Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

A Letter to Abhishek

My Dear Abhishek:

You, like all newborns, are a Little Buddha.

Welcome to the world and may you have a long and happy stay here. In this letter I will try to tell you a few things that may help you along.

You are just a month old. The universe you are born into is infinitely older than you. I hope someday you would learn what the relation between you and the universe is and appreciate the unique place you occupy within it. You will spend quite a bit of time making a living, but to truly make a life, you will have to comprehend who you are in the larger scheme of things. We will talk about this at length later.

Narrowing our focus, we now move on to the world we inhabit. Our world—the earth—is almost, but not quite, as old as the universe. Also, compared to the universe, the earth is infinitely smaller. While our concerns are mainly focused on the earth, don’t forget that there is a larger universe out there. Why? It will lend perspective to whatever you do. The most important feature of the universe—and therefore all that is in it including the earth and you—is impermanence and change. This realization is the most profound that you will ever achieve. The rest is all details. Whatever you do, great or small, is of no consequence in the larger scheme of things. Relieved of the burden of having to worry about consequences, you can then focus on what is your duty without being distracted by the inconsequential. For us the big over-arching task is therefore to figure out what our duty is. Each one of us is unique and therefore our tasks are unique. The good life, not merely a good living, is guaranteed to one who is able to figure out what that unique task is. It is an infinite uncharted plain out there and you have to figure out your own path. You cannot follow anyone else’s path. Others have walked that plane but their path is not the path for you.

To figure out your path, you have to comprehend the world. To comprehend the world, you have to know it. Acquiring knowledge is hard work and it involves sifting through vast amounts of information. You will read breathless prose about how stupendously amazing amounts of information is available to you at your fingertips. That is good but don’t make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. It is important to make that distinction to avoid fundamental costly mistakes. Remind me to explore this distinction later. That brings us to an important point: the ability to make skillful distinctions is very crucial to thinking and consequently to comprehension.

The more sophisticated a consciousness is, the more distinctions it can make, and thus be able to comprehend the complexity of the universe more acutely and comprehensively. To illustrate what I mean, an intelligence which is only able to distinguish between one and many is not as sophisticated as one that is able to use the counting numbers 1, 2, …, etc. Our ability to distinguish is directly related to our ability to learn vocabulary. In a sense, all education is about learning vocabulary. Each word stands for a concept, and each concept is made up of simpler concepts and each of these simpler concepts has a one-to-one mapping with simpler words. The hierarchy of concepts is reflected in the hierarchy of words and in a strict sense, what we know consciously about is limited by our vocabulary. As our vocabulary grows, so does our comprehension of the world. The Word is primary; all else is merely an elaboration of the Word. What is that word, you ask. Some call it the Om, others the Tao. We will explore this a little later.

You must have noticed that I keep hinting at things and do not go into details. That is because this one is only the introduction, or even the introduction to the introduction. I promise you that we will discuss at length all the points mentioned above and more as they arise. Our exploration will be bounded only by our bounded rationality and our limited comprehension of the world.

I will close this one with some words from The Desiderata: “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

With a deep bow to the Buddha within you,
Atanu

The Towing of Cars

Greater Vehicle, Lesser Vehicle, no matter.
All vehicles will be towed at owners’ expense.

It all began innocently enough. Three friends meeting in Pune’s Koregoan Park quarters to have lunch and chat. We finished lunch at a roadside dhaba and walked back to Shrikant’s car parked in a quiet little street only to find that the car was missing. Scrawled on the spot next to where the car should have been was a message in chalk: “Bund Garden Road.”

We surmised that the car had been towed to the Bund Garden road transportation police office. Less than an hour ago we had parked the car in front of a bank branch at a spot that was marked “Parking for Bank Customers Only”. It was Sunday and the branch was closed. It was not a busy street and it was a convenient place to park under a bit of shade on a scorching summer afternoon. But now the car was gone. My heart sank because my laptop was on the backseat and I conjured up images of someone breaking into Shrikant’s car just to take the laptop.

We took an autorickshaw to the police station about three kilometers away. I was relieved to see that my laptop was still on the backseat of the impounded car. The constable who towed the car showed up eventually after a half hour wait. The car, he claimed, was illegally parked. Shrikant explained very patiently that there were no signs which prohibited parking the car. The constable insisted that it was parked in a no-parking zone and that there was a sign attesting as much a little ways up the road. Shrikant countered that there was no way anyone could figure out that parking in that spot was prohibited because no signs were posted along the stretch of road we passed before we parked.

