But is anyone listening?
A good op-ed in www.dailypioneer.com by Anuradha Dutt.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=OPED&file_name=opd3%2Etxt&counter_img=3
Duplicity of the Left
If the duplicity of leftist intellectuals and activists was in doubt, two incidents serve to expose them completely. The first concerns their silence on the shocking case involving the rape of Imrana Bibi by her father-in-law, and subsequent issue of a fatwa by a Deoband cleric prohibiting her from living with her husband. The woman, thereby doubly victimised, may have little hope of redressal within the framework of Islamic law, which, in the present instance, seems to hold her in the wrong.
By contrast, Hindu women, in view of the codification of laws for their community on modern, secular lines, have access to a criminal justice system that acknowledges rape as a cognisable offence.
Sadly for Imrana, even the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, which is yet to eliminate the barbaric practice of triple talaq - considered un-Islamic - is reported to have endorsed the despicable fatwa. Muslim intellectuals and journalists who zealously guard their personal law against attempts at reforms so that it becomes more equitable in terms of gender and community relations, have scarcely spoken on her behalf.
Permitted so long by free India's rulers to exist on an island of medievalism amid a sea of modernity, Muslims, in general, appear to be oblivious to the terrible injustice suffered by the victim. Feminists, particularly of the Left, who have made a career out of crying themselves hoarse over transgressions involving Hindus, are also quiet.
Among political parties, it is the BJP alone that has taken up the woman's cause, with spokesman Arun Jaitley underlining the urgent need for India to implement a uniform civil code. At the least, Muslim personal law should be reformed in order to protect women from its misuse and to make it conform to the constitutional pledge of granting all Indians equal rights and a life of dignity.
The Congress, which is to blame for allowing Muslims to retain an outdated personal law in a secular democracy, is naturally unwilling to act. And, the Left, always vocal while endorsing the community's right to disputed pilgrimages such as the one at Ayodhya even as it targets Hindu practices and religious leaders, has hidden its head like ostrich-like in the sand.
CPI(M) politburo member Brinda Karat, commonly seen to be a proponent of women's rights at public fora, has not dared to condemn the outrage perpetrated against Imrana by mean, narrow-minded clerics. Neither she, nor others of her ilk have bothered to endorse Mr Jaitley's proposal for a uniform civil code though one might have assumed that egalitarian, liberal ideologues would be the first to voice such a demand.
Her silence possibly owes to her party's long-standing stratagem of nurturing the Muslim votebank by playing up to its weaknesses, which has yielded the desired results in its bastion West Bengal and occasionally, Kerala. Yet, the lady has exerted herself to target the renowned Patanjali yoga exponent Swami Ramdev on the charge of adulterating ayurvedic medicines prepared at his Hardwar ashram with human and animal remains.
The episode provides further proof of the Left's deceit. While turning a blind eye to the excesses committed by Islamic prelates as they deploy occult intercessions on behalf of the superstitious among their flock - lethal practices that have been graphically portrayed by TV news channels she has demanded a probe into the swami's affairs.
The guru, who is daily watched on television by lakhs of viewers, has triggered a revolution of sorts in the sphere of holistic health by his demonstrations of yogic kriyas as well as vegetarian dietary remedies for maladies. His debunking of American colas and fast food as much as the mammoth allopathic medical industry has made him many enemies. His supporters suspect that the attack on him is part of a conspiracy to destroy his reputation.
Certainly, the swami's spiralling popularity and the effectiveness of his prescription for a healthy life have served to make many Indians value their own heritage. His successful propagation of Patanjali yoga has indirectly won new adherents to the Hindu cause since the swami also happens to be extremely nationalistic in his discourses. And, his brand of patriotism has a spiritual flavour, akin to Swami Vivekanand's.
This may have induced CITU, the CPI(M)'s trade union wing, to mount the attack on him by joining disgruntled ashram workers. For, the eventuality most feared by communists and Congress alike is a Hindu resurgence, spearheaded by religious gurus rather than power-hungry politicians. They would do their best to nip it in the bud.
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Friday, June 24, 2005
We & They
We & They
Flash Back to 2001:"We the people". A prime time television program on left wing's NDTV. Barkha Dutt, the host, taking a rabble rousing round of question & answers session with the studio audience & targeting Raveena Tandon.
Tandon had just received the prestigious national award. for her role in Daman
Even before Ms Tandon could enjoy her sweet success, she was embroiled into an unwanted controversy. Her only problem being, she was related to someone in the jury of national awards committee who happened to be BJP supporter.
The all confident & I-know-all Barkha Dutt was full of rhetoric that night. "Should national awards be politicized?" "Should politics interfere in fields like arts & cinema awards?" She was going hammer & tongs on a simple question of an award.
Poor Raveena. She must have dreaded the mere mention of national awards ever since.
Comeback to 2005. Anupam Kher ousted. Sonal Mansingh "replaced". Asha Parekh. Who's that ? The UPA's party with politization of arts & culture has just begun. And guess what? NDTV & Barkha Dutt have forgotten all about "interference" & "politicizing".
Call it amnesia or plain blank shameless-ness on part of NDTV & media in general. The media does not even want to mention this blantant politicization of national institutes.
The conservatives (BJP supporters) of the nation have become 'they'. We have become the 'THEY'.
"THEY have 'saffronised' history books." "THEY have 'communalised' the country"."THEY have 'victimised' an innocent Gandhi bahu".Blah Blah Blah.....
For most of the media houses in the nation today, the BJP supporters are the,well, - the THEY of the nation.
Ever since Vajpayee took over the reins of the nation in 1996, the media led by NDTV, took on the 'Sangh Parivar' head on.
The RSS became NDTV's single biggest obsession. The news headlines, the commentaries, the news content - everything revolved around one word. That magical word was "SECULARISM".
By 2000, NDTV had become the de-facto opinion maker of the nation. TOI, Indian Express, The Hindu, Outlook, Hindustan Times joined the "secular" bandwagon & before NDA & BJP could realize, the entire English Media was in Sonia Gandhi's kitty.
NDTV's success was not so much in streaming out lies after lies every night through satellite to the middle class Indian audience .. (the bulk of NDA voters); it was more in making the entire media fall in line with its brand of "secular" lies.
Let's give the devil its due. NDTV's packaging of news was impeccable. It was effective communication with the news-thirsty Indian middle class who had for years consumed the insipid Doordarshan news every day. NDTV's presentation was a welcome change & it complemented with the "globalization" mood set in the country, post-reforms.
The middle class gave the NDTV the much needed sanctity; by its overwhelming viewership in metros.
NDTV was emboldened in its pursuit & much of UPA's victory in 2004 elections should be attributed to NDTV's subtle but persistent campaign against BJP.
What Sonia Gandhi could not have achieved on her own, NDTV did that for Congress.
Let's look at it this way.What NDTV told or stood for, became the voice of not only the English Media but also the vernacular media.
The Domino Effect :
NDTV's more or less negative campaign against Vajpayee had begun way before Godhra & Gujarat. Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt & other's from Prannoy Roy's NDTV team were the most visible faces of prime time news in the metros. For the middle class these
newscasters were no less than celebrities. Even if viewership of the English news was less than the readership of vernacular dailies, what the NDTV was able to do was impress its views upon the editors of those vernacular dailies who were in fact NDTV watchers.
For example Arun Tikkekar might be the editor of the marathi 'Loksatta', but as a viewer he was the NDTV news watcher.
This domino effect can be best stated like this. NDTV impresses the vernacular daily's editor, who in turn fall in line with its views & 'spreads the word around'.
An irrelevant & baseless news like some 'attack' on Christian tribals in Dang, Gujarat, became a national news.
How?
Rajdeep Sardesai goes on-site at a small hut in Dang, Gujarat which was allegedly attacked by Hindu 'fanatics'.The news is reported almost verbatim in TOI,IE,Loksatta,Tarun Bharat,Navbharat Times,Gujarat Samachar, etc etc etc....and becomes - BIG
So the news that was meant to be consumed by 1% of English speaking audience became a national news, digested by all Indians of all hue & cry.
The worst part was that, no one actually went & cross-checked the alleged attack. Whether the attack on the hut was "communal" or a result of just plain neighbourhood rivalry?The truth never came out.
I guess that news item was the turning point in electronic media history. NDTV tasted blood that day. It realized that one small piece of news if presented effectively (and specially in English) can put the Vajpayee Government on the back foot.
(I say specially in English, because we Indians are in awe of English speaking "gentleman", 50 years after the "angrez" left us. Somehow news in English is supposed to be more authentic, in India)
NDTV got the winning formula that day.It realised that a small piece of news item could be blown out of proportion and made to stick by repeated assertion.
The "THEY' would now be targeted more frequently & with much more vigour. Whether it would be an isolated incident of attack on nuns in some remote town or burning of
missionary in orissa, or transporting Bangladeshi's back to where they belong, NDTV attacked the "THEY" of the country almost incessantly, spreading one lies after another. And yes, succeeding in sticking those lies in the public memory.
The RSS became the Nation's enemy number 1. The Hindu Nationalist, stood for nothing more than a communal pervert who by virtue of being Hindu was by default the "aggressor". Indian muslims & christians (also called minorities (???)) became by default the "victims".
As a rule of thumb, the fault always lay with the Hindus, whatever may be the circumstances.
The west & missionary backed Human Rights industry got a fillip with NDTV at the helm of national dialogue.
The NDTV's success story had just begun. More programs.More lies.Biased news room "debates" were stage managed in Delhi studios.Various "talk shows" were aired & "intellects" from JNU (a leftist haven) prevailed over the gullible audiences.
(It is not a surprise that Prannoy Roy & CPM's Brinda Karat are related)
In a few years NDTV managed to demonise BJP like no other.
What required "The Hindu" newspaper more than 50 years, it's younger brother "NDTV" achieved in less than a decade.
BJP's demonisation was complete after Gujarat riots. The riots of much less intenstity than 84 Sikh riots, and that which was brought within control in just 3 days, unlike the ghastly Sikh riots which went on for days if not months.
The future of nationalist Hindus:
With the Judiciary, the Parliament & the all important media firmly behind her, its a cake walk for Sonia Manio from here on.Its difficult not to be frustrated under the current conditions.But what's worse is that now a feeling of helplessness has crept in the Hindutva camp.
For all its roar & bark, there's very little bite.
Bal Thackray, Vajpayee, Advani are more or less, spent forces. The "WE" of the nation has successfully alienated the "THEY" of the nation. An entire generation of voters, now basking under the glory of BPO & IT has no time for what's currently happening to the nation. This new generation lies confused & rootless. Shivaji Maharaj & Rana Pratap have been overshadowed by Akbar & Aurangzeb in children's history books.Nehru stands as a symbol of modern India & Savarkar is the villain of Indian independence. All thanks to messrs HKS Surjeet,Arjun Singh,Mani Shankar Iyer et al.
Secularism stands for everything anti-Hindu now.
Imagine the uproar (created by media) if following events had occurred under NDA.
1. Vajpayee's foster son goes on an official visit to Russia & meets Putin & uses private jet.
2. The governor calls a minority party to form the government.(Bihar)
3. An elected assembly is dissolved by means of blatant horse-trading. (GOA)
4. The Shahi Imam of Delhi is taken in custody for illegal enchroachment.
5. Jagdish Tytler,An elected MP of the government is denied US Visa, for his role in 84 riots.
6. A Bangladeshi army officer is killed inside Indian borders, after the Indian army traps him.
7. 5% jobs are reserved for parsis,sikhs,jains each.
8. There's acute power shortage in some states.
9. The Finance Minister imposes a tax on withdrawing money.
10.Like Aligarh university, BHU reserved the right to admission on religion basis.
Sadly its only the "WE" of the nation who have the voice. The Vinod Mehtas, The Kuldeep Nayars, The Praful Bidwais,The Arundati Roys, The Shekhar Guptas, The Amulya Gangulis, The Shabana Azmis, The Javed Akhtars, The Rajdeep Sardesais,The Mahesh Bhatts are the icons of the "WE"s. They are not only most vocal but nauseatingly most visible owing to the love media has for them.
The NDTV today is a great platform for the "WE"s of the nation, not to forget TOI,HINDU,IE,OUTLOOK etc.
The "THEY"s of the nation do not have one, they can call their own.
All the brave army men fighting Islamic terrorism from outside,all the brave policemen fighting the same inside,all those in Bihar suffering under Lalu & his goons everyday of their lives,all those in Kerela helplessly watching the rich Chritian onslaught,all those Hindus in West Bengal & Assam feeling squeezed out in the face of exponential growth of Muslim population,all those Kashmiri pandits who have lost hopes from Indian government & have lost faith in God, all those Hindu nationalist who once were proud of Hinduism,Hindutava & Bharat varsh,all the people who watch in frustration one Italian born waitress rule the nation as queen & prepare her dumbo son to take on as next Prime Minister, all of these have now become the 'THEY' of the nation.
The "WE"s have shrewedly but surely won this round.If you love pakistan,if you suck up to China,if you happen to be a human rights activist & file a case against the police for "falsely implicating" a muslim terrorist, if your heart goes for Gujarati muslims but does not give a damn for Kashmiri Hindus or Sikh riot victims, if you feel ill-treating the highest spiritual leader of the Hindus was right, well you are in luck.
Because you belong to the "WE" camp of India.
Flash Back to 2001:"We the people". A prime time television program on left wing's NDTV. Barkha Dutt, the host, taking a rabble rousing round of question & answers session with the studio audience & targeting Raveena Tandon.
Tandon had just received the prestigious national award. for her role in Daman
Even before Ms Tandon could enjoy her sweet success, she was embroiled into an unwanted controversy. Her only problem being, she was related to someone in the jury of national awards committee who happened to be BJP supporter.
The all confident & I-know-all Barkha Dutt was full of rhetoric that night. "Should national awards be politicized?" "Should politics interfere in fields like arts & cinema awards?" She was going hammer & tongs on a simple question of an award.
Poor Raveena. She must have dreaded the mere mention of national awards ever since.
Comeback to 2005. Anupam Kher ousted. Sonal Mansingh "replaced". Asha Parekh. Who's that ? The UPA's party with politization of arts & culture has just begun. And guess what? NDTV & Barkha Dutt have forgotten all about "interference" & "politicizing".
Call it amnesia or plain blank shameless-ness on part of NDTV & media in general. The media does not even want to mention this blantant politicization of national institutes.
The conservatives (BJP supporters) of the nation have become 'they'. We have become the 'THEY'.
"THEY have 'saffronised' history books." "THEY have 'communalised' the country"."THEY have 'victimised' an innocent Gandhi bahu".Blah Blah Blah.....
For most of the media houses in the nation today, the BJP supporters are the,well, - the THEY of the nation.
Ever since Vajpayee took over the reins of the nation in 1996, the media led by NDTV, took on the 'Sangh Parivar' head on.
The RSS became NDTV's single biggest obsession. The news headlines, the commentaries, the news content - everything revolved around one word. That magical word was "SECULARISM".
By 2000, NDTV had become the de-facto opinion maker of the nation. TOI, Indian Express, The Hindu, Outlook, Hindustan Times joined the "secular" bandwagon & before NDA & BJP could realize, the entire English Media was in Sonia Gandhi's kitty.
NDTV's success was not so much in streaming out lies after lies every night through satellite to the middle class Indian audience .. (the bulk of NDA voters); it was more in making the entire media fall in line with its brand of "secular" lies.
Let's give the devil its due. NDTV's packaging of news was impeccable. It was effective communication with the news-thirsty Indian middle class who had for years consumed the insipid Doordarshan news every day. NDTV's presentation was a welcome change & it complemented with the "globalization" mood set in the country, post-reforms.
The middle class gave the NDTV the much needed sanctity; by its overwhelming viewership in metros.
