Mush’s Jon Stewart appearance

Apart from the inevitable spin on why bin Laden went undetected lo all these all many years, and the attempted obfuscations of trying to distinguish between ISI activities in Afghanistan (the bad kind of terrorism) and against India (presumably the good kind of terrorism) that is expected of any Pakistani establishment persona, the more interesting comments were on the subject of the putative US withdrawal from Afghanistan currently set for 2014, when he claimed that setting an artificial deadline before demonstrated progress would be counterproductive and would simply cause the Taliban and allied parties to wait it out up until that date. It was as if the script had been pre-approved by John McCain, Lindsey Graham or the Weekly Standard editorial desk. Although I can see how a military general would be predisposed to such a worldview, one would think that those in the Pakistani political system would be relieved to be rid of a huge military presence next door, especially since the strategy has stifled grand “strategic depth” ambitions that were curtailed by 9/11 and the ensuing conflict.

http://www.hulu.com/embed/AqyEOWh1W1H2eCJ4S2UbUw

http://www.hulu.com/embed/VF4BMSvYTVwznqPAu302iA

Of Trump and General Elections

This New Republic editorial is correct that Trump’s recent rise among primary voters is due in large part to “an exaggerated sense of victimhood.” Trump has managed to combine the usual CEO-whining about Obama’s Marxist-Lenninist-Maoist economic policies (which include compromising on public-option health insurance, creating a watered-down, Wall Street-friendly version of financial regulation legislation, abandoning stimulus at the first hint of Congressional resistance and jumping on the deficit-reduction wagon, so on and so forth) and familiar cultural resentments hurled at liberal politicians since time immemorial (reaping benefits of affirmative action, accusations of foreignness embodied in the “Birther” insanity) that are an instant hit among Republican primary voters. Of course, having a popular reality-show on a major TV network also helps with visibility.

But what the editorial skips mentioning is that if economic conditions are bad enough in summer or fall 2012, Trump (or Palin, or Romney, or whoever captures the nomination) will end up in the White House. Never mind the vanishing stimulus, the mood of “austerity” currently sweeping the nation’s political system (curiously reflected in budgets cuts aimed at weaker sections of society and a continuation of low marginal tax rates for investors and the business class) is a disaster for economic recovery and job growth, anemic as it is right now. While Obama might be interested in reaching further agreement with House Republicans on additional budget cuts in order to gain press coverage that appeals to Independents, I hope his advisers realize that a double-dip recession isn’t really the best re-election strategy, especially once the GOP candidate has been selected by next spring and the polls inevitably tighten.

Clearly, the Federal Reserve needs to step up to the plate and continue its “quantitative easing” policies in bigger quantities, especially given current inflation rates of 0.5%. Oh, wait…

Of Weddings and Economic Power

Some friends of mine are outraged over an astronomical 14 million pound figure that was quoted in a British newspaper as the amount spent by a Congress politician at his son’s wedding. The article cites Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, a renowned socialist, as saying such ostentatious behavior should be avoided by party members. Indeed, notwithstanding the rising inflation in the Indian economy of recent years, the amount allegedly spent by a public figure is quite obscene.

But I think a lot of us are missing the point by simply criticizing the spending behavior, whereas the most pernicious aspect of this whole affair is that a representative of the people [at least an aspiring one] would have accumulated such vast sums of money. Human beings often behave differently depending on their circumstances and consciences, so it is only natural that some wealthy people would like to flaunt their riches at a joyous occasion like their offspring’s wedding. But would the distribution of economic (and implicitly, political) power be much different if the person in question had thrown a more austere party?

To generalize this a bit more, Forbes’ list of India’s filthy-rich contains examples of the most ostentatious  [your Vijay Mallyas], as well as more modest ones [Narayana Murthy comes to mind]. But it is undeniable that their overall net worth provides them with disproportionate influence on corporate and public policies. Our marginal tax rates of 30%, along with major holes in the revenue collection process, do nothing to lessen the political power held by such figures in a society that has an average annual income of US$1,200, and a human development index rank of 119.

So let’s rail against lavish spending by political figures tied to the incumbent governing party by all means, but also let’s recognize the underlying systemic issue, aside from the ostentatious behavior.

Thaw, Baby, Thaw..

