Faizal Awan : The Making of a Grand Groom

Had the most happy time at Faizal Awan's wedding and reception. Met his loving, happy and close knit family, finger lickin' yummy food and some beautiful settings.

Here are some pictures of Faizal getting into his groom gear. Looked like a prince in the end.

Brother Zain was the first to congratulate him after the ceremony got over.

God bless the young couple.

Killing Time at Schiphol, Amsterdam

Sobriety

Rajesh Sundaram

An ambush in the Cranial cavity
Masked Freudian mutants take charge

A commandeered cerebrum, altered sobriety

Under siege...reassuring lunar cycles broken

Fear departs unleashing twisted ghosts

All checks and gone... balances distorted

Thoughts defy convention, actions blind to consequences

Then the mutants conspire to retreat
Leaving the changes and the twisted ghosts
leaving the altered sobriety

Are you being served?

Rajesh Sundaram

Plastic smile,
Dull inner wear hidden by fine livery
Deep Blue jacket and brass buttons…gleaming
Shoes polished to a dazzling shine

“Are you being served?”

An indifferent nod. Acknowledgement

Polite gesture, trying not to fidget
Uncomfortable in the role

Unhappy to ask “Are you being served?”

Halloween, Santa Monica, CA

Stock Market Crash :Only Greed can overcome Fear

The Gloom

Our newsroom was abuzz with news of the meltdown in the global stock markets last week. The ticker team had its hands full updating stock market movement across continents and time zones.

The massive slide on the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the NYSE sending Asian and European markets into record intra-day lows.

No one is immune...except for stocks in insulated Iran ( that is another story).

The domino is triggered by fear...fear of the US economy slipping into a recession, taking the world economy with it.

This fear sees no reason. Even a synchronized substantial cut in key interest rates by major central banks fails to sooth frayed nerves.

No amount of assuring noises from central bankers, finance ministers and even the US president seems to be working.

No bailout plan is big enough to counter the flight of capital out of the global stock markets.


Enter The Contrarian

So what will help the markets overcome fear ? Like always greed will.

Only greed can make investors see reason.

The instinct in a trader to look for "value" will turn the tide... and soon.

It is alright to say " We still have not hit the bottom"

At some level every stock looks attractive and many of the bellwethers world wide will soon reach that level.

The turn around will start with a few contrarians beginning the cherry pick.

The opportunity would be too big for others in the sidelines to miss. Valuations will make sitting on cash...feel stupid.


Cyclical Markets


And then others will follow ...the domino will be triggered in the opposite direction.

Perhaps from the most attractive markets in emerging Asia to Europe and eventually into the largest economy in the world.

So here is waiting for the market forces to come to play...and the lifting of gloom in the weeks and months ahead.

Avirooksen.com

WITH just a month to go for the presidential elections, Avirook Sen will travel coast-to-coast in the USA for ET. He will talk to unlikely people and report from improbable datelines, describing life in America at a time when it seeks both stability and change, when it has to choose between black and white, and worry about fuel, food and Wall Street to boot. Sen’s travels will take him from the centres of the civil rights movement to where Sarah Palin was born, with many stops in between. We invite you to join ET on this journey.

The Economic Times

Monetary Policy and the Indian Dream

This is a generation that dreams bigger and grander than Indians have done in a long time.

Bigger homes, bigger cars, bigger plasma TV sets...fat salaries and easy availability of credit have brought all of these and much more within grasping reach.

At least that was the situation till a few weeks ago.


GONE SOUR IN JUST A FEW MONTHS

The steep rise in international fuel and commodity prices over the past few months has pushed India's headline inflation rate to a 16 year high...and brought the dream down like a pack of cards.

Home loan rates have rocketed to 13 percent...from just over 6 percent two years ago. Most middle class Indians have to contend with a bigger chunk of their salary going towards repaying home loans.

20 year repayment terms have widened to over 40 years. Many now will have to pay monthly instalments on housing loans well past their retirement age.

Lesser and lesser people are queuing up to get new loans. Housing projects and the real estate sector have been hit severely...the dream house for many will have to wait.

Car sales too have been hit as auto loan rates rise.

Maruti Suzuki India, the company which makes half the cars sold in India, has already reporting weaker sales, as India's output growth in 2008 has averaged half last year's pace.

Passenger car sales in India fell 4.4 percent in August from a year earlier after declining 1.7 per cent in July, the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers recently reported.

More Indians are delaying buying their dream car.

Interest rates on consumer loans too have been on a steady rise...triggering a dip in the sales of TV sets, air conditioners, refrigerators and other white goods.

Weaker industrial production may deepen India's economic slowdown. The Reserve Bank of India projects the economy to expand at 8 percent in the fiscal year to March 2009, the slowest pace of expansion in four years.


