"I wont celebrate my birthday."

This is laughable, I swear. 

All indians and some of the international communities know what happened in 

11/26. This was the most audacious and "blow on your face" type attack on Indian financial capital

and major metro city.  And hotels like the Taj and Oberoi are the most luxurious and expensive hotels in India. I would never imagine that they can be attacked and held hostage for 72 hours. 

I would rathe rbelieve if someone attackes our airports and other government establishments because we know our police and law enforement officers. If they would they do their job, there is no single element in this world who would dare to do this.  Anyway. I was supposed to write on 

the "I wont celebrate my birthday".

In the wak eof this attack, our honorable PM said "we wont tolerate any form of terrorism on our soil." This I have been hearing since my childhood. Believe me. All the politicians and ministers say this when we have an attack. 

Then comes the kicker. Our so called "influencial" lady of Infdia says I wont celebrate my birth day. Well " Who cares ". So many people died. So many common people laid their lives protecting others. Bare handed constable saved so many lives. You Miss Gandhi roam around in Delhi with Z- security. Noone can touch you. When you go out, roads are blocked. People face lot of trouble and pray that when a common person starts for his office, no VIP like you are on roads , else he would be bound to be late. Pakistan every time blows us on our face and laugh at home. International community said its "horrible". Ita bad and blah blah. But Mrs Gandhi, the last word is, we should save our own ass. We should not wait someone to come and save us. And without doing that, what you say is " I wont celebrate my birth day." Who care please. stop this laughabl ecomments in press. This does not impress the widnow of the constable who dies in CST railway station attack. She has no income now and her child will be another uneducated no job young man in few years. Does she get anything if you dont celebrate your birth day. People get a good laugh and feel sorry for you Mam. Please stop this. 

Then our honorable president. First thing is, she replaced Dr APJ Abdul Kalam. Dr Kalam was the most loved and most active president ever in Indian history. He gave an identity to the Presidential post and was not merely roaming around the world in taxpayers money like our new Pres. I havbe seen since my childhood, when someone becomes Indian President, he/she goes on world tour with their families and absolutely do NOTHING. I would say, if you cant do any good, atleast stop spending taxpayers money and save the planet too. Dont just go glod trotting. When Mumbai attack happened, our president was gold trotting. 

The bad thing is, even some of International leaders said something and condemned Pakistan for its act. But our President does not have the guts to say anything. Instead she announced " I wont celebrate my birthday ". Well Mrs President, "who cares ". And also I would plead you to stop taking your so called unusable husband on your world tours. I dont see any reason why he would spend tax payers money just because he is our Presidents husband. Again Mrs President, please try to learn from Dr Kalams legacy and honor the identity of the post you are holding. 

We know how you got there. And we know, you do not possess any caliber to hold that post. So understand the sentiments of common people like me and do something. Atleast try. 

And my last request to Mrs Gandhi. Please stop devisive politics and puppet governements in India. We know you have the power. But dont force inactive Presidents and weak PMs on us. 

If you want to be remembered as a great politician and do any honor to the Gandhi name, please clear the way for clean and honest politics and same Indian people.

And you think we will be ok !

So far this is the calculation. Please excuse some here and there billion ! if I have missed.

And add to that, $20 billion in Citi and to guarantee as much as $306 billion.

 

Term Auction Facility = 900 billion
Commercial Banks = 99.2 billion
Investment Banks = 56.7 billion
Loans to buy ABCp = 76.5 billion
AIG = 112.5 billion
Bear Sterns = 29.5 billion
Term Securities Lending Facility = 225 billion
Swap Lines = 613 billion
Money Market Investor Funding Facility = 540 billion
Commercial Paper Funding Facility = 257
Treasury Asset Relief Program = 700 billion
Automakers = 25 billion
Federal Housing Administration = 300 billion
Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac = 350 billion

Total $4,284,400,000,000

So, as per the popular notion, we are trying to fix the economy and improve confidence of people, pat the banking system at their back saying, well, dont worry we are there ( Uncle Sam does this on behalf of tax payers ! ) , unfreeze the credit market so on...

So with this, where are we going ? With all this enormous amount of money being lended to the banks, auto companies, insurance companies etc, what is the long term impact ? Even though, situations improve, how is the future look like ? How will we recover the money ? How much will we owe the anonymous creditors to the treasury ? What are the terms for getting this money ? and million other questions ! 

