I think when it comes to education we need to go back to the basics. We have made the system needlessly complex and it has not surprisingly failed.
A few years ago, at the university, all of us in the student housing co-op were required to attend a presentation by a HIV+ man. At one point he took out a small polythene bag. It had about 70 pills and he said that he took them daily for avoiding getting sick. The pills would make a substantial snack. So why so …

Also Sprach Carl Sagan:
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother …

Here is the slide set I used at ISB on the 9th of March. The background reading material starts off with “Inclusive Economic Growth.”

So then the two state-owned Indian airlines are going to merge (according to this rediff report — hat tip: Tejaswi) and the merged entity will be called — umm, let’s see now — “Air Indian,” the title of a blog post last month on the merger.
I have written earlier about the stupidity of changing the name “Indian Airlines” to the even more generic “Indian,” repainting a few dozen airplanes spending tens of millions of dollars, knowing full well that in a matter of months the whole exercise will …

Two fish were swimming along a stream when they come upon a third fish which remarks, “The water is absolutely fine today.” The two carry on without a reply. Later upstream one of them says to the other, “What the heck is water?”
Talking fish is not the point of the little story, of course. I find it remarkable that we often miss what we take for granted, and don’t question what we are perpetually immersed in. What explains the unreasonable success of cities is not something that we ponder …

Why support free speech, asked Gaurav in a comment on a previous post here. The short answer is: because we are not infinitely wise, our rationality is bounded; because we are not equally wise; because ideas matter, and because markets work.

The matter of the freedom of speech and expression is not just at the heart of economic growth but also of development. I make no apologies about my unconditional and eternal support of free inquiry, speech, and expression. If the exercise of free speech offends someone, then that person belongs to a lower order of existence than that of a human. I have written about the absolute necessity of the freedom of speech. Among the many reasons for my distaste for monotheism is that it prohibits free speech, free …

Related to my previous post on Fanatics and Development, I think this poem is rather funny.

Hopeless ignorant masses need some sort of refuge. In many materially and culturally impoverished parts of that world, religious fanaticism affords that refuge. Monotheistic intolerant faiths such as Christianity and Islam are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for evoking the fanatical response. Combine a dangerous belief in a homicidal cruel monomaniacal god with general cultural and material poverty, and you have the perfect recipe for generalized murderous violence. Although the advanced industrialized countries are nominally Christian, their general prosperity moderates their belief in the monotheistic Christian god. But …

Take a look at this video. Damn, the world does have some very clever and creative people. Thanks to the wonder of the world wide web, we get to enjoy stuff from the comfort of our desktops.

Brand Blanshard wrote eloquently about American education in his essay “Quantity and Quality in American Education.” The essay was published nearly half a century ago but the message is universal. Thanks to Anthony Flood for making it accessible. It is a long and thoughtful essay, worth reading in its entirety. The last bits resonate most forcefully with me, and so I present this extended quote for your reading pleasure and intellectual delight.

Economic growth is an imperative if the widely discussed goal of development has to be achieved by India. There are a number of well-known causative factors that lead to economic growth. Among them are an educated and healthy population, reliable and adequate infrastructure, a free and fair market-driven economy, and the availability of public goods such as law and order, political freedom, efficient governance, etc. These causative factors have complex interdependencies and have to be present–simultaneous in time and co-located in space—for economic growth, and consequently, development. Even after a …

Julius Caesar was warned by a soothsayer to “beware the ides of March.” The ides of March is today, the 15th of March. Good old Julius disregarded the warning and on this fateful day in 44 BCE he fell dead, assassinated by his friend Marcus Brutus. As Shakespeare wrote, it was the most unkindest cut of all. “Oh what a fall there was my countrymen. Then you and I and all of us fell down, whilst bloody treason flourished over us” as Mark Antony later orated. (I am quoting …

A French journalist, Marianne Enault, is writing a piece for a French newspaper about cricket fever in India and wrote to me requesting help.

Where there be challenges, there be opportunities. That is a mantra well-known to every entrepreneur. That immediately implies that India is truly the Land of Unlimited Opportunities. The challenges have been created by a persistent attachment to a certain way of thinking and doing. As Einstein astutely noted, the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. Translating the challenges into opportunities requires a different way of thinking.

Here is a brief video on the Zen Mind — An Introduction. I like Zen Buddhism. It is profoundly simple and direct. The voice-over states clearly at the end of the clip that “… do not differentiate yourself as apart from others, or from the world outside. The search for self-realization is powered by our anxieties and our fears which feed our ego causing frustrations in our daily life. Selfishness, jealousy, anger, hate — which unconsciously serve to protect us, and in doing so, set us in opposition to everyone …

Where is India today? How did it get here? Where should India be going? And how should it get there? These are the big questions that I try to grapple with. And that is how I began my presentation.
ISB at night [source]
Recently I was on a panel discussion titled “Business Strategies for Inclusive Economic Growth” held during the semi-final round of the Global Social Venture Competition at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad on the 9th and 10th of March. The panel–moderated by my friend Dr Reuben …

The business plan was about creating a business which would help the blind become more productive. But the presenter took elaborate pains to avoid the word “blind”and instead constantly referred to the “visually challenged.” I suppose the PC police would have immediately handcuffed and hauled off anyone who was so insensitive as to directly point to blindness and call it such. No, a person is not blind but visually challenged. And I wondered how long before the PC police decree that “visually challenged” is itself un-PC and now you have …

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

“Short, therefore, is man’s life; and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells.” Marcus Aurelius Antoninus – (121-180) noted that in his Meditations. Here is a picture of how small the earth is whose narrow corner we dwell.