no man is an island

so often, a prominent politician or social activist will take the stage and bemoan our dependence on some other party — whether they be another country, another ethnic group — for food, clothes, or any other necessity of life you can name. The rallying call for self-sufficiency is a resounding, clarion call; it is also an unfortunately deeply mistaken one.

In theory self-sufficiency sounds like a good, harmless idea: why shouldn’t we rely on ourselves, rather than having to go to someone else for the things we need? Prime Ministers have decried the necessity for Malays to buy clothes from Chinese textile manufacturers; social activists have opposed the privatisation of water companies lest they fall into foreign hands; politicians far and wide have suggested we should aim for self-sufficiency in rice. What’s wrong with self-sufficiency?

The problem with self-sufficiency is quite obvious when you wonder why more individuals aren’t self-sufficient. I can’t grow my own food, prepare my own stationery. I can’t type the words you’re reading on a laptop which I can’t build. It is insane to expect any human being to singlehandedly mine all the raw materials necessary and put them together to build his own notebook computer. Unless you want to do it as a hobby, being completely self-sufficient in almost any area of your life is impossible.

The reason for this is that every individual has their own particular talent. Mine happens to be writing, rather than farming or playing football. So I write, and use the money I earn from there to buy food and watch football. I could try to grow my own crops, but it would not be worth my time — and there’s the rub.

Being self-sufficient in most cases is simply not cost-effective: unless you are the most brilliant farmer the world has ever seen, and have an additional half dozen limbs, you almost certainly cannot feed yourself. Even real farmers specialise in a few crops and buy the rest they need. When every individual has a unique talent, it makes more sense to focus on what we do best rather than to try to do everything by ourselves.

So why should we expect a country to be completely self-reliant? To be self-sufficient as a country, you have to be bloody damn good at what you’re setting out to do. If you want all rice to be locally grown, you have to have extremely fertile land, the perfect climate and the right tools. This is not an easy task, considering we are still importing rice in spite of all the government’s efforts to promote local agriculture.

Why do we need to be self-sufficient in the first place? If we can earn more by setting up factories for microprocessors and Islamic financial institutions, why don’t we just take the money we earn from those businesses and buy the rice we need, rather than expending more unnecessary effort and unnecessarily sacrificing potential earnings for the sake of saying we do not need to import any rice? Except for some misplaced sense of “national pride”, there is really no good reason to waste money on self-sufficiency, in any sector.

Ultimately, we have no choice but to depend on someone. Even if we try to be self-sufficient in rice, to support rice production of such magnitude we would have to buy machinery and expertise from overseas. Wherever you turn, we cannot run from reliance on someone else — that is how globalisation and interconnectedness work.

The only half-plausible excuse for self-sufficiency is “national defence” — but this is disingenuous, at best. If we have so many enemies who are out to get us, they will have better ways of getting at us than contaminating our water supply (as many anti-privatisation activists fear) or refusing to sell us food. What sort of crisis can you imagine where another country would completely embargo us?

Empowerment and capacity-building are of course desirable things, but it is one thing to set up an industry and another thing to target self-sufficiency in a particular area. Unless the stars align perfectly in our favour, the only way to ensure we will “buy local” is to distort the market by taxing foreign competition out of the picture and wastefully subsidising local products instead. If you want a peek into a future of self-sufficiency, look no further than our local cars — much maligned and overpriced. When we know our limits and when we trade, we can play to our unique advantages, which will serve us much better in the long run than the wild-goose chase of hunting for self-sufficiency.

ortiz peom

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war ... ssssshhhhh....
Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all...Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing...For our dead.

j.r.r and lotr

These days, the writing of heroic fantasy has become a mass-production industry; scarcely a week goes by without an author inventing a brave new world and subsequently being acclaimed as "the true inheritor of Tolkien's mantle", or some such. Unfortunately, fantastic settings alone do not an epic make, and 90% of new fantasy writing is crap - the same generic swords and sorcery, thud and blunder, repeated ad nauseam.

