Read Part 1 and Part 2

Part 3: Macanos Hangba

It was a sultry morning as he got into the newly opened Dubai Metro service, Macanos wondered why Dubai was so late in introducing metros. His own hometown, Bangkok, though much worse in terms of traffic than Dubai, had a metro network since quite some time. The reason for all these thoughts was simply that he was running late for his meeting and could not afford to be late. This was a critical meeting.

Thankfully the metro station opened into the hotel lobby and Macanos reached a good 15 minutes before the appointed time of 9:00 AM. Five minutes to 9:00, a young boy dressed like an American teenager walked in and joined him at his table – “Crimson Carter!” he said extending his hand. Macanos had heard that Internet hackers were mere ‘kids’ but he wasn’t really prepared to actually face a kid with a hoodie on him! This is going to be interesting, he said to himself.

Crimson Carter was the online identity with whom Macanos had been interacting for past several months. Following the arrest of Khan Saheb, his business was in deep trouble and he urgently needed to find ways to revive his trade if he wanted to survive. The business of arms is dirty and you cannot just quit – you make enemies in this business and they are always out to get you, so you got to keep making money – not just to make ends meet but to keep paying to secure your life.

Recent arrests in India hit him hard in two ways – Khan Saheb was a financing conduit to his customers. Militant groups in India’s North East would receive funds siphoned off from government schemes and then use these schemes to pay dealers like Macanos who would supply them arms. On the other hand, Khan being a civil servant could also provide them access to fake identities and opening Bank accounts to move and receive funds. Macanos himself had a fake Indian passport and even the recently launched Aadhar Card. Last time he had crossed the border, he even used an ATM card to withdraw funds from a Bank account earmarked for him by his hosts.

But with this arrest, the Indian intelligence agencies had cut off both – his source of funds and his channel of moving these funds – in one fell swoop! It was then that Macanos, despite his relative apathy to the Islamic terror outfits, started researching more about how they operated. After all, they had perpetrated attacks against America – they must have much superior means of working! It was in this research that he encountered Crimson Carter in a chat forum online and after a parley of emails they agreed to meet in Dubai.

Macanos wasn’t quite sure whether or not to trust Carter, he had in fact delayed this meeting for 3 months in hope of some other way emerging. But time was running out on him, it seemed that the Indian intelligence authorities had gained a lot of headway. Also, some of his ‘customers’ had gotten politically misaligned with the ruling disposition and were being targeted. He had to find other ways of financing his business and moving funds. Carter had supplied him with online passwords for email accounts, fake IDs and even Bank account numbers as a test. In today’s meeting, Macanos was going to be told the ‘hawala code’ which he had saved in an email draft on Proton – an encrypted email service.

To Macanos, all this was a huge education – after all, forget about the Internet, Hacking and Computers – he wasn’t even educated properly on literacy. Macanos was an alias he had acquired during one clandestine smuggling deals, and the name just stuck to him – his real name was Thiounn Mok and he was a Cambodian national.

Thiounn was born in the city of Batambang but by the time he was old enough to understand the world, his parents were exiled [1] to a village in the interiors by the dreaded Khmer Rouge. Then, within an year Thiounn lost his parents when Khmer Rouge executed [2] several ‘weak’ city dwellers unable to contribute to farming in the village. He, being a child, was spared, so was his uncle – his mother’s much younger brother. Thiounn and his uncle, himself 29 years of age, had seen enough bloodshed to believe in any regime – Communists or the Monarch; they were just figuring out ways to keep alive.

So, when Khmer Rouge leadership lost the war with the Vietnamese and were fleeing to Thailand, his uncle hatched a plan to join the entourage and smuggle himself and young Thiounn along with them. Thiounn was 11 when the Khmer Rouge leadership fled the country through his village which bordered the Khao Larn camp in Trat Province of Thailand [3].  On reaching Trat, they broke away from the Rouge party and with the help of local fishermen escaped to Pattaya. Once in Pattaya, they changed names, addresses and his uncle changed jobs as often as he could, always afraid of getting detected and extradited back.

Young Thiounn hence never had the luck to get a formal education and the only company he had was amongst poor kids from brothels – his education was in crime, and arms dealing came naturally as a career choice. His uncle, having lost his youth in running away from persecution and then trying to evade detection was so lost in his own insecurities that he didn’t notice when Thiounn grew up into a bulky body building teenager on the outside, but a hardened criminal on the inside.

Somewhere along the way, they just went separate ways – his uncle still languishing taking up odd jobs in Pattaya, while Thiounn carved out a life for himself in Bangkok as an arms dealer. Initially, he would keep visiting his uncle and even tried to show gratitude by helping him financially and asking him to join him in Bangkok, but his uncle would always just remain a drifter, increasingly wanting to return to his homeland. A few years later, when Thiounn visited Pattaya, he couldn’t locate his uncle as he seemed to have moved places – only to discover after some recce, that he had gone back to Cambodia. Thiounn never again contacted him – the anonymity and lack of family ties suited his criminal life anyway. From then on, he never mentioned his name Thiounn to anyone - he was Macanos Hangba.

Macanos looked at Carter and guessed that he was probably 17 or at best 19 years old – this was the age when Macanos had done his first arms deal. It was difficult to place Carter’s nationality – his face covered in a full beard, eyes covered in sunglasses and the hoodie on his head, little of his face was visible – but Macanos could guess that Carter was of South Asian descent; India, Pakistan or Bangladesh. Carter started with giving him the hawala code which turned out to be correct – the first test passed! Macanos also blurted back certain pre-decided codes to establish his identity and then Carter motioned to follow him.

