Tagpolitics

🔖 Radical Care as the Foundation for a Better World (archive)

Care is the foundation of society. It goes unrecognized and is undervalued. It is crucial for the maintenance of the personal, as well as the maintenance of infrastructures and institutions. Without it there would be no economy, culture, or politics.

Care goes beyond the logic of capitalism:

  • Value as defined by capitalism is quantifiable through economic measures
  • Values like caring on the other hand are cultural, ethical, and qualitative, and are thus hard to measure

There are places where radical care is being demonstrated. Sociologists can enable Popular Education, a process that connects people’s experiences with critical theories. This helps people place their problems in a historical and political context and use the knowledge to develop strategies for change.

🔖 Kerala vs Gujarat Models: History Matters (archive)

A historic look at the Gujarat and Kerala development models, separated from political biases. The two models have evolved over the last two centuries, and even have some commonalities.

Gujarat

Known to have a market-friendly, growth first approach that aims to raise incomes that would lead to trickle down.

The trading communities in Gujarat — Parsis, Bohras etc — weren’t evangelical and there were fewer Christians here. Thus, there wasn’t much focus on education or health.

The route to prosperity was through business and commerce, not education.

The freedom movement was strong in Gujarat with many important figures coming from here. The people were politically aware, but it didn’t lead to any significant social reforms.

Presently, the citizens who’ve left the state have set up businesses and developed roots in other places. The remittances contribute to ~1% of the state’s GDP.

Kerala

Known to have a state-led focus on human development parameters like health and education, creating a foundation for economic growth.

Princely states of Travancore and Kochi and the british controlled the region of present day Kerala in the 1800’s. When the Christian missionaries arriived they opened up schools. Seeing this the princely states followed suit and started providing free education. They also focussed on public health and vaccinations.

Travancore introduced private property rights to increase incentive for farming productivity. This led to a budget surplus which was invested in education and health.

Since the royal families were focussed on taking care of their subjects the freedom movement didn’t get a stronghold here. However, there was a focus on social reform for civil rights of the lower castes that was led by the non-varna Hindus.

Presently, even with high HDI scores, citizens leave the state to find opportunities elsewhere, but remittances from them contribute to ~14% of the state’s GDP.

🔖 On Emergent Centralization (archive)

There is a principle of Defensive Decentralization: when besieged, a well constructed decentralized system will further decentralize.

The corollary of which is: A well constructed decentralized system will identify & attack emergent centralization.

There has been a tendency for some decentralized systems to move towards centralization, even in non-adversarial conditions — most email going through Google servers, or a few Mastadon servers hosting a bulk of the users. The centralization isn’t always in-protocol, sometimes it can be political, in code, or in design — as seen in many blockchain projects. Designing systems that defend against this is an open problem.

Indian Government and Politics

Indian Government and Politics
Indian Government and Politics

I didn’t pay attention to Civics class in school, so it was time I revisited the syllabus and found out how the Indian government worked. This interest was triggered by the Aadhaar case, and also by my attempt to understand where the ISRO WikiProject lies in the larger Indian government system.
I decided to get Indian Government and Politics from SAGE publishing because I read somewhere that it was a textbook for UPSC exams (of which I learnt more in the book). I supplemented my reading with an entertaining YouTube series called Consti-tuition hosted by Meghnad. I even got a subscription to Newslaundry to access the bonus content.

The video series and the book covered what the constitution said, and what reality is like. This was important for me as it helped me learn where the system fails and what kind of structures are made ad-hoc to deal with it. As Dan Kaminsky points out, this part of my learning will go on for much longer, maybe forever.

Graph of Indian political parties and their ideologies, as listed on Wikidata.

It also gave me a lot of new WikiData projects ideas. The first one being to visualize the national political parties and their ideologies. I’ll be working on more as time permits. Click image below for the Wikidata query.

This book was a good first step to learn the system and it’s lies. It seems pretty complex, and I know I’ve only scratched the surface, but at least I’ve begun to understand something… the me in school would have understood nothing, even if he did pay attention.