Most of the media coverage has, quite understandably, focused on Europe. But the tremors from Communism's collapse were felt far beyond the immediate battlegrounds of the Cold War. The breakup of the Soviet Union had a profound impact on India. In many ways, it paved the way for a reinvention of the country

Akash Kapur

While an important socio-political milestone, Kapur notes the equally important intellectual milestone - an event Francis Fukuyama memorably christened The End of History. History in this sense didn't mean an "end to events" but rather, the (potential) end of a type of dialectical debate about political systems. ]]>

It's tough to remember now, BUT, prior to the fall of the wall, there were many serious scholars who seriously argued that not only would communist / socialist systems deliver greater equality but also, long run greater wealth than capitalism. The economic arguments went a l'il sumthin like this - the capitalist steel industry, for ex., might currently consist of 10 small, competing companies which are constantly hunting for cheaper labor to exploit, can't all run their plants at max efficiency b/c of inter-firm supply/demand flux, and ignore other, more important social goals.

"I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors."Instead, why not start with a top-down, national plan for how much steel "we" need? Then, build 1 big steel factory, gain the economies of scale, run at a scientifically calculated maximum efficiency, eliminate "wasteful" expenditures like marketing budgets, commissions for sales forces and particularly those evil profits & exec-bonuses. And "we" can achieve important Social Ends like hitting female/minority employment targets, insulating employees from the vagaries of the employment market, and making sure no one makes more than 2x the lowest paid employee's salary. Lather, rinse, repeat for all other parts of the economy and poof! we'd all be better off.*

Of course, the fact that we (well, most of us) now get a hardy laugh out of the idea that the Soviet system could somehow lead to greater wealth is indicative of the degree to which History, in Fukuyama's dialectical sense has ended. We instead generally accept the troika of Liberalism, Democracy, and Capitalism (LD & C) are the right big picture features of a socio-politico-economic system and most debate is about comparatively fine grained variations of the theme - advanced economy workers aren't quite circling the capitol in tractors with raised pitchforks like they did back in the day.

Meanwhile, in India, Nehru/Gandhi did OK on L+D but were pretty actively opposed to C...Kapur's piece provides some great examples - big & small - of how, despite official pronouncements of non-alignment, India truly was on the wrong side of this History -

India was never a Communist country. But it was far closer to the Soviet Union than to the United States throughout the Cold War, buying weapons on concessional terms, doing barter trade with the Eastern Bloc and receiving financial and technical aid for industrial and infrastructure projects.

I remember, from my childhood, the Soviet engineers and scientists who filled the bars in Pondicherry, seeking respite from the rigors of the power plant they were building up the road. I remember the dusty bookstores that stocked cheap Russian classics and the bottles of sparkling Russian wine my father used to buy from visiting sailors.

There were many reasons for the closeness between India and the Soviet Union, not least of which was a U.S. foreign policy that tilted decisively toward Pakistan. But the closeness was born, too, of genuine ideological affinity.

At about the same time the balance of payments crisis was prompting India's 1991 economic reforms, the Soviet Union was collapsing. While many of the reforms were arguably inevitable (the Indian state was truly running out of other people's money), the fall of the Wall provided the important intellectual "cover" for enthusiastically pursuing the reforms -

It's possible that all of this would have happened anyway, with or without the dissolution of the Soviet Union...Most important, the death of Communism had a psychological and intellectual impact that paved the way for India's transformation. As the economist T.N. Srinivasan (among others) has argued, it provided an opening for would-be reformers, who had already recognized the need for some form of liberalization but who had run up against ideological resistance.

The collapse of the Soviet Union wasn't just the collapse of a political and military behemoth. It was the collapse of an idea, too, and with the discrediting of Communist ideology, Indian socialism, long the guiding philosophy of statecraft and economic policy making, confronted a crisis of confidence. Ideas that had until then been anathema to the nation's governing class -- ideas about markets, about profits, about entrepreneurship -- suddenly seemed, amidst the detritus of Communism, to be incontestable.

It's hard to remember now, after the spectacular market failures of the last few years, but policy makers in 1991 were operating at "the end of history." Capitalism wasn't just a superior model; it was the only viable one.

And so, perhaps the biggest reason India couldn't have liberalized sooner was plain old ideological inertia. Unfortunately, the cost of waiting to abandon those socialist ideas now appears to be 14M infant deaths, 260M literate individuals, and 100M folks who missed the opportunity to rise above poverty.....

*alas, the same sort of "the top-down plan = efficiency, lower costs + cut out middleman profits = we're all better off" thinking underlies many of the proposals in the US healthcare reform debate... so I suppose there's still a lot of room to debate just how closed the verdict is on History....

