Chart of the day: Farmer suicides in India

More than a quarter million suicides :(

The data show clearly that the last eight years were much worse than the preceding eight. As many as 1,35,756 farmers killed themselves in the 2003-10 period. For 1995-2002, the total was 1,21,157. On average, this means the number of farmers killing themselves each year between 2003 and 2010 is 1,825 higher than the numbers that took their lives in the earlier period. Which is alarming since the total number of farmers is declining significantly. Compared to the 1991 Census, the 2001 Census saw a drop of over seven million in the population of cultivators (main workers). The corresponding census data for 2011 are yet to come in, but their population has surely dipped further. In other words, farm suicides are rising through the period of India's agrarian crisis, even as the number of farmers is shrinking.

The literal and financial nuclear news from India

First was the indictment of Rajat Gupta, which is not that much of a surprise given the widely reported links between him and the hedge fund heavyweight, Raj Rajaratnam, who as been sentenced to eleven years in prison for insider trading. After all, Gupta was no ordinary executive from India:

Few Indian executives have achieved the stature that Rajat Gupta held in global business, a position that made him an icon for many in India seeking to rise in the U.S. and elsewhere.
So Mr. Gupta's indictment Wednesday was greeted with a mix of surprise, sadness and even some anger in India's tightly knit business community. It also prompted some concern that his arrest might reflect poorly on Indian executives in general, though Mr. Gupta, the former chief executive of consulting firm McKinsey & Co., has lived for many decades in the U.S.

At the same time, apparently the Indian Government is also looking into a few of his dealings in India:

will probe the possibility of Gupta having contravened the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, involving, inter alia, his purchase of shares in Tamilnad Mercantile Bank (TMB).
The newspaper quotes unnamed ED officials as saying: “We suspect that control of shares in Tamilnad Mercantile Bank was in violation (of regulations) and had no approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Besides, some of his other financial transactions are also under the scanner.”

On a slow news day, I might have been captivated with those stories.

But, Condoleezza Rice upped the ante:

India had deployed nuclear-capable missiles on its western border and refused to budge under US pressure to hold any talks with Pakistan after the 2001 attack on its Parliament by terrorists from across the border, says former top American diplomat Condoleezza Rice.

It has always been suspected that India and Pakistan were on the verge of a war, and a nuclear war at that, soon after that horrific attack on the Parliament building.  But, to get details of that from an insider who was closely monitoring the developments, well, it is awfully shocking how terrible those few days were.

It is also fascinating to read about the kinds of strategies the US and other countries employed in their attempts to calm the Indians:

As there was no let-up in the tension between the two neighbours, Rice said the US and Britain joined hands and organised a series of high-profile visits to the two countries with the view that there would be no war as long as some important dignitary was in the region.
"Colin (Powell, the then Secretary of State) and Jack Straw, the British Foreign Minister, organised a brilliant diplomatic campaign that could be summed up as dispatching as many foreign visitors to Pakistan and India as possible.
"We reasoned that the two wouldn't go to war with high-ranking foreigners in the region. Every time they accepted a visit, we breathed a sigh of relief. We needed to buy time," Rice writes, recollecting the events of those days.
But the situation continued to deteriorate, she said, adding that by December 23 there were reports of troop movements as well as a disturbing one that India was preparing to move short-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads to the Indian-Pakistani border.
"We reviewed the list of dignitaries who had been deployed to the region, searching for possible intermediaries through whom we could send messages to the adversaries, and agreed to reconvene the next day," Rice said.
Given the volatility of the situation in South Asia, Rice said she cancelled her Christmas vacation at her aunt's house in Norfolk Virginia and rushed to Washington the next day.
"By December 27 the reports were confirmed: India had, indeed moved nuclear-capable missiles to the border. Colin called Jaswant Singh, the Indian Minister of External Affairs, and asked that the two countries sit down and talk. The suggestion was flatly rejected," Rice writes.

Talk about dodging a bullet; phew!

