Arthshastra

My apologies for deleting all your comments accidently. I obviously did not mean to, but I ran an incorrect query on my database (I am a cheapskate and my database is not backed up), and “boom”, all my comments were gone.

I hope that you realize how deeply I appreaciate your feedback and how sorry I am for loosing all the comments.

Is Islam a peaceful religion? Is it a violent one? Does Quran teach violence? Does it teach love and peace? Are all Muslims violent? Are some of them violent while a majority of them just wants to live peaceful lives?

Questions like these and many more have been asked many times over, specially in the West and specially after the 9/11 attacks. President Bush has gone from emphasizing that Islam is a peaceful religion to using the term Islamo-fascists. So how do we make sense of what really is Islam? Or, for that matter, how do we make sense of any other religion? If we cannot answer this fundamental question, then we will never be able to answer the more obvious ones that I enumerate at the beginning.

To be able to answer that question, we first have to answer an even more basic question. Is religion a static entity, as defined in its holy books, or is it a living, breathing entity, as defined by the lives led by follower of that religion at a given period? I would assert that religion is a living, breathing entity as defined by the lives of its followers in the present. Going by that definition, one simply cannot assert or ask the question, “Is Islam a peaceful religion?” for that question is too absolute. The question that needs to be asked is, “Is Islam a peaceful religion today?”

If asking the right question was tricky, answering it is bound to be more so. What criterion does one use to quantify one’s answer? Should we find out the ratio of violent verses to non-violent verses in Quran? Should we find out the ratio of violent Muslims to non-violent Muslims (this criterion is often used when people assert that there are “millions of Muslims practicing their religion peacefully”)?
I think the answer can be found in one of the very basic observations that Mahatma Gandhi made about human nature - that if you want to find out the true nature of a person, find out how he treats a weaker person. Let us apply that simple test to present day Islam. We can say that Muslims are in “strength”, that is able to dictate political, social and religious decisions in countries or regions where they are in majority. Of course, in certain instances, they might be able to dictate terms even in regions where they are in minority but for now, we can simply focus on Muslim majority regions. Let us think of Muslim majority regions and nations like the Middle East, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, certain regions of Africa and Indonesia and see how the “weaker party” that is, non-Muslims have been treated in those regions? Is there freedom of religion? Is there freedom of speech? Can you openly practice your faith? What about civil laws?

In a nutshell, what kind of society have Muslims created in places where they had the power to create the kind of societies that they wanted to create?

Now compare those societies with the societies created by Christian majority states, like those of the Western Europe or in the US. Or the society created by the Hindu majority state of India.

There, you’ve answered the question that “Is Islam a peaceful religion today?” The real violence committed in the name of Islam was not committed when those planes hit the twin towers, not even when those bombs went off in the streets of London or in the trains of Mumbai. The real violence in the name of Islam is committed every single day in those Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia where you cannot freely practice any other religion, cannot have a free civic discourse and cannot have basic human rights. That is the real Islamic terrorism, Islamo-fascism or whatever other term that you fancy. The people ramming those planes into the twin towers were only the end result of that terrorism.

A recent IEEE report scrutinizes the Labor Condition Application (or LCA for short is a form that needs to be filed by a company wanting to hire foreign workers) to come to the conclusion that the H1B visa worker program has been exploited by various Indian companies.

The study cites an interview given by Vice President of Tata Consultancy Services Phiroz Vandrevala to Business World magazine in which he had said his company enjoys a competitive advantage because of its extensive use of foreign workers in the United States on H-1B and L-1 visas.

“Our wage per employee is 20-25 per cent lesser than US wage for a similar employee,” Vandrevala said. “Typically, for a TCS employee with five years experience, the annual cost to the company is $60,000-70,000, while a local American employee might cost $80,000-100,000.

While this acknowledgment by one of the big three in itself is shocking, many of us who have been working in the IT field for many years, both in India and in the US know that there are much bigger elephants in the room that no one is willing to acknowledge. The following points, in my view, make for a much bigger case of banning all Indian companies from the H1B and L1 visa program:

Resume embellishment: Embellishment might be a much milder term for what goes in many of these consultancy shops that get Indian IT workers on H1B visas. Resumes are bloated, many job experiences cited on the resume are more fictional than Sydney Sheldon’s novels and “a deep knowledge” of X technology often means flipping through “Teach yourself in 24 hours” books. There is also anecdotal evidence that many of these “consultants” have subject experts who answer client technical interviews over the phone, while the actual candidate is sitting thousand of miles away in India.