Carter walked outside to the parking lot and motioned him to get into the back seat of a black SUV. As Macanos, opened the door and stepped in to sit, he sensed fear – but it was too late; two hands came from behind, blindfolded him and he felt the nozzle of a pistol being pointed to the temple – a thick voice instructed him to keep his mouth shut to avoid being shot.

Macanos cursed his own negligence, he had apprehensions about the identity of Carter and he knew that meeting someone in a foreign country was fraught with risk of his playing into the enemies’ hands. But it was too late to reminisce – what he wondered now was what would happen next. He had taken a calculated risk when he knew that the meeting would be in Dubai – a country with a heavily controlled law and order system. He was quite sure his meeting and even his entry into the SUV was recorded in the CCTV cameras. If his enemies wanted to get him, Pattaya or Phuket would have been better options – why Dubai?

The car started moving, in between, he had heard some conversation between the kid whom he had met as Carter and the thick voice who commanded him. The kid must have been a non-entity contracted to just meet him and get him to the SUV, it was apparent that the kid was not in the car any longer. No words were spoken for the next several minutes as the car seem to have been cruising at high speeds on the highways of Dubai.

After several minutes, they came to a halt, the felt the pistol being withdrawn from his temple and his blindfold being removed. The door opened and when he looked out, a valet wearing a uniform was standing holding the door – this was an unusual abduction style for Macanos. His abductors stayed in the car as it drove off and the valet let him into a warehouse-like building outside which they stood. Macanos cast an eye on the surrounding, and all he could see in all three directions was the Desert.

They entered the warehouse shed, which seemed like a storage facility for electronics – he could see boxes with images of computers, laptops, printers etc on them. The valet led him to a set of stairs, and he saw glass panelled offices lining up to where they ended. As they reached the top of the stairs, the valet opened a glass door for him and stood outside while ushering him in. The man seated behind the desk rose as Macanos entered and extended his hand – “I apologise for the last 40 minutes of harrowing experience you’ve had Macanos, but this was necessary to secure us.”

Macanos was relieved, it seemed that the bluff was over, this was not an abduction and he may live to see many more suns. The man explained that ‘Crimson Carter’ was not a single individual but a whole organization of hackers who worked in a loose federation. They were all independent – he himself did not know the real identities of all the hackers but he was their quarter-master nevertheless. He managed to get them deals, arrange payments and kept the engine running. Some of them called him the ‘accountant’ which was technically his role in this cartel. When dealing with players like Macanos where payments wouldn’t necessarily come via established banking channels, they wanted to be sure of the identity of the individual giving them business but to keep matters as discrete as possible, they had employed this method of pseudo abduction.

He then explained that things were changing and soon, they may even be able to transact money without much hassle using a new technology called Bitcoins. Many hackers in his network were already asking him to pay them in Bitcoins and asked Macanos if he had any Bitcoins which he can pay them in. Macanos could just blurt out a ‘No’, knowing well that the expressions on his face gave away that he was hearing this name for the first time.

Then they came to the subject – what did Macanos want? Macanos explained his problem that he needed secure means of exchanging information and money with his customers; he wondered if he should ask how he could use this Bitcoin thing, but refrained knowing well that his customers in North East India might be even more unfamiliar with this term than him. He did not want to add any more complexity to the chain which was already weakening after Khan Saheb’s arrest.

The solution was simple, he was explained - the hacking group would break into email accounts of real people, steal their identities and use this information to create fictitious bank accounts which can then be used to transfer stolen money without the authorities ever noticing. He was told about a pricing model where the rate changed depending on the nationality of the victim – stealing an American identity would be the priciest – given that the Americans had superior technology to detect such hacks, the cheapest would be Bangladeshi or Pakistani nationals followed by Indians and then the Burmese and Thai.

Macanos was sold – it sounded simple enough and very similar to what Khan Saheb had provided. Instead of a fake identity, he would use a stolen identity from the hackers. If they could supply an Indian identity, this would be the lowest friction route to solving his problems; he was familiar with the modus operandi to use an Indian identity to transact. A deal was struck, an Indian identity it would be – Macanos was told they’d get back to him with a few names over IRC in the next few days. Some advance in US Dollars had to be made the next day at the same hotel lobby where he met the kid today and the rest would have to be arranged in Bangkok.
... to be continued.

Photo by Drew McKechnie on Unsplash

If you have ever visited Jabalpur, you surely would have taken a boat ride across 'Bandar Kodini' at the Bhedaghat waterfalls. The boat ride initially takes you along the Narmada river at a leisurely pace, as you gape in wonder at the majestic white cliffs - a hundred feet tall on both sides - changing colour. They do not actually change colours, the cliffs comprise of many shades of marble and as the rays of the sun bounce off their surface, give an illusion of changing colours. And then as your boat ride comes to a close, the tranquil waters of the river gain a sense of urgency after a point and turn turbulent as they crash down the Dhuandhar falls.

I don't know if the new Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has ever visited Bhedaghat, but she might be able to relate this with the experience she is going to have with the Indian economy. The two giant cliffs she is rowing the boat between are Slowdown in Economy and Managing Inflation. With the NDA government having managed a thumping victory in the elections - the waters are very calm now on the surface but as we get nearer to another election, the waters will again turn turbulent like they did for the UPA-2 (though for an entirely different set of reasons) from 2012-13.

