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Discovery Mysteries Of Asia - The Lost Temples of India

Wish Everyone A Very Happy 2009!!

A thing of beauty is a joy forever!

HAPPY NEW YEAR FOLKS!

India, US and Pakistan : Tale of a choatic democracy, a super power and a rogue nation

There is a striking difference in the way Israel and India handled their response to terror attacks. While the former is an example of extreme response, which is not justified, the latter is an example of inaction. In both cases the reason for the attacks, and who is right and who is not, is rather complicated. I am not condoning the attacks either in India or Israel, both are highly despicable and the perpetrators should be punished to the maximum. However, the driving force behind these attacks are rather complicated, which elements in Palestine and in Pakistan have used to take advantage. Both involve a land dispute where both sides feel they are on the right side and also involve impoverished populations who think they are justified in their terror tactics.

While Israel is killing civilians for the act of a few, India is constrained by the same consideration (also, the power disparity between India and Pakistan is not the same as Israel and Palestine). It would be a fool's errand to start a war against Pakistan for the actions of LeT, JeM etc. But, lest we forget, Pakistani Govt is equally culpable. This begs the question, how should India handle the current situation when

a) Pakistan claims that the attackers are non-state actors, thereby acquitting itself of any responsibility
b) It is not ready to take any action against these so called non-state actors despite knowing their location.
c) Not willing to accept that the Mumbai attacks were carried out by pakistanis inspite of overwhelming evidence.
d) Has safe havens for all kind of terrorists in parts of its territory where it necessarily doesn't have any control. It also doesn't want other countries which are victims of these terrorists' actions to take any action either. A very convenient excuse indeed.
e) Not ready to give up terrorists like Dawood Ibrahim who are directly implicated in earlier attacks. If this is not a safe haven for a terrorist, then what is?
f) Pakistan Govt doesn't have control over either its military or its intelligence service.

Furthermore, a financially bankrupt country with a very feudal and dysfunctional society, Pakistan has nothing much to lose in case of a war with India and hence it threatens with a nuclear attack very easily knowing fully well that it will be the one that will be obliterated in such an exchange. Pakistan fully knows that India has a lot more to lose as a country in such an exchange. Given this background, what are the options left to India?

India has rightfully kept all third parties out of the Kashmir issue. However, we should at the same time wonder if any solution that India might negotiate with the Pakistani Govt will hold without the involvement of its military/intelligence agencies (its military vetoed Zardari's promise ISI's chief will come to India in a day). Any negotiation with Pakistan should involve its military for the same reason. Since the only power which holds any sway with the Pakistani military is US, it might have to at some point get involved to underwrite the whole treaty. For this reason, all the talk about soft diplomacy, back door diplomacy and its all other connotations are moot. There is no point in India signing a treaty with Pakistani Govt which is toothless without a stake from Pak military.

With China ready to use Pakistan to slow down India and get us tied down in South Asia, and US willing to turn a blind eye towards Pakistan's involvement in every other terrorist activity, the odds are stacked against India. It requires years of diplomatic effort to first isolate Pakistan and then squeeze it when it really hurts. This requires that India should always be on the look out for such an opportunity, instead of getting carried away with brotherhood sentimentality that affects our politicians so easily. A long memory and a ruthless pursuit of our interests are what is needed from India's side. (No, Narendra Modi is not an answer).

India should use all its diplomatic clout (for whatever its worth) to hold Pakistan accountable for every penny of loan or aid it gets from IMF, World Bank and other donors. These institutions shouldn't be subsidizing the terror acts in India. Much of the money Pakistan gets is anyways diverted to ISI and military.

It is not an easy situation for India and it cannot (and should not) be cavalier like Israel. This should not, however, mean that the Indian politicians blame the complication to absolve themselves of their incompetence.

Merry Christmas To All!!!

Vote for Sale!

Yet another reality check about our democratic tradition that we are proud about and about which we crow at a drop of a hat. From TOI:

The CMS study has Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and Bihar trailing Karnataka in 'vote for cash' phenomenon. The report bluntly states, "The recent assembly elections in Karnataka in 2008 have set a new benchmark in purchasing votes." Bribing menace was found to be lower in Left Front-ruled states of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura (in May 2008).

