There has been a spate of coverage recently about the Vajpayee's summit meeting in Beijing. Frankly, it is pretty rare for good news from South Asia to get so much coverage here! I suspect part of the underlying cause is the subterranean Western media paranoia about China.
Like most other Indians, I am a tad obsessed with China. And would probably spend the next few days trying to post my thoughts on the subject.
In a excellent report titled 'Two systems, one grand rivalry' Economist (June 21-23, 2003) compared the two economies (it is not available free):
India's figures are understated, they say, because they exclude foreigners reinvested profits, the proceeds of foreign stockmarket listings, intra-company loans, trade deficits, financial leases and so on. China's, on the other hand, are inflated by "round tripping of domestic investment through Hong kong. ...As for FDI, Sadhana Srivastava, in an article in India's Economic and Political Weekly, has recalculated both India's and China's figures for the year 2000 to make a fairer comparison. He found that China's FDI fell by half, while India's more than tripled. This meant that, as a percentage of GDP, there wasn't much differenc; 1.7% for India against 2% for China.
.....However, even on this basis, India was still attracting just 40% of the amount of foreign investment that went to China. Much of the gap is attributable to the activities of overseas Chinese ..they have ploughed back far more of their money into the motherland than have non-resident Indians..."
It goes on to ask
Much that holds India's economy and businesses back has little to do with democracy has such: corruption, fiscal mismanagement, a lack of international ambition and a history of over-protection at home.Where India overcomes these obstacles, and has a clear competitive advantage- as in software and other information-technology services- it can be a huge success...The way India's democracy has evolved has undoubtedly complicated policymaking. Coalition governments give disproportionate power to regional and caste based minority parties. Worse, the electoral time table, with many important states holding polls between the national votes, tends to put governments into cautious, electioneering mode for much of their time in office."
I completely agree that endemic corruption and red tape are huge hindrances against the growth of manufacturing sector in India. It not only acts as a break to existing ventures, it stops young people from starting out on their own.
But one the key reasons behind China's gigantic leaps in the manufacturing sector (and here I am on dangerous ground) is the incredibly cheap Chinese labour. India does not have that sort of cost advantage. In an earlier story Economist had referred to it,
Shoes, semiconductors and televisions are expected to follow. .. Heinrich von Pierer, the boss of Siemens, a big German electronics and electrical conglomerate, has called the country ?a global factory? for his company. Comparisons are made with Manchester during the Industrial Revolution. China, it is said, is becoming the ?workshop of the world?.
A few weeks back, I read a fascinating conversation on the net. While commenting on James Surowiecki's column on the impact of the spread of SARS on world economy, Paul Krugman took us on a historical analysis of causes behind the rise and fall of slavery in Western civilization.
But now suppose that for some reason land becomes abundant, and labor scarce. Then competition among landowners will tend to push up wages of free workers, and the ruling class will try, if it can, to pin peasants down and prevent them from bargaining for a higher standard of living. In Russia, it was all about gunpowder: suddenly steppe nomads were no longer so formidable, and the rich lands of the Ukraine were open for settlement. Serfdom was an effort to keep peasants from taking advantage of this situation. (And if I've got it right, those who were venturesome enough to run away and set up outside the system became Cossacks.)
Meanwhile, the New World opened in the west. Sure enough, the colonizing powers tried various forms of indentured servitude - making serfs of the Indians in Spanish territories, bringing over indentured servants in Virginia. But eventually they hit on a better solution, from their point of view: importing slaves from Africa."
He ended by asking ....
Dr Brad De long addresssed it in his weblog:
Towards the end of an otherwise excellent article published last year (that I had linked to earlier too), Kenichi Ohmae bared the dark secret of China's cheap labor:
The Western debate over China?s political acceptability should not be cast as a simple matter of right or wrong, but of when and how. Politically, China is comparable to the United States of 1800: an emerging nation with high ideals but widespread poverty and a great many practices that other regions find intolerable. People tend to forget that the U.S. did not establish civil rights legislation until the 1960s. A decade or two of economic growth, under the shrewd and highly motivated leaders of Chung-hua Inc., will provide China?s people with the necessary education in the ways of capitalism,...."
I am not claiming here that labor in India does not operate under slavish conditions. But that sort of activity happens largely away from the glare of governmental inspection processes in semi organized sectors like bangles, carpets etc. In the vast majority of larger manufacturing companies, in spite of the all the corruption, all the thuggery, labor has recourse to unions and access to press and the judiciary.
Neither do I mean to denigrate the superhuman achievements of China in all aspects of business in the last two decades. But I also do believe that the Chinese advantage on cheap labor partly derives from the nature of government that it has at local levels. it is foolish to compare oneself or even try to compete with it on low end cheap labor products. I'll try to take off on this tomorrow.