NDTV was emboldened in its pursuit & much of UPA's victory in 2004 elections should be attributed to NDTV's subtle but persistent campaign against BJP.
What Sonia Gandhi could not have achieved on her own, NDTV did that for Congress.
Let's look at it this way.What NDTV told or stood for, became the voice of not only the English Media but also the vernacular media.
The Domino Effect :
NDTV's more or less negative campaign against Vajpayee had begun way before Godhra & Gujarat. Rajdeep Sardesai, Barkha Dutt & other's from Prannoy Roy's NDTV team were the most visible faces of prime time news in the metros. For the middle class these
newscasters were no less than celebrities. Even if viewership of the English news was less than the readership of vernacular dailies, what the NDTV was able to do was impress its views upon the editors of those vernacular dailies who were in fact NDTV watchers.
For example Arun Tikkekar might be the editor of the marathi 'Loksatta', but as a viewer he was the NDTV news watcher.
This domino effect can be best stated like this. NDTV impresses the vernacular daily's editor, who in turn fall in line with its views & 'spreads the word around'.
An irrelevant & baseless news like some 'attack' on Christian tribals in Dang, Gujarat, became a national news.
How?
Rajdeep Sardesai goes on-site at a small hut in Dang, Gujarat which was allegedly attacked by Hindu 'fanatics'.The news is reported almost verbatim in TOI,IE,Loksatta,Tarun Bharat,Navbharat Times,Gujarat Samachar, etc etc etc....and becomes - BIG
So the news that was meant to be consumed by 1% of English speaking audience became a national news, digested by all Indians of all hue & cry.
The worst part was that, no one actually went & cross-checked the alleged attack. Whether the attack on the hut was "communal" or a result of just plain neighbourhood rivalry?The truth never came out.
I guess that news item was the turning point in electronic media history. NDTV tasted blood that day. It realized that one small piece of news if presented effectively (and specially in English) can put the Vajpayee Government on the back foot.
(I say specially in English, because we Indians are in awe of English speaking "gentleman", 50 years after the "angrez" left us. Somehow news in English is supposed to be more authentic, in India)
NDTV got the winning formula that day.It realised that a small piece of news item could be blown out of proportion and made to stick by repeated assertion.
The "THEY' would now be targeted more frequently & with much more vigour. Whether it would be an isolated incident of attack on nuns in some remote town or burning of
missionary in orissa, or transporting Bangladeshi's back to where they belong, NDTV attacked the "THEY" of the country almost incessantly, spreading one lies after another. And yes, succeeding in sticking those lies in the public memory.
The RSS became the Nation's enemy number 1. The Hindu Nationalist, stood for nothing more than a communal pervert who by virtue of being Hindu was by default the "aggressor". Indian muslims & christians (also called minorities (???)) became by default the "victims".
As a rule of thumb, the fault always lay with the Hindus, whatever may be the circumstances.
The west & missionary backed Human Rights industry got a fillip with NDTV at the helm of national dialogue.
The NDTV's success story had just begun. More programs.More lies.Biased news room "debates" were stage managed in Delhi studios.Various "talk shows" were aired & "intellects" from JNU (a leftist haven) prevailed over the gullible audiences.
(It is not a surprise that Prannoy Roy & CPM's Brinda Karat are related)
In a few years NDTV managed to demonise BJP like no other.
What required "The Hindu" newspaper more than 50 years, it's younger brother "NDTV" achieved in less than a decade.
BJP's demonisation was complete after Gujarat riots. The riots of much less intenstity than 84 Sikh riots, and that which was brought within control in just 3 days, unlike the ghastly Sikh riots which went on for days if not months.
The future of nationalist Hindus:
With the Judiciary, the Parliament & the all important media firmly behind her, its a cake walk for Sonia Manio from here on.Its difficult not to be frustrated under the current conditions.But what's worse is that now a feeling of helplessness has crept in the Hindutva camp.
For all its roar & bark, there's very little bite.
Bal Thackray, Vajpayee, Advani are more or less, spent forces. The "WE" of the nation has successfully alienated the "THEY" of the nation. An entire generation of voters, now basking under the glory of BPO & IT has no time for what's currently happening to the nation. This new generation lies confused & rootless. Shivaji Maharaj & Rana Pratap have been overshadowed by Akbar & Aurangzeb in children's history books.Nehru stands as a symbol of modern India & Savarkar is the villain of Indian independence. All thanks to messrs HKS Surjeet,Arjun Singh,Mani Shankar Iyer et al.
Secularism stands for everything anti-Hindu now.
Imagine the uproar (created by media) if following events had occurred under NDA.
1. Vajpayee's foster son goes on an official visit to Russia & meets Putin & uses private jet.
2. The governor calls a minority party to form the government.(Bihar)
3. An elected assembly is dissolved by means of blatant horse-trading. (GOA)
4. The Shahi Imam of Delhi is taken in custody for illegal enchroachment.
5. Jagdish Tytler,An elected MP of the government is denied US Visa, for his role in 84 riots.
6. A Bangladeshi army officer is killed inside Indian borders, after the Indian army traps him.
7. 5% jobs are reserved for parsis,sikhs,jains each.
8. There's acute power shortage in some states.
9. The Finance Minister imposes a tax on withdrawing money.
10.Like Aligarh university, BHU reserved the right to admission on religion basis.
Sadly its only the "WE" of the nation who have the voice. The Vinod Mehtas, The Kuldeep Nayars, The Praful Bidwais,The Arundati Roys, The Shekhar Guptas, The Amulya Gangulis, The Shabana Azmis, The Javed Akhtars, The Rajdeep Sardesais,The Mahesh Bhatts are the icons of the "WE"s. They are not only most vocal but nauseatingly most visible owing to the love media has for them.
The NDTV today is a great platform for the "WE"s of the nation, not to forget TOI,HINDU,IE,OUTLOOK etc.
The "THEY"s of the nation do not have one, they can call their own.
All the brave army men fighting Islamic terrorism from outside,all the brave policemen fighting the same inside,all those in Bihar suffering under Lalu & his goons everyday of their lives,all those in Kerela helplessly watching the rich Chritian onslaught,all those Hindus in West Bengal & Assam feeling squeezed out in the face of exponential growth of Muslim population,all those Kashmiri pandits who have lost hopes from Indian government & have lost faith in God, all those Hindu nationalist who once were proud of Hinduism,Hindutava & Bharat varsh,all the people who watch in frustration one Italian born waitress rule the nation as queen & prepare her dumbo son to take on as next Prime Minister, all of these have now become the 'THEY' of the nation.
The "WE"s have shrewedly but surely won this round.If you love pakistan,if you suck up to China,if you happen to be a human rights activist & file a case against the police for "falsely implicating" a muslim terrorist, if your heart goes for Gujarati muslims but does not give a damn for Kashmiri Hindus or Sikh riot victims, if you feel ill-treating the highest spiritual leader of the Hindus was right, well you are in luck.
Because you belong to the "WE" camp of India.
Thursday, June 16, 2005
Walmart.com migrates to java 1.5
I found this case study interesting for one particular reason. The author has not used unneccessary jargons to impress the readers. He has used straight-forward language & simple examples to represent, what actually was/is a huge task.
As a developer one knows how painful any migration can get. Even a short re-engineering or re-factoring of a small project takes hell lot of time & energy. Moreover there's always the fear that we might have missed something, or something may come up in due course.
However strong designing or coding skills a person might have, the possibility of human error or over-sight can never be completely removed, it can only be minimised.
Considering that Walmart.com handles 7 million sessions per day (huge by any standards), it must have been a herculan task to upgrade the present system working on Java 1.3/1.4 to Java 1.5.
http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=MigratingtoJava5
How do you upgrade one of the busiest web applications of the whole Internet to Java 1.5? This is a challenge under the best conditions, considering that the application must handle up to 7 million sessions and 106 million page views per day. This article is a case study of the Java 1.5 upgrade for the application and subsystems that make up the walmart.com web site.
Upgrading to Java 1.5 was motivated by the need to have better monitoring tools and JVM capabilities on the production site, the evolution of some foundation technologies that require Java 1.5 functionality in their latest releases, and programmer demand to use the new language features.
The walmart.com store is structured as a single application with scores of subsystems. The application combines open-source, commercial, and proprietary technologies. The main web site is a served by Apache and Tomcat, and it depends on:
Database stored procedures
Apache Axis
Commercial application APIs
Internal applications
Various presentation technologies
The application runs in a loosely coupled cluster of over one hundred servers. Data is managed by a massively parallel database server. The application provides and consumes web services in the form of HTTP POSTs, ad hoc file transfers, and SOAP web services. Since it all depends on Java, the upgrade to 1.5 was planned in three distinct stages over the course of 24 weeks. The goal was to have minimum operational impact.
The application development calendar is made up of eight-week cycles. A typical cycle includes:
new software development;
unit, integration, and interoperability testing;
staging; and
deployment.
The release dates are immutable because of the interdependence with many vendors’ applications. Delaying a release impacts the application itself and a large number of third-party vendors who provide services throughout the site.
Table 1 shows how the Java 1.5 upgrade was mapped to the release calendar:
Release
Activity
Notes
A
Introduce Java 1.5 tools to the development environment, but allow compilation only as Java 1.4
Define workarounds for issues so that a roll ‑ back to JVM 1.4 is possible in case of major production issues not identified during this release or due to system load
Identify and address build and environmental issues
Training in the new Java 5 language features for the engineers
B
Deploy Java 1.5 in production, running as Java 1.4
Define “best coding practices” for developers aching to use the new language features
Resolve issues identified during release A in a permanent way and adopt Java 1.5-compatible solutions
If the production deployment causes problems, roll ‑ back to Java 1.4 and reevaluate
Some third party products, like Apache Axis, may be updated in release B
C
Deploy code written using the new Java 1.5 language features in production
Migration is complete
Table 1
The release schedule is designed to minimize operational disruption and to give the engineers time to address any development and integration issues. The rest of this article presents some of those issues and how the development and operations teams addressed them.
SWITCHING JAVA COMPILERS
The application used Jikes instead of javac prior to release A. Jikes was used in the development environment for compiling static classes and content, and at run‑time for generating JSPs. The upgrade required switching the compiler to javac and configuring it for 1.4 sources and 1.5 targets. This created minimum disruption in the core application building tools, which rely on make and Ant for compiling the application. It created a few problems among the developers because the engineering department policy allows the developers to build with any IDE of their choice as long as the site can be built with the standard make/Ant/javac command line tools. The compiler switch affected the developers in varying degrees:
Users of standard *NIX-only tools were not affected; all they had to do was check the new compiler and build files out of the CVS repository and run “make clean; make”.
Eclipse 3.1 users had the most problems getting the site to compile and execute within the scope of the IDE. None of the problems was a showstopper, and issues were resolved within 24 hours of the upgrade in most cases.
IDEA users didn’t experience major disruptions with the upgrade.
Users of jEdit and other tools didn’t report issues.
There was a small performance impact in building dynamic JSPs with the javac compiler. The impact was deemed insignificant in the context of the site, and balances out with performance advantages gained with the use of Java 1.5 Hotspot.
XML SUPPORT IN JAVA 1.5
Java 1.5 introduced several changes or enhancements to its XML API (SAX, DOM and XSLT in particular). These changes first became apparent when running code that relied on JSP’s imports. Previous versions of the XML API allowed the same XML attribute to be defined more than once in a single JSP. Quite a few JSP pages, dynamic and static, broke when running under Java 1.5 because of the attribute repetition. The two main solutions proposed to address this problem were:
Parse all the JSP files that made reference to this attribute and replace it with a unique name per file. This would allow nesting and cause minimum impact to the existing code or the site itself, since the offending attribute had limited scope.
Restructure the JSP pages and imports so that the attribute was defined once, and only once, for each page, without collisions while retaining the attribute’s name.
We discarded the first solution because, although expeditious, it was also considered a kludge. The “unique name per file” solution would help perpetuate a bad-coding practice. This would result in short-term impact to the production site but non-maintainable or brittle code in the long term. This is not acceptable for a site that relies on several hundred JSPs that, combined with database queries and templates, explode to thousands of different pages.
Implementing the second solution was relatively straightforward, albeit labor-intensive for the platform engineers. Several hundred pages were updated to reflect the change, and were individually tested. We expect to find few issues during quality assurance thanks to their work. The application engineers participated in a training session that explained the reasons for this change and adapted the production code to the new header page import sequence.
SOAP WEB SERVICES
Some mission-critical applications are implemented as Axis SOAP web services. These applications presented two major challenges during the upgrade:
The Axis 1.1 developers had used the word ‘enum’ in one of their package names; enum is a word now reserved for designating enumerated types. Java enums are class‑like constructs and specialize the java.lang.Enum class.
The platform group upgraded Axis to version 1.2 with a different package nomenclature. This worked fine for the compiler but resulted in a run‑time error because of Axis.
Changes to existing Java classes relying on any component upgraded along with Java 1.5 were kept to a minimum to simplify the roll-back process. The standard operating procedure for Axis implementations is to re—generate the application code with the new code base and tools such as WSDL2Java. We chose to keep the existing classes instead for release A and build a programmatic solution to the bug found in Axis 1.2 that would also work with Java 1.4/Axis 1.1. That way only the JVM and libraries need to roll-back if needed. Full implementation of Axis 1.2 (or latest) will wait for releases B or C, when the development focus shifts to language and library features, not JVM/run‑time migration.
HOTSPOT CAVEATS
The servers implement all possible optimization advantages because of the traffic volume that they must handle. The application relies on Hotspot to optimize frequently used methods. The introduction of the Java 1.5 JVM brought with it a few run-time exceptions in code that worked fine under the JVM 1.4.
Troubleshooting and resolving these errors is simple, though somewhat labor intensive:
Use profiling tools, if possible
If the JVM dies, analyze the core dump for clues as to which methods are causing the error
An example of the first case was a problem with the concurrent and parallel garbage collector. It was resolved by increasing the stack memory available to the GC through the use run-time configuration parameters like CMSMarkStackSize and CMSParallelRemarkEnabled, per the Java vendor’s recommendation.
In the second case, some methods threw NullPointerExceptions during the JIT compilation, regardless of the configuration. The short-term workaround this problem is to add the class/method name to the .hotspot_compiler configuration file. The JVM won’t compile the methods listed there. The long-term solution is for the JVM vendor to provide a bug fix.
JSTL TRANSFORM ERRORS
Some portions of the site are implemented with JSTL. They are isolated within a set of common end‑user services, so it was easy to resolve issues when they cropped up.
A number of errors were reported when the JSTL code was executed in the Java 1.5 environment. It was determined JSTL relies on JAXP 1.2 but the J2SE provides JAXP 1.3. The solution to involved two steps:
Specifying the JAXP 1.2 classes to the run-time; and
Resetting the default transformer factory from Xalan to XSLTC.
In step with our desire to disturb the environment as little as possible, these changes were made as command line switches passed to the JVM during startup; they are easy to remove if there is a need to roll Java 1.5 back in a production environment.
OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER
The examples listed so far are the most glaring examples of incompatibilities and issues introduced by the new JVM in an otherwise stable environment. It’s likely that other issues will manifest themselves during regression testing. At this time, the application is stable and the platform development team feels that all the show stopping issues have been resolved.
Once the JVM upgrade to production is complete, the programmers will use Java 5 idioms in the code such as generics, autoboxing, enhanced ‘for’ statements, etc. starting in release B.
RELEASE B: JAVA 1.5 PROGRAMMING
Java 5 coding idioms were introduced at walmart.com through a series of presentations beginning in December 2004. The goal was for the engineering team to familiarize themselves with the new language features and the caveats involved in their use (or abuse). Three 90-minute overview sessions were scheduled:
December 2004: new Java 5 programming features overview: generics, autoboxing, enumerated types, enhanced ‘for’ statement and static imports
May 2005: Annotations, new concurrency API, and enhanced formatted I/O
June 2005: JVM monitoring and profiling tools (JMX)
A team of walmart.com’s engineers developed these training sessions. Additional in‑depth training provided by a third party will follow. The company has a set of non-restrictive coding guidelines in place already; the engineering group will enhance it with a set of best practices specific to the new language features.
