Hackers and Painters

I snitched this headline from the name a book. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. If you haven’t read it yet, may I urge you to? It is a lovely book authored by Paul Graham, a computer scientist, venture capitalist and well, a writer. And if you’re among those not inclined to read a book, he captured the sum and substance of it all in an essay back in 2003.

Some lovely learnings emerge out of it on what comprises the hacker ethic, in which he underlines the significance of relentless practice, devotion to beauty, why a premium ought to be placed on disciplines we are unfamiliar with, the humility to try and imbibe from others what we don’t know of, and above all else, inculcating a habit that allows us to share and collaborate so that we become lifelong learners.

Philosophically, it influenced many in computer science deeply. Because that is where he was best known and enthusiasts—or hackers, as they were called then, when the word wasn’t as bastardized—were enthused by his ideas. They could see the value in what he proposed. When I came of age, I could see merit in his ideas and was among those who embraced them.

But personal philosophies are malleable and susceptible to influences. That is why, at some point, I started to question the premise. I argued against the most beautiful of his ideas—collaboration.

“Maybe, I’m not a nice guy. I don’t care," I wrote once. Friends who knew me as a technology enthusiast and someone who had benefited from it were appalled at what they thought was a complete misunderstanding of a powerful idea. In a scathing indictment, I was told, “the most unfortunate thing is that we have journalists like you..."

In hindsight, I suspect I may have felt insecure with the idea of sharing. Because at the end of the day, my livelihood, I thought, is a function of the ideas and the words that came out of what I think up and my networks. How can I possibly give it away for free? 

That is why, I argued, “by thinking something up and offering it to the collective to improve upon, I stand to lose my livelihood... it leaves me with no incentive to write". Therefore, I ought to do all I can to protect what I come up with.

But much experimentation, conversations and learnings later, I now concede I was wrong. I stand corrected and an apology is in order. I admit the world we live in now wouldn’t have gotten to where it is without collaboration.

So much so that even Microsoft, the bastion of all things proprietary, after having fought to keep the world out of its doors, is now seeking to collaborate. Otherwise, it knows, it will perish.

So, who are hackers and how did hacks get into the lexicon? Everybody, it seems, is into hacking. Computer hacks, study hacks, sleep hacks, food hacks and, to top it all off, life hacks. 

To put that into perspective, let us first understand what a hacker is not:

• Geniuses who write books on “ethical hacking" and sell courses on “ethical hacking" are, well, geniuses. Because it needs a genius to find a market full of idiots willing to pay money to become a “certified hacker". None of what Graham articulated needs to be certified. It is a world view.

• Then there are management gurus who take terms like jugaad—a word most north Indians are familiar with. Loosely translated, a quick fix or, well, a “hack" as it is now understood. Packaged for the West and management schools, it is rephrased and given a lovely twist—frugal innovation.

By way of example, think of a contraption like the jugaad which plies on north Indian roads. The handle of an old scooter, tyres and engine of a motorcycle, the frame of a bicycle, the body of a bullock cart and a diesel engine to are retro-fitted to create a dangerous contraption. 

This is then deployed on the roads for pretty much everything from ferrying people to livestock and goods. It does not fall under the ambit of the Motor Vehicles Act. It is jugaad, and fits the framework of “frugal innovation".

But two problems exist here.

1. It cannot be scaled.

2. It violates the law because it is a safety hazard. So much of a hazard that the Supreme Court had to intervene and has asked all states where such vehicles ply to provide the court with details of what authorities are doing to take these contraptions off the road.

My limited submission here is that the Hacker Ethic in its purest sense is not about finding shortcuts like these. 

Instead, it focuses on finding truth, purpose, beauty, meaning and goodness in an optimum manner. And like I said earlier, this ethic insists we place a premium on optimizing ourselves and our work, so that we can devote as much of our time as we can to learn.

How? Allow me to provide a few instances:

• The other day, I stumbled across an interview of Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaire co-founder of Facebook. The 25-minute interview in which he articulated all of his ideas revealed clarity in thought. But what struck me was something else altogether. While in college, he studied both psychology and computer science.

  In India, this is an alien idea. The way things are, computer science is kosher because it can potentially make an engineer out of you. Psychology is not because it falls in the domain of liberal arts. 

  To cite but one instance, while talking with a doctor the other day, I asked him what his son was up to. He told me the original plan was to get the young man to pursue a career in medicine. But if he doesn’t get through the exams, “let him do arts or some shit".

  The tone was not condescending, but one that smacked of downright derision.

  Hackers sneer at people who speak this language. That is why Zuckerberg studied psychology. All thanks to it, he could ask, “What is it that people want the most?"

  His understanding of the domain taught him that humans seek other people out the most. What he learnt at his computer science class helped him create a software platform that could take his understanding of the human mind into a place he would otherwise not have been able to if he were wedded to either one of the disciplines. In his head, the disciplines collaborated.

  Having done that, he sought out people who understood the other arts, like design, and domains like business to build what is now one of the most formidable entities in the world. He optimized himself by collaborating between disciplines and others.

• Then there is this nonsense I come across every other day about how large organizations are trying to “replicate the start-up culture". And to do that, they have begun by “breaking down silos". This includes doing ridiculous things like spending obscene amounts on creating “open offices".

  Apparently, “open offices" facilitate conversations and an “open culture". Who is to tell them the Hacker Ethic includes an idea called Deep Work? And that there is evidence that conclusively demonstrates open offices are actually an insanely stupid idea because they kill productivity?

  This is because, to get meaningful work done, the human mind needs to find the optimal state to be in—the Flow, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Most people call it as “being in the zone". To get here, they need their space.

  But organizations, in attempts to ape Facebook or Google without understanding the ethic that drives them, compel people to operate under suboptimal conditions. Zuckerberg didn’t start out trying to build a company. Neither did the founders of Google. They started out by trying to solve problems that real people face.

  To do that, they worked with the resources they had on hand. Which is essentially what a start-up is. That profitable entities came out of it is another story altogether. 

  But in trying to replicate start-up cultures, you cannot force-fit the Hacker Ethic into it. The most charitable thing that can be said of such attempts is that it is a horribly atrociously version of jugaad. It is destined to fail.

• And why will they fail? Because hackers share. They work with the collective. By way of example, take the Human Genome Project (HGP). It is the world’s largest collaborative biological project, conducted across 20 universities and research centres and funded by the governments of the US, UK, Japan, France, Germany, Canada and China. 

The database is there for anybody to access on the Internet. When looked at in isolation, the database can be gibberish because the quantum of information in it is so huge, it is impossible for any single entity to make any meaning out of it. Unless individuals and organizations collaborate to make meaning out of it for the greater common good.

Are there profits to be made out of it? Most certainly. Businesses have come to build around the ecosystem that is the HGP and provide highly personalized services to individuals across the world. The system is still evolving and who knows what may come out of it?

• Now, this ought us to introspect and ask: Am I a hacker? Let’s put it this way. If you think of the Hacker Ethic as a way of life, then yes. It isn’t always about coding and computers alone, but about looking at the wisdom they have gained and trying to emulate it. 

