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Rahul Desai


I like writing (read Typing) and here's my attempt to put up my opinion about non/important things and aspects of non/human issues.

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A class analogy: Ant and Grasshopper

Posted by Rahul Desai
 
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An Old Story:Ant and Grasshopper

    * The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter.
    * The Grasshopper thinks the Ant is a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away.
    * Come winter, the Ant is warm and well fed. The Grasshopper has no food or shelter so he dies out in the cold.
 

The Indian Reality:

    * The Ant works hard in the withering heat all summer building its house and laying up supplies for the winter.
    * The Grasshopper thinks the Ant's a fool and laughs & dances & plays the summer away.
    * Come winter, the shivering Grasshopper calls a press conference and demands to know why the Ant should be allowed to be warm and well fed while others are cold and starving.
    * NDTV, BBC, CNN show up to provide pictures of the shivering Grasshopper next to a video of the Ant in his comfortable home with a table filled with food.
    * The World is stunned by the sharp contrast. How can this be that this poor Grasshopper is allowed to suffer so?
    * Arundhati Roy stages a demonstration in front of the Ant's house.
    * Medha Patkar goes on a fast along with other Grasshoppers demanding that Grasshoppers be relocated to warmer climates during winter.
* Mayawati states this as `injustice' done on Minorities.
    * Amnesty International and Koffi Annan criticize the Indian Government for not upholding the fundamental rights of the Grasshopper.
    * The Internet is flooded with online petitions seeking support to the Grasshopper (many promising Heaven and Everlasting Peace for prompt support as against the wrath of God for non-compliance).
    * Opposition MPs stage a walkout. Left parties call for 'Bengal Bandh' in West Bengal and Kerala demanding a Judicial Enquiry.
    * CPM in Kerala immediately passes a law preventing Ants from working hard in the heat so as to bring about equality of poverty among Ants and Grasshoppers.
    * Lalu Prasad allocates one free coach to Grasshoppers on all Indian Railway Trains, aptly named as the 'Grasshopper Rath'.
    * Finally, the Judicial Committee drafts the ' Prevention of Terrorism Against Grasshoppers Act' [POTAGA], with effect from the beginning of the winter.
    * Arjun Singh makes 'Special Reservation' for Grasshoppers in Educational Institutions & in Government Services.
    * The Ant is fined for failing to comply with POTAGA and having nothing left to pay his retroactive taxes,it's home is confiscated by the Government and handed over to the Grasshopper in a ceremony covered by NDTV.
    * Arundhati Roy calls it 'A Triumph of Justice'. Lalu calls it 'Socialistic Justice'. CPM calls it the ' Revolutionary Resurgence of the Downtrodden'.
    * Koffi Annan invites the Grasshopper to address the UN General Assembly.

 

Many years later...

    * The Ant has since migrated to the US and set up a multi-billion dollar company in Silicon Valley,
    * 100s of Grasshoppers still die of starvation despite reservation somewhere in India,

 

..AND

    * As a result of loosing lot of hard working Ants and feeding the grasshoppers,...

India is still a developing country...!!! :-(


 



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The true costs of Iraq war

Posted by Rahul Desai
 
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Hello World!

If you're following my blogs then here's yet another in the series, a Copy - Paste from Economic Times. Well, a little off-track for that matter, it talks about interesting facts and figures of Iraq-war. For those interested, the article is by Joseph Stiglitz... read more straight from him.

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When opponents cooperate...

Posted by Rahul Desai
 
I'm not the greatest at management fundamentals, and describing this logic in my language will be tough (for the reader to digest). So like an established programmer, I’ll simply Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V this article from The Economic Times (New Delhi, January 25, 2006), ‘Money Talk’. I prefer reading ET regularly, however ‘Editorial’ is the only page I manage to read for sure. And that's where I came across this well-pondered article on Indo-China trade-ties.

