no man is an island

so often, a prominent politician or social activist will take the stage and bemoan our dependence on some other party — whether they be another country, another ethnic group — for food, clothes, or any other necessity of life you can name. The rallying call for self-sufficiency is a resounding, clarion call; it is also an unfortunately deeply mistaken one.

In theory self-sufficiency sounds like a good, harmless idea: why shouldn’t we rely on ourselves, rather than having to go to someone else for the things we need? Prime Ministers have decried the necessity for Malays to buy clothes from Chinese textile manufacturers; social activists have opposed the privatisation of water companies lest they fall into foreign hands; politicians far and wide have suggested we should aim for self-sufficiency in rice. What’s wrong with self-sufficiency?

The problem with self-sufficiency is quite obvious when you wonder why more individuals aren’t self-sufficient. I can’t grow my own food, prepare my own stationery. I can’t type the words you’re reading on a laptop which I can’t build. It is insane to expect any human being to singlehandedly mine all the raw materials necessary and put them together to build his own notebook computer. Unless you want to do it as a hobby, being completely self-sufficient in almost any area of your life is impossible.

The reason for this is that every individual has their own particular talent. Mine happens to be writing, rather than farming or playing football. So I write, and use the money I earn from there to buy food and watch football. I could try to grow my own crops, but it would not be worth my time — and there’s the rub.

Being self-sufficient in most cases is simply not cost-effective: unless you are the most brilliant farmer the world has ever seen, and have an additional half dozen limbs, you almost certainly cannot feed yourself. Even real farmers specialise in a few crops and buy the rest they need. When every individual has a unique talent, it makes more sense to focus on what we do best rather than to try to do everything by ourselves.

So why should we expect a country to be completely self-reliant? To be self-sufficient as a country, you have to be bloody damn good at what you’re setting out to do. If you want all rice to be locally grown, you have to have extremely fertile land, the perfect climate and the right tools. This is not an easy task, considering we are still importing rice in spite of all the government’s efforts to promote local agriculture.

Why do we need to be self-sufficient in the first place? If we can earn more by setting up factories for microprocessors and Islamic financial institutions, why don’t we just take the money we earn from those businesses and buy the rice we need, rather than expending more unnecessary effort and unnecessarily sacrificing potential earnings for the sake of saying we do not need to import any rice? Except for some misplaced sense of “national pride”, there is really no good reason to waste money on self-sufficiency, in any sector.

Ultimately, we have no choice but to depend on someone. Even if we try to be self-sufficient in rice, to support rice production of such magnitude we would have to buy machinery and expertise from overseas. Wherever you turn, we cannot run from reliance on someone else — that is how globalisation and interconnectedness work.

The only half-plausible excuse for self-sufficiency is “national defence” — but this is disingenuous, at best. If we have so many enemies who are out to get us, they will have better ways of getting at us than contaminating our water supply (as many anti-privatisation activists fear) or refusing to sell us food. What sort of crisis can you imagine where another country would completely embargo us?

Empowerment and capacity-building are of course desirable things, but it is one thing to set up an industry and another thing to target self-sufficiency in a particular area. Unless the stars align perfectly in our favour, the only way to ensure we will “buy local” is to distort the market by taxing foreign competition out of the picture and wastefully subsidising local products instead. If you want a peek into a future of self-sufficiency, look no further than our local cars — much maligned and overpriced. When we know our limits and when we trade, we can play to our unique advantages, which will serve us much better in the long run than the wild-goose chase of hunting for self-sufficiency.

ortiz peom

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me
In a moment of silence
In honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon last September 11th.
I would also like to ask you
To offer up a moment of silence
For all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned,
disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes,
For the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing...
A full day of silence
For the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the
hands of U.S.-backed Israeli
forces over decades of occupation.
Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people,
mostly children, who have died of
malnourishment or starvation as a result of an 11-year U.S.
embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem,
Two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa,
Where homeland security made them aliens in their own country.
Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
Where death rained down and peeled back every layer of
concrete, steel, earth and skin
And the survivors went on as if alive.
A year of silence for the millions of dead in Vietnam - a people,
not a war - for those who
know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their
relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.
A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of
a secret war ... ssssshhhhh....
Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.
Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia,
Whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have
piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem.
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guatemaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found
their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could
poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of
sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west...

100 years of silence...
For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half
of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand
Creek,
Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the
refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut
A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust.

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same
And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be. Not like it always has
been.

Because this is not a 9/11 poem.
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem
This is a 1492 poem.

This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written.
And if this is a 9/11 poem, then:
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971.
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa,
1977.
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison,
New York, 1971.
This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and
Newsweek ignored.
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children
Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit.

If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window
of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost.
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the
Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful
people have gathered.

You want a moment of silence
Then take it NOW,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand,
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all...Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime. But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing...For our dead.

j.r.r and lotr

These days, the writing of heroic fantasy has become a mass-production industry; scarcely a week goes by without an author inventing a brave new world and subsequently being acclaimed as "the true inheritor of Tolkien's mantle", or some such. Unfortunately, fantastic settings alone do not an epic make, and 90% of new fantasy writing is crap - the same generic swords and sorcery, thud and blunder, repeated ad nauseam.

Tolkien is different. His imaginary homelands are not just names on the (by now obligatory) frontispiece map, they're countries, with rich histories and vibrant cultures; his invented tongues are not meaningless agglomerations of random syllables, they're carefully designed showcases of the linguist's art, with comprehensive lexica and detailed etymologies; his many invented beings are not cardboard cutout monsters, they're creatures who live and breathe and walk the pages of his books as convincingly as do his human heroes and heroines. The suspension of disbelief in Tolkien is total.

And then there's his verse. Tolkien's verse has genuine poetic merit, and it's not in the least bit self-conscious; when his characters break into song (which, mind you, occurs fairly often in his books), it always seems the perfectly natural thing to do. Today's poem is an excellent example: in "The Fellowship of the Ring" (the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings"), the eponymous fellowship are forced to detour through the dark and deserted Dwarven mines of Moria. One of the party asks why the Dwarves chose to live in such darksome holes; in reply, Gimli, the lone representative of that race in the Fellowship, half sings, half chants a poem describing the glory of the Dwarven kingdom in the Elder Days... at the end of the recital, the reader is left with the realization that the story of Moria couldn't have been told any other way: mere prose is simply too dry to communicate the wonder and the beauty that was Khazad-dum.

As always with Tolkien, the form reinforces the content to marvellous effect: the language is intentionally archaic, the alliteration pronounced (but never obtrusive), the sense of nostalgia and loss almost palpable. Notice how Gimli never explicitly states just what it was that caused Moria's abandonment: his reticence seems to imply that the events being recounted occurred at a great remove from the here and now; this in turn enhances the mystery, the vague undercurrent of dread that runs through the poem (and especially through the last stanza). This lack of particularity might be annoying in what is ostensibly a historical tale, but this is definitely one of those cases where less is more: a straightforward cataloguing of facts could never hope to capture the audience's attention the way Gimli's hypnotically beautiful couplets do.

And beautiful they certainly are: Tolkien's feel for the English language, for the music of words and the perfection of images, is flawless. It's a pity that his poetic output was (by and large) limited to within the confines of his invented universe (wide though they were); he could easily have been this century's successor to Kipling and Tennyson, so perfect is his verse, so effortless his prosody...

The World was Young, the Mountains Green

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
When Durin woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Durin's Day.

A king he was on carven throne
In many-pillared halls of stone
With golden roof and silver floor,
And runes of power upon the door.
The light of sun and star and moon
In shining lamps of crystal hewn
Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
There shone for ever fair and bright.

There hammer on the anvil smote,
There chisel clove, and graver wrote;
There forged was blade, and bound was hilt;
The delver mined, the mason built.
There beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
And metal wrought like fishes' mail,
Buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
And shining spears were laid in hoard.

Unwearied then were Durin's folk;
Beneath the mountains music woke:
The harpers harped, the minstrels sang,
And at the gates the trumpets rang.

