The intersection of Technology, Leadership and Society that made Aadhar happen.A captivating account

 My review at Amazon, of the book "The Aadhar Effect", written by my friend and inspiration, Ramnath.

Technology work with Indian Government is  hard. Harder still, when private and public institutions have to work together. The hardest part is when it involves each of the 1 billion citizens as an end user. The Aadhar project faced all these levels of hardships. The book, 'The Aadhar Effect' seeks to capture this hard, complicated and multi-faceted journey to consolidate and de-duplicate the Indian digital identity.

Somewhere in the book, the authors mention that the project had many aspects of a thriller with twists and turns, conflicting forces, drama etc. Well, the book itself seems to be that! Particularly the sections on privacy, with RTI activists .vs. Privacy activists, are page turners. The book is beautifully written. At many points, when I was reading a section, I had some thoughts (ex: about fortune at the bottom of the pyramid) and as I progressed, I discovered they were exactly covered in the book. That shows a natural flow that evokes reading interest.

The book goes beyond Aadhar itself and discusses enabling digital platforms and digital services that are or could be built over Aadhar. There is a small amount of noticeable (though well-deserved) Nandan praise for his leadership abilities, his ability to conceive the larger aspects of the project and put a diverse team together. To be fair, in the chapter 'Who's afraid of Aadhar?', the book lists a collection of 50 common problems and objections to Aadhar. Nowhere else can you find such a comprehensive counter-view in one place.

At some places, the authors tend to delve on the 'larger picture', philosophically or strategically, which may be viewed as a stretch. Like, towards the end, they portray Aadhar like it's some foreign relations enabler for its learning potential for implementing large digital projects.

The angle on Aadhar being, an important, but only one of the many Lego blocks is a significant theme of the book. In the same lines, the book dwells upon future possibilities and great potential of Aadhar, rather than on how it has been useful in the development arena, the exceptions being the Direct Bank Transfer scheme and payment systems. It dwells on the architectural beauty of having a unique identity and how it can be a true transformation tool if you want to use it for development and empowerment and how the central payments infrastructure is already making it possible.

The book has a good share of the stories of getting work done. For example, with Nandan's backing by the PMO, his access to PM worried the bureaucrats,. The authors mention it as: 'It's not that he would call. It's that he *could* call'. The book is of full of such super-interesting tidbits and also many anecdotes about the dynamics between Nandan Nilekani, his colleagues and various government departments.

As you write a book review, you realize that you are not writing a review of the book, but a review of the Aadhar project itself! Thats a good thing, it means the book has achieved its goal, of pushing you to think about the project, its impact, potential and ramifications.

If you seriously think about the impact of technology in Samaj and Sarkar, if you tend to have an 'integration' view of all things tech and the power of digital platforms to transform landscapes, this book is a great read. If you have been in situations, where you have to demonstrate extraordinary leadership to bring a diverse team together to push towards a visionary goal, you must pick up this book. You will understand both, how hard it is do good work in India and how hard it isn't, i.e. if you have the commitment, the right team and undaunted persistence.

It may be waiting for you at the airport, at a book fair, at a neighbourhood store, or in Amazon. It might pick you up. Like they say, when it comes to good books, you don't choose them, they choose you.

Little Go-Green Steps in the wide waste world... My efforts exploring an eco-friendly lifestyle...

Last year, on 1st Jan 2018, I resolved that 2018 will keep me excited about learning to adopt an eco-friendly, waste-reducing lifestyle. We write New Year Resolutions all the time, but I wanted to write a post on the New Year, about the previous year's resolve, chronicling what I did about it all year, whether I remembered it every single day and where I failed. It is also my first post for the Facebook forum Zero-Waste LifeStyle India which I follow keenly.

