Fuzzy Math

  5 Responses to “Fuzzy Math”

1. 

   Dilip D'Souza says:

   Feb, 7 2005 at 2:46 am

   Fact: I had a 98 per­centile score on the ana­lyt­i­cal por­tion of the GRE.

   But apart from hand­wav­ing about it being fuzzy logic, and apart from pre­tend­ing that the argu­ment is solely whether the tsunami is the same as the Maha­rash­tra Govt, would you care to explain exactly why the com­par­i­son is invalid?

   After all, to take just one slice of this, the tsunami did hap­pen to destroy many hut­ments in Chen­nai and down the coasts that were as ille­gal, if you like, as those in Bom­bay. Yet we all rushed to help those peo­ple too. Why? Why did we not just sit back and say, “Hey they were on ille­gal land and the tsunami did a fine job?”

   (It’s no use point­ing to tsunami-caused deaths either, because in Chen­nai, the “ille­gal” hut­ments were destroyed with min­i­mal loss of life).

   So please, go ahead, tell me. Why is the com­par­i­son wrong?
2. 

   Karthik says:

   Feb, 7 2005 at 1:22 pm

   Dilip,

   To me, the cru­elty of the Tsunami lay in its sud­den­ness. And yes, the loss of life it caused. You bring up Chen­nai, but if all that the Tsunami had done was destroy a few hut­ments in Chen­nai, reac­tions across the world would have been sig­nif­i­cantly different.

   This demo­li­tion of houses in Maha­rash­tra was a lot of things, but it surely wasn’t some­thing sud­den that hap­pened out of the blue and caught fam­i­lies unaware and destroyed all their prop­erty. In short, it was no Tsunami.

   I have mixed feel­ings about the destruc­tion of encroach­ments — legally, it was the right thing to do, but morally, I am not so sure. We had our house bur­gled once when I was young, and my mother’s anguish when we returned to find our house empty is still fresh in my mind. I guess these peo­ple are going through the same thing, mag­ni­fied sev­eral fold.

   That said, I think it is disin­gen­u­ous to com­pare this with the Tsunami. If the Tsunami par­al­lel was so obvi­ous, why you think there is no national out­rage? It may sound harsh, but when you build houses on pub­lic prop­erty, you are gonna lose them some­time. And every­one is aware of it, at least subconsciously.

   PS : 98% is impres­sive The GRE men­tion was just a light-hearted dig.
3. 

   Dilip D'Souza says:

   Feb, 8 2005 at 12:50 pm

   Karthik,

   When news of the wave that over­whelmed Marina beach and the hut­ments there spread across Chen­nai, friends of mine in the Rotary got together imme­di­ately and took relief mate­r­ial out. They didn’t know till much later about the huge extent of the dam­age (i.e. beyond Chen­nai). As far as they could see for sev­eral hours that day, all that the tsunami had indeed done was destroy a few hut­ments in Chen­nai. Yet their reac­tions were based on their human­i­tar­ian feel­ings. They didn’t stop to think, as we seem to do in Bom­bay, hey, these hut­ments are ille­gal, good the are gone.

   You may not think the demo­li­tions were a sur­prise, but most of the res­i­dents did indeed think so. They had been assured that they would be allowed to stay, they had proof of being “legal” (i.e. pre-1995, a con­cept I have prob­lems with any­way, but still), they were given no notice. They woke up one morn­ing to find bull­doz­ers flat­ten­ing their homes. Sounds to me every bit as sud­den as the tsunami.

   This “legal” bit, in any case, makes no sense to me. In what way can we arbitar­ily decide that peo­ple who come in before 1995 are “legal” and those who come in after­wards are not?

   The whole point of my writ­ings on this sub­jects, as also Sainath’s is exactly what you ask: why is there no national out­rage? My expla­na­tion: it’s the poor who are being affected. We think they are the hin­drance to our “devel­op­ment”, they are ugly, they breed too much, they are dirty, they pay no taxes — pretty much all of which is untrue, but that’s for another day. So it’s OK to pull down their homes. Why is it that not one middle-class block of flats has been brought down that I know of, even though pretty much every one of those is built flout­ing FSI and other build­ing reg­u­la­tions, is built pay­ing bribes, is paid for using ille­gal money? Would there be a national out­rage if that hap­pened? You tell me.

   Of course peo­ple know that if they live on “pub­lic prop­erty” they will face action. That’s hardly the point. But two things are the point. One, these peo­ple are an inte­gral part of the econ­omy. This city gen­er­ates jobs all the time, a process we all see as desir­able. Peo­ple come into the city to fill those jobs, because they are there and because there is no com­pa­ra­ble gen­er­a­tion of jobs in their rural homes. But to go with those jobs, there is no com­pa­ra­ble gen­er­a­tion of afford­able rental hous­ing (plenty of peo­ple have writ­ten about this). So where are these peo­ple to stay? After all, all of us want our hair-cutters, our cob­blers, our bus con­duc­tors, our maids, our dish­wash­ers, our couri­ers, our sweep­ers, even our police­men. Where do you think all these peo­ple live? What would our econ­omy turn into if we got rid of them as we are doing? (Yes, the true irony is that many of the cops who accom­pa­nied demo­li­tion squads them­selves live in slums).

