Be responsible and ... go spend money?

So, given the economic conditions over the last two years, should we praise those saving money, or praise those who are fearlessly spending like there is no tomorrow?  (BTW, this might be a good time to read Somerset Maugham's take on the Ant and the Grasshopper ... I can't seem to find a free version online though!)

Roger Lowenstein writes that being an ant is ok, but sometime soon we better become grasshoppers:

Credit and inflation are really two sides of the same coin. When credit expands, people have more money to pay for goods, and prices go up. The Federal Reserve Board has kept short-term interest rates at nearly zero, effectively jamming the credit-creation pedal through the floor. But it hasn’t persuaded people to take out their wallets or their credit cards, stoking fears of a Japan-like deflation. Core inflation (which measures price increases of everything but energy and food) has fallen to its lowest level in 44 years. As people pay back loans rather than take out new ones, they exert a drag on business.

 Keep in mind that this a deflation threat along with high unemployment levels.  Anyway, when would Americans get back to being Americans and spend, spend, and spend, while taking on more debt in the process?

The Conference Board, which asks consumers every month whether they anticipate buying a home, a car or an appliance within the next six months, reported plummeting numbers in June. Consumers used to get their kicks from new Sub-Zero refrigerators; now they chip away at their balances. The turn is yet to come.

So, ok, that is Lowenstein.  Economics being economics, there has to be more than one interpretation, right?  Of course, yes.  Here is the libertarian Reason being sarcastic (so what's new, you ask?)

With inflation hawks questioning his every move and disloyal Fed underlings urging an interest rate hike, Bernanke finds himself unable to do the one thing he's spent his career preparing to do: save the world by throwing money at it.
Like many supergeniuses, Bernanke is in trouble because his plan is too brilliant. It really is possible to create inflation if you have the will. Just print another trillion or two, stop paying banks to keep that money in their vaults, and the country will be flooded with dollars. The problem is that the Fed keeps trying to micromanage the inflation, explode the monetary base without anybody noticing. But at some point you have to commit to devaluation of your currency. The moment to strike is now: Personal savings rates have been increasing for the last three months [all pdfs] measured. There are still millions of jobs to save or create. It's time to send a clear message: We're going to keep printing money until you stop saving it.

So, what do you say, Professor Krugman?

Like others, I’ve been warning that policy makers in the United States are defining normalcy down — accepting high unemployment and below-target inflation as just the way things are. It’s not just an obsession with inflation risks; it’s an abdication of responsibility for the economy, even if prices are falling rather than rising.
The passivity of the Bank of Japan offers an object lesson. The BOJ is now under political pressure? Why? Because it still sees no reason to act after fifteen years of deflation.
Is this a glimpse of the Fed’s future? That’s what I’m afraid of.

Christo, art, and his umbrellas

I have no clue about art. (editor: ahem, do you have a clue about anything, for that matter?)
But, I tell people that I appreciate art in my own way, which is nothing but yet another version of Justice Potter Stewart's comment "I know it when I see it."  Well, that itself is nothing but an iteration of the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I know it when I see the beauty in art!  And I did see one unique piece of art--Christo's umbrellas.  I lived in Bakersfield, and remember going up to Gorman to look at one of the umbrellas up, close, and personal.  And to stand under it because of the bright and hot Sun :) ... I should note that the photo here is not mine, but one I found on Flickr--this too is from Gorman.

The neatest thing about Christo's umbrellas was that the art was an experience.  Because, unlike a painting that might hang in a museum for centuries, Christo's umbrellas were temporary.  I liked that Buddhist sand mandala approach of his to remind ourselves of the temporary lease we have on this planet.  I would like to think that it was more than mere art.
(Why the note on Christo? All because of this!)

Say, all that talk about umbrellas remind me of Rihanna's hit number :)

Letters to Juliet

After watching the movie, I have only one question: Is Amanda Seyfried going to be Sophie in every movie? :)
To some extent, it seemed as if she ditched the bloke from Mamma Mia, left Greece and moved to New York, working for my favorite magazine--The New Yorker ... and then ditched yet another bloke, only to get involved with a third one, who is a real British bloke ... come to think of it, it all makes sense.
At least, there was no Pierce Brosnan torturing the glorious Abba sound, eh!

