Today’s Mint has an opinion piece by yours truly which they titled “India needs a good 3G order.” I confess that I don’t know what that title means. Whatever that means, here is the full text of the piece below the fold.
Continue reading “On the proposed spectrum auction for 3G services”
Category: About
The Tyranny of Faith
One can’t seem to get away from the devastating effects of faith – especially monotheistic religious faith – around the world.
Blind faith can justify anything. If a man believes in a different god, or even if he uses a different ritual for worshiping the same god, blind faith can decree that he should die–on the cross, at the stake, skewered on a Crusader’s sword, shot in a Beirut street, or blown up in a bar in Belfast. Memes for blind faith have their own ruthless ways of propagating themselves. This is true of patriotic and political as well as religious blind faith.
Hi from ISB Hyderabad
Sunday was a day of travel for me. It took me 14 hours to get from Pune to Hyderabad, door to door. I had a 3 PM flight to Hyderabad out of Mumbai. Even though I left home at 8 AM, I could not reach Mumbai airport in time. The Lonvala hills had received a lot of rain with the result that there was a landslide which disabled a portion of the Pune-Mumbai expressway. I had to buy another ticket for a 7 PM flight on the airlines formerly known as Indian Airlines and later renamed “Indian” and now known as Air India.
I landed at 9 PM and took a cab to Gachibowli — about 40 kms from the new Hyderabad airport — where ISB is located. The cab ride came to Rs 620. Wow!
Anyway, today was a busy day. I sat in on two classes at ISB. I wanted to get a feel for how they teach around here. I had a couple of long sessions discussing a proposed “Institute for Urbanization” with my host Dhaval. Later in the evening, a group of students wanted to have an informal chat with me. I had a great time discussing India with a bunch of seriously motivated business school types.
Tomorrow more meetings are lined up. So until we meet again and the case is sol-ved, take care.
Open Thread — Your turn
This is an open thread. Say what you will. In case you need a login to comment, email me atanudey at gmail and I will add your selected user name.
Profiting from Education
My contribution to the August issue of Pragati. I am reproducing the piece here below the fold, for the record. Regulars to this blog pretty much know my position on what needs to be done on education. Still you may find something of use.
Continue reading “Profiting from Education”
Pragati Aug 2008: Should India Send Troops to Afghanistan
Urbanization and Development of India
The following is an article by me that appeared in ISB’s in-house magazine insight June 2008 issue.
There is a definite positive relationship between the size of the habitation and the productivity of the population.”
The full article is below.
Continue reading “Urbanization and Development of India”
Plagiarism on blogs
The bad news is that it is easy enough to get a free blog (wordpress, blogger, blogspot, etc) and it is easy enough to cut and paste stuff to the blog. The good news is that if inexpertly done, plagiarism is easily noticed.
Here’s a case in point. This post on DKSHAMLI’S BLOG (July 5th, 2008) is an exact copy of my post titled “Unfair and Unlovely” (April 20th, 2007). This is done without the slightest nod to the original. Nowhere on the dkshamli blog is there any indication that it was not written by dkshamli.
Not very nice. A real shame.
Update: (6 PM IST 22nd July) I had reported the matter to WordPress.com. I got an email from tosreports@wordpress.com saying, “The blog has been deactivated, and the user will be forced to get in touch with us and remove the post.“
India’s Energy Challenge
I have a piece in today’s livemint.com on India’s Energy Challenge. The money quote is this:
The advanced industrialized economies were lucky to have had their development fuelled by cheap fossil energy. Today’s developing economies have a much tougher challenge. It was a very short window of opportunity which opened just about 150 years ago and is likely to close in the next 40 years, by when the known reserves will be depleted at current levels of consumption.
All told, 200 years is a very brief interlude considering thousands of years of human civilization and hopefully hundreds of thousands of years yet to come. At some time in the distant future, they will look back and remark that the age of fossil fuel was a short inflection point, a point at which humanity passed through the bottleneck of dependency on oil from the ground. Before that point, humanity’s primary source of energy was the sun, and so it will be after that point.
The full article is below the fold. Continue reading “India’s Energy Challenge”
Off to Chennai
I have been busy in meetings in Delhi and could not find time to blog. Waiting at the New Delhi airport for an Indian flight to Chennai, which is delayed an hour. Will keep in touch later.
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 