Making choices

In 2016 my final pass% for the choices in the election was 30%.

This year was better. Have been tracking my voting choices. While this post might end up attracting a bunch of more telemarketers before the next election, want you all to see how tricky it can be for many voting choices, given the Marketing machinery that goes behind every one of these measures and propositions.

To say elections are messy in the US is an understatement! 

My 2020 Election Report card : 

Pass/ Fail: 12 pass, 10 fail, 1 Meh. That is >50%. Better than 2016! 

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✅ means got it right..❌ means the choice has lost or is almost gone.

My vote:
President?VP - Biden/Harris - ✅

Voted for Sanders in the Primary. Had nothing against Biden and thought the choice of Kamala was interesting. I love Kamala as she has more balls than most of the old goats in the senate. It was sickening to see so many of my racist Indian friends (yes, you can have friends who have views different than yours) who suddenly attached themselves to her after she became the VP choice, but will take it.  

Unlike my meh vote for Hillary, voted for this Biden/Harris ticket whole heartedly.

My original thought during the primary was that the US ship had moved too far to the right and was about to topple.. to bring it back to center, you might need to try and pull it too far to the left or it might still end up wobbling for a long time.. Biden is a moderate. He is almost a Republican in a lot of ways, compared to Bernie. Hope a moderate choice is good enough to get the US back on track! for COVID/healthcare, social justice and the economy/Foreign policy (that was my order or priorities).

I personally want us to have a decent working relationship with China and Taiwan till we can get our own Hardware (read semiconductor, chip making in general) business up and running in the US. This was at a personal level where you are thinking just about you and your family. You can ask me "isn't every choice on your ballot, your choice, where you doing the absolute selfish thing?" and I will answer immediately "No. Politics is about "people" as a collective. This is where an individual decides a collective choice. You have to see if your selfishness is goign to backfire on you badly when making choices."

When it comes to China, saying you have to stop eating out when your stove at home isn't working is not a good strategy. Subsidising farmers and not fabs is ridiculous. If Fabs were subsidized, maybe the trade war was not called for and there would be no retalliation on Pig/soy/bourbon etc.  from China and the folks who were hit in the US getting subsidies to compensate for this retaliation. This was an elaborate chess game which in my opinion was botched and turned into a game of "whack-a-mole" by someone who knows more about chess than all the grandmasters put together. 

Not absolving China of unfair practices or asking for trouble. They made a lot of bad choices in the last three years. If China had elections, Xi would have probably lost in a landslide after COVID. But they don't, so this is China's chance to do better and get back on the right side of things. Hope the Chinese "community" is able to "capitalize" on this! 

Half this country agrees Nazi's are bad, but almost all of them seem to be anti China now?! Not good for the world. Hope this situation changes. Things will never be the same again but they can get better.

Now for the rest of the choices.

Ro - House Rep District 17 ✅ 72.9% to Ritesh 27% (Ro was a reluctant vote. Given he is young, expected his votes to align with Bernie.. but was not to be. This was my lesser of two evils vote. All those ads with Ritesh being blessed by the priests was a turn off. I am not going to vote for him because the local priests endorsed the guy. Who do you think I am? an Indian version of an Evangelical Floridian? was the thought in my head)
Ann - State senate District 15 ❌ 46% to 53.9% for Cortese
Evan low -State assembly District 28 ✅ 73.1%

Skipped it (Judge vote with only one candidate in ballot...only Kim Jong Un runs an election with one name only one name on a Ballot? No.. we do it too! ) 

Govind only - Local Community College Board-  ❌ (got only 14% of the vote)

William and sudha - Local school board ❌-  the ladies who want to shut the local schools  for where we live are leading with 38 and 27% . Sudha trails by 3000 votes and Bill is a distant 4th with only 11%. (this was the big disappointment for me on local level)

Steven and kitty -Cupertino City Council ~ Meh Top 2 win.. Only Kitty made it and is in 2nd place with a 900 vote lead. Steven in 4th place and trails by 1100 votes. The surprise is the Conspiracy theorist Charlene Lee who is in 5th place and still got 2600 votes!!  Cannot call this a win. Not sure if Kitty can do what she told me before the election without the support she needs of the 5 total members.

