The AfPak quagmire

A month ago the Register Guard published my opinion piece where I discussed political instability in the Baluch territory of Pakistan and Iran. In that, I referred to the Balochs who are yet another ethnic group whose lands got divided--in this case, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And the Baluchs have been treated as less-than-equals in these countries, which has therefore resulted in militancy in Iran and Pakistan. My concern then, and even now, is that by expanding our operations in AfPak, we might be drawn into these situations also, which is not what we want ....

A month after my piece, ahem, the NY Times has a report on "another insurgency" gaining in Pakistan. These are the kinds of instances that end up as positive feedback on my approach to understanding the world and writing about them. Anyway, the NY Times says:

Although not on the same scale as the Taliban insurgency in the northwest, the conflict in Baluchistan is steadily gaining ground. Politicians and analysts warn that it presents a distracting second front for the authorities, drawing off resources, like helicopters, that the United States provided Pakistan to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

Baluch nationalists and some Pakistani politicians say the Baluch conflict holds the potential to break the country apart — Baluchistan makes up a third of Pakistan’s territory — unless the government urgently deals with years of pent up grievances and stays the hand of the military and security services.

Kashgar, Uighurs, Kashmir, and Aryans

With Xinjiang in the news, the curious person in me started wondering whether there might be connections between Kashgar--a major Uighur city--and the name Kashmir. After all, these are all place names up there in the mountains and it is possible that they are all derived from the same clan, of sorts?

If Wikipedia can be believed, they are indeed related.

The Khasas are an ancient people, believed to be a section of the Indo-Iranians who originally belonged to Central Asia from where they had penetrated, in remote antiquity, the Himalayas through Kashgar and Kashmir and dominated the whole hilly region. They are believed to have given their names to Kashgar, Kashi (Central Asia), Kashkara, Kashmir, Khashali (south-east of Kashmir) Kashatwar, Khashdhar (Shimla Hills) and other recognizable colonies at the present day in the hills from Kashmir down to Nepal as also in various plains.

Indo-Iranians? Aryans? How interesting!

The same Wikipedia entry goes on to discuss the role of Khasas in the Mahabharata, and in the famous Kurukshetra War in that epic. (BTW, apparently a friend was talking to his brother-in-law about the Hindu mythologies, and that BIL stopped him right there with an admonition that to him those are not mythologies but real gods he believes in, and events he believes unfolded centuries ago!)

My huckleberry friend ....

Moon River, wider than a mile,
I'm crossing you in style some day.
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker,
wherever you're going I'm going your way.
Two drifters off to see the world.
There's such a lot of world to see.
We're after the same rainbow's end--
waiting 'round the bend,
my huckleberry friend,
Moon River and me.

Some more on Uighurs, and China

This time from the Economist:

The government, however, was unusually quick to restrict internet and mobile telephone communications. It has been spooked by the role of the internet during recent unrest in Iran. The Iranian opposition has sparked considerable online discussion in China, as well as disapproving coverage in the official media. Within hours of the Urumqi riot, internet access was cut across Xinjiang (the first time such a wide outage has been reported anywhere in China, even during the unrest in Tibet). International telephone calls were blocked. Within 48 hours text-messaging services were also suspended. A few broadband lines were kept open in an Urumqi hotel for the media .....

China can count on strong moral support from its Central Asian neighbours, with which it is co-operating closely to try to combat cross-border militancy. In the old alleyways of Kashgar, now being rapidly torn down as part of an urban-renewal programme that is fuelling yet more resentment among local Uighurs, official painted slogans condemn Hizb-ut-Tahrir, an Islamic group calling for a universal caliphate. The group, which has roots across China’s borders, has started to gain recruits in Xinjiang, but is not thought to be widespread. China’s efforts to establish common cause with its neighbours, and to encourage them to stamp out Uighur militancy in their own territories, may partly explain the prominence that Kashgar’s authorities give the organisation.

America feels these closer ties with Central Asian countries are being forged at its expense. But it appreciates China’s quiet support for the anti-terror campaign, including intelligence-sharing. America has no interest in supporting Uighur nationalism and exacerbating instability in an already volatile region. Xinjiang for now is one unstable Muslim area of the world where America is not a public enemy, at least among its Muslim population. It will require a skilful balance between the preservation of crucial ties with China and support for the rights of an aggrieved minority to ensure that this remains so.

