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The trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy.
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Aravind Adiga (The White Tiger)
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As an entrepreneur in India put it: 'Indians have learned from painful experience that the state does not work on behalf of the people. More often than not, it works on behalf of itself.
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Thomas Sowell (Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy)
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The fact is, the primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with Native people is to ignore us. They know that the court system favors the powerful and the wealthy and the influential, and that, if we buy into the notion of an impartial justice system, tribes and bands can be forced through a long, convoluted, and expensive process designed to wear us down and bankrupt our economies.
Be good. Play by our rules. Don't cause a disturbance.
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Thomas King (The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America)
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In fact our ideas for the Indian economy have in recent years become more ghettoized than ever.
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Nandan Nilekani (Imagining India: Ideas for the new Century)
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Better people are possible to create, even in Delhi.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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Somehow, India needs to make Indians think Rocket Singh is more likely than Guru.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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the influence of organised crime reaches into the economy, our politics and everyday life- dongri to dubai
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S. Hussain Zaidi
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The name ‘JSW’, you will note, is not particularly imaginative. Nor is it the kind of thing you would imagine is incredible intellectual property. Yet, in 2014, JSW Steel told shareholders that it would pay Rs 125 crore a year to a firm entirely owned by Sajjan Jindal’s wife, Sangita. In return, Sangita Jindal would graciously permit her husband to use the ‘JSW’ acronym, which JSW Steel insists her company, JSW Investments, owns.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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When the first effectual settlement of our colony was made, which was in 1607, the country from the sea-coast to the mountains, and from the Potomac to the most southern waters of James' river, was occupied by upwards of forty different tribes of Indians.
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Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia: A Compilation of Data About the State's Natural Resources, Economy and the Nature of the Good Society)
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The big economic story of our times is not the Great Recession of 2007–2009, unpleasant though it was. Now it’s over. The big story is that the Chinese in 1978 and then the Indians in 1991 began to adopt liberal ideas in their economies, and came to welcome creative destruction.
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Deirdre Nansen McCloskey (Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All)
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The country was passing through turbulent times. British Raj was on its last legs. The World War had sucked the juice out of the British economy. Britain neither had the resources nor the will to hold on to a country the size of India. Sensing the British weakness and lack of resources to rule, different leagues of Indians sniffed different destinies in the air following the imminent exit of the British: a long stretch of Nehru Raj, Hindu Raj extending from Kashmir to Kerala not seen since Emperor Ashoka in third-century BCE before the emperor himself renounced Hinduism and turned a non-violent Buddhist, a Muslim-majority state carved out of two shoulders of India with a necklace-like corridor running through her bosom along Grand Trunk Road, balkanisation of the country with princes ruling the roost, and total chaos.
From August 1946 onwards, chaos appeared to be the most likely destiny as it spurted in Bengal, Bihar, and United Provinces, ending in the carnage of minority communities at every place.
The predicament of British government was how to cut their losses and run without many British casualties before the inevitable chaos spread to the whole country.
The predicament of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, was how to achieve his dream of Muslim-majority Pakistan carved out of India before his imminent demise from tuberculosis he suffered from, about which—apart from his doctor—only a handful of his closest relations and friends knew about.
The predicament of Jawaharlal Nehru, the heir apparent of the Congress Party anointed by Gandhiji, was how to attain independence of the country followed by Nehru Raj while Gandhiji, a frail 77-year-old at the time, was still alive, for God only knew who would be the leader of the party once Gandhiji’s soul and his moral authority were dispatched to heaven, and Nehru couldn’t possibly leave the crucial decision in the hands of a God he didn’t particularly believe in.
Time was of the essence to all the three.
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Manjit Sachdeva (Lost Generations)
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The failure of India's public institutions to keep pace with the dramatic political, economic and social transformations under way has led to severe gaps in governance. The end result of this disjuncture has been a proliferation of grand corruption - a malaise made up of a diverse array of regulatory, extractive, and political rent-seeking activities.
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Milan Vaishnav (When Crime Pays: Money and Muscle in Indian Politics)
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The CAG chose to indict Manmohan Singh by starting its study of coal mine allocations from 2004, the year he took over. Why? Because that is when the government first mused that coal block auctions might be a good idea. So Dr Singh gets indicted—for having the right idea in the first place. Talk about perverse incentives. He should have just kept quiet—not something that’s often said about Manmohan Singh.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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On one hand the Christian missionaries sought to convert the heathen, by fire and sword if need be, to the gospel of peace, brotherhood, and heavenly beatitude; on the other, the more venturesome spirits wished to throw off the constraining traditions and customs, and begin life afresh, levelling distinctions of class, eliminating superfluities and luxuries, privileges and distinctions, and hierarchical rank. In short, to go back to the Stone Ages, before the institutions of Bronze Age civilization had crystallized. Though the Western hemisphere was indeed inhabited, and many parts of it were artfully cultivated, so much of it was so sparsely occupied that the European thought of it as a virgin continent against whose wildness he pitted his manly strength. In one mood the European invaders preached the Christian gospel to the native idolaters, subverted them with strong liquors, forced them to cover their nakedness with clothes, and worked them to an early death in mines; in another, the pioneer himself took on the ways of the North American Indian, adopted his leather costume, and reverted to the ancient paleolithic economy: hunting, fishing, gathering shellfish and berries, revelling in the wilderness and its solitude, defying orthodox law and order, and yet, under pressure, improvising brutal substitutes. The beauty of that free life still haunted Audubon in his old age.
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Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
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At some point, economists must study the Business Family Wedding Gift Economy. It is an extraordinary, closed bubble. What happens is this: a woman marries into a conservative Indian business family. She may well be energetic and bright, but there’s no place for her at work, nor can she work elsewhere. So, instead, she’s urged to ‘take up something’. Scented candles, usually. Sometimes kurta design. Or necklaces, or faux-Rajasthani coffee tables. She then becomes a ‘success’, because every other woman in the family buys her candles as wedding presents, at hideously inflated prices. In return, she buys their kurtas as wedding presents. Eventually, everyone is buying everyone else’s hideous creations at hideously high prices, and nobody can ever tell anyone else their stuff sucks, and that nobody really likes the smell of lavender anyway. The most amazing thing is, this is not a very different economy from the one their husbands are in.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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For example, Shawn Cole, a professor at Harvard Business School, finds that Indian state-owned banks increase their lending to the politically important but relatively poor constituency of farmers by about 5 to 10 percentage points in election years.51 The effect is most pronounced in districts with close elections. The consequences of the lending are greater loan defaults and no measurable increase in agricultural output, which suggest that it really serves as a costly form of income redistribution.
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Raghuram G. Rajan (Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten The World Economy)
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By 1900, a small white minority radiating out from Europe would come to control most of world’s land surface, imposing the imperatives of a commercial economy and international trade on Asia’s mainly agrarian societies. Europeans backed by garrisons and gunboats could intervene in the affairs of any Asian country they wished to. They were free to transport millions of Asian labourers to far-off colonies (Indians to the Malay Peninsula, Chinese to Trinidad); exact the raw materials and commodities they needed for their industries from Asian economies; and flood local markets with their manufactured products. The peasant in his village and the market trader in his town were being forced to abandon a life defined by religion, family and tradition amid rumours of powerful white men with a strange god-on-a-cross who were reshaping the world- men who married moral aggressiveness with compact and coherent nation-states, the profit motive and superior weaponry, and made Asian societies seem lumberingly inept in every way, unable to match the power of Europe or unleash their own potential.
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Pankaj Mishra (From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia)
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Bollywood's economic workings are more mysterious. It still exists in what was known as the informal and high-risk sector of the Indian economy. Banks rarely invest in Bollywood, where moneylenders are rampant, demanding up to 35 percent interest. The big corporate houses seem no less keen to stay away from filmmaking. A senior executive with the Tatas, one of India's prominent business families, told me, "We went into Bollywood, made one film, lost a lot of money, and got out of it fast," adding that "the place works in ways we couldn't begin to explain to our shareholders."
Since only six or seven of the two hundred films made each year earn a profit, the industry has generated little capital of its own. The great studios of the early years of the industry are now defunct. It is outsiders- regular moneylenders, small and big businessmen, real estate people, and, sometimes, mafia dons- who continue to finance new films, and their turnover, given the losses, is rapid. Their motives are mixed: sex, glamour, money laundering, and, more optimistically, profit. They rarely have much to do with the desire to make original, or even competent, films.
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Pankaj Mishra (Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond)
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Act is to provide for the termination of Federal supervision over the trust and restricted property of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewas in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana, for the disposition of Federally owned property acquired or withdrawn for the administration of the affairs of such Indians, for the intensification of an orderly program of facilitating the relocation and placement of such Indians in a self-supporting economy to the end that federal services and supervision with respect to such Indians may be discontinued as no longer necessary, and for the termination of Federal services furnished to such Indians because of their status as Indians.
