Dharma -Individual social responsibility

Author Gurcharan Das has very interesting article in the Times of India about functions of capitalism and revisit of Corporate Social Responsibility in India. What interest me more is the below para:

"Although two decades have passed since the reforms of 1991, capitalism is still trying to find a comfortable home. Indians still believe that the market mostly helps the rich. They do not distinguish between being pro-market and pro-business. Being pro-market is to believe in competition, which helps keep prices low, raises the quality of products, and serves everyone. Being pro-business is to allow politicians to distort the market through excessive intervention, resulting in ‘crony capitalism’. The result of this confusion is the timidity of reform, excessive number of dysfunctional public sector companies, and a nation that is not performing to potential."

Poems and Books

Great Tamil poet Subramania Bharati wrote: "We will learn both scripture and science We will explore both heavens and oceans We will unravel the mysteries of the moon And we will sweep our streets clean too"

The above poem was quoted by the President of India in his address to the nation on August, 14.


Nobel prize winning scientist Prof. S. CHANDRASEKHAR wrote a poem in 1993  titled "Gods", the poem starts:

"Secularism has only been on our lips.

In its most modem form,

It says not what it does

And does not what it says."

and ends with the following lines

"Man’s collective consciousness

Runs riot when stripped

Of reason, and at journey’s end.

When culture is consumed at religion’s crossroad

In the name and altar of righteousness."

What he says in between are the lines about Gods.

Author Gurcharan Das has listed books which are important to read in some or other ways to recount the India and other narratives. The list is here.

Author and writer Aravindan Neelakandan has listed seven books which will change your views about India's of last seven decades. The list is here.

Government has never been central to out live-OLD Draft

That is all.

Here is must read article published in today's Financial Express with many insights from Gurcharan Das.

15-volume series on the history of Indian business

Gurcharan Das talks about a 15-volume series being published by Penguin on the history of Indian business

In this interview with Mint Mr Das says:

• I raise a question on the notion of property. What was it? In many countries the king owned everything. But in India, the Arthashastra says very clearly to the king, “You don’t own the kingdom. You have a bhaga and it’s shath-bhaga (one sixth).” In other words, that is the moral, the right tax rate, for a kingdom. And so, whenever kingdoms had higher tax rates, such as in the Mughal empire, when the tax rates went up to 40% and 50%... they collapsed. That’s a lesson that India pretty much forgot for 40-50 years. Our tax rates during Indira Gandhi’s time had gone to 97.5%

Thankless Polity

Indian economists especially the one who is leaning towards Congress by default don't tell us their heartless-gut-feelings. However, here is one such good belief:

From Professor Arvind Panagariya interview:

• … even the minority governments of IK Gujral and HD Deve Gowda were much better than the UPA. So this whole idea that coalition doesn’t let you do reforms is an eyewash. The larger problem is sitting within the Congress party. A lot of the Congress men don’t want reforms. Congress leadership today is extremely sceptical of reforms. And of course their coalition is extremely mismanaged.
• …even the BJP did not do the nation a service by forcing Sonia Gandhi to appoint Manmohan Singh as the PM.                                              

Excerpts from Gurcharan Das’s latest book titled IndiaGrows at Night: A Liberal Case for Strong State.

• Merchants and bazaars, however, emerged even earlier as centres of exchange in the towns of the Indus Valley (3300–1500 BCE) or even in the Neolithic age, soon after Indians first engaged in agriculture and there was a surplus. As Jean-Jacques Rousseau has taught us, inequality also had its origins with the birth of agriculture because with it was born private property.

Tavleen Singh point out that the:

• "..truth about the incalculable losses made in our socialist decades by a public sector that almost never made a profit."

Inheritance of frightening

"..millions of young Indians who have risen in recent years and are now part of the confused, upwardly mobile, post-reform internet generation, the question has a new urgency..."

“If Indian education and scholarship continue along their current trajectory,” writes Sheldon Pollock, the brilliant professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University, “the number of citizens capable of reading and understanding the texts and documents of the classical era will very soon approach a statistical zero. India is about to become the only major world culture whose literary patrimony, and indeed history, are in the hands of scholars outside the country.” Das's full article is here.

Blinking links

Swapan Dasgupta: "Everyone loves a good poverty business" India except the poverty stricken on poor human being.

• "It certainly didn’t need a familiarity with complex econometric models and either Keynes or Hayek to realize that the Planning Commission’s extrapolation from the Suresh Tendulkar method of poverty measurement was just another example of economists living in a make-believe wonderland. The wise men of Yojana Bhavan had once again demonstrated to the public’s satisfaction that after lies and damned lies comes statistics."

