MB Lal Book 6
68. Private members’ clubs
69.
Child trafficking
70.
The rewards of royalty
71.
Davos Man and his defects
72. Growth
will suffer as workers dwindle
73.
Storing information in DNA
74.
Monetary Mayhem From Myanmar
75. Young
Palestinians re-define grammar of protests
76. ‘Yes,
we spent money on paid news ads’
77. India
78.
Like poetry for software
79.
India vs. China vs. Egypt
80.
The Virtual Middle Class Rises
81.
Behind realty rush in Haryana, a gilt-edged licence raj
Private members’ clubs
Clubbing together
Clubs are thriving. Especially those with gyms
To the gym, Sir?
BEHIND an unobtrusive door in one of London’s most expensive streets is the city’s newest club. Unlike its traditional counterparts (known for their elderly male membership, deep leather chairs, excellent wine and terrible food), Grace Belgravia is for women only. For £5,500 ($8,867) a year, members can enjoy relaxation rooms adorned with silver birch trees, a spa and gym, and an in-house medical practice run by Tim Evans, the “Royal Apothecary” (his other patients include the queen).
New clubs are thriving all over the world. In London Grace Belgravia is the second to launch in seven months. Beijing has an estimated 4,000 clubs—ranging from humble bars with a joining fee to golf clubs with a 20-year waiting list. Tennis is fashionable there (senior officials like it). The thriving Capital Club has a rooftop court. Reciprocal rights in clubs abroad are a big draw too.
Clubs with sports facilities offer both healthy exercise and good networking. The University Club in Washington, DC, has a big pool and personal trainers. The 17,000 members of London’s Royal Automobile Club enjoy its gyms, pool, Turkish bath and squash courts.
Clubs with sports facilities offer both healthy exercise and good networking. The University Club in Washington, DC, has a big pool and personal trainers. The 17,000 members of London’s Royal Automobile Club enjoy its gyms, pool, Turkish bath and squash courts.
The new entrants are giving the traditional membership-run outfits a competitive shock. Many clubs used to “slightly bumble along”, says Adrian Stones, the chairman of the Special Forces Club in London (a discreet hangout for spies and action heroes). Now they have to become more business-like.
That can mean tweaking the balance between exclusivity and informality. Many clubs still require ties, or ban sports clothes. But rules are softening. The Muthaiga Country Club in Nairobi, which still echoes with the high living, hard drinking and wife-swapping of colonial times, has recently opened a restaurant, Pink’s, where jeans can be worn. New York’s Yale Club, where Jay Gatsby lounges in slacks in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, has also allowed some denim. Pin-striped Lycra, anyone?
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Child trafficking
A cruel trade
To curb widespread trafficking of abducted children, officials and parents are turning to social media
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THE Chinese new year, which this year falls on February 10th, is a time of family reunions. But Xiao Chaohua is preparing to spend his sixth new year without his son, who was abducted in 2007 by suspected child traffickers. China’s one-child policy has fuelled demand for children like his, thousands of whom are snatched and sold every year to desperate, usually boy-less, couples. Spurred by the campaigning of parents like Mr Xiao, the government is starting to acknowledge the practice more openly. But curbing it is proving tough.
Mr Xiao has been trying the hard way to raise awareness of the crime; driving around the country in a minivan covered with posters of missing children. One of them features his son, then five years old, dressed up for a school photograph in a white jacket with red lapels (see picture). Mr Xiao, who lives in a village near Tongzhou, one of Beijing’s satellite towns, says he has spent as much as 400,000 yuan ($64,300) of his own money on the project. He says there are other parents elsewhere in China who tour the country in similarly bedecked vehicles.
The authorities have launched several crackdowns over the past two decades, but the crime has persisted. Since a renewed effort began in 2009, more than 54,000 children have been rescued and 11,000 trafficking gangs “smashed”, Xinhua, the state news-agency, reported in December. Officials claim the problem has become less rampant.
Given the patchiness of official data, this is hard to prove. Individual cases of abduction are rarely reported by the state-controlled media. But Deng Fei, a Beijing-based journalist and prominent campaigner on behalf of victims and their families, believes the number of children being abducted is falling. Mr Xiao estimates that the price of abducted boys has risen in recent years from around 40,000 yuan to about 90,000, perhaps because the supply of abducted children has been affected by the police crackdown.
Social media may also have played a role. In recent years, parents and activists have been using websites and microblogs to share information about cases and draw public attention to child abduction. Their efforts have put pressure on the police, who have responded (unusually, given their suspicion of internet activism) by using the internet themselves to contact the families of victims.
The police official in charge of anti-trafficking, Chen Shiqu, has an account on Sina Weibo, one of China’s most popular microblog services. Its main page shows a cartoon drawing of him, cuddling a rescued baby. “Have mobilised to verify”, he wrote on January 23rd in response to a message from another microblogger about a missing child. His account has 3.4m followers. Mr Deng, the journalist, has 2.8m people who follow his microblog, which he uses to help return rescued children to their parents. An account on Sina Weibo run by Baobei Huijia (Baby Come Home), an activist network based in north-eastern China, has nearly 140,000 followers. Mr Chen, the policeman, is a keen follower of the activists’ work, say the Chinese media. Zhang Zhiwei, a lawyer who helps Baobei Huijia, says the public security ministry has encouraged police to join internet groups that discuss child abductions and engage with members openly. This is a novelty for the publicity-shy police. China Youth Daily, a Beijing newspaper, reported that Mr Chen began his online outreach under the pseudonym “Volunteer 007”, but his mastery of the subject had soon led to his identity being revealed.
