The UChicago BSchool professor who was Chief Economist at the IMF for a few years, and gained prominence recently for having 'predicted' the financial meltdown talked at Bangalore today, mostly about the root causes of the meltdown and also about India. The main talk did not resonate much with me but a few points that did:
* India will be the 2nd or 3rd largest economy in the world in a couple of years he said (I think he must have meant 4th, or else he was referring to many more years than just a couple). Do we have the thinking going on that would be needed for a country with that clout ? Like geopolitical thinking ; what should be our policy towards different countries/blocs, towards Africa ? A country like the US has a whole bunch of people discussing and debating these kind of things, and finally it crystallises into policy. Absolutely I agree -- there is a complete lack of depth in thinking about all the many areas of a complex industrialized (post industrialized) society. (Now this is where I step in ...)
* He felt that land/real estate has become a stumbling block for India's growth. Like if you have land or control of land then you can make money and if you don't, you don't. There is lot of lack of trasparency and distortion in land ; political people influence things unfairly, who you know matters. He also cited POSCO which has been trying for a long time to get land for its plant in Orissa. While I don't agree with the POSCO example (there is a lot of popular resistance to this from the local people), I agree completely to the broader point. When I see all the building construction in the cities of India, it gives me a very uneasy feeling. I've tried to analyse this and usually conclude that putting up such large buildings feels such a complex business and requires so much financing, that it makes me feel very small in comparison. But now I think the kind of thing Rajan was talking about also feeds into it ; the whole business of real estate is so opaque and criminalized and common people feel completely helpless in front of the forces involved. This shouldn't be.
* He pointed to UID and cash transfers (apparently being proposed) as critical pieces to stem the massive leakage and put more power in peoples' hands.
*Government's role need not be as a service provider per se. in areas like education and healthcare, the critical thing is that govt. plays a transparent regulatory role, so that whoever is delivering the service is constrainted to deliver a certain quality.
Sunday, August 01, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
'Mobilized'
A friend put me in touch with a startup mobstac.com that is beta testing its product to optimise websites and blogs for mobile. So now this site , despoki.blogspot.com can be viewed cleanly on a mobile. You should be able to navigate to despoki.blogspot.com on a mobile and get the mobile version, else go to despoki.mobstac.com . If you aren't able to get it through despoki.blogspot.com, please let me know.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Walking
The long awaited event. He started walking (more like staggering) about a month back, and slowly got better and better at it. Now he walks more than he crawls.
Sunday, July 04, 2010
Monday, June 28, 2010
Rework The World
I went to the Rework the World conference, www.reworktheworld.org in early June, representing Arghyam. The conference was in Leksand, a lakeside resort a few hours north of Stockholm. The conference was a very good experience. The next and last edition of the conference , which is one of a series is going to be held in Alexandria , Egypt in 2012 and I heartily recommend that to any young person, though needless to say, it would be quite expensive.
As luck would have it, my passport was quite close to expiring and I needed to get it renewed. I had a difficult time getting the renewal done ; worth its own blog post!
I flew out of Delhi and back to Delhi which make the overall trip more strenuous.
The event was on youth and social entrepreneurship. It was co-organised by two interesting groups the Yes Foundation (one of whose key people is an Indian American, Poonam Ahluwalia), and the Tallberg Foundation, a wellknown think-tank in Sweden. The trip expenses were sponsored by the organisers which was really nice of them, though I think they were hoping I would play a more active role than I did.
From Stockholm Airport, I drove down to the conference location by car with Thomas Bjelkeman-Petersson of Akvo.org, who's visited us in India a few times. It was a great drive through open sparsely populated countryside. A very welcome break from the crush and the dirt of Bangalore and India which gets to me.
There was a huge amount of infectious energy in the gathering ; so many people, especially youth (1500+), all trying to make the world a better place, all over the world.
Lots of particulars that bear a passing comment but maybe in a later post.
Some videos below:
1.) The Max hamburger chain in Sweden now tracks the carbon footprint of each kind of burger and lets you know !
2.) There was a lot of great music at the event:
Friday, May 28, 2010
Saturday, May 08, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Mutyalappa : In memoriam
Mutyalappa is my friend and Sarpanch of Mushtikovela village whom Asha for Education (www.ashanet.org) supports on a fellowship for which I am co-steward. On 4th April night/ early hours of 5th, Mutyalappa passed away after a road accident in which he suffered severe head injuries.