Meanwhile, a few countries, including the US, have issued cautionary statements about travel to India, because of terrorism concerns.  The Indian government is not happy about this, naturally:

The Government has decided to protest after five countries - The US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - have issued advisories against travel to India during the festive season for security reasons.
The Government has protested saying such advisories are done to defame India. Minister of State for Tourism Subodh Kant Sahay said the matter will be taken up with appropriate authorities.

And students wonder why I tell them that the AfPakIndia region is way more dangerous than the Israel/Palestine issue!

The depressing economic reality for college graduates

The small-sized university where I teach recently introduced a major in gerontology.  Introducing a new major (and a minor too) has also been accompanied by long-term investments in terms of tenure-track faculty.

Yes, society will have to increasingly deal with various issues related to the elderly.  The question that we could ask from a public policy perspective is this: could we have prepared students for gerontology-related careers without this degree program/minor?  For an entry-level job in this field, will it really matter if the undergraduate major is in psychology or sociology or biology or English literature?

We never had these kind of discussions on campus.  I suspect it is a similar story at other universities too.  It is unfortunate that these discussions do not happen because of what these decisions mean:

• long-term investments and commitments are being made, for which benefits seem to be way to low
• the costs are being borne by taxpayers and students, who are already being sucked dry
• students are misled into believing that pursuing one liberal arts major versus another is better for jobs in that major
• a further dilution of higher liberal education

The proliferation of undergraduate majors and minors is a vastly under-reported aspect of higher education.  There is a world of a difference between researchers specializing in a narrowly defined subtopic versus a narrow major like gerontology.  Narrow focus ought to come later in graduate schooling, not at the undergrad level.  Even medical school is post-undergrad, and yet we want to invest in "gerontology?"  Of course, gerontology is merely an example.  Numerous other similar programs have been initiated over the past few years.  Works well for marketing purposes, I would imagine!

In any case, students majoring in gerontology are going to face a future that will be no different from the future that awaits students majoring in geography or English literature or business: a bleak one.

Over to Mike Mandel on what the trends have been:
 

Imagine showing every college freshman these charts.  Wouldn't that be full disclosure?  In fact, shouldn't we demand such full disclosure?  At least from taxpayer supported colleges and universities?

The typical explanation is that college graduates fare better than those without degrees.  There are huge problems with such statements.  Instead of me pointing them out from my own posts, here is from a recent Cato report:

There are numerous problems, however, with simply concluding that because enrollment, degree attainment, and the college wage premium all rose along with spending, spending increases were good investments. The first is that in looking at averages one can miss a lot of data, and many people with college degrees might not get much economic value from them. The second is that we might be fueling credential inflation, in which the difference between earnings for people with a bachelor’s degree and those with only a high school education are large not because one attains valuable skills pursuing a degree, but because degrees are so commonplace—and perhaps signal some basic threshold level of intelligence and work habits—that employers reflexively screen out job seekers without degrees. Finally, there are very large percentages of people who enroll in college, perhaps lured by the promise of government aid to pay for it, who do not end up getting degrees. Their payoff is often small or negative.

Tyler Cowen offers another take:

Non-college grads also have seen declining wages, and so one can look at the “finish college vs. finish high school only” margin and conclude that the return to higher education is robust.  Another approach is to look at the “finish college and get on a real career track” vs. “finish college and hang out” margin and conclude the sector is in trouble, which indeed is the case.  Don’t get stuck looking at the old margins only, the new and powerful margin, I am sorry to say, is relative to unemployment or extreme underemployment.  The status and avoid-shame returns are high enough to keep a lot of people going to college, at current prices, but the falling real wages for graduates aren’t going to sustain an enormous amount of extra sectoral growth, including on the price side.  Nor do I expect the preceding orgy of student debt to repeated, at that level, anytime soon.

All these mean that President Obama dusting off the student loan problems through an executive order will not do a damn thing for students because they are looking at very low returns, assuming they will find jobs, on their huge undergraduate investment dollars.