The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dum.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep,
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

-- J. R. R. Tolkien

P.S.: Some stuff in the initial funda isnt mine, thanks to Amit, a friend of mine.

eating a cake in maths

The problem of fair division can be traced back a full 3000 years in history. Stated in simple terms, the problem is:

How do you divide a cake between n people such that each person gets a fair share of the cake? An additional clause is that if someone thinks they got lesser than someone else, then it should be such that, that person alone is to bear the blame.

Lets first consider the case of n=2. If there are two people involved, say Alice and Bob, the solution is simple -- "Alice cuts, Bob chooses". So the best solution for Alice in this scenario is to cut such that she feels both shares are equal halves, so that no matter which piece Bob chooses, she's happy with the other one. Best solution for Bob is that he chooses the piece he thinks is bigger. Now, if Alice didnt cut it into equal halves, and Bob chooses the bigger one, she has only herself to blame for being left with the smaller piece.

If you now extend this to n=3, the problem becomes extemely complicated. You can imagine how the above solution can be extended. Say Tom, Dick, and Harry are trying to divide the cake equally between themselves. You can imagine a solution where Tom cuts the cake into what he thinks are 1/3rd and 2/3rds. Then Dick cuts the 2/3rd piece into two halves. Harry picks one of the three pieces. Tom picks next, and the left over piece goes to Dick.

Some elementary analysis will reveal that this is fair to Tom and Harry, and not fair to Dick. Now, clearly, Harry is satisfied. There are three pieces and he picks the biggest of the three. Tom comes next. If Harry picked one of the pieces that Dick cut, then Tom can take the piece that he cut (as 1/3rd) and be satisfied. If Harry picks the 1/3rd piece that Tom cut, then Tom can take whichever of the other two he thinks is bigger -- at this stage it is a two-person problem betwen Tom and Dick, since he thinks the 2/3rd really was a 2/3rds.

The story for Dick though is very different. If Dick initially thought Tom's cut was fair, then he has no issues, and the solution works for all. However, if Dick thinks Tom's cut was unfair and the 2/3rd was smaller than actual 2/3rd, then no matter what, he will end up with an unfair deal.

The way to fix the solution is to not let Dick think Tom's cut was unfair. This is achieved by allowing Dick to "trim" Tom's 1/3rd version and adding that into the 2/3rd share before making the second cut. Now if Harry thought Tom's cut was fair, then he will pick from Dick's cut since he thinks that is bigger. Tom will also pick from Dick's cut. And Dick can take the "trimmed" 1/3rd since he thought that was a fair 1/3rd. The deal with this solution is it will take 3 cuts (one by Tom, one "trim" by Dick, and another by Dick). If you generalize this to the n player version, then this algorithm will take n*(n-1)/2 cuts.

This problem has been addressed by a lot of mathematicians in history. The first (erroneous) solution for the 3 person problem was provided by Robertson and Webb. The corrected n*(n-1)/2 cuts solution was provided in 1944 by Hugo Steinhaus. Since then advanced concepts in mathematics have chosen this problem to purvey their theories. We'll see a non-envy version of this problem later in this post. Fair division is a very practical problem in the real world. Be it geek-ish like bandwidth sharing, or esoteric like dividing Jerusalem and West Bank. As a twist, the problem gets very intricate and interesting when different parties believe different parts of the cake are better than other parts.

We extend the original problem to fair division without envy. In the earlier case, everyone got a fair deal, but we potentially still had people imagining that others got more than them. In fact, that was the case in all solutions except the 2 person scenario. The two person "I cut, you choose" scenario is guaranteed to be envy-free.

Lets define a cake-division as envy-free if no one thinks that someone else got a larger piece than they did. An envy-free division is always guaranteed to be fair. However a fair division need not be envy-free at all.

Lets look at a solution for the 3-person case envy-free fair division -- same drill: Tom, Dick, and Harry want to divide a cake fairly between them in an envy-free fashion -

• First, Tom divides the cake into three parts which he thinks are equal 1/3rds.
• Next, (a) if Dick thinks the two largest pieces are equal, he does nothing, otherwise (b) Dick trims one piece to achieve two equal largest pieces.
• Now, Harry, Dick, and Tom in that order pick. If Dick trimmed a piece earlier, then he has to pick the trimmed piece unless Harry has already picked it.

At this stage, you have an envy-free fair division of three pieces. What is leftover is the problem of dividing the "trimming".

• Now, if Dick didnt trim, then there is nothing to do. If he did trim, then either Dick or Harry took the trimmed piece. We'll assume Dick took the trimmed piece. (Substitute Harry for Dick in the rest of the solution if Harry took the trimmed piece.) Dick now divides the "trimming" into three equal parts.
  
• Harry, Tom, and Dick in that order now pick. Harry picks first, so he's not envious at all. Tom picks next, but he's absolutely not envious since this trimming is already a bonus for him -- he thought his first three way cut was already equal 1/3rds. Dick picks the last one, but he isnt envious either since he divided the "trimmings" 3-ways.
  

When you extend this to a n-person scenario, the problem becomes extremely complicated. Found a wikipedia link on Fair Division. Wikipedia talks about many versions of the problem and how after a century of solutions Steven Brams and Alan Taylor finally solved it in 1995. That was the solution for the general n-person envy-free fair division. That came 30 years after the first 3-person envy-free fair division solution.

india:the next superpower?

The state of the politics stability of the nation has been on tender hooks ever since the era of major coalition in politics was heralded by the then ruling party at the center by the NDA government.

Over the past few weeks ever since Dr.Mannmohan Singh took a definitive stance over his conviction that a nuclear allegiance with US will hold the country in good stead meeting some of the many varied usages of nuclear power for commercial and domestic purposes, there has been cloud of uncertainty over future of the UPA government completing it full term.

Stepping back from the messy state of current affairs, I shrug to think of the great opportunity that we as the largest democracy are missing out.

Is the utility of the democratic political creed we fought for so passionately 60 years ago to serve us as Indians to build a nation serving the cause of every citizen coming to a cropper?

As I see stalwarts after stalwarts coming up on television and print and striking an opportunistic alliance or put they elected status on sales, I am deeply pained to see the reality and the propose for which we elected them as representatives of people to work for the country in the office of the parliament being so blatantly abused! I am certain that the political stance taken by the leaders are most definitely not representing what a common man on the street and the fields’ cares.

Is it for this that the innocent farmer or an educated urban from the city cast his valued vote– to see his representative being traded like commodity in the political bazaar? Or lobby for minister ship (basically an opportunity to loot the public money) when there is barely enough time left in the last stage of the UPA government? Do you think that the ministers will perform wonders in this while when it takes at least 5 year term for a majority government and a cabinet of ministers to cause a mild impact of reform on the society?


Where has the Lefts secular stand gone today? For years they have been professing secular politics and hold a vision of secular India as sanctum sanctorum , will be voting with BJP to pull a government who they were part to so far ?

Is the Left then only custodian of Indian sovereignty? Which towering leaders like Sharad Pawar, Lalu Prasad, Karunanidhi, APJ Abdul Kalam, and Dr.Manmohan et al don’t worry about?

Where was Samajwadi party all these days? Where they waiting for the crisis to emerge before jumping in to support Sonia lead UPA like a knight in the shining amour?

Did Amar Singh wake up today to fight the cause of Windfall taxes to be imposed on RIL?

Mayawati ? What is her political legacy which has prompted leaders like Chandrababu Naidu , Ajit Singh and other to propose her as the next prime minesratial candidate?

Why are patriarchs like Atal Behari Vajpayee and Jyoti Basu salient? They may not be active in politics but may I question them to seek to understand “Is it the political legacy that they have left behind after their 40 plus years in politics? Aren’t they pain and bother to opine to the nation they helped build.

Where are Party manifestos? reading which the citizen exercises her/his adult franchise? Is there any reference to these documents or party ideologies before bargaining or horse trading?

