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Showing posts from August, 2021

Should India Nationalize Vodafone-Idea?

Recently a Bloomberg opinion article by Andy Mukherjee proposed to nationalize private telecom player Vodafone-Idea in the wake of their financial struggle and a possible exit from India which will result into job and economic losses. Author  says ,  The world’s cheapest data costs have done wonders for India by helping spread the benefits of the internet beyond a tiny, urban, affluent class.  But there’s a problem: Successive governments have hounded telecom operators with outlandish financial demands.  Now things have gone too far.  Vodafone Idea  Ltd., one of the three private-sector competitors left standing in what used to be a field of a dozen players, is very close to crumbling under the weight of its $30 billion debt. That will effectively turn the wireless market in the nation of 1.4 billion people into a duopoly. Maybe not immediately, but the gains to consumers could be reversed because of the lack of competition. (An international survey shows Indian data plans to still be

Our Visible World is a Giant Racket

  Hollywood’s famous movie The Matrix shows that our visible world is a giant make-believe world of a matrix created by our machine overlords. The reality is something totally different than what we experience daily. The protagonist of the movie Neo is being exposed to this world of slavery by the rebel character Morpheus. He offers him two pills: red and blue. Red pill takes Neo into the ugly reality while the blue pill keeps him in the make believe happy world of the Matrix. In this article I am going to play the role of Morpheus for my readers. This article is like a dose of those red pills of ugly reality. Let’s begin our descent into the rabbit hole.    What is a racket?  Before we discuss different types of rackets running behind the happy facade of our make believe world of the Matrix, we need to define what a racket is. In his famous essay  War is a Racket ,  US Army General Smedley Butler defined a racket as,  A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not wha

On India’s New Education Policy

After coming to power in 2014 the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi is spearheading a movement to change India completely. He and his ideological backers RSS want a   New India  which is supposedly rooted in ancient Indian traditions. They want to discard the “Old India” which they believe was built by the British colonial masters.   In their effort to build this New India they have drafted a new  national education policy . The vision of this policy is, The National Education Policy 2019 envisions an  India centred  education system (emphasize in original).  The implementation of this policy has slowly begun. In this brief article I am going to discuss this policy and some of its most important implications.  First, before we discuss this new national education policy we need to discuss whether any such national education policy is required. We must question the very need of such national policies. Should education be centralized and provided by the state in a uniform fashion to eve

What is the fallout for India of Taliban's take over of Afghanistan?

Taliban has quickly taken over Afghanistan after an abrupt exit of USA and NATO forces from its lands. This was inevitable. In this short discussion I want to focus on the fallout of this surprising event for India. First, it seems Modi government is again caught napping as they have very little diplomatic talks going on with the Taliban at the time of take over. India's Hindu fundamentalist government was getting cozy with US government in their bid to control China. Instead of becoming trading partner of China by joining OBOR etc., Indian government decided to stay out and be an enemy of China, and with it Russia, Iran and Turkey etc., also. Pakistan is an arch enemy already. With Taliban's win now China, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria and Turkey are altogether in a continuous landmass trading area. China will start diplomatic talks with Taliban soon if they behave well. I am sure new Taliban leaders are smart enough to see potential gains they can have by being p