Bosworth, Gatto and Angela- Local Sanitary district - ✅ (all the three candidates picked are leading with 33, 24 and 24% of the vote. unlikely to change)

Propositions for CA : Only 83% of votes reported so far :

14- yes ✅ fund stem cell research 50.9% (not yet called)
15-yes ❌  Change how business property taxes are assessed. Got only 48% (not yet called)

 Not sure how this helps. It would be a good thing if Apple which practically runs Cupertino could just come up with 11M $ to stop the four local schools from closing. How can schools in Cupertino close for lack of funds? More people enrolling their kids in private schools (less PE? Grade inflation, which is a term I heard for the first time two weeks ago?) This topic needs a blog post in itself! 

16-yes ❌ End ban on affirmative action. Got only 43.5% (called)
17-yes ✅ Restore parolee vote – 58.7% (called)
18-yes ❌ Allow some 17 year olds to vote 

If they turn 18 by election, they should vote in March primaries so their candidate would be on Nov ballot). Got only 44.4% (called). This is a big big disappointment where the older generation screws the younger generation. Sorry kids. I tried?!

19-no ❌ change property tax transfer rules – 51.2% (not called yet)
20-no ✅ Increase criminal penalties and limit parole – 37.8% (called)
21-yes ❌ Allow rent control expansion – got only 40% (called)
22-no ❌ Classify gig workers as contractors - got 58.5% (called)

Read a yes vote on this as an Uber win and contractor loss as they get screwed out of benefits and voted no.Wanted to make sure Uber drivers who are risking a lot during COVID times to have healthcare.  This was the most controversially worded measure that had an intent to confuse.. Maybe Yes was the right vote?  Eventually when COVID leaves and I am on planes again and get to talk to Uber drivers enroute to SFO.. will find out the ground reality.

23-no ✅ Add regulation for kidney dialysis clinics – got only 35.9% (called)

Had to ask a doctor relative for advice on this! 

24-no ❌ Amend state data privacy law – got 55.9% (called). 

This was yet another one which was worded badly. My take is folks have voted against their own interest thanks to word play on the ballot. Have one adorable friend who is a technical writer who will hopefully take to task these folks who end up writing ballot measures with an intent to deceive and confuse the voter! 

Technical writing was weaponized in this ballot! At this rate they could write a ballot measure for mandatory castration of all male babies once they reach the age of 10 and have it pass..that was my thought after reading this!

25-no✅ End use of cash bail – got only 44.1% (called)

Measures for Local region:  Voted for keeping an existing tax or add a tax, and all three passed! 

M-yes -   ✅ pass school district parcel tax .. 73% 
S-yes -   ✅ pass parcel tax for santa clara valley water district - 75%
RR-yes - ✅ Peninsula corridor 0.125% sales tax increase - 69.6%

Don't have a problem paying Taxes as long as there is accountabilty for that tax dollars and it actually ends up doing what it is supposed to do. Seeing all the signs for "please stop our school from closing" on every street corner is making me want to push for more reform on commercial properties to pay proportional taxes which would actually benefit the local community!

Overall, happy with this pass %. Makes me feel less disconnected with the rest of the community this time compared to the last time. 

Waiting for Biden/Harris and an all star team to bring some much needed sanity. In the meantime

- Social distance

- If you can't wear a mask

- wash your hands often

- Get tested if you are sick

- Exercise regularly

- Talk to people who don't agree with you

Put yourself in other peoples shoes or make a conscious attempt to engage

Bring facts and truth back! 

Let's all work on avoiding the concept of "alternate facts" as they are just "lies". 

NASER

The Past : NASER 

NASER, an acronym I am coining stands for  "News Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Rubbish". Till the morning of the election everyone, even the guys at fivethirtyeight who has predicted things very successfully in the past wrote a post that said "no matter which scenario we pick, Hillary Clinton comes up the winner". Today the US stands where it is because people are disconnected with reality.

There is the Fox news watching folks who believe that all muslims are terrorists and the Chinese are taking their jobs or that Obama is after their guns.. the list goes on. Then there is the coastal mix that has no idea that there are folks who are born and raised in the Midwest who have never crossed their county borders and have lived to be past sixty and their aspirations for the rest of their lives and their children look very bleak. 

There is probably one dude who is going door to door and collecting some info. This then gets amplified and mirrored multiple times with some embellishments and gets called news. We live in a country where 1$ was shown as collateral 31 times to create a debt crisis. Same thing happens to polling?!

Three weeks ago, spent 4 hours voting.

(Put the sticker on my phone instead of my shirt.. it lasted three plus weeks! now it is a bitter reminder of my pass %...)

