Dark side of digital age

CYBER AGE: From The Statesman by BY ND BATRA

What would you do if you found someone shouting: “Everything’s horrible, I want to die. Who will die with me?” That’s how Reuters read the message in a Japanese Internet chatroom after four people varying in age from 19 to 30 were found to have committed suicide in a car parked on a riverbank in Hokkaido island in northern Japan last Thursday. In the digital age, you can google-froogle anything from sushi kits to death kits, and so easily that Internet pioneers might wonder what they had wrought. Of course inventors cannot control whether people would mess up with their inventions or use them to enhance the quality of life.
In 1973 when two young computer scientists, Vinton G Cerf and Robert E Kahn, came up with the revolutionary idea of making different isolated computers talk to each other through a common language – Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol – they did not foresee the whole new world that would eventually open up. Of course there were many more people who made the Internet possible, which eventually, looking at the bright side, made Bangalore, for example, become a global outsourcing hub, among other things. Cerf and Kahn did not anticipate the Internet to become such a driving force for good – and evil – in our lives.
E-trading, e-pornography, e-surveillance, e-death and who knows what else is in store for us!Welcome to the digital age, which makes networking and sharing inevitable. For example, you might wonder how a 26-year-old man, Gerald Krein from Klamath Falls, Oregon, narrowly failed in enticing 32 women in chatrooms to commit a mass suicide on Valentine’s Day. “The common theme is that these were women who were vulnerable, who were depressed. He invited them to engage in certain sexual acts with him – and they were to hang themselves naked from a beam in his house,” Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger said. Had Krein succeeded, he might have used his Webcam to netcast the event – 32 women hanging naked by a roof beam. Sexual asphyxiation is a most extreme form of sexual act and in a land of extremes, of death by choice – Oregon has been toying with the idea of physician assisted suicide solution for terminal patients – it would have probably created a stir; and then been shrugged off as a bizarre event after the media had milked it dry.
A Canadian woman, probably a prospect for after life, who saw the message entitled Suicide Ideology in a chatroom and learned to her horror that another chatroom woman intended to kill not only herself but also her two children, promptly informed the police. Depressed women have been known to kill their children. At least 31 women had agreed to participate in the mass suicide, Krein told police investigators upon his arrest. Chatroom records show that Krein had been networking with women to solicit suicide since 2000. It is difficult to say at this stage of investigation how successful he has been. Nor do we know what was driving these people to commit a group suicide rather than doing it alone.
Getting out of deep depression through extreme sex, consummated finally with collective suicide by hanging: if that’s a probable explanation, then one might also understand why some people blow themselves up in their zealous commitment to jihad, which without networking and sharing wouldn’t be so blindingly enticing. Dying alone is terrible. Dying becomes easier when people die together. The Internet provides togetherness to faceless strangers.
Group suicide of strangers who meet on the Net isn’t an infrequent occurrence in Japan where hara-kiri has been an ancient ritual. In Japanese chatrooms, bulletin boards and suicide-related websites, people come together to talk about not how best to escape from their suicidal fantasies but how to execute them – sealing themselves in a coal-burning room and dying of carbon monoxide poisoning; in cars parked in remote mountain places; overdosing on camera; jumping together from high-rise buildings. Though some succeed, others end up with terrible injuries and life-long misery. Yukio Saito, a Methodist minister, who founded and oversees a suicide hotline, Phone of Life, made a very insightful remark to Reuters: “The idea of dying together is somehow reassuring. Dying alone is lonely and takes more courage. The way these suicides are carried out is very sensational for the media, and very suggestive for people who may be thinking of taking their lives.”
Think of Jim Jones of the People’s Temple, the cult leader who led 913 followers to a mass suicide death pact in 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana. Had Rev. Jones had a website, let us say, Your Guide to Death is Beautiful, with a seductive young woman giving step by step instructions and the precise time from here to thereafter, he might have attracted millions of people to an unheard of mass suicide. You could imagine what a charismatic jihadi leader might do in future when he wraps up mass suicide bombings with a noble religious cause.

