Viswanathan K's Thoughts

After the recent riots in UK, there was a lot of coverage of this 11 yr old boy who was among those arrested. And more importantly, among those who the British government said would be charged. I found that very surprising: was this the same British government that had leaned on Scotland a few months back to release the Libyan convicted over the Lockerbie bombing ? So they want to release a convicted (by a Western court) mass murderer who is a foreigner but also charge a 11 year old who is a British citizen? Back home, Kapil Sibal feels that Anna Hazare putting ultimatums to the government violates the “sanctity of Parliament”. So let me get this straight: as per the Congress, arresting Hazare for calling a spade a spade (saying that MP’s are criminals who won’t do a thing to prevent corruption) does more for the sanctity of Parliament than, say, weeding out corruption? Or how about hanging Afzal Guru, the man convicted of attacking Parliament in 2001. How launching a terrorist atta...

I didn’t realize how much dislike and fear that most of Europe still has when it comes to German influence until I read this article by Michael Lewis . The article itself is very long, gets quite vulgar at times and is still very informative. While the rest of the Western world (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, the US) behaved like lunatics when loans were easily available at low interest rates, the Germans showed restraint. Commendable? Not entirely. Because the Germans lent their “own money to enable foreigners to behave insanely”. I guess that’s why they say “Neither a lender nor a borrower be”. (Of course, like any advice, overdoing that one isn’t a good thing either because it brings all economic activity to a halt). Today, to avert financial Armageddon in Europe, everyone wants the Germans to bail out the Greeks (and presumably, the Irish, the Italians and the Spanish after that). The Germans, obviously, are not enthusiastic about doing any such thing. But even if they do agree, t...

The knives are out in UK. In so many different ways. The rioters have taken out the literal ones. It’s surprising that it can go on for so many nights, with the police unable to do anything. Then there all the other types of knives, the non-literal ones. Like from the people who’ve decided to attribute reasons for the riots. The reasons range from had-enough-with-racial-discrimination to feeling-excluded-from-prosperity to feeling-of-hopelessness to simply-looting. Based on their reasons, these people blame the riots on everything from discrimination to non-inclusive growth (sound familiar?) to the recession and cuts in spending to lack of good parenting! When the British PM said that social networking sites like Twitter were partly responsible because they acted as tools for co-ordinating such riots, another set pointed out how, just a few months back, the Brits were so in favour of Twitter when it was used in the Arab risings. How quickly times change. The Chinese took a sho...

S&P’s downgrade of the US government’s credit rating is all over the news. Will that be the straw that pushes the US into Round 2 of the recession? And if the US situation worsens, will it take down most of the world with it? Who can say? So I’ll just stick to some other aspects linked to the downgrade. Even as S&P downgraded the US rating, the US treasury officials pointed out a $2 trillion error in S&P's math . S&P has acknowledged the error. So how reliable is the downgrade assessment then? (I don’t know how big an error that is with respect to the US, my only reference is that $2 trillion is the size of India’s GDP!). Secondly, the other rating agencies haven’t downgraded the US… yet. Then again, all these rating agencies were assigning high ratings to all the crap that the investment banks sold before 2008. So how much trust should one put on anything they say? Or are the rating agencies now in the “boy who cried wolf” situation? Maybe it’s a case of nobody bel...

One of my friends pointed me to this article in The Economist that criticized India’s attitude towards its neighbours . It correctly pointed out that India has good relations with almost none of its neighbours (except the tiny and inconsequential ones like Maldives and Bhutan). But some of the criticisms and reasons given in that article are just, well, what you’d expect of any holier-than-thou European publication. Like when it condemns India on its Myanmar policy because it “snuggles up to the country’s thuggish dictators”. I’m curious how we are any different from the Brits who snuggle up to Libya (until recently)? Or the West that mollycoddles the Saudis? As Kissinger said, "He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch". That’s realpolitik. And that’s the way all nations work. But apparently when India does the same, it’s time to be sanctimonious! Methinks The Economist is just being hypocritical. Remember our dear neighbour, Pakistan, that even the Brit P...