For knowing what happens next….
So the first link comes from the Other India, who seems to have hired some kind of newbie who isn’t in the mould as the others. This is a very moderate, tempered article, relative to the usual crud.
And the second link goes EXACTLY according to plan, from our own beloved Hindu. (Link courtesy Recursive Hypocrisy .
What am I going on about? Why THIS, of course!
So I’m off to Bombay for 4 days…
…where I will get to see lots of celebrities and ‘High Net-Worth’ Individuals at an art exhibition being hosted by my sister. I will also attempt (for the 7th/8th time) to try and keep an open mind about the place, and see it the way everyone else sees it. I have been unable to do that thus far (if you’ve read any of my previous blog posts, that would be pretty obvious). I’ll do this by wandering the city by myself in search of….er.. I have no idea. Well maybe I’ll just walk along Marine Drive ogling at couples and pretending to be a Shiv Sena gangster. Or not. It’s 9.30 am and I am very sleepy. Yawn. So the to the 3/4 lurkers out there contributing to my hit counter, I’ll see y’all on Monday, or later.
So let me hereby state that I am no relation to the CM of Delhi, nor do I have (ewww) carnal knowledge of er…
Interesting. I write a post about Delhi, and why it’s the best-maintained city in all India.
And then today, this article appears in Mint, where the Chief Minister backs me up (well sort of)…
And the best that Bombay can muster is this, linked to by Dilip D’Souza also a few days after my post, no less. To begin with, we have some unfair criticism and mis-statement of facts….
This isn’t Delhi, where public outcry ensued after Richard Gere recently planted a public kiss on the actress Shilpa Shetty at a fund-raiser.
Now, if someone had actually read newspapers, this is what they would have found:
The pair had appeared at a press conference in New Delhi as part of a campaign to preach safe sex to truck drivers in India, the country with the world’s largest proportion of HIV sufferers.
‘No condom, no sex,’ Gere shouted in Hindi to thousands of truckers who roared his words back in unison at a dusty fairground.
They whooped and whistled as Gere swooped on Miss Shetty to kiss her on her hand and cheek. Nationally, however, the reaction was of violent disapproval
(Emphasis Mine). Now for those of you who passed your English exam, the above paragraph says that in Delhi, the truck drivers were whooping and whistling (I’m pretty sure you could take that as approval) however it is NATIONALLY, that the disapproval was voiced – why is Delhi being blamed for this? Further, where else do you think people will protest about something – in front of fucking Karan Johar’s house or Rashtrapati Bhawan. Public outcry in Delhi MY ASS!
After her fashion show, Dé explained to me Mumbai’s social architecture. “If you are in Delhi, it’s which minister you know,” she said. “If you are in Chennai, it’s all about which caste you are. In Calcutta, it’s what your grandfather did. But in Mumbai, it’s not about that kind of rigid social structure any longer. It’s about what you have done.
Yea. Right. “Mumbai” where people from the North are discriminated against – “You’re from Delhi?” / “You’re Punjabi“ with an upturned nose. A place where non-vegetarian people may be banned from living in certain neighbourhoods. Right. No caste prejudices here. No no no, it’s not who you know at all in Bombay. So what if you are related to Bal Thackeray> Oh yes, that’s right, he’s not a minister. How VERY different from Delhi. Ah yes, Dawood Ibrahim is not a minister either. Yep, it’s definitely not about who you know in Bombay, not at all. Oh you don’t know Yash Chopra, or have a Khan or Kapoor in your last name? Well then, let’s sign you on to my next blockbuster, because, of course, it’s what you’ve done. Somebody get a shovel and a gas mask please…
Now the rest of article is just typical NYT trash. Example:
The culture seeks the kind of innocent enchantment Bollywood movies promote, yet the city’s red-light district, Falkland Road, is populated by prostitutes who pose in cages, and the country now ranks third in the world in people living with H.I.V. (roughly 2.5 million), according to a 2007 report from the United Nations.
Now what the writer of this article CONVENIENTLY forgotten to mention (because it would have ruined his oh-so-flowery contrast) is that this statistic is DOWN from ranking NUMBER ONE in the world with the most number of people with AIDS. Why? Because the UN counted wrong the first time, and a more comprehensive count revealed what some people already knew – THAT HIV IS NOT AS PREVALENT IN INDIA AS THE SCAREMONGERS WOULD HAVE YOU BELIEVE. But let truth not stand in the way of good journalism, as the Times Of India would say. This is further backed up by the Daily Mail quote from above (the description of Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty) which states “in India, the country with the world’s largest proportion of HIV sufferers“. Between the Daily Mail article and the NYT article, the numbers were revised downwards….
