On Indian Journalism

I think it was way back in 1999 that Michael Kelly in an op-ed in the Washington Post had asked fellow journalists, “Why does everyone loathe us so? Because, my little preciouses, we are so loathable. … Reporters like to picture themselves as independent thinkers. In truth, with the exception of 13-year-old girls, there is no social subspecies more slavish to fashion, more terrified of originality and more devoted to group-think.”

It appears to me that the above quote could apply to India–except for that bit about the everyone loathing the Indian press. The 10% or so of the Indians who have access to the press don’t seem to mind the garbage that is fed to them. In any event, whether the larger public perceives them to be loathsome or not, the Indian press is loathsome indeed. And why is it loathsome? Because the ones who constitute the press somehow loathe themselves for being Indians and self-flagellation seems to be their forte. The self-flagellation takes the form of force-feeding the foreign press all that it (the foreign press) wants to believe about India–miserable ignorant uncivilized savages killing peaceful missionaries, wrecking holy mosques with sickening regularity, unchecked xenophobia in questioning a widow’s sacrifice, Hindu fundamentalism gone berserk, ad nauseum.

But there has to be a reason for the loathsome behavior of the press — especially the English language press. I think there is a domestic element and then there is a foreign element. First, the foreign bit. If a journalist writing in English wants to be quoted by foreign publications, then he or she has to appeal to the biases of the foreigners and reinforce their prejudices. Otherwise, the foreign press would not touch it. The more shrill a journalist is in denouncing anything that remotely hints at Indian ethos, culture, or pride, the more likely he or she is to get invited to give talks at US universities and other goodies. The term for this phenomenon is “being a house nigger.”

It’s not just in India

Mike Huckabee is a potential Republican nominee for the US presidential elections next November. “Who’s your favorite author?” asked 7-year old Aleya Deatsch. Huckabee said it was Dr Seuss. That surprised her because she thought that someone grownup should be reading at a higher level. Her favorite author she admitted was C. S. Lewis.

Huckabee is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, evidently. Here’s what he said on record: “I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.” [Via Cosmic Variance.]

Perhaps he meant “free of energy waste”. But who knows. Perhaps he is not stupid, only plays stupid so that he can win the approval of the majority of the Republicans. I am told that Lallu Prasad Yadav is a very sharp guy but likes to play the simpleton to appeal to his voter base.

My working hypothesis is that politicians are really reflections of the general characteristic of the population. It is only rarely through some historical accident that someone who is un-representative of the population leads the nation out of its predictable path. In general, leadership is endogenous. It is a depressing hypothesis.

Winter Solstice Greetings!

Winter solstice (Northern hemisphere) this year occurs around 6:08 UTC on Dec 22nd. Wish you all a Happy Winter Solstice. Happy Christmas as well.

I think this post is close enough to be the 1,000th post on this blog (give or take a few.) It has been a good run and thanks for your support. Perhaps it will see the 2,000th post one day.

Traffic Rankings for Business and Economics Websites lists this blog number 33 with 1753 page views a day for November. For comparison, the site notes that if this blog were a newspaper, it would be the equivalent of the Mobile Register of Mobile Alabama. 🙂 But it drops to rank 37 with 981 average daily visitors, which puts it in the same class as the Springfield News-Leader (Springfield, MO). See this for what the newspaper comparison means.

Unacceptable Blowback

Blowback. Backlash. Expressive words. They mean that sometimes the reaction to an action can be severe and unacceptable. Blowback is often associated with fire. You set a fire thinking that it will go that way but instead it goes this way. Ill thought-out policies usually suffer from blowback and backlash.

I observe with a great deal of trepidation the policies that Dr Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, is promoting. I think that with friends like Dr Singh, the minorities (as the pseudo-seculars like to call them) don’t need any enemies. Their “friends” are selling them down the road for votes now. Later — and the later it is, the worse the reaction — they will suffer not for crimes of their commission but for what the likes of Dr Manmohan Singh did to get their votes. Dr Manmohan Singh will be long gone, a footnote in history, but what he is participating in today will have set back Indian civilization decades if not entirely doom it to third world irrelevance. The leadership of the minorities (and we all know what that actually refers to) is too stupid and ignorant not to see the long term consequences of the Faustian bargain they are making with the oh-so-secular government today.

I really feel for the minorities. They don’t deserve such punishment that Dr Singh and his bosses are planting the seeds of today. The harvest will be bitter indeed for them.

The Acorn lays it out by asking Manmohan Singh the right questions. Over a year ago I had written an open letter to Dr Singh. What a reply.

The Banality of Corruption

The facts are pretty simple to state. A piece of land was sold by party A to party B for Rs 22 lakhs. The official price was Rs 7 lakhs, less than a third of the actual amount that changed hands. That means A received Rs 15 lakhs which he cannot account for. And it also means that B paid Rs 15 lakhs from sources which are also unaccounted for. Then parties A and B arrived at the land registration office to record the new title. The registration fee is 10 percent of the sale price, or Rs 70,000. Party B paid that. But that was not all. Also paid to the clerk in charge of recording the transaction a 20 percent bribe, or Rs 14,000. Only a part of that bribe goes to the clerk. The rest goes up the chain of command all the way up to the chief minister of the state. This is common knowledge.

Stuff and Ideas — Part 2

[Continued from the previous post on Stuff and Ideas.]

Economic growth, development, progress—whatever you call it—is neither inevitable nor impossible. There are lots of examples of economies that continue to struggle with economic growth. And there are many examples of economies that have made rapid progress. What distinguishes the ones that that succeed from the ones that fail is economic policies. Again an operational definition of “good economic policies” will have to do: those that work.

A peek at the archive

I was reviewing stuff on my blog from way-back-when and came across a post “Education for a Nation” from October 2003. The post has aged well. Not bad at all.

Stuff and Ideas — Part 1

1. Stuff Fundamentalist

Fundamentally, it is all about stuff. That’s what it is basically all about. The universe is stuff, of course. My thesis here is that the economy is also about stuff. Stuff and one more thing we will get into in a bit. At the very bottom of it all, the necessary ingredient for making an economy is people. Without people, you don’t have an economy. You can have the whole planet with trees and animals and fish and rivers and mountains and oil and land and rain and volcanoes and storms and . . . But until you have people, you don’t have an economy.

The New Education Landscape

The future of education is going to be one of the most exciting things going on in the world. I see a revolutionary change occurring because of two specific reasons. First, the increasingly complex nature of our world. Change is accelerating and therefore to prepare people for that dynamic world, people need skills that were not needed previously. These skills cannot be imparted once and for all in the formal years of schooling. Therefore, what education has to do is to prepare people to be life-long learners. The schools have to be a place where a child learns not specific topics or subjects but learns how to learn any subject. The job is then to teach how to learn.

Chidambaram Speaks the Truth

The Finance Minister of India, Mr Chidambaram speaks the truth, or at least that is what a certain communal newspaper reports. He was speaking at a TiE event in New Delhi. He said, “This country will hold together only if we give everyone in India a stake in the future of India … We cannot build an inclusive society, unless every institution of governance consciously sheds its biases and prejudices that work for every section of the people.”