New language features will be added only when:
they’re necessary because a third—party API requires them;
an existing third—party API is updated and integrated with the environment;
new application code is developed; and
existing application code is revised;
There won’t be a massive updating exercise to implement the Java 5 language features in every source file. The number of classes and JSP pages to update is staggering, and such endeavor would be plagued with bugs. The goal is to add these features as their need becomes apparent.
CONCLUSION
Upgrading a production Java 1.5 environment for a popular site is a task riddled with risks that can be minimized or addressed through conscientious planning. This article presented how problems were overcome during a run‑time Java 1.5 upgrade process. The engineers in charge of this upgrade and their users (i.e. the application developers) feel comfortable with the process so far, though a few things might be done differently in the future. For example, JTidy (an HTML syntax checker that can fix malformed HTML output) was introduced along with the Java 1.5 upgrade. The engineering group spent some resources chasing ghosts thinking that some problems introduced into the environment by JTidy were caused by the XML parser changes in J2SE 1.5. Future run‑time updates will focus on JVM—specific upgrades, leaving the introduction of new functionality to the late part of the current cycle, or moving it to the next release altogether.
This article is limited to just the Java environment at walmart.com. Except for the problems presented in here, the overall feeling is that a migration to Java 1.5 in a production environment can be a mostly painless exercise. No insurmountable issues are expected when the new coding features come in use. The Java 1.5 upgrade engineers feel that this update will result in performance, integrity, coding and monitoring benefits for the site’s customers, the application developers, and the operations team in charge of the site.
AUTHOR BIO
Eugene Ciurana is an author and computer engineer with 20+ years of experience in the design, implementation and deployment of mission-critical systems.
As a developer one knows how painful any migration can get. Even a short re-engineering or re-factoring of a small project takes hell lot of time & energy. Moreover there's always the fear that we might have missed something, or something may come up in due course.
However strong designing or coding skills a person might have, the possibility of human error or over-sight can never be completely removed, it can only be minimised.
Considering that Walmart.com handles 7 million sessions per day (huge by any standards), it must have been a herculan task to upgrade the present system working on Java 1.3/1.4 to Java 1.5.
http://www.theserverside.com/articles/article.tss?l=MigratingtoJava5
How do you upgrade one of the busiest web applications of the whole Internet to Java 1.5? This is a challenge under the best conditions, considering that the application must handle up to 7 million sessions and 106 million page views per day. This article is a case study of the Java 1.5 upgrade for the application and subsystems that make up the walmart.com web site.
Upgrading to Java 1.5 was motivated by the need to have better monitoring tools and JVM capabilities on the production site, the evolution of some foundation technologies that require Java 1.5 functionality in their latest releases, and programmer demand to use the new language features.
The walmart.com store is structured as a single application with scores of subsystems. The application combines open-source, commercial, and proprietary technologies. The main web site is a served by Apache and Tomcat, and it depends on:
Database stored procedures
Apache Axis
Commercial application APIs
Internal applications
Various presentation technologies
The application runs in a loosely coupled cluster of over one hundred servers. Data is managed by a massively parallel database server. The application provides and consumes web services in the form of HTTP POSTs, ad hoc file transfers, and SOAP web services. Since it all depends on Java, the upgrade to 1.5 was planned in three distinct stages over the course of 24 weeks. The goal was to have minimum operational impact.
The application development calendar is made up of eight-week cycles. A typical cycle includes:
new software development;
unit, integration, and interoperability testing;
staging; and
deployment.
The release dates are immutable because of the interdependence with many vendors’ applications. Delaying a release impacts the application itself and a large number of third-party vendors who provide services throughout the site.
Table 1 shows how the Java 1.5 upgrade was mapped to the release calendar:
Release
Activity
Notes
A
Introduce Java 1.5 tools to the development environment, but allow compilation only as Java 1.4
Define workarounds for issues so that a roll ‑ back to JVM 1.4 is possible in case of major production issues not identified during this release or due to system load
Identify and address build and environmental issues
Training in the new Java 5 language features for the engineers
B
Deploy Java 1.5 in production, running as Java 1.4
Define “best coding practices” for developers aching to use the new language features
Resolve issues identified during release A in a permanent way and adopt Java 1.5-compatible solutions
If the production deployment causes problems, roll ‑ back to Java 1.4 and reevaluate
Some third party products, like Apache Axis, may be updated in release B
C
Deploy code written using the new Java 1.5 language features in production
Migration is complete
Table 1
The release schedule is designed to minimize operational disruption and to give the engineers time to address any development and integration issues. The rest of this article presents some of those issues and how the development and operations teams addressed them.
SWITCHING JAVA COMPILERS
The application used Jikes instead of javac prior to release A. Jikes was used in the development environment for compiling static classes and content, and at run‑time for generating JSPs. The upgrade required switching the compiler to javac and configuring it for 1.4 sources and 1.5 targets. This created minimum disruption in the core application building tools, which rely on make and Ant for compiling the application. It created a few problems among the developers because the engineering department policy allows the developers to build with any IDE of their choice as long as the site can be built with the standard make/Ant/javac command line tools. The compiler switch affected the developers in varying degrees:
Users of standard *NIX-only tools were not affected; all they had to do was check the new compiler and build files out of the CVS repository and run “make clean; make”.
Eclipse 3.1 users had the most problems getting the site to compile and execute within the scope of the IDE. None of the problems was a showstopper, and issues were resolved within 24 hours of the upgrade in most cases.
IDEA users didn’t experience major disruptions with the upgrade.
Users of jEdit and other tools didn’t report issues.
There was a small performance impact in building dynamic JSPs with the javac compiler. The impact was deemed insignificant in the context of the site, and balances out with performance advantages gained with the use of Java 1.5 Hotspot.
XML SUPPORT IN JAVA 1.5
Java 1.5 introduced several changes or enhancements to its XML API (SAX, DOM and XSLT in particular). These changes first became apparent when running code that relied on JSP’s imports. Previous versions of the XML API allowed the same XML attribute to be defined more than once in a single JSP. Quite a few JSP pages, dynamic and static, broke when running under Java 1.5 because of the attribute repetition. The two main solutions proposed to address this problem were:
Parse all the JSP files that made reference to this attribute and replace it with a unique name per file. This would allow nesting and cause minimum impact to the existing code or the site itself, since the offending attribute had limited scope.
Restructure the JSP pages and imports so that the attribute was defined once, and only once, for each page, without collisions while retaining the attribute’s name.
We discarded the first solution because, although expeditious, it was also considered a kludge. The “unique name per file” solution would help perpetuate a bad-coding practice. This would result in short-term impact to the production site but non-maintainable or brittle code in the long term. This is not acceptable for a site that relies on several hundred JSPs that, combined with database queries and templates, explode to thousands of different pages.
Implementing the second solution was relatively straightforward, albeit labor-intensive for the platform engineers. Several hundred pages were updated to reflect the change, and were individually tested. We expect to find few issues during quality assurance thanks to their work. The application engineers participated in a training session that explained the reasons for this change and adapted the production code to the new header page import sequence.
SOAP WEB SERVICES
Some mission-critical applications are implemented as Axis SOAP web services. These applications presented two major challenges during the upgrade:
The Axis 1.1 developers had used the word ‘enum’ in one of their package names; enum is a word now reserved for designating enumerated types. Java enums are class‑like constructs and specialize the java.lang.Enum class.
The platform group upgraded Axis to version 1.2 with a different package nomenclature. This worked fine for the compiler but resulted in a run‑time error because of Axis.
Changes to existing Java classes relying on any component upgraded along with Java 1.5 were kept to a minimum to simplify the roll-back process. The standard operating procedure for Axis implementations is to re—generate the application code with the new code base and tools such as WSDL2Java. We chose to keep the existing classes instead for release A and build a programmatic solution to the bug found in Axis 1.2 that would also work with Java 1.4/Axis 1.1. That way only the JVM and libraries need to roll-back if needed. Full implementation of Axis 1.2 (or latest) will wait for releases B or C, when the development focus shifts to language and library features, not JVM/run‑time migration.
HOTSPOT CAVEATS
The servers implement all possible optimization advantages because of the traffic volume that they must handle. The application relies on Hotspot to optimize frequently used methods. The introduction of the Java 1.5 JVM brought with it a few run-time exceptions in code that worked fine under the JVM 1.4.
Troubleshooting and resolving these errors is simple, though somewhat labor intensive:
Use profiling tools, if possible
If the JVM dies, analyze the core dump for clues as to which methods are causing the error
An example of the first case was a problem with the concurrent and parallel garbage collector. It was resolved by increasing the stack memory available to the GC through the use run-time configuration parameters like CMSMarkStackSize and CMSParallelRemarkEnabled, per the Java vendor’s recommendation.
In the second case, some methods threw NullPointerExceptions during the JIT compilation, regardless of the configuration. The short-term workaround this problem is to add the class/method name to the .hotspot_compiler configuration file. The JVM won’t compile the methods listed there. The long-term solution is for the JVM vendor to provide a bug fix.
JSTL TRANSFORM ERRORS
Some portions of the site are implemented with JSTL. They are isolated within a set of common end‑user services, so it was easy to resolve issues when they cropped up.
A number of errors were reported when the JSTL code was executed in the Java 1.5 environment. It was determined JSTL relies on JAXP 1.2 but the J2SE provides JAXP 1.3. The solution to involved two steps:
Specifying the JAXP 1.2 classes to the run-time; and
Resetting the default transformer factory from Xalan to XSLTC.
In step with our desire to disturb the environment as little as possible, these changes were made as command line switches passed to the JVM during startup; they are easy to remove if there is a need to roll Java 1.5 back in a production environment.
OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER
The examples listed so far are the most glaring examples of incompatibilities and issues introduced by the new JVM in an otherwise stable environment. It’s likely that other issues will manifest themselves during regression testing. At this time, the application is stable and the platform development team feels that all the show stopping issues have been resolved.
Once the JVM upgrade to production is complete, the programmers will use Java 5 idioms in the code such as generics, autoboxing, enhanced ‘for’ statements, etc. starting in release B.
RELEASE B: JAVA 1.5 PROGRAMMING
Java 5 coding idioms were introduced at walmart.com through a series of presentations beginning in December 2004. The goal was for the engineering team to familiarize themselves with the new language features and the caveats involved in their use (or abuse). Three 90-minute overview sessions were scheduled:
December 2004: new Java 5 programming features overview: generics, autoboxing, enumerated types, enhanced ‘for’ statement and static imports
May 2005: Annotations, new concurrency API, and enhanced formatted I/O
June 2005: JVM monitoring and profiling tools (JMX)
A team of walmart.com’s engineers developed these training sessions. Additional in‑depth training provided by a third party will follow. The company has a set of non-restrictive coding guidelines in place already; the engineering group will enhance it with a set of best practices specific to the new language features.
New language features will be added only when:
they’re necessary because a third—party API requires them;
an existing third—party API is updated and integrated with the environment;
new application code is developed; and
existing application code is revised;
There won’t be a massive updating exercise to implement the Java 5 language features in every source file. The number of classes and JSP pages to update is staggering, and such endeavor would be plagued with bugs. The goal is to add these features as their need becomes apparent.
CONCLUSION
Upgrading a production Java 1.5 environment for a popular site is a task riddled with risks that can be minimized or addressed through conscientious planning. This article presented how problems were overcome during a run‑time Java 1.5 upgrade process. The engineers in charge of this upgrade and their users (i.e. the application developers) feel comfortable with the process so far, though a few things might be done differently in the future. For example, JTidy (an HTML syntax checker that can fix malformed HTML output) was introduced along with the Java 1.5 upgrade. The engineering group spent some resources chasing ghosts thinking that some problems introduced into the environment by JTidy were caused by the XML parser changes in J2SE 1.5. Future run‑time updates will focus on JVM—specific upgrades, leaving the introduction of new functionality to the late part of the current cycle, or moving it to the next release altogether.
This article is limited to just the Java environment at walmart.com. Except for the problems presented in here, the overall feeling is that a migration to Java 1.5 in a production environment can be a mostly painless exercise. No insurmountable issues are expected when the new coding features come in use. The Java 1.5 upgrade engineers feel that this update will result in performance, integrity, coding and monitoring benefits for the site’s customers, the application developers, and the operations team in charge of the site.
AUTHOR BIO
Eugene Ciurana is an author and computer engineer with 20+ years of experience in the design, implementation and deployment of mission-critical systems.
Jagdish Bhagwati's Interview
I must confess that when the first time i heard Mr. Bhagwati on a local cable channel deliver a lecture on his new book, i wasn't particularly impressed by his views, especially on the outsourcing. The audience, which was pre-dominantly middle class american, was asking questions to Bhagwati about the impact of outsourcing on American jobs & economy, a la Doubbs.
Bhagwati's replies were not, in my view, sharp or focussed. I might have joined the program a wee bit late & hence could not get the right context of his replies. Because Mr. Bhagwati's credentials & bio-data speak for themselves. And one cannot question his authority on subject of Global economy.
This interview i picked up from Rajeev Srinivasan's blog. Though it appeared on NPQ's site.
I particularly liked the reference that Mr. Bhagwati makes about the former NDA government of India. I am more or less convinced that Vajpayee's NDA government's biggest achievement was to make India & Indian's regain some confidence in world market. Something that we were lacking in those depressing Nehru-Gandhi family rule era.
Owing to government policies, we Indians over the years had practically no expectations from our system & government.
What BJP & NDA did was , 1) raise the bar of expectations of a common man from the rulers, 2) address the basic issue of infrastructure & most importantly 3) make the government accountable to the people's needs.
Sadly for India, NDA lost, and now within one year of UPA rule we are back to , 1) falling industrial growth, 2) high inflation 3) acute power shortage 4) and now due to poor monsoon , low agricultural productivity.
Though one cannot blame the poor monsoon on UPA's rule, the point here is that the present day government , a rag-tag coalition of anti-BJP forces, is not a good sign for India.
The current establishment along with it's left partners is only involved in witch-hunting & demolishing the good work done by previous government.
http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2005_spring/12_bhagwati.html
China Shows Trade Is Best Route Out of Poverty
JAGDISH BHAGWATI, professor of economics at Columbia University, is one of the world's leading policy intellectuals on trade and development. He has been a key advisor to the director general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Among his 45 books are Protectionism: The World Trading System at Risk, A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration and Democracy and, most recently, In Defense of Globalization. He spoke with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels in Davos during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
NPQ As usual, this year anti-globalization protestors picketed against the WTO in Davos, and the World Social Forum met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to argue that freer trade hurts the poor.
Yet, hasn't it by now become clear that liberalized trade-codified in the World Trade Organization, which is now 10 years old-has lifted more people out of poverty than all the social revolutions of the 20th century combined?
JAGDISH BHAGWATI That is exactly right. Liberalized trade, along with foreign investment, has opened up opportunity for the poor across the globe by expanding economic growth. In fact, the great sea change over the past decade has been precisely that the governments of traditionally poor countries like India, China and Brazil now see liberalized trade and investment flows not as a threat but as the opportunity it actually is.
This way of thinking marks a profound break with the old prominent ideas of people like Raul Prebisch about the "Third World periphery" being exploited by the "rich center." As a sociology professor before he preceded (Luiz Inacio) Lula (da Silva) as president of Brazil and changed his mind, Fernando Henrique Cardoso formulated the "dependencia" theory, which said that the "South" was poor because the "North" exploited it to get rich. If a country avoided the "neocolonial embrace," he thought in the old days, it would be better off.