Gurcharan Das on, "Duty or revenge":

• On a sweltering afternoon on September 29, 2011, principal district judge S. Kumarguru began to hand out sentences. There was a hushed silence in the packed courtroom in Dharmapuri, Tamil Nadu. He began at 3.30 pm but could not finish until 4.40 pm because he had to read aloud the names of 215 government officials. Among those convicted were 126 forest officials, 84 policemen and five revenue officials. Seventeen were convicted of rape and they were sentenced from seven to 17 years; others received from one to three years on counts of torture, unlawful restraint, looting and misuse of office. Had 54 of the accused not died in meantime, the sentencing would have taken longer.
• Early on June 20, 1992, four teams of government officials descended on the adivasi hamlet of Vachathi, near Sathyamangalam forest, also home to the dreaded brigand Veerappan. They assembled the villagers beneath a neem tree and let loose a reign of terror as they searched for smuggled sandalwood. They picked up 18 teenage girls and dragged them into the forest, where they raped them repeatedly. They only brought them back at 9 pm.
• Claiming a haul of sandalwood from the riverbed, the officials then put 133 villagers in jail. How does the human mind begin to cope with this soul-numbing news? My first reaction was horror at the rape of teenage girls by men in uniform. Second, was a feeling of relief and catharsis when punishment was meted out to powerful men. The third emotion was outrage at those who allowed the case to drag for 19 years. Then questions arose in my mind. How could this happen in the first place? And was this not as serious an act of corruption as the 2G scam? And why was the nation quiet?

Government has never been central to out lfie

That is all.

Here is must read article published in today's Financial Express with many insights from Gurcharan Das.

Successfully silence

The problem of silence is at the heart of today's political crisis. The rage of the Indian public is over an honest Prime Minister who seems to be presiding over one of the most corrupt governments in recent Indian history . In these dark days, people have desperately wanted to clutch on to an honest man. They found one in selfless, ethical Manmohan Singh. 

Das on Cities:

• Because of the harsh, ugly reality of urban squalor, we try to escape in pastoral dreams of the countryside. Mahatma Gandhi, a man of the city, had such a romantic view before B.R. Ambedkar, corrected him: 'What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?'

Liberty vs Statism

Mr.Das writes:

"As the years went by, I discovered that Nehru’s economic path was taking us to a dead end. I became a manager in a private company and soon found myself trapped in a thick jungle of Kafkaesque bureaucratic controls of the Licence Raj. Having set out to create socialism, we had created statism."

Nothing is quite perfect in this world and certainly not human beings

Das on dharma in twenty-first century

Ayn Rand and Nehru

Gurcharan Das writes:

• I quickly forgot Ayn Rand when I went to college and read serious philosophy. When her name came up in undergraduate conversations, I dismissed her as a writer of potboilers and propaganda. Like everyone around me in the mid-1960s, I passionately believed in Nehru's dream of a modern and just India. But as the years went by, I discovered that Nehru's economic path was taking us to a dead-end. Having set out to create socialism, he had created statism. Later when I was working as a manager I found myself caught in the thick jungle of Kafkaesque bureaucratic controls, a story that I have told in India Unbound.

some readings

• The mysterious Mr Gandhi
• On moral luck and human vulnerability

SLW diminishes us daily

From Gurcharan Das valid argument:

• The real problem,.., was not with our economic model, but with poor governance. As a result, we have public squalor amidst private affluence. So, don’t blame growth. Blame the state’s inability to deliver public services, especially in remote tribal areas, where the police and forest officers tend to be rapacious.

• Most of us who call ourselves liberals in India are tolerant of dissenting attitudes and oppose interference in the affairs of others but we do not generally oppose state intervention on ideological grounds.

• We do not oppose the public sector for threatening our liberty, as Americans do. We oppose it for its inefficiency. Our problem is not of the “what” but of the “how”.

• The future of India and China is mercifully no longer dependent on ideology. The race between the two hangs on the more practical question: Can India fix its governance before China fixes its politics? Because the state has failed to deliver in India, our policy makers increasingly seek pragmatic public-private partnerships. But, this is a slow process, for people are still suspicious of the market. They may not seek moral perfection in public life but they tend to impute good motives to government officials. They think businessmen make money for their own good and markets loot the unfortunate. They have trouble in seeing that the pursuit of profits can lift the general standard of living of the whole population. The idea is too counter-intuitive. Hence, SLW commentators are always popular on TV.