So before I ramble on into the philosophical tangents( don't miss them at the end), here are the specific steps, where I succeeded, failed, plan to bounce back and where I continue to remain confused, lazy and indifferent. The Successes :

• Reduced paper coffee cups from 4 per day to 1 per day. The 1 cup is my breakfast so it has stayed, but it needs to change too.
• Hand shower and health faucet in the bathroom.
• Stopped tetra packs, Lays chips.
• Drink tender coconut water without a straw, like tribals might do. By mistake if anyone tells you to use a straw, that's the flaunt moment, say #NoStraw.
• Say No to Straw for juices in restaurants.
• Say No to customer copy of debit card slips at POS. Say No to ATM slips.
• Reduced consumption of instant noodles greatly.
• Bought a second-hand laptop, although I could have perfectly bought a new one, after 12 years of using and killing my old laptop.
• Repaired the headphones twice, (courtesy my room-mate). The Sony MDR XD 100 is into the 9th year now.
• Keep only a fixed no. of clothes, and give away old clothes to charity every year in May. Ditto for all other miscellaneous junk "things" that accumulate from time to time.
• Shifted to Tooth powder for night brushing. Tried bamboo brushes with plastic bristles, not happy. Might try again.
• Stopped Dhobi from packing clothes in plastic covers every time. He wants to cover, so he shifted to covering them in newspaper. Now I have to stop him from using stapler pins.
• Using the bicycle. Has a 3-fold advantage. Energy-friendly, Economy-friendly and Exercise-friendly.
• Give wet waste to cows. Since Aug-15, in honor of Swacha Bharat. Collect fruit and vegetable waste from home, go in cycle and give to cows. It's a 4-in-1 winner. Exercise + Eco-Friendly + Circular economy + Go-sewa. In the west, people who for jogging are encouraged to pick up plastic, they call it plogging. I should call this cowcycling.
• Give dry coconut shells to the farmer who (anyway) uses such a stove.
• Collect fruit seeds, don't throw them away, set them aside. Might use them for seed-balls-with-clay before monsoon. (Dunno how far this will work). Worst off, they can always go to the bushes.
• Stopped eating chocolates.
• Shifted from running water shaving to mug-based shaving. I actually measured how much water I wasted, before I did this.
• Have tried old-fashioned shaving rounds instead of gel/cream, works okay with me, once the current lot of gifted gel gets over, planning to stop gel.
• Stopped using after-shave and tried old-style alum cake used by barber, but not happy. Cold cream seems okay. Not the best, but recyclable and wastage rate is slower than after-shave lotions.
• Carry a spoon and tiffin box on trains.
• Carry cloth bags or polythene bags you have collected from before. Say No to new polythene covers and also those flimsy cloth-like replacements. They are not recyclable too.
• Set aside electronic waste for responsible disposal. (For which, it seems, options are very less in India, if you were to investigate the entire trash trail).
• No Fan or light, when I am alone in the room. Like our Prof used to say, open the windows and let the atmosphere in. I also prefer well-lit, so if there are no big windows, chuck this rule.
• No AC when I am alone in the room.
• No use of geyser, enjoy cold water bath.

An occasional exception is allowed for fan, AC and geyser based on extreme climate, though. It's not as if God is sitting in judgement and will paste a ticket on your forehead, LoL.

• Use lift only at the end of the day, if the knees are tired.
• Use sleeper coaches in trains, instead of AC. Use trains instead of flights. An occasional exception when travelling with friends or long-distance in summer.

Not Through My Hands :

Dry waste segregation : I adopted a vow 'Not Through My Hands'. I shall not put any dry waste in the dust bin at home with my hands. All dry waste that passes through my hand is set aside for handover to scrap dealer. Waste that the local scrap dealer is likely to toss out or send to the landfill, is set aside to be turned over to recycling agencies in other cities when I travel. No pushing or preaching to others, may be suggest/nudge, but move on, take care of your waste first.

After a while, as an experiment, I tried sorting my own dry waste as a scrap dealer would. That's quite a revealing and awareness-creating exercise. If we really took 'Your waste, your responsibility' as a mantra, when you spend time sorting your own dry waste of few months or so from cartons/sacks, you are appalled at what you buy, what you discard, what portion is non-recyclable and straight goes to the landfill. Also, you realize the utter monotony, manual labour and thankless, endless, pointless job that segregation workers go through to sort our million wastes, apart from the filth and the health hazards they face. Become them for three hours, it will change you.