The simile with Bhedaghat doesn't end here - the cliffs that Sitaraman faces change their colours and hues. Economic Slowdown manifests in form of farm sector distress, and the moment you allow farm incomes to rise - you drift towards the other cliff - retail inflation! Then you might try to solve the dual issues by not allowing farm output costs to rise (thus keeping retail inflation in check) but dole out money to farmers via Income Guarantee schemes like MNREGA or PM-Kisan Samman.

But the moment you grant income guarantee to farmers, the cost of labour goes up [read more on this here]. With this, sectors like real estate - already grappling with a slowdown due to structural reasons, stringent regulation and impact of demonetisation - will suffer the problem of labour shortage.

The manufacturing sector will also start avoiding labour because they are costly and their availability very seasonal. Also, as labour availability drops or cost of labour rises, manufacturing becomes a capital intensive industry rather than labour intensive industry (like it is in China) - and so that leads to a drop in generation of jobs which is again another sign (colour) of the Economic Slowdown.

If you've noticed the highlighted text - we have come a full circle from Economic Slowdown to Economic slowdown, just like you can keep shuttling between two tall marble cliffs at Bhedaghat.

Successive finance ministers have kept shifting their policy positions from trying to spruce up the 'Indian economy' to gain escape velocity 8%+ growth to trying to protect 'Bharatiya Arthvyavastha' from getting marginalised in the rising tide. If you had infinite time, you could keep shuttling between these two and enjoy your boat ride merrily - like successive FMs starting with Yashwant Sinha, Jaswant Singh, P Chidrambaram, Pranab Mukherjee, and finally Arun Jaitley have done.

But as all of their cases indicate - no one has infinite time; with every election comes the point where the river leads to a waterfall. Vajpayee lost because his FMs could not manage consumer distress, Chidambaram survived because he managed to keep growth high but in the very next term this came biting the UPA back and leading to high inflation coupled with cases of corruption in high places. With Jaitley, the reverse happened where farm distress came biting him back, but two things saved him - one that he got an opportunity to bring in a short term solution of PM-Kisan in the interim budget and second is national security becoming the focal point of the 2019 elections. The government's ability to execute PM-Kisan with swiftness definitely had a role to play.

However, Nirmala Sitaraman now has to bear the brunt of increased load on government expenditure of welfare schemes, at the same time managing to maintain low inflation, high growth and yet keeping fiscal deficit low. Unfortunately, solutions for her lie outside the purview of the Finance Ministry into structural reforms by other ministries - probably the reason why her role in the Cabinet committees will be more important than her role within her own ministry. Some of the changes that need to be brought about are:

1. Land reforms - For all the talk about India's farm distress, the most visible statistic is India's agricultural productivity which is less than 6% of the global average and 25% of the median. Urgent reform in land laws and agricultural ownership methods - this is urgently needed so that the farm sector gets corporatised and can improve its productivity.
   
   
2. Labour reforms - the reason for manufacturing boom in China is not a program like Make In India or Make America Great Again, but flexible labour laws. As much as I believe that the global economy has already passed the point where manufacturing can become a force to beckon [ref], if any country wants to employ its people in labour-intensive industries - whether its manufacturing or BPO/KPO services - freedom to hire and fire labour is a key requirement to boost employment.
   
   One of the reasons why a majority of employment is generated in India by Small Enterprises rather than large ones is that major labour laws do not apply to Small Enterprises. So large corporations often prefer outsourcing jobs to smaller companies than insourcing those jobs by increasing workforce. The result, of course, is not just non-applicability of labour laws on labour employed but also the exclusion of this labour from government statistics and social security programs offered by large corporations. If only certain aspects of labour laws were modernized, these labour could enjoy better work conditions doing the same work they are doing right now, but under the aegis of a larger corporatised entity in the formal sector. 
3. Infrastructure development - mostly the portfolio of Nitin Gadkari; improving infrastructure will contribute to a large extent in removing the growth bottlenecks for the industry. Again, the China equivalent shows up - whether it is highways, highspeed rail or better-planned IDCs (Industrial Development Corridors) - almost all measures are outside the purview of the Finance Minister's portfolio. 

Finally, what can the FM do within her own department which can bring about required changes - the list indeed is short:

1. Resolve the NPA mess and bring about measures to improve corporate governance in public sector banks  
2. Provide tax subsidies or reductions or both to export-oriented industries which are badly hit by the US government's announcement to revoke GSP status from India.
3. Sops for sunrise sectors of consumption such as food processing, energy (especially cleantech) and technology. 
4. One of the biggest challenges for the RBI has been that its decisions to cut interest rates have little impact on the markets because Banks choose not to transmit these rates to the market. While I am not a big fan of the Govt running the Banking Business, nevertheless, given that the government does today own majority of Banks and regularly intervenes causing ill-effects on the economy; the govt can push public sector banks to get better interest rate cut transmission. 