Scandals of Corporate America

Cyber Age ND Batra: From The Statesman

The unceremonious firing of Carly Fiorina, the glamorous globetrotting CEO of Hewlett Packard, one of the few women who broke the proverbial glass ceiling – some would say by sheer guts and grits – has been an odd occurrence in the annals of corporate America. Boards of directors normally don’t act that brazenly; they sweeten the departure with friendly negotiations, mutual understandings and hefty severance packets, which sometimes seem so excessive that they evoke public repugnance. Fiorina too will get a full purse ($21 million or so) but she was fired because of her inability to beat the competition (Dell, IBM, for example) rather than any fraud she might have committed. Ultimately, fraud and incompetence are the two sides of the same coin; they hurt the market as well as the shareholders.
The functioning of corporate USA is based on authoritarianism, not on internal checks and balances. In contrast, the US political system is based on a healthy distrust of people in power. The tripartite system of a government of co-equals – the White House, Congress and the judiciary – and other built-in checks and balances along with a free press have kept politicians from abusing power by exposing them to the threat of public ridicule, impeachment or jail. Think of Nixon and Clinton, and the hosts of governors and legislators, who have been disgraced. The founding fathers didn’t leave the functioning of the political system to the innate goodness of the people in power. Nor did they leave the development of good political behaviour to any kind of special training in schools or colleges; or the culture of the sports arena, for that matter.
The temptation of power trumps everything else, so transparency and accountability are indispensable to a self-renewing democracy. That unfortunately isn’t the case with Wall Street where most Americans are vested through pension and other retirement accounts. Bush’s idea of an ownership society, if given a practical shape, would invest future social security funds into the stock market. Today we live in a world where corporate power overshadows most of our activities.
Corporate leaders rise to power on the promise of maximising profits, market values and economic health for their companies. There are no internal checks and balances in the form of a healthy opposition seeking accountability and presenting an alternative vision of the company. Shareholders are selfish and passive. Boards of directors are morally neutral; their interest is limited to dividends and capital gains. They worship executives who maximise their investments. So long an executive performs well and exceeds the expectations of Wall Street, he/she could get away with some excesses. Fiorina was fired for a style of management that despite its aggressiveness did not produce results to cheer the market. Fiorina lacked imagination; the power to do “superspeculation” about an alternative future for Hewlett Packard when under her leadership the merger with Compaq Computer did not work out as expected.
But other CEOs have done worse. One of the former chief executives on trial for security fraud is Bernard Ebbers of WorldCom (now MCI, Inc.), whose $11 billion fraud dumped the telecommunications company into bankruptcy. The former financial chief of the company, Scott Sullivan, who is cooperating with prosecutors after pleading guilty and is testifying against his former boss, told the jury that he had warned Ebbers that accounting adjustments, creative accounting or cooking books, whatever you call it, could not be justified. Ebbers told him nevertheless that the company had to “hit the numbers,” and meet the financial and revenue targets. Ebbers of course has blamed his underlings for the fraud, said to be the largest in US history, and if convicted he would go to jail for 30 years. At its peak in 1999, WoldCom had a market capitalisation of $180 billion, and Ebbers was a toast of Wall Street. That was the problem.
To maintain its market reputation WorldCom had to cook books and lie. When WorldCom real earnings could not meet the forecast, Ebbers asked the account department to “adjust the numbers”. Accounting departments are notorious for doping others until they are caught. Wall Street analysts and financial journalists who out of fear or favour work as paid employees of big corporations rather than watchdogs of public interests went along with the web of lies woven by the WorldCom team until the whole edifice began to collapse in 2000; and the share price sank to $15 from a high of $65. Ebbers’ personal fortune too was linked with WorldCom’s market share price and in order to keep it high, he raised the analysts’ expectations. But Wall Street is a hard and cruel taskmaster. One cannot get away with lies for too long. But sometimes the price a company, and eventually the public pays, is too high; and the damage irreparable.
But can we make corporate bosses honest? Can we instill ethics into their souls? Robert J Schiller, a Yale professor and author of Irrational Exuberance, faults the education that US business schools impart to budding executives. Writing in the New York Times, he said that instead of emphasising ethics and liberal arts, “Modern business education often encourages excessive respect for anything that can be considered a result of the free market.” Teach them ethics, he says.
The average age of a student in a US business school is 28. By that time, a person should be able to know what is and what is not ethical. Liberal arts and ethics education is not enough. Transparency and internal checks and balances must be embedded into the system. More importantly, if the media pays as much attention to the internal working of corporate America as it does to the scandals of political America, CEOs would behave better and our financial future would be secure.

Bold strokes to change the world?

From The Statesman
Cyber age: ND Batra

Probably the most touching moment during President Bush’s State of the Union address on Wednesday night occurred when the entire assembly gave a standing ovation to two women, Safia Taleb al-Suhail of Iraq and Janet Norwood of Texas. The women embraced each other like two long lost sisters. Eleven years ago, Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service agents had assassinated Safia’s father but the family survived. On the day of elections, while bullets were flying, Safia along with her family went to the polling booth to cast their votes for a new Iraq. The other woman, Janet Norwood, had lost her son, Marine Corps Sergeant Byron Norwood, during the assault on Fallujah. But before going to Iraq Byron told his mother how proud he was to be a Marine, and as she had protected him as a child, now it was his turn to protect her.

Although the showcasing of these two families for a worldwide television audience was a diplomatic act, the emotions were genuine. In that moment death had become meaningful. Some leaders are capable of doing that. “The fall of imperial communism was only a dream – until, one day, it was accomplished. Our generation has dreams of its own, and we also go forward with confidence. The road to Providence is uneven and unpredictable – yet we know it leads to freedom,” Bush said eloquently, brimming with confidence. Elections of course do not a democracy make but can you do without them? Something new has begun. The process of reaching out by the Shia majority to various sections of Iraq, especially Sunnis, is gradually taking place. Though the Sunnis would be losing their exclusive control over political power in Iraq after 80 years of domination, they hold a key to Iraq’s political stability. They have the sympathy of other Arabs in the region who are mostly Sunnis. They cannot be ignored regardless of the political set up that emerges after the 275-member transitional national assembly chooses an interim government and drafts a constitution.

Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Sunni, may not be in power for long, but I am sure in the long run he would be proved right. He had said: “The terrorists now know that they cannot win.” Millions of Iraqis have already rejected terrorism by braving the danger and voting fearlessly. Though the Sunnis were not as jubilant about voting as others, hopefully “the voice of all Iraqis” is present in the future political set up. “We are entering a new era of our history, and all Iraqis – whether they voted or not – should stand side by side to build their future… let us go together towards a bright future – Sunnis and Shias, Muslims and Christians, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen,” Allawi said. That is a plea for secularism, and truly this would be the only way Iraqis could ask the USA: Quit Iraq. Prolonged differences among religious and ethnic groups and unsettled conditions would prevail upon the USA to stay on, in fact, much against its wishes. I don’t believe the Americans want to continue the occupation a day longer than necessary. Domestic pressure continues to be unbearable; nonetheless, Americans don’t want Bush to quit unless the job is done in Iraq. That’s why they voted him to power again.