They don’t seek shortcuts. They seek elegant solutions to complex problems. When wrong, they have the humility to admit that they were in the wrong, move on and find the next optimum. They seek, they search, they look for the best ideas and they share as openly as they gain. This ethic is a life of learning, adapting and not scrimping.

This piece was first published in Mint on September 17, 2016

Field Notes from an ICU

Contrary to what I always imagined, the ambience outside the intensive care unit, or ICU, where my dad sleeps now isn’t antiseptic. Around me are a few chairs, and a few weary faces. Pretty much everybody is glued to mobile handsets. The only time they come to life is when one of the security personnel shouts out a number. The guardian of one of the human beings admitted in the ICU then jumps up and scrambles to do whatever it is that the resident medical officer (RMO) or nurse in charge wants them to. 

The only times I have seen my dad are when the number he is now identified by is shouted out. I haven’t been allowed in any place close to him since he was wheeled into the emergency room earlier today. Since then, he has become just another body that lies sedated in a sterile environment, in sharp contrast to the air outside. I don’t know what will become of him when he gets out of there. The doctors in charge claim they don’t know either. “Under observation for 48 hours," is all they mutter.

*****

I think it was yesterday. Or at least it seems like that. The two sons of a junior warrant officer (JWO) in the Indian Air Force (IAF) and his wife would walk the lanes and bylanes of Sion, a suburb in Mumbai, every evening. 

At some point, the young officer would strike a deal with his sons. Either they could stop by a street vendor who hawked comics where they could debate and deliberate further on which title of Amar Chitra Katha they ought to settle on, or whether they’d much rather everybody share a plate of vada sambar or masala dosa at Hanuman Restaurant right across where the vendor sat. The only times there was no debate was when the latest copy of Tinkle hit the stands.

At all other times, the officer was clear it had to be either the comics or the food. Certainly not both. The boys resented it because they thought they were being disciplined into making choices. The young officer made it sound that way while the mother looked on indulgently. More often than not, the comics won over the food.

Purchases done, all of them would troop home and the young man would lie on his bed, open the comic, the boys on either side, and he’d animatedly read out tales from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Valmiki, the Jataka Tales, and every once a while stories of heroes from contemporary Indian history that Amar Chitra Katha thought appropriate to publish. 

The older boy grew to become me—a journalist; the younger one, my brother, a researcher in the neurosciences. Thirty-five-odd years down the line, in hindsight, the both of us know the young officer wasn’t trying to teach his sons to choose. It was because a JWO in the IAF then barely took home enough money to make both ends meet. 

We grew up in an India where “India was Indira and Indira was India". My folks hadn’t heard of economic liberalization and its potential benefits until the early 1990s. Not that it made sense to them. But by the time they did and figured out what it meant, their boys were ready to join the workforce. Until then, the only kind of parenting most middle-class folks like them knew was to give their boys the best, like buying comics pretty much every other day. If that meant mortgaging little pieces of gold at the local pawn shop from our mother’s meagre dowry, then that is what they did.

But something happened, a mutation if you will, between generations. The kindness and genteel parenting dad weaned us on got replaced by “helicopter parenting" of the kind my generation and I practise. 

My older daughter Nayanatara doesn’t have the time for long walks with me. Just out of Class IV, her mornings are crammed with a ruthless curriculum that leaves no room for simple joys like Uncle Pai in Tinkle. When done with her formal class hours, she attends classes for taekwondo, kathak, phonics (which will apparently do her diction good), quilling, art and pottery. My wife and I think it par for the course if she has to grow up into a well-rounded individual. 

My folks aren’t so sure. They think their kids—my brother and I—turned out to be reasonably decent blokes given the Rs. 400-odd the IAF paid my dad every month by way of salary. I suspect they may just have a point.

Each time dad tried to tell me that gently, I’d go into a funk and tell him the times have changed. But as he convulses yet again, the RMO tells me they’re at a loss, and that the ventilator sounds the most plausible option—someplace in my head tells me I ought to consider his advice on parenting a bit more seriously. It’s okay to let children be and soak life in without imposing the ideals of what adulthood ought to be like on them. They’ll just turn out fine. So long as you have the bandwidth to attend to their simple needs—be a playmate when they need you and read a few comics together every once in a while.

*****

The kind of literature on medicine I have read includes the compassion of Atul Gawande, the eruditon of Sherwin Nuland and the perspective of Roy Porter. Their expositions on the practice offered me stunning insights into the relentless world of young resident doctors, the nature of how we biologically live and why our cells die. That is why I always thought of medical practitioners as romantic ideals.

But in the real world, across the glass wall where dad lies right now, Gawande and Nuland and Porter are just that—romantic ideals. The resident doctors are—pardon my expression—kids on whom the graveyard shift is an imposed one. They are trying their damndest best to do what the textbooks have taught them. But experience is still to mentor them. 

Over time they will morph into seniors, like the ones doing the rounds now, and who during their normal waking hours are arrogant pricks. Pardon my expression, but there is no other way to describe them. Allow me tell you why. Fed up of the “He’s under observation" line, I thought up a quick one to throw at the senior doctor on the rounds. 

“Excuse me sir, but which lobe of his is affected?"

“You understand medicine?" he asked me condescendingly.

“I’m a practising biochemist," I lied through my teeth. 

“Ah! You’re one of us," he melted and proceeded to take me through the initial prognosis.

Much of it sounded like Greek and Latin. But because curiosity had compelled me to read Gray’s Anatomy and some textbooks on biochemistry closely in the past, and carry an app called HealthKart on my phone that I look up every once a while to understand the nature of various drugs, I managed to nod intelligently, ask some questions, and finally get a fix on what is happening to dad. 

Perhaps I am being unduly harsh on the fraternity. When looked at from one perspective, how can an overworked medic sit down and possibly explain the nuances of medicine to traumatized caregivers clueless about the machinations of medicine? 

I can think of exceptions to the rule like the good Dr Natarajan, an obstetrician, who devoted patience and time to my wife and me when we’d gone through a scare a long time ago when she was carrying our second child. He assuaged our concerns and treated us like humans—not like preserved tissue samples in formaldehyde jars that reside in medical schools. That said, I maintain that the likes of him are exceptions.

But why should it be? If kids weaned on comic books purchased on the back of wafer thin pay packets and mortgaged gold can grow up into informed individuals, what makes medical professionals think they can be condescending? I buy the argument that they soak in an enormous amount of pressure. But what if these medics were put into the pressure-cooker environment that is the newsroom; or a trading room at a broking outfit; or asked to frame policies that rein in the fiscal deficit? None of these professionals can get away without explaining the nuances to the masses. Because if they don’t, they’ll get lynched. 

Why did I have to lie and claim I am a biochemist to understand what’s going on? Why did their doors open warmly only when my brother, who is actually a doctor, walk in? What if I hadn’t lied? What if my brother wasn’t a doctor? Much like the weary souls splattered across chairs outside the waiting room, I’d be groping in the dark and be on tenterhooks. 

The problem with the practical medicine that exists in hospitals outside the books of Gawande, Nuland and Porter is that they don’t understand the nuances of what it means to be human. It lives instead in a cloistered world seeped in arrogance.

The other problem with contemporary medicine—and by that I mean allopathy—is that it exists in silos. There are neurologists, cardiologists, urologists, pathologists, pharmacologists and so on and so forth. Each of them has a microscopic understanding of the microcosm they work on in the human body.

