The Indian Blogger : Life and times in India

The New Look Indian Blogger

Eklavya — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:19:56 +0000

You must have noticed something new here?

The new elegant design of this blog is because of my decision to shift to one of the most powerful theme framework for Wordpress – the Thesis.

This is just one of the new changes on this blog in a series of many which are coming very soon.

Though there has been a substantial drop in my site’s visitors owing to this new changes but I am ready for this.

The prime reason I change from my old theme (Lemon) to Thesis is that Lemon is no longer supported or developed by its creator. In fact he has even removed the page for this theme.

So from a stable old theme to a new ever growing theme framework ! This is my blog.

I am also looking for a new header which can truly reflect my style of writing here.

I am now a Thesis Developed License holder and my next venture is to start exploring this mesmerizing theme.

This is not a theme per s. It is a theme framework . It simply means that it has unlimited design options to create power websites (like these)!

Keep reading !

Thinking to change my topics

Eklavya — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 16:46:08 +0000

Hello everyone,

As you must be aware that the Indian Blogger.Com blog (the one you are reading right now) has a collection of useful articles on India, its life in general, its economy and other relevant Indian things.

This blog is basically a reflection of my thought on various things which happen in India – be it economy, the terrorist attacks, the cricket, movie or what not?

However, of late, I am finding myself extremely busy in my other offline and online activities which leave almost no time to read contents about India.

As such whenever I come here to write something, I get a big blank from my mind because it just can’t think as to what to write about India when, honestly, I, myself, am no so updated about latest happenings in India.

I believe that an honest reflection can only come by getting involved into the things. When you are no longer in touch, you start loosing the edge over your subjects.

This is what I am facing right now. In my desperate attempts to establish, maintain and promote a collection of niche websites I own, I am finding it extremely difficult to write quality stuff here on this website. This has resulted into a sense of guilt inside me.

An extremely demanding offline job is also taking its toll my online activities.

As such I have two options with me:-

(1) Either to stop posting on this blog and let it be in a hibernation mode with a tiny hope that in a not very near future, may be I will be able to write India specific articles on this blog.

(2) Till such time I find time to write my India specific posts, I change the topic of this blog and start writing on topics related to my other online activities so that this blog can survive. There are many other topics on which I can write without getting a guilt feeling of not knowing them well.

I am not decided yet. However, some friends have suggested that I should use the option (2) to let this blog survive instead of sending it in a long hibernation mode.

I will write more about it in my next post. Meanwhile I am open to all suggestions.

Wikileaks and US patriotism

Eklavya — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:47:46 +0000

I came to know about this in the morning through Times of India. A leak of 91000 classified documents by wikileaks which clearly demonstrate that Pakistan and its notorious ISI is fuelling terrorism in Afghanistan and India. You can read about this in Afghan War Di ary, 2004-2010.

For we, Indians, this, in fact, is no news. It is a common knowledge here. ISI works very closely with separatist elements to perpetrates heinous crimes of violence against Indians – in India and abroad.

We Indians often find ourselves totally helpless in the midst of such attacks. India, who is a very soft target for terrorist is suffering from the callous and insensitive attitude of its successive Political leaders, who are just incapable of developing a winning strategy for winning this war.

Often I think as if common man in India is condemned by destiny to live in perpetual fear with no surety whether he will return home safely in evening or not.

Well enough of India and its bad luck. There is something which I want to say about Americans.

The wikileaks reports have shown that Washington is blindly paying Pakistan massive amounts of money for access to Afghanistan even as Islamabad uses its spy agency ISI to plot the death of American and Nato troops, allied Indian personnel, and undermines US Policy.

Now I want to ask two question

Number one : Where are the patriot Americans?

Those we see in Hollywood blockbuster who always emerge as the savior of the man kind.

Will those American now arise to take notice of this leak? Can we expect that something will be done now?

Number two : Is President Obama any different from Mr Bush ?

