Institutions Matter

Why is it that some countries continue to be poor despite being blessed with abundant natural resources, human capital and technology transfer from developed countries?  Many resource-rich African countries mired in poverty and bloody civil wars come to mind. Even India, despite its much lauded economic growth of recent years, can be added to the list of these underachievers. 

According to Tim Harford in The Undercover Economist (2006), the answer lies in the poor nations' institutions or lack thereof.  As he puts it succinctly, "institutions matter".

Most resource-rich poor countries lack institutions capable of holding executive power in check and making them accountable to the people. As a result, the ruling cliques and their cronies can cream off the proceeds from the resources with impunity and become obscenely rich while the vast majority of their compatriots sink deeper into poverty.

"Institutions matter".  This phrase popped into my mind again when reading about the 1843 British annexation of Sindh (Punjab) in John Keay's India: A History (2000). One of the last so-called princely states to be bullied into Pax Britannica, Sindh had been able to keep the British at bay with diplomacy and a modern military under the inspired rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

On the eve of the First British Afghan War in which the British Raj suffered one of its most disastrous losses, Ranjit Singh, the Bonaparte of Sindh, the Lion of Punjab, died, in 1839.   

Keay writes: "A philander of many wives and more women, he was not without potential successors. Yet so personal had been his rule and so absolute his authority that the institutions of sovereignty and government through which a successor might establish himself scarcely existed."

The result was predictable. In the midst of the succession crisis that engulfed Sindh, the British, in the words of the victorious British general, pulled off a "very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality."

'Rascality' actually sums up the Indian, or perhaps any human, history.

Keay opens his narrative with the ancient Indian concept of Matsya-Nyaya or 'fish law' according to which big fish devour small fish. The subsequent laundry list of dynasties great and small that subjugate various parts of the Indian sub-continent through the millennia appears like a rogue’s gallery of history.

When the various dynasties are not oppressing their wretched subjects by imposing extortionate taxes to finance their ego-boosting monumental extravagances, they are at each others' throats, pillaging the defeated kingdoms’  treasuries and polluting their women.

This gives lie to the myth of a golden age, the so-called ‘Ram Rajya’, to which many people of certain persuasion look back with great nostalgia in the Indian sub-continent.  

Keay has a slippery grasp of Sanskrit words and phrases but he, nevertheless, convincingly demolishes many cherished mytho-historical sacred cows of India. For example, he cogently argues that the epic Mahabharata predates Ramayana, a startling proposition only an outsider like Keay could perhaps make.

After reading about the umpteenth petty cutthroat performing a ritual digvijaya or world conquest and assuming the title of Maharajadhiraja ,  one starts to contemplate the august personages of surviving Maharajadhirajas with fresh eyes.

Five Books That I Enjoyed Reading in 2010

The followings were the five books that I enjoyed reading most in 2010:

1. Dreams From My Father by Barack Obama


2. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb


3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson


4. 3:59.04:  The Global Quest to Break the 4 Minute Mile by John Bryant.   


5. The Best Australian Essays 2010 edited by Robert Drewe

Special mention goes to Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It happened to be the first book that I read in EPUB format on a mobile device.

The Mythical Man-Month: Project Management Insights

Frederick Brooks, Jr’s software project management classic, The Mythical Man-Month (The MM-M), continues to be read, debated and entrenched in undergraduate reading lists thirty-five years after its publication. This is surprising in a field where 20 percent of current knowledge is estimated to become obsolete every 12 to 18 months.

To put things in perspective, when the book was first published, computer memory rented at USD12.00 per kilobyte per month. At that rate, the 32GB SD card in my Samsung Galaxy S would have cost over 400 million dollars per month.

One of the reasons behind the enduring popularity of The MM-M is the author’s premise that “managing a software project is more like other management than most ... initially believe”. Brooks, who earned his stripes as the Project Manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and its software, advances “propositions” that would be applicable in almost any non-trivial project, repeatedly hammering the point that project management is about people and teams, not technology.

