Of value, costs and cost saving

I like to think that I do dare to question conventional wisdom. That was a lesson my late father taught me. Not directly, but through a book he gave me for a birthday present for my fourteenth. He never gave me anything else but a book, and then followed it with a Biriyani or an egg-hopper feed in celebration.

The book he gave me that particular day, I will never forget. To me it was a high point in my life and the memory of it is stored away in a very special place in my mind. Its title was ‘Square pegs in round holes’ and it was about greats like Galileo Galilee, Aristotle, Archimedes, Mahatma Gandhi and the like. The stories of their lives told and I learnt how each of them in different ways had defied what was accepted conventional wisdom and norm at the time.

Causes and rebels

But then, we often oppose and question things for the sake of opposing and questioning as well. Some of you who belong to my vintage will remember the landmark movie of 1955 by Nicholas Ray Rebel without a Cause. James Dean played the role of the rebellious teenager and the same year died in a car crash. He was the first actor to receive a posthumous Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and remains the only person to have two posthumous acting nominations. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Dean, the 18th best male movie star on their AFI’s 100 Years, 100 Stars list. The movie was a hit then and was a sociology class case-study at most schools and universities all over the world.

Kilinochchi meeting

Today’s rebels are not entirely without causes. The problem is that there are too many causes for them to take on. This world of ours seems since, to have taken ‘right’ turns in the wrong direction.

But that is not what I wanted to write about today. It is about how we calculate the cost of things or the benefits.

The urge to write about this phenomenon came to my mind, when I read a news item on the e-version of this newspaper (for I am momentarily away from the Motherland), where some members of the Opposition have questioned the cost of holding a Cabinet meeting in Kilinochchi.

True, the transport of all the ministers was a cost. Fresh security arrangements there would have been an additional cost. Any extra allowances for the support staff and the time taken to prepare for an out of the usual location meet would have been a cost. But look at it again. It was symbolic of our unification as a nation.

It was taking the centre of governance to an area where there are real and I mean very real needs. Giving a reality check and on the ground feel and understanding, to all in the Cabinet of Ministers was a gain.

Making them feel the urgency with which issues of the country and particularly of the North and East need to be addressed, was indeed a gain and a benefit. We ought to add a value to that and cost it into our ‘for or against’ argument of the event’s validity.

Presidential Palace

During the period of our last President, I recall news of a proposal to build a new official residence for her at a location close to the Parliament complex. The cost was to be some impressive figure that I cannot remember now. There was a huge hue and cry of that cost and it was called the ‘Presidential Palace’ by the Opposition and the project ended in a still-birth.

She continued to stay in the very heart of the business district conducting her government business. That meant that half of the Fort area was closed for normal business activity and whenever she had to move around towards any other part of the city or the country or other VVIPs came to visit her, roads had to be closed for traffic.

Opportunity costs

Imagine the cost of the fuel wasted of the vehicles in the traffic jams and the cost of the inconvenience to so many ordinary citizens. The productive time wasted of many hundreds of thousands in the buses, cars and trucks struck in those jams, year after year. The Opposition then should have calculated the cost of all of that in making their judgment call and we as a nation would have saved billions of rupees in opportunity costs if that shift was allowed.

Virtual meetings

Today, where one works from is of no importance from a productivity point of view. What is significant is the symbolic value of the action and if that will yield value as against the cost it takes to make it happen. In this day and age of info-communications, we could also have virtual meetings and significantly reduce overhead costs of such meetings.

In fact in Sri Lanka, we live in the remote village of Kiula, near the Kalametiya Bird Sanctuary and are effectively and productively connected with the rest of the world, with a relatively fast mobile broadband connection. We use Skype, Facebook, Twitter and many other tools for such communication and have a satellite TV connection also to keep in touch with happenings from around the world.

High-tech High-touch

We some times wonder why many of our politicians do not use these tools to communicate with officials and civic leaders to get the most of the ‘High-tech yet High-touch’ advantage it offers. That would greatly reduce the need for them to be at these locations to ensure that projects and programs are implemented properly, save lots of costs in fuel usage, need for powerful and fancy vehicles, security personnel and other overheads.

It will save them much time to use for other productive work and will have a very healthy impact on our national budget as well. What it would take is a little bit of getting used to such communications and stepping out of their boxes to embrace them.