“As the sultry Lakshmi, Ms. Mali demonstrates, in a series of crop tops and halters, that the culture that first eroticized the navel has lost nothing to the Britney Spearses of the West”

New York Times review of “Road”(Free Registration Required)

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats”
George Orwell

I belong to the third generation after independence, so I bear no part of the responsibility for our country’s abandoning Gandhiji in practice. But I would like to do my bit to get people to abandon his theories too. All of his economics and most of his politics.

• The earth has enough for everyone’s needs…
  Actually, the earth doesn’t have enough for anyone’s needs. Hunting and foraging can support only a fraction of us, that too at subsistence levels. Anything that we need has to be farmed, mined, built or manufactured. It turns out that a society that p?nders to the greed of its most productive members is also the one that satisfies the need of all its members.
• India lives in the villages…
  India had one of the earliest urban civilizations. All through history, when farmers produced surplus food, they used to bundle it into their bullock carts, converge at a place and trade what they produced for something else. These places developed into cities. The extra food that civilization produced left others free to do other things. This has been going on for thousands of years. There is no good reason why we should stop this process now, rather than a thousand years back or a thousand years hence.
• Self-sufficiency…
  If you are planning to fight a war with everyone else in the world, self-sufficiency is a good policy. Obviously, you wouldn’t want critical supplies to be disrupted hampering the war effort. In all other cases, trading with others is good for you. It enables you to specialise in what you do best and buy all else from others. Trade helps prevent wars. This is true whether you are an individual, village or a country. Hindus and Muslims don’t riot where they trade with each other. India and Pakistan won’t fight if they start trading.
• Charkha…
  Gandhiji opposed all machines except the sewing machine. But he travelled by trains inside India and by went by steamer to England. He believed that machines had impoverished India. He was wrong. By the time he arrived on the scene, the re-industrialization of India had started. Textile mills were being set up in Bombay. The Tatas had set up steel mills. Gandhians thought that machines were a problem. Nehruvians thought that India should mechanize, but under Government tutelage. Together they ensured that India’s industrialization would crawl along for the next 40 years.
• Non violence…
  Non-violence is a good tactic, but bad philosophy. British rule was actually liberal and mild by the standards of those times. Not many people would have participated in an armed rebellion against such a government, risking death. But many people would offer satyagraha, go on protest marches and go to jail. But it is the most inconsistent and fuzzy of his philosophies. Did he believe that there shouldn’t be a police force and jails? No he didn’t. Did he believe that the army should be abolished? No he didn’t. Did he believe that there shouldn’t be a government at all – did he support anarchy? No he didn’t. He failed to realize that all government action is backed by force. He failed to realize that non-violence was incompatible with all his other policies. Prohibition – the government has to set the police on those who drink. ‘Self-sufficiency’ – The government has to set the police on those who trade with foreign countries. Small scale sector – The government has to physically prevent industries from buying machines. Not surprisingly, non-violence was the first of his principles to be abandoned. He did not intend it that way. He believed that people could be made to follow his principles through persuasion. Unfortunately, this idea doesn’t scale. I find it tough enough to persuade neighbours and friends of my views. What are the chances that I will put my trust on a philosophy where my life depends on persuading the rest of the world of Gandhiji’s principles?

On the subject of payment systems, I just remembered that the HTTP Status code has a status called 402 Payment Required. It is supposed to be reserved for future use. If it ever catches on, payment support can be built into browsers. But I don’t think it will. A payment systems protocol will probably be implemented through Web Services.

Ouch… Those who got conned did not bother to read the URLs properly. No wonder people don’t take steps to protect their privacy (Free Registration required. via S Anand ) They don’t know what to do. I am sure most people are not aware of security risks either.

Arundhati Roy is rapidly turning into a verbal terrorist. Her essay in the Guardian sputters words as an AK-47 scatters bullets at random passers-by. She seems to have abandoned the idea that ideas should follow a logical sequence and an essay should have a coherent argument.