Sadly, vote buying was rampant in highly literate states like Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Of interest to the current state bypolls is that CMS data has Doddaballapur topping the list in bribing voters compared with other assembly segments. In a study conducted in seven segments, Doddaballapur polled 57%, while Arabhavi stood last with 16% of voters given or taken cash to vote for a particular political party.

Maybe we should clean up our mess before pontificating about democracy to others.

WTF of the day

From Guardian:

Saudi girl, eight, married off to 58-year-old is denied divorce

An eight-year old Saudi Arabian girl who was married off by her father to a 58-year-old man has been told she cannot divorce her husband until she reaches puberty.
[]
Relatives said the marriage had not been consummated and that the girl was still living with her mother. They said that the father had set a verbal condition by which the marriage was not to be consummated until the girl turns 18 - although it was unclear how this could be enforced. The father agreed to marry off his daughter for a dowry of 30,000 riyals (£5,400) as he was facing financial problems.

Its interesting that women always end up getting a raw deal, both in societies that give dowry for girls or the ones that take (India and Saudi).

Huh?!

According to TimesofIndia, TN has come out on top in e-governance. From TOI:

According to a recent survey by IDC Dataquest, Tamil Nadu has been ranked No. 1 in e-governance with satisfaction levels among citizens and businesses quite high.

Falling from the top position in the list was Delhi, which stood at No. 1 last year, and has dropped down to No. 3 in the all India ranking.

Among the top citizen services were water utility, police, security, education and other civic amenities, while the business index saw best satisfaction levels in issuance of licences and permits, government tenders, and financial assistance.

Huh?! I mean, how bad are the other states doing then for TN to come on top?

A R Rahman : Up close with the man himself!

Modi - Subsidizing TATA for building Nano

Modi gives away 30000 crores and hides it away from the public to bring TATA to gujarat, costing the exchequer 60000 rs for every Nano built. No wonder Ratan Tata finds him the best CM in India. Even i can run a business if the govt will subsidize that much for my production. Also, i would like to see what all the free market zealots who don't like subsidies to farmers stand on this issue.

From Hindu:

The Narendra Modi government is reported to have offered over Rs. 30,000 crore in sops to Tata Motors to bring its Nano car project to Gujarat.

The government has agreed to not only provide a soft loan of Rs. 9,570 crore at a negligible interest of 0.1 per cent for setting up the project but also defer repayment for 20 years, besides initially meeting all the cost of infrastructure development, cut in power tariff rates and an expenditure of Rs. 700 crore on shifting machinery and equipment from Singur in West Bengal to Sanand.

What does he do when the document containing the details comes out. He orders an inquiry into the leak of the document to the public, not explain why he did what he did. Maybe thats too much ask.

Its so sad that many think this communal demagouge has answers for all the problems India faces.

Satyam - An Untruthful family story

So you are running a publicly traded company which has $1 Billion in cash. Your sons' business ventures weren't doing that great. You want them to make a lot of money, even when the economy is in shambles and the sector your sons' are in hit hard. So, What do you do? You agree to buy out your sons' businesses for 1.6 billion dollars with the company's money. So, that leaves you and your family 1.6 billion in cash and around 400 million hole in the company's balance sheet for the shareholders to worry about. How is that for a family story?

Thats what Satyam's Ramalinga Raju tried to pull with the acquisition of Maytas properties and Maytas Infrastructure. And know what?! He almost got away with it.....

Desis with Dollars II - UPDATED!!!

pic from yahoo ($ vs Re):

The dollar exchange rate is one of the things always on our minds. I have linked up some stuff on this topic earlier here. Given the credit crisis, and a counter intuitive dollar rally has all of us wondering how long this would continue and where would the dollar settle down. Like many I too expected the dollar to peter down back to the early 40s and late 30s vs Rupee as the magnitude of the crisis started to become clear. Instead, dollar began to rally reaching record highs vis-a-vis Rupee this december, leaving many of us scratching our heads. Now we know the reason. For the uninitiated, it was basically because of damage control here in the US. As the credit crisis hit home here in the US, all the FIIs and others who had invested in India started pulling back to take care of the fiscal situation. Since all these payments are in dollars, there was a huge outflow of dollars from India, leading to a stronger dollar. This happened not just with respect to India, Dollar has been strengthening against most currencies.

