Desicritics Author: Vikas Chowdhry

Green Card Applicants Resort to Gandhigiri

Vikas Chowdhry — Fri, 6 Jul 2007 00:47:33 EDT

If you are a desi in the US and have not been locked up in a basement for the past couple of weeks, then you most likely know about the big brouhaha surrounding the sequence of events in which the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) first announced that it will start accepting green card applications from all eligible candidates and then, on the very first day of acceptance, issue another directive, revoking the previous announcement. This has caused much hand wringing, anguish and disappointment in the legal, skilled non-immigrant community (see the article in the Wall Street Journal – Reversal Frustrates Green-Card Applicants).

Now, some of these anguished green-card applicants have hit upon a unique way of bringing a spotlight on their situation – Gandhigiri. For the uninitiated, Gandhigiri is a colloquial term made famous by a hit 2006 Bollywood film, Lage Raho Munnabhai (Carry On Munnabhai). In the movie, Munnabhai, confronted with problems of everyday life, tries to follow the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi to find solutions or what would Gandhiji do?

The effect of Indian movies on the expatriate Indian population everywhere in the world is undeniable. So it was no surprise that in various immigration discussion forums, people hit upon the idea of sending a bouquet of flowers to Emilio T. Gonzalez, director of the USCIS on the same day. The flowers would be sent on July 10 through various online flower delivery sites by interested individuals with an encouraging message so that they are better able to predict green card availability dates for future.

This should be an interesting, unorthodox and grassroots level event with the Director of USCIS getting hundreds of bouquets on the same day by skilled, legal non-immigrants and it should garner a lot of media attention. If you are interested in making this event a success, please see the details here.

US Immigration Bill Discriminatory to Skilled Workers

Vikas Chowdhry — Tue, 22 May 2007 00:41:16 EDT

After months and months of deliberations, multiple bills and fake anger over illegal immigration, the Senate announced its so called grand bargain immigration bill and the message from the US Senate to legal, skill based immigrants was, "so long suckers!"

A great majority of the skill based non-immigrants waiting to legally immigrate to the US (in simple words, temporary worker visa holders waiting to get their green cards) are from South Asia. While these workers don't win by numbers compared to illegal workers, they are definitely an asset to the American society. Largely law abiding, highly motivated and skilled, by some estimates, these people are responsible for starting up to 25% of the companies in the Silicon Valley.

These people have been waiting patiently for years working their way through grad school or working in different jobs in different states in the hope of achieving that ever elusive American dream, and yet, when the US lawmakers had the chance to set the system right, they screwed this law abiding group, sending a strong message that in the US, illegal workers get the priority.

US lawmakers often accuse President Bush of living in a bubble, but one wonders what kind of bubble are they themselves living in? Or maybe, they are not living in the bubble at all, because despite all the platitudes about this bill being forward looking, it actually is exceedingly favorable towards illegal workers.

It seems like the lobbies of illegal immigrants were present behind closed doors when details of this bill were being thrashed out. You can read about some of the many flaws of this bill here, but to highlight just a few absolutely absurd ones:

Instead of the current allocation of 140,000 immigrant visas (green card) to skilled workers, this bill brings it down to 90,000.

It will require H1B holders to renew their visas on an annual basis.

Under its merit based points system, an agriculture worker can earn 25 points for working 100 days a year for 5 years, while a skilled individual will get 10 points for working the same number of years!

Economic contribution by the undocumented is recognized by awarding points for property ownership but not for people working legally.

Legal workers in the US have for years maintained the right of the United States to implement an immigration system that is fair and is in the best national interest of the country. By any reasonable standards, the current bill is neither in the best national interest of the US, nor does it offer a fair shake to the people who've been law abiding residents for years.

As of now, it seems like the powerful lobbies of Hispanic workers will be able to amend this bill even more in the favor of illegal workers while legal immigrants, majority of them do not have the time or the inclination to be activists, will be left holding the bag.

Why We Love Google

Vikas Chowdhry — Sat, 9 Dec 2006 00:46:17 EST

There are a lot of companies that pay lip service to out-of-the-box thinking but Google is the best example of a company that has made a religion out of this concept. What else can explain Google's ability to take seemingly mundane and well established products like the web based email, document management software etc. and turn them into groundbreaking ones?

