Atanu Dey on India’s Development

Via Myke, a very very cool illusion. You better not believe your eyes.

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Asato ma sat gamaya
Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya
Mrityur ma amritam gamaya
Lead me from illusion to the Truth
Lead me from darkness to Light
Lead me from death to Immortality
from the Brihadaranya Upanishad.

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Money is fungible.
If I give money to my neighbor to help out with his grocery purchases, I may be acting out of good neighborly feelings. But what if he is an alcoholic? By giving him money, I could as well be funding his alcohol purchase. Even if I were to buy groceries and have them […]

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Just a few weeks ago, we learnt that the KGB poured cash into the pockets Indian communist leaders and handsomely bribed the leaders of the Congress Party which was then under the control of Indira Gandhi. This past week we learn from UN sponsored investigation that Natwar Singh and the same Congress Party […]

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“It is all about power, isn’t it?” said CJ.
I was on the phone with CJ, discussing a series of columns that the Indian Express newspaper has been running called “India Empowered” which as the newspaper puts it, “if there’s one engine that’s today driving a changing India, it’s empowerment. Empowerment of the individual, the family, […]

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A bit of Saturday silliness.

My blog is worth $101,617.20.How much is your blog worth?

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Have you noticed the spanking new brown decal on the right hand side column which says, This blog is listed on W I K A B L O G? Wikablog is a new ultimate Wiki of blogs.
They said it shouldn’t be done, and they were probably right, but here it is anyway: The Wikablog, so […]

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I would describe the Mercedes Benz International School in Pune to be the Rolls-Royce of schools in India.
They follow the International Baccalaureate Organization’s curricula. About half their students are Indians and the others are the children of expatriates working in multinational firms in Pune.
It is the kind of school that if you have to […]

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Why exactly is connectivity so expensive in India? For instance, these days in Pune I pay Tata Indicom Rs 880 (US$20) a month for 64kbps (max) speed. Compare that to 5 years ago I used to get 256 kbps unlimited usage ADSL connectivity in Berkeley CA for only about $20 a month. One can naively […]

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For reasons unknown to me, I want to write about some songs that I like. Songs always bring back memories to me and I always associate songs with the most profoundly moving experiences of my life. The song lyrics matter to as much as the musical arrangement. I must know a thousand songs by heart, […]

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As Alice remarked, she had seen a cat without a smile before but never a smile without a cat. Gross National Happiness, the wonderful new and improved measure of national well-being about which I wrote the last time, is according to James Elliot, like the cat’s meow but with no cat in the background to […]

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A New York Times article (hat tip: Suhit) of Oct 4th, starts off with
What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money.
Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., […]

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A terrible specter is haunting the world and it goes by the name H5N1, more commonly called the avian flu virus which cases influenza in birds. This avian flu high pathogenic virus mainly kills birds but has also killed a few dozen people since 2003. That is not the bad news. The bad news is […]

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Ignorance, stupidity, in great affairs of state is not something that is commonly cited. A certain political and historical correctlness requires us to assign some measure of purpose, of rationality, even where, all to obviously, it does not exist. Nonetheless one cannot look with detachment on the Great War (and also its aftermath) without thought […]

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Sorting and searching through information are uniquely human activities because only humans have an external store of information which needs to be accessed and acted upon. The notion of acting on information stored externally is not associated with non-human animals.
The larger the stock of information, the more expensive it is to search through it to […]

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Today is Bijoy Dashimi, the final day of the festival we Bengalis call Puja. Ma Durga–Mahishashurmardini–has returned to her abode after defeating the forces of evil. My greetings to you all on this joyous occassion.
Now it is time for me to sit and listen to Raga Durga, sung by Veena Sahasrabuddhe, to mark the […]

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Here are the facts, very briefly. A magazine called JAM, did a story on a management institute called IIPM. The story said that IIPM makes tall claims. Many Indian newspapers carry full page IIPM ads. A blogger, Gaurav Sabnis, blogged about that and basically called IIPM claims fraudulent. IIPM served a legal notice threatening to […]

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In yesterdays post on science and famous scientists, I had asked people to guess one famous Indian scientist’s name. In the comments so far, Praveen guessed Raja Ramanna. Nothing funny about that candidate. Sorry but no cigar. Sameer correctly guessed APJ Kalam but hedged his answer by adding Vikram Sarabhai. The latter would not have […]

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As part of my interest in high school education, I have been checking
out the textbooks that Indian schools prescribe. Take for instance the Science and Technology textbook for the 10th grade. The book that I am examining is published by the National Council for Educational Research and Training.

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First there was the Andaman-Sumatra earthquake which resulted in the Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean. South Asia suffered massively last December and now another earthquake in the Himalayas has led to the loss of tens of thousands of lives. As if the man-made disasters were not enough, natural distasters have added to the […]

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