The best myth of them all.
The economy is in great shape. This is the biggest lie that our leaders keep telling us. If we are to believe them, then India has a growth rate just about ready to enter double digits and that will lead to a better life for all of us, so stop complaining.
Western economists have propagated a theory for a while now: in a free market economy, if we let everyone become as rich as they can, everyone benefits. This is the exact kind of stupid thinking that comes from having no acquaintance with the physical sciences and no idea about human behaviour either.
Two things: 1. The absolute amount of available resources in this world is finite. For the truly stupid amongst us, that word translates to ‘limited’. Limited as in ‘ride in an SUV today, and your grandkids might have to walk to work’.
2. People are greedy. Asking people to curb their consumption of resources assumes that these people have something of a conscience. Now there are certain people, the Mother Tersea’s, the Nelson Mandela’s and the Mohandas Gandhi’s of this world who do, but it would appear that people like our dear Mr. Cheney wield more absolute power.
Right, to put this thesis into shape, we now have our basic assumptions. So the idea is simply the following: without external control, wealth will accumulate in the hands of a privileged few, and will do so at the expense of the masses. The gap between those who have and those who will never know otherwise will continue to widen until, inevitably, something will give. And the consequences of that will be terrible and far reaching. For let us not forget, the world is a veritable neighbourhood at the present time, we cannot sneeze, without jostling our Chinese neighbours. And we do possess the resources to inflict horrific damage on our planet.
This time, more than any other calls for leaders of vision and responsibility. Instead, all the world has to offer are people distinguished only by their appalling greed and callousness. The West which has championed the cause of the ‘fellow man’ has now found it expedient to revive economic slavery. The old days of running the colonies with an iron hand and a brilliant Civil Service are gone. It is more efficient for the leaders of the West to employ their private armies, and thus we have left the Iraqis to the tender mercies of the Blackwater Corporation. The people who coined the term ‘human rights’ have made a mockery of it. The world is clearly apportioned between the rich white man and the poor white man who serves the former. All others exist by sufferance: a problem of lebensraum, which will undoubtedly be solved one day.
Experimental drugs are sent initially to be tested in the more relaxed regimes of Africa and Asia. Brown and black lives are less valuable and safety and dosage margins can be easily estimated without the pesky FDA looking over a private firm’s shoulders. It is a very basic perversion of the whole concept of industry that the people who design and create a product are usually paid far less than the people who advertise it. Reminds me of the Doug Adam’s Golgafrinchian Ark B, where they packed all the useless people of their race and shot them into space. Except, of course that WE are those people who have been assumed to be useless, and are being nudged ever so gently into extinction.
Here’s raising our goblets to those politicians who pay lip service to their duties and fill their coffers with oil money, gun money and blood money. Let us toast the leader of the free world, my friends, for he leads from the front! Join me in raising a cheer to his spokesman across the Atlantic, the man who sits on the chair, which was once the throne of Pax-Britannia. And finally, my dear fellow Indians, let us shout out a loud hurrah for our self-delusional friends in New Delhi. There is no wog like a wog who actually believes that he belongs! To make this point clearer, perhaps I should tell you what a wog is: a Westernized oriental gentleman, the oh-so-genteel sobriquet for a desi dhobi who doesn’t know his place. Our beloved politicians believe in the mantra of disinvestment… selling off the family heirlooms to pay for an expensive drug habit, as it turns out. After years of professionally running the best public sector undertakings to the ground by handing out favours to selected businessmen, and getting a job for everybody’s favourite nephew, our political masters point out that the nation cannot sustain these loss making enterprises. My dear reader, can one fail to note that it is principally the policies of these very politicians which have pushed profitable undertakings to the brink of bankruptcy.
Disinvestment is not a panacea. How is it that businessmen are capable of turning a profit when government employees are not? Reliance petrochemicals, one of the best known faces of corporate India recruits heavily from the Gas Authority of India, Limited (GAIL), and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). Why does it do so?.... obviously because these government undertakings are staffed by competent people. Then why is it that our political masters find it expedient to turn our coalfields, our oilfields, to private companies? Why cannot they be exploited with maximal efficiency by state corporations, and the economic benefit translate to rural electrification and safe drinking water facilities for all instead of another Mercedes Maybach for someone like Mukesh Ambani? The answer, my dear friends is simple- those paybacks, those election fund contributions, all those hidden perks of which there are so many to be had, especially now, that the Indian markets have opened up and the luxuries of the world are there for those who can pay.
Contrary to all popular images, the Indian economy is not flourishing. Our national assets, no, call them treasures are being bled dry by opportunistic politicians and their partners in crime: the businessmen of negotiable conscience. The 9% economic growth means nothing as long as the vast majority of rural India has no access to clean drinking water and intermittent supplies of electricity (if indeed, cables have been laid down). Laying high speed data cables in Bangalore is meaningless unless food shortages in Orissa’s Kalahandi district are solved.
The India of today is like an overstressed athlete who is forced to run on steroids, but on an empty stomach and on weakened, atrophied legs. Something will give, and when it does, the results will be calamitous. The signs are there to see: the Naxal movement has huge tracts of land in its grasp. These people are not anti-national; they just don’t see the point of a government, of successive governments which have shown them nothing but callousness and prison cells when they became too restive. There is a way out of the impending darkness: but it will require vision, courage and resolve. These are not qualities, which our current crop of leaders has shown. But things have to change, and soon, else I fear, our country will enter a long and terrible night.
