Power and Water Riots India

Power and water riots in India erupt every year and this year is no different. The intensity and frequency increases every year. With monsoon showing no signs of appearing and the temperature averaging 43 C/110 F and peaking at 45 C it is particularly bad this year.

Today I got stuck on the highway near the farm due to the locals blocking the road with buses and tractors because there has been negligible electricity in the whole area since the heat wave started. It took me almost twice as long as normal to reach my home and it left me totally drained. I don't have air-conditioning and I had to drench my head with cold water twice.

I have talked about the problems we face every year during summers on my post "The Unearthly Earth Hour." The government seems to be no hurry to relinquish control over the power and water sectors and instead preaches the virtues of conservation. The governments all over routinely force businesses to shut down to save power.

It doesn't strike people as odd that in sectors where there is free-competition there is no such talk and consumers are exhorted to consume more and get better prices as more competition arrives. It has happened in telecom which previously was a government monopoly and people had to wait for as long as ten years to get a phone connection.

Today you can get a cell phone connection in minutes and even people earning less then $2 a day have a phone. In Delhi call rates are as low as 20 paise (half a cent) a minute. The same has been seen in all the sectors which have been liberated from the slimy paws of the bureaucrats.

Conservatism- Intellectual backbone wanted

This article on American Chronicle "William F. Buckley vs. Ayn Rand: Ayn Rand's Revenge" highlights the reasons for demise of conservatives in last 50 years. It shows William F. Buckley Jr.´s antipathy towards Rand and her idea's.

"The important point here involves Buckley, but it involves a lot more. The issue with Buckley is that he truly had nothing to contribute intellectually. And when faced with a true intellectual like Rand, all he could do was guttersnipe. Yet the wider point pertains to conservatism today. Until it begins to intellectually justify itself in a logical way, conservatism will remain lost, and statism will continue its march. Rand provided the intellectual justification for capitalism and liberty and she did so by reference to the fundamental metaphysical facts of reality and human existence. She did not appeal to tradition or the supernatural. She appealed to the rational. And the public has been responding to her ever since."

I think the above argument is equally applicable to a lot of conservative parties around the world. Here in India the BJP which tasted heavy defeat is floundering after a second consecutive defeat by the leftist Congress party. It's vacillation in defining itself as a religious right or a more forward looking free-market one has cost it dear. Although BJP did well during it's tenure, it is this failure to define it's identity in clear and precise terms which today has left it virtually rudderless.

The kick-ass rifle

I read this article in Strategypage some time back about afghans rediscovering The Lee-Enfield rifle. It really amused me, since in India it has been in constant use since it was invented in 1885. More then 17 million have been made since then and the Ishapore factory in India still makes it. This rifle has seen a lot of history and I have seen this rifle at very close quarters. In fact, hind quarters is the right term since I got hit in the butt by the Lee-Enfield rifle stock. I wince every time I hear the term rifle-butt.

It was for a noble cause and very long time back (no pun-too painful). As mentioned in my post "Definition of Excessive force" it was 1991 and I was protesting with a lot of students against reservations in educational institutions based on a persons caste. I was waving a black flag and right on the front lines. We were moving towards the parliament when the Indian Gestapo (police) started shooting tear-gas at the crowd. I used the flag to pick up the tear-gas shells and threw it right back and suddenly everybody started doing that. I was single-handedly responsible for demise of that metal canister tear-gas (or so I would like to believe) since the next time they started using the ones which burst on contact.

So to make the long story short I was in the front, waving the flag when the police on horses charged. I stood my ground for a while and when I looked back the others were long gone. I said," bloody cowards " and ran like a gazelle. Too late, one of the policemen on side-lines ran swinging his rifle with full force and hit me hard on my rear-end. I thankfully didn't fall and kept running. I managed to crawl into a building and avoided going to the jail. I couldn't walk for a few days and needless to say standing was preferable to sitting. So the moral of the story is that never be at the rear-end (pun intented-pain fades with time) of a retreating protesting crowd when the police charge.

