Tuesday 24 September 2013

Remembering Ravi

This spring, we ran into a familiar Indian looking guy by the pool bar at the Jacaranda Indian Ocean Beach Resort, one of the dozens of resorts on the Kenyan coast – after many awkward glances back and forth, we realized and were excited to see that it was Ravindra Ramrattan, known to us as Ravi.

This June, in the second week of my summer internship based in Upper Hill, Nairobi, I was sitting down at the Java House alone one morning, when the same familiar face walked up – Ravi and I were again both surprised and excited to see each other, and had breakfast together. We shared many more meals over the course of this summer, and in particular, shared an interest in exploring some of the more local eateries in Upper Hill – Meladen Club, a place which serves great tilapia, with beans, sukuma-wiki (well-cooked greens), cabbage and chapatti, was one of our big discoveries. I was lucky that my office was right next to his.

Some of our meals were planned with long strings of e-mails inviting our other friends also working in the area, and some were spontaneous – frequently we would just run into one another. I would sit down at Java, and a minute later, an Indian looking guy sitting two tables down from me would turn his head around, and turn out to be Ravi. I think he spent more time at the Java House than his office, and I pulled his leg about this whenever I ran into him there. He would then start ranting a little bit about his office and his work, in a quirky, self-deprecating sort of way – he was really good natured, and always meant it in good, entertaining spirit.

We knew Ravi socially in Nairobi – he was well known and loved across the young expatriate community, particularly for his open, fun, easy-going and quirky personality, but also for his intellect.

One of my lasting memories of Ravi took place over one of our several lunches this summer. Ravi is an economist and a solid econometrician – we were arguing about something in the development space (which he was really knowledgeable and passionate about), when he claimed that we were “omitting variables”. What he meant is that we were confusing correlation for causation, and using something that was merely correlated to an underlying driver or explanatory factor, and misconstruing it as the actual driver.

He was clearly extremely smart, and often framed his arguments as an academic would, which made conversations with him even more “fun” and unique (especially since you could make fun of him for his style, and he always took it in a nice, good-natured way) – it was always interesting to have someone like him weigh in on anything, but he was never arrogant or condescending, which is perhaps why people felt so comfortable and open around him.

In another “fun” conversation this summer, he quoted Sherlock Homes – “Data, data, data – I need bricks in order to make clay”. He took such pride in this quote that you had to be there and see his smile as he said it, in order to truly appreciate how he meant it. Not only did Ravi live and breathe his triple degree in Econometrics, but he was also truly passionate and absorbed by his work in the development space.

But my favorite Ravi story is from another set of interactions this summer – at one of our lunch meals he complained that he was suffering from a hangover. When I asked him how he got the hangover, he told me that he had gate crashed the cocktail party at the GSMA Conference in Nairobi the previous evening, and had too much to drink. He complained, in his usual stating-first-world-problems, self-deprecating sort of style that the wine was good, and completely free, so he had no choice but to drink too much of it, and that he now regretted his actions. Later that week, he attended or rather gate crashed many other GSMA Conference events.

The GSMA Conference is a big deal in Nairobi, and Ravi worked in the mobile money space, so it wasn’t too unusual for him to attend these events uninvited – and to be fair, many of his colleagues were invited, so he wasn’t entirely uninvited. But in one of our following lunches, he asked me randomly if I knew anyone at the IMF. When I asked him what he wanted specifically, expecting that it might be to look for a job, or help with a research paper or a report he was writing, he told me that he wanted to attend the IMF Conference in Washington D.C. later this year.

This is when I started pulling his leg – he clearly had a conference gate crashing habit. After a little bit of pushing, he confessed to many more such activities, and unlocked his secrets. He actually frequently gate crashed conferences – his methods included walking up to a conference welcome table, where often the name tags of invitees are pre-printed and on display for pick-up, and picking up the first name tag with an Indian sounding name. He got away with most of this gate crashing – one such event was for lawyers who had just finished the bar in London, and he had to pretend to be a lawyer at Lincoln’s Inn for an entire evening. But he also shared stories of the couple of times he got caught. He was so good natured that he had no trouble making fun of himself for getting thrown out of these conferences

These memories of Ravi highlight two things about him. First, his intelligence and insatiable intellectual curiosity ran to the point where he took a little bit of pride in being an academic and a researcher, and this made him an extremely interesting person to interact with. And second, his quirkiness, and easy-going nature made him popular among so many in our community. Perhaps we share a lot of common personality traits, or I might be projecting my own likes and habits on his personality – but still, I have met few people like Ravi who have made me feel so at ease, and with whom I have connected so early on in our friendship.

