In the midst of the Second World War, Joseph Stalin, seized by one of his historic fits of paranoia and cruelty, declared the Chechen people disloyal to the U.S.S.R. and banished them from their homeland in the northern Caucasus to Central Asia and the Siberian wastes. Tens of thousands of Chechens, along with members of other small ethnic groups from the Caucasus and the Crimean Peninsula, died in the mass deportation or soon after—some from cold, some from starvation. The Tsarnaev family eventually settled in a town called Tokmok, in Kyrgyzstan, not far from the capital, Bishkek. Most who survived the next thirteen years in exile were permitted to return home, in the late fifties, under Nikita Khrushchev, and they reëstablished a sense of place as well as identity. Some remained expatriates. Chechens speak Russian with a thick accent; more often they speak their own language, Noxchiin Mott. The Caucasus region is multicultural in the extreme, but the predominant religion in the north is Islam. The Chechen national spirit is what is invariably called “fiercely independent.” When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, nationalist rebels fought two horrific wars with the Russian Army for Chechen independence. In the end, the rebel groups were either decimated or came over to the Russian side. But rebellion persists, in Chechnya and in the surrounding regions—Dagestan and Ingushetia—and it is now fundamentalist in character. The slogan is “global jihad.” The tactics are kidnappings, assassinations, bombings.
Anzor Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen who lived much of his life in Kyrgyzstan, emigrated a decade ago to the Boston area with his wife, two daughters, and two sons. Despite arthritic fingers, he made his living as an auto mechanic. Members of the family occasionally attended a mosque on Prospect Street in Cambridge, but there seemed nothing fundamentalist about their outlook.
Anzor’s elder son, Tamerlan, appeared never to connect fully with American life. “I don’t have a single American friend,” Tamerlan told a photographer named Johannes Hirn, who asked to take pictures of him training as a boxer. “I don’t understand them.” He studied, indifferently, at Bunker Hill Community College, for an engineering degree. He described himself as “very religious”; he didn’t smoke or drink. Twenty-six and around two hundred pounds, he boxed regularly at Wai Kru Mixed Martial Arts. He loved “Borat” (“even though some of the jokes are a bit too much”). He had a daughter, but scant stability. Three years ago, he was arrested for domestic assault and battery. (“In America, you can’t touch a woman,” Anzor told the Times.)
David Bernstein, a retired mathematician from Moscow, who emigrated thirty-three years ago, said he knew the family because he used to take his car in regularly to Anzor. He noticed that Tamerlan sometimes worked at the body shop, although he didn’t seem happy about it. “I talked with Tamerlan about stupid things,” Bernstein recalled. “I asked him if he knew about his name, the great warrior. He talked a little about religion and politics. I said everyone is religious in a certain sense, and he said I should become a Muslim. I put him off, saying everyone invents his own religion.” When Bernstein discovered that his acquaintance was believed to be responsible for an act of terror at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, he was mystified. “I feel like Forrest Gump,” he said. “Suddenly, he is famous through this terrible act, and I had these conversations with him. But who can say they know him, really?”
Dzhokhar, nineteen, had graduated from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, where he was a locally celebrated wrestler, described as slight, agile, and a little shy. He won a scholarship from the City of Cambridge. He worked for a couple of years as a lifeguard at a pool on the Harvard campus. A fellow-lifeguard remembered him as a “nice” kid with a “good sense of humor.” Dzhokhar’s high-school friends remembered him fondly, too. “He was a cool guy,” Ashraful Rahman said. “I never got any bad vibes from him. He wasn’t a star student, but he was smart. We met sometimes at the mosque in Cambridge. Dzhokhar went to the mosque more than I did, but he wasn’t completely devoted. When I think about this, I have to ask, was he forced to do this? Was he brainwashed? It’s so out of character. And you have to remember—he was a stoner. He was really into marijuana. And generally guys like that are very calm, cool.”
Essah Chisholm, a fellow-wrestler, said, “He was a cool dude.” But when Chisholm and a couple of his friends saw photographs of the Tsarnaev brothers on television Thursday night, they called the F.B.I. tip line. Late that night, the armed confrontation began—a shoot-out, a furious chase, hurled bombs. “It’s mind-boggling,” Chisholm said on Friday afternoon. “Every time I see his name on TV, it’s just unbelievable. To see Dzhokhar’s name, to see his face. I think this had to do with his older brother. Unless he was some sort of sleeper agent, I think his brother had a pretty strong influence. Tamerlan maybe felt like he didn’t belong, and he might have brainwashed Dzhokhar into some radical view that twisted things in the Koran.”
The sense of bland unknowingness—“He seemed so nice!”—began to evaporate the closer we got to the Tsarnaev brothers. Tamerlan’s YouTube channel features a series of videos in support of fundamentalism and violent jihad, including a rant by Feiz Muhammad, an Australian cleric and ex-boxer based in Malaysia; in one video, the cleric goes on about the evil “paganism” in the Harry Potter movies. Another video provides a dramatization of the Armageddon prophecy of the Black Banners of Khurasan, an all-powerful Islamic military force that will rise up from Central Asia and defeat the infidels; it is a martial-religious prophecy favored by Al Qaeda.
Dzhokhar’s Twitter feed—@J_tsar—is a bewildering combination of banality and disaffection. (He seems to have been tweeting even after the explosions at the finish line last Monday.) As you scan it, you encounter a young man’s thoughts: his jokes, his resentments, his prejudices, his faith, his desires.