When Google first came out with its web-based email, a lot of critics hailed it as a me-too product which wouldn't be able to make a dent in the established market share of Yahoo and Hotmail. However, with the help of its innovative interface and on the back of the complacency shown by Yahoo and Hotmail who hadn't updated their products in ages, Gmail quickly gained ground, first amongst the technically savvy and then amongst regular users. You might see a lot of data out there that might tell you that Yahoo and Hotmail are still the leading email providers, but I am loathe to believe it. Just anecdotally, looking at the email ids in my contact list, I find almost everyone has started using Gmail on a more regular basis and they maintain other accounts just because they've had them for a long time; and not too many people on my contact list can qualify as being technically savvy.

Recently Google unveiled its web based document management product and yet again, both Yahoo and Microsoft were caught with their pants down. With features like easy collaboration, chat facility amongst collaborators and a clean and functional interface, Google Documents is the product to beat. It has some great features to create basic text documents and spreadsheets and it can serve the needs of a huge majority of users without the bloated MS Office that costs hundreds of dollars.

The most astonishing aspect in the Google story is that they are becoming increasingly good at satisfying the unsaid needs of their users; the kind of needs and requirements that an average user cannot even begin to articulate in focus groups and such. This ability to seemingly delight customers is the holy grail that any company strives to achieve and Google seems to have done that. Usually, when Microsoft releases new features in its products, it tends to bloat the software and makes it increasingly difficult for users to effectively complete the 80% of tasks that they need to do on a more regular basis. With Google, the new features add to the value of the product. A few examples would include integration of Google Talk in email, ability to update a conversation on-the-fly while you are in middle of replying to it and ability to chat between collaborators in Google Docs.

Google has changed the game in consumer software and it has shown that the first-mover advantage can be negated by a smart, motivated company, no matter how deeply entrenched its competitors are. Using Microsoft and Yahoo's products often leads to frustration and frequent anguished exclamations of "What were they thinking?", while it is mostly a delight to use Google's products. The recent updates to Hotmail and Yahoo mail only serve to illustrate how big the gap is between Google's and its competitor's products. While Hotmail and Yahoo are just content to replicate MS Outlook's interface in a web-based product, it is Google that is doing true out of the box thinking and redefining how we interact with computers. And for this, we love Google.

Thanksgiving: A Uniquely American Festival

Vikas Chowdhry — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 00:37:44 EST

Harvest festivals are celebrated all over the world and Thanksgiving Day, celebrated on the fourth Thursday in November is one of them. However, there is something special about the way this harvest festival is enjoyed in modern day US. While harvest festivals in other countries tend to take regional and religious tones (for example, Baisakhi and Onam in India), Thanksgiving remains a uniquely secular festival enjoyed by Americans of all ethnicities, color and religion. It has evolved from its origins of early settlers giving thanks for the bountiful harvest and freedom of religion to an occasion when families get together to eat and give thanks for the simple pleasures in life.

Of course, everything is not hunky dory from coast to coast on Thanksgiving Day and this day is capable of evoking different emotions in different people. For some, it is a day to sit on the couch, drink some beer and watch a couple of football games on the TV, while for some, this is a day when they are stuck in traffic or at the airport making that yearly trip back home to their families while for some guys, this is a day when they would be running around trying to find an open grocery store just because the night before, the wife forgot to put that crucial ingredient to prepare that special Thanksgiving meal on the shopping list (yes, that happened to yours truly last year). Of course, in an ultimate ode to Capitalism in the land that almost worships the concept, for most Americans, this day is inexorably linked to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade and the early morning shopping deals the day after Thanksgiving. And then, for many native Americans, this day probably evokes mixed reactions. While on one hand, the entire country celebrates a tradition that started at the table of their ancestors and the first settlers, it is also linked to the tragedies and massacres they suffered at the hands of the descendants of those very settlers.

Coming from a country that celebrates hundreds, if not thousands of festivals, I am always game to add a few new ones to my repertoire and I have taken to Thanksgiving like a fish takes to water (as Will Ferrell says in Anchorman, "When in Rome"). Last year, we hit upon this brilliant idea that a bunch of Indians should dress up as, well, Indians on this day and the result was a lot of fun. While I don't have any such plans for this year, I can't wait to put an Indian spin (pun intended) on this uniquely American festival and contribute my own bit to this continually evolving tradition. I would love to know how other Desis visiting and reading this post plan to celebrate Thanksgiving.

