1 India's six crises (Business Standard) The Indian economy has been plagued by several crises in the last few months. Consider first the external sector, since that is what the government is most happy talking about and blaming. Exports have weakened considerably over the past 18 months, particularly in labour-intensive sectors. India’s fiscal deficit missed its target by 1.3% of GDP last year – when the target was 4.6%. This year’s deficit target is 5.1%, and there is little reassurance that the margin by which it will be missed will be any smaller. The government’s fiscal crisis comes at a time when it could have used resources to address the conventional demand crisis that exists: no company is willing to invest, on the assumption that there will be no demand for its production.
To the external, fiscal, and demand crises should be added the energy crisis that was so stunningly brought home by the back-to-back blackouts recently. Even otherwise, factories across India stand idle for want of power. Meanwhile, even the power that’s generated can’t be sold, as many state electricity boards have failed to reform tariffs, and are deeply in debt. The holders of those debts dominate India’s financial sector, which is close to a crisis of its own. Few believe official figures of its bad debt; and it isn’t just power-sector debt that’s weighing it down, although that by some accounts is over Rs 5 lakh crore, and may even be 6% of GDP. There continues to be concerns that corporate debt restructuring hides de facto bad loans, and bad lending to the agricultural sector is being covered up, too.
Put these five crises together, and you have a sixth: a worldwide crisis of confidence in India, reflected in the very real possibility of a downgrade to junk status—worsening the external and financial crises. One crisis the Indian economy could perhaps manage. But six? The India story now runs the risk of going down for a time, before it goes up.
2 Zakaria and subcontinental plagiarism (Idrees Bakhtiar in Dawn) It was Fareed Zakaria’s misfortune that he was born in the Google era, a double-edged sword. "While it is extremely tempting to plagiarise these days because it is easy, it is also easier to catch the plagiarist," a senior editor commented when the prominent Time magazine and CNN journalist was recently caught.
Zakaria is not the only one we know of who has indulged in the practice. He is simply one who immediately apologised and admitted his mistake. There is a long history of plagiarism in our subcontinent, and those found copying from books and articles written by others include a number of prominent names of Urdu literature. They were luckier than Zakaria, as their handiwork was exposed much later; there was no Google then. But they do stand exposed.
Prominent journalist Syed Hasan Masanna Nadvi and his colleagues have done some research on plagiarism that was carried by the literary magazine Mehr-i-Neemroze, launched in the 1950s, and has now been compiled into a book. Che Dilawar Ast is a ready reference on plagiarism.
3 'Migrants are temporary, so get married and have kids' (Straits Times) Singaporeans need to marry and have children if they do not want the country to fold up, Mr Lee Kuan Yew has warned. In his annual National Day dinner speech, Mr Lee kept his message on population simple: The country's citizens are not reproducing enough, and migrants are needed as a temporary solution. But in the long run, mindsets must change, and the trend of declining birth rates needs to be reversed. "If we go on like that, this place will fold up because there will be no original citizens left to form the majority," he said.
4 How airlines separate men and boys (San Francisco Chronicle) Australian men are up in arms over airline policies that prevent male passengers from sitting in the seat next to unaccompanied minors. A male nurse, Daniel McCluskie, 31, said last week he was humiliated after Qantas made him switch seats with a woman to get him away from a 10-year-old girl, The Age reports. A similar incident occurred at Virgin Australia, where fireman Johnny McGirr, 33, sitting next to two boys, ages 8 and 10, was forced to move as part of company policy, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
"[The attitude of the airline] is ‘we respect you but as soon as you board a Virgin airline you are a potential pedophile’, and that strips away all the good that any male does regardless of his standing in society, his profession or his moral attitudes," he said. In the US, there are no regulations governing the seating of unaccompanied minors, and no evidence could be found that airlines have similar policies. In 2009, a woman reported that her 13-year-old daughter was molested by an Ugandan man while traveling alone on a United Airlines flight, and later filed suit against the man and the airline.
