Naxalite Terror: Published Letter - SAKAL TIMES

http://epaper.sakaaltimes.com/SakaalTimes/29Nov2011/Enlarge/page8.htm

ORIGINAL EXCERPT
Death of Maoist leader Kishenji is a significant development in countering naxalite terror. Maoists have wrecked havoc for more than four decades, claiming to be fighting for the rights of the tribal people and rural poor with low literacy and high poverty rates. However the mass murder the Maoists ensued to achieve their ‘social equality’ goal itself discredits them. Modern India was born into chaos. We had chronic poverty & social inequality but not all poor resorted to arms. Majority of people embraced hard work & education to overcome their hardships. Today they have become net contributor to India’s progress. It is true that remote tribal population is lagging behind but thanks to our economic progress there is hope of them receiving better economic attention hence forth. India is a developing democracy home to more than 1.2 billion people & it will be unfair to expect overnight alleviation of millions out of poverty.

Mobiles can save Indian women

Women at the bottom of the pyramid need health, education and empowerment information, but they are likely to need subsidized service, voice-based apps and training in using VAS

Digital World | Osama Manzar

India ranks 122 out of 138 nations in the United Nations Development Programme’s gender equality index—and for good reason. Only 65% of Indian women are literate, compared with nearly 83% men. A third of the married Indian women are underweight. Maternal mortality rate is high (450 per 100,000 live births) in part due to inadequate antenatal care coverage. Women now account for 39% of HIV infections, and awareness of prevention and treatment still lags.

Can any technological or communication tool help change the scenario? The answer is the mobile phone. Mobiles are cheap, oral—they do not require users to be literate—and are already in the hands of more than 300 million Indian women.

“Women in India suffer from pervasive inequality and have distinct health, education, and economic needs not being addressed by current institutions and media,” says a research report prepared by Vital Wave Consulting for Vodafone India Foundation with which we work closely. “Mobile phones represent the largest opportunity to address these needs, with 225 million women owning phones and the female VAS (value-added services) market worth $1 billion and growing.”

These numbers are from the first quarter of 2011. There are far more women with access to mobile phones than to the Internet (60 million active women Internet users) or landline phones (50 million women with landline access).

Vital Wave further elaborates: “Female mobile phone owners generally prefer voice and use SMS less frequently than their male counterparts, but female subscribers already send more than 6.8 billion SMS per month.”

An average woman mobile subscriber in India sends 30 SMSes per month, uses voice service of 300 minutes per month and about 40% of women subscribers have found employment opportunities with their mobile phones. According to Vital Wave, “The most basic aspects of mobile phone ownership are already empowering Indian women, with over 90% saying they feel safer and more connected just owning a phone.”

Thankfully, we have several torch bearers to show us how mobiles are already being used in the hinterland for empowering women and, in effect, achieving gender equality with equitable economic opportunity. Barefoot College at Ajmer in Rajasthan has been using mobiles along with community radio to serve 25,000 women from 200 villages in training, livelihood programmes and health services—50% of these women have their own mobiles that they are using to interact and convert opportunities into economic gains. Members of the well-known organisation SEWA (Self Employed Women Association) in Gujarat use voice-based system and symbol-based SMS system providing them access to market information.

India’s number one VAS provider, IMIMobile, realizing the scale of women mobile subscribers, has created a suite of services targeting women, including health information that is specifically tailored for women and children’s health issues and information related to career opportunities, including entertainment. Mobile operator Uninor partnered with the department of telecommunication to launch the Sanchar Shakti voice-based service for women to deliver information, expert advice and news alerts on health, education, self employment and finance, in cooperation with self help groups (SHGs), NGOs, and educational institutions.

Catholic Relief Services and Dimagi are using mobile phones to enable Asha workers to collect information on pregnant women and their communities and improve coverage of pre-natal and neo-natal services and convey information on healthy practices directly to expecting mothers and their families. The Commonwealth of Learning and the Vidiyal SHG created 500 audio messages on a variety of topics that were sent to women on a daily basis to promote lifelong learning, with the specific aim of supporting their businesses. In Jeend in Haryana, Kisan Sanchar has been serving women farmers group through mobile for agriculture extension services and they use voice-based as well as SMS-based platform to reach out. In Konark in Orissa, Young India has achieved 100% attendance of girl students in Gop Block schools through the integrated use of Mobile and community radio.