The economy is in great shape. This is the biggest lie that our leaders keep telling us. If we are to believe them, then India has a growth rate just about ready to enter double digits and that will lead to a better life for all of us, so stop complaining.
Western economists have propagated a theory for a while now: in a free market economy, if we let everyone become as rich as they can, everyone benefits. This is the exact kind of stupid thinking that comes from having no acquaintance with the physical sciences and no idea about human behaviour either.
Two things: 1. The absolute amount of available resources in this world is finite. For the truly stupid amongst us, that word translates to ‘limited’. Limited as in ‘ride in an SUV today, and your grandkids might have to walk to work’.
2. People are greedy. Asking people to curb their consumption of resources assumes that these people have something of a conscience. Now there are certain people, the Mother Tersea’s, the Nelson Mandela’s and the Mohandas Gandhi’s of this world who do, but it would appear that people like our dear Mr. Cheney wield more absolute power.
Right, to put this thesis into shape, we now have our basic assumptions. So the idea is simply the following: without external control, wealth will accumulate in the hands of a privileged few, and will do so at the expense of the masses. The gap between those who have and those who will never know otherwise will continue to widen until, inevitably, something will give. And the consequences of that will be terrible and far reaching. For let us not forget, the world is a veritable neighbourhood at the present time, we cannot sneeze, without jostling our Chinese neighbours. And we do possess the resources to inflict horrific damage on our planet.
This time, more than any other calls for leaders of vision and responsibility. Instead, all the world has to offer are people distinguished only by their appalling greed and callousness. The West which has championed the cause of the ‘fellow man’ has now found it expedient to revive economic slavery. The old days of running the colonies with an iron hand and a brilliant Civil Service are gone. It is more efficient for the leaders of the West to employ their private armies, and thus we have left the Iraqis to the tender mercies of the Blackwater Corporation. The people who coined the term ‘human rights’ have made a mockery of it. The world is clearly apportioned between the rich white man and the poor white man who serves the former. All others exist by sufferance: a problem of lebensraum, which will undoubtedly be solved one day.
Experimental drugs are sent initially to be tested in the more relaxed regimes of Africa and Asia. Brown and black lives are less valuable and safety and dosage margins can be easily estimated without the pesky FDA looking over a private firm’s shoulders. It is a very basic perversion of the whole concept of industry that the people who design and create a product are usually paid far less than the people who advertise it. Reminds me of the Doug Adam’s Golgafrinchian Ark B, where they packed all the useless people of their race and shot them into space. Except, of course that WE are those people who have been assumed to be useless, and are being nudged ever so gently into extinction.
Here’s raising our goblets to those politicians who pay lip service to their duties and fill their coffers with oil money, gun money and blood money. Let us toast the leader of the free world, my friends, for he leads from the front! Join me in raising a cheer to his spokesman across the Atlantic, the man who sits on the chair, which was once the throne of Pax-Britannia. And finally, my dear fellow Indians, let us shout out a loud hurrah for our self-delusional friends in New Delhi. There is no wog like a wog who actually believes that he belongs! To make this point clearer, perhaps I should tell you what a wog is: a Westernized oriental gentleman, the oh-so-genteel sobriquet for a desi dhobi who doesn’t know his place. Our beloved politicians believe in the mantra of disinvestment… selling off the family heirlooms to pay for an expensive drug habit, as it turns out. After years of professionally running the best public sector undertakings to the ground by handing out favours to selected businessmen, and getting a job for everybody’s favourite nephew, our political masters point out that the nation cannot sustain these loss making enterprises. My dear reader, can one fail to note that it is principally the policies of these very politicians which have pushed profitable undertakings to the brink of bankruptcy.
Disinvestment is not a panacea. How is it that businessmen are capable of turning a profit when government employees are not? Reliance petrochemicals, one of the best known faces of corporate India recruits heavily from the Gas Authority of India, Limited (GAIL), and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC). Why does it do so?.... obviously because these government undertakings are staffed by competent people. Then why is it that our political masters find it expedient to turn our coalfields, our oilfields, to private companies? Why cannot they be exploited with maximal efficiency by state corporations, and the economic benefit translate to rural electrification and safe drinking water facilities for all instead of another Mercedes Maybach for someone like Mukesh Ambani? The answer, my dear friends is simple- those paybacks, those election fund contributions, all those hidden perks of which there are so many to be had, especially now, that the Indian markets have opened up and the luxuries of the world are there for those who can pay.
Contrary to all popular images, the Indian economy is not flourishing. Our national assets, no, call them treasures are being bled dry by opportunistic politicians and their partners in crime: the businessmen of negotiable conscience. The 9% economic growth means nothing as long as the vast majority of rural India has no access to clean drinking water and intermittent supplies of electricity (if indeed, cables have been laid down). Laying high speed data cables in Bangalore is meaningless unless food shortages in Orissa’s Kalahandi district are solved.
The India of today is like an overstressed athlete who is forced to run on steroids, but on an empty stomach and on weakened, atrophied legs. Something will give, and when it does, the results will be calamitous. The signs are there to see: the Naxal movement has huge tracts of land in its grasp. These people are not anti-national; they just don’t see the point of a government, of successive governments which have shown them nothing but callousness and prison cells when they became too restive. There is a way out of the impending darkness: but it will require vision, courage and resolve. These are not qualities, which our current crop of leaders has shown. But things have to change, and soon, else I fear, our country will enter a long and terrible night.
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