A good general practitioner (GP) with a holistic view is practically impossible to come by. Contemporary allopathy has, for all practical purposes, killed the GP. Philosophically, Ayurveda espouses the idea of holistic medicine. But it is hopelessly outdated. In times of crisis, it is not a science that can be relied on. The way it is now, it is but a body of ancient texts that practitioners turn to. As for homeopathy, anybody who thinks it a science ought to be an idiot. How am I to take any system that believes in the placebo effect seriously?

Where does this leave us when faced with a crisis but to turn to a splintered system like allopathy? For all of its frailties, at the end of the day, it has done more to extend our life spans than any other system. 

Now, if only it could temper the arrogance its practitioners come with! 

*****

Dad thought it only appropriate he marry my mum when he first set his eyes on her. He was 22. She was 20. Her old man, my grandfather, was scandalized in what was then a very traditional Malayali society. He tried to talk the young man out of it. But dad firmly declined. She was his first girlfriend. He was her first boyfriend. They’ve been married 45 years now. Neither will eat a meal without the other. Nor will they end the day without having reported to each other all of what they did during the day.

I always thought this an old-world relationship that is pretty much impossible to sustain in the world we live in now. I’ve had conversations in the past with friends who practise psychology. Their hypothesis is easy to comprehend.

We live terribly busy lives. Not all of our needs can be satisfied by one individual. So, in theory, it is not just probable, but okay to seek multiple partners so that all of our needs are satisfied. To that extent, I am told many practising psychologists believe adultery is kosher—and that over time, the mainstream will come to accept it.

During one of my long walks with dad, I asked him what he thought of the hypothesis. He laughed gently, as is his wont. “Your mother meets all of my needs," he told me then. “I haven’t looked at another woman, ever."

“You won’t understand how we love," mum once told me. 

That is why, even as his sedated mind now groans out for her, she watches stoically from the other side of the glass door. There is nothing she can do but hold his hand in the brief moments they allow her to.

A wall of silence separates mum from both of her sons. Her front is brave. But deep down, I guess she needs to talk to somebody. But that somebody lies in a mist. What will happen of their 45-year-old love story if he isn’t around? What will happen of her if he isn’t around to pamper and drive her around? I don’t know.

I wish that I knew how to love like he loved—the good, old-fashioned way—devoid of all pretences.

He tried his damndest best to teach us that through Amar Chitra Katha so we understood how to love our spouses in much the same way that Satyavan did Savitri, so that when Yama, the god of death, comes calling, death can be cheated. 

As I wind these dispatches up, I wait and watch quietly, hoping Satyavan will indeed wake up from the deep sleep he is in now, beat the odds that Yama has placed on him, and walk back home to the Savitri he loves so much.

“We’ll keep him under observation for 48 hours," I’m told again and am jolted back to reality.

This piece was first published in Mint on Sunday on May 30 2015

The ethics of lying

A little before I sat down to write this piece, I saw a headline that screamed: “I never lie”. It featured someone from the advertising business. I couldn’t help but snigger. What’s wrong with a lie, I wondered.

Indeed. It is a question that has resided in our collective human conscience forever. So much so that it resides as one among the central themes of that philosophical tour de force the Mahabharata is—an epic narrative of the Kurukshetra war and the fates of its protagonists that comprise two warring clans, the Kauravas and the Pandavas.

In the epic, there is this part where one of the greatest warriors of all time, Drona, is on a rampage through the Pandava ranks. Related to both sides as an uncle, for various reasons, he chose to align himself with the Kauravas in this battle. If he isn’t stopped, the Pandavas fear it is only a matter of time before their army is in shreds. The oldest of the five Pandava brothers, Yudhisthira, then turns to their spiritual and philosophical mentor Krishna for counsel.

Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu, the supreme god, tells Yudhisthira this is a war that must be won. And that if a lie ought to be told to win it, then the lie must be told. In this instance, Krishna knows Drona’s only weakness is his son Ashwathama. So, he asks Yudhisthira to spread the word that Ashwathama is dead. But Yudhisthira has a problem with that. His morality and reputation do not permit him to lie. He despises it as dishonest.

But even as Yudhisthira is thinking through Krishna’s proposition and its implications, Bhima, one of the Pandava brothers, kills an elephant named Ashwathama and screams: “Ashwathama is dead”. Word reaches Drona. The man thinks it is his son Bhima is talking of. Stunned, he refuses to believe the news until he hears it from Yudhisthira and summons him.

Krishna’s words still ringing in his ears, Yudhisthira goes over to his uncle’s camp.

“Is it true,” Drona asks him, “that Ashwathama is dead?”

“Yes,” Yudhisthira says. And then trails off inaudibly, “Ashwathama the elephant.”

Technically, Yudhisthira did not lie. But Drona doesn’t catch the words, lays down his weapons and bows his head in grief. In that very instant, on Krishna’s instructions, Dhrishtadyumna, Yudhisthira’s brother-in-law, chops his head off.

In Vedic society, this is the worst possible crime. The Pandavas killed an unarmed Brahmin on the back of subterfuge who in their younger years was a teacher to them as well. But it had to be done for the sake of “dharma”, argues Krishna.

When looked at from Krishna’s perspective, it makes sense. All of the brothers are killing each other, too many people are dying and the war has to end in everybody’s interest. To that extent, morality demands that Yudhisthira lie. The end, in this case, argues Krishna, justifies the means. Psychology has it that Krishna makes this call without compunction because he is emotionally more evolved.

This argument though has always been under scrutiny with much being written and debated around it. The founding fathers of the Christian church like St Augustine make it abundantly clear that a lie is a lie, no matter what the intent is. Western philosophical thought led Immanuel Kant and closer home Mahatma Gandhi find their moorings in this school of thought. They leave no room for a lie in any shade. And that is what we are taught to live by.

As Michael Sandel, who teaches philosophy at Harvard University, points out, Kant believed that telling a lie, even a white lie, is a violation of one’s own dignity. But do exceptions to the rule exist? When is ambiguity possible? For instance, if your friend were hiding inside your home, and a person intent on killing your friend came to your door and asked you where he was, would it be wrong to tell a lie? If so, would it be moral to try to mislead the murderer without actually lying?

This question has implications in modern-day business as well. In a paper published last year titled Are Liars Ethical, Maurice Schweitzer, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton University, and co-author Emma Levine veer philosophically to Krishna’s side.

The video of a conversation with them can be viewed here. The sum and substance of their argument is this: “We look at deception that sometimes can be helpful to other people. We typically think about deception as selfish deception: I lie to gain some advantage at the expense of somebody else. And we typically think of honesty as something that might be costly to me, but helpful to others.”

“In our research, we actually disentangle those two things. We think about deception that can help other people, and honesty that might be helpful to myself and maybe costly to somebody else. When we separate honesty and deception from pro-social and pro-self-interests, we find that people actually don’t care that much about deception. We find that the aversion to lying, when people say ‘Don’t lie to me’, what they really mean is, ‘Don’t be really selfish’.”

To that extent, they argue that in the kind of world we live in, it is time to revisit the dictum: Honesty is the best policy. Instead, we ought to understand when we should lie. “When does honesty actually harm trust and seem immoral? And when can deception actually breed trust be seen as moral?”

