She’s special and has been peddling her wares for a long while. An article, “Damn Nuisance” in the Telegraph of the UK put it thusly in March 2002:

Nobody questions the rights of writers to express political opinions but when it comes to the bulk delivery of unsolicited guidance on the world’s shortcomings, Miss Roy’s currently in a class of her own.

Attention whores thrive on attention. The best way to deal with her is to ignore her. But the main stream media in India depends on her types to get their TRPs and GRPs. Unfortunately we are not going to see the last of her.

Related Posts: I have argued a lot for the freedom of expression on this blog. Note especially this, “Freedom to be Offended“, and this, “Forbidding Expression,” and this, “Ridiculing Religious Insanity“.

There are many indications that there are stupid people among us. One of the most compelling proofs lies in your spam folder. They are the ones which have fascinating titles such as “You have won $300 million”, “Your Inheritance Payment from the IMF”, etc.

The senders of these emails would not bother if there weren’t enough stupid people in the population who respond to them. Seeing the hundreds of phishing and Nigerian scams, one can guess that the number of people who fall for these schemes must be non-trivial. Estimates of amounts lost to the so-called “Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud” put the figure at $1 million every day for the US alone.

The emails start off with something like the following

Dear Sir,

Confidential Business Proposal

Having consulted with my colleagues and based on the information gathered from the Nigerian Chambers Of Commerce And Industry, I have the privilege to request your assistance to transfer the sum of $47,500,000.00 (forty seven million, five hundred thousand United States dollars) into your accounts. The above sum resulted from an over-invoiced contract, executed, commissioned and paid for about five years (5) ago by a foreign contractor. This action was however intentional and since then the fund has been in a suspense account at The Central Bank Of Nigeria Apex Bank.

We are now ready to transfer the fund overseas and that is where you come in. It is important to inform you that as civil servants, we are forbidden to operate a foreign account; that is why we require your assistance. The total sum will be shared as follows: 70% for us, 25% for you and 5% for local and international expenses incidental to the transfer.

The transfer is risk free on both sides. I am an accountant with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC). If you find this proposal acceptable, we shall require the following documents:

(a) your banker’s name, telephone, account and fax numbers.

(b) your private telephone and fax numbers —for confidentiality and easy communication.

(c) your letter-headed paper stamped and signed.

Stupidity, gullibility and greed. What’s scary is that these stupid people who respond to such evident scams go out and vote.

However, sometimes it is amusing to read those letters for the gems they contain. Here are a few samples lines snipped from various emails in my spam folder:

. . . My name is JANET SYLVIA BESTMAN (MRS), I am a British woman of 52 years of age married to a Nigerian JOHN EMEKA BESTMAN (MR) who is presently late. . .

. . . although we have not met or entered into any kind of contract with you before as to know the extent of your honesty, but based on the recommendation, I personally want to believe that you are honest . . .

All emails of this variety involve dishonesty and death. It is usually the widow writing about her dear departed husband who used to be a dictator or an arms dealer or a banker. One letter however upped the ante on the death front: your death.

Your name appeared among the beneficiaries, who will receive payment of your
contractual sum and has been approved already for weeks. You are requested to
get back to me for more direction and instruction on how to receive your fund.

However, we received an email from one Mr. Virgle Lee Samples who told us that
he is your next of kin and that you died in a car accident last week.

He has also submitted his account for us to transfer the fund to him we want to
hear from you before we can make the transfer to confirm if you are dead or not?
Please if you are still alive, kindly furnish us with below information: so that
I can give you the contact of the paying bank in London .

Now that’s what I call a lethal combination of death, dishonesty, greed and gullibility.

Related Post: The Indian $10 Laptop. Feb 2009.

What’s worse than a $10 laptop that winds up costing $30? A $10 $30 laptop that’s not really a laptop at all. India is shrugging off the disappointment surrounding its apparent failure to bring home-grown tech to its youth, but thankfully isn’t giving up on the kids, ordering a whopping 250,000 OLPC XO laptops. Waiting this long to drink the Negroponte Kool Aid means 1,500 schools will get the latest and greatest models, featuring VIA C7-M processors and bumped up storage. The plan is for a total of three million portable computers for Indian schools this year, and while it’s unclear just how many will be little, green, and different, that’s a whole lot of lappys regardless. [Emphasis added.]

