[From the Berkeley blog June 2003 archives.]
Why is India poor? As some have argued, India is poor by choice. I will explore that idea a bit here.
Of course, that does not mean that every poor Indian has chosen to be poor. Someone else in a position of power made choices whose consequences are evident. India’s leaders – past and present – have consistently made choices that have had, and are having, a disastrous effect on the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. What motivates these people is a …

I used to have a blog at UC Berkeley. It was titled “Life is a Random Draw.” I wrote it for a couple of years and decided to shut it down as it was attracting too much spam. I will re-publish some of the posts from the Berkeley blog depending on relevance. Here’s one from 13th May 2003. This one is related to the recent incident in which an exhibition of some historical records related to Aurangzeb was shut down by the police in Chennai because some people felt that …