The Way We Were

Back when I was a regular columnist for the local newspaper, I systematically made my decisions on what to write about--above and beyond the journalistic question of will it play in Peoria.  One of the factors was the timeliness.

That's how I ended up writing this column in July 2012, in which I appreciated the Americans with Disabilities Act.  The anniversary of that legislation was coming up and I timed my column for that.  It was published on July 20, 2012, in time for the anniversary date of July 26th when the law became effective.

I wrote in that piece:

The ADA is also a wonderful example of why we need government, and how political parties can work constructively toward the betterment of the people — a concept that has become old-fashioned and is drowned out increasingly by the loud and harsh yelling that accompanies the trivial pursuits played by politicians and commentators.

I had no idea that tRump would get elected to the Oval Office four years later, and that the dysfunctional politics of 2012 that I was complaining about would come across in 2020 as noble and saintly discussions!

I hope that the elections in November will get us back to doing the greatest work for the greater good of the country and the world.

The following is the column from 2012:

*************************************

The Register-Guard (July 20, 2012)

The United States’ current dysfunctional politics reminds me of the contrast with a serious piece of history-making legislation: the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in July 1990.

I was in graduate school in Los Angeles and in the early phase of getting to know the new country when the ADA was introduced in Congress. The idea of the act appealed to me as noble: that people with disabilities ought to be accommodated so that they, too, can rise to their potential and freely engage in the pursuit of happiness.

Having grown up in India, I had witnessed at close quarters many different ways in which friends and relatives were restricted, sometimes literally to within their homes, because of disabilities. A distant uncle, for instance, who lost his eyesight as a young adult became practically unwanted in his own family because he had become a “burden.” India’s public spaces are daily reminders of the extreme challenges in everyday life for those who lack full physical abilities.

If a great society is identifiable by how it takes care of those with limitations of any kind, then the unfolding of the ADA — from the introduction of the bill to its implementation, which continues — has been a story about which we truly can be proud.

The ADA was not without its opponents. While it was an academic exercise for me to learn in coursework about how cost-benefit analysis is employed in public policymaking, it sounded quite awful when critics argued that the ADA would increase costs. Claims that the law would become a mandate conveniently overlooked the reality that those with disabilities were being treated as less than equals. When religious institutions were concerned that they would be forced to accommodate disabled people by spending money on structural changes to their buildings, I was struck by how much they seemed to be going against their own fundamental teachings on how human beings should be treated.

The bill eventually passed and became the law of the land, despite a divided government then — the U.S. Senate and the House were in the control of the Democratic Party, and a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, was in the White House. The final passage of the bill was, for all purposes, completely and totally bipartisan — a world away from the contemporary bickering over all things trivial!

The implementation phase of the ADA coincided with my first few years of gainful employment. In the small public agency that I worked for, we now had an additional responsibility of conforming to the ADA.

It became even more fascinating as the Internet gave us all an entirely new way to deal with information, which required us to think about accommodating those who were challenged visually. Later, when I returned to the academic world, I was impressed with how the ADA translated to accommodating students constrained by their hearing disabilities.

The ADA-led accommodations have become so much a part of my existence here in the United States that I forget how different conditions are elsewhere — until I cross our borders, that is. My recent experiences in different parts of the world were reminders of the phenomenal advances in the United States on this front.

Accommodating the disabled has required us to spend on everything from sidewalk improvements to sign language interpreters. These are additional expenses, yes, when compared to how we conducted our affairs before 1990. But I bet there are very few people in this country anymore who would ever question these kinds of “expenses,” because we fully understand the value these deliver — a value that cannot be captured through any bean counting or cost-­benefit analysis.

The ADA is also a wonderful example of why we need government, and how political parties can work constructively toward the betterment of the people — a concept that has become old-fashioned and is drowned out increasingly by the loud and harsh yelling that accompanies the trivial pursuits played by politicians and commentators.

There is no business like ... the news business?

Our local newspaper is practically dead.  When I first came to town, it was one of those old-style large sheets, with plenty of local, national, and international news.  It was an excellent family-owned newspaper, just like the one that I was used to in my previous hometown.

The death of this newspaper has been swift.  It is now an unrecognizable shrunk version of its former self, with overlords from far away.  I have decided to let the subscription expire when Movember ends.

But, the news business itself has been highly profitable for those who have tapped into the zeitgeist.  Like the New York Times, for instance.  trump has made the NYT great again! "More than three million paid digital-only subscribers."

Perhaps more important to shareholders, the company reported that it continued to be profitable. Net income reached $24.9 million ... Operating profits, the company’s preferred measure, rose 30 percent to $41.4 million in the period.

Including this sucker!

The more trump pisses off the media, the more profitable these big time media companies get.  The more the media piss off trump, the more popular he gets with his base.  It is a twisted relationship that they have.

What worries me is the wider question of how Trump and the media interact.
When you watch the US morning shows - and evening shows come to that - what you notice is how things have changed.
Even those who were not originally taking sides are now nailing their colours to the mast. Fox and MSNBC have always played to their own bases. But now CNN, too, has editorialised its evening slot with Chris Cuomo - who gives us an essay, a comment piece, on whatever is getting him fired up.
It's a good watch actually. And makes you engaged.
But make no mistake - it's the same game that Trump is playing. The one they pretend to despise. If DJT can rally his base - then - goes the logic - why shouldn't TV do it too.
It works for viewing figures in the same way it works for electoral success. It works, in other words, for those who like their chambers echoed - but it's an odd place for news to sit.

So, is the US media doing its job?

I leave it to the critic-extraordinaire, Noam Chomsky, to answer that question:

It depends on what we think their job is. They are businesses, so by accepted standards their job is profit. By other standards, they have a duty to the public to provide “all the news that’s fit to print,” under a concept of “fitness” that is as free as possible from submission to power interests or other distorting factors. About this there is a great deal to say – I’ve devoted many words to the topic elsewhere, as have many others. But in today’s strange climate of Trumpian “alternative facts” and “false reality,” it is useful to recognize that with all their flaws, which are many, the mainstream media remain an indispensable source of information about the world.

U.S. outsourcing not fault of China or India

(For The Register-Guard, August 13, 2012)

The sudden populism over outsourcing reminds me of a Chinese saying that I recently came across: “If we don’t change the direction in which we are headed, we will end up where we are going.”

Twelve years ago, when I taught at California State University, Bakersfield, I assigned a class of about 35 students the task of figuring out, through rough calculations, whether Bakersfield could compete against Bangalore, India, when it came to call centers that the local leaders were pursuing as a growth strategy.

At that time, outsourcing hadn’t entered the everyday political and cultural vocabulary, and Bangalore was unknown to most in the United States — after all, Thomas Friedman had yet to publicize these through his best-seller, “The World is Flat.”