I thought that India was done with that OLPC insanity bit. I was wrong. The sheer stupidity of those who make these decisions never ceases to amaze. Or perhaps it is not stupidity but cynical manipulation of the system by power-hungry politicians using public funds to give away goodies to their favored caste and religious groups in exchange for political patronage.

Update: Just came across olpcnews.com’s post which gives more details.

Satish Jha, president and CEO of OLPC India has announced via IDG that two government organizations and one private-sector entity placed a 250,000 XO laptop order. Apparently, the XO laptops will be distributed to about 1,500 schools, starting in June.

This is seriously disturbing. They are doing their best to further impoverish a seriously poor country. Hell would be too good for these.

“The use of computers in offices is creating unemployment problems. Our party feels that if work can be done by a person using hands there is no need to deploy machines,” Mr. Mulayam Singh said at a press conference after unveiling the [Samajwadi Party] manifesto.

Actually, his world is internally quite consistent. According to him, “the basic cause of terrorism lies in regional differences.” Which means that if India were to develop faster than Pakistan or Bangladesh, it would lead to conflict. Since it is not possible for the Islamic republics of Pakistan and Bangladesh to join the 21st century, as they are busy dragging themselves back to the stone ages, the only way for achieving parity among India, Pakistan and Bangladesh is for India to also join the party. How? Ban computers and just along the way ban agricultural machines, ban education in English, . . .

Actually according to him all these new-fangled things are really not in tune with ideal society — 7th century Arabia. “The Samajwadi Party will focus on increasing security at the borders and ensuring that India has better policies with regard to neighbours like Pakistan and Bangladesh so that the three countries develop together.” Computers are obviously haram, not halal.

“Nothing should be allowed to go beyond certain limits. We have seen enough of computerisation and any further move in that direction would be detrimental to the overall growth of the nation.”

He felt, “Even proliferation of management courses seemed to have only resulted in producing more and more unemployed MBAs.” [Source]

It’s a circus.

As the photoshopped image in my first post on this matter previously states, “I see stupid people . . . they don’t even know that they are dumb.” And now we note the furious back-peddling. I had noted in the followup post that the claim is that it was a typo. It seems that India’s Minister of State for Higher Education D Purandeswari’s claim that a $10 laptop was a reality was based on a simple typo, a dropped “0″. (H/t: Sudipta)

A fine invention — the missing zero — from the land which lays claim to have invented the zero.

It’s a sad commentary on the state of India’s governance that the minister of state for — hold on for this — “higher education” is so ignorant so as to be unable to reason and uncritically announces a near impossibility. Should anyone be even the least bit surprised at the sorry state of India’s education sector if its policy makers are so astonishingly disconnected with reason and reality?

I can imagine an illiterate person who has never seen an electronic device in his or her life being unable to estimate the cost (or the price) of a computer. He or she would have no basis for estimating the cost — it could be anything between Rs 1,000 or Rs 100,000 or more. But even the average high school student in India — who probably knows roughly the prices of cell phones, mp3 players, various electronic toys and gaming machines — would easily enough reject the notion that a laptop could cost as little as Rs 500.

You don’t need to have the smarts of a professor of quantum physics to know that some things are too improbable. For instance, most of us really don’t know how much a commercial airliner costs. For all we know it could be $50 million or it could be $500 million. We have no way of telling for sure. But if someone claims that they have recently built one for the astonishing $100,000, we would tell him to get a brain cell or two. We can do this because we know that a car costs around $20,000 and a commercial airliner is tens of times bigger and more complicated than a car.

I will not dwell anymore on this shameful display of ignorance. Let me review a bit of economics to take off the bad taste in my mouth left by having dropped my jaw too often lately.

The first fun fact is that most of the manufactured stuff available out there is produced by private firms in competitive markets. That implies that they have to make profits. How do they make profits? By reducing their costs. Because in competitive markets, if your costs are below what the prevailing price for your widget is, then you make a profit. But since all firms are simultaneously trying to cut costs, the price itself drops because firms reduce their own prices as much as they can while still making a profit so that they can sell more to the market. This leads to the situation that in competitive markets, prices track costs closely.

