Well I am off to the City Formerly Known As Madras. I will be in Chennai for the weekend.
Here is a classic Christopher Hitchens piece for you reading pleasure. “It’s impossible to satisfy “Rage Boy” and his ilk. It’s stupid to try.” And don’t forget to see the pictures of Rage Boy here.

TataIndicom
I live in a development called “Magarpatta City” on the southeastern edge of Pune. Like most other recent real estate developments around the country, it is a gated community. It is far from complete and but most services are available, although choices are limited. One service essential to me is internet connectivity. The only service provider within the complex is VSNL TataIndicom Broadband.
It is “broadband” only if you have a sufficiently flexible definition of broadband. (You know, like “2 + 2 = 5” for sufficiently large values of “2”.) …

Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion. But only if Caesar himself is above suspicion. What if Caesar is way way below suspicion? Shouldn’t you expect that his wife will also not be above suspicion?
Think about it.

One is forced to the generalization that at the level of the individual it is all exogenous, while at the level of the society, it is all endogenous. Take the market, for instance. To an individual, price is something that is a given and whether he or she participates in the market or not, cannot change the price. Price is determined externally and is indifferent to the efforts of the individual. It arises from almost magically from the collective interactions of the individuals in the market. Price arises out of, …

Talk to Me
You can learn a lot from talking to people. Long train journeys were a prefect setting to have long conversations with perfect strangers, people who have a different point of view, a different set of life experiences. Now that these days there are very few train journeys, long cab rides are the substitute setting for me to conduct an impromptu interview. Books and other publications generally give you a macro-level view of the world. For a micro-level understanding, you have to talk to people who you would not …

I got tagged by Raj In the past, getting tagged usually pins me against the wall and I end up not playing along. But it being a lazy Sunday, here goes nothing: eight random things about me.

Death
Someone I used to know in California died rather suddenly. It was about 20 years ago. She and her husband were casual friends of mine. The perfect yuppie couple, they had everything going for them. Then she started having back pain. They were into fitness and perhaps the back pain was due to some sprained muscle while at the gym. A few visits to the doctors, a few more to chiropractors, a bit of muscle relaxants and pain killers, a few more visits to the medical establishments—a few months went …

Oh wonderful new world of the web, that has such people like E. O. Wilson in it!

E O Wilson got his wish. “As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we’re still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; yet we’re still steadily destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), using the acronym HIPPO, and …

Since the last few days, I notice that this blog is getting a lot of visitors from esatsang.net, a site devoted to Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. I am not sure why but my blog does get a lot of attention from the followers of SSRS. It is interesting that my knowledge of the Art of Living organization and its leader is only impressionistic. I never studied the organization or its head. I had a general idea that SSRS was one of the many gurus that India produces fairly consistently. There …

Read it, it’s dam funny.

A report in the Middle East section of the NY Times contains the sort of stuff that you cannot make up. It is about fatwas.
A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life
CAIRO, June 11 — First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed …

I came across the name Gordon Wu in an item in a recent Knowledge@Wharton mailing. It was titled “Gordon Wu Sees Huge Opportunities in China’s Rapid Urbanization.” Wu, a Hong Kong native, graduated from Princeton in 1958, and in 1969 founded Hopewell Holdings, a civil engineering firm. “Wu’s Hopewell Holdings — where he serves as chairman of the board – has been a pioneer for nearly three decades in building highways, power plants and bridges in China and Hong Kong. In addition to Hopewell Holdings, Wu heads Hopewell Highway Infrastructure …

Of Economic Freedom and Bondage
This is the concluding part of my re-write of PM Dr Manmohan Singh’s speech to the CII. (Previous part on Social Contracts here.) The PM in his speech had quoted from Tagore’s Gitanjali. I suppose the irony of quoting Tagore in the context of the government’s sustained effort to divide the country along caste and religious lines is lost on him. Severe cognitive dissonance perhaps. I have critically examined the PM’s speech for what it was, an attempt to browbeat the Indian industrialists into further crippling …

Social Contracts
I have a strong aversion to sanctimonious hypocritical idiotic talk (just to spell it out) but it happens, as they say. Perhaps it doesn’t just happen, it is demanded. A sort of reverse Says’ law, “demand creating supply.” If not actually demanding it, sufficient people are not disgusted by it that the supply is maintained. Lack of aversion, or at least a publicly stated aversion to the peddling of it.
With that, here is part four of my re-write of PM Dr Manmohan Singh’s speech to the Confederation of …

Fair and Just Profit
Why has profit become such a profane word in India? I believe that it is due to a failure to fully comprehend the nature of what humans do when they engage in economically productive activities and what results from that action. If you believe that the world is static in the sense that there is only a limited amount of stuff to go around irrespective of what one does, then naturally you would believe that it is a zero-sum game, a game in which Ramesh gains only …

Governance
Yesterday I posted the first part of the fake speech that I wish the real PM of India had delivered. The message in the first bit was simply that there are things that the government is supposed to do and there are things that individuals and the private sector is supposed to do. There is a natural division of labor arising from comparative advantages of the competing parties. The government has a comparative advantage in governance, not in producing stuff. The government must stick to governance. Here’s why.

Division of Labor
The “fake”qualifies the “speech” and not the PM, I hasten to add lest there be any misunderstanding. You must have come across the much celebrated speech that Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh gave the other day at a CII conference. I read it with rising disappointment and dismay. Smeared with high-sounding socialistic rhetoric, the message was clear: take care of the mess or else dire consequences will follow. Never mind that the mess was not the creation of the Indian industries, that it is not their responsibility, and …

Charlie Munger delivered the 2007 Law School Commencement address at the University of Southern California on May 13th. Munger is a guru in the original sense of the Sanskrit word, a person who conveys wisdom. He begins the talk with “Safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.” The transcript of the talk is worth reading very very slowly. Take this line near the end, “The highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.”
There are too many lines that …

Anyone who knows me soon realizes that I have few heroes, and I consider most entities of the human persuasion to be at least mildly stupid, if not outright moronic. Prof Richard Dawkins makes the very short list of my heroes. I am proud to say that I have even met him briefly when he visited UC Berkeley to deliver a fairly famous lecture (I forget which lecture considering that Berkeley has a truck-load of famous lectures) a few years ago. He signed my copy of the book by him, …

The makers of monsters and their fates are inextricably tied, both in fiction and in real life. Dr Frankenstein’s monster. Dr Faustus. Mrs Gandhi, the elder and Sant Bhindranwale. The CIA and Osama bin Laden. The CIA and the Taleban. Add your own favorite examples.
Dr MM Singh. VP Singh. The monsters created for gaining political power by legislating divisions of the country along caste and religious lines are beginning to have a life of their own.
Soon to be released, the sequel to the hit drama, “August 1947: The First Cut.” …