Category: Random Draws

The Times of India recently came up an idea that essentially amounts to this: if Indians and Pakistanis have a love-fest, there will be no war. That reminded me of this piece of dialog from Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder: Continue reading “TOI’s Cunning “Aman ki Asha” Plan”

Quick question: In the near future, what is that one thing that the government of India will allow the people living within the borders of India to do without having the unique ID number? Think for a bit. I know it is hard to imagine an action you would be free to do without that number. You will need that number to get anything done at all. The government is working hard towards making it impossible for its citizens (and even non-citizens living in India) to move a finger without the express consent of the government. But I kid you not, there is one thing that you will be able to, as before, without having that unique ID. Continue reading “For everything else, you must have the unique ID.”

One way to ensure impoverishment in the future is to recklessly eat the seed corn. Practically everything that is good about the US comes from its awesome higher education system. It is arguably the world’s best. One indicator is the number of Nobel prizes it gets each year. Just this year, of the 12 people who shared the five (I am ignoring the peace prize joke) prizes, 10 are Americans. But how long will this last? Continue reading “Eating the Seed Corn”

Go read the story of Babar Ali, a 16-year old kid who runs a school in his village in West Bengal. [link thanks to Vipin Veetil.]

Continue reading “And we all sang dirges in the dark the day satire died”

This morning the Nobel Peace Prize committee were woken up by a call from the Ig Nobel Prize committee saying, “Congratulations! you have won!” (The Ig Noble prize people have just gone out of business — they cannot parody the Nobel Prize any more.)

The Nobel Peace Prize has become the Nobel Joke Prize. And not a very funny joke either. Not funny at all when in 1973 they gave it to Kissinger, a man who should have been tried for war crimes. Or maybe it should be called the Nobel Politicized Prize. Seriously, there’s something rotten in this sort of shameless pandering. Timeonline.co.uk calls it a “mockery of the Nobel peace prize” and writes, “Rarely has an award had such an obvious political and partisan intent. . . the prize risks looking preposterous in its claims, patronising in its intentions and demeaning in its attempt to build up a man who has barely begun his period in office, let alone achieved any tangible outcome for peace. . . There is a further irony in offering a peace prize to a president whose principal preoccupation at the moment is when and how to expand the war in Afghanistan.”

What’s destroying the US is most likely this: government grown so big that its insatiable appetite devours the society that created it. Watching the US go down “the road to serfdom,” to use that memorable phrase from Hayek, is scary because what destroys the US can hardly not be expected to destroy weaker countries. Here’s Dan Mitchell arguing forcefully the case for limited government.
Continue reading “What’s Destroying the US?”

In the present issue of Pragati, I argue why bribing the Naxals to surrender will not work. “While the schemes speak of getting the Naxalites to surrender, the only surrendering that is being done is by the government. Financial incentives for surrender will result in an increase in violence.” The article is reproduced below.
Continue reading “Surrendering to the Naxals”