Guardian writer asks Indians to get a reality check

[fd24]

Can you point out some of these threads mate?

i will pm later if that's ok roy?thanks

 

[DarK-LorD]

Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist chief minister accused of complicity in the murder of more than 2,000 Muslims in 2002 (and still barred from travel to the US), is a great visionary for opening up his state's ample resources to businessmen.

India's Tommy Hilfiger utopia is a bluff that will soon be called across the globe | Pankaj Mishra | Comment is free | The Guardian

It was the US congressional think tank which praised Modi.
US report praises Modi's style of governance - Yahoo!
It was US department of state which lauded Modi:
‘Incorruptible’ in WikiLeaks, Modi smiles - Indian Express
WikiLeaks exposes US change of heart about Modi - Rediff.com News

BTW,India bashing threads are becoming a part of PDF's 4pm-8pm routine.

 

[jha]

This is where PPP comes into picture...You can have a healthy breakfast for Rs. 10 in Indian Cities ( Poori-Sabji in Kolkata and Idli-Sambhar in South )..Try that in London...This does not mean that India is not poor...

OT, This Pankaj Mishra is just amusing...

 

[nForce]

Thank you for this post.
Im grateful and honoured that you dtop to read my posts.
If you do then you will be aware that my normal tone of thread making is not this.
I wish to explain. In the last 2 or 3 days everytime i come on here i have been greeted with threads and posts ripping to shreds Pakistan and Pakistanis. Their seems to be a common ingrediant and that is associated with banned topics and generally talking about how poor Pakistan is and how great India is. It came to my attention that even SpArK has started to join in the gang bashing. Its sad to see.
Now 2 wrongs don't make a right. I put this thread up to say guys Pakistan is not exclusive to problems and issues. A Pakistani starving child is the same as an Indian child. My partner is a Hindu and i am a Muslim. Every month we take it in turns to send to charities based in Pakistan one month and India the next. We both understand the dire straits our everyday people are in.
What annoys me is when the likes of Praful or Nelson feel that their nation is the garden of Eden and Pakistan is blessed with all the cr*p in the world. This thread is for people of that nature to stop and have a reality check.
Please nForce if you doubt what i say check for yourself.
Brother if i offended you fateh71 or Butters that was NOT my intention. My intention is to stop dishing negativity and rubbish about Pakistan because we ALL have issues. Concentrate on solutions or good news in both our nations.
Thanks for reading his.

Appreciate your point of view.Appreciate your efforts.
BTW,how do you send charities? I have been associated with Worldvision for some time,send some money there.I would like to know about other avenues as well.

 

[jdme]

Thank you for this post.
Im grateful and honoured that you dtop to read my posts.
If you do then you will be aware that my normal tone of thread making is not this.
I wish to explain. In the last 2 or 3 days everytime i come on here i have been greeted with threads and posts ripping to shreds Pakistan and Pakistanis. Their seems to be a common ingrediant and that is associated with banned topics and generally talking about how poor Pakistan is and how great India is. It came to my attention that even SpArK has started to join in the gang bashing. Its sad to see.
Now 2 wrongs don't make a right. I put this thread up to say guys Pakistan is not exclusive to problems and issues. A Pakistani starving child is the same as an Indian child. My partner is a Hindu and i am a Muslim. Every month we take it in turns to send to charities based in Pakistan one month and India the next. We both understand the dire straits our everyday people are in.
What annoys me is when the likes of Praful or Nelson feel that their nation is the garden of Eden and Pakistan is blessed with all the cr*p in the world. This thread is for people of that nature to stop and have a reality check.
Please nForce if you doubt what i say check for yourself.
Brother if i offended you fateh71 or Butters that was NOT my intention. My intention is to stop dishing negativity and rubbish about Pakistan because we ALL have issues. Concentrate on solutions or good news in both our nations.
Thanks for reading his.

Hold on! This was an offensive attack because Pakistan was "shredded" in last 2 days? This is PDF! 80% of threads created here either bash India directly or indirectly! And even if they are praising say China or Sri Lanka, they are actually taking shot at India! You have members who have thousands of post and it is 99% about India and not one of them good! And your stomach was churning over couple of threads in past 2 days? Obviously Indians have higher tolerance or just stronger stomachs

 

[SpArK]

The god damn Schadenfreudes.

