Weekend Videos & Pix: Nikon Micro Pix, Inside Syria, & #MeToo

• Nikon Small World winners zoom in on microscopic marvels (108 images, New Atlas)
• Has #Metoo helped or harmed women? (video, 5 min 27 s, BBC Ideas)
• Inside Syria (13 min, SNI)

Indiana Joneses & Other Reads

General Reads

• Calling all Indiana Joneses: Clue to Undiscovered Asokan Inscriptions (Telegraph India)
• What you need to know about India's missile defence shield. Read the comments also. (Dawn - yes, its a Pakistani newspaper)
• China's Cultural Revolution: No desire to dwell on the past (BBC)

Photo Gallery

• Inspire (NatGeo)

Controversial Read

• Reconciling three narratives about global growth (Bloomberg)

Anecdote

In a test match between Australia and West Indies, Ramnaresh Sarwan scored a superb century. In that innings, Glenn McGrath bowled an unplayable bouncer that zoomed past Sarwan’s face. McGrath went up to Sarwan and said, "How does Lara’s d%ck taste, mate?”. Sharp came the reply from Sarwan: ”Go and ask your wife.” 

Sunday Reads + Anecdote

• The power of Wet Waste (NIE)

• The Tennis Files: Have top players been paid to lose? (BBC Magazine)

• Ash and Cash saga in Netaji files (Telegraph India)

• How close are we to creating Artificial Intelligence? (Aeon)

Sunday Bonus: What really happens at a Jallikattu - in pictures. (Swarajya)

Sunday Anecdote: 

In a county match in England, Greg Thomas was bowling to Viv Richards and getting a few to whizz past the bat. After Richards played and missed another one, Thomas said: "It's red, it's round. Now fucken hit it!". This obviously angered Richards who proceeded to hit the next ball out of the ground. Richards: "You know what it looks like now go and get it."

Sunday Reads - Cows might fly & In praise of micromanagement

• Why emergency was Fali Nariman's toughest moment. (ET)
• In praise of micromanagement. (BBC Capital)
• Why the cult of hard work is counter-productive. (New Statesman)
• Cows might fly. (Aeon) 

Year-end bonus: Best photos of 2013 from FP.

Anil Agarwal on India's Economic Prospects & MSD's Not Alone

Anil Agarwal is the Chairman of Vedanta Resources. He is nicknamed ‘metal king’ for his ownership of a clutch of metals companies, like bauxite and iron ore. In a free-wheeling interview with the Economic Times, Mr Agarwal ­­­rues that “the world wants India to remain an import-based economy”.

He further says that “India produces 130 MT of iron ore. And they are talking about depletion of iron ore reserves. India has potential to produce 600 MT of iron ore annually. We’ll have reserves for another 100 years at 600 MT annually. That is India’s capacity.” 

As a co-owner of an oil major (in partnership with Cairn), he says that, “We need 20 oil and gas companies in India, but we have only three — Reliance Industries, ONGC, and Cairn. Cairn produces oil at three dollars. Can you believe this? And India imports at 110 dollars a barrel. So, priority to local resources has to be given.” Read the complete interview here.

Also read, ‘India’s realty bubble waiting to burst’, from the pages of the Business Line.

M. S. Dhoni is sporting a new hairdo. There have been several before who have had a “good or bad hair day”. Treat your eyes to this DC slideshow on sportspersons with some real weird hairdos.

The Explainer: Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust

At the outset, let me tell you that I wrote this piece on Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust upon the request of a few readers of this blog; I have used pretty simple English to explain one of the most complex episodes in world history; I hope this helps you in learning about the Holocaust.

The end of the First World War (1914-18) saw the emergence of Nazism in Germany. The movement took political colour in 1919, in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed several humiliating terms on the defeated German nation.

The Nazi party’s official name was ‘National Socialist Workers Party’; its followers came to be called Nazis. Though the Nazi movement started small at a local level, it gained mass popularity across all sections of the German society, including among the poor and unemployed as well as the several small royal houses that dotted the German state.

