ponderings & pennings

Wishing the world a very happy and peaceful year of 2008!

Here is a video that I watched over two years back but its intensity to influence continues to be just the same.

Before I put my thoughts I’d like to qualify that coming from India my views may not necessarily reflect the ground reality of Pak affairs.

IMO, somehow over the years the Military in Pak has come to enjoy an exessive power. Recent reports on CNN and few Indian media showed how Pakistan army is a pseudo corporation running various businesses in real sense of it especially business of real estate in the country. Pakistan army, as an establishment knows that it can continue to enjoy the power that it has become so used to, only by making sure that civic bodies are given a secondary status in the state matters (this is also the reason of why encouraging India bashing is its loved past time - but that is another issue altogether).

Mush’s decision to give up his uniform and take up a civil role and added to that the elections that held the promise of transforming Pak’s society radically with good hope on restoration of democracy had left the army worrying. I don’t think of all the candidates running for the PMship, anyone had a larger image than Ms. Bhutto. Thus to give a terrible setback to the radical transformation that was knocking the doors of Pakistan, Ms Bhutto was assassinated.

I believe that Mush had no role in this and Sharif is too meek to do anything of this sort. This leaves me wondering if Pak army had a major role in this by being the gloves of the hands of taliban like estalishments and I am sure it is not a wild conjecture.

To end this pondering, my condolences to the family of Ms Bhutto and the people of Pakistan.

A sombre video but you need to have patience of about 1 minute!

That the world’s economy is more integrated than ever before was evident from the G-20 conference at Cape Town where the central bankers met and came up with a solution to the problem of liquidity/credit crunch faced by many of them. An auction among them followed by an auction by the central bank receiving the monies in its country. Its something like LAF in India and various countries now being extended across countries. With collateralised B&L it may be more like repo.

And as if my forgettable encounters with accounting and costing weren’t enough, I today landed up on an article on Mental accounting (I could not get an online link to it) but surprisingly it made a very interesting read. It is in fact related to sunk costs and opportunity costs that were long forgotten!

And while I brush up the old fundas of these different kinds of costs you enjoy this video from my favs on youtube.

P.S. A moment of pride: The San Jose State University in California set up Guru Nanak Heritage Institute to promote Punjabi language and culture.