Farce is funny when staged deliberately. It borders on the tragic when it is splashed across the front pages of the nation’s newspapers and is eagerly slurped up by the gullible even in high places.
Just the other day I was taken to task for not high-lighting the successes of Indians and instead focusing on problems that we need to solve to be a real nation of some consequence.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our chief weapons are fear and …
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This one is too good to pass up. Myke sent me Jim Kunstler’s column about Pentecostals and evangelicals. The post is worth reading, including the many comments. For the record, here are the first and the last paragraphs of the post.
Last month media elder statesman Bill Moyers made a speech after receiving an award at Harvard in which he said that “born again” members of the Bush regime couldn’t possibly believe in the future if they …

If the industrial age was characterized by increased specialization and standardization, then the post-industrial modern age — often referred to as the information age — is subject to even greater specialization and standardization. Since education forms the very foundation of this information age, one should expect greater standardization and specialization in the production and delivery of education.

An item in the Nagpur local newspaper The Hitavada caught my eye as I had breakfast. “Surjeet, Bardhan to visit Pak next week” read the headline. Surjeet is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Bardhan holds the same post in the sister communist organization, CPI. The paper reported that they were to be felicitated and accorded the status of “state guests” by the Pakistani Government. Warmed the cockles of my heart, reading that piece. Here at last, I said to myself, is dedication being finally …

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more; it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Those lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth are a sure-fire way of deflating any false sense of importance one might have while going about one’s business. Blogs, …

Over the last weekend I spent a little time at the IIT Bombay, the alma mater of many a successful and celebrated Indian, resident as well as non-resident. IIT — the Indian Institutes of Technology. Sometimes called the Institutes of Indian Technology.
I had gone there to sit on a panel which was deliberating such weighty matters as policy for encouraging open source in education. I had little to add to it but still I was given a nice desk weather station (has a hygrometer and …

One of my favorite bits from Shakespeare. This one is from Act 3, Scene 1 of The First Part of King Henry IV:
Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?
The “vasty deep” is so evocative. I see visions of deep dark oceans with strange creatures never seen on earth dwelling there. And spirits that are powerful and perhaps evil.
Anyway, …

Yesterday at a meeting where we were discussing India’s development, someone mentioned Justice Louis D. Brandeis. That recalled to my mind something that Justice Brandeis had noted about the dangers of government which I find absolutely applicable in the Indian context.

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty
when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are
naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded
rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment
by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

Amen to …

Yesterday I wrote about being homeless and just for comparison used Finland in my blog post. I love Finland. And I love Monty Python. So the combination
is double-love.

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet
My days in Mumbai are numbered. Strictly speaking, all the days of our lives are numbered. I will soon be saying goodbye to the …

Blogs are all very fine and democratic. But the opportunity cost of all the time listening to vox populi and reading stuff on blogs is pretty high considering that the world has an enormously stupendous store of amazingly insightful words which can instruct, entertain, and even enlighten. What would you rather re-read: the words of Shakespeare, or the prose by some idiot who is primarily concerned with his own silly little world?
Since you have wandered over here (by error, I presume), I offer you a …

On this blog, I have pondered the matter of education quite a bit because development and education are inextricably related. Irrespective of how rich an economy is by the usual measures of GDP, if the population is not educated, it is not a developed economy. An economy may have a high per capita GDP, due to say exporting oil, but it cannot be considered a developed economy.

Rajesh Jain blogged about
a News.com
contest on underplayed IT innovation. My take on the underplayed
trend is based on Rajesh’s ideas. I entered the following.

The PC-centric world of computing evolved in an age when networks did
not exist and users were technologically sophisticated enough to
comprehend the complex system. In a world where networks are
ubiquitous and fast, where the average user cannot manage the
increasingly complex software, where spam and viruses
abound—centralized network computing model wins but has been ignored
by most IT gurus.

Network computing did not take hold in the developed countries because
networks arrived after …

One of the greatest challenge that India faces is that of rural development. Successfully solving any problem requires a proper formulation of the problem. Fundamental questions arise when the matter of rural underdevelopment is considered in depth. Is rural development the development of rural areas, or is it about development of rural populations? They are not the same thing and require entirely different approaches. Is it possible that the antidote to rural under-development lies in urban development?

Those questions allows us to consider the possibility of addressing the problem of rural …

Bringing the benefits of ICT to rural populations is
a commendable goal. The use of kiosks with connected
PCs for bringing services to villages is a model worth
considering among various means. The advantages of
kiosks are many. Primary advantage is that of proximity.
Villagers do not have to incur any travel cost to obtain
the services delivered. Next, the investment required
is relatively small and so a start can be made with
limited resources. Finally, rural entrepreneurship can
be motivated by giving over the management of the kiosk
to a person from the village itself.

Disadvantages of Kiosks

The primary disadvantage …