Although the main mission of the transitional national assembly will be to write a constitution, its selection of the interim government could set a tone for a broad political inclusiveness. The national assembly would choose a President and two deputy presidents, who then would choose a Prime Minister and a cabinet. Even at this early stage, there would be a great scope for give-and-take and an opportunity for power sharing. For example, a key political position in the cabinet could be given to a Sunni.

There is another reason to allow Sunnis to participate fully in the government. The Sunnis might act as a strong counterweight to the dominant influence of the neighbouring Shia Iran; similarly Iraqi Shias might counterbalance the Sunni Arab influence, thus creating the possibility of making Iraq truly independent of both Iran and Arab countries. Constitutional arrangement based on federalism and local autonomy might serve Iraq well, as it has done by and large in India.

President Jacques Chirac of France, who relentlessly opposed the Iraqi invasion along with most of other Europe, expressed cautious optimism. “These elections mark an important step in the political reconstruction of Iraq. The strategy of terrorist groups has partly failed,” he said. Russian President Vladimir Putin called it a historic event for the Iraqi people, but it was German foreign minister Joschka Fischer who held an olive branch of reconciliation with the Bush administration. “The challenge of putting Iraq on a stable democratic footing is one we must all take on together,” he said. Once again Europe is calling for togetherness, for sharing responsibilities, and the Iraqi elections provide a great opportunity for a new relationship among the USA, Europe and other major powers to fight global terrorism and poverty. That’s the only way to spread freedom and democracy.

Global brain emerging?

Cyber Age/ND Batra/ From The Statesman

Some of the biggies of the computer world, IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, among others, announced that they are forming a consortium to educate the corporate world to adopt open-source grid computing for commercial applications. The impulse is not charitable. It is competitive, and always so in a world dominated by Microsoft. The initial barrier to the widespread use of the concept of the grid may be psychological: Grid—> gridlock, which is a form of terror. A powerful idea is linguistically stymied. We need a new lingo, but apart from that, it is an idea whose time has come. And it is very simple.
When you turn off your computer and go home, no one can use the computing power locked in on your office desktop. Nor can the dispersed unused computing power of hundreds of other computers be utilized or leased by your company to anyone, which is such wastage especially when the power could be tasked to solve complicated problems. If you multiply this unutilized computing power by millions of computers around the world, India, China, the United States, Europe, you get some sense of the unused resources.
But this has begun to change. A few years ago, the National Science Foundation in the United States undertook an ambitious project called the TeraGrid. By virtualizing four geographically dispersed supercomputing centers into a grid, it became possible to make them work as if they were one giant virtual computer, which could be accessed from any of the four gateways. Virtualization is a buzzword of the cyber age. It is an Internet technology approach that optimizes, pools and shares resources so that supply and demand match in an ever-rising crescendo.
The supercomputing clusters that have been networked are: the San Diego Supercomputing Center at the University of California, San Diego; Caltech, Pasadena, California; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign; and the US department of energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. Others are getting on the bandwagon. The TeraGrid is capable of creating eight times the power of the most powerful supercomputer today, capable of carrying out trillions of operations per second, according to one estimate.
Grid computing enables not only geographically dispersed computers but also different operating systems to coalesce as one brain, and provide the user a steady, consistent and economical access to enhanced resources from any point of access on the grid. The unleashed supercomputing power, emanating from a single unified source, could be used for solving large-scale data-intensive science applications, such as designing new drug remedies based on molecular modeling, tsunami-earthquake modeling and forecast, and military operations in insurgency-ridden battlefields. In a grid-based virtual laboratory, a scientist, for example, could examine millions of molecules in the Chemical Data Bank to identify and select those that have the most potential use for designing a new drug for breast cancer. The grid power could be used for teleimmersion, giving users high-bandwidth access to virtual environment such as a simulated surgical operation; a rising pandemic; or a massive stampede at the next Kumbh Mela in India.
Eventually all computers will be linked with local, national and international grids, enhancing computing power and sharing databases and applications that may reside anywhere. Just as TCP/IP protocol broke the barriers and made the Internet possible, grid computing must have a single worldwide standard and most bets are on the Globus, an open sources system that would make it possible to tap the Internet on demand from anywhere.
The Globus Toolkit, a collection of software applications and resources to support grid computing, could locate where a particular database is housed; how to divide and distribute a given computing work among several computers on the grid system; and whether the user is an authorized person. Once a handheld or desktop machine or any other device is plugged into the Globus, it would draw not only its computational power from the grid but could also use myriad applications, such as audio-video streams, databases, videoconferencing and so on.
A company needing 25 terabytes of computing power could simply tap into the grid to perform a specific task and once the job is done, the resource is returned to the grid for others to use. Your cell phone could become a gateway to a supercomputing power grid. Universities could form their own grids and be networked into national and international grids, creating the possibility of on-demand grid power. The central processing unit need not be on every desk, but those who have it could share it with others.
The wireless revolution that’s sweeping the world now would make grid computing a global phenomenon. Sometime ago Larry Smarr, an Internet pioneer, was quoted in Technology Review: “Because of the miniaturization of components, we will have billions of endpoints that are sensors, actuators and embedded processors. They’ll be in everything, monitoring stress in bridges, monitoring the environment, ultimately, they will be in our bodies, monitoring our hearts.” The foundation for grid computing infrastructure must be based on security as the first principle, of course.
Some regard grid computing as the natural evolution of the Internet. It is one of those technologies whose value is perceived to be so great as to make its universal acceptance inevitable, thus making it possible to define common standards that would transcend heterogeneous systems and turn them into a universal platform. When all major research universities and technology institutes are virtualized into one international computer grid, the impact of the emergent brainpower would be immeasurable. But think about what it would do to the business world when it goes on the grid. Imagine global retailers like Wal-Mart going on the grid to make their supply-chain systems more efficient. Grid technology might enable even Sri Lanka to compete with the Chinese textile juggernaut. Size and geography won’t matter.

