The strengthening democracy in the Islamic world: Turkey

When they became independent in 1947, there was a lot of hope for India and Pakistan, which adopted the British parliamentary system.  If only Pakistan had continued on along a democratic path, instead of all the chaotic military rulers who created a whole bunch of unholy alliances that have led to a near-complete de-legitimization of government and social institutions.  A successful Pakistan, on the other hand, could have become a model for so many countries that are overwhelmingly Islamic.  But, that was not to be.

And then there was promise with Egypt.  But then Nasser went all anti-Israel, and soon the country became a property of the military.

A contrast to all that is the case of Turkey, which has slowly outgrown the Kemal Ataturk version of society and governance.  As the Arab Spring bloomed--even in Egypt--and as the rest of the world started wondering whether indeed democracy will take firm roots in the Islamic countries, eyes turned to Turkey as the role model.

Of course, there are some lingering problems within Turkey.  The treatment of Kurds is one serious issue, among others.  But then which country doesn't have problems within its democratic structure.

We need to keep in mind a unique aspect of Turkey's history, which Bernard Lewis pointed out back in the early 1990s:

Turkey alone, it is argued, was never colonized, never subject to imperial rule or domination, as were almost all the Islamic lands of Asia and Africa. The Turks were always masters in their own house, and, indeed, in many other houses, for a long period. When their mastery was finally challenged, they won their war of independence, and are therefore able to achieve a degree of realism, a detachment, and of self-criticism that is not possible in countries where political life was dominated for generations by the struggle for independence, and in which freedom and independence become virtually synonymous terms, to the detriment of the former.
In Turkey, democratic institutions were neither imposed by the victors, as happened in the defeated Axis countries, nor bequeathed by departing imperialists, as happened in the former British and French dependencies, but were introduced by the free choice of the Turks themselves. This surely gave these institutions a much better chance of survival.

So, yes, the odds were in Turkey's favor.  But, there was more to the country's democracy:

Successive governments of Turkey wisely did not attempt to introduce full democracy all at once, but instead went through successive phases of limited democracy, laying the foundation for further development, and, at the same time, encouraging the rise of civil society.

Democracy works really well as a political structure only when it is home-grown. It does not mean all the home-grown ones survive either--Pakistan is a prime example here.  But, the probability of democracy taking hold seems to be higher when it comes from within than from the outside.

Which is all the more why the Arab Spring was, and continues to be, so promising.

But, at the same time, some of the developments in Turkey are not necessarily encouraging:

Politically Turkey has changed more in the last ten years than it did in the previous eighty. For generations the army was able to enforce strict secularism in the tradition of Ataturk, but a new ethos, more open to religious influence, has changed the terms of politics and public life. Erdogan prays daily and his wife wears a headscarf. In some Turkish towns, Justice and Development mayors have sought to restrict the sale of alcohol or establish single-sex beaches. This has alarmed many secular-minded citizens. Erdogan could help calm their fears, but instead he has become increasingly strident. Turkey has emerged from the shadow of military power, a breakthrough of historic proportions. Whether it is moving toward an era of European-style freedom or simply trading one form of authoritarianism for another is unclear.

 The NYRB article concludes thus:

Turkey has great potential as a twenty-first-century power, but can only fulfill it by reuniting its own fragmented society.

The latest development is quite a head-scratcher for me--the military chiefs quit en masse. On the one hand, it could be a sign of the weakened military being subordinate to the democratically elected government.  But, on the other hand, given the relative strengthening of religion in politics, are there enough institutions for the checks and balances that are needed for a successful democracy?

I bet Egypt and Tunisia and the rest are closely following the developments.

What, me worry about getting older? I look forward to it. Here's why ...

My daughter has remarked more than once, when looking at photos of me when I was young: "you looked strange" ... am mighty glad the emphasis was on "looked" which was said in a firm past-tense :)

A friend from my school days comments on the facial transformations I have gone through over the thirty years: "Looking at the other snaps of the Prof I am wondering what metamorphosis age brings in."

If past trends are any indication, then you ain't seen nothin' yet, buddy :)

Speaking of comic strips, another friend noted in response to an earlier post, "comic strips in general. That's one thing I miss when we're in India."  I, too, miss the funny pages when I am away from the US.  And they are not always for the laughs alone--some make me think, like how this BC strip has triggered a blog post!

No other comic strip has made me think as much as Calvin and Hobbes did, and continues to ... like this one, which was originally published on a July 29th (of what year, I know not)

So, hang on little tomato :)

The Great Recession continues. Here comes the second dip

It is not because of all the brouhaha over the debt ceiling though.