If you are getting a laptop for around $700 a pop (give or take a couple of hundred bucks), then you can be sure that the costs are around that. The margins are super thin. Laptops are almost commodities and there isn’t much room for super-normal profits.

The second fun fact is that manufacturing has “scale economies.” The more units of something you manufacture, the lower is your per unit cost. So what happens is that firms specialize in the manufacture of components.

Example: Intel makes processors. They make them by the millions. They spend billions of dollars in the design of a chip (that’s the fixed cost) but then manufacture tens of millions of those babies. That distributes the high fixed costs and so the average fixed cost is a few dollars per chip. The scale economies arise from the combination of high fixed costs and low variable costs (these are the costs of the silicon wafer and the fabrication of each individual chip.)

Then Intel sells these chips to others. These processors are intermediate goods, as opposed to final goods such as laptops. Much international trade is trade in intermediate goods. You see container ships carrying components from one country to another. The globalized world we hear so much about is held together by links that are essentially component manufacturing.

There are tons of intermediate goods. Just look around. The LCD display: made by a few large manufacturers like Samsung. Same goes for the hard drives in your computer. But let’s not restrict ourselves to computers alone. The windshield in your car is made by one of a handful of windshield makers, regardless of whether you drive a Suzuki or a Honda.

Every subsystem of a complex machine is actually produced by some firm specializing in the manufacture of that bit. The end product that you buy is an assembly.

What does this specialization imply? Obviously that you get stuff at prices that would have been impossible without it. The firms do the best they can, spending truck loads of money in research and development to figure out how to make their stuff cheaply. Over decades of this sort of learning and doing, the ones that manage to survive are the best of the breed. It is not easy to dislodge these firms. So if I have dreams of starting up a company which will knock Intel out of the ring, I should wake up and smell the coffee.

The bottom line is this: a computer is a complex bit of manufactured stuff, each subsystem of which is manufactured by firms at the lowest possible costs given the present state of the art, and it takes billions of dollars worth of investment to keep improving the technology and advancing the state of the art.

You can bet your bottom dollar that although things get cheaper over the years, there are no quantum leaps. (Here, I use the term quantum in the original sense of the word — a discrete step — and not in the sense that is generally misused as a synonym for “massive” or “big.”)

Things improve gradually. They evolve. Not just evolve, they co-evolve. To make something, it takes an ecosystem of firms all competing and all trying their hardest to cut costs and improve efficiencies. Last month I paid $100 for a 250 GB external (USB) hard drive. Two years ago, I had paid $130 for a 80 GB hard drive. Next year, I will perhaps pay $100 for a one-terabyte drive. But I will not be paying $2 for a 250 GB drive next year. That will not happen.

Why? Because there is a simple rule. There is a minimum cost dictated by the amount of stuff in a device. It is easy to arrive at that minimum cost. Just weigh it and then multiply the weight with the per kilo cost of the matter that went into it. By this device you can immediately put a floor on the cost (and therefor the price) of a car (weight multiplied by the cost of steel, say), or the floor on the cost of a bus. The latter minimum will be more than the former.

But note that this is a minimum. It says nothing of a maximum. A Porche sports car can cost a lot more than an average bus.

Also note that in many cases, the smaller the thing, the more expensive it can be. The Macbook Air costs a lot more than the average laptop.

The point is that one can reject the idea that a computer, however minimalistic in its design, can cost $10. It takes eye-popping ignorance to do otherwise. (Here we are not talking of a price. The price can be arbitrarily set by the government.)

Well, that is it for now. Got to go. Perhaps I will write more later.

A collaborative team between the Indian governments ministry of science and ministry of technology will unveil a super-low-cost computer on February 3rd, as part of the country’s $10 laptop project. Specifications of the notebook – which is intended for education use – are unconfirmed, but unofficial sources suggest it will have 2GB of memory, both ethernet and WiFi connectivity, the ability to expand the storage and low power requirements of just 2W, all in a small, portable package. [Slashgear]

Here’s what I feel like.

(“I see dead people” is one of my all-time favorite line from a movie.)

Like Milton Friedman saw money supply factors behind every economic disaster (which provoked Robert Solow to remark “Everything reminds Milton Friedman of the money supply. Everything reminds me of sex, but I try to keep it out of my papers”), I see the failure of the Indian education system behind every episode of public stupidity.

