Biased against millets

Historians who do not believe the Aryan Invasion Theory say that folks who believe in it are biased towards Europeans. Folks who believe in Aryan Invasion Theory think that others are biased towards Indians. But in this biased word of history, have you heard of people who are biased against millets? Who can be so stone-hearted to be biased against those small-seeded species of cereal grown around the world for food and fodder?
Such evil people do exist and the people who do this are rice and wheat lovers. In fact, if you look at the history of millet farming you may be able to identify the period and place of the first farmer according to Steve Weber of Washington State University.

‘These are the facts. In Southern India, millets were being cultivated as old as 3000 BC to 2500 BC, while rice came into existence only by 500 BC. and in North India, millet cultivation was even there before it made an entry in South India” said Fuller. Weber added, “There have been sites in Gujarat, India, and even a few Harappan sites, which have been primarily millet-dominant.”
Weber says that since millets were more nutritious and were even drought- resistant, perhaps more and more people started cultivating them before anything else. “In India, China and South Africa, millets were the staple diet. And surprisingly, the so very Indian millets like ragi, jowar and bajra actually come from South Africa.”
“The British started researching with rice and wheat and even today, organisations like the UN and FAO concentrate on that. This may have been because rice and wheat are bigger grains and easier to identify, whereas millets were smaller and more time-consuming to find,” they opined. [Millets older than wheat, rice: Archaeologists]

A recent discovery of a grain of rice in India may prove Weber to be wrong. Excavations in Lahuradeva in Uttar Pradesh have shown that people of this region took to farming and domestication of animals about 10,000 years back.
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Herbal Beer

A healthy herbal beer, invented by an Indian is to hit UK markets. The beer promises much less hangover. Lady Bird Bio Beer contains aloe vera – more commonly found in health food shops – and medicinal herbs.
The beer has the same alcohol strength – five per cent – like all other regular beer. The difference however, according to its inventor Dr Srinivasa Amarnath is that it will leave you with less of a sore head.
Dr Amarnath, who has apparently worked on the particular beer for a decade claims it, has health benefits. He claims it can alleviate conditions such as asthma and arthritis. [Indian to launch herbal beer in UK]

What more can one ask for? Beer that can reduce asthma and has other potential health benefits. You don’t need herbal beer for regular beer is capable of all that. After a six pack, most health problems are usually solved, well atleast till you wake up. Now since we are on the health route, if he could add some flax seed and anti-oxidants to it, then there could be a huge market in California.

Blame it on Globalization – II

Jo, has a new episode of his Malayalam podcast M-POD. This time it is an interview with Dr. C. R Rajagopal who teaches Malayalam at Sree Kerala Varma College, Thrissur. He is also the director of Centre for Indigenous Knowledge, a group working on documenting traditional knowledge.
To explain the value of traditional knowledge, he sang a a very nice folk song about various types of seeds and when to farm them. This song was from a book Krishi Geetha (Krishi = Farming) written in the 17th century and was taught in schools. Not anymore.
As people worked with nature, they observed many facts about weather, plants, animals and such information was captured in stories, legends, songs, and sayings. They also had art forms which captured various rituals. This knowledge is getting lost and now there are about 60 groups in Kerala which sing these songs and transmit the knowledge from the older generation to the younger. There are audio albums, photo albums and books available which capture these words of wisdom. A very commendable effort indeed.
If you are a Malayalee, then the words, globalization and western culture has to be used in a negative connotation due to how the Malayali DNA is structured. This word appears in this interview also for no reason. In his introduction Jo mentions that Dr. Rajagopal is going to tell us about knowledge which is getting lost due to the big influence of western culture in our lives. Then Dr. Rajagopal utters the word globalization in an unusual situation.
He said that collecting this information is required due to the globalized situation we are in. According to him, this information can also be used for fight globalization which according to him is trying to grab the intellectual property of local people. He has contempt for the current culture (calls it Azha Kuzhamban culture) and wishes that people would pay more attention to this knowledge.
Globalization has definitely introduced problems and the patent fights for Basmati and Neem are good examples. There is no doubt that local knowledge is getting lost, but it would happen even if the forces of globalization were not present.
Long time back itself, farmers stopped cultivating land and started selling it off for real estate due to the increased labor costs. Now due to the excellent living conditions in Kerala bought about by the globalization of labor, no one wants to work for a living. Fruits and vegetables come from Tamil Nadu and when there is a lorry strike, the prices of everything goes up. When you are not farming anymore, what is the need of songs which talk about various seeds?
Second, knowledge is being lost as people from villages move to towns. We are not talking of Dubai here, but towns in Kerala. Half of the knowledge of grandmothers get lost when mothers live far away from them. When this knowledge is transmitted by the mother to her offspring, some more knowledge is lost. Even if you exclude globalization, information is just lost as the current generation does not need it. This is happening in each family living in Kerala itself.
Instead of blaming everything on globalization, such people should take advantage of the forces of globalization to spread the knowledge. Already they are doing it by collaborating with universities and organizations outside India, creating websites and multimedia and by producing such podcasts. What is required is an attitude change to look at the positive power that globalization can provide.
Related Links: Blame it on globalization
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Indians in Davos

Goh Chok Tong, Former Prime Minister of Singapore was in India recently and gave a speech asking India to accelerate the pace of reforms.

