Calculi's Politics Blog

Letter from my old blog:
Please don’t hurt the majority!

There may be many reasons which causes communal violence, mostly due to political interest, but sometimes politicians itself are influenced by another root-reason or sometimes they use at least this reason to cause such violence. This root-reason is imbalance of treatment to majority and minority. This division can be of any sort, based on religion, classes, ideologies, etc. Here one can introduce another division, take notice, which is no way a social division, but it is of being conservative and liberal. Well, they can be found in majority as well as in minority. Continue reading…

Popularity: 70% [?]

Letter from my old blog:
India-China past and future

For more than 2000 years, two of the world’s ancient cultures shared their ideas, science, knowledge and expertise, providing new dimension for human social development. But it is the very recent history of few decades which shows complete different picture. Both nations, regarded one as largest democracy and one as largest communist nation, have seen each other with skepticism thru’ gunpoint. Democracy (the modern one) and communism, both are western ideologies, which still divides Asia geopolitically. Without taking a side of particular nation – more precisely particular ideology – I’d like to present some articles I’ve found on Internet, which summarizes the conflict between India and China, a more product of misunderstanding and mistaken indian policies than true clash between ideologies. Continue reading…

Popularity: 87% [?]

Letter from my old blog

It was, in fact, in 2005, that I started writing politics blog. But I was not writing that often and it ended up being almost a dead blog. But there were some articles I wrote, which I think can still be interesting in the present world scenario. In this Letter from my old blog series I’ll put again those old articles for the visitors to read. I hope you enjoy it.

Popularity: 47% [?]

Arm sales

Arm sales is one such kind of business, where, irrespective what american-styled free market believes, strong government support and intervention is needed. Perhaps it is the most corrupt form of trade which keeps domestic government as well as international agencies blind. Very few arm sales are transparent enough. Maybe it is due to various reasons: open arm sales sometimes create aggresive anti-sales sentiment in the seller country (like Germany) or the seller country has geopolitical wasted interest in the region of buyers or defence state executives have their own wasted interest in promoting their associated arm developing MNCs. It is not a surprise that arm sales is very profitable business, even in recession. The following infographic gives you how it has changed since 2001.

Global arm sales via good.is

Prosperity also increases the defence spending, but not necessarily (see Syria, Venezuela, Pakistan, etc.). For fast-growing countries it makes sense to modernize its weaponary or get involved into intense global affairs as a formidable military power. For example, India is the second largest buyer of arms in last 8 years. India used to depend mostly on arm sales from Russia, but it has diversified the arm buying portfolio last couple of years, mostly after nuclear deal with USA. And one sees even in this bad economic times, the country, in particular like USA, has managed to increase its arm sales to new profits. Although China is the fourth largest buyer of the arms, it is also one of the top arm sellers. At the moment, China’s share is pretty small, but definitely it is going to increase in next couple of decades. But for the moment, USA is the sole largest seller of the arms with share more than 60%. It seems really scary looking at realpolitik disasters of its foreign policy. As long as these arm sales doesn’t include nuclear weapons, one should not worry about the end of the world.

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Popularity: 98% [?]

Improving life in Iraq

Empirical data is still the best method to analyze any sort of situation. Present vital data explaining life in Iraq shows the situation is changing in positive direction. The whole Iraq war was big mistake and political blunder. But all the mistakes should be undone and present data shows that life is moving towards better ends. This infographics shows it all.

Improving state of Iraq

Click on the image or source below to get the full version of the graphic.

source: How life in Iraq has changed

Popularity: 71% [?]

World Recession Map

At Moody’s website, popularly called Economy.com, the global recession is stated in a detailed interactive map. More than a year has passed from the economic shock of 2008, and most part of the world seems to be recovering. As usual, Asia-Pacific block should not fear about the recovery and it is expanding, perhaps the expansion is not as quick as during those glory days. But clearly it can be seen how the international map of economy has changed ever since.

Global recession status

Honestly I’m not very much impressed by the quality of the plot. It gives you information just qualitatively, not with acutal data. I guess the main aim of this map was to give overall picture of the health of world economy. And at the moment, it doesn’t seem that bad.

source: Global Recession Map

Popularity: 100% [?]

America’s wealthiest religions

It’s a great infographics showing how the wealth is distributed among people of different religious followings. To my surprise, according to this statistics, the wealthiest religions comes out to be Hindu and Jew. Perhaps these include immigrants or green card holders who enjoy privilege of getting high paid jobs mostly due to their higher education. Money controls the power. No wonder that american foreign and economic policies are somehow influenced by these wealthy groups.

Source: Transparency: America’s Wealthiest Religions

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Present defence Budget of India

For the past two decades, the military expenditure of India has hovered around 2.75 per cent, but since India has been experiencing significantly higher rates of economic growth over the last decade compared to any other time in its history, the overall resources that it has been able to allocate to its defence needs has grown significantly.

The armed forces for long have been asking for an allocation of 3 per cent of the nation’s GDP to defence. This has received a broad political support in recent years.

Is that enough comparing the defence expenditure of other countries? India is 12th largest economy in the world and petty less than 3% GDP accounts in real term to nothing for defending sovereignty of such a large country, geography as well as population-wise.

Continue reading…

Popularity: 67% [?]

New Climate Change Swindle? | KAL’s cartoons

What other way would be better than to kick start the quasi-first post with political cartoons by Kevin Kallaugher. These cartoons from The Economist share very high calibre showing the present state of situation on particular issue. The efforts by the winner of the Nobel Prize [for the cause from the future *cough*] is so much hampered by sort of inexperience in the politics. This really depicts the picture of the [old] world which still believes in the leadership of [once] great nation.

The global f(pl)ight against the climate change

Source: KAL’s cartoon | Political cartoons by Kevin Kallaugher | The Economist.

Popularity: 43% [?]

Hello world!

This is a first post in my new blog related to politics. There are various blogs and forums available to express personal political point of view. Here I will try to avoid becoming more subjective in any posting. Most of the post shall be aggregation of different news and op-eds found elsewhere with short commentary. Although the primary focus shall be on world affairs, more emphasis shall be given on political news from asian region. I’m hoping in this way to entertain all kinds of audience. I’m very excited how this blog evolves into in coming months.

Popularity: 25% [?]