A news item reports that Coke has completed some rain water harvesting projects in MP. “The projects have the combined capacity to harvest 36 lakh liters (3.6 million liters) of rainwater annually, benefiting the schools and surrounding communities.” Good start.

“A demoralized, timid, and hopeless mass bullied and crushed by every dominant interest and incapable of resistance.” Who said this about whom and when?

Too much hypocrisy in the air these days. Commies, Christians, Congressis, . . . the list goes on. The three C’s converge on the campus of the Jawaharlal Nehru University — which is appropriate and right.

Richard Dawkins, he of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, pulls no punches. He tells it as he sees it.

For anyone to do anything great requires will and vision. True for an individual, true for a nation. India is stuck not because it does not have the resources but because it does not have the will and the vision to succeed. To be more accurate, India has not had leaders who have the required will and vision to make use of India’s resources, such as they are. The so-called “Nehru rate of growth” was the consequence of having leaders with little will and even less understanding — starting of …

You know that old piece of wisdom, “Good, fast, cheap: choose two.”

Forget anthropic global warming. Sure there is climate change. But when did the climate ever not change? Even before hominins walked upright, climate has been changing. Indeed, without climate change, we would not be here. Climate change from a reducing to an oxidizing atmosphere allowed complex lifeforms on earth to develop. Life has always changed the climate — and will continue to do so. What matters is not climate but what mankind’s major sources of energy is.

In a recent debate on a blog post (Offstumped), the matter appeared to me to be pretty cut and dried. To me, the freedom of speech is sacrosanct (to the extent that anything about the world is sacrosanct to me) and absolutely non-negotiable. Why?

Ever wonder why India is so corrupt? Because like three-day old fish, the rot starts at the top. Now you know what the top was at the time of India’s independence and therefore you must have had your conjectures. Now wonder no more.

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The ability to do things differently than was done previously must rank as one of the more desirable features of any entity. Individuals and institutions that have the flexibility to change as circumstance change are more successful than others. Those who are confident of themselves can dispassionately examine what about themselves needs change. It takes intelligence to figure out what is wrong and how to fix it. It takes courage to admit that the current system just does not work. It takes optimism and self-confidence to know that one has …

The particular strength of the US is that it has a great education system. As a consequence, it produces many people who are articulate, intelligent, thoughtful and above all, reasonable. That thought struck me forcefully once again when I was reading James Fallows’ essay in the recent issue of The Atlantic titled “How America can Rise Again.” Of course, the reason it has a good educational system is simply because it has a good set of rules, the primary source of which is the constitution of the US. Below the …

I don’t follow cricket but this is too precious to ignore. I guarantee that it will crack you up. Thanks to lalbrofessor. AoA!

As tired as that cliche is, India does need to wake up and smell the coffee. The world is moving on while India is still stuck in the socialist swamp created by the government after independence. I write this as a public service. I have no doubt that writing this for the edification of Indian policymakers is as useful as trying to teach a pig to sing (which as they say, cannot be done and it merely annoys the pig), but perhaps the general public will take note.

The Russian word “pogrom” means “to destroy, to wreak havoc, to demolish violently” and is applied to “any incident of wanton and unrestrained destruction on a mass scale.” According to the wiki, the word came into English via Yiddish. The etymology of the word makes sense. Yiddish literally means “Jewish”. Jews have been the victim of pogroms by Christians and Muslims for millennia everywhere in the world except for India. The world will never be allowed to forget that because the Jews will make sure that they themselves will not …

Did you know there’s a connection between UC Berkeley and India’s political independence from the British? Let me get to that after this.

One of the perils of reading newspapers in India is that you are exposed to some rather mindless nonsense. Last Sunday morning in Ahmedabad, throwing caution to the winds, I picked up a newspaper, DNA Sunday. To my horror but not to my surprise, there was Sri Sri Sri Ravishankar’s hirsute image atop a column titled, “In love, losing is winning.”
You caught that, didn’t you – that there are three sri’s where there used to be only two sri’s? That’s not a typo.

In today’s Business Standard, Pranab Bardhan in his article “India — A case of bad governance“, makes a number of very important points.

Christopher “god is not great” Hitchens on why Pakis hate the Americans.