Deterrence,Terror, learning from Israel way

Few days back, I read an article by Biju Dominic, ' Wiping out terrorism calls for a radically different approach'. I have respected Biju for a long long time, infact from the time in 2005 when he was leading the account from DDB side and I was brand manager at Philips. Coming from a family with many generation of military & political history, I have seen these debates at close quarters for long... as far as 1982-83. Add to it, I have a deep and abiding interest in most subjects military and human behaviour related.

Terrorist the word itself, carries the message they want to deliver, terrorise the populace in order to mould their opinion to suit group's political, religious or economic agenda through covert and overt use of Violence.

Since America is the foremost military power with a global reach and agenda, it is also at the forefront of military, social doctrines to contain the 4th generation of hybrid warfare. Like any other democracy it is also constrained in its response in accordance to its domestic laws. Add to it the emotional, knee jerk reactions due to virtue signalling by its liberal, intellectual class.

India, due it its geographic location and surrounded by hostile states with religious and geopolitical pecking order motivations (Pakistan/BD and China, UK/US) is another frontline states for terror with a large Muslim population (largely peaceful) but fished in by western neighbour, calling for decimation of a Kafir state. People may not know but the motto of Pakistan army is 'Jihad-fi-sabilliah' - Jihad in the way of Allah. I don't want to get into the details of partition and Pakistan being "New Medina". Add to it, we have many faultiness of language, religion & many grievances, ready to be stoked.

3rd frontline state is Israel, surrounded by huge, hostile (driven by religious motivation) neighbours whose avowed goal is destruction of Jewish people. There is lot to learn from Isarel on anti-terror and there is lot to learn from India on anti-terror.

At the very beginning, let me say Terror can only be defeated with greater terror. A jaw for a tooth and an eye, hand and leg for an eye. It creates deterrence and targeting the key stakeholders (leadership) is the right strategy.. domino theory.. One domino falls the whole pack does. I have repeated ad nauseam that we need to create deterrence.. target families and friends of generals anywhere in the world.

Make them fee fear of personal loss.. bring their skin in the game. Apart from head of state, all must be on table.

The American and Indian counterterrorism debate has largely ignored Israeli calculus. Washington is generally averse to learning from others, and Israel’s security establishment, until recently, was reticent about revealing its thinking. That changed last August when, for the first time in the IDF’s history, Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gadi Eizenkot published an unclassified version of the IDF defense doctrine. But because the document appeared only in Hebrew, it has remained largely unknown in the American strategic community. To make it accessible, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs recently posted an English translation of the document.

Indian establishment has only upped its collaboration and for the very first time started implementing the learning i.e. Uri, BawalKot now post Pulwama. So people who say we must make peace know nothing about war. It’s only war, ability to bring unprecedented violence on enemy that ensures peace. And war must continue till one of the participants is exhausted and spent in will and resources. War may not be the beautiful but it ensures beauty to thrive.. Our whole history has been wars with some peace in between.

The “IDF Strategy” document discusses in detail how to deter terrorist groups, specifically Hezbollah and Hamas. In the U.S. policy lexicon, Hezbollah and Hamas are labeled “terrorists.” The IDF calls them “substate organizations.” Substate actors have headquarters, hold territory and govern populations. Thus they present targets of value, making them vulnerable, like states, to a combination of “general deterrence” and “specific deterrence.” General deterrence is achieved by maintaining overwhelming military superiority and earning a reputation like that of the Godfather. The Godfather “takes everything personal.” As his consigliere observed, “If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. . . . Accidents don’t happen to people who take accidents as a personal insult.” In Eizenkot’s words, Israel must be seen as “an unpredictable enemy that can react in a very severe way.” This something that Indian state and IA has not done till now as our responses have been very measured and lot of times sub-par courtesy optics and politics.

Specific deterrence is tailored to each enemy and focuses on particular actions. It requires “an ongoing analysis of the enemy’s characteristics, considerations, capabilities, identity, and decision making processes.” Israel seeks to influence the “calculations” of its enemies directly by persuading them of “the futility of continuing to fight” and reminding them of the “outcome of previous confrontations.” This is come thing Indian army has only started to say recently when Lt Gen Dhillon stated that anyone who picks a gun will be killed and he appealed to the mothers of these youth to put some sense into their wards.

