Modi:Mitta::Fact:Fiction

“The Fiction of Fact Finding - Modi & Godhra” has been floating around the house for some time now.  Enticing with its promise of investigating the investigators and the investigations of Modi 2002.

 “...clear-eyed, unsparing of no one...” is the resounding endorsement of a previous work on the dust jacket of Mr. Mitta’s new book. The endorser is Sagarika Ghosh, one of the shrillest screamers on our journalistic firmament. As with many of her ilk, her linguistic reach exceeds her grasp by a long chalk. That, by itself, does not concern us but it does reflect on the author and his editors.

Finally we pick up the book and get off to a promising start. Mr. Mitta tells us in the very first pages about how he single-handedly stopped the VHP from creating nationwide mayhem shortly after the Godhra incident.

Fact 1: On 13 March 2002, the Supremes rejected a Vajpayee Government request to allow the VHP to conduct a symbolic pooja on the 15th at the Ayodhya site sacred to them.
Fact 2: The rejection order, instead of specifying all 100 odd revenue sites involved in the dispute or using a wider description like “nowhere within 100 miles of  ...”, specified two revenue sites as barred.
Fact 3: VHP chief Ashok Singhal caught on to this error and, interpreting it as permission to pooj away at any adjoining site, proclaimed victory. He was all over the visual media all day.

What followed was remarkable. The whole country heard him. Multiple times. Yet no one understood.  Except, of course, Mr. Mitta, who promptly wrote about it for the Indian Express, to appear the following morning, “pointing out the error and explaining how it had crept in”.

Chief Justice B N Kirpal read Mr. Mitta’s write up and, to his credit, quickly understood that he had slipped. He promptly scheduled a hearing to correct the “ambiguity”.

Mr. Mitta does not share with us how he happens to be privy to CJ Kirpal’s news reading habits. Living as they do in a cloistered world, it is entirely possible that CJ Kirpal, his staff, colleagues, family or friends did not hear, or hear of, Singhal boasting of victory till they heard from Mr. Mitta.

Mr. Mitta does quote jurist A G Noorani who commends Mr. Mitta’s “...mention of an inadvertent error...” for helping the court. Noorani’s early morning or otherwise equation with Justice Kirpal remains unexplored.

Having told us about this singular history shaping act, Mr. Mitta is quick to reassure us that he is not  recounting it “to blow his own trumpet” but that, and get this, he has in the course of his career routinely “sought to expose mistakes, even if by the Supreme Court...” both “inadvertent” and “deliberate”. He has a closetful of trumpets.

To research this book, Mr. Mitta has, apart from poring over thousands of documents, met with a host of lawyers, activists and whistle-blowers all intent on digging up or covering up dirt. His own efforts to assist the whistleblower cop Sanjiv Bhatt are trivial he says in the overall scheme of things, and have been overblown by the investigators.

Mr. Bhatt famously has a clear recollection of some events at a meeting where he was not present according to dozens of other people who were. Mr. Mitta avers that those others do not really count. It is all about credibility and not about numbers. 

We will never know how big a debt of gratitude we owe Mr. Mitta.

Next: Modi:Mitta::The Godhra Incident

Life Insurance - All you need to know to save big bucks

This is for you if you have a life insurance cover. Or have plans to get one.

This blog post emerges from a project I started  to help young professionals with understanding and, I hoped, better management of personal finance affairs. 

I soon realised that countless people of all ages, including hardened finance professionals and clear headed numbers experts, are buying ridiculous life policies which will collectively lose them billions while enriching the insurance companies and their agents.

Insurance is the subject matter of solicitation. This caution mandated by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority leaves me both bemused and amused. I don't understand what they are actually trying to say and I doubt if the author intended to make a tongue-in-cheek allusion to that other profession, dalliance with which also gets you screwed. 

The Simplistic Basics
Everyone who has people dependent upon their earnings needs to get a life cover.