Lakshmi wants to know whether Gurumurthy’s article which I referred to below is true.
Well.. his economics is definitely wrong. His reasoning is flawed and he has messed around with data. He made a valid point about the American economy, but it is not a well argued one. It has been taken out of thin air. His extrapolations for India are off base.
His reasoning goes as follows:

1. Japan exported more to the US than it imported from the country. That got Japan into trouble.
2. The US imports much more than it exports. Yet it is doing fine.
3. America hai hai! Greedy capitalist pig! Consumerist culture!!!
4. So the point is…

Step 3 is fun to read, so no one really notices that step 4 is missing. The only logical point there could be is “Neither a US nor a Japan be”, to the tune of “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”.

Gurumurthy is wrong. If India’s exports to the US exceeds its imports from that country, it will have some dollars left over. Those dollars are an investment in the US. If it goes the other way round, the US is investing in India. Which is better? From an economic point of view, it doesn’t make sense to invest in a country that is growing at 2 % per year at the best of times, when there is a country that is growing at 6% per year at the worst of times. It makes much more sense for an American to invest in India than vice versa. Which is what is happening. (Which is also why NRIs flocked to invest in RIBs – they were assured of a much better rate of interest than they’d get in the US.)

It is good for India to get investment from other countries, for the same reason that it was good for me to take a student loan to do my MBA. It was an investment, and it was easy to repay the loan after I got a job. If I had partied away my loan, that would have been a disaster. Similarly, taking loans or FDI is bad only if we fritter it away and can’t repay.

Japan did make a hash of things. There is nothing wrong with your exports exceeding your imports, but accumulating dollars without investing it anywhere worthwhile is a particularly bad strategy, akin to keeping your money in cash at 0% interest.

Yes – the American economy is a paradox – they import more than they export. They don’t save much, and they have high levels of debt. But still people are willing to hold dollars, i.e, they are willing to invest in the US. The Economist article I referred to claimed that this is only because the US dollar is treated as the gold standard – everyone hoards it because everyone else is willing to accept it as common currency.

But that is beside the point. Neither the US example nor the Japanese example is applicable to India, as I have explained. His argument seems to be that India should develop on the basis of its own savings – the Swadeshi way. That is a red herring. We already save roughly 30% of our income. We can save and borrow to grow faster.

(And finally, he also has also fudged figures. Where did the 50 billion USD we are supposed to have invested in the US versus the 20 billion they have invested in us come from? I suspect he has compared the accumulated dollar reserves with this years FDI figures – an indefensible crime for a CA)

Dotcoms spent millions of dollars trying to be first in the fray and acquire and keep as many customers as possible. This explains why they were wrong not to wait.

Normally an article as illiterate and badly written as this [Found through Kiruba] wouldn’t pass through my first line of defence. It essentially accuses the US economy of living off the savings of the rest of the world.
Except that I have read a more sophisticated analysis (Link requires subscription) of how the American economy stays afloat inspite of a huge current account deficit and remain distinctly unconvinced.
The problem is this: Americans don’t save. They borrow a lot. They import much more than they export, (in Economese, this means that they have a large “current account deficit” ). So why is the American economy strong? The Economist article basically claims that it is because everyone else treats the dollar as the equivalent of a gold standard. All other countries are perfectly happy to sell their goods to Americans and keep the dollars that they get in return because they are confident that someone else (not necessarily the Fed) will buy the dollar at stable rates. Looks like a bubble to me.

Joel Spolsky asked why on earth a team of 15 at Napster could not come out with version 2.0 in two years, when Shawn Fanning came out with v 1.0 in a few months. He got an answer. The answer is an instructive one.

President Musharraf is a lucky man. People generally find that their lies are not believed by others. Musharraf is in the fortunate position of not having the truth he spoke being believed. Here is the google cache of his speech to Pakistanis on 19th September 2001. (The original speech no longer exists in the government’s website.) In that he promised them that he would do whatever he could for the Taliban. He also alluded that the compromise with the US was a short term one, and he would stab them in the back once Pakistan’s national goals are achieved. He has kept his word so far.

Stupidity Watch:
Terrorists attack a temple and kill 45 people . Someone has zeroed in on the most important reason why we are helpless – Terrorists have easy access to army uniforms!