Confessions of an Economic Hitman

or How the United States Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

I had heard about this book from Vinod, and he just sent me this link to an interview with John Perkins by Amy Goodman on Democracy now.

John Perkins was a self-professed Economic Hit Man. He worked for a score and more years as chief economist at an international consulting firm in Boston called Chas. T. Main. His job was to persuade countries that are strategically important to the U.S. - such as Indonesia, Panama, Ecuador, Iran and Saudi Arabia - to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development from USAID and World Bank and then to make sure the lucrative projects were contracted out to U.S. corporations. This ensured that the principal money moved only from Washington D.C. to New York, Boston and San Francisco. The countries which received all the infrastructure improved the lot of the top 2% of their elite and further marginalized bulk of their poorer population. Stuck with extraordinarily huge debts which they couldn't possibly repay, these countries came under the control of the U.S. government and other U.S.-dominated aid agencies. Terms of repayment were meted out and the foreign powers were forced to hand out free or cheap oil, allow U.S. military bases and other atrocious empire building actions.

As an economic hit man, chief economist John Perkins' job of persuasion entailed coming up with projected economic growth rate charts over a futuristic 25 years in the event of the country accepting the generous loans of the empire-building aid agencies. According to Perkins, when he and his ilk failed to convince the heads of state, the CIA (he calls them sharks) would move in and silently assassinate the president and instead place a puppet at the head who would agree to the terms of the loan. When this failed, U.S.A. would go to war, an Iraq would occur.

Very lucidly in his new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins takes one through his career, from being hired as an econmic hit man to his actions in Indonesia, Equador, Panama, Saudi Arabia and Colombia.

I have to buy this book soon.

More on The Bottom of the Pyramid

OK, so continuing my summary/review of C.K. Prahalad's book, here are some of his principles of innovation for BOP markets (I quote directly from his book along with examples, taken from other chapters):

1. Serving BOP markets is not just about lower prices; it is about creating a new price-performance envelope. The best example here is the incredible growth the world has seen in the use of cell phones. What used to once cost $1,000 in India (GSM handsets used to be that expensive!) now is so cheap, and India is now the second largest growing wireless market. Another example is the Aravind Eye Care System, the largest eye care facility in the world, headquarted in Madurai, Southern India. Cataract operations that cost about $2,500-$3000 in the US cost about $50-$300 here, including the hospital stay and post-operative care. This case study is truly worth reading more about! I was amazed.
2. Innovation requires hybrid solutions. Most scalable, price-performance-enhancing solutions need advanced and emerging technologies. A case in point here is the how Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), an Indian conglomerate innovated the manufacturing of iodized salt. More than 70 million Indian children suffer from iodine deficiency disorder (IDD), which can lead to mental retardation. Same with Africa. Only 15% of salt sold in India is iodized. Salt, to be effective as a carrier of iodine, must retain a minimum of 15 ppm of iodine. Due to harsh conditions of storage & tranportation, and furthermore due to the cooking habits, the challenge of creating iodized salt that will release the iodine only on ingesting cooked food is truly great. HLL innovated their process by performing what is called molecular encapsulation. Unilever is now using this innovation from HLL to other countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast and Kenya.
3. Solutions must be designed for ease of adaptation in similar BOP markets. How does one take a solution that worked in India to Brazil? This is a key consideration for gaining scale.
4. Developed markets are accustomed to resource wastage. All innovations must focus on conserving resources.
5. Product development must start from a deep understanding of functionality. Marginal changes to products developed for rich customers in the US or Japan will not do. One case study here is that of the Jaipur Foot. The artificial limb business is not new, it has been around since the American Civil War. In India alone, there are 5.5 million amputees, and about 25-30,000 are added each year due to polio, accidents, etc. Traditional artificial limbs were found to be both expensive (about $7,000 per prosthetic foot) as well as not serving the needs/requirements of the Indian life style - for example, most Indians squat (hence the need for dorsiflexion of the limb), they sit cross-legged (need for transverse rotation), walk on uneven ground (need for inversion and eversion) and walk barefoot (need for natural look). This unique set of requirements (well, not that unique, since this was adopted to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cambodia, Congo & Vietnam) led to a master design. Master craftsman Ram Chandra & Dr. P.K. Sethi, along with their Jaipur design team, developed a prosthetic that meets all he criteria for less than $30.
6. Deskilling work is critical - most BOP markets are poor in skill.
7. Education of customers on product usage is key. Most BOP markets live in "media dark" zones, without access to radio or TV.
8. Products must work in hostile environments - noise, dust, unsanitary conditions, low quality of infrastructure such as electricity, water, etc. ITC, the Indian conglomerate, was building this network for connecting Indian villages in a seamless supply chain. The PCs placed in the villages had to work in conditions unthinkable in the West. For example, the voltage fluctuated between 90-350 volts (against the rated 220 volts), and sudden surges are very common. ITC engineers had to add an UPS, and a solar panel that would allow at least 3-4 hours of uninterrupted, quality electricity. For communication, they had to depend on satellites.
9. Research on interfaces is critical. Given the multitude of languages, ethnicities and diversities in culture, this is no surprise. The interfaces could be either of - iconic, color-coded, voice-activated, fingerprint and iris-recognition interfaces. This is another area of crucial research, in my opinion. There is already a lot of work that has been done in this area. For example, the Baraha software is a wonderful tool to create documents in about 13 different Indian languages. Incidentally, my cousin was the key person who developed this during his spare time.

More recently, notable research in some of these areas:

• MIT announced the $100 laptop that has a hand-powered crank that can charge up the battery and comes in the form of a rugged, rubberized case so that it can survive under harsh conditions. More here.
• Intel Research, Berkeley, is working on real-world deployments of Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN) that considers the networking usages of satellite-based connections. More details here and here.

Some other key areas the book focuses on: Governance, and the interaction/importance of governmental interaction with NGOs, conglomerates and getting the common people involved in a transparent manner. This is a critical factor - lack of transparency, bureaucracy and corruption are the leading obstacles towards making the Millenium Developments a reality.

Case studies in the second half of the book illustrates in a very nice manner how millions of lives have been transformed by these projects:

• Casas Bahia (Brazil) - Innovation in retailing
• CEMEX (Mexico) - Innovation in Housing for the Poor
• The Annapurna Salt Story (India) - Solving the Iodine Deficiency problem for India
• Selling Health: HLL and the Soap Market (India)
• Jaipur Foot: Challenging Convention (India)
• The Aravind Eye Care System: Delivering the most precious gift (India)
• ITC e-choupal Story: Profitable Rural Transformation (India)
• Voxiva: Disease surveillance and response (Kosovo, Peru, Iraq, Africa, India)

All in all, a terrific read! I would highly recommend this book.

Whew, that was a lot of stuff. I hope I havent bored anyone off from the web site!

Back from Goa

Just got back from Goa, I was there for the last one week for HiPC - the 12th International Conference on High Performance Computing. A lot of my friends asked me what I did in Goa. Unfortunately, I dont have many interesting things to report. Being one of the core organizers of the conference, I hardly had any time to see Goa, except for early morning runs on the beach, and a visit to one of the forts close by overlooking the beach (yeah, the one they have in the movie Dil Chahta He). And some amazing walks on the beach during sunset. Maybe next time, I will actually do some sightseeing. I forgot to take my camera, maybe I will steal some pics from my friend's camera & post them later.

