Category: Random Draws

Good riddance. “Those that live by the sword, die by the sword” as Jesus is supposed to have cautioned Peter according to Matthew.

And as they say in India, “Indian government, hai, hai.”

Go read Arun Shourie’s op-ed in today’s Indian Express. I agree with him. I think that passivity in the face of naked aggression is morally wrong. It encourages those who harm society. I have written about that in my post The Unbearable Silliness of Loving One’s Enemies. He touches on that principle.

At another point he mentions that India’s dismal economic growth pushed by socialists had been branded “the Hindu rate of growth.” I call that dismal rate of growth “the Nehru rate of growth.”

The main point is that there is a point beyond which even laid back people attacked needlessly do retaliate and are quite capable of extreme violence. He believes that a tectonic shift has been happening in the Hindu mind for the last 200 years. Go read it all.

The Acorn explains why the US paid big money to Pakistan following a report in the NY Times that “Billions in Aid to Pakistan Was Wasted, Officials Assert” which begins:

After the United States has spent more than $5 billion in a largely failed effort to bolster the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, some American officials now acknowledge that there were too few controls over the money. The strategy to improve the Pakistani military, they said, needs to be completely revamped.

In interviews in Islamabad and Washington, Bush administration and military officials said they believed that much of the American money was not making its way to frontline Pakistani units. Money has been diverted to help finance weapons systems designed to counter India, not Al Qaeda or the Taliban, the officials said, adding that the United States has paid tens of millions of dollars in inflated Pakistani reimbursement claims for fuel, ammunition and other costs.

The Acorn responds: Continue reading “The Great Instrument”

The Acorn remarks (in the context of Narendra Modi’s electoral victory, no doubt) that voters have nothing against an incumbent government that is competent. He says, there is no such thing as anti-incumbency, only anti-incompetency. It is certainly a plausible explanation. But then, how do you explain the continuation of the communists in West Bengal, election after election? They are supremely incompetent and yet keep getting voted back.

I believe the answer is that it is not whether a government fails to deliver that matters — what matters is perception. Perhaps in West Bengal, they don’t even realize that the communists are failing miserably and should be shown the door. Perceptions and expectations matter. Chandrababu Naidu was thrown out by Andhra voters. In some objective sense he was very competent and was succeeding in improving that state. The voters did not perceive that. Their judgment was that he had failed them.

My conclusion: Bongs are trusting and stupid (hey, I am one, ok?) and Gults are impatient and stupid. 🙂

I think it was way back in 1999 that Michael Kelly in an op-ed in the Washington Post had asked fellow journalists, “Why does everyone loathe us so? Because, my little preciouses, we are so loathable. … Reporters like to picture themselves as independent thinkers. In truth, with the exception of 13-year-old girls, there is no social subspecies more slavish to fashion, more terrified of originality and more devoted to group-think.”

It appears to me that the above quote could apply to India–except for that bit about the everyone loathing the Indian press. The 10% or so of the Indians who have access to the press don’t seem to mind the garbage that is fed to them. In any event, whether the larger public perceives them to be loathsome or not, the Indian press is loathsome indeed. And why is it loathsome? Because the ones who constitute the press somehow loathe themselves for being Indians and self-flagellation seems to be their forte. The self-flagellation takes the form of force-feeding the foreign press all that it (the foreign press) wants to believe about India–miserable ignorant uncivilized savages killing peaceful missionaries, wrecking holy mosques with sickening regularity, unchecked xenophobia in questioning a widow’s sacrifice, Hindu fundamentalism gone berserk, ad nauseum.

But there has to be a reason for the loathsome behavior of the press — especially the English language press. I think there is a domestic element and then there is a foreign element. First, the foreign bit. If a journalist writing in English wants to be quoted by foreign publications, then he or she has to appeal to the biases of the foreigners and reinforce their prejudices. Otherwise, the foreign press would not touch it. The more shrill a journalist is in denouncing anything that remotely hints at Indian ethos, culture, or pride, the more likely he or she is to get invited to give talks at US universities and other goodies. The term for this phenomenon is “being a house nigger.”
Continue reading “On Indian Journalism”

Mike Huckabee is a potential Republican nominee for the US presidential elections next November. “Who’s your favorite author?” asked 7-year old Aleya Deatsch. Huckabee said it was Dr Seuss. That surprised her because she thought that someone grownup should be reading at a higher level. Her favorite author she admitted was C. S. Lewis.

Huckabee is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, evidently. Here’s what he said on record: “I think we ought to be out there talking about ways to reduce energy consumption and waste. And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.” [Via Cosmic Variance.]

Perhaps he meant “free of energy waste”. But who knows. Perhaps he is not stupid, only plays stupid so that he can win the approval of the majority of the Republicans. I am told that Lallu Prasad Yadav is a very sharp guy but likes to play the simpleton to appeal to his voter base.

My working hypothesis is that politicians are really reflections of the general characteristic of the population. It is only rarely through some historical accident that someone who is un-representative of the population leads the nation out of its predictable path. In general, leadership is endogenous. It is a depressing hypothesis.

{For an updated version of this post, please see “India is Poor by Choice.” Jun 2012.}

An updated version of this post is available. See “Ideas Dictate the Destiny of Economies“.

The Finance Minister of India, Mr Chidambaram speaks the truth, or at least that is what a certain communal newspaper reports. He was speaking at a TiE event in New Delhi. He said, “This country will hold together only if we give everyone in India a stake in the future of India … We cannot build an inclusive society, unless every institution of governance consciously sheds its biases and prejudices that work for every section of the people.”
Continue reading “Chidambaram Speaks the Truth”

C N R Rao is a “real Bangalorean” and laments that Bangalore has become an awful city in a recent opinion piece in Outlook titled ‘If IT Is Going To Take Away Our Values, Burn Bangalore, Burn IT‘ and the subtitled ‘IT squeezed Bangalore dry, hasn’t given anything in return. The signs are worrying.’

Before Bangalore became an IT city, it was a city full of not just science, he says. “There was more poetry and music here before the IT boom. The city we have created in recent years is rotten—highly polluted, garbage strewn everywhere, including the intellectual garbage dumped on this city by the IT industry.”
Continue reading “IT Industry to Blame”