End of commercial break

They don’t like their lies exposed. Unable to respond with arguments, some Islamists go batshit crazy and kill; the more sophisticated and spineless ones leave anonymous abusive comments on blogs. Congress camp followers generally don’t kill like the Islamists — they leave the Congress party to organize the mass killings, such as the killing of thousands of Sikhs following the murder of Indira Gandhi. The Congress camp followers go apeshit crazy (as opposed to batshit crazy) and rapidly descend into pseudo-secular illogic.

Since I have made the change that comments can be posted without registering, the discussions have become more lively. Thanks to a reader who suggested the change — you know who you are. But the downside is that the Islamists and Congress camp followers post stupid comments. One has to live with that. I have decided to disemvowel some of their comments and delete the totally insane ones.

Here’s what the last paragraph looks like disemvoweled:

Snc hv md th chng tht cmmnts cn b pstd wtht rgstrng, th dscssns hv bcm mr lvly. Thnks t rdr wh sggstd th chng — y knw wh y r. Bt th dwnsd s tht th slmsts nd Cngrss cmp fllwrs pst stpd cmmnts. n hs t lv wth tht. hv dcdd t dsmvwl sm f thr cmmnts nd dlt th ttlly nsn ns.

Can be read but easily avoided as well.

Stats for Atanu Dey on India's Development

There are 1,520 posts! That’s not bad. I bet that out of those, around 750 are fairly long articles. I am going to compile them into a handy book. It will be priced at $19.99 and sold at fine bookstores.

There are 9,095 comments too. Many of them are from discerning readers who have added a lot of value to this blog. Thank you for reading and commenting. My policy is to allow all points of view and I am happy to say that the policy works great. I don’t believe in censorship. The best way to combat nonsense is to expose it to examine it in broad daylight. Some comments are too good to keep buried in the pile. Like this one:

You are a dead hardliner! There is a great bunch of people like you who believe in spreading hatred. You somehow related your communal and fanatic sentiments to Aurangzeb. If you are so eager to take instances from Indian history, then my advice is that don’t be so selective about it. Most of the rulers in this country have been tyrants. Why didn’t you name Asoka?

Apparently, your concern here was not the national security but your petty ideal of Hindu nationalism. This country has had contributions from all communities in its freedom struggle and in the nation building. You are absolutely no one to declare someone a traitor. In fact, i see the people like you as the biggest traitors as you are denying the secular character of our constitution. You are simply using the incident to bring out your frustration as a fanatic. You have a problem with SRK. He is not of your religion. That’s what concerns you the most.

If all your education could not bless you with any rational and liberal thinking, i don’t intend to feed your brain either. I’m just writing this comment because i want to let you know that the world is not occupied with retards like you.

Further, i would like to suggest you to join some retard organisations as well. VHP, RSS and the Senas to name a few. Probably, you are already a part of the herd. So, go ahead and spread hatred as much as you can!

That comment is from one Amit Kumar who, going by his email address, is from some IIT.

India has been ruled for centuries by small bands of invaders. Those invaders could not have held power over such a large population of Indians without the enthusiastic cooperation of Indians. Amit Kumars have been around for as long as India has been around and they have sided with the enemy for some reason. Perhaps it is a sense of inadequacy which leads to self-loathing. That self-loathing manifests as a desire to destroy one’s homeland. Amit Kumar’s ancestors are evidently Hindus but he would fight against Hindus. His ancestors no doubt had Hindu contemporaries who like Amit Kumar took the side of the invaders and converted. The descendants of those converted contemporaries of Amit Kumar’s ancestors are now living in Pakistan — the country that has sworn to destroy India. Amit Kumar’s descendants in time will help those who wish to destroy India.

Pity is that India is in dire straits because of Amit Kumars — people whose self-loathing is so pathological that they would destroy their motherland.

Whether Amit Kumars win or not depends on whether we let them win. What say you?

We are thrilled to inform you that your blog has been included in a new journalism project called “Voci Globali: il meglio della blogosfera internazionale“, a partnership between Global Voices Online in Italian and La Stampa, a major Italian newspaper.

Our focus is to present and promote the “best of the international blogosphere” with a “glocal” approach by selecting, translating and publishing each day a post covering current news, important issues, intelligent commentaries.

LaStampa.it is already publishing Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez’s daily posts (http://www.lastampa.it/generaciony), with some excerpts also featured weekly on its paper edition – same path is planned for “Voci Globali”.

I am happy to find myself on the list which has Neha Vishwanathan, my friend Ethan Zuckerman, and Rebecca MacKinnon, among others. Here’s a partial screen shot of the bloggers.

Suggestions, questions, comments — all welcome.

Also, please check your spam folder for the email that is sent by the system for verification of the user email. Thanks.

In greetings for the new year, I quote Robert Browning’s poem Rabbi Ben Izra, “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.”

In the next week or so, I will make the blog up to date with the posts that were made to Asian Correspondent.

Update: (1 PM IST)

There were problems with the intensedebate commenting. Some comments were not getting through. So for now we are back to square one and the commenting system will be as before. Sorry for the inconvenience.

A BBC TV crew stopped by the office to have a chat with me about economic policy after the next coalition government takes charge following the elections. The program will air a week from today in the India business report segment.

Anyway, blogging will resume shortly. In the meanwhile, consider this an open thread. Say what you will. Keep in touch but remember that twitter is evil.

Recycled image from a previous post:

Say what you will. And stop lurking.

Right now it only has a brief bio. I will add a photo and some links later. Thanks for visiting. Also, consider this to be an open comments post. Say what you will.

This blog had its first post on this day in 2003. For five years, I have been expressing my opinion and perspective on a range of topics that deal with development and India. I had been writing a blog at Berkeley, “Life is a Random Draw”, for a while before I started on this one. I shut down the Berkeley blog as maintaining it was becoming a bit of a bother. It was my colleague Rajesh Jain who suggested that I should write a blog on economic development of India.

Economic growth and development is at the center of this blog’s concern. With very rare exceptions, every opinion and perspective here is somehow tied to development. Education, urbanization, energy, transportation — are obviously connected with development. But so are the institutions and ideologies that have a strong impact on economic activity. Communism and monotheism are religious ideologies that are corrosive and harmful to development.

Rule of law, as opposed to the rule by people, matters. India gets infected with personality cults repeatedly. Gandhi (the man), Nehru, all the other Gandhis (starting from Indira and anyone related to that family) are prominent examples. Perhaps “rule by people” happens because “rule by law” is not an option for India given its conditions. I think that rule by law requires knowledge and understanding of what laws are, and appreciation of what the distinction is between laws and people. Unfortunately, too many Indians are illiterate and uneducated. The education system is flawed. But even among those who are literate (and many of whom are even educated), the constitution — the set of rules and meta-rules — is a big fat closed book.

I am fascinated with the phenomenon of personality cults. That explains my fascination with Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (SSRS, for short) who has anointed himself as “His Holiness”. I suppose if sufficiently large numbers of people consider you holy, you can wear the “His Holiness” without embarrassment even though you continue to preach humility and service. SSRS matters because understanding the associated personality cult helps explain the fanaticism that motivate people to extreme acts of good and evil. Monotheism is just an example of personality cults taken to an extreme by billions of people. Jesus and Mohammed are personalities whose cult followers basically impede development, not just economic growth.

