Arab world? Democracy? Huh?

The news in Egypt as of this morning on Google News is about everything but Egypt. While there is a huge upheaval underway in Egypt, the rest of the world is discussing Egypt, not for the sake of Egypt or any of those misused words such as freedom and democracy, but for a more realistic reason of how it affects them.

The first headline is how the American politicians are now supporting a change in Egypt, thus risking antagonizing their Israeli allies. The second headline is how crude oil prices have reached USD 103 as tensions in Egypt escalate and then every national daily reporting from their perspective - how India should go on from here, how the Britons are returning home and another big mini-story within this story is the Egyptian government's control of the internet. 

I am really not quite sure how the whole turmoil and the call for democracy started in Egypt, but I am willing to put my money on the hypothesis that it must have started as some protest against some action, or inaction, by the government in terms of price rise, or crime, or any other issue of importance for any common man, and then when everybody realized that this is getting way bigger than a simple protest against the government, somebody must have thrown the D word in.

Anyways, even the first protest in Egypt must have been inspired from what happened in Tunisia. Speaking of Tunisia, whatever happened to Tunisia? Apparently the media has completely stopped talking about the country that actually can claim to be the forerunner in bringing such sweeping change in the Middle East. well, their dictator Ben Ali is gone, and a new government is in, so hopefully the rebuilding of that country is underway now. Egypt, being a bigger economy in the region, is now generating much more interest, and the events that unfold there will probably have a bigger impact in the region.

Okay, so in Tunisia, the rebuilding process is on, rather, should be on soon, as the Tunisian PM urges people to return to work after the "revolution"

Tunisia has had two changes of government since weeks of popular protests ousted former president Zine al-Abdine Ben Ali on Jan. 14. Demonstrations had already brought the country to a standstill but the ouster of Ben Ali has also emboldened many Tunisians to strike to demand better pay and conditions.

"The government calls on you to preserve its independence by returning to work, otherwise the country may collapse," Ghannouchi told privately-owned Hannibal TV.

The security situation is normalising, we have passed the crisis of recent days and we urge you to resume work and defer your claims to meet the challenges."

Marauding gangs of youths have intimidated Tunisians in recent days, rampaging through streets and schools and attacking government buildings.

The chaos was aggravated by a two-day police strike, but security forces returned to work on Wednesday.

Okay, so that's one. Now the latest on Egypt is that we know that currently the Pro-Mubarak and the anti-Mubarak supporters were clashing in the Tahrir Square. Before that, Hosni Mobarak had announced on national tv the he will not run for reelection when the country goes to Presidential polls in September. Egypt was tantalizingly close to being yet another nation with dynastic politics (such as India and North Korea), but Mobarak's son Gamil, who was supposedly being groomed to take over power, totally out of the equation. Of course, the Americans are all for democrazy in Egypt now that their ally's hold has been shattered.

Big churn is still expected in Egypt, but lets move onto other nations which were slated to be the next staging grounds for these "democracy" protests.

Yemen: Another bid for dynastic politics busted in Yemen as the President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, says he will step down in 2013 and will not pass reins to son. If only we could do the same in India, and bring some actual, real democracy in this system.

But back to Yemen,

“No extension, no inheritance, no resetting the clock,” he said, making reference to ruling party proposals on term limits that had been seen as designed to enable him to run again.

 

The move was Saleh’s boldest gambit yet to stave off anti-government turmoil spreading in the Arab world as he tried to avert any showdown with the opposition that could risk drawing people into the streets in deeply impoverished Yemen.

 

Saleh’s remarks came a day before a planned large opposition rally, dubbed a “day of rage,” seen as a barometer of the size and strength of the Yemeni people’s will to follow Egyptians and Tunisians in demanding a change of government.

Lets move onto another country. Which other country's name cropped up but some preemptive measures are under way? Ah yes, Jordan! So King Abdullah has sacked the government, appointed a new prime minister and has called for more reforms. King Abdullah, another of America's great friend in the region, is trying to "tune into" what the Jordanians want. Of course he realizes that sacking the government does not mean the axe over his head is removed, so has undertaken some serious economic reforms.

Next, umm, yes, the media had said something about Bahrain. Let's see what's happening there. Yes, the royalty of Bahrain has indeed gone into action and plans to bring about economic changes in their monarchy. According to this Canadian newspaper, the country was already a fledgling democracy, and the only one in the region to offer a safety net for workers, but still.....