As has always been the case with America's foreign policy, realpolitik will end up triumphing over principles, which means that the US will screw the Uighurs and kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party. After all, they are our economic colonizers!

More on Uighurs

James Fallows notes that:

it is a lasting error and embarrassment that after 9/11 the U.S. won Chinese government support by agreeing that Uighur separatists -- formally, the East Turkestan Liberation Organization -- should be seen as part of the world terrorist threat. After all, they are Muslims.

It is such stupid decisions by the US government that continue to fuel the Islamist view that America and the West is anti-Mulsim.

Fallows throws a damper on my hope--my hope that the collapse of the Chinese communist stronghold will be triggered by any radical youth or Tibet, but with Uighurs. He approvingly cites the NY Times op-ed:

The state apparatus has become dizzy with success in dealing with unrest. This gives little hope that further mass outbreaks will not be violently crushed. It also demonstrates that social upheaval will not pave the way to democracy. The party is too strong and confident to allow change from below.

Fallows is way more informed about China--way, way, more than me--which means that I have to kill my hopes for reform, and any hopes for the Uighurs. The world might not care because, after all, they are Muslims without oil :-(

Do professors think and say foolish things?

YES, they do. A lot more than we let the public know. Unfortunately.

Christina Hoff Sommers has a wonderful essay, again. When she writes about the lack of professional and academic integrity, I cannot think of any flaw in her argument. Her comments below, in the context of feminism, are applicable to any field:

Why should it matter if a large number of professors think and say a lot of foolish and intemperate things? Here are three reasons to be concerned:

1) False assertions, hyperbole, and crying wolf undermine the credibility and effectiveness of feminism. The United States, and the world, would greatly benefit from an intellectually responsible, reality-based women's movement.

2) Over the years, the feminist fictions have made their way into public policy. They travel from the women's-studies textbooks to women's advocacy groups and then into news stories. Soon after, they are cited by concerned political leaders. President Obama recently issued an executive order establishing a White House Council on Women and Girls. As he explained, "The purpose of this council is to ensure that American women and girls are treated fairly in all matters of public policy." He and Congress are also poised to use the celebrated Title IX gender-equity law to counter discrimination not only in college athletics but also in college math and science programs, where, it is alleged, women face a "chilly climate." The president and members of Congress can cite decades of women's-studies scholarship that presents women as the have-nots of our society. Never mind that this is largely no longer true. Nearly every fact that could be marshaled to justify the formation of the White House Council on Women and Girls or the new focus of Title IX application was shaped by scholarly merchants of hype like Professors Lemon and Seager.

3) Finally, as a philosophy professor of almost 20 years, and as someone who respects rationality, objective scholarship, and intellectual integrity, I find it altogether unacceptable for distinguished university professors and prestigious publishers to disseminate falsehoods. It is offensive in itself, even without considering the harmful consequences. Obduracy in the face of reasonable criticism may be inevitable in some realms, such as partisan politics, but in academe it is an abuse of the privileges of professorship.

"Thug," "parasite," "dangerous," a "female impersonator" — those are some of the labels applied to me when I exposed specious feminist statistics in my 1994 book Who Stole Feminism? (Come to think of it, none of my critics contacted me directly with their concerns before launching their public attacks.) According to Susan Friedman, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, "Sommers' diachronic discourse is easily unveiled as synchronic discourse in drag. ... She practices ... metonymic historiography." That one hurt! But my views, as well as my metonymic historiography, are always open to correction. So I'll continue to follow the work of the academic feminists — to criticize it when it is wrong, and to learn from it when it is right.

Oh, yes, save the whales, er, males :-)

Sommers mentions Sarah Blaffer Hrdy as one of the models for scholarship. Interestingly enough, it was yesterday that I was reading a review of a book by Hrdy--the book is an anthropological exploration into why humans might be interested in raising children who are not their own.

Save the males, part two :-)

In August of last year, I blogged that we needed to worry about the males.
Now, two significant developments--one from economics and the other from science. (No, economics is NOT a science!)