Freedom is at the core of being a sentient being. Liberation from bondage is what development — personal as well as social — is essentially. Liberation from the tyranny of others is political freedom. That is why I am a liberal. That is why I support freedom of expression. Liberation from the tyranny of the state is economic freedom. That is why I oppose socialism, and support free markets. Liberation from slavery to evil ideologies is human freedom. That is why I oppose monotheism and support the Indic philosophies, particularly Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism.

Economic development is tied to economic policies. They are like recipes. With the same ingredients, you can cook up a fabulous dish or you can cook up something quite unpalatable. It depends on which recipe you use. Recipes are ideas. You don’t have to invent all recipes yourself. You can look and learn from others. Recipes accumulate and they don’t get used up when you use a recipe. I believe that economic growth and development is possible provided we use the right ideas. Determining which ideas are right is difficult for some. Nehru got those wrong and India continues to suffer from his socialistic ideas.

I believe that ideas matter more than objects. Technology is embodied ideas. Technology is ideas made into objects. The greatest change the world has seen of late has occurred in the information and communications technologies (ICT). The tools it has made possible have become accessible to billions of people. Its impact on development will be profoundly transforming — most of it will be for the better. Why ICT matters for development more than other technologies is that ICT transforms the marketplace of ideas. It increases the supply by reducing all sorts of costs related to the generation, storage, transportation, and distribution of ideas. Cost-reducing technological change in competitive markets always implies a reduction in price. Lower prices imply greater quantity consumed. Better ideas in more heads mean greater possibility of good things. Hence development.

A word of thanks

Thanks to all of you who have bothered to read and comment. I do get hate mail from those who find my frankly stated opinion challenge their core beliefs. Mostly they are monotheists and followers of SSRS. But the hate mail is more than compensated for by the emails of support that I get. I hope to continue to be of use in this blog.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

I landed at 9 PM and took a cab to Gachibowli — about 40 kms from the new Hyderabad airport — where ISB is located. The cab ride came to Rs 620. Wow!

Anyway, today was a busy day. I sat in on two classes at ISB. I wanted to get a feel for how they teach around here. I had a couple of long sessions discussing a proposed “Institute for Urbanization” with my host Dhaval. Later in the evening, a group of students wanted to have an informal chat with me. I had a great time discussing India with a bunch of seriously motivated business school types.

Tomorrow more meetings are lined up. So until we meet again and the case is sol-ved, take care.

Here’s a case in point. This post on DKSHAMLI’S BLOG (July 5th, 2008) is an exact copy of my post titled “Unfair and Unlovely” (April 20th, 2007). This is done without the slightest nod to the original. Nowhere on the dkshamli blog is there any indication that it was not written by dkshamli.

Not very nice. A real shame.

Update: (6 PM IST 22nd July) I had reported the matter to Wordpress.com. I got an email from tosreports@wordpress.com saying, “The blog has been deactivated, and the user will be forced to get in touch with us and remove the post.“

This is the mother of all wounds you could get in a civilian area. I went back to where I was staying. Sure there was pain and blood, but more seriously I was outraged that I had let the system and the weather get the better of me. I had lost my composure merely because there are no addresses in the city and it was hot and extremely humid. Just because I had spent about an hour fruitlessly searching for an ATM in the center of the capital of India, there was no reason to be so stupid as to stumble in the heat and humidity to injure myself so severely that it required a hospital visit.

I am staying at my friend Mitra’s place in Safdarjung Enclave. She suspects that I did this deliberately to get even more sympathy than what she normally supplies. In fact, I cannot post this without her consent. She is the national editor for Mint and a dear friend who puts up with all the bs that I am capable of. In any event, I am telling you all this just to let you know that I am alive but not kicking. The pictures of the knee wound are ugly and horrifying. No, not as horrifying as what Blue Turban is doing to Mango Man but close.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Thanks you all for visiting. I hope it has not been a total waste of your time, and I trust that you have found something of interest here. Of course it has been fun for me. For otherwise I would not have persisted in writing. I have made some good friends through this blog whom I would not have known otherwise. I have made a few enemies as well but it is well worth the friends.

Life is a random draw. That was the title of the first blog I wrote, way back in the early days of blogging while I was at Berkeley. That blog is now defunct, thanks to the strenuous efforts of spammers. The admin at my department at UC Berkeley took it offline a couple of years back. Besides, I thought that I would concentrate on this one exclusively.

This blog has become a part of my identity. It serves as an introduction to who I am, what I consider important, and issues that occupy my mind professionally and personally. Writing is a way of learning, a process of self-discovery through an exploration of one’s thinking. The written word is a record of ephemeral and elusive thoughts, a trace of the immaterial in a material form. I often delight in the recollection that re-reading my own writing affords me. If I have one bit of advice to offer, it is this: write down what is important to you now so that you will have a reminder should you need it.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Some have used the “lurker” login and thoughtfully identified themselves. But most are not doing so and this is leading to confusion that I would rather avoid. So I am reluctantly removing the lurker login.

If you wish to comment, please email me and I will send you a login ASAP. Sorry for the trouble.

My Hindi is nothing to write home about. But even I can tell that Alok’s translations of the posts are excellent. I realize that my writing style is not the simplest as I favor the convoluted sentence too frequently. Yet Alok gets the ideas across. Thank you very much, Alok Kumar. Your work is much appreciated.

I asked him why he is taking the trouble. He said that he was doing his bit to add to the Hindi content on the web. The more Hindi content on the web –> more Hindi readers on the web –> more Hindi content on the web –> . . . and so on.

So dear readers, please spread the word about Alok’s translation of this blog.

[Cartoon by Clay Bennett.]

If you wish to have a real user login for comments, email me atanudey at gmail and let me know what user name you wish to have.

Wish you a fun weekend but don’t be like the guy on the right.

I have been pondering where I want to go with this blog. One idea is to increase the range by posting all sorts of things that I find interesting. One way is to post links with very very brief commentary, and every now and then post an original article. I have some requests that I should post very brief “basic principles of economics” sort of thing. Let me see what I can do to overcome my laziness.

So stop lurking. Introduce yourself to other readers, tell us where you are from, and be critical.

NOTE: If you wish to not bother with registering before commenting, here’s a generic username and password which you could use. Username: lurker Password: lurking

POSTSCRIPT: If you do use the generic “lurker” login, please do sign off with your actual name or even a persistent pseudonym so that the comment can be referred to. Thanks.

Ankan wrote:

You write extremely well. You have very good ideas, but your posts are a joy to read even when I do not agree completely with the ideas.

They say good writing comes as a result of clarity of thought. Is it just that, or can one do something more to improve one’s written ability? Is there any advice you would like to give to someone who wishes to write well?

Thanks for the generous comment.

