The tyranny of numbers

Yesterday India lost the first test of the current England Test series by 196 runs. Indian fans are of course disappointed, but there are three more games to go and they hope that India will claw its way back. Our team certainly has the ability to do so.

 

Anyway, the intent of this piece is not to talk about cricket. It is to talk about metrics. Metrics as in measurements, numbers, ratings, rankings, and how we are all slaves to them. The front page of the Mint newspaper has a photograph of Sachin Tendulkar with the following caption "Sachin Tendulkar missed out on his 100^th international hundred as India faltered while trying to stave off defeat in the first Test against England at Lord's on Monday. The 196-run loss puts India's No. 1 Test ranking in jeopardy."  

 

What is more important in our scheme of things? The fact that it is after all a game and wins and losses are part of it? Or that it is a disappointing loss in a test match where we played badly and England played well? Or the fact that we are waiting for Sachin's hundredth international ton – what is his hundredth ton but a statistic, an eagerly awaited and welcome one of course, but a statistic nevertheless? Sachin made only 12 runs yesterday, it's not even that he got out in the 90's! Or is India's No.1 Test ranking more important?  A No. 1 ranking is a cumulative effect of many matches –maintaining the ranking is important, but is it more important than the game that just took place?

 

Also, the fact that it was the world's two thousandth test match, and the hundredth India-England test match, and Duncan Fletcher's 100^th Test as coach, got a lot of mileage. The combination of all these important factors makes it a landmark test!

 

When it comes to measuring anything, there comes a point beyond which the focus is merely on the measurement; on the collection, compilation, collation, reporting and discussion of statistics. Everyone talks about these numbers, what they mean  and how significant they are. It is very likely that many of these numbers are converted to graphs and charts, preferably dual axis and in 3D. After some time, someone comes up with a metric indicating how many metrics there are. This is compared to another setup which tracks more metrics, of course followed by an effort to increase the number of metrics. The number of metrics itself becomes a metric and a target to be exceeded. Cricket of course lends itself to metrics generation much more than any other game, so it is not possible to compare cricket with other games. If it were, there would be comparisons, based on metrics of course, of how many and what kind of metrics cricket has in comparison to, say hockey, and there would be tomes and tomes of analysis on that. There would be consultancy organizations offering to take the learnings from cricket (meaning the metrics, not the game itself) and apply it to other games like hockey. There would be conferences with the theme "Metrics and their measurement, in pursuit of excellence" which would be attended by all the cricketers, presumably to improve their game.

 

And so on it will go… somewhere in this whole process, the fact that we are talking about cricket in the first place is forgotten. We focus on the numbers, create our own interpretation of them, bring them to life in different contexts, weave stories around them, and bask in the resultant insights. After some time, it ceases to matter whether it is cricket we are discussing or some other game.  It is reduced to a play of numbers, and in the process the spirit is lost! If it sounds familiar, it is t because the same thing happens in many other contexts as well.

 

The fight to take over the world

Google+ is creating quite a buzz. It is still in a restricted-user testing stage but it has created enough interest among the early users and it looks like it will have a good chance of challenging Facebook's dominance. It is almost a desperate final attempt by Google to enter into the social media space – a do or die effort. Its two previous efforts, Wave and Buzz failed, the first because no one could figure it out, and the second due to major privacy concerns. Google looks like it might get third time lucky.

 

The internet battlefield is littered with corpses of companies that were once healthy, growing, and thriving, but grew sickly and died away as quickly as they rose to prominence. In social media, MySpace is an example that comes to mind. And Orkut. All the people gravitated quickly to Facebook – beyond a certain tipping point, more people join Facebook and desert the other sites since more people are already on Facebook. Facebook has long ago exceeded that tipping point – half the world is on it now. The other half is of course excluded from the world – a bunch of weirdoes who don't belong.

 

Google is by far the most successful internet company making huge revenues and profits. And they have achieved this position in just a few years. A large proportion of searches (except in China) is through Google, and since so many people access the net through the Google gateway, the gatekeeper gets to profit from the traffic. In this case, the gatekeeper also acts as their guide for the journey ahead; he knows a few million paths they can take – with his omniscient wisdom and infinite sagacity he prioritizes the options and most people follow his advice. As they proceed they are greeted with banner advertisements that the gatekeeper places in their path, advertisements that are very relevant to the object of their search. What power! What influence! It comes closest to being God.