How much freedom does a man need?

Cyber Age/ND Batra/From The Statesman

“And then there came a day of fire,” Bush said at his second inaugural indirectly referring to terrorists’ attacks that pulled the United States out of a long slumber. Rather too soon, the end of communism had brought about a sense of complacency, a grand illusion as if it were the end of history seen as struggle in the Hegelian sense, and the final triumph of freedom. As Francis Fukuyama prematurely gushed after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “What we are witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or a passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Of course that did not happen. It did not happen in Russia after the Soviet Union dissipated; and it did not happen in China in spite of 1989 Tiananman Square pro-democracy protests and in spite of rapid economic growth and broadening prosperity under state controlled market capitalism. China has been growing at the rate of 8-9 percent for more than a decade and is on the path to become an economic and military superpower in the next few decades. If the authoritarian rule has not hindered China from growing at a phenomenal rate to which there seems to be no end, one might wonder: How could they do it without civil liberties? How much freedom does a man need?

Democracy did not happen in the Muslim-Arab world where Islamic fundamentalism, partly as a reaction to the Soviet communism and partly due to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, has been taking hold of the hearts and minds of the people. In fact after the collapse of the Soviet Union worldwide tyranny might have increased, if metrics were available. China has ceased to be an imminent threat as its economic growth became increasingly tied up with exports to the United States and foreign direct investments. Along with that human rights including Tibet too ceased to be an issue in the United States and China relations. Between the United Sates and Saudi Arabia or other pro-American Arab countries in the region where Islamic fundamentalism has been holding a long sway, human rights and freedom were seldom an issue. After the 2001 terrorists attacks, the United States clasped Pakistan with financial and military ties to make it an ally against the Taliban and Ala Qaeda terrorism. And to maintain its hold over Pakistan, the United States overlooked even the black-marketing of nuclear technology by one of its most revered scientists, AQ Khan. Unelected generals rule the land.

Is this diplomatic paradigm shift from the realpolitik of supping with the devil to the messianic fervor of universally spreading freedom for the real? Or was the inaugural rhetoric of liberty a latter-day rationale for the invasion of Iraq where though weapons of mass destruction could not be found, the tyrant had to be removed nonetheless for the spread of liberty?

Bush said that the United States would remain vulnerable to terrorism so long tyranny and hate ideology prevailed abroad and for which there’s no other solution except to expand freedom. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world…. Across the generations, we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave.” Bush has come to the same conclusion as Abraham Lincoln had reached at the time the Civil War, “I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” So the ultimate guarantee for freedom at home is to end tyranny abroad by supporting “the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture….” But what about poverty and disease?

Bush is not going to challenge every authoritarian nation: Democratize or else. He may not push guns for freedom but he is certainly not going to give up what he has already undertaken. With Iraq in mind, Bush said, “Our country has accepted obligations that are difficult to fulfill, and would be dishonorable to abandon. Yet, because we have acted in the great liberating tradition of this nation, tens of millions have achieved their freedom.”

Elections in Afghanistan and the Palestinian Authority have kindled some hope that eventually elections and sharing of power in Iraq might bring about the beginning of law and order in Iraq too. And keeping in mind the forcefulness and the tenor of his inaugural address, Bush cannot run away from his commitment to establish a semblance of democratic regime in Iraq. The January 30 elections in Iraq in many ways would be a momentous event to watch, probably another bloody day to which the world has become used to do, nonetheless, a new day when millions of Iraqis would exercise their freedom.

But a free country too could harbor terrorists. Nor does freedom mean the end of poverty and unemployment, a fertile ground for terrorism. The Bush freedom package must include economic aid including preferential trade for poor countries.

Bush's second term: Making elephants fly

FromThe Statesman BY ND BATRA

Although the ghost of weapons of mass destruction has been finally laid to rest with the release of the latest official report, George Bush has shown no regret for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein. In spite of the fact that now a majority of Americans believe the Iraqi invasion was a mistake, Bush continues to believe regime change was the right thing to do to prevent Iraq from becoming a sanctuary for terrorists.

Of course, foreign policy cannot be run on public opinion polls, which heave up and down so often that it would be politically crazy to be solely guided by them. National leaders at times take measures that are unpopular but necessary according to their perception of the problem the country faces and their political vision. What hurts their cause, however, is the language in which they frame their thoughts and deeds.

That the result of the Iraqi invasion turned out to be much different, much bloodier than expected, has not lessened the Bush administration’s newly framed resolve to bring about changes in West Asia through democratic processes. As secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld – the man who coined terms like “Old Europe” and “New Europe” and widened the Atlantic Ocean with his tongue wagging – said recently: “Just having elections in Iraq is an enormous success and a victory. Following the elections in Afghanistan and the one held recently in the Palestinian Authority, the Iraqi vote will mark still another success for democracy and a defeat for pro-dictatorship and extremist elements in the region.”