Working in teams, the students independently arrived at the same conclusion: Bangalore will beat Bakersfield any day! My hope was that most of the class would have understood through this exercise how their economic futures could become increasingly dependent on developments in other parts of the world.

Well, we have now almost ended up where we were going — economic activities that might have generated many middle income jobs in the past have migrated to other countries that are equally, or more, interested in their development. Therefore, unemployment rates in the United States do not seem to be coming down despite all our attempts. And, yes, “outsourcing” is now a part of our lexicon and for which politicians have suddenly developed a fondness.

Yet we are not talking about outsourcing in a constructive manner. Outsourcing is being used to portray China or India as bad actors, when, in reality, they are far from any real competition to us. The average Indian earns barely 5 percent of the per capita income here in the United States. The average Chinese is in a much better position than the average Indian, but the per capita income there is only a tenth of that in the United States.

India and China are not our competitors, but they are much poorer countries where people are eager to improve their economic conditions.

Outsourcing economic activities to India or China, or any number of other countries, has made possible goods and services at remarkably low prices. From T-shirts to smart phones to customer support, we would have to pay a lot more than we currently do if there were no outsourcing at all.

It is not China’s or India’s problem that we failed to change our own direction over the years when we enjoyed the abundance of goods and services at affordable prices. Obsessed by the Internet bubble, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars that followed, and then the housing bubble, we continued to keep going without even attempting to alter our course, seemingly oblivious to how the economic structures all around the world were rapidly changing.

Should we then be surprised that it has become extremely difficult to generate gainful employment that will keep alive the American Dream for the middle class?

Outsourcing enters our public discourse only when it conveniently fits into political calculations. Sens. John Kerry and John Edwards angled for votes by referring to outsourcing and offshoring when they were on the Democratic ticket for the White House in 2004. Now, both President Obama and Mitt Romney are talking about it, but for all the wrong reasons that don’t seem to reflect in any way the Harvard credentials they both have.

Obama beats up on outsourcing in order to imply that the Chinese and Indians are taking away “our” jobs, which is a highly screwed-up interpretation. And Romney doesn’t seem to recognize that outsourcing and the globalization of the economy have not translated to real economic betterment for the middle class.

Since the Great Recession, I have increased the intensity with which I try to make students understand that any job that can be sent to a different country will be sent, and that any job that can be automated will be automated. Unfortunately, a captive audience does not always mean an attentive audience.

I suppose we seem to be bent on making sure we will end up where we are going

Disabilities Act — when politics had meaning

The Register-Guard (July 20, 2012)

The United States’ current dysfunctional politics reminds me of the contrast with a serious piece of history-making legislation: the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was signed into law in July 1990.

I was in graduate school in Los Angeles and in the early phase of getting to know the new country when the ADA was introduced in Congress. The idea of the act appealed to me as noble: that people with disabilities ought to be accommodated so that they, too, can rise to their potential and freely engage in the pursuit of happiness.

Having grown up in India, I had witnessed at close quarters many different ways in which friends and relatives were restricted, sometimes literally to within their homes, because of disabilities. A distant uncle, for instance, who lost his eyesight as a young adult became practically unwanted in his own family because he had become a “burden.” India’s public spaces are daily reminders of the extreme challenges in everyday life for those who lack full physical abilities.

If a great society is identifiable by how it takes care of those with limitations of any kind, then the unfolding of the ADA — from the introduction of the bill to its implementation, which continues — has been a story about which we truly can be proud.

The ADA was not without its opponents. While it was an academic exercise for me to learn in coursework about how cost-benefit analysis is employed in public policymaking, it sounded quite awful when critics argued that the ADA would increase costs. Claims that the law would become a mandate conveniently overlooked the reality that those with disabilities were being treated as less than equals. When religious institutions were concerned that they would be forced to accommodate disabled people by spending money on structural changes to their buildings, I was struck by how much they seemed to be going against their own fundamental teachings on how human beings should be treated.

The bill eventually passed and became the law of the land, despite a divided government then — the U.S. Senate and the House were in the control of the Democratic Party, and a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, was in the White House. The final passage of the bill was, for all purposes, completely and totally bipartisan — a world away from the contemporary bickering over all things trivial!

The implementation phase of the ADA coincided with my first few years of gainful employment. In the small public agency that I worked for, we now had an additional responsibility of conforming to the ADA.

It became even more fascinating as the Internet gave us all an entirely new way to deal with information, which required us to think about accommodating those who were challenged visually. Later, when I returned to the academic world, I was impressed with how the ADA translated to accommodating students constrained by their hearing disabilities.

The ADA-led accommodations have become so much a part of my existence here in the United States that I forget how different conditions are elsewhere — until I cross our borders, that is. My recent experiences in different parts of the world were reminders of the phenomenal advances in the United States on this front.

Accommodating the disabled has required us to spend on everything from sidewalk improvements to sign language interpreters. These are additional expenses, yes, when compared to how we conducted our affairs before 1990. But I bet there are very few people in this country anymore who would ever question these kinds of “expenses,” because we fully understand the value these deliver — a value that cannot be captured through any bean counting or cost-­benefit analysis.

The ADA is also a wonderful example of why we need government, and how political parties can work constructively toward the betterment of the people — a concept that has become old-fashioned and is drowned out increasingly by the loud and harsh yelling that accompanies the trivial pursuits played by politicians and commentators.

I received my first real hate mail. Not pleasant :(

I am by now used to put-me-downs, sarcastic comments, faculty and administrative colleagues behaving unprofessionally and unethically towards me .... but never have I been a target for hate mail.

Until now, that is.

An email I received tells me that someone was ticked off with one of the two newspaper columns that I wrote based on my Ecuador experiences.  I have reproduced verbatim the message in that email:

 Fuck you, nigger.  You are a vestige of my evolutionary past and deserve to be extinct.  Your race and the aboriginal savages of Ecuador have contributed nothing to the modern world.  You filth have no "heritage."  The Europeans did not believe the equator was in the Mediterranean.  You are a revisionist historian that has to resort to lies and trickery to mask the fact that everything that we hold dear, everything that we cherish, everything that separates us from the apes is the culture of the white race.  Universities and the Ph.D curriculum taught in them was devised by whites.  Electricity, pharmaceuticals, politics & democracy, synthetics, cars, computers & the internet, space travel & astronomy, etc. etc. is European cultural heritage.  Do a google search on "Norman Borlaug."  This one white saved your race from extinction.  If it wasn't for him, most of India and China's population would have starved off.  And how do you thank whites for saving billions?  Lies and slander.  Fuck you, filth.  You belong in a mud hut, starving to death, like most Indians.  For crying out loud, 65% of the population of Ecuador is MESTIZO-- mixed European and aborigine.  And now we se this regression in humanity, backwards, into an earlier mental and behavioral level.  Go practice your OWN heritage.  Starve to death.  Good riddance, nigger scum.

