tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-73066913361784586952012-01-30T16:21:50.141+05:30An Indian view of the worldBhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.comBlogger1861100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-58473945890027126692012-01-27T06:15:00.001+05:302012-01-27T14:46:26.935+05:30

Two years ago I was disbelieving when Dadi Janki, the head of the Brahma Kumaris, told an invited group at a retreat at Mount Abu that the Kali Yuga is coming to an end. Little has happened since then to advertise a trend towards such a moral transformation – in fact, if we go by the daily headlines the world is sinking deeper into the darkness – but I have come to think that she is right. This

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-41903030578599033732012-01-24T10:54:00.001+05:302012-01-24T10:58:49.617+05:30

The devilishly handsome character leaves his office early: “Monday” he twinkles to a secretary who says his boss wants to see him. He heads out for a stint of surfing, partying on the beach and a lap dance with a girl in a cowboy hat. As the sound track drones on about a man with “many passhons” the commercial ends with our hero arriving back home, where an elderly person is waiting up; “

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-22420632759566029482012-01-20T14:05:00.004+05:302012-01-20T21:57:36.768+05:30

Salman Rushdie’s no-show at the opening of the annual Jaipur Literary Festival has received much media attention, almost all of it focused on objections to his presence raised by a number of Muslim groups. There has been almost nothing about the value and significance of his work, which should surely be the focus in a literary context. To remedy that insufficiency, I give below a short rundown on

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-34309528572030336832012-01-15T06:40:00.000+05:302012-01-15T06:40:52.510+05:30

The interview of Joseph Stiglitz aired by CNBC TV-18 on 14 January belongs in every Journalism School's How Not To Do It List. Stiglitz, perhaps the most intellectually stimulating economist since John Kenneth Galbraith, has been travelling through India. He began by saying what he found interesting in his forays through the coutryside: it was peaceful, "bucolic," but man and beast were in "

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-2761217556022536712011-12-22T18:53:00.000+05:302011-12-22T18:53:19.011+05:30

Anna Hazare and Team have confused and confounded discussions about the proposed Lokpal by equating its strength with executive independence and authority. They have talked of “wiping out corruption” by enabling the Lokpal to investigate all branches and levels of government, including the Prime Minister and the judiciary, and giving it the power to suspend officials on its own findings, before

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-8524657630847396142011-12-22T06:02:00.002+05:302011-12-24T07:38:28.099+05:30

Just as government spokesmen voice the suspicion that foreigners are behind the Koodankulam anti-nuclear protest, comes the news that the rules restricting foreign investment in Indian media organizations are to be relaxed. Will the real Government of India please identify itself? No one has explained why foreign investment in the mass media is being  "liberalized" now. If it is merely to show

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-79053964941112085132011-12-21T01:18:00.001+05:302011-12-22T02:52:27.949+05:30

“Pragati: The Indian National Interest Review” is the publishing equivalent of the Flipkart.com commercial in which grotesque kids pretend to be adults. Although it describes itself as “a publication on strategic affairs, economic policy and governance,” the contents of the monthly tend to be a strange muddle of right-wing ideology and – how can I put it kindly – stupidity. Much of the writing

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-12916313725833528692011-12-20T01:04:00.001+05:302011-12-21T12:37:08.379+05:30

Economic austerity measures imposed by governments could land the world in a Great Depression. That is the unvarnished warning from two parts of the UN System that usually have very different takes on policy matters: the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In a new Policy Brief, UNCTAD has explained that warning. It noted that

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-90332532118130937132011-12-19T16:38:00.001+05:302011-12-20T01:10:40.729+05:30

It is now eight hours after the North Korean announcement that Dear Leader Kim Il Jong died last Saturday. Since then, both BBC and CNN have suspended normal programming and broadcast nothing but analysis and commentary about this unexpected development. (Dear Leader was known to be ailing, but his death was generally supposed to be years away.) Indian television broadcasters initially took note

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-70128794925607726412011-12-17T07:56:00.000+05:302011-12-17T07:56:06.732+05:30

The Secretary-General of the United Nations is not required to be an orator, and none of the 8 men who have held the office has been an inspiring public speaker. However, all except the incumbent, Ban Ki-moon, have had the good sense to deliver professionally written speeches; although generally soporific they did not make audiences wince, at least not in print. Ban’s speeches, even in print –

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-91484720389568477092011-12-14T14:50:00.001+05:302011-12-14T14:54:53.229+05:30

Another piece of feel-bad journalism  came our way on 11 December from The New York Times blog on India. Business Standard columnist Nilanjana Roy made the case that Indians have less freedom of expression than Americans. “The framers of the United States Constitution so highly valued free speech that they enshrined it in the document’s very first amendment” she wrote. “India, the world’s other

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-37929459830501213912011-12-14T01:00:00.000+05:302011-12-14T01:00:55.125+05:30

The Times of India on 10 December had a front-page story explaining why Britain had refused to join a European Union deal to move towards closer economic cooperation. It said that Prime Minister David Cameron had been unable to “secure a halt in ongoing EU efforts to curb the City of London’s huge financial services sector.” It quoted Cameron saying he had failed to get “safeguards” from EU

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-62017529387438985712011-12-10T07:25:00.002+05:302011-12-10T15:02:14.964+05:30

