"CSK players and support staff are distressed."
Stephen Fleming
"CSK players and support staff are distressed."
Stephen Fleming
Today, April 13th, is the anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre during the British Raj in Amritsar in 1919. It was a Sunday. The Wikipedia says:
On Sunday, 13 April 1919, Dyer was convinced of a major insurrection and thus he banned all meetings. On hearing that a meeting of 15,000 to 20,000 people including women, children and the elderly had assembled at Jallianwala Bagh, Dyer went with fifty riflemen to a raised bank and ordered them to shoot at the crowd. Dyer continued the firing for about ten minutes, until the ammunition supply was almost exhausted; Dyer stated that 1,650 rounds had been fired, a number which seems to have been derived by counting empty cartridge cases picked up by the troops. Official British Indian sources gave a figure of 379 identified dead, with Read More...
One of the most hilarious skits of the irreverent British TV comedy series, Monty Python, revolves around the Spanish Inquisition. “NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise… surprise and fear… fear and surprise… Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency... Our three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope... Our four… no. Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry are such elements as fear, surprise…”
A certain Indian political party which I shall not name here reminds me of that skit. First, nobody expected that party to survive as long as it has done. Their longevity does come as a surprise. Second, one of their chief weapons is fear. Inducing fear of the Read More...
Politicians, political parties and governments are often corrupt. It comes with the territory since they all have power, and as Lord Acton famously said and has been repeatedly confirmed, power tends to corrupt. But Congress/UPA led by the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi rises above that generally expected level of corruption and reaches stratospheric heights of public malfeasance and corruption. And yet they continue thrive. By hook or by crook, they win elections. What’s the secret of their success?
I think the secret lies in their contempt for the people and for India. Yes, plain old-fashioned contempt. If you care about people, the very least you would do is to not exploit them and destroy their lives for purely selfish reasons. Contempt coupled with extreme avarice would allow you to Read More...
Railways are a public sector undertaking in India, meaning that the Government owns and operates the entire enterprise of passenger rail and freight traffic in India. How efficiently it is run is a function of how efficient the Government is in general. The evidence from the other sectors in which the Government operates makes one suspect that the railways are not an exception.
In the previous post on this matter I had estimated that just the waste of two resources used for the tracks – concrete sleepers and steel rails – amounts to between $3 and $10 billion. These numbers are order of magnitude estimates only. The actual figures can be easily obtained if the need were to arise. Which is where the problem lies: there is no need to account for waste and inefficiency in a Read More...
Railways are an essential part of the transportation infrastructure of any large economy. They have to be efficient and widespread in India. The primary reason is that for moving large numbers of people and large volumes of goods, it is the most effective mode of transportation. Aviation and road transportation have their place but cannot form the backbone of the transportation system because they are costly compared to steel-wheels on steel rails.
The Indian Railways can be cited for many reasons but being modern and efficient is not one of them. And the main reason behind why it is dilapidated, slow and inefficient is that it is Government-owned. That is another way of saying that it is public property and therefore nobody owns it.
It need not be necessarily so but when something Read More...
Rail journeys will always remain associated with very pleasant memories for me. When I was growing up in Nagpur, the family would make its annual visit to see my maternal relatives in Kolkata. The train journey was one of the highlights and was as exciting as the rest of the vacation. Holdalls and food packed, we – parents, three brothers and a sister – would make a picnic of our three-tier sleeper-class daylong journey. I remember vividly waking up in the moving train in the morning and seeing outside the window green fields and coconut palms, know that we were close to our destination, Howrah station.
Those days are gone. The parents are no more, the siblings have their own families and there are no more family trips. Like for many others previously firmly in the Read More...
It was one of those Rashomon moments for me after I watched the movie. I am referring to the recent movie Argo. If you recall, Rashomon is a movie from 1950 which introduced the master movie director Akira Kurosawa to the wider world. Set in medieval Japan, it is the story of the rape of a woman and subsequent mutually contradictory accounts told about the incident by various eyewitnesses. According to Kurosawa, there are no particular truths, no definitive version of what actually happened in any event. What is recalled and later told depends on who the observer is and his vantage point.
The movie Argo, which won the Best Picture award in the 85th Academy Awards, is the story of how half a dozen American diplomats, hiding from Iranians who had captured the American embassy in Tehran Read More...
Imagine Ramesh and Suresh at a store that sells TVs. Ramesh pays for a TV and then someone -- a strong man who is a friend of Suresh -- snatches the TV that Ramesh paid for and gives it to Suresh. The story is one of daylight robbery. No one with any moral or ethical sense would defend such a deal.
Yet, this scenario has become almost too common to elicit any comment at all. Change a few particulars in the story above and it becomes instantly recognisable. Replace Ramesh with hardworking taxpayers, Suresh with people who don’t produce much of anything, and the Government as the strong man who gives stuff to Suresh, and it is no longer fiction.
When politicians promise freebies to people in exchange for their votes, what is being promised is that the Government will use its Read More...
Comparing how India and the US are Governed -- Part 3
India continues to be under imperial rule of foreigners. It is no longer a British colony but it is still a colony nonetheless.
The Government still holds all the major cards, therefore the intense struggle to get into the Government. Once you get into the Government, not only do you get to make the rules in your favour and thus decide what is going to be done, you also get to decide how it is going to be done. This is due to the previously noted fact that there is no distinction between the legislative and executive functions of the Government in India.
Now back to the main theme. Important distinctions arise from the difference in the power balance between the people and the Government in India as compared to the US. For Read More...
Comparing how India and the US are Governed -- Part 2
In the last piece, I noted a number of differences between the US and India in how these two countries approach elections. The first arises from the fact that the US has a two-party system. The second is that the US is more homogenous than India. The third is that Americans participate in the democratic process more intensively. I continue along that line of reasoning here.
The fourth distinction is that in the US, the executive and the legislative branches of the Government are clearly demarcated and distinct. In India, there is no distinction. This has the effect in the US of weakening the power of the executive and keeping it in check. As a consequence, the power balance between the Government and the people is more in Read More...
Comparing how India and the US are Governed Part 1
Among the things that appear to matter most to Indians, elections must rank among the top few. So too it is for Americans. There are many dimensions along which India and the US -- the two countries that matter to me -- differ. Elections in these two countries is one such.
The most important distinction is that the US has a two-party system, and most people identify with one or the other. There are independents of course but at the time of voting, these have to choose one or the other. The choice is between Tweedledum and Tweedledee mostly but still there are only two of them. There is some fracturing of votes to the 'green' party or the libertarian party candidates but those are mostly marginal. In India, we have a large degree of Read More...
Modi slams Centre for delaying completion of Sardar Sarovar dam
Maoists attack Congress convoy in Chhattisgarh, Mahendra Karma among 25 killed
No miracles to resolve India-China disputes: Antony
Over 260 million victims of caste-based discrimination: UN
IPL spot-fixing scam: What the world is saying
Government promises to enact new law for spot-fixing
Bayern favourites, Dortmund underdogs in all-German Champions League final