Merge branch 'master' of github.com:wona/wona.github.com

_posts/2017-02-02-in-conversation-with-mr-rajiv-sikri.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: In conversation with Mr. Rajiv Sikri, ex-Secretary, MEA
+tags: [wona, column]
+category: verbatim
+author: "Utkarsh Ruhela"
+image: rajiv_sikri_cover.jpg
+excerpt: Mr. Rajiv Sikri retired as Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs after an illustrious career spanning 36 years with the Indian Foreign Service. Read on as Mr. Sikri talks about the growing role of policy think tanks, the nationalist wave enveloping the world and his love for Russian authors.
+---
+
+Mr. Rajiv Sikri retired as Secretary in the Ministry of External Affairs after an illustrious career spanning 36 years with the Indian Foreign Service. In this capacity he had overall responsibility for India’s relations with East Asia, ASEAN, Pacific region, the Arab world, Israel, Iran and Central Asia. He earlier served as the Special Secretary for Economic Relations supervising foreign economic relations, including India’s external technical and economic assistance programmes. He has also served as India’s Ambassador to Kazakhstan, and headed the Departments dealing with West Europe as well as the Soviet Union and East Europe in the Ministry of External Affairs. Mr. Sikri completed his bachelor studies from St. Stephen’s College, majoring in History and entered Foreign Services in the following year.
+
+Read on as Mr. Sikri talks about the growing role of policy think tanks, the nationalist wave enveloping the world and his love for Russian authors.
+
+<b>A lot of think tanks and independent organizations like in Washington DC have come up in India as well. How impactful is the contribution of such organizations like Carnegie, IPRC?</b>
+
+There is no competition between our think tanks and DC’s think tanks. They attract the best minds of their country. It is also because of the revolving door policy. One day you are working in a think tank and the other, you are in the administration, this policy also gives incentives there to work. It is not such a case in India, you don’t have funding and infrastructure. But, all this is changing. There are a few brilliant people working in these organizations now, and it seems to be a growing sector in our country as well, but it’ll take time. We need to consolidate our research sector and at the same time, the attitude.
+
+<b>The introduction of your book, “Challenge and Strategy: Rethinking India's Foreign Policy”, mentions your love for books. Which are some of the books that moved you?</b>
+
+I don’t read fiction much, even lesser lately. But, It’s mostly fiction which impacts you. I have been touched a lot by the Russian authors in my early young days. Particularly Tolstoy. I found, his work to be incredibly descriptive. It immerses me in itself. The setting, the characters. Both Anna Karenina and War & Peace. I enjoyed Vikram Seth’s ‘A Suitable Boy’. Because, of course it is a detailed piece of writing and deals with the whole Indian society of a particular time period. Short stories by Chekhov. The reason, I am compelled and moved by Russian authors is maybe because of my stay and service in Russia. The grandiosity of Moscow can be felt through these author’s works.
+
+Another book I enjoyed was by Prakash Tandon (Chairman of PNB), he has written a trilogy, “A Punjabi Century”, because I wanted to know more about the place where I come from.
+I currently started watching this TV series as well, “The Crown”. I loved it. It’s the most recent piece of art I enjoyed.
+
+<b>We can see that the masses are more “aware” of their standing in the globalized world, no country seems to be free of the bias of national sentiments. Do you think these populist sentiments creeping in the foreign policy of nations is a worry?</b>
+
+What has happened is the period of growth and prosperity that began after the second world war ended some time ago. When the economy is expanding the jobs are expanding, you take that for granted. But, the history shows that there are always ups and downs and development don't always go in a linear fashion. After the second world war there was a sense of idealism and will to create structures and to observe the rules of civilized behavior, so much carnage and destruction had taken place in the wars. Those who were the victors structured it in the manner that they became the Guardians of the world, Japan, Germany were kept out of it. The European Union was created created by which started as European Coal and Steel community. Who could have imagined in 1945 that their grandchildren would live in a Europe without borders, obviously threat from Soviet power were affecting as well, situations changed Soviet Union break up is this was the world with Americans was going to dominate it was just the beginning of the process which is still changing.
