Why Indians will never be a THE GREAT EUROPEAN DREAM......

The Term ‘India‘ was taken up from River Indus where the first settlers established their residence. The river was worshipped by Aryans as Sindhu.
The Number System was first invented in ancient India. Zero was first used by Aryabhatta.
The Decimal System and Place Value System were developed in India in 100 B.C.
Takshila holds distinction of being World’s First University. It was established in 700 BC. More than 10,000 students some of them from far-off countries like China and Japan enrolled in about 60 subjects. It was one of the greatest achievements of Ancient India.
The Earliest School of Medicine Ayurveda was known to mankind. It was consolidated by Charaka some 2500 years ago. Over 2600 years ago Sushruta the father of Surgery conducted Surgeries like Cataract, Fractures, and Rhinoplasty and Brain Surgeries without the use of Anesthesia.
Navigation started in the River Sindu 6000 years ago. Derived from the Sanskrit word Navgatih Ancient Indians excelled in this art. ‘Navy’ word is also derived from Sanskrit word ‘nou’.
Bhaskaracharya calculated the Time Taken by the Earth to Orbit the Sun hundreds of years ago. Guess his calculation done in 5th century- 365.258756484 days.
Budhayana was the First Indian Mathematician (6th century) to calculate the value of ‘pi’ and explained the concept of Pythagorean Theorem. Ancient India is the home of Algebra, Trigonometry and Calculus. Greeks and Romans used the numbers as big as 106 whereas ancient Indians used numbers as big as 10*53 (10 to the power of 53).
Saurashtra is the home of Earliest Reservoir and Dam built for Irrigation. The records of King Rudradaman I of 150 BC show that a beautiful lake called Sudarshana was constructed on the hills of Raivataka during Chandragupta Maurya’s time.
Shataranja or Ashtapada or common Chess Was Invented in India
THE ANCIENT INDIAN CIVILIZATION, CULTURE, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT is one of the oldest (almost pioneering system) and begins with prehistoric human activity at Mehrgarh, in present-day Pakistan, and continues through the Indus Valley Civilization to early states and empires. If we can, keenly observe our Science and Technology from our Epics, we can understand, how advanced our systems are in arena of Space, Polar, Nuclear Sciences, Automobile Engineering,Economics, Information Technology, Communications,Physics,Law,Medicine and Surgery ,Astrophysics,Metallurgy  and infrastructure through city planning.
As Indians we never had the unification factor of the European forces to conquer the world  or the dreams of the Oligarchs of the medevial Europe to build a necessarily huge structure that transcends all propositions.We never thought of building Intellectual mazes of wisdom.But if Indians were born Indians it was a long standing destiny to capture the void and then leave the void as if nothing exists.
Though, Indians are philosophical people, our Ancient Indians has made enormous advancements which are far away to understand. 
If we are to understand the value and art of Indianism it is very sorry structure that Indians all over the world go to schools of repute to be taught something which is basically in their genes.
An indians goes to US  to propogate facebook through social network ..
Ha ha a person from a country which still suffers under colonial system of rule...
An architect goes to US to build their houses while a country still reels to provide the minimum threshold of plain drinking water and other imminent supplies.
An IT expert keeps reeling chains of walmart and starbucks while a common indian dies without knowing proper health standards and subjects to live.
Do this people really succeed in being doctrines of their art 
No they just reel under the imperialist regimes twisting an dturning their minds to create something new that will improve their needs of living.
Why  do not they go to seek possibilty they fail likely cause of genetic physchological  syndrome.
An indian will always be religious which may or not be he may seek a divine sect for happiness but will always explore the mind to be happy.An indian will hate confrontation and argument on the possibility of existence of god because he knows that God exists and he tries to prove not confront the actions set on him through the effect of what he sees in himself as God.If physics be the case of confrontations in Indianism , it was closely linked with religion and theology and it even differed from sect to sect. Almost all religions believed that the universe consisted of elements like earth, air, water, and akasa (ether). Most schools maintained that there were as many types of atoms as there were elements.
Indians will never be able to build huge machines or huge marvels because that leads to uncertainity in his mind and his being.An Indian always sees the world as an explorer with a small point of origin  or vortex being the realization of his self.An Indian will never be able to match to Europeans on this issue as oligarchs see the world as an extension of their self which is why they are the best in explaining market strategy ,economic valuations and military accomplishments.For an Indian his mind is his biggest weapon and not the other way round.If nature is the explanation of the world markets ,valuations and accomplishments are the way of living and contributions to the betterment of self.But there are always variations in understanding Self in a form transgressing from the behavior of the getting more and more.It is the 

