1 From idea networks to action networks (The New York Times) Networks are valuable when it comes to having an idea because, in fact, broad-ranging networks give you access to lots of ideas to choose from. Call these idea networks. No one idea will likely be any good but, with enough ideas, one will. More importantly, however, no idea is going to be good enough. The act of making it real will change it beyond recognition—and that’s where very different networks, action networks, are required.
As an old story goes: A pig and a chicken open an outlet together, selling ham and eggs. The chicken says, “This is fun, we’ll split the profits.” The pig looks down for a while, then at the chicken, then says: “I don’t think so. You’re contributing but I’m committed.” With that in mind, idea networks are wonderful in their time and place. As Thomas Jefferson said: “My knowledge is like a candle; with it I can light your candle, and now we both have light.” The other side of that is, in giving you his idea, he didn’t commit much. Idea networks are low-commitment networks. When it’s time to do something, it’s necessary to switch over to action networks. Whether it’s in a big company or a startup, This entails a very different approach (and very different set of skills). Discussions have to happen: about ideas, about goals, about timing, about roles, and about what has to happen next.
2 How Greeks live now (The New York Times) By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40% in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed. Last September, organizers of a government-sponsored seminar on emigrating to Australia, an event that drew 42 people a year earlier, were overwhelmed when 12,000 people signed up. Greek bankers said people had taken about one-third of their money out of their accounts; many, it seems, were keeping what savings they had under their beds or buried in their backyards. One banker, part of whose job these days is persuading people to keep their money in the bank, said to me, “Who would trust a Greek bank?”
The situation at the macro level is, if anything, even more transformational. The Chinese have largely taken over Piraeus, Greece’s main port, with an eye to make it a conduit for shipping goods into Europe. Qatar is looking to invest $5 billion in various projects in Greece, including tourism infrastructure. Other, relatively flush Europeans are trying to make “Greece the Florida of Europe,” Theodore Pelagidis, a Greek economist at the University of Piraeus, said there were plans to turn islands into expensive retirement homes for wealthy people from other parts of the continent. Whether or not the country pays its debts, he went on, other nations and foreign companies “now understand the Greek government is powerless, so in the future they will take over viable assets and run parts of the country by themselves.”
3 Shame on Europe for betraying Greece (The Guardian) The "austerity package", as the newspapers like to call it, seeks to impose on Greece terms that no people can accept. Even now the schools are running out of books. There were 40% cuts in the public health budget in 2010. Greece's EU "partners" are demanding a 32% cut in the minimum wage for those under 25, a 22% cut for the over 25s. Already unemployment for 15-24-years-old is 48%. Overall unemployment has increased to over 20%.
When we casually use a term like "bailout", it is important to remember that it is not people who are being bailed out, or at least not the Greek people. The bailout will not save a single Greek life. The opposite is the case. What is being "bailed out" is the global financial system, including the banks, hedge funds and pension funds of the other EU member states, and it is the Greek people who are being ordered to pay – in money, time, physical pain, hopelessness and missed educational opportunities. The relatively neutral, even stoic, term "austerity", is a gross insult to the Greek people. This is not austerity; at best it is callousness.
In essence, this crisis is a failure of the EU states to show solidarity in the face of an onslaught from the financial markets. At first glance this seems to be a very simple fight. In one corner you have nation states, which have the wellbeing of their citizens as their raison d'être; in the other you have global capitalism as represented by the financial markets, which has the wealth of a tiny few as its raison d'être. But the nation state has, for a considerable time, identified itself with those same markets. States have agreed to see themselves as economies rather than societies. More recently we have been led to believe that the market alone can provide everything the citizen needs and much more efficiently than the structures that the citizens normally rely on and which they have, over generations, erected as protections against the revenge of the market. This is the triumph of capitalism, that it has persuaded the world that capitalism is the world.
4 India woman wins right-to-toilet fight (BBC) A newlywed woman in a village in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has won her struggle to have a toilet at her husband's home. Anita Narre left husband Shivram's home two days after her marriage in May last year because the house had no toilet. She returned eight days later after Shivram, a daily wage worker, built one with savings and aid from villagers.
An NGO announced a $10,000 reward for Mrs Narre for her "brave" decision and forcing her husband to build a toilet. More than half-a-billion Indians still lack access to basic sanitation. The problem is acute in rural India and it is the women who suffer most. Shivram said he was not able to build a toilet at home because of lack of money. Under new local laws in states including Chhattisgarh, people's representatives are obliged to construct a flush toilet in their own home within a year of being elected. Those who fail to do so face dismissal.
5 Apple share price goes over $500 (BBC) Shares in technology giant Apple have crossed $500 a share for the first time. It caps a remarkable turnaround for the iPhone maker, whose shares were once worth as little as $3.19 in 1997, when it faced the possibility of bankruptcy. Apple is now worth $460bn. Last month, Apple reported record-breaking net profits for the last three months of 2011, up 118% to $13.06bn from the same period a year earlier. The profits were the fourth-biggest in US corporate history. Apple is in an escalating patent war with rivals Google and handset-makers such as Samsung and HTC over their operating systems.
