A tale of two countries and their catastrophes

Writes Pankaj Mishra:

India may have been passive after the Mumbai attacks. But India has not launched wars against either abstract nouns or actual countries that it has no hope of winning or even disengaging from. Another major terrorist assault on our large and chaotic cities is very probable, but it is unlikely to have the sort of effect that 9/11 had on America.
This is largely because many Indians still live with a sense of permanent crisis, of a world out of joint, where violence can be contained but never fully prevented, and where human action quickly reveals its tragic limits. The fatalism I sense in my village may be the consolation of the weak, of those powerless to shape the world to their ends. But it also provides a built-in check against the arrogance of power — and the hubris that has made America’s response to 9/11 so disastrously counterproductive.

The Middle Eastern financial earthquake from Dubai

A few days ago, I told my colleague that we are only an event away from a double-dip-recession .... the much feared w-shaped recession and recovery. 

I thought that the second dip would result from an event in the Middle East--Iran, or the Israel-Palestine issue, or Iraq.  

But, could Dubai's sovereign default reverse any recovery and slide us down a second recessionary dip?  

What sayeth Krugman?

First, there’s the view that this is the beginning of many sovereign defaults, and that we’re now seeing the end of the ability of governments to use deficit spending to fight the slump. That’s the view being suggested, if I understand correctly, by the Roubini people and in a softer version by Gillian Tett.
Alternatively, you can see this as basically just another commercial real estate bust. Either you view Dubai World as nothing special, despite sovereign ownership, as Willem Buiter does; or you think of the emirate as a whole as, in effect, a highly leveraged CRE investor facing the same problems as many others in the same situation.
Finally, you can see Dubai as sui generis. And really, there has been nothing else quite like it.
At the moment, I’m leaning to a combination of two and three. For what it’s worth (not much), US bond prices are up right now, suggesting that the Dubai thing hasn’t raised expectations of default.
Anyway, we continue to live in interesting times.

Horrible times.  If only our collective madness hadn't found it worthwhile to invest a gazillion dollars in crazy developments

Not from Monty Python, but from Senator James Inhofe

From the NY Times Magazine: (in bold are the questions, and his responses follow)

You think the detainees at Guantánamo eat better than you do?
I’m talking about before they got in there, what they ate back in Yemen or wherever they came from. One of the big problems is they become obese when they get here because they’ve never eaten that good before. Can you tell me one reason to close Gitmo?
Because it’s on foreign soil, where prisoners don’t have the same legal rights as prisoners tried here, and we want to apply the same laws to everybody.
You want to apply the same laws to terrorists that are captured as you do to criminals in America?
Yes.
Wow.
Because we have to take the high road as Americans.
I see. That’s an interesting concept.

Video for the day: "Twist and Shout" from Ferris Bueller :-)

Mobile phone ops in Tanzania: a story of globalization by itself

Kuwait-based Zain Group has awarded Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) a five-year outsourcing contract to manage and upgrade its mobile networks in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

So, a corporation based in Kuwait is responsible for the mobile phone operations in Tanzania--and Kenya, and Uganda.  And this corporation awards the contract for the day-to-day management to Nokia Siemens, the global headquarters for which are in, Finland I assume!

The eternally curious guy that I am, I thought I would explore who actually runs Nokia Siemens. 

Laugh not: the CEO is Rajeev Suri.  Of course, not only an Indian name, the guy is from India :-)  And the second in command there? Ashish Chowdhary.  Turns out Suri is three years younger than me, and Chowdhary is one year older than me.  It is because of such reasons that my parents for a long time could not understand why I ditched electrical engineering when quite a few from my cohort--the larger sense--were raking in money like crazy, even at a middle management level. 

It is one crazy world, man, one crazy world!

Delhi, globalization, and ..... the Ramayana? and Freud?

‘You know about the Oedipus complex? Freud said this was the universal condition of young men: they unconsciously want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers. That’s the source of revolutionary energy – you kill your father symbolically by rejecting all his values and finding new ones. But I don’t think this applies to Indian men. I would analyse Indian men in terms of what I call the Rama complex. In the epic poem Ramayana, Rama gives up the throne that is rightfully his and submits himself to enormous suffering in order to conform to the will of his father. Indian men don’t wish to kill their fathers, they wish to become them; they wish to empty themselves out of everything that has not come from their fathers.’