Predicting economic crisis based on physics of the mind

The rarer the pricer or the deadly: If you look at the graph with  the magnitude of earthquakes on the x-axis plotted against the frequency of the earthquakes on the y-axis. You can see that as earthquakes get stronger they get rarer. The way the frequency of earthquakes varies as a function of their size is characterized by an exponent - or a power - of the frequency. The enormously powerful Tohoku and Sumatra earthquakes, more than magnitude 9, are many times less frequent than magnitude 4 earthquakes. The other thing about power-law phenomena is called scale-invariance - otherwise known as fractals. Earthquakes have no characteristic size or scale - so even though large earthquakes are rare they are no different than small earthquakes. Think of a coast line or cauliflower: as you zoom in the patterns will repeat themselves at each scale.Power-law distributions have been found in many phenomena: the sizes of cities for example follows a power-law. In addition to the frequency-size function, there is frequency-rank: which is that the frequency of something is inversely proportional to its rank. For cities the biggest city is about twice the size of the second biggest city, three times the size of the third biggest city, etc. So you have very rare huge cities like New York City, and thousands of small cities with 50,000 or fewer people. This is also known as Zipf's law, who discovered the same pattern for word frequency. The second most common word in a text is half as common as the most common word in a text.

What does all this have to do with extreme income inequality? Well we can see that income inequality follows a power-law, so that people with very large incomes are very rare, and people with very small incomes are very common. These kinds of distributions can arise from what is called self-organized criticality. These are nonlinear systems that manage to stay stable by adapting their internal dynamics in subtle ways to their environments. The idea was introduced using very simple models of this kind of behavior: forest-fires and avalanches in sand piles.

Sand piles are often used to illustrate how self-organized systems stay on the edge of order and disorder, and illustrate the concept of a nonlinear threshold.  Imagine a completely flat surface on which you pour grains of sand at some constant rate. The grains of sand fall randomly to either side of the pile as it builds up. At first the pile is small and so the angle of its slope is very shallow. You can keep adding sand and the pile will just get taller. At a certain point the angle of the pile will become steep enough so that adding more sand causes small avalanches. After a time the angle of the pile and the frequency of the avalanches will converge to form a balance so that the overall shape of the pile is maintained. However, the key to this is that there is an open dissipation of sand running off the pile to compensate for the new sand being poured on to the pile. If you keep adding sand and it cannot dissipate the pile angle will become so steep that when you add just one more grain of sand, it will cause a catastrophic avalanche that flattens the whole pile.

So actually you can estimate how often catastrophic sand pile avalanches will occur based on how often smaller avalanches occur: and crucially you can maybe prevent catastrophic avalanches by causing smaller avalanches.

While I don't have this rigorously worked out because a) I probably couldn't do the math and b) I just thought of all this today after seeing the YouTube video (if someone wants to try I think it would be very interesting): in hazard research for example, small controlled forest fires are used to prevent enormous disastrous fires. If we could, causing small scale earthquakes in critical regions might actually prevent Sumatra or Tohoku-type earthquakes. And just as in the sand pile case in which there are extreme situations where adding only one grain of sand causes a catastrophic avalanche: are we now in such an economic situation of steep inequality teetering on the threshold of a catastrophic event? Where one tiny seemingly insignificant "grain of sand" causes our entire economy to collapse? The super-rich would do well to heed the lessons of nonlinear dynamics and power-law distributions: it might only require them to give up small portions of their wealth to prevent a convulsive social upheaval.

In these situations the stable dynamics of the systems (forest, sand pile, earth's seismic activity, society) are maintained by small crises: small fires, small avalanches, small earthquakes; but catastrophic disasters are no different from these smaller ones. When these systems go too far from this stability they become vulnerable to massive catastrophes: what are called Dragon-Kings. The Tohoku earthquake for example was so powerful that it's even an outlier in a power-law distribution. And likewise: the super-wealthy are so rich they are outliers even in a power-law distribution. So the term dragon-kings serves a nice double-purpose: an apt name for the super-wealthy and the mathematical description of their outlier status. More ominously, dragon-kings can also refer to rare catastrophic events.