He buttresses his propositions with war stories drawn from his IBM experience and other contemporary projects. Little wonder, then, that The MM-M continues to attract a motley readership comprising doctors, psychologists, sociologists, lawyers as well as IT professionals.

What are Brooks’ project management insights that have withstood the test of time and continue to be relevant in the new century? Here are some randomly selected teasers from the book, in quotes when copied verbatim, with my own comments in square brackets:

• The Biblical Tower of Babel project failed due to communication issues


• “... the essential problem [in project management] is communication”


• “The crucial task is to get the product defined. Many, many failures concern exactly those aspects that were never quite specified.”


•  “... adding manpower to a late software project makes the project later”


•  “... conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design” [or project]


•  “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce systems which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”


• “The [project] manager will be continually amazed that policies he [sic] took for common knowledge are totally unknown by some member of his team”


• “The total cost of maintaining a widely used program is typically 40 percent or more of the cost of developing it. Surprisingly, this cost is strongly affected by the number of users. More users find more bugs.”


• “The fundamental problem with program maintenance is that fixing a defect has a substantial (20-50 percent) chance of introducing another”


• “Many poor systems come from an attempt to salvage a bad basic design and patch it with all kinds of cosmetic relief.”


• “How does a project get to be a year late? ... One day at a time” 


• “When one hears of disastrous schedule slippage in a project, he images that a series of major calamities must have befallen it. Usually, however, the disaster is due to termites, not tornadoes ... ” [As the saying goes, for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost]


• “I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation.” [author’s emphasis. He means coding by ‘representing’. The author contends that fidelity to specification is pointless if the specification itself is flawed]


• “The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build ... For the truth is, the clients do not know what they want ... So ... it is necessary to allow for extensive iteration between the client and the designer as part of the system definition.”


• “In my experience most of the complexities which are encountered in systems work are symptoms of organizational malfunction. Trying to model this reality with equally complex programs is actually to conserve the mess instead of solving problems”


• “Chemical engineers have learnt not to take a process from the lab bench to the factory in one step, but to build a pilot plant to give experience in scaling quantities up and operating in non-protective environments.” [author’s emphasis]


• “The second [project] is the most dangerous system a person ever designs; the general tendency is to overdesign it ... using all the ideas and frills that were cautiously sidetracked on the first one.”


• “My rule of thumb is 1/3 of the schedule for design, 1/6 for coding, 1/4 for component testing, and 1/4 for system testing” [This means testing should be assigned half the schedule time. Coding gets the least amount of time]


•  “Schedule disaster, functional misfit, and system bugs all arise because the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. Teams drift apart in assumptions.”

Three Chinese Poets

After one of my friends made a favourable comment on the Tang poem posted in the previous entry, I picked up from my modestly-stocked bookshelf Vikram Seth's Three Chinese Poets, a translation of poems by the three major Tang Dynasty (618-907) poets, Wang Wei, Li Bai and Du Fu. I have this habit of signing and dating books after I buy them, and this is how I know that I purchased this hardcover edition on March 1, 1993, probably from one of my three favourite bookshops in Kathmandu.

When I visited the small Himalayan Book Centre opposite the old bus park at Bagh Bazaar, Kathmandu, in 2007 after an 8-year-long self-imposed antipodean exile, I was pleasantly surprised and moved when the elderly bookstore owner with thick glasses and slick oiled hair recognized me and enquired where I had been for so long!

Seth, who spent eleven years at Stanford University from 1975 to 1986 researching an economic doctoral thesis that he never completed, went to China to collect field data. While there, he honed his Mandarin. This must have inspired and emboldened him to translate the three premier classical Chinese poets later on.

Seth introduces the three near contemporary poets thus:  "The standard trichotomy of Wang Wei as Buddhist recluse, Li Bai as Taoist immortal and Du Fu as Confucian sage has been rejected by some critics as unsubtle and artificial, but it can act as a clarifying approximation for those approaching Chinese poetry of this period for the first time.

"Wang Wei's typical mood is that of aloneness, quiet, a retreat into nature and Buddhism. What one associates with him are running water, evening and dawn, bamboo, the absence of men's voices. The word 'empty' is almost his signature."

