Cant Help Thinking

Giving in to the inevitable

No more posts!

I have been planning to do this for a while. It was not so much a difficulty in making the decision, as intertia in implementing it that held me back so far. "Cant Help Thinking" and "The Brooding Dude" are going to be relegated to history (how nice, since that is one of my favorite topics!).
This does not mean of course that I would stop blogging. Whatever drove me to blogging (and the initial prolificity) does not exist any more and has not existed for a while. Minus that drive, I decided to limit myself to fewer posts, and if the quantity reduces the quality must make up for it.

I cannot say that the quality has. However I do put much more into the posts now, and they probably have much more useful substance than my rants used to on this blog. What posts am I talking about?

Well a little while after I started this blog, I became a contributor on The Scientific Indian. Since I am now one of the posters, I will refrain from saying anything more about the blog.

A little while later, I started The Indic View. Straying from the original intent of the blog, it has now become dedicated (though not entirely) to issues of energy security in India. There is a weekly India Petroleum Update that highlights the developments in the petroleum sector in India. It is timely because there is an urgency in that area that has not been seen since Independence. There are also some posts on alternate energy efforts, mostly coming out of India or with some other India link.

I will not have a Vote of Thanks, because this is really not the end of anything. I will henceforth just concentrate on my other blogs without feeling guilty of not having put up a post here. But I must say that "Cant Help Thinking" has benefitted immensely from the support of various bloggers, and to name a few (in no particular order): Dreams, Seema, Vimal, Shweta, Patrix, Swarna, Anwesha and Nitin.

In summary, this is the last post on this blog. I will however continue posting on:
1. The Indic View
2. The Scientific Indian

Whats a Government for anyway? - II

Old wine in a new bottle - or is it the other way around?

In the last post, we saw how the primary function of a government, which is to protect the borders of the nation, transformed over time from maintaining a strong military to building up the economy.

In the early days, promoting trade and commerce had no meaning as long as you were not strong enough to protect it. So trade and commerce naturally progressed under a strong ruler (who was not too repressive for that matter). In fact in medieval Europe, this was becoming a fine business, in the millenium of relative general lawlessness and barbarism between the Roman Empire and Renaissance. Small states would revolve around castles which were impregnable, using which as a base a ruler (with a certain degree of autonomy) could become strong and provide protection to, and extract taxes from, traders (they were important because they made the most money).

The change in status quo came in from China. The Chinese had been using rockets and canons from ancient times. The problem was that these had not changed enough since then. Once it reached renaissance Europe, the canon underwent dramatic upgradation into a state-of-the-art destruction machine. When this same upgraded canon went back to China, it helped the Hans finally establish lasting supremacy over the Mongol hordes. In Europe itself, it helped eliminate the last vestiges of the knight-based fuedal war machine (already reeling from the invasion of the "humble" archers), and far more importantly, because of its ability to destroy castles, changed the geographical requirements of a sovereign state forever. Castles fell even before the canon was invented, but never so easily (provided the invading force had canons). Also now the invading force needed lower manpower in terms of soldiers, but of course not necessarily lower resources.

Thus soveriegnty would now have to be guaranteed only with a standing army and sufficient strategic depth in terms of territorial size. For the former, you needed a big enough tax base, while for the latter you needed large enough territory. Both mandated the emergence of larger nations, and that spelt the death knell for both the city-state as well as the city-based state (where only the city need protected in times of a seige).

While the nations got bigger, wars naturally became more expensive, as bigger and better-armed armies faced off each time. So while the economy had to be strong to build up a strong army, war would deal a serious blow to the economy, firstly by draining the treasury and secondly by eliminating a chunk of the most productive workforce.

As trade grew (thanks to falling distances between nations), the value of global trade became more pronounced. Global trade is driven by the competetiveness of respective economies in producing certain goods. So the economies of nations began to get interlinked. Once the economies were interlinked enough, a war in or on one nation badly affected the interlinked nation too. So nations interlinked in trade would prefer not to fight each other.

This however did not prevent Germany and France going at each other in two disastrous (for the World at large) wars - WW-I and WW-II. Prior to both wars, they were each others' leading trading partners. So what changed since then?

The answer was politics. Commerce remaining secondary to political ideology was still dangerous. Capitalist democracies came up where people with jobs voted the leaders into power. If the leaders went to war, the voters would face inflation and job losses. If the leaders worked hard to improve the economy, the voters would have more money and feel happier. This in turn ensured that Governments would work harder at the economy.

Whats a Government for anyway?

Different people have different views on what a Government should be doing in life. A look at the historical evolution of Governments in terms of function.

I learnt this in civics, many, many years ago: The primary function of a Government is to secure the borders of the country.