As for the conference itself, it was good, we had some great keynote speakers, good discussions on how Google uses clusters for doing their searches, Google Earth, etc. There was another very interesting talk on how the Institute for Genome & Biological Research in New Delhi uses clusters for their gene sequencing work.

All in all, some good learning, wonderful time meeting new people and discussing some good ideas for next year.

The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid

I finally got down to jotting down some notes from C.K. Prahalad's recent book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, I thought I will put them here.

The book starts off on a very ambitious note, and he surely doesn't disappoint the reader throughout the book. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

Turn on your television and you will see calls for money to help the world's 4 billion poor - people who live on far less than $2 a day. In fact, the cry is so constant and the need so chronic that the tendency for many people is to tune out these images as well as the message. Even those who hear and heed the cry are limited in what they can accomplish. For more than 50 years, the World Bank, donor nations, aid agencies, governments, and civil society organizations have all fought the good fight, but have not eradicated poverty. The adoption of Millenium Development Goals (MDG) by the United Nations only underscores that reality; as we enter the 21st century, poverty - and the disenfranchisement that accompanies it - remains one of the world's most daunting problems.

The purpose of this book is to change that familiar image on TV. What we need is a better approach to help the poor, an approach that involves partnering with them to innovate and achieve sustainable win-win scenarios where the poor are actively engaged and, at the same time, the companies providing products and services to them are profitable.

Now, for some observations that I thought were interesting:

1. There is money at the BOP (Bottom of Pyramid): The dominant assumption has been that the poor have no purchasing power and therefore do not represent a viable market. Prahalad shows that we should take aggregate purchasing power into consideration. To do this, we convert GDP-based purchasing power (for example China with a population of 1.2 billion and $1000 GDP represents a $1.2 trillion economy) into its dollar purchasing power parity (PPP). I think this means that you take into account the local currency and not just the dollar units. Nine countries - India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa & Thailand - collectively home to about 3 billion people, represent about 70% of the developing world population. In PPP terms, this group's GDP/aggregate Purchasing power is $12.5 trillion. This is not a market to be ignored.
2. BOP consumers accept advanced technology readily: This has been clearly shown by the ready acceptables of wireless devices, PC kiosks, etc. in different parts of the world. For example, ITC, the Indian conglomerate, decided to connect Indian farmers with PCs in their villages. This has allowed them to check prices not only in the local aution houses, but also prices of soybean futures at the Chicago Board of Trade! This has helped improved their profit margins, because they now how when to sell, how much to sell, and at what price they have to sell their produce. I thought this was really amazing.

I have to rush out now. I promise a post later in the day covering the other parts of the book.

The joys of Podcasting

I recently got a new iPod (and a cool FM transmitter that beams it to my car radio), and I have been having a great time downloading some great Podcasts - NPR's Science Friday, BBC's In Our Time, and here are some more: NPR's Health & Science, Canada's Quirks & Quarks, Australia's The Science Show, Boston Musuem of Science's Current Science and Technology Show, UC Berkeley's GROKS Science Show, Science cast, Nature's Science Podcast.

Now I can listen to Ira Flatow's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday here in Bangalore. Super cool...

If folks have any other interesting podcast sites, especially on science & technology, please let me know.

Ranga Shankara

We went to watch a play yesterday at Ranga Shankara. For those of you who don't know, Ranga Shankara is one of Bangalore's firsts that aims to keep the theatre alive, much like what the Prithvi Theatre has done in Mumbai. It is a performing arts space which frequently hosts plays by India's best theatre personalities and groups. In addition to the plays, which are hosted regularly, a cafe plays host to reading sessions, meet-the-people sessions, where one can meet with theatre stalwarts like Girish Karnad, Arundhati Nag, T.S Nagabharana, Girish Kasarvalli, etc. Yesterday I saw Alyque Padamsee and Arundhati Nag there, chatting over a cup of coffee after an open forum.

Ranga Shankara is named after Shankar Nag, one of Karnataka's most brilliant film & theatre personalities in the recent past. By the time of his early demise in 1990 in a tragic road accident (he was 35 then), he had won multiple awards including the Best Actor Award at the International Film Festival of India for his first film "Ondanondu Kaaladalli" (Once upon a time), directed by Girish Karnad. He had acted in over 100 films, acted/directed numerous plays. He also directed Malgudi Days, one of Indian Television's best known serials. His wife Arundhati Nag has spearheaded his dream of a theatre for Bangalore; she is herself an acclaimed theater and film personality. Among her other affiliations, she is also a big patron of Nritya Gram, the residential dance school at Hesarghatta on the outskirts of Bangalore, established by the late Protima Bedi.

Yesterday was a nice light hearted Kannada comedy play by the group Benaka, which is one of the oldest theatre groups in Karnataka. I am looking forward to more plays this week and meet-the-people sessions (hoping to catch Girish Karnad on Sat morning!).

BTW, if ever a TV channel called Times NOW goes on air, I might get lucky to go on air - my friend & I did a small interview with them about why theatre festivals like this, and places like Ranga Shankara are important to us Bangaloreans :-)

Images from a rain-battered Bangalore

It took me 2 hours to get back home yesterday, but once I saw these images, I am thankful that I at least got home fine. A lot of areas are plunged in darkness, houses half submerged in water, etc. etc.

My musings for better Bangalore roads...

I guess this morning was one of those days when traffic was flowing smoother than usual, no traffic jams & I was able to get parking at work even though it was well past 9AM! All this due, in no small measure, to the fact that it is holiday season, all schools are closed and a lot of people have taken days off for a small vacation. So, I was thinking to myself - yes, Bangalore needs to do a LOT to improve the roads and traffic flow. In addition to adding more high capacity roads (the sad part of building any new roads here is that by the time the road is built, if built that is, the traffic density has gone way past what was originally planned, rendering the new roads rather ineffective), I thought there could be other things the city needs to do. I am wondering if there are any Citizen's Intiatives to drive things like this with the government. If anyone knows of such things, do let me know.

1. Ply the big buses only at city centers/big roads. Most of the smaller areas/roads of Bangalore just CANNOT handle the big buses, especially the longer variety. All internal traffic should be smaller vans, mini buses. So, they could have some kind of zones (circular perhaps starting from the center of the city radiating outward). You can change zones at key transit points and take other buses if going further, or mini buses if going to more interior areas.
2. Provide incentives to citizens to use public transport - make them on time, reach all parts of city, convenient timings, from early morning to late night. Most of the inconvenience of public transport is evident when it rains - buses dont come on time, or even stop in designated stop areas. Auto rickshaws take people literally for a ride asking for ridiculous fares the moment it starts raining.
3. Introduce car pooling - I am not entirely positive that this will work here, but this could be tried out. A lot of times, office colleagues commute in the same direction. But there has to be some benefits - I am not sure what kind of incentives we can have here, given that there are no car pool lanes on roads. Maybe discounts in parking lots, discounts on petrol? But then the authorities must ensure that people cant fake car pool passes or misuse them.
4. Make roads bike friendly. Maybe identify alternate roads all through the city that can be used by cyclists. I for one, would gladly bike to work if I can feel reasonably secure that no one is going to crash into me from behind, and there is lesser pollution.
5. Force convert (in phases) all buses and autos to CNG. I think this has worked well for New Delhi.
6. Enforce traffic rules strictly - the bigger vehicles are the ones that most often flout the rules - if a big bus is jumping a red light, everyone will get out of the way without asking questions. Regardless, offenders must be immediately prosecuted. One thing I have seen though - people will gladly pay lesser fine in return for not getting a receipt - this is a key encouragement to bribing the traffic cops. So, how does one go about solving this problem?
7. Emergency vehicles - Something MUST be done about this. On so many occasions, I have been stuck in traffic jams and have seen ambulances blaring away dolefully, all to no avail. There is JUST NO PLACE on the road for emergency vehicles. All the available space is taken up by traffic, and there is virtually no concept of lanes, so what can the emergency vehicles do? I am sure a lot of poor blokes have suffered delayed medical attendance, surely death too, due to these delays.