Increasingly, I feel terribly guilty that I am being a part of the problem by taking money from the unsuspecting students.  But then, if ever they make the mistake of coming to me for advice, I take the time to present them the larger picture and, therefore, how they need to systematically plan for their academic and employment lives.  Some of them never come back to my office though!

But then some read my blog, which means I am reaching an audience and being a part of the solution too.

The apple doesn't fall far from ... Kazakhstan?

A high school friend was on a business trip in, yes, Kazakhstan.  The women there are pretty, he adds.  Where are the women not pretty, right?  Another high school classmate puns (in Tamil) that the country should then be called Azhaghastan (Azhagu = beauty)

I wrote to them that he guy's alibi in going there is that he is checking out the apples :)

Why apples, you ask, to which I reply: it is the geographic home for all the apples of the world. 

Well, until yesterday, as Johnny Carson often said, "I did not know that!"

Even in blogging, the only note I have had on Kazakhstan was on a completely different topic!

I was diving back home and listening to The World, when the show's host, Lisa Mullins, posed the geoquiz about the origin of apples. 

I would never have thought that apples originated from the mountains of Central Asia. 

Even more hilariously educational was the hypothesis on how perhaps the fruit spread: animals ate the best of the fruits, and then the seeds passed through their guts, which then led to new plants in new places.

And, of course, the roles of the Silk Road, the Roman Empire, the wanderers ... and then eventually to the US, and now we associate Washington with apples.  Who woulda thunk it was a story out of Central Asia!

I will add this to my repertoire of fun stories for my classes. 

This blog entry by itself will be a convincing answer to the student, "J," who asked me yesterday what I do for fun :)

99 Percent: The evil corporations be damned!

Worth a gazillion words :)

Yes, Solidarity!     hahaha

And from the world of science comes this grumble from the dark matter:

Yet another odd response to a blog post :)

So, a couple of days ago, I had blogged about a Gopal Krishna voicing his religious right rhetoric in Iowa. 

Turns out that the blog post was read by him; I had no idea that my blog has that kind of reach! 

In an email, Gopal Krishna writes:

Thank you for writing a blog about me.  I hope it gave you a good night sleep.

Sounds like he was not happy with my post, eh!

It is strange how my rather trivial observations from a small town end up being read by people in strange places.  No, I don't mean Iowa being strange :) 

Even the very light traffic my website generates, while catering mostly to an American audience, gets visitors from every continent--except Africa.  Rarely does the blog have African visitors.  Perhaps nothing here interests them?  But then I have blogged a lot about Africa, too ...

An atrocious ten year anniversary :(

It was ten years ago that President Bush signed the Patriot legislation into law.  If you wanted to find a textbook example of how not to make law, review the history of this law.  First, toss dozens of legal proposals together into a giant “package” and resist any effort to unpack it and hold separate votes.  Second, unveil the package at the last minute so members of Congress will not have an opportunity to study it.  Third, call it the “Patriot Act” so that any person voting against it will have to consider television ads declaring his/her opposition to the Patriot law.  Fourth, have the Attorney General declare over and over that if the law is not enacted right away, the terrorists may well launch more 9-11 attacks.  When members of Congress proposed attaching sunset provisions so that the law could go into effect, but would need reauthorization a few years later, the Bush administration fought the idea.

That is the lead paragraph here (ht)

The op-ed link from there:

During the recent debate to reauthorize sections of the Patriot Act, two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee — Mark Udall (D-Colo.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) — warned that the government is interpreting the law to conduct surveillance that does not follow from a plain reading of the text. “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry,” Wyden said. As someone who had to keep silent and live a lie for the better part of a decade, in the false name of “national security,” I know he’s right.

The Patriot Act lives on under a president who promised hope and change!

ACLU

More on screw the students, and taxpayers too :(

A few days ago, I blogged about the fiscal mismanagement at my own university, and further worried that we are not any exception but that similar stories abound at many, many public colleges and universities.