 

“While financial crashes, recessions, earthquakes and other extreme events appear chaotic, Didier Sornette’s research is focused on finding out whether they are, in fact, predictable. They may happen often as a surprise, he suggests, but they don’t come out of the blue: the most extreme risks (and gains) are what he calls “dragon kings” that almost always result from a visible drift toward a critical instability. In his hypothesis, this instability has measurable technical and/or socio-economical precursors. As he says: “Crises are not external shocks.”
Stability breeds instability.
1. A type of strategy or mindset becomes prevalent (Momentum, Don’t Fight Fed)
2. The winners become more successful, attracting imitators
3. Crowding in the strategy makes out-performance more difficult, without increasing risk/leverage
4. The stability & low-volatility meltup usher in a new paradigm for risk as VaR models encourage levering (today, selling vol)
An interesting insight that I took away from a recent comparable reading “Forecast” – markets tend to tip into the “unstable” (crash-prone) when:
1. Momentum/Short-term strategies and market participants become increasingly powerful/wealthy and garner a larger share of the market (ownership, volume, etc.)
2. The number of competing strategies shrinks, leading to erosion of profits, or increasingly risky behavior to maintain profits – more leverage, turnover, etc.
3. Let the first domino fall……

Especially troubling is his view that up until the mid 1980’s, GDP growth was the result of real productivity and since then it’s artificial due to the rise of the financial sector. Yet, even he notes, that the longest bubble in the S&P 500 was in the 1955-1975 period. However, he then describes the great crashes the late 1990’s and 2008 as resulting from debt, ignoring that the fall from 1964 to 1968 was as large as the late 90’s fall, and then it kept going, so that the market in 1982 was only 22% of it’s peak, while the post dot-com low was 45% of it’s peak. He doesn’t say what measure of CPI he uses, but I use CPIAUCSL, and with this the all time normalized market highs are around 1958 and 1962 while his figure shows the 1998 peak slightly higher than the earlier ones.
Much of the rest is equally troubling. He constantly uses some measure of debt/gdp or similar, but never takes into consideration that the actual share of economic flows servicing this debt is a small fraction of what it was earlier. And he fails to note that the fluctuations in the actual economy and the markets were large and frequent pre 1980’s.
In Forecast, physicist and acclaimed science writer Mark Buchanan answers these questions and more in a master lesson on a smarter economics, which accepts that markets act much like weather. While centuries of classical financial thought have trained us to understand “the market” as something that always returns to equilibrium, economies work more like our atmosphere — a loose surface balance riding on a deeper torrent of fluctuation. Market instability is as natural — and dangerous — as a prairie twister. With Buchanan’s help, we can better govern the markets and weather their storms.
Any economy operating above the sustenance minimum is unstable. Some version of the fundamental economic equation is always valid, and in fact debt does not appear in it. Even with zero debt, if people save more (spend less), businesses invest less, and government spends less, the economy contracts.

Does Sornettes’s track record of predicting so-called unpredictable events not speak to the value in his work (i.e Chinese equities in 2007, oil in 2008, the Swiss Franc vs. the Euro in 2011 and bitcoin this year)–regardless of his view of debt?

“Games are fundamentally different from decisions made in a neutral environment. To illustrate the point, think of the difference between the decisions of a lumberjack and those of a general. When the lumberjack decides how to chop wood, he does not expect the wood to fight back; his environment is neutral. But when the general tries to cut down the enemy’s army, he must anticipate and overcome resistance to his plans. Like the general, a game player must recognize his interaction with other intelligent and purposive people. His own choice must allow both for conflict and for possibilities for cooperation.
The essence of a game is the interdependence of player strategies. There are two distinct types of strategic interdependence: sequential and simultaneous. In the former the players move in sequence, each aware of the others’ previous actions. In the latter the players act at the same time, each ignorant of the others’ actions.”