Today, India is widely acknowledges as an emerging super power! The opportunity to lead by example on a global stage and set benchmark of global citizen is OUR lest we lose playing opportunistic petty politics.

The process of democracy is a powerful tool in our hands. Let’s take this opportunity to CHANGE the political constitution. We can today put the best and the brightest minds from the country to good use. The unbridled leadership be unleashed to make good of the time of our lives to become a model nation and global benchmark.


Time then to conceive a political constitutional blueprint for the future:

A blueprint which mandatory have issues pertaining to the national interest as a necessary precondition in every parties election manifesto:

Matters related to :

· Healthcare
· Education.
· Farming
· National Defense.
· National Integrity and Sovereignty.
· Human Rights.
· Pluralistic View point promoting inclusive agendas for all religions, cast and creed.
· One Country , One Nation concept and fearlessly condemning the likes of Raj Thackeray or other devious minds splitting the nations unity.
· Above all compete in the global society as one united nation honoring decisions taken by the elected state head unilaterally.


Only then shall we claim to be better than the best society and add meaning to being the world’s largest democracy. There are one too many challenges that we have to face as a united nation, challenges which are outside the country. High time we sorted the internal political skirmished and behaved like a mature democratic country. After all 6 decades of freedom should lend some civility to our societies.

This is the “Audacity of Hope” that I carry for my beloved nation “INDIA” the SuperPower by 2020.

will the great indian middle class please stand up!

Where is the “Great Indian Middle Class”? Where are those conspicuously-consuming, frequently-flying, gizmo-toting, big car-driving, globalized offsprings of our jet-setting “new economy”? Don’t we see them all around us: living in highrises with blue-tiled swimming pools, with people living a few miles away getting water once in three days, shopping in glittering malls built on the land of evicted slums, driving around in Toyotas and Chevrolets on roads choked with traffic? From all accounts, and appearances, we have reached the heady days when the Indian middle class has finally arrived. They are the ones who supposedly constitute one of the biggest markets in the world, for whom multinational corporations are falling over one another to invest in India, for whom our governments’ policies are directed, for whom roads and airports are built, for they ARE the “people” of India. This great middle class is our hope, the engine of growth for our economy.

But is it true? Can we try to find out who, and how many, belong to the middle class in India? The data sets available from the surveys of the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) and from the 2007 report of the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS), better known as the Arjun Sengupta Commission, make for sobering, and often startling reading. The last three surveys of the NSSO, possibly the most comprehensive surveys on employment-unemployment and consumption expenditure, were done in 1993-94, 1999-2000 and 2004-05. We will take a look mostly at the 2004-05 data in our search for the Indian middle class.

The NSSO surveys collect data on consumption from each of the selected sample households in a detailed schedule containing a list of every conceivable item of consumption ranging from edibles to fuels to clothing and consumer durables, and also include educational and medical goods and services. Based on these extensive datasets, the NCEUS computed the monthly per capita consumption expenditure (MPCE) and daily per capita consumption expenditure (DPCE) in an effort to evaluate the performance of the economy in terms of the consumption expenditure of our people. Based on these values, each household was classified as one of the following: “extremely poor” when the MPCE is less than or equal to 0.75 times the poverty line (PL), “poor” when the MPCE is greater than 0.75 PL but less than or equal to 1.0 PL, “marginal” when MPCE is greater than 1.0 PL but less than or equal to 1.25 PL, “vulnerable” when MPCE is greater than 1.25 PL but less than or equal to 2.0 PL, “middle income” when MPCE is greater than 2.0 PL but less than or equal to 4.0 PL and “high income” when MPCE is greater than 4 PL.

Before we go into the details of what percentage of our population belongs to each group, it would be instructive to know what the poverty line is. There is considerable criticism about the determination of the poverty line in India, which systematically underestimates poverty and deprivation. The authors of the report determine the poverty line from the data of the employment-unemployment survey (EUS) and the results are not very different from the official poverty line estimates. For example, the official poverty line for 2004-05 is Rs 356.3 for rural areas and Rs 538.6 for urban areas whereas the poverty line as computed by the commission is Rs 346.2 for rural areas and Rs 514.0 for urban areas. It is also important to know that for international comparison purposes, people below purchasing power parity (PPP) of $1 are considered extremely poor and those below PPP of $2 are considered poor. $2 at PPP therefore signifies a sort of international poverty line.

Now, coming back to the data from the NCEUS, we find that the extremely poor have an average DPCE of just Rs 9 (PPP $1), the poor has DPCE of Rs 12 (PPP $1.3), the marginal, Rs 15 (PPP $1.6), and the vulnerable, Rs 20 (PPP $2.2). The middle income group has an average DPCE of Rs 37 (PPP $4) and the high income group has an average DPCE, the highest in India, of Rs 93 (PPP $10.2). These estimates are nationwide averages including rural and urban areas. These data by themselves are startling. The extremely poor, the poor, the marginal and vulnerable on an average subsist on less than Rs 20 per day and on less than Rs 600 per month (remember that the average to and fro train fare for an overnight journey in the lowest reserved class is around Rs 600; therefore, not withstanding Lalu Prasad’s “populist” rail budgets, a train journey in a reserved compartment is out of bounds for all these people). The middle income group in India has an average daily consumption of the princely sum of Rs 37 and an average monthly consumption of Rs 1,098 which is just double the international poverty line (the airfare for a single journey in one of the low-cost air lines is around Rs 3000, which means that the airports and the proliferating airlines are not for these people). This leaves the high income group, and even the presence of the Tatas and the Ambanis, and the 53 dollar billionaires of India who contribute 31% of the GDP, and the thousands of conspicuously-consuming software professionals, does not pull the average DPCE of this group above Rs 93. This means that for an overwhelming number of people in this group, the DPCE would be much below Rs 93, and would be actually closer to the average DPCE of the middle income group.

Now, after we have an idea of “who” might (or might not) belong to the “great middle class” in India, looking at the percentage distribution of the above groups among the population will tell us “how many” of our people really belong to this group. The 2004-05 data on the distribution of population among these various groups classified on the basis of consumption expenditure show that 6.4% of the population is extremely poor, 15.4% is poor, 19.0% is marginal and 36.0% belongs to the vulnerable group. This means that together, a staggering 77% of the population lives on less than Rs 20 per day, which barely reaches up to the poverty line (therefore, a train journey with a reservation is out of question for 77% of our population, unless they go hungry for a month). Among these, 41%, the extremely poor, poor and marginal, live on an average expenditure of Rs 15 a day, which cannot afford more than a miserable existence in today’s India. The vulnerable section, which constitutes 36% of the population, is one mishap away from destitution. So, a death or disease or even a crop failure can drive them to desperation; we now know to which group all the “suicidal” farmers belong. This leaves the so-called middle income group which constitutes 19.3% of the population; but these definitely do not constitute our fabled “middle class” with an average monthly expenditure of Rs 1098, which wouldn’t even afford them a family dinner at any of the fancy restaurants. We finally come to the high income group, and find to our dismay that they just constitute 4% of the population. And remember, even this group has an average daily consumption of Rs 93, which is less than the price of two litres of petrol or a taxi ride in one of the big cities. Therefore, as we observed before, we estimate that an overwhelming majority, maybe 80%, of people in this bracket would actually be nearer to the middle income group than to the software professionals and business people who constitute our “visible” middle class. So, a back of the envelope calculation would show that the middle class, which we have been searching for, can be estimated to be around 0.8% of our population, which comes to around 8-10 million people. There is our “Great Indian Middle Class”.

So, we finally find that our “great” middle class, for whom malls and multiplexes are built, rail fares are reduced, airports are constructed, and “Nanos”, stained with the blood and tears of evicted farmers, roll off assembly lines, is more like the legendary Cheshire cat of Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. If you look at it deeply and deconstruct it using statistics, it slowly disappears until what remains of it is its smile, suspended in mid-air as a macabre joke on the Indian people.

child , gap and sweatshops

Child workers, some as young as 10, have been found working in a textile factory in conditions close to slavery to produce clothes that appear destined for Gap Kids, one of the most successful arms of the high street giant.