Life insurance works like a mutual support group with the insurer as co-ordinator. Those who survive help pay for those who die early. The cost of such mutual cover plus a reasonable profit for the insurance company is very very small. All in all a brilliant and fair-to-all concept.

Insurers employ actuaries to do precise calculations of what anyone joining the party needs to pay, and they are very good at it.

The Ugly Reality
However, the moment you start talking to an insurance agent, public or private sector, you get bombarded with a sales pitch which has nothing whatsoever to do with life cover. The key words you hear in varying order but without variety are:

• Tax Saving
• Endowment
• Money Back
• Capital Growth
• Profit Sharing
• Unit Linked
• Stock Market Gains
• Bonus
• Insurance Bhi, Investment Bhi

All these are seductive but dangerous ideas. Don't listen. Don't get diverted from your objective, which is life cover in case of pre-mature death. Don't ever think. Their sole purpose is to get you to spend more money than you should. 

 

This is what happens to the premium paid for 90% of the policies:  

• A tiny part goes for covering the risk to your life.
• A largish part goes to agent fees, specially in the first few years. 
• A significant part goes to insurer to cover costs and profit.
• The rest goes to market investments which they are not very good at managing. 

It gets worse when you are sold policies to cover a child's education or marriage. It gets ugly when "life policies for children" are sold.

The fact that very often the person selling the junk to you is your banker makes it contemptible. You trust him. He is out to make a package at your cost, for himself or his bank or both is besides the point. 

The Simple Truth 

• Mixing insurance with savings or investment puts you to great loss.
• Only an earning person with dependants needs a life cover.
• The best life cover is one that pays nothing if you survive. If you want your money back, don't give it in the first place. Insurance companies are no good at managing your money. They are not smart investors on your behalf. They don't know stock markets better than mutual funds, which additionally offer you low or no cost realignment if needed. Plus they have sticky fingers; some of it never comes back.
• If you want full tax savings, get the cheapest life cover and put the rest of your 80C allowance in public provident fund. You will save and earn at least twice as much. Much more than an insurer will pay to cover education or marriage of children.
  
• If you want to get stock market benefits, save money on premium and invest directly into ELSS tax saver funds and realign every three years with advice from a stock market specialist. 
• If you wish to endow anyone, do it directly. Why pay a middleman to do it?
• If you have insured your family members who don’t, in turn, have dependants on their present or potential earnings, cancel such policies, and finally,
• If you have any policy other than a term insurance with nil maturity benefit. Look to get out of it.

What is Term Insurance?

It is a simple contract. You agree to pay the insurance company Rs. X per year for a term of, say, 25 or 30 or so years. In return the insurer agrees to pay your nominee Rs. Y Lakhs if you die before the term is over. If you survive the term you get nothing. The premium for your exact age for different terms should be easy to ascertain.

What Next?

Clean up your insurance act and, using the same amount of money, you have the choice of getting a much larger life cover and  / or putting away the rest into more fruitful savings options.

Get the cheapest and simplest term insurance, or a minor variant, from a reputed private sector life insurer or LIC. Useful add-ons are a. accident cover, b. disability cover and c. life cover to a later age while premium stops with your earning years. Preferably buy online. Update it at least every five years to ensure you have cover for 5 to 8 times your current annual earnings.

~

ps1: For my friends who have public sector / private sector issues, I would like to add that for medical or health insurance I strongly recommend public sector insurers.
ps2: Getting out of an existing policy may involve some costs but in a vast majority of cases is still worth it for the money you start saving immediately. You may need some number crunching. 

ps3: Why the swipe at the Government of India in the title?  While every insurer deceptively mis-sells, the originator, master and the greatest practitioner of the mis-selling art is the LIC. The GOI is the biggest beneficiary of LIC's financial success and muscle. LIC routinely bails out GOI's overpriced share offerings of public sector non-performers. Also invests inefficiently in the private sector. With your money.
ps4: One of key tasks of IRDA, the insurance regulator, is to protect LIC.

