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| This is both the 'Origin Story' of the "Food-for-Wood" Brief, and a very brief précis of its central ideas. |
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Genesis:
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The "Food-for-Wood" Brief, authored by Gairik Banerjee (1985-1992) -- is NOT (and was not intended to be) Available to the general public.
| Gairik started to do the research that led to the "Food-for-Wood" Brief, as part of a (penal) College assignment during the 1984-85 college year, at St. Xavier's College, Calcutta, India. |
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Bertie Wooster-ling:
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Calcutta, India, 1985
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The city the Colonial English built to be the Capital of the British 'Eastern Empire' -- from Arabia to New Zealand, Africa to China ... |
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| Set far apart from other Colleges and Universities, St. Xavier's College was always deemed La-crème-de-la-crème, catering to the sons of the ultra-privileged -- very different even from other private, exclusive collegiate institutions regarded non-pareil by the cognoscenti. India's St. Xavier's Roman Catholic / Jesuit mission having started in the glory days of the Imperial British Raj at least two centuries ago, the college (now University) in Calcutta, India has long been widely considered to be India's premier collegiate institution, particularly for its Business baccalaureate program, having produced more Company Directors, Chairmen, Industrialists, Billionaires and Captains of Industry than any other establishment in the most populous place on earth, the South Asian Subcontinent. |
| Run rather regimentally by (fascist) Jesuits from Belgium, the students were treated more as they might be in a secondary school (or a Boot Camp for loutish malefactors), rather than as young adults, who might be presumed to have earned -- by dint of having matriculated high school with flying colors and secured a coveted place at the nation's most haloed, centuries-old premier college -- the right to some measure of respect, responsibility and dignity. |
| Attendance was strict, and a 'Roll Call' taken at the start of every class. If anybody was absent from any class, they were expected to have a jolly sound explanation, and could expect to be interrogated about it. And it could affect their grade. |
| The informal dress code was also very sober, and the boys were expected to BEHAVE in class, and even on the college grounds, as they might at a Cathedral Mass -- obedient, solemn and dignified, never drawing any attention to themselves with boorish pranks, or loud / disrespectful / rowdy talk, slovenly appearance, or even uncouth comportment. |
| Young Gairik had a propensity to "cut classes", i.e., to miss classes deliberately (truancy), so that he could embark on mindlessly petty yet unambitious adventures with his mischievious cohort of rebels without causes. What these geniuses avoided in cogent ideology, was more than recompensed by their arduous senses of humor and cavitas cranii unassailed by any travails of cerebral musculature. Gairik and his band of merry morons (delightfully tacky, yet unrefined) generally congregated outside the nearby gates (on 'Middleton Row') of their sibling establishment, "Our Lady of Loreto" Convent School and Christian Girls' College, run very similarly by a cabal of (terrorist) Catholic nuns, to hit on the chaste young ladies who attended that also-august institution, endeavoring (a time-honored tradition) to flirt, 'corrupt' and convince these vestal flora-ettes to entertain them and be their partners-in-crime (in enterprises à la getting outside of a spot of tuck (in the forbidden form of 'Beef Kebab Rolls' at Nizam's), going to movie theatres to catch a Matinée or three in the company of their youthful cannot-quite-be-called gentlemen callers, or make plans to attend raucous crepuscular soirées at nighttide (also alongside said fauna), et cetera -- behaviors that while commonplace in America and Europe, were deemed anathema in Indian aristocratic society of that day (particularly for college-goers 'cutting classes', neither officers nor gentlemen)! Miraculously, the boys' natural ineptitude occasionally failed to send the young ladies screaming for the hills; ergo, the boys (who worked mightily at it, toiling without requiem) succeeded (on rare occasions) to 'score dates' with select prey. |
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One Fine Morning:
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| Once Gairik had cut a 'Resource Studies' (Economic Geography) class at college, going instead to a novelty store, aptly named "Giggles", on nearby 'Park Street'. Whence he was caught 'red-handed', by no less a god-man than St. Xavier's ex-Principal, self-appointed morality policing Pasha and 24-7-365 proctor-at-large, Father Joris himself. |
| Very, very white and almost comically Francophone European even after a lifetime in India's tropics, the lithe and little Father Joris, a good foot shorter than the lanky Gairik, was a squat yet nimble priest, a Walloon from L'Ardennes, rumored to have played 'centre half' in soccer for Belgium in an earlier incarnation. The yappy little padre, as was his wont, lost no time in embarrassing the gangly Gairik by dragging him tout suite out of the store by the lapel of his jacket and on to the side-walk, and then speedily boxing his left ear with a flourish, in public, exhibiting all the panache and showmanship of a stubby homuncular lion-tamer sans flagellum at an open-air circus. The cassocked clergyman thereupon proceeded to threaten to appraise Gairik's pater and grandpater (whom he knew personally) of their scion's disgraceful digressions, and demanded to be informed of any reasons that Gairik might be able to imagine as to why he should NOT forthwith be rusticated from college, then and there (due process be damned). |
A crowd had gathered around them, basking in the spectacle of the rangy Xavierian Toff being overtly prosecuted thus. The proletariat AND L'bourgeoisie, petites et moyennes, of that time, pharisaic and holier-than-thou, demonstrated an innocent childlike mirth at any sight of a well-dressed son of the obviously upper classes getting a flagrantly Napoleonic dressing down ...
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CRUCIFY 'im sire -- H-H-H-humiliate the bloody light-skinned entitled drone-spawn pirate-lings of the parasitic aristocrats, don't you know!
