Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

Form is Emptiness

Buddha Purnima

You have to agree that Siddhartha Gautama had great timing. His birth was during the full moon in the month of May. He attained enlightenment and became a buddha some years later on a full moon in the month of May. And to round it all off, he attained parinirvana (died) during a full moon of May when he was old.

The full moon is so bright outside my bedroom window this morning that it woke me up at 4 AM. It being the 2nd of May, this month we will have “a blue moon” – a second full moon in the same month. Two “purnima’s,” as a full moon is called in Sanskrit (and many of its daughter languages.) This purnima is called the Buddha Purnima.
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The Indian Education System — Part 3

The education system is embedded in the bigger socio-political order of the economy. To a large degree, the larger system dictates the characteristics of its subsystems. In the broadest terms, the government of India is an extractive and exploitative system created specifically for that purpose during the nearly one hundred years of its existence as a British colony before India became politically independent. The British, as a colonial power, created a system designed to control every aspect of the economy to maximize extraction. The challenge of administering such a large population required a certain small percentage of the native population to be educated in a very specific way. Therefore the total and absolute control of the education system was a necessity.
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Comment Policy

Comments on this blog are not moderated. But abusive comments are out of bounds as they are not part of civilized discourse. I regret that I will, in the extreme case, ban anyone from commenting if he or she repeatedly demonstrates that he or she is incapable of disagreeing without being disagreeable.

The Indian Education System — Part 2

Education matters immensely when it comes to the health of an economy. There is a positive correlation between years of schooling and the GDP per capita. Let’s look at the numbers that are indicative of the generalization. In 2001, “school-life expectancy” and the ppp GDP per capita for Ethiopia were (4.3 years, and $675); for Indonesia (10, and $2,844), for China (12.4, and $4,065), for South Korea (14.6, and $17,048), Japan (14.3, and $25,559), and the US (15.2, and $32,764).
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First of May

. . . you and I, our love will never die,
but guess who’ll cry come first of May.

That refrain from the song — First of May — by the Bee Gees always echoes in my mind whenever I hear the words “first of May.” It is a wisftul love song, a song of yearning and longing for a sweet remembered past.

The lyrics of the song are below the fold.
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The Indian Education System — Part 1

The fractal nature of the generalization that education matters holds across time and space. Irrespective of the granularity of analysis, education aids development through the intermediate step of economic growth. At the finest level of detail, an educated individual anywhere in the world is more productive than an uneducated one. At the broadest level of analysis, the modern world is more productive arguably because it is more educated compared to the world that existed before. A cross-sectional study of the world today, or at any earlier time, reveals that the general level of education of the population is a good predictor of the success of the population.
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Obscenity in India

This is obscene. The way we get our priorities mixed up is seriously obscene and disturbing. A bunch of people — clueless retards, more descriptively — get offended by some Hollywood actor kissing some silly young woman on the cheek in public and publicly protest what they call an attack on their cultural ethos. Worse yet, a case if filed in some court and the judge orders the woman to appear in court and orders that the actor be arrested if he sets foot in India.
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Deluded Government

Very young children in Christian households (especially in the US) are led to believe that if they are good, Santa Claus will bring them gifts during Christmas. It is rather cute to see their eyes light up with eager anticipation of the stuff that Santa would deliver. By the time these kids are teenagers, most realize that it is a just a harmless story and Santa does not really exist. While it would be sad to see a grown up believing in Santa, what would be really pathetic is if a grown up starts believing he is Santa. That fellow would be in serious need of professional psychiatric help.
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PanIIT’s “Reach 4 India”

Today I was favored with an email from the PanIIT alumni organization. The subject of the email was “Required for IIT alumni Reach 4 India! organisation” and the text was about their search for a “Chief Operations Sevak” and a “Chief Finance & Funding Sevak.”

PanIITlogo

I wrote back promptly asking if among the illustrious alumni of the much celebrated IITs there wasn’t someone who knew the distinction between the numeral “4” and the word “for”? Methinks their reach exceeds their grasp.

[I have written previously about PanIIT here: Inspire, Involve, and Transform — Part 1, and Part 2.]

Dryden on Intelligence

Gordon Dryden, the New Zealand-based co-author of The Learning Revolution, and more importantly a dear friend of mine, disagrees with many of the key points proposed in Charles Murray’s series of three articles from the Wall Street Journal mentioned in the post Murray on Education yesterday. It is important for me to note that Gordon himself “dropped out of school at age fourteen, and started learning.” Here is his response, parts of which I do not agree with but for the moment post without comments: Continue reading “Dryden on Intelligence”