Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas Haegin who wrote (1554)	1/26/1998 9:44:00 AM
From: Worswick	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 9980

I had promised you a little note on India. First, Thomas India has six hundred thousand villages. It has six hundred thousand villages and most of these villagers don't have MBA or even bicycles. The Indian middle class would like to pretend that they don't exist these six hundred thousand villages; that everyone is riding motorcycles instead of bullock carts; that India is a modern country with one foot in the future and one foot still in those quaint old picture perfect palaces in Rathasthan on the edge of the Thar desert. There is a kind of National Geographic version of India, a kind of Kodachrome place and then there is reality. The sad fact is that politically India is pulling apart rather than together. The Central Government makes a deal with a foreign company (Enron) to provide power; local politicans steal anywhere between 10-40% of the powe now produced; then, the lofcal state government (in Maharasthra) repudiates the Central Governments deals and put forward their own. The company (Enron) threatens to sue, probably pays off through an Indian-deal maker, and fianlly years after spending something like $600 million dollars on the project... is finaly cleared to do the power plant, a $3 billion plus deal. Meanwhile, in the countryside, it is my view that a kind of defacto disintegration of India has alredy occurred. One has local state power, local politicans dictating the real power in India with the Central government all but helpless. In a state like Bihar one sees the true complexion of Indian politics to come, which incresingly will be polariszed between Hindo caste lines of the "haves" vs. the "have nots". The Chief Minister of Bihar, a state that abuts Nepal to the North and Bengal to the East, is from the lower castes and he has totaly polarized local politics along caste lines. This delightful fellow, one Laloo Prasad Jadav, is from a rustic farming family and has torn up the governor's formal gardens and plated fodder for his cows. When your car is stolen in Patna (the capital of Bihar) you go to the local police who will sell it back to you. Laloo's version of India. "I had five brothers and one sister. There was never enough money. When we were old enough we were all sent out to graze buffalo. My two brothers went to the city(Patna), they earned 94 paise (about $.10 cents) a day. When they had saved enough money I went to Patna to school. I was 12 years old and I did not know even ABC. All my life I was beaten and insulted by landlords. Because we were from the Yadav caste we were not entitled even to sit on a chair; they would make us sit on the ground. We have been an independent country for 50 years, but there has been no alteration of the caste system, no social justice." The captial of Bihar, Patna, has power blackouts most of the time. I guess that means there isn't much running water Ramesh. The Indian upper and middle classes are terrified of people like this. I mean piss-in-the-pants terrified. With reason. With very good reason. Strangely, into this wierd mix the NY Times people have a sort of old boy network going with India, so that many of their top people have done tours in India as reporters. The result is that the media coverage of exactly how bad it is in India simply hasn't gotten out. In India everything is broken. The roads, the political system, even social relations between communities. Tell me a bright note. Everyone has cell phones? Right, a sign of progress? Everyone is watching Sky news and getting the latest Siberian weather report, or the latest business news from Hong Kong. Try booking a train ticket and then taking the train or a bus. When I go to India these days my first stop is the pharmacy to buy antibiotics for lung infections. I get lung infections Ramesh and Sankar because all the shit in Delhi is emptied onto evaporation pans where it evaporates. Then, the wind comes along and you have airborne staph and strep infections. You breathe in air born disease. Recently, I asked a man who was coughing and hacking in Delhi why he didn't take something for his dreadful cough. He said, "We can't. For decades we have taken anti-biotics. They don't work anymore. There is nothing we can do." In Delhi there is so much pollution in the new block long luxury hotels you can see a grey mist wafting up and down, literally, like a layer of mustard gas in the halls of the hotels. Population increments are killing this country now. Intercaste politics are going to kill this country if it survives in it's present political form. The only respite from this tale of woe I think is the south and particularly Kerala. In the south, as in the west, all the local politicans are undoing their links with the rest of the world and the rest of India and taking down the English signs. English is the lingua franca of India and in many cases the only medium of coimmunication between India's 13 disparate linguistic groups. When I was India last I noticed that Madras, a city of some 3-5 million (depending upon who is counting what) had simply disappeared. No one could tell me how to get there. I looked on the railways schedules, on the aircraft schedules.. it just didn't exist, or if it did apparently no one went there. It was only after spending two weeks wondering where Madras went that I discovered Madras had disappeared and it was now called Chenai. Airplanes went to Chenai, the trains. Yet, India is a great place and one hopes that the disentegration I spoke of is far enogh along so that states can take up the power that the Central Government had. One hopes against hope that the words of politicans won't esclate into communal violence. The Indians in Africa worked out a system of investment in difficult African climes. It was, you made back your investment in one year: after one year and one day you were in profits and from then until the next collapse it was worthwile doing business. In India if you invest have an exit frame.