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You may call India "the world's largest democracy" - but I call it the world's largest hypocrisy, the world's largest kleptocracy.

Elections in India have been reduced to a farce - but that doesn't seem to bother you, as long as you can make a technical claim that there are elections.

Now, now. Don't be a troll. The same thing can be said of any country in the world. Just because political parties swoop real low to influence your vote, it doesn't mean the voting system itself is broken and unfair. That said there are severe consequences when such laws are broken. The Election Commission of India by all means is a strong and independent body.

Take a look at the latest electoral antics from the ruling Congress Party:

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/guj-polls-cong-meticulously-plotting-to-dethrone-modi/183402/on

http://news.outlookindia.com/items.aspx?artid=772594

Now they're promising free homes to people who'll vote against the opposition party. They're handing out "registration forms" which carry no legal weight whatsoever, in an attempt to target the most vulnerable and gullible sections of society.

The ruling party at the Centre has committed itself to using any means, by hook or by crook, no matter how foul, to defeat political opponents. The day isn't far off when they'll be kidnapping opponents and physically eliminating them.

Did you even read the links you posted? Congress is the opposition party. Ruling party happens to be the BJP in Gujrat. There is no mention of "registration forms" or free housing within those links.

India is no longer a democracy - it's now just a dictatorship punctuated by elections.

Sure, a dictatorship who's term ends every 5 years. 1.2~ billion people and this is the way a country is run when everyone's voice is heard. That is called democracy. If you are unhappy, move to China and complain there.

You may call India "the world's largest democracy" - but I call it the world's largest hypocrisy, the world's largest kleptocracy.

Elections in India have been reduced to a farce - but that doesn't seem to bother you, as long as you can make a technical claim that there are elections.
Take a look at the latest electoral antics from the ruling Congress Party:

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/guj-polls-cong-meticulously-plotting-to-dethrone-modi/183402/on

http://news.outlookindia.com/items.aspx?artid=772594

Now they're promising free homes to people who'll vote against the opposition party. They're handing out "registration forms" which carry no legal weight whatsoever, in an attempt to target the most vulnerable and gullible sections of society.

The ruling party at the Centre has committed itself to using any means, by hook or by crook, no matter how foul, to defeat political opponents. The day isn't far off when they'll be kidnapping opponents and physically eliminating them.

India is no longer a democracy - it's now just a dictatorship punctuated by elections.

Funny, I couldn't remember the source of my 1/3 loss, so I threw a few words at google, and found the same reference that you did - 7.2%.

But the funny part is that THAT citation isn't exactly authoritative, either. Further searching found that in India, the rate is as low as 70% while the state of Deleware declares that "70 percent of the energy in the fuels used to generate electricity is lost" and in the UK it's supposedly about 2% lost in transmission.

Wikipedia isn't the definitive answer, folks, even if it is a good starting point!

How are you measuring the number of banks? I don't have numbers on the number of bankers (though I suspect that automation has cut down the banker/population ratio significantly), but according to two sources found easily via Google, there were 31,000 banks in the US 1921 and only about 7,200 now. http://bss.sfsu.edu/tygiel/hist427/texts/1920seconomy.htm and http://www.outlookindia.com/pti_news.asp?id=636977

http://outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodname=20060720& fname=blogs&sid=1

the satellite dint just explode but was made to explode when its path deviate from the intended one... thats a big difference.. http://www.outlookindia.com/pti_news.asp?id=398107 "Following this, the vehicle deviated to about 10 degrees, leading to the mission control giving the 'destruct command'."

I just wanted to emphasize the tourists part with a few Golgafrinchan comments about how us humans came to this planet ... But I don't carry my HHG2G bible (in an Orange cover to boot) around.

Now since the God is in the White House , anything that challenges Biblical Creationism might get the short stick ?. Sadly even education seems to teaching creationism rather than darwinism. I hate how these people try to explain dinosaur fossils with the great flood.

It really sucks when religion clouds Science !!. Even the hard-core Hindutva does not enforce creationism as the entire tantric cycle is based on evolution of a single unit mind into a human yogi. Even Einstein allowed it and said "God does not play dice with the universe" . Stephen Hawking takes the high road by "God did have a choice in the initial state of the universe" (and he set rules too, so science IS GOD).

"Damn American tourists" ... (repeat in whatever native language for maximum effect)

A recent Cover Story in Indian weekly.