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler, who joined the Nazi party when it was still a marginal player in the German political space, turned into one of the greatest mass movements in history.

The political philosophy of the Nazi party had some basic features: It was anti-democracy, anti-communism, anti-peace, anti-Semite, extreme form of nationalism, and pro-capitalism. Hitler believed that the Aryan race, to which he and most of the Germans belonged, was the most supreme racial group and was destined to rule over Europe. He believed that the Aryans were the most intelligent people on the planet.

In this space, I will discuss the anti-Semite, i.e., anti-Jew policy of the Nazi party. In a period of 13 years (1933-45), Adolf Hitler and his Nazis killed over six million Jews. This systematic, state-sponsored mass killing of Jews, carried out in different parts of Germany and Occupied Territories, is called the Holocaust. ‘Holocaust’ is a word of Greek origin meaning ‘sacrifice by fire’. In a larger picture, the Holocaust is an important part of the ‘Final Solution’ policy, which called for the elimination of the Jewish people.

It is not just the Jews who were singled out by Hitler; other groups, deemed racially inferior to the German race, like Roma Gypsies, Slavs (Russians and Poles) and ideological rivals, like communists and socialists, were also targeted and killed in large numbers by the Nazi party. It is believed that more than 2 lakh Gypsies were killed by the Nazi party.  

Hitler blamed the Jews for all the ills suffered by the German nation. He accused them of being hand in glove with the country’s enemies, like France and Britain. He derided them as the scum of the earth and treated them as sub-human.

Source: Martin Frost

Jews, who at the time made up less than one per cent of Germany’s population, had become leading members of the professional classes and the cultural space. Hitler accused them of hoarding the wealth and resources that belonged to the Germans.

In 1933, Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany. As the most popular and powerful leader of the German nation, Hitler put in place his anti-Semite policy, i.e., anti-Jew policy. A Jew was defined as any person with “one Jewish grandparent”.

Jewish prisoners at a concentration camp.

Jews were asked to move into special areas marked for their settlements, i.e., they were ghettoized. They were required, by law, to wear the yellow Star of David and were stripped of their German citizenship. They were not allowed to display German national symbols, like the national flag. They were not allowed to participate in arts, like music and dance.

Jewish businesses were boycotted; Jews were forbidden from holding any government/public office. Jewish professionals, including teachers, doctors and lawyers, did not find any takers for their services.

The Nazi party explicitly banned marriage between Jews and non-Jews; in fact, such marriages were denounced as “racial pollution”. In many towns and villages, Jewish tenants were evicted and forced to live outdoors.

Starving prisoners at concentration camp

As the German State, under Nazi Party, invaded and occupied large swathes of territory across Europe, including in Poland, the discrimination against Jews became a pan-Europe phenomenon. Jews across German-occupied territories were forced to group and live in particular settlements.

The most sinister part of the anti-Semite policy of the Nazi regime was the establishment of more than 300 Concentration Camps and Exterminations Camps.  These camps were run by the SS (Schutzstaffel; Protection Squadrons), set up by Adolf Hitler, in 1925 (yes, long before he became the Chancellor of Germany).

Jews from across Occupied Territories were taken to these camps. They were divided into two major groups: slave labour and the group to be killed. To put in blunt terms, women, children, and the aged were taken to Extermination Camps while the healthy males were turned into human slaves.

Hundreds of thousands of Jewish women, children and the aged were taken by trains to these Extermination camps, which housed large warehouses. These warehouses were in fact gas chambers. They were all herded into these air-tight chambers and killed through release of poisonous gases.

Mass grave at Bergen-Belsen camp

The Jewish men, turned into slave labour, were used to build railway and help in the German war effort in the Second World War. They were treated as sub-human, were fed poorly, denied medical attention, worked in appalling conditions, and lived (and killed) at the whim and fancy of the German Nazi officers. 