Mr Xiao, the parent, believes the authorities could be doing a lot more. Buyers of abducted children still often get away without punishment—they usually live in villages and sometimes enjoy protection from local officials. He says orphanages sometimes fail to take DNA from children they receive. This can be used to look for matches with DNA records held by anti-trafficking police. The absence of such checks allows traffickers to sell children to orphanages, which can then offer them for adoption at high fees.
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Foreign companies in India
The rewards of royalty
Despite what you might hear, some foreign firms in India are prospering
EVEN now, when India is desperate to attract capital to fund its big balance-of-payments gap, the red carpet it rolls out is a little dusty. A year after rules were eased to permit foreign “single-brand” retailers to operate in India, Sweden’s IKEA is still waiting for the go-ahead to sell Nordic comfort food and furniture. India’s cabinet has yet to make its mind up about the flat-packed sort, it seems.
The delay may become just another war story about foreign direct investment (FDI) in India. In the 1970s India chucked out IBM and Coca-Cola in a fit of nationalist pique. In the late 1990s the alchemists at Enron met their match in the subcontinent, losing billions on a power plant embroiled in a government spat. Recent acquisitions by foreigners, including those by Vodafone, a British mobile-telecoms firm, and Dai-ichi Sankyo, a Japanese drugs firm, have done poorly.
Yet just how representative are these horror tales? The stock of FDI in India is now quite big—some $220 billion, or 12% of GDP, according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the central bank. This includes everything from research centres in Bangalore to cement plants.
The balance-of-payments data suggest that the overall return on equity for foreign investors is probably below 10% and slumped in the year to March 2012. An alternative measure is a recent survey by the RBI of 745 firms with significant foreign shareholders. It is mildly more optimistic: the overall return on equity was 13% in the year to March 2011, it finds. Technology firms, carmakers and chemical-makers did well, transport and telecoms firms less so. Unlike FDI in China, which has been directed at building factories for export, investment into India is aimed at the domestic market—only 12% of the firms’ sales were foreign.
That mediocre big picture belies some stunning successes, however. In particular India has a handful of high-profile firms that are listed while being controlled by foreign firms, such as Suzuki, Nestlé, Unilever and Siemens (see chart). These are well-established businesses with deep roots in India and high profitability. Foreign-controlled firms among the top 100 companies listed in India made a 24% return on equity in the year to March 2011—better than domestic firms’ returns. Their market value doubled over the five preceding years. Although the foreigners will never admit it, some of these operations have gone from backwaters within multinationals to vital sources of growth.
That in turn has presented a different set of problems. Some foreign firms had the foresight to convert minority stakes in good Indian firms into controlling ones. Suzuki took control of Maruti, India’s biggest car manufacturer by volume, in 2002. Others have failed. After a botched effort to take control almost two decades ago, British American Tobacco still owns only 31% of ITC, a fags-to-biscuits conglomerate that has grown so fast it is now a global player in its own right. Faced with no prospect of control, some foreigners have pulled out. Honda sold its stake in Hero, an Indian motorbike-maker, in 2010 and is now competing directly against it.
Those firms that have control of fast-growing subsidiaries have been keen to boost their stakes still further. Siemens raised its stake in its unit from 55% to 75% in 2011. But often the valuations of Indian subsidiaries are queasily high. Nestlé India is valued at 50 times its profits —more than double the ratio of its Swiss parent.
Faced with lower stakes than they would like, foreigners have found another, shabby, way, to extract more value from their Indian subsidiaries: charging them “royalty fees”. They argue that these reflect the brand and technology benefits of being part of a global group. On January 22nd Hindustan Unilever became the latest firm to do so—announcing that the fee paid to its foreign parent would rise from 1.4% to 3.15% of sales.
Livid minority investors howl that they are being short-changed, as indeed they are. Still, for India the trend towards higher royalty payments is a backhanded compliment. It shows that some foreign-run firms in India make tasty profits. That is why their parent companies want to guzzle more of them. As a signal about outsiders’ appetite for exposure to India, that may be rather important.
_______________________________Schumpeter
Davos Man and his defects
The global-leadership industry needs re-engineering
THE two most popular words in the business lexicon are probably “global” and “leadership”. Put them together and people in suits start to salivate. That is perhaps why more than 1,000 corporate bosses are flocking to Davos, a Swiss ski resort, this week. There, at the annual bash of the World Economic Forum (WEF), they sip vin des glaciers with some 50 heads of state and 300 cabinet ministers. Whatever the topic, from deficits to deadly diseases, the talk is all of providing “global leadership”. And not just in the short term: the WEF rigorously selects and nurtures “Young Global Leaders” to form a “next-generation leadership community that is mission-led and principle-driven”.
The rise of the rootless
The cult of the global leader is spreading. Business schools are full of it. INSEAD calls itself “the business school for the world” and has campuses in Singapore and Abu Dhabi as well as Fontainebleau. Fuqua School of Business at Duke University boasts that it is “the world’s first legitimately global business school”; it has campuses in six countries. Big firms no longer aspire merely to train competent managers. They pride themselves on their ability to select and train leaders for global roles.
This is not all guff. Many industries are globalising fast, creating waves of disruption. Parochial companies may perish. Global ones complain that a shortage of global talent impedes their growth, especially in emerging markets. Yet they rapidly burn through what global talent they have: by one estimate, nearly 80% of CEOs of S&P 500 firms are ousted before retirement.