Is Islam a Peaceful Religion?

Vikas Chowdhry — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 13:04:08 EDT

Is Islam a peaceful religion? Is it a violent one? Does Quran teach violence? Does it teach love and peace? Are all Muslims violent? Are some of them violent while a majority of them just wants to live peaceful lives?

Questions like these and many more have been asked many times over, specially in the West and specially after the 9/11 attacks. President Bush has gone from emphasizing that Islam is a peaceful religion to using the term Islamo-fascists. So how do we make sense of what really is Islam? Or, for that matter, how do we make sense of any other religion? If we cannot answer this fundamental question, then we will never be able to answer the more obvious ones that I enumerate at the beginning.

To be able to answer that question, we first have to answer an even more basic question. Is religion a static entity, as defined in its holy books, or is it a living, breathing entity, as defined by the lives led by follower of that religion at a given period? I would assert that religion is a living, breathing entity as defined by the lives of its followers in the present. Going by that definition, one simply cannot assert or ask the question, "Is Islam a peaceful religion?" for that question is too absolute. The question that needs to be asked is, "Is Islam a peaceful religion today?"

If asking the right question was tricky, answering it is bound to be more so. What criterion does one use to quantify one's answer? Should we find out the ratio of violent verses to non-violent verses in Quran? Should we find out the ratio of violent Muslims to non-violent Muslims (this criterion is often used when people assert that there are "millions of Muslims practicing their religion peacefully")?

I think the answer can be found on one of the very basic observations that Mahatma Gandhi made about human nature - that if you want to find out the true nature of a person, find out how he treats a weaker person. Let us apply that simple test to present day Islam. We can say that Muslims are in "strength", that is able to dictate political, social and religious decisions in countries or regions where they are in majority. Of course, in certain instances, they might be able to dictate terms even in regions where they are in minority but for now, we can simply focus on Muslim majority regions.

Let us think of Muslim majority regions and nations like the Middle East, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, certain regions of Africa and Indonesia and see how the "weaker party" that is, non-Muslims have been treated in those regions? Is there freedom of religion? Is there freedom of speech? Can you openly practice your faith? What about civil laws?

In a nutshell, what kind of society have Muslims created in places where they had the power to create the kind of societies that they wanted to create?

Now compare those societies with the societies created by Christian majority states, like those of the Western Europe or in the US. Or the society created by the Hindu majority state of India. There, you've answered the question that "Is Islam a peaceful religion today?"

The real violence committed in the name of Islam was not committed when those planes hit the twin towers, not even when those bombs went off in the streets of London or in the trains of Mumbai. The real violence in the name of Islam is committed every single day in those Muslim majority countries like Saudi Arabia where you cannot freely practice any other religion, cannot have a free civic discourse and cannot have basic human rights. That is the real Islamic terrorism, Islamo-fascism or whatever other term that you fancy. The people ramming those planes into the twin towers were only the end result of that terrorism.

Ban Indian Companies from the H1B program

Vikas Chowdhry — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 00:33:24 EDT

A recent IEEE report scrutinizes the Labor Condition Application (or LCA for short is a form that needs to be filed by a company wanting to hire foreign workers) to come to the conclusion that the H1B visa worker program has been exploited by various Indian companies.

The study cites an interview given by Vice President of Tata Consultancy Services Phiroz Vandrevala to Business World magazine in which he had said his company enjoys a competitive advantage because of its extensive use of foreign workers in the United States on H-1B and L-1 visas.

"Our wage per employee is 20-25 per cent lesser than US wage for a similar employee," Vandrevala said. "Typically, for a TCS employee with five years experience, the annual cost to the company is $60,000-70,000, while a local American employee might cost $80,000-100,000.

While this acknowledgment by one of the big three in itself is shocking, many of us who have been working in the IT field for many years, both in India and in the US know that there are much bigger elephants in the room that no one is willing to acknowledge. The following points, in my view, make for a much bigger case of banning all Indian companies from the H1B and L1 visa program:

Resume embellishment: Embellishment might be a much milder term for what goes in many of these consultancy shops that get Indian IT workers on H1B visas. Resumes are bloated, many job experiences cited on the resume are more fictional than Sydney Sheldon's novels and "a deep knowledge" of X technology often means flipping through "Teach yourself in 24 hours" books. There is also anecdotal evidence that many of these "consultants" have subject experts who answer client technical interviews over the phone, while the actual candidate is sitting thousand of miles away in India.