Speaking to The Observer, the children described long hours of unwaged work, as well as threats and beatings.

Gap said it was unaware that clothing intended for the Christmas market had been improperly subcontracted to a sweatshop using child labour. It announced it had withdrawn the garments involved while it investigated breaches of the ethical code imposed by it three years ago.

The discovery of the children working in filthy conditions in the Shahpur Jat area of Delhi has renewed concerns about the outsourcing by large retail chains of their garment production to India, recognised by the United Nations as the world’s capital for child labour.

According to one estimate, more than 20 per cent of India’s economy is dependent on children, the equivalent of 55 million youngsters under 14.

The Observer discovered the children in a filthy sweatshop working on piles of beaded children’s blouses marked with serial numbers that Gap admitted corresponded with its own inventory. The company has pledged to convene a meeting of its Indian suppliers as well as withdrawing tens of thousands of the embroidered girl’s blouses from the market, before they reach the stores. The hand-stitched tops, which would have been sold for about £20, were destined for shelves in America and Europe in the next seven days in time to be sold to Christmas shoppers.

With endorsements from celebrities including Madonna, Lenny Kravitz and Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker, Gap has become one of the most successful and iconic brands in fashion. Last year the firm embarked on a huge poster and TV campaign surrounding Product Red, a charitable trust for Africa founded by the U2 lead singer Bono.

Despite its charitable activities, Gap has been criticised for outsourcing large contracts to the developing world. In 2004, when it launched its social audit, it admitted that forced labour, child labour, wages below the minimum wage, physical punishment and coercion were among abuses it had found at some factories producing garments for it. It added that it had terminated contracts with 136 suppliers as a consequence.

In the past year Gap has severed contracts with a further 23 suppliers for workplace abuses.

Gap said in a statement from its headquarters in San Francisco: ‘We firmly believe that under no circumstances is it acceptable for children to produce or work on garments. These allegations are deeply upsetting and we take this situation very seriously. All of our suppliers and their subcontractors are required to guarantee that they will not use child labour to produce garments. In this situation, it’s clear one of our vendors violated this agreement and a full investigation is under way.’

Professor Sheotaj Singh, co-founder of the DSV, or Dayanand Shilpa Vidyalaya, a Delhi-based rehabilitation centre and school for rescued child workers, said he believed that as long as cut-price embroidered goods were sold in stores across Britain, America, continental Europe and elsewhere in the West, there would be a problem with unscrupulous subcontractors using children.

‘It is obvious what the attraction is here for Western conglomerates,’ he told The Observer. ‘The key thing India has to offer the global economy is some of the world’s cheapest labour, and this is the saddest thing of all the horrors that arise from Delhi’s 15,000 inadequately regulated garment factories, some of which are among the worst sweatshops ever to taint the human conscience.

‘Consumers in the West should not only be demanding answers from retailers as to how goods are produced but looking deep within themselves at how they spend their money.’

the man-made famine

For anyone who understands the current food crisis, it is hard to listen to the head of the World Bank, Robert Zoellick, without gagging.

Earlier , Zoellick waxed apocalyptic about the consequences of the global surge in prices, arguing that free trade had become a humanitarian necessity, to ensure that poor people had enough to eat. The current wave of food riots has already claimed the prime minister of Haiti, and there have been protests around the world, from Mexico, to Egypt, to India.

The reason for the price rise is perfect storm of high oil prices, an increasing demand for meat in developing countries, poor harvests, population growth, financial speculation and biofuels. But prices have fluctuated before. The reason we’re seeing such misery as a result of this particular spike has everything to do with Zoellick and his friends.

Before he replaced Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, Zoellick was the US trade representative, their man at the World Trade Organisation. While there, he won a reputation as a tough and guileful negotiator, savvy with details and pushy with the neoconservative economic agenda: a technocrat with a knuckleduster.

His mission was to accelerate two decades of trade liberalisation in key strategic commodities for the United States, among them agriculture. Practically, this meant the removal of developing countries’ ability to stockpile grain (food mountains interfere with the market), to create tariff barriers (ditto), and to support farmers (they ought to be able to compete on their own). This Zoellick did often, and enthusiastically.

Without agricultural support policies, though, there’s no buffer between the price shocks and the bellies of the poorest people on earth. No option to support sustainable smaller-scale farmers, because they’ve been driven off their land by cheap EU and US imports. No option to dip into grain reserves because they’ve been sold off to service debt. No way of increasing the income of the poorest, because social programmes have been cut to the bone.

The reason that today’s price increases hurt the poor so much is that all protection from price shocks has been flayed away, by organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank.

Even the World Bank’s own Independent Evaluation Groupadmits (pdf) that the bank has been doing a poor job in agriculture. Part of the bank’s vision was to clear away the government agricultural clutter so that the private sector could come in to make agriculture efficient. But, as the Independent Evaluation Group delicately puts it, “in most reforming countries, the private sector did not step in to fill the vacuum when the public sector withdrew.” After the liberalisation of agriculture, the invisible hand was nowhere to be seen.

But governments weren’t allowed to return to the business of supporting agriculture. Trade liberalisation agreements and World Bank loan conditions, such as those promoted by Zoellick, have made food sovereignty impossible.

This is why, when we see Dominique Strauss-Kahn of the IMF wailing about food prices, or Zoellick using the crisis to argue with breathless urgency for more liberalisation, the only reasonable response is nausea.

why its india

1. India is the world's largest, oldest, continuous civilization.

2. India never invaded any country in her last 10,000 years of history.

3. India is the world's largest democracy.

4. Varanasi, also known as Benares, was called "The Ancient City" when Lord Buddha visited it in 500 B.C.E, and is the oldest, continuously inhabited city in the world today.

5. India invented the Number System. Aryabhatta invented the number zero.

6. The World's first university was established in Takshashila in 700 B.C. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.

7. Sanskrit is the mother of all European languages. Sanskrit is the most suitable language for computer software - a report in Forbes magazine, July 1987.

8. Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans. Charaka, the father of medicine consolidated Ayurveda 2,500 years ago.

9. Although modern images of India often show poverty and lack of development, India was the richest country on earth until the time of British invasion in the early 17th Century. Christopher Columbus discovered America trying to find an alternative way to get to India.

10. The art of Navigation was born in the river Sindhu 6,000 years ago. The very word Navigation is derived from the Sanskrit word NAVGATIH. The word navy is also derived from Sanskrit 'Nou'.

11. Bhaskaracharya calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the sun hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. Time taken by earth to orbit the sun: (5th century) 365.258756484 days.

12. Budhayana, was the first to calculate the value of ?pi?. He then went on to explain the concept of what today is known as the ?Pythagorean Theorem?. He discovered this in the 6th century long before the European mathematicians.

13. Algebra, trigonometry and calculus came from India. Sridharacharya developed quadratic equations in the 11th century. The largest numbers the Greeks and the Romans used were 106, whereas Hindus were using numbers as big as 10 to the power of 53, as early as 5,000 BCE during the Vedic period. Even today, the largest used number is Tera (10 to the power of 12).

14. IEEE has proved what has been a century old suspicion in the scientific community, that the pioneer of wireless communication was Prof. Jagdish Bose and not Marconi.

15. The earliest reservoir and dam for irrigation was built in Saurashtra.

16. According to Saka King Rudradaman I of 150 BCE, a beautiful lake called Sudarshana was constructed on the hills of Raivataka during Chandragupta Maurya's time.

17. Chess (Shataranja or AshtaPada) was invented in India.

18. Sushruta is the father of surgery. 2,600 years ago he and health scientists of his time conducted complicated surgeries like cesareans, cataract, artificial limbs, fractures, urinary stones, plastic surgery and brain surgery. Usage of anesthesia was well known in ancient India. Over 125 surgical tools were used. Deep knowledge of anatomy, physiology, etiology, embryology, digestion, metabolism, genetics and immunity is also found in many texts.