He was brought to Bangalore from Anantapur as the medical facilities there were not good. I met them here. He was on a ventilator so he had a pulse but the doctors at multiple hospitals said that he was beyond resuscitation due to damage to the brain. We then took him off the ventilator and his body was taken back for post-mortem and funeral.
His pillion rider on the mobike also suffered injuries but is recovering.
If you can contribute some money for to help his family piece their life together ; as well as cover the medical expenses for him and his co-rider, it would be very useful.
Below is something I wrote for the Asha website:
==
It is with shock and sadness that ASHA notes the death of N. Mutyalappa, ASHA fellow. He passed away on the night of 4th April/early hours of 5th. He was 33 years old. He had a road accident and suffered severe head injuries while driving his motorcycle on the Bangalore/Hyderabad National Highway near his residence in Chennekothapalle village of Anantapur district.
Mutyalappa was nominated as a ASHA fellow in mid-2007 to support his work as a Sarpanch of Mushtikovela panchayat in Anantapur district of Andhra Pradesh. The details of his work can be seen on the Asha page tracking the fellowship here: https://www.ashanet.org/projects/project-view.php?p=854 His extensive previous work with the NGO Timbaktu Collective laid a solid grounding for him to undertake village development work as Sarpanch. He made Mushtikovela panchayat an outstanding example of NREGA implementation, with more than 1 crore rupees in cumulative disbursements to labourers. His most recent project which was just reaching completion at the time of his demise was the optimal utilization of Mushtikovela's tank through a process of consensus and dialoguing, so that a crop of paddy could be taken even in a drought year, creating significant income for the village.
Mutyalappa was a highly dynamic individual who understood the system and decided to work within it, by entering the political arena at the village level. Despite tremendous pressure and continuing difficulties he worked for proper implemention of government schemes for the benefit of the village. In interactions with him, his tremendous capacity to mobilize people, put pressure on the goverment to make the will of the people prevail came through clearly. He had an amazing talent in negotiating the delicate terrain of caste, political, personal and other divides in a village to get people together to achieve something of value. It is tragic that a person like him met an untimely demise while he had much more to contribute. The circumstances of his death were also unfortunate as he was shuttled between hospitals and places in a desperate attempt to find appropriate emergency treatment.
He is survived by his wife, a young son and an elder brother. ASHA volunteers would like to convey their profound condolences to his relatives in this time of grief.
===
Some videos and posts about his work:
====
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The Times of India
I recently began subscribing to the Times of India. The reason was a bit stupid and the kind of ass-backwards decision-making that I sometimes indulge in -- I find the Hindu so compelling to read that in the morning, I get absorbed in it, so that it both makes me late and distracts my mind. A bad way to start a work day. So finally I decided not to subscribe anymore. But my wife still wanted to subscribe to a newspaper so that she could keep in touch with what was going on outside Vibhat-world ; so we subscribed to the Times of India instead. It seems to be working out; I am definitely not absorbed in the newspaper in the mornings nowadays.
Subscribing gives me an opportunity to take a closer look than when I would just pick up occasionally at the office or elsewhere. My observations backs up that of many others, that The Times is a breathtaking newspaper and I feel compelled to add my notes to the reams that have already been written about it. This is hopefully just a beginning.
The first thing to say I think, is that a simple switch of context makes all the difference when thinking about the Times. Its as follows:
The Times of India is a business: then it becomes a predictable, sensibly run, run-of-the-mill, moderately interesting entity which is not very special compared to all the other zillions of businesses in India.
The Times of India is a newspaper: It becomes a jaw-droppingly amazing, completely crazy, death-of-satire, evil-empire, laughing stock, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, death-knell-of-Indian-civilization entity.
Again:
business -- nothing special
newspaper -- what the **&&^&#(@*@*!&&!!* is going on?!
Moving on:
the paper design seems really bad. Actually I have not been really looking at the paper with a critical eye, I've been just reading it, so to say, since we started subscribing, so this post will be more off-the-cuff comments. Having said that, the paper is just a mess. The pages are a loud clash of colours from all the ads and the colors used in the articlespace too. I haven't yet figured out the logic of the newspaper in terms of what kind of articles go where or on what page, because the cues towards this are not there or not strong enough. The mixing up of editorial and advert makes the jaw drop lower each day.