Media reports invariably say that Union Cabinet Minister Kapil Sibal’s meetings earlier this month with representatives of Facebook, Google and Microsoft were an “attempt” to censor the Internet. In fact, the government has gone well beyond that; the Internet is effectively being censored right now, and in ways that strike at the root of our democracy. I can vouch for this from first-hand

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-66523637668561738622011-12-07T06:46:00.001+05:302011-12-07T08:02:22.161+05:30

With the Eurozone teetering on the verge of collapse and the export-led Chinese economy facing a disastrous crash, it is more than likely that the world will slip into another Great Depression. That will require national elites to recalibrate their perks and priorities, setting off furious power struggles that could, as in the 1930s, tumble the world into a global war. The epicenter of the war

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-42826281530477361582011-12-05T11:32:00.000+05:302011-12-05T11:32:21.997+05:30

Amidst the first week of furor after the Central cabinet approved foreign investment in Indian supermarkets, the Universe sent us a small but important signal: Varghese Kurien turned 90.  The life of the US-trained engineer who quit a government job in 1949 and went on to fashion the cooperative of milkmen in Gujarat that became Amul, now a Rs. 10,000 crore dairy group, has important lessons for

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-5015912291834216122011-12-04T06:32:00.000+05:302011-12-04T06:32:07.857+05:30

As a result of the item that someone was blocking my blog and main website, Netsparx, the Goa-based company maintaining www.undiplomatictimes.com unceremoniously dumped me as a client. In the process I discovered the actual ISP is Bagful.net in Haryana. Netsparx has not responded to repeated queries whether information to access my site was given to anyone else. Google reported on 2 December 

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-73586293560436973462011-12-03T16:17:00.000+05:302011-12-03T16:17:21.900+05:30

The best argument against allowing foreign direct investment in Indian supermarkets is that it will open the door to virtually unrestricted entry of Chinese manufactures. Giant Western retailers like Walmart source much of what they sell from Chinese small and medium companies, and that is unlikely to change if and when they move into India. It is also possible that a Chinese company -- perhaps

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-23832726238079610572011-11-29T14:00:00.002+05:302011-11-29T15:17:45.309+05:30

A few days ago I finally figured out how to get Google Webmaster Tools to divulge traffic statistics about this blog, and made a rather unexpected discovery: someone is trying to block access to it. A report I downloaded on 25 November said – if I am reading it right – that there had been 363 recent cases of “restricted by robots.txt,” “Not Found” responses had been returned five times, and “

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-44472454751149326632011-11-28T12:37:00.001+05:302011-12-04T23:12:07.814+05:30

Markandey Katju seems bent on demonstrating the truth of Mark Twain's observation that the only thing worse than a fool is an earnest fool. In a Times of India Op-Ed piece last Saturday (25 November) the former Supreme Court judge and new Chairman of the Press Council of India blathered on about the need for freedom in the context of Indian industrialization, which alone could "abolish poverty

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-34305688356485752722011-11-25T09:38:00.000+05:302011-11-25T09:38:31.989+05:30

Indian mass media coverage of developments in the strategically important country on our troubled eastern border has been dismal. Of the four newspapers I get in Puducherry – The Hindu, The Times of India, The New Indian Express, and The Deccan Chronicle – only the TNIE has made any attempt to provide perspective. In a perceptive edit-page piece in TNIE on 12 November, Whiff of Spring in

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-83443896158340698802011-11-18T11:40:00.001+05:302011-11-19T11:14:20.005+05:30

Markandey Katju’s “clarification” of his outrageous comments about the Indian people and mass media has confirmed that his ignorance is multifaceted and extends to history.  Consider just one paragraph in the long excerpt from an interview published by The Hindu on its OP-Ed page on 16 November.  In it Katju says India is making “a very painful and agonizing” transition from a “feudal

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-31032925900973370942011-11-14T05:02:00.002+05:302011-11-18T11:47:29.350+05:30

The frisking of former President Abdul Kalam by New York Airport security has incensed Indians. Especially because the insult was both deliberate and egregious: Security officers followed him on board an Air India flight and asked him to remove shoes and jacket for inspection. The Indian Ambassador in Washington has been instructed to protest officially, and the Press has taken note that she

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-60911747395268514392011-11-11T11:00:00.003+05:302011-11-11T11:39:23.894+05:30

Two saint-poets stand at the beginning of the Indian renaissance that is still gathering force. One was Kabir, a Muslim foundling raised by a Hindu, the other was Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion. Both of them revived the distilled excellence of Indian tradition, freeing it from centuries of meaningless ritualism. They were born (Kabir 1440 and Nanak 1469) before Columbus made

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-67323456194265444452011-11-06T10:01:00.000+05:302011-11-06T10:01:33.570+05:30

Jug Suraiya bills his new book, JS & The Times of My Life, as “a worm’s eye view of Indian journalism.” That might make you think it dishes up gritty stuff about a profession – trade rather – that has long been the receptive home of drunks, cynics and misanthropes. It does not; the book is an elegantly written memoir of a person who declares, “I never wanted to be a journalist” and is far too

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-70054160301268049662011-11-05T18:30:00.003+05:302011-11-06T00:06:53.421+05:30

According to a wild rumour that we do not believe for a moment, the Honourable Markandey Katju, newly installed chairman of the Press Council of India is setting up his own television broadcasting organization. KTN-1984. According to a document in our possession that is obviously fake but too sensational not to report, the following is the pitch that KTN-1984 is making to potential investors:

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-28119019112823710322011-11-04T21:56:00.000+05:302011-11-04T21:56:51.025+05:30

The Times of India editor responsible for matching the photographs to editorial content in the following stories is obviously in dire need of psychological help. Or perhaps he just needs to get laid. If anyone starts up a fund for that, count on support from me.

