Africa's aid industry

A long time ago I had started writing an article on how foreign aid in Africa had done absolutely nothing to bring the people out of their poverty and instead given birth to this huge self-serving industry in the developed nations which involved expensive fund raisers for the rich and vacations in the third world for their 'volunteers'.

I have in fact written about this earlier, but a very nice and detailed article again introduced me to this issue. Written by Yash Tandon on the news site http://www.allafrica.com/, the article follows the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held at Busan, South Korea from 29 November to 1 December.

Titled "It is Official - Busan Heralds the Dismantling of the Aid Industry", the article says that all the donors at the Forum finally came around to accept that what is required is not "aid effectiveness", which has been the focus all along, but "development cooperation", which should have been the focus on the entire aid industry in the first place. Everybody got this but the Western aid industry itself, and perhaps for very obvious and self-serving reasons.

According to The Guardian, the biggest outcome of the Forum at Busan was the emergence of the BRIC nations as one of the key players in providing aid and assistance in future. Apart from that, the article says, there was no serious commitment or targets set at the Forum, but only a promise to do so in the future.

If you care about evidence-based policy making, this conference has been mixed. While there was not enough explicit referencing, sifting and collation of the plethora of evidence available on what has worked and what hasn't over the five years since the Paris declaration, it has, nevertheless, filtered into the outcome document, with less important Paris commitments being dropped and the vital ones being reaffirmed.

The issue of ownership, as I understand, is that the third world nation that is the recipient of the aid must have a great control on the aid and a greater say in where to spend the aid. This has been lacking because, I feel, the donor does not believe the recipient has the ability to spend it wisely, or perhaps the fear of corruption, or simply because they think they can do a better job. In India's case, corruption was and remains a huge issue as large amounts pilfered through the numerous aid schemes, both funded within and without the country.

After last minute negotiations (in which Brazil played a key role) and the insertion of a paragraph distancing non-DAC (the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) donors from concrete commitments, China, India and Brazil all endorsed the idea of working together more closely in what is being described, even by usually critical civil society representatives, as a "new global partnership". This matters to African countries that want to apply principles to all international partners, without diminishing the distinctiveness of Chinese support for their development.

The inclusion of civil society in negotiations was also an important procedural innovation, in contrast to the reduced political space it is experiencing in many countries.

If Paris was a triumph of technocratic organisation, Busan has been an expression of shifting geopolitical realities, with the role of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) proving more critical than ever before.

African nations too, are beginning to demand greater ownership of aid, and its a good step forward in asserting to the donors that the former probably knows best whats best for itself.

The Business Daily Africa article linked above says it best that while aid is a noble thing, all effort must be made by African nations to replace it with homegrown aids to development.

In the aid industry, since the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 there have been significant structural changes to make aid more effective. In recent years, this re-engineering process has come to be known as ‘the new aid architecture’.” Before 1989 aid transfers to poor countries were largely driven by geopolitical and commercial reasons. Consequently, some of the most inhuman regimes in Zaire, Philippines, Haiti, Bangladesh and Nigeria received aid regardless of atrocities committed on citizens.

With the Cold War long gone today aid delivery is being informed by a number of factors. These include: failures of previous economic management approaches such as the Washington Consensus; emergence of new global economic players (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Venezuela and South Korea) from among recent developing countries; reinvigorated roles of the international philanthropic foundations; emerging development challenges such as climate change and global terrorism; and recurrence of financial crises around the world since the 1970s.

Much as aid has been useful in preventing destitution and in catalysing economic growth, on its own it is not a panacea to development in poor countries. There is need therefore to radically implement local non- aid means to development.

But to finish out on this post where I can see that the global consensus is firmly headed towards the realization that the aid industry, the way it has functioned, has achieved very little, and rather, has emasculated the societies it proposes to help by making them dependent on that aid and doing nothing to enable them to be independent. China has built a lot of infrastructure in the continent of Africa in recent years, but as more and more media publications find out, it is mainly on a quid pro quo basis as the Chinese ask for the country's natural resources in return. A Professor in the American University in the United States follows Chinese aid in Africa and seems to be a decent source (biased in the way I like it) of information.

Coming to the paper written by Mr.Tandon, there are some choice lines I could pick up.

Professional politicians and diplomats have a particular way of making public speeches. They send important and often critical messages encrypted in coded language. One has to be able to interpret the code, to read between the lines, in order to get to their hidden messages. At Busan, when the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said 'Beware of those who want to take your resources with quick fixes', you can be reasonably sure that the warning was levelled at African countries and the pointer was at China. (I was once a politician and a diplomat; I have learnt to read between the lines).

One, the ODA (Overseas Development Aid) is no longer the main source of development financing. 'It used to be 70% of total financial flows in the 1960s; now it is only 13% -- even as aid quantity has increased'. So, then, what is the purpose of aid? It should be, she said, 'to facilitate private sector investment'.

Two, 'donor aid is driven by donor agenda...We should follow partner lead'. By 'partner' she meant the recipients of aid. There should be, she added, 'genuine mutual accountability'. She gave the example of recipients' insistence that donor aid should be 'untied' to donor procurement sources.

Three, and this is a telling statistic that put to question the whole issue of aid effectiveness. Clinton said that an independent study undertaken just before the Busan meeting revealed that out of 13 objectives set out by the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, only one was met.

The principles of the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness do not address the underlying dynamics of 'aid'. The PDAE takes 'aid' for granted as a 'virtue', and gets on to the 'technical' task of making it 'effective'. Deeper thinking (not a forte of 'normal' professional politicians and diplomats) would show that the PDAE principles obscure, obfuscate, reality of life; they encourage muddled thinking on aid.

The President of Rwanda made a cool, dispassionate, speech covering the following issues.

One, 'massive aid transfers have been ineffective'.

Two, there is a contradiction in the growth statistics of Africa. On the one hand, African economies have grown 7 to 8 per cent over the last several years; on the other hand, the per capita income has fallen.

Three, many African countries are unlikely to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by 2015. This is the hard reality.

Four, there is a 'huge aid industry' that has now become 'a permanent feature' of north-south relations. This 'industry' is undermining the essential linkages between aid, trade and investment.

Five, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness states 'mutual accountability' as one of its principles. 'In reality there is no mutual accountability'. Kagame pointedly added: 'When a country is not managing its resources how can it be held accountable?'

Six, Donors only talk about channelling aid through country systems; 'in practice they refuse to use national systems'. There is a 'need for greater mutual trust'.

QUEEN RANIA AL ABDULLAH OF JORDAN - THE MOST ENLIGHTENED AND FUTURIST SPEECH OF THE WHOLE BUSAN CONFERENCE

Busan, she said, is different from Paris or Accra. 'We live in a different world; it is a world of Tahrir Square, and Wall Street occupation'. The world, despite all talk about globalisation, is 'growing apart, not coming close'. In some countries such as Argentina and Malaysia they have narrowed income gap. But global inequality is increasing. We need 'a new development paradigm'. Development has to be based on equity; growth itself does not bring equity. We must give everyone an opportunity to develop his or her potential. 'Sixty percent of our people are youth and a quarter of them are unemployed. They want jobs not aid'.

ANGEL GURRIA, MYUNG-BAK LEE AND BAN KI MOON TREAD OLD, OBSOLETE, PATHS

Angel Gurria, the Secretary General of the OECD, President Lee Myung-bak of Korea, and Ban Ki-Moon, UN Secretary-General were treading old, worn out, paths in their presentations. Interestingly, they had the same message, as if they had sat together and planned what to say. Their arguments can be briefly summarised as follows:

One, Korea is a shining example of a country that has 'moved from being a recipient of aid to a donor'. (This message was played up, insensitively, almost nauseatingly, in speeches and in large poster displays at the Bexco Convention Centre).

Two, aid will end poverty, improve gender equality, bring education to girl children, and so on and so forth.