And then it just gets funnier and funnier:
Despite the fact that she was raised in a palace with 30 servants, India’s culture then, she said, was not one of constant acquisition
Oh man, what a riot. Asking a real-live princess to comment on the daily-lives of Indians back in the day. Gee, when I was a feudal lord living in my palace, I didn’t see many of my subjects indulging in ‘acquisition’. WHAT AN INSIGHT! Not a culture of acquisition. This is just great…
Yes.. a Mumbai Moment alright.
Basically….
I had a dream last night, where I dreamt of a kazaki (cossack?) girl who used to be in my school. I thought I had a crush on her in school, but it only lasted for about a day – had to do with being dumped by first girlfriend… 
This kazaki was a bit _too_ decent for me…
Anyways, she had nice eyeliner in my dream, and all we did was have a passionate conversation. I wish knew what it meant…. dreaming about somebody you haven’t even given more than 5 minutes thought to in over 11 years…
Ah well. I will go look her up on Facebook…
Brahma Chellaney thinks I’m smart
At a recent conference held on India’s Energy security, Brahma Chellaney took a break and went for a walk with a friend of mine. He was questioning why we Indians revere everything done by the British, and how, in his view, we should level Rashtrapati Bhavan and all of the New Delhi Area. On hearing this ‘radical’ opinion, my friend was reminded of me, and she told Professor Chellaney – “I have a friend who feels exactly the same way” to which Prof. Chellaney is said to have responded: “Your friend is a smart guy.”
*pats self on back*
Of course…. this is all hearsay, and completely unconfirmable, so don’t sue anybody over it….
This is what happens when you’re a pompous arse
So let’s see, pompous, armchair critic makes a statement about the One Lakh Car, and then can’t take the criticism. Aww poor baby. Then proceeds to write an article which basically puts down his commenters and tries to put Free Market economics above all of us laypeople. It’s not that you said something stupid, Mr. Dey, it is, us the laypeople who didn’t read our nobel-prize-winning economics textbooks properly. Oh wait, but you don’t blame us for being dumb, it’s just that the authors of those textbooks didn’t dumb their stuff down enough for us peasants. I mean, you, the supreme being, have the most expert grasp of economics, what with your Ph.D and all, but the CEO of the Tata Group, heck, what the hell does he know. He’s just a money-grubbing capitalist acting out of his own self-interest. The Invisible Hand seems to be jerking off at the moment….I mean, do you really think these CEOs do arithmetic? Surely you jest! They just wander around buying foreign companies because daddy left them with a lot of money.
No no, you know what’s best for the economy, like the countless central planners before you. You and Nehru both. Could it be, that producing a cheap car might be more for export? Could producing a cheap car automatically lead to some conclusion that it’s impossible and therefore alternative engines might need to be tried out to get a cheap car? In fact, could the whole idea just flop horribly?
Do any of these choices lie outside the realm of Free Market Economics? Free Market Economics, REGARDLESS of the conditions surrounding them, produce the best outcome. ‘Market Forces’ are ALWAYS at play. That’s because ‘Market Forces’ is another name for Human Nature. Don’t get a stable electricity supply? The market provides you with generators. Doordarshan stinks as a TV channel? Some dude starting getting signals from the sky and tossed a wire into your home. Your water supply is full of crap? Coca-Cola will sell you clean drinking water. That is the market. It is always at work. It’s job is to ‘Allocate Scarce Resources’. And it does this well. The price of oil is very high? Well then, let’s try and make cars cheaper. Or let’s use public transport.
Is using public transport, and making cheaper cars mutually exclusive? Could producing a car at a ridiculously low price also lead you to produce a bus at a low price, just like your Tata Ace Truck, so that you give people cheap public transport? Could some other innovation spring from this? Are we God-gifted seers? Could my project fail miserably when people realize that the cheap cars are deathmobiles and turn into tin sheets on being greeted by Buses? Could the fact that most of the buses and trcuks on the roads of India that kill people are made by same company force that company to make safer buses and trucks?
Could, in fact, ‘the Market’ decide whether this idea is good or bad, externalities included or not?
Free Markets do not prevent people from coming up with stupid ideas. But definitely prevents them from implementing them. Mr. Dey, your Ph.D is useless, and it is ironic that you blame others for not having explained Economics clearly enough to the rest of us. You’re doing a really bad job of it yourself.
