What Summits, Diplomacy, Lobbying, Fraud and Crises look like to Ignoramuses!

I like imagining the Eurozone rescue packages as pretty gift boxes that they hand over to each country during their financial crisis, with a card that says “With Best Compliments”… Feliz Navidad Spain, Feliz Natal (also Fatal) Portugal… Ho Ho Ho to Italy, Merry Christmas! :)

This year felt like a war of words. It has been full of countries opening channels of dialogues to solve problems, albeit ending each dialogue with everyone papering over their disagreements on what the problems are, what the solutions need to be, and how to collaborate in the future.

To add to this, there have been copious number of media-related conspiracies and political and business scandals that have been widely reported.

As I scan through the news and see what is happening in the world, I find myself looking more for rundowns of whatever is being discussed than opinions. I can’t even be bothered to piece the facts together and make inferences. Most often than not, the only inferences I seem capable of making are the obvious kind, like “Barkha Dutt should have been more careful!”

I am hopeless at keeping up with the summits. Take November alone… Even before we could get a grip on where everyone stood with respect to the issues being discussed at the G20, we were bludgeoned with APEC, NATO and EU-US summits. There was the economic recession to discuss, currency disputes, fiscal stimulus, financial regulations, protectionism, free-trade agreements, UN, World Bank and IMF reforms … and so on…

Moreover, it’s just like watching a soap opera! Now we have to wait for the Cannes and Honolulu summits in 2011 to learn about how everything will be resolved… or not! (Even soap operas have a shelf life. The Days of Our Lives has finally ended after 45 years!)

In contrast, the UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP16) in Cancun seems more calm, almost like a business vacation.

It gives us time to reflect on some things that have happened over the year that are not entirely our fault – like the earthquake in Haiti, followed by the earthquake in Chile, followed by the earthquake in China, followed by the earthquake and volcanic eruption in Indonesia, the Pakistan floods, and the flash floods in Ladakh, and my most favorite… Volcanic ash eruptions in Iceland that disrupted air traffic across Europe. “Sigh! Global Warming!”

Speaking of air traffic, there was that Ethiopian Airlines crash earlier in the year that killed 90 people, followed by another plane that killed the President of Poland and 96 others, which was then followed by the Air India plane that overshot the runway and killed 158 people. I also want to add here, the 74 people who drowned after a ferry-boat capsized in India recently!

Should we consider the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the mining accident in Chile as unfortunate catastrophes beyond our control as well?

Should we ignore the ethnic riots in Kyrgyzstan that killed 2000 Uzbeks and displaced 100,000 people?

Also the elections seem to have favored the center-left (albeit partially!) in several of my favorite countries, which is, I think, an Act of God to balance out all natural calamities!

As I consider these on a philosophical level, there are the Wikileaks dump and Barkhagate to take on board. There are also hordes of scandals related to money laundering by Indian ministers… India has also seen many changes to State governments over the last few days. I am learning quickly that world crises is inexhaustible!

Aside from crises and high-level meetings and other scandals, there is a need to understand the issues themselves. I haven’t the slightest idea how to go about comprehending the ongoing European sovereign debt crisis, or the US financial crisis, and the US foreclosure crisis. I haven’t still made sense of the Healthcare and Wall Street reforms we have seen over the last year… and I am still digesting the Mid-term elections! Did that devastation really happen?

Apparently, in most cases, learning from the past is not an option. It seems rather foolhardy to look at the European crisis now in light of the previous crises in Russia and Argentina. It is also near impossible to relate textbook theories with real life scenarios. And we can’t look at any one country or one issue in isolation of several other world events!

Speaking text book theories, sometimes I have to wonder if the media needs to ask itself what its role is in this collective order of the world! Perhaps they should spend a year contemplating media ethics, and how far they can go about their journalistic enquiry without making themselves synonymous with political brokering and corporate peddling.

I am in no way trivializing their role as mediators, but I find it irritating that they disrespect diplomacy! It can’t be right to destroy confidentiality and trust between foreign officials and hamper peaceful resolution of disputes!

That to me is more wrong than the media lobbying and causing scandal just to drive sales or forward personal agenda.

I can however see leaks as being useful to expose wrongdoing or make questionable policies known to the public. In the case of Wikileaks I don’t see this as being the case. James Rubin explains this point well.

For me, the "question of the moment" is “Is everyone going to be more straitlaced and inhibited in their talks in 2011”, and can that be good?