Category: Random Draws

[Edit note: This piece was written & published elsewhere in Oct 2013. The Indian political scene has changed somewhat since then, thankfully under the leadership of Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi but evidently not enough. True that Rahul Gandhi is no longer relevant but clearly sleazy politicians like Kejriwal and his minions are successful in bamboozling the public in Delhi. This piece is, unfortunately, still relevant.]

If the people of the village, in the best traditions of their hallowed democratic processes, elect the village idiot as the King and Supreme Ruler of the village, it is hard for me to bring myself to find fault with the village idiot. It’s not the idiot’s fault that nature dealt him a lousy hand in the random genetic draw of life. He’s a congenital idiot and made no demands on being recognized as a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Based on that principle, I indicted American voters for electing some of their recent presidents, a few more than once. I can see no reason for not applying that principle to India.
Continue reading “The Great Indian Bamboozle has to Stop”

Kiran Bedi is funny. Unintentionally of course. Here’s why. (Click on the image below to get to the tweet.)

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So 2400 hours, instead of just 24 hours? Is that the total number of hours that Delhi will have electricity? And if so, total for how many years?

That reminds me of one of Steven Wrights jokes.

I went down the street to the 24-hour grocery. When I got there, the guy was locking the front door. I said, ‘Hey, the sign says you’re open 24 hours.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not in a row.’

I like his humor. He points out the obvious. For example, “Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.” Or, “It doesn’t matter what temperature the room is, it’s always room temperature.” More of his insanity here.

India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.
— Will Durant
(1885-1981) American writer, historian, philosopher.

The first bit of news I got today through twitter was that Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister of the Islamic State of Pakistan had declared a day of national mourning and ordered the Pakistani flag to be flown at half mast because the king of Saudi Arabia died. Typical, I said to myself. A beggar state like Pakistan has to acknowledge the debt it owes to its benefactor state. Pakistan gets life-support from the Saudis. And support for its death-dealing terrorism that it routinely directs at India. It has to kowtow, beg, grovel, bow and scrape before its masters. And as one would expect, now it has to ostentatiously beat its breast and loudly weep like a penniless widow. Self-respect is a luxury that beggars cannot afford. Too many Pakistanis are wannabe Arabs. I felt sorry for Pakistan and I admit that I gloated a little bit. It would never happen in India, I told myself.
Continue reading “A Day of Shame and National Mourning for India”

I was talking today to a friend in Boston who was recently in India for the Pravasi Bharatiya Divas (Non-resident Indian Day) in Gandhinagar. He reported that it was the worst managed PBD he’d seen in his 15 years of attending the event. Among his other observations, he noted that some of the states are trying their best to attract investment from within and outside India. But, he said, he was distressed to see how poorly his ancestral state of West Bengal was doing. Nothing at all is happening there and it appears to be in terminal decline. I said that that’s too bad but I could have told you that decades ago. Have you been following the news about Venezuela, I asked. No, he replied. I pointed him to a Jan 13th Forbes article: The Impending Collapse Of Venezuela.
Continue reading “Socialism Works its Wonders in Venezuela — also in West Bengal”

I have always been suspicious of what has become almost conventional wisdom that there is something called the “wisdom of the crowd.” It is generally interpreted to mean that the collective somehow knows what is not knowable by any individual. That notion is one of the motivating factors that recommends democracy to some. I disagree: I think the crowd collectively does not “know” since the act of knowing applies to individuals and not to abstract collectives. (Actually, it is superfluous to write “abstract collectives” since there are no other kinds of collectives; all collectives are abstractions.) Each individual knows something but those particularized “knowings” cannot be meaningfully aggregated to something that can be called the “knowledge of the crowds” or some such.
Continue reading “The Wisdom of the Crowd”

It takes a long time and sustained effort to learn a subject, to understand the basics, to appreciate its complexity. At some time in this often arduous journey one usually arrives at the point where one begins to understand the immensity of the subject and how ignorant one is about it. Expertise is accompanied with an acceptance that one is now in full view of one’s ignorance. No one is as acutely aware of his own ignorance as the expert.
Continue reading “On Knowing Enough to Know that You Don’t Know”

So the new game in town is called “NITI Ayog” — National Institution for Transforming India — and the news is that Prof Arvind Panagariya will be appointed as the vice-chairman of the institution, as the Hindustan Times reports. That “Niti” bit may sound familiar to some who have been following this blog. If you recall, my book of 2011 is titled “Transforming India” and in 2012, my colleague and I decided that “New Initiatives for Transforming India” or NITI would be a good word to use for all our initiatives related to . . . wait for it . . . transforming India. Why? Because in Sanskrit (and so in Hindi and Bengali), Niti (or नीति in Devanagri) means variously “morality, policy, ethics, the right path” etc. Our goal was to figure out how to bring about — and help in — the transformation of India. We wanted India’s transformation and continue to do so. “NITI Central” was one of those initiatives.

So I am quite tickled to note that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has relabeled the old Planning Commission as the “National Institution for Transforming India”. It is the old planning commission with a new name. Of course, you all know how I feel about central planning and how wonderful it is for human welfare. Anyway, here’s wishing NITI Ayog the best and hoping that it lives up to its meaning.

Correction: I had mistakenly believed that NITI Ayog was “New Institution for Transforming India” but I was corrected (hat tip Anup) that it was actually “National Institution for Transforming India.” I regret the error (as they say in the MSM.)

A few days ago, the following tweet was retweeted approvingly by many Indians, no doubt out of a sense pride and patriotism. “Look, look,” they seemed to say, “Look, how great India was. In 1870, India’s GDP was higher than UK, US, Russia, Germany, France and Italy. In fact, India’s GDP was over four times that of Italy.”

Continue reading “Will India Recover?”

Well here we are, the end of 2014 CE. It has been an interesting year, all things considered. Nothing of any great important happened to me on the personal front. On a scale stretching between happiness and unhappiness, I was somewhere marked “contented.” I learned a great many things of value and forgot a good deal of what needed to be let go.
Continue reading “End of 2014”

I make no secret of the fact that I believe Shri Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, is an honest, intelligent, dedicated, sincere and diligent man. I admire him immensely for who he is and what he has accomplished over his many decades as a politician. The set P = {p | famous politician p is honest, intelligent, dedicated, sincere, diligent} is small but non-empty. For all I know, the set P is exhaustively enumerated as P = {Narendra Modi, Arun Shourie}. But at the very least, I am certain that {Narendra Modi, Arun Shourie} ⊂ P. I indulge myself in the frivolity of using set-theoretic notations at the start of this piece only because I have a few serious points to make.
Continue reading “Mr Modi goes to Washington”