Remembrance of things past

Back in graduate school, when I was lot more of a bumbling idiot than what I am now, a couple of graduate students from India pitched an idea: why not perform a film song at the university's international students day (or whatever that was called.)

I had nothing to hold me back, and I said I will gladly sing along, while making sure they knew that my knowledge of Hindi was pretty basic at best.

It was a long time ago, and I have forgotten the names of people.  The leader was nearing the end of her PhD days--in the sciences, was it?  The name of one guy suddenly came back to me, and easily did I track him down on the web.   Another girl, whatever her name--we even worked together at the university's computing services--was the sister of this guy, as I recall.

Anyway, it was a group of about eight or ten of us.  And the song that our leader had us practicing quite a bit was this one:



A lovely tune, yes.  I had no idea what the lyrics meant.

Later on, this friend joked that I was pronouncing a few words like how somebody with a Bengali accent might.  (Interesting side note: through the years that I was there, he was working on his PhD in economics, and then I find out years later that he switched to film studies.  Only in America, eh!)

Those were the days, my friend :)

Oh, the performance itself? You had to ask? We sucked. Big time!

This is the future me?

Robert Mankoff, the New Yorker's cartoon editor, has a lot to say on how cartoonists dream things up

How Zuckerberg spells "hype"

India slowly regressing to the old Hindu rate of growth?

My punditry is perhaps no different from advertising in that perhaps half of what I say are correct, but the problem lies in not knowing which half it is!

Thus, it is always more than comforting when I can spot the instances where I have been correct all along, and then it turns out that those are not happy developments either. It is a bloody no-win situation.

For a while now, I have been blogging and writing op-eds on how not everything is going well in India, and that Indians ought to be really, really worried.  Instead, of course, Indians appear to care only for whatever happens in the cricket and movie worlds, while ignoring the phenomenally more urgent issues--like India's s(t)inking economy, about which, it turns out, I have been way more right than wrong.

The Economist reports that India's economic growth has considerably slowed down.  In its characteristic punning style, the magazine newspaper captioned it as "A Bric hits the wall":

perhaps most important—issue raised by lower growth is another kind of stability: social. India, unlike the other BRIC countries, is still desperately poor. One businessman and guru interviewed by your correspondent recently declared that "the next fifteen years will be India's worst since independence" and that there was a one-in-ten chance of a revolution. If India's economic miracle turns out to have been a mirage, it will not be so easy to dismiss that kind of talk as cranky. There is already widespread disgust at corruption. And at least ten million young folk will enter the workforce every year for the next decade or so. They will be coming to the big cities, looking for jobs that won't be created if India expands at a rickshaw rate of growth. Talk of a demographic dividend may turn back into talk of a time bomb.

 The Economist worries about the economic miracle having been a "mirage" while I have referred to it simply as a hype.  But, otherwise, we are referring to the same set of economic conditions.

The Hindu adds:

In tandem with a host of negative factors at home and abroad impacting the macro-economic environment, the country's GDP (gross domestic product) growth slumped to a nine-year low of 5.3 per cent during the fourth quarter (January-March) of 2011-12 as compared to a robust 9.2 per cent expansion in the same quarter of the previous fiscal. ...

The scale-down in growth rate for 2011-12 to 6.5 per cent — the lowest since 2002-03 when the economy grew by four per cent — disappointed both the government and the industry but came as no surprise as indications of a steady slowdown have been there for quite some time.

Disappointed with the dismal GDP figures, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, however, expressed cautious optimism and pointed to some signs of recovery in some select sectors. ...

In a statement, Mr. Mukherjee said: “GDP growth is the lowest in contemporary period. It has been substantially because of the very poor performance of manufacturing sector…The government would take all necessary steps to address imbalance on the fiscal front and on the current account. It would help in checking inflationary expectations and inspire confidence for improved capital inflows as well as recovery in domestic investment growth”.

This is the same finance minister, who, less than a month ago, stated:

 India was growing at over 9 per cent before the global financial crisis of 2008 pulled down the growth rate to 6.7 per cent in 2008-09. India has projected a growth rate of 7.6 per cent in 2012-13, up from 6.9 per cent recorded in the previous fiscal. 

Seriously!  It is a huge difference between 7.6 percent and 6.5 percent within four weeks, don't you think?

The good news: at least it is not 1991!

Bimal Jalan, Former Governor of the RBI showed confidence that the Indian economy has not gone back to the 1991 era yet.

Jalan was of the opinion that both the political and economic situation during the 1991 crisis was very difficult. He said that at present the economy has the strength to grow on the back of the industrial sector. He hoped that India will not be faced with a situation similar to the unprecedented external debt crisis of 1991. 

Well, I suppose the swearing in of the Indian cricket god, Sachin Tendulkar, as a member of the upper house of the parliament will by itself transform the sluggish economy, right?

