Tin Tin's deepest thoughts

Ok - this is a little absurd. But please consider it art, and please hold some faith in my mental stability. It's a parody of an extremely famous and deep poem by Bulleh Shah from present day Pakistan, so I feel a little guilty for butchering that poem. But I believe that Bulleh Shah would have approved of appropriating such ridiculous thoughts to something as ridiculous and heavily entertaining as Tin Tin.

Tin Tin, I know not who I am,

Am I a polar bear, or an albino?

Am I just a toy, or could I apply to become a real boy?

Am I a believer, or an infidel?

Would I have made a better Mosses, or a better Pharaoh?

Tin Tin, I know not who I am.

Tin Tin, I know not who I am,

Do I actually like cats, or do I just enjoy the thrill of conquest?

If Theo lost her tail in some tragic accident, would I still find her attractive?

Do I enjoy sleeping by the main door, or in the upstairs living room more?

Is cat food better, or dog food?

Tin Tin, I know not who I am.

Tin Tin, I know not who I am,

Why do they all hate me?

Is it because of their own insecurities?

Would they feel differently, if I dyed myself grey?

How would I do that anyway without thumbs and fingers, or the ability to express my wishes to real boys?

Tin Tin, I know not who I am.

The crazy things that might well happen in our lifetimes

For some reason, it’s a real joy to talk and speculate about the crazy and unusual things that might happen in our lifetimes. It’s open license – no right or wrong answers. And I guess there could be no greater creative and intellectual exercise than to stretch the imagination, and think about how things might be different to what we’re used to.

I also feel that we live in a really bland world since the end of the Cold War. The rise of China, pan-Islamic jihadism and the Arab Spring have spiced things up a little bit – but it’s still a really bland, neo-liberal, unusually peaceful state we’re in right now, which I don’t think will last.

And most of the powerful actors in the world have a really strong moral self-perception, and hold themselves to more moral and ethical scrutiny than ever before. People still continue to do many bad and ethically questionable things, but never before have they been so proper, mainstream and questioning of themselves. It just defies human nature, in my humble opinion.

So, I was doing this over dinner this evening with an old friend in New York, who is somewhat of a kindred soul. We really think alike – it’s a little scary at times. Here’s what we came up with:

1. There might be mass pogroms of Muslims in Europe: The population of Muslims in Europe is rising fast, and placing some serious stress on the national character of all these countries. 30% of Amsterdam is now Muslim – that’s really insane. And can you imagine a Muslim majority Amsterdam with legalized prostitution and drugs? It’s going to happen within the next 30 years.

And at the same time Europe is becoming more and more atheist. It’s not crazy to imagine the swift rise of a radically militant form of atheism. Everyone from Bill Maher to Richard Dawkins already represent the first banner holders of this movement, though at the moment they are quite restrained because their numbers are so small.

And when that switch flips and demographics do their thing, it’s going to get really dark and ugly. I really wish that more atheists were agnostic and held some self-doubt and possibility in the belief of others. Religion isn't the only cause of violence (though it certainly helps) - I hope these atheists realize that people are the biggest cause of violence.

2. Today’s Islamic world will hold 90% of the world’s failed states: It’s already happening. But countries like Egypt and Pakistan might be like what Somalia is like today. I really don’t know how to explain it. Is it religion? Would it have happened regardless? Did what happened in Karbala 1,400 years ago kill this otherwise (in most ways) miraculous religion? Who knows, but it really seems like it’s going to happen. And the humanitarian crisis that will follow will be unprecedented.

3. Asia and more specifically China will be the new United States: People will immigrate to China in boat loads. The ethnic Han will not do any dirty work. Chinese physical features will define our new standards for beauty and physical attractiveness. Koreans are already getting there – you should just watch the music video for the S.E.O.U.L. song. I don’t hold any trace of Yellow Fever (I even have a vaccination card to prove it), but I find the girls in that music video to be attractive. Plastic surgeons will make a killing, changing peoples’ faces to these ethnic Han physical characteristics. The tiny border between Pakistan and China will need to be fenced – Chinese anti-immigration hawks will be more hawkish than the American Tea Party.

