Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The Chinese growth story is often questioned by outsiders, sometimes due to envy, at others, because they are so secretive and who knows what they might be hiding? Are they over-constructing without any demand, some wonder? (The construction spending shows up as GDP growth) I got a glimpse of this when I saw empty high rises all along the Shanghai-Wuxi highway; and then more of them, around Wuxi. Unlike the ones in India, where the reason they are empty is because they are still under construction, in China, they are complete and yet they are empty! But empty buildings are nothing: it turns out there are entire cities that are constructed and lie practically empty! There is even a term for them: ghost cities. 20 such cities came up in 2013 alone. I asked my American counterpart why anyone would construct entire cities without a corresponding demand? Why would they take such a big financial risk? His answer: you are thinking like a capitalist, this is a communist country. I re...

As someone who grew up in Delhi, I didn’t realize how pampered the city is until I went to a small town university. It also hit me how bitter people there felt about cities like Delhi that hogged everything (money, resources, infrastructure, connectivity etc). It’s the same where I live now: Bangalore. Other parts of Karnataka feel the same way about Bangalore as being a pampered city. To make matters worse, Bangalore is full of non-Kannadigas who can’t and won’t even bother to associate with anything Kannadiga (I am guilty of the same). The Americans chose to be different on this count: they built a new capital that didn’t fall in any state. In fact that was necessary because none of the founding states trusted the capital to be in any other state! Which is why it’s called Washington DC, a federal district, not part of any state. (Later the Australians, Candiands and New Zealanders too decided to make an obscure city their capital for similar reasons). The Americans eve...