SO IS THIS THE END OF THE DREAM

Some analysts say there is light the end of the tunnel...and that things would be back to normal in a few months.

They say international fuel and commodity prices are moderating, the inflation rate has peaked and is on a decline and that it is just a matter to time before other macro-economic indicators look up.

But others are more cautious. The new central bank governor Duvvuri Subbarao, who took over last week, is grappling with inflation running at 12.1 percent.

With inflation in double digits...stimulating growth by lowering interest rates may not be his first priority.

Some economists believe the central bank would tighten monetary policy at least one more time to get inflation under control before gradually starting to lower rates, most likely in 2009.

So at least till then the bigger new house, car and plasma TV would have to remain a dream for many in new India.

Long, Listless, Pacific Stretch

Rajesh Sundaram


Stuck on auto pilot

...through a long,listless, pacific stretch

Increasingly uncomfortable about the effortless cruse

Unable to break the mindless trajectory.

Unwilling to wrestle the mechanics...the mutant switches, the hijacked controls

Mahatma Gandhi and Violence

Violence the Choice

I do believe that, where there is only a choice between cowardice and violence, I would advise violence... I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honour than that she should, in a cowardly manner, become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.

But I believe that non violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment.

Forgiveness adorns a soldier...But abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish; it is meaningless when it pretends to proceed from a helpless creature....

But I do not believe India to be helpless....I do not believe myself to be a helpless creature....Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.

We do want to drive out the best in the man, but we do not want on that account to emasculate him.

And in the process of finding his own status, the beast in him is bound now and again to put up his ugly appearance.

The world is not entirely governed by logic. Life itself involves some kind of violence and we have to choose the path of least violence.

Desperado

"Desperado"

-The Eagles

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
You been out ridin' fences for so long now
Oh, you're a hard one
I know that you got your reasons
These things that are pleasin' you
Can hurt you somehow

Don't you draw the queen of diamonds, boy
She'll beat you if she's able
You know the queen of hearts is always your best bet

Now it seems to me, some fine things
Have been laid upon your table
But you only want the ones that you can't get

Desperado, oh, you ain't gettin' no younger
Your pain and your hunger, they're drivin' you home
And freedom, oh freedom well, that's just some people talkin'
Your prison is walking through this world all alone

Don't your feet get cold in the winter time?
The sky won't snow and the sun won't shine
It's hard to tell the night time from the day
You're losin' all your highs and lows
Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?

Desperado, why don't you come to your senses?
Come down from your fences, open the gate
It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you
You better let somebody love you, before it's too late

Nepal : Prachanda's Challenges

I spoke with these People's Liberation Army, PLA fighters a few weeks after the Maoists and the seven party alliance signed their historic ceasefire and power sharing agreement.

Each of these 18 year old combatants claimed to have killed over a dozen "class enemies."

They had just moved to a UN designated camp near Janakpur in South Nepal.

Both were sure the Maoists would sweep the constituent assembly polls and that the 250 year old monarchy and Nepal's feudal system would be rooted out.

" If the current ceasefire holds and Nepal becomes a republic I would like to join the army or become a political workers," one of them told me.
"What if it fails?" I asked.

" We are fighters and will go back to the jungles and take up arms and fight the class enemy till the oppressed people are not rid of their misery."

A few days later in January 2007, I met their supreme commander Pushpa Kamal Dahal known better by his nom de guerre Prachanda (The fierce one).

The man who spearheaded the maoist guerrilla movement in Nepal for most part of the last decade. An armed conflict that has left over 13,000 dead and many more wounded.

We where asked to wait at a small hotel in Kathmandu for our interview with Prachanda.

He appeared minutes after his men had checked and positioned themselves all around the hotel and its surrounding buildings.

" The king has many supporters and he would do whatever is in his powers to disrupt this process towards a republic. These supporters are powerful players both within Nepal and outside. " Prachanda told me.

" There can be no solution till Nepal becomes a republic. If the current process and the polls are free and fair, the people of Nepal will boot the king out," he added.

More than a year on Prachanda's party is on the verge of being declared the single largest in the constituent assembly...and he could very well be the very first president of the "Republic of Nepal"

But the road ahead is filled with many challenges. For one high inflation, unemployment and slow growth need to be fixed fast. The festering "Madheshi" armed rebellion in the Tarai region of south Nepal also needs urgent attention. Claims of underrepresentation and unfair sharing of resources there, could very well plunge Nepal into another phase of strife and conflict.

Agra 2007

Missing the Vanni

As I look back, the phase of my professional life I enjoyed the most was working as a conflict reporter across Indian and international television channels.

I have reported from Kashmir, Nepal Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and from India's Maoist red corridor.

Here are some pictures from the ceasefire line in North Sri Lanka shot in 2006.