Very ... er ... Bolshevik. |
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| Gairik knew that if the pater and grandpater found out, then, he, Gairik, would definitely be in water much hotter than that in which he currently found himself floundering. This realization promptly catapulted him into a prayerful mood of sombre reflection. |
| Indubitably, Gairik got down on his knees and started grovelling piteously -- with practiced ease, like a show-dog at a dog-show begging for a dog-biscuit on cue, drawing upon his finely honed (dating and mating) skills acquired through the diligent practice of his craft -- the prolific pursuit of gaggles of Les Belles Femmes of various ages and types, who inevitably exhibited -- (A) Wonder; (B) a surprisingly curious Shyness; and (C) a dastardly Reluctance to succumb to his not-inconsiderable suäveté and charm at all times. |
| Amazingly, or perhaps reflective of -- Gairik's consummate and fiendishly masterful mastery at the most pitiful bleating beggary: and all that in the dulcet prose, thespian oratory, soaring rhetoric and polished prosody apropos of Victorian Barrister Edmund Burke (in his "Impeachment of Warren Hastings") or the Bard (of Stratford-on-Avon), and the princeling pretender's skill at deftly choosing from a broad repertoire of stratagems 'canis catulus oculii' (puppy dog eyes) -- the blustering Belgian Ecclesiastic was checkmated, his inner pugilist forced to relent in the face of the (not really) contrite sinner's appeal for that Prison-Warden's more Christ-like Grace. |
| Imagine the spectacle of the crafty yet cherubic Gairik (normally quite the towering Brobdingnagian lad), faux-cowering meekly below his very short tormentor, the succubine martyr on this mock-rostrum astride the strada, affecting to look up to the cassocked cleric in pedantic piety and puerile penance, as, once upon a magical time many a century past, the mediaeval Iberian fool Sancho Panza might have gazed up in submission upon Don Quixote de La Mancha on his trusty Castilian steed. Calmed to the cockles by this sartorial hyperbole, Joris melted. Dissapointed, the crowd melted away. Thereupon, Tormentor and Tormentee also exited, ... stage left. |
| The two sat down for (Gairik to fork over a few farthings for Joris to enjoy) a cuppa at the Flury's Café nearby, while the latter orchestrated a psychotic Saddusuicidal psycho-analytical shallow-dive into the soul of his youthful and unwilling ward, delving into -- why Gairik favored truancy, why he was in College at all, whether he knew that unlike the role of 'Scarlet woman', there was scant profit in playing 'Scarlet gentleman', whether Gairik had considered, with his hulking presence, a career as a 'Railway Station Coolie', or a Bond villain, and how best Gairik was to be immolated for the day's villainy in a manner that befitted the sin, and provided a soupçon more motivation for the behavioral betterment of his future self. |
| Upon learning that Gairik had a career waiting for him as a trainee manager in the Tea Plantations up in the Darjeeling Himalayas after college, or perhaps the 'Tea Tasters' Rooms' at the largest Tea Brokerage and Auction House in Calcutta and London (the equivalent to a 'Wine Nose' or Sommelier in the Wine Trade) -- Joris made young Gairik an offer that forbade refusal, as under. |
| The day's trangressions would be overlooked and consequences held in abbeyance, if the rapscallion Gairik would commit to writing an University-level thesis, on any topic of Gairik's own choosing, curated by St. Joris of course, that was reflective of Gairik's academic acceptability, maturity (to mitigate his juvenile delinquency), ability to work hard and his capacity to function in the world of (respectable) Adults. |
The Grand Prize:
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If Joris liked said tome of Gairik's toils, the rascal would receive a passing grade and not be expelled, .... Oh Joy! |
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and |
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if the proactively and retroactively stony heart of Joris was not romanced by Gairik's opus, or felt that the young scoundrel had shorted his best efforts, well, that was ... left (insinuated but) undiscussed, ... with all the subtlety of Damocles, sword out of scabbard, ghoulishly salivating over a French peer astride l'estrade d' guillotine (in the embers of the Siege of Bastille) ... (gulp)! |
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Parry-Rally-Riposte
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| Ever the (farcical) scallywag swain, normally steadfast and tireless in his principled opposition to all manner of intellectual muscle-building (or, <<shudder||shudder||shudder>> -- anything even remotely reminiscent of 'gainful employment' needing effort (Gairik's, NOT others', our Heel Par Excellence was a reprobate yet warm admirer of otherfolk working up honest sweat), indeed ever opposing any activity that precluded the bona fide effortless pursuit of Whisky-Wine-Women-and-Song, with the firmness made exemplary in scripture by Balaam's Ass (in the Good Book -- Numbers 22: 23-29), Gairik, an iconic thoroughbred princeling Drone of yore, all his very young life trapped resplendent in a sorrowful world of Worker Bees, was facing martyrdom, his pedestrian plot for a little low-brow brigandry fatally foiled, jinxed, on pain of being jettisoned in jest by a jaunty jihadi Jehovah-loving Jurassic Jesuit from the jocose joys of juvenile jocular jack-assery. Yikes!!!! Our boy-rogue, anti-heroic gentleman thug and highwayman-hero Gairik, trapped in this cartoonishly bedevilled Theatre of the Absurd faux-real-life enactment, had just the weekend to come up with, viz, invent -- a suitably adult-sounding topic or worldly null hypothesis for his impending extra-curricular course of honest yeoman labor, a thesis of consequence backed by arguments epistemologically defensible, one that celebrated neither Wine nor Women, and not even a Song! The tragedy was pictureque and palpable, wringing tears in the eyes of Gairik's pet regiment of (well-dressed, idle-rich) nattering gnomes and goblin-cavalry of cretins (and even many a motley minion miscreant in the neighboring post codes). And yet he knew not, had a clue not, what topic to proffer. I tell you, sir, the chappie was more than a trifle panicked. |
| The pater and others had recently been blathering at the breakfast table about something called "Glass-nosed" or "Glasnost", and some girl called "Perestroika", in Russia, by all accounts. Some excitement, unrest and uncertainty there apparently. And a few of the bulk-tea-export-house chappies touched upon it as they tipped their caddies off the eighteenth hole to relax awhile by the Shamiana Green, as they downed their pints of mild-and-bitter at the Tollygunge Club after the rounds of afternoon golf under the setting Indian Sun. |
| In his urgency, Gairik decided to clutch on to this "Russia thing", and find out a wee bit more. |
| Something international and consequential like that sounded very adult and mature, surely boring enough to impress Joris, and would probably put Gairik in the good graces of his uncles and the pater later on in this saga, if it came out. And this Perestroika lass sounded like a damsel of the comely sort, to boot. Tally Ho, what! |
After a patronizing but informative lecture on the subject from a gibbering 'International Sub-editor' at The Statesman, at the time the city's pristine English-language newspaper (who happened to be a superlatively pompous, stupendously boring and nerdily bespectacled gargoyle of an older cousin), and a few vists to the library later, Gairik was
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mildly dissapointed that Perestroika had turned out to NOT be who, ... er ... what ... he had hoped for, |
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armed with all kinds of wisdom about happenings in the U of SSR, and |
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generally more than a smidgeon up-to-speed on International Current Affairs du jour. |
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... to Young Dr. Zhivago:
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| By Sunday night, Gairik had broadly cognized his Mind Map on how the whole bally unfolding Soviet mess lay out, and had loosely formulated how he would present the topic of his would-be (term paper?) to Joris, as under. |
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Due to the
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Long-term impact of the Cold War with America and the West, particularly President Reagan, |
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Inherent inefficiency of the Soviet economic system, |
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Rampant and systemic Soviet Corruption, and |
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Sharp intellect, honest humanity and thoughts and actions of Premier Gorbachev, which incubated Glasnost and Perestroika ... |
-- the Soviet Communist Party and its de facto controller, the KGB, along with the USSR itself -- are all likely moving towards a headlong COLLAPSE. |
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If and when this happens, the USSR will disintegrate into a number of constituent smaller countries, on religio-ethno-liguistic and / or other lines. |
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Russia itself would be the largest of those emergent countries, in all probability encompassing most of the territorial land-mass of the by-then-former Soviet Union. |
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But without any private ownership of business enterprises, and complete detachment from the very concept of a Market Economy, Russia and the other Newly Independent States would have to regress to becoming more primitive and simplistic Third World-like economies, based primarily on Resource-Extraction-and-Export. |
| Which begged the central question: |
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But how would they earn enough to feed their collective population of about 330 million people? |
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Getting Started:
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| On Monday morning at College, this above was what Gairik presented to Father Joris. |
| Joris was taken aback, having had very low expectations. But he liked what he saw, and approved promptly, albeit somewhat in shock. |
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| Gairik started on his project without any further delay. |
His first tasks were to
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State the central subject matter of this thesis / essay -- designing an economic and existential SURVIVAL LIFELINE for the Soviet Bloc generally, and RUSSIA specifically, in the event of the collapse of the USSR (and then inevitably the Soviet Bloc). |
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Assert the obvious -- that (in, and after, the event of collapse) the Russian Bloc's critical vulnerability and key import had to be FOOD (and perhaps Animal Feed). |
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Identify Lumber, or WOOD as Russia's key exportable resource under the would-be-prevalent cuircumstances, and then organize the facts and available evidence supporting this. |
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Present the facts and evidence that the only country that could help Russia to survive through those very hard times would be the UNITED STATES. |
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Propose a framework to make this happen on a sustainable and mutually beneficial basis. |
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Posit that basically, a proposed new trading model would have to emerge -- encased herein as a case-specific Brief. Gairik framed the Brief as, "Food-for-Wood". |
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The idea was straightforward enough.