Its a tough job and historically, no one has emerged unscathed from their role as the Finance Minister - including the much haloed Manmohan Singh. It remains to be seen how India's first woman Finance Minister fares with this role!
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Image Credit - Abby0427 Yoga

• If a student of art, passionate about arts, knows that s/he is assured of a minimum sustenance income even if her art doesn't sell, s/he won't be forced to take up that job in the advertisement firm and instead pursue a slightly longer but fruitful journey to become a classic artist himself / herself. In short, UBI gives youth the freedom to pursue whatever they want to do in life, without the compulsion of what earns them their livelihood. 
• If a farmer knew that they have minimum income support, whether the crop makes it or fails, they can chase a cash crop over the staple one or they can pursue fertilizer & pesticide less organic farming over fertilizer & pesticide supported "high produce" farming. This choice by the farmer is because they can now risk the crop getting spoilt but at the same time, they also bet on the upside of higher prices due to the growing interest of the urban population in organic foods. In short, UBI helps producers make a choice to chase healthier alternatives for society over the more 'efficient' or 'remunerative'. 
• If an experienced professional knew that he is assured a minimum income and that his family - his ageing parents and his children - will be able to afford a good life, good education and necessary healthcare whether or not he keeps earning his monthly paycheck, he might quit his job (which he hates!) and take up his passion in social work, join politics and either way help the community. In short, UBI provides society free up qualified human capital for its social obligations.
• If the head of an independent news journal is assured of minimum income, s/he does not need to rely on Government grants or private funding to make ends meet. S/he can then pursue stories which matter rather than chase 'masala' stories or celebrity news. S/he already is freed from the need to get access to broadcast media, thanks to the Internet in general and YouTube in specific. In short, UBI helps media become independent of the biases introduced by its funding sources.
• The biggest of all, if a poor man is assured of minimum income, he will never force or condone his children into begging or stealing because he knows that he can afford not to equip them with life skills like these to survive! Their life and liberty will be assured by UBI. In short, UBI can be a game changer for law and order and bring down common sins without the state making any active intervention. 

In essence, IG, unlike UBI, can only provide temporary succour to those affected. IG is a good scheme if one is dealing with a time-bound crisis - like those impacted by a natural disaster but it fails all tests of fulfiling the constitutional promise of "JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all FRATERNITY ".

In fact, IG will only contribute towards decreasing fraternity because of the have-nots (those classified as privileged) would resent the haves (the disadvantaged eligible for IG) for getting a subsidy here or an income there without 'having to work for it'; while the haves would anyway resent the have-nots for their economic or social status.

Read Part 1

Manikarnika Crematorium Varanasi

Part 2: Prosenjit Hazra

Disclaimer: This is a purely fictional amalgamation of several real-life incidents I've read in the past several days formed into a contemporary tale running across threads of misinformation, cyber-security, terrorism et al. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this series of posts are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred. [0]

I had written in past about how the science fiction of the 1980s predicted several innovations (like Androids, Space Travel, Space cities, and teleportation) would come true by the year 2000, and how hardly any one of these seem to be coming true by 2050.

As we cross the year 2019, and we can predict with a more absolute sense about where we will be in the year 2020, and Kurzweil's vision that "we will succeed in reverse-engineering the human brain" and "we'll be able to manufacture almost anything we need in the 2020s, from information, in very inexpensive raw materials, using nano-technology", look pretty much unachievable.

Nevertheless, self-driving cars are here and smart digital assistants Alexa, Siri and Google are answering all those questions which Genie couldn't have answered for Aladin! My peeve is - what is this fascination futurists have with the 20 year horizon. Studies have proven that "we overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term" and futurists should know this better than anyone else. And yet, they insist on making predictions for a 15-20 year horizon (a short period by standards of a human society's evolution).

Compounding effects are something of a fascination for me right now; having listened to this podcast by Naval - I can see how compounding would act over 20 years to bring about significant change - but from the perspective of futurists, I doubt this is significant. Futurists need to look at a scale of 40-50 years horizon.

Most technologies take about 50 years to scale:

• the steam engine experiments started as early as 1698, but the first steam engines came together in late 1760s; the steam turbine came about only in 1800s 
• the internet started as ARPANET started in 1960s but the Internet boomed and then busted around 2000s, finally settling down the curve by 2010
• the electric car has been around from earlier than the internal combustion engine, but serious research of the current wave started in 1990s - we are still seeing them only trickle into the market. 

The main events which brought EIC (the predecessor of the British Raj in India) into control of the largest parts of India, were the infighting, stupidity and power-lust of different factions of the then 'ruling alliance' of India - the Marathas. British and Leftist historians have very conveniently used the titular regency of Bahadurshah Zafar to conclude that the British wrested power of the Indian sub-continent from the Mughals - nothing could be far from the truth. When the British started 'conquering' India, the Mughals did not have control over most of India.

Right-wing historians rightfully elucidate that it was the Marathas and not the Moghuls who were ruling the largest part of the Indian empire in the 1750s when the British walked into India. While these same historians extoll virtues of Rani Laxmibai and Tatya Tope; they shrewdly ignore how and why the Peshwa power centre of Pune; the political capital of Marathas from 1750s-1800s and the virtual capital of India, fell into British hands.

Marathas were able to consolidate their territory during the Mughal–Maratha Wars and later controlled a large part of the Indian subcontinent. From the time of Balaji Vishwanath - the first Peshwa - till Madhavrao (the penultimate Peshwa before Baji Rao II who gave away the throne to the British), the Maratha Empire had control of almost the whole of India. By the late 1700s, the equation between Marathas and Mughals was so unequal, that in 1788, when Ghulam Qadir attacked Delhi, it was the Maratha commander, Mahadaji Shinde who led the army of Marathas to Delhi and saved the Mughal emperor and his family.


The territory in Yellow was under direct control of Marathas while Hyderabad state in Deccan - was a tributary of the Marathas. The only territories which are a part of present-day India but weren't part of Maratha empire were Oudh (or Awadh - now known as Eastern UP), Bengal and Mysore (comprising parts of present-day Karnataka / Tamil Nadu) and Kashmir.

