Poverty The Root Of All Evil

The recent Bonn conference on the future of Afghanistan was an evocative illustration of how the great tragedies of our age stem from economic disparities that are untreatable with military or political misadventures. How the great powers refuse to address inequality, the root cause of the age of terrorism, at any cost.

Has it occurred to the reader that, almost exclusively, every lunatic Islamist terrorist is based in a country that does not have electricity or running water outside it’s capital? Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan are countries that are heart wrenchingly under resourced. They are the disowned second cousins of the international family.

These countries have people that are disenfranchised of every ‘ism’ you can throw a stone out. They are both disenfranchised citizens and consumers. They are the great unwashed who are thrown our crumbs.


In recent times the North effortlessly ignored them. With globalisation we dare not. The world’s people now view their personal situation in a much broader perspective. They look further than the village to assess what is right and what is wrong in their life.

The starving Sudanese farmer, whose crop has failed and whose family is victim to murderous bandits, can be convinced by militant opportunists that his situation is a sinister American sponsored plot. Twenty years ago the farmer would think anyone who made that claim had been hit on the head by a speeding rickshaw.


American Express gold card members are thin on the ground in Northern Sudan but intelligence is not the monopoly of the wealthy. With the penetration of cable television and Internet untold millions are now witness, in streaming video, to just how shamelessly ostracized they are by the players of global business and politics.

This also gives rise to jealousy, imagine underemployed Abdul, watching the hedonistic Kardashians on YouTube, in conjunction with the biting shame of poverty, you will have no dearth of combatants who will be spellbound by the teachings of prophets who envision a just world.

The West was all but consumed by this phenomena. Hitler prayed on the weak and feeble minded in the height of the Great Depression. Promising exactly what any Al Qeada propaganda officer, worth his salt, does today. Order in chaos. Bread for the poor. Expedited justice. A classless society. Above all, belonging. 

Post war, during the sixties, smelly opinionated students everywhere worshipped Che Guevara. The bearded violent revolutionary who did not hesitate to kill and imprison Cubans who detracted from an overwhelmingly radical philosophy.

He is responsible for the execution of hundreds of former regime members who didn’t perfectly fit his fundamentalist mold. Not dissimilar to another bewildered bearded prophet who killed scores of Americans who didn’t enroll in his cockeyed school of Islam.

Both Guevara and Bin Laden had philosophies that nourished themselves on the biting indignity of exploitation. The genesis of inequality. Bin Laden, who was as mad as a March hare, was the modern Guevara.  Same manure different bucket. Both figureheads of organisations that violently overreacted to what they believed was larger state sponsored violence.


Now with globalisation, the West has to contend not with a single strategically relevant population, that is easy pray to a master manipulator, but a matrix of impoverished communities plugged in to a network we all share.  London, Madrid, Bali and New York were horrific scenes of carnage that were born of philosophies nurtured in the backwaters of the world.  Countries that no longer are beyond reach or, as these crimes have evidenced, not beyond us being touched.


The North justifiably labels these crimes as terrorist but how long can they also see them as Jihadist or Communist or any other philosophy? A Somali identifies with Islam, and this is a readily available vehicle, but it is not the driver. As the American revolutionaries easily identified with an inflexible school of Christianity but they were driven by a desperate need to assert their rights that had been so shamelessly defiled by the Crown.

The war on terror, a stillborn idea from the fact you can’t wage battle against an emotion, should be a war against poverty. How many Talibanis could be arsed patrolling the deathly cold Khyber Pass if they could be at home watching football on a two metre wide plasma television, with a goat roasting in an oversized barbeque that looks like a milk factory. Or more seriously, how many Afghan patriots would pursue violence if their children had access to the same health services that Westerners afford their pets?

Giving violent misfits a middle class life would have cost a fraction of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which have reportedly cost US Dollars $1,292,164,039,372.  If I’m not wildly off mark that is $1.2 trillion dollars. Thus far, the cost of the war in Afghanistan is $465,056,330,769, which I’m guessing is a lot of textbooks and hospital beds in any borough.

India’s own litany of mutinies is painted over with the same brush. In the Indian Government’s eyes Maoists are terrorists that need to be eliminated.  This is the easiest route as addressing the real problems of acute poverty, that is breeding armies of youth who literally have nothing to lose, is well and truly stuffed into the ‘too hard basket’. Bureaucrats studiously ignoring the numbing fact that hunger is the worst form of terrorism.

How different are the motives for Kashmiri Azadis? Nagas? ULFAS? How much of their revolutionary zeal is driven by ethnic and religious identity? How much of their hatred stems from suffering poverty?  From not having a ticket on the great Indian economic miracle?

With Governments internationally refusing to acknowledge the true motives behind terrorist behaviour how can they win this abstract war? If they want militant organisations to stop mushrooming should they stop keeping the South in the dark and feeding them shit?

Asia Pacific's Muggy Cold War

The endless run of Asia Pacific conferences attended by the region’s powers has founded a deeply troubling new paradigm.  With the US insisting that China must be contained by the multitude of smaller states that surround her.

Sound familiar? A muggy cold war? Beijing the new Moscow?

India plays no small part in this US obsession with the meteoric rise of China, who in ten years will enjoy a GDP that will surpass America’s. The State Department sees India as a wonderfully heavy counter weight to the Red menace.

This has manifested itself with Gillard declaring, without consulting Rudd, her Foreign Minister, who vehemently opposes the policy, that Australia will indeed supply India with Uranium. This was hot on the heels of Gillard meeting with Obama, Australia’s Commander-in-Chief in Hawaii.

The State Department will not be devastated by India being armed to the teeth with Nuclear weapons, vaguely pointed at Shanghai, and of course even less concerned if Indian manufacturing is better fueled by nuclear plants.

Obama and Gillard’s announcement of the establishment of a new US marine base in Darwin has ramifications. It embitters an Australian, Chinese relationship that means so much more to Australia than it does to China.

The Australian mining sector has a steadily increasing trade with India but it is still a fraction of the coal and ore exports to the devouring dragon. This establishment of the Marine base is a celebrated snub to China.  Australia really is playing with fire and has not appreciated just how catastrophic a Chinese response would be for this country.