Pulibius Syrus on stone pelting & suicide bombing: Pardon one offence and you encourage the commission of many. Here is where we have had a massive failure with both of the regional parties undoing each other in relating stone pelters and pushing the forces to ignore these.. even though most gunweilders in Cashmere have graduated through stone pelting. A stone a 90-100KM/hr is a projectile that breaks the skull and soldiers are succumbing to it, severely demoralising the morale.

The IDF constantly worries about whether its deterrent is sufficiently strong. It works daily to ensure that it meets each and every condition required for success. Red lines are clearly, publicly and repeatedly announced by top Israeli officials not only in Hebrew, but also in Arabic. Israel’s capability to enforce these red lines is demonstrated by “building a force that is partially visible to the enemy.” Credibility is enhanced by taking “limited offensive actions to signal that the ‘rules of the game’ have been broken.” And it is careful to withhold punishment otherwise. (Indeed, Israeli policymakers have occasionally chosen not only to avoid punishment but to reward good behavior, for example, in supporting the reconstruction of Gaza even though Hamas uses some of the material Israel supplies to build tunnels and rockets.)

"Israel sees Hezbollah as the “most severe threat.” A proxy of Iran, it has assembled an arsenal of more than one hundred thousand missiles and rockets aimed at Israel—many of them precision-guided with the ability to hit strategic targets, including the equivalent of the Pentagon in Tel Aviv. Hamas, whose charter pledges to “raise the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine” occupied by “warmongering Jews,” stands second among substates whose attacks must be deterred. It has fought three wars against Israel in the past decade. During the Second Intifada, Hamas perfected the suicide bomb and used it to kill hundreds of Israeli civilians. Today, the group has thousands of rockets and is burrowing tunnels into Israeli territory for future attacks. (Israel has discovered a number of tunnels in recent months, each buried one hundred feet underground.)"

How does the IDF meet threats posed by these groups? Not by direct attacks to degrade them; not by all-out war to destroy them. Instead, it attempts to deter them. As Yadlin explained,

“Vis-a-vis Hamas and Hezbollah, we haven’t destroyed their capabilities, but we were able to establish deterrence. And this is basically because we hit them hard, and because the terrorists became . . . half-state entities. . . . The terrorists have discovered that when they are responsible for their economy, for education, for the life of their people, suddenly they are not that daring to use terror all day.”

India has NOT been able to establish deterrence because most leadership of Kashmiri terrorism enjoys the hospitality of Pakistani state. Guided, protected and feted to realise their strategy of "Bleeding by 1000 cuts". We have not been able to physically hurt these entities also due to domestic politics in India. You kill a family member of these Jihad leaders, you deter. The day we hurt families of Generals in Rawalpindi, we put fear of God that any action against indian state or its citizens will have severe personal ramifications for perpetrators 

Of course, deterrence is not the only strand in Israel’s strategy to counter its enemies. Full-spectrum prevention of terrorist attacks includes detection (deep penetration to identify threats), defense (such as the Iron Dome missile-defense system and secure walls or fences on all borders) and decisive defeat (when, despite best efforts, attackers succeed). While many states, including the United States, invest heavily in similar efforts, Israel is unique in its placing deterrence at the core of its counterterrorism strategy.

Pulibius Syrus to propagandists saying we can’t afford war: Necessity knows no law except to conquer.

The IDF accepts the fact that this strategy sometimes fails. When it does, Israeli citizens die. But Israel’s national-security community still considers deterrence better than any feasible alternative for meeting threats posed by its substate adversaries. And after each conflict, the IDF has redoubled efforts to establish a new level of deterrence.

I see more educated a person become, less is his proclivity to see violence as a means to an end thus leaving out one very important traits of specie's survival on this planet. I have more faith in that semi-literate (so called) who stands up to fight for his land, home & hearth.

"Sūrā so pahicẖānī▫ai jo larai ḏīn ke heṯ,

Purjā purjā kat marai kabhū na cẖẖādai kẖeṯ."

He alone is known as a spiritual hero, who fights in defense of religion.He may be cut apart, piece by piece, but he never leaves the field of battle.

"Chose pen over violence.. Make a career...Terrorists are cowards...they are crazy.." all these are euphemism for self cowardice. Directed violence has a purpose, terrorise, in this case, population into accepting your political, religious views. We need ruthlessness but with a scalpel, not sledge hammer. Need to find long term solution.

"The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools."

