The Sociologist Andre Beteille on Democracy in India

When I studied Sociology at the University of Poona in the 1980s, I heard of Broom and Selznick, Margaret Mead, August Comte, Emile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Karl Marx, and of course Andre Beteille. Today thanks to the Azim Premji University, I saw Andre Beteille in the flesh and heard him speak like the ‘sutradhar’ of our lifetimes in India. The venue was the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, on Race course road, Bangalore. I was impressed by the articulate views of a range of generations in the audience gathered there on 29^th November, 2013. 

Padma Bhushan of India Andre Beteille

For someone, who studied in Kolkata when Lenin was both alive and had a lead influence on communists of Bengal, his alacrity on what may be fact and what is opinion is sharp. It edges the idealism of youngsters armed with fingertip internet information.

While his scholarship, focus and passion shone through – as if here were a political historian, I was absorbing the philosophical stance from which he treated sociology. His vantage point could shift in malleable form from historian to social relations student to political anthropologist. Yet he was unapologetic of taking on the categories he saw his world view from. For him structure and order were cornerstones of analysis of paradigms in democracy. He used a colloquial term to explain his perceptual position – the conformist. To have held that standpoint to hold out his categories of analysis is a feature of analysis in itself. 

His sociology may be seen as a sociology of regulation, and disorder to be seen as a sign of ‘movement’. For ‘movements’ like that of Anna Hazare, JP  Narayan, and the like would change and evolve into something like ‘parties’. Such legitimacy in Andre’s perceptual position is the necessary condition in which ‘meaning' is restored to regulate relations between institutional entities in society. He says, that the difference between Anna Hazare and JP was simply this – that JP was more self-critical and a thinker. And although Andre did not see it himself from the outside, he gives credence to the possibility that those within the movement, saw it coming before most could. E.g. Arvind Kejriwal created a political party. And this when the democracy we have in India hosts a multitude of parties under the swelling tent of liberty, quite apart from a multi-party democracy of 5 or 6 political parties that European nations have.

In terms of signs of deviance, we should look for patterns in factions, which according to him is an unstable entity in parties. It is difficult to pin down factions to stable properties. In fact, factions happen to find friends among university teaching staff too. In terms of regulation however, the academic function of a university, would be lost if faculty co-opted students within their factional identities.

Otto Scharmer's view of the world in 2013

On rather lighter notes, Andre’s pearls included the following :

1.  Laws and customs are different units of analysis in sociology.
2. Longer lasting democracies survive on good customs, not on good laws alone.
3.  Somnathda, erstwhile Speaker of the Lok Sabha,  in his farewell speech wished none of the parliamentarians get re-elected. In his subsequent withdrawal, he expected a Brahmin’s curse to have a salutary effect in Indian society, as he confessed to Andre the sociologist whom he respected. So much for entrenched communism in India!
4.   Lenin may have called India a zoo, and not a democracy, but more fatally, he may not have known his own country any better.
5. One must not disdain disorder in Indian democracy as to wish it out of existence, but as in The Westminster model, make sure that the opposition is Her Majesty’s Royal Opposition. (His need for order to contain disorder a clear sign of the sociology of regulation, than the dialectic sociology of radical change).

Lastly, his most telling sign of democracy in India having brought about change is the average age of women at marriage. He would not have imagined this of the India of a 100 years ago. His one distillation of institutional resilience was if the institution survived the life of its founders! Indian democracy has survived, and we could be more hopeful than being in the grip of irrational fears of factions like Naxals and Maoists whose inherent structures would not help their endurance as institutions.

I am however left with how Andre's sociology of regulation may survive the age of the internet, and the mindless degradation of our ecology, if man proceeds without conscious attention to destroy givens.

Paradigms I've experienced over the last decade

No major paragraphs. Just a few reflections from my experience in India as someone at the world of work.

THEN around 2000-2002	NOW around 2011-2013
1.       Does this belong to our industry? If yes, your opinion is of value to me.	Does this apply only to our industry? If no, good. The more beyond our industry that much more value.
2.       Is he joining a good Company?	Is he working with good People?
3.       Does he know problems of the Third-World?	Does he know what is an emerging economy?
4.       Do they have capability to change?	Do they have capability to learn?
5.       Is the person eligible to apply for the job?	Is the person suitable for the role?
6.       Is the professional inter-personally effective?	Is the person socially active?
7.       Is the person God-fearing?	Is the person spiritually inclined?
8.       Can the candidate write well?	What does the candidate read?
9.       Does the candidate come from a good family?	Does the candidate have positive peer references?
10.   What successes does the candidate possess?	What learning does the candidate have from failure?

