Let me tell you a story. It’s a vignette of what I consider to be important although it may appear to be rather trivial. Perhaps its apparent triviality is what should astonish us. But allow me to first recount a conversation I had the last week.

A short century ago the US and Argentina were rivals. Both were riding the first wave of globalisation at the turn of the 20th century. Both were young, dynamic nations with fertile farmlands and confident exporters. Both brought the beef of the New World to the tables of their European colonial forebears. Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, Argentina was among the 10 richest economies in the world.
That’s from a fascinating article by Alan Beattie in the Financial Times of May 23rd titled “Argentina: The superpower that never was.” …

That’s the title of the course I am conducting at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. It is a small class of about 15 students. It’s a half-credit elective in the final term of the year.
We have had two lectures so far. I am having fun — which is another way of saying that I am learning quite a bit. I think I will share some of what I have learned on this blog in the next few weeks.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea,” advised Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Does makes sense, doesn’t it? Motivating the task is the real job of the leader, not messing around with petty details.

Anyone familiar with the disastrous state of India should not be overly surprised to learn that the Indian parliament has an overwhelmingly greater percentage of criminals than the general population. How effectively a nation functions and how successful it is depends on its leaders who make public policy and thus critically determine the outcome. India’s failure to develop and achieve its potential is proof positive that its leadership is lacking.
Underdevelopment, poverty, and all other ills that plague India are an unavoidable consequence of poor public policies and choices.

This is a follow up to the previous post, “Begging for a World Class University.” In this I will address two responses to the post: one, the comment left by Aditya, and two, a post by Pramode titled “A Question (or two) for Atanu“.

Consider this scenario. Someone you know imprisons his grown up children and does not allow them to go out and do jobs that they are fully capable of doing. He also locks up his productive assets and prevents his children from using them. Then he goes around begging his neighbors for help with feeding his family as he does not have any income. The words that spring to mind upon considering this man’s behavior are words like contemptible, immoral, stupid, pathetic, pitiable, and sad.

That’s what a report in the Hindustan Times claims: US $13 billion each year. Figures such as these are unbelievable but I suppose someone must have done the numbers. In any case, I had estimated that number to be around $10 billion a few years ago.
Let’s pause for a moment and figure. $13 billion every year. Or in the last 10 years, about $100 billion. Imagine what you could buy for that money. How about 100 colleges with first class infrastructure with housing, classrooms, labs? Each year India could …

I have it on good authority that Satyameva Jayate is India’s national motto. The English translation of the Sanskrit is “Truth Alone Prevails.” Is that claim itself true? Can it really prevail in a land where some people are afraid to speak what they perceive to be the truth because some others confront that expression with violence?
Thomas Jefferson claimed over 200 years ago that “it is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself.” I agree only partly. I don’t think that without courageous people …

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury.
– Alexander Tytler
Some numbers are well beyond human comprehension. We can talk glibly about millions and billions of this or that but we cannot intuitive grasp what they actually mean. Evolution has equipped us with fine brains but those brains never needed to deal with thousands — leave alone millions — of anything. So we have to do some mental …

There appears to be a thriving cottage industry which is primarily engaged in churning out shallow pieces of journalistic garbage. The pieces detail a particular person’s or family’s struggles and then juxtapose it in some dramatic way with perceived overall prosperity. The implicit argument is that there is an immense injustice being perpetrated against the poor, that it is all the fault of those who are not poor, and that the poor have absolutely no responsibility for the miserable state of affairs. These articles reveal a lot without intending to. …

Don’t read Tavleen Singh’s column “Educating the Education Minister” in the Indian Express today if you wish to continue being puzzled by the question why India is poor.
Basic decency and propriety prevents me from suggesting what should be done to the Indian minister she writes about. Shame on you, Dr Manmohan Singh. Please, in the name of everything decent and human, resign.

Golf, not Chess
Economic growth in a sense, and to a much larger extent economic development, is more akin to a game of golf than a game of chess. In golf, the opponent’s moves matter very little; you may as well play by yourself and later compare scores if needed. In chess, your move depends on how your opponent has moved and how he is likely to respond to your move. In other words, chess is a strategic game while golf is not. All this is very broadly speaking, naturally. I …

The makers of monsters and their fates are inextricably tied, both in fiction and in real life. Dr Frankenstein’s monster. Dr Faustus. Mrs Gandhi, the elder and Sant Bhindranwale. The CIA and Osama bin Laden. The CIA and the Taleban. Add your own favorite examples.
Dr MM Singh. VP Singh. The monsters created for gaining political power by legislating divisions of the country along caste and religious lines are beginning to have a life of their own.
Soon to be released, the sequel to the hit drama, “August 1947: The First Cut.” …

Don’t know much about history. Thanks to the government control of education, we are not told inconvenient truths. Fortunately, in this day of free information flow, one is slowly getting wise. I think it is just a matter of time before Indians figure out the truth. I find it bitter irony that India’s national motto is “Satyameva Jayate” — Truth Alone Prevails — and the powers that be do all they can to delay the victory of truth.

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.

George Bernard Shaw with characteristic cynicism noted that a government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. Regardless of their specific stripes, all Indian governments, because they are “democratically” elected, naturally solve the problem of identifying the Peters and the Pauls by a numbers game: Pauls must outnumber the Peters. So it should come as no surprise that yet another idiotic scheme is hatched by the party in power to gain the support of a large underclass by promising them something that will …

BBC reports that the US has done a U-turn and is not opposed to the Iran-India LNG pipeline through Pakistan. I suppose that the US has finally figured out that the pipeline would make India vulnerable to even more Pakistani blackmail and all in all, it would be a bonus for the US. Normally the US puts the screws on India by merely arming Pakistan to the teeth. This time the dumb Indians are obliging the US by voluntarily bending over for Pakistan with no help from the US.
The …

Most regular readers of this blog figure out soon enough that when it comes to the question of India’s ills and its causes, I refer to Jawaharlal Nehru. Like all roads eventually leading to Rome, all my explanations into what India is suffering from and why lead to Nehru, the Nabob of Cluelessness, at some point. I look around the country and marvel at how much damage has been caused by one single individual. It will take centuries to clean up and the cost in terms of lives lived in …

Along the lines of my earlier post on new political parties, here is another item from the news related to Indian politics regarding an NRI member of the Indian parliament from the Toronto Star. (Hat tip: Reuben Abraham.)
The man, Madhu Yaskhi, moonlights as an MP for the Congress Party and his day job is being an immigration lawyer in Manhattan.