   Two, what about reset­tling them? I have no objec­tion to demol­ish­ing slums if their res­i­dents are assured of alter­na­tive hous­ing. Where is that assurance?

   > PS : 98% is impres­sive The GRE men­tion was just
   > a light-hearted dig.

   Thanks. I know it was light-hearted, but even so: you might be bet­ter off not assum­ing that those you dis­agree with are auto­mat­i­cally dopes… Allow me some more trum­pet blow­ing: Ver­bal 97%, Quan­ti­ta­tive 99%.

   This has got long enough that I may adapt it into a post on my own blog, if that’s OK.
4. 

   Karthik says:

   Feb, 8 2005 at 11:17 pm

   As far as they could see for sev­eral hours that day, all that the tsunami had indeed done was destroy a few hut­ments in Chen­nai. Yet their reac­tions were based on their human­i­tar­ian feel­ings. They didn’t stop to think, as we seem to do in Bom­bay, hey, these hut­ments are ille­gal, good the are gone.”

   “My expla­na­tion: it’s the poor who are being affected. We think they are the hin­drance to our “devel­op­ment”, they are ugly, they breed too much, they are dirty, they pay no taxes — pretty much all of which is untrue, but that’s for another day. So it’s OK to pull down their homes.”

   Don’t you see the con­tra­dic­tion here? Why are these same human­i­tar­i­ans (by your own admis­sion) not too con­cerned about what is hap­pen­ing in Bom­bay? Is it that all the good peo­ple have decided to con­verge on Chen­nai? Or maybe unbe­knownst to me, there is a strange Jekyll and Hyde thing going on in India, where peo­ple oscil­late between intense love for the poor when there is a giant wave and hatred otherwise.

   Per­haps, the truth is the obvi­ous thing : that most peo­ple — even diehard Von­negut fans like me — real­ize that this is not a bat­tle between the rich (aka Maha­rash­tra Gov­ern­ment) and the poor. It would be very con­ve­nient to paint it thus, but unfor­tu­nately it is not all black and white.

   While I can appre­ci­ate your anguish about peo­ple being uprooted from their homes, I am also prag­matic enough to real­ize that in the end some­thing dras­tic had to be done in this sit­u­a­tion. The ideal thing would have been to pre­vent encroach­ments, but that didn’t hap­pen, so this had to. Sooner or later. If every­one that decided to encroach on some­one elses prop­erty is enti­tled to it because they are poor then there will be no con­cept of pri­vate prop­erty any­more. What will pre­vail will be anar­chy. Being poor does not enti­tle any­one to own what is some­one else’s. Would you react the same way if some­one had built a multi-storey office build­ing at the same place on encroached land?

   About the effect on the city’s econ­omy — it is more resilient that you think. At the risk of sound­ing cal­lous, I will say this : Peo­ple will strug­gle a bit, but in the end things will work out for them. That is the beauty of a market-driven sys­tem. The mid­dle class that you seem to loathe will end up pay­ing a bit more to their bar­bers to take care of the com­mute, and learn to wait a lit­tle longer in the morn­ing before their maids arrive. A painful tran­si­tion, but one that will have pos­i­tive con­se­quences in the end. Here’s wish­ing for the best.
5. 

   Dilip D'Souza says:

   Feb, 9 2005 at 10:58 am

   And here’s my response, also up on my blog.

   Don’t you see the con­tra­dic­tion here?Actually, no. What’s hap­pen­ing, as I see it, is this: with the tsunami, peo­ple react as they do because they think: “that could have been me.” (I hes­i­tate to use “there but for the grace of god go I” because that phrase has caused some literal-minded peo­ple some heartache in these pages in the past). With the slum dwellers, peo­ple react as they do because they think: “those guys deserve what’s com­ing to them, they are on ille­gal land, they are filthy and messy, they are all Bangladeshis and a threat to national secu­rity.” Etc. (Don’t laugh, I spent half an hour on the phone with a very artic­u­late, very well-known Bom­bay per­son­al­ity this morn­ing lis­ten­ing to exactly these phrases).

   Of course some­thing dras­tic had to be done. But I won­der why it wasn’t one of these other dras­tic things. One, get rid of the Rent Con­trol Act that has essen­tially killed the rental hous­ing mar­ket in Bom­bay. Two, build alter­na­tive cheap rental hous­ing for the peo­ple who need it. Three, stim­u­late job cre­ation and oppor­tu­nity in the rural areas. There may be more.

   Why is it that the only dras­tic thing that ever hap­pens is the tear­ing down of the homes of the urban poor?

   I have no loathing for the middle-class, and I don’t see how it fur­thers your argu­ments to make out that I do. But I do think we in the middle-class in India don’t fully under­stand what’s going on with slums and our urban con­di­tion. That’s why we choose the easy option: destroy slums. Too bad it is also the futile option.

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