Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

Thundering Airlines

The mother of all thunderstorms is roaring outside the window as I write this from Kolkata. I got here last night from Pune after a brief stop-over in Mumbai.

The sky was ominously dark this morning and now it is pouring so hard that visibility is reduced to less than 100 feet. The thunder and lightening is almost continuous. There is something deep inside which rejoices in beholding the awesome power of nature. There must be something atavistic in this reaction, a genetically programmed response to life-giving rain.
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Mobile Internet and India

“In India, the Future of the Internet Will Be Built around the Mobile Phone” reads the title of one of today’s articles at Knowledge@Wharton. It is an interview with my colleague, Rajesh Jain, CEO of NetCore. Rajesh believes that the mobile phone will be the primary device for interacting with the web for a vast number of users in India. It is easy to follow his logic.
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Found on the web

New and improved 🙂 feature on this blog: “Found on the web.” The inaugural item is the Hubble Space Telescope pictures. Check them out and even download them as wallpaper, but don’t stop wondering how magical the universe is and how fortunate we are to be able to observe it.

Spiral galaxy

galaxy

A Passage to India

Hi from Seoul’s Incheon international airport. Just a couple of hours lay over in transit from San Francisco to Mumbai.

This is pretty cool. Find a seat, open up the laptop, and you are connected and ready to do business.

At SFO, the Homeland Security code was “Orange.” Which, it appears to me, means that special attention was to be given to frail old ladies in wheelchairs. It boggles my mind — what are these guys smoking. When was the last time wheelchair bound old ladies went ballistic and blew up a commercial jetliner? Someone should clue in the Transportation Safety Authority that there is a definite profile that fits potential suicide bombers and little old ladies don’t fit that, and nor do young mothers with babies in their arms. I saw one such mother made to give up feeding bottles.

It makes me feel very secure (not!). Confiscating toothpaste tubes from the general public can achieve little other than harrassing people who mean no harm. Clue to TSA: start profiling.

Banning Child Labor

From time to time I wonder whether some people are merely stupid or whether they are inherently evil. Or maybe they are actually stupid evil bastards. Just yesterday a report on the NPR show Marketplace got me wondering. It reported that India has recently passed a law outlawing child labor in households and in restaurants. It noted that employing children in factories was already banned.
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Happiness

Sunset at Santa Cruz CA (click to embiggen)

The pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right according to that famous document signed on July 4th of 1776. Preamble to the Declaration of Independence reads —

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The right to the pursuit of happiness follows after the rights to life and liberty in the document, as it should be. You have to be, and be free, to have a shot at happiness. But that right to the pursuit of happiness is like buying a parking permit for parking on the UC Berkeley campus. You are not guaranteed a parking spot. You pays your money and you takes your chances. If you drive around for a while and are lucky enough to find an empty spot, you may park.
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Hola

Hola! from Mexico City. I arrived here last evening.

Apologies for not keeping in touch. Having too much fun in Mexico City visiting the Instituto Thomas Jefferson:

Based on the principles of self esteem, respect, and academic excellence, our mission is to develop educated leaders for the 21st Century who can compete, succeed, and be role models in this high tech world while maintaining a commitment to family and moral values.

The Thomas Jefferson Institute is located in the northwestern part of Mexico City in the State of Mexico. The school has a total population of 1,850 students, 130 teachers and 70 administrative staff members. The Thomas Jefferson Institute has developed into one of the most prestigious schools in the Mexico City Metropolitan Area.

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UC Berkeley on Google Video

It was bound to happen, wasn’t it? Google getting into education. Not directly, of course, because Google does not create content. Google enables the transmission of content. So here is UC Berkeley on Google Video.

The University of California, Berkeley is the preeminent public research and teaching institution in the nation . From classic literature to emerging technologies, the curricula of our 130 academic departments span the wide world of thought and knowledge. Supported by the people of California, the university has embraced public service as an essential part of its mission since 1868. The content on this page —drawn from campus seminars, courses and events—is just one part of UC Berkeley’s commitment to the broadest possible dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of our state, the nation and the world.

As it happens, I am writing this from Giannini Hall on the UCB campus where I spent seven wonderful years learning economics. I am visiting my alma mater for a couple of days.

[Thanks to Bhargava Swamy for also sending me an alert on this one.]

Puja

Devi Durga

Today is the first of the five days of Puja, the worship of the goddess Bengalis call Ma Durga. Oct 2nd is Vijaya Dashami, the day the Puja (worship) ends. As children, we are told that Durga comes with her children (Lakshmi, Saraswati, Kartik, and Ganesh) to visit her parents. Another story goes that Rama, in his war against Ravana, invoked Durga to help him. He was victorious and the worship of Durga is a celebration of the triumph of good over evil.

Puja for Bengalis is something special. New clothes, gifts, great food, visiting friends and family, and of course going to Puja pandals. I will probably go to the local pujas around the San Francisco Bay area.

I wish you all a wonderful Puja.

Mind the Gap

wwww

I do believe that the world wide web is one of the greatest instruments ever for comprehending the world. What makes it so powerful? The tens of thousands of wonderful things you can find there. It should be called wwww — wonderful world wide web.

Visualizing Data

Wandering around the wwww, I came across Ola Rosling’s presentation at Google on March 7, 2006. It is a Google video and the presentation is nearly 70 minutes long. Although the entire presentation is worth watching, in a few minutes you get a pretty good idea of what it is all about. Then you could move on to the Gapminder.org site.

“Gapminder is a non-profit venture for development and provision of free software that visualise human development. This is done in collaboration with universities, UN organisations, public agencies and non-governmental organisations.”

When you get there, first thing to do is to check out the Human Development Trend 2005 presentation. Ola Rosling’s video uses this presentation. You can download the presentation. There is a truckload of interesting stuff on that page. For example, I downloaded the “World Education Chart 2003” It is fascinating to play the shockwave flash presentation and see the data dynamically presented.

For the last couple of hours I have been learning from that site and I am sure that you will not find it a waste of your time.

Don’t miss this Google tool for Gapminder. Guaranteed to fascinate.

[Hat tip: Jaya Kumar for the Gapminder link.]