I am not qualified to give advice on how to write well. Attempting to do so would be presumptuous, as it would imply that I myself know how to write well. By definition, only a few of us can do something well. Much of the time it is a combination of innate talent and years of practice. Little can be done about talent except to accept what one is endowed with gracefully. What one can do is practice enough to become better at something – and perhaps do it well. So what follows is briefly what I believe it takes to become a better writer.

Like the advice on how to get to Carnegie Hall, to become a better writer one has to practice, practice, practice. Whether one becomes a good writer is not within our control.

So first you have to have something to write about. You write about something that you consider important and have thought about. Then you write.

Writing is often a way of revealing to yourself what you know. Writing becomes a learning process. You teach yourself what you already know. It is a process of discovery. In conversations with others, I discover my own thinking. A similar thing happens when I write. It is a way of having a conversation with myself. I am often surprised by what I write. I find myself saying, “Hmmm. I did not think about it that way.” But that is not true. I must have thought about it that way but did not realize it until I tried to communicate my ideas.

The written words are a reflection of one’s thinking. The fidelity of that reflection depends on well one knows a language. Often enough I have had thoughts that I didn’t have the necessary vocabulary to express them. But later, when I did get sufficient vocabulary, I was able to express the thought. So it is absolutely necessary that one commands a reasonable vocabulary. For that you have to love words and concepts. You have to be able to distinguish and discriminate between related words and concepts and be careful to mean what you say and say what you mean.

The best way to learn how to write is to read good writing. It has to be deliberate reading. Not the kind of reading one does when one is hurrying through the daily news. It has to be the slow, methodical, reflective, questioning type of reading that is like having a conversation with the author.

I once attempted reading Nirad Choudhury and found that I could not penetrate his dense prose. It is very impressive but a page is about the most that I can deal with. Sentences that run into hundreds of words leave me gasping for breath. I like to read authors who write clearly and with a light touch.

Bertrand Russell, in stark contrast to Niradbabu, is a pleasure to read. His writing has a precise elegance that reveals complex ideas in words that in their stark simplicity resemble a Zen painting.

To learn from the masters, one can do worse than to read and re-read them enough times that the elements of their style becomes part of your vocabulary. I used to memorize long passages of the writers I admired.

Form is important of course. But the content is what matters even more. As the computer science witticism goes, “Syntax is taxing but it is semantics that tics.” To write as well as you can, you have to think as well as you can. To think well, one has to have knowledge and know logic. Logic is unfortunately not stressed too much in our Indian education system. It is however never too late to learn logic. Like bicycle riding, it is best to learn it when one is young. Also, once you know it, you never forget it.

That is all: Good writing is the product of some very hard thinking. Lazy thinkers cannot be good writers. Know a bit, know that you know it, know logic, read great writers, do some hard thinking, learn vocabulary, and practice writing. Repeat until desired results are obtained.

By the by, I am in Mumbai tomorrow at at panel which is discussing “Inclusive Growth.”

It’s simple. If you are in India, send an SMS saying “Start AtanuDey” (case insensitive, and without the quotes) to 575758 or to 098453 98453.

You will start receiving messages that I publish, starting with an acknowledgment message from “ATANUDEY”. What will it cost you? Nothing except whatever it costs to send that single “start” message. Anytime you wish to stop receiving messages from “ATANUDEY”, send an SMS saying “Stop AtanuDey” to 575758 or 098453 98453.

This is what is called the “pub sub”–publish subscribe–paradigm. Basically you are in control and so don’t have to suffer spam.

I intend to use the channel sparingly. Once in a while I will high-light some post of special significance. For instance, I may say, “Go read my opinion piece in today’s Mint”, or “Catch me on BBC World TV at 8 PM.”

I would also publish “Where in the world is Atanu today?” type of SMS. For instance, I am in New Delhi on the 9th and 10th. So I will send an SMS saying “Visiting N Delhi 9th and 10th. Meeting Esther Dyson for a chat about education and technology.”

Catch you on SMS.

By the by, you too can create any channel you want and keep in touch with your friends, family and colleagues. Just go to MyToday.com and get started. It’s the coolest thing to hit the mobile scene since sliced bread.

I think this post is close enough to be the 1,000th post on this blog (give or take a few.) It has been a good run and thanks for your support. Perhaps it will see the 2,000th post one day.

Traffic Rankings for Business and Economics Websites lists this blog number 33 with 1753 page views a day for November. For comparison, the site notes that if this blog were a newspaper, it would be the equivalent of the Mobile Register of Mobile Alabama. But it drops to rank 37 with 981 average daily visitors, which puts it in the same class as the Springfield News-Leader (Springfield, MO). See this for what the newspaper comparison means.

I generally don’t censor comments and I don’t remove comments, however irrelevant to the post, unless it is pure spam. Some comments test my resolve about not removing comments. Those are the type which clearly indicate that the commenter has not bothered to read my post carefully, or has read it with sufficient prejudice that my point has been utterly misunderstood. Those comments are pure bullshit and against pure bullshit, even the gods struggle in vain, leave alone a mere mortal.

Usual rules of courtesy apply. Consider reading someone’s blog akin to visiting them at home. You are a guest and generally welcome. If one wishes to abuse the host, one should have the decency to leave the place, and do the abusing from a different place.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Form changes will be matched with content changes. Let me know how you like the new looks and also what you would like to see by way of content.

Needless to say the new crew of monkeys are going to be hard at work while I am away. Posts will be regular and well considered — none of the low quality stuff we had been seeing of late.

So now the weather. Pune must be centrally airconditioned. At 5 pm, it is about 25 degrees Celcius — there is a gentle breeze blowing under an overcast sky. Here’s the view from out the window (11th floor).

Will be back with a real post real soon.

The availability of public goods increases the utility of private goods. It is also true that one has to sometimes compensate for the lack of public goods by a greater investment in private goods. Places like Singapore are to some extent rich because the efficiency of private goods is high because public goods are efficiently and optimally provided.

This place is good.

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Click here to get clear 4g internet.

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Ah, yes, the weather. The regular afternoon downpour occurred on schedule around 3:30 PM. It rained cats and dogs. David says that these days they have monsoons round the year. Climate change is definitely evident in Singapore. We did not get into whether it is anthropogenic climate change or not.

What I like about Singapore is that the city is neat and clean. Some say that it is sterile. Maybe so. But I would take sterile over disease any day of the week. Of course, fertile trumps sterile. I am convinced that there is a way to get to fertile from sterile. I think that the transition from disease to fertile has to go through the sterile phase. Cleaning up is not a very attractive job but at some point one has to do it.

Laters.

I have given instructions to the monkeys with typewriters in the basement to carry on with their random typing as always. Sufficient bananas and peanuts has also been stocked. So I don’t think there will be any disruption in the output of this blog. You may have noticed that of late, the output of the monkeys has gone up. That is because better management techniques have been instituted in the basement. Think more frequent whipping.

Seriously though, this is not a happy blog. That is to some extent understandable since I focus on some of India’s pressing problems and that always involves the dismal science. But it is not mere gratuitous finger pointing. The intent is to understand the problems well enough so that the solutions are revealed. At times I even get around to stating what in my opinion are some possible solutions.

