Readers of this blog know for a while that good ol’ Tommy is one of my favorites. So when I stumbled upon a list of “50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2005” and found him listed at number 7 squeezed between number 6 (Michael Jackson) and number 8 (Judith Miller), I was thrilled. He’s in good company — Pat Robertson, Dick Cheney, and George W Bush come in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, respectively in the list.
Continue reading “Tom Friedman on the List”
Month: December 2007
IT Industry to Blame
C N R Rao is a “real Bangalorean” and laments that Bangalore has become an awful city in a recent opinion piece in Outlook titled ‘If IT Is Going To Take Away Our Values, Burn Bangalore, Burn IT‘ and the subtitled ‘IT squeezed Bangalore dry, hasn’t given anything in return. The signs are worrying.’
Before Bangalore became an IT city, it was a city full of not just science, he says. “There was more poetry and music here before the IT boom. The city we have created in recent years is rotten—highly polluted, garbage strewn everywhere, including the intellectual garbage dumped on this city by the IT industry.”
Continue reading “IT Industry to Blame”
Lee Kuan Yew on “India’s Peaceful Rise”
Lee Kuan Yew begins an article in Forbes.com with:
Even though the [Indian] economy’s annual growth rate has been 8% to 9% for the last five years, India’s peaceful rise hasn’t led to unease over the country’s future. Instead, Americans, Japanese and western Europeans are keen to invest in India, ride on its growth and help develop another heavyweight country.
Dvorak on the OLPC
John C Dvorak writes in PCMag “One Laptop Per Child Doesn’t Change the World.” (Hat tip: Shiv Senthilvel.)
He quotes some figures from the world hunger site:
In the Asian, African, and Latin American countries, well over 500 million people are living in what the World Bank has called “absolute poverty.” Every year, 15 million children die of hunger. For the price of one missile, a school full of hungry children could eat lunch every day for five years. Throughout the decade, more than 100 million children will die from illness and starvation. The World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world is well fed, one-third is underfed, and one-third is starving. Since you’ve entered this site, at least 200 people have died of starvation. One in 12 people worldwide is malnourished, including 160 million children under the age of 5. Nearly one in four people, or 1.3 billion—a majority of humanity—live on less than $1 per day, while the world’s 358 billionaires have assets exceeding the combined annual incomes of countries with 45 percent of the world’s people. Let’s include Negroponte and the Google billionaires.
Islam’s Silent Moderates
The nation of India and the ideology of Islam have a long history. India was subjugated by Islam for many centuries and it bears those wounds till date. Now the entire globe is feeling the pain that Islam inflicts on what it calls “Dar ul Harb” or the “Land of War” (as opposed to it’s own dominion the “Dar ul Islam”.) India is unfinished business for Islam — as many high-ranking officials of Islam do remind us from time to time. In the Islamic division of humanity into two distinct factions, India is the land of infidels that must be brought under the sword of Islam. And that attempt is bleeding India. That explains why I occasionally focus on Islamic terrorism and triumphalism on this blog which is primarily concerned with India’s economic growth and development.
I am opposed to violent ideologies. I make no distinction between religious or secular ideologies. If it is violent, I am opposed to it. It’s ideology I oppose, and not people. I have nothing against Germans, for instance, but I am against Nazism. But Nazism is dead and Germans today themselves oppose Nazism. That ideology has been defeated by rationality and humanity — backed by superior fire power. Communism is not as violent on the surface but it inflicts incalculable harm on human society. I am opposed to it. Communism is dead around the world except in India where it persists in its cancerous influence. Islam is a religious ideology, and from all evidence historical and contemporary, causing harm to humanity. The people who follow it to the letter cannot coexist with non-believers. The fundamentals of that ideology do not allow peaceful co-existence — only subjugation or war. As subjugation is not possible at present, it is war by Islam against the rest.
Yes, the majority of Muslims are not violently opposed to non-Muslims all the time and in all places. But that does not in any way indicate that Islam itself is willing to compromise with non-believers. Surely there are moderate Muslims — just as there were Germans who did not fully subscribe to the Nazi supremacist dogma. But their mere existence did not moderate the horrors that Nazism inflicted on “undesirables”. The question was where were they? Why didn’t they prevail? Or at least, why didn’t they get heard? The question today is where are the moderate Muslims? Why don’t we hear from them as vociferously as the true believers of Islam? Ayaan Hirsi Ali opines about that in NY Times op-ed recently. I reproduce it fully here.
Continue reading “Islam’s Silent Moderates”
Solar Power Investment — Followup
In the earlier post on Public Investment for Solar Power I had advocated that the government of India should spend a huge deal of money in research and development of the technology for using solar power.