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The easiest way to sneak alcohol into Rang Bhavan was to hide it under a girl’s jacket. The notoriously long queues of people waiting impatiently to enter Mumbai’s legendary open air theatre were predominantly male, which meant that the security guards at the gate would only frisk guys. A girl, depending on her stature and the size of the jacket, could slip in anywhere between four to eight cans of Kingfisher beer. Inebriation was as crucial to the Rang Bhavan experience as the Metallica-inspired, ’90s metal cover bands.

[snip]

In India, rock is a much maligned genre, mostly because it is totally misunderstood. India’s Bollywood-loving masses generally accept and believe the particularly damaging stereotype that rock music is overrun by dudes with knee-length hair screaming into microphones and groaning like cats being tortured by pitchforks. And until the late ’90s, Indian rockers did very little to change that impression.

He goes on to trace the changes (fan attitudes, new kinds of venues, advent of the internet, bands stopped noodling around) that contribute to the fact that Indian rock bands were recently invited to the Glastonbury Festival in the UK, and SXSW in Austin, TX. It’s long(ish) but you can read it in full here. The full special feature is here.

An video introduction to some of the bands (Jalebee Cartel, Shor Bazaar, Them Clones, etc.) is after the jump.

And please think your comment over before you criticize. The sepia intern will be moderating this closely and a thoughtful discussion will be appreciated.

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Well, Kiran Ahuja has just been named Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

This federal-wide effort was first established in June of 1999 by President Bill Clinton… The office will be housed in the U.S. Department of Education and include a Federal Interagency Working Group (IWG) co-chaired by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke.

Kiran has a rich history of leadership in government, public policy and AAPI communty advocacy. Most notably, she was the Founding Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF). [aapimomentum]

I first met Kiran when we were both sitting together on a panel after the 2004 elections. She was sincere and genuine, her personality reflecting a precision and knowledge reflecting a strategic firmness. I have no doubt that she will be the new voice of change needed to truly shift the political paradigm inside the beltway, with regards to how our AAPI communities are organized.

For almost twenty years, Kiran Ahuja has dedicated herself to improving the lives of women of color in the U.S. Well-known as a leader among national and grassroots Asian and Pacific Islander and women’s rights organizations, Kiran served as the founding Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum from 2003-2008….Kiran grew up in Savannah, Georgia, where her understanding of race, gender and ethnicity was formed as a young Indian immigrant. She attended Spelman College and worked for Georgia’s first African American Congresswoman since the Reconstruction.[aapimomentum]>

Congratulations Kiran! We look forward to what you bring!

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Arguably, while many of the most famous what-if's focus on chance events in history, prominent Indian econ journalist Swaminathan Aiyar, writing for the Cato Institute, decided to take on a far more considered, deliberate economic policy "what-if". He asks "what if India liberalized its economy 10 yrs earlier?" Put differently, what if 1970s India followed the economic path pursued by Korea, Japan, and Taiwan?

Until the 80s/90s rounds of liberalization, India followed a Soviet-inspired economic model resulting in stuff like this -

India's per capita GNP growth was only 1.49 percent in the three decades from 1950 to 1980. In this period, socialism was the avowed policy of the government, the peak income-tax rate rose to a record 97.75 percent, several industries were nationalized, and the government sought to capture the commanding heights of the economy.

To answer his alternative history question, Aiyar does two interesting things. First, instead of trying to come up with a hypothetical "Korean policy mapped to India", Aiyar simply remaps the growth rates across different decades within India itself -

This paper considers what would have happened if reforms had begun in 1971. It projects an early-reform, high-growth scenario in which the per capita GNP growth rate in each decade would have been as high as that actually achieved one decade later. That is, this scenario envisages that the trend per capita GNP growth rate actually achieved in the 1980s (2.89 percent per year) would have been achieved in the 1970s; the trend rate actually achieved in the 1990s (4.19 percent per year) would have been achieved in the 1980s; and the trend rate actually achieved in the early 21st century (6.78 percent per year) would have been achieved in the 1990s.

While there are a hundred possible issues with remapping growth rates like this, I think Aiyar's approach is likely the "least bad hack" for estimating some numbers.

Second, while growth rates and their inherent compounding are important academic subjects, they leave the lay audience a little, shall we say, underwhelmed. So, Aiyar mapped those growth rates to a few classic human development indices - infant mortality, literacy, and poverty rates - to guesstimate what the India of today might look like -

...with earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line.

As Aiyar notes, even if a later, more sophisticated model cuts his projections by half, these results are still in a league of their own. These numbers dwarf the proposed outcomes of even the most optimistic charity / foreign aid / econ development / govt-led initiative / NGO / UN program in existence and demonstrate just how pervasive & important bottoms-up GDP growth is for a population. As Aiyar concludes -

The delay in economic reform represents an enormous social tragedy. It drives home the point that India's socialist era, which claimed it would deliver growth with social justice, delivered neither.

