India: Economic Growth & Development

Saturday, December 30, 2006

Jealous of Arundhati Roy? anyone?

In her recent opinion piece in Outlook, SABA NAQVI BHAUMIK, grandly proposes to examine why India allegedly loves to hate Ms Roy. While this appears to be an urgent life and death issue to Ms Bhaumik, I'm more interested in why she thinks this is a topic worth examing. Perhaps a bit inadvertently, she does reveal a bit of this by conceding that a "foreign journalist recently asked me how Roy is perceived by Indians". Point to be noted your honour that instead of turning around and querying the foreign journalist, on behalf of all Indians
Why do you care how Roy is perceived by Indians?
..... Ms. Bhaumik is satisfied with "how high?" Indians are left wondering about the motives of the foreign journalist. Is it (1) concern about the dwindling relevance of Roy despite all those expensive foreign awards & column inches in the foreign press? (2) is it perhaps the case that as India shines brighter, the light is revealing more and more of Roy to the masses?


There are increasingly rational and cogent arguments deconstructing Roy's public utterances against which she seems both helpless & defenceless. Here is one compelling case where Sankrant Sanu, a successful I.T professional based in the U.S. systematically & thoroughly
decomposes Roy's comments at the WSF. Something to which Roy has never been able to respond.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

India Has Fewer HIV Infections Than UN (Over) estimates

In a front page story on April 6 2006, the Washington Post finally acknowledged that HIV/AIDS cases in Africa have been grossly exaggerated. The numbers were exaggerated in order to generate more money for the U.N., in a modern form of cruelty, despicable exploitation of sick, suffering and dying people.

Exaggerated claims & doomsday predictions being made for India were thoroughly debunked by Ashutosh Seshablaya in this article. Seshabalaya showed that, even if one accepted the grossly inflated U.N. numbers, HIV prevalance per capita in India is far lower than in South Africa and not significantly different from the USA, UK etc. Now, a
recent study strongly suggests that the number of people afflicted with HIV/AIDS in India could be far lower than current U.N. estimates.