Thoughts on Parenthood

Kavya is already three. For first time parents, there is always a feeling that there was an era before parenthood and after parenthood. Before parenthood, life is much simpler. With a child around, the amount of activities suddenly explode. Also if you are someone who is not used to anticipating and planning, you can quickly get behind the task list, that just keeps on extending. Next thing you know is that you are on a treadmill - tasks at home, tasks at work. Then there is confusion on who is responsible if the task list does not get completed. This keeps on happening until you decide that certain things are just not worth the effort. Never mind if someone has to feel bad.

Action-Reaction

You are also learning on the job. You are learning what is means to step back from a "situation" and see what is really happening. It takes time to realize that you do not react if a child is crying. You do not react if your child is provoking you. You do not react if your partner is angry. You just step back and let things settle down a bit.

If you happening to be the questioning kind, specially if you have any affinity to the question "why", then your troubles are bound to multiply. Because almost everything we are conventionally taught about raising children is based on shaky ground and opinion. Books on parenting can have diametrically opposite opinions. You can try to raise your child as an achiever (producer) or a thinker. A lot depends on what you think and how you react to the situations.

With Kavya, since she is the only child in the house with five adults, she gets disproportionate attention. Judgement is passed on almost every act, and it is usually amusement or praise. So she has tended to be a producer. She has learnt to answer back nonsense because adults seem to love that. She also knows that everyone in the house has different levels of patience. So if she cannot get a response from one adult, she goes on to another. After the basics (input, output, rest) are satisfied, children want to learn and want attentions from adults. They think that the maximum learning happens from an adult, so they want all of them engaged. Adults are not always in the mood to respond, so children try different antics to get attention. A child does not realize that they are annoying someone by licking the floor. All they want is to test a hypothesis on how long can a particular adult tolerate me licking the floor. They also want a response from the adult. For them a groan or a retort is a victory. Once they find a pattern, they keep trying it again and again with some minor variations.

Schooling

Soon it will be time for her to go to school. In school she is going to realize that getting attention is going to be much harder. What she does to get that attention, or will she be okay not getting it will be interesting. The current system of schooling is a big failure, you realize thanks to John Holt. If they really taught concepts, then why pre-determined questions for exams? And how can you create inspiration that will make you learn? What really happens is that children are playing games all the time. Whatever "learning" (abstract or academic learning) happens is in spite of their schooling. Abstract thought often comes in solitude, when you model the system you are trying to understand in your brain. In school you only pick up patterns or skills. Mostly you learn how to stay out of trouble and kill your will. The incentives of schools are stacked up in such a way that exploring on your own will land you into trouble. Soon we will have to decide what is our role in this phase. How much should we submit to the schooling system so that we can stay out of trouble with our families and friends.

Children Again

Though it can be nerve wracking, the best thing about parenting is that it helps you decode your own childhood. Without being a parent I would have never realized why I respond to certain things in a certain way. Schooling did not work for me, but I realized this only after I became a parent. I was under the false assumption that I knew a lot more than I actually knew. I am sure there are many more things to learn, if I get the time to reflect.

Some people say parenting is rewarding and helps them unwind. I think parenting it is natural activity and there is nothing specially rewarding, and rather than unwinding, it draws you deeper into life. Maybe it could be because different people react differently to parenting. Perhaps because of they way they themselves were raised. 

What Aam Aadmi Party Can Learn From Open Source Software

Recently Chetan Bhagat asked on Twitter which company does Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) resemble. Many people replied Open Source Software companies like Android. One key comparison here is that the AAP like Open Source is mostly run by volunteers.

Personally, I find AAP to be the most exciting to happen to India in the past so many years and I want to be out there contributing in any way I can. I thought maybe I should help their web team locally. But did a few searches and did not find any contact info. From my past associations, I knew some senior functionaries in Mumbai and sent them a mail asking a few slightly hard questions, maybe my tone was a bit impatient too. What I got back was an unfriendly response from the functionary.

Now that got me thinking. I am a part of a smallish open source software from the beginning and have been in open source software for a few years now and I can understand where this bitterness comes from. They are having a volunteer and scaling problem. For AAP though, the Open Source Movement has already given a few answers.

1. Maintain public mailing lists

Almost all discussions, decisions of open source software happen on public mailing lists. Infact some of the discussions become stuff of legends. Sample this discussion between the legendary Tanenbaum and a young Linus Torvalds. Not only does having public discussions educate the rest about the thinking behind the actions, but also helps maintain a public record that is searchable by everyone. Plus, the burden of answering all questions does not fall on a few key people but a wider community. This one is really a no brainer.

Imagine if the entire public had access to the inner discussions between the core AAP team members like Arvind Kejriwal and Yogendra Yadav on whether to form a government or not, would not that be a huge win? Transparency to such a level would be game changing for politics.

If one list is very large, you can break-it up into sub-groups. One for each major region, one for communication, one for events, one for publicity, one for web, one for social media etc.

2. Make easy for people to contribute

All major open source projects maintain public repositories of their code which can be read and contributed to by technically anyone. And you can not only contribute in code, but also help by identifying bugs, helping in documentation, translation etc. The biggest game-changer for Open Source has been the rise of GitHub. Thanks to GitHub, the amount of contributions to Open Source projects, specially the newer ones has just exploded.

For politics, the equivalent of code is policy, there are issues, there is documentation and translation requirement too. So if AAP uses GitHub or any such platform, they can exponentially increase their problem solving capacity. Sample this problem: AAP needs to find out what is the most efficient way of distributing electricity in Delhi. They can open an issue / repository and their internal experts can post their views. They can also publish data from exiting utilities including technical, commercial etc. Now this problem encompasses technology, commerce, economics, supply-chain, management and implementation. So any experts from all of these areas can comment on the various aspects of implementing a new distribution policy. This way AAP can tap into virtually any number of resources. Sometimes it is surprising to see the number of people who are happy to help.