This brings me to a serious point. I like scribbling on this blog and some of you like some of those scribblings and some don’t. It would be good if you would take a moment to add a comment to this post about what you like and what you don’t like about this blog. What would you like to see more of, and what less of? What do you think I should do that would make this blog more useful to you?

Goodbye, goodnight and may your god go with you.

Thank you.

The sky was ominously dark this morning and now it is pouring so hard that visibility is reduced to less than 100 feet. The thunder and lightening is almost continuous. There is something deep inside which rejoices in beholding the awesome power of nature. There must be something atavistic in this reaction, a genetically programmed response to life-giving rain.

Last week at this time I was in northern California. Saturday morning saw me in Mumbai. And last night I was in Kolkata. Within the space of two weeks, I have been in northern California, Mexico city, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata, and transited through Guadalajara and Seoul. The miracle of commercial air transportation is easy to take for granted. But it was impossible just a 100 years ago. And who can tell what will be possible 100 years hence: will we be moving about the planets as nonchalantly as we move about the earth today?

Indian (the airlines formerly known as “Indian Airlines”) brought me to Kolkata. The seating has been optimized for stunted dwarves. It is certainly not meant for people over six feet tall such as yours truly. The saving grace — and this applies to all non-discount airlines in India — is that the food is not inedible like it is on most American and European airlines.

Talking of Indian, here is something that puzzles me a bit. The airlines formerly known as “Indian Airlines” is now called “Indian.” Don’t know who the genius was who thought that it would be a brilliant idea to change “Indian Airlines” to merely “Indian.” So now you have to refer to that airline as “Indian (the airlines which was formerly known as “Indian Airlines.”)” The idiocy of this leaves one stunned. The mind staggers. Even boggles. It makes your head spin and strains credulity. Surely among stupid braindead moronic lobotomized ideas, renaming an airline “Indian” must take the cake. You may ask why. Here is why.

First, it was not as if the name “Indian Airlines” was biting someone in the butt. It was not as if a person was not very sure what that name meant. It was not that someone else claimed that domain name and the airline was forced to change its moniker. No sir, there was no problem with that name. But then, you may say that perhaps the name was getting old and somewhat generic. It could happen, you know. You say “Indian Airlines” and someone thinks you are talking of Indian air carriers in general and not about the specific carrier. I have found that about “American Airlines.” You have to be careful to distinguish between the specific and the general. So alright, “Indian Airlines” could have been changed to something else.

But removing the “airlines” and just retaining “Indian” is as astoundingly stupid as one can ever get. So now when you say “Indian” you don’t know whether you are talking about food, clothing, land, thought, behavior, or . . . an airline! Making a bad thing worse is not an improvement.

OK, so you would say, “what is the big deal anyway?” Renaming airlines is not the end of the world, you would remind me. No it is not the end of the world but it is stupifyingly costly. Have you ever gotten your car repainted? Set you back a few thousand bucks, if you did. Now painting a plane costs a few hundred thousand dollars. That is not all. It could take two weeks to paint a plane. And you cannot paint it when it is plying its routes. So there is the loss of revenues from painting a plane. I think a reasonable cost for painting a plane would be a million US dollars. Do that for about 30 or 40 planes and your total cost would be (I estimate) about US$50 million. There you have it: an extremely stupid idea which costs a bundle.

So who pays for this? Not the lobotomized idiot who came up with this idea. You and I pay for it. We pay high prices so that we can be packed in like stunted dwarves. And if not enough people wish to be treated such, the airline suffers a loss and the government (which owns the airlines) suffers a loss. But this just means that we — the taxpayers — ultimately pay for the totally needless waste of public resources in repainting an airline just for the heck of it. We cannot flog the chairman of the airline who wasted our money but we should really flog the idiot.

OK, so you say, “Atanu, calm down. Take a chill pill and consider this. It is a one time deal. $50 is not all that much.” I will say this. Painting the plane is not all that you have to do. You have to go and change all sorts of things when you change a name. You have to go and redo all stationery, for instance. You have to repaint all signs — in offices, at airports, in god alone knows how many places. In the end, it could cost you $100 million.

And this is the best part of the sheer idiocy of the name change of “Indian Airlines” to “Indian.” This year, 2006, Air India and Indian (the airlines formerly known as “Indian Airlines”) are going to merge. Just about the time that the idiot who approved the name change finishes spending $100 million, they will have to redo the whole thing. You see, that renaming will be good for only a few months. The combined airlines will most likely be called “Air India.” And they will then have to go and repaint all those planes “Air India” after having just finished repainting them “Indian” from “Indian Airlines.”

So here is my conspiracy theory: someone is making bucks painting and repainting airplanes. Some of those bucks are pocketed by someone in a position of making decisions that are clearly stupid and costly.

Why is India poor? Because of a lack of accountability. Accountability is missing in public sector enterprises. The bosses are not accountable to shareholders, only to their political bosses. The whole thing stinks to the high heavens. And most of us — especially those who vote for communists — are totally unaware that our public sector is just another ingredient in the poisonous mix that stunts India’s economic growth.

The thunderstorm is over. The sun is out. I am out of here.

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All travel is an attempt to better understand who we are. I believe it goes like this: you go out in search of something and then with time you come to understand that whatever it was that you were looking for is inside rather than out there. As the Moody Blues sang on their In Search of the Lost Chord:

Walking through that door
Outside we came
Nowhere at all
Perhaps the answer’s here
Not there anymore

What tickles me is the fact of an American rock band reaching out to ancient Indian thought to write their songs. Though currently materially poor, India’s spiritual heritage is the richest in the world. Increasingly, intellectuals and scientists around the world are reaching out to that wisdom to better comprehend the world. An example. Just a few weeks ago, The Economist (Sept 2nd, 2006) carried an article on cryptography, “The non-denial of the non-self,” which talks about the concept of a negative database and the work of Yale University computer scientist Dr Fernando Esponda. The article concludes with a quote from him, “In Hindu philosophy, to find out who you are, you ask what are you not. Then you are left with what you are.”

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The SF Bay Area is not home–just like all the other places that I have been to have not been home. So the search must end where it began. There is no home out there. Home is right here. I am home.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

I leave you with a few quotes from Henry David Thoreau:

Goodnight, goodbye and may your god go with you.

[My apologies to Crazyfinger for the delay in carrying this announcement. Due to time constraints, I was unable to get to updating the blog.]

Right now I’m looking out my office window, perched above the large, grassy, Frisbee-playing, picnicking, and sunbathing area that stretches through Berkeley’s campus. I’m looking straight out at the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s a view that I marvel at every day. I wonder why the chancellor hasn’t confiscated such offices and rented them out to hedge funds to improve the university’s finances.

I walk out my door and look around: at the offices of professors who know more about topics like the history of the international monetary system or the evolution of income distribution than any other human beings alive, and at graduate students hanging out in the lounge. It’s a brilliant intellectual community, this little slice of the world that is our visible college. You run into people in the hall and the lounge, and you learn interesting things. Paradise. For an academic, at least.