Tolkien is different. His imaginary homelands are not just names on the (by now obligatory) frontispiece map, they're countries, with rich histories and vibrant cultures; his invented tongues are not meaningless agglomerations of random syllables, they're carefully designed showcases of the linguist's art, with comprehensive lexica and detailed etymologies; his many invented beings are not cardboard cutout monsters, they're creatures who live and breathe and walk the pages of his books as convincingly as do his human heroes and heroines. The suspension of disbelief in Tolkien is total.

And then there's his verse. Tolkien's verse has genuine poetic merit, and it's not in the least bit self-conscious; when his characters break into song (which, mind you, occurs fairly often in his books), it always seems the perfectly natural thing to do. Today's poem is an excellent example: in "The Fellowship of the Ring" (the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings"), the eponymous fellowship are forced to detour through the dark and deserted Dwarven mines of Moria. One of the party asks why the Dwarves chose to live in such darksome holes; in reply, Gimli, the lone representative of that race in the Fellowship, half sings, half chants a poem describing the glory of the Dwarven kingdom in the Elder Days... at the end of the recital, the reader is left with the realization that the story of Moria couldn't have been told any other way: mere prose is simply too dry to communicate the wonder and the beauty that was Khazad-dum.

As always with Tolkien, the form reinforces the content to marvellous effect: the language is intentionally archaic, the alliteration pronounced (but never obtrusive), the sense of nostalgia and loss almost palpable. Notice how Gimli never explicitly states just what it was that caused Moria's abandonment: his reticence seems to imply that the events being recounted occurred at a great remove from the here and now; this in turn enhances the mystery, the vague undercurrent of dread that runs through the poem (and especially through the last stanza). This lack of particularity might be annoying in what is ostensibly a historical tale, but this is definitely one of those cases where less is more: a straightforward cataloguing of facts could never hope to capture the audience's attention the way Gimli's hypnotically beautiful couplets do.

And beautiful they certainly are: Tolkien's feel for the English language, for the music of words and the perfection of images, is flawless. It's a pity that his poetic output was (by and large) limited to within the confines of his invented universe (wide though they were); he could easily have been this century's successor to Kipling and Tennyson, so perfect is his verse, so effortless his prosody...

The World was Young, the Mountains Green

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
When Durin woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Durin's Day.

A king he was on carven throne
In many-pillared halls of stone
With golden roof and silver floor,
And runes of power upon the door.
The light of sun and star and moon
In shining lamps of crystal hewn
Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
There shone for ever fair and bright.

There hammer on the anvil smote,
There chisel clove, and graver wrote;
There forged was blade, and bound was hilt;
The delver mined, the mason built.
There beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
And metal wrought like fishes' mail,
Buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
And shining spears were laid in hoard.

Unwearied then were Durin's folk;
Beneath the mountains music woke:
The harpers harped, the minstrels sang,
And at the gates the trumpets rang.

The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dum.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep,
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

-- J. R. R. Tolkien

P.S.: Some stuff in the initial funda isnt mine, thanks to Amit, a friend of mine.

eating a cake in maths

The problem of fair division can be traced back a full 3000 years in history. Stated in simple terms, the problem is:

How do you divide a cake between n people such that each person gets a fair share of the cake? An additional clause is that if someone thinks they got lesser than someone else, then it should be such that, that person alone is to bear the blame.

Lets first consider the case of n=2. If there are two people involved, say Alice and Bob, the solution is simple -- "Alice cuts, Bob chooses". So the best solution for Alice in this scenario is to cut such that she feels both shares are equal halves, so that no matter which piece Bob chooses, she's happy with the other one. Best solution for Bob is that he chooses the piece he thinks is bigger. Now, if Alice didnt cut it into equal halves, and Bob chooses the bigger one, she has only herself to blame for being left with the smaller piece.

If you now extend this to n=3, the problem becomes extemely complicated. You can imagine how the above solution can be extended. Say Tom, Dick, and Harry are trying to divide the cake equally between themselves. You can imagine a solution where Tom cuts the cake into what he thinks are 1/3rd and 2/3rds. Then Dick cuts the 2/3rd piece into two halves. Harry picks one of the three pieces. Tom picks next, and the left over piece goes to Dick.