Barack Obama takes some more [sensible, may I add] baby steps towards easing the Cuba embargo. Fact is though, the existing policy towards a small island nation off the coast of Florida makes little sense, given that the Cold War ended more than 20 years ago [the dubious proposition of whether the embargo was introduced to overthrow the communist regime is outside the scope of discussion of this particular blog post]. There’s been predictable protests from the usual suspects, such as hawkish Republican congressmen, on how this would perpetuate survival of the Castro regime. That sounds about right, given the incredible success of undermining the Cuban government through economic and travel restrictions put in place for the last 5 decades.

Revelations Inside “Inside Job”

Walked into a movie theater after quite some time last night to catch a screening of “Inside Job“, a documentary about the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath. The narration was by Matt Damon, presumably to put more people in seats (also might be a logical move given Damon’s identification with Democrats and liberals in general).

A lot of the stuff in the documentary has been out in the public domain for a long time now: deregulation of financial markets starting with Reagan, the dot-com and housing bubbles, the power exerted by a handful of investment banks on the political scene, securitization of mortgages, derivatives trading, repeal of Glass-Steagall under the Larry Summers-Robert Rubin-Alan Greenspan regime (“The Committee to Save World”, as I recall from a Time Magazine cover of that period), the collapse of Lehmann Brothers that triggered the epic financial crisis of 2008, et cetera, et cetera. Relatively little of this was new information, though presented nicely in a coherent format. The contrast with Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” was fascinating. Although Moore’s work is a lot more humorous and on a different level in terms of cinematic excellence, “Inside Job” avoids the question of profit-versus-welfare motive altogether, focusing instead on the role of the financial industry, legislators, the Federal Reserve and the role of the Clinton and Bush administrations in bringing about the debacle of September 2008 and the resulting worldwide recession, from which we are recovering painfully to this day.

Something new that I learned from the screening: the role of Economics professors in lending respectability and a certain legitimacy to the financial industry, be it while writing papers about the (in)stability of Iceland’s banking sector in conjunction with Goldman Sachs [Frederic Mishkin], or advocating for deregulatory legislation as Treasury Secretary and subsequently cashing in while giving speeches to Wall Street executives following a stint as President of Harvard [Larry Summer], or advocating supply-side tax policies that increase the personal wealth of the top 0.1% of the population, many of whom happen to be employed in the financial services sector [Glenn Hubbard].

Another take-away was the commentary on the kid-gloves treatment provided to the big banks by the Obama administration, that has been a major sore point for liberals who expected things to change at least slightly in the past couple of years. Notably, the movie points out that many of the players who were central to bringing about the crisis (Bernanke, Geithner, Summers, the list goes on) are still running the show. Of course, those who were paying close attention to the Obama primary campaign would have recognized that economic populism was not one of the strongpoints of the campaign [their differences were mainly in the foreign policy domain].

To sum up, “Inside Job” is a good primer on the events leading up to the financial “Armageddon”, and its lingering aftereffects. However, the documentary does make you leave the theater feeling a little pessimistic..

Cirque d’IPL

Mukul Kesavan articulated almost everything I have wanted to say about the way BCCI runs Indian cricket.  ”Disneyfication” is an apt term to describe the whole process of monetization that’s been undertaken on steroids since the advent of Twenty20 and IPL, with “DLF Maximum” sixes, “Karbon Kamaal” catches and “Citi Moments of Success” (assuming that’s wickets), blonde cheerleaders, so on and so forth. Not that this is the first time money has determined how much cricket is played and in what formats. Test cricket, after all, has gotten step-motherly treatment ever since the World Cup victory of ’83 and the increased popularity of limited-overs cricket in the subcontinent since then. It is just that the degree of commercialism has skyrocketed ever since the administrators found that an even-shorter version of the game could be viably marketed to a wider audience, and greater profits could be raked in by having movie stars and glamorous business tycoons invest in such franchises.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, to quote a certain famous sitcom line.  To my mind, there’s no contemporary sport that doesn’t need to generate profits in order to sustain itself and flourish. Yet, what’s been a pet peeve of mine, and what Kesavan captures exquisitely in his piece, is the sheer crassness with which the BCCI has gone about its business, sacrificing the international cricket calendar and the well-being of players in the quest for reaching a broader audience.

Money quote:

Can you imagine Fifa placing its biggest bets on seven-a-side football? Or the USPGA hustling the Augusta National Golf Club into scrapping the Masters and replacing it with a six hole Pro-Am tournament, which then becomes the centre-piece of America’s golfing calendar? ……….. Of course you can’t. But you don’t have to stretch your imagination in the case of cricket because that is, in fact, what the BCCI has done to the game.