In the world of economics, in this Great Recession, it turns out that males have been losing jobs, and finding it difficult to get employed again, than what has been the female experience thus far. So much so that apparently one economist has termed this the "mancession"--"a recession that hurts men much more than women, and we are allegedly in the worst mancession in recent history"

The huge loss in manufacturing has a significant gender implication. On the other hand, services like teaching holding steady to a large extent has kinds of gender implication.

Amidst this kind of an update from economists, comes a completely surprising, though not that unexpected, news from the world of medicine--reports, which are yet to be confirmed through independent studies, that scientists have been able to create human sperm without any help from a male! To which the BBC has assembled a bunch of funny and serious responses; here is my favorite:

The Daily Telegraph's Rowan Pelling says men are redundant but worth keeping for menial tasks.

"Yet I feel compelled - and not just as the mother of two small boys - to make a spirited defence of the weaker sex. Where would I be without my husband to read 80 pages of a car manual, in French, to find out how the back windscreen-wiper works? Who would tug the dried lumps of excrement from our cat's backside? Who would explain the rules of cricket to an American? Who would clear a blocked drain of unspeakable clotted matter? Who would take hours to demonstrate the dreadnought manoeuvres at the Battle of Jutland, armed only with salt cellars and jam jars? Without men, there would be no one to read Joseph Conrad or Norman Mailer, to remove spiders from the bath, or (important one, this) to tell women they're pretty."

So, if unemployed men had so far been lining up to donate at sperm banks, the prospects are getting dimmer, eh!

Struggle of the Uighur people is quite real

In the context of violence in Xinjiang, I am "re-publishing" my opinion piece from the Register Guard (February 5, 2009):

A wonderful aspect of teaching is that it is a version of “life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re gonna get.” The latest was when students introduced themselves in one of my classes, and one said that her off-beat name reflects her Uighur heritage.

When I, from a land of a billion people, am a rare ethnic representative on campus, a Uighur student at our university was beyond my wildest imagination. So, naturally, excited am I!

Until this term, the Uighurs (also spelled Uyghurs) had been only an abstract concept to me ever since reading about Muslims in China, in the far western province of Xinjiang. Not anymore I am now able to connect this academic concept with a real person.

As a student many years ago, one of the first things I did upon reading about the Uighurs was to play my favorite game in such contexts, which is to establish a connection to India. It turned out that it was not a difficult process between India and the Uighurs there are not many degrees of separation.

In the English language, we use a word “mogul” when we refer to highly powerful businessmen. This word derives from the powerful and influential Mughal empire that ruled a large part of the Indian subcontinent, until it was replaced by the British.

The Mughal dynasty began in 1526, when Babur defeated the reigning sultan in Delhi. The empire had some of its glorious years under Akbar and Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal. Babur was descended from Timur (also known as Tamerlane), who was Turkic, with some Mongol heritage. The Uighurs also speak a Turkic language. Aha! I had linked up the Uighurs to India.

But I was not happy once I understood that the Uighurs were pretty much in the same situation that the Tibetans are, and fear the loss of language, culture and traditions under the heavy-handed rule of the Chinese government.

A reader might wonder why we should care about some 8 million Uighurs in a remote part of China. Well, we in the United States have even fewer degrees of separation, through a direct and controversial connection Guantanamo.

Soon after the U.S. and NATO forces liberated Afghanistan from the Taliban regime, the U.S. picked up a number of people while sweeping the area for Taliban and al-Qaeda militants. In the process, we apparently also picked up a few Uighurs who happened to be in that area. Their presence in Afghanistan is not that difficult to imagine, given that Xinjiang is so far out in the west of China that it borders Afghanistan.

Designated as enemy combatants, these Uighurs were confined to Guantanamo. However, as it became clear that the Uighurs were not involved with any militant activity directed against the U.S., five of them were released. But they did not want to be sent back to China out of a fear that they might be tortured there. No other country offered to take them, either except Albania, which is where they have been since their release in 2006. What a strange story of globalization!

Meanwhile, another 15 of the remaining 17 Uighurs in Guantanamo have been cleared for release, but more than a hundred countries contacted by the U.S. have refused to take them. While Uighur families in the U.S. have offered to house and help rehabilitate them, our government is not in favor of 15 Guantanamo alums living within our borders.

The status of the Uighurs in Guantanamo will soon have to be addressed by the Obama administration. The fundamental issue, though, is that the Chinese government continues with its policies of denying rights, particularly to minorities. The Tibetan story is all too familiar to us; the situation in which the Uighur are trapped in is very similar which is why it is also referred to as China’s other Tibet problem.

