Passionate About India

With all due respect to the reports published by United Nations and other similar global bodies, there are certain anomalies that nobody points out, at least publicly. These anomalies have been going on for years, if not decades, falling in line with Western interests. Even if we track global history in the post-World War II period, these irregularities are vivid and clear. For example, Japan was for long considered an emerging economy, rather than a fully developed one, despite its per capita income being higher than the many so-called developed nations. The same pattern still persists with other nations, like South Korea, which is even now considered an emerging country, although its per capita income (in PPP terms) is higher than Spain’s and at par with Italy’s (both Spain and Italy are recognized as developed nations). The G-7 club was formed on the basis of the seven biggest economies among developed nations coming together. Now, with South Korea’s GDP size in PPP terms becoming ...

The poster boy of Indian entrepreneurs of the 21st century, Narayana Murthy, is back in business at Infosys – the third biggest Indian tech firm – with a renewed mission to reverse the slide that had happened in his absence. Of course the economic slowdown had its own role to play, but the Infosys slide has been mainly engineered by a rising attrition rate, probably because of eroding values of employee welfare; values that were initially laid down by Murthy himself. The catchword of ‘employees first’ resonating with equal importance to ‘customers first’ was pioneered in India by Infosys, not just as a business strategy to foster higher revenues but also higher happiness levels of its workers. You can call it altruism, but trust me, despite some new-age philosophies preaching against this construct, it is better than the ‘me only’ capitalist doctrines. Even the heartland of United States that was built on the ideals of ‘survival of the fittest’ and showed little sympathy for those who...

With another forgettable budget being presented in India, let me show how real commitment for the downtrodden can alter a country’s economic landscape! When the capitalist West won the Cold War against Soviet Union and Eastern European nations, it became an underlined conclusion among political pundits and in fact a common perception that capitalism was the real path for success – rather than socialism, which was made to appear as a sure shot road to economic doom! However, this self-ratified superiority of capitalism and the entire Western chest-thumping exercise that existed during those times and even the succeeding decades are all but gone. United States is grinding it out through an extended recession streak and Europe is literally struggling to keep the eurozone in one piece, with the entire eurozone on the verge of collapsing like a broken jigsaw puzzle. The recession in Europe and North America, which started in 2008, is like a never-ending nightmare with no sight of revival w...

This article is not about Shiv Sena bashing, because enough people are doing that; and personally, I can’t imagine how Mumbai could have possibly had a normal day on the streets when two million of its citizens were genuinely mourning the death of the Shiv Sena supremo, Balasaheb Thackeray. In fact, before I get into the main article, let me also first say a few things about the Mumbai bandh and the Balasaheb legacy of absolutist fear. Yes, post his death, the fear factor was surely there... and that was a key reason why, even without a formally announced bandh, there was a total bandh in Mumbai. Yes, I also believe that the rest of Maharashtra should have been more normal. However, it is also a fact that this vexing fear that we are talking about and such quasi-bandhs are not really the monopoly of Shiv Sainiks. Bangalore was at a standstill when Rajkumar died a few years ago; there have been bandhs and equal fear of SP goons in UP, and far more fear, door to door, all over West Beng...

I have been in the United States the last few days on a lecture tour. Every time I come here, I discover more fascinating things about this fascinating country! Though my hectic tour has not allowed me much time, as I would have loved to go through all manners of newspapers and magazines, I have still managed to go through a lot of them. And one thing strikes me as very strange. I mean, most of the media is full of stories about the imminent face off between the Republican Mitt Romney and the Democrat incumbent Barack Obama. But the media seems to have an equal number of stories on the Tea Party, on how the Republicans are waging a war on women and on how Obama has a massive lead over Romney when it comes to women voters in America. One thing you must grant this country – even those from the ‘Left’ ideologies who dislike America so much – the freedom of speech here is genuine and everybody seems to exercise the right to yell their heads off! I was blown away by some of the articles, co...

Woodrow Wilson once said that, “A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon the nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.” Rebutting the same, decades later, Omar Bongo, former President of Gabon, argued against the use sanctions, commenting, “...It is important to observe that when Europe or the United Nations impose sanctions that are supposed to be aimed against a certain regime, usually millions of people end up being directly punished.” With time, the very objective of sanctions has undergone a full transformation – today, sanctions are used mostly for strategic gains than anything else. The United States and its allies (particularly Israel) are closing in on Iran! With a thumping majority (100-0), the US Senate last month approved sanctions...