I said nothing about Moore and there was nothing in his movie that was new to people who get their news from sources other than Fox News. I'm always puzzled that people are learning all this stuff for the first time from Moore's movie. The international media have been covering it for ages.

Obviously you have absolutely no idea what you are talikng about. To quote from an article by Arundhati Roy:

Meanwhile, economists cheering from the pages of corporate newspapers inform us that the GDP growth rate is phenomenal, unprecedented. Shops are overflowing with consumer goods. Government storehouses are overflowing with grain. Outside this circle of light, the past five years have seen the most violent increase in rural-urban income inequalities since independence. Farmers steeped in debt are committing suicide in hundreds; 40% of the rural population in India has the same foodgrain absorption level as sub-Saharan Africa, and 47% of Indian children under three suffer from malnutrition.

A lot of people have followed George Soros on his very vocal position against outsourcing. He's the funder behind moveon.org and has claimed he'd be willing to part with his billions of dollars of wealth in order to get rid of Bush, the "outsourcing nightmare president." (Soros has launched a new ad campaign through MoveOn.org that specifically blames Bush for outsourcing job loss and lack of overtime pay which unfortunately ignores the same campaign finance reform laws. Just like Martha Stewart, Soros apparently feels that laws are for little folk, not rich folk like him).

Interestingly, if one looks at the companies Soros's investment company, Soros Fund Management, holds, (specifically check the Form 13F-HR), you'll discover outsourcing company after another. I spent an hour looking at just the companies starting with "A" and "B" and found over 90% were aggressively outsourcing. Several had financial reports literally bragging about how they've saved investors money through this process.

I had wondered where Soros was at. A few years ago, a Soros disciple approached a company I worked for and strongly recommended the company dispose of its information technology and call center operations to India as a precondition of the fund looking at the company. The disciple insisted outsourcing had worked well and Mr. Soros used it as part of his investing strategy to differentiate investments.

Imagine my surprise when I've heard Soros himself (as well as his moveon.org group) blaming the current president for the flight of jobs. How is Bush supposed to stop Soros from demanding his holdings "optimize"? Is it Bush's fault that he hasn't stopped Soros before he moves-jobs-on to India again? For those of you who've fallen sucker to the moveon.org ploy, do your own research and you'll confirm what a few of us who have crossed Soros's path have learned first hand. You're unfortunately playing in the guilt trip of a very rich man who must not like how he makes his money. For anyone in IT supporting moveon.org, it'd be like a Linux advocate joining a SCO fan club.

Take a look at the list. Search google for the company name. It's shocking. My only theory is that Soros has the typical upper class guilt trip going where he wants to be thought of a better person than he is per his destruction of IT in the US.

For these Fortune 1000, it's not easy to tell Soros (who may be holding 5% or more of your company) to blow off and keep those jobs in the U.S.

In other news (which didn't make a dent in the U.S. press), Soros apparently has one-upped Martha Stewart. Just like Martha, he's liberal, a Bush hater, a rich fat cat, big business guy, believes he's immune to trading laws, and liberal. Warren Buffet, the U.S.'s second richest man, is also a big time Democrat and despises Bush. I think we can put away the myth that Republicans have a monopoly on "big business/special interest." Democrats seem to be leading the pack these days.

Does the economic boom of Bangalore have an influence on the average living standard of the typical citizen of Karnataka?

The most damning thing however, at least as far as I'm concerned, is that the fact that outsourcing per se has not been the shining star in whatever percentage growth we've had, either in GDP terms or in forex terms. Remittances by Indian workers internationally, and other star sectors, such as pharmaceuticals, agriculture, automobiles and telecom, are more to blame. Look up any article on the outsourcing 'boom'; all of them uniformly talk about what will happen in 2007.

Is the indian middle class a closed economic system or does a member of the indian middle class spend a large percentage of her money on stuff which is produced by the lower classes?

In a sense, I suppose you could argue that other sectors are also like that; for all its impressive record, the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, is mostly a motley group of itsy-bitsy factories spread all over the landscape. The same for the diary industry (which is another of those success stories), and as Roblimo will probably post on newsforge, it's also true for the outsourcing sector. (Trying to differentiate between 'outsourcing' and 'product'-based companies)

Things are, however, changing.

Is there a major difference between the communist and the noncommunist indian states in this respect?

