus services in the sub-continent and everyone is just held hostage not able to do anything. No week goes by without reading of the fall in standards of the bus service on all accounts. Once in a while the same papers do a good PR exercise for the IAS officer in charge. Papers are a waterway, which will carry glacial melt and filth alike.

Then again across Mumbai Metropolitan Region car centric urban design is like an uncontrolled wildfire. There is zero accountability in any of the municipal corporations in the region for something like adhering footpaths to Indian Road Congress guidelines while making new roads or redeveloping old roads.

Look at Pune, and the Vetal Tekdi agitation earlier this year. Maharashtra is the most urbanised state in the country and should be the beacon for all the gyan in the article.

The elected representatives are being bought and sold in the crores in one of the most shameful eras of governance underway. Which one of them is listening to Kant or which one of them is Kant holding accountable?

COP 27 – 1

Good article. Thanks for sharing.

There really should be no conundrum if India would only engage in what it has been preaching. If we were to read the statement on expanding coal production along with the biggest announcement called LiFE where the Indian PM exhorted the world to follow sustainable lifestyles then we could see stable coal production at current levels and moderate rise going into the next few decades.

Mitigation pathways easily available by incorporating basic sustainability principles within all the big sectors have been ignored for decades now. That’s what activism has been for some of us for decades. Sustainable urbanization, agriculture and lifestyle.

There is no way that renewables can power the utterly wasteful paradigm which we are mainstreaming. More than a “staunch environmentalist” PM we need a more mainstream environmental ethic which is completely absent today.

The value system at the village level to the large city level is the same. People would care much less about air pollution and garbage and sewage, where does the question of forests and biodiversity and climate come? Or reducing coal production?

The Metro cities are adding large quantities of air conditioning capacity on a daily basis. Personal mobility is expanding rapidly, we are nowhere close to half way mark. None of it can be served by renewable energy. We will be most populous in a few years, middle class expanding (and not consistent with LiFE). In all of this coal consumption is only going to keep increasing.

Demand management is nowhere even close on the horizon – forget the common man, its not close in the civil society actors at COPs who would much rather go after historic emissions rather than face and confront the very visible and uncomfortable squander within.

Preserving the forests of Hasdeo Arand should not even require a climate dimension or being seen as a responsible global citizen. It should be consistent with the dominant cultural and religious values which are millennia old.

If the double speak continues then I really don’t understand why India even participates in any climate talk. There really is no need. The global compact has anyways failed and there is a huge trust deficit. It is not that there will be any effective sanctions against India for runaway emissions. Every developed country needs the growing Indian middle class market.

People like Nirmala Sitharaman and Bhupendra Yadav or Modi for that matter are not visionaries. They are not thinking of 2050. They are cogs or nuts and bolts, which help deliver the machine give the desired output. They did not design the machine nor do they own it. No staunch environmentalist would be taking the kind of decisions that are being taken. The least that can be done is to prevent the pollution from double speak.

Bharat Jodo Yatra

A man who has led his party to spectacular decline and one election loss after the other – who cannot even do a good Congress Jodo will do a Bharat Jodo? What kind of a delusion do those who are excited by the yatra live in?

This is a stage managed show. The activities are stage managed, the participants are stage managed. Who stage manages it? Those excited should probe deeper. IAC a decade ago was stage managed. I had felt exasperated that time and written and spoken in vain. People want to believe.

The deep state and dark state is apolitical and agnostic. To them Modi and RaGa are irrelevant and only to be used as relevant to the context and requirements. Maybe Rahul will be made the next PM by the deep state and that government would be as distanced from the basic principles of good governance as the current one. We will have one set of devotees replaced by another.

Imagine if so many people on social media and some kind of Congress hopefuls were to be engaged so actively with their most immediate politicians and checking on them. What is the basic idea for the yatra anyways.? The idea of Bharat Jodo is to ultimately deliver better on government promises and delivery to the people. Most people will never meet Rahul Gandhi or walk with him on a yatra, but everyone can walk to their nearest elected representative and convey their views on local issues or check on the performance of the elected representative. Do the same people do that? Do they even reach out to proxies like civil advocacy organisations?

Even as I am writing this post I am reading this informative and fascinating article on Gujarat – Modi rules Gujarat…. So many lines stand out.