Today's front page had a truly stupid artistic illustration of a big-boobed woman being flagged at airport security, because of some news that the new airport security detectors are set off by silicone implants. I mean... really, this is too idiotic.
More often than not, upto 30% of the front page is taken up up by a single ad which completely distracts the attention. Today its about 25% distributed between several ads. A couple of days back there was some absurd article of less than 12 column-lines on one of the pages, and all the rest were ads. Today the first "City" page has about 5% of articles and 95% of ads.
On the plus side: generally they seem to have a lot of coverage of water issues, and not competely superficial which I can vouch for, since I keep an eye out for this. So they do have some news going. For a couple of days now they've had a lot of coverage of the naxal issue, ("Deep Focus"), though I haven't had the enthu to read in detail.
Today's "Global" page, had an "Around the World" section (probably a standard feature. It had a.) a picture of an unknown (but stunning) South Korean actress, b) "Teri Hatcher looking for love" c.) "Postmen boycott UK house because of cat".
Swaminathan Aiyar, one of their usual columnists had a stupid article on irrigation, something about using piped or drip irrigation instead of canals. Not a single figure about how economically viable this might be.
They've expanded their "Speaking Tree" column into a full Sunday supplement and are running a slick, nicely designed, but, to me, predictable ad about it in the main paper for a while ("Visit yourself, once a week", "If you listen, you hear", "Somewhere between our head and heart (Ed- our neck?) lies a land we rarely go to")
Enough of Times bashing for now.
Subscribing gives me an opportunity to take a closer look than when I would just pick up occasionally at the office or elsewhere. My observations backs up that of many others, that The Times is a breathtaking newspaper and I feel compelled to add my notes to the reams that have already been written about it. This is hopefully just a beginning.
The first thing to say I think, is that a simple switch of context makes all the difference when thinking about the Times. Its as follows:
The Times of India is a business: then it becomes a predictable, sensibly run, run-of-the-mill, moderately interesting entity which is not very special compared to all the other zillions of businesses in India.
The Times of India is a newspaper: It becomes a jaw-droppingly amazing, completely crazy, death-of-satire, evil-empire, laughing stock, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it, death-knell-of-Indian-civilization entity.
Again:
business -- nothing special
newspaper -- what the **&&^&#(@*@*!&&!!* is going on?!
Moving on:
the paper design seems really bad. Actually I have not been really looking at the paper with a critical eye, I've been just reading it, so to say, since we started subscribing, so this post will be more off-the-cuff comments. Having said that, the paper is just a mess. The pages are a loud clash of colours from all the ads and the colors used in the articlespace too. I haven't yet figured out the logic of the newspaper in terms of what kind of articles go where or on what page, because the cues towards this are not there or not strong enough. The mixing up of editorial and advert makes the jaw drop lower each day.
Today's front page had a truly stupid artistic illustration of a big-boobed woman being flagged at airport security, because of some news that the new airport security detectors are set off by silicone implants. I mean... really, this is too idiotic.
More often than not, upto 30% of the front page is taken up up by a single ad which completely distracts the attention. Today its about 25% distributed between several ads. A couple of days back there was some absurd article of less than 12 column-lines on one of the pages, and all the rest were ads. Today the first "City" page has about 5% of articles and 95% of ads.
On the plus side: generally they seem to have a lot of coverage of water issues, and not competely superficial which I can vouch for, since I keep an eye out for this. So they do have some news going. For a couple of days now they've had a lot of coverage of the naxal issue, ("Deep Focus"), though I haven't had the enthu to read in detail.
Today's "Global" page, had an "Around the World" section (probably a standard feature. It had a.) a picture of an unknown (but stunning) South Korean actress, b) "Teri Hatcher looking for love" c.) "Postmen boycott UK house because of cat".
Swaminathan Aiyar, one of their usual columnists had a stupid article on irrigation, something about using piped or drip irrigation instead of canals. Not a single figure about how economically viable this might be.
They've expanded their "Speaking Tree" column into a full Sunday supplement and are running a slick, nicely designed, but, to me, predictable ad about it in the main paper for a while ("Visit yourself, once a week", "If you listen, you hear", "Somewhere between our head and heart (Ed- our neck?) lies a land we rarely go to")
Enough of Times bashing for now.
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