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It was a story (imagined forward) about two countries, with their two (classes of) commodities (resources). |
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Either country had a surplus, each of one resource (but not the other), and a dire scarcity = strong need for the other resource, the one that they themselves did not possess, but of which the other country had a surplus. |
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In their own selfish interest, the two countries would both benefit greatly by setting up a simple exchange of their respective surplus resources with each other. |
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In a nutshell, it was to be (an innocent College essay) about two countries exchanging -- Food for Wood. |
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| And so was born -- the "Food-for-Wood" Brief. |
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The Unfolding:
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| Humorous and irreverent as its provenance was -- through a series of interesting and unforeseen twists and turns of the plot in this 'Comedy of Errors' -- this (initially) harmless jejune essay, "Food-for-Wood", which started out as a facile college assignment -- ended up as much more. |
| At an early phase of its development, purely by chance, the copy of an early draft of the document (was probably leaked, either by a smug Joris, or some other indiscreet / gosippy well-wisher, and) fell into the hands, initially, of some minor but well-meaning family friends and / or minor celebrities or socialites of the Calcutta 'Haute Société'. The ranks of these included St. Xavier's College's own Father Joris (ex-Principal of the most Elite college, well-known in the public life of the city, and widely respected by everyone who knew him, or knew of him), Dr. C.R. Irani (the then Editor-in-Chief of "The Statesman" newspaper), Neil O'Brien (Member of Parliament and Head of Oxford University Press), Satyajit Ray (Filmmaker, Litterateur, Cultural Icon), Russi Mody (Chairman - Tata Steel, Air India, etc.), Dr. Rafiq Zakaria (Political Scientist), John Mason (Prominent Educator), Ajit Narain Haksar (Chairman, ITC), Sir Robert Wright, KCIE (British Raj colonial icon, Businessman, Leading Voice for Wildlife and Conservation Activism, Director - World Wildlife Fund), Maharajah Digvijay Singh (Polo Captain, horse afficionado and ship broker), Vijay Vittal Mallya (Industrialist & Politician), Rashid Kidwai (Marketer & Corporate Executive), Prince Madhavrao Scindhia of Gwalior (Indian Royal & Politician), Tony Hayward (Industrialist and Brewer-Baron), Sir Michael Lord Wardsley (Stockbroker, Financier, Underwriter), Ismail Merchant (Movie Producer and Director, Hollywood Celebrity), His Holy Eminence Lawrence Trevor Cardinal Picachy (Archbishop Emeritus of Calcutta, Plenipotentiary Vatican Envoy to South Asia and Spiritual Leader to Mother Teresa, Calcutta's most revered citizen), Aroon Purie (Economic Journalist and Publisher), Lalit Mohan Thapar (Industrialist), B. M. Khaitan and Gordon Fox (Tea Plantation Barons, 'Merchant Princes' of the Global Tea Trade and Plantations Agro-Industries), et al. |
| The above were mostly part of the general social circle close to Gairik or his family. But oddly, the early draft document also fell into the unlikely hands of some local U.S. Consular and Foreign Office functionaries in India. One of these latter, the then U.S. Consul General to Calcutta, the Hon'ble George Sherman, upon reading the document on a lark, contacted Gairik, and invited him to lunch at the U.S. Consulate in Calcutta. Never a man to turn down a free meal, Gairik did accept, and shortly thereafter had a pleasurable meeting (and libations) at the Consulate General, with the good Mr. Sherman, and a few others whom the latter had also invited. They discussed the paper that Gairik was writing -- Gairik's family background and upbringing (a conversational practice very ritualistically Indian), Gairik's favorite aspects of college life, why he was writing this paper, why he had picked this particular, seemingly obtuse topic, the sources and methodology of his research, why he drew certain conclusions, or made certain recommendations, etc. On the face of it, the lunch and the discussions were casual, but also quite surprisingly in-depth. |
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The Plot thickens:
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| After the in-person meeting with Gairik, Consul-General Sherman decided to escalate the document up: to more senior stake-holders in Washington DC (a few important American statesmen and national security strategists -- including former Ambassador to India, Dr. John Kenneth ("Ken") Galbraith of the Brookings Institution). |
| A few days later, Gairik was quite shocked to get a call from Dr. Galbraith's secretary, who connected him to her boss. After almost an hour on the phone, Dr. Galbraith invited Gairik to come and see him, at the American Embassy in New Delhi, and spend a few days in Delhi, meeting some American visiting scholars and diplomats who were coincidentally also very interested in the subject on which Gairik was working, adding that his office would make all the arrangements for Gairik's visit. In a bit of a daze, but feeling flattered (and uncharacteristically important), the boy in Gairik excitedly blurted out, "Sure", although a little unclear about what sort of big-boy 'tamasha' (shenanigan) he was signing up for. |
| A few weeks later, Gairik was at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. He was received and ushered in to meet with Dr. Galbraith in a very resplendent private office, for a brief one-on-one meet-and-greet over a cup of coffee. Soon after that, he accompanied his host into a very formal and grand conference room. Gairik was seated at one end of a massive conference table, that could easily seat at least three dozen people. Dr. Galbraith had earlier explained that some of the people Gairik would be meeting shortly -- had flown in from the US, or other US Embassies and stations (some of these being US military posts), just to meet Gairik, and to discuss his research. Wow -- that made Gairik nervous. |
| By now, Gairik was both astounded and more than a smidgeon scared, and not just of making a fool of himself (of which he had plenty of experience). For God's sake, these chaps weren't just friends of his pater, or his uncles, or from the country clubs, egging him on affectionately like a favorite pedigreed puppy or thoroughbred foal, or buying him a gin-and-tonic to encourage him! Why were these obviously important people from worlds away so interested? ... in what was -- after all ... a college assignment, just a bunch of stray thoughts, the product of Gairik's fevered imagination vomitted and comitted to paper -- the wannabe grandiose meanderings of this ignominious college penalty-piece or sin offering, written by an 'accidental tourist' of a barely post-pubescent Indian boy who knew too little! What had he done? Surely this was all getting out of hand! |
