After my South African Debconf experience and especially the Doha, Qatar layover experience soon after my return back, a friend from Kerala had sent me a link of a movie called Pathemari . For various reasons I could not see the movie till I had come from the Hospital few months back. I would recommend everybody to see that movie if they want to see issues from a blue-collar migrant worker’s views.
Before I venture further, I think a lot of people confuse between economic migration and immigration. As can be seen in the movie, the idea of economic migrants is to do work and come back to his/her own country while immigration is more about political asylum, freedom of expression those kind of ideas. The difference between the two can be starkly seen in one of my favorite movies of all times ‘Moscow on Hudson’.
I have had quite a few discussions with some friends from Kerala last year and years before seeing this movie and had been sort of flabbergasted with the answers shared by them with me at the time. Most of them were on the lines of ‘we don’t want/need any development. I/We would go to X (Any Oil producing country) or west to make money and then come back home. Then why should we have industry ? While this is from personal anecdotal experiences while I was in the hospital, I also saw similar observations online as well. For e.g. Northwestern did an article which explains some of the complexity years ago . More recently has been an IIM, Bangalore Working Paper which corroborates the importance of Nursing to Kerala, the state as well as to the Indian economy as a whole. It’s a pretty interesting paper specifically for those wishing to understand aspects of Indian migration outward (nursing) and some info. about expectations from such migrants who want to join in the labor markets in Netherlands and Denmark (local language, culture, adaptions etc. all of which is good.).
In hindsight, I now agree with parts of the reasons shared by my colleagues and peers from Kerala in context to what has occurred in Goa in recent past and how that affected tourism of the state. While it has been few years since I last stayed in Goa for 2 weeks or more, I have always found it to be a little piece of Paradise tucked in the corner.
Also similarly in the context of median age of Americans rising which was shared in the previous article, I don’t see them replenishing their own ranks with young blood. The baby boom years for America seem to be over (for now and bit into the future). On the medicine side, since we have been talking about nursing. another observation is it seems that the American Government will cut off whole lot of Americans from medical care which Mr. Trump did few days back. The statements shared therein seems much a spin story as no numbers were shared or anything. There was this report I read last year which tells how an urban middle-class American family might suffer depending on how much medicare is cut.
I have seen something very similar happening in Pune, India, with quite a few insurance companies, medical practitioners, staff etc. giving needless medicines or tests where they aren’t needed, more so if you have insurance. Of course after you have availed it, your individual premium will rise as the ‘risk’ has increased but this is veering off the main story. There were quite a few patients who shared their horror stories and lessons with me during my stay in the hospital.
On the labor front I don’t see a way out for Americans to work. For e.g. Patels (a caste and a community) went to States and found that most Americans do not or did not like maintaining motels and they provided/took over the that service, partly as it’s a risky business and partly most motels are run-down etc. Apart from the spin being put in the context of both legal and illegal immigration in States, it seems, at least to me there would be more undocumented illegal Americans living then those coming legally and America would suffer economically due to that.
You can see Qatar doing it already as well as Saudi Arabia trying to be more open, while States seems to be dancing on another beat altogether.
Coming to the India perspective –
Note – Mrs. Sushma Swaraj, Ministry of External Affairs, India has been particularly active and robust in seeking welfare for Indian brethren trying to find work abroad.
One of the few good things that the present Government has done is have a pro-active foreign policy minister and being given a free hand to operate, she also seems to trust herself and others to do the right thing. Although she hasn’t done much apart from taking the lowest apples which were ripe for taking for years, it also tells/reminds that what apathy most Governments had towards foreign policy partly due to the socialist structure and culture in education, culture and even affairs of the State.
While I was reading on the subject I came across I,Daniel Blake . I saw the movie and shared with my mother. We were both shocked as we saw the trials that the gentleman had to go through and eventually his passing away. We thought that only bureaucracy in India was bad, now we come to know its the same at least as UK is concerned.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/28/freedom-great-deal-of-that-inside-the-eu-brexit
After seeing the movie saw the. The above does give some of the understanding why UK opted for Brexit and the expected fallout that probably will be.
Before I end I want to give a shout out, kudos to Daniel Echeverry for putting guake ported to gtk3 with dark theme. I really like the theme and do hope more themes follow in upcoming days, weeks and months.
Also another shoutout to Timo Aaltonen for getting a newer snapshot of xserver-xorg-video-intel for testing .
I do hope to explore a bit more of the new system, see what the new CPU, GPU can do in the coming days and weeks. I did some explorations about libsdl1.2 recently http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-sdl-maintainers/2018-January/002711.html and do hope to at least get some know-how where the newer integrated graphics and power options would become more useful in short and medium-term.
I also was thinking about the impending python3 transition and it seems that 90% of the big libraries are ready to make the transition. The biggest laggards seem to be mozilla, which I guess is still trying to deal with the fallout from firefox 57.0, the whole web-extensions bit etc.
Atm it seems a huge setback for mozilla, whether they will be able to survive is entirely on the third-party add-on developers. If that ecosystem doesn’t get enriched to the status they were before the transition, we could see firefox losing lot of users, at least in the short and medium-term.
Lastly, I did try to add a new usb device in the usb-database at https://usb-ids.gowdy.us/read/UD/1ecb/02e2 but there doesn’t seem to be a way to know whether that entry got accepted or not 😦
Experiences in the community 