Back in Pune

Being lost is worth the coming home, as Neil Diamond observed in his song “Stones” many many years ago. Traveling to Delhi and Patna was worth the leaving behind of those places, I feel. Now I am back in Pune, the weather is awesome, and I am fully charged up with all sorts of interesting tales to tell. Well, if not to tell, at least to contemplate at leisure since for the past ten days I have been extremely busy. For every hour of observing I do, it takes me many hours of reflection to fully understand what I need to learn. This is not just a thinly-veiled attempt at justifying why I have not been blogging, mind you. I am sure that if you are a regular, you too are grateful for the break.

View from my room in Magarpatta So now the weather. Pune must be centrally airconditioned. At 5 pm, it is about 25 degrees Celcius — there is a gentle breeze blowing under an overcast sky. Here’s the view from out the window (11th floor).

Will be back with a real post real soon.

Comment Policy

Comments on this blog are not moderated. But abusive comments are out of bounds as they are not part of civilized discourse. I regret that I will, in the extreme case, ban anyone from commenting if he or she repeatedly demonstrates that he or she is incapable of disagreeing without being disagreeable.

Wireless Broadband in Singapore

Singapore gets it. I am at the Funan Center, a shopping center, for lunch. Besides lunch, I also get to check mail on the wireless broadband provided gratis by the city. I flipped open my laptop, connected to wireless@sg and here I am blogging away.

The availability of public goods increases the utility of private goods. It is also true that one has to sometimes compensate for the lack of public goods by a greater investment in private goods. Places like Singapore are to some extent rich because the efficiency of private goods is high because public goods are efficiently and optimally provided.

This place is good.

Hi from Singapore

Hi from Singaore, one of my favorite cities. I am writing this from the Overseas Family School (OFS) during a break in my meeting with David Perry, the man who founded OFS.

Ah, yes, the weather. The regular afternoon downpour occurred on schedule around 3:30 PM. It rained cats and dogs. David says that these days they have monsoons round the year. Climate change is definitely evident in Singapore. We did not get into whether it is anthropogenic climate change or not.

What I like about Singapore is that the city is neat and clean. Some say that it is sterile. Maybe so. But I would take sterile over disease any day of the week. Of course, fertile trumps sterile. I am convinced that there is a way to get to fertile from sterile. I think that the transition from disease to fertile has to go through the sterile phase. Cleaning up is not a very attractive job but at some point one has to do it.

Laters.

Visiting Singapore

I am going to be in Singapore next week for a few days on work. Arrive Singapore Monday 9th early morning and leave on the evening of 12th.

I have given instructions to the monkeys with typewriters in the basement to carry on with their random typing as always. Sufficient bananas and peanuts has also been stocked. So I don’t think there will be any disruption in the output of this blog. You may have noticed that of late, the output of the monkeys has gone up. That is because better management techniques have been instituted in the basement. Think more frequent whipping.

Indibloggies 2006

Competitions are good. Spoken like a true market economist. Not just economists but biologists would also proclaim the benefits of competition. After all, the great diversity of our living world is the result of intense competition among the gene carriers or living entities. And the great diversity of human artifacts we enjoy is the result of intense competition among buyers and sellers of stuff in the marketplace. So it is great to have the blog competition called the “Indibloggies.
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Administrivia: Deleted Comments

If you have recently commented and have not seen it, it is because the last 15 comments were deleted by mistake. Do re-submit the comment if you don’t mind. The managment sincerely regrets the trouble. Those responsible for the mistake will be fired.

Thank you.

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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