Title:	A review of power laws in real life phenomena
Source:	Pinto, Carla. Communications In Nonlinear Science And Numerical Simulation Volume: 17 Issue: 9 (2012-09-01) p. 3558-3578. ISSN: 1007-5704

Title:	Black swans, power laws, and dragon-kings: Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, wildfires, floods, and SOC models
Source:	Sachs, M. The European Physical Journal Special Topics Volume: 205 Issue: 1 (2012-05-01) p. 167-182. ISSN: 1951-6355

 

Where India lags behind China and that to badly

When two equally dominant  patriachs of two neighboring families come and meet over a dinner to discuss the role they played in shaping the ethos of the family;it often ends in strategic moral play and lot of down tones and lively banter.But when the same issues transgresses to the national respect the situation is more the same but the accountability factor of governance comes to play.When we call of India and China to be the issue of contention and who will turn to a bigger superpower the question of morality and ego and equally the question of consistence in continuance comes to play.The shadows of the past  have shown both China and India as the largest empires of rule .If China consists of a eminently strong population of 20% of the entire population India ranks close second in 18%.
But where is the difference between the two.China is rolling ahead in the economic scenario with its avalanche schemes of financial superiority.
That makes us ask will the situation remain the same in the coming years or is it petulance and the strict discipline that the sages taught which will bring us back as a nation of reckoning in Governance sector.
There is a saying with the coming of the British in India and going of the Raj; lord Vishwakarma fled from India to China .The manufacturing sector in China and the realty boom has been going boom boom or gung ho as Chinese firms create new milestone give more credit to US and create a new order.
But where lies the real issues.
If we see modern India, the Indian system keeps  gropling heavily on a coterie of politicians diplomats industrialist filmstars and a few of the mango generation are rendering their weight on the subjective art of Selling and Reselling a brand.
A shah Rukh Khan has to still sell a Raj  or a Dilwale dulhaniya train seen to be recognized for his films.A Cricketer has to still sell and resell his centuries he made to prove he is in the topmost bracket of the elite group.A politician has to still sell and resell godhra riots babri masjid demolition and the whole lot to prove of his competence with someone else...
If that is not all attending a developmental economist lectures may be a test of endurance but having done that with attending a brilliant question and interaction section for Amartya Sens and Jean Dreze An UnCertain glory I got a taste of the apathy Indian civilized executives  have for a nation they lived in for  four thousand years.
India suffers from a multi dimensional poverty index;Even Bangladesh is ahead of Indian states in terms of providing vitamin supplemets for the young.Where bangaldesh is at 81% India ia weak at 18%.Less than 40% can read a paragraph.Kerala has unique social indicators.In the modern scenario Chattisgarh Orissa and Madhya Pradesh came up with ICDS schemes for children.Himachal Pradesh has seen an excellent turnover with primary education.Gujarat and Rajasthan model has succeded a few places but baring this the rest is like a dead tomb of self eulogizing babus and dictats.Universal health care and Primary health security bill needs to be followed in every state and needs conditional optimization.
We need aggressive and an intrusive agricultural marketting scenario.This is one sector which will lead the rest of the beehive  to thrive.The question still remains whether a China can consider us as contender in their own game or as as the same old pyajama ka naara which holds everything in place because it was made to be like that.China will have a lot to answer in English if they destroy us.So let the superpowers scratch what they do not want to hurt.

But the biggest problem in Indian politics lies we sell and resell Indian  tradition through our filmy drama  and not through products which speak of our endurance of earning the independence and the constitution we have after generations of toil.
China is going steadfast of distribution and redistribution.The entire ghost cities like Ordos in inner mongolia and the whole lot  built replete with skyscrapers, shopping malls, highways, parks and other facilities, but which are entirely empty of people.This may be the way of the dragon but the  process of redistributon of static property like land and place has already started before it has been thought by the future world.
Is there a way forward for India stop appeasing the centuries old behavior of selling and reselling we used to sell the idea that India was at the forefront of studies in foreign affairs; agriculture; medicine and sanitation are some of the ideas we get studying the cities of Indus valley.This needs to believed again and then promoted by Indians.

According to Mathew McCartney director of contemporary south Asian studies at Britain's Oxford UniversityIndia cannot compete with China's 'efficient' system of corruption, a British academic told a conference in Brussels. was there to document the debatePublicServiceEurope.com
While both countries suffer from high levels of corruption, China's one party system has a "more efficient" business-friendly system for paying backhanders. In India, on the other hand, corruption is "unpredictable" and is seen as more of a tax on investment -
"The strong centralised Communist Party has efficiently organised corruption," McCartney said. Large-scale infrastructure projects such as dams are simply forced through in China whereas the Indian government struggles to push past "populist, fragmented" interest groups. "For all developed countries, democracy and property rights have been a product of economic development - not a pre-condition," McCartney said.