Three, the world has fallen behind achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). 'Therefore' (sic!), rich countries need to 'give more aid'.

Four, the 2008 financial crisis has shown that when countries work together they can prevent contagion. Etc, etc.

Korea was presented as a 'success story'; that may be the case. But the period when Korea was able to carry out land reform under American occupation; pursue state-aided and bank-rolled programs for encouraging Daihatsus; industrialise without having to pay massive intellectual property rents for technology; and export to the US almost duty-free at a time when the latter needed a dependable ally in Asia to contain communism - this period and its circumstances are not the same as today. Korea cannot be repeated by, for example, African countries. Korea is no 'model'. Furthermore, the two Koreans (Lee Myung-bak and Ban Ki-Moon) conveniently ignored the fact that their country's development owes itself largely to their hard-working working classes rather than 'aid'.

Here is a brief analysis of the outcome document.

To start with its title, 'Busan Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation'. 'Effective aid' is now replaced with 'effective development'. This is a more telling indictment of 'aid' than is realised at first glance.

HLF4 was largely an affair between the 'poor' countries of the so-called 'third world' and the so-called 'traditional donors' of the OECD countries. Conspicuously absent were the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China).

This was reflected in the telling opening of paragraph two of the 'Outcome Document' with the words 'The nature, modalities and responsibilities that apply to South-South cooperation differ from those that apply to North-South cooperation.'

There is no question that the bigger countries of the south (India, Brazil and China) as well as Russia have distanced themselves from the 'aid effectiveness' agenda of HLF4. Their agreement to refer to the principles of North-South relations on a 'voluntary basis' can only be interpreted as a political rejection of those principles.

Aid to the Third World is a self-important feel good activity of the developed world, and Mr. Tandon makes a very valid point that it will not go away easily. The likes of Oxfam and Bono will forever call for aid to help the third world, but I believe it will be better if they channel their energies in getting the third world to be more self reliant and thus more confident in its abilities to take care of itself.

One big point made is the greater south-south cooperation, which is something I have always stood for and believed in in my blog. The third world, including the fast industrializing and fast developing nations, must come together and get out of the WASP shadow on their own future. I had written in a post some time ago about how countries like India and Brazil help the rest of the third world by introducing them to better agriculture practices, or China can come in (without its greed for resources) and genuinely usher in infrastructure development and redevelopment of cities and urban spaces.

An important point is that if global trade is still the way forward, notwithstanding the protectionist attitude of the first world now that globalization is finally becoming the two way street they advertised, the third world is an important market in itself. There are big markets in developing nations across the globe where fledgling industries in other third world countries can sell their goods and services.

I think a big factor in achieving this greater south-south cooperation is getting rid of the developed west centrality. A brown man must learn to trust a black man or a yellow man, to give a very crude example! Considering the last two centuries were ruled the WASPs, unfortunately our thinking is centered around their thinking. Global media and flow of arts and culture is controlled by North America and Western Europe, and a greater exchange of people and ideas among the third world is absolutely essential for this shift to take place. I can see it happening and I hope it only goes stronger.

another fire tragedy in Kolkata

Kolkata is a city that is crumbling apart. Littered with old, unmaintained British architecture and bustling streets with people living in every nook and cranny, tragedies should be inevitable, and when they do happen, there is a lot of talk of change, of rules being followed, and people being punished, and then things go back to the usual till the next tragedy occurs. What is true of Kolkata is true for the rest of the country - safety of buildings and the people inside is just not a concern for the society at large.

After the tragedy at Stephen Court on Park Street where an old heritage building caught fire and it was found out that almost every construction rule was violated such as illegal construction of additional floors, no fire exits, and the doors to the roof-top locked by the owners, this tragedy that occurred at AMRI Hospital took place in a modern super-speciality hospital which, ideally, should have been at the forefront of building safety.

The tragedy with Indian society is that we just don't value life as much as we should. No rules are followed by individuals who live in the cities, who man the buildings, who construct the buildings and those who control the buildings. Once the details become clearer, nobody has any doubt that there will be a long list of rules that the building flouted and hence the tragedy. BusinessWeek calls it India's worst fire tragedy in 7 years, and with 93 lives lost at last count, I still doubt if anybody will wake up. We will blame everybody, like I am, but there is no doubt that things will be back to regular programming sooner than we know it. I suppose it is impossible to enforce rules over a billion people!

The big news was that as soon as the fire broke out, many of the doctors fled the building. Another big news is that many of the fire alarms were turned off so hospital staff could smoke indoors.

The police told HT that several smoke alarms, which were connected to fire-sprinkler devices, had been installed at AMRI hospital.

“But they did not go off on Friday as some doctors and hospital staffers, during their night duty on Thursday, turned off the main switch connecting all smoke alarms so that they could light up indoors,” said an investigating officer on condition of anonymity. The police are now trying to identify the doctors and staffers who habitually deactivated the alarms before smoking.

I don't suppose any of those individuals would have ever thought their seemingly harmless action could lead to such a tragedy, but it did, and I don't think this will be the last time either when fire alarms in modern buildings across the country are turned off because they are either a pain, not deemed necessary, or they get in the way of the people in the building.

Meanwhile, the amazing regularity with which the government gets "wake-up calls" from tragedies would make one believe that governments in India must never be sleeping anymore, but always awake. Unfortunately, that's not true either. There is a system that has to run, and I suppose when apparently the basic premise of this society (I mean the Indian society at large) is still to make money, make ends meet, or get through the day, a lot of the rules and regulations simply take a back seat. I've made this point earlier, and in relation to other regulations as well, such as the environment.

Its like letting the beggar be on the street because at least he is able to get some money. Letting people live in dangerous settings because at least they have a roof. Letting people travel in dangerously overcrowded buses, trains or other public transportation modes because at least they are traveling and adding to the economic output of the country. Let factories burn pollutants in the air because the cost of controlling effluents is high and that will cause undue economic stress on the many who rely on such a factory. So this thought seems to permeate each and every justification of this country to not follow rules. We simply have not been able to get out of the "we are a poor country only hence can't follow rules" mentality.

It is amazing how regularly the same scenarios cause the maximum damage in a fire tragedy. In Uphaar Cinema, the emergency exits were locked shut. The doors to the roof top were locked shut in Stephen Court, and in AMRI Hospital, the basement intended for parking was turned into office space and storage space for flammable material. According the article linked above from Live Mint,

Within 24 hours of the hospital disaster, the fire and emergency department, the state health department and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC), which were responsible for checking and monitoring fire safety, again formed fresh committees for carrying out inspections and pledged to bring the errant to book.

The accident in Amri hospital in Dhakuria area has shown that promises made in the past have not been kept. Amri caught the attention of the fire department for flouting guidelines as early as 29 August.

“A routine inspection showed glaring deviations from norms,” according to a retired fire service official. A basement car park had been converted into a two-tier structure—one accommodating the radiotherapy unit and cubicles for doctors, and the other serving as a godown, crammed with inflammable materials such as chemicals, jerry cans of spirits, oxygen cylinders and wooden furniture.

Moreover, firefighting equipment such as fire extinguishers, smoke alarms and sprinklers were not functioning in the basement.

Despite this, the fire department did not slap a closure notice on the hospital. Instead, it allowed the authorities three months to set their house in order. This deadline expired at the end of November, but no team returned for a follow-up, said the fire service official quoted earlier.

A team from the city’s municipality, which has independent infrastructure and staff to conduct inspections of buildings before renewing trade licences, also looked the other way when they found serious irregularities in the basement, said an official from the building department of KMC who did not want to be identified.