| At that conference table, Gairik remembered seeing, amongst others, several tall, handsome men of soldierly bearing, broad of shoulder and square of jaw, very Nordic in appearance, with very short-cropped hair, ice-blue eyes, fixed stern half-smiles, in military uniforms with lots of colorful regalia on their chests. Talk about being 'dressed to impress'. Outside the embassy, there had been U.S. Marines, toting M16-esque machine guns and ammunition bandoliers on their camouflage fatigues, hawkishly guarding the massive and fortress-like premises. Even inside the Embassy's palatial grounds, similarly dressed infantrymen stood at posts all around, looking to be on high alert. Americans clearly do intimidation really well. |
| Without going into the minutiae of the discussions that followed, suffice to say that it was an exercize of very deep and detailed scrutiny, by a group of people who clearly had a lot expertise and experience in various areas related to what Gairik was writing about. |
| The meetings and other protocol events lasted into the weekend, with Gairik staying on in Delhi for the duration, as a guest of "Ken" (Dr. Galbraith). |
| At the end, Ken asked Gairik what his career and life plans were, post-College. Upon learning that Gairik was trying to decide between becoming a trainee Asst. Manager in a remote Tea Plantation some 7,000 feet up in the Himalayan wilderness, or, an apprenticed Tea Taster at a Tea Brokerage and Auction House, Ken seemed rather taken aback. He asked Gairik if he had considered continuing his higher studies, in the same field as his current research, perhaps at a premier American University? |
| Studying in America was surely quite expensive, and Gairik did not think he was a good enough student to gain admission to any good University, let alone get a scholarship. And he didn't want his family to spend more money on something like that. Besides, he was looking forward to a career in Tea, ever a safe bet in Calcutta (the international center of the Tea industry), with good money and a stable career to be had, with lots of golf and a generally great country club lifestyle, steeped in the remnants of the jolly old British colonial empire, where time stood stillbound in a tranquil bygone era of de rigueur genteel languor, where bow-ties, dinner jackets, Pathan laskars, Raajpoot cavalrymen, Goorkha sepoys, aproned chambermaids, turbaned footmen and personal valets / batmen in tails, and riding your horse English Saddle were still the lingering norm centuries past their expiration, "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife ...". |
| Unused to hearing about the footprint of English Colonialism portrayed in such terms of nostalgic fondness, and from a young man of color to boot, Ken listened to Gairik, with a bit of a quizzical grin, half-closed eyes and furrowed brow, as if trying to internalize the innate romance of Gairik's words, but failing. |
| Afterwards, he told Gairik that he was going to send a copy of the draft "Food-for-Wood" Brief to a few people he knew, connected to a few good U.S. Universities and Think-tanks (whatever those were), just to get their thoughts about it. |
| And then the visit .... ended. |
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| Gairik headed back to Calcutta. |
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Westward Ho:
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... Go West Young man ... |
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| Gairik's regular routine soon returned. The visit with Ken Galbraith and his American Vikings gradually faded into the fabric of his memory, as more mundane events and humdrum excitements took over his mental real estate and firmly anchored Gairik back into the pedestrian normality of the life he was used to. |
| Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, as the work on the Brief continued. Joris loved it, bursting with the zealot's benevolent pride. He showed it off to a bunch of people he knew, and arranged for Gairik to meet or speak with them. They were all quite encouraging. Some of them asked interesting questions related to the subject, sometimes prompting Gairik to delve deeper and do the work to find more answers (which of course just added on to the paper, making it longer and longer, and in some cases, less focused). A few urged Gairik to come to work for them. It was an overall flattering experience for the young accidental scholar. |
| In the short-term, the biggest impact on Gairik was that -- once disinterested in studies and a frequent truant -- he started to really enjoy college and his college work. The professors all recognized him now, and admired him, a small parade of Xavierian rodomontade, pride in one of the College's own. One Prof. N. Vishwanathan -- an erudite Oxonian scholar of the English language, a TV News Anchor, writer and an actor of some repute -- became quite close to him, and told him that he thought that Gairik spoke and wielded the English tongue about as well as he had ever heard anyone do so, including native-born ethnic Englishmen of high birth and education, and his time at fair Oxford. Not to be braggadocious, that was a remarkable compliment (though possibly an embellishment of speech), and really buttressed the young Gairik's confidence and his strife to excel in English articulation and wordsmanship. His orientation changed radically, from chasing girls and partying nights and drinking like a shoal of whales on bank holiday -- to reading voraciously and an ever-growing fascination with his accidental labor of love, the "Food-for-Wood" Brief. And he became more and more interested in other things laterally related to Russia and the Slavic lands, and the other lands and peoples of the East of Europe, their history, philology, culture, resource profile and in particular their geography. Unexpectedly, it turned out he had a real knack for this domain of scholarship. |
| This of course was the sort of outcome that Joris had intended: the Bad Boy Gone Good! He more than kept his end of the bargain, fondly watching Gairik finish his baccalaureate magna cum laude; and his family never found out what had happened, that had led to all this. |
| Even though the college assignment was completed, the Brief had developed a life of its own. The instability and rapid institutional disintegration of the USSR continued. And through it all, strangely, the Americans -- who had come into the picture thanks to Ken Galbraith -- kept up the engagement with Gairik. As their conversations continued, in parallel to the unfolding events in the Sovietscape, more and more questions continued to be asked, and Gairik, almost out of habit, or impassioned addiction -- kept on working on the subject. |
| It appeared that after reading the "Food-for-Wood" Brief (as it had been at the time), Ken Galbraith had concluded that the information therein contained (and conclusions drawn, courses of action recommended), if properly further researched and developed, could be an uniquely valuable resource to guide certain aspects of America's Post-Soviet Policy Road Map, that was likely to have a significant impact towards a beneficial post-Cold War outcome for all sides, in the years and decades to come. |
