Category: Random Draws

The price of leaked AIEEE (All India Engineering Entrance Examination) in Uttar Pradesh is reportedly Rs 6 lakhs (around US$13.5k). Around 1.2 million high school students compete for 27,000 seats in a specific set of engineering colleges across India. That’s an admission rate of 2.25 percent. That 2.25 percent explains the price of the leaked exam question papers. The bigger story is worth recounting. It’s a story of shortage, corruption and government control. It’s the story of India, in short.
Continue reading “The Price of Leaked Exam Papers”

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Islamic terrorism started with Osama bin Laden if one were to go by what the US politicians claim and what the media reports. But India has had the unwanted attention of the proselytizing faiths, Islam and Christianity, for centuries hell bent (to use an expression) on converting the infidels into their bloody ideologies. Terrorism is one of the tactics that people motivated by these ideologies have routinely used — although that fact does not get too much play since much of the media (and in many cases the governments of states) is controlled by the institutions founded on those monotheistic faiths. India is perhaps the oldest victim of religious terrorism and it continues to bleed copiously from it even today. India’s civilizational struggle is certainly the longest ongoing war the world has ever suffered — and it goes on only because India is still not totally vanquished. It survives but the prospects are not very good.
Continue reading “Rajiv Malhotra’s book, “Breaking India””

I was reminded of Gun Shy one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite singers, Natalie Merchant — lead singer and songwriter of the band “10,000 Maniacs.” It’s from the album “In My Tribe.” What I find moving about the song is in its lyrics. Have a listen.
Continue reading “Gun Shy”

{Why? Because in the last few months, I bought a big fat LCD tv (Samsung), a network blu-ray player (Samsung), a big fat internet-ready 7.2 receiver (Onkyo), a big fat sub-woofer and other assorted speakers (Polk Audio), and other bits of electronics. TVs and receivers are awesomely complicated these days. Just figuring out what all the receiver can do is going to take a week’s worth of full time work. That’s why.}

In a Foreign Policy magazine article, “More than 1 billion people are hungry in the world“, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo ask what if its really true. It is an extract from their book, “Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty.” The article is long and well worth reading to get an idea of how some people think how some other people behave. Much of that thinking of even superficially wrong but there is a significant part where the thinking is plausible at first glance but wrong nonetheless.
Continue reading “The Poor and their Poverty”

The title of this post echoes the title of Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume “Democracy in America” (1835 and 1840). Inequality in America is the subject of Joseph Stiglitz’ piece in Vanity Fair (May 2011), “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%.” Fittingly, in the concluding bit of the essay, Stiglitz quotes Tocqueville.
Continue reading “Inequality in America”

I know, I know. I am suffering from writers’ block. I wonder if William Shakespeare ever stumbled upon a writer’s block. Probably. Or probably not. Anyway, it’s his birthday today and I am glad that he was born. Or at least those who wrote what is attributed to him were born. Francis Bacon, for instance. Be that as it may, I am sorry that I have been incommunicado. I wish I could use the excuse that I had a visitor from my India office to chaperon around California for the past 10 days. But really, who would buy that? Not you, I am sure. But ’nuff is ’nuff. Let bygones be bygones and get on with this post.
Continue reading “Happy Birthday, Mr William Shakespeare”

Anna Hazare in the context of rural development praised the work of chief ministers Nitish Kumar and — here’s where he slipped up and deviated from the script — Narendra Modi. That’s going to cost him. But Narendrabhai is a master strategist. He promptly — at 5 AM in the morning — wrote an open letter to Anna Hazare.
Continue reading “Anna Hazare Has Painted Himself into a Corner”

Just thought that an old post from over three years ago in Jan 2008 is worth revisiting since it appears that some idiots people in India are waking up finally to the truth of how NREGA causes inflation. “Does the NREGS Cause Inflation?”
Continue reading “Old Story: NREGA Causes Inflation”

How should we live, how should we treat others, and how should we govern our society. Normative questions like those keep philosophers busy. To that extent we are all philosophers. Our society is a reflection of our collective philosophizing on those concerns. So therefore for society to change, our answer to the question — “What’s the right thing to do?” — has to change.
Continue reading “We All Are Worldly Philosophers”