The slide from Timur’s expansive empire, which provided an environment for Turkic culture to flourish, to having a few of their people locked up in Guantanamo has been quite a tragic tale for the Uighur people. I suppose not everything in life’s box of chocolates is good.

Pakistan is not salvageable

I am always worried about Pakistan. And it is not because I was born in India, but because of the immense geopoloitical fallout from the Pakistan disaster.
It, therefore, feels good to know that I am in good company; here is Christopher Hitchens in an interview with The Walrus Magazine:

On a bit of a different subject, I’ve been reading your more recent columns, and in your opinion, what do the next few years hold for Pakistan?

Well, the column I’d like you to read is called “On The Frontier Of Apocalypse,” and I wrote it in late 2001 after I went out to the Afghan, Pakistan and Kashmir after 9/11, for Vanity Fair. It’s in my collection, called Love, Poetry and War. And in there I say the problem is not Afghanistan, the problem is Pakistan. And I give quite a lot of reasons why that is. If I can say it without being facetious, in the last year or so I’ve been sort of almost hysterically proven right, with people crowding around me to say “Goddamn.” I’ve had more vindication than anyone should have. The original mistake in that region was the creation of separate states. The amputation of India instead of independence; the worst thing the British empire ever did was to give way to religious sectarianism, and not promise that we were there to unify India, not divide it. A terrible betrayal, and it got worse every decade. And this decade is no exception. We will never stop paying for the mistakes of 1947-1948. It’s one of the reasons why Salman’s novel Midnight’s Children is almost better than The Satanic Verses, because it’s prescient in just the right way. So I think the endgame in Pakistan... it’s conceivable that the state has enough resources left to battle those who care more about the Muslim bit than the state bit. Pakistan’s institutions are fighting the people who take the idea of Pakistan seriously, the idea of a Muslims-only state. Boy, we are gonna pay for this. Obama has no idea.

You don’t think?

He made a glib decision, the same mistake John Kerry made, that you can’t lead an anti-war, pacifist, isolationist party into an election, that you could in essence say there’s a great war in Afghanistan and a bad one in Iraq. One is good and just and legal and winnable, and the other is none of the above. And it’s exactly to the contrary. Well, not exactly to the contrary, because of course Afghanistan is a just war and a legal one. But it’s not winnable, though, and it’s not the important battle. But because [Obama] thought this was such a clever idea, and because it worked so well with his Democratic constituents, and because it confused the Republicans, he promised a demonstration of a very private stand. I put it down in several columns before the election. His supporters have no idea how much war the president is promising. Endless, endless. So if there’s anything keeps him awake, it should be that. Because he’s either got to go through with it, and see a lot go straight down a rat-hole, or he’s got to do a scuttle that will be more humiliating than any American president has ever had to face. It’s much, much worse than the risk Bush took in Iraq. And hey, the wonderful thing is that there isn’t a single liberal in North America who understands this. Or is willing to admit it. That makes me laugh. I do not want to give up Afghanistan or Pakistan, but I do not think the state of Pakistan is salvageable.

It is a stark choice for the president.

The best thing Bush did as president, apart from removing Saddam Hussein and removing the Taliban, was to make friends with India, and shift American foreign policy away from Pakistan. I think that was a long and vastly overdue move. And he gets so little credit for it. And I think Obama should build on that. I’m not sure we can save Pakistan; I’m pretty sure we can save Iraq and defeat Al Qaeda in Iraq, and Iraq is important to us, strategically, economically. We don’t need to control Afghanistan. We need to have a say, and make sure it isn’t controlled by our deadly enemies — or that if it is, they live in constant fear. But anyway.

If Pakistan falls, then Afghanistan falls too?

Well, the British partition lines, I’m an expert — well, I’m not an expert, but I know more than most people do — but the British drew the lines of partition in Kashmir, which is where Pakistan once raised fight with India; they drew the Durand line, which is what separates Afghanistan and Pakistan; it runs through Pashtunistan, as you know; they drew the other line separating India from Bangladesh, which used to be East Pakistan. I thought all of those lines were lines in the sand, they were very well positioned. Fighting to keep them going any longer is very problematic. There are large bits of Pakistan that wouldn’t submit, I think ever, to Taliban rule, and of Afghanistan too. They’ve come up against some really tough opposition from people who’ve never put up with them.