India's strong democratic institutions were likely to be a "handicap" to future growth rather than a boost, he predicted. "Good democracies emerge as a consequence of development," he said. "If you look at the statistics you will see that it is difficult to find a link between democracy and growth." Rather than plough money into democracy in under-developed nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, the international community would do better to investment in other areas - such as the education of girls, he suggested.

Historically speaking, countries that have experienced large leaps forward in economic terms have not been particularly democratic at the time - he pointed out. As an example he took the United Kingdom of the 1830s, when the industrial revolution was in full swing. At the time, only 1 per cent to 2 per cent of the population had the right to vote. His comments led a former official of the European External Action Service, the European Union's diplomatic corps, to wonder out loud if Europe was not "too democratic" to achieve its growth goals. Does the EU need a dictatorship to redress its downward spiral?

"I hate hearing democracy knocked," retorted Naina Lal Kidwai, president of the federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry. What was important was a "combination of democracy and leadership", she said. "What we have to knock is coalition governments not democracy per se."

Talking at the conference interval, McCartney told PublicServiceEurope.com that despite his presentation he was a "big fan of democracy". Governance by the people was however more likely to "stick" in countries that had achieved a certain level of per capita income, he said, citing statistical research going back more than 200 years. Countries can swing between democracy and dictatorship almost at random, he maintained. Democracies can be found in poor countries and rich countries, but they are more likely to be enduring in wealthy countries.

Read more: http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/2977/india-too-democratic-to-overtake-china-as-economic-superpower#ixzz2ZinrjYft

Life of a madman anarchist revolutionist yet a seeker of true peace

When you view the biography of a creative individual you look for the treatment method of imagery followed by the director and the central protagonist to bring out the character.With Meghe Dhaka Tara the shadow of the towering mind of a genius is no less over shadowed.The film is a technical genius au naturel character synchronizing lifes and events of Ritwik Ghatak.The technique of using a mental assylum as the background is brilliant as it deeply associates in engaging the sub altern voice of the maverick director and engaging his sujourning wife as Ananya Chatterjee serves as an icing on the cake. The director subtly delves in the theorist,purist yet non conformist mind of Ritwik Ghatak and blatantly serves the best expressions you might see from an actor.With Saswata as Ritwik Ghatak he breaks and moulds himself that sends wireless waves of agony pain non- challlance yet tremendous hope in the power of the people.Though the film is boring due to the extreme research and transparency of work yet the story line is brilliant and should be the best film of the year due to the research work. If an emotion can be changed it results in a resistance of the mind .We always feel something a potent force of change .Many times we get mired in the same tone of life that stretches endlessly and we beleive that by manipulating circumstances we bring in agents of change .The emotion generates anger sadness infatuation excitement or some other dramatic change that shocks you life.Yet we are made to still make our mind to remain the effect of the world and remain a victim.The change from black and white to color at the end signifies the confusions of the mind of a Ritwick ghatak leading way to freedom.
This brings me to the question of existence .The belief that events in life are going to add up asks me to justify the core of my action and avoid rejection which makes me plan nd avoid the future.The inner recess of our mind asks me to confess as an avoidance of change But I must act now without knowing the results which makes me atleast justify to respond to the part of me which took the priority to respond.Excitement dejection and irritation are also some of the results which are a part of me to follow.

Geo political significance of Calcutta for USA and China and use of cultural homeopathy