So there is clearly a need for global leadership. But when the public look at what is on offer, they are not impressed. Many of the bankers and politicians caught dozing by the financial crisis were regulars at Davos. Ordinary folk trust Davos Man no more than they would a lobbyist for the Worldwide Federation of Weasels. A survey by Edelman, a public-relations firm, finds that only 18% of people trust business leaders to tell the truth. For political leaders, the figure is 13%.
What can be done? Much of the answer lies in giving the little guys better tools to keep Davos Man in check: stricter accountability for government leaders, sounder regulations to curb corporate abuses. But there is also a case for reforming the global-leadership industry. The people who run it need to think hard about what they mean by both globalisation and leadership.
People whose jobs require constant whizzing through airports often overestimate the extent of globalisation. Most other folk live in the same country all their lives. Most trade occurs within national borders. Nearly all politics is local. Company bosses who fail to notice this may underestimate political risks or ignore cultural differences, and such errors may prove disastrous. The best global leaders need to immerse themselves in local cultures.
Leadership has always been a slippery concept, and is getting slipperier by the day. In the West, as deference collapses and knowledge workers rise, companies have flattened their management hierarchies. But many non-Western companies continue to believe in hierarchy. In India and China, leaders are often lofty figures and companies have lots of rungs to be climbed. And disruptive innovation can put a premium on command-and-control. Apple thrived as a dictatorship under Steve Jobs; Nokia’s consensus-seeking leaders let the firm crumble.
Global-leadership gurus also need to think more carefully about the relationship between business and the wider world. It sounds noble to promise, as practically every boss in Davos does, that your company will solve all manner of problems unrelated to its core business. For companies in emerging markets, this may make sense: if they do not build a road to their mine in a remote area, no one else will. In rich countries, however, governments leave fewer gaps that so obviously need filling. Talk of social responsibility needs to be realistic: it is more dangerous to promise too much than too little.
There are signs that the global-leadership industry is trying to shape up. Harvard Business School obliges its students to spend time in other countries. Companies increasingly expect their high-flyers to spend time running far-flung subsidiaries. Henkel, a German chemical-maker, insists that executives live in at least two different countries before being considered for promotion. Nestlé, a Swiss food company, boasts executive board members from eight different countries. The WEF urges charities to learn from businesses and vice versa.
Management gurus are producing new measuring devices: the Global Leadership and Organisational Behaviour Effectiveness (GLOBE) project has surveyed more than 17,000 managers in 62 countries to identify cultural differences that leaders ought to know about. Americans are unusually assertive, apparently, and Brazilians surprisingly unconcerned about the future.
World leaders with wings of wax
But there is still a flaw with the very notion of global leadership. Abraham Lincoln observed that “nearly all men can stand adversity but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Similar temptations afflict those who are given the title of “young global leader”. Clever businesspeople have a tendency to be arrogant at the best of the times; telling them that they are masters of the universe can only magnify it. Arrogance breeds mistakes: look at all the empire-building bosses who attempt ambitious mergers despite ample evidence that such mergers usually fail.
If leadership has a secret sauce, it may well be humility. A humble boss understands that there are things he doesn’t know. He listens: not only to the other bigwigs in Davos, but also to the kind of people who don’t get invited, such as his customers.
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Working-age shift
Growth will suffer as workers dwindle
THE new-year message from investors and policymakers is the same: Europe has turned the corner. Even so, this year’s economic outlook remains dire. A forecast from the IMF on January 23rd envisages GDP falling by 0.2% in the 17-strong euro area and growing by just 0.2% in the wider 27-strong European Union (EU). But even if a sturdier recovery does eventually get under way, Europe’s longer-term growth prospects will be dulled by an unwelcome new demographic trend.
This year the EU as a whole starts on a long journey—one already begun by the euro area in 2012. The EU’s working-age population (aged 20-64, as Europe’s statisticians define it) starts falling in 2013, from last year’s peak of 308.2m, and will drop over the next 50 years to 265m in 2060 (see chart). The working-age population may be shrinking but the number of older people will carry on rising. That will raise the old-age dependency ratio from 28% in 2010 to 58% in 2060. These demographic shifts, which may be tempered by people working longer, reflect an earlier transition from post-war baby boom to baby bust. They would be even bigger but for an assumed net inflow of over 1m (mostly young) migrants a year.
Europe’s ageing population will cast a pall over growth, which is driven by rising employment as well as higher labour productivity. Higher participation rates in the workforce and lower jobless rates may allow employment to grow a bit until the early 2020s; thereafter it is expected to decline. Based on what may well be an optimistic assumption about potential labour-productivity gains, the European Commission last year projected economic growth of just 1.4% a year in the EU over the next half-century.
Adverse demography will hurt European public finances. The commission expects a rise in annual age-related public spending in the EU of four percentage points of GDP over the next 50 years. Austerity already feels interminable, and there is no end in sight.
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Storing information in DNA
Test-tube data
Archives could last for thousands of years when stored in DNA instead of magnetic tapes and hard drives
LIKE all the best ideas, this one was born in a pub. Nick Goldman and Ewan Birney of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) near Cambridge, were pondering what they could do with the torrent of genomic data their research group generates, all of which has to be archived.
The volume of data is growing faster than the capacity of the hard drives used to hold it. “That means the cost of storage is rising, but our budgets are not,” says Dr Goldman. Over a few beers, the pair began wondering if artificially constructed DNA might be one way to store the data torrent generated by the natural stuff. After a few more drinks and much scribbling on beer mats, what started out as a bit of amusing speculation had turned into the bones of a workable scheme. After some fleshing out and a successful test run, the full details were published this week in Nature.