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Louise Erdrich (The Night Watchman)
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13 million Indians will join the workforce every year from now till 2030. They know their prospects aren’t good. Here’s why: in the years from 1972 to 1983—not celebrated as a time of overwhelming prosperity—the total number of jobs in the economy nevertheless grew 2.3 per cent a year. In the years between liberalization in 1991 and today, jobs have grown at an average of only 1.6 per cent a year. But, if these young people have to be absorbed, then jobs must grow at least 3 per cent a year—almost twice the rate at which they have since liberalization. This is simply not happening. In other words, one out of every two youngsters who starts looking for a job next year won’t find one.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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The inevitable fact is that satellite technology and space exploration are far more accessible to large institutions, military and corporate, and are hundreds of times more likely to benefit their goals than yours or mine or the Sierra Club's. These space communications technologies were invented to provide a competitive edge to the institutions that invented them, and to assist their intended exploitation of nature. People who wish to live within the confines of the planet's organic limits, and who are not committed to a constantly expanding economy, or to seeking control of resources or land, do not need satellites to map resources. The people who live near what we call "resources" already know they are there, and are happy to leave them in place.
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Jerry Mander (In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations)
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His reading habit was so varied that in his early teens, he was reading both Maxim Gorky’s Mother and the detective thrillers (Jasoosi Duniya) of Ibn-e-Safi. The detective thrillers—be it Indian or American pulp fiction—were a big favourite for their fast action, tight plots and economies of expression. He remembers the novels of Ibn-e-Safi for their fascinating characters with memorable names. ‘Ibn-e-Safi was a master at naming his characters. All of us who read him remember those names . . . There was a Chinese villain, his name was Sing Hi. There was a Portuguese villain called Garson . . . an Englishman who had come to India and was into yoga . . . was called Gerald Shastri.’ This technique of giving catchy names to characters would stay with him. The wide range of reading not only gave him the sensitivity with which progressive writers approached their subjects but also a very good sense of plot and speaking styles. Here, it would be apt to quote a paragraph from Ibn-e-Safi’s detective novel, House of Fear—featuring his eccentric detective, Imran. The conversation takes place just outside a nightclub: ‘So, young man. So now you have also starred frequenting these places?’ ‘Yes. I often come by to pay Flush,’ Imran said respectfully. ‘Flush! Oh, so now you play Flush . . .’ ‘Yes, yes. I feel like it when I am a bit drunk . . .’ ‘Oh! So you have also started drinking?’ ‘What can I say? I swear I’ve never drunk alone. Frequently I find hookers who do not agree to anything without a drink . . .’ This scene would find a real-life parallel as well as a fictional one in Javed’s life later. Javed
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Diptakirti Chaudhuri (Written by Salim-Javed: The Story of Hindi Cinema's Greatest Screenwriters)
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Trail of Tears, “these forced migrations” whose “fearful evils…are impossible to imagine…. I have witnessed evils,” Tocqueville admits a couple of paragraphs later, “I would find it impossible to relate.”* Regarding the plight of Indians in the United States, words practically fail Tocqueville. As for black people, they seem less fated for extinction than Native Americans, but their situation is nevertheless dire: black people, enslaved or free, “only constitute an unhappy remnant, a poor little wandering tribe, lost in the midst of an immense nation which owns all the land.” Such an assessment seems strange, if not ridiculous, to the twenty-first-century ear, since “this poor little wandering tribe” comprised more than two million people, more than 18 percent of the total population. Tocqueville very clearly realizes that slavery damages southern white people as well as the southern economy. Because of slavery, southern white people’s customs and character compare poorly with those of other Americans.
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Nell Irvin Painter (The History of White People)
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But as soon as you enter a university, we witness a radical and communal face of Communism. Here, they propagate the weaknesses and evils of Hindu culture. They manipulate and twist ancient books to misrepresent them and provoke students. For example, they use Tulsidas’ chaupai, without mentioning the rest of the Ramcharitmanas, which is the real context. “ढोल गंवार शूद्र पशु नारी, सकल ताडना के अधिकारी.” Dhol ganvar shudra pashu nari, sakal tadana ke adhikari. ‘The above lines are spoken by the Sea Deity Samudra to Ram. When Lord Ram got angry and took out his weapon in order to evaporate the whole sea, the deity appeared and said the above lines in the context of boundaries that are created by God himself in order to hold his creations. ‘What Leftists do is that they very cleverly translate it literally in Hindi, ignoring the fact that Ramcharitmanas is written in Awadhi and the same word means one thing in Hindi and another in Awadhi. While the literal meaning of the line in Hindi is ‘Drums, the illiterate, lower caste, animals and women deserve a beating to straighten up and get the acts together’, its real meaning in Awadhi is different. In Awadhi, tadna means to take care, to protect. Whereas, in Hindi, the same word means punishment, torture, oppression. Samudra meant that like drums, the illiterate, Shudra, animals and women need special care and need to be protected in the boundary of a social safety net. In the same way, the sea also needs to reside within the boundaries created by God. And hence, Samudra gave the suggestion to create the iconic Ram Setu. ‘Here, Shudra doesn’t mean lower caste or today’s Dalit. It meant people employed in cottage industries.’ I remember there is a book by R.C. Dutta, Economic Interpretation of History, in which he has said that when the Indian economy was based on the principles of Varna, handicrafts accounted for over twenty-five percent of the economy. Artisans and labour who were involved in the handicraft business were called ‘Shudra’. If there was so much caste-based discrimination, why would Brahmins use their produce? Both Dutta and Dadabhai Naoroji have written that the terminology of ‘caste discrimination’ was used by the British to divide Indian society on those lines.
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Vivek Agnihotri (Urban Naxals: The Making of Buddha in a Traffic Jam)
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THE GLOBE | Unlocking the Wealth in Rural Markets Mamta Kapur, Sanjay Dawar, and Vineet R. Ahuja | 151 words In India and other large emerging economies, rural markets hold great promise for boosting corporate earnings. Companies that sell in the countryside, however, face poor infrastructure, widely dispersed customers, and other challenges. To better understand the obstacles and how to overcome them, the authors—researchers with Accenture—conducted extensive surveys and interviews with Indian business leaders in multiple industries. Their three-year study revealed several successful strategies for increasing revenues and profits in rural markets: Start with a good distribution plan. The most effective approaches are multipronged—for example, adding extra layers to existing networks and engaging local partners to create new ones. Mine data to identify prospective customers. Combining site visits, market surveys, and GIS mapping can help companies discover new buyers. Forge tight bonds with channel partners. It pays to spend time and money helping distributors and retailers improve their operations. Create durable ties with customers. Companies can build loyalty by addressing customers’ welfare and winning the trust of community leaders.
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Anonymous
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As an aside, Sheldon Rovin in his first draft of a guide to Systems Thinking, repeated this old chestnut: The often-quoted tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians, passed on from generation to generation, says that, ‘When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’ However, in government more advanced strategies are often employed, such as: 1. Buying a stronger whip. 2. Changing riders. 29 3. Appointing a committee to study the horse. 4. Arranging to visit other countries to see how other cultures ride horses. 5. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included. 6. Reclassifying the dead horse as living impaired. 7. Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse. 82 8. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed. 9. Providing extra funding/training to increase the dead horse’s performance. 10. Doing a productivity study to see if lighter riders would improve the dead horse’s performance. 3 11. Declaring that as the dead horse does not have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the economy than live horses. 12. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses. And, of course… 13. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.
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Russell L. Ackoff (Systems Thinking for Curious Managers: With 40 New Management f-Laws)
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By the time Lillian had turned twelve ears old, cooking had become her family. It had taught her lessons usually imparted by parents- economy from a limp head of celery left too long in the hydrator, perseverance from the whipping of heavy cream, the power of memories from oregano, whose flavor only grew stronger as it dried. Her love of new ingredients had brought her to Abuelita, the owner of the local Mexican grocery store, who introduced her to avocados and cilantro, and taught her the magic of matching ingredients with personalities to change a person's mood or a life. But the day when twelve-year-old Lillian had handed her mother an apple- fresh-picked from the orchard down the road on an afternoon when Indian summer gave over to autumn- and Lillian's mother had finally looked up from the book she was reading, food achieved a status for Lillian that was almost mystical.
"Look how you've grown," Lillian's mother had said, and life had started all over again. There was conversation at dinner, someone else's hand on the brush as it ran through her hair at night. A trip to New York, where they had discovered a secret fondue restaurant, hidden behind wooden shutters during the day, open by candlelight at night. Excursions to farmers' markets and bakeries and a shop that made its own cheese, stretching and pulling the mozzarella like taffy. Finally, Lillian felt like she was cooking for a mother who was paying attention, and she played in an open field of pearl couscous and Thai basil, paella and spanakopita and eggplant Parmesan.