[The irony of course is that gokulpod, despite being from Kerala, doesn't seem to know much about this.;-) ]

No longer do you need to transport 50 kg of film reels in canisters.Instead, the movie will be stored in a high-capacity disc drive about double the size of a cigarette pack which will be couriered to the hall where the film can be downloaded to the server. Also, it'll be a digitally encrypted signal with an access password. This, to keep the pirates at bay. While a conventional print costs Rs 60,000-80,000, digital images come at only about 10 per cent of the expense, at Rs 3,000-8,000 for a disc.

In any case, the YahooGroups incident, methinks, is actually shows that the situation isn't as dire as you might think; consider, for instance, the fact that CERT-India's discussion fora themselves were flooded with angry protests from Indians worldwide, as also the massive negative publicity for a government that wants to project the country as an IT "superpower" (and indeed, the ban, I'm told, has been quietly lifted anyway, although it perhaps can be commented on better by someone like you who is currently in India). This, I believe, is indicative of the very real restrictions that GoI has to face, if it does indeed try to do anything funny; it will be a very long time indeed before CERT-India ventures to ban any other website.

Incidentally, and I pointed this out in another web forum, it's interesting to note a delicious irony regarding American and Indian legal histories:- the First Amendment to the US Constitution gaurantees free speech, while the First Amendment to the Indian Constitution placed restrictions on speech that the original Constituent Assembly didn't call for. Food for thought.

Shipbreaking seems a bit tough.

How do you define an Indian "race"? Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Mongol, Negrito, African or tribal? What about Dr Verrier Elwin, independent India's foremost anthropologist? Ruskin Bond, a fine Indian English author? Michael Ferriera, India's snooker champion? Ronald Perceival, India's first Olympic medal winner? What about the 10,000 strong Chinese community in Calcutta? The Jewish community in Cochin? The Somali community in African Cavalry (AC) Guards enclave in Hyderabad? Did you know that 10% of the town of Pondicherry in south India is still French? Or that, many Indian universities see students from 28 different countries, including the US? Did you know that all state assemblies and the national Parliament reserve one seat for a Eurasian (ie, of European origin, but Indian nationality) member? Heck, what about these people? None of them are "brown" (if that's what you mean by this Indian "race" bullshit).

Like any other country, India has tolerance problems, some serious mainly because of ignorant nincompoops shouting their voices. But no, none of them are related to non-"brown" people coming over, thank you very much. Not yet, anyway.

Reliance is not India's first CDMA network. Others have already deployed networks that are showing signs of growth; in places like Chandigarh, for instance, the number of mobiles have outstripped the number of landlines for the first time in India. Reliance Infocomm's troubles are only partly because of regulatory concerns; the other more significant problem is that its distribution network for the phones is showing signs of failure.

Not that the telecom regulatory rules are okay, (here's a very interesting and candid interview with the telecom minister on the tussle and other aspects of reform), but let's not write off Reliance that easily. They are one of the largest Indian companies around and have succeeded even during the (socialist, insulatory) Licence Raj period in the petrochemicals industry, traditionally considered closed to private sector participation.

They've had some massive lobbying effort in Indian political circles; Roads and Buildings Dept employees often complain how they get calls from their political masters in the middle of the night because they threatened to go against Reliance Infocomm's country-wide road-digging and laying of optical fibre network (a process which, while admittedly professional and impressive, apparently bends a few rules here and there).

Let's face it:- these people are powerful enough to make rules for themselves. They won't give up so much investment without a fight.

Reliance is not India's first CDMA network. Others have already deployed networks that are showing signs of growth; in places like Chandigarh, for instance, the number of mobiles have outstripped the number of landlines for the first time in India. Reliance Infocomm's troubles are only partly because of regulatory concerns; the other more significant problem is that its distribution network for the phones is showing signs of failure.

Not that the telecom regulatory rules are okay, (here's a very interesting and candid interview with the telecom minister on the tussle and other aspects of reform), but let's not write off Reliance that easily. They are one of the largest Indian companies around and have succeeded even during the (socialist, insulatory) Licence Raj period in the petrochemicals industry, traditionally considered closed to private sector participation.

They've had some massive lobbying effort in Indian political circles; Roads and Buildings Dept employees often complain how they get calls from their political masters in the middle of the night because they threatened to go against Reliance Infocomm's country-wide road-digging and laying of optical fibre network (a process which, while admittedly professional and impressive, apparently bends a few rules here and there).

Let's face it:- these people are powerful enough to make rules for themselves. They won't give up so much investment without a fight.