Does this read like a familiar set of perceptions for you too? What implications does this set of differences have for you?

An evening of Insights from Innovators

I recently attended talks by two leading innovators. They were Ramji Raghavan of the Agastya Foundation and Dr. Lalitesh K of Google. I share what I learnt from their own sharing.
1.       Innovation has a new arena. It is out of the closet of enterprises. It is in the needs of consumers, and not in those of enterprises, that innovation will thrive.
2.       Poverty in material terms can be framed in terms of information access problems. An information abyss co-exists with poverty. What was once known as information asymmetry is now reframed as the valley of despair. For those who do not pay their ‘knowledge tax’ create an avoidable void. Social inequity is a symptom of the information abyss.
3.       In computing, cognitive divides are subtler and perhaps more damaging than digital divides themselves.
a.       Emotional responses to text are diminishing with the rise of broadband access. With more information being read online, the thresholds for emotional arousal on visual media are contested with the sense of hearing. This is why video content with audio sounds richer in emotive content. 
b.      Information search is targeted at new results. Text based search is giving way to video search. Tactile and visual information may be demanded even more. So You Tube is the default search engine for new generations on the net.
4.       Crowd-sourcing, crowd-mediation and crowd dissemination make web 2.0 based platforms participatory and yet challenging because of unintended consequences that the medium holds.
5.       In our times, Facebook, Google, Amazon and the like, compute stochastic models of trust without much obtrusion using search affinity and interaction networks and operationalise 'trust' in their own way.
6.       Google made 'safe' calls on building Google Maps with Map Maker software in much like the prosumer society of the Tofflerian Third-Wave. While parts of Northern Europe, and most of US and Australia had Google Maps, the tipping points were in the rest of the world, where users were given the power to create maps online. Most people would want to do the right thing, most of the time. Hence, even in late starter locations like Pakistan800000 people affected by floods could be reached out to by the UN recently.
7.       Firms bets are large and can cause revolutions merely because they seek to boil the ocean than fill up a bucket with water. They do not also know what to expect in the sense that they allow emergence of phenomena through universality of access to information.
8.       Paradigms that are fiercely defended will find it difficult to move as fast as the radical shifts these firms engender on our finger tips. Mobile internet will allow resume editing on handheld devices with handwriting skills in the next 5 years itself. Broadband access will be tested by a demography of users who are emotionally blind on text, and text-repellent on video and images.  Yet, any such change has to originate in at least one person. That change will find support if the person stays the distance with the compelling idea that is put out there in easy language that masses will relate to.
9.     The boundaries of trust - along with its inherent drivers and manifest behaviors would be so fluid that our traditional frames of analysis will get redefined very, very often.
10.   For societal shifts to occur, the absorptive capacity of its people needs renewal. If at least two thinking skills are addressed the social system could tip over. These are a) Cause-effect thinking and b) Creative Thinking

CRITICAL THINKING LAYOUT

11.   The value of curiosity reaches its heights when continuous concentrated introspection unravels as passion.
12.   Observers give new meaning to phenomena that pass us by. Else it takes a crisis to get us to think differently. The shift in confidence from learned helplessness to learnt optimism is the challenge of developing economies.
13.   If people who do the work of teaching and facilitation are from within the system, change ensues faster and surer, both. Catalysing the internals may need transformational leadership or external facilitation, and sometimes-  maybe both!
14.   In rural India two significant milestones are worth noting.
a.       Google’s Rural Maps are up due to Kerala’s CNR Nair, a retired government servant who despite cancer made it a passion to map rural Kerala on Google Maps.
b.      Parents of children who learn science through mobile science labs like that of the Agastya Foundation, are keen on learning Astronomy and chemistry, as the visual treats these provide hold prime attention!
15.   Competition can be reframed if we elevate the dimension of its threat. E.g. Ask the question, have we solved a problem, that has not yet been solved? Competition is no longer the red ocean then!


Evidently there are more implications, I will muse on in times to come!

Nine Days to Knowing by Iain Ewing - Book Review

Why was Alexander the Great not as great as we should consider as great? Where do real heroes of the world toil? 

