Youth, India and Corruption

I believe it was Marx that said in his terse but elegant thesis on Feuerbach, “The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed men are products of changed circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that it is men who change circumstances and that the educator must himself be educated.” It is through this prism that I will attempt to analyze the current and future role of young generation of my country, India, against the omnipresent and fiercely nuanced specters of corruption.

Wittgenstein and Policy Making

"The limit of  my language are the limits of my world" -Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Profound and impressionable were the words Ludwig Wittgenstein used to write. Profound, impressionable.....and overarching. It may or may not be a slight stretch to call the above quote a Wittgenstein's unified thesis of everything human. However, one thing is certain, the above quote has a lot to offer by way of policy making.

If one takes the above statement to its logical conclusion and applies it to policy making, the person may find that the key to a successful new policy has 2 important characteristics:

a) It attempts to change the existing language of the people.

and/or

b) It attempts to reflect the already changed language of the people.

X Men and Radical Face of Civil Rights Movement - Magneto and Malcolm X

There is always a grey area that moral figures delve in between. Malcolm X and Magneto were two such figures. The similarity between the two personalities becomes apparent at first glance. Both were fostered at a young age after losing their loved ones to bigotry. Both fought for the cause of their people (blacks and mutants), and both, depending on point of view that was held were either ostracized or seen as liberators. However, this only begins to scratch the surface of their characters.

Analysis of Automobile Industry FDI Policy of BRIC Nations

Building up on the previous post of how FDI policies are formulated, here I have analyzed the automobile industry policy of BRIC nations with regards to FDI.

A Look Into FDI Policy Models

The issue of policy making for FDI is seen as a very challenging task. This is especially true in context of BRIC nations, most of who were forced into paradigm shifts from import substitution to liberalization rather than natural adoption of it. Be it the fall of the Soviet Empire, the Indian and Brazilian economic crisis of 1980s and 90s or the reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping to correct the economic malfeasance that riddled China, the 4 emerging economies were coerced into changes.

A Letter from Wittgenstein to Economist Piero Sraffa

Dear Sraffa,

The following are some remarks I've put down on the topic of our last conversation. I hope they won't be too disconnected and that you'll read them to the end.

You said, "The Austrians can do most of things the Germans did." I say, How do you know? What circumstances are you taking into account if you say they can? "This man, Austria, can remove the wedding ring from his finger." True, it's not too heavy and doesn't stick to his finger. But he may be ashamed of doing it, hiw wife may not allow it, etc.

My Time at Transparency International India

During the course of the first week I became familiar with the Transparency International India work environment. After constant dialectic with my directors I was able to understand good governance and corruption in a clearer light. The reading materials such as the Anti-Corruption reports, the IP Pact reports and reports from Transparency International Nepal and Bulgaria acted as a prism into understanding the need for garnering political activism and ethics based governance as a basis for an ideal society.

My Delhi Travelogue

My first time living alone and what an incredible way to start: none other than the capital of India itself. New Delhi. But I must admit my initial thoughts on Delhi were iffy at fairest and not just because of its skin cracking heat, its high crime levels and sheer lack of empathy compared to my favorite Indian metro Bangalore, but also because unlike other Indian cities the initial hustle and bustle and the clear materialistic approach to life made Delhi feel soul-less. Just another place with more malls than the rest, just another place with more hormonal teenagers than the rest, just another place with more class divide than the rest,…..just another place.

How wrong I was.

A Milestone of Determination

“I  am a new day rising

I'm a brand new sky
To hang the stars upon tonight
I am a little divided
Do I stay or run away
And leave it all behind?

It's times like these you learn to live again
It's times like these you give and give again”

-Its times like these, Foo Fighters

I have always considered Canada to be like a second home having lived in Vancouver for a good part of my early childhood. I was thoroughly enamored by how beautiful it was, how responsible its citizens were, and how the only criticisms I heard were mostly backhanded compliments such as, “Canada is not interesting because it hasn’t messed up enough like the rest of us.” However, I did find one of its traditions quite irksome.

Making Globalization Work - A Look Into Solutions Offered by Joseph Stiglitz

It was Peter Berger that said it is within human nature to offer meanings to all that they perceive and construct social realities from it. (Luckmann, 1967) A certain fear of the unknown and a desperate need to predict the future also falls under the same category regardless of how aloof the outcome is or how misinterpreted. Like the oracle of Delphi who told Croseus, king of Lydia that if he were to attack the Persians, “a great empire will be destroyed”. Little did Croseus know that the oracle was speaking about his own empire. And yet the need to consult soothsayers, astrologers and reading into the predictions of Nostradamus is still continued to this day because reputable sciences have very little to offer on this regard.

Argentine Economic Crisis 2001

The Argentine debt crisis was unique in several ways in such that it was not just the failure of the local and international economic institutions and international trade but also a socio-political failure.  It set precedence on how a bad government can bankrupt one of the traditionally richest countries in the world. It is however hard to pick one incident that sparked Argentina’s downward economic spiral. Like most crisis a number of factors over a long period of time culminated into its bankruptcy in 2001. It is a topic of hot debate on what these factors were.

‘Le Bon’ – David Hume (1711-1776)

             

               

David Hume as a political and ethical philosopher probably represents the zenith of Scottish enlightenment. In an era that saw renaissance in free thinking and libertarian spirit and gave the world philosophical legends like Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid and James Hutton; David Hume seems to occupy a corner all for himself. Hume, a notorious empiricist, in a sense represents a dead end in his line of philosophical thinking. Nonetheless Hume’s greatness comes from the fact that he developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke and Berkeley and by making it self-consistent made it incredible. (Russell, 1945) However, Hume was more widely known for his writings in economics and history than as a philosopher. His philosophical sophistication and greatness was only recognized through the works of his contemporaries like Reid and Kant who cleared a pathway into Hume becoming a reference point for all future philosophers (Schmidt, 2003). Hume in a sense could be considered a precursor along with Francois Quesnay to Adam Smith’s theories on political economy, exchange and property. At a personal level what I find most appealing about David Hume, and my inspiration behind this paper is his theory of property and exchange and how his idea of formulation of justice is derived from it. This formulation of justice in turn becomes the bed rock of a social contract that binds societies together.