The Inkstained Mind

Willkommen in Der Reich 4.0

2012-01-30T10:33:00.011+04:00

The Forth Reich, led by financial Commissars and panzer divisions of Eurocrats are quietly marching in and taking over Europe. As in any invasion, it's starting with the continent's peripheral nations. Truth be told, the Reich is not really about the Germans, nor is it a German creation! The Reich is a concept - one extending from the Roman Empire - and the Germanic race just seems to be its most convenient tool for the past 500 years or so.

Since last year, after having appointed ex-Goldman Sachs-men as Prime Ministers of Greece and Italy, they are now openly demanding control of Greece's finances via a 'Budget Commissioner' - effectively, total control of Greek nation.

(Ironically, it is a German financier going by the name of Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who was once quoted as having declared: "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes her laws.")

Anyways, this is from Reuters,

Philipp Roesler (chairman of the Free Democrats who share power with Chancellor Angela Merkel) became the first German cabinet member to openly endorse a proposal for Greece to surrender budget control after Reuters quoted a European source on Friday as saying Berlin wants Athens to give up budget control.

...

The Financial Times reported on Saturday that it had obtained a copy of the proposal showing Germany wants a new euro zone "budget commissioner" to have the power to veto budget decisions taken by the Greek government if they are not in line with targets set by international lenders.

"Given the disappointing compliance so far, Greece has to accept shifting budgetary sovereignty to the European level for a certain period of time," the document said.

Under the plan, Athens would only be allowed to carry out normal state spending after servicing its debt, the paper said.

And Greece is just the beginning...

A government source in Berlin said Germany's proposal was aimed not just at Greece but also at other struggling euro zone members that receive aid and are unable to make good on their obligations.

Auf Wiedersehen. (That, 'Goodbye' to all you soon-to-be-reichsfolk.)

Groupthink: The nurseries of mediocrity

2012-01-28T19:00:00.024+04:00

There's a thought-provoking article titled "The Rise of the New Groupthink" at The New York Times' The Opinion Pages.

Groupthink, which one could possibly define as being contrained by consensus-seeking, usually ends up in action that's based on what passes the lowest common dinominator... What everyone "agrees on" / is "comfortable with".

The morale-sapping cube-farms - the nurseries of mediocrity - are everywhere...

The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about.

Groupthink prevents truly creative outcomes because there is little room for personal intuition, initiative or inventiveness if it cannot muster enough 'ayes'! At the same time, the Groupthink environment is ideal for process-fiends zealously following the minutest rules largely blind (or ignorant) of the greater scope of their work - and contributing little of actual value. And it is a favoured refuge for those who hide behind the group to escape personal accountability.

One creative genius - the inventive half of erstwhile Apple Computers - Steve Wozniak, was an introvert seeking solitude for "the sheer hard work of creating something from nothing". He often worked alone, late in the night.

The article says,

In his memoir, Mr. Wozniak offers this guidance to aspiring inventors:

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me ... they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone .... I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team.”

Of course, teamwork is a good thing when two or more individuals get together to do what each is best at. There the capabilities are multiplied, while each one's accountibility in the outcome remains equal.

The article quotes Organisational Psychologist, Adrian Furnham...

“If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

So the key priority, then, for all organisations must be to consciously acquire talented people, keep them motivated - and allow them the freedom to do things on their own.

That's 'HR 101' - and easier said than done...

UPDATE:
Another point occured to me... And that is the Risk vs. Reward paradigm - or 'incentivisation' in a Groupthink environment.

I believe that every action we choose to take is driven, consciously or unconsciously, by the inherent risk vs. the potential reward embedded in that action.

In an individual-centred environment, an employee works with 'X' amount of quantified risk (cost of failure). And an incentive, 'Y', which is the potential reward or recognition attached to a successful outcome. For an individual working alone, risk is more or less limited to starting again (i.e. mostly, lost time), whereas reward has no such obvious constraint.

So independent workers, in theory at least, are likely to take risk more often in order to maximise their rewards.

In a Groupthink environment, employees still work with 'X' amount of quantified risk (mostly, lost time) - but now MULTIPLIED by the size of the group. And their incentive 'Y' is now DIVIDED by the size of the group!

So obviously Groupthink members are likely to - in my humble conclusion - work assiduously to avoid failure since it would mean considerable total lost time, and they will also be less motivated by the reward because it is probably not in directly proportion to input.

What if India had a Ron Paul?

2012-01-16T16:31:00.006+04:00

Remember, India has a de facto two-party system too - the NDA and the UPA.

What if India could come up with a Ron Paul? Yeah, what if...

Blimey! Even Rupert Murdoch's shills endorse Nandan Nilekani's UID...

2012-01-16T13:55:00.006+04:00

First chanced upon the Rothschilds' mouthpiece endorsing India's UID, now I find this from Dec 2011...

Nandan Nilekani seems to have some really powerful backers for bio-tagging Indians.

Just listen to our former masters...

BY THE WAY, I NEVER KNEW INDIA IS A WELFARE STATE!

Maybe they deduced it from the fact that just 100 Indians (and their immediate families) on the Forbes Rich List own as much as 25% of India's GDP (according to Reuters)... Or perhaps, because India is ranked BELOW in Yemen in Per Capita GDP (according to the IMF)... Or possibly, because that India ranks NEXT TO East Timor in standard of living (according to the Human Development Index)?

Or maybe, they mean that India is a welfare state for the richest (do we call it the top 0.00000001%?) Indians who have around $1,456 billion stashed in Swiss Accounts (according to the Swiss Bankers Association)! All thanks to Dr. Manmohan Singh's crony 'liberalisation' agenda?

The road paved with good intentions...

2012-01-16T10:34:00.013+04:00

Whether it is engineering an utopian model of society or short-sighted welfare state legislations that attempt to achieve the notion of "social justice", they invariable end up accomplishing just the opposite of what was intended.

I would extrapolate this to include the 'Occupy Wall Street Movement' in the US and the 'Lokpal Bill' fracas in India. The intent of these movements are laudable... and they have certainly achieved a lot by way of waking up the majority from their TV-induced hypnosis by standing up for serious local issues. And they have redefined the way reliable news is delivered with their use of decentralised social networks.

NOW THEY SHOULD CONSIDER THEIR NEXT OBJECTIVE.

Fighting the SYMPTOMS of injustice instead of addressing the CAUSES, will essentially be paving the way for a hugely expanded 'command and control' structure that will be further out of the scope of purview of society... For example, in the US, expanding entitlements will act as a demotivation for small businesses and local productivity, and increase the viscious cycle of multinationals, offshoring and unemployment. And in India, more unaccountable bureaucratic watchdogs and red tape will only serve to eventually increase the number of hands to be greased.

This video showcase the libertarian philosophy of supply-and-demand deciding the true price/value of labour and products in an economy... This is not to be confused with unbridled, exploitative crony capitalism, which results from a few deciding what's good for the many.

P.S: When I walked in for my first copywriting job, I had no experience, so I told the employer I'll work one month for him for FREE. I didn't lose a salary, I learnt a profession.

Now the Rothschilds endorse Nandan Nilekani's UID

2012-01-15T16:31:00.008+04:00

When the House of Uber Profiteers - the Rothschilds - endorse something, it is usually reason enough to step back and consider their dark motives.

I had posted before about how E.L. Rothschild, based in Mumbai, has almost covertly acquired a large interest in the agriculture sector of India. And later, I'd focused on their creeping tentacles as the company's adopted some of the sinister features of an earlier heavily financed 'agriculturist-cum-government consultant' called the East India Company.

Yesterday, 14 Jan 2012, the Rothschild's very own shills at The Economist began to fawn and drool all over Nandan Nilekani's UID programme (audio clip below), with its stated intention of bio-tagging the unskilled and semi-skilled population in rural India as the ONLY means to bring them out of poverty...

Lynn Forester de Rothschild has been a non-executive director of The Economist Group since in October 2002. Her husband, Evelyn de Rothschild was chairman of the publication from 1972 to 1989. And the Rothschild family are key owners of The Economist Group.

Just listen to these patronising limeys (notice the BBC-like tone)...

There's an equally condescending online article touting the UID as a panacea of all India's ills accompanying the above audio clip.

If the involvement of the Rothschild gang of shylocks is not enough reason to suspect the very intention of the UID project, how about the well informed facts - not posturing or rhetoric - presented by some highly informed former Indian government, defence and national security officers?

The individuals in the following 30-odd minute video are:
- Col. (retd) Mathew Thomas, Former Head of Missile Manufacturing Establishment, Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO)
- Satish Chandra, Former Deputy National Security Advisor
- Dr. R Balasubramaniam, Former Special Investigator (PDS), Lok Ayukta, Karnataka
- J.T. D'Souza, Managing Director of SPARC Systems Limited (a biometrics technology company)

Watch (pardon the inconsistent sound quality) as they take the rose-tinted glasses off the view presented by the fraudster-minions above and systematically expose the UID project for the sinister and blatant deception that it is.

My sincere thanks to amateur film-makers Abhay, Ajay and Prashant for this hugely informative must-see documentary.

Is Reliance Comm India's next corporate debt domino?

2012-01-11T20:51:00.019+04:00

India's shining corporate stars, like Reliance Communications, Tata Steel and Suzlon Energy, among others, sold convertible bonds - many of them Foreign Currency Convertible Bonds (FCCB) - to finance 'growth'. (Convertible Bonds are bonds that can be converted into the issuing company's equity or into cash at an agreed price.)

Reliance Communications, India's second largest telecom company, has $925 million in convertible bonds coming due on 1 March 2012. The problem, however, is that its shares are trading around 88% below the bond conversion price... This means that in less than 50 days, the company may have to repay nearly $1 billion - possibly, in cash that it doesn't have!

The title of the latest post on oft-quoted investment advisor, Mike Shedlock's (Mish's) Global Economic Trend Analysis blog is interesting... "Debt Trap Looms in India on Convertible Bonds; Borrowing Costs May Quadruple for Indian Corporations"

Mish quotes Bloomberg...

Indian companies with a record $5.3 billion of convertible bonds due this year may see borrowing costs more than quadruple after the worst performance among the world’s 10 biggest stock markets.

But according to moneycontrol.com, the actual redemption value facing India Inc is a "whopping $7.2 billion", with stock prices of "almost 90% of (them) significantly below conversion prices."

So besides having one of the worst performing stock markets... and the worst performing currency (falling about 20% against the USD since mid-2011)... India also has the dubious honour of a corporate sector that's holding its highest foreign currency debt ever!

But wait, the bad news isn't over...

According to analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg, corporate earnings in India are expected to see the biggest drop in three years in the Financial Year ending March 2012!

One bond trader in London put it ever so eloquently: “(Indian) Companies are heading into a debt trap...”

Funny, how neither India's exalted (double doctorate) professor nor his "chief economic advisor" saw this one coming when they were cheerleading the nonsensical notion of 'double-digit GDP growth'!

UPDATE...
Last heard on Reuters, Reliance Comm was in talks with state-owned China Development Bank (CDB) for a loan at a higher interest rate to - ahem, repay the earlier loan.

The company is also looking to hawk-off some 50,000 microwave towers for around $3 billion to pay off part of its "$6.5 billion in net debt" as on 31 September 2011!

By the way, if I were a member of the Chinese Politburo, I'd advise the CDB to stall negotiations till mid-February when Reliance Comm share prices would plunge lower - and then arrange for the Red Army to purchase 50,000 'listening posts' in India at a bargain basement price.

Geopolitical Climate Forecast for January 2012

2012-01-09T21:16:00.001+04:00

I can't say it any better...

Watch what you say on TV

2012-01-04T10:55:00.010+04:00

Oops! CNN conveniently 'loses' transmission at a crucial moment while interviewing military veteran, Jesse Thorsen.

(I can't say what I find more frightening to imagine: That some appointee of the 'Ministry of Truth' has a finger on the 'lose transmission' button? Or, that this individual is actually vested with the authority to decide what views can't be aired?)

Later, the 'unelectable' Dr. Ron Paul (who, by the way, is ahead of most of the electable candidates) calls Jesse Thorsen on-stage (at 9:45) to finish what he was saying...

It is perhaps obvious why the good Dr. Goldstein - er, Dr. Paul, is 'unelectable'?

Ever wonder why a coup d'etat invariably starts at the TV station?

2012-01-01T18:15:00.008+04:00

Because nothing is credible till it's on TV.

Of course, the corollary is that the public is conditioned to believe that if it is on TV, it must be true!

Think about the relationship we have with our TV set. Our homes are organised around it. Our social lives many times depend on its whims. We tell ourselves that OTHER members of our family (not us) can't live without it. We only need it so we're not "out-of-touch" with what's happening! And for the reassurance that we are "in-the-know" we are ready to pay literally any cost - even if we are unfairly made to pay for channels we will never see.

You can't call something so manipulative, an idiot box. In fact, the wide-eyed idiot is blissfully unaware, catching up with "reality" on TV.

Switch the TV 'off'. Switch your mind 'on'. Only then can we fight off the coup d'etat of independent thought and reasoning. If enough people fight, 2012 will be different. Otherwise, it will be whatever they show you on TV.

Anyway, don't go unarmed...

Educate yourself, because no-one else will

2011-12-31T10:38:00.044+04:00

I am certain there is a serious crisis coming...

And apparently, the realisation is finally dawning on mainstream economists and TV pundits that the Indian banking sector, the corporate sector (a.k.a. India Inc.) and the central government (GoI) are sitting on a mountain of bad debt. (There is a reason for this... which I will come to at the end of this post.)

I am no economist, but with a little research, it was obvious that Kingfisher Airline's crash-landing is just the tip of iceberg when it comes to corporate India's profilgacy.

The following is today's Wall Street Journal online article titled, India's Slowing Growth Will Test Banks' Resilience,
After the peak of the financial crisis in 2009, India's banks opened the floodgates with loans to already over-leveraged companies. Credit Suisse looked at loans to 3,550 non-financial services companies in India with aggregate borrowing of $385 billion at the end of March and found that nearly 30% had net debt more than six times current earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

And the risk is currently spread across several sectors that are ALL expected to do badly in case of a economic slowdown in 2012 - which in itself seems to be a foregone conclusion!

India's private airlines, construction companies, utilities and real estate developers are all notorious for generating non-performing loans. All those sectors will suffer from an economic downturn.

But no matter how illogical it is, the big debtors can look forward to the big banks contorting numbers to restructure the unpayable loans - of course, to keep the sham 'assets' on their account books.

To compound the problem, many companies have borrowed in foreign currency from local banks, taking advantage of lower interest rates overseas. But an 18% fall in the rupee against the dollar since April means they now face significantly higher repayment costs. Struggling borrowers could try to convert foreign debt into rupee-denominated loans or restructuring high risk loans to ease repayment conditions. For lenders, that's better than outright defaults but it will hurt profits.

It's not just the big corporate houses that are essentially 'safe' from the risks of a default. Even the banks don't seem to care if their bad loans are beginning to look like a ticking 'time bomb'.

The Reserve Bank of India's stress test report published earlier this month forecasts 5.8% of non-performing assets in the worst-case scenario...

Since 'assets' are hypothetical numbers (remember, banks hold over 26% of equity in KFA bought at a 60% premium as part of loan 'restructuring' last year) that are leveraged 12-14 times their actual capital funds, 5.8% NPA ACTUALLY MEANS A LOSS OF UP TO 81% OF CAPITAL - in other words, insolvency!

India's top bankers are unafraid for the same reason that India's richest know they cannot lose their assets... because almost all the loses will be transfered to someone else!

This was in the Deccan Herald on 26 Dec...

(Finance Ministry) Officials said PSU banks including SBI may need Rs 40-100 billion capital infusion to maintain Tier-I capital of 8 per cent of their total risk-weighted assets. The government is mulling Rs 10,000 crore extra capital infusion depending on the profits of the banks until March 2012.

Planning Commission recently approved Rs 14,000 crore recapitalisation plan for public sector banks in the current fiscal year 2011-12.

Since Public Sector Banks make up about 70% of India's banking sector, the GoI will eventually 'nationalise' their bad debt as well.

There will be a prolonged play-for-time, but two things will inevitably follow:

1) A sovereign debt downgrade (India's sovereign debt is currently rated just one notch abvove 'junk'), followed by an IMF / World Bank loan.

2) The imposition of 'conditionalities' or 'structural adjustments' that include austerity, deregularisation and privatisation of national assets.

We have been there before... Dr. Manmohan Singh's twin mantras of 'liberalisation', 'economic growth' - and sometimes even his 'foreign policy' - stem from the conditions placed as a result of the 'economic crisis' in 1991.

I strongly believe India, like Greece and Italy, is essentially in bank receivership - and run by unelected technocrats beholden only to a handful of global financiers.

THIS RINSE-REPEAT CYCLE OF PRIVATISING ASSETS AND SOCIALISING LIABILITIES MIGHT END DIFFERENTLY THIS TIME – BUT ONLY IF MAJORITY OF THE PUBLIC STOP TAKING THE OPINIONS OF SO-CALLED EXPERTS FROM THINK TANKs AND NGOs ON MAINSTREAM TV AS THEIR SOLE SOURCE OF INFORMATION. (If these guys were such experts, they should have seen and analysed the crisis before a layperson like me even suspected it.)

I'm afraid the mainstream media is just propaganda dressed-up as entertainment... You'll never (nor are you ever meant to) know the facts till there is ONLY ONE desperate straw to cling onto!

Switch the TV off, people - and switch your mind on before it's too late.

P.S: This goes for the Team Anna Hazare TV jamboree as well... Try seeing through the mainstream and social media hype; question the motives of everyone involved; and ask yourself if the Lokpal Bill - in any form - can really end or control corruption, or will it just add another elite layer of corruptible, power-hungry appointees outside the purview of the general public... Power begets corruption. Always.

I think India's anti-corruption agitation (and the 'Occupy movements') - if they are successful - will accomplish just the OPPOSITE of empowering people... But that's another post.

Ayurveda. Black swans. And geopolitical puppeteers...

2011-12-20T14:14:00.010+04:00

All the business pundits on TV seem to think that the central banks or the central governments must necessarily intervene with appropriate policies to stabilise financial markets or mitigate economic volatility.

Just look at what this mind-set is doing for the Eurozone countries.

By suppressing the SYMPTOM (the approach in Allopathy, the 'conventional' Western system of medicine) instead of the CAUSE (the approach in Ayurveda, the traditional India system for well-being) one is actually preventing the purging of toxic build-ups from the system - and increasing the potential for fatal reaction at a tipping point!

This tipping point is similar to a 'Black Swan' event.

According to wikipedia...

The black swan theory or theory of black swan events is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that The event is a surprise (to the observer) and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight.

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology

2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)

3. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

This is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb says in 'Black Swan of Cairo', a document written for the Council on Foreign Relations (arguably, the most infuential group of geopolitical puppeteers on the planet).

The Black Swan of Cairo pdf

View more ebooks on ebookbrowse.com

If you must know, finance and economics is geopolitics.

