Deserving Need

I often think about charitable giving. Giving, not as an act of generosity alone, but that which rises above the need to fulfill a moral incentive to an act of promoting fairness. Most of us would like the world to be fair, and know that it is not, and this makes thoughtful giving important.

The appropriateness of the act of giving can be viewed from the standpoint of the giver as well as the recipient. From the perspective of the giver, the essence of thoughtful giving is summarized well in a verse from the Upanishads:

"Shraddheya deyam (Give with faith)
Ashraddheya adeyam (Otherwise do not give)
Shriya deyam (Give generously)
Bhiya deyam (Give with fear)
Hriya deyam (Give with humility)
Samvida deyam (Give with the knowledge of the purpose of your gift)."

On the other hand, from the receiver's perspective, the purpose of a gift is that it should improve the receiver's condition. It is too easy to make a gift that helps someone in the short term while hurting the receiver's prospects in the long run. As the old saying goes:
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime."
Unfortunately, if we give a person a fish a few times, that person will develop an expectation of receiving fish, even making it harder to teach that person to fish.

In other words, the existence of need, while necessary, sometimes isn't sufficient to warrant generosity. Only in certain conditions is a need a deserving need. One of the clearest examples of deserving need arises out of birth inequality - children born in circumstances where they cannot be raised are beyond doubt both needy and deserving.

Birth inequality reminds me of Parivaar - an organization whose progress I have been following for several years. The founder of Parivaar made an unusual choice in life - he graduated from a top engineering school, then did an MBA from a top management school, and then deviated from the paths of most of his peers by founding Parivaar on a shoestring budget. I quote from Parivaar's website: "... children admitted into Parivaar are orphans, street kids, children with critically-ill parents and no other family support, and children from other vulnerable backgrounds, including single-parent households, kids from areas where exploitation and victimization, especially of girls, is common, and kids from highly impoverished rural and tribal areas where starvation and malnutrition are rampant, and where daily income per family is less than 1$."

The above is a clear example of 'deserving need', but I think this particular organization goes father than that. Unlike a lot of initiatives that provide food, education or healthcare, which are no-doubt valuable, Parivaar takes total responsibility for a child's upbringing - an excellent example of Samvida deyam - giving with cognizance of the gift's ultimate purpose.

Disastrous Analogies

Munshi Premchand wrote that a salary is like the full moon (which becomes less full with each passing day) whereas business profits are like water from a spring (a steady flow).

While people in the north-eastern states were bearing the brunt of Hurricane Sandy, I was sitting at home thinking of the San Andreas fault line and its potential for causing earthquakes. I was in Houston when Rita struck. We were very fortunate that what could have been a category 5 storm that was headed right towards the city weakened and moved away in the last 24 hours. A day before the hurricane hit, we tried to drive to Austin. But so did half of Houston. The other half was driving to Dallas. No one got anywhere that day. We weren't even able to go to the Houston airport to pick up my dear friend and roommate Sampad who had just flown in with his newlywed wife.

Which is worse, an earthquake or a hurricane? I don't think the question has an answer, but I was having hiccups while pondering the question. The hiccups inspired me to the following analogy: A hurricane is like a sneeze (you can feel it coming) whereas an earthquake is like a hiccup (you know it will come, but can't time it exactly). When it comes to major natural disasters, I think most people would prefer sneezes to hiccups.

Meeting Professor Ray

Professor Ajoy Kumar Ray, who is currently the Vice Chancellor of BE College (now known as Bengal Engineering and Science University or BESU), Shibpur, was one of my mentors at IIT-Kharagpur. We have remained in touch after my graduation, and I decided to pay him a visit on my recent trip to India.

Prof. Ray is one of the nicest people I know, and meeting him is always a pleasure; however, I was also curious for a different reason. Before joining BE College (his alma mater) as Vice Chancellor in 2009, Prof. Ray used to teach in IIT. In those days, BE College was thought of as a college on the decline with a long proud past. Among other things, there was too much student unrest, which inevitably shifts the focus away from education. Since Prof. Ray joined, the college has made a remarkable turnaround, and in recent months the media has been showering glowing praise on the college. I wanted to learn how the change was brought about.

Many steps were taken to address the politicization of the student body. Underlying all of them, there were a few basic realizations. First, students have a lot of energy that must be channelled somewhere. In the absence of creative and constructive channels, student unrest is to be expected. Second, students, like any other group, have unique problems that need to be addressed. I had heard that shortly after joining BE College, Prof Ray had joined the students in a game of cricket - a fine way to bond with a bunch of youngsters. Such actions can quickly clear up the air of mistrust so that constructive change can begin. I believe that much more was done to address student needs, but lack the details. To quell my curiosity on how to reduce politics, Prof. Ray himself gave the following example. Suppose that the college elects a student soccer secretary each year. One might allow all students to vote to choose who it should be, in which case representatives of opposing political parties field their candidates and organize the campaigns. If we modify the system so that only those who play soccer vote to choose the soccer secretary, then that dramatically reduces the involvement of transigent individuals with sworn affiliations to political parties. Through the creation of various sports, social and cultural clubs, and by encouraging the participation of students in these clubs, an attempt can be made to channel student energy into creative activities. Simple but powerful steps towards reform. I was very impressed.

