Lee Kuan Yew (1923 – 2015) was the 1st prime minister of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. In the very short list of public figures I admire, LKY stands at the very top.
Though he led a very tiny city-state (he liked to say that Singapore was only 224 square miles at low tide) his ideas had an impact on the world at large. He guided Deng Xiaoping formulate post-Mao China’s policies and therefore helped lift many hundreds of millions of people out of dire poverty.
I never get sentimental at the passing of public figures. In fact, I quietly celebrate the passing of most world leaders because they end up doing more harm than good. It comes naturally to me since I am a sworn enemy of the state. But I could not help becoming misty-eyed at LKY’s passing in March 2015.
Nobody is perfect but LKY was the least flawed of them all. He had the wisdom of a Confucian master, the grasp of realpolitik of a Machiavelli, the knowledge of history of a Gibbon, the understanding of economics of a Ricardo. I could go on but I am not skilled enough to express how much I admire LKY. Continue reading “Lee Kuan Yew at the Kennedy School”
Is Albert even a real German name, I wonder. Sounds English to me. Like the name of a character in a Wodehouse novel. Einstein should have had a good German first name. I know Germans with authentic German names — Karl, Ludwig, Hermann, Amadeus, Bodo, Arnold, Dieter, Konrad, Dagmar.
The US has this weird convention of writing dates as MM/DD instead of the DD/MM which the rest of the world follows. So today is 3/14 in the US but it is 14/3 elsewhere. One gets used to it, just like you get used to flicking switches up to turn them on, whereas (say, in India) switches are turned on by flicking them down. Fortunately, we do drive on the right side of the road, both literally and figuratively.
The internet reveals to me more than anything else how little I know about the world compared to how much others know. And how intelligent, wise, wealthy, famous, accomplished, and spectacularly talented some others are. In short, granted that I learn a lot through the internet, the unfortunate side-effect is that it gives me an inferiority complex.
Gandhi matters enormously and he is rightly considered the “Father of the Nation.” That of course means that Gandhi is to a very large degree responsible for what India became (or failed to become) after India’s independence from the British raj.
The great big game of life has a surprising counterpart in a cellular automata developed by John Conway in the 1960’s. It’s called “Game of Life.”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 