Rumi Nations

No. It's not about THAT. Nothing HAPPENED on the dinner table. In fact, I don't have one. And that's the point. It occurred to me out of the blue about the fact that I do not own a dinner table while most people do. (Of course, when one talks of India, probably it would be truer to say that most people in fact don't.) But clearly the readers of this blog would likely belong to the dinner table owning class. So, the point is this: how essential is it to own a dinner table? Does one's quality of life degrade in any noticeable manner (let alone significant manner) on account of not owning a dinner table?  Clearly, the stark fact has to do with our sense of priorities.  We make these choices and so many of them. Some of these choices are conscious and some are unconscious. There are individual choices made and societal ones too. Individuals choose to worry over dresses or dining tables or door frames or dogs or whatever.

The number of those who died in the Second World War will never be known with precision. Tens of millions of men, women and children were killed without any record being made of their names, or of when or how they died. Millions of soldiers were killed in action without anyone recording their names, or marking the place where they fell. Many calculations have been made of the number of war dead. In the war between China and Japan, which began two years before the war in Europe, it has been estimated that six million Chinese civilians were killed. The Soviet Union suffered ten million deaths in action, on land, in the air and at sea. A further 3,300,000 Soviet soldiers were killed after they had become prisoners-of-war. Seven million Soviet civilians also died; a death toll in excess of twenty million Soviet citizens. The Germans calculate 3,600,000 civilians dead, and 3,250,000 soldiers. The Japanese calculate two million civilians and a million military deaths, the largest single deat...

So, India is probably begging China to please, please, please let it become a member of the UNSC please, please, please ... What a sad state of affairs! There was a time when Nehru maganimously refused an invite for India to become a member of the UNSC and instead offered the seat to China ... or, something along those lines. I am not really familiar with the detailed history of all of that ... What is the UNSC by the way? And who are the members? And, perhaps more importantly, who are not? UK and France ARE members ... ok, nations with about 60 million folks each ... India is not a member ... population: 1.2 billion and counting ... Japan is not a member ... still the second largest economy in the world, I think ... about the same size as UK and France combined ... I mean, in terms of the economy. Germany is not a member ... with an economy that's DEFINITELY (right Rain Man ?) bigger than UK's or France's. Oh, I forgot ... luck of the 'losers' ... oops ...

This Wall Street Journal article by a journalist with a seemingly Indian name lists the myriads of misfortunes Detroit is in ... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013004574517700766354972.html?mod=djemEditorialPage I remember Lee Iaccoca's autobiography where he he remembers landing at the train station and asking for the direction to Detroit and someone telling him: "Go West young man." Times have changed drastically since those days when the automobile industry was the throbbing heart of a vibrant manufacturing economy. Today, we live in a world and the services sector dominates and the knowledge economy is where everyone wants to be. Old fashioned factory townships with assembly lines manufacturing goods that everyone wants to have ... that has pretty much shifted out of advanced economies like the United States to developing economies like China and India. To a large extent, that's a positive development for these countries as basically manufacturin...