Hurting deserving candidates: Every year, the quotas for H1B visas fill up much ahead of time. I have personally seen many deserving candidates, who went to grad school in the US, ending up continuing to go to school, taking up yet another major or wasting their time at low level jobs at the universities, because the H1B visa quota ran out. This year, even the quota specially reserved for candidates with an advanced US degree was exhausted in a flash. One saving grace has been that the US Department of Labor has not budged from its requirement of getting an education from an accredited US university as a pre-condition to apply under this quota, despite all the pleas in various immigration forums that go something like "will an MCA + 5 years IT experience count as a US advanced degree?"

Creating an immigration backlog: During the Y2K years, everyone and his uncle who had the money to get a certificate from NIIT or Aptech managed to come to the US on an H1B visa. The lax rules of those days are coming home to roost for a lot of people who simply cannot understand as to why there is a big backlog of immigration visas. I don't mind waiting in the line behind a guy who went to IIT Delhi and then wrote two IEEE published papers while finishing his MS in a year at Illinois. What I do mind is a person with a GNIIT degree, who came to the US in the Y2K rush eating up 5 immigration visas for his wife and 3 kids. While there is no doubt that the US immigration policy is deeply flawed, it is made worse by these cases.

Creating an H1B backlash: There were days when there were close to 200,000 H1B visas available each year. However, blatant exploitation of the program by Indian companies followed by a technical downturn led to the cap returning back to 65,000 per year. Now, with the Democrats and Republicans both posturing to claim the higher ground on immigration, there is a serious possibility of an even bigger backlash. As long as Indian companies continue to exploit the program, there will be studies like the one by IEEE, exposing those violations. In the long run, this will just give the H1B program a bad reputation and might lead to its revocation entirely.

In my opinion, the H1B visa program should only be open to students graduating from accredited US universities. There are plenty of students who have put in a few years of hard work and have bona fide academic credentials and don't deserve to be left hanging in limbo because the H1B visa quotas are over. I don't hold this view because I think that only students graduating from the US universities are smart or that they have a right to work in the US, but because this is the only way in which this blatant abuse of H1B visas by Indian off shoring companies can be stopped and deserving people can stop feeling like suckers.

As for the Indian companies, if they are willing to prove their mettle and willing to prove that they can compete on much more than cost alone, then they should not shy away from hiring people at prevailing wages graduating from the US universities.

Movie Review: Lage Raho Munnabhai - The Mahatma As A Sutradhar

Vikas Chowdhry — Sun, 3 Sep 2006 07:59:56 EDT

Oh these pesky sequels, they are always a tough act, specially if the original has attained the status of a beloved classic, as it has, in the case of Lage Raho Munnabhai. While making the sequel you have to be concerned with the continuity of the story and the logical development of characters while making sure that the audience does not get a sense of deja-vu. The creative team behind Lage Raho deftly steps aside these minefields by not continuing the story from Munnabhai MBBS, rather, they just retain the two lead characters of lovable small time crooks - Munnabhai and Circuit and start with a clean slate. The result is a movie that is a triumph of the art of movie making.

Of course, the movie works as a great comedy and that itself would have been sufficient to make it a worthy sequel. What really makes the sequel standout and indeed surpass the original is that it is so much more ambitious than the original and yet it works so well at so many different levels - as a comedy, as a feel good heart warming story, as a political movie, as a patriotic movie and finally, as a movie that serves as a great antidote to the mindless violence and rubbish solutions presented in Rang De Basanti. The first fifteen minutes of the movie have Arshad Warsi and Boman Irani (as a gaudy, unscrupulous builder who is a spitting image of many such builders found in the by lanes of Karol Bagh) displaying their impeccable comic timing and got me to laugh so hard that I was crying. That itself was worth the price of admission, everything else that follows is a bonus. Sanjay Dutt again excels in a role that might end up defining his career, Vidya Balan shows that the charm, charisma and acting prowess that she displayed in Parineeta was no fluke and Arshad Warsi was born to play the role of Circuit.

