CYBER AGE: FROM THE STATESMAN
ND Batra
The arrest of Avnish Bajaj, the CEO of e-Bay’s Indian subsidiary Baazee.com, in connection with the posting for auction of a teenage-sex video, should not have become a matter of such grave concern as it has been made out to be in the Indian media. The buck must stop at the CEO’s door. Period. And that’s why so many corporate chairmen, presidents and other top officials in the USA are in jail, some for direct involvement in the abuse of public trust and others for contributory criminal negligence. Ignorance of law, as has been said many times, is no excuse especially when software programmes are available to filter out what is illegal.
It was a failure of imagination on the part of e-Bay-Baazee that its top officials could not foresee this kind of criminal activity taking place on their platform. Despite all the noise about Bajaj’s temporary incarceration, it is important to keep in mind that child pornography, even the possession of it in the privacy of one’s home, is a serious crime in the USA, where Baazee.com’s parent company e-Bay is based. Dissemination of child pornography offline or online, or being a contributory to it, is treated almost at par with murder. Bajaj who went to Harvard and is a US citizen should have known that creating an auction platform would not have given him any immunity in the USA. And he should not have expected it in India either. But being a member of the new Brahmin class that is rising in India, NRIs and Indian-born US citizens returning home to “civilise” their motherland, people like Bajaj think that they are ushering in a new era of not only unprecedented economic growth but also of unbridled freedom, thus unfortunately mimicking the worst of America despite their presumed good intentions.
It is surprising that Infosys chairman NR Narayana Murthy described Bajaj’s arrest in the MMS scandal as “too drastic” an action. No, it was the proper thing to do to prevent India from gradually sliding into cultural anarchy. As India grows economically, it needs more social discipline. Worse than Murthy’s misplaced sympathy was the US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher’s statement that secretary of state Powell was concerned about the case. “I do know this situation is one of concern at the highest levels of the US Government,” Boucher said. “It’s a matter that we have been following.” I thought Powell had better things to do than interfere in a petty law enforcement case in India! Bajaj will get his day in the court but a high-profile case like this would alert other online service providers to watch their corner of cyberspace.
Corporate American leadership, whether e-Bay or Union Carbide (responsible for the Bhopal disaster), must accept responsibility for its actions. Instead of making amends for their criminal negligence, they seek diplomatic immunity based on the false argument that since they are contributing to economic growth, their crimes should be overlooked. It is most shameful when some in the Indian media try to cozy up with global companies doing business in India and ignore their abuses. Consider, for example, a typical response from an India journalist, who wrote, “As India continues its struggle to integrate itself with the global economy and attract more international investments, the experience of Bajaj could turn out to be a serious dampener.” That’s an absurd statement! Should India prostitute itself to attract foreign investment? What India needs is a courageous person like Eliot Spitzer, the New York Attorney General, who has taken upon himself the mission of preventing corporate greed and financial abuse. With the cleaning up of the corporate mess, Americans have begun to trust the market again.
NASSACOM forgets that the Baazee case is not about doing business in India but about trading and auctioning of online child pornography. NASSACOM’s admonition too was misplaced: “As a global, mature and responsible technology industry and the most attractive destination for services, we need to ensure that we do not send out the wrong signals to global customers and investors.” NASSACOM should let foreign investors know that the law of the land must be respected and that like any other “civilised and modern democracy,” India too would take “draconian measures” to protect its citizens, especially children. Listen to what the US Attorney General John Ashcroft said some time ago: “No one should be able to avoid prosecution for contributing to the abuse and exploitation of the nation’s children. The Department of Justice stands side-by-side with our partners in the law enforcement community to pursue those who victimise our children…”
Absence of moral outrage over the behaviour of school teenagers involved in the sex scandal and the lackadaisical attitude of school authorities has been no less shocking. Which makes me wonder where India is heading.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
Monday, December 27, 2004
US foreign policy
"Corporate power is the driving force behind US foreign policy - and the slaughter in Iraq," wrote JK Galbraith in The Guardian. Corporate Power is an expression of free market capitalism, but how does this lead to slaughter anywhere?
Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Dragon makes a move and Americans are all shook up
ND Batra: From The Statesman
WHAT’S in a name?
A lot.
Brand is the thing, the real thing in the global economy.
Suddenly the old question, “Guess, who is coming to dinner?” has assumed a new meaning.
Chop sticks, please. We’re Chinese.
Although no security alert or red flag went up when it was announced that a most celebrated icon of the US technology, IBM, was selling a part of itself, as it were, its brain, ThinkPad, to a Chinese company, Lenovo Group, for a paltry sum of $1.25 billion, a diffused state of anxiety and discomfort set in. Chinese companies, even when some of them don’t know how to manage themselves — Chinese Aviation Oil (Singapore) is a case in point — are nonetheless so ambitious that they are on an international hunt for acquisitions, especially for global brands.