This did not make sense to me, because in that case, the Government should have been made up of the top dogs of the armed forces, because after all it is they who protect the borders of the nation. It was my assumption that the primary job of the nation is to ensure that there is law and order in the country, and that there is economic development. I was only partly in the right.

In ancient times, the civics definition I mentioned above held good. That was a rather simplistic world. As long as a king maintained a strong army he would be king, otherwise some other king would defeat him and take over his kingdom. So the stress was on building a strong army and protecting the borders. As a privilege of being the ruler, the king would collect taxes and wallow in wealth, wherever possible. The wealth would act as an incentive for other rulers to attack, so unless the wealth was well invested in strengthening the defence forces, the kingdom would not survive. But there was only so much that money could buy, as far as defence was concerned. So money was still for wallowing in, and the rulers changed once the wallowing crossed a limit. The Government (represented by the king) still had to spend the bulk of its time looking after the borders, and collecting taxes. Very little thought had to be given to economic development (it took care of itself once the borders were secure), and law and order was a localized issue.

With the industrial revolution, means of warfare saw dramatic changes. These changes brought as much additional destructive capacity as they brought additional cost. Wars became more and more costly affairs - in short there was no limit to what money could buy in defense capability. For instance, the US could build the atom bomb, and even successfully fight the war, primarily because they had the resources in terms of money. The relative wealthiness of Germany and Japan strained the US resources to their limit. Historically manpower resources could always be bought, even from across borders, so costly technology remained the key.

Where a Govt could afford to fight many wars a year, a single war with a worthy adversary would empty the treasury. So governments began to take loans to fight wars. Now there are two things to a loan - you have to show an ability to repay it to get it, and then you have to actually repay it. The answer to both these problems was economic development. So the government finally had to get seriously into ensuring the economy of the nation grows strong enough that a powerful defence force can be economically maintained. Many years of economic development are ruined by a single war. So the government needed to be more able as economic administrators than as war strategists.

As the race to develop economies hotted up, the economies themselves became pretty complicated. So we had the governments devoting more and more of their time to the economy. Law and order was also important because it ensured the growth of the economy.

Entertainment Updates

Of movie tickets, and two new modes of television delivery and viewing.

Hey! Did you know that India is the cheapest place to watch movies in theaters? At least so says the "Cinema Index" which the Screen Digest hopes will become an affordability index similar to the Big Mac - where the BM indicates spending power, the Cinema Index will indicate the cost of entertainment (relative to average earning power).

In a remotely related development British Telecom and BBC are trying to bring TV to homes over Broadband. This opens a huge new world for the couch potato, as there will be a number of new applications that could replace anything from your video recorder to your video library. Imagine an online pay-per-view video library that lets you to, on a whim, watch any one of thousands of movies. Say you picked up an old novel, like Alistair Maclean's Puppet on a Chain, and liked it so much that you just WANT to watch the movie. Well now you just could!

Update: Nokia meanwhile hopes to let you watch live TV programs on your mobile phone.

The Award Missers

Our so-called answers to the Academy awards are indeed poor excuses.

Let me get this out of the way. It has been on my chest for a fairly long while now...

Masti (2003) is one of the all-time best comedies in Hindi. Considering the poor level of competition, that is not a difficult niche to achieve at all! The only thing against it is the generally adult nature, which takes it out of the Hera Pheri and Chupke Chupke company. So that makes it the all-time best adult comedy in Bollywood? Maybe - but the movie sure is a blast once you get the first song out of the way.

This one however is not about that. It is about the "Oscar-equivalents" in our country - the Screen and Filmfare awards.

I used to be a major fan of these shows, and I must say that over the years we have been getting better and better at these shows. But that is about the shows. The awards themselves are becoming more of a farce. SRK's hamming won him three best actor nominations this time. At the Filmfare awards, AB in Khakhee and Hritik in Lakshya kept him company - both extraordinarily brilliant performances.

There were two AB scenes in Khakhee that I have since memorised for the sheer number of times I have watched them - the speech at the academy, where in a rather subtle manner, and providing a pretty restrained performance, he puts forward the frustration of a lifetime that uprightness in the force brought him. The second starts with a very quiet, "Duty... duty... Kya HAI aapki... duty?". This was controlled melodrama at its best - AB's second outpouring of frustration and anger against a system that has taken his profession to the depths and has brought the scorn and ridicule of an entire society on it. After some more happennings, the scene ends with the errant officer saying, "Shukriya sir. Mujhe meri duty yaad dilane ke liye" - and there was a new found pride in the way he says "duty" this time.

In Lakshya, Hrithik's justice to the two radically different characters was more than most give in even a double role. The intensity was highlighted by the scene where he says to Preity, "Tum hamesha kehti thi naa ki meri zindagi mein koi lakshya nahin hai? (brief pause) Ab hai...", as he points a trembling figure at the peak his division had just failed to capture.