On Saturday we heard that Ravi was caught-up in the attack at Westgate Mall, and that no one had been able to hear from him. He had gone to the supermarket at the mall, to buy supplies for a BBQ, one of the many which take place across the young Nairobi expatriate circle on a typical weekend. On Sunday we got the news that everyone had dreaded – they found his body in a morgue.

The thought of what he might have gone through in the final moments of his life is extremely distressing. He was separated from his girlfriend as they were shopping at the supermarket (she was able to escape unhurt) – words will probably never be able to fully describe the shock and panic he probably went through as he saw the militants go through their rampage; and most disturbingly, as someone from an Islamic background, hearing their demand that Muslims in the mall state the Shahadah, or Islamic declaration of faith, so that they (the militants) don’t make the mistake or commit the sin of killing fellow believers.

Ultimately, I have never been this shocked and devastated by a terrorist attack – having known someone who has been killed makes it so real in so many ways that it is otherwise impossible to appreciate, at least for me personally.

I must be really honest here. Years of attacks have desensitized me to terrorism – my hotel was close to the bombing of the CID building in Karachi in November 2010. Not only was I caught in the middle of the events, especially the ensuing panic which lasted for a couple of hours, but I also walked past the pools of blood, and saw the horrifying white sheets with red stains at the scene afterwards. The smell of human flesh, and some kind of powder that they use to cover it up was shocking and I will never forget it – but all of it somehow faded in my memory.

The fact that an estimated 36,000 Pakistanis and many thousands more around the world have been killed by terrorists since 9/11 has almost just become a statistic. I have been desensitized to it all, so much so that the threat is just not real anymore – sometimes, I have even compared it statistically to the chances that one will die in a road accident, trying to make the case that it can be safe for foreigners to travel to Pakistan.

But it’s time that this issue became real, at least for me. In all the sadness and good wishes that we have shared across friends from Nairobi and more broadly across the world, I do not want to bring any anger in – but I am angry, partly for my own inability to be an effective part of the solution.

I think we need to understand terrorism better, in order to eliminate it – and terrorism simply cannot be allowed to become a new constant in our world, which we might eventually learn to live with and become completely desensitized to.

But I genuinely fear and foresee that this is how it might actually play out, and that Ravi may not be the last friend or family member that we will be remembering and mourning.

And while it’s a deeply complex issue which I do not claim to understand myself, I feel that we have a tendency to understand it only in terms of clichés, empty words and our own (often narrow and biased) beliefs. The “usual” words can be powerful, and obviously have their time and place – they help ground our own values and make us feel better in such times. But maybe it’s time we throw out what we want things to be like, or what we find comfortable to hear, and especially in such hard times, ask some really tough questions.

The people who carried this attack out are definitely “cowards” in the metaphorical or greater philosophical sense, but did it not take a serious ideological grounding and lots of guts to pull it off on their part? Were they not true to their strong beliefs, however misguided, and did they not perceive themselves to be (at least ultimately) doing good and something much larger than themselves?

It’s also easy to dismiss them as crazies – but just how common or uncommon are their views across the world? How many sympathizers do they have, and why are these people sympathetic towards them? Is it that they just attended madrassas, or are there real political grievances underlying their actions, in addition to the crazies? Will the crazies alone ever achieve something this significant, or are the political grievances a necessary part of their recipe?

Are these events of a narrow geographic scope, or are there broader and more peripheral pieces in the puzzle which we might actually be part of? Are the fairytales we read, or the beliefs we hold deeply, actually true or is there value to subjecting them to some skepticism?

And is this simply a problem of poverty and underdevelopment? Or would Ravi say that the causality actually runs in reverse?