How are the other cities handling these issues - not just in India, but cities in other developing countries as well?

I will pen more such useless thoughts some other time.

India approves Right to Information Bill

Finally, India has approved the Right to Information Act 2005, giving the people of the country the right to get information about the affairs of any department or arm of the government, thereby giving the democracy some more transparency in its functioning.

FreedomInfo.org has a good analysis here. Some key points:

1. Information is defined in a very broad manner, not being restrictive to "records" or "documents". Information has broadly defined to permit the inspection of public works including taking samples of materials.
2. Public authorities must publish: the budget allocated to each agency, including plans, proposed expenditure and reports on disbursements; the manner of execution of subsidy programmes, including the amounts allocated and beneficiaries; recipients of concessions, permits, licenses; and relevant facts while formulating policies or announcing decisions.
3. Time limits: In cases where "life and liberty of a person" is at hand, the time limit is a mere 48 hours. 30 days otherwise.
4. Fees: No fees if the person seeking information is below the poverty line.
5. Intelligence and Security agencies are exempt from this, except in cases which constitute claims of corruption and human rights violation.
6. I thought this was a bit weak: Any information that is over 20 years old can be release to any person. However, this pertains only to information that would "prejudicially affect the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security, strategic, scientific or economic interests of the State, relations with foreign States of which would lead to the incitement of an offence". That is rather broad, and a lot of information would fall in that category.
7. Another serious weakness of the Act is that there is no provision for an appeal to an independent authority. Both of the appeals under the Act are to the government itself. This would hardly provide any relief to the citizens in cases where top officials of the government are themselves interested in withholding information from disclosure, which is often the case.
8. Another serious weakness of the Act is the fact that it does not provide any penalty for willful nondisclosure of information or for willfully incorrect disclosure of information by a government authority.
9. (7) and (8) above taken together makes the Act rather weak, in my opinion.

The important thing, however, is that this important right has now at least been recognised by Parliament, almost 60 years after independence. This is, however, not yet an effective instrument for the citizen due to its weaknesses. Apparently, the Supreme Court may examine these defects in the Act when the case of the Centre for Public Interest Litigation comes up for hearing in January. I do believe, however, that this Right is an important one for India, which should hopefully soon provide the citizen right to information and bring about transparency in the functioning of the government and its agencies.

India's Latest Marathon Runner....aged three!!

BBC reports here that he runs seven hours at a stretch, sometimes as much as 48km (30 miles). On a daily basis. And Budhia Singh is just three and a half years old.

Wow!!!

BlogDay

Apparently it is Blogday today, and apparently I made it to David Weinberger's list of blogs to read!

Have been traveling last few weeks in the US on work, so have not had the the time to blog...well, that is my excuse for now, I know I am not that regular even otherwise :-)

Amartya Sen's new book

The Guardian has high acclaims about Amartya Sen's new book on India called The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. Here is the Guardian's review.

Every year, the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics returns to Santiniketan, the tiny university town 100-odd miles from Calcutta. In Santiniketan, the former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, can be seen on a bicycle, friendly and unassuming, chatting with the locals and working for a trust he has set up with the money from his Nobel Prize. One of the most influential public thinkers of our times is strongly rooted in the country in which he grew up; he is deeply engaged with its concerns. There can, then, be few people better equipped than this Lamont University Professor at Harvard to write about India and the Indian identity, especially at a time when the stereotype of India as a land of exoticism and mysticism is being supplanted with the stereotype of India as the back office of the world.

In this superb collection of essays, Sen smashes quite a few stereotypes and places the idea of India and Indianness in its rightful, deserved context. Central to his notion of India, as the title suggests, is the long tradition of argument and public debate, of intellectual pluralism and generosity that informs India's history.

This is a book that needed to have been written. The perception of India in the West and, indeed, among Indians themselves has never been more amorphous as it is now. The Argumentative Indian will provide a new dimension and perspective to that perception. It would be no surprise if it were to become as defining and as influential a work as Edward Said's Orientalism

I just bought it yesterday. Yet to start though.

The End of Poverty - II

Oh wow, it has been a month since I blogged. How do people find the time to blog regularly???

Anyways, I did a bit of travel over the last month (first to Cochin to attend a friend's wedding) and another to Delhi and Dharamshala and the good thing about traveling, especially on train is the amount of time you have to just sit & read. So, as it turned out, I finished reading The End of Poverty towards the end of my Delhi/Dharmshala trip. BTW, Dharamshala is a beautiful place, situated at the foothills of the Dhauladhar Himalayas. McLeoydgunj, about 10 kms up north from Dharamshala is the official residence of the current Dalai Lama. Although I wasnt lucky enough to get a glimpse of him, I did manage to visit a few monastries and the Chinmoy Tapovan. I ran out of luck with heavy rains & had to cut short my plans of a trek to Triund and Indrahar Pass, and just head back to Delhi.

So, The End of Poverty was a brilliant read, for me at least. It got very interesting from the point where Sachs starts describing his experiences with helping different economies of the world. Starting with Bolivia, where he helps solve their problems with hyperinflation and more importantly, how understanding a nation's history of economics helps with solving the longer term problems. There is this interesting anecdote, where Sachs reveals how the IMF is driven, and controlled by large conglomerates like Citibank. Sach's scorn for how IMF's debt strategy is sometimes determined by international banks was quite evident.

During the course of his campaign for nullyfying the international debt that some of the developing countries are heavily burdened with (so heavy that there is really no use of any amount of economic liberalization within the country), Sachs seems to have made a good bit of enemies in the US government.

Onto Poland, Russia, China & India. The story of Poland's return to modern Europe was quite fascinating. Poland was considered the most liberal of the communist countries, but it went under martial law between 1981 & 1989, during which it was a freewheeling, chaotic country & economy, with black marketing, smuggling. In 1989, in one of the biggest demonstrations of voux populi in recent history, Poland held its first free elections, resulting in a political earthquake with the public screaming in unison "we want the communists out". On invitation from the Polish Solidarity Party, Sachs worked out a comprehensive plan, the first in history, for transforming a socialist economy to a market economy. The plan covered questions of trade, exchange rates, stabilization, industrial policy, debt cancellation and slow privatization. The rest of the chapter describes how the plan actually worked, and how Poland's proximity to mainland Europe went a long way in getting Poland out of trouble.

Russia, on the other hand, is a much sadder story. Russia's economic crisis started in the mid 80s. Russia depended heavily on oil and and gas exports to earn foreign exchange, and on its own use of oil & gas in an energy-intensive heavy industry. World oil prices plummeted in the mid 80s when Soviet oil production peaked and then sharly fell due to depletion of old oil fields and a lack of investment in new harder-to-reach fields in the tundra. This lead to increased international debt, the economy was caught in a crises, without a hope of salvage. Around the same time, Gorbachev's efforts with perestroika failed miserably. Coupled with this were the complications around USSR's recent split into multiple countries - currency convertibility was an issue with so many currencies, hardly any foreign assistance, growing international debt, etc.

