The Wandering Falcon - a novel on the cliched tribal way of life

Title: The Wandering Falcon
Author:  Jamil Ahmad
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 181
Price: Rupees 399

If you want to have a view of North West Frontier Province and Balochistan that is remotely different from what you get to see in CNN and BBC, then this could be a resonably good bet. The author Jamil Ahmad served as chairman of the Tribal Development Corporation, and he had an insider’s view of the struggles of tribals living in this area. He has written in a convincingly manner about people who are trying to hold on to their fierce tribal identities in face of regular onslaughts from modernity. At times, you do get the feeling that the narrative is getting cliched, perhaps that can't be avoided in this kind of a book, where the tribal way of life looms like a gigantic cliche by itself.

It is natural that Ahmed should show a degree of empathy in his treatment and description of the tribal chiefs, who often are ageing men trying to keep their clans together and dealing with issues like promiscuity and debt and revenge. The story, set before the Taliban regime came into power, revolves around Tor Baz, a boy who is a wanderer type. In many ways, Tor Baz is the eponymous falcon who grows up during the course of the novel; he moves between tribes and meets different men and women. He interacts with men whose one and only obsession is bloody wars. He also introduces us to women who in the name of honour lead a secluded life. His origins remain amorphous all the time. There are only subtle hints to his parents who are said to have defied the tribal code of honour and eloped.

Ahmad’s haunting prose does a good job of capturing the sudden cultural changes coming into the life of the nomadic tribes. “Lonely, as all such posts are, this one is particularly frightening. No habitation for miles around and no vegetation except for a few wasted and barren date trees leaning crazily against each other, and no water other than a trickle amount some salt-encrusted boulders which also dries out occasionally, manifesting a degree of hostility. Nature has not remained content merely at this. In this land, she has also created the dreaded bad-e-sad-o-bist-roz, the wind of a hundred and twenty days. This wind rages almost continuously during the four winter months, blowing clouds of alkali-laden dust and sand so thick that men can barely breathe or open their eyes when they happen to get caught in it.”

We also learn about the nomadic Kharot tribe whose way of life is being threatened by the limitations imposed by political boundaries and also by the emergence of powerful clans of the Wazirs, Mahsuds or Afridis. There is no continuous narrative or central plot. Instead, there is a form of storytelling that attempts to fictionalise facts and spotlight a region, a people and a way of life that has been misunderstood so badly. It comes as a surprise when the story ends at a happy note. Tor Baz decides to end his wanderings and settle down. Perhaps the moral of the story is that even the energetic falcon of the rugged land has to settle down at some point of time.

Price rise is fatiguing the nation

The fact that the political elite continues to plough on with their social service schemes is the result of profound arrogance. There is ample evidence to show that schemes such as NREGA are not leading to the creation of any useful infrastructure, they are only contributing to the price rise. The country’s economics has been overcome by the politics. It almost seems as if government if using inflation as a deliberate tool to fund its projects.

No one is interested in talking the language of economic reform.

Under such a situation the economy will go on contracting for years. At some point of time the game of musical chairs will end. There will have to be “an event”. The only issue is when this meltdown will happen; of course, it will be the “aam admi” who picks up the tab, but the politicians who are currently in power will have to pick up the blame. In any case, now it is time to fasten our seat-belts, because the economic roller coaster is going to take us all on a crazy ride.

Armageddon: The Return of Quetzalcoatl or the Asteroid

These days we have lot of crazy theories floating around about the world coming to end in the next couple of years. There is the talk of the ancient Mayan calendar coming to an end in 2012. By the way, I just finished reading the book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. Even though we like to live in peace, we love to read about destruction. The book turned out to be quite boring. Not even worth reviewing. However, the plot made me think of ultimate Armageddon! What would it be like? Many scientists believe that the gigantic Shiva Crater off India’s western continental shelf might have been the place where an enormous meteor crashed 65 million years ago. The earth became a ball of fire, which burned for thousands of years.What happened 65 million years ago could happen again.

According to NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Tracking team, “The most dangerous asteroids, capable of a global disaster, are extremely rare. The threshold size is believed to be 1/2 to 1 km. These bodies impact the Earth only once every 1,000 centuries on average. Comets in this size range are thought to impact even less frequently, perhaps once every 5,000 centuries or so.” Despite there being lot of objects in the universe, much of the space is still empty. Large-sized objects are hundreds or thousands of light years apart. Even in the asteroid belt, much of the space is empty. That is why the probes sent from earth are able to pass the belt without any problem. The asteroids in the belt are spread over a ring that is more than a billion kilometres in circumference, more than 100 million kilometres wide, and millions of kilometres thick.

Still NASA’s Near Earth Asteroid Tracking has identified many objects that could strike earth in distant future. Some of these objects are large enough to cause widespread damage if not obliterate the civilisation completely. As of now none of these objects intersect earth’s orbit, but these bodies can change position slowly with time, so it is possible that in some point of time they could strike the planet. There was reason for widespread fear when on July 9, 2002, the Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research Project (an MIT Lincoln Laboratory program funded by the United States Air Force and NASA) in New Mexico managed to detect a 1.2-mile-wide (2 km) asteroid. The preliminary calculations showed that this object’s orbit around our sun was of 837 days, and there existed a remote possibility that it could collide with Earth in the early days of 2019. Shocking, isn’t it. Clock really seems to be ticking. But that is really not the case.

After further observations and calculations Astronomers from NASA and from other observatories around the world came to the conclusion that there was very little possibility of the asteroid known as 2002 NT7 actually striking our planet. “The threat is very minimal,” reassuringly says, Donald Yeomans, of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. However, scientists are keeping close track of the movements of 2002 NT7. We had another close encounter on June 14, 2002, when the asteroid known as 2002 MN, which was the size of a soccer field, passed within 75,000 miles of the Earth. In the parlance of space science, a distance of 75,000 miles is considered to be only a whisker away. Had this object hit any densely populated area, it would have caused millions of deaths and unimaginable amount of destruction.