For Chinese wealth is matching her military power but her real immediate power is economic. They are offended by Australia having a foreign policy that is lazily xeroxed from the US State Department. If China decided to flex her tail and discourage Chinese importers of Australian minerals then the US would be in no position what so ever to help.  Regardless of how many garrisons dot the coast.

If China does exert economic pressure then Australia will back track shamelessly and will strongly reassess her role in the effeminate constraining of China. She cannot afford to do otherwise, when elections are at stake ANZUS be damned.

Can India afford to help tame the dragon? High on the agenda, in this long season of expensive talk shops, was the fact that China has laid claim to the better part of the South China Sea.

This area is sickly rich in oil.  India’s thirst for black gold is desperate. India is increasing her reach in exploration by scouting for new partners in the region. This Chinese claim of the Sea confidently challenges that. It will be strongly in India’s’ interests to side with the region’s powers against this stake.

The Chinese claim has also scared the living daylights out of the US. Her navies 7^th Fleet have used the South China Sea as her own by perpetually patrolling the area for decades in enormous convoys.

Paul Keating, the former Prime Minister of Australia,  very recently made the observation that China had good grounds for this claim as the predicted US reaction to the equivalent, the Chinese Navy patrolling off the coast of Florida, would not be polite.

I am of the mind that it should not be a given that India side against China. In fact India should take a leaf out of Lee Kwan Yew’s, Singapore’s former dictator, wizened diplomacy. My Father asked him why he let the Russian fleet in after the Americans fleet had barely just set sail out of Singapore’s docks. “Oh David, you are so young.”

He was a Statesman who knew how to play each superpower off each other.  I believe India could benefit enormously from this.  One month Washington’s darling and the next up for anything with Beijing.  India must not be bullied into playing this counter weight role to China just because it fits the US’s motives so beautifully.

India should not get involved in this game that is the same manure in a different bucket. For all the buzz that this is a new Asia Pacific stand off; China and the US have a long and bloody relationship in our region.  Korea, Malaya and Vietnam were deathly conflicts that extinguished millions of civilian’s lives and Korea ploughed the ground for future global nuclear war. This is plainly evident in North and South Korea.

Comically, the US’s Asia Pacific policy during those conflicts was  strongly motivated by their determination for Communism to not threaten the capitalist way of life. Now their motivation is to stop China being so shamelessly capitalist and threatening the US’s entrenched policy of living beyond her means.  Which, co-incidentally, is only made possible by China being, by far, the largest buyer of US treasury bonds.

India has it’s own destiny to reclaim and cannot be distracted by signing up as the US’s wingman in this fast developing geopolitical nightmare.

Qantas And Australasian Globalisation

Australia is many decades behind New Zealand in coming to terms with globalisation. This was very clearly evident when, with the grounding of Qantas, the countries personalities shouted naked racist slogans against Asia.

The phrase of the aftermath was ‘Asianisation’.  Mostly spluttered from the Transport Workers Union’s Tony Sheldon ‘stand by the workforce, the Australian brand of Qantas and not have it Asianised’. Dick Smith’s (The erstwhile electronic store chain chap) polemic rant was memorable. “When I get my private jet serviced in Dubai it’s half the price of Australia because it’s all bloody Pilipinos!” I know if these tirades were uttered in civilized New Zealand these opportunists would be in a Fairtrade recycled doghouse. In Australia they are championed.

These instinctively racist comments were a reaction to a long standing dispute with Qantas management who are planning to greatly expand their outsourcing to Asia. The first dispute of this transition was in 2006 when Qantas outsourced a fair size of their IT to Tata Consultancy Services to the loss of 300 Australian jobs.

Joyce, the CEO of Qantas, insists that if outsourcing is not disallowed by the Unions, Qantas will not only be half it’s fleet size by this time next year they will ultimately perish.

This is true. A global business cannot survive by being hijacked by a local workforce who insist on being paid inflated wages out of sheer nationalism and sentimentality.  This hurts my unhinged lefty sentiments but it is a cold fact.

Australians are outraged by the outsourcing of services for their airline but only 18 per cent choose the airline to travel abroad because for $50 bucks less you get to travel on an airline with hostesses that don’t resemble scrum props and don’t have the charm of a country pub bouncer. For Asia does it better.  And if it’s a few bucks cheaper fair dinkum working Aussie families feel the flying kangaroo can go and get made in to Russian sausages.

It’s no news that India is the world’s outsourcing capital. It is 60 per cent of the countries GDP (Only employing one percent of the population). Finding enormous success with a business model that could be paraphrased as ‘Half the price, twice the size’ they have cornered an elliptical market.

India aircraft engineering service will be candidates for the further Qantas outsourcing contracts.  They already have an enormous IT contract with the company.  India could very well be the saviour of Australia’s greatest international brand. Will India be the saviour of the sacred Holden?

In the very same week as the unprecedented news blitz of outsourcing woes for Qantas, Holden announced that several jobs would be lost to future outsourcing.  Could Tata be a manufacturing candidate? They would have to be as they have saved Jaguar Land Rover. But that reminds us of the cultural challenges of outsourcing.

If you are a Top Gear fan you would have cringed at those pompous twits cringing at their countries icons Land Rover and Jaguar being manufactured by an Indian company.  As an Australia will launch in to his best Peter Sellers Indian accent when they discuss telephone banking.

These cultural challenges are compounded by Australians holding a deeply inherent belief that being overpaid is a God given right. Especially employees of a company, such as Qantas, that is perceived as an Australian institution rather than a business. A local Mum and Pop milkbar rather than a global business.

The old instincts of protectionism will never die and I am starting to believe  that a return to hugely expensive protective tariffs can not be discounted.  The Western experiment with globalization  has largely been  a mixed bag. The current European crisis is a symptom of this. Europe, like Australia, has relocated it’s manufacturing base to the emerging nations and no matter how well you dress this fact in free trade communities, like the Eurozone and the proposed APAC model, we have lost our means of production which is the fundamental foundation for the nurturing of wealth.

A return to those uncompetitive days is not impossible when you hear Australians hyper allergic reaction to not only jobs been lost but more often previously generous salaries and conditions being dramatically reduced.

But the Qantas shareholders don’t give two samosas. They voted overwhelmingly for Joyce’s plans because they want a dividend and they don’t care if that bonus is dressed in a sari and has an accent.  Australian shareholders would make vegemite in a Kolkata hospice if it was cheaper and they thought they would get away with it.