Life is a mixed bag, I suppose. Not rainbows all the time :(

The ‘other’ India fails to get much attention from the West

During the last presidential primaries, Sen. John Edwards, who has since disappeared from the political radar, constantly referred to “two Americas” — one America that struggles to get by and lacks political clout, and another that has plenty of everything, including the ability to shape government policies. While this duality is subject to debate, such a schism is certainly visible all the way across the planet — the “First World” India of commerce, call centers and high technology, versus the poor and backward millions of “Third World” India.

After being ignored by successive American governments all through the Cold War, India now gets considerable attention. We have now had three successive, and successful, presidential visits by Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama. Of course, the economic and geopolitical angles are what interest the United States, and it is this “First World” India that we are increasingly familiar with. It is also thanks to such a familiarity that NBC now features a sitcom, “Outsourced,” whose context is India and its call centers.

And when the media report about the world’s first billion-dollar house, which will be home to the family of India’s richest individual, Mukesh Ambani, we are certainly impressed — and perhaps made a little insecure, too, by rapidly growing prosperity in a country that for years did not rank that much higher above Ethiopia in our mental impressions of poverty on the planet.

However, poverty has not really gone away; it is, unfortunately, alive and well in “Third World” India.

While it is true that rapid economic growth has lifted quite a few million Indians from poverty, the poor are by no means an insignificant minority. A multidimensional poverty index used by the United Nations Development Program counted 421 million people living in acute poverty in eight Indian states, exceeding in sheer numbers the 410 million in the 26 poorest African countries combined.

This is a staggering number of poor people, a number that does not show up in our calculated economic and geopolitical interests in India. Even those skeptical about the accuracy of the UNDP estimates will not find it difficult to imagine that the number of poor in India will be in the hundreds of millions.

Over the years, this parallel existence of an India that is poor has also resulted in a growing radical and violent movement, whose members are referred to as Maoists. Yes, Mao — as in China’s Mao Zedong, who has been pushed aside ever since Deng Xiaoping opened the Chinese economy in 1979 and declared that “to be rich is glorious.”

It is no surprise that India’s Maoists are active in the same states that are home to the vast numbers of poor tallied in the UNDP study of poverty. Decades ago, in a much poorer India, Maoist “rebels” were present in other states, too.

During my childhood, the adults in the family often spoke in hushed tones about a much older cousin of mine who had suddenly dropped out of college and gone “underground.” As a kid who only knew the literal meaning of the word, I didn’t understand then that “underground” meant that he had joined the radical, and often violent, communist groups.

But now, such groups are almost nonexistent in the southern parts of India that I visit — these states boast of homegrown multinational computer and automobile corporations. Maoists have long exited these regions, which have experienced economic growth and prosperity, and where governments offer considerable support for the economically and socially disadvantaged.

It is also not a mere coincidence that this cousin later on completed his college education, had a successful banking career, and is now a retired grandfather.

It is time for my next trip to India, and it includes spending a couple of days at a conference that will be held in one of those eight states with high poverty — Orissa. The focus of this academic conference is on rural laborers who, without land, property and political weight, find themselves in precarious economic situations.

Through the conference papers and a little bit of traveling, I hope to understand this “other” India, even as I spend most of my time in the successful “First World” India and report as your correspondent.

For The Register-Guard

Published: Monday, Nov 29, 2010 05:01AM

1979: start of a new era

Way back on January 31, 2008, the Register Guard published my op-ed--titled "1979 was the start of a new era", where I pointed out that pretty much everything that we are dealing with today as major global issues can be traced back to one single year: 1979.

Fast forward 18 months. One of the essays in the latest issue of Foreign Policy--a leading policy publication--is "1979: The Great Backlash"

Am excited that I was way ahead--by a year and a half, which seems more than a lifetime in this contemporary world :-)

Thailand and India stealing America’s medical mojo

“We needed a visa to go to India, but not to come here. So, we came to Thailand for medical treatment.”

So said a couple from Dubai, with whom I shared a table while we were on a cruise boat down the Chao Phraya River to Bangkok from the historic ruins of Ayutthaya.

After completing the medical procedures, the young husband and wife from Dubai had been vacationing in and around Bangkok for a week, which is when I met them. They represent very well the rapidly growing medical tourism market, into which India has jumped as well.

The previous day, I spent almost three hours in Bumrungrad Hospital, which is in one of the busiest areas of Bangkok — not as a patient, but as an observer curious about the globalized health care market.

The multistoried building is impressive even from the outside. Even the healthy options in the food court reflected the multinational customer base, with visitors and patients’ families invited to choose among varieties ranging from Lebanese to American foods.

And, yes, there is a Starbucks, too!

Bumrungrad is a hospital that offers as much as, or sometimes even more than, what some of the best hospitals in the United States have to offer, but for much lower fees. Its certification from the Joint Commission International speaks for the quality of medical professionals, technology and care.

In fact, it was the first hospital in Asia to have met the American standards for hospital accreditation.

The success of Bumrungrad, and the potential for an ever-expanding international health care market, has catalyzed the growth of a similar industry in India. According to one estimate, India treated about 450,000 foreign patients in 2007 alone. However, reliable data on precise numbers of medical tourists are hard to obtain for a number of reasons; for one, it is quite likely that a foreigner might not want to explicitly state that medical treatment is the reason for a visit, because of worries that the visa application will be denied.

Wockhardt Hospital and Apollo Hospitals, both with highly qualified staff and some of the latest technologies, are examples in India. Wockhardt has partnered with Harvard Medical International, while Apollo operates hospitals not only in India but even in Africa.

With six of its 43 hospitals having been accredited by Joint Commission, Apollo has the largest number of accredited facilities outside the United States. The male half of the Dubai couple remarked that his father prefers going to India because of better service and, interestingly enough, for the tastier foods.

An important aspect of medical tourism is not discussed much in America — the United States was the true pioneer for medical tourism. It used to attract patients from all over the world because of its dominance with the latest and sophisticated health care. But now, patients from Asia and Africa can choose from facilities such as Bumrungrad or Apollo, which compete to provide American-­quality health care at lower prices — sometimes as low as one-third of American prices.

As with many other products and services, the rest of the world is racing to catch up with America. I am, therefore, less worried about a potential outflow of American patients to Thailand or India, but more concerned that America might have lost her groove.

Finally, medical tourism highlights a profound contradiction — quality health care is available for those who are able to afford it, irrespective of where they live, even as many millions lack access to basic health care. India’s Planning Commission notes that public expenditures are a very small fraction of the nation’s total health care expenditures.