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-40602788627978542982011-11-02T22:37:00.001+05:302011-11-04T20:34:36.360+05:30

People have been led to believe that 7 billion people make for a crowded planet. Not so. They could all fit into Paris. Or with less elbow room, into Manhattan.The web site www.persquaremile.com has a series of maps illustrating the area 7 billion would occupy if their density were equivalent to that of existing urban areas: The "population problem" is actually a "consumption problem." If 7

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-9649587695222865362011-11-01T05:03:00.000+05:302011-11-01T05:03:49.334+05:30

There was an interesting little morality tale in The New Sunday Express on 30 October. Shampa Dhar-Kamath in her column Unfaithfully Yours told about Ram Singh, a family servitor in Delhi’s Safdarjang Enclave who was “aghast” at receiving an air gun with instructions to shoot pigeons disturbing the sleep of his aged and ailing “master.” “Wracked by superstition at the best of times,” wrote

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-29580653123080069052011-10-31T22:07:00.000+05:302011-10-31T22:07:34.306+05:30

It is amazing how unexamined Indira Gandhi’s death remains 27 years after her assassination. Almost everything I have read on the matter skips critically important detail; in fact, the accounts are so unvarying in the details they do provide the authors could well have been working from a shared template. To help the generation now coming of age to understand what happened, I present a

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-81013338885744763632011-10-31T04:12:00.000+05:302011-10-31T04:12:52.378+05:30

Judge Markandey Katju, the new chairman of the Press Council of India, a governmental watchdog body mandated to oversee print media, wants to expand his purview to broadcasters and get a new set of teeth. Speaking to Karan Thapar, anchor of The Devil's Advocate on CNN-IBN, he put on display a set of arrogant opinions founded in such a blunt understanding of Indian realities (not to mention the

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-81026762010364832482011-10-29T19:59:00.002+05:302011-10-31T02:29:06.735+05:30

The Hindu carried last Friday (Op-ed page, 28 October), a lengthy interview of historian Romila Thapar. It focused on the decision of the Academic Council of Delhi University to drop from the BA syllabus, the controversial essay on the Ramayana by the poet and translator A.K. Ramanujan. In introducing the interview, the paper noted that the Academic Council decision came three years after "the

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-25975062634698074812011-10-29T08:45:00.000+05:302011-10-29T08:45:56.852+05:30

What passes for “history” today is an intellectual construct of the colonial era that originated in the effort by Europeans to explain their sudden global dominance. It appeared to them that they were innately superior in many ways, one being a unique sense of the past. Beginning with the German theorist Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), it became a fashion to assert that only Europeans had

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-29757636142052779102011-10-28T19:13:00.000+05:302011-10-28T19:13:14.378+05:30

Outlook magazine has just celebrated its 16th anniversary with an issue devoted to “Generation Awesome;” it tells how “India’s young are driving the change in politics, business, sport, music, news – and beyond.” I hate to rain on a birthday party, but the issue seems a last-minute effort, with a disparate guest-list babbling rather incoherently about their presumed areas of expertise. The

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-62249763762091922102011-10-23T00:58:00.005+05:302011-10-26T04:18:35.194+05:30

Criticism of the move to drop A. K Ramanujan’s essay on the Ramayana from the BA History syllabus at Delhi University has been entirely predictable. Those who wear their “secular” label on their foreheads, saw the decision to drop the essay as a response to pressure from the Hindutva brigade. Some Press reports said the Hindutvadis considered the essay “blashphemous.” “Cultural fascism” said

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-42470683059094871322011-10-19T18:52:00.001+05:302011-10-21T21:35:03.996+05:30

The following came my way with no indication of authorship. To whoever wrote it, thank you for a great bit of cultural history. All of it might not be true, but it is amusing. There is an old Hotel/Pub in Marble Arch, London that used to have a gallows adjacent to it. When prisoners were on their way to be hanged their horse-drawn prison cart would stop outside the pub and the guard would ask

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-12738051422666941012011-10-13T10:51:00.000+05:302011-10-13T10:51:33.591+05:30

The shameful assault on Prashant Bhushan by thugs from the Sri Ram Sene has been condemned around the country, but our political class should be aware that it too stands heavily indicted in the criminal incident. The anger that drove the attack on Bhushan must be seen as an indication of our political failure, not only in containing and defusing it, but in the inability to forge an ironclad

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-57631078730078026152011-10-12T09:21:00.003+05:302011-10-13T23:57:05.869+05:30

The New York Times blog on India has an item asking, “Where’s India’s Steve Jobs?” The writer, an Indian journalist by the name of Samanth Subramaniam who seems to cater mainly to foreign magazines, admitted it was perhaps a “hollow, even narcissistic, question" because "Brazil hasn’t produced a Steve Jobs; neither has China, the Philippines, Zambia, Australia or any one of dozens of countries

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-61987776735027426042011-10-09T18:41:00.000+05:302011-10-09T18:41:39.819+05:30