What followed was a mini-drama: Shrikant was patient and conciliatory; I was indignant and angry that we were being needlessly hassled for no fault of our own; Girish was silently observing the proceeding from a distance maintaining an amused reserve that I found admirable. We had already wasted an hour and a half trying to retrieve the car. The private operator towing truck was parked close at hand and the constable was leisurely having lunch with the operators of the truck. A camaderie born out of extended mutually beneficial association was evident between the cop and the towing truck operators. They depended on each other.

The cop (whose name I eventually noted down) insisted that we had to pay a fine of Rs 250 for illegal parking. But, he said, that he would consider the case settled if Shrikant paid him Rs 100. Shrikant said that he would not pay Rs 100 but would be happy to pay the Rs 250 penalty provided the cop would come with him to the spot where the car was parked and show where the infraction was. The ultimatum from the cop: pay a Rs 100 bribe or pay Rs 250 to reclaim the car. Shrikant said he would pay not just the penalty but twice the penalty if the cop would just show him how any person could reasonably figure out that it was illegal to park at the spot we had parked at.

The cop figured that we were tough customers and would not be intimidated into paying the bribe. So he escalated the case to his superior, an officer who was in the little two-room dilapidated police post. We entered the office to find the officer in his undershirt asleep on a cot in the backroom. He heard the dispute and concluded that we either pay Rs 250 or we don’t get the car back. I told him in no uncertain terms that this was extortion.

To cut a long three hour story short, Shrikant paid the fine of Rs 250 and then insisted that the cops return with us to the spot where the car was towed from and show us where the sign was. He would pay double the fine if the cops proved that we were at fault. There was a sign about 20 meters ahead of the parking spot which said “No Parking 100 meters ßà”. It was small, nailed to a tree, aligned parallel to the road, and could not be seen unless viewed directly across from the road.

The sign had to be there for the whole scheme to work. It was part of the trap. They merely show up and tow any car parked there by mistake and extract a bribe. I asked the owner of a cigarette kiosk across the road how often the cops show up to tow cars from this spot. He said about half a dozen times most days.

One of the cops finally admitted that it was not our fault but neither was it their fault. The fault, he concluded, was the Pune municipal corporation’s for improper signage. Shrikant cornered the guy. Do you have any children? Do you teach them to be good or do you teach them to be dishonest? How do you sleep at night? The guy squirmed uneasily. He was not entirely devoid of a moral sense, although he was clearly not willing or unable to reason. He said that since we had paid the fine, we had admitted to our crime.

Later in the evening we were recounting this to a friend, Sunil. He said, “You guys should never have argued with the cops. You had no idea what you were up against. The cops are ruthless and could have cooked up some story and thrown you in a lockup. In the end it would be their word against yours. They would have claimed that you were attacking them.”

That was almost exactly what our confrontation was headed towards, I said. At one point, the inspector, who had bothered to get out of his cot and put on a shirt to come out, claimed that I had used abusive words towards the constable and threatened to throw me into jail. There was nothing any of us could have done. The cops knew that they had the authority and the means to really give us a bad day. In fact, they depended on this power to extract bribes from their hapless victims, the very people they are supposedly hired to protect. It was protection money they demanded and they got regularly.

Cops have figured in local news recently. Stories of rape and violence by cops is common enough for the cartoonist RK Laxman to pen a strip in which a mother cautions her young daughter to be careful out in the streets because there are cops around.

Sunil claimed that Asians are the most corrupt in the world. As a businessman, he recounted half a dozen stories of harassment by various officials of government agencies that he has to deal with, from excise departments to income tax to customs. Nitin, another businessman friend, added his own stories to the litany of woes that business people appear to take for granted and as cost of doing business in India.

Anecdotal evidence at best but it lends credibility to the findings of agencies that rate Indiaas one of the most corrupt economies of the world. (See India, the World’s Largest Kleptocracy on this blog.) It is disheartening to hear how pervasive corruption is in India. An industrialist recently recounted his encounter with an official from the state-owned power company. The official offered to fix the industrialist’s power bill because “he was paying too much for electricity.” The industrialist finally had to bribe the official to not tamper with the bill. The bribe was needed because of the fear the official could have disrupted the power supply to the manufacturing unit out of spite. It reminded me of the caution that joggers in NY’s Central Park were given: carry some cash just in case you are mugged because if you don’t want to get caught with no money—it could enrage the mugger.

