Quick notes: Brand-free growth | Stolen treasures...

• India's Brand-free Economic Growth: While it is great that India is now making a lot of mobile phones for export, none of these carry an Indian brand name. The Chinese and Koreans, on the other hand, have spawned a half-dozen brands that dominate global markets.
  
  The Modi government's manufacturing push is very good and necessary, but basically it is pushing Indian manufacturing in the same direction as our software (services) industry: Outsourcing -- India's fully (global) brand-free "strategy".



• China could dominate the next big advance in batteries. In two years, China will have nearly 95 percent of the world's capacity to make sodium batteries.
  
  500 watt-hours per kilogram! CATL announces very energy-dense "condensed battery" for passenger aircraft. It’s likely a semi-solid state battery, an emerging technology with the potential to address issues that have held back the mass commercialization of solid state batteries.
  
  China challenging incumbent automakers: The legacy industry’s greatest assets are not worth as much as in the past... China’s car buyers have fallen out of love with foreign brands. Home teams are routing MNC competitors that had dominated China’s auto market.
  
  How China plans to get in on US clean energy subsidies: Chinese companies are opening up manufacturing plants in the US and embedding themselves ever more deeply into the supply chains of major critical minerals. The influx of Chinese clean energy manufacturing projects raises the question of whether US industrial policy efforts to revitalize American manufacturing risk being hijacked by its chief rival.
  
  



• India Pride Project : The sleuths bringing back India’s stolen treasures.
  
  The narrative "they" often sell is that these precious antiquities deserve to enjoy global attention while staying safe in secured museums. A recent New York Times article summed up the colonial thinking that continues around restitution, suggesting that "in America, critics of the surge in returns worry that museum collections built over time by scholars and imbued by a sense of context are being randomly depleted. Should US audiences, they ask, be deprived access to iconic objects that they suggest belong, not to individual nations, but to humankind?".
  
  The fundamental flaw in this argument is that many of these artefacts are not art pieces to be "enjoyed" but sacred objects cherished and worshiped through generations before they are snatched away.
  



• Modi sarkar's narrow perspective: The dangers of allowing foreign universities to set up campuses in India.



• Unemployable: India's worthless degrees undercut world's fastest-growing major economy.



• India's migrant millions: Caught between jobless villages and city hazards. This internal migration is bound to intensify as India becomes the world's most populous nation, throwing up enormous challenges for the government to absorb its army of young unemployed.



• How to pronounce ZHA in Malayalam:




• US Is Getting ‘Lonely’: Deepening links between the Middle East and Russia and China are a huge challenge for the United States. “If the Bretton Woods system is not delivering strongly around the world, there are going to be serious challenges.”



• Saudi Arabia's cricket league: What will happen to the $8.4 billion IPL?