Office hours for November -- and biases in American academia (gasp!)

The office hours for November are on November 5. The next office hours are on November 19, December 3 and December 17 between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m. Office hours have usually been on the first Monday of every month between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m. Additional office hour times have been added for November and December.

The theme for November will be "Politics and Religion". Over the month of November, I will be proposing a new theory of  Hindu Studies. I call it the Bias Theory of Hindu Studies. (I am hoping that people won't call it the Racial Bias Theory of Hinduism Academia -- although racial biases are part of the picture.) I will be making the argument that at least part of the problem for Hinduism scholars is that they have biases that they are not able to overcome. (Implicit racial biases may be part of the picture although racial biases do not represent the entirety of the matter). But this is only one part of the overall thesis. The overall thesis is that American universities, as organizations, do not have sufficiently good processes -- processes in the sense of organizational processes. This causes them to produce products that have a quality problem overall. The product in question is, of course, papers and such produced by Hindu Studies scholars. And although this area has half-beaten to death by a number of people, I believe that what I am proposing is novel. Wendy Doniger, Rajiv Malhotra, Balagangadhara, Paul Courtright, Russell McCutcheon - not a single one of them has really come up with the argument that I will be making as part of this thesis. None of them. And the funny thing is that they are all really quite fundamentally mistaken. Each and every one of them.

Anyhoo, besides Hindu Studies, this theory has significant applicability to American academia in general as well. I have laid out the basic arguments in one of the papers that I recently wrote which should probably called the Bias Theory of American Academia. In fact, one of the reasons I am quite happy to take the time to write these posts although I am extremely busy right now is that I have already written up the paper and so I know exactly what I am going to say. That is about it for an introduction. The first post will be up shortly.

Update (Nov. 11): Note that I am only promising to kick off my proposal this month. I am planning to make this into a two month series. The first series of posts will be this month. The second series of posts will be scheduled for a future month.

Update (Dec 3rd): The theme for November is "Politics and religion" and the subtitle for the theme for November is "-- and all the things you are not supposed to discuss at work."

Cows in India, or What Gets Measured Gets Managed

Prefatory Note: This is intended to be a talk, not an article. Please treat it as a sort of transcript of my talk. In particular, expect low information density. I find that much of the information in TED-style talks comes in the Q&A. My lecture is really in a very different tradition, if you will, of lecture, namely, the Case Based method of teaching. The aim of the lecture is to inform the audience assuming that they have already read the Case Materials beforehand. It is a more intimate setting, but makes for a much richer experience. Furthermore, with the Case Method and unlike in a regular talk, you can engage with nearly all the members of the audience on substantive issues related to the topic at hand during the course of the lecture itself. Thus, the Case Method technique serves as validation for the idea itself. Using this technique, I have given this speech a few times thus far, and have found the main idea validated each time. I hope you enjoy the presentation.

The Talk:
I created and uploaded a video of my talk for my meeting with Prof. Lietz, but unfortunately, my Macbook has a soundcard problem, and so the sound is simply not showing up. Here is the video.



The title of the talk is "Why are there cows on the road in India?" In this post, I will provide a brief walkthrough of the talk since there is no sound. This is meant to be a very accessible talk so please feel free to write in if there are any questions at all, but please do bear in mind that this is a talk and so it is meant to be heard, not read.

My basic argument is simple. The way Indian Assemblies work today is dysfunctional, and we need a system of checks and balances there. There is just too much commotion in the Indian Parliament and State Assemblies today. (I have a clip from one of the State Assemblies in my video above (6:12 to 6:28). You will see footage here of an incident involving two members that occurred in the Kashmir State Assembly.) Things are clearly not working. I propose that we need to have a system of checks and balances in Assemblies and in the Parliament to make sure order is restored. I propose one such system (Proposal A - please see below), but it does not necessarily have to be the one that is adopted. In fact, even if the Parliament does not adopt this proposal, people could use a variant of the proposed system to keep tabs on the politicians themselves (Proposal B - also see below). What gets measured gets managed. What these proposals offer is a way for people to measure the performance of the members of parliament (MPs). If people can keep track of the performance of their members of parliament, they could put pressure on the politicians to do something about it.

TEDx talk

I am preparing for a TEDx talk later this year. It is related to the idea of "power distance", a concept in organizational behavior which has arisen out of research into organizational culture. This research has been based in some interesting mathematical statistics, and I will be talking more about this talk in future posts.

I am preparing for this talk in two ways : one, I am giving practice preparatory talks to friends; and two, I am taking a course on Public Speaking at Stanford. As part of the public speaking course, I will be making a presentation as part of a three member group on "Torture" today.

Torture has become a controversial issue of late. It has been frequently making it to newspaper headlines. Here is what we plan to cover as part of the talk. The talk is in three parts : one, a historical perspective on torture; two, the ethical and moral aspects of torture; and three, we will talk about torture using a Case Study. I will be presenting the first part of the talk, a historical overview of torture.

As part of my portion of the talk, I will be making the case that in modern times, torture is no longer the evil that it used to be. In premodern times (the Ancient and Medieval historical periods), fear of torture was quite widespread. With the Age of Enlightenment, however, it became increasingly recognized that torture was not acceptable. Organizations show isomorphism. When one legal system adopted codes against torture, other legal systems tended to follow and adopted similar legal mechanisms. The British legal system abolished all forms of torture around 1640, except for "peine forte et dure". (This form of torture was abolished in 1772.) Legal mechanisms similar to those in Britain were adopted around the world with organizational forms similar to the British legal system (hence the term "organizational isomorphism", of course). Today, torture is almost universally frowned upon. Whereas it used to be common for a slave, as one example of a Common Man, to be tortured as punishment, the Common Man today no longer needs to fear torture.