Nobody should be surprised that rules are flouted because the people in charge of ensuring those rules aren't flouted are almost always hand in glove with the perpetrators. However, we know how the system works, and how the government works at all levels, so an aspect that should be shocking to everybody is that when such seemingly professional organizations such as this modern super-speciality hospital flout safety rules, it hints at the general apathy that is deeply set even in the most modern of India's private sector. When such an organization does not want to follow norms on its own accord, then perhaps even the best of governance can't make them, because as its often repeated, its not possible to rule a billion people and keep an eye on each and every regulation by the government. Most times, the people have to step up to regulate themselves, and unfortunately, the Indian society is incapable of doing so.

This editorial in the Hindustan Times raises the same valid points.

The AMRI incident has proved that money alone can’t buy safety in India. The second-floor cabins that were affected by the fire there did not come cheap for patients: they have a hefty tag of Rs9,000 a day. Moreover, unlike in government hospitals, there was no funds crunch at AMRI. Then why was there no emergency staff on duty or any evacuation plan? It is now clear that there was no chain-of-command that could have taken quick decisions during the emergency. So while the patients suffocated and choked to death, there was no one to give out the basic order of calling the fire brigade. Now that the tragedy has happened, the law will take its course and the case will go on for a while.

So while the laws of the land will follow the slow path to justice, the basic problems of cracking urban housing, poor and unscientific construction and a general attitude among the population of cutting corners and getting more bang for the buck will remain. So like we say after a terrorist attack - lets wait for the next tragedy. Statistically, we're still doing well per thousand Indians, so bring on the tragedies! Bah, even sarcasm doesn't feel nice at this point.  

I don't think the Hindi cinema that was made in the 1950's, the 1960's and some of the 70's can be matched anytime, if ever. I am a very old fashioned individual when it comes to Hindi cinema I suppose. I simply refuse to believe that there can be a better gamut of actors, singers, directors and musicians than from that era. I just think that much of the things made in those years made a lot more sense than most of the things made today. The inane acting, the cacophony of music and putting in models instead of proper actresses tells me that today's Bollywood isn't really about substance, at least not as much as it was way back in the day.

Everybody's talking about the spate of deaths to some of India's best musical and thespian treasures within a span of a few months. We lost Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Bhupen Hazarika, Shammi Kapoor, M.F. Hussein and now Dev Anand. That's a lot of talent!

So while Dev sahab had drifted into making independent films with unknown faces and daring themes in the later half of his film career, nobody can deny the quality of stuff he made way back in the day. They say that when he would venture out wearing black, girls would literally swoon over him from every corner. Of course, the great music that accompanied him in so many of his great movies just adds to the perfection.

One of my most favorite movies is the movie Guide. Based on a Sahitya Kala Academy Award winning "The Guide" written by another of India's great literary sons, R.K. Narayan, directed by Chetan Anand and starring Dev Anand and Waheeda ji as the protagonists, this movie hit the entire spectrum of human emotion. And the music this movie had was heavenly. I think the scenes in the end of the movie (yes they have taken some theatrical liberties with the story line but all for a good cause) such as the Swami asking Ram to take him and his Muslim friend Gafoor in the background praying "No, Ram", or the people singing the Lord Ram bhajans and then the Swami finally passing on are etched permanently in this mind of mine.

The music sung by Mohammad Rafi sahab, Kishore da and Lata ji and music by S.D. Burman all in all created one of Bollywood's masterpieces.

Then there is Haqeeqat, about the India-China War, and all the buggers who talk about how India should be China's best friend because they are oh so nice and oh so progressive should watch this movie. The Chinese of today have only one demonic aim in mind, to rule the world, and since they can't rule the world on the basic principles of human freedom, they can only do so by force. Sorry for bringing it in but this is just to talk about the relevance of this movie even today.

My respects to all these great people who've passed away. There is something about being an artist, at least their creations will stay long after they're gone. Unfortunately those of us in the corporate grind will probably never be remembered for any achievement at work. The position of Manager - Finance will stay, but maybe 2 years down the line people will forget who was in it on Friday, 9th December 2011.

But I must not be cynical now. I want to remember the great movies and songs of that era of which Dev sahab was an integral part, and hope that humanity for all its shortcomings and failures continue to inspire itself and keep unlocking its artistic potential.

Fraud Gandhis' sycophancy

At airports all across the country, Indians are greeted to a rare sight where an individual, not elected to power by the people, not leading soldiers and not having served this country in any sort of way is exempt from security check-in because he happens to be the son-in-law of the fraud Gandhi family that is raping this country today along with its very very dangerous posse of criminals and thieves. I suppose he needs the protection considering how his entire family was wiped out in freak accidents.

So retails happened.....

Have a very Walmart morning, fellow Indians. The great bastion of India's socialist past that has been under assault from western retailers for so many years has finally fallen. India has opened up multi-format retail to foreign players.

Walmarts, Carrefours and Tesco's of the world are smacking their lips at finally getting a chance to sell to the discerning Indian buyer. According to the Head of the India-US Business Forum (the Americans must have felt a great sense of satisfaction considering they've lead the assault for years), d

"The singular act of opening the multi-brand retail sector to foreign direct investment will significantly benefit the Indian consumer by spurring the modernization of India's vast agri-retail marketplace," said Ron Somers, the President of the US India Business Council.

"Investments will now flow into India's farm-to-market supply chain, which will usher in expertise and bring efficiencies to India's supply chain infrastructure. Food price rise and inflation will now effectively be tamed," he said.

"Opening the retail sector will create a larger market opportunity for Indian farmers, increasing quality and choice for India's sophisticated consumers," Somers said.

Unfortunately, this western enthusiasm really makes me uneasy even if FDI in retail may be a good thing for the country, because there is still no consensus on the issue at all. So is it good for the poor Indian farmer or not?

According to Arun Jaitley, and this is probably the official explanation of the BJP as well,

"The services sector accounts for 58% of country's GDP. The retail chains in India, both small and big, account for a major segment of the services sector," Jaitley said. "FDI with deep pockets entering this segment will have an adverse impact on our domestic retail sector…"

Jaitley insisted that "fragmented markets" gave more choice to consumers than "consolidated" ones, adding that once they eliminate competition through predatory pricing, large global retain chains create monopolies.

While it is true that 51% FDI is now allowed in multi-format retail and India will soon see lots of Walmarts and Carrefours and umm, Harrods maybe, and Aldi's, and some other American chains such as Target and maybe even the likes of Lord & Taylor and Saks Fifth Avenue, I am curious to know how it will de-fragment the market. As far as I know, its up to the Indian consumer how de-fragmented they want their market to be, but at the same time, it is also true that they will go to a place with the cheapest goods, and if that happens to be Evil Walmart (couldn't resist that), then that's where they will go.

According to the big Walmart, this is the "first important step", and just thinking about that makes me shudder. First step to what?!? Its just like the sinister feeling I get when I think of that Coca Cola executive who once said that he wants to replace every traditional drink in India such as lassi, chaachh, coconut milk and sharbat with a Coca Cola product! Very scary indeed, and like I said, even if this is good for the retail scene in this country, the way these companies are smacking their lips should make anybody uneasy.

According to Sitaram Yechury, FDI in retail should be allowed if it follows three criteria - "generating employment, enhancing capacities and bringing new technologies." Each of these three could be a PhD subject, or in other words, are very elaborate and detailed explanations in themselves.

Many years ago, when the debate first started, the unifying thought against foreign retail was that it will kill the mom and pop stores and the neighborhood kirana's. The response was that foreign retail will bring in foreign expertise, best practices, and money to fill the huge, huge void in storage and transportation of perishable goods that results in India losing tens of thousands of crores worth of fruits and vegetables every year because they can't be stored. If the government can ensure that these big companies deliver on their promise to strengthen (or rather build from scratch in many cases) the back-end of the chain, I can only see the rural folk benefiting, apart from the middlemen that is. Actually, even middlemen then most likely will be on their payroll.

As the top Indian Walmartian (sorry, couldn't resist that either) said,

Jain said Walmart is "willing and able" to invest in back-end infrastructure that will help reduce wastage of farm produce, improve the livelihood of farmers, lower prices of products and ease supply-side inflation.