March 14, 2012—a decade in america already, I want out
August 16, 2012—The value of human life ain’t shit nowadays that’s #tragic
August 22, 2012—I am the best beer pong player in Cambridge. I am the #truth
September 1, 2012—Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job. I mean I guess fuck the facts y’all are some real #patriots #gethip
December 24, 2012—Brothers at the mosque either think I’m a convert or that I’m from Algeria or Syria, just the other day a guy asked me how I came to Islam
January 15, 2013—I don’t argue with fools who say islam is terrorism it’s not worth a thing, let an idiot remain an idiot
March 13, 2013—Never try to fork a mini tomato while wearing a white shirt, it will explode
April 10, 2013—Gain knowledge, get women, acquire currency #livestrong
April 15, 2013—Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people
April 15, 2013—There are people that know the truth but stay silent & there are people that speak the truth but we don’t hear them cuz they’re the minority
April 16, 2013—I’m a stress free kind of guy
Gregory Shvedov, the editor of a Web site based in Moscow called Caucasian Knot, visits the Caucasus regularly and studies both the jihadist movement and the Russian government and military’s draconian behavior in the region. He was hardly shocked that two ethnic Chechens, raised largely in the U.S. but with a strong attachment to their homeland, might carry out such an act on a “soft target” like the marathon. “These days there are social networks, and people make their decisions from them,” he said from Moscow. “I would not be surprised if they had another life over social media. What kind of videos are they watching? What kind of lectures and YouTubes about jihad?” If Tamerlan did what he is suspected of doing, he might not have got his education, or instructions, entirely through digital means. On January 12, 2012, he flew from New York to Moscow, a regular target of Chechen rage; he didn’t return until seven months later.
The greatest sympathy is reserved for the families of those who were killed by the bombing and in the violent pursuit that followed—and for the dozens who were severely injured in the blasts. Even the most ardent New Yorkers felt a profound allegiance to, and love for, the people of Boston. But, as the day was coming to an end, you could not help but feel something, too, for the parents of the perpetrators, neither of whom could fathom the possibility of their sons’ guilt, much less their cruelty and evil. Interviewed at their apartment in Makhachkala, the capital city of Dagestan, they spoke of a “setup,” an F.B.I. plot. The mother, Zubeidat Tsarnaeva, told the television station Russia Today, “Every single day, my son used to call me and ask me, ‘How are you, Mama?’ Both of them. ‘Mama, we love you.’ . . . My son never would keep a secret.” The father described Dzhokhar as an “angel.” By the end of Friday (Saturday morning in Dagestan) their sons were gone—one dead, the other wounded, hospitalized, and under arrest.
The Tsarnaev family had been battered by history before—by empire and the strife of displacement, by exile and emigration. Asylum in a bright new land proved little comfort. When Anzor fell sick, a few years ago, he resolved to return to the Caucasus; he could not imagine dying in America. He had travelled halfway around the world from the harrowed land of his ancestors, but something had drawn him back. The American dream wasn’t for everyone. What they could not anticipate was the abysmal fate of their sons, lives destroyed in a terror of their own making. The digital era allows no asylum from extremism, let alone from the toxic combination of high-minded zealotry and the curdled disappointments of young men. A decade in America already, I want out.
the newyorker
Sunday 21 April 2013
Sunday 7 April 2013
The spectacular month that went by
Spanish banderillero Luis Garcia "Nino de Leganes" is gored by a bull during a bullfight at The Maestranza bullring in the Andalusian capital of Seville, southern Spain March 31, 2013.
A man pulls a rickshaw carrying his wife in a wedding gown during their wedding ceremony amid snowfall in Weihai, Shandong province of China on March 30, 2013.
Pope Francis holds a candle as he leads a vigil mass during Easter celebrations at St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.
A soldier from the Seleka rebel alliance stands guard as the Central African Republic's new President Michel Djotodia (not pictured) attends Friday prayers at the central mosque in Bangui March 29 2013.
An Ultra-Orthodox Jewish man is seen through the smoke as they burn leaven in the Mea Shearim neighbourhood of Jerusalem, ahead of the Jewish holiday of Passover, March 25, 2013. Passover commemorates the flight of Jews from ancient Egypt, as described in the Exodus chapter of the Bible. According to the account, the Jews did not have time to prepare leavened bread before fleeing to the promised land.
French soldiers patrol in the Terz valley, about 60 km (37 miles) south of the town of Tessalit in northern Mali March 20, 2013. France has deployed some 4,000 troops to Mali, alongside a regional African force, in a nine-week operation that has driven Islamists into desert hideaways and mountains near the Algerian border. The French soldiers were patrolling for Islamist rebels and rebels' arm caches in the area.
Policemen (L and 2nd L) stand on a car on a flooded street following heavy rains in Sanaa March 20, 2013.
A trainer prepares an Afghan Hound before competing at the Shanghai International Dog Show, in Shanghai March 15, 2013. In a country where dog meat is still being consumed, dog shows got their start about 15 years ago and are gaining popularity among a fast-growing sector of upper-class Chinese.
A man carries a sofa on his motorcycle on a highway near Kenya's capital Nairobi on March 10, 2013.
The ash-encrusted hands of a sadhu are seen as he sits beside a fire after applying ashes to his face and body at his ashram at Pashupatinath Temple in Kathmandu March 4, 2013. Hindu holy men from Nepal and India come to this temple to take part in the Shivaratri festival, which this year falls on March 10. Celebrated by Hindu devotees all over the world, Shivaratri is dedicated to Lord Shiva, and holy men mark the occasion by praying, smoking marijuana or smearing their bodies with ashes.
Finding the Human Factor in Bank Risk
When he left physics, John Breit had the choice of a job in naval intelligence or on Wall Street. “My wife said I couldn’t be a spy. She hates capitalism, but said to go to Wall Street,” he told me recently. “And then I ended up running a spy network.”
Calvin Trillin once attributed the financial collapse to the influx of smart people on Wall Street. The physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians displaced the slow-thinking country club types. With their incomprehensibly complex models, the smart guys’ hubris brought our economy low.
Mr. Breit was part of that initial incursion. A Ph.D. in physics from Columbia, he was doing postdoctoral work when he realized that he could never be as good as his contemporary Edward Witten, who went on to pioneer string theory.
So in 1986, he joined Wall Street, moving not to the trading floor, like many of his fellow rocket scientists, but into risk management. In 1990, he took his skills to Merrill Lynch, rising to become the firm’s head of market risk oversight. The physicist came to understand the limits of mathematical models. He learned that his job was really psychologist, confessor and detective. He became the financial version of a counterintelligence officer, searching for the missed clues and hidden dangers in the firm’s trading strategies.