The industrial and agricultural output declined during 1990-91 leading to a drastic fall in gross national product and national income. By 1991 the Soviet economy had stopped declining and gone into complete collapse. How did perestroika fail so miserably? First of all Gorbachev never planned to remake the Soviet system, he merely wanted to modernise it. He attempted to curb the production and sale of alcohol. While alcoholism was a major problem in the USSR he inadvertently forced production underground. Like America during prohibition the Mafia took control and has plagued Russia ever since. Other measures introduced under perestroika were leasing land to farmers (all land was owned by the state), allowing loss making factories to go bankrupt and limited numbers of private enterprises to open. McDonalds even opened a branch in Moscow although its prices were out of reach for the average person. The most promising measure of all was a cut in state spending especially in military expenditure. The reforms while on the right track were not comprehensive enough to overcome the sluggishness in the Soviet economy. When more radical changes were made they were mostly too late to prevent the slide in the economy and often had adverse effects. This was the case with the long overdue 1991 price rises which caused panic buying of any and all goods. Perestroika was to little too late to revive the Soviet economy.

The failure of perestroika was exacerbated by Gorbachev's continual boasting about the results that the reforms would have. In the last years of perestroika erratic policy shifts were common with wide ranging reforms soon clamped down on. Gorbachev's failure to approve Grigory Yavlinsky's 500 day economic plan (Rajeev's note: this by the way, was the plan Jeffrey Sachs came up with working with Yavlinsky) in September 1990 after much earlier enthusiasm lost him any remaining support he still had from the Soviet people. By steering a course between the conservatives and the reformers Gorbachev alienated almost everybody leaving himself with few allies. The Soviet economy was in decline as Mikhail Gorbachev took office and after much early hope he could not prevent economic collapse. His insistence on slow gradual economic reforms annulled any positive effects that the reforms might have had. This reluctance to introduce meaningful free market reforms to the Soviet economy lost Gorbachev the support of the people.

Sachs also reveals how US foreign policy, especially towards Russia was another big reason why Russia failed to look up again. In his own words,

I had supposed in 1991 and 1992 that the United States would be rooting for Russia's success much like it was rooting for Poland's. With hindsight, I doubt if this was ever the case. Poland was viewed by US strategists as the eastern flank of the Western alliance. Poland was a candidate for the European Union and for the NATO. Bolstering Poland was, therefore, umambiguously bolstering Western interests as well. I had believed the same was true for Russia as well, but I now doubt that (Dick) Cheney and (Paul) Wolfowitz ever shared that perception. Russia was not destined to become a member of the European Union, and was certainly not a candidate for NATO. It was still a country with more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. It now seems plausible to me that bolstering Russia's quick recovery was viewed as inimical to US interests by the Bush and the defense establishment.

Russia did become a market economy, although lopsided towards oil and gas. Economy has grown since 1998 on the basis of high international energy prices. But will Russia become a democracy is a big question no one dares to try to answer I guess. Though Vladimir Putin rules with constitutionalism and multi party democracy, he has also successfully centralized power, tamed the media and muzzled the independent opposition. Its efforts of privatization has led to highly acute imbalance of a lot of power with a few oil magnates, leading to a lot of corruption and ill gotten wealth.

Whew! I guess India's story is more well known (at least to us Indians). So I will leave that for now.

The next half of the book is about Africa and parts of Asia that are in extreme poverty, and Sach's detailed plans on how much aid is required to help African nations out of their misery. According to Sach's 0.7% of the GNP of developed countries, if targeted correctly towards the extreme poor, can help bring them out of poverty and onto a path whereby they can try and get onto the next rung of economic development.

I would highly recommend this book.

The End of Poverty

A few weekends ago, I spent a few hours in one of the latest of those malls that seem to be crowding the Bangalore cityscapes. I actually went there with my sister and friend to watch a movie, but the Landmark bookstore there drew me like a bee to a flower. I ended up ditching them for the movie, and instead bought a couple of books and spent the next couple of hours in a blissful state just reading by myself. I started reading The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. The place did get awfully crowded by noon with swarms of people all over the place, but it was a nice Saturday morning for sure. Since I moved back from the US, I dont think I had spent quality time like that by myself reading at a bookstore.

If you havent heard about the book, there are a whole bunch of web resources on this, including some great NPR radio stories on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, etc. with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. Here is the official website on the project at the Earth Institute of Columbia University. Prof. Sachs is Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University; professor of health policy and management; and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He headed the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals project recently, has spent over two decades working with economists and leaders of developing nations, helping and advising them on economic policies, steps to tackle basic problems of hunger, health policies, etc.

My first thoughts on the book (I havent completed it yet) - it is a great read for anyone who wants to understand how some of the world's economies have fared, how economics of a nation effects the common man, hurdles to eliminating poverty, disease, etc. Sachs has the experience to talk about this, and nothing in the book so far seems to be spun out of yarn.

An excerpt from the first chapter:

The path from poverty to development has come incredibly fast in the span of human history. Two hundred years ago, the idea that we could potentially achieve the end of poverty would have been unimaginable. Just about everybody was poor with the exception of a very small minority of royals and landed gentry. Life was as difficult in much of Europe as it was in India or China. With very few exceptions, your great-great-grandparents were poor and most likely living on the farm. One leading economic historian, Angus Maddison, puts the average income per person in Western Europe in 1820 at around 90 percent of the average income of sub-Saharan Africa today. Life expectancy in Western Europe and Japan as of 1800 was probably about 40 years.

If we are to understand why vast gaps between rich and poor exist today, we need therefore to understand a very recent period of human history during which these vast gaps opened. The past two centuries, since around 1800, constitute a unique era in economic history, a period that the great economic historian Simon Kuznets famously termed the period of Modern Economic Growth, or MEG for short. Before the era of MEG, indeed for thousands of years, there had been virtually no sustained economic growth in the world and only gradual increases in the human population...

Ok, so now onto some of the interesting facts, at least things I found interesting.

1. On the idea that the rich (here we mean Western Europe and the USA) have gotten richer because the poor have gotten poor, he says "this interpretation would be plausible if gross world production had remained roughly constant, with a rising share going to the powerful regions and a declining share going to the poorer regions. However, GWP (Gross World Product) rose nearly fifty-fold, with every region of the world experiencing some economic growth, but some regions experienced much more growth than the others. The key fact here is not the transfer of income from one region to another, by force or otherwise, but rather the overall increase in world income, but at a different rate in different regions."
2. There is a very interesting analysis of the effects of the two World Wars on world economies, the Great Depression, political (in)stability across the world and the rise of the world democracies. Most of the time between WWII and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 went into reconstructing a new global economy. It seems to me from this part of the book, that the countries that were already industrialized (and some of them were the colonial powers) - USA, Europe, Japan had the biggest advantage here in terms of definining the new world order, the new global economy and international trade. Agencies like GATT (General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs) made it easier for international trading, helping boost these countries. In my opinion, this is one place where countries that were still struggling to find a foothold in the post-colonial era lost out since they had no say in the matter, and worse still, the long colonial era had left them in deep suspicion of some of these international powers.
3. Why are we called Third World countries? The First World countries were the truly capitalistic ones - Europe, USA, Japan that grew tremendously since WWII. The Second World was the socialist world, that created by Lenin and Stalin in the wake of WWI. The second world remained cut off economically from the rest of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR in 1991. The main characteristics of the Second World were state-owned production, planning of production, one-party rule by communist parties, etc. The Third World included the rapidly rising number of postcolonial countries. Today, the word Third World is used simply to mean poor. In actuality, the term came about with these countries emerging from imperial domination that chose neither to be part of the capitalistic first world or the socialist second world. The main ideas in these countries were, in general, "we will develop on our own, we will nurture industry, some through state ownership, sometimes through private enterprises, but we will do it without foreign investments by multinationals. No open international trade. We do not trust both the First World or the Soviet Union."