Technology has so widened the possibility of asymmetric warfare, that even a tiny group with relatively limited capabilities, but a strong grievance can now cause significant damage – and it does takes a strong grievance for someone to take such a radical step.

It is impossible to eliminate these groups, as if one were eliminating cancer, and much more important to focus on eliminating the root causes of their grievances. What this means is that the room for moral and political error has narrowed far beyond what we have been used to in the past – and while people generally disagree on what is morally and politically right, and those of us who try to understand the world appreciate that it is messy, the perceived political injustices of the past simply cannot be an option any longer. We know where these flashpoints exist across the world, and we have a moral and ethical responsibility to resolve these conflicts in a truly fair manner, rather than persist with some of our own human stubbornness in the (effectively) zero-sum games that we are playing.


Not all is lost – I see hope that we can use these events to build stronger societies and political systems in places like Pakistan. To quote a famous philosopher: “When virtue has slept, it will arise again all the fresher”. It is my vision and dream that several decades from now people will ask us how things turned around so dramatically, given how bad that they had once become – and perhaps our response will be that they had to get really bad, in order for the good to re-emerge so strongly.

Thursday 19 September 2013

“O man, know how disgusting you've become” – Fresh lows of depravity



This week, three different parts of the world – Pakistan, East Africa and the United States – have hit the news in ways that have outraged so many including myself. Read below …

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FEUDALS BUY THEIR WAY OUT OF MURDER IN PAKISTAN SO THAT EVERYONE CAN GET ON WITH ENJOYING RICE PUDDING AND CRICKET

What’s the price of a human life? It’s 10 she-camels, according to pre-Islamic tribal customs in the Arabian Peninsula. In other words, a murderer could compensate for a murder with 10 female milk-and-baby-camel-producing camels and be pardoned for the crime by the victim’s heirs.

Now setting the exchange rate for a human life in terms of livestock seems primitive and tribal – but some of the tribes of the Arabian Peninsula weren’t just ragtag nomads. The Quraysh, for example, were settled, sophisticated urbanites, who ran a successful and largely peaceful, trading and pilgrimage center in Mecca during this period.

The core idea is simple – an eye for an eye will make the world blind (1,400 years before Gandhi); or that it is better (magnanimous) to forgive and forget than to avenge. In some cases, the initial murder, the one that sparked it all, can come under dispute and lead to a perpetual cycle of killing, so some form of non-human tradability helps put an end to the blood-letting (think “War on Terror” and who started it first).

Whatever the real reason, Islam adopted the principal of blood money, under the term “diyat”. If the perpetrator and the victim settle on a sum, then the one who committed the crime can be pardoned. And it’s not that Islam opposes the Death Penalty. It’s just one of several alternatives paths to justice available (and I am no expert on which form of justice is preferred or recommended under Shariah Law).

In fact, I oppose the Death Penalty – but my position is driven by some abstract liberal notion governed by some mental short-cut that I sometimes cannot explain, especially when faced with a real concrete situation, where anything short of the Death Penalty seems so blatantly insufficient. One such instance is the Delhi Bus Gang Rape in India, where the perpetrators where awarded the Death Penalty just a few days ago. Another such situation arose in December of last year in Pakistan.

Shahzeb Khan was an Upper Middle-Class youth living in the city of Karachi. One December evening he was gunned down in cold blood by the scions of two powerful, land-owning, feudal families of Pakistan – Shahrukh Jatoi and Siraj Talpur. The causes were petty, but the crime scene gruesome – the murderers lodged multiple bullets into Shahzeb and his car, in the parking lot of his building, an act clearly in cold blood.

The murder sparked outrage and a successful social media campaign which signed up 200,000 supporters. Police were unable to, at first, arrest the feudals. One of them even managed to escape to Dubai, under a botched identity, with his passage through the airport facilitated by public officials. He didn’t even obtain an Immigration Exit stamp on his passport, as required under Pakistani law.

But the UAE eventually deported this feudal, and the other one was arrested after an independent media and judiciary placed immense pressure on the law enforcement agencies (some of the most corrupt and politically manipulated institutions in Pakistan).