Arguing that the old mindset opposed to competition on the plea of foreign economic colonisation and the theory of protectionism would only breed complacency and inefficiency. He said “competition drives economic growth; you lose some but you win more,” and urged the Indian government to remove impediments to healthy competition.[Indian atma biswas and the positive sum economics of trade]

Looks like this message is being taken seriously. “India Everywhere”. This is the campaign that Indians are unleashing in Davos for the World Economic Forum on Jan 25.

“India: the world’s fastest-growing free-market democracy,” proclaims one sign. Others will extol India’s growing business prowess (it now boasts 91 companies with revenues of $1 billion-plus), its $500 billion stock market capitalization, and its vast and youthful consumer market.
Waiting for visitors at their hotel rooms will be gifts from India — a pashmina shawl, an Apple (AAPL) iPod loaded with Indian pop and classical music, a piece of traditional art, some ayurvedic oils — along with a CD packed with all sorts of economic information about the country.[Davos Days, Bollywood Nights]

Finally someone got the clue that being understated and unspoken is not the way to do business. Among the list of people in the delegation are some odd balls like Amartya Sen and Shabana Azmi. The article also mentions that the ruler of Kerala will also be present and Kerala is a magnet for foreign investment.
Ignoring all that, it is important that India perform the right song and dance routine where it matters and display its cultural power along with the economic might. As the Globalization Institute notes

The figures tell a story. Economic growth is expected to be 8% in 2006, at a time when Japan would consider 1% a major success. There are now 91 businesses in India with turnover in excess of $1 billion, stock market capitalisation is in the $500 billion range, and there are reportedly over 200 million people learning English in India.
It’s worth contrasting this image with the pessimistic predictions of the late 1960s and early 1970s. India was headed for “inevitable” mass famine. Its population would drop as disease and chronic malnutrition raised the death rate. Corruption was seen as “endemic” and the combination of bureaucracy, protectionism, and a willingness to support the pirating of foreign trade marks were major obstacles to inward investment.[India flaunts it at Davos]

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Unconventional Tactics

Assuming that Ayman al-Zawahiri was present in the Pakistani village of Damadola, an unmanned American aircraft fired four Hellfire missiles at a mud walled compound killing 18 people. Few Al Qaeda members including the weapons expert Midhat Mursi was killed in the attack. While this attack got major press coverage both in United States and in Pakistan, there was another minor incident which happened a week before it which was not noticed much. According to Jim Hoagland, some foreign troops landed in Saidgi in North Waziristan, grabbed some folks and flew back into Afghanistan.
All this happened due to the help Musharraf is doing to prevent terrorism from Pakistani soil. Remember how he tried to hoodwink India into believing that there are no terrorists in Pakistan. He has been trying to do the same with the Americans. But since Americans are not Indians, they decided to take matters into their own hands and teach Musharraf a lesson.

“You can draw the Afghan-Pakistan border on a map by looking at the pattern of signal intercepts,” says one U.S. official. “The bad guys chatter away in Pakistan, feeling they are safe. That area lights up like a Christmas tree. Then they go silent when they cross into Afghanistan, where they fear getting hit.”
Two limited, carefully planned border attacks in rapid succession would appear to be something more than accidents of opportunity. The escalation by terrorists in Afghanistan has been met with an escalation, still at a low level, in U.S. attacks on Pakistani soil. Musharraf’s failure to curb the terrorist forays into Afghanistan after the incursion at Saidgi conceivably led to the attack on Damadola and the death of innocents there.[Message to Musharraf]

Fighting terrorism requires unconventional tactics and only Americans seem to have understood it.

Pockets of Poverty

When you think of poverty, countries like Saudi Arabia and United States do not come to mind, but there are pockets of poverty in both these countries. In Saudi Arabia, the guess would be that the poor people would be the expatriate people and the guess would be wrong. It seems there are poor Saudis too.

The image of Saudi Arabia abroad is of a land teaming with wealth and opportunity — the “oil-rich desert Kingdom” as the international media insist on saying. Inside the Kingdom, it is a rather different picture. Yes, there is wealth and opportunity — and massive development — but there is also poverty. The slums of south Riyadh or south Jeddah are real and shocking. It is not expatriate laborers who live in such places; it is poor Saudis. They cannot afford anything better. Nor is poverty confined to places like Qarantina in Jeddah or Suwaidi in Riyadh. There is serious rural poverty as well; as elsewhere, it manifests itself in substandard, rundown accommodation.
For many years, Saudi poverty was a taboo subject, unspoken by those who saw it as shameful and who foolishly imagined that by ignoring it, it would go away. It was Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah who, as crown prince, broke the taboo. His unprecedented visit to the slums of Suwaidi just over three years ago brought poverty into the open and with it a determination address the issue. [Poverty in the Kingdom]

During the Hurricane Katrina, the world saw the poverty in New Orleans. Here in California, which is the fifth largest economy in the world, poverty exists and one such place is Fresno (about 150 miles from Silicon Valley), which is the hearland of the California farmland.