It was not a role that seemed to challenge Vanessa Redgrave in any form...it seemed like she was happy to be retired and doing such a light role.  Good for her.
Natasha Richardson did resemble Redgrave a lot; after all, it is a daughter/mother, right?  Richardson was fantastic in the remake of Parent Trap ... awful that she died that young, and in such a tragic accident at that ...

The dark clouds of war over India-Pakistan

It appears to be an intifada of sorts in Kashmir, and the situation there is one of the worst in recent years.
Against that background, the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan were to hold talks ...

Here a a few reports:
The day prior to the meeting, India's Home Secretary (a civil service position, not to be confused with the American "Secretary") flatly stated that Pakistan's ISI was directly behind the Bombay (Mumbai) terrorism:
"It was not just a peripheral role," the Indian Express newspaper quoted Pillai as saying. "They (ISI) were literally controlling and coordinating it from the beginning till the end."
Like that will go well with the Pakistani government, eh!  Not that this statement was the clincher, but the talks failed. Spectacularly.
The Pakistani minister was not pleased with the Indian contingent:

Pakistan from the start had been insisting on a sustained dialogue and picking up from where the composite dialogue was suspended by India, but New Delhi's contention was that since the process was called off because of the Mumbai terror attack, it cannot be restarted without some action in unravelling the conspiracy and bringing the culprits to book by Islamabad.

Commenting on the way the Indians conducted the negotiations, the Minister said the Indian side appeared ill-prepared with Mr. Krishna having to time and again consult New Delhi.

Pointing out that he had entered the dialogue well prepared and with the full mandate of the Pakistani leadership, Mr. Qureshi pondered aloud why his counterpart — who is supposed to preside over Indian diplomacy — needed to consult New Delhi ever so often. 

India's minister disagrees:

External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna said here that India did not think it was prudent at this stage to accept the Pakistani offer of timelines because of the complexity of the issues involved. “We told them terrorism is the biggest problem in normalising relations. Unless this is met, everything else will be futile. In diplomatic parleys, we don't go by a timeline unless it is absolutely necessary. The question of timeline was not feasible.''

The Minister dismissed suggestions that the Indian delegation was not flexible and ill-prepared. “I am not going to score debating points. The fact of the matter is we did discuss many issues of concern…. The mandate was very clear. As External Affairs Minister, I confined myself to the mandate. I am quite satisfied,'' he observed.

Sensing a political opening, the out-of-power the crazy nutcase Hindu religious fundamentalist party, the BJP, calls for suspending talks altogether:

“The time has come for India to call off the dialogue,” she said. There was no need for India to keep putting up with insults heaped upon its representatives.

At the party headquarters here, spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said Mr. Qureshi seemed to have lost his cool because Home Secretary G.K. Pillai mentioned about the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan in a comment he had made. This showed the ISI was the “real boss” in Pakistan, he said.

At some point, the game of chicken could lead to one completely losing it.  I hope that dangerous day does not come. ever.
But, worry we should.

OMG chart of the day on unemployment

The unemployed continue to be jobless for weeks and weeks on, as a contrast to past recessions. (ht)

At some point, this alone could break the economy, right?  I mean, a rational explanation for why this is not a bad omen is ....???

One possibility is that this high rate of unemployment will become the new normal for the US economy.  In other words, something that Western European economies have known for the longest time.
But, there is one major difference between us and them: we do not have the kind of safety net that Western European governments provide their peoples.

Surveying the economic scene, Paul Krugman writes:

this past Monday Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, was asked the obvious question: if deficits are so worrisome, what about the budgetary cost of extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which the Obama administration wants to let expire but Republicans want to make permanent? What should replace $650 billion or more in lost revenue over the next decade?

His answer was breathtaking: “You do need to offset the cost of increased spending. And that’s what Republicans object to. But you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans.” So $30 billion in aid to the unemployed is unaffordable, but 20 times that much in tax cuts for the rich doesn’t count.