Mr. Breit is retired now, studying ancient Greek in his spare time and volunteering as an adviser for New York’s pension funds. He comes across as George Smiley if he were a Southerner — gracious, reluctant to talk about himself, with iconoclastic opinions just below the surface. I’ve been talking to him periodically over the years about how giant financial institutions should manage the aggressive traders slinging giant sums around the world in ever more complex transactions.
After the Senate issued a report last month on JPMorgan Chase’s multibillion-dollar London whale trading loss, an incident where the mathematical modeling went seriously wrong, I reached out to him again.
That debacle encapsulates much of what is wrong about how banks manage their risk and how the regulators oversee those efforts. At JPMorgan Chase, the risk models hid — and were used to hide — risks from the traders and top executives. Too many measures and too many numbers undid the risk managers. But ultimately, they failed because of human frailties; the risk managers lost sight of their mission and tried to protect the traders and their trades. As in all spy debacles, the counterintelligence officers got co-opted.
Early in his career, Mr. Breit figured out that models for markets aren’t like those for physics. They don’t come from nature. It was necessary to know the math, if only so that he couldn’t be intimidated by the quantitative analysts.
But the numbers more often disguise risk than reveal it. “I went down the statistical path,” he said. He built one of the first value-at-risk models, or VaR, a mathematical formula that is supposed to distill how much risk a firm is running at any given point.
The only thing from capital markets math he came to embrace was this immutable law of nature: investors make money by taking risk. “If it’s profitable and seems riskless, it’s a business you don’t understand,” he told me.
Instead of fixating on models, risk managers need to develop what spies call humint — human intelligence from flesh and blood sources. They need to build networks of people who will trust them enough to report when things seem off, before they become spectacular problems. Mr. Breit, who attributes this approach to his mentor, Daniel Napoli, the former head of risk at Merrill Lynch, took people out drinking to get them to open up. He cultivated junior accountants.
“They see things first,” he said. “Almost every trading debacle was sitting on some accountant’s desk.”
All the while, he was on the lookout for bad trades. Most traders who get into trouble, he thinks, aren’t bad guys. The bad ones, who try to cover up improper trades, are relatively easy to detect. The real threat, he said, comes from the “crazy ones” who really believe they’ve found ways to spin flax into gold. They can blow up a firm with the best of intentions.
They don’t do it suddenly. “I hate the whole Black Swan concept,” he said, referring to the notion, popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that the true risks lie in unforeseeable events that occur with much more frequency than the mathematical models suggest. “It takes years of concerted effort to lose a lot.”
Yes, a big market move might reveal a fatally flawed trade, but that volatility is not the root cause of an oversize loss.
The problem, as Mr. Breit sees it, is that this has nothing to do with how risk management is practiced today, or what the regulators encourage. Regulators have reduced risk managers to box checkers, making sure they take every measure of risk and report it dutifully on extensive forms. “It just consumes more and more staff, turning them into accountants and rotting brains.”
Take VaR. In Mr. Breit’s view, Wall Street firms, encouraged by regulators, are on a fool’s mission to enhance their models to more reliably detect risky trades. Mr. Breit finds VaR, a commonly used measure, useful only as a contrary indicator. If VaR isn’t flashing a warning signal for a profitable trade, that may well mean there is a hidden bomb.
He despises the concept of “risk-weighted assets,” where banks put up capital based on the perceived riskiness of the assets. Inevitably, he argues, banks will “pile into” the same types of supposedly safe investments, creating bubbles that make the risks far more severe than the initial perceptions. Paradoxically, risk-weighting can leave banks setting aside the least capital to cover the biggest dangers.
“I could not be more disappointed,” he said. “The cynic in me thinks this is all in the interests of senior management and regulators to avoid blame. They may not think they can prevent the next crisis, but they then can blame the statistics.”
Instead, Mr. Breit says he believes that regulators should encourage firms when they reach different conclusions on what is risky and what is safe. That creates a diverse ecosystem, more resilient to any one pestilence.
And the regulators should empower risk managers by finding out how many times they meet with chief executives and what they have recently vetoed, and by judging whether the traders respect them. “It’s all completely unquantifiable and vague,” he said, adding that a risk manager should be divorced from the profit and loss statement, the one “who throws sand in the gears.”
Mr. Breit’s sand-throwing days are over now. Undermined during the credit boom, as the firm’s head, E. Stanley O’Neal, became isolated and paranoid, he resigned his position in 2005 (but stayed at the firm). By the summer of 2007, he realized that something was terribly wrong with Merrill Lynch’s subprime mortgage exposure. He began calling in favors to find out what was going on and became alarmed. Eventually, Mr. O’Neal called him in, seemingly thinking that Mr. Breit was still his risk manager. It was too late to save the firm from billions in losses.
When he resigned his position at Merrill Lynch, did a board member or regulator call him to ask why?
“Not a one,” he told me. Government overseers need to develop human sources, too.
nytimes
The Man Who Wants to Sue Facebook Raymond Bechard has been campaigning to keep the social networking site free of child pornography
A fervent supporter of causes for children and women, it wasn’t long before I stumbled upon the online campaign ‘Force Facebook to Block all Child Pornography’ by Men against Prostitution and Trafficking (Menapat). The social networking site that has become such an indispensable part of our lives had apparently turned into a haven for child exploiters.
According to Raymond Bechard, executive director of Menapat, one of the first to take note of this phenomenon, Facebook pages devoted to child pornography and paedophile activities are used to exchange photographs, videos and posts. Before Bechard came into the picture in 2010 with his campaign to get Facebook to take action, child nudity was easy to come by. Now, says Bechard, the images are “just on the edge, but you still wouldn’t want your child to be that”.
A quick scan brings up fake profiles with photographs of children as young as six or seven years of age, skimpily clad and in sexual poses. A girl barely 12 years old, with poker straight brown hair, glamorous eye make-up, accentuated lips and a spaghetti strap top through which an electric blue bra strap is clearly visible. Another girl, maybe 11 years old, lifting her bikini top, her legs wide apart. One of the comments on this photograph reads, ‘Young hot sexy.’