Amen! More importantly, the author is careful to not scapegoat Lalit Modi and his alleged failures at administering this T20 circus, while giving the rest of the folks who have run the board for years (Pawar, Dalmiya, Muthiah etc.) a pass. In fact, there’s a real danger that all the controversy that has been stirred following the Modi-Tharoor spat over the Kerala franchise will not lead to a bigger investigation into the opacity and shady practices that the Board has engaged in for years. That would be history repeating itself as tragedy, reminiscent of the way the match fixing crisis was handled, where there was no public inquiry into the wheelings and dealings of bookies and consorting players, simply ad-hoc bans that were handed out to players allegedly found ”guilty”.

However, I am a little skeptical of having the government step in to “clean up the mess” as suggested at the end of the article. Having a government that’s influenced by many of the same characters (Pawar, Tharoor, Rajiv Shukla etc.) run a house-clearing operation is very likely to end up as a musical chairs exercise, with a few token heads rolling, while the underlying structure that has been running the show for the past several decades is left intact. A more radical solution would be to go the whole nine yards by privatizing Indian cricket, either through a transparent bidding process, or by making BCCI a publicly traded company to be regulated as a corporate entity, with a mandate of not just playing more T20s at the expense of 5-day cricket, but to look after the long-term interests of the game.

Dev. D – ***

Alert!! Spoilers included in thoughts below:

Boredom on Saturday led to Netflix browsing. Spent the afternoon watching Dev. D. The instant streaming version has really taken off, especially with respect to Bollywood, er, I mean, Hindi flicks. For the lazy ones among us, it saves us a trip to the local Indian store to get it on DVD (of course, the more ingenious ones among us still download it for free using some BitTorrent black magic).

Back to the movie, Dev D is an updated take on Sarat Chandra’s classic novel Devdas, recounted a half dozen times on the silver screen by now, portrayed over the years by actors as varied as P.C. Barua in the 1930s, Dilip Kumar in the mid-50s and most famously, Shah Rukh in the 2002-vintage caper/magnum opus. Devdas, shortened here to “Dev”, is played by Abhay Deol, who has been making a name for himself in the Hindi/English crossover genre in recent years. “Paro” is played by the gorgeous Mahie Gill, while “Chandramukhi” in this case happens to be the rather exotic Kalki Koechlin.  The backdrop to the story is not colonial Calcutta, but present-day Punjab and Delhi.

First, the good news: Dev D is miles, if not light years, ahead of Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s clunker of a film, which basically had a bunch of hummable songs, extreme SRK-style hamming, and the pretty faces of Aishwarya and Madhuri somehow strung together in a plot. The editing and transitioning between scenes here is crisp, with the background score doing an excellent job at conveying the mood to the audience at any given moment. But the flaws are also pretty evident, with the whole background story on the prostitute Chandramukhi distracting from the main plot. Though well-intentioned, the whole MMS-scandal angle does not help advance the story. Would have been better served had it been shown in a movie about how women get into the call-girl business.

Abhay Deol does a pretty decent job as Dev, the spoiled brat who missed out on love and thus embarks on a path of self-destruction filled with alcohol, narcotics and rage. Deol succeeds in making us empathize with his plight through the duration of the movie, although his petulant behavior is something  that we haven’t seen portrayed in earlier versions of Devdas. Think the director here misses out on showing the melancholy side to the character that has been such an essential feature in the novel as well as previous versions onscreen. Mahie Gill fills the screen with her radiance, and justifies the director’s casting decision. She holds her own in several exchanges with Dev. Kalki Koechlin as “Leni” and later “Chanda/Chandramukhi” is a surprise package. Though the entire background of how she got initiated in the flesh trade seems to me to be a distraction, it does help demonstrate her acting chops. However, it’s not exactly clear why she falls for Dev, apart from the fact that the story dictates such an outcome. One suspects there shall be more good performances from her in times to come, especially in this genre, given her Western appearance and demeanor.

Overall, Dev D is eminently watchable, though falls short of the “Classics” category. Director Anurag Kashyap manages to take Sarat Chandra’s novel and creates a convincing narrative tailored to contemporary times,  though he gets sidetracked at times by things like the MMS-pornography shenanigans associated with Leni, and the hit-and-run incident at the end (similar to ones that have been reported over the years). Special note for the music and background score, especially Emotional Atyachaar that has pretty much caught on fire ever since the movie first released about a year ago.

