Category: Random Draws

Following up on the post “The False Bottom of the Pyramid” thanks to Raja Sekhar Malapati once again for the responses of Prahalad and Hammond to Karnani’s critique of the Bottom of the Pyramid propostion.

OM Shri Ganeshaya Namaha!

Of the 330 million gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, my favorite is Ganesh, the Lord of the Ganas. He is Vighneshwara, the Remover of Obstacles. The story goes that Shiva, the great god, had challenged Ganesh and his brother Kartik to go around the universe three times. While Kartik took off in great haste on his peacock to complete the task, Ganesh walked his portly figure around his parents, Shiva and Parvati, and declared that he had accomplished the task as his parents were the totality of the universe. Shiva was quite pleased at Ganesh’s strategy and granted that Ganesh will be invoked before the invocation of any other gods when anyone embarks on any task. Continue reading “Happy Ganesh Chaturthi”

A particular instance of the general statement that there is no such thing as a free lunch is “There is no such thing as a free textbook.”

This line of thinking was provoked by an article titled “Ads Coming to Textbooks” (thanks to Rohit Malik) which reports that a publisher, Freeload Press, is trying to break into the $6 billion annual US textbook market by offering free PDF downloads of books which have embedded ads.

Ads supported free textbooks make sense only in specific instances and these do not include the particular instance of Indian education. Continue reading ““Free” Textbooks? Not really.”

Hi from Sydney, Australia!

Got here on August 1st after a long and uninteresting flight from Mumbai via Bangkok. Sydney was deliciously cold when I arrived that night. The first two days were sunny but today it is raining. I am glad that I did not go to the US which is suffering from a serious heat wave. After the summer in India, it would have been silly of me to go to the next hot spot.

So for the next few weeks, I will work from Sydney. The last time I was here, exactly three years ago, I had traveled from San Francisco. Spent a week here then. Now I will be here longer and call it home for a bit. Being essentially homeless, whereever I unpack my suitcase is home for me. As they say in Hindi, dhobi ka kutta, na ghar ka, na ghat ka. 🙂 I am reminded of the words from a song by Neil Diamond which expresses the same sentiment:

LA’s fine, sunshine most of the time
And the feeling is laid back
Palm trees grow, rents are low
But you know what I keep thinking about?
Making my way back.
I’m New York city born and raised
Nowadays I’m lost between two shores
LA’s fine but it ain’t home
New York’s home but
It ain’t mine no more . . .
I am, I said . . .

I expect to get some serious thinking and quality work done here. I may throw in some site-seeing but for the most part, I will make some real progress on work. So until the next time, be well, do good work and keep in touch.

The other day an old school friend of mine Ajay (not his real name) came to meet me when I was visiting Nagpur. Talk came around to how his son was doing. Ajay said that the kid was doing well, finally.

“Why,” I asked, “what was the matter?”

“He was not doing well at all in his studies. He was not able to focus on his school work. His confidence level was low and I was really worried about his grades. You know, his board exams are right around the corner.” Continue reading “Wonders will never cease”

Words can never describe the sheer lunacy of the response. Hence the cartoon. Thanks, India-Forum.com, for the straight talk.

So I am off today to one of my alma maters. IIT Kanpur where I studied computer science a life-time ago.

I am contributing to a volume called “India Infrastructure Report” which will be published later this year by Oxford Univ Press. This year the focus is on rural infrastructure. I am going to IIT Kanpur to be at the writers’ workshop where we will sit and review the first draft of all the contributors.

My contribution is simple. RISC. More about it later.

PS: Getting to IIT Kanpur is hard. Flights from Mumbai to Delhi, then Delhi to Lucknow, and then a car ride from Lucknow to Kalyanpur where IIT Kanpur is located. Wish me luck since the security will no doubt put me on edge.

Public Radio International (PRI) program “Open Source with Christopher Lydon” of July 19th is called “A Class Profile of India“. The guests on the show were Pankaj Mishra, Suketu Mehta, and yours truly.

India, according to Messers M&M, is a mess.

And it appears that the mess can be traced to the problem that there is a segment of the population which is doing absolutely fabulously and there is a huge segment of the population which is absolutely miserable. And the outcome of this disparity between the standards of living of these two classes: It is terrorism.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, economic disparity in India is to blame for the bombs that killed 207 commuters and maimed over a thousand.

Not just that, according to Mr Mishra, Hindus are to blame for the 1993 terrorism in India and indeed all terrorism. Hindus systematically kill Muslims and then there is a reaction in which “militants” bomb innocent people. The words “pogrom” is used often. Worse, it appears only the number of Muslims killed matter and just to drive home the point, the numbers are tripled.

Mr Mishra has a sturdy disdain for numbers and data, when it does not suit his thesis. So he is very happy to use numbers such as “400 million live on less than 1 dollar a day” but he dismisses data on the real growth in per capita income across the board (though the upper income deciles have gained more than the gain to the lower deciles) as just a lot of “fiddling with numbers.”

The show was slanted to tar India with a very wide brush. Mishra had his line pat. He deliberately mis-characterized Islamic terrorism acts as those arising from economic injustice. What his thesis essentially boils down to is that the poor are rebelling against the rich and that is what explains the terrorism of 11th July.

If I were a poor person in India, I would be insulted and offended by his thesis. The poor do have a right to rebel against injustice but Mishra is not doing them a favor by accusing them of using terrorism and wholesale murder to make their case.

I have more to say but for now I am too incensed to write coherently.

Yes, one does profit from terrorism. If you can spin terrorists bombs as acts of justice against an oppressive Hindu majority, you get invited to write op-eds and appear on talk shows in the US and other rich countries.