Corruption

Indians Make it in the USA, not in India

~ atanu ~ Leave a comment

Prime Minister Modi is visiting the SF Bay area this weekend. Entreaties to “Make in India” will echo all around. Sadly, little attention has been given to why Indians themselves are unable to make in India, or even make it in India. Indians make it anywhere except in India. Particularly, Indians make it in the US. They are immensely successful as entrepreneurs and as top level managers in major corporations in the US. Why?

I wrote this in February earlier this year. Here it is, for the record.
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Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi is #4 “Richest Politicians”

~ atanu ~ 14 Comments

Business Insider has a short feature, “Meet The 23 Richest Politicians In The World“, and Dr Manmohan Singh’s boss, Ms Antonia Maino aka Sonia Gandhi is listed as the 4th richest with wealth estimated between US$2-19 billion. This must have given Kapil Sibal and Digvijaya Singh the conniptions, and I am sure that it lends more weight to Dr Subramanian Swamy’s charges against AM aka SG. I am of course thrilled and here’s why.
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The Habit of Being Honest

~ atanu ~ 28 Comments

A few days ago, a Pakistani singer by the name of Rahat was caught smuggling around $130,000 out of India. It does not matter what the prescribed penalties are for such an act but the interior minister of Pakistan called up the Home Minister of India, P. Chidambaram and thanked him for facilitating Rahat’s release. Thanks to Mr Chidambaram’s intervention in the matter, it all ended well for the singer. But not for the country.
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Wikileaks is good for the Third World

~ atanu ~ 16 Comments

The other day a friend asked me, “I have often heard about India being a third-world country. What exactly is the third world?” It struck me that most of us are ignorant about what that exactly means. I said to my friend that “third world” was an euphemism for “desperately poor extremely underdeveloped starving nations utterly misgoverned by unimaginably corrupt kleptocrats.”[1] And, I added, as a consequence, the third world is a world of human-created misery.
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