Perhaps seeing the effects of the Tunisian and Egyptian upheavals, though, the King has met with advisers, security officials and Sunni and Shia clerics, pressing upon them the need to abide by the system and respect the law. The Gulf Discussion Forum also reports that the King was clearly worried and called on clerics and mosque leaders to counter calls from those who were trying to agitate in the streets. It did not elaborate.

The King also promised that Bahrain would see political reforms and improvements in living conditions in the coming days, and asked those who'd met to move quickly and take their responsibilities seriously. 

Moving onto another Middle East nation now. Yes, Syria's another candidate for change. But in the end, it might just turn into a damp squib, with people only protesting for the sake of protesting. In fact, according to Al Jazeera, the calls for revolution are strongest on Facebook! I somehow doubt if this will result in anything at all, and as a local journalist quoted above puts it,"I think the day of anger will turn out to be no more than a day of mild frustration." Am i the only one who finds this line to be really funny?!

I read about another country in the news today, Algeria, but it was about the government warning against violent protest against itself. Not that there haven't been protests, and already 3 people have killed themselves by lighting themselves on fire in protests. Being right next to Tunisia, Algeria would have been the first country to feel the heat from across the borders anyways.

So a lot of change has indeed taken place, and even if revolution may be a word that would be stretching the current state of affairs, I have no doubt in my mind that the kings and emirs and dictators (often meaning the same person or family), have been shaken out of their slumber, and we should definitely see many changes in governance in this region. While for the rich countries, it will be easy for the incumbent to employ economic reforms by spending money and keeping the people happy, the non-oil rich nations of the region, should definitely see bigger reforms, economically and even politically. Will all this affect the rich nations of the region, such as the ridiculously fundamentalist Saudi Arabia? Well, nobody knows for sure, but a study by a university in Israel says that at least some shakedown can be expected in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Morocco. Well, lets see how the Middle East emerges from this.

 

What did Engels really say?

While in IIM Calcutta, I was walking along Chowringee Road one day, when I came across a street seller of old books. Without wasting time and opportunity, I at once delved into the book sellers collection for I was sure I would definitely find something of my interest in his lot. The literary culture of Kolkata is well known, after all it is the city of the Bengali intellectual, and it was always my desire to try to take away at least something from it during my time at Joka. Visiting old book stores in College Street and elsewhere and going through their vast and myriad collection was one way I was trying to do that.

Coming back to the book seller on Chowringee Road, I was not disappointed, for I saw some very old books, including some from the Soviet era. There was a very nice comic book (a propaganda book from the western point of view) about the heroics of Stalin! I think I brought that and then gifted it to a friend who really wanted it. There was another book which I kept for myself, and perhaps a well known classic in itself. It was Friedrich Engels, the father of communist theory according to Wikipedia.org, and his classic book - Socialism - Utopian and Scientific, published in 1880.

While today socialism is readily associated with communism which in itself is a very negative word, thanks to the slow and steady demonization process initiated by the US and its allies against the Soviets, socialism does not begin and end with the USSR. In fact, there are a lot of good points in communist and socialist theories that this world would do well to inculcate and follow. I do not claim to be an expert on any social or political theory, but I do know that my education in second year at IIM Calcutta further opened my eyes to the highly unequal and unjust world we are living in, and how this injustice is only strengthening itself.

The Americans have for long, actually throughout the last 60 years, have propagated open economies, global trade, no barriers, and that governments have no business doing business. Of course now that the rest of the world is slowly catching up to the American version of "globalization", they suddenly start preaching protectionism and job creation. Of course, their global corporations have entrenched themselves into every economy across the world on this American claim that its good for them; I mean what better example to show the world than the great American dream. The third world paid for it but unfortunately is slowing taking its economic destiny into its own hands.

This is matter for another post, but coming back to Engels, there were a lot of good points he made which are relevant even today. The common man is at the mercy of the market, and in most cases, the market is not a friend. Just like the Americans used the "American way of life", and the IMF and World Bank, to force many small nations to adapt capitalist policies that would effectively take away the control of their economies from their own hands, economic liberalization today uses its own posterchilds to drive home the point that its good. In India for example, people have made lots of money in the stock market, we all know that, but what the media will rarely mention that less than 5% of this country's population actually has money in the stock market. In the end, the common man is still affected by the price of onions, so what is all the economic modernization we are talking about then?

The book has some very deep writing, and it will be impossible for me to recall even half of it without reading it again, but there are certainly a few mental notes I remember taking after I read the book, or a really long essay in three parts.

For example, he writes that when the freedom to property was brought about in England, while protecting the common serf from the feudal master, turned into something totally different, though of the same color. Now they lost their properties to bigger landowners and capitalists. This is historically correct that with the advent of the industrial revolution, the British society underwent a monumental upheaval, with the money in control of the new rich, the "bourgeois manufacturers".

