There are Marxists in India?; Imperialism lives -- now it's called international law; A third of Indians suffer poor quality of life; Statues don't cry, unless...; India has no Valmikis now; Telcos pass on India; Blumenthal is most successful chef

1 There are Marxists in India? (Robert Jensen in Dissident Voice/Al Jazeera) After an engaging half-hour interview with India’s pre-eminent Marxist economist, I told a friend about my one-on-one time with Prabhat Patnaik. “There are Marxists in India?” came the bemused response. “I thought India was the heart of the new capitalism.” Indeed, we hear about India mostly as a rising economic power that is challenging the United States. While there certainly are no shortages of capitalists, there are still lots of Marxists in India, as well as communist parties that have won state elections.

“It’s important to understand that capitalism is a spontaneous system, not something that is always necessarily planned or controlled,” Patnaik said. Because the reward for ignoring, evading, or getting around rules is so powerful, the attempts to make capitalism follow ethical norms are bound to fail. “Keynesianism worked in a specific time and place, but capitalism escaped Keynesianism,” he said. Even though capitalism is in deep crisis, resistance to capitalism is not nearly strong enough to produce movements that could make that possible.

If leftists reject the current dominance of finance in the world, Patnaik said it’s important to reject any suggestion that a single perspective or party should dominate. If the goal is to resist hegemony, then the approach of the old communist movement simply isn’t relevant, Patnaik said, but socialist principles are more relevant than ever. “Any resistance has to be about opening up alternatives, opening up critical thinking to imagine those alternatives,” he said. “The only way to challenge that global regime is mass mobilization.” At the age of 66, when many people hold on tightly to what they believe will work, Patnaik doesn’t hesitate to say, “It’s time to invent.”

2 Imperialism isn’t dead – now it’s called international law (The Guardian) The conviction of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, is said to have sent an unequivocal message to current leaders: that great office confers no immunity. In fact it sent two messages: if you run a small, weak nation, you may be subject to the full force of international law; if you run a powerful nation, you have nothing to fear.

While anyone with an interest in human rights should welcome the verdict, it reminds us that no one has faced legal consequences for launching the illegal war against Iraq. This fits the Nuremberg tribunal's definition of a "crime of aggression", which it called "the supreme international crime". The charges on which, in an impartial system, George Bush, Tony Blair and their associates should have been investigated are far graver than those for which Taylor was found guilty.

3 Malawi’s first woman president (The Guardian) For 48 turbulent hours she was the victim of a conspiracy that left the future of Malawi hanging in the balance. Then Joyce Banda made a critical phone call to the head of the army, asking if she could rely on his support. He said yes. And at that moment her place in history was assured.

“You ask how I feel to be the first female president in southern Africa?” she said in an interview. “It’s heavy for me. Heavy in the sense that I feel that I’m carrying this heavy load on behalf of all women. If I fail, I will have failed all the women of the region. But for me to succeed, they all must rally around.” Banda’s dramatic rise came when President Bingu wa Mutharika’s increasingly autocratic rule was cut short by a fatal heart attack earlier last month. As vice-president, it was her constitutional right to replace him. After overcoming resistance from Mutharika’s powerful allies, she has now set about rebuilding the country’s shattered economy and pursuing a cause close to her heart: women’s rights.

“I got married at 22 and remained in an abusive marriage for 10 years. I made up my mind that that was never going to happen to me again. I made a brave step to walk out in a society when you didn’t walk out of an abusive marriage.” Pointing to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, Africa’s first elected female head of state, Banda added: “Africa is changing in that regard and I hope you know that we are doing better than most countries. America is still struggling to put a woman in the White House but we have two, so we’re doing fine.”

4 A third of Indians suffer from poor quality of life (BBC) About 31% of Indian adults - about 240 million people - say they are "suffering" because of poor quality of life, according to a Gallup survey. The polling firm's research divides people into "thriving", "struggling" and "suffering" according to how they rate their present and future lives. Globally, only 13% people rated their lives as "suffering". The poll shows that suffering has increased among Indians at all income and education levels. The survey also showed that nearly three-fourths - or 73% - of respondents perceived corruption as being widespread in the government.