*All quotes and commentary on IDF from a blog I read on http://nationalinterest.org/feature/why-isis-fears-israel-17286?page=2

Very intelligent but wisdom... well

People often equate wisdom with intelligence or being knowledgeable; but all too often, it becomes apparent that being intelligent and being wise are quite different things. The world is full of brilliant people who intellectualise without really understanding the essence of things. In contrast, wise people try to grasp the deeper meaning of what is known and strive to better understand the limits of their knowledge.

As Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.' Wise people are attuned to what constitutes a meaningful life. Being heated in crucible of life, they perhaps understand what actually matters and is only transactional requirement for managing life. Our daily distractions, financial and professional commitments add layers of hinderance to our quest for wisdom and in my humble student conclusion, it is the environment itself in which we nurture ourselves that can more fluidly put us in the "state" of readiness.

Wisdom implies more than merely being able to process information in a logical way. Knowledge becomes wisdom when we have the ability to assimilate and apply this knowledge to make the right decisions. As the saying goes, ‘knowledge speaks but wisdom listens’. Wise people are blessed with good judgement. In addition, they possess the qualities of sincerity and authenticity, the former implying a willingness to say what you mean, the latter to be what you are.

Wise people are also humble; their humility deriving from a willingness to recognise the limitations of their knowledge. They accept that there are things they will never know. By accepting their ignorance, they are better prepared to bear their own fallibility. People who are wise know when what they are doing makes sense, but also when it will not be good enough. Ironically, it is exactly this kind of self-knowledge that pushes them to do something about it.

I have seen people at the very top saying to very young me, " I don't know.. why don't you try it? That way, I will also learn & be able to contribute in some ways..". I have rarely seen wise people seeing things in perspective of absolutes i.e. Success or failure.

Wisdom is understating that in a world as complex as our, such generalisations ( Success ..failure) are a sign of naive, unsophisticated or even malevolent analysis.

Knowledge is understanding that we are always and simultaneously at point 'a' (which is less desirable than it could be), moving towards state/point 'B' (which we consider better in line with our implicit values and aspirations). Wisdom is understanding that as we continue to close on point 'B', we never really reach it, as everytime we touch, it metamorphose into point 'A'. Its understanding that we always encounter the world in a state of insufficiency and seek it's correction lifelong.

Wisdom is what the sages in Vedanta mentioned about limiting desires in order to be happy in personal life and that's why teachers, knowledge seekers (Brahmins) though dirt poor, continue to be respected.

Wisdom is in understanding that the future is like the past only albeit with a little crucial difference. As prof Jordan Peterson said, "The past is fixed but the future.... it could be better. It could be better , some precise amount. Happiness is to be found in the journey uphill and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at next peak.." ( 12 rules of life).

Now imagine the implications of this differentiation in corporates. What differentiates great &successful CEO with a good CEO. former understands being a CEO is a width job, upholding principles.. building alliances, helping people coordinates/collaborate. Later is a master of function and pivots organisation to what he knows personally & is a master.. knows the depths.

Thank god, my wisdom tooth has stopped aching for few week now.

Social media, being ordinary & happiness

 

Greatest calamity ushered in by social media is shunning of 'Ordinariness'. People don't understand that media is an eyeball game (mostly) & only extremes make eyeballs possible as none would watch ordinary. Social media addicts need to understand, 'Extreme' is not the norm. By the way, 'Ordinary' is NOT deformity, it's the NATURAL state of being. Genius is an anomaly. The way media glorifies genius or our social news feed shows people enjoying life with endless surfing in hawaii to dancing on pier 39 in frisco almost every single day, we have started assuming this as normal.

People like me, Ordinary, mostly at home on Sundays reading books or doing household chores, trying to break fights among children in our old T-Shirts and shorts have started looking like anomaly. We have somehow been thrown into an abyss of being 'losers'. our images of coming out of crammed trains/tubes, rushing to catch an auto to complete last mile to office are not 'Facebookable' with sweat beads & sometimes crumbled creases. Wearing a tie with fine cut suits (may be once in a month) in an office is real work, rest all of us ordinary men/women are failures.

This is dangerous & cutting the young from reality of everyday grind. The reason why lot of millennials are not able to hold jobs for long is the dissonance & dichotomy between the pictures of their friends/cousins in offices (nice fine suits in AC offices) messes up their heads.

