Recession for India, never happened! ! – An analysis

In my opinion, recession for people of India never actually happened as compared to many of us in the US.

India as a transitional economy, is very vibrant, resilient and to some extent, self sustaining. India enjoys the benefits of being a developing country with much-talked domestic growth, staggering internal consumption from its burgeoning 800 million strong middle class and the new spirit of entrepreneurship . So when the economic downturn started in the US two years ago, the India exports were still steady and imports increased marginally. However as the economic condition worsen over the months, it was only in December 2008, every other country felt the ripples as well.

Indian recession was primarily triggered by a mix of couple of factors. First, the global financial meltdown tailored by few at Wall Street brought the entire US credit market down. With Fanney and AIG going down, the two heavy hitters brought jitters to the people at Oval office.  Beginning of the year and the unemployment rate grew upto 13%, highest in the history of United States in this modern era. Higher credit crunch, means more layoffs. With more and more people becoming unemployment, the number of expats going back home to India rose sharply. The not-so-much expected “changes”  in the fields of money sent by expats to India as remittance exports diminished as the demand globally hit the bottom.

Thanks to the provisions of Stimulus bill and Tarp funds, bad assets were bought out and economic players were freed of the upcoming bankruptcy. In addition to the good work these funds did, they limited the ability to hire American companies foreign nationals. Indian software industry was the worst hit by this. For the ninth year in a row, India has been the top source of sending students to study in the US. Foreign nationals graduating from school, and also who were already here, heavily rely on H1 B visas and the provisions of the Stimulus limited this overflow. Slowly and slowly, as the credit crunch at the Wall street eases, US economy continues to recover from depression bruises.

Less people working in the US means less money sent back home as remittance to India. As a result, the Indian earnings dropped for fiscal year. The world must not forget that US is of course $13 trillion economy and whereas India is expected to reach $2 trillion by 2020. There is a whole lot of dollar gap even if that happens. So developing countries will continue to line up for US’s business.  And as more and more companies recover from red lines in the balance sheets, the business will struggle back to come back to it’s “expected state.”    This means more business for the countries like India, who depend heavily on imports and are in the process of becoming industrialized nations.

Another important dichotomy to be noted is that, many in the BRIC countries didn’t experience negative growth. Indian economy never went down to a negative number in the recession, however the world’s biggest economies did. Japan, UK, Germany and the US contracted by atleast one percent of their economic size during this recession. At worst, the Indian economy declined to a figure near 6.5 % and NOT negative. So I m very convinced that recession for India never happened.

I could have easily bought the argument that Indian economy slowed down in the midst of the economic meltdown, but recession never came to the people of South east transitional economy.

Cross connections – Serial or Parallel

How do you feel about yielding your bed at 3:30 am in the morning? Disgusting right! Even if I get up late, say 7, morning still comes anyways! J

Yearning up from a place a little far away from my own bedroom, I entered my bed at 4:50 am and after contemplating going to bed again or not for less than 60 seconds, I finally gave up on going to bed.

So imagine at 4:51 am you are standing in the middle of your room and thinking what to do? Seems a little lost? I was honestly. Rushing through the book kept next to me ( Blink) and understanding that I cant read it any faster, I gave up on that too, and did allow myself to relax a little bit watching SG1 on Hulu.com. And before I knew, it was time to get ready for work! LoL

Then all of a sudden my eye shutterbugs went down and I was almost going to give in. I think I gave in for a nano seconds coming back only to see another adverstismetn running in between the season 4 of SG1,which can become a little too much when you don’t have the patience to wait for the episode to continue giving me thrill of SG.

Away from that, I messed up a little bit before I could eat my breakfast and pack my lunch ( yes yes, I pack my lunch! BOOOO.. I am vegetarian and it is hard ! lol ) It was my intention do as the old German proverb says;

“Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.”            

So based on this, I made two eggs ( sunny side up in my own special delicacies) sandwiched between toasted 12 grain bread slices and a little protein butter. This was soon supplemented by bowl of (warm to hot) milk and oatmeal cereals. But that is not just enough. I kept on thinking something was missing; Because this CAN’T be what Kings eat! ( ha ha ) So I decided quickly grabbed the nicest curry from the leftovers I got from my temple. Together I pushed a nice home made wheat bread onto the pan for heating it.  