But I am greedy. I want more. I would like a larger college, an invisible college, of more people to talk to, pointing me to more interesting things. People whose views and opinions I can react to, and who will react to my reasoned and well-thought-out opinions, and to my unreasoned and off-the-cuff ones as well. It would be really nice to have Paul Krugman three doors down, so I could bump into him occasionally and ask, “Hey, Paul, what do you think of .. .” Aggressive younger people interested in public policy and public finance would be excellent. Berkeley is deficient in not having enough right-wingers; a healthy college has a well-diversified intellectual portfolio. The political scientists are too far away to run into by accident — somebody like Dan Drezner would be nice to have around (even if he does get incidence wrong sometimes).

Over the past three years, with the arrival of Web logging, I have been able to add such people to those I bump into — in a virtual sense — every week. My invisible college is paradise squared, for an academic at least.

Brad is worth reading.

1. Copy this url to your address bar: http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php?url=http://

2. Append the url of the blocked blog. So if you, for instance, want to reach mysite.blogspot.com, you will construct the url http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php?url=http://mysite.blogspot.com/

3. Hit Go.

What have you done to amend the situation, oh armchair intellectual ? Cribbing about the status quo is pointless, if you don’t follow it up with action. If you don’t have a way to put into practice the ideas you espouse, then your ideas are not practical. You seem to have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about “what should be done”, but what have you really done?

I cannot respond to the accusation of being an “armchair intellectual” because I am not sufficiently vain to call myself an intellectual, armchair or not. However, I would like to speak in defense of armchair intellectuals first, then admit that I am basically an armchair critic, then argue why critics are important in the overall scheme of things, and finally explain what I am doing to move beyond just being a mere critic.

The word intellectuals is often used pejoratively by some. They seem to value only activities that appear to move matter on the face of the earth, activities that result in things that you can hold in your hand, take a bite out of, bounce off the walls, see it plainly with unaided eyes. It is born out of a misunderstanding of human nature, human society, human capacity. Humans are primarily distinguished from other life forms on earth by their capacity to think, comprehend the nature of the universe they live in, analyse and solve problems in the abstract, comprehend the notion of time, plan for the uncertain future, etc. What humans produce is not just the result of physical action, but perhaps more importantly it is the result of the cogitation, the non-physical analysing, comprehending, solving and planning which goes on in the background and which superfically appear to be a pointless waste of time.

Ideas matter, both for good and for evil. It is safe to claim that pretty much everything you see around yourself is the result of ideas combined with action. The ideas come out of the intellectualizing of some people. Undoubtedly it isn’t that merely having ideas is sufficient–someone has to translate them into stuff. But ideas are primary, whether they relate to the physical world of objects, or to the abstract world of political economy and psychology. We can do worse than recall the last half of the last paragraph in John Maynard Keynes’s book General Theory of Employment Interest and Money.

” . . . the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

Keynes confined his opinion to the ideas of the worldly philosophers (academic scribblers, as he called them) but analogous statements can be made in practically all fields of human endeavor.

Consider an intellectual such as James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879). Did he build stuff? No, he gave a mathematical formalism to electricity and magnetism. The echoes of his intellectualizing reverbrates through time and touches every aspect of modern society.

A little reflection is all that is needed to realize that intellectuals of all varities — including the armchair ones — matter. How can you tell what is going on inside the brain of an intellectual who is passively sitting in an armchair, and how can you ever imagine what earth-shaking ideas are being formulated within?

I am not an armchair intellectual–I don’t have that brain power. But I believe that I do have the brain power to be a competent critic. Do we need critics? Yes, because we need keen observers to tell us what we may not be fully aware of. The one who tells you that you have spinach stuck between your teeth is a competent critic pointing out something that you need to take action on. Of course, you could berate the fellow and tell him that all he does is point out things but not do anything about it. But then, the critic, at least in this instance, is not empowered to do anything: you are.

We need people (critics) who recognize that things aren’t hunky-dory. Then of course we need people (thinkers) who understand why they aren’t h-d. And then we need people (intellectuals) who know what needs to be done to go from ~(h-d) to (h-d). Finally, we need people (movers) who can do the things that need to be done to effect the actual transformation. It needs all sorts to make a world. It is very rare that you find someone who is good at being a critic, a thinker, an intellectual, and a mover. Good movers build on the work of critics, thinkers, and intellectuals.

One of my fundamental beliefs is that when movers act without basing their actions on the work of competent intellectuals, thinkers, and critics, they quite frequently make things worse. These movers are like the monkey trying to save a fish from drowning by putting it up on a tree. It is very important to comprehend the nature of the problem and only then act on an appropriate set of moves. The Buddha’s directive was clear: First do no harm; then try to do good.

The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. Very few of the movers who do harm (and their numbers are legion) actually wake up with an evil glint in their eyes and act to make things worse. Most are well-meaning monkeys trying to save fish from drowning. Again, as they say, we should not ascribe to malice what can sufficiently explained as stupidity.

Now on to what is it that I do. I am first of all a critic. Born and brought up in India, I am first and foremost a critic of India because India matters to me. I want it to be better than what it is today. I do believe that India can be better. Next, I try to be a “thinker.” I want to understand why things are the way they are, to understand the root causes of the problems I see around. The time I spent studying economics formally has been of great help to me in this regard. My engineering background had not prepared me for it.

In a few areas that I focused on–namely, rural development and education–I have some tentative solutions. I write and talk about it whenever I get the chance. Most of all, I try to sell my ideas in the marketplace of ideas. Again, as an economist of the neoclassical school, I believe that markets grind out efficient outcomes (subject to conditions, of course) and in the marketplace for ideas, the good ones will survive (subject to some conditions, again.)

Thus I claim that I am a full-fledged “critic,” a somewhat competent “thinker” and a budding “intellectual” as I have defined those types. I am, so far at least, not a “mover.” Can I be a mover? I don’t know. But I am very cautious about making moves. I don’t want to do harm. Most of the time I want to play the role of being a critic, thinker and intellectual to others who are movers. For instance, I have spoken to the movers who are going to implement the Common Service Centers (CSC, a scheme of the eGovernance scheme of the Govt of India). In my capacity as a critic, I think it is a disastrous plan. As a thinker, I have pointed out why it is flawed. I have proposed alternatives.

One area in which I can also be a mover is that of education. But since this post is already so long, I will postpone the discussion for now.

So, coming back to answering Gulab Singh’s question, the answer is that I have not done anything because that is not what my nature — my dharma — is. But as I have argued above, it is not true that only movers add value to society. Even someone like me does have a positive role. They also serve, as the poet said, who only stand and wait.

In the meanwhile, my apologies to the visitors for the inconvenience. If this continues for too long, I will shift my blog platform. Pity, all the stuff that I have already written will be inaccessible. C’est la vie.

After 3 days of awfully hot and humid weather of Chennai, my next stop–Bangalore–was a sheer delight. It was cool and comfortable enough that you did not even need a fan, never mind an airconditioner. My stay in Bangalore was a wonderful mix of business and pleasure. I spent time at two schools which had been recommended: Vidya Niketan and Vidya Shilpa. Discussions with those running the schools was very gratifying: I not only learnt a lot, I got some validation for some of my ideas from people who have been in the eduation business for a while.