India straps on "financial suicide vest"

2011-12-12T19:32:00.045+04:00

It was the 'Oracle of Omaha', Warren Buffett who famously described derivatives - like speculative Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) - as "financial weapons of mass destruction" in his 2002 annual report to Berkshire Hathaway's shareholders.

And they don't call him the 'Oracle' for nothing... Six years later, CDSs were a little talked-about, yet key reason for the global scale and massive destruction of the financial crisis that started in 2008.

In the current Eurozone crisis, a Bloomberg-Businessweek article aptly titled, "Credit Default Swap Risk Bomb Is Wired to Explode" lays out the reasons how CDSs have helped transform the problems that began with a few banks in Greece into an apocalyptic worldwide crisis.

In theory, CDSs function like insurance contracts on bonds. In the event of a default, the seller of the CDS promises to pay the the bond’s value to the buyer. CDSs are touted as 'risk-sharing' instruments meant to mitigate the impact of a potential default - but in the real world, CDSs seem to ecalate risk of institutional failure into risk of systemic failure!

In essence, CDSs are "financial suicide vests" that can 'take out' the CDS seller - and if that bank has bought a CDS - a chain-reaction (or contagion) is triggered, which can rip apart the financial system and bring down entire economies. This is the reason why the ECB, IMF and Fed cannot let Greece default!

On 7 Dec 2011, India got it's shiny new "financial suicide vest".

Reuters reported that "India's fledgling credit default swap market kicked-off [...] with two deals covering 100 million rupees worth of bonds." It involved ICICI Bank and IDBI Bank.

On 13 Dec, Firstpost quoted a Bloomberg report as saying that costs to protect bonds of Indian banks against default are rising at the fastest pace among Asian lenders: Five year CDS of ICICI Bank jumped the highest to 471 basis points, and swaps of SBI hit a two-year high of 397 basis points.

But India's bankers are bullish over CDSs! CRISIL says that it "believes that the RBI guidelines incorporate learnings from the CDS markets worldwide. Systemic safety and stability remain the regulator’s priority..."

True. The RBI make the rules, but banks and CCIL (Clearing Corp India) which processes the transactions have to uphold them. And CCIL is 83 percent-owned by banks and financial institutions - with the usual suspects: SBI, ICICI, IDBI, LIC, Bank of Baroda and HDFC Bank as its promoters!

Nothing to worry, then... Except...

The launch of India's CDS market was "sooner than expected". Could it be because India's banks are facing increasing "risk of credit default" considering the health of the overall Indian economy?

This week...
- India's Index of Industrial Production (IIP) for October (Year-on-Year) had nosedived to -5.1% from +3.5% in the April-October period. Not only has India's industrial output fallen like a rock, it's now sits at the lowest since the height of the previous crisis in Q1 200.)

- The Indian rupee has fallen over 15% to hit an all-time low against the US Dollar - and it is still falling in value! This means that all of India's payments denominated in USD - including its trade deficit and volume of external debt - has grown proportionately.

- Sector after sector (public and private) - including Aviation, Real Estate, Textile, Power Distribuition, and even State Governments - are facing mountains of debts that they cannot pay.

- During the 2008 crisis, India's foreign exchange reserves was 38% MORE than its external debt. Today, it is 0.4% LESS that the external debt.

I am no economist, but here is what I think: CDSs have given India's bankers a "self-destruct button." If they go down, the entire economy goes down with them!

At the very least, the Government of India (a.k.a the taxpayer) now has to bailout every bankrupt company to save its insolvent banker.

But it could get much worse... India's oligarchs, bankers, (IMF-appointed) politicans and (Wall St-appointed) media cronies could push India's economic system to the very edge of a cliff, India's sovereign credit rating will go down a notch - to 'JUNK' status.

"We urgently need foreign exchange," will be the mantra chanted repeatedly in the media. Dr Manmohan Singh's Cabinet will come up with a magical 'rescue package'. It will involve wholesale privatisation of public utilities, PSUs (public sector units), and natural resources. It will also involve across-the-board deregulation in all sectors.

I don't know if he'll have the gall to do it, but: MANMOHAN SINGH MAY 'BE FORCED TO' SELL INDIA'S GOLD RESERVES... AGAIN!

And after we lose our sovereignty, comes the REALLY painful part... Large scale unemployment. Civil unrest. Fractures along India's many cultural faultlines.

Well, have a Happy New Year everyone.

Bankers vs. Lynch mob, coming soon to India?

2011-12-11T10:47:00.018+04:00

There are some news articles that 'open your eyes' - and there are those that make your eyes pop!

Just yesterday, I had posted about how the ballooning billions in debt accumulat in India could be one unlucky snowflake away from an disastrous default avalanche.

Lo and behold! Along comes the reason why the oligarchs of India Inc. remain unfazed... The following news is from The Economic Times of 6 Dec 2011: Big borrowers of India Inc default on Rs 47,000 crore loans

The article opens thus...

Large borrowers, who took loans of Rs 10 crore or more, have defaulted on payments to the tune of Rs.47,000 crore, with banks not even pursuing cases to recover over half the amount.

Data available with the finance ministry shows that least 700 defaulters who had borrowed Rs.10 crore or more from public sector banks and cumulatively owe over Rs.26,000 crore have gone scot free despite not clearing their dues.

The article goes on thus...

In fact, in several cases, defaulters have gone ahead to get a second loan despite not clearing their past dues.

There is nearly Rs.14 lakh crore of credit outstanding against those who have borrowed Rs 10 crore and above! But, apparently, the banks are not in any hurry to get them to pay it back.

So India's genius bankers - when they are not helping out India Inc. with loans against worthless collateral or taking on hefty losses in the name of corporate debt 'restructuring' - are actually willing to let their 'friends' walk away from humungous loans with next-to-no consequences.

Oh, but there are consequences, to be sure... Not for the oligarchs, the banking elite or the traitorous political class. They get to hoard the profits, while their obscene debts are dumped on the nation (one step from a Moody's debt downgrade to 'Junk' status) and its citizens (one step from starvation and mass civil unrest) to pay up.

Look westward at imploding societies of Europe and the United States - NOW is the real opportunity to learn lessons on how (not) to run the economy.

A word of advise for those who live in ivory towers: The effette media-tamasha around Anna Hazare and his merry band of Rockefeller-Magsaysay awardees will be the least of your worries when the economy goes into debt-shock.

Just how many sten-gun magazines will your Z-triple plus category Special Protection Group have to empty to stop a 1.3 billion-strong juggernaut?

REMEMBER ONE WORD: KARMA

India's himalayan debt crises-in-waiting...

2011-12-07T20:01:00.074+04:00

If it continues blindly stumbling down the path of 'economic growth' through monetary inflation - a model that is globally coming apart at its seams - there will be hell to pay for India... Hell in the form of growing MOUNTAINS OF DEBT!

INDIA'S AVIATION SECTOR NEEDS GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION.

According to Bloomberg,

The (global) airline industry’s profit next year will fall 49 percent [...] as the sovereign-debt crisis in Europe hurts economic growth, the International Air Transport Association (IATA) said.

That's not good news for the five leading domestic airlines in India — Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines, Air India and SpiceJet Ltd — which have combined liabilities of Rs.84,058 crore.

The industry has already escalated the crisis right up to the Prime Minister's Office.

INDIA'S POWER DISTRIBUTION SECTOR NEEDS URGENT GOVERNMENT ASSISTANCE.

The sector had loans of about Rs.4.8 trillion from various creditors in March 2011! Canara Bank faces almost certain insolvency with 13.3% of its assets exposed to the sector. India’s top two lenders, State Bank of India and ICICI Bank, have more than Rs.300 billion of exposure each.

The government has stepped in waving the magic wand of "reforms". This may buy some time - but little else.

INDIA'S REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY IS DANGEROUSLY DEEP IN DEBT.

According to Bloomberg-Businessweek, India’s biggest real estate developers are having to fork out an unsustainable 20% interest for borrowing because of already high debts.

And while facing high interest rates, falling demand, dropping profits, high inventories, and bad forecasts, they also need to come up with the means to repay their towering debt of Rs.1.8 trillion over the next two to three years!

INDIA'S TEXTILE SECTOR IS HEADING FOR LOAN DEFAULT.

According to a report by CNBC-TV18,

The banks have a total exposure of about Rs.80,000 to Rs.1 lakh crore to the entire (textile) sector including unlisted companies. While so far none of these companies have reported major defaults, they fear that due to the fall in demand these companies may report defaults going forward.

Falling demand from their key western markets has prompted the industry to seek the Finance Ministry's support in restructuring their loans. Specifically, "[...] they have sought two things. One is repayment of principal amounts on long-term loans should be postponed for the next 24 months and also there should be easier norm for working capitals for the next five years."

In layman's terms, the textile industry don't seems to have the capital to keep factories operational - let alone service their debt. And they obviously do not see this as a "short-term" downturn either.

Given the huge numbers of direct employees, the farming communities upstream, and the massive exposure of the banking sector - all of who could literally "lose their shirts" - the GoI is almost certainly going to have to "do something".

SEVERAL OF INDIA'S STATES ARE ALREADY FINANCIAL BASKETCASES.

West Bengal's Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee, this month managed to wrestle permission from the GoI to raise an overall amount of Rs.21,614 crore from various sources. This, despite inheriting a state indebted to the tune of Rs.2 lakh crore. In fact, West Bengal's debt is currently around 40.8% of its (Gross State Domestic Product) GSDP, and the state spends about 33% of its entire revenue on just interest payment!

Other states on central fiscal life-support include, Punjab (debt, 34.1% of GSDP) which spends 21.1% of all revenue on interest payment alone; and Kerala (debt, 33.4% of GSDP) which pays 19.6% of its entire revenue on interest payment ...And these two are supposedly among the progressive role-models in the union!!!

INDIA'S BANKING SECTOR IS GETTING A GOVERNMENT BAILOUT.

I had posted previously on SBI's "request" for capital infusion from their largest shareholder: the Government of India.

The sectors that pose the most "troubled assets" for SBI, according to its Chairman...

The 'doomsday' scenario for SBI according Moody's...

Since SBI claims to be "leveraged" 12 to 14 times, 12 percent Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) translate into at least 144 percent of capital fund - that isn't "extreme stress" - that's insolvency! Besides, SBI is not the only bank that needs to be "recapitalised" to offset its NPA.

In fact, banks in India are so worried of NPAs, that they are refusing to lend - creating a 'credit crunch' in the market!

THE RISING RISK OF INDIA'S EXTERNAL DEBT.

Recently, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has had to inject 'liquidity' into the system by buying GoI securities. The amount? Rs.22,000 crores in three weeks!

The following is a snapshot of where India stood in terms of debt issuance even before the RBI opened the liquidity tap...

According to a Ministry of Finance press release on 2 December 2011,

Credit growth to specific sector may pose concerns. According to the data published in the Report on Trend and Progress of Banking in India 2010-11, [...] credit to infrastructure, real estate, retail and Non-Banking Financial Companies witnessed a growth of 38.6 per cent, 21.4 per cent, 19.5 per cent and 54.8 per cent, respectively [...]

(The emphasis is mine.)

According to the Finance Ministry report, India’s external debt at end-March 2011 was US$ 305.9 billion, of which, corporate borrowing was 28.9% - and growing! BusinessLine has an article on the growing similarities between the 1991 'balance-of-payment' crisis and today's circumstances... And the falling value of the Indian Rupee certainly isn't helping.

The main difference is massive scale of the problem today.

AND WHAT WE MUST REMEMBER, IS THAT INDIA'S SOVEREIGN DEBT RATING AT "Baa3" - THAT IS JUST ONE STEP ABOVE 'JUNK'!!!

Airlines hijack India, Banks hold-up taxpayers

2011-12-01T01:07:00.032+04:00

According to a Frontline article, "(Kingfisher Airlines) has not paid to the government Rs.410 crore collected by way of taxes deducted from the employees' salaries. It has defaulted on the payment of salaries and taxi, airport landing and parking, catering and aviation turbine fuel bills. On November 14, the company posted its 16th straight quarterly loss."

FLASHBACK: MEET INDIA'S NUMERICALLY-CHALLENGED BANKERS!
Last year in a deal with creditors, Kingfisher managed to magically 'restructured' Rs.1300 crore of debt into shares worth 62% over the prevailing market rate. The value per share has since fallen from nearly Rs.65 to around Rs.20!

The deal, something of a stroke of financial genius on part of the consortiunm of 13 creditors, was achieved under the stewardship of the venerable State Bank of India (SBI), the country's largest bank.

A year later, SBI proudly informs us that it now has Rs.1400 crore exposure to Kingfisher Airlines - which is Rs.100 crore MORE than the previous year's entire 'restructured' debt!

But the bank isn't the least bit disconcerted. No siree!

Because SBI isn't alone... "Non-performing assets, or bad loans, of banks in India are set to triple by March 2014, according to the latest report by CLSA." And according to the same article on FirstPost, "the corporate sector accounts for 70% of bank credit." Must be a coincidence, eh?

Pratip Chaudhuri, Chairman of SBI, cooly notes (in video below) that Moody's which recently downgraded his bank's rating (presumably because of dubious 'assets' like its equity in an airline that has NEVER made a profit!) also said that, "SBI is assured of the continuous support of the sovereign."

In English, it simply means "taxpayer-sponsored bailout." You see, they are just Too-Big-To-Fail.

(Apparently, SBI overall is rated Baa2 by Moody's, while India (SBI's 60% owner) is rated a notch BELOW them at Baa3! I guess, the magical world of finance is beyond the scope of concepts as mundane as logic.)

INDIA'S AVIATION SECTOR: HOW TO FLY WITHOUT A MORAL COMPASS!
The Frontline article also quotes a report by Toronto-based Veritas Investment Research Corp. that Vijay Mallya's UB Group had "provided bank guarantees totalling Rs.16,000 crore, according to some reports, to Kingfisher Airlines' debt, far beyond its own marketable assets, thereby rendering both companies insolvent." It is amazing that no creditor considered this possibility?

But while Kingfisher Airlines has raked up debts of Rs.12,668 crore, and cancelled 175 out of 418 flights alloted to it for the current winter holiday season, the company's Chief Optimist and CEO, Sanjay Aggarwal, wrote "there is no risk to the long term future of the airline" in an email meant to stem the haemorrhaging of pilots and other employees.

But Kingfisher Airlines isn't overly perturbed either!

Because they are only the visible part of the iceberg... According to a LiveMint article, the entire Indian aviation industry is headed for a crash landing!!!

Collectively, the five leading domestic airlines — Jet Airways (India) Ltd and its unit JetLite (India) Ltd, Kingfisher Airlines Ltd, state-owned Air India Ltd and SpiceJet Ltd—are weighed down by Rs.84,058 crore of liabilities.

State-run Air India has a total debt of Rs.48,000 crore, Jet Airways Rs.19,602 crore, JetLite Rs.2,197 crore, Kingfisher Airlines Rs.12,668 crore, and SpiceJet Rs.1,591 crore.

(Try to pick a flight-path around this unholy skyline...)

So what do India's intrepid aviators do? Why, of course, the aggrieved jet-setters troop off to the Prime Minister's office... Jet Airways' Naresh Goyal (Chairman), Indigo's Rahul Bhatia (Promoter), IndiGo's Aditya Ghosh (CEO), SpiceJet's Neil Mills (CEO), Kingfisher's Sanjay Aggarwal (CEO), and Go Air's Jeh Wadia (owner), met Manmohan Singh over a cuppa Assam or Scotlands finest to seek government 'invervention'!

In plain English, it means "taxpayer-funded bailout." They too are Too-Big-To-Fail.

There are ultimately only two possibilities before India:
1) The Indian government intervenes, with a disasterous inflationary consequence, or
2) The Indian government does not intervene, allowing all the loss-making airlines and the over-leveraged banks to collapse, with disasterous deflationary consequences.

India's 'Lehman Moment' is looming large like a wide-body attaining terminal velocity... Whether it is direct incentives, tax-cuts, subsidies, or Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs), it is either lost income or new expense, both of which will be offset by taxing the aam aadmi!

THERE WAS ONCE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL - BUT NOW IT'S JUST AN ONCOMING TRAIN!
India is primarily a domestic demand-driven economy, with consumer spending accounting for nearly 60% of the economy by expenditure. The current slowdown in India's GDP growth signals an ominous trend: Rapidly falling domestic spending!

And the less Indians spend, the lower the profits for India Inc. And in times when companies are stuffed to their gills in debt, it means losses that can threaten lenders who happily leveraged their capital up to 14 times and hold worthless IOUs as collateral!

But why is the aam aadmi tightening his purse strings? I suppose he is just tired...

Tired of the false promises. The 'economic superpower' lie. The uncertain global economic climate. The high cost-of-living. The falling value of their savings. Their cities falling apart at the seams and rotting at its heart. The erosion of traditional Indian family values. The consequent decadence in society. The frivolity in the mainstream media. The naked cronyism in the corporate world. The nepotism of epic proportions in government. And the complete failure of virtually ANY authority figure to set an example.

The aam aadmi knows he's Too-Small-To-Matter.

He know that nobody gives a rodent's rear-end if he swings from the end of a rope because he failed his family. What he might not know, however, is that there are roughly one billion and three hundred million others who feel just like he does... Right now!

What are we preparing our children for?

2011-11-30T22:10:00.011+04:00

In the video below, Chris Martenson clarifies his studied (and I must say, very convincing) observation that "the next twenty years are going to look very different from the last twenty."

Here's why.

Since all our money is loaned onto existence, our economy has to grow exponentially. [...] If we wanted to continue on this path, our debt load would have to double again over the next 10 years. By continually increasing our debt relative to GDP we are making the assumption that our future will always be wealthier than our past. (Martenson) believes that this assumption is flawed and that the debt loads are already unmanageable.

...Add to that, energy depletion, increasing social unrest, growing international competition and rancour over natural resources - and you will begin to recognise his point-of-view more clearly.

But why does 'understanding the future' even matter?

Well, I believe it matters a whole lot if you are a parent. It matters that you understand that your child is not likely to live life the way you have. In fact, you will have very, very little in common materially, and consequently, even in values!

The lesser aware we are now of the changing dynamics, the lesser equipped we are to imagine what life would be like for him or her, a decade or two from now. And the better aware we are of the possible variables, the better equipped we may be to prepare our child, and of course ourselves, for life - say, in 2020 and beyond.

Go on, hear Chris out. He isn't scare-mongering; he's merely holding up the facts for us to see and interpret.

What 4D technology is not...

2011-11-30T17:00:00.017+04:00

No amount of technology (or loose purse-strings) can make up for the lack of creativity. Or cover up gratuitous narcissism, for that matter. Watch.

The world's most advanced '4D technology' used to deliver the world's most impressive damp squib finale... (DJ with alpha-numeric name and vacuous-looking teenagers with smartphones, included)

Or in their words,

Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows phone [...] created an amazing free light show at Millbank Tower, London. Each of the 120 metre high building's 800 windows were covered with vinyl as 16 powerful projectors, stationed 300 metres away on the other side of the river, beamed 3D images onto the structure.

The world's most expensive product catalogue... (giant-ego-in-the-window, included)

Or in their words,

Ralph Lauren London celebrates 10 years of digital innovation by putting on a virtual fashion show that brings it's building on Bond Street to life.