United States’ finely tuned images of ‘land of opportunity’, ‘land of the free’ and ‘home of the brave’ – all have in recent time received a major jolt with protestors pouring in from all over the country in thousands. It is probably the biggest protest since anti-Vietnam-war demonstrations in the 70s! Finally their police are finding it tough to control their own people. This time they are failing to smoke them out, because the enemy lies in every other house. I wrote about the coming end of capitalism – the way we know it – in 2008 itself as an aftermath of the latest recession that has hit the world due to its blind belief in free market profiteering and was surprised why (despite people around the world, from countries in the Middle East to a laid back country like India, showing a tendency to come out on the streets to press for their rights) people in the western world were delaying coming out in the streets to press for what was their right – the right to stable and dignified li...

Arindam Chaudhuri argues why the Radia tapes prove nothing and why Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi remain two of India’s best journalists When Barack Obama was running for the US presidency, the common joke in America was that win or lose, Obama was sure to get a job with MSNBC! And when he won, the joke was that “all the channels declared Barack Obama as the US President at 11 in the night; MSNBC declared him the winner six months back.” That’s representative of how blatantly MSNBC had lobbied to make Obama the US President. And every media house with an ideology and conviction does so. Yes, that’s the job of media houses and of journalists with character, ideology and convictions. Wake up to reality, my friends! In UK and USA elections, newspapers rally behind individual parties till the very end – openly. And it’s not because the party owns the media house. During the very next elections, the media houses could support the opposition. That’s how it is in all true democracies where media...

Barack Obama came, he spoke and he conquered. At least that’s what some of the biggest media houses would have you believe. Nothing could be more misleading for the Indian public. Here are the reasons why the trip was only of feel-good value, that too for dumb people. 1. Obama had a clear cut mandate. And that mandate was to show Americans that he was taking back jobs for them. He took away business worth 10 billion dollars and 50,000 jobs. These 10 billion dollars could have been used in India to create 200 times more jobs, because for every American job we create in America, we can roughly create about 200 jobs in rural India. It was a classic game of begging that the new America is now seen playing in India and China. With India, it’s about access to its markets and deals with the government. And with China, it’s about the revaluation of the Chinese currency to reduce their foreign debt and make Chinese products uncompetitive in American markets! I would even say that it was indee...

Praising American presidents has not been quite my forte! However, I celebrated Obama’s Presidential victory wholeheartedly (read my editorial in The Sunday Indian, issue dated November 9, 2008) because I almost believed that he held a promise that American presidents in the past have rarely held! He really could have been the change the world was waiting for. Recession had shown its ugly face once more in the greedy capitalist world and Bush had left a near criminal legacy behind. There was no better a time for Obama to prove his worth. But forget bringing the world out of recession, Obama has not even been able to do anything to bring the USA out of recession! Of course, if we were to believe the Nobel Committee and its choice for the Nobel Prize in Economics this year, then there is nothing wrong with the capitalist system and nothing much to be done at all but match the existing unemployment with the existing jobs vacant in various companies! Ludicrous... just like their Peace Priz...

It is not that Washington has done something like this for the first time. In fact, the US has got a checkered history of taking gratuitously arbitrary and insensitive stances, with a singular objective of fulfilling their own selfish motives. I’m referring to Obama’s recent trip to China and his most ridiculous statement of how China can play an important role in making the Indo-Pak relationship healthier. Not just this, Obama has clearly indicated a visible tilt towards China by offering to strengthen communication, dialogue and cooperation on issues related to South Asia and work together with China to promote peace, stability and development in that region! Although US Presidents have had a sparkling history of purposefully committing such extravagant blunders (for selfindulgent American gain), Obama seems to surpass them all, as it has been extremely rare for any American President to acknowledge China as a harbinger of ‘peace’ in South Asia, and that too with respect to India and...

