Himanshu Gupta's blog

Human behaviour as a function of Mobility

The Economist has a survey on Mobility in its latest issue, as how the tools of mobility are having an impact on Human societies and leading to change in communication and behavioural patterns across the world. Excepts:

SHERRY TURKLE, the psychologist at MIT who studies the nexus between people and gadgets, believes that the tools of mobility are leading to “the emergence of a new type of person”. In the distant, landline-dominated past, she says, people thought: “I have a feeling so I want to make a call.” Young people today, including Ms Turkle's teenage daughter, seem to be thinking instead: “I want to have a feeling, so I need to make a call.” What she means is that there is something inorganic, derivative and inauthentic about a lot of mobile communication.

It also notes that with mobile phones, family members and friends today are more regularly in touch with each other compared to the past, which creates an emotional space around the person where he might choose to ignore those physically around him:

With mobile phones, on the other hand, people call, text or e-mail one another constantly throughout the day. Since they are always, in effect, contacting a person rather than a place, and since the receiver can see the caller's name, and probably his picture, they often dispense with greetings altogether. The exchanges now tend to be frequent and short. People expect less content but instead a feeling of permanent connection, as though they were in fact together during the entire time between their physical meetings.
[..]

The potential problem with connected presence is that it usually excludes other people who may be physically present. In situations that might once have been an opportunity to talk to a stranger—waiting for a bus or boarding an aeroplane, say—people now fill the time with a few messages to parents, lovers or friends. This strengthens the strong ties, but weakens, or even cuts, the weak ties in society. In some cases, says Mr Ling, it leads to “bounded solidarity”, when cliques become so turned in on themselves that they all but stop interacting with the wider society around them.

Some interesting stuff there. Go read.

Related stuff: Jan Chipchase writes an interesting and insightful blog on how users across various societies are getting influenced by technology, and how this interaction might shape the future tools of mobility. Go through his blog if you find this topic interesting.

Note: The Economist's article are free online only for one week, after that they go into subscription only access. If any of you is not having its subscription and is interested in reading the survey, I'd suggest you to do it before 17th of April.

Pay commission hike -- On defense forces

Today, A friend forwarded me this online petition asking for increase in the remuneration of Indian Defense Forces, as they've been treated poorly with respect to Civil Servants as per the latest hike by Pay Commission. The argument given is also very straightforward: These Jawans ought to be paid more, after all they pay with their lives for us. So, If you're not supporting this current pay hike demand, You're bound to be called a rich capitalist pig.

As Raj wrote in one of his posts, The above kind of arguments are flawed, with the most famous of such arguments being that of George W Bush when he stated, “Either you are with us or against us in the war on terrorism”. Now, I'm no expert on defense matters and wouldn't be able to give a proper analysis based on numbers on this matter, but I'd try to justify why I support the demand for pay hike but not in its current form.

To take an example, anyone who has seen Indian education system would understand that the current Indian education system can never be brought out of its current mess just by increasing the salaries of government school teachers. There is no accountability -- the labour laws in India guarantee that a teacher can never be fired whatever be his/her performance, no respect for meritocracy -- the networks and political games determine the promotions. Unless the incentives change for teachers as well as for administrators, the situation won't change just by a salary hike.

Some would argue that even if 60% goes as waste, the rest 40% money spent would actually work -- and we should not care for the costs when it comes to the future of our children/farmers/soldiers and other such emotional heroes. But what people do not think about, is what if that 60% of wasted amount was put to a better use? What if that money was used to build toilets for girl students[In my childhood, I've studied in a school where there were none for the students. So, girls used to go out for toilet in groups. While one or two girls relieved themselves, the rest kept a watch so as to shoo away boys].

Indian Defense forces are in desperate need of officers at the higher level while they need to shed a huge chunk of work force at the lower level, and therefore pay hike and incentives need to be aligned on these basis only. And yet, as Nitin Pai wrote:

India’s transformation into a middle-income country requires its Armed Forces to be more capital-intensive. Yet only around 10% of the defence budget is actually available for modernization, compared with around 30-40% in developed countries.