The US-based Bechard was doing research for his book The Berlin Turnpike, on human trafficking in America, when he came across similar photographs of children on Facebook. His curiosity arose when the classified advertisement website Craigslist, headquartered in San Francisco, shut down its ‘Adult services’ section in 2010 after being accused of housing and promoting prostitution, apart from child and human trafficking. “I realised that these advertisements marketing sex services had to move somewhere else on the internet, which included websites like escorts.com, backpage.com. But I soon realised that a lot of it had, in fact, migrated to Facebook. You see, unlike Craigslist, Facebook allowed these traffickers to contact people themselves. They didn’t have to wait for someone to contact them,” says Bechard.
Bechard then created a false profile for himself on Facebook under the alias Heather Fey. “Heather,” he says,“was an attractive, fun and outgoing girl. She had several open galleries for people to see on her ‘profile’ in which there were images that were quite sexy. Her profile picture, too, was of the same nature. She used to update it frequently and men could contact her openly.” Within a week, Heather had about 600 odd friend requests; some of these profiles had pictures of children on them. Delving deeper, he found that these profiles had open galleries with images of children posing provocatively; some were nude and these were open for anyone to see on Facebook.
“So yeah, that’s pretty much when I realised that this is something that shouldn’t be here,” he says. “We knew that something was systemically wrong, so in addition to reporting it to Facebook, we reported it to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children [in the US] and also to the FBI.”
In 2011, Bechard started Menapat to fight the cause. While tracking the pages, Bechard figured that paedophiles had an easy way of contacting one another. While certain profiles had children’s pictures, some referred to the book Lolita or contained words like ‘child’, pedo’, ‘kid’, ‘young’ or ‘little’. With the help of a false profile created by Bechard, the FBI was even able to arrest a Kentucky resident, Jerry Cannon, for disseminating child pornography through 13 different fake profiles on Facebook. He was, incidentally, also the pastor of a church.
The disturbing part, though, is that it is not easy to put a stop to such activity. Once a user reports a profile or a page, Facebook takes it down, but it can’t stop the people involved from stealthily opening new pages. Also, once a picture has been reported, it is taken down but the person or page displaying such a picture isn’t put under the scanner until reported separately. After Bechard’s campaign and several news reports on the phenomenon, Facebook did try to block reported images. A Facebook spokesperson stated: “We have zero tolerance for child pornography being uploaded onto Facebook and are extremely aggressive in preventing and removing child exploitative content. We scan every photo that is uploaded to the site using PhotoDNA to ensure that this illicit material can’t be distributed and we report all instances of exploitative content to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. We’ve built complex technical systems that either block the creation of this content, including in private groups, or flag it for quick review by our team of investigations professionals.”
PhotoDNA basically identifies the picture by reading its pixelations, unique for every image. “It is like a human fingerprint,” says Bechard. The drawback, he claims, is that it can only detect a picture if it is already in the system. “If you’re paedophile and know your photos are registered, it encourages you to create new images and that basically leads to more child porn. Another thing is that it can’t detect videos, and that is a major drawback in itself,” says Bechard. Nonetheless, the steps did have some effect. “Recent changes include images that aren’t as sexually overt. But even in these, the comments next to pictures are the silver bullet. The paedophiles’ intentions are mirrored in those,” says Bechard.
It’s easy to verify these claims. Within four days of creating a false profile myself, I found pages that use cartoon images like ‘Pedobear’, a meme centred round paedophilia. After ‘liking’ a few pages, Facebook’s system started suggesting more pages with similar content. It also flashed many profiles—some obviously fake— with children’s pictures on them under ‘People you may know’. Some pages had external links that re-routed one to websites rife with pornographic material. “It’s just everywhere. Absolutely global,” exclaims Bechard, “You know I feel that human nature goes wherever humans go. It cannot be defined by boundaries.”
Facebook insists it has been working with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the New York State Attorney General’s Office in the US, as well as the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre in the UK, to use known databases of child exploitative material to heighten its detection and bring those responsible to justice. But Bechard says it is still not enough. “If you look at adult porn sites, you’ll notice that they keep their sites absolutely child porn free because they don’t want to get in trouble with authorities or invite any kind of legal action. So, if they can do it, why can’t Facebook?” he asks.
According to Bechard, Facebook has declined to work with Menapat directly. “Facebook refused to consider us and our plea. According to them, we aren’t from any law authority and neither have educational credibility, so they refused to listen to us,” he says.
And he doesn’t trust them enough to tackle this problem on their own. “Facebook constantly says ‘Tell us and we’ll tell the authorities’. It is basically asking us to report to them, not to authorities directly. But what happens of the proof once a page with such content is gone? Nobody knows. Throughout this time, since we’ve been in contact with them, Facebook officials say that they are constantly improving their security system, that ‘it’s not as bad as it looks’, ‘we’re working with law enforcements’, and basically toe the company line.”
While Facebook’s spokesperson insists that “we’ve created a much safer environment on Facebook than exists offline, where people can share this disgusting material in the privacy of their own homes without anyone watching”, Bechard continues to find and report any illicit content Menapat finds on Facebook, “and there’s still so much of it”. Twitter, he says, is “horrible in this respect” but Menapat is solely focusing on Facebook for now. “You know, it’s not something that will end in a matter of days or even years. Maybe someday we’ll wake up and it will all be gone,” he says.
The most important mission right now, though, is to locate a victim of child pornography. “We are trying to locate a victim so that s/he can sue Facebook for not taking down the picture,” he says. Menapat, he says, has been communicating through the media both on the issue of child pornography on Facebook and the need to find victims.
“We have not found a victim yet. The problem is that Facebook is relatively new, so victims posted there are still quite young. As such, they are still hidden from view and not of age to come forward as witnesses. If they have been rescued from the situation, then they are being highly protected—and justifiably so. We may have to wait years for legal action against Facebook to become a reality,” he says.
Look Who’s Kidding
Professors who go to such unusual extents to reach readers are impossible to ignore
Professors of tricky subjects usually resist the risk of over- simplification, which is why they rarely write books with popular appeal. And when they do, their work often betrays an anxiety about having to trade rigour for readability.
