Infrastructure, Not Guns

Byoliveridley

Things that make me want to bang my head against the wall at 6:30 in the morning.

Building a Modern Arsenal in India – New York Times

Over the next five years, military analysts expect the country to spend as much as $40 billion on weapons procurement alone, more than its entire annual armaments budget today — upgrading systems as diverse as jet fighters, artillery, submarines and tanks in its largely Soviet-era arsenal. As a result, India will become one of the largest military markets in the world.

In terms of “potential for growth, India is our top market, ” said Richard G. Kirkland, Lockheed Martin’s president for South Asia.

Great, now we only need to start another war and American military contractors are set for life. After all, now they’ll be arming both sides. Meanwhile, the average South Asian is sitting in her hut somewhere wondering how to feed her family, send her kids to school, protect them from flooding and disease, all on less than a dollar a day.

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    Bhutan to pay for others climate sins

    Byoliveridley

    Bhutan is a small country nestled in the Himalayas, breathtakingly beautiful and “quaint”. Unfortunately, it’s about to be hit by a truck!

    Reuters AlertNet – FEATURE-Bhutan to pay for others climate sins

    The retreat of Bhutan’s glaciers presents an even more formidable and fundamental challenge to a nation of around 600,000 people, nearly 80 percent of whom live by farming.

    Bhutan’s rivers sustain not only the country’s farmers, but also the country’s main industry and export earner — hydro-electric power, mostly sold to neighbouring India.

    For a few years, Bhutan’s farmers and its hydro power plants might have more summer melt water than they can use. One day, though, the glaciers may be gone, and the “white gold” upon which the economy depends may dry up.

    The threat led the government’s National Environment Commission to a stark conclusion.

    “Not only human lives and livelihoods are at risk, but the very backbone of the nation’s economy is at the mercy of climate change hazards,” it wrote in a recent report.

    Scientists admit they have little solid data on how Bhutan’s climate is already changing, but say weather patterns are becoming increasingly unpredictable.

    Well, as I keep saying, Americans and Europeans will be incovenienced by global climate change, Asians and Africans will die. I don’t have an answer, though, which is depressing on this gray and cloudy Friday morning…

  • Harry Potter and the idiocy of Copyrights

    Byoliveridley

    No, that is not the title of the next Harri Puttar. It’s how a slavishly devotional fan base that has spent millions of rupees buying your books, watching your movies, purchasing all your assorted paraphrenalia gets repaid. By getting sued when they pay homage to you.

    BBC NEWS | South Asia | Harry Potter and the Hindu gods

    A community group in the Indian city of Calcutta says it has been sued by JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, for breach of copyright.

    The group has been building a huge model based on Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as part of celebrations for a Hindu festival.

    If you want to know all the ways in which copyrights have gone amok in this society of ours, just go read Dean Baker.

  • Violence in North East India

    Byoliveridley

    ULFA attack has WB, Bihar on alert : ULFA, Assam, violence, Bengal : IBNLive.com : CNN-IBN

    In a brutal backtracking, after gunning down 17 non-Assamese workers on Friday in the Tinsukia and Dibrugarh districts, the ULFA went on a rampage on Saturday gunning down migrant workers from Bihar and Bengal.

    Assam is a state in North East India bordering West Bengal, and Bangladesh, and there has always been a lot of tension between the ethnic Assamese and Banglas from both sides of the border. The United Liberation Front of  Asom (ULFA)  purports to  speak for the Assamese and has been waging a violent armed struggle. Unfortunately, they are not really powerful enough to take on the Indian army and usually take their frustrations out on innocent day laborers. The Assamese feel that Banglas and Biharis are coming into their state and taking their jobs and disrupting their culture. Like any other ethnic situation in India, it is complex, messy, and with no “right” or “easy” solutions. Clearly, increased development in neighboring states would keep the Banglas and Biharis from moving.  But, thanks to its oil reserves, the jobs are in Assam. The Indian army has been active in this area as a counter insurgency force since the ’80s. Complicating the matter are the mountainous  terrain and the remoteness of most of these attacks.

