Human All Too Human

Joseph Stiglitz on Iraq War costs

2008-12-08T04:20:00.000-08:00

“War at Any Cost? The Total Economic Costs of the War

Beyond the Federal Budget”

Joseph E. Stiglitz1

Testimony before the Joint Economic Committee

February 28, 2008

Thank you for this opportunity to discuss with you the economic costs of the Iraq War. March 19 marks the fifth anniversary of what was supposed to be a short venture to save the world from the threat of weapons of mass destruction—which simply weren’t there. It is now the second longest war in America’s history, and, after the all-encompassing World War II, the second most costly, even after adjusting for inflation. In terms of costs per troop, it is by far the costliest—some eight times as expensive as World War II.

A War for Democracy

Before turning to the costs beyond the Federal Budget, I want to make three prefatory remarks. We went to war to fight for democracy; but democracy is more than just periodic elections. It involves broader notions of democratic accountability. Citizens have the right to know what they are spending their hard earned dollars on. They have a right to know what their government is doing and the consequences of its actions. Over the past two years, I have worked with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to estimate the full costs of the Iraq war. We published our initial study in January 2006, and I would like that paper to be entered into the record. We published a second study, concerning the costs of providing medical care and disability benefits to our returning veterans, in January 2007. I would ask for that to also be entered into the record. We have now published a book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, which estimates the true costs of the war, the veterans’ costs, and the impact on the U.S. economy. I want to point out that it required an enormous amount of work to write our book. We should not have needed to write it, and when we came to write it, it should have been a far easier task. The Administration and Congress should have provided these numbers to the American people. Five years after the beginning of this war, you should not be funding this war with emergency appropriations, which escape the normal budget scrutiny. We should not have had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act to find out how many Americans have been injured in this war. This Administration has said that it will provide everything that our troops need. We should not have had to use the Freedom of Information Act to discover that more than three years ago, senior officers in the Marines were already sending urgent requests for MRAPs—which would have saved the lives of a large fraction of those killed if we had provided them at that time.

The Soaring Budgetary Costs

1 University Professor at Columbia University and Chair of the Committee on Global Thought. 1

The second remark is that the budgetary costs themselves have been enormous—far, far larger than the some $50 billion that the Administration estimated at the beginning of the war. We are now spending that amount in operations every three months. But the costs to the Federal Budget are far larger than the day-to-day operational costs. The war has raised overall military costs: we have to pay more to recruit and retain our troops, and even with these increased expenditures, standards for recruits have had to be lowered. It will be costly to restore our military to its pre-war standing, both in terms of personnel and materiel. There are costs hidden in other parts of the budget—not only are the direct costs of the contractors high, especially as a result of single source contracting and low levels of oversight (the defense contractors and oil companies have been the only true winners in this war, evidenced by what has happened to their stock prices), but we are also paying for the contractors’ insurance for death benefits and disability. Even with these high insurance premiums, remarkably the government often winds up paying the benefits as well. In our calculations, we have not included the full costs of these, simply because it is impossible for ordinary citizens to find out what they are.

The most important costs that go well beyond the operational costs are the expenditures required to provide health care and disability for returning veterans. These are likely to be very, very high, and we will be paying these bills for decades to come. Almost 40% of the nearly 700,000 troops who fought in the one month long Gulf War have become eligible for disability benefits, and we are paying more than $4 billion a year for disability benefits from that short war. Imagine, then, what a war that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years will cost. Already, we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at VA hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability, and large numbers with severe psychological problems. These problems increase disproportionately with every tour of duty and with longer tours of duty; and with more than one-third of our men and women being asked to do two or three tours of duty, the numbers will almost surely mount. While in previous wars, the ratio of injured to fatalities was 2.5 to 1, in this war it is 7 to 1, and if we include those that have to be medically evacuated because of what are classified as non-hostile accidents or illnesses, the ratio soars to 15 to 1. Many of the injuries are horrific and will require a lifetime of care. It is a testimony to modern medicine—though clearly we could have done a lot more to spare our troops than we did. Most of the costs will be borne by the VA, but there will be a burden on our social security system as well. We have estimated the total costs (in present discounted value terms) in what we call our “realistic” (but still highly conservative) scenario as $630 billion.

Bills we will be paying for decades

My third prefatory remark is this: we will be facing these budgetary costs for decades to come. Even the CBO methodology, which looks ten years into the future, is too short-sighted for these liabilities which we have incurred. In the case of World War II veterans, VA expenditures peaked more than four decades after the cessation of hostilities. Furthermore, because the Administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by

deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself. But the meter is still ticking. By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.

There has been much discussion of unfunded entitlements in recent years. This war has created a new unfunded entitlement—future benefits of Iraqi veterans—that may total a half a trillion dollars or more. But this is an entitlement which they have earned, and from which we should not, we cannot walk away. What we should do, now, is to recognize the financial obligations that we have incurred, that we are incurring today, and that we will incur before this War is over, and fully fund them. These obligations are much like deferred compensation: we require private firms to fully fund such obligations, and for good reason. There should not be a double standard.

When, of course, we add together all of these costs of the war, we are talking about budgetary impacts that are not just $12 billion a month (or $16 billion if we include Afghanistan), but greater than that by at least 40%. Our full cost of the war—our $3 trillion dollar tally—is twice the direct operational budget. We should remember that every month we stay in Iraq and Afghanistan is really costing us some $22 billion; every year, more than $250 billion. In another two years, the tally will exceed another half trillion.

Micro-economic costs

The focus of my remarks today, however, is on the large costs that go beyond these budgetary costs. We classify these into two categories, micro-economic costs (to individuals, especially to the troops that have served us so well and their families, and to firms) and macro-economic costs (to our overall economy, today and into the future).

We have consistently understaffed, underinvested in, and underfunded the medical and disability programs that serve our veterans. As a result, our servicemen and women returning from the battlefield in Iraq often face a new battle—with the bureaucracy to get the benefits to which they are entitled and which they deserve. When they cannot get the health care to which they are entitled, or they have to wait months just to schedule an appointment to see a VA doctor, those who are fortunate enough to have families who can afford to do so, pay for it on their own. This doesn’t diminish the cost to society; it just shifts the burden from the federal budget to these people who have already sacrificed so much.

There are other ways in which the costs to society exceed the costs to the budget, often by considerable amounts. When the government evaluates whether a safety regulation is worth instituting, it balances the costs with the benefits, that is, the savings in lives; as unpleasant as it may seem, it places a dollar value on people’s lives, which includes the loss in output. The typical numbers, called the value of statistical lives, are $7 to $8 million. But to the budget, the cost of the life of a troop is only the $500,000 death benefit. I have already noted that in this war, we have been penny wise and pound

foolish—a little extra spending earlier on would have made the war, in the short run, seem more costly, but it would have saved us billions in the long run. But the billions that it would have saved the budget pale in comparison to what it would have meant to those who have died unnecessarily or who face a lifetime with disabilities far worse than needed to have been the case. I am not a lawyer, but I do know this: any private employer who had acted in this way, with consequences as serious, would be liable for a suit for gross negligence.

There are other costs: for instance, the Dole-Shalala Commission estimated that in one of five families with a seriously disabled veteran, someone in the family has to give up their job to provide the necessary care.

Some of the costs are hard to quantify, but nonetheless real: Reservists and members of the National Guard who are forced to serve in Iraq find their lives and careers interrupted. Their employers lose the services of these often highly valued employees.

Economists emphasize the concept of opportunity costs. Resources devoted to the war could have been used for other purposes. One of the main responsibilities of the National Guard is to serve as a first responder in times of an emergency; their services are invaluable, and when they are not available—because they are in Iraq—everyone suffers when an emergency occurs. We saw that so clearly in Hurricane Katrina.

More broadly, we are today less equipped to handle a variety of challenges that might arise. If we are lucky, we may muddle through. We may not be so lucky. Already, one of the opportunity costs is apparent: while we were focusing on the weapons of mass destruction that did not exist in Iraq—and that we should have known did not exist—a new country joined the Nuclear Club.

Our country and our businesses are suffering due to America’s changed standing in the eyes of the world because of the war and the way it has been conducted, as shown in survey after survey. These surveys show a clear relation between attitudes towards America more generally and attitudes towards American businesses. In many quarters, the supposed war for democracy has even given democracy a bad name.

I have, so far, emphasized the direct economic costs as well as the opportunity costs—the diversion of funds that could have been used in so many other and better ways. I would be remiss, however, if I did not note that there are other costs: in the long run, the squandering of America’s leadership role in the international community, the diversion of attention from critical global issues, including issues like global warming and nuclear proliferation in North Korea—that simply won’t go away on their own, and that cannot simply wait to be addressed—may represent the largest and most longstanding legacy of this unfortunate war. 2

2 This is a point that even conservative commentators have emphasized. Anne Applebaum, for instance, noted that “Countries that would once have supported American foreign policy on principle, simply out of solidarity or friendship, will now have to be cajoled, or paid, to join us. Count that—along with the lives of

Macro-economic costs

Finally, I want to turn to the macro-economic costs. First, I want to dispel a widespread misconception that wars are good for the economy—a misconception that arose from the role that World War II played in helping the US emerge from the Great Depression. But at least since Keynes, we know how to maintain the economy at or near full employment in far better ways; there are ways of spending money that stimulate the economy in the short run while at the same time leaving it stronger for the long run. This war has been especially bad for the economy. Some of the costs are becoming apparent only now; others we will face for years to come.

There are four major categories of macro-economic impacts. The first is through the war’s effect on oil prices. Before the war, five years ago, the price of oil was under $25 a barrel. As you know, now it has hit $100 a barrel. Before the war, future markets expected the $25 price to persist for at least a decade. Yes, there would be increased demands from China and India; but in well-functioning markets, supply responds to meet new demands. With large supplies and low extraction costs in the Middle East, markets expected production would increase in tandem with demand. The war changed this equation. How much of the increased price should be blamed on the War? In our book, we have taken a very conservative position—that only $5 to $10 of the increase is due to the war, and that the price increase will last for only 7 to 8 years. We think those assumptions are unrealistically conservative. For instance, futures markets today expect that the price will remain in excess of $80 for at least the next decade. We chose to be excessively conservative, simply because we did not want to have an unnecessary squabble: as it was, even with these very conservative estimates, the costs of the war are vastly higher than its advocates were willing to admit. (Even the CBO, at the time we did our earlier study in 2006, was projecting that the total cost of the war would amount to only a half trillion dollars, still ten times greater than the Administration had estimated at the beginning of the war. Our objective was the more modest one of trying to get people to realize that this war was going to be far more expensive than that.)

Money spent to buy oil is money not available to be spent here in the U.S. It’s as simple as that. Lower aggregate demand leads, through a multiplier, to lower national income.

The second impact arises from the fact that Iraq expenditures do not stimulate the economy in the short run as much as expenditures on, say, infrastructure or education that are so badly needed here at home. A dollar spent to hire a Nepalese contractor—or even an Iraqi—in Iraq does not have the first round, second round, or nth round impacts that a dollar spent here does.

soldiers and civilians, the dollars and equipment—as another cost of the war.” Anne Applebaum, “Why They Don’t Like Us,” Washington Post, October 2, 2007, p. A19. 5

The third impact is that both directly, and indirectly, through the mounting deficits, Iraq expenditures are crowding out investments that would have increased America’s productivity in the future.

The mounting Iraqi war debt has meant that we have had to borrow more and more money from abroad—America as a country is far more indebted to others than it was five years ago. We and our children will be paying interest on this debt. The fact that we borrowed rather than paid the bills as they came due does not mean that the war was for free; it only postponed the payments. The payments we will have to make to service this debt will lower the standard of living of Americans from what it otherwise would have been—an outcome which is particularly harsh, given that median American income today is lower than it was five years ago (which is simply to say that, adjusting for inflation, most Americans are worse off now than they were five years ago). This was true even before America went into its current downturn.

It should have come as no surprise that, when America’s great financial institutions, Citibank and Merrill Lynch, needed money quickly, there were no pools of liquid cash available here. High oil prices and high national savings in China and elsewhere have created huge pools of wealth outside the United States, and it was to these that our financial institutions had to turn. It is, and should be, a cause of concern.

Until recently, it was a surprise to some that, in spite of these obvious ways in which the Iraq war was weakening the American economy, the economy seemed as strong as it did. Was there something, after all, to the old adage about wars being good for the economy? To me, and to other serious students of the American economy, there was, however, an obvious answer. These weaknesses were being hidden, just as much of the other costs of the war were being hidden from easy view. The exposure of these weaknesses was, it seemed to me, just around the corner—perhaps even more than the long vaunted victory that remained elusively just around the corner. The macro-economic effects were being hidden by lose monetary policy, a flood of liquidity, and lax regulation. These allowed household savings rates to plummet to zero, the lowest levels since the great Depression, and fed a housing bubble, allowing hundreds of billions of dollars to be taken out in mortgage equity withdrawals that increased the irresponsible consumption boom. As I once put it somewhat graphically, the subprime mortgages and lending programs with slogans like “qualified at birth” meant that easy credit was available for anyone this side of being on a life support system. Our financial institutions and credit rating agencies came to believe in financial alchemy, that these toxic mortgages could somehow be converted into AAA assets. We were living on borrowed money and borrowed time. There had to come a day of reckoning, and it has now arrived. The games we played—which for a time allowed us to hide the true costs of the Iraq war—are now over. And, just as our troops paid a high price for our penny wise pound foolish policies, so too will our economy.

The cost to the economy of this downturn will be enormous. We do not know, of course, how long or how deep the downturn will be, but it is likely to be worse than any we have experienced in the last quarter of a century. Even if growth this year is 0.8% (as the IMF

forecasts), and next year growth starts to resuscitate, to 2%, and in 2010 returns to its potential growth of, say, 3.5% (a quicker recovery than most would expect), the total lost output over those three years—the discrepancy between the economy’s actual output and its potential—will amount to some one and a half trillion dollars.

Reforms

This war has been very costly. We have made many mistakes. Some have been honest errors of judgment. But when there are repeated mistakes of this size, as social scientists, we have to ask, are there some systematic patterns? Also, as policy analysts, we have to ask, are there things that we can do to avoid their repetition? In our book, we set out a list of eighteen recommendations for reform. Here, I want to highlight five.

First, we should not be funding any war years after the beginning through emergency appropriations. If we do, it should be a sign that things are not going as expected, and there should be a detailed, written explanation to Congress. Second, there should be a full, comprehensive, accrual-based consolidated accounting of all the budgetary and non-budgetary national defense costs; with so many of the costs years, even decades, down the line, cash accounting not only fails to provide an accurate picture of the cost but encourages what we have seen: short-sighted decisions to keep today’s costs down which simply raise the overall costs. And unless the accounting is comprehensive, it encourages cost shifting. Furthermore, the accounting, particularly of military expenditures, must be auditable, with those in charge held responsible. Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley to hold private firms accountable; but the Defense Department has not lived up to these same standards. The President has not presented, on a regular basis, an accounting of how much the war in Iraq has cost us. These costs span the Departments of Defense, State, Labor, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Social Security, and other agencies. It is only through hard work that we, and others, have been able to piece together the accounts.

Third, if we think a war is worth fighting, we must force Americans to pay up front and not shift the costs to our children; we cannot pretend that one can have a war for free. We must set aside the money required to pay health care and disability benefits for the returning veterans. We require companies to do this, and we should ask nothing less of ourselves. We cannot let what they receive be hostage to the whims of a future political process, and we should not be creating enormous new unfunded entitlements.

Fourth, we must not place the burden on so few who are asked to do repeated tours of duty. It is unfair, and in the long run, as we have seen, it is costly, not just because of the toll it puts on those put through such repeated stress, but also because it will inevitably make it more difficult and more expensive for the armed forces to recruit in the future.

Fifth, we should be wary of privatizing the military to the extent that we have; it has been expensive, in so many ways. There are some things that should be privatized, but there are some things which should not: this is one area where economic theory and historical experience suggests that we should not. To the extent that private contractors are used,

there is a need both for greater reliance on competitive bidding and more oversight; and we need a full accounting of the costs, including those costs taxpayers will pay outside the defense department budget.

Concluding remarks

America is a rich country. The question is not whether we can afford to squander $3 trillion or $5 trillion. We can. But our strength will be sapped. We will be less prepared to meet challenges in the future, and there are huge opportunity costs. Some of our children will not have the medical care that should be a right to every citizen born in a country as rich as ours; some will bear the scars for life. We are not investing as we should in technology and science, to make our economy as competitive as it should and needs to be. We worry about the inroads China is making in Africa—but our foreign aid budget in Africa amounts to but a few days fighting in Iraq. With a fraction of the amount spent on this war we could have had a new Marshall plan, which would have done so much to win the hearts and minds of those around the world. We have talked about the huge problem facing our social security system, putting into jeopardy the economic security of our elderly. But for a fraction of the cost of this war, we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half century or more.

Economists are fond of saying that there is no such thing as a free lunch. It is also the case that there is no such thing as a free war. This is not the first time that an Administration tried to enlist support for an unpopular war by trying to hide the true and full costs from the American people. And this is not the first time that America and the American economy have suffered as a result. The inflationary episode that America went through beginning in the late 1960’s was at least partly a consequence of President Johnson’s failure to own up fully to the costs and adjust other tax and expenditures appropriately. This time, the underlying economic situation is different, and, accordingly, the consequences have been different—but in many ways even more severe.

The budgetary costs of this war have been huge. But the costs that go beyond the budget are at least as large, and the meter is still ticking. Every year of this war has seen the costs rise. But even if the troops stay where they are, two more years will add, conservatively, another $500 billion to the total tally. No one can know for sure whether, when we depart, things will get better (as more Iraqis seem to believe) or worse. No one can know for sure whether staying an extra two years will make the chaos that might follow less—or greater. But it is your solemn responsibility to make the judgment: is this the best way of spending $500 billion? Is it the best way to strengthen America’s capacity to meet future challenges, to promote democracy around the world, to help create the kind of world, here and abroad, that we would like our children to inherit? For too long, this Congress and this Administration has approached the problem by dribs and drabs: a little more today might just do the trick; a little more later will help us turn the proverbial corner. But as the late Senator Dirksen said, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty

soon you’re talking about real money.” Today, we would have to say, a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.

Even a rich country ignores costs of this magnitude at its peril.

Change must come from within.................

2008-11-28T09:19:00.000-08:00

26th of November was yet another day which was of no use to myself or this world. As the day was drawing near the end, I was trying to do something useful for the day by attempting to read Stephen Hawking's "A Briefer history of Time". My room mate was surfing the TV when he saw the militant attacks at Mumbai coming as flash news, though he got excited, I dismissed it as another series of bomb blasts which our country had learned to live with and tried to bury myself in the book. As the clock ticked towards midnight we could figure out that this is not a bomb blast but an extremely well planned operation which is going to cause a major outrage in the world. We went to sleep around 1.00 clock still unsure of what was exactly unfolding in Mumbai.

In the morning when we switched our TV sets we saw that it had been a sleepless night for thousands of people. The whole world was watching as terror unfolded its clutches across the Mumbai, there was little anybody can do. The army was pressed into action and even their seasoned NSG commandos were finding it tough to flush the militants and save the hostages, it has been almost 48 hours since everything began but still the battle to save people is going on.

Yesterday (Nov 27th), it was raining cats and dogs here at Chennai, our house at Velacherry had had more odds of going under water. The previous night we had a small warning with the water reaching our veranda and bathroom at the back. The fear of water flooding into our house and the terrible situation in Mumbai had me in an awful state of mind and I decided to take the day off. I was alternating between Times now and NDTV to track what is happening in Mumbai till 11, but I got pissed off with some of their predictions and decided to watch a movie instead. These days our media houses are all about reporting and TRP ratings, it is really rare to see good journalism, seems with quantity has traded for quality.

I was browsing through my room mate Pannai's collection of movies and picked Batman Begins to watch, the recent admiration of Christopher Nolan's Dark Night made me to watch the movie though I had watched it earlier. I found myself enjoying the movie which I didn't when I saw it almost about two years ago, seems laziness and prejudice has slowly crept inside me in every walk of life. As I was going through the movie I felt what Bruce Wayne had felt in Batman, the grudge against the people who are responsible for the chaos prevalent in our society. I wished there would be a person for our country, the world to save it just like Batman did it for Gotham, though it was not pragmatic, I slept off with such a dream.

The situation was still pale at Mumbai when I woke up, but it was turning worse in my room with water slowly starting to seep in through the back door. Myself and my room mate had an intuition that this was going to worsen, hence we just shoved all the things lying around (usually too many in a bachelors room) into shelves and prepared a backpack to go somewhere. The waters level rose at alarming rate and as we left more the level was more than a feet. Wishing the situation would turn around quickly I left for my uncle's house at Beasant Nagar.

The travel was horrendous with my share auto severing along the breadth of road which had sank under water without a trace. The journey from Velacherry to Thiruvanmayur under normal circumstances takes about 20 minutes, but it was not a normal day. When we had finished three quarters of the distance, the auto came to a virtual stand still just before the Taramani junction. I waited for about 10 minutes inside the auto and thought trotting on the foot was a better alternative to reach quickly. As I came to the T junction of Velachery road and Perungidi link road there was a deadlock which any Operating system teacher would have pretty much liked to use as an example. A section of traffic was trying to take a right towards SRP tools, whereas the traffic from SRP had blocked the entire road. Worse still there was another set of vehicles trying to take a right towards the Perungudi road.

And all the vehicle drives were not just hoping but working hard to clear the traffic with persistent honking of their horns which amused me a lot. Though vice (we will discuss later what is the vice) has spread across the length and breadth of our country there are many persons who have not been still attacked by the same, maybe our population is too huge even for a vice or disease to spread. 3 persons unaffected by these vices were trying to do something for the traffic, buoyed by their spirit I also jumped in to lend my effort as far as possible. And after a struggle for about 15 minutes we were able to regulate it a bit. The worst part was we had to persuade, plead, shout at people to ease the traffice, everybody sounded that it is urgent for them to reach home and to them it didn't matter what happened to others.

In other words everybody was trying to follow Adam Smith's philosophy of "In a group best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself". Little did they realize that what John Nash had corrected it as "In a group best result comes from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself and the group". (Courtesy: A beautiful mind).

After half an hour of effort, I realized it is time to leave or else it will be too late to reach my uncle's house. As I walked my way to the next bus stop more than a kilometre away I was thinking about the vices which has engulfed our society. The first and foremost one is materialism, which has spread its tentacles across the length and the breadth of our society. Everybody wants to become rich, build homes, buy ornaments, cars, etc. There is nothing wrong in being materialistic but the way in which we attain materialistic is extremely vital in determining the health of a nation. I think our understanding of God is also one of the reasons why we are like this blaming everything on God and asking him for a solution instead of trying to find out one.

Call it fate or irony the fact is, the land in which Gandhi was born, people no longer have regard for the philosophy of means and ends which he adhered till his death. If we had indeed followed that principle of Gandhi, this country would have been a better place to live. Still it is not late, we could see a turn around in the lives of each and everyone of us, but it will take some time to see the effect. Alas, the present day Indian lives in an era of instant coffee and soap operas where he has become devoid of something called patience.

I believe the second most important thing which is proving to be a nemesis is patience. We are not even patient enough to wait for a traffic jam to clear, instead we just jump over the yellow line and take the wrong side of the road to reach our destination which ultimately will create a deadlock or an accident and in fact worsens the problem for everyone of us. It is not just traffic, we do it everywhere in every phase of our life from paying our bills in a shop counter to taking coffee in our offices, wherever it is possible.

The third reason is lack of social responsibility. The definition of Social responsibility has got narrowed down, by corporate India, to the helping of orphans, old age homes and destitute children. There is also another definition of Social Responsibility used by our media, it is about people coming out to help during natural catastrophes, terrorism etc. Do these things alone constitute Social Responsibility? I believe the above said acts are due to empathy and constitute only a part of Social Responsibility.

During the past two days I noticed lot of people blaming the Government for its inability to tackle terror, inadequacy to tackle floods. The only question I would like to ask each one of them is, "Who is the government?". If you are blaming the government it means you are blaming yourself not someone else.

The problems faced by our country is not due to the politicians or the administration, it due to each and everyone of us. We cannot become a developed country unless each one of us change, unless each one of us bring in control the demons in us.

I have come across many people who talk about the problems in our system and are ready to work for the change, but they want to see the change immediately. Change in a country with such a big population will not come quickly, it might take years, even centuries. For that to occur we must start now, lets strive our best to leave this world a better place for the generations to come.

For that the Change must come from within.................

AN AMAZING DAVID AND GOLIATH STORY

2008-11-27T01:04:00.000-08:00

CM: What brings Howard Zinn to Cuba?
HZ: The fact that Cuba has just published its own edition of my book, which in the United States is called The People's History of the United States, though in Spanish it's been translated as La Otra Historia de Estados Unidos. They invited me to the International Book Fair to talk about my book and to participate in some other panels on the war in Iraq. I was here last spring and got to be friendly with a number of very interesting people. Cuban people are so warm. They make you feel at home and it feels good to be here. The atmosphere is a very family atmosphere. There is music and spirit… So, I was happy to come back. Cuba represents something very important in this world of wars and power plays and imperial expansion. I mean, here is this little island, which is not expanding anywhere, is not trying to take over the United States. It is, in fact, holding out in a very courageous way with meager resources against the most formidable military power in the world. This is an amazing David and Goliath story; an amazing story of heroism. So, you have to admire Cuba for being undaunted by this colossus of the North and holding fast to its ideals and to Socialism. And even though there are many problems, it's an interesting Socialism with many possibilities… Cuba is one of those places in the world where we can see hope for the future. With its very meager resources Cuba gives free health care and free education to everybody. Cuba supports culture, supports dance and music and theatre. The United States does not do that. The United States is rich enough to do this, but it doesn't. People who are in the arts in the United States, people who are dancers and poets and in theatre, they struggle to survive, and so, there is this model in Cuba for the future of health care, of education, of culture. We are in a world which is so full of violence and injustice that when we see a place that has the kind of future Cuba does, it's important to hold on to it, important to immerse yourself in it, which is what you do when you come here.
CM: Why do you think the US Government, the Bush administration in particular, does not want US citizens to visit Cuba?
HZ: I wish I could probe the minds of the people who run the United States government. I would ask somebody with really advanced knowledge in psychiatry to do that. We can only guess their motives. One of them undoubtedly is that they know that Americans and people from other countries that haven't come to Cuba are intrigued by the kind of things that Cuba has, which other countries don't have; intrigued by Cuba's progress in literacy, in medicine, in culture and so on. The United States would rather have people be ignorant to what Cuba is. If people don't come to Cuba, then the government can say whatever it wants about Cuba and can ignore its accomplishments and nobody would know the difference. But when people come to Cuba, of course, they go back to the United States and spread the word. So, the United States doesn't want that. Then, of course, the United States doesn't want an example set of a small country that fights its government successfully; that insists on surviving in spite of all the attempts to do away with it -whether by invasion, by subversion or by blockade. It's an irritant to the United States to see this model of survival of a small country. There's a psychological problem there: the frustration of this enormously powerful nation that cannot bend this little country to its will. The United States has had this problem several times in its history. It could not defeat the people of Vietnam -a tiny country in Asia with very few resources, and it just could not defeat it.
CM: Your book The People's History of the United States just sold a million copies. One of the things I found so important about the book is the need to keep the history of activism and resistance alive, which has been hidden from us. This is a particularly difficult time in the United States in terms of the dismantling of social programs. Where do you feel people in the US today get hope?
HZ: I think they get hope in several ways. First, by seeing that there are people all over the world who understand things that many Americans do not understand. When the Iraq war was first beginning about fifteen million people all over the world demonstrated against the war in a single day. That is enormously encouraging, and shows that there's a worldwide movement of resistance. How many people support the administration? You know, it's only fifty percent of the people. They look outside the United States and they see that it's eighty or eighty five percent. That's encouraging. The other thing that is encouraging is that people in the United States who might otherwise loose hope look at the history of social movements in the US and realize that these movements always look hopeless, insignificant and powerless at the beginning. Some of them would remember the recent history in the South -this is something I went through myself- where it seemed that Black people in the South were powerless. They had nothing on their side -certainly not the federal government. And yet, they rose, they organized, they agitated, they demonstrated, they went to jail. Things happened to them, but they persisted and changed the South forever. That's a remarkable story of how a powerless people can gain power and how you mustn't look at power in a superficial way or by asking who has the money or who has the guns? We have to ask, who has the commitment and the energy, and the spirit of sacrifice and is willing to take risks? Then you'll see the future.
CM: Your theatre piece Marx in Soho is playing here in Cuba. What significance do you think it has to Cuban people?
HZ: This play about Marx is significant to the Cuban people for two reasons; one of them, probably, is maybe not as necessary for the Cuban people as it is for the American people, and that is for Marx to once again bring alive his critique on Capitalism and say: Capitalism thinks it triumphed with the collapse of the Soviet Union… No, look what Capitalism has done to people. Look at its failures. Maybe the Cuban people know that. Maybe that's why they support the idea of Socialism. But I think that something very important to people in the United States and in Cuba is to give people a clear idea of what Marxism is and what Socialism is.
2005-03-00

a good read on poverty and perceptions

2008-11-19T23:05:00.001-08:00

http://www.columbia.edu/~sr793/count.pdf

La Sa Ramamirtham - the astounding tamizh writer

2008-11-18T03:45:00.000-08:00

அடையாளங்கள் - லா.ச.ரா.

தருணத்தின் தர்க்கத்தினின்னு இன்னும் மீளவிலை. தேடினால் வராது; ஆனால் எதிர்பாராத சமயத்தில் பின்னால் வந்து தோளை தொடும் தருணத்தின் ஸரஸம்.

எண்ணத்தோடு, அதனினும் மஹத்தான இன்னொரு எண்ணம் இழையும் ரஸாயனத்தில், மனம் நித்யத்வத்துடன் உராய்கையில், வேறு ரோமாஞ்சலி, நெஞ்சடைப்பு, தனக்குத்தானே தனிழப்பு, பயம், கணமேயுகம். யுகமே கணம் - கோடுகள் அறிந்த நிலையில் எல்லாவற்றையும் தாங்கிக் கொண்டு ஒரு ஆனந்தம் - ஆனால் நொடி நேரமே தாள முடியாது. ஆனால் அதில் அமுதம் உண்டு விட்டேனே! அதற்காக அலைகிறேன்.

தரிசனத்துக்கு ஆதாரம் அன்புதான். அன்பின் பெருக்கு. அன்புக்கேற்றபடி ஆவாஹனம் ஆவாஹனத்துக்கு ஏற்றவாறு தரிசனம். தரிசனம் என்பது என்ன? அன்பின் அலைச் சிகரத்தில் சமயத்துக்கேற்றவாறு அவள் தோன்றுவிதம், ரூபம். இங்கு அரூபமும் ரூபம்தான்; ஆமாம் யார் அவள்?

நித்யத்வத்தில், மானிடப் பரம்பரை வழிவழி. நம்பிக்கையின் தீவிரத்தில் செதுக்கப்பெற்று, அதே வழிவழி பக்தியில் ஊறி, இலக்கியமென்றும் இசையென்றும் கலை, ஞானம், விஞ்ஞானம், தியானம் என்றும் பல்வகை வழிபாடுகளில் செழித்தவள்.

அவள் எங்கும் நிறைந்த சக்தி ஆதலால் அவளை தனி உருவத்தில் முடக்குவதற்கில்லை.

வான் நீலம் அவள் நிறம்.

வாழை மரத்தில் ஆடும் தலைவாழையிலை அவள் பச்சைப் பட்டுப்பாவாடை.

அதோ செம்பருத்திச் செடியில் எட்டா உயரத்தில் என்னப் பார்த்து நாக்கை நீட்டிச் சிரிக்கிறாள்.

துளும்பிய கண்ணீர்த் துளியில், குமுறும் இடியில் நிறைந்த மனதில், இருவரிடையே தேங்கும் மௌனத்தில்.

பூவரச மரத்தினின்று தானே சுழன்று சுழன்று உதிரும் இலையின் காவிய சோகத்தில்.

கிணறுள், அதோ ஆழத்தில் சுரந்து கொண்டேயிருக்கும் தாரைகளில்,

கோபுர ஸ்தூபி உச்சியில் உட்கார்ந்து சிறகைக் கோதி, உடனே பறக்கும் பச்சைக் கிளியின் சொகுஸில்,

அடுத்த சமயம் அதே ஸ்தூபி மேல் கழுகின் சிறகு விரிப்பில்.

