Tuesday, June 3, 2008

I AM A BIHARI

Slaughtered in the North- East,
Ostracized in Maharshtra
Abused and mauled in Delhi.
Stand as a confused witness
To a cultural paradox
Representing shrunken ‘India’
Entertaining people
With its cultural mimics.
I am shy enough
To disclose my identity.
For the extent proved shackle
The rendered resultof battle of wits
Was not some, short of debacle.
I owe to me my agonies
With perplexities keeping me at bay
A conspiring world to avenge
And shattered emotions struggling to say.
Was is a sequel of my doing
Or rather the act of undone mooing.
That put the shovels across the fate
And marked the gloomy, morbid; trait.
I stand baffled and seeking forgiveness
To the set of emotions unprocessed
For it’s injustice indeed to mores of life
If the hard-earned experienced sublimate compressed.

Sunday, February 17, 2008

SUBPRIME MORTGAGE CRISIS-

The US subprime mortgage crisis may have taken the global losses beyond 300bn USD but it also as a sequel leaves behind certain unjustly enriched people. These people gaining in the whole process are the cause or the effect of the crisis is debated and far from clear. Groups of people who maintain the glint in their eyes irrespective of global failures stand as anathema to financial markets as they invest in shares, securities or quarters inversely correlated to each other. This kind of diversification of the portfolio helps them ride the wave in the face of any economic crisis whatsoever.
The ouster of Merrill Lynch's Stan O'Neal followed by the resignation of Chairman and Chief Executive of financial giant Citigroup Charles in face of fresh losses from distressed mortgage assets leading to a $5-billion write-down and sharp drop in profits has heralded a new era of mutual mistrust between the government and the people, wherein lately people have started complaining of the Government’s social security contributions in the wake of the crisis.
The crisis basically happened because of rising interest rates which caused people with adjustable rate mortgage to see significant increase in their mortgage payments and declining property values as the real estate market began making corrections.
Lately Joseph Stiglitz’s taunt, ‘that we all share the same planet’ seems to be haunting the native country and people have started criticizing the government of making the rich, richer by allowing them to function under fraudulent and deceptively welfarist regulations. However, not to forget that the US is probably the only country to have the Government backed Freddie Mac to opt for financial bail out provisions of the bad and written down assets.
The US’s financial history is replete with instances including the Long Term Capital Management disaster of 1998, wherein the Federal Reserve of New York along with the creditors had to arrange a bail out provision and hence, another economic catastrophe was partly prevented.
The subprime crisis has been widely alleged as a stunt and consequence of the acts of the Hedge Fund Managers, but the roots of the story protrude long back. In 1986 Japan had created a terrific and robust economy with excessive surplus in banks and thus, started lending at very low rates and without any security.
The market that was sensitively fragile reacted and an asset price bubble i.e. disproportionate relative pricing of assets was created. Properties were evaluated for much higher prices than their actual values. Estimates projected the price of the land beneath the palace in Tokyo to be worth of the whole of the city of California. Interestingly, the Japanese ego was exhibited in the contemporary texts, like the one that wase tactically and purposefully titled “The Japan That Can Say No”.
Thus, the expected happened, the markets hit back, creating liquidity crunch in the banks and helped a small number of people to rake in fortune out of this global mispricing of the alternatives.
Contrary to Japan, the liquidity crisis in US was limited to the Real Estate, and the people who can stir the markets at their whims and fancies had done the damage yet again. Speculations are creating turmoil in the markets globally. The impact is also not far from obvious – an empty house in the Californian suburbs leaves the prices in an eight mile periphery, down by 2%.
Now where the problem lies, is not the mystery but the concern, because if the economic turbulence is high, realty stocks and real estate can not be stable. The markets now days are being exploited at more tiers than one and hence, the road ahead is rutted and needs to be treaded cautiously to avert any further reparations.
So, where are we headed? - is a question that stands answered, unfortunately though. The crisis, which claimed the jobs of top chief executives and prompted more than $45 billion in write-downs at the world's biggest banks, may end up spilling into 2009.
"These events tend to become deeper and play out longer than most people initially expect," said Michael Mayo, an analyst covering securities firms at Deutsche Bank in New York.
The tumbling U.S. housing market will continue to inflict the damage and mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations containing those securities will keep falling in price and will not find their footing anywhere in near future.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

