IPL

Modi should feel like an ass right now. I, for sure haven’t seen a worse foot in the mouth situation. This guy tried to screw Tharoor and he ends up getting right one in the ass. It’s naïve to think that IPL is squeaky clean at all. Along with the citied reasons of “love of the sport” and “regional patriotism”, the opportunity to launder some dirty money and for some Dons to invest their “hard-earned” monies are not to be disregarded.

Look at the bright side, the money that would have gone to financing feudal wars and maintaining their existing business of drugs, extortion and prostitution would be used instead to cater to the masses as entertainment and provide the much needed exposure to the local talent. I don’t give a rat’s ass to who owns what. In the end, it’s the players battling it out not the owners (would love to see a cat fight between Shilpa and Preity though!)

These things will pass; IPL will come out unscathed because it’s too big to fail.  Hope the Kochi team survives, till then CSK rules

Milking it!

After what seems to be an eternity; I decided to write a post. The excuse for the hiatus was literary constipation brought about by anxiety, uncertainty and depression.  The insidious pleasure that a writer derives from pain and suffering to bring about incredulous manifestations are rather contrary to my modus operandi. By god’s grace it came to an end by Bangalore Stock Exchange making a mistake of hiring me.

It’s’ Microfinance’ that has caught my attention this time. Muhammed Yunus, the economist who started it all, remarked at an UN meeting, “We created microcredit to fight the loan sharks; we didn’t create microcredit to encourage new loan sharks”. I believe this statement says it all.  Microcredit, the darling of economists and celebrities alike was viewed as the solution to reduce abject poverty and to bring about financial inclusion, and it did with aplomb.

It all changed in 2007, the Mexican firm ‘Compartamos’ which started as a tiny non-profit organisation went public to amass $458million. Investors suddenly realised the immense potential of Microcredit, which is corroborated, as politicians have started to invest in such ventures through surrogates. The business model is quite sturdy. Money is taken from donations and banks at very low interest rates and given to Self Help Groups (SHG) which by design ensures that the risk is reduced to the minimum. The risk is further mitigated by imposing higher interest rates.

The world average interest rate charged by MFIs (Micro Finance Institutions) is a whopping 37%. This figure is highly dubious as actual figures are not available due to unaccountability of non-profit organisations. In some countries like Mexico, the average is 70% while some companies like Te Creemos charges up to 125%.

The problem of over lending also comes into the picture. Recent figures from Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka show that their coverage in some areas is 200 to 300%, that is, people have multiple loans at such high rates, often taken to repay previous loans. This could to lead to a debt spiral which defeats the whole purpose.

Legislation and governing bodies should be put in place to check such atrocities. In India, RBI does have a watchful eye, but the existing policies needed to be revised and adapted to bring MFIs under its more stricter purview and also to increase transparency.

The Washing Machine

A question that often quips up in conversations in these days is how you would spend your first salary (provided you get placed by ‘Team Usha’). It’s a perfect question to get a perspective of an individual’s priorities. The standard answer is to say that they would spend it on friends and family, call me a sentimentalist, I applaud that. The conceited of the lot say that they’ll spend it on clothes or a new phone or a new girlfriend, the list can be endless.

I, belonging to the latter would actually buy a washing machine, yes, a washing machine. Why? Because I consider it as the greatest invention after the automobile

Hear me out; nobody likes dirty clothes except for hobos and a few people in college who think it’s rather cool to wear them. I don’t know where they get that idea but it’s quite prevalent. So I’ve established need.

It is also one of the few innovations that have actually reduced effort. Some of you may argue that the microprocessor was a better example but think of it, your lives are more screwed up because of it. The constant pressure to keep in touch and be creative in your tweets or status messages is quite a vexation. Don’t even get me started on mobile phones. Washing machines are placid devices that don’t interfere with your life nor does it need your attention.

A front loading one is a perfect addition to any home. It’s multifunctional, it can be a table top for a round of cards, it’s the perfect height for ‘certain’ experimentations or for the more infantile pleasure of siting on top of it while it goes on spin dry. I have made up my mind though-a Siemens front loader is definitely in my list.

2009

I turned 25

Slumdogged the Oscars

Obama happened and got a Nobel peace prize and he still got to send troops to Afghanistan... talk about CHANGE!

Copenhagen

Six friends got married- two of them were my ex’s

Tiger Woods finally proved to be human, let’s face it, sportsmen get a lot of good a**, case in point-Nehra, so I don’t blame him

Section 377

Didn’t confess for a year and the list now covers everything short of murder, contemplating to do that soon.

Michael Jackson went out with a whimper, but people made millions out of it. Guess, he is more valuable when dead

India’s first nuclear submarine INS Arihant was commissioned; incidentally we also had a small nuclear accident.

Did something meaningful for Christmas

The biggest show on earth- the Indian elections went off with not much of a hitch, it also proved the theory of collective intelligence

No more LTTE

YSR flew to his death

Most of Africa, South America, Iraq and Afghanistan occasionally went up in flames

Bored a lot of people to death by talking too much

Satyam proved to the world that we too can pull big scams

Did the cardinal mistake of helping others, which always seemed to bite me from behind

Tata dreamed big with Jag and small with Nano

Gatecrashing entered into the petite Indian vocabulary with the White House incident

The economy was boring

One whole year without a girlfriend since 2001-it was actually good

Liquor consumption grew by 16% in Kerala (our humble contribution to the country’s revenues)

Jenson Button and Brawn GP won F1, an underdog victory!

Nursed my pet dog to life

Bought a new dog, named it Cody, he clearly doesn’t like it though, pees every time you call him that.