Sidenote 1: Notably, during this period, another Empire - the Sikh one - was emerging from the underbelly of the decayed Mughal Empire. Led by iconic Ranjit Singh, who just like the Peshwas consolidated power distributed among the Sikh Misls into one cohesive Empire.

Shivaji (1627-80), the founder of Maratha Empire, and Guru Gobind Singh (1666-1708), the creator of the Khalsa, both rose against the tyiannical rule of Aurarangzeb, and although the Sikhs` real crusade in the Punjab took its birth on the banks of the River Godavari in Maharashtra, the two forces did not come in direct contact with each other until the Marathas, in a bid to fill the power vacuum caused by the fall of the Mughal empire, expanded their influence as far as Delhi.

How did an empire as expensive as this, collapse? The answer lies in how the last generation of Peshwa's acted in complete disregard to national honour, strategic prescience and let petty personal feuds come in the way of the larger good. The story starts with Nana Fadnavis - considered by Europeans as the Indian Machiavelli who was Phadnavis or Finance Minister of the Maratha Empire under Balaji Baji Rao.

Background

The Marathas were defeated by Abdali in the Third Battle of Panipat, and the heir apparent Balaji Baji Rao's eldest son Vishwas Rao died in the same and so Madhavrao - his younger brother assumed Peshwai (Premiership) under the regency of his uncle Raghunathrao. While power politics continued to wax and wane between the uncle and nephew - overall this period saw a resurrection of the Maratha empire after the eventful defeat at Panipat. In this resurrection,  Pilaji Rao Gaekwad, Mahadji Shinde (Scindia) and Tukoji Holkar played a major role in advancing Maratha confederacy and establishing their sub-regency in central India from what are present-day Baroda, Gwalior and Indore. However, Madhavrao died of TB in turn succeeded by the youngest prince Narayan Rao.

Narayan Rao was assigned his uncle as the regent and this is where we start the story of human falling and subsequent fall of India into the British hands. A story no different in its roots than the grand epic of Mahabharat - lust for the throne and craving to see one's direct progeny to inherit it.

Ragunathrao's wife Anandibai conspired with mercenary guards, the Gardi's, and got them to murder Narayanrao in broad daylight in the regent Raghunathrao's own presence. The legend has it that Narayanrao himself ran to his uncle's chambers shouting काका मला वाचवा and walked into a trap laid out by the Gardis who killed him in front of his uncle.

The next in line of succession was the yet unborn son of Narayan Rao, but Raghunathrao tried assuming the Peshwai after the murder of Narayanrao. Suspected to be an accomplice in the murder itself, he was however deposed by a coterie of 12 ministers - titled Barbhai [बारभाई / बारहभाई - 12 brothers]. The council was Nana Phadnavis's mastermind plan to protect Madhavrao II, son of Narayanrao, born posthumously to Gangabai, the widow of Narayanrao, from the Peshwa family's internal conflicts. The Barbhai Council was an alliance of influential Sardars (generals) led by Nana.

The beginning of the fall

The Barbhai council ran the state and continued to rule under the name of Madhavrao-II. During this time, the Maratha Empire was significant in size with a number of vassal states under a treaty of protection who recognized the Peshwa as the supreme power. Raghunathrao was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by the justice Ram Shastri Prabhune but the sentence was never carried out.

Sidenote 2:By this time, while the Marathas had reached the zenith of their power, the Sikhs, caught in the pincer grip of Mughal and Afghan persecutors, were still struggling for survival. The two 'Empires' fought on the same side in couple of wars - including the above metioned Third Battle of Panipat and subsequent resistance to other advances by Abdali throughout 1700s.

 

Left to sulk, Raghunathrao, craving for revenge, went ahead and joined the British. Thane, Vasai and Sashti were to be handed over to the British, and in return, the Company would assist Raghunathrao to become the Peshwa. Raghunathrao hoped to do to the Peshwai, what Mir Jafar had done to Sirajuddaulah. His personal ambition, however, was in complete disregard to the size and stature of the Empire he was inviting the British to intervene into. This treaty was the watershed event which gave the British an entry to annex the actual rulers of the entire Indian sub-continent.

However, the Barbhai council was a very able and astute administration - even though (or maybe because) Nana Phadnavis was considered a Machiavellian administrator. The Peshwas defeated the advances of the British from Bombay and signed treaties with them, effectively cutting off any support Raghunathrao had. Ragunathrao died in 1783.

The fall 

Unfortunately for the Barbhai, in 1795 Madhavrao-II committed suicide at the age of 21 and they were left with no option but to appoint Raghunathrao's son Baji Rao-II as the Peshwa. Nana Phadnavis, who was glue and leader of the Barbhai council died in 1800 - by then Mahadji Scindia, who was instrumental in Maratha victories against the British and a key member of Barbhai council had also died.

While Baji Rao-II remained the titular head, he lost his control over the other chieftains after Nana's demise. The first to fall to British was Baroda - in 1802, the Gaekwads concluded the Treaty of Cambey with the British that recognized their independence from the Maratha empire and guaranteed the Maharajas of Baroda local autonomy in return for recognizing British suzerainty. But this would have still been a small loss as only a small slice of the Maratha empire was chipped away to British suzerainty.