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Erica Bauermeister (The Lost Art of Mixing)
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By the time Lillian had turned twelve years old, cooking had become her family. It had taught her lessons usually imparted by parents- economy from a limp head of celery left too long in the hydrator, perseverance from the whipping of heavy cream, the power of memories from oregano, whose flavor only grew stronger as it dried. Her love of new ingredients had brought her to Abuelita, the owner of the local Mexican grocery store, who introduced her to avocados and cilantro, and taught her the magic of matching ingredients with personalities to change a person's mood or a life. But the day when twelve-year-old Lillian had handed her mother an apple- fresh-picked from the orchard down the road on an afternoon when Indian summer gave over to autumn- and Lillian's mother had finally looked up from the book she was reading, food achieved a status for Lillian that was almost mystical.
"Look how you've grown," Lillian's mother had said, and life had started all over again. There was conversation at dinner, someone else's hand on the brush as it ran through her hair at night. A trip to New York, where they had discovered a secret fondue restaurant, hidden behind wooden shutters during the day, open by candlelight at night. Excursions to farmers' markets and bakeries and a shop that made its own cheese, stretching and pulling the mozzarella like taffy. Finally, Lillian felt like she was cooking for a mother who was paying attention, and she played in an open field of pearl couscous and Thai basil, paella and spanakopita and eggplant Parmesan.
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Erica Bauermeister (The Lost Art of Mixing)
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Think about it,” Obama said to us on the flight over. “The Republican Party is the only major party in the world that doesn’t even acknowledge that climate change is happening.” He was leaning over the seats where Susan and I sat. We chuckled. “Even the National Front believes in climate change,” I said, referring to the far-right party in France. “No, think about it,” he said. “That’s where it all began. Once you convince yourself that something like that isn’t true, then…” His voice trailed off, and he walked out of the room. For six years, Obama had been working to build what would become the Paris agreement, piece by piece. Because Congress wouldn’t act, he had to promote clean energy, and regulate fuel efficiency and emissions through executive action. With dozens of other nations, he made climate change an issue in our bilateral relationship, helping design their commitments. At international conferences, U.S. diplomats filled in the details of a framework. Since the breakthrough with China, and throughout 2015, things had been falling into place. When we got to Paris, the main holdout was India. We were scheduled to meet with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. Obama and a group of us waited outside the meeting room, when the Indian delegation showed up in advance of Modi. By all accounts, the Indian negotiators had been the most difficult. Obama asked to talk to them, and for the next twenty minutes, he stood in a hallway having an animated argument with two Indian men. I stood off to the side, glancing at my BlackBerry, while he went on about solar power. One guy from our climate team came over to me. “I can’t believe he’s doing this,” he whispered. “These guys are impossible.” “Are you kidding?” I said. “It’s an argument about science. He loves this.” Modi came around the corner with a look of concern on his face, wondering what his negotiators were arguing with Obama about. We moved into the meeting room, and a dynamic became clear. Modi’s team, which represented the institutional perspective of the Indian government, did not want to do what is necessary to reach an agreement. Modi, who had ambitions to be a transformative leader of India, and a person of global stature, was torn. This is one reason why we had done the deal with China; if India was alone, it was going to be hard for Modi to stay out. For nearly an hour, Modi kept underscoring the fact that he had three hundred million people with no electricity, and coal was the cheapest way to grow the Indian economy; he cared about the environment, but he had to worry about a lot of people mired in poverty. Obama went through arguments about a solar initiative we were building, the market shifts that would lower the price of clean energy. But he still hadn’t addressed a lingering sense of unfairness, the fact that nations like the United States had developed with coal, and were now demanding that India avoid doing the same thing. “Look,” Obama finally said, “I get that it’s unfair. I’m African American.” Modi smiled knowingly and looked down at his hands. He looked genuinely pained. “I know what it’s like to be in a system that’s unfair,” he went on. “I know what it’s like to start behind and to be asked to do more, to act like the injustice didn’t happen. But I can’t let that shape my choices, and neither should you.” I’d never heard him talk to another leader in quite that way. Modi seemed to appreciate it. He looked up and nodded.
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Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House)
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Except then a local high school journalism class decided to investigate the story. Not having attended Columbia Journalism School, the young scribes were unaware of the prohibition on committing journalism that reflects poorly on Third World immigrants. Thanks to the teenagers’ reporting, it was discovered that Reddy had become a multimillionaire by using H-1B visas to bring in slave labor from his native India. Dozens of Indian slaves were working in his buildings and at his restaurant. Apparently, some of those “brainy” high-tech workers America so desperately needs include busboys and janitors. And concubines. The pubescent girls Reddy brought in on H-1B visas were not his nieces: They were his concubines, purchased from their parents in India when they were twelve years old. The sixty-four-year-old Reddy flew the girls to America so he could have sex with them—often several of them at once. (We can only hope this is not why Mark Zuckerberg is so keen on H-1B visas.) The third roommate—the crying girl—had escaped the carbon monoxide poisoning only because she had been at Reddy’s house having sex with him, which, judging by the looks of him, might be worse than death. As soon as a translator other than Reddy was found, she admitted that “the primary purpose for her to enter the U.S. was to continue to have sex with Reddy.” The day her roommates arrived from India, she was forced to watch as the old, balding immigrant had sex with both underage girls at once.3 She also said her dead roommate had been pregnant with Reddy’s child. That could not be confirmed by the court because Reddy had already cremated the girl, in the Hindu tradition—even though her parents were Christian. In all, Reddy had brought seven underage girls to the United States for sex—smuggled in by his brother and sister-in-law, who lied to immigration authorities by posing as the girls’ parents.4 Reddy’s “high-tech” workers were just doing the slavery Americans won’t do. No really—we’ve tried getting American slaves! We’ve advertised for slaves at all the local high schools and didn’t get a single taker. We even posted flyers at the grade schools, asking for prepubescent girls to have sex with Reddy. Nothing. Not even on Craigslist. Reddy’s slaves and concubines were considered “untouchables” in India, treated as “subhuman”—“so low that they are not even considered part of Hinduism’s caste system,” as the Los Angeles Times explained. To put it in layman’s terms, in India they’re considered lower than a Kardashian. According to the Indian American magazine India Currents: “Modern slavery is on display every day in India: children forced to beg, young girls recruited into brothels, and men in debt bondage toiling away in agricultural fields.” More than half of the estimated 20.9 million slaves worldwide live in Asia.5 Thanks to American immigration policies, slavery is making a comeback in the United States! A San Francisco couple “active in the Indian community” bought a slave from a New Delhi recruiter to clean house for them, took away her passport when she arrived, and refused to let her call her family or leave their home.6 In New York, Indian immigrants Varsha and Mahender Sabhnani were convicted in 2006 of bringing in two Indonesian illegal aliens as slaves to be domestics in their Long Island, New York, home.7 In addition to helping reintroduce slavery to America, Reddy sends millions of dollars out of the country in order to build monuments to himself in India. “The more money Reddy made in the States,” the Los Angeles Times chirped, “the more good he seemed to do in his hometown.” That’s great for India, but what is America getting out of this model immigrant? Slavery: Check. Sickening caste system: Check. Purchasing twelve-year-old girls for sex: Check. Draining millions of dollars from the American economy: Check. Smuggling half-dead sex slaves out of his slums in rolled-up carpets right under the nose of the Berkeley police: Priceless.