It is 2002 NT7 that might turn out to be the greatest threat to life on earth. It could cause destruction of biblical levels. NASA’s Near Earth Object Program has released this statement, “With the processing of a few more observations of asteroid 2002 NT7 through July 28, we can now rule out any Earth impact possibilities for February 1, 2019. While we cannot yet completely rule out an impact possibility on February 1, 2060, it seems very likely that this possibility will be soon ruled out as well as additional positional observations are processed.” So is the year 2060 going to be the year of Armageddon? Only time can tell. Asteroids are thought to have brought life on this planet, so we might think of it as a cosmic irony that one day they might become responsible for destroying us.

Antilia is the most beautiful building in India

From the pictures that I have seen in magazines, newspapers and websites, Antilia seems like the most beautiful building ever built in India. There is a kind of geometric pattern in the sharp rectangular way the building reaches upwards towards the sky. The front face exudes a feeling of extravagant openness; the different floors are like cubes of glass and concrete placed on top of each other. All this seems to showcase the fact that the inhabitants of the building are open minded and they have nothing to hide. I guess this is exactly the kind of building that Howard Roark of The Fountainhead would have created.

The entire edifice is completely free of decoration. The building rises up just as it is. Even the support pillars are also visible and they only add to the appeal. With its clean, clear-cut lines, the building towers against Mumbai’s skyline. It looks accusingly towards the corrupt politicians and industrialists who prefer to deposit their ill-gotten wealth in secret Swiss bank accounts. The Antilia is a compelling proof of how beautiful the entire country could look if we had more industrialists started investing their money to create their palaces in India.

The Indian celebrities, who have nothing better to do expect hogging all the space on Indian TV, seem to be completely bereft of any sense of art, architecture and aesthetics. Otherwise why would they be whining about Antilia being like a monstrosity? Perhaps they prefer the imperialist bungalows that occupy acres of prime land in Delhi. Some of the worst bungalows are located in Lutyen’s Delhi. These bungalows look like army barracks and they are fit only to house dictators and their cronies.

Since independence, our central government has been living in the buildings created by the imperialist British dictators. All that the Indian socialists have created since independence is the monstrous looking DDA Flats and the slums. Socialism has denuded our country with even a semblance of architectural beauty. Antilia is the nearest thing to heaven in India. It is the temple of free enterprise. A building is after all a concrete realisation of thought. If Mukesh Ambani has the vision for creating a home as beautiful as this, then he must be a man of great artistic taste.

Is Quantum Mechanics Science or Science Fiction

Just finished reading a book on Quantum Mechanics, but still can't make out if this is really science or it is science fiction. But it might even be for real, because they are actually about to implement some Quantum theories to come up with practical gadgets. As quantum particles can exist in multiple states at the same time, computers based on it can theoretically be used to carry out many calculations at once, factoring a 300-digit number in just seconds, compared to the years required by conventional computers. 

Quantum Mechanics can be understood as the study of the behaviour of matter and energy at the molecular, atomic, nuclear, and even smaller microscopic levels. The sub-atomic particles do not seem to observe the laws of motion and gravitation that govern macroscopic objects. 

Once you enter the realm of Quantum Mechanics, even your vision can have the effect of changing reality. For instance, the moment you actually see something, you actually bring about a change in the physical process that is taking place. Quantum objects can exist in multiple states and places at the same time, and you must be a master of probabilities or statistics for pointing out their position at any given point of time.

Another hard to swallow fact that can be derived from theory is known in the scientific parlance as wave-particle duality – light waves can act like particles and particles can start showing properties of a wave. Instead of being a concrete entity governed by certain set of laws, under the Quantum regime the entire universe becomes a series of probabilities. It becomes possible for matter to travel through the intervening space, by a process called Quantum Tunnelling. There are also the philosophical issues. For instance, there is the theory that says - measurement actually determines the state. If this is true, then it can lead us to believe that the size of the universe might actually be dependent on the measurement techniques being used.

The most interesting of all is the highly popular many worlds interpretation, which suggests that quantum objects display several behaviours because they inhabit an infinite number of parallel universes. According to the multi-verse theory, there exist a series of parallel universes. Now if parallel universes exist, then according to some scientists time travel becomes a possibility. It was the great Quantum pioneer Hugh Everett III who first of all grappled with the mathematical idea of parallel worlds universes. He published his paper on the subject in 1957, which dwelled on the problem of what actually happens when an observation is made of something of interest - such as an electron or an atom - with the intention of measuring its position or its speed.

According to the traditional brand of Quantum Science that was in vogue during those days, a mathematical object called a wave function, which contains all possible outcomes of a measurement experiment, collapses to give a single real outcome. But not satisfied with this reasoning, Everett came up the audacious theory that the universe is constantly and infinitely splitting, so that no collapse takes place. If you accept this theory then every possible outcome of an experimental measurement occurs, each one in a parallel universe.

In other words, our universe is not a solitary phenomenon. It is an entity that lies embedded in an infinitely larger and more complex structure called the multi-verse, which is a set of parallel universes whose number is constantly multiplying. So each time, a radioactive atom decays, or even a particle of light strikes against the retina of your eye, the universe in which we live splits into few more universes. Lets say a motorist has a near miss in a road accident in this universe, then it is possible that in some other universe, he might actually have been killed in the same accident.

Why can't India have a service like Paypal?