 

[nForce]

The god damn Schadenfreudes.

que sera sera

 

[harshad]

india is a developing country,what does pakistani people expect it to be
its a miracle that it is developing with so many handicaps

 

[jdme]

The god damn Schadenfreudes.

Worse thing is that whatever is reported in this article is not new! Too old for PDF. Same thing gets rehashed everyday as if things can change overnight!

 

[MrProudIndian]

Last week, as India's TV anchors and columnists worked themselves up into a moralistic frenzy about a measure of poverty proposed by the planning commission (40p a day per person), I visited the new outlet for Tommy Hilfiger in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Press coverage about the opening, and accounts of the new Hermès store in Mumbai, which will sell saris for £6,000, seemed to make debates about India's poverty line look irrelevant. Himachal, too, seemed to be taking a giant step towards becoming a consumer of western brand names.

The shop was empty, the salesmen sunk into torpor. There were no likely customers in sight when I passed it a few days later. Obviously, there are few takers for the reassuringly expensive preppy look in one of India's predominantly rural states. But the wisdom of financial elites and their mouthpieces in the media rarely brushes against actuality. In any case, appearances are everything in the age of globalisation.

Along with Tommy Hilfiger, several new private "universities" have also opened up recently in Himachal. According to a local daily, the Tribune, one of these institutions enrolled students and started offering courses even before it came into legal existence. You might put down this haste to the high demand for quality education among India's overwhelmingly youthful population. But as the Tribune described in a series of reports, the universities not only lack faculties, laboratories and libraries; a few do not meet the criteria for acquiring property in the state.

In other words, private universities have become a pretext for real estate speculators to acquire expensive land from the government: another example of the collusion between state and private business manifested recently in some of India's biggest corruption scandals. These sweetheart deals would be somewhat excusable if, unlike most Indian institutions of learning, the private universities offered an education rather than degrees. But they are only interested in extracting steep tuition fees from parents anxious for their children to join India's new economy. Not surprisingly, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, 75% of technical graduates and more than 85% of general graduates in India are unemployable.

The professionalisation of education has taken a toll of even the country's elite Indian Institutes of Technology. Last week Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys, India's premier software company, said "coaching classes" that help aspiring engineers cram for the IIT entrance exams have caused a sharp deterioration in the quality of students.

But for those making money while the sun shines there is no compelling reason to worry about the future. There is enough beguiling fantasy in the form of cloud-cuckoo-land projections (as much loved by globalised free marketeers as the central-planning communists of old): that India has a "demographic dividend" in the form of its young population, which is all set to out-produce and out-consume every other nation in the world in the next 30 years.

It is this unexamined ideological conceit that David Cameron echoes when he exhorts Britons to summon up the "energy, hunger and drive" of an emerging economy like India. It is also what the Economist magazine amplifies when, in an embarrassingly upbeat report on the Indian economy last year, it exulted that "remarkably, in rural areas more than 20% of Indian students, most of them poor, attend private schools. The literacy rate is rising fast".

So it is, on paper, along with the number of private schools and universities. But last month a study of schools in the biggest states found India's peers in adult literacy are Afghanistan and Papua New Guinea. Many children were unable to read even after three years of schooling. One of the report's researchers, the eminent economist Jean Dreze, told the Financial Times, "after 20 years of meteoric economic growth, there's been so little improvement in terms of the living standards of the people".

Writing on the recent contretemps about poverty lines in the Hindu, Utsa Patnaik, one of India's most respected economists, pointed out: "Per head energy and protein intake has been falling for the last two decades as the majority of the population is unable to afford enough food." Delinked from "nutrition standards", especially in a time of high food inflation that has put cereals and vegetables out of reach for most Indians, the government's poverty line measures destitution rather than poverty.

So how do falsehoods turn into truths in our enlightened democratic societies, which are presumably immune to crude propaganda of the kind churned out by totalitarian regimes? Patnaik explains that "hundreds of economists are closely imprecated within a vast global poverty-estimating structure with the World Bank at its apex, producing increasingly misleading estimates every year in glossy reports". CEO-struck writers and journalists – the "useful idiots" of the rich and powerful – hold up another end of what the economist Ha-Joon Chang calls the "financial-intellectual complex".