Auschwitz is the most well-known of these camps. After the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the eventual defeat of Germany in the Second World War, the Nuremberg Trials were set up, which tried tens of Nazi officials for their complicity in the Holocaust. Rudolf Hess, who was the first commandant at the Auschwitz camp, testified that up to 3 million (30 lakh) people were killed at his camp. Of these 2.5 million were gassed while the rest died from disease and starvation. He said that the camp had four gas chambers, which during the height of deportations to the camp, gassed up to 6,000 Jews each day.

In all, Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semite policy led to the deaths of over six million (sixty lakh) Jews in different parts of Europe. The number of the dead is staggering, given that in 1933 (the year Hitler became the chancellor of Germany), there were just about 10 million Jews in the whole of Europe. 

A number of films have been made on the controversial subject of the anti-Semite policy of the Nazi Party.  I would recommend: The Great Dictator (starring Charlie Chaplin), The Pianist, Inglorious Basterds, Schindler’s List, The Reader, and Life is Beautiful (my personal favourite). In case of books, A Diary of Anne Frank is probably the most popular work that captures the suffering of the Jews through the eyes of a fourteen-year old Jewish girl.

  

The BBC has an interesting interactive feature on the happenings at the Auschwitz camp. 

Keep learning!

Sunday Reads - Kill Him Silently & The Myth of Long Working Hours

Food for thought for your Sunday!

• The myth of long working hours. (The Rodin Hoods)
• Kill him silently: The story behind Mossad's bungled bid to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal. (AlJazeera) 
• Mali Army, Riding U.S. Hopes, Is Proving No Match for Militants (NY Times)
• The Resource Race: China Dips Toes in Arctic Waters (Der Spiegel)

Check out this slideshow of 20 terrific pictures of the U.S. Air Force.

The Rothschilds Family - Do they own the world?

Conspiracy theories may sound improbable yet they are fascinating, else they would not sustain our interest. 

Let me share yet another major conspiracy theory: that the world is controlled by one major banker family - the Rothschilds! 

A few weeks back, I read this interesting piece on the Business Insider website on how the Rothschilds created modern finance and a vast fortune that has lasted for centuries. In fact, the Rothschilds are considered to be the richest family in all of history.

Seen in the picture above is Emma Georgina Rothschild, an economic historian at Harvard and an honorary professor at Cambridge. She also serves as a trustee to the Rothschild Archive, a London-based center for research into the family. She is married to the Nobel-prize winning economist Amartya Sen. 

Also check this photo-show to meet the remaining heirs of the legendary Rothschild family.

Sunday Reads Late Edition - Pakistan Special

• Formidable power of Pakistan's anti-Shia militants. (BBC) 

• The mystery of Tahir ul Qadri. (Economist)

• O God, have mercy on Pakistan. (Dawn

• No more FOP talk. A rabid Pakistan must be told to behave or... (The New Indian Express)
  

(Read Preparing for B-School GD, Essay, & Interview)

The Tribune Pakistan has a slideshow on the increasing violence against Shia Muslims in Pakistan. 

The Explainer: China's Malacca Dilemma

China is already considered one of the top two global powers, the other being the United States. Its GDP, at U.S.$7.3 trillion, is already the second largest and is poised to overtake the U.S. GDP, at U.S.$15.2 trillion, by 2020, as most estimates suggest.

China’s GDP is expected to grow at 7.8% in 2012, making it the fastest growing major economy in the world. The Economist Intelligence Unit predicts that China’s real GDP growth is expected to average 7.9% a year in 2013-17.

China is the world’s largest exporter of finished goods (U.S.$1.9 trillion in 2011) and the second largest importer (U.S.$1.7 trillion in 2011). It is the biggest consumer of energy resources and as its economy expands, its energy hunger will only grow.  

Almost all of China’s external trade is sea-borne; in fact, shipping lanes are the life blood of China’s trade with the world. It is in the light of this crucial fact that we can appreciate China’s Malacca Dilemma. 