The joy of being in Bangalore is in spending time with Vijay and Sudha, and their children Anupama (15) and Abhishek (10). I know Vijay for donkey’s years, since IITK days. Vijay is a prof of EE at Univ of Southern California, LA, and for the last few years is a visiting faculty at IISc Bangalore. Over the years, Vijay, Sudha, and I have spent many vacations traveling around in the US, and I have seen Anu and Abhi grow up.

In both places I got to meet my blogger friends. I had dinner with Prashant Kothari in Chennai. Prashant is a fellow blogger at the Indian Economy Blog. The Bangalore impromptu bloggers meet was at Madhu Menon’s restaurant, Shiok. I met Jagadish, Madhu Menon and Sandeep for the first time; Nitin (of Acorn) I had had the pleasure of meeting a couple of times before in Singapore. Excellent company, all thanks to the power of blogging.

Truth be told, I did not entirely not blog during this time. I had the rare honor of guest authoring Rajesh Jain’s Tech Talk on Emergic.org. The subject was on Indian education and the recent reservation issue. They appear in five parts, each about 600 words long. I had to exercise a great deal of restraint and not ramble on as I am wont to do on my blog. I am pretty happy with the results (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5.)

Well, so that is all for now. I am in Nagpur for a few days. Next stop may be Delhi or Mumbai. Or perhaps it will be Nashik. Who knows where the winds will carry me to next.

I used to write a lot on the Usenet years ago. Blogging to me is a second-best substitute to writing on the Usenet. Sure the Usenet exists but it is no longer what it was, the noise to signal ratio is through the roof.

What brought on this line of thought was an article that Prashant Kothari sent the link to called Time for the Last Post. I think it is a must-read. Here are two paragraphs, just for the record.

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold – a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave “new economy” a few years ago?

. . .

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts – a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PS: If you want to visit the archives, may I suggest this one on the privatization of public sector units and the followup posts on “Wrong-headed policies condemn millions to misery,” and the “Government’s Anti-Midas Touch“.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

I am surprised to note that the US counts for the largest number of visitors to this blog. One solitary dot (1-9 visitors) for Canada; none from Mexico (Carlos Munos, I thought that you would visit your old officemate’s blog occassionally); a few dozen from the South American continent; moving east across the Atlantic, the UK and the western European countries are well represented (hi Marita, Ville, Courtenay, Alexis, …); the whole of Africa has a few dozens, which I find surprisingly high; more people from the Middle east visit than from Africa; I note a few Pakistani visitors even; then comes India, which I guess accounts for about 20 percent of the visitors — this I find really surprising because I thought visitors from India would outnumber others, c’est la vie; then the far east sends a few, including some from China; I note Singapore especially; moving east and south, I note that Australia and New Zealand (hi Gordon) send a few.

Well, that is about it. There was no real point to this post. Just a bit of curiosity.

Update: Navin says he is the big dot in London. Hi Navin. Jyoti says she is the BD in Texas. Hi Jyoti.

Where, you may ask, am I going? I am off to London to see the Queen. Just kidding. I am off to New Delhi to attend the “Annual Conference of the HUDCO Chair Institutes” Sept 8-9th. The topic is “Cities: Engines of Rural Development.”

You may know of my abiding interest in rural development. I have written a concept paper on RISC–Rural Infrastructure & Services Commons. It is rather long — about 40 pages. So I would not recommend it as casual reading.

Of late there has been some action on RISC. Vinod Khosla guest-edited a recent issue of The Economic Times and he mentioned RISC in it. Then I got to hear that he spoke about RISC to the Planning Commission. And now I am going to be talking to a bunch of academics (those are the Chairs of HUDCO institutes) and some government bureaucrats (I guess from rural development departments and such.)

It has been a while since I was in Delhi. Last time in mid-February, I spent a few days meeting with people in connection with my interest in education. That is my day job–think about enabling education. My idea is to use the power tools of information and communications technologies (ICT) to make education more effective and efficient. Technology, as any economist will tell you, is labor substituting. Whenever a factor of production is expensive (labor for instance), you substitute it with a less expensive factor (capital for instance.) Since teaching labor is very expensive in India, use technology which is cheap these days.

Crazy, I hear the cry go out. How in the name of god almighty is teaching labor expensive in India? The fact is that good quality teachers are extremely–let me repeat that–extremely scarce. Scarcity implies high price. Therefore the cost of high quality teachers is prohibitive. We cannot afford high quality teachers because they are a luxury. Not just that, even if we had all the money, there is an acute shortage of teachers required. We need millions of teachers. We simply don’t have them. Hence my insistence that we have to find a substitute for good teachers and that happens to be the tools that ICT provides very inexpensively.

That’s it for now.

Conversations on the Internet are not a new phenomenon. Before the World Wide Web, the Internet was home to Usenet, a very diverse set of virtual communities (called news groups) with interests that ranged from metaphysics to culture to science and everything in between. In the mid-80s and 90s, I conversed furiously on the various Usenet groups (such as soc.culture.Indian) writing thousands of posts on matters that mattered to me as an Indian living in the US, and connecting with others with similar interests—India, economic development, Buddhism, etc. That habit of conversing with others quite easily transferred to writing a blog centered on my obsession with India’s economic growth and development.

Einstein had noted that humans, limited by time and space, suffer from what he called an “optical delusion of consciousness” which makes one experience oneself as something separate from others. The goal then, he said, was to “free ourselves by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

At its best, blogs enable that widening of compassion by connecting with others in conversations that continue to draw people with differing points of view. My blog helps me connect and learn from those who converse with me on my blog. By writing I often reveal to myself what I know implicitly but don’t know explicitly. It is process of discovery. Then there is the wider learning that comes from visiting other blogs and overhearing the conversations going on there.

Of course, one may not find all conversations interesting or meaningful. Coming across tales told by idiots full of sound and fury signifying nothing, one just moves on. There are many tellers of tales and many stories being told that deserve to be heard. Our neighborhood now has a virtually (sic) unlimited number of interesting people for us to hear stories from.

Let the blogs roll on.

I love you too much
To ever start liking you
So don’t expect me
To be your friend.

Time flies like an arrow (but fruit flies like a banana.) Especially when you are having fun. I had great fun writing this blog since Sept 2003. Can’t say that I did not piss off a bunch of people. This blog has been the expression of a personal viewpoint. It could have been worse. It could have been an account of what I had for lunch or reporting on the details of the fad de jour or some such trivial pursuit. It was, instead, a contrarian viewpoint. I picked on holy cows such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi, the incompetent Indian governments, Mother “the Merciless” Teresa, and others. Being an equal opportunity offender, I even dared to poke fun at Thomas “Flat-head” Friedman. Finger-pointing at idols is not taken very kindly by idol-worshippers.

I do not write about pretty things. And some of the ugliness I write about is connected with India, but not all. Me write pretty some day but not yet. The population problem received quite a bit of play on this blog. So also the problem of inadequate infrastructure.