Environmental activists going to the "Rio+20" Conference in Brazil next June  should use it for two things primarily: to springboard civil society action aimed at bringing about global change, and to reject the governmental agenda. The reason for rejecting governmental proposals is simple: for four decades official action has been ineffective. The world today is far more polluted than it was

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-9794442721050156672011-10-06T00:42:00.000+05:302011-10-06T00:42:23.649+05:30

There are several levels at which we can understand the “debt crisis.” As currently reported by the mass media, it is a crisis of the 17-nation Eurozone centered on the inability of the government of Greece to service a national debt of nearly half a trillion dollars. If we step back a bit, the crisis grows larger. Because banks in most developed countries hold varying amounts of foreign

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-89062445220251201812011-10-04T11:35:00.001+05:302011-10-04T11:35:34.591+05:30

What exactly is Z Cafe advertising in a commercial that explicitly promotes drug use? What does Tata Dokomo think it is selling when it shows a car rocking rhymically in the dark? There's an element in Indian advertising that is not selling anything but subversion of our social values. Take that company selling sunglasses and wallets with the pitch line "Why the world moved to ... ". It seems

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-63588337688447567562011-09-28T14:18:00.000+05:302011-09-28T14:18:56.846+05:30

Arun Shourie told an audience in Coimbatore last Friday that Indians must “know, understand and live according to” Indian tradition. Speaking at a seminar on scientific and cultural perspectives on India, he expanded on the theme as if it were a purely academic matter: knowing Aryabhatta’s work, understanding the mantras of pundits, and studying Hinduism at the university level.  I’m afraid he

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-72094454034483996992011-09-26T07:51:00.000+05:302011-09-26T07:51:31.016+05:30

The United Nations is engaged in its annual "General Debate" in New York. It is the opening ritual of the gathering of the organization's 193 members, meant to map the world's problems and set the context for the work to be done in the next three months. In theory, a "Report on the Work of the Organization" from the Secretary-General is meant to give focus and substance to the talk. That does

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-86373938181700751802011-09-24T10:39:00.001+05:302011-09-26T08:07:18.766+05:30

Ever since I moved back to India after several decades in the United States, I've had a growing sense that Google discriminates against its clientele here. Just as it worked with the Chinese government to censor the availability of information to the unfortunate citizens of that country, I think we are getting a screened access to the Worldwide Web. I doubt if this is at the request of the

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-48644973995311620362011-09-11T21:59:00.000+05:302011-09-11T21:59:54.401+05:30

Okay children hold on tight, for the global economic rollercoaster will soon go off a cliff. Here’s why. There’s been a sharp slowdown in manufacturing in all the major economies, and it’s tied to slackening exports. Most of the economies of the Eurozone are contracting. Germany is just a hairsbreadth away from joining the rest. The United States had zero jobs growth in August. Japan, reeling

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-55549227329437341002011-09-08T15:28:00.001+05:302011-09-08T15:41:30.503+05:30

I've just watched New Delhi chief honcho Sheila Dixit in an infuriating television interview about the bombing of the High Court in her city yesterday, less than four months after it was last hit. She maintained throughout a cold distance from what had happened, making the right noises but seemingly not in the least perturbed. It was as if she had no personal responsibility for the death of 12

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-4200389960913652032011-09-02T04:00:00.003+05:302011-09-03T07:48:16.801+05:30

N. Ram, the supposed-to-be-retired Editor in Chief of The Hindu, has vented his feelings against the “barbarity and ‘unspeakable wrongness’ of capital punishment” by reproducing on the op-ed page of his newspaper a long extract from the famous George Orwell account of the execution by hanging of an Indian in colonial Burma. It is done, he explains, “in the context of the scheduled execution” of

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-59668560220253162302011-08-31T06:23:00.001+05:302011-08-31T13:54:57.127+05:30

This is the kind of stuff that makes me really mad. A new study by the World Health Organization and its partner NGOs has found that 3.3 million newborn babies died in 2009 of easily preventable causes. The "good news" is that a decade earlier the figure was 4.6 million. “The first week of life is the riskiest week for newborns, and yet many countries are only just beginning post-natal care

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-59874613901667314432011-08-30T18:42:00.000+05:302011-08-30T18:42:41.329+05:30

Dear Prime Minister, I am writing this as an Open Letter because of the certainty that any private communication would be useless. This way, at least some people will read my proposals and perhaps ...  who knows ... What I propose will ensure double-digit economic growth, close the income and services gaps now separating our rural and urban populations, improve the quality of governance and 

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-65725610910254404902011-08-28T20:14:00.002+05:302011-08-29T10:10:52.465+05:30

The patriotic glow cast by the mass media on the end of Anna Hazare’s fast should not blind us to the fact that the primary institution of Indian democracy, Parliament, has just survived a serious assault. The chronological sequence below shows where the threats came from and how they were defused. 1.    The essential prelude to the agitation were the "CWG scams" brought to light in August

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-58793684639287307982011-08-25T18:17:00.001+05:302011-08-25T18:17:53.740+05:30

I've just watched Anna Hazare deliver an unbelievably energetic speech on what is supposedly the 10 day of his fast. In a major climbdown from yesterday's arrogant position that the fast would end only if the government withdrew its Lokpal Bill and Parliament immediately passed his Jan Lokpal Bill, he set three conditions. Only one of them was the same as the three identified as cardinal a few

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-75794587690800309892011-08-21T08:53:00.002+05:302011-08-22T06:39:55.207+05:30

