Brain Drain

It seems very dangerous to be a small country with large reserves of a natural resource in today's world. Quite swiftly, a media campaign painting the country's situation as requiring Western intervention is drummed up. Over a few years this builds up to the point where the country can be invaded, and its resources are signed away in order to "pay" for "rebuilding".

But India seems exempt, partially because it is a large country, and partially because there aren't many crucially important natural resources. The one really abundant resource in India is manpower. But India willingly gifts this resource to various rich countries; there is no need to invade.

This doesn't matter to a few Indians. But for many, those living in India and even some who have "gifted" themselves to the West but still care about India, this is a sad thing. India should do things to prevent it, they believe. But there is cause for despair, and little cause for celebration on this front. Rao's reforms of 1992 have brought a modicum of prosperity to India, but some governments don't seem to have learnt the positive lessons from those reforms.

People are important. All efforts should be made to keep the best people, by keeping them happy. Money spent on retaining good talent is repaid many times over. The presence of talent has a ripple effect, stimulating talent in other individuals. The loss of talent has exactly the opposite effect: the loss of talent is exacerbated by the loss of potential mentors for new talent.

Reports such as this one are especially wrenching.

The Food Crisis, and the Fingers Pointing at India

In the current global food price crisis, George Bush and Condoleeza Rice deflected attention away from America by pointing fingers at the convenient focal points for all negative changes occurring in the world today: India and China.

The American appetite for fuel already has most of the world irritated; it is already blamed for the half-million Iraqi deaths. Now bio-fuels have made imminent the near-starvation of a billion other humans. The American publicity machine recognized that adding this to the list of transgressions wouldn't do much good. So a simple, plausible deflection was arranged: India and China are eating more, they are to blame.

The pro-American media is quick to try to soothe tempers in India by saying that Indians eating more is a good thing. But this is just meant to blind gullible Indians. After hearing this, who will the starving man in Africa blame? The Indians who are enjoying a "good thing" by eating more while the African starves, obviously. This statement is simply a smart publicity move to kill two birds with one stone: soothe ruffled Indian feathers, and still make everybody blame Indians (who are trying to eat enough to survive) rather than the Americans (who want to drive more SUVs and luxury cars).

Besides, the figures show that these statements are completely false. Indian foodgrain consumption increased by 2% in 2007-2008, while American foodgrain consumption increased by almost 12% in the same year!! (See this report). So even in terms of who's eating more (setting aside the biofuel issue), America is to blame more than India.

The problem I am trying to address here is not the food crisis itself, but attempts to evade responsibility and pin blame on others through a publicity machine. Such attempts are indeed a "cruel joke".