NationStates Jolt Archive

Indian Soviet Commonwealth of Beddgelert

With no interest rates applicable to the Commonwealth's economy, the notion of a 'credit crunch' meant little -in itself- to many ordinary Indians. But the fact that export revenues were crashing certainly did. The 2007 rains had been weak, then last-year's total failure of the monsoon-belt meant that Soviet India was importing more food than ever before and -as domestic farmers had been obliged to direct limited water resources to staple foods at the expense of saleable luxuries- export revenues were down while import costs to the state were up, representing a double blow to the complicated simulated-market economy of the sub-continent.

Using the powers it had selectively retained from the more purely Igovian Communist days of the 1990s, Portmeirion (the seat of Beddgelen political power, in the heart of Raipur) had adjusted prices in hopes of dodging the issue, but the crisis was too deep to be glossed over.

No banking haven, Beddgelert was if nothing else a layover between east and west. The food was hot as the climate, the idea that anyone else had better booze was highly suspect, the girls ranged from Bollywood babes to Boudican beauties, and the sport was world-class in terms of talent when it came to the cricket and brutality when Geletian rules football was in season. With domination of the sub-continent and its adjacent waters and airspace, the Commonwealth attracted travelers en route between South East Asia and Africa or the Middle East, and Europe, and also plenty of holidaymakers. Some came for commercial purposes, but, for capitalists, trade with the Soviets was one-way: India would sell to all sorts, but gave its custom only to Socialist producers.

So, when the Young Igovians -a radical student-lead association of the most die-hard adherents to their increasingly skewed interpretation of Graeme Igo's brand of left-wing Communism- launched a nation-wide vigilante action against the international bourgeoisie, they found hundreds of viable targets scattered across a thriving sub-continental mass of more than thirteen billion persons.

Kolkata, West Bengali Soviet State

An estimated hundred and forty million people make their homes in the sprawl of the Commonwealth's third-largest city. It was here that the so-called Blackjackets, the Young Igovians' in uniform, first struck, being filmed on the phone-camera of another tourist as they hauled a couple of white men, apparently foreign businessmen, through a bustling laneway, frog-marching one while another was dragged limp-limbed. The mobile phone concerned, of course, could receive no signal in Soviet India, which operates a totally different sort of personal communication network and lacks conventional phone masts, but it was not long before similar scenes were played-out in Mumbai, Trincomalee, Karachi, Dhaka, Chennai, and elsewhere, the Young Igovians having apparently organised their action through Indonet, the Soviet intranet.

In the sunny coastal resort of Goa an especially large number of vacationing foreigners were seized by the Blackjackets, who in this case -and several others- were assisted by spontaneous risings of the local Soviet bodies and their Militia Auxiliary cells, public ire being directed chiefly at foreign bankers and the diplomats and legislators who enabled their allegedly destructive works across the globe.

On a popular tourist beach at the resort district, seven wealthy foreigners were executed on the sand, beheaded by the ornate ancestral blades of several Geletian Celts and the large kirpan knife weilded by a lapsed Sikh in their company.

In the early hours of the disturbances the level of their organisation and the extent of the bloodshed was unclear, but it seemed apparent that a significant portion of the heavily armed and usually well-informed populace was actively or passively complicit with the Blackjackets' move against the spector of international banking and capitalistic exploitation and speculation. Over five billion Beddgelens had legal access to military-grade armaments at a good eight million public locations across the Commonwealth, and thus far there were no confirmed reports of any attempts to intercede against the Young Igovians and their cohorts in the actions.

OOC: I'm assuming you're wanting some volunteers for bankers, so nations can express outrage at their citizens being executed without trial?

(OOC: Ah, yes, I would be open to that, as well as to general reactions.)

(OOC: Would a member of a credit cooperative be labeled as a "banker" for propaganda purposes?)