At such a time as this, easing of the supply-side inflation will sound like music to the government's ears, and now that i've said it, I greatly fear that the great CONgress propaganda machine will turn this into their great strategic move to get India out of this stagflation. $hit. As far as the livelihood of farmers is concerned, I think i'll still stand by what I think I had written many moons ago that only a drastic, structural, philosophical, mental change will improve the lives of farmers in the country because while they have had a good meal of lip service for decades, they are starving of real reforms, at least till after the Green Revolution, and that was 4 decades ago. Since then?

If the Government says that India needs open up the retail sector to foreign firms which have been smacking their lips in the most creepy way, then are we to assume that only the western retailers are capable of bringing in the best practices into the country? Are the best practices that we are talking about a protected trade secret and only in the hands of Walmart and Carrefour? Are the western companies the only ones capable of spending the money on setting up the back end logistics in the retail sector?

The BJP raises a very valid point - first, it is true that India in a sense will end up corporatizing a lot of essential food item supply chain control into the hands of the private sector, which most likely will be dominated by the North Atlantic firms. Secondly, this whole talk of strengthening the food chain logistics has been talked about for decades, and yet the government has failed to take the lead in the creation of say cold storage's and encouragement of technology adaptation and utilization in the sector. Now the hope is that these companies will do all that. My question is that companies like P&G, HUL and ITC also sell their wares in the vast rural hinterland, so are they too using primitive and wasteful methods in supply chain logistics?

I also believe that there are some inherent constraints that even the entry of any player can't change. For example, a bad road is a bad road for a foreign player and a domestic player, and for a foreign truck with a 200 HP engine and an old Tata Truck with much less. The super duper supply chain logistics that these companies boast of in Europe or North America are backed by a strong infrastructure that India will probably not see for many many decades, if at all. So to expect those logistics operations being replicated here is naive and ignorance at best.

So let us see if the promise of creating thousands of jobs, inclusive growth, increasing farm productivity etc etc will hold true for a company that pays its employees some of the lowest wages in the US.

Quite a few things happened in the past ten days since i've written anything here. The two major tasks I was involved in at work - getting the annual report printed and the work related to the listing of the company I work for, both came to fruitation and it felt good to see some results come out of the numerous hours I spent on them.

Work's been keeping me really busy these days and it just becomes impossible to do anything else. For me, anything else is a lot of things these days, including waking up in the morning to go running, learning to play the guitar (which is going very slowly at the present unfortunately), learning more about photography, and well, trying to keep a social life going. When I am surrounded by so many activities and aims and hobbies and interests, I wonder sometimes what I should write about, considering my awareness of all things political has gone down considerably, and has been replaced by one common platform and that is hatred for the CONgress party and the fraud Gandhi cronies.

So as much as I hate them, ranting on and on about them gets repetitive, and when even I don't want to keep on writing similar rants about them, I would understand anybody else would not like to keep on reading the same rants about them. When I use the word rant, I know I am risking taking away some of the seriousness and authenticity of what I write, because a rant, more often than not, is more about displaying ones anger towards something, usually more heightened than normal and thus less factual and logical, but when I rant about how much I hate whats going on in the country, I try to follow it up with some bits of real news.

Nothing seems to be working for India these days. Its government had stopped functioning many years ago, and the global economic scenario mixed with bad economic management at home have been keeping everybody quiet. The only news items today are as usual, corruption and its many related subheadings, the economic scene in Europe, the falling Rupee, and gold. Just this morning, I read that India's gold demand for the last quarter fell 23%. That's a very big number if you look at it - they fell by 1/4th! India for all its love of gold can't be blamed, with falling rupee and inflation that is not looking to go down anytime soon.

Speaking of inflation, it has been said again and again that inflation is due to the supply side constraints, and raising interest rates can only do so much, but the reasons for the inflation will remain. As pointed out by me and many others, Governments in India are loathe to changing the supply side economics for whatever reasons, and India continues to remain a bottleneck country with bottlenecks and constraints in every conceivable sector of the economy, be it transport, housing, power, health care facilities, education, oh, and most importantly, food.

But real work on the ground needs one to pull up their sleeves and get down to work, and the Government of India and most state governments should never be expected to get their hands dirty. So the other option is to get the people to spend less, and thus when you can't affect the fiscal policy (perhaps because you have none), you attack the monetary policy. High interest rates will inflate what families are paying for their loans, the price of food remains high, so that means spending less on everything else. So basically the demand needs to shrink to match the supply.

If I think about it, its always a good idea to cool the consumption juggernaut down and perhaps give the earth some breathing space. On my way to work this morning, I was thinking that India is perhaps of the world's worst utilizers of space. Our cities are in a sprawl without planning, our agricultural lands produce less crop and food then many other nations of the world, our potable water's running out and there is no urgency to save it, and in general, the common Indian is unhappy and only thinking about money. What I have been wishing on the wild west - that perhaps its time they realigned their lifestyle and conspicuous consumption, could be wished upon my own countrymen.

The conundrum here is that the countrymen I am talking about are 1/4th of this country's population. The middle class is too engrossed in making their own lives better through more money to think about anything else, but what kind of a lifestyle adjustment do I talk about with the millions of poor who live under the open skies and have no steady source of income? What kind of a lifestyle adjustment should the hungry and malnourished children of this country bring?

I ask a question and there seem to be a dozen truths that respond to it in a dozen different ways. I think the chaos around is enough for most of us to just shake our heads and hope for the worst. In this "free for all" India of today, the only truth that remains for most people is that you have to fend for yourself. The slums of Mumbai have no proper sanitation and every morning thousands and thousands of people defecate in the open, but their small living holes which they will return to will have cable television which will be beaming a lifestyle of utmost luxury and consumption which they will watch with gusto.

I heard somewhere, either on television or from a friend, that an issue with Indian election process is that it is first past the post, so in a simple example, if there are a hundred people who can vote in a voting zone, and there 3 candidates, and only 60% vote, so that is 60 people voting out of the hundred. Now one candidate gets 25 votes, and other two get the remaining, that is, 35 votes. So the candidate with the 25 votes wins, but she represents only 25% of the population of that voting zone she stood up in. Again, there can be two issues here, first, that the system needs to change so that a candidate must represent if not at least 1/3, but some percentage of the population in that zone, or second, there needs to be something done so that the abysmal 60% voting percentage rises to at least 80%.

We know that the people who vote today are the most economically disadvantaged, and they are the ones who are always short changed by the people they vote in. Quite ironic really. The same with caste politics. Perhaps a poor person belonging to a caste protected by the constitution would rather live on the 'pride' of having an MP from his or her caste than in a better home with food for the family and school for the kids. At least this is what the politics of India today seems to suggest. The politically disinterested middle class, often blamed for so many of the ills that plague today's politics because of their non-participation and focus on wealth and only wealth was said to have stirred epitomized by the rise of Anna Hazare, and it remains to be seen what levels of participation will be seen when India goes to elections for the national government. I am also curious to see what happens in the many state elections that are coming up, including that of Uttar Pradesh. Rahul "Voted in or not, i'll be made PM of this banana republic by mom" Gandhi has started campaigning against the tyranny of Mayawati, who by the way plans to divide UP into 4 new states! I always advocated for the division of UP into two, but wouldn't 4 be pushing it? India's federal structure already leaves so much to be desired with the states rarely seeing eye to eye with the center. The problem with state politics, as I had written long ago, was that most are simply incapable of thinking from a broader point of view. Their narrow interests sometime go against the interest of this country, and more often than not, they win.

So while I continue to feel worthless and overwhelmed by everything that seems to be going around me, I suppose the only way I can respond is by making my life more meaningful than being just a corporate slave that I am. I'm looking forward to my family visiting me next week and perhaps like millions of others like me, will continue to make my life better, hope for the best and leave the rest to God.