But not the region they’ve just been handed.

What, the Swat valley? No. No one fought the war on that. Swat is like giving the Christian Coalition Northern California. There’s a difference between fundamentalist rule in an area like this, and having a launching pad for jihad. They just took it as their due, most of the inhabitants ran away, and then they used it to try and attack the capital city. And they’re twenty miles from where the [nuclear] reactor is.

President Obama Still Smoking

What do people think about this?

YouTube is free. Who foots the bill?

[An] estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other.

So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap. To recap: YouTube is a great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising YouTube’s ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat from the “abundance thinking” that lies at the heart of Free. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.

That was by Malcolm Gladwell, in his review of Chris Anderson's Free.

So, what is the rationale for Google bleeding half a billion dollars on YouTube? Google would not discuss details. So, apparently it is one big guessing game.

Anyway, Google and YouTube is not the focus of Gladwell's piece. He points out:

[Information] does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.

And there’s plenty of other information out there that has chosen to run in the opposite direction from Free. The Times gives away its content on its Web site. But the Wall Street Journal has found that more than a million subscribers are quite happy to pay for the privilege of reading online. Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine. Apple may soon make more money selling iPhone downloads (ideas) than it does from the iPhone itself (stuff). The company could one day give away the iPhone to boost downloads; it could give away the downloads to boost iPhone sales; or it could continue to do what it does now, and charge for both. Who knows? The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.

Asia isnt rising, and America aint setting soon

Over at Foreign Policy, Minxin Pei writes about the rise of "Chindia" and the decline of America:

Don't believe the hype about the decline of America and the dawn of a new Asian age. It will be many decades before China, India, and the rest of the region take over the world, if they ever do.

These are my feelings too. I hope to visit China in 2010. India, I am convinced, is more a paper elephant than a real one. This is a country that does not even systematic trash collection, or storm water drainage, and with almost 400 million poor. I am reminded of the old SNL skit: Dukakis points to Bush and remarks something like, "I can't believe I am losing to this guy." Dukakis lost, but I don't see the US losing to Chindia.

A few months ago, the Economist noted this:

To make a serious dent in poverty, India needs to keep up economic growth of around 8% a year. In the medium term that should not be too difficult. More impressive even than the success of India’s best companies is the zest for business shown by millions of Indians in dusty bazaars and slum-shack factories. They are truly entrepreneurs. It is no coincidence, as is often noted, that Indians have prospered everywhere outside India.

But India’s task remains daunting. Some 65% of Indians live on agriculture, which accounts for less than 18% of GDP. Shifting them to more productive livelihoods—and so reducing poverty—would be hard even if the number of people of working age was not growing so fast. Roughly 14m Indians are now being added to the labour market each year, and that number is rising. Half of India’s people are under 25 and 40% under 18 (see chart 2). They cannot all work for Infosys. Indeed, because of India’s historic underinvestment in education, many are not obviously skilled at anything. By one estimate, which may be optimistic, only 20% of job-seekers have had any sort of vocational training. If India cannot find employment for this lot, poverty will not be reduced and India may face serious instability.

I liked the following lines by Pei--a wonderfully insightful play with words:

Dictatorships are good at concealing the problems they create while democracy is good at advertising its defects.

Will we be able to feed 9.5 billion people?

The Aspen Ideas Festival is over. You nor I went to that one means that apparently we did not have ideas that anybody wanted to listen to, or we did not have the money to listen to those with ideas! Oh well ....

James Fallows was one of those that the attendees wanted to listen to, and has blogged about a session he moderated; it was on "Feeding the World's Billions." Fallows writes:

Sample alarming fact: if the world population eventually tops out at 9.5 billion, 50% more than now, total food production will probably have to grow by 200%, as people eat higher up the food chain and demand more and more meat. The challenge, as several panelists put it, was to produce three times as much food on no more than the current amount of agricultural land. (About why it won't just work to cut down all remaining forests to grow food, see here.)

