Atanu Dey on India’s Development

I don’t think that I have ever had a more hassle-free flight ever than the one that I had last night. I left home around 9:45 after dinner. It was drizzling a bit. (Thanks, Raj, for the ride.) At 10:15 I was at the Spicejet counter and got a printout of the e-ticket. Was the flight on time, I asked. “It is before time,” I was told. By 10:25, I had a boarding pass and had gone through security. At 10:30, I was on board the flight. I have never ever gone from the kerb to my seat on a plane in 15 minutes.
[Read more →]

The events of the last few days which ended with the UPA government winning a vote of confidence yesterday in the Indian parliament demonstrate something quite dramatically. Rajinder Puri’s editorial in today’s Free Press Journal goes a little bit into the matter but in far enough, in my opinion.
[Read more →]

This is a wordle cloud of the post “National Corruption Guarantee Scheme–Revisited.”

The bad news is that it is easy enough to get a free blog (wordpress, blogger, blogspot, etc) and it is easy enough to cut and paste stuff to the blog. The good news is that if inexpertly done, plagiarism is easily noticed.

Here’s a case in point. This post on DKSHAMLI’S BLOG (July 5th, 2008) is an exact copy of my post titled “Unfair and Unlovely” (April 20th, 2007). This is done without the slightest nod to the original. Nowhere on the dkshamli blog is there any indication that it was not written by dkshamli.

Not very nice. A real shame.

Update: (6 PM IST 22nd July) I had reported the matter to Wordpress.com. I got an email from tosreports@wordpress.com saying, “The blog has been deactivated, and the user will be forced to get in touch with us and remove the post.“

One has to defer to experts when it comes to matters that one does not know much about. I don’t know what the deal is with the nuclear agreement with the US is and over which the UPA government is possibly going to fail tomorrow.

In the mail today was a piece by a retired chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. It is reasonable to suppose that he knows what he is talking about. So here’s what he calls “Ten misconceptions about the nuclear deal” by P. K. Iyengar below the fold.
[Read more →]

Anyone familiar with the disastrous state of India should not be overly surprised to learn that the Indian parliament has an overwhelmingly greater percentage of criminals than the general population. How effectively a nation functions and how successful it is depends on its leaders who make public policy and thus critically determine the outcome. India’s failure to develop and achieve its potential is proof positive that its leadership is lacking.

Underdevelopment, poverty, and all other ills that plague India are an unavoidable consequence of poor public policies and choices.
[Read more →]

Is this the much tom-tommed Indian democracy? The convicted 6 who may decide UPA’s fate:

Among those who hold the key to the survival or fall of the government on July 22 are six jailed MPs, some convicted on serious charges like murder, others accused of heinous crimes. Check out the men who both sides are seeking to woo to win that day.

1. Pappu Yadav alias Rajesh Ranjan

   RJD, Purnea, Bihar

   SENTENCED in Feb 2008 for life for murder of former CPM MLA Ajit Sarkar in 1998.

2. Suraj Bhan

   LJSP, Balia, Bihar

   SENTENCED To life last month for murder of a farmer in 1992.

3. Ateeq Ahmad

   Phulphur, Uttar Pradesh

   Charged in: 21 criminal cases, including some involving murder. One such was the murder of Bhartiya Samajwadi Party MLA Raju Pal in 2005.

4. Afzal Ansari

   Samajwadi Party, Ghazipur, UP

   Brother of Uttar Pradesh don Mukhtar Ansari. In jail facing charges in murder of Bhartiya Samajwadi Party MLA Krishanand Rai in 2005.

5. Umakant Yadav

   BSP, Machhlishahr, Uttar Pradesh

   Jailed for allegedly razing shops and houses while trying to forcibly occupy land in Azamgarh in Uttar Pradesh in 2007.

6. Mohd Shahabuddin

   RJD, Siwan, Bihar

   Convicted in: 3 cases between March and August 2007: life term for kidnapping leading to murder of a trader in 1999, 10 yrs for attack on Siwan SP in 1996 and 2 yrs for attack on CPI(ML) office in 1998.

I think it is a cargo cult democracy. I have long maintained that the Indian government is the real enemy of the people of India. This is not at all remarkable considering that it comprises mostly of criminals and other low life.

The world is going to hell in a handbasket. That’s what you’d think if you consider all the bad news coming at you from all quarters — inflation, the rising price of food and fuel, the commies taking their ball and going home (you wish), the possibility of a disappointing monsoons, sundry acts of terrorism, and so on. Comic relief is what one sorely needs to lighten the doom and gloom.