Now while making my breakfast, I had a tough time dealing parallel activities. Like my ideals in life (Stay tuned for the next blog posting about Mahatma Gandhi), I also like to stay on top of my things and work very hard for whatever cause it might be. Time was clocking very quickly and no kidding I wanted to cook breakfast ASAP, eat and then wear my socks, shoes and belt, take my laptop, oh yeah the charger and yes the mouse! It almost appeared that I was flooding with breakfast and clothes at the same time.

Seriously, consider your home kitchen slab (shelf) with Protein Butter, Wheat Bread, Eggs pack, Butter knife, Plate, curry, home made bread, a pack of cereals and an empty bowl. So now you make two eggs, put bread onto grill, microwave curry, and prepare for next slot of things. Once the face of eggs is done, it is time to cook the back! Swap it up a little and add black pepper and a little salt now. Ding! The bread is done. Tossing it up on the porcelain plate, I am careful not to break it and increase my work by cleaning the menace. Well, the work is not done yet, apply the butter and take out the curry from microwave. Now run to the fridge and get milk for microwave and how about the cereals? Bring them from the attic and see what flavor you like. Quickly you drop the flavor you like onto the shelf behind you and grab the eggs, bread and butter while you rush to the fridge. By this time, the eggs are almost done and you still have the pan on the fire! J Oh where is my other bread? I forgot it in the fridge!

Well finally after two more minutes, my myriad with cooking breakfast and eating king size ended with food finally ready and I decided to eat it outside rather than have to go to my room to eat and then bring the dirty plates to the kitchen later.

Now off to the room to do the rest of shoes, socks, belt, laptop, chords, mouse and other things! And I had 10 minutes to complete all of this. Yeah baby! BREAK a leg. Ha Ha Ha

Well you see there is a connection, it appeared to me if not parallel, then serial. I just think I would be way well off cooking my breakfast at dinner time. It just appeared to me, as much as we want our mind to work in parallel, mind likes to work serially, afterall!

Time for a little twist

Twist – A little change of pace in the moronic way of life is sometimes a life saver. That is what happens Aaj Kal! ( these days). What has happened to life? Anyone? I guess we scrambled out our lives to the commonalities of urban working phenomenon. And in between all of the grocery shopping, picking up kids from school, laundry and eating out, we just lost the pickle of life – Twist/Change.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in an environment where I could see the sunlight by 6 in the morning flooding my room. This was partially because of the way our house was built ( Civil BS) and partially to my nature loving/urban phenomenon hating folks; they would sneak into our rooms in the morning when they get up and slide the curtains to the sideways, making already gigantic entrance of sunlight look even more behemoth and kill my need to sleep.

But that being said, change is almost always a good thing. And so is the twist in expectations.

I personally have always wanted to stay near LI/NJ/NYC/CT  area, for my personal reasons. In short, I just like it here. And in August month, I moved here ( read the story of moving here), it was a change. A change because of which I experienced new portions of life, a change which made me a little more grumpy ( for meeting weird people), a change which made me very loyal customer to Starbucks! ( My favorite Starbucks bar in New jersey), a change that made me go to Barnes and nobles everyday, a change that made me drive almost 200 miles every week, a change that made me cook everyday again and a change that took away all of my exercise! But twist with mint of change is good.

As I understand change is always difficult to absorb and accept.

Some people take more time to chill out and be back to normal than others and it is this very discernible ability makes people them real.This is what makes them, the real them. Think about it!

On the other hand, thoughts the most important thing in one’s conscious. I remember this famous quote

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny

Source : Thinkexist.com

There is more that I can talk and type in, but apart from this, I have a life ( with a twist) which I need to get back. I might be a king in real life, but all I am is a weapon drenched in swamp for now ( with a twist)!

For the fans from India homeland,

the teaser is  this. I like this song because it is peppy and light. Keeps you in a good mood! Works at least for me

Till my next musing! Chao!

One of it’s kind – Motivation or Pep talk!

Motivation is a complex emotion. Just standing near sea can accelerate your adrenaline rate. And for some, it is just fancy pep talk for the average life.

