"dammit, i can hear the birds chirp"

These commnets came in a few moments later, again by Pari. They are on "Who was the most influential of them all".

“just read your post on greatness and either it was too convoluted for me to understand it (dude, you should NOT try to write in ayn rand's style... it's very hard on the brain) or your ideas on greatness are not right according to me...
greatness is in some sense a prefix... and needs to be attached to a value/property for it to have any significance. and in that sense, the influence/greatness theory is correct. it might be wrong to say hitler was a great person, but he WAS a great LEADER... for exactly the reason that he could pull/organize/motivate/lead to action large numbers of people. he might be evil, but he was as great/greater than winston churchill in that respect.
the same stands for pele/gates/edison... they were/are great _____ (fill in the blank appropriately). full stop. bill gates is great in terms of the software and the company he build, his marketing skills etc. bill gates is not a great person for us when it comes to us having a choice. and every person is going to have different notions about what is a more important value.
dammit, i can hear the birds chirp. i should sleep. g'nite!”

The confusion clearly is in understanding the meaning of the word greatness, so refer to the good old dictionary. This is what dictionary.com says: Greatness: (Used of persons) standing above others in character or attainment or reputation. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/great

Guess this bit clarifies the confusion between ‘great’ as an adjective or prefix as you call it and ‘greatness’ when we talk of persons. “First, there ceases to remain any difference between great leaders like Winston Churchill and evil leaders like Hitler.” This sentence is the only place where I imply greatness in the first meaning of the word and it very clearly differentiates between the two.

And hey, the article is pretty lucid and intelligible!!!

Pari is always there

Paritosh, batchmate, yaar and an Ayn Rand fan is always there to comment on my articles....this one is on "Must be tough being Managers". Came at half past 4 in the morning on Bracket.....

“hey, was going through your blog... some really interesting stuff. just read the post on social responsibility and responsibility towards the environment. the great thing about both of them is that they make (economic) sense, if you care to look beyond the confines of the immediate profits of the corporate. a couple of assumptions (which pretty much explain what i'm going to say) before i start:

1. the corporate is and intends to be a going concern
2. the law of nature is that every being in every species wants it's genes to survive (i hope this makes sense biologically, but i'm sure u get the drift)

so let's start with social responsibility. what is it that makes the tatas tick? mind you, though they may not be the largest or fastest growing conglomerate today in india, they've survived a 100 years. one of the reasons is that they have taken good care of not only their employees (which makes intuitive sense), but also other people living around... which is a reason why more people come and reside in the areas around tata companies (jamshedpur being a case in point), which in turn gives the tatas access to more of good people, more of good resources. secondly, people have faith in the tatas coz they've done good for the society... though they haven't really been involved in any scandal, to whom do you think the people will show their allegiance? the govt or the tatas? if those ppl think rationally (i mean the people living in and around tata companies/townships), they would gain much more out of lending support to the tatas...”

The actions of TATAs as you have described through your example of Jamshedpur is Charity. There is no point in trying to figure out the long term profitability of Charity, this is something that the owner of the concern has to decide. The number of owners and decision making process is irrelevant to this discussion.

Hmmm….so what does Social Responsibility mean and why it doesn’t make any sense at all, economic or otherwise. I searched for quite some time on the internet and the definitions are varied and inconsistent. This is what loosely what everyone means- Social responsibility is the obligation towards the needs of all those who are influenced by your actions. And this is precisely what I meant by “slavery” because charity is one thing, an obligation to charity another. Social responsibility if endorsed by a company is a blank check. A blank check which any ‘stakeholder’ can use to claim the unearned.

The last word - There is no conceivable choice between Freedom and Slavery. Economic calculation of profit and loss comes into picture if and only if there is a choice between two seemingly equally good alternatives.


“responsibility towards environment: couple of things, one more far fetched, which i will discuss second. do you see what is happening to the pollution levels in china? several of the main rivers are so polluted that they can't provide sustenence to people any longer, because in their rush for expansion, all environmental 'rules' have been flouted. now that is china (and i'm sure u're a capitalist), and the govt has the muscle to suppress people. what happens though in a democracy? people will bear such a thing for only so long... after that there's rebellion, bloodshed, a shift in power... possibilities are endless. so what's better? to follow some environmental norms or risk losing it all? secondly (and as i said earlier, a little far fetched), tell me, would you not spend whatever you have to save the life of your progeny or your grandchildren? similarly, would you not do the same to save the life of your future 'gene-bearers'? if yes, then does it not make sense to pollute less so that this world remains sustainable for humans (forget other species, though i could expand on that too) for longer?

lemme know what you think of this. i agree in principle with you that social/environmental responsibility for looking good in the newspapers/class does not make sense, but the acts themselves do make sense for very different reasons (than given in class).”

The China example is very curious. Taking it at its face value, it clearly shows how a mixed economy can ruin one group of people (those who were dependent on the rivers) for the common good.

I am glad you haven’t identified the environment as having any intrinsic value. There certainly are ‘rules’ of the nature, you can’t flout them and still get away with it. I’ll relate to you a short story to understand the concept of property rights in the context of pollution:

"Assume that we live on a tropical island. There is a certain kind of exotic coconut growing on this island that is very delicious, but it releases fumes when you crack it open. The fumes of a single coconut are harmless, but if people open more than 3500 coconuts a week, the combined fumes of the coconuts can cause people to go blind. For the sake of argument, also assume that the person opening the coconut is not necessarily the one likeliest to go blind from its fumes. (I hope this helps you appreciate how improbable a scenario of this kind is in the first place.) So what does a capitalist government do to keep people from making each other blind? Ban the eating of coconuts in all quantities? No. Put a tax on coconuts so people eat fewer of them? No. What it does is prosecute the guy who opens the 3501st coconut (and 3502nd, and so on) for causing the victims to go blind. This is why the option to open a coconut will become a scarce resource If there are 1000 people living on the island, each of them would get to open 3.5 coconuts a week. Those who want to open fewer of them could sell their options to those who want to open more. "

The story was told by a fellow member, ‘Capitalism Forever’ on an online forum. The story is very close to reality. There is an objective way of measuring the threshold limits of pollution beyond which it is harmful to men.

Does it make you wonder with all the attention paid to the environment, with the ‘Greanpeaces’ of the world devoting their lives to the cause of environmentalism why such a simple principle has not been operationalised so far. Are they dumb? Don’t they have enough ‘friends’ in the parliaments/senates? The answer is very simple. Environmentalists are not concerned with clean air, water or land. Their only goal is to make sure there is no intervention by humans in the environment because, according to them, environment has got an intrinsic value. The cheetah has to be protected regardless of anything, the dear spoiling the crops is to be protected come whatever, you can’t release any effluents into the river irrespective of everything else…….

The last word- Once you endorse their ideology of ‘responsibility towards environment’ try being consistent and productive at the same time. Bet you can’t because, every act of productive work by its very nature means altering the environment.