Petrol is Not Fuel but Financial Investment! Greet New Gordon Gekko’s.

Joseph Stiglitz:

“When there is chaos, Wall Street makes more money.”

“Market fundamentalists never really appreciated the institutions required to make an economy function well, let alone the broader social fabric that civilizations require to prosper and flourish.”

On November 8, 2007, NYT reported:

“…As oil approaches the $100-a-barrel milestone, M. S. Srinivasan, India’s petroleum secretary, has an unorthodox recommendation for cooling overheated prices: halt trading of crude oil on commodity exchanges….

Mohammad Alipour-Jeddi, the head of market analysis for OPEC, and William F. Galvin, the secretary of state in Massachusetts, have blamed speculators for rising prices. “There is enough crude in the markets,” Mr. Alipour-Jeddi said Monday. Bottlenecks in refining and “speculative activities” are forcing prices higher, he said.
”
Conspiracy theorists have long been saying that oil prices are being manipulated to hurt prospects of emerging economies like China and India.
Gordon Gekko’s of oil trading have emerged. Sunday Times, London reports:

” THREE science graduates with a combined fortune of more than £500m have emerged as the commodity traders who led the “oil rush” that has pushed petrol prices to more than £1 a litre.

David Harding, Michael Adam and Martin Lueck are renowned in the City for their skills in targeting the most lucrative trades in commodities, including oil.

Their system - known as the “black box” and based on mathematical algorithms - is now deployed by three of the biggest hedge funds in London and has helped push oil prices towards $100 a barrel.

The three funds, AHL, Aspect Capital UK and Winton Capital Management, control more than £15 billion of funds used to buy future oil contracts and other commodities, usually on the gamble that prices will rise…”


Artist: Chappatte November 9, 2007

Indian Culture Devoid of Picture?

Talking to Lokmat लोकमत October 21, 2007, artist Ravi Paranjape रवी परांजपे said:
“…We are culturally poor. But no one talks about it. We don’t have picture-literacy. The British misguided us that we could become cultured without picture-culture. Our education system was based on that belief….”

If we consider the times during and after the British Raj, this assessment, with the exception of Tagore’s Shantiniketan, may be fair.

However, we had very robust “picture-culture” before the Raj. The late D G Godse द ग गोडसे has convinced me about it long ago. If you need any proof and can’t access D G Godse, just follow 25-part series on Indian Art being published by Frontline.

Indic art, which is on display all over India, does not strive to convey photographic reality. Instead, it depicts the grace that is inherent in all creation.

I have been reading Orhan Pamuk’s books and the thing that strikes me most is the importance of miniatures, the highly stylized paintings, in Turkish life.

ORHAN PAMUK too talks about grace:

“My miniaturists saw the world through the God's eye, so that's a very communitarian world where the rules are set and there is an endlessness of time.”

Orhan Pamuk compares and contrasts Western and Eastern art forms like painting and miniature. He claims that the Western portraiture is a more popular art form since the artist imitates reality as it is, as if immortalizing the one painted. However, the Eastern miniatures are more original in content since they turn out to be the expression of the miniaturist's synthesis of the external reality through his own prism.

One of Pamuk’s character says: “Believe me, none of the Venetian masters have your poetic sensibility, your conviction, your sensibility, the purity and brightness of your colors, yet their paintings are more compelling because they more closely resemble life itself... Indeed, [the Venetian masters] paint what they see, whereas we paint what we look at. Beholding their work, one comes to realize that the only way to have one's face immortalized is through the Frankish style... Just a glance at those paintings and you too would want to see yourself this way, you'd want to believe that you're different from all others, a unique, special and particular being.”

Most popular Marathi writers of 20th century have not much demonstrated their “picture-literacy”. Versatile artist P L Deshpande पु ल देशपांडे is almost mute when it comes to paintings and cartoons. If he were to, Punch and The New Yorker would have figured in his writings. He would have paid more than just lip service to the art of great cartoonist like Vasant Sarwate वसंत सरवटे.

Pictures and we go back long way. Even in caves, our vanity was expressed through them. Worse, our wives caught us RED-handed!


Artist: Ed Fisher The New Yorker 11 Feb 1956

Real Atom Bomb Tastes in the Mouth Like a Chinese Toy!

Paul Tibbets, who dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima died this month. BOB GREENE has written his obit. (NYT November 12, 2007).

“…In the sky above Japan that August day, he polled his crew: “Do we all agree that this is Hiroshima?” Afterward, he noted that he could taste the bomb in his mouth. “It tasted like lead.”…”.

Thanks to controversy in USA over Chinese toys, lead has been a lot in the news this year.

