Category: Politics

Happy Birthday, India

Everybody forgets about India.  We all know it’s there, looking like Asia’s sticking its tongue into the Indian Ocean, but generally, the world is so firmly focussed in on China that India gets a miss.

india

So why do people forget about India?

Perception.  When most Westerners think of India, they think of yoga, curry and Mohandas Gandhi.  They think of bearded mystics, bony cattle and television train journeys on the Beeb or PBS.  They think of tigers and tea, spices and flowers, and probably that chirpy voice at the other end of the tech support telephone.  While all of these things are true, none of them are 21st century India.  And boring old facts might not be as sexy as jeweled elephants and maharajahs, but they tell a better story about what’s going on in contemporary India.

It’s generally accepted that by 2025, India will surpass China and become the most populous nation in the world.  However, many experts believe that the Chinese have been fudging the numbers for years and India already has more people than the Middle Kingdom.  That’s one helluva work force!

More importantly, 50% of India’s population is under 25; 65% is under 35 and the average age on the subcontinent is somewhere around 29.  In comparison, the average age in all of China, the European Union and the USA is approximately 37.  (Japan’s is a whopping 48.)  Do the math!  While the developed world is getting older and closer to retirement, India is getting younger.

India has the largest middle-class in the world — over 250 million people — and it’s growing.  Economists say that it will double in the next ten years.  So, even though, in 2017, its economic, cultural and political power is nowhere near that of China, the European Union or the USA, with numbers this large, it soon will be.  That’s a lot of rupees, folks!

Oddly enough, even though India is not a member of the G8, it has the 7th largest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the world — with an average annual growth rate of 6.6%.  What does that mean?  India’s economy is actually growing as fast as China’s and more than twice as fast as the USA’s.

In all the traditional industries like metals, mining, agriculture and manufacturing, India’s production generally ranks in the top ten globally.  But, more importantly for the future, India has the second largest cultural industry in the world.  Nobody packs a bigger cultural punch that the Anglo-Americans do — but India is getting close.  Everybody knows that Bollywood has more studios, makes more movies and puts more bums in seats than Hollywood does.  However, India also ranks 2nd (behind China) in Internet use, 4th in YouTube accounts, 6th in online news views and last year (2016) passed the USA in Facebook profiles.  And the list goes on.  There are also over one billion mobile phones in India, and last year (2016) Google Play alone recorded 6.2 billion App downloads.  This is the Digital Age; information is power.

Unfortunately, despite its economic prowess, India still has some problems.

The fact is India is not a homogenous monolith.  It is the sum of some very different parts, and it’s strange to consider, but one of India’s greatest strengths is also one of its biggest problems — diversity.  It’s very difficult to get the entire subcontinent moving in the same direction at the same time — for several reasons.

There are over two thousand self-identified ethnic groups in India, and — although it’s officially frowned upon — a well-defined and seriously observed Caste system.  This makes social interaction and mobility difficult at best and, in some rural areas, practically impossible.  India is the world largest democracy, but it’s not a very dynamic one.

There might be only two official languages, Hindi and English, but (depending on who you talk to) there are at least 20 other semi-official ones.  Just to put things into perspective, there are more Bengali speakers in India than German speakers in Germany; more Telugu speakers than French speakers in France; and more Urdu speakers than Polish speakers worldwide.  Plus there are thousands of different dialects, so that, in some cases, villages 30 kilometres apart can’t understand each other.  Ideas don’t flow very freely when millions of people don’t know what millions of other people are talking about!

Furthermore, even though, India is mainly Hindu, the country has huge numbers of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and every other religion on the planet — including Jews, Baha’is and Zoroastrians.  Plus there are so many religious sects, cults and factions that experts have never even been able to agree on how many gods there are in India.  Some say (preposterous as it sounds) they could number in the hundreds of thousands.  It’s very hard for a central government to effect social change with that many deities looking over your shoulder.  Chances are good any law you want to enact is going to piss somebody off!

And all this contributes to India’s most serious problem — grinding poverty.  The average income in India is still only $1,570.00 US, and nearly 200 million people are living on less than $4.00 US a day.  And although this is changing, it’s a very slow process.

Today, is modern India’s Independence Day.  Seventy years ago, the Raj ended when Great Britain hauled down the Union Jack and went home.  In three generations, India has gone from a colony, to a developing nation, to a country on the verge of becoming a great economic power.  Not bad!

And trust me, in ten years, nobody is going to forget about India!

