Sunday Posts

It has now become a habit: A turn in the stock market, followed by as much excitement as possible on the TV and predictions on the newspapers that finally world economy is turning a corner. This then is followed by the trivial and the ordinary, politicians trying to claim that they are in charge of the future, daily chores submerging the global trends, an odd story of million dollar acquisitions breaking the gloom just a little - and then bad news returns in force, a triple-dip recession, an anaemic job market, another nation tottering on the edge of bankruptcy, a storied company shutting the door. This is followed by more claims from the politicians, that they are in charge of the future and what we need is more of the same, and then another cycle begins. This seems like events, moving forward, but the truth is that we are getting used to our own stories, that we shall get over with this recession with a bit of time, that it is all our past folly and that of governments long vote...

Dreaming can be helpful: It keeps one awake. Particularly when life gets too dark, the possibilities dim, the opportunities obscure, the only thing left for us is a Halogen dream, which lights up everything, just like a sole lighting stand in the middle of barren fields. Jobless numbers go up and down. Greeks never really rescue themselves. People always kill people in Afghanistan. The Iranians don't tweet anymore. India loses way in corruption. Japan is still radioactive. Americans confused, busy to burn books. The leaders seem to be using up all their vocabulary, the politicians running low on charm. But life still goes on. Dreaming is the only time one can think time moves linearly, ahead. That is swiftly dispelled by morning newspapers, which seem to recycle headlines from their archives. If Fashion comes back every twenty years, the news reappears every fifty days perhaps. We still make same mistakes. We still moan the same way. We still get slaughtered, swindled,...

If the stock markets are to be believed, the US and the European economies are on the verge of a double-dip, a second recession in three years, which will possibly, inescapably perhaps, lead into a long great depression, the second time in modern history. Whether or not that really happens, one thing is clear: If we thought the recession of 2008 would be a short-lived affair, it turned out to be far more persistent. With governments and central banks across the OECD countries frozen into a rudderless chaos, as against their initial strident response with big stimulus and matching rhetoric, we can only expect the worst now. And, if this happens, this will transform our societies completely and reshape history, remember the last great depression ended in a global war and ensuing detente lasting over six decades, and these days and weeks would go down in history when we brought this upon ourselves, through our collective senselessness. The warning signs were all there. In 2008, we kne...

I am signing off early. With 30 more hours to go in 2010, I already had enough. I am rather eager to start the New Year. It is always good to start a New Year in a high. And, considering that I am all too aware of the fragility of any upbeat feeling, that should be okay. This isn't like 2010, when I knew I was doomed. In fact, the last time I started a year with this feeling was back in 2006, but indeed, that was a different reality altogether. Lots of things have changed since. My life is different; my demands are completely transformed. In January 2006, I was seeking adventure, all but ready to take on an USAID funded position in Beirut, notwithstanding the pleas from my family and friends; now, I am looking forward to a few more years in Suburban London, keeping my day job and working on some new possibilities within it. The irony is: In 2006, I was all too attached to my family, with my mother still around; now, I am living the the loneliest time in my life. But, that apart, t...

The recession is refusing to go away. Even before some good news emerged in the United States - at last - Europe started crumbling. It was Deja Vu all over again: The leaders' scramble, a patched up loan fund, a North-South divide, and one crisis after another. We are just in the Christmas Break from the crisis, and there is no signs yet that the domino effect has been contained. And, it is not about the financial crisis alone. The world continued its journey towards becoming a more dangerous place. Despite some drone-induced victory against Al Queda and Asif Zardari clinging on to power by his teeth in Pakistan, the American-led coalition in Asia looked tired and divided, ready to cut-and-run, in contrast with their opponents, who seemed to have an endless stream of recruits, covert state sponsors and a zeal to continue for thousand years. North Korea, on the brink under pressures of economic crisis and leadership succession, continued to play dangerously. The Chinese induced...

It was interesting to watch London in a foreign news channel last week: The student protests got more footage than anything else. The Police Officers are already warning that we are entering into a new age of public protests. All over the Europe, this is evident. Strikes are back: Anger is back. We are no longer confined to our Post-modern cocoon of differences, but suddenly linked up in a grand narrative being played out on the streets. Back to the sixties, shall I say, and expect a re-emergence of Hippies, spiritualism, LSD, and all that? It seems somewhat similar, as conformity gagged creativity in our age, reality TV dominated the public imagination and an unpopular war is raging on for far too long. But, sixties were about the demise of grand narratives, not emergence. Sixties is when we lost the hope for humanity, and started discovering our selfish selves above everything. Sixties is, in a way, the high noon of Industrial Man, and the birth decade of post-modernism. We are indee...

The crisis that did not happen, will possibly be the way history will remember this. Indeed, if there is a history to be written still, and if the events of last two years are to get a place in the usual boom-and-bust ride of the market capitalism. I say this because this may just be the end of history, no return to life as usual may be around the corner; or, may be that's just too pessimistic, we will just be unleashed in a brave new world where such things won't matter. One would love to think the Irish crisis, which didn't happen, won't matter. After all, we have now learned to be prepared. The lessons were learned when one had to get Greece out of water, and we almost always knew Spain and Ireland were coming. It is after all, just a monetary thing, which can be solved by pumping money in. And, it was. The trouble is, it does not end there. When you pump money in, you are plugging a whole today by taking away the wealth of the future generations. Or of people's ...

