Sagarika Ghose seems to have hit the nail right on the head. When we see the likes of Bindas Bhai and others gloating over their riches when the average Indian is trying to make ends meet, it reminds me of Marie Antonette who said "If you don't have bread, eat cake". The liberalization of India has attracted legitimate capital as well as shady money. It is this shady money which is fuelling all the demand for real estate. Last January, at the mere mention of the abolition of P-Notes, the market crashed 20% from 21k to 17k. The money moving in Indian stock market is highly speculative leverage capital and part of those profits are ploughed back into Mumbai real estate. Folks who make money should be careful in how they invest it. We have seen how the mighty have fallen. I know of folks working on Wall Street earing $500k + bonus and those folks cannot find a job paying them 1/5 of their salary. Indian housing bubble is a subset of the Indian money supply bubble and both will unwind viciously when it become unsustainable. Manmohan, Montek and company are doing little to curb its appeal. They act like ostriches when the wolves are out in full play. The real money has to spent in building infrastructure, agriculture and basic necessities. The Naxals are not reading Sagarika's blog before striking back. They are rising against the unfair trade practices. If the poor don't become a participant in India's growth, the rich wont be able to enjoy their riches for long. Her blog is below.
Two seemingly unconnected events point to our most urgent contemporary dilemma: how should the rich behave in a country of the poor? Just a week after Corporate Affairs minister Salman Khurshid asked CEOs not to take "vulgar" salaries, Naxals beheaded police officer Francis Induvar in Jharkhand and as many as 200 Naxals attacked a police station in Gadchiroli. Four Indian CEOs recently made it to the Forbes list of 10 wealthiest CEOs in the world, yet almost half of India lives on less than a dollar a day. Today, many rich Indians are indeed vulgar and arrogant, and the poor are no longer content in their 'god given' lowliness and have taken up the gun. India and Bharat are on a collision course as never before. The government's response of a crackdown on Naxals is only a treatment of the symptom rather than the disease. If Naxalism is defined as a violent response against perceived inequality, then its not just occurring in the Red Corridor. There are versions of it going on all over India. Read more at IBNlive.com
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