Governments in the poorer world today have not changed their policies on ideological grounds-"embracing the neoliberal, Washington consensus"-but as a pragmatic response to the need for access to markets, investment capital and economic growth. They did not move to the right, only from the left to the center.
Of course, privatization can be corrupted, as it was in Russia's haste to break with the Communist past. It went from the Politburo to the oligarchs. China, of course, has its problems with corruption. But two decades of high growth that resulted from opening up to the world economy have pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty.
The same is true for India. It has gone from 3.5 percent annual income growth rate over 25 years to 5.5 percent rate of growth in the past 15 years. The opportunities created by that growth have pulled huge numbers of unemployed and underemployed people up the ladder.
In my view, the last government in India, which moved toward liberalization and privatization, lost the elections not because it hadn't done anything about poverty-but because it had! And that created a revolution of rising expectations it couldn't fulfill. People no longer accepted that living in poverty was the normal way of life-"the non-revolution of non-expectations." This is democracy's importance in development terms: It reinforces the expectations of growth and thus drives governments to produce or be thrown out of power.
The empirical evidence is there for all to see. It is therefore mystifying to me to see the anti-globalization movement continue to insist that liberalized trade and the WTO are somehow enemies of the poor. The ball is now really in their court. They can't just take ideological positions and ignore the enormous strides in India or China that have resulted from globalization.
NPQ To the chagrin of the antiglobos who gathered recently in Porto Alegre, even one of the most leftist leaders in the world today, President Lula da Silva of Brazil, now embraces a policy of liberalized trade as the main route to development.
His foreign minister, Celso Amorim, hailed the decision of the WTO meeting in Geneva last August to move toward lifting agricultural subsidies, saying that "the WTO Doha Round now provides a framework for the full integration of developing countries into the international marketplace. Estimates of global gains vary from $250 billion to $700 billion per year. An estimated 500 million people are expected to rise out of poverty as a result. This new dynamic rekindles the belief that trade, not aid, should be the main engine of international development and social justice."
BHAGWATI President Lula has been very smart-and cautious-in general. He has learned the lessons of (Salvador) Allende in Chile, who moved too sharply and quickly to the left, destroying the domestic equilibrium and creating the chaos that Henry Kissinger and company took advantage of. But the wound was first of all self-inflicted: The financial capital for growth fled Chile, yet the workers wanted to be rewarded right away. An impossible situation.
Lula is much more pragmatic and thereby more prudent. He is not a French Marxist intellectual but a trade union leader down in the trenches with his sleeves rolled up. Utopia is a nice idea, but, as trade union leaders know, you have to settle for what you can get based upon your bargaining strength. If you go too far, you kill the golden goose.
This approach is exactly what won the concessions on agricultural subsidies in the WTO negotiations. Brazil has led the g-20 group of countries [which includes South Africa, India and China-ed.] to press for change. In Cancun a couple of years ago, the g-20 simply stood up and told Europe and the United States that without a reduction in agricultural subsidies, they weren't getting enough out of the bargain to make a deal. A year later in Geneva, those countries conceded to the g-20.
Amorim is right to celebrate this transition to a new framework as an important victory.
NPQ What seems to be going on is a shift in the global balance of economic power. Once China joined the WTO and the larger developed countries joined in the G-20 group, they have used their weight against the European Union and the US to insist on fairer rules of trade. Globalization is thus now a two-way street, with benefits flowing all around, not just to the rich countries.
Do you see that shift?
BHAGWATI This is definitely true. Without question there has been a shift in the ethos of the world trading system because there are now weighty players on both sides. It is no longer just the EU and the US running the show, but China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, South Africa and Argentina. Clout has been democratized. Under these circumstances, WTO can never be an instrument of the rich countries.
China's mere weighty presence has shifted the balance of how trade rules are set, yes. Though, perhaps wisely for them, China has not led the charge because it knows it is vulnerable if demands to include human rights and labor rights in trade negotiations ever reach fruition. Also, with the elimination of textile quotas this year, many other poorer countries see China as a competitor which threatens to capture most of the market.
NPQ Textile quotas set by GATT were put in place decades ago both as a kind of affirmative action policy for the poorest countries from India to Bangladesh to export to the West, but also as a way to protect the American textile industry by limiting imports.
Now that has expired, the poorest countries, as you mention, fear being overrun by China, which can dominate textile exports.
Do you see this?
BHAGWATI I don't think so. India was not even fulfilling its quotas when they existed because it was so uncompetitive it couldn't find enough buyers for its textiles. Now that the market is open, the Indians are saying, "Oh, if we don't shape up to world standards, we'll lose out."
As a result, the languishing textile sector is now being modernized with better quality control and capacity to produce quickly on a large scale. The winds of competition for India are like spinach for Popeye; suddenly it is pumped up and ready to fight.
In general, the effect of the new competition in global textiles will be similar to the opening of the American auto market to the Japanese. All those fuel-efficient, high-quality cars from Japan after the first oil shock forced Detroit to become efficient again. It suddenly learned all kinds of manufacturing innovations from the Japanese, from just-in-time production techniques to diversifying the supply chain.
The other issue is that China itself is not static. As big as China is, two decades of double-digit growth in a country with a one-child policy is already producing labor shortages in the Pearl River Delta and around Shanghai and some other coastal cities, thus pushing up wages. Once-desperate young women coming to work in factories from the provinces now quit their job if they don't like it to find another one. Suddenly, all that social legislation on the books which was ignored is finally kicking in. Workers will stay at plants where they are treated well and leave worse places.
Overall, this will make China less competitive in labor-intensive industries-such as textiles-which will begin to shift more to places like Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, parts of India and even Africa. China, like Japan before it, will begin to move up the value-added ladder to more skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive production.
In short, the fear of China's dominance of global textiles is probably exaggerated.
NPQ The promise of globalization is the creation of a global middle class. With the flattening of the global economy we've been discussing, the rising middle classes of India or China are now set to compete with those of the US and Europe. We see this with outsourcing of service jobs to India, for example. How do the rich countries now cope with the displacement of their jobs elsewhere?
BHAGWATI There is a genuine worry that the rising middle classes of India and China will push down wages and salaries in the richer world. That is valid. As far as job displacement, however, it is far more impacted by technology than trade. When a laptop computer can do what a secretary can, or when an ATM machine can do what a bank teller does, he loses his job. Even so, whole new sectors have opened up: You may not need a secretary or bank teller, but now you need the technicians to fix your computers or the ATM machines when they don't work. And they charge $100 an hour!
During the deindustrialization debate a few years ago in the US, presidential candidate Walter Mondale said America threatened to become a nation of hamburger flippers, working in low-wage fast food restaurants. Instead, unfortunately, we've become too much a nation of hamburger eaters!
But I do think there are trade adjustment policies-such as wage insurance-that need to be put in place to relieve the middle-class anxieties about liberalized trade, including outsourcing. But these should not be universal, across-the-board policies, but targeted to the impacted sectors.
NPQ While it may be true that liberalized trade is helping create a larger middle class in the developing world, that may comprise only 20 percent or so of a country's population. Are there ways to link the growing prosperity of the export sector to benefit the rest of the economy that remains poor?
BHAGWATI This question of linkage is critical. In India, the innovation of multiple cropping of the Green Revolution actually increased the demand for labor not only because the growing and harvesting season was longer, but because the rest of the economy, including the export sector, was growing and demanded more food. If workers are paid more in the tradeable sector, they buy more in the rest of the economy.
And, of course, if the inputs to the manufacturing sector that is exporting come from within the country itself-domestic content-that will expand jobs and income growth all down the supply line.
One of the most important things that the rich countries can do to help expand growth more evenly in poor and developing countries-and here I agree with Oxfam-is to reduce or remove tariffs not just on agricultural commodities or raw materials, but also on processed goods. That would encourage the growth of industries that require higher-wage and skilled workers, who in turn will spend more in the domestic economy. Growing incomes will pull other people into employment. Trade can be an engine for that.
Bhagwati's replies were not, in my view, sharp or focussed. I might have joined the program a wee bit late & hence could not get the right context of his replies. Because Mr. Bhagwati's credentials & bio-data speak for themselves. And one cannot question his authority on subject of Global economy.
This interview i picked up from Rajeev Srinivasan's blog. Though it appeared on NPQ's site.
I particularly liked the reference that Mr. Bhagwati makes about the former NDA government of India. I am more or less convinced that Vajpayee's NDA government's biggest achievement was to make India & Indian's regain some confidence in world market. Something that we were lacking in those depressing Nehru-Gandhi family rule era.
Owing to government policies, we Indians over the years had practically no expectations from our system & government.
What BJP & NDA did was , 1) raise the bar of expectations of a common man from the rulers, 2) address the basic issue of infrastructure & most importantly 3) make the government accountable to the people's needs.
Sadly for India, NDA lost, and now within one year of UPA rule we are back to , 1) falling industrial growth, 2) high inflation 3) acute power shortage 4) and now due to poor monsoon , low agricultural productivity.
Though one cannot blame the poor monsoon on UPA's rule, the point here is that the present day government , a rag-tag coalition of anti-BJP forces, is not a good sign for India.
The current establishment along with it's left partners is only involved in witch-hunting & demolishing the good work done by previous government.
http://www.digitalnpq.org/archive/2005_spring/12_bhagwati.html
China Shows Trade Is Best Route Out of Poverty
JAGDISH BHAGWATI, professor of economics at Columbia University, is one of the world's leading policy intellectuals on trade and development. He has been a key advisor to the director general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Among his 45 books are Protectionism: The World Trading System at Risk, A Stream of Windows: Unsettling Reflections on Trade, Immigration and Democracy and, most recently, In Defense of Globalization. He spoke with NPQ editor Nathan Gardels in Davos during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum.
NPQ As usual, this year anti-globalization protestors picketed against the WTO in Davos, and the World Social Forum met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to argue that freer trade hurts the poor.
Yet, hasn't it by now become clear that liberalized trade-codified in the World Trade Organization, which is now 10 years old-has lifted more people out of poverty than all the social revolutions of the 20th century combined?
JAGDISH BHAGWATI That is exactly right. Liberalized trade, along with foreign investment, has opened up opportunity for the poor across the globe by expanding economic growth. In fact, the great sea change over the past decade has been precisely that the governments of traditionally poor countries like India, China and Brazil now see liberalized trade and investment flows not as a threat but as the opportunity it actually is.
This way of thinking marks a profound break with the old prominent ideas of people like Raul Prebisch about the "Third World periphery" being exploited by the "rich center." As a sociology professor before he preceded (Luiz Inacio) Lula (da Silva) as president of Brazil and changed his mind, Fernando Henrique Cardoso formulated the "dependencia" theory, which said that the "South" was poor because the "North" exploited it to get rich. If a country avoided the "neocolonial embrace," he thought in the old days, it would be better off.
Governments in the poorer world today have not changed their policies on ideological grounds-"embracing the neoliberal, Washington consensus"-but as a pragmatic response to the need for access to markets, investment capital and economic growth. They did not move to the right, only from the left to the center.
Of course, privatization can be corrupted, as it was in Russia's haste to break with the Communist past. It went from the Politburo to the oligarchs. China, of course, has its problems with corruption. But two decades of high growth that resulted from opening up to the world economy have pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty.
The same is true for India. It has gone from 3.5 percent annual income growth rate over 25 years to 5.5 percent rate of growth in the past 15 years. The opportunities created by that growth have pulled huge numbers of unemployed and underemployed people up the ladder.
In my view, the last government in India, which moved toward liberalization and privatization, lost the elections not because it hadn't done anything about poverty-but because it had! And that created a revolution of rising expectations it couldn't fulfill. People no longer accepted that living in poverty was the normal way of life-"the non-revolution of non-expectations." This is democracy's importance in development terms: It reinforces the expectations of growth and thus drives governments to produce or be thrown out of power.
The empirical evidence is there for all to see. It is therefore mystifying to me to see the anti-globalization movement continue to insist that liberalized trade and the WTO are somehow enemies of the poor. The ball is now really in their court. They can't just take ideological positions and ignore the enormous strides in India or China that have resulted from globalization.
NPQ To the chagrin of the antiglobos who gathered recently in Porto Alegre, even one of the most leftist leaders in the world today, President Lula da Silva of Brazil, now embraces a policy of liberalized trade as the main route to development.
His foreign minister, Celso Amorim, hailed the decision of the WTO meeting in Geneva last August to move toward lifting agricultural subsidies, saying that "the WTO Doha Round now provides a framework for the full integration of developing countries into the international marketplace. Estimates of global gains vary from $250 billion to $700 billion per year. An estimated 500 million people are expected to rise out of poverty as a result. This new dynamic rekindles the belief that trade, not aid, should be the main engine of international development and social justice."
BHAGWATI President Lula has been very smart-and cautious-in general. He has learned the lessons of (Salvador) Allende in Chile, who moved too sharply and quickly to the left, destroying the domestic equilibrium and creating the chaos that Henry Kissinger and company took advantage of. But the wound was first of all self-inflicted: The financial capital for growth fled Chile, yet the workers wanted to be rewarded right away. An impossible situation.
Lula is much more pragmatic and thereby more prudent. He is not a French Marxist intellectual but a trade union leader down in the trenches with his sleeves rolled up. Utopia is a nice idea, but, as trade union leaders know, you have to settle for what you can get based upon your bargaining strength. If you go too far, you kill the golden goose.
This approach is exactly what won the concessions on agricultural subsidies in the WTO negotiations. Brazil has led the g-20 group of countries [which includes South Africa, India and China-ed.] to press for change. In Cancun a couple of years ago, the g-20 simply stood up and told Europe and the United States that without a reduction in agricultural subsidies, they weren't getting enough out of the bargain to make a deal. A year later in Geneva, those countries conceded to the g-20.
Amorim is right to celebrate this transition to a new framework as an important victory.
NPQ What seems to be going on is a shift in the global balance of economic power. Once China joined the WTO and the larger developed countries joined in the G-20 group, they have used their weight against the European Union and the US to insist on fairer rules of trade. Globalization is thus now a two-way street, with benefits flowing all around, not just to the rich countries.
Do you see that shift?
BHAGWATI This is definitely true. Without question there has been a shift in the ethos of the world trading system because there are now weighty players on both sides. It is no longer just the EU and the US running the show, but China, India, Brazil, South Korea, Mexico, South Africa and Argentina. Clout has been democratized. Under these circumstances, WTO can never be an instrument of the rich countries.
China's mere weighty presence has shifted the balance of how trade rules are set, yes. Though, perhaps wisely for them, China has not led the charge because it knows it is vulnerable if demands to include human rights and labor rights in trade negotiations ever reach fruition. Also, with the elimination of textile quotas this year, many other poorer countries see China as a competitor which threatens to capture most of the market.
NPQ Textile quotas set by GATT were put in place decades ago both as a kind of affirmative action policy for the poorest countries from India to Bangladesh to export to the West, but also as a way to protect the American textile industry by limiting imports.
Now that has expired, the poorest countries, as you mention, fear being overrun by China, which can dominate textile exports.
Do you see this?
BHAGWATI I don't think so. India was not even fulfilling its quotas when they existed because it was so uncompetitive it couldn't find enough buyers for its textiles. Now that the market is open, the Indians are saying, "Oh, if we don't shape up to world standards, we'll lose out."
As a result, the languishing textile sector is now being modernized with better quality control and capacity to produce quickly on a large scale. The winds of competition for India are like spinach for Popeye; suddenly it is pumped up and ready to fight.
In general, the effect of the new competition in global textiles will be similar to the opening of the American auto market to the Japanese. All those fuel-efficient, high-quality cars from Japan after the first oil shock forced Detroit to become efficient again. It suddenly learned all kinds of manufacturing innovations from the Japanese, from just-in-time production techniques to diversifying the supply chain.