Fox News programs blatant attack ad! (Un)Fair and (Un)Balanced

A New Yorker cartoon that is not funny? Yep, it happens!

It ain't funny because the cartoon simply presents the reality, about which there is nothing to chuckle:

But then, the magazine has another cartoon for people like me who didn't think that the internship cartoon was funny:

Ok, am laughing now ... call off the mafioso :)

The better war-president? Bush or Obama? A trick question?

Over the last couple of days, I have read one too many news reports and commentaries about Obama's use of drones and his zealous pursuit of wars that no amount of sunshine outside can lift my spirits up, it seems.  Compared to the bumbling Bush, the current president executes a war plan. I mean, "execute" with all the presidential powers that are granted by the Constitution, and even those that are not!

A lengthy NY Times report notes:

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve. 

 Of course, this report itself isn't really anything new.  But, depressing every single time I read about how much this president is more a drone fanatic than the previous one was.  

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.  Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.

So, how does the leader of the most powerful country on this planet go about this killing route?

Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.

The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda.

“What’s a Qaeda facilitator?” asked one participant, illustrating the spirit of the exchanges. “If I open a gate and you drive through it, am I a facilitator?” Given the contentious discussions, it can take five or six sessions for a name to be approved, and names go off the list if a suspect no longer appears to pose an imminent threat, the official said. A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.

The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.

 You see how lethally focused on the job Obama is, compared to Bush who felt proud about not caring for nuances?  Aren't we happy that we have such an efficient killer as the president?

I was sure that Glenn Greewald would have something to say in response to the NY Times report, and he sure does.  Greenwald quotes from this Foreign Policy article that there is no difference between Obama and Romney when it comes to foreign policy:

A post 9/11 consensus is emerging that has bridged the ideological divide of the Bush 43 years. And it’s going to be pretty durable. . . .  As shown through his stepped-up drone campaign, Barack Obama has become George W. Bush on steroids.

Yep, I have often blogged this as Barack O'Bush and other variations.  The bipartisan cheering for wars simply nauseate me.  I told my neighbor that this November, too, my candidate of choice will not be the Democratic or Republican ones, but I will vote a lunatic as my protest vote.

The net result of all the drone warmongering?

Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”

 Because, yes, children die.  Like this kid, Fatima:

How did Fatima die?

Around midnight on May 21, 2010, a girl named Fatima was killed when a succession of U.S.-made Hellfire missiles, each of them five-feet long and traveling at close to 1,000 miles per hour, smashed a compound of houses in a mountain village of Mohammed Khel in North Waziristan along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Wounded in the explosions, which killed a half dozen men, Fatima and two other children were taken to a nearby hospital, where they died a few hours later.

Is this the best that we can do as the richest and most powerful country ever?

Our grade-inflated world makes college that much more worthless!

I semi-seriously note in my classes that neither the students, nor my colleagues, nor the world outside ever listens to what I have to say.  I refer to this as the Rodney Dangerfield syndrome, but the reality is that hundreds of thousands of people paid to hear what Dangerfield had to say!

Take, for instance, the issue of higher education, about which I have blogged a lot. I mean, a lot!  I have also authored op-eds in newspapers, like this most recent one.  But, I bet people pay a lot more attention when, say, a Robert Samuelson says the same thing, even though I beat him to these arguments by quite a few years :)

Thus, here I am blogging more about higher education, and about grade inflation, even though this merely adds to my collection:

A University of Minnesota chemistry professor has thrust the U into a national debate about grade inflation and the rigor of college, pushing his colleagues to stop pretending that average students are excellent and start making clear to employers which students are earning their A's.
"I would like to state my own alarm and dismay at the degree to which grade compression ... has infected some of our colleges," said Christopher Cramer, chairman of the Faculty Consultative Committee. "I think we are at serious risk, through the abandonment of our own commitment of rigorous academic standards, of having outside standards imposed upon us."

Well, in this age of every kid getting a standing ovation for merely doing the routine work, grade inflation ought not to surprise us at all anymore.  Yet, I am, every time I read yet another report on this. 

University of Minnesota anthropology professor Karen-Sue Taussig suspects that today's "grade-inflated world" can be traced to the growing cost of a college degree, i.e. today's "tuition-inflated world." As Taussig told the Star Tribune, "They're paying for it, and they worked really hard, and they put in time, and therefore they think they should get a good grade."

Makes sense to me--the more we operate in a business-like world, the more we are tempted to tell customers what they want to hear.  And what they want to hear is that they are all above-average.

We also devise elaborate shenanigans so that students can even begin to feel awesome about their routine work.  I need not go outside my own academic walls for that--we have an Academic Excellence Showcase coming up in a couple of days. 

The entire day will be dedicated to the presentation of student scholarly activities, including original research papers, projects, artwork, performances, and upper-division course projects, presentations, and papers. 

