What has your Beer Drinking to do with Groundnut Oil Prices?

I am like a squirrel. Peanuts are my most favourite food. Next only to Payari and Hapus mangoes. I can eat them in any form- raw, roasted, fried, coated, boiled, crushed etc etc. During my school days, I used to relish eating them with a lump of jaggery. Both items would first go in pockets of my half-pants before they went down my throat. Peanuts also are integral to many snacks I relish. Of course, I don’t touch any of them if they have no peanuts or some one like me has picked them before.

My weak liver is the only thing that holds me back from going for a peanut binge from time to time.

I remember one morning in 9th or 10th standard when I had gone to fetch my friend for the school. He was busy with morning chores and I was asked to wait in the drawing room. There I could see what his father and his friend had done previous night. Drinking. There were bottles, glasses- empty, full. But what I found most attractive was a plate full of peanuts. I helped myself with some of them without asking anyone.

When I started drinking or watching people drink, I realized that drinking is just an excuse. Objective of the damn thing is to eat peanuts without feeling any guilt.

All along I knew drunkards ate lots of peanuts but I was not ready for following.

Business Line reports on June 25, 2007: “What's increasing consumption of liquor in the country got to do with rise in prices of groundnut oil? Simple, consumption of peanuts during consumption of liquor is leading to more direct consumption and, thereby, affecting its availability for oil crushing.

Groundnut oil prices topped Rs 70 a kg last week and during the weekend it was quoted at Rs 72 in Mumbai. The oil prices have gained 23 per cent since the beginning of this year, while groundnut kernel, which was quoted at Rs 3,600 a quintal during the weekend, has also increased around the same level.

"The problem with groundnut oil is that mills are not getting kernel for crushing. One of the reasons is rise in direct consumption, including as snacks, especially for liquor consumption," says Mr B.V. Mehta, Executive Director of the Solvent Extractors Association of India.

The current oil year ending October has been witnessing a lower oilseed crop. Groundnut, in particular, is projected lower at 53.5 lakh tonnes against 62.5 lt last oil year.

On the other hand, the country has seen its citizens guzzle 105 million cases of beer during 2006 and 115 million cases of Indian made foreign liquor.
Liquor consumption has increased over 50 per cent since 2001 and annual rise in the offtake is seen between three and four per cent.

The scenario with regard to groundnut is that of the 53.5 lt projected output, 18.5 lt are crushed for yielding 7.4 lt of oil, while 19 lt are retained by the growers for sowing. The remaining 16 lt are assumed to be consumed directly. This season, availability of groundnut for direct consumption is seen lower by 2.5 lakh tonnes.
"Peanuts are preferred to be eaten during consumption of liquor as they are cheaper than cashewnuts. Also, rising income levels are seeing corresponding increase in consumption of almost all products, including liquor," say analysts. “

Hey Indian Homer, Marge has more than one reason to crib for your frequent visits to Moe’s Tavern.


Artist : Charles Barsotti The New Yorker 20 Apr 1998

Who in hell uses oil, anyhow?

Some say America and Britain have meddled in Middle East only for oil.

If you read William Bowles’s review of William Engdahl’s “A Century of War – Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order”, you tend to entirely agree with it.

“….The core of the book reveals the pivotal role played by the Wall Street/London financial axis that determined how the world of the 20th century developed, whether it was the competition between rival capitalist powers or the control of the vital resources needed to power the entire process. So for example, whenever it looked like there might some kind of challenge posed to the Anglo-American alliance such as that of Germany in the 1920s or Italy in the 1970s, ‘convenient’ assassinations of key players would occur, or ‘exposés’ that scuppered deals that would have endangered US/UK hegemony.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the masters of the ‘Great Game’ as the rule of British Empire was so named, was dictated by oil and even though the by the post-WWII period, it was the de facto American Empire calling the shots, the alliance formed between the two remained solid, dictated by the seven great oil cartels and a handful of international banking corporations that between them were to control events including the inevitable slide into yet another war, again determined by oil, without which modern industrial capitalism was nothing.
Fast forward a century and we find a world almost entirely shaped by that imperialist vision…”