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| One day in early 1988, Gairik got a call from a gentleman at one of the US 'Ivy League' schools, who said that he had read a draft of Gairik's Brief given him by Ken Galbraith. The caller's main concern seemed to be whether Gairik had (yet made the mistake of having) talked to any other University or Think-Tank about taking his research there, before giving Yale a chance to make its pitch. It seemed that they were starting an inter-disciplinary program on Geopolitical Strategic Forecasting and Post-Soviet Policy Research, and the Food-for-Wood Brief fit right in. It was emphasized that -- with full support from the likes of Dr. Henry Kissinger and Dr. Samuel Huntington, various think-tanks and the Pentagon -- funding would be plentiful. |
| As the man had foretold, several other U.S. Universities also contacted Gairik shortly thereafter -- Dartmouth, Harvard, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, UPenn, Georgetown -- with similar narratives. And all offered quite attractive incentives. |
| Stunned and more than a little overwhelmed, Gairik asked Father Joris, and also sought the counsel of several others, including persons he had interacted with about the Brief, and elders in his family (as is conventional in Indian culture). The general consensus was that, at the time -- under the circumstances, a higher education in America was a better choice, than a career in Tea, for Gairik. |
| Cutting a long story short, in 1988, Gairik moved from India to the U.S., to begin his formal academics in conjunction with the furtherance of the "Food-for-Wood" Brief. |
|
Top-line Synopsis:
|
| At University, a certain amount of time and effort had to be expended on mastering the quantitative analysis and computer skills mandated in the new environment. But in addition to coursework, Gairik was able to focus his attention on continuing his research on the Brief, using the much greater resources now available to him to do so. |
| Gairik had the opportunity to meet with many great scholars, boffins, thinkers, policy-makers, and thought-leaders, mostly from the Washington establishment. |
| The turning point was meeting William Jefferson Clinton, Democrat of Arkansas -- one of the "'Beautiful Minds' of the era, who became a friend, guide, philiosopher and de facto patron supporting Gairik's work. His interest in and grasp of Gairik's subject matter was awe-striking, and the main source of inspiration for the young Indian, pushing him to work with greater dedication and diligence than ever before. |
| Gairik had met with Governor Clinton, and then Presidential Candidate Clinton, on numerous occasions to discuss his findings and address the many questions and nuanced interests that Mr. Clinton had. Along the way, Gairik had de facto transitioned to becoming a Democratic Party establishment 'staffer' of sorts, with responsibility to help develop policy positions affecting (post-Soviet) U.S.-Russian Relations. |
| The winter of 1990-91 saw the ramp up to Bill Clinton's Democratic Primary Run. And Gairik, along with thousands of other idealistic young men and women swept off their feet by the Governor's razor-sharp intelligence, eidetic memory, passionate humanity, wry humor and easy charm -- clamored to be a part of the fledgling campaign of this unknown charismatic Democrat from a lesser-known State, then universally held unlikely to win the June 9th, 1992 Primary election for the Democratic Party nomination. |
| Nonetheless, Gairik's unique grasp of East European geopolitics made him the sole available and obvious choice for Post-Soviet Policy Advisor, allowing his campaign work and his scholarly work to converge and proceed in unison. On the job, Gairik got the opportunity to work with Viktor Lukin (Russian Ambassador to the US, 1991-94), Jack Matlock (US Ambassador to Russia, 1987-91), Jack Downing (CIA Moscow Station Chief) and Richard Palmer (CIA Field Operative, Russian Raions / Interior), Clair George (Directorate of Operations), Steve Coll (Conflict Zone Reporter, Author), and countless other fantastic resources who helped him organically frame and cement his understanding of the Geopolitics of Russia and Autocracies. |
| Thereupon, over the period ensuing, Gairik was goaded, cajoled, convicted and incentivized to do whatever more he could do, to develop the information and his ideas further, but from a very different perspective (from when he had started), that of the U.S. Government's policy (and long-term military preparedness planning) apparatus, not only of the then George H.W. Bush administration, but the (anticipated) transition to a Bill Clinton administration. |
|
| In late 1991, the "Food-for-Wood" Brief was turned over (through Ron Brown and Vernon Jordan, advisers close to him) to the personal staff of Presidential Candidate (then Gov.) Clinton (who had been driving the project, for awhile by that time, and was already the primary intended audience for the entire body of work). |
| In March, 1993 (shortly after President Clinton took office in the White House), the Food-for-Wood Brief was (it is believed, 'Classified' and then) taken over, transferred to the "Special Activities Div.", Fort Belvoir, Virginia, USA. |
| Of the remaining working notes and research documentation not formally considered part of the Brief itself, most of that was also taken over by Special Activities, and it is believed -- redacted and sealed, under informal order from the Pentagon (and then allowed to be retained by Gairik). |
| Beyond this, no comment or information is available, NOT even through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) (5 U.S.C. 552). |
| The remaining (unredacted, unsealed) portion of the contents -- retained by Gairik -- was then disposed off: to "Dai-Ichi Kangyō", the banking arm of a Japanese conglomerate, which purchased it (supposedly to use the information therein contained) for their Group's own internal strategic planning and expansion. |
| In the early 2000s, Dai-Ichi ceased to exist as a public entity, being folded and buried into some other large Japanese conglomerate. |
| |
| Below is a very simplistic top-line recap of the ideas and matter contained in the "Food-for-Wood" Brief. |
|
Historic Backdrop:
|
| In the late 1980s, the world was going through a very difficult time of transition. After "Glasnost" and "Perestroika", the (erstwhile) Soviet Union was in a state of complete chaos, disintegrating, but still remained a nuisance and a threat to peace globally, with its vast arsenal of rusty, moth-eaten, semi-functioning nuclear warheads, much of it in the hands of a cabal of dangerous sociopaths, formerly paramilitary-trained, many of whom were alumni of the ex-Soviet Inteligence (and Secret Police) community, executioners and trained malefactors (for instance, Russian President Vladimir Putin was a KGB Interrogator in East Berlin, before returning to St. Petersburg and working as a taxi driver). |
| The Soviet economy, with almost zero private enterprises in those days, had long been based on the State, under complete control of the Communist Party (in turn controlled by the KGB), owning all resources and means of production. With the State and Communist Party in tatters, and the Collective Farms and Factories, and even stores and shops shutting down, there were no private businesses or businessmen to keep on producing, and selling, and paying employees for work performed -- to keep the economy functioning, even if on crutches. The people, having been spoon-fed from cradle to grave by the Patronal State for 3 generations, did not really understand the concept of money, or 'prices', or monetory value, or a 'Market Economy'. There did not appear to be any viable economic solution to keep the then approximately 330 Million inhabitants of the Soviet Bloc -- fed, warm and alive. |