That was from an essay in Granta.
I thought it was about time I re-visited Granta; I do that every once in a while.  I don't understand why I do that though.  Because, rarely do I find essays or fiction that resonate with me.  The poems there are, well, like the essays--way too pretentious.
Well, I know why I visit Granta--occasionally I come across a piece like the one on Pondicherry.  And because I still carry a torch for the kind of issues that are normally addressed only by the lefty-left and the greenies.
Anyway, back to this quote and the essay itself ... I wonder if any of the "Indian" readers have anything to say about the quote, and the entire essay too .... anybody? :-)  

Thanksgiving: "fat" chart of the day

A sense of humor at the White House

This is a change I can definitely live with.  Cool. (ht)

East African Community--signs of hope

I think back in India we still have a couple of stamps in our collection that refer to the Kenya-Uganda-Tanzania alliance that later collapsed.  Now, the alliance is regrouping, with Rwanda and Burundi also in the mix.  Good for them, I say.  You--the reader--ought to be happy too.  (editor: what makes you think that this blog actually has readers?  Well, the site traffic data?) 

The note accompanying the photo at the source reads:
Leaders of the Eastern African Community sign the common market treaty

Of course, this will not be a common market when I am there in Tanzania in, oh my freaking life, two weeks!!! 


It was interesting to read in that news item the following quote:

"From 36 million people in the Kenyan market we are moving to 126 million. The impact is going to be great," said Vimal Shah, the chief of a giant Kenyan beverages and food manufacturer.
"We cannot remain an island anymore. The key now is to become competitive."

Vimal Shah! 
How much ever I am familiar with the idea that there are people of Indian origin scattered all over the planet, it continues to amaze me that it is such a global group.  When I was young--a long time ago--a new kid (Belliappa) who joined our school had spent a couple of years in Kenya because his dad was working there.  That might have been the first time I came face-to-face with what was otherwise merely  news reports.  I wonder what that guy is up to now .... 

From Neyveli to America to Tanzania ..... I would not have imagined such a life journey .... awesome!

Remembrance of things past--Thanksgiving

The following was published in the Register Guard, back in 2007:

Given my accent and distinctly ethnic appearance, it is not any surprise when students ask me whether I celebrate Thanksgiving.  To me, the answer is a no-brainer: of course, yes.

If unable to shake off the teacher within me, I might then use the students’ question as a learning opportunity and ask them whether Native Americans and African Americans will be thrilled about Thanksgiving, and whether their responses could be different from how the movies depict the day.  “Would you be thankful if you had been brought over as a slave, or if your people were practically wiped off the face of the earth?” is my typical probing question. 

As I see their eyes glaze over, perhaps even regretting broaching this topic with me, I lighten it up with my old joke that the best thing about inviting me to Thanksgiving supper is that I am simultaneously both an Indian and an American. 

As is the case with me, there is a good chance that to most of us Thanksgiving has expanded beyond the notion of remembering the meal that the early settlers had with Native Americans.  Now, Thanksgiving is a day for families to get together, with a common theme of feeling grateful for the good things over the year.

In such an understanding, I would think that “giving thanks” is a universal notion, irrespective of histories, cultures, and traditions.  I cannot imagine people in any culture not being thankful for surviving yet another day, or for enjoying life with people they cherish. 

I am sure my parents tried drilling into me such a concept of life when I was young and, like most kids, I probably ignored their comments and rolled my eyeballs way up.  In any case, every other day it seemed like we had a religious event to thank any one of the thousands of Hindu gods and to pray for the continuation of the good things. 

My grandmother, though, was always a tad hesitant to loudly recognize the good things out of a fear that this might trigger the onset of unfortunate events.  “Don’t laugh too much,” she warned, “because you will end up crying.”  Having experienced too many unfortunate events, including the death of her husband when she was only eighteen and when her son—my father—was barely a month old infant, my grandmother had enough reasons to be cautiously optimistic.