But this interference seems to predate the Otto Cycle

Read Robert Kagan’s review of Michael B. Oren’s book “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present”
“..Today, the conventional view is that George W. Bush took the United States on a radical departure when he declared a policy to transform the Middle East and that, as soon as he leaves office, U.S. policy will return to an alleged tradition of realism, rooted in the hard-headed pursuit of tangible national interests. This is both bad history and bad prophecy, as Oren shows in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, a series of fascinating and beautifully written stories about individual Americans over the past four centuries and their contact with Middle Eastern cultures………. U.S. backing for the establishment of Israel was rooted in religious convictions going back more than four centuries… …..Despite all the crises of the past years, including the present war in Iraq, Oren predicts that the United States will continue "to pursue the traditional patterns of its Middle East involvement." Policymakers "will press on with their civic mission as mediators and liberators in the area and strive for a pax Americana." American "churches and evangelist groups will still seek to save the region spiritually." And Americans will regard the region as both "mysterious" and "menacing," as they have for centuries, and will seek to transform it in their own image. Many today may want to disagree, but they will have to wrestle first with the long history of American behavior that Oren has so luminously portrayed. “

Therefore, America was always in their neighbourhood even when Arab Sheikhs asked “Who in hell uses oil, anyhow?”


Artist: Everett Opie The New Yorker 20 April 1957

Filth, Noise & Stench in our cities

Our cities are dirty. They were dirtier. Some times nostalgia does not let us remember the dirt of the past accurately.

I remember how dirty Miraj and Kolhapur used to get.

Lack of adequate public toilets, insensitivity to personal hygiene and plain laziness has forced Indian people, particularly children, to defecate at the roadside. Monsoon used to wash all that was deposited at the side to bring it to the middle of the road. One could barely walk there. And many areas used to stink.

Until 1970’s, we also had toilets from where night soil was removed and carried manually in handcarts. We used to call those carts “battle tanks” because people used to change their course after sighting them or on hearing their rattle.

Miraj and Kolhapur, the towns I knew well, had plenty of filth and stench but not much noise. Pune the city I live today has perhaps less filth and stench but it more than makes up by creating cacophonic noise. All the days of Ganpati and Diwali festival have ear bursting noise.

How did London fare on FNS?

Michael Crichton describes 19th century London in “The Great Train Robbery”. High on FNS.

For earlier centuries, Emily Cockayne has recently written a book “Hubbub: Filth, Noise & Stench in England”:
“…for the citizens of London, Oxford, Bath and Manchester in the 17th and 18th centuries, life was not merely nasty, brutish and short. It was ugly, itchy, mouldy, noisy, grotty and dirty…….. Viewed in one light, 17th and 18th-century cities were libertarian paradises: economically vibrant, but with a quality of life tending towards the lowest common denominator.”


Artist : Alan Dunn The New Yorker 27 June 1970

Are Pigeons Rats with Wings or Man’s Second Best Friend?

During my childhood at Miraj, I saw pigeon only in a stock picture of Jawaharlal Nehru freeing it. Nehru all smiles, bird little scared, happy to be in the air instead of human hands.

I really got to see them only when I spent some time with my aunt, Kumud-mavashi, at Girgaum, Mumbai when I was already 23. At Girgaum they were everywhere like cockroaches. There was only one difference between the two. I did not see cockroaches making love.

For me, Mumbai was truly a sensuous city full of beautiful girls and women. So was perhaps the case for pigeons. But I was not as lucky as them. I felt little jealous of them.

I left Mumbai and forgot all about pigeons, as they never visited me at Nashik, Assam, Calcutta and Bangalore. When I came to stay at Pune in 1999, they were present in all their glory: eating, making love, nesting and generally dirtying the place.

Once we allowed them to breed just outside one of our windows. The place stank for a long time. Next time when they laid their eggs there, I pushed them over. The place I stay today has no pigeons in its vicinity. And guess what, no one from my family is complaining.

Sorry I have not been to develop any respect for these creatures.

Looks like I should.

