The Great American Dream Plan.

Watching TV, I never thought I would be allowed such a new insight into the world Americans live in - advanced, yet worried. Intensely planned, brilliantly executed, and yet brittle and no more resilient than less touted ways of life.

You see, it is all about "the plan". Americans have a plan for everything. When that new airport design works brilliantly, it should surprise nobody, for they really thought about it. God bless the geniuses this country produces. The creative juices that flow into the cleverness of all the little things that work well are a joy to behold, unlike for instance, our Indian bank tellers who are much slower after they got computers and money counting machines!

Americans are excellent when it comes to embracing something new, and hence their engineering codes and standards are updated once every six months, whereas ours in India haven't been updated even once since independence. When this something new works neatly into the overall "plan" of things, Americans are happy, like with the fabulous iPhone, but if this something new is not part of a plan, they are completely messed up, like with Sept 11th and now, this financial crisis.

It isn't so much the matter how good this plan is, as long as there is a plan! What a strangely conditioned bunch of people! Now it makes some sense to me how they can be so overwhelmed by this phenomenon new to them called "terrorism". It isn't as if they have anything to be mortally afraid of Osama Bin Laden. But there is something inherently fluid about the man and his methods that Americans are really scared of.

That's why they went to war against Iraq - to let off some steam, but in a war they could "plan" for. You can't feel very good trying your high tech weapons against the ideology of your enemy, against his nebulous network of arms suppliers, against the prowess of his religious calling - all that is too complex and takes too much time. Americans needed some immediate action, and for that you need to knock out buildings, set fire to a few targets from far away, and move ships and troops. Afghanistan and its border with Pakistan are notoriously difficult areas to put up this kind of a show. Even the fake WMD claims were nicely accommodated into this planning mentality, which wouldn't have worked very well in rag tag mountain and cave territory where embedded reporters would have been ill at ease showing the American army as a chaotic bunch. That is the last thing Americans would want to see - their fine men and women of the armed forces in a clueless situation.

Iraq also turned out to be a clueless situation, but at every step of getting there, there was a plan. There were presidential speeches, there was media coverage, there was a clarion call for action! Then there were constant updates, up until the infamous era of beheadings. That was a clever one by the Al Sadr gang. Those rascals knew exactly what kind of below the belt blow the Americans couldn't take. They knew what truth Americans would be most uncomfortable with, and sure enough, once the heads started rolling, white people's sense of the value of a human life came sharply into focus, even though they hardly cared when thousands died in cluster bombs they dropped from far away.

See, a cluster bomb is an evil thing, but there is something fully planned about its design, the way a plane carries it, instructions are given by seemingly respectable people in military uniforms, and promises a sterile and sometimes even spectacular display as it completes its evil duty. But it doesn't look evil! It looks like a nicely planned scientific journey gone horribly right! But a beheading, even though done one at a time, is gruesome to the white American culture. It makes them sick, and they are repulsed by the sight of a human head separated from the rest of the body. All of a sudden, Moqtada Al Sadr and his men are a bunch of "savages", while the son of a bitch who dropped the cluster bomb that killed thousands more of unconnected civilians probably got a medal for his meritorious effort of pushing a button from the safety of his plane flying thousands of feet above the ground. But if it took so much effort to make a random killing machine so antiseptic in its presentation, it must be a "good" thing, that can defend our freedoms and values and our way of life.

American weapons seem to be particularly good at defending American freedoms and American values and the American way of life. I wonder if cluster bombing Wall Street will fix the financial crisis right now and do something to restore faith in the American way of life. In the least, the illicit narcotics trade seems to be the safest investment anywhere in the world, but the Americans are spending millions to stop this and have caused the creation of several druglord billions! Is it hard to get your hands on any banned substance in any part of America? Not at all! Go figure!

For a while now, I have wondered how you can be the most powerful nation on the planet and the most scared, ill informed bunch of sore, loser idiots at the same time. It is because they have been brought up on this diet of result-is-proportional-to-effort. The American Dream is itself quite a well defined three bedroom house, father, mother, two children, two cars and a dog! Is this a dream? Come on! And there are fools who believe people go to America to have just this? What is so great about it? Ah, now! See, this is something you can plan for! Your daughter snorting coke at fourteen, your son shooting his classmates, and you being sued by your neighbour for being bitten by your dog - these are not part of anybody's dream, but in reality should be part of some parents' planning!

Osama Bin Laden represents such an enormous threat to this way of life, not because he wants to rape American women and kill their dogs and feed dope to their children, but because in his world nobody is really bothered by day to day chaos. His world doesn't depend on that pin point control of events and there is no particular end result without which his tribe won't go to sleep peacefully.

That's why Islamic terrorism doesn't do anything more than irritate Indians. Radical Islam trying to inject chaos into an Indian's life is the joke of the century. Indians already have enough chaos and not only do they ignore it, they revel in it. They have partnered it, danced with it, and go to bed with it all the bloody time! This pesky business of being hit by bombs and bloodshed is rather annoying, but India is not likely to be threatened by anything being thrown out of gear.