I am about half way through the book. Will post more soon, I hope. I did jump across into the chapter devoted to the rise of the Indian economy, Indian economic reforms by Dr. Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram, advised by Prof. Jagdish Bhagawati, & Jeffrey Sachs himself.

Have a good weekend, all!

A Helping Hand 

Images from India 

What a smile! 

India Miscellany

Conversing with V. is always refreshing, motivating and educating, to say the least. He was here last week, and we spent a long time talking about a whole gamut of things sitting in one of our favourite haunts in Bangalore - the coffee board of the India Institute of Science (IISc); from Computer Science research in India, Asha projects (we spent a few hours at Shristi too), to discussions on some of the latest books on socio-economics of India. Not to mention plans of future marathons, 100-mile races in the Amazon and Sikkim, trekking in the Himalayas one of these upcoming summers and whatnot...

I also ended up buying a couple of interesting books at the IISc book stall - C.K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Amartya Sen & Jean Dreze's India Development and Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality.

CK Prahalad's book (he doesnt need an introduction as the Professor of Corporate Strategy and International Business at the University of Michigan Business School, and has been named about the top ten management thinkers of the world in every major survey for over a decade) is about empowering the Bottom of the Pyramid, the 4 billion people of the world who live on less than $2 a day. These people are the world's most exciting, fastest growing new market. Collectively, he says, the world's billions of people have immense entrepreneurial capabilities and buying power. How do we serve them and help them escape poverty? Prahalad shows this is being done - profitably. Through several case studies implemented in countries like Guatemala, Brazil, India, etc. how poverty could be eradicated through profits, by involving these people in whatever form of production/markets they are suited for.

Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze's book also seem very fascinating on the socio-economics of India. I am yet to read it of course (too many books piled on my desk as must-reads). Roger Penrose's new book is for the serious reader, taking one through the nuances of the essential fields of mathematics and physics for an audience interesting in understanding the guts of the latest areas of physics like string theory, twistors, quantum physics, etc. I intend to spend a few months on it sometime soon hopefully.

I finally got around to completing Mark Tully's India in Slow Motion; well, almost. I have a couple of chapters left. It is a nice account of some of Tully's travels in India trying to understand some of the key problems India is facing. There is a first-hand account of the Babri Masjid when Tully was on site. Next is his conversation with Mathew Samuel, the reporter who caught Jaya Jaitely on tape accepting bribe in the Tehelka scam. Most saddening to me were the stories from the villages - about how farmers in most places have such a tough time growing crops, with growing debts, cases of suicides in villages, insentivity of the government towards subsidies for agriculture, mismanagement, corruption and bereaucracy at all levels. One sad fact was that due to lack of proper storage for grains produced, most of them go wasted, in fact over a third! This when the same could be used to feeding millions others who are forced to go hungry...There was a truly amazing story about this IIT Chennai graduate who decided to give up the fancy jobs of our world, bought a piece of land of a few acres in a place in North Karnataka, started farming, became one with the farmers so that he could understand their problems more, and was now trying his best helping them out and himself. Truly amazing.

Am on top of the world

Yeah, I guess I am feeling quite exhilarated. Never thought I would finish the half marathon today, mostly because I hadnt trained enough - I started training seriously 3 weeks ago and my longest run was just under 5 miles. I had been hoping to do 10km and call it quits....but never underestimate the power of the mind, enthusiasm of a large crowd trudging towards a common cause and the energy provided by a satchet of GU and bottles of water :-). Before I go into the details, my official time was 02:50:55 for the 21km stretch, getting that to just over 8mins per km. I did the first 10km at about 7.5 mins per km, the latter half slowed me down, quite expectedly. First of all, thanks to all your wishes, friends! I have not injured myself, and except for some cramps and tightness, I am fine:-)

We began bang at 6:30 (the full marathoners started at 6AM). Oh yes, before that I had to get up at 4AM to pick up my friend V coming into Bangalore from Austin. Crazy that he is, he was quite enthusiastic about running as soon as he landed. He has already run 4 or 5 marathons now, and this time he was content with giving me company as much as I could run. We got to the stadium around 5:30, warmed & stretched a bit, and started at 6:30 sharp. The route took us through some of the greenest parts of Bangalore; and thank God for small mercies, it was kind of cloudy till 7:45 AM or so, so the first few kms were just awesome. There is a certain quality of beauty in such situations that can only be experienced, and i certainly cannot come up with the right words to describe the way it feels when you settle into your own pace, run along looking at greenery early in the morning and just feel nice about the world...

My only long run was a 7.5 km run I had done last weekend, so as expected, I took a small break at the 5 km pitstop, got some water, stretched a bit and got moving again. The route had taken us through Cubbon Park, Vidhana Soudha, Raj Bhavan Road, Race Course Road, Windsor Manor Bridge and the Mekhri Circle flyover was just looming ahead. The course certainly offerered variety, small and nice gradients to some gradual ups and downs.

However short they are, conversations during running stick in your mind. V. was telling me about this 72-year old guy he met in the Royal Victoria marathon - he apparently started running when he was 50, and in 22 years, he had done 229 marathons...what would you say about that! And this 70-year old lady who finished & said - "Once in a while you have to challenge your mind & body and push them to the limits". And about the 92-year old Fauji Singh, who ran his first marathon when he was 89....he doesnt have a soul in this world whom he can call his family...and he is now the new poster boy for Adidas with Beckham and Laila Ali. And oh yes, this man with an artifical leg who also finished....

Before I knew it, we saw the really fast half marathoners on their way back - the first few looked like they were Army guys, running against the clock. It was also nice to see local people standing on the pavements cheering & waving at us. On we went, and the Hebbal flyover loomed up around the 9km mark, with people encouraging us that the loop was just around the corner. It was quite a beautiful sight - running over one loop of the flyover that was overlooking the Hebbal Lake, still looking green and pristine in the soft (thank God!) morning sunlight. At the 10km mark, I knew I had to take a break, and i really wasnt sure how much more I could push myself...but the good thing was that I wasnt like dying or anything. Apart from some tightness in my thighs & ankles, I was doing pretty ok. So, we took a break, I took a GU (for those of those who dont know, Goo is this energy gel satchet; V. had just got me a bunch with him today), drank some water...and started stretching. I guess I was wrecking V.'s half marathon timing! so, I asked him to go ahead from now on...I had by now done 10 km in about an hr and 16 mins, just over 7.5mins per km. The next few kms were slow, I was making double sure I wasnt hurting myself in anyway by stretching my endurance. Guess I got past the 14km mark without too much trouble, and then the leg started hurting, and breathing was also showing signs of being anerobic. Another small break, some stretching, water and a GU stop got me going again.