In such economic times, the fact that I have a job is more than enough reason to celebrate, even though it is at a place where I have been excommunicated by those faithful to the union leadership and unionism.  I feel terrible for those millions who are looking for something productive to do.  And even more for those who have given up.

The Sunni-Shiite conflict ... in Iran

The AP reports that:

A Sunni insurgent group said it carried out a double suicide bombing against a Shiite mosque in southeast Iran to avenge the execution of its leader, as Iranian authorities Friday said the death toll rose to 27 people, including members of the elite Revolutionary Guard.The insurgent group, Jundallah, has repeatedly succeeded in carrying out deadly strikes on the Guard

The Jundallah is not anything new, and nor is the allegation that the US provides support to this group. I wrote about this in the Register Guard back in June 2009.
 
The AP has a footage of one of those rare moments when there was a live camera that recorded how the explosions were felt:

The Dalai Lama Dilemma

I can't figure out this Tibet stuff.

I mean, yes, the Chinese were awful and brutal in the 1950s that led to large-scale ethnic cleansing of sorts with the Dalai Lama and tens of thousands of his followers fleeing Lhasa and its vicinity.  And, yes, the suppression of a basic freedom to believe in whatever one wants to is a gross violation of human rights.  I written about these (like this one) and have blogged a lot as well.

But, on the other hand, I have always wondered whether we are idealizing Tibet, the Tibetan life, and overly glorifying the Dalai Lama.  After all, there is a long track record of Western countries celebrating the simple lifestyles of the poor, when many of that same poor would way prefer not to be poor and starving and ill and illiterate ....

The ever contrarian Spiked makes it all the more difficult to figure this out:

The first sounds that greet me as I arrive in Lhasa are the incandescent honking of horns as car-drivers and motorcyclists (some with three to a bike) negotiate the roads. My own Tibetan driver is wearing a Playboy jacket. Maybe he bought it in the Playboy shop that I later see in the centre of Lhasa. It’s near the Tibet Steak House (‘juicy meat for you!’) and the Lhasa casino, in which Tibetan men in leather jackets pile coins into slot machines. On the streets young men in Kappa and Nike sweatshirts (fakes, I’m guessing), with hair by Topman, flirt with casually dressed young women, one of whom is sporting hotpants that even Kylie would consider too risqué. How can they dress like this in the freezing kingdom of snow and Yetis, as made famous by Tintin in Tibet? Because that’s another myth of Tibet, at least in July, and at least here in Lhasa: I might be 3,650 metres above sea level, inside a mountain range and with the clouds so close by I almost feel I could touch them, but it’s so hot that I get sunburnt.

Of course, one could argue that the dreaded hotpants would not have been there, and the Shangri-La would have continued, had the Chinese government not interfered in Tibet the way it did and continues to do.  But, what if all that Shangri-La talk itself is a myth?

it is during that period of the self-serving Orientalism of British rule in Tibet that the popular modern image of Tibet as a mystical, cut-off entity takes shape - most notably in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933), which invented the idea of ‘Shangri La’. As McKay points out, the writings of the British imperialists, and of their sympathisers, are still regularly cited in the propaganda produced by the Dalai Lama’s people, which is designed to prove that Tibet is a unique and special place that only they can and should govern. Some of those old Orientalist writings were available at that hippy-fest in Lambeth, too - British imperial paternalism recycled as anthropological New Age ‘at-oneness’. What connects the old imperialists with the new Tibetophiles is their desire to have Tibet as a ‘buffer state’ – only where the imperialists wanted to use Tibet to protect their material interests against China and Russia, the new lot want to use it to protect their emotional interests, to preserve an idea of innocent, childlike humanity so far uncorrupted by modernity.

Reminds me of that controversial book on Orientalism from my graduate school days.  Speaking of which, Rongsheng, who was a fellow graduate student, always argued that the Chinese government was trying to get rid of feudal traditions and ignorance in Tibet, and that the West was keen on maintaining those horrible systems that do not help the Tibetans themselves.