Even in American storytelling, even in crime, planning is everything, all the way from The Day of the Jackal to Oceans Thirteen, it is all about the precision of the attack. If someone is two seconds off, it is too dangerous! I wonder how many assassins can really pull the trigger under that kind of pressure and still hit the right target. It isn't as if the madman strapped with explosive running into a bunch of people is any less effective, but to Americans, the act of killing through precision and science is always more fascinating and respectable. Islamic terrorism flies in the face of this fascination, and that's the real reason Americans hate this new adversary!

For some strange reason, Americans thought there was going to be another attack on Sept 11th, 2002! There was no intelligence, just millions poured into being "safe" on that particular day. This to me is the retarded blind belief in the spectacle of precision and the blinder belief that their enemy was likely to be like them! Osama Bin Laden really doesn't have to have the resources to call upon this kind of precision in his warfare. He has to plan to carry out something that will not be easy to detect, and that's pretty much it. If one day doesn't work out, his men will simply do it the next time they see an opportunity. If they can't do it, they will do something else. Usually their plans work because there aren't too many geniuses involved and split second precision is not needed even when displayed in a series of bombs going off in a city.

Americans on the other hand, plan so far ahead, that their banks lent fifty times their worth, believing the housing bubble would keep on expanding, and all the financial geniuses who were brought up on that diet constantly fed into that myth in a methodical frenzy that ate up all logic, and sure enough all the planning went to the toilet as soon as reality showed up.

As funny as it may seem, Islamic banking is completely insulated from the kind of mess that Wall Street finds itself in!

What meltdown?

This financial "m e l t d o w n" that our media loves to directly copy from American media is to say the least, comical. Why can't the fools who get paid insane amounts of money to serve as financial experts see a bubble when it is blowing sky high? It isn't as if Wall Street didn't know this was coming. But nobody wanted to poke the balloon and question the unreality of banks that lent fifty times their asset base, and obviously American borrowers were stupid enough to buy homes they could not afford now, but based on how much their precious homes would be worth thirty years down the line!

Stupidity - and this is fast becoming my favourite word - is always expensive. The speculative optimism of American people doesn't border on stupidity, it is entrenched and enshrined in it. Just after Sept 11th, I had a conversation with an American man - I told him I wanted no part of the American Dream where each citizen owed an average of $36,000. He brushed off my concern and said his money was making him more than he was paying for. In other words, he was telling me that his investments were raking in good returns while he was paying a small interest on the money he owed. Of course that means some bank was being a sucker and he was in a good part of the food chain, where he could essentially grow fat without doing much.

Somehow, in a connected world, when you are unproductive, you tend to get your arse kicked sooner or later. Sure enough, American banks went crazy over easy money they were making based on home values bloating all over the place, and it is such a great economy that there were a great number of people buying homes, and then refinancing them to pocket a good chunk of money every so many years, and the few that weren't able to pay were becoming an acceptable percentage of repossessions. Now, in a bad economy, which Bush and Co. ensured Americans would face, people's confidence tends to sag as incomes aren't as rosy as they used to be, and jobs are harder to come by as more and more money went to Iraq and for buying oil!

So, a lot of loans went bad, and repossessions meant nothing when there were no "other customers" to push those homes to. The bubble had already burst but nobody was willing to use the word "recession" in case it threw people into a bigger panic. See, it is all about perception, and relying on perception instead of knowledge is .. you said it, "stupidity". The stock market is all about perception too. Stock value is buoyed up by the perception of a company doing well and how badly people want or do not want to be a part of that company. Fair enough if things are going well. But when one thing connects to another and big lending institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have to face the reality of having bet on the bubble, all they get is soap water.

So, Bush, after pissing away billions in Iraq, and having done nothing to improve his country's competitiveness or productivity (America consumes 6% to 7% more than it produces), knowing fully well that the Chinese own the 3 trillion dollars of credit card debt that Americans have all accumulated, did nothing but put on a show for the fools watching the superfool on TV. The reason he could afford this luxury was because for nearly the entire second half of the last century, America was the engine for the world's economy, by the power of consumption alone. But to get to the bottom of it all, at some point, laziness comes at a price, and when America isn't quite as productive as it once was, it is bound to be forced to correct itself. Add high oil prices to this mess, and Americans are really being squeezed - because, guess what, surprise, surprise, they also consume the most oil per capita! (It is another matter that the USA with 4% of the world's population also consumes 25% of the world's energy)

So, as money kept drying up in American institutions, others stepped in to lend, because who doesn't want the animal that consumes so much? It's like a bar loves big drinkers, but doesn't like drunkards! As if debt is going to really mean anything if the borrower commits suicide! That suicide is what is being prevented by Bush and Co. with this famous 700 billion dollar "bailout", but the joke continues beyond the American tax payer!

This is what the "liquidity crunch" is really due to. Americans could show their houses as their "piggy banks" (to quote George Soros) and keep borrowing and spending out of notoriously good "refinancing" schemes! But when the housing bubble burst, everything went down the toilet rather fast! Houses were suddenly worth less, or worthless depending on how candid you want to be, and banks couldn't do much beyond gawk, since there were hundreds of such bad loans and nobody to palm the bad loans off to, based on these houses!