These are some examples we have received in the nomination process for Women & Innovation in Mobile Award, under which funding will be provided to the three best initiatives with support and mentoring for two years. The award is supported by the Vodafone Foundation and is being conducted under the framework of Manthan Awards. What we need is extensive scaling up of these projects, nationwide adoption by government and private sector and active participation of the social institutions to integrate mobile into their daily operations across all sectors targeting women.

Women at the bottom of the pyramid need health, education and empowerment information, but they are likely to need subsidized service, voice-based apps and training in using VAS, because 25 million mobile phone owners belong to the poorest income brackets and all use low-cost basic handsets. Similarly, we can target women at home, schools and colleges, offices and agricultural fields. Some 60% of all women in rural areas already own mobiles, but almost all of them are low-cost phones. Half of all women who live in homes, irrespective of urban or rural settings, own mobile phones. Also, 80% of all women in colleges and schools use mobile phones and 50% of all women in jobs in urban areas own smartphones and spend Rs.3,000 per month on usage. Let me know how we can be of any help to accelerate your idea to give a better life to the better halves of India.

Osama Manzar is founder and director of Digital Empowerment Foundation and chairman of the Manthan award. He is also a member of the Working Group for Internet Governance Forum at the ministry of communications and information technology. Tweet him @osamamanzar

http://www.livemint.com/2011/10/30205407/Mobiles-can-save-India8217s.html?h=B

Ubiquitous Pakistan

By Muhammad Ali Siddiqi

“KARACHI, India” was a talking point and a source of tremendous national hurt and humiliation when my generation was at school — letters written by foreigners often carried an address which ended with “Karachi, India”.

The government of the day would come under harsh attack for not making the world know that Karachi was in Pakistan and not India. Hearts choked and people hit the ceiling when an address ended with “Karachi, Pakistan, India”. Those were heady days, and we lived under the spell of the euphoria over Pakistan’s emergence. Those who had opposed
Pakistan had no face to show and were hiding in rat holes.

Look, patriots would say, the country was two and a half years old, and the world still thought Pakistan was in India. What was the government doing? Harsh words for the government were rare. A British paper, taking note of this controversy, added fuel to the fire by remarking that “Pakistan will always remain part of India”. In spite of Radcliffe and Mountbatten, Britain still had some admirers, thanks to Claude Auchinleck and Beverly Nichols. But even they vowed never to purchase a Morris minor and to remain jobless rather than work in a British firm, of which many were household names with the middle class — Burmah Shell, Glaxo, BOAC, Standard and Chartered, Mackinnon Mackenzie, etc

A forceful pain provider every year was the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference in London. Pakistan and India were the only non-white members of the Commonwealth (CW) and occupied the place of pride, because the rest of Afro-Asia was still groaning under colonialism.

In the photograph, the British prime minister sat to the monarch’s right; Nehru to the left. Liaquat Ali Khan was seated — or as we believed was humiliated and made to sit — next to the British prime minister. This was a tremendous source of national grief. Why wasn’t Liaquat next to the monarch? Shouldn’t we quit the Commonwealth? This was a matter of national honour.

Much later, when Pakistan had come of age, Bhutto in the 1960s made the issue clear. Neither Pakistan nor India would ever quit the CW, because the withdrawal by one would swing the CW members’ sympathies to the other. So, that I suppose continues to be the guiding philosophy in a zero-sum game even today when the CW membership has gone up to 54.

The shift from the British-centric attitude came with the advent of Uncle Sam on the Pakistani scene. A major event was the ‘Thank You America’ signs dangling from the camels’ necks as the carts carried American wheat from the harbour through Bunder Road, Karachi’s only artery then. Only the leftist elements — more powerful and well organised than they should have been in Pakistan’s formative years — made an issue of it. It was a humiliation, they insisted. For the majority, however, the American gesture of rushing wheat to Pakistan in a food-deficit year was timely and friendly. Anti-Americanism was decades away.