He may be the most charismatic leader of our times, but can he bring justice to those martyrs US soldiers who were died because the US money which was expected to help them was diverted to plot their killings?

I hope world’s most powerful democracy will try to look inwards and have an introspection.

Emergency in Pakistan

It’s rain rain & rain in Delhi

Eklavya — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 18:00:09 +0000

It was raining cats and dogs in Delhi today evening. The shower were so intense and forceful that they almost stalled the city. There was water logging everywhere, collasus traffic jams and many small accidents too.

In a sad incident, two people were electrocuted in Chandani Chowk due to heavy rain resulting into falling of an electric wire from a pole.

The only thing which is pleasing is the huge shorfall in temperatue. The weather is a great respite from the hot and humid condition prevailing in the city.

Monsoon has arrived with a bang !

No related posts.

Agriculture and increasing food prices rise

Eklavya — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 11:34:36 +0000

These days if you happen to meet any common citizen of India and ask him about the most annoying, painful and consistent problem he is facing these days, in all probability, a majority of Indian citizens will say- “It’s huge rise in prices of common food items of daily needs”.

Believe it or not, but in India, inflation is taking it toll on each and everybody. Except for the privilege few – most Indians are feeling the heat in their domestic front. The prices of all food prices – be it vegetables, Fruits, Dairy Products, Cereals or You name what – almost every food item has become costly. The budget of most Indian family has become extremely tight and many people are making daily adjustment in their needs and demands.

So why food items have become so costly in India? Is it a conspiracy by traders/black marketers who have hoarded most of the material in their hidden shops ? Or is it a game plan by all the opposition parties in India? Or a Divine but cruel justice for our collective sins?

You may guess any of the answer you want. But the fact is that this entire problem has its roots in our failure and gross negligence to give the Agriculture- the due importance it deserves.

Do you know that :

According to the World Bank, transporting grapes to the Netherlands from India costs more than twice as much as transporting them from Chile, even though Chile is twice as far.

This year (i.e. in 2010), for the first time in the country’s history, India’s factories may contribute more to GDP than its farms, forests and fisheries.

The above two basically are part of an extremely interesting and informative article recently published in The Economist’ on the state of Indian Agriculture which explains all.

Read the story here : Agriculture in India : Crop circles

Test post

Eklavya — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 10:15:04 +0000

Hello,

finding it difficult to make new post after making upgradation from old to new version of wordpress.

This is my test post to see if things work properly or not.

My first post in 2010

Eklavya — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 19:06:55 +0000

Hello all,

For the past one year, I have been able to just write a few posts on this blog. Yet the good thing is that I am still getting regular visitors for my some good written articles of past.

My project for which I stopped blogging, unfortunately, had failed miserably. Apart from monetary loss, I lost thousand of productive hours and peace of mind.

In fact I also lost PageRank of this blog.

When I left blogging, this blog was having a healthy PageRank of 4. Now it has come down to a PR 2 Blog.

Well I read somewhere that :

” What you are left with is more important and valuable than what you have lost”

While trusting my faith on this great saying, I hereby start my new innings as a blogger here

So I am back. Permanently this time !!

Down but not out

Eklavya — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:16:42 +0000

To all those who have left any hope of seeing a new post here, I just want to clarify that Indian Blogger is down and passing through a tumultuous phase in his life.
But certainly he is not out. Yes DOWN but not out.

He will soon come back…Amen !

Privacy Policy Update for Indian Blogger.com

Eklavya — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:47:22 +0000

Hello,

I have updated my privacy policy for this blog.

This policy update was important to comply with some revenue program I am using on this blog.

Read : Privacy policy for Indian Blogger.com

Regards

Eklavya

Reasons for Global Recession – Part Two

Eklavya — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:12:08 +0000

In one of my earlier posts, I wrote about the causes of global recession. This post become quite popular and hundreds of people thanked me for the simple explanation of this phenomenon. This is article is in continuation of what I wrote in that post.