சொல்லிக் கொண்டே போகலாம். உவமைகளில், உருவங்களில், அடையாளமாய்த் தன்னைக் காட்டிக் கொள்கிறாள். உள்ளத்தின் நெகிழ்ச்சியில் அவள் நடமாட்டம்; மௌனத்தின் உச்சிதான் அவள் வாழுமிடம்.

திரிகரண சுத்தியில் எப்பவுமே இருக்க முடியாது. சுத்தமாயிருக்க ப்ராயத்தனம் தான் செய்ய முடியும். அழுக்கு சேர்ந்து கொண்டே தான் இருக்கும்.

ஆனால் சில அபூர்வ சமயங்களில், முகூர்த்த வேளைகள் என்றே சொல்லலாம். தருணங்கள்; நான் என் பாசாங்குகளைக் களைந்து, பொய்மையில் மூழ்கிக் கிடந்த என் நாணயம் தானே மேல்வந்து, நான் யாருடனும், எதனுடனும் விரோதமில்லாமல் புவனத்தின் ஜீவஸ்ருதியோடு இழைந்துபோன வேளையில், இதயத்தின் அமுத கலசம் பொங்குகையில், தன் ஸஹிக்க முடியாத சௌந்தர்யத்தில் அவள் தோன்றுகிறாள். என் உள்ளத்தின் சதுப்பில் இறங்கி நடக்கிறாள். மார்பை இருகைகளாலும் பொத்திக் கொள்கிறேன். அவள் பாதச்சுவடுக்ளின் இன்பம் தாங்க முடியவில்லை. அதோ அவள் கொலுசு சப்தம் கேட்கவில்லை?

அவள் தருண்யை.

தெய்வம் வேண்டாம். ஆனால் தரிசனம் கட்டாயம் வேண்டும்.

வார்த்தைகள் கிளிஞ்சல்கள்.

அடையாளங்கள் (கட்டுரையின் சில பகுதிகள்) - லா.ச.ரா. (லா. ச. ராமாமிருதம்)

Remember the bottom billion in our brave new world

2008-11-14T00:32:00.001-08:00

This editorial was from Financial Times UK
This weekend an attempt will be made by world leaders to redesign capitalism. A new financial architecture will be put in place. This effort will fail unless the bottom billion – those living on less than a dollar a day – are invited from the shadows and allowed to work with us in forging our brave new model.
Just a few weeks ago it was hoped that Main Street could avoid the fallout from a disgraced Wall Street. That has proved to be another case of bankers’ self-interested delusions. It is in the nature of streets to meet. The results were as predictable as they are awful. Yet, with great effort, we will recover.
For those in Africa who live in the world’s hardest circumstances, this crisis can seem academic. Yet there is a threat that they will be overwhelmed by a new wave of poverty, just when there had been the beginnings of real sustained economic change. While Africa is sheltered from the immediate impact of the crisis because of its relative isolation from the global financial system, it will be buffeted by the after-shocks: falling demand for exports, slowing capital flows, reduced remittances, sluggish growth and the threat of development aid drying up.
The food and fuel crisis knocked the poor off their knees; the financial crisis threatens to kick them when they are down. This must not be allowed to happen. Instead the crisis offers a moment of opportunity. When financial vested interests are weak and laisser faire fundamentalism on the ropes, there is a chance to finally live up to the oft-broken commitment to the poor while also regulating the more irresponsible sides of capitalism.
Just as the crisis has been international because of globalisation, any new reforms will also need to be international. As Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, has remarked, a modernised multilateralism must put global development on a par with international finance. The next round of globalisation must be one where economic opportunities and responsibilities are more widely shared.
This moment of flux offers the chance to revive ideas that have been around for some time but have been heavily resisted. First is the Tobin tax. In 1978 James Tobin, the Nobel economist, proposed a tiny tax of 0.5 per cent or less on all foreign currency exchange transactions to deter speculation and pay for development. Some calculate this tax could yield $375bn (€289bn, £253bn) annually. Even at half that amount, it is on a par with the amount that should already have been directed to development globally. This levy, even if it is cut to 0.005 per cent would limit volatility in small economies whilst generating enormous sums for the poor. It would also cost taxpayers nothing.
Second, we need to institutionalise the means by which profits from carbon trading can be channelled to development. As Germany has already shown, this is a vast market. It involves creating incentives for polluters to pollute less while generating resources for development. It is a smart, painless way to create revenues and jobs while bringing the poor into the global economy. A Europe-wide scheme is planned, but in Washington it should be seized upon as an effective mechanism for growth and development. It, like the Tobin tax, is tax neutral to the consumer while curbing overproduction of carbon dioxide and helping the world’s poorest.
Third, this new round of globalisation must not be accompanied by a return to protectionism. Make Poverty History called for progress on debt, aid and trade. Trade is the area in which the least has been delivered. We need to pursue a stand-alone trade deal for Africa that supports regional integration, delivers improved market access, addresses supply-side constraints such as weak infrastructure, deals with the most damaging subsidies and allows governments to determine their own development strategies.
The voice of Africa’s poor will barely be represented in Washington. The world cannot afford to disenfranchise 900m potential producers and consumers. Of course the Bretton Woods institutions need reform, but this cannot simply come in the form of a different carve-up between countries that have newly acquired more power and those that have always had it. Investing in Africa through effective aid and trade may seem counterintuitive at a time of hardship, but is a necessity. Globalisation has been a boon for many, but has not benefited everyone. Reform of the global economy will not work until all are connected and involved.

Remember the bottom billion in our brave new world

2008-11-14T00:32:00.000-08:00

Salutation To A Brave Soul Who Valiantly Fought Her Honor

2008-11-11T06:34:00.000-08:00

This article by Vidya Bhushan Rawat at Countercurrents.org once again reinforces the fact that we have a long way to go.

They came in large number with their OB vans, photographers and anchor persons. Much before she could come and join the press, the hall at the Indian Social Institute in Delhi was fully overcrowded. Every body present thought that for that day there was enough 'news' to spread the TRPs. I had never seen such a 'concern' from the commercial media for the communal violence against the Christians, so it was quite surprising that the popular faces of the TV were there to broadcast live the 'historic' press conference.

Yes, I am talking about Sister Meena, an Adivasi nun who was raped by the Hindutva's thugs in kandhamal district of Orissa On August 24th. In her statement made to the press She said, "

On August 24th, around 4:30 pm, hearing the shouting of a large crowd, at the gate of Divyajyoti Pastoral Centre, I ran out through the back door and escaped to the forest along with others. We saw our house going up in flames. Around 8:30 pm we came out of the forest and went to the house of a Hindu gentleman who gave us shelter.

On 25th August, around1:30 pm,the mob entered the room where I was staying in that house, one of them stopped me on my face, caught my hair and pulled me out of the house. Two of them were holding my neck to cut off my head with axe. Others told them to take me out to the road; I saw Fr. Chellan also being taken out and being beaten. The mob consisting of 40–50 men was armed with lathis, axes, spades, crowbars, iron–rods, sickles etc. They took both of us to the main road. Then they led us to the burnt down Janavikas building saying that they were going to throw us into the smouldering fire.

When we reached the Janavikas building, they threw me to the verandah on the way to the dining room which was full of ashes and broken glass pieces. One of them tore my blouse and others my undergarments. Father Chellan protested and they beat him and pulled him out from there. They pulled out my saree and one of the stepped on my right hand and another on my left hand and then a third person raped me on the verandah mentioned above. When it was over, I managed to get up and put my petticoat and saree. Then another young man caught me and took me to a room near the staircase. He opened his pants and was attempting to rape me when they reached there.

I hid myself under the staircase. The crowd was shouting "where is that sister, come let us rape her, at least 100 people should rape." They found me under the staircase and took me out to the road. There I saw Fr. Chellan was kneeling down and the crowd was beating him. They were searching for a rope to tie us both of us together to burn us in fire. Someone suggested to make us parade naked. They made us walk on the road till Nuagoan market which was half a kilometer from there. They made to fold our hands and walk. I was with petticoat and saree as they had already torn away my blouse and undergarments. They tried to strip even there and I resisted and they went on beating me with hands on my cheeks and head and with sticks on my back several times.

I am not putting the entire text which is already available to various websites where the nun says openly how the police never protected her and it was not even doing its basic duty of filing her FIR. Instead, it discouraged her from doing so. Her horror story moved every one but more than that was her immense courage to come in the forefront against the guilty who are being protected by the inefficient and corrupt state government of Orissa. For the past one year, the Hindutva's hate campaign against the Christian missionaries in Orissa and other parts of the country have not resulted in anything. Despite the terror the work of these communities in the far flung areas of the country is praise worthy. Despite all the blames of evangelism, the work of the missionaries in the poor communities in India is unparallel. No one can deny the fact that such an enormous amount of work particularly in the health and educational sector in India is much disproportionate to the number of the community in the country, which denied education to large part of the its masses named as Dalit-Bahujans and an educational set up dominated by brahmanical elites of the country.

Orissa's horror story did not end in frightening the community workers. It is terror in all the forms. From burning the churches, demolishing their holy book, to attacking the social institutions of the community and even when such things fails to dampen the spirit of the community then the final assault. And the final assault is in the form of molestation, rape and indignity heaped upon women and men both. It is beyond shock that such mishaps of history are defended shamelessly on the television channels and widely circulated internet debates.

So, it was refreshing to see a large number of media persons to show their concern when they received an intimation for the press conference of Sister Meena. The timing was accurate at 2 pm. But the entire media was much before the organizers could make it there. The TV Cameras, the photographers, the anchors cum reporters, every one was settling for the final moments. There were cries from behind where the full team of camera persons were ready to 'shoot' the minutes details. The still photographers were preparing for the final assault.

Around 2 pm, as Father Dominic Emanuel came and announced modalities of the press conference saying that the sister would read her statement to the press and nothing more and nothing less. He made it clear that no further question would be taken in this regard as the sister was not in a position to speak and also the matter was subjudice.

The journalists, particularly from the electronic media were shocked as they thought of having an 'exclusive' interview with sister. They thought that the sister would give them lucid details of the incidents and then they would run it for several days like what they have been doing regarding Arushi murder case or Jessica Lal murder case. They perhaps forgot that a victim of the feudal communal mindset in India need a lot more than just courage to speak to the national media. Even when many of the Sangh Parivar people say that the charges of rapes were false, I do not want to comment on the hired pen-pushers who do not have the courage to come open and accept that something horrible has happened. The sister's narration moved every one who understands that how a woman mustered courage to speak of her plight to the 'national' media. It is time to stand with her and provide her mental support. We all know what happened to kandhamal and that if Hindu Rastra becomes a reality in this country, it would be a Kandhamal kind of rastra. Remember, a Hindu Rastra would be a great calamity for India, warned Ambedkar.

The irony is that some of the Church people from Orissa went and met Mr Lal Krishna Advani, just a few days before nun's press conference and Advani in turn expressed his 'gratitude' to the missionaries as how he studied in Christian schools. He then went on to condemn the incident of rape on the nun and said that there should be dialogue among all the religion. Now, somebody, should have told Advani that this is not a question of dialogue but bringing culprits to the book. Those who initiate such a dialogue with a criminal gang are criminal and have betrayed their very cause. The nun has her original identity as a tribal from Orissa and it is important to understand that she paid a price of her faith. Sangh Parivar's loyal intellectuals would always like to debate and then justify their positions after each event. If we continue to legitimize them by initiating a dialogue with them we make them representative of non Christians-non Muslim population of India which is highly objectionable. The Muslims and the Christians who initiative such a fake religious dialogue with them must be isolated and boycotted.

Finally, the sister arrived with her face covered with mask escorted by responsible friends like John Dayal and others but see the rush among the photographers. They heckled with each other to take photograph of the nun with different angle. It was just shocking to see how they were just fighting to take per photographs as if it was a photo session with a Bombay beauty queen. There was no understanding that a victim of the fascist onslaught was here to explain her plight. In a civilized society a victim of a such a horrible act would have found enough people from media and civil society speaking on her behalf but the scandalous silence of these sections of the society, added with Sangh Parivar's assertion that she was lying as if a woman is very happy to say that she was raped, compelled the sister to speak to the media. It is further when the state government and its police which was unable to protect the nun from the humiliation. The state government wanted her to identity the accused in Orissa itself without giving her due protection. It needs not to be elaborated here how Orissa and Kandhamal district in particular have become an area where Christians are being targeted and hounded. And the government's inaction has further deteriorated the situation with Christians still finding it difficult to return their home. In such a scenario when the media has no time to follow up their own stories, a brave woman speak her plight should have been welcomed. A society where the victim is asked to prove her innocence can not be termed as civilized society and those who claim for it must hang their head in shame. We must admit that we live in one of the most brutal society and the only civilized thing about us is our civilized constitution without being effectively used to protect its citizens who need it.

Many in the crowd said that there was nothing wrong in photographers taking the photos in such a way. It was great that media was present but it should properly think that not everything is meant to strengthen your TRPs. A person's plight needs to be heard properly. If you need to take photographs to do your 'professional' duty, do it with grace, understanding the importance and seriousness of the issue. I know these days the TV cameras are everywhere even when the dead bodies go from the family and the reporters are asking the family people ' how are you feeling'. But it is not just media fault. People are also eager to see their faces on TV and print so we see they do 'speak' on the camera how 'great' their dear one was.

One thing is clear that the friends in support of Sister including CBCI need our solidarity for not making this incident cheap and vulgar. Friends like John Dayal and others handled this issue graciously and did not allow the 'crazy' media anything that would be termed a cheap publicity. Secondly, by supporting the sister's courageous act of speaking to the nation her plight and her conviction to get justice, need to be encouraged. In this country the exploiters, rapists, and all those anti social elements get away with the law because the victims are victimized more than the tormentors. The Christian community has shown their great courage by siding with the sister. Let the media put pressure on the government of Orissa as well as the central government to act on the issue fast and get the sister a justice. Tragically, nothing has happened and the media will wait for another juicy story to which can raise their TRPs and the Hindutva terror would go unabated all over the country and the victims of this terror would rarely find space in our national media unless there is some 'masala' in it. One sincerely hope that with this press conference, the media will understand that serious issues need to be tackled seriously and they are not here to get more advertisement and market their channels. Let us see how many of them turn up to cover the issues if the CBCI organize another press conference related to violence against Christians in any part of the country. One hope the editors are listening and will do the needful. One can only hope that such atrocious and tedious process of law will not demoralize her further. Let us salute her spirit to get justice. Let us stand with her in this hour of crisis. Let us hope she get justice so that our faith in the institution of law remains intact.

Is bailout really neccessary, no I don't think so now.

2008-11-10T22:28:00.000-08:00

Few days back, I wrote a post stressing the need for bailout. I came across an article which which pointed out that how the bail out is going to make life worse for the common man me explain how it is going to be worse.

Say Mr.X has taken a loan of $200,000 from a mortgage firm for buying a house. The mortgage company in order securitize the loan, converts the it a bond and sells the bond in the open market. The bond is bought by an investment bank or a mutual fund or a pension fund since it offers good returns. In order to securitize their investment, the entity which bought the bond insures it with an Insurer. when Mr.X defaults, then it sets off a chain reaction which affects all those involved in the chain of events, i.e. the mortgage company, investment bank & insurance company.

The guys with with fat pay checks in Wall street never cared about the fact that this vicious chain may crash. All that mattered to them were profits, never the means to achieve it. Wall street being the brainchild of capitalism came up with a master plan to save their skin from this economic breakdown. The US government $700 billion bailout save only the financial companies from bankruptcy and leaves Mr.X in total disarray.

The bailout has put a double burden on the common man, first $700 billion has been made raised from the tax payers money which includes Mr.X's contribution also. We need to remember Mr.X has been shown door from his house has he has defaulted his payments. His house would be auctioned off now and say it is sold for $50,000. Mr.X still has a liability of $150,000 to his mortgage company. In other words he needs to pay for the house he doesn't have and also he has to pay for preventing the financial institutions from crashing, the very same institutions which has left him in lurch. These guys do have a lot of brains.

Had this bailout not happened the entire world economy would have collapsed and a new world system might have been formed. Of course we would have faced many problems, but I sincerely believe it might have cut off the wings of Capitalistic Imperialism. The bankers have made sure that this didn't happen and Capitalism continues to thrive so that they can reap it's benefits.

What lower oil prices mean for the world

2008-11-10T20:00:00.000-08:00

Oil prices are a barometer of the world economy. Rising prices between 2003 and 2007 reflected the best global economic growth in a generation. This high economic growth was brought to an end not only by underpricing of risk, excess liquidity and over-confidence but also by an increasingly unsustainable commodity boom – of which oil was a crucial part. Now, as the world has dropped into recession, oil prices have fallen by more than half.
This fall also reflects the power of price itself. For rising prices set in motion decisions by consumers, governments and businesses that have changed the course of demand. Now the recession is also weighing increasingly heavily on demand.
Of course, a price “collapse” to the $60-$70 range is a collapse only if one forgets that the average oil price in 2007 was $72 a barrel (and $66 in 2006). The tight balance between supply and demand was not the only factor driving the increase in oil prices. The last explosion in oil and other commodity prices began in the late summer of 2007, as a weakening dollar set off a “flight to commodities”.
Certainly, oil prices were also driven up throughout July 2008 by psychology; what Professor Robert Shiller of Yale describes as “contagious excitement about investment prospects”. It was almost like bets in a poker game, with a $200 prediction being raised by a $250 prediction, which would in turn be raised by a $500 prediction. It was all self-reinforcing, creating its own reality.
Yet there were two hidden assumptions in this contagion of enthusiasm. The first was the belief in “decoupling” – that the rest of the world was insulated from a US economic downturn. The reality of the past several months has demonstrated the opposite: how closely economies are linked together in a globalised world. Brazil, Russia, India and China became the up-and-coming “Brics” by virtue of globalisation.
The second hidden assumption was that price does not matter. Both demand and supply, it was assumed, would not budge as prices soared. Yes, this was just possible, but it would have been the first time in economic history. As it turned out, cycles are still with us.
What was all the more odd about this “contagious excitement” is that, while the price was going up, the energy fundamentals were declining along with the overall economy. Petrol consumption in the US had hit “peak demand” in 2007 and was beginning to decline. On a global basis, estimates for demand growth for 2008 have fallen from as high as 2.1m barrels a day at the beginning of the year to 200,000 barrels a day now. Or perhaps zero.
The world oil market is caught in what Cambridge Energy Research Associates two years ago described as a “Global Fissure” recession scenario. Total US oil demand over 2008 is down 1m barrels a day compared with last year. The last time demand dropped this much was in 1981, on the eve of the recession that was – until now – known as the “worst recession since the Great Depression”.
The fall in oil prices is a great bounty to hard-pressed consumers. If you compare the average US petrol price in July ($4.14 a gallon) with October ($2.26) on an annualised basis, the savings to American consumers are $282bn (€220bn, £180bn). The fall in oil prices is a sort of de facto tax cut – a stimulus package that does not have to be approved by the Congress or paid for out of the beleaguered Treasury.
What will happen to oil prices in Global Fissure? One of the most important determinants – just as in the 2003-2007 increases – is the pace of global economic growth. But, this time, the question is how deep and long the recession and how big the hit on consumer spending. The other crucial question is oil supply itself. How large will be the flow of new oil supplies that have been stimulated by the rising prices and have been under development but were delayed by shortages of people and equipment? Watch what happens in 2009.
Lower prices are forcing energy companies to cut their budgets and hold back on starting some new projects. This will make itself felt in a new turn of the cycle after an economic recovery. In the meantime, it is not only investment in new oil and gas and electric power projects that will be restrained.
The energy policies of the new US administration, as in other countries, will emphasise greater energy efficiency and renewables. A “green stimulus programme” is already high on the transition agenda. But the worried question around Washington now is: to what degree lower prices will crimp investment in renewables and efficiency.
The answer will not be determined just by energy prices, important as they are. The biggest impact will come from the health of the economy, the nation’s fiscal position and the availability of capital and credit. With the costs of two wars and a vast financial bail-out, and with an impaired credit system, resources for other purposes are likely to be constrained.
In such circumstances, some kind of charge or auctioning for carbon permits may suddenly take on new attractiveness, not just for combating climate change but as a revenue-raising measure for a federal government that certainly needs the money.

காணாமல் போகிறேன் .....

2008-10-28T11:25:00.000-07:00

ஒரு முறை என் கேமரா
என்னை மீட்டு குடுத்தது;
ஒரு முறை என் புல்லாங்குழல்
என்னை மீட்டு குடுத்தது;
ஒரு முறை என் தோழி
என்னை மீட்டு கொடுத்தாள் ,
நான் தான் அடிக்கடி
தொலைந்து போகிறேன்.

Credit crunch for dummies

2008-10-20T01:23:00.000-07:00

Once there was a little island country. The land of this country was the tiny island itself .The total money in circulation was 2 dollars as there were only two pieces of 1 dollar coins circulating around.
1) There were 3 citizens living on this island country. A owned the land. B and C each owned 1 dollar.
2) B decided to purchase the land from A for 1 dollar. So, now A and C own 1 dollar each while B owned a piece of land that is worth 1 dollar.
* The net asset of the country now = 3 dollars.
3) Now C thought that since there is only one piece of land in the country, and land is non producible asset, its value must definitely go up. So, he borrowed 1 dollar from A, and together with his own 1 dollar, he bought the land from B for 2 dollars.
*A has a loan to C of 1 dollar, so his net asset is 1 dollar.
* B sold his land and got 2 dollars, so his net asset is 2 dollars.
* C owned the piece of land worth 2 dollars but with his 1 dollar debt to A, his net residual asset is 1 dollar.
* Thus, the net asset of the country = 4 dollars.
4) A saw that the land he once owned has risen in value. He regretted having sold it. Luckily, he has a 1 dollar loan to C. He then borrowed 2 dollars from B and acquired the land back from C for 3 dollars. The payment is by 2 dollars cash (which he borrowed) and cancellation of the 1 dollar loan to C. As a result, A now owned a piece of land that is worth 3 dollars. But since he owed B 2 dollars, his net asset is 1 dollar.
* B loaned 2 dollars to A. So his net asset is 2 dollars.
* C now has the 2 coins. His net asset is also 2 dollars.
* The net asset of the country = 5 dollars. A bubble is building up.
(5) B saw that the value of land kept rising. He also wanted to own the land. So he bought the land from A for 4 dollars. The payment is by borrowing 2 dollars from C, and cancellation of his 2 dollars loan to A.
* As a result, A has got his debt cleared and he got the 2 coins. His net asset is 2 dollars.
* B owned a piece of land that is worth 4 dollars, but since he has a debt of 2 dollars with C, his net Asset is 2 dollars.
* C loaned 2 dollars to B, so his net asset is 2 dollars.
* The net asset of the country = 6 dollars; even though, the country has only one piece of land and 2 Dollars in circulation.
(6) Everybody has made money and everybody felt happy and prosperous.
(7) One day an evil wind blew, and an evil thought came to C's mind. "Hey, what if the land price stop going up, how could B repay my loan. There is only 2 dollars in circulation, and, I think after all the land that B owns is worth at most only 1 dollar, and no more."
(8) A also thought the same way.
(9) Nobody wanted to buy land anymore.
* So, in the end, A owns the 2 dollar coins, his net asset is 2 dollars.
* B owed C 2 dollars and the land he owned which he thought worth 4 dollars is now 1 dollar. So his net asset is only 1 dollar.
* C has a loan of 2 dollars to B. But it is a bad debt. Although his net asset is still 2 dollars, his Heart is palpitating.
* The net asset of the country = 3 dollars again.
(10) So, who has stolen the 3 dollars from the country ? Of course, before the bubble burst B thought his land was worth 4 dollars. Actually, right before the collapse, the net asset of the country was 6 dollars on paper. B's net asset is still 2 dollars, his heart is palpitating.
(11) B had no choice but to declare bankruptcy. C as to relinquish his 2 dollars bad debt to B, but in return he acquired the land which is worth 1 dollar now.
* A owns the 2 coins, his net asset is 2 dollars.
* B is bankrupt, his net asset is 0 dollar. ( he lost everything )
* C got no choice but end up with a land worth only 1 dollar
* The net asset of the country = 3 dollars.
************ **End of the story; BUT ************ ********* ******
There is however a redistribution of wealth.
A is the winner, B is the loser, C is lucky that he is spared.
A few points worth noting -
(1) when a bubble is building up, the debt of individuals to one another in a country is also building up.
(2) This story of the island is a closed system whereby there is no other country and hence no foreign debt. The worth of the asset can only be calculated using the island's own currency. Hence, there is no net loss.
(3) An over-damped system is assumed when the bubble burst, meaning the land's value did not go down to below 1 dollar.
(4) When the bubble burst, the fellow with cash is the winner. The fellows having the land or extending loan to others are the losers. The asset could shrink or in worst case, they go bankrupt.
(5) If there is another citizen D either holding a dollar or another piece of land but refrains from taking part in the game, he will neither win nor lose. But he will see the value of his money or land go up and down like a see saw.
(6) When the bubble was in the growing phase, everybody made money.
(7) If you are smart and know that you are living in a growing bubble, it is worthwhile to borrow money (like A ) and take part in the game. But you must know when you should change everything back to cash.
(8) As in the case of land, the above phenomenon applies to stocks as well.
(9) The actual worth of land or stocks depends largely on psychology.

Bail out is neccessary

2008-10-15T06:16:00.000-07:00

I came upon this article by Scott A.Kjar

"Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson needs to change his reading list. Instead of reading the balance sheets and income statements of the failing banking industry, he needs to read Henry Hazlitt's classic book Economics in One Lesson. It will cost Paulson far less than the $700 billion that he is spending on the bailout, and he might just learn a little economics in the process.

Hazlitt delivers his "one lesson" in chapter 1, and proceeds to spend the rest of the book giving examples. His lesson, based on the work of Frédéric Bastiat, is that "the art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."

For example, in chapter 2, Hazlitt delivers the well-known "broken window fallacy" in which a hoodlum breaks a shopkeeper's window with a rock. The common folk see it as a tragedy, but an astute Washington bureaucrat could argue that it creates new jobs for glaziers. As Hazlitt points out, though, any resources that the shopkeeper spends on the new window would have been used elsewhere, perhaps for a new suit. So while the glazier gets new business, the tailor loses the same amount of business. There is no net benefit; in fact there is a net loss. Absent the hoodlum, the shopkeeper would have had both a window and a new suit; given the hoodlum, the shopkeeper has a window but no suit. Even though the damage was to the window, it is the suit that is lost to the shopkeeper and, hence, to society.

In chapter 6, entitled "Credit Diverts Production," Hazlitt discusses government lending policies, such as additional credit to farmers or business owners. However, he points out, the recipients of such programs are rarely the more-productive farmers and business owners. After all, the more-productive people are able to borrow their money from private lenders. It is only the less-productive individuals and firms, unable to get funds on the free market, that must turn to government.

For example, suppose that there is a farm for sale. A private lender would normally be willing to lend money to farmer A who has proven his abilities in the past, rather than to farmer B, who has demonstrated a lower level of productivity than has A. However, because government taxes citizens or borrows money itself in capital markets, private lenders have fewer funds available to lend to A. Instead, government lends the money to B on the grounds that B is underprivileged, in need of a hand, or some other politically based argument. The more productive borrower, A, loses out on the scarce land while the less productive borrower, B, gains the resources. Because the less-productive individual acquires the scarce resource, there will be less total production, and the entire society is worse off.

Further, Hazlitt states, the government takes bigger risks with taxpayers' money than private lenders take with their own money. Private lenders who make bad loans will go bankrupt and be forced out of business. But when the government gets involved, it lends funds for riskier ventures since the bureaucrats who approve the loan face no personal recriminations — much less loss of profit — for error.

In other words, private lenders would take Action A while government lenders would take Action B, and Action B is the less-productive path. After all, there is no need for government to take Action A: it can be handled quite well in the free market.

So it is with the current rash of bailouts. Whatever the final price tag — $500 billion, $750 billion, $1 trillion, more — the fact is that government gets its money either from taxes, borrowing, or the printing press. It is hard to raise taxes by $1 trillion on short notice, and since there is a small hurdle that slows the government's ability to print the money,[1] we know that government will issue bonds. In other words, government will borrow the money from private capital markets.

As Hazlitt points out, though, the private capital markets (those that aren't bankrupt and standing in line for a bailout) would otherwise lend their funds to more-productive ventures. If private capital wants to lend directly to the failing banks, it is already capable of doing so. The fact that such private capital is not lending to the banks is a clear indication that the government's current bailout is contrary to free-market principles.

The argument that the government is somehow pumping new capital into the market is absurd. Government is actually borrowing the money from the capital markets that it is in turn injecting into the capital markets. There is no additional source of funding; there is only a diversion of funds from more-productive outlets to less-productive outlets, with government acting as the middleman.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson needs to read this book.

So when Henry Paulson argues that it is necessary to pump money into credit markets to prevent them from freezing up, he doesn't bother to realize that the money he pumps into the credit markets is coming directly out of the very same credit markets. He is doing little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; shuffling the money from one set of financial intermediaries to another does not increase either liquidity or solvency. It merely delays the problem for a few brief moments.

Even the failing banks pay lip service to their fiduciary responsibility, but any privately funded firm that took money from more-productive people to give it to less-productive people would soon go out of business. Only the government can violate Hazlitt's logic and survive, because only government can socialize its losses through the tax system."

Though his argument theoretically seem correct, I believe the bail out is necessary without which lot of banks would collapse and the one to be most affected would be the common man. The bailout might be helping the banks whose policies were managed by the greedy and dumb guys, who failed to foresee the catastrophe, but I don't find this reason to be strong enough for people who had invested in these institutions also to suffer. The increasing liberation policies and complex instruments make the functioning of banks and economics incomprehensible to an ordinary man and is really tough to expect him to analyze this situations beforehand, when seasoned economists themselves have been left confused. The bailout in turn must be followed by stricter regulations of the market and trail of those responsible.

International Peace By Mahatama Gandhi

2008-10-06T21:51:00.000-07:00

I do not believe that an individual may gain spiritually and those that surround him suffer. I believe in advaita. I believe in the essential unity of man and for that matter of all that lives. Therefore I believe that if one man gains spiritually, the whole world gains with him and, if one man falls, the whole world falls to that extent. (SB, 27) There is not a single virtue which aims at, or is content with, the welfare of the individual alone. Conversely, there is not a single moral offence which does not, directly or indirectly, affect many others besides the actual offender. Hence, whether an individual is good or bad is not merely his own concern, but really the concern of the whole community, nay, of the whole world. (SB, 27) Though there is repulsion enough in Nature, she lives by attraction. Mutual love enables Nature to persist. Man does not live by destruction. Self. love compels regard for others. Nations cohere because there is mutual regard among individuals composing them. Some day we must extend the national law to the universe, even as we have extended the family law to form nations-a larger family. (SB, 22) Mankind is one, seeing that all are equally subject to the moral law. All men are equal in God's eyes. There are, of course, differences of race and status and the like, but the higher the status of a man, the greater is his responsibility. (MM, 137) My mission is not merely brotherhood of Indian humanity.

My mission is not merely freedom of India, though today it undoubtedly engrosses practically the whole of my life and the whole of my time. But through realization of freedom of India I hope to realize and carry on the mission of the brotherhood of man. My patriotism is not an exclusive thing. It is all-embracing and I should reject that patriotism which sought to mount upon the distress or the exploitation of other nationalities. The conception of my patriotism is nothing if it is not always, in every case without exception, consistent with the broadest good of humanity at large. Not only that, but my religion and my patriotism derived from my religion embrace all life. I want to realize brotherhood or identity not merely with the beings called human, but I want to realize identity with all life, even with such things as crawl upon earth. I want, if I don't give a shock, to realize identity with even the crawling things upon earth, because we claim descent from the same God, and that being so, all life in whatever form it appears must be essentially one. (MM, 135) It is impossible for one to be an internationalist without being a nationalist. Internationalism is possible only when nationalism becomes a fact, i.e., when peoples belonging to different countries have organized themselves and are able to act as one man. It is not nationalism that is evil, it is the narrowness, selfishness, exclusiveness which is the bane of modern nations which is evil. Each wants to profit at the expense of, and rise on the ruin of, the other. (MM, 134) I am a humble servant of India and in trying to serve India, I serve humanity at large....