Sample specific solution-possibilities, or at least interesting facts: Average yields in U.S. farms are roughly three times as high as the overall average for Mexico, India, and Brazil. If those countries got to even two-thirds of the US level, it would make a huge difference in closing the "grain gap." Also: a huge share of the world's food output is wasted -- in the developing world because it rots and spoils before it can get to market, and in the US to a significant degree because of restaurant waste. Thus easy opportunities for gain.

I am sure the neo-Malthusians will be all over this one in no time at all ....

Thailand and India stealing America’s medical mojo

“We needed a visa to go to India, but not to come here. So, we came to Thailand for medical treatment.”

So said a couple from Dubai, with whom I shared a table while we were on a cruise boat down the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok from the historic ruins of Ayutthaya.

After completing the medical procedures, the young husband and wife from Dubai had been vacationing in and around Bangkok for a week, which is when I met them. They represent very well the rapidly growing medical tourism market, into which India has jumped as well.

The previous day, I spent almost three hours in Bumrungrad Hospital, which is in one of the busiest areas of Bangkok — not as a patient, but as an observer curious about the globalized health care market.

The multistoried building is impressive even from the outside. Even the healthy options in the food court reflected the multinational customer base, with visitors and patients’ families invited to choose among varieties ranging from Lebanese to American foods.

And, yes, there is a Starbucks, too!

Bumrungrad is a hospital that offers as much as, or sometimes even more than, what some of the best hospitals in the United States have to offer, but for much lower fees. Its certification from the Joint Commission International speaks for the quality of medical professionals, technology and care.

In fact, it was the first hospital in Asia to have met the American standards for hospital accreditation.

The success of Bumrungrad, and the potential for an ever-expanding international health care market, has catalyzed the growth of a similar industry in India. According to one estimate, India treated about 450,000 foreign patients in 2007 alone. However, reliable data on precise numbers of medical tourists are hard to obtain for a number of reasons; for one, it is quite likely that a foreigner might not want to explicitly state that medical treatment is the reason for a visit, because of worries that the visa application will be denied.

Wockhardt Hospital and Apollo Hospitals, both with highly qualified staff and some of the latest technologies, are examples in India. Wockhardt has partnered with Harvard Medical International, while Apollo operates hospitals not only in India but even in Africa.

With six of its 43 hospitals having been accredited by Joint Commission, Apollo has the largest number of accredited facilities outside the United States. The male half of the Dubai couple remarked that his father prefers going to India because of better service and, interestingly enough, for the tastier foods.

An important aspect of medical tourism is not discussed much in America — the United States was the true pioneer for medical tourism. It used to attract patients from all over the world because of its dominance with the latest and sophisticated health care. But now, patients from Asia and Africa can choose from facilities such as Bumrungrad or Apollo, which compete to provide American-­quality health care at lower prices — sometimes as low as one-third of American prices.

As with many other products and services, the rest of the world is racing to catch up with America. I am, therefore, less worried about a potential outflow of American patients to Thailand or India, but more concerned that America might have lost her groove.

Finally, medical tourism highlights a profound contradiction — quality health care is available for those who are able to afford it, irrespective of where they live, even as many millions lack access to basic health care. India’s Planning Commission notes that public expenditures are a very small fraction of the nation’s total health care expenditures.

In other words, health care is a highly privatized economic activity in India, where the number of poor exceeds the entire population of the United States. This highly privatized nature immediately implies that the poor, who cannot afford to spare a rupee, have practically no health care at all.

I suppose to a large extent, the health care problems in Thailand or India are no different from what we are struggling with in the United States — how to guarantee a minimum level of health coverage to citizens, while making sure that any such framework does not take away the incentives for further progress in the research, development, and provision of advanced health care. I hope that we in the United States can set a successful example for the rest of the world.

For The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Monday, Jul 6, 2009

Violence in Uighur territory of China

The presence of a student of Uighur ethnicity sparked me to write about them--particularly in the context of Guantanamo.
A few days ago, I read this compelling essay by Parag Khanna. When I read about Urumqi in that essay, I emailed that student--now a former student since her transfer--whose family is from that city.

I had hoped for a debate/discussion between this student and another student--an alum now--who was a Han Chinese from China. I told them that if they were not comfortable with a public setting, well, we could discuss Xinjiang in my office. But, that did not come to pass.

