This screen capture of an India Today tweet is from just six months ago but feels like much longer. Posted here for the record.
The link above leads to “Stick to huffing and puffing: Congress’ Manish Tewari reacts to Huffington Post’s story on Sonia’s wealth”.
Also see, “Sonia Gandhi worth $2 billion, richer than Queen Elizabeth“.
{By the way, if you hold the cursor over the links above for a second, it will show brief quotes from those reports.}
If you had the luck of the Indians
You’d be sorry and wish you were dead.
If you had the luck of the Indians
You’d wish you was English instead!
I have substituted “Indians” for “Irish” in the song “The Luck of the Irish” by John Lennon.
I was born and brought up in India. By most measures, I did get a decent schooling in India. But my education did not expose me to any even remotely accurate version of history. What little “history” was taught was a heap of lies over a handful of selected politically correct sanitized facts about India’s past. The horrors that the Islamic invaders and the European colonial rulers of India committed on Indians were carefully hidden.
Continue reading “If you had the luck of the Indians . . .”
India’s Phase Transition
Prime Minister Mr Narendra Modi’s administration can be considered to be a “phase transition” for India’s economy, to borrow a concept from thermodynamics. Phase transitions are abrupt, often discontinuous changes in systems that alter the degrees of freedom available to it. A familiar example of such a transition is the change from ice to water. Under Modi’s administration, India’s phase transition is likely to be from an economically bound state to an economically free state.
Continue reading “Narendrabhai Modi, the Man who will Transform India”
I am back in Brussels. Accurately speaking, I am in Leuven. I arrived at Brussels airport this morning from Mumbai (Jet Airways). It was overcast and 10 degrees Celsius on arrival at 7:30 AM. Quite a change from 35+ degrees C in Mumbai. Tomorrow is the start of a road trip to Marseilles and Nice for three days. Cheers.
So far I have asked around 10,000 Indians if they have read the Indian Constitution. Not one of them admitted to having read it. A few say yes initially but when probed a bit admit that they haven’t really read the whole thing. Some claim to have read the preamble. That is like saying that they have seen the movie merely because they have seen the ad in the newspaper or have had lunch because they checked out the lunch menu.
Continue reading “The Indian Constitution – Part 1”
TIME has a brief piece on an interesting change in what the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) tests. “Students will no longer be rewarded for the rote memorization of semi-obscure definitions. Instead, the words that the SAT will highlight in vocabulary questions will be “high utility” words that students are likely to encounter in life and reading beyond those four hours in the testing location. Even the most studied students won’t be able to breeze through vocab sections, matching a word with definition B by reflex; they’ll have to read and gather from the passage exactly what a word means.”
Today is the anniversary of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919.
The Jallianwala Bagh massacre, also known as the Amritsar massacre, was a seminal event in the British rule of India. On 13 April 1919, a crowd of non-violent protesters, along with Baishakhi pilgrims, had gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh garden in Amritsar, Punjab to protest the arrest of two leaders despite a curfew which had been recently declared. On the orders of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer, the army fired on the crowd for ten minutes, directing their bullets largely towards the few open gates through which people were trying to run out. The dead numbered between 370 and 1,000, or possibly more. [Wiki.]
The picture on the left shows the narrow passage to Jallianwala Bagh Garden through which the shooting was conducted. The question is: who killed those hundreds of Indians — men, women and little children — in cold blood at the orders of Gen Dyer? They were Indians. Indians killed Indians mercilessly, in cold blood. They always do. Indians kill Indians and help foreigners rule India. Here’s some evidence that you must read to understand that point.
Continue reading “Who Killed Indians at Jallianwala Bagh?”
Considering how ubiquitous talk about GDP and growth rates is, it is noteworthy that as a concept it is of fairly recent vintage. The idea of having a measure of the “income” of a country was invented by the American economist Simon Kuznets for use in a US Congressional report in 1934. The “product” part of gross domestic product refers to the production of goods and services. It is an aggregate measure — and hence a macroeconomic measure. It is a measure of the total amount of goods and services that an economy produces. Full disclosure: I am not a macroeconomist and find the subject painfully boring. But here I am only discussing the limited idea of GDP.
Continue reading “Notes on GDP, money and wealth”
Medha Patkar is working hard for terrorists. Are you? Please help Medha & AAP help terrorists. (via @ChiragDesai)i pic.twitter.com/LU9dfa5OC6
— Atanu Dey (@atanudey) March 25, 2014
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 