Optional Reading:   

1. Actuary
2. Term Insurance 

Madrasis and Other Relations

At a recent family dinner, in response to something said in casual conversation, I made the offhand remark that southern Indian populace was rather more homogeneous than its northern counterpart. This, in the context of serial invasions of northern India from the west and osmotic exchange with the east over the centuries, has been a part of one's subconscious forever.

Alok was appalled by my ignorance and pointed out that the south has had a vibrant maritime exchange of peoples with other geographies and probably hosts as much of a genetic potpourri as the north. What's more, while tandoori chicken may taste the same from Amritsar to Birmingham to New York, sambhar tastes verrry different every few miles if you trouble to go by road from Chennai to Thiruvananthapuram.

His mother-in-law, not to be left behind, weighed in with the observation that for north Indians all southerners are Madrasi and they can't tell one Madrasi from another.

I can't quite recall how we got away from this awkward spot but we must have done for I live to tell the tale. However, I was tempted to look up and see how far wrong I had been.

Way Out West
The genetic make-up of Indians seems to have attracted quite some scholarly interest in the 21st century and some major studies have been carried out during the last decade or so. This write-up is based on my understanding at the time of writing. However, scientific research is an ongoing process and I am sure our understanding will improve as we go along.

Research papers on genetic studies, in keeping with the highest traditions of academia, are awash with jargon and far from unanimous. Most seem to draw conflicting conclusions to suit preconceived hypotheses from similar numbers by massaging them a bit differently.

Hence it is that, in keeping with the lowest traditions of second hand research, one can draw some fairly simple, and simplistic, conclusions:

• There has not been any major influx of Central Asian genes into India for over ten millennia.
• The Indo-European linguistic links are more recent than that and are not explained by conquest or large scale in-migration. 
• Genetically the population of India is fairly heterogeneous and the bulk of it descends from two major genetic groupings which have been assigned the names  
• Ancestral South Indians (ASI), and  
• Ancestral North Indians (ANI).
• The two major streams probably arrived in the sub-continent at different destinations along different routes at different times from Africa.
• There are no pure ASI and ANI lines left on mainland India.

• The ASI line is the older one and has very little presence in north India.
• The purest ASI line is to be found in the Andamans. It is quite possible that the ASI stream landed first in the Andaman islands and 'flew' across to south India.
• The ASI line does not seem to have any linkages beyond the sub-continent and the Andaman islands although some very weak links have been traced to the Australian aborigines.

• The ANI line has a fairly strong presence in south India.
• The ANI line is genetically linked to certain Middle Eastern, Central Asian and  Eastern European populations but not to Western European populations. These links are weak and probably date back to a pre-ice age male ancestor. 

...and Our Relations
The ANI linkages, quite counter-intuitively, do not seem to sit on a continuum but seem to exist at discrete points and at distant locations.

This has created some interesting connections. For example, the R1a1 genetic haplogroup, descendants of a common male ancestor, probably Indian, is strongly marked among Punjabi Khatris of the Indus basin; high-caste brahmins of Bengal and Konkan; certain eastern European populations; and the Chenchu tribes of Andhra.

Who would have thought that

• a certain ageing, Bangalore based golfer; 
• the world's best daughter-in-law,  rooted to a Konkan town better known for sending out terrorists; 
• a certain Illinois based, internationally noted trade economist of Bengali origin; 
• an avatar of Lord Vishnu's consort Mahalaksmi, Chenchu Lakshmi, forever ingrained, in said ageing golfer's mind as the buxom Anjali Devi  from the 1958 movie; 
• and the lithe blonde Lithuanian shaking her booty in a Bollywood number, unknowingly but comfortably ensconced among her kin, as the contemporary take on feminine allure;

are all distant cousins?