The other issue is that China itself is not static. As big as China is, two decades of double-digit growth in a country with a one-child policy is already producing labor shortages in the Pearl River Delta and around Shanghai and some other coastal cities, thus pushing up wages. Once-desperate young women coming to work in factories from the provinces now quit their job if they don't like it to find another one. Suddenly, all that social legislation on the books which was ignored is finally kicking in. Workers will stay at plants where they are treated well and leave worse places.
Overall, this will make China less competitive in labor-intensive industries-such as textiles-which will begin to shift more to places like Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, parts of India and even Africa. China, like Japan before it, will begin to move up the value-added ladder to more skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive production.
In short, the fear of China's dominance of global textiles is probably exaggerated.
NPQ The promise of globalization is the creation of a global middle class. With the flattening of the global economy we've been discussing, the rising middle classes of India or China are now set to compete with those of the US and Europe. We see this with outsourcing of service jobs to India, for example. How do the rich countries now cope with the displacement of their jobs elsewhere?
BHAGWATI There is a genuine worry that the rising middle classes of India and China will push down wages and salaries in the richer world. That is valid. As far as job displacement, however, it is far more impacted by technology than trade. When a laptop computer can do what a secretary can, or when an ATM machine can do what a bank teller does, he loses his job. Even so, whole new sectors have opened up: You may not need a secretary or bank teller, but now you need the technicians to fix your computers or the ATM machines when they don't work. And they charge $100 an hour!
During the deindustrialization debate a few years ago in the US, presidential candidate Walter Mondale said America threatened to become a nation of hamburger flippers, working in low-wage fast food restaurants. Instead, unfortunately, we've become too much a nation of hamburger eaters!
But I do think there are trade adjustment policies-such as wage insurance-that need to be put in place to relieve the middle-class anxieties about liberalized trade, including outsourcing. But these should not be universal, across-the-board policies, but targeted to the impacted sectors.
NPQ While it may be true that liberalized trade is helping create a larger middle class in the developing world, that may comprise only 20 percent or so of a country's population. Are there ways to link the growing prosperity of the export sector to benefit the rest of the economy that remains poor?
BHAGWATI This question of linkage is critical. In India, the innovation of multiple cropping of the Green Revolution actually increased the demand for labor not only because the growing and harvesting season was longer, but because the rest of the economy, including the export sector, was growing and demanded more food. If workers are paid more in the tradeable sector, they buy more in the rest of the economy.
And, of course, if the inputs to the manufacturing sector that is exporting come from within the country itself-domestic content-that will expand jobs and income growth all down the supply line.
One of the most important things that the rich countries can do to help expand growth more evenly in poor and developing countries-and here I agree with Oxfam-is to reduce or remove tariffs not just on agricultural commodities or raw materials, but also on processed goods. That would encourage the growth of industries that require higher-wage and skilled workers, who in turn will spend more in the domestic economy. Growing incomes will pull other people into employment. Trade can be an engine for that.
Monday, June 13, 2005
Bull in the Chinese Shop
You can call it my prejudice mindset. But I have been carrying this feeling for sometime now that China ain't doing all that good. The more i read, the more i feel intrigued by what's happening there. For all the hype & hoopla surrounding Chinese economy, the hard fact is that unlike India's economy which is growing all round, China's economy's growth is still restricted to coastal urban areas. A large 80% of the Chinese population still remains devoid of fruits of the so called Chinese success in recent times. What's worse, the government does not allow (or want ?) these remaining people to be the part of the sucess story.
In this article which was posted in sulekha.com, the author makes some scathing attack on the current Chinese establishment.
The author being American, you can take this article with a pinch of salt. But even if half of what he says is true, China is not all that "glowing".
Who can stop the rise and rise of China? The communists, of courseBy Mark Steyn(Filed: 12/06/2005)
Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel."
Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.
The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-à-vis JFK) now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the cockroach she is.
Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."
Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.
What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid hovel. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is like for the local boys.
China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way that a mob boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not the behaviour of a psychologically healthy state.
How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen when they collide? If the People's Republic is now the workshop of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop. It's unclear, for example, whether they have the discipline to be able to resist moving against Taiwan in the next couple of years. Unlike the demoralised late-period Soviet nomenklatura, Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free - or even free-ish - society.
Mao, though he gets a better press than Hitler and Stalin, was the biggest mass murderer of all time, with a body count ten times' higher than the Nazis (as Jung Chang's new biography reminds us). The standard line of Sinologists is that, while still perfunct-orily genuflecting to his embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square, his successors have moved on - just as, in Austin Powers, while Dr Evil is in suspended animation, his Number Two diversifies the consortium's core business away from evildoing and reorients it toward a portfolio of investments including a chain of premium coffee stores. But Maoists with stock options are still Maoists - especially when they owe their robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus.
The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It makes almost all Disney's official merchandising, yet it's also the country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China's contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old China's contempt for the concept of all private property: because most big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another) government-controlled, they've failed to understand the link between property rights and economic development.
China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people - and Beijing still has no interest in that. If a blogger attempts to use the words "freedom" or "democracy" or "Taiwan independence" on Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal, he gets the message: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech." How pathetic is that? Not just for the Microsoft-spined Corporation, which should be ashamed of itself, but for the Chinese government, which pretends to be a world power but is terrified of words.
Does "Commie wimps" count as forbidden speech, too? And what is the likelihood of China advancing to a functioning modern stand-alone business culture if it's unable to discuss anything except within its feudal political straitjackets? Its speech code is a sign not of control but of weakness; its internet protective blocks are not the armour but the, er, chink.
India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.
I said a while back that China was a better bet for the future than Russia or the European Union. Which is damning with faint praise: trapped in a demographic death spiral, Russia and Europe have no future at all. But that doesn't mean China will bestride the scene as a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about a "Chinese century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a second American century". But wishing won't make it so.
China won't advance to the First World with its present borders intact. In a billion-strong state with an 80 per cent rural population cut off from the coastal boom and prevented from participating in it, "One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three or four systems. The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America, India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting on Beijing will find the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of bull.
In this article which was posted in sulekha.com, the author makes some scathing attack on the current Chinese establishment.
The author being American, you can take this article with a pinch of salt. But even if half of what he says is true, China is not all that "glowing".
Who can stop the rise and rise of China? The communists, of courseBy Mark Steyn(Filed: 12/06/2005)
Seventy years ago, in the days of Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, when the inscrutable Oriental had a powerful grip on Occidental culture, Erle Stanley Gardner wrote en passant in the course of a short story: "The Chinese of wealth always builds his house with a cunning simulation of external poverty. In the Orient one may look in vain for mansions, unless one has the entrée to private homes. The street entrances always give the impression of congestion and poverty, and the lines of architecture are carefully carried out so that no glimpse of the mansion itself is visible over the forbidding false front of what appears to be a squalid hovel."
Well, the mansion's pretty much out in the open now. Confucius say: If you got it, flaunt it, baby. China is the preferred vacation destination for middle-class Britons; western businessmen return cooing with admiration over the quality of the WiFi in the lobby Starbucks of their Guangzhou hotels; glittering skylines ascend ever higher from the coastal cities as fleets of BMWs cruise the upscale boutiques in the streets below.
The assumption that this will be the "Asian century" is so universal that Jacques Chirac (borrowing from Harold Macmillan vis-à-vis JFK) now promotes himself as Greece to Beijing's Rome, and the marginally less deranged of The Guardian's many Euro-fantasists excuse the EU's sclerosis on the grounds that no one could possibly compete with the unstoppable rise of a Chinese behemoth that by mid-century will have squashed America like the cockroach she is.
Even in the US, the cry is heard: Go east, young man! "If I were a young journalist today, figuring out where I should go to make my career, I would go to China," said Philip Bennett, the Washington Post's managing editor, in a fawning interview with the People's Daily in Beijing a few weeks back. "I think China is the best place in the world to be an American journalist right now."
Really? Tell it to Zhao Yan of the New York Times' Beijing bureau, who was arrested last September and has been held without trial ever since.
What we're seeing is an inversion of what Erle Stanley Gardner observed: a cunning simulation of external wealth and power that is, in fact, a forbidding false front for a state that remains a squalid hovel. Zhao of the Times is not alone in his fate: China jails more journalists than any other country in the world. Ching Cheong, a correspondent for the Straits Times of Singapore, disappeared in April while seeking copies of unpublished interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party general secretary, who fell from favour after declining to support the Tiananmen Square massacre. And, if that's how the regime treats representatives of leading global publications, you can imagine what "the best place in the world" to be a journalist is like for the local boys.
China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over - the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China - a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private. China is the Security Council member most actively promoting inaction on Darfur, where (in the most significant long-range military deployment in five centuries), it has 4,000 troops protecting its oil interests. Kim Jong-Il of North Korea is an international threat only because Beijing licenses him as a provocateur with which to torment Washington and Tokyo, in the way that a mob boss will send round a mentally unstable heavy. This is not the behaviour of a psychologically healthy state.
How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen when they collide? If the People's Republic is now the workshop of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop. It's unclear, for example, whether they have the discipline to be able to resist moving against Taiwan in the next couple of years. Unlike the demoralised late-period Soviet nomenklatura, Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free - or even free-ish - society.
Mao, though he gets a better press than Hitler and Stalin, was the biggest mass murderer of all time, with a body count ten times' higher than the Nazis (as Jung Chang's new biography reminds us). The standard line of Sinologists is that, while still perfunct-orily genuflecting to his embalmed corpse in Tiananmen Square, his successors have moved on - just as, in Austin Powers, while Dr Evil is in suspended animation, his Number Two diversifies the consortium's core business away from evildoing and reorients it toward a portfolio of investments including a chain of premium coffee stores. But Maoists with stock options are still Maoists - especially when they owe their robust portfolios to a privileged position within the state apparatus.
The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. It makes almost all Disney's official merchandising, yet it's also the country that defrauds Disney and pirates its movies. The new China's contempt for the concept of intellectual property arises from the old China's contempt for the concept of all private property: because most big Chinese businesses are (in one form or another) government-controlled, they've failed to understand the link between property rights and economic development.
China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people - and Beijing still has no interest in that. If a blogger attempts to use the words "freedom" or "democracy" or "Taiwan independence" on Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal, he gets the message: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech." How pathetic is that? Not just for the Microsoft-spined Corporation, which should be ashamed of itself, but for the Chinese government, which pretends to be a world power but is terrified of words.
Does "Commie wimps" count as forbidden speech, too? And what is the likelihood of China advancing to a functioning modern stand-alone business culture if it's unable to discuss anything except within its feudal political straitjackets? Its speech code is a sign not of control but of weakness; its internet protective blocks are not the armour but the, er, chink.
India, by contrast, with much less ballyhoo, is advancing faster than China toward a fully-developed economy - one that creates its own ideas. Small example: there are low-fare airlines that sell £40 one-way cross-country air tickets from computer screens at Indian petrol stations. No one would develop such a system for China, where internal travel is still tightly controlled by the state. But, because they respect their own people as a market, Indian businesses are already proving nimbler at serving other markets. The return on investment capital is already much better in India than in China.
I said a while back that China was a better bet for the future than Russia or the European Union. Which is damning with faint praise: trapped in a demographic death spiral, Russia and Europe have no future at all. But that doesn't mean China will bestride the scene as a geopolitical colossus. When European analysts coo about a "Chinese century", all they mean is "Oh, God, please, anything other than a second American century". But wishing won't make it so.
China won't advance to the First World with its present borders intact. In a billion-strong state with an 80 per cent rural population cut off from the coastal boom and prevented from participating in it, "One country, two systems" will lead to two or three countries, three or four systems. The 21st century will be an Anglosphere century, with America, India and Australia leading the way. Anti-Americans betting on Beijing will find the China shop is in the end mostly a lot of bull.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Viva Vegas
You generally do not start with a negative comment for describing a vacation you enjoyed thoroughly, but one of the most striking things that hit me after landing in Vegas was the total lack of pleasant demeanor of the people in general. Having been witness to some of the most gracious hospitality in Orlando,Florida in my last vacation I was carrying a baggage of huge expectations compounded by the fact that Vegas was branded even higher in tourist ranking.
The first acrimonious event occurred the moment we landed at the baggage claim of the Vegas airport. All round chaos was the order of the day & there weren't many pleasantries between the fellow baggage claimers one would usually expect at US airports.It was a no holds barred & on-your-face body language all the way.It soon dawned on me that I might have too long been a part of the cozy,homely, small town atmosphere where no one's in hurry; something that is abundantly lacking in big cities around the world.
Anyways atleast one thing I was prepared for was the soaring heat.It was amply evident the moment we had landed out of the airport waiting for our rent-a-car shuttle to pick us.
Now when in India I have personally witnessed temperatures in 100 F+ range very routinely. But here it was different. You generally do not associate hot summer with the US when you are living in the north of midwestern region. 90 is like blazing hot for us. So it took a while to weather ourselves with that heat.
We picked our rental car & picked up Avinash from his hotel & headed straight for a lunch.
We wanted to cover Hover Dam before heading to the Canyons. So after a sumptuous lunch at Denny's on the strip itself we headed straight to Hover, the Dam.
Hover Dam wasn't particularly spectacular at the first site.And as we were on a pure fun trip, nobody really bothered to venture into the technicalities of the Dam history & its fundamental engineering. It was more of a photo-op than anything. But so was it for many others who had gathered there for having their share of its patel* value.
I feel when you go to places like Hover Dam, the single most important thing is to have ample amount of time at your dispensation.Something that we lesser mortals do not have when we squeeze in a 3 day vacation from our regular office routine. So one might say, enjoying the Hover Dam is a luxury someone should keep it for over-the-hill days, when you can plan an exclusive knowledge trip.
(I hope to undertake those knowledge trips once I am done with all my responsibilities. Whoops ! I am already sounding old).
OK. Before I start sounding like a retired man, let me take our rental car back to US-93 & I-40. The highways that took us to Grand Canyon.We started driving towards Grand C after spending some quality time at Hover Dam. We were fully aware of the fact that we might reach very early in the morning. But it was still worth it,as it did not make sense stopping anywhere else.
We had started at around 21:00 hrs for Grand Canyon. I did not push the gas too much as it was meant to be a leisure drive.
Discussing/arguing with Avinash about politics was always going to be fun. So it was not before we reached the gates of the Grand Canyon National Park that I realized that we had covered the entire distance within no time. In fact by the time we reached it was an unearthly 02:00 am.
We reached right at the nose of Mather Point.It was only in early morning that we realized how close we were from our destination.
Deepak & Avinash did try some stunts with their digital SLRs during those dark periods at 2:30 in the morning after reaching the Canyons while me,Vaidehi & Richa were blissfully unaware of their histrionics with camera.
We were fast asleep in our rented Ford.
It is not an irony that places like Grand Canyon attract the highest crowd for something like sunrise or sunset. In my entire lifetime this would be my 3rd or 4th tourist spot sunset/sunrise. Pachmarhi,Mahabaleshwar,Darjeeling are some I remember. But this one took the cake. It was royal.It was 'Grand' in every sense of the term.
As the crowed swelled near Mather Point, each individual trying to hijack the most strategic position possible for his/her tryst with camerawork, the Grand Canyon started appearing in all its glory with the first rays of sun hitting the earth at around 5:15 am.(Trivia: It takes 8 minutes for the sun rays to reach earth.)
The Asian community dominated the crowd & I instantly felt at home with the surrounding. It was almost a sense of deja vu that gripped me; if i might add.
We spent a good hour or so at the Mather Point. As the sun truely & finally rose over the Canyons, the beauty of the Canyons became more & more evident.
We had to move out from Grand Canyon sooner so that we could make the most of the day in Vegas.We hanged around for sometime in the national park with Avinash & Deepak going ballistic with their sleek Digital SLRs that they were carrying. They got some of the most exquisite pictures of Grand Canyon in those couple of hours.