+
+The 1789 was the French Revolution that was followed by Napoleonic wars and subsequent defeat of Napoleon and formation of Congress in 1815, what all it took was about 26 years, to see the parallel, it was in 1991 Soviet Union broke and it is 2017 and things have changed again. China has gone up, Russia is rising up again. The assumptions behind the European policies and American policies, it is an end of a particular era today. What you see today as Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, it is the reactionary forces against globalization. Globalization was meant to bring benefits into the nations but there are downsides to it as well.
+
+<b>What role do you think the average citizen plays into considerations pertaining to foreign policy?</b>
+
+First of all, there is a behavorial aspect. There were these attacks on Africans living in India. These assaults lead up to certain aversion from that country’s point of view towards India. These are sensitivity issues. We should take care of such things.
+
+Or when we go abroad, what kind of impression we leave. For example, how there has been a positive impact of Indian techies, what they have created all around the world. And, managers. All around the world. If 50 years ago, we were a nation of snake charmers. It reminds me of a joke, when Bill Clinton was coming to India, his administration said India is always asking for this and that technology. Bill Clinton said, “Is there anything we can get from them?”, and one of the delegates said, “There’s this technology they use,  such innovative, out of the box solutions of tricky problems. They call it ‘jugaad’.”
+So, when Bill Clinton asked for ‘jugaad’, Atal Bihari Vajpayee burst into laughter and said. “I can’t give you this technology. Because Mr. President, our whole country runs on this thing called ‘jugaad’.”
+
+That’s a joke, but there’s the impression that if you’re Indian, you are intelligent, innovative and hard-working. On the other hand are Gulf countries, where Indian workers go and they are exploited. That leaves a negative impression of weakness and poverty. Our culture and arts are recognized worldwide. All in all, every Indian is contributing towards foreign policy. We just need to capitalize on the positive aspects, and eliminate the negatives out of this equation.

_posts/2017-02-22-can-we-trust-ourselves.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Can We Trust Ourselves? 
+tags: [wona, column]
+category: editorial
+author: "Lanka Adarsh, Vedansh Bhartiya, Yash Singh"
+image: can_we_trust_ourselves.jpg
+---
+
+_“The problem with people is that they are so stupid. So stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.” - John Cleese_
+
+Trust is a fundamental cog in the machinery that drives the world. We trust drivers to follow traffic lights and not bump into cars. We trust news agencies to give us factually correct quality content; our politicians to make the right decisions. However, the grounds on which it is built are largely unknown – our decision to trust others is perhaps a subconscious, impulsive one, acting more as false assurances than absolute security against potential deviations. When weighed collectively with the consideration that our senses (and what they perceive thereof) are not “facts” as we wrongly attribute them to be, an unsettling question presents itself: Can we trust ourselves?
+
+George Orwell floated such an idea before the world in 1984. By tampering with evidence and indulging in propaganda, Big Brother is successful in reinforcing the desired belief in the subjects’ mind. Elizabeth Loftus, who specialises in false memories, has shown that they are easily born or planted. In her TED talk, “How reliable is your memory?”, she explains how false memories are responsible for a three quarters of wrongful convictions and other bizarre, irrational beliefs and occurrences that constitute our identity. Memory, she states, is unlike a recording device which stores information without modification; the brain is plastic, and accounts evolve over time into stories that distort the truth to great extents. She attributes this phenomenon to misinformation and the subconscious or unconscious acceptance of memory (or other sensory stimulus) as fact.
+
+Oftentimes, hypocritical behaviour is foreign to our awareness. Christened the “Actor-observer bias”, this phenomenon encapsulates how our angry disapproval persists despite the probable circumstances under which a fellow human being has committed an infarction (say jumped a signal) – but when the observer becomes the doer, he feels that his act was justified. Here, empathy is stifled by ignorance of the said principle, rendering us not completely impartial, in contrast to what we tend to believe.
+
+In 1999, Dunning and Kruger presented their hypothesis, seconding Bukowski, who had previously remarked: “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence”. By checking the consistency of actual test scores of candidates against their own predictions, they concluded that high-ability individuals underestimate themselves, while those with low abilities overestimate themselves. This illusory superiority is a manifestation of the lack of metacognitive abilities; i.e. people are unable to recognize their incompetency.