The idea is not new. DNA is, after all, already used to store information in the form of genomes by every living organism on Earth. Its prowess at that job is the reason that information scientists have been trying to co-opt it for their own uses. But this has not been without problems.
Dr Goldman’s new scheme is significant in several ways. He and his team have managed to set a record (739.3 kilobytes) for the amount of unique information encoded. But it has been designed to do far more than that. It should, think the researchers, be easily capable of swallowing the roughly 3 zettabytes (a zettabyte is one billion trillion or 10²¹ bytes) of digital data thought presently to exist in the world and still have room for plenty more. It would do so with a density of around 2.2 petabytes (10¹⁵) per gram; enough, in other words, to fit all the world’s digital information into the back of a lorry. Moreover, their method dramatically reduces the copying errors to which many previous DNA storage attempts have been prone.
Faithful reproduction
The trick to this fidelity lies in the way the researchers translate their files from the hard drive to the test tube. DNA uses four chemical “bases”—adenosine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G)—to encode information. Previous approaches have often mapped the binary 1s and 0s used by computers directly onto these bases. For instance, A and C might represent 0, while G and T signify 1. The problem is that sequences of 1s or 0s in the source code can generate repetition of a single base in the DNA (say, TTTT). Such repetitions are more likely to be misread by DNA-sequencing machines, leading to errors when reading the information back.
The team’s solution was to translate the binary computer information into ternary (a system that uses three numerals: 0, 1 and 2) and then encode that information into the DNA. Instead of a direct link between a given number and a particular base, the encoding scheme depends on which base has been used most recently (see table). For instance, if the previous base was A, then a 2 would be represented by T. But if the previous base was G, then 2 would be represented by C. Similar substitution rules cover every possible combination of letters and numbers, ensuring that a sequence of identical digits in the data is not represented by a sequence of identical bases in the DNA, helping to avoid mistakes.
The code then had to be created in artificial DNA. The simplest approach would be to synthesise one long DNA string for every file to be stored. But DNA-synthesis machines are not yet able to do that reliably. So the researchers decided to chop their files into thousands of individual chunks, each 117 bases long. In each chunk, 100 bases are devoted to the file data themselves, and the remainder used for indexing information that records where in the completed file a specific chunk belongs. The process also contains the DNA equivalent of the error-detecting “parity bit” found in most computer systems.
To provide yet more tolerance for mistakes, the researchers chopped up the source files a further three times, each in a slightly different, overlapping way. The idea is to ensure that each 25-base quarter of a 100-base chunk was also represented in three other chunks of DNA. If any copying errors did occur in a particular chunk, it could be compared against its three counterparts, and a majority vote used to decide which was correct. Reading the chunks back is simply a matter of generating multiple copies of the fragments using a standard chemical reaction, feeding these into a DNA-sequencing machine and stitching the files back together.
When the scheme was tested, it worked almost as planned. The researchers were able to encode and decode five computer files, including an MP3 recording of part of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and a PDF version of the 1953 paper by Francis Crick and James Watson describing the structure of DNA. The one glitch was that, despite all the precautions, two 25-base segments of the DNA paper went missing. The problem was eventually traced to a combination of a quirk of DNA chemistry and another quirk in the machines used to do the synthesis. Dr Goldman is confident that a tweak to their code will avoid the problem in future.
There are downsides to DNA as a data-storage medium. One is the relatively slow speed at which data can be read back. It took the researchers two weeks to reconstruct their five files, although with better equipment it could be done in a day. Beyond that, the process can be sped up by adding more sequencing machines.
Ironically, then, the method is not suitable for the EBI’s need to serve up its genome data over the internet at a moment’s notice. But for less intensively used archives, that might not be a problem. One example given is that of CERN, Europe’s biggest particle-physics lab, which maintains a big archive of data from the Large Hadron Collider.
Store out of direct sunlight
The other disadvantage is cost. Dr Goldman estimates that, at commercial rates, their method costs around $12,400 per megabyte stored. That is millions of times more than the cost of writing the same data to the magnetic tape currently used to archive digital information. But magnetic tapes degrade and must be replaced every few years, whereas DNA remains readable for tens of thousands of years so long as it is kept somewhere cool, dark and dry—as proved by the recovery of DNA from woolly mammoths and Neanderthals.
The longer you want to store information, then, the more attractive DNA becomes. And the cost of sequencing and synthesising DNA is falling fast. The researchers reckon that, within a decade, that could make DNA competitive with other methods for (infrequently-used) archives designed to last fifty years or more.
There is one final advantage in using DNA. Modern, digital storage technologies tend to come and go: just think of the fate of the laser disc, for example. In the early 2000s NASA, America’s space agency, was reduced to trawling around internet auction sites in order to find old-style eight-inch floppy drives to get at the data it had laid down in the 1960s and 1970s. But, says Dr Goldman, DNA has endured for more than 3 billion years. So long as life—and biologists—endure, someone should know how to read it.
