Atanu Dey on India’s Development

Today I am blogging at “Why Democracy?” and have just published a post on Democracy in India.
The idea behind the Why Democracy? project appears to me to be to ask what democracy actually means and if it works as advertised, and if not, what are the deficiencies in the real places where it exists, etc. […]

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It is not to the State that we owe the multitudinous useful inventions from the spade to the telephone; it is not the State which made possible extended navigation by a developed astronomy; it was not the State which made the discoveries in physics, chemistry, and the rest, which guide modern manufacturers; it was not […]

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During my visit to the campuses of the Thomas Jefferson Institute school at Queretaro and Mexico city, I was asked to address the students. Talk? Me? Of course, I can talk to classes. Been doing that for a while and I must say that I miss teaching. So I am given a pretty hectic schedule […]

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Cyrus Farivar has a piece on Slate today titled “Still waiting for that $100 laptop?“. He writes: “Negroponte’s plan to heal the world with laptops is well-meaning but fundamentally flawed. What good is a laptop in the middle of rural Thailand when electricity, much less Internet access, are spotty at best? Rather than getting laptops […]

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For the past few days, I have been in Mexico. On Monday, on my way from Mexico city to Queretaro, I took a detour and visited the pyramids at Teotihuacan (wiki). I uploaded a few of the pictures of the pyramids.

Yesterday I spent time visiting the school Instituto Thomas Jefferson’s Queretaro campus and […]

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That image is from a site in Roundwood, Co. Wicklow, Ireland. The caption to it says: “When Hindu Lord Ganesh came to Ireland he decided to go native, as indeed, he had done when he went to China and Japan. He is accompanied by his servant, the rat, the latter playing the bodran and […]

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I am tickled that the National Knowledge Commission website has linked to a post on this blog. This page entitled “Governance” (?) lists an article as “The Better, Faster Way to Help Rural India (Perhaps the answer to India’s rural development woes lies in creating cities instead).”
Heh heh!

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Education in India is generally in dire straits even though some people mistakenly believe that it is excellent from the successes of some ex-IIT non-resident Indians in the US who made piles of money. It is not hard to figure out what is the root cause of the distress of the educational system in India: […]

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Click on image to see web album.

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San Francisco Bay Area
It feels good to be back to the place I called home for much of my adult life. After just a few days it feels as if I had never left the San Francisco bay area, even though I have been living in India for the past four years. Certainly I visit […]

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The problem with the typewriter monkeys has been solved. An entirely new crew has been hired because the older bunch were slackers and did not produce enough posts. I am back on the road, vagabonding in Paris today. Here are some pictures of my afternoon in Paris with my friend Courtenay. Tomorrow I leave for […]

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