My day started with this BBC news that Apple has a lot more cash than what Uncle Sam has in the treasuries.  It is a staggering billions of dollars that Apple has.  It is yet another statistic on the jobless recovery we have experienced the last two years--corporate profits not translating to job creation.

Commentators like Robert Reich have worried enough about this for all of us.  As Alan Blinder put it forcefully, we have a national job emergency. 

The situation is getting uglier, not because of the US default possibilities but:

Whatever fear global investors may have about a potential U.S. debt default, it's being trumped for the moment by another fear: that the economy could be headed back into recession.
Money is pouring into Treasury notes and bonds Friday, driving yields down sharply, after the government said the economy grew at a dismally weak annualized rate of 1.3% last quarter -- below even the lousy 1.8% consensus estimate of economists.

Be really, really worried :(

John Cassidy in the New Yorker dares to say it:

I think it is fair to say that the dreaded “double dip” recession is at hand.

And Cassidy is not even "Dr. Doom" ... Cassidy writes:

what we are going through looks suspiciously like the beginnings of another recession. Payrolls, after growing at a monthly rate of more than two hundred thousand jobs earlier in the year, have essentially been flat since the end of April, and the unemployment rate has crept up from 8.8 per cent to 9.2 per cent. The sharp falloff in job growth was a development that very few economists predicted. 

The Economist summarizes it all:

Time to crawl into a cave and hibernate until the end of the elections in 2012.

The unbearable whiteness of being ... an Indian?

If only we understood deep within ourselves that we are all variations of Africans!

But, of course, the world doesn't work that way, and the recent hate email itself is a strong piece of evidence from my own life.  While it is one thing to function in society with whatever personal preferences one might have, making political statements of any sort is an entirely different issue.

It is that kind of an issue, however minor that might be, which has landed South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley in a controversy.

The Associated Press reports that in 2001, Haley listed her race as "white" on her voter registration form. State Democrats accuse her of being a fake-race opportunist in a state that is, according to the US Census poll, about 66% white (and just a tick over 1% Asian).

 Like she didn't have enough on her plate already.  And this in a state where the previous governor took quite a hike!

Of course, the news has already echoed around the world, in India:

The 39-year-old Ms. Haley is also the first Indian-American woman Governor and, after Bobby Jindal from Louisiana, is only the second from the community to occupy this post.

The local Post and Courier newspapers reported that the State Democratic Party, which obtained the public record in this regard, is asking whether her inconsistency on the card made her ineligible to vote under a new law.

State Democratic Party chairman Dick Harpootlian said whether Ms. Haley listed her race as white or not did not really matter to him but the issue was that the Governor had shown a pattern of such actions. “Haley has been appearing on television interviews where she calls herself a minority — when it suits her,” Mr. Harpootlian was quoted as saying. 

 Oh well ...

The Supreme Court made it clear, back in 1932, that a person like Nikki Haley cannot claim to be white:

Courts have classified Indians as white and non-white without any real pattern until the crucial 1923 Supreme Court case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, which created the official stance to classify Indians as non-white."

Back in the days of racial segregation, this change in the classification meant, among other things:

As they became classified as non-whites, Indian Americans were banned by anti-miscegenation laws from marrying white Americans in the states of Arizona, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia.^[3]

Back in 1933, a Nimrata Nikki Randhawa would not have been able to marry a Michael Haley!

I suppose as much as race and ethnic issues have largely died down, they really haven't gone away.

For the record, whenever I am asked to bubble in my race/ethnicity, I go with whatever pleases me. Sometimes I am a White, sometimes an Asian, sometimes it is simply Other.  I simply don't care about that identity.

Do you ask yourself, "am I an old geezer?"

Now I know :)

Speaking of old geezers ...

Life in the fast lane? Nah! More from the grocery checkout lanes ...

"How are you today, Sriram?" greeted the checkout cashier, "R." 

I have known R for a few years now.  All I know about him, and all he knows about me, are from the one-minute chat we engage in as he scans and bags the items.  It is not that R is there every single time I go to the store either.  Perhaps once a fortnight on an average, over the past five or so years.  But, those minutes add up to something, I suppose.

"I am always delighted you remember my name, R" I said.

R explained that he developed a mnemonic to remember my name, which is so common in India but so unusual on the other side of this planet.