 

But God is getting jittery. His followers still ask him for advice on which path to take and they follow his advice. They still read the banners placed in their path. But they travel in groups, hang out in groups and spend a lot of time with each other – and the places they hang out in are not owned by this God. That privilege is Facebook's. As people interact more and more on Facebook , posting millions of pictures, having trillions of conversations, and interacting in tons of forums, Facebook gets a deeper and deeper insight into people – how they connect, what they say, what they are interested in – and gets to control the environment in which they spend a lot of their time. The aggregation of information from this has immense potential to profit the person who has it. And this new God knows it. He is already muscling into Google's mail space by getting more and more people to send message s to each other on Facebook. It won't be long before he offers them search options as well – and then Google is in real danger of going the MySpae or Orkut way. Nothing is more sad than a God whose followers have all deserted him. The world is littered with ruins of ancient temples which were once the center of their universe. And for Gods who measure their own worth in market cap, it can be even more heartbreaking.

 

So Google is trying to woo people away from the new God. The task is not easy since they have grown used to worshipping at the Facebook altar. It is very difficult to make them desert – anyone who tears himself away to come over to the altar of the new God, is faced with an unfamiliar terrain, new rituals, new ways of doing things, and is very very lonely at first. And like any new world, this world will take getting used to. After going through the trouble of understanding Facebook, figuring it out, and getting used to it, why would anyone want to switch? The early adopters also have to wait for the entire thing to catch on; it will take time till they get a feeling of real community.

 

This time the chances of success for Google to encourage apostates into its fold seem good. The concept of Circles that Google has introduced is intuitive, easy to understand, and addresses the issue of privacy upfront. Facebook does have its privacy settings, but it is so hidden that most people do not know how to use it and it is not so intuitive. You don't send "friend' requests – you just drag them into your circles. They do the same to you. In that sense, it is a combination of Twitter and Facebook. The "Hangout" where ten people can get into video chat at a time is a great feature. People see that there are other people "hanging out" on video chat and join the group. Very similar to what happens in real life interactions. The early adopters are liking what they see and they are creating a very positive buzz around the product.

 

Whether Google+ will succeed or not remains to be seen. The denouement will not be long in coming. If it succeeds, then it becomes much more powerful than it already is. Google already controls a lot of internet traffic of the world, and knows what people are looking for. If Google+ succeeds, it will also be eavesdropping in the places they hang out, and know more and more about them. Them in this case of course means us. In our lives Google will become more omniscient, more omnipotent, and more omnipresent than ever.  That is a scary thought.

P.S: Link to a poem on Google I wrote a couple of years back:   http://www.dineshgopalan.com/2011/05/google.html

Redefining Privacy

Nandan Nilekani announced yesterday the throwing open of the Aadhaar platform for development of third party apps. He wants to do an Apple or Android – create a bouquet of services, tapping into the creativity of thousands of skilled developers. Where there is a need, an application will emerge, motivated either by profit or social service considerations.

 

People are talking about creating secure payment gateways for e-commerce to accept payments from an Aadhaar verified source, scanning and uploading of verified documents with an Aadhaar tag, so that the person need not carry the document again – the possibilities are endless. All this is possible because we are able to identify and tag a person with accuracy.

 

Once every person in the world is identified, and every object in the world is tagged, and every interaction between these persons and objects has been coded or given an identity in code, then every transaction in the world can in theory be trapped, with myriad ways of search to locate them online.  

 

Since most of our interactions with the world are through gateways which pass through computers – think banking, credit card payments, office swipe card systems, cctv’s in malls and buildings - our entire lives are being uploaded into digital databases. Couple this with better search techniques – Facebook has just rolled out a technology where you can be identified based on features in photos that are uploaded; billboards can recognize you in the crowd as you walk past, and flash ads targeted at you; apart from your UID your biometric data like shape of your nose and length of your ears will exist in computer databases which will automatically identify you and tag you wherever you go. The mobile phone you carry with you constantly broadcasts your location down to the nearest 500 meters which can be “geo-tagged” and kept on record for posterity. And the latest snooping devices are unbelievably effective, cheap and difficult to find. Any object in your house or office can have a hidden camera and an attached microphone – these devices can now be bought over the internet starting at Rs.500 onwards.

 

All the data generated from all the above will be stored in databases. There will of course be people with access to these databases, or rather persons with access to software that will have the capability to hunt you out in all this data, and present your entire life’s story in one neatly compiled digital docket, either to people who have the power to access them like the government, or to people who are willing to pay for them. The trend is only helped by social networking sites where your friends post yesterday night’s party photos with you tagged on them.

 

So what happens to privacy? They say that nothing that you do online is private any more. We should extend that statement to say that everything that you do offline can be stored online, and nothing that exists online is private.