My interest in this is because I was confident that while the world was fixated with Tibet and the Tiananmen Square, it is Xinjiang where there will be real tensions. And, for all we know, the tight grip that the Communist Party has on the country will crumble only starting with Xinjiang. Of course, the latest news could very well be nothing more than a flash in the pan. But, I think we ought to spend time covering this news item, and understanding the issues. According to the BBC:

Several hundred people have also been arrested after the violence erupted in the city of Urumqi on Sunday.

Xinhua news agency said police restored order after demonstrators attacked passers-by and set fire to vehicles.

The protest was reportedly prompted by a deadly fight between Uighurs and Han Chinese in southern China last month.

The BBC's Chris Hogg in Shanghai says that if the numbers of dead are to be believed - and state media say they may rise - this looks like the bloodiest suppression of protest in China since Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.

I am all the more concerned about this development because these are the kind of opportunities that keep alive groups like al-Qaeda. Those maniacs can easily spin this as a situation where "godless" communists are wiping out Muslims because of their beliefs and practices. A few convinced graduates of the fundamentalist madrassahs in Pakistan and Afghanistan will try to sneak across the border into China, and soon we can have yet another crazy place on the planet. And, by the same token, and unfortunately, the legitimate demands of the Uighurs will get pushed into the background.

Stay tuned.

Facebook.Students.Teachers.Friends?

I created a Facebook account some time ago merely to understand what the fuss was all about. Then, a few months ago, I started using it (kind of) when I realized that it was the best way to keep in touch with a friend back from my high school days. And before I knew it even students emailed me to add me as a "friend" .... I find it kind of strange to read status updates about students who do what students do, while I am glad those days are far behind me :-) Thankfully, because I am in a university setting, I don't run into the kind of ethical issues as in the following one from the NY Times Magazine:

My friend is a popular eighth-grade teacher. She has a Facebook account and has been “friended” by many of her students, who make their pages available to her. Consequently, she has learned a lot about them, including the inevitable under-age drinking and drug use and occasional school-related mischief like cheating on tests or plagiarizing assignments. Must she report any of this to the school, the police or the parents? The school has no policy for dealing with this modern problem. A.S., NEW YORK

This teacher should respond to students apt to get themselves into trouble, and the most significant peril you describe may not be a little teenage drinking or recreational drug use but the public exposure of this “mischief.” Your friend has a chance to teach these students about Internet privacy or the lack of it. She should carpe that diem. Were she simply to bust these online doofuses, she would squander a chance to convey something of lasting importance and leave them feeling that she had betrayed their trust. In short, her essential role is educator, not cop.

Strictly speaking, when these students gave her access to their Facebook pages, they waived their right to privacy. But that’s not how many kids see it. To them, Facebook and the like occupy some weird twilight zone between public and private information, rather like a diary left on the kitchen table. That a photo of drunken antics might thwart a chance at a job or a scholarship is not something all kids seriously consider. This teacher can get them to think about that.

She might send e-mail messages to transgressing students, noting their misdeeds and reminding them of their vulnerability. Or she could address her entire class, citing (anonymous) examples of student escapades. Or she could encourage her school to include a regular instructional session on the Internet and its pitfalls.

This is not to advocate turning a blind eye to bad behavior. It is to establish priorities. If a kid is in genuine danger, she should intervene swiftly. When students violate academic standards, she should warn them sternly — in her first e-mail message — that the lesson has been conveyed, there are no more free passes and henceforth they can expect her to respond vigorously to anything she learns online.

Your friend should also think about the boundaries she maintains between herself and her students. It is great that they can confide in her as long as she remembers that “confide in” is different from “gossip with,” and that she is their teacher, not their pal, a necessary distinction if she is to be effective as the former.

The death of the newspapers.

It is not an exaggeration by any means. Megan McArdle writes:

Journalism is not being brought low by excess supply of content; it's being steadily eroded by insufficient demand for advertising pages. For most of history, most publications lost money, or at best broke even, on their subscription base, which just about paid for the cost of printing and distributing the papers. Advertising was what paid the bills. To be sure, some of that advertising is migrating to blogs and similar new media. But most of it is simply being siphoned out of journalism altogether. Craigslist ate the classified ads. eHarmony stole the personals. Google took those tiny ads for weird products. And Macy's can email its own damn customers to announce a sale.