I have no idea why the government is not allowing a payment gateway like Paypal to function properly in India. It is so much easier to transfer and receive funds through Paypal. All you need to do is send an email and the money reaches the other end. If Paypal were to become fully functional in India, millions of small entrepreneurs, freelance writers and professionals would benefit. They would be able to receive payment in a more quick and seamless manner.

However, our government is only interested in coming up with policies that help the corrupt rich. So a man like Hasan Ali Khan is allowed to park billions of dollars in Swiss banks, but a freelance writer cannot open a Paypal account to receive $10 from Europe or USA! The rich guys have option of using the infamous Mauritius route to transfer their black money into India, but the middle class people find it very difficult to receive from abroad even the white money that they have earned through hard labour.

In the latest instance, online payment service provider Paypal has notified its Indian users that they will need to update their accounts with more information in order to continue to receive export-related payments and withdraw money. Users will have to add their PAN (permanent account number), their Indian bank account, postal addresses and a purpose code that is related to the majority of commercial activities for export-related payments. This is to ensure compliance with RBI’s guidelines in India.

But who has the time to do all this paperwork? If people have to do so much of paperwork then why should they use Paypal at all? After all, this system or receiving and making payments is all about speed.

Why is it that only the poor and middle class people have to provide pages and pages of documentation and identification for the smallest transaction that they make? Will the government ever dare to ask for documentation from the super-rich people who own Swiss bank accounts or transfer money into India through the Mauritius route? Will the government ever dare to ask the top politicians to declare their unaccounted wealth? It is only the “aam admi” who is harassed.

These days “national security” has become a tool for the politicians and bureaucrats to heap more and more inconvenience on the common man.

Apocalypse postponed by 5 months

There is a lot of talk about religious nuts in third world countries, but we don’t bother to focus as much on the nuts who babble out of their pulpits in liberal democracies. Harold Camping! This guy predicted that the world would be obliterated on October 21, his supporters even spent millions of dollars on erecting billboards announcing world’s end. Now those crestfallen followers are straining to find meaning in their lives.

However, Harold Camping is still not done with making his insane predictions. Now he has revised his apocalyptic prophecy by five months. So the new date for the obliteration of the Earth is actually Oct. 21. That is the day when, according to Camping, 200 million Christians will be taken to heaven before global cataclysm. If you want to go on a binge, now is the time, because after Oct. 21 you might never have the chance.

At times, even prediction made my nuts come true. The globe will be completely destroyed in five months, when the apocalypse comes, Camping insists.

A lukewarm party

Yesterday the UPA celebrated its second year in power. But this seemed like a really strange celebration party. None of the senior ministers on the stage appeared in celebratory mood. If the visuals on the TV screen were anything to go by, then the atmosphere in this so-called party seemed quite grim actually.

The invitee list for the party was limited to the members of the UPA coalition. Ordinary people were nowhere to be seen. The stars from Bollywood and the world of cricket were nowhere to be seen. One would have expected the UPA II’s party to be a public event, a mega jamboree in which people from all walks of life would be invited.

Perhaps the top leaders of the government have developed the impression that their only task is to manage the coalition; they don’t need to think about people at all. Their only hope of retaining power lies in management of the coalition. Once political power used to come from wooing the voters, now it is all about wooing the coalition partners.

Will this political strategy continue to yield results in the long run?

India can’t afford a prolonged probe into 2G scam

Finally some big people are being arrested in the 2G scam case. But how long is this trail going to go on? The focus of the entire political class, the bureaucracy, the industrialist class and of the media is on the 2G drama. It is almost as if nothing else matters in the country. Now there is talk of some major industrialists being arrested.

If that happens then what will be the future of the companies that these industrialists are running. Many small investors have invested their lives savings in blue chip companies like Reliance Communications, TATA Tele, Airtel, Idea, etc. The telecom shares keep making a new bottom ever since the 2G scam broke out.

Of course, prosecution of the guilty has to be a priority. But at the same time the government also needs to frame policies, which can ensure that the telecom sector remains efficient and profitable. The spread of mobile telephony and broadband should not get halted. The shares of the telecom companies should start looking up once again.

Just because few top people were involved in a financial misdemeanour we can’t penalise the entire telecom sector. India has already wasted almost two years on this 2G drama, how many more years are we going to give to this trail. Guilty should be punished as quickly as possible so that it can become business as usual for the country.

Why do prices keep rising?

This cartoon that I found on The LRC Blog does a good job of shedding further light on the terms that  governments usually use to explain price rise:

Aristocrat Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a staunch socialist

Isn’t it strange that a man of the left Dominique Strauss-Kahn should have such aristocratic tastes? He is alleged to have made a rape attempt in a $3000-a-night suite. He makes appearances in astronomically priced suits, has friends in the richest circles, flies in chartered jets, owns a few lavish mansions and yet he is a socialist. He has always been projected by the international media as a friend of the poor! 

There is big mismatch between the values that the modern leftist leaders preach and what the practise. I have no problem if anyone has earned his wealth through hard work and enterprise, but people like Dominique Strauss-Kahn tend to fund their lavish lifestyle through taxpayers money, donations and perhaps corruption.

In India we have a number of flamboyant socialists and leftists like Dominique Strauss-Kahn. You only need to take a stroll through the richest neighbourhood in any Indian city, and chances are that the best bungalows will be belonging to the leftist and socialist types. The elites are leftist because they know that this is the ideology that can safeguard their perks, privileges and entitlements.

Marxism is an ideology that favours only the politically connected elite…

Higher education is unnecessary

From the moment a child is born, he is learning during every moment of his existence. In normal course of things it should not take more than 15 to 16 years for a human child to gain knowledge that will allow him or her to survive independently. That is how nature seems to have planned human life. In a natural world, a human being is supposed to gain enough knowledge and maturity by the age of 16 and after that he or she can fend for himself. But modernity has brought a seminal change in the way young boys and girls are trained for the future.