Many Devi Mata temples are caste specific. Of course, the most important aspect of these temples is devotees. When you talk to them, you know how important these beliefs are to them. Many believers are saddled with daily problems and a hard life. Their local temple is the only place where they find solace. Over the years, many devotees have told me that the “Devi is leading them.”

This is the essential state of India – a land of devotees. People go to their kul devta/devi for any and all problems but not to the governance structures which “saddle their lives with many of the daily problems and hard life”. This is what makes the work of those working on governance reform, improvement of the environment, social issues so difficult and almost irrelevant.

Imagine so many devotees in every city for local advocacy efforts? None exist in the first place. Besides some metro cities that concept is alien to India.

Some good information on the yatra and matter for further deliberation in this article

Lets save this beautiful heritage house

House in question in the foreground. Bottom of slope. Middle of frame

I am creating this post to invite residents of Mussoorie and much beyond anybody who will appreciate the house shown in the above photo and like to be involved in an effort to save and revive it. You can see the close-up photos in this link.

Especially inviting friends from heritage conservation, architecture and civil engineering to move in quickly to look into the complete range of work required.

The house in question belongs to the Department of Post, Government of India. It clearly belongs to the colonial era and must have been constructed easily a century ago by the British. Excludes an old world charm and architectural features which provide timeless joy, which is so much missing in many modern buildings. A number of employees were still staying here till some time back. But now only one family (maybe two or three) stays on the ground floor. They just take up a small corner of the large property. The property is more than 100 years old.

We could be using these homes and buildings and caring and preserving them rather than not using them and letting them fall to pieces. A town which is a pivot for tourism and gives itself the moniker of Queen of the Hills would show some pride, sentiment and effort among its people and the government to preserve this built heritage as tourist attraction if nothing else. Lets move the Queen to some action.

Straight to the call for action

  1. The Department of Post needs to be moved at the highest level in Delhi. Inviting members from INTACH and others to intervene. What are the Department plans? Is the property being deliberately destroyed to allow a sale to some real estate interest? If yes then possibly nothing can be done. If not then why does the Department not preserve it? At a time when housing is such a big crisis in Mussoorie, ten families could easily stay there. There are ministries of culture, heritage and tourism. This should be an inter-departmental issue. Get in touch with thoughts and leads.
  2. An initial fund needs to be put together for cleaning and repairing the passages. The main passage had a lot of cow dung and there needs to be a barrier for cows to come in. Get in touch if you would like to contribute to hire a cleaner and some basic carpentry. 
  3. An architect and civil engineering team needs to visit and do a quick assessment – quick fixes and whether the property can be made to see better days. What would be the cost of a good quality thorough restoration? Again get in touch if you love restoration and preservation of these kind of properties. Leave a public comment to the post or end a direct message. 

Do get in touch to join the efforts.

Space Adventures

Even as space is in the flavour of the season, I get reminded of this book in my shelf which I picked up some time in 1986 or 87 as an 11/12 year old. A cold war relic, I picked it up from an annual exhibition of Soviet publications.

Those were the days (and still) when my hunger and interest in knowledge extended beyond the classroom and if anything the classroom was to only go and do severe damage to me.

Cost a princely sum of Rs11.75

Billionaires Equilibrium

For decades the business forces dismissed or downplayed linkages between development and environmental issues, arguing that technology and enlightenment that will follow from everyone having a high per capita income will ensure that we will be able to take care of any environmental issue that comes about.

Now it is clear to the capitalists own number crunchers that there is indeed a crisis and the economic system they have created is self perpetuating and a prisoner of its rules and left on its own will work towards Singapore standard of per capita income for everyone. Even as they go about selling container loads of air-conditioners and cars and drive one set of numbers they can also hear the ticking in the background of a bomb mean to go off sooner than later.

We have seen enlightenment come about with high per capita income. It can be seen in the form of a clutter of teen and youth climate activists born to parents who pursued high carbon careers and lifestyles. With material needs more than taken care of the ‘enlightenment’ has come towards the fag end and in many a case seems a pursuit to become world famous and be seen as a hero of the planet. The best they could have done is to denounce their parents wealth first but that would be asking for too much. Enlightenment does not come easy to the species and hence cannot be relied upon to save the planet. You need more drastic steps.

