Want to weave a rainbow? Here’s your chance.

Not having the gift of foresight, one rarely knows how far one will stray having embarked on an ill-advised direction. So it is with me and my simple assessment of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar many years ago. I began with concluding that SSRS is very skilled in marketing a good and ancient Indian technique generally known as yoga. Many others from India have done so and I approve of all of them because I approve of good ideas being shared. Some made huge fortunes (self-styled “Bhagwan” Rajneesh AKA Osho, for …

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
That bit of popular wisdom comes to mind when one considers POTUS George W Bush. Clearly the man is not to blame. Nearly half of the US voted for the man. Twice. Bush is not the problem; he is only the most visible symptom. The neo-conservatives that run the US are representative of a significant percentage of the US population. If the leader of the pack is as dumb as a rock, then the pack has the collective …

Advertisement as Signaling
Advertising is the communication of a signal (information) with the express purpose of gaining advantage over one’s rivals in a competitive environment. That’s my definition of advertising in the broadest terms. In those terms, advertising is not limited just to the world that is human made. All sorts of life forms over evolutionary time scales have been in the business of advertising. In the natural world, advertising serves a very useful function, the end result of which is the astonishing appearance of beauty and diversity. A beautiful human …

Reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon is a luxury that I look forward to eagerly. Authors that I have special regard for, I read slowly and deliberately. I value not just the ideas but also how they are presented. So it was with particular relish that I curled up with today’s book “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. He is a master craftsman constructing elegant arguments that are a delight to behold. Here are some excerpts, for the record.

Check out this site. Click on the little square after the site has finished loading. Like that instruction on the shampoo bottle, repeat. Isn’t the web an amazing place? Why? Because the world is full of inventive, amazing talent and it allows people to showcase their ingenuity, and because we get to share in the joy of discovering those nifty ideas.

Today is 27th January of 2007 of the common era (C.E.) calendar. The date is just a name, a nominal entity only. Different calendars give different names to the date. Even though it is just a name, it is still interesting to know names. Did you know that the epoch we live in is called Holocene?

The Planning Commission has recommended that PURA–Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas–be dropped from the Ministry of Rural Development’s Centrally sponsored schemes, the Pioneer reports. (Hat tip: Pranav Kumar Vasishta.)
I have argued against PURA because it makes no economic sense. However I suspect that the recommendation will be overturned and money will be wasted on PURA.

Well, well, well, what have we here? (Hey, that would make a good site: www.whathavewehere.com)
“Vinod Khosla’s Marshall Plan for rural India” is the subtitle of a “How the World Works” article by Andrew Leonard on Salon.com.
I must admit that the article is very well written. Here are some excerpts, for the record:
The daily drumbeat of biofuel headlines has made Vinod Khosla — co-founder of Sun Microsystems, former Kleiner-Perkins venture capitalist, and ethanol evangelist/entrepreneur extraordinaire — a hard man to ignore of late. But Khosla’s massive bet on renewable energy …

Cafe Baghdadi is a little hole in the wall restaurant in Colaba, Mumbai, just around the corner from Regal Theatre and next to the famous street restaurant Bade Miya. Baghdadi’s fried chicken would beat KFC’s chicken any day of the week, by the way. That chicken is good. What tickles me at Baghdadi is a sign which lists a set of rules for its patrons. The list is long and fairly detailed. It says, for instance, that “Customers are not allowed to argue with the waiters,” and that “Alcohol is …

My younger brother’s daughter shares her birthday today, 23rd Jan, with David Hilbert who was born in 1862. Hilbert compiled a list of 23 unsolved problems in mathematics in 1900. “This is generally reckoned the most successful and deeply considered compilation of open problems ever to be produced by an individual mathematician.” Hmm. Born 23rd Jan; compiled 23 problems. Coincidence? I think not.

A NY Times book review (Hat tip: Pankaj Narula) begins with a classic gambit: “All eyes are on China as it races to become the world’s next great power. Smart bettors would be wise to put some money on India to get there first, and Edward Luce explains why in “In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India,” his highly informative, wide-ranging survey.”

T.S.Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton begins with
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.” With that quote from Francis Bacon (1595) I introduced the topic of “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” at the XIMB’s (Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar) conference on “Innovation and Entrepreneurship.” I was asked to give the concluding keynote talk on 13th Jan.

I spoke about RISC at the “International Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship” at XIMB last Saturday, Jan 13th. It was a brief talk and was largely based on a document that I had done for an infrastructure report published this month by OUP. Even though the document is quite brief, I think it does a good job of describing RISC. The rest of this post is the “what, why, how” of RISC—Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons.

“We shall do such things, what they shall be I know not, but they shall be the terror of the earth”. That’s Shakespeare’s King Lear making his new year’s resolutions, I suppose. My more modest goals are to blog more regularly, and avoid matters related to religion and politics. How one can reasonably comment on the economy without reference to R & P is a mystery to me. But I shall strive.

“Be Indian, fly Indian” could have been the subliminal message that they wanted to convey when they (whoever they are) decided that it would be good to change the name of the airline to “Indian” from “Indian Airlines.” As I have pondered that change of name before on this blog, I will move on. I only mention this because yesterday I was flying Indian to get from Mumbai to Bhubaneswar. I am attending the “International Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation” at the Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar.

This post will make no sense to most people who have not had the experience of being an impoverished student in the US. Very few who read this blog can relate to Top Ramen. But for those of you who do, I am sure you would be saddened to learn of the passing of Momofuku Ando, who died in Ikeda, near Osaka, at 96, the inventor of ramen, according to this appreciation in the NY Times. [Hat tip: Shrikant.] Mr Ando invented ramen noodles way back in 1958.

If you have been unable to access blogspot today (as I have been), then here is a work around. Use Anonymouse.org.
This public service announcement has been made possible by a grant from the Freedom Foundation (which hopes to have an office in India in a few centuries.)

The Atlantic Monthly recently published a list of The Top 100 most influential Americans. Arguably, many on that list would also make it into a list called “The Top 100 Most Influential People” as well. Indeed, the modern world is defined and shaped by many on that Atlantic Monthly list. It is remarkable how much the world of today (both good and bad) owes to those who were, and are, Americans. In every broad area of human endeavor—science, technology, politics, economics, law, medicine, education, literature, architecture—Americans have made seminal …