Rumi Nations

To elaborate on the above, I find it a bit mystifying that we seem to have so much of reserves of ... sympathy perhaps ... for an Elizabeth Taylor. Was she a poor little women who suffered through her life and she deserved better? I think the fact is that she was lucky beyond compare. Perhaps she was the luckiest one in a population of one million. Which is to say, I am counting her as one of the roughly 7,000 luckiest people in the world. Contrast this with the tragedy in Japan. And even more so, other natural disasters of the past few years. Also, the everyday disasters that permeate this world. I consider myself one of the people who enable this situation ... having read three obituaries and seen perhaps a similar number of photo albums of Taylor. But I'm wondering about some psychological or biological/evolutionary explanation as to why this is so. What is it in our make-up that makes us do what we do? Is there some evolutionary advantage to doing this? Or, is it a faul...

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...

Americans are having to scrimp … saving quarters for diapers … Americans luckily have access to a few social safety nets provided by the government such as Medicaid, unemployment benefits, food stamps, etc. Then, non-governmental organizations and religious charities pitch in to provide whatever help they can. The effects of this prolonged recession are definitely going to be far-reaching on the psyche of those who will have gone through long periods of unemployment. This is happening after some seven decades. So, very few are alive today who had experienced it the last time it happened. The last recession was followed by an economic boom aided by both government policies as well as the ‘martial’ nations of Europe who still wanted to fight one last great, climactic mother of all wars after the Great War. The lessons for India? I think the message is a very sobering one. If a nation as advanced and prosperous can suffer such havoc from economic cycles of boom and bust, what chance does...

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...