Author Archives: Shanu Athiparambath

Rand, Markets and Sadism

February 5, 2012 7:23 am3 Comments

Ayn Rand

When I see condemnation of the journalistic standards of “The Times of India” filling my newsfeed, a question posed by Gail Wynand whose media empire spread like bubonic plague comes back to me: “Do you think it took no talent to create the Banner?”  Gail Wynand, the publisher of the New York Banner owned twenty-two newspapers, seven magazines, three news services and two newsreels. He burnt prodigious energy and will power to achieve perfection in serving every perverse need of his ultimate boss-the imbecile on the street who consumes news, gossip and lurid stories like drugs. It took spectacular talent for Wynand to achieve extraordinary perfection in the ordinary.

One of the most powerful scenes in “The Fountainhead” is when several newspapers cornered Gail Wynand, the publisher of New York Banner, to censure him for debasing public tastes. Gail Wynand replied in his characteristic manner: “You give them what they profess to like in public. I give them what they really like. It is not my function, to help people preserve a self-respect they haven’t got. Honesty is the best policy, gentlemen, though not quite in the sense you were taught to believe.”

In the New York Banner’s first public campaign, they appealed to the charitable sentiments of the public by displaying pictures of a pretty girl waiting for her illegitimate child, and a starving scientist side by side. The campaign raised one thousand and seventy-seven dollars for the unwed mother when the young scientist had to be content with nine dollars and forty-five cents. At the end of the campaign, Gail Wynand had decided how the Banner deserves to be run. Continue Reading →

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The Distant Cheeping

January 20, 2012 7:30 pmLeave a Comment

They are so clever!

A week ago, I felt that pressure was suddenly building up inside my head. There was a mild heaviness that didn’t seem to go away. I have never had a headache in my life. But, one night, I was turning back in my bed, trying to sleep. I never had sleeping problems. There was suddenly a sharp pain that never came back. I was having mild bodily disturbances on and off which I have never had before. Doctors often dismiss it telling me: “Wait, you are confusing me now.” I almost never sleep in the morning-even during Magazine production when I often have to skip sleep. But lately I am sleeping at my desk or office sofa for hours. While I was listening to a talk, I noticed that my eyes were drooping, even when I had slept six hours the night before.

When I went to a hospital nearby, the doctor asked me many questions: “Where do you work? How many hours do you work? Do you read a lot? When you read, do you read from a computer? How many hours do you sleep?” It was all true. I have averaged four hours of sleep for many years.  I am always hooked to the web. I rarely read hard copies.  He just asked me to do a vision test, brushing off everything else. Continue Reading →

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The Mind And The Conscience

January 14, 2012 10:09 pmLeave a Comment

One evening, when I was in a restaurant, the waiter pointed his finger at a very young girl standing outside and said to me with a sly smile: “Look, she is smoking”. I looked at her, assessing the merit of the notion that a woman’s good looks will purchase indemnity for even her most grievous sin. Perhaps I should join Goethe in admitting that baseness attracts everybody.

Men and women are not expected to go beyond a certain point, when these are precisely the points they want to cross. When even the bravest man or woman tries to push these boundaries with self-righteous iconoclasm, they do it hoping against hope that the harshest judgment of the world wouldn’t be reserved for them.

Manu Joseph expresses it so well: “Sometimes I am amazed at how women in India go through life being women. No matter what they do, they can never be invisible, and it is very important to be invisible. There is a peculiar stoic expression they have when they stand out in the open and smoke. They know everybody on the street has judged them. Even on my lane in South Bombay it is true. I’ve not conducted a poll yet, but I am certain that nobody on Third Pasta Lane believes that a woman who smokes can also be a virgin.”

When a woman smokes in India, more than exploring the forbidden, she is stirring up the transgression and taboo. She is flouting the social norms of a world in which men and women are afraid to be themselves. It tells us more about those norms than about the inner conflicts which torture her mind. The conflict between what is visible to the naked eye and what is visible only to the inner eye of the mind becomes all the more clear when we see that even in the far more permissible society of South Delhi or South Bombay, there are far more social limits than it meets the eye. Continue Reading →

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The H. L. Mencken of Economics

January 7, 2012 12:27 pmLeave a Comment

While reading biographical accounts of Murray Rothbard, one thing becomes clear to me: He was very true to himself, more than most thinkers I have ever read of. Murray Rothbard was an honorable exception in a profession where even blind idealists find themselves being tempted to play by the rules. There was of course, a terrible price for being the greatest entertainer in the history of economic thought. Because, Manu Joseph’s take on Delhi is all the more true of the Economics profession: “Delhi, often, confuses seriousness with intelligence and humour with flippancy. People will not be taken seriously here if they are not, well, serious.”