After nearly fifty years of public life, I am able to say today that my faith in the doctrine that the service of cue's nation is not inconsistent with the service of the world ,ms grown. It is a good doctrine. Its acceptance alone will ease the situation in the world and stop the mutual jealousies between nations inhabiting this globe of ours. (MM, 135-36) Interdependence is and ought to be as much the ideal of man as self-sufficiency. Man is a social being. Without inter-relation with' society he cannot realize his oneness with the universe or suppress his egotism. His social interdependence enables him to test his faith and to prove himself on the touchstone of reality. If man were so placed or could so place himself as to be absolutely above all dependence on his fellow-beings he would become so proud and arrogant as to be a veritable burden and nuisance to the world. Dependence on society teaches him the lesson of humanity. That a man ought to be able to satisfy most of his essential needs himself is obvious; but it is no less obvious to me that when self-sufficiency is carried to the length of isolating oneself from society it almost amounts to sin. A man cannot become self-sufficient even

in respect of all various operations from the growing of the cotton to the spinning of the yarn. He has at some stage or other to take the aid of members of his family. And if one may take the help from one's own family, why not from one's neighbours? Or otherwise what is the significance of the great saying, 'The world is my family'? (MM, 136) Duties to self, to the family, to the country and to the world are not independent of one another. One cannot do good to the country by injuring himself or his family. Similarly one cannot serve the country injuring the world at large. In the final analysis we must die that the family may live, the family must die that the country may live and the country must die that the world may live. But only pure things can be offered in sacrifice. Therefore, self-purification is the first step. When the heart is pure, we at once realize what is our duty at every moment. (DM, 287) The golden way is to be friends with the world and to regard the whole human family as one. He who distinguishes between the votaries of one's own religion and those of another miss-educates the members of his own and opens the way for discord and irreligion. (MGP, I, 359) I live for India's freedom and would die for it, because it is part of Truth. Only a free India can worship the true God. I work for India's freedom because my Swadeshi teaches me that being born in it and having inherited her culture, I am fittest to serve her and she has a prior claim to my service. But my patriotism is not exclusive; it is calculated not only not to hurt another nation but to benefit all in the true sense of the word. India's freedom as conceived by me can never be a menace to the world. (SB, 43) We want freedom for our country, but not at the expense or exploitation of others, not so as to degrade other countries. I do not want the freedom of India if it means the extinction of England or the disappearance of English-men. I want the freedom of my country so that other countries may learn something from my free country, so that the resources of my country might be utilized for the benefit of mankind. Just as the cult of patriotism teaches us today that the individual has to die for the family, the family has to die for the village, the village for the district, the district for the province, and the province for the country, even so, a country has to be free in order that it may die, if necessary, for the benefit of the world. My love therefore of nationalism or my idea of nationalism, is that my country may become free, that if need be, the whole country may die, so that the human race may live. There is no room for race-hatred there. Let that be our nationalism. (SB, 43) There is no limit to extending our services to our neighbours across State-made frontiers. God never made those frontiers. (SB,44) My goal is friendship with the whole world and I can combine the greatest love with the greatest opposition to wrong. (SB, 152) For me patriotism is the same as humanity. I am patriotic because I am human and humane. It is not exclusive, I will not hurt England or Germany to serve India. Imperialism has no place in my scheme of life. The law of a, patriot is not different from that of the patriarch. And a patriot is so much the less a patriot if he is a lukewarm humanitarian. There is no conflict between private and political law. (MM, 133) Our non-co-operation is neither with the English nor with the West. Our non-co-operation is with the system the English have established, with the material civilization and its attendant greed and exploitation of the weak. Our non-co-operation is a retirement within ourselves. Our non-cooperation is a refusal to co-operate with the English administrators on their own terms. We say to them: 'Come and co-operate with us on our terms and it will be well for us, for you and the world.' We must refuse to be lifted off our feet. A drowning man cannot save others. In order to he fit to save others, we must try to save ourselves. Indian nationalism is not exclusive, nor aggressive, nor destructive. It is health-giving, religious and therefore humanitarian. India must learn to live before she can aspire to die for humanity. (SB, 113)

I do not want England to be defeated or humiliated. It hurts me to find St. Paul's Cathedral damaged. It hurts me as much as I would be hurt if I heard that Kashi Vishvanath temple or the Jumma Masjid was damaged. I would like to defend both the Kashi Vishvanath temple and the Jumma Masjid and even St. Paul's Cathedral with my life, but would not take a single life for their defense. That is my fundamental difference with the British people. My sympathy is there with them nevertheless. Let there be no mistake on the part of the Englishmen, Congressmen or others whom my voice reaches, as to where nay sympathy lies. It is not because I love the British nation and hate the German. I do not think that the Germans as a nation are any worse than the English, or the Italians are any worse. We are all tarred with the same brush; we are al! members of the vast human family. I decline to draw any distinction. I cannot claim any superiority for Indians. We have the same virtues and the same vices. Humanity is not divided into watertight compartments so that we cannot go from one to another. They may occupy one thousand rooms, but they are all related to one another. I would not say: 'India should be all in all, let the whole world perish.' That is not my message. India should be all in all, consistently with the well-being of other nations of the world. I can keep India intact and its freedom also intact only if I have good will towards the whole of the human family and not merely for the human family which inhabits this little spot of the earth called India. It is big enough compared to other smaller nations, but what is India in the wide world or in the universe? (SB, 171-72) Not to believe in the possibility of permanent peace is to disbelieve in the godliness of human nature. Methods hitherto adopted have failed because rock-bottom sincerity on the part of those who have striven has been lacking. Not that they have realized this lack. Peace is un-attained by part performance of conditions, even as a chemical combination is impossible without complete fulfillment of the conditions of attainment thereof. If the recognized leaders of mankind who have control over the engines of destructions were wholly to renounce their use, with full knowledge of its implications, permanent peace can be obtained. This is clearly impossible without the Great Powers of the earth renouncing their imperialistic design. This again seems impossible without great nations ceasing to believe in soul-destroying competition and to desire to multiply wants and, therefore, increase their material possessions. (MM, 59-60) I do suggest that the doctrine [of non-violence] holds good also as between States and States. I know that I am treading on delicate ground if I refer to the late war. But I fear I must in order to make the position clear. It was a war of aggrandizement, as I have understood, on either part. It was a war for dividing the spoils of the exploitation of weaker races-otherwise euphemistically called the world commerce.... It would be found that before general disarmament in Europe commences, as it must some day, unless Europe is to commit suicide, some nation will have to dare to disarm herself and take large risks. The level of non-violence in that nation, if that event happily comes to pass, will naturally have risen so high as to command universal respect. Her judgments will be unerring, her decisions firm, her capacity for heroic self-sacrifice will be great, and she will want to live as much for other nations as for herself. (MM, 60-61) One thing is certain. If the mad race for armaments continues, it is bound to result in a slaughter such as has never occurred in history. If there is a victor left the very victory will be a living death for the nation that emerges victorious. There is no escape from the impending doom save through a bold and unconditional acceptance of the non-violent method with all its glorious implications. (MM, 63) If there were no greed, there would be no occasion for armaments. The principle of non-violence necessitates complete abstention from exploitation in any form. (MM, 63) Immediately the spirit of exploitation is gone, armaments will be felt as a positive unbearable burden. Real disarmament cannot come unless the nations of the world cease to exploit one another. (MM, 63) I would not like to live in this world if it is not to be one world.

Of mass murderers and petty criminals

2008-09-02T04:21:00.000-07:00

The white man will never understand the ancient wordshere in spirits roaming freebetween sky and trees.
Let Columbus scour the seas to find India,it's his right!
He can call our ghosts the names of spices,
he can call us Red Indians,
he can fiddle with his compass to correct his course,
twist all the errors of the North wind,
but outside the narrow world to his maphe can't believe that all men are born equalthe same as air and water,
the same as people in Barcelona,
except that they happen to worship Nature's God in everthingand not gold
.Columbus was free to look for a languagehe couldn't find here,
to look for gold in the skulls of our ancestors.
He took his fill from the flesh of our livingand our dead.
So why is he bent on carrying out his deadly wareven from the grave?
When we have nothing left to givebut a few ruinous trinkets, a few tiny feathers toembroider our lakes?
All told,you killed over seventy million hearts,
more than enough for you to return from slaughteras kind on the throne of a new age.
Isn't it about time,
stranger,for us to meet face to face in the same age
,both of us strangers to the same land,meeting at the tip of an abyss?
We have what is ours
andwe have what is yours of the sky.Yours air and water, such as we have.
Ours pebbles, such as we have,yours iron, such as you have.
In the shadow domain, let us share the light.
Take what you need of the nightbut leave us a few stars to bury our celestial dead.
Take what you need of the seabut leave us a few waves in which to catch our fish.
Take all the gold of the earth and sunbut leave the land of our names to us.
Then go back, stranger.Search for India once more!

This quaint poem was written by red indians for their masters .History is nothing but a biography of great men said a historian . If we can draw some parallels between us and them and between then and now , every things has changed , every body has changed .The world has been stripped from the natives and have been given special staus in their own native countires , Israel ,drawing on false historical premise , established itself as a pariah state with borders .

Where there was merchant ships looting on hapless natives , now we have multi -national corporations doing brisk business empowereing the poor in their backyard .where we had British , Spanish and Portuguese civilizing the natives now we have Americans spreading their noble vision of democracy and freedom ( no body talks of responsibilities but freedom alone ).Where we had coal now we have petroleum , where we had horses we have automobiles .
Everything has changed but everything is the same for the poor .Armed with words of disguise and lofty promises rich countries set up growth oriented democracies after sanguinary conflicts .
Those who forget history are condemed to repeat it said Satyayana . But now we people forgetting everything through consumerism.
Are we better people , more civilized and humane than our predecessors ? HAs all the goods , materials and prosperity that came with so much bloodshed making us anybetter or is everything an illusion ? Are we disillusioned about the future of humanity as a whole ?

Russia is back !

2008-08-12T21:17:00.000-07:00

One thing is for sure. This week's operation in Georgia has displayed the failure of the west's policy of belligerence towards Vladimir Putin's Russia. The policy was meant to weaken Russia, and has strengthened it. The policy was meant to humiliate Russia with Nato encirclement, and has merely fed its neo-imperialism. The policy was meant to show that Russia "understands only firmness" and instead has shown the west as a bunch of tough-talking windbags.

Georgia, a supposed western ally and applicant to Nato, has been treated by Russia to a brutal lesson in power politics. The west has lost all leverage and can do nothing. Seldom was a policy so crashingly stupid.

Putin would die laughing if he read this week's American newspapers. The president, George Bush, declared the Russian invasion of Georgia "disproportionate and unacceptable". This is taken as a put-down to the vice-president, Dick Cheney, who declared the invasion "will not go unanswered", apparently something quite different. Bush says that great powers should not go about "toppling governments in the 21st century", as if he had never done such a thing. Cheney says that the invasion has "damaged Russia's standing in the world", as if Cheney gave a damn. The lobby for sanctions against Russia is reduced to threatening to boycott the winter Olympics. Big deal.

Every student of the Caucasus has known since the fall of the Soviet empire that this part of the world was an explosion waiting to happen. The crisscrossing fault lines of ethnicity, religion and nationalism, fuelled by gas and oil, would not long survive the removal of the Red Army and communist discipline. There were too many old scores to settle, too much territory in dispute and too much wealth at stake - rivalries brilliantly portrayed in Kurban Said's classic novel of Edwardian Azerbaijan, Ali & Nino.

In every crisis the west craves goodies and baddies. The media finds it impossible to report a modern conflict without taking sides. In Yugoslavia, where a similar clash of separatist minorities occurred in the 1990s, coverage was so biased that Kosovo is still "plucky little" and the Serbs can still do no right.

In South Ossetia both sides appear to have committed appalling atrocities, and can thus generate a sense of outrage in front of whatever camera is pointed at them. Georgia's government claimed the right to assert military control over its two dissident provinces, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, even if they were openly in league with Russia. Equally, Russia felt justified in stopping the consequent evictions and killings of its nationals in these provinces, in which it had a humanitarian locus as "peacekeeper".

The difficulty is that entitlement and good sense are rarely in accord. Georgia may have been entitled to act, but was clearly unwise to do so. Russia may have been entitled to aid its people against an oppressor, but that is different from unleashing its notoriously inept and ruthless army, let alone bombing Georgia's capital and demanding a change in its government.

What is clear is that the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is a poor advertisement for a Harvard education. He thought he could reoccupy South Ossetia and call Russia's bluff while Putin was away at the Olympics. He found it was not bluff. Putin was waiting for just such an invitation to humiliate a man he loathes, and to deter any other Russian border state from applying to join Nato, an organisation Russia had itself sought to join until it was rudely rebuffed.

Saakashvili thought he could call on the support of his neoconservative allies in Washington. Tbilisi is one of the few world cities in which Bush's picture is a pin-up and where an avenue is named after him. It turned out that such "support" was mere words. America is otherwise engaged in wars that bear a marked resemblance to those waged by Putin. It defended the Kurdish enclaves against Saddam Hussein. It sought regime change in Serbia and Afghanistan. As Putin's troops in South Ossetia were staging a passable imitation of the US 101st Airborne entering Iraq, Bush was studiously watching beach volleyball in Beijing.

The truth is that the world has no conceptual framework for adjudicating, let alone resolving, these timeless border conflicts. Where poverty is rife, it takes only a clan war and a ready supply of guns for hostilities to break out. The only question is how to stop them escalating.

Once such conflicts could be quarantined by the United Nations' requirement to respect national sovereignty. That has been shot to pieces by the liberal interventionism of George Bush and Tony Blair. The result has reinvigorated separatist movements across the world. Small-statism is not an evil in itself: witness its quadrennial festival at the Olympics. But the process of achieving it is usually bitter and bloody.

The west's eagerness to intervene in favour of partition, manifest in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Sudan, is more than meddling. It encouraged every oppressed people and province on earth to be "the mouse that roared", to think it could ensnare a great power in its cause.

The parallels are glaring. If we backed Kosovo against the Serbs, why not back South Ossetia against the Georgians? But if we backed the Kurds against the Iraqis, why not the Georgians against Russia? Indeed, had Nato admitted Georgia to full membership, there is no knowing what Caucasian horror might have ensued from the resulting treaty obligation. Decisions which in Washington and London may seem casual gestures of ideological solidarity can mean peace and war on the ground.

I retain an archaic belief that the old UN principle of non-interference, coupled with a realpolitik acceptance of "great power" spheres of influence, is still a roughly stable basis for international relations. It may on occasions be qualified by soft-power diplomacy and humanitarian relief. It may demand an abstinence from kneejerk gestures in favour of leaving things to sort themselves out (as in Zimbabwe). But liberal interventionism, especially when it leads to military and economic aggression, means one costly adventure after another - and usually failure.

The west has done everything to isolate Putin, as he rides the tiger of Russian emergence from everlasting dictatorship. This has encouraged him to care not a fig for world opinion. Equally the west has encouraged Saakashvili to taunt Putin beyond endurance. The policy has led to war. If ever there were a place just to leave alone, it is surely the Caucasus.

Good Bye Mahmud Darwish , Hope of an Independant Palestine Died with you

2008-08-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

Will the American Media Cover this ?

The poet Mahmoud Darwish was the voice of the Palestinian odyssey, whose stark writing reflected the desperation and alienation of the Palestinian people. He published more than 20 collections of poetry, which have been translated into many languages (although few of them into English), and was the Arab world's best-selling poet. His poems are engraved in the hearts of millions of Palestinians and his words have been shouted by anti-occupation demonstrators in the streets of Ramallah, Damascus and Cairo. Many have been set to music, including "I yearn for my mother's bread."

They fettered his mouth with chains,
And tied his hands to the rock of the dead.
They said: You're a murderer.
They took his food, his clothes and his banners,
And threw him into the well of the dead.
They said: You're a thief.
They threw him out of every port,
And took away his young beloved.
And then they said: You're a refugee.

But his poetry also contained irony and a universal humanity. For Darwish the issue of Palestine became a prism for an internationalist feeling. The land and history of Palestine was a summation of millennia, with influences from Canaanites, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Ottoman Turks and British. Throughout all this has survived a core identity of Palestine. He was able to see the Israeli soldier as a victim of circumstances like himself. He expresses the bureaucratic absurdities of an oppressive military occupation.

I’ll beget you and you’ll beget me,
and very slowly I’ll remove the fingers of the dead from your body,
the buttons of their shirts and their birth certificates.
You’ll take the letters of your dead to Jerusalem.
We’ll wipe the blood from our glasses, my friend,
so we can reread Kafka,
and open two windows onto a street of shadows.

My outside is inside me;
don’t believe winter smoke.
Soon April will emerge from our dreams.
My outside is inside me;
pay no attention to statues.
An Iraqi girl will decorate her dress
with the first almond flowers,
and along the top edge of the arrow
drawn just above her name
she’ll write your name’s initial letter
in Iraq’s wind.

We find a lots of voices of dissent including Alexander Solzhenitsyn passing away . Is the age of reason over ?

We witnessed the death of a concupiscent Poet who fought the west , who fought for the fist-less.
We see no end in sight of the suffering of the Palestinian refugees . Should the Unpeople( to borrow a term form a British Historian ) succumb without a fight ?

The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century

2008-08-05T20:57:00.000-07:00

The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims' names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.

In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including "capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was "fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out" that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".

Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.

The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.

This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.

In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.

The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer

Girl who slapped the entire mankind on face

2008-07-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

Severn Suzuki, at the age of nine, along with a group of children founded the Environmental Children's Organization (ECO), which was dedicated to learning and teaching other kids about environmental issues. In 1992, at the age of 12, Cullis-Suzuki raised money with members of ECO, to attend the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and gave this speech which is a Slap in the face for the entire mankind. Simply superb, it is not enough that we watch it, but we must think about it also.

The transcript of her speech is below,

Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. - The Environmental Children's Organisation.

We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference:
Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We raised all the money ourselves to come six thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.

Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.

I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard.

I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. We cannot afford to be not heard.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it.

I used to go fishing in Vancouver with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going exinct every day -- vanishing forever.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterfilies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry about these little things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you!

You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.

You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.

You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct.

And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organisers, reporters or poiticians - but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles - and all of you are somebody's child.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil -- borders and governments will never change that.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal.

In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid to tell the world how I feel.

In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to share.

In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter -- we have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets.

Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets. And this is what one child told us: "I wish I was rich and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter and love and affection."

If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everyting still so greedy?

I can't stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio; I could be a child starving in Somalia; a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India.

I'm only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us to behave in the world. You teach us:

not to fight with others,

to work things out,

to respect others,

to clean up our mess,

not to hurt other creatures

to share - not be greedy.

Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?

Do not forget why you're attending these conferences, who you're doing this for -- we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying "everyting's going to be alright" , "we're doing the best we can" and "it's not the end of the world".

But I don't think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My father always says "You are what you do, not what you say."

Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown ups say you love us. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening

All work and no pay

2008-07-18T00:50:00.000-07:00

IN India, one of the more depressing features of government policy in the social sectors is the extent to which it relies on the unpaid or underpaid labour of women.

This was evident in the functioning of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in many States. This parallel system of “education centres” (rather than proper schools) was set up using local women with eight years of schooling to teach children for a paltry “remuneration” rather than employing trained teachers at regular wages. Similarly, the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme operates on the basis of poorly paid Anganwadi workers and helpers.

While these women perform essential and demanding tasks that typically amount to full-time work, they are not given the status of regular government employees. And because their payment is so low that it would contravene minimum wage laws in many States, it is described as “honorarium”.

More recently, this tendency was taken to its logical conclusion. One of the flagship schemes of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government – the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) – relies almost entirely on unpaid female labour. Indeed, the lack of remuneration for the accredited social health activists (ASHAs), who form the backbone of the scheme, is part of its very design.

India is among the worst-performing countries when it comes to government expenditure on health. In 2004, such spending amounted to only 0.9 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP). Only four or five countries in the world had ratios lower than this. The UPA government had promised to increase this ratio to 3 per cent of GDP within five years, but four years on, it is still only around 1 per cent.

However, the government at least recognised the pressing need to improve health conditions when it launched the NRHM. Its stated goal is ambitious: to provide effective health care to the entire rural population, with special focus on the 18 States that have weak public health indicators. Commentators have pointed out that despite being presented as an entirely new flagship programme, the NRHM is essentially an amalgam of existing schemes and programmes. Most of its key components, including the reliance on ASHAs, have been tried before with varying degrees of success.

These elements include the provision of an ASHA in each village; a village health plan prepared by involving a local team headed by the panchayat representative; strengthening of the rural hospital for effective curative care and making it measurable through the Indian Public Health Standards (IPHS), and accountable to the community; and local integration of the programmes and funds of the Health and Family Welfare Department.

The most significant element of the NRHM is, therefore, an ASHA, who acts as the link between the community and the government health system and becomes the first port of call for any health-related matter, especially for less-privileged groups.

The mission statement makes that clear: “The ASHA will be a health activist in the community who will create awareness on health and its social determinants and mobilise the community towards local health planning and increased utilisation and accountability of the existing health services. She would be a promoter of good health practices. She will also provide a minimum package of curative care as appropriate and feasible for that level and make timely referrals.”

Does this already sound like a lot of work? But there is more, for the NRHM explicitly requires an ASHA to do many more things. Here is a brief list of the activities that she is required to undertake:

■ Create awareness and provide information to the community on determinants of health such as nutrition, basic sanitation and hygiene, healthy living and working conditions, information on existing health services and the need for timely utilisation of health and family welfare services;

■ Counsel women on birth preparedness, the importance of safe delivery, breastfeeding and complementary feeding, immunisation, contraception and prevention of common infections (including reproductive tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases) and on the care of young children;

■ Mobilise the community and facilitate access to the health and related services provided by the government at the local level, including immunisation, antenatal and post-natal check-ups, ICDS, sanitation, and so on;

■ Arrange to escort pregnant women and children requiring treatment and/or admission to the nearest pre-identified health facility, which could be the primary health centre or the first referral unit;

■ Provide primary medical care for minor ailments such as diarrhoea and fevers and first aid for minor injuries;

■ Be a provider of the Directly Observed Treatment Short-course (DOTS) under the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme;

■ Act as a depot holder for essential health provisions such as oral rehydration therapy fluids, folic acid tablets, chloroquine for treating malaria, disposable delivery kits, oral contraceptive pills and condoms;

■ Manage and allocate to members of the community the contents of the drug kit supposedly provided to each ASHA;

■ Inform the health authorities at the primary health centre or sub-centre about births and deaths in the village and any unusual health problems or outbreak of disease in the community;

■ Promote the construction of household toilets under the Total Sanitation Campaign; and

■ Work with the Village Health and Sanitation Committee of the gram panchayat to develop a comprehensive village health plan.

Just in case these tasks are not enough to keep the ASHA occupied, the NRHM website helpfully suggests that “States can explore the possibility of graded training to her for providing newborn care and management of a range of common ailments, particularly childhood illnesses”!

All these tasks are to be performed by a woman who is to serve one village or a population of 1,000. The minimum qualification of an ASHA has been set at eight years of completed schooling. This rigid requirement has been placed even though several parts of the country, especially the tribal and underdeveloped areas, which need such intervention the most, do not have literate women, much less those who have completed elementary school.

Once chosen, an ASHA receives a total of 23 days of training in separate modules before she returns to fulfil her responsibilities. It is hard to imagine how a few weeks of “training” in a typical government format can help create all these capacities, especially when an ASHA is also expected to diagnose and treat minor ailments and recognise serious illnesses. Once she has been chosen and trained and made to perform all these complex and demanding tasks, what is her remuneration? Amazingly, nothing! The NRHM envisages that an “ASHA would be an honorary volunteer and would not receive any salary or honorarium. Her work would be so tailored that it does not interfere with her normal livelihood.”

There is some grudging acceptance that ASHAs can be compensated for the period they spend in training but only at the training venue and by day of attendance. Any other remuneration can only come in the form of the monetary incentives that are given as part of specific programmes such as immunisation. Some State governments have instituted payments to ASHAs but in no case do they exceed Rs.1,000 a month. And, usually, ASHAs get much less, only around Rs.500 a month at the most. Yet, in most cases, fulfilling all their responsibilities would require ASHAs to work for more than eight hours a day as well as at odd times, given the unexpected nature of sickness, deliveries, and so on. All this is supposed to be done out of a sense of idealism and community feeling, trading on the time-worn stereotype of caring women who serve their families and communities selflessly.

It is appalling to think that such a major and massive programme could be designed and launched by explicitly relying on the unpaid labour of so many women – nearly 500,000 ASHAs have been recruited – and now there is talk of launching an Urban Health Mission with USHAs. The bureaucrats who administer this programme are only too happy to be the beneficiaries of periodic pay commission awards that allow their salaries to rise faster than the inflation rate.

But when it comes to ensuring essential health services for the people, the women who bear almost the entire responsibility for delivery are to be deprived of minimally adequate remuneration. This combination of cynicism and miserliness does not augur well for the success of the programme. •

A letter from Iran to members of US Congress

2008-07-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

Honorable Ladies & Gentleman!

It was with great dismay that I, and many of my fellow Iranians in Iran and abroad, learnt of the regrettably widespread support by you in the U.S Congress, for the Resolution HR 362. This resolution which imposes a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf to stop all shipment of refined petroleum products from reaching Iran and to inspect all vessels approaching or leaving Iran, is an act of war waged on our country and the Iranian nation.

If passed, this resolution, would be yet another instance in a chain of flagrant violations of international law committed by the US and a war crime under the United Nations Convention on Genocide, executed against one of the most peaceful nations on earth who has not attacked any other nation, at least, for the past two and half centuries, a nation that has suffered a most brutal eight- year-long war of aggression by the ruthless dictator, Saddam Hussein, with the full political, financial, intelligence and military support of the United States, including the provision of the WMD.

Whereas the surviving victims of Saddam’s chemical attack on Halabja in the Iraqi Kurdistan and on Iran (in which thousands of innocent civilians were massacred) are still dying in agony, and the US hireling, Saddam, was conveniently disposed of as the witness and the executor of such crimes after the US “Mission” was “Accomplished” in 2003, the main perpetrators are still at large to move on from the bloodbath in Iraq to a genocide in Iran.

From a teenage admirer of the US and its culture in the early 60s who was deeply saddened by the assassination of JFK, I, and many people of my generation, have grown disillusioned and disgusted with the iron-fisted policies of your country unleashing wars of aggression, waging coups and toppling democratically-elected governments all over the world, installing ruthless regimes in developing countries and giving your full blessing to the massacres of their peaceful political opponents (1953: Iran, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh; This US-engineered coup became the blueprint for many of the future black operations. 1954: Guatemala, president Jacobo Arbenz. 1965: Indonesia, president Dr. Sukarno, with more than a million people massacred, many on the basis of execution lists supplied by the US embassy in Jakarta. 1960s: Congo, Dr. Patrice Lumumba. 1960s: Greece. 1973: Chile, Dr. Salvadore Allende. 1976: Argentina; then Panama, Haiti … just to name a few. You well know that the terror list goes on).

The recent revelations by Seymour Hersh, in the New Yorker magazine, of the US Congress secretly funding of Bush’s request for 400 million dollars to escalate major covert operations in Iran involving assassinations, abductions, fomenting and supporting ethnic unrest and terror campaigns by such despised terrorist groups as MKO, to force a regime change, is a full circle since the 1953 US overthrow of the popular and democratically -elected government of Dr. Mossadegh in Iran. Under the circumstances, it is fully understandable why the US has exempted itself from prosecution under the International Criminal Court.

Honorable ladies and Gentlemen! The United States’ deeds towards Iran and the larger Middle East, rather than “promoting democracy”, have earned it the reputation of the “The Assassin of Democracy".

We, the recipients of your terror, tie our hopes only on the conscientious efforts of the peace-loving and humane American individuals and organizations in the anti-war movement to open your eyes to the catastrophic consequences of signing on to resolutions which usher incalculable human suffering and war. The pending Resolution HR362 is a war resolution which would potentially conflagrate your manufactured conflicts in the Middle East and the chain of its uncontrollable reactions and reprisals would spread and burn the globe. Violence breeds violence, ladies and gentlemen! Learn from the history! Learn from your recent mistakes. Do not flare up an unending chain of hostilities, to then naively and cynically question: "Why do they hate us?".

Perhaps a second go at Joseph Heller's brilliant Catch 22 is a timely read. Remember Yossarion's wonder at people on the ground raising their fists and shouting when he was flying up there only to do his job of bombing!! Let us not doubt for a moment that only acting wisely and humanely on the part of US statespersons would bring back respect and admiration for what US once stood for.

If your belief and love for "Democracy" and a “Free World” is sincere and genuine, then please respect the spirit of of democracy and the rights of other nations to live with dignity, to decide their destiny free of foreign interference, and to prosper as you do. A genuine celebration of your "Independence Day" would require celebrating the spirit of independence and respecting the independence of other nations too. Only God knows how, in the 21st Century, the US would have treated the poor Tom Paine whose "Common Sense" we have translated into Farsi and is just about to reach Iranian readers. If the American public and the US Congress do not reign in this ruthless hostility towards our nation, we wonder whether those who might escape becoming your “collateral damage”, would still be interested in reading on American ideals of liberty or whether they would rather spit us (the translators) in the face for propagating American “values” and “ideals”.

I sincerely hope that your wisdom, common sense and sound judgment would prevail over the elaborate false propaganda and agitations aimed at manufacturing a most vicious consent. This consent, if given, could not only devastate our lives, but would also, ultimately, be to the great detriment of the US itself.

Yours, with hope and in anticipation,

What a Miner's Life is Worth

2008-06-23T21:19:00.001-07:00

The only thing more predictable than the deaths of those twelve miners in the Sago coal mine on January 2, 2006 was the Bush administration’s rush to exploit a tragedy that they helped foster.

Since 2001, Big Coal has benefited as Washington regulators have turn a blind eye to their rampages across Appalachia. The cost of such official laxity is borne by decapitated mountains, buried and polluted streams, and hundreds of miners injured and killed by an industry that has been liberated from even the most basic regulations governing worker safety and environmental protection.

The Sago miners didn’t even have the minimal protections afforded by membership in a union. In the economics of coal country these days people are so desperate for a job that they will sign up for the most dangerous kind of work while asking few questions about the risks or the precautions taken by the companies. And that’s exactly the way Big Coal wants it.

Since Bush arrived in Washington, more than 230 coal miners have perished in 206 mine accidents. Hundreds of others have been injured. Thousands suffer from chronic ailments and lung diseases caused by hazardous working conditions.

The Sago mine was a death trap. In 2005 alone, the Mine Safety and Health Administration slapped the mine with 208 citations for violations, ranging from the accumulation of flammable coal dust to ceiling collapses.

The accident rate at Sago was abysmal. In 2004, Sago had an accident rate of 15.90 accidents per 200,000 man-hours worked. This rate is nearly three times more than the national average of 5.66. The next year was even worse. In 2005, Sago’s accident rate spiked to 17.04, with at least fourteen miners injured.

But these citations and accidents came without regulatory sanction. Most of them resulted only in negligible fines. In total, the mine was hit with just $24,000 worth of penalties. It’s much cheaper to pay the fine than to fix the problems, even when the conditions are lethal. For example, in 2001 Jim Walters Resources paid only $3,000 in fines for an accident that led to the deaths of thirteen miners in Alabama. That’s $230.76 per dead miner. The company earned more than $100 million that year. Other companies have paid less than $200 in fines for fatalities linked to safety violations.

And these token fines often go unpaid by the mining companies. A review of the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s records since 2000 reveals that the agency has hit the mining industry with $9.1 million in fines following fatal incidents. But the companies have paid less than 30 percent of that puny amount.

All a company has to do is appeal its fine, and it will likely be reduced. More than $5.2 million in fines have been reduced to $2.5 million following appeals. Another $2.2 million is unpaid pending appeal. The agency lists more than $1.1 million in fines as being delinquent, but most of those mines remain in operation.

Under the Bush administration, Big Coal has essentially been handed the responsibility for regulating its own behavior, with few questions asked. Even in the aftermath of the Sago disaster there were no serious calls for congressional hearings or criminal sanctions against the mine bosses and their corporate chieftains. The biggest outrage was reserved for the false report, which stated that the twelve miners had miraculously survived their ordeal in the poisonous pit, where carbon monoxide levels had reached 1,300 parts per million, more than three times the maximum safety level.