Today we have the results, but I have to check across different sites to find out if I got an A or a D.  When we wait at airports, Jr. plays a game on her phone called family feud and she keeps bugging me to help her with answers. There when you answer something it goes "you said the answer is Hillary.. the audiene said Trump".. wish there was an answer key to the election that shows the correct answers to all the things you picked and gives you a score and it gets mailed to your home after the exam, err. election is over. 

This time majority of my choices were not the winning choices. Usually it is 50/50. This time it is more like 30/60. Chances are I am way too disconnected with the folks around me. We should all get a disconnect score at the end of an election, be it within your city, county, state and the nation. 

Last night I went for a yoga class and for 90 minutes forgot what was going on outside that hot room. The fact that my hand was sending pain signals every 10 seconds was making it more challenging than thoughts of the election. Came home to find out that Trump was very close to winning and there was a general doom and gloom scenario in the house and neighborhood. There was also a lot of disbelief that this could acutually have happened. 

I did predict a Trump win and got yelled at for it three weeks ago. My prediction was based on two things. The first was related to how Narendra Modi was elected Prime Minister of India. The media world over said he had no chance or he had only a fighting chance, but he came roaring with an absolute majority. The reason the pollsters were not predicting that right? A lot of folks did not tell everyone who they were really voting for but came out in droves to vote for the BJP. At that time, voting for the BJP was associated by mainstream media as a Hitler vote! In my mind, the same thing was going on in the US. Folks who want to vote for Trump, but have a problem associating with the stigma (there were Republicans endorsing him who would not mention him by name) weren't going to advertise it loudly!

The second thing was our own dissonance with what is happening in a large part of the country. In this year I have made one trip to Ohio, one aborted trip to Ohio which ended in a Denver airport sleep in, one trip to Seattle, Austin and Pittsburgh as fas as domestic travel goes. The Ohio and Pittsburgh trip were eye opening. There is a overwhelming sense of despair for folks who have a problem and sincerely believe their problem is because of a,b,c thanks to what they see and hear. The fact that they associate the root causes of their problems to things or countries or folks, that are so far off the mark, does not make their problems unreal. They are vey very real. Folks who were able to screw the same nut into the same bolt for 8 hours a day, five days a week for 20 years and get paid a decent salary to raise kids, put food on the table and pay a mortgage are suddenly jobless. A lot of such jobs were also military jobs making tanks and other things we may not need. If we closed those plants, they all have to make something else or have some other skill. The roof, the food, the kids, they don't go away. Yes, there is a sense of entitlement for some because of their race, but the folks I met or spoke to were not showing any entitlement. They were just lacking a job matching their skillset. 

The Present : Day After Tomorrow

That movie keeps coming to mind. Yes, Trump is now President elect. We did have a tough time explaining to our kids what was going on. It is true that we have a democracy and the we accept the system for what it is.

If someone tells you "Clinton won the majority vote", that is an excuse. The rules of the game is the electoral college and everyone has known the rules for hundreds of years, so both campaigns were playing for the electoral college. If Trump won, it was with the same rules. That part is easy to explain.

If someone tells you "the third party vote is what cost Clinton the election", that is also an excuse. We always knew that Johnson/Weld were going to do better in this election because they were a compromise for people who used to vote for establishment Republicans and the Libertarian folks were not going to vote for Hilary anyways. That was a constant that wasn't new or unexpected.

We are not ready for a woman president. Even that part is easy to explain. There are so many nations out there with women leaders, but the US is not ready for it. Maybe some other woman will be President some day. The fact that Hillary came so close is something to rejoice. Someone asked me during the Primary, why are you not coming out in support of Hillary explicitly. My answer was "I don't like women who stand by their husbands in front of the press to show their support after said husband has just been caught cheating with a girl old enough to be his daughter. She should have castrated the bastard or separated from him, not stand by him and take that crap for the sake of politics". I was lectured on that statement by many of my family and friends that in spite of that she is where she is. I was Hilary neutral.. let's put it that way. My reason for not being enthusiastic was my perception that she can be pushed easily. She did prove me wrong in the debates. 