I am quite willing to recognize that government officials are not the sharpest knives in the drawer — one secretary for higher education said, “At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down” — but how does the press go about reporting their statements as if they make even the least bit of sense? How on earth is one be able to compose syntactically correct sentences and publish them in blogs without having the ability to reason worth a damn, like this item in The Better India illustrates?

The writer states that poor people cannot afford laptops for education now but this “is poised to change in the near future with the advent of a new Rs. 500 laptop (currently in prototype phase).” Why? Is it plain gullibility? He read somewhere that the government has claimed it to be so and uncritically accepts it as something that is even remotely possible. Besides that, what he fails to do is basic arithmetic.

I think that the Indian education system fails dramatically when it comes to teaching basic arithmetic. Of course they do teach 2 plus 2 is 4 and that sort of thing. But it does not teach how to reason after doing the sums. It is not just how to add that matters but what and why of addition that matter more.

So what’s wrong with a $10 laptop? What’s wrong is that it flies in the face of all reasonable expectations about the world. It is disconnected with reality. The reality is that Nicholas Negroponte’s OLPC project tried desperately to build a $100 laptop and despite having access to considerable talent and expertise, the best it could do was a machine that costs around $200. What this tells us is that hardware costs, though they have fallen dramatically over time, are still high enough that it is virtually impossible to produce a laptop for around $100. If it were possible, they would have done it.

One has to either ignore — or be totally ignorant of — physical, commercial, and technological limitations to make an outlandish claim that the Rs 500 laptop will consume 2 watts of power. Even a small phone consumes more than that, and any laptop is a lot more complex than a cell phone.

The most compelling reason for totally rejecting this claim of a Rs 500 laptops is this: if the government, together with “students of Vellore Institute of Technology, scientists in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, IIT-Madras” could pull-off a near-impossible technological miracle, does it not imply that the entire global computer industry is either totally incompetent or else it is a huge big scam which actually produces stuff at very little cost and then sells them at exorbitant prices.

As far as I know, the global IT industry is viciously competitive and therefore cannot price their goods — especially consumer hardware — at prices too far above costs. So if the price of some display is $200, one can be reasonably sure that that is pretty much very close to cost. Furthermore one can be confident that each manufacturer is trying its best to reduce the cost as much as possible — because that is how they make their profits. That’s called competition in the market.

So if one were to believe that some entity is capable of producing some sort of laptop at a cost of Rs 500, then one has to believe that that entity can overturn the entire global IT industry by producing it cheaply and undercutting every other vendor in the world. If the laptop costs Rs 500, presumably each major component of it must cost less than Rs 50, assuming that it has at least 10 major components. Since these components each actually cost Rs 500 at least (and most cost in the thousands), if the government can produce them at a tenth of those costs, clearly the government of India should be in the hardware manufacturing business. Clearly the Intels, HPs, Dells, Samsungs, IBM, etc should be worried.

But wait! It is not that the cost is Rs 500 but the price will be Rs 500. Perhaps that’s what the government means. The government will sell it for Rs 500. And you and I will foot the bill. Votes. Votes bought at our expense. Good thinking, dear UPA.

With terrorists using unsecured wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks to shoot off emails every time they carry out bomb blasts, TRAI is examining a series of measures to have security processes in place to protect such networks. [Source]

Once the WiFi networks are secure, Islamic terrorists will not be able to use them to send emails to mass media claiming responsibility and justifying their mass murders based on ideology. This will have the salutary effect of the terrorists stopping their mass murders because (if one were to go by the reasoning of the telecom authorities) their main reason for killing innocents was clearly that insecure WiFi networks are scattered all over the country.

I suppose soon enough internet service providers will be forced to look over your shoulder while you use their services. Lots of employment possibilities here. But wait! What if terrorists figure out that they can use phones to call the media? No problem. The government will require people to sign a register somewhere stating who you are calling and what you are calling about. That would close that loophole. Now at last there will be no bombings. Unless of course, the holy warriors of Islam decide to use the postal service. One cannot be too careful, can one? So the next step will be to get a bureaucrat’s permission before using the postal services.