Instead of practical experiences, the focus is on school and college based education. Instead of learning from observations and interactions in the real world, the students are expected to devote all their mental and physical energies in whatever they are being taught in schools and colleges. At times, such education takes as much as two or three decades to complete.

A human being is not expected to live forever, the average life expectancy for an urban Indian is around 70 years; so what sense does it make for a young man or woman to keep studying till he is 25 or even 35 years old. These days it has become a fashion amongst students to do multiple MA, PHD, Mphil and keep studying till they are 30 or 35. By the time they emerge out of the college campus, they are completely out of touch with the real world. Instead of real knowledge, in many cases, their mind is filled with latest political propaganda. One almost gets the feeling that there exists an international educational mafia that is bent upon cornering maximum amount of resources from these gullible students. If we look at the top performers in any field of activity, whether it is business, politics, research or arts, we find that these are mostly self-made people.

The capacity for original thought, which can only come through a process of practical experiences that are deeply personal in nature, is important for success. If we examine the list of people who have received the Nobel Prize for literature since 1901, then we find that a number of these laureates were those who have never received a college degree. They were entirely self-made. Even in the field of science, there are so many eminent scientists who didn’t have any higher education at all. In fact, the greatest scientific brain of the modern world, Albert Einstein, was in his early twenties and he used to work as a clerk in Swiss postal department when he made some of the most remarkable discoveries of science. He wrote his landmark Theory of Relativity and deduced the relationship between mass and energy even though he didn’t even have an access to any modern university, laboratory or library.

It is not at all necessary that a person who has a done PHD, MA, Mphil will be more qualified to make a scientific discovery, write a best-selling novel or even tackle the myriad vagaries of life, as compared to a man who has never had the chance to venture inside a college campus. Bill Gates does not have a college degree and yet he was able to found Microsoft. By working on his vision of bringing a PC on every desk, he has single-handedly brought about an incredible change in the way of life of people around the world. Despite the fact that he never completed his college education, he has turned out to be a revolutionary figure. Now lets imagine what would have happened if in his youth Bill Gates had continued his education till he was 30 for getting a string of PHD, MA, Mphil, etc. All those years of education would surely have stifled his natural sense of creativity and he would never have been able to found Microsoft.

The education system needs to be redesigned. The current system takes too long to teach too less. The process of dissemination of knowledge needs to be made faster; so that the students can gain freedom from schools and colleges by the time they are 20, and they are able to bring their natural talents to the world. Perhaps the modern education system is a huge conspiracy of the leftist intellectuals, who are motivated by the desire of destroying the spirit of enterprise in everyone they can get hold of. That is why they want to go on teaching worthless rubbish forever.

The Daily Bell - Arrest of IMF's Most Magnificent Man Seen as Ending the World

This is a really interesting take on the international scandal that has now mired the world's leading leftist organisation, the IMF. Here is an excerpt: 

The melancholy news of Strauss-Kahn's incarceration, due no doubt to a misunderstanding, caused absolute havoc in Europe. Portugal and Spain suffered back-to-back earthquakes and a number of commercial banks declared they would go out of business on Monday. The euro bond market sank to its lowest level since its inception and several junior IMF officials committed suicide.

A number of attractive junior, female journalists on the staffs of the BBC, Reuters and Al Jazeera were said to have breathed sighs of relief but throughout Southern Europe, currencies, crashed and whole business districts were said to be burning out of control. Riots struck major cities throughout Europe and following a run of foodstuffs and resources around the world it was said that the entire developing world was teetering on the edge of incipient famine.

It is not too much to say that the Strauss-Kahn's arrest, warranted or not, has jeopardized the very survival of billions and destabilized not only the European Union, but even the physical integrity of the continent. As of this writing several volcanoes – dormant for millions of years – were said to be rumbling back to life and most ominously of all a pall of smoke was seen spreading out from Mount Vesuvius.

As the European Union itself for some reason had placed most of its non-Brussels bureaucratic offices in New Pompeii, it is likely that an eruption of Vesuvius shall cover some of the most necessary workings of EU in lava and virtually paralyze the larger mechanisms of regional government. Unless Strauss-Kahn is released from jail it is probably not too strong to suggest that Fate of Civilization hangs in the balance and perhaps the very survival of mankind.

The story of K L Saigal

Title: K L Saigal – A Definitive Biography
Author: Pran Nevile
Publisher: Penguin
Pages: 218
Price: Rupees 299

I got hold of this book on K L Saigal because I really wanted to learn about this legendary Bollywood singer. But the book is written in a rather tepid documentary style. Perhaps Indians have still not mastered the art of writing gossipy biographies in the way that the writers from Hollywood have.    

It would come as a surprise to most readers of the book that when Saigal first appeared to audition for singing, he was rejected. Pran Nevile writes, “According to an HMV source, when Saigal appeared for an audition at their Delhi studio and subsequently at their Calcutta rehearsal room, he was rejected at both places for his lack of formal training by the one man selection committee. No one took notice of the exceptional quality of his voice, his unusual natural talents and instinctive knowledge of classical ragas.” The thing is that Saigal did not have any formal training at all. Perhaps that he was the reason he was able to preserve his originality and make such a resounding impact on Indian music.

During his music career, he recorded as many as 185 songs. The biography begins from the day when Saigal was born in Jammu. Very few pages, less than ten to be precise, are devoted to describing the early years of Saigal’s life. That could be because very little is known about Saigal’s childhood and teenage years. From the second chapter onwards the focus is squarely on Saigal’s singing career. Apparently Saigal arrived in Calcutta on a business trip. The city was then the cultural hub of the country and the centre of performing arts. Artists from all over India used to flock to the city in quest of fame and fortune.

