Monday Reads - The Best of Politics, Economics, & Ideas

I am back with the reading list!

• How Britain has sold more than half its companies to foreigners. (Daily Mail)

Is this the
price that all nations have to pay for an increasingly globalised world? Not at
all — in fact, Britain is unique in having such a supine attitude to selling
off its crown jewels. Other countries adopt what’s come to be known as
‘economic patriotism,’ which involves putting tremendous obstacles in the path
of foreign bids. While India has bought
UK enterprises such as Jaguar Rover, it won’t allow British firms to take full
control of its own companies.

• Nigeria: A preview of an overcrowded planet. (NewYork Times)

In a
quarter-century, at the rate Nigeria is growing, 300 million people — a population about as big as that of the present-day United States — will live in
a country the size of Arizona and New Mexico.... [In] a typical
apartment block known as a “Face Me, Face You”... whole families squeeze into
7-by-11-foot rooms along a narrow corridor. Up to 50 people share a kitchen,
toilet and sink — though the pipes in the neighborhood often no longer carry
water. 

• Hypocrisy, thy name is the great Indian middle class.
  (Business Standard)

India is the most elitist, exclusive, unequal and stratified country in
the world, and we don’t even know it. The Indian elite – which smugly calls
itself the “middle class”, since it alone benchmarks itself globally – has
constructed walls of privilege for itself that are all the more powerful for
being invisible to many eyes. And if not invisible, then concealed behind other
words — “culture” and “merit”, for example. 

Swagato & Ninan of TOI lampoon the farce of issuing apologies in bilateral relationships between the triumvirate of the U.S.-India-Pakistan.