The Great Indian Tamasha

The Indian General Elections of 2014 will be remembered for their massive numbers. According to the Election Commission of India, the voting schedule has involved 814.5 million people, making it the largest election ever in history. On May 16th the results were declared: the National Democratic Alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party won, beating the United Progressive Alliance led by the Indian National Congress. What happened next signified, why the nature of this campaign was different than anything that the Indian electorate had seen before. Narendra Modi, leader of the BJP, made his victory public right away, by tweeting “India has won! The tweet went viral and the landscape of India elections had changed for all times to come. How was it done? As per a report in Digital in the Round , Mr. Modi effectively deployed the dual strategies of using Social Media as a campaigning tool and deploying technology for mass outreach. For the first time in Indian electoral ...

The Paradox of Globalization Professor Dani Rodrik of Harvard University in his much celebrated book;   “The Globalization Paradox” writes that a delicate balance exists between democracy and processes of globalization. He notes that as different societies have different needs and preferences in terms of how they structure the institutions required to ensure markets function correctly, democratic pressures are likely to lead to a variety of different institutions across different territories. This diversity inhibits the global integration of markets by raising transaction costs across jurisdictions. Consequently, a world, which is fully responsive to democratic preferences, will be unable to achieve full globalization. The argument in the book “The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy” can be expressed in the form of a syllogism. 1.      Markets require a range of non-market institutions (of regulat...

As per the Wikipedia definition the term citizens media refers to forms of content produced by private citizens who are otherwise not professional journalists. Citizens’ media is causing a few fundamental changes in the media landscape that will impact how we produce and consume information in the decades to come. The changes are: This is about democratized media and wide participation because it is open to many people A fairly fundamental change is that consumers are now producers and vice versa Also, we now have a read-write Web that allows people to write easily on the Web Journalism has traditionally been a lecture – journalists tell you what the news is, you either buy it or you don't. Now it's moving into something like a conversation and the first rule of a conversation is to listen. And Journalists have not been listening, many a times readers know more than journalists. This isn't a bad thing, it is just...

Inequality has become central to the public debate over economic policy in the U.S. and across the world. Rightly so, as much of this discussion focuses   on the sharp increases in the share of income and wealth going to the richest 1 percent, 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent of the population. This is indeed a critical issue. Whatever the resolution of particular arguments about particular numbers, it is almost certain that the share of personal income going to the top 1 percent has risen by 10 percentage points over the last generation and that the share of the bottom 90 percent has fallen by a comparable amount. The only groups that have seen faster income growth than the top 1 percent are the top 0.1 percent and top 0.01 percent. Interestingly this trend marks a return to a pattern that prevailed before World War I. There is evidence [1] now to suggest that the phenomenon of inequality is not dominantly about the inadequacy of the skills of lagging workers. Even in terms ...