In other words, health care is a highly privatized economic activity in India, where the number of poor exceeds the entire population of the United States. This highly privatized nature immediately implies that the poor, who cannot afford to spare a rupee, have practically no health care at all.

I suppose to a large extent, the health care problems in Thailand or India are no different from what we are struggling with in the United States — how to guarantee a minimum level of health coverage to citizens, while making sure that any such framework does not take away the incentives for further progress in the research, development, and provision of advanced health care. I hope that we in the United States can set a successful example for the rest of the world.

For The Register-Guard

Appeared in print: Monday, Jul 6, 2009

Oversell college. Waste. Unemployment

It increasingly looks like I was more correct than otherwise in my arguments that maybe we are overselling college. Here is an excerpt from the editorial in the Register Guard, which quotes a report from Skills2Compete-Oregon.

[In] 2007 only 29 percent of Oregonians were employed in jobs that required four or more years of college. Another 19 percent worked in jobs that required only a high school education or less. The majority — 52 percent — held middle-skill jobs. What’s more, nearly half of all job openings until the middle of the next decade will be in middle-skill fields.

The report surveyed current and projected demand in 30 middle-skill occupations, and found that employment in all of them is expected to grow. The median income — half earn more, half earn less — of electricians was $56,800 in 2006, and Oregon will need 12 percent more of them by 2016. Radiology technicians’ median income was $53,500, and the number of jobs in that field will grow by 28 percent. Firefighters’ median pay was $46,400, and their number will grow by 12 percent. Paralegals had a median salary of $39,400 in 2006, and over a 10-year period the number of jobs is projected to grow by 15 percent.

Oregon is not preparing its labor force to fill these jobs.

I suppose it is really easy for me to say, "I told you so!" But, I do remember how my opinion was not quite well-received.

Anyway, watch the group's testimony at a House Committee hearing:

The Civil War in Sri Lanka

Out of sight, out of mind.  That seems to be the bottom line when it comes to the crisis in Sri Lanka.

 

A civil war has been raging in the former Ceylon since 1983, despite several attempts by outsiders to diffuse the tensions and to put an end to the conflict.  The rebel group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and referred to as the Tamil Tigers, has adopted a violent approach to achieve an autonomous homeland for the ethnic Tamils who, it alleges, are discriminated against by the majority Sinhalese.  The Sri Lankan government, over the years, has attempted to squelch the rebellion without much success.  

Until recently.

 

For the first time after many years, the Tamil-dominated Jaffna Pensinsula, in northern Sri Lanka, is now under the control of the Sri Lankan army and government. The Tamil Tigers are now boxed into an area of just over 200 square miles—much smaller than the area that they controlled up until the latest military offensive.    

 

International groups watching the war rather helplessly from the sidelines are worried about the fate of civilians, which is my concern too.  The government, sensing that an ultimate military victory might be within reach—something that has been quite unimaginable over the 26 years—has apparently banned aid groups from entering the war area and assisting civilians.  

Reuters reports that “aid agencies say there are about 230,000 refugees in the war zone, where rights groups say the Tigers are keeping them as human shields.”  

Of course, the Tamil Tigers flatly deny that civilians are being used as shields. 

 

It is not only Tamils who are being caught in the crossfire.  A Sri Lankan newspaper editor, Lasantha Wickrematunge, a Sinhalese himself, was shot dead while he was on his way to work.  Ironically, it was not the Tamil Tigers who killed this journalist, even though he has described the rebels as “among the most ruthless and bloodthirsty organisations to have infested the planet.”  

While the killers are yet to be identified, it is believed that Wickrematunge was a target because he was highly critical of the government’s handling of terrorism in his country.  Wickrematunge predicted his end in an editorial, where he wrote that "When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me."

 

Wickrematunge’s death and the ongoing war highlight how much the ferocious fanaticism of the rebels is being matched by the government's, and how civilians—Tamils and Sinhalese alike—are paying a huge price for this mano a mano behavior. 

 

Over the Christmas break, I was in Chennai—the capital of Tamil Nadu, and the largest city in the state.  “Tamil Nadu” means the “land of the Tamils” and, as one would surmise, there is, therefore, immense sympathy for the Tamils in Sri Lanka.  There were public demonstrations urging the government—at the state and federal levels—to act in order to help both the Tamils and the Sri Lankan rebels. 

 

Of course, while there is enormous sympathy for the Tamil civilian population in Sri Lanka, the same cannot be said for the Tamil Tigers—after all, this same rebel group was responsible for assassinating India’s former prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, back in 1991, at an election campaign rally only a few miles south of Chennai. 

 

Yet, I find that there is very little coverage in the US of this serious development.  I do not think there has been a statement on this from our State Department and White House, either.  

Granted that this news item has to compete against updates on the global economic meltdown, the presidential transition, or the situation in Gaza. But, even the controversy over Russia turning off the flow of natural gas to Ukraine and other European countries gets more coverage, not to speak of the hours that were spent on the recently concluded Golden Globes. 

 

I would think that the Sri Lankan situation where hundreds of thousands of civilians are caught in the crossfire merits our attention.  However, and unfortunately, it turns out that the importance of destruction of life and property depends on the geographic area where that happens. 

 

William Shakespeare said it best, although in a different context: “there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”

update: this was published in the Register Guard on January 19, 2009, under the title "Sri Lanka flies under the radar"

A university associated with the Oregon Ducks?

A neighbor says this joke at get togethers almost always.  But, it is not tiresome to listen to it though.  The joke?  "Hey, I just found out the other day that there is an university in town, with a whole lot of buildings too, with the same name as the Oregon Ducks football team" 

Yes, ha ha, indeed.  As much as a sports fan as any average American, this neighbor is unhappy with the huge amount of resources and attention that the university's athletics programs--football and basketball in particular--receive.  Well, he has a number of fellow travellers, including me.

Nathan Tublitz, a biology professor at the university, has a sharp op-ed in the paper.  He writes there:

The University of Oregon recently triggered this reaction by rescheduling the 2010 June Commencement Ceremonies to accommodate the NCAA national track and field championships.

Move graduation for a track meet?

This decision to prioritize athletics over academics, inconveniencing thousands of students and their parents, might have been excusable were it not the latest in a long line of similar decisions. For example, the Athletic Department’s current football plans include moving the Civil War game to the Saturday before exam week, holding more Thursday night games, and establishing an annual Thanksgiving Day rivalry game against the University of Washington Huskies. Never mind that students need to study for finals, attend Friday classes, or spend Thanksgiving with their families. Oregon athletics and the university administration are again reaching for a quick payout at the expense of academic quality and institutional integrity.

Hard to live green when just surviving

Chennai has been unseasonably warm during this visit, compared to my trips the last few Decembers. The overnight low, which is normally around 65 degrees, has been consistently and significantly above that — typically about 73 degrees. Is this a mere blip in the weather pattern, or a part of the overall climate change story?

