Neither Fat nor Slim Brownie

That short, fat, bald, brownie. Yes, my best client was referring to me when he thought I was out of the range of his booming voice. I never found out whether it was said to show contempt for my origins or with some fondness. Not that it really mattered. It was accurate even if a sensitive person may have found it offensive. I later used it to describe myself in a letter to the local newspaper and the editor used it with glee.

Strange though it may sound to you I was not always short, nor fat nor bald though I have been a brownie since I opened my left eye as a newborn. I was never tall but of a little more than average height when growing up in India. I became short the day I landed in the West. I started fattening when meat became a vital part of my diet soon after acquiring the short stature. My curly black hair started falling off the day I fell in love. When I immigrated to Canada a few years later, short, fat, bald brownie is what I was. If I wanted to be something else, I should have gone back to India with my tall, slender, blonde, white wife who would have stood out there like a sore thumb.

I did not mind the moniker but had to get rid of it on my doctor’s rather firm advice. During my last check up she pointed out, a little harshly I thought and it did hurt my feelings, that I had become shorter by four centimeters and heavier by five kilograms. Dr. Shepherd, who is always greatly concerned with the well-being of her flock, instructed me with all the gravity at her command to lose several kilograms in weight unless I could find a way of recouping the lost centimeters and some. Since the later was not possible, and I would be at the shepherd’s door again before long, losing weight assumed a high priority. There was another reason for urgent action. Shorter, fatter, totally bald and very dark brownie doesn’t roll off the tongue all that well and something had to be done to restore order in my life.

No lunches at our favourite Indian restaurant – only way to avoid the temptations of ten kinds of delicious curries soaking in fat. No desserts after dinner – may be a mango or an apple but not as a pie and certainly not a la mode. Snacks must be low sugar, no salt. Tea down to two measly cups a day. No more creamy homogenized milk in my breakfast of granola, it had to be skimmed. No butter on toast. A tall glass of water at regular intervals followed by frequent visits to the washroom became a routine. The life was dull, hardly worth living for a food junkie like me but it had to be lived. Thankfully, the sacrifices bore fruit. Soon the waist line began to shrink. After a year, I was still short, hair hadn’t grown on the head although it did grow where it shouldn’t and shade of my skin had stayed the same, may have become a little darker even. But I was not fat although no one would call me slim.

My client was not happy. I was no longer ‘that short, fat, bald brownie’. He couldn’t call me ‘short and bald brownie’, it doesn’t feel good; ‘short, no longer fat, bald, brownie’ sounds contrived. One afternoon it occurred to me that his unhappiness may have nothing to do with my appearance. It may have been because I no longer had enough weight to throw around in the meetings and therefore failed to win support for my proposals. My words no longer carried weight.

I do not know if my tall, elegant client spent much time in thinking of some other name to use behind my back He did come up with one. Only the other day I heard him say, “that short, bald, good for nothing brownie.” English being my second language I have trouble with hints. But this one is clear as a bell and even I can’t miss it. I realize that my days in this outfit are numbered and I need a new client. Do you know of any company looking for a consultant who happens to be a short, neither fat nor slim, bald, brownie?

Collapsing Economies and Commodity Cycles

Commodity prices have a huge role in causing economic collapse and recovery, much more than outside help and government actions. When commodity prices are low, weaker of the developing countries are in trouble but they recover when prices of what they grow and produce pick up. This happened in Brazil and Indonesia. On the other hand, at this stage of cycle industrial activity is profitable and the economies in developed countries prosper, consumer spending is high and bubbles form in some of these places. When the commodity prices improve, pendulum swings the other way and some of these bubbles burst. The best solution is to wait for prices pendulum to swing back, as it always does, and in the meantime take just enough action to tide over. Ireland, Spain and Portugal will be OK if they can manage to survive current price cycle for oil, steel, copper etc. What saved UK in late seventies was oil discovery not anything Maggie did. Britain's current problems are at least partly due to declining North Sea production. Ireland's problems arose from property market collapse because bubbles collapse if they are not continuously pumped. The pumping stopped because sustained high commodity prices drained overseas investment funds out of the real estate in Ireland into mining and oil sectors in Canada, Australia and Africa. The commodity prices will turn down sooner rather than later, then smart money will move out of resources into real estate and manufacturing in the desperate European countries of today and they will be laughing till the pendulum swings again.

If we want to eliminate the boom and burst cycles we have to remove commodity price cycles. I have no idea on how to achieve this except that they would be dampened if hedge funds were somehow controlled.

We Need WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks is getting a lot of press for publishing secret documents that confirm what most people suspected, if not believed, all along. Afghan government is corrupt: which government is not; it is a matter of degree. NATO soldiers have killed civilians: when was the last war in which civilians were not killed; before the Stone Age. Politicians and diplomats have been saying one thing while doing something else: since when have they told correctly what they had done; not since the forbidden apple episode.

So what is all this fuss about? I suggest that it is because the people caught lying are still in positions of power and the exposed lies are not something in the past long gone but relate to the current events. To put it starkly, the voters have short memories and bring themselves to think that their leaders are not out and out liars. Not only the leaked papers are raising issues which our leaders would rather not face, they are also reawakening the voters’ suspicions and the reelection of esteemed leaders is being put in danger.

Politicians are self-centred and focused solely on gaining and retaining power. They have reacted to published confidential archives as one would have expected. What saddens me is the position taken by some in the responsible media that lying on this scale is justified either to protect the sources of information which are vital for our welfare or for strategic reasons. Indeed, there are cases where ignoring the truth may be tolerated, but who does it help when the shaky leadership of an obviously non-functioning state – Pakistan in this case – is defended, indeed bribed by billions of borrowed dollars, to achieve ends which conflict with the professed goals of the leaders of the army and the doddering political apparatus of that country, none of which speaks for the population? Who is helped by misrepresentation of how the war is going in Afghanistan? Who is helped by confusing representations of Iran situation when much more belligerent and unruly states like North Korea and afore-mentioned Pakistan, not to mention Israel, already have the dreaded nuclear weapons? Who is helped by one-sided discussions of Palestine problem? Not an average citizen, neither in developed West nor in the developing Rest. Only people who are helped by these deceptions are the lying and cheating leaders who get elected by promising what they know they can’t deliver.

It should not surprise any one that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are being hounded by the agencies of the U.S. government and the pressure will be put on businesses to dissociate from them. But why would the media join in this persecution? Exposing the lies, wherever they originate, is what the free press is about. I would have thought that the journalists would be generally supportive of all efforts to bring out the truth rather than condemning it with unprecedented unison. Are we so afraid of the truth, or is the truth so unpleasant, that the populace has to be protected from being exposed to it lest they all have heart attacks and die? Since no one has suffered such fate from what we have seen so far, I tend to think that the storm is of little consequence. Before long it will all be forgotten and the lies and cover up will continue unabated unless some brave souls are willing to take great risk and protect us from the misdeeds of leaders by bringing their behind the scenes machinations in the open. If the media will not do it we need the likes of Julian Assange and his cohorts at WikiLeaks. All power to them.