The Malacca Strait is a narrow channel of water that separates the Malaysian Peninsula from the Indonesian island of Sumatra. In geographical terminology, a strait is a narrow channel of water that separates two land territories and connects two water bodies; for one, look at the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka.

The Malacca Strait is one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, with over 85000 vessels passing through it every year. Located pretty close to this is Singapore; an island City State, Singapore is separated from the Malaysian peninsula by the Johor Strait.

Singapore hosts a huge naval base belonging to the United States Navy. In fact, it is the U.S. Navy that more or less controls the Malacca Strait and other water-based trade channels in this part of the world.

It is this reality that is giving Beijing the jitters because more than 70% of China’s energy supplies move through the Malacca Strait.

                                                           

The External Boundaries of India as depicted

 in these maps are neither right nor authentic.

China has never concealed its ambitions to become a world hegemon though it often mouths platitudes like ‘peaceful rise’. It wants to convert the Pacific Ocean into a Chinese lake. Also, it is scouring different parts of the world for sourcing raw materials and to sell finished goods.

China treats the U.S. as the biggest obstacle to realize not just its ambitions of turning the Pacific Ocean into a China lake but also become the second pole in global power order. In fact, it is waging a massive low-intensity diplomatic war with the U.S. for political and economic influence around the world at large and in the Pacific in particular.

Today, despite all the superficial U.S.-China bonhomie, there is a great deal of mistrust (and distrust) between Beijing and Washington. Also, Beijing is involved in a tug-of-war with almost all maritime nations in its neighborhood, like Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia mainly on account of Beijing’s claims on all of the South China Sea and the resources (like oil and gas) and islands therein.

In the light of these facts, China fears that if a war with the United States (or with American allies, like Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam) breaks out, the latter will block access to the Malacca Strait.

Such a development will stop the movement of vessels carrying energy resources (like oil & gas) and raw materials to Beijing that are absolutely central to fuel its humongous economy and waging a war.

This would place China at the mercy of its rivals, which in turn may stoke social, political and economic instability within the nation, all of which may come together to threaten the very existence of the Communist Party of China.

To avoid such an internal scenario, Beijing is trying very hard to bolster its external defences not just to secure its economy but also the communist party’s future. To resolve its Malacca Dilemma, Beijing has embarked on the ambitious Ring of Pearls strategy. We will focus on that in the next installment of The Explainer. 

Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

An eclectic mix of reads:

• How the Chinese Prime Minister's family amassed billions of dollars in hidden fortune. (NYT)

• Is the worst for the Indian economy? (WSJ)

• The doormen policing Egypt's morals. (BBC Magazine)

• What happens when decisions go wrong. (Farnam Street)

Foreign Policy has two interesting slideshows: one, the changing face of the holy city of Mecca and two, the March to Mecca. 

The photo below, captured by the author Ahmed Mater, comes with this text: "At this bus depot you can see people coming from countries and regions around the world: America, Andalusia, China, Malaysia, and so on. They come in groups, and each one wears its own version of white. People dress in modest white cloth for the hajj; this ihram clothing, which cannot be stitched and must not have any scent, symbolizes unification. Pilgrims are supposed to forget everything singular about their own lives and enter a similar spiritual state. There is no difference in race, color or class. Everyone comes together to meet one another and do hajj for one God."

Things You Should Know - Episode IX

• Facebook was originally founded as 'thefacebook.com'. Before the homepage was redesigned in 2007, FB's homepage featured Al Pacino's face, hidden behind 1s and 0s (ONEs and ZEROs), the basis of binary code.

• Recently I found this about the Virgin Group: In an interview, the flamboyant founder Richard Branson revealed that when he started a business to sell music records by (postal) mail, one of the saleswomen proposed a name for the new business: "What about 'Virgin'? We are complete virgins at business."

• An Open Collar worker is one who works from home, through the medium of the Internet.

• Only Vimal is a brand owned by Reliance Industries. Dhirajlal Heerachand Ambani (yes, that's the full name of Dhirubhai Ambani!) named the business after the name of his nephew - his elder brother's son. 