IBM’s sale of its personal computer business would catapult Lenovo to become the third biggest computer company in the world, after Dell and Hewlett-Packard. “As Chinese companies move from prey to predator, they are also sitting on a powerful advantage: A possible currency revaluation. If the yuan rises 10 per cent, 20 per cent or even 40 per cent analysts expect, overseas acquisitions of household-name companies and properties become that much cheaper. In other words we haven’t seen anything yet from China,” writes Bloomberg’s columnist William Pesek Jr.
The Brits too have become alarmed and wonder whether America will become China-compatible one day, a secondary power at the service of a new superpower that’s sans freedom, sans, democracy, sans human rights. David Smith and Dominic Rushe recently wrote in the Sunday Times: “The sale of IBM’s personal computer business to a Chinese group shows that China is no longer content to be just the world’s workshop. It wants to own global businesses as well, and is using its low-cost advantages to embark on the acquisition trail. The Lenovo-IBM deal represents a coming of age for China. Until recently the economy that will dominate in the 21st century has been content to be the new workshop of the world. Now it has signalled that it wants a big slice of the control, and the boardroom action, as well.”
The fall of the dollar is not only bringing hordes of Europeans to shop and vacation, it is also bringing Chinese investors to buy businesses and industries, much as it happened in the 1980s when the Japanese went on a shopping spree. Of course ThinkPad will look like ThinkPad, which in fact is part of the deal that will allow Lenovo to keep the brand, and IBM, as a junior partner, would stand by it. But eventually ThinkPad would succumb to the Wal-Mart effect: Bring down the price. So would the quality, perhaps. But there are others who think that IBM’s sale of its PC business would have far reaching consequences because it is more than the simple fact that a part of Americana is being nibbled away by a foreign competitor. China’s unprecedented economic growth, galloping international trade and desperate hunt for raw materials, from oil to minerals, would give it a compelling reason for world domination.
Mark Helprin, a Wall Street Journal contributing editor and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, recently wrote that the days of the US dominated unipolar world are over. He contends that China is following the example of the militaristic Japan under the Meiji and plans to dominate the Pacific Ocean. The immense economic growth generated by market economy has made China the world’s second largest economy in purchasing power parity with a total GDP of $6.5 trillion, which is likely to double in eight to 10 years at the present rate of growth. China “harbors major ambitions” and plans to counter the USA in outer space, oceans and in cyberspace (The acquisition of IBM PC business by Lenovo may be a step in that direction).
While the USA is bogged down in fighting Islamic insurgencies and terrorism, China is slowly taking weaker states of South-East Asia (consider, for example, the Asean-China free trade agreement) under its protective wings. Helprin warns: “This century will be not just the century of terrorism: terrorism will fade. It will be a naval century, with the Pacific its centre, and challenges in the remotest places of the world offered not by dervishes and crazy-men but by a great power that is at last and at least America’s equal. Unfortunately, it is in our nature neither to foresee nor prepare for what lies beyond the rim.” Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State designate, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t necessarily agree with that assessment.
All this might seem obsessively alarmist but no one should discount the Chinese goal of ultimately bringing Taiwan into its fold. Its trump card ironically may be the nuclear North Korea, about which the USA is extremely worried, a country over which China has more influence than it admits. But what has this to do with Lenovo buying ThinkPad from IBM? Diplomacy and corporate power work in tandem and China uses both to advance its national interests.
WHAT’S in a name?
A lot.
Brand is the thing, the real thing in the global economy.
Suddenly the old question, “Guess, who is coming to dinner?” has assumed a new meaning.
Chop sticks, please. We’re Chinese.
Although no security alert or red flag went up when it was announced that a most celebrated icon of the US technology, IBM, was selling a part of itself, as it were, its brain, ThinkPad, to a Chinese company, Lenovo Group, for a paltry sum of $1.25 billion, a diffused state of anxiety and discomfort set in. Chinese companies, even when some of them don’t know how to manage themselves — Chinese Aviation Oil (Singapore) is a case in point — are nonetheless so ambitious that they are on an international hunt for acquisitions, especially for global brands.
IBM’s sale of its personal computer business would catapult Lenovo to become the third biggest computer company in the world, after Dell and Hewlett-Packard. “As Chinese companies move from prey to predator, they are also sitting on a powerful advantage: A possible currency revaluation. If the yuan rises 10 per cent, 20 per cent or even 40 per cent analysts expect, overseas acquisitions of household-name companies and properties become that much cheaper. In other words we haven’t seen anything yet from China,” writes Bloomberg’s columnist William Pesek Jr.