NATALIE ANGIER has written beautifully on the subject of lead (NYT August 21, 2007).

“The human body needs a diet enriched with many ingredients from the periodic table that sound less like food than like machine parts or spare change. We must have iron to capture oxygen, copper and chromium to absorb energy, cobalt to sheathe our nerves and zinc to help finger our genes. Other creatures demand the occasional sprinkling of tin, nickel, platinum, tungsten and even strontium.

But when it comes to lead, the 82nd item on Mendeleev’s menu of the elements, the universal minimum daily requirement is zero. As far as we know, neither we nor any known life form needs the slightest amount of lead to survive. And for humans, especially infants and young children, consumption of even moderate amounts of the metal can have serious consequences.

Developing brains seem to be extremely sensitive to the effects of the metal, which is why many scientists who study lead were distraught by the latest news of lead paint’s being used on children’s toys…

Lead was a civilizing metal, there were so many things it could do…”

Was atom bomb too a civilising bomb for Americans?!


Artist : Chappatte August 17, 2007

Headless Chickens and Headless Cockroaches

Finally India’s ambassador to the US tendered an unqualified apology for allegedly calling Indian lawmakers “headless chickens”. (India Today November 12, 2007)

Scientific American reports in November, 2007 issue: “A headless roach may not be the smartest of its kind, but it can certainly survive.”

If Indian politicians are headless chickens, most Indian senior civil servants must surely be headless cockroaches- the teflon coated ultimate survivors.

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar wrote in his column for Times of India May 27, 2007:

“…most of the government sector is third-class and tarnished…… Actually, government spending is gargantuan: a million crores per year. But it has so much waste and corruption that voters refuse to show gratitude for the little that gets through…

The police no longer catch criminals and the courts no longer convict them. Conviction rates have fallen to 16%… Bureaucrats are typically callous and corrupt…

Around 35% of all electricity is stolen, causing power crises…

it takes Rs 3.65 of government spending to get one rupee of Public Distribution System benefit to the poor. What a waste! …

The problem is a decaying government sector that neither Congress nor other parties are willing to reform.”

Members of Indian middle-class are in the habit of blaming all the ills country faces on politicians. Instead they should target senior civil servants.

They don’t because they are their cousins, parents and children.


Artist: R K Laxman Times of India August 23, 2007

Shitting In Public, Not a Cell Phone- Image of India

Asian Age on October 28, 2007 reported:

”The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority commissioner Ratnakar Gaikwad said that nobody would defecate in public by 2009.”

I thought we had moved on from the days of Mark Twain and V S Naipaul. Not really.

Newsweek November 12, 2007 has an article “The rich are getting richer due to market forces—and to very human choices” by Daniel Gross.

“…Aneel Karnani, an economist at the University of Michigan, notes the widespread "self-applause" in India over the booming private sector, with the increased penetration of consumer items like cell phones, but is critical of the nation's failure to provide basic health and a social infrastructure to the masses of citizens.

"The representative image of contemporary India is not a cell phone, but rather defecating in public," he says. "In Mumbai, the business capital of India, about 50 percent of the people defecate in the open."…
”
India's poor should get their privacy to defecate.

There's another bad news for them. India's Supreme Court says:"A Killing provoked by littering isn't murder".
If a person throwing waste and rubbish is knifed, I wonder if a defecating person will be lynched.

Personally, I defecate with dignity therefore I am. And NOT iPhone therefore I am!



Source: The Spectator 2007

Opium Dens of Delhi, Aundh, New York and Vietnam

Times of India on November 3, 2007 reported: “Jaswant in opium controversy”
“A brew served by BJP leader Jaswant Singh to welcome Rajasthan party dissident leaders at a much publicised at-home at his native village of Jasol in Barmer district is threatening to leave the host with a nasty after-taste.

A Jodhpur special court dealing with drug-related offences has agreed to hear a petition against Singh on Saturday which wants directions to be issued to the police under the harsh Narcotics Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act — better known as NDPS Act — which prescribes a minimum 10-year jail term for offenders…”

The paper had reported in 2006: “Indians among highest opium users…According to the report, India has 25 million drug users, which makes the country account for 1/10th

A great leveller opium,like alcohol and tobacco, has always been with us.

I am told opium is eaten, drunk and smoked.

My father’s father- D G Kulkarni- was a political secretary to the ruler of princely state of Aundh- BHAVAN RAO SHRINIVAS, Pant Pratinidhi - until its accession to Indian union in 1948.