Finally, the two murderers were brought to trial. There was all kinds of drama – what should have taken a week (under Pakistani Anti-Terrorism Law) dragged on for four months. Witnesses were intimidated. The feudal kids who are 19, claimed that they were juveniles at 17, and so had to be medically examined. The doctors issued conflicting reports.

Ultimately, the trial concluded in June of this year, and the two main culprits were awarded the Death Penalty, with their two accomplices awarded life imprisonment. For once, Pakistan had proven that no one, not even the kids of two powerful feudal families, are above the law. But our celebration was short-lived, and we recently hit new depths of despondency.

Earlier this week, news broke out that the victim’s family has settled the murder for 350 million rupees in blood money (approx. US$ 3.5 million). A good camel costs around 100,000 rupees, so the settlement happened for 3,500 camels equivalent as opposed to just 10. And it’s not even fully clear whether or not money is involved, so let’s set aside direct greed and material convenience, as considerations in this whole saga.

What is important to understand here is that the family and the witnesses who were instrumental in the prosecution of the feudals have a social obligation to uphold justice, and fight for it until and even after it has been delivered. This is easy for me to say from the sidelines, but I am not just saying it because it helps me score moral credentials without any skin in the game. This is no longer just a private matter that can simply be settled out of court. It impacts everyone when a feudal can simply gun down anyone they wish to, with the understanding that they can buy their way out of it afterwards.

I spent 40 minutes last night listening to an interview with the victim’s parents, trying to understand where they might be coming from. Because even though this is a social issue now, their loss has been the greatest and their views must be sought out and understood in a respectful manner. But I came out with much less respect for them than I had when I went in.

Their first argument is that the sentence will probably never be carried out, so they might as well settle. This is an incorrect assumption – even fatalistic. The civil society and the media are behind them, and will ensure that the sentence is delivered. Why have they jumped to such a conclusion?

Their second line of reasoning is that they are doing this, not for themselves, but for all the witnesses and supporters of the victim – more specifically they want their lives to be normalized, and do not wish to place additional burden on them. This is a combination of not wanting to owe and not wanting to make them, the witnesses and supporters, feel that they owe anything.

While this second argument is somewhat abstract, underlying it are two premises. The first one is that the feudals can continue to harass them, and make life difficult for them, unless they settle amicably – this may not be far from the truth, unfortunately in a country like Pakistan. Justice and truth is not going to come without cost here.

The second premise is that the victim’s family, and its supporters seek a “normal” material life over and above justice for Shahzeb and all of Pakistan, with the potential price of justice being the harassment from the feudals. This assumes that they value their material conveniences over and above their ideals. This again is quite possibly a false assumption and I will come back to this at the end.

Their third and final set of arguments is faith based – the first sub-argument being that God likes those who forgive. So they will score “sawaab” or brownie points for their magnanimity, which in a purely rational, self-interested, value maximizing world, is in fact the right thing for them to do. But not only does it smack of quasi-material self-interest, but conveniently ignores the longer-term social cost of not standing up against the “zalim” or aggressor.

They continued their faith based argument by postulating that God will bring these individuals to justice on The Day of Judgment, anyway, so why not be patient until then? But if all we’re doing is waiting for the Day of Judgment, then we might as well give up right here, right now, and take a back seat in everything until the real show begins.

Unfortunate as it was, the day this incident took place, the lives of those involved changed forever. Now they must stand-up, above and beyond themselves, for all of society, and help ensure that nothing like this happens ever again. The alternative is to settle so that they can enjoy a “normal” life eating rice pudding and watching cricket. I cannot force them one way or another – but they do hold the burden of the choice which will impact us all.

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EAST AFRICAN LEADERS FAIL THEIR STATES IN BLATANT ACTS OF DEGENERACY

The two highest public office holders in a certain East African country, namely Kenya (also known as Silicon Savannah and hailed as an example of leap-frogging, and home-grown solutions to development like M-PESA), have been accused of crimes against humanity, and summoned to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. They have been accused of organizing criminal gangs and death squads to intimidate rivals following the disputed 2007 elections in Kenya, which were clearly rigged. In fact, they were so blatantly rigged, that the individuals who rigged them didn’t even bother to cover their tracks properly.