This 'facebookable' fad leads to more and more entitlement, breeding more and more unhappiness in search of a new high.. This is what is killing relationships by creating this 'Outrage Porn' on social media platforms everyday. This brazen victimhood mentality & then demanding entitlements from society is creating a class of happiness junkies in search for another high through outrage or outrageous.

Dear Young graduates, everymen like me do succeed as well. Superstardom is not the perverse of genius alone. There is a way, ORDINARY man can do it also. Its called WORKING HARD & being disciplined. Though what success means to you is different to me but yes all can succeed basis our feet on ground.

Path to greatness exist but what is great depends on your value system. I am happy being the prophet (my measure of success), being 'God' is not my idea.

capitalism, stories and social media

Standard economic theory requires that consumers and businesspeople pay close attention to a vast array of prices, quantities and other information. Because keeping track of this flood of information is very costly, it makes sense to think that people economize on what they pay attention to. That kind of economizing is called bounded rationality, a term coined by polymathic social scientist Herbert Simon, himself a recipient of the Nobel.

Statistics are useful to the extent that we find their insights more persuasive than stories.

But we often don’t.

Data takes effort to contextualize. Stories offer instant gratification. With social media proliferation, everyone is a story teller and has access to publication at no cost.

Capitalism’s success rests on a belief that, given the right incentives, people can work together to solve problems. It’s the greatest story ever told. To understand this better, we need to understand human behaviour. Our brain stores information in bits & pieces as it tends to economise usage of energy. Given that our roughly 2.5 kg brain uses 25% of our overall energy consumption, it become all the more imperative to economise memories or analysis. Stories akin to experience, are a very useful way to believe..

• Stories are often wildly disconnected from our productive capacity.
• We confidently convince ourselves of absurd stories. 

As morgan housel says," The growth of anything -- an economy, a company, a market, a career -- has two parts:

• A technical ability that can solve problems and add value.
• People’s propensity to believe in that value.

It is intuitive to believe that most of what drives success is the first point. Real skills add real value. But the second point, the stories we tell ourselves about those skills and values -- can play the deciding role. Stories can infuence the production of real skills themselves, effectively becoming the pilot of our economy "

Think about stock valuations in 2017 for a minute... What is driving this boom?

Not actual problems being solved. No new laws to date actually solve people’s problems but mostly disturb the cosy status quo.

The boom is being driven by a booming belief in the boom.Stories of reforms being fundamental in nature (GST, RERA, Bankruptcy code), drove the optimism about future and thus increased our ability to take immediate pain.

 The higher bitcoin’s price goes, the less people think it’s a bubble. A four-fold price increase caused a 12 percentage point drop in those who believed it was a bubble, and a doubling of those who found it undervalued..

These stories can be healthy. Like the optimism bias, we wouldn’t get out of the couch if we believed otherwise. But we should acknowledge that they are stories, susceptible to change and often disconnected from reality. 

We must encourage application of the techniques of “scientific” study of the past to analysis of complex ongoing situations and estimates of likely future events. Just as rigorous analysis could cut through the gaps and ambiguities of information on events long past. Analysts shd be self-conscious about their reasoning processes..shd think about how they make judgments and reach conclusions, not just about the judgments and conclusions themselves.

Young Indian, rural, misunderstood and restless.

Nobody can turn 70 overnight, neither a living being nor a nation. An ancient nation (older than history) yet a young state, forged in the crucibles of fratricidal violence of 1947 turned 70. Slowly the generation of 1947 fades away enrolee to their heavenly abode & the one coming of age, so called millennial carry the burden of passing the baton to a generation who would have no physical contact with the 'Midnight children' per se. What they pass-on will depend a lot on how millennials live their lives, realise their dreams, fulfilled their aspirations.

There is a looming crisis that awaits India as a nation and subsequently the businesses as well. An army of 500 million young, literate barely employable (plenty of statistics) in formal sector, aspirational & voting populace is about to come to age.. deciding the destiny of this nation. Today agriculture employs almost 57% contributing to 12-13% of GDP. in 5 years contribution will come below 10%..where will be young (rural millennials) find employment if private sector doesn't step up?