The billionaires after decades of sales have now come to realise that they really do not need so many sales to remain billionaires. That if across board consumption and sales reduced uniformly they would still be billionaires. They would like to sell air-conditioners and cars and software and cement and steel to every single person around but that need not be seven billion people going to eight and nine.

The billionaires have not much interest in the welfare of the people much as they may create that impression. Their primary interest is their bank balance and position in society. And they are realising that it is not linked to a specific population number. They don’t take pleasure in wiping out rain forests in Indonesia to mine for coal to ensure that millions of middle class families in India or elsewhere air-condition their silly existence. And there will be no end to this cycle.

If the world’s population would drastically come down to 4 billion in two decades it would shake their capacities and plans a bit but working in tandem with governments they would be able to take care of everything and adjust to the new equilibrium and still be billionaires. Maybe a few 100 billionaires may get wiped out but that’s ok for the billionaires shaping the new equilibrium – there is no love lost on Wall Street. Taking the argument further they would still be billionaires if the global population came down to half a billion i.e 50 crore people or even one tenth – 10 crores. 10 crores is roughly the population of Maharashtra State in India. Imagine the whole world with only that many people. No 450 ppm, no plastic and shit in the oceans, no decimated rainforests and polar caps.

Technology advancements have anyways made labour rapidly redundant. There has never been a better time to have your cake and eat it to. Except that ticking in the background of the time bomb really is spoiling the party. With a global population of 100 million people it really will be possible for everyone but at least certainly for the billionaires to thoroughly enjoy their lives with maximum carbon entitlement. They could comfortably hop around in personal jets for business trips or vacations every month to exotic locations. Do whatever they want with none of the attendant commentary at shaming them and making them feel guilty. None of that nagging realisation that you are directly connected to all that plastic in the ocean, or the rapid decline of the rainforests. But now to get to the plan.

Maybe the best enlightenment does indeed come about at the top of the cash pile. Or at the absolute bottom of it. Everything in the middle is a charade.

Death is life

This post began on 13th April 2020, was refined in June 2020 and then I refrained from publishing it. Finally now.

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Operating on faulty first principles is the way of the human species. After making a wrong beginning everything else is managing consequences and adjusting.

A pandemic has seen humans scurrying. Death is in the air and everyone wants to ensure that its not their life or a near and dear ones which is on the line. Through the same so called pandemic and lockdown there has been an upsurge of sentiment for and about nature and a guilt tripping about the impact human species is having on the planet. Issues which were being highlighted for years but going undiscussed are now on table. Though I believe economic recovery will soon be the focus.

A keener understanding of nature would bring us to appreciate just how much death is an integral part of life. Pick your favourite natural haunt, a sanctuary or a tourism hotspot, mountain or beach, what makes the place tick and remain refreshing and bring joy is death. You don’t see or experience suffering and sickness. Death has cleaned up the landscape of clutter.

If anything, nature is quick and liberal in dispensing death than life. Death is what makes life worth celebrating in ecosystems which have been left relatively untouched by human presence. Without death those ecosystems would suffer from the same issues for which we need campaigners and heroes and champions and Nobel prizes and policy and support.

In nature there is no room for the weak, whether with weak immune systems or otherwise. There is no error margin for the unhealthy. There is no question of skipping your daily yoga and diet and keeping cardio-vascular and orthopaedic health. Everyone is self-actualised, a struggle with the human species, even with best-selling authors and philosophers over millennia.

Millions and maybe billions of humans suffer from experiencing a lack of meaning and direction in their lives, seek magic pills and potions and drugs and workshops and books and videos to transform their lives, to live happier, more content, control anger and depression. There is no such need in nature. Death is the cure for all of this. If that is where you begin with as the first principle then nothing of all this follows and there is no need for cures.

A ruthless and paranoid focus on efficiency (not the word of choice I would like to use here) ensures that any process or organism seen as inefficient – requiring more resources to support than the median norm – is eliminated at the earliest so that only those meeting the benchmark standards remain. There is no affinity for one or the other. Todays benchmark performer may be tomorrows laggard who would then be shown the door. The performer would not have built a crony support network to bail him out when he turns a laggard.