Cut the nexus

Gurcharan Das’s IPL and capitalism

• …….markets are natural to human beings. Banias and bazaars have been with us for thousand of years, ever since Indians first engaged in agriculture and there was a surplus. Our first towns in the Indus valley emerged as centres of exchange. But markets are not the same thing as the market system, which requires that moneymaking be regarded as respectable. Historically, commerce has had a bad odour in all societies. In India, the merchant was third in the caste hierarchy. Even though we have the wondrous spectacle of thousands of young Indians starting business ventures today, the idea that their struggle for personal gain might actually promote the common is too bizarre. This is behind the animus against the big sums in IPL. Even sophisticated Indians distrust the market, perhaps because no one is in charge. No wonder Samuel Johnson said, “There is nothing which requires more to be illustrated by philosophy than trade does.”
• Modi’s entrepreneurship necessarily involved assuming risks and valuing novelty, characteristics that are not common in a stable society. He was a brash new kid around the block, and he will admit that entrepreneurial success does not lead to social acceptance. The economic historian, Jean Baechler, tells us that in 6th century BC, firms in Babylon took in money deposits, issued cheques, made loans at interest, and invested in agricultural and industrial enterprises. Yet they were looked down upon. All agrarian civilisations have looked down upon merchant capitalists and commercial activities have been universally held in low esteem.
• It was only in the High Middle Ages that this changed, and capitalists were finally given social acceptance and protection from the predation of the state, as Deepak Lal argues in Unintended Consequences. It was due to a legal revolution in the 11th century when Pope Gregory VII in 1075 put the church above the state. The resulting church-state created the whole legal and administrative infrastructure required by a full-fledged market economy. This led to the rise of the West and its divergence from the rest of the world.
• India after 1991 has joined in this capitalist adventure, and with vigour. Because India got democracy before capitalism, the critique of capitalism began in the 1950s even before full-blown capitalism arrived in 1990s. Hence, players in the capitalist game have a responsibility to behave with restraint until capitalism establishes a comfortable home. IPL’s irregularities have not helped. But having said that, it is impressive that the critique of IPL has been constructive by and large, and shows we have come a long way in our attitudes. The challenge before regulators remains how to bring transparency in the market without killing the animal spirits of the likes of Lalit Modi.

The Dharma bums

Gurcharan Das on why be good?

• “The only thing certain, the Mahabharata tells us, is that kala (time or death) is ‘always cooking us’ and that the truth about dharma is hidden in a cave.
• After six years with the Mahabharata, I have come to realise that despite its dark, chaotic theme, and despite ironic reminders about how difficult it is to be good, the Mahabharata is able to snatch victory in the character of its unhero, Yudhishthira. He teaches that it is part of the human condition to also aspire. He shows that it is possible for good to triumph even in a time of cosmic destructiveness, making us realise that the theme of the Mahabharata is not war but peace.”

It’s not the dilemma everywhere, are they?

I had an opportunity to attend and listen to Mr Gurcharan Das’s lecture which he gave before the launch of his new book “The Difficult of Being Good On the Subtle Art of Dharma”

Mr Das read his lecture (with a link to two Rajus: one he encountered in a village in Tamil Nadu in the 1990s and another one is in jail now and almost everybody knows) which he later posted in his blog as “Adam Smith's Dharma"

Some excrepts from his book published in the today’s The Hindu:

“I had studied the great books of the West during college but I had never read the Indian classics. The closest I had come was to take Daniel Ingalls’ Sanskrit classes at Harvard as an undergraduate. Now, 40 years later, I yearned to go back and read the texts of classical India, if not in the original, at least with a scholar of Sanskrit nearby.

What blacken our days are the insistent reminders of governance failure, hanging over us like Delhi’s smog. I am not only thinking of corruption in its usual sense — of a politician who is caught taking a bribe. My anguish comes from something else—from a recent national survey that found that one out of four teachers in a government primary school is absent and one out of four is not teaching. Another study found that two out of five doctors do not show up at state primary health centers and that 69 per cent of the medicines are stolen. A cycle rickshaw driver in Kanpur routinely pays a sixth of his daily earnings in bribes to the police. A farmer in an Indian village cannot hope to get a clear title to his land without the humiliation of bribing a revenue official. One out of five members of the Indian parliament elected in 2004 had criminal charges against him; one in eighteen had been accused of murder or rape.

It was a stray remark of the poet, A.K. Ramanujan, which finally pushed me to Chicago. “If you don’t experience eternity at Benares,” he said, “you will at Regenstein.” He was referring to the Regenstein Library with its fabulous collection of South Asian texts and its array of great Sanskrit scholars.

…moral blindness an intractable human condition, or can we change it? Some of our misery is the result of the way the state also treats us, and can we re-design our institutions to have a more accountable government? I have sought answers to these questions in the epic’s elusive concept of dharma, and my own search for how we ought to live has been this book’s motivating force.”

If you have not read poet, A.K. Ramanujan’s works at least you should read one of his great and famous essay on “Is there an Indian way of Thinking? An Informal Essay”.

He thunders the reader’s throat to ponder the way in which he had described which is marvelous.