There is a general sentiment being permeated by the over-zealous and narrow visioned Indian media that the men and women of the armed forces who defend our lands on our borders are the villains who have terrorised the local populations and they do whatever they want on a whim without fear of repercussions.

The materialistic and bohemian Indian urban youth readily buy this glib that the best of the best in the business, the business of media that is, peddle day in and day out on the airwaves and in print. Unfortunately, there are very few who stand up to rebut this dangerous propaganda purveyed by the yellow media. Television news more often than not never allows airtime to opinions that go against the picture that they are trying to draw in the minds of the viewer and the articles written in the print media simply never get the eye balls to open the peoples' eyes to to the truth. Considering that the general population of India is increasingly averse to reading real news and takes its daily dose of information, I should say infotainment, from the likes of the Tabloid of India and its posse, the space for people who actually speak for this country and for the truth shrinks even further.

Just like I find Hinduism bashing to be the past time of choice for most of the media, it is also very prevalent for them to question the integrity of the Armed Forces and other paramilitary. A single crime is enough for the media to club the entire organization in the same light, and the ignorant masses join in. Unfortunately, the Indian media currently simply does not seem to have the wherewithal to delve deeper into issues and actually try to represent some semblance of truth, which in turn is probably because the common population does not look for serious truth, they simply look for infotainment.

When the topic of Kashmir is discussed in the media, I have more often than not seen the media portray the Army there as the villain who victimize the local population in the garb of fighting terror. While Bollywood has showcased the Indian Armed Forces as the brave and honourable institutions that they are, there have been some instances where this liberal bleeding heart, Wagah candle kissing comes to the full fore, with themes such as 'bad' soldiers not wanting the peace loving people of India and Pakistan to be united, or a Hindu nationalist Army Officer posted in Kashmir killing innocents simply out of his hatred for Islam. Yes, such movies have been made too and in the name of intellectual freedom aim to harm the very moral fabric of the Armed Forces that holds them and in turn this supposedly great country together. Irony is that those in the political circles and the media who profess to be the most secular are the most divisive of all.

Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger strike for the past 11 years and was barely a blip on the national media, and has now gained prominence once the Kashmiri politicians raised their pitch to repeal the act. While the "Iron Lady of Manipur" has every right to be heard, and justice be done for the act that was committed by the jawans of the Assam Rifles in Manipur over a decade ago, and I personally do not know the details of the Act, but as a retired Colonel Athale wrote in Rediff.com, this is one of the few pieces of legislation that tries to protect the soldiers themselves without putting them at the mercy of the states' civil administration which needs no proof of its incompetence and lethargy in responding to a call for help of any kind from any citizen.

Kashmir in my opinion is a very strange conundrum in the minds of the Indian media and population. Correct information and news rarely comes out of the state without first being dipped in religious connotations or allegations or rebuttals. Thus, I believe that every Indian knows that there is a problem in Kashmir, but the way the Indian media portrays the situation, everybody is unclear of whether its really Pakistan's pathological hatred for all things Indian that's the problem or whether the problem is somewhere else. Most unfortunately, there are many ignorant youth out there who view their country as the occupier and will voraciously advocate that India should leave Kashmir and make peace with the already suffering Pakistan. Yes, the must sought after India-Pakistan partnership that will beat the rest of the world in everything.

I had written a few weeks ago about how the current Government of J&K is pushing through for the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act which they say gives too much power in the hands of the Army. I had written that the Indian media due to some strange affliction view the Army as the largest perpetrator of human rights violations in J&K while the AK-47 toting terrorists remain "alleged" militants/terrorists/rebels in the eyes of the world media. The Indian media does nothing to correct this untruth. What I am simply saying is that with the political class and the media and the watching population only too eager to hold an entire institution responsible for the act of a few, should the safety and security of the greater masses be held to ransom because of denial of justice to the ones that were wronged? I feel a major issue is that justice is denied in India to those who deserve it, and because justice is denied, the tendency is to blame the laws under which the act was committed, and instead of focusing on the specific injustice, a sweeping generalization is made that should change the laws themselves. I think that means most simply miss the target of their ire.

There is a meeting today between Omar Abdullah and the United Command of the Armed Forces in Kashmir where he will raise the issue of removing the Act in certain parts of the state. Let us see how that goes. Its quite easy for politicians to make the people believe what they think is good for them, and I believe for many people, afraid of facing up to the terrorists, find the easy target to vent their frustrations with their situation, and turn towards the group that by law can't respond - the police and the Army. I think it is similar to the sentiment among the many Muslim organizations who focus on preaching that Islam is a religion of peace but shy away from taking a stronger stand against the terrorists themselves.

Col. Athale writes in Rediff.com:

there is a clamour of late about the 2,000 odd graves in Kashmir... mostly of militants who infiltrated but no mention of the 5,000 Indian soldiers who died during the same period!

It appears that the Left-liberal dominated government may well succumb to this concerted campaign and remove the legal protection of soldiers who are engaged in fighting a guerrilla war launched by our neighbour. This is a last ditch attempt inject some sense of realism in the debate by an author who has been studying this form of war in the north-east, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, South Africa and Northern Ireland for the last 25 years.

The first and foremost fact that must be understood is that the armed forces have NO powers to act within the country other than in aid to civil authority. These powers are defined by Sections 129 to 131 of the Criminal Procedure Code. The CrPC sections dealing with riots empowers the local magistrate/police commissioner to call army in 'aid to civil authority'. The local military commander is under legal obligation to obey this demand. However, the quantum of force and methods to be used are at the discretion of the military commander.

The civil authority has to give this requisition in writing. Section 131 that was added in 1973, gives a power to a commissioned officer to act even when a magistrate is not present, but must contact a magistrate at the earliest. This genesis of this section was that in West Bengal the armed forces were came under criticism when in their presence mobs destroyed government property, while the army watched helplessly since a magistrate was not present. These are the only powers available to the armed forces.

The Assam Special Powers Act 1958 was promulgated when the Nagas revolted, civil authority collapsed and armed and organised Naga rebels controlled vast stretches of territory and began a guerrilla war against the state. It is not aid to civic authority but a virtual army rule because of breakdown of state or inability of the state to deal with armed challenge... this is NOT for crowd control but fighting an armed group intent on overthrowing the state.

AFSPA is merely an enabling provision and the forces act at the behest of the government and not on their own. This is meant for use in a 'disturbed area' where the writ of the state has ceased to exist and its existence is challenged by an armed group. The purpose of this act is to fight a guerrilla war.

In this war ambushes, raids, combat patrols are the tactics used by the army. These actions are not covered under the CrPc and IPC. The armed forces have no other police powers so it is not special.

Can a guerrilla war that is supported and even fought by foreign citizens on our soil be faced in any other manner, should the NSG not have been used in Mumbai attack on 26/11? In Kashmir the army faces a 26/11 situation on a daily basis.

Does the Indian Army use excessive force? Funny that countries that preach to us like the US have been using drones, helicopters, artillery, fighter aircraft etc as so also Pakistan! The Indian Army has never used heavy weapons against civilians due to fear of causing collateral damage and is yet being criticised. The Indian Army fights with one hand tied, non use of full force. Some want it to fight with both hands tied!

The third issue is can it be removed from some parts in Kashmir that are undoubtedly peaceful. The problem in this case is what if the militants commit violence somewhere else and take shelter in these areas? Knowing fully that the army cannot operate here!

What am I angry at? As much as I am angry at the politicians who are simply unable to comprehend the long term repercussions of their selfish and dangerous actions today, I am even angrier at the dumbed down population which has lost its ability to seek the truth and question what they are being force-fed. Much of the urban youth of today is lost in the land of the lotus-eaters, and they could only care about fornication and consumption. I generalize of course, but I see it as the truth. The media has succeeded in making the people feel ashamed of their heritage and their culture and replaced it with a North Atlantic pop culture where everybody is happy driving cars, hanging out with women (this works very well for the male-centric society), wearing nice clothes and sipping alcohol. I wish something would happen that made this society stop taking for granted the blood and sweat of our armed forces.