+
+Even if it rests on false pretences, trust is necessary for the continuation of normal life. In its absence, external chaos and internal anxiety would uproot all order; it is a safe assumption, having no basis and yet – having no evidence to the contrary either. Every fact or principle was once an assumption; unbounded scepticism is hardly helpful in the establishment of such bases, which the civilized world believes to be true. This said, perfect trust is a symptom of ignorance. The longer one lives, the more selective they become about who they trust. Trust is bestowed upon others because we believe we are intelligent and capable enough to make such choices; however, in light of the above considerations, it seems that the foundations of this faith are built on the marshy lands of our perceptions and memories, which are, in and of themselves, unreliable and fallible.
+
+__The article features in our latest print issue. The issue delves into the roadblocks to having a truly meritocratic election at IITR and expounds on the limited academic flexibility offered at Roorkee. To read our previous issues visit: https://issuu.com/wona-iitr__

file01

@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
++---
+ +layout: post
+ +title: Can we trust ourselves
+ +tags: [wona, column]
+ +category: verbatim
+ +image: http://media.topito.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Scientific-American-Mind-Amnesia_resultat.jpg
+ +excerpt: The problem with people is that they are so stupid. So stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.
+ +---
+ +
+ +-- _Lanka Adarsh, Vedansh bhartiya, Yash Singh_
+ 
+ 
+ +<b>“The problem with people is that they are so stupid. So stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.”
+
+-John Cleese
+</b>
+ +
+ +Trust is a fundamental cog in the machinery that drives the world. We trust drivers to follow traffic lights and not bump into cars. We trust news agencies to give us factually correct quality content; our politicians to make the right decisions. However, the grounds on which it is built are largely unknown – our decision to trust others is perhaps a subconscious, impulsive one, acting more as false assurances than absolute security against potential deviations. When weighed collectively with the consideration that our senses (and what they perceive thereof) are not “facts” as we wrongly attribute them to be, an unsettling question presents itself: Can we trust ourselves?
+ +
+ 
+ +George Orwell floated such an idea before the world in 1984. By tampering with evidence and indulging in propaganda, Big Brother is successful in reinforcing the desired belief in the subjects’ mind. Elizabeth Loftus, who specialises in false memories, has shown that they are easily born or planted. In her TED talk, “How reliable is your memory?”, she explains how false memories are responsible for a three quarters of wrongful convictions and other bizarre, irrational beliefs and occurrences that constitute our identity. Memory, she states, is unlike a recording device which stores information without modification; the brain is plastic, and accounts evolve over time into stories that distort the truth to great extents. She attributes this phenomenon to misinformation and the subconscious or unconscious acceptance of memory (or other sensory stimulus) as fact.
+
+ +
+ +Oftentimes, hypocritical behaviour is foreign to our awareness. Christened the “Actor-observer bias”, this phenomenon encapsulates how our angry disapproval persists despite the probable circumstances under which a fellow human being has committed an infarction (say jumped a signal) – but when the observer becomes the doer, he feels that his act was justified. Here, empathy is stifled by ignorance of the said principle, rendering us not completely impartial, in contrast to what we tend to believe.
+
+ +
+ +In 1999, Dunning and Kruger presented their hypothesis, seconding Bukowski, who had previously remarked: “The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence”. By checking the consistency of actual test scores of candidates against their own predictions, they concluded that high-ability individuals underestimate themselves, while those with low abilities overestimate themselves. This illusory superiority is a manifestation of the lack of metacognitive abilities; i.e. people are unable to recognize their incompetency.
+
+ +
+ +Even if it rests on false pretences, trust is necessary for the continuation of normal life. In its absence, external chaos and internal anxiety would uproot all order; it is a safe assumption, having no basis and yet – having no evidence to the contrary either. Every fact or principle was once an assumption; unbounded scepticism is hardly helpful in the establishment of such bases, which the civilized world believes to be true. This said, perfect trust is a symptom of ignorance. The longer one lives, the more selective they become about who they trust. Trust is bestowed upon others because we believe we are intelligent and capable enough to make such choices; however, in light of the above considerations, it seems that the foundations of this faith are built on the marshy lands of our perceptions and memories, which are, in and of themselves, unreliable and fallible.
++
+ +<b>The article features in our Autumn ’16 print issue. The issue delves into the roadblocks to having a truly meritocratic election at IITR and expounds on the limited academic flexibility offered at Roorkee. To read our previous issues visit: https://issuu.com/wona-iitr
+</b>
+ +
+ 
+