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Ann Coulter (¡Adios, America!: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)
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Indian Express (Indian Express) - Clip This Article at Location 721 | Added on Sunday, 30 November 2014 20:28:42 Fifth column: Hope and audacity Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Tavleen Singh | 807 words At the end of six months of the Modi sarkar are we seeing signs that it is confusing efficiency with reform? I ask the question because so far there is no sign of real reform in any area of governance. And, because some of Narendra Modi’s most ardent supporters are now beginning to get worried. Last week I met a man who dedicated a whole year to helping Modi become Prime Minister and he seemed despondent. When I asked how he thought the government was doing, he said he would answer in the words of the management guru Peter Drucker, “There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all.” We can certainly not fault this government on efficiency. Ministers, high officials, clerks and peons now report for duty on time and are no longer to be seen taking long lunch breaks to soak in winter sunshine in Delhi’s parks. The Prime Minister’s Office hums with more noise and activity than we have seen in a decade but, despite this, there are no signs of the policy changes that are vital if we are to see real reform. The Planning Commission has been abolished but there are many, many other leftovers from socialist times that must go. Do we need a Ministry of Information & Broadcasting in an age when the Internet has made propaganda futile? Do we need a meddlesome University Grants Commission? Do we need the government to continue wasting our money on a hopeless airline and badly run hotels? We do not. What we do need is for the government to make policies that will convince investors that India is a safe bet once more. We do not need a new government that simply implements more efficiently bad policies that it inherited from the last government. It was because of those policies that investors fled and the economy stopped growing. Unless this changes through better policies, the jobs that the Prime Minister promises young people at election rallies will not come. So far signals are so mixed that investors continue to shy away. The Finance Minister promises to end tax terrorism but in the next breath orders tax inspectors to go forth in search of black money. Vodafone has been given temporary relief by the courts but the retroactive tax remains valid. And, although we hear that the government has grandiose plans to improve the decrepit transport systems, power stations and ports it inherited, it continues to refuse to pay those who have to build them. The infrastructure industry is owed more than Rs 1.5 lakh continued... crore in government dues and this has crippled major companies. No amount of efficiency in announcing new projects will make a difference unless old dues are cleared. Reform is needed not just in economic matters but in every area of governance. Does the Prime Minister know how hard it is to get a passport? Does he know that a police check is required even if you just want to get a few pages added to your passport? Does he know how hard it is to do routine things like registering property? Does he know that no amount of efficiency will improve healthcare services that are broken? No amount of efficiency will improve educational services that have long been in terminal decline because of bad policies and interfering officials. At the same time, the licence raj that strangles private investment in schools and colleges remains in place. Modi’s popularity with ordinary people has increased since he became Prime Minister, as we saw from his rallies in Kashmir last week, but it will not la
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Anonymous
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The development-minded prime minister is looking for foreign capital and technology to boost India’s economy. China’s stock of direct investment of $400m in India is derisory—less than that of Belgium. Talk fills the Indian press of a 250-fold increase, to $100 billion in just a few years.
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Anonymous
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Indian economy can withstand the world financial crisis better. This is due to: The liberalization process in India has checks and balances consistent with the unique social requirements of the country. The Indian banking system has always been conservative, which has prevented a crisis similar to that in the US and in Europe. The Indian psyche is generally savings-oriented and living within one’s means is a part of the Indian mindset. The 400-million-strong middle class, with its purchasing power, is providing economic stability to the nation.
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A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
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Meanwhile, on Raghav’s wish list was a film company. He was a Hindi film buff, but he was not in any way star-struck. He simply thought it was a good business idea, and that the time was right. Vandana, who had a lot of connections in the film industry, was to be a part of the venture. Raghav launched the film company as a personal venture, though TV18 was a minority investor, with a holding of 20 per cent. In June, the Indian Film Company raised Rs 400 crore at London’s Alternative Investment Market, much to Raghav’s amazement. ‘Almost any guy with even half a track record and a gleam of new economy, media or technology in his eye could go to London, float a company which hardly did anything, probably even if revenues were zero, and pick up equity. We did exactly that with our film fund. We had no track record in the film business. Zero.’ But investors were more than willing to throw money around in 2007.
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Indira Kannan (Network18: The Audacious Story of a Start-up That Became a Media Empire)
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The manipulation of currency, throughout a feature of the colonial enterprise, reached its worst during the Great Depression of 1929–30, when Indian farmers (like those in the North American prairies) grew their grain but discovered no one could afford to buy it. Agricultural prices collapsed, but British tax demands did not; and cruelly, the British decided to restrict India’s money supply, fearing that the devaluation of Indian currency would cause losses to the British from a corresponding decline in the sterling value of their assets in India. So Britain insisted that the Indian rupee stay fixed at 1 shilling sixpence, and obliged the Indian government to take notes and coins out of circulation to keep the exchange rate high. The total amount of cash in circulation in the Indian economy fell from some 5 billion rupees in 1929 to 4 billion in 1930 and as low as 3 billion in 1938. Indians starved but their currency stayed high, and the value of British assets in India was protected.
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Shashi Tharoor (Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India)
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The first and the most exciting thing for me as someone who has studied growth across countries from a macro perspective was that there is something truly unique about the Indian development model. I call this the ‘precocious development model’, since a precocious child does things far ahead of its time—in both the good and bad sense.
Political scientists have often observed that India is a complete outlier in having sustained democracy at very low levels of income, low levels of literacy, with deep social fissures, and with a highly agrarian economy. Almost no country in the world has managed that under these conditions. I think the only continuous democracies have all been small countries (Costa Rica, Barbados, Jamaica, Mauritius and Botswana) with higher levels of literacy and fewer social divisions.
The second part of the precocious model is that it entails not just precocious politics but also precocious economics. There are many ways of explaining this precocious economics model, but I focus on two.
Most countries grow by either specializing in or exploiting their minerals—as in the old model—and in some cases, exploiting their geography. But most of the post-war growth experiences have come about by becoming manufacturing powerhouses, especially starting with low-skill labour and going up the value-added spectrum. Korea, Taiwan and China are classic examples, specializing in textiles and clothing initially and now becoming major exporters of electronics, cars, IT products, etc.
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Arvind Subramanian (Of Counsel)
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You may not be able to imagine what it means to see upper-middle-class Indians wearing traditional African shirts and black Kenyans wearing Indian saris as they circled up to share the Lord’s Supper together. And I’m confident you cannot imagine the food.
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Michael Rhodes (Practicing the King's Economy: Honoring Jesus in How We Work, Earn, Spend, Save, and Give)
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India needs a progressive leader to represent her locally as well as internationally.She needs a dignified ,vociferous statesman , to represent her, talk for her, talk about her, talk to her and bring out the best out of her. I support a progressive, hate-free government for the future of my country. Every human deserves due respect and honour for being all that he or she is, however it cannot be denied an ounce of learning (with all humility) certainly aids in building a strong nation in every aspect. For eons India is known for her ideals, her diversity , and that she cherishes freedom and equality. Now any one who she calls her leader cannot be allowed to puncture the constitutional fabric and infringe on the privileges she has enjoyed for years ,especially after independence. Fellow citizens need to rise from sleep, that apathetic stupor, to realisation of the danger that she was plunged into in the recent past ,and the imminent danger posed to the constitutional fabric, the economy of India, and the image of India. India needs to rise above the constant bickering within her walls, as the wise saying goes, a house divided within herself cannot stand. The torch of peace that we light within our walls will help us glow and light the world. Awaiting results.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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India needs a progressive leader to represent her locally as well as internationally.She needs a dignified ,vociferous statesman , to represent her, talk for her, talk about her, talk to her and bring out the best out of her. I support a progressive, hate-free government for the future of my country. Every human deserves due respect and honour for being all that he or she is, however it cannot be denied an ounce of learning (with all humility) certainly aids in building a strong nation in every aspect. For eons India is known for her ideals, her diversity , and that she cherishes freedom and equality. Now any one who she calls her leader cannot be allowed to puncture the constitutional fabric and infringe on the privileges she has enjoyed for years ,especially after independence. Fellow citizens need to rise from sleep, that apathetic stupor, to realisation of the danger that she was plunged into in the recent past ,and the imminent danger posed to the constitutional fabric, the economy of India, and the image of India. India needs to rise above the constant bickering within her walls, as the wise saying goes, a house divided within herself cannot stand. The torch of peace that we light within our walls will help us glow and light the world.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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At the time of our visit, European manufacturers doubted the robustness of the Indian car market, as well as the merits of being a minority partner in a government-managed company. Their fears were not without basis. Though the Indian economy had grown 7.2 per cent in 1980-81, it was not seen as a very vibrant economy. The demand for cars had been stagnant for a decade. Cars were highly taxed and were considered a luxury item. The economy was still closed and highly controlled and the business environment for foreigners was not friendly. If the number of cars produced was small, royalties would not yield much income. The stringent localization conditions would mean that profits from the sale of imported components would be low. The world car market was going through a downswing at that time and European car makers were battling stiff competition from Japanese cars on their home turf. Getting into an unfamiliar, and what appeared to be an unattractive market, was hardly a priority.
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R.C. Bhargava (The Maruti Story)
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If you could even find Marx outside of university classrooms (where he was increasingly presented as a humanist philosopher instead of a revolutionary firebrand), it was on Wall Street, where cheeky traders put down Sun Tzu and heralded the long-dead German as a prophet of globalization. Capitalism had certainly yielded immense progress in countries such as China and India. In 1991, when Indian finance minister Manmohan Singh announced plans to liberalize India’s economy, he quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” Over the next twenty-five years, India’s GDP grew by almost 1,000 percent. An even more impressive process unfolded in China, where Deng Xiaoping upturned Mao-era policies to deliver what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and what the rest of the world recognized as state-managed liberalization. China is now as radically unequal as Latin America, but over five hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty during the past thirty years.1
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Bhaskar Sunkara (The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality)
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However, foreign observers were struck by how often even large Indian cities resembled immense camps, with people grouped around the people they served.
