Rama, Modi vs India, Bharat

"Lord Ram’s credos emphasised the sixteen noble qualities of life—unconditional, righteous, assertive, grateful, truthful, steadfast, charismatic, emancipative, thoughtful, capable, presentable, spiritual, dreaded, radiant, admirable and calm, All of this together made him the ideal Maryada Purushottam. These Shodasha Kalyana Gunas, as they are known in Sanskrit, define the human way of living that transcends boundaries making it globally relevant. The Ram temple movement had its own sixteen dimensions due to its religious, social, cultural, spiritual, anthropological, philosophical, judicial, liberal, historical, local, regional, national, global, geographical, mercurial and political contours". More here.

It wasn’t until Sonia took over the Congress that such cooperation became impossible. The current political polarisation started with her. But paradoxically that has worked in favour of the BJP! More here.

An Ode to the doctor’s scribble

"Hindu Resurgence in India That Is Changing"

India, China: ancient civilisations, different paths

I have new article in SO website by Centre for Civil Society.

My article on India- China's ancient civilisational roots and their social, economic and political paths looks what many commentators especially the strategic geo economic commentators tend to ignore the historical past, they go upto 1962 or the times of Nehru or Patel letters!

"If anything, India could do well to learn from Deng himself: “… political independence and economic independence are inseparable. Without political independence, it is impossible to achieve economic independence; without economic independence, a country’s independence is incomplete and insecure.” With such leaders at the helm, little wonder that China has reached the stage it has."

Must Read Books Published Recently

I like reading books like talking or walking with a close friend. Reading books which interest you are more pleasurable than anything else. It is the book that gives the world view of matter that matters man and nature, other things in between.

In the current education system in government schools in India, is such that they do not deal with books which has world views and helps them only in their jobs!

Reading books while thinking in authors views is like watching birds flying at fifty thousand feet height from the ground.

The following are some of the interesting books which I have come crossed recently, though it has been long time, five years of gaps reading books seriously.

By virtue of observations, the truths are simple but detailed in books- the ways and means of it.

Just forget the title of the books, dive into the content of it!

• agriculture is not merely an occupation in India. It is a way of life and must be protected and preserved at all costs. 

• young people in southern states, or in the north-eastern states, may have different perspectives, and this could be a very interesting subject for further exploration

• I gave Mahatma Gandhi’s example that he never went to court for his release and insisted that political matters had to be dealt with only politically. 

• Government cannot change the nation; selfless people change it

• There is a detailed narration of certain clusters as in Tiruppur (hosiery), Sivakasi (crackers) and Surat for diamonds. He also refers to what he characterises as Vaishyavisation of India or the morphing of backward castes into the business class.

• The poor Raghul Gandhi who did not know his job want to know badly others job to do good

• Yengde provides an unflinchingly honest account of divisions within the Dalit community itself-from their internal caste divisions to the conduct of elite Dalits and their tokenized forms of modern-day untouchability-

New Discussion about GDP of India

As in the past, there is a heated discussion about the new method of arriving the GDP of India in the last few years.

Here are some of the reading to ponder it wisely:

The great Indian GDP debate, explained in five charts

Subramanian fails the smell test no less than India’s GDP data by Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar

Arvind Subramanian’s attempt to estimate GDP instead of explaining it through cross-country regression fraught with problems by Bibek Debroy

GDP estimation: System not perfect, but it’s better than one based on annual surveys by Bibek Debroy

Passing the tax smell test by Harsh Gupta

Ex-CEA Arvind Subramanian Has Junked Not Only GDP Data, But Also Monetary And Fiscal Policy Wonks

Skills vs Jobs

Mr Manish Sabharwal has been writing more than a decade now urging the governments to reform the Indian labour market systems, but its going to be long firefighting before achieving the desire goal.

"after reviewing decades of evidence, Nehru would acknowledge that the nutty economics of the 1955 Congress Avadi resolution and slogans posing as policy like Garibi Hatao kept many Indians in employed poverty.

The 67 per cent-plus turnout in our recent election not only reflect the invisible threads that hold India together but capture an aspiration that breaks with India’s economic past. This dua needs policy to pray to the one god of formal jobs."

Skills for managing State welfare in India

More than what employers wanted from job seekers, it is the job seeker who have to self assess what he can do or cannot do with his right kind of skills identified with confidence.

Some readings

Not a bad analysis about the prospects of Modi becoming a Prime Minister of India.

Do four Delhi think tanks matter disproportionately in India?

India’s demographic challenge: Wasting time

Stupidly unfair

Manish has a great piece in today's IE on minimum wage in India. He argues very perceptively that the "The trade union demand is a predictable positioning of narrow self-interest as national interest but the government's acceptance of their demand is unfair, delusional and economically stupid."