This is a brief response to a couple of comments to that post. First, let’s recognize that the current state of the art does not allow the harnessing of solar energy on a scale that will make conventional fuels obsolete or even make a significant dent in their demand. That is precisely why more research and development is required. If doing the R&D were cheap and easy, we would not be having this discussion because it would have been done by some enterprising corporation already. The reason I put the figure around US$100 billion is because it is going to be a hard problem — you have to solve all sorts of related issues, from storage technology to fabrication of photo-voltaic devices to the mass manufacture of associated equipment.
Second, public investment does not mean that a bunch of government entities will be doing the R&D. Funding is public but the actual work can be entirely in the private sector. The hard problem is to create the mechanism which would allocate the funds to the most productive teams. One way would be to create an independent authority or an institution along the lines of the National Science Foundation or NASA of the US.
Technology does not spontaneously arise out of thin air. Someone somewhere at some time has to have the will to make the effort to develop it. So far for all practical purposes all the modern technologies are developed in the West, particularly in the US. It is time for us to pause and wonder why it never happens in India. Are Indians incapable of developing technology? Surely they are not dumber than any other large aggregate of people. Are they lacking resources? Not really, because India is a large country, even though it is poor in per capita income and wealth. So what is the missing ingredient? I think it is a lack of vision, a lack of national pride. Sometimes in a dark mood I think that Indians are a nation of followers, not leaders.
Malaysia Revisited
The details are fuzzy as I had read this story long time ago but the lesson is clearly imprinted on my mind. Once upon a time, in land far away, some company — let’s call it ACME Corporation — put up a huge billboard advertising their ketchup. The billboard was an eyesore and the local people complained to the authorities to have the company take it down. Fact was that ACME was not breaking any city ordinances and so they refused to remove the billboard. One enterprising woman in the community had an idea on how to deal with ACME. She started a campaign telling others not to buy ACME ketchup and explained why. ACME’s ketchup sales plunged and it got the message. The billboard was history.
Consumer boycott is a very powerful weapon. It can be wielded with devastation force. Refusing to do trade with another sends a powerful message.
[Previous post: Malaysian Repression.]
When I first heard of the institutionalized discrimination of the Malaysian government against their citizens of Indian origin, my first impulse was to make a mental note that I will not fly Malaysian Airlines. If all Indians who sympathize with the discriminated group in Malaysia refuse to buy Malaysian — whether airline tickets, holidays, or furniture imported from Malaysia — it would send a clear signal of disapproval of the people of India. The Indian government has to do nothing. And besides, India has no standing when it comes to Malaysia’s internal affairs. The Indian government cannot and should not do anything, but Indians can and must do something.
The fact is that it is an integrated world — and no nation is an island. We are linked to each other through common humanity for millions of years but now we are also linked through trade and travel. We are all dependent on each other, and if someone tends to forget common humanity, we can use the trade link to remind them of our shared existence and destiny.
The Web 2.0 Bubble Song
This just cracked me up. (Hat tip: Anup Nair).
It is a brilliantly composed song and the video is packed full of very clever references. Here are a few lines that matter here:
blog blog blog it all
blog it if it’s big or small
blog at the cineplex
blog while you’re having sex
blog in the locker room
babies blogging in the womb
blog even if you’re wrong
won’t you blog about this song . . .
19.20.21
19 cities of the world with
20 million people in the
21st century
See 19.20.21 for a quick overview of the defining megatrend of the 21st century: the rise of supercities.
In the year 1800, less than 3% of the world lived in cities. Most people lived their entire lives without ever seeing one.
In 1900, 150 million people live in the world’s cities. That number has now surged past 3 billion and last year crossed another tipping point: more than half the people on earth now live in cities. By 2050 – it will be more than 2/3 of us. Humans are now an urban species, cramming into vast urban agglomerations.
Also from the presentation at the site, I note that in the year 1900, the world’s 10 largest cities were (in descending order of population) London, New York City, Paris, Berlin, Chicago, Vienna, Tokyo, St Petersburg, Manchester, and Philadelphia. The combined population of those 10 cities was approximately 26 million. By 2005, just Tokyo — the largest city then — itself had 35 million people, followed by Mexico City with 19.4 million. Mumbai with 18.2 million is listed 5th.
There is a definite trend and a correlation between the growth of cities and the progress of human civilization. India needs to figure out how to manage the transition of its rural population into livable cities. Without the urbanization of India’s rural population it is not even remotely possible for India to work its way out of poverty.
[For more on this topic, see the posts on Cities and Urbanization.]
Charlie the Coyote
The most famous coyote (I like the “kai-o-tee” pronunciation) in the whole world is Wile E. Coyote and his supplies from the ACME corporation, but I am sure that Charlie is going to be pretty famous on the internet.
From “The Daily Coyote“:
Charlie came into my life when he was just ten days old, orphaned after both his parents were killed. He lives with me and a tomcat in a one-room log cabin in Wyoming.
Definitely not work-safe as it will distract you no end. But it is food for the soul. All creatures great and small. Go marvel at the cute little critter.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 