Are there more bosses than leaders with transformational prowess? Seldom have business fables captured responses to such questions as has Nine Days to Knowing by Iain Ewing. This book is about several layers of distillation and narration. Part autobiographical, part spirited in the giving dimension of a richly experienced life, and part an amalgamation of brain science, social norms and evolution of the human species, this book is not for the weak at heart. It surprisingly will not exclude the meek who comprehend the harsh brutalities of living life on our planet. 

In the land of the Tundra, hunters evolve to become herders, who in turn may see some people getting herded themselves. “People who are herded do not spend time observing the behavior of the herd to which they belong.” Shamans in the cold deserts of the Tundra consciously step back to observe the hunters, the herders and the herded. At one level, such wisdom as Iain Ewing narrates is deeply spiritual. It reminds me of the work done by Rev. Richard Rohr, in his book “The Wild Man’s Journey” that explains the revelations and transitions sensed between the deep and the shallows of the masculine and feminine parts of ourselves. 

The fable is revealed through a 65 years old book-store owner when approached by a modern day set of youngsters from work life. It took about 9 days for him to reveal what he could about the relentless harshness in which the high-latitude desert bears life. What  that difficulty did to about 3 million caribou amidst predatory wolves is a compelling backdrop. In a year, this region could see about 250 cm of snow. Caribou move in herds to keep themselves alive from wolves. Their migratory path involves almost 3,000 km at times, one of the longest for four legged animals on the planet. And the lessons in the book are about the ways of the wolves. 

This book is also about the power of paradigms. Paradigms can govern our thinking as much as it can conceive of possibilities and patterns. The paradigm of this narrative is about the parallels in wolf packs that resemble human conduct in organizations. Social order is controlled not only by Alphas (male or female); it is also routinized by Betas and Omegas.  And while that may be in caribou worlds as in wolf packs, behaviors of escape and hunting differ. A caribou will keep a constant distance from other herd members and turn when neighbors turn; a wolf will not keep constant distance but vary it with the closest wolf; and turn when the prey itself turns. A company of humans is more like a wolf pack, watching what the Alpha does and what the Senior Betas do. And while such sits easily between imaginations, general awareness from popular nature channels on television; what separates that from this book is involved interpretation.

The book-shop owner is a figurative shaman, of the good variety; for in life evil shamans exist too. The interpretation distilled from keen observation tracks human evolution too. While our brains defense systems triggers either a fight or flight response in default mode, it also gives us the competitive advantage through nutrition and advances in medical sciences to discern phases in life-span. The new paradigm is about thriving in 6 phases – childhood, adolescence, odyssey, adulthood, active retirement and old age. The associations between time-based biological evolution and roles in corporate hierarchy are strongly brought out, although contemporary technologies may allow for social roles to flip once in a while between age-groups in counter-intuitive ways. Generally, however, the rules of occupying leadership and followership roles in an organization seem to draw on wisdom from the ages. There seems to be an order of nature there that the narrative seeks to share as a mark of respect for life’s harsh conditions for survival and growth. “I don’t think powerful Alphas can be powerful shamans and that powerful shamans can be powerful Alphas”. But they need each other.

“Being kind is not a sign of weakness; it is a sign of strength”. The relationship between the means and the end is an interesting concept. Iain also provides his version of what paradigms do as contrasted with analogies. The relationship between personal transformation, observation of shamans and one’s shadow self is a struggle in intensity as the fable unfolds. Selective episodes of being a son oneself in regions close to the tundra and being a father rearing one’s own son between China, India, Indonesia and Thailand – all indicate personal transformation worthy of sharing. With tips on how to approach life at each stage, and making allowances for each stage of life to enter our conscious psyches this is an alternate reading written lucidly and convincingly for those in the modern day wolf-pack – the organization. The sharp integration from the I Ching, the Milarepa, Vyasa’s Bhagvad Gita and Lao Tzu’s Art of War are only a faint depiction of a distilled wisdom in this book – of how we can make learning simpler. Do not merely aggregate learning – integrate the lessons in life to convey it in a compellingly simple way. It took 9 days for the book shop owner to entertain the contemporary corporate employee through personalized knowing in this book. 

Else, this book is an easy, quick read of timeless heritage. It is also the mark of a living son's odyssey in wrestling with one’s shadow side trusting in the knowing that Alphas need endearing company. The author's son Tejas makes for a minimalist in the sketches he provides for a figurative symbolism through visuals - also including the notion that Alphas need to know when to retire and how to keep friends for Old Age. One of the benefits of reading this book is surely, watching out for one’s future NOW.