Left-Of-Bush Brain Curry Man

Makes even Hemos' most astonishing efforts look lucid.

You miss the point. I regularly travel to India myself, among other internatioal destinations, so this is no *guesswork* of any sorts. The point is, as you yourself have so correctly said, the existence of an education infrastructure. Did you know that over 50% of students in Uttar Pradesh flunk their primary schools? And really, do you think this 9000 rupees thing will have *any* effect on classrooms in villages? If my experience is any indication, some bigshot somewhere up there will pocket the Simputer, claiming that it won't be useful for kids.

My take:- Great that someone (okay, someone from India for all those patriotic Indians out there :-D) developed a cost-effective PDA, but let's not start having wet dreams about it. It ain't gonna change anything drastically.

Don't take it personally, but I really don't think you should troll just because someone else doesn't sound Indian and has something negative to say. I know that there are a lot of anti-India trolls out here in /., but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't rub off someone else's point. For all you know, it could be valid.

Did you know that 50% of public school students in the state of Uttar Pradesh fail their exams, probably because they're taught in a language that is not their mother tongue?

I agree that English is by far becoming ubiquitous in India, but to say that they're more people who can't speak in English is a major denial of sorts.

It's even worse than saying that the United States and the United Kingdom speak only English, or that France speaks only French.

I speak five languages, three of them Indian (see my siggie for more information). I understand that people like me are quite common in India; "someone very low on India's social/ literary echelon" speaks more languages than I do.

Point #2: There was a story sometime back on /. on how illiterate slum kids figured computers for themselves. One interesting result in that exercise was that the slum kids created metaphors for themselves that didn't quite correspond to Microsoft-suggested ones. ("Arrow Pointer" versus "trishul" for instance). And here's something more damning:- after the experimenter changed the English interface to a Hindi one, they didn't know how to operate the computer! All their traditional metaphors were gone; indeed, any native Hindi speaker would laugh if you say "karyakram ko bhaago" instead of "run the program". It's just too silly, a bit like Coca Cola's alleged mishaps in translating its company name into Chinese.

Bottomline: The process of internationalization as you describe it is definitely not going to work in India. People there are waaay more multi-lingual than your traditional West European or East Asian.

I guess this will attract all India-bashing trolls out there, but electronic voting has been a common feature in the last few Indian (both federal and state) elections. (All elections in India are conducted through a disinterested regulatory body called the Election Commission of India). Most people widely welcome the use of Electronic Voting Machines; there have been lesser instances of rigging and booth-capturing after their deployment. Besides, there's been a cost-effectiveness as well; suddenly general elections have become cheaper.

Oh yes, EVM's are being used in the ongoing Kashmir elections as well; since the Kashmir issue is highly emotive (and consequently, irrevocably factionalised) for most people, I'll refrain from commenting on the EVMs' effectiveness there. But yes, the response in most other places in India has been positive.

The amount of oil we're talking about isn't worth a fraction of the cost of the bombs dropped

Don't be too sure about that. Quoting from this article (you wouldn't have seen it previously since it is published outside of the AOL/TW propaganda network):

(from page 6)
"Turkmenistan, which borders the northwest of Afghanistan, holds the world's third largest gas reserves and an estimated six billion barrels of oil reserves. Enough, experts say, to meet American energy needs for the next 30 years..."

Arundhati Roy covers that and some other disturbing connections in this article. Really interesting read.

In response to the parent post, I am an American and I consider myself to be as well or better informed about world events as most Europeans. However, I agree with you that this would not be the case if I swallowed all the crap that the major American news agencies try to spoon feed us. Most Americans do not expend the effort to find articles like the one I mentioned above.

For most Americans, the wtc tragedy will mean buying an american flag, and coming together with other Americans to support a war that, while diminishing the fear that we feel in the short term, will only engender hatred against America into a new generation of people around the world. I am only slightly worried about terrorism today. I am petrified about terrorism twenty years from now.

I find it shameful that the people running America do this. And by this, I don't just mean bombing a country that is barely out of the stone age back into it. I also mean using the fear and pain of its citizens as a means of obtaining further profits for American companies and even themselves (read the article above...it details how Bush himself will literally make *millions* off this war). This country founded on such lofty ideals which have so much potential. We just need to realize again that capitalism is a result of freedom, not vice versa.

Just wanted to get the links in better.
Digital Empowerment: Seeds Of E-Volution
Wired to the Future