While a day for giving thanks does not seem to have become quite global, Valentine’s Day, on the other hand, is one of the few that has caught on almost all over the world.  We might think this is a great idea—“make love, not war”—but, apparently even saying “I love you” can cause controversies.  In India the fanatically minded Hindu nationalists protested Valentine’s Day celebrations because “it is a Western concept”. 

Yes, it is an irony that India, which is known to many in the west only for a much misunderstood Kama Sutra, has quite a few who think celebrating love is not Indian.  In a letter to a moderate mainstream newspaper last February, one reader suggested that “to avoid further controversy, the government should restrict, if not control, the celebrations.”  I suppose the Hindu god of love, Kama, ought to be thanked for making sure that sanity prevailed.  Of course, love triumphs, and people in urban India seem to have latched on to Valentine’s Day. 

Perhaps the reason for why a day of giving thanks is not as universal as it ought to be lies in lighthearted remarks of a friend, an immigrant herself—she tried to convince me that Thanksgiving is the day that husbands buy gifts for their wives.  Could it be that a day to give thanks has not caught on, as much as Valentine’s Day has, because there is no gift-giving associated with it?  If that is indeed the case, then I have yet another reason to be thankful for.

Above all, I am eternally thankful for having had the opportunity to immigrate to, and become a citizen of, this wonderful country, and then to move to the paradise that the Willamette Valley is.  I suspect that my family has an additional reason to offer thanks—that over the years I have resisted the urge to bake a tandoori turkey!

Billion-plus in the dark, while we energy hogs whine

Get this:

An estimated 79 percent of the people in the Third World -- the 50 poorest nations -- have no access to electricity, despite decades of international development work. The total number of individuals without electric power is put at about 1.5 billion, or a quarter of the world's population, concentrated mostly in Africa and southern Asia.
The 1.5 billion figure represents an improvement over previous years, but not because of any concerted effort to expand power connections. Rather, it is a consequence of rapid urbanization with populations moving to electricity and not the other way around, said Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist.
"This is very bad and is something that the energy community and others should be ashamed of," Birol said. The amount of electricity consumed in one day in all sub-Saharan Africa, minus South Africa, is about equal to that consumed in New York City, an indicator of the huge gap in electricity usage in the world.

In case you missed that last sentence, let me repeat that quote:

The amount of electricity consumed in one day in all sub-Saharan Africa, minus South Africa, is about equal to that consumed in New York City

We don't talk enough about this HUGE imbalance. I suppose it is because we will feel guilty as a result; denial helps, eh!

But, these are the kind of issues that will bubble up at Copenhagen and other conferences.  My metaphorical hat is off to people who bring such issues to our attention:

about 2.5 billion people globally subsist on wood or charcoal. With so much attention on the energy consumption habits of larger economies in the climate talks, the report's authors say they worry that the plight of those without any modern power is being willfully ignored. A quarter of the world is disconnected from debates over clean energy "because their reality is much more basic than that," said UNDP's director of development planning, Olav Kjørven.

This map of the world shows the artificial light used in the night--a measure of electricity usage.

India news all the time? Slow down, please ....

Way too much about India .... First, here is a groaner (at least according to my students!): Looks like Obama has advanced the Thanksgiving dinner, but wait, he has invited the wrong Indian to a state dinner at the White House ... ha ha ha

What do you expect here; this is not a comedy show!

So, Manmohan Singh is visiting the US and is dining with the Prez.  I don't know if this was the only date open in Obama's calendar, or whether this was a calculation to get Singh's input as well into the Afghanistan decisionmaking.  If these two were reasons, great.

If not, it is really lousy timing.  Why?

For one, the release of the report after what seemed like a gazillion years of investigation into the destruction of the Babri Masjid by Hindu fanatics.  Even Time has a rather lengthy report on it:

Even as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh arrived in Washington Monday to represent an India emerging as a cosmopolitan economic powerhouse, his parliament sent an ugly reminder that the world's largest democracy has a dark side: Both chambers of India's parliament have had to be adjourned repeatedly over the past two days amid a furor over leaked findings of a judicial inquiry into the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in 1992. The mosque was destroyed by Hindu extremists in order to rebuild a Hindu temple that had stood on the same site hundreds of years earlier, and it triggered a wave of Hindu-Muslim violence that left more than 2,000 people dead.