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“Sir, this one is...” he paused, searching for the right words, “too old.” “Too old?” I said. “Yes, sir. Do you have a new one?” And so began a little game played throughout Myanmar. The Myanmarese are very particular about the appearance of the US currency they accept. I’ve been in Myanmar since last Tuesday. I spent the first few days in Yangon. I’m traveling with my friend Lawrence Mackhoul of Leopard Capital. We left Myanmar with no set itinerary. We would just go by whatever means seemed best at the time — plane, boat, train or bus. We’d book our hotels at the counter when we arrived. We’d let the wind take us where it might, so to speak. We had a few spots we knew we wanted to hit, such as Mandalay and Bagan, and we had some meetings we’d arrange as we went. But otherwise, we’d be flexible. Between us, we started with about $3,000 in cash. There are no ATMs, and we knew that credit cards are nearly worthless in this country. You have to pay cash for everything, even hotels and airfare. (One hotel did take credit cards, for a 5% transaction fee. They sent the information to Laos, of all places, for processing.) We also knew that the people of Myanmar like clean US bills. But their pickiness on this last point quickly had us worried we might run out of money. We had bills rejected because of small tears or tiny ink spots or small pen marks. We had money rejected because the crease in the center was too great. Most absurd of all was when Lawrence tried to change his hundreds at a hotel desk and they rejected his perfectly crisp hundred dollar bills because they had “CB” in the serial number. Lawrence stood there at the counter with a small pile of hundreds as they rejected each one. It seems the whole stack had “CB” in the serial number. When asked why the “CB” mattered, we got a long answer that didn’t make much sense to us. Something about how the US sanctions make certain money impossible to exchange. I went to the bank before I left home to get cash. As luck would have it, my banker is from Myanmar and goes there every year. She carefully went through my stack of hundreds and fifties. She did a good job too. None of the money I got from her has been rejected. We found, however, that not everyone in the country is so well trained. We started to keep separate envelopes of “bad money.” This was money that was rejected once. Sometimes, more than once. But we found we were able to pawn off this money here and there. The Myanmar currency is the kyat — which sounds like “chat” when people here say it. About 800 of them will buy you a dollar. But it is the US dollar, despite all the problems, that remains a king among peasants. Despite, say, the Canadian dollar’s better performance against the dollar over the last decade or so, you can’t go to Burma and buy an airline ticket or pay for a hotel room with Canadian dollars. At some point, the US dollar will lose its prime seat at the center of global commerce. And when it does, it won’t matter how clean your dollar bills are. People who don’t have to take them won’t take them. That won’t happen until there is some kind of competitor. Looking at the world’s paper monies, though, is like looking through a mangy kennel of flea-bitten dogs. The best alternative is the one everyone used to accept for goods and services the world over. The alternative is gold. Maybe we won’t live to see a day where you can buy groceries with gold. But gold’s place as a store of wealth will remain, as it has for millennia.
In the 19th century and earlier, gold leaf was a popular money in Myanmar. It was easily divisible and easy to carry. While in Mandalay, I visited a shop that made gold leaf by hand. So far, I’ve been to Yangon, Mandalay, Bagan and Ngapali. I’ll have more notes to share about these places when I get a chance to write them up. I also have some amazing pictures that will give you a sense of the place. But my Internet connection is not great. I can send and receive emails OK, but anything beyond that is impossible or painfully slow. My general impression of the country so far is not what I expected. I expected that 50 years of relative isolation would’ve left a pretty desperate and decrepit country. I expected something more like the look and smell of India, with all the awful poverty and filth that you see traveling through Indian cities. I found a place much more prosperous looking than official GDP figures and the like would indicate. Traveling here shows you how stupid US sanctions are, too. It just meant that the Myanmarese cozied up more with the Chinese, who imposed no such sanctions. Nor did Thailand, which remains a big trading partner (and gets about 20% of its natural gas from Myanmar). Nor did India. The only thing US sanctions did (and continue to do) is handcuff US businesses from tapping into this market. As far as investment ideas go, I have a strong sense that this is a market where there must be a great opportunity somewhere. In the big-picture sense, the upside for Myanmar is clear. People best grasp emerging markets by analogy. You find another market with broad similarities and/or some historical parity that has since widened. Then you think about what happens when the other market catches up. Mongolia, for example, could be the next Kazakhstan. This gives the boom in Mongolia some context, some tangible upside. It makes the upside plain because you see how far Mongolia has to go — in terms of real estate prices, incomes, etc. In Myanmar, the analogy is neighboring Thailand. Even a move halfway to where Thailand is would be huge for Myanmar. This upside has investors excited. But the particulars of investing are harder. It is easy to like a market, harder to find the winning opportunity. Or as Lawrence likes to point out, you can lose a fortune in a booming market and make a bundle in a weak one. Prices have already adjusted quickly here. A taste: A studio apartment in Yangon in a less-than-average-quality building goes for $1,500 per month. Real estate prices have moved big-time already. There is no “Growth Group” here, like there is in Mongolia. The one listed property stock, Yoma, is very expensive, in my view. More on all this soon. All is to say, I am still searching for the right idea here. I still have some crisp hundreds left. And there is always something over the horizon that makes me want to have a look. Until the money runs out, I’ll keep exploring. Stay tuned... Regards, Chris Mayer, for The Daily Reckoning
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JERUSALEM, January 27, 2013
Young Palestinians re-define grammar of protests
APPalestinian activists sit by the fire in the village of Beit Iksa in the West Bank, between Ramallah and Jerusalem. File photo
In a cyber-connected world of instant communication, the powerful message from the Arab world that idealistic waves of youthful protests can sweep aside encrusted regimes and governments has homed in well in the Palestinian territories.
An ever-growing body of youth, inspired by blazing uprisings that toppled fossilised regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, are getting organised to instill change as never before.