I suppose the only way I can figure this out for myself is to travel in and around Tibet.  Will you, the reader, please pay for this important educational trip? Please? :)

Meanwhile, the Economist dryly notes that:

China seems to calculate that the eventual death of the Dalai Lama, a charismatic and internationally popular figure, will make its job in Tibet easier. Each passing birthday brings that day closer. But it also offers supporters of the Dalai Lama and his cause a chance to sing his praises.

That is some realpolitik, eh.

Information is beautiful.

Or ... not? (ht) ... click on the graphic for a larger and clearer image

Comment of the day. Well, for a long time :)

What the hell is this education you are talking about? My wife can neither cook nor play the piano, but has a degree in "Industrial Labor Relations". Progress!

That was a comment--the first of the comments, in fact--from a Josh, in response to this news item that "at current rates women can be expected to get the same number of years of education as men, as a world average." (ht)
To that comment, another reader, David, asks, "Can you cook or play the piano?"
What is Josh's response?: "I can cook."

The internet is one funny place, too :)

I am rich. I am rich. ... wait ..

A new avatar of the old Nigerian scam artists? Boy, look at the specifics :)  And the name of the sender: "Dr. Emperor Cross" .... muahahaha

After the just concluded United Nations summit held in Geneva regarding the 2010 first quarter of the year diplomatic payment, your funds are among the twenty others that were released and endorsed for immediate delivery to their beneficiaries. The official approved mode of payment for this exercise is a "First class diplomatic delivery as a result of scrutiny and diplomatic fraud
checks.

Your payment will be made out from the United Nations diplomatic drop box in Seattle Washington United States of America . Failure to respond to this notice within three days of the receipt of this notice will attract a cancellation of this payment till further notice and we are advised to conclude this delivery within seven business days as the United Nations will soon commence with their end of the year diplomatic reconciliation exercise.

You are advised to re-confirm the below details to enable us cross-check with the ones we have in our files. This is for us to be sure we are communicating with the right beneficiary to avoid misdirection of package.

FULL NAMES:
DELIVERY ADDRESS:
DIRECT PHONE NUMBERS:
OCCUPATION:
AGE:
MARITAL STATUS:
SEX:
CLOSEST AIRPORT:

I will provide all the required details as soon as I confirm your understanding. The United Nations has advised you to stop all correspondence with whoever that claims to be in possession of your funds.

Thanks for your understanding.

Dr Emperor Cross
US DIPLOMAT

Photo of the day: Indian summer!

FP: An Indian child cools off under a roadside tap in Allahabad on May 27. The graffiti above him reads: "Wash your sins in the Ganges, not your fault or dirtiness."

The "rare earth" chemistry

My grandfather earned his metallurgy degree back in 1938.  Yes, that long ago. For reasons that will be a tad too long for this post, he chose to study at the university in Benares (Varanasi) by the Ganga, far, far, away from his home in Sengottai--which is very close to the peninsular tip in southern India.  If not for his mother threatening to kill herself should he take up a job far away from home, grandfather would have put his education to far greater use.

But, playing with the cards he was dealt, grandfather worked for quite a few years at Indian Rare Earth, and split his time between Manavalakurichi and Chavara.  He worked there until his horribly untimely death when he was just about 51 years old.  (Since then, family lore is that every male in the family goes through a crisis at that age; I wonder what awaits me then; bring it on, cosmos!!!)

I was four when he died.  Soon after that, my parents thought that I as a four year old kid might be a great distraction for my grandmother from her grief, which is how I ended up spending about eight months with her, while the rest of my cohorts went to kindergarten :)  Throughout my growing up, I was immensely influenced by the fantastic stories about him that my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts always had about him.  Not one had anything even remotely negative to say about him.  As kids, we thought it was strangely interesting to see test-tubes of sands of different colors tucked away in a cabinet, and I recall mixing them up wondering whether they would explode :)

So, why "rare earth"?

The rare earths start at lanthanum, Element 57, and run to lutetium, Element 71, and if you look them over, there's a good chance you won't recognize any of them.

Why are these rarely heard elements in the news?  Why is this important?

some patient chemists have learned to exploit the subtle differences among rare earth elements to create amazing technology. Neodymium and gadolinium now make unprecedentedly powerful magnets, which can cool and refrigerate things for pennies, replacing nasty, expensive, ozone-killing chemicals. The Honda Prius uses neodymium in fuel cells. Cerium makes great catalytic converters to clean pollution up, and europium makes energy-efficient LED bulbs. Many superconductors use yttrium, and even simple wind turbines need dysprosium and terbium to store energy, among other things.