Naturally, the Democrats offer the miners almost no relief. In the 2004 presidential campaign, when the election hinged on results from the coal belt, John Kerry wrote off the mining country of southeast Ohio and West Virginia, counties burdened by the highest unemployment in country, and lost by landslide margins to Bush.

If you’re going to tie black ribbon on the gates of the White House, you might as well wrap one around a tree outside one of the Kerry-Heinz mansions, as well. Neither party gave a damn about the lives of those men.

Please dont capitalize on hunger

2008-06-23T21:07:00.000-07:00

As the global food crisis escalates, Big Biotech (Monsanto, Novartis, Syngenta, Dupont-Pioneer, Dow et al) are capitalizing on the desperation of the hungry at runaway prices and rapidly diminishing reserves as a wedge to foist genetically modified (GMO) seeds on a reluctant Third World.

Latin America is a prime marketing target for Big Biotech's little darlings, often tagged "semillas asasinas" or "killer seeds" for their devastating impacts on local food stocks. Now the killer GMOs are suspected of literally provoking murder most foul.

Last October, Armando Villareal, a farm leader in the Mexican border state of Chihuahua, was gunned down after a farmers' meeting in Nuevo Casas Grandes. Villareal had been denouncing the illegal planting of GMO corn in the Mennonite-dominated municipalities of Cuauhtemoc and Naniquipa.

Chihuahua Mennonite communities originally migrated from Canada after a dispute with the Canadian government over education in the 1920s and were granted land by post-revolutionary president Alvaro Obregon. Over the decades, the Mennonites have successfully cultivated up to 60,000 hectares in the northeast of the state. Acutely insular with their signature dress (denim overalls for the men, prairie dresses and calico bonnets for the women) and speaking low-German as befits their European roots, the Mennonites have never integrated into the Mexican mainstream and their success as farmers - they have benefited from Mexican government irrigation projects - has created tensions in a region where aridity limits agricultural production for most farmers.

Hundreds of tractors lined up in a cortege at Villareal's October 15th funeral during which he was compared to another Chihuahua hero, Francisco Villa. Ironically, the slain farmers' leader who claimed to have evidence that the Mennonites' killer seeds had been smuggled in from Kansas, was not opposed to planting GMO corn which his "Aerodynamica" group hoped would save strapped farmers money on pesticides and power costs. His followers had even burnt tractors to demand that the Mexican government grant them permits to plant the transgenic corn.

Eight months later, Armando Villareal's murder remains unresolved.

The Chihuahua farm leader's assassination is not the only death of a militant Latin American campesino being linked to Big Biotech's encroachments. In Parana Brazil about the same time Villareal was gunned down in Chihuahua, Keno Mota, an activist of the Movement of Landless Farmers ("Movimento de Sem Terras" or MST), affiliated with the international poor farmers coalition Via Campesina, was drilled by security guards during an action on an illegal experimental station under cultivation by the Biotech giant Syngenta - the Syngenta plot, adjacent to Iguazu National Park, a protected nature reserve, violated Brazilian strictures as to where such "semillas asasinas" can be planted.

Unlike Mexico, Brazil has few restrictions on GMO crops and indeed under social democrat president Lula da Silva, has become the second-largest GMO soybean producer on the continent. Neighboring Argentina is Numero Uno. Big Argentinean growers, who have been blocking that southern cone nation's highways in a dispute over tariffs on soy exports for weeks, have announced intentions to surpass the United States as the largest grower of genetically modified maize in coming years. Argentinean corn is grown exclusively as feed for the gaucho nation's cattle industry, a cornerstone of its agrarian economy.

Mexico, where maiz was first domesticated 8000 years ago and where corn is at the core of culture as well as nutrition, has been more circumspect in embracing GMO seed. Under the banner of the "No Hay Pais Sin Maiz" ("we have no country without corn") campaign, farmers and environmentalists have joined hands to prevent GMO contamination of native species and the nation's Bio-Security Commission, initialed CYBOGEN, an inter-secretarial government body, declared a moratorium on the cultivation of genetically modified corn in the late 1990s.

Nonetheless, millions of tons of GMO maize pour into Mexican tariff-free each year from the U.S. under provisions of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA.)

Now, in the wake of the much-hyped global food crisis, Big Biotech is pressuring the Mexican government to permit experimental plantations of the semillas asasinas as the only solution to predicted shortages, a ploy that Monsanto and its ilk have successfully sprung on the European Union.

Although GMO corn remains officially proscribed in Europe, seven EU members will grow the modified maize this year. Agribiz combines like the British National Beef Association, insist that "all resistance to GMO crops must be abandoned" in light of the growing international food psychosis.

One motive for the industry's big push, according to Sylvia Ribero who keeps tabs on Big Biotech for the left daily La Jornada: patents for some of the major GMO seed brands like Monsanto's BT corn are set to expire in the next five years.

Buckling under the Biotech barrage, Mexico's CYBOGEN posted regulations this March for applicants who contemplate cultivation of "experimental" GMO corn. Now, with a 60-day countdown ticking, Mexican farmers could be legally planting genetically modified maiz by July.

Under ground rules issued by both the Agriculture and Environmental secretariats (SAGARPA and SAMARNAT), experimental patches of GMO corn must be limited to regions where native corn stocks will not be contaminated by windblown pollens from such fields.

But the Mennonite farmers who occupy huge tracts in Chihuahua apparently jumped the gun. Under the tutelage of Monsanto and Syngenta-Golden Harvest with the SAGARPA and the SAMARNAT turning a blind eye, the Mennonites have sewn GMO corn in at least two of their "camps" or agricultural stations (#102 and #305) in the municipality of Naniquipa where Villareal spotted the illegal patches last year. Decrying insufficient safeguards against windblown pollens, Chihuahua campesinos led by Victor Quintana of the "No Hay Pais" campaign, also affiliated with Via Campesina, and a deputy in the Mexican congress for the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), have threatened to tear out the Mennonite fields before they flower in mid-summer.

Quintana's group worries that the Mennonite "experiment" will germinate five to 25 million "granos" or kernels, each of which is a potential threat to native corn.
SAGARPA regards the Mennonite "experiment" as a field test to see just how far the pollens can be spread by winds and other weather conditions.

Windblown GMO pollens are held responsible for the contamination of maiz in neighboring Sinaloa state where Greenpeace activists found traces of genetically modified corn in 96% of samples taken in nine municipalities in 2007 - Sinaloa is Mexico's top corn producing state. Aleira Lara, Greenpeace anti-GMO campaign coordinator, considers that trying to confine experimental plots to one geographical region is merely cosmetic. Last year, the Greenpeacers listed 39 instances of windblown GMO contamination in 23 countries.

Native Mexican corn was first found to have been infected by NAFTA GMO imports in 2001 when Indian campesinos in Oaxaca's Sierra of Juarez discovered that maiz from a lot introduced from Michigan and sold by a local government DICONSA grain distribution center had been inadvertently planted in the Zapotec-Chinanteco village of Calpulapan. Subsequent investigation by the National Ecology Institute, documented in a report suppressed by the Secretary of Agriculture, turned up traces of GMO contamination (some as high as 60%) in 11 out of 22 corn-growing regions in Oaxaca and Puebla. Maiz was first domesticated in the Puebla-Oaxaca altiplano eight millenniums ago.

Although the CYBOGEN has never until now licensed the production of genetically modified corn in Mexico, the semillas asasinas have almost certainly been cultivated here since the late 1990s. The International Commission for the Betterment of Corn and Wheat (CIMMYT), financed by the Rockefeller Foundation, with experimental fields in Texcoco just outside Mexico City is thought to be one source of windblown contamination. Roberto Gonzalez Barrera, the King of the Tortilla, the owner of MASECA, the world's biggest corn flour miller now a third owned by Archer Daniels Midlands, once boasted that he had thousands of hectares under GMO corn. NAFTA imports fall off DICONSA trucks on rural highways and the pollens are blown into roadside "milpas" (cornfields.)

Now GMO infestation is about to get much more acute. In a move to offset soaring prices and shrinking reserves that invariably generate social discontent, Mexican president Felipe Calderon has announced the tariff-free importation of millions of tons of basic grains (corn, wheat, soy, sorghum.) Because the Cargill Corporation, which has dominated grain distribution in Mexico ever since the government's CONASUPO system was privatized in 1999, claims it cannot separate out GMO from uncontaminated imports, the impacts on native corn and other grains will be greatly magnified - Greenpeace estimates that 60 to 70% of all corn imports are contaminated by genetically modified organisms.

My questions to Obama -Fidel Castro

2008-05-29T05:46:00.001-07:00

It would be dishonest of me to remain silent after hearing Barack Obama's speech delivered at the Cuban American National Foundation last Friday. I feel no resentment towards him, for he is not responsible for the crimes perpetrated against Cuba and humanity. Were I to defend him, I would do his adversaries a favour. I have therefore no reservations about criticising him and expressing myself frankly.

What were Obama's statements? "Throughout my entire life, there has been injustice and repression in Cuba. Never, in my lifetime, have the people of Cuba known freedom. Never, in the lives of two generations of Cubans, have the people of Cuba known democracy ... I won't stand for this injustice ... I will maintain the embargo."

This man who is doubtless, from the social and human points of view, the most progressive candidate for the US presidency, portrays the Cuban revolution as anti-democratic and lacking in respect for freedom and human rights. It is the same argument US administrations have used again and again to justify crimes against our country. The blockade is an act of genocide. I don't want to see US children inculcated with those shameful values.

No small and blockaded country like ours would have been able to hold its ground for so long on the basis of ambition, vanity, deceit or the abuse of power, the kind of power its neighbour has. To state otherwise is an insult to the intelligence of our heroic people.

I am not questioning Obama's great intelligence, his debating skills or his work ethic. He is a talented orator and is ahead of his rivals in the electoral race. Nevertheless, I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions. I do not expect answers; I wish only to raise them for the record.

Is it right for the president of the US to order the assassination of any one person in the world, whatever the pretext? Is it ethical for the president of the US to order the torture of other human beings? Should state terrorism be used by a country as powerful as the US as an instrument to bring peace to the planet?

Is an Adjustment Act, applied as punishment to only one country, Cuba, in order to destabilise it, good and honourable when it costs innocent children and mothers their lives? Are the brain drain and the continuous theft of the best scientific and intellectual minds in poor countries moral and justifiable?

Is it fair to stage pre-emptive attacks? Is it honourable and sane to invest millions and millions of dollars in the military-industrial complex, to produce weapons that can destroy life on earth several times over? Is that the way in which the US expresses its respect for freedom, democracy and human rights?

Before judging our country, Obama should know that Cuba - with its education, health, sports, culture and science programmes, implemented not only in its own territory but also in other poor countries around the world, and in spite of the economic and financial blockade and the aggression of his powerful country - is proof that much can be done with very little. Cuba has never subordinated cooperation with other countries to ideological requirements. We offered the US our help when hurricane Katrina lashed the city of New Orleans. Our revolution can mobilise tens of thousands of doctors and health technicians. It can mobilise an equally vast number of teachers and citizens who are willing to travel to any corner of the world to fulfil any noble purpose, not to usurp rights or take possession of raw materials.

The goodwill and determination of people constitute limitless resources that would not fit in the vault of a bank. They cannot spring from the hypocritical politics of an empire.

IMF and World Bank - Rascist organizations

2008-05-27T21:33:00.000-07:00

The International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization promised that more trade would help to eradicate poverty and hunger. Food crops? Self-sufficiency in food? They had a better idea. Local farms would be closed down or encouraged to concentrate on exports. This would make the most, not of natural conditions which might be good for growing tomatoes in Mexico or pineapples in the Philippines, but of the fact that production costs are lower in Mexico and the Philippines than they are in Florida or California.

Farmers in Mali would rely on more highly mechanised, more productive producers in the Beauce or the Midwest for grain supplies. The farmers would pack up, move into town and get jobs in some western firm that had relocated to take advantage of cheaper labour than it could find at home. The countries on the East African seaboard would lighten their load of foreign debt by selling their fishing rights to the factory ships of wealthier countries. The Guineans would import tinned fish from Denmark or Portugal. Never mind the additional pollution generated by transporting all these goods. A life of bliss was guaranteed and so were the profits of the middlemen – wholesalers, shippers, insurers, advertisers.

The World Bank, prime promoter of this “development” model, now tells us that there may be food riots in 33 countries. And the WTO fears a resurgence of protectionism: some food-exporting countries – India, Vietnam, Egypt, Kazakhstan – have decided to reduce exports in order to feed their own people. What a nerve! The North is easily upset by other people’s selfishness. The Chinese eat too much meat, that’s why the Egyptians are short of wheat.

Some states have followed the World Bank and IMF advice and turned over their food crops. They can no longer keep their produce for themselves. Well, they will pay, that’s the law of the market. According to UN Food and Agriculture Organisation figures, their bill for grain imports has risen by a massive 56% in one year. Naturally the World Food Programme (WFP), which feeds 73 million people in 78 countries every year, is asking for a further $500m.

Someone must have decided this was excessive, as it got only half that amount. But the sum it sought was only what the war in Iraq costs every couple of hours, and a tiny fraction of what the sub-prime mortgage crisis will cost the banking sector, which has been bailed out by the state. To look at it another way, the WFP asked on behalf of millions of starving people for 13.5% of the sum earned last year by John Paulson, the astute hedge fund manager who realised that thousands of Americans are in negative equity and face ruin. No one knows how much the incipient famine will yield or who will reap the profits, but nothing is ever lost in a modern economy.

History repeats itself, one speculation after another. The Federal Reserve’s monetary policy encourages debt, first the internet bubble, now the real estate bubble. In 2006 the IMF was still saying there was “every indication the mechanisms for granting loans on the US property market were still relatively effective”. Market effective. Perhaps the two words should be welded together once and for all. The real estate bubble has burst. So the speculators are resurrecting an old eldorado: the grain markets. Purchasing contracts to deliver wheat or rice at a future date and counting on selling them at a higher price. And what ensures prices will keep on rising? Famine.

So what does the IMF do? The IMF, which has “the best economists in the world” according to its managing director, explains that “one way to solve the problem of famine is to increase international trade”. The poet Leo Ferré once said that “all you need to sell despair is the right formula”. It looks as though they’ve found it.

India's food crisis and neo-liberal conspiracy

2008-05-27T00:24:00.000-07:00

FOOD CRISIS EXPOSES FAILINGS OF INDIA'S ECONOMIC REFORMS

The recent escalation in food prices is the latest calamity to hit the poor and marginalised communities in India. The price of food and other essentials has been rising for the last 12 weeks and the current inflation level is the highest witnessed since November 2004. Retail prices of some essential food commodities have seen a sharp increase. Retail prices of gram, sugar, mustard oil, vanaspati and onions have increased by up to 11 per cent in the national capital in last one month, pushing inflation to a 39-month high of seven per cent. (1)

"SHINING INDIA" AT THE COST OF "SUFFERING INDIA" Facing public outrage on rising food prices, the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, took refuge by issuing statements that inflation is a global phenomenon. Even though it is a global phenomenon and food riots have been witnessed in more than 30 countries, the food crisis in India is primarily caused by the pro-market biased policies of the government. Indians (along with the Chinese) have been accused of eating more due to rising prosperity resulting in the global food shortages. But the per capita food consumption and calorie intake indicates that irrespective of the current inflationary trend, majority in India are facing hunger and starvation since liberalisation policies were introduced.

The irony is that though signs of the food and agriculture crisis were evident, policy makers continued with neoliberal policies to benefit corporations. The government is witness to the increasing schism between 'shining India’ and ‘suffering India’ but their mantra has always been that only the pro-capitalist, corporation driven economy can bring sustained economic growth which will trickle down to benefit the disadvantaged sections of the population. Despite looming inflation, the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India believes that robust investment growth and strong corporate performance would drive India towards prosperity. It also says that “in the current year, the strong growth in agricultural GDP has come mostly from activity other than food grain production, namely commercial crops, horticulture and animal husbandry.” (2)

This paradigm shift in foodgrain production was introduced under the World Bank direction which “required India to move away from the existing subsidy-based regime and instead, invest in building a solid foundation for a highly productive, globally competitive and diversified farm sector.” (3). The report recommended the removal of subsidies related to grain procurement and Public Distribution System (PDS), diversification of Indian agricultural development, increased space for the private sector in agriculture extension services, contract farming and for agro-industry in general. Interestingly during the recent crisis the Indian government severely criticised the World Bank for their advice to countries to shift from food crops for domestic population to cash crops for exports. (4) Addressing a special meeting of the United Nations Economic and Social Council to consider the issue of rising food prices, India’s UN Ambassador Nirupama Sen, said that the “tradition of these institutions’ advice was partly responsible for the crisis in the first place”.

The corporate led growth regime has contributed to mass displacement of mainly small and marginal farmers, leading to loss of livelihood opportunities and employment generation for the common people. The widespread farmers’ suicides, which reached 150,000 (5) in just eight years (1997-2005), is a manifestation of the ongoing corporatisation and mindless deregulation of the agricultural sector. Though India is seen as a rising economic power and it is hoped that a trickle down effect will benefit the poor and marginalized, in reality the gap between ‘Shining India’ and ‘Suffering India’ is widening: 77 percent (6) of the Indian population who survive on Rs. 20/- (half a US dollar) a day, does not figure in this ‘booming Indian economy’.

MYTH OF GLOBAL MARKET INTEGRATION Two years of wheat imports have exposed the fallacies of neoliberal policies. India, once a wheat exporting country was forced to become the largest wheat importer through a design to benefit the global food corporations. The declining procurement of locally produced wheat by the Food Corporation of India (FCI) prepared the ground for wheat imports. This was a sea change from the situation during 2001-2002 to 2004-2005, when the country exported 12.4 million tonnes of wheat. Since early 2006, the USA was pressuring India to break its tariff wall and open up for wheat imports. In March, despite predictions of a bumper wheat harvest, the US Wheat Associates (7) said India would import up to 30 lakh tonnes of wheat in that year. (lakh = 100,000). Following this, the government reduced the applied tariff on wheat from 60 per cent to zero for imports by the State Trading Corporation of India (STC) while for private traders, the duty was brought down to five per cent. This led to import of 5.5 million tonne of wheat in 2006 at prices ranging in between US $178.75 to US $228.94 (8) a tonne when the local wheat production was 69 million tonnes. In 2007 the government first scrapped a wheat import tender at an average price of $263 per tonne in June citing high prices but in July, less than 40 days later, it contracted 5.11 lakh tonne of wheat at an average price of $325.59 per tonne. Then again on September 3, it contracted 7.95 lakh tonne of wheat at an average price of $389.45 (9) but only 1.8 million tonnes of wheat finally landed on Indian ports at double the price of last year despite increase in wheat production upto 74.82 million tonnes in that year. Thus the government paid foreign traders exorbitant price upto Rs 16,000 per tonne while the MSP (market spot price) was only Rs. 8500 per tonne. And the main beneficiaries of the India’s wheat import were giant grain corporation like Glencore, Toepfer, Cargill and the Australian Wheat Board who gained at the cost of Indian farmers. However, the import of wheat at expensive rates led to the sharp increase in local wheat and wheat flour prices making it unaffordable for the poor.

The story of wheat is not different from what happened in late 1990s in the edible oil sector when under pressure from the USA, India reduced the duty on the crude edible oil to 15 per cent in August 1998. In July 1999 Oil World reported that India was set to replace China as the world's largest vegetable oil importer and projected India’s import around 3.6 million tonnes (MT) in 1998-99 oil year. In the first nine months India had imported 3 MT oil and during 1998-99 oil year, edible oil import amounted to a massive 4.4 MT, an increase of 111 per cent over the previous year's 2.08 MT. The increasing reliance on imports considerably weakened the domestic edible oil production.

In spite of the above experiences, early this year the government allowed liberalisation of imports to deal with rising inflation by reducing import duty to zero in respect of articles like pulses, edible oil and maize; withdrawal of four per cent additional duty on edible commodities; reducing import duty on refined oil and vegetable oil by 7.5 per cent; reduction of import duty on butter and ghee to 30 per cent. But does the reduction in import duties and import of food grain help in containing the domestic food prices? In June 2006 the same government had unilaterally liberalised imports to bolster the supply side of essential commodities but this couldn’t control inflation. The government’s Economic Survey 2006-07 had said that “duty free wheat imports did not help to check price rise, rather the rising global prices impacted the domestic market in a subtle way”. A billion plus population of India cannot depend on the ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence and the government needs to restore its policy to build up food grain reserves in order to serve the farmers and the consumers. Moreover there is greater threat that the unilateral trade liberalisation as a solution to inflation would soften India’s position in WTO.

PUBLIC DISTRIBUTION UNDERMINED BY CORPORATIONS The Public Distribution System (PDS) (10) has been one of the most crucial elements of food policy and food security system in the country. But the Indian government has been deliberately weakening the public distribution system under the World Bank pressure to benefit the agribusiness corporations. India witnessed a shortage of wheat in 2005-2007 because systematically the foodgrain (wheat and rice) buffer stocks were lowered through below target offtake of grains by government from the farmers.

In order to make a case for wheat import under US pressure, the government went slow on the procurement of wheat in 2005-2007 and deliberately kept the government's purchasing price low to allow multinational corporations to enter the trade. In 2006, Cargill India, the Australian Wheat Board, and two Indian based companies with a lot of foreign equity, ITC and Adani Export, procured 30 lakh tonnes of wheat. In 2003-04, government procured 16.8 million tones of wheat which went down to 14.8 million tonnes in 2004-05 and it further reduced to 11.1 million tonnes in 2005-2006 and last year it was just 9.2 million tonnes. (11) The government deliberately created a situation of food insecurity in the country by allowing multinational corporations to move into agro-business and large procurement. However in 2008 it corrected its faulty policy of reduced procurement and procured a record 20.5 million tonnes (12) till 20 May this year, which is a huge jump from a meagre 11.1 million tonnes in the entire season last year, helped by a bumper crop and higher prices. Moreover the government went a step further and Indian Railways decided to stop allocating wagons for transporting wheat from the growing areas by the private trader, impacting their wheat procurement.

The reduced procurement of food grains resulted in reduced amount of off take by the state governments for the subsidized grain distribution through a network of more than 450,000 Fair Price Shops (FPS). An analysis of data from 2005-06 onward reflects a consistent fall in allocation of wheat in the BPL (below the poverty line) category, even while there was a perceptible upward shift in demand. (13) It means that at a time when open market prices of wheat were rising, there wasn’t enough wheat in the PDS for those eligible to buy it there for less than the market prices.

COMMODITY FUTURE: TRADING ON HUNGER Besides the agribusiness, the traders engaged in future trading in commodities were beneficiaries of the declining food procurement and shrinking of buffer stocks. Infact the opposition parties in India claimed that the lowering of procurement and shrinking of buffer stocks was meant to facilitate the speculative trading of foodgrains. Reduction in government stocks is imperative for the private traders and speculators to speculate on prices of foodgrains. Mr. Sitaram Yechury representing the Community Party of India (Marxist), debating the issue of price rise in the Parliament said that, “three billion dollars a day is the speculation that is taking place in the commodity exchange market of futures and forward trading” across three national level electronic exchanges and twenty-one regional exchanges. In just two weeks, from 17 March to 31 March 2008, the total value of trading at these commodity exchanges was Rs. 2,12,465.17 crores (14). The cumulative value of trade in the last financial year, from 1 April 2007 to 31 March 2008 was to the tune of Rs. 40,65,989 crores as compared to Rs. 5,71,759 two years ago in 2004-2005. One firm calculates that the amount of speculative money in commodities futures markets, where investors do not buy or sell a physical commodity, like rice or wheat, but merely bet on price movements – has ballooned from US$5 billion in 2000 to US$175 billion to 2007 (15). The price behaviour of food over 2007 and the first three months of 2008 is more or less explained by such speculation on food products.

But the speculation and bidding in food stocks does not benefit small and marginal farmers. The Economic Survey 2007-08 clearly stated that, "Direct participation of farmers in the commodity futures market is somewhat difficult at this stage as the large lot size, daily margining and high membership fees … work as a deterrent to farmers' participation in these Markets. Farmers can directly benefit from the futures market if institutions are allowed to act as aggregators on behalf of the farmers”. Though the government has put a ban on future trading of some crops, it may be opened up anytime, therefore the government must totally ban the futures trading of food commodities as demanded by the citizens groups and left parties.

RETREATING FROM CAPITALIST ECONOMY The UPA government under the leadership of Manmohan Singh seems to concede the failure of the capitalist system (but it could be a gimmick for the election, which is due in early 2009). The inflation also made him realise the viability of the small farm essential for the survival of millions of small and marginal farmers and to deal with the food crisis. Recently the Prime Minister made a statement which is discordant with the general pro-market reforms push, including promotion of contract farming, that the UPA government has encouraged for the past four years. At the Global Agro-Industries Forum, the Prime Minister said that, "collectivization, corporatization and land consolidation through land alienation are neither possible nor socially desirable, while warning that rising food prices could hamper the country's economic growth…We cannot wish away the existence of economically unviable farms… It is particularly worrisome that the new economics of biofuels is encouraging a shift of land away from food crops”. (16) Even two of his colleagues from the cabinet showed their concern on the capitalist economic model when Mr. Kamal Nath (Union Commerce Minister) and Mr. Sharad Pawar (Union Agriculture Minister), stated that if the need arose they were ready to look at invoking the Nehru-era controls built within existing commodity regulation laws. The last few months have witnessed several steps where the UPA government have retreated from its capitalist move and brought in government regulation to check inflation. One can infer from this development that the UPA government headed by Manmohan Singh (a former World Bank governor) has lost the confidence in the neo-liberal trajectory in agricultural reforms.

SMALL-SCALE FARMERS HOLD THE KEY Given the deepening of agrarian crisis which is causing hunger and malnutrition in rural areas due to unprecedented decline in purchasing power in the rural areas, the first priority of the government should be to strengthen the agriculture sector by increasing public investment, facilitating public control over inputs and market, strictly regulating the corporate investment in agriculture as well as retreating from neoliberal reforms in agriculture.

Since India is a land of small and marginal farmers, and over 650 million of its over one billion population are directly or indirectly dependent on agriculture, there is urgent need to encourage and strengthen biodiversity based small scale agriculture which are crucial for the food security of the millions of Indians. Infact, it is the small biodiverse farm, which has higher productivity than large industrial farms. Large farmers and industrial farming has serious limitations on increasing agricultural productivity. In the face of a worsening worldwide food-price crisis, even the President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), Mr. Lennart Båge feel that small farmers are now essential to ensure food security, spur economic growth and help mitigate climate change. He said that smallholder farmers are a vital global asset, a key factor for increased food production, economic growth and development, and mitigating climate change. The 2 billion people in rural areas in the developing world can be tremendously more productive. They can be part of the supply response, feeding the world, and also very much a part of the climate change agenda, both in terms of adaptation and mitigation. (17)

In India, small farm based on internal inputs are the only hope to deal with the impending food crisis and can ensure food security and food sovereignty to millions of people living off the farm. A food secure and peaceful India is in the hands of her small farmers

Beyond Munich: The UN Security Council Helps Disarm a Prospective Further Victim of U.S. Aggression

2008-04-30T01:03:00.000-07:00

magine that when Hitler was threatening to invade Poland, after having swallowed Czechoslovakia-with the help of the Western European powers' appeasement of Hitler at Munich in September 1938-the League of Nations imposed an arms embargo on Poland, making it more difficult for the imminent victim to defend itself, and at the same time suggested that Poland was the villainous party. That didn't happen back in 1939, but in a regression from that notorious era of appeasement something quite analogous is happening now.

Here is the United States, still fighting a brutal war of conquest in Iraq, which it is now doing with UN Security Council approval, with open plans and threats to attack Iran and engage in "regime change," gathering aircraft carriers off the coast of Iran, already engaging in subversive and probing attacks on the prospective target, and the UN Security Council, instead of warning and threatening the aggressor warns, threatens and imposes sanctions on the prospective victim!

The way it works is that the United States stirs up a big fuss, proclaiming a serious threat to its own national security, and expressing its deep concern over another state's flouting of Security Council resolutions or dragging its feet on some point of order such as weapons inspections-we know how devoted the United States and its Israeli client are to the rule of law!

In the Iraq case, this noise was echoed and amplified in the media, often splashed across headlines and drummed up in editorial commentary. In turn, elite opinion in the United States and Britain coalesced around the beliefs (a) that a WMD-related crisis really existed in Baghdad and (b) that it required the Security Council's special attention. Straight through March 19-20 2003, Iraq, the prospective target of a full-scale attack, decried the absurdity of this U.S.-U.K. noise, and filed regular communiqués with the Security Council and Secretary-General documenting the U.S.-U.K. aerial strikes on its territory,[1] including the "spikes of activity" period from September 2002 onward.[2] The vast majority of the world's states and peoples also rejected the war propaganda-including the largely voiceless U.S. public, where in the weeks before the war, two-thirds of non-elite opinion stood firmly behind multilateral approaches to defuse the crisis, foremost of which was permitting the UN weapons inspections to take their course.[3] But then, as now, pretty much the entire world recognized the U.S.-U.K. hijacking of the Security Council, and its strategic misdirection away from a defense of the actual target of the threats (Iraq) onto the execution of the policy of the states making those threats while playing the role of Iraq's potential victims (the U.S. and U.K.).

So the aggression planning proceeded then and does now with the cooperation of the UN and international community. In the Iraq case, the Security Council allowed itself to be bamboozled into restarting the weapons-inspection process, accepting this as the urgent matter, rather than the war-mobilization and threat of aggression by the United States and its British ally. Although the Security Council did not vote approval of the U.S.-British attack, it helped set it up by inflating the Iraq threat and failing to confront the real threat posed by the United States and Britain. Then, within two months after "shock and awe," the Security Council voted to give the aggressor the right to stay in Iraq and manage its affairs, thereby approving a gross violation of the UN Charter after the fact.

Now, four years later, the Security Council has outdone itself. Not only has it failed to condemn the U.S. and Israeli threat to attack Iran-the threat itself a violation of the UN Charter,[4] and one made ever-more real by the U.S. invasions of neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq during this decade alone, now followed by a huge U.S. naval buildup near Iran's coast to levels not seen since the U.S. launched its war on Iraq four years ago in what the New York Times just called a "calculated show of force."[5] But even worse, the Council has aided and abetted these potential aggressors by adopting three resolutions in the past eight months under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, each of which affirms that Iran's nuclear program is a threat to international peace and security, and reserves for the Council the right to take "further appropriate measures" should Iran fail to comply-that is, should Iran not cave-in to U.S. demands on exactly the terms demanded.[6]

Since July 31, the Council has demanded that Iran "suspend all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development"[7]-despite the fact that Iran's right to engage in these activities is guaranteed under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.[8] Since December 23, it has identified the existence of Iran's nuclear program with so-called "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities"[9]-despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency has never shown Iran's program to be engaged in any kind of activities other than peaceful ones. Indeed, in the December 23 resolution, the Council used the phrase "proliferation sensitive nuclear activities" no fewer than eight different times to describe Iran's nuclear program, the clear-and perfectly false-allegation being that for Iran to do research on and develop its indigenous nuclear fuel capabilities places Iran in violation of its NPT commitments.

But perhaps most egregious of all, the March 24 resolution prohibits Iran from selling "any arms or related material" to other states or individuals (par. 5), and calls upon all states "to exercise vigilance and restraint" in the sale or transfer of a whole list of weapons systems to Iran, "in order to prevent a destabilizing accumulation of arms…" (par. 6).[10] As the editorial voice of The Hindu immediately recognized, the first term is critical "not so much because the Islamic Republic is a major vendor of weapons even to Hamas or Hizbollah but because it gives the U.S. an excuse to intimidate or interdict all Iranian merchant shipping under the guise of 'enforcement'."[11] Likewise with the second term, which, if history is any guide, Washington will interpret as a strict prohibition on weapons sales to Iran, thus depriving the potential victim, faced with attack by one or more nuclear powers, of the right to obtain even non-nuclear means of self defense. This of course has been a standard U.S. tactic over many years, even against puny victims-Guatemala in 1954 and Nicaragua in the 1980s, among other cases. But now the United States has succeeded in getting the Security Council to help it impede the self-defense of yet another target of aggression. In this truly Kafkaesque case, the state targeted for attack (Iran) has been declared a threat to the peace by the Security Council, at the behest of a serial aggressor openly mobilizing its forces to attack the "threat."[12]

It should be recognized that the treatment of Iran's nuclear program, and the Security Council's cooperation in this treatment, is the ultimate application of a global double standard, enforced by an aggressive superpower now able to get away with both hypocrisy and murder. Only the United States and its allies may possess nuclear weapons. They alone may threaten to use nukes. They alone may improve their nukes and delivery systems. Only client states such as Israel may remain outside the NPT indefinitely and without penalty. The United States may ignore its NPT obligation to work toward nuclear disarmament. It may even renege on its promise never to use nukes against nuke-free states that joined the NPT. But no matter. By sheer fiat-power, no other state may acquire nukes without U.S. consent. Nor as the case of Iran shows may a state engage in its "inalienable right" to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes unless and until the United States approves.