I had a friend with me that day. He had promised his family that he would not join the protest. We lost contact when the chaos started. The next day his father called him and asked him how was yesterday. He started with his story which was cut short when his father showed him the newspaper. It had a big picture of him running with a big Sikh policeman on a big horse chasing him with a raised baton. We had a good laugh over the whole episode.

After a week my local magazine vendor showed me the cover of the a magazine and guess what? I was there in full color with a bunch of other people. It was an interesting picture because it had something else; one of the guys caught in a naughty act (to put it mildly). I have that magazine with me somewhere so I will try to upload the cover soon.

Definition of "Excessive force"

There has been a lot of hue and cry over the attacks on Indian students in Australia. There are over 90000 Indian students in Australia and there have been half a dozen attacks recently of varying degrees ranging from beatings to a stabbing. There has been a lot of noise over the racial nature of violence.

What I would like to know is whether the brutal beating of the non-racial nature is any less painful or acceptable? A lot of the acts were robberies gone wrong. In any case racism of all variety is deplorable but to condemn the whole country as racist because of a few nuts is ridiculous. A lot of my relatives have been and some still are in Australia and they can't stop singing it's praises.

The role of media in whipping up of hysteria is verging on unethical. There have been no figures given on the comparisons in attacks on Indian students and other students, number of attacks in past and the current year. The TV channels in their enthusiasm now are going hysterical on the alleged excessive force used by the Melbourne police in removing protesters forcibly who refused to move from one of the busiest streets of Melbourne. Excessive force? You've got to be kidding me? I saw the footage and I saw nothing of that sort. Besides, what were they supposed to do? Let them sit there and inconvenience everybody else?

The students by their mass protest and blocking of the streets have done their cause no good. I'll quote Ayn Rand who said the following:

The forcible occupation of another man’s property or the obstruction of a public thoroughfare is so blatant a violation of rights that an attempt to justify it becomes an abrogation of morality. An individual has no right to do a “sit-in” in the home or office of a person he disagrees with—and he does not acquire such a right by joining a gang. Rights are not a matter of numbers—and there can be no such thing, in law or in morality, as actions forbidden to an individual, but permitted to a mob.
The Cashing-In: The Student ‘Rebellion,’” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, 256.

In India a protest like this would not be handled by Indian police with such civility. There are far more worse things police here do then bodily lift protesters. These include tear gassing, cane charge, hitting with rifle-butts (I was beaten-up during anti-reservation protest in 91, couldn't walk for three days), molestation of women (the whole country saw the groping of doctors on TV), shooting- frequently resulting in seriously wounding and killing of protesters (retaliation against stone throwing).

The hypocrisy of the Indian media is unbelievable. I have not seen such massive collective cry of outrage by the media in recent past over the far more serious violations by the police in India. If the conduct of Aussie police is labeled "excessive force", I wonder if we can ever find the right words to suitably describe the barbaric behavior of the Indian police.

Mainstream Press Treachery

Canada Free Press has this article about the treachery of American mainstream press. It raises some important points about the lack of balanced reporting. The press in America totally veers towards the leftist view point with no pretense of fair reporting. It says:

Honest unbiased reporting in the American news room has been so absent for so long that most Americans now seek information elsewhere. Americans no longer trust the free press to be their eyes and ears, to keep them abreast of the facts needed to make intelligent decisions about daily life or politics. Sadly, at this moment in history, even Russia has a more reliable free press than America. If Americans don’t read foreign news sources, they have no clue what is going on in their own country, much less the world.

It also mentions some very important stories like the one where US Federal Reserve Inspector General Elizabeth Coleman stated brazenly before the US Congress that she has “no idea” where $9 Trillion of US taxpayer has gone, or who got it (see the video here).

The story is equally applicable to the mainstream world press. Here in India I would not know a thing if I got my news from the press. I get 90% of my news from the Internet. The mainstream media here is completely leftist/anti-capitalist with stories on ever thing from evils of plastic bags to the pollution from industries. The business channels have no interest in questioning the polices of the government. There are no opposing viewpoints presented. At least in U.S. CNBC had the token Peter Schiff (see him predict the recession) to present the other side even though they thought he was a joke.

Cast Iron story

A large bucket full of molten material is poured into a large container, possibly a mold, by a group of men using machinery.