3. Create a eco-system for contributors

Once people have engaged in a project, their public "commit" record speaks for itself. Suddenly it is apparent to the entire community who are the people that have done exceptional contributions and whose insights matter. In Open Source, good projects are helped by donors and by people who use the software. Apart from donations, the public profile of these key contributors is elevated so that they can now earn a living as consultants, trainers and speakers. This creates a sustainable pool of contributors that is based on meritocracy and new contributors are encouraged to join.

In politics, debates do not end in policy creation only, they also have to be executed. The contributors should be given a chance to act as executives too. For example if in the electricity distribution debate, a few key individuals appear to be most knowledgable and competent, then their services will be automatically required to execute the policy too. All execution should be based on strict guidelines for transparency and accountability. The most important thing is that the party in charge of execution should be accountable to the people that could be a government or non-government body. Any party, private or government, that manages to win the contract for execution, they would be better off hiring the consultants who have publicly demonstrated high level of knowledge and skill.

4. Create public forums or let third parties maintain unbiased ones.

Open source encourages debate and this is best done on forums. Some of the best ones out there are obviously Stack Overflow, Hacker News and the erstwhile Slashdot. The quality of discussions on these forums is mind boggling. These are places where Open Source developers hang out to ask questions, share news or comment. This is also where culture is created. The best part of these forums is that there is a system that values good contributions v/s noise creation using a point system. Each of them have perfected the sauce based on their community. There are elaborate rules so that the forums are not gamed and moderators make sure that quality of each discussion is very high.

For AAP or politics, there is a big need for such forums. There are so many issues to be discussed and these do not all have to be discussed in the main forums. Having multiple forums will help in creating different cultures where the people will be discuss and form views. Such forums can be a good sounding board to gauge an idea before is brought into the purview of policy.

5. Let go of hierarchy. Let meritocracy take over.

Meritocracy is at the heart of the Open Source movement. If you do not like what is out there, you are free to make it better, in fact you are encouraged to make it better. Linus was not the President or Convenor of some high sounding group that made people use his software. People use Linux because its just better. The open source software domain is probably the most democratic one out there. There are numerous projects, contributors and sub-cultures out there and they are all thriving. The greatest example is probably Sal Khan. From nowhere, he became a major force in post-modern education because his videos where actually good.

For AAP, there is lots to be done. Everything from primary education and healthcare to the most esoteric financial regulation needs public attention and accountability. The only way they can quickly scale up quality is to embrace meritocracy. What is important is the mission not who executes it. If there is someone who is more capable, the system should allow that person to be identified and elevated quickly and not be buried in some senseless bureaucracy. For example, the Maharashtra leaders distributed two sample posters as the "official" posters of the party. Now who decides if they are good? What if someone can do a better job? Is there a system? Is there a way to put the mission before the personality? I think this is going to be culturally difficult to implement.

In conclusion, these are tall expectations, but the AAP has surprised us till now and I am hopeful they will continue to so!

(I am a reasonably skilled web developer and a member of AAP and would love to help the party to implement any of the above suggestions. If anyone in the party who matters is listening, give me a shout at my twitter handle @rushabh_mehta)

Aam Aadmi Party: How Far is Delhi?

These are just some reactions to whether Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) should form a government in Delhi or not.

By having a "yes/no" type of public vote, the AAP leaders may have bought some time, but in making the decision I don't think that should matter. According to me, what is at stake is this.

Currently the AAP is facing the curse of doing much better than it realistically anticipated. Never mind the bravado of internal opinion polls, but it seems that the AAP is not ready to run a government. They probably do not have the expertise or manpower or even the inclination (so far) to run a government. By pushing them to form a government, the mainstream parties have done the right thing. In Mumbai the slang when someone is burdened with un-realistic expectation is "bachhe ki jaan lega kya" (will you take the life of a kid?) So the mainstream parties think that the best way to fix AAP is by forcing it to form a government and then failing.

Now the AAP also has national ambitions and the national polls are only a few months away. To scale to a national level will require their top brains to fully dedicate to this task. This means that if it forms a government in Delhi, then it has to curtail its national ambitions. Otherwise it will fail miserably at the polls and the sheen of success will quickly fade.

So what should the AAP do?

In my view, the option is clear. Curtail national ambitions and try and run a government for as much time as possible. Why?

1. By not forming a government, it will lose faith of Delhi voters. They voted for governance and they deserve one.
2. The party is yet to establish it at the national level, so even if the momentum is big, it will take a lot of time to separate the signal from noise and this will not happen overnight.
3. By forming a government, they will learn the inner workings of running the government machinery. It is one thing to criticize, but it is another thing to motivate, fill the gaps, educate the government workers so that they start delivering.
4. By doing a decent job in Delhi, people across India will have a lot more faith in the AAP
5. Fixing urban utilities (water, electricity), public schooling and healthcare are "big" problems and all the top AAP leaders should get their hands dirty and show direction on how they are going to address them.

I think its a no brainer that AAP should form a government, even for 6 months or a year and show the mainstream parties that they are not kids. Arvind Kejriwal must become chief minister. He clearly went for the top job, standing himself against Sheila Dixit.

National ambitions can wait, minor resources could be applied to form deep relations with other regional leaders and also the verify if they are truly in for the "new" politics of AAP.

The worst outcome will be to form a government in Delhi and go for national ambition at the same time. This way they will do a half-assed job in both and lose the moment.

Best wishes to AAP in what they decide.

(I am a member of AAP)