(OOC: Hm, to be honest I think that it could go either way, TSS. I mean, in some communities across Soviet India there are statues of Robert Owen, and if the Blackjackets were seen to be targeting his ideas, some of those eight million Militia Auxiliary weapons lockers probably would be broken open by (admitedly dwindling numbers of) Beddgelen Owenites and we might be looking at the early stages of civil war. In theory it would depend on how the co-operative functioned and how it had conducted itself.

'Interest rates', being totally alien to the Beddgelen economy, act as something of a buzzword for what's wrong with the free market economies, and are good for getting people riled, so someone associated with a credit union or whatever that functions without them may be able to talk their way out of trouble with a mob.

But then some people now have a problem with any economic model that isn't Beddgelen, because even in the 39th least stupid nation in the multiverse, people are still idiots, so I suppose it's kinda up to you. You're certainly welcome to have plenty of people in Beddgelert -more than most nations would have- and with so many billions of citizens people are behaving differently across the nation, so if you want to have people watching what's going on and just having to deal with a few probing questions and suspicious looks, that's fine, but if you want some of them to actually end up in trouble that's good too.)

David Richmond worked for a foreign investment bank, in the Indian Soviet Commonwealth of Beddgelert. Since he worked at a desk, and never had face to face contact with clients, he was allowed a casual dress code. Wearing khaki pants and a polo shirt, and carrying a backpack instead of a briefcase, he didn't fit into the stereotypical image of a bank employee. His goatee and long hair, pulled back into a ponytail further distanced him from the bank employee look. This look worked in his favor when foreign bankers and diplomats began getting murdered. David was on his way back from a late lunch, when he rounded the corner and saw his manager and the bank president being dragged out of the bank. He saw a crowd watching, and walked up to them. He asked one of the crowd what was going on, and was shocked by what he was told. He watched for a minute more, then slowly drifted away from the crowd. He started to make his way to his apartment, but thought better of it. It was possible the mob had looked at the personnel files when they raided the bank, and if that was the case, they could well be waiting for them. He grabbed his cell phone, and called his parents in the ASoGM. After telling them what was happening, he asked them to call the ASoGM State Department, to figure out what to do next. Meanwhile, he told them he would call back in 6 hours. He hung, shut off his cell phone, and looked for an alley to hide out in until he figured out what do do next.

(OOC: Hope I don't take too many liberties with my description of your business in my nation, GM, but Soviet India has no banking sector, so actually I've made up a whole sector of my economy to accommodate your 'bank' and perhaps others... so, actually, thanks for that :)

Also, sorry, this post is a bit epic, but I am way drunk on red wine, shite gin, and napoleon brandy, and feel like rambling about my nation. Feel free to take your time responding to it, as tomorrow night I will be out drinking for my birthday and that of my best mate, so I might be a day or two before even checking this thread again!

Hopefully most posts won't be this long, I'm just still trying to explain my nation. Thanks to those who bothered to read!)

Mumbai

Over one hundred and seventy million people crowded the Commonwealth's largest cityscape, and it was here that the largest number of foreigners were engaged in business. For the largest absolute figure one had to look at Goa's holiday resorts, but the mobs were allowing many foreigners there -even westerners- to go unmolested, as the locals saw tourism as a valuable source of income.

It was in Mumbai, though, that the Beddgelens experimented with new economic ideas, and -despite knock-back after knock-back- it was here that capitalists came time and again in their efforts to open this gigantic market of more than thirteen billion humans. So it was here that Beddgelens immediately sought class enemies.

Mr.Richmond's employers were one of those firms prepared to accept a small on-going drain on resources for the slight chance of a gigantic pay-off should the Commonwealth ever significantly alter its economic policy. After all, India's Communist revolution only happened in 1982, and the Communist Party of India (Amalgamated Maoist-Leninist) was only toppled by the popular Soviets (who now supposedly controled the nation) in early 1989, less than three years before the USSR fell... the smell of change had never been expunged from the Indian air, and it seemed foolish to cut and run now!

