Winston Churchill’s pithy observation that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter” is unfortunately too accurate to be dismissed lightly. We are often acutely reminded of that by the results of elections, in developed as well as in developing countries. It is a marvel that the myth of the enlightened voter persists against all evidence to the contrary.

As you probably know, 21st of May is the rapture. Nothing to do with rap music or anything like that. Just that Jeebus will be gathering those who believe in him. Anywho, check out this thoughtful video on the upcoming rapture.

“The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.” Ralph Waldo Emerson was a clever man. Someone else wrote that if we know the why, we can always figure out the how. Perhaps it was I or perhaps it was someone smarter. Anyhow, this is an open thread. Say what you will. I am going to be back in a bit.

Gautam, aka Sakyamuni (the sage of the Sakyas), became a buddha around 2,500 years ago. Today, known as Buddha Purnima, the day of the full moon in May, is celebrated as his birthday. So here’s the Chinese singer Imee Ooi singing the Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, aka The Heart Sutra. Listen.

Many of you know that I believe that the backbone of India’s transportation system has to be rail-based. I love trains and continue to marvel at how amazing railroads are. This post is about how amazing are the machines that lay, repair and replace railroad tracks in advanced industrialized countries (and I suppose nowadays in China.)

I think the reports of India’s independence from colonial rule are severely exaggerated. Indians have been under foreign rule for several centuries and have become accustomed to being treated like irresponsible slaves, demanding to be controlled. Sure they do “democratically” determine who will rule them, but in the end, they are still slaves entrusted with the task of electing their masters. And the masters decide what the slaves will hear, read, and write. Let me explain why I hold the slaves with special contempt — because they acquiesce so willingly …

The importance of rules cannot be overestimated. Human societies differ not so much in the physical characteristics of people or their mental capabilities as they do in the rule-sets that define and distinguish them. If we have to understand why some societies prosper and others don’t, we could do worse than to examine their rules. Culture is another term for the collection of rules, and it more than any other factor determines how successful a society is.

The pricing of a book is an interesting economics problem. For economic efficiency, the price should be equal to the marginal cost. But as often happens, marginal costs are sometimes far below average costs (due to fixed costs.) So P=MC leaves a deficit in the recovery of full costs. Therefore P>MC has to be it. For ebooks, the MC=~0. But if you shift some of the deficit by pricing ebooks > 0, you reduce the deficit. I have been thinking about book pricing because we have to attach a price …

Of course pretty much everyone knows that democracy, universal franchise, “first past the post” elections, etc, is the best way — if not the only way — to organize our political system. In a country overflowing with religions, that should be considered another religion. And as with other religions, since they have been brought up thinking in a particular way, people accept its articles of faith without question, and anyone doubting its tenets is met with hostility. At the risk of being branded a foreign agent and an enemy of …

This is a request for help. My modest little book “Transforming India” will be ready for distribution in about two weeks. If you or anyone you know is willing to carry a bunch of them as accompanied baggage from India (anywhere) to the SF Bay area, you will have my eternal gratitude(*). Specifically I am looking for people traveling in the 25th May to 10th June time frame. I will pay for any additional costs charged by the airlines. Thank you. (* eternal gratitude limited to three days or …

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” And I would add that sometimes by standing aside from the ranks of the insane one runs the risk of being the object of unwelcome attention from the insane. But one does not have much of a choice in the matter: you are either sane or you are not. (Sanity, I should hasten to add, is a subjective matter and opinions would …

There’s something about the Osama bin Laden saga that makes me immensely sad. I will come to that presently. But first, are people really so dumb as to believe that the Pakistani leaders did not know precisely where OBL was? They must be. Why? Because some people are earnestly writing in widely read journals that the Pakistanis must have known. Such articles indicate that there are people who are clueless enough to believe that the Pakistanis did not know and the US trusted the Pakistani claim that they did not …

Now that this fallacy has been making the rounds since the demise of Mr Osama bin Laden, as a public service, please remember to pass this on to the pointy-headed idiot who declared that Osama bin Laden was not a leader of Muslims.

For having helped (yeah right) the US find and kill Osama bin Laden, the US will give $10 billion in military aid to Pakistan. This is a prediction. Hillary Clinton and her boss will make sure that happens. That aid will help keep India poor by forcing India to buy even more weapons of mass destruction. (Weapons of mass destruction — meaning that buying them forces a few millions of Indians die of starvation.)

The price of leaked AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Examination) in Uttar Pradesh is reportedly Rs 6 lakhs (around US$13.5k). Around 1.2 million high school students compete for 27,000 seats in a specific set of engineering colleges across India. That’s an admission rate of 2.25 percent. That 2.25 percent explains the price of the leaked exam question papers. The bigger story is worth recounting. It’s a story of shortage, corruption and government control. It’s the story of India, in short.

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Islamic terrorism started with Osama bin Laden if one were to go by what the US politicians claim and what the media reports. But India has had the unwanted attention of the proselytizing faiths, Islam and Christianity, for centuries hell bent (to use an expression) on converting the infidels into their bloody ideologies. Terrorism is one of the tactics that people motivated by these ideologies have routinely used — although that fact does not get too much play since much of the …