Indy Telecom & Industrial Media

I rarely recommend textbooks as good reads. Not that they aren’t, of course, but they often tend to be academic in nature and therefore of little interest to anyone other than academics (and unfortunate students).

However, I’m taking a class by Professor Stephen P. Marks on World Poverty & Human Rights this Spring, and one of the textbooks is Amartya Sen’s rather excellent book Development as Freedom.

The book was such an engaging read that I finished reading it even before the start of my semester. Sen’s writing is very humanist in nature, peppered with a wry sense of humor in parts, all the while maintaining a tone that is at once both philosophical and pragmatic to the world’s problems.

Sen starts out addressing the question of whether or not freedom is conducive to development. He feels that such a question is at best defectively formulated, for reasons given below.

Sen ponders over how freedom is often dissociated from development, and considered a pleasant consequence thereof. However, Sen counters that freedom in itself should be the goal of development, and it is both constitutive and instrumental to development. He makes the argument that freedom (political, economic or societal) is central to achieving development; while freedom may result from such development, it would be unwise to ignore the inverse relationship, and true development will only happen through the proliferation of such freedoms. Furthermore, if the definition of development is to move beyond GNP and include freedom, unfree societies aren’t really quite developed.

Sen also argues against the “Lee Hypothesis”, named after the first Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. The idea behind the “Lee Hypothesis” is that democracy and freedom are luxuries that only developed societies can afford, and to become developed, less-developed societies will need to push forth agendas that may be at odds with democracy and freedom. Furthermore, a more ardent view would be that “non-democratic systems are better in bringing about economic development” for such societies.

In the same vein, he also takes to task the interpretation that “Asian Values” are inherently unsuitable and unfit for democracy, where Asia is defined not by region but through culture. The argument goes that discipline and obedience are critical traits to the Asian cultural psyche and as such, democracy is at odds with such a principle. This particular notion has had the unfortunate reputation of being exploited by authoritarian governments across Asia.

Sen counters both the “Lee Hypothesis” and the “Asian Values” argument by offering the example of the biggest democracy in Asia — India. While India has made several economic mistakes through the years, the fact that it continues to be free democracy hsa helped its economy grow while preserving the freedoms of its citizens. Sen also counters that the “Asian Values” argument isn’t necessarily unique to Asia, and that even within Asia, there have been differing schools of thought, including those that question blind allegiance to the state.

And of course, this book also touches upon Sen’s (now-famous) insight on famines and democracies.  He argues that famines are not necessarily caused by lack of  declines in food production but rather due to instability in the political, economic, or societal structures that leaves sections of the population unable to fend for themselves. Sen further proposes that countries that are “free” in the economic sense would have citizenry with a consistent income flow, and this income can be used to borrow or import basic necessities in times of need.

But at the end of the day, Sen concludes that true development cannot be measured through mere tangibles (e.g. GNP). Freedom remains the only true measure of development, and when there is freedom, development will follow.

(Cross posted from my International Relations blog.)

Here’s a fun visualization created using Google’s Visualization API.

The data was queried from International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook Database, October 2009.

I have talked about India’s merchandise trade here before. Looking at the First Quarter Review for 2009-2010 published by the RBI, things don’t seem to have improved a whole lot (although the markets certainly are showing some signs of an upturn).

Scary looking merchandise graph from a recent Reserve Bank of India publication.

[Source: RBI: Macroeconomic and Monetary Developments - Third Quarter Review 2008-09]

One of the most important things that the Indian culture (like most Asian cultures) insists upon is a good education. Growing up, the value of education is drilled into you, time and again.

And when it comes to education — and this is important — it is not just any education that is valued. It is education that serves a practical purpose that is considered “good”. You either get into engineering or medicine. If you are looking for variety, you do accounting, finance or law.

Even those that get into the sciences do so as a springboard for doing their graduate studies in something “practical” — like an MCA. If you’re studying something like fashion, art, economics or journalism, you must either be rich or just plain nuts (or just plain dumb, of course).

And of course, there is always that good old fashioned MBA. Do your penance of four years of engineering, either work for a short while (or not), and get into a B-school — any B-school. And Viola! You now have the perfect combination and all Indian parents will point to you as the perfect little example of how wonderful a son (or daughter) you are.

The really adventurous ones, of course, apply to graduate schools and come to the US (or go to Europe) to pursue an education (in the sciences — what else?!). The radicals come here and do *gasp* business.

But doing a PhD in Pure Math? Or studying History or the Classics? Or Philosophy? Music Theory? PLEASE!

You’d be insulting the Indian intellect by suggesting these subjects, because they have no practical value. You see, most of India’s educational system is not based on what you like, but rather what your family and friends deem you capable of.

Competition is rampant from the very beginning of your high school years, and if you still want to do Art History, you must not be very smart. Hell, I don’t even know if any school in India offers a degree in Art History.

