WTO and globalisation

The World Trade Organization (WTO) was established in 1995. Two major changes agreed were: (i)  not to impose import duties in excess of certain agreed rates and (ii) not to manufacture a patented item using alternate process. 

• The large-scale imports of goods from China taking place at present is a consequence of  provision (i) of the WTO which we willingly accepted.
• The provision (ii) restricted the growth of our pharmaceutical companies.
• The drugs invented by MNCs were hitherto produced by our pharma companies using alternate processes and making them available at a fraction of the MNC's price and that freedom was lost.
• The major benefit expected from WTO was that our farmers will be able to export their produce to the developed countries and get much higher prices. But the developed countries fudged the rules of the WTO and continued to provide subsidies to their farmers and that deprived our farmers ability to export their goods. 
• Thus the WTO and the globalisation has become largely a losing proposition for us. It has even become a losing proposition for developed countries like USA as well. They find that their jobs are disappearing. 
• The WTO needs to shape up for the US to stay a part of it, said former Trump trade advisor Dan DiMicco. He further said that WTO has enabled China’s bad behavior and allowed the country to manipulate its currency from 1995 to 2015. Nobody has held them accountable.
• President Donald Trump told that the WTO has treated the US “very badly". Trump also said "I hope they change their ways. We’re not planning anything now, but if they don’t treat us properly we will be doing something.” Trump told his advisors, “I don’t know why we’re in it. The WTO is designed by the rest of the world to screw the US"
• India has walked out of the WTO mini-ministerial being held in Geneva in July 2006 to thrash out the thorny agriculture and industrial tariff issues, with the US refusing to agree for wider cuts in farm subsidies. The Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath said: "We came here to negotiate, but there is no space for negotiations. We are on 8 to 9% growth. I've come here looking for a trade deal which helps me to reach 10 to 11%. I have not come here to get a trade deal which makes me go to 4 or 5%." 
• The failure of WTO to move ahead in framing rules for global trade means that globalization is retreating.
• Our Mughal rulers thought that by allowing the British to trade in India will be beneficial for the country. Similarly, we have agreed and signed the WTO treaty because we thought we would get foreign investments and access to foreign markets for our exports.
• The globalisation under the Mughal rulers and the WTO are fundamentally similar. In both the cases, we ceded our sovereign rights willingly in the belief that the benefits will be more than the costs. In the former case the benefits to us were less than the costs and that arose Mahatma Gandhi and we retracted from that globalisation. Very much the same is happening with the WTO today.
• The globalisation succeeds only if it provides more benefits than costs to all the member countries. We can today walk out of the WTO because it is not beneficial to us. People are the ultimate sovereign and no power on earth can take their sovereignty away. The people will rise no matter how strong the forces of globalisation are.
• The challenge is to inform the people of the benefits and costs of globalisation to make an informed choice to withdraw or not. The worry is that our intellectuals will get coopted and misinform the people of the true costs of present globalisation.
• Our government should wake up, walk out of WTO and start supporting domestic businesses instead of running after MNCs.

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Copying western models and implementing in India without proper groundwork is futile. The more we stay in WTO and globalisation, the more our poor and peasants would lose and suffer. Since the present WTO model can't be modified so easily due to the influence of vested interests like China, the only option India has is that it should walk out of WTO and work in the direction of mutually beneficial bilateral treaties and self-sufficiency.

Absolute truth doesn't exist

There is no absolute truth and that’s the absolute truth. Truth is surprisingly difficult to define. Truth is defined as the body of real things, events, and facts. Truth is most often used to mean being in accord with fact or reality, or fidelity to an original or standard. Truth may also often be used in modern contexts to refer to an idea of "truth to self," or authenticity. The best-known saying about truth is by Aristotle "To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true". It is not the only thing Aristotle said about truth.

• It’s doubtful whether there is any such thing as the truth.
• It is an absolute truth that absolute truth doesn't exist.
• Truth is agreement of thought with its object. 
• Truths are facts. And there are no facts, only interpretations.
• Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
• The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.
• Telling what is not true may result in legal and social penalties. 
• Truths are subjective; absolutism is objective. So, the question is whether something subjective can be objective.
• Anyone who believes in absolute truth is a fanatic or in imminent danger of becoming a fanatic. Absolute truth is the mother of extremism everywhere.
• Truth is in the eyes of the beholder. It may not appear as truth to others. 
• Absolute means completely. Try as you will, there will always be a trace of untruth. Nobody is capable of an absolute truth. Therefore, there is no such thing as absolute truth.
• People tend to have different opinions, which is natural. Because of these differing opinions some might view a certain topic morally right whereas others might see the same issue as completely immoral. 
• Deciding that absolute truth doesn’t exist is much more sensible than believing that they absolutely know everything.
• The idea of something being 100% right can always be challenged.
• In every statement, there is an ounce of bias, and bias is opinion, and opinion cannot be taken as fact.
• Truth comes only from the laws of nature. Nature always demonstrates its laws. Therefore truth is unique and universal.
• Let’s not ask what truth is. Let us ask instead how we can recognize it reliably when it appears. Four factors determine the truthfulness of the explanation: congruence, consistency, coherence, and usefulness.
• Truth is a complex, contradictory process in which error is constantly overcome through the development of knowledge, while truth itself becomes increasingly complete and profound.
• Any truth is objective. Subjective truth is merely an individual's opinion. Its content does not depend on the will, desire, passion or imagination of human beings. 
• We are humans who depend on relationships to survive. When it comes to stating your opinions without being asked, it is likely you shy away from telling a friend, colleague or family member something that you fear could hurt. As adults, we rarely choose to deliberately do something that will hurt people we know. We especially avoid sharing a truth face-to-face that could embarrass, offend or wound someone we like. 
• It’s been said that everybody lies, but the question is when, to whom, and why? And if someone is lying, how can you tell? The detection of deception is big business with big stakes. Children’s lies are ridiculously easy to spot, but as we get older, we get better at disguising the truth. We don’t necessarily get better at spotting it. 

