Favorite Links 29th May

From my mails to my BITS E-Group.

Hi All,
This is the first edition of my favorite links! The topics can be really varied as do my reading interesting based on the mood of the day to whats on my mind more often these days!! So here you go! And as they say
- World is a biiiiiiiiiiiiiig place and there are so many interesting things to know about it!! So keep at it!!

1. http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/may/29ram.htm - Ofcourse when someone voiced exactly what I thought of this topic, I couldn't but put this one up first!

2. Did you guys hear of 'The Great Famine' and 'The Great Leap' of China? These were two powerful and connected events of china that tell you a whole lot about how china views development and executes it.
Communism in china changed gears many a times and the ideologies changed... It's a very interesting topic to be kept for a longer mail at a later point!! Read these for a view of how thousands of farmers and citizens died of hunger when china thought of moving from a agricultural nation to a industrial nation!
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/02/16/reviews/970216.16ebersta.html
http://www.orbit6.com/crisf/misc/gr_leap.htm

3. Did you ever wonder what drug dealing as a trans-national industry look like? What does it consist of? Definitely not as many of those Don's that you see in the movies as the number of common men and women involved in the production, processing and most importantly transport of opium around the world. It's one industry that changes political equations across nations and if you thought it's a recent phenomenon, you are very faaaaaaar from truth. There is an interesting history to this very important business! And not so surprisingly, chinese were again the biggest producers at one point in time of opium!! Know about historical events like Opium wars in china??

There are a lot of sites on this topic however, my personal favorite is http://www.pa-chouvy.org/ (also www.geopium.org takes you to the same
site!)

4. And yet again, my favorite topic - Chinese blistering growth and possible impacts

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/may2006/gb20060516_457180.
htm
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_17/b3981039.htm