Clearly, David had learned well. Turning up with a haircut you could set your watch to immediately identified you as foreign. Amongst Geletian Celts -40% of the population- men still favoured a certain kind of hairstyle, business up front, party behind, because they were warriors, free-spirited but warey of being caught with hair in their eyes during the heat of battle. Wearing a pony-tail was a good way for a man to look like a warrior without the pain of actually cultivating a mullet, and any man who wasn't a warrior had better damned well be a talented bard if he wanted any kind of respect. There were those who shaved their heads, but these were mostly revolutionaries from Sikh families, making a dramatic point of their rejection of religion and its dictates.

When David asked locals to update him on the drama, he was taken for a backpacker. Beddgelert loved backpackers, because they brought money, lost drinking games, and then fucked off home without a penny to their names. Several million passed through the Commonwealth each year, and stayed in dorms in Pantisocratic Phalansteries -democratic communes- with ordinary citizens, paying their room and board by helping around around the community while spending all of their holiday money on infamously strong Geletian ale and wine.

However, when Richmond called his family over-seas, a complicated process was set in motion.

With no cellphone masts, Beddgelert received no outside signal except by satellite phone and radio et cetera. Instead, citizens shared handests that were docked in central computer units in each of the more than eight million communes (the Pantisocratic Phalansteries) in which people lived. Each time a citizen checked-out a handset, they uploaded a set of contacts -and their personal caller identification (so that friends always knew how to call them)- and a sort of wi-fi network provided their telecommunications. This did mean that updates were less regular, and mobile phones in Beddgelert were rather larger than the latest razor-thin articles found in some countries... they were more handy than the 1980s brick-like phones of the west, but only just.

David's call, being to a foreign number, was routed through the PCC (People's Cosmonautical Co-operative, akin to a socialised NASA) framework, converted into a different medium, and transmitted on an infuriating two second delay. No doubt he and his parents were accustomed, by now, to giving a couple of seconds between hearing and speaking, which was necessary to allow the filters to convert satellite communications for consumption on the domestic grid.

Unfortunately, this did mean that GSIC were listening. GSIC would be better known to David as The Gelert Sentinels, the blanket organisation under which Beddgelert's internal security, counter-intelligence, secret-police, and special-operations forces were organised. They'd been formed back when Beddgelert was an infant nation, with an imploded economy, that found itself under siege by Islamist terrorists who at one point held the entire national theatre to ransom (and were consequently slaughtered, along with the entire population of their now extinct state), and since then they'd been accused of using genetically-modified biological weapons against Roycelandian imperialists in Madagascar, and assassinating disagreeable foreign politicians, amongst other things, though to this day not one single member of the organisation had ever been positively identified as acutally existing.

It was only now that the GM citizen was identified as a potential troublemaker and his lodging highlighted. A couple of Blackjackets hurried around to the commune that had given David a private room, but found him absent, and so waited quietly amongst the 1,587 residents, hoping that he would show up. They did place a letter-bomb under his door incase he came back unnoticed, hoping that he would open the envelope that had been stamped with a GMian watermark as if it had been posted from his own country... though close inspection would reveal that the stamp was a crude forgary, printed from the internet after a hasty investigation of his nation's philately.

Unless he took out a vehicle from the communal pool, however, David would prove hard to pinpoint. GSIC knew where he had been, and that he may be worth watching, but for now they did not know in which laneway in this maze of a city he may be currently. They would just wait... no reason, as yet, to suspect that he'd not go back to his room.

Taken for a backpacker and hiding in alleyways between communes, David would be pestered by many locals wanting him to come in and try their Geletian curried bread, or to sit at their Irani café for tea and sweet biscuits. In many of these establishments, televisions were now starting to report on the 'arrest' of many hundreds of foreign 'political and economic terrorists'. It seemed that even the state media organ, Gadar! (Revolution!) was supporting the notion that foreign governments were using their capitalists and bankers in a grand plan to starve out the anti-capitalist economies of the world until they had no choice but to beg for loans that would forever make them slaves to the west like the many African states that are crippled by interest payments!

Few people in the cafes and bars were disagreeing, and backpackers out for fun were suddenly finding a more serious side to their borderline alcoholic hosts.