Fearing democracy

How many decisions in our day-to-day lives would we like to be made through majority rule or the democratic process?

Ramachandra Guha's musings!!

“They (the supporters) are largely young, almost all of them upper caste, many of them live abroad and virtually without exception they are male. I don’t get hateful mails from women – so we have to understand what is it that young men are angry about.”

Inheritance of frightening

"..millions of young Indians who have risen in recent years and are now part of the confused, upwardly mobile, post-reform internet generation, the question has a new urgency..."

“If Indian education and scholarship continue along their current trajectory,” writes Sheldon Pollock, the brilliant professor of Sanskrit at Columbia University, “the number of citizens capable of reading and understanding the texts and documents of the classical era will very soon approach a statistical zero. India is about to become the only major world culture whose literary patrimony, and indeed history, are in the hands of scholars outside the country.” Das's full article is here.

Interesting reading

Manish on rightly asks why there is no narrative for youth in India in the contemporary political setups. The following para is really suburb:

• The garibi hatao card does not work because voters are jaded by the lack of execution of promises since that slogan was coined 40 years ago. The free electricity card does not work because it leads to no power, which infuriates the people further. The reservation card does not work because we have reached the limits of confiscating capacity in hiring, education and promotions. The big state that is financed with deficits is discredited because the economic mayhem of the past few years shows that there is no magical “multiplier effect”, and deficit financing leads to inflation with no boost in output. The freebies card is less effective because it has to be given to everybody, since fixing the plumbing to target its distribution is so difficult to achieve. The majboori card is less potent because of prosperity; it is much harder to get people to migrate to big cities than it should be. The foreign enemy card does not work because Pakistan is imploding and we are hardly surrounded, like Israel is. The mystique of the incumbent does not work because the 24-hour news cycle encourages breathless breaking news over reflection. The “young blood” card does not work because the only pathways in politics are geriatric. The corruption card does not work because, um, if everybody lives in glass houses, everybody needs to answer the bell. 

"India can learn from Brazil’s Bolsa Familia and China’s Gansu Programme to make refinements to its MGNREGA scheme."

Professor Indiresan on "There is a proverb in Kannada language, ootathannicche; nota pararicche(meals according to personal taste; dress according to the taste of others). On that basis, the present day youth are trying to please their own kind even if it is against the wishes of their elders"

Dear Delhi dudes...

Excerpts from a 'Madrasi' girl's scathing letter to all Delhi boys that has now gone viral 

Uninspiring map of city and sex

Here is a lines to ponder hugely:

In aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower, a doctor commenting on builder Dharmen Shah’s admiration for China, says astutely, “The first experience of Shanghai to a middle-aged Indian businessman [is] what the first experience of sex is to a teenager.”

More here

‘The ideal way to bridge the skill gap is to privatise the education system’

"Actually the most inspiring thing is a parent coming and saying, “The job you have given my daughter has allowed us to buy a home, has given her a better prospect when she is looking to get married, it has allowed her brother to study.” It has impacted the entire family in a way they couldn’t have imagined. The father of one of the girls who works with us is a cook. My driver says he will make his children study computers. And they will earn more within two years than he has earned at his age. That’s just one thing. The other elements are the phenomenal opportunities these kids see. And they take it for granted, which I think is good."

Getaway from this cynicism of Professor T T Rammohan

At the root of solutions such as an omnipotent Lokpal is the belief that the politician is the arch-villain in our system and that we must look to non-political actors to solve our fundamental problems, including corruption. This is an offshoot of the neo-liberal ideology that government is evil and all is best left to the market. If government is evil, then so are those who run government.
The above paragraph is completely misunderstood one.

Dividendnomics

From Nitin’s new fortnightly column in DNA: 

• Dilip Rao, a blogger at Law and Other Things, found a Freakonomics-like correlation between birth rates and terrorism in some states. He notes that a spurt in birth rates in the early 1970s in Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir meant that there was a youth bulge available in the 1980s to answer the separatists’ call. We can trace back the rise of terrorist violence in these states to Operation Blue Star or the rigged 1987 state election, we can prove that Pakistan used these conflicts to conduct proxy war, but Heinsohn goes to the extreme to argue that the cause itself is immaterial - if there is a youth bulge, it will be accompanied by violence. 

• While these studies do not indicate or claim a definitive causal link, the data are sufficient for us to regard youth bulge violence as a long-term risk to national security. Going by the National Commission on Population’s projections to the year 2026, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Delhi will experience a net increase in young people. The 15-24 cohort will grow in Bihar, Assam, Haryana, Uttarakhand, Jammu & Kashmir, Maharashtra, Jharkhand, and Gujarat. States that cannot both reduce grievances and create enough opportunities are likely to get into trouble. 