Fascinating.  Absolutely wonderful that these rare elements play such significant roles.  So, is America leading the charge on this?  Ahem ... while we were busy fudging mortgage loans, waging wars, and watching reality shows,

China has half of the world's reserves and produces a staggering 95 percent of the ore on the world market. That's because the Chinese government made a shrewd guess in the 1990s and invested in the infrastructure necessary to tediously separate one rare earth from another on an industrial scale. China's dominance wouldn't be a huge concern except that the government has put strict quotas on exports lately. Some rare earths now fetch more than $100 a pound in the United States. (The U.S. once mined rare earths but let the industry flag and would need about 15 years to catch up.)

You got to be kidding here ... come on, isn't there anything that the US can do anymore?
Oh well ...

The tyrannical group called "faculty" :)

The world outside academia is often confused, at best, whenever there are reports of faculty being reprimanded or fired for saying something "wrong" because of the pervasive belief that we faculty have academic freedom.  Yep, we do have freedom, but only if we say what is ruled as the correct thing to say.  If otherwise, it is the tyrannical equivalent to "off with their heads."

Hey, I ought to know this--the faculty body and its leaders ruled that I do not have a right to expression, and also advised their peeps not to ever listen to me.  Yes, academic excommunication :) 

So, it does not surprise me at all that a religion professor--an adjunct--who had been "recognized by the religion department in 2008 and 2009 for being rated an excellent teacher by students" was fired not because he groped students or that he yelled and screamed, but "for saying he agreed with Catholic doctrine on homosexuality."

He was a religion professor in Illinois, and taught Roman Catholicism.  Is it difficult for anybody to imagine that he had his religious beliefs as well?  And he was fired for stating his belief in the context?  Despite the recognition the last two years for the excellent teaching?

Oh well, yet another evidence of the tyrannical ideologues who masquerade as faculty in colleges and universities. I tell you, the real news from academe will be if and when a Marxist professor ever tells students that maybe a liberal democratic economy is not that bad after all :)

(Source: 1, 2, and 3)
ps: No, this post is not because I agree with the Vatican's stand on homosexuality.  I don't care what the Catholic church thought or what the Ayatollah thinks.  Those are for the respective believers to sort out.  I am more worried about the physical and emotional abuse to kids ...
Nor am I one of those in-your-face atheists who wants to convert the believers away from religion.
What worries me is when democratic governments rule on how people ought to live. Like when France decides that a religious garb is illegal. Or when the US Congresses decides that a marriage is only between a man and a woman.  Or when the Anglo-American alliance decides it can freely torture the lives out of anybody it thinks is worth torturing while conducting the War on Terror.

Faith-based thoughts and actions, well, people can always exit those religions if they do not agree with those views ...

David Brooks needs a break. A long one, preferably.

If Brooks is going to churn out columns like this one on the princes and the grinds, and he gets paid for it, I suppose we are all living proof that there's a sucker is born every minute!

There is nothing new or substantive there.  I stand corrected: it has a whole bunch of metaphors, all in one column enough to claim the title of the master manipulator of metaphors from another NY Times columnist.  Let us list the metaphors in this Brooks column, shall we?

• Prince
• Grind
• Conversational ping pong
• Cockroach up his arm
• Social butterflies
• Social polish
• Sitting on mountains of cash

And the winning one is the final sentence all by itself:

the real issue is how we are going to light a fire under the country’s loners, its contrarians and its narrow, ambitious outsiders.

WTF!  seriously, they get lengthy profiles for writing stuff like this?  Hey, George Orwell, can you stage a miracle of sorts and straighten these people out?