Failures :

Good Day biscuits : These serve as instant food for late night hunger. Should move to oats instead.

Glucose biscuits : These serve as breakfast. This should change too.

When I travel, all rules are off. (Why ?) I subsist on mineral water bottles all day during travel, can't afford to risk any which water due to my health. Nowadays, I try to fill RO water in stations, but not always accessible. I use Ola, something I wouldn't do in daily life in my town. I use it because otherwise I would get tired sooner and that upsets plans. I don't segregate waste and bring back, though I drop them in dustbins. Often, I travel some distance within the city I am visiting, just to have good food at a place of my liking, something that could be avoided.

Shaving : A major consideration for me. I don't worry too much about an occasional waste, but daily stuff is worrying, recurring waste is always a concern for me.

Razors : Haven't been able to solve the problem at all, confused. Electric shavers save water. Water in my area is pumped from long distances, we need to worry about it, so it seems great to me. But they cause industrial waste, not recyclable, disposal is a problem. haven't been happy with Braun Cruzer 6, burns after a close shave. The higher models are too costly. Mach 3 twin blades provide the best experience, but cause recurring waste of blades and not recyclable. The stainless steel blades, used by the barber, are the most eco-friendly if you collect the blades to dispose. Tried that, but they are the least comfortable for shaves. Finally, may be my friend Ramnath's New Year Resolution of growing a beard might be the most green solution, but it may cause tremors in other areas of my life, LoL. Now what to do ?

Fountain Pen : Turned out to be another confusing flop show. I stopped using ball point pens or pens with use-and-throw cartridges. Tried out a few models of fountain pens, nothing seems to work for me. I use a pen very infrequently. So, in most fountain pens, the nib has dried up by the time I want to write next. Just when I want to write, it won't write. Learnt from some of my students about hacks to re-fill ink in cartridges using syringe etc. For now, using pencils more. Will revisit in a while.

Toothpaste tubes seem to be the next unsolvable problem for me, because they are not recyclable. I am not a big fan of using Neem stick etc on a daily basis, unless we understand the long-term effect on gum care. Ditto for Ayurvedic Dantmanjan etc. But I may be biased here.

No solution for Tablet strips. I segregate them hoping to send them away for polyfuel, dunno how it will work.

Things for future :

• Want to visit the local landfill, with a mask.
• Want to visit an actual waste sorting facility, particularly for electronic trash trail. Must be a very sensitizing experience. Inspiration for this comes from the The Conscious Desi FB page and other articles on Trash Trail.
• Wondering about stopping the use of Talcum powder / Deo. May be try out Chandan or something.
• Should learn some hand-craft to make upcycled products. Though handicrafts is not my cup of tea.

Compost bin : Haven't bought one still, though this is considered a mantra for Go-Green, because 60% of all household waste is wet waste. The single thing that has been evading me all year. Right now, I don't need one, because wet waste goes to cows. Some wet waste not meant for cows (such as onion peels, puja flowers) goes to the bushes as mulching. Seems to work well for me. Except that, some days you are too lazy, busy or tired. About the compost bin, I am worried about odour, worms, rats in a shared flat in apartment block. Seems a very subjective art with too many elements of balancing such as dry leaves/saw dust, moisture, stirring, jaggery, buttermilk, what not. Every third blog on composting, tells about so many aspects you need to be careful about. There should be something simple and algorithmic, LoL. Or I should simply take the plunge.

