07 September 2010
PC Models That Sound Like Alphabet Soup
26 August 2010
Landmark decision: Vedanta denied mining rights
13 June 2010
To Save Africa We Need to Ignore its Nations
If this were to happen, relatively benevolent states like South Africa and a handful of others would go on as before. But in the continent’s most troubled countries, politicians would suddenly lose the legal foundations of their authority. Some of these repressive leaders, deprived of their sovereign tools of domination and the international aid that underwrites their regimes, might soon find themselves overthrown.
African states that begin to provide their citizens with basic rights and services, that curb violence and that once again commit resources to development projects, would be rewarded with re-recognition by the international community. Aid would return. More important, these states would finally have acquired some degree of popular accountability and domestic legitimacy.
Like any experiment, de- and re-recognition is risky. Some fear it could promote conflict, that warlords would simply seize certain mineral-rich areas and run violent, lawless quasi states. But Africa is already rife with violence, and warlordism is already a widespread phenomenon. While unrecognized countries might still mistreat their people, history shows that weak, isolated regimes have rarely been able to survive without making significant concessions to segments of their populations.
For many Africans, 50 years of sovereignty has been an abject failure, reproducing the horrors of colonial-era domination under the guise of freedom. International derecognition of abusive states would be a first step toward real liberation.
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Mitul Choksi
13 June 2010
12:57 PM Indian Standard Time
09 June 2010
Rant - American Double Standards
The Attorney General even announced a criminal as well as a civil investigation into the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration of Barack Obama has vowed to hold the oil giant BP accountable for the disaster caused by its collapsed rig for billions of dollars.
However the world's worst industrial disaster was the in Bhopal in 1984. It has believed to claim up to 15000 lives and damaged the lives of thousands others. When asked if the US government will put more pressure on Dow Chemicals which bought Union Carbide Corporation a decade ago for cleaning up the site and extraditing Union Carbide executives including former CEO Warren Anderson who fled India just a few days after the accident and is absconding ever since the State Department officials diplomatically said "No".
The judgment given of two years in prison and fines of a few thousand dollars with no mention of Anderson is a travesty of justice which has left even American lawyers aghast.
Had this entire situation been the other way round and had an Indian company (or any other non-US company) been responsible for a similar disaster in the US, I am sure that the Americans would have left no stone unturned in getting their hands around the necks of the foreign company's management. If the management would have fled the US just like Anderson fled India, the US would have used "big brother scare tactics" to get them extradited to the US. If this seems far fetched then let me point to an example of what the US did in Pakistan. The Pakistani authorities have regularly been apprehending "terror suspects" on their soil and handing them over to the Americans even though an overwhelming majority of Pakistanis disdain these acts.
America was not likely to extradite Anderson even if he was convicted in absentia in India. The possibilities are even less now at a time when the US is keen to sell nuclear technology to India and the Indian government is facing a lot of heat from its allies as well as the opposition for agreeing to a "limited liability" clause in the nuclear agreement which absolves American corporations from paying astronomical amounts of damage in case another Bhopal like tragedy ever occurs in the future.
Its time we stood up to this double standard of America and at the same time kick our government in its derriere for taking this softly and sitting back like towards.
Remember, we will not be able to blame people in Bhopal for chanting "Death to America" if this sham justice goes through just like another run of the mill industrial accident.
30 May 2010
A single currency is not required for economies to prosper
18 May 2010
3G Auction Madness
17 March 2010
Only Fools will pre-order the Apple iPad
Friday morning, the fool's parade started. Apple is taking online "pre-orders" for its iPad tablet, which is supposed to begin shipping on April 3 in the United States. Buying a new kind of product sight unseen is foolish. Especially given how mysterious Apple has been on what the iPad can do and what restrictions on capabilities and media access it will place on users and content providers.
Why blow $500 to $830 on a device that may not be what you expect? Just wait a mere three weeks to see for sure what it actually does and what surprises, good and bad, Apple has packed into the iPad.
Don't get me wrong: The iPad concept is promising in many ways. And I have no doubt that the iPad will appeal to many people even if it's not perfect. But we've all seen promising product demonstrations that resulted in major letdown when we finally got a hold of the real thing. Why take that chance? After all, the first-generation iPad is particularly likely to have disappointments, as it's the version that will tell us what, after the hoopla dies down, Apple should have done.
Sure, we can expect Apple to make future innovations in the iPhone OS (which the iPad uses) available to the first generation of iPad devices through OS upgrades -- as Apple has nicely done for iPhone and iPod Touch owners. But the iPad's hardware isn't upgradable, so you'll be stuck with the iPad's relatively low amounts of memory and its lack of connectors such as USB that I would expect Apple to remedy inthe future. And you'll be stuck with whatever iTunes-based content locks Apple decides to place on media content and e-books.
Remember, the same thing happened with the iPod Touch, Apple's iPhone-based PDA. The first-generation iPod Touch could play only a few sounds and even then only at a whisper, so its calendar alarms and new-email alerts were useless unless you wearing its earphones. You couldn't change the volume without using the touchscreen -- a real issue when driving, jogging, or carrying groceries. There was no microphone, so you couldn't take voice memos or use services like Skype. (Apple even blocked external microphones from working on it!) Despite Apple making sure each iPhone OS revision has continued to support the first-generation iPod Touch, those hardware limits remain in the actual devices.
You can bet that similar types of issue will be discovered in the first iPad.
Maybe I'm wrong -- maybe the iPad will be the full "magic" that Steve Jobs promises. Wonderful! If that's the case, buy one when you know it really is magic --after people not employed by Apple have had a chance to really use it and put it through its paces. Until then, why send Apple your money until you know for sure? Doing so would be, well, foolish.
A fool and his money are soon parted, the saying goes. Let's hope most Apple fans are as smart as they claim to be.
10 February 2010
Why do we need to thank Microsoft?
04 February 2010
The trouble dealing with India's deficit
- Generally the activities for which the government provides various ministries with money take time to start and thus spending picks up gradually, only accelerating in the end of the financial year. Thus we haven't seen the real expenditure happening as of now and will only get a clear picture of the total expenditure towards the end of the FY that is still around 2 months or so away.
- One of the other major reasons why the deficit won't budge is that the tax revenues of the government will not pick up this time unlike the previous years due to a sharp decrease in tax rates in various avenues, especially indirect taxes like CENVAT (Central Excise). Excise revenues of the government have declined nearly a quarter in the November-January period as compared to the previous year due to a sharp decrease in duty rates even though the industrial production has risen in the same period compared to the corresponding period in the previous year.
- Direct tax collections have risen only marginally this year.
- Customs and Service Tax collections are down significantly.
- The Tax-GDP ratio which is a very important economic indicator has gone from 12% in the April-September period last year to 10.3% in the current fiscal year.
- The government also has to provide for other expenditures like fuel subsidies, food subsidies, loan waivers to farmers and many other such expenses.
- The government can't just forgo spending on the initiatives taken by it in the previous years which include many large social sector programs that require a lot of spending.
- The government also needs to allocate sufficient funds to various ministries and departments in the upcoming fiscal so as to not hinder their working and ensure smooth working of these departments.
- The 3G spectrum auctions which were earlier slated to be held this fiscal year are more or less likely to be held in the next fiscal (or even in the one after that) due to various bureaucratic hurdles. The auction was supposed to fetch the government anywhere between 30-50 thousand crore rupees which would have been a great help in covering the deficit