And finally, in their own words... Let there be rock! (real audience feedback, included)

(I am seriously beginning to think that the 'generational gap' exists mostly because smartphones seem to be frying what's between people's ears!)

Guess what comes after an economic upheaval?

2011-11-23T13:31:00.044+04:00

Kyle Bass seems to have made it his business - and a profitable one, at that - to see the 'big picture' evolving around world. First, the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US; then the sovereign debt crisis in Greece; and now he is betting that the next domino to fall will be... Japan!

(Here's an interesting bit of trivia: Japan is the Indian government's single largest bilateral creditor! At end-March 2011, they owed Japan US$ 14.7 billion, followed by US$ 2.7 billion to Germany.)

Watch Kyle Bass spar ever so graciously with the lady presenter on BBC HARDtalk.

Towards the very end of 24-minute episode, Kyle points out that, historically, fiancial and economic upheavals tend to lead to social upheavals as well.

Which brings us to the next subject...

It's an interesting article on the Bloomberg-BusinessWeek website on the emigration, or more rightly, a near-exodus of China's super rich from the country.

Many of them are seeking foreign passports or residency permits in the US, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand.

How many of them?

More than 500,000 Chinese have investable assets of over 10 million yuan ($1.57 million), according to a joint survey released in April by China Merchants Bank and Bain & Co. The study says almost 60 percent are considering emigrating, have begun the process, or have emigrated.

Want to guess why?

So-called mass incidents—riots, strikes, and protests—doubled in five years, to 180,000 in 2010, Sun Liping, a professor at Beijing’s Tsinghua University, wrote in a Feb. 25 article in the Economic Observer. “Some people in China are talking about class conflicts against rich people,” says Wang Xiaolu, deputy director of the National Economic Research Institute in Beijing. “Maybe some of those emigrating or getting residency are worrying about possible policy changes turning China ‘left’ that will put them in danger.”

And it's not just the crazy professors saying things...

One émigré in Boston (who asked only that his last name, Yang, be used since he still owns a factory in China) points out that the Chinese government spent more money on internal security (549 billion yuan) than on defense (534 billion yuan) in 2010. He says that if things got ugly, the rich would be targets not just for being rich but for their close connections with the government.

Wait a minute, this sounds familiar...

Blistering economic growth rate. Massive 'investments' in the infrastructure and real estate sectors. Financial sector joins the party, with absurd leverages and adventurous schemes. The economy overheats with excess money supply, sending inflation skyward. The central bank steps on the brakes with interest hikes. The inevitable slowdown sends the financial sector precariously close to tipping-point. This causes a credit / liquidity crunch.

Almost overnight, the starry-eyed ambition of the masses awaken to the realisation that the political and oligarchic classes manipulate the system at will, in their own interest. There never was, any 'trickle down effect'; and the 'middle class dream' was just that - a dream.

But the "good times" go on for the corporate kings... And if their country's circling the drain with economic woes and pollution that they caused - they've got dual citizenships now!

Live with it.

A war waged with megapixels

2011-11-22T03:21:00.016+04:00

In my previous post, Journalism 2.0 vs. Propaganda 1.0, I tried to explain how the mainstream media can (and does) hide, obfuscate or skew what the public views and hears via the News.

The analogy would be: A tree falls in the forest. Nobody hears it (and it's not in the News). Ergo, it never happened.

Now we shall see Journalism 2.0 at work.

From the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea to the Green Zone in Baghdad, and Zuccotti Park in New York to Tahrir Square (again) in Cairo, every place on earth it would seem is under some form of disputed occupation - and it is getting near-impossible to keep tabs on it all... But the recent pepper-spraying of students sitting peacefully on a sidewalk at UC Davis (first video below) - and the students' brilliant 'wall of silence' revenge trageting the UC Davis Chancellor afterwards (second video below) offers something of an insight.

Watch the students of US Davis (after being pepper-sprayed) force police in riot-gear to retreat using just their voices and their video cameras...

Later, the students of UC Davis use complete silence but keep their video cameras rolling in order to shame the Chancellor as she takes, probably, the longest walk she ever took to her car...

It seems the "weapon of choice" for today's generation is a video camera!

Videos of the incidents (in all its versions and interpretations) have been seen by millions. The action of the students and the police are now subject of intense discussions.

The analogy now would be: A tree falls in the forest. Nobody hears it (and it's not in the News). Ergo, it never happened. But wait, someone's posted a video of the tree falling/fallen. Now we all know what happened.

And now that we know it happened, we can have an frank discourse on the whys, hows and wherefores...

There is an excellent article titled: "What George Orwell Can Teach Us About OWS and Police Brutality" over at The Atlantic website.

The writer's astute analysis on why overly-armed police resort to disproportionate and uncalled-for force in non-threatening situations is based on a predictably rich short story by George Orwell, called Shooting an Elephant.

You may have read the above article (and possibly made a mental/digital note to read the short story, later). You see now how Journalism 2.0 can be not just about informing - but enlightening as well.

I think we might need it for humanity to evolve higher.

Journalism 2.0 vs. Propaganda 1.0

2011-11-20T19:33:00.032+04:00

(Update: Oops! The video is now added. Apologies.)

I want you to discount everything you see in the following video, and focus on just one thing: What is the statistical probability of what you are about to see occuring if there was more than ONE source of the narrative on ALL of mainstream TV?

I think it is time we disabuse ourselves from the illusion of choice... Right now! There are six giant media holding companies that own the airwaves - and your rapt attention.

The following are only their tentacles on the idiot box...

So the next time you flip through news channels on TV, please remember this: You hear what their "scriptwriters" want you to hear.

A thinking mind can sift through obvious biases. But to be blinkered and fed a repetitive 'scripted reality' is an insult to human intelligence.

That's why this year in particular is turning into the dawn of the Age of Journalism 2.0... With ordinary people around the world increasingly - many, unconsciously - turning to Internet-based alternate sources of news and information for a more believable narrative of what's happening around them.

And the minions of the mainstream media "scriptwriters" are shocked and appalled!

Thank you, Conan O'Brien.

India's ticking debt bomb

2011-11-16T19:09:00.039+04:00

According to Finance Ministry report, India’s external debt at end-March 2011 was US$ 305.9 billion, up 17.2 per cent over 2010. Government (sovereign) debt remained near-static 25.6 per cent of the total, while the share of commercial (corporate) borrowing was 28.9 per cent and rising.

The Finance Ministry is of the opinion that, "The changing composition of [external] debt in favour of commercial borrowing is also an indication of [...] the increasing role that corporate sector is playing in sustaining high growth rate."

(Also, the US$ is the predominant currency component accounting for 53.5 per cent of India's total external debt. The INR sliding in value against the US$ can't be good news. And already Moody's has warned that India's public debt burden at 70% of GDP is a "constraint". But that's another story...)

We need to focus on the growing corporate sector. And the unquestioning support they receive from individuals within the GoI - like our unelected Prime Minister (he's a Rajya Sabha 'nominee') and Kaushik Basu, the uneleced PM's unelected Chief Economic Advisor.

Because India's corporate giants seem to have the serious potential to trigger an economic collapse!

A BusinessWorld article is the only one I came across that mentions the risk for Kingfisher's bankers - saying,

The million-dollar question, according to airlines CEOs, is whether the government would actually step in and try to salvage the situation in some way through the public sector banks, since they cannot afford to allow Kingfisher Airlines to collapse. “The contagion effect on banks — many banks have large exposures to the airline — will be a cause of worry for the government”, says a ministry official. However, setting a precedent by helping in a bailout of one private company would be dangerous for the future — across industries.

The article quotes the CEO of the Centre of Asia Pacific Aviation (CAPA),

"The airline’s immediate cash requirement is estimated at Rs 1,000 crore. This includes dues to the private airports, AAI, oil companies and other vendors... [Moreove, Kingfisher] needs $800 million [Rs 4,000 crore] plus over the next two years. Out of this, $400 million [Rs 2,000 crore] is required urgently..."

Kingfisher's overall debt stands at over Rs 7,000 crore with annual losses exceeding Rs 1,000 crore.

In fact, it was just last year that a consortium of 13 lenders, led by SBI and ICICI Bank, restructured Kingfisher Airline's debt by turning Rs 1,200 crore worth of debts into equity paying a 50% PREMIUM (Rs 65 per share) over the market price of Rs 40. This year the price per share went down to Rs 17!

The sheer futility of everyone scrambling to save Kingfisher Airline should be obvious by now!

An article in BusinessToday by Harsh Vardh, former MD of Vayudoot, candidly questions the long term viability of the airline's business plan...

He says,

Mallya has recently tweeted "Why should Kingfisher operate on loss-making routes on government directive?"

[But] The main cause of losses for the industry is its excessive deployment of capacity on metro routes where over 70 per cent of capacity is deployed. Metro and international routes account for the majority of losses of Kingfisher, and not government directed sectors.

And on the Indian Prime Minister's response, Mr Vardhan rightly points out,

A PM who only few days ago has taken a firm stand on petrol prices being market driven should not be seen contradicting himself in favour of private enterprises.

Obviously, that there are different rules for corporate houses and individual citizens - but it is no time for indignation. We really should be worried about huge recklessness and profligacy in the corporate sector unleashing a financial contagion in India!

Yet again, it the hapless aam aadmi and his parivaar that will bear the brunt. The oligarchs will simply set sail to a tax haven on their plush yachts.

Has the Debt Tsunami reached India's shores?

2011-11-15T20:02:00.013+04:00

I don't believe the Kingfisher Airline saga is as mundane as it is made out to be - because the real pandora's box is not at the airline but at the Indian banking sector, especially the country's largest bank - and biggest lender - the State Bank of India (SBI).

SBI has an exposure of Rs 1,400 crore to Kingfisher Airlines. But that's not the point...

In September 2011, the credit rating agency, Standard & Poor's (S&P) downgraded SBI, and on 9 Nov, Moody's downgraded the entire Indian banking system from “stable” to “negative”, citing the likely deterioration in asset quality.

SBI's Chairman Pratip Chaudhuri had said at the time, “Perhaps they [rating agencies] are stung by experience elsewhere. But otherwise I feel Indian banks are well-regulated. We don't deal in exotic products. Also, the amount of leveraging is low, we do 12-14 times while the best of European banks leverage up to 20 times.”

What is hidden, but implicit, in his statement is that any event that destroys even as little as 1/14th of the assets of an Indian bank will actually wipeout the bank's entire capital base! Because that's what 'leverage' means in finance. One hundred rupees of your deposit in SBI can be 'leveraged' to give out a loan 12 to 14 times that amount to some disfunctional crony corporate client.

Moreover, SBI has been getting into bed illicitly quite regularly with corporate clients lately. An article in Businessline on June 9 notes that SBI has overshot the exposure limits fixed by the RBI while lending to three corporate clients - Reliance Industries, Indian Oil Corporation and BHEL... and exceess overshot the RBI's limit by around Rs2,000 crores on several occasions.

RBI's credit limit is 15 per cent of a bank's capital for single borrowers, and 40 per cent for groups. So how close to a financial abyss is the State Bank of India in reality?

In Europe, greedy bankers, leveraged their capital 20 times (and more), made bad corporate 'investments', whereupon the host nation stepped in to bail them out in the name of saving deposiors' savings. But what it meant was that corporate losses and bankers' bad bets both end up as the national (soverign) debt to be paid by taxing citizens - living and yet-to-be-born!

The Government of India WILL have to allow Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the aviation sector in order to save not Kingfisher - but SBI! Because if SBI tumbles, the GoI may be forced to essentially print money in order bail the bank out, both fuelling monetary inflation and perhaps a soverign debt ratings downgrade. Higher inflation will force the RBI to push interest rates up, making it more costly for industries to borrow, causing the economy to slow down further, forcing workforce lay-offs, causing economic hardship... And - well, the kind of social unrest that Europe and the US are witnessing.

With over one-fifth of humanity within our borders, India will just that have to multiply - ok, let's call it, 'leverage' - the unrest by one billion!

But what really shows how obnoxious SBI's actions really is, is the contrast of its 'accommodative' attitude to corporate borrowers with the way they have dealt with individual customers. I'd posted before about SBI's predatory lending practices with hapless customers. I'll conclude with the same words that I concluded that post...

Before I leave, I have a question for ALL bankers: Just how much profit is enough? Seriously, will there ever be a time that you will pull your usurous fangs from the throat of humanity?

Just remember, Mr Banker, that one day when his hungry children are in bed, Mr Humanity will step out of his home holding a torch in one hand and a pitchfork in the other. And in the streets, he may not be alone.

You remember that - and that alone.

What does the Zeitgeist Movement have in common with the Vatican?

2011-11-12T20:42:00.009+04:00

Can a stupid idea be contagious?

While I admit the film by the Zeitgeist Movement was a real eye-opener for me, the so-called Resource-based System called for by Peter Joseph feels extremely ominous now that (I believe) I know better.

"We have a resource-based economic model. It's a 'ground-up' approach to resource management. And we make everything as efficient and productive as possible - technically! No monetary evaluation, no monetary association - because all that does is interfere (and cause more problems)."

Nice. But perfectionist, techno-utopian societies have been expounded before. Take Alduos Huxley's Brave new World from 1931.

And more recently, a benevolent One World Government based on themes such as "self interest must become social interest" and "common values in a global community" is being propagated by lumineries of selfless service like the Vatican and the European Union.

All that is left is to 're-define' the IMF's Special Drawing Rights (SDR) as a sort of non-monetary entitlement based on one's "use to society". They won't even have to change its name!

Peter claims to have "worked at Wall Street and Advertising - two of the most meaningless occupations on the planet"... Then he should know better, in my opinion.

Welcome to Empire 2.0

2011-10-31T14:24:00.018+04:00

The European debt crisis is all but over!

Here's how... The G20 is being asked to finance the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which will finance the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF), which in turn will finance the governments that will take over the debts of the too-big-to-fail European banks that have lent to Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Greece (PIIGs) by buying their bonds. And if all else fails, the US Federal Reserve's private bankers are already sitting with their collective fingers on the 'Print' button.

And when the chaos peaks, they'll declare a 'World Government' and 'World Central Bank' with the power to 'Reset' the entire system. Ordo ab Chao (or, Order from Chaos) indeed!

This is no idle hypothesis...

We know for a fact that the Vatican has been advocating the idea for years. The IMF already has a little-known 'World Currency' called Special Drawing Rights (SDRs). The EU leadership is actively discussing 'Global Governanace' within the G20.

In fact, in the Joint letter of the European Commission President and European Council President to the G20 they say that they are aiming for 'ambitious outcomes' in 'eight priorities' they've set for the G20 Summit at Cannes (France) on 3-4 Nov 2011. Priority No. 8 states simply: "Improving global governance. Finally, we look forward to discussing the report on global governance by Prime Minister David Cameron."

And what might be the shape of this global hegemony?

Well, the financial aspects have been worked out, where else, but in Europe - for a 'permanent rescue funding programme' called the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

Watch...

A love story gone horribly wrong... Episode 2

2011-10-29T22:21:00.033+04:00

In the first episode of "A love story gone horribly wrong", the torid East-meets-West-meets-East love triangle between the little-blue-pill popping Western oil speculator; the unpredictably fiesty Himalayan lass; and her dangerously capricious toy boy end in an unsavoury break-up.

The spotlight almost immediately falls on the homely doe-eyed girl-next-door, and the neighbourhood's sweatshop-running badboy.

But like any good Mills & Boon-inspired soap opera, there's an utterly gratuitous, inexplicable, and rather violent (thankfully, metaphorical) twist in the plot!

In Episode 2... The former toy boy confesses that he still has "feelings" for the mountain lassie - and that he'd defend his ex-amour if the old Yank ever laid a hand on her!

The old man is shattered! The timid one retreats, speachless at the betrayal. (Toy boy had been courting her just days ago!) ...And what will the surly badboy do when he gets back from an extended shopping trip at a 'clearance sale' in Southern Europe, laden with counterfeit designer stuff for his lady love - only to find his new gf snuggling up to her ex-bf?

Nail-biting stuff, this...

Stay tuned for Episode 3! Coming to a geopolitical theatre near you. (Well, provided you're somewhere near South Asia.)

Digital Moses & His Ten Commandments

2011-10-29T17:13:00.012+04:00

Douglas Rushkoff is one of the very, very few people who can see the big picture - not the complete picture - but close... Don't believe me; watch his documentaries.

I highly recommend The Persuaders (2001) and Merchants of Cool (2004). Both are goose-bumps inducingly accurate insider-view of the evolution of Advertising and brand-building - and its possible future.

The latter documentary introduced a then-obscure Advertising Agency called Acxiom. Six years later, Ad Age Agency Report 2010 declared that "For the first time in the history of the Agency Report, the ranking's biggest agency is far removed from the clique and clack of Madison Avenue. The largest U.S. agency is Arkansas-based Acxiom, a major player in data-centric marketing and customer-relationship management."

(I'd posted first about Acxiom on 27 April 2010, and Rushkoff's 2004 "prophecy" about Acxiom on 30 April 2010.)

This is the Ten Commandments for the Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff.

Watch live streaming video from etsy at livestream.com

Why Advertising isn't totally f-ed, yet

2011-10-26T17:35:00.042+04:00

There's an interesting article on FastCompany.com that talks about the woefully inadequate time, effort and resources spent on training people in Advertising Agencies.

Unsurprisingly...

Agencies are losing status as go-to thought leaders because frankly, leadership is in short supply. Clients are parceling out their projects to consultants and 'specialists.' The best and brightest grads aren’t choosing advertising the way they used to, nor taking it as seriously as other talent-based businesses.

So Advertising isn't attracting the quantity or quality of talent we used to!

Ad Agencies also have, for years now, expected new hires to jump right in and hit the ground running - very fast. Nothing wrong with it - except that they never get to slow down long enough to understand, let alone imbibe, create or nurture, a unique 'work culture'.

The FastCompany article also sites another article titled "Why the Average Barista Gets More Training Than Most Agency Staffers" by Andrew McMains of Adweek, which was based on a study of Talent Management.

The study described the Advertising industry’s "talent retention and development problem in hourglass terms: some training at the bottom levels, very little in the middle and more at the top." Naturally, the study found that one-in-three Advertising people they talked to were looking to move within 12 months!

So Advertising isn't able to retain talent either!

The FastCompany article says,

The next generation of leaders appears to be missing, according to creative directors we spoke to around the globe... The next level down looks like a giant case of arrested development: hard-working, heads down. But the mature, big-picture perspective once typical of people ready to step up has given way to hands thrown up when the going gets tough, tantrums, and myopia.

So the 'depth' of talent in Advertising is already wafer-thin!

Frankly, I don't think that 'training' per se is a solution for Advertising. After all, how do you train people to think creatively?

No, actually we just need to make our people feel - nay, convince them that - what they are doing (which is Advertising) is going to change the freaking world... That has, and always will, attract intelligent, imaginative and passionate people like moths to a burning flame. Trust me - I've met a few of them.

Let's light the fire, the moths will come.