| The 'Growing Season' in the cold North was very short, meaning that there would be very little time to grow the food needed to support the people and the livestock over the long, brutally cold winters, of which -- one, maximum two -- would obliterate most of the livestock herds that feed the human population. And with a collapsed State, there was neither money, nor means (for example, a functioning domestic transportation infrastructure) to import the necessary goods. In the short term, imports could perhaps be substituted by charitable donations in kind from the West. But even for that to happen, the market mechanisms to obtain the food (and feed) from the outside world, and distribute it within the Russian landmass, to the exact places where it would be needed, across the vast expanse of the land -- did not exist. |
| Disaster stared the Russki mir (Russian world) in the face. |
|
From 2nd World to 3rd World:
|
| Sophisticated industrial activities and work processes take a long time to develop and stabilize and become the norm. The more sophisticated and complex an industry, the more sophisticated the management input it needs. This kind of management, or entrepreneurship, did not exist in the Soviet Union, a Goliath of a country run largely by deeply inefficient and highly corrupt kleptocrats. And it would take many years to create and transition to a Market Economy, years they did not have. |
| Once the Soviet State and the Communist Party (and the KGB, the notorious Secret Police, et al) had imploded, there were very few choices to keep industrial or economic activity going. |
| Only viable, or even possible, were a few simple, very primary industries, based on Resource-Extraction of (highly in-demand, yet technology-light) 'raw material' goods that are very easy to extract, store and transport to ocean ports, goods that do not need any further processing to be able to be sold, and to be handed over to shippers and buyers, who needed to be very easy to find and connect with, and supply to. |
|
Russia's Easy-to-Exploit Resources:
|
| Russia did (and still does) have such comodities, in spades -- Lumber, Natural Gas, Petroleum, Coal, Gold, Uranium / Nuclear Fissile Materials, a few other key minerals. |
| |
| Global Warming had not yet expanded the 'growing season', and Russian WHEAT / GRAIN Production -- to (the now-current) high levels. |
| |
| All the great NATURAL GAS pipelines had not yet been constructed or operationalized as they were years later, so NatGas was not yet in a position to become the main driver of the Russian economy. |
| |
Further, Russian OIL (PETROLEUM) was also not in a position to be the Silver Bullet.
| Much of Russia's Oilfield areas lay in brutally cold, impenetrable Arctic Permafrost -- very hard to operate in. |
| Much of it lay far below the surface (necessitating the drilling of much deeper bore holes). |
| Russia's historically colossally inefficient and undisciplined drilling practices had over-drilled the oilfield areas (too many holes drilled into the same contiguous underground reservoirs where the oil was located) -- to the extent that the Oil Pressure was much lower than in other parts of the world, and took a lot more effort and expense to extract. |
On top of all of which -- Russian Oil has a high Paraffin wax content. In those days, this alone cost on an average about 8 dollars a barrel to remove. In the late 1980s, World Oil Prices were low. Brent Crude, or West Texas Intermediate, or Kuwaiti Sweet Crude were all selling below USD 15 per barrel. As such, Russian Oil was barely viable.
| (Obviously, those numbers and that economics was about to change, drastically, but nobody knew then that it would.) |
|
|
| |
| Russia's plentiful COAL (say, in the Novokuznetsk basin) was super cheap to extract (with no environmental protection concerns by the Russian authorities), but it was a very bulky commodity, and expensive to transport (relative to its sale price). |
| |
| NUCLEAR MATERIALS were dangerous and many potential buyers suspected to be persona non-grata (who would use the same to make nuclear bombs, and the like), and therefore any aspect of the processing and sales of Nuclear materials would be shut down by the West, and the rest of the Free World. |
| |
| GOLD would not generate enough revenue to feed such a large population, and in any case, its over-production might crash the world's prevailing gold prices. |
| |
| That really just left LUMBER. Russia's vast Siberian Taiga contained enormous quantities of lumber, that was cheap to source. Lumber was very easy to harvest. The equipment, infrastructure, expertise, personnel, and other practicalities needed to sustain any simple operation of logging, and getting the logs ready to load onto a railcar headed straight to a convenient ocean port -- all existed, and could be activated within days, if the impetus and will to do so existed. |
|
The Resilient Trans-Siberian:
|
| Although much of Russia was collapsing alongside the State, and the Communist Party and Secret Police that ran it all, there were a few parts of the Russian State Machinery that just kept on running. |
| This included the Red Army, historically the challenger to the KGB in Kremlin / Politburo politics, the Army was manned by Soldiers, programmed to keep on functioning, whether they got paid or fed or not. |
| And the soldiers, and their leaders, the Generals, kept on working at their posts, desperate to keep Russia's borders from being breached in those increasingly uncertain times, by enemies foreign or domestic. |
Russia's domestic air and road transport infrastructure was weak and shaky. So, the challenging (largely East-West) movement of troops and the critical military logistical supplies across Russia's vast expanse -- occured largely using the Trans-Siberian Railway, which, consequently, was de facto controlled by the Army at that time. And as such, at a time when much of Russia and its institutions were grinding to a halt in slow motion -- Trains on the Trans-Siberian Railroad quietly just kept on running, across the entire endless expanse of this gigantic Northern land -- from the Baltic Sea, through the Great Northern European Plains and meadowlands, the windswept plateaus and desolate
snow-drenched mountain ranges, the frozen arctic marshes, the Steppes, the Taiga and the Tundra, to the chilly North Pacific Ocean.
|
|
Factors favoring forestry:
|
| AND along the route of the Trans-Siberian lay many small Russian hamlets, where logging from the surrounding deep forests of the Taiga had long been an established tradition, with raw, barked and hand-skinned logs being loaded by the locals on to long-bed open-top freight-cars headed to the Pacific port of Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan, or the Blagoveshchensk-Heihe Manchurian Railhead junction interchange on the Amur River. |
|
Measuring 'Recession':
|
Interestingly, how do economists determine and measure a 'Recession'?
