My top takeaways from a recent seminar which I attended on Indian Law -

On the backlog of cases in the India courts* -

"I tell my clients that in India, we believe in reincarnation.  If we don’t get to deal with your case in this life, we will do in the next".

* India has a backlog of about 31 million cases pending before its various courts as at March 2010.  It will take about 360 years, by some estimates, to clear this backlog.

On the enforcement of intellectual property -

"One of the challenges of intellectual property (IP) enforcement in the smaller / rural courts is that you get judges who are only familiar with ruling on village disputes.  When I first started work I had to argue a trade marks case before a judge whose main experience was hearing complaints about buffalo theft.  How do I explain to a judge who usually hears complaints about neighbours stealing buffaloes, that someone was trying to steal my name ?"

I just love this quote which Constance Singam, former President of AWARE, borrowed from British Philosopher Stephen Law, for her article "State’s Decisions a Threat to Secular Society" (20 May 2010).  Attempting to define what a secular society is about, Stephan Law (ironically writing in a Journal called Think) proposes -

"It protects freedoms: the freedom to believe or not believe, worship or not worship. It is founded on basic principles framed independently of any particular religious, or indeed, atheist, point of view: principles to which we ought to be able to sign up whether we are religious or not."

It sounds clever but I would like to know what those principles "framed independently of any particular religious or … atheist point of view" are.  If principles are not derived from any religious view or atheist (non-religious) view, where do we get principles from ?

As the "secular society" which Constance Singam is advocating is based on the above flawed if not totally meaningless definition, I’m afraid I can’t take what she says very seriously.

On the plane to India last week I watched The Book of Eli. Not my first choice of movie fare because I’d rather watch a romantic or brain-dead comedy, like American Pie.

It turned out to be worth my time. The movie is about Eli, who has been walking west across America for 30 years. America which has become a total wasteland after a nuclear war. Blaming religion for the war, every copy of the Bible has been destroyed. Furthermore, the world has become a lawless civilization where people rape, and rob and kill for water, or for food (cannibalism), or just for fun. Eli has the final copy of the Bible, and is in his words has been guided by a higher power to protect and bring that book to a place which will use it for good.

There were several interesting themes in this movie. One being religion as a force which can be manipulated to subjugate the weak-willed. A town leader in this movie has been hunting desperately for a copy of the Bible, and he hunts Eli mercilessly for the Bible. Asked for his reason he says

"It’s not just a fucking book, it’s a weapon aimed at the hearts and minds of the weak and desperate, if we’re to rule one more small fucking town, we need that book, people will come from all over the world if the word’s from the book."

I can’t disagree with the opinion that religion can and has been used to manipulate people, sometimes for wicked ends. 

But I prefer the other theme and view proferred by the movie : how depraved humanity fundamentally is, and how depraved society can become without God. Secular humanism believes that man is better without God. Society is currently in love with the idea that we can arrive at good (or even better) decisions as individuals and as a community without the moral guidance of religion. This movie, not made by Christians, strips away the view that people are fundamentally good, and that they are better without God.

Burn the Bibles, and maybe this is how great a civilisation we’ll become.

One of the more amusing news articles I’ve read lately revolves around a Powerpoint slide.  The glorious spaghetti diagram below was presented to General McChrystal, commander of the US forces in Afghanistan, who wryly commented that "when we understand that slide, we’ll have won this war". 

In other words, perhaps some hapless lower ranked officer was expending too much time and effort in drawing up solutions to complex real world problems using one page diagrams and bullet points.  At best, a waste of time that should have been better spent shooting insurgents.  At worst, overlooking incidental but significant factors contributing to the problem or the interconnectedness of issues, thereby stifling critical thinking and thoughtful decision making.

In Singapore, there is probably no organisation so obssessed with reducing critical thought to paper, in a prescribed format, for the purposes of decision-making by its management, through an immutable and highly hierachical approval process, than its civil service.  Interestingly, I never remembered it to be so bad — though I recall attending weekly senior management meetings where ten or more "papers" were presented with Powerpoints for approval — until the Beloved started work at a pseudo civil service setup, which is sometimes the worst type of organisation to be in. 

Statutory boards and similar setups, without direct access to the senior management and policed by timid and obssessive-compulsive (former) civil servants, have all the trappings of service — the worst being mindless adherence to rules, particularly the one on leaving the brains on a sheet of paper, and the fear of making decisions without explicit approval of the king — but little opportunity to bypass the bureaucracy through an audience with the king.  So everything crawls.