19. When many cultures were only nomadic forest dwellers over 5,000 years ago, Indians established the Harappan culture in the Sindhu Valley (Indus Valley Civilization).

20. The four religions born in India, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, are followed by 25% of the world's population.

21. The place value system and the decimal system were developed in India in 100 BC.

22. India is one of the few countries in the World, which gained independence without violence.

23. India has the second largest pool of Scientists and Engineers in the World.

24. India is the largest English-speaking nation in the world.

25. India is the only country other than U.S. and Japan, to have built a super computer indigenously.

untitled laws of men

1: Under no circumstances may two men share an umbrella.

2: It is OK for a man to cry ONLY under the following circumstances:

(a) When a heroic dog dies to save its master.

(b) The moment Angelina Jolie starts unbuttoning her Blouse.

(c) After wrecking your boss's car.

3: Any man who brings a camera to a stag night may be legally killed and eaten by his friends.

4: If you've known a guy for more than 24 hours, his sister is off limits forever unless you actually marry her.

5: Moaning about the brand of free beer in a mate's fridge is forbidden. However complain at will if the temperature is unsuitable.

6: No man shall ever be required to buy a birthday present for another man. In fact, even remembering your mate's birthday is strictly optional. At that point, you must celebrate at a strip bar of the birthday boy's choice.

7: In the mini-bus, the strongest bladder determines pit stops, not the weakest.

8: When stumbling upon other blokes watching a sporting event, you may ask the score of the game in progress, but you may never ask who's playing. -->

9: You may fart in front of a woman . If you trap her head under the covers for the purpose of flatulent entertainment (commonly known as a Dutch oven), she's officially your girlfriend.

10: It is permissible to drink a fruity alcohol drink only when you're sunning on a tropical beach ... and it's delivered by a topless model and only when it's free.

11: Only in situations of moral and/or physical peril are you allowed to kick another guy in the nuts.

12: Unless you're in prison, never fight naked.

13: Friends don't let friends wear Speedos. Ever. Issue closed.

14: If a man's fly is down, that's his problem, you didn't see anything.

15: Women who claim they 'love to watch sports' must be treated as spies until they demonstrate knowledge of the game and the ability to drink as much as the other sports watchers.

16: A man in the company of a hot, suggestively dressed woman must remain sober enough to fight.

17: Never hesitate to reach for the last beer or the last slice of pizza, but not both, that's just greedy.

18: If you compliment a guy on his six-pack, you'd better be talking about his choice of beer.

19: Never join your girlfriend or wife in discussing a friend of yours, except if she's withholding sex pending your response.

20: Never talk to a man in a bathroom unless you are on equal footing i.e., both urinating, both waiting in line, etc. For all other situations, an almost imperceptible nod is all the conversation you need.

21: Never allow a telephone conversation with a woman to go on longer than you are able to have sex with her. Keep a stopwatch by the phone. Hang up if necessary.

22: The morning after you and a girl who was formerly 'just a friend' have carnal, drunken monkey sex. The fact that you're feeling weird and guilty is no reason for you not to nail each other again before the discussion occurs about what a big mistake it was.

23: It is acceptable for you to drive her car. It is not acceptable for her to drive yours. -->

24: Thou shall not buy a car in the colours of brown, pink, lime, green, orange or sky blue.

25: The girl who replies to the question 'What do you want for Christmas?' with 'If you loved me, you'd know what I want!' gets an Xbox 360 End of story.

26: There is no reason for guys to watch Ice Skating or Men's Gymnastics. Ever.

27: We've all heard about people having guts or balls. But do you really know the difference between them? In an effort to keep you informed, the definition of each is listed below:
· 'GUTS' is arriving home late after a night out with the guys, being assaulted by your wife with a broom, and having the guts to say, 'are you still cleaning or are you flying somewhere?'

· 'BALLS' is coming home late after a night out with the guys smelling of perfume and beer, lipstick on your collar, slapping your wife square on the ass and having the balls to say, 'You're next fatty!'

my job application

NAME: neonstein (Grumpy Bastard)

SEX: Not lately, but I am looking for the right woman (or at least one who will cooperate)

DESIRED POSITION: Company's Chief Executive or Managing Director. But seriously, whatever's available. If I was in a position to be picky, I wouldn't be applying in the first place - would I?

DESIRED SALARY: £150,,000 a year plus share options and a Tony Blair style redundancy package. If that's not possible, make an offer and we can haggle.

EDUCATION: Yes.

LAST POSITION HELD: Target for middle management hostility.

PREVIOUS SALARY: A lot less than I'm worth.

MOST NOTABLE ACHIEVEMENT: My incredible collection of stolen pens and defunct cds.

REASON FOR LEAVING: It was a crap job.

HOURS AVAILABLE TO WORK: Any.

PREFERRED HOURS: 1:30-3:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

DO YOU HAVE ANY SPECIAL SKILLS?: Yes, but they're better suited to a more intimate environment.

MAY WE CONTACT YOUR CURRENT EMPLOYER?: If I had one, would I be here?

DO YOU HAVE ANY PHYSICAL CONDITIONS THAT WOULD PROHIBIT YOU FROM LIFTING UP TO 50 lbs.?: Of what?

DO YOU HAVE A CAR?: I think the more appropriate question here would be "Do you have a car that runs?"

HAVE YOU RECEIVED ANY SPECIAL AWARDS OR RECOGNITION?: I may already be a winner of the Reader's Digest Timeshare Free Holiday Offer, so they tell me.

DO YOU SMOKE?: On the job - no! On my breaks - yes!

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO BE DOING IN FIVE YEARS?: Living in the Bahamas with a
fabulously wealthy Swedish supermodel and who thinks I'm the greatest thing since sliced bread. Actually, I'd like to be doing that now.

NEAREST RELATIVE....7 miles

DO YOU CERTIFY THAT THE ABOVE IS TRUE AND COMPLETE TO THE BEST OF YOUR
KNOWLEDGE?: Oh yes, absolutely.

even the world votes for change

People around the globe widely expect the next American president to improve the country's policies toward the rest of the world, especially if Barack Obama is elected, yet they retain a persistently poor image of the U.S., according to a poll released Thursday.

The survey of two dozen countries, conducted this spring by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, also found a growing despondency over the international economy, with majorities in 18 nations calling domestic economic conditions poor. In more bad news for the U.S., people shared a widespread sense the American economy was hurting their countries, including large majorities in U.S. allies Britain, Germany, Australia, Turkey, France and Japan.

Even six in 10 Americans agreed the U.S. economy was having a negative impact abroad.

Views of the U.S. improved or stayed the same as last year in 18 nations, the first positive signs the poll has found for the U.S. image worldwide this decade. Even so, many improvements were modest and the U.S. remains less popular in most countries than it was before it invaded Iraq in 2003, with majorities in only eight expressing favorable opinions.

Substantial numbers in most countries said they are closely following the U.S. presidential election, including 83 percent in Japan _ about the same proportion who said so in the U.S. Of those following the campaign, optimism that the new president will reshape American foreign policy for the better is substantial, with the largest segment of people in 14 countries _ including the U.S. _ saying so.

Andrew Kohut, president of Pew, said many seem to be hoping the U.S. role in the world will improve with the departure of President Bush, who remains profoundly unpopular almost everywhere.

"People think the U.S. wants to run the world," said Kohut. "It's not more complicated than that."

Countries most hopeful the new president will improve U.S. policies include France, Spain and Germany, where public opposition to Bush's policies in Iraq and elsewhere has been strong. Strong optimism also came from countries where pique with U.S. policies has been less pronounced, including India, Nigeria, Tanzania and South Africa.

Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon have the strongest expectations the next president will worsen U.S. policies, consistent with the skepticism expressed on many issues in the survey by Muslim countries. Japan, Turkey, Russia, South Korea and Mexico had large numbers saying the election would change little.

