The July/August issue of The Atlantic magazine has a review of Lelyveld’s book by Christopher Hitchens — “The Real Mahatma Gandhi.” An absolute gem of a piece, it has to be read. Excerpts below the fold. Also, I have blogged about the book and the banning of the book on this blog.

I am teaching during this Summer term at UC Berkeley starting Monday 20th June. Summer courses are hard, both for the teacher and the students since a regular course of 17 weeks is squeezed into 8 weeks. I was foolish enough to agree to teach not one but two courses. That’s a stupid thing to do but in my case it’s par for the course. Still, teaching is always fun and instructive.

People deserve the government they get. That’s generally true, but in the particular case where the government is democratically elected, as H L Mencken observed, “the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” But why just restrict just deserts to governments alone — the easy extension is the press. People deserve the press they get, and exhibit number 1 is the Indian press. The press and the government go hand in hand. That’s true regardless of whether it is a democracy or a …

The Chicago jury’s verdict on Tahawwur Rana, accomplice of the Islamic terrorist David Headley, is provoking comment from the Indian establishment. The charge is that the US should have punished Rana for his role in the Pakistani terrorist attack of Nov 2008 on Mumbai. This is more than a little puzzling. The Indian establishment has not punished the one and only of the surviving Islamic terrorists, Ajmal Kasab. If the Indians don’t have the balls to hang Kasab, whose guilt and involvement in the actual crime is beyond doubt, I …

I am pleased to note that my book, “Transforming India” is available. You will have to be the judge of the content. But I hope you will not judge the book by its cover or the quality of the print run. Due to a major snafu, the book comes up short in the quality of the production department. It is a costly mistake and I am partly responsible for not paying attention to that part of the job. Mea culpa. For now, I hope you do grab a copy and …

This is a follow up to an Oct 2010 post, “The US and its Deadly Faustian Bargain” which needs revisiting because of new information. I urge you to read that post to get a sense of the insanity that is going around. What the new information does is just add more evidence to confirm my hypothesis that the US is the auctioneer in the dollar auction formulation of the conflict between India and Pakistan.

Baba Ramdev is a popular Hindu leader. He is widely respected and celebrated for his teachings on yoga shastra. He is a tireless teacher to millions of people. He has rendered incomparable service to his followers in India, and — with the power of the internet — around the world. No one can take away the significance of his achievements in bringing understanding and empowerment to his followers in their private and social lives. No one except Baba Ramdev himself, that is. I think that the greatest enemy that …

Presenting a short playlist of randomly selected songs for your weekend listening. Do let me know if you like it. Since a few people have written to me asking me what I thought of Baba Ramdev’s fast, I will write about it in my next post sometime tomorrow. Have a good weekend. Bye.

The subtitle of Siddhartha Deb’s article, Feast and Famine, in the Boston Review reads, “India Is Growing, But Indians Are Still Starving.” The subtitle is too short. It should have added,”If India had not been growing, a couple of hundred million additional Indians would be starving.” I make this point because the article gives the impression that somehow India’s growth has something to do with the 800 million Indians who have to survive on less than Rs 20 a day.

Winston Churchill’s pithy observation that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter” is unfortunately too accurate to be dismissed lightly. We are often acutely reminded of that by the results of elections, in developed as well as in developing countries. It is a marvel that the myth of the enlightened voter persists against all evidence to the contrary.

As you probably know, 21st of May is the rapture. Nothing to do with rap music or anything like that. Just that Jeebus will be gathering those who believe in him. Anywho, check out this thoughtful video on the upcoming rapture.

“The man who knows how will always have a job. The man who knows why will always be his boss.” Ralph Waldo Emerson was a clever man. Someone else wrote that if we know the why, we can always figure out the how. Perhaps it was I or perhaps it was someone smarter. Anyhow, this is an open thread. Say what you will. I am going to be back in a bit.

Gautam, aka Sakyamuni (the sage of the Sakyas), became a buddha around 2,500 years ago. Today, known as Buddha Purnima, the day of the full moon in May, is celebrated as his birthday. So here’s the Chinese singer Imee Ooi singing the Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra, aka The Heart Sutra. Listen.

Many of you know that I believe that the backbone of India’s transportation system has to be rail-based. I love trains and continue to marvel at how amazing railroads are. This post is about how amazing are the machines that lay, repair and replace railroad tracks in advanced industrialized countries (and I suppose nowadays in China.)

I think the reports of India’s independence from colonial rule are severely exaggerated. Indians have been under foreign rule for several centuries and have become accustomed to being treated like irresponsible slaves, demanding to be controlled. Sure they do “democratically” determine who will rule them, but in the end, they are still slaves entrusted with the task of electing their masters. And the masters decide what the slaves will hear, read, and write. Let me explain why I hold the slaves with special contempt — because they acquiesce so willingly …

The importance of rules cannot be overestimated. Human societies differ not so much in the physical characteristics of people or their mental capabilities as they do in the rule-sets that define and distinguish them. If we have to understand why some societies prosper and others don’t, we could do worse than to examine their rules. Culture is another term for the collection of rules, and it more than any other factor determines how successful a society is.

The pricing of a book is an interesting economics problem. For economic efficiency, the price should be equal to the marginal cost. But as often happens, marginal costs are sometimes far below average costs (due to fixed costs.) So P=MC leaves a deficit in the recovery of full costs. Therefore P>MC has to be it. For ebooks, the MC=~0. But if you shift some of the deficit by pricing ebooks > 0, you reduce the deficit. I have been thinking about book pricing because we have to attach a price …

Of course pretty much everyone knows that democracy, universal franchise, “first past the post” elections, etc, is the best way — if not the only way — to organize our political system. In a country overflowing with religions, that should be considered another religion. And as with other religions, since they have been brought up thinking in a particular way, people accept its articles of faith without question, and anyone doubting its tenets is met with hostility. At the risk of being branded a foreign agent and an enemy of …

This is a request for help. My modest little book “Transforming India” will be ready for distribution in about two weeks. If you or anyone you know is willing to carry a bunch of them as accompanied baggage from India (anywhere) to the SF Bay area, you will have my eternal gratitude(*). Specifically I am looking for people traveling in the 25th May to 10th June time frame. I will pay for any additional costs charged by the airlines. Thank you. (* eternal gratitude limited to three days or …

“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority,” wrote Marcus Aurelius, “but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” And I would add that sometimes by standing aside from the ranks of the insane one runs the risk of being the object of unwelcome attention from the insane. But one does not have much of a choice in the matter: you are either sane or you are not. (Sanity, I should hasten to add, is a subjective matter and opinions would …