Outsourced

I was surfing through the net.. digging up some past.. and I found Senator Barack Obama's speech after the Virginia Massacre. Bill Smith glorifies Obama's speech. He says "his instinct for abstraction and larger themes" is what endears Obama to the people! See the full article here. Quoting Obama...

"There's also another kind of violence that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily the physical violence, but the violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways," he said, and goes on to catalog other forms of "violence."

There's the "verbal violence" of Imus.

There's "the violence of men and women who have worked all their lives and suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job is moved to another country."

I read this and went "Whaa...". I can imagine a lay man talking about this.. but a senator, a prospective president? What was he thinking... Now I am irate that this is about outsourcing.. but that is not all, I am very upset because I thought Obama was a level headed guy.

(Pict Courtesy : http://www.kuleuven.be/thomas/secundair_onderwijs/in_de_kijker/37_globalisation.php)

But apparently he doesn't have the faintest clue about globalization. Did he know that globalization is a two-way street.. That it affects other countries in the world too? Come on did you really think outsourcing was only a problem in the US and everything was hunky dory on the other side? Oh yes, the other side of the grass is green is not it?

In India Globalization opened free trade. While we are on that, let me point out that America was always the advocate for free trade, as for India they were dragged in Kicking and Screaming. For America it opened up a huge market for their goods. A consumer market of over billion people, imagine that!

Dell and Microsoft sell their products to the billions in India. Coke and Pepsi have replaced the local Thumbs Up and Gold Spot of erstwhile years.. Ford and GM not only sell their cars there, slowly replacing Ambassdor's and Maruti's. They even have factories there and make use of the cheap labor. And where do you think the money goes.. to the US of A!!!

Subway, Mc Donald, Pizza hut and KFC adorn every corner slowly replacing the Indian fast foods. Further Nike and Adidas, Tommy and Channel have discovered a huge market in India. And many others are going there too. Including the supermarket chain Walmart. Imagine what this means to Indian brands and age old companies. This means more competition and the urge to do even better. In the end the consumer is benefited by the variety and competition.

Here is a 2002 report on India-US Trade and Economic relations. In the current year alone $830 million was the outflow from India to the US. Read more here. And the trend is only increasing with more and more revenue coming in every year!

That is the other side of the globalization coin.. if it is outsourcing in the US, it is free trade in India and China! But still outsourcing is talked of akin to violence. I mean get some perspective!! Gone are the days when Indians were replacing Americans and taking their jobs as Obama put it! Now Indian companies are recruiting Americans and creating opportunities in America, Britain, Australia , China and many other countries. Opening development centers in the US and offering jobs to the fresh engineers and management graduates from US Universities. This is globalization for you. If this had not been done, the same job would have gone to an Indian! But that is the beauty of globalization.. breaking the barriers. The 21st century is here, we better gear up and get ready for a global world and a global economy!

(Pict Courtesy: http://www.newint.org)

[Edited to add. Here is a video from Discovery Spotlight. Thomas Friedman the author of "The World is Flat" visits India to explore the other side of outsourcing

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Be forewarned... Global Warming!

(Pict Courtesy - http://alternative-energy.everything-fine.com/)

I watched the National Geographic documentary series Six Degrees Could Change the World. Like everything else in Nat Geo this was very graphic and reached out to me at a personal level like nothing else I have read or seen about Global Warming ever did.
On the first episode I watched the melting ice in Greenland.. slowly melting away and if the global temperature increases they could start melting at a faster pace! Later that week I watched another documentary on Antarctica. (I can't seem to remember on which channel that was) In the documentary a researcher on the base station in Antarctica spoke in a matter-of fact tone .. "When I came here a few years ago, there was Ice everywhere and I could not imagine a ship coming here " (Pointing to the ship that brought in the explorers - oh yes an antarctic expedition no less). "Choppers landed where the ship stands today he said". This was like a Deja Vu for me.. and fear gripped my heart!
I also watched the part about the Australian corals getting bleached.. no more Great Barrier Reef.. and this is true too.. In 2002 the Great Barrier Reef experienced the worst coral bleaching on record.. about 60% in Australia alone.. The cause a rise in the water temperature ..the result of global warming.
Today it was talk about a disappearing Ganges... the sacred Indian glacier.. The Glacier Gaumukh above the Gangotri where the Ganges starts has receded by about a kilometer in the past 20 years or so... So what happens if the glaciers disappear? What happens if Ganges disappears.. will this mean an end to the Spirituality of India as we know it? Ganges is believed to flow from Lord Shiva's head after all.. in an effort to stem the force of her flow from heaven to earth. So what will happen to the culture that stems from this belief?
Ever wonder what happened to the Dinosaurs? The end of the cretaceous era .. Either by a meteorite or huge volcanic eruptions..resulting in global warming, acid rains, reduced sunlight and finally ice age! How did the earth bounce back? All the carbon from the atmosphere was absorbed by the oceans and the plants and the soil. And the air was good to breathe again. The irony? We burn the very same fossil fuels today and start the cycle yet again!

Do watch the series Six Degrees Could Change the World on National Geographic. This is based on the book by Mark Lynas - Six Degrees. Its alarming to say the least and hopefully will awaken us to the effects of Global Warming.. What can we do to help? Recycle, burn less fuel.. car pool, walk, cycle... and lend your hand!

Like the trailer says "Global Warming isn't out of control but it soon could be. Warning signs are all around us. " It is up to us to take notice and be forewarned!

Drawing Parallels

We are so advanced in comparison to our co-inhabitors on this planet. We are the six-sensed human beings. And how do we have foresight and hindsight as we so call it. By a beautiful thing we do, called pattern matching. We love to pattern match and derive/ extrapolate from these matching patterns. Hence we predict anything from weather and catastrophes.

I recently watched heart in mouth this series on Nat Geo called Six Degrees. National Geography does have its way of keeping us in constant fear of the perils we are bound to face in the future! And they do this by extrapolation. All statements start with "With the rate at which the ice is melting...", "With the rate at which the global warming happens ..." and so on.

But that is science for you and we all accept it, as it seems very rational to us ,this analysis.

Now I ask you, what do you think of astrology? Astrology is the art of studying the position of the celestial bodies at the time of one's birth. Further with the movement of these celestial bodies and the patterns they take, the person's fate is predicted.

This to me seems to be pattern matching again. How did the astrologers know that certain celestial patterns/ movements characterize certain behavioral patterns/ events in the person. Because over the years they have pattern matched and extrapolate these learnings to come up with a science called Astrology.

So why do we believe one when we reject another?