Some elementary analysis will reveal that this is fair to Tom and Harry, and not fair to Dick. Now, clearly, Harry is satisfied. There are three pieces and he picks the biggest of the three. Tom comes next. If Harry picked one of the pieces that Dick cut, then Tom can take the piece that he cut (as 1/3rd) and be satisfied. If Harry picks the 1/3rd piece that Tom cut, then Tom can take whichever of the other two he thinks is bigger -- at this stage it is a two-person problem betwen Tom and Dick, since he thinks the 2/3rd really was a 2/3rds.

The story for Dick though is very different. If Dick initially thought Tom's cut was fair, then he has no issues, and the solution works for all. However, if Dick thinks Tom's cut was unfair and the 2/3rd was smaller than actual 2/3rd, then no matter what, he will end up with an unfair deal.

The way to fix the solution is to not let Dick think Tom's cut was unfair. This is achieved by allowing Dick to "trim" Tom's 1/3rd version and adding that into the 2/3rd share before making the second cut. Now if Harry thought Tom's cut was fair, then he will pick from Dick's cut since he thinks that is bigger. Tom will also pick from Dick's cut. And Dick can take the "trimmed" 1/3rd since he thought that was a fair 1/3rd. The deal with this solution is it will take 3 cuts (one by Tom, one "trim" by Dick, and another by Dick). If you generalize this to the n player version, then this algorithm will take n*(n-1)/2 cuts.

This problem has been addressed by a lot of mathematicians in history. The first (erroneous) solution for the 3 person problem was provided by Robertson and Webb. The corrected n*(n-1)/2 cuts solution was provided in 1944 by Hugo Steinhaus. Since then advanced concepts in mathematics have chosen this problem to purvey their theories. We'll see a non-envy version of this problem later in this post. Fair division is a very practical problem in the real world. Be it geek-ish like bandwidth sharing, or esoteric like dividing Jerusalem and West Bank. As a twist, the problem gets very intricate and interesting when different parties believe different parts of the cake are better than other parts.

We extend the original problem to fair division without envy. In the earlier case, everyone got a fair deal, but we potentially still had people imagining that others got more than them. In fact, that was the case in all solutions except the 2 person scenario. The two person "I cut, you choose" scenario is guaranteed to be envy-free.

Lets define a cake-division as envy-free if no one thinks that someone else got a larger piece than they did. An envy-free division is always guaranteed to be fair. However a fair division need not be envy-free at all.

Lets look at a solution for the 3-person case envy-free fair division -- same drill: Tom, Dick, and Harry want to divide a cake fairly between them in an envy-free fashion -

• First, Tom divides the cake into three parts which he thinks are equal 1/3rds.
• Next, (a) if Dick thinks the two largest pieces are equal, he does nothing, otherwise (b) Dick trims one piece to achieve two equal largest pieces.
• Now, Harry, Dick, and Tom in that order pick. If Dick trimmed a piece earlier, then he has to pick the trimmed piece unless Harry has already picked it.

At this stage, you have an envy-free fair division of three pieces. What is leftover is the problem of dividing the "trimming".

• Now, if Dick didnt trim, then there is nothing to do. If he did trim, then either Dick or Harry took the trimmed piece. We'll assume Dick took the trimmed piece. (Substitute Harry for Dick in the rest of the solution if Harry took the trimmed piece.) Dick now divides the "trimming" into three equal parts.
  
• Harry, Tom, and Dick in that order now pick. Harry picks first, so he's not envious at all. Tom picks next, but he's absolutely not envious since this trimming is already a bonus for him -- he thought his first three way cut was already equal 1/3rds. Dick picks the last one, but he isnt envious either since he divided the "trimmings" 3-ways.
  

When you extend this to a n-person scenario, the problem becomes extremely complicated. Found a wikipedia link on Fair Division. Wikipedia talks about many versions of the problem and how after a century of solutions Steven Brams and Alan Taylor finally solved it in 1995. That was the solution for the general n-person envy-free fair division. That came 30 years after the first 3-person envy-free fair division solution.

india:the next superpower?