My grandpa's family hailed from Atpadi. His younger brother once came from Atpadi to visit him at Aundh and asked for something. Brothers had an argument. Younger brother wasn’t happy with the outcome. He felt so depressed that he bought opium from multiple vendors at Aundh-one could buy only a limited quantity from a vendor- and walked all the way from Aundh to Atpadi consuming opium all along. He died at the end of the journey.
(I have never known if my grandfather felt any guilt for this involuntary manslaughter and if he did, how he dealt with it.)

No artist has described as well as Graham Greene what it must feel while smoking opium pipes in the company of a Vietnamese girl. Read his “The Quiet American”. It’s very tempting!

William Dalrymple says in “The Last Mughal”:

“In northern India opium was drunk rather than smoked, and judging by the frequency with which opium shops appear in miniatures of the period, opium addiction seems to have been a major problem. Since the Company had the monopoly on the growing and trade in the substance, which by the 1890s provided an astonishing 40 percent of their exports from India, it of course made no attempt to control the problem.”


Artist: Leonard Dove The New Yorker 26 Feb 1949


Unlike New York of The New Yorker above in Delhi of following miniature you didn’t have to ask for opium dens, off the record!



A Delhi opium den with recumbent addicts, from James Sinner’s Tazkirat al-umara

Did Boils of Karl Marx Cook The Goose of Millions?

On November 7, 2007, Indian communist leader Prakash Karat called American President George W. Bush a fool because Bush compared Lenin to Hitler and Osama bin Laden.

Comparison between Lenin and Hitler is fair when we count the murders they committed in the name of one thing or the other.

All American Presidents,including Harry S Truman , and all religious terrorists, 20th century onwards, put together, have committed far fewer murders than either Hitler or Lenin.

I deeply appreciate efforts of Indian left when they bring up issues ranging from Indo-US nuclear deal, natural gas pricing, rotten wheat import etc. But I don’t understand why they bring up emotional issues like Lenin. When they do, they sound exactly like Indian right bringing up issues like Ramsetu.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot killed millions in the name of a truly great man- Karl Marx.

Reuters reported on October 30, 2007:

“Karl Marx, who complained of excruciating boils, actually suffered from a chronic skin disease with known psychological effects that may well have influenced his writings, a British expert said on Tuesday.

Sam Shuster, professor of dermatology at the University of East Anglia, believes the revolutionary thinker had hidradenitis suppurativa (HS) in which the apocrine sweat glands -- found mainly in the armpits and groin -- become blocked and inflamed.
"In addition to reducing his ability to work, which contributed to his depressing poverty, hidradenitis greatly reduced his self-esteem," said Shuster, who published his findings in the British Journal of Dermatology.

"This explains his self-loathing and alienation, a response reflected by the alienation Marx developed in his writing."...

Marx, who died in 1883, was one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century and his radical writings formed the basis of modern communism.”

Our history has been shaped by physical affliction of great men. Leaders, thinkers, artists, scientists...

Dr Dermot Kennedy wrote to The Economist (May 12, 2007):
“…Known as Spes phthisica, or the euphoria of the tuberculous consumptive, this partly explains the disease's impact on a long list of aesthetes, including George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and Amedeo Modigliani.

Frédéric Chopin complained that he could not compose unless he was coughing blood.

John Keats, “With anguish moist and fever dew”, poured out his ineffable poetry as the disease accelerated.

An interesting aside to this is the aphrodisiac effect of tuberculosis, so familiar to staff working in sanatoriums. As a nursing sister in my hospital once said, “You need a blowtorch to separate them.”

M. A. Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis in 1947. If others knew about it, one of the worst human tragedies of 20th century- partition of India- could have been avoided.

To give more personal touch, my father-a prolific writer all his life- suffered from psoriasis.
I too suffer from much milder version of what Karl Marx suffered from. Is this blog coming out of that suffering?!


Artist: Perry Barlow The New Yorker August 1, 1931

Don’t Anger Gods During This Diwali…

Diwali always brings to my mind these words of Charles Dickens:

"…………a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of other people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys" (A Christmas Carol 1843)

Was Mark Twain fair in saying:

"It is a curious people (Indians). With them, all life seems to be sacred except human life." (Following the Equator; a Journey Around the World 1897)?

At Miraj, I remember when mother kept earthen lamps outside the house and in windows, they were stolen, not for decoration but for cooking oil.

It's hard to be indifferent to such poverty.

Rajendra Pachauri has asked us:

Say no to firecrackers
Use diyas and candles
Don’t choke gifts with plastic wraps
Cut down on materialism. Gift a plant
Keep your car parked in the garage. Use the public transport to visit the friends.

(Indian Express November 4, 2007)

The Economist November 3, 2007, our thought-leaders' Reader's Digest, has called India "the world's most religious country". Therefore let us invoke god.

Open your “shut-up hearts freely” and observe green ways during the festival otherwise gods will be angry!


