Tag: religion

Caste, Cricket and Classical Economics

… among other things, I should note.

All of what you read in the title of today’s post is from a nice little write-up on the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) website.

The shiny red ball at the centre of a game of cricket, is made by highly skilled craftsmen in Meerut district who work long hours tanning, greasing, cutting, stitching, shaping, lacquering and stamping it. Despite the glamour surrounding the game, this continues to be a caste-based occupation

https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/all-work-and-no-play-for-cricket-ball-makers/

My takeaways:

  1. The prices of cricket balls ranges from Rs. 250 to Rs. 3500. Three and a half thousand, for one ball?!
  2. Three ingredients go into the making of a cricket ball: Alum-tanned hide, cork and cotton thread. But note that ““People do not have a problem with leather in the form of a cricket ball, but they do when it comes to working with it,” he adds.”
  3. Making cricket balls, like so many other professions in our country, is associated with a specific caste.
  4. Move aside, pin factories: “Line se kaam hove hai aur ek karigar ek hi kaam kare hai [The tasks are sequential and a craftsperson specialises only in one task],” he explains.
  5. Pig bristles are used instead of needles to stitch the balls, and therefore Muslims don’t take up this profession.
  6. Why is Meerut big on making cricket balls? Partition, migration and specialization.
  7. The author, Shruti Sharma, is a PhD scholar working on “the social history of sports goods manufacturing in India“. What a lovely topic!
  8. What questions do you have after having read either this post or the article by Shruti? Here are mine:
    • How do they make ’em in Sialkot?
    • How do they make ’em in, say, Australia?
    • Are there quality standards for cricket ball manufacturing? Of course there are.
      There are standards that specify the “construction details, dimension, quality and performance of cricket balls”. And they’re updated. You can read ’em, if you like, but it will cost you one hundred and forty two pounds.
    • What else has Shruti written? This lovely metaphor, from an essay written by her: “The two sides of the ball divided by a seam is a metaphor for the simultaneous embedding in and distancing from the social norms and relations concealed in the ball in its commodified form. The shiny side – nurtured and maintained – symbolizes the aesthetic spectacle that cricket is in a stadium and on television. This aesthetic fuses play with nationalist fervor. The rough side of the ball becomes a signifier of the spaces where cricket is produced – socially, spatially, and temporally distant from the aesthetic site of play.”
  9. Rabbit holes are underrated. When you read an article, go down one, and see where else it can take you!

How To Get the Most Out of Life

Oof, it’s taken me a long, long time.

About a month ago or so, I wrote a blog about parsing my favorite definition of economics, and Akshay Alladi responded on Twitter thusly:

And coming up with a reply to this tweet is what has occupied my mind for all this while. I don’t mean that as a complaint – quite the opposite, in fact. It has been a very enjoyable thing to keep gnawing away at, and it has resulted in more than a couple of lovely, relaxed conversations. It has also taken me down many a rabbit hole online, including on the etymology of the word religion. I have, in fact, a whole other draft of a post in response, but it ended up being so chaotic and full of links that I decided to start anew instead.

And in this new post, I decided to keep things simple. Rather than try to define religion (and I invite you to take a stab at it), or think about why one should be (or should not be!) religious, I decided to step back for a bit and take a look at the definition again:

Economics is the study of how to get the most out of life

And here’s my first line of defense against Akshay’s question. “What might be the thing that will give you the most out life?” is a question whose correct answer may well be religion for some. What is religion?

Here’s the definition Google will give you:

“the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.”

Wikipedia goes on an extended trip, with a twist at the end of the sentence, if you prefer a more thorough definition. But whichever definition you go with, you may well decide that it is this – the practice of this thing called religion – that will get you the most out of life. And I say this will all sincerity: good for you, if that be the case!

Again, to be clear, religion isn’t my own answer to the question of how to get the most out of life, but it may well be yours.

But now that you have decided to get the most out of life by practicing religion, economics absolutely can help you from here on in.

What is the cost to you of practicing religion? What are you giving up in order to do so? What incentives can be put in place for you to be religious – both positive and negative? Should you be needing incentives at all in the first place when it comes to being religious? What are the short term benefits and costs, and what are the long term benefits and costs? Economics can help you frame these questions, and can help you answer them.

Or put another way, economics does not help you decide what “most” should be. In fact, it cannot help you decide what “most” should be. It may well be the case that something associated with religion (or even religion itself) helps you answer this question. But once you’ve decided that this – whatever this may be – is your definition of “most”… then the how to go about it is all economics.