This city at the heart of the richest farmland in the world has been poor for so long, no one can remember it otherwise. Last month, when the Brookings Institution issued a report that said a higher proportion of poor people in Fresno lived in areas of concentrated poverty than in any other major city in the country — pre-Katrina New Orleans was number two — no one here was surprised. “My goodness, that’s why I ran,” said Alan Autry, who became mayor in 2000. “I called it ‘A Tale of Two Cities.’ “[In Fresno, Tackling Poverty Moves to the Top of the Agenda]

Since Saudi Arabia runs at the King’s mercy, some direction has to come from him to eradicate povery. According to Govt. study, it would take atleast 30 years to reduce poverty to minimal levels if the spending in human services increased and people are calling for Saudi Arabia to be a more inclusive and democratic nation in the hope that it would bring prosperity to all people. But then United States is democratic and very inclusive and still the problem persists.

Globalization helps customers

If America is the place from where globalization is radiating outward, then all American industries would be secure and only rest of the world would be in trouble, but it not so. Few American industries are in dire straits and the reason for it is globalization.
Ford, America’s second largest auto maker announced yesterday that it would shutdown fourteen facilities and fire a quarter of its work force (about 30,000 people). This comes as no surprise to anyone living here. It was obvious when they started giving employee discounts to entice people to buy their cars that disaster was on its way. Employee discount which means customers can buy a Ford car for the same discounted price as employees was one of the master plans that the management came up to boost sales. Also they could not afford to stay away from the race since the other American car makers, GM and Chrysler were also offering it.
It is not just Ford which is in trouble. Chrysler which saw a dip in sales started offering free gasoline and maintenance for two years. Other are extending the warranty and soon American car makers might pay you money if you agree to take one vehicle from the showroom.
All the while the CEOs of these companies never even paused for a moment to wonder why their sales are dipping. Getting to the root cause of the problem never seems to taught in management classes here. The problem was that American car makers were making cars which the consumer did not want while Japanese car makers Toyota and Honda were successully selling cars and increasing their market share. Toyota which will soon beat GM as the world’s largest automaker outsold Chrysler in December.
In this whole episode, just having capitalism did not help the consumer, for the local capitalists did not want to build fuel efficient cars or ones with hybrid technology. The manufacturers from Japan understood the customer needs and are killing the players who could not adapt. Thanks to globalization, the American consumers are getting the vehicles they want.
Some management consultants are going to take millions of dollars and educate the American car makers something which commonsense and globalization should have taught them – listen to the customers.
Related Stories: The Toyota Story

HOWTO: Read blogs more efficiently

Looking at the log files of varnam.org, I find that a lot of visitors do not use any feed readers, instead come to the site via a bookmark or by typing varnam.org/blog in the address bar. This means that you are visiting this site daily, to see if there are any words of wisdom from me and believe me, it is the most inefficient way to read blogs.
If you read news from about three hundred sources daily, imagine how much time would be wasted if you had to manually check each site for updates. Some folks like The Acorn have many posts each day, while Seriously Sandeep and The Palm Leaf are not updated daily. Now there is software available which can keep track of blogs, let you know which have been updated, all for free. This is how I read about three hundred blogs daily and efficiently.
Continue reading “HOWTO: Read blogs more efficiently” →

Found: A missing State

Usually archaeologists find artifcats like terracota idols, amphorae or the first labelled portaiture of Emperor Asoka. They also find old temples, forts, boats, and sometimes even skeletons. But it is only once in a blue moon that they find an entire state and this is what happened in China.
The existence of this 3000 year old state, Peng, was never recorded in any historical documents, but only in some inscriptions in bronzeware excavated from two Western Zhou Dynasty tombs

Li Boqian, director of the archaeological research center of the prestigious Beijing University, said at an archaeological forum recently in Beijing that the discovery of the Western Zhou graves in Hengshui is the most important archaeological discovery since the excavation of the graves of the Marquis of Jin, another state of the Western Zhou Dynasty, in Quwo County of Shanxi Province.
The newly found ancient state will help archaeologists and historians better understand the history of the Western Zhou Dynasty and its jurisdiction, Li said.
More than 80 tombs have been excavated at the site in Hengshui, with the tombs of Pengbo and his wife the largest ones. The couple were buried side by side with lots of funeral objects such as bronze ware, carriages and jade, said Song Jianzhong, deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology of Shanxi Province.
One of the most important findings in the graves is the remains of a pall covering the coffins. The remains of the pall, already blended with earth after several thousand years, are still a vivid red color. Phoenix patterns can be seen on the pall, said Song.[3,000-year-old ancient state found in Shanxi]

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