A book that acquits itself marvellously of that charge is Indianomix by Economics Professor Vivek Dahejia of Canada’s Carleton University and columnist Rupa Subramanya of WSJ India. It uses game theory, incentive analysis and other nerdy tools to explain a wild variety of Indian oddities, ranging from why people are routinely late and cabs seem so resolutely lazy to how superstitions appear to validate themselves and railway-track hoppers are best nudged to safety. All this is breezy and believable, if a little nigglish.
But then Indianomix gets so casual in the confidence of its own devices that it begins to turn ticklish. It takes a 2 per cent gap in vote-share between the NDA and UPA as proof that the latter had ‘unforeseeable random factors’ to thank for its win in the general election of 2004, that ‘it was decided by a coin toss’ rather than any aam appeal or mind shift. Is this irony? A prank? A ploy to push reality relativism? A little later, Dahejia and Subramanya turn to Devdutt Pattanaik, a chief—ahem— belief officer who believes mythology clarifies the basics of business, defines a myth as a ‘subjective truth’, and suggests that America Inc could well have escaped the Great Recession had it kept wealth worship and regulatory order on an even keel, just as India Inc keeps Lakshmi and Vishnu.
For a book that goes the other way on the simplification scale, pick upHow Stella Saved the Farm by Professor Vijay Govindarajan of Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and his former colleague Professor Chris Trimble. This book, a fable about an animal farm inspired by Orwell’s classic, starts fabulously flippant and turns superbly sound as it goes along. Instead of ideals going haywire, ideas go livewire. Stella is a young ewe who goes gaga over an Andean alpaca called Alejandro and finds alpacan wool so soft that she gets the family of horses she works for to bet their farm on its future. As an idea, it’s a game changer, their only hope of surviving an onslaught of mechanised farms run by humans. But that is all it is—an idea. The real challenge is in getting it past all the bleats and snorts to see it through. Hoofs are stomped, nerves lost and wings flapped before horse-sense dawns on the farm’s chief mare, Deirdre: that it’s an experiment, and ought not to be treated like just another business operation. What counts are not the new idea’s losses, but the lessons they hold.
The authors say the story is drawn from their 2010 book The Other Side of Innovation, but it reminds me of their earlier 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators, which I felt signalled a ‘desire to deliver a sort of innovation algorithm for corporate engineers’, as I wrote in a review for Business Standard.
Well, if 10 Rules was geektalk, Stella is a fairytale, and it reveals the significance of its academic rigour only once you reach its ultimate question at the end: ‘Okay, so who really saved the farm?’
Who—or what? There is no snappy answer, is there? Beyond Stella’s idea and Deirdre’s openness, what ultimately saves the farm is a combination of diverse skills. Einstein the Rooster tests one hypothesis after another against its evidence, even as Maisie the Cow cracks the fashion market in alliance with ‘Stellalalala’ (as she calls her)… until our four-legged farmers rid themselves of all their idyllic assumptions that get in the way of the truth. It’s not exactly an algorithm, but a process of rational negation. Done well, it might even have given Orwell’s rebellious animals a chance of success.
openthemag
Singapore Diary
Mall Nation
Within minutes of landing in this island nation, I felt I was passing through a gigantic mall. The city was an extension of the airport. I lowered the taxi window to let the wind whip my face and suggested that the driver turn off the air-conditioning. After all, it was a lovely 30 degrees. He grunted and made me roll up the window. I was soon to realise that every indoor space in the city was air-conditioned. That evening, I was told by a friend about the work of Cherian George, a local academic and author ofSingapore: The Air-Conditioned Nation (2000). Seems Lee Kuan Yew believed that the tropical climate made people lazy, and decided ACs would make them productive, efficient. Not just the air, everything here is conditioned. I gaped at trees that appeared too reticent, too conscious of spreading their branches. I was hosted by the National University of Singapore where I was to give a few lectures, on Ashis Nandy’s recent utterances, the Ambedkar cartoon and suchlike. I began one of my presentations with a lesser heard sound bite from Nandy at the same Jaipur festival where he otherwise mouthed nonsense: “The only country which I know is close to zero corruption is Singapore and that’s not part of my concept of utopia, it can be very much a part of my concept of dystopia.” A few days in Singapore reinforced this perception.
Nothing to crow about
As I walked the city, I kept drawing the attention of my friends to things that did not seem odd to them at all. I was fascinated by how Singapore treated its trees—they reflected the spirit of this atrophied nation. Many trees were supported by three strong poles triangulated to keep them straight. Initially, I thought they did not want their trees, like their citizens, to be wayward. Both had to learn to walk the straight and narrow path to damnation. But not really. I was told that fully grown trees were imported and replanted. Hence they needed support on new soil. Tending to a sapling and seeing it grow over the years was too much of a hassle. Moreover, only such trees were imported that did not shed too many leaves or yield silly fruit. (As I write this, I am looking at the blooming shahtoot-mulberry tree outside my Delhi office window with renewed love—they indeed leave a beautiful gooey mess on the street below. They attract flies.) Here, trees must decorate; not mess the streets. This seems connected to Singapore’s decision in 2006 to exterminate all house crows, for these were declared a menace. Some 1,50,000 of them were culled or shot down by the Singapore Gun Club in a few years. Dense trees where they could roost were felled. So they shipped in pretty, unfussy trees lacking in character. Also banned is the “smelly, stinky” durian fruit in all indoor spaces—the metro, theatres, malls, cinemas, auditoriums. Once upon a time, this island, nestling in mangroves (13 per cent cover in 1810, 0.5 per cent now), had tigers and crocodiles. These only appear in children’s books and folktales now.
