Author Archives: vinod

All Hail Toral

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We introduced Toral to mutineers with a gentle reminder to her that “all glory is fleeting” and my oh my how true it was. On Thursday, October 13, her Apprentice star was extinguished in dramatic fashion after a run of just 4 episodes. While probably not an ideal role model, we can answer Desi media critics and say that this week at least 1 TV show was truly led by a desi characterThis week at least 1 TV show was truly led by a desi character.

The episode’s story arc traced Toral’s fall starting with her perilous escape from last week’s boardroom – something Trump pointed out was her high point in words almost fitting a Greek Oracle – “Enjoy the view, Toral“.

The subsequent verdict from the flock of Cassandras was immediate and fierce –

“Not bringing Toral into the boardroom isn’t loyalty, it’s stupidity”

And in Waiting to Exhale fashion, a caucus was called where her teammates admonished her to step up the plate and run like she hadn’t run before. The die was cast as her teammate’s demands were diametrically opposed to Toral’s master plan –

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The Toral is Unleashed

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I’ve been working like a dog the past few months & one of my few connections to pop culture has been my beloved TiVo.  So, after a day of conference calls & meetings, I decided to vege a bit and watch last week’s Apprentice and check out how Sepia Mutiny’s friend Toral Mehta was doing.

Now, in contrast to Raj who dished up the drama almost from the outset, Toral’s been disappointingly flying beneath the radar and laying low.   No longer – last week her fangs were unleashed and my-oh-my what snobby, elitist, east coast fangs they were.   A few choice quotes –

“I’m from Wharton …we’re really here to demonstrate work ethic and that’s a different style of thinking from those individuals who have not been trained by large corporate institutions

“I would have to say that there are a group of women here [pointing at a gaggle of laughing blondes] who have banded together based on the fact that they have no work experience.   I like them all on a personal level, I think they’re cute people if I had a secretary job or an administrative job, I’d happily hire any of these people”

Oh Boy.   Now that’s a good way inspire folks.  Note to The Toral, it’s one thing to not forget the little people as you rocketship takes off.   It’s a different thing to tell ’em they’re little before your ship has even left the ground. 

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The Bugs Tell The Story

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A fascinating article from a science blog I read from time to time – 

This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was announced this morning. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren won for discovering that ulcers can be caused not by stress or genes but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (shown here)

…Helicobacter infects half of all people on Earth…The scientists documented a surprising variety of genes in the bacteria. Each ethnic group they looked at carried a distinctive strain.

As scientists got to know the global variation of Helicobacter better, they began to discover a remarkable pattern. They mapped out an evolutionary tree of the strains of the bacteria and found that it lined up very well with the migrations of humans over the past 50,000 years. One study looked at the Ladakh province of northern India. Muslims and Buddhists have coexisted there for 1000 [years] but remain isolated from one another. It turns out that Muslim Ladakhs only carry a European strain of Helicobacter, while Buddhists carry a mix of European and East Asian bugs.

They might be neighbors, but that don’t mean they’re friends.

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GWOT In Pakistan… Updates

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Stratpage has a roundup of some interesting news from the Pakistan front –

September 16, 2005: Pakistan has compiled a list of 173 clergymen, believed to be active in supporting terrorist activity. Pakistan has lost patience with religious leaders who support terrorism, and is cracking down.

September 14, 2005: In Pakistan, troops raided an al Qaeda base, a religious school, arresting 28 terrorist suspects, most of them foreigners. Weapons, bombs and other equipment were seized, including a small Chinese UAV. That was unusual, and the terrorists were apparently using the UAV to scout routes for infiltrating people across the nearby Afghan border, and to spot troops or police operating near their base. That didn’t work, as the UAV was on the ground when the troops swooped in. The army had been tipped off by a local tribesman. The base was also used by the Taliban, to recruit local men for raids across the border in Afghanistan….

A friggin’ UAV? Sheesh. Makes you pause.