The State, Morality and Capitalism and Mahabharata

On 15 July 2007 Gurcharan Das wrote a piece in TOI titled “Capitalist morals” which not only will raise your eyebrow but will give you how The State in the Independent India has been in “economic loss from Nehru's decision to place the State at the 'commanding heights' of the economy.” and more importantly “We don't realise how much damage Nehruvian socialism has done to our moral character. Our reforms are rightly shrinking government's role in business, but it will take much longer to rebuild character.”

To save the reader’s time, ready reference and for a record also I am posting the full piece below!

Capitalist morals

Gurcharan Das15 July 2007, 03:26 am IST Times of India

• “In a meeting of the board of directors that I joined recently, the company disclosed that it had paid a bribe to recover an overdue payment from the government. My first reaction was: Holy cow, how did I land in this unholy mess! I wondered about my responsibilities as an independent director. Should I resign from the board? Do we sack the managing director?
• Seventy percent of the company's sales came from this government customer, who had always received 2% of the invoice under the table for expediting payments. The bribe was shared by many state employees. Our new MD, who had joined a year ago, refused to pay the bribe.
• As a result, the company's bills were not paid for nine months. The MD tried everything — cajoling, political influence, cutting off supplies — but nothing worked. One painful morning he found that the company was bankrupt and would cease operations in 48 hours and 829 people would lose their jobs. He closed his eyes, said a prayer, and ordered the bribe to be paid. Thus, he saved the company but disclosed the improper payment to the board's audit committee.
• "Why doesn't this problem occur with your private sector customers?" I asked. The MD replied that in the private sector, it is somebody's money — the founder's or shareholders'. Hence, accountants and auditors are vigilant, and no one dares. But it is no one's money in the government. If supplies stop because of non-payment, no one cares. No one is accountable. He is right, I thought. I have been a director or consultant to lots of companies. I have never heard of bribing a private sector customer. If you are unlucky enough to do business with the government, you always have to bribe someone.
• The board decided that morning to close its government business. Sadly, 390 workers lost their jobs. I felt guilty, but i think we did the right thing. If you have to work, you might as work honestly. We are aware of the missed opportunities and the economic loss from Nehru's decision to place the State at the 'commanding heights' of the economy. We don't realise how much damage Nehruvian socialism has done to our moral character. Our reforms are rightly shrinking government's role in business, but it will take much longer to rebuild character.
• Are people honest only because of the fear of punishment? Without checks would people behave like Duryodhana in the Mahabharata? Modern social scientists assume that people are only motivated by 'self-interest'. But is that true? If a child is in danger, don't we have a natural desire to rush and save it? Adam Smith called this sentiment 'sympathy' in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. Rousseau called it 'pity' in his classic, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
• We are not purely selfish, but our public institutions have to hold individuals accountable. In our case, accountability is eroded because our idealistic labour laws relied on the worker's 'good' nature and his superior's 'bad' nature. Hence, there isn't quick punishment for corruption in the government (while you are sacked in the hour in private companies.)
• Institutions have to depend both on the 'good' and 'bad' in human beings. If one is cautious and re-designs government only on selfish motives, you might erode whatever public spirit that exists. But ours was the opposite mistake — we relied on too much public spirit. To restore accountability now you don't need new solutions. Just adopt the accountability systems of high performing governments like Canada and Australia. Even better, follow the recommendations of our own administrative reforms commissions.”

Other readings:

From his new book release and an article on the book:

The difficulty of being good by Gurcharan Das 25 January 2009, Times of India

• “Remember, there are crooks in every society, and they will get around the most fool-proof systems. So, don’t try to reform the system — it will only create more red tape and kill the animal spirits of capitalism. The important thing is to quickly get to the truth, and put the guilty behind bars. Ideally, make the crooks sing and book their political protectors as well. Don’t blame liberalisation either — the answer is more reform, not less, in order to break the nexus between politicians and business in the unreformed sectors of our economy.”

The Dharma of Capitalism by Gurcharan Das 22 April 2009, Wall Street Journal Asia

• “If envy is the sin of socialism, greed is the sin of capitalism. As capitalist nations grow, the resulting wealth creates enervating influences. Generations of savers are replaced by spenders. Ferocious competition is a feature of the free market and it can be corrosive. But it is also an economic stimulant that promotes human welfare. The subtle art of dharma tries to strike the right balance between healthy and unhealthy competition.”

Yudhi·shthira’s answer comes as a surprise:

In times of trouble one’s duty alters. When one’s livelihood

is disrupted and one is totally poverty-stricken, one

should wish for other means to carry out one’s prescribed

duties.… which means that in dire situations one may

perform normally improper acts. (CSL V.28.3-5)

Liberal attitude and Dilemma

Gurcharan Das writes in the TOI “I feel sad that so many boys and girls in India are growing up rootless, and they will never have access to these forbidden fruits of pleasure.”