I have mixed feelings. I see the way forward intellectually but in my heart I am frightened for I see great hardship for Australasia being thrown from the nest and flying in a turbulent  world. And if I brutally honest I too feel greatly attached to the undeserved privilege that we have enjoyed but not acknowledged. In this country, with it’s astronomical mineral wealth, the Saudi Arabia of the Pacific.

But I do greatly look forward to the global economy drowning out the racists, that have surfaced in this dispute, and dragging them, kicking and whining into an Asian century.

A positive start would be for Joyce to bide by his vision and outsource the entire Qantas management to Asia. For the companies experiment with outsourcing to Ireland is a strange failure and no Indian CEO would ground his fleet voluntarily.

Diwali:1,000 Bottles Of Pepsi, Roulette and Delhi Police

My memories are Diwali in Delhi are as colourful as the celebration. As a student of Delhi University, I celebrated this festival with gusto and on one memorable year with 1,000 bottles of Pepsi, a roulette wheel and the Delhi Police.

The catalyst for this adventure was an amazing man called Chintu Chawla, proud resident of Rajouri Garden and entrepreneur extraordinaire. Like many Sikhs, he made the best of friends and the worst of enemies. Despite his outwardly aggressive Delhi persona that involved charismatic tirades of Punjabi abuse that would have made Laloo Prashad blush, he was big-hearted to a fault and wept every time we had a chicken slaughtered. Despite his habit of loudly threatening drivers that cut him off with dire sexual consequences to their next of kin, I sentimentally remember him threatening to kill me if I swore within a kilometre of Bangla Sahib, the great Sikh temple of Delhi.

I had been fortunate enough to be befriended by Chintu in Sri Venkateswara College when I was still struggling to spell it. I soon found out, before the days of Twitter or even mobiles, that he was a human social media hub and knew everything that that was going on in West Delhi. To a supernatural extent. “Nirula’s at D-28 were raided last night by the ITO. They had 3 crores under their mattress!”; “My cousin’s bhabhi’s grandfather owns three illegal rifles and last week shot a monkey!”

Chintu not only knew everything that happened, he desperately wanted to be there when it did. That meant long laughter-filled nights jumping off and on the Mudrika (Ring Road bus) or if we were lucky, in his family’s temperamental Maruti 800, chasing down the latest Old Monk and water get-together or in this case, the latest high stakes Diwali “Flash” game.

Twenty years later I can very clearly remember Diwali flash parties at the Chawlas. Even then the joint family was an institution under attack, but the Chawlas had gallantly swum against a strong tide of change, and a matrix of relatives lived in a huge house in D Block. Diwali would see the lounge filled with enormous Sikhs, constructed with stiff Patialas and paddling pool sized servings of butter chicken, jealously nursing their two dealt playing cards. They looked like a range of the Himalayas with two dwarfed checker-patterned billboards on the side of each mountain.

Punjabis are a jovial lot but when money is involved, there can be an sudden air of intense seriousness and uncharacteristic silence. The tradition of gambling during Diwali was no exception. It was a very serious business indeed, with little eye contact between poker faces, just a flurry of suspicious side glances and nonchalant throws of money into the pot.

This mesmerising meditation would be broken by truly violent eruptions of cheating accusations and heart-stopping drama. Not for the faint hearted! On my first few visits to the Chawlas I thought they were suffering an almighty ongoing row and confided this to Chintu who doubled over laughing and said, “ Nei yaar, that’s how Punjabis talk only!”

Chintu may have had a protective instinct for condemned chickens, but I soon found this didn’t extend to his fellow man. Diwali night in the streets of Rajouri garden is to relive the Lebanese civil war, on a bad night.

It is beyond description. India has not heard of occupational health and safety, and her fireworks are not the effeminate crackers of my youth. They really should be stored in ammo dumps under armed guard.These annually claim thousands of fingers and under our command, made enormous holes in aluminium billboards advertising VIP underpants.

Skyrockets were designed to be fired vertically, but West Delhites find a well-intended horizontal launch very satisfactory, and in the direction of a neighbour’s face, infinitely more satisfying! Multiply that by a thousand neighbours, slash combatants, and you have some idea of the ferocity the celebration evokes. The exhausting swing of my emotions from an instinct of self-preservation, fighting a strong impulse to dive head first in to the ditch, and the wonderfully liberating experience of firing kilos of gunpowder at young families. 

In hindsight, I can see why Chintu is such a good survivor. Though we nearly didn’t survive the following year’s Diwali.

Chintu, naturally entrepreneurial, had heard on his amazing radar that people were making a small fortune in the Diwali fairs selling the new multinational soft drinks. Thick as thieves, we pooled resources and in no time we were riding in a truck, the proud guardians of 1,000 bottles of Pepsi.
Setting up our stall in Green Park mela, it didn’t take long to realise we were in deep trouble. We had been duped into believing we would have the monopoly, and our prices plummeted from a level that would have seen the proceeds purchase a year’s supply of Old Monk from the Army Canteen to a level that would have seen a year’s supply of ruthless ridicule.

We hadn’t even dented the skyscrapers of Pepsi crates which formed a towering backdrop to our depressingly quiet stall, in a furiously busy fair. That night we barely slept as we nervously pondered how we were to sell more bottles, and I had never slept on Pepsi crates before (because we couldn’t risk any bottles being stolen). It was a tricky manoeuvre as we hadn’t sold more than six crates and we were dangerously high off the ground.

The next day, despite his deep reservations, Chintu listened to me and we made a clowns face with holes for eyes and a mouth to charge punters to take a chance at throwing a ball through and claiming a Pepsi as a prize.

This was reminiscent of my later business decisions. I clearly should have seen that establishing a game, where our fiscal survival was dependant on Indians not having any cricket skills, was not sound. We got rid of quite a lot of Pepsi, but it was next to free. Cricket guns with seriously strong throwing arms consistently found their mark and in no time the hardboard clown, to their great delight, was firewood.

Then Chintu looked dangerously preoccupied, genius was in motion. As genius is a slip away from madness, we found ourselves at a toy shop buying a miniature roulette table.

Incredibly, we moved the supplies to Lajpat Nagar where we slept again on the crates and I have a very clear memory of wrapping myself up against the swarm of mosquitoes in a cloth street sign for woman’s unmentionables in Central Market, and drifting off to the calls of the night watchman as he made his rounds.

