Gates of IITK
It takes nearly two hours by road to get from the Lucknow airport (Kanpur does not have an airport) to the IIT campus in Kalyanpur outside Kanpur city limits. The road is fairly good by Indian standards and just before entering Kanpur city, it crosses the wide expanse of the river Ganga.
It was just a little before midnight when the car turned towards the IIT main gate. I felt a sense of nostalgia and sadness.
Continue reading “Journey to Kanpur — Part 2”
Prof James Reese recently interviewed Jagdish Bhagwati, listed as one of “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” on RadioEconomics. Continue reading “Jagdish Bhagwati on RadioEconomics”
Not that I am being lazy, but I think that you should read The Datsun and the Shoe Tree, a “Florid Affairs” column by Thomas L Freetrademan. Continue reading “Fragments — 11 (Tom Friedman edition)”
There are places I remember all my life,
Though some have changed
Some forever, not for better
Some have gone and some remain. . .
IIT Kanpur
In case you have been wondering about the break in blogging, wonder no more. I have been on the road. Last week, I was first in Mumbai and then I was in IIT Kanpur.
Visiting IIT Kanpur was a bittersweet experience. The place was at once both familiar and totally unfamiliar. The place had not changed all that much since I was a computer science student there a lifetime ago, but I had changed. What had changed was not in front of my eyes, but rather behind my eyes.
There were ghosts there as I wandered Hall V, where I lived. “Misty watercolor memories, for the way we were …”
Continue reading “Journey to Kanpur — Part 1”
Subho Nobo-borsho, as we say in Bengali, which is the greetings on the “Auspicious New Year” since today is the Bengali New Year!
New year, new resolve. What else to quote but Guru Robindranath Thakur’s (aka Robindranath Tagore) prayer from Gitanjali, a collection of song offerings:
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Beautiful China
Via Myke’s Blog, these pictures of scenes from China are breathtakingly beautiful. This is a magical world that we live in.
Searching Tips
And talking about magic, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C Clarke has famously noted. To me the technology which powers Google search is magical. Almost all of the world’s information at the tip of a few keystrokes. Again, via Myke, I came across a bunch of tips on how to search more effectively on Google.
May your searches always end serendipitously.
E. F. Schumacher: “We must do what we conceive to be the right thing and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we will be successful. Because if we don’t do the right thing, we will be doing the wrong thing and we will just be a part of the disease and not a part of the cure.”
Thanks, Myke, for that beautiful quote.
Pippa’s Song
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn
Morning’s at seven
The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d
The lark’s on the wing
The snail’s on the thorn
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!
Robert Browning (1812-1889) painted that beautiful word-picture. It has the quality of a haiku–sparse and based in the here and now. What I especially like is the “zooming in” that he does. The time of the year is the best — spring. Then it is day time, and not just any time of the day but it is at 7 in the morning. And what is going on at that time? All things are in their place and the world is perfect. It recalls to mind the insight that Siddhartha (in Hermann Hesse’s novel) communicates to his friend, “The world is perfect at every moment, Govinda.”
I think it is fair to make the claim that development and economic growth are positively correlated with how educated the population is. It is also fair to say that the returns to education are positive. There are important implications which arise from the latter.
Continue reading “Education Matters — Part 2”
Yesterday I got a call from someone who wanted my advice. It was regarding his son who is in the 7th grade. The school required the parents to fill in a multi-page form with detailed information about the background of the student. The conjecture was that this information was going to become part of the permanent record of the boy. The form, I was told, required the parent to indicate – among other details — if the family belonged to scheduled caste, or scheduled tribes, or other backward classes.
Continue reading “Education Matters — Part 1”
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Those lines are John Donne’s From Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Written around the 1620’s, they are faintly reflective of Advaita Vedanta. Donne’s philosophy encompasses all humanity into a whole but places God outside and above, as you can tell from the full meditation (included below.) Advaita Vedanta negates the distinction between the “me” and the “not me.”
Continue reading “No Man is an Island”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 