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Kenneth Pomeranz (The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World Book 118))
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Gilder G, 1996. The Moral Sources of Capitalism. In: Gerson M (ed.), The Essential Neo-Conservative Reader. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., pp. 151-159
Quoting page 154:
The next step above potlatching was the use of real money. The invention of money enabled the pattern of giving to be extended as far as the reach of faith and trust from the mumi’s tribe to the world economy. Among the most important transitional devices was the Chinese Hui. This became the key mode of capital formation for the overseas Chinese in their phenomenal success as tradesmen and retailers everywhere they went, from San Francisco to Singapore. A more sophisticated and purposeful development of the potlatching principle, the Hui began when the organizer needed money for an investment. He would raise it from a group of kin and friends and commit himself to give a series of ten feasts for them. At each feast a similar amount of money would be convivially raised and given by lot or by secret bidding to one of the other members. The rotating distribution would continue until every member had won a collection. Similar systems, called the Ko or Tanamoshi, created saving for the Japanese; and the West African Susu device of the Yoruba, when transplanted to the West Indies, provided the capital base for Caribbean retailing. This mode of capital formation also emerged prosperously among West Indians when they migrated to American cities. All these arrangements required entrusting money or property to others and awaiting returns in the uncertain future.
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Mark Gerson (The Essential Neoconservative Reader)
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We work hard. We retire at sixty. We go golfing or run around a nude colony. That’s the American dream. Quick money. Dodge diesels and women and drinking beers with your buddies. And there’s camaraderie in that. We all felt like we were really doing something. We were contributing to the economy. But that’s what sucks about money. When it’s gone, you figure out it’s not even real. It’s just a dopamine rush. We know what an oil field does. We know what drugs do. We know these things wreck everything about the human spirit, but we keep doing them.
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Sierra Crane Murdoch (Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country)
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The questions that I am concerned with in this book are about the very survival of Indian society. How Hinduism failed in constructing the dignity of labour; how it repeatedly attacked the productive values and energies of Dalitbahujan masses; and thereby how it attacked the productive culture itself. How it constructed violence as its social and spiritual essence.
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Kancha Ilaiah (Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy)
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For most of my childhood in the 1980s, no one had even heard of Bangladesh. The erasure brought up an old feeling of being illegible. Invisible. Maps make borders real. On this map, Bangladesh didn’t matter. As if generations of our people—who lived as Indian, British, Pakistani—didn’t fight or die for India’s Independence. As if they had not labored to build India’s economy and wealth for centuries. As if this land where India’s rivers end can be separated from the rivers and dams that Roy has written so fiercely about. As if the women-led garment workforce and rural microfinancing have not shaped modern South Asia’s feminist future. As if the soil of East Bengal did not birth ways of divine feminine worship. As if we have not always been despised, maligned, and erased by upper-caste Brahmins as the mleccha, low caste, Dalit, Muslim, barbarians.
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Tanaïs (In Sensorium: Notes for My People)
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Dalitbahujan structures, though they encompass a far larger number of people, indeed the whole working mass of India, is treated by brahminical literary, political and legal texts as nonexistent. As a result, even historians and social scientists from other parts of the world constructed Indian culture and history either in conformity with brahminical theocracy or critiqued it in its own terms without comparing it with the secular and democratic social systems of the Dalitbahujans. If only that had been done, every observer (if not from India, at least from abroad) could have realized that India has always been divided into two cultures and two civilizations: the Dalitbahujan and the brahminical. But this fact has been systematically glossed over.
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Kancha Ilaiah (Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy)
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Does he not know the rules, though? Slashers aren’t into guns. One of the papers she wrote for Mr. Holmes, even, back in the days of extra credit, was how the reason bullets never can take the slasher down is that they’re not in the gun economy at all, are far outside it, like there’s some unspoken deal in place: I won’t use you, you can’t hurt me.
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Stephen Graham Jones (Don't Fear the Reaper (The Indian Lake Trilogy, #2))
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Former slaves and natives. Eskimos and Hiroshima people, Amazonian Indians and Chiapas Indians and Chilean Indians and American Indians and Indian Indians. Australian aborigines, Guatemalans and Colombians and Brazilians and Argentineans, Nigerians, Burmese, Angolans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Afghans, Cambodians, Rwan-dans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Liberians, Borneoans, Papua New Guineans, South Africans, Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, Armenians, Palestinians, French Guyanese, Dutch Guyanese, Surinamese, Sierra Leonese, Malagasys, Senegalese, Maldivians, Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Kenyans, Panamanians, Mexicans, Haitians, Dominicans, Costa Ricans, Congoans, Mauritanians, Marshall Islanders, Tahitians, Gabonese, Beninese, Malians, Jamaicans, Botswanans, Burundians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Uruguayans, Nicaraguans, Ugandans, Ivory Coastians, Zambians, Guinea-Bissauans, Cameroonians, Laotians, Zaireans coming at you screaming colonialism, screaming slavery, screaming mining companies screaming banana companies oil companies screaming CIA spy among the missionaries screaming it was Kissinger who killed their father and why don’t you forgive third-world debt; Lumumba, they shouted, and Allende; on the other side, Pinochet, they said, Mobutu; contaminated milk from Nestle, they said; Agent Orange; dirty dealings by Xerox. World Bank, UN, IMF, everything run by white people. Every day in the papers another thing! Nestle and Xerox were fine upstanding companies, the backbone of the economy, and Kissinger was at least a patriot. The United States was a young country built on the finest principles, and how could it possibly owe so many bills? Enough was enough. Business was business. Your bread might as well be left unbuttered were the butter to be spread so thin. The fittest one wins and gets the butter.
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Kiran Desai (The Inheritance of Loss)
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The flourishing Indo-Mediterranean trade brought great prosperity to the Indian coast. The annual arrival of fleets of Roman merchants with considerable sums of gold and silver to exchange for the luxuries available at the ports transformed the economies of this region. A single hoard recently found in a sand dune at Kottayam in Kerala, for example, consisted of a large brass bowl containing 8,000 gold aurei, worth some 800,000 sesterces of imperial money – a considerable fortune.
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William Dalrymple (The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World)
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People searching for a new relationship with nature and a set of spiritual values to counter the individualism, political economy and environmental impact of modern industrial society latched on to the image of the Ecological Indian.
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Leigh Phillips (Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff)
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While based in Natal, Gandhi was also drawn into the Indian question in the Transvaal. Here, the ruling race were the Boers, who spoke Afrikaans and were largely of Dutch extraction. When, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the British took firm control of the Cape, the Boers commenced their ‘great trek’ inland. They established themselves beyond the Vaal and Orange rivers, displacing the Africans and taking control of vast areas of fertile land. Their economy, and their sense of self, was founded on farming, herding and hunting. While the British coveted the coast – which provided access to their jewel in the east, India – the Boers had possession of these inland territories.
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Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi Before India)
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Aditya told me that he produced staple fiber in Thailand from pulp that he bought in Canada. He sent the fiber to his factory in Indonesia for converting to yarn. He exported the yarn to Belgium, where it was made into carpets, and finally, the carpet was exported to Canada. “Here is Aditya Birla,” I thought, “an Indian, and yet India does not figure in this global value-added chain.” It did not because India had closed its economy. By closing it, it denied its citizens the chance to participate in the enormous expansion in global trade in the second half of the twentieth century. It denied its people jobs, technology, knowledge, and new ways of organizing. Thus, it deliberately suppressed economic growth.
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Gurcharan Das (India Unbound)
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Indian companies also had clear and numerous weaknesses. The most important ones were the inability to separate ownership from management; a lack of focus and business strategy; a short-term approach to business, leading to an absence of investment in employees and in product development; insensitivity to the customer, largely because of uncompetitive markets, but resulting in weak marketing skills; an indifference to technology; and, lastly, poor teamwork. Many of these weaknesses were the result of a closed economy.
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Gurcharan Das (India Unbound)
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Millions of Nepalese have swelled the armies of cheap mobile labour that drive the global economy, serving in Indian brothels, Thai and Malaysian sweatshops, the mansions of oil sheikhs in the Gulf, and, most recently, the war zones of Iraq. Many more have migrated internally, often from the hills to the subtropical Tarai region on the long border with India. The Tarai produces most of the country's food and cash crops and accommodates half of its population. On its flat alluvial land, where malaria was only recently eradicated, the Buddha was born twenty-five hundred years ago; it is also where a generation of displaced Nepalese began to dream of revolution.
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Pankaj Mishra
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The combination of internal controls and international protectionism gave India a distorted economy, underproductive and grossly inefficient, making too few goods, of too low a quality, at too high a price. The resultant stagnation led to snide comments about what Indian economist Raj Krishna called the “Hindu rate of growth,” which averaged some 3.5 percent in the first three decades after independence (or, to be more exact, between 1950 and 1980) when other countries in Southeast Asia were growing at 8 to 15 percent or even more.