The roulette table was the hit of the fair and we didn’t know where to put the bundles of cash that were being thrown at us. Chintu had had the courage to give the wrong odds without our customers knowing any better. We could see ourselves hosting a party to end all parties in no time at all.

Then as I greedily looked down at the glorious piles of crumpled notes ready to sweep yet another avalanche into our money box, I only just missed having all my fingers broken.

A lathi (truncheon) was brought down with such force on our table that the roulette wheel flew into the air, closely followed by Rs 100 notes and the grasping hands of their owners. A Jaat constable who looked like a well-made public building screamed a string of abuses that even Chintu, though now open-mouthed and decidedly paler, couldn’t help feel some admiration for it’s colourful delivery.

Chintu trembled, “Bhaisahib, please come to the side and we can work this out!” The cop erupted, “Do you think I am dishonest cop?” We all shook our heads furiously, indicating ‘no’.

“If I take money, I take it front of the people!”

Twenty years on Chintu lives in Torronto with his beautiful young family. It’s a joy to phone my brother and remember those cherished days. It’s with sadness I won’t be able to wish him Happy Diwali with a big Punjabi hug.

You can take the boy out of West Delhi but you can’t take West Delhi out of the boy. For that I am very grateful because for some he was the worst of enemies but for me he always made the very best of friends.

India Emerging, Australia Submerging.

The Australian Governments main defence in the sacking of 1000 BlueScope workers was that this was a painful symptom of an ongoing economic transition. But this transition is been treated as a magically vague happening and not explained for very strong political reasons. Australians don’t want to hear that India and China are fast becoming their economic superiors.

For the Government to fully explain the implications of this ‘transition’ would be political suicide. To enlighten the electorate that Australia has been reduced to a quarry for booming Jamshedpur steel furnaces would make Gillard’s chances of reelection impossibly even more remote.

The Australian public is simply not ready to take on the reality that the United States is no longer our obvious choice for snuggling up to in a new Asia Pacific. With our Uncle Sam looking increasingly senile how long can Australia unquestioningly endorse American policy and as Professor White of ANU says, ‘turn around, point up to the US and say ‘I’m with him.’

Australia is an obedient ally of the States. I don’t belittle that in the unhinged lefty sense. If it wasn’t for the US, Australia would have predated it’s Asian destiny by many decades. We forget how many 19 year old GI’s died in malaria infested Papua jungles ensuring a resource starved Japan didn’t set up shop in Newcastle.

Australia will be forever grateful and of course culturally identify more with her North American cousins. But the US’s faltering economy and her ditzy expeditions in the Middle East have exposed a shrunken dog with a deafening bark.

The US economy has proved shockingly fragile. The myriad of reasons given to why it can’t shake it’s unrelenting string of crisis are unconvincing. Few are brave enough to talk of the elephant in the room. The US doesn’t produce it consumes.

This model has been enthusiastically taken up by Australia. 25 years ago, 20% of Australian GDP was from the manufacturing sector today that is halved. Only one in 20 Australians are involved or connected to the manufacturing sector.

Our economy is overwhelmingly service based. We have become latte servers and pizza deliverers. We serve one another in a closed loop with the assistance of coffee machines and pizza ovens all made almost exclusively in China or India.

This is of course globalization. Where you are rewarded for your competitiveness not your country club. Where as a lefty I take an eccentric view.

I believe that globalization is more beneficial to countries that have been excluded form the world’s economic engine. Strongly tempered with the West taking advantage of the sickening reality of child labour exploitation and the virtual non existence of labour law implementation.

For the West could not have seen the writing on the wall. They could not have foreseen how the well India and other Asian giants have risen to the challenge. They have embraced globalization with a rabid enthusiasm.

This has left countries like Australia, who dreamt that their products were infinitely superior and would find new massive markets, looking non plussed. They never dreamt that they would become the market.

Australia’s economic position can now be equated with pre independence India. Gandhiji would lead huge rallies burning Manchester woven clothes made from Indian raw cotton. Gandhiji saw that the paralysis of the Indian economy stemmed from India exporting her raw materials to be almost exclusively processed in England then insultingly imported back into India to be purchased by her then British ruled masses. Not unlike Australia exporting raw materials like coal that is then used to make steel in India that is then imported into Australia at a massive added value.

Australia’s economy rests treacherously heavily on this model. 90% of the diamonds from Australia’s Kimberley mine find their way to Indian traders who polish the stone s in centres like Baroda. Again adding a massive value to a resource that was sold in Australia at a fraction of it’s final Mumbai showroom price or indeed it’s Sydney showroom price.

Australia has all but resigned to the reality she cannot compete in manufacturing. She is still a force in innovation but I feel this century will be characterised by India and China shedding their well deserved nicknames of copycats and show the world they have a also have a strong creative spirit with future ground breaking research and development.

This new Indian innovative spirit may break Australia’s back. For if an Asian laboratory with increasingly huge budgets, searching to solve over reliance on Australian resources, finds a steel substitute, Australia will be banished to an economic wilderness. The demand for coal and her own steel manufacturing would plummet. In an age of windmills and macbooks the whole process of steel manufacturing seems medieval crude and is begging to be replaced by a new competitive material.

With these future prospects Australia will have to decide whether to keep snuggling up to Uncle Sam and be a detached quarry or partner with India and become once more competitive.

Twitter And Facebook India's New Democratic Institutions?

With the London riots has the Indian Government appreciated that the new social media under the furiously texting thumbs of the barely literate is a frightening adversary? Will this new social media be relegated as just another form of limp political expressionism in India’s democracy or actually be a threat to the democracy?

With the historical cases of cabinet corruption there has been much discussion in the Indian media over the so called failure of India’s democratic institutions. The twitter sphere was set ablaze by youth thoroughly repulsed by Raja and Kalmadi’s ill gains and often tweets pleaded for Government to be more democratic. But democracy has not failed in India, India has failed in democracy. For 60 years it has embraced the philosophy far too enthusiastically and is drowning in the blessed thing.

Indian democracy has seen the birth of hundreds of institutions in a plurality that would have left Plato gob smacked. The Indian democracy complex now has the look and feel of a post war computer that was the size of a three bedroom house and took an afternoon to balance your cheque book.