The book does not have much detailed information on the kind of struggles that Saigal might have had to go through before he became introduced to B N Sircar, the owner of Kollatta’s famous New Theatre Studio. B N Sircar was planning his company’s first Hindi film, “Mohabbat ke Ansoo.” According to Pran Nevile Saigal was recommended by someone called Pankaj Mullick. He became the hero of the film, which was a runaway success. Suddenly Saigal found himself on the path of stardom. After that Saigal played the role of the leading man and the singer in every subsequent Hindi film by New Theatre.

Pran Nevile devotes an entire chapter to the film Devdas, which enjoys a cult status till this day. The book also sheds light on the social and cultural scenario in the country at the time of Saigal. We learn about how the film industry evolved in the cities of Calcutta, Lahore and Bombay. The discussion of the kotha culture, which then was synonymous with music, turns out to be somewhat interesting. An entire chapter is devoted to Saigal’s heroines. The appendix section is of more than 70 pages, and it has all kinds of information.

Petrol is the new Gold - because we have a government of price hikes…

An intrusive government is the forerunner of tyranny. The job of the constitution is to be the guardian of people’s liberty. But the problem is that constitution is not an entirely fixed document. It is constantly changing and is open to interpretation and amendment by the people with an agenda.  More often than not politicians and bureaucrats use the legal recourse to expand government’s authority.

It is the responsibility of every Indian to guard against the usurpation of governmental influence. There should be campaign for new laws that will keep the government from interfering in the country’s economy. The best government is one that restricts itself to maintaining law and order. Instead of having a real government in the country, what we are having is a “nanny-state,” which wants to mollycoddle each and every Indian.

Who wants to be mollycoddled on substandard rationed wheat!

I fail to understand why should government be allowed to decide at what price petrol can be sold in the country? Don't we have companies like Reliance, Essar, Tata, ONGC in the petrol sector! Prices of any commodity should always be market based. It is so over-smart of our government to raise the price of petrol a day after the election results were declared. This shows that are our leaders are more concerned about political management than about the plethora of problems that the “aam admi” faces.

If we are supposed to pay such high price for petrol, then why do we need a petroleum ministry? Let the private entrepreneurs and businessmen take care of the petrol and diesel sector. With private ownership, some amount of efficiency must certainly come in and then the prices should come down. The competition between different business entities will certainly see to it that the prices are reduced. We can’t depend on the government to ever reduce the price of anything.

Only private sector can ensure lower prices and better quality. If the petroleum sector had been wholly private, then we would never have had to suffer such high petrol prices.

Goodbye Left and the DMK, hope to never see you again

I must begin this post by mentioning Shekhar Gupta’s latest article in The Indian Express. The article titled “Jantar, Chhu Mantar” sheds very accurate light on the issues that modern India faces. Shekhar Gupta has now started writing like a God of liberals, libertarians and the objectivists in India. I found these lines in the article particularly interesting:

The really bright, intelligent and, most importantly, “honest” Indians were now bringing you your Tahrir Square, to liberate you from tyranny. And tyranny of what else but this curse called India’s electoral democracy. And you were complaining? Whose side were you on? A perfectly intelligent and creative actor as Anupam Kher (if you want to see how brilliantly talented he is, go watch his autobiographical solo act, Kuchh Bhi Ho Sakta Hai, next time he brings it to your city) was exhorting us to throw our Constitution out of the window. Neha Dhupia, who cut such a fetching yet convincing figure in Phas Gaye Re Obama as the S&M, man-hating don-madam of Uttar Pradesh’s kidnapping mafia, tweeted that when she landed in Delhi a day after Anna’s fast, the air already felt less corrupt to her. All this nonsense, even if from such talented and well-meaning people, was given wide currency by many of us in the media as if this was our moment of deliverance — from our rotten democracy. Yet, it took the simple honesty of venerable Anna Hazare himself to say clearly what was being insinuated in whispers, or read between the lines: that the one responsible for the destruction of our democracy, governance and public life, was our silly voter. To borrow an expression from Barack Obama, Anna Hazare spiked his own movement’s football by explaining why if he contested elections he would lose his deposit, because our voter, the corrupt, drunken idiot, would merely trade her vote for cash, a sari, a bottle of liquor.

Yesterday truly was India’s D-Day. Now it is final goodbye to Left in West Bengal and to DMK in Tamil Nadu. No one is going to miss these parties. The corruption was unbelievable, but even worse than corruption was the lack of development. Hopefully with new administrations in place, things will change for the better in coming years.

These elections prove that now democracy in India has matured. The voters have started recognising their rights. They are capable of throwing the leaders who indulge in corruption, nepotism and anti-development rhetoric. Shekhar Gupta rightly points out in his article that there is now no need for a Lok Pal run by Civil Society. The normal tools of democracy are enough to cleanse the system. Lets give democracy a chance.

The people in this country are now desperate for development. Just the empty slogans of socialism and Gandhian austerity will not do. The ruling class needs to come up with policies that make a practical and visible difference to the quality of people’s lives. Development can only happen when the government moves out of the people’s way. People must have the freedom to manage their own lives.

The Congress party should learn the right lessons from this verdict. The time to bring in BIG economic reforms is now. There are still three more years before the elections for central government will be held. Three years is enough time to change the economic landscape of the country. Cut down on the government. Reduce the number of ministries. End the culture of VVIPs.