Kolkata as a dying city or a city of joy has been exonnerated by many philosophers  who visiited the city.The joy of visiting the land of tagore and ray leaves many elated for both entering and  leaving the city .They say there is romance in the putrefied habbits of the city.Dark alleys ideologoues termed  addas , people brimming with confidence at tea stalls;habbits which never changed as people surrendered to a kind of cultural homeopathy to relieve themselves of rules set by themselves ;But is Kolkata for the future going to be the same for US and China setting foot for the South Asian hubs of Malaysia Indonesia and even China  and indian elite looking for a secure place to die in their last days .
Lets look back three hundred years back.
Calcutta is founded as a trading post under the British in 1690 a year when the european countries were looking for strategic expansion.Lets compare present days four metros as colonies of //USA and China .China as it will always be will look to Kolkata as their hub for strategic expansion both in India and the rest of South Asia .
With direct roads linking to Delhi Madras and the rest of India and yet serving as a lynch pin to the rest of the north east .Kolkata is there for grabs.Poor infrastructure as a tool can be developed for building new cities massive towers of excellence.Kolkata is the closest to the chickens neck .You hold the neck you orchestrate the rest;That will serve as a tool for the rest of India to follow.
Kolkata offers an excelent bio reserve and the oil reserves of the north east has to move through kolkata .There is no alternative route out.
Kolkata gives excellent communication with the seas a boon for the Goliathic navy of the imperialists which again is a boon as with time you conquer the entire Eastern Ghats and get control of the waters of Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean.Kolkata can be directly connected by Land  to Chittagong another port of Power and provides excellent route to Kumming, China ,Bhutan Nepal,,Myannamar and you get via foot to the booming markets of Singapore Thailand and the rest of South Asia. I want to formulate the rules of the game that will be followed systematically by the world power as visualized by Kaplan in his book Monsoon
Now, as we enter this new era, the winds of time seem to be shifting towards the East, as China and India emerge to exert their influence on the world stage. As Mr. Kaplan studies this shift, from the Horn of Africa, past the tense arc of Islam, past the Indian subcontinent, all the way to the Indonesian Archipelago, he sees this area as a place where he believes the struggle for religious freedom, energy independence, and the fight for democracy will all take place.
Kolkata served as the most improved hub .
Lets transit to the present day..............
With Kolkata being a secure hub with favorable climate and natural disasters diverted away to orrisa and bangaldesh it serves as an idealistic vantage point for overthrowing the idea that kolkata is a dying city.It will and mind you will be a ideal colony with its subversive ideologies and a submerging inteligensia for future take overs and a future colony of present day imperialists.
If Hirok Rajar deshe served as a work of fiction and the cultural homeopathy was a forgotten dream it will be true in the coming days.The rulers overturned the elite polity at its foot and the intelligensia afraid to decide but ready to work will culminate as the faction for US and China agents of change or better termed as the counsels of rule.
The emerging multipolar world Mr. Kaplan envisions has the Indian Ocean as its center. Why?
For example, it is the Indian Ocean, the third-largest body of water in the world, that serves as the global
energy interstate. Nearly 50 percent of the world's container traffic and 70 percent of the world's
petroleum product travel through these waters. It is also where the political future of Islam will most likely be determined.  It makes sense, Mr. Kaplan argues, that if America wants to remain relevant in an ever-changing world, we will need to concentrate our power in this vibrant, evolving geographic sphere that cannot be ignored.
If Satyajit Ray envisioned the jewels transmitted to far lands and the rulers serving as the social polity ;Lets look at the present day exchange
The Bay Of Bengal and the  the Indian Ocean—the entire arc of Islam, from the Sahara
Desert to the Indonesian Archipelago. It is literally the world's global energy interstate, where all the oil
and natural gas from the Arabian Peninsula and the Iranian Plateau are shipped across the Indian Ocean,
through the Strait of Malacca and Lombok Strait, up to the burgeoning middle-class fleshpots of Asia in
the Chinese coast, in South Korea, in Japan, et cetera."
Indian Ocean is vast and yet Predictable;
What is unique about it is that it is reversible. The winds flow in one direction—northeast, southwest
—steadily for six months a year, then reverse themselves by 180 degrees and flow in the other direction
for six months a year.
And they are utterly predictable, unlike other wind systems around the world. Because they are utterly
predictable, it makes sailing distances calculable in advance. In other words, sailors could calculate
exactly when to sail, and how much time it would take to get to a place. This has been the pattern since
antiquity. The Indian Ocean, unlike the Atlantic or the Pacific, did not have to wait for the age of