Such a description might convey a notion that there would be presentations galore that resulted from "original research."  Except, it is not.  Here, the term "research" is used in the meaning that students and I use when we deal with assignments.  Like, when I tell them, "do your research on this topic before you write the three-page paper."  "Research" is nothing but, well, do your homework.

It turns out that the celebration of "academic excellence" is often nothing more than standing ovations for routine coursework.  And lost in this circus is real accomplishment when that happens.  Like a former student, "A," who presented a philosophy paper at a regional conference as a true freshman.  Yes, a true freshman.  Now, when the excellent work like hers is granted the same ranking that a routine coursework gets, you now get an idea of the Lake Wobegon traits in colleges.

Full disclosure: when the idea of undergraduate research was kicked around on campus, I was one of the very few involved in that original effort.  But, I got severely disillusioned when the discussions quickly morphed into how to make students feel great, and how faculty ought to get workload compensation.  I stopped my involvement right there.  Because, remember, nobody listens to what I say, which was the story at those meetings, too :(

Harvard prepares Presidents, judges, and China's commie leaders?

A follow-up to my earlier post.  Matt Yglesias corrects Niall Ferguson with this simple graphic (HLS is Harvard Law School, and Harvard's business school is HBS)

So, Harvard is tightening its grip on the Executive branch, it has more than a choke-hold on the Judiciary! And they are prowling on Wall Street, too!

Hmmmm ...

If Harvard is that good, well, it should not surprise us then that Harvard "is training the next generation of Chinese Communist Party leaders"

The Harvard curriculum, specially designed for this program, resembles a midcareer executive course. Housed at the Kennedy School’s Ash Center—the same graduate school Bo Xilai’s son attended—Harvard faculty teach Chinese officials leadership, strategy, and public management. Some of the lectures are given by big-name Harvard professors, including Roger Porter and Joseph Nye. Although the classes are restricted to Chinese officials, these party members have ample opportunity to mix with the school’s faculty and general student body. Borrowing from the case-study method made famous at the university’s business school, the coursework zeroes in on specific topics such as U.S. policy and government, how the media operates, negotiation strategy, and even social media. The classroom work is supplemented by site visits to places like the Massachusetts State House, the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and larger institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations. Besides its main leadership program, which lasts eight weeks, Harvard runs more tailored courses, too. One is focused on crisis management. Another is entirely devoted to the Shanghai municipal government. A new energy program will bring together executives from the China Southern Grid Power Corporation. “The goal is to help the Chinese government work in this environment of globalization,” says Lu. “To catch up.” 

Harvard specially designed a curriculum for this? As Johnny Carson often said, "I did not know that!"  The difference, however, is that this this Harvard story ain't funny. 

BTW, the graphic interests me for another reason: I will add this to my venn diagram collections--well, this be only the third!   The Venn diagrams that my math teacher, Vimala Sitaraman, taught us a long, long time ago :)

"Pyaasa" for poetry, music, and life itself

This world of palaces, thrones, and crowns
This world of societies that resent humanity
This world of those hungry for material wealth
What is this world to me, even if I can have it?

Each body is afflicted, each soul thirsty
With confused eyes and hearts full of sorrow
Is this the world or the realm of the senseless
What is this world to me, even if I can have it?

In this world where a person's being is only a toy
It is an establishment that worships death
Where it costs less to die than to breathe
What is this world to me, even if I can have it?

Here youth wanders in apathy
Young bodies are decorated and sold in the market
Where love is treated as a product to trade
What is this world to me, even if I can have it?

That is the translation of the lyrics of this wonderful song--the translation provided by this YouTube user.  May their tribe increase!



Incidentally, this movie Pyaasa has always been highly rated by critics.  My favorite song from the movie is the following one though:

As the rupee speeds towards 60 ... hey, retirement age!

India's economic situation and the worsening rupee are beginning to consume my attention, which is not good news!

The Financial Times editorial notes that the situation is quite serious:

Not so long ago there was excited chatter in India about the possibility of the country overhauling China to become the world’s fastest growing large economy. But the Indian tortoise, far from gaining on the Chinese hare, is going backwards. Growth has not edged into double digits. Instead it has sagged back towards 6 per cent. In recent days, three investment banks have downgraded their view of India’s prospects. Morgan Stanley says the slowdown, the result of policy paralysis and a worsening external environment, could be deep and prolonged.
The symbol of India’s fall from grace is the rupee. It has sunk more than 17 per cent against the dollar this year to its lowest level on record. That ought at least to have helped exports. In fact they have shrunk, along with industrial output, which fell 3.5 per cent in March.

 Remember all the time and the effort that went into selecting a symbol for the rupee?  The focus ought to have been on the substance and not merely a symbol.  Well, hey, the new sign is fast losing its shine!