"I tell you" I said, "this will make it difficult for me to ditch the store and go elsewhere.  I mean, there is no other store in Eugene where I will be welcomed by name."

R knows that I am a college faculty and that I have a daughter in LA.  I know he has two daughters, and one of them is a med school resident as well.  In a strange way, we have a lot in common in terms of our daughters.  Once, from this checkout conversation, I came to know that he and his wife visited with their daughter and her husband, who live across the continent on the other coast.

And then there is "K."

R is quiet, while K can be heard for miles around.  One experience with her at the counter and you walk away convinced that she doesn't care a shit about what you think about her.  A confident "I have seen it all" attitude, with fun and laughter and not with arrogance.

K has good reasons.  For instance, a few months ago, when she was scanning the items, K noticed I had picked up curry powder.  It triggered some memories in her, I think, and she said, "I love curry. I had a lot of it in Pakistan."

Surreal it was to hear about a country that was so near when I lived in India but had never visited and to listen to this woman who had been to Pakistan all the way from here.

"They always called me memsaab because of my white American skin" she chuckled.  Turned out that K had been to quite a few countries.  I suspect that she was with the US military, but why ask questions!

Another middle-aged cashier from the adjacent counter walked over to her and with quite a "I had no idea" look on her face asked K about Pakistan and Iran.  I picked up my bag of groceries and kept going.  Their voices slowly faded away in the background. 

Sometimes I wonder if my genuine interest in small talk at the neighborhood grocery store is a reflection of the village past within me.  Or even in my DNA? Or both.  In Sengottai, grandma would send me on grocery errands and all I had to do at the store was to identify myself as the grandson of Narayani Ammal.  The irony though is that grandma herself rarely went to any store in town, primarily because of her widowhood.  But the store folks knew her and her family--including this grandson.

Even in Madras, the grocery store guy seemed to know all about us, and dad and mom knew about his family too.  Which is why it didn't surprise me one bit that the store owner, too, was invited to my sister's wedding!

Either way, whether it is the literal DNA or the environment that nurtured me, this is one behavioral quirk that I am glad is within me.

So, ... you really want to go on to graduate school?

When I was relatively new to the neighborhood where I live, a neighbor remarked that becoming a college professor did not come with the economic returns that one might normally expect, particularly when you factor in the subsistence lifestyle in the long years between the undergraduate degree and the full-time academic position.

"One needs to be independently wealthy or should have a spouse who earns, and earns a lot" he added.  We both agreed on this--I from my own experience, and he was basing it on his son's.

Over the years, I am all the more convinced that I don't belong anywhere else but in academe but, at the same time, make sure that I warn any interested student about the realities of graduate school and academia itself. 

William Pannapacker, who writes about many of these aspects of higher education at the Chronicle, has a piece at Slate, where he writes about the need to "remind undergraduates that most of them are out of their freaking minds if they are considering graduate school"

I can only recommend graduate school in the humanities—and, increasingly, the social sciences and sciences—if you are independently wealthy, well-connected in the field you plan to enter (e.g., your mom is the president of an Ivy League university), or earning a credential to advance in a position you already hold, such as a high-school teacher, and even then, a master's degree is enough. 

 Of course, truth-telling of any sort doesn't earn friends.

But, that never stops me, right?

What might "The Simpsons" have to say about graduate school?




Not convinced yet about graduate school?  Ok, how about this one:

On the sight of a young woman crying ...

I walked up to the express checkout lane at the local grocery store where I have shopped ever since the move to Eugene.  As I prepared myself for the casual chit-chat that has become my habit--a very American trait, I think--I was caught flatfooted by what I saw: one young female cashier was consoling another who was uncontrollably sobbing.

I have known them both from the checkout hellos over the past few years.  The one who was crying is a final year student at the university here--again, a very American thing to juggle quite a few balls at a young age, unlike me who was nothing but a loafer when I was an undergrad back in India. An energetic and eager young woman she always was.

Life is awful in that it makes sufferers even out of cheerful youth.  The young are supposed to be happy, and the old draw strength from that.  It becomes a rotten life when otherwise.

With tears flowing, she returned to her checkout counter, while the young woman at my lane said hi to me and started scanning my purchases.

I walked over to the crying girl and said "I am sorry it didn't turn out well."

That was the best I could do.  I have no idea what the "it" was and that doesn't matter to me either.

Through her red and watery eyes, and even as she got ready for another shopper in her lane, she said "thanks."

I returned to the counter where by then the other cashier had finished tallying up my bill.