Gradually, the world started waking up to the reality of Pakistan, less from its membership of the US-led military pacts and more because — in spite of being America’s most ‘allied ally’ — it drew closer to China, especially after the India-China war. The 1965 war with India, the burning of the American embassy in November 1979 for no fault of America’s, Abdus Salam winning the Nobel prize in physics, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US-led jihad that once again made Pakistan America’s blue-eyed boy, and the entry of words ‘jihad’ and ‘mujahideen’ in popular lexicon and media jargon turned the world focus on Pakistan.

There were three eventful decades — pictures in the world media about the obscenity that was whipping by Zia’s lash men, Pakistan’s monopoly of the world squash championship — thanks to icons Jahangir and Jansher — hockey’s Olympic, World and Asian titles coming to Pakistan; Imran Khan holding the cricket World Cup, a charismatic Pakistani becoming the Islamic world’s first woman prime minister, Pakistan going nuclear, 9/11, the Taliban, the flames of the Marriott shooting into Islamabad’s night sky in Ramazan, the Bush-Mush honeymoon, BB’s return and assassination, the black coats, 7/7, Mumbai, the drones, the earthquake, the flood, Raymond Davis, Bin Laden-
Abbottabad, ‘safe havens’, Mike Mullen and the ISI. Well, it is Pakistan and Pakistan on the world’s front pages and TV screens. Even the New York Times and Washington Post can’t help it — for the wrong reasons.

Tossing between hope and despair, the Pakistani people’s world is a mix of triumphs and tragedies — accolades mixed with slurs; insinuations tempered with hidden admiration; bombed-out mosques and schools; a beautiful face smeared with blood and soot and contorted by pain, like Afia’s; an unceasing struggle between harsh realities and self-delusions; a nation’s soul crying and craving for normality.

Nevertheless, Pakistan has arrived. Nobody writes, “Karachi, India” anymore, nor does anybody care which side of Elizabeth a prime minister sits; BOAC and Burmah Shell have been replaced by Citibank and KFC; and the closure of the News of the World has been attributed to divine wrath, some solace for our match fixers.

World powers continue to come to Pakistan, focus on it, help it, abuse it, and betray it (we Pakistanis are very fond of being betrayed, because we ourselves do not hesitate to betray). As defined by Paul Kennedy, Robert Case and Emily Hill in The Pivotal States: Policy in Developing World, Pakistan is among the world’s nine “pivotal countries”. Mike Mullen, while parting, told his successor “to remember the importance of Pakistan. …There is no solution in the region without Pakistan”. This affirmation of Pakistan’s
importance makes some people very jealous.

So, Pakistanis, carry on! Irrespective of what you are, irrespective of your misdeeds and crimes against yourselves, rejoice, for Pakistan, your country, remains “important”, “pivotal” and — unfortunately — ubiquitous.

SOURCE: http://www.dawn.com/2011/10/27/ubiquitous-pakistan.html

Indian firms & R&D

If you have been lucky enough to travel across Africa you would have noticed a rising Indian entrepreneurial footprint across the continent. TATA, Ashok Leyland, Bajaj, TVS, Airtel all have made significant roadways into Africa & these are just the visible brands which you see on the streets and or on television. The invisible small and medium scale entrepreneurs too have made major contribution towards soft Indian diplomacy. I feel proud to spot home grown businesses abroad. As Indian economy gains steam in this decade I expect more and more Indianess to spread across the world & not just Africa. Unlike other counties (CHINA) who promote their companies abroad Indian businesses are promoting Indian agenda on behalf of the government.

India already is one of the biggest exporters of brain but still lacks world class engineering and non engineering products to compete with Western and Japanese goods. We are not able to pioneer new technologies like the Americans, British, Germans and Japanese. I hope our major brands will increase their R&D and prepare themselves to compete with the international majors.