Thanks to the cooler early morning temperatures, stepping out for a walk at 5 a.m. is an activity that I always look forward to. For one, it will be months before Eugene warms up to that temperature, and therefore I feel an urgency to enjoy the warmth.

Also, after having become accustomed to the milder Oregon climate, while I rush around the park in Chennai wearing shorts and a T-shirt, it is quite a sight to see the young and the old walk and jog wearing woolen beanies, scarves and sweaters. I suppose after getting used to temperatures in the high 90s and in the triple digits for most of the year, 65 can seem relatively cold to them.

This time, though, my sister mentioned the other day that she has yet to take the woolen blankets and sweaters out of the boxes. It is no wonder, then, that I have spotted very few people wearing sweaters in the park.

The much warmer overnight temperatures also have made the city a fertile breeding ground for mosquitoes. While not as huge as the mosquitoes that sucked the blood out of me in Alaska, the smaller ones here in Chennai are equally thirsty for nourishment and seem to enjoy my “American” blood, much to my discomfort!

Yet there is very little talk about the weather and climate change. Those topics have been pushed way back by the worsening economic conditions and the possibility of a war with Pakistan.

Furthermore, all it takes is one trip outside the comfortable enclaves in cities to the smaller towns and villages, where the majority of India lives, to understand why climate change fails to register as the biggest worry for the struggling millions. Thousands of villages and towns in India lack even the basic necessities of sanitation facilities and a protected and clean water supply.

As one commentator put it recently in an Indian newspaper, “Out of the 1.2 billion people who defecate in the open worldwide because they have no access to toilets, more than half are Indian.” Ouch!

When daily life for millions is thus severely constrained by economic and public health limitations, it is not difficult to understand why these issues might take precedence over climate change.

I am not dismissing the reality that as more and more Indians, Chinese and the rest of the world’s population become affluent, the more they also are going to contribute to global climate change — particularly given the reliance on inefficient carbon- based energy sources. And, of course, we could make a convincing point that even the poor in villages and cities need to worry about climate change because we are all doomed to experience its effects, irrespective of how poor or affluent we are. But the importance of climate change pales in relation to the immediate struggles of daily life.

Thus, with every trip, I am convinced even more that the burden is on us in the advanced countries, and the United States in particular, to take the lead on tackling this global environmental challenge. (It is ironic, indeed, that I should write about climate change after having traveled to the other side of the world in highly polluting jet planes!)

The economic recession gives us an opportunity to consider our enormous consumption — which is, after all, a significant part of the climate change story. We need environmental equivalents of Slim Fast to get us on to a consumption regimen that can help slow down this urgent global problem. The highly influential Oprah Winfrey can launch a “climate change diet” program — perhaps even a separate television channel, “O!-lite,” that will be exclusively devoted to this topic.

Maybe we can employ one strategy that we have used to educate and alert consumers about dietary consumption — the nutritional labels on food packages.

I can imagine easily the packing on the 56-inch high-definition TV or an iPhone having a “climate change” information chart similar to the nutritional labels — information on carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, comparable to the calorie data on a chocolate bar. We can then make decisions as informed consumers, just as some of us avoid junk food packed with fats.

Otherwise, it is equally possible that the bloodthirsty mosquitoes of Chennai will enjoy the warmer world, and write the final chapters of the planet’s story.

Published in the Register Guard, Jan 4, 2009

In India, U.S. gets blame for economy

“Your country’s problems are affecting us,” complained my cousin, who is a senior executive with a vehicle component manufacturing factory in Chennai. He added that their factories are now operating at 10 percent to 15 percent capacity, and that he was not sure if they will be in business for long if demand does not pick up.

The global economic slowdown is revealing itself in India in many ways. News reports here are not that different from those in America. For instance, Honda not only has postponed an expansion of its manufacturing operations in India, but also is trimming production in its existing plant.

I met a businessman who owns a factory where about 60 are employed. A little more than a year ago, he made additional investments in his factory, importing newer machines from Japan. After all, it was a time when talk was about economic growth and not about a meltdown.

Now, this businessman is worried about the high levels of uncertainty and fear: “For the first time in my life, I don’t know what to do.”

Airline traffic is down significantly. Passengers frustrated with airline companies engaging in last-minute cancellations under the umbrella of “technical difficulties” suspect that perhaps the real reason is that they don’t want to operate money-losing flights with very few passengers. The financial liquidity crisis has left everyone scrambling for hard cash, which has led banks and investment firms to pay high interest rates of more than 11 percent for deposits for two or more years. Naturally, interest rates on loans have shot up as well.

Senior-year students in engineering and computer science who were looking forward to flashy employment contracts only a few months ago are now wondering whether they will be able to find any job.

The state of the economy is reflected even in “arranged marriages,” which are quite the norm in this part of India. (No, mine was not arranged!) Apparently, parents of girls are shying away from potential grooms who are in the information technology field because of concerns over economic security.

In all these situations, there seems to be an underlying frustration — sometimes explicitly articulated in conversations and news reports — that America has let the world down. In her column, spiced with humor and sarcasm, the editor of a leading weekly financial magazine notes that the pizza parlors her daughter loves are quite empty these days. She goes on to explain how it is connected to, you guessed it, the mortgage mess in America.

Against such a background, it did not help that television news stations seemed to have on endless loop footage of an Iraqi journalist hurling his shoes at President Bush. While the journalist who flung his shoes was making a statement strictly about U.S. involvement in Iraq, here, those same shoes flying toward Bush also are seen as a statement about everything that has gone wrong under U.S. leadership, both on Pennsylvania Avenue and on Wall Street.

I am now worried way more than before that it might take the rest of the world quite a few years to once again have trust and confidence in anything American, given how much America is viewed as the source of this financial pandemic.

There is not much of a hope that the new president would be able to turn things around any time soon. One person compared it to the typical joke about the common cold: it lasts a week if untreated, and for a full seven days if treated with medicines. I should note that this pessimism about the capability of an American president to overcome an economic crisis of such a magnitude is separate from the overwhelming support for Barack Obama himself.

One of the toughest questions about the economic meltdown — and a very simple one at the same time — came from my mother: “If this problem is so severe, then how come nobody saw it coming?” I simply shrugged my shoulders because I had no answer. So, I chose to focus on something easier — the delicious breakfast she had cooked.

Published in the Register Guard Dec 16, 2008

Car crisis could well be repeated

Like most Americans, I am conflicted over how we ought to deal with the crisis with the three car manufacturers — Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.

This is not an abstract public policy issue for me by any means. After all, the vehicles that our family currently owns are from one of these manufacturers — a Ford Focus, a Saturn Vue and a Jeep Cherokee. We also have owned a Ford Taurus and a Saturn station-wagon. The only “un-American” vehicle we ever had was a Nissan Sentra.