5 Tech woes have only just begun (BBC) Large organisations of all kinds will always be complex and therefore so will the systems that support them. The question is, how do you incorporate the current and rapidly developing IT challenges into your business IT infrastructure in a way that will enable you to predict and learn from your IT failures when they do occur? As the consumerisation of technology grows and more of us look to access services through the internet, and on increasing numbers and types of digital platforms, this only adds to the management headache.
So many of us rely on the internet, and increasingly our personal devices, for statement updates and payments services that when the system goes down we instantly feel the impact. Brand is increasingly tied to digital experience, and the damage that a digital breakdown can inflict on brand trust and reputation is now visible for all to see.
The other significant consideration is the huge number of interdependences within any given system. The domino effect that can be triggered by a failure means that by the time the impact is felt, tracing the problem back to its source is very difficult. Buzz words like "cloud computing" and even "automation" promise insight, savings and increased simplicity. While taking systems and applications out of the in-house architecture can certainly help reduce the complexity, cloud computing is not a panacea. Automation too is a no-brainer, but it has to be intelligent automation - the kind that works hand in hand with human intellect.
6 Who's behind Google's doodles? (BBC) A playable Les Paul guitar, a Pac-Man game and a keyboard in celebration of Robert Moog. These are just some of the many doodles that Google has displayed on its home page. What started in 1998 as a stick figure drawing behind the letter "o" to show the team were out of the office, has now developed into intricate designs, games and artistic representations of famous figures and events. They depict both the famous and the less well-known, they feature anniversaries and some more idiosyncratic tributes, and are increasingly becoming interactive and shareable.
How else would hundreds of millions of people been reminded of Amelia Earhart's 115th birthday or that Gideon Sundback was the inventor of the zip? On his 132nd birthday, Google placed a giant zip down their home page. The team's "creative lead", Ryan Germick, says he doesn't dwell on the idea of his work being viewed by such a mindboggling number of people. Kris Hom, a technical engineer who recently joined the doodle team full time, says the pinnacle for him was when his mother shared her score from one of the Olympic playable doodles. The doodles are a way to "humanise the home page", says Hom.
7 Gates Foundation tests revolutionary toilet (Sydney Morning Herald) The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has bought about 200 litres of fake poo to trial out revolutionary new toilets that don't need water, electricity or even connection to a sewage system. This week the foundation is holding its 'Reinvent the toilet fair' aimed at improving the lives of the 2.6 billion people in the third world who do not have access to a toilet.
Many living in the poorest parts of the world are exposed to deadly disease because there are no pipes in their villages to support flushing toilets and no treatment plants - or not enough electricity - to treat sewage properly. Using $3 million in grants from the foundation, eight engineers took up the challenge to reinvent the commode into a self-contained, power- and water-less system.
8 Olympics and statistics (Western Australia Today) Using the formula, medals won multiplied by athletes in your team divided by home count population, here are the top four of the 2012 London Olympics: Australia 632, Great Britain 565, Hungary 268,, and Russia 250. Team USA scored a measly 175, and China only 23.
9 India Hindus thrive in the US (The Wall Street Journal) A study of the lifestyles and attitudes of Asian Americans based on their religion has suggested that Indian-American Hindus are the most educated and best paid group in the country. "In terms of education and income, Hindus are at the top of the socioeconomic ladder – not only among Asian-American religious groups but also among all the largest US religious groups," the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, based in Washington, DC", said in a report.
But Vinay Lal, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California and author of "The Other Indians: Politics and Culture of South Asians in America," has criticized the study for presenting a narrow, "naïve and inaccurate" portrayal of the situation for Indians living in the US. Mr. Lal said the survey provided a "comforting picture of the nature of the American immigration experience" that was "highly inaccurate" and masked the reality for thousands of Indian Americans who work in low paid and low skilled jobs in the country. He also questioned the premise of a survey that uses religion as the main category for identifying respondents, calling it a "colonial" interpretation of the Asian community.
10 Baba on the bus (Mint) The arrest of India yoga guru Baba Ramdev in New Delhi proves Indian police have not learnt much from the experience of its British predecessors in managing difficult political customers. Ramdev mounted a bus and, for hours, refused to climb down. It was the police officer arresting him who was in trouble.