While to Marx and other great thinkers such as Owen and Fourrier (who Engels writes about in the first part of the book), socialism was a utopia that had its roots in the minds of modern man, Engels said socialism really was an inevitable outcome of a struggle between classes. Even today, do we not talk about the struggle between the haves and have nots? Is it any different? I think not, other than that it has taken a more global scale and incorporated issues such as gender and race. Engels does talk about it in fact, saying the economies and countries that can't stand up to the industrial onslaught are bound to be cast aside.

In 1880, Engels was talking about the economic cycle that we are all familiar with today. He said that every ten years economies will fall under the weight of their own production. We are taught today that economic cycles are a part and parcel of the system, nobody actually questions the need to be a system which sees such a debilitating and devastating cycle repeated as if at clockwork.

Now my question is - do we have to follow the economic system that we are following? The world thrives on the images of success enjoyed by a small percentage of the population, while the majority of this world's individuals are breaking their backs to earn for themselves and their families. Nobody talks about them. My belief is that the world, the way it is right now, is unsustainable. For most of the world, unfortunately, it may be a case of nothing gained and nothing lost. For the small percentage of the world with the high capital and resource consumption, well, they certainly will realize that the earth's running out of resources, and the developed world will realize that the third world is more and more unwilling to share their resources with the former for their gratuitous consumption.

money and brute force to happiness

I am having this really strong sense of deja vu when I write this, but I simply must write more about this whole China world power farce. I know I have written about this earlier, but then again, this is not a one-off episode to be forgotten among the thousands of other events making headlines every day.

I ask a few simple questions to anybody who is interested - what are the foundations on which modern society is built?
I don't mean the physical foundations, but more on the lines of the way the modern human being lives, or at least strives to live. The basic tenet of modern society I would assume is freedom of the individual, freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, all of which are missing in China which aims to be the next superpower in the world. Now my question is - how? Through fear? Through intimidation? Through money?
Unfortunately, China seems to be employing all three with gusto, especially the last one. China has been impressing small nations in Asia, Africa and the Americas with its promise of a great China-led manufacturing revolution in their respective nations, and big promises of aid and investment. Their foreign affairs seem scarily meticulous, planned, and unemotional, thus adding to the discomfiture of ALL.

I write all in capital because certainly China's neighbors are looking uneasily over their shoulders perhaps expecting China to jump over their sovereign land claiming it to be there own. China and Vietnam fought many years ago, and has since kept control of the Spratley archipelago in the South China Sea, taken from the Vietnamese. Already the Chinese have taken for granted that the South China Sea is their own and nobody elses.

Similarly, after decades of self-imposed refusal to rearm itself, Japan is finally considering to begin rearming itself, given the potential danger of conflict with the newly belligerent China. Of course the USA, still the lone superpower has a huge stake in this decision, but it needs all the help it can get when China will knock at its door to ask for a share in global control. I am fairly certain its going to happen - China asking for the reins, but I do not think anybody can foresee the outcome.

Do I even need to mention China's belligerence with India, which i am fairly certain it considers a state so soft that it can do whatever it pleases, and say the nicest things to our leaders' faces. Stapling of visas to Indians from Arunachal Pradesh, denying a visa to an Army Officer who had served there, and other such Chinese tomfoolery certainly seems very calculated and premeditated.

In Africa, both India and China are trying hard to win the hearts and minds of African people and their governments. Perhaps both are being selfish and driven more by the resources in Africa than anything else, but even then, there seems to be more resentment against the Chinese presence than the Indian presence. India has had longstanding ties with Africa, and has built schools, hospitals there, and shared knowledge. China has simply given lots of aid, and taken over African resources.

The point I am trying to make in the end is that can China claim to be a world power through intimidation and bullying? The USA is a bully, and dozens of small nations across the globe have suffered their belligerence, but in the modern world, minds are won through soft power. Hollywood, rock music and fast food are America's weapons to win new friends. Unfortunately, I think the Chinese society is all but dead inside, and the Chinese leadership are driven by their own visions of dominating the world with money and brute force if need be. It all used to happen in the medieval eras, but I highly doubt the chances of it happening anymore.  

In today's free world, the power of the press, the power of information are unstoppable, and if any government thinks it can control it to its own ends, I think its only kidding itself. China was ready to take on the Nobel Prize Committee for awarding the Nobel Prize for Peace to a dissident Liu Xiaobo, arresting his family (he was already under arrest), and threatening Sweden on trade. This episode probably made the Chinese public, and the rest of the world, more aware of who Liu Xiaobo is, and why he has won the prize! 