steamships to unite it.It may be vast, many thousands of miles across from the Indonesian Archipelago to South Africa or East Africa, but it is in a way a small, intimate ocean. It's why you have large Malay communities from South East Asia living in Madagascar, right off the coast of East Africa. It's why you have large Yemeni communities from the Arabian Peninsula living in Indonesia. It's why you have large populations of Omanis from the Arabian Peninsula living in East Africa. It's why Gujaratis from northwestern India are everywhere in the Indian Ocean, particularly in East Africa. It's all because of the historical legacy of this geographical fact of the monsoon winds. That leads us to another realization. If everyone was everywhere along this ocean, it kind of does violence to Cold War area studies, which artificially separated the world.
At the end of World War II, the United States found itself as a great global power and it had to manage
the world to an extent, and it needed experts for everywhere. So it divided up the world. We had the
Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, South East Asia, East Asia,and other regions. University
departments, think-tanks, and the U.S. government did this. The CIA, the Pentagon, the State
Department especially, had different divisions for different parts of the world. We live in a world now where South Asian energy demand in India requires Middle East, or particularly Iranian, natural gas in the future decades. It's where China is investing heavily in the Middle East, and it is particularly in Saudi Arabia and in Iran. It's where India in South Asia wants to build gas pipelines toward South East Asia. It's where the Chinese are prospecting for copper in Afghanistan.If there were ever even semi-stability in Afghanistan, it could become a nexus of pipeline and road networks that would take gas from Turkmenistan across Pakistan into South Asia and then across to the Malacca Straits, to China, or directly by pipeline from Turkmenistan across to Uzbekistan into western China.
      We are entering a world where these area divisions are breaking down. There is nothing more symbolic of that than an Indian Ocean map. Focusing on the Indian Ocean allows you to deal with the whole world
without drifting into the bland nostrums of globalization. It allows you to kind of see a picture of the
world while focusing on one particular area that shows that, rather than subdivisions, what you have is a
flowing, organic continuum of economics and culture.Another thing about the Indian Ocean: It shows you a different take on Islam. Americans tend to think of Islam as a desert religion, supposedly prone to the extremities of thought to which deserts give rise. But Islam is also a great seafaring faith, with Arab and Persian soldiers in the medieval centuries, before the arrival of Vasco da Gama and the Portuguese in South Asia. These Arab and Persian sailors sailed across the longitudes from the greater Middle East all the way to the South Seas and the Far East. If you go back and look at the book Sinbad the Sailor and Sinbad's voyages, Sinbad was an Omani who sailed out of Basra in Iraq. If you look at the descriptions of his voyages, it takes you to the Andaman Islands and the Bay of Bengal, to Borneo, to various places in South Asia and South East Asia. Sinbad was a story that encapsulated the trading adventures of these early Muslim traders. The Islam that developed in the tropics, in the Far East, was very much a cosmopolitan religion because it was spread gradually by sophisticated traders, rather than suddenly by the sword, as it was across North Africa. Because it was spread gradually, it overlaid neatly onto the indigenous Javanese and Malay cultures in what is today the Indonesian Archipelago and Malaysia. So it gives you a whole new kind of cultural representation of Islam. I contend that we are going back in a way to the era before the Portuguese, to the era when you had Arab and Persian sailors all over the Far East, which is why you have remains of 8th century mosques in the cities of China. We are back to an era when you had early Ming Dynasty Chinese navigators in Yemen, making the hajj to Mecca if they were of Mongolian Islamic descent, and back to an age where the Chinese are all over the Middle East, when Middle Easterners are all over Asia. In other words, we are back to a trading system where in this case the Chinese will be the first among equals in the area. When Vasco da Gama sailed to India, he didn't discover India. What he did was he reacquainted
Europeans with the monsoon wind system that allowed him to go to India. It was Arab navigators in what
is today Kenya that helped him do that. The Portuguese were not the first Westerners in the Indian Ocean. The ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans were the first. They have even found Roman coins in West Bengal, up the Hooghly River near present-day Kolkata. This knowledge of the wind system was lost until Portuguese navigators reacquainted Europe with it. These navigators instituted basically a 500-year domination by the West of the Greater Indian Ocean from the Horn of Africa to the South China Sea. Following the Portuguese were the Dutch, the French in the southern part of South Asia, the British, and finally the Americans in the guise of the American Navy. But the American Navy, which was 580 warships during the Reagan era and 350 warships during the Clinton era, and now down to 286 warships, and maybe going down to 250 if you trust the Congressional Budget Office and other studies, means that maybe we are slowly passing out of the era of complete domination by the West and going back to the pre-da Gama era, where this trading system will be in the hands of the indigenous countries.
