A few quick searches took me to the manufacturer’s website. As usual, you find all the information that is available except the one you are looking for. A fresh search on Google took me to some discussion groups where I found others who had similar issues. But alas, no solution to the problem. That’s when my better half decided to search for video solutions to the problem on YouTube. And guess what? A fellow TV owner who had the exact same issue had gone to great lengths to describe and demonstrate the solution to this problem! The problem was that two “diodes” on a particular circuit board were busted and needed to be replaced. It’s been years since I had touched a circuit board, let alone replaced a part on it. It was at this juncture that my wife decided that she had more than done her part. “You are the Electrical Engineer, you should know how to do this,” she said, rubbing it in.

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Sri Sri Ravishankar, in a recent article in the Huffington Post, advocated a two pronged approach. To pass the Jan Lokpal bill, on the one hand, and to create awareness among public about ethical and moral values against corruption, on the other. He rightly says, “An individual alone cannot fight the menace of corruption. Without strong community support, individuals are likely to succumb to corruption. Strong community which would help the weak and vulnerable is most essential.” This sounds like a worthy plan, but getting past the first hurdle of passing strong anti-corruption laws still seems insurmountable.

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Arguing about the “who said what” and whether it was appropriate would be case of not seeing the forest for the tress. Clearly, this Parliament vs. Team Anna struggle has wider implications for India’s future. If you disregard for a moment the individual players in this struggle, their motivations and their allegiances, it does raise some very important issues that warrant significant public debate. Over the last sixteen months, the anti-corruption movement has been a major part of the public’s pre-occupation and a primary cause for an overall sense of dissatisfaction. Despite this, thanks to coalition politics, lack of leadership, and political will, virtually nothing has been accomplished to address these legitimate concerns of the people. Sadly, cases of corruption continue to be unearthed, the most recent being the one involving our Army. On the law and order front, RTI activists have been routinely killed over the years and most recently, Narendra Singh, an IPS officer, was crushed to death supposedly by the mining mafia in MP. Our Parliament has little to show in terms of concrete action on any of these fronts.

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There has been plenty of optimism-laden talk about the passing of the baton to a new generation in UP, as Netaji Mulayam Singh Yadav makes way for son Akhilesh Yadav. No matter who is in charge, the pedigree is impossible to change and so is the baggage of history. The Samajwadi party is known for its “goondagiri.” This was apparent almost immediately after the victory, when SP supporters went berserk and assaulted their opponents. Mulayam Singh Yadav is possibly headed for a plum role in the UPA government, emboldened by his mandate at the state-level.

Are all these signs of progress? Is this state of our democracy supposed to make us proud? If you disregard the fact that we have elections today, how different is this from the days when Kings and Queens ruled different parts of our country? The headlines could very well have been, “Queen Mayawati voted out of power, King Mulayam crowns young Prince to be King and heads to Delhi.”

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Firstly, Obama’s anti-outsourcing job campaign was directed mainly towards manufacturing jobs that have migrated to China. While anti-outsourcing legislation might certainly affect India, the impact is likely to be far greater on the manufacturing sector than on IT services. To put things in perspective, let me recount an anecdote. A friend of mine who lives in Michigan said that a man approached him while he was mowing his lawn and asked him if he could work for him as his gardener. My friend agreed, and over time, got to know him better. It turned out that this man was a middle manager at one of the big car companies. He was in his mid-forties, had worked for over twenty years for the same car company, had two school-going kids, and had been out of a job for over six months. He had joined the company fresh out of school and had worked his way up to the middle management level. In other words, he had dedicated the best years of his life to the car manufacturing industry. After over twenty years of serving the company, he was laid off along with several colleagues, and as luck would have it, there were no matching jobs available in the area.

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A number of questions come to mind as you think about the various issues involved. What was the role of the parents in the case of this student? Were they even aware that he was angry, upset and prone to such extreme violence? Did the student confide his plans with any of his friends? Did he have a track record of violent acts in the past? Was he ever counseled about his performance or about his behavior?

Let us assume for a moment that the attack was beyond everyone’s control. But what about the issue of the teacher’s life that was so abruptly snuffed out? This is the most painful part of this episode and unfortunately hardly covered in the media. Consider the sequence of events – In broad daylight, a school kid (not a professional killer) stabs his teacher multiple times; this happens right in the heart of one of India’s leading metros in the middle of a regular school day, with students and school staff going about their daily routines; then the teacher succumbs to the stab wounds and dies.

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Today, India is run by a coalition government at the center and several regional parties at the state-level. This has been the norm for the last couple of decades and seems likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.  Parties come together to form governments driven by opportunism and political expediency rather than shared ideology. Almost every party is dominated and run by rich, affluent, families like a true fiefdom. The concept of intra-party democracy is non-existent and sycophancy is the order of the day. Control over parties is handed down from fathers and mothers to sons, daughters, brothers and sisters. To add another level of control, all parties are run by their respective party high commands. The party whip decides the party’s stance on every issue and all members of the party fall in line at the time of voting on these issues. This is a result of the anti-defection bill introduced by the Rajiv Gandhi government in the 1980s. The intent at that point was to prevent MPs from cross-voting in return for money and other favors. But now, after a couple decades the pendulum has swung to the other extreme. Instead of preventing MPs from cross-voting, the MPs today are crippled by the party whip and the high command. The elected representative is now a pawn of the party. Once elected, he or she can’t pay any heed to the wishes of the electorate in their respective constituencies even if they want to.

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The situation with Team India today is akin to a public company that has delivered consistently under its current leadership, but has seen a dramatic and embarrassing reversal of fortunes over the last couple of financial quarters. The stock market has run out of patience and shareholders are demanding a complete overhaul of the organization. Unfortunately, therein ends any similarity with a professionally run public organization – one that is ultimately accountable to its shareholders.

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Team Anna rallied the masses and raised hopes of a utopian tomorrow – one with a clean and independent CBI under an incorruptible Lokpal. But after an entire year of wrangling with the government, the UPA summarily “checkmated” the social activists and drove them into existential crisis while simultaneously reducing the Lokpal bill to a “Ghost Protocol.” At the moment, the activists will be happier with the “no bill at all” than the current version of the bill tabled by the government. None of the political parties wants the Lokpal bill. Even if individual politicians want it, they can’t do a thing about it because their “High Command” does not want it. But the country’s future is at stake. The politicians are out to maintain the status-quo in order to protect their corrupt practices and ill-gotten wealth. But Team Anna has accepted this mission and is not going to relent until their goals are met.

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Let me give you an example from cricket, India’s most popular sport. Today, in cricket neutral umpires (umpires from countries other than the two playing teams) are taken for granted. Before the introduction of neutral umpires there were frequent cries of bias by visiting cricket teams. For example, it was widely believed that its next to impossible to get a favorable LBW decision against Javed Miandad when touring Pakistan. There was once a serious altercation between English captain Mike Gatting and a Pakistani umpire Shakoor Rana, over a bad umpiring decision. Likewise, umpires from New Zealand were under constant attack for their bias. Similar accusations have also been made against Indian umpires by visiting teams. But since the advent of neutral umpires, the accusations of bias have completely stopped. Today, the focus is mostly on the quality of decisions made by umpires. Further, metrics are available to analyze the performance of individual umpires and an international panel of umpires exists with a formal process for selection. Also, advancements in technology have made possible the introduction of the third umpire who has the luxury of watching television replays before deciding on an umpiring decision.

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