[Reader-list] Contents of reader-list Digest, Vol 63, Issue 18- India- others amongst us.?

[rajendra bhat]

After reading this post I could not but feel like lauging at the very idea of "others" amongst is. In India there are no others amongst us, both hindus and muslims are having tough time to reconcile with the thought of others, as media feeds on human miseries, day in day out, journalists make it a point to misinformation and feed on "others" amongst us, the divisive politics of all political parties are feeding on the theory of "others" amonst us, and the word secular is not in practice at any walk of life. A famous muslim wants her fourth home in a building that she likes, in a town she likes, at a price she wants as she is accustomed to getting what she wants by being "others". She forgets all the juggi and slumdwellers once she becomes a MP, forgets the cause of working for the slum dwellers as she is busy manipulating the political parties for the next term in rajya sabha.

   More importantly, the media has forgotten the past so quickly that the  event of mid fifties, when India was having wheat shortage, America gave aid in wheat, the aid then became a soft loan, PL 48o. It was misused by the then governance to create law and order issues in kerala to dismiss a democratically elected government of EMS namboodripad, the issue being it was left party ruled state, democratically elected. then, visionary leader was the Pm of the nation, Nehru. Declassified archives of America reveal  how the then Home minister, S K Patil had a role in misuse of the funds to boot out the elected governance. This is the flash back, now just look around what is happening in India, after N-deal, with billions of trade and some more billions in kickbacks, the rulers have new game in force, as supreme court judgement in Bommai Case does not allow use of art,356 that easily, so now the use of art.355.

  Yet the citizens do not understand the role of media which is busy with hailing the PM for his vision of the PM and non-functional home minister, who has to be pro-active n booting out the terror, whoever indulges in it. But vote bank politics is such that all parties political, are keen to encash the vote banks.

Regards.



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Today's Topics:

  1. FINANCE: Waiting for Schadenfreude (Naeem Mohaiemen)
  2. INDIA: Others Among Us (Naeem Mohaiemen)
  3. Centre for Internet and Society's Researchers At Work
      Programme - Histories of the internets in India (Nishant Shah)
  4. Re: Rescue the Rescue by Friedman (Naeem Mohaiemen)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 09:50:59 +0600
From: "Naeem Mohaiemen" <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>
Subject: [Reader-list] FINANCE: Waiting for Schadenfreude
To: "Sarai Reader List" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Message-ID:
    <e9cfea7c0810042050v4e620e05jaab75457b5662834 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="WINDOWS-1252"

"Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats ‹ the ones who bent the
rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes
because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed
regulations on the banking and mortgage industries ‹ are taking us down with
them."


October 2, 2008, 10:02 PM
Waiting for Schadenfreude

Judith Warner

(Judith Warner's book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety",
a New York Times best-seller, was published in February 2005.)

A couple of years ago, at the height of the boom, a friend in New York
publishing described to me the indignities of being a five-figure employee
commuting daily from suburban New Jersey on trains packed with traders,
stock brokers and hedge-fund types.

³These were the guys who, in college, I used to step over on Sunday mornings
when they were lying in a pool of their own vomit,² he said. ³And now
they¹re earning millions and millions ­ in bonuses alone.²

The image, as you might imagine, stuck in my mind. For it summed up so well
a certain kind of resentment and sense of injustice that a particular class
of non-monied professionals in the New York area came to feel sometime in
the late 1990s.

The feeling of injustice wasn¹t just about money, though it was partly about
being more than solidly middle class and still struggling to pay the bills,
as New York writer Vince Passaro captured so well in his ³Reflections on the
Art of Going Broke² (³Who¹ll Stop the Drain?²) in Harper¹s in 1998.

It was, rather, about a sense that the wrong people had inherited the earth.

They had taken over everything. Their salaries (and bonuses in particular)
had pushed real estate costs and living expenses sky-high. Their values had
permeated every aspect of life. And their choices seemed to have become the
only acceptable ‹ even viable ‹ ones possible.