And let's perhaps even 'bill by ideas' instead of merely by hours.

The Vatican has a stupid idea: One World Government

2011-10-24T17:53:00.045+04:00

Sorry - but a 'One World Government' is a really, really stupid idea, regardless of where it came from, or its intentions...

The Holy See has today released a new document titled “Towards a reform of international financial and monetary system in the prospect of a public authority with universal competence”. The ambitious proposals to tackle the global economic crisis includes a "World Political Authority" and a "Central World Bank"!

Not only is this particular idea from the Vatican not the light at the end of the dark tunnel that humanity needs - it is an oncoming train!

Pope Benedict XVI actually began working on an earlier document called Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), for the establishment of a “true world political authority” to oversee the economy and work for the “common good”, more than two years before it was finally released in July 2009, according to The New York Times.

The new document builds upon the principles outlined in the earlier one.

The new document says,

The establishment of a world political Authority should be preceded by a preliminary phase of consultation from which a legitimated institution will emerge that is in a position to be an effective guide and, at the same time, can allow each country to express and pursue its own particular good. The exercise of this Authority at the service of the good of each and every one will necessarily be super partes (impartial): that is, above any partial vision or particular good, in view of achieving the common good. Its decisions should not be the result of the more developed countries' excessive power over the weaker countries. Instead, they should be made in the interest of all, not only to the advantage of some groups, whether they are formed by private lobbies or national governments.

Is it just me, or has it just described the principles behind of the (currently) mortally wounded European Union? Or is it the lofty ideals touted for the creation of the elaborate Marionette Show that is the United Nations?

Or is the Vatican, one of the apex organisations in the world, actually - well, pontificating a dangerous ideology: Collectivism?

It says,

Thanks to the principle of solidarity, a lasting and fruitful relation is built up between global civil society and a world public Authority as States, intermediate bodies, various institutions – including economic and financial ones – and citizens make their decisions with a view to the global common good, which transcends national goods.

But History has taught that the idea that "the group is greater than the individual" is the 'common thread', if you will, of societies that eventually become highly repressive, and iniquitous, because some individuals in positions of (relatively) greater power inevitable 'game' the system to their advantage.

Collectivism has repeatedly and visibly failed in all its various forms... Examples in history, include the Soviet Union, and the crumbling super-welfare states of the US and EU today. In fiction, it is more ominous... Examples, include the social orders depicted in Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1931) and 1984 (George Orwell, 1948).

My fundamental issue is this: Giving more power to those who already have power is NEVER going to be a solution - under ANY circumstances.

If humanity does bow its head collectively, let it be in prayer - not servitude.

Lord Acton - a very influential man himself, rightly said: "I cannot accept [...] that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men [...] All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Neither unbridled capitalism nor oppressive socialism works - at least not to the benefit of 99.99%. Another of Lord Acton's profound quotations is this: "The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."

Amen.

The revolution will be livestreamed

2011-10-19T16:36:00.005+04:00

There's Livestream coverage of the action in Greece.

Watch live streaming video from syntagmasquare at livestream.com

It's also covered by Zougla Live Radio. The commentary is in Greek - but you really don't need a language to understand angry crowds and flying tear gas canisters.

Why 'employment opportunity' is an oxymoron

2011-10-18T13:29:00.021+04:00

One thing I need to clear at the outset is that 'being employed' is different from pursuing a gratifying and/or rewarding activity.

'Employment' is quite possibly the worst use of a human life.

So why do we think of 'employment' or 'good job' as an end in itself? Why do we believe 'employment' is actually a human right?

If you answered: "For the money", then it is time you realise that there really is no such thing. 'Money' is simply a notion that converts someone's "promise to pay" into a piece of printed paper or pixels on an ATM screen.

It is belief - and that alone - that gives 'money' value. For instance, have you tried buying a bus ticket in India with the equivalent in another currency?

'Employment', 'money' and 'lifestyle' are all mere concepts that exsit only in your mind.

Now watch... A sad, beautiful, and somewhat universal, story about 'employment opportunities'.

Film: Last Train Home (China, 2009)
Type: Documentary (Chinese, with English subtitles)
Director: Lixin Fan
Duration: 85 mins (6 parts)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Synopsis:
Changhua Zhang and Suqin Chen are a couple from a rural village in China's Sichuan province. Frustrated with their lack of employment opportunities, they traveled to the industrial city of Guangdong and took jobs with a large textile firm, making clothing for export. However, Changhua and Suqin were not able to bring their two children with them, and since then the kids have been raised by their grandparents, with their mother and father staying in touch though occasional telephone calls.

The only time they have a chance to see their now-teenage children is during China's annual New Year's celebration; they are among the 130 million Chinese whose work keeps them away from their families and make the trip home during the holiday, resulting in an overcrowded rail system as the trains struggle to keep up with the rush.

Filmmaker Lixin Fan follows Changhua and Suqin over the course of several years in the documentary Last Train Home, as the couple makes the long journey home (over a thousand miles) only to find that their family is slowly falling apart - 16-year-old Qin and her younger brother, Yang, are all but strangers now to their parents, and the youngsters have come to resent their parents, while Qin considers leaving school to move to the city on her own and get a job.

The most famous book in Advertising

2011-10-17T19:08:00.003+04:00

By Advertising's two most prolific authors, lately.

Stop hating the top 1%

2011-10-16T20:21:00.010+04:00

It's really not fair to characterise the current social and economic inequalities based on the top 1% vs. bottom 99% income earners.

According to MotherJones, this is who are in the top 1% income bracket in the US: They are overwhelmingly not Wall Street fat cats...

The really startling, exponential inequality becomes apparent as you go closer to the very - the top 0.01% and beyond. This too is from MotherJones.

Research it... In the US, there are some 400 billionaires - compare their wealth to the nation's GDP. In India, the 100 richest individuals (and their immediate family members) account for nearly 25% of the country's GDP - and that too in fully accounted-for wealth alone! In Russia, the wealth to GDP ratio is even more skewed. Now imagine the clout they wield over the entire system.

I assume this trend holds true for almost every nation - yes, every nation - regardless of its purported ideological leaning!

So please open your eyes and blaming the top 1% income earners.

Stop hating a number. Start looking for names.

People vs. Bankers

2011-10-16T18:49:00.008+04:00

From Wall Street, to all across Southern Europe... and finally it would seem, the Occupation Army has reached the Belly of the Usury Beast... OccupyLSX began at St Paul's Cathedral in the City of London on 15 October 2011.

This is their livestream...

occupylsx on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

The 'Occupy Together' movement seems a little too well-oiled and slickly orchestrated to really be 100% about the 99% (I'd rather it was more accurately identified as the 99.99%). It even has clever crowd-sourced downloadable PDF posters.

So - where next? What next?

More pictures of the naked emperor

2011-10-15T20:06:00.010+04:00

"I'm not moving" is a powerful, well-edited short film by Corey Ogilvie. Visuals and words that together lay it bare!

Perhaps history is what happens when people don't flinch in the face of hypocrisy...

An oath for the hypocrites

2011-10-11T21:06:00.029+04:00

Case 1: Jeffrey Sachs, Economist

Jeffrey Sachs is no ordinary economics professor. He is Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and founder and co-director of the Millennium Promise Alliance, a non-profit organisation dedicated to ending extreme poverty and hunger. He was twice named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, and authored two New York Times bestsellers, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, and Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.

In an opinion article in AlJazeera, Jeffrey Sachs says that globalisation calls for more government control on economies - not less. He even criticises the US policy of "cutting the role of government in the domestic economy" over the last 30 years.

He says that governmental deregulation has meant that "the rich have used their wealth to strengthen their grip on power"... And now there are "important signs around the world that people are fed up with governments that cater to the rich while ignoring everyone else".

But... before the buttercups, baby unicorns and rainbows, Mr Sachs was the man whose work gave rise to the economics term, Shock Therapy.

His first live lab rat was Bolivia in the 80s. He turned it into an iniquitous corporate-run profiteering racket that eventually brought the present president Evo Morales to power. His final masterpiece of disasterous economic advice was the oligarchical cesspool in Russia of the 90s.

After this was accomplished, Prof. Sachs later embraced U2 lead-singer, Bono, to transform butterfly-like into a gentler version dedicated to saving the children of Africa.

Prof. Sachs' economic Shock Therapy in the 80s and 90s usually involved the rapid transfer of PUBLIC PROPERTY AND ASSETS to private ownership. And since it happens during hyperinflationary conditions, the price in foreign currency is extremely cheap.

In more recent days, so-called government intervention in the economy has been mainly to prop-up stock markets, bailout private financial institutions and rescue bankers from bad investments. But notice how, this time around, it involves the conversion of PRIVATE DEBT into public debt to be borne by future taxpayers!

Makes me wonder: Is the kinder 'New Sachs' really any different from the marauding 'Old Sachs'?

Case 2: Andrew Liveris, Chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company

No small fry, this. The Dow Chemical Company is one of the largest multinational corporations in the world, a leader in science and technology, and one of the world's biggest manufacturing companies. Liveris is apparently an ardent advocate for manufacturing, and serves as Co-Chair of President Obama's Advanced Manufacturing Partnership.

It is apt then that Mr Liveris wrote a book called Make It in America: The Case for Re-Inventing the Economy

The Wall Street Journal review fawns: "In Make It in America, he (Liveris) calls for a national strategy to revive manufacturing. We need manufacturing jobs, he says, if we are to keep a growing population busy and start paying off our debts to the rest of the world."

It goes on... "Mr. Liveris doesn't shy away from proposing ideas that have defeated countless other reformers. For instance, he wants to overhaul our K-12 education system so that it will concentrate more on science, math and engineering. That promises to be a long struggle, he admits. ‘I pushed science at the dinner table with my kids,’ writes Mr. Liveris, who loved chemistry as a boy..."

The book was published on 4 January 2011.

On 8 October 2011, Andrew Liveris announces to the world that a 20-billion dollar joint venture plan between Dow and Aramco will create 26 new plants and 14,000 new jobs - in Saudi Arabia!

Both men still retain straight faces, their jobs, as well as the adulation of many proles!

"#"$*%&!!!" - What else can one say?

"Selling is fun, influencing people is a joy"

2011-10-11T14:16:00.003+04:00

What we all can learn from "Search for the World's Greatest Salesperson" by Ogilvy...

What We've Learned So Far

View more presentations from OgilvyOne Worldwide

Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

2011-10-06T03:55:00.005+04:00

Steve Jobs is no more...

"Here’s to the crazy ones.

The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.

And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

A salute to the man who really did change the world.

R.I.P

There is perhaps no better tribute than to re-post these simple, life-changing words of wisdom from the man himself...

Human, meet Siri...

2011-10-05T18:02:00.009+04:00

Some of the more paranoid techno-phobes have already begun comparing 'Siri', the voice-command software on the new Apple iPhone 4S, to sinister predecessors form Hollywood, like Skynet in Terminator and others to HAL 9000 in 2001.

But I think it's a precursor to something more like this...

Incidentally, Steve Jobs has been Co-founder & CEO of both Apple and Pixar, the makers of WALL-E! Phew, that's eerie...

Why traditional publications need to go social online

2011-10-04T20:17:00.027+04:00

Having to content with the fact that they always several hours behind 24-hour TV news and online news aggregators; hardly ever being able to air breaking news; and almost never being able to be part of the resultant chatter... traditional publications find it impossible to stay away from the online medium.

Today, the rise of mobile Internet means that newsfeeds are now broadcasted directly to individuals around the world! In fact, the availability of real time economic data has made business publications almost superfluous.

On the flip-side there are high quality editorials, op-eds and expert analyses that still command respect and are valued by readers. But this has a direct cost - and mushrooming competition and thinning advertising revenue do exert tremendous pressure on expenses.

So they all inevitably have to go online looking to generate revenue and build equity.

However, there are 3 practical aspects to be considered when an offline publication goes online:

1. Offering largely the same content for free online (almost in real-time) would logically eat into offline subscription. This problem would be more pronounced for non-news, non-daily publications that cannot constantly update content.

2. The few dozen competitors on a supermarket shelf, now turn into millions of rival content sources online!

3. Advertisers may not wish to invest in online advertising till sufficient traffic is generated. Worse still, they may ask for online advertising to be a 'value-add' to a paid offline ad.

The solution, possibly, is for the online version of a publication to cater to a much more niche community than the offline one!

For example, a Women's magazine (offline) may turn into a Women Entrepreneurs' community online. Or a Business magazine (offline) may become a CMOs' community online.

The rationale is that while the objective of an offline publication is to sell space - so the broader the audience, the more the advertisement possibilities - the goal online should be to build and monetise specific user communities by creating high-value advertising opportunites.

The aim online must be for the highest 'quality' of interaction / involvement, instead of 'quantity' of traffic.

Yes, it is 'good' content that drives involvement and interaction; but we can only begin to define 'good' when we know 'for whom'.

A love story gone horribly wrong

2011-10-03T00:02:00.045+04:00

It was the typical East-meets-West romance. Bellicose Western billionaire (few know he's neck-deep in debt) wows - if a bit boorishly - the frisky local lass on the slopes of the Himalayas. They settle down - well, sort of.

After a turbulent on-again, off-again relationship lasting three decade, the libidinous, little-blue-pill-popping (uncle) Sam has finally broken up with the feisty highland wench! And the mainstream tabloids and shrill talking heads on TV are having a field-day speculating about her more-than-maternal interest in one of the couple's several unruly love children!

Apparently, he now suspects she's been having 'it' behind his back all the while! (Tch, tch, the poor sods are always the last ones to find out.)

However, their break-up is particularly nasty, with much ugly name-calling and the threat of sordid linen being aired in public. (The pair had been - on more than one occasion - accused of getting up to some exceptionally deviant stuff!)

Meanwhile, the yokel from next door with who she's been having a torid, clandestine affair has dumped her inexplicably and unceremoniously!

As if conspiring to land a coup de grâce to her grieving heart, both her ex-paramour and the licentious (uncle) Sam have flung themselves quite shamelessly into the ample bosom of her preening (and somewhat bewildered) eternal rival - the shy brunette living down the street.

On a classic rebound, the fiesty lassie for her part, cozies up to the notorious neighbourhood bad-boy - a shady, inscrutable oriental, who surprises everyone with his uncharacteristic vow: "Till death do us part!"

This could make for a riveting 100-something episode television soap-opera.

Or it could be a rather precarious geo-political situation developing in South Asia.

India to drag Monsanto to court?

2011-10-02T12:42:00.007+04:00

In an unprecedented move, India is expected to be the very first country (and hopefully, not the last one) to take legal action against a multinational company for bio-piracy!

India is expected to drag Monsanto to court for taking indigenous plants bred by generations of people in rural India; tinkering with their genes; and then re-introducing them as genetically modified varieties owned by Monsanto!

Besides it being an arrogant 'flipping the bird' in the face of the nation and its farming community, we also need to remember that the modified gene will eventually contaminate the indigenous genepool - and, technically, Monsanto could end up owning all the fields that are contaminated with the GMO.

Read how transgenes contaminated indigenous corn, the staple food of Mexico. As well as wild varieties of Canola in Canada.

And one thing I cannot quite reconcile with though, is the involvement of India's own Department of Biotechnology in tranferring indigenous know-how to Monsanto through its subsidiary, Mahyco, on terms that can be described as both ridiculous and disgusting.

C'est liquid locomotion...

2011-10-01T18:23:00.006+04:00

A.k.a Dubstep Robot Dance

I just love it.

Anonymous comes to Bollywood...

2011-09-28T13:36:00.027+04:00

According to PC World, Anonymous' failed 'Operation India' had all the makings of a Bollywood thriller...

Let's begin with a flashback...

It is June 2011, and a well-meaning group - Anonymous or someone claiming to be them - hack one of the websites of the National Informatics Centre, an Indian government IT organisation.

They were, they said, protesting the police action on Baba Ramdev's protest venue in Delhi. (Now, I have nothing against Anonymous (or any other group) throwing their collective hat into the Lokpal circus ring - but I do question their motives.)

Here comes the obligatory comedy sequence...

The following is their list of demands...

The demand for "The complete removal of corruption in all its forms..." seems like extreme naiveté at best; and "clearance of pending court cases in all courts of India swiftly, and fairly" makes me stop and question their intellect.

But the one that, both made my jaw drop and raised my hackles, was this: "Unique ID number (like citizenship) for everything. All data must get store (sic) under single ID."

First, the UID has nothing to do with citizenship - it is for all residents of India. Second, once the UID is made a necessary pre-condition (something the Indian governement is trying hard to do) for services that are actually a citizen's right, it does not bode well for anyone who those with access to the 'delete' button disapprove of!

But finally, and this one's a real knee-slapper... To have all of one's data stored and collated under a single ID is ipso facto the abolition of privacy. It strikes me as either a little odd for such a demand to come from a group calling itself "Anonymous"!

Anonymous also claim they took down the Indian Army's website - and end up being blitzkrieged by outraged Indians on facebook. They quickly hit 'Control Z' on their keyboards, but it was too late! (Apparently, the Indian Army manages to keep a decent public image notwithstanding the efforts of Arundhati Roy.)

Finally, we cut to the climax in the villian's lair (minus the plaid jackets, flashing coloured zero-watt bulbs, and tank full of hungry crocs)...

In true Bollywood ishtyle, the heroes (calling themselves 'Real Anonymous') burst-in in the nick of time. They 'unmask' the villianous first group for what they really are - and save Mother India's izzat!

The End.

Anonymous: Hackers turn Economists?

2011-09-28T12:31:00.003+04:00

Anonymous - the erstwhile hackers group - has morphed into a economic research organisation! Honest.

According to the Financial Times, "The group has accused Chaoda Modern Agriculture, one of China’s biggest vegetable producers, of fraud in what the faction says will be the first of many such investigations. It plans both to comb corporate balance sheets itself and solicit WikiLeaks-style submissions from whistleblowers."

Last heard, the company in question was getting a fair bit of pounding on the markets.

Here's more about what Anonymous Analytics - the new avatar - are up to.

I truly don't know what to make of this... except to wait and see who the next target is, which would possibly give a better idea of what their real agenda is.

Occupy Wall Street. Live!

2011-09-26T23:53:00.002+04:00

Wow!

Watch live streaming video from globalrevolution at livestream.com

"Goldman Sachs rules the world."

2011-09-26T19:12:00.008+04:00

There you have it - on the BBC, at that!

I think he used "Goldman Sachs" as a sort of metaphor. But the rather unsurprising part is that Goldman Sachs and their ilk do have a plan on how to profit from the misery of millions.

Let's not be naive about this - if someone makes a profit, someone else has to make a loss. What could be more simple than millions of stupid working-class people losing their savings to a handful of financiers?

And if you know history, you would know this is definitely not the first time the mammon-worshippers did it. (Hint: Find some time to research who financed - oops, giveaway! - wars and colonial exploitation over the centuries.)

One more thing, the well-meaning Mr. Alessio Rastani might say that anybody can make money from a market crash; "it isn't just for some people in the elite" - but it doesn't work that way! Financial trading isn't about a risky venture paying off or a complex computer algorithm estimating the exact timing of a market crash. It is straight-out collution and manipulation involving those at the very, very top.