Corruption is a corrosive force that attacks the moral, commercial, and ethical fabric of the society. Its perceived pervasiveness perpetuates it and sanctions it in a perverse positive feedback loop. Everybody knows that corruption exists. It is common knowledge: not only do you know, you also know that everyone else knows, and everyone knows that everyone knows, and so on. You know that the guy at the top takes in millions in bribes. You justify your little bit of dishonesty by noting that the really rich get away with it and so why should you not take a bit just to make ends meet.

Take the lowly cop whom we encountered. He probably is paid around $100. He is merely trying to make ends meet and provide for his family. His illegal towing is an adaptation to a system which is materially poor. His victims also adapt and pay the extortion because they cannot afford to fight the cop. Neither the crook (the cop in this instance) nor the victim can afford the luxury of a moral stance. Locked within a dysfunctional system, we are playing a repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma game of full information. We are not born inherently flawed; we merely adapt to the system we are born into and which we appear to be powerless to alter. Our apparent moral turpitude is not so much nature induced as a rational response to a structural feature of the environment we live in. We are players in a Thomas Hardyesque fatal drama where the script is seemingly unalterable.

Shrikant asked me on the way back from the police encounter if ever the low quality of our public service will ever improve. It is an important question that we need to answer for ourselves. Like always, whenever I am confronted with a problem, my instinct is to seek the underlying causes that give rise to the symptom which we perceive as the problem. What are the structural features of our society that make corruption so integral to it? Why and when did it arise? If we fully understand its genesis—both in human nature and in the social system that humans create—perhaps then we may have a handle on a possible solution.

I believe that corruption is a rational response to a materially poor system. Material poverty is necessary but not sufficient for corruption to take root. Corruption, in turn, makes the possibility of escape from material poverty more difficult. In its most general formulation, material poverty arises from an imbalance between the resources available to a population and the size of the population.

I will investigate this a bit more in coming days.

Beware of Monkeys

Alan Watts is one of my heroes. From his talks and writings, one can gain significant insight into the nature of the world. The World as Just So is a series of delightful lectures that I first came across on public radio. In them, he explores Indian thought – Vedantic and Buddhist. Trained as a Zen master, he made esoteric wisdom accessible to millions. A very deep bow in his direction. He used to live in Berkeley CA but passed on into the great beyond before I made Berkeley my home and therefore did not have a chance to meet him.

In one of his lectures, I came across a statement which has profoundly affected my thinking about the world. The context was, if I recall correctly, how to comprehend the world and live in harmony with it. In his inimitable style of talking infused with lighthearted laughter he said: Don’t be like the monkey who said to the fish, “Let me save you from drowning,” and put it up on a tree. When I heard that, I was enlightened. (I subscribe to the Soto school of Zen thought which holds that enlightenment is sudden.) The world, I realized, was full of monkeys. Look closely at any disastrous situation in the world and you will see a monkey’s hand in the background busy pulling fish out of rivers saving them from drowning.

For instance? The global disaster perpetrated by an advanced industrialized country which I shall not name. Examine the picture closely and you will see the hand of a chimp. (OK, I know that chimps are not monkeys; they are apes. But the point remains. And if you don’t believe me about the chimp bit, see some astonishing pictures of the guy and chimps posted on various websites. The resemblance is striking as if they were twins separated at birth.)

One is stunned by the realization that monkeys rule the roost pretty much wherever you have disasters. Even though some will loudly protest this, I claim that India is to a first approximation a disaster zone. By saying this I open myself to accusation of being an “India hater”. Whether I am or not is totally immaterial, irrelevant, and inconsequential. What is material, relevant and consequential is whether India is a disaster zone or not. Later we can argue about that but for now I seek the monkeys behind the millions of mini-disasters that add up to the mega disaster I call my motherland.

Mini-disaster #592: Free electrical power to farmers. Ostensible reason given: To support poor farmers. Consequence: depletion of ground water, water-logging of fields, billions of rupees owed by an already bankrupt State government to the electricity board, regular power cuts in most cities of at least four hours each day.

Surely, it has to be an incomprehending monkey that believes that free power to farmers will improve the lot of farmers. First, poor farmers and peasants have little use for free power. They don’t have the equipment to make use of power, free or otherwise. Relatively rich farmers have equipment and given free power they do what the average person does when you get free anything: use it beyond the socially and economically efficient level. As someone put it to me yesterday, the farmers “turn on the pumps in the field in the morning and go back to the village to spend the day and return in the evening sometime to turn off the pumps.” In the meanwhile, excess water has been withdrawn and today’s excesses will lead to more problems tomorrow.