In the 1970s, even in New York, it had been financially possible for a
middle class family to survive if parents ‹ even one parent ‹ built a
professional life around something other than purely making money. In the
1980s ‹ even in the ³greed is good² (which was of course meant to be a
damning phrase) 1980s ‹ it seemed respectable, honorable and, dare I say,
valuable to do things other than make a lot of money. But by the late 1990s,
in New York, if you weren¹t in the financial industry, it was hard to
survive.

And so it went, in a more general way, throughout the country, in the whole
winner-take-all-era ushered in by the boom years of the late 1990s. The
model for success narrowed. The goal posts marking success grew more out of
reach. For all the people who did something with their lives other than
doggedly, single-mindedly ‹ and successfully ‹ pursuing wealth (³You mean,
some people¹s jobs are just about making money?² Julia once asked me in the
course of one of our ³What the World is About² conversations), life got
harder and scarier and more confusing.

Many of us who¹d proudly decided, in our twenties, to pursue edifying or
creative, or ³helping² professions, woke up to realize, once we had
families, that we¹d perhaps been irresponsible. We couldn¹t save for
college. We could barely save for retirement. If we set up a
³family-friendly² lifestyle, we threw our financial futures down the drain.

So, like just about everyone, we worked hard and treaded water, but felt we
were entitled to do better than that. And if we lived in the New York area,
or another similarly wealthy area where the spoils of the new Gilded Age
were constantly thrust in our faces, we felt, like my friend on the train, a
little something more: we knew that we were losers.

(³The Big L,² a friend, an art school grad turned design consultant,
declared last week, calling me in tears after her stockbroker told her how
little she cared about her modest portfolio. ³Why not just brand it right on
my forehead and be done with it?²)

This financial crisis is supposed to be a big moment of reckoning. ³666-Mark
of the Beast² and ³Root of all Evil² the End-of-World Web sites are
shouting, quoting prominent economists on the demise of the American banking
system. ³Wall Street, R.I.P.², a headline in The Times proclaimed last
weekend. ³The Master of the Universe Era is over,² New York magazine chimed
in.

For those of us who have hated this period ‹ the wealth worship, the wealth
gap, the elevation of everything suspiciously shiny and irrationally bubbly
and stupidly ebullient, there should be some feeling of vindication. But it
just isn¹t coming. A great emptiness ‹ and a gnawing kind of fear ‹ has
taken its place.

After 9/11, psychologists said that the tragedy and trauma would magnify
whatever emotional state people were already experiencing. Depressed people
would become much more depressed. Anxious people would become much more
anxious.

The current financial crisis has, I think, proven to be a similar sort of
emotional Rorschach test. People who felt impotent feel even more powerless.
Those who felt lied to see new levels of conspiracy. Demagogues are engaging
in even more demagoguery.

And those of us who felt, well, like losers, are feeling like even bigger
losers, as we shove our unopened 401K or (if we¹re double-loser freelancers)
SEP-IRA statements into bottom desk drawers and wait for a cathartic burst
of schadenfreude that simply refuses to come.

Schadenfreude is impossible because the fat cats ‹ the ones who bent the
rules, the ones who pushed the envelopes, the ones who paid lower taxes
because capital gains were most of their income, the ones who opposed
regulations on the banking and mortgage industries ‹ are taking us down with
them.

The very wealthiest are, as always, likely to do just fine. Real, hard-core
Wall Street, as Tom Wolfe reminded us last weekend, long ago decamped for
the hedge funds of Greenwich. The political leaders who allowed this mess to
develop have turned into the great defenders of ³Main Street.² (If I have to
hear the juxtaposition of ³Main Street² and ³Wall Street² one more time, I
will be the one drowning in a pool of vomit.). It¹s a whole host of other
people ‹ vulnerable middle class homeowners and small business owners and,
now, universities unable to make payroll ‹ who are hurting.