Newly discovered eyewitnesses to the plane crash that killed UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961 say it was not an accident. They remember the aircraft being shot down. The eyewitnesses, men in their 80s who still live in and around Ndola in Zambia where the crash occurred, spoke to Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish aid worker based in Africa. Björkdahl became interested in Hammarskjold's

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-15743901428525293602011-08-20T05:47:00.000+05:302011-08-20T05:47:04.591+05:30

The cheerleading for Anna Hazare by the major television "News channels" is so blatant I almost felt embarrassed for the poor field journalists. For the two days that Hazare sat in Tihar jail making the authorities squirm for their stupidity in arresting him, TV journalists were called upon to provide wall-to-wall coverage of a story that consisted of nothing more than crowds hamming it up for

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-33530563738972729952011-08-19T17:20:00.002+05:302011-08-19T19:29:53.461+05:30

In tracing the evolution of newspapers in India from the beginning of the colonial era, I have kept the British role constantly in view. However, the primary focus has been on Indians. That must necessarily change in the following section for it deals with the postcolonial British manipulation of India. I begin with a brief look at the colonial roots of such manipulation because that is essential

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-90390735985601235192011-08-16T18:33:00.002+05:302011-08-17T08:07:01.374+05:30

A ship floats in undetected one moonless night and grounds itself on Juhu Beach. It is not an empty shell but filled with a small and lethal army that sweeps inland and takes over strategic locations including the Stock Exchange, the Mantralaya and the various defence installations in the city. Once the key spots are secured, ships waiting offshore disembark several thousand additional troops. By

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-51709849994530931042011-08-16T00:55:00.001+05:302011-08-16T22:19:09.207+05:30

Anna Hazare’s supporters are trying to present him as a “veteran Gandhian.” The most vocal of them, the BBC, has termed him Gandhi’s “heir,” and one of its ersatz Indian correspondents even claimed to have found people here who consider him “a modern day Gandhi.” Hazare himself has not been shy about invoking the Mahatma as model. The BBC report had a clip of him saying it is time to “Do or Die,

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-41850959934856468992011-08-14T04:44:00.002+05:302011-08-14T05:18:03.744+05:30

As the financial skies darken and massive economic storms threaten the world, it is essential for people everywhere to understand that we are facing more than a double-dip recession. We are seeing the end of the age that began with the trips of Columbus across the Atlantic (1492) and of Vasco da Gama across the Indian Ocean (1498). The crumbling power structures of that era will cause great

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-46074814550931995162011-08-11T02:30:00.002+05:302011-08-13T13:30:38.687+05:30

The police just happened to shoot an unarmed black man. They did it just when all national leaders and the Mayor of London were on vacation. Then, as vocal outrage brewed, they stayed away. “There wasn’t a single policeman here last night” one outraged woman told a seemingly drunk Boris Johnson, the Mayor, who made a disastrous public relations foray into the streets of London after returning

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-78996089922308687052011-08-10T00:36:00.000+05:302011-08-10T00:36:19.331+05:30

In the 1942 film classic Casablanca there is a priceless moment when Captain Renault, the amiably corrupt Frenchman who heads the local constabulary (played by the inimitably droll Claude Raines), closes down Rick’s. Rick (Humphrey Bogart): How can you close me up? On what grounds? Captain Renault: I'm shocked, shocked, to find that gambling is going on in here! [a croupier hands Renault a

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-75747609887727616762011-08-07T12:23:00.003+05:302011-08-24T16:08:33.888+05:30

Acquiring farmland for non-agricultural purposes is not just a matter of changing ownership; it has to do with the nature of Indian society and must be addressed with vision. Judging from news reports, the new draft of the Land Acquisition Bill prepared by Jairam Ramesh the new Minister for Rural Development will focus purely on logistics. Acquisition of farmland will require approval by 80

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-50828946590699995542011-07-30T11:18:00.000+05:302011-07-30T11:18:24.462+05:30

Indian-owned newspapers were a key factor in promoting and spreading the nationalist perspective under colonial rule. Ironically, after independence, when control of the "elite" British-owned publications passed into Indian hands it did not lead to significant change in their anti-national agenda. This was not a failing of Indian journalists but of the owners of newspapers. Drawn from a class

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-75434137424410009672011-07-29T05:17:00.001+05:302011-07-29T05:28:12.948+05:30

Call me cynical, but I don’t think the outcome of the British-India test match at Lords was quite kosher. I mean Zaheer Khan and Tendulkar conveniently disabled? For the remaining tests in the series I suggest the Indian team be fortified against psychological upset (like talk of a Dhoni disqualification), and be very conscious of the people around them, especially in elevators. They should

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-57472554580186716472011-07-23T10:10:00.001+05:302011-07-23T10:13:10.856+05:30

After independence, as British-owned newspapers passed into Indian hands, they moderated their overtly anti-national agenda, but retained a manifestly alien worldview. It is important to understand why and how this happened, for the English-language Press became the dominant “elite” of Indian mass media, a primary force in shaping the country’s political life. Three factors constrained the

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-44612773624956250152011-07-19T03:21:00.000+05:302011-07-19T03:21:04.847+05:30

In 1889, the Amrita Bazaar Patrika published a secret official memorandum by Mortimer Durand on the state of the Kashmir frontier. British officials in Calcutta (then the capital) claimed it was not accurate and further, that it “could not have been obtained except by a distinct and criminal breach of trust.” They took no action against the paper – since the founding of the Indian National

