Over in Malaysia, Malaysian Hindus (naturally therefore of Indian ancestry) are being repressed systematically. That is pity but no more than the systematic repression of anyone anywhere. I agree with The Acorn that Malaysian Hindus are Malaysians. It is their internal affair. It is their land, their laws, their government and their policies. Others should just butt out.

Woman 1: “What is that little trash can on the screen?”
Woman 2: “My son says that is called the ‘recycle bin’. He tells me when I don’t want a Word document anymore and I delete it, it really goes in there.”
Woman 1: “Why in the recycle thingy? Can’t you just erase it?”
Woman 2: “Oh no, Word wouldn’t work for very long if I did that, I would run out of blank pages.”
Woman 1: “Why?”
Woman 2: “Because it cleans the words off the pages, then sends the blank sheets back to …

India is the largest democracy in the world. Or so it is said. It must be because they have elections and what nots. Cargo cult democracy perhaps but democracy none the less.
So here’s the latest cargo-cultish news about Indian democracy. A man who has been a cook to the Nehru-Gandhi family for decades has been rewarded for his loyalty by the Nehru-Gandhi family — his son has been given a Congress ticket.

If your government is manipulated into disregarding the law of the land by rioting murderous mobs, you might be a third-world country.
{Continued from part 1.}
Taslima Nasreen got hounded out of Kolkata by rioting Muslims. The state of West Bengal displayed its spinelessness and instead of providing protection to a visitor, gave in to intimidation and violence. She was packed off to Jaipur. The fear of murderous mobs compelled the Rajasthani government to kick her out. She is now hiding somewhere in New Delhi, the capital of India. One …

“Does the breath have any religion,” asks His Holiness Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. “Is the air we breathe around us Muslim, Christian, or Hindu?”
No, I did not make it up. That is what is reported in a recent rediff article. The questions are so profound that I found myself moved to ask such questions. Mine are modest efforts, naturally, as I am not blessed with the immense holiness of SSRS. I am sure that you can also add to the list I present here.

I was merely following a link that landed in my mailbox and ended up at someone’s Orkut page, someone called Preeti. She wrote a testimonial for someone thus:
ABHAY…..wat cn i spk bout diz person nw….hez a lil sensitive but very adventerous guy…hez got gr8 potential in him and alwayzz aimzz 4 d best(datz y he got me as a frnd )……hizz my super snr bt nevva made me feel so… …hiz soo gud n down 2 earth…n btw u al kn wat i call him wid many nick name lemme …

Keynes on what it takes to be an economist:
The study of economics does not seem to require any specialized gifts of an unusually high order. Is it not, intellectually regarded, a very easy subject compared with the higher branches of philosophy or pure science? An easy subject, at which very few excel! The paradox finds its explanation, perhaps, in that the master-economist must possess a rare combination of gifts. He must be mathematician, historian, statesman, philosopher–in some degree. he must understand symbols and speak in words. He must contemplate …

The question that faces West Bengal, a state in eastern India [1], appears to be whether a Bangladeshi author named Taslima Nasreen should be allowed to stay. The recent news is that “a minority fringe group” has demanded that Taslima be deported.
The answer is absolutely clear to me: she may stay or go depending on what the law of the land says. Rule of law is something that I consider non-negotiable. So the deeper question is whether India at large, and West Bengal more specifically, is a nation that …

Over two years ago, in Aug 2005, I had written that the national rural employment guarantee scheme (NREG) will ultimately end up increasing the number of poor and deepening poverty — which of course was easy enough to predict since the policy is “pro-poor” and like all policies “pro-” something do, increases that something.
The NEGS is not novel. Maharashtra has had an employment guarantee scheme for decades. According to Sharad Joshi, it “has produced few permanent assets. And the EGS in Maharashtra is synonymous with corruption. Government officials concoct false …

Nov 19th, 1863. Abraham Lincoln spoke for two minutes at Gettysburg. Here’s the Gettysburg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that …

Pakistan matters critically to India. One could dismiss it as a failed tin-pot dictatorship and is of little consequence with respect to India’s development and economic growth. But it is just because it is a tin-pot dictatorship that it matters. Even more precisely, it has been made into a tin-pot dictatorship so that it can serve as a lever to indirectly control India. I deliberately say “made” because it is a tool used by the West and therefore fashioned by and kept in “good” shape to serve the purpose. Principally, …

Here’s an image of tropical cyclone Sidr from the NASA Earth Observatory.

Tropical Cyclone Sidr was continuing its northward progress over the Bay of Bengal on November 14, 2007. It was moving north toward the Mouths of the Ganges at a speed of 13 kilometers per hour (8 miles per hour), and winds in the storm system were raging at 220 km/hr (140 mph) near the storm’s center, making it a Category 4 strength tropical cyclone.

Tropical cyclone Sidr is expected to make landfall sometime early Friday morning near Kolkata. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope that it does not have the impact of cyclone Gorky which hit Bangladesh in 1991 killing 138,000 and leaving 10 million homeless.

Here we go again. In March of 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. These statues had stood there since the early 6th century. Symbols of universal compassion, these were in the eyes of Islam, something that had to be destroyed.

Full marks for perseverance, though. “When Mahmud of Ghazni conquered Afghanistan and part of west India in the 12th century, the Buddhas and frescoes were spared from destruction though Buddhist monasteries and other artifacts were looted or destroyed. Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor distinguished for his religious …

Amit wrote in a comment:
Atanu, when you have time, I’d invite you to do some research on food production and malnutrition, and write a post on it – whether lack of food is because of insufficient production, or asymmetrical distribution and inefficient use of crops/food. Because it’s a very popular sentiment that’s paraded out every time a case is made for biotech crops – that it is the solution to world hunger. Would be interesting to read your take on it.
Sorry but it is unlikely that I will find the …

Deepavali Greetings! May Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, be a welcome visitor to your home and workplace.

[The Wordpress software is putting a "Japonophile" watermark on the pictures. I will have to figure out how to disable that one.]

Technology, in economics jargon, expands the production possibilities frontier (PPF). In simpler terms, you get more stuff by using technology by using resources more efficiently. Which in turn means that you have less waste produced as a by-product of the production of useful stuff.
A recent column by Gurcharan Das titled “Let Biotech Crops Bloom” notes how the introduction of transgenic cotton has doubled India’s cotton production in the last five years and is second largest cotton producing country (after China.) He laments the fact that Indian farmers don’t have …

In the past, I used to try and respond to all comments. Time constraints do not allow me that luxury any more. I sincerely appreciate the comments, however, and my thanks for those thoughtful comments. Some comments which call for a clarification or further elaboration of the subject, I will respond in subsequent posts.
I generally don’t censor comments and I don’t remove comments, however irrelevant to the post, unless it is pure spam. Some comments test my resolve about not removing comments. Those are the type which clearly indicate that …

My distaste for poverty is only exceeded by my utter contempt for those who nurture that awful monster of poverty that chews up living human beings and spits them out like so much garbage. True evil to me is that impulse that disregards human suffering, and more often than not, that evil force emanates from ideology and dogma. Communism is one such evil; the other horror is organized religious dogma mostly represented by the monotheistic religions. The richer the organized religion, the more powerful it is, and has the …

A brief reminder is in order here because from time to time, I do resort to very simple economic models. The utility of simple models in assisting thinking about complex matters is under-appreciated by most of us whose professional interests do not require model-based thinking. In the hard sciences, physicists and cosmologists commonly use models to clarify their thinking and illuminate the essential features of the complex theoretical subjects they study. Where the search space of a solution is unmanageable large, simulations based on simple models come in handy, such …