In the end, since we are a true blue democracy, the people have got to make better choices, but then again, probably nobody thought that the Fraud Gandhi's led CONgress government would take the rape of the country to such an extreme level that I shudder to think that these buggers still have 3 years left. So unfortunately, while our soldiers continue to patrol our borders and face the bullets from enemies who do not have the spine to stand up and fight face to face, we continue to be ignorant of what it takes to defend this nation, and our ignorance shows right at the top of the food chain, the Parliament of India.

Angela Merkel said that Europe is facing its toughest test since the Second World War. Needless to say, the days of capitalist living and socialist economies may be finally over across Europe, including in Germany and France, and perhaps its time the European nations begin strapping up for a new age where the Asians control a part of their economy and living frugally becomes the best way to survive. Yes, it warms my heart to see that the days of gratuitous consumption in the European and even North American economies may be withering away.

After occupying the rest of the world for the past few hundred years, a part of me is pleased to hear all this protectionist talk coming from the US and other Western nations. Despite the massive debt Greece is in and despite the fact that Germany and France, as leaders of Europe, worked hard to get Greece's debtors to write down their debt to the country by almost half, the Greeks are angry. And why are the Greeks angry? Because its Germany, that's why. Those Nazi occupiers are back and the Greeks aren't liking it! Talk about beggars not being choosers.

As Greeks suffer from harsh austerity measures, there is growing popular sentiment here that the country has ceded key parts of its sovereignty, and its pride, to its foreign lenders.

Beyond populist talk, which ranges from euro-skepticism to anti-German demagoguery, experts say the concessions that Greece has made in exchange for the foreign aid it needs to stave off default — including allowing European Union officials to monitor Greek state affairs closely — are unprecedented for a member nation, making Greece a bellwether for the future of European integration.

“If we weren’t under the E.U., which is the only reason this loss of sovereignty may be justified, I’d have to say that Greece is an occupied country,” said Nikos Alivizatos, a constitutional lawyer in Athens.

Now since this is the New York Times, I do not know if they have put their own spin on the story because I could totally trust the media to obfuscate the truth to make it more salacious and scandalous. After all, the word "Nazi" sends a shiver down every American's spine! Actually, I may be wrong here and despite Angela Merkel emerging as the one European leader who seems to have brought some order to this debt crisis, some Greeks view her as the new Nazi occupier!

The Greeks may not be the only ones that seem to be angry at the current situation in Europe and Germany taking the lead in bringing some relief to the debt crisis. Her words that Europe must continue to integrate economically or there could be grave consequences for the continent took many people back to the first half of last century when the then German nation was responsible for bringing the first modern wars to the continent.  As the Sydney Morning Herald quotes the headline in the British newspaper Daily Mail - "German Chancellor warns of war if currency fails!"

But its very interesting to see that after what the IMF and other western lenders have been doing to the third world across the globe, they are applying the same medicine to one of their own. I've bought up this point before on my blog, but now that the European crisis has finally seemed to achieve critical mass, its certain that simple pussyfooting or simple short term measures will no longer work, and Europe has to take some tough decisions about its economic future. All this seemed very vague till some time ago, but now as expected, Merkel and Sarkozy have gotten the European bankers to back down and write down their Greek debt exposure.

For hours, negotiators had been trying to persuade the banks to accede to a "voluntary" 50 percent loss in the face value of their Greek bond holdings. The banks, which had already agreed to a 21 percent write-down, had dug in their heels.

They knew how badly the European leaders needed a deal and how much financial experts feared a disorderly, involuntary default. That could set off a "credit event," throwing world financial markets into turmoil, much as the collapse of Lehman Brothers did in the fall of 2008.

But Merkel called the bankers' bluff, said officials present at the discussions. Accept the 50 percent write-down, she told the bankers, or bear the consequences of default. In effect, she was willing to risk a credit event and place the blame for any fallout squarely on them.

So now Greece seems to have a plan going ahead, Ireland already had a plan with nationalisation of its banks and lots of bailout money, and nationalisation of banks across Europe, and now the show moves to Italy, which, being a G-7 nation, becomes too big to fail. According to that Economic Crimes link, Italy owes USD 2.7 trillion in debt, or 120% of its GDP!! How in the world are they going to get all that money even over several decades? In my opinion, Angela Merkel is hailed as a hero for getting the bankers to write down half of Greek debt, but how in the world is anybody going to write the Italian debt down?

There are many issues here that I constantly rant about when it comes to western economies, maybe with the two most important being how the western economies are moving towards protectionism after talking against it for so many decades, and the scale down from their gratuitous consumption and unsustainable lifestyle. Both of these will obviously change in the coming decades, and are changing right now as well.

Coming back to the point about Asia taking a lead in propping up the world economy in the near future, China and its money are on every body's minds as Europe tries to get China to put in their money in the rescue of Europe as well. As much as I dislike China, I also support them in the fact that they, along with other emerging economies such as ours, Brazil, Mexico etc, are correcting the long drawn skew in the global economy in favour of the western economies.

China is expected to demand significant concessions, including financial guarantees and limits on what Beijing sees as discriminatory trade policies, in exchange for any investment in Europe’s emergency stability fund. 

That Europe would turn so openly to China to help stabilize the debt crisis shows how quickly the Chinese economic juggernaut has risen on the world stage. Indeed, if China comes to Europe’s aid, it will signal a new international order, with China beginning to rival the role long played by the United States as the world’s pivotal financial power.

And I feel the reason I can support China in this is because I know that despite all its flaws, the Indian economy too is at a stage where it can't be arm-twisted any more by the likes of IMF/WB and even China. If I were a Vietnamese, for example, then I would be very, very wary of how China is slowly controlling the global finances.

At the same time, I am also very fearful that with the emerging world looking forward to consuming the way the west does now will be disastrous for the Earth. Of course, my long term view is that the Earth will revolt and in the next few decades, the environment will have been exploited beyond redemption, and then que sera sera. I hope India, China, Brazil and all their third world comrades realize that we must protect the environment for our sake and not start blowing smoke through our nostrils if a first world country tells us to. Its possible to live a comfortable, modern lifestyle with consumption of goods and use of resources, but it is absolutely necessary that we manage what we have better to make it go long and give the Earth a chance to replenish itself. But I digress.

I feel that the notion that globalization was a mutually beneficial economic model is not true anymore, with risks being shared with the most vulnerable nations and economies and the profits continuing to land in the hands of the mightiest of companies, most of which have their origins in the west. Sure Europe is in a crisis but I believe that while I am happy that a rightful shift in the global economy is occurring, whatever is happening today will now be mixed with heavy doses of nationalism, protectionism and distrust from all quarters. Those with the loudest guns will have the strongest clout, and as the economy becomes a greater cause of social distress in societies and we continue to grow (the world population will cross 7 billion soon), we will definitely see some fundamental shift in the way the world runs, and it could be something completely different from our usual conjured scenarios of East-West, BRIC, Asia, WASP etc. The world to me is getting more divided even as it integrates economically, and the only constant that will remain is that most of the global population will continue to struggle to survive.

Diwali 2011

Yesterday was Diwali in India, a time filled with an excitement in the air that permeates all corners of an office, factory, school or college. The period around Diwali is the time when manufacturers and retailers go all out in selling as many goodies as they can to the public that happily opens its purse strings in this otherwise bleak economic environment.

This being Diwali, an important day for the country, also becomes an important day for the enemies of the country, be they within or without our national borders. Just yesterday, there were two blasts in Imphal which injured 6 people and fortunately nobody is dead. Nobody claimed responsibility for the blasts but there could be two reasons for the blast - one, its Diwali and it being an important festival, cowards will try their best to wound the public sentiment. The second reason could be that its because P Chidambaram is visiting Manipur, and he will be specifically visiting three Naga-dominated districts, so perhaps this blast has something to do with it.

