Passionate About India

The war on terror was never on terror. With every passing day come more revelations, humiliating and embarrassing, on how the entire concept of weapons of mass destruction was manufactured to suit US President George W. Bush’s plans to capture the Iraqi oil fields . . . and now as the US-dictated dummy government runs Iraq, and almost all oil and infrastructure building contracts are pocketed by American companies (Bush and Dick Cheney it seems had started deciding on the companies like Bechtel, Flour Daniel etc. for awarding of the contracts even before they started the war on Iraq) . . . the result is quiet evident . . . oil prices at one time all set to touch the $100 per barrel mark are now hovering around the half way mark. And Americans are happily guzzling oil in their heavy duty SUV’s . . . after the destruction of the twin towers instead of finding out the al-Qaeda terrorists, Bush started focussing on all those who, according to him, were evil including the Saddam Hussein-led...

I knew there must be more to it than meets the eye when I read media reports about the latest move by the Prime Minister to send Indian bureaucrats to American universities to improve their ‘governance skills’. Since he took office in May 2004, the honourable Prime Minister has time and again emphasised the crying and urgent need for reforms in the Indian bureaucracy. Many a time, he has used public platforms to assert that India cannot shine for its deprived and disposed citizens unless Indian bureaucrats become more transparent, efficient and accountable. He has even chanted the ‘corporate’ mantra of promoting bureaucrats solely on the basis of merit and performance. Could hapless Indians, who are forever at the mercy of the whims and fancies of Indian bureaucrats, even dream of such a thing happening in the country? I think their dreams will be dashed. The Prime Minister may be an honourable man; but the ‘system’ in India is ensuring that his noble intentions will never be translate...

What do you do when you don’t have solutions to the most pertinent problems devastating the world? Well, you just form a forum of like minded, power hungry and ayesayers, find an exotic resort in Europe and discuss the problems for a few days in the most obscenely luxurious environs and pledge to meet next year again with some new issues to discuss, albeit without any substantial solutions. This is the best way to define a forum most ceremoniously called the ‘World Economic Forum’. From which viewpoint it is a ‘world’ forum, is hard to comprehend. It can be termed a world forum if and only if the world is just about the US and Europe. And since it is not, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is in no way a global forum. So what is it? Well, to begin with, the World Economic Forum is a private entity and not essentially one, which is necessarily represented by all the nation states. Initiated by Professor Klaus M. Schwab (who has been famous for equating the anti globalisation protesters with...

I still remember reading somewhere that a few years ago, when a contingent of police in an Indian metropolis had gone to confiscate some contraband computers and CDs, all that they did was to seize the monitors (assuming them to be the computers, while they left the CPUs behind) and contracted labourers to staple all the seized CDs (as they felt that they might get infected by some ‘dreaded’ computer virus). This might sound hilarious to many, but this incidence reveals more than a crude joke. Whenever you think of an Indian policeman, the picture that evolves is: semi-literate men (as there are hardly any women), armed with antiquated weapons (the worst of them date back to the era of World War I and the best to four decades back), a pittance of a salary (breeding unabashed corruption), stained and un-ironed uniforms (showcasing the attitude), rusty vehicles, overstretched working hours (as there is one policeman for almost 700 citizens), and with a constant fear of persecution from t...