Remember, economics is about choices, horizons, costs and incentives. Choices regarding what? Costs pertaining to what? Incentives for what? The answer to this question must come from you.

The how?

That’s economics.

Tech: Links for 8th October, 2019

  1. “What we are doing is creating selfies, documenting moments with family, and snapping photos of food and latte art. We aren’t even trying to build a scrapbook of those images. It is all a stream — less for remembrance than for real-time sharing. In other words, we have changed our relationship with photography and photographs. It used to be that, photos served as a portal to our past. Now, we are moving so fast as we try to keep up in the age of infinitesimal attention spans. A minute, might as well be a month ago.”
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    The excellent Om Malik on cameras, art, servers and obsolescence.
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  2. “Around the world, governments are setting timeframes by which all cars are to be electric. Norway is requiring all cars to be zero emission by 2025—and more than 50 percent of its cars today are electric. However, China is winning the race in terms of units, with more than 1 million EVs sold in 2018. The U.S was the second largest market, with 361,000; Norway had 73,000. China and the U.S. are at 4.44 percent and 2.09 percent market penetration, respectively, so there is lots of room for growth. China is stimulating growth with public policy: It aims to have 2 million in annual EV sales by 2020 and to outlaw the internal combustion engine sometime before 2040. France has also committed to a ban by 2040 and the UK by 2050. Governments are seeking to accelerate uptake through a potpourri of incentives, ranging from tax breaks to free parking to fees on conventional cars in low emission zones.”
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    A useful (to me, at any rate) overview of the EV market in the years (decades) to come.
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  3. “In a new book, Mr. Smith makes the case for a new relationship between the tech sector and government — closer cooperation and challenges for each side.“When your technology changes the world,” he writes, “you bear a responsibility to help address the world that you have helped create.” And governments, he writes, “need to move faster and start to catch up with the pace of technology.””
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    On Microsoft’s middle path. I come from a generation that simply could not have predicted this.
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  4. “A new priest named Mindar is holding forth at Kodaiji, a 400-year-old Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan. Like other clergy members, this priest can deliver sermons and move around to interface with worshippers. But Mindar comes with some … unusual traits. A body made of aluminum and silicone, for starters.Mindar is a robot.”
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    In a sense, unsurprising. But still: religion, rituals and… robots?
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  5. “Christine Figgener, a marine biology grad student aboard the boat, filmed with her phone as a colleague tried to yank some sort of tube from the turtle’s nose. At first, Figgener thought it might be a worm. Then she saw it was a piece of plastic. “Is that a freaking straw?” she exclaimed, outrage blooming in her voice. Indeed, it was. In time, the straw was plucked from the turtle’s nose and the sad, green fellow liberated. But Figgener—who’d been researching turtle behavior in pursuit of her Ph.D. and had seen marine life tormented by plastic junk countless times before—could not stop fuming as the boat returned to shore. It was, if you will, the last straw.”
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    On technology and… straws.

India: Links for 2nd September, 2019

  1. Heard of Kangiten?
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  2. Or of Vinayaki?
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  3. “A prominent name for Ganesha in the Tamil language is Pillai (Tamil: பிள்ளை) or Pillaiyar (பிள்ளையார்) A.K. Narain differentiates these terms by saying that pillai means a “child” while pillaiyar means a “noble child”. He adds that the words pallu, pella, and pell in the Dravidian family of languages signify “tooth or tusk”, also “elephant tooth or tusk”. Anita Raina Thapan notes that the root word pille in the name Pillaiyar might have originally meant “the young of the elephant”, because the Pali word pillaka means “a young elephant”.In the Burmese language, Ganesha is known as Maha Peinne (မဟာပိန္နဲ, pronounced [məhà pèiɴné]), derived from Pali Mahā Wināyaka (မဟာဝိနာယက). The widespread name of Ganesha in Thailand is Phra Phikanet.[34] The earliest images and mention of Ganesha names as a major deity in present-day Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam date from the 7th- and 8th-centuries, and these mirror Indian examples of the 5th century or earlier. In Sri Lankan Singhala Buddhist areas, he is known as Gana deviyo, and revered along with Buddha, Vishnu, Skanda and others.”
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    A rose by any other name…
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  4. The endless source of delight that is Marginal Revolution.
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  5. A how to for Ganesh Chaturthi in Pune/Mumbai

 

I am, readers should note, cheerfully atheist. But as a Puneri, the charms of this festival are hard to ignore. Now, if only we could figure out a way to remove the loudspeakers…