This was reported in the BBC, and its so true:

If it had not made such a huge fuss about the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, the world's press would not have come to Oslo in such large numbers to report on the ceremony.
And if China had not tried to strong-arm countries with diplomatic representation in Norway and persuade them not to send their ambassadors to the ceremony, then it would not have got into a contest with Europe and the United States - something it was never going to win.

The symbolism of the empty chair was pretty damaging.

The only regimes that have imposed it on the Nobel Prize Committee in the past have been of a kind which China would not want to be compared with: Nazi Germany, the old Soviet Union, Poland under martial law, Burma.

Copyright: AP

December India Telecom Data

Since I am in the telecom industry these days, a part of my job here has been to research the telecom industry in India and Africa. While research in Africa is quite difficult with fewer open source information sources other than the biggest telecom operators in that continent, India has a fairly robust industry with a number of associations and institutions outputting regular research and statistics on the industry. The two industry associations - COAI - Cellular Operators Association of India (a body of GSM service providers), and AUSPI - Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India (a body of CDMA and private wireline providers) provide monthly numbers on subscriber base and occasionally on ARPUs. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, or TRAI, is the main body regulating the sector in India, and is fairly active in research, publishing reports on a number of sectors, and topics, including 3G, rural telephony, urban/rural penetration etc. I try to follow their numbers regularly, and put out my own rudimentary graphs and snapshots.

I wasn't planning on putting in the November 2010 graph per operator but I suppose its a nice comparison to the December data so I will let it stay.

When I first blogged

This blog is 5 years old now, and it seems so far away! When I first started writing this blog in 2006, it had over 100 posts. I had told myself that I would try to write something every day, or at least every other day. I believe it was the time when I was just out of college and waiting to start working, and I believe I continued to blog after I started working as well. I can't believe its been more than a year since my last entry into this blog! Surely it wasn't meant to take this long to write again here.

Unfortunately, things change, and passions fizzle out. For me, its been difficult to stick to passions that stay within me with the same intensity that I have when I first set out on fulfilling them. I tell myself I love writing, but whenever I begin to write something down, it eventually breaks down into severe self-criticism and self-loathing. My frustrations at what I want to do but I can't, or can't get myself to do just pour out in very insipid and banal language. Just like what I am doing here.

I had written in a wordpad entry (something which I have begun using as my journal) about how I had met somebody who had told us - me and a group of friends - to never stop doing what we love doing, and what we would like to pursue as a career in the future. For example, if I want to write, i should continue to write regularly, for if i stop writing with the belief that I can start again whenever i want to, or need be, it will be very difficult for me to do so. Unfortunately, I haven't written anything professional, or even semi-professional, since my days at The Triangle. I was involved in the marketing magazines at IIM Calcutta, but I never wrote anything in them, with my time and effort mainly going into the planning of the magazines. These notepad entries have been my sincere effort (in my own mind), to continue writing whatever I can think of into some physical form. Most of my good thoughts, I believe, simply die out in my mind, waiting to see the light of day. When I lie in bed at night, I am filled with such wonderful thoughts, ideas and rants that I promise myself that I will write them down the next day. Most of my thoughts are not that fortunate.

Since I have started photography, I can actually post some of my photographs here as well, and that is an exciting prospect, because that is one area where I am sure I will be able to contribute with enough gusto and effort to actually make it worthwhile, and perhaps enjoyable for anybody else to go through.

Coming to the theme that dominated this blog when I first started out - politics - will continue to be there. I mean I make no bones about telling anyone and everyone about how much I hate the government, the Congress party and all the games that these people play, perhaps without realizing the hurt they will cause to the country's future. Maybe they do, and there is method to their madness, but this is a theme I wanted to write more on, with a little more research done in the mainstream media and opinion pieces. I don't see why I shouldn't, or why I couldn't.

There is a churn I am expecting at work, and perhaps some long term changes with respect to my job here at Essar and my own profile. I have been without a lot of work the past few days, and that perhaps is another reason I finally turned to my blog again after such a long time. It is wrong on my part, and very unjust, that I needed so much free time with myself to finally remember that I had this beautiful blog that I had started with so many expectations and visions, indicating on my part that i am still doing it only as an outlet to bide time, but I would sincerely like to believe that it is not so. Even if I can't post anything worthwhile, or without incisive opinions or insights, at least I will, or still, have a place where nobody but I venture and write to my heart's content.