Good. So we have finally got the terrorism problem licked. Just prevent the terrorists from communicating with the mass media. Don’t bother looking into the ideology that motivates them. After all, their ideology cannot be very important. They merely claim that it is their ideology of subjugating the whole world through terror is what motivates them to commit mass murder. That is just a claim and it is clearly smart to totally disregard that. What the government must focus on is to foil the terrorists’ attempts at emailing, telephoning, and writing letters. Do that and the terrorists will lose all interest in their avowed goal of claiming India for Dar-ul-Islam.

Everything reminds me of India’s failed education system — and by extension — the stupidity of the government policymakers, bureaucrats and politicians included. Unlike Bob Solow, however, I cannot keep it out of my posts.

Consider the news item that India is developing a $10 laptop.

NEW DELHI: After displaying its prowess in developing the world’s cheapest car, India is on track to roll out the world’s cheapest laptop computer that could cost as low as $10, a top official said.

Minister of State for Human Resource Development D Purandeswari said research was being conducted to develop the laptop, especially for use by students, which will cost all of $10.

“Research in this direction is being already carried out at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras,” she told the e-India annual summit on information and communication technologies.

I wonder how anyone can sit and listen to such unadulterated crap — even if they are participants at an “e-India” summit. And the reporter — doesn’t one have to have the IQ of a cretin to report this without comment about the absurdity of the claim that there can be such a thing as a $10 laptop?

Like I keep saying, the Indian education system is really, truly, badly, irreparably broken. What else can one conclude from the expressed stupidity of a minister of state, a whole bunch of presumably educated people at a conference, a newspaper reporter and various editors, and hundreds of thousands of readers who let the stupidity go unquestioned?

So in the interests of sanity and public service, I will explain why the minister’s claim is idiotic. There is such a thing called the cost of making something. The price at which something is sold has a relationship to the cost of manufacture in the sense that the price is at least as much as the total cost of manufacturing (absent any subsidies.)

Now there is a general rule about the cost of a thing which should be known by every adult who is not, how shall I put it, mentally challenged. The heavier the thing, the more it costs to make. Simple but not fully appreciated by those who are mentally deficient. This is a general rule. A Volvo bus costs more to make than a Volvo car. A motorbike costs more to make than a bicycle. More weight, more costly: Tata Nano, Maurti 800, Honda Civic, Honda Accord, BMW 7series.

Basically, the floor of the minimum cost is dictated by the per kilo cost of the material that the thing is made of.

So what is the minimum cost of a car? Well, if 500 kilos of steel, plastics, and other stuff go into it, and if the minimum per kilo cost is say Rs 100, then you cannot produce a car for less than Rs 50,000. That a 500 kg car can cost a lot more than the minimum to make, or that it can be sold at a price that is multiple times more than its cost, is besides the point. What we are doing here is figuring out that there is a lower limit to the cost of anything.

Now suppose a laptop weighs 3 kilos. If anyone claims that it can be produced at a cost of say $10 (or Rs 400), then the claim is that the material costs are just over $3 a kilo. That is patently absurd. In fact, the more sophisticated a device is, its per kilo price goes up, not down. Its capacity may go up but the basic per kilo price does not go down but up.

What this means is that a one-kilo laptop with the same functionality and features as that of a three-kilo laptop will cost more. That means that per kilo, the lighter laptop will at least three times as costly as the heavier laptop.

So here’s the bottom line. An affordable laptop will be heavier than sophisticated but lighter laptop. And the heavier laptop cannot cost less than the per kilo production cost of the stuff that it is made up of. A laptop at $10 is an impossibility in any known reality. Sure you could have a $10 cell phone — you could have a 100 gram phone. But you cannot have a 100 gram laptop.

Back to our Minister of State and her pronouncements. I don’t suppose anyone will ever hold her to her statement. No one will call bullshit on her claims. And I suppose her IQ is matched by that of the media. So she need not worry that the media are going to challenger her.

Like I said, our educational system sucks.

From: “jaya kamlani”

As soon as I heard about a string of bomb blasts in Gujarat, I sent out the information to some journalists and posted it on the SAJA (South Asian Journalists Assoc) blog, I am a long time member of the organization. I also posted updates to it on the blog. Yesterday, too, we had bomb blasts in Bangalore. It is so sad what is happening in India. My heart goes out to the grieving families.