Experts, however, feel that this dollar run might be petering out and is poised to weaken as US pumps in trillions of dollars into the system to come out of the current liquidity trap and loosen credit. From the article in Bloomberg

The biggest foreign-exchange strategists and investors say the best may be over for the dollar after a four-month, 24 percent rally.

The currency weakened 5.9 percent measured by the trade- weighted Dollar Index after strengthening between July and November as investors bought the greenback to flee riskier assets and repay dollar-denominated loans from lenders reining in credit. Ever since peaking on Nov. 21, the dollar fell against all 16 of the most-widely traded currencies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

There are still skeptics to this reasoning who say that this dollar rally hasn't peaked yet and there is still juice left in the dollar. From the same article:

Dollar bulls say it’s a mistake to bet against the currency now because Treasury yields are falling to record lows even as the government prepares to sell more than $1 trillion of debt, a sign there’s no end in sight to demand for the safest U.S. assets. They also say the yen, which typically rallies as risky assets decline, is appreciating.

“The yen’s strength falls into our theory that the risk- aversion trade is not off the table,” said Peter Rosenstreich, chief market analyst at Geneva-based currency trading firm ACM Advanced Currency Markets. “The fact that the yen continues to gain strength validates our theory in the longer term, the dollar safe-haven trade is not done yet.”

Meanwhile closer home Rupee is moving upward against Dollar keeping up with the global trend. From Economic Times

The rupee closed at 48.05 against dollar, off its high of 47.92. This is its strongest since November 11, and gaining 0.8% from its previous close. Dealers said that the activity was very erratic on Monday, with a lot of banks covering their short dollar positions and there was also some oil buying.

So, would this trend be a long lasting one or a glitch? Should we hold our savings here as dollars or send it back home immediately to cash in on the current rate? No one can give a definitive answer. There are too many variables at play here. However, one thing is for sure, given all the excesses in the wall street and the amount of money being thrown at this problem, dollar has to go down. It might not happen when we think it will, but it has to. Just like the credit crisis, many economists predicted the real estate to burst by 2006, yet it took two more years, but it did burst. I would bet my money on shorting the dollar and sending as much as possible back home and that is what i am doing ;).

Update:

Economic Times seems to agree with the conclusion that the days of a strong dollar is perhaps over and that rupee would settle at 45 against a dollar. From Economic Times:

NEW DELHI: The rupee is climbing back to positions of strength previously held and may soon breach the Rs 45-per dollar barrier, say analysts. The surge is attributed to rising capital inflows, narrowing trade deficits and the weakening of dollar against major currencies.
....
Overseas funds were net buyers of Indian stocks in the five days to December 12, the longest stretch in almost eight months. “With inflows strengthening, the pressure on rupee is easing. Net buying by FIIs for the month and easing trade deficit is putting rupee on a strong ground,” said Shubhada Rao, chief economist at Yes Bank. “Soaring oil prices and its impact on dollar demand is no longer a worry. With some normalisation of the pattern of capital flows, the rupee should move back towards its fundamental trend, which is to appreciate. I am expecting the upward leg to start from here on with minor disruptions in between,” said Crisil chief economist DK Joshi.
....
Due to heavy selling by FIIs and appreciation of the US dollar, RBI had to sell a record $20.63 billion during October to check the steep depreciation of the currency. Forex reserves have depleted by nearly $64 billion since April and is currently hovering around $246 billion.

That Ought to Shut Them Up!!!!!

Enough Said!

Runner Up!!!!

Parvathy Omanakuttan (i don't think there is a single tamil guy who didn't think of vivek and his omanakutty comedy reading this name:-P) is runner up in Miss World. Our media might not have given front page to V.P.Singh, a former PM, when he passed away (on Nov 30th), but you can be sure they will put her in your face more than you want.

NRIs: Whats in store?

If the current economic situation were to get any worse, we could for the first time see mass migration back to India from US, UK and a few more advanced economies. What is the news here one might wonder, after all we have seen many desis go back home in trickles or in droves since the IT bubble burst and India started doing better for most part of the last decade. However, this time there are more reasons for this reverse migration, principally economic.

