Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

SDM

From a review of the movie Slumdog Millionaire by Dennis Lim in Slate:

A slippery and self-conscious concoction, Slumdog has it both ways. It makes a show of being anchored in a real-world social context, then asks to be read as a fantasy. It ladles on brutality only to dispel it with frivolity. The film’s evasiveness is especially dismaying when compared with the purpose and clarity of urban-poverty fables like Luis Bunuel’s Los Olvidados, set among Mexico City street kids, or Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, set in inner-city Los Angeles. It’s hard to fault Slumdog for what it is not and never tries to be. But what it is—a simulation of “the real India,” which it hasn’t bothered to populate with real people—is dissonant to the point of incoherence.

What’s up, OLPC?

At the intersection of high-tech gadgets and public spending on education in poor countries lies XO, the machine from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project led by Nicholas Negroponte. I have been a critic of the program right from the start. I have argued before that the idea of providing one laptop per child is well and good if money were no object. Unfortunately, in resource-strapped economies such as India, the opportunity cost of providing school children with laptops is prohibitive.
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Hubble’s Universe is Beautiful

“HUBBLESITE . . . Out of the ordinary, out of this world” has pictures. I could spend days checking them out and indeed I have. I am sharing a small collection from there: “Astronomers Select Top Ten Most Amazing Pictures Taken by Hubble Space Telescope in Last 16 Years.”

Here are the pictures. The text associated with them is from Nov 2006 article by Michael Hanlon of the Daily Mail.

au_01_sombrero
The Sombrero Galaxy – 28 million light years from Earth – was voted best picture taken by the Hubble telescope. The dimensions of the galaxy, officially called M104, are as spectacular as its appearance. It has 800 billion suns and is 50,000 light years across.
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Not the News

I get to watch TV news only occasionally, mostly at airports, hotels and while visiting friends. Today at my friend’s place in Delhi, I woke up to TV news. It was wall-to-wall coverage of Dr Manmohan Singh’s heart surgery and the gunning down of two Pakistani terrorists just outside Delhi.

On the 24-hour news channels, the presenters have to keep talking non-stop about whatever is the breaking news. Naturally, it is humanly not possible to say something meaningful about any event without some time to think about it. So the need to keep talking incessantly about an event which can only be described in a few words results in verbal diarrhea. There is so little content in the story being told that the TV screen has to be filled with all sorts of other items: there are two or three lines of scrolling texts relating to different issues, some totally meaningless video occupying part of the screen, another part of the screen given to some advertisement, etc.
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Jan 23rd: Subhas Chandra Bose’s Birthday

Netaji Bose was born on this day in 1897. When and where he died is a mystery. The airbrushing of his image from the consciousness of Indians bears testimony to M K Gandhi’s success in crushing his opponents. Gandhi appointed Nehru as his successor and the rest is, as they say, history.

Gandhi cast a very long shadow on India. Mao is supposed to have replied, when asked about his opinion of the French revolution, “It is too early to tell.” The official line in India — and therefore the line parroted by the vast majority of ‘educated’ Indians — is that Gandhi was a prime factor in India gaining political independence. I think it is too early to tell whether Gandhi was good for India or not. But give it a few more decades and I am confident that Gandhi’s image will undergo a radical transformation. Satyam eva, as the old Sanskrit saying (which is India’s motto) goes, jayatey. Truth alone prevails. Eventually.

Update: Thanks to all those who pointed out that the title of the post was incorrect. I have changed the “Jan 13th” to “Jan 23rd.”

Thanks to rahushar for correcting my incorrect transcription of “satyam eva jayate.”

Open post and another poll

Your turn to say what you will in the comments. You need to be registered to comment but fortunately now you can register yourself within a few seconds.

And here’s a poll. Just for the heck of it.

Dilli Chalo

I am off to Delhi for a few days. I hope Jet Airways — the same airline that ferried me back and forth to San Francisco just a few weeks ago — gets me there from Pune uneventfully tomorrow afternoon. I am attending the 19th Skoch Summit in Delhi on 22nd and 23rd. Then I will spend the weekend with friends in Delhi and return on Republic Day, perhaps after attending the republic day parade.

I am excited about this visit to Delhi. As you know, politicians are my favorites and the best of them live in Delhi. Who knows, I may bump into the prime minister. Just kidding. Can’t bump into insubstantial things. But seriously, it’s been a while since I was there. The last time I was with a delegation from Australia. They were an absolutely wonderful group, led by Prof Andrew MacIntyre, Dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific, Director of Crawford School of Economics and Government at the Australian National University, whom I am privileged to call a friend.

See you in Delhi.

ICT, Choice and Democracy 2.0 — Part 2

Institutions as Ideas

Institutions defined most generally are essentially ideas. They are big ideas, ideas that are persistent and which have a profound effect on the populations that evolve, and adopt, the ideas. Examples of powerful institutions – therefore powerful ideas – are easy to find: markets, state constitutions, legal systems, systems of governance, and so on. The institution called democracy is also an idea. The instantiation of an idea — its embodiment or implementation or incarnation – varies from place to place, and from time to time. How an institution is implemented depends on, among other things, preferences of the population and on the available technology. As tastes and technologies change, institutions can be implemented differently, and generally they are more efficiently implemented as time goes by.
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