Used to be that might was determined by the size of your muscles and how many men you could command to do your bidding. Time was when you had to club someone over the head to get them to submit to you. Things have changed and with it has changed what determines might. The world has changed with each revolution. The agricultural revolution privileged foresight over just plain sight. The industrial revolution gave power to those who had knowledge of science and technology over those that didn’t. The post-industrial information …

I gather from Kanchan Gupta’s piece — “In Rome, Durga is not welcome” — the officials in Rome are jerking around Hindus who want to celebrate puja. But for the efforts of the Indian Ambassador, Mr Arif Shahid Khan, this year’s Durga puja celebrations in Rome would have been a disaster. A deep bow for Mr Khan in appreciation of his help to the Hindus in Rome.

Getting things ass backwards is not a crime. Most people act stupid from time to time but are not congenitally stupid. But when organizations, and people who are high up in such organizations, get things ass backwards and persistent in doing so for decades, the results are neither pretty nor trivial. A shining example of the consistent ass-backwardness amounting to criminal stupidity is being reported.

On Sept 10th, Alan Turing received an apology from the British government 55 years after his death. Following a petition to 10 Downing St signed by 30,000 people, Gordon Brown formally apologized to the man who was so persecuted for being a homosexual that he committed suicide.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

There are some topics that make me see red. In that state, I cannot even think rationally, leave alone write coherently. I am so angry that this is not going to read well for sure. But this has to be said. Those who are ultimately responsible for the violence against the Indian students in Australia should not be lynched. Lynching would be too good for them. I am not talking about the red-necks and skinheads (or whatever their Australian equivalents are) who attack foreign students. I am talking of the …

I don’t follow elections even though their outcomes dictate economic policies, which in turn determine the fate of economies. Given my interest in economic development, I should care about elections but I don’t. I also don’t follow the post-elections dissections of analysts mainly because I have better things to do but partly because I feel — incorrectly perhaps — it’s all a matter of opinion and conjecture. It feels like a lot of post-hoc rationalization.

A short century ago the US and Argentina were rivals. Both were riding the first wave of globalisation at the turn of the 20th century. Both were young, dynamic nations with fertile farmlands and confident exporters. Both brought the beef of the New World to the tables of their European colonial forebears. Before the Great Depression of the 1930s, Argentina was among the 10 richest economies in the world.
That’s from a fascinating article by Alan Beattie in the Financial Times of May 23rd titled “Argentina: The superpower that never was.” …

In a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal titled “India’ Greatest Failure,” Paul Beckett writes about T.S.R. Subramanian who retired as India’s most senior civil servant in 1998. Beckett quotes from TSR’s book, “GovernMint in India” — “Since no part of the Establishment has an interest in punishing corruption, trying for a more sweeping solution quickly leads into the realm of blind hope.”

Consider this scenario. Someone you know imprisons his grown up children and does not allow them to go out and do jobs that they are fully capable of doing. He also locks up his productive assets and prevents his children from using them. Then he goes around begging his neighbors for help with feeding his family as he does not have any income. The words that spring to mind upon considering this man’s behavior are words like contemptible, immoral, stupid, pathetic, pitiable, and sad.

Whoring is an ancient human tradition and some primatologists even say that it is not restricted to human animals alone. Cynics definitely believe that everyone has a price and can be bought to assume any desired position. I am a cynic and Diogenes of Sinope is a hero of mine.
The Acorn reports that Aamir Khan has decided to carry the Olympic torch on its journey through India. He is paid by the Coca Cola company to do so. Whoring for the Chinese government indirectly through the commercial interests of a …

That’s what a report in the Hindustan Times claims: US $13 billion each year. Figures such as these are unbelievable but I suppose someone must have done the numbers. In any case, I had estimated that number to be around $10 billion a few years ago.
Let’s pause for a moment and figure. $13 billion every year. Or in the last 10 years, about $100 billion. Imagine what you could buy for that money. How about 100 colleges with first class infrastructure with housing, classrooms, labs? Each year India could …

Despite such [Quranic] instructions, beating is considered a type of violence, according to human rights organizations, which urge women to complain to the police. I just wonder what kind of families our societies would have if Muslim women started doing this regarding their husbands.
Relationships between fathers and daughters or sisters and brothers also provoke argument from human rights organizations, which propose the suggested solutions for all relationships. Personally, I don’t think fathers or brothers would undertake such behavior unless there was a reason for it.
The above quote is from here. …

One of the more irritating aspects of the change of calendar years is the increase in meaningless messages that land in one’s inbox. I love the internet and the world wide web, but that love is severely strained when I have to wade through gratuitous messages wishing “All” a happy new year. It’s a palpable sign of the Age of the Content-free Communications.

I was merely following a link that landed in my mailbox and ended up at someone’s Orkut page, someone called Preeti. She wrote a testimonial for someone thus:
ABHAY…..wat cn i spk bout diz person nw….hez a lil sensitive but very adventerous guy…hez got gr8 potential in him and alwayzz aimzz 4 d best(datz y he got me as a frnd )……hizz my super snr bt nevva made me feel so… …hiz soo gud n down 2 earth…n btw u al kn wat i call him wid many nick name lemme …

My distaste for poverty is only exceeded by my utter contempt for those who nurture that awful monster of poverty that chews up living human beings and spits them out like so much garbage. True evil to me is that impulse that disregards human suffering, and more often than not, that evil force emanates from ideology and dogma. Communism is one such evil; the other horror is organized religious dogma mostly represented by the monotheistic religions. The richer the organized religion, the more powerful it is, and has the …

“If you take all the pieces of Bollywood out of our lives – the celebrities on the billboards, the songs in the nightclubs, the stars on Page 3 – Indians would find their lives to be completely empty,” said Shuchi Pandya, a jewelry merchandiser in Mumbai. “It’s subconscious. Even if you don’t enjoy Bollywood movies, it becomes a part of your life.”
[The concluding lines from an Iinternational Herald Tribune article "Can Hollywood make a Bollywood movie?"]
I don’t have a very high opinion of the Indian masses (and that goes …

At first it was a good idea. About seven years ago, I had been persuaded to join Ryze, a professional networking site. All fine and dandy. Then like poison weeds these networking sites started blooming. Now there’s Linkedin and Facebook. The evil spreads. I am getting a tad tired of dealing with the invitations to confirm so-and-so as my friend. So I have decided to pull the plug on these networking sites and delete my membership.

This is obscene. The way we get our priorities mixed up is seriously obscene and disturbing. A bunch of people — clueless retards, more descriptively — get offended by some Hollywood actor kissing some silly young woman on the cheek in public and publicly protest what they call an attack on their cultural ethos. Worse yet, a case if filed in some court and the judge orders the woman to appear in court and orders that the actor be arrested if he sets foot in India.

The business plan was about creating a business which would help the blind become more productive. But the presenter took elaborate pains to avoid the word “blind”and instead constantly referred to the “visually challenged.” I suppose the PC police would have immediately handcuffed and hauled off anyone who was so insensitive as to directly point to blindness and call it such. No, a person is not blind but visually challenged. And I wondered how long before the PC police decree that “visually challenged” is itself un-PC and now you have …