It is not that we were implementing a “Buy American” policy at home. It just so happens that the vehicles we bought met our preferences and budget constraints.

Earlier today, when I took my Saturn Vue to the dealership for the regular oil change, I began to wonder whether the brand will even exist in the future. News reports suggest that General Motors is planning to sell the division, or merge it with another. It’s possible Saturn could be shuttered completely.

On the one hand, the public policy person in me prefers inefficient economic enterprises to fade away without government intervention. I think about Pan Am, which symbolized air travel when I was a kid. It has been almost two decades since Pan Am closed down when it could not survive in a highly competitive global travel industry. It is the law of the jungle that inefficient businesses lose out to efficient ones. In order to pre-empt a Pan Am-like story, the auto manufacturers should have avoided the strategic errors they made, especially during the cash-flush decade from the mid-1990s when sport utility vehicles and minivans delivered billions of profits.

On the other hand, I recognize that government actively intervenes in practically every aspect of our economy. Heck, even my home is partly underwritten by the government, which permits us to write off the interest paid on the mortgage loan. Thus, if many other industries can be subsidized or bailed out, well, why not help out Saturn and its loyal and committed employees?

Even as policymakers try to figure out the current crisis, we might want to understand a few longer-term trends as well. “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” was a holiday season movie two decades ago; these same American manufacturing industries listed in the title also have been in decline. Trains, for all purposes, have been nearly relegated to history. The automobile industry is in a pickle — some might argue that it has been in denial since the energy crisis in the 1970s.

And all is not well in the aviation industry either — both in the manufacturing of planes and in passenger transportation. Boeing was the undisputed champ in its field, perhaps even more powerfully so than the American “Big Three” ever were. Slowly but steadily, Boeing has been losing its market share to other manufacturers. Twenty years ago, Airbus had barely 16 percent of the market; now it is nearly on par with Boeing in terms of the value of aircraft delivered.

Meanwhile, Brazil and Canada have become active in the manufacture of short-haul jets. China is the latest entry into this field; last month, the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China announced the sale of five of its ARJ21s to General Electric’s aircraft leasing division, with an option for 20 more. The ARJ21 and other larger CACC-­manufactured jets are essentially China’s effort to crack the market dominated by Boeing and Airbus.

Over the last few years, we have come to realize that anything we do can be done cheaper in China. This means that, if we don’t watch out, here in the Pacific Northwest we could be worrying about Boeing 20 years from now, just as Americans are worrying about General Motors today.

Therefore, even as we try to mitigate the woes of the auto industry, and even as the manufacturers begin to articulate a long-term survival strategy, I hope we will learn one important lesson.

Global economic competition is real, and it will only get more intense in the future. If we don’t learn that lesson, another bottom line awaits us: History does repeat.

Published in the Register Guard Dec 16, 2008

Let sports assist war on terror

The recent cricket match here in Chennai (Madras) seemed to be an apt collective response to the terrorism horror in Mumbai (Bombay). Perhaps the world could learn from this.

When terrorists struck in Mumbai, India was in the middle of a cricket tournament with the visiting English squad — though in a different city. The first of the engagements was a series of one-day matches in which India was on quite a roll, completely overwhelming the visitors. The country was preparing for the lengthier, traditional five-day test matches when the English team opted to return home as a result of the massacre.

Given how systematically the terrorists had targeted Britons and Americans, it is impressive that in practically no time at all the authorities in England decided the players would head back to India in order to participate in the test matches. But with one change: Instead of playing the first test in Mumbai as had been originally scheduled, the venue was shifted to Chennai, where I am visiting my family.

Dec. 15 was the final day of this first test match, and England had set up quite a challenging victory target for India. The Indian team rose to the challenge, and the winning runs were scored by one of India’s star cricketers, Sachin Tendulkar, who was born and raised in Mumbai.

It was a poetic and cinematic response that a “Bombaywalla” guided the team to victory. At the end of the match, when awards were presented, both Tendulkar and the team dedicated the victory and the test itself to the victims of terror.

It was almost as if the entire country was practicing an old preaching that the best form of revenge is a life well lived. In this case, the professional approach to winning a test match seemed to be a statement that Indians, and the British as well, would not let terrorists decide how life should be lived.

Getting back to “normal life” this rapidly also has lowered the decibel levels of belligerent calls for military action against terrorist bases in Pakistan. In their meetings with the prime minister and other leaders in India, American and British political leaders also have urged restraint. While not because of the cricket results, the defense minister also has stated categorically that India is not mounting any war effort. I hope that cooler heads will prevail.

Of course, a cricket series amidst extremely tense geopolitical worries is only the latest installment in human history when it comes to the intersection of sports, politics and war. The “ping-pong diplomacy” to help thaw the Sino-American relationships is an example of sports intermingling with international relations. Even the marathon, now held in cities across the world and in the Olympics, owes its origins to the Greek-Persian war 2,500 years ago.

I suppose sometimes sports is not always just about sports. As a new foreign student at the University of Southern California, I remember being impressed with the war-like preparation that I observed for football games. The first game USC played that season, and my introduction to college football, was a sort of re-enactment of history: the Trojans against the Spartans. To my disappointment, the Trojans lost!

Ironically enough, the teams met again at the Rose Bowl after winning their respective league titles. And the Trojans lost again! Such a maniacal approach to sports is, however, far better than the loss of lives and property, which was the case in the real Trojan War.

Along those lines, maybe the Obama administration should designate a “sports czar” who will work alongside the secretaries of State and Defense. Within a short time, this “sports czar” could facilitate soccer tournaments where teams with names such as the Baghdad Bombers and the Saudi Skyjackers can compete, where a soccer ball and the players’ feet and heads will be the only “weapons” for the youth to work with.

Then, comparable to India’s response to terrorism, the rest of the world can deliver a blow to the likes of Osama bin Laden without resorting to violent retaliation and merely through sports.

Hey, I have an inalienable right to dream, right?

Published in the Register Guard Dec 22, 2008

America’s destiny is in space

Over the last month, we in America have been completely fascinated with the twists and turns of elections. In addition to that drama, the rapid collapse of the financial sector and the wild gyrations of the stock market indices made sure that every day, and sometimes even every minute, brought news that we could not have imagined.

If we had diverted our attention a little bit away from this country, we would have found out that while all these were happening, China and India had ascended to new heights. Literally.

On Sept. 26, a Chinese astronaut (yuhangyuan) ventured outside the space craft and waved a Chinese flag while spending 15 minutes walking around in space. Quite an achievement and an emphatic statement on how far the country has come since Deng Xiaoping put China on a new economic trajectory in 1978.