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An ABCD in Amsterdam

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Work & biz travel has been kicking my butt the past few months so I haven’t been able to uphold my end of the Sepia Mutiny bargain of late.   I was however, in Amsterdam last week (on business!) and had a few moments of (sober) time.  ABCD dork that I am, it’s always fun to look for the little signs of desi influence…

Honors for Desi “pride of place” in the US probably goes to Bombay– it ain’t too hard in most good sized cities to find a Bombay Palace, Bombay Bazaar, Bombay Place, etc.    In Amsterdam, on the other hand, the Desi city that secures branding is Goa – the apropos name for one of the city’s many famous, euphemistically named, “coffeeshops”

It’s well nigh impossible for a desi techie to observe the “bicycle rickshaws” peddling tourists up and down the streets & demur that not all technological progress is, uh, monotonic.

These poor, exploited Dutch cyclists, if only they could afford a noxious 2 stroke, soot-spewing engine to alleviate their burden.

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The Next Apprentice?

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The Romans pioneered today’s victory and ticker tape parades in their Triumph ceremony.  Post-war, a long procession of captured loot, slaves, musicians, and, of course, the Legion in its finest regalia marched through the city for all citizens to lavish their praise.  The victorious General followed this procession in a priceless chariot waving to the audience like the beauty queen of his day.  Ever cognizant of human nature, the Roman council enlisted a slave who stood by the side of the general whispering the reminder that “all glory is fleeting”.  

Perennial SM television favorite Raj Bakhta may have to hang up his golden leaf crown as he confronts the newer, younger model this fall.   The latest season of the Apprentice will unveil the newest Desi reality-TV star, Ms Toral Mehta –

Toral, 29, currently a Vice President in the Capital Markets group of a major investment bank in New York City, is among the handful of officer level women in her group responsible for originating, structuring, negotiating and closing multi-million dollar business deals. Fluent in French, Hindi and English, Toral has traveled to more than 15 foreign countries over the course of her career, working with top business leaders in both the public and private sectors. A graduate of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Toral has worked for some of the country’s leading financial institutions including Goldman Sachs and American Express. In addition, Toral is a skilled day trader and self-made multi-millionaire. Her recent investments include luxury real estate and upscale restaurant projects in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Born and raised in Philadelphia, Toral now resides in New York City, and likes to spend her free time at her homes in Miami Beach and London.

A few Penn alums who know her mentioned that Toral has the chops to give Omarosa a run for the money in the drama and tension category.   Delicious.   Her interview Q&A certainly reveals she’s a PC-be-damned type –

When will you consider yourself “a success”?
I already do.

Have any previous Apprentice winners motivated or inspired you? If so, who and why? If not, what did you think of the winners?
No, and I don’t think about them.

Would you rather be stranded on a desert island with Donald, George, or Carolyn, and why?
I would take my chances floating at sea.

Heh.   She sounds charming.   Unlike Raj, for whom charm appeared to be just about the only thing in the show he had going, Toral’s victories sound rather less fleeting.  Let history and the history about to be made be the final judge whilst the denizens of Sepia Mutiny lavish ratings.

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Not Short, Just “Orthopaedically Handicapped”

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Just about any way you slice it, life presents us all with some pretty heavy challenges.  Especially in India.  Especially in Kerala.  And especially if you’re, uh, short.   The Beeb reports –

Dwarfs in the southern Indian state of Kerala have come together to fight for their rights.

The Kerala Small Men Association has 300 members across the state and is demanding what it calls “special recognition” from the government.

Why the crisis?   Well, apparently a former, primary avenue of employment has been beat down due to shifting consumer tastes and globalization –

“Earlier, we were getting opportunities to work in the circus but that industry has collapsed and most of us are out of a job.”

The universe finds ways to create balance.   And politics always finds ways to create conflicting special interests –

The [small men] association’s height limit is 135cm (54 inches – [4′ 6″])…The state also has a Tall Men of Kerala association with 600 members over six feet (1.82) metres.

6 feet qualifies you as a Tall Man in Kerala?   Dang, the Punjabi’s are gonna kick our butts.

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Mad Cow’s Desi Origins?

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Now here’s a topic that’s guaranteed to make folks squirm.   A group of Brit scientists think they’ve discovered the root cause of their country’s recent bout with Mad Cow disease.   Cynics, upon hearing the proposed theory, might argue that this whole thing amounts to a massive deflection of blame to the brown nether world –

LONDON – Mad cow disease may have originated from animal feed contaminated with human remains washed ashore after being floated downriver in Indian funerals, British scientists said on Friday.