India Journal: Overpopulation? I’ll Buy That

By Ranjani Iyer Mohanty

In the 1980s, before India’s economic revolution, there used to be ubiquitous billboards showing the ideal Indian family–a father, a mother and two children–in order to encourage family planning. By the 2000s, these ads had been replaced by ones for Nokia, Coke and “India’s Got Talent.” We seem to have solved our overpopulation issue by using the philosophy “if you have lemons, make lemonade,” or, if you have a heck of a lot of people, make them consumers.

Dibyangshu Sarkar/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Indian commuters travel along a congested street on World Population Day in Kolkata, July 11.

In 1952, when India’s population was less than 400 million, the government initiated a family planning program, one of the first of its kind in the world. By the 80s, India’s population had grown to 700 million. Today, India is the world’s second-most populous country at 1.2 billion. By 2025, it is expected to surpass China and become the most populous country with 1.4 billion, and some predict that figure may reach two billion by the year 2100. To put the growth into perspective, over the past 40 years, the population of the U.K. has increased by seven million while the population of India has increased by 700 million. We proudly call ourselves the world’s largest democracy, but that “largest” bit might not be something to strive for.

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Economist Thomas Malthus first warned of the dangers of overpopulation back in 1798. In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich rang the alarm bells again with his bestseller “The Population Bomb.” The 90s brought population scientist’s Joel Cohen’s book “How many people can the world support?” and ecologist Garrett James Hardin’s “Living within Limits.” But over the last few years, apart from some scientists, academics, NGO-types and concerned individuals shouting into the wind, there seems to have been little mainstream concern about the issue.

The United Nations used to organize a World Population Conference every decade, but the last one was in 1994. The UNFPA is currently promoting a program called ‘7 Billion Actions’ but it seems more like a celebratory event to commemorate in story and song the world population crossing seven billion at the end of this month.

In fact, media and business now largely view demography as one of India’s biggest assets; every Indian is seen as a potential source of talent and labor, and more importantly, a potential consumer of manufactured goods. The more people, the better. The Economist recently said, “India’s population will stay young and energetic for years to come.” This decidedly optimistic shift in perspective from a stance of “Oh-Oh, Overpopulation” to “Duh! Demographic Dividend” may be due to several reasons.

Firstly, the last century saw incredible advances in farming technology and substantial increase in crop yields, leading many to assume that with proper distribution we can feed an unlimited number. Secondly, Indians still remember the forced sterilization clinics of the 1970s – since then, no self-preserving politician is prepared to even bring up the topic of overpopulation.

Thirdly, many adhere hopefully – and perhaps out of sheer laziness – to the prevalent theory that the problem will solve itself. As education and living standards rise, the fertility rate will automatically drop–just like it has already done in many developed countries–and India’s population will plateau. Then again, experts have also said that as education and living standards improve, the sex ratio will equalize. But this hasn’t happened, at least not in India. In fact, a recent study showed that in subject groups of greater affluence and where mothers had more than 10 years of education, the sex ratio was actually more skewed. For reasons of supposed decorum, sex education is not taught in Indian schools. Despite the Indra Nooyis and the Kiran Mazumdar-Shaws, women are generally still seen as subservient to men at home, and therefore may not have control over how many children they have. But even if we accept the thesis of a decreasing fertility rate, India’s population is expected to plateau around the year 2060 at 1.7 billion. Is that a sustainable or ideal level?

The predominant reason for optimism is that we seem to have moved to an era of “the market uber alles.” Where India is concerned, the world and we ourselves have adopted a Panglossian attitude: all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as long as we have 8% growth.

But Indians are not only consumers of mobile phones and credit cards; we are also consumers of food, water and sheer physical space. Food prices are rising. Water tables are dropping. Daily power cuts are common. Land conflicts are frequently featured on the news. The streets are clogged with automobiles, and the Nano isn’t even out in full force yet. Competition is intense in all walks of life. Getting admission to academic institutes from kindergarten upwards is a source of worry for parents. One woman whose daughter scored a 93% average in her grade-12 final exams was very upset, asking how she would ever get into the Indian colleges of her choice with such a low mark. Many who feel they don’t have the natural ability to succeed or feel the system isn’t fair resort to approaching influential contacts for help and, if needed, paying bribes. Add to this scenario of resource constraints ecological impacts such as deforestation, over-fishing, and rising levels of pollution. Even the benefits of our economic revolution are eroded as they are spread out over an ever-increasing number of people.