My Inspiration :

The original inspiration was the famous "The Story of Stuff" video, which I watched umpteen times prior to 2018. (For a balanced perspective, one should also watch the "The Critique to the Story of Stuff" video, which gives a rebuttal to some arguments made in the Story of Stuff video). I was drawn to The Story of Stuff video, of course, by Swami's teachings on Nature conservation, Ceiling on desires and Vedanta. I truly believe, as a social phenomenon, Ceiling on Desires, can become the single great push for an eco-friendly lifestyle, because Reduce and Re-use are at the heart of it. The International Go-Green Conference at Puttaparthi midway in the year was a great push to my learning. One person from a small town in Karnataka who sat next to me in a group discussion, totally surprised me when he spoke at length about the list of green measures he follows in his life, including switching off the community street lights on time in the morning! It's quite humbling, you often catch inspiration from total strangers.

The internal challenges :

All through the year, there are many stray thoughts that impinge on you from time to time, either from your own mind, from other's sarcastic comments or from what you see and read. Some of them :

Why bother ?
As if what you do matters ? For every green guy here, there are 10 others, littering plastic in your neighbourhood. 
The government has to take care. They have to change the laws, enforce the laws better. We can't do anything. 
You talk about going green on this issue A, but see, what about that issue B , haha silly, you are penny wise and pound foolish. 
The earth will find ways to revive itself da, don't worry. 
Conflicting options, for example, washing stuff to re-use them takes water which is becoming an equally difficult resource. 
Simply showing off, nowadays it's more of a fashionable talking point to say I am going green. 
There is the real go-green and the green stuff you do like others do, like buying a new stainless steel water bottle or a new cloth bag. 
Don't overdo these things, like collect seeds, you've gone crazy. 
Every Go-Green decision becomes a debate of a million pros and cons, then how do you even decide and do something ?
It's just a fad, let's see whether you are as much fascinated after 5 years. Take it cool, dude, get a life. 

Although I explore and persist a lot, I don’t have a strong philosophical conviction about why Go-Green. Why we should even bother about these things, Go-Green, Segregation etc. It's quite okay to me if the human race, that crown jewel n all of creation, simply disappears from the face of this earth because of their own follies. There is no duty here. In the larger timeline of Earth's history, it doesn't matter, there have been random events like Ice Ages and natural disasters that just pop up from nowhere to reboot Life. On the endless sands of time, is it not the Child's Play of Goddess Lalitha ? So, why jump around too much to save the earth ? Like that George Carlin Stand-up video on saving the earth, says, don't talk of saving the Earth, the planet is fine, the people are doomed to disaster. I am more worried about the eco-karma coming back to me during our own lifetimes, in the lives of the children around us. That would move my heart. May be we should do it for their sake. Or for ourselves, because, it's simply the right thing to do. Or because it's the new fad. As the Admin guideline at the ZWL forum says, don't debate too much, focus on your bin.

There are other challenges, when you want to take others along, family and friends, or when you want to follow it at your workplace, institutionalize it or to find scaled solutions for society, such as activism or volunteering. But, right now, I am focusing on what I can do at the individual level. Sometimes, the dry waste accumulates or lies here and there in the room, that's something to be taken care of.

The pushers :

Being in a small town and in an ashram, without realizing it, you internalize a greener lifestyle over the years, compared to elsewhere. There is the constant reminder for self-awareness from talks. Commuting is very little. Living in a shared room has its simplicity, resources shared, buying can be bundled. There are good community/public options such as a bakery and canteens that are cheap. Sewage treatment is taken care of, solar power gaining traction. There is no TV, although there is the ubiquitous internet. You don't have to buy stuff to show off your social status. Wasting food pricks your heart a little. You can buy less, because there is limited place in your house, wallet and mind, for buying more and more. You see a lot of simple happy people around you. Even then, you tend to drift away, because there are also many small practices around you that are not eco-friendly. Poor waste segregation, coffee cups, fuel-guzzling vehicles etc, so one needs to push oneself to be conscious all the time. Of course, being eco-conscious is a small part of Conscious Living, which is a larger and more meaningful pursuit.

