“A demoralized, timid, and hopeless mass bullied and crushed by every dominant interest and incapable of resistance.” Who said this about whom and when?

In an opinion piece in the Financial Times of April 15th (hat tip: Sudipta), Razeen Sally writes that “the Congress deserves to lose the elections”. Right up front, Sally wrote about “the do-nothing, zero-reform record of Manmohan Singh, prime minister, and his government.”
I have an excerpt from the piece below the fold. I agree with the particulars that Sally (who is director of the European Centre for International Political Economy) mentions supporting the argument that Manmohan Singh is a singular disaster but I cannot agree with the title …

The topic of the Taliban gaining control of Pakistan is hot this summer. Newspaper editors are busy with lots of serious hand-wringing and mopping of sweaty foreheads. An editorial writer at the New York Times is obviously worried to distraction, it appears from the opinion piece of 27th April, “60 Miles from Islamabad.”

Perhaps most humans are congenitally belligerent and can be reasonably expected to get into fights. But it takes institutionalized big businesses to create a war machine that raises ordinary human belligerence to levels of superhuman insanity. The war machine — and one can argue that indeed there is only one such thing but with a global reach, even though its components are multinational in the sense that people from various nations participate in their creation and maintenance — is so pervasive that it seems to be as natural, unchangeable, and …

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva’s recent accusation that the financial crisis was caused by “white people with blue eyes” at a joint press conference with UK Prime Minister Brown is illuminating if not entirely accurate. [1] Everyone involved in the financial crisis certainly does not have blue eyes, although they may all be uniformly white. Da Silva claimed that he had never met a black banker.

I am privileged to be on Keith Hudson’s mailing list. He is an English polymath, a Renaissance Man in the strictest sense of the term. With his permission I am quoting from one of his musings on the present financial crisis. He quickly hones in on the systemic trouble at the base of the problem: that those who are in charge are incapable of comprehending the system, and the lag between the institutions of yesterday and today’s technical and scientifically advanced world.
Here, for the record, is an excerpt from …

The Acorn says that now is the time to drop trade barriers with Pakistan.
Pakistan’s economy is in a tailspin. Since the second last thing that the international community wants in Pakistan is an economic meltdown, Friends of Pakistan are coming together to provide emergency foreign aid.
The “Friends of Pakistan are “Britain, France, Germany, the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Turkey, Australia and Italy plus the United Nations and the European Union.” Among these are nations — US, China, the Arab states, France, Britain — that give …

The op-ed “India can’t afford to fall victim to psywar” in the New Indian Express of Sept 19th did not make much sense to me. I find the entire piece confusing. Perhaps I am simple-minded and cannot navigate through contradictions, or perhaps because it is an “op-ed by committee,” signed by 20 prominent people.
It begins:
SOME stray voices in the media have been questioning, with surprising nonchalance and lack of depth, the wisdom and expediency of retaining Kashmir as a part of India. This matters not because such voices reflect …

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From a Canadian publication ‘The Province’ (Tuesday, May 1, 1990), author: Crawford Kilian.

“It’s the oil, stupid.”
In an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal of 10th June, Edward J. Markey asks rhetorically “Why Is Bush Helping Saudi Arabia Build Nukes?” He points out that if at all the Saudis need more energy — even after sitting atop the world’s largest oil reserves — then the US should be helping them out by selling them solar technology. Solar technology makes sense in a country three times the size of Texas, and where the desert sands see around 300 days of sunshine every year. …

The NY Times of 30th May reports (“Power and Tenacity Collide in Singapore Courtroom” — Thanks, Naman) on the clash between two personalities — one powerful and famous, the other powerless — in a Singapore courtroom. Former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, 84, met his political adversary Chee Soon Juan, 45, in court where the former is suing the latter for libel. In a newsletter published in 2006, Mr Chee had accused the Singapore government of corruption. Mr Lee takes charges of corruption seriously and refused to let Mr Chee’s …

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“.

A fatwa is a religious decree made by a mullah. A “patwa” is like a fatwa but made by Patil. A patwa, like a fatwa, is not based on reason or logic. But it is not just a matter of whim, a fancy, a just-like-that sort of thing. It is calculated to serve Patil’s and her masters’ interest.

Arvind Lavakare in an article titled The Myth of Mahatma Gandhi notes that the Gandhi icon had been losing its sheen for years until the present government began giving it a nice new varnish. Maybe it is an attempt to “to fuse the original Gandhi image with the Italian one” he hints. I am convinced of that, however. Reading the comments on that article is instructive. Many of them are the equivalent of sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears and loudly repeating “I am not listening. nana nana nana.” If …

The following is a review of Francois Gautier’s Rewriting Indian History. (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing 1996). The reviewer is C J S Wallia who writes:
From my own perspective as a secular humanist, I believe that any whitewashing of historical record is counterproductive. No matter how lofty the ideals of a current cause, any whitewash of history tempts the fates. To forget history will always be fateful; to forgive its horrendous facts can be redemptive. Forgive — but never forget — history.
I, like the millions of others of my generation, …

Here we go again. In March of 2001, the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. These statues had stood there since the early 6th century. Symbols of universal compassion, these were in the eyes of Islam, something that had to be destroyed.

Full marks for perseverance, though. “When Mahmud of Ghazni conquered Afghanistan and part of west India in the 12th century, the Buddhas and frescoes were spared from destruction though Buddhist monasteries and other artifacts were looted or destroyed. Aurangzeb, the last Mughal emperor distinguished for his religious …

Law of Supply and Demand
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the law of supply and demand is a bitch. Stripped of all details it basically states that the price of something is determined by the interaction of the quantities supplied and demanded. Therefore (1) an increase of the quantity demanded, holding the supply constant, will increase the price; (2) an increase in the quantity supplied, holding the demand constant, will decrease the price; (3) a decrease in the quantity demanded, holding the supply constant, will decrease …

Does anyone, other than the recipients and the Nobel Prize committee, take the Peace Prize seriously any more?

When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are pockets. Thus goes a well-worn Zen Buddhist saying. Our perceptions of the external world are filtered through our internal desires and motivations. This process is not linear; a powerful feedback mechanism is involved. How we apprehend the world out there depends on what our internal model of the external world is; and our internal model gets modified with fresh inputs from our filtered apprehension of the world. Regardless of which came first – whether we start off with an internal …