But the real hero of the movie is the script, always innovative and always funny. When you are trying to peddle the Mahatma as the Sutradhar (anchor-man) of your story, and you push his path of non-violence and love as solutions to today's problems, there is always the danger of alienating your audience. Not because there is something wrong with Gandhiji's principles, but due to the fact that since Independence, our political class has so much used and abused Gandhian principles as something to be repeated at every occasion and never to be followed in principle that a majority of the country is simply numb to any sort of Gandhian message. The movie pokes fun at precisely that image of Mahatma Gandhi and might even manage to make the Mahatma cool again for Gen Y. And the audience is never alienated because the script ensures that the movie does not become a preachy, shrill October 2nd speech. It retains its core of being a really funny comedy movie that is attempting to be a little more.

It succeeds and how!

A Lean Mean Fighting Machine aka The Human Race

Vikas Chowdhry — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 02:47:52 EDT

Here is a reality check for all you guys who hold candles at the Wagah border, send out emails containing messages of peace and communal harmony, roam around wearing peace tattoos or peace pendants, lie naked in the bed promoting peace or wistfully sing "give peace a chance". Peace never really had a chance, never did and it seems highly likely that it never will.

You could blame religion, region, nationalism, caste or race but like a water gushing out of a broken dyke, violence will find a way and a reason to break it and flood the plains, no matter how many hands you stick into the dyke. Why? Because human beings are not conditioned for peace - whether by evolution or by design (and you call it intelligent?).

You say that religion is the reason for all the violence? Then explain Shia on Sunni (or vice-versa) violence in Iraq and Pakistan.

You say that race or region is the reason for violence? Then explain the countless wars fought between people belonging to the same race and regions.

The bottom line is that as human beings, we always strive to find what separates and divides us and not what joins us - so Muslims will fight Hindus and if you wipe out all Hindus, then Shias will fight with Sunnis. Eliminate all Shias and you'd be surprised how fast Sunnis start fighting amongst themselves. That great defender of Hindus, Bal Thackerey did not think twice before attacking all those Hindus from South India and of course, the regional feuds between states in the South of India is nothing to sneeze at. Christians have been having a mighty go at each other since centuries, stopping only for short periods of time when they have a bigger pagan to fight.

You might find it depressing but the first step towards solving a problem is recognizing that it exists and realize the true cause behind the problem. By creating these red herrings of religion, region etc., we sidetrack the real problem and start day dreaming. If only there were no religions, if only there were no national boundaries, if only the US would stop its arrogant hegemony, if only we could have democracy in the middle east, if only Israel would relinquish some land in the middle east.

Maybe there is no solution to this problem, this is how it has always been and this is how it always be. Sometimes a few reasonable people like Gandhi, King and Mandela come along and instill a short term rationality amongst their people but the operative term here is short term and in short order, we are back to our true selves.

Yeh Hai Bombay Meri Jaan

Vikas Chowdhry — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 22:59:42 EDT

Like potholes on the Andheri-Kurla Road during rainy season, suddenly, the western media is full of stories on and from Mumbai. The cover story by Time magazine and a politeness survey by Reader's Digest, which put Mumbai at rock bottom was followed today by a rebuttal of the Digest story by ex-Mumbaite and currently a Brooklyn resident, Suketu Mehta, whose claim to fame is Maximum City, a Pulitzer prize finalist novel about Mumbai. In between, the Wall Street Journal also found time to run a front page story on day traders operating out from cyber-cafes in Mumbai.

Stories by Time and Reader's Digest were typical mainstream media stories - barely able to hold attention for the time an average person spends sitting on the toilet seat in the morning. While Time's story was giddy with possibilities of Mumbai, the Digest story was giddy with the stench of apparent rudeness prevalent in the city. But one definitely expected a much more nuanced view from Mr. Mehta, a renowned author and a long time resident of the city. Unfortunately, Mr. Mehta took Digest's criticism of his native city a little too personally and let go of his objectivity like a person getting rid of his singles in a dance bar on Charni Road!

In defending Mumbai, Mr. Mehta takes the oft-trodden path of romanticism, an old enemy of NRI authors, whose memories of their native towns are often tinted with rose colored glasses of distance and comfort of their new home. As he compares New York with Mumbai, Mr. Mehta contends that:

In quest of its exquisitely well-mannered New Yorkers, the magazine conducted its research entirely in what it quaintly considers a quintessential New York institution: Starbucks coffee shops. Not bodegas, or delis, or fried chicken outlets, where the results might arguably have been very different.