4. Israel and Palestine will only end one way: In mutual destruction. Their positions are too irreconcilable, and there’s too many nukes out there and too many ways of delivering them (Pakistan alone could destroy Israel 50 times over, and if the Pakistani state fails, things could well go there). Enough said. You would have to be either be really blind or idealistic to not see this coming. What’s more interesting is whether it will happen suddenly and unpredictably, or whether there will be a massive immigration wave and period of instability leading up to that point. Now that’s really hard to say, though my money is on the suddenness.

5. Bangladesh and an insignificant number of other countries will sink: As Mid-Western Americans continue to drive their monster trucks and centrally heat their homes, large parts of some countries such as Bangladesh will begin to disappear off of the face of the planet. It’s really going to suck – not least for the humanitarian tragedy that will precipitate, but also because it will be so complicated to settle who did what to whom (across both geographies and generations/timelines). With it, we’ll lose unbelievably amazing countries like the Maldives. The Seychelles will survive because it is hilly, but its beaches won’t look as good. That will also really suck, because I would rather have the beaches of Seychelles than some cozy worthless Mid-Western American homes occupied by lazy over-weight people.

6. Immortality: This one is science fiction. But it’s quite possible to crack. We might miss it by a generation or two. But it almost seems inevitable – and plenty of time and energy will be devoted towards cracking it which would be my argument for why it seems inevitable.

7. Drones will become both wide-spread, and a giant head-ache to manage, leading possibly to anarchism: One of the main things keeping terrorist attacks in check right now is that we can road-block or regulate two dimensional ground traffic, and air traffic has not been “democratized” (the irony) enough. But once it opens up, regulating 3-dimensional traffic is going to be an enormous (though not impossible) challenge.

This might sound like science fiction – but it really isn’t. Withn a few years one will be able to download a schematic, and 3D print a drone. It’s completely conceivable.

How will we tell good drones apart from bad ones? May be a tightly managed centralized registration system? And all that linked to an iron dome like air defense system that immediately takes down anything that isn’t authorized? How will we select the gate-keepers of this space from amongst ourselves? And what about software security and hacking? The technology alone sounds complicated, and the institutional strength required to pull it off may only exist in 5 countries right now – may be Singapore and Israel will pull it off, whereas the rest of us will be doomed.

And how will we maintain Government “red zones” in all these countries? (a “red-zone” is typically a 5 block by 5 block part of the capital city, where the formal Government of a failed or failing tends to bunker itself in, though it typically runs not much more than just the red-zone – Islamabad has one, that I grew up in, back when it was not the red-zone; Kabul has one; Baghdad has a really famous one, half of which was taken up by the US Embassy with its massive country club; Mogadishu has one that’s only 3 blocks by 3 blocks). Will they have to build a giant 3-dimensional cage around it, or something like that glass dome from the Simpsons movie? But even those things can be penetrated? How about a complete no-fly zone, where even something as benign as a flapping bird gets zapped and toasted? Or maybe we will have zapping technology that differentiates between birds and drones?

 

P. S. I hope none of this is Nostra-Damus style ambiguous metaphorical B.S. I’ve tried to make it quite specific. But please do feel free to let me know what you think and criticize it.

Irrational is the only thing irrational

One of the greatest myths of our time is this notion that certain people behave in ways that are “irrational”. I don’t think such a thing exists. We tend to use the term often to discredit people who disagree with us, or disagree with what is widely socially accepted – our use of the term is almost a tool for social control, or a means to get people in line. Sometimes, we use it to justify our inability to predict others’ actions, as obvious as those actions might be – if we can label those actions as nonsensical, then we absolve ourselves of the responsibility for having predicted them or dealing with their fall-out. And the use of the term certainly doesn’t help advance the cause of understanding why people feel or behave in certain ways.