Just a couple of weeks back, some tens of thousands of American citizens got together to protest US President Barack Obama’s healthcare plans. Obama has been trying his best to expand health coverage for American citizens, at the same time also trying to arrest the ever increasing healthcare costs in the US. As per his plan, healthcare is going to adequately cover as many as 97% of the American population. Currently, it is estimated that around 46 million Americans do not have health cover and around 25 million of them are not adequately covered. Now, on the face of it, the plan looks fine; but what has agitated an average American is the very fact that this plan (of adequately covering 97% Americans under health insurance) calls for a budget of $600 billion, which would be mobilized through higher taxes. This element of higher taxes has antagonized the Americans, coupled with the fact that they do not want the government to interfere into health affairs. Such is the fury among America...

When Barack Obama occupied the White House around six months back, expectations from him were tremendous! A considerable amount of this expectation building can be credited to his predecessor, who had done so much of damage that people all across the globe were waiting desperately for the big change in America’s highest office. And the rest of the credit goes to Obama’s mind blowing speech that he delivered in Illinois post his win, which further exponentially compounded those very expectations that people had of and from him. So not only were those beleaguered Americans residing in the US and their brethren marines in Iraq expecting a miracle from the new President elect, but also people from all shades of life all across the world, who eagerly accepted that change had finally come. In fact, it was not surprising to observe that Iranians sitting in Teheran had as much faith in Obama bringing change to the Middle East as a Chinese sitting in Beijing. All of a sudden, it seemed that ho...

It has been quite sometime since Barack Obama was elected the President of USA and his iconic speech of “Change we believe in” left the whole world enthralled. The fact that the Western world and many in the rapidly developing economies like India and China could relate to his speech and felt that such changes would benefit their countries too was not something new. But I shouldn’t be surprised if many in some other parts of the world, which are not conventionally considered to be open minded or liberal, too were watching with intent and hoping for change in their countries as well. Over the last few months, as the Obama administration settled down with work and the rest of the world forgot much of them, at least some of the real changes have started showing their presence. No, I am not talking about the initiatives being taken by Obama to bail out loss making American companies; and neither am I referring to the restrictions on outsourcing that are being imposed by him. On the contrar...

you are receptive to change and don’t stick to irrational logic just for the heck of it! Prior to this editorial, I’ve written a couple of more editorials on the American President, Barack Obama. In those editorials, I have been extremely appreciative with respect to his historic win; and more than anything else, with his win that had actually made the American citizen the real winner. I had also been extremely candid with my appreciation towards him, not just for him becoming the President but the arousing reasons that made him so. For the uninitiated, I wrote that he demanded change from his fellow Americans, not simply with respect to the economic outlook or foreign policy, but in something graver; he beseeched them to realise that in the hardships of today should not be forgotten the intensity of the American character of past. This is not to miss how enamoured I was with his outstanding speeches. But then, that’s history now as President Obama is already a few months old in the Wh...

I still remember the early morning of November 4, 2008, as the US Presidential election results started pouring in, I realized that something unbelievably historic was happening in America. I just couldn’t stop wondering how a Black – African American (since so many mails and messages have told me!) – could become the President of the United States of America; the same country that had earlier re-elected George Bush as the President! The whole experience was so tumultuous! I couldn’t help recall old books about America that I had read. Books about the Civil War that President Abraham Lincoln had presided over; the war that eventually resulted in the emancipation of blacks. As I wrote in my editorial in The Sunday Indian on November 9, 2008, my favourite book, of course, was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The book – which passionately documented the immense pain of black slaves – is perhaps the greatest read for any human wishing to understand the meaning of the term ‘depth of character’, and is gu...

November 4, 2008… In all probability, we shall not see another day of more global historical relevance in our lifetimes! While I had hoped that Barack Obama should win the American Presidential polls (you all would know how less of love I have for George Bush and his party representatives), yet, I didn’t really believe six months back that it would be him standing as the President-elect of America today. That the majority in America could vote for a black, half-Muslim, with madrasaa education (in Indonesia, where he lived with his second Muslim father) – whatever his credentials were – was something I felt was quite tough a call. But the tough has happened today! Barack Obama might not be historically a great leader, but he has created history under his leadership. He may not have been a great revolutionary or may not have been identified with any cause-centred leadership – like Martin Luther King Jr had been – but he showed that having got the chance of being the right man at the righ...