They beat him up. According to the MidDay report of June 1, “after a thorough beating,” they handed him over to the police in Mumbai.

Hi from the Big Apple. Brilliant day outside with snow from yesterday’s blizzard blanketing the city. I am visiting with my friend Reuben who lives on 116th and Broadway (Columbia U.)
I have been wandering around the world for the past couple of weeks. Which partly explains why I have been neglecting this blog. Then there is the acute case of writer’s block that I am suffering from. It is with some trepidation that I am pushing against that block. So here goes nothing.
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My journey began on the 16th of February …

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet
My days in Mumbai are numbered. Strictly speaking, all the days of our lives are numbered. I will soon be saying goodbye to the …

The city formerly known in English as Calcutta (now known in all languages as “Kolkata” which is its Bengali name) is an unfortunate city. Its misfortune derives from two major sources primarily. Two of the world’s most destructive ideologies — Islam and communism — have brought a city full of promise to its knees and today it is best known around the world as the “City of Joy” and the “Blackhole of India.” It breaks the heart of any culturally sensitive person — not just someone like me whose …

I keep waiting for the real monsoons to show up in Mumbai. Do they have any thunder and lightening and huge downpours around here or does this anemic occassional rain showers pass for the monsoons? Thank goodness that I went to Lonavla last weekend with a bunch of guys from work. As we entered the Western Ghats, we passed through the mother of all rain storms. Waterfalls by the hundreds cascaded down the rocky cliffs at the edges of the Mumbai-Pune highway. When we reached Lonavla, the downpour had created …

Mumbai is a fascinating place. It is place where the rich and the poor live cheek to jowl, where the so-called first world, the second world and the third world co-exist in the same geographical space. In a manner, it is a microcosm which reflects the global economic condition.

Here is another bit from Anand’s comments.
The collective leadership that is fueling china’s growth today will have to go away in the future. Communism is not going to last long enough for china to become a developed nation. Once communism collapses and democracy begins to form in china, there will be a prolonged period of little or zero growth in the country’s economy.
That is when India will overtake china.

It is very likely wishful thinking combined with admirable patriotism that motivates Anand above. The engine of communism has been decoupled …

In Crouching Tiger, Lumbering Elephant, an essay which recently appeared in a collection, Pranab Bardhan of UC Berkeley (one of my advisors during my doctoral work there) compares India and China while leading up to the main thesis of the paper. He concludes that
By most criteria of standard economic measurements of levels of living and their growth, China has clearly won the race.
To support his conclusion, he notes
Over the last three decades official data suggest that the average annual rate of …