With this spacewalk, China became the third country in history, after the United Sttes and the former Soviet Union, to have one of its citizens engage in, as NASA describes it, extra-vehicular activity. China’s goal is sending a man to the moon, which might happen as early as 2020.

As China was celebrating, India was getting ready to launch its first unmanned mission to the moon. On Oct. 22, “Chandrayaan”, which means “lunar craft” in Sanskrit, was launched. It is expected to reach the lunar orbit in 15 days. Furthermore, India’s space agency has already begun planning for Chandrayaan-II. Interestingly enough, Chandrayaan is carrying payloads for other space agencies as well, including NASA.

Of course, China and India are pursuing these to also improve their global standing and to remind the world that they are important players, as if their combined population of more than 2.2 billion people does not provide enough of a rationale by itself. In many different contexts, from the affairs of the United Nations to international discussions on global climate change, these two countries have made it clear that they will not put up with a Rodney Dangerfield-like “I-don’t-get-no-respect” treatment.

The good thing is that we are not in an ideological cold war with China or India, as we were with the Soviet Union. But, we could, and should, use these Asian space adventures as catalysts to shape our larger goals for the 21st century.

I hope that the new president and Congress will see this as the Sputnik-like wake-up call for America’s 21st century. The Soviet Union launched Sputnik-1 in October 1957, and then sent a dog into space in Sputnik-2 in November 1957. Sputnik awakened and re-energized the United States and 12 years later, Neil Armstrong was on the moon.

It might seem rather incongruous, perhaps even professorial, to highlight these extra-terrestrial developments when there seem to be more urgent issues such as the economic recession, home foreclosures, rising unemployment, and, of course, such a list is endless. But, even as we focus on the pressing issues of the day, I would argue that it is equally important to have a clear idea of the bigger picture — including our vision for deep space explorations.

We are almost at the end of the first decade in this new century, but it feels like all through these years we have only been reacting to global events as opposed to charting our own destiny. Our social and political discussions have been framed strictly as responses to, for instance, economic competition from China, immigration from Mexico, or the atrocious activities of al-Qaeda.

The economic competition will get fiercer as more and more countries develop, and we ought to welcome such economic progress that pulls people out of abject poverty. And perhaps al-Qaeda might continue to affect life and property around the world for a few more years.

At some point we need to stop and ask ourselves, “quo vadis” — the old Latin phrase meaning “whither goest thou?” Thanks to China and India, we now have a wonderful opportunity to ask ourselves this question.

And our answer is ... ?

For The Register-Guard
Published: Nov 4, 2008

Ballot measures prove a tough test

Voting in this election, which I did just a couple of hours after the ballot arrived in my mailbox, confirmed a view that I have held for a long time: If I ever tested my students in ways that messed them up as thoroughly as the ballot messes me up, no sane student would ever register for my classes again.

Like a diligent student, I try to follow national and local political issues as closely as possible so that I can provide the best possible answers at the civics test — the election.

Choosing a candidate for an office is easy. It is like the true-false questions in a test. But choosing an idea, which is what the statewide measures are, turns out to be a disaster for me, because ideas warrant discussions before a simple up or down vote.

It is through discussions that we further understand the issue and, more importantly, the complications that might be buried deep down. This is why when I test students on concepts, I don’t use true-false or multiple-­choice questions. Instead, I force them to explore the fuzzy, gray areas through short essay responses.

Through reasoning and persuasion, and with evidence, students finally arrive at convincing answers, even if they don’t necessarily agree with my conclusions. At least, that is my hope.

Politics is overwhelmingly about the fuzzy, gray areas. For instance, according to the big fat voter’s pamphlet, Measure 61 “creates mandatory minimum prison sentences for certain theft, identity theft, forgery, drug and burglary crimes.” What a juicy piece for discussions! Even on the surface, the measure comes across as one with multiple effects, and with unintended consequences that we will come to know about only years later.

However, instead of having discussions, I am simply being asked to note whether I am for it or against it. Isn’t such a “yes” or “no” the most atrociously inappropriate way for society to decide on most of such ballot measures?

On the other hand, these are the kinds of questions I would love to have on an essay test — or better yet, for classroom discussions. Oh, yes, we do have a forum for classroom discussions in the political context: the Legislature! Not one, but two chambers of the Legislature — the Senate and the House.

Well unfortunately, there was no option to write a 700-word essay as my response to Measure 61. Maybe an opinion piece, if the editor publishes it, but that does not count as a vote anyway.

To complicate matters, the ballot warned me that voting a certain way on Measure 57 could nullify my vote on Measure 61. Shucks! Back to reading the pamphlet all over again. It was certainly one of those rare occasions when I wished I weren’t a teetotaler — a few drinks might have helped ease my frustrations.

Finally, I metaphorically held my nose and voted.

I imagined giving my students an exam with a few questions and warning them there that there would be a penalty if their answers to one question did not match up with their answers to another question. If I did that, I am sure that soon, my peers and the public would seriously question my sanity — which, come to think of it, some do even now!

I simply cannot understand how we have ended up with a political process where we have two measures about the same set of issues, and where a vote on one can negate the vote on the other. Perhaps that is proof enough that neither measure should have been on the ballot in the first place.

I am all in favor of initiative legislation, and want as much citizen participation as possible in our collective decision-making. I am immensely thankful that these citizen-empowering tools are enshrined in the constitutions both in Oregon and California, where I lived before relocating to Eugene.

But if the 2008 ballot is an indicator of how ugly the future tests might be for us civics students, well, I think it is time we overhauled the curriculum. At least to prevent the abuse of initiative legislation, if not for anything else, maybe we ought to revise our state Constitution as a part of Oregon’s sesquicentennial celebrations — before disgruntled voters abandon voting itself.

Published in the Register Guard, October 27, 2008

Indian-Americans break out

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said his deputy, Neel Kashkari, will be in charge of the bailout passed by Congress, and almost immediately Time magazine dubbed him the “$700 billion man.” However worrisome and complicated the crisis and the bailout, Kashkari’s appointment was personally exciting for one reason: he is Indian-American.

According to reports, the 35-year old Kashkari is the son of Indians who immigrated to the United States from Kashmir. It’s a long way from the scenic Himalayas to the waters of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, where Kashkari was raised.

Kashkari joins an impressive list of Indian-Americans who burst onto the American public sphere in quite a hurry over the past few years. I used to joke that we will know for sure that we have arrived on the U.S. scene when one of us got enmeshed in an embarrassing, high profile controversy. Well, not anymore. It has been simply fascinating to watch Indian-Americans exercising a remarkable level of influence.

It was an Indian-American who led the legal fight that profoundly changed our treatment of Guantanamo detainees. Neal Katyal, who is a law professor at Georgetown University, was barely 36 years old when he won Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld — a Supreme Court ruling that challenged the current administration’s interpretation of executive powers.