• The original copy of the 7X formula (seven unknown ingredients) for Coca-Cola is stored in a safe vault in a branch of the SunTrust Bank in Atlanta, Georgia.

Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

Presenting four great reads, with three weekend bonus reads!

• The inside story of a controversial new text about Jesus. (Smithsonian Magazine)

• Siddharth Varadarajan on the UPA's reforms binge: A risky strategy born of panic. (The Hindu)

• The China-Japan tussle over the Diaoyus / Senkakus Islands: Can it lead to war? (Economist)

• What the mega-rich do for America. (Newsweek)

Weekend Bonus Reads:

• Sivakasi: India's dangerous fireworks capital city. 

• The man who gave away his book collection. 

• A Spanish city where there are no medicines. 

Check out these great images from the submissions to the National Geographic photo contest 2012.

Sunday Reads - China Special Edition

Presenting the Sunday Reads China Special Edition!

Source: UN Data

• Playing with fire: Obama's threat to China. (AlJazeera) This is a Dec 2011 article but  very topical today.

• Why China's economic opacity is a serious problem. (Foreign Policy)

• Why China can not adjust. (Project Syndicate).

China’s current economic slowdown has no shortage of causes: Europe’s financial turmoil, sputtering recovery in the United States, and weak domestic investment growth, to name the most commonly cited factors. Since exports and investment account, respectively, for 30% and 40% of China’s GDP growth, its economy is particularly vulnerable to... 

• China's Hong Kong: A city apart. (Economist)

Audio-video slideshow: Check this awesome BBC photo feature, with commentary, capturing China's past. 

Sunday Reads - Microsoft’s Odd Couple & India's superpower dreams

In the regular Sunday Reads column, I publish a collection of four reads and a slideshow. However, today's collection is rather different, with just two incisive reads. But I am sure this two-article collection of reads will keep your mind occupied for the next few days.

• Microsoft’s Odd Couple. Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft, writes on his stormy relationship with Bill Gates and how MS was built.

Paul Allen

One day he showed me the magazine’s special annual issue and asked me, “What do you think it’s like to run a Fortune 500 company?” I said I had no idea. And Bill said, “Maybe we’ll have our own company someday.” He was 13 years old and already a budding entrepreneur.

[...]

I’d occasionally catch Bill grabbing naps at his terminal during our late-nighters. He’d be in the middle of a line of code when he’d gradually tilt forward until his nose touched the keyboard. After dozing for an hour or two, he’d open his eyes, squint at the screen, blink twice, and resume precisely where he’d left off—a prodigious feat of concentration. (End of excerpt)

I strongly recommend this illuminating six-page excerpt from the memoir of Paul Allen at Vanity Fair.

• In his remarkable piece, Think Again: India, Sumit Ganguly, raises a pertinent question: India can help the U.S. contain China. To this, he says:

Hardly. Because of its longstanding disputes with Beijing, U.S. policymakers have hoped that New Delhi would join Washington in balancing against China. But though India has had significant quarrels with China, it remains extremely skeptical of the U.S. "pivot" to Asia and of playing any part in an American strategy of containment. Many Indian elites fear that joining the U.S. effort would simply provoke China's wrath, and their obsessive concern with policy independence, deeply rooted in India's political culture of nonalignment, reinforces the unwillingness to make common cause with the United States.

Read the complete piece on the Foreign Policy website. 

Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

• Poverty and violence in the U.S. (New Yorker)

“My aim is to get to the core of violence in America.... Not just the physical violence against one another but the quiet violence of letting families fall apart, the violence of unemployment, the violence of our educational system, and the violence of segregation and isolation.”

• Malnutrition and hunger stalks Gandhi family's bastion. (ET)

The Rae Bareli seat in Uttar Pradesh has been a Gandhi family bastion since 1967 when Indira Gandhi first stood for election from there. Sonia Gandhi adopted the constituency in 2004 and was re-elected with a huge majority in 2009. It should, therefore, be one of India's most developed districts. Right? Wrong. 

