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Who is the person I hate the most ? No; not that one, whom I frankly don't care about . He is half the planet away and troubling other folks; not me. My visceral hate is reserved for somebody much closer home. The "dotard" called Ramamritham. Allow me an unhinged rant please; I badly need it ! You see, the problem is that Ramamritham has fallen head over heels in insane love. We all know how crazy he is even when supposedly normal. Now that his brain circuits have been singed with love, he has become a monster. The delectable damsel who has swept this idiot off his rockers is called Aadhaar. For the benefit of the one American reader who claims to be ignorant about India (no; not the lady - she is an expert !), Aadhaar is the national ID that every resident of India is supposed to get. The government introduced Aadhaar some 5 years ago ostensibly as a way to identify individuals to whom subsidies could be paid directly and thereby minimise leakages.  The government gave p...

The world's richest woman just died. If you didn't know this, please stop focusing on the tweets and turn your attention to more weighty matters of the world. Liliane Bettencourt passed away four days ago at the age of 94. She was the heiress to the founder of L'Oréal, the world's largest cosmetic company; the only child of Eugène Schueller who founded L'Oréal in 1907. She herself worked in the company from the age of 15 and rose to become its deputy Chairperson. The future of L'Oréal is now in play. And therein lies a story that could give a beating to any soap opera on television. In 1974, fearing that France would nationalise the company, Bettencourt did a deal with Nestle wherein she offloaded about half her holding in exchange for shares in Nestle. Since then Nestle and Bettencourt have had one of the longest tangos in business history. Nestle, a food company, with no presence at all in cosmetics, had a 30% stake in the world's largest cosmetics compan...

Anybody who predicts what the next Standing Committee and the Politburo will be is almost certain to be wrong ! This is why most newspaper columnists are content with naming possible candidates and leaving it at that. This blogger does not care if he is proved wrong or even as a fool. There are no consequences to getting it dead wrong. So here's my prediction what's going to happen ! There are only two near certainties in this political game. One is that Xi Jinping will continue as Secretary of the Communist Party, Chairman of the Central Military Commission and as the President. The second is that Zhang Dejiang, Yu Zengsheng, Liu Yunshan and Zhang Gaoli will retire from the Standing Committee . Everything else is up for grabs. Two of the key moves that is the subject of much speculation is what will happen to Li Keqiang the current Premier (most views are that he will stay on as Premier) and that of Wang Qishan (Xi's ally in the anti corruption drive, but who is crossing t...

Every country faces challenges and China is no exception. But by global yardsticks, China's issues are less critical than what most other countries face.  It is after all the one country in the world which does not face a serious growth challenge (at least as of now).  China is however such a large country that even a seemingly minor issue is of gigantic scale and one that will affect the whole world. This is why everybody in the world ought to take a much greater interest in this country. This post is a compendium of social, political, economic and moral issues that China faces at this point of time, in no particular order Maintaining GDP Growth : The "contract" between the Communist Party and the people is a simple one - Economic growth for political control. When economic growth falters, this contract will be put under strain. There are a number of challenges to maintaining economic growth and some of them are articulated below. You can't grow endlessly at 8%+. Th...

The man in the street simply does not care ! At least politically !! In a country of 1.2 billion, such a sweeping  statement is an outrageous generalisation. But it is broadly true. The average Chinese does not care because (a) what is the real choice (b) she has very little access to information that is even remotely political in nature and (c) she doesn't seem to be hugely interested anyway And this is despite a startling fact; the country with the maximum number of protests from citizens is actually China ! On any given day, there are probably 800 odd protests happening throughout China. If there is such vigorous activity, how come the assertion that the average Joe (Mrs Li) doesn't care ? Two sweeping statements can be made about the average Chinese's views (a) she believes (and it does not matter where or who she is) that the local government is utterly corrupt and inefficient and (b) she believes that the central leaders in Beijing are extremely efficient, working har...

Xi Jinping, the current Chinese leader is easily the most powerful leader that China has had ever since Deng Xiaoping faded away in the early 90s. But in order to understand his power, we have to go back a bit in time in modern Chinese history. Mao was a tyrant and supremely powerful in China and until his death, he was simply the sole power centre. But that degree of concentration of power resulted in chaos in China - the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution being two big disasters. When he died, the elders decided that no single person should ever be allowed to accumulate such power. Deng Xiaoping became the preeminent leader, but there was a rival power centre in Chen Yun and to a lesser extent in Li Xiannian. Multiple purges later,  Jiang Zemin was appointed the Secretary of the Communist Party immediately after the infamous Tiananmen incident in 1989. Jiang accumulated a fair degree of power, but was never all powerful. He led the party out of the post Tiananmen crisis a...

On October 18th, or immediately thereafter, a small line of people will walk in  into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square. That will be the new Standing Committee headed by Xi Jinping. And at that time the world shall know what has happened to the "elections" in China. The stunning fact is that very few people in the world seem to even know about one of the most momentous events in world politics. Very little has been written about it in the world press and almost nothing has made it to TV. Not even the significant Beidaihe retreat that happened in August. All this at a time when many people in the world seem addicted to the nonsense that a certain person spews sitting on his toilet seat.  The lack of interest in what is happening in China is, to this blogger, unbelievable. Perhaps unfamiliarity is the reason. And hence this blogger is breaking his vow to keep this blog completely apolitical and is launching into a series of posts on what is happening in China. I...