Category: About

Off to Singapore

As it happens, I am off to Singapore for a few days. Blogging, therefore, will be suspended. Yeah, yeah, I know that I am not the most prolific of bloggers and stopping for extended periods of time is par for the course. Yet, courtesy demands that I alert you about this hiatus.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

PS: If you want to visit the archives, may I suggest this one on the privatization of public sector units and the followup posts on “Wrong-headed policies condemn millions to misery,” and the “Government’s Anti-Midas Touch“.

Hyderabad

Just for the record, I will be traveling to Hyderabad for the next couple of days and will not have the opportunity to write and respond to the comments on my recent posts.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

The Lights to Navigate By

In a comment to the post on political parties launched by entrepreneurs, “Seven Times Six” wrote:

I don’t think renunciation and self-sacrifice is necessary for a nation to prosper. What is required is the exact opposite — a strong avarice and ambition to promote one’s well-being.
Continue reading “The Lights to Navigate By”

Administrivia: Badly formatted blog

If you are reading this site using IE (Intentionally Evil Internet Explorer), you would find this blog badly formatted. May I suggest using Firefox? For whatever the content is worth, at least the form would be more attactive than with IE.

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.”
Continue reading “The Ownership Society”

The Future of Energy

“Fossil fuel is dead,” declared CJ.

CJ likes to make those kinds of superficially profound statements. We were meeting after a long time. I was in Delhi for a conference and caught up with CJ at the Taj Mansingh Hotel coffee shop. We were discussing the spike in the gas prices.

“Dead or not, seventy dollars a barrel for crude was bad news for India considering that India imports about half of its energy needs. Will slow down the economy a bit, won’t it?” I said.
Continue reading “The Future of Energy”

Reasoning Economically

Or What Economists Do

What the heck do economists do is a question that does not baffle many people because they “know” what economists do. I know it did not baffle me. I was not taught economics in high school, and had an entirely forgettable few lectures ostensibly on economics sometime during my undergraduate in engineering. Given this ignorance, I had a vague notion that economics had something to do with money. I think I conflated economists with finance people and accountants. But I was not baffled because I was too ignorant. Continue reading “Reasoning Economically”

Sept 11: The Looking Glass War

Some events have the power to imprint themselves on one’s memory. One morning about four years ago, my roomie Wayne knocked on the door at the ungodly hour of 6 AM to say “you may want to watch this.” In the living room, the TV was on. His mother had called from the east coast to tell him to turn on the TV. From then on to about 2 PM I stood transfixed watching the towers fall down. If I hadn’t had to teach that afternoon, I would have been there the whole day.

A few days later I wrote a piece for Tehelka (not available anymore, I notice) which I call the Looking Glass War. Not too bad even though I say so myself. 🙂

Where do they come from?

A few days ago, I plugged in a gizmo to this blog which keeps track of where the visitors of this blog come from. Here is the Clustermap for this site. Currently the site lists about 2800 visits in the last 5 days.

I am surprised to note that the US counts for the largest number of visitors to this blog. One solitary dot (1-9 visitors) for Canada; none from Mexico (Carlos Munos, I thought that you would visit your old officemate’s blog occassionally); a few dozen from the South American continent; moving east across the Atlantic, the UK and the western European countries are well represented (hi Marita, Ville, Courtenay, Alexis, …); the whole of Africa has a few dozens, which I find surprisingly high; more people from the Middle east visit than from Africa; I note a few Pakistani visitors even; then comes India, which I guess accounts for about 20 percent of the visitors — this I find really surprising because I thought visitors from India would outnumber others, c’est la vie; then the far east sends a few, including some from China; I note Singapore especially; moving east and south, I note that Australia and New Zealand (hi Gordon) send a few.

Well, that is about it. There was no real point to this post. Just a bit of curiosity.

Update: Navin says he is the big dot in London. Hi Navin. Jyoti says she is the BD in Texas. Hi Jyoti.

Chalo Dilli

Not that you would notice, of course, given my sporadic blogging in general, but I thought that I should let you know that I will most likely not be posting stuff for a few days. So if you land here and find nothing new, I suggest you don’t go away without checking some of the archives.

Where, you may ask, am I going? I am off to London to see the Queen. Just kidding. I am off to New Delhi to attend the “Annual Conference of the HUDCO Chair Institutes” Sept 8-9th. The topic is “Cities: Engines of Rural Development.”

You may know of my abiding interest in rural development. I have written a concept paper on RISC–Rural Infrastructure & Services Commons. It is rather long — about 40 pages. So I would not recommend it as casual reading.

Of late there has been some action on RISC. Vinod Khosla guest-edited a recent issue of The Economic Times and he mentioned RISC in it. Then I got to hear that he spoke about RISC to the Planning Commission. And now I am going to be talking to a bunch of academics (those are the Chairs of HUDCO institutes) and some government bureaucrats (I guess from rural development departments and such.)

It has been a while since I was in Delhi. Last time in mid-February, I spent a few days meeting with people in connection with my interest in education. That is my day job–think about enabling education. My idea is to use the power tools of information and communications technologies (ICT) to make education more effective and efficient. Technology, as any economist will tell you, is labor substituting. Whenever a factor of production is expensive (labor for instance), you substitute it with a less expensive factor (capital for instance.) Since teaching labor is very expensive in India, use technology which is cheap these days.

Crazy, I hear the cry go out. How in the name of god almighty is teaching labor expensive in India? The fact is that good quality teachers are extremely–let me repeat that–extremely scarce. Scarcity implies high price. Therefore the cost of high quality teachers is prohibitive. We cannot afford high quality teachers because they are a luxury. Not just that, even if we had all the money, there is an acute shortage of teachers required. We need millions of teachers. We simply don’t have them. Hence my insistence that we have to find a substitute for good teachers and that happens to be the tools that ICT provides very inexpensively.

That’s it for now.