Dear Sir,
I am a great fan of yours, so allow me to express shock and disbelief at this opinion. To imply that Delhi’s infrastructure is the best because of the British is complete and utter Nonsense.
For starters, Delhi is _not_ a well planned city. It depends which part of Delhi we are talking about. Old Delhi (whose original name is back in fashion these days – “Shahjahanabad”) is not well planned and is a fire disaster waiting to happen.
“New Delhi” which refers specifically to an area built to the south of Old Delhi, designed by British architects and built by Sikh refugees to the City, is extremely “well planned”, and also completely useless for 21st century city dwellers. Nice and wide roads, 3 lanes one way, trees and huge bungalows are eating up space which could be utilised to build skyscrapers, art galleries, theatres, commercial space and residential space which would bring the ridiculous cost of land within Delhi tumbling down. But, that said, it all does look very Pretty. If I could level all of New Delhi, I would do it in a flash. We don’t need a bloody “Presidential Palace”, we don’t old high-roofed White House look-a-like bungalows which require a staff of 15 servants. In fact, there is no real reason at all WHY Delhi should be the capital of the country, other than the fact that is has always been the capital of something for the past 2000+ years. In my view, level the damn place, make a museum out of Parliament house, and send the bloody Central Government packing to most crime-ridden flea-infested part of Madhya Pradesh/ Bihar, and have them build a new Capital from scratch. A new capital, for a New India. And watch how that becomes a new center of economic activity. THAT would wonders for our GDP and economic growth. Fuck the British, and their so-called love of infrastructure.
Now Outside of 600-year-old Shahjahanabad, and 100-year-old New Delhi, the rest of Delhi is just absolute chaos. But this has nothing to do with lack of Britishness. After partition, wave after wave of refugees made Delhi their home. You try setting up an orderly city in those circumstances. Places like GK-1 & GK-2 built by DLF, when they were considered the edge of Delhi, sometime in the 1960s are literally creaking at the seams, with what used be single houses in big plots being converted to 4 storey-8 apartments blocks with equivalent numbers of cars unable to fit into those alleys.
The power cuts in the city used to be extremely frequent up until about a year ago, by which time Tata Power and BSES Rajdhani/Reliance Energy have finally managed to reduce power theft, upgrade billing, metering and fix a few of the centuries old transformers. If the British were so good, how come they couldn’t plan for future power stations? Do you think their broad avenues, bungalows and Presidential Palace with its still waterways consume less energy than anything produced by Indians? In terms of upkeep, water and power? Good infrastructure my left foot!
There has been no water to be had for years. I could blame this on the British too. Which idiot plans on settling next to the Rajasthani desert and have hot winds blowing in during the middle of June with the temperature at a mild 47 degrees celcius? Vasant Kunj is still a dry desert dependent on rusted, leaking Delhi Jal Board trucks. Water pipes from the new treatment plant at Sonia Vihar were completed only 2 years ago, and we are still begging-dependent on UP & Haryana to release some water to us to keep things going. There may be working water pipes under British-built New Delhi, but they are maintained at the expense and cost of that section of the local population that has no water whatsoever.
And I haven’t even begun to talk about North Delhi, West Delhi or East Delhi yet…
With due respect, the British are NOT responsible for the only city with barely passable infrastructure in – dare-I-say-it South Asia.
Delhi embarked on a clean-up plan when a few things happened in recent times:
There may be other factors, but these are the ones that come to mind. Sheila Dikshit, or whoever advises her has been the only person approaching a leader that I have seen in recent times. She has lived in Delhi, and is part of what one might call the Urban Elite – and therefore knows exactly what is required in a mostly _urban_ environment by urban dwellers. No other Urban area in India has this luxury – why? Because every large urban agglomeration in India also happens to be the State Capital. Bangalore for Karnataka, Hyderabad for Andhra, and of course Bombay for Maharashtra (or as arrogant Bombay people would like to claim – Bombay for all India). This means that you have goondaspoliticians coming in from their agrarian/rural base, and governing from an urban capital. So – loot the urban financial centres to feed the farmers with free rice and electricity. Result: Power cuts in the cities, no roads, and lots of cows. Welcome to modern day India.
In USA – NO Big City is the capital of the state that it is in – New York state is governed from Albany. California is governed from Sacramento, and on and on. This allows the Urban centres to focus on their priorities which are strikingly different from the rural ones.