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-19031274643397389462011-07-16T12:40:00.003+05:302011-07-18T16:56:21.081+05:30

By the end of the 19th century Indian journalists were active all over the country. Among the most notable was the impassioned Vishnushastri Chiplunkar in Pune; his Nibandh Mala founded in 1874 turned its satirical attention on Indians who believed the British were in India for the good of its people. He was a formative influence on two college students in Pune, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Gopal

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-63837064546318908252011-07-14T05:36:00.002+05:302011-07-15T13:30:59.648+05:30

It is ironic that after Edward Lytton's insufferable personality and policies provoked a pan-Indian political consciousness, the next jump in national awareness was prompted by the liberal policy of his successor, George Ripon. With a personality and attitude towards Indians in stark contrast to those of his predecessor, Ripon won much applause, especially after he repealed the Vernacular Press

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-64281361117548250652011-07-13T16:27:00.001+05:302011-07-14T04:52:46.019+05:30

Over the last decade an estimated 2 million children have been killed in armed conflicts and 6 million left disabled. Around 300,000 children now serve as soldiers. Little girls fare the worst. Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, reported last month that "sexual violence is becoming systemic and across the world, classrooms and the kids sitting in them are increasingly seen as legitimate

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-20780058579189427492011-07-12T03:17:00.003+05:302011-07-14T05:38:52.583+05:30

Readers today will have a hard time imagining the lengths to which the British went to keep Indians unaware of their political situation. At a time when the only journalists at work in India were a handful of Englishmen putting out weekly 8-pagers read by a few hundred people, Warren Hastings issued regulations banning the publication of any news of India-related discussions in Britain. That

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-78506467603457943732011-07-08T04:57:00.002+05:302011-07-11T16:19:39.370+05:30

The issue of “black money” is one of the focal points of the current debate about corruption in India but neither the discussion nor the proposals to deal with it show any understanding of the phenomenon. This is not surprising, for corporate mass media have done little to illuminate the issue. A brief history lesson is necessary to show its real nature and magnitude. The term itself is

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-42035699403870863652011-07-07T06:06:00.002+05:302011-07-07T15:23:49.250+05:30

The scenario projected in my post on "Ilyas Kashmirir: The Trend" (5 June 2011) is playing out to the letter. While militant pressure grows in Pakistan's tribal frontier, Islamabad has developed a new sincerity in attacking the problem of terrorism. It even discovered that a serving Brigadier was providing aid and comfort to terrorist organizations.  Relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-27232390208858834722011-06-30T14:34:00.002+05:302011-07-01T03:24:46.522+05:30

There is a tendency among elitist Westernized Indians to think of corruption as an obstacle to the coming of the corporate Promised Land where “People Like Us (PLU)” enjoy the benefits of the free market untroubled by government gnats. There seems to be no awareness that the joint-stock corporation has been the greatest fount of corruption in human history. Since 1600, when a group of

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-31555828800456310412011-06-26T06:38:00.001+05:302011-06-27T03:26:19.453+05:30

A cardinal aspect of corruption in Indian society, which the Lokpal debate has studiously avoided, is the divisive, oppressive and nationally enfeebling caste system. Perhaps one reason for its absence from public debate is that while the system is widely condemned, it is little understood. Caste has been the focus of reform efforts for some five centuries, beginning with the Bhakti Poets, most

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-84240234098008437182011-06-25T11:31:00.001+05:302011-06-27T03:25:04.609+05:30

The confused controversies surrounding Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev have made clear the low level of public understanding of corruption. Ramdev’s fatuous proposal to force Indian “black money” to return from foreign banks should have won him instant expulsion from serious public discourse but that came only after his comic descent into infamy. “Team Hazare’s” proposal for a new

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-27360440989028436232011-06-23T18:10:00.006+05:302011-07-03T08:22:19.864+05:30

Does anyone expect the Lokpal to make any real difference? Suppose Civil Society gets its entire wishlist and we end up with an unaccountable supra-governmental body with wide-ranging powers to accuse, investigate, prosecute and more or less prescribe punishment for the people it decides are corrupt. In which of the following situations (all in the headlines in the last few days) will it be

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-56945004987964879362011-06-20T17:47:00.001+05:302011-06-21T15:02:19.865+05:30

Phobotherapy is the use of fear to effect a cure. When you startle a person out of hiccuping that's phobotherapy. In modern multilateral diplomacy phobotherapy has become a sophisticated art. It usually consists of issuing an expert report predicting something really scary. The report gets wide media attention because editors are patsies for anything that will frighten people into reading (or

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-8980981672450467112011-06-12T10:24:00.001+05:302011-06-17T16:33:34.020+05:30

Ban Ki-moon, the Secretary-General of the United Nations is to get a second term. His announcement of interest in staying on was made on Monday, 6 June, followed two days later by an endorsement from the White House. (It is possible that the State Department was not on board with that decision if we are to read the tea leaves in the report that surfaced immediately afterwards that Hilary

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-36209928764632269962011-06-05T05:37:00.003+05:302011-06-05T17:19:02.062+05:30

Now that another key al Qaeda henchman, Ilyas Kashmiri, is reported to have followed Osama bin Laden into the realms of the Djin, it is clear that something more structural than luck has changed in Pakistan. It seems as if the ISI has, at long last, decided that it can no longer afford to run with the hinds and hunt with the hounds. That is an almost unbelievable paradigm shift, for the factors