NYT June 26, 2006 has an essay “Pigeon English” by ANDREW D. BLECHMAN.
“…Humans have had a particularly long and proud association with the rock dove. Pigeons brought news of the first Olympics in 776 B.C. and some 2,500 years later, of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. Charles Darwin (himself a fancier) relied on them to prove his theory of evolution; Julius Reuter built his mighty news empire literally on their backs; and perhaps most important, pigeons saved thousands of Allied soldiers during the two world wars. Keep in mind that a modern racing pigeon can fly 60 miles per hour without stopping for 600 miles and find its loft from a place it has never been before, and that the House of Windsor has proudly raced pigeons for more than a century.
And yet, in a matter of decades, one of the world's most venerated creatures and one of nature's most phenomenal athletes has been reduced to the status of vermin by governments on both sides of the Atlantic. The peaceful co-existence of man and pigeon has deteriorated into a war of attrition.
The bird's crime? Its gregarious nature. Pigeons are simply attracted to people as well as the company of other pigeons. Unfortunately, their unsightly and unhygienic droppings rapidly accumulate. But we really have only ourselves to blame: pigeons subsist on the food we drop. ….
One thing alone leads to an overpopulation of pigeons: overfeeding. Pigeons breed only when food is available. When food is overly bountiful, as was the case at Trafalgar Square for many years, pigeons will mate as often as possible — up to six times a year. When food is scarce, mating drops drastically as the flock anxiously forages for food……
Although some view pigeons as "rats with wings," we should keep in mind that they also bring joy to millions who appreciate how they animate our cities. After all, it's not Lord Nelson's column that attracts flocks of tourists from around the world to Trafalgar Square; it's the birds.”


Artist: Bruce Erik Kaplan The New Yorker 28 Feb 1994

In 21st century Trophy Human Skulls on the soil of the Earth’s Most Powerful Nation

War surely brings the worst out of humans.

In Mahabharata, I read how it brought the worst out of Jayadratha, Ashwathhama Yudhishthira, Bheema, Satyaki …………… The list is long and perhaps includes all players.

And yet as children we seem to enjoy the real wars. I remember how I rejoiced India’s victories in its wars against Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. As I grew up, I learned to hate China and its people because India lost a war against China in 1962.

I was shaken out my romance of war when still in school I read this dedication in Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet On The Western Front”:

“This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.”

Mahabharata is not about the victory of Pandavas against Kauravas but warning to humanity about annihilative nature of war. “Panipat 1761” by T S Shejwalkar is about how bloodily expansionism of Marathas ended and how badly “victorious” Afghan Abdali got hurt in the process. Reading “1812” by Adam Zamoyski made me hate Napoleon as much I hated Hitler.

NYT June 22,2007 has an article “The Bones We Carried” By LORI ANDREWS. ”……. When American G.I.’s returned from the Vietnam War, some tried to smuggle home the skulls of Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers. The graffiti-covered skulls served as ashtrays, candle holders and trophies. Six skulls were seized by the Customs Service. They remain in limbo, relegated to a drawer on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington........"

Can we teach our children to mourn wars? Can we teach them gory details of violence in war? Can we stop calling sports encounters, examinations and other competitive situations as battles or wars?



Artist: Edward Koren The New Yorker 23 Dec 1967

32 Years After The Emergency, Durga Bhagwat and Henry David Thoreau

Thirty-two years ago, midnight today, the Emergency was declared in India.

I remember the next day vaguely. For shouting slogans against the government at Kisan Chowk, Miraj, cops arrested one of our neighbours young Makrand Deshpande (मकरंद देशपांडे). I witnessed it. There was nervousness in the air, which was going to last for a while.

Kuldip Nayar remembers it vividly in Asian Age June 25 2007.

“….The press was gagged, dissent smothered and individual freedom suspended. Nearly 100,000 people were detained without trial. So immense was the fear, that judges tailored their judgment to suit government convenience and magistrates issued blank warrants for arrest. Public servants as well as the police willingly carried out arbitrary and high-handed actions. It was a reign of terror. This authoritarian rule lasted 22 months….. Institutions got such a thrashing that it has not been possible to restore them to their original form even after three decades. Politicians of all parties and their cohorts, the bureaucrats, have found the battered institutions convenient and cooperative. Their whims and wishes get authenticity, and gone are the days when they themselves were looking for norms……. The system has not recovered since. The civil service is now a set of sycophants and supplicants who allow themselves to be used by the politicians……. Media’s role is important. But some of the media is irresponsible and some just timid. I wonder if we will pick up the gauntlet thrown to us by the government in the shape of the Broadcast Bill. The media can retrieve its reputation because it failed during the Emergency. L.K. Advani, when information minister, aptly remarked, "You were asked to bend but you crawled."”