The Brits too have become alarmed and wonder whether America will become China-compatible one day, a secondary power at the service of a new superpower that’s sans freedom, sans, democracy, sans human rights. David Smith and Dominic Rushe recently wrote in the Sunday Times: “The sale of IBM’s personal computer business to a Chinese group shows that China is no longer content to be just the world’s workshop. It wants to own global businesses as well, and is using its low-cost advantages to embark on the acquisition trail. The Lenovo-IBM deal represents a coming of age for China. Until recently the economy that will dominate in the 21st century has been content to be the new workshop of the world. Now it has signalled that it wants a big slice of the control, and the boardroom action, as well.”
The fall of the dollar is not only bringing hordes of Europeans to shop and vacation, it is also bringing Chinese investors to buy businesses and industries, much as it happened in the 1980s when the Japanese went on a shopping spree. Of course ThinkPad will look like ThinkPad, which in fact is part of the deal that will allow Lenovo to keep the brand, and IBM, as a junior partner, would stand by it. But eventually ThinkPad would succumb to the Wal-Mart effect: Bring down the price. So would the quality, perhaps. But there are others who think that IBM’s sale of its PC business would have far reaching consequences because it is more than the simple fact that a part of Americana is being nibbled away by a foreign competitor. China’s unprecedented economic growth, galloping international trade and desperate hunt for raw materials, from oil to minerals, would give it a compelling reason for world domination.
Mark Helprin, a Wall Street Journal contributing editor and senior fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy, recently wrote that the days of the US dominated unipolar world are over. He contends that China is following the example of the militaristic Japan under the Meiji and plans to dominate the Pacific Ocean. The immense economic growth generated by market economy has made China the world’s second largest economy in purchasing power parity with a total GDP of $6.5 trillion, which is likely to double in eight to 10 years at the present rate of growth. China “harbors major ambitions” and plans to counter the USA in outer space, oceans and in cyberspace (The acquisition of IBM PC business by Lenovo may be a step in that direction).
While the USA is bogged down in fighting Islamic insurgencies and terrorism, China is slowly taking weaker states of South-East Asia (consider, for example, the Asean-China free trade agreement) under its protective wings. Helprin warns: “This century will be not just the century of terrorism: terrorism will fade. It will be a naval century, with the Pacific its centre, and challenges in the remotest places of the world offered not by dervishes and crazy-men but by a great power that is at last and at least America’s equal. Unfortunately, it is in our nature neither to foresee nor prepare for what lies beyond the rim.” Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State designate, and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wouldn’t necessarily agree with that assessment.
All this might seem obsessively alarmist but no one should discount the Chinese goal of ultimately bringing Taiwan into its fold. Its trump card ironically may be the nuclear North Korea, about which the USA is extremely worried, a country over which China has more influence than it admits. But what has this to do with Lenovo buying ThinkPad from IBM? Diplomacy and corporate power work in tandem and China uses both to advance its national interests.
Does advertisement create numbness?
“As corporate interests exert tighter and tighter control over information and even art, critical evaluation is more essential than ever. As advertisements creep onto banana peels, attach themselves to paper cup sleeves, and interrupt our ATM transactions, we urgently need to cultivate forms of self-expression in order to counteract our self-defensive numbness and remember what it is to be human.”
-Rebecca Blood
-Rebecca Blood
Saturday, December 18, 2004
That's incredible
That’s incredible, but many people believe that Jesus must have known the teaching of the Buddha and the philosophy of non-violence before he told Israelis, Turn the other cheek. And the three wise men that came to Bethlehem to see Christ when he was born? Did they come from India?
The book titled ”The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of Christ Within You" claims, as reported by The Los Angeles Times, that the three "Indian" wise men named him Isa, or "Lord" in Sanskrit. Isa, Ishwar, Ishu are some of the names by which Indians call their God.
“The book further goes on to claim that Jesus also travelled to India, where he practiced yoga meditation with the great sages during his "lost years" from age 13 to 30, a time of his life scarcely mentioned in the Bible.”
Is that possible? Well, if Alexander the Great could go to India, why not Jesus? The Silk Road was not for conquerors only. Early Buddhists used the Silk Road to spread their teaching to China. Read more.
The book titled ”The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of Christ Within You" claims, as reported by The Los Angeles Times, that the three "Indian" wise men named him Isa, or "Lord" in Sanskrit. Isa, Ishwar, Ishu are some of the names by which Indians call their God.
“The book further goes on to claim that Jesus also travelled to India, where he practiced yoga meditation with the great sages during his "lost years" from age 13 to 30, a time of his life scarcely mentioned in the Bible.”
Is that possible? Well, if Alexander the Great could go to India, why not Jesus? The Silk Road was not for conquerors only. Early Buddhists used the Silk Road to spread their teaching to China. Read more.
Friday, December 17, 2004
Eastern wisdom on leadership
There is no such thing as a perfect leader either in the past or present, in China or elsewhere. If there is one, he is only pretending, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose in an effort to look like an elephant. - Liu Shao-ch'i
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