I called my friend in publishing yesterday to ask him how things were going
on the train.

³There¹s a lot of rueful chuckling. There¹s a lot of talk about riding this
out, about maintaining,² is all he had to say.

It was 23 years ago that Tom Wolfe introduced us to the Masters of the
Universe. They were curiosities then ‹ remote, very rich, and decidedly not
like you and me. But now, the world of Wall Street has become our world;
there is no outside to it, there is no other option than to pay and play.
Our fortunes rise and fall together to a degree like never before, and our
values are enmeshed like never before. The language of Wall Street ‹ of
cost-cutting and efficiency, self-interest, using each situation to maximize
profit, is the language of everyday life and social interaction.

We¹re all losers now. There¹s no pleasure to it.


------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 13:37:34 +0600
From: "Naeem Mohaiemen" <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>
Subject: [Reader-list] INDIA: Others Among Us
To: "Sarai Reader List" <reader-list at sarai.net>
Message-ID:
    <e9cfea7c0810050037p43cd091bt51e0331195f9d844 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="WINDOWS-1252"

...even "famous Muslims" find it difficult to find a house."


Others Among Us
By Suroor Mander

04 October, 2008
Countercurrents.org

I opened newspapers today, to be frank, after many days. Newspaper
after newspaper had articles on Eid. It had to be, Eid was just
yesterday (October 2). I went through article after article, my heart
sinking as I read. What have we done I wondered. So much fear in
Muslim community, that too in secular India, on Gandhi Jayanti.

It seems as if the community is under siege, trying hard to keep
watchful eyes at bay. Speeches from every Imam, cries from every
Muslim ghetto begging people accept them.

It isn't as if these voices weren't around earlier they just became
more prominent after the Jamia encounter in the heart of the national
capital. Floodgates opened. Every Muslim who could write, be it
teachers, journalists, techies tried every forum – the newspapers,
internet, television, in one way or another imploring people to stop
hating them. They tried hard to explain that they weren't the
terrorists, some even adding that those young boys also might not have
been terrorists. The more I would read, the more I was disgusted with
us.

What have we done? We have let the Hindutva forces win. Golwarkar
didn't want the Muslims to be banished to another land or
exterminated; they wanted them to live in fear as second class
citizens.

Since when was it a curse for people to believe in their faith? Why it
is so bad if the Muslims believe in their faith, staunch about their
namaaz, rozas guided by the tenets of their religion, aren't all
believers? Hindus who pray everyday, leaving their house with a tika
or stop eating meat and other things during Navratras etc aren't
viewed with contempt then why Muslims? If secular Indian gives Hindus
the freedom to walk out of their homes with Tikas, then why do we
stare at every skull capped and bearded Muslims?

We have forced a community to stand up and condemn every act allegedly
done by their fundamentalists; expecting this from the educated, the
literate, the clerics and the ignorant. However, we don't have any
such expectation from Hindus against violence perpetuated by
fundamentalists from their community.

We are thriving on the grief of terrified mothers beseeching people to
give their children a chance to access justice; gloating on the fact
that even "famous Muslims" find it difficult to find a house."
Strangely none of this has horrified us. We are happy to let the
community reiterate their secular identity while none of us ever have
to.

We have become complacent in this hate, allowing our silences to be
read as our consent. If we truly believe in the secular identity of
this country we have to actively voice our dissent against hate.

I am still haunted by the words of that man in Thane "Where will I go?
This is the place where I was born. This is the place I will die." I
wonder how many agonised voices it would take for us to speak what our
hearts feel.

Suroor Mander is attached to the NGO Aman Biradari in new Delhi.