Oops, you really meant that the Digest conducted its interview in White dominated hangouts rather than the ones populated by Blacks and other minorities, didn't you, Mr. Mehta? Then Mr. Mehta corrects his oopsies in a hurry by casting his lot with the less fortunate (that is, "I am allowed to make that comparison because hey, I live in Brooklyn" ) :

It's not that people who like to pay three bucks for a cup of coffee at Starbucks are more polite -- only differently polite. In the less chi-chi parts of the city I call home now, they might not hold the door open for you, but they're more likely to help you out in finding a job or an apartment.

Traveling freely on this path of anecdotal evidence, making his argument as unscientific as Digest's, Mr. Mehta gamely tries to bring up a few good points about Mumbai.

I suggest that the Digest conduct a second survey, using my own measures of civic courtesy: If four people are seated on a commuter train bench designed for three, will they accommodate a fifth person? Will people smile brightly at a stranger's little kid in a restaurant, stopping by to say "How sweet!" -- even when the child is being noisy? And if people are eating in a train compartment, will they share their food with you? I bet Bombay would come out tops.

Well, having lived in Mumbai for a few years, I know for sure that letting a fifth person sit on a seat meant for four in second class compartment of a Mumbai local train is not common courtesy, it is simply a survival strategy - if you don't move, they will simply push you and make space or will make you get up. Mumbaites are neither rude nor polite in this case - it is a logical response to the number of people in a train compartment. As for tolerating noisy kids, I could point out evidence either ways, whether inside the train our outside of it.

Mr. Mehta takes further offense at this bit here:

Though most Bombayites would consider the Digest's findings about as painful as a mosquito bite, an article accompanying might cause them to choke on their chapatis. In it, a Bombayite is quoted as saying, "In Mumbai, they'll step over a person who has fallen in the street." I'd like to think that the dear old Digest, which I grew up reading in India, doesn't really believe this grotesque view of the city, for in 1997 they published an excerpt from an article I'd written about the everyday courtesies of the Bombay train

Sure, I have experienced this myself when I saw two teenagers fall down from their bike on Worli Road and no one was willing to take them to hospitals. Heck, even the famed Mumbai cabbies would not stop when my friend and I, two out of townies, tried to take them to the hospital. It is a known fact that due to silliness of Indian law, often the good Samaritan, ends up getting stuck with wasting time in court cases and FIRs and many times people simply prefer to carry on with their lives.

In trying to paint a more polite picture of Mumbai, Mr. Mehta forgets one single thing about Mumbai. It is a town, which, more than anyplace else believes in survival of the fittest. If that leads to allegations of rudeness, then a Mumbaite will say, "Hey, that is no skin off my nose" ("Abey mere baap kaa kya jaata hai - tu kaltee maar yahaan se!")!

Years ago, Mohammad Rafi crooned in CID and defined Mumbai for eternity, as eloquently as anyone ever could, as a place where you have to fend for yourself and as a place where you might find everything but a heart. So why take offense now at the editors of the Digest?

Aye dil hai mushkil jeena yahan
Zara hat ke zara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan

Kahin building kahin traame, kahin motor kahin mill
Milta hai yahan sab kuchh ik milta nahin dil

Insaan ka nahin kahin naam-o-nishaan
Zara hat ke zara bach ke, yeh hai Bombay meri jaan
Aye dil hai..

Global Warming: The US, India and Gandhi

Vikas Chowdhry — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 00:15:09 EDT

Global warming activists have been hitting all the right notes lately. There's the Al Gore Movie, An Inconvenient Truth, there's the report by the National Academy of Sciences that the earth is at its warmest in centuries and James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University's Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences makes a great case on NPR's On Point radio talk show.

In scientific circles, there is no more a fuzziness about the facts behind global warming and Thomas Friedman of the New York Times thinks that the time is ripe for a practical Green Party in the US. As I read Collapse, Jared Diamond's extraordinary treatise on the doomed choices that societies make and do not realize its consequences until it is almost too late, I am repeatedly transported to some of the ominous choices being made today and wonder if a fate similar to the Mayan civilization or the Polynesians in the Pacific Islands will befall us as well. "No! we are smarter and more knowledgeable than those people and we have the power to stop something similar from happening to us", proclaims a small voice inside my head. That voice does not sound that confident however, after seeing what nature's fury can do to man's best laid plans - tsunami, the flooding of Mumbai and hurricane Katrina are too vivid to sound confident - specially when you consider that in none of these events, cataclysmic as they might have been, Mother Nature was at her fearful worst.