In a democracy everyone is equal, so why should there be any VIP or VVIP. Petty government officials constantly harass people living in urban areas. There is red tape everywhere. The need of the hour is to come up with the kind of reforms that Shri Narshima Rao did in the 1990. We need a second round of reforms to kick-start the dormant economy. It is time for the government to wake up from its long slumber.

West Bengal’s much hyped elections won’t mean much

There is too much of hype surrounding the West Bengal elections. It is most likely that the leftist regime will loose after 34 years of uninterrupted power. These 34 years were probably the most sterile period in the last 5000 years of Bengal’s history. In a state where one political party has left so wide and deep a scar on the lives of its citizens, is it any surprise that those citizens should be so eager about jettisoning it?

Shekhar Gupta’s new article in The Indian Express - Bengal stands up to ask for more - is worth reading.

You need to go to Kolkatta in order to find out just how different that city is from every other city in the country. There is no way you can compare cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai with Kolkatta. The capital of West Bengal has been left so far behind that the city seems to be caught in some kind of time warp. While rest of the country moved ahead, Kolkatta remained stuck in the 1970s.

There is no doubt that the leftist government is going to lose on 13th May, but mere fading out of the elite Marxist club is not going to change much at the ground level. It will take decades to dismantle the bureaucratic maze in which the Bengali economy is trapped. Do the people of the state have the patience to wait for at least a decade before the fruits of development starts trickling in! The visuals that you see on TV are of people who are not prepared to wait anymore.

Mamata Banerjee is also a socialist at heart, so she is not going to be in a hurry to bring in reform. Many sections of the political elite strongly believe that the left has lost in West Bengal because they tried to industrialise. The Tata Nano project and other industrial projects are being blamed. This is the tragedy of India – one set of leftists walk out, and other set walk in to retain the same set of anti-developmental policies. There is no way West Bengal can survive on agriculture alone.

Education is one area where government influence is pervasive in West Bengal. With a few exceptions, all children in the state attend local public schools, where they are indoctrinated with leftist ideas from their childhood. The curriculum in the state run educational institutes needs to be changed, but who is going to do that. To be sure, the various arms of government, like the state-run health care system, public transport and state-linked cooperatives, will continue to operate even if the leftist regime is defeated. The voters have been too late in voting for political change.

Indeed, the extent to which the inefficient and corrupt socialist institutions are reformed or dismantled by the new government when it comes to power will determine West Bengal’s future. Big economic reforms are needed. Government should get out of the lives of ordinary people. But I don’t think the Trinamool Congress is the party for that kind of revolutionary change. Things are going to be messy in the state for a many years to come.

Adventure with Somali Pirates - Those in Peril

Title: Those in Peril
Author: Wilbur Smith
Publisher: Pan
Pages: 386
Price: Rs. 325

The first thing that strikes you about 'Those in Peril' is its graphic nature. The dialogues are corny. Its a good time pass. There is lot of action -  murder, rapes and tortures, the usual stuff that you expect from this kind of a book. There is the attempt to examine the Islamic faith in detail. Wilbur Smith gives his take on the mutual suspicion that exists between the West and the Muslim culture. A degree of predictability is certainly there, but as the plot is built around a rollicking formula of violent lust, savage violence and gung-ho derring-do, it turns out to be rather enjoyable.

It is a peaceful sunny day when college girl Cayla Bannock is cruising the Indian Ocean in the family yacht, which goes by the name of Amorous Dolphin. She knows that she has to concentrate on her studies, but her mind is more focussed on the persona of Rogier, the muscular new cabin boy. Alas, she has no idea just how wrong she is about Rogier. While Cayla is still lost in her amorous dreams, he has radioed his Somali pirate pals. Before you can say shiver me timbers, the pirates arrive, almost every member of Dolphin’s crew is brutally dispatched and Cayla is held hostage for a $20 billion ransom. Her mother, Hazel Bannock, happens to be the owner of Bannock Oil Corp; she is certainly rich enough to conjure this kind of amount.

Now the crucial question is - will Hazel succumb to the threats of the pirates so easily? Or will she prefer to hire her late husband’s security chief Hector Cross to organise a crack team of mercenaries and set out on a daring rescue mission? In the world of fiction, there is nothing new about victims taking law into their hands to get back at their enemies, but as the foundation of this novel centres on the pirates marauding the area, it becomes somewhat believable. After all, Somali pirates have been making lot of negative news these days. So this kind of a situation is quite plausible. There are enough twists in this action packed tale to make you keep turning the pages.

The leading man in the novel is naturally Hector Cross. He gets hired by Hazel to rescue her daughter. He is exactly what you would expect him to be - brave, handsome and intelligent; he is also good with a gun. Here he is pitted against violent and unhinged pirates. Even though the pirates profess some kind of extreme belief in religion, they are completely lacking in morals. At stake is not just Cyala’s life, but also the incredible fortune of Bannock Oil Corp. Wilbur Smith seems to have done lot of research on weapons. He tells you about how to send out a distress flare using only a dustbin, how to fire all kinds of guns, and that sort of thing.

Violence in Greater Noida

Once again the land acquisition tamasha is on, this time the venue for the drama is Greater Noida. Land acquisition for creation of new infrastructure is such a volatile issue in India because this country does not respect property rights. In any civilised country property rights should be sacrosanct. If the person is not willing to sell the land for the price that is being offered, then you can’t force him. The only alternative is to give the landowner better rates. But he still has the prerogative to refuse to sell at any rate; in that case the infrastructure project has to be either put off or shifted elsewhere.

In India, the central and state governments tend to act like “real estate” agents on the payroll of Crony Socialist companies (I refuse to call these companies Crony Capitalists. Crony Socialists is a much more apt term, as these companies are led by staunch socialists who only masquerade as businessmen.) In every part of the country we are having instances of brute force being used to forcibly evict rightful owners from their private property. There is no doubt that land needs to be acquired for building of new infrastructure, but why does the government have to get involved in the process.