When I speak of the Greater Indian Ocean, I include the western Pacific too. There are feasibility studies
and visions of building a canal across the Kra Isthmus in southern Thailand, of land bridge projects using
rail and roads to take cargo from the Bay of Bengal side of the Malay Peninsula to the South China Sea
side of the Malay Peninsula. Dubai Ports World and some others are doing feasibility studies on this. In
other words, the Indian Ocean does not have to be totally dependent on the Strait of Malacca to connect
it with the western Pacific, and the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean could be more of an organic
continuum.The Portuguese were not the first Westerners in the Indian Ocean. The ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans were the first. They have even found Roman coins in West Bengal, up the Hooghly River near present-day Kolkata. This knowledge of the wind system was lost until Portuguese navigators
reacquainted Europe with it.
These navigators instituted basically a 500-year domination by the West of the Greater Indian Ocean
from the Horn of Africa to the South China Sea. Following the Portuguese were the Dutch, the French in
the southern part of South Asia, the British, and finally the Americans in the guise of the American Navy.
But the American Navy, which was 580 warships during the Reagan era and 350 warships during the
Clinton era, and now down to 286 warships, and maybe going down to 250 if you trust the Congressional
Budget Office and other studies, means that maybe we are slowly passing out of the era of complete
domination by the West and going back to the pre-da Gama era, where this trading system will be in the
hands of the indigenous countries. When I speak of the Greater Indian Ocean, I include the western Pacific too. There are feasibility studies and visions of building a canal across the Kra Isthmus in southern Thailand, of land bridge projects using rail and roads to take cargo from the Bay of Bengal side of the Malay Peninsula to the South China Sea side of the Malay Peninsula. Dubai Ports World and some others are doing feasibility studies on this. In other words, the Indian Ocean does not have to be totally dependent on the Strait of Malacca to connect it with the western Pacific, and the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean could be more of an organic continuum.
In thinking strategically about the Indian Ocean, look at it this way. Think of China moving vertically
south and India moving horizontally east and west and in the course of that overlapping.
When I talk about the rivalry—and I use the word rivalry, not conflict—between India and China, I am
talking about a rivalry that has very little history behind it. India and China developed separately two
great world civilizations separated by the Himalayas. It's not a hot-blooded dispute, like between India
and Pakistan. Buddhism spread from India to China in the early modern centuries.
It's a rivalry that has come about because of the shrinkage of distance caused by the advancement of
military technology. You now have Chinese airfields in Tibet with fighter jets whose arc of operations
theoretically includes India. It's a rivalry because you have Indian warships in the South China Sea and
Chinese warships in the Indian Ocean. In other words, their military arc of operations and economic
operations have spread so that each one layers on top of the other.
It's a rivalry that will ultimately be held in check because India and China will constitute the world's
greatest trading relationship. Their economies are very complementary. But let me go back to China moving south, and India moving east and west. China does not have a coastline on the Indian Ocean, but the Indian Ocean was never far from China's gaze, going back to the Early Modern era. Early Ming Dynasty explorers got as far as the Red Sea and Yemen.  China is presently building or helping to build deep-water ports in Gwadar in Pakistan, in Chittagong in Bangladesh, in Kyaukphyu in Burma, and in Hambantota in the southern tip of Sri Lanka. All these ports serve as port but do not double up to be a International City of Choice.Calcutta will be the manouevoring tool for the the pattern analysis of ports and designing specifications.Kolkata also facilitates as a multihop port for reaching future international cities.With ports clearing the shore for greater co operation countries in the South Asia will look for greater collaboration with both China and USA.India serving as coffers for exchange.Kolkata will be the best port and international logisitc hub for building an elite polity.It is secure from natural disasters ,crowded by people who are ready to work at cheapest rate a regular supply from foreign ports;dearth of central jobs and organizational duties and finally an intelligent and a cultural society.This are all fruitfull to make a city the lynch pin of future colonial and industrial policies.If Hirok Rajar Deshe still looks a bit distant lets not read this post but this is going to happen in the near future and we all will be there to see the bene-facto governments;
Are you still thinking for your daily dose of homeopathy.