------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 13:55:08 +0530
From: "Nishant Shah" <itsnishant at gmail.com>
Subject: [Reader-list] Centre for Internet and Society's Researchers
    At Work    Programme - Histories of the internets in India
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Message-ID:
    <ac6c08200810050125i752e6d10k3a658187ba753b88 at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="WINDOWS-1252"

Dear All,
It is with the greatest pleasure that we announce the launch of The Centre
for Internet and Society's Research Portfolio and the beginning of its
flagship programme Researchers At Work (CIS-RAW) . The CIS-RAW encourages
innovative ideas and perspectives that emerge from dialogue and exchange,
structured around a theme that changes every 2 years. The Theme for its
first two years is "The Histories of the internets in India". The CIS-RAW is
targeted at scholars, practitioners, theoreticians and thinkers willing to
engage with the specific themes that CIS is immediately interested in and
offers full financial support towards quantified academic and intellectual
productions.

Here is a list of FAQ for the CIS-RAW programme (It can also be accessed at
http://cis-india.org/research/cis-raw

*What is the CIS-RAW?*

The CIS-RAW stands for Researchers at Work, a multidisciplinary research
initiative by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The CIS firmly
believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field
of Internet and Society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual
accounts of the interaction between different internets and the
socio-cultural and geo-political structures.. The CIS-RAW programme hopes to
produce one of the first documentations on the transactions and
negotiations, relationships and correlations that the emergence of internet
technologies has resulted in, specifically in the South.

The CIS-RAW programme recognises 'The Histories of Internets and India' as
its focus for the first two years. This particular thematic was envisioned
because though many disciplines, organisations and interventions in various
areas deal with the internet technologies, there has been very little work
in documenting the polymorphous growth of the internet technologies and
their relationship with the society in India. The existing narratives of the
internet are often riddled with absences or only focus on the mainstream
interests of the major stakeholders like the State and the corporate. We
find it imperative to excavate the three decade histories of the internets
to understand the concerns and questions in the field in the contemporary
times.

*How does The CIS-RAW programme work?*

In its first two years, CIS-RAW is interested in working with theoreticians,
scholars, practitioners and interventionists who have had a stake and
experience in researching the field of Internet and Society. We are looking
at a model of collaboration where different individuals and/or organisations
are invited to come up with proposals for constructing historical and
contextual accounts of the internets in India, from their own perspective
and interests.

*What is the role of CIS in the CIS-RAW programme?*

The Centre for Internet and Society sees itself as involved in research in
many different ways. We would of course be involved in providing critical
input, ideas and comments to the original proposals by the different
collaborators. We will also be, depending upon the individual expertise at
the CIS, providing research and intellectual infrastructure required for
several projects.

However, we do not believe in doing everything ourselves. One of the pivotal
roles that we see ourselves playing is that of an enabler. Through financial
support, through establishing networks, through physical and intellectual
infrastructure, the CIS hopes to enable multidisciplinary and unique
research that inaugurates the field of Internet and Society in India.

CIS also believes in a longer commitment to the CIS-RAW projects beyond the
scope of the immediate research. We shall also be committed to disseminating
the findings and the information contained in each individual project
through public media like blogs and newspapers, and also through publishing
of the individual projects as approach papers, journal articles and
curricula designing in various peer-reviewed and respectable academic
spaces.

*What are the responsibilities of a CIS-RAW researcher?*

The CIS quantifies the research responsibility of a CIS-RAW researcher in
consultation with them, based on their individual expertise, interests and
skills. Different projects, depending upon the object that is being
analysed, lend themselves to different processes of documentation and
historiography. Hence, each individual project will have the scope to define
the methods by which the researcher wants to work and the modes of
documentation. We believe in multidisciplinary and innovative forms of
methods and documentation as critical to creative thought and would
encourage that in all our research programmes. However, each research
project will be committed to producing the following minimum research
outputs:

  1.

  An approach paper that charts in detail, the larger scope of the field
  with analysis and information (approximately 50 – 60 pages with additional
  appendices and annexures).
  2.