While Thomas Malthus may have been worried well before his time and Paul Ehrlich a touch sensationalist, they may not have been totally off-base. Concern about the population issue is neither quaint nor quixotic. If we take a home built for five people and put 50 in it, we can expect things to go wrong.

Obviously, there are no easy solutions. No one wants to go the way of China on this and have a forced one child policy, particularly now that we are starting to see its dangers, such as a skewed sex ratio and a rising dependency ratio. Of course, even if it were desirable, such a policy would be impossible in a democratic India and political suicide for any politician who even mentioned the matter. However, there may be more gentle measures, like raising the issue of overpopulation in the media as a source of concern, discussing the benefits of population control both in high-profile platforms (similar to Davos) and public forums, and informing people about related government and NGO programs. Maybe those lovely ads of yore, jazzed up a bit to suit modern fashion, could be brought back. We could also have a population clock put up in city centers, similar to the debt clock in New York City. It may be just as ineffective, but at least we would be constantly reminded of the problem. And each time we cross yet another milestone population number (1.3 billion, 1.4 billion, ….) we should go through a national soul-searching process that is broadcast by the media worldwide before we consciously, and with full knowledge of what we are giving up, raise our mentally acceptable population ceiling.

For now though, there just seems to be a quiet and imperceptible rising of the tide, as we frolic in the waters. Very similar to the naive attitude that the U.S. can spend its way out of a slump, India hopes to procreate its way out of poverty. We have lots of bright young sparks in the pipeline to supply talent and labor, but most importantly to assume the mantle of consumer.

Ironically, the only thing I’ve seen in India lately that addresses overpopulation or even acknowledges it as an issue is an advertisement. Tongue planted in cheek, actor Abhishek Bachchan attributes India’s overpopulation to the numerous power cuts, which leave people with nothing to do but procreate. However, once people have Birla’s 3G enabled smartphone, they are too busy being entertained by it to … do anything else. And therefore, the population drops. What an idea Sir-ji, and perhaps our best one yet.

Ranjani Iyer Mohanty is an editor, working with business, academics, and NGOs.

Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2011/10/07/india-journal-overpopulation-i%E2%80%99ll-buy-that/

My cat bit me

Have you been bitten by a cat? It is an awesome feeling – the pain when the canine sinks piercing the skin, fear of rabies resulting in sleepless nights and if you are vaccinophobic you are in for a treat.

My cat bit me. He’s semi stray non vaccinated white devil. Phunk!!! Bit me while I was asleep. This is not my first animal bite. I have been bitten & scratched by dogs, cats stung by wasps, bees. I probably am the most anti rabies vaccinated person in my town. The good thing is that advanced, small anti rabies have replaced those 1 litre each 14 injections. I had fortune of experiencing those painful old classics.

Anyone who has underwent the trauma of being bitten by rabid animal will truly thank the brilliant scientists who have developed the state of the art anti rabies vaccines. Scientists at Rabipur & Bharatbiotech save hundreds of lives daily. Unfortunately there is not drug available today to treat rabies in its final stage. That will be the day when such a drug is invented or a drug similar to polio drops which will guarantee immunity for life.

FYI: My cat is alive and well. It survived the 10 day incubation period. I have stopped the treatment

Why my father hated India

I first heard about Pakistan's Punjab governor Salman Taseer after he was assassinated by his security. He was murdered because he had raised his voice against Pakistan's notorious blasphemy law. He was a good man. He was a modern and liberal muslim. I thought a person like him would have neutral opinion of India until I read the following article. Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship

Why My Father Hated India

Ten days before he was assassinated in January, my father, Salman Taseer, sent out a tweet about an Indian rocket that had come down over the Bay of Bengal: "Why does India make fools of themselves messing in space technology? Stick 2 bollywood my advice."