Why do the cops and the para-military forces have to forcibly evict people? Proper land acquisition norms have to be developed by the government on a priority basis, otherwise we might soon have a farmers and tribal revolution in the country. Industrialists and infrastructure companies should be allowed to negotiate directly with the landowners. The problem is that in many cases, the land titles are not clear, so the companies don’t know with whom they are supposed to negotiate. This big mess can only be sorted out if there is a rationalisation of the land ownership and acquisition norms.

The TV visuals of the violence that is happening in Greater Noida are as shocking as the visuals that we had few years ago from Singur and Nandigram. From Greater Noida we had visuals of old farmers who have been shot at or beaten up. Now almost every political party in Uttar Pradesh has jumped into the fray, so things are going to get even messier in the days to come. As the summer temperatures rise, tempers will get frayed, and violence will increase. The various governments in the country should realise that they will only alienate their voters by unleashing this kind of violence.

There is a crying need for property rights in this country. Without property rights no other rights are possible. In a country where citizens don’t have clear property rights, the ownership of land will continue to be decided by brute force. 

Nathaniel Branden talks about Atlas Shrugged movie and his role as Ayn Rand's primary exponent

In this interview in The Daily Bell, Nathaniel Branden makes some really wonderful statements.

He says, "human beings have a right to exist. They have a right to freedom. They do not belong to the government. These are all very liberating statements and that is the main message from her work. She also raises very important questions that are foundational. She asks, Why do we need ethics?? That is key because you have to come to that conclusion for yourself. Life on all levels is full of challenges, and you are not born with the knowledge of what is best. You need to look at principals and how they relate to all parts of your life because without it you are susceptible to people with very vicious ideas."

Click on this line to read the complete interview in The Daily Bell.

On Forbes blogs, there is an article by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins - It’s Time To Kill The ‘Robin Hood’ Myth. It is a tragedy for the world that the Robin Hood myth continues to live in the world. Most of world's problems are due to the Robin Hood governments, which believe that it is their duty to rob one section of the population to appease some other section. The blog says, "Instead of ducking charges of “reverse-Robin Hood,” defenders of limited government should follow Danneskjöld’s example–they should fight with full moral confidence against any scheme to take earnings from some in order to lavish others with the unearned."

Click here to read the complete blog on Forbes.

Only the richest employees in India go on strike

Only the richest employees in India go on strike and still get pampered by the government.

Lets stop demonising speculators; India needs more speculators

In few days our most famous yoga guru, Baba Ramdev will be fasting with the lofty aim of ridding this country of corruption. So we can expect another round of breathless and frenzied coverage in TV. In a country where millions of people live at less than $1 a day, such hunger strikes make no sense. Now that people have started becoming sick of the royal wedding coverage and the Osama death coverage, a new high profile fast might serve the purpose of keeping TV viewers entertained.

I am surprised that no one in the country feels the need of going on hunger strike against price rise. It is immensely difficult for anyone to survive in this country on a middle class income. The prices are rising on a daily basis. The government does nothing except blaming the speculators. The speculators are ripping us off – how many times we have heard this statement on TV.

The truth is that the skyrocketing prices have everything to do with the fundamentals of supply and demand, and it has nothing to do with speculators. In India, we don't have a free market. What we have is a government-saturated economy in which big business houses enjoy a cozy relationship with politicians and bureaucrats. Every stage of the production process is tightly controlled by an elite group of Crony Socialists.

The evil speculator theory runs up against the fact that the government has been deliberately running inflationary policies to fund its so-called social sector schemes. More paper money is being printed, this lead to the falling in value of the rupee. As the rupee loses value, sellers start demanding more for their product. In this game of rising prices and falling value of currency, it is the common man who loses the most.

Speculators are necessary for the economy. In fact, a free economy is not possible without speculators. All of us have heard the Aesop’s fable, Ants and the Grasshopper. The ants toiled and saved, while the grasshopper wasted resources. The speculators are like the ants. They save resources, which can be used when the times are lean. Their strategy of saving is advantageous for all sections of the population, because everyone has a chance to buy from them in those lean times.

In a free economy it is not possible for speculators to artificially jack up prices. They take risks by buying in bulk when any product is available in large quantities. After that they have to store the product and sell it in the market when demand outstrips supply and there is rise in price. If the speculators make a wrong guess, they can loose all their investment. Politicians often make speculators into scapegoats, but once the speculators are driven out of the market, it is the common man who suffers greatly.

Environmental Hypocrisy

The hypocrisy of the environmental elite is completely nauseating. They preach green living while living in plush bungalows spread across acres of prime land, driving Porsches and clocking up the air miles in first class. Phelim McAleer has made some really good videos to expose the eco-hypocrisy of the environmental elite. The elite stands accused of failing to practise the environmentalism that they so vehemently preach.

It is time some one made videos on the lifestyles of India’s politicians and NGO activists. These guys are always flying around, and they live like ancient maharajas, and yet they try to palm themselves off as friends of environment and the poor. They act as a stumbling block in every new industrial or infrastructure related project in the country. If these activists have their way, India will remain a backward country forever. The Posco project in Orissa has still not been fully cleared primarily because the country is shackled with a powerful activist minister.

Here is Phelim McAleer’s video on James Cameron



This is the link to the Robert Redford video



I wonder when we will have such YouTube videos on our super-rich politically connected environmental elite.

The best conspiracy theory - Osama bin Laden Is Dead Again?