Nana in Ab Tak Chappan, presented one of the most brilliantly restrained performances of the year. The quiet menace he oozes when confronting criminals, the seemingly nonchalant way in which he reprimands Yashpal Sharma (the overambitious junior), the cynical exterior hiding an exceptional pride for his job and his work - in a better world, he would have at least got a best actor nomination.

I am sure there were more worthy performances than perhaps even these - I dont watch that many films so I dont know. Better luck next time to truer merit.

The beast who caused the Beslan massacre is dead.

I recall a couple of posts on this issue that I had posted a long time back (when I used to be far more prolific of course!). I could only find this one though: The lessons from Beslan

Via Winds of Change. Women are beginning to stand up against so-called "honour crimes" which generally target innocent women. May the Force be with these brave women from across the border.

A tale of two movies

Since I finally raked up the topic of movies on this blog, let me continue for a little longer. One problem with a lot of Hindi movies is bad marketing.

A pretty provocative poster. The title of the movie is also appropriately provocative - Paap, meaning sin. Obviously this was inspired from Hollywood skin flicks with the word Sin in their titles.

Check out the cast - a leading male hunky model turned actor, and a new model turned actress. The producer and writer are both from the Bhatt family - long famous for hatke films. The front-benches are full of salivating near-perverts. The back-benches are full of perverts.

The movie starts starts with the lead actress shedding her clothes and swimming in a desolate lake in only her undergarments. What other goodies will the movie have from here?

Nothing much happens on the skin front after that (though there is a pretty decent story and decent acting too). Then just before the climax, the heroine walks up to the hero and says, "If this is a sin, let me do it". The saliva (and what not else) is flooowing in anticipation. She looks down (she is going to take something off now!). Without touching her clothes she reaches for his face and caresses it once. (Okay, she starts with a kiss - still better). She then lowers her hands and says, "This much is enough for me". All the perverts get a heart attack and die. Naturally the movie flops.

So what was the problem? Bad marketing of a decent script. If the actress could take the opening bath in the confines of her bathroom and the movie was titled something more modest, it could actually have been promoted as a proper family entertainer. It would still not have been a hit, but it would have done much better business.

You would have thought that the father-daughter writer-producer duo of Mahesh and Pooja Bhatt would have taken some lessons from this. No. About a year later they launch Rog (which also had good music), where the same mistakes are repeated all over again.

Unfortunately learning from mistakes is trait commonly missing in Bollywood.

Posted the Indian Petroleum Update on the Indic View.

Meanwhile Selva will be hosting the Tangled Bank, the international equivalent of The Scian Melt on The Scian soon. If you know of any good posts on natural science please hurry up and send them to him - or use the comments on the post.

Also I saw Black last week. It is one of the rare movies that make you cry out of admiration. And at the end of the movie, rather mundane thoughts like, "Was this a good movie?", and, "Will this movie become a hit?", just dont matter. You are just so glad that someone just made a movie as great as this one. God bless Bhansali, Amit, Rani, Ayesha and everyone else.

India getting high on Highways

The initiation of the NHDP will likely be a watershed event in the history of good roads in India

The NDA govt probably did more to improve the infrastructure in this country than any Govt in history. Though vital sectors like power and air continued to suffer, grand plans were drawn up only for the roads and ports sectors via the NHDP and Sagarmala initiatives.

The National Highway Development Programme was kicked off to start working on Vajpayee's dream project - the Golden Quadrilateral (NHDP-I) and the North-South-East-West corridors (NHDP-II). I remained pretty skeptical about it myself, and though my skepticism grew following the successive postponing of dates progress on these projects has been at a pace unimaginable in India previously. I happenned to see some of the Golden Quadrilateral road work in progress - men and machines were working all night over hundreds of kilometers. So there is hope. We may not be building A+ roads by world standards, but definitely dream roads by our own standards.

The UPA Govt has now decided to take the NHDP concept forward. In addition to pledging full support to the first two phases the Govt is going to the cabinet with proposals for the next two phases, and is also working on two phases after that.

NHDP-III will have two major parts. The first will, at a proposed cost of Rs 55,000 crore (about $12 bn), "aim at improving and upgrading 10,000 km of single lane and two-lane roads and providing connectivity of state capitals, ports and cities in the tourist circuit". The second will, involve a, "Rs. 7,931 crore package for development of 6396-km of National Highways and other roads in the north-eastern States". (Source)

NHDP-IV will aim to, "upgrade 20,000-km of National Highways to a minimum 2-lane with paved shoulders".

NHDP-V and NHDP-VI are currently on the drawing board but will essentially revolve around upgrading the remaining 22,000 kms of National Highways.

The NHAI which is in charge of implementing the NHDP puts up a progress report of sorts on its website here.