"I have never seen her with anything but a cheerful appearance.  This is so sad" I told her.

"Yes" she replied.

I paid and left.

This was five days ago, and I have not been able to get over this.  I was at the store yesterday and no sign of that young clerk.  I am hoping it was her day off and not anything else.

Why rush to accuracy when ...

The Colbert Report
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One heck of a good looking foreign minister ... best yet?

What a wonderful transformation over the years ... from the likes of Henry Kissinger to ... no, I am not referring to Hillary Clinton, but Pakistan's foreign minister:

Caption at the source:

The new Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar on arrival in New Delhi, on Tuesday. While leaving Islamabad, she said re-engagement was better than no engagement.

Scary chart of the day: Youth unemployment

Outsourced to the Economist:

Notice how much closer the US is to the Eurozone average, and how much below that average Germany is?

BTW, I wonder how much the Germans are kicking themselves for having been so enthusiastic about a common currency:

the truth is dawning in Germany that although hard-pressed taxpayers will not have to pick up the whole price of the new €159 billion refinancing package, they face instead a future of indefinite help to the single currency's weaker and more profligate economies - the cost of a more integrated core of Europe.

While the report says that Germans are split on this issue, I like this anecdotal point:

Ronny Nickel, 61, a construction worker, shook his head in disapproval. "To help them once is OK. But not again and again. We pour money into their system but no one knows where it is going.
"In Greece you can retire young, but we work until we are 67. It's not right. And it's dominoes – they are all falling."
His son Jeremy, 20, an apprentice metal worker, nodded. "What upsets me is that they call us Nazis," he said, showing a newspaper report of how the German consulate in the Greek city of Thessaloniki had been painted with swastikas by protesters.
"That was way before I was born. We've only just stopped paying for the First World War, and it's not right that my generation should be labelled with this too. I used to be very pro Europe, but not any more."

The Middle-Man v. the Orange Man. We all lose :(

There I was reading Eliot Spitzers' column where he writes that back in December 2010 President Obama had a wonderful opportunity:

why, as a condition for extending the Bush tax cuts, which President Obama repeatedly said he opposed, did he not require the Republicans to raise the debt ceiling then? Why didn't he make raising the debt ceiling part of the transaction that extended the Bush tax cuts? Why did he give the Republicans a second bite at the apple, cutting the revenue first, and then a chance to hold the government hostage again in the summer. 

As much as I agreed with him, it felt oddly familiar.

Could it be that Spitzer was working off this satirical comic strip with Obama as the incredible "Middle-Man" ...?

Oh well ... in any case, looks like there are more and more fleeing the Obama ship.

To those couple of people who back in 2008 tried to convince me that Obama is the man, I have only four words for you: "I told you so"

Robert Reich reminds us who the ultimate losers will be thanks to President Pushover and the Tea Party Lunatics:

As more and more Americans lose faith that their government can do anything to bring back jobs and wages, they are becoming more susceptible to the Republican’s oft-repeated lie that the problem is government — that if we shrink government, jobs will return, wages will rise, and it will be morning in America again. And as Democrats, from the President on down, refuse to talk about jobs and wages, but instead play the deficit-reduction game, they give even more legitimacy to this lie and more momentum to this vicious political cycle.
The parallel universes are about to crash, and average Americans will be all the worse for it.

To ruin or not to ruin? The economy, that is. Congress undecided.

The IMF and other global agents are now beginning to panic.

More on this, and other updates, from America's Finest News Source:


Ruin The Economy Or Not? Congress Still Unable To Decide

Shut up and sign the fucking form!

A couple of years ago, dad was surprised when I briefly mentioned to him that I had to deal with a lot of crap at work because I was not a member of the union.  (For the record, I have never been a member of any union.)

He didn't seem to worry that much that my professional life was being screwed because of this refusal on my part to carry the card and embrace the "comrades."  But then I had spared him the gory details anyway.

Dad's only response was "college professors have unions in America?"

I laughed, and left it at that.

It wasn't until my third year, by when I had already been tenured (thankfully,) that the union's membership VP walked into my office with a bunch of papers.

"Sriram, we didn't realize you hadn't signed up" he said in his usual loud voice.  "I have the form here for you."

I thanked him and refused.

He said that all the rest of the Division faculty were members.

I acknowledged that information.  But, was firm and made it clear that I didn't want to join the union.

I suppose that was the day all hell broke loose, and life has not been the same since then!

So, why write about that seven years later?