If you have enjoyed the company of Delhi’s pseudo intelligentsia you will have a clear understanding of this diatribe. You will have ridden the acronym mail, Delhi’s hopelessly complicated mocktail circuit.

You will attend a seminar at the I.I.C. about the misdeeds of the I.M.F. then nip other the road, past U.N.I.C.E.F., to the I.H.C. to a discussion on the C.A.G. You will then feel robbed because you didn’t have time to go the H.T. at the I.T.O. to give your article on the C.W.C.

This is a marked point of difference to North Africa that was set ablaze by activists exploding on social media after been violently constrained for years.

To voice your democratic right in India is possibly far too easy, with far too many avenues. The instinctive reaction of any political crisis is to form yet another committee or dusty red bricked institution.

Many of the academics who attend these never ending talk shops are brilliant scholars. When I watch a NDTV panel discussion I am always impressed at how far more in depth, as compared to an Australian TV panel, the debate proceeds. There is no scarcity of brilliantly eloquent, if not slightly bewildered, intellectuals.

But this beehive of higher thought is in conjunction with the Brahmanic curse where the intellectuals that fleet between these multiple forums largely do not connect thought with action. Carrying embryonic ideas to full term and implementing the thousands of schemes that have been excitedly consummated by the heat of the overhead projector is not their bag.

Ironically this involved, very academic, relationship with democracy has instilled a paralysis. A matrix of pressure valves that emasculates any head of steam.

As the Arab world and the UK have experienced, Blackberry messenger and Twitter does not only vent rage it focuses that intense rage into a social changing blinding light. The perfect opposite effect of India’s democratic institutions.

Treasonous tweets and Facebook status updates are not diluted by coma inducing committees and Parliaments. They are not censored by the very well hidden ethics of contemporary media editors. These short explosive slogans are out in the world in a Mumbai second. Unformed and mutinous.

‘Flash Mobs’ is the phrase of the month. Where a crowd of hundreds or indeed thousands of disaffected mobile phone users assemble ready for what is almost exclusively anti social behavior. This is of interest to law enforcement agencies but it also should be of utmost interest to India’s political elite.

For what institutions did the youth of London attack? Westminster and St Pauls? No. They attacked Footlocker and Debenhams. They didn’t attack the radio stations and broadcast a political agenda they smashed high street shop windows and looted sandshoes.

This was is the new paradigm. We are not citizens we are consumers. One in three under 18 years olds in the UK are officially in poverty. They are too young to vote but not too young to be disenfranchised consumers. Young people that have been programmed into believing they are hopelessly inadequate without the latest accessory.

Capitalist society has created such a overwhelmingly powerful illusion that consumers are ready to go to even murderous lengths to keep up with the Sharmas. This is where India has to pay focused attention.



The mobile is the 21st centuries Kalashnikov. A weapon that can help form a flash mob in minutes. In the Indian context a flash mob could mean hundreds of thousands of rioters not the few hundred that have England in a tail spin.

For six months ago Hindi was rarely seen on Twitter. Now it is increasingly more common. It is an obvious sign that an all powerful media is no longer in the hands of gymkhana groupies and in the hands of a far more representative cross section of the society.

And the more India experiences economic progress the deeper mobiles will penetrate down the rungs of the social economic ladder. These Kalashnikovs will increasingly be in the hands of people who have been largely excluded from the economic miracle.

This mobile owning underclass will not give two samosas about the latest acronym institution or this weeks drafting committee. They will demand a Mercedes and a Macbook within a broadband instant with a murderous passion that will not have the faintest whiff of democracy.

A New India Independence Day

For me Independence Day conjures up a range of powerful emotions and memories. When I was very young in the 70’s it would mean jumping in a banged up car with my father and being driven at break neck speed to attend an Auckland Independence Day celebration. Amongst my earliest memories are cavernous memorial halls filled with the echo of excited Gujurati, being spoilt by Aunties draped in usually moth-balled cotton saris  and the confusion of seeing my beloved Uncle Thakur Prabhu in his kardi topi. My father would introduce me to frail old men who he would proudly say served time at His Majesty’s expense with Gandhiji himself. The older I got, the greater the awe I enjoyed in hearing their stories.

Pop had a deeply strong attachment to all things Indian and this plays no small part in my infatuation with the country. The freedom struggle reverberated in his political philosophy and I sentimentally remember our long discussions on Pandit Nehru and how Pop’s eyes would glaze over when he recalled the greatest speech of them all. He would look lost and uncharacteristically murmur ‘literature, Nehru’s tryst with destiny speech was literature.’

For the freedom struggle, led by a man who many saw as a God amongst men, is one of the most tremendous epics of modern history. To not be attracted at some level to this romance means you safely do not have a single fibre of political being.

The greatest empire the world had ever suffered was humbled by a man in a single hand woven cloth softly evangelising the virtues of non-violence. This gives further understanding to the world’s love for Gandhiji. His character is so clearly reminiscent of Christ. To turn the other cheek was a largely untested philosophy of their messiah’s disciples, with Gandhians it meant enduring the very real experience of being bloodied by the sickening crack of the lathi striking their skulls without succumbing to an overwhelming temptation to retaliate. And what is even more inspiring is that this Gujarati messiah actually got rid of the Romans.

Since those immortal days India has had to live in a world of lesser men and hard realities.

India may have rid itself of the English but it has not purged itself of characters that would make the most pompous gora sahib look positively socialistic. The glowing promise of a Gandhian post independence India held an ecstasy that was easy to express by silver tongued politicians but proved impossible to implement. India suffered a slow colonisation from within. A sad victim of friendly fire.

Bernhard Shaw said if you are not a communist by the time you are twenty you have no heart and if you are communist after twenty you have no brain.

By the Indo-Sino war of 1962 India came of age and painfully realised the futility of embracing Gandhian principles of disarmament and non-violence. She realised that loving your neighbour with cries of ‘Chini Bhai Bhai!’ was enjoyable enough but turning the other cheek was just plain lunacy and would be conductive to the Chinese marching in to Kolkata. It was a pragmatic but traumatic abandonment of the heart of India’s political philosophy that had been so lovingly nurtured by the architects of Independence.