If Ms. Indira Gandhi was the architect of the Emergency, one of its fiercest and the most fearless opponent was another lady- Ms. Durga Bhagwat दुर्गा भागवत. In the presence of powerful union cabinet minister Y B Chavan,she launched a frontal attack on the government from the dais of 51st Marathi Sahitya Sammelan at Karad in December 1975. Later Ms. Bhagwat inspired opposition to Emergency across Maharashtra.

Durga-bai had a lot of affection for Henry David Thoreau because of his nature’s love and that he was an inspiration to Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi. The affection was so deep that she absolved India Gandhi of all her crimes when she discovered that Ms. Gandhi had written a poem on Thoreau!

Durga-bai quoted following paragraph from Thoreau’s writing in her speech to Mumbai Marathi Granth-Sangrahalay in December 1975:

“However mean your life is, meet it and live; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. the fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perchance have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man's house. The snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts as anywhere, and, indeed, the town's poor seem to live the most independent lives of any. They are simply great enough to receive without misgiving. Cultivate poverty like sage, like a garden herb. Do not trouble yourself to get new things, whether clothes or friends. That is dissipation. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. If I were confined to a corner in a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts.”

During her life Durga Bhagwat knew the path Thoreau took. She didn’t need to ask like Helen E. Hokinson’s characters below.


Artist: Helen E. Hokinson The New Yorker 3 Aug 1935

Americans, you peel Indian mangoes ONLY yourself for sheer pleasure and not because some stupid manual tells you so

Indian mangoes seem to be now available in US. First, exports to middle-eastern countries made them expensive for people like me. Now, it is US’s turn.

However, I don’t mind. I have had a shot at the best of mangoes for a long time because I was born and raised in western Maharashtra-truly a mango country.

For us, lunches in summer were subservient to mango. Every thing else on the plate was distant second. We ate almost six chapattis daily for a lunch, a number that would dwindle to two or three once mangoes departed for the year. Mango aroma (particularly of Payari and Hapus, characterized for their juice and meat respectively) filled the air of April, May and part of June. By the way- mangoes never left us fully because our parents would cook a mango jam (known in Marathi as Muramba or Sakharamba) with the last crop of Hapus (Alphonso) that hit the market every year.

Americans are obsessed with sex. Now, they have some thing equally sensuous to fuss about. This summer I see pictures of white Americans, wearing jackets, sitting at the table with knife and fork to eat Indian mangoes. I feel they need some training eating mangoes. Kamasutra of eating mangoes.

Here is the Chapter I:

“Eat them with your bare hands. First feel them up. Then smell them for a while. Now peel them slowly, eat portion sticking to its skin. Remove the entire skin continuing this process.
Now feel the naked fruit in your hand. You are ready to eat it. Tuck into it until you reach the seed. Lick the seed until no meat is left there. If your mango is indeed the original Hapus, the licked seed should leave no fiber on its shell or in your mouth.
Clean your bloodied hands but not with strong soap. A true mango should leave behind its aroma long after hands are washed.”



Artist: Alan Dunn The New Yorker 31 July 1943

“A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time”, Taj Mahal will remain. Stop being rabid.

The biggest threat to humanity never was global warming but always rabid nationalism of some kind and it will always remain so. History has many exhibits- Napoleon, Hitler,American Empire since 19th century etc.

Educated Indians are exhibiting more and more rabid nationalism by espousing causes like religion (“if Islam has become little loud at few places in the world, others too should”), national borders (“China cannot even mention Arunachal Pradesh”), Cricket (beating Pakistan is the greatest glory), language (“Is Pratibha Patil- aspiring President of India- ‘Marathi’”?), river-waters (“not a drop to neighboring state let alone nation”), historical-figures (“how can a white man even mention Shivaji?”), tracking every move of astronaut Sunita Williams because she has Indian roots and many, many others.

