THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

I was travelling in Jumla, a remote district in mid-western Nepal in 1992, when I became acutely aware of how scary diahorrea can be. I was all of 19 years old. I’d flown there on a rickety plane that landed in a small runway. The plethora of tea-shops that I was assured, by the non-governmental organization that had hired me and had sent me out, were in existence and would take care of my food and lodging never materialized. Instead, there were small homes selling a few items-perhaps a biscuit packet, some cigarettes or matches. Tea was still a luxury.  After tramping around the villages for six weeks, and living off fox tailed barley bread sprinkled with salt and chilli, and recording stories of mysterious deaths on the side (“my sister was walking back home to her husband’s house and she fell down dead on the way”, “about seventeen people have died in that village that-a-way, we don’t know why”) my fellow guide suggested we try to climb up to Rara lake. “It will take ...

I’m not sure if I caught all of Indian PM Modi’s speech to the Nepal Parliament, but the portion I did was   powerfully articulated, well thought out, and persuasive.   What came across most clearly was the PM’s interest in decreasing poverty not just in Nepal but all across the 7 SAARC nations. I’d read a great deal about Modi—from Modi’s critics. One criticism was that his much vaunted results about decreasing poverty in Gujarat was hyped up. His poverty figures, said critics, were less than what the Modistas claimed the numbers were. After listening to his speech, it was clear to me that PM Modi has a clear anti-poverty agenda—not just for his own country, but also for the SAARC region as a whole. Whether he can show results is unproven. But clearly he’s putting a remarkable amount of energy and devotion to this project, traveling thousands of miles and meeting people of all persuasions in order to inspire them with this vision. And that, I think, is achievement en...

When I heard that Japanese Prime Minister had gone to America with his prototype for the Maglev, the train that levitates on a magnetic field, and offered it royalty-free for the Americans to try out, I felt a tiny bit of incredulity. For such a smart people, it appears the Japanese are not to up to date with the American aversion, and outright hostility, to public transport.   For a country like America that has depended upon the internal combustion engine and its gas guzzling propensity to rule the world, the Maglev brings the quiet hiss of revolution. And the ruling elites, unsurprisingly, will resist this at all costs. America’s influence around the world would wane if people started to use magnets to get around—forcing this gas-dependent giant to quickly reconsider priorities. The wars of the Middle East would cool down as oil became a fuel of the past century.   Much of America’s spending, now dedicated to a war machine of insatiable proportions, would shrink,...

Ms. Joshi is currently busy with various activities, including a lot of thought about gas, petroleum, water, energy, and information technology. On the side she is socializing with a really cool bunch of people from all over the world who are also thinking about the same issues, but in the meantime, she would like you to read this article about a "The Search for a Buddha without Boundaries." Ms. Joshi takes no responsability for the photograph (it looks nothing like the overgrown site she visited), but she takes full responsibility for the article. As you can tell from "responsability", Ms. Joshi has been socializing with people who speak Spanish. But more on that later. In the meantime, please read "In Search of a Buddha Without Boundaries" in the Irrawaddy Magazine. PS: The author will be posting the posting photographs of her visit (some really cool ones from a Go Pro camera) as soon as she figures out the intricacies of the technology. PPS: Oops. T...

Here's my response to Gerrard Toffin's fascinating take on astrology and dasha. Dasha is not: staving off disease or afflictions caused by supernatural beings (dasha).  Dasha means "time."   _______________________________ Dear Professor Toffin: I read your article on astrology and timing-very interesting and thank you for addressing what I feel is a cultural topic of great interest but which so far has been neglected in public discourse. I don't have time to address all the points raised in your article, except these few important points: Dasha means "time"--specifically the time ruled by each planet in a person's life at that specific time. Maha dasha, antar dasha, pratyantar dasha, shoookshma dasha and prana dasha--you can go down to the breath level, and all of these are planetary forces ruling a person at a specific time. More here on how to calculate: http://www.galacticcenter.org/blog/joni-s-blog/vedic-astrology-for-w...

Seems the NSA, despite collecting millions of cellphone records and billions of metadata, still has no idea ifSnowden is a whistleblower or a spy. Admiral Michael Rogers, the new NSA chief, has this to say (according to the NBC website): Asked whether he thought Snowden was or is working for the FSB, the Russian security service, Rogers said: "Could he have? Possibly. Do I believe that that's the case? Probably not." Now that’s some fuzzy “possibly/possibly not” intelligence right there for the most omniscient agency in the world. Which goes to show you that listening to a billion phonecalls about homework and dinner may actually be the wrong strategy, in terms of collecting intelligence. Since traditional methods of intelligence, taken to monster extremes, as evidenced by the NSA global surveillance strategy, has clearly failed, I thought I’d help the NSA out here with my trusty astrological calculator. Snowden: spy or whistleblower? Edward Jos...

CUTTING OUT THE MIDDLEMAN CNBC has this interesting article: What Russia-China relations mean for the dollar.  Basically, the Chinese and Russians have cottoned on and said: “hey, why are we paying all this money to America to change our yuans to dollars to rubles, then back again? Lets cut out the middleman.” Now it’s always painful for the middlemen to hear they are middlemen. All around the world, producers are constantly trying to cut out the middlemen and get straight to their consumers. Like religious devotees of yore, who yearned to get straight to God without intercession from priests and popes and other figures of religious authority, the Chinese and the Russians, it appears, have finally figured out the way to divinity. Basically, just exchange yuans for rubles. How easy is that? The large-than-life of the illusion of the indispensability of the dollar, compounded by lots of illusory sleight of hands in Wall Streeters, financial institutions, regul...