An unprecedented movement driven by young people is taking root in the West Bank that has the rejection of the feuding Palestinian factions -- Fatah and Hamas -- as its starting point. “The Arab awakening -- I won’t call it the Arab Spring -- has surely and distinctly spread to the Palestinian territories,” says Mahdi F. Abdul Hadi. Dr. Abdul Hadi runs the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA), the intellectual power-house that is helping provide cerebral inputs that encourage young Palestinians to re-interpret their history, culture, art and identity, through the medium of open debate. “As of now there is no grand design, but there is a spontaneous demand for dignity which is an astonishingly powerful force for change,” observes Dr. Abdul Hadi.
Outside the learned and open environs of PASSIA where intellectuals and practitioners freely mingle, the activists are having a hard time, torn between the heavy demands of bringing bread on the table, and the onerous call for reclaiming their land through creative protests. Hanadi Kawasmi, a young activist and working woman who does not fit into any stereotype, exemplifies the aspirations of the new generation of Palestinian youth. A blogger, cyber-activist, and a grassroots worker all rolled into one, her demand for gender rights and grassroots democracy is as passionate as her advocacy for Palestinian cultural rootedness.
Between sips of Cappuccino in a trendy East Jerusalem restaurant, she explains how the new Palestinian movement has been imbued with a strong cultural component. She points to the emergence of Zedni, a cultural group that has made a significant contribution in the “Palestinian awakening”. “In 2011 Zedni began in Nablus as a student society that focused on book reviews. The idea went viral over the social media,” she explains. The success of Zedni in Nablus triggered a demand for its new branches, which have now cropped up in Jerusalem and Gaza. Zedni’s politics is subtle, for in the discussions over books, films and videos, the focus on their political content is inescapable.
“In the Zedni experiment, the social media has played a critical role,” says Ms. Kawasmi. “It has brought in new hope, confidence and a sense of connectedness with larger Arab communities in countries like Egypt that are undergoing broadly similar experiences”.
Empowered by the cyber revolution, a group of young people last year decided to form Saned, a self-sustaining musical group. The band emerged as a form of protest against a musical event that was sponsored and micro managed by the European Union (EU), says an activist. Saned’s maiden performance announced over Facebook turned out to be a huge success, as people thronged the venue in Ramallah paying an inexpensive $6 ticket. More importantly, in an economy dependent heavily on foreign aid and funding, it sent a strong message of self-reliance and financial independence within the community.
As they explore unchartered territory, fresh confrontations with the state have also begun. The omnipresence of the Israeli police and an increasingly antagonistic relationship with mainstream Fatah is adding to the pressures. Both the Israelis and Palestinian Authority, for instance, swiftly dismantled the encampment in Bab-Al-Sham -- a village near Ramallah where young Palestinians had converged with their tents to engage in cultural pursuits. They also experimented with new techniques of agriculture that would be relevant to the local communities.
Nearly 6,000 young Palestinians languish in Israeli jails, says Dr. Abdul Hadi, the academic. Major drawbacks are also emerging within the movement itself. Despite is creativity, the absence of a leadership, generated from below, that would help channel novel protests into tangible political accomplishments is yet to emerge. “It is still work in progress but the feeling to bring about change -- a longing to be free, to feel the flesh and the soul is strong,” says Dr. Abdul Hadi.
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 January 30, 2013 11:50 IST‘Yes, we spent money on paid news ads’
Confessions by politicians to EC belie claims of innocence by top newspapers
The political class is more honest than the media when it comes to ‘paid news’ during elections, judging by the fact that several poll candidates have owned up to this corrupt practice. At least, after the Election Commission and the Press Council of India shot off notices to them and held inquiries into the matter. They have acknowledged guilt by belatedly adding their “news” buying expenses to their election statement of accounts. Some candidates have accepted in writing that they bought what are now called, somewhat oxymoronically, “Paid News Advertisements.” But not a single one of the newspapers they say they gave their money to has accepted any wrongdoing. These are not just any papers. In readership terms, they include three top-ranked dailies.
In some cases, the battles are still on, involving both the politicians and newspapers concerned. On January 15, the EC found that Madhya Pradesh Cabinet Minister Narottam Mishra “failed to lodge his accounts of his election expenses in the manner prescribed by law.” He faces possible disqualification. The EC’s notice to Dr. Mishra concerns 42 news items on him during the November 2008 state elections. These, it pointed out, “read more like election advertisement(s) in favour of you alone rather than (as) news reports.” The EC names four newspapers in its notice: Dainik Bhaskar, Nai Duniya, Aacharan and Dainik Datia Prakash. Dainik Bhaskar is the second most-read daily in the country.
Less than a month earlier, the Press Council of India held quite a few dailies guilty of doing much the same thing during the 2010 Bihar assembly polls. These include Dainik Jagran, the newspaper with the highest readership in the country. The others are Dainik Hindustan, Hindustan Times, Dainik Aaj and Purvanchal Ki Raahi. Also, Rashtriya Sahara,Udyog Vyapar Times and Prabhat Khabhar.
In many cases, the route to exposure followed the pattern set in the classic case of the former Congress Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Ashok Chavan. His 2009 poll campaign for the State legislature drew scores of full pages of “news.” Not a single one of those pages ever mentioned the name of Madhav Kinhalkar, his rival for the Bhokar seat. In a 2009-10 investigation into paid news, The Hindu found a hagiographical article on Mr. Chavan appear word for word in three major rival publications. In two of them, on the same day, in all of them under different by-lines (The Hindu, Nov. 30, 2009).