Only death frees you
Singapore is a hub. Nothing is produced there. Everything—milk to fish—is imported and consumed. Money is the state religion. This is the capitalistic other of Cuba. The Gini coefficient—income inequality levels—is among the highest in developed nations. Every 25 years, old buildings are razed, and new highrises erected. This needs labourers, and slaves are imported from Tamil Nadu and Bangladesh. They live in tin sheds. They’re ferried in open trucks, like cattle. Not really, since cattle (imported of course; there are fewer than 800 goats in Singapore’s only dairy farm; no cows or buffaloes) are carried in air-con comfort. The men are drenched by humidity and intermittent rains. Sometimes they are flung out as trucks skid, and are run over by speeding vehicles. The humanitarian state decided, some three years ago, that these trucks must have railings workers can hold on to. These drudges form the backbone of this thriving economy. Singapore also imports a lot of underpaid, overworked maids: Filipinas, Indonesians, Myanmarese, Indians. Some fall to their death from highrise apartments. Sounds a bit like India, no?
An iPad for your effort
How do you get citizens to conform? Like in Israel, conscription, called the National Service, is compulsory for all men who turn 18. It lasts two years. That takes care of half the population. The rest fall in line. In fact, in 1965, the newborn nation approached India for help with military training. India refused, and they secretly turned to Israel. I was told by a friend’s 18-year-old son that every recruit now gets an iPad. Consumerism feeds nationalism.
A friend took me to Little India...
The streets were messy. The Tamils even had a Tasmac wine shop and open bars. I felt at home.
outlook
Saturday 6 April 2013
Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook Home, Money, and the Future of Communication
As caretaker of a service with a billion users, Mark Zuckerberg is used to sparking protest. Any time his company releases a new product, adjusts a privacy setting, or even tweaks the design, thousands of outraged Facebookers take to the Web to decry the change. So Zuckerberg can expect to hear sirens today, as he announces Home, Facebook’s most dramatic response to the pivot from desktop and web to phones and tablets. New paradigms like mobile can be the ill winds that blow down card-houses of tech dominance, and to maintain its status as the alpha social network, Facebook must get this right.
First, what it’s not: Home isn’t the long-rumored Facebook Phone. That was always a red herring. Instead, Home turns your phone into a Facebook device. Even with the lock screen on, a photo stream of your friends’ activities fills the screen. Updates appear on your home screen, too. What’s more, Home makes Facebook the primary means of communication on your device. The company’s messaging software merges with SMS, and you can continue using its “chat heads” to text while inside another app. Zuckerberg believes that the social network plays too big a role in its users lives to be drowned out by a vast sea of apps. “Apps aren’t the center of the world,” he says. “People are.”
Home does put people—your people—front and center. And Zuckerberg is probably hoping that most users choose it over the standard Facebook app. The catch is that not everyone can participate, even if they want to. At launch, Home is limited to a few Android phones; iPhone users are shut out. Apple enforces its own look and feel, and allowing a developer to take over the lockdown screen is currently unimaginable.
But there are plenty of things that were once unimaginable that have come to pass. One of them is the personal evolution of Facebook’s CEO. Accounts of Zuckerberg’s early years as a founder paint him as callow. But in recent appearances—and interviews like this one—he has been articulate, engaging, and at ease. Clearly Zuckerberg is at home at Facebook. Now his task is to make us all feel that way.
What led to your building Facebook Home?
Facebook occupies an interesting space in mobile. We’re not an operating system, but we’re not just an app either. Facebook accounts for 23 percent of the time people spend on smartphones. The next-biggest ones are Instagram and Google Maps, which are each at 3 percent. For the past 18 months, we spent our efforts building good versions of Facebook’s mobile apps. But the design was still very close to what we have on the desktop. We knew that we could do better.
Why not just build a phone?
Why not just build a phone?
I’ve always been very clear that I don’t think that’s the right strategy. We’re a community of a billion-plus people, and the best-selling phones—apart from the iPhone—can sell 10, 20 million. If we did build a phone, we’d only reach 1 or 2 percent of our users. That doesn’t do anything awesome for us. We wanted to turn as many phones as possible into “Facebook phones.” That’s what Facebook Home is.
It’s only available on Android phones. Isn’t it ironic that your mobile strategy is now tied to Google’s operating system?
It’s only available on Android phones. Isn’t it ironic that your mobile strategy is now tied to Google’s operating system?
We have a pretty good partnership with Apple, but they want to own the whole experience themselves. There aren’t a lot of bridges between us and Google, but we are aligned with their open philosophy.
So do you think in, say, two years you will have this on the iPhone?
So do you think in, say, two years you will have this on the iPhone?
That’s above my pay grade to be able to answer that.
That’s a pretty high pay grade.
That’s a pretty high pay grade.
Look, I would love for that answer to be yes. Facebook is in a very different place than Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, and Microsoft. We are trying to build a community. We have a billion folks using our services now, and we want to get to 3 or 5 billion one day. We’re going to do that by building the best experience across all devices. Android is growing quickly, and we’re excited that the platform is open and that it allows us to build these great experiences. I think that this is really good for Google too. Something like this could encourage a lot of people to get Android phones, because I think people really care about Facebook. In a lot of ways, this is one of the best Facebook experiences that you can get. Of course, a lot of people also love iPhones—I love mine, and I would like to be able to deliver Facebook Home there as well.
Facebook now calls itself a “mobile first, mobile best” company. If you had started the company in 2013, would you have done it as a mobile app?
Facebook now calls itself a “mobile first, mobile best” company. If you had started the company in 2013, would you have done it as a mobile app?
I don’t know. Maybe once or twice a year I’ll just take a few days off and wander around and ask myself, if I were starting from scratch today, and I weren’t running Facebook, what would I build? I look at this mobile trend in light of the law of sharing, our equivalent of Moore’s law, which states that the average amount of information that a person shares doubles every year or so. Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.
OK, so what is the next big trend?
OK, so what is the next big trend?
The big stuff that we’re seeing now is sharing with smaller groups.
How would you implement that? Do you do it within Facebook or with separate apps?
How would you implement that? Do you do it within Facebook or with separate apps?
There’s a place for both. There’s a place for a service that only communicates with your core friends and family, and I think that’s going to be ubiquitous. But there are other great services out there doing great things. Instagram is a good example of this. They just crossed 100 million active users. It’s a much smaller product by Facebook standards, but it’s a really meaningful product.
wired
Do we love our cars more than ourselves?