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Google India had launched a ‘Doodle 4 Google - My India’ contest in August. The Doodle is the logo design you see on the Google homepage. The theme of this competition was ‘My India’. On November 12, Google India announced at Taj Ambassador Hotel that tech hub Gurgaon based 4th standard school kid Puru Pratap has won the competition…a laptop computer for himself, a t-shirt with his doodle and Rs. 1 lakh (approx 2100 US dollars) for his school.

But his counterparts in USA and UK won substantially more. According to Google their US winner “will win a $15,000 college scholarship to be used at the school of their choice, a trip to the Google New York Office, a laptop computer, and a t-shirt printed with their doodle. We’ll also award the winner’s school a $25,000 technology grant towards the establishment/improvement of a computer lab.”

So let’s see: Indian winner = laptop + T-shirt + $2100 (for his school) + $0 (for himself)
US winner = laptop + T-shirt + trip to NY + $25,000 (for his school) + $15,000 (for himself)

Let me see…let me do the math…I dunno, maybe you need a special algorithm or something to make these two things equal? Because to my eyes, it looks like the Indian kid is getting royally screwed. It looks like the same contest, run by the same company, is rewarding a far lesser prize to the winner from one country than to the winner from another country.

The writer of the quoted piece goes on to point of various other prizes that are awarded equally to winners from all countries. She concludes:

Are we children of a lesser Google? Or is the Indian market less important? Perhaps Bing has the answer.

Dammit. I like Chrome.

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Fantastic capture, isn’t it? It was taken by a Debasis Roy, of Asansol, India, and I felt like it deserved to be seen, in case you missed it when it was featured on National Geographic’s “Top Shots”. As for how the fishy fared, don’t fret about the poor pet:

While transferring fish from one bowl to another, science tutor Roy, 27, was inspired. He composed this scene—a baby guppy sustained by a single droplet, cradled on a grass leaf atop a wooden stool—then put the fish back. [link]

Beautiful. I sweat such talent and creative vision. A whale-sized thank you to the Barmaid, for showing me this magical image.

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This phrase would describe the turn of events where a seemingly integrated Muslim-American—a friendly donut vendor in New York, say, or an officer in the U.S. Army at Fort Hood—discards his apparent integration into American society and elects to vindicate his religion in an act of messianic violence against his fellow Americans.

The most irksome part of Varadarajan’s column for me was the following paragraph:

The difference between “going postal,” in the conventional sense, and “going Muslim,” in the sense that I suggest, is that there would not necessarily be a psychological “snapping” point in the case of the imminently violent Muslim; instead, there could be a calculated discarding of camouflage—the camouflage of integration—in an act of revelatory catharsis. In spite of suggestions by some who know him that he had a history of “harassment” as a Muslim in the army, Maj. Hasan did not “snap” in the “postal” manner. He gave away his possessions on the morning of his day of murder. He even gave away—to a neighbor—a packet of frozen broccoli that he did not wish to see go to waste, even as he mapped in his mind the laying waste of lives at Fort Hood. His was a meticulous, even punctilious “departure.”

In fact, reports from Hasan’s colleagues strongly suggest a profile of a person who was borderline psychotic for several years, but who finally snapped around 2007. Yes, he gave away his broccoli on the day he went on a shooting spree. But that is in fact entirely in keeping with how psychotics behave.

What Varadarajan doesn’t realize is that the kind of paranoid argument he is making about immigrants in “camouflage” could very easily be used against any other immigrant group, including Hindus, as a pretext for mistrust or active discrimination.

Varadarajan also make a claim about “integration” into American society that is simply not supported by any facts. The diverse groups of immigrants who are Muslim have done just fine in terms of their economic performance, civil participation, etc. By coining this pernicious phrase, and by promoting an argument based self-evidently on bigotry, Varadarajan has shown us why we no longer need to take anything he says seriously.

Even if the political correctness claim is supported by facts that will come out of the forthcoming investigation, the focus of our concern should be the Army protocols for assessing mentally ill service members, not Muslims as a group.

Needless to say, Varadarajan’s column has caused quite a firestorm of controversy in the NYU community. You can see some of the responses, including one from the president of the university, here.

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I know the Mutiny community has lots of literature lovers, so I wanted to let you know about some sharp new writers, and where you can find them—Amitava Kumar and I have edited the fiction section of Guernica this month, and it features South Asian writers. Tomorrow, two of them (Tania James and Hasanthika Sirisena) will be joining us for a reading in Brooklyn as part of Page Turner - The Asian American Literary Festival. (There’s a day of great programming—we’re on at 3. Disclosure: Amitava and I are both on the board of AAWW, the sponsoring org.)

I thought it would be interesting to talk to some of the writers a little bit more about the stories they submitted, and writing in general. Sirisena, who won a prestigious Rona Jaffe Award last year, gave us a story called Murder The Queen. You can read it here. She agreed to chat with the Mutiny—Preeta Samarasan will follow next week.