The Indian test team ranked first, let’s hope it stays there long enough

Swiss banks started to spill their beans, wonder who all got a cold sweat after hearing that

Compromised on a lot of things, mainly education

Demand for two states in Andhra and all the other states followed suit, in other Andhra news governor N D Tiwari was caught with his pants down, literally!

Mayawati’s fetish for statues redefined heights of ego

Recession killed my brother’s business and his spirit but still drives an Audi though

Shoe throwing has been officially accepted in press circles as taking a stand.

Made a good friend but huge distances now separate us

Maserati Granturismo and Ferrari 458 Italia

25 years after the Bhopal gas tragedy, the affected are still to receive the basic right of having safe drinking water- the ugly face of capitalism

One hell of an year, ain't it?

The Poor

"Give me your tired, your poor.
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

This is the inscription on the famous Statue of Liberty.

The world needs the tired and the poor. It was actually on them that the capitalistic world that exists today was built. America in its tumultuous ontogenesis needed them the most then and they came in by the thousands creating the leader of all nations that we know today. It was the colonial countries, which had the poor and needy, that built the English empire and also most of Europe.

So, you see, basic utopian theories on society are flawed on two counts- there can’t be economic equality and you can’t expect them to behave rationally. That is why perceptions and decisions formed by such systems go wrong most of the time and we end up resorting to the proverbial statement of ‘Man proposes, God disposes’ to lie to ourselves that life is all dandy. In fact, perfect society can be envisaged by factoring in selfishness and irrationality and then the only aberrations in the system would be random acts of kindness, which are rare enough.

But, that argument is for a different day. Let’s talk about economic inequality or the need for it. The rich need countries like Columbia to make sure that they get their weekly lines of cocaine, the tired from Africa so they can test their drugs, the needy from Mexico to give them their blood plasma to big drug companies so they can process it and resell it for 80 times the price to get it, the poor to provide their wombs so that women can have kids without having cellulite to worry about, they are needed to build Xanadus in deserts.

The poor do all this because they aspire for sustenance and better lives which the rich ideate everyday through extravagances. The inevitable consequence is that people eventually would grow out of poverty and the developed world would go in search for better pastures to exploit. Africa is still fertile with poverty and the lords of war make sure they stay that way by financing military governments. At least, when the rich are done with the world, people would at least have 3 square meals a day and then the relatively poor would have another chance to go up the ranks.

Mirage in the desert

This was an article that was published in the Economic Times on 1/12/09 as part of the editorial, couldn't stop myself to post it here..

A Time Of Fear And Loathing In Dubai

It was a monument to overvaulting human ambition, a fantasy fuelled by frenetic investment-dollars and oxymoronic benevolent despotism. A desert mirage built to rival the sheen and glitz of Las Vegas. Crass spectacle on a surreal scale. And it seems to have ended in a nightmare. Welcome to fear and loathing in Dubai. The emirate for which the term metropolitan disorder seems to have been solely invented. Sure, given its paucity of oil, Dubai did the right thing to posit itself as a model of the new economy. But the fun and games bits were grandiloquent. An attempt to cast the world anew, according to fantasy. Thus, the 24-squaremile archipelago of islands in the shape of a world map jigsaw ; the new Pyramids and the Colosseum; hyper resorts, mega-hotels , sky-scraping towers, amusement parks and an array of kitschy mansions in the middle of water. Buildings that echo the Tower of Babel: half a mile high, higher than the Empire State Building doubled. The childish wonderland extended downwards too a hotel like the Hydropolis , jellyfish-shaped and 66 feet below the surface of the sea where you could presumably have your sharkfin soup while gazing at a live specimen. That, perhaps, is what happens when a small sea-trading town fantasises about becoming a megapolis. Megalomania as a way of life.

You didnt need a financial whiz to suspect something was wrong here. At best, it was like watching an unrestrained kid pile on the lego blocks, amazement tinged with the lingering certainty of the impending collapse. And it did. The bust is as staggering as the spectacle. The total debt estimated at a jaw-dropping $80 billion. This was a citystate built as an anti-thesis of the original Greek conception. One that ballooned using the exploited labour of masses of south Asians, subject to total control, working inhuman shifts in white heat to enable the sheikhdom to wallow in refrigerated swimming pools. Often, it was compared to indentured labour under colonial rule. Livelihoods might have been lost, but the moot point is whether such a colonial Xanadu was ever workable in the first place.

Books, Movies and Music

I can’t take it anymore! The constant yammering of lectures, formulaic books, romantic comedies and all that is called mundane has driven me to the point of desperation. I reached a point in time when you feel you have to speak out or forever hold your breath. Why? You may ask. Well, the best the reason I can conjure up is ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ and my threshold to tolerate bullshit has gone down a lot.

People would attribute it to my apparent smugness, well, I pride myself for having an opinion of my own and so I don’t give a damn. Let me explain myself why I snapped.

I read ‘The Lost Symbol’ by Dan Brown.

My verdict- a waste of 7 hours of my life! It follows the same formula, Langdon wakes up the morning having no idea what shit is going down that evening, some superhuman crazy guy who is borderline gay, likes playing dress-up and is trying to get ‘atonement’, of course, the damsel in distress, a sceptical Langdon (on the premise which crazy rituals thought up by show-off scientists are explained), symbols and architecture explained by half truths, a near death experience for Langdon… yada yada yada… Sounds familiar? It’s the formula that revived the sheen ridden ‘thriller literature’. It’s as if though, the writer did not even try to conjure up something original. It’s a disgrace.

It’s the same for movies and music, all formulaic and even copied; we then nurture it by consuming them without criticism. The whole point of creativity is to be fresh and inspiring. If you are a serious follower of art, please don’t encourage such mediocrity and give fresh ideas and fresh minds a chance.