What followed was devastating - after Nana's demise, Daulatrao Scindia [Mahadji's grand-nephew, ruler of Gwalior seat of Marathas] started intervening in the affairs of the Pune. In the ensuing power struggle within the heirs of the Barbhai, Scindia's rival chief Yashwant Rao Holkar [of Indore] marched towards Pune. He proclaimed allegiance to the Peshwa and sent assurances that he only wanted to free Pune of Scindia's control.

The last nail in the Maratha Empire's coffin and the first major milestone in the British Raj's control of the Indian sub-continent was when Baji Rao -II 'invited' the British to thwart advances from Scindia and Holkar (members of his own Peshwa tribe) to reserve the throne of the Empire for himself.

Sidenote 3:The last Sikh-Maratha contact look place in 1805 when Yashwant Rao Holkar, defeated and pursued by the British General, Lord Lake, entered the Punjab and sought help from Maharaja Ranjit Singh [reference]. 

Initially, Baji Rao-II sought to play the Scindia's against the Holkar's but in 1802, Holkar defeated the joint forces of Peshwa and Scindia in the Battle of Hadapsar. At this point, Baji Rao II concluded the Treaty of Bassein in December 1802, in which the British agreed to reinstate Baji Rao II as Peshwa, in return for Marathas paying the British its maintenance and accepting the stationing of a permanent British political agent (Resident) at Pune.

Holkar and Sindhia, once divided, now resisted the British intrusion in Maratha affairs - but it was already too late. The British triumphed in the second Anglo-Maratha wars and later after the Third Anglo-Maratha war Bhosles, Holkars, and other Maratha feudatories were also defeated. Almost all (including the Newalkars of Jhansi - which in 1857 gave birth to the rebel Jhansi Ki Rani Laxmibai) finally accepted British suzerainty.

Attempts to recover losses

Having accepted British intervention only to retain the throne of Pune, Baji Rao-II soon realised how pyrrhic his victory was. He tried repeatedly thereafter to usurp power back from British - trying in vain during the Third Anglo-Maratha war to get his rivals - Bhosles, Holkars, Scindias and others to help him defeat the British. But an Empire once divided, could never come back together - descendants of feudatories neither trusted nor respect Baji Rao-II and none came for help. Finally, after his surrender, Baji Rao-II was settled by the British at Bithur near Kanpur and lived and died in exile.

His entire lifetime, Baji Rao-II is said to have been haunted by the ghost of Narayan Rao, whom his mother allegedly got murdered. He conducted several religious ceremonies from Pandharpur to Banaras (Varanasi) to get rid of the Ghost. Whether or not Narayan Rao's ghost was real or just a figment of his imagination, the ghost of Maratha Empire would surely have haunted Baji Rao-II. While he had 'other accomplices' to the crime of handing over India to the British, Baji Rao-II was definitely the 'Jaichand' of India against the British.

Epilogue - Next Post

Bithur, where Baji Rao-II was exiled, gained prominence during the battle of 1857 - when Baji Rao's successor Nana Sahib laid siege to the city of Kanpur and made Bithur his headquarters. Nana Sahib's story is often told extolling virtues of valour and national pride like those of his contemporaries Rani Laxmi Bai and Tatya Tope, however a deeper look into its annals will indicate why Indians lost the Battle of 1857 also. 

Nana Sahib too, like his predecessor, was not fighting only for a higher national pride - unlike the founder of Marathas, Shivaji. He too had many fallings and petty personal reasons for his participation in the 1857 revolt - like other players of the times. Marathas and all other Indian princesses who participated in 1857, were as divided as the Marathas pre-1857, which led to India's defeat to the British in 1857. That will be the subject of my next post.

Stay Tuned.

I know its too late to post a movie review, the movie Sanju was released more than 10 months ago and honestly, I just happened to watch it because it was showing on TV yesterday. But I am writing this because I simply cannot subdue my ruth at the complete waste of opportunity the movie turns out to be and mainly for the lack of directorial ability from someone as adept as Rajkumar Hirani.

Rajkumar Hirani is an excellent story-teller but more so, a director par excellence, as anyone who has watched Munnabhai MBBS would confirm. His first directorial venture was a testimony to how a saturnine subject can be presented in an entertaining manner, yet contain a social message. But with Sanju, Hirani has failed as a director - because he has stuck to his template for a subject which demanded an independent treatment and not paid directorial attention to what the subject demands.

There are many posts online [1] [2] [3] [4] which call out for the selective editing of Sanjay Dutt's life story but I would rather pardon that. A director has limited time on the reel and surely has the right to decide what to show and what to edit out from his story. Not every director can be a Satyajit Ray to show every small detail of their character's lives from the morning ablutions to last sleeping thoughts, thereafter produce a series of films, than just a single succinct one - and yet be able to carry it off.

I am also not miffed [like here] at Hirani's one-sided criticism of the media as being responsible for vilification of Sanjay Dutt. Hirani is known for his one-sided criticism without acknowledging the nuances, on the subjects he chooses. I am sure many doctors and hospital managements feel wronged by Hirani for not highlighting the nuances of moral, social and financial compulsions which they deal with during treatment. I have met many educationists who find criticism of education in '3 idiots' a gross oversimplification of the problem. But I feel that Hirani's method has merit - a one-sided over-simplified critical narrative of the subject does help magnify the problems we are dealing with as a society and hence it does trigger a debate and thence a change in the social order.