The good news is that the agenda for a university-wide meeting lists similar issues:

Last year’s strong ending financial position will be significantly deteriorated by deficits in both years of the current biennium. The principal reasons are a 25% decrease in state appropriations compared to the last two biennia, significantly higher salary and benefit costs due to negotiated salary increases and PERS rate increases, and a flattening of enrollment increases. Future risks include further declines and reductions in the state’s revenue forecast and uncertainty of future enrollment numbers. Clearly, now is the time to continue our efforts for being in a much weaker fiscal position for the beginning of the 2013-2015 biennium.

That is the good news--that these issues will be discussed.

The bad news: how come the financial picture was overlooked when those higher salaries and benefits were re-negotiated?  And it should have been obvious even then that the state allocation would decrease, and that the economy was nowhere near any rebound, right? 

"Clearly, now is the time" ... nope, clearly the time was back in early 2009. At least in late 2009. Or at least any time in 2010.  Why not even in mid-2011?  "Now is the time" is ... oh well :(

PS: there is no point going to the meeting.  The believers will recite the same narratives, and a subset of those believers will ask me to please shut up :)

Gaddafi is dead. As are the West's secret and horrible deals with him

As much as I was a supporter of the protests in Libya, almost right away I started worrying about the lack of any well-articulated game plan from Obama.  Verbal jujitsus like "kinetic military action" made me worry even more.  

A critical question was always about the day after.

It is now the day after, and boy has Libya gotten off to a messy start!

The video below shows in quite some graphic detail how the "mad dog" was handled after his capture.  Andrew Sullivan writes about this lynching of Gaddafi, while linking to this video:

We now have solid video evidence that some resistance fighter tried to sodomize him with a stick or a knife in the moments after his capture. One recalls what was done to Mussolini and, indeed, how the execution of Saddam Hussein turned, at the last minute, into a Shiite revenge fantasy. It's an ugly, ugly thing - when dictators lose power. And not a great omen for a genuinely new start for Libya.

Gaddafi's torturous end perhaps was even better than what he and his regime did to many others.  But, in a civil society, even the cruel maniac is given a proper trial before sentenced to death--a proper one, unlike the show trial after Romanians threw out the Caeusescus.

Now, Obama and Sarkozy will have to wait and watch from the sidelines the consequences of their hasty involvement in a civil war in a country where two generations had experienced only a life under a dictator. 

If only Obama had come out strongly against Gaddafi from the first days of the protests--there was a chance that Gaddafi might have fled the country.  But, his dilly-dallying emboldened the delusional dictator.

David Riff writes that Western governments are perhaps relieved that Gaddafi is not alive; here is why:

Qaddafi was, quite simply, a man who knew too much. Taken alive, he would have almost certainly have been handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which had indicted him -- along with his son, Saif al-Islam, and brother-in-law and military intelligence chief Abdullah Senussi (whereabouts unknown) -- for crimes against humanity in late June. Imagine the stir he would have made in The Hague. There, along with any number of fantasies and false accusations, he would almost certainly have revealed the extent of his intimate relations with French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the details of his government's collaboration with Western intelligence services in counterterrorism, with the European Union in limiting migration from Libyan shores, and in the granting of major contracts to big Western oil and construction firms.
He would have had much to tell, for this cooperation was extensive. In the war against the jihadis -- a war to which Qaddafi regularly claimed to be as committed to prosecuting as Washington, Paris, or London -- links between Libyan intelligence and the CIA were particularly strong, as an archive of secret documents unearthed by Human Rights Watch researchers has revealed. If anything, the CIA's British counterpart, MI6, was even more involved with the Qaddafi family.

Oh what a tangled web we weave!

even if Qaddafi was not targeted and, as Omran al-Oweib, the electrical engineer-turned-rebel leader who commanded the forces that finally caught up with Qaddafi in a tunnel just outside Sirte, continues to insist, really was killed in a crossfire, leaders like Sarkozy, Blair, Brown, and the Bush State Department must surely be sleeping better these last few nights. Whether they deserve to is another question entirely.