The hardest part to explain to the kids? A guy who said and did what he did, managed to get elected to this office. If your kids aspire to be the POTUS someday, the value system that you need to instill in them are not ones of family values, compassion, responsibility to fellow citizen and country but whatever Trump stands for. That is a new low as a parent. It is a growing up lesson as a parent. Our kids have to grow up to a new reality and wake up to a lot of concepts a little too early. Forget the tooth fairy or Santa.  Jr. was getting nightmares after reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" which is mandatory 9th grade reading. Maybe it should be mandatory 6th grade reading! but I did have a spin for it.. 

The greatness of the American electoral process is not that a black man was our president for 8 years. It is not that a woman managed to stand for this office and come close to winning it. It is that a man like Trump can be President if he perseveres. That is a very American thing to do. You ignore anything anyone says about you and still manage go grab America. Okay, looks like the cynic in me is staring to come out again. Deep breath. Deep breath. Where were we?

We told our kids this morning that the only thing no one can take away from them is their education and knowledge and the more they share that knowledge the more valuable it is. The little one looks up at me and goes "what I learned in this election is that if you have a rich daddy, you can be messed up and still become president!" and she gives me a look that says "if only you were rich..."  Definitely not the value system conversation you want to have.. but ... 

The Future : A big ship vs. a jet ski... I am thinking Hunt for Red October

A dictatorship is like a jet ski. You can change direction very fast with your hands and the craft responds. It can go fast and there is a good chance to crash and burn. A large and complicated democracy with electoral colleges, senate, house of representatives, city councils, governers, etc. is like a ship. You can be the captain and say "set course for this lattitude and longitude" and that gets conveyed to a first officer to another guy to another guy and finally by the time it gets to change, it is not fast or perceptible. The US is like that ship. There are social experiments that have time scales in the decades. 

Trump is a social experiement. We thought we were going to get golden spangles by mixing potassium iodide with lead nitrate, but were surprised to see an orange sediment in the test tube. The lead was there.. but the iodide was missing! If my daughter reads this, please note that I still remember this from 30 years ago. I will do a pop quiz on this sometime soon. Get ready.. where were we again? This whole election thing is making me go all over the place.  This social experiement has to be supported and accepted. We still do not know how the world will react. I am not expecting wide spread riots like the ones that happen in third world nations when an election is close. There is a lot more tolerance in the US than the world gives us credit for. Trumps words during his run up to this office definitely do not project him as a President for everyone and he is most likely going to be pushed over by the likes of Putin. 

If there is one thing that any President has always focussed on irrespective of managing the way we are perceived by the world, it is the strength of the USD. Trump will not do anything to damage that. If anything that is for sure. That will be the first reassuring thing. 

His biggest challenge is to bring jobs back to the US. Sooner or later the good folks in the midwest will realize that robots took a lions share of their jobs, not the Chinese, not bad trade deals, not Mexicans and immigrants. Trump can make tanks that no military would want to use and stock pile them if that is what it means to put food on the table for that vote base or he can try and line up with the world and realize that good jobs will mean energy jobs and Information technology jobs. Those are the engines for the next decade. Making his constituents happy and getting jobs back automatically involves certain other compromises. That will keep him busy and away from his hate rhetoric.

When I first became a manager, I realized that it is easy to be an individual contributor than a manager. It is not easy to herd cats. Trump has a government job for the first time. Moving from the private sector to the government, he is going to have a massive transition. First they are going to take his phone away and give him one of those kid phones (you should watch Obama describe it in one of the late shows) and that might mean, no tweeting at 3PM.  That is just the first adjustment. 

There is an expecatation from the POTUS from everyone here and abroad. At the least he should meet the expectations of those who voted for him. Let's hope he does that. I am all for a happy midwest where folks prosper again. Hope that hole in the US donut becomes a cream filled solid one. 

On a side note, a majority of my Indian family and friends who are US citizens are sad that Trump won. There are a few who voted for Trump because of one or both of below reasons :

a. He will lower taxes

b. he will put the muslims in their place (they are still friends or family and they took this stand because of things they encountered in their life.. we continue to have an active dialogue on that)

A majority of my Indian family and friends who are NOT citizens are overwhemingly happy that Trump won.

They are happy for one or many of below reasons :

a. He will fast track green card process which has crawled under Obama

b. H1B visas will be a thing again and we can see IT folks come to the US to work

c. The US deserves to have Trump as President as he represents the real US (read it as "you are not any better off than we are")

Everyone has their reasons and biases.