The journey made me develop a lot of interest in Minimalism, Minimalist Living and Decluttering. At the root of an eco-friendly life, is to Reduce. To reduce things, you have to reduce the space things occupy in your minds. In the movie, 'Into the Wild', there is a restaurant scene where the rich parents offer a new this and new that to their graduating son. The guy says, 'Oh, these things, things, things, I don't want them'. It was my favorite scene. If you buy gifts, they won't stay with me. Hand-write a note on a chit, I'll keep it for life. Buy less today in the first place, and lesser tomorrow. Household waste is only a miniscule portion of all waste, most of it is industrial waste which is driven by the consumerist frenzy and automatic obsolescence. Recycling is not a great solution, because we can't recycle a whole planet! In any case, only a portion what is recyclable gets actually recycled. So, think before you buy.

I enjoy the meeting point of spirituality, Go-Green, Minimalism and De-cluttering, even if they conflict occasionally. The spiritual concepts of detachment and respect for Nature can be great pushers for your interest in these things.

The FB forum Zero-Waste Life Style India has been a great learning ground from successes and constraints mutually shared by like-minded users. Can't thank each one of you enough for the countless day-to-day stories from small middle-class green households amidst their challenges. After a year of comments engaging at the forum and learning from the Maharathis, this is my first post, Thank you ZWL India.

Teaching Dinosaurs to dance digitally - Part 2

Part 1 of this article was about why PDF India is not #DigitalIndia and some thoughts on access to public data and data submission. 

Now that the rant is over, let me document some of the woes that I came face to face in accessing public data.

A couple of years back, I was consulted by a friend once on having to extract select data fields from hundreds of PDFs from SEBI website, for research work. It involved the extraction of fields such as Offer Price, Negotiated price etc (well, whatever their finance lingo), from Letter of Offer documents submitted by merger/takeover companies to SEBI, over 15 years. Putting together a strategy using open-source/free tools and an eye to automate most of the tedious tasks to the maximum and maintain accuracy, a sequence of steps was devised for automated extraction. In some stages, semi-automated. Some steps required human eye reviews from time to time, about whether the automation ghost, that eerily moved the mouse pointer at midnight, is working properly or is being interrupted by the invalid data ghost.

Here are some of the concerns I came across. 

The SEBI page of Letter of Offer for Takeovers, was treated as the starting point for collection of data fields related to Final Letters of Offer. ​

Original data collection by SEBI is not structured :

The fact that information was collected as PDF and not as structured data gives less scope for meaningful analysis of data. Ideally, the data should have been collected from the companies in more organized formats such as XML, Excel or CSV or by seeking information in a web form, as is the standard practice. This would have allowed the collection of raw data by SEBI in a database-friendly format. Since this was not to be, it led to a situation where the structured data have to be sought by sifting through PDF documents. For ages, we have been looking at standards like IFRS and XBRL from a distance, but nothing moved because SMEs complained of compliance cost.

No options to bulk download :

There were no options to bulk-download documents by querying for multiple companies based on search criteria. One had to traverse the pages a few links at a time to download the documents. This constraint was later overcome partially by a series of semi-automated steps using tools such as FlashGot, TinyTask and the parsing of the pages for file paths.

Inconsistency and non-standard methods in the organising of PDF links in the SEBI website :

The formats in which the document links were organized varied between pre-2005 and post-2005 periods. Links to pre-2005 takeover documents, would lead to a direct download link of the Final Letter of Offer. The file name would be numeric, giving no idea about the company in question. Such as this.  On the other hand, post-2005 takover documents, would lead to another intermediary web page of links for the company (such as this), which in turn would lead to the PDF link. In the later years, the PDF file would be named more meaningfully such as LOF etc (which is a relief), but not consistently. This meant more manual downloading and filtering of necessary documents from unnecessary ones. Some HTML tags filtering using tools such as NotePad++, followed by exporting to a database, were used to partially overcome these constraints.

Unsuitability of PDF format for structured data :

The PDF format doesn't lend itself to efficient parsing to collect data. Moreover, the data fields required (such as Average price), were often presented in a table inside the document. This meant that the PDF documents needed to go through a series of steps before data could be culled out from them. Calibre software and the online service pdfonline.com were used in batch processing to convert PDFs to HTML web pages. The individual code lines from the web pages were exported to an SQL database and parsed for HTML tags to look for tables that contained the required fields.