Among those tracking the American election, greater numbers in 20 countries expressed more confidence in Obama, the likely Democratic nominee, than John McCain, the Republican candidate, to handle world affairs properly. The two contenders were tied in the U.S., Jordan and Pakistan. Obama's edge was largest in Western Europe, Australia, Japan, Tanzania and Indonesia, where he lived for a time as a child.

The U.S. was the only country where most expressed confidence in McCain. Besides the countries where he and Obama were tied, McCain's smallest gaps against his rival were in India and China, where neither man engenders much confidence.

The U.S. is seen as the world's leading economic power by 22 countries in the survey. Yet in 11 countries, more think China will replace the U.S. as the world's dominant superpower or has already done so than predict that will never happen.

At the same time, China's favorable ratings have edged downward since last year, with widespread worry over its military power, pollution and human rights record. The survey was taken during China's crackdown on unrest in Tibet, but before last month's earthquake in China.

The poll also found:

_Sixty percent or more had favorable views of the U.S. in South Korea, Poland, India, Tanzania, Nigeria and South Africa. One in five or fewer had positive impressions in Egypt, Argentina, Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey.

_Nine in 10 in South Korea and Lebanon say their economies are in bad shape, while eight in 10 Chinese, seven in 10 Australians and six in 10 Indians say theirs are strong.

_Hillary Rodham Clinton, who lost the Democratic nomination to Obama, generally was rated higher than McCain overseas but lower than Obama.

_There is growing pessimism that a stable democratic government will take hold in Iraq, with majorities only in Nigeria, India and Tanzania predicting success.

_Only in the U.S., Britain and Australia do most want U.S. and NATO forces to say in Afghanistan.

_Iran is viewed mostly negatively. Even the eight countries in the survey with large Muslim populations have mixed views. In six of those eight, Muslims oppose Iran getting nuclear weapons.

The polling was conducted from March 17-April 21, mostly in April, interviewing adults face to face in 17 countries and by telephone in the remaining seven. Local languages were used.

The number interviewed in each country ranged from 700 in Australia to 3,212 in China. All samples were national except for China, Pakistan, India and Brazil, where the samples were mostly urban. The margins of sampling error were plus or minus 3 percentage points or 4 points in every country but China and India, where it was 2 points.

with age beauty creeps inwards

In April, of last year, Maya Angelou was interviewed by Oprah on her
74th birthday. Oprah asked her what she thought of growing older.
And there on television, she said it was "exciting." Regarding body
changes, she said there were many occurring every day...like her
breasts.. they seem to be in a race to see which will reach her waist first.
The audience laughed so hard they cried.

She also said this....

"I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today,
life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow."

"I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she
handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled
Christmas tree lights."

"I've learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents,
you'll miss them when they're gone from your life.."

"I've learned that making a "living" is not the same thing as "making a
life."

"I've learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance."

"I've learned that you shouldn't go through life with a catcher's mitt
on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back."

"I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I
usually make the right decision."

"I've learned that even when I have pains, I don't have to be one."

"I've learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone.
People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back."

"I've learned that I still have a lot to learn."

"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will
forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them
feel."


Life may not be the party we hoped for, but while we're here we might
as well dance.

mapping u.s.a. minds

It would appear that more and more young Americans know less and less about the world they inhabit. A recent survey has revealed that the average 18 to 24 year old could only answer 54% of questions correctly. This is indeed a depressing and worrying figure.

Over 60% of Americans aged 18-24 couldn’t find Iraq on a map of the Middle East (yes, a map of the Middle East… not even a map of the world) in a 2006 survey (that’s three years after the start of the war). The survey found a few other interesting facts:

Only 50% think that map-reading skills are “absolutely essential”
Despite that fact, 75% couldn’t find Iran or Israel on the same Middle East map.
65% couldn’t find the UK on a world map.
88% couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map of Asia.
Half of people couldn’t find India or Japan on the Asian map
70% couldn’t find North Korea, and only 37% knew that the North/South Korea border is more heavily fortified than the US/Mexico border and the China/Russia border (both of which are mostly barren).
Only 35% knew about the huge earthquake in Pakistan, which had killed 70,000 people only a few months before the survey.
74% of people thought that English is a more common first language than Mandarin Chinese(which was picked by 18%).
When asked to pick the country with a Muslim majority (between Indonesia, India, Armenia, and South Africa), 48% thought it was India (which is only 10% Muslim) and only 25% picked Indonesia (which is over 80% Muslim).
More interestingly, people thought that the Mississippi’s flow had something to do with Hurricane Katrina.

Even for U.S. geography, the survey results are just as dismal.

Half could not find New York State on a map of the United States!

A third of the respondents could not find Louisiana, and 48 percent couldn't locate Mississippi on a map of the United States, even though Hurricane Katrina put these southeastern states in the spotlight in 2005.

Many young Americans also lack basic map-reading skills.

Told they could escape an approaching hurricane by evacuating to the northwest, only two-thirds could indicate which way northwest is on a map.

Perhaps even more worrying is the finding that few U.S. young adults seem to care.

Fewer than three in ten think it's absolutely necessary to know where countries in the news are located. Only 14 percent believe speaking another language fluently is a necessary skill.

Fewer than one in five young Americans own a world map.

This geographic ineptitude was further emphasized when young Americans were asked questions on how the United States fits into the wider world.

Three in ten respondents put the U.S. population between one and two billion (it's just under 300 million, according the U.S. Census Bureau). Seventy-four percent said English is the most commonly spoken native language in the world (it's Mandarin Chinese).

Although 73 percent knew the U.S. is the world's largest consumer of oil, nearly as many (71 percent) did not know that the U.S. is also the world's largest exporter of goods and services, when measured in terms of monetary value; half think it's China.

And what about India, which features prominently in the job-outsourcing debate, even more so in the USA than the UK? Forty-seven percent of young Americans were unable to locate where their jobs may well go on a map of Asia.

On a positive note, since 2002 the percentage of young Americans who use the Internet for news has more than doubled from 11 percent to 27 percent. Respondents who use the Internet were found to do better on the survey than those who do not. So perhaps as Internet usage increases so will Americans geographical knowledge. But as long as the American educational system is obviously failing its young people in this respect there is more and more likelihood of a dangerous trend towards isolationism born out of ignorance. It might be worth whoever wins the election in November giving this some consideration - just don't hold your breath.

why am i what i am

i wake up in the morning after the stupid alarm in my cellphone has beeping in the most ultrasonic way possible.i go to the bathroom and begin bathing in the warm springs of h2o that have come from the shower.being a bathroom thinker,i wondered-how come i live in such a luxury?in the last few minutes,some things have saved me efforts which would have taken hours to do.so who is responsible for this?and the bulb of thought lits up and i get the answer,engineers.such small thing reassure me everyday that i have taken up a profession which will reduce the toils of humankind,this is why i chose to be an engineer.
from childhood i was fascinated by gizmos ,gears,gauges and giant working parts. i loved to repair stuff in my house,assist the handyman and sometimes just admire the complexities of simple things.that is why i never hesitated while making a decision about my career.the next question arises,why the subject electronics.i love the concept of currents,conductors,capacitors and everything that sparks.i am fascinated by the snot green color of the pcb and the beta and gammas of the transistors.you can say that i eat,sleep and breathe electronics,electronics was my hobby,which developed into a passion and now is my career.isn't life worthwhile when passion turns to work.
its difficult to say what would i do if i wasn't an engineer.but the next thing i am passionate about is writing.my alternate career option would be journalism.journalist has a interesting and adventurous life.they get to meet people,discuss issues and do something to bring about a change.we get a chance to interact with people,people who share experiences and experiences which are the ultimate and purest form of knowledge.journalist are the mirror of our problems,agents of change in the rising of India.
these are the two professions that my relatively vagabond mind adhere to and it says-"who determines which profession is superior to another.in an event of a drought,the need for a simple water bearer is much more then all the admirals in the world.

back from hibernation

animals preferably hibernate in winter,but i chose to differ to do it in summer.actually i had gone for an research internship,which was immediately followed by my university engineering exam.at last,now i am 0.25 an engineer and will write ,hopefully,better basscrap and more stupid stuff for you to munch upon.

the red pill or the blue pill?