It may sound amateurish, but when and how the fed is going to recover the money and how the Fed is going to pay off the debt ? 

It may sound simple to a economist, but for me ; a main street middle class person, it sounds a black hole with no path back !!!

Please share your views !!

Thanks

BIswajit

Our Digital Footprint

I have always wandered, what kind of foot print we are leaving in this digital world.

All of us are aware of blogs, social networking sites, public forums etc etc and the list goes in a web2.0 world. I believe all of the mediums do maintain some form of private data about the user to maintain the session or in simple cases, provide the service you intend to receive from them. So when we no longer want to use any service, or simply stop using the service, we often do not go ahead and close/remove our data from the service providers. Also, even though, we do close our account or remove ourselves, we still do not know what happens to our private data. One classis example is, gmail (www.gamil.com) the popular free email service from Google, does nto delete any email even though you delete them from yoru view. 

Though we do not know, who and why someone would be interested in my personal data in near or far away future, we know our service providers keep it. Even when we are long gone from this world, we still leave some kind of footprint in this world. 

I came across a nice article about this in here:

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=328752

Until my next musing,

Biswajit

The World Leaders and Their Off Moments

On a lighter note:

I always wondered, how the world leaders will be making a conversation during the so called high profile meeting or conferences they attend. Then I realized they are also human beings and they also have their off times. Times they would probably be tired to be awake in course of long meetings like I do in classes etc.

To clear my confusion, todays media came to a big help.  

Few examples I can quote here is, 

President Bush said "Ask Syria stop the 'shit' "to Prime Minister Blair in one of the conferences.

Prime Minister Putin told President Sarkozy "I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls" when President Sarkozy was in Russia to broker a peace deal during Georgia-Russia conflict. - This is taken from the news published in www.timesofindia.com.

Indian Prime Minister Devegowda taking a nap in a public meeting 

So I think , these high profile leaders are also like us. They also bath, eat, drink, go on vacation, use the loo etc ...

The Bailout and Me

I have been trying to say something about what I have been thinking of the whole financial mess we all are in and the subsequent bail-out drama. The views expressed here is purely personal. Well thats the blog concept is all about, isnt it ? Hmm.. Well my point was I am not trying to say "Mr Bush" created it, or Mr Banker created it and so on.. All I am trying to say is, "we are in mess". And Personally I think everything goes up has to come down (Well not coincidentally , originally not mine; I would say its learned from the Famous guy who failed in Maths in his school days. Never mind)!!

So applying the same concept of gravity in a general sense, the Asian stock market boom, the Oil price surge, the technology innovation etc will one day would have seen a shrink. And thats what it is not. You would probably argue that, "if we would not have done A, we would not have landed up being in B". Thats true. Probably the A-B thing helped in being in this mess, but I would not see its totally teh reason. 

We are digressing from the topic too much.. Lets come back to the blog.. What I feel about the whole thing. This is sure that, we are in mess. What I want to tell you is, where do I stand for the whole bail-out thing. In simple terms, I say, I dont support it. I dont think it will help. You would ask why ? Not that I claim to be a super intelligent economist or something. But I have some fairly simple reasons.  

Reason 1: Mr John Doe is a home owner. He had a job. He had calculated his mortgage, car loan, education assistance to his kids and the phone bill, and the cable / internet bill. Now he has lost his job. He is no more able to pay his mortgage. Well not only mortgage, his gas bill, grocery and so on.  

Now, the fed is funding the banks to unfreeze credit. So far so good. So our Mr Doe, is defaulting his mortgage, car loans now. He goes to the bank and bank turns him down looking at the credit history. He comes back and files for foreclosure and returns the car to the dealer as he cant pay. 

So my understanding is, the bailout may be a great thing in the long terms and in bigger context of things. But if we dont save Mr Doe, then the problem in the grassroot level still remains. And to me, it looks like, its much more important to look at Mr Doe than Mr Banker at this moment. 

Reason 2: We started the whole bailout thing since last 1 month roughly. We said, this will increase investor confidence, the market will come up, the OPEC guys will nto be scared etc etc. Has not seen any progress so far. My 401K is down 49.6 percent to be exact. 

I have so many other reasons. But I think you got the point.. We need to address this issue from the root level.