Enough talk. Here is a famous poem by Wang Wei as translated by Seth that distills the essence of the contemplative state of mind of a Buddhist hermit:

Birdsong Brook

Idly I watch cassia flowers fall.
Still is the night, empty the hill in Spring.
Up comes the moon, startling the mountain birds.
Once in a while in the Spring brook they sing.

The theme of aloneness and emptiness that Seth associates with Wang Wei is expressed masterfully in the following verse. In the introduction to the translations, Seth draws readers' attention to the contrast of meaning between lines three and four, and five and six, which was required by the strictures of the regulated form of the octet.

Living in the Hills: Impromptu Verses

I close my brushwood door in solitude
And face the vast sky as late sunlight falls.
The pine trees: cranes are nesting all around.
My wicker gate: a visitor seldom calls.
The tender bamboo's dusted with fresh powder.
Red lotuses strip off their former bloom.
Lamps shine out at the ford, and everywhere
The water-chestnut pickers wander home.

In terms of poetic sensibilities, Li Bai was the opposite of Wang Wei. In Seth's words, "Li Bai's poetry sparkles with zest, impulsiveness, exuberance, even at the risk of bombast and imbalance. Sword, horse, wine, gold, the moon, the Milky Way and impossibly large numbers are recurring features of his work. He attempts alchemically to transmute life through the intoxication of poetry or music or wine into delight and forgetfulness." This is what Seth means:

The Waterfall at Lu Shan

In sunshine, Censer Peak breathes purple mist.
A jutting stream, the cataract hangs in spray
Far off, then plunges down three thousand feet --
As if the sky had dropped the Milky Way.

'Bromance' was a staple of classical Chinese poetry long before Matt Damon and Ben Affleck pioneered it in Hollywood. Just like everywhere at the time, in classical China, travels were ponderous, long and fraught with many dangers, and, when friends parted, they could not be sure if they would ever see each other again. After one such parting, Li Bai wrote the following:

Parting at a Wineshop in Nanjing

Breeze bearing willow-cotton fills the shop with scent.
A Wu girl, pouring wine, exhorts us to drink up.
We Nanjing friends are here to see each other off.
Those who must go, and those who don't, each drains his cup.
Go ask the Yangtze, which of these two sooner ends:
Its waters flowing east - the love of parting friends.

Du Fu was born into an impoverished, cadet branch of the royal family, and, despite his prodigious poetic talents, did not pass the imperial civil service exams after repeated attempts (Empress Wu, a concubine of the founding Tang Dynasty Emperor Tai Zong, introduced verse composition into civil service exams during her 15 year reign, prompting a critic to observe that the Chinese thought poets made the best administrators). This effectively hobbled his Confucian aspirations to high office. He spent the rest of his life in penury and desperation, holding minor official posts and suffering horribly during a rebellion from which the Tang Dynasty never recovered.

Typically, the rebellion was started by a 'barbarian' general named An Lushan, who had managed to gain the trust of Emperor Ming Huang's favorite concubine Yang Guifei. When An Lushan marched on the imperial capital Changan, the court fled the capital. The emperor was powerless to save Yang Guifei from the murderous rage of court officials, who strangled her to death with a silk scarf. Whenever I mentioned this episode to my Chinese friends at university, all of them would automatically assume that I had learnt about it by watching Chinese TV soaps on the topic.

Seth writes: "Du Fu's poetry is informed by deeply suggestive and often sad reflections on society, history, the state and his own disturbed times, all central concerns of Confucianism. But what especially endears him to the Chinese is his wry self-deprecation combined with an intense compassion for the oppressed or dispossessed people of every kind in a time of poverty, famine and war."

The following poem is interpreted either as the universe's indifference to human suffering or life's capacity for renewal and growth in the face of wars and tragedies.

Spring Scene in Time of War

The state lies ruined; hills and streams survive.
Spring in the city; grass and leaves now thrive.
Moved by the times the flowers shed their dew.
The birds seem startled; they hate parting too.
The steady beacon fires are three months old.
A word from home is worth a ton of gold.
I scratch my white hair, which has grown so thin
It soon won't let me stick my hatpin in.