Sirisena’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Glimmer Train, Narrative Magazine, Epoch, StoryQuarterly, Witness, Best New American Voices, and other publications.

Can you tell me a little bit about the genesis of this story?

HS:

I came up with the idea after reading a story in a Sri Lankan newspaper about a young Sri Lankan in Malaysia who, along with his friends, made up a story about a kidnapping in order to con money from his mother. The story fascinated because, frankly, I was amazed at the callousness and the sheer stupidity of the people involved. Also, it happened at a time during which there was an extraordinary level of violence in Sri Lanka. Finally, I’ve been rereading Edgar Allan Poe off and on over the past year and was trying, as silly as it sounds, in some sense to channel him in this story.

VVG:

I Googled, and I think I found the story. Ugh. Awful. You and I have talked about writing in different points of view—how was it to write from the perspective of someone callous and stupid? And were you thinking of any particular Poe story?

HS:

Ugh is right. I like writing from the point of view of people who do stupid things. I’m not sure why. It must tap into an anxiety of mine. I think its also the test of a writer—to use the imagination to explore and explicate acts that most people want to distance themselves from. Of course, a writer could take that too far. But I think its for the most part true.

I was thinking of all the things The Tell-Tale Heart and the Pit and Pendulum. Maybe more the latter, since it’s a story about captivity.

VVG:

How often do you use real-life incidents to trigger your imagination? I know you were recently in Sri Lanka. How was your time there, and how did you go about gathering fictional material?

HS:

I use real-life incidents a lot these days. Honestly, I couldn’t make some of these things up! I enjoyed my time in Sri Lanka. I was there for the end of the war. My first evening there, the LTTE conducted an air strike on Colombo. By May, the war had officially ended. I gather material mostly by reading newspapers. I read any newspapers I can get my hands on. I read them from front to back. I read the police blotter. I also try to talk to people, even people on the street, but you have to be careful. It’s obvious I’m not Sri Lankan from my accent. People asked me a lot if I was Indian. It didn’t make people very willing to talk to me when they weren’t sure who I was—or might be.

This last line seems to me to segue pretty perfectly back into the questions of identify and security raised in Murder The Queen… So with that, I hope to see some of you tomorrow, and if not then, in our next installment, with Preeta.

Other work by Sirisena is online here. (This opens a PDF.)

(A and I wrote an editorial note for the issue, which may interest some of you. That’s here.)

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co-VEN was featured in a recent New York Times multimedia video by Adam Ellick (not embeddable) which can be seen here.

Other musicians mentioned in the Times story include Ali Azmat and the band Noori (identified in the video as the Noori Brothers). To me, Ali Azmat comes across as a blithering idiot in the Times video, but I found the comments from co-VEN more compelling — at least coherent. (For the most part, I agreed with the Pakistani journalists in the Times’ video, not the musicians.)

What was interesting to me was the fact that Ellick, in the Times video, seemed to be putting co-VEN forward as an example of a band that criticizes the west but not the Taliban.

I haven’t heard much of co-VEN’s other music (none of the songs on YouTube seem political) or looked closely at their public statements, but the lyrics to the song above are present in the YouTube video, and they seem more ambiguous than Adam Ellick suggests. While “Ready to Die” does put forward the idea that there is a pattern — and a long history of failure — to western policy in the Muslim world, I don’t necessarily think the song reflects Pakistanis in denial. You can be opposed to the “game of chess” co-VEN is talking about while also being opposed to what the extremists have been doing in Pakistan in recent months. I’m not sure co-VEN is actually willing to go there, but it seems like a stretch to put an interesting indie/metal band next to the more banal pop music of Ali Azmat and Noori, as if they’re all the same.

Oh, and one more thing: it’s a shame that this irreverent and upbeat song, Laga Re by Shehzad Roy, was apparently banned on Pakistani TV. (I wonder whether it might have circulated anyway through the internet etc.)

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It’s the classic story, with a modern twist. Bangladeshi immigrant Mujib Rahman wants to be elected to New York’s City Council. It’s the story of an immigrant, running for office on the Republican ticket, wanting to make a difference for his community. The clip shows how he tries to campaign in the local Bangladeshi community to gain votes - to get one of their own Bangladeshis in office. But the campaign he’s running on is based on a divisive message - letting voters know his opponent is gay.

I was conflicted as I watched this. On one hand you want this hard working Bangladeshi uncle to achieve the bootstrap American dream. He’s getting himself and his community involved in civic engagement. But on the other hand, his closed minded smear campaign just reflects all the reasons I stopped talking politics with my father’s generation of uncles. Were any of our readers involved in Mujib’s campaign? Did any of you have the chance to vote (or not vote) for Mujib?

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