So here’s some news of the weird that fits the bill. It comes from the University of Central Florida. (You have to take what you get — even if that is half-way around the world in some godforsaken state.)

‘Body Of Christ’ Snatched From Church, Held Hostage By UCF Student, reads the headlines.
[Read more →]

I have a piece in today’s livemint.com on India’s Energy Challenge. The money quote is this:

The advanced industrialized economies were lucky to have had their development fuelled by cheap fossil energy. Today’s developing economies have a much tougher challenge. It was a very short window of opportunity which opened just about 150 years ago and is likely to close in the next 40 years, by when the known reserves will be depleted at current levels of consumption.

All told, 200 years is a very brief interlude considering thousands of years of human civilization and hopefully hundreds of thousands of years yet to come. At some time in the distant future, they will look back and remark that the age of fossil fuel was a short inflection point, a point at which humanity passed through the bottleneck of dependency on oil from the ground. Before that point, humanity’s primary source of energy was the sun, and so it will be after that point.

The full article is below the fold. [Read more →]

India is a country that’s renowned for its diversity – the country is a potpourri of different languages, religions, castes and cultures. While this variety makes the nation more interesting and intriguing, it’s kicking up a storm in the sphere of education. The country’s government-aided institutions all allow a certain quota of seats to be reserved for educationally and socially backward classes and for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
[Read more →]

I have been busy in meetings in Delhi and could not find time to blog. Waiting at the New Delhi airport for an Indian flight to Chennai, which is delayed an hour. Will keep in touch later.

Ok, this is a personal post of the type what I had for breakfast yesterday. So if you aren’t interested in my personal life, consider yourself warned and don’t read any further.
[Read more →]

Pragati July issue is available.

The National Rural Corruption Guarantee Scheme (NRCGS) was the title of a post from Nov 2007, one of a series of posts dealing with the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, starting with one in Nov 2004 on “Sir, won’t you buy this bridge and the Employment Guarantee Act?”
[Read more →]

Today I make my way to Delhi for some days. And then on to Chennai. So I will be reporting from the capital of this great country. I have not been in Delhi for many many moons and I am looking forward to a very exciting visit.

Old soldiers never die,
Never die, never die,
Old soldiers never die
They just fade away.

Field Marshal Sam Hormusji Framji “Sam Bahadur” Jamshedji Manekshaw MC (April 3, 1914 – June 27, 2008)

Here’s a warm farewell to Sam Manekshaw from a little boy. And from a soldier to Sam Bahadur.

Having grown up in the age of the USENET, I am intimately familiar with Godwin’s Law. “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” The corollary to which has always been that whoever equates his opponent in a debate to Hitler or the Nazi, he has admitted that he has lost the argument. The thread or discussion has to be considered closed.
[Read more →]

The title of this post is from Oliver Goldsmith’s poem, The Deserted Village (1770). It appears here:

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed can never be supplied.

[Read more →]

Time to do the numbers. This blog has been publishing since September 2003, just a few months short of five years. During that time, it has accumulated over 1,100 posts, and people have commented over 7,000 times. Around 1.1 million pages have been viewed in the last three years, going by the numbers Sitemeter reports since September 2005.

Thanks you all for visiting. I hope it has not been a total waste of your time, and I trust that you have found something of interest here. Of course it has been fun for me. For otherwise I would not have persisted in writing. I have made some good friends through this blog whom I would not have known otherwise. I have made a few enemies as well but it is well worth the friends.
[Read more →]

Here’s an idea. You are going to take a flight sometime in the afternoon. You SMS a particular well-known number. It reads, “Start flight S26641″. Immediately you get a response, “Welcome to updates on Jet Lite flight from Pune to Hyderabad. Estimated 20 minutes delay. ETD 1540 hours.”

Later, around 1 PM, you get another SMS “Jet Lite Pune to Hyderabad delayed 1 hr 20 minutes. ETD 1640.” You plan accordingly. Finally, just when you were about to leave home, another SMS arrives: “Jet Lite Pune to Hyderabad delayed 1 hr 40 minutes. ETD 1700 hours.”

You get to the airport around 1600 hours. You get an SMS at 16:30 saying “Jet Lite Pune to Hyderabad broading.” You proceed to the security and off you go. Once you pass through the boarding gate, the final SMS says, “Have a nice flight. End of transmissions.”
[Read more →]