Since I am working on my book on rural India and the ones left behind in the booming economy, I do a lot of research on the subject each day. As you know I traveled through the villages and slums of India for over two months this winter to gather material for my book. I certainly feel that the model of Indian economy is based on the American economy, which is capitalism. The ordinary man has been forgotten in India. What you are seeing is the dissatisfaction of the mass. . .

Jaya Kamlani is wrong. It is immoral, unethical, stupid and insane to pin the acts of barbaric savagery of killing innocents on the poor. The poor suffer enough and endure enough indignities without being also gratuitously blamed for acts of terrorism.

I am disgusted and repelled by Jaya Kamlani’s suggestion that it is the poor retaliating against the system by killing indiscriminately. Shame on you, Mr or Ms Jaya Kamlani.

I don’t know but I hope and pray (to use an expression) that St Stephen’s is not supported by any public funds.

Anyhow, here’s a nice illustration of innumeracy to add a bit of humor to an otherwise pathetic story:

The management wants 50 per cent reservation for Christians, another 30 per cent for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe candidates. So that would leave 30 per cent for general category students.

PS: For the benefit of those who did not get the “Sonia Sarkar” joke, “sarkar” means “government” in many Indian languages.

The Acorn recommends “that taxpayers line up in large numbers and vote against the simians making economic policy.” I concur. I have always maintained that India is ruled by monkeys.

But I don’t think that taxpayers can do anything to dislodge the simians. The taxpayers probably did not have much of a say in the electing of the simians in the first place; there are not all that many taxpayers anyway compared to non-taxpayers. Which is precisely the reason that the government finds it convenient to steal from taxpayers. As has been noted before, robbing Peter to pay Paul always assures the government of the support of Paul. Democracy is a numbers game. If Pauls outnumber Peters, the government can continue to steal from the Peters with impunity.

Imposing a fuel subsidy cess is a very bad idea because it goes against one of the most basic economic principles: don’t mess with prices [1].

Prices convey important information to consumers and producers. High prices send a signal to consumers to consume less of the thing and/or to shift their consumption to substitutes, thus reducing demand for the thing (and increasing the demand for the substitutes). Simultaneously, high prices induce increase supply of the thing, and also encourage producers of the substitutes. The changes on both the demand side and the supply side are rational reactions to high prices. By suppressing this price signal, these economically beneficial changes are inhibited and the net effect is welfare loss. If messing with prices is done sufficiently frequently and over extended periods of time, eventually the economy spirals into poverty.

I claim that India’s poverty is (at least to some significant degree) the result of sustained and frequent messing with prices. Now you can naturally expect simians to not appreciate basic economics. The story appears plausible: simians get elected; simians don’t understand economics; simians therefore make bad economic policies; the country suffers welfare losses and eventually is trapped into poverty.

But I hear you say, “Shirley you jest! The finance minister is a trained economist. And if the not prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh himself has some knowledge of the field. So why on earth would they propose economic policies that are guaranteed to make India poorer?” My reply would be, “I am not joking. And don’t call me Shirley.”

I have arrived at an economics variation of Weinberg’s take on religion and people’s behavior [2]. My position on economists as policymakers in the context of democracy as practice in India: “Good economists propose good policies and stupid economists propose evil economic policies. But for good economists to enact evil economic policies they have to be part of the Indian government.”

It is easy to see why the policymakers, instead of allowing the price of oil to rise to reflect the true cost, want to impose yet another cess: the taxpayers are powerless to oppose it. Even among taxpayers, imposing a cess for fuel subsidy is not equitable. For instance, I don’t have a car and don’t directly use any subsidized fuel. A cess on my income to subsidize fuel for car owners is in effect an involuntary transfer from me to others who do use cars. Besides being economically wasteful, this is unethical and immoral [3].

The whole policy of the government subsidizing fuel is immensely harmful and goes beyond the mere immediate effects. Eventually it harms the whole economy. The government does not create resources. It merely redistributes wealth and often does so with considerable inefficiency. The subsidy broadly borrows from the future since sooner or later today’s consumption which results in a debt has to eventually be balanced out by lower consumption in the future. The fuel subsidy is therefore forcing the future generation to fund the consumption of the present generation.