Now, this is understandable since India is a relatively young nation, and a developing one at that. Therefore, the luxury of an impractical education is not one that is offered to most people. You get out of high school, and you study a subject that has the maximum earning potential (choice translates into what branch of engineering or medicine you want to do).  And once you graduate, you take up a job and earn money.

But what does this mean for India, as a nation? There is a rich intellectual tradition in India, and we’ve had our share of Chanakyas and Aryabhattas.

However, by implicitly attaching a lower value to subjects such as the Pure Sciences, Classics, History, Art, Economics etc., we are destroying that intellectual tradition. How many Ramanujans are lost because they do engineering and take up an IT job, rather than do pure math? How many Raja Ravi Varmas are slogging away at a call center? How many people study Sanskrit? For some reason, all the Sanskrit scholars I’ve met seem to live in either Cambridge, UK or Cambridge, Mass. And let’s just say that none of them are Indian. You would think that a Nobel-winning economist would inspire people to study economics, but no. Hell, the Indian Prime Minister is one himself, but that does not seem to matter. Because you see, India may need to open more engineering colleges because they can’t keep up with the demand.

There is a very significant downside to this. There is a reason that undergraduate degrees in Classics or Philosophy are valued before you do business, law, medicine or just about anything. It is because it broadens your perspective. It gives you critical thinking ability. You get skilled at abstractions, and at conceptualizations.

Indians are excellent at details. Given the emphasis on pragmatism, this is obviously to be expected. However, Indians are not good at looking at the big picture, simply because over the years, they have not been trained to do so. If anything, if you want plebes, looking at the big picture is probably not a good thing because you do not want your measly programmer to get delusions of grandeur.

But long term vision, long term planning and strategic thinking ability only comes from looking at the big picture. Intellectual traditions are very, very vital to the soul of a nation. And I am afraid that India as a nation is sacrificing its vision for tomorrow in its short term pursuit of practicality for today.

The Economist has an excellent article on inflation in emerging economies, and how they may be making the same mistakes that developed economies once did.

For instance, the graph below shows the CPI comparison between today and a year ago, and the difference is simply staggering. This is made made worse by the fact that food is one of the biggest component of the consumer price buckets.

Also interesting is the comparison of GDP vs. interest rates, and the currency supply between developed and emerging economies.

An interesting take away could be that the increasing price of exports from emerging nations could be because of a weakened Dollar, rather than faster inflation. But as someone who has relatives in Asia (who complain a lot about the price increases), I’d like to point out that the current rate of inflation increase in emerging economies (at least in Asia) is among the fastest, historically speaking.

Either way, increased inflation in the developed economies translates to less discretionary spending. Increased inflation in emerging economies usually translates into less food on the table, which is something to think about.

Turns out that fears of a possible recession in the US has wreaked havoc to Asian stocks, India and China in particular.

The worst hit was the Indian BSE, which fell by 1408.35 points — a fall of 7.41%. This resulted in trading being halted amid some disastrous speculations (which, of course, begs the question on BSE’s ability to run a stock exchange after such a drama).

This leads us to question the fundamentals of the Indian economy — while China has reasonably good infrastructure and manufacturing to back up its economy, the Indian economy seems to be increasingly modelled after Western styled economies, without the basic infrastructure and economic  fundamentals to back it up.

It would certainly be interesting to see how the next few days play out.

While it looks like the oil prices may not hit the $100 mark after all, I did read a rather bizarre article on the New York Times on a proposed Indian solution to help contain the rising oil prices.

M.S. Srinivasan, who is India’s Petroleum Secretary, is as worried as anyone else about the rising oil prices, despite steady demand and steady supply (we’ll ignore the temporary jumps due to oil rigs being closed in some parts of the world due to unfriendly weather in the seas).

His solution?

Why, taking the crude oil off the commodity exchanges, of course. The way he sees it, the speculators are driving up the prices of oil, fueled (pardon the pun) by investors from hedge funds, banks and other financial institutions that have poured a lot of capital into the oil market.

Not that it’s a bad idea, per se, but it does sound a lot like an Indian idea — when something does not work, regulate it until it does.

A weird Telugu PSA on why you should use condoms. And oh, it gets particularly interesting ~5:42.

In its time, the Indian finance ministry has done a lot of good things. Agreed, most of them were fortunate mistakes (sorry, too much Taleb on my brain), but they still did a reasonable job of opening up the economy, especially after the 1991 economic crisis.

In fact, you would think that with the current Prime Minister being a former RBI Governor and being the former Finance Minister with a PhD from Oxford, and with the current Finance Minister being a Harvard educated economist/lawyer, India’s economic and fiscal policies would be a little more sound.