Du Fu was too poor to keep his family in the capital Changan. In the following poem, he pines for his family in a moonlit night in Changan:

Moonlit Night

In Fuzhou, far away, my wife is watching
The moon alone tonight, and my thoughts fill
With sadness for my children, who can't think
Of me here in Changan; they're too young still.
Her cloud-soft hair is moist with fragrant mist.
In the clear light her white arms sense the chill.
When will we feel the moonlight dry our tears,
Leaning together on our window-sill?

Reading Best Australian Essays: An Annual Rite

Reading Black Inc. anthology of best Australian essays of the year has become something of an annual rite for my readerly self. Edited by a well-known published writer, the anthology showcases essays that meet three criteria.

Firstly, the essays have to satisfy the standards set by the editor, which could include parameters such as currency and relevance to contemporary debates and issues, literary and aesthetic merits, and whatever else the particular  idiosyncrasies of the editor dictates. Secondly, the writers have to be Australians and/or the essays have to engage Australian topics. Lastly, the essays have to have been published in the previous calendar year.

Having found last year's offering, The Best Australian Essays 2008, which was edited by David Marr, a bit disappointing, I bought this year's collection with a degree of reservations. I need not have worried. So far, the essays, which range far and wide just as Black Inc. promises, have succeeded to 'entertain, inspire and provoke'.

I have been reading the essays in random order (surely, an oxymoron), and two essays that have so far stood out are Richard Castles' Death Duties and Robert Dessaix's The Grand Illusion. In the former, Castles recounts the year when he worked in the grandiosely named Transfer Response Unit but which the author liked to think of as a 'taxi service for the already departed'. In unadorned terms, the job involved collecting dead bodies or body parts from homes, hospitals, nursing homes and crash sites whenever the coroner wanted to examine the bodies.

Castles observes that 'death could be beautiful', especially when old folks died in nursing homes. However, "Like all things in life, death can be done in a variety of bizarre and often messy ways". And, yes, people die during sex, he informs helpfully from his macabre experience.

The writer describes his first body pick-up memorably. A gung-ho homicide detective greets him and has a dig at him for his inexperience. He writes: "I simply told him that he was right, that this was my first time. As I walked through the door, I caught first glimpse of the body in situ. I never got used to the jolt of those moments. A dead body is always out of place: an interruption in the picture; a spectre; a mistake."

In a culture where death is sanitized, where most people have never seen a dead body, Castles' essay confronts readers with the pervasiveness of death, its finality and  implacability, the stark reality that it is always lurking nearby in the shadows, just below our consciousness.

[caption id="attachment_344" align="alignright" width="105" caption="Robyn Davidson, editor of The Best Australian Essays 2009. Picture Courtesy of Black Inc."][/caption]

Dessaix's essay The Grand Illusion sifts through the travel industry hype and hyperbole to re-define the notion of a perfect getaway, in itself a quaint Victorian notion that became a 20th century mass consumer craze just like MacDonald's thanks to the swelling of the middle class rank in the developed countries.

For Dessaix, who, among others, authored Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (2004), the perfect holiday destination is not tourist-infested Bali but the "grubby little Tozeur on the edge of the Sahara in Tunisia's south, however, where there's nothing to see and nothing ever happens" but where "I feel dense with wakefulness".

"In Tozeur, in the labyrinth of the old town, lost amongst the endless palms, or just loitering with intent outside a carpet shop at night, when the town springs to life, I find myself very interesting indeed."

The central contention of this essay is that modern travel is a form of escape from our own bored, satiated selves to places where we find ourselves interesting again. This may not necessarily happen in luxury hotels and resorts where we end up drinking the same cocktails and watching the same silly sitcoms as at home.

"The antidote to boredom lies not in excitement, amazement, unparalleled vistas or repose in paradise, but in being woken up to our own inner complexity, our density, and befriending it," Dessaix writes. He cheekily suggests that such inner awakenings could take place even in, wait for it, Dubai, the new Mecca of conspicuous consumerism, for "Good travelling depends not on the travel, but on the traveller."