Centre for the Study in Developing Societies (CSDS) in partnership with Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) conducted a sample survey-based study on the attitudes, anxieties and aspirations of India’s young population. The CSDS-KAS Youth Survey 2016 was conducted in 19 states of the country among 6,122 respondents in the 15-34 age group. The study gives us a fair idea about how the economic, political and socio-cultural, and technological changes in the country have impacted the Indian youth, as the last such survey was conducted by the two organisations ten years ago in 2007. Here are 4 big insights mostly ignored : deliberately or otherwise.

a. Most millennials are extremely anxious :

The number of young Indians who marked ‘student’ as their occupational profile has seen a significant rise from a mere 13% in 2007 to about 32% in 2017. Being more educated than their parents, they are more informed too.. share of news consumption continues to rise and the only the size of screen and medium has changed from Newspaper/TV to Mobile and videos on the go.. WatsApp forwards to Twitter/facebook

Yet... prospect of unemployment is their biggest worry. More worried are the urban youth even with their accessibility to resources, infrastructure, better educations and higher economic status. No sociologist or marketer has dived deep trying to understand the underlying fear. I at best have tried....

Given almost 65% prefer a govt job over a private one, it points to few very notable aspects..

i. They value stability over chaos... need time for their extracurricular activities which they don't want to give up. Socialising is important to them & Private sector in India is notorious for treating employees' time as unlimited commodity extended into late nights & holidays. They actually need a work-life balance. job preference in the private sector is at 7%. Tough luck Corp India.

ii. They don't have struggles of their own & don't have stomach for them either. Most millennials are product of relative abundance in comparison to their parents (urban india for sure), rural too. With basics met, they are prepared to make trade offs.

iii. Govt salaries are at par with better life & balance. With younger suave babudom on social media, millennials have heroes..

iv. Millennial generation in India is far more 'giving' and altruistic than parent's generation and they see govt job to serve society, bring about a change.

b. Young Indians are style conscious

Indian youth seems to be quite conscious about how they look. 61% says they are somewhat or very fond of wearing stylish clothes. 59% were keen on acquiring the latest mobile phone. 39% said they liked applying fairness creams quite a lot and 36% reported a moderate or high degree of fondness for visiting beauty parlours and salons.

Mobile phone ownership among the Indian youth has doubled in a decade. About 81% own a mobile phone in 2017 as opposed to only 34% in 2007. 24% of the households surveyed own a laptop, compared to only 8% in 2007.

They LOVE their badges & want to belong. Brands are giving them identity, yet they are cool with fakes as well (even if they can afford originals). Show healthy skepticism to price if the value doesn't match their parameters.

c. Young Indians are returning to their spiritual roots more vigorously.. even more conservative

This is reflected in their attitude towards women, wherein 51% agreed (either somewhat or strongly) with the proposition that wives should always listen to their husbands. 40% of the respondents agreed with the proposition that women should not work after marriage. Interestingly, a fairly high proportion of young women respondents also held such conservative views.

After taking into account five questions probing attitudes towards women, the survey found that about a quarter (24%) of the young respondents were very patriarchal and 29% were somewhat patriarchal, another 29% were less patriarchal and only 18% or one in every six were found to not be patriarchal at all.

When asked about their opinion on the issue of same sex relationships, three in every five or about 61% of the young respondents considered a love affair between two men as wrong. Similarly, 61% considered a love affair between two women to be wrong. Interestingly, young people living in big cities were found to be less approving of homosexuality than those living in smaller cities and villages.

Over 60% believe that movies that hurt religious sensibilities should be banned and mostly cinema makers are not fair to the majority belief system of this country.. This has nothing to do with Modi effect but actually may be the reverse. Narendra Modi is a result of this feeling of distortion & seize mentality that has gripped majority millennials in Urban India. So a church wedding of a Hindu-couple in love scenario in movies may not sit down well.. people are rediscovering their roots & holding them tightly..

Two-thirds or 67% of the respondents did not approve of live-in relationships and two in every five or 40% were opposed to the celebration of Valentine’s Day.

In fact, most youngsters don’t stand with liberals on contentious political issues like the death penalty, ban on films, and consumption of beef. 49% disagreed that death penalty should be abolished, 60% agreed that films that hurt religious sentiments should be banned and 46% disagreed that consumption of beef is part of personal eating habits and nobody should have an objection.

d. Proud to be Indian..