(OOC: Hope I don't take too many liberties with my description of your business in my nation, GM, but Soviet India has no banking sector, so actually I've made up a whole sector of my economy to accommodate your 'bank' and perhaps others... so, actually, thanks for that :)

Also, sorry, this post is a bit epic, but I am way drunk on red wine, shite gin, and napoleon brandy, and feel like rambling about my nation. Feel free to take your time responding to it, as tomorrow night I will be out drinking for my birthday and that of my best mate, so I might be a day or two before even checking this thread again!

Hopefully most posts won't be this long, I'm just still trying to explain my nation. Thanks to those who bothered to read!)

Mumbai

Over one hundred and seventy million people crowded the Commonwealth's largest cityscape, and it was here that the largest number of foreigners were engaged in business. For the largest absolute figure one had to look at Goa's holiday resorts, but the mobs were allowing many foreigners there -even westerners- to go unmolested, as the locals saw tourism as a valuable source of income.

It was in Mumbai, though, that the Beddgelens experimented with new economic ideas, and -despite knock-back after knock-back- it was here that capitalists came time and again in their efforts to open this gigantic market of more than thirteen billion humans. So it was here that Beddgelens immediately sought class enemies.

Mr.Richmond's employers were one of those firms prepared to accept a small on-going drain on resources for the slight chance of a gigantic pay-off should the Commonwealth ever significantly alter its economic policy. After all, India's Communist revolution only happened in 1982, and the Communist Party of India (Amalgamated Maoist-Leninist) was only toppled by the popular Soviets (who now supposedly controled the nation) in early 1989, less than three years before the USSR fell... the smell of change had never been expunged from the Indian air, and it seemed foolish to cut and run now!

Clearly, David had learned well. Turning up with a haircut you could set your watch to immediately identified you as foreign. Amongst Geletian Celts -40% of the population- men still favoured a certain kind of hairstyle, business up front, party behind, because they were warriors, free-spirited but warey of being caught with hair in their eyes during the heat of battle. Wearing a pony-tail was a good way for a man to look like a warrior without the pain of actually cultivating a mullet, and any man who wasn't a warrior had better damned well be a talented bard if he wanted any kind of respect. There were those who shaved their heads, but these were mostly revolutionaries from Sikh families, making a dramatic point of their rejection of religion and its dictates.

When David asked locals to update him on the drama, he was taken for a backpacker. Beddgelert loved backpackers, because they brought money, lost drinking games, and then fucked off home without a penny to their names. Several million passed through the Commonwealth each year, and stayed in dorms in Pantisocratic Phalansteries -democratic communes- with ordinary citizens, paying their room and board by helping around around the community while spending all of their holiday money on infamously strong Geletian ale and wine.

However, when Richmond called his family over-seas, a complicated process was set in motion.

With no cellphone masts, Beddgelert received no outside signal except by satellite phone and radio et cetera. Instead, citizens shared handests that were docked in central computer units in each of the more than eight million communes (the Pantisocratic Phalansteries) in which people lived. Each time a citizen checked-out a handset, they uploaded a set of contacts -and their personal caller identification (so that friends always knew how to call them)- and a sort of wi-fi network provided their telecommunications. This did mean that updates were less regular, and mobile phones in Beddgelert were rather larger than the latest razor-thin articles found in some countries... they were more handy than the 1980s brick-like phones of the west, but only just.

David's call, being to a foreign number, was routed through the PCC (People's Cosmonautical Co-operative, akin to a socialised NASA) framework, converted into a different medium, and transmitted on an infuriating two second delay. No doubt he and his parents were accustomed, by now, to giving a couple of seconds between hearing and speaking, which was necessary to allow the filters to convert satellite communications for consumption on the domestic grid.

Unfortunately, this did mean that GSIC were listening. GSIC would be better known to David as The Gelert Sentinels, the blanket organisation under which Beddgelert's internal security, counter-intelligence, secret-police, and special-operations forces were organised. They'd been formed back when Beddgelert was an infant nation, with an imploded economy, that found itself under siege by Islamist terrorists who at one point held the entire national theatre to ransom (and were consequently slaughtered, along with the entire population of their now extinct state), and since then they'd been accused of using genetically-modified biological weapons against Roycelandian imperialists in Madagascar, and assassinating disagreeable foreign politicians, amongst other things, though to this day not one single member of the organisation had ever been positively identified as acutally existing.

