Lunch with Ashwini Kumar

Had a wonderful lunch today with Mr Ashwini Kumar, who is the Head of Chancery at the Indian High Commission. A last minute arrangement and am glad we both found the time to catch up. We met at Anglo Indian restaurant at Chijmes.

We spoke about the US India trade tensions. India has a $100b trade deficit with the US. This is created primarily  by the export of pharma, steel, aluminum, engineering goods and electronics to the US. Unfortunately there are very few things for India to buy from the US. The way out may be for India to purchase oil. Strange. I always thought that the US was dependent on oil, especially from the Middle East. It was the squeezing of oil supply by the Arab nations in the 1970s which led to a huge recession in the US and Europe. Now they are in a position to export oil to other countries. Amazing.

I wonder if the US was not such a consumer oriented society whether it would have such a large trade deficit with many countries especially China. Also the US stopped manufacturing products some time back because it was much cheaper to make them in low cost countries. Why would one now want to purchase more expensive products made in the US when you can purchase the same or better quality prices made elsewhere cheaper? What does it have to sell to the world apart from arms?  Even then not the latest technologically advanced ones? It does well in services but that is sold by US based companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon. I wonder if that counts towards the deficit accounting?

We talked about Singapore and India, its relations, connectivity, people and trade.

We briefly spoke about the politics of India and Singapore.

We also talked about the mainstream media reporting of events in India, in particular that of the recent world chess championship held here.

Finally good to know the High Commission is organizing a biryani festival in May!! Looking forward to that!