The World Cup Football could not have been timed better: We needed a diversion from continuous bad news. For every good news these days, there seems be something darker lurking around the corner. The moment economies seem to be returning to growth, inflation starts to raise its head. As we hear the US jobless rates dropped, we also know that most of these new jobs came from US Government, primarily temporary positions created for the US census work. In fact, the job data turned out to be bad news and only indicated a precipitous fall in private sector job creation. The scare regarding European finances seem to be on hold right now. But Europeans seem to have taken the recovery for granted. While Spain was forced into a Greece-style austerity package, Hungary's government thought talking about Greece-style meltdown is a good idea and paid the price. That, however, did not stop Britain's David Cameron keep stoking up the fears of Britain defaulting at some future date, all to ram...

When I was writing about the economic recession in October 2008 [ Memoirs of A Recession , for a local literary journal], I expected a short, painful recession, which will be ended by splurges of public spending. I also thought this would be an unfinished recession, which will come back in a few years with sovereign bankruptcies. President Bush was still at the helm, and I thought about the mother of all bankruptcies, that of America, and how that will mean the end of economics as we know it. I likened it to the First World War, which was an unfinished war, only to culminate in the mother of all wars, in 1939. I fancied telling the story as if sitting in 2040, old and wise, reflecting on lessons learnt and not learnt. It seems now that I was optimistic. The world has been on a downward spiral since then. We failed to learn the lessons. We tried failed and discredited remedies to new diseases, not recognizing the limitations of our thinking nor the complexities of our situation. Mostly,...

I wrote a note about Modern Entrepreneurs [you can read it here ] before, wherein I talked about the disconnect I felt between the ideal of entrepreneurship - creation of new possibilities against the odds - and the usual practise - speculative opportunism driven by superficial knowledge and unlimited greed. There are glorious exceptions, indeed. Besides, the entrepreneurial practise has always had an element of opportunity-taking and many successful entrepreneurs built their careers just on being at the right place at the right time. Identifying and running with opportunities lie in the very essence of entrepreneurship. However, my enquiry was part of a larger effort to understand modern capitalism, with the objective to understand how the post-recession world may shape up. That way, my previous posts about the Morality of Profit , Memoirs of a Recession and the Practise of Modern Management can be seen as a continuation of the same theme. But, as some of my correspondents point ou...

Let's start straight: What is management? Here is my take: It is a pseudo -science designed to preserve power relationships in the new, industrial society. That will not pass me any exam, but that is what I learnt during my twenty-odd years in commercial running around. If that sounds a bit too uncharitable, consider sitting through any business strategy planning session. You will surely be impressed by the pomp and the seriousness these sessions are conducted with, the charts and graphs, and the elaborate models that get discussed and presented. For all the statistical sophistry, the whole thing is actually bunk though. Managers will laugh at their own efforts during the lunch time. All about beers and bullet points, the exercise is all about the story hanging together in a series of interconnected slides, rather than any serious analysis of the future. And, why so? Elementary, because future can not be analysed. I am not trying to belittle the statistical models that we have grow...

This is not a rhetorical question, nor a political one. The question, how real is the recovery, is serious and needs serious consideration not just from the policymakers, who are only too aware of the situation, but also from the media and the general public at large. We have long lived with this motto of 'perception is reality' and the current recession has indeed established the primacy of psychological factors in our economic world, but when we have started seeing the green shoots of recovery everywhere, it is better to set perception aside for a moment and get real. Yes, because despite all the optimism in the market, the economic problems remain. What we see now are more symptomatic of the problems of the cure applied than of the disease itself, so to say. We are straddled with a big debt everywhere in the Western World, societies which have become accustomed to cheap money and lower interest rates, and unless some serious steps are taken now, it will be a very long time b...

Next time I need to ship something, I won't use Fedex . This is because of a simple error made by the person who attempted delivery of a package to me yesterday and left a Sorry We Missed You card. The error is that instead of writing the Airway Bill number on the card, he wrote my phone number instead. It did not take me long to recognize it. But, then after a maze of phone calls to different call centres and depots, I realized how de -humanized the system has become, and how this simple error can not be rectified. Now, the package has to be sent back and the original sender has to contact me again. What a waste of energy, time, every resource and disruption even, of businesses and even business relationship. I can think of a whole story plot that can come out of it. Even a possible title, Fedex fails to deliver. But, this isn't funny. I am trying to laugh because I don't have a choice. There was no point being angry with anyone. The Call Centre workers could not do anyt...

Despite all the ongoing conversation about Capitalism 2.0, and my enthusiastic participation in this, I am not sure we are done with the kind of neo -classical lessaiz - faire capitalism that dominated our thinking and policy-making for last thirty years. This crisis was a big shock, and the very fact that it was a big shock was a big surprise to a number of economists and social thinkers, because they have been predicting such a breakdown for a number of years. But, I would argue that this is still not a big enough crisis to force a fundamental rethink about the economic system. When I asked to write about the recession with a futurist perspective about a year back by an independent magazine, I ended up comparing this crisis with the great war of 1914. The First World War was a brutal, long war and forced the whole world to rethink the assumptions about the Golden Age, but it was still unfinished business. Despite its terrible human consequences, it was not big enough. It was just a ...

Capitalism has failed. Or, so it seems, standing in the middle of the worst post-war economic crisis. It is not about the house prices, which have started turning upwards, or the stock markets, which have recovered some time back. Precisely to the point, Capitalism has failed people. For all the talk of economic recovery, the unemployment is stubbornly high in many places. Carefully crafted careers have been wrecked, families lost their homes and a lost generation has been created. Capitalism as a system indeed failed all these people. The funny thing is that it was always expected to fail. Despite all the hopes that we have finally beaten recession, economists knew all along that such cyclical changes are ingrained in capitalism. In fact, some of them actually celebrate it - creative destruction is what it is called. This is Capitalism's mechanism of wiping out the old and the inefficient, and create new efficiencies and businesses. The theory is - with progress, societies create...