This epitomises the new policy, which has moved beyond fighting terrorism to include what Bush has been calling as exporting and spreading freedom abroad. Bush now admits that his ill-famed utterances like “Bring ‘em on,” challenging insurgents to attack US forces in Iraq was a mistake, though he still does not realise how much damage the expression “Axis of Evil” has done to US diplomacy. Evil is of course everywhere and the world has become a dangerous place. No nation is safe from evildoers, jihadis and non-jihadis, but by characterising that evil is limited to a small axis of three countries, Bush absolved others by default.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis says: “The terrorists of 11 September exposed vulnerabilities in the defences of all states,” which necessitated for Bush to preside over “the most sweeping redesign of US grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt. The basis for Bush’s grand strategy, like Roosevelt’s, comes from the shock of surprise attack and will not change. None of FDR’s successors, Democrat or Republican, could escape the lesson he drew from the events of 7 December 1941 (Pearl Harbour): that distance alone no longer protected Americans from assaults at the hands of hostile states. Neither Bush nor his successors, whatever their party, can ignore what the events of 11 September 2001, made clear: the deterrence against states affords insufficient protection from attacks by gangs, which can now inflict the kind of damage only states fighting wars used to be able to achieve. In that sense, the course for Bush’s second term remains that of his first one: restoration of security in a suddenly more dangerous world.”

The USA was not the first country to bear the brunt of terrorists. India had long suffered terrorist attacks sponsored by its neighbour, which brought the two countries to the brink of war a few years ago. But by then, the USA had begun to look at the situation differently. Terrorism was a global phenomenon and had to be eliminated from all corners of the earth. The horrific events of 9/11 necessitated the establishment of US presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan to defeat the Taliban and fight Al-Qaida terrorists. But the US presence has had an unintended consequence in the region, in the sense that Pakistan felt persuaded to withdraw its support from terrorist groups operating from its territory against Kashmir. India and Pakistan have been opening up to each other at several levels and the cease-fire is holding up along the Line of Actual Control. The prospects of settlement of disputes including Kashmir and long-term peace are brighter today than ever before. Albeit indirectly, the Indian sub-continent has been the greatest beneficiary of Bush’s pre-emptive policies, regardless of their partial failures and successes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

To make elephants fly, the second term Bush administration needs a new diplomatic tongue (and good manners, especially), to reframe its policy of pre-emption in terms of international cooperation, to eliminate terrorism and to save the nation state system itself. Saudis and Pakistani military rulers know that breeding and financing terrorists can boomerang. The Bush administration should help EU, especially France and Germany, so that the Islamic terrorism growing in their bellies is purged. Prof Gaddis says: “The President and his advisors preferred flaunting US power to explaining its purpose…. It is a failure of both language and vision that the USA has yet to make its case for pre-emption” in terms of the self-interest and survival of each nation; and a collective security system, which could best be under US leadership. Well, at least for the present, until China rises and challenges the USA.

Notoriety Pays

How bad girls bite back

Damien Cave of The New York Times says, “Women, it seems, have finally upended the double standard that allows scandal-slagged men to re-emerge to a hero's welcome while the ladies are pushed back down into the muck” ReadMe…