…Professor Alan Colchester of the University of Kent in England says it may have been caused by the tons of animal bones and other tissue imported from India for animal feed which also may have contained the remains of humans infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

…In a report in the Lancet medical journal, Colchester and his daughter Nancy, of the University of Edinburgh, explained that many human and animal corpses were disposed of in rivers in India in accordance with Hindu custom.

The remains washed ashore in poor areas where bone collectors work.

“We are aware of a considerable risk of the incorporation of human remains with the animal remains that are collected. They are processed locally and some have been exported. In 10 years, more than a third of a million tons of material from these areas was imported into the UK,” Colchester said.

Needless to say, other scientists advise that these are waters upon which one should tread lightly –

“Scientists must proceed cautiously when hypothesizing about a disease that has such wide geographic, cultural and religious implications,” Shankar said.

Your old, crazy aunty from back in da homeland may have found yet another way to haunt her Western son from beyond the grave.    

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Our Parents Shrugged

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Between the Ayn Rand discussion Manish’s post kicked off a few days ago and the fisking of Dr. Patnaik cited on IndianEconomy.org, I figured I oughta finally commit to a post that’s been rattling in my head for a few months – the startling parallels between the fictional, dystopian economic world Ayn Rand outlined in Atlas Shrugged and real life Indian history.

Now although I’m one of those Desi dudes who cites Atlas Shrugged as an all-time favorite, I’m far from a Randroid. I readily recognize that getting too literal runs headlong into a more, uh, empirical assessment of the human condition. But, I’m also more than willing to give Rand credit – especially writing in the 1940s and 1950s – for being more right than wrong about some of the biggest issues of the day. Doubly so because, given the intellectual zeitgeist of the time, Rand was decidedly a contrarian. The example of the License Raj – India’s economic regime “progressively” enacted a scant few years after Atlas Shrugged was published (1957), and to some degree of Intellectual fanfare, gives us the latest, almost depressing example of how Indian fact can be more extreme than Western fiction.

In the novel, a key milestone as the world plummets into dysfunction and chaos is the passage of the innocuously titled Directive 10-289 by the government. It opens with a rather lofty goal –

“In the name of the general welfare to protect the people’s security, to achieve full equality and total stability…

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Bread? I’ll take cake.

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Amit Varma, writing at promising new The Indian Economy blog, points to a much needed takedown of an anti-market, left-wing OpEd by a Dr. Utsa Patnaik.   As with many ideas of this sort, Dr. Patnaik starts with a rather broad, well-intentioned need / desire to save the poor –

THE ARGUMENTS for a universal, not targeted, National Rural Employment Guarantee Act as well as for a universal Public Distribution System (PDS) are far stronger than most people realise. Rural India is in deep and continuing distress.

National Employment Gaurantee?   Universal Public Distribution?  Eek.  Someone’s been lifting lines from Orwell, Marx, and Rand .  The fisking, authored by Aadisht Khanna, summarizes Dr Patnaik’s argument thusly –

* Rural India is facing an employment crisis
* This is because of the economic policies pursued in the past fifteen years.
* The proof of this is that people are eating much less grain.
* The assertion that people are eating less grain is borne out by data from the National Sample Survey, which measures consumption and expenditure across India.

Aadisht’s response?   An important lesson in economics & statistics – not all products rise monotonically in consumption or production given increasing incomes & productivity –

 There is a decline in rice and wheat consumption, and also in the consumption of dal… But at the same time, the consumption of other stuff has risen- milk, vegetables of all sorts, meat of all sorts (though fish has shown the most dramatic rise), and most notably eggs- the consumption of those has doubled.

And this suggests something that you would expect a Professor of Economics to know- the consumption pattern looks suspiciously like that of Giffen goods.

… What’s the classical example of Giffen goods used in economics textbooks? That when your income rises, you buy less bread and more meat- exactly what we see happening in rural India from 1988 to 2000.

Then again, I suppose that if your goal is to make the case for a “new deal for the rural poor” replete with a messianic role for left-wing econ professors, then perhaps statistical anomalies like Giffen goods are a bit of a godsend.  Too bad for the poor – the bureaucracy and tax burden will have to grow until they go back to the past & eat more dal.

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