We could herd every new media type into camps and force them to become shorthand/typists, and newspapers would still be in just as bad shape as they are now. We could take down Google News, and it would barely register in their bottom lines. Even if every newspaper and magazine in the country entered into a binding cartel agreement not to put more than a smidgen of free content on their websites, newspapers would still be losing money, and closing by the dozens. It's the economics, stupid.

We're not witnessing the breakup of a monopoly, in which more players make more modest incomes providing more stuff, and everyone flourishes (except the monopolist). We're witnessing the death of a business model. And no one has figured out how to pay for hard news. Hard news stories take a great deal of time to write--more time than most amateurs can afford, which is why blogs tend to do opinion rather than journalism. Moreover, they are at least greatly improved when their authors are not worried about losing their jobs if what they write pisses off a local power broker.

This is a genuine loss for the American public.

Yes, it is a genuine loss. Papers, particularly local papers, if they do good work, can be wonderful for the local communities. And, many of them do. As they close shop, I wonder what will happen.

Will mothers attend the Copenhagen climate conference?

Visualize this: the temperature outside is 105 degrees, with about 80 percent relative humidity. And there is no electricity supply, which means no air-conditioning. That was my experience on the third day after arriving in Chennai, which is India’s fourth largest city with more than seven million people.

I suppose I have been spoilt by the temperate conditions in the paradise that the Willamette Valley is and am no longer able to bear the weather conditions in which I spent the first twenty-two years of my life. Power supply eventually resumed after a few hours. After a couple more days in Chennai, I headed to the cooler temperatures of Mysore to, at least temporarily, escape from the heat and humidity. As I was walking around a little after the sun went down in Mysore, everything turned dark because of load shedding. With the entire area in darkness, the well lit Royal Palace stood out as a fantastic spectacle to behold, while being simultaneously a symbol of India’s paradoxical problem of shortages and consumption.

When I wrote in this paper a few months ago about energy and water problems in India, I had no idea I would experience the shortage within a short time. In addition to the power shortage, there are widespread worries about water shortage as well because the monsoon is delayed, and is expected to be below-normal.

A below-normal monsoon might well be the proverbial last straw to this country of a billion that has managed to weather the Great Recession without too many problems. Agriculture, which is mostly rain-fed, will have significantly lower productivity as a result.

Electricity generation will drop as well with a decrease in hydro-power. Like China, India too will ramp up its consumption of coal in order to produce electricity in order to try to keep pace with the dizzying growth in demand. Which means a larger carbon dioxide emission from the power plants.

There will be a lot more of carbon dioxide—from automobiles. One report suggests that automobile sales can be expected to double in the next fifteen years. Tata Motors, the manufacturer of the much talked about Nano—the $2,000 car—has enough orders to keep it going for years. It is the same Tata that is also the owner of the upscale Jaguar and Land Rover, which it has introduced into the Indian markets.

Meanwhile, Nepali and Indian scientists have been collecting and analyzing data on glaciers and glacial lakes in the Himalayas. Preliminary reports indicate that the lakes have become larger. Yet, this is no cause for celebration, and is a reason to worry because the increased size of the lakes comes from glaciers that are melting.

All these experiences from this trip thus far are valuable indicators on the intense arguments that are forthcoming when the world gathers later this year in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

It is clear that the energy needs of India are immense, and will continue to grow at dizzying rates that will match China’s. We can expect both these countries to continue to state at the conference that advanced countries are higher polluters on a per-capita basis and that, therefore, should share a larger burden than the much poorer India and China, which are low per-capita polluters. I am confident that Bob Doppelt, who has been writing in these pages about climate change issues, will agree with me that India and China will press hard the case that slowing down their economic growth rates will not be politically or morally feasible for them.

At a casual dinner table conversation about Chennai's pollution levels, my parents asked me whether America, too, polluted a lot. It was a tough question in many ways. For one, I was representing America at the table. And, as an academic, I am expected to be “neutral” and stick to the facts. I gave them examples, from places where I have lived, of how America also polluted its way to economic prosperity—from how even the Willamette River was a convenient dumping ground to how Los Angeles used to be even dirtier than what it is now.

I then added that the old American model is not sustainable. America has got to change its habits, and other countries need to avoid the unsustainable aspects of the American model. Well, if my dinner table conversation is an indicator, then maybe the Copenhagen meetings will be successful only if it is attended by a lot more mothers.