This is a true story. The faculty member involved emailed me yesterday. Scene: an IIT professor interviewing a potential candidate for PhD in a technical subject.
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Author: Atanu Dey
Economist.
Gordon Dryden on India
New Zealand author Dr. Gordon Dryden, who showed me around his home-country last year (mentioned before here and here), breezed into India last month, and a week later flew out “head filled with a haze of contraditions”:
Air travel: Horrified at the Air India trip from Hong Kong to New Delhi (“Do they really have to spend several minutes, first up, showing what not to push bottles down the toilet? Have they not heard of the power of negative suggestions? Possibly my worst flight since the Soviet Aeroflot slog from Moscow to Tokyo in 1970.”) But thrilled at the Jet Airways flight from Delhi to Pune (“Great airline; beaut service.”)
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Desperately Seeking India’s Google
The San Jose Mercury News has a recent report about how mobile phones are going to be for India what the PC was for the US. Naturally, they quote the most passionate evangelist for the mobile web, my colleague and MD of Netcore, Mr Rajesh Jain. The matter that the article focuses on is of paramount interest in the context of India’s development: the mobile phone revolution in India.
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Instituto Thomas Jefferson
George Bernard Shaw had claimed with characteristic immodesty that “when I want to read a good book, I write one.” Fulfilling a perceived need is a defining characteristic of entrepreneurs. Like great artists and poets, entrepreneurs see the world not as it is but rather how it ought to be. And they follow that creative vision to create something of value. Ricardo Carvajal is a visionary and an entrepreneur in that sense. I had the pleasure of meeting him and his wife Jeanene Bluhm Carvajal, the creators of the Instituto Thomas Jefferson (ITJ), during my brief visit to Mexico City exactly two months ago as their guest.
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Story of my Life
Give me Peace on Earth
Give me love
Give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light
Give me life
Keep me free from birth
Give me hope
Help me cope, with this heavy load
Trying to, touch and reach you with,
heart and soul
Om
My Lord . . .
PLEASE take hold of my hand, that
I might understand you . . .
George Harrison (1943-2001)
Outlawing Child Labor
My position is that child labor is not the problem, but rather it is the symptom of a different underlying problem. Merely outlawing child labor will not fix the underlying problem any more than malnutrition will be fixed by outlawing hunger.
Also see related post on Banning Child Labor on this blog.
Your thoughts?
Milton Friedman: A Joke and Some Serious Stuff
One day an economist looked up and saw a little girl being attacked by a vicious dog, just down the street. He rushed over and saved the girl by strangling the dog.
A reporter interviews him and says, “Sir, this is a wonderful thing you have done. Did you say you are an economist?”
“Yes, I am,” says the economist.
“Very good, sir,” says the reporter, “this will be our lead story tomorrow, and the headline will be ‘Radical libertarian economist saves little girl from vicious dog.‘ ”
“Well, I’m not that radical,” says the economist. “I’m really more of a classical liberal.”
The reporter scratches his head and says, “Well, we’ll come up with something. Whose views would you say you are closest to?”
“Oh, I suppose it would be Milton Friedman,” says the economist.
Next day, the economist buys the paper. Across the front page is splashed: “CHICAGOITE KILLS FAMILY PET!”
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Ideas on the Road to Development
Last Thursday I hitched a ride from Pune to Mumbai in a friend’s car. Don’t be dismayed; this is not one of those personal blog posts “What I had for breakfast last week Thursday” types.
We set off bright and early in Nitin’s Mahindra Scorpio, a largish SUV-type car. The car is alright on a well-paved road but you get bounced around like crazy on badly paved pot-holed roads, especially if you elected to ride in the back seat like I did. For nearly 200 kms, we bounced along with only minor stretches of adequately-paved level road. Around half of the journey was on what is called the Pune-Mumbai “expressway.” You can maintain speeds of up to 120 kmph on that stretch, except for those bits that wind through the mountainous Western Ghats around Lonavla.
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Tubular Belle
Last month, while waiting at San Francisco International airport for my flight back to India, I was tickled to see a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 which was named Tubular Belle taxi into the next parking bay. It had Richard Branson’s zany sense of humor written all over it. Mike Oldfield’s album Tubular Bells is one of my old-time favorites and, as it happened, I had it in my MP3 player (a new Creative Vision M, I will have you know). Clever name for a 747, I thought to myself. But I did not know the connection between Virgin and Mike Oldfield until this afternoon when I picked up and read Richard Branson’s book Screw it, Let’s Do It: Lessons in Life. (Virgin Books (C) 2006).
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 