The state of the politics stability of the nation has been on tender hooks ever since the era of major coalition in politics was heralded by the then ruling party at the center by the NDA government.

Over the past few weeks ever since Dr.Mannmohan Singh took a definitive stance over his conviction that a nuclear allegiance with US will hold the country in good stead meeting some of the many varied usages of nuclear power for commercial and domestic purposes, there has been cloud of uncertainty over future of the UPA government completing it full term.

Stepping back from the messy state of current affairs, I shrug to think of the great opportunity that we as the largest democracy are missing out.

Is the utility of the democratic political creed we fought for so passionately 60 years ago to serve us as Indians to build a nation serving the cause of every citizen coming to a cropper?

As I see stalwarts after stalwarts coming up on television and print and striking an opportunistic alliance or put they elected status on sales, I am deeply pained to see the reality and the propose for which we elected them as representatives of people to work for the country in the office of the parliament being so blatantly abused! I am certain that the political stance taken by the leaders are most definitely not representing what a common man on the street and the fields’ cares.

Is it for this that the innocent farmer or an educated urban from the city cast his valued vote– to see his representative being traded like commodity in the political bazaar? Or lobby for minister ship (basically an opportunity to loot the public money) when there is barely enough time left in the last stage of the UPA government? Do you think that the ministers will perform wonders in this while when it takes at least 5 year term for a majority government and a cabinet of ministers to cause a mild impact of reform on the society?


Where has the Lefts secular stand gone today? For years they have been professing secular politics and hold a vision of secular India as sanctum sanctorum , will be voting with BJP to pull a government who they were part to so far ?

Is the Left then only custodian of Indian sovereignty? Which towering leaders like Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Karunanidhi, APJ Abdul Kalam, and Dr.Manmohan et al don’t worry about?

Where was Samajwadi party all these days? Where they waiting for the crisis to emerge before jumping in to support Sonia lead UPA like a knight in the shining amour?

Did Amar Singh wake up today to fight the cause of Windfall taxes to be imposed on RIL?

Mayawati ? What is her political legacy which has prompted leaders like Chandrababu Naidu , Ajit Singh and other to propose her as the next prime minesratial candidate?

Why are patriarchs like Atal Behari Vajpayee and Jyoti Basu salient? They may not be active in politics but may I question them to seek to understand “Is it the political legacy that they have left behind after their 40 plus years in politics? Aren’t they pain and bother to opine to the nation they helped build.

Where are Party manifestos? reading which the citizen exercises her/his adult franchise? Is there any reference to these documents or party ideologies before bargaining or horse trading?

Today, India is widely acknowledges as an emerging super power! The opportunity to lead by example on a global stage and set benchmark of global citizen is OUR lest we lose playing opportunistic petty politics.

The process of democracy is a powerful tool in our hands. Let’s take this opportunity to CHANGE the political constitution. We can today put the best and the brightest minds from the country to good use. The unbridled leadership be unleashed to make good of the time of our lives to become a model nation and global benchmark.


Time then to conceive a political constitutional blueprint for the future:

A blueprint which mandatory have issues pertaining to the national interest as a necessary precondition in every parties election manifesto:

Matters related to :

· Healthcare
· Education.
· Farming
· National Defense.
· National Integrity and Sovereignty.
· Human Rights.
· Pluralistic View point promoting inclusive agendas for all religions, cast and creed.
· One Country , One Nation concept and fearlessly condemning the likes of Raj Thackeray or other devious minds splitting the nations unity.
· Above all compete in the global society as one united nation honoring decisions taken by the elected state head unilaterally.


Only then shall we claim to be better than the best society and add meaning to being the world’s largest democracy. There are one too many challenges that we have to face as a united nation, challenges which are outside the country. High time we sorted the internal political skirmished and behaved like a mature democratic country. After all 6 decades of freedom should lend some civility to our societies.

This is the “Audacity of Hope” that I carry for my beloved nation “INDIA” the SuperPower by 2020.