  A working paper that can appear in a scholarly journal; the working paper
  is a condensed and more precise version of the approach paper.
  (approximately 5,000 – 7,000 words including references and footnotes)
  3.

  Contribution to our various media forms like blogs, newspapers, curricula
  design etc. depending upon the scope of the project.
  4.

  A detailed annotated bibliography and resource list to build our library
  and information archives.
  5..

  A commitment to peer review, public outreach and engagement with the CIS
  networks defined in consultation with the researchers.

*What is the nature of financial support that the CIS-RAW programme offers?*

Currently, we do not have a specified budget for the CIS-RAW researches.
Depending upon the scope of the project and the skills of the researchers, a
budget is arrived at by mutual agreement. We follow precedent when costing
projects in different sectors but are sensitive to the varied needs of
different projects and the research costs involved.

*Does the CIS-RAW programme have a fixed time-line?*

We see the CIS-RAW projects as spanning 6-9 months, leading to the producing
of quantifiable research outputs. However, we also look upon the CIS-RAW
projects as works in progress. Moreover, there are no fixed beginning and
termination time-lines for the CIS-RAW programme itself. New ideas and
innovative approaches to the field of Internet and Society are always
welcome to come and find us and we can initiate the project based on further
conversations.

*Do I get to work in your office if I am a CIS-RAW researcher?*

The Centre for Internet and Society has its offices, currently, in
Bangalore. If you are based out of Bangalore or outside of Bangalore (or
relocating to Bangalore for the scope of the project), we would be more than
happy to offer you office space and research infrastructure that might be
required for your research, including research equipment and your own space
in the office.

*I have an idea but it is more about an activity rather than research…*

We, at the Centre for Internet and Society, believe that research happens in
many forms – through theoretical apparatus, through philosophical debates,
through proactive interventions and through dialogue and exchange of ideas
and information. We like to think of Research as a broad umbrella term to
encompass many different activities.

However, we also believe that any project deserves (and indeed, needs) a
contextualisation and historicisation document which helps more clarity
about the aim, the scope and the relevance of the project. We offer the
CIS-RAW programme as a space to think of these various histories and
contexts and thus offer resources and infrastructure for projects which
might eventually take a life of their own beyond the CIS-RAW programme.

If you have an idea of a new field of inquiry, or a more active intervention
oriented project, and if it fits within the scope of our interests and
measures against our vision statement, we would be happy to collaborate with
you over the idea in its initial state and hopefully help with more
resources and administration. You might also be interested in looking at our
Advocacy Programmes <http://cis-india.org/advocacy> for more information.

  *I have a research idea which does not fit your theme. Would you still be
interested?*

All of us at CIS are always excited about new research questions and ideas.
Even if you have something in mind that doesn't fit anything that we might
have documented on this website, please feel free to approach us with the
idea. As a young and growing centre, we see ourselves as much in the
learning mode as we imagine ourselves as in the enabling mode. To learn,
through dialogues and exchange, is our motto and we have the fortunate
flexibility of resource allocation to engage in projects which might have
been outside of our earlier visions or imaginations.

In other words, if you have an idea, please buzz us or walk in to our
offices. We promise really good coffee and hopefully interesting
conversations.



*Are there any other forms of research outside the CIS-RAW programme?*

The CIS engages in many different kinds of research programmes that cover a
wide spectrum of areas and a huge galaxy of modalities. For more information
you might want to look at the other programmes available under the
Research<http://cis-india.org/research/>and
Advocacy <http://cis-india.org/advocacy> Portfolios.



*I don't have research experience but I am interested in the CIS-RAW
programme…*

The CIS-RAW, as a programme, is focussed specifically on individuals or
organisations which have already been in the field of Internet and Society
or related areas. It is designed to document the existing knowledges with
new perspectives and frameworks, which are not available as a useful
resource right now due to lack of such an initiative.