I am a big fan of The Daily Bell. They are publishing some of the most thought provoking articles. Within hours of Osama’s death being announced we had an article on The Daily Bell. It is not exactly a conspiracy theory, but it does manage to present us with a very interesting way of looking at this development. This is how the article goes:

America's number one enemy is dead. "I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda and a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women and children," US President Barack Obama said during a statement from the White House Sunday evening.

This is actually the second time a high-ranking official has made such an announcement. On YouTube, you may find a video available online with over 1.6 million views of Benazir Bhutto explaining to David Frost that Osama bin Laden was murdered in the early 2000s. We carry it in our video archive and you can view it here: Benazir Bhutto: Bin Laden was murdered.

According to the video caption, the BBC censored the clip, then reinstated it and claimed they had not censored it after all. The program aired on 2nd November 2007, before Bhutto was assassinated, and David Frost the presenter "did not challenge her on her assertion (at 2:14 on the clip) that Bin Laden was murdered. It would make sense that the West would cover up such a truth, as Bin Laden was needed as a "bogeyman" to continue the farcical "War on Terror."

There are other reports that bin Laden died of kidney failure even earlier than Bhutto claimed. But he has probably been dead for years. Apparently the last confirmable sightings of bin Laden came when he was traveling around Los Angeles back in the 1990s under the name "Tim Osman." He was meeting with his CIA handlers presumably. Later on he would show up in France (just before 9/11) for kidney treatment. He had bad kidneys.

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The villains in Ayn Rand’s novels eerily resemble India’s socialist elite

The villains in Ayn Rand’s novels like Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead have a lot in common with India’s socialist elite. The description of lobbyists, celebrities, and politicians in Rand’s novels is prophetic. It almost seems she is talking about India as it has always been. Politicians, educationists, media bosses, business tycoon, and so-called social servants are talking about helping the poor, but behind closed doors they are always conspiring to retain and expand their power base.

In regular press conferences and campaign speeches they attempt to convince everyone that even more legislation is needed to control private companies and safeguard the population. There is talk about “right to education,” “right to healthcare,” “right to food,” “right to job,” etc. The thing is that education, healthcare, food or jobs don’t occur naturally. Someone has to make an investment and do the hard work before someone else can have access to such facilities.

Government taxes private individuals and enterprises to death in order to fund these meaningless rights, which instead of helping the poor, serve the purpose of enhancing the power of the political elite. What we are seeing in India today is game of increased regulations and rising taxes that many failed regimes around the world are engaged in playing. The meaningless rights and subsidies are not helping people at all, and this is exposing our socialist elite as nothing but a gang of self-serving villains. 

The problem is that majority of Indians are of the socialist mindset. I have met very few people who actually believe that economic liberalisation can be helpful in alleviating poverty. The famous economic reforms of 1990s happened in an intellectual vacuum. Since then the socialist intellectuals have crept back into the vacuum and they have been coming up with an orgy of regulations to stifle the spirit of private enterprise in the country. The socialists have already been defeated through empirical evidence, but they continue to wreck havoc as “Un-dead” intellectuals.

Lack of economic development is a more important issue than corruption

The biggest issue that this country faces is – how do we get the economy rolling again. The UPA government is making a big political mistake by focussing solely on the issue of corruption. Perhaps it is a strategy of the UPA’s political opponents to make this government so entangled with allegations of corruption, that they have no time left to pay heed to economic matters. The issue of corruption has now become like a quicksand in which the UPA is caught, the more it tries to free itself from it, the deeper it sinks.

The best thing that the honourable members of the government can do at this point of time is that they should turn their gaze elsewhere. FORGET corruption, let the law take its own course. Concentrate on getting the economy back on the tracks. If the economy takes off, the prices of essential commodities start coming down, the public might be tempted to forgive the few sins that have been committed in the past. The government must chase higher employment figures while stomping down hard on inflation. Right now the government seems to be doing the opposite thing.

It seems as if the government is intent on following a deliberate policy of inflationism, under which the prices will keep rising forever. Every economic indicator has started showing that the Indian economy is now in a deep mess. But the government is slumbering on the economic issues. All their social sector schemes like the NREGA are an unmitigated big disaster. Under the guise of stopping corruption, the nefarious license-quota raj is back.

There’s a sense in the land that the UPA is anti-reform and anti business. This government seems to have taken the policy decision to stand in the way of India’s economic recovery. Case in point is the takeover of Cairn India’s assets by the Vedanta group. Why is the government coming in way of this business deal! This unprecedented interference in the private sector rings alarm bells. The presence of an activist environment minister is also creating lot of problems. All this exposes the anti-private investment attitude of our government.

The telecom industry is similarly being shackled with new rounds of red tape, as a result of which now the tariffs have started going up instead of coming down. Hardly anyone can afford to go in for a new 3G connection. As long as Mr. Kapil Sibal is the telecom minister, I don’t think the price of 3G services are ever going to come down. He is too busy issuing character certificates to 2G scam accused, and he has no time to come up with policies that can bring some relief to India’s telecom industry.

At the time of elections, Shri Manmohan Singh had won over the urban voters, by presenting a pro-reform image, but the ministers that he has placed in charge of various ministries turn out to be virulently pro-red tape, pro-environmental and anti-business. It is time the government started recognising the “objective reality.” The economic issues can only be dealt through a process of reform. The NAC should be disbanded. The policies that have been implemented at the behest of NAC till now have proved to be very bad for the nation’s economy. The NAC seems to be functioning like a communist politburo.

Meaningless rights such as “right to job,” “right to education,” or right to food,” are a hallmark of Soviet Union styled dictatorships. Such meaningless rights ultimately lead to more poverty and starvation. History is proof of this fact. In a democratic and liberal country like India such rights have no meaning. Such rights must be consigned to the nearest garbage dump.What India needs is a set of "objective rights and laws."