I was having a conversation with a fellow Stanford Graduate student, who is actually going on to do some fairly high profile and important work in security and international relations – we seem to share a common vision for a safer, more prosperous and more egalitarian world. We were discussing how military weapons systems are going to shape up in our ever flattening and technologically advancing world, which I find to be a fascinating topic – this is when she mentioned all these “irrational” people, and how hard it is going to be to live in this world and deal with such “irrational” actors.

But it’s not just my Stanford Graduate student friend. Condi (Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State) teaches a popular course at Stanford, which it titled “Challenges and dilemmas in American Foreign Policy” – the course description specifically calls out “irrational” actors. May be they’re “irrational” because they made Condi’s job really hard. But I personally think that it’s both intellectually lazy and cowardly of Condi to use such a term.

As we label things rational and irrational, let’s keep in mind the Socratic claim that “no one willingly does wrong”. It’s fairly self-explanatory, and at the heart of it is the notion of self-interest. Enough said.

And we know both from real world observation and from social science, that people will willingly inflict damage upon themselves, in order to also inflict damage onto others, or for what they perceive to be higher and more important causes. The “Ultimatum Game”, which is one of the great discoveries in social science over the past 30 or so years, shows this clearly.

In this game, two players, who cannot see one another or communicate, have to split $10 among themselves. The first player proposes a split, any split, and the second player can either accept or reject the split – if the second player accepts the split, then both players end up getting the money in the proposed split. But if the second player rejects the split, then both players end up with nothing.

The ultimatum game has taught us, and it has been proven to hold across cultures, ethnicities, socio-economic classes, education levels, different sizes of money being split, or whichever other way you might choose to draw up the experiment or cut up humanity, that people will inflict damage upon themselves in order to impose justice on others. Irrational? Enough said.

I hope that the most educated and savvy among us will start to realize that the only thing that is irrational about notions of rational and irrational is believing that others can actually be irrational.

Future business leaders love taking pictures with accused genocidaires … ??? …

Perhaps they know not … ??? …

Stanford Graduate School of Business is a funny place when it comes to politics and controversial international issues – they are almost never discussed. You can only ever have authentic and deep political conversations with classmates who trust you to a flaw. At that point, they’re generally pointless, because chances are that you’ll generally agree on what is being discussed.

Perhaps some classmates with a burning desire to discuss politics (like yours truly, and I know there are many others like me) are too aggressive and uncivic. It’s mostly their fault, and they need to double down on compressed classes like “Persuasion” and “Political Communication”, and learn how to break through those barriers. After all, Silicon Valley is all about taking personal responsibility (which is an inherently an apolitical way of thinking).

Perhaps some of our classmates are super savvy and understand where these conversations generally go and what they tend to lead to – nowhere and nothing. They have either consciously or unconsciously taken Dale Carnegie’s lessons to heart (Author of “How to Win Friends and Influence People”). They don’t want to do anything to jeopardize this opportunity, which they believe they have been blessed with, to build a strong life-long professional network. To these individuals, nothing is more important than building a network – it’s almost an end in of itself.

And perhaps business people are business people, and people like yours truly should have enrolled in a Public Policy School (I am not very fond of those schools, because they don’t ever get anything done). Apathy and ignorance on political issues is only to be expected. Changing lives, organizations and the world (the “MECE”ness ingrained in me in an earlier professional organization makes me cringe every time I hear those three changes), are inherently apolitical pursuits – and this is reinforced by the Silicon Valley’s Libertarian bend, and its disdain for Government and the nation state.

I generally do fine here – I realize that the culture is apolitical, and I like the fact that everyone’s trying to get along. But I must speak out when GSB study trips visit controversial political leaders, and the controversy surrounding them is swept under a rug – let alone discussed, explored and understood.

Narendera Modi is one such character, recently visited by a GSB study trip – social media was flooded with pictures and articles from my classmates celebrating this visit. And I believe he has been visited in the past by other GSB trips as well. He is the current Chief Minister of Gujarat, having held that office for over 10 years, and is likely to be elected the next Prime Minister of India, unless something changes drastically between now and the Lok Sabha Polls in May.