  • Tamil doctors let their 15 year old perform a C Section

    Byoliveridley

    Where my home state of Tamil Nadu gets into the news for this bizarre story of parental pride gone too far.

    Two Indian doctors investigated over claims they let son aged 15 deliver a baby by caesarean | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited

    Two Indian doctors are facing an investigation into claims they let their 15-year-old son perform a caesarean section to get into the Guinness Book of Records.

    The government of Tamil Nadu state in southern India today said it was launching an inquiry, according to Indian newspaper reports.

    It is alleged the doctors screened a video of their son performing the caesarean at a meeting of the regional branch of the Indian Medical Association (IMA) last month in the hope their son, Dhileepan Raj, would get into the record book as the world’s youngest surgeon.

    I feel like laughing at the parents, but the patient and her fetus were put at grave risk, what idiots!

  • Aerosmith rocks Bangalore

    Byoliveridley

    Ah, takes me back to my past! “Rock shows”.

    The Hindu : Front Page : It was an electrifying performance

    Bangalore: They came with intent to experience the sweet taste of India and left Bangaloreans with an aftertaste that will linger for long. The performance by rock `n’ roll legends Aerosmith, simply put, had everything one could ask for — a powerful sound and impressive stage act — that just made for a thoroughly entertaining evening. After an interminable delay, the giant display that formed the backdrop to the stage lit up to welcome the band on stage. In a departure from the set they are playing around the world for this tour, they began with the apt number “Taste of India”.

    Classic rock is very popular in India, BTW.

  • Terrorists boated in from Pakistan

    Byoliveridley

    MUMBAI: Maharashtra Police investigators say they have evidence that operatives of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba carried out the fidayeen-squad attacks in Mumbai — a charge which, if proven, could have far-reaching consequences for India-Pakistan relations.

    Police sources said an injured terrorist captured during the fighting at the Taj Mahal hotel was tentatively identified as Ajmal Amir Kamal, a resident of Faridkot, near Multan, in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

    Highly-placed police sources said two other Pakistani nationals had also been held in the course of intense fighting on Thursday.

    All three, the sources said, identified themselves as members of a Lashkar fidayeen squad.Based on the interrogation of the suspects, the investigators believe that one or more groups of Lashkar operatives left Karachi in a merchant ship early on Wednesday. Late that night, an estimated 12 fidayeen left the ship in a small boat and rowed some 10 nautical miles to Mumbai’s Gateway of India area.

    The investigators say the fidayeen unit of which Mr. Kamal was a part then split up into at least six groups, each focussing on a separate target: Mumbai’s Nariman House, which is home to a large number of Israeli families and a Jewish prayer house; the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus rail station; the Cama hospital; the Girgaum seafront; and the Taj and Trident Oberoi hotels.

    via The Hindu : Front Page : Three Lashkar fidayeen captured

    Well, so it goes, this gives the government and all politicians free license to start bashing Pakistan all over again, while failing to take care of all the changes that need to happen in order to avoid an attack of such brazenness and sophistication. There is no intelligence gathering, no infrastructure to coordinate intelligence, no disaster preparedness, insufficient patrolling of the coasts, gang influences that run deep in the police and the politicians, an inability to run effective investigations, the list is endless.

    All that being said, how does one deal with the lawlessness in Pakistan? If we assume that the Pakistani establishment did not have anything to do with this, we are still left with the conclusion that terror groups can function with impunity and in broad daylight in Pakistan’s major cities and just sneak across the border to attack, either in Afghanistan or in India.

    The US is bombing the crap out of the Pak-Afghan border, but the terrorists are in the cities and towns, can’t really bomb away. India needs to seriously tighten its borders, and cannot rely on Pakistan’s situation improving any time soon.

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  1. Pingback: Meanwhile, in the other India « The Olive Ridley Crawl

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