There are a lot of other factors as well, but I am at work currently so can’t answer you fully.
But I would like to strenuously deny that the British built city of New Delhi is the cause of what resembles passable infrastructure. All this is recent phenomena caused by the luck of having a semi-decent politician in power, and some of the other factors mentioned above. She privatised the electricity distribution. She’s privatised the Waste Management (garbage) which is now managed by the DWM (Delhi Waste Management). She wanted to privatise water distribution but that was shot down due to ‘concerns’. She wanted to liberalise the liquor policy because she was quoted as saying “I do not feel it is the government’s business to sell alcohol” but was also shot down by public protest. She managed to push through a half-attempt. Large ‘kirana’ stores can stock beer and wine. She attempted to allow shops to remain open for 24 hours, and I think that still holds, but most stores don’t do it, claiming issues with the police.
She wanted to revise farcical privatisation of Blueline buses done in Delhi by the BJP (One bus to one owner!~#$##!#!$) and revise that with a system resembling the telecom industry – allow 3/4 corporates to run bus services in Delhi. Again, this proposal was struck down by her own party members, and various other vested interests.
Now I don’t want to sound like a Sheila Dikshit fan, but which other politician in this whole country has their head screwed on this straight?
Prior to Sheila Dikshit running Delhi, it was exactly what Bombay people still perceive it to be – a sarkari village without a nightlife and where everybody knows someone in the government. (Nowadways everybody knows someone who owns a pub and can get you free entry).
Note – the Delhi Metro is success not because of anything the British did, but because of a man called E Sreedharan, and also because of Sheila Dikshit – who COULD have obstructed its construction, but instead got straight out of the way, and let them acquire the land they wanted to acquire, let them compensate the people freely and fairly, and basically gave them Support. (Having a friendly government at the Centre helped this as well).
To conclude I’d like to say a few things:
On Delhi
Pind is Punjabi for gaon which is Hindi for village.
(So the title is such because most people consider Delhi to be a pind. An Urban Pind. )
Went to Urban Pind last night for the first time ever. Was quite impressed with the place, they’ve done it up well. Plus, it was ‘expat’ night last night, though honestly, these days, any night is expat night in most of the bars/clubs/pubs in Delhi (and elsewhere too I assume. Lots of white people travelling through India these days). The crowd was good, the music kicked ass, and a good time was had by one and all. I attribute some of this good time to my previously-mentioned colleague A. Somehow, whenever I go out with her, I end up having an excellent time. There will be a post on our fun trip to Bangalore soon, which will explain more. Or not
Anyways, just the whole night scene Delhi serves to remind how this city has been on the ascendant for a while now, until the next plunder. Allow me to explain. I have become obsessed with Khushwant Singh’s ode to Delhi called “Delhi, A Novel”. I don’t think it’s in print anymore, but I highly recommend you get a copy. While Bombay will have its Midnight’s Children and its Maximum City, Delhi has “Delhi, A Novel”. It’s when you read that you really begin to understand things. How many ‘big’ cities rose (and fell) 100 years before Rome? After reading the novel, you get to see a cycle.
1) Foreigners invade Delhi.
2) Delhi-ites fight back
3) Foreigners murder lots of Delhi-ites, plunder the city, and then govern their kingdoms from there.
4) They then proceed to get increasingly decadent, going native, all the while falling further into complacency
5) Go back to 1)
Sure, in the old days we were dealing with Mughal Emperors and such like. Then we had the British. Now we have ‘ministers’ some of which are Prime and others are just Chief (with some Foreign & Home thrown in ) But the cycle continues. They invade, they plunder, they go native, and then they get invaded again.
And thus the story goes on as it has for a 1000 years.
It’s interesting what prompted that ramble. I was busy drinking my Vodka Tonic in Urban Pind, when a bunch of ‘Expats’ decided to order some Hookah (or Sheesha if you prefer) and were passing it around. Another bunch of ‘expats’ – the Mughals were doing that in the same place about 800 years ago.
Some things never change.
Where I do a little pre-emption
The birds are singing, the sun is shining, the Rupee & GDP are rising, and so are Indian stock markets, namely the Bombay Sensex and the NSE-50 (or Nifty, for short).
Along with the unprecedented increase in the stock market, the communist/socialist/”I must stamp out any good news”-ists e.t.c. will now start using the stock market as another club to hit you with some guilt.