 

So then, what happens to privacy? We have to get used to a new world where there is no such thing as privacy, at least the way we understand and define it in today’s world. The way we look at it, our personal lives are off limits to our colleagues, what we do at work should be of no concern to those at home, our political views, religious views, groups that we are part of, whom we hang out with, and what we choose to do with our lives, are our business alone, and ours to divulge or not divulge depending on who are dealing with. That definition needs to be relooked at.

 

In several primitive societies, the concept of privacy is very rudimentary. Apart from the acts of defecation and procreation, very little is private in these societies. Extend that to much more evolved societies like our villages, and there is a little more privacy, but nowhere near what urban westernized notions of privacy have come to mean. Throughout human history, the norms of what is considered private have evolved depending on the times, the technology and the culture.

 

We are all adapting fast to the new online world. This new world is profoundly changing the way we live and throwing up newer possibilities and concerns in the way humans interact, and our notions of privacy have to change accordingly. A lot of things we now consider private will no longer be so.  Along with the redefinition of what privacy means, we will have to change our cultural and moral rules and taboos. Human nature will perhaps continue to be the same, but morality and culture depend a lot on projection where people like to project images that are different from what they are. As the projection changes, the rules need to evolve to keep pace – and along with that, our mindsets, behaviors, and way of living as well.

 

And at the pace things are changing, we should be prepared to do a lot of this in our lifetimes. We are headed for interesting times!

 

 

On godmen and marketing

Baba Ramdev blew it. He had (of course still has) a huge fan following; thousands of people follow him, yearn to be in his presence, listen to his sermons, bask in his shadow, or see him on TV. He with the most famous stomach in India then went and did something stupid. He decided to take on the politicians.

 

He declared that black money is bad, and needs to be brought back into the country. So far so good. Motherhood statements like this are excellent and no one dares counter them. Vague demands of "bringing back" black money, which has no fixed place of residence and cannot be identified, are excellent feel-good topics that make the conscience glow.  There is an innate need in all of us to feel morally superior – this is mostly satisfied by making grandiose uplifting statements of the moralistic or religious kind, and basking in the resultant glow.

 

He with the huge following thought he could do a Anna Hazare. What he forgot is that Anna is a social worker, not a godman (or yoga guru as the case may be); has a huge following but it is not being leveraged for money or fame; has not built a huge business empire which is vulnerable; and has a moral standing that the Baba, even with all his millions shouting his fervent praises, cannot match.

 

He perhaps thought he has reached the stature of a Satya Sai Baba or a Sri Sri. He has a long way to go before he gets anywhere close. He does not attract the devotion of his followers the way the other two do. Also, Ramdev's communication is too direct, too controversial, and too worldly – he is not even close in spiritual messaging to these other two gentlemen, one of whom is of course now deceased.

 

His meteoric rise (counted from an already high place which he occupied) and inglorious fall, all happened within a couple of weeks. He had the ministers of the UPA government fawning on him, visiting him at the airport – him who was a common citizen come to play a charade of protest – and the whole nation starting with the PM and Madam his leader, focused on him alone. He made some promises to the bigwigs he was negotiating with, then went back on his word. He decided to up the stakes in spite of his private assurances to them to the contrary. That pissed them off. It is dangerous to piss off such powerful people. They sent their armies in, obviously. He then ran away wearing women's clothes! That was the most stupid thing to have done – he should have stood there and demanded to get arrested. Whether he got arrested or got hit with a lathi, his stature as counted in martyrdom points, would have gone up several notches.

Then Baba Flat Stomach, who seems to be very ignorant on how to deal with the media, even though he owes his rise to them, went and said something to the effect that he would raise an army! What he said was bad enough, but the way it was twisted by his enemies-in-waiting made it sound diabolical. What he said sounded more like rhetoric, but people in high places with media attention on them need to be very careful of what they say. Which is why when any politician or great leader decides to speak "extempore", their close advisors tremble in fear. They the enemies, made sure that they denounced this as a plot by a deranged maniac to destabilize the nation by encouraging an armed uprising.

 

The Baba who should have stuck to his asanas, announced at the same time that he would go on a hunger strike. Self mortification as a ploy works only when the opponent is receptive, has a sense of guilt, has a lot to lose in case the mortifier ends up in the mortuary, and has not been recently very pissed off with the person in question. In short, given the sequence of recent events, the timing was all wrong.

 

He went on a fast. No one listened. He was shifted to hospital and reports emerged of his health deteriorating. No one heard. Amidst all this, no one was in any doubt that he would not die of hunger.  When an Anna Hazare declares a fast unto death, you cringe when you think about it because you know that the probability of his continuing the fast unto death or near to it in any case, is high. In the Baba's case, he had too many worldly attachments  including his ever-expanding business empire for him to lose it all by dying. That would be a clear waste, and the public saw it. So no one took his "unto death" seriously.  On the contrary, the government decided that this was a good time to take some resources away from investigating the 2G and Commonwealth Games Scams, and divert them to investigating the Baba's burgeoning business empire. They are not even subtle nowadays when they use the CBI and allied agencies to meet their own ends – no one thinks Kanimozhi would be in jail today if the DMK had won in Tamil Nadu – but that is another story, another track.

