Just the other day I had been surfing the net for Rung references and came across this german website called living traditions link is http://www.living-traditions.at This was quite interesting and then I mailed to Ms. Sabine as I wanted to understand nature of the work published there ( was difficult to understand german even though I had done a primary course in it). There was no reply for sometime but then I got a pleasant surprise when Mr. Ashok Pandey gave me a call one evening. Mr. Ashok Pandey told me that he was husband of Ms. Sabine. Ms. Sabine and he had spent a lot of time in Darma, byankho and Bungba while doing research work. Mr. Ashok Pandey had spent so much time in Budi that he feels proud to call himself almost a Budiyal now. It was nice chat as he told that they had recorded a lot of material on Rung culture and were willing to share it with us. Mr. Pandey has started to publish some of his travels through blog now which you can see that at http://meresafarname.blogspot.com/ Hope we will all gain from this collaboration.

Comment (0)

Today if you go to a supermarket you cant miss to notice the Organic products on the shelves. In our hills it was always organic farming only and as this news item suggests, now hill region farming also can give good returns ( though it is a back breaking effort still). This time during Byankho trip I came across a few cultivated fields but they all looked promisingly green and healthy. I think all of us should try and find opportunities around us to market our native produce and someday when the roads have better reach we can really reap the benefits

Comment (0)

Last few days i have been trying to share a bit of my web surfing with rung mung. idea obviously is aggregate the diverse interests of our rung mung and see how collective benefits can accrue to us even in terms of shallow general knowledge. this is in the same spirit. i was discussing with someone yesterday as to how Chinese economic juggernaut is getting bigger and faster every year. How China's forex reserves are bloating every passing day. So much so that even chinese economists are worried about the size of it today. Our first (rude )brush with the term was in in late 80's when Narsimha Rao government took oath and Manmohan Singh was made finance minister. Country's accounts were in bad shape and forex reserves had plummeted to abysmal levels. That was the time when we came to know that country needed US dollars for imports and that was what forex reserve was supposed to be in other words how much US Dollars RBI had. How does the US dollar come to RBI. In simple way our people earn foreign exchange by selling products and services against US dollars and then we get a big chunk in the form of remittances from Indians abroad. The bigger form in post 80's decades has been foreign investor's money into different sectors of economy including foreign investment that goes into our stock markets. During cold war years India had avoided lot of these hassles by doing barter trade with communist block countries. Wikipedia defines Forex reserves as : "Foreign exchange reserves are the foreign currency deposits held by national banks of different nations. These are assets of governments which are held in different reserve currencies such as the dollar, Euro and yen." Recent figures show that more than 50% of the world's forex reserves in these countries :

Central Bank/Monetary Authority billion USD People's Republic of China > $875 (March) Japan > $864 (May) Republic of China (Taiwan) > $260 (May) Russia > $248 (June) Republic of Korea > $223 (April) India > $148 (March) Hong Kong > $125 (March)

China is reported to have crossed 1 trillion dollars recently!!! so whats the significance of all this. Big forex reserves ofcourse show that country must be exporting a lot of goods and services and county's economy must be healthy to attract investment. Big forex reserves also allows country to control its exchange rate by buying its own currency or the foreign currency depending on which direction they want to go. Ofcourse a big purse helps countries buy their requirements in the international market which are mostly for food/ oil/ defense related products. interesting story which i read somewhere recently was that currently Japanese interest rate stand at 0%. so Japanese investor takes a loan in yen and then converts this to US Dollars / Euro and then invests in foreign stock markets where they hope for growth in economy and bullish stock markets. Now the main problem in this is only the exchange rate. for example he converts 100 USD so as per today's rate ( 114.89 yen per usd) he will need 11489 yen. now suppose he invested in growing stock markets in Asia ( till recently BSE) or elsewhere. if he made 10% net profit, that means he made 110 USD but he will make money only in case the yen doesn't go up against i e he will get less yen per dollar. suppose it becomes 112 yen per usd so he will get 12320 yen. that means he made loss 831 yen ( which is 7.25 almost. suppose it remains the same at 114.89 yen per usd then he will make 1148.9 which is exact 10%. and if it becomes 115 yen per USD his profit rises even higher. One speculation is that much of the money was poured in commodity and stock market like this and when fears rose about Japanese interest rate going up many of the investors started selling and cashing out to save themselves. Slide of commodity market further complexed the stock market slide thereafter. In today's free market economy everything is connected like dominos and one sneeze at one end of the world becomes fever at the other end pretty soon. ( hope it didn't bore you guys )

Comment (3)