Month: June 2007

A Fatwa on both your Houses

A report in the Middle East section of the NY Times contains the sort of stuff that you cannot make up. It is about fatwas.

A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life

CAIRO, June 11 — First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed a blessing.

For the past few weeks, the breast-feeding and urine fatwas have proved a source of national embarrassment in Egypt, not least because they were issued by representatives of the highest religious authorities in the land.

Ah the joys of monotheism!

Who’s India’s Wu?

I came across the name Gordon Wu in an item in a recent Knowledge@Wharton mailing. It was titled “Gordon Wu Sees Huge Opportunities in China’s Rapid Urbanization.” Wu, a Hong Kong native, graduated from Princeton in 1958, and in 1969 founded Hopewell Holdings, a civil engineering firm. “Wu’s Hopewell Holdings — where he serves as chairman of the board – has been a pioneer for nearly three decades in building highways, power plants and bridges in China and Hong Kong. In addition to Hopewell Holdings, Wu heads Hopewell Highway Infrastructure and other companies of the Hopewell Group, whose operations span property development, leasing and hospitality. Queen Elizabeth knighted Wu in 1997 for his contributions to Asian infrastructure – and in effect for building one of the continent’s largest civil construction firms.”
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Fake PM’s Speech – Part Punch

Of Economic Freedom and Bondage

This is the concluding part of my re-write of PM Dr Manmohan Singh’s speech to the CII. (Previous part on Social Contracts here.) The PM in his speech had quoted from Tagore’s Gitanjali. I suppose the irony of quoting Tagore in the context of the government’s sustained effort to divide the country along caste and religious lines is lost on him. Severe cognitive dissonance perhaps. I have critically examined the PM’s speech for what it was, an attempt to browbeat the Indian industrialists into further crippling the Indian economy. It is all very sad.
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Fake PM’s Speech – Part Chor

Social Contracts

I have a strong aversion to sanctimonious hypocritical idiotic talk (just to spell it out) but it happens, as they say. Perhaps it doesn’t just happen, it is demanded. A sort of reverse Says’ law, “demand creating supply.” If not actually demanding it, sufficient people are not disgusted by it that the supply is maintained. Lack of aversion, or at least a publicly stated aversion to the peddling of it.

With that, here is part four of my re-write of PM Dr Manmohan Singh’s speech to the Confederation of Indian Industries.
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Fake PM’s Speech – Part Teen

Fair and Just Profit

Why has profit become such a profane word in India? I believe that it is due to a failure to fully comprehend the nature of what humans do when they engage in economically productive activities and what results from that action. If you believe that the world is static in the sense that there is only a limited amount of stuff to go around irrespective of what one does, then naturally you would believe that it is a zero-sum game, a game in which Ramesh gains only at the expense of Suresh. But perhaps the world is dynamic and when economic activity takes place, the available amount of stuff goes up and Ramesh’s profit is not necessarily Suresh’s loss. True, the question remains about the distribution of the total gain from the activity: perhaps Ramesh gains disproportionately more than Suresh. But even in that case, it can be argued that it is better for society to allow that activity than to prohibit it merely because of the unequal division of the gain.

Anyway, on with our continuing series (earlier bit here) on what the PM should have said at the CII address.
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Fake PM’s Speech — Part Duh

Governance

Yesterday I posted the first part of the fake speech that I wish the real PM of India had delivered. The message in the first bit was simply that there are things that the government is supposed to do and there are things that individuals and the private sector is supposed to do. There is a natural division of labor arising from comparative advantages of the competing parties. The government has a comparative advantage in governance, not in producing stuff. The government must stick to governance. Here’s why.
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Fake PM’s Speech – Part Yuck

Division of Labor

The “fake”qualifies the “speech” and not the PM, I hasten to add lest there be any misunderstanding. You must have come across the much celebrated speech that appointed Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh gave the other day at a CII conference. I read it with rising disappointment and dismay. Smeared with high-sounding socialistic rhetoric, the message was clear: take care of the mess or else dire consequences will follow. Never mind that the mess was not the creation of the Indian industries, that it is not their responsibility, and most importantly that they are not equipped to clean up the mess.

It appeared that the PM’s speech writers are ill-educated socialists. You can’t get good speech writers for the money the government is willing to pay, I suppose. (Even the PM is paid Rs 30K a month.) Now if they had hired me to write the PM’s speeches, that would be a different matter. But then, I suppose they can’t afford me. So as a public service, I present in five easy-to-read parts the speech as I would have written it. This is the fake speech.
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Charlie Munger’s Address: Deserved Trust

Charlie Munger delivered the 2007 Law School Commencement address at the University of Southern California on May 13th. Munger is a guru in the original sense of the Sanskrit word, a person who conveys wisdom. He begins the talk with “Safest way to get what you want is to deserve what you want.” The transcript of the talk is worth reading very very slowly. Take this line near the end, “The highest form a civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust.”

There are too many lines that need highlighting. So I will just post the entire transcript below.
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Richard Dawkins’ Diary

Anyone who knows me soon realizes that I have few heroes, and I consider most entities of the human persuasion to be at least mildly stupid, if not outright moronic. Prof Richard Dawkins makes the very short list of my heroes. I am proud to say that I have even met him briefly when he visited UC Berkeley to deliver a fairly famous lecture (I forget which lecture considering that Berkeley has a truck-load of famous lectures) a few years ago. He signed my copy of the book by him, River out of Eden.

Of course I admire his intellect and his passion for rationality. What really amazes me is his indefatigable perseverance. Just listening to him repeatedly explain and defend his position in innumerable interviews on TV and radio, answering the same old questions that he has written eloquently and at length about in his many books, is itself tiring. I wonder how he can calmly and so politely deal with the steady barrage of nonsense that he faces relentlessly. That is what I admire the most about him — the Zen warrior who is not moved to distraction in his fight for sanity in a world that is given over to insanity. I bow deep in reverence to the Master.

Dawkins was recently at Time’s gala event celebrating ‘100 Most Influential People of the Year’. He wonders why he was chosen but most people who have read him would not hesitate to include him in the 100 most influential people alive in the world today.
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Dr Frankenstein, I presume

The makers of monsters and their fates are inextricably tied, both in fiction and in real life. Dr Frankenstein’s monster. Dr Faustus. Mrs Gandhi, the elder and Sant Bhindranwale. The CIA and Osama bin Laden. The CIA and the Taleban. Add your own favorite examples.

Dr MM Singh. VP Singh. The monsters created for gaining political power by legislating divisions of the country along caste and religious lines are beginning to have a life of their own.

Soon to be released, the sequel to the hit drama, “August 1947: The First Cut.” New updated imported Gandhi. Bigger bombs. In production, “August 2017: The Final Cut.” Totally new cast, with hundreds of specially recognized castes. Supporting mega roles by ISI in Bangladesh and Pakistan. Islamic terrorists and RDX will blow you away. You can’t miss it. You won’t be able to.