The 2010 Bihar polls saw a similar pattern. This time, though, one paper came up with a truly novel defence. Same story in different papers? That’s not paid news, argues Udyog Vyapar Times. It submits that other newspapers “hack their computer site and publish the same news.” So what might look like paid news, contends Udyog Vyapar Times, is merely the outcome of desperate rivals hacking into the internal network of this Aligarh-based daily to steal their national exclusives.
How did the candidates issued ‘Paid News’ notices for the Bihar polls by the EC react? All but one seem to have accepted their guilt. According to the EC, they did so by simply adding “the expenditure included by them on account of these ‘news’ in their accounts of election expenses.” In fact, the District Election Officer of Muzaffarpur in Bihar stated flatly that the dailies had carried “news for payment.” He even had letters from the candidates owning up to buying “news.”
The Press Council of India, acting on the matter referred to it by the EC, issued show cause notices to Dainik Jagran,Dainik Hindustan, Hindustan Times et al, between July and September 2011. On December 21, 2012, the PCI, on the basis of its own inquiry committee’s report, got tough. Of the high-profile line-up, only Prabhat Khabhar escaped “the highest penalty” of the Press Council — censure — under Section 14 (1) of the Press Council Act of 1978. This was the only case where the paper and the candidate both firmly denied the charge. (In all the other cases, the candidates accepted they had purchased “news”.) And Prabhat Khabar’s own record — it has strongly campaigned against paid news — added weight to its defence. The paper offered to apologise if the EC produced proof of any such aberration. It was “cautioned for the future.”
All the other dailies denied the charges, too. But, as the PCI’s inquiry committee puts it, “in all these cases, the candidate in question admitted before the Election Commission of India that he paid for the impugned material.” These dailies were found “guilty of having carried news reports that were in fact self-promotion material provided by the candidate in the fray,” and so faced the highest penalty of censure.
So quite a few politicians seem willing to confess to their paid news sins. They face penalties, too. Just 16 months ago, the EC disqualified Umlesh Yadav, then sitting MLA from Bisauli in Uttar Pradesh, for a period of three years for failing to provide a “true and correct account” of her election expenses. She had skipped any mention of her spending on advertisements dressed up as news during her 2007 poll campaign. She was the first legislator ever to bite the dust on grounds of excessive expenditure (and paid news). Dr. Mishra, Health Minister in the BJP government of Madhya Pradesh, now faces charges of the kind that got her disqualified.
Ashok Chavan case
Oddly enough, the Ashok Chavan case, which triggered off a spate of such cases, is itself bogged down in both the EC and the Supreme Court. The case of former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda is likewise held up in the courts. Judicial delays could have a serious and possibly adverse impact in the fight against Paid News in the 2014 general election.
But what action do habitual offenders in the media face? The Paid News Committee constituted by the Election Commission has concluded that those 42 “news items” involving Dr. Mishra “appear to be advertisements in the garb of news” and fall “within the definition of ‘Paid News’.” The Press Council defines Paid News as “any news or analysis appearing in any media (print or electronic) for a price in cash or kind as consideration.” A Press Council team appointed by PCI Chairperson Justice Katju found last month that Paid News had been rampant in Gujarat during the State polls there in December 2012.
So what happens where media outlets concerned are found guilty? Where the “highest penalty” is censure and that draws not even an apology? Of course, Paid News is not only about elections, though that’s where it does greatest damage to the greatest number. It is an everyday activity in much of the media. The cloying coverage that powerful corporations get routinely reeks of it. You can see it in some completely corporate “sporting” events or “partnerships.” Governments, too, buy “news” sometimes. You can see it at work in Davos, too. Who funds journalists and channels from India at that World Economic Forum event each year is worth looking at. But that’s another story. Watch this space.
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 India slips on human rights index
Apart from the HRW report, its South Asia director in a statement said that urgently needed are resources to enforce India’s laws and hold accountable officials who don’t discharge their duties in a sensitive way.
Human Rights Watch's 665-page world annual opus on the subject for 2012 released on Friday also zeroed in on the rape of a Delhi medical student that convulsed the nation and brought worldwide opprobrium, saying violence against women continued unabated in India with increased reports of sexual assault. "Global revulsion over the Delhi gang rape should send a message to the Indian leadership to bring about long overdue reforms to criminalize the full range of sexual assault and to protect women's dignity and rights," Meenakshi Ganguly, HRW's South Asia director said in a statement that came with the report. "Urgently needed are resources to enforce India's laws and hold accountable officials who don't discharge their duties in a sensitive way." The criticism came even as India's ambassador to Washington Nirupama Rao wrote on op-ed in theWall Street Journal on Thursday promising that the government is "determined to change our nation's laws—as well as the implementation of those laws—to prevent such heinous acts in the future." "All of this energy and determination to improve, to bring about and demand change, is good for India. It reflects the strong democratic experience and institutions in the country," Rao wrote, referring to the public outpouring of anger. However, HRW's tract on India was conspicuous for its anti-government tone while giving a wide berth to rebels groups and NGOs, some of which are suspect in government eyes, particularly with respect to their funding. In fact, the report criticized the government's continued to use the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) to restrict access to foreign funding for domestic organizations. It also panned new restrictions on internet freedom arising in part from concerns about the use of social media to organize protests. However, the report acknowledged that the government did make progress in some areas, including new legislation to protect children from sexual abuse and stronger support for international resolutions to protect human rights in other countries, notably Sri Lanka. February 2, 2013 01:03 ISTLike poetry for software
Open source programme creators cater to the highest standards and give away their work for free, much like Ghalib who wrote not just for money but the discerning reader
Mirza Ghalib, the great poet of 19th century Delhi and one of the greatest poets in history, would have liked the idea of Open Source software. A couplet Mirza Ghalib wrote is indicative:
Bik jaate hain hum aap mata i sukhan ke saath
Lekin ayar i taba i kharidar dekh kar
(translated by Ralph Russell as:
I give my poetry away, and give myself along with it
But first I look for people who can value what I give).