All new articles by these characters will start off with mentioning how the Sensex is at an all-time high, make a brief mention of a mass-consumerist culture, and how the reforms have benefitted ”the Few at the expense of the Many” somewhere, and terminate with guilt-inducing stories about people in Bombay slum-dwellers/Suicidal farmers or Hindutva crimes.
When they use the stock market to contrast with these other issues, they reveal the entirety of their ignorance.
Stock Markets 101 (Simplistic view)
What is the ‘Sensex’? Well it’s the short form of Bombay Sensitive Index. What is an index? It’s basically a way of measuring a percentage change in a group of somethings.
In this case, it is measuring the change in the prices of publicly-listed companies’ shares. SPECIFICALLY, THE SENSEX MEASURES PRICE CHANGES IN SHARES OF 30 COMPANIES. Nothing more, nothing less. If the Sensex is ‘up’, it means that on average, the share prices of these 30 companies is up. If it is down, then naturally the opposite holds true. That. Is. All. It measures JUST those 30 shares. These 30 shares are considered to be representative of the entire share market, based on a whole bunch of financial indicators (i..e what is the size of the company, does the public hold a large amount of shares in the company, and other factors). So therefore, it should be no surprise that Reliance industries is one of the 30 shares whose price is measured. In fact, a big jump in just Reliance’s share price will cause the Sensex to go up quite a bit. So the ASSUMPTION is that if there are price rises in these 30 shares, then in general, there must be price rises in all shares in the Stock Market. This assumption holds true for most of the time, and if it doesn’t, the company shares used to represent the market are changed.
Why is a rise in the price of shares considered a good thing? Well what are shares, and what is the Stock Exchange?
A Stock Exchange is place where people can buy & sell SECOND-HAND shares, i.e. shares already owned by other people.
A ’share’ is a chunk of ownership of a company. If I buy 100 shares of Reliance, I OWN a piece of Reliance. That means that if Reliance makes a profit, it can choose to give me some of it. If it decides not to, and I get pissed off, I can sell my chunk of Reliance to someone else. If Reliance loses money, I can again sell my chunk of Reliance to someone else. Of course, if everybody thinks Reliance is stinky, I won’t be able to sell my shares for a good price. So the price of a share represents (amongst a WHOLE BUNCH of OTHER THINGS) how “good” a company is (THIS IS A VERY SIMPLISTIC VIEW). So naturally, I get happy if the price of the shares I own rises. Just like owning a house (AGAIN, SIMPLISTIC)
Now the media, being as sensationalist and as misinformed as it can be, attributes a rising share market to the general mood in the Country. It is not hard to see why this is so. If the shares prices of all the companies in the stock market are rising, it means a lot of people are viewing these companies as ‘good’ or ‘performing well’. If these companies are performing well, that means the economy is performing well. And that means all is right with the world. ALSO, if lots of people are buying shares on the market, it means people have money to buy things, which means incomes must be high, which means the economy is performing well, which means all’s right with the world.
Thusly, a rising sensex makes it to the front page headlines. Now it shouldn’t take much to realize why the above extrapolations aren’t always correct – Pakistan’s stock market is the second best performing in Asia. But there you have it.
SO – when one of our guilt-inducing brethren decides to contrast rising stock markets with suicidal farmers, what they want to say is this:
A small, select band of greedy, high-caste capitalists pigs with a sense of entitlement are making money in a way I know nothing about, and celebrating it as though it is good for the country, while farmers are dying in Vidharba.
But what they end up saying is this:
The share prices of 30 publicly listed companies is on average higher these days than it was a few years ago, but there are farmers comitting suicide in Vidharba.
Yes. It is as stupid as that.
where’s here? Here’s there of course, where else?
If you actually look my last post, you will know that I went back and read some of my old posts, and what I realized is that I need to blog. Not to get laid or to get a book deal, but because the blog actually ends up turning into a little autobiography, one way or another. What was the mood at the time. What was I thinking? (The “what was I thinking” feeling comes up often, especially when I see the woman_who_I_thought_was_my_girlfriend_but_she_did_not-related posts).
So yes, where am I? Well it’s been 2 years, and I am still travelling to Gurgaon to work. Only, I’m working in a building that didn’t exist 2 years ago. I am also travelling on a stretch of road* which used to take me 1.5 hours to cross on a good day (2 years ago), and now only takes 45 minutes. That, my friends, is called progress. I am car-pool-partner-less now, but not alone in the car.