I was flicking through the channels on the telly, and watched a few minutes of John Candy and Eugene Levy in "Armed and Dangerous."  The scene I watched was hilarious.  You will see why that scene, which I have embedded here, reminded me of this incident from seven years ago!  "Shut up" indeed!

More on the failed "War on Terror"

It is such a relief to read commentaries by Glenn Greenwald and Christopher Hitchens, a day after writing that the Norwegian terror attack reveals the hollowness of our obsession with wiping out terror and linking terrorist acts with Islamism and al-Qaeda.

Hitchens opens thus:

Having had 16 years to reflect since Oklahoma City, we should really have become a little more refined in our rapid-response diagnoses of anti-civilian mass murder.

But, of course, as Greenwald also documents, there was an insane rush to concluding that the Oslo massacre was somehow linked to Islamic terrorists and al-Qaeda.

Greenwald, who has been writing for years now against this "War on Terror" and the atrociousness of naming a violent activity as terrorism only when the agent is a Muslim, writes:

Terrorism has no objective meaning and, at least in American political discourse, has come functionally to mean: violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes, no matter the cause or the target.  Indeed, in many (though not all) media circles, discussion of the Oslo attack quickly morphed from this is Terrorism (when it was believed Muslims did it) to no, this isn't Terrorism, just extremism (once it became likely that Muslims didn't).  As Maz Hussain -- whose lengthy Twitter commentary on this event yesterday was superb and well worth reading -- put it:

That Terrorism means nothing more than violence committed by Muslims whom the West dislikes has been proven repeatedly.  ... [As] NYU's Remi Brulin has extensively documented, Terrorism is the most meaningless, and therefore the most manipulated, word in the English language.  Yesterday provided yet another sterling example.

The Norwegian mass murder ought to have convinced us once and for all that there is no winnable war on terror.

Among the Muslims who have been sidelined because of our baseless and shameful obsession with Islamic terrorists are the ones who have been suffering through the Arab Spring, which is now well into a summer of discontent.  Hitchens points out:

Meanwhile, the streets and squares of Syria and the committees of the Libyan civic opposition fill up with eager and anxious people who want to know if they have been naive to place their bets—in some cases to wager their lives—on democratic transition, peaceful tactics, the transparent allocation of previously stolen funds for long-overdue reconstruction, and the removal of a parasitic military and police caste.

How awful in the manner in which we are messing with people!  Were politicians and pundits always this terrible?

Debtageddon, Debtocalypse, and President Pushover

It was initially disappointing to read Paul Krugman's note that an article in the NYRB about "President Pushover" was not online yet.  I tried anyway; it was online. When I went back to Krugman's blog, he had already updated it.  Man, does this guy eat and sleep and take bathroom breaks at all?

Why is that essay in the NYRB so good?  Because it recaps how we are now only a couple of days away from the default deadline and there is no deal yet on the debt ceiling.  (I heard a funny line on NPR yesterday: most Americans think that raising the debt ceiling will make it harder for them to paint!)  And has sentences like the following:

Boehner hadn’t realized at first that he’d have so many Republican defectors—fifty-four—who voted against the continuing resolution he’d negotiated with Obama in early April, on the ground that it didn’t cut spending enough, though Boehner had, in effect, taken Obama to the cleaners. This established in both Democrats’ and Republicans’ minds the thought that Obama was a weak negotiator—a “pushover.” He was more widely seen among Democrats and other close observers as having a strategy of starting near where he thinks the Republicans are—at the fifty-yard line—and then moving closer to their position.

 And this:

In early July, when Obama suddenly injected Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid into the deficit and debt negotiations, many, perhaps most, Democrats were dismayed. They believed that the President was offering up the poor and the needy as a negotiating gambit. (His position was that if the Republicans would give on taxes, he’d give on entitlements.) A bewildered Pelosi said after that meeting, “He calls this a Grand Bargain?”

So, why did President Pushover, er, Obama wimp out so fast?

It all goes back to the “shellacking” Obama took in the 2010 elections. The President’s political advisers studied the numbers and concluded that the voters wanted the government to spend less.

The other side is hostage to the Tea Party and their maniacal single-minded ideological framework that is disconnected from reality:

The antitax dogma of the Republican Party is strongly rooted in mythology. The theory that tax cuts create jobs has been discredited by the results of George Bush’s tax policies. The Republicans cling to the myth that “small business” owners are the “job creators,” and so they oppose proposals to eliminate the Bush rate cuts for even those earning over $250,000. But relatively few small business owners earn $250,000—in fact, fewer than 3 percent of the 20 million people who file business income on their personal tax forms (the 1040s) earn that much.