The latest to join the long list is The Taj Mahal. Indian Media want Taj to make it to the list of Seven Wonders of the world. As usual they have become hysterical and cacophonic.

I wonder why it should matter. People will continue to either love it or dislike it (there are many such). Either way, they will flock to see it. For me the greatest thing about Taj was finding it where I did. Very unexpectedly. Suddenly. Out of nowhere.

I don’t know how many of us realize it but Shivaji might have seen Taj when he famously visited Agra in year 1666. I mentioned this to the Late D G Godse द ग गोडसे, one of the greatest art critic, artist and historian who wrote only in Marathi. Remember, Godse has written extensively about aesthetic beauty of Fort Raigad’s (seat of Shivaji’s small kingdom) architecture in his book “Shakti Saushthav” (Popular Prakashan 1972). Godse wrote back to me that Shivaji must have appreciated beauties of both Raigad and Taj.

Diana and Michael Preston has recently published a book on Taj- “A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal”. It has been reviewed quite favourably in FT and Guardian.

Some interesting tidbits from the reviews.

“……. Even in her late thirties, when most women were considered ”too old for sex”, Mumtaz had an enduring appeal: Shah Jahan impregnated her 14 times in the 19 years before her death (in childbirth) and she had available to her a number of techniques to ensure that her madan-mandir (temple of love), ”slackened by constant pregnancy”, we are told, contracted to enhance Shah Jahan’s pleasure……Fulfilling Mumtaz Mahal’s deathbed request (”build for me a mausoleum which would be unique, the like of which is not on earth”) took almost 20 years, stretched the finances of the 17th-century’s richest monarch and diverted his attention from the business of governing……… In later life, Shah Jahan’s voracious sexual appetite returned as memories of Mumtaz faded. The authors, optimistically perhaps, suggest his later pursuit of loveless sex and ”debauching of his courtiers’ wives and daughters represented a fervid quest to prove that Mumtaz Mahal had been unique and worthy of a unique love”.

……Over time the Taj was neglected, vandalized. Finally Lord Curzon, the British viceroy, undertook a major restoration. It was, he said, ‘an offering of reverence to the past and a gift of recovered beauty to the future’. But the future brings its own dangers: the biggest threat now comes from pollution, and the moisture-laden breath of tourists. When we visit the Taj and sigh in admiration, we are helping to destroy it.”

Although as D D Kosambi (year 2007 is his birth centenary) has argued in his numerous writings, life of common people in India has not changed much through so-called golden ages or dynasties,Shah Jahan was 17th century’s richest monarch in the world.

Yes, ma'am he did not need any aid to build The Taj!


Artist: Ed Fisher The New Yorker 25 Aug 1962

Mount Everest the Overfull

I liked my stay and travel to Assam and Arunachal Pradesh for their somnolence. There were empty parts of the day, of the week, of the year; times when there were no people around, no traffic in the streets, no audible human voices, now and then no sound at all.

I used to have similar experience as a child just behind our home at Miraj. Other than a stray dog or a passing bicyclist, nothing happened when I planted my self on a branch of Tamarind tree. Some people talked about ghosts on the trees. Ghosts seem to prefer somnolence and that was all right by me. I even liked reading books with pictures that gave the impression of somnolence like Chandamama(Chandoba in Marathi)or Phantom(Vetal in Marathi).

PAUL THEROUX (according to me one of the only three Americans who understands India-Mark Twain, J K Galbraith are the other two) has written about this in the essay “America the Overfull” (NYT December 31, 2006):

“A longing for a simpler world, for a glimpse of the past, is one of the motives in travel……… Travel, except in almost inaccessible places, is no longer the answer to finding solitude. And this contraction of space on a shrinking planet suggests a time, not far off, when there will be no remoteness: nowhere to become lost, nothing to be discovered, no escape, no palpable concept of distance, no peculiarity of dress — frightening thoughts for a traveler……. We are passing through a confused period of aggression and fear, characterized by our confrontational government, the decline of diplomacy, a pugnacious foreign policy and a settled belief that the surest way to get people to tell the truth is to torture them. It is no wonder we have begun to squint at strangers. This is a corrosive situation in a country where more and more people, most of them strangers, are a feature of daily life. Americans as a people I believe to be easygoing, compassionate, not looking for a fight. But surely I am not the only one who has noticed that we are ruder, more offhand, readier to take offense, a nation of shouters and blamers.”

