Brad DeLong over at UC Berkeley writes a mean blog, Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal, from his office at Evans Hall with a view of the campus and the Golden Gate Bridge off to the west. He considers the academic enviroment he lives in to be a paradise. Continue reading “In Praise of Blogging”
Author: Atanu Dey
Economist.
Back to IIT Kanpur
So I am off today to one of my alma maters. IIT Kanpur where I studied computer science a life-time ago.
I am contributing to a volume called “India Infrastructure Report” which will be published later this year by Oxford Univ Press. This year the focus is on rural infrastructure. I am going to IIT Kanpur to be at the writers’ workshop where we will sit and review the first draft of all the contributors.
My contribution is simple. RISC. More about it later.
PS: Getting to IIT Kanpur is hard. Flights from Mumbai to Delhi, then Delhi to Lucknow, and then a car ride from Lucknow to Kalyanpur where IIT Kanpur is located. Wish me luck since the security will no doubt put me on edge.
Profiting from Terrorism
Public Radio International (PRI) program “Open Source with Christopher Lydon” of July 19th is called “A Class Profile of India“. The guests on the show were Pankaj Mishra, Suketu Mehta, and yours truly.
India, according to Messers M&M, is a mess.
And it appears that the mess can be traced to the problem that there is a segment of the population which is doing absolutely fabulously and there is a huge segment of the population which is absolutely miserable. And the outcome of this disparity between the standards of living of these two classes: It is terrorism.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, economic disparity in India is to blame for the bombs that killed 207 commuters and maimed over a thousand.
Not just that, according to Mr Mishra, Hindus are to blame for the 1993 terrorism in India and indeed all terrorism. Hindus systematically kill Muslims and then there is a reaction in which “militants” bomb innocent people. The words “pogrom” is used often. Worse, it appears only the number of Muslims killed matter and just to drive home the point, the numbers are tripled.
Mr Mishra has a sturdy disdain for numbers and data, when it does not suit his thesis. So he is very happy to use numbers such as “400 million live on less than 1 dollar a day” but he dismisses data on the real growth in per capita income across the board (though the upper income deciles have gained more than the gain to the lower deciles) as just a lot of “fiddling with numbers.”
The show was slanted to tar India with a very wide brush. Mishra had his line pat. He deliberately mis-characterized Islamic terrorism acts as those arising from economic injustice. What his thesis essentially boils down to is that the poor are rebelling against the rich and that is what explains the terrorism of 11th July.
If I were a poor person in India, I would be insulted and offended by his thesis. The poor do have a right to rebel against injustice but Mishra is not doing them a favor by accusing them of using terrorism and wholesale murder to make their case.
I have more to say but for now I am too incensed to write coherently.
Yes, one does profit from terrorism. If you can spin terrorists bombs as acts of justice against an oppressive Hindu majority, you get invited to write op-eds and appear on talk shows in the US and other rich countries.
How to beat the blog censorship
Try this:
1. Copy this url to your address bar: http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php?url=http://
2. Append the url of the blocked blog. So if you, for instance, want to reach mysite.blogspot.com, you will construct the url http://techbytes.co.in/experimental/bypass.php?url=http://mysite.blogspot.com/
3. Hit Go.
Blog Censoring by the Goverment of India
“Somebody must have asked for some sites to be blocked. What is your problem?”
I can just hear the derision in that question. That is what Shivam Vij was told by Dr Gulshan Rai, director of CERT-IN, which is the organization which is authorized to issue orders to ISPs. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) of the Government of India asked that certain domains be blocked (but does not reveal exactly which though it is clear that the list includes *.blogspot.com, *.typepad.com and geocities.com/* .)
Like the imperial rulers they are, they did not bother to explain why this attempt at censorship. I write “attempt” because on the internet, you really cannot censor anything. The net treats it like it were the failure of a link and routes traffic around the failed link, as anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the internet knows. Continue reading “Blog Censoring by the Goverment of India”
Democracy
“When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is the fact that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental — men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack or be lost… All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
H L Mencken * Baltimore Sun (26 July 1920)
It would appear that the more perfect the democracy, the more its leaders reflect the inner soul of the people. India, I am told, is a great democracy. Looking at the leaders of India, one does wonder about the inner soul of Indians.
Jihad Watch – 1
India’s development is not insulated from global forces shaping the world. Islamic terrorism is a global reality that only the seriously deluded can deny. Its bloody hand reaches deep inside the global human breast daily and wrenches the heart out.
The world spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year trying to protect itself. The security apparatus we go through at the airports is in place largely to dissuade jihadists. Soon I guess the local train stations in Mumbai will have to have some sort of security in place.
Islamic terrorism impedes the free flow of law abiding people, it hurts commerce, it hurts development, and most importantly of all, it destroys lives and families. Around 200 dead and a thousand injured in Mumbai last week was just one more the hundreds of incidents of jihad the world suffers each year.
Jihad is a regular feature of our world. Jihad Watch will be a regular feature on this blog. Why? Because we must understand the enemy if we wish to prevail. We need to understand what motivates them and why. I will highlight articles and viewpoints which I believe can help inform our understanding of jihad. Continue reading “Jihad Watch – 1”
On Being an Armchair Intellectual
A comment on this blog is worth highlighting because it is too important to be buried among the comments. It is from Gulab Singh who wrote:
What have you done to amend the situation, oh armchair intellectual ? Cribbing about the status quo is pointless, if you don’t follow it up with action. If you don’t have a way to put into practice the ideas you espouse, then your ideas are not practical. You seem to have spent a lot of time thinking and writing about “what should be done”, but what have you really done?
I cannot respond to the accusation of being an “armchair intellectual” because I am not sufficiently vain to call myself an intellectual, armchair or not. However, I would like to speak in defense of armchair intellectuals first, then admit that I am basically an armchair critic, then argue why critics are important in the overall scheme of things, and finally explain what I am doing to move beyond just being a mere critic. Continue reading “On Being an Armchair Intellectual”
Too many early risers
Give a man a reputation for being an early riser, and he can sleep every day until noon without worrying. — Mark Twain.
The Right Response
As I have held before, there should be a special hell for those who forward inane stupid emails with the breathless admonition to “forward it to all your friends.” The terrorist bombing of Mumbai locals has inspired one such idiotic email which is making the rounds.
It is addressed to the terrorists with the endearment “Dear.” It basically says (I will spare you the details, in case you haven’t already seen it) that we don’t care to be bothered by the bombs and we don’t really care about the hundreds killed; we are Mumbaikars and we just get up, and go about our business earning our next buck. Continue reading “The Right Response”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 