My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.

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Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Mohandas Gandhi visits Muslim refugees in New Delhi as they prepare to depart to Pakistan on Sept. 22, 1947.

Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.

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Rex USA

Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan's Punjab province, in May 2009. He was assassinated in January 2011.

But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

This rage is what makes it impossible to reduce Pakistan's obsession with India to matters of security or a land dispute in Kashmir. It can heal only when the wounds of 1947 are healed. And it should provoke no triumphalism in India, for behind the bluster and the bravado, there is arid pain and sadness.

—Mr. Taseer is the author of "Stranger to History: A Son's Journey Through Islamic Lands." His second novel, "Noon," will be published in the U.S. in September

Value for money: used laptops

Since I turned entrepreneur I have become a strong believer in the idea of 'value for money'. I bargain every purchase. I do this mostly for two major reasons 1) Its cool, makes me think of myself as a tough buyer (whatever that means) 2) I do not have much money left with me after I am done paying for my business & personal expenses. Saving money is on top of my list. I shop for my Levis & Benetton during discount sale. This is the time when prices appeal to my common sense. Also I don't mind shelling a bit extra for regular retail if the product is worth it. I go for it.

But there is one particular item that I will never pay to buy brand new no matter how lucrative the bargain : Laptops. I think buying a new laptop is waste of money, especially for budding entrepreneurs who need to bootstrap every expense. I cannot see myself paying Rs.35K - Rs.45K for a business laptop. No can do. I prefer to save my money and go for a used laptop. Usually I target 2-3 year old machines which are in great shape & offer reasonable computing power (Core2 Duo or greater).

So far I have purchased 2 used laptops, first was a Toshiba Portege M300 which I purchased for Rs.8.5K. It had a minor screen problem. It was my work horse & delivered awesome performance. It worked fine for 18 months & suddenly one evening it died. The screen went dark and never came back to life. My second purchase is a HP 2510p which I purchased in Dubai for Rs.10K recently. Btw I bargained for this one & secured a discount of Rs.0.5K :) It looks awesome and works fine. I am blogging using it.

I use my machines for browsing and checking my emails. I am not involved in high end computing stuff. So purchasing a second hand laptop makes sense for me. But you people out there please continue buying new, expensive & latest laptops and please sell them in 1-2 years. Thnx :)

Condition in Pakistan deteriorating rapidly

My letter on Pakistan's deteriorating condition was published in Sakal Times on 07/03/2011

http://epaper.sakaaltimes.com/SakaalTimes/7Mar2011/Enlarge/page8.htm

Following is the script

"Assassination of Pakistan’s minority’s minister Shahbaz Bhatti on 2^nd March & Punjab governer Salman Taseer in January depicts looming uncertainty and danger for the future of minority communities of Pakistan. Two sensible, bright and secular people have fallen victim to a ridiculous law instigated by people who did not understand the basic principle of religion ‘To Live & Let live’. Pakistan’s social fabric is deteriorating rapidly and is being replaced by a dangerous Molotov cocktail of hate, violence & fanaticism. Stephen Cohen, a prominent American political scientist, has said that Pakistan will be a failed state in next 6 years, a serious prediction for a nuclear power.

Pakistan’s economic condition is not healthy either; it is aided by IMF & US. To finance the high budget deficit Pakistan is printing Rs.200 crore everyday, a self destructing strategy which will lead to depreciation of Pak Rupee, loss of foreign currency reserves and hyper inflation. There is no major foreign investment coming in the country, long power cuts have crippled the domestic industry. Businesses are either closing down or are moving out which is leading to rising unemployment. Feudalism, insurgency in Baluchistan & Khyber Pakhtunwa region, regional water dispute, corruption, broken education system, security problem all are adding to the woes of the government headed by two very incompetent leaders. Pakistan today is in dire straits economically, socially, & politically."

India 2020: What will we be like?

Following was published in BUSINESS STANDARD on 02/01/2010.