Hurting deserving candidates: Every year, the quotas for H1B visas fill up much ahead of time. I have personally seen many deserving candidates, who went to grad school in the US, ending up continuing to go to school, taking up yet another major or wasting their time at low level jobs at the universities, because the H1B visa quota ran out. This year, even the quota specially reserved for candidates with an advanced US degree was exhausted in a flash. One saving grace has been that the US Department of Labor has not budged from its requirement of getting an education from an accredited US university as a pre-condition to apply under this quota, despite all the pleas in various immigration forums that go something like “will an MCA + 5 years IT experience count as a US advanced degree?”

Creating an immigration backlog: During the Y2K years, everyone and his uncle who had the money to get a certificate from NIIT or Aptech managed to come to the US on an H1B visa. The lax rules of those days are coming home to roost for a lot of people who simply cannot understand as to why there is a big backlog of immigration visas. I don’t mind waiting in the line behind a guy who went to IIT Delhi and then wrote two IEEE published papers while finishing his MS in a year at Illinois. What I do mind is a person with a GNIIT degree, who came to the US in the Y2K rush eating up 5 immigration visas for his wife and 3 kids. While there is no doubt that the US immigration policy is deeply flawed, it is made worse by these cases.

Creating an H1B backlash: There were days when there were close to 200,000 H1B visas available each year. However, blatant exploitation of the program by Indian companies followed by a technical downturn led to the cap returning back to 65,000 per year. Now, with the Democrats and Republicans both posturing to claim the higher ground on immigration, there is a serious possibility of an even bigger backlash. As long as Indian companies continue to exploit the program, there will be studies like the one by IEEE, exposing those violations. In the long run, this will just give the H1B program a bad reputation and might lead to its revocation entirely.

In my opinion, the H1B visa program should only be open to students graduating from accredited US universities. There are plenty of students who have put in a few years of hard work and have bona fide academic credentials and don’t deserve to be left hanging in limbo because the H1B visa quotas are over. I don’t hold this view because I think that only students graduating from the US universities are smart or that they have a right to work in the US, but because this is the only way in which this blatant abuse of H1B visas by Indian off shoring companies can be stopped and deserving people can stop feeling like suckers.

As for the Indian companies, if they are willing to prove their mettle and willing to prove that they can compete on much more than cost alone, then they should not shy away from hiring people at prevailing wages graduating from the US universities.

Oh these pesky sequels, they are always a tough act, specially if the original has attained the status of a beloved classic, as it has, in the case of Lage Raho Munnabhai. While making the sequel you have to be concerned with the continuity of the story and the logical development of characters while making sure that the audience does not get a sense of deja-vu. The creative team behind Lage Raho deftly steps aside these minefields by not continuing the story from Munnabhai MBBS, rather, they just retain the two lead characters of lovable small time crooks - Munnabhai and Circuit and start with a clean slate. The result is a movie that is a triumph of the art of movie making.

Of course, the movie works as a great comedy and that itself would have been sufficient to make it a worthy sequel. What really makes the sequel stand out and indeed surpass the original is that it is so much more ambitious than the original and yet it works so well at so many different levels - as a comedy, as a feel good heart warming story, as a political movie, as a patriotic movie and finally, as a movie that serves as a great antidote to the mindless violence and rubbish solutions presented in Rang De Basanti. The first fifteen minutes of the movie have Arshad Warsi and Boman Irani (as a gaudy, unscrupulous builder who is a spitting image of many such builders found in the by lanes of Karol Bagh) displaying their impeccable comic timing and got me to laugh so hard that I was crying. That itself was worth the price of admission, everything else that follows is a bonus. Sanjay Dutt again excels in a role that might end up defining his career, Vidya Balan shows that the charm, charisma and acting prowess that she displayed in Parineeta was no fluke and Arshad Warsi was born to play the role of Circuit.

But the real hero of the movie is the script, always innovative and always funny. When you are trying to peddle the Mahatma as the Sutradhar (anchor-man) of your story, and you push his path of non-violence and love as solutions to today’s problems, there is always the danger of alienating your audience. Not because there is something wrong with Gandhiji’s ideas per-se, but due to the fact that since Independence, our political class has so much used and abused Gandhian principles as something to be repeated at every occasion and never to be followed in principle that a majority of the country is simply numb to any sort of Gandhian message. The movie pokes fun at precisely that image of Mahatma Gandhi and might even manage to make the Mahatma cool again for the Gen Y. And the audience is never alienated because the script ensures that the movie does not become a preachy, shrill October 2nd speech. It retains its core of being a really funny comedy movie that is attempting to be a little more.

It succeeds and how!