The reason this is pertinent is because in business, managers have to balance between benevolence and honesty, where benevolence is about being kind and providing supportive feedback. Honesty, on the other hand, can be critical and harsh. Not everybody is built to handle honesty. To that extent, it makes sense to err on the side of benevolence in the longer-term interests of building trust and relationships.

Schweitzer and Levine studied the tension between honesty and benevolence under controlled conditions that it may be applied in business. Their findings make for a compelling read.

“There are a lot of domains in which individuals face this conflict between honesty and benevolence very, very intensely. One example is in healthcare. Doctors frequently have to deliver very negative news to patients. And actually, prior research has found that oftentimes, doctors do lie. They inflate the positivity of these prognoses. We seem to think this is bad, and I think doctors feel a lot of tension and conflict around how to handle the situation.

“But our research suggests that perhaps doctors, and maybe teachers and parents, should be explicitly acknowledging this tension and this trade-off, and thinking about and talking about how to navigate it. When might benevolence and kindness, and maybe a little dishonesty, be right or be appreciated, and how could that enhance the delivery of medicine?

“Another case where we manage this balance between being completely honest and managing being benevolent is when we interact with children. This is true as parents, and it’s also true as educators. So, teachers will need to give feedback to students. And they have to balance this tension between being completely candid, and being benevolent and kind—demonstrating kindness and concern for the child.

“As parents, we frequently tell our kids, ‘Never lie’. But that’s not at all what we mean. For example, before we go over to grandma’s house, we might tell them, say, ‘Remember, thank grandma for that sweater, and tell her how much you like it, even though we both know you never wear it’.”

This is the kind of ambiguity and tension Krishna nailed with precision almost 3,000 years BCE when the Mahabharata was written.

But who’s to tell that to the man in advertising who claims he never lies?

Trust is just a metric

For all practical purposes I was the oddball on the table the other evening at a plush city hotel. To start with, I was the only Indian citizen. Everybody else was a foreign citizen of Indian origin. 

Everyone was sipping on single malt and looked superbly fit. I looked sloppy in my ill-fitting jeans with a potbelly struggling to peek out. Then there was the fact that everybody else had earned their degree from an Ivy league college in the US. Following which all of them had put in at least a decade at a hedge fund or large private equity firm of global consequence in either New York City or Silicon Valley. To my native eyes, all of them looked well-read, well-travelled, well-versed and well-off.

I’m not entirely sure if I was of any consequence to them. Because when asked what is it I do and when told I expend most of my time writing to earn a living—in the silent pauses that followed—I could hear them hold on to pregnant thoughts. But they were the polite kinds who bit their tongue. 

The more forthright ones have told me in the past what they really think of the likes of me. That in their scheme of things, I am among those who got disrupted by businesses people like them have funded. Anybody in the world now with a story or an opinion can voice it on places like Facebook and Twitter among other social media platforms. And that I have no reason to exist. I ought to reinvent myself. I don’t argue anymore, but have learnt to meet these silences with silence.

But this much I must say. My silences are arrogant too. Because their “coming back to India" spiels now sound like clichéd and regurgitated tripe to veterans like me. I’ve heard that one often. 

The story is a familiar one. Been there, done that (either on Wall Street or Silicon Valley), back packed through Europe, and in a moment of epiphany decided it is now time to “give back" to society. What better place to start from than the ones our parents originated from after having left it decades ago in search for a better tomorrow for themselves and their children? 

To be fair to them though, their parents earned their success the hard way. And to be fair to everyone on the table, they had worked their backsides off to get into premier organizations and positions. There is nothing I can say that can take away from that this was an incredibly intelligent bunch of people I was with.

But that said, the irony was difficult to miss as well. How can you possibly sit at one of the fanciest hotels in India, sip all night on the most expensive single malts, nibble at exquisite finger food, talk of doing something for the deprived, and not as much as cast an eye at the waiter on the table? 

I didn’t stay until everyone wound up for the night. But I suspect whatever was run up by way expenses on food and beverages may perhaps have fed two waiters and their families for at least a month. What may have been playing on their minds? Would they have thought of this as an orgy of obscene consumption? 

The thought lingered for a few days until I finally felt compelled to call Haresh Chawla, who is a partner at private equity firm True North and an active angel investor. I have known him from his earlier avatar as group CEO at Network18, a media firm he helped create, and a place I used to work in the past. There were a few reasons I called him. 

The first was that he graduated in management and engineering. But unlike those at that table, his degrees were rooted from institutions in India. The second was that before turning into an investor, he was moulded as an entrepreneur who had first-hand experience at building an enterprise in India out of India. The third is that he is now an active investor. 

What is his investing philosophy? What was I missing out from on the conversation? Why was my voice both unheard and dissed on the table? Why are the two decades I spent documenting first-hand how India operates not of any consequence to the others who have parachuted from elsewhere? Are their experiences superior to mine?

After having heard me out, Chawla reminded me of some thoughts he had articulated earlier last year and over which we have had multiple conversations. He had then suggested that it is naive to think of India as one country. Instead, he argued it is the aggregation of three countries — each of which has its own complexities and dynamics. He called these countries India One, India Two and India Three

Of this, India One comprises anywhere between 150 million and 180 million people and on average, each of its citizens earn Rs30,000 a month. Now, you have to look at those numbers in perspective because this is an average. 

I am a citizen of Indian One. But I earn a lot more than Rs.30,000 a month. It allows me the luxury to afford domestic help at home and a driver to ferry me around. But the conflict I was staring at, Chawla suggested, was because when looked at from the eyes of those who were with me on the table, I appeared to them as part of the so-called great Indian “middle-class". 

I have only one driver and a domestic help. They have multiple helps and multiple drivers and multiple cars to cater to their every need. In the country called India One that they live in, the poor to them are those whose incomes are closer to the average of Rs.30,000. 

Now that is a rather ridiculous way of looking at the entity that is India because there is no taking away from that 30%, or 400-odd million Indians, earn on average of Rs7,000 a month. This is India Two—that part of the population where the waiters tending to the table come from. They offer all the services that India One needs. But for some reason, those who live in India One cannot see the people who live in the country that is India Two. 

Just to get a sense of what those numbers mean, imagine this: If we were to add all the people in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, they would be about 400 million. But we aren’t done with the math yet. India has 1.3 billion people. 

India One and India Two account for only 580 million people. What about the 700 million others? Where are they? Who are they? Why is it that their stories don’t get told? Why are they completely invisible and don’t even make it as waiters who tend to the tables of India One? 

Why do the superbly intelligent people who want to do good and live in India One not see those who live the countries that are India Two and India Three? Is it for a lack of conscience? 

It was inevitable then that my mind go back to a well-documented phenomenon called Wilful Blindness. It formed the theme of a much-acclaimed book and a talk by Margaret Hefernan.

