Monthly Archives: February 2006

I’ll try the canned fish curry, please

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The word curry is a topic sure to rankle desis; the debunking of this colonial category is the rare cause that can unite desis of all origins and persuasions in a chorus of righteous indignation. And rightly so: The reduction of the subcontinentÂ’s rich foodways to this one invented label has caused any number of ills, not least the viscous glop known as tikka masala, and more than a few upset stomachs.

But just because curry isnÂ’t authentically Indian doesnÂ’t mean it isnÂ’t authentically… something. TodayÂ’s New York Times has a review of a new book called “Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors,” by Lizzie Collingham — a book I’m excited to read, despite the kind of horrible cover art that has Manish breaking out in hives. It invites us to follow as curry spread around the world, picking up bits and pieces from each culture like some syncretistic religion. Curry may or may not be Indian, but it sure is global:

Samoans make a Polynesian curry using canned fish and corned beef. … Lots of diners would balk at curried chicken Kiev, but not Ms. Collingham. … One of her goals, in tracing the evolution of curry and the global spread of Indian cuisine, is to pull the rug out from under the idea that India, or any other nation, ever had a cuisine that was not constantly in the process of assimilation and revision.

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Guest Blogger: Siddhartha Mitter

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I found our newest guest blogger sitting under a Bodhi Tree in a snow covered park near our world blogging headquarters in North Dakota. For one who had made such a long journey, an invitation to guest blog seemed very appropriate. As I approached him he simply said, “I had been expecting your arrival.” Please welcome one ill Hindu: Siddhartha Mitter.

I am an independent writer on topics including politics, music, food, race, globalization, and cultural change. After academic training in the politics and economics of developing countries, I worked on electric utilities in West Africa, and then spent six years in research and consulting work in the global energy industry. In 2002 I shed these layers to regain my creative freedom. [Link]

Yes, we have found that people who end up in our bunker have shed themselves of material things and chosen to take the blogastic vows that we too hold dear.

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The tortoise and the hare

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A business professor at MIT Sloan argues in the Financial Times that India is economically underrated. Yasheng Huang sounds a clarion call for China to relax its financial controls:

Rama vs. dragon? Cake.
But Rama vs. Chuck Norris…

From April to June 2005, India’s GDP grew at 8.1 per cent, compared with 7.6 per cent in the same period the year before. More impressively, India is achieving this result with just half of China’s level of domestic investment in new factories and equipment, and only 10 per cent of China’s foreign direct investment…

… in 2003 and 2004, [China] was investing close to 50 per cent of its GDP in domestic plant and equipment – roughly equivalent to India’s entire GDP. That is higher than any other country… China’s growth stems from massive accumulation of resources, while India’s growth comes from increasing efficiency…

While India’s stock market has soared in recent years, the opposite has happened in China. In 2001, the Shanghai Stock Market index reached 2,200 points; by 2005, half the wealth wiped out. In April 2005, the Shanghai index stood at 1,135 points… [Link]

Huang argues against using foreign direct investment as a key measure of economic growth:

Brazil was a darling of foreign investors in the 1960s but ultimately let them down. Japan, Korea and Taiwan received little FDI in the 1960s and 1970s but became among the world’s most successful economies…

With few exceptions, the world-class manufacturing facilities for which China is famous are products of FDI, not of indigenous Chinese companies… [Link]

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His analysis is that India has a more laissez-faire attitude in both politics and entrepreneurship:

[Infosys] was founded by seven entrepreneurs with few political connections who nevertheless managed, without significant hard assets, to obtain capital from Indian banks and the stock ­market in the early 1990s. It is unimaginable that a Chinese bank would lend to a Chinese equivalent of an Infosys…

China was light years ahead of India in economic liberalisation in the 1980s. Today it lags behind in critical aspects, such as reform that would permit more foreign investment and domestic private entry in the financial sector. [Link]

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Air Strikes from the Left

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It has been said and said again several times over, but here is something that bears repeating: India has the worst airports in the world. Our escalators open up unexpectedly and swallow kids; our toilets are horribly bad; our conveyor belts are too small to hold all the bags from a single plane (leave alone the 3 that arrive at one time); sleeping is impossible and even if you escape the airport in one piece, you still haven’t escaped the airport mafia.

And it is only going to get worse – the rapid growth in the Indian economy and the mushrooming of budget carriers in the country means that in a couple of decades from now, Delhi and Mumbai will be as busy as Chicago or Atlanta are today. Imagine. The solution to the problem is quite simple of course: A lot more money, which the Government does not have. As early as 1997, the Government of India released an “airport modernization policy” that said among other things that:

Looking at the quantum of investment required the answer to all the problems lies in the infusion of private — including foreign — investment in this sector. [Link]

Meaning, we don’t have the money. And we think the way to fix these airports is by handing them off to someone else. After a lot of hemming and hawing, the policy finally looked set to take off this year with the Government inviting competitive bids to privatize the management of the two biggest airports in the country: Delhi and Mumbai.

Then the bidding process ran into trouble, and so they appointed a technical committee (but of course) that evaluated the bidding process and okayed it, and then another committee was appointed to make sure the technical committee knew what it was doing. And finally, a decision was made: The bidding process produced a couple of winners. Nice.

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