I was reminded of Gun Shy one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite singers, Natalie Merchant — lead singer and songwriter of the band “10,000 Maniacs.” It’s from the album “In My Tribe.” What I find moving about the song is in its lyrics. Have a listen.

In my previous post about Satya Sai Baba, my point was that he was a fraud. Just to be sure, I define a person to be a fraud if he uses fraudulent means to achieve an end that benefits him. SSB deceived and lied to people to gain an advantage. All the evidence shows that he did so but I would be happy to see evidence to the contrary. His supporters don’t bother with refuting the evidence that he cheated and instead come up with specious arguments about how he …

Satya Sai Baba is dead. He disproved his own prediction — that he’ll die at age 96 — by kicking the bucket at 86. I suppose Yama Raj, the Lord of Death, didn’t get the memo and came by on his bull when he felt like giving the Baba a call. Anyway, there’s no arguing with Yama Raj (except of course if you are Shiva, who can tell Yama to back off) and he, or perhaps one of his minions — Yamdoots — caught Satya Sai Baba in his noose …

{Why? Because in the last few months, I bought a big fat LCD tv (Samsung), a network blu-ray player (Samsung), a big fat internet-ready 7.2 receiver (Onkyo), a big fat sub-woofer and other assorted speakers (Polk Audio), and other bits of electronics. TVs and receivers are awesomely complicated these days. Just figuring out what all the receiver can do is going to take a week’s worth of full time work. That’s why.}

In a Foreign Policy magazine article, “More than 1 billion people are hungry in the world“, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo ask what if its really true. It is an extract from their book, “Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.” The article is long and well worth reading to get an idea of how some people think how some other people behave. Much of that thinking of even superficially wrong but there is a significant part where the thinking is plausible at first glance …

The title of this post echoes the title of Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume “Democracy in America” (1835 and 1840). Inequality in America is the subject of Joseph Stiglitz’ piece in Vanity Fair (May 2011), “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” Fittingly, in the concluding bit of the essay, Stiglitz quotes Tocqueville.

I know, I know. I am suffering from writers’ block. I wonder if William Shakespeare ever stumbled upon a writer’s block. Probably. Or probably not. Anyway, it’s his birthday today and I am glad that he was born. Or at least those who wrote what is attributed to him were born. Francis Bacon, for instance. Be that as it may, I am sorry that I have been incommunicado. I wish I could use the excuse that I had a visitor from my India office to chaperon around California for the …

Wishing you all a Happy Bengali New Year!!
I am visiting Irvine, CA, for a couple of days. Drove down from SF Bay area, part of the way on highway 1. The Pacific coast if fabulous. Then had to double back because 1 was closed a little south of Monterey. Then took 101 South, followed by I-405. Ended up driving for nearly 10 hours.
I will post pictures in a bit.

The April 2011 edition of “Pragati — The Indian National Interest Review” is here. I have a piece in there — The Illusion of Freedom. Here it is below the fold, for the record.

I have not read Joseph Lelyveld’s book on Gandhi. Of course, neither have any of those who are heaping invective upon Lelyveld’s head for having written the book. I will probably borrow the book from the library one of these days but for now, it is good to hear the man himself explain what he attempted to do in the book. Michael Krasny’s Forum on KQED had him on in the second hour of the show today. It was enlightening, as Forum almost always is. Check it out.

Anna Hazare in the context of rural development praised the work of chief ministers Nitish Kumar and — here’s where he slipped up and deviated from the script — Narendra Modi. That’s going to cost him. But Narendrabhai is a master strategist. He promptly — at 5 AM in the morning — wrote an open letter to Anna Hazare.

Just thought that an old post from over three years ago in Jan 2008 is worth revisiting since it appears that some idiots people in India are waking up finally to the truth of how NREGA causes inflation. “Does the NREGS Cause Inflation?”

How should we live, how should we treat others, and how should we govern our society. Normative questions like those keep philosophers busy. To that extent we are all philosophers. Our society is a reflection of our collective philosophizing on those concerns. So therefore for society to change, our answer to the question — “What’s the right thing to do?” — has to change.

Anna Hazare’s indefinite fast for getting the “Jan Lokpal Bill” passed has met with almost universal approval. The media frenzy has caught the Indian public’s attention to an extent that they generally reserve for more important matters such as a cricket match. One could argue that both the public obsession with cricket and the current spectacle of a public fast share a common origin, the deep-seated desire of the people to participate in what they believe are events of great significance. Mob hysteria is awesome to behold but rarely if …

My colleague Rajesh Jain has a “Big Ideas Contest” going on at his blog. Here are the details:

‘Italian by birth and Catholic by baptism‘ is the title of a very brief item by John Maclithon in DNA. It can be best characterized as a confession. He was the only foreign journalist to be awarded the Padma Shri, and that too by the Congress party, which he says was surprising since he has “always been a vocal critic of the Nehru dynasty.” Indira Gandhi, he claims, wanted to throw him in jail during the Emergency. He goes on to confess that he was wrong about India — and …

The chief minister of Gujarat, Shri Narendra Modi, is a hero of mine. That does not mean that I approve of every position he holds. In the case of the banning of Joseph Lelyveld’s book, “Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India,” I most certainly do not agree with Narendrabhai. What is more, I will not hesitate to tell him so. I am a free speech fundamentalist. Banning expression is the start of a journey the destination of which is something akin to an Islamic state which orders …

The freedom of speech and expression is not only a good in itself but it is also instrumental in human civilizational progress. It is therefore puzzling that quite a significant segment of humanity is ever ready to ban expression whenever there’s something said or written that goes against their cherished beliefs. What makes it worse is that another segment which does not fully comprehend what freedom of expression actually means. Usually they go, “I am for freedom of speech but . . . ”