So where should we look for signs of action? That something is being done? Jamse Hansen says that the momentum of the green house gases and global warming is now far too great to be controlled by individual actions. You may buy all the hybrids that you want, use all the energy star compatible appliances that you can, this genie cannot be put back into the bottle until governments of the world make a concerted effort.

Where shall that effort come from? From the US - whose leaders are so beholden to the fossil fuel industries that they have made every effort to break the Kyoto treaty and tried to smear the scientists stating the facts about global warming with the brush of "fear mongering and hoax"? From China, whose very lifeblood of her booming manufacturing industries is cheaper and more abundant raw material consisting of metals, minerals and petroleum products? From India, whose leaders and population is so caught up in its own hype that they don't even bother to clean up the river Ganga (Ganges), not even when it is proclaimed to be sacred and equivalent to mother in ancient Hindu scriptures? Europe and Japan have been making all the right noises, but frankly, at this point on the world stage, wind is definitely not behind their sails and their efforts could make only a small impact.

I don't think all hope is lost yet; between India, China and the US, I feel that with the right leadership and motivation, US and India might still be able to save the day; China has too much of its economy staked on non-renewable fuels to meaningfully support this movement.

What kind of leadership will be needed in the US and India to be able to provide a vision for reducing the threat of climate change? More importantly, who will provide that leadership? While Dick Cheney may proclaim the 1% doctrine to be the operating principle while dealing with terrorists, somehow, for climate change, it is not relevant. Even in the eyes of this administration, isn't there at least 1% certainty that global warming might be occurring? Why is it then that the US must act, even if there is 1% probability of terrorism but not when there is a threat of global warming? India at the moment is similarly bereft of leaders who can rise to the occasion. Where are the Gandhis, the Churchills, the Roosevelts, the Lincolns, the Kings of this era?

Not surprisingly, the hope for both nations might lie in their respective dominant religions - Hinduism and Christianity.

Hindus take great pride in their ancient culture, the scientific foundations of many of their rituals and their symbiotic relationship with nature and living beings. Jainism and other religions and cultures in India take this respect for all living beings to yet another level. Should it not be axiomatic then that a country, where a majority of people are spiritually and religiously respectful of their surroundings rather than claiming a god given dominion over them, should also be a country leading the way in promulgating a lifestyle and developing technologies that help alleviate the current problems associated with global warming? After all, if you consider all species of living beings to be just another form of yourself, aren't you morally obligated to stop a process that is leading to extinction of a vast number of species?

Unlike the US, India can lay a claim to only a handful of great leaders in the past few hundred years, and the greatest amongst them all was Gandhi. Almost sixty years after his assassination, his warning that "Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed" sounds surprisingly true. He was also a leader who understood that the best way to unite this country is through her religion. Gandhi used his religion to give the nation a sense of righteousness and purpose and there is a need for religious leaders in India who can yet again help people renew their ancient relationship with Mother Earth and everything else, green energy, sustainable development and pollution control will simply flow from that.

People of the United States are no less enamored of their Christian roots. Indeed, many of the great movements in the US were created around religion. The idea of John Winthrop's "City Upon A Shining Hill", Lincoln's Civil War and King's Civil Rights movement were all deeply influenced by Christianity. Can another great leader originate from the same tradition? Already there are many religious organizations in the US who are breaking ranks with the conservatives on the issue of global warming, proclaiming that it is the right thing to do to take care of the earth; but there are still too many people getting riled up for the wrong reasons, gay marriages, gay bishops, abortion etc.

A few days ago, Larry King mentioned on his program that people are too busy to think about what will happen from fifty years from now on! Fifty years! As one of the guests on NPR's talk show mentioned that if a civilization cannot think fifty years in advance, then that civilization is doomed! During many critical crisis in the recent past, the US has not acted until really pushed hard but once it gets into the arena, it plays to win. Can enough people in this country be convinced, by religious or political leaders that time for inaction is long past?

Scientists have been trying to re-enforce that the time period we now have to act is not centuries but decades or even years. Many amongst us might end up seeing the face of the earth as we know it change during our lifetimes, or we might be lucky enough to see some truly great leaders stride on the world stage to guide humanity through this unprecedented crisis.