Most of the western economies are in dire straits. If you have been following my blog, i have tried and linked up a number of sources giving a clear picture of what is yet to come. The US is throwing as much money as it could print and/or borrow to fix the sinking economy, but all it is trying at this time is to keep the US economy afloat. What i am saying here is, US is trying to not lose the existing jobs. The question of creating new jobs is a whole new question. It needs fresh investment in newer fields. So, desi students graduating at this point is looking into a long dark tunnel. How soon they will see light is anybody's guess.

There aren't enough H1 visas available for all the desis who are already here and are graduating. Last year alone more than 94000 Indian students landed here for higher education. Even if we assume there will be a small percentage of students in that list who plan to go back immediately after graduation, a majority of them is in for a disappointing realization. With the new OPT rules and insufficient visas available, many would have to go back to India.

US consumption is weakest in decades and it is not going to turn around anytime soon. This had to happen sooner or later. How long can they borrow and spend? Having reached the end of their tether, they are cutting (willingly or otherwise) back on their expenditure. 70% of US GDP is based on consumption. As anyone can see, if the American consumer is cutting back, there is going to be a severe jolt (as we are seeing now) to the system. Having lost all their life savings (401K, home value etc.,) due to this credit crisis (coupled with a very expensive and penalizing healthcare system), they have finally come to their senses. Though the idea of 'Save and Invest' is great in the long run compared to the 'Borrow and Spend', this will lead to significant job losses atleast in the short run due to excess capacity. Thats because both the economy and industries are geared to satisfy the excess of American spending. Many fields including hitech on which many of us, desis, depend will not be in a position to employ the 1000s of graduates out of school, even if we assume that people who are employed won't lose their jobs. Just take a look at the number of chinese factories that are being closed because of cut backs in American spending to understand the impact.

Here is an article from From Financial Times about a trend that still might be nascent but will only grow.

The next few years will see many desis returning home, not because they want to, but because they have to. The picture of Indian IT industry, which is so one-dimensional is not a pretty either. With most of the advanced economies teetering, the Indian IT companies don't have many options to diversify. In this situation what is the best thing for us, especially in IT field, to do? Anyone with ideas?

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On a completely different topic, MUMBAI. Sad state of our society here.



Whatever your opinion about Arundathi Roy, this is a must read from her about mumbai. There are too many things that are true and relevant in there. Of course, there would be closeted bigots amongst us who want to see everything as 'us vs them' and want to sweep everything she has to say under the rug by tagging her as a bleeding heart liberal.

Economy : More Scary Shit

Here is some more scary stuff about the economy. But surely something you must know (watch the first 25 mins or so),



Some bad news from India on its Industrial output here.

Also, what the guys who got it right about this crisis say about 2009? Well, here it is from fortune. If you want to be prepared, better read it. As they say, Better safe than sorry!

Slumdog Millionaire - The Genius of Rahman

Now that A.R.Rahman has been nominated for Golden Globe in the Best Original Score category for Slumdog Millionaire, i thought i will post a couple of pieces here for people who still have not listened to the mind blowing soundtrack. Here is your chance for musical salvation ;)






Check the rest out too, its worth your time. I am HOOKED!

Triangulating the Economic Mess

I am sure there are a lot of souls out there who know the economy is going through a very bad period, not only here but around the globe, but don't know exactly why or what happened. Iceland, Hungary, Greece, United Kingdom (is in a lot of trouble than most people appreciate ), China, Germany and of course the US are all in deep trouble.

Since most of us are worried about the situation here and its effect in India, i have picked three different articles, all of them long, which explain to an extent why this whole mess happened from different perspectives. The first one is by Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist from Columbia University explaining what went wrong from a historical and policy perspective. It's an absolute must read if you want to get a gist of this trouble. From Vanity Fair

In 1987 the Reagan administration decided to remove Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and appoint Alan Greenspan in his place. Volcker had done what central bankers are supposed to do. On his watch, inflation had been brought down from more than 11 percent to under 4 percent. In the world of central banking, that should have earned him a grade of A+++ and assured his re-appointment. But Volcker also understood that financial markets need to be regulated. Reagan wanted someone who did not believe any such thing, and he found him in a devotee of the objectivist philosopher and free-market zealot Ayn Rand.