Today was as interesting as any other day on the road (same or slightly more traffic), at work (interesting challenges), at home (sheet rock guy lights a cigarette inside house) and life goes on. My taxes are unlikely to change. Given we live in California, we are likely to continue to show our kids a pro immigrant, pro LGBT, equal opportunity lesson. Sure, I have some explaining to do as usual on my Asia trips where everyone asks me why as an American I got Trump elected ! Folks, was already asked this when he was a nominee. That will pass soon. 

It is possible that my kids will have a heavier debt burden with more wars and unnecessary spending on things that are no good for the world as a whole.. but that is a long term thing that can course correct. Barring a few downsides, this does not change things for us here. There is a fear for certain minorities in certain areas of the country and one does worry about President Trump's ability to control a mob and restrain it given his rhetoric. Most likely nothing like that will happen. The few crazies will act up much like the few RSS groups acted up after Modi won in India, but other than that, life will go on.

There is a mandate for jobs in the US. We have to provide some service or manufacture something for those jobs. Finding what service to provide or what to make in a cost competitive way is going to be the challenge and it is to be seen how Trump will solve that problem. We also have a mandate for a non politician to be in charge because folks think the current establishment politicians cannot get things done. That is true only to a certain extent. The rest is the impact of globalization which most of the population does not understand or refuses to accept. Trump is unlikely to reverse that process.

Given he was unlikely do a lot of things and he did, hoping that he does manage to reverse it.. 

Time will tell. . . 

ps. a humble request to my democrat friends. Do not distance yourself from the process or the participation. Continue to engage in the debate. talk to people who do not share your point of view. if anything my travels have taught me, it is to sit and hear things you don't want to hear, but dig deeper to find why and what drives others to do or say what they say. you can actually learn a lot. if anything go listen to Positively 4th street and imagine putting yourself in another shoes.. that is not a good start, but at least a start. 

pps. It is safe to say that the media world over is lazy. No one actually goes talks to people and collects real data. Indirect references, copying other peoples snippets has become the norm. I can talk to my grandma on the phone over five days, call it a statistic and publish it and chances are, if it fits the story, it will be amplified, embellished and repeated over and over again. Do your own research where possible. Travel if possible. Watch the travel channel, Discovery channel or National Geographic instead of FOX or CNN or MSNBC. Talk to people! Those folks who have never left their county in their entire life, go meet them if you can! 

Media blitz..

NaMo has won by a landslide!

What the western media is doing, even after more than 1/2 a billion people have clearly said, "They want Development. They want good governance. They have moved on from 2002. They believe jobs and economy will take a focus and the people as a nation can pull out of the current stagnation.", is ridiculous!

Every news report and article today mentions "polarized", "divisive" etc. etc.

The US media needs to grow up!

An absolute majority! where is the polarization? where is the divisiveness? folks from every segment put economy over 2002.. 

Funny thing is that US media does the same thing with China. "No freedom, no rights etc. etc." is all we hear about China, all the time in US media. When I go to China, I see those people are actually happy that the country is growing. They don't see it as a big deal that the govt. is checking their mails. they don't care who their Premier is, as long as things improve day to day. There is a pragmatism there when it comes to accepting that a large population needs a lot of things to support it. The email snooping was happening in the US also, except we didn't know it! So all we pride ourselves on is not security but a false sense of security. 

When you have a billion plus mouths to feed, and a population distribution that is getting younger, you need different solutions. A larger population has larger inertia. It is not easy to move everyone in the same direction. Yet, that has to happen to a certain extent if development has to thrive at that scale. 

It is high time we sent a whole bunch of US media guys on some kind of exchange program to India and China!

There are a bunch of people in India who are still speculating that Modi's government will turn India into the dark ages and communal violence will be everywhere like 2002. Well, it has not happened in Gujarat for 12 years. Why will it happen all over now? 

The polarization seems to be in the minds of folks who do not back Modi, with respect to the sanity of Gujarathis. The argument seems to be "NaMo did not develop Gujarat. Gujarat and Gujarathis were developed long before Modi even came into the picture." If they accept that Gujarathis are smart folks, then they voted Modi and kept him their leader for 12 years! So they must see something in him, no? The response to that question has always been met with silence. 

It is time the media moved on from making Modi into some kind of monster, and see him as the builder that he is!

Political leanings

Most of you who read this blog have seen my feeble attempt to understand my own political leanings here..