Winnie The Pooh And Bieber, Too

pooh

I’ve seen some hardcore people in my time, but for the record, Justin Bieber isn’t one of them.  Except — oops! — apparently, he is.  Last week, the powers-that-be in the People’s Republic of China banned Bieber for — uh — “bad behaviour.”  (So, play nice, children — or China spank.)  Actually, with lyrics like “Baby, baby, baby, baby, baby” I can see China’s point, but just how subversive can a punk kid from Canada be?  Canada is, after all, the Land of the Bland.  We say “Sorry” as a greeting.  Of course, this comes hard on the heels of China’s banning that other badass, Winnie the Pooh*.  I’m still laughin’ about that one.  Bieber now joins a pretty select group of notorious troublemakers.  They include Harrison Ford (who, as Han Solo, was indeed, a member of the Rebel Alliance) Brad Pitt (who once made a movie called Seven Years in Tibet, a place China says doesn’t exist) and Richard Gere because — well — Richard Gere.  They’ve also banned Sharon Stone, but it’s just her movies that are unwelcome in the Middle kingdom. She can show up anytime (assuming she keeps her legs crossed.)

Over the years, along with Iran and North Korea, China has been in the forefront of state-sponsored censorship.  They’ve banned — or thrown in prison — all the usual suspects: poets, painters, writers, Nobel Prize winners, and generally anybody with an opinion who doesn’t keep their head down.  They’ve also banned Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all the other stalwarts of Western social media — plus a myriad of Western movies and television programs — including, oddly enough, The Big Bang Theory. (I guess Sheldon is a jackass in any language.)  Of course, like all dictatorships, China has also bans books — thousands and thousands of books — and I suppose this is where things get serious.  However, I have a lot of trouble not laughing at a regime that feels the need to ban Alice in Wonderland and Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs and Ham.  I can just hear the proclamation:
Will you ban Green Eggs and Ham?
Yes, I’ll ban it, if I can
I will ban it in Beijing
I will ban it in Nanjing
I will ban it here and there
I will ban it everywhere
Yes, I’ll ban Green Eggs and Ham
In Hong Kong, Szechuan and Hunan

*BTW, Winnie the Pooh’s offence was that people were using him as a caricature of President Xi Jinping, the guy who’s currently sitting on the Dragon Throne and running the show on the Yangtze.  Clearly, dictators don’t like people laughing at them.

There Is News Beyond Tr**p

In the big wide world of ours, there are tons of things going on that don’t include President What’s-His-Name.  In the great mediagasm journalists are having with the guy, here are a few things you might have missed.

news-world

In Mexico, the American DEA found a catapult that drug dealers were using to fling narcotics across the border — I assume marijuana.  And this wasn’t just your average medieval rock-tosser, either — the thing was huge.  There’s an “A” for ingenuity in there somewhere, but honestly, why didn’t anybody notice?  I can pick out where my car is parked with Google Earth, and one would think government satellite surveillance was a little bit more sophisticated than that.  But I guess it’s the same old story: when you don’t need a catapult, they seem to be everywhere, but the day you’re looking for one, they’re nowhere to be found.

Apparently, China has discovered that they have a gigantic gender imbalance.  They estimate that, by the end of the decade, there will be 30 million more men in China than women.  To put things into perspective, that’s more single men than the entire population of Austria, Switzerland and Sweden — combined.  The Chinese call them “leftovers,” and there are a number of academic studies trying to figure out how and why this happened.  But honestly, does it matter?  (Toothpaste out of the tube, etc. etc.)  Unfortunately, nobody is addressing the elephant in the room– which is what do you do with 30 million horny men, bubbling over with enough testosterone to melt the polar ice caps?  After all, baseball and cold showers can only do so much!

Oddly enough, the same day China admitted their gender situation, Playboy decided to bring boobs back to its pages.  Coincidence? Yeah, probably!  Pen and paper magazines continue their trudge to the grave, and a little nudity isn’t going to stop that for a nanosecond.  But there’s no law against full frontal irrelevance, I guess.

And finally, my favourite:

Grace Mugabe, wife of 92 year old President Robert Mugabe, who’s been running and ruining the beautiful country of Zimbabwe since 1980, was in the news.  (Honestly, I didn’t know he was married to anything but evil.)  Anyway, she maintains that her husband is so popular in Zimbabwe that, if he died, he could run for president as a corpse and still win the election.  Strange as this sounds, it actually happened — in Missouri, in 2000.  Incumbent Republican Senator John Ashcroft was beaten by Democrat Mel Carnahan who died in a plane crash two weeks before the election.  What a major kick in the self esteem!  When your opponent is dead, and he’s the one who gets elected — well — that pretty much seals the deal that the people of Missouri don’t want you around, John.  All’s well that ends well, though, because in 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Ashcroft Attorney General.  And we all lived happily ever after.