NOAM COHEN has written about crawling crowds on the Mount Everest in “Conquering the Peak Test of Technology” (NYT June 18,2007).
Mobile phones, PDA’s but not Laptops now seem to work at the top of the Mount Everest. Base camp looks like “ a Hollywood production set, with all its flat-screen TVs and generators.”

What next? Menswear…….



Artist: Robert Mankoff The New Yorker 5 Sept 1988

What is common to Bhopal’s MIC (Methyl Isocyanate) and Vietnam’s Agent Orange?

Answer: MIC (Military-industrial complex) in general and Dow Chemical in particular.

Bhopal gas tragedy of 1984 killed between sixteen thousand and thirty thousand and injured around five hundred thousand. No court of law passed judgment on Union Carbide for the crime it committed in Bhopal.

Union Carbide’s legal team argued that an American court was not competent to assess the value of a human life-life that lives in shacks-in the Third World. Wall Street Journal wrote: “An American life is worth approximately five hundred thousand dollars. Taking into account the fact that India’s gross national product is 1.7% of the US, the Court should compensate for the decease of each Indian victim proportionately, that is to say, with eight thousand five hundred dollars”.

The Economist (25 November 2004) says: ” TWENTY years after lethal gases from a Union Carbide pesticide factory billowed across a densely populated shanty town in the Indian city of Bhopal, both the dilapidated plant and its highly contaminated surrounding areas stand as monuments to governmental and corporate inaction. Compensation has still not been fully paid to over 500,000 victims, the plant has not been dismantled and toxic waste estimated to amount to several thousand tonnes remains on the site, polluting local water supplies. Legal cases are continuing in both Bhopal and New York against the American company, which was taken over by Dow Chemical in 2001, and against Warren Anderson, Union Carbide's chairman in the early 1980s, whom India has tried and failed to extradite …..……. Dow Chemical, together with its Union Carbide subsidiary, denies responsibility for victims' health or the state of the site, following an overall settlement reached in 1989 with the Indian government. The claims totalled $3 billion, but the government settled for $470m (then worth 7.5 billion rupees) plus a further $43m in rupees. A criminal case is in progress in Bhopal, and a New York court has yet to decide whether the company should be ordered to clean the site, in addition to paying out more for health problems. Payment of the $470m compensation to victims and those suffering ill health has been slow, mired in bureaucratic delays, judicial appeals and corruption. Eventually, by late last year, most of the 570,000 confirmed victims had received payments averaging 25,000 rupees. That left 15.6 billion rupees (at current dollar values), which is being distributed on orders issued last month by India's Supreme Court.”

DANIELLE TRUSSONI’s writes (NYT June 18, 2007 “End Vietnam’s Air War”): “……United States sprayed about 19.5 million gallons of Agent Orange and other toxic herbicides over the jungles of South Vietnam…… Today the federal Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, is scheduled to hear oral arguments against Dow, Monsanto and 35 other companies that manufactured Agent Orange and related herbicides used during the Vietnam War. In addition, 16 appeals by American veterans will be heard, as well as an appeal by a group that represents Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange……. Perhaps now, after 40 years, the victims of Agent Orange will finally get such recognition.”

Better luck to American veterans and Vietnamese peasants! As per CIA’s website GDP of Vietnam (2006 est.purchasing power parity) is 2% of USA. Therefore, Vietnamese should expect only 2 dollars for every 100 Americans get as compensation,if any!

Wikipedia says: “The term military-industrial complex refers to a close and symbiotic relationship among a nation's armed forces, its private industry, and associated political and commercial interests. In such a system, the military is dependent on industry to supply material and other support, while the defense industry depends on government for revenue. The term is most often used in reference to the United States, where it gained popularity after its use in the farewell address of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.”


Artist: Frank Modell The New Yorker 28 Sept 1968