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Tri Continental Film Festival 2008
July 25 - 30, 2008
Goa, India
http://www.moviesgoa.org/page/tri_continental/
http://www.moviesgoa.org/tricon/schedule_2008.pdf
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Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 14:43:17 +0530 (IST)
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
Dr Barad wrote:
We need YOUNG blood; we need active and honest YOUNG
leaders. I appeal every young generation to realize
the negative effects of staying away from politics.
>
Mario responds:
>
What India needs is honest politicians without
xenophobia and with the common sense to realize why
India struggled economically for the 50 years after
Independance, as did the old Soviet Union and China,
leading to the massive brain drain that benefited
mostly Britain and the immigrant countries. Look at
the difference after they all rejected the failed
extreme socialist experiment. India is beginning to
bloom and the Luddites are left wringing their hands
in despair. But there is so much catching up to do.
Some xenophobis towards foreign ownership of assets in
India still continues, slowing India's development
down.
>
Some Indians have been ridiculing free market
economics even while condemning the poor in India to
50 years of the wasted Fabian socialist experiment.
In the meantime, many Indians voted with their plane
and ship tickets, the brains began to drain,
benefiting the immigrant countries and Britain.
>
The trick is to help everyone to get richer and richer
and not to envy someone who is already rich, but to
figure out how they did it and then try to do the
same. It's called "a rising tide lifts all boats".
>
I remember the bad old days when Indira Gandhi raised
marginal tax rates into the high 90's and there was a
cap of Rs. 15,000 on executive salaries. This led
directly to massive corruption and a spurt in "black"
and "white" money as no one in India was stupid enough
to pay such tax rates, certainly not rich people.
Birlas used to give their executives envelopes of cash
whereas Tata's began to compensate their executives
with all kinds of corporate perks, and everyone used
every loophole and trick in the book to avoid these
confiscatory tax rates.
>
While tax compliance is rising rapidly in India with
the much lower tax rates, old habits die hard. Tax
cheating is rampant, especially among small and medium
sized businesses whose business is conducted mostly in
untraceable cash. Tax officials are also open to
bribery and corruption. This leads to the government
being deprived of crores in revenues that they badly
need.
>
Indian immigrants have been showing the new world -
Australia, Canada, NZ and the USA - the way for
decades now, but were unable to duplicate in India
what they have done in the new world and the UK, until
Man Mohan Singh came along and started to liberalize
the economy, with the communists fighting him every
step of the way. Now the massive brain drain is
slowing and even reversing in some cases as India
begins to slowly but surely catch up.
>
The Indian-work-ethic in the new world and the UK
makes the so-called Protestant-work-ethic look like a
bunch of lazy louts, especially throughout old Europe.
>
What I think will start a tsunami of economic
development for all Indians, on top of the current
economic growth, is if India embarks on a national
highway building program on the same scale as the
Autobahns in Germany and the Freeway system in the US,
using a combination of capital and labor. This will
not only address the bottle-necks in the
transportation infrastructure, but open up the whole
country to travel and commerce and tourism, and create
jobs for millions of villagers who now live at the
subsistence level. The current highway building plans
are a shadow of what they should be in a country
playing catch-up as India is doing.
>
Anyway, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.
>
Mario
>