If you have to be taken seriously by fellow academics, you have to be as dry, boring and confused. Rothbard’s lectures on the contrary, as Bryan Caplan opined, might as well have been named “The joy of Econ”. One of Bryan’s blog posts had an apt title, “History + Comedy = Rothbard”, because he was “Haha funny”. Then, as someone had said, he’d rather have a good laugh than a Nobel Prize.

Rothbard believed that an individualist born in this world “marked by fraud, folly and tyranny” has three ways to deal with it: Retire into one’s own cocoon, set out to reform the world or take immense delight in the nonsense he sees around. Rothbard , it seems, was among the very few who had a driving desire to reform the world and take delight in the spectacle of folly at the same time. He lacked the pessimism of H.L. Mencken who was not too much of a reformer. Mencken knew that his barbaric fellow beings were hopeless and beyond repair and reform. Even when Rothbard writes about the worst of tyrannies, it appeared that like H.L. Mencken, he felt far more delight than indignation. As readers, we feel nothing but amusement even when he cheerfully quotes the listing of monstrosities in the diary of a slave owner who imagined himself to be a kind taskmaster. Continue Reading →

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We Don’t Need No Education

December 30, 2011 2:23 am3 Comments
I’d rather die than go to school!

Unlike many neurotic college-dropouts who help themselves feel better by repeatedly listening to Pink Floyd, I haven’t felt like defending myself too much. I haven’t written anything much on unschooling in the last one decade. Even if I did, I know what many of you would think: “Grapes are sour!”  I do not wish to deny that there is some rationalization involved in me liking Steve Jobs who slept on the floor, returned coke bottles to buy food, and walked several miles once in a week to get one good meal at the Hare Krishna temple after dropping out of college.

My favorite businessmen were never Mittal’s and Tata’s of the world, but men like Mahesh Murthy who dropped out of college at 19, and ended up with a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars after doing many odd jobs like being an announcer at Indian railway and selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Even though my teenage was largely wasted, my favorite fictional character is not the one-dimensional ubermensch Howard Roark, but Gail Wynand who walked into the office of a fourth-rate newspaper at sixteen, and asked “Can you spell anthropomorphology?” to the editor who inquired “Can you spell cat?” I couldn’t get through most fiction works I have read, but when I read that Howard Roark was kicked out of architecture school for insubordination, I was in seventh heaven. I went on to read it eighteen times-but wait, I am still counting.

I have always hated schooling, though in early childhood, it was a truth I would dare not admit. I was expected to say that I loved it- that the “emperor has clothes”.  When I was in school, the whole world looked like an air craft into which hordes of barbarians rushed in to press buttons at random, with self-righteous conviction that they are entitled to act on their capricious whims and fancies. Many feel that anything goes as long as they had a mushy rationalization, or an argument from authority! When I studied libertarianism, the essentials were not hard to see: What politicians and bureaucrats do to decent human beings is not much different from what adults often do to children. If we strip libertarianism down to a postcard, if we denude the abstract philosophy to its bare meanings, that is all there is to it. Once this retrospectively obvious fact is understood, the whole theory behind unschooling will fall into place. Continue Reading →

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Public Choice and the Self-Interested Voter

December 22, 2011 9:30 amLeave a Comment
The rationally irrational voter

My colleague Kapil Bajaj has done some good work on the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway project, which illustrates some valid conclusions of Public Choice theory even where it goes wrong. As I do not read Newspapers much, I haven’t gone much into the details of the project Kapil has mentioned. So, I do not have any hard knowledge. But, I think I get the essentials.

As Kapil has written, many Public Choice theorists argue that individual voters have little incentive to be aware of politics, and vote accordingly. Similarly, politicians and bureaucrats try to optimize their own utility and power.  And Kapil has written, (and unfortunately so), many public choice economists believe in the Self Interested Voter Hypothesis (SIVH) which assume that individual voters vote their pocketbooks. It is all true.

The Delhi-Gurgaon expressway project

Kapil argues that contrary to the claims of Public Choice Theory, in the Delhi-Gurgaon expressway project, the public, bureaucracy and representatives have acted against their self interest: The public protested against a Government policy forgetting their narrow self interest. The elected representatives and officials have revoked a policy which led to much public outrage. So, the assumption of utility maximizing behavior doesn’t hold much water. People are after all, not as bad as cynical economists believe. Continue Reading →

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Bullies, Sissies And Other Libertarian Nutjobs

December 11, 2011 3:52 pm2 Comments
Abstractions aside, we have come so far from the schoolyard!

Truth might be a bitter pill to swallow, but we are all better off with it. There are truths which many of us do not feel compelled to go overboard in stating, while some others state it cheerfully, as these are brutal facts their taste wouldn’t conceal. The economist David Friedman called the former ‘wimps’ and the latter ‘boors’. Or bullies and sissies. While wimps keep away from stating truths like that of the high rate of teenage pregnancy and criminal tendencies among blacks, boors state it with much enthusiasm and delight.