Fact that they are veering more towards thee roots is also reflected in the product choices they are making. This can be seen in the spectacular rise of products and services that appeal to the Indian taste and way of life. For instance, Patanjali Ayurved Ltd, an ayurvedic/natural products firm that was launched in 2006, has already clocked revenues of more than Rs.5000 crore, as of fiscal 2016, set to double to 10000 Cr in 2017, as it appeals to consumers who want to express their Indian-ness. Likewise, Fabindia Overseas Pvt. Ltd, a retail chain for garments, furnishings, fabrics and ethnic products handmade by craftspeople across rural India, continues to remain popular and see good growth even as the larger brick-and-mortar retailers complain of a slowdown in revenue.

Then there is Hector Beverages Pvt. Ltd, with ethnic drinks under the Paperboat brand such as ‘aam panna’ and ‘jal jeera’, which is fast gaining acceptance in the Indian market. Even when it comes to sports, we are now moving beyond cricket, with Indian sports such as kabbadi and wrestling also gaining sponsors and mindshare.

While young India is immensely patriotic and Indian at heart, at the same time, not everything desi is cool; likewise not everything foreign, too, is cool; basically, they aspire to be the best of both worlds as global netizens.. Paisa vasool is the motto but millennials are lapping up experiences like never before.

However, even as we move forward, limitations such as poor infrastructure, the lack of focused policy frameworks and, in some cases, the regulatory environment, continue to hamper progress. 

The youth today is impatient and demanding, taking to the streets to protest and often using social media to voice their opinions.

The imprint of technology has also changed the way we consume. There no longer is a desire to own or build assets.

With the rise of companies such as Ola, the cab-hailing service modelled on Uber, it is now all about usage and the here and now in the sharing economy.

Technology empowerment and media penetration has also blurred the lines between rural and urban.

Moreover, the roles of work and home, business and society are also blurring as it is now possible to pursue multiple roles simultaneously for businesses and people.

According to an Economist Intelligence Unit survey, “Supply on demand: Adapting to change in consumption and delivery models”, “Almost 80% of companies are seeing changes in how their customers access goods and services, and more than 51% are in the process of changing how they price and deliver their goods and services.”

What we are seeing today is the convergence of social, mobile, cloud and big data, which is presenting enormous opportunities for businesses to transform themselves as they can now capture the vast amounts of information and introduce new business, delivery and engagement models.

Technology is also changing the ways that people work, and is increasingly enabling machines and software to substitute for humans. Millennials being more tech savvy & educated are anxious yet optimistic about future.. Will corporate India rise to the challenge of providing platforms to nurture and exploit their talent or they choose Govt job. Credibility of Corporate india is very low with bank NPAs and promoter lifestyles.

Remember Millennials are far more socially conscious & responsible.

The increasing youthfulness of the country with roughly 50% of the population being less than 24 years old plays a huge role. “Nearly 50% of the world’s entrepreneurs are between the ages of 25 and 44. Moreover, 25- to 34-year-olds show the highest rates of entrepreneurial activity,” according to global reports referred to by the EY Megatrends 2015 report.

Giving start-ups a huge boost, Prime Minister Narendra Modi unveiled a new start-up action plan in January 2015 , which included a Rs.10,000 crore fund to be deployed over the next four years, exemption from capital gains tax on investments, faster and cheaper patent applications and easy registration for new companies. Corporate India, are you listening?

I don't know when will I ever make use of what has been learnt over a lifetime of studying Economics, mother of human civilisation, along with being a obsessive 'behaviour addict' (this term belongs to friend Shalini Rawla).

The youth have lesser patience with status-quo and expect or rather demand quicker change.

Young people drift. Sometimes the forces in a country, be it corruption in the political classes or bad grammar in the national press, provoke a revolution. And sometimes, when it appears the revolution will exhaust itself before ever beginning, there is a new outrage & restless find a new cause.

There is a silver lining. millennials may be opposed to reservations (upper castes) but increasingly they are making strides in breaking the caste barriers, have friends across castes and communities. More and more young men have a close friend from the opposite gender than young women.. they are learning to respect choice of women friends..

Brands must listen or they will fade away.. If brands don't stand for something then chances are they may not exist in next decade.

** Credits : Mint & Swarajya for data.

War of languages & unrealised potential of India.

I keep on thinking I have hurt the wrong crowd..
I am Just trying to leave something behind
Oh money is free but loves costs more than a brick
Ceiling is hard to reach and future is hard to breech
I am trying to leave something behind
This whole world is foreign land,
We swallow the moon but don't know our own hand
We are running with the case but ain't got the gold
We are trying to leave something behind..
I can not read what I didn't write...