We had a quick breakfast at the cafetaria in the national park itself.
While I was somehow gulping that insipid breakfast plate, Avinash made an (uncalled for) allusion to the Indian breakfasts & flirted with our taste buds, making us remember the wada pavs, dosas,pav bhajis and anything that made the thing in my plate look more & more bland.
(I have a problem with non-Indian foods. You can call me an Indian food-narcist :)))
It was now time to move out from the Canyons & head straight to our next stop. VEGAS.
With Deepak now taking charge of the wheels, we started back to Vegas at around 10:00 am from GC, thinking that we would want to make the most of rest of the available day.
Alas it was not to be. Though we did reach Vegas at around 15:00 hrs (as what we had planned for), it took us atleast 3 hours to complete the formalities of returning the rental car back to Enterprise & finally settling down for the much wanted nap in out hotel rooms.
Though personally for me it was not all that bad as just after touching Vegas we had a nice little lunch/buffet at Gandhi's; a decent little Indian restuarant just off the strip. After having pizzas & burgers in most sittings of our trip, the Indian food at Gandhi's came as a much needed relief for my desi taste buds & stomach.
Hotel Sahara's rooms were not particularly impressive.Mine & Vaidehi's room atleast had a view to boast off, owing to its 26th floor location.Sadly for Deepak & Richa, that was not the case.
Anyways by the time I reached my room back after returning the rented car, Vaidehi was already fast asleep. Not surprisingly though.She was damn tired for sure. And so was everybody.
We had decided to regroup at around 22:00 hrs in the casino lobby. And so we did.
We started walking down the road from the Sahara Hotel due South.
It did not take us very long to realize that there's more to Vegas than casinos as we walked on the famous Vegas strip that late evening.Cameras & handycams came out soon, much to the dislike of female janata who I believe wanted a more romantic stroll.
All the way from Sahara hotel we walked passed Venetian & Harrah's by the time our tired legs gave in.
We roamed around aimlessly in those casinos & hotels till we finally entered the Harrah's.
Avinash had his share of beginner's luck as he joined a group of seemingly professional black jackers on a table.The casino card dealer added his own bit of glamour & dramatics in his handling of cards. It added to the spice. By the time we left Avinash had already pocketed a cool 60 dollars over and above his investment. (Its a different story that later he lost everything)
It was already around 3:00 am in the morning.And we decided to call it a day.Four of us started walking back to our hotel leaving Avinash to deal with his new found stardom with cards.
As our legs started wearying out further, we desperately missed the convenience of a rented car.We somehow managed to reach our hotel by 4:00 am. It took us forever to walk that distance from Harrah's to our hotel Sahara.
Before retiring to our rooms we decided to stick around in the Sahara's casino and had a hand at gambling.(Honest confession:Sahara was much affordable as the minimum board for black jack was 5$ unlike 15$ in Harrah's)
I was around 15$ positive before Vaidehi applied her "ardhangini" brakes & we had to go to the rooms.I was on a roll & had i not been stopped that night (oops ! morning..) Sahara would have been a loss making casino..(sob.sob).
(What do I loose in saying that ?)
Anyways, next morning was a different day. It was memorial day for Americans. And as it turned out later it was the most memorable day for us.
The stage was perfectly set for a long haul of Vegas mania. Deepak & Richa booked tickets for the David Copperfield show.Vaidehi and myself ended up buying the Zumanity Show at New York New York casino.
Our show was at around 22:30 hrs late night so we had ample amount of time to gulp in as much Vegas as possible.
After a free show called 'Air Play' in Tropicana Hotel we went to watch a magic show exaggeratedly called XTreme Magic , in the same hotel.Some of the items in that show qualified as Xtreme. It was a fun 1:30 hrs & we enjoyed every bit of it.
On the other side of the road Richa had her own tryst with glory as she was called on stage in front of the audience of the David Copperfield Show. She was floored & flowered all the way as the magician performed some mindblowing majic.
One could see the lit faces of Deepak & Richa after they came out of the show to tell how grand that show might have been.
But there was more to come. We had a romantic foursome ride on a pseudo-Venice river in the Venetian.Deepak could not resist the temptation of flirting with our beautiful lady boat driver who by the way was equally forthcoming to all his advances.(Excuse me but spilling the beans is my old habit.)
After the ride we moved on to explore newer territories.
Two minutes of Camcorder recording & one minor fight* with Vaidehi later, I & Vaidehi found ourselves in front of the exquisite Bellagio fountain show.
It was one of a kind.
Many years ago as a kid i had seen the famous Vrindavan Garden fountain show of Mysore in India.I was eternally enamoured by that show. But if today I have to compare Bellagio with Vrindavan Garden's show it would be like comparing Tendulkar's awesome display at Sharjah in 1998 against Australia with Sunil Gavaskar's insipid 36 runs in 60 overs innings in the first one day international match India played in 1975 World Cup.(Where Bellagio offcourse stands for Sachin's innings).
It was so grand. It was awesome. It was truly majestic.
We had to bid Aviansh goodbye from the Balligios itself as he had a flight to catch for Dallas. It had been a great couple of days with him & his camera.Fun all the way. Avinash before leaving had left us a legacy of debates & arguments pertaining to male/female sense & sensibilities**.
Being a bachelor he whisked himself away from the potential chaos of answering uncomfortable questions for me & Deepak to handle later.
I mean how & what on earth should a husband answer when his wife asks him in public whether she's sensible??
Great men have failed to answer this.How can anybody expect an ordinary man like me to get this right?
Phew !!
We still had a couple of hours before the much awaited (by me) Zumanity Show. We had enough time to squeeze in one helicopter ride over the strip. It was already dark & Vegas was all lit up.
The setting was perfect for a ride over the sin city.And ride we did. Passing over those beautiful buildings & well lit roads, me & Vaidehi found ourselves for the first time ever in a Chopper.
From the skies,it was Vegas in all its glory. It was awesome. I could feel Vaidehi beaming with joy over those extraordinary buildings all lined & lit up; almost as if to welcome us into Vegas's lap.
If Bombay's marine drive is Queen's necklace;Vegas was a full blown jewelry store at its best display.Full of rare stones, if i may add.
Stratospher tower,The Mirage,MGM Grand et all.. everything was standing out tall & sensational.Inducing us into committing ourselves to one more Vegas trip. I thought to myself, can I have enough of it (Vegas) in one visit? The answer was NO,bold & italics.
We landed back safely on that strip after getting the best possible perspective of Las Vegas.
It took us a while to sink in that we just had a glorious 15 mins of chopper ride as we walked to our last destination - the Zumanity show in New-York New-York hotel.
We already had a contented & satisfied feeling with us. It was almost like we had grabbed Vegas by both hands just a few minutes ago.
In the meantime Deepak & Richa got a glimpse of Madame Tussad's & a ride on the top of Eiffel Tower of Paris on the Vegas strip.I am sure they could not have asked for more that day.
As we entered the massive auditorium of the Zumanity show & retired to those cozy seats in the front, some of the performers had already started entertaining the audience. It was a prelude to what was coming.Vaidehi became nervous at the thought of she being pulled up on the stage, as the showman moved around in the audience to get someone up.
The show had eroticism written all over. But it was not vulgar. The crowd was very sophisticated & there was a touch of class attached to performance. Though Vaidehi found some of the comments made during the show cheap; I for my part enjoyed every bit of it.(Does the book, Men are from Mars, Women from Venus, ring a bell here ?)
Some of the items of the show were simply out-of-this-world.
After hour & a half of exotic stunts & music the show ended & we walked straight back to MGM Grand casino where we were expecting Deepak & Richa to join us.Our monorail station was right above the MGM grand.
The problem with Vegas is, you just can't sit idle. You have to gamble even if you find 10 mins of free time at your dispensation.Thats exactly what happened with us while we are waiting on them.
I must confess that I lost more dollars in those 5 mins of gambling that I did when Vaidehi went to freshen up than I lost in those serious & committed gambling time.
that's what Vegas does to you. As we were waiting for the Kapurs to arrive we indulged in some casual gambling over the slotting machines & casually lost 20-30 dollars in no time.
We reached back to our hotel by around 1:00 am. (By the way all these unearthly times of 1's & 2's & 3 a.ms are pretty normal in Vegas).
It was now pay back time to Sahara hotel. Last night Sahara inadvertently left me off the hook with 15$ profit.Today was not my day. I lost 120$ in around 20 mins flat behind the back of Vaidehi who was sitting on another table of Black Jack.
One serious suggestion to readers. Whenever you plan to go to Vegas & gamble, have some warm up or practice matches (if you will) in the local gambling den of your city. That way you do not enter the ultimate gambling arena called Vegas without some experience.
I had no option but to go back to my room & sleep, having made a mess of the little profit that i had made the day before.(Gosh!!! was I even thinking of winning in gambling ? Is it something that happens in the normal world? Has anyone come to Vegas & gone with a +ve balance?)
Anyways,we had a nice sleep & next day afternoon we had a flight to catch. For all practical purpose our trip was over by then.
So would you think. But no, next day morning me & Deepak rushed to the Stratosphere hotel. The 110 storied monster near our Hotel. I had heard a lot about the ride on the terrace of Stratosphere from some of my friends.For me it was a must-not-miss thingy.
We had to buy tickets of the ride & decide which one of the 3 rides to pick.We inadvertently chose a ride called "insanity". When you know that the ride's name is something like insanity, you do not want to miss that.It turned out to be a good decision in the end.
I felt confident & at ease when I saw the set up of that ride.My confidence multiplied when I saw riders from previous round coming out all cool & relaxed without any screaming or crying normally associated with the post-ride syndrome of some of those horrible goosey-bumpy rides like roller coasters.
But as it turned out, it was not all that simple. May be the previous riders were experienced.
It is not easy to laugh when you are hinged to a single seat & the seat is revolving around an extended lever which extends way beyond the terrace parapit of a 110 storied building.
As I sat on my seat & the ride continued I realized that I had literally nothing to "fall back upon"...as all I could see from the top was a number of small tiny cars in the parking lot 110 floors below me with nothing but air in between.
I also thought to myself. If I ever fall from this ride, I might as well make a good dent in some rich suckers car in that parking lot before dying.Those first initial moments of the ride we had a hearty laugh. But that laughter was coming more out of fear more than anything else.(As it usually happens)
While me & Deepak were away, revolving on the 110th floor ride, back in our hotel, Vaidehi & Richa could not resist the temptation of having a shot at one more round of gambling. (Apparantely the idea was to cover up for all the losses made thus far. B-R-A-V-O !!!).
(Un) Fortunately for me, Vaidehi was not carrying her ID card. She had given it to me for keeping in my wallet. So as it turned out, only Richa could loose more money & Vaidehi escaped from the casino keeping her card clean of further debit. Vaidehi was dis-allowed to play or even roam in the casino.
(Vaidehi came up with mixed feelings after this incident. Sad because she was not allowed to play in the casino, happy, that she looked young enough to be asked for an identity card from the casino authorities.)
Our Vegas trip officially got over by 12:30 pm that day & it was time to fly back to our routine life.
In the end i came back confused as to what Vegas really stood for? Was it for its exotic hotels, for those mindboggling shows, for all those gambling stories to tell ?
One thing's for sure though. It entices you into spending. You cannot carry a tight pocket & still have a good time there. You need to blow,flow & glow.
Before I end, let me take a quick bow to the group of people who set their first steps into the barren,arid lands of Nevada & built an oasis called Vegas in that un-inhabited dessert.
VIVA VEGAS.
* patel value : no offence for any community. but this term is used to indicate the photo-op potential of a particular spot. Since gujjus form the bulk of tourists at any place, the term comes from how many clicks does a spot get. As a convention, NY's statue of liberty has according to some people the highest "patel value".
* Me & Vaidehi got into a confrontation over the "excessive" use of handycam. Apparently i was guilty of missing out on a romantic movement in the "Venice" boat, at The Venetian
** Avinash popped up a question during a discussion in the car while coming back.It was something about sensible life partner.One thing led to another before me & Deepak found ourselves in a soup.I wish not to elaborate this further as i want to live to see another day.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
Cheap Indian Life
How cheap life really is in India?
This shocking piece of news that i picked up from ndtv.com tells just that.
News of people dying of riots,hunger,train-accidents,bomb-blasts,is as routine as a milk-man depositing the milk packet at the Indian house's doors every morning; for an average Indian middle class.
We almost consider the lives of our brave,young jawans on the border, as cheap. The number of deaths of armymen in Kashmir have become mere statistics for us.
While the mainstream India continues to live in the divine intoxication of Economic liberalization,BPO & IT success, there is an India which does not have a voice. It is much larger in size, but much weaker in strength.
At one end we are today world's fourth biggest economy in GDP terms. On the other we are a nation of 1 Billion people , of which almost half do not have the neccessary ingredients to sustain a decent lifestyle.
It's a damning indication of how the nation's leaders & policy makers have failed us as a Nation and as people, in more than 50 years of our so called independence.
In this small piece of disturbing news, Jayashree from Nashik could not save her dying husband. It is obvious that since she was poor, her voice was not heard. Could this have happened to an upper middle class or a rich chap in India?
courtesy : ndtv.com
Man dies due to hospital negligence
Kishore Belsare
Tuesday, June 7, 2005 (Nasik):
In Nasik, carelessness on the part of a hospital ended in tragedy, when one man lost his life in a horrible mix up. Gangaram was on his way home on his friend's motorbike when a truck hit them. While his friend died on the spot, Gangaram was unconscious, when they were sent to the Nasik Civil hospital. An injured Gangaram was in the ambulance for three hours in the hospital but the doctors, thinking him to be dead, sent him to the mortuary.
Slow death
Gangaram slowly succumbed to his injuries, despite the fact that his wife Jayshree, kept saying he was still alive but to no avail."I told the doctors that my husband is alive but they did not believe me and sent him for a post mortem. I blame the doctors and the authorities," said Jayshree.
Under pressure, due to Jayshree's persistent protests, the hospital conducted an inquiry.It was then they realised that Gangaram was still alive when he came to the hospital, but died a slow death in the mortuary. "It happened because of the negligence of our doctor and we have suspended him. We have decided to employ both the wives in our hospital on a contract basis," said D M Vaidya, Civil Surgeon.It was indeed a bizarre and tragic end, one that the police are still investigating.
This shocking piece of news that i picked up from ndtv.com tells just that.
News of people dying of riots,hunger,train-accidents,bomb-blasts,is as routine as a milk-man depositing the milk packet at the Indian house's doors every morning; for an average Indian middle class.
We almost consider the lives of our brave,young jawans on the border, as cheap. The number of deaths of armymen in Kashmir have become mere statistics for us.
While the mainstream India continues to live in the divine intoxication of Economic liberalization,BPO & IT success, there is an India which does not have a voice. It is much larger in size, but much weaker in strength.
At one end we are today world's fourth biggest economy in GDP terms. On the other we are a nation of 1 Billion people , of which almost half do not have the neccessary ingredients to sustain a decent lifestyle.
It's a damning indication of how the nation's leaders & policy makers have failed us as a Nation and as people, in more than 50 years of our so called independence.
In this small piece of disturbing news, Jayashree from Nashik could not save her dying husband. It is obvious that since she was poor, her voice was not heard. Could this have happened to an upper middle class or a rich chap in India?
courtesy : ndtv.com
Man dies due to hospital negligence
Kishore Belsare
Tuesday, June 7, 2005 (Nasik):
In Nasik, carelessness on the part of a hospital ended in tragedy, when one man lost his life in a horrible mix up. Gangaram was on his way home on his friend's motorbike when a truck hit them. While his friend died on the spot, Gangaram was unconscious, when they were sent to the Nasik Civil hospital. An injured Gangaram was in the ambulance for three hours in the hospital but the doctors, thinking him to be dead, sent him to the mortuary.