Free versus proprietary
Ghalib’s sentiment of writing and giving away his verses reflects that of the Free and Open Source software (FOSS) movement, where thousands of programmers and volunteers write, edit, test and document software, which they then put out on the Internet for the whole world to use freely. FOSS software now dominates computing around the world. Most software now being used to run computing devices of different types — computers, servers, phones, chips in cameras or in cars, etc. — is either FOSS or created with FOSS. Software commonly sold in the market is referred to as proprietary software, in opposition to free and open source software, as it has restrictive licences that prohibit the user from seeing the source code and also distribute it freely. For instance, the Windows software sold by Microsoft corporation is proprietary in nature. The debate of FOSS versus proprietary software (dealing with issues such as which type is better, which is more secure, etc.) is by now quite old, and is not the argument of this article. What is important is that FOSS now constitutes a significant and dominant part of the entire software landscape.
The question many economists and others have pondered, and there are many special issues of academic journals dedicated to this question, is why software programmers and professionals, at the peak of their skills, write such high quality software and just give it away. They spend many hours working on very difficult and challenging problems, and when they find a solution, they eagerly distribute it freely over the Internet. Answers to why they do this range, broadly, in the vicinity of ascribing utility or material benefit that the programmers gain from this activity. Though these answers have been justified quite rigorously, they do not seem to address the core issue of free and open source software.
I find that the culture of poetry that thrived in the cultural renaissance of Delhi, at the time of Bahadur Shah Zafar, resembles the ethos of the open source movement and helps to answer why people write such excellent software, or poetry, and just give it away. Ghalib and his contemporaries strived to express sentiments, ideas and thoughts through perfect phrases. The placing of phrases and words within a couplet had to be exact, through a standard that was time-honoured and accepted. For example, the Urdu phrase ab thhe could express an entirely different meaning, when used in a context, from the phrase thhe ab, although, to an untrained ear they would appear the same. (Of course, poets in any era and writing in any language, also strove for the same perfection.)
Ghalib wrote his poetry for the discerning reader. His Persian poetry and prose is painstakingly created, has meticulous form and is written to the highest standards of those times. Though Ghalib did not have much respect for Urdu, the language of the population of Delhi, his Urdu ghazals too share the precision in language and form characteristic of his style. FOSS programmers also create software for the discerning user, of a very high quality, written in a style that caters to the highest standards of the profession. Since the source code of FOSS is readily available, unlike that for proprietary software, it is severely scrutinised by peers, and there is a redoubled effort on the part of the authors to create the highest quality.
Source material
Ghalib’s poetry, particularly his ghazals, have become the source materials for many others to base their own poetry. For example, Ghalib’s couplet Jii dhoondhta hai phir wohi ... (which is part of a ghazal) was adapted by Gulzar as Dil dhoondhta hai phir wohi..., with many additional couplets, as a beautiful song in the film Mausam. It was quite common in the days of the Emperor to announce a zameen, a common metre and rhyming structure, that would then be used by many poets to compose their ghazals and orate them at a mushaira (public recitation of poetry). FOSS creators invariably extend and build upon FOSS that is already available. The legendary Richard Stallman, who founded the Free software movement, created a set of software tools and utilities that formed the basis of the revolution to follow. Millions of lines of code have been written based on this first set of free tools, they formed the zameen for what was to follow. Many programmers often fork a particular software, as Gulzar did with the couplet, and create new and innovative features.
Ghalib freely reviewed and critiqued poetry written by his friends and acquaintances. He sought review and criticism for his own work, although, it must be said, he granted few to be his equal in this art (much like the best FOSS programmers!). He was meticulous in providing reviews to his shagirds (apprentices) and tried to respond to them in two days, in which time he would carefully read everything and mark corrections on the paper. He sometimes complained about not having enough space on the page to mark his annotations. The FOSS software movement too has a strong culture of peer review and evaluation. Source code is reviewed and tested, and programmers make it a point to test and comment on code sent to them. Free software sites, such as Sourceforge.org, have elaborate mechanisms to help reviewers provide feedback, make bug reports and request features. The community thrives on timely and efficient reviews, and frequent releases of code.
Ghalib was an aristocrat who was brought up in the culture of poetry and music. He wrote poetry as it was his passion, and he wanted to create perfect form and structure, better than anyone had done before him. He did not directly write for money or compensation (and, in fact, spent most of his life rooting around for money, as he lived well beyond his means), but made it known to kings and nawabs that they could appoint him as a court poet with a generous stipend, and some did. In his later years, after the sacking of Delhi in 1857, he lamented that there was none left who could appreciate his work.
However, he was confident of his legacy, as he states in a couplet: “My poetry will win the world’s acclaim when I am gone.” FOSS creators too write for the passion and pleasure of writing great software and be acknowledged as great programmers, than for money alone. The lure of money cannot explain why an operating system like Linux, which would cost about $100 million to create if done by professional programmers, is created by hundreds of programmers around the world through thousands of hours of labour and kept out on the Internet for anyone to download and use for free. The urge to create such high quality software is derived from the passion to create perfect form and structure. A passion that Ghalib shared.
(Rahul De' is Hewlett-Packard Chair Professor of Information Systems at IIM, Bangalore)
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