Hmm.... and the prime minister is out of the country.

Ok, understandable if Obama's calendar or the Afghan situation warranted it.

I am not sure when Singh returns to India, because November 26th is a day that I think he ought to be in the country.  The photo on the left is eerie, even after all these months.
When I went to India a few months ago, during the couple of days I was in Bombay (yes, I way prefer this to Mumbai!) I swung by two of the sites of that horrible terrorist acts--the Taj hotel, and the railway station

Making (non)sense of healthcare reform

When a pretentious and half-baked nincompoop like me in the academic backwaters of a state that is often mispronounced has opinions on healthcare reform, then surely the Dean of Harvard's Medical School has opinions on this, right?  And when it comes down to it, I bet this Dean's explanations on what the reform entails will have more credibility than mine; wouldn't you think so too?

Which is why I am worried about some of the points that this Dean raises:

In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system. The system we have now promotes fragmented care and makes it more difficult than it should be to assess outcomes and patient satisfaction. The true costs of health care are disguised, competition based on price and quality are almost impossible, and patients lose their ability to be the ultimate judges of value.
Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern.
In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult.

All too confusing this healthcare reform is.  So, as always, I turned to the only real source of news and wisdom: The Onion:

Anonymous Philanthropist Donates 200 Human Kidneys To Hospital

Photo of the day .... India ... again? :-)

Cell phones have revolutionized India.  Every visit, I am simply amazed at how much of a market penetration they have achieved. 
With innovative and unique plans and calling strategies.  The first time I heard a driver tell me "give me a missed call, sir" it took me a few nanoseconds of conscious processing of that statement to figure out what he meant.  It made sense once I got used to that logic :-)
Or calling plans where one can only receive calls, but cannot make any.  Comes in handy for the much poorer folks who are keen on finding work--if only somebody would let them know where the job is.  Bingo--cellphone with receive only calling plans.

Despite the evil Murdoch taking over the WSJ, the paper continues to do some decent reporting.  Today's paper had a neat feature on cell phone usage in India, which is where this photo is from.  I think believe that cell phones have played a fantastic role in the economic and social transformation of India--way, way more than what Doordarshan and Hum Log managed to accomplish.  Good for them.

Climate change: outcrazy the crazies :-)

Meanwhile at Government Motors, er, at GM ...

You know what attracted me to this op-ed in the NY Times?  The leader "Portland, Ore."  To think that a NY Times op-ed on GM would be authored from somebody here in Oregon .... I was trapped :-)

It was a bad, bad idea for the government to run this automobile sinkhole company.  Anyway, we are where we are.  This op-ed argues that:

Maintaining a majority stake in a struggling G.M. as the 2012 election approaches will only increase the liability. If G.M. has to use taxpayer money to bail out Opel and Daewoo, its Korean division (which lost billions on currency speculation, no less), the issue of bailout money being sent abroad will undoubtedly be a campaign issue.
G.M.’s global interests are far too diverse for it to serve its taxpayer owners faithfully, and it can’t afford to subjugate its business prerogatives to the political needs of its major shareholder in the White House. So, unless Americans develop a sudden obsession with G.M.’s $40,000 Volt electric car just in time for an I.P.O., taxpayers will be stuck with tens of billions of dollars in losses.

I wonder if the logic is why worry about tens of billions of dollars in debt, when we are piled high in gazillions of dollars of debt.

Speaking of debt, Paul Krugman chips in with we have no reason to worry; after all, Belgium, which will soon preside over the EU, is mired in a lot of debt, and provides this chart.

Ahem, while what was good for GM 60 years ago might have been good for the US then, what is good for Belgium being good for the US now?  Seriously, what happened to Krugman?

And, another page in the NY Times wants us to be afraid, really really afraid, of the debt situation:

With the national debt now topping $12 trillion, the White House estimates that the government’s tab for servicing the debt will exceed $700 billion a year in 2019, up from $202 billion this year, even if annual budget deficits shrink drastically. Other forecasters say the figure could be much higher.
In concrete terms, an additional $500 billion a year in interest expense would total more than the combined federal budgets this year for education, energy, homeland security and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So, who you gonna believe? :-)

The autonomous jihad in America

The ending sentence in this opinion piece is an attention getter that should have been the opening sentence:

Once distant enemies now pose a real threat to the U.S. at home.