In Assam, there was a blast on the train tracks in Central Assam's Dima Hasao district that affected train movement but again did not result in any loss of life. Perhaps I am not paying attention to the news well enough but this was after a while that I heard of a blast in Assam. Unfortunate and dangerous nonetheless, and again on Diwali night.

In what seemed to be a restive Jammu & Kashmir, there were attacks on our security forces for two straight days, with the latest one being a grenade attack on a police vehicle in Anantnag district. On the previous day, there were grenade attacks on CRPF and police personnel in Srinagar. In Kashmir, this comes at a time when the demand for the easing of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) is getting louder, being led by the Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah. The premise is that these special acts are looked at by the locals as oppressive and tyrannical, and considering that the violence in the state has been in a steady decline (which is perhaps due to the fact that the Pakis don't have a lot of money to fund terror now), it is high time these laws be done away with in order to bring a greater sense of being a part of the Indian nation among the Kashmiris. A news report in Reuters, which I do not want to quote here for its obvious bias and regurgitation of hackneyed stereotypes on Kashmir such as Hindu-minority or Muslim-majority or Hindu/Muslim, Muslim/Hindu etc etc and the friendly reminder of how India and Pakistan have fought so many wars over it, says that the terror is subsiding and the government wants to use this opportunity to win the hearts and minds of the Kashmiri folk who hate the law.

I hate to say it but I think that a lot of Kashmiri politicians love to portray themselves as victims and if anybody says anything critical of how the state is functioning or if somebody calls some bluff of theirs, or even of a group of people from there, then that at once becomes an example of how Kashmir is being victimized by India. This is not just a Kashmir problem but an India problem that the law enforcement side is the one that is always supposed to act within the boundaries of what is right, just, lawful, legal etc, while the enemy has all the laws in the world to flout. At the same time, it is much easier to show your contempt towards the side that is forced to work within the law because you know that you can shout at them, throw stones at them and they won't be able to do anything about it. The terrorists, well, they're fighting for a higher cause such as a brainwashed mind and some promised money in their familys' pockets when they are gone. With the grenade attacks in the past few days, maybe Omar Abdullah might consider backing down.

In Kashmir too, it is very easy to shout at the Army and be heard because the Indian media usually works without having sense of what it is doing. The Army in Kashmir is the villain for many Indian journalists who shed tears about how human rights are being flouted by the men in uniform. The terrorists, sorry, alleged terrorists, well, can shoot into a crowd and still be doubted if they are real terrorists at all. Way to stand up for your country, Indian media.

I do not claim to know everything about the AFSPA or even form a good opinion on the Act, because as always, the truth is always muddy. Perhaps if the Government of India grew some more balls and allowed the Armed Forces a little more leeway in doing more damage to the terrorists in Kashmir and those sitting across the border, including their handlers, maybe the state would be a lot more peaceful. This is not just true there, but in a lot of places across the country where the spineless government of India continues to let rashes fester till they become more dangerous. Then its operation containment and appeasement at a national scale.

I'll end up ranting against the absolutely disgraceful and shameless Government of India again but I just want to say that I hope things will get better in this nation so that we can continue to celebrate our traditions and festivals and events without the fear of having some traitor or enemy try to kill us. However, to ensure that the possibility of that remains a bare minimum, sometimes the solution does not lie as deep as making the world a better and a more equal place, all it needs is more spine to get rid of crazy fanatics who have lost all their sense of reasoning and objective.

If these results are anything to go by....

With the shenanigans that the CONgress party and its allies have been perpetrating at all levels of governance, there was always a discussion on somewhere about what it does to the poll fortunes of this sycophantic political party. If anything, there is something which I will always admit the CONgress never lacked, and that is their arrogance and quick dismissal of anything remotely critical of them.

I am sure the fraud Gandhi family and their minions around them are planning to shift power at the center of what was the Government of India - now its the Government of the Banana Republic of India - to bring Raul Maino at the helm, but surely the results that came out in the past few days, not just from one state, but from Haryana, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra. Three of these seats were Assembly seats and the one in Hisar, Haryana was the Lok Sabha seat vacated upon the death of the former Haryana Chief Minister, Bhajan Lal. According to the Business Standard:

The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance’s failure to win not even one of the four by-elections — one Lok Sabha and three Assembly seats — has set off alarm bells within the ruling alliance.

In Bihar, UPA ally Rashtriya Janata Dal lost the Daraunda constituency in Siwan district by a convincing 20,000 margin, enabling the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) to retain the Assembly seat. In Maharashtra, the blow was sharp and deep.

Although all parties in the ruling UPA have gone into a huddle following the current setback, they say it is just a set of by-elections. But in three out of four states, the party in power is the Congress.

Election season in India is clearly showing signs of coming in full force now, and much to the chagrin of CONgress and its allies, Anna Hazare and his team have been pretty active in campaigning against CONgress, including in Hisar, which happens to be Arvind Kejriwal's native place. The Hindustan Times asked on the 11th of this month whether Mr. Hazare and Mr. Kejriwal will be able to influence the outcome?

In fact, the writer, Vinod Sharma, is very critical of what Mr. Kejriwal and Mr. Hazare have been doing in Hisar, which he says, is based on misrepresented facts and false claims. Mr. Sharma, of course, is a known CONgress boy and hence can be expected to be vexed to see so much support for the people campaigning against the CONgress, and apparently, seem to be winning.

Apparently there is a spin in the media these days to show that Team Anna is losing its plot and are losing their support by becoming more political and on many occasions, unabashedly anti-CONgress. There was a shoe hurled at Arvind Kejriwal recently by a man named Jitendra Pathak in Lucknow. I haven't read all the accounts, but the article I just linked from IBN Live is enough to tell me that there was definitely something fishy in that shoe throwing.

The attempted attack came a day after the drubbing Congress party got in Hisar by-poll and a few days after the attack on Prashant Bhushan and Anna's supporters.

There is some ambiguity about the affiliation of the man, Jitendra Pathak, who attacked Kejriwal. He is known to be close to the BJP and has also appeared in many of Congress's rallies.

Pathak said, "I attacked Kejriwal because he said he had come to speak about corruption but then never addressed the issue."

So Jitendra threw the shoe because Team Anna only speaks about corruption but never addresses the issue. Everybody else believes its political but nobody seems to know what is affiliations are, his uncle believes he used to work for the BJP, and this comes after Prashant Bhushan supported a referendum in Kashmir and was slapped in his office for saying so!

IBN Live is not without putting in its parting shot in the article to create some sort of a propaganda among its readers, as it tries to create a spin that Hazare and the people around him are crumbling.

Team Anna caught the nation's imagination by creating strong emotions against the government. Now it seems the same emotion is turning against them even if it's at a small level.

I just love how news stories put their own opinions into their pieces and then pass it off as news. That's the trend now and with the way media is controlled today by the rich and powerful, its no wonder that the media is now so sensationalist and yellow. I am saying this to simply illustrate that this is why I will take what they write with a barrel of salt. Today, for example, the news sources are reporting that Mr. Prasad now says that he will give a "similar treatment" to Anna Hazare. This time the issue is that Mr. Hazare must clear the air on Prashant Bhushan's Kashmir remarks. I suppose he is also upset that Hazare is now more explicit in campaigning against the CONgress, as opposed to campaigning against something as universal as corruption. That smell of bulls**t in the air is just nauseating.

