Vote early and vote often

Competitions are good. Spoken like a true market economist. Not just economists but biologists would also proclaim the benefits of competition. After all, the great diversity of our living world is the result of intense competition among the gene carriers or living entities. And the great diversity of human artifacts we enjoy is the result of intense competition among buyers and sellers of stuff in the marketplace. So it is great to have the blog competition called the “Indibloggies.”

If you have recently commented and have not seen it, it is because the last 15 comments were deleted by mistake. Do re-submit the comment if you don’t mind. The managment sincerely regrets the trouble. Those responsible for the mistake will be fired.
Thank you.

The mother of all thunderstorms is roaring outside the window as I write this from Kolkata. I got here last night from Pune after a brief stop-over in Mumbai.
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.

To an essentially homeless person like me, the San Francisco Bay Area is as much home as any place ever gets to be. A few days ago when I arrived at the SFO immigration counter, the INS agent said, “Welcome back home.” Made me more acutely aware than ever before that I was a wanderer without a permanent home address. Not given to extended self-pity, I soon reminded myself of the advantages of not being rooted to a place.

Tonight I leave for California. For the next three weeks, I will once again call the San Francisco Bay Area home. Blogging will resume from there in the next couple of days. In the meanwhile, do check out the archives if the mood strikes you. I especially suggest the September 2005 archives.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

My stay in Sydney ends tonight. I will be on the road and off the web. This is my final post from Sydney.
I leave you with a few quotes from Henry David Thoreau:

Crazyfinger writes to inform us all of a blogpost contest. The prize is a copy of Stephen Miller’s new book “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art”. Check it out.
[My apologies to Crazyfinger for the delay in carrying this announcement. Due to time constraints, I was unable to get to updating the blog.]

Brad DeLong over at UC Berkeley writes a mean blog, Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, from his office at Evans Hall with a view of the campus and the Golden Gate Bridge off to the west. He considers the academic enviroment he lives in to be a paradise.

Try this:
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.

A comment on this blog is worth highlighting because it is too important to be buried among the comments. It is from Gulab Singh who wrote:
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 …

Well, most of the time it is simply not available and even when it is, most of the posts are not readable. Take the last bit to mean what you will. What I mean is, that if you click “More,” you get an error message. I have pointed this out to the powers that be, and they have predictably responded that they will look into the matter. But then I have heard it in the past and I am sure that I will hear it in the future as well. …

Why the long hiatus in blogging, you may ask. Don’t really know. I guess that I was ready for a break. For the last couple of weeks, I have been on the road. After leaving Pune, I spent a few days in Mumbai. On the 24th of May, I was briefly interviewed on BBC World TV for their live program “China and India: Emerging Giants.” The interview was at the Taj Palace Hotel with the Gateway of India in the background.

I miss the days when I used to work at HP in the Silicon Valley. Those were the days. One of the high points of my time there (7 years ending in 1991) was my association with the Usenet group hp.mic. The quality of discussion and debate was a joy. A few months ago I joined a google group of ex-HP folks. Sure enough, some of the old hands were there. I am delighted to point you to Tom von Alten and his blog Ft Boise. The range of topics …

This is a blog. Schizophrenic though it may be, but I am fundamentally against blogging. I believe that there is a humongous mountain of absolutely wonderfully written totally worthwhile news, views, and analysis out there, and most of it is available to you via the wonder that is the Internet and the WWW, and so there is absolutely no need for anyone to waste time reading blogs. Go read a book, instead.

As it happens, I am off to Singapore for a few days. Blogging, therefore, will be suspended. Yeah, yeah, I know that I am not the most prolific of bloggers and stopping for extended periods of time is par for the course. Yet, courtesy demands that I alert you about this hiatus.
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 …

Just for the record, I will be traveling to Hyderabad for the next couple of days and will not have the opportunity to write and respond to the comments on my recent posts.
Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

If you are reading this site using IE (Intentionally Evil Internet Explorer), you would find this blog badly formatted. May I suggest using Firefox? For whatever the content is worth, at least the form would be more attactive than with IE.

A few days ago, I plugged in a gizmo to this blog which keeps track of where the visitors of this blog come from. Here is the Clustermap for this site. Currently the site lists about 2800 visits in the last 5 days.
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 …

Not that you would notice, of course, given my sporadic blogging in general, but I thought that I should let you know that I will most likely not be posting stuff for a few days. So if you land here and find nothing new, I suggest you don’t go away without checking some of the archives.
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 …