We are in the midst of a crisis within the post-war international system, as a serial aggressor is now able to mobilize the Security Council, tasked with the maintenance of international peace and security, to declare the state that it threatens with war a menace to the peace and to help the aggressor disarm its target. This carries us beyond Munich.

Who Is The Greatest Rogue Of All

2008-04-30T00:18:00.000-07:00

Most people believe that their own country is virtuous and that only others misbehave enough to qualify as international outlaws. But the United States has elevated this popular sentiment to the level of national policy, by designating certain countries, of its own choosing, as "rogue states."

The dictionary defines "rogue" as "a fierce and dangerous animal, like an elephant, that separates itself from its herd." By this standard, the United States, not the piddling tyrannies named by the State Department, is the world's number one rogue.

Since it obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945-cities, not military targets-the United States has bombed eighteen countries, and invaded still others, with no declaration of war nor any possibility of retaliation, at least until September 11, 2001.

And in the case of Afghanistan, the United States launched a unilateral war of revenge against a brutal regime of its own creation, although none of the 19 hijackers were Afghan and none of the thousands of "detainees" held in the United States and abroad have been charged with any participation in the crime. Furthermore, the alleged "mastermind," still at large, might well have been turned over to the United States through negotiations-which President Bush rejected outright from the start. PS: in case you haven't noticed, we don't negotiatee-except on our terms.

Of course all this is defended on the ground that we are "so good" (as the President has said) and always act in the world's interest. Can we explain the universally opposed embargo against Cuba as a global service? Did we support the murderous regime of Suharto in Indonesia for 32 years out of altruism-or because U.S. mining, oil and timber interests loved the "favorable climate of investment" the dictator provided for them?

In other cases too U.S. actions reflect the power of corporate interests. For example, the United States refused to participate in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development-sponsored talks in Paris in May 2001, on ways to crack down on off-shore and other tax and money laundering havens. For any other nation, this would now be highly embarrassing in the age of Enron, but such a thought would never even occur to U.S. policymakers.

Or consider President Bush's declaration in March 2001 that the Kyoto Protocol for controlling global warming was "dead," and his refusal to participate in negotiations in Marrakech (Morocco) to revise it-all because it might harm the U.S. economy. So if the world thinks controlling global warming is more important than short-term negative economic effects, Bush separates himself from the global consensus based on his reading of U.S. interests alone-and his stance coincides with that of the oil and automobile industries, not with the real interests of the American people.

Several U.S. unilateral positions have been geared to the demands of the military-industrial complex, and other parties advocating an aggressive foreign policy. Last December the United States withdrew from the 1972 Anti ballistic Missile Treaty, gutting this landmark arms control accord to the dismay of virtually every country in the world.

The United States has not ratified the Comprehensive (Nuclear) Test Ban Treaty signed by 164 nations, and under Bush opposes it. This country rejects the Land Mine Treaty, concluded in Ottawa in December 1997 and signed by 122 countries; the Pentagon finds land mines useful, outweighing the "collateral damage" they entail for thousands of civilians every year.

In February 2001 we refused to join 123 nations to ban the use and production of anti-personnel bombs and mines; flexible killing power for the Pentagon must be preserved, regardless of human cost. This country was also the only nation to oppose the UN Agreement to Curb the International Flow of Illicit Small Arms in July 2001.

The United States rejects an International Criminal Court because our personnel might become subject to its jurisdiction. In 1986, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that the United States was in violation of international law by sponsoring and supporting a Contra army to attack Nicaragua. The United States simply refused to accept the Court's jurisdiction, although it hastens to do so when the Court decides in its favor.

The United Nations is treated the same way: when the United States can get the Security Council to do what it wants, like bomb Iraq in 1991, it goes that route; when it sees it can't get UN backing, as in its invasion of Panama in 1989, it simply disregards the UN or uses its veto. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stated in 1998, "the United States acts multilaterally when it can, unilaterally when it must."

In the case of Afghanistan in 2001, the Bush administration couldn't be bothered with the UN or any other international body to deal with what it declared to be a "crime against humanity": it simply bombed. As for the treatment of prisoners shipped to Guantanamo chained, blindfolded, and classified as "unlawful combatants," South African jurist Richard Goldstone points out that this is "not a term recognized by international law." If they are prisoners, they are entitled to POW treatment; if simply criminals, "under the US Constitution. they've got even better protection."

But for U.S. leaders, international law is for others, not ourselves. Whether an action involves waging war, with the devastation and death that "precision bombing" brings to a chosen country, or expanding environmental controls and reducing global warming, the United States is proclaiming, more loudly than ever, that it will "act unilaterally" whatever the cost to others-and sooner or later to its own people.

Aswin Kumar

Petroleum and US crisis

2008-03-25T09:30:00.000-07:00

Why the Dollar Bubble is about to Burst?

Currently almost all oil buying and selling is in US-dollars through exchanges in Londonand New York. It is not accidental they are both US-owned.
The Wall Street crash in 1929 sparked off global depression and World War II. During that war the USsupplied provisions and munitions to all its allies, refusing currency and demanding gold payments in exchange.
By 1945, 80% of the world's gold was sitting in US vaults. The dollar became the one undisputed global reserve currency -- it was treated world-wide as `safer than gold'. The Bretton Woods agreement was established.

The UStook full advantage over the next decades and printed dollars like there was no tomorrow. The US exported many mountains of dollars, paying for ever-increasing amounts of commodities, tax cuts for the rich, many wars abroad, mercenaries, spies and politicians the world over. You see, this did not affect inflation at home! The USgot it all for free! Well, maybe for a forest or two.

Over subsequent decades the world's vaults bulged at the seams and more and more vaults were built, just for US dollars. Each year, the USspends many more dollars abroad that at home. Analysts pretty much
agree that outside the US, of the savings, or reserves, of all other countries, in gold and all currencies -- that a massive 66% of this total wealth is in US dollars!

In 1971 several countries simultaneously tried to sell a small portion of their dollars to the USfor gold. Krassimir Petrov, (Ph. D. in Economics at OhioUniversity) recently wrote, 'The US Government defaulted on its payment on August 15, 1971 . While popular spin told the story of `severing the link between the dollar and gold', in reality the denial to pay back in gold was an act of bankruptcy by the US Government.' The 1945 Breton Woods agreement was unilaterally smashed.

The dollar and USeconomy were on a precipice resembling Germanyin 1929. The USnow had to find a way for the rest of the world to believe and have faith in the paper dollar. The solution was in oil, in the petrodollar. The USviciously bullied first Saudi Arabiaand then OPEC to sell oil for dollars only -- it worked, the dollar was saved. Now countries had to keep dollars to buy much needed oil. And the UScould buy oil all over the world, free of charge. What a Houdini for the US! Oil replaced gold as the new foundation to stop the paper dollar sinking.

Since 1971, the USprinted even more mountains of dollars to spend abroad. The trade deficit grew and grew. The USsucked-in much of the world's products for next to nothing. More vaults were built.

Expert, Cóilínn Nunan, wrote in 2003, 'The dollar is the de facto world reserve currency: the UScurrency accounts for approximately two thirds of all official exchange reserves. More than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions and half of all world exports are denominated in dollars. In addition, all IMF loans are denominated in dollars.'
Dr Bulent Gukay of KeeleUniversityrecently wrote, 'This system of the US dollar acting as global reserve currency in oil trade keeps the demand for the dollar `artificially' high. This enables the USto carry out printing dollars at the price of next to nothing to fund increased military spending and consumer spending on imports. There is no theoretical limit to the amount of dollars that can be printed. As long as the UShas no serious challengers, and the other states have confidence in the US dollar, the system functions.'

Until recently, the US-dollar has been safe. However, since 1990 Western Europe has been busy growing, swallowing up central and Eastern Europe. French and German bosses were jealous of the USability to buy goods and people the world over for nothing. They wanted a slice of the free cake too. Further, they now had the power and established the euro in late 1999 against massive US-inspired opposition across Europe , especially from Britain- paid for in dollars of course. But the euro succeeded.

Only months after the euro-launch, Saddam's Iraqannounced it was switching from selling oil in dollars only, to euros only -- breaking the OPEC agreement.. Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Libya, all began talking openly of switching too -- were the floodgates about to be opened?

Then aero planes flew into the twin-towers in September 2001. Was this another Houdini chance to save the US (petro) dollar and the biggest financial/economic crash in history? War preparations began in the US But first war-fever had to be created -- and truth was the first casualty. Other oil producing countries watched-on. In 2000 Iraqbegan selling oil in euros. In 2002, Iraqchanged all their petro-dollars in their vaults into euros. A few months later, the USbegan their invasion of Iraq.

The whole world was watching: very few aware that the USwas engaging in the first oil currency, or petro-dollar war. After the invasion of Iraqin March 2003, remember, the USsecured oil areas first. Their first sales in August were, of course, in dollars, again. The only government building in Baghdadnot bombed was the Oil Ministry! It does not matter how many people are murdered -- for the US, the petro-dollar must be saved as the only way to buy and sell oil – otherwise the USeconomy will crash, and much more besides.

In early 2003, Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuelatalked openly of selling half of its oil in euros (the other half is bought by the US). On 12 April 2003, the US-supported business leaders and some generals in Venezuelakidnapped Chavez and attempted a coup. The masses rose against this and the Army followed suit. The coup failed. This was bad for the US.

In November 2000 the euro/dollar was at $0.82 dollars, its lowest ever, and still diving, but when Iraqstarted selling oil in euros, the euro dive was halted. In April 2002 senior OPEC reps talked about trading in euros and the euro shot up. In June 2003 the USoccupiers of Iraqswitched trading back to dollars and the euro fell against the dollar again. In August 2003 Iranstarts to sell oil in euros to some European countries and the euro rises sharply. In the winter of 2003-4 Russian and OPEC politicians talked seriously of switching oil/gas sales to the euro and the euro rose. In February 2004 OPEC met and made no decision to turn to the euro -- and yes, the euro fell against the dollar. In June 2004 Iranannounced it would build an oil bourse to rival Londonand New York, and again, the euro rose. The euro stands at $1.27 and has been climbing of late.

IRAN HAS REALLY DONE IT…more deadlier than the nuclear..

The Voice (issue 264 -) ran an article beginning, 'Iranhas really gone and done it now. No, they haven't sent their first nuclear sub in to the Persian Gulf. They are about to launch something much more deadly -- next week the Iran Bourse will open to trade oil, not n dollars but in Euros' This apparently insignificant event has consequences far greater for the US people, indeed all for us all,
than is imaginable.

But matters this month became far, far worse for the US dollar. On 5th May Iranregistered its own Oil Bourse, the IOB. Not only are they now selling oil in euros from abroad -- they have established an actual Oil Bourse, a global trading centre for all countries to buy and sell their oil!

In Chavez's recent visit to London; he talked openly about supporting the Iranian Oil Bourse, and selling oil in euros. When asked in Londonabout the new arms embargo imposed by the USagainst Venezuela, Chavez prophetically dismissed the USas 'a paper tiger'.

Currently, almost all the world's oil is sold on either the NYMEX, New York Mercantile Exchange, or the IPE, London's International Petroleum Exchange. Both are owned by US citizens and both sell and buy only in US dollars. The success of the Iran Oil Bourse makes sense to Europe , which buys 70% of Iran's oil. It makes sense for Russia, which sells 66% of its oil to Europe. But worse for the US, Chinaand Indiahave already stated they are very interested in the new Iranian Oil Bourse.

If there is a tactical-nuclear strike on - deja-vu - `weapons of mass destruction' in Iran, who would bet against a certain Oil Exchange and more, being bombed too?

And worse for Bush. It makes sense for Europe , China, Indiaand Japan--as well as all the other countries mentioned above -- to buy and sell oil in Euro's. They will certainly have to stock-up on euros now, and they will sell dollars to do so. The euro is far more stable than the debt-ridden dollar. The IMF has recently highlighted USeconomic difficulties and the trade deficit strangling the US--there is no way out.

The problem for so many countries now is how to get rid of their vaults full of dollars, before it crashes? And the UShas bullied so many countries for so many decades around the world, that many will see a chance to kick the bully back. The UScannot accept even 5% of the world's dollars -- it would crash the USeconomy dragging much of the world with it, especially Britain.

To survive, as the Scottish Socialist Voice article stated, 'the US, needs to generate a trade surplus to get out of this one. Problem is it can't.' This is spot on. To do that they must force US workers into near slavery, to get paid less than Chinese or Indian workers. We all know that this will not happen.

What will happen in the US? Chaos for sure. Maybe a workers revolution, but looking at the situation as it is now, it is more likely to be a re-run of Germanypost-1929, and some form of extreme-right mass movement will emerge..

Does Europe and China/Asia have the economic independence and strength to stop the whole world's economies collapsing with the US? Their vaults are full to the brim with dollars.

The UShas to find a way to pay for its dollar-imperialist exploitation of the world since 1945.. Somehow, eventually, it has to account for every dollar in every vault in the world.

Bombing Irancould backfire tremendously. It would bring Iranopenly into the war in Iraq, behind the Shiite majority. The UScannot cope even now with the much smaller Iraqi insurgency. Perhaps the USwill feed into the Sunni v Shiite conflict and turn it into a wider Middle-East civil-war. However, this is so dangerous for global oil supplies. Further, they know that this would be temporary, as some country somewhere else, will establish a euro-oil-exchange, perhaps in Brussels.

There is one `solution' -- scrap the dollar and print a whole new currency for the US. This will destroy 66% of the rest of the world's savings/reserves in one swoop. Imagine the implications? Such are the desperate things now swimming around heads in the White House, Wall Street and Pentagon.

Another is to do as Germanydid, just before invading Polandin 1938. The Nazis filmed a mock Polish Army attack on Germany, to win hearts and minds at home. But again, this is a finger in the dam. So, how is the USgoing to escape this time? The only global arena of total superiority left is military. Who knows what horrors lie ahead. A new world war is one tool by which the UScould discipline its `allies' into keeping the dollar in their vaults.

The task of socialists today is to explain to as many as possible, especially our class, that the coming crisis belongs purely to capitalism and (dollar) imperialism. Not people of other cultures, not Islam, not the axis of evil or their so-called WMDs. Their system alone is to blame.

The new Iranian Oil Bourse, the IOB, is situated in a new building on the free-trade-zone islandof Kish, in the Persian Gulf. It's computers and software are all set to go. The IOB was supposed to be up and running last March, but many pressures forced a postponement. Where the pressure came from is obvious. It was internationally registered on 5th May and supposed to open mid-May, but its opening was put off, some saying the oil-mafia was involved, along with much international pressure. Just google `pertroeuro' , and the story lies before you.

From now on, anyone in the know will wake up every morning and, even before coffee, will check out the latest exchange rate between the euro and dollar.

Forget saving it for the nation - great art must be freed from the vaults

2008-02-28T17:32:00.000-08:00

Few experiences are so exhilarating as seeing art before completion. The Russian show at London's Royal Academy is a composite work of art. I sneaked in to see it last week, to wander on my own through its echoing rooms, as technicians adjusted a light here and a nameplate there. The pictures were like actors at final rehearsal, testing their voices, adjusting their makeup, looking askance at each other. The effect was surreal. As the spotlights dimmed and brightened, Matisse's dancers seemed ready to swirl from their frame and escape down Piccadilly to a nightclub.

The Royal Academy's latest blockbuster is enjoyable not just for the celebrity of its works - built round 50 French impressionist and postimpressionist masterpieces - but because it tells a story. It sends us away informed as well as inspired. Given the poor quality of some of the Russian works, it may send many engrossed in dispute. Why was France alone so creative in the 1900s?

Russia at the time was America's equal in industrial muscle, and probably superior in taste. The country was immensely rich. That wealth yielded collectors no less astute than their American counterparts, trawling west Europe for paintings, as Catherine the Great had done a century before. In particular, they turned their attention to France. Today we admire the impressionist treasures in America's great museums but understandably forget the trove that has slept undisturbed mostly in the vaults of St Petersburg's Hermitage and Moscow's Pushkin Museum.

At the turn of the century, the two most prominent collectors were the textile tycoons Sergei Shchukin and Ivan Morozov. Their purchasing was near manic. Shchukin bought more than a hundred early Picassos and personally commissioned Matisse's La Danse, a more vivid version of that in New York's Museum of Modern Art. These men filled their Moscow mansions with Manet, Bonnard, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin, and invited artists to see them.

The exhibition strides confidently through this narrative. It opens with pensive 19th-century Russian landscapes and portraits, including Ilya Repin's celebrated picture of Tolstoy barefoot in peasant garb. Over them - indeed over the whole exhibition - hovers a cloud of tense dramatic irony, the viewer's awareness that all this would soon end.

From here we are led directly into the explosion that impressionist France brought to the salons of Moscow. Here are Monet's Poppy Field, Manet's bar scene, Cézanne's Woman in Blue and Renoir's exquisite garden group. We pass into the main gallery, dominated by Matisse's apotheosis of the dance, painted in response to Picasso's poised Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Five naked revellers, bursting from all times and none, hurl themselves about the canvas in the 20th century's homage to primeval energy. Opposite hangs Bonnard's vision of the dance, but here the participants cavort decorously in a bucolic Grasse landscape. The two works, painted at the same time, are at different ends of every spectrum, yet are embraced by the same creative enterprise. Their distraught conversation is flanked by Picasso's Dryad, Gauguin's Sweet Reveries and Braque's gloriously shaded landscape of the Castle at La Roche-Guyon. The exhibition is worth a visit for this room alone.

Sated with such riches we next hear the sound of Russian music (except there is sadly no music) in the form of a room devoted to Diaghilev. His Ballets Russes and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring were one Russian response to the impact of postimpressionist France. Bakst depicts the suave impresario with his old nanny, sad but emphatically present in the background.

Russian art now takes over, as painters stumble to meet the French challenge. They begin with their roots in iconography, symbolism and the patriotic realism championed by Tolstoy, Mussorgsky and Borodin. As France makes its impact, the consequences can be grotesque. Petrov-Vodkin's two boys dancing naked against a green and blue background is a horrible spoof of Matisse.

Painters of whom few will have heard seem derivative, mimicking expressionism, cubism, fauvism, even surrealism. Yet gradually they emerge into the light with a voice of their own. The names and works become familiar once more. We see Chagall's despairing Red Jew and his surreal love picture, Promenade. We see Kandinsky's Winter and Malevich's bold abstracts. At last the message seems to have taken hold. There is hope.

Suddenly it stops. Two brief decades of cultural penetration come to an end and darkness gathers. After the revolution most of these pictures disappeared from view, and by 1948 Stalin pulled down the shutters on the Pushkin Museum, to which Shchukin and Morozov had bequeathed their collections. It was, he said, "a breeding ground of formalist views and obsequiousness before decadent bourgeois culture".

My one regret is the absence from the show of the art of which Stalin approved, by way of contrast and warning. It ends on a dying fall in the emotional emptiness of dictatorship. There is only Tatlin's 1919 model of a gigantic spiral tower that, it was hoped, would be revolutionary Russia's answer to the Eiffel Tower. It was never built.

The works on display come from four museums, the Hermitage and the Russian in St Petersburg, and Moscow's Pushkin and Tretyakov. They offer merely a taste of the treasures buried in their vaults, which few people alive will ever see. About 90% of the Hermitage's collection is not on view, including works that any other museum, city or nation would give a fortune to exhibit. Yet, at the same time, these museums are chronically short of funds for showing or conserving what they have, let alone for acquiring or commissioning new work. They are the most extreme case of asset rich and cash poor.

Sooner or later the professional museum fatwa that treats these places as private curatorial archives and denies their governors freedom to trade collections must crumble. The crude chauvinism that says that a work of art must be "saved for the nation", even if then buried by the nation, is the most arrogant of imperial leftovers. Art should be displayed. Russia has more works of global appeal than it can possibly handle, yet desperately needs money to look after a fraction of what it has.

When Russia was rich, it garnered the choicest works of France and Italy, as Britain did before it and America afterwards. Today new lands and new publics should be able to purchase and enjoy at least what Russia (and others) cannot possibly display. International conventions can be drawn up to prevent abuse, like those of Britain's Museums Association and others debated in last September's issue of the art magazine Apollo. For example, pictures should be sold only to replenish collections, not to repair roofs, though even that is surely worth doing in extremis.

The world does not come to an end if a Monet or a Matisse hangs on a wall in Los Angeles or Dubai rather than being stored in a basement in Moscow or London. The world is enhanced thereby. Russia will always have treasures and to spare to stage a display like this. What it cannot display it should sell to those who can. Pictures are painted to glorify the light of day, not the gloom of vaults.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

If you are interested in the painting exhibits, you can check them out here.

Rs.200 can change the life of this guy...

2008-02-21T07:11:00.000-08:00

Last week, I met a boy named Soundrapandian in a village called Elanthugudi, near Mayiladuthurai. My friend’s dad who is a school headmaster bought Soundrapandian to my notice.
Soundrapandian finished his MCA with First Class in 2005. So, what is so special about him? He might have passed the exams, but still has got many difficulties which need to be addressed. This guy is crippled with Polio to an extent where he cannot walk even with crutches. Worse still is his parents who were taking care of him are no more. He was under the care of his elder brother who also passed a few years ago. He has got a younger brother who also is crippled with Polio. Though his younger brother can walk, he cannot climb stairs, not even board a bus. Being the eldest son in the family, Soundrapandian needs to look after his younger brother, his brother’s wife and children.
So, what to do? He had enrolled himself in Tamil Nadu Government’s employment exchange which gave recommendations to some IT companies for enrollment. But multinational companies rejected citing they don’t need work force at the moment (Good joke indeed).
During his college years Soundrapandian worked part time in a computer center called Tamil Nadu Software College in Mayiladuthurai. After completing his MCA, he had worked full time also. But now, there is no one to take him to the institute, which is ready to offer a job at a decent salary.
So, what can we do?
A tricycle for the disabled costs Rs.3, 800 (Three thousand eight hundred rupees), if 19 of us can shell out Rs.200 each, we can get him a tricycle. You see this amount which is not very large can change the life of the family. If you are willing to contribute Rs.200, kindly please mail me at sathishmayil@gmail.com or call me at 94425 51364
Click here to view his certificates
Do remember the Chinese proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Though i am in a NGO I cannot help via it, since it serves only education.
Please don’t forward this mail and make it a mail chain.

The Books Interview: Ramachandra Guha

2008-02-16T19:10:00.000-08:00

The publication of Ramachandra Guha’s thrilling history of India from 1947 to the present day India After Gandhi was one of the highlights of Indian literature in 2007. Guha, whose other books include a biography of the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, the awardwinning social history of Indian cricket A Corner of a Foreign Field, the marvellous anecdotal history The States of Indian Cricket, a history of the Indian environmental movement (with Madhav Gadgil) and the book of essays An Anthropologist among the Marxists, kindly agreed to answer a host of questions about India After Gandhi and also about the nature of the historian's craft, favourite books and bookshops, Indian newspapers, and food.

Six decades after independence, democracy is now quite deeply rooted in our psyche and in our language: we are at home with democracy, or at least with the rhetoric of democracy. But as you demonstrate, the decision in 1947 to move straight to a system of adult universal suffrage was "the biggest gamble in history". Could you reprise just why this move was so radical?
In the West, the franchise had been granted in stages; first only men of property were allowed to vote; then men of education were added on to the list. The male working class had to struggle long and hard to be deemed worthy of the privilege. Women had to struggle even longer; in a supposedly “advanced” country like Switzerland, women were not permitted to vote until 1971! This is what makes the Indian experiment so radical. So soon after Independence, a poor and largely illiterate citizenry was allowed to freely choose its own leaders. All Indians above the age of 21, regardless of gender or class or education, were granted the franchise. There was, as I show in India after Gandhi, widespread scepticism about this experiment; many Indians, and most foreigners, thought it would never work. But it did.

Although India After Gandhi is 900 pages long, its scope is so vast that you must have left out at least as much as you left in. Did you find that work on this book was an especially demanding instance of that problem which all narrative historians must grapple with: the selection of detail?
I did leave out quite a lot, though certainly not as much as I left in! I cut 40,000 words from my final draft, these mostly original quotes from primary sources. Even so, the book runs, as you say, to 900 pages. My publishers, my agent, my closest friends, had all warned me that a history book about India would not sell if it were more than 500 pages long. In the end, my American and British editors, together, recommended very few cuts–perhaps 5,000 words to add to the 40,000 I had myself deleted. No reader has (yet) complained about the length; although many readers (beginning with my wife) have complained that the book is too bulky to read in bed.
As I explain in the prologue, historians of India have taken 1947 as a lakshman rekha they cannot cross. My real hope for this book is that it will encourage younger historians to write books of their own on the history of independent India, which is without question the most interesting country in the world. Each of my chapters should be a book. Several of my sections could be developed into books. There are themes I have treated only fleetingly (for example, the history of Indian architecture since 1947) that could be made the subject of whole books. And many of the characters who figure in the pages of India after Gandhi—for instance, Sheikh Abdullah, AZ Phizo, JB Kripalani, and NT Rama Rao—deserve full-length biographies.

The decades immediately before and after Indian independence also seem to have been a golden age of political leadership. Your chapters on this period are among other things a chronicle of the contributions of our own Founding Fathers - Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar and a host of others. None of these men except Nehru had a family background in politics, yet they were all drawn to politics, and as you show they were all in some way above politics. Is this just a historical curiosity? Must a democratic citizenry be reconciled to not expecting greatness in its statesmen?
A I think that it was, alas, a historical curiosity, or more accurately, coincidence. Rarely in any country’s history have so many men and women of intelligence and integrity taken—at more or less the same time—to the political life. We Indians are insufficiently aware of (and certainly insufficiently grateful to) the country’s Founding Fathers and Mothers. We owe them much more than we realize. Now, intelligence and integrity have mostly left the sphere of politics—although they are visibly present in the realms of social work and social activism, entrepreneurship, and in professions such as medicine and the law.

Your book synthesizes an impressive amount of scholarship. Among the concepts you take up, I was struck by W.H. Morris-Jones's idea of the three idioms of Indian politics: the modern, the traditional, and the saintly. Would you like to elaborate on this idea, and perhaps explain it in terms of a contemporary Indian debate?
I suppose Dr Manmohan Singh represents the modern idiom, and someone like Medha Patkar the saintly idiom. However, most important or successful leaders nowadays practice one or other version of identity politics—and thus would qualify as ‘traditional’ in the terms of Morris-Jones. Caste, region, religion—these continue to shape and define how politicians win elections and how they run their administrations.

Would you like to talk a bit about the works of history that have most influenced your understanding of the art and craft of narrative history? I know that the historian Marc Bloch was an early influence on you...
Apart from Bloch, his great Annales School colleague Lucien Febvre was also an early influence, as was the British social historian EP Thompson. I have also learnt a great deal from Indian writers, particularly the sociologists André Béteille and MN Srinivas—the two scholars who, in my view, have written most insightfully on society and politics in modern India.
A historian must read capaciously, and eclectically. He must read writers Indian and foreign, theorists as well as biographers, sociologists and essayists apart from formally trained historians. But in the end he must use the narrative style that works best with the theme that he has chosen and the material that he has gathered. In this sense, no other historian or book can serve as a model or exemplar. If you compare India after Gandhi with some of my other books, you will see that it is more sociological and argumentative than Savaging the Civilized, my biography of Verrier Elwin (which had to follow a person’s life and emotions closely); yet less sociological than A Corner of a Foreign Field, my social history of cricket, whose organizing categories are race, caste, religion, and nation.

Your research for India After Gandhi must have thrown in your path many texts about Indian history, politics and culture that are now little read. Would you like to talk about some that can still be read for pleasure and profit?
I don’t know about ‘pleasure’, since very few Indian historians write with any sense of style. An exception must however be made for Sarvepalli Gopal, whose lives of Nehru and Radhakrishnan can indeed ‘still be read for pleasure and profit’. Among the other books that I found particularly valuable in terms of the depth of their research, or the spotlight they threw on important issues, were Prafulla Chakravarti’s Marginal Men (a study of Bengali refugees in Calcutta), and Sisir K. Gupta’s meticulous study of the first decade of the Kashmir dispute.

Must a historian read the newspapers closely? What newspapers do you read? And would you like to provide an account of your changing relationship to the newspaper over the course of your life?
A historian must certainly read, and closely, the newspapers of the period or region he is writing about. For both India after Gandhi and A Corner of a Foreign Field I spend many enjoyable hours looking at microfilms of old newspapers and magazines. The riches of India’s periodical press are an under-utilized resource, since many historians still tend to restrict themselves to official records.
The newspapers of the present day are another matter. Growing up, my favourite newspaper was The Statesman, which combined elegant English with a sturdily independent editorial stance. It was destroyed by a megalomaniac named CR Irani. Back in the 1970s, the Times of India was also a real newspaper; now, as we well know, it is a fashion supplement. If the TOI is too frivolous, then The Hindu is perhaps too solemn. Now, in 2008, my favourite Indian newspaper is The Telegraph of Kolkata, and I often also find things of interest in the Hindustan Times. On the whole, though, I feel that the quality of the English-language press in India has declined over the years. There is too little grassroots reporting; too much celebrity journalism. Editors and columnists are too closely allied to particular politicians or political parties.

In 2007 there was a boom in the publication of books on India both at home and in the west. Are there any books amongst these, whether for a scholarly or a lay audience, that have caught your eye?
The two books on India that I most enjoyed in 2007 were both on that most elevated of art forms, Indian classical music. I was very struck by a remark once made by Amitav Ghosh, to the effect that our classical musicians are the only Indians who strive for excellence and achieve it. Their art is richer and more subtle, and calls for far great discipline, than the game of cricket; and it brings the artist in touch with the Divine.
I mention cricket because it is a game we both love to distraction, and both of us write about. But give me M. S. Subbulakshmi over Sachin Tendulkar any day. Sadly, our shastriya sangeet has not really been written about (at least in English) with insight and imagination; there are no musical equivalents of Sujit Mukherjee or Mukul Kesavan. Or not until last year, when Kumar Mukherji published (posthumously) The Lost World of Hindustani Music, a wideranging anecdotal history of many musicians and many gharanas; and Namita Devidayal published The Music Room, her evocative memoir of singers from a single gharana.

Which is your favourite bookshop in the world?
I have many favourite bookshops: John Sandoe in London, the Strand in New York, Clarke’s in Cape Town, and the New and Secondhand Bookshop in Mumbai. But the one I love most is Premier Bookshop, off Church Street in Bangalore. Its owner, T. S. Shanbagh, is a man of much charm combined with a sly humour. His books are arranged in a most eccentric fashion, but he knows where each one is, and knows too which new arrival is likely to interest an old customer. I have written a tribute to Premier in an anthology of writings on Bangalore edited by Aditi De, which Penguin will publish later this year.

Let us say you were hosting a dinner party and had the liberty of inviting half a dozen personages from the entire sweep of Indian history. Who do you think you would want at your table and why? And what then might you talk about?
That is a tough one! To make matters easier, let me restrict myself to the recent past. I guess I must have the four modern Indians I admire above all others—Tagore, Gandhi, Ambedkar, and Nehru. Then the great (or at least brilliant) Indian whose politics and personality is somewhat at odds with this quartet—namely, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. That will surely get the sparks flying. Finaly, the socialist-turned-social worker Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, not to fill in the gender quota, but because of the range of her experience and the independence of her mind, not to speak of her penchant for puncturing pomposity wherever it was to be found.
The conversation? Perhaps I might begin by asking Gandhi his opinion of his fellow Gujarati, Narendra Modi. Ambedkar might then offer his views on Mayawati, Nehru his views on Rahul Gandhi, Tagore his views on Amartya Sen (whom he named). I think we can trust them to take it from there!