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Shashi Tharoor (India: From Midnight to the Millennium and Beyond)
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So every dollar spent on finding some gene or hormone to explain why becoming fat is not because of sugary drinks, fried foods or unchecked gluttony is a dollar not spent on getting food for the hungry, vaccines for babies, shelter for the homeless. But the rules are made by the ones in power, these neo-Brahmins, and we must follow them if we want to survive in this global village.
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Anirban Bose (The Death of Mitali Dotto)
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On Pine Ridge and Rosebud they had communal cattle herds and some Indians were becoming ranchers in a small way. But the government was quick to destroy our budding economy. World War I broke out and in 1917 the white superintendent sold off our cattle “because it was needed for the war effort.
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Mary Brave Bird (Ohitika Woman)
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Interestingly, Jockey’s first attempt to enter India wasn’t with the Genomals. It was with Associated Apparels in 1962. Through the 1960s, many foreign innerwear brands were launched in India. Associated Apparels introduced the then world-famous Maidenform bras (owned today by Hanes) and tied up with Jockey to launch Jockey underwear in 1962. The international brand, Lovable, entered India in 1966 through a licensing deal and became a huge success. Along with it entered the brand Daisy Dee, through a subsidiary of Lovable, followed by Feelings. In 1971, Maxwell Industries launched VIP-branded innerwear for men in the economy segment, catching the attention of the discerning public with an advertisement featuring a Bollywood actor. In 1973, however, Jockey decided to leave India after the Indian government used the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) to force multinational companies to dilute their ownership in their Indian ventures to 40 per cent. After Jockey exited India, its competitors flourished. Associated Apparels continued to focus on mid-premium innerwear during the 1980s and was successful in establishing themselves as a dominant player in the mid-premium innerwear segment through Liberty (men) and Libertina (women). Maxwell Industries, during the 1980s, launched the brand, Frenchie, to cater to the mid-premium innerwear segment. In 1985, Rupa & Co. emerged in the innerwear market, offering products across categories, including men, women and kids, and became one of the biggest manufacturers and sellers of innerwear in India. The success of Rupa was followed by many other domestic brands in the 1980s and ’90s, including Amul, Lux Cozi and Dollar in the men’s category, while Neva, Bodycare, Softy, Lady Care, Little Lacy, Red Rose, Sonari, Feather Line, etc., were the key players in the lingerie market. Then came the liberalization of 1991. With the regulatory hurdles to enter India removed, Jockey decided to return to India. And this time, it chose the right partners.
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Saurabh Mukherjea (The Unusual Billionaires)
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Look at us! Everybody else used an industrial sector to get rich, but we are so brilliant and ancient and everything that we have jumped an entire stage, and gone straight to a services-dominated economy, like the US is today! Double Promotion! Service–Led Growth!
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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Giving up halfway’ could be our national sport. (In fact, it is—except we call it ‘Indian cricket’.)
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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Well, there are ways and ways of getting your hands on the small shareholder’s cash. Consider Suzuki’s way: it takes a large amount of money out of Maruti Suzuki and sends it to itself in Japan—but not as a dividend, which all the minority shareholders would have to examine and agree with, but as ‘royalty’ for using the Suzuki name. You think anyone still buys a Maruti car because of the Suzuki name? Maybe one or two people—enough to justify Rs 2454 crore going off to Japan in 2012–13? Thought not. Just to rub it in, do note that the amount that Suzuki ‘earned’ from the rights to its storied name in India was more than the conglomerate’s entire profits for that year in Japan, Rs 2402 crore. For that matter, the royalty was also higher than Maruti’s own profits, of Rs 2392 crore. One begins to suspect that the company is overpaying.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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Economic theory is an art more than a science. It fails at prediction half the time—or at just under half the time, which it feels is a defensible definition of ‘success’. It is a particular joy, therefore, when economic theory gets things right.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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The private sector, meanwhile, had treated requirements and contracts as an initial negotiating position, not a strict requirement.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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The era of the Privatization of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, as with any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new megacorporations, Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite, are those that have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth.9 It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.
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Anonymous
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This is the kind of corruption we understand, the corruption of the petty clerk writ large, and so this is the kind of corruption we look for. This is the kind of guilt we expect and understand: personal, targeted, involving suitcases. We really need suitcases.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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a watershed for Indian society was the success of 2001’s Dil Chahta Hai—a story about three rich young slackers trying very hard not to grow up, and eventually failing. That was the first movie, he insisted, in which the heroes were rich—and untroubled by their wealth.
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Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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New Economic Policy Since the announcement of the New Economic Policy (NEP) by the Government in July 1991, several important legislative and administrative policy changes have been brought about, which have had an enormous bearing on the economy. The NEP is very clear in its intent to dismantle control on business, make Indian industries globally competitive, move away from am import substitution regime to an export led growth oriented regime and welcome foreign equity investments to meet the growing demands of technology, products, and capital.
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Anonymous
Ramesh Singh (Indian Economy for Civil Services Examinations)
Mihir S. Sharma (Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy)
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India Version 2.0 was now up and running. Indians championed their nation as a global superpower, expounding its potential to overtake everyone as the fastest-growing economy. Yet for all its advances and progression, this was still a country where, in a village in Orissa, a 2-year-old boy could be married off to a dog called Jyoti to ward off evil spirits and ease the bad omen of his rotting tooth.
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Monisha Rajesh (Around India in 80 Trains)
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The nascent capitalism of modernity is a sacrificial economy that worships money as fetish and sacrifices the “subjective corporeality of the Indian and African slave,” and of other nonwhite peoples and any others whom it can catch up in its grasp. So necessary is such sacrifice that it is rationalized as legitimate. Part of this process of legitimization involved racial disparagement, constructing “others” for dehumanized exploitable purposes. If those who are marked for sacrifice become unruly, they become figures that are seen to merit greater control.
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Mark Lewis Taylor (The Executed God: The Way of the Cross in Lockdown America, 2nd Edition)
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Canadian Permanent Residency, Australia Permanent Residency, and Germany Permanent Residency: Your Path to a Better Future
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• August 27, 2024: 3,300 ITAs were issued for CEC candidates with a minimum CRS of 507.
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Our Canada immigration consultants in India provide expert guidance on navigating the complex Canada PR process. With our personalized approach, we ensure that your documents meet the stringent requirements, paving the way for a successful PR application.
2. Australia Permanent Residency (PR)
Why Choose Australia for Permanent Residency?
Australia’s booming economy and need for skilled professionals make it an attractive option for PR. Through the General Skilled Migration (GSM) program, Australia offers several visa categories, ensuring that you find the perfect pathway to PR.
General Skilled Migration (GSM) Pathways
Australia’s PR process offers various visa options, including:
• Skilled Independent Visa (Subclass 189)
• Skilled Nominated Visa (Subclass 190)
• Skilled Work Regional Visa (Subclass 491)
The GSM system is points-based, with applicants scoring higher points in areas such as qualifications and work experience having better chances. Australia’s Global Talent Stream is also available for fast-tracking PR in high-demand sectors such as IT, engineering, and healthcare.
Australia Immigration Consultants in India
At ESSE India, our Australia immigration consultants provide comprehensive support to Indian applicants throughout the Australia PR process. Whether it’s improving your points score or handling your visa application, we ensure a seamless process.
3. Germany Permanent Residency (PR)
Why Choose Germany for Permanent Residency?
Germany, with its strong economy and demand for skilled workers, is an excellent option for PR. The EU Blue Card offers an efficient route for qualified professionals to live and work in Germany. After 21-33 months, Blue Card holders are eligible for permanent residency.
Global Talent Stream in Germany
Germany’s Global Talent Stream attracts highly skilled professionals, especially in fields like technology and engineering, helping you achieve PR faster.
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esse india
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Western countries today often accuse Asian economies of violating intellectual property rights but it is worth remembering that their own economic rise was based on stealing ideas from others.
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Sanjeev Sanyal (The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History)
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Dio explains the argument given by Agrippa, ‘if we permit all the men of military age to have weapons and to practise warfare, they will always be a source of sedition and civil wars’.
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Raoul McLaughlin (The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy & the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia & India)
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The Upanishads have minutely classified every stage of spiritual advancement:
- Jivanmukta ("freed while living")
- a siddha ("perfected being") has progressed from the state of jivanmukta ("freed while living") to that of:
- a paramukta ("supremely free" - full power over death); the latter has completely escaped from the mayic thralldom and its reincarnational round. The paramukta therefore seldom returns to a physical body; if he does return, he is:
- an avatar, a divinely appointed medium of supernal blessings on the world. An avatar is unsubject to the universal economy; his pure body, visible as a light image, is free from any debt to Nature. The casual gaze may see nothing extraordinary in an avatar's form; but, on occasion, it casts no shadow nor make any footprint on the ground. These are outward symbolic proofs of an inward freedom from darkness and material bondage. [...] Krishna, Rama, Buddha and Patanjali were among the ancient Indian avatars. [...] Agastya, a South Indian avatar.
