The Indian budget every year has always been an eagerly awaited event. For many decades, the best minds in economics, finance, tax, business and industry throng the media house to analyze the provisions shared by the Financial Minister.
Sometimes major events completely disconnected may be data points for the plans of the different powers around the world. The challenge is to discern what purpose they serve? More critically, what are we moving towards?
When the US Ambassador threatened India's "Strategic Autonomy" policy over India's friendship with Russia - much more than meets the eye was at stake. Let us unpack how the Ukraine war has fundamentally changed the US and the world. And why are we here anyway?
Sweden recorded 63 rapes per 100,000 inhabitants this year. That was 30 times that of India (2 per 100,000 inhabitants). Compared to India, Sweden must be the worst when it comes to safety of women. Not just unsafe, but 30 times unsafe! Right? And what was that talk of having open attitudes of men towards nudity and women all about? Scandinavian countries have the most liberated women in terms of their decision making and freedom of expression and life. So what gives?
Well, when one digs deeper, one finds a totally different story. And in that story is a lesson for India.
If you have an issue in your character, the ONLY way you can eliminate that is by first focusing on it with a single-minded focus. In fact, the more you blow up an issue, the more you can nail it. If you let the issue you have in your personality let go under the carpet the lesser motivation you will have to attack it.
That is precisely what Sweden has done.
“In Sweden there has been this ambition explicitly to record every case of sexual violence separately, to make it visible in the statistics,” she says.
“So, for instance, when a woman comes to the police and she says my husband or my fiance raped me almost every day during the last year, the police have to record each of these events, which might be more than 300 events. In many other countries it would just be one record – one victim, one type of crime, one record.”
The thing is, the number of reported rapes has been going up in Sweden – it’s almost trebled in just the last seven years. In 2003, about 2,200 offences were reported by the police, compared to nearly 6,000 in 2010.
Ordinarily, if the rape incidents have TREBLED in SEVEN years, it should be an epidemic and a national crisis already in any country! But not in Sweden. Because, in Sweden it doesn’t represents crime as much as change in attitudes and power in the hands of women to decide their own sexual lives.
How to attack the most heinous of crimes? To make even the basic remnants of it – even in personal relationships – tantamount to a crime that is punishable. Yes, it will impact longevity of relationships, but at least men will be scared into being civilized all over again!
The Indian budget every year has always been an eagerly awaited event. For many decades, the best minds in economics, finance, tax, business and industry throng the media house to analyze the provisions shared by the Financial Minister.
When the US Ambassador threatened India's "Strategic Autonomy" policy over India's friendship with Russia - much more than meets the eye was at stake. Let us unpack how the Ukraine war has fundamentally changed the US and the world. And why are we here anyway?
This visit of India left me with many questions. Many observations and inputs from different people and sections. Food for thought that I have tried to contemplate on and make sense of. Sharing all that with you.
When you analyze the last 60 years of the economic miracles of Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia versus the continued impoverished Indian economy, you get very interesting lessons. Can Indians have the wherewithal in them to do in one generation so that the coming generations may rise?
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