I drool, you drool, we all drool, for ... vella cheedai :)

It is Diwali time in India. 

Mothers all over make a gazillion type of sweets, including this one, which is from a food blog whose feed (no pun intended) is one of the few in my RSS reader

Americans might think these are "doughnut holes" .... nope.  These are "vella cheedai"

And now perhaps the Indians reading this are wondering how one can make and sell "holes" :)

What? I get paid too?

It really is fall

I forget now what the context was in class earlier this morning, but I digressed for a couple of minutes to describe the early morning experience that resulted in this photo.

A cool and crispy 39 degrees it was as the sun was slowly poking its head out and through the patchy fog in the valley.

I kept looking over at my right to enjoy the scenery when it occurred to me that I can easily pull over to the side and enjoy it for a while.  So, blinkers on, I was off on the shoulder space.

I told my students that living in this paradise, and enjoying it, is the real compensation that comes with the job.  The salary is a bonus :)

"Yes, it is all real"

Every once in a while, I intentionally go to a grocery store other than the one that I normally go to--it is all a part of the synapse strengthening/creating strategy to postpone as much as possible the near-inevitable mental decline.  I am then forced to look for familiar items in completely unfamiliar settings, and in the process I sometimes spot products whose existence I might not have known otherwise.

Anyway, with my couple of items, I was at the checkout counter thinking about what I should cook, when I noticed that the young clerk was a real redhead.  Perhaps a high school senior or a college freshman kind of an age, and the redhead grabbed my focus.

I suppose she either sensed my looks fixated on her hair, or perhaps she actually saw me.  In any case, when she was done totaling up the grocery items, I looked at her and she was already smiling away. I said, "wow, a real redhead!"

She smiled even wider a smile and happily replied, "yes, it is all real."

I wished her well and proceeded to my car on to my cooking and cleaning routines.

Back in India, as a kid I was always intrigued by Charlie Brown's strange fascination for the red-haired girl, especially at Valentine's Day time. 

Good ol' Charlie Brown often drove himself crazy over the redhead:

But, that was in a fictional world that Charles Schulz created.  Did it reflect the real world, right?

In graduate school, it was in a trivial conversation that I got to know that the Charlie Brown experience can be quite real as well. 

A professor, "JM," and I were talking about Stanford, where he had earned his degrees, when he started reminiscing and said, "but, don't ever get involved with a redhead.  They cause heartache."

Charlie Brown and redhead troubles of the heart!

Another graduate student, Karl, told me about an apartment for rent in the building where he lived, and I eventually moved in to that building. Karl was a redhead himself, and he often joked, semi-seriously, about how redheads were becoming very rare and that perhaps he ought to marry a redhead and have children with red hair so that the genes don't get wiped out.  I wonder if he ever did that ...

Of course, with easy coloring techniques, anybody can become redheads, blue-heads, and any color of their choice.  But, hey, it is all the more the reason why I was so impressed with that real redhead.  The way she responded, I think I made her day with my comment. 

And I am very happy with my gray hair--it is really gray, and rumors that I dye them gray are just that--rumors :)

On why scholars need to be independent of the government

Good thing that most of us faculty are not scholars and are, at best, pretentious and wannabes eh! :)

The following "Subhashitani" articulates so succinctly the idea of independent thinking:

शिलं किमनलं भवेदनलमौदरं बाधितुं
     पयः प्रसृतिपूरकं किमुन धारकं सारसं ।
अयत्न मलवल्लिकं पथिपटच्चरं कच्चरं
     भजन्ति विबुधा मुधा ह्यहह कुक्षितः कुक्षितः ॥

- वेदान्तदेशिक

Are the grains collected not enough to douse the fire of hunger in the stomach?
Can the water in the lakes not quench the thirst?
Are the rags found on the streets not enough to make clothes to cover us?
Even when all the life necessities are taken care of by nature, why do these scholars serve the King?