Free power to farmers has the first-order disastrous effect of depleting scarce ground water reserves. It has second-order effects of creating power scarcity in cities. Cities which need power for commerce and manufacturing have to invest in costly alternative power supply such as diesel generator sets. This drives up the costs and generally makes us poor. On the supply side, the government owes money to the electricity board and in all likelihood cannot pay and so much needed capacity will not be installed leading to further shortage of power. Third-order effect: urban people who need power to produce non-agricultural stuff and do business don’t produce as much and so have reduced incomes. Reduced incomes means that they have less money to spend on agricultural produce. So the farmers receive less for their production. So they are poor. And the story comes full circle: the next election cycle, the monkeys will promise free fertilizers and power and water and we will be further impoverished.

I admit that free power is a move cynically calculated to win elections and it may not be that those who make these policies are as stupid as they appear to be. But they are still monkeys, really.

So what is the quintessential characteristics of this problem of monkeys intervening. It is this: monkeys, well-meaning perhaps, don’t understand the nature of the universe that they meddle in. We are all monkeys, in some sense. We make mistakes and are not always rational in our personal day to day dealings. Being a monkey is necessary but not sufficient to give rise to disasters; you need to have power. If you are a powerful monkey, you have what it takes to create havoc. The more power you are, the more death and destruction you can unleash. The most powerful chimp in the world is the most destructive today.

But then the question arises, how is it that monkeys get to be so powerful. I think I have a tentative answer to that question which I will go into in a bit.

What about Magarpatta City? Well, let me get to it as well in a bit.

Making Rental Housing Market More Efficient

“Magarpatta City” lies in the south-east outskirts of the city of Pune in Maharashtra, my home state. Searching for place to live in led me to Magarpatta City yesterday. Since moving out of my Mumbai apartment in mid-February, I have been a homeless person leading a rootless life living out of a suitcase. February saw me in New Delhi, Nagpur (my home town), and Bangalore; March was spent in New York City, Long Island NY, Boston MA, and Newark DE; April I was in Berkeley CA, Saratoga CA, Seattle WA, and Tampa FL. Upon my return to India on May 3rd, I spent a few days in Mumbai and then came here to Pune with the idea of storing my suitcase for a bit and have a home for a couple of years.

Searching for a place to call home is not an easy task. You cannot refer to a directory of places available for rent because there is no such central depository of information. What information exists is fragmented and incomplete. There are listings in local newspapers but you would have to consult many sources published over an extended period. Given space limitations in newspaper classifieds, the information for any specific place is incomplete. You would have to call and/or visit to see for yourself what is on offer. Search costs add up and makes the market for rental housing needlessly inefficient. Where there are information imperfections of this kind, specialized services emerge. Rental property brokers step into the picture as specialized agents bridging information gaps manually.

Brokers have specific areas of the city that they operate in and have inside information on available places. To increase my chances of finding a suitable place, I had to engage through various sources, a set of brokers. Each has about a dozen properties to show. The process is time-consuming and frustrating because of a number of reasons. First, there are numerous levels of indirection. The broker is one link in a network of relationships. Broker A, for example, will call up an intermediate B who will in turn call up C who has the key to the apartment. When you go to see the property, a confluence of events have to occur such as the presence of B and C for you to actually look inside. At places, I have spent over an hour just waiting, while the actual seeing of the place took only about two minutes.

The second reason for the frustration is cultural, the inability to say no. I have a set of very specific criteria about the place I wish to rent. Somehow I get taken to see properties that don’t come anywhere close to what I have clearly stated I want. Why do they do that? Don’t they waste their time as well as mine? There has to be a rational explanation. I conjecture it has to do with conveying an impression that they have earned the commission they charge.

Brokers charge about two months’ rent as commission. If they were to show only those properties that meet the specifications, they would perhaps be able to show only one or two places. If that means you rent a place through a broker after he (or she) shows you only a couple of places, the impression could be that the commission is disproportionate to the work done.

The third reason for the frustration is structural. The market is fragmented. Information which could have been aggregated and made searchable is only present as knowledge in heads of various agents. The asymmetric information—renters don’t have information on the complete set of available properties—gives rise to ‘rent-seeking’ opportunities, the commission charged for the deal. Dis-intermediating in this situation would involve aggregating the information (which is currently held as private knowledge) and making it searchable but would result in a loss of income for those agents.