This is because, firstly, almost three-fourths of annual capital allocation goes towards instalments for items acquired in previous years. Indigenous acquisitions— from PSUs and some private firms—account for 40-45% of the capital budget, leaving around Rs28,000 crore ($7 billion) for foreign acquisitions this year.

Along with targeted pay hike and incentives, consideration need to be given to the family related needs of defense personnels:

Much of the disillusionment within the military stems from issues wider than low salaries or difficult and dangerous service conditions. Hundreds of soldiers, sailors and airmen tell me that they worry most about two major issues. Most troubling for them is the shortage of good schooling for their children, and of family accommodation in many cantonments. And there is equal frustration — particularly amongst the more intelligent — about the stifling professional environment of unquestioning obedience, where autocratic commanders can end promising careers with one stroke of a pen.

Of course, none of this means that I'm in support of pay hike of Civil Servants over Defense forces. But blindly throwing away my taxes is hardly my idea of being an emotional fool. And though my rants wouldn't make an iota of difference to this whole issue, I at least can say that "When they came to loot me, I wrote a blog post about how looting others without their permission wasn't such a good idea."

Ghostly food

In many ghost stories, it happens that a human being -- young child, failed lover, ugly cannibal, etc. -- dies a premature death with an unfulfilled wish and later returns as a Ghost. The Ghost, with the use of latest special effects used by Pixar and Disney studios, terrifies and kills a few human beings; and thus, the legend of haunted house is born.

But millions of chickens, pigs, prawns, fish etc. die everyday and become the diet of other carnivores and human beings. Even plants such as onions, beetroot etc. die once they're uprooted. But I'm yet to hear a story of an angry onion which wants to take a revenge because its plan to mate with the its neighbour female onion was aborted by a poor farmer.

Don't you think it would be a scary thought if all the chickens, fishes and onions you've eaten in all your lifetime start appearing in your dreams, cursing you with lifetime dysentry?

Green movement is good, Green regulation is not

Some time back, Tony wrote a post on Global warming and climate change, with the premise that a cleaner and safer world would be better than a colder world, which I felt, had a lot of insight into average consumer's behaviour and would make for a much convincing and reasonable 'fight GW campaign'.

Today, I read this piece by Devangshu Datta in Business Standard, in which he says that even though the effects and exact causes of GW are uncertain, we should support this mad rush over finding new technologies to stop GW, as it might result in next big human invention. He cites examples of heavy spending on military research, which later lead to some very important inventions used for civilian purposes today such as Gunpowder, satellites, and advanced communication devices. And certainly, if we look at the greener technologies and inventions today, for e.g. in case of CFLs vs incandescent bulb, the greener alternative turns out to be cheaper also in the long run.

But there certainly is a danger of going overboard, as is happening in case of biofuels where distorted subsidy mechanisms by major Governments is playing havoc with the food prices of staples all over the world. What's the use of saving world for our future generations if half of today's world population has to suffer from absolute hunger?

What I feel, the right response is to not go for government regulations/subsidies unless it is backed by a strong data because end result of wrongly designed government policies can be disastrous to the poor. In fact, if the public opinion is in favour of greener alternatives, then indeed private companies will create such products. The OLPC project, though conceived as a charity experiment, has ignited a rush for cheaper laptops which are commercially viable too. The Tata Nano, once it comes on road, would definitely be a cheaper and more fuel efficient alternative compared to other petrol cars around. The greening of Apple, GE's ecomagination campaign, and Toyota's stress on developing hybrid cars, are all initiatives taken by these private firms for purely commercial reasons i.e. building a favourable brand image for themselves in the minds of consumers.

Government incentives which reduce wastage of resources like electricity, water or mineral resources by imposing greater taxes for wastage, would definitely work better rather than the bureaucrats determining arbitrary policies to arrive at unintended consequences. But that wouldn't suit the politicians and various industrialist lobbies which get benefited by these regulations; hence, the status quo continues.