- Vedantadeshika

Though, in all fairness, I should note here that the Subhashitani is couched in the contexts of allegiance to the divine, and that message does not appeal to this atheist.  But, the idea of independence in intellectual inquiry is valid though.  And vital.

How wonderful is the Chinese model to development?

As a teenager, when I started worrying-yes, worrying--about the ills that seemingly were all around in India, the communist parties looked quite attractive an option to me.  They promised to take care of the disadvantaged, and it resonated with me.

It didn't take me long, however, to understand that in politics, the color of the stripe didn't matter at all and that every party was out to screw the people.  It then boiled down to who was the least worst because there wasn't any "good" option.

Over the years, as much as I have accepted a liberal democratic capitalism as the least screwy of all the options humans have tried out thus far, there remains a nagging feeling all the time: are we doing anything for the horribly disadvantaged?

This is the question that then makes me obsess over the India versus China comparisons. 

Thus, reading a book review essay in the NYRB made my Sunday :)

The book is about China's development and Deng Xiaoping's role in the country's "transformation."  wonderful essay where the reviewer brings in a personal dimension too, and opens the piece by highlighting how much the China model appeals to many other developing countries for all the wrong reasons:

Mao Zedong died in September 1976. From 1979 until the years just before Deng Xiaoping’s own death in 1997, Deng was, in fact if not always in title, the top leader of the Communist Party of China, of the People’s Liberation Army, and of the Chinese government. He is known outside China, especially in the West, mainly for his decision in 1989 to send field armies with tanks into the heart of Beijing to carry out what came to be known as the “Tiananmen Massacre”: a bloody suppression of unarmed students and other citizens who were demonstrating peacefully in and around Tiananmen Square. Not everyone in the world has looked unfavorably on Deng’s decision. On February 22, 2011, at the height of the “Arab Spring,” Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi had this to say about it:

People in front of tanks were crushed. The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square…. When Tiananmen Square happened, tanks were sent in to deal with them. It’s not a joke. I will do whatever it takes to make sure part of the country isn’t taken away.

Deng’s example of the utility of massacre had not been lost on Qaddafi.

China came down hard on "Occupy Tiananmen" and the country continues to be a notorious poster for the lack of human rights.

Even as most of the world has been awed by its economic success and countries like Rwanda want to emulate this model of a strong pro-capitalist state that tightly constrains individual freedoms, the reviewer writes about how much the economic growth has benefited whom:

the claim that Deng “lifted” millions from poverty confuses the doer and the receiver of action. To the extent that economic “lifting” has happened in post-Mao times, it has been the menial labor of hundreds of millions of people—working without labor unions, or a free press, or a neutral judiciary, or protections like OSHA rules—that has done the heavy lifting. This workforce has improved not just the lives of the millions themselves but, even more, of the Communist elite, who in many cases have soared to stratospheric heights of opulence. World Bank figures show that in China the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality in populations, has skyrocketed from 0.16 before Deng’s reforms to a current 0.47, near the high end of the scale. This dramatic change has much less to say about “hundreds of millions” than it does about one of the maxims that Deng delivered at the outset of reform: “Let a part of the population get rich first.”

While in graduate school, which was when I got to watch on television the tanks in Tiananmen Square, I always hesitated discussing such topics with graduate students from China.  It was almost an unwritten rule that this topic was off limits.  Once, I accidentally crossed that line and asked a classmate, "R," about Tibet.  He sensed where I was going and immediately made it clear that Tibet is, and always has been, a part of China and that the government would, therefore, take every possible to step to keep the country whole.

The simplistic bottom-line seems to be that the China model provides economic growth and keeps the country unified, whereas the India model struggles with both.

After all these years of formal and casual approaches to understanding these issues, I find that I haven't resolved anything in my mind.

Should I consider such a lack of resolution as a sign of intellectual and moral weakness on my part, or as a sign of continued and healthy engagement on such topics of vital importance?