Because of this lack of language - our 1.3 billion actually translate to the population of a small nation. It gets worse and I will stop after this post - maybe we can take it elsewhere. We English clerks also have a contempt for the non English speaker that makes him feel very insecure. Our stress is on cultural belonging by good spelling and pronunciation and refuse to assimilate and modify English ourselves. We boast so much about our IT prowess but we don't even get an Indian spellcheck that does not object to names like Saurabh and Shiv - which get a red line underneath asking if I have typed shit, but William and Ronald are recognized. We should really be ramming in our own words into our own dictionary including grammatical errors as "Where it is" and "What it is" and puncher for puncture. 

But we are such hoity toity sons-a-bitches that we all slavishly follow someone else's dictionary and laugh at those who don't "quite come up to scratch" Harrumph

Game theory & objectives of conflict

The objective should be very clear. As of now it seems, defending territory. Must change to 'Great power status'

You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”

― Leon Trotsky

Many people in India or the world are baffled by the Chinese behaviour or how to negotiate out of tricky situation wherein you want to avoid conflict (not worth the time), as there are other more important things, not because you are afraid. One must understand Chinese history & cultural moorings to nullify the aggression Chinese state shows.

China, in Mandarin is 'Zhongguo'. It means 'Central country/kingdom'. Ie, centre of the earth. 

If Chinese are centre of the earth, then Emperor of China, who is the 'foremost man' in China, is the 'foremost man' in the world. Thus, to the Chinese, any treaty formed, without paying homage to their emperor, was considered 'unequal/null and void'. This is why, even when the Romans traded with China and formed contacts, they had to 'officially pay tribute' to the Emperor of China- even though Roman Imperium could've crushed China if they were closer. 

Same applies throughout history- when the Cholas, Sassanids, Khmer- all of them- wanted trade relations with China, they had to pay 'symbolic submission/tribute' to their emperor. This is also the basis of Chinese claim in Tibet or East Turkestan. 

In Chinese culture, all interactions follow this model : it is a hierarchy. Politeness is offered only to those above you in the ladder. And this is why China emphasizes so much on 'saving face', because central kingdom cannot be wrong, ever.

"The name China was given by Indians. Sanskrit cina which is cognate of zina. That is the root of historic insecurity. Later one of the Han Empresses suggested Sinifying the statues of Indo-Bactarian Buddha and popularized Buddhism.This was to heal the country and society from the mass casualties of the end of Han era."

I got these facts from the Asian Museum of Art in San Francisco.

Mao had great insecurity complex due to this.

The archetype I will describe now is the character of Master/Teacher. The ideal teacher for Indians is Dronacharya, because although he had favorites, he taught everyone equally and everyone was equal as disciples. Not so in Chinese stories where There are grades/hierarchies in disciples. There are IN-name disciples, who are typically naam ke vaaste disciples who do odd jobs. There are personal disciples, who are taught personally by the master and lord over the others and there is a Heritage-Disciple, who inherits everything from the master. He is typically the little emperor who terrorizes everyone, but his master does not stop him from bullying others, because bullying is thought top be a privelege of the strong. If you are weak, you deserve the bullying. People will even say you are responsible for your suffering because you somehow provoked the strong by your mere existence.

The Master does not interfere in bullying inbetween his disciples because he thinks its interfering with their natural growth. That stopping the bullying of a weak person by a strong disciple for the sake of the weak is not worth the risk of adversely affecting the growth of the strong, talented disciple. Parallels to this can be seen in the enormous suffering inflicted by CHinese over many little kids while training them to win olympics. Because the suffering of weak mediocre kids is thought to be okay if it brings forth a strong, talented kid who can win olympics' medals.

Another big trauma has been the cultural revolution & it altered the gentle behaviour of common chinese. In late 2015, when a singer stepped onto a neon-lit stage in Shanghai to perform a song about the tribulations of his family of six during the Cultural Revolution, the outpouring of public emotion surprised many people. One web commenter, quoting a line from the song, reflected: “ ‘After the Cultural Revolution, there were five of us left.’ That is not just the story of his family, but that of many others.”