After this, I am sure it was pure will power and the dream to finish that kept me going the next 6km or so. Other runners cheering me, and me reciprocating that with whoever was running alongside, I coincidentally bumped into a guy who recognized me from my Rutgers days! By the 18 km mark, I was having some bad cramps in my legs, so I stopped running & just walked as fast as I could for the next 2 kms, with frequent stretching. Soon the last 1 km loomed up and that just kicked in energy like no other energy gel!

It was an exhilarating feeling to run the last stretch, see the timing at the finish & flop down in the grass and just feel good...Although it was just a half marathon, I did stretch my endurance and mind to the limit. At so many points of the run, my body was just crying out loud to stop & quit...but the mind has this amazing quality to instead push and ask for more...Never felt this way before...

Any such mentally and physically exhausting races are, I think, a metaphor for life....they can be the most exalting, or heartbreaking and potentially tragic posing every conceivable element to the human: cold, heat, bruises, cramps, bad luck, unthinkable beauty, numbness to pain, and above all a great, deep self questioning. Isnt it the same with life - we're faced with so many different elements as well, ups and downs, fight with failure, just trying to stay upright and to have a little hope. There are no shortcuts, and I realised there was no point in how long long I took to finish...It didnt matter, the fact I finished, pushing myself over and beyond what I believed my capabilities were....that mattered the most...

I could not help, but go back and read this piece from Kristin Armstrong's account of her first marathon days before her divorce from Lance Armstrong..Here is the full article.

It's an odd thing, when your body says no and your mind and your spirit say yes. It's frightening and empowering and clarifying and beautiful all at once. It was the past year of my life, shortened into a span of 26.2 arduous miles. It was the culmination of experiences, the knowledge that my body can be pushed past its breaking point, just like my heart. In both instances, when you come to the end of yourself, God's grace is all that sustains. And it is enough.

BTW, I ran this half marathon for a cause, and I have myself pledged a contribution for every km I ran to an Asha project at Shristi. If anyone else is interested in helping out with this cause, please let me know. Thanks for all your support!

Something Fresh

Well, it had been a long time overdue. The Bangalore International Marathon will be the first marathon to be held in the city. It is on 15th May, and is expected to draw quite a good crowd. It will be held in the center of the city, starting from Kanteerava Stadium, going through M.G. Road (which city in India does not have a road called that I wonder), around Ulsoor Lake, Cubbon Road, Vidhana Soudha, Cubbon Park, and back at Kanteerava. That is one lap of 10.5km, and there are 4 laps to complete the stipulated 42-something km.

I am planning to contribute my part to it too. I havent really trained, but I am hoping to do one of those laps. We did a 7km run yesterday along part of the course...it was great, and I hope I can continue to run after this marathon. A few friends have been getting together at Cubbon Park at around 6 AM in the mornings to run. Early mornings at the only time to get any good running done in the city, by 7:30 AM, traffic gets too much, and too irritating with all the honking...

Lot of activity at Marathon Meetup for those interested.

India in Slow Motion

That is the name of the book I recently picked up. It is one of Mark Tully's highly rated books on India, the other one being No Full Stops in India. I just reading it a couple of days ago, it has been good going so far.

For those unfamiliar with the name, until a decade ago BBC World Service and its South Asia correspondent, Mark Tully were synonymous. Such was his credibility and aura that whenever a sensational news broke out people preferred to listen to the BBC than to All India Radio. He is now a journalist in New Delhi and works with his colleague and partner Gillian Wright. I have seen him often on NDTV too in the weekly program Foreign Correspondent. His knowledge of India is vast - ranging from Kashmir crisis to kebab joints in Lucknow and paan shops in Delhi. He also does a weekly programme on BBC Radio called Something Understood.

The book is more on bad governance that has put brakes on progress in India. The authors say the administrative system has not been properly reformed or finely tuned since the British left. It has been drifting along with no serious thought given to governance. And more often than not, it sadly seems like the government is the problem, not the solution.

More on the book as I make progress. I thought I will read quite a bit over the weekend, but it has been a very hectic one. I was at work on Saturday helping recruit/interview candidates. For most part of Sunday, there were regular power cuts, and Bangalore this week has been as hot as a frying pan. I was dead tired from some running practise I have been trying to get (yes, I plan to run the Bangalore Marathon next weekend, or to be more precise, as much as I can) so I was just lying down and playing dead in the hot afternoon and managed to get a series of cat naps. Thankfully electricity just seems to have been restored now (it is 9 PM Sun night), so hopefully we will be able to get some sleep at least.

Seriously, the common Indian man is a long suffering lot!

On things here and there...

A lot has happened in the last few weeks in the world, and I have to respond to a few of the comments on my last couple of posts..so here goes...

The Indo-Pak Bus Route and the Musharraf Visit

The Telegraph has this very informative piece called "Without Getting Gooey: India-Pakistan peace efforts are back to Vajpayee's initiative":

The national security adviser, M.K. Narayanan, also nearly wrecked the summit, more or less on the same lines that L.K. Advani is accused of having wrecked the Agra summit in 2001. Narayanan’s uncompromising insistence on a reference to terrorism in Monday’s joint communiqué on Musharraf’s talks with Indian leaders meant, for some tense hours on Sunday, that there would be no joint communiqué. It would have cast a long shadow on the General’s visit to New Delhi — which the world now assumes will be a turning point in south Asia’s history. But Narayanan, typically for a man who has spent his entire professional life as a spook, refused to budge.

Before Manmohan Singh had his first meeting in New York with Musharraf, Narayanan’s predecessor, J.N. Dixit, and his Pakistani counterpart, Tariq Aziz, had agreed during one of their four secret meetings that a reiteration of this commitment would be implicit in the September 24 joint statement. Dixit’s attitude made common sense: why rub Musharraf’s face in the dirt, when the objectives of such an action can be achieved without doing so. Thus, it was agreed during the preparatory stages of the September joint communiqué that the two sides would merely refer to Musharraf’s January commitment without spelling out what he said.

In New Delhi, during the last weekend, Pakistani officials tried to sweet-talk their Indian counterparts into dropping any reference to the January document. They argued that the two sides, after all, were making progress on Kashmir: why bring up the distasteful matter of terrorism and spoil the atmosphere? This argument found many takers on the Indian side. The Pakistanis were counting on Dixit’s absence in New Delhi, but Narayanan proved to be an equal match for the Pakistanis as the new national security adviser.

On a more alarming note:

The New Delhi summit took place especially at a time when Narayanan did not have to be reminded, if at all, about Pakistan’s continuing potential for cross-border terrorism. Only a few weeks ago, preparatory to the visit of the American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, he had comprehensively reviewed details of terrorist training camps that still operate inside Pakistan. According to Indian intelligence officials in New Delhi who have gathered intricate details — including photographs — of those camps recently, 52 of those continue to be run inside Pakistan.

So, it is back to square one?

For Musharraf, it is a supreme irony that as a result of his meeting with Singh, he has taken India-Pakistan peace efforts exactly back to where Atal Bihari Vajpayee started a bold peace initiative with his then counterpart across the border, Nawaz Sharif. The man who wrecked that initiative was none other than Musharraf. After Vajpayee’s bus journey to Lahore in 1999, the plan was that Pakistan would stop its sponsorship of violence in Jammu and Kashmir. In return, India would scale down its security presence in the state. Six years later, Narayanan last week proposed just that.

But maybe there is still hope...