In other words, most "market cycles" inevitably culminate - without exception - with the profits passed on to the owners of capital and their facilitators, and the losses passed on to the working-class.

All 9/11 myths busted in under 5 minutes

2011-09-24T20:00:00.003+04:00

This would be hilarious - if it wasn't a sobering slap-in-the-face as well.

For goodness' sake, turn off the damn TV!

Third World to bailout Europe?

2011-09-10T18:25:00.016+04:00

The IMF's list of 'participants' - new and old...

(Source: zerohedge.com)

According to the Wall Street Journal the IMF is reactivating a 'New Arrangements to Borrow' (ironically, NAB) to keep Europe's soverign-debt crisis from bringing down the entire usurous global financial ponzi-scheme. The panacea (or is it just a bandaid) that the IMF is looking for: A credit pool of $580 billion.

Incredibly, besides India and other financial heavyweights like Cyprus and the Philippines, it also looks like Greece and Portugal will now be called on to bail themselves out! (Hmm, I wonder what the cold steel of a monetary gun to the temple feels like.)

As usual, there is an incisive, insightful and rather alarming analysis on Zerohedge. It's a must-read.

Let's hear about the seriousness of the issue from the head of the IMF...

In the opening remarks of her talk on “The Challenges for the Global Economy”, delivered at the Royal Institute for International Affairs - Chatham House, London, on 9 September 2011, Christine Lagarde, Managing Director of the IMF, said: "The bottom line is that global activity has slowed, and downside risks have increased. At the same time, the global rebalancing of demand needed for sustainable global growth has stalled."

In plain English, it means, "Welcome to the Edge of Monetary Apocalypse" - or in simpler terms words, "It's time for the proles to get used to the Age of Global Austerity."

Of course, the esteemed financial and political 'leaders' who participated in the discourse at Chatham House cannot be inconvenienced by the loss of either power or pelf as a result of a disaster they are complicit in - wittingly, or only half-wittingly... It is the citizen, the taxpayer, the worker, the employee, the small business-owner, and his progeny who must be made to pay - and that's what our alphabet soup of 'security agencies' are for anyway.

Is it 1984 quite yet?

Does the future belong to Freelancers?

2011-09-10T17:56:00.002+04:00

Welcome to the 'Freelance Economy' - the world's new economy...

HERE'S BOTH AN UPDATE AND A FLASHBACK...
And when it comes to the Advertising Industry, my readers (yes... those brave, intellectually tenacious and precious few souls who somehow manage to glean substance from my rambling) may recall a few - and at that point in time, borderline blasphemous - blog posts from early 2010.

17 Jan 2010 - What if you don't need an Ad Agency to do Advertising?

25 Mar 2010 - Freelancing in the plug-and-play economy

For an Ad Agency, a plug-and-play model has its advantages...
1. It takes domain experts to create a truly effective marketing exercise for a specific medium
2. There is a plethora of media available today - e.g. Print, TV, Direct Marketing, Internet, Public Relations / Advocacy, Social Media or Digital Networks Marketing, etc.
3. It is unviable for an Ad Agency to retain experts in every domain

For the Advertiser, the pressure to opt for a flexible plug-and-play model come from various corporate levels...
1. The Board and the CFO want cost-reduction
2. The CEO and the CMO want expertise, effectiveness and measurability
3. The Sales Team and Dealers want high visibility, high impact and rapid tactical responsiveness (quick turnaround)

The plug-and-play model has its charms for the Creative-types too...
1. Without hierarchy, talent and skill can quickly command it's deserved price (and respect)
2. Talent and passion can be developed into specialisations - viz. writing, photography, illustration, digital animation, etc.
3. Assignments can be chosen based on how well they align to talent, skill and passion... Meaning, you can decide you'll never do another corporate newsletter again as long as you live unless the price is right

Advertising: The Naked Truth

2011-09-07T12:32:00.006+04:00

We've managed to capture all the nudity and veracity in stop-motion animation too...

If you like it, please share it. And if this video goes viral, I'm holding a LUCKY DRAW for those who shared it...

First Prize: All-the-cheap-liquor-you-can-drink-in-an-afternoon at Khyber
Second Prize: Two (ok, three) decent Hangover Shots for a Morning After
Third Prize: One bottle of bottom-shelf Vodka of your choice from BrandsElite

Please Note: If you're a teetotaller, you can exchange your prize for an equivalent amount of Eternal Gratefulness. And I will also redeem your prize for you!

Did world governments begin preparing in 2008 for social chaos in 2011?

2011-08-10T02:23:00.015+04:00

My previous post was titled "Has London been preparing for riots since 2008?" And in August 2011, we see the possibility of the army being deployed London.

The following videos are from 2008 too... This time it's talk from Washington DC on using US troops on US soil!

Uploaded on October 7, 2008...
Part I

Part II

An RT report on the US troop re-stationing, says that 20,000 battle-hardened troops are scheduled to finish their 'training' by 2011!

Well, I'm sure this is all just a wild coincidence - but I'm going to hazzard a guess anyway...

It looks - to me - that in 2008, at the height (or is it, depth) of the previous 'economic crisis' when governments gave away the future earnings of taxpayers as 'bailouts' and 'stimulus' to the Global Finance Cartel and Oligarchs, the powers-that-be in multiple nations (G8?, G20?) also came to understand the massive scale and inevitable social consequence of the NEXT financial crisis.

They probably realised that the biggest threat to their hold on power and the status quo came from WITHIN their boorders!

I'm also beginning to think that they possibly know the approximate TIMING of the next financial chaos... In effect, we may not merely be seeing the makings of the next financial crisis, and it's societal fallout (as in London)... We may be actually witnessing something much, much more profound!

Could this be the dawn of an Age where its citizens are a nation's (read, the rulers') greatest enemies?

I'd posted that India's governing apparatus too makes it clear that the growing youth population is a serious concerns.

And if you read my post, you will see another interesting coincidence - that much of the 'homeland security' infrastructure even in India is privately-owned and seems to be globally inter-operable too. Government merely lends a convenient facade of legitimacy.

Take Home Minister, Chitambaram's pet NatGrid project. NatGrid is India's mass surveillence network aimed at citizens - and it was created using the Information Technology Act, which was passed through parliament without debate - in 2008!

NatGrid is set to be fully operational in - did you guess it? - 2011! Too many coincidences, perhaps?

Has London been preparing for riots since 2008?

2011-08-09T23:42:00.006+04:00

Maybe it's just a creepy coincidence... Or maybe it's not.

Watch the following videos in any order - and draw your own conclusions.

Uploaded on August 31, 2009.

Uploaded on August 9, 2011.

India leading market for outsourced pharmaceutical 'guinea pigs'

2011-08-03T20:17:00.012+04:00

Clinical Research on new drugs is worth about $30 billion. That is a whole lot more than the life of a few illiterate Indians.

The equation according to the Association of Clinical Research Organisation (ACRO) couldn't be simpler: "Greater population = faster clinical trials = new treatments available sooner. It really is a simple equation. In fact, studies show that the research time needed for cancer clinical trials can be cut in half by conducting the trials globally versus solely in the U.S."

But 'population' is not the only business advantage that outsourced clinical trials in India offer... The cost is low. Regulation is lax. Corruption is rife. Patients are desperate. And the penalty for using human beings as guinea pigs is minimal - or indeed, non-existent.

As the Al Jazeera TV reported implies, what besides profits could motivate the testing of exorbitantly expensive drugs on illiterate slum-dwellers and farm labourers who can never afford it?

The 25-min version of the episode (below) answers the question adequately. Particularly illuminating is improper testing of drugs on people in Bhopal who are already suffering from the debilitating after-effects of corporate greed and official apathy.

If you are not hypertensive, I recommend you watch.

P.S: Also watch out for the part covering the 'demonstration project' for Merck's Cervical Cancer drug, funded by a $27 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that was shut down by the Indian government after public furore over the death of several girl.

Are you pondering the obvious question: If efficiacy and safety in badly conducted clinical trials are largely undependable, how do they get released in the Big Pharma's home markets?

Well, let's just say that India obviously does not have a monopoly on corruption.

How TV is programming our children

2011-08-03T12:59:00.016+04:00

There is a study by psychologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) "to document historical change in the values communicated to 'tween' audiences, age 9-11, who are major media consumers and whose values are still being formed."

Researchers analyzed 16 values projected by the Two Most Popular TV Shows for 9 to 11-year-olds in the U.S. every decade for 50 years, from 1967 through 2007.

Their findings shocked even them. 'To be famous' is the No. 1 value emphasized by popular shows on TV (biggest change from No. 15 in 1967) and 'To make money' is value No. 5 (up from No. 12 in 1967). The distortion becomes even more obvious when we consider that 'being kind / helping others' is No. 12, down from No. 2 in 1967.

How did 'Fame' and 'money' become the most emphasised values on TV programmes for kids?

Well, else what can we expect with the countless 'Reality' shows on virtually every popular TV channel baiting teens (and greedy parents) with million-dollar prizes and instant fame?

Sadly, few bother to understand the warped intentions and cold commercial agenda behind the hyped-up publicity, cheering fans, glittering stages, celebrity judges, and blinding arc-lights...

In reality... Reality Shows - especially 'talent' shows - spawn an assembly line of superfical 'young icons' held on a tight contractual leash by the commercial 'entertainment' machine to be ruthlessly used and sold as advertisement tools. It has little to do with 'talent' - and everything to do with 'marketability'.

Everyone makes a quick buck hawking stuff to fawning 'fans' - before the icon is chewed up and spat out into the real world. While, the phony fans go crazy over the 'next big thing' on TV.

But what really hightens the reach and impact of the new breed of Reality Shows on TV on impressionable children is the spread from the idiot box onto the Internet - especially on social networks.

India forgets past, exploits Africa's future

2011-07-27T22:53:00.009+04:00

(Photo by Philipp Hedemann)

This is 'Red', an 8-year old Ethiopian boy on Karmjeet Singh Sekhon's farm in western Ethiopia. According to a Swiss website, Red works in blistering 40 Degrees Celsius heat to dig up weeds.

Karmjeet, on the other hand is a 68-year old investor/manager of a "huge farm, which covers an area of nearly 300,000 hectares in western Ethiopia."

(I wonder if it's a part of Karuturi Global's Farmistan.)

What makes it even more disgraceful is that according to the United Nations, "4.5 million people in Ethiopia are currently in need of aid as a result of a devastating drought" - while most of the produce on massive Indian, Chinese and GCC states-owned mega-farms are ear-marked for export!

According to the World Bank, "at least 35 million hectares of land has been bought or leased" in Africa.

And the Ethiopian government says that (companies from) 36 countries including India, China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia have leased farm land there.

How life in the 21st Century looks like the fruition of ideas from the 20th Century

2011-07-26T21:30:00.019+04:00

Edward Louis Bernays was the nephew of the illustrious psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. He is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the field of Public Relations.

The following excerpt from his book, Propaganda shows just how uncannily closely the world has followed the scripts of early 20th Century writers like Bernays' Propaganda (1928), Orwell's 1984 (1948), and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1931).

"In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. We have voluntarily agreed to let an invisible government sift the data and high-spot the outstanding issues so that our field of choice shall be narrowed to practical proportions. From our leaders and the media they use to reach the public, we accept the evidence and the demarcation of issues bearing upon public questions; from some ethical teacher, be it a minister, a favorite essayist, or merely prevailing opinion, we accept a standardized code of social conduct to which we conform most of the time.

In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if every one went around pricing, and chemically testing before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would become hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.

It might be better to have, instead of propaganda and special pleading, committees of wise men who would choose our rulers, dictate our conduct, private and public, and decide upon the best types of clothes for us to wear and the best kinds of food for us to eat. But we have chosen the opposite method, that of open competition. We must find a way to make free competition function with reasonable smoothness. To achieve this society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda."

George Santayana, a Spanish-American philosopher wrote, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." He wrote it in The Life of Reason (1905-06).

Have there really been no new ideas since?

Is Foreign Policy just euphemism for Corporate Agenda

2011-07-20T22:17:00.027+04:00

In June 2011, India's Finance Minister visited the US along with a delegation of bureaucrats, industry regulators and businessmen. The highlight of the visit perhaps was the discussion organised jointly by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Brookings Institution.

Now, if you remember, the former Head of the CII, Tarun Das, was embroiled in a rather unsavoury taped telephone conversation with corporate lobbyist Niira Radia in what was allegedly the planning stage of the 2G Spectrum Scam. The CII chief appeared to admit that he was lobbying the PMO for certain Ministerial berths for specific individuals in the UPS government - including Telecom Ministry for A. Raja.

(Outlook India has all the details on the Niira Radia tapes if you're interested.)

CII office-bearers apparently have enviable and unfettered access to the uppermost echelons of the government.

At last month's CII-Brookings event India's Finance Mukherjee, Pranab Mukherjee, regaled the audience of corporate heads and the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, with the claim that India had "untapped potential" to absorb Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) worth $1 trillion.

This is very vast sum - one that dwarfs the $60 billion annual budget that the World Bank says is enough to meet the Millennium Development Goals - for the entire world!

The minister also promised more "reforms" and "investor-friendly" policies. Access to Indian financial and retail sectors seemed to be what most interested US businesses. In turn, India's major concern seemed to largely revolve around H1B visas!

Well, this theme is not one-off. The topic under furitive negotiations on the India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) seems very familiar.

This is British MEP, Nick Griffin of the nationalist BNP...

Here is he is on radio, elaborating the issue a little more...

Mode 4 is NOT new.

At the World Bank (WB)-World Trade Organisation (WTO) Symposium on Mode 4 in 2002, India had strong participation - including a presentation by the represenative of the Indian software services sector, NASSCOM.

Another presentation - a paper called 'Economic Implications of Liberalising Mode 4 Trade' presented by Prof. Alan Winters, School of Social Sciences, University of Sussex spells out the concept and socio-economic implications of Mode 4.

Some interesting point:
- It is mainly to do with "the temporary movement of natural persons (TMNP) from developing to developed member countries"

- TMNP can "often argued to be analytically no different from ordinary goods trade"

- In fact, "admitting less-skilled workers under a Mode 4 liberalisation is fundamentally no different from admitting imports of labour intensive goods under a GATT liberalisation"

- One of the draws for developed economies is that TMNP "offers the foreign workers no rights under the (social security) systems"

- And... "(I)t is the flow of unskilled (or, strictly, less skilled) workers from developing to developed countries that promises the larger returns"

- With 'free-trade' in cheap labour, the benefit for big businesses is that "if firms can control the number of jobs in a labour market, they can drive wages down"

Now, I may be over-reacting, but just imagine columns of millions of unskilled or semi-skilled Indian workers in uniform overalls, tagged and numbered by UID - and ready for export.

Proudly 'Made in India'.

Debunking the myth of Indian democracy

2011-07-13T19:04:00.026+04:00

From 2008 to 2009, India nearly doubled its number of billionaires according to Forbes' Rich List to 52. In 2011, the country increased its tally to 55 billionaires.

The combined net worth of India's 100 wealthiest people in 2009 was $276 billion. More than China's 100 wealthiest with $170 billion.

According to a Reuters article, they also account for one-fourth of India's GDP. Let that sink in... 100 people make up about 25% of India's economy.

Before the collective Indian chest swells to bursting-point with pride, consider that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) calculates India's per capita GDP in 2010 at $1,265. Less than Yemen with $1,282.

The combined net worth of 1 million average Indians is $126.5 billion - still less than half the top 100 individuals.

But that's just the White Economy...

According to data provided by the Swiss Bankers Association, Indians have $1,456 billion in Black Money stashed in Swiss Accounts. That's more than the rest of the world combined!

Who do you suppose those Indians are? A report by Global Financial Integrity confirms that "High Net-Worth Individuals (HNWIs) and private companies were found to be the primary drivers of illicit flows out of India's private sector." (I'd posted about this earlier.)

I don't begrudge the rich. But I do have something to say to the ignoramus thumping his chest about living in the "largest democracy": "You don't count, buddy!"

India's economic growth story is not - I repeat, NOT - about you. At best you'll be held up as one of the bottomfeeders benefiting from the "trickle down".

If you are naive enough to believe that the government is of, by and for the "common man", I pity you.

Look up the list - if you can find a comprehensive one - of individuals and bureaucrats who accompanied the Finance Minister of India, Mr Pranab Mukherjee for discussions and negotiations with US bureaucrats and businessmen. India will open up its Financial and Retail sectors. And the US may widen the H1B visa allotments to Indian companies.

Look up the list of private business people who went with Manmohan Singh on his visit to Addis Ababa. You have no idea what our government is complicit in. Read this Open Letter to the People of India from an African.

You think reforms and liberalisation is to give YOU a better standard of living? Far from it... According to the Human Development Index, India ranks next to East Timor. And incredibly, the Indian States that have the least industrialisation and the least investor-friendly environment are the best off.

Coincidence? Hardly...

The same report on India's Black Economy by Global Financial Integrity adds: "In the post-reform period of 1991-2008, deregulation and trade liberalization accelerated the outflow of illicit money from the Indian economy."

There's one more thing... Some 58% of India's Members of Parliament are multi-millionaires in Rupee terms. And you find the same inverse relation between MPs' wealth and Human Development Index, states-wise. And the average declared assets (yes, just the declared wealth) of MPs grew 186% over a 5-year period from 2004.

Do you still think democracy is what you thought it meant?

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

2011-07-10T18:30:00.023+04:00

The Green Revolution around the world involved increased usage of modern agricultural tools and techniques, building of irrigation infrastructure - but most crucially the revolution centred around the use of genetics to develop and then distribute hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and chemical pesticides to farmers, especially in the then Third World. Much of the 'scientific' co-ordination was done by the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) created by the Rockefeller Foundation.

The Rockefeller Family had huge interests in petroleum and international financing - both essential components of the Green Revolution.

In early 1963, the Rockefeller Foundation sent Norman Borlaug to India. A former employee of DuPont, and then Director of the International Wheat Improvement Program (funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation) in Mexico, Borlaug earns the sobriquet, "Father of the Green Revolution". And he goes on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian honour. He is sometimes credited with saving 1 billion people from starvation.

Environmental activist, Vandana Shiva, doesn't agree.

She points out that the new agribusiness model promotes excessive chemical use, causes large-scale loss of biodiversity, and condemns farming community to a viscious cycle of financial indebtedness.

But there's a kicker...

Apparently, "alarmed by the loss of crop diversity and the vulnerability of the world’s seed collections", the Rockefeller Foundation, and the increasingly everywhere Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are funding the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

A doomsday bunker built deep inside a snow covered mountain on a remote island halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, the vault will store "millions of seeds representing every important crop variety available in the world."

The storage facility is, it would seem, "built to stand the test of time – and of natural or manmade disasters."

Manmade disaster? You mean, like the one you financed in the 70s?

Greece is for sale. Greeks aren't.