The psychic damage of the Cultural Revolution has been the subject of only a few small-scale studies. An interview project carried out by Chinese researchers in collaboration with German psychotherapists in the early 2000s showed that people with Cultural Revolution-related trauma exhibited symptoms typical of post-traumatic stress disorder: Many reported intense anxiety, depression and frequent flashbacks of traumatic experiences; some showed emotional numbness and avoidance behaviors.

Cultural Revolution trauma differs from that related to other horrific events, like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, studies have noted, in part because in China, people were persecuted not for “unalterable” characteristics such as ethnicity and race, but for having the wrong frame of mind. Constant scrutiny of one’s own thinking and actions for signs of political deviance became a necessity for survival that sometimes carried unbearable weight. Thus this horrible inferiority complex needs to be masked with outward aggression & thus need for respect for their thinking.

Give China a crushing military defeat along the border and, ideally, create suffocating chaos for the chinese economy by cutting off its trade routes in the IOR.  

Because China is a rational trading power with non-military culture, a short war is possible especially if we overwhelm them in the theaters of our choice and give them no incentive to pursue further hostilies by limiting territorial gains to what we lost in 1962 and bit more in defensible positions. It won't go long term or total war if we don't get victory disease and attempt to detach Tibet as a whole. They'll settle down to making money again once we magnanimously release our chokehold on the IOR and trade flows again

if Indians do not fight then they will not see India overtaking Cheen in our life time. China adds far more every year to its economy than we do to ours even with a higher growth rate. The GDP gap is widening and will widen for decades. The arms gap will widen, they have built four 12K ton Type 055s in parallel and that is on top of a flood of Type 054 frigates and Type 052D destroyers. Where are our P15Bs? And that's only the surface fleet. We are worst off on the submarine front and when their Type 002 and 003 carriers come out, we'll be behind in naval air as well. This will change the calculus of our stranglehold on their trade routes.

The PRC is already the top dog in Asia (after the US.) As I written above, without war we won't be able to overtake Cheen in our lifetime. War provides India with an opportunity but Cheen with a risk. 

OBOR happens unabated WITHOUT war, with war it goes on hold.  

Defeating India would not change their conflucts with Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam or Korea. It didn't in 1962 and it won't today. And in fact would spur them to arm themselves more furiously. 

G2 is dependent on the US. Why would it grant Cheen the privilege after a war with another democracy? The US public won't let it happen.

There is nothing that war can help Cheen with which is why I don't think they'll fight. They want to intimidate and grab a defensible position on the cheap. 

But it is not in Indian interest to allow them to just back off when we currently own overwhelming advantages along the border and in the IOR.

Advantages that will disappear over time as OBOR and CPEC kick in and their naval programs mature and their printing press buys their bases around the IOR.

Mao was an imperialist with overtly exceptionalist proclivities... his China would define its role on the world stage in terms of the CCP's unique worldview and nothing else. It could define the rules by which it played, simply through its sheer size and willingness to defy the worldviews of either the Western or the Soviet camps. In sharp contrast to the exceptionalism of Mao (a form of revisionist Nationalism, though cloaked in red garb) Deng Xiaoping set China on the path to becoming a thriving economy through leveraging what was then the globalist order in its embryonic form. 

The pendulum swung back and forth afterwards as different successors came to the fore. Jiang Zemin, the key architect of the policy of building up nuclear rogue states like NoKo and Pakistan as proxies via proliferation, was more Maovadi. Others like Hu Jintao were more Dengvadi. Yet none of these leaders had as much direct control of all three axes of the Chinese setup (the Party, the State Council, and the Military) to the extent that Mao used to. Until Xi Jinping.

To my mind Xi is like Napoleon III consolidating power as head of the Second French Empire after the interlude of the Orleans restoration. A man of strong political capability domestically, but more ambition than vision internationally.

Of course Napoleon III's grand ambitions ran headlong into a brick wall when he encountered a rival that would never again allow France to achieve pre-eminence on the European continent: the rising Germany of Otto von Bismarck. The Franco Prussian war furnished a bloody nose that is still in some sense bleeding, and marked the overall decline of France into the second rank of global power until this day.

India must take this opportunity to fight now!!!

You fools! Don't you realize what it means if the Chinese remain? Don't you remember your history? The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life." : HO Chi Min

Geopolitics encapsulated in the vulgarity of a general. Priceless

PS : As usual lot of this is summary of writing, views of many ppl i admire Dr Shiv, Ramana, Rohit, Sridhar.. along with some of mine