There are many positive things about Modi. He is largely credited with creating a business friendly and corruption free public sector in Gujarat, India’s 10^th largest state. But many things about Modi are also shameful. He essentially sanctioned the pogroms which took place in 2002 in Gujarat, by providing a 3 day open window to right wing religious groups to butcher innocent civilians of other religions, while the machinery of the state simply watched (and it has been alleged, even took part). At the very least, he scored significant political mileage from inciting hatred along religious lines.

Yes, we only hear about Islamic extremism, but all kinds of religious extremism is festering in South Asia. Travel authors like William Dalrymple have documented this really well as a trend on both sides of the big border, which cuts across all major religions. His book “Nine Lives” is an absolute gem. You’ll hear about Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but never of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) because they are not a perceived threat to any western country. I wouldn’t say that Narendera Modi is the equivalent of an Osama Bin Laden or a Mullah Omar, but he goes a long way in terms of his similarities with those characters (and by the way, the former was once dubbed “The moral equivalent of America’s Founding Fathers” by Ronald Reagan - the goal posts keep changing, so trying to determine who is the equivalent of whom needs to be a careful exercise).

My understanding of the broader trend towards religious extremism is that as both countries develop and lift more and more people into the (still relatively poorly) educated middle-class, people tend to revert away from traditional forms of religion which have long advocated peace, co-existence and harmony, and revert to more puritanical forms of religion, which provides them with a new identity outlet, and a new found way to express their (shoddy) educatedness. It’s very similar to the Christian Reformation in Europe a few centuries ago.

The issue is complex and I have oversimplified it. Yet if any man on a GSB travel itinerary has even has a blemish on his record, let alone accusations of crimes against humanity, it ought to be discussed, explored and understood. It shouldn’t matter that the issue is controversial or not business related – I thought the whole point of these trips was to provide a holistic view of a country which goes beyond just business and political correctness.

How many of my classmates on two sets of trips last year, who met with Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda, understand his role in ravaging the Eastern Congo over the last decade and a half? The broader conflict has precipitated the greatest humanitarian tragedy of our time, with an estimated death toll of over 6 million – this is in Congo alone, and not counting the Rwandan genocide. And Kagame continues to be a large part of the problem there, and that too with full US backing and support, under the guilt of US and international inaction during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide.

Some neutral international sources have described Kagame as “one of the greatest genocidaires of our era”. Everyone must read the book “Dancing in the Glory of Monsters” about the conflict in Congo. Again, all this is an oversimplification, and who did what to whom in the Great Lakes Region in Africa is extremely complex. But history is replete with examples of victims becoming monsters, and some part of Kagame ought to be explored and scrutinized as potentially one of those monsters.

And to be entirely fair, there are plenty of reasons to visit Kagame. Just like Modi, Kagame is credited with turning around his country’s public sector. The roads there are new and nice and many individuals in that country are now enjoying prosperity. Kagame is often held up as an example of a benevolent dictator who has achieved plenty of good.

Finally, Bibi, another victim turned monster, is all too keen to host Stanford GSB students as well – that man is in his own league. I won’t even bother to write anything about him, for there are too many who actually support him and his policies, and refuse to try to understand the conflict from the other side. You can read about him and his antics in this Haaretz article.

http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/.premium-1.562552

The bottom line is that there are many genocidaires in prominent political positions in the world today – their support of conflict and hatred is one of the factors that has propped them into positions of political power. Institutions like Stanford GSB and its students can choose to engage with them – there’s nothing wrong with engagement and understanding. But if we choose to do so, can we do so fully and holistically? Can we acknowledge the dark sides of some of these characters, so that we may understand currently active and relevant conflicts better, and learn from history?

There is another option – to keep it just about business. Sadly this is a regressive option because I don’t think you can Product Design or NPV your way out of what are often fundamentally political problems. The resolution of these issues involves talking to and understanding others – even if it is really uninteresting, complicated, messy and painful. Business might be business, but some of the more important things in life and in the world require empathy, learning and better understanding.