Currently, the US economy is in a downturn. To top it off, the federal rate cut has created liquidity in the market that’s been driving the FIIs to invest some place. So, all the FIIs have taken to investing a lot in India. This is further helped by the fact that a lot of capital account control measures are being relaxed to help these chaps. While the RBI did make a good call on trying to control the rise of the Rupee against the US Dollar, it does not seem to be enough.

If anything, FII investment has shot up to an all-time high of USD 11 bn this year. Wow. Yay. Way to go. Kudos. Etc etc.

Now, India also happens to be one of the worst borrowers from the World Bank. In fact, India moved into the list of the top 10 borrowers at World Bank sometime back. Well, it is a developing nation and there are some problems (you know, corrupt politicians, poverty, disease, politicians whose kids probably really need that luxury car etc). Well, that’s fair enough and understandable, too.

But do they really need to be stupid enough to try and pay off these debts using money that the FIIs have invested in the economy? Just what do they think is going to happen the moment the US economy recovers? That’s right, they are just going to go back to investing in the US.

One of the things that hit the SE Asian economic crisis of the late 90s was the absolute lack of capital control that these countries demonstrated, that led to their economies crashing. India was fortunate enough to have a fairly strict and tightly controlled (oh, sorry, regulated) market economy then.

Today, the story is slightly different. What would happen when the FIIs pull back and all the money that’s in the economy goes out of it? While I wouldn’t go as far as some people to say that the economy is at a financial risk, it is still a scary thought.

At least in the case of China, they have tangible assets (i.e. manufacturing industries). India has a very weak manufacturing infrastructure and very little in the name of tangible assets. Unless we create new assets, the continued rise will shoot the price of existing assets through the roof. Secondly, in the event of a market crash, there would have been some tangible benefit derived out of the investments that would go back into the system, e.g. infrastructure and industries.

It is indeed a policy dilemma for India. I do not know what the solution is — but what I do know is that we’d better find a good way of absorbing all this investment into the system. Otherwise, when the investors pull out and the stock market starts going down (and oh yes it will, at some point or the other), it could leave the Indian economy in a bad shape.

(Today’s pessimistic armchair economic forecast inspired by Blues from around the world and an over-dose of RSS feeds.)

Sometimes, I just amaze myself — as a follow up to my previous blog post, my Dad just sent me this article that talks about how the RBI has eased the currency outflow norms to contain the rise of the Rupee against the US Dollar.

From the article –

In a bid to neutralise the impact of huge capital inflows and check the sustained rise in the rupee’s value against the dollar, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has further liberalised the foreign exchange norms to boost the outflow of funds from India. The RBI has now allowed resident Indians to transfer up to $2 lakh (around Rs 80 lakh) a year abroad without its approval under the Liberalised Remittance Scheme (LRS). The earlier limit was $1 lakh (Rs 40 lakh) a year. Now Indians can transfer $2 lakh to acquire and hold immovable property, make investments in financial instruments or purchase any other asset abroad without any prior approval.

Worried muchly about what FIIs might do, me hearties? And of course, there are those exporters who will be taking a hard hit otherwise, too.

I found this interesting article that talks about how hedge funds in India part-take in currency arbitrage. From the article –

Hedge funds – known for their high-risk, high-return short-term investment plays – are taking bets on the upward and downward movement of the rupee against the dollar under the pretext of investing in equities.

As one of my friends recently commented, this is probably a good time to invest in the USD, since it seems to be at an all-time low. While there are speculations that it may go still lower, you can always rely on the various national reserve banks to peg the dollar before it goes down too low.

Last June and early July, most analysts said the rupee could not continue appreciating and the RBI would intervene to ensure that the rupee corrects a bit. This view was shared by many foreign brokerage houses as well.

The RBI did intervene, but only to stop the rupee from appreciating further. The hedge funds also believed that the rupee would fall against the US dollar.

Of course it did. You know, it just might make everyone’s life easier if RBI allowed free dollar convertibility within India. When will these people learn?

When I was younger, I used to love several other sports besides cricket. Doordarshan, the national TV channel in India back then, would occasionally show a tennis or a soccer game but every time there was a cricket game, it would be at the expense of the other games.

It never made sense to me, because as far as I knew, India almost always lost. When I saw the spirit that teams and players exhibited in soccer and tennis, it did not compare to the callous attitudes demonstrated by the Indian cricket team. Yet, fools all over the country would act as if the players were demigods. I mean, I would watch Steffi Graf come back from a losing game and I would watch the Indian cricket team whine about some ridiculous excuse after losing, and I would stand there bewildered at the stupidity of the players and the fans.

Even when I grew older, the many cable sports channels would always kill every other game at the expense of cricket. This drove me nuts to no end, especially since I really do not remember the Indian cricket team playing even half decently, ever. In fact, during the many, many series that India consistently lost, I would find that cricket was being shown in place of my favourite channels. And it was always at the expense of a good channel. Somehow, the local language crappy soap-opera channels were left alone.