• The best way to minimise grievances is not by pandering to them individually, but by delivering overall good governance. The politics of entitlement that the UPA government seeks to make respectable under the veneer of “inclusive growth” breeds more grievances for every entitlement. These are already expressed through the idiom of competitive intolerance and coercive violence. While they must be rolled back, those politically opposed to the Congress must do so without themselves creating and appealing to grievances.

Struggle to make worth of life in youngage

• As is evident in NYRS 2009, about 48% of all literate youth indicated that they supported it, while 35% were against caste-based reservations. While 54% of SC, 50% of ST and 47% of OBC are in favour of the current system, 43% of the general castes back it.

• The youth are also often prone to violence. Frustration is a key driver of this increasingly marked attribute and it arises from unfulfilled aspirations. The major reasons for frustration in today’s youth are unemployment, injustice and corruption. What rubs salt on this wound is a sense of victimhood to the forces of unemployment, injustice and corruption. Their impressionable minds are hemmed in from all sides by glamorous objects and options that most cannot possess.

From Rajesh Shukla's Young, employed and Unhappy".

One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction

That is a line from another piece in the Economist. A bit from the piece:

• ...Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg. In those days a thesis was simply a position one wanted to argue. Luther, an Augustinian friar, asserted that Christians could not buy their way to heaven. Today a doctoral thesis is both an idea and an account of a period of original research. Writing one is the aim of the hundreds of thousands of students who embark on a doctorate of philosophy (PhD) every year. 

• One thing many PhD students have in common is dissatisfaction. Some describe their work as “slave labour”. Seven-day weeks, ten-hour days, low pay and uncertain prospects are widespread. You know you are a graduate student, goes one quip, when your office is better decorated than your home and you have a favourite flavour of instant noodle. “It isn’t graduate school itself that is discouraging,” says one student, who confesses to rather enjoying the hunt for free pizza. “What’s discouraging is realising the end point has been yanked out of reach.” 

• But universities have discovered that PhD students are cheap, highly motivated and disposable labour. 

• Brilliant, well-trained minds can go to waste when fashions change.

It is also its cure

Khushwant Singh on friends, ego and humility.

• I fancy myself a humble person. One evening, I sought confirmation of my humility from my daughter and granddaughter. I asked them if they all thought that I was humble. My granddaughter, Naina, who is known for her brashness, replied: “You must be joking! You love flattery. All these ladies who send you kebabs, kheer, cakes and flowers, give you enormous pleasure and inflate your ego. And the man who lays it on thick and keeps giving you vintage Scotch, flatters you as if you were a minor prophet.” As if this were not enough, my daughter, Mala, added; “When you are dazzling your audience with your wit, you expect them to say nice things about you. And when they fall silent, you feel bored and ask them to go. How can you call yourself humble?”

Read the full article you will find even more interesting things.

How strange is no strange

That is how it sounds in the latest column in To The Manner Born:

• The truth is that India is perhaps the rudest country when it comes to making its rules. We don’t like outsiders. Unless they come with money, fame or status. Even then we tolerate them till we have a use for them. For example, we are almost subserviently polite to diplomats. Why? We think in the long run they will help us jump the line when we apply for a visa. Ditto bureaucrats. Or politicians. Or industrialists. But will we let our Gujarati heiress marry a Punjabi investment banker? Only if they threaten to run away and cause embarrassment. Otherwise we would prefer to keep things within the baraadari.

• What is even more reprehensible is that the more educated the class of Indian the more logical their disdain. They can argue a sane person into believing that it is a sin to accept difference. And that they are merely carrying out their dharma/karma by keeping their community free of impurities. Most young people are so convinced that they buy the logic that an arranged marriage is the only way to find happiness. Love has been thrown out of the window.

• A few years ago Mumbai was labelled as India’s rudest city but the truth is we are perhaps the most liberal of all Indian metros. In Mumbai we are kind to strangers. We talk to them in bars, we invite them to our homes. We even let our most beautiful girls marry them. Many of Mumbai’s top models are married to or living with their foreign partners. Each one of these men is an Indophile and has contributed to the city’s cosmopolitan culture. I guess we are polite enough to live up to our reputation of being a “melting pot”. Too bad the rest of India ignores its perpetual slogan of unity in diversity.

Do not use the word ‘freedom’

Because I am filled with mounting sins from India and Pakistan:

“To most young Kashmiris, however, azadi has no meaning other than freedom — from India, and from Pakistan too. Pakistan does not have the resonance for Kashmiris that it had just a few years ago. The alarming levels of terrorism-induced instability in Pakistan combined with the painful memories of militancy in Kashmir — for which Kashmiris blame Pakistan — have served to make Pakistan a “non-option” for the Kashmiri Gen X. Say Pakistan and one common reaction is: “From the frying pan to the fire?”