Since most banks are international institutions now, money flows across borders quite a bit in this free market economy we have all signed on for. It is all nice and dandy when our products and services are being consumed by others, and when we are raking in the money, but not quite so nice when we lend to unproductive fools. Luckily India doesn't usually lend to unproductive fools, and we are rather tight fisted about giving out large loans based on sentiments. That is the reason our economy here in India is fundamentally sound and nearly impossible to whip up to any frenzied activity - in growth or in decline. We are, thankfully, like financial donkeys.

The clowns on Dalal Street that are busy selling in panic induced frenzy clearly do not have an understanding of realities beyond their own sentiments. The idiots who spread rumours about ICICI going down, without even checking the facts on the ground, sent text messages to people that their insurance companies were going down are nothing but idiots who suddenly see themselves as "global" carriers of panic, who reel under imaginary winds of enormous change, who almost by whim or fashion, have to react to something like this, just in case they don't look out of place!

Quite staggeringly, there are a lot of people here in India, that seriously believe America will not pay that heavy a price for its follies. They feel that some "innovative" move will give them a genius break out of this and somehow the American financial flag will fly high again very soon. That is not a bad wish, and this is not to piss on the optimism or wish anything bad on American people, but from my understanding of "fundamentals" of any economy, you have to produce more than you consume in order to be competitive.

America needs to find a way to become competitive again. It is as simple as that, but for that to materialize, a lot of things have to fundamentally change, starting from curing the fever of betting a large amount of money on speculation of unending growth. That kind of growth is no longer happening in America. It is happening in India and China, but both these countries have such enormous cushions of populations that are coming into new habits of consumerism coupled with good, traditional, conservative fiscal sense, that there is hope we won't repeat the mistakes of the West here in the East.

I remember the time in the 90s when the developed "world" complained that India wasn't opening up its economy soon enough, while Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Far East were doing that. I remember our wise men didn't follow suit and sure enough all tigers turned out to be made of paper and India stood strong enough. It is no different now, but there is madness in the air of this New India. Baseless madness. Financial meltdown, my left foot toe, we have a bit of a character meltdown!

India no laughing matter!

India in the eyes of many is a complex, organic, chaotic place, full of promise and yet brimming with so many qualities that make it confusing, and hard to define. We even take pride in this chaos, and consider it part of our lives in this romantic mess called India. It is almost as if some country in the world had to stand up to play the part of the chaotic idiot, and we chose it out of love for the depth of character it promised.

In the chaos, a lot of us see an order that is hard to recreate elsewhere, for this order is something that just comes to be, not one designed to be that way. The traffic on our roads is the prime example for this order within chaos. I have heard a friend define it as a "lyrical dance" of vehicles! Well the dance isn't that lyrical considering how many Indians die in road accidents every day, unless we are now willing to venture into being part of the cosmic whole and that those people were destined to die anyway.

I wonder how we would take it if the Indian Air Force refused to react to Pakistan invading India and just allowed an organic chaos to take over, of course completely convinced that we are part of a cosmic whole and that nothing is really real. I wonder how it would be if we stopped manufacturing medicines and our doctors went on permanent leave, since people were going to die at designated times anyway.

Truth is, we Indians love chaos until it becomes life threatening. Not just any life threatening, but OUR life threatening. We are that selfish. We are that callous about public behaviour. We are heartless, but love to live in our cocoon of suspended disbelief that we are a compassionate people, that really care about other people's lives. We do not. Perhaps we do not wish ill upon others, but we don't really care what happens to others, even though we are perfectly happy to subscribe to a system that causes needless chaos.

We are not torn between a rational today and a culture of very dense superstitions. We are torn between our laziness and a need to do our duty in a democratic set up. We are torn between the demands of civic responsibility and our dearly held and protected indifference to all things that do not immediately affect our well being.

Oh, we do take up moral policing quite regularly. Especially when policemen confront couples on bikes late at night, for example. There is nothing in the constitution that makes it illegal for a man and a woman to be taking a motorcycle ride late at night, and yet, all the questions from the police will usually be aimed at establishing the intent of the ride, not the legality of it. We love moral policing and we are particularly good at doing it when we have the safety of not being bitten by the person being questioned.

Is this a call for us to seek legal help to maintain our freedoms? Most certainly it is. It is time we became a litigious society where we fought for our rights to lead peaceful lives, where the chaos loving maniacs cannot threaten our lives with lousy driving habits, or the moral policing habits of mob-minded Indians drive us to lead invisible lives.

We are not a great country when we have to make adjustments for imperfections we do not subscribe to. We will never be a great country until EVERY single constitutional right and freedom of EVERY single citizen can be absolutely taken for granted, without question, without ambiguity and without exception.

There is nothing to be proud of this chaotic country we currently call our own. There is definitely nothing beautiful about a lack of a certain order that can prevent casualties, and there certainly is nothing to appreciate about traditions that are thousands of years old when we behave like we did a million years ago.