These interviews always end with a question about food. As you have travelled widely around the country, and lived for considerable periods of time in the south, the north, and the east, you must have left your footprints on thousands of eating-houses. What is your favourite memory of a meal?
The older I get, the more I relish Indian vegetarian food. Gujarati cuisine is a favourite, of course, but so is Bengali vegetarian food (I grew up in Dehradun in close proximity to a home in which lived a Bengali widow, for whose delectation—since she had little else to look forward to—this cuisine was first fashioned). But my most memorable meal was had in the Admaru Mutt, adjoining the famous Krishna temple in Udupi. I had been at a conference in the neighbouring town of Manipal, whose presiding deity was the Kannada writer UR Anantha Murty. On the last day of the conference we were taken to the Mutt for lunch by Anantha Murty. The Madhava Brahmins love their food, and this particular meal consisted of forty-two separate items, each listed on a printed card. Udupi is on the crest of the Western Ghats, so to add to the various varieties of cultivated cereals, legumes, and vegetables came a whole array of items picked from the forest—among them wild mango, jackfruit curry, and bamboo shoot pickle.
The meal was made more memorable by the company. We ate sitting cross-legged on the floor. On my left was the Sikh sociologist J PS Uberoi, on my right the Christian anarchist Claude Alvares—both accustomed by culture and upbringing to deprecate vegetarian food as simply ‘ghaas’. Opposite me was the veteran Gandhian Dharampal—not allowed by his upbringing to eat meat, but not allowed either to be exposed to such subtle varieties of taste and essence. As we ate, Anantha Murty walked up and down, explaining the origins and significance of each of those forty-two dishes.
When I was young, I used to say, at the conclusion of every concert by Mallikarjun Mansur that I was privileged to attend: ‘Please, God, allow me to hear this man once more in the flesh before he dies’. Now, from time to time I ask the fellow above that I may be allowed one more meal at the Admaru Mutt before I die.

(Courtesy Mr.Chandrahas Choudhury, and I encourage reading his blog)

Paycut!!!

2008-01-30T22:52:00.000-08:00

This is just the beginning. Expect the same from every software company in India,

Click here

"Real" Dream - 2

2008-01-22T22:44:00.000-08:00

Everybody has a dream. Only a few go on to reach their dream, but they have to undergo various difficulties to attain them. Don't think your dreams are over. Its not, if you can put in that extra effort you can achieve your dreams.

I wanted to be an electronics engineer. I was amazed at the Electronics chapter which we had to study during our Twelfth standard. I was deluged in all the fascination about how I am going to study in electronic scale about working of a radio, TV, etc... As a matter of fact, I didn't study those stuff nor I am working in my field of interest.

I would say four factors that would affect you destiny,

1. Good Education / Institution:

We have a post in our blog stating the education system in India. The educational system should be upgraded as it is outdated. I found that people where teaching vaccum tubes when there is already a revolution in Transistors and MoSFETs. It also depends on the socio-economic class of the student. If he can afford money then he can get admission in good institution.

The education system has become more of a business nowadays. People who have the money power (and muscle power) have started to build institutions and are gaining profit from them. I dont want them to provide education for free (after all they need money to survive), but they could atleast stop the huge amount of donation they claim from those poor parents. I have seen colleges collecting hefty fines and defaulters were made to stand outside the directors office (Like a Watchman!!!) or sometimes suspended. They dont care about the welfare of students anymore . All they care about is money. I am not blaming all of them. We can find some people who have that conscience (or pity) to help the students in their studies and not hinder them.

In the early 20th century, people donated their wealth in order to build educational institutions and help the people in need. In modern days, its the other way round, you take the money from the people to build more educational institutions in order to acquire wealth.

The sad part is even the government are not interfering in these matters. They dont want any trouble from those hotshots (as some of the educational institutions are run by people who are prominent in either the ruling party or the opposition party). They dont care a damn about education to poor, all they care is free TV for the poor when there in energy shortage.

2. Parents:

The role of parents is very important in making you dream come true (or rather their dream come true). Now honestly how many parents would love their child to be an artist, lyricist,etc.. They (some of them) want to impress (or exceed other children) their relatives and friends, so they try to push in their ambitions into our mind. They dont allow you to settle in your minds. They constantly come up and say to you what they want us to become, they dont listen what we want to become. If the kid wants to become something other than what their parents want to be, they are brain washed.

Parents should be supportive of their kids, they have understand what the child wants and not what they want from the child. These days , the interaction time between the parents and the kids are dwindling at an alarming rate. In most of the middle class families, both the parents are working and they come home only by 7.30 pm and the kid is under the supervision of a servant or he will be in some tution class. The kid arrives at 8.00 pm or he is already tired of these classes , so he takes his dinner and goes to sleep. People should listen to what the kid has done in the school, they should follow their activity, spend time with them and thats how the bond between the parents and kid will become stronger. Richard Feynman admired his father, you can find references of his father teaching him in some of his books. Maybe thats why he decided to become a world renown scientist. The interaction between a child and his parent may shape his ambition/career.

Again, if you see from the parents' point of view, they are quite helpless, they want their kids to be in repectable job rather than risking his career for some other profession. Most of them struggle to raise their kids and they expect some payback from child. They think if somehow he/she becomes engineer or doctor, he/she can continue to serve the family. So they are apprehensive of sending their son/daughter to their area of interest which may put the entire family at risk. They are really constricted to some ideas (their ideal world), they dont want to think outside that world.

3. Teacher:

The teacher plays an important role in making one career. Most of the teachers are sub standard,Why? The reason is something to do with the topic of the post. Most of them dont pursue their dream, but forced to come into teaching profession becuase of their family circumstances or due to lack of jobs of their interest. There have been some really good teachers, who have dedicated their lives to teaching, but we need some real gems to force the talet out of the child when a parent fails to do so.

4. The Students:

I would say that the students also play an important role in ruining their ambition/career. Let's for example take engineering, we have been provided facilities (atleast some) when some children could only dream about. Most of the people are forced into engioneering, but there are some people whose ambition is to study engineering. Does all the guys/girls who do engineering study properly? No, I dont think so. We can go about complaining that the facilities weren't there, the teachers weren't good, did we improvise? No. All we did was having fun all the time (maybe sometimes we studied), enjoying life and lost our opportunity to learn more when we had the facility (little facility). We were enjoying with our friends when we should have deluged ourselves in the library books, but we rarely did that, when we did that it was mostly to skip classes and to pass time without much ado.

People dont want to explore the subject, they want to be spoon fed by the teachers. All they want is to score good grades (which is actually important) without actually knowing anything. People have to explore beyond what they have been taught. Its time the students change their attitude, they have internet. Even if they are not taught well, they can go browse the net and actually learn the stuff rather than complaining.

It also takes immense courage to pursue your ambition. It may include going against tradition, parents wishes etc. There are some people who have done it. I knew personally some of the people. I salute them for their courage and reflect upon my cowardice and try to find a workaround for it.

I agree there are exceptions in all the four points I have mentioned above. Finally, I leave you with these two examples to ponder about. One from the past and one from the present.

i) Leonardo Da Vinci - Illegitimate son of a wealthy man. He didnt have education like us or the facility that we have now. Look at him, he did everything - he was a painter, sculptor, engineer, mechanic, designer, scientist,etc... He did everything he wanted to do and succeeded in it.

ii) http://xlalumni.blogspot.com/2007/11/xlri-homecoming-07-idli-boy-steals-show.html

No excuses for any of us. If he can do it, we can do it. We still have time to pursue our dreams. Who's Game?

Running after your "real" dream.

2008-01-22T08:43:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

Imagine what Da Vinci, Zidane, James Hetfield, Godel or whomever great you can imagine would have wanted to become. By becoming something does not mean only our profession but our ambition. I tend to stutter here because I could not make out the difference between career and ambition. This might be the case for many as we are born in India - I suppose.

People, try flying by your past and recollect what you fantasized to be and what you are now. Now that we are mature and we tend to acclimatize our dream or maybe try forget our dream as we can safely say "I made a smart and realistic decision".

What might stop one from becoming a great poet or a painter or a musician. Let me list out some.
1. Fear of inquisition that we might recieve from society.
2. Fear of survival.
And many other list of fears that haunt us. Or I might say that drive us to run in an opposite direction.

Take some time off for introspection. Lets do some reverse engineering. I'll take my own case. I'm an CSE Engineer. What drove me to become one? Fantasy surrounding computers, was interested in maths, heard from someone that CSE has lots of maths and logic- which gave my conscience all clear to choose CSE.

This point is where i strongly feel something is missing. Did I do the research about computer engineering, if it is good or not? No. Is that because I was not exposed to computers much. Is our educational foundation not balanced? Or that I just did not care what I want to be?

I think even now, in this age many just dont know what they want to do in future.. Or what they want to be in future.. People just wait for the jigsaw puzzle to get over all by itself.... they dont go in search of the pieces that help them to solve the puzzle. Once you have the location of the pieces then you can think about the plan of action on how you can solve it.

Do you have the pieces that solve the puzzle or you in search of the pieces or just that you dont know you are in the middle of a puzzle?

I want this to be an open dicussion. Please comment.

Thanks,
Gnanesh.(Poonai)

Beyond old Kollywood

2008-01-13T09:52:00.000-08:00

This is another posting about movies.I couldnt resist posting this from The Hindu,

“Kalloori” is the finest Tamil film of the year. After “Kadhal”, Balaji Sakthivel could have easily made an ambitious film with big stars, but he chose instead to do something smaller, on a more intimate scale. You have to admire him for it. There are few false notes in “Kalloori”, a film about three years in the life of nine college friends. Character, plot and dialogue are flawlessly rendered, staying faithful to its small town roots, never once betraying its authentic rural sensibility. The actors look uncompromisingly South Indian: every face here reminds us of real people and there’s no attempt to airbrush the actors and make them movie-handsome. Sakthivel maintains a fine, calibrated balance between the formulaic and the artistic.

“Kalloori” is only one example among several recent Tamil films that point to a very quiet but exciting revolution taking place in contemporary Tamil cinema: an unexpected, astonishing move towards realistic, intelligent, strongly scripted storytelling. Ram’s “Kattradhu Tamil” and Ameer’s “Paruthiveeran” are also remarkable instances of a new kind of movie in Tamil. What is just as remarkable is their modest success at the box office. In some ways, a film like “Kalloori”, deftly weaving Kollywood and realism, is more ambitious and more entertaining than a big budget film with stars. Is this the new Kollywood?

New wave

What these new wave of Tamil films seem to be doing is to fuse the energy and entertainment of a mainstream film (without its formulaic excesses) with the complexity and sensitivity of an art film (minus the excessive artiness). Mani Ratnam invented it in “Nayagan” and perfected it in “Aayitha Ezhuthu”, but it took all these decades for a newer generation of filmmakers to follow his genius. Other recent examples in this new wave are: Thankar Bachchan’s “Pallikoodam” and “Onbadhu Roobai Nottu”, Vetrimaran’s “Polladhavan”, Nishikant Kamat’s “Evano Oruvan”, Padma Magan’s “Ammuvaagiya Naan”, Gnana Rajasekharan’s “Periyar”, Vasanta Balan’s “Veyil”, Selvaraghavan’s “Pudupettai” and Cheran’s “Thavamai Thavamirunthu”.

Suddenly, it seems there is a new Tamil audience, a young audience, willing to see new things. The big Deepavali releases, “Azhagiya Tamil Magan”, “Vel” and “Machakarran” for instance, seem un-entertaining and even tame to a new Tamil audience now used to a cinema that is more inventive.

The Tamil New Wave is also characterised by style, personal filmmaking, a minimum song soundtrack (with songs in the background rather than lip synched and danced to) a shorter running time, no parallel comedy track (the comedy arises instead from within the plot) and themes that are sharply observed, tough-minded explorations of rural life and life on the mean streets. The characters here are rooted in family, culture and tradition but are forced to break with everything because of their personal choices — usually love or ambition.

The significance of these films is not for Tamil cinema alone. Their influence is already being felt through the rest of Indian cinema, signalling to filmmakers that our formulaic movies can be reinvented.

Already paralleling the Tamil revolution is a new kind of Hindi movie, evidenced by “Hazaaron Khwashien Aisi”, “Black Friday”, “Omkara”, “Iqbal”, “Page 3”, “Mixed Doubles”, “Rang de Basanti”, “Dus Kahaniya”, “Khoya Khoya Chand” etc. Except their themes are urban, looking at sex, adultery, relationships, work pressure, crime and everything else that contemporary living throws up. If Tamil movies depend too much on a rustic milieu, Hindi movies lean too much on the urban. Both cinemas need to crossover.

How exactly did this new cinema come about? Had its young audience, now exposed to better cinema from around the world, begun to tire of the more formulaic, fantasy-driven films? Or was it the young directors themselves who now desired to tell new stories in new ways?

The frontrunners

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when this film revolution in contemporary Tamil cinema started, but I’d like to mark two films as possibly having inspired and kick started this new wave:” Autograph” and “Kaadhal”. Both films were artistically made, entertaining, and — most crucially — huge box office hits. It must have startled the Kodambakkam industry to see two intimate love stories with no stars winning such a huge audience.

Balaji Sakthivel’s “Kaadhal” and Cheran’s “Autograph” signalled two things to Kollywood’s aspiring younger directors — that there was an audience for character-driven, strongly scripted, low budget movies, and that there were bold producers and passionate filmmakers willing to risk telling more realistic, intelligent, personal stories.

Sakthivel brings a documentary naturalness to the acting in “Kalloori”, especially with Hemlatha as Kayal, who can actually make you forget she’s acting. He coaxes an achingly beautiful performance from Tamanna; a complex, intense performance I have not been able get out of my head, one that heralds a major star. “Kalloori” is admirably restrained, subtly humorous and scene-by-scene enjoyable.

Ameer’s “Paruthiveeran” stunned an audience with a brutally detailed depiction of clan wars in rural Tamil Nadu. The first Tamil film to evoke small town life precisely: the festivals, rituals, locale, characters, and dialect. Its strongest character, fascinatingly, is a woman, Muthazhagu (an audacious performance by Priyamani), the heroine who fiercely knows her mind and heart. The scene where she eats with a ravishing appetite just after being sickeningly beaten by her father reverses everything we’ve seen in our movies about women and patriarchy.

Unpredictable

If “Kalloori” is the best Tamil movie of the year, “Kattradhu Tamil” is the most underrated. Ram’s film is original, unpredictable, disturbing and provocative. Prabhakar (Jeeva scorching as a bearded Dostoyevskian hero) has an M.A. in Tamil but it gets him nowhere. He runs into classmates half as bright as him doing fabulously well working for BPOs, while those with a degree in the arts and humanities are marginalised into obscurity. Working as a young Tamil teacher in Chennai for a poor school, Prabhkar narrates his terrifying journey (to Karunas, usually a comic sidekick, who does a superb about turn as a character actor) from idealism and rage to madness and oblivion.

What this postgraduate in Tamil has to say about how irrelevant those who have given themselves to Tamil culture and literature have become in an increasingly Anglicised society feels alarmingly true and painfully ironic. “Kattradhu Tamil” is uneven, dark, and violent but also full of conviction with an uncompromising vision.

The only aspect that slightly mars many of these offbeat Tamil films is their tendency for dark, morbid, violent endings. They seem to interpret any realistic portrayal as necessarily ending in tragedy, almost to say: realism equals tragedy. “Paruthiveeran”, “Kattradhu Tamil” and “Kalloori” also make this error. What they don’t realise is that after soaking in the despair and struggles of these characters, what we in the audience want to see is the triumph of these characters (however small that might be) over their fate. We want to see is Veeran and Muthazhagu, Muthuchelvan and Shobana, Prabhakar and Anandi take flight, escape the past and find a new life. Surely they’ve earned it.

Through the last decade and a half there have been other one-off films that were also intelligent and artful, but because they popped up sporadically and were not, unlike the new Tamil movie phenomenon, part of a gathering movement, they never achieved sufficient momentum to make a strong impact and change the idiom of contemporary Tamil cinema. But they nudged the revolution closer: Films such as Durai’s “Mugavari”, Susi Ganesan’s” Five Star” (his “Thiruttu Payale” is also noteworthy for the way its dark hero stays faithfully in character right up to the end) Suhasini Maniratnam’s “Indira”, and Ameer’s “Raam”. And then, more recently, there have been these other little, deft entertainers — romantic dramas and comedies where the emphasis is not on being realistic or authentic but in being charming and believable: Priya’s “Kanda Naal Mudhal”, Azhagham Permual’s “Dum, Dum, Dum”, Radha Mohan’s “Azhagiya Theeyae” and “Mozhi”, Vasanth’s “Yei Nee Romba Azhaga Irrukkai” and “Poovellam Kettupaar”, and Cheran’s “Mayakannadi”.

Smart and stylish

Even the new wave of Tamil gangster films — “Pudupettai”, Mishkin’s “Chithiram Pesuthadi”, Linguswamy’s “Sandakozi”, Vishnuvardhan’s “Pattiyal” and Vetrimaran’s “Polladhavan” — and thrillers — Gautham Menon’s “Kaaka Kaaka” and “Pachaikilli Muthucharam”, Igor’s underrated “Kalaba Kadhalan”, Vasanth’s “Satham Podaathey” — have a new grittiness and edge to them, and are smartly written and stylishly crafted.

There is plenty that is still disturbing about even new Tamil cinema: endless violence, obnoxious attitude to women, and ingratiating tropes. What is cause for celebration, though, is that this vibrant new cinema in Tamil is not at its culmination but is just beginning. Already in “Kalloori” there is no violence, no caste politics, and no item numbers. It certainly feels like Tamil cinema has finally grownup, turned a corner, and gone beyond old Kollywood.

You can also check the story at , http://www.hindu.com/mag/2008/01/13/stories/2008011350150500.htm

Let us talk about Consumerism

2008-01-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

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While Jan Cecil's friends and neighbors thronged the malls on Friday, filling their shopping bags with sweater sets, video games and aromatherapy candles, she spent the day outdoors with her family.
Cecil, a Berkeley resident who works as a systems analyst, is part of a small but increasingly visible movement dedicated to buying and using less -- less fossil fuel, less processed food, fewer gifts.
In contrast with the orgy of shopping that consumes much of the country from late November through early January, several adult members of Cecil's family have agreed not to exchange gifts this year. (Kids will still get presents.)
"I'm realizing that by giving people things, you're in some ways burdening them," Cecil said. "We have so much stuff that, in a way, it's a wonderful feeling of lightness to lessen it."
The day after Thanksgiving, the traditional start of the holiday shopping season, has become the focus of the growing anti-consumerism movement. This year, "Buy Nothing Day" activities are planned in 40 countries, said Kalle Lasn, a Vancouver activist who helped launch the first Buy Nothing Day in 1993.
While some of the more in-your-face adherents carry signs and chant anti- capitalistic slogans in shopping districts like San Francisco's Union Square, others decide to hike, play with their kids or simply do something other than shop.
De-emphasizing shopping "lets me keep my focus on what's more important in life, like spending time with my daughter," said Joseph Beckenbach of San Jose, a software consultant.
Of course, many other Americans find fulfillment in gift giving and look forward to their annual shopping forays.
"We love Christmas shopping!" said Sue Tiesiera, who wore candy cane earrings and a cherry-red jacket while shopping in San Francisco on Friday. "I love the hustle and bustle."
Tiesiera and her daughter Tiffany had amassed six large shopping bags by 2: 30 p.m. on Friday. They had left their home in Hilmar, in the Central Valley, at 7:30 a.m. for a full day of shopping. "It's been a family tradition for many years," said Sue Tiesiera.
On a macro level, people like the Tiesieras seem to more than compensate for any dent in spending the anti-consumerism movement might be making.
General merchandise sales have grown an average of 4.8 percent annually in the last 10 years. Despite a slowing economy, the average U.S. household plans to spend $1,684 on gifts, travel, entertainment decorations and food this holiday season, according to a survey by American Express.
Nevertheless, the anti-consumerism movement is gaining ground, particularly among left-leaning people who are predisposed to a simple-living philosophy. While some non-leftists have also signed on, the issue has become a rallying point for virtually every progressive cause, including environmentalism, social justice and labor.
Over consumption "can be seen as the root of most evils," said Joe Hill, an organizer of this year's Buy Nothing Day activities on Union Square. "Products that have horrible effects on the environment are created for corporations to make money. Unions are busted so people can have cheaper products (from overseas). It spans all the different issues."
Groups involved in the Union Square demonstration this year included East Bay Food Not Bombs, Global Exchange, Art and Revolution, Hill's Reclaim the Streets and assorted individuals. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and the Save the Redwoods -- Boycott the Gap Campaign also protested individual stores.
So -- Retailer beware? Well, that's probably premature.
Lasn, the editor of Adbusters magazine, estimates that about 1 million people observed Buy Nothing Day last year. On a planet of more than 6 billion residents, that's barely a blip.
But adherents say the philosophy of living with less is spreading through a combination of word of mouth, a pair of seminal books and the Internet.
Buy Nothing Day activities all over the world are coordinated through www. adbusters.org, for example. People interested in exploring less consumption- oriented lifestyles can sign up for local discussion groups called "simplicity circles" at www.simpleliving.net.
Anti-consumerism has even popped up in mainstream media, most notably Time Inc.'s Real Simple magazine, which was launched this year with articles on topics like knitting and organizing one's kitchen.
IT ALL STARTED WITH THOREAU
Of course, the idea of living with less is hardly new. Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," an American classic, details the two years that Thoreau spent living off the land in a tiny cabin in the mid-1840s. In the 1960s, Duane Elgin's "Voluntary Simplicity" gained a small but devoted following.
But with the stresses of contemporary life mounting, the twin concepts of buying and working less appeal to more and more people, movement organizers believe.
"I think deep down there is a feeling that even though we're living in this moment of incredible prosperity, at the same time there's something wrong," said Lasn, whose magazine is a leading mouthpiece of the anti-consumerism movement.
"We're not as happy as we should be," he said. "We wonder, 'Why is my wife so anxious and why does she go shopping so often and why am I feeling dissatisfied?' This dark side of our consumer culture is what's fueling this movement."
Many who prefer the simple life have found their way into the movement through the book "Your Money or Your Life" by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. The book has sold some 750,000 copies and appeared on the New York Times best seller's list.
Robin and her New Road Map Foundation (www.newroad
map.org) in Seattle have parlayed the book into a network of voluntary advisers who help consumers reorganize their finances to get out of debt and spend less money.
When "Your Money or Your Life" was published in 1992, "living lightly was a marginal activity," said Robin, who has been featured in Time magazine and on Oprah. "Now groups all over the country are looking at it. This thing has absolutely mushroomed."
Hundreds of simplicity circles have popped up around the country, including about a half-dozen in the Bay Area. In addition to "Your Money or Your Life," a book called "Circle of Simplicity" by Cecile Andrews is a common guidebook for these groups. (Andrews is a visiting professor at Stanford University.)
Whether the anti-consumerism movement will ever be embraced by the broad mainstream is an open question.
With retail sales heading up, up, up -- along with the size of SUVs, the incidence of childhood obesity and other consumption-oriented indicators -- many Americans don't seem terribly interested in cutting back.
PESSIMISTIC VIEW
But some activists believe our millennial buying spree is bound to come to an end -- if not voluntarily, then by some cataclysmic event just over the horizon.
"We cannot continue to sustain our current levels of consumption, where 5 percent of the world, Canadians and Americans, consume over 33 percent of the world's resources and spew out over one-third of the greenhouse gases and toxic waste while our TVs hype us up to ever-greater feats of consumption," said Lasn.
He foresees another 1929, complete with bread lines. "I'm ready for it," said Lasn. "I'm cultivating a beautiful garden."
Alex Molnar, director of the Center for Analysis of Commercialism in Education at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is less apocalyptic.
While he agrees that current levels of consumption are unsustainable ecologically, he believes an impending credit crunch will change mainstream consumption habits well before some environmental disaster brings the planet to its knees.
"We have a modern wage slave here, with four credit cards all charged to the max and people declaring bankruptcy at record rates," said Molnar.
"Do I think what we're doing now is sustainable for even another half century? Probably not. On the other hand, the human capacity for ignoring unwanted information is extraordinary."
Not surprisingly, retailers and marketers are not happy being branded the bad guys. "I take issue with these alarmist charges being leveled at retail," said Pam Rucker a spokeswoman for the National Retail Federation in Washington.
Consumerism is "dangerous to whom?" she asked. "Dangerous to the people whose livelihoods depend on consumption? To people who work in retail?"
Rucker noted that growth in retail sales has moderated this year as the economy has slowed, evidence that there is nothing unsustainable about consumer spending.
"People consume at a pace at which they feel comfortable," she said

LA Times.

Please share your views about consumerism in the comments section .

Welcome Nano !

2008-01-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

The much awaited people's car from Tata, Nano launched amidst a big cheering crowd yesterday at the Delhi annual auto show. priced at a sweet one lakh rupees wonly tag, it sure has caught not only the country but around the world, as media is spreading the news of the cute car's arrival almost everywhere... the cheapest car in the world...Time dubbed it an "upstart econobox'' And Popular Mechanics headlined its story "Nano Is the $2500 Car That Might Change the World," before the reporter hits the brakes..

too much for their optimism, some consider this sixth in the line of cars that changed the world - Ford Model T (1908 -the first mass car), Willys-Overland Jeep (1941- that 'won' the 2WWar),BMC Mini (1959- fun driving starts),Saab 93 (1958- protection ergonomics) Toyota Corolla (1966- reliability and radio on board)

and Tata Nano! to be sixth??! thrilling for us, the first from namma India.

this sure has made a lot of thoughts running in my mind which i would like to put it down here for discussion.

the pluses first :

the car is a boon for the rising middle-class of the country, definitely no doubt about it. millions of families riding dangerously as fours and fives! on motorbikes can now find this a big relief since it is now within reach. will reduce traveling stress of a big mass of people.. again, no doubt college goers (most would want it for the next academic year! paavam parents!) , IT/IT-ES employees, government servants, shop owners, small agricultural families, NGOs, foreign tourists on short stays, small travel firms, sales groups... everybody would love to get one.

it has all the basic features of a small car, comfortable, (in fact more space than M800), 20k/l and electronic controlled engine for smoother preformance and still more, 92% of M800's size.. cool.

Just a margin more than an enfield, many would think its a better deal and go for it in future. safer still, it is robust for its make, have passed collision tests and Bharat stage 3 and european emission norms. give them innum konjam cash, you can have A/C, power steering and ABS in the forth-coming deluxe models.

so much goodness and optimism in everyone... even rivals as M&M top execs who took a look at the car praised it to the press.

Mr.Ratan Tata would be so very happy and satisfied.. now that his dream came true at last. he made his word a deed braving all odds, rolling the car out of its plant in Singur, WB. the car would be spotted on roads this coming september.

now the consequences to face:

the car could easily break all sales records in the next decade to come and also cover a very wide market in regions like BRIC, african, asian and other south american countries too, in its expected overseas entry soon. Tata has always been very good as a Business house overseas, which could be advantageous in breaking market barriers and getting it on roads around the world.

the perspective in three levels : global, Indian and local

first, global :

the world is guzzling too much of oil.. too much... this car would only add to the smoke. millions of bikers switching to this car implies > oil demand, price rise, shortage, pollution rise... Co2 levels....

Environmentalists are very concerned about the mini bug's arrival. Greenpeace is already planning protests... so is, Mr. Pachauri ponravargaL...

Indian :

local transportation always being a sad failure or at most, a miserable excuse in most cities (Mumbai BEST and Chennai MTC more bearable) People would buy nano in big numbers... and Arasiyalvaadhis will not give a damn about speedy measures in improving the public buses and now can relax for a while in resorts and say everybody,

''Bus la vara mudiyalanaa, car la pongadaa... athaan oru lakshathukku vikkiraayngaLe..
apparamenna? athaan aayirakaNakkula sambaathikreengaLe.. namakku vera naraiyya vela irukku paa... pakistan theevravaathis oda orey ka(u)shtamappaa... athukku mela vivasaayees, industries, IT deals signings,womens issues, goondas... naan romba bisee... aduttha therthal vanthaa paappom... "

but they very well know AC MTC buses are a wasteful addition, much to attract the hip crowd... nyaayama speaking, we can always have two normal buses than a AC sinfaansee bus.arasiyal vaazhkaila ithellaam sagajamappaa...

Local Perspective:
we already are stifling under the worsestest road conditions. potholes, broken speedbreakers, blocked waterways, drains, absolutely insufficient parking spaces, non-existing flyovers where it is supposed to be, too many apartment buildings, too much of too muchs... adadadaaa... ithula ithu verayaa? mothalla road a ozhunga podungappaa.. apram pleasure car la pogalaam... naansans...

more to talk about... rather, discuss. come on !, what do you all guys think?

Why Ponting's heroes just don't appeal to me

2008-01-08T19:07:00.000-08:00

I DON'T like cheats. And I don't like this Australian cricket team.

When Andrew Symonds bowled a straight one on the last day of the SCG Test to Rahul Dravid, who padded up, deflecting the ball into the gloves of Adam Gilchrist, did any of the Australians really think it was out? I doubt it. No one watching on TV thought it was out. It wasn't out. Ricky Ponting and his cohorts knew it. Dravid's bat was behind his pad. To appeal when you know the batsman is not out is, to my mind, cheating.

It's the Australian way. Has been for years. Gilchrist's predecessor, Ian Healy, enunciated the rationale perfectly while commentating — he appealed when he thought the batsman was out, or when he thought the umpire might give it out. That is, he would appeal if knew it was not out but thought the umpire might give it out. As I said, cheating.

The heroes of this Australian team say that in cricket you cop the good with the bad. That's exactly what captain Ponting conspicuously failed to do in this Test. In the first innings he was given not out when clearly out. Quite some runs later he was given out when he was not out. Did he cop it? No, he stood and glared at the umpire. He should have been fined for dissent. He should have acknowledged it was an easy mistake to make, given the bat was next to the pad, making the deflection all but imperceptible. And it wasn't just the heat of the moment: the tantrum continued at the dressing-room. He should have been ashamed of himself. Back to the Bourbon and Beefsteak, mate.

But Ponting is not ashamed. "I really can't see how we have done anything wrong by the spirit of the game," he said when the furore blew up. I can. So can a lot of others.

The Australians have just equalled the game's longest winning streak. Next week in Perth they should better it. Then go one better again in Adelaide. Who knows where it might end. Well, they can stick their streak where they can stick their 3 mobile. After this effort, I couldn't care less.

Which is a pity. There was much to like in this contest. Brad Hogg an unlikely saviour in the first-innings revival. The Indian response was better still: Dravid's doggedness, Laxman's elegance, Tendulkar's mastery. Even Ponting's properness in declining to appeal for a line-ball low-down take. But the match was marred and entered the halls of infamy by the poorest of umpiring, Australian petulance — and Harbhajan's Singh's wrongdoing. If, that is, you accept the Australians' version of events and not his.

But when the Australians stand at the crease when they edge the ball to first slip and appeal when the batsmen is clearly not out — well, why then would you believe anything they say?

The lack of good grace marked the Australians throughout this match. And series — what a cheek of Matthew Hayden to say that Anil Kumble "stole" five wickets in Melbourne. You could say Hayden has stolen 29 Test centuries, having barely faced one decent fast bowler in all that time. The lack of grace was there when Ponting motioned to the commentary box after the game, from where Tony Greig had dared to criticise the timing of his declaration. And it was there at the post-match media conference when he blasted an Indian reporter for daring to question him.

Ricky, time to have some KFC and calm down. Me, I think I need a bucket.

You know what I mean.

Michael Epis writing for THE AGE

Kalloori and other contemporary World cinema

2008-01-05T07:25:00.000-08:00

I recently went for the Tamil movie "Kalloori" directed by Balaji Shakthivel. I entered the theater thinking that it will be yet another movie about college. It had all the elements like friendship and love which you can expect in a Tamil movie which is based on college life. The climax was a shocker, we didn't expect the movie to end this way. The director has portrayed the bus burning incident that happened 4 years back in Dharmapuri when three of the student lost their precious life.