2011-07-07T16:56:00.007+04:00

Greece's politicians put €50 billion of national assets on sale in the ballroom of the uber-exclusive Claridge's Hotel, the most iconic 5-star hotel in Mayfair. Among the overall Greek assets for sale are 39 airports, 850 ports, railways, motorways, sewage works, a couple of energy companies, banks, defence groups, thousands of acres of land for development, casinos and the national lottery.

However, despite rates being pegged "cheaper" than market value, buyers aren't all that enthused.

The "risks are too high," according to Aref Lahham, Managing Director of Orion Capital Managers. What risk?

Them.

And them.

And all of them don't seem to quite agree with their "elected representatives" hawking-off the country while sipping perrier water in a plush 5-star hotel ballroom...

Next stop Portugal, where credit ratings agency Moody's has downgraded the country's bonds to junk status! With Spain, Ireland and others... on the way, perhaps the ECB should keep an open booking on the ballroom at the Claridge's?

Meanwhile, the first Keiser Report of July 2011 focuses on Greece... and why the Greek people are readying for Thermopylae all over again.

How will your $1 trillion "infrastructure" help India's people, Mr. Mukherjee?

2011-07-06T00:39:00.017+04:00

Indian Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee and U.S. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner were part of the high-powered CII-Brookings Conference on "U.S.-India Economic and Financial Partnership" in Washington on Monday, 4 July 2011.

Mr. Geithner (I assume, politely) indicated that although the U.S. valued its strategic relationship with India, there were more important things... He apparently made no bones of the fact that (now that the $100 billion defence purchase is a done deal) the most important thing was for India to “allow a little bit more access” for U.S. firms in its financial and "multi-brand retail" sectors.

Mr. Mukherjee and R. Gopalan, the Secretary of the Department of Economic Affairs, then pulled out and dangled an irresistable carrot. They both claimed that there was a $1 trillion worth of "untapped potential" for investments to meet India’s infrastructural demand. However Mr. Gopalan admitted, “There are issues such as land acquisition, environmental clearances, rehabilitation of displaced persons...” (It's them pesky peasants again!)

Let's pause and consider for a minute how "infrastructure" that would both displace people from their lands and impact their environment negatively would possibly be of any benefit to them! Perhaps, the more pertinent question would be: Is the "infrastructure" that the honourable minister speaks about even meant for the common man - a.k.a. Aam Aadmi?

Anyway Mr. Gopalan reassure the audience that there is a “sustained and continuous policy churn which is happening in these areas, with a view to resolving these impediments.” In plain English, what he meant was essentially this: "Give Infosys, TCS and other accompanying Indian oligarchs what they need - and leave the pesky peasants to us."

To conclude, the taxpayer paid for the entire trip - and the best he can hope for in return is a place in a line at a Walmart in India! Some deal.

Now let us come back to the astronomical figure of $1 trillion...

The following is what a World Bank study estimates to be "(t)he cost of attaining the Millennium Development Goals" for the entire world...

Firstly, what are Millennium Development Goals (1990-2015)?

1. Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
• Halve the proportion of people with less than one dollar a day.
• Halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

2. Achieve universal primary education
• Ensure that boys and girls alike complete primary schooling.

3. Promote gender equality and empower women
• Eliminate gender disparity at all levels of education.

4. Reduce child mortality
• Reduce by two thirds the under-five mortality rate.

5. Improve maternal health
• Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio.

6. Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
• Reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.

7. Ensure environmental sustainability
• Integrate sustainable development into country policies and reverse loss of environmental resources.
• Halve the proportion of people without access to potable water.
• Significantly improve the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.

8. Develop a global partnership for development
• Raise official development assistance.
• Expand market access.
• Encourage debt sustainability.

The document puts "a rough breakdown" of the costs of achieving the goals as follows:
Educational Goals: $05 - $21 billion
Health Goals: $10 - $30 billion
Environmental Goals: $20 - $25 billion
Total: $35 - $76 billion

The World Bank document states, "(W)e conclude that a global estimate of the additional aid required to attain the MDGs is somewhere between $40 billion and $60 billion a year." And that this cost estimate "was roughly consistent with estimates for individual goals obtained by other agencies (UNICEF and WHO in particular)..."

All that for $60 billion per year? Wow.

Mr. Mukherjee, what will your $1 trillion in infrastructure actually do for India's people... not counting dispossessing them of their land, turning their environment into toxic sludge, or shackling coming generations to an unpayable foreign debt burden?

Infrastructure, indeed. C'mon!

Economics for Dummies

2011-07-04T20:31:00.003+04:00

Loss of soverignity takes many forms - but generally the common man (and woman) end up at the receiving end. Europe's ex-democracies in Ireland, Portugal, Finland and Greece find that even politics is not the same anymore. Apparently citizens can vote for anyone, but the result of the ballots cannot alter any prior decision by the EU bosses.

All risk (e.g. national debt) are socialised - i.e. spread across the entire population. And most benefits (e.g. corporate profit) are privatised.

My view of how economics works isn't Keynesian or Hayekian. It's just common sense.

Who's being bailed-out in Greece?

2011-07-04T10:42:00.021+04:00

Even according to the voice-of-the-establishment, The Economist, the current credit rollover is simply "a bank bail-out by another name". You see, a 'rollover' does not mean that the creditors (mainly private banks) forgo their pound of flesh - au contraire - they would just be lending it back at a higher interest rate... All while liquidating as much of Greece's national assets as possible in the name of austeriy and economic 'restructuring'.

Greece WILL default... But by then, the financial vultures would have stripped the country to the bone - and immovable Greek assets, like land and major utilities, would be monopolised by powerful friends.

The 'rollover' according to the Economist... "Take a deep breath; here’s how it would work. As Greek bonds mature over the next three years, the country would repay holders. Banks would pocket 30% of the cash and “voluntarily” buy new, 30-year Greek debt with the rest. Greece in turn would pass on about 20% of the original bonds’ value (or 30% of the amount being rolled over) to a special-purpose vehicle (SPV) that would buy AAA-rated bonds maturing in 30 years. If Greece defaults, these bonds would be used as collateral to repay banks the principal they loaned. "

Nothing but monetary sleigh-of-hand really... But what's the bottomline for Greece and its citizens?

Again, in the words of The Economist: "For Greece, the bargain is far less compelling. The 30-year plan does nothing to reduce Greece’s debt burden and could complicate any eventual restructuring. Since Greece would pay interest on all of its borrowings, but could use only part of them, its cash interest rate over 30 years would be about 10-11%. Some rescue."

(Keep in mind that at 10-11% compunded interest, Greece may have paid back in interest the same amount as the princpal in less than 7 years! So even if Greece defaults, the banks essentially lose nothing.)

One must also remember that banks were part of the problem! According to a Feb 2010 article, The New York Times says, "Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere."

But how did they "mask", you ask? The answer is two words: Credit Rating.

Banks are not alone responsible for the rot in the system... The Credit Rating cartel, consisting of Standard & Poor's, Fitch, and Moody's, take money from the big banks to rate their own instruments. So although they have the power to wreck nations, they are almost completely at the mercy of big financial institution. As long as no-one rocks the boat, everyone's safe.

But the status quo for ordinary people are boom-bust cycles that tend to always move wealth one way - UPWARD!

Greece: A Guinea PIIG?

2011-07-03T22:11:00.017+04:00

The Greek nation today is part of a truly epic experiment!

Soon Portugal, Italy, Ireland - and others like Britain even - may join Greece in what seems to be a corporate takeover of a soverign nation.

A month ago, on 3 June 2011, Jean Claude Trichet, head of the European Central Bank (ECB) - and one evil prong of the "troika", which also includes the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - called for the creation of a European Finance Ministry with the power to "veto national economic decisions" if countries in debt don't impose "austerity" measures on citizens when required by the bankers and elites (a.k.a. the "experts"). This effectively would mean an end to nationhood in Western Europe.

Fortunately, Mr. Trichet is leaving the ECB soon. He will be replaced by the the former head of Goldman Sachs in Europe, Mario Draghi... But not to worry, Mr. Draghi has intimate knowledge of the Greek implosion. Goldman Sachs may have helped create it!

Mr. Draghi, of course, claims he was not "involved" in the deal that lit the fuse.

Anyway, today we hear the news that Jean-Claude Juncker, Chairman of the Eurogroup - the quasi-finance ministry of the EU, which actually makes political decisions regarding the Eurozone and its currency, the Euro - told a German magazine that "(t)he sovereignty of Greece will be massively limited."

Greece can looks forwad to suffering more job losses; loss of national assets through privatisation; and having "to accept expertise from the Eurozone". He added that the Greek tax collection system was "not fully functional." Probably, implying that the "Troika" would collect Greece's taxes!

The illustrous, Mr. Junker has been Prime Minister of Luxembourg since 1995, and was formerly head of the World Bank and then the IMF.

The model by which he wishes to take apart the Greek nation is neither new nor creative (he is a mere bean counter after all). His recommendation for selling off the country that gave us the words, democracy and republic, is on the lines of the Treuhandanstalt (German, for 'Trust Agency') that helped, literally, liquidate East Germany.

Between 1990 and 1994, that esteemed private-public organisation (largely run by some of Europe's top corporate bosses) took over and sold tens of thousands of firms, as well as whole million-hectare swathes of the most fertile agricultural land and forests in Germany... And it still managed to end up 270 billion Deutsche Marks in DEBT! (To find out who actually profited, we may have to ask Mr. Juncker.)

But what happened to the East Germans? Well 2.5 million out of 4 million government employees lost their jobs - and it would seem all hope too... Today, almost 20 years later, areas coming under former-East Germany, still have double the rate of unemployment compared to the Western part. The living conditions have prompted about 12% of the population to leave - alarmingly, in some regions, the number of women between 20 and 30 has dropped by more than 30%. And 57% of East German children are born out of wedlock!

So what does the future hold for ordinary Greeks?

Well, according to Germany's finance Minister, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, there is an 81% chance that Greece will eventually default! But it doesn't take a Harward Degree to see an 'EPIC FAIL!' coming when the purported "solution" to a debt crisis consists of forcing the debtor to take on a bigger loan while simultaneously stripping their assets and impoverishing them.

Well, grab a large popcorn, sit back, and let us watch Act II of this Greek tragedy unfold...

P.S: You might want to keep a pitchfork and torch handy. Just in case.

Brussels, the new Thermopylae?

2011-06-27T19:58:00.009+04:00

The Place: European Parliament, Brussels
The Day: 22 June 2011
Speaker No.1: Nigel Farage, Member of European Parliament (MEP), UK
Speaker No.2: Niki Tzavela, Member of European Parliament (MEP), Greece
The Occasion: Debate preparating for the European Council Meeting, 24 June 2011

Egypt turns down IMF loan

2011-06-25T19:22:00.010+04:00

Egypt's governing military council has said that the country "didn't need outside finance."

Three things seem to have help it arrive at the decision not to saddle citizens with foreign debt: Firstly, both Saudi and Qatar have promised around $500 million each in assistance - apparently, on better terms than the cabal of international financiers; Secondly, the council also managed to pare it's fiscal deficit forecast from 11% to 8.6% of GDP - partly by reducing subsidies to industries, and partly by raising the income tax rate on firms and individuals earning over $1.67 million from 20% to 25%; and thirdly - and perhaps most significantly - the Finance Minister, Samir Radwan, revealed that the first draft of the budget was discussed with "activists, writers, the business community, trade unions and non-government organizations."

Overall, a very progressive move indeed. Godspeed, Egypt!

This is not a toy

2011-06-22T13:44:00.012+04:00

Indeed.

The world's biggest garbage dumps are not landfills. Mostly because they aren't on land! They're at sea.

Giant "plastic soups" of garbage stretch over hundreds, if not thousands, of square kilometres of open ocean. The largest of these is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Estimates on size range from 700,000 square kilometres to more than 15,000,000 square kilometres, i.e. ranging from 0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean - a body of water that makes up nearly 50% of the 'blue' in the 'blue planet'.

There is a floating 'plastic continent' in the Indian Ocean and another one in the North Atlantic too.

According to the UN, debris - especially plastic - kills more than one million seabirds and 100,000 mammals and sea turtles... every year!

Spread the word.

The Bilderberg Group: Power & Secrecy

2011-06-20T20:06:00.010+04:00

From 9 June to 12 June 2011, the Bilderberg Group had their annual meeting at St.Moritz, Switzerland.

The group brought together some of the most influential and wealthiest people in the world: European royalty; high ranking politicians - including Chinese and European Cabinet Ministers; international bankers - including the President of The World Bank, the President of the European Central Bank and the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer; corporate bosses - including those of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Royal Dutch Shell among others; the Head of US Cyber Command and the National Security Agency; senior Executives representing media - like the BBC; and sundry puppeteers like David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger; and a number of incognito members.

The hotel the group stayed at was ringed by security rings several layers deep. Unarmed private guards outside, snipers on the roof and the secret service-types within. The venue was off-limits not just to the general public - but to ALL uninvited guests.

One Italian Member of European Parliament (MEP) was beaten and then arrested by the private guards, and the next day a Member of the Swiss Parliament - yes, Swiss Parliament, was denied entry!

Four days after a meeting of such secrecy and significance, the Reuters' website has NO news regarding the meeting; the BBC's website has one article rather condescendingly titled, "Bilderberg Mystery: Why do people believe in cabals?" (the previous article on Bilderberg being from 2005); and the CNN site has one article surprisingly (or perhaps, unsurprisingly) titled, "Why do we embrace conspiracy theories?". CNN actually has NO news with the word "Bilderberg" in its title.

Thankfully, The Guardian covers it well. (With a scathing conclusion as well.) As did over 300 journalists repesenting alternative media - mainly online ones.

So it may also come as no surprise that one of the topics discussed at the Bilderberg 2011 meeting was "Social Networks: Connectivity and Security Issues". Hmmm... Now go back and read the guestlist.

India gives, Mr Tharoor, but who gets?

2011-06-19T23:32:00.001+04:00

Shashi Tharoor, former Indian Minister of State for External Affairs and UN Under-Secretary General, who is one of the more articulate parliamentarians writes about India's use of what he terms as 'Soft Power' in engaging with African nations - especially during Dr Manmohan Singh's recent visit to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Among the promises is $5 billion in aid to countries in Africa - besides soft loans, schools, hospitals and other civic amenities (which many places in India could do with.)

In the article titled: India Gives, Mr Tharoor contrasts the apparent benevolence in India's actions to the hard-driving methods of China and the West. "Unlike China," he says, "India does not descend on other countries with a heavy governmental footprint. India’s private sector is a far more important player, and the government often confines itself to opening doors and letting African countries work with the most efficient Indian provider that they can find."

Simply put: The government promises to give public money (aid) in return for "doors" being opened for private profiteers? How different is it from President Obama's recent visit to India with a delegation of CEOs in tow?

None. Except that Ethiopians are not Indians.

In India, landowners across several states are, literally, fighting to keep their land from being acquired for mega projects run by large private corporations. Numerous projects in Orissa, Jharkhand, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, and Gujarat have been stalled. (Across the spectrum, from left to right, the political class has been conspicuous by its silent non-intervention. Perhaps, they are all confining themselves to "door opening".)

Anyway, the yokels in India may have impeded 'progress' - but not so in Ethiopia...

One of the private players to have "doors opened" for it in Addis Ababa is Karuturi Global. This Bangalore-based company has taken over one of the largest farmlands in the world in the south of Ethiopia.

At 300,000 hectares (3000 sqkm), the Karuturi 'farmistan' is nearly 1/2 the size of the Indian state of Sikkim (7,096 sqkm). And it's just one of their mega farms in the country.

The Karuturis (also the family name of the promoters) estimate they can grow about 10% of the total traded volume of rice in the world - which would be good news for impoverished Ethiopia, but for the fact that most of the food produced on 'farmistan' is earmarked for export. Karuturi Global pays the Ethiopian government approximately $250 a week for the right to farm on the land... for 50 years!

These guys may be "efficient" Mr Tharoor, but are they welcome? Please watch.

Why Advertising - like everything else - needs a 'reboot'

2011-06-18T18:23:00.028+04:00

It was Albert Einstein who said, "we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them."

Umair Haque, on his Harward Business Review blog, puts it into a more modern context... He looks at the futility of looking for a mere "recovery" from the on-going downturn in the global financial markets. He calls for a more fundamental rethink... socially, culturally, ethically and economically.

In Advertising & Marketing too... teams (on both sides of the table) far too often hang onto The-Way-It's-Always-Done method as if the 'status quo' is itself a business objective.

The odd iphone app or facebook phenomenon notwithstanding, it is painfully obvious that most marketers - no matter how badly their brand needs a rethink - still prefer the 'familiar', the same 'tired (it's not a typo) and tested' approaches to a whole new set of problems.

Ad Agencies for their part, often tax their grey cells no further than to come up with a cheaper way to continue the same formulaic approach! Talk about shooting oneself in the foot... Now there's less incentive, more pressure and no result.

Among the compelling arguments Umair Haque makes, one is especially strong: What if what we need to seek isn't merely "more" prosperity, but meaningfully better prosperity? The economy's just a tool. It's time to question not just it's "how." but it's "why." Why do we have an economy in the first place?

Advertising is a tool too. It is time for some really deep introspection and fundamental assessment of what our job really is... It means changing the question from "How do I earn" my retainer to "Why do I earn it?"

Let's reboot the system and start all over...

Umair Haque is Director of the Havas Media Lab and author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business. And he has many more brilliant posts on HBR.

What happens when a brand doesn't deliver

2011-06-14T20:51:00.006+04:00

This is sort of a sequel to my previous post on Brand Obama.

No matter how great the marketing strategy; no matter how creative the advertising; no matter how attractive the packagaging - you can make people "buy" it ONLY once.

Caution: This film is 2 hour long... And it's worth your every minute.

Lifting the Veil from S DN on Vimeo.

But the reason I am concerned with what is unfolding thousands of miles away is this: For decades, the United States of America was the system that was held up as an "example" for developing nations.

In light of what is going on today, it imperative that nations like India STOP aligning their political, economic, security and even cultural values to what, we know without the shadow of a doubt, is just malevolent and patently false advertising!

This brand doesn't deliver.

The advertising campaign that sold 'hope'

2011-06-12T17:26:00.014+04:00

The "change you can believe in" slogan may not resonate as much today...

But the making of Brand Obama still inspires because it is one those rare audacious campaigns that actually worked. And it worked brilliantly... making billions of people (not just Americans) 'buy' intangible brand attributes like 'change' and 'hope'!

From the Advertising point-of-view, it is an excellent example of a perfectly meshed cross-media campaign.

Above all, it is one of those campaigns that prove that although out-of-the-box ideas matter - it's the making it happen that really counts. As Scott Thomas one of the brains (and hands) behind Brand Omaba's creation, says it all about "Ticking off the 'dos'."

Yes, an idea needs to be 'sold' first - before mundane things like Art Direction, Typography and Copywriting really begin to mean anything.

One percent inspiration. Ninety nine percent prespiration.

Five truths you didn't know about UID

2011-06-08T17:17:00.041+04:00

Truth #1: UID scheme can never be implemented for ALL residents of India
India's population is growing at a healthy clip of about 2.4%. That is compounded every year, i.e. If it is 2.4% of 1.2 billion in 2011, it will be 2.4% of 1.2 billion + 2.4% in 2012, and so on.