Filmed May 14, 1905, at the Westinghouse foundries in Trafford City, Pennsylvania.

This reminds me of my fathers factory where machinery parts were cast during mid-eighties. It was more basic and manual labor was used instead of machinery to pour the metal. We used to sometimes accompany him at night to see the casting. It was always done at night because there was no electricity during the day. I looked forward to these trips.

The silent black and white clip doesn't do justice to the whole process. I'll try to compensate for that. Once you entered the industrial area there were no roads, it was pitch dark and the silence was of the graveyard variety- very eerie. It was a whole different world inside the factory. The first thing that hit you was the incredible noise closely followed by the incredible sight. It took a while to recover from the assault on the senses- the sight, smell, noise, heat left you reeling and spellbound at the same time. The furnace was about 20 foot tall- like a big, old armoured warrior with a lot of fight still left in him and attached to it was a contraption for pumping air into it to stoke the fire for the melting process. It made tremendous noise like it was cursing everybody for making it work at night and the people working there had to shout to be heard.

The furnace spewed the molten metal into the iron buckets with their insides covered with clay to protect them from the metals heat. Once the required quantity was poured into the buckets the furnace was shut-up with clay plugs attached to long bamboo poles. Then a couple of guys lifted the buckets with help of the long iron rods which were welded to the buckets. It was quite a sight to see those thin sinewy guys wearing rags carry a load of yellow lava with sparks jumping out from it.

It almost seemed like that the guys were sweating not from the heat but from the threatening, spitting liquid metal whose sparks leaped disdainfully from their confines to pierce their flimsy flesh (during one cast the clay of the bucket had cracked and metal dropped and splashed the guys carrying it, giving them serious burns). The whole place glowed from the light of the liquid metal. It was poured into the clay casts where it would finally find peace and make a transition from its turbulent angry youth to cool, solid maturity.

The business unfortunately did not last much longer. The iron casting gave way to RCC (Reinforced concrete) casting of man-hole covers. Ah! from taming the wild lava to taming of the stench of the gutters.

Carbon footprint-bigger the better

President Obama in his recent Town hall meet in Germany said India's carbon footprint is much smaller then America's. He also mentioned that the America is rich and India poor. Now the key question is that can he see the obvious that "bigger carbon footprint = rich" and "small carbon footprint = poor"? Does he is realise that what he is saying is that he wants to reduce the greatest, most prosperous country in the world to the level of a country barely coming out of abject poverty.

Freeman Dyson said at Tragedy Is Not Freeman Dyson’s Business
“The greatest evils are poverty, underdevelopment, unemployment, disease and hunger, all the conditions that deprive people of opportunities and limit their freedoms.”

With the reverse of socialism in India we have seen unprecedented prosperity and rise of people above the poverty line. It is only due to the opening up of the markets and giving people freedom to choose their destiny that this has been possible. Now the dubious science of global warming threatens to undo all that. When people in first world sit and sermonise and talk about curbing progress in name of dubious computer generated models, it amazes me.

What Ayn Rand said so many years ago still holds true:
Ecology as a social principle . . . condemns cities, culture, industry, technology, the intellect, and advocates men’s return to “nature,” to the state of grunting subanimals digging the soil with their bare hands.
“The Lessons of Vietnam,” The Ayn Rand Letter, III, 25

There are so many ifs and buts in these theories but there are no doubts about the rise in living standards and the unleashing of the entrepreneurial energy in countries like India and China. Hopefully people can escape the devil with twin horns of socialism and environmentalism long enough to achieve decent standards of living.

Lets hope that the view “Humans, have a duty to restructure nature for their survival” prevails for the sake of billions who are finally getting to see glimpses of life as it should be - a celebration of human achievement and not a struggle for survival.

The Unearthly Earth Hour

What happens to a society when it is abandoned by or ignores it's intellectuals? It celebrates the Earth hour. When Sydney did that by switching off its light, I was dumbstruck. When you see the picture of the Earth's city lights- you see civilization, life, progress. In comparison the darkness hides the human misery. It is a living memory of the dark ages. Suddenly for a moment the darkness returned, winning a battle after a century of spreading lights.