The recent Indian elections have created a confusion of sorts for my family and friends alike who ask me questions like "You are a social liberal in the United States and support the Democrats but you also support Narendra Modi who is pretty much the Ronald Reagan of India?" or "If you support Modi in India because of his economic policies, you have a blatant double standard for what you want in India vs. what you want in the US, no?" or worse "Hi, if you are all for securalism in the US, then why are you supporting BJP instead of Congress?"

Not being a politician, I do not have well rehearsed answers for these questions. Actually have to think deeply to find out answers to these questions and sometimes you might still end up wringing your hands!

The trick to answering some of these questions though is understanding that the words "liberal" and "secular" seem to be interpreted differently in India and the US. Most of the folks I interact with seem to have notions of these two words that fit a different context. 

Lets take the "secular" thing first as it is relatively easy. When I grew up in India, the "secular" word meant "a co-existing of all religious faiths" which meant a "freedom of the local darga to put loud speakers and blast out muslim prayers at 4AM and the ability of the local Maariamman temple to start with Maariamma engal maariammmmmaaa at 4:05 AM". Every so often the Velankanni chariot procession with a Mother Mary statue in it will add its loud speakers to it. When the cacophony is heard by your tired and groggy ear as "alllllah whooo ammmma!", your brain subconsciously lets you understand that they are all an equal nuisance and the best thing for you to do is to turn your head in the opposite direction of "Sathyavaanimuththu Nagar" , put a pillow over your head and try to sleep. 

India is a place where religion competes openly much harder than FB and Google fight for your eyeball time in the internet. Loud speakers, garish displays, festivals created by the local populace that are no where to be found in calendars of folks in other countries who practice the same religions, it is an endless barrage of "in your face religion". My understanding of Secular was that everyone could go visit whatever place of worship they wanted to go to and they had an equal right to assault the eardrums of everyone in a 5 km vicinity. They were also free to take over busy streets, cut holes in them and do "thee midhis" (fire walking) be it in the name of some Indian godess or some descendent or relative of the prophet Mohammad. I always used to wonder why the Christians in India didn't have a nice fire walking ceremony to add to the fun.

What was also odd was that the guys who do the loudspeakers are mostly cousins and some just converted to different religions. They would all show up at our house to collect money for the various festivals and my father, nice guy that he is, would kind of do a deferred payment by agreeing to let them use "electricity" from our house for their loud speakers. The irony of that is not lost on me. There are so many times I have wished to just go uproot that "illegal" umbilical cord that ran across the street from our electric box to those speakers. All said and done, everyone was different and yet everyone was the same. That kind of summed up "secular" for me.

The funny thing was that the two main political parties in Tamil Nadu were both Atheist and 90+ % of the folks doing the fire walking had a choice of voting for atheist vs. atheist. 

Later in life though, it hit me hard when the reservation system reared its ugly head and I actually understood the concept of a "vote bank" after living in Banaras for 4 years. Secular meant the extension of the British Raj by the Congress party by using the "divide and rule" policy. Prey on the differences, give special treatment to minority groups where you define minority in local geographic terms and capitalize this to get votes. 

In the US, my understanding of secular in my early immigrant years can be summed up in one sentence. "We are a Christian country, but we will let you go to a temple and pray the way you want as long as you understand that when we say ONE NATION UNDER GOD, we mean Jesus!" . Over the years, I have realized that given anything other than Christianity is a minority religion in the US, my understanding was more or less accurate. We were seen as a small bit of of spice to the melting pot that did not ruin the taste. The US is 79% Christian, 5% other religions, 16% non religious. Of the 16% non religious, 5% is "secular" or "unassociated". 

In the US, Secular means "I am neutral to religion" in a very different way. 

Now to understand the "Liberal" thingy. I am glad this was not on an exam paper for 10 marks, because I would have run out of paper or ink and not finished the exam in any alloted time. I was not sure exactly what my political leaning was in India. I never voted in an Indian election. In the south I did like the leader of one of the two Atheist parties because he had a way with words when it came to the Tamil language but did not like his party or its followers for their "hate crimes". The rest of my family loved the other parties leader as she acted as though their was a Hinduistic lean. Turned out they were both playing a similar game in different sectors. They have their own TV channels, airlines, newspapers, etc. FOX news executives can learn a thing or two from both these parties and we have a sum total of one guy who represents the  Jon Stewart and Colbert spectrum in Tamil Nadu.