Writer: T N Ninan

http://bit.ly/i7e2Vi

One overriding fact will define the coming decade for India: the high probability that it will continue to achieve economic growth at an annual rate of 9 per cent, give or take a percentage point. That will compare with an average of about 7.5 per cent for the first decade of the new century, and about 6 per cent in the last decade of the 20th.

In grand, macro-economic terms, that does not sound like a seminal shift, for GDP will go up from Rs 60 lakh crore today (about $1.3 trillion) to 2.2 times that figure a decade from now. India’s GDP in 2020, at just under $3 trillion at today’s prices and exchange rates, would be less than two-thirds of what China has already achieved in 2009: $4.6 trillion.

In global rankings, too, there will be relatively small shifts — India will have become bigger than Russia and Brazil (two of the BRIC economies), and should also overtake Canada and Spain. It will therefore become the eighth largest economy in the world, as against the twelfth largest today. And per capita income will have doubled to become a little better than where Sri Lanka’s is today!

These are substantial changes, but essentially incremental, and therefore none of them earthshaking. India’s share of global GDP, for instance, will be only slightly better than 4 per cent even in 2020 — well short of the 24 per cent that prevailed more than three centuries ago, and not much better than the 3.8 per cent of 1952! The more exciting story, therefore, will lie in the scale change that will become evident in specific markets. We have seen over the past decade how this works — the number of new mobile phone connections has gone from 0.1 million per month in 1999 to 10 million now, an increase of a hundredfold. And total mobile connections have gone from less than 10 million to over 500 million.

What has happened in mobile phones will happen in many fields over the coming decade. Chiefly because the number of households with a monthly income of Rs 25,000 and more should more than treble, from about 30 million today to 100 million by 2020, with their average income becoming at least twice what it is today. In other words, the spending power of the middle class will multiply six-fold. Depending on which way spending patterns move, some markets will grow tenfold in the next decade. That kind of scale change will be the real story — mimicking the software business, whose exports have grown from $5.7 billion 10 years ago to about $50 billion now. So when you pick the next crop of stars in the world of business, think carefully.

Airbus, for instance, has said that India’s will be the fastest growing aviation market in the next 20 years (growing faster even than China’s, which already has over 800 domestic planes, compared to about 200 in India). India will also be the fifth or sixth largest maker of, as well as market for, cars. And since India by the end of the coming decade will account for 10 to 12 per cent of world economic growth, the country will become a gigantic magnet (once again) for the world’s companies that will come to do business. It won’t be a repeat of the East India Company story, but expect much greater internationalisation of the economy, especially if the ageing populations of Europe and Japan translate into little or no growth in what are today the centres of economic activity, driving their companies to look for growth elsewhere — as is already happening.

The advent of scale change in India will create turmoil in global markets. If India’s oil demand more than doubles over the next 10 years, and China’s does the same, oil producers will have to deliver an extra 9 million barrels of oil per day to feed the extra demand from just these two countries. Since the total increase in world oil production in the last three decades was barely 9 mbd, don’t be surprised if oil prices catch fire at some point in the next few years.

It’s going to be a disruptive decade ahead for other markets too: in metals, energy and even agro-commodities, as Indian demand starts looking more like what Chinese demand has been in the recent past. If this explains why China has been busy in a one-country race to grab the world’s resources, wherever they may be, perhaps it is time India took the natural resource game a little more seriously.

Domestically, the new game in town will be manufacturing. As the domestic market grows, domestic manufacture cannot be far behind. The problem, of course, is that in the age of climate change, this becomes highly problematic. More immediately, expect bitter battles over land. The harsh fact is that India has 350 people per square kilometre — something like eight or 10 times the global average. By the end of the decade, it could be 400 people per sq km. Typically, then, if a large industrial project or power plant wants 5,000 hectares of land (or 50 sq km), it could displace as many as 20,000 people. Less, if the land is in an under-populated area, but still substantial. Assume the setting up of dozens of such projects: in power alone, the country will need the equivalent of 40 ultra-mega projects of 4,000 mw each; in steel, domestic consumption could go up from 46 million tonnes today to perhaps 150 million tonnes. To feed such demand and to make way for such projects, we are talking of displacing millions of people in the coming decade. The question of whether this is feasible, and where the displaced people are to go, will be one of the prime issues of the decade — especially in heavily populated states like West Bengal, where population density is thrice as high as the national average (over 1,000 people per sq km).