Artist: Charles Addams The New Yorker 13 June 1964

Pakistan Doesn’t Need Supreme Supreme Court!

Dawn columnist Ayaz Amir said on November 2, 2007:
”… This rescue operation (for Pakistan) has to come from some other source, perhaps the Supreme Court. One clutches at straws that are available and in our reduced circumstances it is only the Supreme Court which is keeping the nation’s hopes alive…”

On November 3, 2007: “Embattled President Pervez Musharraf on Saturday night clamped a state of emergency in Pakistan ahead of a crucial Supreme Court ruling on the legality of his re-election, plunging the country into a fresh political crisis.

An eight-member Supreme Court bench immediately set aside the Emergency order which suspended the current Constitution amid reports that Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, who has been at loggerheads with Musharraf, has been asked to go.”

Courageous Pakistani press and senior judiciary are fighting back.

Lawyers are getting beaten black and blue reminding me of the scene of Dandi Yatra from film Gandhi. (Not surprising because so many lawyers were at the forefront of India’s freedom struggle! American image of blood sucking lawyer doesn’t quite hold in South Asia.)

What happened in India during Indira Gandhi’s emergency from 25th June 1975 to 21st March 1977?

In Kuldip Nayar’s words:

“…Nonetheless, had the Emergency not been imposed, the fallibility of the press, public servants and the judiciary would not have been proved. Newspapermen, in the words of L.K. Advani, began to crawl when they were asked to bend. The anxiety to survive at any cost became the key concern of public servants. Most of the judiciary was so afraid that it would reject habeas corpus petitions against detention without trial. The high priests at the SC, with the exception of Justice H.R. Khanna, upheld the Emergency and the suspension of fundamental rights.

The imposition of the Emergency exposed the timidity of Indian society once again. Its moral hypocrisy was reinforced. There was no awareness of what was wrong, nor was there a desire to act according to what was right. The dividing line between right and wrong, moral and immoral, ceased to exist. And the nation is still paying for it….”

My thoughts and prayers are with Pakistani people.

Poet B S Mardhekar बा. सी. मर्ढेकर has said:

धैर्य दे अन् नम्रता दे
पाहण्या जें जें पहाणें,
वाकुं दे बुद्धीस माझ्या
तप्त पोलादाप्रमाणें ;

(Give me courage Give me humility
To witness all that I see,
Let my intellect bend
like red hot steel; )

Like in the picture below, President Musharraf wishfully thinks Pakistan needs a kind of supreme supreme court! No, it just needs the existing Supreme court and Chief Justice Chaudhry.

Artist: James Mulligan The New Yorker 6 July 1957

Yes, Yes, Yes, We Will Follow You. In One-Lac-Rupees Car.

Flavour of the decade in India is sub-one-lac-rupees car. Tata’s will make them and so will Bajaj's.

They dream: People who are walking and cycling will buy a scooter/ motor-cycle. Those who are driving two wheelers will buy sub-one-lac.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN says in his NYT column dated November 4, 2007 “No, No, No, Don’t Follow Us”:

“India is in serious danger — no, not from Pakistan or internal strife. India is in danger from an Indian-made vehicle: a $2,500 passenger car, the world’s cheapest…

Blessedly, many more people now have the incomes to live an American lifestyle, and the Indian and Chinese low-cost manufacturing platforms can deliver them that lifestyle at lower and lower costs. But the energy and environmental implications could be enormous, for India and the world…

If India just innovates in cheap cars alone, its future will be gridlocked and polluted. But an India that makes itself the leader in both cheap cars and clean mass mobility is an India that will be healthier and wealthier. It will also be an India that gives us cheap answers to big problems — rather than cheap copies of our worst habits. “

PANKAJ MISHRA (Outlook Magazine, August 20, 2007):

“…The breathtaking originality and sophistication of these (Indian) thinkers and activists long convinced me that the country in which they flourished has something more profound to offer to the world than its ability to imitate the consumer societies of the West.”

Led by IT, the booming Indian economy has given young Indians the kind of money their parents made only when they won the lottery. (In 1970’s, long cherished dream of my father, a college teacher-one of the best paying job in India then, was to win Maharashtra State’s lottery that offered the highest prize of 2.5 lac rupees and retire!).

Money has brought self-righteousness- “Since I am making lots of money, what I am doing is right and moral. I don’t need any additional soft-skills. I will not mend my ways.”

Like Americans, we associate wealth with personal merit or poverty with personal failure. We don’t want to be a loser. There is no incertitude, no dilemmas. Destination is known. Road is well traveled. In a sub or super one-lac-rupees car!


Artist: R K Laxman Times of India September 1, 2007