5 First loss for Nintendo (BBC) Nintendo, the Japanese game giant, has reported its first annual loss after disappointing sales of its Wii game console and a strong yen hit revenues. It reported a net loss of $533m for the year. Nintendo, which once led the video games world with titles such as Pokemon and Super Mario, has suffered increasing competition from casual gamers playing on their smartphones instead.

6 Statues don’t cry, unless… (MJ Akbar in Khaleej Times) The thought has occurred to me before, but seems more relevant now. If you are lucky in life, you become a statue in death. If you are super lucky, you turn into a giant statue. The great icons of a nation get disfigured on a mammoth scale, whether it is Gandhi dominating India’s Parliament or Lincoln staring grimly from America’s Mount Rushmore. It needs distance to get sufficient perspective on such majesty. No man is a hero to his valet, possibly because the valet stands too close to nose hair.

The wonder that is modern India is not that a Bangaru Laxman episode happened a decade ago, but that the private camera remains the principal tormentor of public lives. The small camera is the perfect prison for gargantuan appetites. Laxman was only caught with his hands up. These days politicians seem keen to be caught with their pants down. One would imagine that they would be more careful about sex than money, but the culture of laissez faire that has seized the powerful seems immune to the potential of hazard.

You never see a laughing statue, for laughter is not heroic: even the laughing Buddha is a bit of a joke. Those ambitious sculptors who try and catch the Mahatma’s beatific smile only manage to turn him into a toothless question mark. But you can always see a statue cry. Just go out and take a look during a shower. It must be raining heavily in heaven these days.

7 Drastic efforts to end foeticide (Khaleej Times) A 36-year-old woman in Ahmedabad, India recently turned a whistleblower after she was forced to go for abortion as many as six times by her in-laws after sex determination tests would show that she would deliver a girl. Amisha Bhatt, who has filed a case against her husband and in-laws for harassment, came to know through the RTI that greedy doctors maintained a secret list of patients sent by in-laws for abortions, and this list was never revealed to the state government.

Bhatt, who found out that her name also did not figure in the list of patients who had undergone sonography tests, has exposed a nexus between gynaecologists and sonography clinics involved in sex determination tests and illegal abortions. Urban areas in Bhatt’s state, Gujarat have fast been emerging as centres of foeticide, with Mehsana in the north recording a gender ratio as low as 845 girls per 1,000 boys, much lower than both the state (886) and national averages (914). No wonder, the Gujarat government has now decided to adopt an advanced technique that uses Active Tracker (AT) — a GPS- and GPRS-enabled device that promises to bring transparency in sonography — to curb sex determination and ultimately female foeticide.

8 B-for-bomb lesson outrages India parents (Dawn) Angry parents are demanding to know why their kids are being taught about bombs and knives at nursery schools in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. They complain that a book on Hindi language alphabets for children aged 4 to 5 says that “B” stands for bomb and “Ch” for “Chaku”, or knife. Pictures accompany the words. Ram Authar Dixit, president of the Parents-Student Welfare Association of Gurukul Academy in Uttar Pradesh, said that the national education board was investigating how such a book was cleared for private nursery schools. More than 100 schools in the state have been using the book.

9 Can technology fix India? (Dawn) The dreams of modern India rarely make it to Rayagada. The Indians of these eastern forests forage for sago leaves and wild mango to survive. Barely a third can sign their names. Most live without electricity. Many have joined a Maoist insurgency fighting to overthrow the system. Now modernity is creeping in. Smart cards, fingerprint scanners and biometric identity software are transforming Rayagada into a laboratory to test a thesis with deep implications for the future of India: Can technology fix a nation? The target here is the disastrously corrupt Public Distribution System, a $15bn food subsidy programme frozen in a pre-digital world, where bound journals hold falsified records scrawled in handwriting so illegible one reformer lamented, “even God could not read it”.

For a country repeatedly jolted by screaming corruption scandals, the fraud and theft tainting the Public Distribution System is the ever-present white noise in the background, losing an estimated 58% of its subsidized grain, sugar and kerosene to so-called “leakages” – the scams that infest every part of the system. The system is meant to serve 400m people, yet more than 250m Indians are undernourished and 43% of children under 5 are stunted. The programme’s failure is a symptom of the government dysfunction that has disillusioned many who were left out of India’s economic growth and driven some to join the Maoists, branded the country’s top internal threat.

