India and China want IMF to sell all of its gold

The IMF holds a staggering 3200 tonnes of gold in its reserves which is sitting idle while the world’s poorest are facing the fallout of the global economic crisis and the IMF itself is facing a liquidity crunch.

A report in the Financial Chronicle says that draft papers have been exchanged between Delhi and Beijing proposing that the IMF sell off its huge gold reserve which is an idle asset with a book value of $9.3 billion. But which would fetch close to $100 billion at current prices. Both countries are proposing that this amount be used to improve IMF’s liquidity as well as to help the world’s poorest countries tackle poverty. An earlier announcement after the G20 summit in London, by IMF, to sell gold to raise $6 billion, caused gold prices to slump. Now this proposed sale is going to be 16 times bigger than the earlier proposal.

This might seem bearish for the price of gold in the short term, but it is being proposed that the sale be staggered over a two or three year period. And if this sale comes to pass, most of this gold will never enter the retail market. Central banks of China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and India will use their dollar reserves to buy it off and increase their gold reserves. This will be a wise step towards a future where the USD will be vacating its seat as the world’s reserve currency. One or some or all of the above countries, with some sort of understanding amongst them, may provide an alternative with a partially gold backed currency.

This sale if approved by the member countries of the IMF will improve its short term liquidity and will remove the pressure on both China and India whose economies have grown substantially in the recent past, to finance it.

Creative thinking and education

I had the pleasure of interacting with a young educated couple during a train journey recently. The husband was working for a BPO, while the young lady had done her masters in history and was studying towards getting a Ph.D.

What was disturbing was her reason for pursuing a Ph.D. According to her, she was doing it to get a job teaching history to undergraduate students. What was apparent was the clear lack of critical thinking on her part. She had accepted everything that had been taught to her unquestioningly during her studies earlier and was doing the same with the preparation of her doctoral thesis. Especially with a subject like history, which is very subjective and open to different interpretations according to the ideological leanings of the interpreter.

Our current education system encourages regurgitation of prescribed information and discourages critical thinking. Compare that to the objectives of an Australian school that I received in an email from Sanjeev.

“We want our students to become lifelong learners who are reflective, creative thinkers, as well as responsible and active citizens.”

He has further proposed that the following is included in FTI’s education policy:

“FTI believes that school education policies should ensure that all school students in India become lifelong learners who are critical, reflective, creative thinkers, as well as responsible and active citizens.”

What will be required is the complete overhaul of the education system to ensure that not rote learning or cramming but creative thinking is rewarded. This is the best possible path to create a better citizenry for the future. And this process will have to begin with the educators, not the students.

Towards a Great India, the FTI magazine

Excerpts from the Message from the Team

Contradictory though it might sound, India is in many ways an overdeveloped, not an underdeveloped country – somewhat like an over-ripened fruit. Our history has fostered great complexity and conflict which needs to be reviewed and redirected. We need to freshen up India for a new journey that lies ahead.

India (as a conglomeration of hundreds of kingdoms) was one of the world’s greatest free markets in the past. And 2500 years ago it allowed, even promoted, wide ranging philosophical discourse. But Dark Ages overtook this openness with the rapid entrenchment of the caste system which excluded large sections in India from educational opportunity. Rigid practices grew strong and freedoms declined precipitously. Our mind grew full of fear – of authority.

The consequent societal decline made India vulnerable to foreign attack. Things did not change after power shifted to Islamic kings, since many of them similarly imposed rigid worldviews (albeit different) and displayed little interest in new learning – for Islam had lost its early spurt of intellectual vigour by then. Since everyone in India believed that everything important had already been said and done, no one bothered to think any more.

While India still remained technologically advanced compared to the rest of the world, its tradition-bound approach made it extremely vulnerable to the new kid on the block – the British: a people freshly groomed in the ideas of freedom. The British had been groomed on the ideas initially thought up by St. Thomas Aquinas who reconciled pagan Greek thought (once shunned) with Christianity and made it possible to think once again. Invention, innovation and technological breakthroughs poured from the West, soon shifting the world’s balance of power.

Unfortunately India remained reluctant to imbibe this new spurt of freedom. After all, Indians thought: what did these barbaric pale-skinned beef-eaters know?

It is true that India must look backward, but only to rediscover the great vigour and freedom that launched our great career 2500 years ago. Once we have found that freshness of approach, we must add to it the modern ideas of freedom and scientific inquiry, and re-assert our thought leadership in the world.

Freedom means the freedom to trade, freedom to think, freedom to innovate. Freedom means building governance mechanisms compatible with human incentives. The Freedom Team of India (FTI) is determined to rejuvenate India through new freedoms to think critically, without fear.

Join the Freedom Team, and ask your friends and relatives to do so. To subscribe to this magazine: http://groups.google.com/group/towards-a-great-india.

