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

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.

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 delivered to his home, I am again freeing up his own money for booze. Worse yet, what if my neighbor actually builds bombs in his basement which he frequently lobs over the fence and destroys …

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 led by Sonia Gandhi has been bribed rather handsomely by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain.

“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, the neighborhood, the community – and, hence, the nation.”

A bit of Saturday silliness.

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

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 called because it’s a big wiki of blogs. We, the Wikablog’s shadowy masters, hope that it will fast become the ultimate wiki of blogs — and why shouldn’t it? All it needs is you. Yes, …

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 ask what the tuition fees are, you probably cannot afford it. With only 167 students, it is as exclusive as it is expensive. The annual fee is mind-boggling—to me at least—over half a million rupees …

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 ask why I don’t get 256 kpbs unlimited usage for say Rs 200 a month in Pune today?
OK, just to frame the question a little better, let me state that I recognize that prices depend …

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, most of them either in English or Hindi. To me, a song is just a poem sung to a tune. My liking for poetry goes along with my love of music, I suppose.

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 back up the meow. James posted a comment which I thought was significant enough for all to ponder. Thanks for carrying the discussion forward.
{Disclaimer: The following views belong to James and I while I …

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., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation.
But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea.
In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused …

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 that this virus could mutate after crossing with human flu strains and become highly contagious. If that happens—and some scientists believe that it is an almost certainty—then anywhere between 50 million to half a billion …

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 as to the mental insularity and defectiveness of those involved and responsible.
Thus wrote John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1994 book A Journey Through Economic Time.
Today he celebrates his 97th birthday. Born in Ontario, Canada, in …

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 locate the precise bit that is relevant at any particular instance. To make the task of searching more tractable, ordering the information in some fashion—called sorting—becomes paramount. Computer scientists have worked on the problem of …

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 end of Puja.

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 sue Gaurav for a huge sum of money. They also contacted IBM, from whom they buy laptops for their students, to convey to them that they may stop that business relationship. Why? Gaurav works for …

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 been so outlandish an example of famous scientists. Uday said it was very sad. Don’t know if he meant the choice of APJ Kalam or the books in general. Navin guessed APJ Kalam.
Sychophancy runs deep …

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.

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 woes.
Lives in over-crowded poor parts of the world are really cheap. The death of thirty thousand lives lost will probably be associated with a total damage of one billion US dollars at most. Hurrican …