Imagine, for a moment, a more efficient system. Let’s say there is “Craigs List” type platform where landlords list their properties in detail including pictures of the insides and of the surroundings. The technology exists for making this list accessible and searchable to prospective renters from anywhere in the world at very lost costs. In a few minutes of searching, one identifies a set of properties and invests in going over to check out the places. If such were the case, I would have only seen three properties and spent about half a day. Instead, I have spent four days and seen about a dozen properties only two of which I would even remotely consider renting.

Is there a point in this renting story? Yes, a general point. The availability of technology is only a small part of the story of development. It is a necessary part but very small and far from sufficient. The technology has to be adopted. There are barriers to adoption of technology which go beyond affordability and appropriateness: adopting technology could hurt the entrenched interests of the existing system.

Using a web-based system to remove information asymmetries in most markets would eliminate rents that information brokers (and property rental brokers are information brokers) currently enjoy and therefore they can be relied upon to resist such an efficiency enhancing change. But then you may ask, how does any efficiency enhancing change come about at all when in practically all cases the vested interests would prevent the change? The answer: If the vested interests can find alternate and better roles in the new system, the change can occur. That is, if they can move up the value chain. Even after the implementation of an efficient web-based system, people would be required to help with the creation and maintenance of the list, of vetting prospective renters, etc.

Efficiency implies that less labor would be required, however. So instead of a dozen agents, I would need only one agent. In short, if the market does not expand, then there will be mass unemployment among property agents. But the market may indeed expand, both due to lower transaction costs and due to increasing population of tenants and landlords. Then again, in an expanding economy, there will be other opportunities for those who used to be property brokers. It is an old story repeatedly told: fewer secretaries when printers and word-processors became the norm but more programmers. What you lose on the swings, you gain on the slides.

So what about “Magarpatta City”, you may ask. I was coming to that. Tomorrow, shall we say?

Guest Post: Navin Jaganathan on “India’s IT Companies”

A guest post from Naveen Jaganathan marks the return of this blog from vacation.

R.A. Mashelkar once said “Even if India does not do anything it is inevitable that we will emerge as the knowledge power in the next 5-10 years. If you look at our successes in the past and our emergence in the field of software technology, then this is fairly clear”.

It didn’t appear a tiny bit clear of how India will emerge as the “knowledge power” when I read this way back in 2003. Only thing that was happening then was, India was getting lot of call center/BPO work along with some outsourced IT work. If this is to be dubbed as “knowledge power”, it is not clear what the benefits of becoming one are. If all Indian kids who are playing gully cricket start to play tennis will we be called “Tennis Power” even though none of us even qualify to Grand slams?

Why is everybody tooting the “IT super power” horn over the past few years? It is simply because we could not do anything great in the Manufacturing/Industries sector and bring development to the country. Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, after traveling on Indian roads sighs like any other westerner: “A journey to Pune, 115 miles southeast of Mumbai .. by road.. I had been told that the Mumbai-Pune expressway is a modern construction. I would rank the six-lane, barely-divided Mumbai-Pune expressway a B-minus, at best. The exit experience was even worse than the approach — a tedious drive on low-quality local roads — overall, a driving experience that left me exhausted, head spinning, and with a sore back. If this is progress in closing India’s infrastructure gap, the problem is even worse than I had imagined.” On another occasion, “India’s infrastructure gap is almost beyond comprehension — inadequate roads, deficient power supply and transmission facilities, and not one good airport in the entire country.”

The India Infrastructure Report 2004 says it all, “…even relative to our income, our failure in water, roads, sanitation, schooling, and electricity is woeful.” The industry/manufacturing sector does not look promising in India as infrastructure is below par which holds back supply chain management and delivery capabilities and doesn’t encourage FDIs. For example, India did not seem to have taken advantage of the post WTO quota regime in textiles. We lost a great opportunity whereas Chinese geared up for it by transforming Dongguan. One of the trade fairs held in the Chinese province seemed to have drawn 30,000 professional buyers!! Because of pathetic growth in the Indian manufacturing sector, the job growth in the sector is just 2% per annum over the decade.

Thanks to high yield crops, Agriculture is doing good enough to meet internal demands). But with fickle monsoons and an exponentially growing population (which pushes the internal demand), this sector is not likely to take India to any great heights.

With manufacturing and agriculture not presenting a rosy picture, all jumped to the IT/Knowledge power bandwagon. Let us go straight to IT/Services work, which seems to be our strength and certainly is the tight rope on which our GDP growth seems to be walking nowadays.