Sub-prime mess which was the main theme of that post and the prime reason that eventually sparked a world wide recession is at best an immediate cause of the recession. In this post, I will throw some light on the reason behind the very emergence of a sub-prime situation and why despite pumping of billions of dollars into the world economy, it is still not showing any sign of recovery.

In my first post on recession, I told you about how availability of an easy credit situation prompted the US lending institution to lend money to sub-prime borrowers and how these risky deals turned into a nightmare for big financial institution. In this post, we will be discussing three main issues :

(1) How American economy became so full of cash that made availability of loans for almost everything so easy?
(2) Why American banks could not foresee the risk involved in sub-prime loans?
(3) Why the situation is not improving as fast as expected despite stimulus package of billons of dollars?

From where the Cash came in US ?

In order to understand how US economy got flooded with dollars, we need to go back in time by a decade. In 1997-98, the tiger economies of Asia (a term used to refer the countries of South East Asia like Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia etc) suffered a major economic crisis. Though it is not necessary to know the details of this crisis, a brief overview of that crisis will help us understand the current mess in world as it is all linked.

During those years, several countries of South East Asia had developed worrying financial weaknesses which were the results of heavy investment in highly speculative real estate ventures, financed by borrowing either from poorly informed foreign sources or by credit from under regulated domestic financial institutions.

The crisis began with wrong banking practices. In those countries crony capitalism (where borrower had the connections with government) became too dominant. The minister’s nephew or the president’s son could open a bank and raise money both from the domestic populace and from foreign lenders, with everyone believing that their money was safe because official connections stood behind the institution. Government guarantees on bank deposits are standard practice throughout the world, but normally these guarantees come with strings attached. The owners of banks have to meet capital requirements (that is, put a lot of their own money at risk), restrict themselves to prudent investments, and so on. In Asian countries, however, too many people were granted privilege without responsibility, allowing them to play a game of “heads I win, tails somebody else loses.” And the loans financed highly speculative real estate ventures and wildly overambitious corporate expansions.

This bubble was inflated still further by credulous foreign investors, who were all too eager to put money into faraway countries about which they knew nothing (except that they were thriving). It was also, for a while, self-sustaining: All those irresponsible loans created a boom in real estate and stock markets, which made the balance sheets of banks and their clients look much healthier than they were.

However, this bubble had to burst sooner or later. At some point it was going to become clear that the high values Asian markets had placed on their assets weren’t realistic. Speculative bubbles are vulnerable to self-fulfilling pessimism: As soon as a significant number of investors begin to wonder whether the bubble would burst, it did.

So Asia went into a downward spiral. As nervous investors began to pull their money out of banks, asset prices plunged. As asset prices fell, it became increasingly doubtful whether governments would really stand behind the deposits and loans that remained, and investors fled all the faster. Foreign investors stampeded for the exits, forcing currency devaluations, which worsened the crisis still more as banks and companies found themselves with assets in devalued baht or rupiah, but with liabilities in lamentably solid dollars.

In 1996 capital was flowing into emerging Asia at the rate of about $100 billion a year; by the second half of 1997 it was flowing out at about the same rate. Inevitably, with that kind of reversal, Asia’s asset markets plunged, its economies went into recession, and it only got worse from there.

Eventually International Monetary Fund (IMF) had to step in to save these economies. How these economies later recovered and at what cost is a different story. However, this crisis brought with it some major lessons for the Asian economies. One of the most important lessons for them was to create a solid Foreign Exchange Reserve so as to withstand the most volatile exit of the money from their markets. High reserves promise safety in a storm. Therefore, most major economies of Asia (including the big China and India) adopted a strategy of maintaining high forex reserve so as to ensure safety from any such crisis in future. This shift in priorities created a very interesting situation.

In the mid-1990s, the emerging economies of Asia had been major importers of capital, borrowing abroad to finance their development. But after the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 these countries began protecting themselves by amassing huge war chests of foreign assets, in effect exporting capital to the rest of the world.