At a national level though, I have never liked any party be it the BJP or Congress. The congress was doing the divide and rule and their economic policies sucked. Sucked the money out of India to Swiss banks that is! The BJP was great for the local economy and Nationalistic pride makes nations improve their standing in the world (see China and how it is doing now!).  However witnessing the demolishon of mosques and watching hindus and muslims go on killing sprees, curfews and shoot at sight orders in Banaras left a bitter after taste for religious politics. It is also difficult to map what party in the US maps to what party in India!

If you had to compare Democrats, Republicans and Libertarians to the Congress, BJP and the new Aam Aadmi party it really gets to be difficult. Somehow folks expect this to be a 1:1 but it is not.  When it comes to economic policies, development policies, influence of religion on the party, govenment reach into policies, individual freedoms and government guarantees they are all over the place. 

Now for the Modi Reagan question. I am going to agree that being a minority in the US based on my religion and part of the majority in India for the same religion, there are some views that are shaped by this discrepancy. Why? While I am not the "in your face" religious type, I do like the freedom to practice what I want to, be it religion or spirituality. It is also the reason why I am probably turned off by the far right in the US while I am not alarmed by the BJP's vote base that is equally far right because they happen to be Hindu. Somehow the reasoning that India is more of a spiritual place seems to supresses that tingling spider sense. 

Supporting Obama because he will bring Healthcare to all and even out the increased divide between the folks who have access to lobbyists and folks who are being left behind while simultaneously supporting Modi who is bringing in Reagan era scalebacks of social subsidy programs does sound hypocratic. But my brain puts it in a differnt context. It is true that both countries have corrupt politicians who make themselves and the rich, richer while the poor get poorer. There are differnces though to concepts like a minimum wage that exists in US but is non existant in India. Social Welfare itself implies different things in the two countries! Infrastructure development does not have the same priority in the US and India. The needs and priorities in the two countries are very different. Yes, they both could use a multi party system and honest politicians and a populace that is not swayed by advertising and lies that makes them vote against their own interests. 

In a way, Modi is closer to Obama and not Reagan because he stands to do a lot better than his partymates, seems to have a character that seems to be outside of the 3*sigma window of the politicians in his party and seems to have an uncanny ability to rally the troops when push comes to shove. He also seems to be as determined to develop the infrastructure and open up trade in the same way Obama pushed the healthcare reform. He also seems to have a personal charm, integrity and conviction, not to mention those things that are common to soccer, tennis, table tennis and cricket. 

After all that rambling, the takeaway is this. The 1:1 mapping does not work between the parties or select leaders.

I am sure there will be a lot of you telling me in intricate detail where I am wrong and where I am right. Will also find out over the years myself on where my bets were right and wrong. It happened with Obama being toothless and playing victim, when it came to taking on certain fights and I am sure the same thing will happen to Modi if he plays pacifist between his far right base and his development agenda. As long as he doesn't start crying like John Boehner, think it will be okay!

Branding

There are elections in India. The only thing we were looking forward to, was to see the incumbent Congress party go. Looks like that is happening. 

We have been getting updates from supporters of different parties on the Facebook feed more than from any news media. This morning, decided to see what Google news presented for me and here it was (link)

Now for someone who is not that much into Indian History and knows Nehru as Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi as Mahatma Gandhi... 

Ok, I know the desi's who read this are going "not possible", but seriously! Today's American textbooks have three pages for Indian political history. Not much mention is there of the fact that Indira Gandhi, who gets mentioned as the first woman prime minister of India is not related to the Mahatma. People put two and two and come up with four!

In all of Indian history, this move by Indira to marry a dude with the same last name as Mahatma Gandhi, was probably the most brilliant branding or marketing idea! 

In South INdian families we stopped using caste or religious sub sect related last names post Indian Independence. Then folks started using their fathers first name as their last name, as "expanded initials". That is why I am now Sundar Narayanan instead of Sundar Iyer. My fathers first name is now my last name. Still it made sense in a way that we were all part of the Narayanan family. Unlike family names in the US, this gets to be tricky. My wife does not want to take my fathers first name as her last name. She was okay with being Sangeetha Sundar (which is how it works in India if a woman wanted to change her last name, she took her husbands first name!) and that also made sense.  

This is a common issue in desi families when they apply for a US passport. They all want to fill out one customs form and have the same last name but cannot agree on one. So the new trend is that the entire family changes their name to the old system. Either go with sect, subsect names or their Gothrams(lineage) in Brahmin families. 

If we ever cross that bridge, we should take a page from Indira and find a "nice" family name to change to!