- Mahavatar (Great Avatar) - Babaji's mission in India has been to assist prophets in carrying out their special dispensations. He thus qualifies for the scriptural classification of Mahavatar (Great Avatar). [...] Babaji is ever in communion with Christ; together they send out vibrations of redemption and have planned the spiritual technique of salvation for this age. The work of these two fully illumined masters is to inspire the nations to forsake wars, race, hatreds, religious sectarianism, and the boomerang evils of materialism.[...]
Only one reason motivates Babaji in maintaining his physical form from century to century: the desire to furnish humanity wit ha concrete example of its own possibilities. Were man never vouchsafed a glumpse of Divinity in the flesh, he would remain oppressed by the heavy mayic delusion that he cannot transcend his mortality.
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pg305-310, Chapter 33, Babaji, Yogi-Christ of Modern India
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Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi)
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The opium was then sold to the Chinese in exchange for goods that were sold back in Europe. It solved the EIC’s silver problem but destroyed the Indian economy. Cheap textiles made on an industrial scale by British mills devastated the old artisan-made textile industry.
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Sanjeev Sanyal (The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History)
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IN MANY RESPECTS, modern-day India counted as a success story, having survived repeated changeovers in government, bitter feuds within political parties, various armed separatist movements, and all manner of corruption scandals. The transition to a more market-based economy in the 1990s had unleashed the extraordinary entrepreneurial talents of the Indian people—leading to soaring growth rates, a thriving high-tech sector, and a steadily expanding middle class. As a chief architect of India’s economic transformation, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh seemed like a fitting emblem of this progress: a member of the tiny, often persecuted Sikh religious minority who’d risen to the highest office in the land, and a self-effacing technocrat who’d won people’s trust not by appealing to their passions but by bringing about higher living standards and maintaining a well-earned reputation for not being corrupt. Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency; and during my visit to the capital city of New Delhi, we reached agreements to strengthen U.S. cooperation on counterterrorism, global health, nuclear security, and trade.
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Barack Obama (A Promised Land)
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Mass population movements, natural disasters, wars and the threat of global pandemics still have the potential to diminish human progress. Ultimately,
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Raoul McLaughlin (The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy & the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia & India)
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The labor of enslaved women and men was crucial to the Five Tribes’ economic and social success in Indian Territory... Preserved through family lines and nourished by increasing dividends, Black chattel slavery had bene an element of life in the Five Tribes for decades by the time of the Civil War.” Pg 23
“The Five Tribes, to varying degrees, adapted the institution of slavery to suit their own needs beginning in the late 1700s and intensifying in the early 1800s. Along with the institution of slavery the Five Tribes also adopted other parts of American ‘civilization,’ such as Euro-American clothing, agriculture, political language, religion….while retaining aspects of their own culture. As in the United States, the majority of people in the Five Tribes did not own slaves. Yet, Indian elites created an economy and culture that highly valued and regulated slavery and the rights of slave owners…In 1860, about thirty years after their removal to Indian Territory from their respective homes in the Southeast, Cherokee Nation members owned 2,511 slaves (15 percent of their total population), Choctaw members owned 2,349 slaves (14 percent of their total population, and Creek members owned 975 slaves, which amounted to 18 percent of their total population, a proportion equivalent to that of white slave owners in Tennessee, a former neighbor of the Chickasaw Nation. Slave labor allowed wealthy Indians to rebuild the infrastructure of their lives even bigger and better than before. John Ross, a Cherokee chief, lived in a log cabin directly after Removal. After a few years, he replaced this dwelling with a yellow mansion, complete with a columned porch.
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Alaina E. Roberts (I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land)
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Before the Second World War, the British paid ample lip service to the idea of self-government in India, but granting full independence was never a serious option. The Raj was the jewel in His Majesty’s crown; giving it up was unthinkable. But by 1947, the British nation was exhausted and traumatized by German bombing; discouraged by the loss of so many of its soldiers; shocked by the desertion and mutiny of its Indian servicemen; benumbed by unprecedented winter cold and an energy shortage that had the population shivering and its factories shuttered; broke, owing not only the Americans for the money that was keeping its economy afloat but India, too; and disgusted by the growing violence between Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs for which it took no responsibility, violence that would shortly lead to a bloodbath of historic proportions. Overwhelmed by these troubles at home and in its disintegrating colony, Britain concluded that exit from the subcontinent was the only option.
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Ayad Akhtar (Homeland Elegies)
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During the last fifty years, owing to the gradual impoverishment of the country and migration from the villages, these religious festivals have been considerably reduced and in some cases have ceased altogether. This has affected the circulation of money within the village economy and on the social side has made life dull and drab.
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Subhas Chandra Bose (An Indian Pilgrim (unedited))
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will be evident from this that Indian entrepreneurs were quick to grasp the possibilities of British and American steam technology. There is no reason to suppose that they would not have been at least as good at imitating it as were their counterparts in, say, Germany or Russia, had the circumstances been different. It was the very fact that India’s ruling power was also the global pioneer of the carbon economy that ensured that it could not take hold in India, at that point in time. The appetites of the British economy needed to be fed by large quantities of raw materials, produced by solar-based methods of agriculture.
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Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable)
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market research in India
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Fasal is an online system that connects farmers in rural India directly with market agents and other buyers. Via Fasal, farmers can quickly learn the price of goods at a number of nearby markets, choose the sales location most advantageous to them, and use the data to negotiate a better deal, a challenge that exists around the world.2 Sangeet Choudary, one of the authors of this book, led the commercialization and launch of the Fasal initiative. One of the challenges facing Choudary and his team was figuring out what kind of communications infrastructure they could use to enable producers and consumers to share value units. They realized that the big advantage working in their favor was cell phones. More than half of Indian farmers, even the poorest, own and use cell phones. In fact, as in much of the developing world, cell phone use in rural India has spread rapidly. Cellular telephony, with its instant communications capability, became the conduit for the market data the small farmers so desperately needed.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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beryls which display the best qualities of the most valuable gems, including the subtle-fires of the ruby, the flashing-purple of the amethyst and the sea-green tint of the emerald’. The most valuable beryls displayed aquamarine colours, but Pliny also mentions golden-yellow chrysoberyls and vivid-blue hyacinthizonte.30 For many Romans these Indian gems became an indispensable mark of their status. Beryl rings were cherished items and many
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Raoul McLaughlin (The Roman Empire and the Indian Ocean: The Ancient World Economy & the Kingdoms of Africa, Arabia & India)
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The removed Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had brought with them approximately five thousand black slaves, and the bondage institution persisted in Indian Territory as the planter-slaveholder elite set out to rebuild its exchange-oriented cotton and tobacco economy. This created secure markets for Comanche slavers who now commanded extensive raiding domains in Texas and northern Mexico.
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Pekka Hämäläinen (The Comanche Empire)
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The objective of Karma-Yoga is stated to be “action freedom.” The actual Sanskrit term is naishkarmya, which literally means “nonaction.” But this literal meaning is misleading, because it is not inactivity that is intended here. Rather, naishkarmya-karman corresponds to the Taoist notion of wu-wei, or inaction in action. That is to say, Karma-Yoga is about freedom in action, or the transcendence of egoic motivations. When the illusion of the ego as acting subject is transcended, then actions are recognized to occur spontaneously. Without the interference of the ego, their spontaneity appears as a smooth flow. Hence truly enlightened beings have an economy and elegance of movement about them that is generally absent in unenlightened individuals. Behind the action of the enlightened being there is no author; or we could say that Nature itself is the author. Action performed in the spirit of self-surrender has benign invisible effects. It improves the quality of our being and makes us a source of spiritual uplift for others. Lord Krishna, in the Bhagavad-Gītā, speaks of the karma-yogin’s working for the welfare of the world. The Sanskrit phrase he uses is loka-samgraha, which literally means “world gathering” or “pulling people together.” What it refers to is this: Our own personal wholeness, founded in self-surrender, actively transforms our social environment, contributing to its wholeness. “Mahatma” Gandhi was modern India’s most superb example of a karma-yogin in action. He worked tirelessly on himself and for the welfare of the Indian nation. In pursuing the lofty ideal of Karma-Yoga, Gandhi had to give up his life. He did so without rancor, with the name of God—“Rām”—on his lips. He embraced his destiny, trusting that none of his spiritual efforts could ever be lost, as is indeed the solemn promise of Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gītā, which Gandhi read daily. Gandhi believed in the inevitability of karma, but he also believed in free will.