I m talking about a special breed of human beings — The people who feel comfortable even when no one is around for them; I m one of them! Motivation is the food for movement. We love what we do and have busier schedules round the clock. Few motivators such as family, the special loved one, religion, etc. are relevant to some degree, but the motivation largely remains internal and self engendered.

For instance, will you continue to work on your vocabulary even when you don’t see an immediate need where you can apply the learning? And the kicker is, what is the language of vocabulary is not your first language.

For rest of us, we need either one of them – direction, outline of path, energy, constant push, or just lame peer competition. Motivation is like a digestible entity, whose diurnal dose is very much looked forward. The individuals characterized with former traits are the ones who lead the latter type of folks.

Some of the media which carries me to a higher motivated state are here below:

One moment in time – Whitney Houston

Again, Again, Again – Miracle Movie

Any given sunday speech

Our greatest fears – Coach Carter

Are bloggers socially challenged or not?

The imperative behind blogging is to explore and share viewpoints delineated with individual experiences thrown to into with heated arguments & sometimes with the kind words of encouragemetns, creating the perfect example of blogging.

There are a lot of issues and everyone of us migh thave something to agree or disagree. In a era of democracy and being physically presented in one of one of the world’s oldest democracies, I can tell for sure, that a lot of people have opinions that they want “others” to hear.

More often than not sometimes our different life experiences like layingoff, death of a loved one, religious intolerance, racial bias, etc. need to be explored from more than one viewpoints.

Like everything, everyone evolves. The methods of interpersonal communication like social networking, face to face comunication and blogging evolves. My thought is that people who frequently blog develop a special kind of skill set which is advanced for blogging communications but is very “retarded” socially. The degree of retardiness might vary very very strongly.

Some people would argue that the amount of time they spend on “connecting” electronically via blogging can ideally and should be spent on social networking and one to one communication.

But you can’t challenge the value of a well thought out and grammatically correct argument about anything and everything.

So blogging might be a cause (for few of us outside) for social communication retardiness but blogging is a way of expression, a method of telling the world how you see it through your glasses & and unbiased ( & sometimes biases) viewpoints ! !

Struggle of Beacon !! – Juice or concrete!

Reading this one quote from the book I have been reading, it made me think. More than just think, it let me believe that I can still hang on to belief and not give up.

I have been struggling lately, but struggling doesn’t mean giving up. It just means you are not happy with the way things are and you are trying to change things and iron things out, but it is not really working that way and you aren’t satisfied with the results that follow.The quote reinforced the concept that belief is a tangible and variable personal entity which will grow or die based on what food is given to it. You can let go of your belief in one moment of struggle and feel “comforted” for a moment or you can hang on to it and still try. After all, sometimes you might have to kiss 100 frogs before you find your prince. (Smile face)

Kiss the damn frog!

Eureka moment is not here yet but the YAY moment is and came from this paragraph:

“From all these episodes, Jacobsen learned an overarching lesson: Don’t let disappointment lead to disillusionment. Surprisingly, after all these letdowns, Jacobsen has kept the faith.” I tell students this all the time,” he says. “The most important thing you can have is the ability to believe. Believing is a controllable aspect of people. You can let it be beaten out of you by bad events. You can become cynics, and a cynic does nothing. If you are going to invent or create, you have to put a lot of effort into something strictly on the idea of belief, because you can never know enough to justify doing it otherwise. It’s pretty much the same way in anything you do. The venture guys bitch and moan and fail about 60 percent of the time. I bitch and moan and I fail about 60 percent of the time. You’ve got to roll the dice. It’s easy to be let it be stomped out of you. But failure can teach you to keep the faith.”

This paragraph has been taken from Chapter “Embracing failure” of the book (page 158). The intention of sharing of this paragraph is to inspire, discuss and if possible learn from it, and not pursue copyright infringement.

Everything for everyone is different. And so is struggle. This part of my life called struggle, is infact different. It is the way I live, it is the way I work, and I feel about things.

Review of “Confessions of an economic Hit Man (EHM)”

Book cover

I don’t exactly remember which of my friends and/or acquaintances told me to read this book in the first place, and like always I added this book to my “to be read” list and decided to wait whenever it’s turn comes up in the my list.