We have all heard the old adage that “two wrongs don’t make a right”. But sometimes, two rights do make a wrong.
We all know that advancements in the medical science space in the 20th century have resulted in a significant jump in life expectancy. This is surely great news for humanity. And, with population control and family planning awareness campaigns, we are seeing a reduction in the size of families. For a number of reasons, that is good news too.
However, in the developed world, their combination has led to a peculiar problem – a growing population of aged people, and hence rising healthcare costs to take care of them.
Writing from Asia, where the population is still young, I cannot help but think that it is only a matter of time before the same issues plague other developing nations. And the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that we all need to move towards managed care, rather than incident-based curative treatments. At the risk of making it too simplistic, what that means is that a sure-shot way to reduce healthcare costs is to fall sick less or be healthier to begin with.
Let me take an analogy that we all can relate to. If we take care of our car and get it serviced regularly, it rarely breaks down. And so, by spending smaller amounts to proactively take care of the car, we save on the bigger costs of repairing major issues.
The same principle applies to our bodies. Managed care encompasses all that we do to take care of our body holistically – preventive healthcare, regular diagnostics, proper diet, to name a few. As a result, there is less chance of developing a major illness (or at least, we’ll be able to detect it sooner when it is easier and cheaper to fight it). Not only would we save on treatment cost, but we also save on the time lost for the patient and the family. Extending the car analogy, this is akin to the loss of time and productivity incurred while your car is being repaired at the garage.
However, this is just one way managed care reduces costs. There are various aspects – such as incentivizing doctors to use cheaper drugs, regulating length of stay in a hospital, tie-ups with pre-selected and limited set of providers, and more fundamentally, incentivizing good health – that together help to reduce costs and improve the “management” of health.
This is not to say that managed care systems are without flaw. There are mixed views on their efficacy and many concerns are raised. Clearly, a lot of work needs to be done before we reach a sustainable solution.
Author: Shivinder Singh is Executive Vice-Chairman of Fortis Healthcare Limited and a World Economic Forum 2013 Young Global Leader.
Saudi Arabian paralysis sentence 'grotesque', says Foreign Office
The reported sentencing to paralysis for a Saudi man for a crime he committed as a 14-year-old has been condemned as "grotesque" by the Foreign Office.
The punishment, which was reportedly handed down to 24-year-old Ali al-Khawahir for stabbing his friend in the back 10 years ago, should not be carried out, the FCO said.
Khawahir will be paralysed from the waist down unless he pays 1m Saudi riyals (£177,000) in compensation to the victim, according to Amnesty International, who quoted reports in Saudi Arabian media.
An FCO spokesman said: "We are deeply concerned by reports that a Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a man to be paralysed in retribution for causing the paralysis of a friend when he was 14 years old.
"We urge the Saudi authorities to ensure that this grotesque punishment is not carried out. Such practices are prohibited under international law and have no place in any society."
Amnesty condemned the punishment as "utterly shocking".
A similar sentence of paralysis imposed in Saudi Arabia in 2010 is not known to have been carried out, the charity said.
If implemented, the paralysis sentence would contravene the UN convention against torture and the principles of medical ethics adopted by the UN general assembly, Amnesty said.
Ann Harrison, the charity's Middle East and north Africa deputy director, said: "Paralysing someone as punishment for a crime would be torture. That such a punishment might be implemented is utterly shocking, even in a context where flogging is frequently imposed as a punishment for some offences, as happens in Saudi Arabia.
"It is time the authorities in Saudi Arabia start respecting their international legal obligations and remove these terrible punishments from the law."
Saudi courts regularly sentence people to forms of corporal punishment, according to the charity. In retribution cases, sentences have included eye-gouging, tooth extraction and death.
In such cases, the victim can demand the punishment be carried out, request financial compensation or grant a conditional or unconditional pardon.
Flogging is mandatory for a number of offences and can also be imposed at the discretion of judges as an alternative, or in addition to other punishments, Amnesty said.
Thieves are often sentenced to amputation of the right hand, while "highway robbery" is punished by cross amputation – cutting off the right hand and the left foot.
guardian
A traditional practice of courtship draws controversy in modern Bhutan
Bhutan | After The Sunset
A traditional practice of courtship draws controversy in modern Bhutan
ON FRIDAY NIGHTS, the cafés and restaurants in Norzin Lam—the main street of Bhutan’s capital Thimphu—teem with customers. On one such night in September last year, I met Karma Dorji (name changed on request) and his friend in one such café, to talk about their past lovers over drinks. It was a warm autumn evening, and though Dorji was reticent at first, as the chatter that surrounded us swelled, he let down his guard a little. Nursing his third whisky, he grew nostalgic as he recounted his first time with a woman.
“I was 17 or 18 then and it was so adventurous,” the 34-year-old from Trashigang district in eastern Bhutan said. “I waited for the sun to go down. After it was dark, I stepped out of my home secretly. I fancied a girl who stayed quite far from my home.” It took Dorji over an hour to reach the girl’s place, and it wasn’t an easy journey. “I had to walk through dense forests, and I was praying all the time because the forest is known to host evil spirits,” he said. “But I was dedicated to get to my woman.”
When Dorji reached the girl’s home, he was met with an unpleasant surprise. “I hopped the fence, and when I landed on the other side, a stack of pumpkins came crashing down on me,” he said. “For a moment I thought I was caught entering the house. I thought I was being beaten for breaking in.” Dorji laughed at this memory, and slammed his glass of whiskey on the table.
Dorji was following the traditional Bhutanese custom of courtship known as bomena, in which a man enters a woman’s house surreptitiously, and woos her into bed—or, more accurately, persuades her to let him into her bed. On most occasions, women have little or no idea about the man’s plans to arrive at night. Bomena has of late come under increasing scrutiny as Bhutanese debate whether it is a practice that has outlasted its time, and should be ended. With the negative connotations that bomena now carries, few men today are willing to talk about it, let alone admit to having done it. It took two weeks of making enquiries before I found Dorji, who was willing to share his experiences with me.
