How to choose an Indian idol

A country with a billion people to choose from can lead to two attitudes. One is to accept with good cheer that there will be unimaginably vast amounts of talent, available for practically anything that needs to be done "" from being plumber to president. The other is to ignore this simple fact. If it is the first, locating the best person becomes a bounden duty; if not, it can become a tiresome chore to be avoided by leaving it to some arbitrary process.

Going step by step, the process of choosing the very best from a huge pool of talent has to consist, first, of defining the objective function; second, of devising the proper incentives for all players; and third, of ensuring that there are many judges who do the judging in a multi-dimensional format by considering the record. The secret of making the best choice lies eventually in ruthlessly eliminating those who are not good enough to achieve the objective function.

An excellent demonstration of how well these rules work can be found on the entertainment channels. Almost all of them run singing contests, for example, Indian Idol on Sony TV and SaReGaMaPa on Zee. These reveal what amazing talent is available in India. The competitors are all small-town kids, in the 18-22 age group, and they sing like professionals.

Gone, it is clear, are the days of the near-monopoly when a Kishore Kumar, a Mohammad Rafi, a Lata Mangeshkar or an Asha Bhosle sang nearly 90 per cent of the songs. Today, music composers and directors have around 50 voices to pick from and, thanks to the contests, the pool is deepening and widening.

The trick, it is evident to those who watch these programmes, is to emphasise elimination, not selection. This distinction holds the key because when you emphasise elimination, you look for even the slightest flaw and eliminate. In that sense these programmes are about as Darwinian as you can get, because only the very fittest survive. And that is how the perfect person for a role is found. But if you don't emphasise elimination and focus on a woolly vasudhaiva kutumbakam sort of approach, errors can increase in a progressive fashion.

Indian cricket provides a good example. Until television money diluted it, the objective function for playing for India was easy to understand and maximise: pick only those who score lots of runs and take lots of wickets over a period of at least three years on different grounds in India. One-day cricket diluted this by first introducing and then increasing the weighting for fielding, and TV money increased the importance of zonal quotas.

The net result has been the selection of teams that are not the best; the result is that the system relies excessively on a few individuals to carry the team with them. That the only real star to emerge on the scene in the last decade is Mahendra Singh Dhoni tells the story.

It is always hard to apply the rules of a meritocratic context to the amorphous world of politics, where the rules that exist usually give way to short-term expediency. Nevertheless, it is sad to say that Indian politics has also fallen victim to this problem, where elimination of the unfit does not happen.

It was not always thus, but the equivalent of TV money in cricket and the combination of this with the equivalent of zonal quotas in the form of coalitions, has done the damage. And as the UPA's choice of a candidate for President shows, the equivalent of fielding has become the main criterion, eclipsing batting and bowling or, in terms of singing, the ability to hold a note. What a pity.