1) I am having a hard time juggling between my responsibilities and other interests. I have also lost some of the enthusiasm to keep up the kind of blogging that I had been doing for some time. It is sometimes hard for me to retrace my train of thoughts or make something useful out of it at a later date, if I dont spend good time on each post.
Basically, I want to do longer pieces. I also want to do them at longer intervals. The kind of schedule I have lately been keeping precludes posting through the week. I expect to post things at the weekends rather than throughout the week. (unless of course there is some breaking news that is overriding interest to me!)
If you want to be kept updated on new posts without having to come here to check for updates, there are two ways you can do it:
-You can also use an RSS reader that will allow you to check on new posts
-You can send me an e-mail requesting notification when I post something (Later on, I would add something on the right hand nav. where you can add your e-mail address)
Mostly though, you would be ok if you check things on a weekly basis. (It is certainly nice to assume that the rest of the world is waiting with bated breath to hear my utterances on every subject under the sun :-)! )
2) As someone whose professional and recreational life is governed by information/ content/ software and the culture and technology that revolves around it, one of the most frustrating aspects of my life in the web enabled world is management of information.
In my life, Information has the following physical dimensions. e-mail, hard drive, paper based documents, urls/Bookmarks, contact information, books. To the extent possible, I would like to have an application that is cross platform, cross referencible, searchable and mobile (when I say mobile, I primarily mean that I should be able to access them through the web). There seems
to be no tool available that allows me to do that, thought there are various tools that give me various degrees of mobility.
It did not help matters that when I originally started using e-mail, I had no idea of what I was getting into and how e-mail and web will come to rule my and most other knowledge workers' lives. I also did not plan for spam. As a result, I now use 5 different e-mail addresses. Consolidating them is proving to be more challanging than I thought it would be.
I remember Jason Kottke once had a very good conversation on the subject of creating a personal schema on his weblog. But the link to those comments doesnt seem to be working. But the idea of building a personal topic map is intriguing. If anyone has a good link or reference on the subject, please let me know. There is a bunch of interesting links on FieldNotes that I plan to read up. If you some thoughts on the subject, I would love to hear from you.
3) I am also looking for a free tool (preferably) that would allow me to manage writing, bibliography etc. in a single, easy-to-use environment. But it is a jungle out there! Is there any field of endeavour left which does not have too many software solutions yet?
I don?t intend to write regularly, or at great length about Iraq. I also suspect that only by 2008 would US may debate more earnestly and objectively about this particular misadventure. For now, I just plan to jot down from time to time, my impressions of what has been catching my interest.
I have been following the unfolding ?Who is Salam Pax?? story a tad obsessively. Many may had already read the Guardian news story which finally identified Salam Pax as a 29-year-old Iraqi architect. Incidentally, he is also writing a fortnightly column
in The Guardian.
Peter Mass was one of the Western journalists working in Iraq who was getting requests to look up Salam Pax while he was there. When he got back to the States and got down to actually reading up Salam?s weblog, he realized that Salam Pax has also been working as an interpreter for foreign journalists in Iraq. He thought it funny that both Salam Pax and him have been moving around in the same circles. He read further and it slowly dawned on him that Salam Pax has been his own interpreter in Iraq! ( Story here).
There is some conservative anger directed at Salam largely because he is being equally dismissive of the new American administration as he has been of Saddam?s. I wonder when would people figure out, that from an every day life perspective, food, safety and basic utilities are at least as important as that elusive ?thingy? called ?freedom?.
Salam Pax caught the imagination of people here largely because he is the only Iraqi commoner with a Western mind, writing on the net in an interesting way. The Iraq debate on the weblog space has largely been about Western men arguing with each other about the morality and/or logistics of intervention in Iraq. There are very few genuine Iraqi voices at the fray. Those that are there are so clothed in religiosity and / or fundamentalism of some hue or other that people elsewhere can?t relate to them. Salam Pax represents is the kind of people America wanted to liberate. So his enthusiasm for the intervention gave emotional vindication to the conservatives. Now that he is turning bitter about the occupation, those folks are feeling betrayed.
The other interesting thing to watch has been the constant leaks from the intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic. The most palatable explanation of the leaks coming out of UK and USA is that the US and British administrations grossly exaggerated the risks of WMD from Saddam. Guradian has a very good summary of the story so far. Timothy Gorton Ash in an interesting essay said that 'distorted intelligence on Iraq is part of an Orwellian world of fabricated reality'.
The question that conservatives are posing is, do we care? Considering the regular discovery mass graves in Iraq, of children buried alive, of men killed at gunpoints, I don?t think anyone disputes that the world is well rid of Saddam. It does leave a very bitter taste in mouth though, that the US and British administrations deliberately mislead, or at best grossly exaggerated, the threats posed by Saddam?s Iraq. That by itself would not have mattered much if the US government seemed genuinely committed to Iraq. Where I come from, I have very low expectations from politicians. Disinformation or lies by this administration, whatever you may choose to call it, does not shock me greatly any more.