The best one though is this comment (#112) in response to Brooks' column:

Mr. Brooks, you are continuing your argument for the benefits of a liberal arts education founded in the classics. Your grinds are merely technicians, trained to do one thing very well. The princes you describe, on the other hand, use their more well-rounded education to charm legislators and siphon money out of taxpayers when the grand temples to their Odyssean egos come crashing down. Remember Odysseus killed all of his wife's maids even though they were powerless to stop the suitors. Those maids were really grinds. So much for the ethical justifications for reading in the classics. It is not what we read that matters, but how critically we read anything.

"A modest proposal" to improve soccer :)

P.J. O'Rourke, as always, has quite a few hysterical lines, such as "As an American I remain convinced that English, if spoken loudly enough, can be understood by anyone" ...
before concluding thus:

Soccer matches should be something special, something people eagerly look forward to, something that brightens life. You're almost there. Just use your hands, introduce some full-body blocking, expand the goal area, break up the game a little so that people have time to go to the bathroom between plays and maybe change the shape of the ball slightly so it's easier to carry. Now you've got a sport.

Dancing at concentration camps: help this go viral

Chart of the day: deficits

Have a nice day :)
(ht)

The travelling Indians .. in Switzerland, too :)

The Roma set the trend in trotting around the world, starting from India.  For a while, I think people from India lost their wanderlust--perhaps that coincided with the European colonialism and then, to quote from my graduate school days, the systematic development of underdevelopment. 

Now, once again, we are wandering around, sometimes as tourists and other times as immigrants.  Sometimes, it is both--as immigrant tourists--which is what happened over the Fourth of July weekend when my cousin, her husband, and I went to Crater Lake.  The three were in three different political categories: he is an American by birth to parents who immigrated from India.  She is an immigrant who is a permanent resident.  And I am a naturalized American.

At Crater Lake, it seemed as if every third tourist had Indian blood.  I helped a couple (both Indians) take photos with the lake as the background, and the wife seemed like she was relatively new in the country.  Vans and cars of traveling Indian families ... A chai wallah could have made quite a few dollars there :)

Apparently, Indians are crisscrossing all over, and up in the Swiss mountains too, as this NY Times story reports (ht).  However, the Indo-Swiss tourist connection is thanks to Bollywood:

For years, Bollywood’s producers and directors have favored the pristine backdrop of Switzerland for their films. The greatest of the Bollywood filmmakers, Yash Chopra, is a self-professed romantic who has made a point of including in virtually all his films scenes shot on location in this country’s high Alpine meadows, around its serene lakes, and in its charming towns and cities to convey an ideal of sunshine, happiness and tranquillity.
In the process, they have created an enormous curiosity about things Swiss in generations of middle-class Indians, who are now earning enough to travel here in search of their dreams.
“The moment you cross the border it is something else,” Mr. Purohit said, “where the scenario changes.”
“No noise, no pollution, no crowds,” said Kamalakar Tarkasband, 72, a retired army officer.
Swiss tourism officials and their Indian counterparts are capitalizing on this obsession. The number of nights spent by Indian tourists, who come mostly in summer (few ski), has doubled in the last decade to 325,000, and the numbers continue to grow.

It is a similar story with people from China too.  As the Chinese gain disposable incomes, they too are exploring the planet.  Good for all of them, I say.  It is a sign of growing affluence in countries that were once depressingly poor (though, as I noted even earlier in the day, poverty persists!)

Anyway, as the Roma know well, "different" could also mean trouble, as even that NY Times piece reports:

In June, the Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger featured an article with the headline “Into the Luxury Hotel with a Gas Cooker,” noting that “in some hotels an entire caste of guests is no longer desired: the Indians.”
The article catalogued the complaints of hotel managers: guests who cook curry dishes on camping stoves in their rooms; guests who use bath oils that blacken tubs; guests who book for a husband and wife, only to show up with the entire family.
In Engelberg, where a visitor is more likely to encounter a woman in a sari than hear the clang of a cowbell, some European tourists are unsettled.

Well, here is a song/dance clip from one of the movies mentioned in the NY Times piece--Sangam:

Yes, the songs from this movie are all classics.  An uncle had a record player, and when I was a kid I recall him playing another song from this movie for me because he said it was dad's favorite ... and that one is:

Encouraging news: Facebook fatigue setting in?

To paraphrase Bogart's Rick, I hope this is the beginning of a wonderful trend:

Have we reached the Facebook saturation point?