It is an open secret among those who practise diplomacy in New Delhi that Singh’s cabinet colleagues who deal with foreign policy tried to sabotage his summit with Musharraf more than once, not by opposing it openly, but by their inaction. It is to the credit of the prime minister and a tribute to his ability to cut through bureaucratic and systemic impediments that he managed to pull off the meeting with Musharraf with a reasonable degree of success.

He did this by using a back channel: S.K. Lambah, his special envoy on Pakistan, a veteran in dealing with Islamabad during his long years as an Indian diplomat. The lesson to be drawn from this experience is that if solutions are to be found to disputes between India and Pakistan, the spadework has to be done through back channels and not through normal diplomatic activity. And that spadework has to be vetted and approved by someone like Narayanan, who, because of his training and instinct, will approach anything done with Pakistan with suspicion and premonitions of a conspiracy.

The opening of the Indo-Pak bus route has been in the cynosure lately in addition to a lot of hoopla about the dictator's visit too. According to The Acorn,

In an interesting turn of events, a Kashmiri woman, who came back after 56 years in the first historic Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus from the other side of Kashmir on April 7, has approached the State Government for restoration of her ancestral property.

India must respect property rights. But in this case, there is the basic question of whether a Pakistani citizen can own land and immovable property in India. Foreigners generally cannot own land in India. It is ominous that the very first bus, that was launched to allow Kashmiris from ‘either side of the LoC’ to meet their relatives has thrown up this controversial passenger. The Pakistani authorities have been very careful in their ’screening process’ indeed.

Under India’s constitution, the state of Jammu & Kashmir is accorded a special status — one of the terms of which is that unless they are residents of the state, Indian citizens cannot own land in Kashmir. If the Pakistani passenger’s claim is successful, it will be an irony that what it denies to its own citizens, India is prepared to offer to Pakistani ones.

Some miscenally:

Amardeep's post here on India being Number one...this time for a deeply saddening reason - it is number one in HIV.

Some nice new Radio Expeditions on the NPR web site:

- Nature bounces back on Sri Lanka's coast after the tsunami.

- Pt. Ravishankar, an interview.

In addition to these new ones, the program on the Gates of the Arctic has got to be one of my favourite NPR Radio Expeditions - I have listened to it multiple times now while at work:-)

Thanks to G, here is Forum's spring reading list. I have read only a handful of those, but I did buy these books recently: Jared Diamond's Collapse (I am hoping this will be as brilliant as Guns, Germs and Steel. I have not read The Third Chimpanzee though), Shashi Tharoor's Bookless in Baghdad, Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide, and some more. The Heart of the World sounded very interesting too...

These trips to The Strand I make once in a while really overload my bookshelf without necessarily me progressing on my reading list. So here is a question for you all: Do you think it is ok to collect books and not really catch up and read all that you have? I mean, I love my books, and I know I read them whenever I can, but my room is too full of books and I hear constant complaining as to why I buy so much more when my reading rate isnt as good....let me know what you all think.

BTW, this weekend Bangalore plays host to one of India's own mini-Woodstocks: Fireflies is an ecological retreat on the outskirts of Bangalore. Bhoomi Jaathre (Earth Festival) is an annual all-nite music and dance extravaganza. I am not sure if I can make it though :-(. Bangalore currently hosts four dream nights - Bhoomi Jathre, Freedom Jam, Underground and Vasanthahabba. Hmm..lots to do this year...

Hopefully more to come over the weekend on India's bid for UN Security Council permanent membership, Lance Armstrong, the Bangalore Marathon in May, and responses to comments on some earlier posts...

Have a good weekend!

Electoral Reforms

Kushwant Singh had an interesting editorial here on the need for electoral reforms in India. He was voicing some of the thoughts I had last years when India went to the polls, of course, my thoughts werent as clear!

I begin to doubt whether our electoral system does in fact reflect what the people think is best for their country, state or themselves. One must bear in mind that more than half of those who actually go to the polling booths to cast their votes are illiterate and cannot read the election manifestos issued by different parties, nor can they read newspapers. Whatever information they get comes from the electronic media: radio and television, or from what their elders tell them.

They also do not pay taxes of any kind and therefore have no personal involvement in the administration of the country. They have strong religious, clan, caste and family loyalties, which candidates exploit to the full. They are swayed by the charisma and oratory skills of those who ask them for their votes. They succumb to bullying by hired armed gundas; their votes are often purchasable, so they often vote for the corrupt as well as for those charged with crimes.

It is time we had a closer look at our electoral system. Let us ask ourselves two questions: Should we not make some sort of minimum educational qualification obligatory for voters as well as for candidates before we extend franchise to them? Should we continue to extend voting rights to those who do not contribute to the running of the administration by paying taxes of some kind or the other?

I think this is a tall order. I am completely for imposing minimum education qualifications on electoral candidates *and* a *strict enforcement* of banning candidates with criminal records. As for the voters, if we impose minimum educational qualifications (for example 10th or 12th grade), how much percentage of India's population will really meet this requirement? Given the huge (~70%?) percentage of India's voter base being uneducated, what will wbe accomplish by this?

So, what do you all think?

Trans-national Terrorism - A blotch in History: The Kanishka Verdict, twenty years later

The war against trans-national terrorism suffered a serious setback on Thursday, with a Canadian court acquitting the two accused of the mid-air explosion of an ill-fated Air India Boeing 747 airliner, ‘Kanishka’. Twenty years after the deadliest terrorist attack before 9/11, Canadian Judge Ian Bruce Josephson Wednesday declared the two accused Indo-Canadians - Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Babri - innocent. Josephson called the evidence presented by witnesses as inconsistent and accused Canadian security agencies of gross negligence in investigations into the bombing of Air-India Flight 182 over Ireland that killed 329 people.

While media reports pour in on the coverage, the frustration and trauma of the victims, it seems like the Kanishka probe was botched up in several ways, pointing to serious negligence (perhaps intentional?) in the investigations. According to this news article, the judge flayed the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) for destroying evidence, including wiretap evidence on all major suspects in and around 1996. CSIS also deliberately destroyed tapes and transcripts of its 1987 interviews with a woman who eventually emerged as the star witness.

Here is a related article on a former Indian Intelligence Bureau director's views on the verdict.

More.

All in all, I think this has been a very sad event...

Olive Ridleys, Rock climbing and miscellany...

It has been a while since I blogged last, almost 3 weeks I guess from looking at the date on the last post I had. I guess it has been a combination of lethargy (what-do-I-write syndrome) and getting too busy at work.

The Olive Ridleys are back!

Just recently, I read about a large number (5000) of the famed Olive Ridley turtles getting killed.

The endangered Olive Ridley turtles are battling for survival with at least 5,000 washed ashore dead in Orissa beaches over the last three months and their eggs sold at Chennai shores as a delicacy. The Gahirmatha Marine Sanctuary is the world's largest turtle nesting site where 700,000-800,000 Olive Ridley turtles swim up every winter, heeding an internal clock to mate and nest.

The turtles apparently mate in November and December. After that, they congregate and come ashore for mass nesting in February or March, depending upon weather and beach conditions. Olive ridleys get their name from the coloring of their heart-shaped carapace (shell), which starts out grey but reaches an olive green once the turtles are adults. Read more on these wonderful animals here. They are now back on the Orissa coast according to this.