What I am miffed at, however, is the absolute lack of attention to technicalities of cinema which I would have expected a biopic to have. Hirani is now a veteran director and the technical inaccuracies make a caricature out of what a splendid story could have been! Sanjay Dutt's story is amazing - the complex mix of a self-made father with a righteous bent of mind and yet someone who loves his son in spite of all his failings is a very powerful subject which could have been presented much better.

First, the small ones like these - the 80s as depicted in the movie are more like what the 60s used to be. Take, for instance, the cars showcased in a scene where the character Kamli is buying a car for himself in the US. In the 80s, it was the Fox-body cars like McLauren or Thunderbirds rather than Impala and the curvacious Chevvy's as shown in the movie. Another instance is the hairdo - characters' hair styles in the first 30 minutes of the movie were more 70s than 80s. The differences are small, but they do matter when making a biopic. All it would have taken was some research by an Asst Director and attention to detail by Hirani - alas looks like in getting their 'formula' right, they overlooked the technical basics of film making.

Second big technical 'liberty' is in mixing several characters into one; the most obvious being Kamlesh / Kamli. This character is based primarily on Paresh Ghilani - but also encompasses a host of Sanjay Dutt's other friends like Kumar Gaurav [and Salman Khan] - apparently, this was done to not add too many characters to the movie. Now, this would have been fine if this was an entirely fictional character (like that of author Winnie Dias in the movie), but it does severe injustice to real-people when making a biopic. Clearly, the way a Kumar Gaurav would have helped Sanjay in overcoming his drug addiction would be different from how an NRI Paresh Ghilani would. Fictionalising can mean adding drama to scenes which are otherwise mundane, it can even mean over-acting by certain characters (like the Gujarati accent of Kamli), but combining multiple characters into one dilutes the whole essence of the movie being a biopic.

The last folly, but the most disturbing to me, was poor assimilation of real-life personalities by the actors and this would be solely the director's flaw. Except for Ranbir Kapoor, portraying Sanjay himself, all other actors did not do justice to assimilating their real-life characters. This anomaly is magnified not just because the movie is a biopic but because almost all the characters are celebrities and there is so much original footage already available in public domain to study.

The most glaring of this is Paresh Rawal's portrayal of Sunil Dutt. Except for a rare mention of the word 'puttar', at no point does Rawal sound like Dutt Saab. And I will not blame this one on Rawal. An accomplished actor, he has portrayed even Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and many others with ease. Rawal does copy Dutt Saab's body language and facial expressions, but his dialogue delivery faulters and this is exactly where an external curator - THE DIRECTOR - should have stepped in to neutralise Rawal's accent. A celebrated actor like Dutt Saab should have been easy to copy - there is no dearth of material to study Dutt Saab's repertoire, his dialogue delivery, his accent. Again, I would blame the lack of proper research and subsequent implementation - the director and his team have failed miserably.

I found the same lack of 'assimilation' of the character with that of Manisha Koirala's depiction of Nargis ji and even Diya Mirza's portrayal of Manyata Dutt. With Dia Mirza, it woud have been difficult to spot issues because there isn't much footage of Manyata Dutt available - but the fact that she sounds so much like the real life Dia Mirza, makes me feel that she too failed to assimilate the character she was portraying.

Sanjay Dutt's story is very serious and thought-provoking. His drug abuse is quintissential of the Hippy age of 70s and 80s and also representative of the social ills we need to overcome - just this one aspect has been the subject of whole movies. Sanjay Dutt's involvement with Mafia, his possession of weapons and involvement with Terrorism are also very serious issues which highlight the problems which an unprofessional Bollywood deals with. Sanjay Dutt's story is just the manifestation of the deep nexus between Movies, Media, Mafia, Politics and Terror.

And yet Dutt's story is of individual strength, grit and overcoming hardship and emotional stress. I personally have great respect to Sanjay Dutt - there are few celebrities who have the moral courage to own up to their mistakes and even serve a prison term for them. Most celebrities - Salman Khan's case being the most illustrious example of this - shirk responsibility for their sins and use their money power and social connections to escape punishment. Sanjay Dutt is a lone exception - clearly, the values imbibed from Sunil Dutt and Nargis show in his conduct.

And that is all the more reason why I think Sanju is a gross injustice and a lost opportunity for Sanjay Dutt. HIs story deserved a much better treatment, much more effort and attention to detail. It is also a disrespect to the fountainhead Sunil Dutt - a self-made man who rose to great heights as an actor, then a politician - two murky professions by standards of personal conduct - and yet remained a human being par excellence all his life.

I hope a more conscious director, a couple of years later, picks up the subject again - applies the right faculties at remaking this story into what it actually is than the guffawed caricature that Rajkumar Hirani made it into.
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For example, take the culinary business - it is possible to standardise not just the process of making food but even the ingredients used in food, to build a super scalable restaurant business like McDonalds - yet the price point which a McDonalds can claim will never ever touch even the cheapest of a local fine dining restaurant.

Another manifestation of the value limiting function of a 'commoditized' service is the inability of providers to be able to 'notch up' quality. As an example, when you go to the farmer's market to buy vegetables, you usually choose the best quality available. If everyone in your neighbourhood does that - the quality of produce sold in the market is generally higher quality. Sensing that lower quality does not sell, farmers themselves often do the sorting of higher quality vegetables in their own farms to save the trouble of transporting produce which will anyway get rejected. This however limits the 'scale' which a farmer can achieve in maximising produce or 'scale' a market can achieve.