When the earth goes out of balance

Cyber Age/ND Batra/From The Statesman


A few days ago my neighbor Cindy called to say hello and asked if my family in India was doing okay. And the next day the school principal phoned to inquire about a little girl Medha Gopal in our neighborhood who had gone to India with her parents and had not reported back to the school. I was deeply touched; but if you multiply these small gestures by the millions of unheard voices, you would know how ordinary Americans feel about the massive tragedy. And they give generously. I explained to them what parts of India were ravaged by the tsunami and how the people were coping with it.
But the only way I could feel the pain and suffering of those who lost their children and other loved ones in the tsunami that struck death and destruction in the Indian Ocean communities was to ask myself, What if my family were there? In fact only last May my son and his friends were vacationing in one of the island holiday resorts in Thailand. The hypothetical question and the thought-experiment simply horrified me. I get creeps whenever I think about it. The tragedy became all the more made shocking by the daily flow of television images of floating corpses being hauled out from the ocean and carted away; grief-stricken parents holding their dead children in their arms; orphaned children lost in a sea of hopelessness, nowhere to go. Nature red in tooth and claw, no, sometime you cannot pour pain and suffering into a metaphor.
Distanced from the huge tragedy and yet feeling its pain vicariously, the only deed I could think of doing was to send a handful of dollars to the prime minister’s national relief fund, hoping that it would reach the needy. Someone would buy a boat or raise a new roof over her surviving family. And millions of people like me have been doing the same, out of compassion or just being thankful that we were not there. It could happen to us, the thought struck again and again. We are all in it together, as we were on 9/11, the man-made horrific event which in caparison, though spectacular, was puny in magnitude.
When the earth goes out of balance, as it happened on 26 December, boundaries disappear, fences collapse and sovereignties become meaningless. Everything is reduced to the least denominator, the survival by chance and of the fittest. The ocean that sustained life for millennia has done its terrible job of killing more than 150,000 people: in a heartbeat. Now the question is, Can we reach and lift someone from the rubbles and make him stand up and walk again? The nightmare for survivors has only just begun. Hundreds and hundreds of people who were injured while escaping the tsunami desperately need urgent medical care. Many need to be on the operating table to have their infected limbs amputated to save their lives. Malaria, dysentery, diarrhea, cholera and other infectious diseases that thrive on putrid water would in the long term be no less dangerous than the tsunami.
It requires more than writing a check from the comfort of one’s living room, so no one should underestimate the problem of logistics, of actually delivering help to the needy, keeping in mind the damaged or non-existent infrastructure, shortages of hospital equipments and medical instruments for performing life saving surgeries, and inadequate supply of clean drinking water and amenities for daily hygiene. International response in financial terms has been so quick and amazing, with most coming from Australia, Germany, Japan; and Uncle Sam, in spite of all the commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, offering a decent sum of $350 million and that’s apart from the sea and airborne infrastructure and manpower support for delivering help to the stricken people.
India has courageously stood up to manage the disaster and help Sri Lanka too, while politely declining to accept international aid. India’s self-help has diverted the international resources to the most stricken areas of Indonesia and Sri Lanka. The question is how far the international community would help the tsunami victims. Would they be abandoned once television cameras are not on them? I hope not.
Major powers are paying special attention to Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, in order to wean it away Arab-Islamic militants’ grip and establish a beachhead of political influence there. There is nothing morally wrong with combining humanitarian aid with diplomatic goals. The United States, EU and other major powers in the region including India, China, Japan and Australia have a genuine interest in the stability of Indonesia to fight Islamic terrorism. But other people who have suffered the tsunami devastation, particularly, Sri Lanka, should not be forgotten simply because they are not a terrorist threat to major powers as Islamic terrorist are.
Natural calamities of this magnitude require well-organized pre-emptive efforts on an international scale so that their adverse effect on human life is minimized. A substantial portion of the $ 4 billion pledged aid should be spent on extending the Pacific Ocean tsunami early warning system to the Indian Ocean. Although India has refused to accept international aid, it cannot afford to forget its responsibilities in the Indian Ocean and must take an aggressive lead in establishing not only the early warning system but also pre-emptive measures to minimize the impact of a natural disaster of this magnitude when the next time the Indian Ocean hiccups.

Why Europe is drifting away from America

“It is not so much, then, that militaristic Americans are from Mars and pacifistic Europeans from Venus. It would be more accurate to say that from an evangelical point of view, Americans are bound for heaven and Europeans for hell.”

Niall Ferguson in The Atlantic Monthly

Tsunami relief

Ways to help with tsunami relief

Beyond goodwill hunting in tsunami’s destruction

The only way you could feel the pain and suffering of those who lost their children and other loved ones in the tsunami that struck death and destruction in the Indian Ocean communities was to ask yourself, What if my family were there?

What's Superspeculation?

Cyberage by ND Batra From The Statesman

The American Tongue

I can’t stop wondering how the American tongue wags, twists and turns to create new expressions, reinforcing its dynamic character that reflects the restless innovative temper of the American people. Grammarians and linguists tell us that human language is a stable system, slow and conservative in assimilating foreign influences. But the American tongue is so open that it is never at loss to come up with something fresh to capture the meaning of a new phenomenon created by technological innovations, and in the process extends its own boundaries of expressiveness. Consider this, for example: Can you do superspeculation about the future of a product, corporation or even a country? But what is superspeculation? The dictionary is of no help.

Talking of unauthorised commercial messages, Nat Ives wrote in The New York Times, “There are agencies and creative executives working on what might be superspeculation, like the team in Vaughn Whelan and Partners in Toronto.” The ad agency created a gratuitous commercial for a beer company, Molson, to shock and awe the marketing guys, in a manner of speaking, and “show them five years of advertising, so they could see the future.” The agency wanted the Molson account and thought of doing superspeculation, imagining the future as it could be, better than the company was realising with its present marketing campaign.

Defending the practice of superspeculation, Harry Webber, the founder of Smart Communications was quoted saying: “If Madison Avenue is no longer the evangelist for creative thinking in the USA, then somebody has to take up the cause.” I thought evangelists were those frenzied religious folks who hectored the lost sheep back to the fold. Can Madison Avenue, the American hub for marketplace creativity, evangelise capitalism through superspeculation? Evangelism at the service of capitalism! That’s something new. Superspeculation counters failure of imagination, which creates myopia that leads to dystopia. Columnist Maureen Dowd wrote about defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Redolent of the myopia that has led to the administration’s dystopia.” She was referring to Rumsfeld’s insensitivity and indifference when he sent machine-signed letters of condolence to the families of the Iraqi war dead.

Absence of creativity or inability to do superspeculation leads to coarsening of behaviour as you could have seen in the full-page ad by World Wrestling Entertainment showing its chairman Vincent McMahon addressing the troops in Iraq: “So, if it is alright with you, when I get back home, I am going to look up some of these negative nay-say-types. I am going to tell them you said that they can go to hell.” Telling those who don’t agree with you to go to hell is not a sign of toughness. It is a sign of helplessness.

But at times you feel that being tough isn’t tough enough. So what do you do? Consider the expression “hardcore,” which is normally associated with pornography. The US Supreme Court ruled in the Miller case that “hardcore” porn has no socially redeeming value; therefore, it is not entitled to the First Amendment protection. In other words, it could be regulated by being zoned out of town or shoved to safe harbour (late hours, 12 midnight to 6 a.m., when kids aren’t there). But recently I found an unusual use of “hardcore.”