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Georg Feuerstein (The Deeper Dimension of Yoga: Theory and Practice)
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The collapse of solidarity and security for many western European working people after the 1970s was compounded by the postwar flood of Third World immigrants into western Europe. When times were good, the immigrants were welcome to do the dirty jobs that the national labor force now spurned. When Europeans began to face long-term structural unemployment for the first time since the Great Depression, however, immigrants became unwelcome.
Moreover, European immigration had changed. Whereas earlier immigrants had come from southern or eastern Europe and differed only slightly from their new hosts (with the notable and significant exception of Jews from eastern Europe in the 1880s and the 1930s), the new immigrants came from former colonial territories: North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Turkey. And whereas earlier immigrants (some Jews again excepted) had tended to assimilate quickly and disappear, the new immigrants often clung to visibly different customs and religions. Europeans had to learn to coexist with permanent African, Indian, and Islamic communities that flaunted their separate identities.
The immigrant threat was not only economic and social. The immigrants were seen increasingly as undermining national identity with their alien customs, languages, and religions. A global youth culture, mostly marketed by Americans and often associated with black performers, did to local cultural traditions what the global economy had done to local smokestack industry.
Anti-immigrant resentment was pay dirt for radical Right movements in western Europe after the 1970s. It was the main force behind the British National Front. The most successful of them—Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France and Jörg Haider’s Freiheitspartei in Austria—were almost entirely devoted to exploiting anti-immigrant fears, fighting multiculturalism and an alleged immigrant criminal propensity, and proposing the expulsion of the alien poor.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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In playwriting there is a conception known as “Chekhov’s gun”: if there is rifle hanging above the mantelpiece in Act One, it’s going to be fired at someone by the end of Act Five. In the regulatory, enforcement and legal landscape around loan recoveries in India over last decade, the unused rifle usually disappears by Act Three, hence not credible since all stakeholders know about the preordained vanishing act. Investment in policy and regulatory integrity requires staying the course there is no other way.
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Urjit Patel (Overdraft: Saving the Indian Saver)
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Imperial domination spread. Slaves were the precious life-blood of the West Indian economy, where King Sugar reigned and in which £70 million had been invested by 1790. Under the asiento, British slave-traders transported a million and a half Africans to the Caribbean during the century: ‘All this great increase in our treasure,’ wrote Joshua Gee in 1729, ‘proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations.’ West African gold gave England the guinea. In 1787, Sierra Leone in West Africa was set up as a trial settlement of free blacks, as was New South Wales from 1788 for transported criminal whites. The future of English society was irreversibly being skewed by empire.
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Roy Porter (English Society in the Eighteenth Century (The Penguin Social History of Britain))
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They will tell you that we are traitors to our nation by encouraging people to use bitcoin. They will tell you that we are criminals, thugs, drug dealers, and terrorists. Don’t believe me? Look up what the Indian government has said just in the last two weeks about people who trade gold on the black market: "terrorists," "criminals," "thugs." I’m just a coder, I’m just a talker; I’m not a terrorist, I’m not a thug. But if I have the opportunity to build an exit from this system, then I will take that opportunity—because I know who the real terrorists are. There is no greater form of terrorism than creating war against your own people, by deliberately disrupting the very lifeblood of an economy, when there is no crisis; creating a natural disaster of enormous proportions simply to fight a currency war against another country.
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Andreas M. Antonopoulos (The Internet of Money Volume Two)
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Generally the rival companies used to molest the ships travelling with passes issued by their rivals. At times commanders of the issuing company were not averse to molest the ships, on account of various allegafions, such as carrying people, money, goods, jewels, letters, etc. forbidden by the pass or accusing them being in league with their enemies in any form. The Dutch issued time and again instructions to their factors to seize all those ships, which were in league with their enemies in any form, despite having passes from them.'^' And this compelled the Indian merchants to make a 'custom' to buy passes from more than one European Company for their voyage.'^^ The best way to ensure safety on the sea was to accompany the ships of the issuing authority of the pass with their permission.
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Nazer Aziz Anjum (Economy of Transport in Mughal India)
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Deprived of their direct ties with Central Asia -- and with it their access to Turkish slaves, mercenaries and war horses -- the later Ghaznavids lost their wider, imperial vision an acquired the character of a regional, North Indian state. They were certainly not seen as menacing aliens who might have posed a civilzational threat to Indian culture. Contemporary Sanskrit inscriptions refer to the Ghaznavids not as Muslims but as 'turushkas' (Turks), an ethnic term, or as 'hammiras', a Sanskritized rendering of 'amir' (Arabic for commander), an official title. For their part, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries Ghaznavid rulers in India issued coins from Lahore bearing the same legends that had appeared on those of their Indian predecessors, the Hindu Shahi dynasty (c.850-1002). These included Śiva's bull Nandi and the Sanskrit phrase 'śri samanta deva' (Honourable Chief Commander) inscribed in Devanagari script. Such measures point to the later Ghaznavids' investment in establishing cultural and monetary continuity with North Indian kingsdoms. Moreover, despite the dynasty's rhetoric about defending Sunni Islam, religion posed no bar to military recruitment, as Indians had always been prominent in Ghaznavid armies. In 1033 Mahmud of Ghazni gave the command of his army stationed in Lahore to a Hindu general, and in Ghazni itself Indian military contingents had their own commanders, inhabited their own quarter of the city, and were generally considered more reliable soldiers than the Turks.
Crucially, the Ghaznavids brought to the Punjab the entire gamut of Persianate institutions and practices that would define the political economy of much of India for centuries to come. Inherited from the creative ferment of tenth-century Khurasan and Central Asia under the Samanid rulers of Bukhara, these included: the elaboration of a ranked and salaried bureaucracy tied to the state's land revenue and military systems; the institution of elite, or military, slavery; an elaboration of the office of 'sultan'; the courtly patronage of Persian arts, crafts and literature; and a tradition of spiritually powerful holy men, or Sufis, whose relations with royal power were ambivalent, to say the least.
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Richard M. Eaton (India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765)
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The Hinglish continuum, then, is an exit strategy. It is not a way of keeping one Indian language alive forever in parallel with English. The destination in India, for language, for the economy, and for politics, is the swift-flowing current taking us into the global arena. The only countries that have held off the decimation of their languages as they tread the neoliberal waters are those where all education has been firmly kept in a local language.
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Peggy Mohan (Wanderers, Kings, Merchants: The Story of India through Its Languages)
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In the end, we had to build our own network of data gatherers—what Indians call a “feet on street” (FOS) sales force.
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Geoffrey G. Parker (Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy―and How to Make Them Work for You)
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A dramatic ageing of the population. Its effects will start being felt in 2005 (from the retirement of numerous groups). Since the government did not foresee and reform the retirement system paid out of each year’s taxes, we know it is already too late. There will not be sufficient funds to furnish allocations and healthcare to seniors and ever higher taxes will be levied on those who are working. The result will necessarily be a generalised lowering of purchasing power and therefore of economic growth based on consumption. The ageing of the population will also rapidly lead — it is already happening — to another frightening effect: a loss of technological skills. There are not enough young minds. 2) The massive immigration of new battalions from the Third World to palliate these gaps, so desired by the UN, is an imposture. These migrants are unskilled and need social services themselves. They are mouths to feed, not the brains needed in a post-industrial society. Germany wanted to import more than 30,000 engineers that it needs (already), but got only 9,000 Indians. The immigration-colonisation (of which the entire cost is already more than 122 billion euros a year), which will not stop growing, added to the steadily increasing birth rate of the foreigners — most of them, as everyone knows, are not able to earn a good education — will be one more brake on economic prosperity. The current masses of ‘youths’ from Africa and North Africa will for the most part have a choice only between unemployment supported by welfare payments or participation in the parallel and criminal economy. The professional value of the workforce is going to experience a dramatic decline as soon as 2010.
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Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
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History is replete with rulers who maintained stability at the cost of justice, humanity and morality. Everyone from Adolf Hitler to Saddam Hussein to Muammar Gaddafi managed productive economies, sophisticated bureaucracies and large populations whilst simultaneously generating simmering dissent.
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Sidin Vadukut (The Sceptical Patriot: Exploring the Truths Behind the Zero and Other Indian Glories)
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The impressive performance of the Indian economy in the 2004-08 period and its ability to withstand the immediate impact of the Lehmann collapse contributed to India’s global standing and to Dr Singh’s global image. Leaving the London G-20 summit in April 2009, President Barack Obama went to Germany where a young school student asked him which politician he admired. Obama’s instant reply was that among existing world leaders he admired Dr Singh of India the most.
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Sanjaya Baru (The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh)
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Indian Gold obsession isn’t just cultural—it’s economic strategy.
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Dipti Dhakul (Quote: +/-)