What ensued left 1,200 dead and over half a million homeless. Kenya, a regional African hub, and darling of the west, for its relative stability and supportive role in the War against Terror, jumped from 34th rank in the Failed States Index to 16th in just a year. No one had recognized or taken seriously, the tensions that were simmering underneath a seemingly calm facade.

Kofi Annan, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and former UN Secretary General, mediated a solution to the conflict, which among many things, included a new constitution for Kenya, and demanded that those responsible for the crimes be brought to justice. But even two years after the mediation succeeded in bringing back peace, Kenya failed to provide any traction towards justice for the victims, amid political wrangling, and general malaise and dysfunction across the public institutions within the country.

Kofi Annan was left with no choice but to hand the cases over to the ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo in 2009, so that proceedings against those accused could take place in The Hague under international institutions, and justice could be dispensed. He recently wrote an article on this in the New York Times:


The accused were not in power at the time that the cases were initiated, but were elected into office in the recent elections of 2013 – again these elections were mired by irregularities. It’s not even a question of voters not being able to select the right candidates (anyone with even so much as a blemish, let alone accusations of Crimes Against Humanity, ought to be rejected), but of the voting process being high jacked for the second time in a row. But this time no one spoke out too loudly for the sake of peace and stability. Everyone’s trying to ensure that the symptoms don’t aggravate, without addressing the root causes.

But even as they stepped into public office, they decided to comply with the court – in fact, they are the first serving public officials ever to comply with the court. Sudan’s President, Omar Al-Bashir, has repeatedly shown the court the finger.

But this was only to last until this week when the Kenyan Parliament decided to exit the Rome Statutes which created the International Criminal Court – in effect, it has finally decided to show the ICC the finger. Here’s an article by the spokesperson for the political party of the two accused individuals:


The arguments include words like neo-colonialism, sovereignty, race-hunting and chasing-Africa – it’s dirty old political rhetoric, and it is so clear that these individuals are absolutely devoid of any integrity. And most of this political non-sense actually does not sell, but what is frustrating is that Kenyan’s have become so apathetic, that they do not even seem to care. This could be their downfall.

So forget M-PESA or toilets which turn human waste into energy. As long as the ruling political elite remains entrenched, taking “turns to eat” (one must read the book, “It’s our Turn to Eat”, by Michela Wrong, which documents anti-corruption efforts by one whistle-blower in Kenya), with no one willing to stand-up for what is right, Kenya risks becoming a Failed State.

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BIGOTRY LIVES LARGE IN AMERICA, BUT IT’S ALL TOO CONVENIENT TO DOWNPLAY IT OR ASSUME IT AWAY

The recently crowned Miss America is of foreign or more specifically Indian origin (oriental or Eastern Indian, not native American Indian). Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss New York, before being crowned Miss America. It’s a triumph for a country whose greatness is built upon attracting and integrating generation after generation of top quality immigrants from all over the world. And it turns out that one of these immigrants is quite pretty too.

But following this news, Twitter exploded with racist and ignorant tweets, some of which have been retweeted thousands of times. I won’t detail these out myself – you can see for yourself here:


And here:


Initially it was about being Muslim, Arab or Al-Qaeda. Then they found out her actual ethnicity, but were still racist. The 7-Eleven and Gas Station jokes started. See them here:


Then I found other Tweets on 9/11, here:


As I shared these with American friends, I heard two types of defensive responses.

1. Don’t pay attention to anything on Twitter

2. There are bigots in every country

Ultimately, America needs to recognize that it does not always live up to the ideals that it espouses and strives towards. Everything from drones to Guantanamo, to these bigots are alive and well in America. Large segments of the education system have utterly failed to create knowledge of and respect for anything outside of America. These things are inexcusable in a country with such a self-perception of greatness.

And it’s all too convenient for Caucasian upwardly mobile urban professionals to assume these issues away or downplay them. But not only does it fail to solve pressing problems, but they do not even recognize that these issues are real because they are not directly impacted by any of them – it’s ultimately individuals like myself who are sent to the side room in SFO every time we have to clear US Customs and Border Protection.

If you can, I recommend watching a new film, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”. It’s pretty good cinema, and will help bridge these two worlds.