Lack of uniformity and fixed format for the presence of data in the document :

Inside the PDF document, data was not found consistently in the same location or format. One had to look for references to the section title such as 'Financial Justification' and then look for the data in the table that geographically followed it below. Keywords such as 'Negotiated Price', 'Average Price' and various combinations of such phrases had to be listed to look for data. Even after all this, one wasn't sure whether the data fields would indeed be found or not. 

Inefficiency of using text-based search to identify data fieds :

When found, they may not be found in a consistent form or a phrase. For instance, 'Not Applicable' could be any of NA, N.A., N-A,a hiphen etc. Sometimes, the justification section would be a paragraph that contained none of the keywords. For an automated lookup, references to 'infrequently traded' might often been confused with 'infrequently traded on NSE and frequently traded on BSE'.   These made automated collection inefficient and necessitated a manual study of the PDF documents.

Mismatch between different databases in company name mentions :

While some data fields required for the study were to be found from Letters of Offer, others were extracted from the Prowess database. The takeovers involve an acquiring company and a target company. There were inconsistencies and mixups in both these names between the Prowess and SEBI data sources. SEBI would list the letter of offer against the target company whereas Prowess would list it the other way round. In some cases, where there were multiple takeover instances relating to same company names, requiring the PDFs of multiple years. This meant resolving the mix-up by manually reviewing the PDF and data fields. One had to arrive at a cross-tab of SEBI name, Prowess Name and the correct Letter-of-Offer-Name in the takeover context before one could collect accurate data.

---------------------------

This is not the issue of a single website of one government insitution or a government department. It’s the opposite, of being unable to work as a single website for the whole country. It’s about the isolated approach to.presenting data to the public or seeking data from them, sulking it as an unwanted duty imposed by the Digital India frenzy.

The data.gov.in  sets an excellent precedent with public APIs throwing an ocean of private opportunities open. It is high time that other government institutions join the bandwagon of unified data view architecture both for submission and presentation of data, in truly seamless transactional digitization, keeping in view bulk submission and bulk download options. Data.gov.in has plenty of uncompleted agenda ahead of having to unify the data from the states at a regular timeline and keeping it update and in getting the various uncomplying departments to co-operate.

Some data dinosaurs have to be taught to dance digitally, because evolution is binary. 
You either become distinct or you become extinct. 

Teaching dinosaurs to dance digitally

It ain’t so much of #DigitalIndia yet. It's just PDF India. For those looking for meaningful, processible data, the difference between the two can make a world of difference. For some government institutions, digital means PDF or JPEG image of scanned print reports, including spreadsheets and balance sheets. One might argue that nowadays it's possible to extract data from PDFs using technology. But it's like garbage disposal and recycling. The messup shouldn't be created in the first place. Image processing algorithms were not invented for spreadsheets.

A good example of a bad PDF document is the District Census Handbook of 2011. It will have reams and reams of pages, with one page showing the first half of a horizontal spreadsheet, titled “Industrial Catgory of”, and next page showing the other half, titled “Marginal Workers”. Man, that must be some innovation in bad design .

Switch to the good example of presentation of the same data. data.gov.in presents hundreds of datasets from the Census of 2011 in open formats for public access. You can access the data for the same district in CSV format, loadable into Excel. Did you know you could download the Indian Railways timetable in Excel ?. How sweet!

The salient rule in data collection or presentation must be that, at the raw source, the data must be collected in a format that is processible by automation. It should minimize human eye intervention only for reviews and green/red flags and throwing up exception patterns. Or for discovering insights of wisdom from "rich experience", which a chip can't discern. Days may have come when chips outsmart elders in experiential wisdom as well, LoL.