Global War on Terrorism: Cricket Edition

I haven’t really cared for the carnival that is 20/20 ever since its inception (it became popular among South Asians pretty much by accident, following the 2007 edition of the World Twenty20), and haven’t really followed the shutout of Pakistani players from the next edition of IPL in any great detail. A friend posted his thoughts about the whole situation/debacle. A brief response in in order, I believe:

• Obviously, merely facilitating cricket series between India and Pakistan is not going to untangle political disputes between the 2 countries, any more than organizing Israeli-Palestinian peace camps is going to hasten a latter-day Camp David. This is not to say that people-to-people contacts have no positive benefits at all, merely that these are long-term efforts  that have to be sustained over generations so as to reduce mistrust among both the societies, and get us to see the other as complex human beings, not just second-hand caricatures.
• It’s pretty outlandish to scapegoat people who merely play cricket for a living, as casualties of the latest round of conflict between the two neighbors. Not the first time it’s happened, surely, but pretty silly nonetheless. Does anyone seriously believe denying Shahid Afridi and Younis Khan the ability to play in India, we are going to make radical Islamic groups and their many benefactors realize their folly and stop promoting violence against civilians across the border?
• If the standard were banning players because of all the damage inflicted by a particular nation or government, then I don’t think the Men In Blue should ever set foot on the Premadasa Stadium, considering what the island nation to the south of India has been through for about the last 30 years, events which were in large part facilitated by successive governments of ours back in the ’80s. Nor should we even invite or ever play with English teams, given all the havoc wreaked on the entire subcontinent with colonization, de-industrialization and an assorted mix  of disastrous policies. Of course, it would be silly to hold Andrew Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen responsible for all that, so why this picking on Pakistanis? [Awkward silence]…
• I think there is some justification in not drafting any Pakistanis because of issues related to security and profitability. Sport franchises are corporations looking to turn a quick buck and not offend anyone’s sensibilities in particular, so one can’t really blame them that much for the state of affairs, a view echoed by some. However, we would all be better off if no one pretended this to be the result of a principled decision to “not engage the enemy”. It is instead of not engaging grandstanding Shiv Sena thugs, combined with a center-left government eager to demonstrate it’s “anti-terrorism credentials” and unwilling to acknowledge the reality that inducting Pakistani players into a cricket tournament has little or no bearing on relations between the two South Asian neighbors.

Overhyped #TOIFail

Another Manmohan Singh meeting with a US President, another in a series of meaningless TOI inferences, having little relation to or bearing on reality.

“..Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Monday threw down the gauntlet to Washington, Islamabad and perhaps even Beijing and other world capitals that India would not be budged from pursuing its interests in Afghanistan..”

Ah yes, such determination was shown by PM Singh. And what might have prompted such a “throwing of the gauntlet”? These were the words used by Singh: “The road to peace on Afghanistan will be long and hard. But given the high stakes involved, the commitment of the international community must be sustained by firm resolve and unity of purpose.” It’s about the most cliched rhetoric you are ever likely to hear about the Afghan situation, really amounting to nothing. “Firm resolve” and “unity of purpose” are meaningless buzzwords, akin to “freedom” and “democracy” and “ancient civilizations” that are thrown around in boilerplate speeches delivered all the time by politicians on the world stage.

The larger point in all this is, Singh’s cautious statement about a potential withdrawal of American troops from the region, is hardly a “challenge” that has been issued to the US, Pakistan, China or some other country. It’s highly unlikely that Obama and his national security advisers shall be swayed one way or the other by a vague statement from the Indian head of government, and India’s premier newspaper should not be overhyping it’s significance.

A note of dissent on IBN..

Transcript of IBN interview with Arundhati Roy (conducted by Karan Thapar). As expected, Roy gets badgered as “crazy” and “nuts” by a lot of people I know. Nothing new about that, since epithets are thrown around every time it’s hard to argue on substantive grounds (similar to how creating a milquetoast public health insurance option in the US gets you labeled simultaneously “socialist” and “Nazi”).

Notice the lame questions the interview directs at her anyway (E.g. “Sixty years after Indian democracy came into being, do you believe that India’s poor and dispossessed have benefited?”) Most of them fall back on the unquestioned premise of India being  the largest democracy in the world, a tiresome phrase that has lost much of its luster with its invocations ad nauseam. The point that she and dissenters like her are trying to get across, namely that there is a lot wrong with our curious mix of democratic politics and partially “free-market” economy systems and we should be willing to admit the failures, is pretty much lost on Thapar. His fallback on Sonia Gandhi & Manmohan Singh apologizing for the Sikh riots was pretty pathetic, I thought.