Slow death
Gangaram slowly succumbed to his injuries, despite the fact that his wife Jayshree, kept saying he was still alive but to no avail."I told the doctors that my husband is alive but they did not believe me and sent him for a post mortem. I blame the doctors and the authorities," said Jayshree.
Under pressure, due to Jayshree's persistent protests, the hospital conducted an inquiry.It was then they realised that Gangaram was still alive when he came to the hospital, but died a slow death in the mortuary. "It happened because of the negligence of our doctor and we have suspended him. We have decided to employ both the wives in our hospital on a contract basis," said D M Vaidya, Civil Surgeon.It was indeed a bizarre and tragic end, one that the police are still investigating.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Advani scores self-goal.
For all those who support BJP's ideology either directly,covertly or just because they do not have a choice as they dislike Congress's; Advani's recent statements in Pakistan have come as a blow.
As it is BJP is loosing ground on the national scene.(Latest by-poll results has taken the wind out of its campaign to revive)
Recent statements by BJP leaders indicate a total lack of conviction amongst it's own people in their own philosophy. It also brings out in open the prevailing confusion & incoherence within the BJP framework.
The last general elections has hit BJP so bad, it is still clueless. I can almost liken it to what happened to the Indian cricket team after Javed Miandad hit that six of the last ball of Chetan Chauhan's over in Sharjah. It took India more than a decade to regain confidence & beat Pakistan again.(Though India did win one or two matches here & there in between that period).
That six from Miandad exposed the soft side of the Indian mentality. As long as we are winning, we are roaring like tigers.Ditto with BJP.
One unexpected loss, and we just cannot get our acts together soon. In fact we follow that act up with more mistakes till we finally find ourselves in the loosing cycle for many years. Our downslide continues un-arrested.
Coming back to Advani. With that statement on Jinnah, Advani has opened a flood-gate for the ever obliging anti-BJP media to start a fresh tirade against the Sangh Parivar. Advani could have simply alluded to Jinnah & gone on without attaching any positive attributes to him. For a whole lot of Indians, Jinnah still stands as the villian of 1948 partition.
Not leaving any chances to take potshots at Advani, the Congress as usual has come up with those grand comments on secularism.Also, the media commentators found a new topic to stretch for days till something more juicy comes up.
Just when & how BJP will learn the art of tackling & using media effectively?
Today the entire English media is more or less in the Congress kitty. BJP is fighting a loosing battle in the media anyways.And instead of consolidating on that front it comes up with these self goals!
It started with (new-entrant) Smriti Irani making some petty comments on Modi, which was followed up by some uncalled for comments from Sudarshan which was then followed by the comment by former governer of Gujarat,Sunder Singh Bhandari & now this.
Can the anti-BJP media ask for more?
BJP is inadvartently pushing India back in the hand's of the Gandhi dynasty. By the time His Excellency Rahul"ji" Gandhi is set to take on the PM's chair after the stop gap Manmohan makes way, India Inc will be easily available for junior Gandhi to rule. Something i can only wish never happens.(Simply because he does not deserve it)
"Vinash Kale;Vipirit Buddhi" is the apt Indian adage for what's happening with BJP.Meaning, when your time isn't right you just commit more mistakes.
I hope for all those millions of Hindus for whom BJP is the only viable hope against the "green army" of Sonia,Lalu,Paswan,Chaterjee,Media etc.,that the BJP is able to come to terms with defeat & quickly get into the act before its too late.
We cannot afford another 5 years of UPA. We are doomed as a nation & as a people if this continues for a decade.I do not see a problem with Congress ruling us again. The real problem is Lalu & Communists.
They have already made a mess of West Bengal & Bihar.As long as they are in power, they have the potential to destroy other states/regions of the country as well.
It has taken India more than 4 decades to come out of that Nehruvian model.It might take us less than half a decade to set the clocks back.
At the cost of sounding a pessimist, i feel this government can only survive but it can never deliver with the kind of people it is carrying in it's boat. And India is (was?) on a growth map from last few years. Six years of NDA rule brought us significant economic success if not too many miracles.
With Congress-Left combination in power now, cynics like me have reasons to believe that we might start hearing the terms "Hindu growth-rate"& "socialism" & "Lal Salaam" all over again.The policies pursued by Manmohan & his team under the shadow of Communists, can only spell doom for the Indian Economy.
As it is BJP is loosing ground on the national scene.(Latest by-poll results has taken the wind out of its campaign to revive)
Recent statements by BJP leaders indicate a total lack of conviction amongst it's own people in their own philosophy. It also brings out in open the prevailing confusion & incoherence within the BJP framework.
The last general elections has hit BJP so bad, it is still clueless. I can almost liken it to what happened to the Indian cricket team after Javed Miandad hit that six of the last ball of Chetan Chauhan's over in Sharjah. It took India more than a decade to regain confidence & beat Pakistan again.(Though India did win one or two matches here & there in between that period).
That six from Miandad exposed the soft side of the Indian mentality. As long as we are winning, we are roaring like tigers.Ditto with BJP.
One unexpected loss, and we just cannot get our acts together soon. In fact we follow that act up with more mistakes till we finally find ourselves in the loosing cycle for many years. Our downslide continues un-arrested.
Coming back to Advani. With that statement on Jinnah, Advani has opened a flood-gate for the ever obliging anti-BJP media to start a fresh tirade against the Sangh Parivar. Advani could have simply alluded to Jinnah & gone on without attaching any positive attributes to him. For a whole lot of Indians, Jinnah still stands as the villian of 1948 partition.
Not leaving any chances to take potshots at Advani, the Congress as usual has come up with those grand comments on secularism.Also, the media commentators found a new topic to stretch for days till something more juicy comes up.
Just when & how BJP will learn the art of tackling & using media effectively?
Today the entire English media is more or less in the Congress kitty. BJP is fighting a loosing battle in the media anyways.And instead of consolidating on that front it comes up with these self goals!
It started with (new-entrant) Smriti Irani making some petty comments on Modi, which was followed up by some uncalled for comments from Sudarshan which was then followed by the comment by former governer of Gujarat,Sunder Singh Bhandari & now this.
Can the anti-BJP media ask for more?
BJP is inadvartently pushing India back in the hand's of the Gandhi dynasty. By the time His Excellency Rahul"ji" Gandhi is set to take on the PM's chair after the stop gap Manmohan makes way, India Inc will be easily available for junior Gandhi to rule. Something i can only wish never happens.(Simply because he does not deserve it)
"Vinash Kale;Vipirit Buddhi" is the apt Indian adage for what's happening with BJP.Meaning, when your time isn't right you just commit more mistakes.
I hope for all those millions of Hindus for whom BJP is the only viable hope against the "green army" of Sonia,Lalu,Paswan,Chaterjee,Media etc.,that the BJP is able to come to terms with defeat & quickly get into the act before its too late.
We cannot afford another 5 years of UPA. We are doomed as a nation & as a people if this continues for a decade.I do not see a problem with Congress ruling us again. The real problem is Lalu & Communists.
They have already made a mess of West Bengal & Bihar.As long as they are in power, they have the potential to destroy other states/regions of the country as well.
It has taken India more than 4 decades to come out of that Nehruvian model.It might take us less than half a decade to set the clocks back.
At the cost of sounding a pessimist, i feel this government can only survive but it can never deliver with the kind of people it is carrying in it's boat. And India is (was?) on a growth map from last few years. Six years of NDA rule brought us significant economic success if not too many miracles.
With Congress-Left combination in power now, cynics like me have reasons to believe that we might start hearing the terms "Hindu growth-rate"& "socialism" & "Lal Salaam" all over again.The policies pursued by Manmohan & his team under the shadow of Communists, can only spell doom for the Indian Economy.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
Perpetual Lies about Gujarat
In Guru Dutt's classic "Pyasa", the male protagonist is made a victim of false propoganda by his rivals & finally crucified without trial.
Something similar has happened with Modi & Gujarat.
Narendra Modi is no Saint. But like any other he is human & is vurlnerable to committing mistakes.
But the amount of virulent attacks made against him by the Indian English Press is unparallaled in Indian history. Even Nathuram Godse must not have been subjected to this kind of incessant attacks by the elite media.
He has been demonised time & again. He has become the referance point for proving one's own secular credentials. The intensity of hatred for Modi is directly proportional to a person's secular credentials.
So much for the Hero of Hate - as India Today called him once on the front page.
Its to the credit of Narendra Modi that he could withstand this huge media onslaught for something he was not even responsible. It was a mere coincidence that he was the CM of Gujarat when the riots broke out. 59 Hindus including more than 20 women & children were roasted alive in a train stationed at Godhra. What followed was a massive public outrage of emotion which i feel was justified , considering the henious crime committed by Muslim fanatics.
According to (UPA) Government official figures around 700 odd muslims & 300 odd hindus died in post Godhra riots.
As Kanchan Gupta rightly says in his article how this fact is over shadowed in the cacophony of "secular lies" perpetuated on us by Congress,CPM & their cheer leaders in the English Press.
India has faced far worse riots than Gujarat. But no one wants to talk of that. Apparently it is not convinient for arguing or putting a strong case against Modi.
Kanchan Gupat in this article in rediff brings out some uncomfortable realities of the present day government.
Communal truth, secular lies
Kanchan Gupta
June 02, 2005
A few days before Parliament's budget session came to an end, PTI circulated a story based on Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal's reply to a Rajya Sabha MP's question on the 2002 riots in Gujarat.
The details provided by Mr Jaiswal in his reply were in total variance to the outrageous claims of the Congress and its leftist allies, especially the CPI-M) to which we have been subjected for the last three years. Perhaps that is the reason why India's 'secular' media, given to aggressively arguing in favour of citizens' right to information, did not pick up the PTI story.
Since the minister's reply provides some interesting facts that deserve to be placed in the public domain, it would be in order to reproduce the salient portions of the PTI report:
The Central government informed the Rajya Sabha that 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed in the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal said a total of 223 people were reported missing and 2,548 sustained injuries during the riots in 2002.
He said the government paid Rs 1.5 lakh to the next of kin of each person killed and Rs 5,000, Rs 15,000, Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for the injured. The amount for the injured was based on the extent of injury, the minister added.
The minister of state for home affairs in the Congress-led UPA government has pegged the death toll at 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus. Yet, these figures are not reflected in the propagandist pronouncements of those who claim to champion the cause of India's Muslims.
More often than not we come across claims of 'thousands of Muslims butchered by Hindu fanatics in Narendra Modi's Gujarat.' This is a lie that has been repeated ad nauseam since that terrible day when Hindus travelling by the Sabarmati Express were roasted alive after their coach was set ablaze by Muslim fanatics.
It has been repeated the most by India's Marxists who subscribe to the Goebbelsian tactic of repeating a lie till in the popular perception it comes to be identified as the truth.
And, it is on the strength of such contrived truth that the Marxists make preposterous claims. For instance, the claim made in a recent editorial in the CPI-M propaganda journal People's Democracy that the communal violence in Gujarat was 'the worst in modern Indian history.'
In one grand sweep, the CPI-M has brushed aside the far more horrendous riots that have resulted in far more gruesome blood-letting. We do not have to go too far back in 'modern Indian history' to locate some of these riots.
The massacre in Malliana has been conveniently forgotten; brutal memories of the riots in Meerut have been obliterated. The nightlong slaughter of Muslims at Nellie in Assam, which witnessed suckling infants being snatched from their mothers' arms and being speared to death, has been erased from the secularists' record of 'modern Indian history.'
Stomach-churning details of the Bhagalpur riots -- Muslims were killed, buried in fields and cauliflower and other winter vegetables planted over the rotting cadavers -- no longer feature in the secularists' collective conscience. The anti-Sikh pogrom that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination is not even talked about any more: More than 4,000 Sikhs were murdered, many of them by placing burning tyres around their necks.
Each of these massacres of innocent men, women and children took place when the Congress was in power and did nothing more than twiddle its thumbs as marauders went about their pillaging secure in the belief that they would not be punished.
Yet, the Marxists have the gumption of claiming that the riots in Gujarat were 'the worst in modern Indian history.' Perhaps they are referring to history after it has been purged of uncomfortable facts by the detox army led by Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh.
Crass pandering to fundamentalism comes easily to the Congress and its cheer leaders in the CPI-M. That is the reason why propaganda disguised as campaign to promote secularism is deployed with such ease, regardless of the truth. And appeasement of the worst variety is projected as secular policy.
Two recent instances can be cited to exemplify this point. Ulema who had gathered for a rally of the Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind over the weekend, passed a resolution demanding proportionate reservation for Muslims in state legislatures and Parliament. Jamiat president Maulana Syed Asad Madani articulated this demand without mincing words.
UPA Chairperson and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who was present at the rally and spoke after Mr Madani was through with his fire-and-brimstone speech, showered praise on the gathered ulema and promised to fulfil every demand of theirs. She then went on to shower abuse on the BJP and the NDA government.
The other example is the cunning manner in which the UPA government tried to manipulate ownership of the Jama Masjid. This 17th century mosque is waqf property, but has been appropriated, for all practical purposes, by the Shahi Imam.
In the past, every time an effort has been made by Muslims to free this place of worship from the clutches of the imam and his henchmen, the Congress has come to his rescue, claiming that it was doing so to 'maintain communal harmony.' This time, too, a similar attempt was made, but the Delhi high court has stymied that effort.
Meanwhile, with elections looming large in Assam, the Congress is pinning its hope on that state's significant Muslim vote bank comprising illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The remarkable growth in the Muslim population of Assam's districts adjacent to Bangladesh may pose a serious threat to the region's demographic balance, but for the Congress, it is manna from heaven.
The Assamese are feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the continuous flow of immigrants and have launched a campaign to throw out the Bangladeshis from Assam. Their efforts have begun to yield results but the Congress is in a rage over the exodus of Bangladeshi Muslims from Assam.
The chief minister of Assam has turned on the governor who is believed to have sent a report to the Union government, placing on record his assessment of the immigration problem, pegging the inflow of Bangladeshis to a startling figure of 6,000 a day.
According to the chief minister, who is also the local Congress satrap, there may be a few Bangladeshis here and there, but 'there is no problem of illegal immigration.' He knows that this is untrue. The Union government knows this is untrue. The Congress and the CPI-M know that this is untrue.
But none of them has the courage to stand up and tell the truth lest the party is forced to forfeit its deposit in the Muslim vote bank. Instead, the BJP and the RSS are being blamed for 'terrorising Muslims' with an eye to the coming assembly election.
This is as logical as describing the 2002 riots in Gujarat as 'the worst in modern Indian history.'
Kanchan Gupta
Something similar has happened with Modi & Gujarat.
Narendra Modi is no Saint. But like any other he is human & is vurlnerable to committing mistakes.
But the amount of virulent attacks made against him by the Indian English Press is unparallaled in Indian history. Even Nathuram Godse must not have been subjected to this kind of incessant attacks by the elite media.
He has been demonised time & again. He has become the referance point for proving one's own secular credentials. The intensity of hatred for Modi is directly proportional to a person's secular credentials.
So much for the Hero of Hate - as India Today called him once on the front page.
Its to the credit of Narendra Modi that he could withstand this huge media onslaught for something he was not even responsible. It was a mere coincidence that he was the CM of Gujarat when the riots broke out. 59 Hindus including more than 20 women & children were roasted alive in a train stationed at Godhra. What followed was a massive public outrage of emotion which i feel was justified , considering the henious crime committed by Muslim fanatics.
According to (UPA) Government official figures around 700 odd muslims & 300 odd hindus died in post Godhra riots.
As Kanchan Gupta rightly says in his article how this fact is over shadowed in the cacophony of "secular lies" perpetuated on us by Congress,CPM & their cheer leaders in the English Press.
India has faced far worse riots than Gujarat. But no one wants to talk of that. Apparently it is not convinient for arguing or putting a strong case against Modi.