Now, you should understand Indian culture — good, thoughtful shows are not liked by the populace. Stupid soap operas are famous, but anything to do with thinking in any form simply does not go over well with the general populace. Science? Nature? Bah, we have no need for that. Just watch one of the many Indian movies if you do not believe me.

Me: “But today is the season premiere of Farscape!”

Cable dude: “Saar, nobody watches that saar. You should watch cricket saar.”

Me: “I don’t give a damn. India’s going to lose anyway.”

Cable dude: “You should not say that saar! You are an Indian.”

(I have never understood what being an Indian has got to do with supporting a team. You should support the best team, not a crappy team, just because they are from your country.)

Me: “But what about National Geographic! That’s a good channel.”

Cable dude: “Saar, we cannot get national geographic when we are showing cricket. They are part of the same package saar.”

Me (frustrated): “Can I kill you?”

Of course, this never changed through the years. And I could never understand why people would fawn over a team that always lost.

You see, Australia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan etc. are teams that play to win. India? Not so much. In fact, Indians cannot play any sport half decently, the only reason we get up there is because the competition isn’t so bad. Once it goes up, we bail out. I’m fairly certain that if the Cincinnati Reds started playing cricket, the idiots in blue will get their asses kicked. And as cricket becomes mainstream, we are finding out just how well we do. Oh, it was all joy when there were all of 5 or 6 good teams in the world. But today? Not so much.

The saddest thing is that cricket in India has grown at the expense of every other game — even in school, you don’t get to play very many other games. If you wanted to play something else, you better find a way to do it on your own. And I have never understood this mad, crazy fawning by a billion idiots.

Indians do not play a game to win. Nor do they play because they like the game. They play to stay in the international team, make ads and while away their time. They play for fame and glory.

The best example of this is what Akshay was talking about the other day — the Ranji trophy players do not play for the sake of the game or to win, they play to get into the international team.

I am a big fan of the Australian and Pakistani teams. Why? Because they play well and they play to win. Because they have the spirit to do their best, no matter what. The Indian cricket team is like Britney Spears, a commercial product for the consumption of the Indian masses. But don’t you ever mention that to the Indian masses — in college, I have been threatened to be beaten up by people for suggesting that Australia or Pakistan should win.

And why not? It’s a game — and may the best team win. I’m sorry, my vote goes for the team that has it in them, not for a team whose only purpose is to make ads for companies and play cricket for snagging the hottest model in town. Maybe now, they could pay attention to the Indian talent in tennis or soccer.

So, I am finally rejoicing in the fact that team India has gotten kicked out of the world cup. Like the Brits say, about bloody time.

Now, on to the world cup. I’m rooting for either Australia for New Zealand!

As you can probably see, there have been a few changes here – for one, there are two bars on either side of the content, as opposed to just one. You can also notice the use of tags and the tag cloud on the left. I have also cleaned up the look and feel a little and added links to RSS feeds and links to various social networking sites.

The President of India, Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, had posted a question on Yahoo! Answers — What should we do to free our planet from terrorism?

Human society, from origin until now, has always been at war within and between groups and has led to two World Wars. Presently, terrorism and low intensity warfare are affecting many parts if the world.

As the current global population of 6 billion increases to 8 billion by 2025, national and international conflicts will continue to be a source of concern for humanity. When evil minds combine, good minds have to work together and combat. In this context, what are the out-of-the-box solutions to free the planet earth from terrorism?

Your answers when processed and implemented can lead to a peaceful, happy and safe planet earth.

And of course, like over 6,000 15,000 other people, I just felt that I had to pitch in too.

A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long supressed, finds utterance. — Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru

59 years ago, a young democracy was born from a people of such diverse cultures that nobody believed that it could last very long. This democracy had Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis; it had folks that spoke no less than a few hundred languages and dialects — it had such diversity that each part of it could be a nation on to its own.

Today, all these years later, it is a land where for all its flaws, democracy still works. Unlike its neighbour which was founded on religion, India was born secular, with an implicit constitution to accept people of all backgrounds and beliefs. Unlike its neighbour which has had military dictators overthrow democracy ever so often, it is a democracy where its 14th Prime Minister was just elected.

In a nation of predominantly Hindus, this fledgling democracy has a Sikh Prime Minister who is an economist and a professor to boot, a Muslim President who is vegetarian and a rocket scientist and a Roman Catholic caucasian female ruling party president. Despite the odds, it has made strides in every walk of life — social, economic, scientific.

There are a lot of things that make me cringe when I think of who I’m, but for all its flaws and faults, I’m proud of what and who I’m — no matter where I go or what I end up as, I will always be an Indian.

Here’s to home, and what it stands for. And on this day, celebrating the birth of India, here is something that will bring a smile to your face — something from the days gone by — Ek Titli, Anek Titiliyan!