Greenspan played a double role. The Fed controls the money spigot, and in the early years of this decade, he turned it on full force. But the Fed is also a regulator. If you appoint an anti-regulator as your enforcer, you know what kind of enforcement you’ll get. A flood of liquidity combined with the failed levees of regulation proved disastrous.

The next one is by Henry Blodget Wall St insider explaining why this cycle of boom and bust will still continue even with new set of regulations from his perspective. Having lived through both the Tech bubble in 1990s and Real estate bubble in 2000s, he gives his opinion pretty well here:

WHO’S TO BLAME for the current crisis? As usually happens after a crash, the search for scapegoats has been intense, and many contenders have emerged: Wall Street swindled us; predatory lenders sold us loans we couldn’t afford; the Securities and Exchange Commission fell asleep at the switch; Alan Greenspan kept interest rates low for too long; short-sellers spread negative rumors; “experts” gave us bad advice. More-introspective folks will add other explanations: we got greedy; we went nuts; we heard what we wanted to hear.

All of these explanations have some truth to them. Predatory lenders did bamboozle some people into loans and houses they couldn’t afford. The SEC and other regulators did miss opportunities to curb some of the more egregious behavior. Alan Greenspan did keep interest rates too low for too long (and if you’re looking for the single biggest cause of the housing bubble, this is it). Some short-sellers did spread negative rumors. And, Lord knows, many of us got greedy, checked our brains at the door, and heard what we wanted to hear.

The third and most interesting from my perspective is this article from Newyork Magazine by a short seller. During the early months of this crisis a lot of us heard a lot of short sellers and naked short selling. Many countries including SEC here in US banned short selling for a brief period of time and portrayed these guys to be the villains in this whole sorry episode filled with villains. Hearing from a short seller about what he does and what it really is gives us a whole new angle to see this whole drama unfold. Jim Chanos in NY Mag:

Chanos was excited that afternoon. He had just read a report that China’s electric consumption had dropped 4 percent, despite official government statistics that the Chinese economy was growing at 8 percent. He relished the implications. “I think they’re making up the numbers!” he said. As Wall Street picks up the pieces of the broken financial system, Chanos is already one step ahead. He sees China as the next domino to fall in the global meltdown. In recent months, Chanos has loaded up short positions on the infrastructure companies that have rushed to build China’s new highways, bridges, and tunnels. Now he is waiting for their share prices to tank.

Watching Chanos’s trades over the last six months is like reliving the economic meltdown in slow motion. Since the summer, he has been cashing in his short positions in cratered banking and real-estate stocks, as the crisis has spread from the subprime-mortgage sector to become a full-scale economic meltdown. Starting in 2006, Chanos took up sizable short positions in residential home builders like KB Home and WCI, firms that transformed places like South Florida and Phoenix into exurban nightmares. This past summer, Chanos cashed out his portfolio’s 30 percent stake in financial-sector and real-estate stocks, after bank shares plummeted in the wake of the Bear Stearns collapse. Chanos then went short on construction and engineering companies, predicting that the credit crisis would spill over into a full-fledged global recession and places like China and Dubai would see their overheated economies freeze up. And he bet against his fellow hedge-fund managers’ mania for art collecting, making a bearish gamble on Sotheby’s. Last month, Chanos closed out his short position in Sotheby’s after the auction house’s stock plummeted from a high of nearly $60 to $8. “That wasn’t a hard one,” he says, smugly.

Each one of these article is a piece to the puzzle. They are as important and interesting as the Michael Lewis piece i had linked here in helping us understand the situation.

Mumbai: More proof via Guardian about Lashkar and Pakistan

Guardian has tracked down the lone surviving terrorist's home in Faridkot, Pakistan. As expected, his parents have been whisked away. From Guardian:

Finally one villager confirmed what was going on: 'You're being given misinformation. We've all known from the first day [of the news of the terrorist attack] that it was him, Ajmal Amir Kasab. His mother started crying when she saw his picture on the television.'

Attempts to meet Amir, the father, however, were not to be successful. Villagers eventually told us that he and his wife, Noor, had been mysteriously spirited away earlier in the week.
....

