It has been raining since morning. My plans of going to Mumbai have been rained upon. The picture above is taken from Shrikant and Ranjani’s home.

Perception and reality are two different things, of course, but they do influence each other. How India is perceived by the US (and vice versa) matters. A significant shift in that perception is clearly visible, going by the writings of observers of the developing India-US relationship. John Mauldin’s Thoughts from the Frontline carries an analysis by George Friedman titled India the Next Big Player.

Never underestimate the power of incentives, is what my economics guru used to say all the time. Economics is at its most generalized form the study of incentives. Positive analysis involves digging below the surface to uncover the incentives of the concerned economic agents (people) with the aim of explaining why things are they way they are. It is not just out of intellectual curiosity that one wishes to figure out why things are way they are. It is only the first step to the ultimate goal of obtaining a …

Books influence us profoundly, of course. But for a book to work its magic on you, you have to be ready. The Buddhist have a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears. Actually, what that means is that when the student is ready, the presence of the teacher becomes known to the student. The teacher has been around all along but the student did not have the faculty to recognize the teacher. The prepared mind is a necessary condition for books to have any impact.

I make no representations about the authenticity of the picture above. Any idiot can doctor up a photo these days. Even then, it is funny. Kind of goes with the image that one has of the prime chimp President of the United States of America.

Once, as punishment for disobeying his mother, Sam Clemens was made to paint a fence. Like all boys he disliked being forced to do chores. He began to think of some way to get out of it. When his friend John showed up and declared that while he was going for a swim, Sam will have to continue his work. “Work?” said Sam, “A boy does not get to paint a fence everyday.” Sam continued to appear to be enjoying his painting and soon enough John was pleading to take …

So if you are all done with Google Earth, it is time to see Google Moon.
Those guys at Google do have a sense of humor. See the moon at max maginification. Don’t forget to visit the Google Moon Help page and the Google Copernicus Center if you are looking for a job.

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.

Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect. (1864-1912)

Story goes that there lived a …

F. Scott Fitzgerald had noted that “the rich are different from you and me.” Ernest Hemmingway agreed and said, “Yes, they have more money.” Having more money is a significant difference because the most important of its derivate effects is that they have more power. The concerns of the rich are more important; their pain is more acute; their viewpoint is more worthy of consideration; their comprehension of the world more accurate. As Tevya, the poor farmer in The Fiddler on the Roof notes while dreaming of being a rich …

One of the rewards of writing a blog is the occasional detailed comment that readers (yes, this blog has more than one casual reader) send in. One such comment was elicited by my earlier post “The World is (Information) Fat.”
Uday wrote in:

Want to have some fun and waste time and learn all at the same time? Check out these optical illusions.
When I come across these sorts of things, I cannot stop marvelling at the amazing power of the world wide web.

I may be mistaken about this but I get the distinct impression that whenever India’s development is mentioned, the matter immediately shifts to PCs and internet, BPOs and call centers. It is as if the entire economy will be magically transformed if only everyone had broadband access and a web enabled cell phone with customized irritating ring-tones and had the ability to subscribe to a gazillion web logs through RSS and had the ability to publish his own stuff for the edification of the masses who were similarly engaged in …

I continue to fix the holes created by the move to wordpress. While doing that, I come across bits that I like and put them in the “My favorite bits” category. For instance, here is The Buddha’s Sermon on Economics. I find putting words in the Tathagata’s mouth a lot of fun. It is my way of paying reverence to the One Who Has Gone Before. All the Buddhists bits begin with “Thus have I heard …” because originally it was an oral tradition.
The other bit I fixed today …

Bertrand Russell considered the basic purpose of education to be the “formation, by means of instruction, of certain mental habits and a certain outlook on life and the world.”
I believe there is a small set of very powerful tools, or mental models, that can help us comprehend the dynamic world we live in. It is surprising that such a complex and complicated world is amenable to comprehension using only a small set of tools. But it is indeed true. The tools that I refer to are immensely powerful and …

A reader, “P”, wrote in response to my “intergenerational transfer model for education” and said:
I came across your blog and the intergenerational model. I thought it was brilliant. My only concern was to do with making graduates realize that they owe something back to the institution. I went to a REC, received a highly subsidized education but do not have immense feelings of loyalty toward it, at least not enough to give back to it.

The magical thing about the world is that it is connected. Not just at the physical level, it is connected in the abstract level at which we comprehend the world. Physical connectivity of course is clearly evident. Above our heads, the weather system is global as is the hydrosphere which then connects all the continents. That is geograhical connectivity. Then there is biological connectivity. Every one of us shares common ancestors. We are all cousins, a few dozen times removed at most since we share common ancestors. It is sobering …

My dear Abhishek,
You are a sentient human being who is capable of using symbols.
There is one fact that distinguishes us from the rest of creation: our ability to use language. Or to put it another way, our ability to do abstract symbol manipulation. That ability, more than anything else, allows us to call ourselves members of the species homo sapiens sapiens. All our best attributes flow from that unique faculty. How did our brains diverge from the brains of our pre-human ancestors? What were the evolutionary forces which molded …

In connection with the London bombings, came across this at Phoenix Muses:
Jihad al-Khazen, an op-ed columnist for the London-based pan-Arab Al-Hayat newspaper, wrote: “Such criminal terror acts prove that no measure is enough to fight terrorism.
“Actions that governments take to fight terrorism are totally justified because protecting life is a lot more important than protecting civil liberties.”
Brings to mind what Benjamin Franklin said about trading civil liberties for security. “Those who desire to give up freedom in order to gain security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.”
Of …

Some apparently wise statements reminds me of lite beer: all the taste and less filling. These statements sound nice but are not reality based. Consider this for a moment this:
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. — Native American Proverb
It is supposed to appeal to our sense of conservation, of course. Since it is our children’s possession, we have to take care of it. Rather flimsy reasoning. It is not our property, says the proverb, and implies that this realization …

Just a quick note prompted by the bombings in London.
A moment of silence for the dead.
Brought to mind the poem “Before I start this peom” by Emmanuel Ortiz which I had first come across in Suhail Kassim’s blog post. Here are the last lines of that poem, for the record.
You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the
second hand
In the space
between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence.
Take it.
But take it all
Don’t cut in line.
Let …