My political coming of age was on the 21^st night of May  1991, four days before my 20^th birthday. Walking through the dark streets of Lajpat Nagar I watched the election banners of a beaming Rajiv get tangled and thrown to the ground in a sudden summer storm. I worshipped him and in my youthful foolhardiness placed all my wildly idealistic dreams for India on his shoulders. His assassination forever changed my outlook and Gandhi's words, which I devoured as a teenager, never had the same spiritual resonance again.

Fortunately for India, the country has citizens who are made of much, much stronger stuff than a gora from Mangere East. Venkita Kalyanam is Gandhiji’s last surviving private secretary. He is fully invigorated by the anti-corruption movement headed by Hazare and had these words "Never was India against corruption as it is today. It is a great feeling," he said. "The Bill will not turn India in to a corruption-free country overnight. It is just the beginning to the end of corruption,"

This is the perfect last chapter to a great political romance.  The man who was with the Mahatma when he uttered his last words and spent his last breath has returned to help lead India to a new Independence.

Clinton India China Human Rights

Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to India saw her make an appeal for India to be more assertive in world affairs. She wants emerging India to have a foreign policy to match it’s vastly increased economic clout.

An instinctive reaction to this is to accuse the US of wanting a counter-balance to China. The US State Department is losing sleep over China’s rather intimidating growth and will warmly welcome any ally to stem it’s charge.

But is it a given that India will take a China negative stance? Despite the two country’s rocky history could India and China form an informal alliance against Western powers that still regard their military and economic dominance as a birth right?

I certainly feel that for India to tow the American line is no done deal. Indeed India may loosely join ranks with the Red menace. Disrespecting Clinton’s strong desire for India to go aggressively hard on countries that perpetuate human rights violations.

India can see Clinton’s wish is ridiculous. Both the US and India hold no true shining torch aloft for the rights of man. One a serial occupier of Muslim States where they habitually interrogate and torture suspects and India who in Kashmir and the North East are equally hospitable.

Sceptics would propose that this American preoccupation with human rights is because this moral high stand is used as a bargaining chip in international trade rather than any warm Christian spirit. I don’t know if it’s that contrived but certainly walking up to this lofty pulpit is terribly bad for business.

China is Africa’s leading trading partner. They conducted 120 billion dollars of trade with the oil rich continent last year. This was achieved in a handful of years without giving a moment’s pause to reflect on the niceties of dealing with militias that machete children and electrify peasant’s genitals. In fact that has been China’s huge advantage. Supplying raping and pillaging Sudanese fighters with anti aircraft guns pays off a million fold when oil exploration rights are awarded.

Obama said India is not emerging it has a risen, and in this new paradigm it is energy starved. If an already energy famished India is to have an even vague future semblance of the Western consumption of hatchbacks and stainless steel fridges this famine will become far more acute. India will have to become markedly more aggressive and take a page from China’s musket and blanket diplomacy.

India will have to flatly ignore American histrionic pleas for her not to trade with badly behaved States. This will be far easier to execute if India and China form a disobedient cooperative. Countries that refuse to interfere in other States human rights affairs and certainly a refusal to be assessed by other States. A sulking and anti-social, non-alliance movement.

Could this eventuate? Rather than India indulging the West by pointing a finger at China’s appalling human rights record I think they could, for a time at least, pretend to have a relationship of convenience with China. These countries could enjoy sharing the commonality of furiously wanting to reclaim their destiny, at what ever cost, no matter how dear.

For in the vast scale of history it is really only late yesterday evening that Western powers have become born again greenies and well dressed social workers. Much like the condemned murderer who, out of sheer terror, on the eve of his execution finds Jesus.

Australia, lately plagued by bribery cases and animal rights atrocities(My Hindu wife nearly passed out), is a classic example. They are struggling to be competitive in a world that has increasingly powerful players who don’t give a waterboarding about any rights abuse, or environmental agenda, in any form.

Australia’s competitively expensive and embarrassingly incompetent attempt to join New Zealand in some form of emissions trading scheme and it’s precursor the carbon tax is bewildering for a country that survives almost exclusively by embracing it’s carbon footprint. Expecting Asian countries, deprived of a hundred years of industrial progress, to follow the piper is a bedtime story. It is as futile as an Australian tourist visiting a Hong Kong gambling den and ill advisedly insisting that all the punters immediately stop smoking because you’d get a fine in St Kilda.

Another great example has recently presented itself. The Securency scandal has thrown several executives into a terminal state for allegedly bribing wonderfully colourful Colonels of shady intelligence agencies in every backwater of the world. India and China would see that as standard operating procedure, hardly worth the effort of a memo.

In Australia it is corporate armageddon and voluminous fill for newspaper broad sheets. This compels these companies to awkwardly compete in an international business environment that does not play by the Queen’s rules. Fighting bare knuckled Thai kick boxers with a pair of woollen mittens knitted by Mommy.

India needs to take full advantage of this handicap. She must enter countries that make Bihar look like Sussex. Build oil rigs on fields that no sane man would even spit on. Dam rivers with political prisoner labour, wipe out cute endangered otters and flood areas the size of the Waikato. Much like the Western hemisphere has done for hundreds of years. Allowing them to lord it over nations much lower down the food chain.

Clinton had better pray India does not find this inner shark. Ambitious India is not the Ganga Din they know and love.

Ghulam Azad's Comments Against Homosexuals

Ghulam Nabi Azad’s startling statements about Indian homosexuals exposes not only an idiot but more importantly the cancerous chamcha culture that grips the Congress.

I met Azad many years ago at a function hosted by Sonia Gandhi, who had then not even hinted at her ambitions. Azad was pompous to the point of absurdity but when Mrs. Gandhi entered our midst I have never seen such a change in posture. He went from being the sultan of greater India to a groveling buffoon. He nearly head butted the floor with his whimpering bow and I’m sure if I had looked his knuckles would have been bright purple from the force he pushed together his namaskar. It was not dissimilar to someone on the brink of starvation begging at an intersection. When Mrs. Gandhi left our circle his fellow Ministers laughed their heads off and told him he was a chumcha, admittedly an excellent one.

When you are assessed for your ability to kiss royal posteriors and possession of obscure vote banks you will always get an Azad. Individuals who are so removed from reality that you have to purchase tickets to their world to have a conversation.

His statements that homosexuals were hard to administrate because unlike prostitutes they didn’t congregate in readily recognizable areas is sensationally bananas.

Azad, not yet even remotely discouraged, then generously bestowed another profound pearl of wisdom. Homosexuality was not only unnatural but that homosexuality was brought to India by foreigners.

