A few days ago, the following tweet was retweeted approvingly by many Indians, no doubt out of a sense pride and patriotism. “Look, look,” they seemed to say, “Look, how great India was. In 1870, India’s GDP was higher than UK, US, Russia, Germany, France and Italy. In fact, India’s GDP was over four times that of Italy.”
Author: Atanu Dey
Economist.
End of 2014
Well here we are, the end of 2014 CE. It has been an interesting year, all things considered. Nothing of any great important happened to me on the personal front. On a scale stretching between happiness and unhappiness, I was somewhere marked “contented.” I learned a great many things of value and forgot a good deal of what needed to be let go.
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The Unbearable Stupidity of Controlling Prices
An astonishing fact about Amazon, the giant retailer which aims to sell everything to everybody, is that it adjusts its prices over 2.5 million times daily. Let that sink in: two thousand five hundred thousand times a day. Around 100,000 price changes an hour. Granted Amazon has over 250 million SKUs (stock keeping units) on its catalog in the US. (See the data on US and other countries here, as of Aug 2014.) Still, that fact bears witness to what technology can do and what market competition can achieve in terms of economic efficiency.
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Winter Solstice Greetings
The (northern) Winter Solstice was on Sunday. On that day, the sun appears to stand still for a moment in the sky as it reverses it direction across the sky. This happens on the shortest day of the year (in the northern hemisphere.) For details, check out the wiki.
Nov 14th as the “Day of Shame and Lamentations for India.”
Why Indians celebrate Children’s Day on Nov 14th is a bit of a mystery to me. Of course I know that Jawaharlal Nehru, the father of the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty was born on Nov 14th. Why would anyone consider him to be significant for Indian children is the mysterious part. If the facts be considered, Indians should observe Children’s Day on some other day than a day that is somehow related to Nehru. For two very pertinent reasons. First, contrary to the government brainwashing, Nehru wasn’t particularly fond of children. He was, according to some reliable sources, very short-tempered with them and had them removed from his presence immediately after the de rigueur photo ops. Sure, he liked roses and the ladies but I find all claims that he somehow adored children rather incredible.
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Happy Deepavali
ॐ Asato maa satgamaya
Tamaso maa jyotir gamaya
Mrityor maa amritam gamaya ॐ
Happy Deepavali. Happy Diwali.
The Indian Constitution — Part 2
George Orwell claimed, “In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” By that measure, a commitment to telling the truth as one sees it must make one a bit of a revolutionary. Here I continue with my argument that the Indian constitution is the fountainhead of all of India’s troubles. Unless and until it is replaced, India will continue to languish at the bottom of the heap. That claim predictably makes people uncomfortable. In this series I aim to support argue for its truth. (Here is the first part.) In this part, I examine the importance of rules. Continue reading “The Indian Constitution — Part 2”
Shubho Bijoya Greetings
For Bengalis, the five day long worship of Ma Durga is simply pujo. This is the time when Ma Durga comes for a visit to her maternal home. The festival culminates on Bijoy Dashimi with the protima (the idol) given a visarjan (ceremonial immersion in a river or a lake). Then it is time for people to greet each other with “Shubho Bijoya.” The important thing is that you wish people after the visarjan is over. This gets complicated in a world in which people live in different time zones. In India, visarjan is already over and they are wishing Shubho Bijoya but over here California we still have not had visarjan. So with that brief caution, here’s wishing you all Shubho Bijoya.
(Tomorrow I will go to a Durga puja and post some pictures.)
Here’s a song from E.S. Posthumus called Durga from their album “Maraka.” Others songs titles in that album are Kalki, Vishnu, Indra, etc.
Hayek on Valuing Individuals
“A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.”
Friedrich August von Hayek (1899 – 1992). Austrian economist.
Mr Modi goes to Washington
I make no secret of the fact that I believe Shri Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, is an honest, intelligent, dedicated, sincere and diligent man. I admire him immensely for who he is and what he has accomplished over his many decades as a politician. The set P = {p | famous politician p is honest, intelligent, dedicated, sincere, diligent} is small but non-empty. For all I know, the set P is exhaustively enumerated as P = {Narendra Modi, Arun Shourie}. But at the very least, I am certain that {Narendra Modi, Arun Shourie} ⊂ P. I indulge myself in the frivolity of using set-theoretic notations at the start of this piece only because I have a few serious points to make.
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 