The iron law of the universe is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Someone somewhere will have to pay for any lunch. If the cost of fuel is high, the price will eventually have to be paid. Stealing from some of today’s people and stealing from the whole lot of tomorrow’s people may keep the government shielded from the effects of their policies today. But in the end, that karma will catch up. But by then, the present set of policymakers would be with yesterday’s seven thousand years after having enjoyed the perks of being rulers. The rest will have to suffer.

It’s all karma, neh?

Notes:

1. Prices should be messed with when there are externalities. If there are positive externalities, subsidies are warranted; if negative, taxes.

2. Steven Weinberg, the 1979 winner of the Nobel prize in physics had this to say about organized religion. “Without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.”

3. This point is also made by Mayuresh in a comment on The Acorn.

I had gone there to sit on a panel which was deliberating such weighty matters as policy for encouraging open source in education. I had little to add to it but still I was given a nice desk weather station (has a hygrometer and thermometer in addition to the clock). Neat little gizmo, made in China, of course.

The event was held at the Kanwal Rekhi School for Information Technology. The school is housed in a building which looks pretty modern. It has a faint resemblance to the painting by Eicher called Up and Down. There is something impossible about that place. If you go there, it is impossible for you to find out who is in which room. There is a fairly large display board with the names of the prominent professors of information technology. It lists names but not the room numbers. Which room does a particular worthy occupies is a closely guarded secret. Remember, it is the school for information technology and we all know that means PCs and wireless and all sorts of stuff that is high-tech and expensive. Information on a low-tech sign board? No way, Jose.

To be fair, perhaps they don’t list room numbers because even if you were to list the room numbers, you cannot find the room because the rooms are not numbered. And even if they are numbered, the numbers are not very prominent. So in the end, you have to ask someone where Dr. Such-and-such may be found. In any event, there you have it: the school of information technology gurus have yet to figure out that the information comes first and technology next.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

While we are on the topic of IIT Bombay, here is something that is a crying shame. Soumen Chakrabarti, of the computer science faculty, has a pictorial essay titled Destruction is our second nature. He documents the algorithm used for the wholesale destruction of trees on campus. What he describes with illustrations resembles slash-and-burn (or swidden) agriculture.

Panthers form another great excuse for decimating trees and shrubs. Here is an excerpt from a notice from our security chief: “Clearing of bushes: Wild bushes in and around departments, residential areas and roadsides are being cleared on priority basis.”

What remains at the end of a burning orgy? Vast expanses of charred moon-like surface, trees devastated worse than the Godhra victims, tracts of wasteland, dramatic loss in ground cover and increase in airborne suspended particulate matter.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Today is my last day in Mumbai. I am leaving for New Delhi by the spanking new Rajdhani Express train. Lately I have been too busy doing stuff that I have neglected this blog. It may get worse since I will be on the road. But who knows, maybe I will write about my travels around the country. Until we meet again and the case is sol-ved, as Inspector Clouseau says, good-bye.

The newsletter from US-India Political Action Committee (USINPAC) contained this:

We need support and financial contribution from at least 50,000 Indian Americans by March 2004 to persuade the US government to support India in its fight against HIV/AIDS. The US government has already funded 14 nations in curbing the HIV/AIDS menace. With your support, India can become the 15th country to receive the much-needed US funds for fighting the epidemic.

Begging bowl all shiny and ready, I suppose. What the heck is wrong with these people? Do they have no shame? Begging for their living? Because I don’t doubt that they fly first class from one end of the country to the other shiny begging bowl in hand.

It is said that there are beggar lords in Mumbai. They send out children to beg on the streets and the beggar lords take the collections at the end of the day. They make a fine living.

So I guess that those who are parading the horrendous HIV/AIDS numbers around looking for a handout are similarly benefiting from the charity they expect to get.

India is a large country. India, if Indians have any shame, should and must do what is required for fighting its own battles. Whether it is fighting AIDS or Pakistan, it should not expect — indeed, refuse to take — any help from the US. Asking for aid from the US is the most ignominious idiotic move made by any organization.

I am truly ashamed that Indian public policy has failed to address public health issues. But I am horrified that USINPAC is begging for money on India’s behalf.