This ensures that only those who can hit the ground running are in the race and the others are all eliminated. There are no special provisions and subsidies and reservations. Of course, there is no exploitation and misappropriation either. When one is absent the other becomes irrelevant.

Those who survive live strong and proud lives, with self-respect and dignity. They do not have to grovel; they have not surrendered their liberties to any among them or out of them. They remain bound by a few universal laws and surrender only to them free of manipulating and exploitative political and social systems. Minding their own business and operating in the few rules that they jointly agree with fellow members of their and other species.

The human species is bloated with the weak, less talented and the outright burdens. And the species goes against natures first principles by protecting them rather than letting them be eliminated unsentimentally. The existence of these weak and less talented leads to much suffering, discord and conflict (when they merge with the strong and healthy) which produces a drag effect and considerable inefficiency. All this is then sought to be resolved in crafty ways, creative ways, spiritual and philosophical ways. All to no avail. When the first principles are so much in denial no craftiness later can provide relief.

And death in nature is not just about the weak and diseased, it can strike the strong equally. You may be a top of the chain tiger or any other predator, who saw siblings fall off after a few months of birth, learnt all the right hunting tricks from the mother, was able to fight off competing tigers and establish a comfortable territory for self and then suddenly a few hunts go wrong, you have a fall during one of the hunts, a competitor take advantage and suddenly its end of the road for you. No insurance or welfare state doling out a universal basic income or helpful neighbours. Nobody grieves, the landscape takes over, you may have been king of the jungle but then soon scavengers who once feared you take over and you become part of them and the rest becomes one with the soil.

In nature a virus eruption like the one confronting the world currently would have been allowed to run its course and cull out the unhealthy. No judgements, no morals, no bias or taking sides, no sentimentality. Whoever remains would have been healthy and been alert towards their own health.

Among the mistaken notions the humans species has about self is that it is compassionate and caring and feels heart and concerned. In Mumbai that compassion is missing when millions of people are made to subsume their existence into dingy and unhealthy living quarters. Or hang out of overcrowded trains. If corona virus is a life and death and health issue then so are those slums. The crisis is explained as a result of India’s population. A lie at best. Every single of those people can live in a nice house and enjoy a good commute. No doubt the population is runaway high and a problem but that becomes a convenient cover for the large-scale mismanagement and exploitation by the establishment, which is the root cause. In nature the establishment does not cause any such suffering. It is seen as ruthless when it dispenses death but it is compassionate to spare such a scale of suffering to its constituents. There are no real estate mafias there and political dynastic satraps.

The lockdown itself is a great example of the convoluted sense of compassion and logic in the species. Hundreds of millions of people have been economically debilitated and made into beggars almost overnight over a virus which has a 1 percent fatality rate. More people have suffered alive than in death as a result of this so called virulent and deadly virus. A minor percent of people with enough resources to survive them comfortably without income for few years have come to decided for a majority who need to earn everyday to feed themselves and are resisting the absurdity but to no avail since they do not have ‘power’. And the greater irony that a species whose evolution into the current stage was marked by the ability to cultivate and settle down now has large sections who cannot cultivate their own food and are dependent on ‘income’ for food.

Would those who have erupted in the current sentimentality about nature like to endorse and subscribe to nature as such? To see the death of one’s own kith and kin, even as a benevolent act of nature?

In denying death the human species denies life. In manners of thinking which are unique to themselves they see nothing wrong in such a denial and it noble to thwart death(life) and save life. The vaccine developers are more of a business response to an opportunity, not a love for life. They see only that part of the picture (life) which provides life to their balance sheet.

And this is where a distinction is important. In the human case a lot of those who are seen as strong might in reality be terribly evil and vicious. Their so-called strength arises out of manipulation and chicanery. There is cunning in nature and when push comes to shove every individual will exhibit behaviour inconsistent with what’s good/bad as per human definitions but nothing like the evil and chicanery that exists among the human species.

Death due to ageing or not as a result of predatorial aggression happens gracefully without attendant display. Think of when you saw or came to know of the death of your street dog or cat or crow or pigeon or sparrow. They just seem to go away when the time has come. What you get to see is always a fresh picture free of the pain and sorrow. That tree branch outside your window will over the years only present a joyful picture of various birds go about their daily chores and play.