Gone with the Wind……..and happy with it!

I will be traveling in Northern India for the next three weeks starting tomorrow and will be visiting seven cities and towns this trip. I have never traveled with a laptop on my earlier trips because I believe in traveling light and the iBook I have, weighs close to 3 Kgs. On hectic travel schedules like this, it is always better to forget about being connected than lugging extra weight around.

Couple of days back, I happened to chance on an MSI Wind Netbook u100 at the local mall superstore going for $315. They had a few pieces in stock and I checked out its amazing specs at this price. It is powered by an Intel Atom processor at 1.6 MHz, has 2 GB of RAM, 10″ screen and a 160 GB hard drive, with bluetooth, wireless and a built-in webcam. It weighs just slightly over 1 Kg with the included 3 cell battery and feels amazingly light compared to my iBook. Even the keys are good sized and the keyboard does not feel cramped although it is an ultra portable laptop. The only minus points for it was that it is shipped with a SUSE linux operating system and the 3 cell battery lasts for just an hour and a half.

I went back the next day and was told that they had just the display piece left, all the others were sold out. So I took the plunge and brought the Wind home, loaded it with XP with the help of the amazing guides provided at the Wind users forum and will be going for a 6 or 9 cell battery later. It came with a carrying case and the small size factor means that the carrying case with the Wind inside, fits easily into my wife’s shoulder bag! So we will be taking it with us on this trip and hopefully will be able to connect when and wherever possible.

Dev D. review

I know, I know. I am quite late in coming up with this review, but I just got to watch this movie and this is one of those movies which need to be taken note of.

Anurag Kashyap has not reinvented the wheel, but he surely has redesigned it. This is the dark story of a young man who wanders through life hell bent on self destruction. Who doesn’t recognize A Good Thing (TM) when he sees it, one who believes that the world exists for his gratification and one who just believes in enjoying his perceived rights without giving any thought to his responsibilities.

Now this story has been told many times on the silver screen by different people with different takes. Most of them have romanticized the hero, what Anurag Kashyap has done is presented him in the raw, the way he is. And left it up to you to decide whether you sympathize with him or not. Most of us in real life come across people who have the characteristics of Dev in varying degrees. I sure have and I remember them for the damage and the heartburn they have caused in their wake.

Abhay is good but Mahi and Kalki are even better and they have done complete justice to what the director and the script required. This film tackles many taboos head on and is a path breaker in many respects. The sexual content and dialog might be offensive to some but it is in tune with the times we live in. This is the story of Devdas as it would have happened in this age.

The music is good. The only gripe I have is about the length of the movie. With tighter editing, the movie could have been brought down to around 120-130 minutes and then it would have been a pleasant experience.

Definitely a must watch and perhaps another watch again.

Log kya kahenge……..

This story was forwarded to me in an email. You might have read or heard it earlier, but it still is good for a laugh every time you come across it!

There was this village pastor who entered his donkey in a race and it won..

The local paper read: PASTOR’S ASS OUT FRONT.

The Bishop was so upset with this kind of publicity that he ordered the Pastor not to enter the donkey in another race.

The next day, the local paper headline read:BISHOP SCRATCHES PASTOR’S ASS.

This was too much for the bishop, so he ordered the pastor to get rid of the donkey.

The pastor decided to give it to a nun in a nearby convent. The local paper carried this headline the next day: NUN HAS BEST ASS IN TOWN.

The bishop upon reading this fainted. He informed the nun that she would have to get rid of the donkey, so she sold it to a farmer for $10.

The next day the paper read:NUN SELLS ASS FOR $10.

This caused the bishop a minor heart attack. He ordered the nun to buy back the donkey and lead it to the plains where it could run wild.

The next day the headlines read: NUN ANNOUNCES HER ASS IS WILD AND FREE.

The bishop was buried the next day.

The moral of the story is . .. Being overly concerned about public opinion can bring you untold grief and misery!

A Close Shave

2008 TC₃ was a meteoroid that entered Earth’s atmosphere on October 7, 2008, at 5:46 a.m. local time, over the skys of Sudan and burned up before it reached the ground. It exploded tens of kilometers above the ground with the energy of a thousand tons of TNT, causing a large fireball in the early morning sky.Very few people inhabit the remote area where the explosion took place; however it has been reported that the explosion was so intense that it lit up the sky like a full moon and an airliner 1,400 km (870 miles) away reported seeing the bright flash.

Last Monday, another asteroid 2009 DD45 buzzed past the earth at just twice the distance of telecom satellites and a fifth of the distance to the moon. This was an asteroid the size of the one that caused the Tunguska event which is estimated to be equal to 10-15 million tons of TNT. It was a near miss in terms of cosmic events. “This was pretty darn close,” astronomer Timothy Spahr of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said Wednesday.