To say in other words, the Asian economy came in to a Saving mode. In order to maintain huge foreign reserve, they also started buying US securities. This resulted in a huge inflow of dollars into the US economy. As more and more dollars kept coming into the US economy from world over, the American investors started devising very sophisticated and innovative methods to convert the flood of money from Asia into a borrowing and spending spree for American consumers.

Now instead of writing as to how and why this saving tendency of Asian Economies has resulted into the current global mess, I would like to point you towards two excellent articles on this issues written by two of my favorites economists. These articles are very well written in a layman’s language and they will clarify all your doubts about the role Asian economies in current global recession.

The first article is : High forex reserves can worsen recession

Written by Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar who is Consulting Editor, Economic Times, the popular financial newspaper of India. He is my favorite columnist.

Second article is : Revenge of the Glut

Written by noted economist, the Nobel winner Paul Krugman. In this article he has concluded that the world is suffering from a global paradox of thrift.

The above two articles provide useful information on how a global saving glut is worsening the recession. I did not feel the need to write on these topics as these two excellent articles are sufficient in explaining the role of Asian economies in the present global recession.

So let us again reconsider the three issues we started with:

(1) How American economy became so full of cash that made availability of loans for almost any thing so easy?

It was all because of the insistence of Asian economy to generate a huge Foreign Exchange Reserve that ultimately created an imbalance of global money flow. If you read the above two articles, you will understand this clearly.

(2) Why American banks could not foresee the risk involved in sub-prime loans?

As Paul Krugman has pointed in his article, it is because of the depth and sophistication of the country’s financial markets. In his own words, “American bankers, empowered by a quarter-century of deregulatory zeal, led the world in finding sophisticated ways to enrich themselves by hiding risk and fooling investors.”

In America which has such a long history of free capital markets, financial institutions have mastered the art of hiding risk and fooling investors. When a huge inflow of money is coming your way, a sense of wealth and greed becomes dominant in our mind. After all capitalism is all about profit and maximizing your return. Isn’t it?

(3) Why the situation is not improving as fast as expected despite stimulus package of billions of dollars?

One of the top global economist of the world (I don’t know his name) has declared that the present crisis is a structural one , reflecting a serious global misallocation of money in recent years, which had created many bubbles that had now burst. Pumping in more money could not resolve the problem, since it amounted to an attempt to reflate the old bubbles. Instead painful structural change are the need of the hour, he said, and this could take years.

What we are seeing the world today is a global saving phenomenon. American who were the front runners of global borrowing and spending spree have started savings seriously. The national savings rate of America has bumped up to 5% in January from 3.9% in December. A year ago, it was at 0.1%.

Saving is not a bad idea. But if everybody on earth starts saving and no one choose to spend, the saving will lose all its meaning. It is a well documented theory in economics known as the Paradox of Thrift. Suppose people decide to become more thrifty, that is, they decide to save more at each level of income, one might expect that this would increase the total amount of savings. But the simple Keynesian multiplier model predicts a paradox of thrift that total savings will remain the same and income will decline.

So when the situation will improve?

I believe in the spiritual mantra of “This too will pass”. This is not the first recession the world has ever seen and certainly this is not going to be the last. I think the need of the hour for individuals is to not loose hope and prepare themselves for future. Keep learning new things, improve your skills and above all don’t loose heart. The best brains in the world are at work to find solution to this recession. Eventually, we’ll find a cure. And even if nothing works, the greatest healer of all – the time – will subside this recession one day.

For every problem under the Sun,
there is a solution or is none
if there is one, try to find it,
If there is none, never mind it.

We all have a limited time span on this earth. A Recession, not matter how lengthy or worse it appears now, is a momentary phenomenon when compared on the global scale of our entire life time. Don’t allow this momentary phenomenon to overshadow the wonderful days of happiness and wealth which will definitely come in your life in the days to come.