As the fruit (IT industry) gets bigger and older, it has started to rot. Any doubt? Take two whiffs of the reek, please.

  1. A big company slashes pay for reasons unknown and shrugs off the massive outrage.
  2. CEO of a famous billion dollar IT firm bullshits “IT pros earn handsome salaries, they should be taxed more to improve the infrastructure of Bangalore” and does not bother about these sensible queries.

The two most insensible things that are happening now in most Indian Software companies are Forced Ranking (Appraisals) and Process (CMM) stuff.

Apprisals – In one of the leading companies, there are SET percentages for each ranking. “10% (for eg) should be given top rating of 5 (on a scale of 5) , 40% should be rated 4 and 40% rated 3 and 10% rated 2”. I can’t understand how they argue that only 10% are top performers. What if more than 10% are top performers? Is that not possible? In addition, how are they agreeing that 10% of the company is low performers? Aren’t they ashamed of this? Guess what the folks who got a low rating do? They mostly switch to one or other big companies and those big companies think they are hiring the top 5%“. This forced ranking is a shameful copy from GE which had different intentions behind the implementation

Process – The main idea behind Indian IT companies going for Process certifications (CMM etc) seems to be to woo customers and not to enhance quality. There is not enough tailoring of the standards mentioned and on most occasions, it presents itself as a pain rather than as a facilitator to quality. I wonder why Indian vendors alone go for this and not the foreign counterparts. Google, Yahoo, IBM etc do not seem to have this.

Then there are other debaucheries like the bonds for not leaving the company, haphazard promotions etc. Other dishonorable thing is the implementation of social activities, the only reason for these seems to be to get the PCMM and hog some limelight in the media. Of course there are exceptions to this like Infosys who generously gave 5 crores to the Tsunami from its own pocket where as other Indian IT companies where busy setting up the intranet page to enable the employee to login and donate from his salary. Some companies take advantage of the huge number of freshers who come out each year and employee them for cheap salaries. There are other malpractices like employ a guy and take in only his part of his previous experience, the guy only gets to know when he gets confirmed an year after and doesn’t get a deserved promotion. Then they try all tricks possible with the salary structure with terms like “Cost To Company” etc. These tricks may seem silly to talk about but when we think on the broader scale, it just appalling. An entire nation is (wrongly) pinning hopes on few Indian Software companies who by involving in hoodwinks is not likely to shape anything. If all the companies are short sighted to just look at their margins/ balance sheet without any ear to all the stakeholders’ expectations, it is not going to hold for too long. Its this shortsightedness that is keeping Indian companies transforming themselves into a Google (35 billion market cap with just 3500 employees), a Yahoo, a Microsoft etc.

You might be in a third world country if you don’t believe in Abraham Lincoln’s quotes – “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”

Change in RSS URL

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What Kind of English Do I Speak?

Your Linguistic Profile:
40% General American English
35% Yankee
15% Dixie
10% Upper Midwestern
0% Midwestern

The Iran-India Pipe Bomb

No very deep knowledge of economics is usually needed for grasping the immediate effects of a measure; but the task of economics is to foretell the remoter effects, and so to allow us to avoid such acts as attempts to remedy a present ill by sowing the seeds of a much greater ill for the future. —- Ludwig von Mises

Indian policy makers’ optimism is matched only by their short-sightedness when it comes to dealing with matters of national security. To recount all the instances when they have been caught with their pants down would require a book-length treatment, not a short few paragraphs on a blog. But I cannot pass up the latest blunder in the making. I hope that I don’t have to say I told you so in a few years’ time. I hope I am wrong in my analysis but I am afraid that I will be proved right.
Continue reading “The Iran-India Pipe Bomb”

No to Musharraf

From The Acorn an important message:


no-mush-s.gif


Indian taxpayers are paying for the security of a man who is personally responsible for the deaths of hundreds of Indian soldiers, and through his sponsorship of terrorism, for the deaths of thousands of Indian civilians. Far from showing any remorse, he is brazenly unapologetic about the whole thing.


[Source: The Acorn.

]

If only, Lord, if only …

Years ago I used to watch a British comedy series called Bless Me, Father on public television. The setting was a church in a small town in England and the stories revolved around the parish priest and his young curate. In one of the episodes, the curate asks, “Father, why do you spend so much time with the rich in our parish? Don’t you think that the poor need our help more than the rich?” The father replies: “No, the rich need us more. They don’t even have the comfort of the illusion that money is the answer to all their problems.”

Continue reading “If only, Lord, if only …”