The main character is a young college graduate with mediocre grades who lands a job at a computer sales company. He is soon confronted with corrupt-but-usual practices in the company, and his naïveté puts him on the fast track to failure. And then the plot thickens.
Rocket Singh takes up negative themes of corrupt in sales, bribery, and conflicts of interest, but the emphasis is on the positive: the sources of self-respect, win-win business relations, and the spirit of entrepreneurship. I responded to the very human challenges of honesty, integrity, necessity as the mother of invention and ingenuity, growing pains, guts, and semi-redemption.
Stating the themes abstractly like that could make Rocket sound saccharine and didactic, but it works as a real movie, with engaging characters, tension, and drama.
Natural News surveyed its readers asking which corporations they believed to be the most evil: Monsanto topped the list, followed by B.P., Halliburton, McDonald’s, Pfizer, Merck, Wal-Mart, and Nestlé. Natural News writer Mike Adams reported on the survey results, chiming in to agree and add his opinion that Monsanto is not only evil but psychotic and a number of other bad things.
I had heard such things in passing from some of my colleagues who are crunchy-granola-eating-nostalgic-for-the-1960s types, so I read the article to learn more. Why is Monsanto so evil? Adams offered four reasons.
1. Monsanto produces and markets genetically-modified seeds, and so, according to Adams, it is an “opponent of open-pollinated seeds.” My questions: What kind of opponent is Monsanto — scientific? economic? political? And why is it evil to be that kind of opponent? No answers in the article.
2. Monsanto, Adams says further, has acted against politicians who try to ban its products: “politicians in France and across Europe who found themselves being added to a ‘retaliatory target list’ that was assembled by the United States ambassador to France, working in conspiracy with the leaders of the GMO industry.” Is that obviously bad? Food production is unfortunately highly politicized, and politics is often rough and tumble. In this case, some European politicians, like some of their African colleagues, are against GMOs and have attempted to ban them. Why shouldn’t Monsanto and other GMO advocates fight back? And why is this a “conspiracy”? No answer.
3. “Monsanto’s GMO crops are now linked to roughly 200,000 suicides of farmers and farm workers in India.” The link in this case seems to be that India’s traditional, low-producing agriculture sector is being modernized, but the transition is slow-going and often ugly. New methods, including GMOs, are increasing crop yields, but some farmers are not making the transition well — for many reasons, including lack of credit markets, nasty politics and guerrilla warfare. So why exactly are the deaths being laid at Monsanto’s door? Unexplained.
4. Adams makes a passing reference of Monsanto as a threat to “planetary health.” But he offers no argument.*
So what exactly is bad about GMOs and Monsanto? And why the strong language?
Also odd are the article’s omissions. Adams does not raise any health concerns about GMO. Yet if GMO producers are evil, wouldn’t data showing their product to be a threat to health be important here? One suspects that the studies showing the safety of GMOs are being ignored by an ideologist.
Nor does he mention the increased yields or other benefits of GMOs. Intellectual honesty requires looking at the arguments on the other side, and this omission is also suspicious.
My Ph.D. is not in bio-tech, and I have not researched Monsanto and have no opinion about whether any of its actions are moral or immoral. But if GMOs really are dangerous and extreme language like evil is warranted, the evidence and arguments should be obvious and strong.
Feeding billions of people is important. Good science and engineering are important. Overcoming ignorant and power-hungry politicians is important. The stakes are high and quality journalism is essential to helping us all become informed.
On that score, I find Adams’ article to be irresponsibly badly argued and an excuse for ideological venting and name-calling.
For much of the twentieth century, poverty and stagnation characterized India’s economic life, yet India has transformed itself and prospects for its 1.1 billion people have improved dramatically.
Economics professor Nimish Adhia recently spoke at Rockford College on how Bollywood films both signaled and contributed to the cultural shift necessary for India’s economic liberalization to occur.
My follow-up interview with Dr. Adhia is below, including excerpts from two representative films: the unintentionally hilarious Upkar (1967) and the seriously excellent Guru (2006):
The interview with Professor Adhia can also be viewed at Youtube and CEE’s site.
The insightful Shikha Dalmia, senior policy analyst at Reason and a columnist for Forbes, in a 6.5 minute video interview for Reason.tv, on two of my favorite topics: India, and movies about India:
Posted 2 years, 3 months ago at 8:47 am. Add a comment
From Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound, on education since 1947, when India became independent of Britain and tried democratic politics mixed with heavily top-down, government-run economic planning:
“The story of education in free India is a sad one. The government created a vast number of schools, practically free, after Independence. But they were so uniformly bad that the middle class shunned them and scrambled for places in a few private schools. Thus there rose a situation of scarcity, and you needed either money or contacts to get it. If this is the plight of the middle class, the situation of the masses is tragic. The state has failed to provide both the quantity and quality of education” (p. 54).
Parallels to the American experiment in government education?
I am reading Gurcharan Das’s India Unbound, and it is fueling my longstanding fascination with India. Das is former CEO of Procter & Gamble India and currently a columnist for Times of India. He grew up under Nehruvian socialism and state planning and watched it become a crippling disaster, and he has seen the dramatic changes since the free market economic reforms after 1991 — the rising standards of living, the shift from poverty into the middle class, increasing literacy rates, and the strengthening of the entrepreneurial spirit, especially among the younger.
But India’s course will also be uniquely its own, Das believes, and in contrast to other east Asian countries’ transformations. He puts it wryly:
“The Economist has been trying, with some frustration, to paint stripes on India since 1991. It doesn’t realize that India will never be a tiger. It is an elephant that has begun to lumber and move ahead. It will never have speed, but it will always have stamina. … India might have a more stable, peaceful, and negotiated transition into the future than, say, China. It will also avoid some of the harmful side effects of an unprepared capitalist society, such as Russia. Although slower, India is more likely to preserve its way of life and its civilization of diversity, tolerance, and spirituality against the onslaught of the global culture. If it does, then it is perhaps a wise elephant” (xix).
Das weaves a tapestry of energetic individuals, bounteous natural resources, deep historical roots, traditions of religion, caste, ethnicity, and language. Optimism is tempered with a realistic eye to India’s weaknesses — often put amusingly:
“The paradigmatic story concerns two Indians who meet in New York and decide to form an Indian Association. When a third arrives, they form a Tamil Association; with a fourth comes the Bengali Association. And so on until there are fifteen regional associations and the old Indian association is forgotten. One day someone was the ‘brilliant idea’ to join the regional associations into an Indian Association. It’s a funny story and it makes us laugh, but it also illustrates our divisive character. A Swiss manager of a multinational company told me that a sure way to inaction is to put two talented Indians on a global task force. They will never agree and brilliantly argue the proposal to death” (p. 149).
(And I’m wondering if the title is an allusion to Aeschylus or Shelley. Das is extremely well read.)
Posted 2 years, 4 months ago at 3:41 pm. 4 comments
The main character is a young college graduate with mediocre grades who lands a job at a computer sales company. He is soon confronted with corrupt-but-usual practices in the company, and his naïveté puts him on the fast track to failure. And then the plot thickens. 
I had heard such things in passing from some of my colleagues who are crunchy-granola-eating-nostalgic-for-the-1960s types, so I read the article to learn more. Why is 