Maria Popova, the curator of a lovely blog called Brain Pickings, summarized the idea beautifully: 

“The concept of Wilful Blindness, Heffernan explains, comes from the law and originates from legislature passed in the 19th century—it’s the somewhat counterintuitive idea that you’re responsible if you could have known, and should have known, something that instead you strove not to see. What’s most uneasy-making about the concept is the implication that it doesn’t matter whether the avoidance of truth is conscious. This basic mechanism of keeping ourselves in the dark, Heffernan argues, plays out in just about every aspect of life, but there are things we can do — as individuals, organizations, and nations—to lift our blinders before we walk into perilous situations that later produce the inevitable exclamation: How could I have been so blind?"

This is a school of thought Chawla subscribes to as well. That is why, as a thumb rule, he said, he consciously tries to stay away from those who are like him. Instead, he tries to seek out those who may hold views different from his and have their ears to the ground. 

“I like people like you in the media business," he said, “because you talk to multiple sets of people and have your ears to the ground." 

I didn’t quite get what he meant then and we hung up. In any case, it was getting late and the both of us thought we’d get into angst-ridden territory.

The next morning, it was inevitable my eyes peer again at voices on social media platforms. It sounded much the same again like it was on the table. Every voice suggested people in politics and media ought to be worried. Because they are no longer the arbitrators of power. 

In the past, they wielded it because there was information asymmetry. But because that asymmetry has since been demolished, I ought to rethink my future. And so, by the only metric we know how to measure the worth of a man—money—I am staring at a bankrupt future. Unless I reinvent myself.

Even as I was thinking around the import of all that, news trickled in that the British philosopher Onora O’Neill has been conferred the prestigious Berguren Prize. It is awarded annually to a thinker whose ideas have shaped self-understanding and advancement in a rapidly changing world. 

It was as good a time as any to revisit a talk by O’Neill on what we don’t understand about trust. This is a theme she has spent a good part of her 76-year-long life thinking and writing about. Allow me to quote some excerpts from her lovely 10-minute talk.

“Why do people think trust has declined? ... But, of course, I can look at the opinion polls, and the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined. When you look at opinion polls across time, there’s not much evidence for that. That’s to say, the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago, principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted...

“But is that good evidence? What opinion polls record is, of course, opinions. What else can they record? So, they’re looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions."

She goes on then to suggest that searching for trust is futile. Instead, we ought to search for the trustworthy. Because while somebody have the right intent, it is entirely possible that individual may be incompetent to perform the task on hand. 

By way of example, while you may trust a schoolteacher with your child, it would be rather stupid to trust her with tending to a garden. She may be incompetent to deal with the task in much the same way that a gardener may be unable to teach a child. 

Therefore, she argues, “… I think that judgement requires us to look at three things. Are they competent? Are they honest? Are they reliable? And if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters, and reliable and honest, we’ll have a pretty good reason to trust them, because they’ll be trustworthy... Trust is the response. Trustworthiness is what we have to judge. And, of course, it’s difficult."

I expended much time thinking about the import of what she said and exchanged some more notes with Haresh Chawla. As things are, this is where I stand.

• While everybody has an opinion and access to a platform, are their voices trustworthy? I’ve expended more than two decades in this business talking to people, honing my craft and trying to keep pace with technology as it evolves. So yes, everybody can voice their opinion. But ceterius paribus, I think my voice, much like that of others who are credible in the business, will continue to resonate. I also know that in keeping with the natural order of the universe, at some point in time, I will have to concede ground to those who are younger, smarter and hungrier than me. But I will not have to concede ground to uninformed voices and opinions. To that extent, my daily bread is protected.

• Pardon my language here. But spending as much time in the business has honed my bullshit detector as well. That is why I did not articulate my opinion in exasperation. Instead, it chose to distance itself from the voices on the table and seek perspective.

  Chawla tells me I did that because I live at an intersection that seeks to listen to multiple voices as opposed to listen in to what resides in an echo chamber. If I were to go by the opinions of those on the table and if I were tuned in only to popular trends on social media, I may have imagined I am out of sync with what is the consensus opinion. 

  But after having listened in to multiple voices and seeking out the trustworthy, I am now convinced of what Bertrand Russell once said: “The fact that an opinion is widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd."

  So, for whatever it is worth, folks like me aren’t going to fade into obscurity. Unless we do something stupid to erode trust built over the years. 

  On the contrary, we will continue to shape the narrative. Because trust is worked upon and earned every day. And it grows, like compound interest. It is something money cannot buy, but is earned by the sweat of the brow, not through trading opportunities, arbitrages hedging on futures, commodities, currencies or passing ridiculous opinions on social media that sound good in echo chambers. 

This article was first published in Mint on Sunday

The now utterly irrelevant TED talks

Like many people, I am among those who derive much joy from listening to TED talks. The format is a compelling one: A great idea presented by an articulate speaker in not more than 18 minutes.

The conferences resonate across the world; speakers take pride in flaunting it as a badge of honour if they have been selected to speak at one; audiences lap up every word of what is being spoken about on stage. What started out in California with some of the world’s most influential thinkers as participants a little more than 25 years ago is now a global phenomenon.

Because these talks took off so well, the organizers thought up TEDx—a TED-like event that can be organized anywhere in the world by a local community. But the organizers carefully curate the speakers, who have to adhere to TED’s format and rules; and if they make the cut there, they stand a chance to go on to the global stage.

As is my wont, when I need a break, I often head to listen to TED in the hope that I may hear something interesting. It was on one such occasion that I stumbled on a talk that sounded incredibly promising. “Why I read a book every day (and you should too): The law of 33%" by Tai Lopez.

Lopez kicks the talk off with a compelling proposition: “Everybody wants the good life, but not everybody gets the good life, right? Imagine for a second. If right now, today, how much more successful you would be if you just started a company 50:50 with Bill Gates as your business partner and he was using every trick of the trade that he used to build Microsoft into one of the biggest companies in the world?

“Imagine how much money you would have in your bank account today—how much more money, I should say—if Warren Buffet was teaching you how to invest in the stock market, showing you what he used to build Berkshire Hathaway into a $140 billion company. Imagine how much happier you’d be today if the Dalai Lama was your personal guide, showing you how to find fulfilment in life, in the little things that most people overlook."

He got my attention right away. I latched on to every word of what he was trying to say because on stage was a man who had just promised me by the end of all that he had to say was I could read a book a day. Between what resides on my shelves and Kindle, I have a few thousand books, a good number of which continue to remain unread—not for lack of interest, but a function of daily exigencies that often take over.

He continued in the same vein and I continued to hear him out: “You should divide up your life and spend 33% of your time around people lower than you. You can mentor them, you can help them. And they will help you back by making you feel good about yourself. Right? It’s good to know somebody’s doing worse than you. That’s that 30%." He followed it up with something about 33% of people who are at your level and ought to be friends. And then there are those in the 33% who are 10-20 years ahead of you. Those, he argues, are the ones who ought to be your mentors. “I call it the 10x Rule," he said with a straight face.

“All right," I muttered to myself. “Come to the point." He finally did.

“How do you read a book a day? Sometimes I take a week. But sometimes, books only have one or two things that are worth reading. In fact, most books only have that." So, Lopez suggests, you take a good look at the cover, then the back of the book, a hard look at the table of contents to figure if there is something in there that matters, flip through the book to see if something else that catches your attention, read it, and you are done.