It is refreshing when these masters of the universe drop the pretence that they are working so very hard to lift all those hundreds of millions out of poverty. In a remarkable recent interview, Shankar Sharma, an equity trader much loved by India's business periodicals for his apparent omniscience about "market behaviour", denounced India's recent anti-corruption movement as a "lynch mob". Apparently, it had destroyed India's image among foreign investors, thereby "eroding corporate profitability".

Speaking to the Economic Times, Sharma offered a stern lesson in the ways of the world: "Remember, fairly won public contracts rarely have any profitability. It's almost always sweetheart deals that carry supernormal profits."

Sharma may sound a bit too cynical. But he differs only in tone and style from India's most prestigious businessmen, such as Ratan Tata, Anil Ambani and Sunil Mittal. For them, Narendra Modi, the Hindu nationalist chief minister accused of complicity in the murder of more than 2,000 Muslims in 2002 (and still barred from travel to the US), is a great visionary for opening up his state's ample resources to businessmen.

"Markets are not there for morality," Sharma helpfully pointed out. But are they at least there for the sake of national economies? It is nice to think, as the Economist recently claimed, that the "whole of India" got a "big confidence boost" out of Tata's acquisitions of such prominent European brands as Jaguar and Corus. But Tata, like Ambani and Mittal, is putting the bulk of his investments abroad, looking, like so many globalised corporates, for an investment climate and tax regime conducive to more corporate profitability; and the UK chancellor, George Osborne, is only too happy to oblige.

This is the brave new world of globalisation in which nothing is what it seems. And it bears more than a passing resemblance to another promised utopia: an alternate reality in which statistics were shamelessly manipulated, and a tiny privileged elite dominating both political and economic life lorded it over the rest, while propaganda machinery manned by a conformist media and assorted "useful idiots" stood ever ready to deceive the restless masses with loud proclamations of a new dawn for humanity. One day, of course, its bluff was called; and we may not have to wait too long before the Potemkin villages of our own time (Himachal's Tommy Hillfiger and private universities being the least of them) come crashing down.

So please when Indians come on here and tell us India is incredible. Take a pause and think. We ALL have issues. To say your problems are big doesnt mean yours go away. They will just get bigger. I pray we all improve our lands.



India's Tommy Hilfiger utopia is a bluff that will soon be called across the globe | Pankaj Mishra | Comment is free | The Guardian

Gimme a break...all those facts stated..seem to be self made
Per head protein and energy intake?Lol wtf?Is this a joke?I have never come across any research that takes into count per heard protein intake..
Modi is the man,he has made Gujarat one of the fastest growing states in the world.
Adult literacy in India is still more than Pakistan...
Tata,Ambani are investing here as well as in abroad...the author doesn't see the investment of Audi,Ford,BMW blah blah other companies making in India?
Stats are manipulated?Oh yeah...antaryaami or he got some really internal sources that tell him so?

yes India has problems and is dealing with it..every country has..we have the resources to deal with them and you ll see the result in the future yourself..
In the end seems to be a BS article,don't cry "its an Indian author"..every country has a version of Altaf Bhai...
paid/biased journalism at its first class!

 

[harpoon]

I am all for the equal distribution of wealth, but lets create some wealth in the first place.

 

[nForce]

I am all for the equal distribution of wealth, but lets create some wealth in the first place.

I am against blind equal distribution of wealth.Public services like education healthcare,roads,water etc are one thing.Anything beyond that,you should earn it.

 

[IndoCarib]

@ Superkaif, get a reality check

-I read this article in 'The Gaurdian' yesterday and I though to myself, this could as well be written by' Arundhati Roy' herself. Pankaj Mishra and Ms. Roy are bosom buddies. He was the one discovered the writing talent of Ms. Roy. His views on naxalism. kashmir etc. are very much similar to that of Roy. Basically both are far leftists,psuedo intellectuals, cant see India being developed. Roy's and Mishra's bluff will be called soon

Pankaj Mishra’s Intellectual Dishonesty « Recurring Decimals…..

ambainny

 

[harpoon]

I am against blind equal distribution of wealth.Public services like education healthcare,roads,water etc are one thing.Anything beyond that,you should earn it.

Thats public property bro.

 

[nForce]

Thats public property bro.

Thats why I said those are public services.A country should provide basic facilities of public services.