Atanu Dey on India’s Development

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Entries from April 2007

The Indian Education System — Part 1

April 30th, 2007 · 12 Comments

The fractal nature of the generalization that education matters holds across time and space. Irrespective of the granularity of analysis, education aids development through the intermediate step of economic growth. At the finest level of detail, an educated individual anywhere in the world is more productive than an uneducated one. At the broadest level of […]

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Tags: Education

Obscenity in India

April 28th, 2007 · 26 Comments

This is obscene. The way we get our priorities mixed up is seriously obscene and disturbing. A bunch of people — clueless retards, more descriptively — get offended by some Hollywood actor kissing some silly young woman on the cheek in public and publicly protest what they call an attack on their cultural ethos. Worse […]

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Tags: Rants (Warning: May cause offense)

Deluded Government

April 28th, 2007 · 14 Comments

Very young children in Christian households (especially in the US) are led to believe that if they are good, Santa Claus will bring them gifts during Christmas. It is rather cute to see their eyes light up with eager anticipation of the stuff that Santa would deliver. By the time these kids are teenagers, most […]

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Tags: Random Draws

PanIIT’s “Reach 4 India”

April 27th, 2007 · 2 Comments

Today I was favored with an email from the PanIIT alumni organization. The subject of the email was “Required for IIT alumni Reach 4 India! organisation” and the text was about their search for a “Chief Operations Sevak” and a “Chief Finance & Funding Sevak.”

I wrote back promptly asking if among the illustrious alumni […]

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Tags: Comic Relief

Dryden on Intelligence

April 26th, 2007 · 1 Comment

Gordon Dryden, the New Zealand-based co-author of The Learning Revolution, and more importantly a dear friend of mine, disagrees with many of the key points proposed in Charles Murray’s series of three articles from the Wall Street Journal mentioned in the post Murray on Education yesterday. It is important for me to note that Gordon […]

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Tags: Random Draws

Leaping Shampoo

April 26th, 2007 · 3 Comments

glumbert.com

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Tags: This Amazing Web

Our Wonderful Democracy

April 25th, 2007 · 4 Comments

Hauled from the archives: India’s Cargo Cult Democracy.
Yes, I do like that post. So sue me

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Tags: My Favorite Bits

Murray on Education

April 25th, 2007 · 6 Comments

When I stumble upon something that clearly expresses how I feel about a subject, it is a sheer delight to read. Brain candy to be enjoyed and hoarded. I immediately thank the god of the world wide web (aside: I think I will nominate Ganesha as the ruling deity of the www as he represents […]

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Tags: Education

Sri Sri the SCotU

April 25th, 2007 · 5 Comments

One of the rewards of writing a blog is the occasional email expressing gratitude for something which resonated with the reader. I get those emails fairly regularly on a variety of topics. The flip side is of course the rant from some disgruntled reader who finds something objectionable about my opinion. I get these very […]

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Tags: Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

IEEE Spectrum on the OLPC

April 23rd, 2007 · 2 Comments

Everything you have ever wanted to know about the One Laptop Per Child but never dared to ask has been answered in an excellent feature titled The Laptop Crusade by Tekla Perry in the April 2007 issue of the IEEE Spectrum. (Here’s a link to the print version of the article.)

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Tags: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

Innumerate Reporting

April 23rd, 2007 · 4 Comments

ExpressIndia.com carries a Press Trust of India report titled “Rise in Number of Indian Students in US.” (Hat tip: Ashish Asgekar.) It is a brief report. Here it is in its entirety.

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Tags: Random Draws

The Living Past

April 21st, 2007 · No Comments

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim […]

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Tags: Quotes

Unfair and Unlovely

April 20th, 2007 · 15 Comments

An accident is not a crime, and a crime is not an accident. That distinction kept playing in my mind as I thought of the incident in which a drunken driver, Alistair Pereira, killed seven and injured eight pavement dwellers in Mumbai one night last November. The case against him was ruled to be one […]

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Tags: Justice and Humanity

OLPC and Markets

April 20th, 2007 · 4 Comments

Alex Singleton, President of the Globalisation Institute, a European think tank, argues against the OLPC and says that computers should be left to the market economy. “The very worst idea in international development circles is the One Laptop Per Child scheme being fronted by academic Nicholas Negroponte. ”

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Tags: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)

India Needs Cities

April 18th, 2007 · 11 Comments

Well, well, what do you know! Just as I had finished a series on why India needs to have cities for its economic growth and therefore development (see the last post in the series, Make No Little Plans), my friend Alok pointed me to a Scientific American report dated 17th April by Nikhil Swaminathan titled […]

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Tags: Cities and Urbanization

Where have all the leaders gone?

April 17th, 2007 · 7 Comments

Lee Iacocca asks that question in his book.

His concern — correctly, in my opinion — is with the lack of leadership in the US. But with some substitutions in the names and a few other changes, he could as well been talking about India. At least, the US is fortunate enough that it […]

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Tags: Random Draws

Rambling on about Seatbelts

April 16th, 2007 · 7 Comments

To get back to Pune from Mumbai on Saturday, since I had some luggage, I took a cab instead taking a bus or a train as I usually do. Later, on the expressway, I regretted not taking the bus as I feel safer in a bus on Indian roads. As the car entered the highway, […]

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Tags: Random Draws

Bengali New Year Greetings

April 15th, 2007 · 6 Comments

Shubho Nobo Borsho

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Tags: Random Draws

Life is Cheap

April 14th, 2007 · 10 Comments

Very cheap in India. Alistair Pareira, a 21 year old, in a fit of drunken driving, ran over a bunch of sleeping people a few months ago in Mumbai. He successfully killed seven (including one pregnant woman and two children) and injured eight others.
Those who died were poor. The judgement was that it was […]

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Tags: Justice and Humanity

Make No Little Plans

April 13th, 2007 · 5 Comments

Think Big
There is something in the nature of the world that it is sometimes paradoxically more difficult to make small changes than to make big ones. Logically consistent big changes are more likely to succeed because of the interconnectedness of the world.

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Tags: Cities and Urbanization