It is MATHEMATICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for the UID scheme to catch up to this exponential population growth curve.

If someone says otherwise, I suspect, they lie.

Truth #2: UID is meant to be eventually made COMPULSORY
The UID is NOT a voluntary scheme... It is designed to be inescapable. It is primarily aimed at the most vulnerable sections of society and the largely uneducated rural populations. The aspects of life tied most closely to the UID scheme are Employment (NEGRA), food (PDS), healthcare (public hospitals), and education (public schools). Exclusion from any of these can easily be used as an threat to submit to the UID.

The threat is already VERY REAL for some.

Truth #3: UID can easily be used as a tool for ostracising anyone, and even deny services they are entitled to
The UIDAI has NO SET PROCEDURE to deal with the dead and deceased. The current idea is to retain the data and ID number for at least 10 years of inactivity. Essentialy, the identity will exist - but only in a binary limbo.

Theoreticaly, a living person can be a made - to borrow a word from Orwell's 1984 - an "unperson"... or, a more Latin American theme - someone may "disappear" from the database - and technically, cease to exist!

Truth #4: UID is near-useless as a national security tool
The biometric scans of 10 digits (all fingers on both hands) and scan of irises of both eyes are stored as jpeg images. E.g. If an investigation turns up a fingerprint, unlike what you see on CSI, it is nearly impossible to retrieve the identity of the individual. It would mean matching it to over 10 billion fingerprints (10 digits of 1 billion individuals).

A highly onerous task unless the UIDAI also profiles India's residents (which they claim they would not do) by sex, age, demography, ethnicity, domicile, etc. But even then, given the size of India's population, it helps narrow the database only slightly.

Despite claims of both the government and the UIDAI, the UID is near-useless as a national security tool!

Truth #5: UID is useful almost EXCLUSIVELY in two situations
UID is a passive proof-of-identity. Meaning, it can ONLY be used to prove you are indeed who you claim to be.

Nandan Nilekani and the UIDAI will spend about Rs3000 crores of government money for a type of ID that is useful ONLY in two situations: 1.) Immigration and 2.) Financial transactions (KYC).

Since the poor of India are not going to have much to do with immigration services... it all points to the possible REAL objective of the UID: IT IS A BANKING TOOL!

Hmmm... Could this be related to the utterly strange fact that the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ICICI - a private foreign financial institution - sits on the Biometrics Committee of the UIDAI?

(Below: No. 5, Mr. Pravir Vora, ICICI)

Since so one has bothered to tell the public, about how this strange connection has come to be, I am going out on a limb and draw another hard-to-believe conclusion of my own.

ICICI has strong historical, and much more current, association with the rapacious Wall Street Bank, J.P. Morgan Chase. J.P. Morgan was a co-founder of ICICI in 1955 - and more recently, there was a sizeable migration of Top Management from ICICI to J.P. Morgan India.

Now for some fact about J.P. Morgan. They run, and of course, profit from the largest proportion of the 'food stamps programme' encompassing 43 million Americans for the US government. That's nearly, 1 in 8 Americans - and growing! And the 'destination' for the 'food stamps' are the mega retail chain. Like, Walmart, Costco, Carrefour, Tesco, etc.

Now WHAT has food stamps possibly got to do with India?
- The Government of India is actively considering dismantling the Public Distribution System of food (PDS) and replacing it with a cheaper (albeit less effective) 'targeted food subsidy' - euphemism, for food stamps.
- The Government of India is pushing (I might add, pushing very hard) for Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the Retail Sector - euphemism for opening the floodgates for Walmart and its ilk.
- Much of J.P. Morgan's food stamps business is already being processed in India.
- ICICI is actively looking to expand banking to rural areas. And J.P. Morgan sees the untapped potential too.
- J.P. Morgan is looking to acquire banks / financial institution in India, and ICICI's long association makes it a strong contender, I would guess.

The connections I've drawn are tenuous, my conclusion may be wrong, and my concern completely unfounded. But facts are facts... I invite you to connect them any way you want to, add more information that you may come across, and arrive at your own conclusion.

But here's how a well-connected financial institution, a highly-controlled food subsidy programme, and mega retail stores - all mesh together beautifully in the guise of a (heavily identity-dependent) social security system...

Oh, and before we exit the twilight zone, here's another nugget: ICICI Bank is quite the pioneer in Bioinformatics too.

Addendum: A look at the vast untapped potential that UID opens up for corporations.

A tale of two shoes

2011-06-06T19:47:00.004+04:00

Footwear the government dislikes...

Footwear that the government apparently prefers...

Never piss off the government

2011-06-06T11:25:00.025+04:00

According to reports, the police crackdown on Baba Ramdev's protest venue came after the government cancelled the permission granted to him to convene a 'yoga camp' at the Ramlila Grounds.

Then, the government went ahead and imposed Section 144 in the area... at midnight!

According to an Express News Service report, the move was said to have been given a "green signal" by the Prime Minister... And the police action was supervised by Delhi Police Commissioner BK Gupta himself.

Did this happen largely because the government (and the Congress party's various satraps) are miffed that the wily Baba went back on an "agreement"? (Ummm, what about when the public are miffed about the gazillion times that the government has gone back on its promise to the 'aam aadmi'? Or, was that just an advertising claim with an invisible disclaimer?)

Meanwhile, there are signs (thankfully) that India has not totally descended into a fascist dictatorship... At least, not yet.

In response to a petition, the Supreme Court of India has issued notices to the Union Home Secretary, Chief Secretary of Delhi, Delhi Police Commissioner, and the Delhi Administration in general. The court, rightfully, wishes to know "the exact circumstances" under which the people had to be dispersed in the middle of the night - that too, by "using brutal force."

(Come to think about it, even the 'outraged' Opposition parties in parliament haven't thought of questioning / probing the real reason for the crackdown.)

However, the people of the nation do have a right to know... Are sleeping yogis and faux sathyagrahas a greater threat to our nation and it's future, than kleptocrats in power and hereditary politics?

Why it is better if the Lokpal Bill doesn't become law

2011-06-05T20:19:00.020+04:00

I don't quite agree with the demands of hunger-strikers in Delhi, first Anna Hazare and then Baba Ramdev, ostensibly seeking to end corruption in government. But I believe with all my heart that - as citizens of India - they had the right to protest peacefully.

Firstly, why I disagree with them...

You see, even if the Lokpal Bill is successfully passed by parliamentary, it becomes just another 'law'. And often laws are a useful stick the government uses against its own citizens!

Just like the one police used when they barged into the Ramdev protest venue last night... Apparently, Baba Ramdev had overlooked the law that said he needed "permission" for the gathering!

Perhaps, emboldened by the fact that the law was on their side, the 'law enforcers' went ahead and inflicted multiple spinal fractures on a woman yoga teacher... She is now a quadriplegic!

Shame on you, whoever ordered the assault on citizens' rights last night. (The police force in India lacks the backbone themselves to have done this on its own volition. They are mere instruments. Someone very high up in the corridors of power told them - nay, ordered them - to do this.)

We don't need more laws. We need more sensible people at the helm.

All 'laws' are open to interpretation. And unsurprisingly, laws have a way of meaning exactly what the ones with money and power want it to mean.

Corruption is a not about breaking a law. Usually, it is only about interpreting it differently.

Otherwise, why are naked examples of corruption on a gargantuan scale, like the sale of 2G Spectrum and S-Band Scam cloaked in legalese? Why are obvious cases of greed and misuse-of-office, which caused over a trillion rupees in losses to the nation referred for arbitration to a 'Court of Law'?

As a Republic, India is governed by laws. But when a law is made with a vested interest or out of naiveté, it is more dangerous than not having one.

The Lokpal Bill included.

This is Tahrir Square... yesterday

2011-05-28T17:03:00.008+04:00

Yes. It is the afternoon of 27 May 2011... And Cairo's Tahrir Square is filling up with thousands of Egyptians in what organisers called a "Second Revolution".

Why? Because "people do not see any change," according to one volunteer. "The only change we see is that the Mubarak metro station has been changed to the Martyrs station."

Meanwhile packs of international financiers are licking their chops... On Thursday, 26 May, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated in a report to the G8, that "external financing" needs of oil-importing countries in the Middle East and North Africa will exceed $160 billion over the next three years - and that donor countries must step in to help.

The IMF has announced it is ready to lend about $35 billion to "stabilise" economies of countries such as Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Syria who are facing surging food and energy prices.

The same week, the World Bank said they want “to help the people there and seize the opportunities of historic change to modernize their economies and build more open and inclusive societies.”

Apparently, they want nothing to "undermine the transition to democracy".

Aw, how considerate of them...

So when is the Nile scheduled to be privatised? And are the pyramids going as a package deal?

Why is India's Department of Biotechnology funding Monsanto's GMO development?

2011-05-26T18:37:00.009+04:00

For the life of me, I can't think of a good reason why the public sector Department of Biotechnology (DBT) is funding 2 GMO development projects by Mahyco (26% owned by Monsanto) to the tune of Rs 2 crores each.

Then again, why does a company whose revenue in 2009-10 crossed Rs 220 crores require this funding? Well, the reason is that the funding also comes with knowledge transfer!

Under the Biotechnology Industry Partnership Programme (BIPP) Monsanto - er, Mahyco can access the "the vast expertise on rice available with the public sector research institutions". This expertise has been built up over several decades of partnership with farmers, and paid for by Indian taxpayers.

But who owns the technology that Monsanto develops using this expertise? Well, Monsanto, of course. The Indian public will manage to get back the paltry fund amount in the form of a 5% "royalty"! Now that's a really fine deal for the country.

And Monsanto isn't the only beneficiary.

Here's how the "partnership" has panned out for the Indian farming community so far...

And for a glimpse of the future, let's hear it from people who really know the "benefits" of dealing with Monsanto...

Engineers vs. Snake Oil Salesmen

2011-05-24T13:34:00.020+04:00

I was sent this interesting piece of news today (Thanks, Anusha).

It seems...

"Toyota has teamed up with salesforce.com to create Toyota Friend, a private social network for owners of Toyota cars.

The network will be accessible through PCs, tablets and smartphones, giving Toyota customers the ability to connect with their dealerships, cars and Toyota itself. For example, your car could send you an alert when its battery needs recharging, and you would be able to connect to your dealership to get maintenance tips and service information.

Toyota Friend will primarily be a private network for Toyota car owners, but customers will be able to connect and expand the experience through public social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

On the financial side, Salesforce.com will invest 223 million yen ($2.7 million) and Toyota Motor Company will invest 442 million yen ($5.4 million) in Toyota Media Service, which oversees Toyota’s global cloud platform development. Microsoft, which entered a strategic partnership with TMC in April, aiming to bring internet services to Toyota vehicles, will invest 350 million yen ($4.3 million) in the platform."

WTF!

Firstly, aren’t social media devices totally incompatible with Toyota products' core use: Driving?

Secondly, according to Mr Toyoda, “Despite negative factors such as a rapid rise in the yen and the earthquake, our profit sharply rose, thanks to massive cost-cutting and sales efforts.”

Let's decrypt that statement: Toyota is skimping on production and quality (i.e. cost-cutting), while spending more on marketing (i.e. sales efforts). So possibly, they now have a higher profit ‘margin’ with an inferior product!

Toyota’s recent ‘recall’ fiasco affected 14 million vehicles worldwide and battered the company’s reputation for quality. But hey, investors care more about Q-on-Q profits than reputation – so, $12.4 million spent on a marketing gimmick makes more sense than improving the actual product!

It makes one wonder though, if Mr Toyoda (who family name is at stake) doesn't see the pitfalls, why would ANY company management care for a sustainable long-term Brand Strategy?

Are account books blinkering the vision of corporate decision-makers? Is the focus on numbers leading into a unacceptably myopic view?

I posted once before on how inordinate focus on short-term profits can erode equity and actually stand in the way of long-term growth.

To me it seems that somehow, across the corporate world - up and down the line - the wrong set of behaviours are being incentiviced.

Who decides what you see on the Internet?

2011-05-23T20:37:00.009+04:00

Well, for one thing - it isn't you.

As you will find out in the following video, information is not only filtered at several levels, but in so many different ways as well... And the worst worrying aspect is that you never really know what is being kept from you!

One manifestation of this is the Splinternet - which is, to use a metaphor, ranchers (service providers) corralling steers (users) into vast pastures (Internet and mobile platforms) in the Wild West. The difference is that the world outside the fence is invisible!

This trend is not going to be rolled back as 'users' and their 'profiles' are the only real assets that can be monetised by companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, and their ilk. Also the more detailed the user profile, the more valuable it is.

The web as we know it has changed. And most of us don't even know it.

India to hand out 1 billion Internet 'kill switches'

2011-05-21T15:44:00.039+04:00

I had posted earlier about the absurdity of the new, degenerate IT (Information Technology) Act passed by the Government of India.

Well, looks like it's actually much worse.

Now anyone can censor anyone... Internet platforms (like Google and Yahoo) will have a hefty hardcover volume of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) thrown at them if they don't yank, within 36 hours, posted content that has been construed as 'objectionable' or 'disparaging' by literally any one of the billion-plus Indians with an individual opinion or an excitable disposition.

But wait! That's just the beginning... There are now what can only be described as 'bizarre' conditions for the ubiquitous Indian cyber cafe too.

According to an article on the Outlook India website the new rules regarding cyber cafes include such draconian directives as the layout and arrangement of furniture!

In addition, "the new guidelines mandate that cyber cafes keep a photo ID record of all users apart from maintaining usage data of individuals — including logs of all websites surfed by them — for one year." This, mind you, inspite of mildly annoying requirements that already exist, like stating your name, mobile number and browsing time. Many governments already view their citizens as potential criminals who must have their every activity open for investigated - whenever the "authorities" demand it.

Ladies and gentlemen, what you are witnessing is Big Brother slamming your freedom to express yourself onto the pavement, and proceeding to kick its teeth in!

However, the legal rape of opinion does have the wholehearted support of a certained shady ponytailed B-school professor-cum-salesman. But he's got good reason... I wonder if Sachin Pilot has one.

Sachin Pilot is the US-educated, baby-faced Minister of State for Communications and Information Technology. If one needs any more evidence of the increasingly disgusting hereditary nature of politics in India, and especially, New Delhi - this is a portfolio that was once held by his (late) father, Rajesh Pilot!

Oh! By the way, baby-face (who became India's youngest MP at 26) is under investigation in the multi-billion 2G spectrum sale scam. I wonder if the investigating agencies have a record of all the websites he visited. Or are such ridiculous laws not applicable if your daddy had a red light on his Amby?

The spin doctor's prescription

2011-05-17T18:21:00.030+04:00

Reuter's website has this brilliant piece of Orwellian Doublethink.

It pontificates that the Government of India (GoI) isn't helping the country's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in controlling runaway inflation. This is probably true given that while the RBI tries to tighen the fiscal belt, the GoI's single-minded focus (besides increasing the net worth of individual MPs) seems to be in maintaining the asinine 8% to 9% economic growth figure while the average Indian family frets over the price of rice, onion and cooking gas.

But the line that got my attention opines that the GoI's "foot-dragging on reform and foreign investment contributes towards keeping food price inflation high."

The highly imaginative author of the article however fails to mention exact how he or she arrived at the convoluted logic that higher profits for foreign investors means lower food price for Indians!

Even in actual fact, the GoI is shovelling financial deregulation through parliament; running through buckets of ink signing Free Trade Agreements (FTAs); and taking a crowbar to the backdoor of the nation's agro industry and food security. In short, India's present government seems hell-bent on burning down the economic defences of the nation.

The aim seems to be to throw the unprepared, unprotected Indian economy into bed with rapacious, unscrupulous multinational vampires. It will be a short, unsightly struggle - and then it'll all be over.

Still, it looks like one logically challenged economics pundit/journalist thinks the GoI has not done enough damage - not acquiesced quite enough.

Your move, Manmohan.

The news this morning...

2011-05-17T10:21:00.021+04:00

A 20-year old Australian man fell from a 7-storied building in Brisbane while trying out a social media fad called "planking".

For those physically aged over 30 (and mentally, over 3), "planking" involves lying face down with arms to the sides, in a straight line - preferrably in an unusual public place; photographing it; and posting it on social media sites like Facebook and YouTube.

Apparently, it's to do with the pressures of today's online "reputation economy" on young people - or at least, that's the local Deputy Police Commissioner's take on the situation.

Anyway, the Brisbane Planking Association (I'm not kidding) vows that they will "absolutely not" stop. The Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, weighed in by urging plankers to learn the difference between "a harmless bit of fun ... and taking a risk with your life". And this morning, the incident was front-page news on the Reuters website.

Sad.

In other tragi-comic news from around the world... The United States has hit its debt limit. Congress will now have to decide whether (rather, when) it will raise the national debt ceiling (or the debt burden carried by citizens and taxpayers) from $14.3 trillion. This is only the 11th time they will be doing so since 2001.

Meanwhile the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor has decided that the Libyian leader and his son must be punished for authorising the killing of civilians. Hours later, NATO jets continued to pound the capital city - presumably, causing no harm to civilians - er, I mean collateral damage.

The Dogs of War Redux

2011-05-16T16:18:00.010+04:00

WTF? Honestly.

What else can I say? ...Except that this development may ultimately have a twist that actually outdoes Frederick Forsyth's magnificent plot.

And perhaps the ending may not be as "fortunate" as the novel.

Google's Do-It-Yourself Stasi File

2011-05-16T10:33:00.018+04:00

Call me cynical (OK, even paranoid), but I saw this video dripping in saccharine sweetness - and the only thing I could think about was a Stasi File!

The erstwhile East Germany's secret police maintained minute, banal, and often absurd, personal details on its citizens. But according to an article in Spiegel Online, Herbert Ziehm - Head of the Department in Germany that now manages the Stasi Files archive: "More often than not, the Stasi did not need to apply pressure at all. In fact, many often felt snubbed if their information was deemed to be of no interest."

Hmmm...

Also, the fact that the files occupy over 100 kilometres of shelf space somehow reminded me of a Server Farm.

Hey, personal information is personal information... whatever manner it is stored!

What's next? An Internet kill switch?

2011-05-15T11:34:00.012+04:00

The Government of India has amended the Information Technology (IT) Act to make the Internet safer. Presumably, for itself.

NGOs, free-speech advocates and legal experts are appalled that the new rules force Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block websites hosting content that officialdom deems to be “disparaging”, “harassing”, “blasphemous”, or any of a whole range of other labels that are vague and open to interpretation. To make matters worse, there are no provisions to challenge wrongful interpretations.

News articles covering the subject seems to imply that this is a problem only if it is "enforced", but the very fact that the threat of censorship looms over Indian cyberspace is entirely unacceptable. All laws that rely on the whim of politicians or the judgement of their lackeys are inherently dangerous.

By the way, is there a law that allows the general public to selectively shut down a government department that it considers as "harassing"? Thought not.

