The title of this post is borrowed from an article by Arun Shourie in today’s Indian Express, “Conduct above all.” In it Shourie recounts a story told about an ancestor of mine, a fellow called Diogenes. Also known as Diogenes of Sinope, he was a cynic. Here’s that story:
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Month: September 2009
It’s a joke, you stupid cretins
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.
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Thomas Jefferson on Christianity
UPDATE 23 Oct 2018:
The post is clearly wrong. It was Mark Twain, not Jefferson, who wrote this about Christianity.
See this: TwainQuotes.com
Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) had this to say about Christianity —
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How Does one Market Something Free
My friend, Dr Aniruddha Malpani, is an IVF specialist in Mumbai. When he is not busy getting women pregnant, he runs “HELP” — the world’s largest free patient education library. Now he needs help. He wrote to me, saying, Continue reading “How Does one Market Something Free”
The Endurance of Indians
Reports of gross misdeeds by people in power leave as much of an impression on the Indian mind as does yesterday’s weather forecast. And they appear to be as helpless in the face of institutionalized corruption and criminal behavior as in altering the weather. They take both as a given, a fact of nature that is outside their control.
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Paul Romer: Charter Cities
Cities are the engines of growth. Therefore, a policy that promotes urbanization of the population is an indispensible instrument for economic growth and development. In the following TED Talk, Paul Romer, a world-class growth economist at Stanford, makes the case.
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Wasting time on Wikipedia
I have many avenues for wasting time but most of them involve the internets. Here’s a trick for you: go to wikipedia and click on “Random Article” in the navigation panel. Here are the lessons.
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A bit from Garrison Keillor
For decades I have been a fan or Garrison Keillor and his radio show “A Prairie Home Companion” on public radio.
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First Debug the Child . . .
The topic of education is an obsession with me for the simple reason that one cannot address any development related issues without reference to education, however broadly or narrowly one defines education or development. My interest in the use — and misuse — of technology in education is a natural extension of that basic interest in development and growth. The One Laptop Per Child comes in for special scrutiny because the implications of such a program are phenomenal for a poor country like India. I have long argued that there are simpler, more affordable and more urgently needed interventions that is needed than is provided by the OLPC program. Here’s one that I recently became aware of.
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Best Tennis Shot Ever
Don’t do sports on this blog but this is too good to not mention here.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 