Kanchan Gupat in this article in rediff brings out some uncomfortable realities of the present day government.
Communal truth, secular lies
Kanchan Gupta
June 02, 2005
A few days before Parliament's budget session came to an end, PTI circulated a story based on Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal's reply to a Rajya Sabha MP's question on the 2002 riots in Gujarat.
The details provided by Mr Jaiswal in his reply were in total variance to the outrageous claims of the Congress and its leftist allies, especially the CPI-M) to which we have been subjected for the last three years. Perhaps that is the reason why India's 'secular' media, given to aggressively arguing in favour of citizens' right to information, did not pick up the PTI story.
Since the minister's reply provides some interesting facts that deserve to be placed in the public domain, it would be in order to reproduce the salient portions of the PTI report:
The Central government informed the Rajya Sabha that 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed in the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Sriprakash Jaiswal said a total of 223 people were reported missing and 2,548 sustained injuries during the riots in 2002.
He said the government paid Rs 1.5 lakh to the next of kin of each person killed and Rs 5,000, Rs 15,000, Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for the injured. The amount for the injured was based on the extent of injury, the minister added.
The minister of state for home affairs in the Congress-led UPA government has pegged the death toll at 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus. Yet, these figures are not reflected in the propagandist pronouncements of those who claim to champion the cause of India's Muslims.
More often than not we come across claims of 'thousands of Muslims butchered by Hindu fanatics in Narendra Modi's Gujarat.' This is a lie that has been repeated ad nauseam since that terrible day when Hindus travelling by the Sabarmati Express were roasted alive after their coach was set ablaze by Muslim fanatics.
It has been repeated the most by India's Marxists who subscribe to the Goebbelsian tactic of repeating a lie till in the popular perception it comes to be identified as the truth.
And, it is on the strength of such contrived truth that the Marxists make preposterous claims. For instance, the claim made in a recent editorial in the CPI-M propaganda journal People's Democracy that the communal violence in Gujarat was 'the worst in modern Indian history.'
In one grand sweep, the CPI-M has brushed aside the far more horrendous riots that have resulted in far more gruesome blood-letting. We do not have to go too far back in 'modern Indian history' to locate some of these riots.
The massacre in Malliana has been conveniently forgotten; brutal memories of the riots in Meerut have been obliterated. The nightlong slaughter of Muslims at Nellie in Assam, which witnessed suckling infants being snatched from their mothers' arms and being speared to death, has been erased from the secularists' record of 'modern Indian history.'
Stomach-churning details of the Bhagalpur riots -- Muslims were killed, buried in fields and cauliflower and other winter vegetables planted over the rotting cadavers -- no longer feature in the secularists' collective conscience. The anti-Sikh pogrom that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination is not even talked about any more: More than 4,000 Sikhs were murdered, many of them by placing burning tyres around their necks.
Each of these massacres of innocent men, women and children took place when the Congress was in power and did nothing more than twiddle its thumbs as marauders went about their pillaging secure in the belief that they would not be punished.
Yet, the Marxists have the gumption of claiming that the riots in Gujarat were 'the worst in modern Indian history.' Perhaps they are referring to history after it has been purged of uncomfortable facts by the detox army led by Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh.
Crass pandering to fundamentalism comes easily to the Congress and its cheer leaders in the CPI-M. That is the reason why propaganda disguised as campaign to promote secularism is deployed with such ease, regardless of the truth. And appeasement of the worst variety is projected as secular policy.
Two recent instances can be cited to exemplify this point. Ulema who had gathered for a rally of the Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind over the weekend, passed a resolution demanding proportionate reservation for Muslims in state legislatures and Parliament. Jamiat president Maulana Syed Asad Madani articulated this demand without mincing words.
UPA Chairperson and Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who was present at the rally and spoke after Mr Madani was through with his fire-and-brimstone speech, showered praise on the gathered ulema and promised to fulfil every demand of theirs. She then went on to shower abuse on the BJP and the NDA government.
The other example is the cunning manner in which the UPA government tried to manipulate ownership of the Jama Masjid. This 17th century mosque is waqf property, but has been appropriated, for all practical purposes, by the Shahi Imam.
In the past, every time an effort has been made by Muslims to free this place of worship from the clutches of the imam and his henchmen, the Congress has come to his rescue, claiming that it was doing so to 'maintain communal harmony.' This time, too, a similar attempt was made, but the Delhi high court has stymied that effort.
Meanwhile, with elections looming large in Assam, the Congress is pinning its hope on that state's significant Muslim vote bank comprising illegal immigrants from Bangladesh. The remarkable growth in the Muslim population of Assam's districts adjacent to Bangladesh may pose a serious threat to the region's demographic balance, but for the Congress, it is manna from heaven.
The Assamese are feeling increasingly overwhelmed by the continuous flow of immigrants and have launched a campaign to throw out the Bangladeshis from Assam. Their efforts have begun to yield results but the Congress is in a rage over the exodus of Bangladeshi Muslims from Assam.
The chief minister of Assam has turned on the governor who is believed to have sent a report to the Union government, placing on record his assessment of the immigration problem, pegging the inflow of Bangladeshis to a startling figure of 6,000 a day.
According to the chief minister, who is also the local Congress satrap, there may be a few Bangladeshis here and there, but 'there is no problem of illegal immigration.' He knows that this is untrue. The Union government knows this is untrue. The Congress and the CPI-M know that this is untrue.
But none of them has the courage to stand up and tell the truth lest the party is forced to forfeit its deposit in the Muslim vote bank. Instead, the BJP and the RSS are being blamed for 'terrorising Muslims' with an eye to the coming assembly election.
This is as logical as describing the 2002 riots in Gujarat as 'the worst in modern Indian history.'
Kanchan Gupta
India's highway to disaster
Tavleen Singh is fervent advocate of reforms & development. But as a political commentator she comes out as politically baised sometimes. But one can appreciate the strong conviction she usually carries of her views. Her confrontations & debates with the left wingers Arundati Roy & Medha Patkar have become media legends.
But i must confess, i did not find many of her articles ; that appeared off late; to be of very high standards.
In this new hard-hitting article that appeared in Indian Express,she makes a case for significance of infrastructure development to remove poverty. As i mentioned in one of my comments in previous articles, i too believe that poverty cannot be removed by simply doling out sops to the poor. We need investments & infrastructure. Vajpayee Government was very clear about that from day one. NDA somehow could not market this to the general public.
The public perception that NDA did not do anything positive for the country is as far from the truth as the the perception that Congress party won the last election on a popular mandate.
Congress came to power purely on electoral arithmatic. I am waiting for the day when the halo of "sainthood" acquired by Sonia 'Manio' Gandhi for her so called "sacrifice" of the PM's post is disloged & exposed by some one from her own camp.
UPA’s speedbreakers on road to development
Tavleen Singh
Indian Express Jun2-2005
Last week I spent a morning exercising my right to information. What happened is a sideshow to the subject I write about this week, but I share it with you so you understand that this new right is as meaningless as the right to primary education that every Indian child supposedly has.
Before writing this piece I needed to know how many kilometres of road are being built daily since the fall of the Vajpayee government. They claimed they were building 11 kilometres a day and I wanted to know if this was still the pace of highway development.
So I called the Minister of Surface Transport, T R Baalu. He was on tour but his personal assistant said I could get the information from the Director General, Road Transport. He was also on tour but his office said I could get the information from the Additional Director General. He was in a meeting but his secretary said I could get the information from the Chief Engineer of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), Shri R K Singh. When I called him I managed a slightly longer conversation with factotum who answered the phone because of insisting firmly that there was now a Right to Information Act and I was a journalist. ‘‘Just a minute,’’ said factotum as I overheard him say to his boss ‘‘there’s this journalist who insists on talking to you, she wants some information.’’
Telephone conversations are clearly heard these days so I heard Mr Singh say, ‘‘Tell her to call Atul Kumar, give her the mobile number. Tell her I’m not available.’’ I called Atul Kumar’s mobile number and got his message service so I tried the landline and was told that he was also on tour and I should call the General Manager of the NHAI, Mr Venkataraman. My search for information ended with ‘‘sorry extension 1104 is either busy or not answering just now, please try again later.’’ By this time more than an hour had gone by and my deadline was beginning to make urgent demands so I gave up my quest. It needs to be said here that in Vajpayee’s time the Ministry of Surface Transport worked with military efficiency. There was a retired General in charge and he was determined that the highways the Prime Minister ordered him to build would be built on a war footing.
Since I failed to exercise my right to information I cannot tell you how many kilometres of road a day we are building now, but as a frequent road traveller I can tell you that the war footing has gone. This is sad because the change a road brings is often the difference between extreme poverty and nascent prosperity and roads, in the end, are things that cannot be built unless the government of the day wants them built. To quote from Jeffrey Sachs’ new book, The End of Poverty, ‘‘It (government) must identify and finance the high-priority infrastructure projects, and make the needed infrastructure and social services available to the whole population, not just a select few.’’
The rich need infrastructure too but when the government does not build it they can manage. Where there is no power they build their own supply, where there are no roads they use private planes and helicopters and where there is no clean water they purify their own. It is for those who live in extreme poverty that a road can make the difference between subsistence and opportunity and if the Vajpayee government understood nothing else it understood this. It would be a monumental tragedy if the Sonia-Manmohan government slowed down the highway programme just because it is associated with the last Prime Minister.
For a government that claims to speak for the aam aadmi, it seems extraordinary that nobody at the top appears to have realised the importance of roads in the fight against extreme poverty. Wherever you see extreme poverty in India, wherever you see people living below the poverty line, you will notice that it is in villages to which there are no roads.
Last week I happened to drive from Mumbai to Gujarat on one of the new highways. Till it was built last year the journey used to take between six and seven hours. It took me three hours and the pace at which we drove made me forget more than once that I was driving through rural India in a region so backward that till not long ago village living standards were primitive. Local people told me that men used to wander around in grimy loincloths and the women were lucky to be able to afford a single sari. Nobody could afford shoes or consumer goods of any kind. I found this hard to believe as I drove past pretty, little towns with buildings and bazaars so shiny and new they seemed to have come up at the same time as the new road.
In Nandurbar, last year, I saw the lives of starving babies saved because a road made it possible to bring them to the nearest town for treatment. Our government with a ‘‘human face’’ has spent the past year coming up with grandiose schemes to guarantee rural employment and dangerous schemes to distribute forest land to Adivasis apparently without realising that the best anti-poverty measure is to build the highways.
Let me clarify that I am not saying that the programme has been stopped altogether. I am only saying that the urgency seems to have gone. There would not have been urgency under the last government either had the Prime Minister not made it clear that the highways were something he was personally interested in. Perhaps, the missing ingredient at the moment is political will and without this it is only a matter of time before we return to the bad old days of building roads at the pace of 11 kilometres a year. If my attempt to get information out of the Ministry of Surface Transport is anything to go by then the bad old days are already back.
But i must confess, i did not find many of her articles ; that appeared off late; to be of very high standards.
In this new hard-hitting article that appeared in Indian Express,she makes a case for significance of infrastructure development to remove poverty. As i mentioned in one of my comments in previous articles, i too believe that poverty cannot be removed by simply doling out sops to the poor. We need investments & infrastructure. Vajpayee Government was very clear about that from day one. NDA somehow could not market this to the general public.
The public perception that NDA did not do anything positive for the country is as far from the truth as the the perception that Congress party won the last election on a popular mandate.
Congress came to power purely on electoral arithmatic. I am waiting for the day when the halo of "sainthood" acquired by Sonia 'Manio' Gandhi for her so called "sacrifice" of the PM's post is disloged & exposed by some one from her own camp.
UPA’s speedbreakers on road to development
Tavleen Singh
Indian Express Jun2-2005
Last week I spent a morning exercising my right to information. What happened is a sideshow to the subject I write about this week, but I share it with you so you understand that this new right is as meaningless as the right to primary education that every Indian child supposedly has.
Before writing this piece I needed to know how many kilometres of road are being built daily since the fall of the Vajpayee government. They claimed they were building 11 kilometres a day and I wanted to know if this was still the pace of highway development.
So I called the Minister of Surface Transport, T R Baalu. He was on tour but his personal assistant said I could get the information from the Director General, Road Transport. He was also on tour but his office said I could get the information from the Additional Director General. He was in a meeting but his secretary said I could get the information from the Chief Engineer of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), Shri R K Singh. When I called him I managed a slightly longer conversation with factotum who answered the phone because of insisting firmly that there was now a Right to Information Act and I was a journalist. ‘‘Just a minute,’’ said factotum as I overheard him say to his boss ‘‘there’s this journalist who insists on talking to you, she wants some information.’’
Telephone conversations are clearly heard these days so I heard Mr Singh say, ‘‘Tell her to call Atul Kumar, give her the mobile number. Tell her I’m not available.’’ I called Atul Kumar’s mobile number and got his message service so I tried the landline and was told that he was also on tour and I should call the General Manager of the NHAI, Mr Venkataraman. My search for information ended with ‘‘sorry extension 1104 is either busy or not answering just now, please try again later.’’ By this time more than an hour had gone by and my deadline was beginning to make urgent demands so I gave up my quest. It needs to be said here that in Vajpayee’s time the Ministry of Surface Transport worked with military efficiency. There was a retired General in charge and he was determined that the highways the Prime Minister ordered him to build would be built on a war footing.
Since I failed to exercise my right to information I cannot tell you how many kilometres of road a day we are building now, but as a frequent road traveller I can tell you that the war footing has gone. This is sad because the change a road brings is often the difference between extreme poverty and nascent prosperity and roads, in the end, are things that cannot be built unless the government of the day wants them built. To quote from Jeffrey Sachs’ new book, The End of Poverty, ‘‘It (government) must identify and finance the high-priority infrastructure projects, and make the needed infrastructure and social services available to the whole population, not just a select few.’’
The rich need infrastructure too but when the government does not build it they can manage. Where there is no power they build their own supply, where there are no roads they use private planes and helicopters and where there is no clean water they purify their own. It is for those who live in extreme poverty that a road can make the difference between subsistence and opportunity and if the Vajpayee government understood nothing else it understood this. It would be a monumental tragedy if the Sonia-Manmohan government slowed down the highway programme just because it is associated with the last Prime Minister.
For a government that claims to speak for the aam aadmi, it seems extraordinary that nobody at the top appears to have realised the importance of roads in the fight against extreme poverty. Wherever you see extreme poverty in India, wherever you see people living below the poverty line, you will notice that it is in villages to which there are no roads.
Last week I happened to drive from Mumbai to Gujarat on one of the new highways. Till it was built last year the journey used to take between six and seven hours. It took me three hours and the pace at which we drove made me forget more than once that I was driving through rural India in a region so backward that till not long ago village living standards were primitive. Local people told me that men used to wander around in grimy loincloths and the women were lucky to be able to afford a single sari. Nobody could afford shoes or consumer goods of any kind. I found this hard to believe as I drove past pretty, little towns with buildings and bazaars so shiny and new they seemed to have come up at the same time as the new road.
In Nandurbar, last year, I saw the lives of starving babies saved because a road made it possible to bring them to the nearest town for treatment. Our government with a ‘‘human face’’ has spent the past year coming up with grandiose schemes to guarantee rural employment and dangerous schemes to distribute forest land to Adivasis apparently without realising that the best anti-poverty measure is to build the highways.
Let me clarify that I am not saying that the programme has been stopped altogether. I am only saying that the urgency seems to have gone. There would not have been urgency under the last government either had the Prime Minister not made it clear that the highways were something he was personally interested in. Perhaps, the missing ingredient at the moment is political will and without this it is only a matter of time before we return to the bad old days of building roads at the pace of 11 kilometres a year. If my attempt to get information out of the Ministry of Surface Transport is anything to go by then the bad old days are already back.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)