The real cost of corporate profit

2011-05-14T17:42:00.029+04:00

In an earlier post, I touched upon the woeful track record of the Government of India when it comes to protecting the nation's and its people's interests against unbridled greed of businessmen.

Whether callous neglect that led to an unprecendented tragedy in Bhopal; or supply of substandard equipment for soldiers fighting a high altitude war in Kargil; or kickbacks paid to an Italian middleman for Swedish military equipment; or selling national assets at a tax discount of trillions of rupees... Big business always wins, no matter how vile the act.

Despite the chatterati yaking away about India being a "Superpower"... I am sorry, the facts on the ground show that Indian lives are cheap. And India is rather like a large doormat for corporate houses.

Knowing very well (Manmohan Singh is supposedly an Economist) that India escaped the full brunt of the recent financial meltdown because of its stringent (albeit imperfect) financial regulations, has not stopped the Government of India from surreptitiously pushing through financial deregulation, including in Savings.

More importantly, study after study have shown that India was less affected by the recent economic crisis because the Indian economy was largely focused at the domestic market. But our erudite, doctorate-holding elected representatives go on a veritable signing spree of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) over the last two years.

So when the next economic crisis hits, India will be ripe for asset stripping by foreign investors and international financial institutions. Way to go, sirs.

This is NOT old news...

Since we have such an exemplary record of upholding Indian consumers' and producers' rights, it is heartening to see the line-up of eminent multinational successors of Union Carbide eager to strip profits from the Indian countryside: Walmart, DuPont, Bayer, Monsanto, and the Rothschilds.

I fear that Governement of India's policies are - deliberately or otherwise - leading the country into an unimaginable agro-holocaust!

To understand and appreciate just what is at stake, we must look back in history... The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 million Indians... more than World War I, World War II, the entire Indian freedom struggle, and the death toll in the partition riots.

The chief cause, according to Dr. Amartya Sen, was not a drop in production... it was a combination of several factors - including steep food price inflation, falling wage value and unchecked exports.

What do you suppose will happen when profit-hungry multinational businesses are in control of food production and distribution in India?

Did the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation fund coercive vaccine research on girls in India?

2011-05-12T11:57:00.000+04:00

PATH is an NGO funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It claims to be "an international nonprofit organization that improves the health of people around the world". One of its programmes being the vaccination of young girls against Human Papilloma Virus (HPV), a sexually transmitted disease passed on usually by sexual intercourse.

PATH's activities on HPV are based on a coordinated strategy developed by Harvard University, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, and the World Health Organization (WHO) to "make HPV vaccines available, acceptable, and affordable to those most in need." This strategy too is funded by the sinister money spout of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In India, PATH allegdely conducted vaccine trails on possibly as many as 23,000 girls in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat under the guise of a "vaccination programme". The project had extremely strong backing from the government apparatus. This included "ordering" of all educational institutions to support the programme, and in tribal areas, parental consent was even substituted with that of hostel wardens!

It went smoothly for the munificent foundation... Till seven innocent girls died. The Indian government suspended the project - and true to form, commissioned a report.

The final report submitted found "large-scale ethical violations", and states that the "nature and objectives of these projects makes it evident that they are in fact clinical trials."

But despite exploiting unsuspecting girls as experimental guinea pigs, the "report finally does not fix the responsibility on any individual or institution despite evidence."

So who is being protected? And who really benefitted from the "vaccination" programme?

According to Rani Kumar, Dean of All-India Institute of Medical Sciences, “The ambivalent sentences in the consent form tantamount to covert inducement and indirect coercion especially in the light of the high cost of the vaccine.”

The vaccines are pushed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded PATH, and are manufactured by pharma giants, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The cost of vaccinating an individual is approximately $360.

This sounds familiar... If you haven't seen it, please watch The Constant Gardener based on a novel by John le Carré, and starring Ralph Fiennes.

By the way... Bill, Melinda, you have a daughter too. Is she vaccinated against HPV?

The open corporate takeover of government has begun

2011-05-12T10:55:00.001+04:00

This 7-minute video tells a very disturbing story of how those given the job of acting as mere "representatives" of the public are increasingly utilising crises to transfer power from the public (who elect them) to corporate houses (who fund them).

But for this transfer of power to happen in a democracy, the public must first willingly handover an inordinate amount of power that is rightfully their's to "representatives" who constitute a "government". The trouble (and tyranny) begins when the public begins to believe that a government's role is to "rule" and "provide" for them - and not merely to "represent" them...

Incidentally, it was an American, Benjamin Franklin, who once said that anyone who is willing to trade liberty for a sense of security, deserves neither.

How corporations do the state's dirty work

2011-05-11T11:24:00.014+04:00

The US Department of Justice believes every mobile phone user is a potential criminal.

On 10 May, the U.S. Department of Justice called for new laws requiring mobile providers to collect and store information about their customers! According to Jason Weinstein, the Deputy Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the DoJ, "when this information is not stored, it may be impossible for law enforcement to collect essential evidence."

Apparently, the push for mandatory retention of data is not new. Back in January 2011, CNET reported that the authorities are "frustrated" because no law exists to force service providers to track what customers are doing online.

And the irony of it all is that the DoJ's privacy-bustin' proposal was raised during a U.S. Senate hearing arising from the revelation that corporations like Apple, Google and Microsoft record information about users' locations without their consent!

Now what is the chance that this - or any other - Senate hearing will help tangibly improve consumer privacy?

Well... Surprise. Surprise.

Big Brother 2.0 on your smartphone?

2011-04-27T17:03:00.011+04:00

This is an update to my previous post on both Apple and Google engaging in geo-tracking via smartphone...

The Privacy Rogues Gallery is growing: First Apple, then Google, and now Microsoft...

According to a new article on CNET: "Like Apple and Google, Microsoft collects records of the physical locations of customers who use its mobile operating system.

Windows Phone 7, supported by manufacturers including Dell, HTC, LG, Nokia, and Samsung, transmits to Microsoft a miniature data dump including a unique device ID, details about nearby Wi-Fi networks, and the phone's GPS-derived exact latitude and longitude."

Users of the products didn't have a clue - but apparently the enforcers of "law" have known about it - and have been using it for over a year.

If geo-tracking via mobile phones is so prevalent, and obviously useful for the powers-that-be, it cannot be a technical oversight by the engineers.

So... is it actually a special "service" created by corporations for the state? If it is, how does the state apparatus pay back the corporations? And are there more such secretive "arrangements" between the political class and the business class?

And just one other question: Is this Big Brother 2.0?

Your smartphone knows where you were last night...

2011-04-22T17:17:00.014+04:00

...And the night before that. In fact, some devices store location-related data for a whole year!

"Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go – and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised," according to an article on The Guardian this week.

Before the Google fanboys begin to smirk... Within about 24 hours of this exposé comes the next revelation in The Guardian: "Smartphones running Google's Android software collect data about the user's movements in almost exactly the same way as the iPhone, according to an examination of files they contain."

Both articles raise serious concerns about consumer privacy - and the more forgiving readers' comments conclude that the location cache is probably for "better user experience", "quicker operation", "location-specific advertising", or "locating lost devices". There are also resigned observations from readers that "all mobile phones can record location", "the authorities can track cell phones anyway", "it's the price you pay for high-tech services", etc.

Meanwhile, a United States Senate member, Al Franken, has even shot off a letter to Steve Jobs demanding to know why there is a secret file recording the location of iPhone users.

Amid all the hullabaloo, two entities seem have nothing to say on the subject: Apple and Google.

To paraphrase what Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, once said about 'user privacy': “If you have been somewhere you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t have gone there in the first place.”

Lo and behold! The problem's solved.

How deeply entrenched is E.L. Rothschild in India?

2011-04-20T00:47:00.026+04:00

In one word: VERY.

Evidence No. 1: FIELD FRESH

The Field Fresh website seems to imply that it is a simple tie-up between the Del Monte group, based in the Philippines, and Bharti Enterprises (best known as for its transnational telecom brand, Airtel), based in India. But under the surface is a "partnership" that includes the elusive E.L. Rothschild Ltd.

The ELR website doesn't help. But one scribd.com document on Field Fresh, says unequivocally that "Del Monte Pacific's partners in FieldFresh Foods Pvt. Ltd. are the well-respected Bharti Enterprises and EL Rothschild Limited."

To make matters worse for farmers (and other producers) Bharti Enterprises has also brought Walmart into the Indian retail market.

Evidence No. 2: International Affairs Fellowship

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is said to be the fountainhead of continuity in US foreign policy - as well as at the centre of every New World Order (NWO) conspiracy theory in that country.

Apparently the CFR has a programme called the International Affairs Fellowship in India (IAF). According to the CFR website, "the IAF in India enables several outstanding young leaders to expand their professional horizons and enhance their understanding of India by spending up to a year on policy oriented research or related professional activity in India."

Only thing is that the Rothschilds sponsored the first International Affairs Fellowship in India (IAF) throught a front called the ERANDA Foundation.

Evidence No. 3: ICICI and UID

This is the crazy part, the smack on the face of every Indian...

There were two host for the recipients of the very first IAF fellowship in India: First is the Centre for Insurance and Risk Management (CIRM) - a dubious "social initiative" front for the ICICI banking group, and second is the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (ISDA) - a think-tank funded entirely by the Indian Ministry of Defence.

For the novice this may be all coincidences but for the ones that follow the ways of these uber-elites, this is prime conspiracy material. (I admit I am not above feeling uneasy.)

ICICI, essentially a non-Indian entity, is a kind of cesspool incubating this hellish takeover of the nation's sovereignty... starting with the much-lauded Unique Identity (UID) Card... which (inexplicably) has Pravir Vohra, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of ICICI on the UDAI Biometrics Committee. Go straight to page 23 of the Biometrics Design Standards for UID Applications document.

I am sure there is a perfectly rational explanation for the presence of a banker on the committee... but I am a wee bit worried about coincidence of the overlapping interests of IAF, UID and ICICI.

If you haven't noticed yet, "Expanding Access to Financial Services in Rural India" was the topic on which Luke A. Bronin (hosted by CIRM) received the IAF fellowship...

This exact aim of "expanding financial services to rural India" is also ostensibly among the key aims of BOTH the Unique Id scheme as well as the ICICI Foundation.

(Update: An ICICI manager has been questioned by India's Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in connection with the Rs170,000 crore 2G Spectrum scam. It seems that ALL 7 telecom firms embroiled in the infamous affair has accounts in ICICI - and ALL of them transfered massive amounts of money in 2006-07.)

Evidence No. 4: The Challenge of India, London 2007

Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Founder and Chief Executive of E L Rothschild LLC, listening to Dr J. J. Irani, Director of Tata Sons

Apparently the who's who of Indian industry spoke on the nation's future. Among them was Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild, Founder and Chief Executive of E L Rothschild LLC.

The event was organised by none other than - and I would never have guessed this in a million years - Tehelka!

There is no one that I can trust... and with due apologies to the McDonald brothers, I'm not loving this... Not one bit.

Recipe for a DIY public relations disaster

2011-04-18T17:05:00.057+04:00

A fast food restaurant takes exception to a review on a blog. The brand's managers opt for a knee-jerk reaction and threaten legal action against the blogger. Unfortunately, not everyone empathises with the restaurant's point-of-view. This story has all the ingredients for a PR-disaster-in-the-making. Even if it is potentially a short-term one.

In case you are interested, here's how you too can create the perfect PR disaster all by yourself in less than 48-hours.

Step 1:
Find an unflattering, seemingly unbiased view of your brand - preferably online, and preferrably on a platform that allows for third-party commenting and sharing.

Step 2:
React strongly. Pick on the blogger - preferably, use disproportionate means.

Hint: Threaten legal action. There's nothing that attracts the attention of commenters, casual readers, passers-by and news agencies than a David vs. Goliath scenario. Underdogs make for a lovely conversation topic.

Step 3:
Allow the situation to simmer for 24 to 48 hours.

Step 4:
Realise you have overreacted only when the situation is clearly impossible to control. After the SHTF, sprinkle incoherent half-hearted excuses.

Hint: Try the ever popular "we-were-only-kidding" defence to garnish. Nothing says "gaffe" better than fumbling and backpeddling.

Step 5:
Hunker down, keep fingers crossed, and hope for the online storm to pass.

Step 6 (Optional):
If you are looking to make a really well-done PR mess, choose a rigid position, dig in, and swing blindly at everyone with a different viewpoint.

Bon apetite.

Now, on the other hand, the brand's owners could turn the free publicity into a positive thing! How?

Well for example, the brand's managers could tender a sincere apology to the blogger for his anguish. They could come out with a "We're-So-Sorry Burger"! They could reach out to angry commenters and readers by leaving a conciliatory comment and a message on the "offending" blog.

The thing to realise is that there are no 'wrongs' and no 'rights' here. It's impossible to rationalise with a group of incensed people - in real life or online.

Update: The blogger and the restaurant have apparently made up... Quite a mature and civilised way to do things.

Surreptitious haiku break

2011-04-13T07:31:00.007+04:00

A pen twitches
The writer's on vacation
Withdrawal symptom?

Is this victory bigger than the World Cup?

2011-04-08T23:32:00.018+04:00

Congratulation India! This is a sweet victory gifted to the people of India by a 72-year old man with the spine to stand toe-to-toe against the arrogance of public servants turned autocrats turned kleptomaniacs.

And this has the potential to be waaaay more important the fake ICC World Cup.

Today I feel I may have a remote shot at walking into a government office and getting some inane paperwork done without being met by pillar, post or chai-pani request.

I wish to take nothing away from the moment, but this is just the conclusion of Act I. There was no choice for the government given the circumstances. And especially given the timing, which is right smack in the midst of election season.

We also need to bear in mind that what comes next is a committee, so... Even if there is consensus. Even if there is a recommendation. Even if there is a draft bill. Even if it is debated in parliament. Even if it gets voted into law... It will still need to be implemented.

India doesn't lack laws - but accountability and a sense of duty.

One more thing I cannot come to term with is this: If the goverment exists under a people's mandate, why then should "the people" have to literally plead for 50% representation on a lousy committee?

Why can't the Jan Lokpal Bill, which was jointly drafted by Justice Santosh Hegde, Prashant Bhushan and Arvind Kejriwal, simply be forwarded to the hon'ble Law Minister to be drafted into law? Why involve ANY slimy politicians at all when it is so clearly the will of the people?

Anyway, the Jan Lokpal Bill only requires that:
1.) investigations into any case should be completed within a year
2.) the trial should get over in the next one year
3.) so that a corrupt person goes to jail within two years of complaint, and
4.) the ill-gotten wealth is confiscated

If Mr. Kapil Sibal feels "committee notification" or "summoning of the National Advisory Council" or any other legal hocus-pocus needs to be done - well, then Sir, do it. And make it pronto. That's what you get paid to do.

And still another thing that piques my interest: If members of the public are part of "civil society", does that mean the rest are - well, "uncivil" or "anti-social"? Can we not expect honesty, decency and integrity from them?

Anyway, it seems like a good idea to get out there and occasionally remind the political class that they are not ruling India - but mere representating Indians.

Whose homeland? Whose security?

2011-04-07T18:32:00.001+04:00

Just read this on Tehelka... At an internal seminar conducted by the Indian Army's think-tank, Centre for Land Warfare Studies in March 2011, Home Ministry officials identified India's growing population of young people as a potentially significant security "challenge".

Let us try to understand the scale of their concern... India is expected to add a whopping 241 million people of working age to its population between 2011 and 2030, compared to China's probable growth of just 10 million during the same period.

The only reason the governing system in general - and the security apparatus in particular - should view a "growing population of youth" as a "liability" and not an "asset" is because a larger population is more difficult to control.

This control-driven mentality is clear from the solutions that are being proposed by the Home Sectretary, GK Pillai: "This increasing population requires better policing measures and judicial intervention." India apparently requires an additional 800,000 police personnel, many more judges, and the country also needs "to churn out good lawyers".

The sum total, or at least, the essence of his solution is this: More laws. More interference. More enforcement.

The "us" (government) vs "them" (governed) divide pervading in the corridors of power could not be more obvious. Population-control policies and practices are first a hangover from the colonial past, and later aped from the so-called democracies of the Western Hemisphere.

The seeds of a highly intrusive government are perhaps already sown in India.

How else can one explain the Homeland Security System being set up in India - with its barbs clearly pointed INWARD?

Take Rolta, for example. It is a private company with 32.59% FII (foreign institutional investor) ownership, and 41.91% ownership resting with just 10 individual shareholders. Rolta's services are aimed at the full alphabet soup of security and intelligence agencies in India.

And many of their technologies and services are clearly directed at the citizens and residents of India. For example, "Rolta provides systems to cater to lawful interception of communication be it IP Traffic, Cellular Traffic, Satellite Communication or Radio Communication." And their services "portfolio also includes systems that can undertake Data and text mining in real time." In other words, "spying".

But of course, they'll tell you all of it to keep you and your family safe... The question is, safe from who?

Has India found its Tahrir Square?

2011-04-07T10:12:00.020+04:00

"So, is Jantar Mantar the new Tahrir Square?" asks columnist, G Vishnu at Tehelka.

Since social movements are good for ratings amd soundbytes, the mainstream media is on the bandwagon too. But this time they have the opportunity to make a real difference... It's the difference between playing "nation's conscience-keepers" and "corporate opportunists". Either way, I hope Anna Hazare's gesture will not degenrate into a frenzied media circus!

As an aside, there seems to be a close parallel with the exasperation against both corruption and politicians seen in Middle Eastern protest... If the parallel continues, the issues will not stop at cosmetic changes. I do hope someone within the GoI is thinking seriously of a systemic overhaul.

Perhaps it is time for an new (Indian or Eastern) paradigm for progress... The current one doesn't seem to be working too well.

Anna Hazare is 72, India is 62, and the Lokpal Bill is 42

2011-04-06T22:00:00.011+04:00

There is bitter irony in the fact that it took a man 10 years senior to Independent India to take a stand about the nation's future.

One can only hope it's not too late.

In his open letter to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Anna Hazare asks: "You say that your Group of Ministers are drafting the anti-corruption law. Many of the members of this Group of Ministers have such a shady past that if effective anticorruption systems had been in place, some of them would have been behind bars. Do you want us to have faith in a process in which some of the most corrupt people of this country should draft the anti-corruption law?"

A fair point - but surely, Anna must know that bills take time - sometimes years - to be drafted, debated on, possibly amended, and finally voted upon in parliament... Or do they?

About three years ago, I had come across this rather interesting piece of news: In 2008, the Lower House (Lok Sabha) of the Indian Parliament set a record of sorts by passing 8 Parliamentary Bills in just 17 minutes! A little over 2 minutes per bill.

The feat was accomplished amid the chaos and din of the final hours of Winter Session.

The action apparently did not go un-noticed... “So many important Bills were passed without any discussion. The Congress and BJP have killed democracy,” said CPM leader Basudeb Acharia. “The Congress tried to bulldoze the institution of Parliament,” said BJP MP Kiren Rijiju. Even Congress MP Bagun Sumbrui, who was first elected to the 6th Lok Sabha, said what happened was “unusual”.

Hmm... It would be interesting to find out what exactly were in those 8 super-urgent bills.