Companies like HowIndiaLives.com , where my friend Ramnath is involved, address this problem by helping their customers and website visitors make visual sense out of the non-sense data in India's public domain. They also present it in a beautiful and user-friendly ways and help project stakeholders glean useful insights from data. That data shouldn't have been nonsensical in the first place, in its raw open form, is the sad fact. That they converted rants like these into a business opportunity is their ingenuity. While raw data must be disseminated in open processible formats, it should lead to an ecosystem of companies like these, which compete in discovering insights from data and presenting them, without having to spend too much time cleaning it. Not just cleaning it, but having to fight inconsistencies between multiple sources of data for the same item of information, I guess, must be another tedious task.

Taking a leaf out of international open data like data.un.org, the open data platform for India is a big leap in this direction for sharing of public datasets (though they don’t have options to bulk download data). 

On the other hand, some of the transactional websites of the government websites can make life extremely tedious. If you are a high-volume transaction submitter, your life can become miserable, having to submit thousands of records into old-style web forms. Some of them must have been in a cave since AJAX was invented. They can put thousands of person names with option buttons on a single page, expecting the user to scroll down or use the browser's Find, choose one name and then submit. Wwwhaaat!

The format in which data must be submitted to government websites must be pre-defined with digital processing in mind. For a billion-headed Titanosaur like India, it should definitely have scale in mind too. Ideally, it shouldn't even be Windows OS intensive and Windows OS requiring. Kerala, for example, wants to dabble in Linux and it's a good thing. I hope they don't up give up like Munich, the city that wanted to run on Linux. But, that kind of thinking is good. It may lead at least to the adoption of open formats for seeking data, if not an open-source OS.

Not all is a sad story with Digital India. There are a handful of bright spots in good design, that take scale and digital processibility into account. Aadhaar, no doubt, is a beautiful example. The Income Tax website often has some sudden quirky differences between its Java tool and the Excel tool with mysterious conclusions of inability to generate the XML file. But it at least uses XML to upload data. Thats a good thing. Even within the Income Tax Department, you may not find the same kind of good design for other tasks, for instance, for applying for non-deduction of TDS. Another of my favorite examples of handling technology at scale carefully is SBI's transition to core banking and their merger with associate banks. It was not about open data or about government per se. But, at its scale, it's truly a project of teaching elephants to dance, and for their size, they did a mighty good job at it. The GSTN must be the next Aadhaar-like unifier, after the easing out of the initial troubles.


This is the intermission, the end of Part 1. 

In Part 2, I mention some of the woes I faced while extracting data from PDFs from the SEBI website. It has a sad ending that rounds up by saying :

Some data dinosaurs have to be taught to dance digitally, because evolution is binary. 
You either become distinct or you become extinct.  

Lot of technical debris ahead on Part 2. Blissful poets, musicians and other non-tech readers not allowed beyond this point. :-) :-)

-->> Part 2 

Book Reflections : The Shattering of the Soul

How long does a good person remain good ? The true test of the goodness of a person may lie in extreme conditions that test it. They say the strongest of tyres are tested on the toughest of roads. Is your neighbour good, will he remain good to you in times of trouble ? Wait a minute, ask muslim widows who are victims of the Bosnian war. We don't get a very enthusiastic answer that we normally face. Most of us live under "normal" conditions, so it helps to assume an average goodness in the people around us. It's necessary too. However, in times of war, or war-like riots, the same human, acts differently, as if possessed by a war ghost. 

 

The book, "The Shattering of the Soul", which I just completed, captures this aspect of human nature. It captures the stories of war misery of 10 Bosnian muslim women, in a first hand account of their experiences on how the ethnic cleansing by Bosnian Serbs during 1992-95 unfolded, and how their lives were changed overnight. All the accounts have plenty of the events in common, that makes it a little repetitive in detail. They would all say, roughly, “We had a house and a farm, and we grew our food. War broke out, we were invaded and looted. We fled. We want to go back to our roots, but what is left but ruins?”. 