“See yourself like a gold miner just looking for that one nugget. Then put it back on the shelf." That out of the way, he went on to say something abouts Stoics versus Epicureans. The audience applauded, I nodded my head in appreciation, he soaked it all in, and I was ready to listen to another talk.

This one sounded equally compelling: “How to multiply your time" by Rory Vaden. He sounded all the more credible because one of his books, Take the Stairs, appeared on the New York Times bestseller list in 2012.

Starved as all of us are for quality time to do all of what we want to, Vaden raises a pertinent question. After warming up to the audience later with a heart-warming story of a brown-haired two-year-old girl who wanted her daddy to spend time with her, he launches into the central premise.

“In fact, there is no such thing as time management. You can’t manage time, time continues on whether we like it or not. So, there is no such thing as time management. Really, there is only self-management." Profound, I told myself.

What followed next was a brief history of time management. Iteration one of time management, Varden points out, gained traction in the 1950s and ’60s. The next iteration emerged in the late 1980s led by Stephen Covey. “He gave us something called the Time Management Matrix, where the X-axis was urgency, and the Y-axis was importance, and the beauty about this was that it gave us a system for scoring our tasks, and then based on how they scored in these two areas, we could prioritize tasks, one in front of the other."

That out of the way, he then launched into how he thinks time ought to be managed. “What we have noticed is the emergence of a new type of thinker, somebody that we refer to as a multiplier, and multipliers use what we call three-dimensional thinking. While most people only make decisions based on urgency and importance, multipliers are making a third calculation which is based on significance, and if urgency is how soon does something matter, and importance is how much does it matter, then significance is how long is it going to matter. (…) when we assemble our to-do list, we say: ‘What’s the most important thing I can do today?’ But that is not how multipliers think; multipliers instead ask the question: ‘What can I do today that would make tomorrow better?’ ‘What can I do right now that would make the future better?’ They are making the significance calculation."

I must confess again, after having heard the talk delivered with the kind of conviction he brought to the stage, I told myself there was enough material here to ponder over.

Call it a sudden moment of epiphany if you will, but for whatever inexplicable reason, suddenly scepticism kicked in.

Through all of the 18-odd minutes Lopez was on stage, pardon my expression, he was bullshitting. The core of his argument was this: Look at the cover of a book, read the flap on its back, browse through the table of contents, if anything gets your attention, read it, and you are done. Some more looking around later, and it turned out Lopez is a smooth talker who made a ton of money starting life out as the promoter of a website called Elite Global Dating. It promised to connect rich men from across the world looking for arm candy.

A closer look at Vaden’s talk points to some interesting things. Two slick slides on what the first- and second-generation of time management looked like, he introduces a third one, but with fancy words like “multipliers", “three-dimensional thinking" and “significance calculation". But there is nothing radical he has to say—save what every productivity hack routinely repeats—don’t check email all of the time, focus on the task at hand, make time for the family and other such assorted noises.

My limited point: So, what if his book made it to the NYT bestseller list? Packaged rubbish in any form is packaged rubbish. Surely, surely the millions of people who routinely listen to the few thousand carefully curated talks on TED can’t be so dumb. And whatever happened to the so-called scepticism I was trained to practise as a journalist who routinely listens to an overwhelming number of platitudes?

So, I thought it only appropriate to look a bit harder at what I, like many others, maintained was intelligently curated content. It didn’t take too long to figure out I was hopelessly behind the times. As early as 2013, Harvard Business Review had published a detailed report on all of what was wrong with TED.

It was prompted by a talk titled “Vortex-based mathematics" by Randy Powell, to which a professor based out of Stanford University raised a storm by calling it “Wow. Such f*** b****. I am a theoretical physicist who uses (and teaches) the technical meaning of many of the jargon terms that he’s throwing out. He is simply doing a random word association with the terms."

The report prompted a good many news outlets to investigate the machinations of what is widely considered a place for the world’s intellectual and elite to congregate and discuss ideas of global significance. When I last checked, the entity that is TED earns upwards of $45 million in revenue. At the very least, participants pay $8,500 to be a part of this three-day event held at plush locations, in spite of which the speakers are not paid. Mind you, not for lack of funds.

Having gone through all of the literature and criticism of the event that is TED, I cannot help but agree with a review of the event by Matt Robinson of the New Statesman.

He posited events like these are all about making people feel good about themselves—that they have emerged cleverer and more knowledgeable; that they are part of an elite group that engaged with the world’s finest minds to make the world a better place to live. “TED’s slogan shouldn’t be ‘Ideas worth spreading’, it should be: ‘Ego worth paying for’," the critique concludes.

 am not suggesting here that all of the content that exists on TED.com is rubbish. There is some compelling content. But the hype around it and the overwhelming amount of nonsense that has infiltrated the portal offers a strong case to give up watching TED talks that promise you the world in 18-minute nuggets. There is no easy way out, but to read more and listen in to livelier, deeper conversations.

If that sounds like hard work, then turn to TED, a “monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers", as described by the globally acclaimed statistician and author of The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb.

This was first published in Mint on Jan 16, 2016

Big Data and the India Story

Distance provides perspective. I figured that on the airplane back home to Mumbai earlier last week after a short trip through the Middle East. I was mandated to talk to a select audience behind closed doors about the India story. 

The reason I was among those invited was because for two years now, my colleague N.S. Ramnath and I have been researching the ecosystem evolving around Project Aadhaar. Between the both of us, we have been interviewing multiple sets of people and asking questions like what does this means for India, what may the geopolitical implications of it all be, how should people think about it and why does it attract such fierce reactions from people. One of the outcomes of this research is intended to be the first in a series of books that Founding Fuel has commissioned.

On the back of primary research and conversations with people who hold diverse points of view, I felt compelled to assert when on stage that it is true that multiple hiccups in the project exist. For instance, there is much political bickering over which party must be seen as the one that gave legitimacy to Project Aadhaar. Then there are government departments falling head over heel over to please those in power and make it mandatory that citizens link their accounts to this identity number, by a deadline that sounds out of whack, if they need uninterrupted access to services. 

It is inevitable then that civil society raise their voice. In any case, making it mandatory violates the spirit of Project Aadhaar. That is because it was originally crafted on the back of what technologists call a “consent architecture”. Simply put, it ought not to be imposed on anyone or made mandatory. That is also why I believe the judiciary will step in at some point. 

That is also what makes me optimistic about the outcomes of Project Aadhaar, and the precedents it can set for the world to follow on how must an individual’s fundamental right to privacy be protected in the longer run. 

Why? Because when examined deeply, Project Aadhaar combines, on the one hand, the idealism of people like Richard Stallman, whom I have had philosophical differences with in the past, and on the other hand, the pragmatism of Linus Torvalds. Between the both of them, they made open source software, collaboration and Linux palatable propositions. Google, for instance, has Linux at its heart and most mobile phones in the world are powered by Linux at their cores. 

Men like Stallman have always argued that some things like art, music and software must be “free”. Free like freedom, not free like free beer—as he likes to put it. It took me a long while wrap my head around his ideas.

It is much the same thing with Aadhaar and India Stack. That is why it was not difficult to figure why questions from the audience were fast and furious. While there, I thought it was because they were stunned by the audacity of attempting to provide a unique identity to over 1.3 billion people. If I were an outsider, I would have felt much the same way too. 