 

His advisors had to do some serious background work to prevail upon another guru, "his senior", to prevail upon the by now hungry Baba to break his fast. Sri Sri landed up and admonished his junior. The precise admonishments are not known but I guess it would have been something like "Don't be stupid – learn from me. Eat well, sleep well, give a lot of good advice, breathe deeply, but never paint yourself in a corner. Since you have just managed to do that, you stupid oaf, swallow your pride and some orange juice, and break your fast. Then come to my ashram in Bangalore, be my guest for a month, and I will teach you the art of Darshan (how to motivate followers), Sudarshan (as in Kriya) and Politician (how to make them run in circles around you)." And so it happened.  The Baba has retreated, broken his fast, and hopefully will go back to doing Nauli or Uddiyana Bandha for a while.

 

The Politics of Corruption

Everyone agrees that corruption is bad and that it needs to be rooted out. Half the people who do so are corrupt themselves, and are like the thieves who join the crowd singing devotional songs. The other half are sincere, but cannot seem to agree on the means to do so.

 

A significant proportion of the sincere half has rallied in support of the current movement sweeping the country, which reached a mass movement status thanks to Anna Hazare. Anna himself is a person who has led a very simple life, who was a driver in the Army before he went on to transform Ralegan Siddhi village and has been conferred the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan. His personal possessions are few, and he does not seem to be harboring any political ambitions. This gives him a moral authority that few can match.

 

However, it is debatable whether the cure proposed by Anna is in the long run going to be any better than the disease. His proposal of having a superordinate body with power to investigate and hand out punishments, seems to be an immediate way out of our current mess, where we have lost all faith in the existing institutions. People yearn for a dictatorship when law and order totally breaks down and there is extreme hardship caused by what is perceived as lack of decisive leadership. The yearning for a Lokpal with extensive powers seems similar to that. What about the current institutions? The CBI is considered the handmaiden of the government in power, the higher courts have  been of late tainted with accusations of impropriety against judges, the lower courts have never been perceived to be totally honest, the political class is expected to make money by dishonest means, the administration is seen to be suborned to the will of their corrupt masters the politicians, and so on the list goes at every level of governance and administration. With this kind of erosion of faith in institutions, it is understandable that people yearn for a super-body.  On a little reflection it will become apparent that the age-old question is coming back to haunt us: "Who will guard the guardians"? The Lokpal, if and when it comes into being, is also going to be made up of people – who will select them, on what basis, and how will we ensure that they use their powers with fairness and transparency?

 

The entry of Baba Ramdev only complicates matters further. He is a yoga guru who has built up a huge following, not least due to the power of TV and media. He runs a flourishing business empire that he has built from scratch. He has shown a tendency to enter into controversial areas, and air his strongly held, but hardly what you may term unbiased, views. It is good that he is using his vast credibility to crusade for such a noble cause, but where this will ultimately lead is anyone's guess. His main demand seems to be to bring black money back into the country. It is a demand that resonates well, but black money is not some identifiable dinosaur roaming in the wild, where all you need to do is go and catch it. With his antics, he might actually end up muddying the waters more, creating confusion and diverting the debate, which might end up suiting a certain section of people quite well.

 

What then are the solutions? Unfortunately that is not such an easy question to answer. We already have several laws and governing institutions in place. What we need to think about is how to strengthen these institutions by ensuring sound governance and non-interference. We should  look at a thorough revision of existing laws to give them more teeth, and introducing new laws where there are gaps. We should look at strengthening the ideas of ethics, morality and honesty in our education and public debates – there is too much emphasis given to "hard" aspects that can be measured, and lesser emphasis on these softer issues nowadays. Above all, we need to introduce more transparency in all areas of public governance right from the Village Panchayat upwards – sunlight is always the best disinfectant. Transparency and dissemination of information have become more and more easy in the modern world thanks to technology and the internet. Nothing radical in these suggestions, and nothing original – but perhaps that is the way to go. It is also not an easy journey – the battle against corruption is a constant struggle not very different from the mythological battles between the Devas and the Asuras.

 

 

What is undeniable is that there is a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction and people are restive and want change. Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev, and others who have risen in their support, are helping to bring the issue to the fore, and strengthening the voices demanding change. Let us hope that we will have changes that are principled, practical and capable of lasting.