| • |
Through a basket of 'Major Economic Indicators'. |
| • |
Each 'Major Economic Indicator' (MEI) is an item that is considered to be of crucial importance in the functioning of the economy. |
| • |
Each MEI is assigned a 'weight' value it occupies within the total basket. That weight is a fractional vakue of the MEI's importance within the basket, the sum of all the weights being equal to 100. |
| • |
The prevailing price of each MEI is measured at regular intervals, to determine its price movement. |
| • |
And each time, using the assigned weights, a 'Weighted Average' is calculated for all of the MEIs (within the basket) taken collectively together. |
| • |
Then that value for that period is compared to its corresponding counterpart value for the prior period. |
| • |
That delta (expressed as a percentage) represents the change in price over that period within that economy. |
| • |
If that delta is a negative number, for 2 consecutive quarters running, it is generally considered that that economy 'is in recession'. |
| • |
And one of the MEIs with the most weight -- is the number (and/or value) of 'Housing Starts', i.e., new construction projects that have started during a given quarter. |
| • |
This is important. If the amount of Construction activity goes up or down significantly -- then that has a disproportionately high impact on the calculation of growth performance for a given period in that economy. |
|
| For the Administrators of an economy, it is therefore important to keep the Construction activity trending slightly upwards at all times, to cause the perception (and generally, the reality) of the economy being in good health, growing at a steady, healthy pace. |
|
Meanwhile, in America:
|
| On the other side of the Pacific, the US and Canada were also deep in a recession. The economy was doing badly as the Reagan administration sunset into the sequel George H.W. Bush administration. |
| The construction industry, residential home-building in particular, which has always been one of the bulwarks and bastions of the American economy and way-of-life, was at an all-time low. This was in part because of the shortage of building lumber ('2-by-4s' and such) that is the most basic ingredient of American home-building. This in turn was largely because of the then ongoing 'White Owl' endangered-species-extinction controversy, which was shutting down logging activity in the highly productive Forestry hinterlands of the 'Pacific North-West', where most of America's building (and other) lumber originates. The great saw-milling centres of Washington State, Oregon, and elsewhere -- Olympia, Tacoma, Willamette, ... 173 mill-towns in Oregon alone -- were shutting down, from having no logs to process. |
| This in turn meant that millions of construction workers throughout America and Canada were out-of-work, with no money coming into their pockets, left wondering where their next meals would come from. |
| |
| American farmers, amongst the most productive in the world, were still over-producing food. |
| And this was also causing disaster, by crashing the price of basic food commodities to below what the farmers needed to earn (in order to sustain their farms and families). |
| Which leads to the US Government having to subsidize Agriculture by paying farmers 'support payments' to keep their farms fallow, in order to reduce food production and supply, and stabilize food prices and the national economy. |
| In furtherance whereof, vast quantities of Grains, and Meat (mainly beef and pork) and Dairy products were being trucked from the midwestern farm states to the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, to be dumped and taken out of circulation. |
|
Counterbalancing Imbalances:
|
It was at this quixotic point in time, in the mid-to-late 1980s, that Gairik (then a College student), had noticed (completely by accident and with no expertise whatsoever) -- this strange twisted pair of compensatory imbalances (or counterbalancing discrepancies if you will), as under.
| A. |
Russia, about to starve for food and the basics, but with lots of lumber to make and sell, |
| |
and |
| B. |
America, on the one hand -- with a huge problem on its hands of having to spend a lot of money to dispose of excess food stocks, and yet, on the other hand -- being pushed deeper into a recession, brought on at least partially because of a lack, and consequent rise in prices, of building lumber. |
|
Gairik realized that IF these two phenomena could be matched, coupled and framed into a single bi-national combined policy challenge, THEN Russia and the USA could just barter 'Food for Wood'. And both would avert their respective disasters, and live happily ever after, right? |
|
Whoa there, Not so fast:
|
| Well, unlike in Fairy Tales, global catastrophes are rarely that simple, or their solutions that simplistic. |
| For one thing, Russia did not have a government with the wherewithal to even conceive, let alone implement -- such a deal. The internal administrative systems were in a state of collapse. There was almost NO communication between the Kremlin in Moscow and the distant and lowly Raion adminstrations, particularly in far away Siberia. |
| As an example, the Governors of some of these vast Oblasts, Okrugs or Krais (adminstrative units in the Russian system) -- some ruling over territories as large as India or Argentina, i.e., about 1 Million Sq.Miles -- had never even been invited to visit the Kremlin or meet with the Moscow bosses. |
| And even if a functioning Kremlin Apparatchic could be found with the initiative and courage to pursue a bigger goal like this, punching far above the weight of their pay-grade -- WHO would they talk to? |
| The United States of America was the only country that had the food stocks and all the other resources (and circumstances), that would be needed to avert disaster in Russia. |
| The American civil servant class was neither equipped nor authorized to initiate, or participate in such conversations. The US Policy Framework and Best Practices did not allow for dialogs like this at the time. The US State Department could act, but that would take years of bureaucratic negotiation and boatloads of paperwork, input from different US Federal Agencies (like the USDA, Commerce, Housing, etc.), not to mention Congressional approval, authorization and oversight -- and that's even prior to the work order reaching any Attaché or other trade officer in a chronically understaffed American Embassy or Consular station in Russia. |
| The odds of making this happen through the official
inter-governmental channels looked pretty bleak. |
|
Laissez faire to the rescue:
|
| But the beauty of America lies in its fantastic private enterprise system. If a suitable entrepreneur or corporation could be sold this idea, then they could move heaven and earth to make it happen, and turn a profit, to boot. |
| But who? |
The Forestry / Logging industry had the most skin in the game, the most to gain by laying their hands on all that Russian lumber for the North American log-starved sawmils. And the largest players in the forestry and lumber space were:
| Weyerhauser |
|
West Fraser |
| Georgia Pacific |
|
Hampton Affiliates |
| Emmerson Sierra Pacific |
|
Resolute Forest Products |
| InterFor |
|
CanFor |
| Tolko |
|
Idaho Forest |
|
| Gairik posited that the U.S. Federal Government, through its many influential tentacles -- direct and less direct -- could lean on any of these doynes of "Big Lumber". |
| If one (or a combination) of these big companies were convinced of the opportunity that existed, they could assign an enterprising young "think-on-your-feet"-type executive (let's call him "Joe American"), somebody on the CEO-fast-track, with lots of initiative, gumption, guile and a robust expense account -- to go to work making the whole thing a reality. They'd have to figure out a way to enter Russia, hire a local team of suitable Russian Assistants and Interpreters, and travel with their newly forged teams to the capitals and railway-side hamlets of these remote Siberian Oblasts, and meet with local Governors and Mayors in charge of the local Administrations and the welfare of the citizenry under their charge. Our Joe American would have to convince, motivate, and as needed, cajole, goad, and/or incentivize the Russian Apparatchiks to play ball and greatly escalate the local logging activity, and load more and more logs onto (suitable) railway freight-cars on the Trans-Siberian, on trains bound for the Vladivostok port railcar unloading yards for bulk freight. |