Mahatma Gandhi said truth is what the voice within tells you. What may be truth for one may be untruth for another. It is not given to man to know the whole Truth. His duty lies in living up to the truth as he sees it, and in doing so, to resort to the purest means, i.e., to non-violence. God alone knows absolute truth. It follows that man, a finite being, cannot know absolute truth. Relative truth is all we know. Therefore, we can only follow the truth as we see it. Such pursuit of truth cannot lead anyone astray.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything ... Mark Twain

The truth is rarely pure and never simple ... Oscar Wilde 
Half a truth is often a great lie ... Benjamin Franklin

Truth can be stated in many different ways, 
yet each one can be true ... Swami Vivekananda

Modi's lies - what it means to India?

US President Donald Trump had spoken 2,140 lies, or uttered several such inaccuracies in his public life since becoming a Republican contender for the White House. Trump is not a stand-up comic artist jocularly falsifying facts to arouse amusement, or a founder of a fake news website running a political agenda. He is not just only the commander-in-chief of the world’s largest military power, but also has the largest nuclear button in the world at dangerously close proximity.

• If the most powerful leader of the free world cannot be trusted on account of his mental equanimity or is of questionable credibility, we clearly have a lot to worry about. By an uncanny coincidence, the world’s largest democracy, India, has a similar predicament; fake news, post-truth and alternative facts dominate mainstream media.
• Politicians regularly indulge in making outrageous statements and get away with it. Since their brazen lies go unchallenged and social media amplifies that mendacity, they inflict incalculable damage to society due to proliferation of misinformation, calumny and distorted history. 
• We as a nation are far too lazy to contradict the negative torrent of fake news with ulterior motives or delusional in the  false notion that automatically people will segregate the wheat from the chaff in the long-term. Or we under the current dispensation are just too scared? Several have surrendered the fight as they believe it is a Sisyphean exercise. Either way, the consequences can be serious. We are in a quicksand, and sinking.
• From the moment, Modi became the PM in 2014, India’s first prime minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru became the target of an orchestrated BJP campaign of calumny and character assassination. A malevolent media campaign was unleashed to malign Nehru, by insinuating that there was an attempt to cover-up the untimely death of the valiant freedom-fighter and former Congress president Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in an unfortunate air crash. The BJP, using right-wing stooges with literary pretensions, dubious historians, indulgent media editors delighted to be co-conspirators and disgruntled family members of Netaji launched a vicious assault on Nehru’s character. India’s finest statesman was being stigmatised by snake oil salesmen.
• The BJP was clearly relishing the malicious and disingenuous deluge as Modi gave a generous reception to the noble cause of knowing the ultimate truth on Netaji’s death. A member of the Bose family joined the saffron brigade, contested the elections, and lost. The Sangh Parivar went to the extent of creating a fabricated letter wherein Nehru called Bose a "war criminal". It was utter balderdash, but who cared? The fact is we should.
• Modi’s speech in Parliament on February 7, 2018,  he hemorrhaged truth by saying that had Sardar Patel been the first PM, Kashmir would have been totally ours. Sure, if my aunt wore a pyjama she would be my uncle. It was a convenient political twist with no historical foundations, but Modi continues to violate the basic precept of political morality by populating ludicrous charges on all and sundry, especially targeting the Nehru-Gandhi family. We are scraping the bottom of the barrel in our daily discourse.
• Politics was always about perceptions, but in the world of Facebook feeds, YouTube videos, Twitter trolls and WhatsApp forwards, truth itself is subjected to Amazonian proportions of vulnerability. No one is safe. No one has a constant bulletproof against sustained malignant accusations. There are no vanguards.
• It is a disconcerting reality that the process of transparent news dissemination has become carnivalesque and that Netaji indeed died in the plane crash at Taipei on August 18, 1945, was acknowledged by Modi sarkar in an obscure part of a daily newspaper.
• The vituperative anti-Nehru strategy was quickly consigned to the backwaters. Several susceptible minds subjected to the carcinogenic tirade against Nehru, would still be wondering  what is the real truth? That residual doubt that lingers long is exactly what fake news really wishes to accomplish. 
• Remember that the human mind can be extremely fragile to sustained bulldozing. Recollect the Holocaust? That Netaji named one of his infantry brigades in the Indian National Army after Nehru, or that the Nehru wore his barrister robes for the first time to defend the INA army soldiers charged with treason by the British are nonchalantly overlooked.
• Fake news, consciously elliptical, still triumphs. It is like heads I win, tails you lose.
• Another masterly deception is a work-in-progress and it even boasts of a grand edifice, the Statue of Unity, allegedly the tallest such in the world. Modi’s ideological mentors and political strategists is the RSS, without whose support he would not have even become the chief minister of Gujarat. It would seem like political incongruity that Modi is lionising Sardar Patel, the same man who banned the RSS for creating a poisonous environment that led to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. 
• Nehru and Patel were brothers-in-arms, each other’s conscience keepers, but Modi and the BJP are burning the midnight oil to tell the country otherwise. It is a cunning project to deceive India. Political hypocrisy has reached epic proportions.
• Vinayak Damodar Savarkar’s Hindu Mahasabha assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation. Savarkar himself miraculously escaped conviction by the skin of his teeth. Modi has publicly called Savarkar a patriot. The rest is left for public wisdom.

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