Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

Saving Private Information

I just googled “information” and got 5,930,000,000 hits, or nearly 6 billion hits in 0.06 seconds.

Compared to someone sitting at home about 20 years ago, my access to information from within the comfort of my home is a few orders of magnitude higher. Hal Varian and Peter Lyman at UC Berkeley estimated that the rate of production of information was two exabytes, or two billion billion bytes in 2001. That information could take a stack of floppy discs about 2 million miles high. That rate must have gone up and I can reasonably assert that for this year we will need a stack 3 million miles high to contain all our NEW data. Thankfully we don’t use floppy discs and depend on hard-drives.
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India Funding Pakistani Jihad — Followup

“India funding Pakistani jehadis” prompted Dan to comment:

Couldn’t you make the argument Indian charity and compassion during Pakistan’s time of need might make a positive impression on at least a few Pakistanis. Maybe the aid provided will change a couple of hearts and minds and they will be less likely to “throw a bomb over your fence.

Dan, unless you are kidding, your naivety is touching. If $25,000,000 were to change a couple of hearts, then to change the few hundred million hearts that need changing would require a brazillion** dollars (which is more money than the entire debt–foreign and domestic–of the United States which is merely in the order of thousands of billions of dollars.)
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Happy Diwali

Diwali Greetings

Asato ma sat gamaya
Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya
Mrityur ma amritam gamaya

Lead me from illusion to the Truth
Lead me from darkness to Light
Lead me from death to Immortality

from the Brihadaranya Upanishad.

India Funding Pakistani Jihadi Groups

Money is fungible.

If I give money to my neighbor to help out with his grocery purchases, I may be acting out of good neighborly feelings. But what if he is an alcoholic? By giving him money, I could as well be funding his alcohol purchase. Even if I were to buy groceries and have them delivered to his home, I am again freeing up his own money for booze. Worse yet, what if my neighbor actually builds bombs in his basement which he frequently lobs over the fence and destroys parts of my house? Surely, giving him grocery money out of misplaced pity is the same as my paying him for his bombs which he uses against me.
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Absolute corruption and absolute power

Just a few weeks ago, we learnt that the KGB poured cash into the pockets Indian communist leaders and handsomely bribed the leaders of the Congress Party which was then under the control of Indira Gandhi. This past week we learn from UN sponsored investigation that Natwar Singh and the same Congress Party led by Sonia Gandhi has been bribed rather handsomely by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussain.

Is the Congress Party corrupt? It is like asking, is the Pope Catholic? Or asking, is Bill Gates rich? Or the more earthy question, does a bear shit in the woods?

The corruption of the Congress Party is not a new thing, however. In 1938, Sri Aurobindo wrote:

All this [referring to certain dishonest financial practices] promises a bad look-out when India gets purna Swaraj [full independence]. Mahatma Gandhi is having bad qualms about Congress corruption already.

Power corrupts, as Lord Acton famously observed, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. It is a nice aphorism but in India’s case, it is the corrupt that get power and the absolutely corrupt get absolute power.

I think that people seek political power in India fundamentally because it allows them to gain personally by corrupt means. The politicians are best placed to engage in corrupt practices because the economy is a command and control economy. So it is not that they become powerful and therefore later become corrupt. It is the other way around. It is the already morally and ethically bankrupt that seek power and attain it because they are corrupt. The honest and the good don’t have what it takes to reach the pinnacle of political power. They cannot compete with the criminal class from which the politicians rise to the top of the heap.

The Ownership Society

“It is all about power, isn’t it?” said CJ.

I was on the phone with CJ, discussing a series of columns that the Indian Express newspaper has been running called “India Empowered” which as the newspaper puts it, “if there’s one engine that’s today driving a changing India, it’s empowerment. Empowerment of the individual, the family, the neighborhood, the community – and, hence, the nation.”
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How much is this blog worth?

A bit of Saturday silliness.


My blog is worth $101,617.20.
How much is your blog worth?

http://www.truthlaidbear.com/MyDetails.php?url=http://www.deeshaa.org/&style=javascript

Wikablog–the meta blog

Have you noticed the spanking new brown decal on the right hand side column which says, This blog is listed on W I K A B L O G? Wikablog is a new ultimate Wiki of blogs.

They said it shouldn’t be done, and they were probably right, but here it is anyway: The Wikablog, so called because it’s a big wiki of blogs. We, the Wikablog’s shadowy masters, hope that it will fast become the ultimate wiki of blogs — and why shouldn’t it? All it needs is you. Yes, you. Continue reading “Wikablog–the meta blog”

Random Education Thoughts

I would describe the Mercedes Benz International School in Pune to be the Rolls-Royce of schools in India.

They follow the International Baccalaureate Organization’s curricula. About half their students are Indians and the others are the children of expatriates working in multinational firms in Pune.

It is the kind of school that if you have to ask what the tuition fees are, you probably cannot afford it. With only 167 students, it is as exclusive as it is expensive. The annual fee is mind-boggling—to me at least—over half a million rupees a year. The top fees is Rs 5.7 lakhs ( approximately, US$ 13,000) and the one-time fixed cost is Rs 3 lakhs.
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