11 Paresh's cartoon in Khaleej Times on the global arms trade treaty:
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/cartoongall.asp?next=0&file=data/photogallery/cartoon/cartoon.xml§ion=cartoon
To the external, fiscal, and demand crises should be added the energy crisis that was so stunningly brought home by the back-to-back blackouts recently. Even otherwise, factories across India stand idle for want of power. Meanwhile, even the power that’s generated can’t be sold, as many state electricity boards have failed to reform tariffs, and are deeply in debt. The holders of those debts dominate India’s financial sector, which is close to a crisis of its own. Few believe official figures of its bad debt; and it isn’t just power-sector debt that’s weighing it down, although that by some accounts is over Rs 5 lakh crore, and may even be 6% of GDP. There continues to be concerns that corporate debt restructuring hides de facto bad loans, and bad lending to the agricultural sector is being covered up, too.
Put these five crises together, and you have a sixth: a worldwide crisis of confidence in India, reflected in the very real possibility of a downgrade to junk status—worsening the external and financial crises. One crisis the Indian economy could perhaps manage. But six? The India story now runs the risk of going down for a time, before it goes up.
2 Zakaria and subcontinental plagiarism (Idrees Bakhtiar in Dawn) It was Fareed Zakaria’s misfortune that he was born in the Google era, a double-edged sword. "While it is extremely tempting to plagiarise these days because it is easy, it is also easier to catch the plagiarist," a senior editor commented when the prominent Time magazine and CNN journalist was recently caught.
Zakaria is not the only one we know of who has indulged in the practice. He is simply one who immediately apologised and admitted his mistake. There is a long history of plagiarism in our subcontinent, and those found copying from books and articles written by others include a number of prominent names of Urdu literature. They were luckier than Zakaria, as their handiwork was exposed much later; there was no Google then. But they do stand exposed.
Prominent journalist Syed Hasan Masanna Nadvi and his colleagues have done some research on plagiarism that was carried by the literary magazine Mehr-i-Neemroze, launched in the 1950s, and has now been compiled into a book. Che Dilawar Ast is a ready reference on plagiarism.
3 'Migrants are temporary, so get married and have kids' (Straits Times) Singaporeans need to marry and have children if they do not want the country to fold up, Mr Lee Kuan Yew has warned. In his annual National Day dinner speech, Mr Lee kept his message on population simple: The country's citizens are not reproducing enough, and migrants are needed as a temporary solution. But in the long run, mindsets must change, and the trend of declining birth rates needs to be reversed. "If we go on like that, this place will fold up because there will be no original citizens left to form the majority," he said.
4 How airlines separate men and boys (San Francisco Chronicle) Australian men are up in arms over airline policies that prevent male passengers from sitting in the seat next to unaccompanied minors. A male nurse, Daniel McCluskie, 31, said last week he was humiliated after Qantas made him switch seats with a woman to get him away from a 10-year-old girl, The Age reports. A similar incident occurred at Virgin Australia, where fireman Johnny McGirr, 33, sitting next to two boys, ages 8 and 10, was forced to move as part of company policy, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.
"[The attitude of the airline] is ‘we respect you but as soon as you board a Virgin airline you are a potential pedophile’, and that strips away all the good that any male does regardless of his standing in society, his profession or his moral attitudes," he said. In the US, there are no regulations governing the seating of unaccompanied minors, and no evidence could be found that airlines have similar policies. In 2009, a woman reported that her 13-year-old daughter was molested by an Ugandan man while traveling alone on a United Airlines flight, and later filed suit against the man and the airline.
5 Tech woes have only just begun (BBC) Large organisations of all kinds will always be complex and therefore so will the systems that support them. The question is, how do you incorporate the current and rapidly developing IT challenges into your business IT infrastructure in a way that will enable you to predict and learn from your IT failures when they do occur? As the consumerisation of technology grows and more of us look to access services through the internet, and on increasing numbers and types of digital platforms, this only adds to the management headache.