However, we are also committed to looking at younger researchers in the
field and have many interesting ways of collaborating – through teaching,
workshops, projects, internships, etc. We also have interest in creating
inclusive pedagogic practices and would love the opportunity to exchange
thoughts and ideas with you. Just write to us or walk into our office and we
can take things from there.

If you are looking at involving yourself with CIS, you might want to have a
look at our Advocacy Portfolio <http://cis-india.org/advocacy> which is
always looking for motivated volunteers who are ready to learn, intervene
and make a contribution in the fields that we are concerned with.

You can also look at the other programmes in the Research
Portfolio<http://cis-india.org/research/>to see if we might have
something that caters to you.



*Are you looking at more international research involving comparative
studies across countries?*

The Centre for Internet and Society considers itself an international
research centre based in India, with a particular interest in South-South
exchange and dialogue. We are certainly interested in opportunities of
collaboration, exchange and engagement with researchers from other contexts
or researchers in India who have larger cross-boundary projects in mind.

However, for the CIS-RAW programme, we are focusing largely on India and its
contexts. If you have a much larger project in mind, you might be interested
in our Project Inception
Grants<http://cis-india.org/research/projects-inception-grant>Programme.
*For more information on the specific theme of the Histories of the
internets in India, please read here:*
http://cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories-of-the-internet

We welcome all ideas, conversations or programmes that the people on this
mailing list might be interested in. Please contact us either on phone or
via email (If you have specific queries about collaboration, please email us
in person so that we can spare the list some traffic), or if you are going
to be in Bangalore, just drop in to our office.

Warmly
Nishant

P.S. Posting it on several lists, apologies if you get it several times!
-- 
Nishant Shah
Doctoral Candidate, CSCS, Bangalore.
Director (Research), Centre for Internet and Society,( www.cis-india.org )
Asia Awards Fellow, 2008-09
# 0-9740074884


------------------------------

Message: 4
Date: Sun, 5 Oct 2008 15:14:56 +0600
From: "Naeem Mohaiemen" <naeem.mohaiemen at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Rescue the Rescue by Friedman
To: reader-list at sarai.net
Message-ID:
    <e9cfea7c0810050214k142dc59ao834b9bfa736b25b at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"

HI Tara
Just finished reading your text. It's quite eerie how both both James
McDonald and Matt Taibbi have zeroed in on Friedman's "Cinnabon" as a
target for irritation.

Friedman has a thing for fast food and theory.

He famously said two countries that both had McDonalds would never go
to war with each other.

Guess again...