Selected Readings:

1. Large Scale Influx from Central Asia?
2. Coancestry of European & Asian Chromosomes
3. Genetic Heritage of Tribal & Caste Indians
4. The Origin of Paternal Haplogroup R1a1   (download)
5. Land of Seven Rivers (Book)

Bhagat Singh

I grew up in the early 1950s in Ferozepur, a small town within walking distance from the Indo-Pak border at Hussainiwala. The border ran along the river Sutlej, the eastern bank being India and the western one Pakistan.

Among the joys of a riverside town are the festivals that involve a dip in the river. On festival days the railways ran a special train for the short journey to an otherwise defunct railway station at Hussainiwala. There the line was blocked and beyond the block lay a barrage over which pre-partition trains used to ply into what was now Pakistan.

The Barrage on the Sutlej

An early childhood spent close temporally to the partition and physically to Pakistan meant that every visit to the river for a festival or for a picnic, incited  speculation among the youngsters about what lay on the other side.

Just across the water, in addition to the sworn enemy of India and all things good, the folklore went, lay what definitely belonged to us, the cremation place of Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukhdev.

It seemed  like a cruel twist of fate or laziness of Cyril Radcliff's pen which had put it just outside our reach.

Many hangovers from the partition featured regularly in the headlines. But the one closest to the our hearts, never seemed to do. There was heartburn about the apathy of those in Delhi towards, what must have been my first exposure to the phrase, "Punjabi Sentiments".

To our surprise however, it turned out that, away from the public eye, diplomatic negotiations were on. And in 1961, in a low key barter deal, the borders got redrawn. In exchange for a narrow strip of land covering the Bhagat Singh memorial, India ceded some twelve villages elsewhere along the border.

In 1965 and again in 1971, Pakistan tried, unsuccessfully, to  take back by force what had been ceded at the barter table.

My first visit to the cremation point in 1969 was an awe-ispiring moment. Where there was then a rudimentary plaque now stands a massive, if slightly gaudy, monument. I was there in 2011. The pictures can be seen here: The Martyrs' Memorial.

The Man who could make Gold dance

His name was Bobby Randhawa and he was on his way to see me. He had landed that morning in Bombay from Boulder, Colorado. Too late to catch the flight he was booked on, he spoke to me briefly before taking IC605. It crashed that afternoon in February 1990 short of the runway at the Bangalore airport and came to a halt within the Karnataka Golf Course.

Key cause: pilots not fully conversant with the fly-by-wire technology of the recently commissioned Airbus A-320. 

Fellow ISI alumnus Srinivas Bhogle, who was then with National Aerospace Laboratories, recently wrote about the crash in detail here and triggered this memorandum on the events set off by Bobby's death. There are 89 other stories out there.

Around the time of the crash, I was going through the background papers and wondering how to deal with Bobby.

At about 1:30 p.m. the secretary buzzed to say that the flight had been delayed. Two more such calls happened over the next one hour. No official announcements, but rumours of a plane crash had started floating around town and phones had started ringing. 

Background
Bobby was the Technical Director of Vac-Tec, a company working at the cutting edge of thin film technology. I had met him a few weeks earlier when a colleague and I visited Vac-Tec in a four nation sweep to select a 'physical vapour deposition' (PVD) based decorative coating plant for watch cases.

Using this technology expensive gold electroplating is replaced by a coat of gold-lookalike titanium nitrate, a very hard substance. A sparse dusting of actual gold on top creates the illusion of real gold colour much coveted by the human race. PVD thus offers enormous gold savings and phenomenally increased durability.

The alchemy happens in a vacuum chamber where an Argon plasma is created, and in a process reminiscent of sci-fi movies, gold is literally vapourised off a solid gold bar, dances across to the desired object and condenses there in a magically fine and uniform layer.

Worldwide, only four or five equipment manufacturers were then able to achieve the desired results consistently. We adopted an accelerated learning-evaluation-selection cycle by visiting all of them in quick succession. Vac-Tec was our last stop. After a courtesy meetings with top management, Bobby took over for the next two days for a thorough presentation of what they had to offer.