I have seen movies that portray real life incidents (sufferings) or the internal problem of people in a particular society (for e.g., No Man's Land , Paradise Now, Kannathil Muthamittal, etc..). Most of the people in the world are not aware of these kind of sufferings that's happening every moment in some part of the world.

Directors from all over the world have started to show the "real" situation in which people around the world has suffered ( Schindler's list, Hotel Rwanda, Blood Diamond) or suffering (Paradise Now, No Man's Land). Cinema is a powerful media where you can send powerful message to people but unfortunately Indian directors are far behind in this kind of sensitive subject. All the producers and directors want to portray a hero as a larger than life hero and pocket millions. The actors also expect the same from the directors, they don't want to portray sensitive things, they want to enhance their image in front of their fans.

Its high time our actors and directors turn to the social issues plaguing our society. India is the second largest movie producer in the world and most of the movies that are started are not finished and some of the movies are finished with heavy financial backing (and with no story) and only the actors and directors are benefited by this and not the society.

The day after watching kalloori, the 3 accused in the Dharmapuri were sentenced to death (The sentence was nothing to do with the movie) and I thought it was perfect to end this way. Alas, today the court have stayed the sentence. Like the ending of the movie, we will never know if the accused will be brought to justice.

Directors like Vittoria De Sica, Kieslowski, Fellini, Satyajith Ray were daring enough to show the "real" human conditions and emotions. Will we ever see a period like that in Tamil Nadu if not in India? Thats a question for which we will never know when we will find answers.

"The politicians want to see it as black and white, good and evil, and art wants to see it as a human thing." -- Hany Abu-Assad

Edward Said -The tallest intellectual of our time.

2008-01-04T20:40:00.001-08:00

I would like to thank Gautam for bringing in Said into the discussion and i will continue from where he left .

Edward Said remained as the voice of the voice less from almost half a century .His orientalism laid the foundation for most the intellectual debate about the Orient. Let me begin by dispensing certain definitions for a better understanding of the article.

The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.

Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives, perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient." It is the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an entire system of thought and scholarship.

The first 'Orientalists' were 19th century scholars who translated the writings of 'the Orient' into English, based on the assumption that a truly effective colonial conquest required knowledge of the conquered peoples. This idea of knowledge as power is present throughout Said's critique. By knowing the Orient, the West came to own it. The Orient became the studied, the seen, the observed, the object; Orientalist scholars were the students, the seers, the observers, the subject. The Orient was passive; the West was active.

The western argument was very simple. East should be dominated and west shows it by conquering them.West knows what is right for the east because it knows its culture right from the dawn of civilization (as in Egypt) through scholarship (learning; knowledge acquired by study).So the west knows what is right for the east .

What is considered the Orient is a vast region, one that spreads across a myriad of cultures and countries. It includes most of Asia as well as the Middle East. The depiction of this single 'Orient' which can be studied as a cohesive whole is one of the most powerful accomplishments of Orientalist scholars. It essentializes an image of a prototypical Oriental--a biological inferior that is culturally backward, peculiar, and unchanging--to be depicted in dominating and sexual terms. The discourse and visual imagery of Orientalism is laced with notions of power and superiority, formulated initially to facilitate a colonizing mission on the part of the West and perpetuated through a wide variety of discourses and policies. The language is critical to the construction. The feminine and weak Orient awaits the dominance of the West; it is a defenseless and unintelligent whole that exists for, and in terms of, its Western counterpart. The importance of such a construction is that it creates a single subject matter where none existed, a compilation of previously unspoken notions of the Other. Since the notion of the Orient is created by the Orientalist, it exists solely for him or her. Its identity is defined by the scholar who gives it life.

Said argues that Orientalism can be found in current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab" as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--perhaps most importantly--prototypical, are ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. These notions are trusted as foundations for both ideologies and policies developed by the Occident. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind is increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force.

The implications of this understanding can take us very far in our understanding of cultures and respecting Nations' sovereignty .This attitude of the west has not changed much of the last century even though the empire is no more.But the dirty things it left behind still lives on in the form of Palestine , Iraq and may be Iran in the future,and much of the impoverished Africa.

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.
Suggestion:
One of the best books i ever laid my hands on was After The Last Sky by Said and another Photo Journalist Mohr A very personal text, and a very moving one, about an internal struggle: the anguish of living with displacement, with exile. The most beautiful piece of prose about what it means to be a Palestinian.

On Humanism

2008-01-04T16:48:00.000-08:00

Please read through this review by Terry Eagleton of humanist Edward W. Said's collected lectures in Humanism and Democratic Criticism. I believe this has a lot to do about what we are really trying to achieve here.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040510/eagleton

The Need for Constructive Journalism

2008-01-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

I watched Taare Zameen Par a few days back. I am not going to try and write a formal review. It is a beautifully written, craftily directed film by Aamir Khan that touches upon some important issues faced by children today. Although it is a film centered on a dyslexic kid Ishaan, it is precisely not one about dyslexic kids.

Aamir Khan conveys the very important fact that children are very impressionable at a tender age and they should be cared after a lot of deliberation and caution. Kids, particularly kids in India are under extreme pressure right from their kindergarten to perform well. The rat race of which they become a part of sooner or later teaches them certain lowly values that seriously have a negative effect on their attitude towards life itself.

Mayil anna had pointed out in his previous post about the importance of teachers today and I totally concur with him. Good teachers are few and far between these days and the values and thoughts these young minds are exposed to at a tender age is totally contingent on the teachers handling them at a very young age. But I find most in this generation enamoured to the materialistic realm of things only and not many have a 'the life of the mind'. It is all about video games, cars, consumerized life style, the glitz and glamour of being a corporeal being, the flaunting of money etc.

And after feeling good about the fact that this film has addressed a much important issue, I was shocked to see some critics writing that this film had a number of fundamental flaws and it has fallen short on a number of areas. I beg to differ from them because I think this is heights of cynicism because these very critics give good reviews to a 'typical' Shahrukh commercial. ( I understand that the primary task of a critic is to be critical of anything and everything thrown at him)

Although some might argue that making films and being an actor is artistic in demeanor, it just doesn't end there. I am trying to make a point about sensible journalism. Aamir has made a admirable effort in trying to get us notice a very important issue that has pretty scary repercussions. Films are an amazingly potent medium to convey ideas that can change the way we think and improve the lives of our subalterns. But the problem is that sensible journalism is really rare and hard to find. People are more interested in absolute gossip than a million other issues that are throwing lives of innumerable lives in disarray. And the film medium particularly is so bloody corrupt with wrong values and priorities.

Coming to media in general, you find the paparazzi hassling the Beckhams and Shetty's for a snap. The media just doesn't care for thousands displaced due to the Sardar Sarovar Project. Recently, Arvind Kejriwal was awarded the Ramon Magsasay award for his stellar contribution to society. Here is a journalist that believes journalism should be all about a process of a larger constructive social change. Unlike our journalists "J" who believe they are doing a great job when they go get a snap with some mediocre cine star, this man has shown the way for propective journalists.

I patronize this film so strongly because it has been something which can give so many of us a vicarious experience and also illuminates us of one thing that is absolutely important for this country; Kids. I can only think of Kamalhassan and a few others who think they are viewing Films as an avenue for an artist who can make his ideas tell; And ideas need not be revolutionary. Even a mundane thought expressed in the right way can make a difference.

The Continuing Possibilities of Land Reform

2008-01-04T00:39:00.000-08:00

There was a long period during which land reforms had completely dropped from the national policy agenda, and even from the policy discussions of most state governments. Not only were there seemingly insuperable barriers, but it was made to appear that land reforms were unlikely to deliver much in terms of growth or productivity. Also, land reforms were typically seen as essentially taking the form of land redistribution, which is generally regarded as politically so difficult as to be next to impossible.

The more recent crisis in agriculture has created a new and different sort of cynicism about land reforms: it is being argued that since peasant cultivation is barely viable given the increasing costs and uncertain prices, it is in any case pointless to try and provide small amounts of land to peasants.

All these arguments ignore the range of possibilities of changes in land relations which remain not only necessary but even essential for ensuring viable conditions of farming. While land distribution is doubtless important, it is not the only kind of institutional change that can affect the peasantry. Indeed, there are large problems in farming today because of poor recording of land rights, inadequate official recognition of tenants,

The experience of West Bengal shows very clearly how even relatively limited land reforms such as tenancy reform and distribution of vested land can play very important roles in improving agricultural productivity, generating a range of complementary economic activities in the countryside, and generally enabling a small-producer led pattern of growth at least for some time. Therefore, it is important to consider how even small changes in legislation - and in some cases - the mere enforcement of existing legislation - can transform the conditions facing a large proportion of small farmers.

Since land reforms are essentially a State subject in the Indian constitution, it is more useful to consider the possibilities in any one state. In this article, we focus on Andhra Pradesh, a state which has been experiencing agrarian crisis for some time now, and where the need for major policy changes has been recognised also by the state government.

Land relations in Andhra Pradesh are extremely complicated and this complexity has contributed significantly to the problems facing actual cultivators in the state. Because of the fact that in many areas (especially Telengana) the names of the current holders and actual cultivators are not recorded in the land registers, such cultivators are not eligible for institutional finance and a range of other public benefits such as subsidised inputs from public agencies, compensation in the event of natural calamities, and so on.

In addition, some regions (especially in more irrigated areas) have a high proportion of tenancy, which is typically unrecorded, and tenant farmers face similar difficulties in accessing bank loans and other benefits. They are therefore all driven to the informal credit market, which supplies loans at very high rates of interest, which in turn adds greatly to their cost of cultivation. In tribal areas there are even more difficult issues of land entitlement, and tribal people are typically being denied their land rights through encroachment and lack of official protection.

Recording of land rights

In large parts of Andhra Pradesh - as , indeed, in many other states - the state, the existing land records do not accurately portray the actual position with respect to land holding and cultivation. Subdivision and fragmentation of holdings over generations, consequent upon household division, are not reflected in the land records, which sometimes continue to list the names of deceased holders, etc. This problem is especially acute in Telengana. The settlement of revenue records is meant to take place every ten years because of such processes of changing ownership and cultivation holdings; however, in Andhra Pradesh, the revenue records have not been altered for more than fifty years. (This is not uncommon - in most states, land records have not been altered for several decades.) This has meant increased disputes related to land and insecurity of holding, especially for small farmers.

Additionally, women cultivators are rarely if ever listed as the owners of land, even when they are the actual cultivators. This is despite the fact that the state's own Land Revenue Act of 1999 makes it the responsibility of the state government to enter the name or names of the actual cultivators in the Record of Rights.

It is obvious that several things can be done to resolve these problems without embarking on any legislation at all, and simply implementing the provisions of existing legislation such as the Land Revenue Act of 1999. To begin with, a fresh settlement of revenue records is imperative. This requires a major administrative drive to record the actual cultivators. While this has to be undertaken by the state government, it will obviously require the assistance of local panchayats and other agencies, since it can of course urn out to be a complicated process.

The state government had tried to bypass the problem of poor and inadequate revenue records through the provision of pattadar passbooks to all cultivators. However, as can be expected, this process was flawed in the absence of adequate proof, and many farmers have not received such passbooks. Once again, a concerted administrative drive would ensure that pattadar passbooks are provided to all cultivators. A special focus on recognising women farmers would ensure that women cultivators also receive passbooks. In addition, the land rights of tribal populations need to be clearly recognised and tribal farmers should also be issued pattadar passbooks.

Recognising tenancy

In Andhra Pradesh there are no records and therefore no official statistics on the extent of tenancy. But reliable estimates suggest that tenancy is quite high, amounting to around one-third of the cultivated land and often a larger proportion of farmers. It has been seen that, in addition to completely landless cultivators, many small farmers who own very small plots also tend to lease in additional land. The incidence of tenancy tends to be higher in irrigated tracts and in regions where rainfall is more plentiful, in other words, where there is more assured water supply.

The increasing extent of tenancy in this state over the past few decades has been associated with a shift away from sharecropping to fixed rent tenancy. Earlier, sharecropping tenancy dominated, with the crop being shared on a 50:50 basis. However, most tenancy contracts are now fixed rent contracts. The fixed rent systems are of two kinds: those which involve an advance of working capital from the landlord, and those which involve no such advance. The latter type of tenancy contracts tend to be more common.

Tenant farmers face a range of problems, dominantly stemming from the lack of official recognition of tenancy and the fact that their status as actual cultivators is nowhere recorded. This continues despite the fact that the Land Revenue Act 1999 stipulates that the names of tenants should be recorded in the revenue records. This lack of recognition effectively denies tenant farmers all access to institutional finance such as bank credit and crop insurance. In addition, they cannot benefit from any of the government schemes directed to farmers, or get any assistance or compensation at times of natural calamity, since such benefits go to the registered owner of the land. Nor do they receive any of the free or subsidised inputs which are distributed to owner cultivators from the state government, such as seeds, subsidised fertilisers and pesticides and implements.

Cash rent rates in rural Andhra Pradesh are typically quite high, ranging from Rs. 3,000 per acres in unirrigated and less fertile areas (such as in parts of Anantapur district) to as much as Rs. 7,000-9,000 per acre in irrigated areas of higher soil fertility (such as in Guntur). In the fertile south coastal Andhra region, rents can go up to as much as Rs. 15,000 per acre. These rates are in direct contravention of existing legislation (such as the AP Tenancy Act of 1956 and its 1974 amendment) under which land rents are controlled. Of course, such legislation has been so totally ignored that it is now effectively forgotten, and so neither landlords nor tenants pay much attention to such limits. In actual practice, tenant farmers are currently paying more than 3 or 4 times the rents stipulated in this Act.

It is fairly clear that some measures would immediately remedy the situation. For example, obviously the names of tenant farmers (including also women) should be recorded in the revenue records. Of course, this is not likely to be simple - it is not only politically difficult, it is also hard to record cash rent tenancies that may change with every season. The administrative costs are likely to be very large, especially in the absence of a properly functioning system of panchayati raj. But that may be yet another reason to make sure that panchayats are representative and function effectively.

Once tenant farmers are recognised as actual cultivators, they should automatically be entitled to the various benefits provided by government to other farmers, including subsidised inputs, compensation for losses, etc. This will require careful separation of owners from tenants and clearly establishing who is actually cultivating any piece of land, which means continuous monitoring by some local body.

Land distribution

Land ceiling laws have been relatively ineffective in Andhra Pradesh - only 5.1 lakhs of surplus land have been acquired in total, which suggests that the laws have been counteracted on the ground by benami transactions and distribution of large ownership holdings among family members. In addition, in the recent past there appears to have been substantial corporate acquisition of land. Much greater regulation of land grabbing of public or common land by corporations or powerful individuals is obviously required. In addition, of course, stricter enforcement of land ceilings would make available much more vested land for redistribution among the landless population.

Despite this relative lack of implementation of land ceilings, operational holdings have become much less concentrated. The data in Table 1 suggest that there has been a decline in the absolute number and area covered by large and medium holdings since 1971. There is therefore an increase in ''peasant'' holdings compared to large holdings, and it is evident that many of these must be held under tenancy contracts. The substantial increase in marginal holdings, which accounted for more than half of farmers in the early 1990s, is likely to have contributed to the difficulties of ensuring that cultivation provides a reasonable livelihood.

There is also substantial landlessness in rural Andhra Pradesh. The NSS data of Table 2 show that AP has the second highest extent of landlessness among rural households, after Punjab. Some of this landlessness is itself the result of the growing difficulties of cultivation, as indebted small and marginal farmers have been forced to sell or give up their land because of the inability to repay their debts through the proceeds of farming. It is also the case that landlessness is heavily concentrated among the Dalit and tribal populations. This high degree of landlessness is why agricultural labourers outnumber cultivators by nearly two times according to the 2001 census.

Land Degradation

Once problem that is inadequately recognised across rural India is the decline in soil fertility that has in some areas quite dramatically affected agricultural productivity. Even in Andhra Pradesh, there are increasing problems of soil degradation and fallow land.

As is evident from the chart, the proportion of waste and fallow land has increased significantly since the early 1990s. This has actually meant a decline in cultivated area. While adverse weather and rainfall conditions have certainly been associated with this, it is true that cultivation practices have eroded soil qualities over time. The problem is especially acute in certain areas of Rayalseema and northern Telengana, where cropping pattern shifts and greater use of chemical inputs have led to declining soil fertility and even forced fallows.

In other areas, the increase in current fallows also reflects the lack of viability of cultivation, as small farmers migrate in search of other incomes rather than cultivating their fields at a loss. Obviously, a focus on strategies for land regeneration, such as soil regeneration practices which can be part of a rural employment programme, would be important for dealing with such concerns.

While these may be achievable - and even necessary - policy goals, there is no doubt that they cannot be achieved without strong political will. In West Bengal, the land reforms were an outcome of decades of peasant struggle which eventually brought to power a state government committed to these reforms. Even in other states, similar motivation and social pressure will be necessary, even to make sure that the existing laws are actually implemented.

C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

The Farce of ''School Choice''

2008-01-02T23:54:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows even a little bit about school education in India knows that it is largely about exclusion. Only a tiny minority of children in our country get anything resembling a decent schooling - the rest are either excluded altogether, or provided very poor quality education with weak infrastructure and inadequate pedagogic attention, which in turn encourages high rates of dropout.

As with so much else in Indian society, the reasons for such exclusion are dominantly, but not exclusively economic. Of course the poor everywhere are adversely affected, because they cannot afford expensive private schools and must suffer whatever conditions prevail in government-run schools in their areas of residence. Those living in backward regions are affected because they often simply do not have school near enough for the children to attend regularly. But in addition, a wide range of various forms of social discrimination operate to exclude children from particular castes of communities, or linguistic categories, or other groups, even when the schooling is ostensibly open to all.

The sheer extent of the exclusion from schooling is evident from the official data relating to schooling. Of around 200 million children in the age-group 6-14 years, 30 million never enrol at all. Of those who do join school, 36 per cent drop out at the primary stage, by Class 5. By Class 8 the drop out rate is 52 per cent. This means that less than half of the children under 14 years actually get the minimum schooling of 8 years mandated by the Constitution.

Some of this is because the physical infrastructure for schooling is still completely inadequate in our country. Around 30 per cent of our villages do not have a primary school within the village; another 16 per cent do not have one within 3 km of the village. Even in urban areas, there are many slum settlements without access to schools. One-fifth of the primary schools in India function without a proper building; another one-fifth operate out of only one room for all the five classes, and many do not have electricity connections. Facilities such as separate toilets for girls and boys and clean drinking water are rare.

Even where the physical infrastructure is better, teachers in many parts of the country have to deal with huge and multi-grade classes. They are often forced to teach subjects for which they are pedagogically not prepared, with only the barest minimum of basic teaching aids. They have to deal with syllabi which are out of tune with their students’ experienced reality and aspirations. So it is not particularly surprising that the quality of education in such circumstances is sub-standard. Clearly, substantially increased public spending in such areas is a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for improving the quality of education.

But of course that is still not the only reason for exclusion, or for having to experience poor quality education. It will be no surprise to any reader that most of the children excluded from schooling are poor, or that the majority of them are girls, or that they are dominantly from marginalised and deprived social groups such as Dalits, tribals, backward castes and certain religious minorities. Explicit and implicit social discrimination remains a potent factor in depriving such children of good education.

In this matter of discrimination, private schools in India (except for a few run by certain charitable organisations and well-meaning NGOs) have typically been even worse than government run schools. Quite apart from anecdotal evidence, there is confirmation of this from the spate of legal judgements condemning various private schools in the major metros for not conforming to the required criteria of admission, so as to exclude children from disadvantaged background.

Given all this, it is quite remarkable to find that proponents of a voucher system for school education are claiming that the purpose of such a scheme is ''to empower poor students so that they can attend a school of their choice.'' A voucher system is essentially one whereby parents are allowed to choose the school to which they send their children (private or government) and get reimbursed for the expenses partly or fully by the government.

Votaries of this scheme have been getting louder in recent times. The typical arguments presented in favour of this scheme are that it would lead to increased choice for parents and students, especially among the poor, and it would force schools to improve quality in the competition to attract students. It is argued that such a scheme would therefore deal with both the problems of poor quality and limited access that currently plague our schooling.

Such schemes have been tried in certain states of the US, as well as in modified form in other countries. In some developing countries, because of shortage of funds, vouchers are not supplied to all children but to a subset (in Bangladesh to girls from defined poor families; in Colombia through a random allocation to thirty per cent of students).

Even votaries of the system admit that it presumes a great deal of institutional capacity. Obviously, such schemes only make sense when there are sufficient schools in the local area to create a real possibility of ''choice''; when it is possible for parents and children to make informed judgements about quality on the basis of easily accessible information; when schools are not allowed to discriminate between students on non-financial grounds; and so on.

Even when such conditions do exist, the actual experience with vouchers has been mixed at best, with varying assessments of whether there has been improvement in school quality and access as a result. But it should be completely obvious that where such conditions do not exist - which is clearly the case in most of India - the chances are that a voucher scheme would simply shift resources away from a public education system that is already desperately underfunded, and continue to exclude disadvantaged children.

In any case, as we have seen, given the overall context of social discrimination, private schools in India will continue to exclude children from deprived and marginalised sections unless they are forced to do so. The voucher system has no element of compulsion for schools, only supposedly ''free choice'' for all.

The problem of quality in our schools is complex and multi-dimensional, related to resources and to a range of institutional features. It is far too simplistic to believe that it can be dealt with merely by increasing competition across schools. A voucher system would not only divert much-needed resources, it would also divert our attention from addressing the real issues involved in improving quality in school education.

Media is a tool to dispense information, but it has ..........

2007-12-29T19:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I had been to a meeting with some friends regarding the challenges facing the IT industry, the story shifted to the traits of media in India.

Lets take a typical example of what they are doing now. When Sanjay Dutt was sentenced to jail, all the tv channels ran a live coverage of his movement from Arthur Road jail in Mumbai to the Yerwada Jail in Pune. In the same state, Maharashtra that is, where thousands of people who are committing suicide, they did mind covering this. The hot discussion was whether Dutt will celebrate his Diwali incarcerated or free?

Worse still, Times Now conducted a SMS poll on whether Sanjay Dutt should be acquitted or not? Crazy indeed. I don't understand why there is a court then? Some ran a story asking whether Sanjay deserves prison after imparting Gandhijiri to the people after Munnabhai. Isn't it completely insane? For the sake of TRP, they are just telling whatever they want. Times of India ran an article whose purpose I am yet to understand.

Whenever a natural calamity or accident happens, TV channels race to show the debris and injured. They believe showing people dripping with blood is an excellent coverage which precisely isn't. Never do they make an analysis of why it happened. Constructive journalism has almost vanished off in Indian Media.

In the events of 2007 listed by CNN IBN, one of the events was Bipasha Basu kissing Ronaldo, Sanjay dutt getting sentenced and lot of other crap. It seems the development of high-speed interceptor missile, Advanced Air Defence by our DRDO is a lesser achievement compared with Bipasha kissing Ronaldo. There is not a single event which shows the challenges faced by India. They seem to show all is well, which is were the purpose of Media fails.

These days they are even influencing the decisions by the court by conducting sms polls on what the people think and putting pressure on the judiciary itself. Why do these people give an opinion provided they don't know the facts about the case.

It doesn't end there, the stories which deserve a mention, issues which require attention are never mentioned. For a state to be successful, media must be rational, it must act as a tool to dispense information not as an entity to influence decisions.

The Gujarat Verdict

2007-12-26T17:06:00.000-08:00

The Gujarat verdict is out. Narendra Modi has led BJP to their 4th successive term in office. All TV channels are busy analyzing the various electoral permutations and the strategies involved.

Modi is supposedly a honest and an effective leader who has done quite a bit for Gujarat in the last five years. They say he is 'incorruptible' and I dont know how much credible that argument is. Here is a leader who proclaimed that execution of Sorabuddin was 'just' and vowed to crackdown further on minorities. After the post godhra riots in 2002, people were just amazed with the simmering barbarity demonstrated Mr.Modi and his men. This bout of barabarity and intolerance on the part of Modi and his men was all too conspicuous and easy to see. But you have got to wonder why the people of Gujarat again voted him into power?

The people of Gujarat didn't have an alternative? Did they? The opposition is all messed up and unconvincing with its "soft hindutva" rhetoric. This election came after substantial amount of time after"GODHRA" and everybody had eons for deliberation and thought.

I dont want India to become a fascist state. After the partition of India and pakistan, all the so called big leaders like Churchill predicted that India will go to dogs and Pakistan will survive because they were a bunch of people who were followers of a single religion and spoke the common language and were ethnically not variegated. But India was anything but that. We have held on to our secular, internationalistic outlook towards this world and the powers of tolerance and compassion shown by us is a great accomplishment in this ethnically ravaged, intolerant and supernationalistic world.

Our political system is an exceedingly messed up labyrinth which shows no sign of credibility and integrity. All the political groups are ravaged by avaritia for power which is indispensable for them at any expense even if it means taking away a thousand innocent lives.

Do we have a solution?

Lets thank our teachers........

2007-12-17T11:25:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows the social problems facing India. Today I was talking to my friend regarding the same during lunchtime.We were trying to get deeper into the problem to find out what actually is responsible for the mayhem that we are seeing around.

One of the things that usually crops up during these kinds of discussions is politics. Though politics is a major factor, there is another thing that is more critical. It is the education everybody receives. If, each and everyone learn good ideas, ability to think and self-reasoning, this world will become a very beautiful place to live in.

Thus teachers play a very important role in a society. There are a lot of teachers who inspire students and probably every one of us must have certainly come across one. A good teacher isn’t a one who teaches a great deal of things, he (or she) is a one who makes us believe that we can scale new peaks, invent things, makes us realize the potential in us. In short a good teacher is a one who ignites the spark in our minds.

Though the quality of teaching is slowly and steadily facing a downhill in India, the primary reason for decline is mainly it is a non-lucrative job. These days, persons who aren’t able to find a proper job become teachers. With time, the breed of good teachers is slowly ebbing out.

What can we do?

Do we need to forgo our careers and take teaching? Anyone will call it absurd. It is going to be very difficult to give up this cozy life we are enjoying. So, what can be done?

We should at least encourage, compliment the teachers who are doing a good job. Just think about the best teacher whom you have come across in your life. While you are well enough to read this article in a computer, odds are high that he/she might be leading a pretty normal, some even struggling for the same.

Remember we fume at not given a proper bucket in appraisal after six months of hard work, we abuse our team leaders saying that they have not thanked us for the work we have done.

Have we ever thanked our teachers who are responsible for the lives we are leading now?

I haven't, I don’t think a lot would have. Let us do one thing for this New Year. We will find out the address of our favorite teachers and send out a New Year card thanking him / her.

Just imagine the happiness in their faces when they see the card. I bet many will cherish it and it will motivate them more to wield more responsible citizens. This might be a little thing, but I believe little things like these can change the society.

Sending cards is not only a way of thanking them, but also making them feel that are responsible for the society’s well being.

~ GuEvArA SpEaKs ~

2007-12-06T01:40:00.000-08:00

I am not a liberator. Liberators do not exist. The people liberate themselves.

We must bear in mind that imperialism is a world system, the last stage of capitalism-and it must be defeated in a world confrontation. The strategic end of this struggle should be the destruction of imperialism. Our share, the responsibility of the exploited and underdeveloped of the world, is to eliminate the foundations of imperialism: our oppressed nations, from where they extract capital, raw materials, technicians, and cheap labor, and to which they export new capital-instruments of domination-arms and all kinds of articles, thus submerging us in an absolute dependence

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? That tension of the soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, its shudders face to face with great ruin. its inventiveness and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting and exploiting suffering and whatever has been granted to it of profundity, secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness - was it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In man creature and creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form giver, hammer, hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that your pity is for the "creature in man". for what must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified - that which necessarily man and should suffer?

The monopoly capitalists - even while employing purely empirical methods - weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed.

The amount of poverty and suffering required for the emergence of a Rockefeller, and the amount of depravity that the accumulation of a fortune of such magnitude entails, are left out of the picture, and it is not always possible to make the people in general see this.
Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism, and a battle hymn for the people's unity against the great enemy of mankind: the United States of America. Wherever death may surprise us, let it be welcome, provided that this, our battle cry, may have reached some receptive ear, that another hand may be extended to wield our weapons, and that other men be ready to intone our funeral dirge with the staccato singing of the machine guns and new battle cries of war and victory.

~ Ernesto Che Guevara ~

"What a Shame" Spineless Nation

2007-12-03T19:56:00.000-08:00

“When Governments and Corporations do not live up to their obligations, it is only
solidarity among workers, trade unions and people’s groups that can carry us forward.”

It is 23 years since the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal exploded, killing and maiming countless thousands as toxic gas swept over the city's poorest inhabitants. Its US owners deserted the devastated site , still contesting their liability to pay the victims compensation. But the legacy of the disaster, and the continued lack of any clean-up operation, claims more lives even today.This is our Country, India, claiming to have more millionaires and Billionaires than any other country in the World.

Union Carbide, renamed as Dow Chemicals is being encouraged by the spineless Union commerce minister and the government of India to consider investments in the same country in which it killed innocent civilians and refused to pay any compensation .And the Tata's are brokering a deal so as to making it easier for them to leapfrog errant judiciary and bigoted regulations .

This deplorable company should not be allowed to have any shady links with a country in which it has been utterly ruthless.Let us be practical here , where can this happen? How can this be allowed to happen? How can the very country to whose citizens it has inflicted unspeakable damage accommodate them again?Do we need the money that sucked the blood of children in their graves?

Look at those photos , how can the government be so spineless . It is a blatant disregard of human lives the government has vowed to protect .We are living in a world where everything from the water that we drink and the air that we breathe are getting bottled and sold. A powerful hidden hand of corporations are ubiquitous .There was a East India company for India, a United fruit company for the Latin America , it will be soon globalization and its patrons in the free world(what ever that means when everything is charged) .

Three years after the September 11 attacks Americans are willing to put up with almost anything if they are told they are being kept safe from terror. Their corporate masters don’t feel the same way. While we submit to strip searches in airports, chemical plants across the U.S. can be easily sabotaged. The chemical industry has successfully fought all attempts to regulate safety standards.

Meanwhile back at the corporate ranch, Dow Chemical purchased Union Carbide in 1991. Dow also denies any responsibility for liability or for cleaning up the site but ASSURES that it has “never forgotten that tragic event.” Thank God for small favors. I am sure that the physically and emotionally scarred survivors of Bhopal are grateful that Dow remembers them.

Bend it like Murali

2007-12-03T10:48:00.000-08:00

It is for his dignity as much as his wizardry that we should salute the Tamil's historic feat

By the time you read this, Muttiah Muralitharan is likely to have become the highest Test wicket taker in cricket's long history. It's an extraordinary, heartwarming achievement that will be celebrated at length and in style in Sri Lanka, and elsewhere in the cricket world. But there will be quarters, particularly in Australia, where it will be begrudged and depicted as tainted.

The allegation is that Murali throws rather than bowls: that he bends his elbow when releasing the ball. It goes back to his being no-balled against Australia in 1995 - by Darrell Hair, the umpire who made the ball-tampering allegation against Pakistan at the Oval last year (which led to the Pakistanis refusing to play and forfeiting the match). Over the years Australian fans, commentators and politicians, notably the outgoing PM, John Howard, formed a chorus of detraction, branding Murali a cheat. That Murali will have overhauled Shane Warne, the most celebrated Australian of the age (whose total of 708 Murali equalled yesterday), to claim the record - probably in perpetuity - will only further sour their mood.

No bowler's action has been as intensively scrutinised as Murali's. Again and again it has been declared within the law. Murali's detractors argue that the law was changed to accommodate him, and that Murali has been spared the rod because of the power of the Asian bloc. They are wrong on both counts.

What happened was that in examining Murali's action, experts in human motion (not from the Asian bloc) discovered that many bowlers flex their elbow to some degree at the point of delivery. There was a gap between cricket theory and practice. Just as the precise arrangement of a horse's legs at the trot was undetermined until Edward Muybridge's stop-motion photography in the 1870s, so advancing technology has revealed the complexities of the bowling action as never before. And the definition of a throw appears less clear-cut than was supposed. The authorities responded by revising the laws to allow a degree of flex. This has nothing to do with Murali's feats: the law was changed to reflect new research, not to protect Murali. In retrospect it's clear that, far from enjoying preferential treatment, Murali has been singled out unfairly.