| Once in Vladivostok, there was no dirth of ships on the global freight markets. Booking the cargo for pickup at Vladivostok, and delivery to any of many suitable North American Pacific Northwest ports, large and small -- was the easy part. |
| Working through the finer points and details with the stevedores, longshoremen and Customs Officers and Clearing Agents, and local stateside truck-lines to carry the freshly-unloaded Russian logs to the lumber intake points at the awaiting North American sawmills was likewise just a normal day's work for the people in the trade. |
| A crucial facilitating step would need to come from the U.S. Customs and Excise authorities at this stage in the plot. The incoming logs must be made tax-exempt, the customs duty levied on them being set at 0.00% (or even less). |
| And this is what Gairik recommended in the Brief. |
|
Ripple effect:
|
| Once the Russian lumber (costing a very small fraction of what the mills were used to paying) was processed and ready to sell as Building Lumber -- it was simply to be delivered (through the Supply Chain's domestic U.S. distribution network) to the warehouses and stores that sell building materials -- like Lowe's, or Home Depot, or Ace Hardware, who were ready to sell the high-quality Russian lumber (with the new and drastically lower intake prices), also at much lower selling prices, passing on a great portion of their savings, and simultaneously enjoying a much higher quantitative demand at the lower price-points (because of the effect of the Price Elasticity of Demand), thereby still making a windfall profit. |
| The direct result would be an upsurge of building and construction activity. Builders and consumers who had put off construction projects, because of economic uncertainlty and higher material costs, now suddenly could start up those projects. |
| Within just a few months, this would put millions of construction workers back to work. And with their newly minted paychecks to spend, these guys would be spending money too, buying things they hadn't been able to afford for some time before, which were made by other people, who also would start seeing money coming into their pockets. |
| And so ... that consumption-infectious madness of a now-once-again spendy consumer economy -- would start to ripple and radiate outwards in concentric circles of ever-increasing circumference. |
| Following this scenario, Gairik predicted that in 2, maybe 3 quarters, the American National Economy would be out of the Recession, and growing again at a steady and healthy pace. |
|
Paying for it:
|
| But all this was predicated on America getting Russia to ship them all this cheap lumber. |
| How would America pay the Russians for it? |
| |
| And here was another fantastic crux of the matter. |
| Russia needed food, and basics, not so much money, at least in the short run. |
| America had a Food over-production problem, having to pay a lot of money to dump the excess food, and also make support payments to the farmers to keep them from producing more food. |
| So, if America could stop the food-dumping, and redirect the trucks carrying the excess food to the Mississippi river and the Gulf of Mexico, to dump it -- to now turn around and head over the Rocky and Cascade Mountains instead, to the ports of the Pacific North-West, to be briefly stored locally and then loaded onto suitable, waiting cargo vessels queing up to take all that surplus food across the Pacific to Vladivostok, to be loaded onto trains on the Trans-Siberian railroad, thence to be dropped off in smaller consignments to various little logging towns across Siberia -- you get the picture. |
| It goes without saying that the massive shipments, tens of thousands of containerloads of Food (and Animal Feed), the bounty and generosity of America's farmers, constantly rolling in from Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian, quietly chugging westward -- would slay the wolf of Russian starvation baying at that decomposing nation's decaying door. |
| Wouldn't that just be swell? Why, so it would. |
| And so Gairik opined and averred in the "Food-for-Wood" Brief. |
| |
| As to the cost of this preposterous proposal, it would really be very little, mostly the ongoing costs of transporting and the logistics of moving all that massive amount of cargo. But compared to the benefits accruing, that cost was going to be peanuts. |
| And apart from grandly and magically resuscitating both the American and the Russian economies, in one fell sweep, the bonus dividend would be a new and very auspicious beginning to the new relationship being forged between the two historic arch-rivals and (hopefully former) sworn enemies from the Cold War, ever on the path of mutually assured destruction, hatred that had lasted most of the twentieth century -- and had just forgotten to stop. |
| |
| This above constituted the core premise of the "Food-for-Wood" Brief. |
|
Sayonara, Arrivedercci, До свидания:
|
| But as time went by and assorted other stake-holders from different backgrounds became involved, they pressured Gairik to widen the scope of the Brief, diving deeper into various aspects of the potential interaction with the Aboriginal tribal peoples living in these interiorlands, socio-cultural and potential political fallouts of the actions recommended in the core Brief. |
| In particular, the Americans from the Defense and Diplomatic communities wanted deeper and deeper dives into the logistical details of distributing food and other products into the remote Russian Heartland, and extracting (not only wood, but) many other types of valuable or hazardous materials therefrom. |
| They were absolutely obsessive in their interest in the micro-geographic layout of the land and water resources, bridges and spots at which rivers and streams could most easily be forded, the geological make-up of the soil and rocks, the existence of roads and even informal paths in the Taiga, the presence, or even the suspected potential existence of missile silos and legacy stores (or naturally occuring deposits) of nuclear materials; and in particular -- the layout of the terrain from the perspective of current military presence, potential troop-movement and potential logistics of a future war. |
| As this went on, the USDoD appointees (who already contolled the budget, and the access to U.S. Govt. resources and funding) took greater and greater control over the content and the direction of the research. |
| Ultimately, they took over (what was by now, just the so-called) "Food-for-Wood" Brief, and Gairik was afforded an (attractive) off-ramp, while remaining available on-call for future consultations on an 'as-needed' basis. |
| |
| What had started as an Indian College assignment, had transitioned to a piece of Intellectual Property in the American Military doctrinal arsenal, the Road Map for a potential future war with Russia. |
| Gairik -- being anti-war, and a conscienscious pacifist, and a bit of a Russophile by natural affinity -- did not want to be associated with the weapoonized incarnation of his original essay. He requested to exit the now-quite-pretentious and heavily-funded "Secret" Military-grade project. |
| At his bittersweet request and consent, Gairik's name was removed from all records related to his pièce de résistance, the whole footprint, which in and of itself gradually vanished from view -- a demonstration of the trade-craft and exceptional expertise of U.S. Intelligence. |
| The banking arm of a large Japanese conglomerate offered a tidy sum to take over the few remaining non-militarized elements of the project documentation that remained of Gairik's chef d'oeuvre -- and which did not warrant much additional work, or funding, any more. President Clinton was now in the White House, with wide swathes of the U.S. Executive Branch tasked to handle all elements of post-Soviet Policy that had been touched upon by the Brief. |
| All while Gairik focused his energies on expanding the footprint of Walmart, the largest American company and its hallmark, pride and joy -- to far countries across the globe. |
| Current affairs, world events, political realities, and his own life and career (now in America) having moved on by this time, Gairik was happy enough to acquiesce, and bid adieu to his Magnum Opus and Последний Роман (swansong). |
| |
| And so -- here endeth the saga of the Russo-American "Food-for-Wood" Brief. May it Rest In Peace. |
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