Black Money, White Economics

    I sometimes wonder about the colour coding of currency: why legitimate money is ‘white’ money and illegitimately acquired money is ‘black’ money, even though we Indians are legitimately brown and black, and the colonizing chaps who came here as thieves and robbers were ‘white’!

But this blog is not about racial language. What I would like to ask readers is that while there is so much noise about Black money, how come so little has been said about White economics? Because Black money is not so much our problem, fundamentally, as is White economics.

    By White economics, I am referring to the ways of business as it has evolved among European colonisers, which is now being globalised. The basics of White economics are that it is: debt-driven, profit-driven, free-trade-driven, consumption-driven, and competition-driven. Since 1991, we in India too have followed and practiced White economics, and what is the result after 25 years of this experiment?

Feminism & the Naked Empress

    In the end, it was once again the story of the naked emperor who strutted about all over his kingdom, but who had no one to tell him that he had no clothes on. Except that in today’s story, the emperor turns out to be an empress.

    Hillary Clinton was romping the American stage for a year, exposing her weaknesses for all to see: her overarching artificiality, her attempt at cleverness, her desperate ambition, her constant prevarication, her unethical deeds, they were all nakedly in sight for a full year. Even the solitary fig leaf of so-called ‘work experience’ began to slip off during the long exposure to media lights: it could be seen that she had risen to her full level of incompetence.

But that is for those who wanted to see. Unlike the naked emperor’s story where his staff did not speak out of fear, and the populace did not speak out of respect, the two categories of people here who refused to see or speak were the establishment elite, and the feminists.

The Tolerant Majority

    I see that famous people in our country are returning the national awards they have received as a protest against the present state of intolerance in the nation. Apparently, they cannot tolerate this situation anymore, and don't know what else to do, except to return their trophies.
    I am also disturbed by many things. My protests are many, and I too am willing to return whatever it takes to set things right. I have had my quota of minor recognitions in my younger days in school and college, which are largely useless, just as the education that came with it. But now, there is a possibility that they could be of use in their return journey.
    I am, of course, neither famous nor are my achievements of national hue. But then the issues which disturb me are also local issues, small issues. I therefore announce herewith that I return all my trophies to their places of origin, to protest the following:

The Rich want protection from the Masses

    In April last year, I wrote about Chidambaram's and Modi's common vision of building 100 new cities, even though they were in opposing parties in the election. I questioned and critiqued that step for its devastating effect on rural India (The 100-City Madness).
    What I did not expect, however, was that the government and academic elite would cobble together a scheme which is so wilfully depraved.
    We should be grateful to Shri Laveesh Bhandari for revealing these views during a recent seminar on 'Smart Cities in India: Reality in the Making'. Now we know what these chaps really think and do behind closed doors.
    In his presentation paper, Bhandari, an economist, says:
    "When we build these smart cities, we will be faced with a massive surge of people who will desire to enter these cities. We will be forced to keep them out. ‎This is the natural way of things... There are only two ways to keep people out of any space - prices and policing...
    "Even with high prices, the conventional laws in India will not enable us to exclude millions of poor Indians from enjoying the privileges of such great infrastructure"..

The modern myth of 'social mobility'

This is a letter I wrote recently to the Indian Express in response to their series on 'Is India Moving to the City?'. I have not been following newspapers for some time so I do not know if they have published it.
- - - - - - - -
Dear Sir,
    As a person who grew up in Mumbai, worked in Delhi, and who then lived in rural Garhwal and ran a village school there for many years, I found your series on 'Is India Moving to the City?' relevant and useful. It is an issue which has been staring at us in the face for 65 years, while we, the urban elite, have looked the other way.
    There is one basic assumption which has to be questioned for us to understand this issue fully. A few of your contributors may have touched upon it, in an oblique way, while most have missed it altogether.
    That basic assumption is the modern creation of 'social mobility' as a norm, indeed as a necessity. This 'social mobility' is represented as a geographical or financial movement - moving from village to town to city, or moving from small house to big house or from small to bigger bank balance.
    This is a crude, hastily gathered assumption of 'development' of the last hundred years. I feel we must question this 'need' completely, honestly, so that we understand ourselves first, before we try and understand the village and city..

Let us Vote for Change

    I write this as a supporter of Aam Aadmi Party. I write this in support of a people's movement which has the potential to correct the errors of modern politics and economics.
    The issue is not Mr Kejriwal. I feel it is important that we should not overlook a fundamental fact - that for once we actually have an alternative which is really an alternative, not just the same mindless copying of 'development' which all political parties are doing.
    The fear that this 'alternative' has triggered in the conventional political parties is apparent. Both the BJP and the Congress are desperate to show that the Aam Aadmi Party 'is like the rest of us'. They are shouting and screaming that AAP too has internal dissent, that it has people leaving them, that it plays caste politics, that it is irregular in taking donations, etc., etc. In a way, both BJP and Congress are conceding that political parties are after all corrupt and dishonest. So why should AAP be different?
    Why this fear of the Alternative? ..