ALL-THAT-MATTERS Page in The Sunday Times of India
Dated 08-June-2008
Bachi Karkaria in her column Erratica talks of Garry Kasparov's widely attended press conference at Goteborg. Kasparov said in the conference: “We are not fighting to win an election, but to have an election.” Kasparov deprecated the recent elections in Russia as an 'appointment' and far from an exercise in democratic franchise. Sharply criticizing Putin's description of Russia as a managed democracy, Kasparov maintains that any democracy with an adjective stops being one. Kasparov has transitioned well from being a world chess champion to a politician leading Drugaya Rossiya, a motley band of liberals and neo-Bolsheviks who dislike Putin and his policies.
The other lady columnist, Shobha De, talks about Hillary Clinton's defeat at Democrat nomination as something that will be mourned by womenfolk at large. It was a tug-of-war between the two genders as also between two races. With Hillary out of the fray, the presidential election will be contested by two mere males from different races and different age groups. De exhorts Hillary to get in touch with the woman in her for the next elections, and promises that womenfolk will not give up as long as Hillary doesn't.
IPL (Indian Premier League) cricket matches have drawn the attention of two star columnists, Jug Suraiya and Shashi Tharoor. Shashi has words of praise for IPL which has brought an end to chauvinism as Indians cheer and laud good performance by a Pakistani fast bowler as he demolishes great Indian batsmen. Also he doesn't consider Twenty20 a threat to real cricket. On the contrary he feels that it will invigorate test matches and ODIs by infusing the players with more assertive batsmanship, athletic fielding, and speedier running. Shashi finds cheerleaders fun as they keep the excitement up. Cricket that was described as an Indian game accidentally invented by the British, has been turned by IPL and cheerleaders into an essentially American game deliberately reinvented by Indians. What has left him a little puzzled is the monarchical names assumed by the teams – names that would be out-of-place even in a mediaeval kingdom.
Jug takes a dim view of IPL as yet another distraction that puts paid to the habit of reading (books.) He meanders to the current tribal ritual of book launch. He finds these launches more of a page 3 activity than an academic one. Here the author runs the risk of being mistaken as a waiter as attendees disrupt academic reading session and panel discussion in their quest to breach the bar and the buffet, and ensure their presence in the media coverage.
Swaminomics examines the ongoing debate on subsidizing fuel prices. While one school maintains that it protects the poor, the other school asserts that benefits to the poor are insignificant compared to the gains by the rich who are major consumers of fuel. Swaminathan adds that the real beneficiaries of such subsidy are not the local rich so much as oil exporting countries. It is so because subsidies keep the demand artificially high and when several countries do so the high demand naturally leads to high prices worldwide and profits for the producers. The rich countries have learnt their lessons and are passing the complete burden to the consumer thereby lowering the demand. However developing economies are yet to learn the lesson.
Chidananda Rajghatta writes about a recent power outage in Washington DC that lasted 26 hours and had some members of the Indian community there cribbing about US turning into another India. The more resilient ones displayed typical derring-do in overcoming the problems and getting chores done that do not need power. He feels that though Indians may be spoilt by our unsurpassed B&B (Bai & Bahadur) and M&A (Maid & Ayah) services, they do learn early to cope with power cuts, traffic snarls, and every day glitches and thereby get prepared for the worst. There are pluses in both places, India and the developed world.
(This summary is published by the author (anil.upadhyaya@gmail.com) every week on Shvoong.)
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