Yes, we do share common ancestors with the other primates. Playing and having fun is part of our common heritage.

NOTE: That “monkey” actually is an ape: I am guessing a Lar Gibbon.

We all know that the government of India is secular because they proclaim it as so. Therefore it must be so. Secularism by assertion. So also we know that in India freedom of expression is a right — as long as what is expressed is in line with the ruling coalition’s preferences.
Ventatesh Rangarajan pointed me to a news item on IBNLive which says “Anti-Congress” Blogs blocked.
The block against various websites has been lifted but the ban is still in place.
It seems there is a definite slant to the websites …

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is not going to happen in India.
The Human Resources Development (HRD) ministry of the government of India recently decided to just say no to the $100 laptop that Prof Negroponte of MIT Media Lab has been furiously peddling. He wanted the government to buy, oh, about 1,000,000 of those at the modest cost of $100,000,000 and give it to school children. Mind you, noble intentions motivate this: so that no child is left behind and the digital divide is bridged and all the kids …

The other day an old school friend of mine Ajay (not his real name) came to meet me when I was visiting Nagpur. Talk came around to how his son was doing. Ajay said that the kid was doing well, finally.
“Why,” I asked, “what was the matter?”
“He was not doing well at all in his studies. He was not able to focus on his school work. His confidence level was low and I was really worried about his grades. You know, his board exams are right around the corner.”

Words can never describe the sheer lunacy of the response. Hence the cartoon. Thanks, India-Forum.com, for the straight talk.

Crazyfinger writes to inform us all of a blogpost contest. The prize is a copy of Stephen Miller’s new book “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art”. Check it out.
[My apologies to Crazyfinger for the delay in carrying this announcement. Due to time constraints, I was unable to get to updating the blog.]

Brad DeLong over at UC Berkeley writes a mean blog, Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, from his office at Evans Hall with a view of the campus and the Golden Gate Bridge off to the west. He considers the academic enviroment he lives in to be a paradise.

So I am off today to one of my alma maters. IIT Kanpur where I studied computer science a life-time ago.
I am contributing to a volume called “India Infrastructure Report” which will be published later this year by Oxford Univ Press. This year the focus is on rural infrastructure. I am going to IIT Kanpur to be at the writers’ workshop where we will sit and review the first draft of all the contributors.
My contribution is simple. RISC. More about it later.
PS: Getting to IIT Kanpur is hard. Flights …

Public Radio International (PRI) program “Open Source with Christopher Lydon” of July 19th is called “A Class Profile of India“. The guests on the show were Pankaj Mishra, Suketu Mehta, and yours truly.
India, according to Messers M&M, is a mess.
And it appears that the mess can be traced to the problem that there is a segment of the population which is doing absolutely fabulously and there is a huge segment of the population which is absolutely miserable. And the outcome of this disparity between the standards of living …

Try this:
1. Copy this url to your address bar: http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php?url=http://
2. Append the url of the blocked blog. So if you, for instance, want to reach mysite.blogspot.com, you will construct the url http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php?url=http://mysite.blogspot.com/
3. Hit Go.

“Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?”
I can just hear the derision in that question. That is what Shivam Vij was told by Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, which is the organization which is authorized to issue orders to ISPs. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) of the Government of India asked that certain domains be blocked (but does not reveal exactly which though it is clear that the list includes *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/* .)
Like the imperial rulers they are, …

“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, …

India’s development is not insulated from global forces shaping the world. Islamic terrorism is a global reality that only the seriously deluded can deny. Its bloody hand reaches deep inside the global human breast daily and wrenches the heart out.
The world spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year trying to protect itself. The security apparatus we go through at the airports is in place largely to dissuade jihadists. Soon I guess the local train stations in Mumbai will have to have some sort of security in place.
Islamic …

A comment on this blog is worth highlighting because it is too important to be buried among the comments. It is from Gulab Singh who wrote:
What have you done to amend the situation, oh armchair intellectual ? Cribbing about the status quo is pointless, if you don’t follow it up with action. If you don’t have a way to put into practice the ideas you espouse, then your ideas are not practical. You seem to have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about “what should be done”, but …

Give a man a reputation for being an early riser, and he can sleep every day until noon without worrying. — Mark Twain.

As I have held before, there should be a special hell for those who forward inane stupid emails with the breathless admonition to “forward it to all your friends.” The terrorist bombing of Mumbai locals has inspired one such idiotic email which is making the rounds.
It is addressed to the terrorists with the endearment “Dear.” It basically says (I will spare you the details, in case you haven’t already seen it) that we don’t care to be bothered by the bombs and we don’t really care about the hundreds …

The surreal does not shock.
Pakistan is buying US$5,000 million worth of military hardware, including F-16s from the US. India is subsidizing that purchase to the tune of US$25 million in cash. I am sorry about India’s niggardly gesture — it should be giving Pakistan at least US$ 100 million. After all, dhimmis have to pay jizya and at US$ 25 milllion, it works out to be a very low per capita. [Here is the relevant news item. And here is the explanation of what I mean.]
The jizya tax is traditionally …

India has been singularly unlucky in the sense that its movers and shakers don’t seem to get what it takes for the economy to prosper. Therefore it comes as a terribly pleasant surprise when one comes across a M&S who apparently gets it. Not only does the man get it, he gets it in spades and how.
Mukesh Ambani apparently gets it.

The terrorists have struck once again. This time it appears to be a series of bombs on the Western line of Mumbai locals. So far reports indicate about half a dozen bombs during rush hour.
Assumption: lots of people killed. Islamic terrorism in action.
Prediction: More ineffectual inane statements from the politicians. Especially the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the supreme leader of India Ms Sonia Gandhi. More security will be assigned to them and other politicians. Dr Singh may increase the number of bus and train services between Pakistan and …

I was invited to attend a meeting at the Ministry of Rural Development at the Krishi Bhavan in New Delhi on the 7th of July. (Here is a note which I wrote while waiting in the lobby.)
The meeting was chaired by Renuka Vishwanathan, Secretary, Mininstry of Rural Development. Largely the meeting was attended by secretaries from various state governments such as Chattisgarh and Orrisa. There were a couple of people from President Kalam’s office; Dr PV Indiresan, the architect of PURA; Dr PS Rana, Chairman and MD of HUDCO (Housing …