In an extremely provocative article, “What’s Next for Google?” in Technology Review, Charles H Ferguson says that “if Microsoft got “hardcore” about search (as Bill Gates has promised), then yes, Google would be in for a very rough time.” Getting “hardcore” is being more than single-minded. Microsoft notorious for its single-mindedness and brute force in crushing the competition could become “hardcore” and, as Ferguson says, the giant corporation could do “cashectomy” on Google and dominate the search ecology with its dominant architecture as it has done with its desktop operating system Windows. “Cashectomy” is an etymological despoliation, if I may say so, of vasectomy, a surgical act that induces permanent sterility in a man. But is it more benign than castration? Doing “cashectomy” is evocative of wealth and power.

Microsoft’s masochism evokes sexual images like “hardcore” and “cashectomy” and unless it is stopped, it might bring disaster to the competition and to society as well because absence of competition would give the company control over networked databases on which the search ecology is based. Ferguson’s article is an example of negative superspeculation, a future that must not happen.

But could this be done to prevent the consequences of a future that one could not prevent from happening, say, the tsunami in the Indian Ocean? Well, that would depend upon who lives in the vulnerable future. The multi-billion-dollar Thai tourist industry might do superspeculation and take pre-emptive steps to mitigate the consequences of the future that cannot be prevented, but why would anyone bother about the poor living on the seaboard of eastern India?

Diplomatic immunity for e-Bay, Baazee.com?

CYBER AGE: FROM THE STATESMAN
ND Batra

The arrest of Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of e-Bay’s Indian subsidiary Baazee.com, in connection with the posting for auction of a teenage-sex video, should not have become a matter of such grave concern as it has been made out to be in the Indian media. The buck must stop at the CEO’s door. Period. And that’s why so many corporate chairmen, presidents and other top officials in the USA are in jail, some for direct involvement in the abuse of public trust and others for contributory criminal negligence. Ignorance of law, as has been said many times, is no excuse especially when software programmes are available to filter out what is illegal.

It was a failure of imagination on the part of e-Bay-Baazee that its top officials could not foresee this kind of criminal activity taking place on their platform. Despite all the noise about Bajaj’s temporary incarceration, it is important to keep in mind that child pornography, even the possession of it in the privacy of one’s home, is a serious crime in the USA, where Baazee.com’s parent company e-Bay is based. Dissemination of child pornography offline or online, or being a contributory to it, is treated almost at par with murder. Bajaj who went to Harvard and is a US citizen should have known that creating an auction platform would not have given him any immunity in the USA. And he should not have expected it in India either. But being a member of the new Brahmin class that is rising in India, NRIs and Indian-born US citizens returning home to “civilise” their motherland, people like Bajaj think that they are ushering in a new era of not only unprecedented economic growth but also of unbridled freedom, thus unfortunately mimicking the worst of America despite their presumed good intentions.

It is surprising that Infosys chairman NR Narayana Murthy described Bajaj’s arrest in the MMS scandal as “too drastic” an action. No, it was the proper thing to do to prevent India from gradually sliding into cultural anarchy. As India grows economically, it needs more social discipline. Worse than Murthy’s misplaced sympathy was the US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher’s statement that secretary of state Powell was concerned about the case. “I do know this situation is one of concern at the highest levels of the US Government,” Boucher said. “It’s a matter that we have been following.” I thought Powell had better things to do than interfere in a petty law enforcement case in India! Bajaj will get his day in the court but a high-profile case like this would alert other online service providers to watch their corner of cyberspace.

Corporate American leadership, whether e-Bay or Union Carbide (responsible for the Bhopal disaster), must accept responsibility for its actions. Instead of making amends for their criminal negligence, they seek diplomatic immunity based on the false argument that since they are contributing to economic growth, their crimes should be overlooked. It is most shameful when some in the Indian media try to cozy up with global companies doing business in India and ignore their abuses. Consider, for example, a typical response from an India journalist, who wrote, “As India continues its struggle to integrate itself with the global economy and attract more international investments, the experience of Bajaj could turn out to be a serious dampener.” That’s an absurd statement! Should India prostitute itself to attract foreign investment? What India needs is a courageous person like Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General, who has taken upon himself the mission of preventing corporate greed and financial abuse. With the cleaning up of the corporate mess, Americans have begun to trust the market again.

NASSACOM forgets that the Baazee case is not about doing business in India but about trading and auctioning of online child pornography. NASSACOM’s admonition too was misplaced: “As a global, mature and responsible technology industry and the most attractive destination for services, we need to ensure that we do not send out the wrong signals to global customers and investors.” NASSACOM should let foreign investors know that the law of the land must be respected and that like any other “civilised and modern democracy,” India too would take “draconian measures” to protect its citizens, especially children. Listen to what the US Attorney General John Ashcroft said some time ago: “No one should be able to avoid prosecution for contributing to the abuse and exploitation of the nation’s children. The Department of Justice stands side-by-side with our partners in the law enforcement community to pursue those who victimise our children…”

Absence of moral outrage over the behaviour of school teenagers involved in the sex scandal and the lackadaisical attitude of school authorities has been no less shocking. Which makes me wonder where India is heading.

Dealing with your boss

To keep your job, act reasonably dumb before your boss. Why? Read more here.

US foreign policy

"Corporate power is the driving force behind US foreign policy - and the slaughter in Iraq," wrote JK Galbraith in The Guardian. Corporate Power is an expression of free market capitalism, but how does this lead to slaughter anywhere?