the STATEMENT that cudn make a statement

SCHOLARSHIP ESSAY
The India I was born in, was half a century behind the developed world but my locale, was over a century back to civilization. In 2001, almost a decade after acceding to globalization of my country, (when the last village in United Kingdom was electrified), the term electrification was alien to the people of the tinsel settlement wherefrom I hailed. I was stirred to see the digital divide in a nascent nomenclated world, global village. I realized, to my satisfaction that instead of jumping from one childhood to another, I was actually growing up.
Preliminary education at an institution known for its cultural values (Ramakrishna Mission, Kolkata) inculcated in me a deep sense of compassion for the poor and corresponding detachment for worldly equations.
A couple of years back, when I penned down the book of poetry titled “The Twenty First Shade of Autumn”, I realized that the words of appreciation and concomitant foreword by the President of the India (Dr. A.P.J.Abdul Kalam), were a circumstantial but objective outpour to an introspect into destiny, which all can pamper me but still not provide any solace. I moved to the study of law as I found this a solution superseding the role of the conspiring Nations and the faulted institution of the United Nations in all its congruent projections.
I was moved by circumstances and gagged by conscience to yield for the poor and the needy, realizing at the same time that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet were better and greater philanthropists than all of preachers of global peace and order combined together. I decided to create and leave a trail on my own instead of charity on begged capital. Hence, I opted to study corporate law subjects. Charity begins at home but should not end in the courtyard. Believing strongly in the same, I decided to opt for a subject that helps me make money to do good to the people who need me rather than following the machinery of the Government that leads no where. Unfortunately of which there has been a long saga of failures and plots in the history.
As a reflection of the change in the pursuit, my awards as Best Mooter and Best Overall Performer at International Human Right Summer School 2005, Dhaka, Bangladesh, were shadowed by Maritime Lawyer’s Association of Australia and New Zealand Award at the International Maritime Arbitration Competition in Sydney the following year. I was firm in my quest. I will not confine myself to a poet who could just lament the situations, I would change it.
Lately, I started editing India’s first solely student managed law journal the ‘Edict’, which catered to my ethical wellbeing and contributed in drawing nearer to the achievement of my imaginings. However, a deep sense of introspection kept intriguing me, and I was someway tracing my roots back to serving people, which was echoed in my work on ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ and a return at the Summer School in 2006 to teach ‘Human Rights’, ‘Capital Punishment’ and Mooting to the students there.
I organized a seminar on “International Trade” followed by another on “Criminal Justice Administration” with Supreme Court Judges as moderators. With the help of Amnesty International, I organized a training programme for the District Judges of Chhattisgarh. I invited a monk of the Ramakrishna order to our University, to speak on the Indian Constitution in order to instill compassionate tap among my fellow students at the University. I put my ability to write draft speeches to good use for the visiting dignitaries that included Judges and Governor by making them touch on the woes of the poor and the trodden otherwise neglected under the State and the Constitutional mechanism.
Poetry remains my passion helping me to realize that there are two kinds of human being, the suffering human who thinks and the other; the thinking human who suffers, people belonging to any one of these two categories have an easy way out, but the one belonging circumstantially to the two groups faces chances of extermination. I was not born with silver spoon in my mouth, and hence, when was made to bear the brunt of cultures across the country by staying in residential schools all my life, I suffers annihilation to persona. Under circumstances as such there is always a chance of losing the self in the sea of varying identities, if the soul is not in tandem with the nuances that do time and again jostle with the character from deep within. I used to find it difficult to make economic compromises I was forced in to because of my father’s honesty in his profession. May be because I was hailing from a society where morality was a private and very hard-enduring luxury. However, I gladly lived by it to my father’s expectations.
Amidst all these alternating canvasses, time has painted my portrait with the haphazard strokes of the brush of time. My thinking became extremely bold and the actions and behaviors fail to keep consonance with each other, creating courage of confusion than the courage of conviction that I was expecting, making me realize why Marx would have frustratingly written about being the most capital less person to write about capital.
I had joined the National Cadet Corps training and also participated in Intra State Table Tennis Tournament. I have performed incredibly well in sports specially football at various rungs. An enrollment for the BCL programme helps me to understand and establish the nuances and intricacies of my quest, which I have vigorously chased all my life.
An LLM. at the Oxford in BCL programme will help me to achieve what I had dared dream against all odds in life and help me impersonate a life away from Bernard Shaw’s words, declaring; we are guided more than often by a wisdom that is administered through inexperienced and malexperienced dupes.
Thus, I learnt from history not to learn from history and unfetter to community benevolence.