Bobby was from a small village in the Punjab. The only one from his village to have gone to college in a nearby town. He did well and landed in the U.S. on a scholarship for graduate studies. A well built, presentable, cusp-of-thirty young man, he was one of the few Indians then in Boulder. 

And one of the half a dozen acknowledged technology leaders in his field worldwide - he could make gold dance exactly the way it needed to.

By the time we were done in Boulder, though highly impressed by their product and technology, we were convinced that Vac-Tec were not really equipped to provide support and service to a novice customer in far away Bangalore, and we decided to go for one of their competitors.

Back to the crash
Vac-Tec, who had been following up vigorously for the mega-bucks order, were not willing to give up. In spite of our telling them that it was of no use, Bobby embarked on a journey, punctuated by the delayed London-Bombay leg, the missed domestic connection and the not-missed alternate flight that crashed that afternoon.

Around 5 p.m. I was told that the injured, as also the 90 or so who had perished, were being shifted to the Air-force Hospital.

I hauled myself over there. Bobby was not among those injured. Nor among the recognisable bodies, covered in white sheets and lined up on the lawn.

Aftermath
Turned out Bobby had no Indian friends in Boulder. And his family had no phone at home or anyone in the family who spoke english. Our associate Timex, also a Vac-Tec customer, with offices in the U.S. and in Delhi, helped co-ordinate the disposal of his assets and entitlements.

A few months later the phone buzzed and a bewildered secretary announced the unexpected arrival of a Mr.& Mrs. Randhawa. That would be Bobby's brother and sister-in-law. They had come straight from the train station by the simple device of telling the auto driver: Titan office ko le chalo.

They needed some sort of closure by visiting the place where Bobby's life had come to an end. And by talking to the one person they could reach who had last spoken to Bobby. Over the years he had visited them occasionally but they had never gone over and had no idea what he did. They had been surprised to receive a veritable fortune as the proceeds of his estate.

There was not much we could say to each other. They ended up crying inconsolably for what must have been about half an hour but seemed much longer. Later that day we arranged for them to be taken to the very spot where the plane had crashed.

Aftermath
About a couple of years later, Paul, who had been Bobby's deputy in Vac-Tec called out of the blue. The company was liquidating stocks. Would we be interested in buying a coating plant at fire-sale prices?

Our technical people were by now conversant with the technology and felt that if we were getting a great deal we should look at it. I was headed westward on other business anyway, so I landed once again in beautiful Boulder. I was received by the company's Corporate Secretary and taken to the factory.

The empty parking lot had not prepared me for the shock awaiting me in the lobby. What had been a tastefully decorated space abuzz with activity was now bare. Where there used to be an attractive secretary at a glass and steel counter now stood, leaning against the wall and smiling, Bobby Randhawa. It took a couple of moments to register that it was just a life-size, and life-like, portrait.

In the cavernous, dark shop floor stood a number of tall cylindrical systems of different sizes in various stages of completion - looking like a George Lucas movie set. There around a work platform I met Paul and the remaining skeletal technical team.

Over the next couple of hours as Paul tried to sell me a plant, the story of how Bobby's departure had killed a vibrant business unfolded. As he spoke about what they could offer us, Bobby turned up every few minutes in some context, and Paul had to stop to wipe away silent tears. He had lost a boss he admired and a friend he loved; the company an asset it had not been able to replace.

They had tried various people from the academic space but no one could comfortably manage the move from lab scale to production scale. Regular customers, who were used to calling up Bobby directly for help in dealing with problems, or designing jigs and fixtures, or developing new coatings, had peeled off and new ones were hard to come by. Product development had come to a halt. Vac-Tec had gone into liquidation under Chapter 7.

Epilogue
This technology till today remains in a few hands. Out of the ashes of Vac-Tec was later born a new company Vapour-Tec, in Boulder. They do not offer gold coating in their regular line-up.