Dragon makes a move and Americans are all shook up

ND Batra: From The Statesman

WHAT’S in a name?
A lot.
Brand is the thing, the real thing in the global economy.
Suddenly the old question, “Guess, who is coming to dinner?” has assumed a new meaning.
Chop sticks, please. We’re Chinese.
Although no security alert or red flag went up when it was announced that a most celebrated icon of the US technology, IBM, was selling a part of itself, as it were, its brain, ThinkPad, to a Chinese company, Lenovo Group, for a paltry sum of $1.25 billion, a diffused state of anxiety and discomfort set in. Chinese companies, even when some of them don’t know how to manage themselves — Chinese Aviation Oil (Singapore) is a case in point — are nonetheless so ambitious that they are on an international hunt for acquisitions, especially for global brands.
IBM’s sale of its personal computer business would catapult Lenovo to become the third biggest computer company in the world, after Dell and Hewlett-Packard. “As Chinese companies move from prey to predator, they are also sitting on a powerful advantage: A possible currency revaluation. If the yuan rises 10 per cent, 20 per cent or even 40 per cent analysts expect, overseas acquisitions of household-name companies and properties become that much cheaper. In other words we haven’t seen anything yet from China,” writes Bloomberg’s columnist William Pesek Jr.
The Brits too have become alarmed and wonder whether America will become China-compatible one day, a secondary power at the service of a new superpower that’s sans freedom, sans, democracy, sans human rights. David Smith and Dominic Rushe recently wrote in the Sunday Times: “The sale of IBM’s personal computer business to a Chinese group shows that China is no longer content to be just the world’s workshop. It wants to own global businesses as well, and is using its low-cost advantages to embark on the acquisition trail. The Lenovo-IBM deal represents a coming of age for China. Until recently the economy that will dominate in the 21st century has been content to be the new workshop of the world. Now it has signalled that it wants a big slice of the control, and the boardroom action, as well.”
The fall of the dollar is not only bringing hordes of Europeans to shop and vacation, it is also bringing Chinese investors to buy businesses and industries, much as it happened in the 1980s when the Japanese went on a shopping spree. Of course ThinkPad will look like ThinkPad, which in fact is part of the deal that will allow Lenovo to keep the brand, and IBM, as a junior partner, would stand by it. But eventually ThinkPad would succumb to the Wal-Mart effect: Bring down the price. So would the quality, perhaps. But there are others who think that IBM’s sale of its PC business would have far reaching consequences because it is more than the simple fact that a part of Americana is being nibbled away by a foreign competitor. China’s unprecedented economic growth, galloping international trade and desperate hunt for raw materials, from oil to minerals, would give it a compelling reason for world domination.
Mark Helprin, a Wall Street Journal contributing editor and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, recently wrote that the days of the US dominated unipolar world are over. He contends that China is following the example of the militaristic Japan under the Meiji and plans to dominate the Pacific Ocean. The immense economic growth generated by market economy has made China the world’s second largest economy in purchasing power parity with a total GDP of $6.5 trillion, which is likely to double in eight to 10 years at the present rate of growth. China “harbors major ambitions” and plans to counter the USA in outer space, oceans and in cyberspace (The acquisition of IBM PC business by Lenovo may be a step in that direction).
While the USA is bogged down in fighting Islamic insurgencies and terrorism, China is slowly taking weaker states of South-East Asia (consider, for example, the Asean-China free trade agreement) under its protective wings. Helprin warns: “This century will be not just the century of terrorism: terrorism will fade. It will be a naval century, with the Pacific its centre, and challenges in the remotest places of the world offered not by dervishes and crazy-men but by a great power that is at last and at least America’s equal. Unfortunately, it is in our nature neither to foresee nor prepare for what lies beyond the rim.” Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State designate, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t necessarily agree with that assessment.
All this might seem obsessively alarmist but no one should discount the Chinese goal of ultimately bringing Taiwan into its fold. Its trump card ironically may be the nuclear North Korea, about which the USA is extremely worried, a country over which China has more influence than it admits. But what has this to do with Lenovo buying ThinkPad from IBM? Diplomacy and corporate power work in tandem and China uses both to advance its national interests.

Does advertisement create numbness?

“As corporate interests exert tighter and tighter control over information and even art, critical evaluation is more essential than ever. As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.”
-Rebecca Blood

That's incredible

That’s incredible, but many people believe that Jesus must have known the teaching of the Buddha and the philosophy of non-violence before he told Israelis, Turn the other cheek. And the three wise men that came to Bethlehem to see Christ when he was born? Did they come from India?
The book titled ”The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of Christ Within You" claims, as reported by The Los Angeles Times, that the three "Indian" wise men named him Isa, or "Lord" in Sanskrit. Isa, Ishwar, Ishu are some of the names by which Indians call their God.
“The book further goes on to claim that Jesus also travelled to India, where he practiced yoga meditation with the great sages during his "lost years" from age 13 to 30, a time of his life scarcely mentioned in the Bible.”
Is that possible? Well, if Alexander the Great could go to India, why not Jesus? The Silk Road was not for conquerors only. Early Buddhists used the Silk Road to spread their teaching to China. Read more.

Eastern wisdom on leadership

There is no such thing as a perfect leader either in the past or present, in China or elsewhere. If there is one, he is only pretending, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose in an effort to look like an elephant. - Liu Shao-ch'i

Question of the day

Would China use North Korea to blackmail the United States on Taiwan? Do you hear China whispering, Taiwan or us?