The agents of dark ages have now come to America- to the birth place of the inventor of electricity. The stakes are raised now. America, which has been a beacon of Enlightenment to the rest of the world has to decide. Will it surrender to the collectivists or tell them to go back to their dark hell holes. Let this a warning of things to come. I felt like yelling out what L-C said on The New Clarion - For every light you turn off, I’m going to turn on three.

Today if you switch the lights off voluntarily, tomorrow there might not be an option to turn them back on. I will tell you what happens when the lights are switched off. I work on a poultry farm on the outskirts of New Delhi, India and we get an average of less then three hour's of electricity everyday. We spend a fortune on generators, diesel and maintenance. Every month someone from the farm has to go to the government run electricity office to ask for our bill. We get one day to pay the billed amount.

Our jet pumps and water motors keep developing problems due to poor quality of electricity. We have to repair local transformer our self if something goes wrong. The linemen will not come without a bribe although others will drop by to threaten us with disconnection or worse due to some imagined misconduct on our part (pay up or else). Because of electricity or lack of it we can't expand easily, install electronic security without expensive backup and it makes life hell in temp. of 110 deg. Fahrenheit in the summers.

Some of my favourite pictures have been night shots of American cities shinning with lights. It makes me feel like they are celebrating civilization's birthday everyday. So when somebody talks about switching lights off voluntarily and celebrating the Earth hour I feel like telling them- don't be a fool, that's the unearthly hour- which from where I come from, we are always trying to escape.

The counter-attack against Ayn Rand

Paul Hsieh has posted this on the OActivist.
The too-brief honeymoon that Ayn Rand has enjoyed in the media is now over, and the anti-Rand counterattack is now in full swing. There have been a number of recent high-profile articles disparaging Rand and her ideas, including:
"Ayn Rand is the last role model we need right now" (Independent) http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/christina-patterson...
Do their misrepresentations of Rand make you mad? They make me mad.

Damn right they make me mad so in response to the one written in the Independent, I wrote:
I wish you had come to India where I live instead of Cambodia. Most people have seen in the recent past how difficult it is to live and work for productive people in a place where profit was a dirty word, it is very easy for people here to understand what Rand was talking about in the "Atlas Shrugged". The coming out (even partially) out of the socialist pit was like a lifeline for the people and which has bought unprecedented rise in living standards and made heroes and icons out of people like the billionaire Ambani brothers.

It's not about strong trampling the weak instead its rewarding competence and giving freedom to people to pursue there goals and happiness. The example you give of an injured child being ignored was more likely to happen in the socialist past then it is today where there is a thriving media willing to highlight injustices and people are more willing to share there prosperity and help others.I wish that the author of the article was more through in her research and had Ayn Rands views before writing such a piece.

What is it about such a philosophy which advocates rational self-interest and capitalism as its expression- essentially freedom for people to deal with each other without govt. interference- that brings out such misleading and negative comments. Who could have thought that the very idea of free people could scare so many people.

Living under Socialism

It was the summer of 89 and I was in my second year of college doing my B.Com. I was working for my father in New Delhi. He had a factory where we made cast iron machine parts. A few years ago the government had set quota's for the pig iron used for casting. The criteria for quota was whatever quantity had been bought during the previous months. It was the start of the shortages, black market and bureaucratic interference in the business which was already very difficult to conduct. There were dozens of inspectors from various departments and they had be paid-off or you could forget about doing any business. There were so many ridiculous laws that it was impossible to comply with them even if you wanted to.

One of my jobs was to check with the local govt. office if our quota of pig iron had come. I had to go to the office which was on the outskirts of the city on my puny scooter between rashly driven trucks since nobody would tell you anything on the phone even if you somehow got through. One time I went their consecutively for three days , stood outside the office (no place to sit and during summer it can reach 44 deg. C/111 F.) and still had no news of our iron. Since there were no mobile phones at that time and no payphones around I had to beg some official to let me use his phone to make a call.