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-4010365284057366152011-06-04T00:29:00.047+05:302011-07-03T13:07:41.202+05:30

 If alarm bells were not already ringing all over India about Baba Ramdev, his 3rd June speech at the Ramlila Grounds in Delhi would be reason enough to sound them. But before I get to the speech, let me remind people who the guy is. He was born Ramkishan Yadav in a village in Haryana in 1965, attended school nearby until the 8th Standard and then went to study Yoga (and supposedly Sanskrit)

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-52818762321328000322011-05-31T21:34:00.001+05:302011-06-01T14:16:19.584+05:30

The slow train-wreck of the world economy is progressing like one of those Peckinpah Westerns, each step slowed, bloodied, shown close up and then again from another angle, until the mind forgets what it is watching and is fascinated just by the blood and spilling guts. When will the bodies start falling? I figure they're already falling. But as Buzz Light-Year put it, "falling with style.

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-9455005738722468602011-05-29T07:03:00.000+05:302011-05-29T07:03:37.761+05:30

A statement issued under the signature of five “Left” figures is making the rounds of e.mail lists. It seeks to garner support for the sentiment that the recent electoral defeat of the communist-led coalitions in Kerala and West Bengal does not mean “the end of the Left in India.” The five – Dilip Simeon, Jairus Banaji, Sukumar Muralidharan, Satya Sivaraman, Rohini Hensman – argue that “the

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-64265297437618760682011-03-30T03:38:00.019+05:302011-05-05T06:19:41.286+05:30

NDTV Chairman Prannoy Roy’s patty-cake chat with Wikileaks honcho Julius Assange on 21 March was a weird and disconcerting experience. Assange, appearing via a satellite hook-up from Britain was his usual sepulchral film-negative self. Roy too appeared to be from another dimension, remote from Indian loyalties and concerns. The 50-minute programme began on a strongly anti-American note: a

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-36384381002333197692011-03-20T06:57:00.000+05:302011-03-20T06:57:25.045+05:30

I have just finished writing a book examining why Gandhi’s political legacy died as quickly as it did, and what we must do to revive it. The book makes the case that Gandhi’s legacy did not die a natural death. It has been killed by a set of British post-colonial and neo-colonial policies that have effectively transferred the exploitative functions of the “Empire on which the sun never set” to

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-14889576546827162702011-03-18T01:31:00.001+05:302011-03-18T01:48:11.942+05:30

Late on Thursday (17 March) The Hindu's top editor N. Ram was on Headlines Today defending the shoddy story his paper carried about the "Wikileaked" allegation of parliamentary vote-buying in 2008 (see the blog post below). What had he done to verify the cable was authentic? Nothing, of course, but he blustered that no one had challenged their veracity and that the United States had confirmed

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-41479260369122614462011-03-17T14:36:00.002+05:302011-03-17T15:16:13.249+05:30

The Hindu, Chennai's bastion of radical chic journalism, has done it again. A quarter century after an anonymous "leak" to its NRI stringer in Geneva set off the clown-show in Delhi  that has gone down in history as the "Bofors Scandal," it has mobilized a repeat performance by the pratfalling, slaphappy crew that passes for the parliamentary opposition. The story is totally delicious in its "

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-57717362504415168112011-02-22T01:43:00.000+05:302011-02-22T01:43:00.074+05:30

Just watched a stomach-turning bit of coverage on CNBC-18 of the RIL-BP $7.2 billion deal announced in London this morning. Bob Dudley CEO of BP and Mukesh Ambani of Reliance were video-conferencing with selected reporters to explain the deal they signed at 10 Downing Street in the presence of the British Prime Minister. It was stomach turning because the Indian CNBC-18 anchors did not ask a

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-82504049700502904452011-01-12T13:26:00.001+05:302011-01-23T05:46:48.973+05:30

Prince Charles has been belatedly inspired by the 2007 movie Slumdog Millionaire to build a "green utopia" for "low caste" Indians. It is to look like a pile of rubbish from the outside and to extend over 25 acres. He hopes to build it in Bangalore. Indian newspapers which carry this item report it as a straight story, but it seems to me the man has had his rather large snout put out of joint

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-25189630935971177822010-02-16T06:07:00.004+05:302010-02-18T00:54:27.735+05:30

If the “Earth Summit” convened by the United Nations General Assembly in 2012 is to save the world from sliding into certain environmental disaster, it must address the rapacious ecological impact of giant corporations. How to do that when corporations control the world economy and have enormous influence on the policies of governments? To know what must be done we have to understand how

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-47746914429353384082010-02-08T08:36:00.003+05:302010-02-18T00:55:26.510+05:30

[News: The UN General Assembly has called for a new "Earth Summit" in 2012.] Five decades after biologist Rachel Carson’s best-selling book “Silent Spring” rang the alarm about environmental pollution, world leaders will gather for the fourth time to deal with the rapidly worsening problem. Their previous meetings achieved limited but important goals; in 2012 they have an opportunity – if they

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-21899428455024138942010-02-01T01:40:00.003+05:302010-02-08T08:41:25.975+05:30

