The Hindu Business Line : Mother of all wars

SADDAM could be waging the mother of all wars, but according to N. Vittal, the war against corruption is the mother of all wars, as the back cover of his book Corruption in India puts it. Again, war is too serious to be left to the generals like Myers or Rumsfield.

Similarly, the combat with corruption is too important to be left in the hands only of the Chief Vigilance Commissioner or the CBI, says the author, who has recently retired as the CVC.

The last page of the book has a few one-liners from the author, such as: Behind every corrupt man there is a greedy family; the honest have value, the corrupt have a price; the corrupt have wealth, the honest have worth; and so on. Read on:

Our democracy is based on corruption because all political parties have to collect funds in cash, which is black money. Corruption in our system has resulted in Rs 58,000 crore of non-performing assets in the banking sector, a VDI scheme which rewards the tax evader by levying a 30 per cent tax while punishing the honest taxpayer with a 40 per cent tax and so on.

Corruption is estimated to cause a loss of Rs 480 crore per year to the street vendors of Delhi. The amount of bribe paid by the rickshaw puller was estimated at Rs 40 crore per month to the municipal and police officials.

There is what is called the LUCKI generation — that is, labelled, urban, cool, knocked-out Indians.

Those who can afford to have this lifestyle may be very small in number because it costs lot of money. But then this leads to a sense of jealousy and the tendency to keep up with the Joneses may lead to a whole lot of corrupt practices.

The simple principle of accountability is many a time difficult to enforce because of the insidious application of Parkinson's Law of government organisation. There is a continuous expansion of the number of people in an organisation and naturally the work gets divided. When the work gets divided, it becomes difficult to fix responsibility.

There are three dimensions of any corporate fraud situation: the human, technology and legal dimensions. The most important is the human dimension.

Though in principle we are supposed to have a politically neutral permanent civil service of the British type, what we have in practice is the spoils system of the US, without corresponding checks and balances in that country. The simple instrument, by which the political executive has found that the bureaucracy can be made to dance to its tunes, is the instrument of transfers and postings.

Vital info about the enemy, corruption, that is.

Read Java

WHERE is the `world's leading Java resource'? Try the Java Developer's Journal. "Oracle has always had a reputation of being a rather bold and some would say bullyish company," writes the editor, commenting about the company's recent claims about JRockit. Try some snatches:

The process of rendering to an off-screen image buffer to reduce animation flickering is known as `double-buffering'. The off-screen buffer is commonly referred to as the `back buffer' and the other, `front buffer' which is the area Video RAM that's read from during the refresh cycle of the monitor to set the intensities of all the pixel phosphors.

Permissions are the heart of authorisation: they control access to resources. However, the JAAS permissions are built on top of the existing Java security model. This model is good for controlling access to resources like sockets and files, but has no concept of URLs. Thus, to apply JAAS to a Web application, a new permission class must be created.

If you look at the documentation for the JDK class ThreadDeath, you'll see the following comment: "The class ThreadDeath is specifically a subclass of Error rather than Exception, even though it's a `normal occurrence', because many applications catch all occurrences of Exception and then discard the exception."

A WAP microbrowser is a software application so it's always being enhanced with new capabilities. It would be nice to be able to update the browser on the phone to the newest release and not have to buy a new phone.

In Java Data Object (JDO), any object class to be persisted needs to be PersistenceCapable, while any class that references a persistence-capable object needs to be PersistenceAware.

Be persistent, be aware.

(Books courtesy: Fountainhead, Chennai. E-mail: fhbooks@satyam.net.in)

Culture shocks

NATIONAL cultures differ along five dimensions:

The degree of integration of individuals within groups; differences in the social roles of women versus men; ways of dealing with inequality; degree of tolerance for the unknown; and the trade-off between long-term and short-term gratification of needs. Organisational cultures don't follow the same track, because they are more manageable, offering to bridge national cultures, says Geert Hofstede in his book Cultures and Organizations. More:

There is inequality in any society. Even in the most simple hunter-gatherer band, some people are bigger, stronger, or smarter than others. A higher education automatically makes one at least middle class.

In an individualist culture when people meet they feel a need to communicate verbally. Silence is considered abnormal. Social conversations can be depressingly banal, but they are compulsory.

In a collectivist culture the fact of being together is emotionally sufficient; there is no compulsion to talk unless there is information to be transferred.

In masculine countries both boys and girls learn to be ambitious and competitive, although the ambition of the girls may be directed towards the achievements of their brothers and later of their husbands and sons. In feminine countries both boys and girls learn to be non-ambitious and modest. Assertive behaviour and attempts at excelling which are appreciated in masculine cultures are easily ridiculed in feminine ones.

German students are brought up in the belief that anything which is easy enough for them to understand is dubious and probably unscientific. French academic books not infrequently contain phrases half a page long.

Intercultural communication can be taught. Some students are more gifted in learning than others. People with unduly inflated egos, a low personal tolerance for uncertainty, a history of emotional instability, or known racist or extreme political sympathies should be considered bad risks for training.

As the author emphasises, media people play a uniquely important role in creating multicultural understanding, or misunderstanding, and moulding `software of the mind'.

(Books courtesy: Landmark, Chennai. www.landmarkonthenet.com) Tailpiece

"Captain! This is First Lieutenant Joe at Saddam, er... Baghdad Primary School, Sir. The building is in tact, sir. No enemy in sight, sir."

Captain: "Blow it up, you nut. The rebuilding team is coming

hindubusinessline@hotmail.com

D. Murali

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Mother of all wars