Musings

As I marvelled at Vikram's lunar soft landing, my friend quipped, "How is this worthy of such grand celebration in 2023 when the US put humans on the moon and brought them back — in the 1970s!" Before I go about my response, let me also present you with the merits of his argument. Mr C. Rajamohan, an international affairs journalist,  writes , "While Chandrayaan 3 took nearly six weeks to get to the Moon, the failed Russian mission Luna-25 arrived there in a week. China’s Change-5 launched in 2020 took a week. In 1969, the US Apollo-11 mission, which landed the first men on the Moon, took just four days." (FYI: The Saturn V rocket, which powered the Apollo mission, remains the most powerful rocket ever built) Since there is a lot of talk about cryogenic rocket technology, let me also tell you that we were late by two decades in indigenising it. Cryogenic technology was first mastered by the US as early as 1963, followed by Japanese, French and Chinese. Russia ...

During my UPSC preparation, I often read many expert opinions championing the cause of free trade. After the 1991 economic reforms, any talk on protectionism is censored. However, these Free Trade Champions are often caught in a fix when asked about our burgeoning trade deficit with China. If open trade is supposed to increase efficiency and make your economy more competitive, why is India still a trading colony of China? Why is there a deafening silence from these people when India chose not to join RCEP?  Joe Studwell's How Asia Works attempts to answer these questions.  Studwell doesn't shun confronting the harsh truth - That protectionism is a device to hone your industries. When you are at your nascent stage of industrialization and when you quickly open your economy, how will your domestic businessmen ever get their hands dirty? How will they learn to create/make things?  This begs us to the next question. If protectionism is indeed the way, should we revert to p...