Bring out the men in white coats with two straight jackets. One for Azad and one for Mrs. Gandhi.

Investing any responsibility in this incompetent (that involves anything more complicated than the demands of a rickshaw puller) is equally mad. Mrs. Gandhi’s constant five cents that the windows to Government need to be cleaned and MP’s held accountable is now a further heavily devalued currency. The window has not been cleaned as so much as it has been smashed and we have had an unsettling peek at her bathroom cabinet. Cabinet ministers that could not run a brothel.

If Azad had had the intelligence to remember mid sentence that his Empress was an erstwhile foreigner he would have died from a major cardiac event. That he didn’t is very unfortunate because he continues to administer the mortally important health portfolio, that he clearly does not, without a pinch of ambiguity, have the marbles for.

This fact is cold steel solid when you consider where the statements were made. In an HIV conference. The equivalent of rocking up to a Holocaust memorial in a Volkswagen or asking for a jumbo box of condoms at the Vatican gift shop.

Many of my dearest friends are Indian homosexuals. I am very proud to call them friends. For six years I lived next to a Delhi Hijira colony full of characters. Their sexuality is only a part of their identity. Though I will indulge in some bigotry.

My stereotype of an Indian homosexual is quite prejudiced in that I believe they are almost without exception above average citizens. High achievers in business and the corporate world with their strong sense of civil behaviour. I also believe in my prejudice that they have a predisposition for getting the job done right.

To alienate this community that could be at least 50 million Indians is not the brightest move. Twice the population of Australia could be natural dancers and know their flared jeans from their skinny jeans.

A phenomena I have witnessed is that a considerable amount of Indian students studying in Australia have come out of the almirah. It is of course much easier to do here rather than Rajouri Garden.

A gay friend very bravely went back to North Delhi, a bastian of conservatism, and shaking like a leaf told his parents he was batting for the other team. His Father’s reaction would have been less violent if he had told him he was batting for Pakistan.

Indians will forgive you for being gay but they will never forgive you for not procreating. His Father’s response?(After having a stiff peg and a lay down) “Beta, you have to stop being naughty and get serious”, as his Mother handed him some homeopathic medicine and told him about some girls she had lined up.

Azad’s jurassic attitudes help reinforce these impractical ideas. The Congress leadership needs to purge itself of unqualified dinosaurs living in fractured realities. Ministers who hold position for their chumcha skills not any administrative flair.

Indian gays need to be recognised in a society that badly needs them. They need to be embraced by competent members of the State and welcomed to share the exciting burden of lifting India higher and yet higher.

Cut Off From Reality

The last few days have seen Delhi University colleges reach new heights for cut off marks. SRCC announced a stratospheric 100% cut off with St. Stephens, in a close second for absurdity, with 97%.

Things have changed since my days in Sri Venkateswara College, or Venky for the English medium types. Even then getting admission was not simply a matter of turning up and bribing your way into the sports quota. (Many Venkyites were track and field champions who didn’t have the stamina to run after the Mudrika(ring Road bus) for more than the length of a bus stop.)

Many readers will be very upset that I gained admission by quota. Not as a scheduled tribe person or a backward caste member, despite those groups being a more apt description of my character, but as a bloody gora. This was something I didn’t advertise, as my very first day in College was a full blown riot in the dark days of the Mandal Commission, that saw volatile nationwide protests against quotas for education and jobs.

I spent that first day with my eyes wide open like a possum caught in a car's headlights. I saw future friends, through a light haze of tear gas, address the students with a frenzy that you don’t see in New Zealand unless you are a mental health nurse. That has never left me. That raging passion for a fair chance from having studied madly for the larger part of their lives. Often at the cost of a childhood.

Australasians have it so very easy. For me to have qualified for a seat in DU on a level playing field is a comical concept. I certainly wouldn’t have got in the sports quota as sumo wrestling in India is still in it’s infancy. My Kiwi exam marks were an almost perfect inverse of the now ridiculous cut off marks.

Not everyone is disadvantaged enough to have an unfair advantage, such as being a Kiwi. This lack of opportunity, despite securing an average of 80% plus, is a matter of life and death to many students.

The tragedy of the annual suicides that darkly come with the admission season is proof to that. Young boys and girls who have pressures that many western children would simply not withstand for a mere morning. The years of family discipline that enforce daily hours long shifts of calculus and Shakespeare. Parents petrified at the thought of their loved children ill equipped in a society that has no Centrelink and then strongly projecting those intense fears on already stressed kids.

Frustratingly, these tragedies are not only driven by justifiably neurotic parents and elite colleges conducting ‘branding exercises’ but by the reality of sheer numbers mismatched by finite seats.

Delhi University has 54,000 seats with over 125,000 applicants. "It is a grave crisis that we need to look into. At least six more DU's are needed in the national capital region to meet the skewed ratio of demand and supply," said Pillai, The Vice-Chancellor of Indira Gandhi National Open University.

Other solutions have been put forward including a much wider program of evening classes in DU’s 70 colleges. This would have been a policy from heaven in my day. Our Doordarshan era dance parties were stifled by girls having 4 pm curfews. I think you’ll find students will have no incentive to graduate within 8 years and the necessary introduction of abnormally large crèches.

All this injustice is good news for Australasian education institutions. In fact it might give impetus to a phenomena where the intellectually less fortunate Indian students are the foreign students rather than the cream.

As when Malaysia exercised it’s prejudice against ethnic Chinese aspiring students and Australian and New Zealand Universities enjoyed a windfall, as they still do. The continued and strongly increasing prejudice of the Indian Government against her own aspiring students, albeit a universal prejudice, will ensure greater numbers will look abroad.

But what about students who do not come from business families who can afford foreign fees? What about students who don’t come from business families that can support perfectly good students that don’t have impossibly perfect scores?

They will have to live in a society that has very little opportunity for a ‘respectable’ position without a graduate qualification. It can be a nightmarish reality to exist in a vacuum of opportunity.

Young seventeen year old innocents know this. I feel deeply sad remembering the tears when friends saw their posted results. The student sitting next to me in an exam who was caught cheating. How he wept and begged with pressed hands to be excused. It was like he was begging for his life. He was.