Initially I had reservations reading this book. For a guy like me who had none whatsoever background of accounting & economics, words like Economic Hit Man were totally intimidating. My first reaction to the title was of fear. It appeared daunting and a bit of too subjective to read. It is not clear to me, what made me read this book – my internal ability to push myself to do new (read weird) things and keep myself open (read vulnerable) to everything or my ability to torture myself with most awkward things in life just because I want to see myself as strong (read Mighty STRONG) or just random curiosity. But whatever it was, I can’t thank it enough for making me read this book and completing it till the very end.

John Perkins writes very candidly about his life, his geographically widespread professional entourage, turbulent personal accidents and of all the stories which his experience brought to him. The book started with a confused and a not clear note, which is acceptable given the fact that the reader should be able to put things in “his perspective” rather than putting things in “author’s perspective”.

At first I guessed that this book would be a fable of some economic blunders made in the US economy and some of its “free trade partners” in this global economy, but to my surprise this book contained that and much more.

The way John passes through countries through countries and explains tirelessly about what MAIN Corporation stands for and how MAIN reaped him in, intertwined with the notion of personal life as well is nothing short of indescribable. Earlier just professional and later his personal experiences started to revolve around MAIN’ strategy to expand the global empire and meeting to my realms of understanding, this thirst of oil continues to evade US supported MAIN from one continent to another.

Horrifying examples of Ecuador, Panama, Indonesia, and Canal country are meant to open the eyes of the readers and the masses (by a long shot though) to the corporate bureaucracy. The author coined a new term out of it, which is interesting too. The book clearly shows that the oldest democracy in the world has outlawed all the international laws (the experience stories about Vietnam and Iraq war), nullified all the popular democracy movements in the targeted countries (for e.g. Canal), CIA assassinations imprints (for example, murder of Roduge) all over the books, colossal amount of national debts incurred to these countries in lieu of providing foreign aid for building infrastructure ( such as highways, dams, power plants, oil plants and many more), loss of national freedom, and many similar activities.
Why this book & its controversial experiences seem to me as different is a good question that I am asking myself, way before even I thought I would write a review about it.

Big fish still eats the small fish. A mightier country today dictates the smaller country by means money (read foreign aid), technology transfer (read lobbying for concessions and army base) and sometimes war (read US supported army coup). Oil thirst seems to overtake everything else in the world and on this planet. NOTHING stands in front it. The fact that first EHMs are sent to a country to investigate and prepare the ground to a new country and if that fails, the jackals are sent shows the pinch of might these bigger conglomerates have over you and my daily affairs.

Each one of us likes to think that I am free and I am equal as guaranteed by the constitution (this is usually true for most of the countries, irrespective of where you belong to and from where you are reading this), but in the bigger picture, these big money earning and oil thirsty juggernauts will destroy the very fundamental of freedom by enslaving everyone of us with their products, services and money.

To our greatest fear, even today the imperialism prevails. It really doesn’t matter that which nation you are reading this entry from, but it matters what history you nation has and most importantly what it is going through now. Imperialism as we knew it, ended ages ago. Now you don’t see geographically spread colonies and rampant human slavery, but you see huge national debts of countries once rich with natural resources, now we don’t see blacks and browns tortured because of their skin color (partly thanks to the system and partly to education that let’s everyone to be seen as equals), but we see good people like John Perkins working as EHM and helping to create global empires for the countries like this one on the expense of so many others.

You can visit this page to read on goodreads
or visit my page at blogger at http://myownhope.blogspot.com/

Good reads

On insistence from a friend, I went to Good reads and to my amazement, I liked it. I thought I would just share.

Book worms love books

I know it not be a big deal for the people who don’t read or are already expert users of this website, either way, I think it is a great way to keep in touch with what you are reading and your preferences.

If you are a book lover, you wouldn’t want to miss this website, if you haven’t been to it. Believe me, you won’t regret it.

There is plenty of books available to select and maintain your shelves from. And you create your profile and create an inventory of books you have read, want to read, and reading. And there you go,you share your reviews, books and catalog.