To me, the more important question has always been, would this government make enough of a commitment, to create in Iraq, a just, humane and prosperous society. Most liberals have always felt that this administration does not have the patience and inclination for nation building. And I must admit that the post war management of Iraq is so incredibly badly handled that you have to agree. There is only a very small window that you get when you have so much good will that you can make magic happen. I suspect that window of opportunity is running out in Iraq and the air of empire building rather than nation building has slowly been pervading the airwaves.
Let me wrap up with some good news about the looted treasures from the Iraqi museum.
The other day, on the train back from New York I overheard an emerging market analyst exclaim to an older guy, ?You know what? India is really changing. Many people think that India is not changing. But IT IS. And not just in the more dynamic and modern industry domains. Even industries like Oil and Gas are changing. That country is getting transformed. And the impact is going to be huge??
I must admit it felt good to hear that; even though it coming from a Wall Streeter to someone who looked like a potential investor, it should be taken with a pinch of salt.
Meanwhile, in Stamford, the controversial tiger has finally landed. Apparently, in order to welcome the summer that has been obstinately refusing to come to coastal Connecticut, Stamford city fathers decided to commission some fun sculptures (models?). Most of these (elephants, giraffes, tigers etc.) look rather cheery and colorful. But the guy commissioned to do the tiger decided to paint the American flag on the tiger?s backside. This enraged the conservatives who felt that painting it on the tiger?s ass is an outrage. The artist claimed that his ?art? is being subverted.
The piece has now been placed in the green near the UBS Warburg building. The compromise solution was to paint the flag all over the body. The tiger lies almost supine, looking a little like a very thin bear wearing the American national flag. It looks rather odd and is probably destined to become the star attraction of the summer festivities.
Anita Bora has an article on site counters in Rediff on the net. I am quoted in it :-).
Everett True in a particularly moving passage about Rock:
I want to dress in black, cool, studied, shades a matted mess on my shaking faces, life a riot of colour, (pink and gold and red). I want to conga with Billy Liar, dance on the grave of dead and given up friends and shout in their comatose skulls, leaven this existence, with an enthusiasm that is all the more wonderful because it is so primal. I want to fuck the world and give birth to nobility, a new strain of life.
Everett True in 'Careless Talk Costs Lives' (CTCL) #11, Feb 2002 issue as quoted in Pink Planet May-June 2003 issue. CTCL is an independent British music magazine started a few months back by Everett True. True is a slightly eccentric British journalist, ?credited with discovering grunge, introducing Kurt (Cobain) to Courtney and later busting the door wide open with a now infamous story in Bretain?s Melody Maker?. Later on, he hit the road.. hit the bottle.. wrote books..dropped out of circulation and has now resurfaced with a new magazine. His stated goal is ?Destroying the music industry with 12 issues ? or else we have failed?
Everett is one of dozens of personalities from the zine world interviewed and excerpted in the May-June issue of ?Pink Planet?. This issue is a celebration of print rather than music and introduced me to a host of zines and people I have never had the time or inclination to research. If you are in North America and have access to the magazine, this is definitely one for the keeps. (Incidentally, CTCL is a British magazine and for some weird reason True doesn?t seem to terribly interested in finding distribution)
It doesn?t even sound like Chris Bell; He had never sung that well before, which makes it even harder to take, since it was the last, or one of the last things he did. So confident, and at the same time, somehow so vulnerable. The song itself, the experience of singing it, seems to have done something to him, worn him our. Three and a half minutes have gone by, but he sounds ten years older. The chorus is simple:
I fall every time
Though I know she lies
I can?t stay away
But it?s how he holds the words in his mouth, sings ?stay aawaaay? from the back of his throat, like he?s physically trying to hold himself down in the bed, knowing he shouldn?t go over there, shouldn?t call. There is only one line of harmony in the song. It comes out of nowhere, on the bridge, a quiet falsetto, maybe Bell?s own. You can miss if so easily ? you have to squeeze the headphones to sides of your head. The line is ?keeping me in the dark?.
John Jeremiah Sullivan writing about Chris Bell who sang the track 20 ?You and Your Sister? in Oxford American?s 2003 music issue. Chris Bell died when he crashed into a telephone pole a few days after Christmas in 1978. John Jeremiah Sullivan has a book coming out about horses and fathers in 2004 (Farrer, Strauss and Girox?). The song is available in the album ?I am the cosmos? released by Rykodisc in 1992 and ?The big star story? released by Rykodisc in 2003.
Oxford American is a literary magazine of the South. It showcases music from the South in an issue every year. This year, the accompanying CD has 20 tracks of blues, jazz, soul, folk and pop music from the South. The magazine itself is devoted to describing each track, its singer and the history behind the music. It is worth checking out.
The current issue of PDN magazine out on the shelves is their photoannual. Check it out. I ought to start subscribing to the magazine instead of buying it off the shelf every other month!