The question of which pill to take illustrates the personal aspect of the decision to study philosophy. Do you live on in ignorance (and potentially bliss) or do you lead what Aristotle called 'the examined life'...

The Matrix is a film filled with religious and philosophical symbolism. The plot supposes that humans live in vats many years in the future, being fed false sensory information by a giant virtual reality computer (the Matrix). The perpetrators of this horror are machines of the future who use humans as a source of power. Humans are literally farmed.

The central character of the film, Neo, is presented to us in the opening part of the film as a loner who is searching for a mysterious character called Morpheus (named after the Greek god of dreams and sleep). He is also trying to discover the answer to the question "What is the Matrix?"

Morpheus contacts Neo just as the machines (posing as sinister 'agents') are trying to keep Neo from finding out any more. When Morpheus and Neo meet, Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The red pill will answer the question "what is the Matrix?" (by removing him from it) and the blue pill simply for life to carry on as before. As Neo reaches for the red pill Morpheus warns Neo "Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

The film as a whole and especially the choosing scene is deeply compelling. Why is the choice between what you believe you know and an unknown 'real' truth so fascinating? How could a choice possibly be made? On the one hand everyone you love and everything that you have built you life upon. One the other the promise only of truth.

The question then is not about pills, but what they stand for in these circumstances. The question is asking us whether reality, truth, is worth pursuing. The blue pill will leave us as we are, in a life consisting of habit, of things we believe we know. We are comfortable, we do not need truth to live. The blue pill symbolises commuting to work every day, or brushing your teeth.

The red pill is an unknown quantity. We are told that it can help us to find the truth. We don't know what that truth is, or even that the pill will help us to find it. The red pill symbolises risk, doubt and questioning. In order to answer the question, you can gamble your whole life and world on a reality you have never experienced.

However, in order to investigate which course of action to take we need to investigate why the choice is faced. Why should we even have to decide whether to pursue truth?

The answer in short, is inquisitiveness. Many people throughout human existence have questioned and enquired. Most of them have not been scientists or doctors or philosophers, but simply ordinary people asking 'what if?' or 'why?' Asking these questions ultimately leads us to a choice. Do you continue to ask and investigate, or do you stop and never ask again? This in essence, is the question posed to Neo in the film.

So what are the advantages of taking the blue pill? As one of the characters in the film says, "ignorance is bliss" Essentially, if the truth is unknown, or you believe that you know the truth, what is there to question or worry about?

By accepting what we are told and experience life can be easier. There is the social pressure to 'fit in', which is immensely strong in most cultures. Questioning the status quo carries the danger of ostracism, possibly persecution. This aspect has a strong link with politics. People doing well under the current system are not inclined to look favourably on those who question the system. Morpheus says to Neo "You have to understand that many people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."

The system also has a place for you, an expected path to follow. This removes much of the doubt and discomfort experienced by a trailblazer.

Another argument on the side of the blue pill is how does anyone know that the status quo is not in fact the truth? The act of simply questioning does not infer a lack of validity on the questioned. Why not assume that your experience is innocent until proven guilty? Just accept everything?

So if the arguments for the blue pill are so numerous, why take the red pill? Why pursue truth even though it may be unpalatable and the journey to it hard? In the film, Neo risks death to escape the virtual reality and discovers a brutal reality from which he cannot return. As he discovers the trouble with asking questions is that the answers are not necessarily what you want to hear.

To justify taking the red pill we might ask what is the purpose of an ignorant existence? Further still, what is there in merely existing? Simply existing brings humans down to the level of objects; they might have utility or even purpose, but where is the meaning? Existence without meaning is surely not living your life, but just experiencing it. As Trinity says to Neo, "The Matrix cannot tell you who you are."

Given the potential disadvantages of choosing the red pill, the motivation for discovering the truth must then be very strong. The film makes much of this point. Trinity says to Neo "It's the question that drives us, Neo." and Morpheus compares the motivation for Neo's search to "a splinter in your mind - driving you mad." The motivation for answering the question is obviously strong as the answer will help us to find the meaning in our lives.

What we are looking at here is the drive to answer a question, but the key to this is what drove the question in the first place. The asking of questions about our environment our experience and ourselves is fundamental to the human condition. Children ask a seemingly never-ending stream of questions from an early age. It is only with education and socialisation that some people stop asking these questions. However, we remain, as it were, hard-wired to enquire.

This is an inevitable consequence of consciousness. A being with a mind, conscious of itself and its existence, experiencing a reality, needs to organise the data that it receives from its senses. Simply observing and recording does not allow for consciousness. It is what we do with that information that allows us to think. In order to process and store the vast amount of information received, the human brain attempts to identify patterns in the data; looking for the patterns behind what is experienced. This is asking questions of the sensory information, and requires reasoning. By definition a conscious mind seeks to know. Knowing something requires more than just data, but intelligence or reasoning applied to that data. To attempt to obtain knowledge we must therefore question the data our mind receives; thus, consciousness questions.

So the metaphor of the journey to truth that Neo takes is complete. The journey starts with a question, there is a search for the answer and the answer may be reached. This shows us that the journey does not start with Neo choosing between the pills, or with ourselves deciding whether to question. The act of asking the question is itself the starting point as the aim of asking the question is to seek truth and knowledge.

We have established that consciousness is aware and seeks knowledge and that thus the conscious mind must question. To question is to seek the truth and start on the journey to knowledge. Therefore the choice between the pills is surely made for us. The fact that we are conscious appears to require us to take the red pill.

However, this can be simply countered by someone who would prefer to take the blue pill. They may wish to seek the truth in a different way, or in a less mind jarring set of circumstances. They can choose the blue pill and not deny their consciousness, but to stop seeking the truth entirely would be to deny their consciousness.

Thus we are philosophically driven to seek the truth and the act of questioning whether to seek it is in itself seeking the truth. As conscious minds we will always seek the truth. However, the choice over the red or blue pills is not solely a choice between whether to question or not, it is a personal choice on the method of discovering the truth.

real time games

my dear zohaib asks for some real-life examples of game theory in ethics.

In many instances where game theory intersects real life, we just play the game according to the (local) Nash equilibrium. The phrase "All's fair in love and war" says that one is free to pursue the strategy that will bring the greatest immediate individual benefit. We construct specifically ethical systems when for one reason or another, we have to go "outside" the game to achieve what we intuitively feel is the best overall outcome.

For example, I can go into a restaurant, eat a meal, and then be presented with the bill. This is an example of a related game, the asymmetric closed bag exchange. Regardless of whether or not I'm actually served a good meal, I am always "better off" not paying (I get to eat the meal and keep my money). Paying before I eat (like at McDonalds) just changes the asymmetry; whether or not I pay, it's always "better" for the restaurant to not feed me (defect) once I've paid (cooperated).

The Pareto optimum (and usually the global maximum), though, is for the restaurant to serve me a good meal and for me to pay.

In a small community, we can play tit-for-tat. If I don't pay on Monday (he cooperates, I defect), the restaurant won't serve me again until I pay without eating (he "defects", I cooperate). However, a rational person with foresight will simply see the outcome of the repeated iterations. We call this foresight the ethical evaluation that you should pay for your meal.

In a larger community, where there are more non-communicating restaurants than I can eat meals, tit-for-tat doesn't work; I can play as many one-shot games as I like without fear of reprisal. So we make laws which follow from our idealized tit-for-tat strategy (i.e. good laws follow from good ethics).

But we can observe that the law is relatively easy to circumvent: There isn't a police officer standing at the door to every restaurant. Instead, we cultivate in ourselves ethical habits. In this case, the the thinking is one level more abstract: If too many people in general were to eat without paying, no one (myself included) could eat at restaurants, so we police ourselves.