So many of us rely on the internet, and increasingly our personal devices, for statement updates and payments services that when the system goes down we instantly feel the impact. Brand is increasingly tied to digital experience, and the damage that a digital breakdown can inflict on brand trust and reputation is now visible for all to see.
The other significant consideration is the huge number of interdependences within any given system. The domino effect that can be triggered by a failure means that by the time the impact is felt, tracing the problem back to its source is very difficult. Buzz words like "cloud computing" and even "automation" promise insight, savings and increased simplicity. While taking systems and applications out of the in-house architecture can certainly help reduce the complexity, cloud computing is not a panacea. Automation too is a no-brainer, but it has to be intelligent automation - the kind that works hand in hand with human intellect.
6 Who's behind Google's doodles? (BBC) A playable Les Paul guitar, a Pac-Man game and a keyboard in celebration of Robert Moog. These are just some of the many doodles that Google has displayed on its home page. What started in 1998 as a stick figure drawing behind the letter "o" to show the team were out of the office, has now developed into intricate designs, games and artistic representations of famous figures and events. They depict both the famous and the less well-known, they feature anniversaries and some more idiosyncratic tributes, and are increasingly becoming interactive and shareable.
How else would hundreds of millions of people been reminded of Amelia Earhart's 115th birthday or that Gideon Sundback was the inventor of the zip? On his 132nd birthday, Google placed a giant zip down their home page. The team's "creative lead", Ryan Germick, says he doesn't dwell on the idea of his work being viewed by such a mindboggling number of people. Kris Hom, a technical engineer who recently joined the doodle team full time, says the pinnacle for him was when his mother shared her score from one of the Olympic playable doodles. The doodles are a way to "humanise the home page", says Hom.
7 Gates Foundation tests revolutionary toilet (Sydney Morning Herald) The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has bought about 200 litres of fake poo to trial out revolutionary new toilets that don't need water, electricity or even connection to a sewage system. This week the foundation is holding its 'Reinvent the toilet fair' aimed at improving the lives of the 2.6 billion people in the third world who do not have access to a toilet.
Many living in the poorest parts of the world are exposed to deadly disease because there are no pipes in their villages to support flushing toilets and no treatment plants - or not enough electricity - to treat sewage properly. Using $3 million in grants from the foundation, eight engineers took up the challenge to reinvent the commode into a self-contained, power- and water-less system.
8 Olympics and statistics (Western Australia Today) Using the formula, medals won multiplied by athletes in your team divided by home count population, here are the top four of the 2012 London Olympics: Australia 632, Great Britain 565, Hungary 268,, and Russia 250. Team USA scored a measly 175, and China only 23.
9 India Hindus thrive in the US (The Wall Street Journal) A study of the lifestyles and attitudes of Asian Americans based on their religion has suggested that Indian-American Hindus are the most educated and best paid group in the country. "In terms of education and income, Hindus are at the top of the socioeconomic ladder – not only among Asian-American religious groups but also among all the largest US religious groups," the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, based in Washington, DC", said in a report.
But Vinay Lal, professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California and author of "The Other Indians: Politics and Culture of South Asians in America," has criticized the study for presenting a narrow, "naïve and inaccurate" portrayal of the situation for Indians living in the US. Mr. Lal said the survey provided a "comforting picture of the nature of the American immigration experience" that was "highly inaccurate" and masked the reality for thousands of Indian Americans who work in low paid and low skilled jobs in the country. He also questioned the premise of a survey that uses religion as the main category for identifying respondents, calling it a "colonial" interpretation of the Asian community.
10 Baba on the bus (Mint) The arrest of India yoga guru Baba Ramdev in New Delhi proves Indian police have not learnt much from the experience of its British predecessors in managing difficult political customers. Ramdev mounted a bus and, for hours, refused to climb down. It was the police officer arresting him who was in trouble.
11 Paresh's cartoon in Khaleej Times on the global arms trade treaty:
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/cartoongall.asp?next=0&file=data/photogallery/cartoon/cartoon.xml§ion=cartoon
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