 I hope that inflection point has been reached ...
That news item also reports that:

the net’s dominant social networking site lost active users in the 18-25, 26-34 and 35-44 demographic ranges, while gaining users in their mid-teens and middle years.

It just keeps getting better and better ... but then, one swallow doesn't make a summer!

The poorest (Sub)continent is ...

After being conditioned to images from Somalia, Ethiopia, and many other African countries, we might be surprised to read that:

Acute poverty prevails in eight Indian states, including Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, together accounting for more poor people than in the 26 poorest African nations combined, a new 'multidimensional' measure of global poverty has said.

The new measure, called the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI), was developed and applied by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative with UNDP support.

It will be featured in the forthcoming 20 th anniversary edition of the UNDP Human Development Report.

Which states are those?

(421 million in Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal) than in the 26 poorest African countries combined (410 million).

Doesn't surprise me on bit.
Interestingly, and not coincidentally, most of these states have the highest fertility rates in India, yet again demonstrating that economic growth and development is the best contraceptive out there.

Love in the land of Kama Sutra

India is a country of a billion-plus.  So, yes, while sometimes gross numbers might be shocking, in percentage terms they might not be that different from comparable data from elsewhere.  Despite such a caveat about numbers, reports about "honor killings" and abuses related to family-honor are terribly depressing.

A typical story that is reported is about a young woman--often between 18 and 23 years old--who is in a relationship with a young man, and there is a caste or religion difference.  It is not unusual for the woman's family to find out about this when she is also pregnant.  And then all hell breaks loose, and tragically the young woman dies.  Sometimes her lover too.  And, while most are reported as suicides, a significant percentage of them are murders committed by the families who consider these developments a huge disgrace to their honor.

In the bad old days, the horror was sati--the widow burning alive along with her dead husband's body.  And then the horror of "bride burning" and now this ... Awful ... All because of love :(

Nineteen honour killings between April 9 and June 30. That translates to 80 days. Roughly, one murder every four days. Clearly, north India is waging an undeclared war against love.

You might think, along with Khap officials, honour killings have to do with caste. But the real casualty is love. None of the murdered couples married by arrangement. Scratch the skin of caste, and out comes love, bleeding.

 However, am not sure whether governments alone can social-engineer a different set of ethos:

"We will not compromise on traditions. We will either kill or get killed," says Om Prakash Malik.

Many actively defending the killings and ostracisation of the couples in love in the name of family honour.

"No one can stop such deaths. Not the Government or the Supreme Court. Even the military can not stop it," says Choudhary Naresh Singh Tikait.

Such a scenario is no different from that in many of the societies in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

Honour killings have been rampant in orthodox and socially backward groups in many countries including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan and the Palestinian Territories, they say.

While statistics are hard to come by due to non-reporting of such crimes, United Nations Population Fund approximates that as many as 5,000 women are murdered in this manner each year around the world.

 Here is to hoping that women everywhere will soon live in free conditions.

Music for the day

See if you can sit still through this tornado from one awesome ensemble :)

Cartoon of the day: the Afghan War

Futbol Mundial Sudafrica

The disappearing middle class

I will outsource this to James Fallows, who is quoting a German executive who, get this, was an Indian by birth--born in Madras (Chennai) ... aahh, the circular universe we will live in... the name of this executive, Bharat Balasubramanian, is such a typical Tamil brahmin name that maybe dad will tell me that he is some nth cousin or soemthing :)

"I will state that there will be a polarization of society here in the United States. People who are using their brains are moving up. Then you have another part of society that is doing services. These services will not be paid well. But you would need services. You would need restaurants, you would need cooks, you would need drivers et cetera. You will be losing your middle class.

"This I would not see in the same fashion in Europe, because the manufacturing base there today can compete anywhere, anytime with China or India. Because their productivity and skill sets more than offset their higher costs. You don't see this everywhere, but it's Germany, it's France, it's Sweden, it's Austria, it's Switzerland.... So I feel Europe still will have a middle level of people. They also have people who are very rich, they also have people doing services. But there is a balance. I don't see the balance here in the US."