The Colleague
I take a female colleague with me, whom we shall call A. Me and A have an affinity for the song Umbrella by Rihanna. We sing it at the top of our beautiful voices, when we’re driving back sloshed from a night out at Cafe Morrison (erstwhile Gourmet Gallery in South Ex)or Saket Buzz or Vasant Vihar Opus-but-now-the-new-so-called-Turquoise-Cottage. Now, now folks it’s nothing like that. A is getting married shortly. Yes yes, this situation resembles a mess I got into in Melbourne, which resulted in the Delete Blog button being pressed, but it won’t happen this time assure you. Her fiance is a nice guy, worth marrying by the looks of it.
The Job
I work for a ginormous Multinational company whom I shall not name, but shall call Big Blue. If that rings a bell, don’t give yourself a cookie, because it doesn’t require much effort to figure out who I am talking about. Big Blue is cool. It lets me work from home (although I haven’t fully taken advantage of that). Big Blue let’s you take a day off without having to ask for permission (but if you do this often enough, you and I know both know what would happen). But you see what’s interesting is that to an extent, I was working for Big Blue, even when I wasn’t. HUH?
Well you see, Big Blue got kicked out along with Coke, Common Sense & Prosperity in the 1970s, by our good Christian Hindu Fundamentalist George Fernandes. Now, when Big Blue left, its assets were appropriated by Indian entreprenuers, as were Coca-Cola’s. Thus we ended up with these oh-so-pure Indian brands. Campa Cola, Thums Up – built on the corpse of Coke. Ex-Big Blue employees banded together and created their own firms as well. One of them, called Hindustan Computers Limited (now a US$ 4 billion enterprise, apparently) went on to do quite well. I worked for it from 2002 to 2005. Then I worked there for 2 months in 2007. And then I left it, to work for Big Blue. So I’ve never really left Big Blue you could say.
Wow, what an awful ramble. But I’ll leave it here to remind me of how much my writing has deteriorated.
*ok ok, it’s actually National Highway 8, which will take you Bombay if you let it. And being the Original Delhi-ite, I would never let it do that to me!
Man, I never realised I was good…I actually find my old posts interesting.
So to the few people who accidentally stumbled onto this blog instead of AyatollahKhomeini.com, allow me to introduce myself to you. I am TTG, erstwhile blogger, victim of a sting operation of the Delhi Times (circa 2005), and chaser-after of the now almost famous eM. In that previous life, I was a very prolific blogger. But quantity does not equal quality my friend. Don’t believe me? Well, if you’re a single woman in Delhi, go stand at your nearest street corner, and shout at the top of your voice – “I NEED SEX”. The result will be a substantial quantity, and as for quality… well…
I digress. I was at work today, researching an unlisted company (i.e. not on the stock market, and therefore with no publicly available information) when I stumbled upon a site called The Wayback Machine. Which for some bizarre reason has archived my site. Only some of it. The beautiful obituary I wrote for my grandmother is lost forever, along with her. But there were other posts which are still there. Go and have a look if you’re tired of sending Valentine’s Day cards to yourself. Some of my posts were so good that they engaged even me! Imagine their effect on you! Anyway, let me then announce to the world at large, that I hereby begin the TTG Atlantis Setu Samudhram Recovery project. I need to get the blog posts from The Wayback Machine site, and get them uploaded onto this site. This is a massive task, requiring:
Oh wait. That’s been done before! Damn you ISKCON Temple, always stealing my thunder!*
*If that joke went straight over your head, there’s not much I can do to help you understand it except maybe this might help
Ah the joys of local food. What a crock (of dung)
So the latest fad to save the Earth has to do with eating local. This will be a short post. Why? Because I don’t think I really have to explain why I don’t believe I will be saving the planet by eating carrots growing on the central verge of Khel Gaon marg. Is that local enough for you?
Oh I took it literally. I should look within my region. Ah. So you mean the garden in the front of the DLF Infinity Towers, Gurgaon is better to grow carrots and apples? No? A little further afield? Within 100 km of my city you say? I have the The Great Indian Desert to my south and west. So that limits the ability to grow stuff does it not? Oh I should restrict myself to cactus juice then? Thanks. Could it be that there might be some parts of the world that live in areas not conducive to growing nutritious stuff within their 100 km radius? Oh then we relax the rule. So tell you what. Why don’t we just tell that rule to fuck off?
By the way – once we’ve all decided to eat local and killed off the population of all the world’s islands, who is going to console the farmers around the world, who were shipping their stuff much farther afield than they are now. They will make less money, which means they won’t be able to feed their families. But hey. We saved the planet didn’t we?
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