There are other examples. I can work hard (cooperate) or slack off and just look busy (defect); my company can give me a raise next year (cooperate) or stiff me (defect). As an exercise, use game theory to relate the Communist slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," with the cynical Soviet observation, "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

A lot of human behavior can be modeled just by reducing it to pure game theory and locally rational choice. But as the Prisoner's Dilemma shows, some situations are not so easy to reduce, even in theory. It is precisely those Prisoner's Dilemma and similar games which cause us to go outside the game and create ethics and laws.

multiculturalism

The comments on Stephen Law's response to Ibrahim Lawson [link fixed] have become a conversation about multiculturalism.

Steve Chester appears to argue that condemning any behavior under the umbrella of a religion is tantamount to totalitarian oppression.

The problem with that stance, though, is that nobody supports absolute tolerance. We don't tolerate murderers, thieves, rapists, people who don't pay their taxes, or even people who jaywalk. The Nazis presumably had some sort of prosaic law enforcement, but we are not Nazi-like just because we enforce prosaic civil law.

The question is not whether to be intolerant of anything, it's about what specifically to be intolerant of; not whether but where to draw the line.

It's one thing to argue that we should tolerate some particular behavior. It's a horse of a different color to try to protect some behavior by arguing that we should draw no lines at all. It's so patently false — precisely because we do draw entirely uncontroversial lines — that one wonders why the speaker wishes to distract attention from the specifics of the behavior.

"Multiculturalism" has been assigned so many incompatible meanings that it's been rhetorically bludgeoned into meaninglessness. It can range anywhere from tolerating varying styles of dress to racial tolerance all the way to permitting and condoning the murder and mutilation of one's own children for trivial or even imagined sexual misbehavior.

Part of the problem is that multiculturalism and anti-multiculturalism have been adopted as smokescreens by people with objectionable hidden agendas. Right-wing extremists have adopted anti-multiculturalism to justify naked racism, racial oppression, and to justify wars of aggression to get those damn wogs off of our oil. Religious extremists have adopted multiculturalism to shield abhorrent misogyny and a genuinely totalitarian political ideology from democratic criticism. (Islam is not necessarily totalitarian, but Islamic totalitarianism is hardly a fringe movement, as evidenced by Saudi Arabia, the Afghani Taliban, the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan, and any number of fundamentalist movements in other Islamic countries, even secular Turkey.

If people are going to live and work together, they need to establish some core values that are affirmed by everyone in that society. However, determining specifically what those core values are or should be is a nontrivial task, because it is also the case that beyond those core values, there is a considerable range of value that can be tolerated, and in many cases a range of values has value in itself.

It's a fundamental value of Western civilization from the dawn of the enlightenment that verbal criticism should never be suppressed. Although J. S. Mill makes the case most forcefully and coherently in On Liberty, it's arguable that freedom of speech is the sine qua non of Western Civilization. I view any attempt to suppress or condemn speech as speech on any basis — multiculturalism included — to attack the very foundation of my own values. Criticize the content of any speech to your heart's content, but to demand that anyone just absolutely shut up on any basis is beyond the pale.

Within my own (or other Western societies) if Muslims want to defend the practice of murdering their daughters, throwing acid in their faces, crippling their education, or restricting them from full civic participation and equal rights, let them argue the merits of these demands and submit them to full, vigorous democratic debate. To hide behind "multiculturalism" is nothing more than pure cowardice.

And if the racists and colonialists want to defend the practice of subjugating and denying full civil rights to brown people, if they want to defend wars of aggression and robbery on a national scale, if they want to enforce Christianity, let them defend those demands on their own merits. To hide behind "anti-multiculturalism" is equally cowardly.

Update: Here's an example of bullshit anti-multiculturalism (h/t to Political Crank):

Juashaunna Kelly, a Theodore Roosevelt High School senior who has the fastest mile and two-mile times of any girls' runner in the District this winter, was disqualified from Saturday's Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet after officials said her Muslim clothing violated national competition rules.

Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for the past three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt's cross-country and track teams: a custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard that covers her head, arms, torso and legs. On top of the unitard, Kelly wore the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.

I'm no fan at all of Islamic dress codes for women. I think these codes are inherently misogynist and oppressive, and they deserve criticism. On the other hand, singling out Ms. Kelly in this manner is just egregiously stupid, and the supposed justification is just slavish, authoritarian adherence to a different arbitrary dress code. When multiculturalism vs. anti-multiculturalism becomes a heated argument over which kind of petty authoritarianism to enforce in society, we have entirely missed the point of liberal democracy.

meta-philosophologer

In his latest essay, The Limits of Science?, Mark Rowlands holds up Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as (possible) paradigmatic (or at least exemplary) of an epistemic methodological alternative to science.

I'm not a philosophologer (I'm not concerned with having a detailed knowledge of the philosophical canon), and I read Critique of Pure Reason more than twenty years ago, before I was seriously interested in philosophy. I wasn't impressed then, and none of the commentary I've read about it since has given me much motivation to revisit the work.

Going by my general impressions from commentary and decades-old memory, I recall that Kant's overall argument rests on what we can (and, to his credit, much that we cannot) say about synthetic a priori propositions. A synthetic proposition is some proposition that states a truth about the world (e.g. "all crows are black"), as opposed to an analytic proposition, which is about the meanings of words (e.g. "all bachelors are unmarried"). An a priori proposition is some proposition that is known (or can be known) prior to experience, as opposed to an a posteriori proposition, which can be known only on the basis of (i.e. after) experience.

Kant's argument rests on our a priori knowledge of mathematics and geometry and our deep a priori intuitions about space and time. (One might also add our a priori intuitions about morality.) I think this sort of argument fails both on the specifics and in general. Kant cannot be faulted too much: He works at the birth of modern science, immediately after Newton (Kant: 1724–1804; Newton: 1643-1727). He precedes Lobachevsky (1792–1856), Riemann (1826–1866), Darwin, Gödel and Einstein.

Non-Euclidian geometry, chaos theory, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and all the weirdness of 20^th and 20^st century mathematics casts considerable doubt on the a priori truths of mathematics. Furthermore, Tobias Dantzig's history of mathematics, Number, the Language of Science, shows us just how hard-earned were the mathematical concepts of even Kant's day. Dantzig argues persuasively that our "primary" mathematical intuition is very limited, and the sophistication of modern mathematics can be seen as groping for concepts that would allow us to understand practical problems; our mathematical discovery has been driven as much or more by the requirements of experience as by the exercise of pure reason.

Einstein puts paid to our ordinary, intuitive "Newtonian" intuitions about space and time. Worse yet, quantum mechanics subverts our core assumptions about reality itself. If paradigmatic synthetic concepts are actually wrong — or obviously limited to the conditions of our ordinary experience — it's suspect to maintain they are actually known a priori.

It's provably true that individual human beings have true synthetic propositional beliefs that precede their own individual experience. Someone of Kant's time would be justified in concluding that such beliefs are fundamentally a priori, the result of the exercise of pure reason uninformed by experience.

But someone of Kant's time precedes Darwin, and Darwin makes all the difference. Because, of course, it becomes a plausible counter-argument to say that our true synthetic "a priori" beliefs are actually a posteriori with respect to the experience of evolution. Our brains, far from being engines of "pure" reason, have been shaped by at least 500,000,000 years of multicellular evolution (and perhaps even by the full 4,000,000,000 years of the evolution of terrestrial life). Evolution is not only undeniably an experiential process, it is also scientific. The parallels are exact: theoretical structure = genome; creation of hypotheses = random mutation; acceptance or rejection of the hypotheses by experiment = natural selection.

I am almost certainly missing some subtlety of Kant's argument, and it's possible I'm missing it completely; like I said, it's been a long time and I'm not much of a philosophologer. But Darwin seems to rebut any argument that rests in any way on synthetic a priori propositions.