• The world economy is in grave danger. A lot depends on one woman. (The Economist)

• Why the U.S. will never be able to win the arms race with China. (FP)

Sunday Slideshow Special: Photos from the War Zone in Syria, from TIME.

Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

• Beyond Black Hawk Down. (Vanity Fair) If you have watched Hollywood top film Black Hawk Down, then you must read this story.

• When Hindu Meets Catholic and the Children That Follow. (NYT Blog) 

• Mafia States: Organised crime takes office. (ForeignAffairs; registration required, its free!)

• The economic case for Bribery. (The Economist)

Sunday Slideshow Special: Mukesh Ambani's Antilla, featured in an exclusive (not really) slideshow from the pages of Vanity Fair.

Sunday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, and Ideas

My collection of best reads for your Sunday!

• Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash (BBC)

It's not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn't always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the financial world. 

• Why do they hate us? (FP) This article on the status of women in the Middle East societies (and in Islam), is one of the best I have read in a long time.

How much does Saudi Arabia hate women? So much so that 15 girls died in a school fire in Mecca in 2002, after "morality police" barred them from fleeing the burning building -- and kept firefighters from rescuing them -- because the girls were not wearing headscarves and cloaks required in public. And nothing happened. No one was put on trial. Parents were silenced. 

• Finland imagines life without Nokia. (BusinessWeek) 

Nokia’s 94 percent share-price plunge from its 2000 peak has left thousands of engineers looking for work now that Nokia is curtailing local development and moving production to Asia. Nokia’s share of gross domestic product probably shrank to 0.8 percent in 2011 from as high as 4 percent in 2000.  

• Must watch: Andre Kuiper's stunning photographs of the Earth and space sent to Earth via Twitter. (Telegraph UK) Take, for instance, this photo of the UK and Ireland by night, with the Aurora Borealis on the horizon, snapped on March 28 this year.

3 Thursday Readings - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

Every week at least twice I publish lists of interesting reads under the title, The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas.  

Today, I am sharing just three articles; I am sure they will make for some really interesting readings.

At CIA, a convert to Islam leads the terrorism hunt

Colleagues describe Roger as a collection of contradictions. A chain-smoker who spends countless hours on a treadmill. Notoriously surly yet able to win over enough support from subordinates and bosses to hold on to his job. He presides over a campaign that has killed thousands of Islamist militants and angered millions of Muslims, but he is himself a convert to Islam. Read the complete article on the Washington Post Web site. 

Global warming close to becoming irreversible

The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned... As emissions grow, scientists say the world is close to reaching thresholds beyond which the effects on the global climate will be irreversible, such as the melting of polar ice sheets and loss of rainforests. Read the complete article on the Scientific American Web site.

Want to know your history of activity on Google products?

Google has announced an interesting feature called Account Activity recently. It sums up what you have been doing with Google products each month, including whom you have mailed most or which places you have visited etc. Check out how to find out your Google activity on the NDTV Gadget site.

Deve Gowda is in news, for all the wrong reasons, like always. When I was in college (yes, I did go to college!), I once participated in a 'Sell This To' contest. I was asked to sell 'sleeping pills to Deve Gowda'. How tough it is? Well, selling a refrigerator to an Eskimo is easier. Check out this twitpic which I found here. 

7 Monday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

Begin your week with this shortlist of interesting readings and a slideshow. 

• China's parliament enlivened by brands and beauties. (BBC)

• Rahul Dravid - India's genius who could see way beyond the boundary. (Guardian)

• Pakistan's middle class is conservative and latent radical. (The Friday Times)

• Mother Teresa's house of illusions. (Secular Humanism)

• India's biggest mafia. (Media Crooks Blog)

• Time zones are fluid. (The Smart Set). Hat Tip: PCR.

• Slideshow: Photos of the Week (March 2-9) from TIME. The photograph below shows Indian Hindu transvestites dance together in the Radha Rani Temple during Lathmar Holi in Barsana, India.