Greeting from Thiruvananthapuram, aka Trivandrum. I arrived here yesterday evening from Mumbai. This is the city of the famous Mahavishnu temple in South India, the Sri Anantha Padmanabhaswamy Temple. Thiruvananthapuram means “The land of Sree Anantha Padmanabhaswamy”. A few months ago, that temple’s treasures were valued at Rs 90K crores (around US $20 billion.)

The world is reaching a milestone – nominally today – 7 billion people are alive in the world. I suppose there must be some uncertainty about that number; perhaps we have to give or take 100 million or so. It has been estimated that the total number of people who have ever lived is around 100 billion. Thus around 7 percent of people who have ever lived are alive today. That’s an incomprehensively large number.

Used to be that once upon a time, India had leaders who had a backbone and could shoulder responsibility without buckling. Thus have I heard that one man, Lal Bahadur Shastri, resigned as the railways minister following a train accident in which scores of people died.

I have mentioned the basic laws of human stupidity enunciated by Prof Cipolla before on this blog. For your convenience, I repeat the basic laws here:

Folklore says that things come in threes. Prof John McCarthy, Stanford University, passed away on the 24th of this month. Before that, we said goodbye to Dennis Ritchie. He was found dead on Oct 12th. Steve Jobs died on Oct 5th. It’s been not a very good month for people related to computers and computer science.

For me, one of the best things about being in India during Diwali – or any Indian festival for that matter – is that it gives me hope, that all is not yet lost, that there is something precious that we have, that we will still endure even though it may look quite hopeless.

A good friend sent me an email which reminded me of an old post of mine. Here, for your entertainment, is the text of the email and a link to the old post.

I am not against porn. It has its place but that place is not in the pages of newspaper that pretends to be a national newspaper. It’s a dismal situation. Here’s a picture compiled by someone — graphically illustrating the fact that the Times of India peddles porn. They have been in that business for a long time. I wrote about it in June 2004 — Peddling Pornography. See also this April 2004 post about the Slimes of India.

My previous post “Narendra Modi Scares Some People” received a comment by Sanjeev Sabhlok. See the full text of the comment here. He began by writing, “Much as I respect your opinions on other matters, I simply can’t understand your stand on Modi.” This post is a reply to Sanjeev explaining why I support Narendrabhai Modi.

In the 10 days that I have been in India, I have traveled quite a bit. First was a road trip from Mumbai to Nashik to see my younger brother. Then a day trip to Ahmedabad/Gandhinagar. Three days ago I came to Kolkata and I’ll return to Mumbai on Tuesday 25th October.

I am on my way to Kolkata — the city most likely to be mispronounced in airport announcements. What’s so hard about “coal-kaa-taa”? Three simple syllables with equal stress on each. In any case, the plan is to meet people and talk about things related to India and its political future. Just BTW, for the rest of my visit, I am going to be in the following cities:

I suppose I owe my readers (all three of them) an apology for not posting to this blog. But all that is going to change, as of this very moment. Once you know what I am up to, you will understand the reason for my uncharacteristic lack of communications. I have been wandering around the country.

I am off to the old motherland. I will be the guest of Lufthansa flight from SFO to Frankfurt on their Airbus 380, and then on to Mumbai (on a Boeing 747, I guess.) First time on A380 — I am looking forward to it. I will catch up after I land in Mumbai on Oct 13th Thursday at 1 AM. Take care.

In the information technology sector, the two well-known categories of goods are hardware, the stuff you can hold in your hands, and software, the bits that have no weight. The third category is termed vaporware: hardware that exist only in the fevered imagination of their promoters and which will never hit the stores.