6 Syrians take to pigeon mail (Dawn) Cut off by a relentless barrage of government shelling, activists in the besieged Syrian city of Homs have reverted to the age-old practice of using carrier pigeons to communicate with each other. “From the activists in Old Homs (district) to those in Baba Amr, please tell us what you need in terms of supplies, medicine and food,” reads one message attached to a pigeon’s leg. “God willing, we will deliver them to you,” says the message.
“We thank Bashar for taking us back to the Middle Ages,” says Omar, an activist in the Bab Sbaa neighbourhood of the city, referring to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Omar is seen standing among pigeons on the rooftop of a building in Bab Sbaa in one of the YouTube videos uploaded to the Internet via a satellite feed. He carefully scrawls a message on a small piece of paper to his counterparts who are little more than two kilometres away in Baba Amr, which has suffered some of the heaviest shelling. Syrians were among the first people to use pigeons as messengers and this was often the sole source of communication in the region.
7 India’s awesome threesome (Khaleej Times) Indian women have been discriminated against by their male counterparts for centuries and there are ancient texts justifying their inferior status. This discrimination is clearly shown in the preference most Indian couples have for the male child. Yet – and this is the paradox – the most powerful political personality in India is a woman, the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi.
Which brings me to the three women of this column, each remarkable in her own way, who presently hold sway over an immense swathe of India: Mayawati, Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee. Mayawati is the Chief Minister of India’s most populous State, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Jayalalithaa of Tamil Nadu, and Mamata of West Bengal.
Together, they control the destiny of 360 million Indians, a third of the country’s population, and more than the entire population of the USA. All these three women, completely different otherwise, have one trait in common: They are single and have made it to the top of their respective States, on their own. They had no family name or kinship, did not even belong to a major national party. So, their achievement is all the more remarkable. How does one explain their success in a largely male-dominated society? Space constraints prevent a comprehensive answer. However, note how these ladies are called by their devoted followers: “Amma” (mother) for Jayalalithaa, “Didi” (elder sister) for Mamata, “Behenji” (also sister) for Mayawati. A matriarchal-like, or elder sister-like figure is easier to deal with, or look up to, than a wife wanting equality. In India, mothers and elder sisters, along with goddesses such as Parvati, Laxmi and Kali, are both revered and feared. And these three women are a combination of all of them.
8 The reasons for political dynasties (The Wall Street Journal) How can we explain the anomaly of dynastic politics in a thriving democracy? As the third phase of voting gets underway in Uttar Pradesh, members of the Nehru-Gandhi (and now perhaps also Vadra) clan will be very much in evidence on the hustings. In the upcoming election in the state of Goa for instance, a third of the candidates that the Congress party is fielding come from just five families. It looks like dynastic politics is here to stay.
Pradeep Chhibber, a political science professor at Berkeley, argues that internal party organization in India is indeed a key factor determining whether a party becomes dynastic or not. He pinpoints three conditions that promote dynasticism. The first is a party whose leadership is self-perpetuating and oligarchic, rather than independent and democratically accountable. The second is the absence of large-scale voter mobilization through independent civil society bodies. The third and perhaps most crucial factor is that campaign funding is collected and dispersed by central party officials and not devolved to the local level. It’s pretty obvious that all of these conditions apply in spades to the Congress party, in power at the center, and many regional parties as well. Several major parties, such as the various Communist parties and the Bharatiya Janata Party are not dynastic in their organization, but that doesn’t mean they too don’t have hereditary MPs in Mr. French’s sense of the term.
The Chhibber study matches the results of research on other countries in which dynastic politics are prevalent. It’s worth remembering that politics in that other great democracy, the United States, also has strong dynastic features. This is quite apart from well-known political dynasties such as the Bush and Kennedy families. In their study, Ernesto Dal Bo, Pedro Dal Bo and Jason Snyder establish that the US Congress is also heavily dynastic. They find that this is not because political families are somehow more capable of the job of politics than everyone else. Rather, as they put it, “in politics, power begets power.” All of this begs the question: parties may be dynastic, but why do voters passively accept it? One possibility is that dynastic politicians bring more public spending or other benefits to their constituencies compared to non-dynastic politicians.
9 Photograph in The Times of India showing a couple being punished by a woman police constable in Dhanbad for celebrating Valentine’s Day. (Considering the noise around the ban on Salman Rushdie attending the Jaipur literary festival recently, this photo deserved better placement.)
10 Pocker cartoon in The Financial Chronicle on Indians stashing $500bn worth illegal funds abroad: That’s why the India story still sells overseas and never in India.
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