Nevertheless, expect sustained improvement in India’s socio-economic indicators — like a halving of the percentage of people below whichever poverty line you choose, a literacy rate by 2020 of 80 per cent (close to today’s world average of 84 per cent), and life expectancy finally crossing the 70-year mark, perhaps even approaching 75 years. All this will be achieved despite manifest deficiencies of governance, and the imperfect delivery of public health and education services by government agencies. Perhaps because of these, India will continue to have only a “medium” category score of about 0.7 on the human development index, short of the 0.8 that would categorise it as having a “high” score. The index for India in 2007 was 0.61.

With many of these changes, and greater urbanisation — more than a third of the people should be living in towns and cities in 2020 — politics can be expected to undergo a change, for the better. Citizens will be less concerned about voting their caste; instead, they will cast their vote for the politicians who they think are more likely to provide them with electricity, water, good public transport and clean air.

What can make this scenario come unstuck? Plenty, actually. One can list the growing inequalities in the system — of income, wealth and opportunity, the challenge of jihadi terrorism, the criminalisation of politics, the dramatic increase in the scale of political corruption, and the threat to the established order posed by the Maoists. These are obvious, because they are urgent issues even today.

An issue which has not received much attention comes from businessmen, because the bald truth is that India’s capitalists have failed capitalism. Take the business story that ran through the last year: the feud between the Ambani brothers over the supply and pricing of gas. The skeletons come tumbling out of the cupboard every time there is such a fight, and what comes out isn’t a pretty sight.

No one also needs reminding that 2009 began with the breaking of the Satyam Computers scandal, the founder-chairman’s arrest, and the company’s collapse and its subsequent sale. Other headline events during the year included the scandal over the handing out of telecom licences, with an inquiry by the Central Bureau of Investigation under way. There was also the Koda affair, with Rs 2,000 crore of unaccounted money being linked to the handing out of no fewer than 47 mining leases in a single day.

The headlines suggest the thesis that India’s businessmen and politicians have come together to make hay from the push towards a market economy — and thereby undermined the effort.

To be sure, businessmen have also shown that India’s private sector works. There are Nano and Swach, the dramatic spread of telecom services, the greater efficiencies achieved through privatising Delhi’s power supply, the steady flow of consumer goods of greater quality at reduced prices, the increased efficiency of companies like Maruti, the green initiatives of ITC…

But it is dangerous to turn a blind eye to the dark side, especially if the country seems to be undergoing a dangerous transition from the era of crony capitalists to the era of oligarchs — businessmen who acquire and use political power for their own ends — like the Reddy brothers who nearly toppled the Karnataka chief minister. Russia points to some of the dangers.

Boris Yeltsin launched a widespread privatisation programme in the mid-1990s, a variety of “oligarchs” captured companies at throwaway prices, often used physical violence to intimidate, and developed political ambitions, before there was the inevitable backlash. Boris Berezovsky bought an oil company and a TV station and funded political parties, but eventually had to seek asylum in Britain. Mikhail Khodorkovsky was another oil billionaire who developed political ambitions, only to lose his company and his freedom. Russia itself has swung back to authoritarianism.

The situation in India is not comparable, you would say and you might be right. But Indian tycoons like the Reddy brothers now risk being tagged as robber barons — a tag that links business success to political dealings, or to anti-competitive and/or unfair business practices. It is worth finding out, for instance, which mining interests were behind the installation of Mr Koda as hapless Jharkhand’s chief minister, and who arranged for the Congress party’s support.

You could argue that all countries go through such phases — the United States saw it in the late 19th century, just as Russia did a century later — and that this is a stage through which India too is passing before market regulation, political oversight and the institutions of governance improve and become more effective. That positive outcome is possible, of course, but has to be worked for and will not happen automatically. Indian democracy has withstood the test of poverty. It now has to demonstrate that it can withstand the test of growing prosperity.