Fight or Flight

SWAMINATHAN S ANKLESARIA AIYAR As the world sinks into the worst recession since the 1930s, leaders of the top 20 countries are meeting in Britain to discuss major reforms of the world economic system. There is a consensus that the existing system has failed massively, especially in the US. The five biggest investment banks in the world (Lehman Brothers et al) have vanished in the financial carnage. The two biggest mortgage companies in the world, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, are under government overlordship. The biggest insurance company in the world, AIG, is on government life support. The biggest bank in the world, Citibank, has survived only with massive government help. General Motors, the biggest auto company in the world, is also on life support. The greatest icons of US capitalism are on crutches. But hold the dirges. The most vocal critics of US capitalism are sinking too. Look at Latin American socialist regimes (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador), Russia and Iran. For all ...

This rant was written for the Wharton Undergraduate Journal This is a tribute to the nice guys. The nice guys that finish last, that never become more than friends, that endure hours of whining and bitching about what assholes guys are, while disproving the very point. This is dedicated to those guys who always provide a shoulder to lean on but restrain themselves to tentative hugs, those guys who hold open doors and give reassuring pats on the back and sit patiently outside the changing room at department stores. This is in honor of the guys that obligingly reiterate how cute/beautiful/smart/funny/sexy their female friends are at the appropriate moment, because they know most girls need that litany of support. This is in honor of the guys with open minds, with laid-back attitudes, with honest concern. This is in honor of the guys who respect a girl’s every facet, from her privacy to her theology to her clothing style. This is for the guys who escort their drunk, bewildered female frie...

Gratitude and apology are emotional yardsticks of human character. We must not strip them of sincerity, says Harsh Kabra Thank you and sorry are perhaps the first words we learn. And they stay with us right through our lives as yardsticks of our civility. But when was the last time we said “thank you” or “sorry” without meaning to simply offload our burden of obligation or guilt? Indeed, these words no longer express what they are supposed to. Instead, they are used flippantly, thrown around without care, often reduced to an easy way of getting off the hook and evading meaningful action. They may well be the most used words in times of political correctness. But they are clearly the most abused as well. The emotions of gratitude and apology are vital to the chain of human reciprocity. But in stripping them of sincerity, we also seem to be closing the doors on their benefits for us. In almost all religious traditions, gratitude is a manifestation of virtuous character. “Gratitud...

Companies ride on market perception and cooking the books can burnish that perception to breathtaking highs. Until someone cries foul. Enron was once billed America’s most innovative company. Then a massive accounting fraud, exposed in 2001, blew up on the US energy giant. In 2009, the script has been revisited in India. Boasting Fortune 500 firms among its clients, Satyam Computers won a top award for corporate governance in 2002 and 2008. Its fall began with chairman B Ramalinga Raju’s aborted buyout of two Maytas firms founded by his sons. Angry shareholders swiftly punished this brazen display of nepotism in India’s fourth largest IT firm. The sequel to Maytas is more sordid. Confessing to a Rs 7,136 crore fraud, Raju said Satyam’s books had been cooked for years to inflate profit and revenue figures. In September 2008, they showed a non-existent cash and bank balance of Rs 5,040 crore and hundreds of crores of fictitious accrued interest and debtors’ position. Liabilities worth Rs...

Year 2008 was rough. It was a year where past excesses and lack of foresight led to perhaps the greatest recession in history; a year of reorganisation of world powers; and a year that ended in terrorist attacks on India that called into question the effectiveness and adequacy of our government, media, police and intelligence forces. The question stands--did we do anything right? A fiscal cushion The lack of foresight across the board--among economics experts down to the common man—is perhaps one of the most startling aspects of the global financial crisis. But taking a closer look at the Indian economy and the fiscal policies of the past year, it seems not everything was done in error or without prescience. Ajit Ranade, Chief Economist with the Aditya Birla group, says the expansionary budget unveiled by then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram in February was a measure that helped stave off some of the crisis. When Chidambaram announced the budget, it was called ‘populist’ and the BJP sa...

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks on Mumbai, many citizens are feeling the need for community, and to do something. The December 3 rally at the Gateway was rife with slogans against politicians and calls for India to attack its enemies. “Do we really believe that terrorist attacks can be prevented by citizens’ actions?’’ asks Shailesh Gandhi, who went from being a Mumbaibased RTI (right to information) activist to Central Information Commissioner in Delhi. Gandhi is convinced there’s no quick solution and that a citizen’s role is to improve the quality of governance. He says, “Every citizen has a stake in society. Normally we don’t recognise it, except for immediate concerns at maybe neighbourhood level, if that. We don’t bother whom the nation belongs to, except when there’s a cricket match.’’ Most Indians identify with a community in ethnic or religious terms, which is passive membership. Communities of choice, drawn together by a shared cause, are less common in ur...

TARUN J TEJPAL ROHINTON MALOO was shot doing two things he enjoyed immensely. Eating good food and tossing new ideas. He was among the 13 diners at the Kandahar, Trident-Oberoi, who were marched out onto the service staircase, ostensibly as hostages. But the killers had nothing to bargain for. The answers to the big questions — Babri Masjid, Gujarat, Muslim persecution — were beyond the power of anyone to deliver neatly to the hotel lobby. The small ones — of money and materialism — their crazed indoctrination had already taken them well beyond. With the final banality of all fanaticism, flaunting the paradox of modern technology and medieval fervour — AK-47 in one hand; mobile phone in the other — the killers asked their minders, “Udan dein?” The minder, probably a maintainer of cold statistics, said, “Uda do.” Rohinton caught seven bullets, and by the time his body was recovered, it could only be identified by the ring on his finger. Rohinton was just 48, with two teenage children, a...