Just to add to his burden, for many years Murali has been the only Tamil in the Sri Lankan side. For some this made him a symbol of tolerance in an ethnically riven society. But the backdrop for Murali's career has been ethnic hostility and civil war, more acute now than for many years, even as Sri Lanka's favourite Tamil becomes a world record holder. It was always naive to expect Murali or any cricketer to provide a counterweight to the belligerent forces on either side. Many who cheer Murali vote for fiercely anti-Tamil politicians. Nonetheless, he has carried off this difficult role with dignity and scruple and in an island where people agree on next to nothing, that Murali is some kind of hero is accepted near universally.

Anyone who cares for cricket should celebrate Murali's achievement, which is the result of his own skill, accuracy, stamina, variety and ingenuity. In his pomp, with the ball fizzing off the pitch - either way - he's a magnificent sight. His whole body is involved in generating spin, yet he remains a marvel of balance in fluent motion, the eyes wide but sharply focused. And there's the smile. Murali relishes his craft and workload, and has done so throughout his career. He is proof that supreme competitive success need not be packaged with aggressive belligerence; not every triumph has to be celebrated with a vindictive roar and pumping fist. He's not just a Sri Lankan hero; he belongs to us all.

Mike Marqusee for The Guardian

THAT WAS NOT MY DUTY

2007-12-02T22:39:00.000-08:00

“That was not my duty anyway”, the statement which I hear often or may be this statement makes a strong impact on me that makes me feel like I hear it often. Either ways this thing keeps running in my mind seeking justification for its meaning ever since I started thinking rationally. “I’ve done my job, that’s not my responsibility”- when does a person say these words? - When a person is asked to do something really he’s not supposed to do (but that’s not the case all the time). It signifies one’s inefficiency, lack of ability, lack of interest and more importantly lack of humanity!!! Well, wait wait, what does humanity got to do here, he is not saying that he won’t do his duty, all he claims is that he won’t do something which is not his duty/responsibility. Is he right or wrong? I’m not sure, but doing one’s duty without realizing the actual cause for doing it is as good as not doing at all. Many officials follow the rules just for the sake of following it forgetting the actual reason for which the rules were defined.

Once I wanted to book a train to Coimbatore from Chennai. It was a round trip journey and again I had to go back to Coimbatore in just couple of days after the return. It was a sultry afternoon and the booking centre at Chennai-mambalam was already suffocating with over crowd. Being a partly civilized Indian I waited patiently in the queue for more than 2 hours until my chance to go to the counter came. I had to book three tickets totally and the person in the counter rejected my forms stating that according to rules he was not supposed to book more than two tickets for the same person. The ultimate purpose for framing such rules was to avoid stagnation and to avoid ticket brokers who block an entire line having bunches of their customers’ form. But with me it was a different case, I was booking tickets for myself and between same stations and journeys were scheduled within a week. The rule was formed to benefit the passengers and it shouldn’t have been a hindrance to me, and while trying to explain all these things to him, he booked two of the tickets, one to return from Coimbatore and my next journey to Coimbatore. Things can’t go crazier than this, without going to Coimbatore, how can I return from there. It’s next to impossible to get a ticket either in bus or in train from Chennai to Coimbatore at eleventh hour especially during festive season. The remaining tickets were very few and I pleaded him to book one more ticket that was very essential. He started shouting at me and he said that I have stopped him from doing is duty and he continued saying that it was because of people like that India is getting corrupted and lot of honest government officials are misdirected because of people of my caliber and what not. If he had been allowed he would have told even that I was solely responsible for India’s debts and for all the wars with neighboring nations, internal riots etc. Later he called the public for his support, which were standing behind me in the line and obviously they came for all they need is to throw me out of the row to get their work done. I explained the situation to them and one of the gentlemen in the row agreed with my argument and asked the official to book the ticket for me, but he wouldn’t listen.

All I could do according to the rules was to go and stand at the end of the row and wait for another two hours to get my ticket booked. But by that time the counter would get closed. So I asked him to cancel the return ticket because there was no hope that I would get to the destination and there is point in having the return ticket. He said ‘no’ for that also because according to the rules he was not supposed to perform more than two transactions per passenger, be it reservation or cancellation. My god, this was getting on the top of my nerve and I was completely helpless.

Though the person was technically correct and he performed his duty of booking two tickets perfectly he was completely useless. All I had in my hand was two tickets which I could not use unless he books an onward journey ticket and I was already thrown out of the booking center. I could hear his voice from there lamenting to his counter parts “saavu kirakki, thaali arukka vandhuttan pa, duty time la disturb pannitaan pa”. If I have to technically translate his statement he means that “I’m a person with a dead body who disturbs him during working hours to cut the sacred thread (mangal soothra).

So what does the word duty mean? According to my e-dictionary duty means “Work that you are obliged to perform for moral or legal reasons”. Each and every one of us is bound to do our work both on legal and moral reasons. Legal reasons are described on the paper and every organization has its own rules and regulations to follow. But moral reasons come from within, the reasoning capability that every individual possess. We have to make use of those underlying sixth sense and perform our duties. Such an act I technically define it as HUMANITY. Be human for all humans, we are human beings not the same old Homo sapiens. Doing the duty with humanity means taking up the responsibility, if every one of us take up the responsibility we will really shine and yes one day we can it will be really meaningful to say “India shines”.

I wanted to convey this thing to all and hence I have penned it down. Will it create any impact on someone and ignite the spark needed for the society? Will someone carry this lamp to illuminate the lives socially blind? Well that’s not my duty anyways….

The Moral Agent

2007-12-01T13:45:00.000-08:00

What he wants us to see is: the lot. Not one side or another, but the whole shooting match A Polish immigrant, cabin boy and gunrunner, Joseph Conrad wrote action-packed adventure stories, which were also modernist classics. Giles Foden celebrates an enduring master on the 150th anniversary of his birth

"I have never learned to trust it. I can't trust it to this day ... A dreadful doubt hangs over the whole achievement of literature." Thus wrote Joseph Conrad, in an essay published in the Manchester Guardian Weekly on December 4 1922. Long before Auden was telling us poetry makes nothing happen, or Adorno was saying there could be no poetry after Auschwitz, Conrad was questioning - fundamentally - the political and moral utility of writing. Yet this was a writer who drew the approbation of FR Leavis, the pre-eminent British supporter of the view that literature could play a role in the maintenance of civilisation. In 1941, Leavis described Conrad as being "among the very greatest novelists in the language - or any language".

Maybe the dichotomy is not so marked as it first appears. Leavis prized "essential organisation" in a novel, and this was something that appealed to Conrad, too. It is evident in his Guardian piece. Under the headline "Notices to Mariners", he asserted the futility of literary effort in contrast to the informational precision of reports of the comings and goings of ships, then commonly printed in newspapers. I would also contend that Conrad prized moral intensity and perspicacity as much as Leavis, even if he did not believe in abstract moral principles. That the marine register's "ideal of perfect accuracy" cannot be achieved by literature does not mean literature must be empty of ideals. For Conrad, there was a middle way, one in which moral values emerged from relative positions, from the "essential organisation" of the literary work itself, rather than anything beyond it.

Literature was not the only thing about which Conrad was doubtful. A decade or so before "Notices to Mariners", he was entertaining similar doubts about identity: "Both at sea and on land my point of view is English, from which the conclusions should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning." He wrote The Secret Agent, one of the great novels of modernism, a few years later. The depiction of Verloc, the agent provocateur and double man of the title, whose diplomatic employers insist he must rouse his anarchist friends to a terrorist outrage in London, would be one of the great feats of world literature were it not outshone by the portrayal of Verloc's wife, Winnie, whose quietist attitude to her husband and life in general is overturned by the plot. She stabs him with a carving knife.

Part of the genius of The Secret Agent is the way it shows the unknowability of people. A cold eye is cast on character - the very idea of character - in all Conrad's novels. In his doomy worldview, as in TS Eliot's, subjectivity cannot be pinned down with accuracy. As Marlow says of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, it is a chimera. "He was just a word for me ... it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one's existence ... its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream - alone.

For Conrad, none of the big stories, from Christianity to communism to psychoanalysis (he met a disciple of Freud's in 1921 and was extremely scornful of the books lent to him), provided adequate explanations of selfhood. He had seen the decline and fall of too many men who put their certitude in equality or justice or liberty tout court. His fundamental position is revealed in a letter to his friend, the socialist Robert Cunninghame Graham:

Life knows us not and we do not know life - we don't even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth, and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow.

But behind the modernist sentiments and fabulous sentence-making, there is something else going on: an idea of moral and cultural dialectic, a sense of virtue as relative rather than fixed and static. By its nature, such a conception of virtue is likely to appear in negative form. As Conrad put it in his 1905 essay "Books": "To be hopeful in an artistic sense it is not necessary to think that the world is good. It is enough to believe that there is no impossibility of it being made so."

This shouldn't be taken as the defensive, hollowed-out position it appears to be. Positively, usefully, a sense of relativism-as-virtue was what Conrad was all about. It was what he valued. On the 150th anniversary of his birth and the centenary of the publication of The Secret Agent, such a value seems worth exploring again. In a networked global culture, in which the differences between moral beliefs are constantly thrown into sharp relief, it seems more necessary than ever.

Yet Conrad is not a popular writer these days. Partly this is exactly to do with the sceptical, unsentimental line he tends to take, but it is also a question of the density of his writing. Coming to him for the first time, many readers find him difficult. Sometimes it is said that this is because English was his second language (actually it was his third - he learned and wrote French before he knew English, adopting Flaubert as one of his literary masters). Whatever the reason, "opaque" is a word often used to describe his style. Or an appropriately maritime metaphor is employed: "I couldn't make headway." Or: "A bit long-winded."

Even supporters such as Leavis complained of language whose effect "is not to magnify but rather to muffle". The objection was best put by HG Wells: reviewing An Outcast of the Islands (1896), he described Conrad's style as being "like river-mist; for a space things are seen clearly, and then comes a great grey bank of printed matter, page upon page, creeping round the reader, swallowing him up". Seeing Conrad clearly can indeed be tricky. But that is the point: his books are epistemological journeys, parables of knowing. He is a writer whom one has to get to know. The reader has to become familiar with a narrative manner, a tone, a way of proceeding. It helps to have a grasp of his biography, too, because his life story informs the slipperiness of subjectivity in his work.

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3 1857 in Polish Ukraine. At a time when much of Poland was under Russian control, his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a Polish nationalist revolutionary with artistic sensibilities. A poet and dramatist with a "terrible gift for irony", as Conrad put it, he translated Shakespeare and Dickens (two authors who had a crucial influence on his son). When Józef was four, Apollo was arrested by Poland's tsarist authorities for underground activity. After six months' imprisonment in the Warsaw Citadel, the family was sent into exile in the Russian province of Vologda, a place Apollo described as "a huge quagmire" where the two most important aspects of society were "police and thieves".

In 1863, the family was allowed to move to Kiev, where Conrad's mother died. When Apollo himself fell ill, they were permitted to relocate to Galicia back in Poland, then to Cracow, where his father died in 1869.

These events, together with an unsuccessful teenage love affair, led Conrad to make a decision that he would dramatise again and again in his fiction. At the age of 17, in October 1874, he left Poland, travelling by train to Marseille, making what he later described as a "standing jump out of his racial surroundings and association". This idea of the "jump" - the radical existentialist step - is central to Lord Jim and many of Conrad's other novels and short stories. In Lord Jim, the hero leaps from a ship full of Muslim pilgrims, which he believes to be sinking. The act dogs him for ever, but the question of whether he is a coward is not simply answered. It relates to the whole book and other books, too - the idealistic Coral Island-style yarns that made Jim take ship in the first place.

Conrad's own step into another life was taken gingerly. For a month or so, he lived in a lodging house in the Old Port in Marseille, before boarding a three-masted wooden barque called the Mont-Blanc bound for Martinique and Haiti. He made the return trip, then joined the ship again, this time as a cabin boy. Further travels followed as a steward on another ship, the Saint-Antoine, with a range of Caribbean ports on the itinerary. Friendship with two of the crew, the brothers César and Dominique Cervoni, led him during 1877-78 to become involved in gunrunning along the Spanish coast for the Carlist cause. The episode is fictionalised in the late novel The Arrow of Gold (1919), in which Dominique Cervoni appears, complete with a thick black moustache, under his own name. Cervoni was also the model for the eponymous protagonist of Nostromo (1904), probably the most difficult to read of all Conrad's novels. Set in an imaginary South American country called Costaguana, it portrays the effects of the San Tomé silver mine on a wide range of characters. Cervoni figures in The Rover (1923) and Suspense (published posthumously in 1925), too. It is as if he is Conrad's idea of the perfect hero, always chancing his arm but never losing his self-possession.

For all that, Dominique Cervoni didn't bring Conrad much luck in life. The gun-running ship was scuttled to avoid capture and Conrad ran into financial difficulties. In late February or early March 1878, after a gambling jag in Monte Carlo, he attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver.

He avoided serious injury and was rescued by his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowksi, who settled his debts. The story was hushed up and didn't emerge fully until the 1950s. But the clues were always there in the fiction. The idea of suicide is important in the novels, several of which defend it as a legitimate act in the face of an absurd world. They do so rather in the terms of French existentialism - there are links between Conrad and Camus - as a form of conviction when all other forms seem worthless.

It was decided with Tadeusz that Conrad should sign up for the British merchant navy. Joining the Skimmer of the Sea at Lowestoft on July 11 1878, he began his career as a proper seaman, which would last until he signed off as second mate on the Adowa on January 17 1894, at the age of 36. In between came many adventures, in ships sound and unsound, and destinations that included Australia, Thailand, India and Malaya, as well as, in 1890-91, the gruelling journey up the Congo that gave rise to Heart of Darkness

The trips abroad were interspersed with periods in London where Conrad, like Dickens a keen walker, absorbed the alienating, sinister cityscape - from the docks to the slums of Islington - that would provide the backdrop to The Secret Agent. His first shore-leave was spent in London, in digs in Finsbury Park, in 1878. He afterwards moved to Stoke Newington, then to Pimlico, where in 1889 he began his first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), a suspense-subverting critique of adventurism.

After its acceptance by the publisher Unwins, Conrad began to familiarise himself with literary London as well as the city's shadowlands of crime and poverty. He also got married, having proposed to Jessie George on the steps of the National Gallery. Just before the wedding, Conrad described her as "a small, not at all striking person (to tell the truth alas - rather plain!) who nevertheless is very dear to me". It might not seem the most secure foundation for a successful marriage.

Conrad's friend Edward Garnett (senior reader at Unwins) introduced him to the luminaries of the day, often at a French restaurant in Gerrard Street. Like his first ship, it was called the Mont-Blanc, but the atmosphere could hardly have been more different. He would convene there with the likes of Chesterton, Belloc and Edward Thomas, as well as with the fellow novelist to whom he would become closest, Ford Madox Ford.

Later in life, Conrad met Henry James and HG Wells, the literary titans of the day. He had close but tense relationships with both of them. They recognised his genius with a condescending prickliness; he was always conscious of their greater earnings and renown. Money was a serious problem in the Conrad household until the 1920s, when he began to secure substantial serial deals and sell in large numbers.

Married life was problematic, too, but he and Jessie rubbed along, puzzling friends and acquaintances. Garnett worried that Conrad's "ultra-nervous organisation appeared to make matrimony extremely hazardous". Ottoline Morrell described Jessie as "a good and reposeful mattress for this hypersensitive, nerve-wracked man, who did not ask from his wife high intelligence, but only an assuagement of life's vibrations".

Jessie understood more than they knew, writing to Garnett after Conrad's death from a heart attack in 1924 at the age of 66: "I may not be capable - as you say - of appreciating or even understanding his genius, but you may remember one point I make ... which is to live in this world one talented partner is enough, the other must be more commonplace and ordinary. I have claimed that distinction for myself." There is something of her passivity in the portrayal of Winnie in The Secret Agent, whose husband is provoked to say: "Oh yes! I know your deaf and dumb trick." But Jessie Conrad was not so colourless as she has sometimes been thought, claiming for herself both the right to sell her husband's manuscripts to support a gambling habit and (via mediums) a channel to him after his death.

Writer's block was the biggest factor in Conrad's professional life. Commonly, in his letters and articles as well as his fiction, incertitude of will is pitched against the physical immediacy of action. Action, that is, in the sense of both the boys' adventure book style that his own novels ironise and the act of writing itself. The moving pen is set, retrospectively and somewhat nostalgically, alongside the roaming life of the sailor. For pure activity, the pen will always lose the battle with the belaying pin, but the task of writing must be faced up to, just as maritime tasks were. Often, however, very often, Conrad was not up to it. "My dear Pinker," he wrote to his agent in 1907, "I feel that this is almost too much for me." At the time he was writing a longish tale called "The Duel" and working on his bestseller, Chance (1913), as well as The Secret Agent

Greater experience and increased renown did not help much. The delivery of books and journalistic copy became, as the narrator of The Shadow-Line (1917) has it, an "ordeal ... [for] maturing and tempering my character". Oscillating between mental torpor and highly productive bursts, Conrad turned achievement anxiety into a personal moral sounding board.

Appropriately, the line between action and inaction is the ground of many of the novels. In Conrad's writing generally, the grandiloquent Edwardian temper shades into something hesitantly modern, as the forthrightness of imperialist subject matter is undercut by the obliquities of narrative form. All this leaves his works unclassifiable, spilling "out of high literature into light reading and romance", as the critic Frederic Jameson has put it, "floating uncertainly between Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson".

Uncertainty is itself thematically unstable in Conrad's work. Although some of the maritime novels promote the need to act decisively ("command means self-command", as it is put in The Shadow-Line), in others uncertainty is the positive ground the novel discovers: a place where the world's multidimensional difficulties can, if just for a moment, be squared. Conrad was following in famous footsteps here: it has been argued - by the excellent Conrad critic John Stape - that the imprint of Shakespeare on his works amounts to "a full-scale dialogue with the playwright's ideas".

There is much evidence for the significance of Conrad's Shakespearian encounter. Although Victory (1915) is often seen as a rewriting of The Tempest, some early reviewers called Heyst, its withdrawn and hesitating hero, a "Hamlet of the South Seas". The scholar Eloise Knapp Hay wrote an article entitled "Lord Jim and le Hamletisme", and the novel is indeed full of passing allusion to the play.

From Shakespeare, Conrad took not only doubt and scepticism, but also cultural multiplicity - the idea that there is never a single right position in human affairs. Other masters gave different lessons. From Dickens came a sense of the particularity of character, but also direction as to how different characters' viewpoints might usefully be distributed across space and time. This was particularly important in the management of the disparate narratives in The Secret Agent and in the novel's depiction of London: "that wonder city", as Conrad put it, "the growth of which bears no sign of intelligent design, but many traces of freakishly sombre fantasy the Great Master knew so well to bring out". From Flaubert, meanwhile, came the belief in the novel as being founded on impersonality, and further lessons in handling of point of view: that most difficult part of the novelist's art.

Typically, Conradian narrative has a frame supplied by a narrator figure or set of narrator figures, named or anonymous: most famously, perhaps, Marlow in Lord Jim. Henry James - Conrad's sometime supporter, but more often tricky competitor - identified the key to Conrad's narration as being "a prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed". A century or so later, one can see it differently, with the subjective in Conrad being largely derived from the "essential organisation" of the outstretched ground itself. For one such as Conrad who is sceptical about abstract ideas, for the modernist who cannot believe in human essence, context supplies character value. Humanity is not something hovering "up there", nor something hidden kernel-like "in here" (in the soul, genes, etc): it is forged in exactly such complex perspectival interconnections as Conrad's writing so splendidly affords.

As his first great biographer Jocelyn Baines wrote: "The essence of his art lies in the construction of a setting where a complex state of mind can be presented with the fullest emotional and dramatic effect." In Lord Jim, for example, switches between sympathetic and negative responses to a character create depth by constant realignment and play of emotion. It is, to my mind, the nearest thing in fiction to the substance of one's real encounters with people.

As well as defining character, the "outstretched ground" of context provides a map of Conrad's moral vision. Oblique narrative techniques - the intersecting frames or narrative "lenses" for which he is famous - have the effect of lifting the subject matter from the boys' books with which Conrad's novels share an affinity. These frames transform plain action stories into inquiries about what it means to act in the world, what it means to be a moral agent.

The reader is part of that transformation. Rather than the continuity of linear narrative, with the coherent subject which that implies, Conrad offers something closer to sets of pictures that the reader must make sense of in collaboration with the writer. This is one of the reasons for the alleged opacity. You have to do the work yourself.

As well as taking place over the span of an individual novel or story, this process of inclusion happens paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, through a process the critic Ian Watt has described as "delayed decoding". It is a means of deferring the reader's decipherment of the text in the same way that a consciousness takes fuller stock of its environment over time. The classic instance of this is Marlow's belated understanding of the arrows hitting the boat in Heart of Darkness

Critics have connected delayed decoding to impressionism and phenomenology, and Conrad himself described his literary task as "to make you hear, to make you feel ... before all, to make you see". And what he wants to make us see is: the lot. Not one side or another, not my point of view or yours, but the whole shooting match. As he put it in a letter to his friend Richard Curle: "my 'art' ... is fluid, depending on grouping (sequence) which shifts, and on changing lights giving varied effects of perspective".

Everything in his work, in particular the manipulation of time and perspective, is directed to the aim of varying understanding across the widest possible context. He wants to give us the "ideal" or universal value of things, and fluid alteration of perspective may be the only way to do this if you do not believe in God or universally applicable abstract ideas. Playing all sides is partly the explanation for the extreme pains of composition that Conrad suffered.

Yet the attempt to be not just "homo duplex", but homo complex (or homo multiplex, even) is liberating rather than imprisoning. It is exactly why he remains such an important writer. Far from the "bloody racist" Chinua Achebe once accused him of being (in a lecture in 1975, with respect to Heart of Darkness), he is consistently inclusive. Conrad is the perennial immigrant. As his friend John Galsworthy put it: "Prisoners in the cells of our own nationality, we never see ourselves; it is reserved for one outside looking through the tell-tale peep-hole to get a proper view of us."

In today's era of globalisation and environmentalism, which demand holistic approaches, we can appreciate Conrad's attempt to dramatise the human condition in its widest possible ideation. Only when the other is recognised, geographically and historically, is the true moral value of a given situation revealed. So far as such value is calculable, it always involves differentials between positions rather than measuring up to any external "sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct" (Lord Jim

For opacity, then, read capacity. Conrad's genius lies in his constant migration to the outside edge, to a place on the periphery from where value is generated inwardly, by a constantly recessive unveiling or unwrapping. In his greatest work, Heart of Darkness, the mode of storytelling itself is determined in this way. We never know what "it" is, we never know what "the horror" is. The unknown? The subconscious? The "unspeakable potentialities of the human soul" (Leavis)?

The deconstructionist critic J Hillis Miller has analysed Heart of Darkness in terms of two metaphors that help us to understand what is going on. To him the process of reading the novella is like the cracking of a nut that has no kernel, or a series of misty haloes, which he connects to the German word for parable, Gleichnis. These metaphors actually emerge from the text of the novella itself, as a frame narrator introduces Marlow's "inconclusive experiences":

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical ... and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty haloes that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

In other words, the meaning is defined by context rather than something internal. This very modern way of looking at things is one of the reasons for Conrad's endurance. What he did was turn this approach into a functioning aesthetic.

By dramatising multiple points of view, and constantly shifting the coordinates, he was able to project a truly democratic, multi-cultural worldview, one appropriate for his own fractured identity. For any practising writer, it is a relief to learn that renown finally came to him. In 1923 he visited the United States to great acclaim, and the following year declined a knighthood. His influence on subsequent authors has been so pervasive that Graham Greene, for one, wrote of having to stop reading Conrad for fear of becoming completely enslaved to his style.

One couldn't describe EM Forster as having been influenced by Conrad, exactly, but he probably had it right when he said of him that "the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel".

Ah, that mist again. The explanation of what the vapour enshrouds is best left to Conrad's finest statement about the fundamental truth of fiction, published in the New York Times Saturday Review on August 2 1901:

Fiction, at the point of development at which it has arrived, demands from the writer a spirit of scrupulous abnegation. The only legitimate basis of creative work lies in the courageous recognition of all the irreconcilable antagonisms that make our life so enigmatic, so burdensome, so fascinating, so dangerous - so full of hope.

· Giles Foden

Ayn Rand - Objectivism

2007-11-30T07:19:00.000-08:00

Its time I spoke about Objectivism and Ayn Rand. I read Fountainhead 3 years ago. To be frank, at that time I never knew anything about Ayn Rand or Objectivism. The book was written pretty well given the author is from Russia. In the coming years, I learnt about objectivism through internet. I recently saw a documentary about (Gautam is gonna kill me for this, but I saw it even before you could warn me). The title of the documentary is "Ayn Rand - A sense of Life". After watching it , I decided to write about this topic someday and I think I have the time to write it now.

Ayn Rand was short and precise about her philosophy. This is what she asked people to do, "Be Selfish!!!” .She should be absolute nuts to say that people should be selfish. She defies all Religion in this world. It also had some archive footage about Ms. Rand talking about how everyone should be selfish and she was supportive of capitalism. I thought Ayn Rand was utter rubbish, I know I may get the ire of some of the readers, but How can one live without helping others. The irony is Cecile B. Demille helped Ayn Rand to get a job in his studio and that kick started her writing career. I found it foolish when someone else helps you create a career; you say that you must be selfish. I think Ms. Rand missed the whole point.

Every religion in this world preaches that we have to help others in some way or the other. Feynman says that the moral part of a religion is the only thing that he accepts from a religion. Ms. Rand is an atheist that does not mean that she can say whatever she thinks. I think she missed the whole point, and in the documentary she was taking her characters in her book for her philosophy.

I thought that Ms. Rand missed the whole point. Each and every action that a man takes is to satisfy his conscience. For e.g., when a guy offers something to a beggar, he is happy that he has helped a poor guy. Inherently, he does that because it gives him satisfaction, otherwise he would not have offered anything to that beggar. Even if he is a miser and doesn’t give anything to that beggar, he does that because that makes him happy. So every action that a man does is for his satisfy his inner greediness. By satisfying his inner self, he also helps another person. Is this wrong? Ms. Rand says it is wrong and I say Ms. Rand is wrong. She staunchly opposes Socialism. What a joke?

In a particular interview she was caught unawares by the host, the guy asked her she felt when her husband died. She thought that she wished that she can be with him when he meets St.Peter in heaven in support of him. So the host told her that it was against objectivism (he was right). She said something and escaped that question. If she wants to help his husband, doesn’t that action goes against her philosophy? Every philosophy has some flaws, but Ms. Rand’s philosophy is full of flaws. How can a selfish person write about Love? In Ms. Rand stories, love plays a major part. A selfish guy cannot love. A guy loves a girl and will do anything to make her happy which in turn makes him happy.

I was also angry that she was supporting the capitalist policy of America and she started to campaign for it. We can see what selfishness and capitalism (of US and UK) has brought to this world. We have numerous example, Iraq, Afghanisthan , etc…. They wont go and fight the militants in Africa, because there is nothing in Africa. Their sole interest is the oil rich countries and that’s why they went for Iraq , when there is no sign of WMD in there, get control of all the oil resource and start a civil war and devastate the whole country. Their next target could be Iran. During time when people need care and peace, I thought that documentary to be piece of s*** and Ayn Rand’s philosophy to be utter crap.

2007-11-25T18:07:00.000-08:00

2007-11-25T17:54:00.000-08:00

our brothers who suffer... Safi karmachars... thuppuravu thozhilaaLigaL... sewer workers...

2007-11-25T17:21:00.000-08:00

yesterday was when our common drains leaked like its a miniature black river, spoiling our day altogether... in the evening, the khaki-clad guy was called in... he came in with a nice smile on his face, chit chatted with his co-worker for a while and after changing into bare minimum, he got into work... yes, sewerage work...

Sewerage Work

“It is a familiar sight for residents: A frail man, drenched in raw sewage, looking out from a manhole. He dives into the sewer, scoops a bucketful of the dirt, comes out and hands it over to a co-worker before plunging again. the worker repeats this inhuman operation several times and yet manages to survive the hazards.there are several unfortunate men who have lost their lives while making a livelihood by cleaning the city’s sewers with a network of about 3,000 km length.
The underground sewers of Chennai have become death traps for workers and little seems to have been done to prevent the loss of innocent lives. Last year, 30-year-old Ramesh choked to death when he stepped into a Metro water sewer at Pulianthope. On another day, Shanmugham (47) met with a similar fate at Purasawalkam. On both occasions, firemen reached the spot after the workers died.
interestingly, Karnataka was the first state to ban the practice as early as the 1970s, but the practice continues there to this day. There are about 10,000 to 15,000 manual scavengers clearing away the human shit in the Hi-Tech capital of India, Bangalore, also known as the ‘Silicon Valley of India’, the state capital of Karnataka.They lived in segregated housing with minimal amenities.
Banning manual scavenging did not stop the exploitation of Dalits. Exploitation has taken on a new form over many decades and it is purely the cities that have built underground sewerage systems. The workers, all men, are assigned to carry out the maintenance of sewers and also to unclog them—a normal procedure in many countries one might think. But what makes it horrific in the Indian context is that the work is carried out under vile conditions—the worker, without any protective gear, dives into the raw sewage through a narrow manhole and cleans the sewer manually. The work is even more hazardous than the manual scavenging that the women do, as the worker is immersed completely in raw sewage. In India, industrial waste is also directly mixed with domestic sewage exposing workers not only to biological hazards but also to dangerous chemicals.
Ironically instead of improving the work conditions or investing in machinery and protective equipment the municipalities have started to subcontract the sewerage cleaning jobs to private contractors so that they escape prime responsibility. This has resulted in even lower wages and absolutely no security for them. a Dalit dying in the sewers is a non-event. With so little wages and no benefits it is hard to understand how any Dalit can get any sort of education for their children to make use of the wonderful reservations (quotas) that the government has promised; it seems the only reservation they have 100 percent is to work in filthy sewers.

an NGO study found the presence of toxic chemicals like chlorides, hydrochlorides, sulphates, nitrates, and even metals like mercury, lead, and chromium. they found about 680 ailments among them.

According to the The National Geographic report, more than 100 workers die every year in sewer ‘accidents’ due to inhalation of toxic gases (methane etc.) or drowning in excrement. No official data are available about the number of workers who are killed cleaning the sewers; estimates based on newspaper reports give a rough figure of well over 1,000 a year across India.
“Rainy seasons are worst when the sewers get flooded. The manholes have a small circumference and we have to dive without any rope attached and at times it is difficult to find the way back due to the dark waters. Many of our colleagues have perished and we might also die but this is the only livelihood we have. No one here lives to old age, if one does not die in an accident, a disease kills him,” one worker reported to the PRIA researcher.

Some of the preliminary findings from the The Centre for Education and Communication (CEC), another NGO's study: • Few workers in age group 50-59; most die before retirement• 35 percent literacy• Monthly wage for daily wagers Rs 2,950 ($67)• More than 40 percent of workers are not permanent though more than 90 percent of them have been working for more than five years continuously• 60 percent of workers enter manholes more than 10 times a month• Acute illnesses: eye irritation, upper respiratory tract irritation , difficulty in breathing, skin rash , cut and injury . Chronic illnesses: fatigue, watering/burning of eyes, cough , skin irritation , skin roughness , skin rash , lower backache • Little awareness about hazards at work;• No knowledge about protective gear except safety belts • 35 percent immunised against tetanus; no immunisation for hepatitis B or typhoid fever

what can we do about it?

the questions which raise in our minds after reading this ... :
1: what will i do when i encounter a person in my neighborhood, my apartments who does sewerage cleaning work?

2: what do you think we can possibly do to end such practices?

3: when there are machines available now in India to do even menial jobs, why not machines eliminate them altogether? and if you are an engineer, what can you do towards making such machines?

4: how much will you pay him? do you think paying him a little more can really undo the harm that happens to his body? 100? 200? a thousand rupees??

5: what awareness can we create in the people ? what kind of medical care and precautionary seminars can we ourselves do towards such people?

6:lastly, would you care to give him a cup of coffee in your favourite mug after he cleans himself after he is done with cleaning your bowel products?

Some Advertisements to make people think!

2007-11-24T19:43:00.001-08:00

Some Advertisements to make people think!

2007-11-24T19:41:00.000-08:00