On the other hand, if vegetables are sorted, transported and repackaged for consumption from supermarkets in towns - we often discover that there is larger wastage / rejection observed at the point of sale. Either the overall quality of the 'full pack' of tomatoes would be bad - you'd find one bad tomato in a pack on an average or one of a dozen packs would be bad. By achieving scale, the market here often loses quality.

Those who operate e-commerce related business can relate to this pretty well. The larger your scale, the more your systems need to tolerate some 'rotten apples'. In travel for example [the industry I operate in], the more the number of bookings on a portal, the more the chances of a bad traveller experience statistically. Online platforms have to provision some part of their expenses purely on doling out freebies or favours to inconvenienced/disgruntled customers. Amazon doles out millions to keep such customers happy who might have been inconvenienced or 'cheated' due to scale - even if this is done under the garb of 'customer-centricity'.

In essence, while we can deploy technology to improve the fidelity of systems or processes or measure and thence improve quality of produce - scalability introduces a hurdle rate above which quality takes a hit and must be compensated for through other means.

When interpreted in form of the financial term 'hurdle rate', it becomes easier to define businesses which are unsuitable to scale. If the hurdle rate is so high that higher input in investment to increase the 'throughput' of the process will not result into higher returns - then the business is non-scalable. And therein lies the opportunity that these businesses are the one's which claim higher premiums.

If you operate in an industry which affords a very high hurdle rate, you should be charging a premium for your services. But if you find that no one is ready to pay the premium - most likely your industry is undergoing a transformation towards becoming a commodity.

The Cyber-Security / Information Security industry has seen such a transformation in the last few years. There was a time when consultants ran scripts and manualy verified the ouput to identify vulnerabilities once in an year. Today automated tools do the same within minutes several times a month - the number of attacks, malware and exploits have also gone up systematically. But as a result, the premium claimed by the 'Pen-Tester' has slowly perished.

The graphic design industry is currently undergoing this metamorphosis along with the photography industry which has already transformed. When each one of us carries not only a high resolution camera in our pockets but it also comes loaded with software which can achieve all those effects which, at a time, took an experienced photographer followed by a photoshopper to get right; as the film got replaced by a few bytes of ever-falling-price memory - the phoshopper's art also got transformed first into a widely available skill, and then, with Instagram - a commodity where readymade 'effects' are available with a few swipes right or left.

AI and Machine learning are attacking industry after industry in similar ways and soon many skills which at one point of time were premium may start going the commodity way. Which industry will be the next one on the block? And which one continues to remain a non-scalable but premium claimable one?

Views are welcome. You can tweet to me on @kulkarninikhil

*Photo Credit: Thanks to @MacAulayCalum for making this photo available freely on @unsplash 🎁 https://unsplash.com/photos/TU1b56dfn2A

Those of you who read these posts [Part I Part II] know that my worldview of ecologically sustainable living, has, over the years veered towards cluster based human settlement – large metropolises or cities with shared infrastructure which reduces the ecological cost of living and that recent technological breakthroughs in Solar power, off-grid power storage, biodegradable materials etc have created a window for suburban sprawls also be become ecologically efficient lifestyles.

But as we concluded in the previous post of this series, the biggest stumbling block in making suburban life sustainable is the real estate overhead claimed by it. Suburban sprawls, however energy efficient, do consume much larger space per-capita leaving less land available for food and related needs to serve the ever-burgeoning population of the world. The matter is further complicated by the rapid upward economic mobility of large populations in Asia and Africa.

I wrote about two routes to manage these contrasting necessities - need to bring prosperous living to all human population and maintaining an ecological balance. I elaborate these two below.

Route A - Stick to cities until we can move back to suburbs!

It is predicted that human population will peak to 9bn around 2050; then come down to today’s levels by end of this century. If we can keep walking on the fine line of ecological sustenance by then, the human population will possibly live in a healthy harmony on earth after this period. An illustration of this ‘sustainable life’ is available in parts of Europe where prosperous nations with low-density population aided largely by mechanised solutions are living a far more ecologically balanced lifestyle than cities and suburbs in Asia or even North America.

It looks difficult however that almost 5bn Asian and African populations slowly maturing towards the lifestyle of the West, would wait for another century – these populations will want the comforts of a developed lifestyle faster and hence might put increasing pressure on our ecological systems. As is evident already with the environmental imbalances across the globe – this might spawn an ecological disaster far before world population peaks, plummeting human prosperity or even threatening human existence!

In a best-case scenario, if we do continue to walk on the thin line between ecological disaster and providing comfort to populations in developing nations; the future, until population abates, lies in clustered living – even denser cities and metros rising vertically leaving larger swathes of land for agriculture and forests.

Route B - Fly away!

The other alternative, like Solar, electric cars and off-grid charging; is again being heralded by Elon Musk. If we can’t reduce human population and we can’t prevent an ecological collapse with the rising population, the only option we have left is to create more real-estate. And what better than colonizing Mars to increase real estate. In fact, several innovations such as Solar Power, Electric Vehicles, even Tunnel based Hyper-Loop systems are a ready fit for a Martian colony.

Humans could harness the power of the Sun to create a cocooned Martian ‘space’ station which would grow its own food, manage its own micro-sewage, and people could commute within the station with electric vehicles and between two stations through hyperloop tunnels.

Are we there yet? Hell - no!

However, we are racing against the ecological clock with both these alternatives; will mankind be able to set up a Martian colony before earth implodes with human population? Or will we be able to create enough cities while keeping the ecological cost of living under check to prevent imminent ecological collapse?

Only time will tell – I just hope I can live long enough to see how the suspense ends!