The Makings of Obama

The life story of President Barack Obama is too well-known to repeat here.  However, having just read his acclaimed memoir Dreams From My Father (1995), I just had to add my two cents' worth to the growing discipline of Obamalogy.

[caption id="attachment_303" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Young Obama with his (from left) grand father, mother and half-sister Maya in Hawaii early 1970s. Picture sourced from wikipedia"][/caption]

Written after becoming the first African American president of Harvard Law Review and years before he ran for his first political office, the book strikes readers with the honesty and poignancy of the voice of a young African American man searching for his place in the world.

Born in Hawaii to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, the young Obama feels trapped between two worlds, and groans under the unbearable burden of the 'unique and universal' history of his people in the US.  He recounts the angst and sense of helplessness felt by himself and his black college friends in a world in which they feel the rules of the game have been written by somebody else and even their perceived identity foisted on them by others.

The search for his identity takes Obama to the ancestral land of his forefathers in a remote village in Kenya.  There, he learns the full story of his own absent father, who, despite being a brilliant Harvard scholar, died a broken man thanks to a combination of his naive idealism, incurable character flaws and ancient tribal grudges.

Obama largely won his presidency in 2008 on the back of his sublime oratory reminiscent of Abe Lincoln. His simple, direct prose is equally a joy to read.

Towards the end of the book, a female African history professor that Obama meets in Kenya tells him, "In the end, I'm less interested in a daughter who's authentically African than one who is authentically herself." I think there is a priceless lesson for all of us in this beautiful thought.

The Joy of Running

My tongue-in-cheek remark to a friend after reading Christopher McDougall's Born To Run was this: "Marathons are for wimps". Now, I have yet to run a marathon and I have no illusions about the dedication, hard work, toughness and tenacity required to complete a marathon but after reading about 'ultra freaks' running up and down the 10,000+ feet high Colorado mountains for 100 miles, or plodding 135 miles across the floor of the Death Valley in California in 135 degrees heat, one can be forgiven for thinking that marathons are a stroll in the park.

Born To Run opens with an all too familiar story. A beefy former war correspondent who is built like someone that nature intended 'to take a bullet for the President' rather than pound down the pavement, Mcdougall is doing the rounds of sports shrinks to treat his dodgy feet. In the winter of 2003, he is in Mexico chasing a missing pop star for The New York Times Magazine when he stumbles across a picture of a Jesus like figure running down a rockslide. Welcome to the secret world of Tarahumara Indians, the greatest ultra runners the world has never heard about.

Living like invisible ghosts in the shadowy recesses of the Copper Canyons of Mexico, the peaceful Tarahumara tribes have for centuries outrun their Indian and European tormentors alike just to survive. What is the secret behind their superhuman prowess that enables them to run for hundreds of miles without rest? This is the question that persuades Mcdougall to abandon his celebrity hunt and start another type of hunt, the hunt for a mythical gringo named Caballo Blanco, the 'white horse' who lives with the Tarahumara and runs like one.

Before the book finishes, there is a gripping duel over 100 miles of punishing Colorado trails between a Community College teacher named Ann Tracy and top Tarahumara runners who have been coaxed to participate in the Leadville 100 ultramarathon with promises of corn bags for their villages. I felt the description of this race alone gave all the bang for my bucks.

The book climaxes with a 50 mile foot race in the treacherous Tarahumara territory between the cream of the Tarahumara tribe and the superstars of the North American - which is to say, the world's - ultramarathon scene.

And the secret to the Tarahumara success? In a sentence or three, it is this: All humans are hardwired to run. As kids, all of us run with joyful abandon. As we grow up, we lose this sense of playfulness and sheer joy in running. The Tarahumara keep this playful spirit alive into adulthood, and they have over the millenia woven the art of running into rituals that govern their daily lives. Also, they do not buy expensive, gel-filled Nike running shoes that seem to do more harm than good.

Shantaram: Crime and Redemption

If one has to summarise in three words Gregory David Roberts' 2004 debut novel Shantaram, then it has to be this: "Dostoevsky meets Bollywood". 

