A meaty pick

These days, with the Randian prognosis of a moocher nation seeming increasingly accurate thanks to large ill-managed corporations frolicking in bed with lawmakers, seeing a well-run independent company is like a breath of fresh air.

A few days back, my local newspaper reported the opening of a new In-n-Out restaurant nearby. It appears that the company is privately held and is doing very well. At a time when expansion was the name of the game, In-n-Out stuck to growing slowly and sustainably. It promises to serve its food fresh, and so operates in only four states to where meat can be shipped from their handling facility without being frozen. The company also seems to have pretty good terms for its employees, quite in contrast with other major burger chains which are far from the best places to work.

Coincidentally, while on The Motley Fool today for unrelated reasons, I ran into an article titled The Best Company I've Ever Seen. Yes, it was about In-n-Out. Funny, and impressive, that an investment writer should sing paeans about a company that is closed to investors.

Also, look, there is a book!

A hundred thousand dead...

...as a result of the unprovoked and baseless war that America waged on Iraq. Yet, Americans have the moral temerity to have their knickers in a knot over torture.

(100,000 is the approximate number of civilian deaths)

Without PBS...

...how would one have plumbed the depths of one's own ignorance?

Check out this documentary - Okie Noodling - about noodling, a Southern US practice of catching fish with bare hands.

Youtube link (video not embeddable, sorry)

Or, another excellent one here - Bethlehem Steel, The People Who Built America - about the rise and fall of the gigantic Bethlehem Steel Corporation. Just the story for today; a perversely optimistic tale to assure those panicked by the economy that economic decay and decline have always been with us.



(Note of interest: After its commercial demise, Bethlehem Steel sold out to International Steel Group in 2003 which in turn sold out to Mittal Steel in 2005, which in turn merged with Arcelor to form Arcelor Mittal.)

Thirty letters in his name

One of the blogs I follow is Thirty letters in my name by Hari Jagannath Balasubramanian. As mentioned before, I like the kind of fiction that transcends the experience of both writer and reader. It is rather easy today to write about many different things without knowing much about them; however, the wide ranging topics that Balasubramanian writes about is amazing because he doesn't only write about them, but seems to have lived them or at least delved deeply into.

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I often use the term 'powwow' in casual or even professional conversation to indicate a meeting or discussion. Without giving it much thought, I had assumed it was a relatively modern American slang. Till I read Balasubramanian's account of attending one.

Elite vs elite

Retributions accuses elite South Mumbai citizens of letting down Indian democracy by not voting. The rant reflects a broader fashion this summer of holding the elite as scapegoats for a democratic process that is seen (by the elite, of course) as not producing satisfactory results.

Ironically, the blogger in question also acknowledges that elites play an important role in guiding democracy and governance through their financial resources and intellectual ability.

Why then make a big deal about the vote? Is it not statistically obvious that well-meaning (or crooked) elites around the world have historically influenced societies not through their numbers but through precisely the two qualities that the blogger already identifies? By their very definition, elites in any society represent an insignificant fraction of the population which makes their vote a purely symbolic gesture.

This insistence on unreasonable symbolic acts is what I privately identify as the Detroit-Jet Disorder. Remember when car executives from Detroit flew in their private jets to Washington for their congressional hearings and the mainstream media made such a big deal of it that the next time around they drove or took commercial flights? Without going into a discussion about how well the execs were running their business (they were not running it well, I know) and a debate about capitalism, it is likely that not using the private jet was a purely symbolic act that, if at all, hurt their own efficiency and ultimately Congress' cause.

(An excellent instance of the Disorder surfaced yesterday when the American media lambasted Michelle Obama for wearing trendy $540 sneakers to a poverty event. Wtf?! Not that the cause of the food bank was hurt or helped by what she wore, but she was supposed to undertake the completely symbolic gesture of wearing cheap shoes anyway.)

Back to the Mumbai elite chargesheet, of course the allegation of "letting down Indian democracy" is ridiculous. Democracy, like capitalism, is a disaggregated, selfish game - you don't vote for the sake of democracy, you vote for your own sake. There are 542 other constituencies in India and when the Jat farmer in Haryana, the industrial worker in Jharkhand, the tribal daily-wager in Madhya Pradesh, and the religious believer voted with their own narrow objectives (reservations, union power, or temple as the case may be), they made democracy work for themselves; no one lets no other down.

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When elite actions are criticized by elite commentators, it comes full circle. And when allegedly-elite bloggers like yours truly criticize other elite bloggers (instead of choosing to look at the countless fascinating instances or Indian democracy going good or bad elsewhere), it comes fuller circle, so to speak.