Before we dwell on the “India” story, what about the other story?

Most Americans I spoke to while in the Middle East—all of whom were from the diplomatic corps and CEOs of various entities—are terribly embarrassed about their president, Donald Trump. So much so that one of the key speakers who was part of the former president Bill Clinton’s administration, served as an advisor to President Barack Obama, and is now part of a global lobbying group, went on to paint a dismal picture of the US. That is why he said he is among those who are at work to initiate impeachment proceedings around Trump’s presidency. 

Then there is the China story. I continue to wonder: how does China continue to grow at a scorching pace? What can India do to catch up? Some Chinese officials and diplomats based out of Beijing condescendingly nodded their heads at my naivety for imagining all is well there. 

In conversations over dinner, and on the sidelines, they suggested the China story is a hyped one. And that the truth does not get reported. The stories we read are on the back of numbers vetted by the state apparatus. I pushed some, whom I thought may be amenable to open up, and asked what they think real growth rates are like. Nobody seemed to know—but in their reckoning, China is in a recession. But no one is willing to say that in the public domain in as many words. Instead, it is couched as a question on whether or not China may be headed into one.

As for those in the UK and Europe, they seem utterly devastated at how things have come to such a pass. British diplomats articulated their concerns over how wretched the economy looks. And those from Germany and other parts of Europe suggested they had never imagined a time would come when Europe would reach the impasse it has. Through their eyes, they cannot comprehend why Indians want to migrate to their part of the world.

In the Middle East, where we were having these conversations, local diplomats thought it a good place to have a picnic. But when heavy lifting is called for, the big boys from the White House swing into action and issue instructions on what is to be done. But everyone is acutely aware that they live in a filter bubble, and that the gleaming glass facades do not represent the political and economic morass the region has descended into. 

Multiple fissures between various kingdoms exist, power struggles between them have to be mediated upon, economic battles are being fought in the region, and new sources of revenues for each kingdom must be thought up because oil wells have practically dried up. 

That is why many seemed most curious about India and what I had to say. On the one hand, their newspapers are gushing about “this thing you guys are implementing called Aadhaar and India Stack”. Then on the other hand, reports emanating from India argue it is part of a larger conspiracy on part of the Indian government to “snoop on its citizens”. 

What sense are they to make of it?

My submission is this. That, much like my understanding of what a lovely place the US and Europe is basis rosy pictures painted on multiple media platforms, Aadhaar and India Stack as reported from India is also a badly reported story.

By way of example, many critics argue the system isn’t a perfect one because it excludes potential beneficiaries from the system. The most recent cases of pig-headed officials throwing the rule books at the underprivileged in Jharkhand to deny them subsidies is a case in point. But this argument must be scrutinized. 

Unlike most developed democracies where every citizen is conferred with a unique identity, like a Social Security Number (SSN), for instance, in the US, the Indian system is such that people can acquire multiple identities. 

If perspective may be needed, it is entirely possible to subvert the current ecosystem and tax assesses can acquire multiple Permanent Account Numbers (PAN). Incidentally, those who are taxed live at the top of the economic pyramid in India. They live in a country called India One with a population of 180 million people on the outside. But because those who live in this country can acquire multiple identities, one of the many outcomes in unreliable data. Add to this ingenious accounting practices and people can get away without paying taxes. An undesirable outcome of this is a low tax base. By the government’s admission, the latest numbers have it that a little over 22 million people filed tax returns in India. How, and where, did the others disappear? 

It doesn’t stop at that those living in the country that is India One get away without paying taxes, but exploit loopholes in the system to acquire multiple identities to appropriate benefits that may otherwise accrue to those who really need it and live in India Two and Three. 

It is entirely possible that somebody appropriated the identities of those in Jharkhand and kept the subsidies that were due to them. Our ground reporting has shown this is indeed possible. Officials on their part can go the extra mile and throw every rule book to cover their backside.

I can go on and on—but to plug leakages of these kinds, the surest place to begin with is confer every citizen with a unique identity that cannot be duplicated and that benefits be transferred directly. 

That said, it is also inevitable that when technology is deployed at such scale, some will get excluded. Those who have worked on the system ground up are cognizant of these issues and are at work to plug the loopholes and will follow Moore’s Law—that technologically-driven systems will improve exponentially every 18 months. This law has stood the test of time for 50 years now. 

Then there are those who argue that while Aadhaar may be a good way to deliver subsidies, what is the case to link it to PAN cards? I think both are connected. Enhancing state capacity to implement a progressive tax system gives it additional resources to spend on safety nets for the poor.

To that extent, the conversations Ramnath and I have had suggest that this is a model of development unique to India and one that is evolving. The significance of the data it generates must be looked at through the eyes of an underprivileged Indian citizen. 

As for the much-amplified debate around privacy, these are stories that come without an understanding of the technical architecture of the project. Here again, Ramnath and I believe the regulatory authorities and the Supreme Court will intervene and cut past the bluster. I’ll come to that in a bit and try to illustrate why they must do it urgently. Government departments must be reminded they are in office to run a marathon for the people of India—and not running a sprint to please those in power.

The economic case for data

The American model of wealth creation is capitalism. This is of the kind where winner takes all. But it is a brutal one that leaves those at the middle and bottom of the pyramid to fend for themselves. To give the system credit though, this economic system has created spectacularly successful entities like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google (or the FANG quartet, if you will) and Uber. The problem with this system now though is that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few. 

Then there is capitalism of the kind practiced in Western Europe. It tries to walk the middle path between naked capitalism on the one hand and social markets on the other hand. On paper, all of us like it. But it cannot be scaled. Basis trips through Western Europe and multiple conversations with friends with whom I spend time when there, I have witnessed first-hand the exasperation writ on their faces at the kind of taxes they pay. When past their prime, in their reckoning, what the state provides them by way of welfare isn’t in line with what they spent busting their backsides off. If they’d done as much time in the US, they’d have paid far less in taxes, and may have been better off. 

In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, a part of the world through which I have again had a chance to travel through extensively and interact with people, I have friends who live a brutal life. When looked through their eyes, the Western European model looks like a good one. Work five days a week, get paid leave, the state takes care of you when unwell, and life is good. On their part, the Americans who live at the middle and bottom of the economic pyramid seem to concur too.

But when looked at from the eyes of the Chinese authorities, models like these work in the US and Europe because the governments there deal with a barely a few hundred million people at most. They have no clue what it is like to manage a country that has in excess of a billion people. 

In their mind, to get things to work in China, everything must be imposed. That is why they issue orders without any qualms. The authorities there thought the American quartet of FANG and Uber are not good for China. And that they must create their own ecosystem and narrative to dominate the world. The outcome is a model that has created formidable creatures like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT). It is now a trinity that is challenging FANG. 

As for Indians, another bunch of over a billion people, they seem to look like poor cousins who see the FANG quartet and the BAT trinity as creatures worth emulating. But like I said earlier, the FANG quartet was created in a free market where winner takes all. And the BAT trinity is imposed on the back of orders. 

Emerging evidence suggest both are flawed. In a country like India where the population is as dense as it is, inequality as high, and the political system is a democracy, neither will a winner-takes-all-model work nor can a top-down approach be imposed.