Or, that is what I thought after yet another scene in the novel in which Bombay's (when the story unfolds, the bustling Indian island city is about another couple of decades away from being re-named Mumbai in response to a Hindu nationalist popular groundswell) chic set banter and indulge themselves in one of the city's fashionable tourist haunts by the sea. 

And what a chic set it is. Roberts, who tells the story in first person, drinks, smokes, eats and philosophises with local Indian journalists, film producers, mafia enforcers, Iranian army deserters, washed-up Palestinian fighters, Pakistani spies, European outcasts, and an Afghan mafia boss who claims to have found the rational basis of morality.   

And just like Bollywood movies that the author claims to love, the novel packs a lot of action, and enough surprises to satisfy even the most demanding fan of Bollywood suspense thrillers. However, the book is much more than a pulp version of Bollywood. 

At the heart of the narrative is that eternal quest for meaning, love and redemption that inform all great works of art. Roberts, who escaped from a maximum security jail in Victoria while serving a sentence for armed robbery, finds all of these and more in the most unlikely of places and persons. 

Towards the very end of the 933 pages long book, Roberts declares: "The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love". 

One can only say "Amen!" to that and recommend the book as a must read.

Ornament of the World

A few random notes from my recent reading of David Levering Lewis's God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215:

• The famous 732 Battle of Poitiers, in which a Christian coalition halted an Islamic force in what is now France, may have been retrospectively elevated and mythologised as a turning point by Western historians but it was a minor, temporary setback in a skirmish at the periphery of the empire as far as the Islamic rulers in Damacus were concerned.


• Before Baghdad of the One Thousand and One Nights fame, Damascus was the Caliphal seat of the Islamic empire. Caliph Abu Ja'far al-Mansur (754 - 74) ordered the construction of Baghdad beside the Tigris "with the point of his sword". It was finished in four years. Madinat al-Salam or "The City of Peace" was rivalled only by Constantinople in grandeur.


• In the battle of Poitiers, the Christian coalition was led by Charles the Bastard, whose political and battlefield exploits would earn him the sobriquet Hammer (Martel in Latin). Martel's grandson, Charlemagne, would be crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor.


• In his role as Palace Mayor (Prime Minister), Charles Martel virtually brought down the curtain on the Merovingian line, which is now regarded as the first French royal dynasty. Charles's line was officially formalised and divinely sanctioned when his son and heir Pippin the Short successfully sought papal blessing for a palace coup, signalling the ascendancy of the Carolingian dynasty.


• Charlemagne once executed forty-five hundred defeated Saxons in a single morning after they refused to recant their pagan beliefs in favour of Christianity.


• A fierce Germanic tribe with long beards challenged the temporal power of papacy. Eventually pacified by Franks under Charlemagne, the tribe settled in a part of the continent that came to be known as Lombardy, the home of the long beards.


• The celebrated deeds of the eponymous hero of the Song of Rolland was inspired by a disastrous chapter from one of Charlemagne's military expeditions into al-Andalus. However, it was not Muslim treachery or cowardice but the opportunistic attack of independent-minded Basque partisans that trapped and martyred the archetypal Christian knight in a narrow mountain pass.


• Cordoba attained its exalted status as the "ornament of the world" under the Umayyad rule transplanted by Abd al-Rahman I from Damascus to the Iberian peninsula. Prince Abd al-Rahman I fled Damascus after losing his Caliphal inheritance in a bloody power struggle against an Abbasid usurper. His enlightened policy encouraged the famous convivencia, the civic collaboration of Muslims, Jews and Christians that resulted in an unprecedented efflorescence of arts, culture, science and commerce. Al-Andalus would turn out to be the conduit of the flow of ancient Greek knowledge preserved and enhanced by Islamic scholars to then backward Christian dominions.


• Abd al-Rahman's architectural masterpiece, La Mezquita or the Friday Mosque, had the following self-referential inscription: It embodied what came before. Illuminated what came after. The inscription could have been the motto of the Umayyad Cordoba itself.