The staff was indifferent at best of times and outright hostile at other times. All the offices were dull, dusty, drab, dreary and every time you entered one your heart sank a little at the prospect of dealing with people who didn't even bother to look at you and were deliberately dismissive. If you persisted they would snap at you like a rabid dog and it was almost physically painful when you had be very polite and use deferential tone even when you wanted scream at them and ask them if they were human before grinding there faces in the pile of dusty files in front of him.

Sometimes I wish I could have made a virtual tour of the whole experience for the benefit of those people who want more regulation, more interference and remind them of those days. As such we are hardly out of the license and inspector raj and some people want to drag us back to those evil times.

I wish I could tell people in America that I had lived through the worst case scenarios portrayed in "Atlas shrugged" by Ayn Rand. A society which mocks and denigrates the achievements of it's producers is not a pleasant place to live in. I dreaded the days when some new teacher would ask kids about their fathers profession and I kid you not when I say that after saying my father was a businessman I would see contempt and in one particular case downright hostility. This one teacher got on my case and constantly taunted me by saying why did I have study since my father was a big businessman I didn't have to worry about making a living anyway.

I wonder about America's capacity for more abuse. Is Obama going to be the last straw? Is he going to turn people away from socialist idea's by proving their futility and failure. With Santelli's rant on CNBC getting widespread support and a lot of resistance to the bailout I would say Americans are not ready to throw in the towel and surrender meekly. With core of objectivist activists leading the way their is still hope for the greatest country in the world. And don't forget people like me who are American at heart (born in the wrong place) who will do there best to keep it that way.

Maruti Suzuki wants to sell less cars

Few days back I went to the Maruti's (Nariana, Delhi) car service outlet. There were signs all over the place wanting people to avoid using their cars once a week and instead use the public transport. I asked a couple of officials who were around the reason for it and they said that the company was pro-environment and they wanted me to admire the various measures like their compost pit etc. (you get the idea). When I explained that I thought that the sign was illogical and if they thought that their cars were damaging the environment wouldn't it make more sense to simply use public transport everyday and completely do away with the cars. He had no answer and he explained that it was their GM's idea and since he was standing just behind us why didn't I talk to him.

He introduced me to the GM (who comes to work on a bicycle) who was flabbergasted when he heard about my objection to his sign. He just blurted that this was the first time someone had any problems with the environmental message of his. When I explained that it was illogical for a business to want it's customers to use less of it's product and that it made no sense, he became outright hostile and said that I was entitled to my opinion and that he didn't want to argue with me. He softened a little when I patiently explained that I was a big admirer of the company (first modern car maker in India) and that I assumed that his message was for welfare of his customers and people in general. If that was so then it made more sense for company to sell more cars, build more plants, establish more dealerships and continue to bring prosperity as it had been doing in the past (and not go back to riding bicycles).

The guy first refused to acknowledge that using less of a product means selling lesser amounts of it and tried to bluster his way out by asking me if I had been to Australia and if knew how things worked there? (made no sense at all). I said I was very well informed (didn't go to Moon to know about the terrain on it) but I was more interested in his reasons for his action here in India. He just said a thing can't be wrong if so many intellectuals had come together and decided that this was what was right. Ah! the consensus thing again. I reminded him that just a few centuries ago only one man on the planet said that it was spherical and the rest believed it was flat and that it didn't change the fact that it was round just because millions said it wasn't so.

Reality, reason and logic are not decided by a popularity contest. Needless to say that the conversation didn't go anywhere but I made my point and objection heard (had an audience of three junior officers). The GM who I believe is a IIT and management school product was less open to reason then his lesser educated juniors. The so called institutes of higher learning have become places of non-reason and anti-intellect. These people who should be proud flag-bearers of capitalism have turned suicidal and instead embraced all sorts of irrational and anti-man ideologies. All we can do is object to these stupid things and try to get our point across using reason as our primary tool.

Delhi government's anti-business ban on plastic bags

Couple of days back I saw a notice posted at our local grocery store saying "please get your own bags" beginning the start of the plastic bag ban. It will make things very difficult for retailers and will have a negative effect on the sales.

The environmentalist win another round in their battle at the local level against progress, business, lively hoods, families, children' pocket money, happiness and mankind in general.
Read the post on a similar ban in a US city. http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com/2009/02/plastic-bags-illegal.html