Consider the constraints, to begin with, from a geopolitical prism. The FANG quartet and Uber in the US are private enterprises. It is inevitable then that the winner keeps all. This includes the platforms they build, the data that emerges from it, all value that accrues out of it—including the money and the data that resides on it. It is a free market. In a BAT trinity, the state decides and the masses comply. So, both of these are options that don’t sound viable.

But India seems to be uniquely placed in that civil society is loud and vibrant. It is also uniquely placed in that it will not allow any private enterprise to dominate public discourse—nor will it allow the state to impose its authority on the people. 

Between these two stories, there is another narrative taking shape. It traces its roots to the idealism of Stallman, the pragmatism of Torvalds and lessons learnt from mistakes made in the US and China. The outcome of which is a model called India Stack, of which Aadhaar is one component.

To understand what India Stack means, imagine a lovely highway. If the government builds one, that development around it will happen is inevitable. But to drive a vehicle on it though, you need to have a license. In much the same way, India Stack is a digital highway. How you choose to build a business on the highway is open to your imagination. To use this highway though, you need a unique identity—and that is your Aadhaar number. 

The intent behind building his “digital highway” is because unlike other parts of the world where “highways” exist to deliver public services and goods to people, what exists in India is something that is either broken or non-existent. To get 1.3 billion people into a formal economy, plug leakages of all kinds, and deliver seamless services, smart solutions lie in adopting the digital route. 

Now, the thing with all platforms (or highways, if you will) built using digital technologies is that it is prized because it contains data about people. Minus data, it is worth nothing. 

What has gone unreported about India Stack is that this framework is a unique one. It allows citizens to own their data and port it to another “highway”, or from one platform to another—an idea that no private entity or government is comfortable with. Not just that, business models are being tested around this idea—all of which are uniquely Indian ones and can be exported to other parts of the world.

We, the people of India

What lends legitimacy to this platform now is that the Supreme Court of India has ruled that privacy is a fundamental right of every Indian citizen. If the architecture of India Stack, of which Aadhaar is the unique number you are identified by, is followed in letter and spirit, this is an easy order to comply with. 

By way of example, let’s say, you apply for a loan. The bank doesn’t know your name. Why does it need to know you name after all? All it needs to know is whether you are eligible for a loan or not. To do that, it needs to access some documents and your credit history. Convention has it that your presence is needed at the bank and documents be presented. 

In the proposed dispensation, only a number needs to be presented at the bank. This can be sent digitally and you may permit the bank to see the documents it may need to view to examine your credit history. If they think it good enough, they can go ahead and process your application. You have the latitude to offer your document to multiple banks at once as well so they can bid for your business. Process done, you can withdraw permissions for them to look at your data again.

What India has to now decide is that if privacy is indeed a fundamental right, then if I decide to move from, say Facebook, to some other platform, can Facebook retain my data from the past? If Indian authorities rule that Facebook (or any entity for that matter) cannot retain my data from the past, and that it belongs to me, the business models of these entities will have to be re-looked at. As things are, it is built on the back of what it knows about me from the past. 

To cite another instance, if you own a fitness tracking device and you stop using the device, the device will not just have to stop tracking your activities, but must hand over your data from the past as well to you. It will then know nothing about you. This is privacy in its purest sense.

On his last visit to Bengaluru, when Bill Gates heard of this, he remarked, “This can kill Facebook.”

When articulated in as many words, the idea sounded unsettling to the Americans, alien to the Europeans, and had those from the Middle East wondering whatever may the implications of all this be. 

I had to leave it at that as an Indian, I stand at an inflection point. Because the issue on hand here is, while the Supreme Court has ruled in favour of privacy as a fundamental right, there is no taking away from the fact that much work remains to be done.

By way of example, as things are, you and I live in the Wild West and much of our future depends on what call the regulatory authorities take. If some more perspective may be needed on why this is the Wild West, the other day, for instance, I saw an ad by a leading financial services company that has just gotten into offering personal loans as well. Until now, it has done very well for itself. The ad claimed if I share my Aadhaar number with them, it can check the backend and tell me in an instant if I am eligible for a loan or not. No paperwork. 

This sounded very disconcerting. All my research has suggested Aadhaar has a very narrow scope. It is a “foundational identity number”. All it does is to tell the other party “I am whom I claim to be”. 

It contains no other information. If they want more details about my name, address, gender and date of birth, they can ask me for those details. I may consent to allow them to view that data stored in an electronic locker called the DigiLocker for a specific period of time. But they cannot download the data, copy it, or disseminate it. That is the how India Stack is architected. So, if anybody suggests they can tell me I am eligible for something basis my Aadhaar number, either their promise is a false one or my research is off the mark. 

Curiosity got the better of me and I clicked the link. A page opened that asked for my mobile number. A one-time password (OTP) was sent to authenticate if the number indeed belonged to me. That done, a page opened up that prompted me to share personal details like where do I live, how much do I earn, and other such assorted things. I filled in some random details. 

When done with sharing, a minute or so later, a screen popped up to suggest I am not eligible for a personal loan. Fair enough. I’m not eligible. That is the company’s call. 

But the larger question here is: what happens to the data it collected about me, from me? It went beyond prompting for my Aadhaar number. Instead, it used my naiveté to use Aadhaar as a tool to willingly part with details about me it may otherwise not have access to. There was no caveat or fine print on what the company plans to do with the data. Will it trade in the data? 

Turns out, it already has. A few hours later, a direct sales agent (DSA) representing a large private bank called me on my mobile phone to pitch a personal loan. And ironically enough, another DSA representing the bank I have my primary account with called to offer me a personal loan and a pitch to open an account as well. The offerings they had was tailored basis the data I had shared a while ago. 

Surely this is proof that my data has been “traded” in violation of the spirit of Aadhaar and India Stack? Regulatory authorities must grapple with the issues on hand. Can I sue the firm that traded my data?

That is why I am keen to hear what the final report of the Srikrishna Committee has to recommend. Ramnath and I believe this report will find its way to the Supreme Court, which in turn may have to rule on the fine print. 

There is much at stake here and I desperately want to the Supreme Court of India to rule in my favour. I don’t want my fundamental right to privacy to remain just on paper. I want to have the latitude in a democracy to move the court and sue an entity that traded my data for a few pennies in the open market. It has compromised me.

Between the Srikrishna Committee and the Supreme Court, I hope they will protect my rights as a citizen of a free country. If they do that, it will have a significant bearing on not just protecting my fundamental rights as a citizen, but to business models that will emerge out of India.

Even as all of these conversations carried on, I had my eye on the gentleman who had delivered the address about Trump’s shenanigans. He was surrounded by many who wanted to talk to him. On his way out, I managed to follow him through the lobby, introduced myself and asked if I may have a word with him. He heard me out for a while, the implications of Aadhaar, the potential of India Stack as a threat to the FANG quartet and its potential implications on big American businesses. I thought I could hear something go off in his head. He got the import of what I was trying to say.

He gave me his business card with his co-ordinates on it, introduced me to his press attaché and suggested we speak on the phone at a later date. This is the kind of thing that has much at stake for too many people across the world. Fingers crossed, the Supreme Court will rule in favour of the people of India.

First published in Mint in December 2017. Copyrights with HT Media