Like Friedman, I too have mixed feelings. It must be obvious that if rightly analyzed and interpreted, knowing all the Non-Politically Correct (Non-PC) facts will have a positive impact on the way many people look at economic policy in particular and the world in general. But, an incurable obsession with such issues is more often than not a sign of bigotry.

An excessive focus on gender, race, sexuality and nationality, whether legitimate or not, while turning a blind eye to war and immigration restrictions is like complaining of one’s mother-in-law’s nagging when someone is raping your wife and mugging your children. Needless to mention, it only means that your hatred for your mother in law trumps your hatred for explicit violence by a wide margin.

Continue Reading →

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The Lure Of The Mommy State

December 7, 2011 11:40 am1 Comment

A YouTube video of a woman who has 15 children and does not feel like looking after them is doing rounds on Facebook.  She claims that someone else should really take the responsibility of taking care of her brats. Unlike the street bum who slyly asks for a cent, she thinks that she deserves to get it good and hard. Many libertarians are pointing out some facts: She grew up poor, with the implicit notion that the “Mommy state” has always been there, and will always be there to feed and clothe not just her, but also the long line of babies behind her. She is black, and the state has kept her poor. It all makes them feel terrible for her and her welfare babies, as most libertarians who would rather party and play poker than feel for her.

The response it elicited from the libertarian community was amusing. Someone drew up a feasible business plan: “In a libertarian society this would be easily dealt with. Since prostitution would be legal, it would be the perfect job for her to support her mob of children!” Someone else had a more ingenious one: “Her husband was a drug dealer. Now, she can be a baby dealer!  They should force her to sell some of those kids to willing rich families, and with that money she could care for the rest. Hey, Mrs. 15 kids has found her niche in the market!” Many were suddenly reminded of the iron fist of the paternal state: “Two words: Mandatory sterilization.” Social Darwinists were even more honest: “So now that they are here, and she obviously can’t take care of them. What should we do? I say let them all starve to death. It is what would happen if natural biological processes were to be at work. It feels bad to be her kids, but I don’t feel bad. She should. She is the one who brought them to the world to starve.” The rest turned their face: “Pathetic. That lady is disgusting” Continue Reading →

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An Anomaly That Completes The System

December 7, 2011 1:27 amLeave a Comment

Manu Joseph makes an interesting observation on bleeding-heart liberals. The iniquitous social system which persists in stuck-up countries like India strengthen a minority elite which leverages the unfair privileges, and before long slowly turns against the system which made their wealth and self-righteous indignation possible. They are, like Arundhati Roy, “an anomaly that completes the system”. Their heart of course, lies with the real India waiting to get in, but is still kept out by the elitist middle class. With misty eyes, they tell us that the dull masses will never go away. It might be their only hope, but they have something called vote which will humiliate their betters. When the middle class and the rich are busy partying, they will doggedly march to the polling booth in hordes once in every five years and press the button with glee, throwing all the rascals out. It would be quite an inspiring sight!

The great 20th century polemicist H.L. Mencken had hinted that democracy originated in the poetic fancies of refined men who felt like putting the donkey into the cart to revolutionalize transport, saddened by the fact that it is over-laden.

There was no mass movement which was different. The Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises had pointed out that behind all socialistic ideas we see the dark, ugly hands of the wicked scion of one of the prominent aristocratic families of royal France. Marx never did a honest day’s work, and lived off Engels, who was a wealthy industrialist and a much more original thinker. The anti capitalist ideas were by no means an achievement of the masses, but of that of much pampered intellectuals and artists who never had to wonder where the next meal would come from. Rustic poetry on the pleasures of country life was never written by shepherds or village idiots, but by urban poets. Murray Rothbard was one among the many who noticed that most that complain about the ugliness of cities and worship primitivism were firmly ensconced in these crowded cities. Continue Reading →

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The Exoteric And Esoteric

November 15, 2011 1:06 pm1 Comment

The Exoteric And Esoteric

Murray Rothbard, one of the greatest polymaths of all times made an interesting observation of religious cults: “Every religious cult has two sets of differing and distinctive creeds: the exoteric and the esoteric. The exoteric creed is the official, public doctrine, the creed which attracts the acolyte in the first place and brings him into the movement as a rank-and-file member. The quite different creed is the unknown, hidden agenda, a creed which is only known to its full extent by the top leadership, the “high priests” of the cult.” Murray Rothbard is said to have had some stubborn heterodox tendencies, but when he feels something is awry, you’d better take him seriously.

The glaring contradiction between the open and hidden agenda of religious cults is quite illuminating. It is true not just of religious cults, but of social movements, ideologies and of course, the most complex and ridiculous of all: human beings. Socialists and Objectivists swear by reason, science and logic, but beneath all their pretensions, we find nothing but the corpse of irrationality-of subjectivity, of feelings. We shall call this the exoteric-esoteric dichotomy. Continue Reading →

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