I feel there is a confusion in many minds about what the central theme of whats going in. Anna Hazare brought up corruption in the government and the people rallied with him. So the main issue is corruption and now no matter what Hazare and his team does, the hope would be that the people's awareness towards the absolutely unbelievable levels of greed and avarice in the current Government has risen that their demand for justice can sustain itself. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and more often than not, to kill the issue, one has to kill the messenger. By discrediting Hazare and digging up his past and implicating Arvind Kejriwal in old tax cases, just to give examples, are ways by which the government is using the vast machinery at its disposal to get back at the people who oppose it.

Of course, since elections are in the air, that has been gaining the maximum coverage in the media, but once in a while the issue of election reforms also comes in. There is still a big discussion on about the various aspects of election reforms such as the right to reject or the right to recall, and there are opinions from various stakeholders including the Chief Election Commissioner of the India saying that Right to Recall will lead to destabilisation of the country, the Right to Reject is a more easily adoptable idea. He makes a valid point though - "everywhere there is discontent, people will start recalling their representatives." Since this nation is a nation of discontent, I am imagine that will happen very frequently.

So I do not know whether Hazare's strong words against the CONgress will work and whether it was his campaign or cast politics which lost CONgress the Hisar seat. However, I do sincerely hope that with so many elections coming, people will actually be more aware and vote for change. I simply can't shake my belief that this country and society has a government and representatives that it deserves. Till our society, especially the democratically inactive part, stop blaming the ills on everybody else and be more active in demanding what is right, we won't get it.

How do we recycle?

I work in a very large Indian company that has operations in many parts of the world. I work for a company that is a part of this large group, and its operations are only a tiny part of the total operations of this enterprise. So when I look at the paper consumption of my relatively small company, that can run into many reams of paper in a day, I can only imagine how many hundreds of reams of paper will have been consumed in one day by the company's operatives in all parts of the world.

Now if this is one Indian conglomerate, there are dozens like this with revenues running into thousands of crores, so one can imagine how many reams of paper all these companies put together will be consuming in a day and when we realize that the world is full of such conglomerates with operations and activities in every corner of the world, I find I am unable to fathom the sheer amount of paper consumption of all these corporations. 

A few weeks ago, I asked the maintenance person what happens to all the waste paper that is generated on the floor. He didn't know where it ended up, and upon my question that did he know if all this paper went to recycling at all, he drew a blank. Another colleague of mine with who I raised this point mistook my intention, and assuming I was talking about the security of the discarded paper, as in, whether they were shredded to destroy their content.

These reactions ably demonstrate our own attitude towards trash. We throw something in the trash can, somebody comes and collects it, and that is the end of it. I think none of us has ever bothered to wonder what happens to the trash that is generated by us and by our surroundings. Most of us are too used to dumping all our waste together, so that our tea leaves mix with plastic, our banana peel mixes with our waste paper, and we turn in into a stinky cocktail of trash and put it out for somebody else to take care of it.

Indians are chronic litterers. For one, we can't seem to travel to any place without food. A calling sign of many Indian tourist families that travel without and outside the country is the need for food. Gujarati families are famous for carrying as many Gujarati packed food items as they can, and no matter where Indian tourists are - on a boat, on a train, on a sidewalk in Singapore, on the beach in Thailand, on a raft on the Ganges river - our favorite activity is eating. I say our favorite activity is eating because we do that consciously. Our second favorite activity of course, is littering, which most do almost as unconsciously as breathing. Every passing moment in Mumbai when I am on the local train or sitting at Marine Drive or riding in a taxi, the most common theme I see are people spitting and littering, and I sincerely believe that we all will be living on mountains of trash soon. The movie Wall-E may actually be a very true scenario many years down the line, because it is amply visible to me that the earth's capacity to take our crap, and scrap, is diminishing.

Of course, littering is only a small part of the overall increased consumption levels of the developed and the developing world. The first world had already adapted a lifestyle of gratuitous consumption and now the developing world is matching them trash per trash. Is it any wonder that our pristine seas are now slowly dying because of the decades of human and industrial trash that is being continuously dumped into them?

There is a formation called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is the world's largest landfill according to some, and sits smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! Very simply, the oceans are our dumping grounds, and have been forever. We know that there are ocean currents that flow in various directions across our oceans, and when a few currents meet each other at such angles that creates a sort of vortex in the middle, imagine a tiny tornado you see when the winds blow through building corners and lift light dust and trash into a tornado, they dump all the trash they are carrying with them into this vortex. Such a system is called a gyre involving large ocean currents.

So just like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there is the Indian Ocean Garbage Patch, and just like them, there are three other great garbage patches floating on our oceans.

While there is visible debris and trash floating on the oceans, the problem with the garbage patches is that they are mainly plastic, and that too in a form that is broken down to very tiny levels, or as the article says, polymer level.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has one of the highest levels known of plastic particulate suspended in the upper water column. As a result, it is one of several oceanic regions where researchers have studied the effects and impact of plastic photodegradation in the neustonic layer of water. Unlike debris, which biodegrades, the photodegraded plastic disintegrates into ever smaller pieces while remaining a polymer. This process continues down to the molecular level.

As the plastic flotsam photodegrades into smaller and smaller pieces, it concentrates in the upper water column. As it disintegrates, the plastic ultimately becomes small enough to be ingested by aquatic organisms that reside near the ocean's surface. Thus, plastic waste enters the food chain through its concentration in the neuston. Some plastics decompose within a year of entering the water, leaching potentially toxic chemicals such as bisphenol A, PCBs, and derivatives of polystyrene.

Who is to disprove what I say is a fact that the suspended polymers will definitely have originated from the tobacco satchets that millions of Indian men dump around them without thinking anything about it. This is just to illustrate that eventually, we will be polluting the entire world and then have to deal with the consequences. Most of the world's trash ends up in the water bodies, notwithstanding the large masses of landfills that we continue to fill.

I wanted to write about a relatively simpler process of recycling of paper, but its hard for me to not think about what's happening to our planet through our littering. I simply do not trust the human race to change its behavior, especially the consumers, and perhaps the only way out now is to develop a game changer, maybe something that can reduce plastic to organic waste or simply burn it into water vapour! 

Here are some facts from an article in the Telegraph, a British newspaper:

There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year.

Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.

Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.

The world's navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, he discovered, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day, along with their other litter. But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, and comparing notes with scientists in Japan and Britain, Moore concluded that 80 per cent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land, and the United Nations Environmental Programme agrees.

The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and landfills, and lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter dropped by people at the beach is also a major source.

Plastic does not biodegrade; no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by physical friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous plastic soup at the becalmed heart of the Pacific, but Moore also found a fantastic profusion of uniformly shaped pellets about 2mm across.

Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging.

During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname: mermaids' tears.

Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, plastic is killing a million seabirds a year, and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles. It kills by entanglement, most commonly in discarded synthetic fishing lines and nets. It kills by choking throats and gullets and clogging up digestive tracts, leading to fatal constipation. Bottle caps, pocket combs, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, cottonbud shafts, toothbrushes, toys, syringes and plastic shopping bags are routinely found in the stomachs of dead seabirds and turtles.

A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs – an average of 45 pieces per bird.  

Plastic is bound to a human life in such a way that if we were to discard even a quarter of all the plastic products that we use, I believe we would not be able to survive! That's modernity for you. Unfortunately, so it is for the rest of the species on this planet as well, as we kill them slowly. I've reached this conclusion many times that we won't be able to turn back to living a life that is simpler, nature-friendly and simply less materialistic. Unfortunately, recycling is not very profitable, its not very profitable to produce electricity using the sun or the wind, there is no alternative to plastic, and nothing has been found, organic or chemical, that can burn down plastic, so I do not know what's going to happen, but if there is ever a change for the better on this planet, it will be only after we've managed to kill half the planet! I'm being a pessimist I know, but I do not see anything around me to make me believe otherwise. I'm a sinner myself, and I know how difficult it is to find alternatives to so many of the plastics I use daily. Working towards changing the world on that front is a failed exercise that will never succeed. The only solution now is to find something that will make all this plastic vanish!