My motivation for asking why is India poor is simple. I don’t want India to be poor. I love India too much to ever like what I see around me in India.

Only by seeking to comprehend why India is poor can we figure out how to not be poor. I admire those who have transformed their nations and societies profoundly instead of merely making pretty speeches. That is why I admire leaders like Lee Kuan Yew. I think democracy in India is a rather pathetic joke. That viewpoint is, as Dale Carnegie would have pointed out, doesn’t make friends and influence people who talk loudly about democracy without recognizing that it is an institution that does not exist in a vacuum.

I have suggested some solutions along the way. For instance, Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons. I hope some day it will be implemented. Recently I hear Vinod Khosla, my co-author in the RISC concept paper, spoke to the Planning Commission about RISC. Or my recommendations about how to make India literate in three years, or the integrated rail transportation system (IRTS), etc.

Well, that is all for now. I speak my mind and I am sure that my readers (all five of them) will not hesitate to speak their minds and tell me where I am right and more importantly where I am wrong.

Goodnight, goodbye and may your god go with you.

As time permits I will add more to this category from the archives.

My obsession with fully comprehending a problem before attempting to solve it springs from a simple personal trait: I am unbelievably lazy. How to get something done with the least effort is my constant obsession. My motto is work as little as possible to get only those things done that cannot be avoided. So of course I have to identify a minimal set of things that are unavoidable and then figure out the most efficient way of getting them done. Easily enough stated, my creed is not easy to follow. Sometimes I misidentify the set of things that need to done, and sometimes even after properly identifying the set, my method is imperfect. But by and large, I do get by and have managed to keep body and soul together—with a little help from my friends, of course.

Though I have a tendency to avoid unpleasant truths, I could not evade the conclusion that something was radically wrong with India. Even while I was in engineering school, I was aware of the poverty around me and figured out that being born poor was like getting a very poor outcome in a random draw. I went to a good school because I was lucky to be born to middle-class professional parents; the cleaning lady’s kid would never see the insides of a school and would probably end up with a much poorer life through no fault of his. Having had good schooling, I was able to study computer science at one of India’s premier institutions (IIT Kanpur) and was even paid to do so. Who paid for my education? The unlucky kids from poor families who got dealt a lousy hand in life’s random draw.

The IITs are a portal to the US. I ended up at Rutgers University to do a PhD in computer science. But grad student life sucks compared to that of a yuppie in the Silicon Valley and I quit within a short time with another master’s degree to work for HP. California lies pretty much at the other extreme of the world from India, both geographically and economically. With a population of about three percent of India’s population, its economy was double the size of India’s. Why was California so rich and why was India so poor? I had sufficient time to ponder that question. What distinguished the two? What was the reason for the totally different ways of living: the thoughtless affluence of the few compared to the grinding dehumanizing poverty of the many? I came up with the hypothesis that per capita resource availability had something to do with it. The cause of India’s poverty, it appeared to me, was due to an imbalance between resources and people. As a first approximation to the statement of what India’s basic problem was it was not too bad.

In northern California living is easy and my work at HP was a breeze. I spent a lot of time reading and thinking about India’s problems. I soon realized that economics informs that fundamental question: Why is India poor? I liked the way economists thought (Thomas Schelling was one of the first economists I read) and I wanted to be one so that I could either justify or reject my hypothesis. A PhD in resource economics would do very well, I thought. And since the University of California at Berkeley was just up the road from me, I pestered the admissions committee sufficiently that they admitted me against their best judgment about allowing in someone with not a single economics course in their background. In case you are wondering, they liked having me there and I made lots of friends and even though I changed topics three times, each of my advisors was unhappy to see me go.

Enough of this biographical aside for now.

In all my readings about India, one thing that struck me was that no one appeared to ask the more fundamental questions such as:

• What is wrong?
• Where did we screw up?
• Why did we screw up where we did?
• How can we avoid such screw-ups?

It appeared to me that those at the decision making level in India did not have any clue about what was wrong, and they had even less than a clue about what to do about it. Even to an average seventh-grade student it is clear that problems have causes and exhibit symptoms. By examining the symptoms, one can figure out the causes of the problem. And by addressing the causes of the problem, the problem can be solved and thus bring about the removal of the symptoms.

The problem in India was that most people were not even very clearly perceiving the symptoms (poverty, illiteracy, corruption, overcrowding, etc.) to say nothing of understanding the problem and eventually solving it. The decision makers, especially, were evidently living in a separate universe which bore little relation to the universe the great unwashed masses inhabited. The government made plans that applied to their parallel universe and I don’t think they were the least astonished when their schemes did not work in the real universe. They were not astonished because they told themselves that their plans had worked marvelously and so they made even more of those idiotic plans.

Like individuals, countries also get hands dealt to them from a random draw. In one, you get leaders who are superhuman, and the country prospers; in another, you get puny unimaginative egomaniacs and the country ends up with malnourished children and illiterate adults. Can something be done to change the effects of the luck of that draw? I think there is.

For now, let me close with a quote from John Kenneth Galbraith (A Journey Through Economic Time, (1994)):

Ignorance, stupidity, in great affairs of state is not something that is commonly cited. A certain political and historical correctlness requires us to assign some measure of purpose, of rationality, even where, all to obviously, it does not exist. Nonetheless one cannot look with detachment on the Great War (and also its aftermath) without thought as to the mental insularity and defectiveness of those involved and responsible.

First, a tip of the hat to Rajesh Jain for insisting that I write a blog specifically dealing with Indian economic development and growth. I already had a personal blog Life is a Random Draw at UC Berkeley; but this one was to be more focused on issues economic and developmental. I have neglected my personal blog almost entirely since I moved from California to Mumbai in September of 2003 and started this blog. One of these days, once I get my act together, I will resume my personal blog.

While this blog has been moderately successful (it won the Best Indibloggies Award in 2005) and has a modest readership, I don’t believe that I have been successful in my objective. I will try to express my objective here. My basic objective is to provoke thought about India’s development and economic growth. That objective is motivated by my desire for India to progress materially and spiritually beyond where it is today. That immediately implies that I somehow do not approve of what India is. I see India as an extremely overpopulated desperately poor massively corrupt largely illiterate insanely over-regulated country of over a billion people. I use no commas in there to stress my belief that all those characteristics are not disjoint and are mutually dependent: overpopulation, poverty, corruption, illiteracy, insane regulations are inter-related and mutually reinforcing.

I cringe with distaste in having to describe the land of my ancestors in such unflattering terms. I wish it were otherwise. But how will it be otherwise? That is precisely what I am trying to understand: What should India be? The answer to that question is not immediately obvious as some may insist. We have to ponder that and have a reasonable answer to where our destination is before we start on our journey. And to properly plot our course, we have to have a reasonable idea of where we are to begin with.

Therefore the questions we need to grapple with are: Where are we? Why are we here? How did we get here? Next, where should we be going? Is there a reasonable chance that we can get there? If so, how should we get there? Only then should we begin the journey.