Most people think of Britain as America’s closest ally, but it’s time to jettison that idea. The two primary factors that shaped their “special relationship” in the aftermath of World War II -- the Cold War and the need to arrange a stable transatlantic transfer of power -- are now irrelevant. As one of Britain’s cold blooded politicians put it two centuries ago, the country has no permanent

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-14914717801846954492010-01-15T07:17:00.001+05:302010-01-15T10:41:43.610+05:30

My predictions for 2009 didn’t pan out, but only because massive intervention in the financial markets by central banks staved off a cataclysmic collapse. Whether 2010 will see that respite turn into a stronger recovery or send the world into another heart-stopping descent into crisis will depend on what happens in China. At first flush, the news out of China looks good. As widely reported last

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-33088180670081270872009-12-14T01:13:00.000+05:302009-12-14T01:13:07.347+05:30

George McGovern had a piece in the Sunday Washington Post recalling how, during his run for the presidency in 1972, he told audiences across the country “that the only upside of the tragedy in Vietnam was that its enormous cost in lives and dollars would keep any future administration from going down that road again.” He was wrong, he declares: Obama is going down the same path that Kennedy,

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-50220256163183596402009-12-13T19:19:00.009+05:302009-12-13T21:49:55.567+05:30

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has two years left of his first term, and the jockeying has begun to get him a second term -- or find a successor. At the moment it seems likely Ban will not get a second term, for his sleep-walking performance in office has been unredeemed by any initiative that can claim to be even marginally successful or imaginative. Assessments of his performance

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-24063513807690358992009-11-25T00:22:00.004+05:302009-11-25T00:34:30.032+05:30

I’m beginning to wonder if the entire Indian foreign affairs commentariat shouldn’t be hauled off to a Chinese re-education camp.Not a single pundit got it right in parsing the joint statement issued by Presidents Obama and Hu Jintao at the end of the American leader’s visit to China on 18 November. All of them were hot and bothered by a paragraph in the statement that said the US and China “

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-78495559244491641382009-11-07T09:32:00.005+05:302009-11-07T11:04:07.174+05:30

In a piece titled "Superpoor India" DNA columnist Venkatesan Vembu writes pompously about the "triumphalist chest-thumping" in Indian newspapers about the country’s ranking in the recently published "Prosperity Index." He thinks that is “solely” because “India came in at 45th place, whereas China -- our civilizational "twin brother" who (we fear) has made good and moved out of our league in the

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-77405826615228390722009-11-05T21:04:00.005+05:302009-11-05T21:51:46.422+05:30

Danny Boyle, the Director of Slumdog Millionaire the Oscar winning dump on India, is reported to be "tired" of dealing with the financial "demands" of the families of the two slum kids whose acting made his movie a hit. Boyle paid the kids a pittance for their heavyweight roles purely because they lived in a slum. He was shamed by pre-Oscar publicity into announcing that he intended to set up a

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-54535999727175078992009-11-05T20:13:00.005+05:302009-11-06T06:50:52.825+05:30

Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the influential Council on Foreign Relations in New York, has just circulated an article titled "Know thine enemy: why the Taliban cannot be flipped."It is by Barbara Elias, who directs the Afghanistan, Pakistan and Taliban Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. She argues that the "main Taliban leaders will never abandon

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-68410729803856501292009-11-05T11:40:00.001+05:302009-11-05T20:58:55.844+05:30

Just finished reading Superstar India (Penguin 2008) by Shobaa De. It was written to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Indian independence, but is an all round dump on the country. Consider this near gibberish: “We want foreigners (read Westerners) to like us ... admire us. When we are disappointed with our present (oh please, forget all that rah-rah India Shining rubbish. It’s more like

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-54031691935980164262009-08-15T21:16:00.000+05:302009-11-05T22:19:56.955+05:30

Whoever writes Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s speeches is going to need therapy after his/her assignment is over. The speeches Ban delivers give every indication of – how shall I put this delicately – of being Asianized. Take the speech Ban delivered to the University Presidents’ Forum on Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Asia and Africa, at Korea University in Seoul, on 17 August.

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-58087599312125794772009-03-18T11:31:00.007+05:302009-03-19T10:19:34.597+05:30

The New York Times has a front page story saying that President Obama is considering expanding the "American covert war in Pakistan" from the "unruly tribal areas" to Baluchistan, "where top Taliban leaders are orchestrating attacks into southern Afghanistan."I'm sure a diligent researcher can find an exact analogy to that story in the Vietnam era: President Kennedy/Nixon/Johnson considering

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-74175072412286467912009-02-23T00:14:00.004+05:302009-02-23T00:31:23.952+05:30

Here's the clincher that Slumdog Millionaire deliberately sets out to be poverty porn. The scene in which the kid dives into a pool of shit is not in the original book by Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup. it was invented for the film by the Brits who directed the movie and wrote its script.In fact, the kid's early childhood is not spent in Mumbai at all but in a Delhi orphanage run by an English

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7306691336178458695.post-11050594350290594422009-02-17T16:38:00.009+05:302009-02-17T18:19:39.788+05:30

I hope Slumdog Millionaire gets booed at the Oscar ceremonies on 22 February. Here are three reasons why.REASON 1The movie is poverty porn, titillating affluent audiences with a bizarrely unrealistic presentation of the lives of the poor. The so-called "feel-good" element of the young hero winning out at the end is like dabbing on icing on a piece of shit (to use the movie's own idiom) and

Bhaskar Menonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10509050909297898657noreply@blogger.com1