Month: April 2007

Innumerate Reporting

ExpressIndia.com carries a Press Trust of India report titled “Rise in Number of Indian Students in US.” (Hat tip: Ashish Asgekar.) It is a brief report. Here it is in its entirety. Continue reading “Innumerate Reporting”

The Living Past

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

—William Faulkner

Unfair and Unlovely

An accident is not a crime, and a crime is not an accident. That distinction kept playing in my mind as I thought of the incident in which a drunken driver, Alistair Pereira, killed seven and injured eight pavement dwellers in Mumbai one night last November. The case against him was ruled to be one of rash driving and not one of culpable homicide by a court. Pereira was handed down a six-month prison sentence and a fine of Rs 5 lakhs (approximately US$ 11,000.)
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OLPC and Markets

Alex Singleton, President of the Globalisation Institute, a European think tank, argues against the OLPC and says that computers should be left to the market economy. “The very worst idea in international development circles is the One Laptop Per Child scheme being fronted by academic Nicholas Negroponte. ”
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India Needs Cities

Well, well, what do you know! Just as I had finished a series on why India needs to have cities for its economic growth and therefore development (see the last post in the series, Make No Little Plans), my friend Alok pointed me to a Scientific American report dated 17th April by Nikhil Swaminathan titled “If You Can Make it There… Cities Are the Greatest Generators of Innovation and Wealth.” He writes of a study that “finds increased social interaction of urban life fuels leads to a more productive populace.”

I take the risk of quoting that report in full just in case one of these days it goes behind a subscription wall.
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Where have all the leaders gone?

Lee Iacocca asks that question in his book.

His concern — correctly, in my opinion — is with the lack of leadership in the US. But with some substitutions in the names and a few other changes, he could as well been talking about India. At least, the US is fortunate enough that it has an 82-year old ex-CEO to tell it like it is. Where are they in India?
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Rambling on about Seatbelts

To get back to Pune from Mumbai on Saturday, since I had some luggage, I took a cab instead taking a bus or a train as I usually do. Later, on the expressway, I regretted not taking the bus as I feel safer in a bus on Indian roads. As the car entered the highway, I reached for the seatbelt. Yes, the seatbelt was there but the end into which to plug it in was nowhere to be found. It was trade-off time: should I continue to sit the backseat without wearing a seatbelt or move up to the front seat and be belted in. I continued to sit in the back and hoped for the best. The driver, however, promptly took off his seatbelt. I asked him why. He said that they ticket people only in Mumbai for not wearing seatbelts, not on the expressway.
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Life is Cheap

Very cheap in India. Alistair Pareira, a 21 year old, in a fit of drunken driving, ran over a bunch of sleeping people a few months ago in Mumbai. He successfully killed seven (including one pregnant woman and two children) and injured eight others.

Those who died were poor. The judgement was that it was a case of rash driving. The judge Ajit Mishra ruled that the drunken driver was not guilty of culpable homicide but was just guilty of rash driving.

The driver is a rich kid. It is amazing how badly the police mess up an investigation when rich people are invovled in a crime.
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Make No Little Plans

Think Big

There is something in the nature of the world that it is sometimes paradoxically more difficult to make small changes than to make big ones. Logically consistent big changes are more likely to succeed because of the interconnectedness of the world.
Continue reading “Make No Little Plans”