“I was very nervous about what would happen if others in the house woke up,” Dorji continued. “I stood outside her door contemplating what to do for about five minutes. I assumed that she would be asleep on the first floor—that’s normally where the girls sleep. And I couldn’t spot a ladder to enter the upper floor.” He had two options, he said—returning, unsuccessful, or knocking on the door. Dorji went quiet for a few seconds, letting the suspense of his story build. “If I knocked, I risked waking up the parents,” he said. “But it was freezing outside and I was too scared to walk back through the forest at night. So I took a chance, and went knock, knock.”
To Dorji’s luck, the girls parents were away, and she answered the door herself. Though she was shy, he recounted, she let him in, and they spent the night together. “She said yes. I was really happy that it all paid off after I’d gone through so much trouble to get there,” Dorji said. He and the girl fell in love, he added, and remained in a steady relationship for the next two years. They parted ways when she became involved with another man, whom she met in a similar fashion.
The story of Dorji’s courtship is not an anomaly even today in most parts of central and eastern Bhutan, where bomena, which in Bhutanese means ‘going towards a woman’ remains practiced by many men. Unsurprisingly for a custom that hinges on secrecy and discretion, the precise nature of bomena varies widely. In a paper published in December 2010 in the Journal of Asian and African Area Studies, Dorji Penjore of the Centre for Bhutan Studies described it as an institution through which people seek partners for marriage. But, Penjore explains, “It can also be as short as a one night affair if coitus is the primary motive.”
The process by which bomena progresses into a public relationship—known as jai do jong (‘coming to the surface’)— begins with the man remaining in the woman’s bed till morning, instead of sneaking back to his own home in the dead of night. This, Penjore writes, “is enough to declare them as husband and wife. They then enter into a different world of adulthood, bear more responsibility, and enjoy higher social standing and status.”
But the practice has increasingly acquired a negative reputation. Among the problems associated with it, notes Penjore, are the exploitation of rural people by urban, the exploitation of women by men, the increased tendency toward promiscuity, the spread of venereal diseases, and the increase in the number of illegitimate children, teenage pregnancies and single mothers. In the modern context, bomena has come to be known by the ominous term ‘night hunting’.
Tashi Dema, a Bhutanese journalist who won a national award for a story about the subject, told me she is opposed to the practice, pointing out that in many cases, bomena turns to rape. “I have heard testimonies of women who have been forced into sex,” Dema said. “The women claimed that some men would barge into their homes and refuse to leave even after being beaten.”
Dema herself was born and raised in a small village in Trongsa district, in central Bhutan. During her childhood and adolescence, bomena was a norm, not an exception. The custom goes on even today. “I was fortunate to never have been ‘night-hunted’,” she said. “I left the village when I was young for getting schooled. But all the women who stayed behind had to face it. It is a reality until today.” Though never revealed in the census, Dema said 60-70 percent of the children from her generation were born out of wedlock, and remain unclaimed by their fathers. “I have met these children and they’ve often told me that they wish they had a father,” she said.
Respect, Educate, Nurture and Empower Women (RENEW), a women’s rights group based in Thimphu has been conducting surveys over the past two years to document the number of children born out of wedlock in Bhutan. “In a survey in one district with a population of few thousands, we found out that 700 children were born out of wedlock,” said Chimi Wangmo, RENEW’s executive director.
The organisation, which was established by Bhutan’s royal family, has been working to register fatherless children, to enable them to access basic social facilities like health and education. “In order to register a child in Bhutan, you need to have information about the biological father as well as the mother,” Wangmo said. “In many cases of night hunting, we cannot even trace the father’s whereabouts.”
Wangmo explained that the organisation isn’t against tradition, but against the exploitation that occurs in the name of tradition. “The traditional form of courtship began transforming with urbanisation and modernisation,” she said. “Men from urban areas began going to rural areas to seek sex from women and never turned back to see the impact their philandering left.” The women who are exploited by night hunting are often incapable of seeking legal remedies for redressal because they are unaware of their legal rights—RENEW supports them in these efforts too. While there is no law that directly safeguards women from night hunting, the Domestic Violence Bill, currently being discussed in the Bhutanese parliament, will offer stronger support for the victims, if passed as a law. Currently, under the Bhutanese penal code, there is no law that safeguards women against domestic violence or abuse by family members or intimate partners.
RENEW’s efforts aren’t limited to counselling and supporting women. “We have male volunteers who go from village to village and educate the men about the ill-effects of a custom like this,” Wangmo said. The organisation also helped produce a feature film in April 2012 about the night hunting culture, called Gawa, directed by Chand RC. The director said that though the film has educated lots of young audiences about the evils attached to the custom, it has also attracted some criticism. “Some sections of the society have criticised the film as being biased against men, but my job is to tell a story and tell it well,” he said. Chand added that Bhutanese people view Bhutanese society as being gender neutral, which made his job of highlighting gender-based discrimination difficult.
While efforts to combat exploitation in the name of bomena continue, the culture itself has changed with the times in much of Bhutan. Technology has played a role in rendering the practice somewhat redundant. With the advent of electricity, men find it increasingly difficult to sneak into women’s houses without being noticed. Mobile phones have allowed young couples to make appointments for meeting late at night. Television and the internet have introduced Western ideas of dating.
Today, in urban centres like Thimphu, bomena doesn’t exist. Most women I spoke to in Thimphu said they had heard of night-hunting, but never experienced it themselves. Men are almost equally reluctant to talk about it.
But back in the café, many more drinks down, Dorji said, “It gives me a nostalgic feeling—talking about those days and those experiences. It was alright then, you know. It wasn’t wrong.” Dorji is aware of the discussions around night hunting today, and said he doesn’t approve of the practice anymore. “I know what the implications are of night hunting. It harms society. It doesn’t bring anything positive,” he said, wagging his finger. He looked at his watch and announced that he had to go home. “I wish I’d known better then,” he said as he gulped down his last drink.
Gayatri Parameswaran is a freelance journalist specialising in conflict, social justice and sexual health. She has reported from South Asia, the Middle East and the Caucasus.
caravanthemagazine
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