I’m equally horrible at management jargon, and please correct me if by the end you realise I’ve completely killed the crux of the article; but as how I could see it, it’s on ‘collaborating with your opponent’ and simply leaving the rest wondering! Though this particular article talks about Indo-China’s probable tie-ups in energy sector, the concept makes great sense to me. For that matter, any such initiative are likely to solve many other political issues between the two human-resource giants. In fact, how about growing such a scenario between India-Pakistan too? Okay, may be I’m deforming the morale of this article. Back to the point...

Ladies & Gentlemen, presenting... Mr M K Venu, on "It’s time for an Asian energy forum":



The western world already seems to be taking a somewhat exaggerated view of the impact that India and China could have if they were to come together on a common platform on certain critical issues. Sample this one — petroleum minister Mani Shankar Aiyar was in Beijing last fortnight with a small delegation comprising heads of public sector oil companies. He signed a memorandum of understanding with a Chinese minister — equivalent of our Planning Commission deputy chairman — on broad cooperation between the two countries in the area of energy. Coming as it did on the back of an unprecedented joint acquisition of a Syrian oil field by India’s ONGC and a Chinese oil company, the western press came in unusually large numbers to figure out what this new MoU was all about.

Mr Aiyar himself may have been a bit surprised at the number of journalists who showed up at his press briefing at the Indian embassy. The room was choc-a-bloc, to say the least. Everyone wanted to know what was the India-China MoU all about. Mr Aiyar, of course, held forth in his own inimitable style, on his pet passion — India and China driving Asian energy cooperation as the largest buyers of oil and gas in future.

The bigger surprise came the following day. The Financial Times carried the story of India-China cooperation in energy on top of the front page, running right across as a lead item. In sharp contrast, almost all Indian newspapers had put the same story on the inside pages. This, by itself tells a story. India and China doing anything together — even nominally — will be viewed with a sense of awe by the west. This also partly explains why there is so much eagerness among large sections of US strategic community to have India on its side to contain China in this region.

Energy is the single most important issue on which the US would not want to see India getting close to China. Though the outcome of the petroleum minister’s visit produced several MoUs, including the ones between Chinese and Indian oil companies, there is also some scepticism in the media as to how far they will succeed in practice. This is largely because of the historic bias that exists against China in our foreign policy establishment. But then things are never static in the world of diplomacy. Diplomacy can often produce non-linear results, surprising everyone, as was seen in the landmark Indo-US nuclear agreement. It may be interesting to watch whether China and India would give each other a similar positive surprise in the years to come.

But one thing seems clear from the Chinese approach so far. They may be somewhat inscrutable and slow in moving, but they do stay committed once they decide to. The other significant trend that this writer discerned after interactions with top Chinese think tanks is that the message about cooperating in the area of energy has seeped down to all levels. Everyone, including the heads of oil companies as well as their middle level managers, was unanimous on the idea of working closely with India.

The president of China’s biggest oil giant, China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) passionately advocated that as big consumers of oil and gas, India and China must not raise the cost of energy through mindless competition. They must cooperate to optimise their respective energy production and consumption strategies. Strategists at the Chinese foreign policy establishment even suggested that energy cooperation between the two countries could be dovetailed into some of the existing sub-regional economic and security groupings in Asia. A suggestion was made that energy cooperation could be made part of either the existing Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, in which energy-surplus Russia is an important member, or the East-Asian Summit process. The point made was that energy cooperation could be incorporated into one of the many evolving sub-regional architecture in the larger Asian region.

Mr Aiyar addressing a large Chinese audience made out a strong case for an Asian Energy Forum, which will eventually act as a trigger for stitching up a larger Asian economic community. The Chinese appeared to have received well his idea that India and China would do well to take lessons from 19th century Europe where nations were constantly at war over limited resources. It is only later in the mid-20th century that some sanity prevailed and the idea of resource sharing became institutionalised through the Coal and Steel Union, the precursor to the European Union.

Many thinkers believe that if India and China, with nearly over 70% of the world’s prime consuming population, were to grow at 8% plus over the next two decades, they will necessarily have to institutionalise resource sharing within the evolving sub-regional architecture in Asia. There is a certain inevitability about this prospect, which many will recognise progressively.

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