If foreign investors take fright, India’s balance of payments situation could quickly deteriorate. Standard & Poor’s has warned it may downgrade the rating on India’s sovereign debt unless Delhi can get the fiscal deficit under control. India also needs faster growth to help bring hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty.
Mr Singh, who used to be lauded as the architect of economic reforms, is now routinely derided. More than a prime minister, he is characterised as an errand boy for Sonia Gandhi, the Congress party leader. Indeed, the 79-year-old Mr Singh seems to have lost all ambition, as well as any grip over the administration he might once have had.

Singh has become a punchline--an awful way to be finally remembered in history!

But, forget all the words of the commentators; editorial cartoonists distill them well into a neat image, like this one:

Sometimes, I wonder if Indians are way too intoxicated by their cricket obsession to even notice the deterioration.  An outright ban on cricket might be the best fiscal policy, eh!

Bets are always on the US

The juggernaut that the US is, I expect it to easily keep moving along for a very long time. 

In responding to this post blogged by a friend from the other side of the planet, I commented:

My long-term bets, if I were a betting man, will always be on California and not on, say, Oregon, just as the bets will favor the US over any other country in the world.

Of course, I have written about this earlier too, like here.  The more I read and think about this, the less I am convinced that the juggernaut will be stopped in its tracks anytime soon. 

So, what I did read to trigger these additional remarks?  For one, The Economist concludes, after reviewing two books on this topic:

All things considered, America looks remarkably strong. I will be very surprised if another large country is richer and more stable than it two decades from now.

Of course, there is plenty wrong with the US--from bombing the shit out of innocent families to an increasingly dysfunctional political system where a majority vote in the Senate is often broadcast in the media as a bill having failed to pass to ... well, the list is quite endless.    

Yet, it is the US that I would bet on.  At one level, the logic is quite simplistic, similar to how in the bad old days the pinks and the reds would be asked a rather simple question: how many people in the world would rather immigrate to the US versus immigrating to the USSR?  Sometimes such Occam Razor-like thoughts, as simplistic as they might sound, carry a great deal of weight.

There is also plenty going well for the US, which the Economist also points out:

[One] thing that is often underappreciated about the place is its remarkable economic and institutional flexibility. When Michigan's economy implodes, that's bad—but people find it remarkably easy to pack up and move to sunnier climes. When Congress can scarcely keep the money for highway repair flowing, the city of Chicago pioneers new public-private sources of infrastructure finance. America's federal government is often a wreck. Luckily, America's success isn't driven almost entirely by the choices and actions of the federal government. China's success is really remarkable in so many ways, and I don't pretend there is nothing America can learn from its success. As a special report this week indicates, it is in many ways a surprisingly resilient economy. Its institutions are well-equipped to handle a major macroeconomic shock. Yet every government makes mistakes, and an economy built on the assumption that the government won't make too many mistakes is putting itself at risk for eventual stagnation, or perhaps collapse.
Meanwhile, American innovation is proving as impressive as ever. The golden age of the Space Race may be long gone, but private firms in America are putting ships into orbit. Apple is the envy of the world, and rightly so. Google is doing pioneering work on autonomous vehicles, which could revolutionise transport. IBM's Watson, and things like it, could change medicine and many other fields besides.

 To quite an extent, this Houdini-like magical performance of the US was probably what led the taxi driver in Nagercoil to remark that it is amazing that America always comes out on top.

As Branko Milanovic points out in his wonderful book, The Haves and the Have-Nots, even if the US grows at a mere 2.5% a year, while China and India grow at 7% a year, well, catching up won't be easy.  Furthermore, as countries reach that middle-income sweet spot, it becomes difficult to maintain high growth rates.

If one considers California as a barometer, a leading indicator, of what lies ahead for the US, Dowell Myers, whose class I have had as a graduate student, cautions that we do not believe any tales of the Golden State's gloomy future.  Even when it comes to population dynamics:

When it comes to retaining native sons and daughters, California has the fifth-strongest attraction of all 50 states. Among California-born adults who were at least 25 years of age and old enough to have moved away, fully 66.9 percent were still choosing to reside in the Golden State in 2007, the last year of high migration before the recession held people down. Texas, with 75.1 percent of native Texans still living in the state, has the strongest loyalty, and the other three rounding out the top five are Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Georgia. California’s top-five ranking is all the more impressive when you take into account the state’s high living costs and other negatives. We must have something going for us.

A variation of that old question comparing the US and USSR, would one rather go to, or be in, California, versus living in, Utah?  Is it any wonder why Facebookistan would be headquartered in California, though the authoritarian founder is a New Yorker!  Here, too, it is not that everything is well in California, but my bets are on that state.

But, would I ever want to move back to California?  Sure, to La Jolla, if I can afford it :)

Never on Sunday!