Rock Climbing @ Kanakapura Road

A couple of weekends ago, I went with a bunch of friends from work to a Rock Climbing For Dummies (well, sort of) event. The place is just off Kanakapura Road, in South Bangalore. It was quite nice actually; I didnt know what to expect but as it turned out, it was enormous fun. There were a couple of experienced guys training us to find cracks/wedges on different rock fronts to aid in climbing. Rappling was a great experience too - letting gravity do the work as you slide down a vertical rock front, facing upwards, with the aid of ropes that ensure you dont slide away to nothingness. I should do this again!

Social enterprenuership

Last Sunday, I dropped in for a conference on Social Enterprenuership that was organized by Center for Social Intitiative and Management (CSIM). There were quite a few corporates from Motorola, Wipro, etc. Shristi Special Academy was also there. The conference was about how to increase involvement of citizens in social causes, and how to cultivate/attract social enterprenuership. I could not stay for the whole conference but left feeling a bit on the down side that social work is so hard to do, with such few incentives that I personally think it is hard to attract young blood unless they are themselves willing to get paid less for a career that pays you far less. CSIM was planning to start a Bangalore chapter, and I am in touch with folks from Shristi on the progress they make on this front. Let us see where this leads me to...

Books

I have been in this mode of reading some serious books. Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom was one such. It is a nice read, and is the heartwarming story of Albom's relationship with his college mentor, Morrie Schwartz, with whom Albom has lost touch for 16 years. Upon seeing him on the "Nightline" program - talking to Ted Koppel about what it was like to die from Lou Gehrig's disease - Albom was both horrified and ashamed. He called his old teacher, flew to Boston for a reunion, and began a series of weekly visits, rekindling their loving teacher-student relationship while tackling a larger subject in their final "class": the meaning of life.

Walking with a Himalayan Master is the other one I am almost done with. Justin O'Brien lived with Swami Rama for the last few decades of his life, and this book is a collection of his experiences with the great Yogi. I would not like to preach much about this book, and my beliefs on Yoga, spirituality here, but let me just say I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in knowing about some of the true sages of India. Swami Rama lived till the 1980s, founded the Himalayan Institute of Yoga in Pennsylvania (Honesdale) and was a true exponent of the ancient wisdom of India. Some other books I would recommed for anyone interested:

Living with the Himalayan Masters by Swami Rama: His own experiences of living in the Himalayan Yoga masters for over 4 decades of his life.

Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahamsa Yogananda: Another spine chilling (almost) account of another master from India...makes me amazed that such people actually existed.

'Later. Have a nice weekend!

M.K. Gandhi in Telecom Italia's award winning ad

Here is a nice one. I particularly liked this ad.

http://www.epica-awards.com/assets/epica/2004/winners/film/flv/11071.htm

Dr. H.N is no more

For those of you who are from Bangalore, HN, as he was called by one & all, needs no introduction. Dr. H. Narasimhaiah had been the beacon of the National Education Society (NES) for over six decades; NES was started in the pre-indedependence era when political unrest was rife, educational institutions were scarce and quality higher education was almost non existent. Himself a staunch Gandhian, HN led an absolutely spartan existence, living in a small room for the last 53 years — first as a poor schoolboy, then as a lecturer, then as the principal and lastly as the president of the National Education Society. The room leaves a lot desired by most standards — a couple of folding metal chairs, a fan and a telephone. He did not even have a cot to sleep on.

He stood staunchly by values - an uncompromising rationalist with a scientifically tempered questioning mind, although not an atheist (just one example of this was the manner in which he led the enquiry into the so-called magical powers of the Satya Sai Baba - the findings of which were never really publicised to the best of my knowledge), a unwavering belief in the importance of primary and higher education, and a strong proponent of the proliferation of science. I was myself a student of one of NES's institutions - National College Jayanagar, during my 11th and 12th grade. My primary interest in science was also, to a large extent, fuelled by the NES Bangalore Science Forum lectures & summer classes for school students that I attended during my school & college days regularly. HN was the primary reason this happened, and I am sure a lot of students will gladly acknowledge the same. HN himself held a PhD in Nuclear Physics from Ohio State University, and undoubtably this played a major role in shaping his contributions to the science community in India.

Here is an excerpt on HN from the Deccan Herald today. The complete article is here.

The crumpled, though spotless, khadi dhoti-kurta and the Gandhi cap lent him the demeanour of rustic simplicity, but belied his erudition and indomitable commitment to the cause of education. And he was an uncompromising rationalist, though not an atheist, but a Gandhian. In an age when the term “educationist” stands devalued to mean one who starts schools and colleges which are money-spinners, he headed with distinction, the City’s premier educational institutions run by National Education Society for many years. He served ably as the vice-chancellor of fledgling Bangalore University from 1972 to 1977.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of Dr H Narasimhaiah or HN, as he was popularly known, is the Bangalore Science Forum, that he started to promote scientific temper in 1962. The forum has been organising periodic lectures, constituting updates in various subjects in an unbroken series till now. So far, nearly 2,000 such lectures and more than 500 film shows have been organised.

His credo was “Do not accept anything without questioning”. Keeping with this, his office is adorned with a quotation of Albert Einstein on the wall “Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds” and a question mark-signifying a spirit of inquiry.

It is quite amazing and actually motivating to see such a simple person living upto such high ideals and self-imposed standards.

Bangalore will surely miss HN.

Remember Shakti

It was quite an idyllic setting for the Remember Shakti concert on Jan 26th - a cool evening breeze at the onset of spring in Bangalore, the backdrop of the magnificient Bangalore Palace looking almost orange in the twilight hours, and a full moon rising behind the Palace also looking orangish in the evening. Unfortunately I didnt take my camera, only my binoculars.

The group was the usual Remember Shakti troupe - John McLaughlin, Mandolin Shrinivas, Shankar Mahadevan, Selvaganesh Vinayakram & Zakir Hussain. Thankfully, there was no compere/MC to cause any embarassment to art lovers. The artists introduced themselves - Zakir introducing Shakar, John & John introducing Zakir & Selvaganesh. This was good considering the last time I went to a Zakir Hussain concert (with Ustad Sultan Khan), the compere was SO BAD, I was appalled how someone could do such a bad job (she actually said - "please bear with us & join us for this evening's concert with Zakir Hussain & Ustad Sultan Khan"!). Anyways, it was interesting to hear John speak so much - the last 2-3 Remember Shakti concerts I went to, Zakir did most of the talking. He was reminiscent of the older times of Shakti, when John used to collaborate with the great Vikku Vinayakram, Zakir & L. Shankar, Vikku's son Selvaganesh was barely two years old. John also kept repeating how much he loved Bangalore in comparison to other Indian cities he has performed in.

They played some of my favourite Shakti numbers. They began with a number I didnt recognize, maybe it was new. It was followed by the famous Giriraja Sudha, then by Ma No Pa, a composition by Zakir. Soon to follow (there was no break/intermission) was Lotus Feet. This is one of the most sublime compositions I have heard, very slow & soft and absolutely quietening to the mind. Next were Maya, a composition of U. Shrinivas and brilliantly filled with the mandolin maestro's best pieces and Niyati, a riot of percussion duets between Zakir & Selvagesh that had so many instruments, it was mind boggling to follow them - tabla, drums & banjo by Zakir, mridangm, ghatam & kanjira by Selvagesh. Their hands & fingers were flying creating waves of rhythm faster than the mind could comprehend. Shankar soon came back and the last piece was based on a Hindustani classical music thumri called Sakhi.