Don’t let me stop your great self-destruction. Die if you want to, you misguided martyr. I wash my hands of your demolition. Die if you want to, you innocent puppet! ————– Pilate to Jesus at the trial in Jesus Christ Superstar.
Fact: A permanent arms industry requires perpetual wars for its sustenance.
Fact: The most advanced industrialized economies have the most high-tech industries.
Fact: The arms industry …

I came across this quote in Myke’s weblog.
T.E Lawrence wrote in the Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.
I recall a scene from the movie “Lawrence of Arabia” where Lawrence puts out a burning matchstick with his bare fingers. Someone tries to immitate …

The recently concluded elections in the US gives credence to
what H. L. Menken (1880-1956) predicted when he wrote:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents,
more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and
glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s
desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright
moron.”

There is much truth in the saying that a country deserves the
government it gets. It is a chilling realization that India is
not exempt from …

Yesterday I claimed that
India is the world’s largest kleptocracy somewhat along
the lines of the claim usually made about India being the
world’s largest democracy (if you use a really flexible
definition of democracy, of course.) One reader, Sudhar, wanted
to know exactly how is it that corruption retards economic
growth. It is a very important question. I could spend a whole
day writing about that but being bone lazy, I am taking the
easy way out of giving you a reference. Why re-invent the wheel,
eh?

So the article you may wish to read is
from the …

My brother came to visit me at our offices in Lower Parel in Mumbai this afternoon. He was duly impressed by the spanking new buildings that occupy what used to be Morajee Mills land. I guess I can understand why he was impressed because usually he ends up in seedy run-down offices trying to do business. He has a bunch of dealerships for equipment and materials required for large-scale public sector enterprises. As part of his business, he has to visit the offices of his customers who …

Stand-alone computing a la PCs delivering “services” is fine for those who can afford that luxury, but is definitely a show-stopper for those who have very little disposable income and yet can make use of those services that PCs deliver. I remind myself repeatedly that people do not want a PC — what they actually want are the services that a PC delivers. As long as we focus on the fact that it is services — and not the hardware nor the software — that matter to people, we will …

Indian roads reflect the amazing diversity that is India, a mix of the modern and the ancient. It is as if a cross-section of the entire history of transportation were displayed for all to marvel at. A huge mass of humanity using every conceivable mode of transportation — from no-wheelers to two-wheelers (powered and otherwise) to three-wheelers to four-wheelers to sixteen-wheelers — moves along at varying speeds on what apparently are roads. I say moves but at times the whole mass merely sits there for hours. That is …

Many years ago, while in high school, I had read a bunch of books by Carlos Castaneda about the Yaqui shaman don Juan. Later on in the US, I learnt that Castaneda’s claim that don Juan was a real person was questioned and most likely he made up the shaman. In short, his books were not an anthropological study but fiction. In any case, what the books presented was an alternate reality which was accessible through magic and psychoactive drugs. I am wary of all claims of magic. I do …

I have never been able to shake off the conviction that there must be a very good economic reason for why there are so many poor people around the world. You may say that I am crazy to connect what apparently are totally distinct facts about the world but bear with me for a bit while I lay out my argument.
I argue that the large pool of poor people serve as a reservoir of extremely cheap labor which helps the rich. The rich have control and are powerful. …

The converse concept of bounded rationality, it seems to me, must be unbounded stupidity. So is the statement that humans exhibit bounded rationality merely an euphemism for the fact that humans are prone to unbounded stupidity?
A moment’s reflection should convince us that the world around us is definitely complex and we cannot really fathom what the consequences of our actions will be. The best we can do is to try to learn from our previous bouts of “bounded rational” actions and try to avoid being unboundedly stupid.
Here is …