http://www.siberianlight.net/2008/09/16/russia-georgia-mcdonalds-theory-of-war/

> From: "TaraPrakash" <taraprakash at gmail.com>
> Hi all and Naeem.
> Thanks for this wonderful post responding to Friedman's false claim that the
> world has become flat. Someone on a blog entry said that the world is flat
> as Friedman's head is flat.
> I wrote a detailed critique of the book in the backdrop of the name change
> farce from Bangalor to Bangaluru. Both always existed, Friedman could see
> the former; Bangluru, the native Kanadigas  are feeling left out in the
> "flattened world" is ready to assert.
> Let me see if I can fish the entire paper out for the list. Till then, here
> is an excerpt
>
>
> The Bangalore he describes in his book has nothing intrinsically Bangalorish
> about it. In his narrative, he plays at the golf courses, attends meetings
> in five-star hotels and western-looking multi-storey office complexes.
> Friedman's Bangalore is a debangalorized, deterritorialized, delocalized
> Bangalore, which can be found in any city of America. About this Bangalore,
> Friedman says in The World is Flat, "No, this definitely wasn't Kansas. It
> didn't even seem like India." He further asks, "Was this the New World, the
> Old World, or the Next World?" (Friedman 13) The answer perhaps should be
> the third one. Whereas "the old world", for Friedman, represents India, not
> developed and, due to poor infrastructure, not easily accessible to all,
> "the new world" represents very well developed American cities with very
> restricted access to outsiders. "The next world" perhaps can be said to
> exist anywhere, anytime. It is not constrained by any place or time, and
> Friedman thinks, is open to all. As self-styled discoverer of this new
> world, Friedman has absolute right to compare himself with Columbus, and he
> makes full use of the opportunity by doing so at the very outset of his
> scripture.
>
> An avid student of history, even though one does not have to be so to know
> this, surely knows that explorers like Columbus, in order to motivate
> royalty and aristocrats to support their further voyages, did inflate their
> successes by means of concocting fabulous and misleading yarns about the
> discovered places, with one fundamental moral: the place promises
> prosperity, you must invest in it. Columbus did sell to some European
> aristocrats the idea of concentrating on the new world he discovered, for
> economic prosperity; Friedman seems to be doing the same in a different
> context. His motive is to give a favorable publicity to Bangalore, so that
> people from out of Bangalore do not mind shifting to this new world.
>
> After reading his book (which in addition to other epithets, calls
> Bangalore, "the Silicon Valley of India",), if one, ignorant about the real
> Silicon Valley, decides to move to Friedman's Bangalore, as Indians from
> various parts of the country are doing for employment, one will find a very
> squalid picture of the real Silicon Valley. The Silicon Valley, for him,
> will have dirty, narrow, polluted roads with lots of potholes, with traffic
> hardly moving on them. On the other hand if a resident of America visits the
> real Silicon Valley to have a feel of Bangalore, he will find Bangalore a
> sophisticated city with very well developed infrastructure. He won't mind
> relocating to the city his boss wants him to, to manage the back office of
> his firm. Firms in the U.S. increasingly want their employees to relocate to
> Bangalore so that the management of those firms remains in "trained,
> trustworthy" hands. This trend is likely to intensify with the time. Such a
> "feel good factor" offered by Friedman helps to convince a reluctant
> American employee to move to Bangalore. Friedman is really so much like
> Columbus, when it comes to exaggeration about the newly discovered
> territory.
>
> However, there is one fundamental difference between Columbus and Friedman
> as explorers. Whereas Columbus's faulty calculations about the earth led him
> to a new scientific discovery that the earth is round, Friedman's incorrect
> calculations about the new world led him to an incorrect economic discovery
> that the world is flat. This discovery is based more on faith than reason,
> therefore, requires a religious zeal to be believed.
>
> But then there are heretics who challenge Friedman's sermons on
> Globalization. Friedman, evidently, has not been successful in selling his
> theory of "the world is flat" to many nonbelievers. He has been criticized
> by various globalist writers. But more interestingly, he has earned a
> significant amount of bad publicity even in the blog literature. It is
> notable to read the following poem "On first looking into Friedman's
> Flathead" by James D. Macdonald
>
> Criticizing Friedman's romantic ideas about Globalization, composed in the
> fashion of one of the romantic poets, John Keats. The reference, in the
> context of Friedman, to Don Juan and Jose Canseco, perhaps symbolizing
> villainy, mendacity and dishonesty undermining the flat, level playing
> field, are very remarkable. Here, interestingly, the poet is using for his
> heresy, the same medium, communication technology, which, in the first
> place, made the religion of Globalization possible, and the same as the
> auspex used for disseminating his prophesy of Globalization to the world.
>
> Much have I travell'd in a chartered jet
> And munched betimes upon a Cinnabon;
> Upon my iPod listened to Don Juan
> Which I downloaded from the wireless 'Net'.
> I did not understand the 'Nineties lore
> Of Windows systems and of Pizza Hut,
> How one was opened and the other shut,
> Till I heard Friedman speak in metaphor.
> Then felt I like a steroid in a vein:
> Jose Canseco on a level field,
> Whose random thoughts of glory and of pain
> Were like an ice-cream sundae all congealed.
> The moral is, when put by words in train,
> That which does not exist can't be revealed.


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