I came across this story on a mailing list. Let me retell the story first and then the source of the story.

I gather from Kanchan Gupta’s piece — “In Rome, Durga is not welcome” — the officials in Rome are jerking around Hindus who want to celebrate puja. But for the efforts of the Indian Ambassador, Mr Arif Shahid Khan, this year’s Durga puja celebrations in Rome would have been a disaster. A deep bow for Mr Khan in appreciation of his help to the Hindus in Rome.

Let me tell you a story. It’s a vignette of what I consider to be important although it may appear to be rather trivial. Perhaps its apparent triviality is what should astonish us. But allow me to first recount a conversation I had the last week.

India, like all other countries of the world, is embedded in the larger context of the world. Naturally therefore India’s fortunes and the prospects for its development are circumscribed by the world’s prospects. Religion — especially the monotheistic ones — are arguably one of the most powerful of the forces that shape the human world. One cannot hope to study economic growth and development without understanding how religion is impacting the world at large. One fact is undeniable: when societies undergo severe stress, they fracture along predictable lines. The …

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The questions about our universe — how it evolved, what governs it today, and where is it going — have been asked for a while. A small step in answering those questions has been the construction the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Here’s a great explanation of the LHC is and how it works.

A BusinessWeek article of 14th September, “Next: An Internet Revolution in Higher Education,” makes the case that the way higher education is done will be changed by the internet revolution. This is not the most earthshaking bit of news you may have heard since it is fairly obvious that nearly everything has been affected by the internet and in the future, every aspect of human society will be qualitatively different as a consequence of the ease with which information is recorded, stored, transmitted, searched, and retrieved.

This morning I was reminded of the words of a song “Impossible Dream”. The song goes thus:

One suspects that the government of India spends considerable amounts on its office bearers — bureaucrats and politicians. Although their nominal salaries perhaps don’t amount to much, the costs of the royal perks they enjoy must be pretty large. Many of these perks were meant for the British rulers of India, naturally, and the new rulers saw no reason to not enjoy them as well. What’s good for the white must be good for the browns. Indeed, I also suspect that the perks must have increased.

The title of this post is borrowed from an article by Arun Shourie in today’s Indian Express, “Conduct above all.” In it Shourie recounts a story told about an ancestor of mine, a fellow called Diogenes. Also known as Diogenes of Sinope, he was a cynic. Here’s that story:

Getting things ass backwards is not a crime. Most people act stupid from time to time but are not congenitally stupid. But when organizations, and people who are high up in such organizations, get things ass backwards and persistent in doing so for decades, the results are neither pretty nor trivial. A shining example of the consistent ass-backwardness amounting to criminal stupidity is being reported.

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) had this to say about Christianity –

My friend, Dr Aniruddha Malpani, is an IVF specialist in Mumbai. When he is not busy getting women pregnant, he runs “HELP” — the world’s largest free patient education library. Now he needs help. He wrote to me, saying,

Reports of gross misdeeds by people in power leave as much of an impression on the Indian mind as does yesterday’s weather forecast. And they appear to be as helpless in the face of institutionalized corruption and criminal behavior as in altering the weather. They take both as a given, a fact of nature that is outside their control.

Cities are the engines of growth. Therefore, a policy that promotes urbanization of the population is an indispensible instrument for economic growth and development. In the following TED Talk, Paul Romer, a world-class growth economist at Stanford, makes the case.

I have many avenues for wasting time but most of them involve the internets. Here’s a trick for you: go to wikipedia and click on “Random Article” in the navigation panel. Here are the lessons.

For decades I have been a fan or Garrison Keillor and his radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” on public radio.

The topic of education is an obsession with me for the simple reason that one cannot address any development related issues without reference to education, however broadly or narrowly one defines education or development. My interest in the use — and misuse — of technology in education is a natural extension of that basic interest in development and growth. The One Laptop Per Child comes in for special scrutiny because the implications of such a program are phenomenal for a poor country like India. I have long argued that there …

Don’t do sports on this blog but this is too good to not mention here.