Why does the Tea Party have so much of a sway over the Republicans anyway?

The Tea Party’s strength was larger than its numbers—about eighty in the House and as few as four in the Senate—because the entire House Republican freshman class and some more senior members were sympathetic to its views, and because the ghost of Bob Bennett now haunts many Republicans. Bennett (still alive), a solid conservative three-term senator from Utah, was, astonishingly, rejected for reelection last year by the Utah Republican caucus for having been insufficiently pure in his conservatism. (His vote in 2006 against a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning was seen as heresy.)
If Bob Bennett could be dumped, no one was safe. Boehner himself was facing a possible primary challenge. Some Tea Party members dug in on the debt ceiling because they, too, feared attacks or challenges, principally from people who would accuse them of not forcing sufficient cuts or of failing to keep their pledge not to raise the debt limit.

So, a wimpy president + lunatics who have taken over the asylum = the crisis where we are now.

Here is to hoping that Churchill was correct when he observed that Americans will do the right thing, once they have exhausted all the alternatives!

It was way hotter then. And without air conditioning.

These being the hotter months of Chennai, where the three seasons are hot, hotter and hottest, practically every conversation with dad is punctuated with his comments on how hot it is, and how much dad and mom have to rely on air conditioning to get through the day.

"Maybe it is because I am getting older that I am not able to take this heat" dad often adds.

At least there is air conditioning, and they are able to pay for it.

Life, as I recall my younger days, was rarely not hot in the industrial town of Neyveli.  Relatives coming from other places, including Madras (as Chennai was known then,) would comment on the blistering heat in Neyveli.  But, as kids, who grew up with it, we didn't know any better.  I don't ever recall knowing the temperature outside because it really didn't matter.  I biked, played, and even sat under the trees to read books, during those hot, hot days.

Most summers were at grandmothers' places--Sengottai and Pattamadai.  And every time we returned to Neyveli, dad's first few comments were directed at mom for having let us run around in the sun.  And with every passing year, my grandmothers and aunts kept commenting that I was getting darker and darker.  Of course, I was getting more and more tanned--who wouldn't when out in the sun, and staying put indoor was not an option for me, and even now is not!

Those were the days when there was no air conditioning available.  To most of us, going to an air conditioned movie hall was a thrill.  But, even this enjoyment was only during any visit to Madras--the only movie hall in Neyveli was not air conditioned.

Air conditioning has dramatically changed our relationship with heat.  Summer has barely crept in here in Oregon and my neighborhood hums in the afternoons with the sound of air conditioning units.  An irony, when we are the same people waiting and waiting for the sun to come out from behind the clouds and the rains that overwhelm and depress us for a good chunk of the year.

Air conditioning, which is an early-twentieth century innovation, is perhaps one of the easiest measures of affluence.

Data on air conditioning in the developing world is scarce, but it's safe to say most Africans and South Asians still make do without it. A recent Times of India article on how to stay cool in summer recommended wearing linens and drinking lots of fluids to avoid heat stroke. The modern Indian version of iced tea on the front porch? Nimbu paani from a street cart.

The American South, with its heat and humidity that made living there quite a hassle, might not have experienced the rapid grown in the post-WWII decades if it were not for air conditioning.  As the Economist pointed out a few years ago, "the South became suddenly more comfortable to live and work in."

The friends and relatives who live in the Persian Gulf countries know the heat all too well.  It is interesting to hear them complain about the heat in Chennai though.  They do have a point: while working and living as professionals in the Middle East, they rarely step outside the climate-controlled environments.  "We go from air-conditioned homes, by air-conditioned cars, to air-conditioned offices or malls" is their typical explanation.

Of course, that is for life as professionals out in the deserts.  It is a harsh life for those laboring at construction sites--this is the cheap and exploited labor that makes possible those homes and offices and malls to exist.  When the recession hit, this labor, especially the undocumented. suffered:

hundreds of laid-off migrant workers were stranded in labor camps without electricity or running water for months on end after their Dubai-based employers closed; some had to fight off rats while sleeping amid garbage heaps

Meanwhile, scientists keep reminding us that the planet is getting hotter.  To make things worse, the urban heat island effect seems to amplify the temperature--I feel it every time I visit Chennai. 

I wonder if the kids in Neyveli now think that all this talk about the heat is bizarre, as much as I never gave t a thought back in the day!