Musings: Dear Leader Mayawati

A leader of an opposition party was arrested this month for criticizing the rather ridiculous compensations that the government and its headstrong leader give rape victims.  The charge could be equated to ‘inflammatory public speaking’, which is hardly surprising in a region where a massive park is underconstruction, filled with statues of the aforementioned government leader.  Where, then, is this taking place?  Iran?  No – Ahmadinejad has not quite developed a cult of personality – North Korea?  Good guess, but the real location is both surprising and distressing.  These events occurred in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where the somewhat uncharismatic Chief Minister Mayawati, who has long been applauding her own efforts as a visionary leader of India, continues to spread her cult of personality across the dalit community. 

 

Digest: Down The Chrome Bricked Road

9 months ago Google published their new browser, Google Chrome which was supposed to be a minimalist browser that was very quick. It was great competition in the browser market, and it was a great way to crawl up Microsoft’s skin. They now have 30 million people regularly using Google Chrome, which is a pretty good number after 9 months. On the 7th of July Google introduced their newest item from their labs, the Google Chrome Operating System. Just like it’s browser counterpart, it is an open source, lightweight operating system which is directed towards netbooks. It focuses on speed, simplicity and security  with the design to be kept minimal.

 

Digest: India’s Red Schism

Not as uniform as it looks

India is one of the rare nations to have a tradition of democratically-elected regional Communist governments.  The state of West Bengal has been ruled by the Marxists and their allies for over 30 years (BBC, 2009), the longest period that a Communist party has held power via democratic means.  Communism is peacefully manifested in both West Bengal and the southern state of Kerala, the most literate and least corrupt state in India.  Indeed, it seems that the Indian school of Marxism fits rather well in the democratic machine that makes up the nation, a far cry from the stereotypical revolutionaries made famous by Lenin, Castro, and Mao.  However, there is another element in India’s mosaic of political affilations that adheres to the Communist stereotype in a rather more linear fashion – the Naxalites.

 

Musings: On the fate of the German model

What happened to the good ol' days of inflation?

Post-War Germany was a fascinating place.  While East German avant-garde artists were putting together synthesizers from old electronics and creating fashion expositions out of anything and everything available (brilliantly displayed in the up-and-coming film Comrade Couture), West Germany was radically progressing in its own manner.  Indeed, the East German avant-garde movement can be seen as an artistic response to the massive changes that were taking place in West Germany, as a result of the successes of the Marshall Plan – the Wirtschaftswunder.  Just like Japan in the east, post-war West Germany went through an incredible time of redevelopment and rebuilding, catapulting it into being a global economic power.  Also like Japan, Germany focused on export – indeed, the German brand is known abroad for its high-quality automotive exports: BMW, Mercedes, Porsche – and the fate of the German economy was soon bound to the ebb and flow of international consumer demand.

 

Arts & Recommendations

Mahratta’s Picks

Music for the Chapel Royal

2009 marks the anniversary of the death of George Frederic Handel, the first true cosmopolitan composer of the Western tradition.  Handel’s name is synonymous with his brilliant Baroque compositions ranging from oratarios to operas to concerti.  However, the most enduring and popular (by far) of his works is the magnificent Messiah, the first of Handel’s works that cemented his name as the common-man’s composer.  This was a far cry from the religiously inspired music of Bach or the courtly compositions of Purcell – Handel can arguably be seen as the first pop musician.  However, Messiah’s incredible popularity caused some other (in my opinion equally brilliant) works to not receieve the recognition that they deserve.  Handel’s oratarios were always overshadowed by Messiah, which caused works like Music for the Chapel Royal to go down in relative obscurity.

 

Technologia: Palm Pre

These days when talking about different kinds of cellphones one cannot ignore the ever popular iPhone from Apple. It revolutionized cell phones at the time and we can see the waves of influence in the current generations of phones trying to live up to the iPhone. HTC, Samsung and even RIM have been trying to compete with the iPhone, but it seems they cannot make a product that can beat it. In comes the Pre.

 

Musings: Perspectives on Zimbabwe’s Hitler

“Hitler had only one objective: justice for his people, sovereignty for his people, recognition of the independence of his people and their rights over their resources…If that is Hitler, then let me be a Hitler tenfold.” It is difficult to believe that any modern politician would make such a statement.  To make a proud personal comparison to Adolf Hitler seems like political insanity. Nonetheless, Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s words are indicative of the kind of leader he has become. Much like Hitler, Mugabe is a powerful and paranoid dictator.  Also like Hitler, the world has a chance to stop him.  Hopefully, the world will not pass the chance up once more.

 

Feature: Tea, Tigers, and the Sacred Island

The original Sri Lankan, says the Ramayana

It’s difficult to picture Barack Obama or Nicholas Sarkozy chatting with Osama bin Laden over a cup of tea.  However, heads of state and foreign ambassadors have routinely met and discussed with the leaders of a decades-old terrorist outfit responsible for tens of thousands of deaths.  Rarely has the world witnessed an enigma like the Tamil Tigers (formally the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam or LTTE).  Despite being named a terrorist organisation by the EU, India, and the United States among others, the Tigers have also enjoyed reciprocal relations with the very nations that marked them as terrorists.  Unlike most other terrorist organisations, the Tigers are not synonymous with religious sectarianism – indeed, their story lends itself to romanticism; a desperate people take up arms to free themselves from the oppression of the state, not unlike the fight for American independance.  Born out of a period of youthful protest and nationalism, the LTTE and their leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, rose to challenge the Sri Lankan state and even India as their fight for independence drew on through the decades.

 

Arts: Recommendations

Mahratta’s Picks

Kraftwerk

For too long, the culture of the German Democratic Republic has been associated with monolithic Stalinist edifices and neo-Prussian social discipline – a distorted view of a dynamic society.  One of the rare glimpses available into this lost culture is gained through the music of one of pop culture’s most innovative and truly brilliant ensembles – Kraftwerk.  Although the band hails from Dusseldorf, their instrumental role in the creation of an avant-garde German musical culture has not only given Germans an artistic voice from a tumultuous time but has also captured the essence and attitudes of both East and West Germany.    

 

the Model, from Kraftwerk’s 1978 release the Man Machine

 

Digest – Commerce: the Shogun fights deflation

 

No belly for Aso to rub

With the latest announcement of an increase in allotted funds, the Aso government has pledged over 500 billion dollars to the package as an effort to rescue Japan’s ailing economy (BBC 2008).  The Nikkei has plunged over the past few months, tipping the Japanese economy into a period of recession, and does not seem to be on a path for natural re-alignment.  The falling through of the recent bailout plan for the Big Three automakers in America caused finicky investors to be even stingier in the Japanese markets than they were being before, as the Nikkei began a new plunge with the news of the Senate’s rejection of the plan (BBC 2008).  The export-based Japanese industry has been gravely damaged by the global financial crisis, as the yen-dollar and yen-yuan ratio has increased, resulting in less money for exporters.   As governments around the world announced bailouts for their economies, it was not clear what exactly the incapacitated Aso administration was going to do.