Rashtriya Hindi Diwas Ki Shubhkamnayen

September 14th is National Hindi Day, the day we celebrate the language that is one of the two official languages of the Union Government, and one of the several official languages of the Union, but not *the* official national language.

Junior Hatter would like to add the following

If I find the person who invented Hindi, I will thrash him, cut him to pieces, and pulverize his remains.

Needless to say, the kind of Hindi "teaching" that our schools offer results in this kind of undiluted love for the language among non-native-speaker children and makes it safe to bet that Hindi isn't going to become a de-facto national language any time soon.

Aap sabhi ko mere taraf se hindi divas ki hardik shubhkamnayen. 

A Thought Experiment In History

All this trade and capitalism is bad. 


Ignoring the loudly ringing alarm bells in my head, I decided to take issue with the remark.

"Why do you say that?"

It's that East India Company that colonized us. 


Indeed.

And it's trade that helped them do that.


and?


All this talk about globalization is just pretext for more trade, and hence more colonization. Globalization is just East India Company 2.0


Actually, you have a point, but not the point you think you have.

What?


We didn't get colonized because of trade. We got colonized because we didn't have a  Indian West Europe Company driving our trade instead of a British East India Company.

Really? 


Indeed. Suppose we had woken up to the potential of trade with Europe, and formed our own trading companies to compete with the East India Companies, we'd have fared better. With trade being competitive, profits  would've accrued to the producer and consumer, rather than the monopolist trader. That'd have meant the British East India Company wouldn't have managed to accumulate the capital that enabled them to become a military powerhouse.

Trading wasn't our mistake. Not grabbing a share of the trading channel when it became big was. Distrusting the process, and leaving it to the Europeans was. Not rising above feudal disputes to create trading alliances within the country was, and so on ...

Hmmm ...


And, by extension, that means what we need to do today is to not deny globalization, but ensure we don't end up a passive factor in it again.

So you're saying we should embrace and participate in the process.


Yes, we need to own a fair share of the trade channels.

Since trade is as much in services, we need our own services companies to compete with multinationals, and to hold their own. We need our own brands to market and sell Chinese manufactured goods under their own brand names. We need our own oil and natural resources companies to invest in fields outside the country to extract and bring home the coal and oil we need. You get the drift ...

Yes, but I'm not sure I'm convinced. I need to think more about this....


Sure. Come back when you've thought more about this.  That'll also give me some peace and quiet in the meantime.

(Of course, I didn't say that last sentence. But I did think it.)