Henry, King Of The Intellectually Less Fortunate

The recent fine imposed by the Broadcasting Standards Authority of $3000 for Paul Henry’s racist observations on Sheila Dixits name was pathetically limp wristed. It also could not have come at a better time for Henry as it coincided for the launch of his memoirs “What was I thinking?”, and provided him thousands of dollars of nationwide advertising.

How there was no fine imposed for his repugnantly racist questions about the Governor General is bewildering.

Random House, his publishers, who admit to him being a ‘complex character’ probably very wisely decided to launch his book at the same time as the judgment.

The book has sold 4,000 copies in it’s first week which is litmus test not so much of Henry’s contribution to New Zealand society but on sections of the society.

It seems New Zealand is suffering another intense brain drain but now from experts refusing to leave. Any citizen who spent the 30 odd dollars on his memoir and not on a bucket of KFC needs to reassess their life’s philosophy. Then check in to a mental health facility.

But these imbeciles who endorse Henry’s character mostly need to broaden their jaundiced horizons. But I really hope they don’t.

That would mean mixing with them. That would bore me to death. ‘Yes Dave, Indians eat eggs’, ‘Yes Susan, India does have elephants but they are not the main mode of transport’. My wife was asked in Onehunga how on earth could she be television producer when India didn’t have any electricity. She sweetly replied Indians watched TV by candlelight.

These stratas of society really should remain just stratas. Easily identifiable mono culturalists. Bitching and moaning about immigration and globalisation as they speed off to have a curry after an hour shopping at The Warehouse. Marked out and easy to maneuver around.

They are welcome to tune in for TV breakfast shows run by fellow bigots. That means for a few hours they are off our roads. It worries me greatly that Henry is back in radio and his disciples might be simultaneously operating dangerous machinery and listening to tripe.

I am also told within their raving loony ranks are National Business Review journalists who propose that Dixit should change her name. On the contrary, it is a cruel fate that Henry’s name is not reminiscent of a Punjabi abuse. It is also fateful that he did not poke fun of goras with truly ridiculous names in New Zealand’s political sphere. Chris Carter had an assistant with the very judgmental name of Badcock and another man suffered friction with being Christened James Cockburn.

What I will agree with Henry is his anger at the New Zealand Government apologising to the India Government for his appalling behavior. That was setting a precedent for the Government to accept responsibility for precious dandys who pollute our culture.

We can barely tolerate them at home but internationally they are an intense embarrassment.

(Image stolen from nz-tees.spreadshirt.com)

Loony or Messiah?

The last few days saw the surging anti-corruption movement in India suffer an affront with Baba Ramdev’s supporters being lathi charged in Delhi. This has prompted Ramdev to declare he will form a militia of 11,000 armed soldiers. Is Baba Ramdev a guiding light to the movement or will he potentially derail this rare chance for Indians to wipe the window to the gears of Government clean?

Baba Ramdev’s wide influence in India cannot be overstated. He has for many years been a televised Yogi with an audience of millions of people. I cannot tell you how surreal it was to be sitting in Arunachal Pradesh, the remotest state of India, to be lectured on the benefits of Ramdev’s signature explosive breathing. The late tribal Minister, who was enthusiastically telling me this, was convinced this would cure his hypertension. As indeed Ramdev’s drug company insists that his herbal remedies cure HIV and cancer.

This creative entrepreneurship has spawned an empire worth many millions.

This is a break from the Swami tradition of austerity. Gandhiji on being asked why on earth he travelled third class replied because there is no fourth class. If Ramdev was asked why he was travelling in an aircraft’s first class he would reply because I couldn’t charter the whole blessed aircraft, which is exactly what he does.

But India has changed. This hedonistic behavior inspires awe not disdain. His eccentricities are swallowed whole by millions of followers.

Including his five-point plan. 100% voting. 100% Nationalistic thought. 100% boycott of foreign companies. 100% unification of the country. 100% yoga oriented nation.

These tickle me but his points that address corruption make me sit up and pay attention. The death penalty for graft convictions amongst them. This would be a sound move if it didn’t involve the impracticality of liquidating the entire political class but it is academically deeply satisfying.

The repatriation of the estimated trillion dollars in Swiss bank accounts. I have met industrialists who openly admit to having offshore accounts. It seems there is a finite amount of black money you can blow up in 5 stars and weddings attended by a populace that would qualify as a New Zealand city.

He has tempered these Swadeshi instincts with a reported purchase of a Scottish Island for several million pounds. Which is a just spare change for a man worth 1,100 crore.

But can we be too precious about the individuals who are leading the people to what we pray is a historical change? Who gives a monkey’s uncle if the diseased limb of corruption is severed by a scalpel or a garden spade?

Yes, Ramdev is the polar opposite of Hazare. Hazare is the cleaner than clean Gandhian. Not the MLA Gandhian who habitually sports a gold Mount Blanc pen in his kardi kurta pocket but the real deal. Hazare would sooner starve to death than charter an aircraft. Yes, this has gained a deep respect but not a universal respect. No contemporary politician has understood this modern voter burnout to Gandhian austerity like Mayawati.

Mayawati, the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, understands down to her chopals that Gandhism isn’t moving off the shelves like it used to. She sells bling. She shamelessly flaunts her massive personal wealth like a West Coast rapper and commissions pharaoh like memorials to her living self. The dalits love it. She’s one of them and they want to be like her.

They no longer respect Gandhian ideals because the lifestyle they aspire to rid themselves of is in fact Gandhian and is practiced out of simply having no choice. They are now revolted by the hypocrisy of money grabbing gangsters shouting twisted versions of the Gandhian gospel. Ramdev is unashamedly capitalist, much like the electorate.

He still has a long journey to be an enduring national leader. For India’s villagers are uneducated and because of this they rely on a steel strong instinct for a person’s character. Will he stand up to this aggressive litmus test? Will the result be saffron or a cowardly yellow?

What is indisputable is that Ramdev is a marketable hybrid of emerging India’s worlds. The jet setting sadhu. A living metaphor of India’s half complete metamorphosis from spiritual socialism to globalisation.

He has my reluctant vote because I think he can learn to not talk of armed revolution when having fasted for three days. He has the vote too of 85 year old K.L. Gupta who made his way from Indore to Rajghat, alone and in 40 degree weather. Even with his catheter bag he slept outside on Delhi’s pavements so he could pray with Hazare and Ramdev for his beloved India.