Life on this planet we call home is fragile and humanity now has the capability to develop counter measures and early warning systems to stop an extinction level event from happening. But for that to happen, we have to get rid of our blinkers and adopt a wider view of where we as humans stand in the design of this universe.

Rape ‘harmless fun’ says lawyer

This is a verbatim news report from today’s Gulf Daily News:

THE alleged abduction and gang rape of a woman was dismissed as harmless fun by a female defence lawyer in a Bahrain trial yesterday.

Three men accused of the attack should be acquitted because young people often commit crimes for “fun”, without criminal intent, said lawyer Fatima Al Hawaj.

The men, aged 19, 20 and 21, are accused at the High Criminal Court of snatching a Filpina off the street as she walked home from work at night, last September.

They allegedly drove her to an isolated area in Askar, gang raped her and then abandoned her, after stealing her mobile phone and purse.

All three deny abduction, rape and theft.

Ms Al Hawaj told judges that her clients were youngsters and that “minors’ often committed crimes for fun, without ill-intent.

“It is general knowledge that youngsters commit crimes for the fun of it and not with the intention to harm others and I request the court to take that into consideration and clear my clients of the charges,” she argued.

The 24-year-old woman failed to show up in court yesterday for cross-examination despite knowing about the session.

Attorney Mohammed Al Mutawa stepped in mid-session, saying he represented her and pledged to bring her to the next hearing.

“I am representing her in this case and she knows about the hearing, but couldn’t make it due to personal reasons. I pledge to personally bring her to the next session,” he told judges.

The woman was allegedly walking home from the hotel she works in Manama when the men, who were driving a rented car, followed her.

Prosecutors claim they grabbed her hands and dragged her into their car, drove her to a secluded area in Askar and gang-raped her.

The men then allegedly stole her mobile phone and purse, which contained cash and dumped her in the middle of the desert. She later managed to identify her abductors’ car and the rape kit results were positive for the defendants’ DNA, said the prosecution. Judges adjourned the case to April 12, to summon the woman for cross-examination.

Welcome to stories from Wonderland!

P.S. Coolred 38 has already written about this here.

Provocation………

Indian Home Maker has written a thought provoking post on provocative dressing here. And Nimmy has written a post in reply here.

Universally, society sets the norms for acceptable behavior. All the individual can do is try to raise awareness and contribute towards changing how a society deals with issues. Even in the west, emancipation and equal rights for any underprivileged section of society, whether women or blacks, has been won one small step at a time.

Here is a story from today’s Saudi Gazette. A 23-year-old unmarried, gang-raped woman was awarded a one-year prison term and 100 lashes for committing adultery, getting pregnant and trying to abort the foetus. The judge was considerate enough to postpone the lashes to be administered after the child is born.

I have read somewhere that a society is judged by the way it treats its weakest members. And I guess this society has a long way to go before it can be called compassionate or just or civilized.

The Lure of the Gulf

Visit any Gulf country and you will see Indians laboring away industriously in all types of jobs, from the menial jobs that no local would want to do, to the highly sophisticated ones which require professional qualifications. Most of these migrant workers are from South India and a great percentage of them are from Kerala. This has led to the saying that most people from Kerala are more familiar with Dubai than they are with their own Trivandrum.

Southern India has enjoyed a historic trade relationship with the Arab world with Arab settlements in almost all notable coastal cities and ports of Kerala. The current outflux of workers to the Gulf began in the seventies with the price of oil skyrocketing and the Gulf economies starting to enjoy an economic boom. Most of those workers migrate on bachelor status, leaving their families behind. They live in cramped accommodations, segregated from any interaction with the opposite sex for long periods of time. This results in a host of social and psychological problems both among the migrant population and the population left behind in the home country.

Most of those migrant workers work hard and long hours and remit their savings back home for their families to enjoy a comparatively good standard of living. This influx of Gulf money has proved unhealthy for Kerala. Because it has not generated any lasting development back home. Instead, it has made the local economy even more dependent on exporting its human capital for the purpose of earning remittances.

But things are changing. It is not only monetary considerations these days which come into play when a highly qualified professional decides to migrate to the Gulf. Nowadays for the Muslim professional from the subcontinent, migrating with his family to the Gulf is a chance to enjoy the best of both worlds. Because they get all the material benefits and the infrastructure of the first world, while living in an Islamic state and retaining their own cultural heritage and identity. So they get to live in the West, but without its decadence. Plus they are close enough to the home country to be able to frequently travel and visit their relatives back home. While for other non-Muslim migrants looking for a better life and looking to escape the madness that is the subcontinent, the Gulf is the first step in their trajectory of ultimately migrating to the West.