It was only now that the GM citizen was identified as a potential troublemaker and his lodging highlighted. A couple of Blackjackets hurried around to the commune that had given David a private room, but found him absent, and so waited quietly amongst the 1,587 residents, hoping that he would show up. They did place a letter-bomb under his door incase he came back unnoticed, hoping that he would open the envelope that had been stamped with a GMian watermark as if it had been posted from his own country... though close inspection would reveal that the stamp was a crude forgary, printed from the internet after a hasty investigation of his nation's philately.

Unless he took out a vehicle from the communal pool, however, David would prove hard to pinpoint. GSIC knew where he had been, and that he may be worth watching, but for now they did not know in which laneway in this maze of a city he may be currently. They would just wait... no reason, as yet, to suspect that he'd not go back to his room.

Taken for a backpacker and hiding in alleyways between communes, David would be pestered by many locals wanting him to come in and try their Geletian curried bread, or to sit at their Irani café for tea and sweet biscuits. In many of these establishments, televisions were now starting to report on the 'arrest' of many hundreds of foreign 'political and economic terrorists'. It seemed that even the state media organ, Gadar! (Revolution!) was supporting the notion that foreign governments were using their capitalists and bankers in a grand plan to starve out the anti-capitalist economies of the world until they had no choice but to beg for loans that would forever make them slaves to the west like the many African states that are crippled by interest payments!

Few people in the cafes and bars were disagreeing, and backpackers out for fun were suddenly finding a more serious side to their borderline alcoholic hosts.

David politely declined all the offers, feigning a full stomach from other offers. He kept on the move, looking for an internet cafe or out of the way payphone so he could contact his parents. He didn't like the delay present in his phone when he talked to them earlier, although he put it down to busy phone circuits.

OOC: Are there pay phones or internet cafes in your nation?

((OOC: A -real- Communism wouldn't have foreign banks in the first place... the only real bank would be nationalized, if I'm correct.))

OOC: Vetalian expatriates almost always live in enclaves isolated from the local population unless it's ethnically related to us. I wouldn't mind having a Iranian-Revolution type siege of the community, one that would probably end up resulting in their unfortunate demise or an attempt at breaking out of the enclave and fleeing.

Ah, you know what, folks, I think I may actually start this again in even more dramatic form.

I was writing an OOC reply to recent comments, trying to clarify things, but as I wrote more I realised just how much my nation is changing (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=586641) and thought it may actually be easier to start a big RP to deal with these changes, and to explain the economy and society a little better, for all to see. Sometimes I forget how little other people really know about my nation, which has been alive in my head for over six years, after all :)

You'll all be welcome to participate in that, when I sort it out, which I'll start working on tonight.

Concerning Vetalia's comments, for example, I think the old Beddgelert couldn't really have accomodated an insular community of ex-pats like that, but I can see the creation of just such a thing as a pretty convenient tool for the developments I want to play out. I'll explain how when I actually start this new thread.

Anyway, watch this space, and I'll be back with a link to new IC and OOC threads.

Oh, and I can't resist calling GWO Captain Obvious before finishing this post, since my last one started with a sentence including the phrase "Soviet India has no banking sector" :P

OOC: I figured that would be the case. Of course, our colonists often bank on the fact that by the time any government takes action against them we will be essential to the community, either legitimately or through exploitation.

For example, we'll come in and begin offering various products and services that are unavailable or scarce in the country as well as permit other things like drugs, money laundering, prostitution loan-sharking and gambling to be run under-the-table. After that, the local community becomes dependent on us for their funds and we "create" a banking sector that is little more than a major profit mill for the people involved. Of course, it's possible a society as well-ordered as yours could offset that, but there are always those bad apples...