 

But, if you read one story at a time, during train travels as I did, you see the common thread not just of the events, but of both evil and good in man. You see that all grief is similar to the onlooker, yet each grief is different for the victim. The feelings of the common people in a typical village are so different from the ones who might have initiated the wars, but the stories of war travel far and wide to create more wars and more misery. It is as if the ethnic war ghost is a virus that spreads like an epidemic. It spreads, not through touch or food, but through the shreaks in the voices and fiery red eyes of patients infected with hysteric rage. It causes a clouded vision of the world and makes you hate thy neighbour as your enemy. 

 

The Museum of Tolerance provides an online version of the book for free : http://motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLcMVIuG&b=394691

 

The book speaks of how the Bosnian families were protected by the Serbian neighbours of the same village, although it was Serbians who looted them. The Serbian neighbour would stand up for them, they would stop their Serbian soldiers and say, “This one here is a decent family. They don't have weapons. Spare them.” . Yet another would say, “Take my life before you touch that child”. Some others may not stand as upright, but they would smuggle cheese and other food supplies for their Bosnian neighbours. Some would warn them in time so they could go into the woods and stay for days, till the invaders came and looted their houses and went back. After the houses were devastated, some would at least call them for a coffee in the afternoon to their house. How many of us can manifest goodness in the face of threat to our lives ?

 

They also speak of how, in some other cases, the very same Serbian neighbours who were close until the previous day, would participate in the loot of the Bosnian house. Some said they had to point guns at their Bosnian muslim neighbours, because otherwise, their own Serbian clan would kill them. They would make the youth from the Bosnian families work like a slave. The victims mention how they were clueless that the very faces whom they met across the street everyday would land at their door, demanding to chase them out and loot their houses. 

 

Until then, they were neighbours who helped each other build their houses. The houses were built by the neighbours lending a hand to each other, except for the roof, which would be given to the professional. The houses that were self-built and built as a shared labour between Bosnian and Serbian families would be destroyed, looted, the doors and windows or whatever was left just taken away by the invaders. Families with children had to move over to Slovenia, leaving all property back in their village, travelling long distances, even having to bribe for their paperwork to move out. Mosques on the way would arrange some food for the children of the migrating victims. The stories distinctly recall, how it was all fine till one day when the war started and the news of war arrived in the village and neighbours become archenemies. 

 

Which of these two is true human nature ? How does one know which part of Man will manifest when ? I can't help but think of similar stories from the Gujarat Riots of 2002 or the exodus of North-East people from Bangalore in 2012. 

 

As the compiler of the stories admits, the book captures only the view of select Bosnian Muslim victims, there are no stories about Serbian or Croatian victims, which must be equally mentioned. But as the epilogue argues, that is not much relevant. "Human suffering due to mutual hatred is universal, and by presenting the suffering of some we are presenting the suffering of all". 

 

Sri Ramakrishna tells an interesting story about two brothers fighting for land. They were on either side of the disputed border and were quarelling at the top of their voice, about the patchy border. “It's mine”, one said. “No, it's mine”, yelled the other. Voices grew into arms, arms grew into bruises, bruises grew into attacks and soon they both dropped dead at the border. God, who was watching the fight from above, felt funny. “Well, whose land is this now ?” He asked. There were no owners left to answer. 

 

After I read the book, I felt like listening to A R Rahman's song from 1947 Earth : "Ishwar Allah Tere Jahan Pe". It's a beautiful song that captures the questions that would have, surely arisen in the minds of those war victims rendered homeless, with their souls shattered and their hopes killed. From the ruins of their houses and ashes of their families, some seeds of hope must have flown across the Slovenian border. They wanted to come back and they wanted to live. But they had to choose between the two. The ghost of war abandoned their villages, and now went to possess some other race, tribe or religion, elsewhere on earth. But they had to struggle, rebuilding their lives and houses in another distant land. This time, without a neighbour, to lend a helping hand. 

 

Like that song asks: 

 

So many screams, who will hear the voice of love ? 

So many dreams shattered, who will gather the pieces ? 

 

The song is verily a Prayer for Peace. 

The link is here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ha2zTxnROJg

 

#NoWar #MusOfTolerance A.R.Rahman