During the last half-hour of my stay, Prof. Ray and I went for a walk. He showed me an old clock tower which was powered by water, and had been broken for decades before being fixed recently. There are few such clocks in India, and to repair it, a technician had to be summoned from a different state (finding such a technician was the first challenge). He also showed me a pond with a paved path running along its side, lined with bright lights powered by nearby solar panels. On one side of the lake was a very fine nine-foot bronze statue of Rabindranath Tagore. Five years ago, none of this existed. As a passer-by remarked, the place used to be like Sundarban (a forest) - light from a few flickering incandecent bulbs from a road in the distance being the only barrier to total darkness.

Again I was curious, what did Prof. Ray do that others did not? He explained that BE College is a government-run institution, which has pros and cons. Money given to the college is carefully accounted for, which prevents outright theft. On the other hand, to spend money - even a few hundred dollars - tenders must be issued and quotes must be invited, the best quote chosen, and the task overseen and completed. The cost of this bureaucracy and red tape is high, both in terms of time and money. To get around the problem, Prof. Ray worked with a few prominent donors, and asked them to give not in cash but in kind. One company might donate the bronze statue, another may provide the lights, etc. The contributors' names appear on a stone tablet that stands next to the pond.

He similarly took steps to encourage research, of which I did not seek details. But research funding has gone from Rs. 3 crores/yr when he joined to Rs. 65 crores/yr. I can totally believe that he took some simple steps that made an enormous difference.

On the downside, overwork and the stress of dealing with individuals set in old ways has taken a toll on Prof. Ray's health. I believe that he drinks too much tea, his meals are irregular, and he has not set aside time for exercise or its equivalent. I hope he remains healthy and lives a long life. Such people are rare.

Free speech

Confidence without understanding in speech is like power without responsibility in action.

Customer vs. Steve Jobs

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company once said:

"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

his point being that it is possible to meet customer needs better than customers can envision.

Steve Jobs embraced the above philosophy. In 1985, he was quoted as saying:

“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.”

This was shortly after he was fired from Apple.

Now, here's a quote from 2000:
“This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’”

Same content, but there is one very important difference. The customer may not be able to see Henry Ford's vision of a car, but when presented with a car, the customer must agree that the car is better than a horse, even a faster one. The Steve that returned to Apple in 1996 showed far greater respect for this fact that the Steve that had been fired in 1984.

Two doctors and a patient

In a town, there are two doctors and only one patient who is a drug addict. After a particularly bad seizure, the addict goes to one of the doctors. The doctor knows that the addict should be checked into rehab, but also foresees that since rehab is frustrating, the addict will likely switch doctors. Hence, the doctor, acting to avoid the loss of his only patient, administers to the addict a large dose of his own drug to restore the semblance of normalcy. In this way, the doctor buys time to implement a better long-term treatment plan. The other doctor is vocal in his criticism of the treatment method, although one might conjecture that had the patient gone to him instead, events would have unfolded with broad similarity while differing in details.

The analogy with the two-party system and the US economy is imperfect. If the above were to happen, the patient would ultimately die. The US economy will merely be reborn at some point. A part of me would like to believe that a long-term cure can be found for the excessive debt that has accumulated, but experts everywhere seem to not deny that debt has simply changed hands, not disappeared. The best outcome that I can think of is one where the dollar smoothly devalues, in the process reducing the effective sovereign debt burden, and also boosting exports. But a major economic adjustment such as this is unlikely to be without hiccups.

Debt signifies that tomorrow's spending was done yesterday, and in a zero-sum game we must spend less sometime in the future. Since we spent more yesterday, the economy did better than it would have. To quote Kenneth Fisher "Historically, big deficits are followed by stock-market returns that are dramatically superior to those following surpluses--for as long as 36 months out." When the time comes, stock market returns will be less than dramatic as the US government, which directly or indirectly is a big customer of the US economy, will have gone from spender to the opposite. Whether spending will reduce because of higher taxes or fewer public entitlements is something that the two doctors can debate ad infinitum.

Choosing the right animal

A donkey is an inefficient horse. It is smaller, weaker, slower. But that a horse is an inefficient donkey is more revealing, because it is less expected. You see, a donkey has certain traits that are valuable in certain contexts - it is a dull, docile, complying animal.

So if a dhobi (washerman) needs a donkey to carry his pile of laundry to the dhobi-ghat (place by the side of a water body where clothes are washed), then it is a donkey that he must buy. If instead he buys an animal from a sale on race-horses who fell short of racing standards, then the next morning the whole village will watch with a mix of bewilderment, amusement and pity as an out-of-breath dhobi chases a trotting horse with a pile of clothes falling off its back.