Much has happened over the last two months. The global financial structures have come toddering down like a pack of cards; the castle is still standing but the upper echelons are certainly missing. Some would attribute it to a faulty base, some to over-ambitious strategies, some to mismanaged plans, and some to extraneous factors.
Whatever it may be attributed to, the truth is that we are in for a long winter, and we haven't even seen the worst of it. I read yesterday that India's foreign exchange reserves depleted by a whopping $63 billion, sufficient for over 600 unmanned lunar missions like Chandrayaan (which is also a current event, but more on that later). China's economy is showing signs of slowdown and its leaders are expressing worry, which in itself is a sign that it's time to take out the parachutes.
Obama's election as President of the USA is path-breaking, but not entirely unexpected. I mean, you would have to be a complete dullard to lose an election when the economy's going into recession and your opponent's party has been in power for the last 8 years. This was always the Democratic Party's election to win; the question was whether it was Obama's to lose. Thankfully, it turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to the USA in these troubled times. The problem with McCain and company was that they represented the status quo, and frankly issues were getting exacerbated by their reluctance to do anything. Problems are solved by doing something, not by sitting pretty wishing them away. Obama comes into power with a lot of expectations, some self-created, some inherent to his post, that he will make a difference and that by 2012, the USA will have recovered well enough for the Americans to give Obama a second term. Whether he will be true to those expectations remains to be seen.
The economic crisis has suddenly made socialism and the welfare state a byword for something that works, and capitalism as some sort of demon. As BBC's The News Quiz quite succintly put it, the West's going gaga over nationalization and Russia's an oil-rich capitalist country. I would prefer if the State merely invested in the future of the economy and desisted from trying to exercise actual control over the economy. More often than not, their tendency to dictate policy to the banks leaves the banks incapable of independent thought and when the times comes to such a stage when one needs to act, neither the State nor the banks is in a position to determine what needs to be done, and the clock's ticking at the side. If you want to see what sort of mess demented socialism can create for a country, you only need to read India's history post-1975.
In other news, India's entered the hallowed precincts of the club of countries/alliances that have landed a mission on the moon. India's only the fourth country/alliance after the USA, Russia and the European Union (explains the alliance now?) to have accomplished this feat. Remarkably, the costs incurred are a mere fraction of the costs normally incurred by NASA, a testament to ISRO's high-quality optimization of limited resources. I read that ISRO has planned a second mission in 2012, and maybe even a manned mission by 2015. While many may decry this as a wastage of resources at a time when more pressing issues face the country, I feel that we, as Indians, are in desperate need of an icon, like the Apollo 13 became for the Americans or Sputnik for the Soviets, to aspire to. One hopes that such missions will inspire more people to opt for vocations other than IT and bench-work; hopefully many more astronauts, astrophysicists, aerospace engineers and avionics experts arise from this experience.
This blog has been more of a news bulletin; but then something's better than nothing, no?
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