Why all this pondering and thinking, you may ask. Why not just do something? Because I take the Buddha’s admonition very seriously: First Do No Harm; Then Try To Do Good. Or, from a Zen perspective: Don’t Just Do Something; Sit There.

We need to understand something before we intervene. Otherwise we may make a bad situation worse. Or even make a perfectly good situation bad, as illustrated by one of my favorite sayings “Let me save you from drowning, said the monkey to the fish, and put it up on a tree.”

Akira Kurosawa recounted in one documentary on his life that when he was a small boy, his slightly older brother took him to see the death and destruction that occurred in wartime Tokyo. Akira could not bear to see the dead and wanted to turn away. His brother told him, “Akira, you must see this so that you can work towards preventing this sort of thing from happening.” (I am paraphrasing.) Akira later realized that his brother was probably more scared than he was and it was an act of courage on his brother’s part.

So my first objective is to look frankly and as dispassionately as I can at what India is today and then describe it as best as I can. Look, here is India with all its ills. We have to face that reality and acknowledge it without shying away. Only then we may be moved to say that we don’t like it and gather sufficient resolve “to break this sorry scheme and remold it closer to our hearts’ desire.”

To see what is wrong with India and write about it is not pretty. Me write pretty some day but I cannot yet. For me are denied the pleasures of writing how India is unbound for an adoring readership. Even if I wanted, I probably could not write in glowing terms how India is an IT superpower. I am not gifted with a golden pen that I will be able to describe how India is shining. And for that, I am run the risk of being labeled an “India-hater.”

In the next bit, I will justify my obsession with fully knowing and acknowledging what is wrong with India. Understanding the problem is the first step; the next is to figure out the genesis of the problem; the next is to eradicate the root cause of the problem. In the next bits I will give a brief outline of what I think the methodological error that are made in problem solving, which is that people try to mask symptoms instead of addressing the underlying causes.

Until then, goodnight, goodbye, and may your god go with you.

Post Script: Part 2 of “Me Write Pretty Some Day”

This blog is back on-line after a few technical changes. I assure you that I have definitely not left the building.

Ethan Zuckerman invited me to join in a Global Voices Brainstorm on Tuesday 29th March at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School. It was a great opportunity for me to meet with many people associated with Global Voices:

Global Voices is an international effort to diversify the conversation taking place online by involving speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make these voices heard.

Check out the Global Voices Manifesto when you get a chance.

A bunch of Indian bloggers are getting together on Saturday 2nd April in NY, NY for lunch. Details are at Seshu’s Tiffinbox. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, as the song goes.

“Another damned, thick, square, book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?

- William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, upon receiving the second volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire from the author, 1781.

Well, what do you know!

This blog won the Best Indiblog Award. To be more specific, of those who cared to vote (around 600), this blog got around 38 percent of the votes. Thanks to each of you who considered my modest attempt worth noting. My sincere appreciation for that vote.

I admit that I am not surprised that some people actually find my writing acceptable. Nor I do not find it entirely surprising that 62 percent who voted did not vote for this blog. I don’t expect to be popular. More about that later. The topic that I concentrate on largely is not a happy one. One does not like to be reminded that one’s country is in dire straits. We see the evidence all around us if we care to just see.

Some people have criticized my point of view. I don’t like criticism. I don’t want to be told that I am wrong. But I need to be told my faults. While I like to be told that I am right, I need to be told even more where I am wrong. I am a pretty smart cookie but I am not so smart as to know all by myself where I screwed up.

Back to the topic of being popular. I think that if one is totally honest, one is not likely to be popular. Which may partly account for the fact that politicians are inveterate liars. They seek popularity and they lie. They lie because they know that people are gullible and that they can get away with transparent lies and blatant falsehoods. People would rather believe in some feel-good fiction than in hard facts.

Given the gullibility of people at large and their need to believe in happy fiction, democracy has a near-fatal flaw built into it. A person who states it like it is is going to be at a disadvantage when it comes to unpleasant truths. And most of the time, a society or an economy confronts hard facts, irrespective of how rich or powerful it is. I recall Walter Mondale telling the hard truth to Americans that taxes will have to be raised, and George Bush, the Elder, said, “Read my lips: No New Taxes.” Later, after having won, Bush went on to raise taxes like nobody’s business.

The poorer the country is, the more its politicians lie. The most adept at lieing win. They have to — because the truth is too awful to bear. Farmers are suffering? Promise them free stuff. Can the country afford it and will it actually make them better off? No and no, but do it all the same because that is what guarantees winning at elections.

India is caught in a trap. Venal politicians lie and the gullible public votes them to power because they would rather hear a pleasant lie than hear the unpalatable truth. Anyone with any sense in their heads would reject them outright but then when were the good and the holy in majority anyway? Democracy assures the rule of the venal over the gullible.

In any event, I will go on scribbling and only time will tell if I am correct in my assessment that we are doomed unless we face some rather harsh reality.

Goodnight, goodbye, and may your god go with you.

PS: I have loads of emails. Please bear with me if you have written and haven’t heard back from me yet. I am going to reply to all my emails.

Those are lines from a poem (Yussouf by James Russell Lowell) that I had memorized in school many years ago. They immediately came to mind when I read about Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, or “Dr. V”, a few months ago. Reading about Dr V was empowering and I wrote Unsung Hero — Dr V in my weblog. Today Karthik emailed me another article about Dr. V. Once again, there was that same feeling of being inspired, of being empowered to do what needs to be done.

Dr. V. created the Aravind Eye Hospital. I quote from the latter article:

Since opening day in 1976, Aravind has given sight to more than 1 million people in India. Dr. V. may not run a business, but it’s important to note that Aravind’s surgeons are so productive that the hospital has a gross margin of 40%, despite the fact that 70% of the patients pay nothing or close to nothing, and that the hospital does not depend on donations. Dr. V. has done it by constantly cutting costs, increasing efficiency, and building his market.

It costs Aravind about $10 to conduct a cataract operation. It costs hospitals in the United States about $1,650 to perform the same operation. Aravind keeps costs minimal by putting two or more patients in an operating room at the same time. Hospitals in the United States don’t allow more than one patient at a time in a surgery, but Aravind hasn’t experienced any problems with infections. Aravind’s doctors have created equipment that allows a surgeon to perform one 10- to 20-minute operation, then swivel around to work on the next patient — who is already in the room, prepped, ready, and waiting. Post-op patients are wheeled out, and new patients are wheeled in.

Aravind has managed to beat costs in every area of its service: The hospital’s own Aurolab, begun in 1992, pioneered the production of high-quality, low-cost intraocular lenses. Aurolab now produces 700,000 lenses per year, a quarter of which are used at Aravind. The rest are exported to countries all over the world — except to the United States. (In order for Aravind to get its lenses approved for sale in the United States, it would have to pay for an FDA study and a clinical study, which the hospital cannot afford.) Aravind even has its own guest house, and students and physicians from around the world come to teach, study, observe, practice — and boost their training.

So here I begin this journey with the proper invocations to Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles, the One with the Broken Tusk, and with thanks to Dr. V. and his vision.