Following our last visit to Faridkot, the mayor, Wattoo, announced via the loudspeaker at the mosque that no one was to speak to any outsiders. By yesterday, Pakistani intelligence officials had descended in force on Faridkot. Locals, speaking by telephone, said a Pakistani TV crew and an American journalist had been roughed up and run out of town. It appeared that the backlash had begun.

Read the whole thing from the link above. Its good!

More Mumbai

From Indian express. A very well articulated take.

South Mumbai, you study at Cathedral school, holiday in Cannes, eat kebabs at bade miyans, drink beer pipes at Leopolds and aperitif at the Taj, lecture at Davos, and fail in Hindi exams as a matter of honour. You refer to your part of the city simply as “town”. Your life may be the stuff of our dreams, but your own dreams are in a foreign land. You disdain India’s ineffectual politics — while being insulated from its ills. Today, you are at war.

Funny video of the day

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Thanks to Anand Nair for finding this gem :P

Bloggers Beware of the Recession....

Blogging for money ain't a pretty picture, not in the near future atleast.
From Economic Times,

The current economic recession has scared people. Bloggers are facing the wrath of the recession, especially in US and Europe. Online ad-spend by advertisers has come down due to the current cash flow problems. But advertisers haven’t completely stopped online advertising; they have stopped new online ad campaigns but are running existing ones on blogs,” said Vikram Deo, blogger, nampblog.com.
....
G Mallikarjun Reddy, author of the tech blog codeinspections says the slump stumped his google adsense revenue. “The revenue per ad click on my blog used to be $0.13 during the first half of this year, but now it is $0.08,” he says. This dip in revenue for bloggers is a phenomena the world over. Charles Knight, editor, AltSearchEngines blog, a high-traffic blog focusing on internet search, said: “When I approach a firm requesting they place an ad, they say, our marketing budget is cut to zero.”

Economics to Environment

Does this economic mismanagement by the big wall st types with their Ivy League degrees and super fast computer systems due to greed, and the incredible cost it has brought to the tax-payer portend of things to come. When a purely human activity like commerce can be hit so hard by this credit crisis and it is costing trillions to save it (they are still trying to) even with the best minds, how much would it cost if a really world threatening issue like Climate Change is not addressed. Given how little control or understanding we have of climate, how irresponsible of humans in not taking any kind of action with immediate effect? How can we not act upon it.

At least, we can pour money to handle the current crisis. What can we do if our environment is irreparably damaged by our activity. How can we let politicians (especially American ones) hold the whole world hostage in this regard. Even Al Gore has accepted that America is on the wrong path in this regard. The problem with climate change is that the changes required to even have an impact, let alone overcome, is going to be so painful it is going to be unpalatable. But the other option is fatal. The injustice in this whole thing is, for all the American profligacy, it will be people in places like Bangladesh who will be affected the most. It is time for all of us to do something about this. Cutting our consumption of power, reducing wastage of water and food is a great way to begin. And its time for the governments in the third world countries which are the most vulnerable, to come together and make the first-world countries act. Europeans are obviously miles ahead of Americans, but this is something that has to be dealt with at a global scale. With the economic crisis, the average Joe paid with his hard-earned money, but for the other he might end up having to pay for with his life.

Helpful Link - Check your Credit Report

There might be so many ads you might have seen about credit reports with all sorts of caveats. Annual Credit Report is one (probably the only one according to CNBC) website which lets you access your credit report from all the three credit reporting agencies Equifax, Transunion and Experian for free once a year. I tried it today and it does work.

Mumbai Attack : Cell phone video of terrorist being caught and Inside Taj

The videos say it all.

Mumbai: Interesting read

Here is a good read from Outlook India. Saikat Datta lists some of the practical issues in the 'Bomb Pakistan' Strategy.

From the article -

Fine. Let's bomb Islamabad, assuming we have the capability to do so and that the frontline aircraft of the Indian Air force are all serviceable, the MiG-21s ready to escort the bombers, and we can launch a full-scale military attack by penetrating the secure skies over Islamabad and then bomb it back to the stone age.

But are we really ready for a war?

Are we ready for the fallout when two nuclear nations go to war? Are we ready for destroying everything that we have built in the last decade and a half? Are we prepared for rolling back our consistent 9 percent growth story and undertake hardships that several generations of Indians have never seen?