Another one almost became a vice presidential nominee. Bobby Jindal, who is the 37-year old governor of Louisiana, was a serious contender for the second spot on the Republican ticket.

Readers of Newsweek may be familiar with Fareed Zakaria, who also hosted a news show on PBS. A friend once described Zakaria as being sexier than Omar Sharif, and with brains on steroids!

Jhumpa Lahiri makes us think about profound issues through her award-winning narratives that are often about Indian-Americans. And director M. Night Shyamalan scares the daylights out of filmgoers with stories that are deceptively simple.

On the other hand, it was absolutely depressing to read that an Indian-American family was one of the first who lost their lives because of the current economic crisis.

Karthik Rajaram was a former employee of PriceWaterhouse Coopers and Sony Pictures in Southern California, but had been unemployed for a few months. He committed suicide, after killing his family — his wife, mother-in-law, and three children aged 19, 12 and 7. It is unfortunate that this Indian-American resorted to guns, reinforcing the notion that guns and violence, too, are as American as the oft-repeated apple pie and mom.

All these are absolute contrasts to the stereotypes that we run into on television and movies, where the typical Indian character is either a motel owner or a physician, both with accents far stranger than mine. After all, even from a statistical perspective, one would expect a lot more than just these two stereotypes when the population of India itself is more than a billion, and when a few million with Indian origins are scattered all over the planet!

Perhaps I am not different from other “ethnic” immigrants in getting pumped up. I clearly remember a fellow student in graduate school who was from Canada.

He was acutely aware of Jewish players in professional baseball, and his interest in this came from his passion for the game and from his Jewish background. To him, Sandy Koufax was not merely the best pitcher ever, but was almost a god. There is no Indian-American equivalent of Koufax. Yet.

There is no denying the fact that Kashkari, Katyal and others are fantastic testimony to the idea of America.

More than in any other country, it is in America that there is a high probability of anybody making it big in whatever they choose. It is that idea, an ideal even with its own blemishes, that continues to draw immigrants from all over the world, from thousands of miles away.

So, I don’t get depressed about the multi-trillion-dollar global economic crisis. After all, an Indian-American is in charge of straightening things out!

Published in the Register Guard, October 21st

Growing instability in Pakistan

Pakistan leaders must act decisively after deadly Marriott bombing, analysts say
If the country doesn't crack down harder on Islamic radicals, analysts suggest, Pakistan could crumble into chaos. LA Times The following is my commentary published in the Register Guard today:

On Aug. 12 a year ago, I wrote that an unstable Pakistan has the potential to cause geopolitical crises beyond our wildest imagination. I wondered whether it would be better if Pervez Musharraf continued as the president of Pakistan, even though he had come to power through a military coup.
Ding, dong, the witch is dead. Musharraf stepped down when the parliamentary majority initiated impeachment proceedings.
Having followed Pakistani politics from a distance ever since I could read a newspaper, I suspected that this would trigger more instability and chaos. While recent developments indicate that I might be correct, being right in this case is, unfortunately, no cause for celebration.
Soon after Musharraf’s exit, the ruling coalition came unglued. The opposition was held together by the focused and singular objective of getting rid of Musharraf. That unifying force no longer exists.
Leading one faction is Nawaz Sharif, whose elected government was the one that was ousted by Musharraf in a military coup in 1999. The other faction is led by Asif Ali Zardari, who inherited the mantle of leadership after his wife, the late Benazir Bhutto, was assassinated. These two leaders and their parties formed the majority in the parliament. But when Zardari became a nominee for president, Sharif took his party out of the coalition.
Zardari won the elections and is the president now. But he may not be well; Britain’s Financial Times reported that he apparently “was diagnosed with a range of serious illnesses including dementia, major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.” Who would want this person to be in charge of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal?
To make things worse, U.S. forces stationed in Afghanistan apparently had President Bush’s approval to go after the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan — without prior permission from Pakistan’s government. Pakistan’s government, military and media are furious at the unilateral U.S. moves, which seem to undermine the country’s sovereignty.
It was therefore no real surprise when Pakistani military forces recently fired shots to repel American helicopter and ground forces. The only good news here is that the shots were fired in the air as warning. But Pakistani military officials are clear about what could happen: “In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire.”
Meanwhile, al-Qaeda sympathizers and other militant fundamentalists have seized upon the political confusion as an chance to remind everybody of the havoc they can unleash. Take the horrific truck-bomb explosion at the Marriott hotel in Islamabad — just a few hundred yards from the prime minister’s house, where government leaders were dining after the president’s parliamentary address. I shudder to think what might have happened if the truck bombing had happened at the prime minister’s house.
The world has gained nothing from Musharraf’s exit. In addition to triggering geopolitical complications, Musharraf is now completely off the hook and is not bound to answer the question that has dogged us for seven years: “Where’s Osama bin Laden?” Musharraf is the one person who the world suspects has an idea of the whereabouts of bin Laden and his deputies.
Second, with his exit, Musharraf does not have to clarify to anybody how much he was involved in nuclear proliferation.
Recently, in the German publication Spiegel, the wife of the man called the “father of
Pakistan’s nuclear bomb” claimed that Musharraf and his military minions orchestrated the spreading of nuclear know-how to other countries, including
Libya and North Korea. Alas, we will never find out what Musharraf knew and when
he knew it.
It just boggles my mind that the entire world has stood by practically waiting for such events to unfold.
It is more than a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Anti-science attitudes keeping Africa poor

Speaking before a keynote lecture tonight to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, of which he is president, Sir David said that the slow pace of African development was linked directly to Western influence. “I'm going to suggest, and I believe this very strongly, that a big part has been played in the impoverishment of that continent by the focus on nontechnological agricultural techniques, on techniques of farming that pertain to the history of that continent rather than techniques that pertain to modern technological capability. Why has that continent not joined Asia in the big green revolutions that have taken place over the past few decades? The suffering within that continent, I believe, is largely driven by attitudes developed in the West which are somewhat anti-science, anti-technology - attitudes that lead towards organic farming, for example, attitudes that lead against the use of genetic technology for crops that could deal with increased salinity in the water, that can deal with flooding for rice crops, that can deal with drought resistance.”

That is from Professor Sir David King, as reported in the Times. Sir David was the British government's Chief Scientific Adviser until last December. (Via aldaily) He then adds:

The problem is that the Western-world move toward organic farming - a lifestyle choice for a community with surplus food - and against agricultural technology in general and GM in particular, has been adopted across Africa, with the exception of South Africa, with devastating consequences.

I wrote about some of these issues in an op-ed in the Register Guard (April 27, 2008). In that, I wrote: Let us not forget that food is a vital component of world peace. Here's hoping that we will soon launch Green Revolution, version 2.0.