10 Writing India’s anti-corruption movement (The Wall Street Journal) Searching Amazon.com for books on the Occupy Wall Street movement brings up more than 500 entries. Searching the site for books on Anna Hazare brings up just 15 relevant entries, while there are only six on the Lokpal bill, and a solitary one if you enter “anti-corruption movement India.” That’s quite a discrepancy for two similar movements that took place in the same year. The Occupy Wall Street movement happened in the fall of 2011. It was centered in New York but spread to other major cities in the US and Europe. At its height, there was a group of some 15,000 protestors in Lower Manhattan. India’s anti-corruption movement crested several times during 2011. It was centered in New Delhi, with other demonstrations in hundreds of cities throughout India. At its peak, there were also crowds of around 15,000 protestors at Jantar Mantar.


Unesco’s documentation expert John A Joseph writes: “Proper documentation of events is essential for providing the contemporary professionals and future generations the opportunities to know, learn, and benefit from the past knowledge and experience.” If Valmiki hadn’t bothered to write down the Ramayana, or Ganesha the Mahabharata, we might not have these epic stories as part of our culture today to refer to, to learn from, and to inspire us.

11 Foreign telcos pass on India (The Wall Street Journal) Foreign companies are steering clear of an auction of Indian mobile-phone bandwidth in a sign of how far the nation's once-booming telecommunications industry has fallen from investor grace. On Monday, Australia's Telstra Corp. and Sweden's TeliaSonera AB said they won't participate in the coming sale. Norway's Telenor ASA threatened to pull out of India, saying that the new base rates proposed by India's telecom regulator for the auctions are far too high.

India was until recently a favored investment destination for many foreign companies. But a scandal over alleged improper conduct by the government and companies during an attempt to sell second-generation wireless spectrum in 2008 has marred the industry's image. A federal investigation agency accuses then-Telecommunications Minister Andimuthu Raja and two associates of taking millions of dollars in bribes for handing out the licenses, and says the alleged irregularities deprived the government of potential revenue of $7 billion. India's Supreme Court in February canceled 122 telecom licenses, including 22 held by Telenor, at the center of the corruption case.

12 World Trade Center is NY’s tallest tower (Straits Times) New York's skyline got a new king on Tuesday after the still unfinished World Trade Centre tower, built to replace the destroyed Twin Towers, crept above the venerable Empire State Building. Workers gently maneuvered a steel column into its base atop the skyscraper's skeletal current top, bringing the total height just beyond the 381m of the Empire State Building's observation deck. Coming on the eve of the anniversary of the killing by US forces of Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the Al-Qaeda attack that demolished the former World Trade Centre, the moment was marked by a celebration of technical prowess and flag-waving patriotism.

13 Blumenthal is world’s most successful chef (Western Australia Today) Heston Blumenthal has been crowned the world's most successful chef after two of his restaurants were named among the top 15 in the world. The chef's new London restaurant, Dinner, was voted the ninth best in the world, the highest new entry in an annual survey of the world's finest restaurants. The Fat Duck, Blumenthal's establishment in Bray, Berks, was named 13th best. The rankings were announced in London last night as part of the World's 50 Best Restaurants survey by Restaurant Magazine. The high ranking of Blumenthal's two establishments means he is the only chef in the world to have more than one restaurant in the top 15. The next most successful restaurateur on the list is Thomas Keller, whose US establishments Per Se and The French Laundry are at number six and number 43 respectively.

14 India has no room for its wandering builders (The Hindu) The report on the violation of labour laws at a massive construction site belonging to the Army Welfare Housing Organisation in Bangalore raises the repeated neglect of regulations relating to the employment and welfare of workers by construction companies in India. The company concerned was found paying migrant workers Rs 50 per week as wages, as against the promised Rs157 per day. This shocking story of exploitation in India's IT capital became public only when a handful of workers from Chhattisgarh managed to escape from the work site and were put in touch with a labour union which in turn produced the emaciated and frightened workers before the media for their testimony.

Constituting an important segment of the overall services industry (seven per cent of total GDP), and recording an annual growth of over 10% over the last five years, the construction industry is one of the biggest employers of labour in India. According to the Planning Commission, employment in the construction sector in India has witnessed a steady increase from 14.6 million in 1995 to nearly 31.5 million in 2005.