dec 16th
they are talking about the philippines, but this applies to kerala too. the word 'cargo cult' leaps to mind. the gulf boom (which may end shortly) and the nurse boom (which shows no sign of ending any time in the near future -- and now men are joining nursing schools as well in kerala) will keep the money-order economy going strong in kerala.
'moral hazard': in kerala this means rampant land speculation, the accumulation of gold and clothes.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/12/16/news/phils.php
6 comments:
Off Topic:
For a change a white American is supporting the Indian Nationalist standpoint with regards to the Nuke deal. It is very heartening, considering the fact that there are quite a few Indians, some on this blog too, who support National suicide through the Nuke deal, just to please Uncle Sam.
link
..and now that a white man has given his seal of approval for the nuke standpoint of Indian Nationalists, I am sure the few Indians who were supporting the American stand would have no problem in now accepting our view.
Interesting trend..
link
Another good article from Bharat Karnad. Posting in full as it is not archived in Asian Age.
Does the U.S. deal really serve India?
- By Bharat Karnad
Any foreign or defence policy wrinkle is justified in terms of its serving the national interest. This is par for the course. But the treating of "national interest" as an overly fungible concept to legitimise even lame and myopic initiatives in the nuclear policy field with plainly injurious consequences to the country, is a seminal development in the annals of Indian foreign and military policy-making and an achievement of the economistic-minded Manmohan Singh-led regime that the Congress Party may find hard to live down. After all, for 57 years of the nuclear programme, successive Indian governments cutting across party lines have been zealous in protecting this high-technology enclave from the predatory attentions of the established nuclear weapons states, and thereby in safeguarding the country’s weapons capability and potential size and quality of its nuclear arsenal. It is the nuclear security of the nation that is now endangered.
With one mis-step following another, the people have a right to wonder whether this government has a grip on international reality. The problem lies as much with the government and the prime drivers of the nuclear policy — deputy chairman of Planning Commission Montek Ahluwalia, the metallurgist and former science adviser to the defence minister V.S. Arunachalam, with the dubious distinction of serving both the Indian and US defence ministries and no knowing where his ultimate loyalty lies, and ambassador in Washington Ronen Sen — as with, what I call "casual" strategic analyses generated by commentators dominating the media, whose world-view the government relies on to make its case. India’s national interest is spoken of by this breed of analysts in the post-modernist idiom as something for the government to interpret narrowly. They maintain that in the post-Cold War era national security has to be differently conceived, that the "old mentality" of national self-interest is passé, that policy parameters have now to be strained through the new cognitive filters of trade and globalisation, overlapping interests and close social inter-linkages and international cooperation and, more specifically, that nuclear weapons have little utility generally and a small, light-weight nuclear arsenal will suffice as deterrent in any and all future contingencies. This reading has motivated the controversial nuclear deal with the United States wherein the Indian nuclear weapons programme has been made hostage to civilian nuclear energy needs of the country. This is so notwithstanding a Planning Commission study by one of its members, Kirit Parikh, which has concluded that even with a bunch of new nuclear power plants on stream the 20,000 MW of electricity outputted will be only six per cent of all energy produced in the country. This "Six Per cent" solution is no answer for the country’s energy woes and yet Parikh and the government declare that nuclear energy is "critical" for India’s well-being to beget which the Manmohan Singh regime is ready to sacrifice sovereignty over nuclear decisions and to undermine the indigenous nuclear weapons sector.
The nub of the issue, as mentioned earlier, remains "national interest." Classically-defined ideas of national interest may clash with the views of the "casual" strategists in India. But, the fact is, no government of a major country is buying this post-modernist nonsense about the end of the sovereign nation-state and indeed not only do they continue to imbue their national life and policies with extreme nationalism, but also to act on that basis. This suggests, firstly, that the salience of "globalised, new world"-type of thinking to hard-boiled international politics is negligible and, secondly, that India stands out as the proverbial sucker. And suckers, as we know, are never given an even chance.
The driving force behind American foreign policy and approach to the world, it is not widely known, is the strong, expansive and unrelenting Judeo-Christian nationalism that to a lesser or greater extent informs American official circles and policy establishment. It fuels the supremacist streak in American thinking and renders US policies combative. This is not readily apprehended by Indian policymakers or even strategic analysts, none of whom among the present lot, has other than passing acquaintance with mainstream America and Americans. Diplomatic soirees, embassy postings and extensive attendance in seminars and conferences or private high-level parleys often mislead Indian leaders, intelligentsia and media-persons into believing that the United States is as liberal abroad as it is at home.
Only those who have spent a lot of years in that country intuit correctly that the US is extraordinarily focused on perpetuating its power by any and all means, and it has the ideological sanction for it in the twin exceptionalist concepts of "manifest destiny" and the "last best hope of mankind." And that if it is to have any chance in dealing with the US, India has to be moved by the same kind of nationalistic spirit and has to be diligent in pursuing its national interest in extremis.
It is a pity that nobody from the security circles in government or any of the analysts and commentators who write so confidently about the benign nature of US motivations, intentions and policies towards India, was present at the two-part lecture by Rajiv Malhotra, a successful US-based management consultant and president of the Infinity Foundation, delivered at the India International Centre on 14-15 December. They would have been jolted to learn from his painstaking, encyclopaedic and revealing research into the wellsprings of American values and attitudes just how single-mindedly nationalistic the US is in realising its interests and at any cost.
Because the run-of-the-mill Indian analyst is unexposed to the undercurrents within American society and polity, he feels free to expound on India’s supposed "exceptionalism" as if that were exceptional and then to turn this factor on its head and, in contrast to how Americans use it, ballyhoo the benefits to the country from climbing aboard the US non-proliferation bandwagon even at the cost of cleaving the Indian nuclear programme into two unequal parts and accepting the loss of sovereignty over its nuclear decision-making and nuclear security. And this, mind you, is part of their game-plan for making India into a great power!
Bharat Karnad is Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi
Hey, where is san these days,, missing his links. :)
>> Interesting trend..
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Yes Kapi, Wonder if any american/britisher/whocares who is anti-outsourcing is reading this. It is not one way. The americans/europeans too are getting jobs and benefitting out of it. !!!
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