Now, before you jump to conclusions, no, the opinion piece is not in the context of the incident at Fort Hood.  In fact, the essay makes no mention of Texas, or Fort Hood, or Hasan.  Which is why the piece is all the more interesting.  I have no idea about the data in the column, but the publication is a reliable one.
And, you know what?  It is not any war-obsessive right-wing American publication either.

This column is from The Hindu.  I copied and pasted the title of the column, for the title of this post.  It is clear that the author wants to make a case that Pakistan is the area that is most connected to terrorist acts anywhere:

Even as it moves to address the causes of the rising tide of jihadist violence at home — among them resentment over foreign policy, racism, religious bigotry, and Islamist institutions that exploit them — the U.S. will have to work to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorist groups in Pakistan.

But, in trying to make this point, the essay does not make it easy for the reader; not quite an example of wonderful writing.  Check it out though.

Waiting to exhale on Afghanistan ... egalitarian faux-democracy?

I have made my position clear.  Now, I am with billions of others on the planet waiting for Obama to tell us what his decision is.

If he still planning on a surge, hey may want to think more about it.  Why? Pakistan is not keen on a surge, particularly if the US does not share its plans. (ht)

Pakistan expressed fear Friday that a large increase in foreign troops in Afghanistan could push militants across the border into its territory and called on the U.S. to factor in that concern as part of its new war strategy.....
...The Pakistani concerns, raised by the prime minister during a meeting with visiting CIA director Leon Panetta, could pose another headache for President Barack Obama as he weighs military proposals to send 10,000 to 40,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year.

And, that same AP story ends with this BTW kind of an observation, which is a nasty reminder of how we got to where we are:

Pakistan helped nurture a generation of Islamic militants after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Following the Soviet withdrawal a decade later, Pakistan helped the Taliban seize control. Many of these militants fled to Pakistan after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001.

Meanwhile, Obama taking his longest time trying to come up with a solution that pleases all is beginning to get noticed, finally.  The ever caustic Dowd, who is good at playing with words (I don't care for her columns at all; but, to borrow from Rumsfeld--did I really quote this war criminal?--we have to go to engage in discussions with the columnists we have!)

If we could see a Reduced Shakespeare summary of Obama’s presidency so far, it would read:
Dither, dither, speech. Foreign trip, bow, reassure. Seminar, summit. Shoot a jump shot with the guys, throw out the first pitch in mom jeans. Compromise, concede, close the deal. Dither, dither, water down, news conference.
It’s time for the president to reinvent this formula and convey a more three-dimensional person.

Lee Siegel describes the un-decider's approach as:

egalitarian faux-democracy, in which the illusion of responding to every side in a debate undercuts the democratic process of actually arriving at a decision.

How exactly does this work? Siegel explains:

This illusion of national participation in his decision-making process, with the promise of a happy ending that excludes no one, has been Obama’s method almost from Day One. Call it the American Idol style of governing—except that no possibility ever gets voted out of the competition.
No one must feel marginalized by a tyrannical majority. Obama allows the responses of the public, and the political establishment, and the media to break down every issue into a million parts, so that the multi-faceted clamor outside his head ends up looking a lot like the multi-faceted way he considers the world from inside his head. And by the time a decision comes—and yet it seems that Obama has not come to a single consequential decision since his inauguration—some people will feel unsatisfied, but no one will feel defeated.

Not looking good, man.  Not looking good at all. 
Update: later I was reminded of this comment on candidate Obama by Robert Samuelson--back in June 2008 that he might be the best graduate student ever:

I cannot detect powerful convictions in Obama. He seems merely expedient in peddling his convenient conflicts. He strikes me as a super-successful graduate student: the brightest, quickest, most articulate guy in the seminar. In his career, he has advanced mainly by talking and writing -- not doing -- and may harbor a delusion common to the well-educated: that he can argue and explain his way around any problem.