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“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune . . .” Shakespeare used a sailing metaphor of tides for what in modern terminology we call “a window of opportunity” or ” an inflection point”. There are inflection points in the affairs of countries too.

India has had a number of those. One was in 1947. Then came another when Nehru died (and not a day too soon.) Then another when Indira Gandhi lost the elections following the imposition of “Emergency” and assuming dictatorial powers. Then another when she paid for her misadventures in Punjab by being shot by her bodyguards. Then another when her son Rajiv was killed by a suicide bomber. All of them were inflection points, amazing opportunities for India to change tack. All were not taken at the flood and India continued to be bound in shallows and miseries.
Continue reading “Squandering India’s Greatest Opportunity”

Pardon my French but Sri Sri Ravi Shankar is an asshole. He sent his running-dog lawyers to shut down criticism. I will write about that in a bit.

Well, what do you know? Once again Indian American kids have won the spelling bee. We’ll come to that in a bit. But first, here’s Akash Vukoti of San Angelo TX, just six years old and was the youngest of 280 contestants of the 2016 Scripps National Spelling Bee finals. He’s been at it since he was 2 years old. He’s pretty amazing. Watch this short video of him on a sneak peak of the NBC primetime show, “Little Big Shots,” which premiered in March. The little guy is full of beans and is an absolute delight.
Continue reading “Cornering the market for spelling bee championship”

Mr Katju, who is a retired supreme court judge, provided his insights into “abolishing unemployment in India” on social media yesterday. According to him, Soviet Russia solved that problem by “raising the purchasing power of the masses, and thereby rapidly expanding the economy and consequently abolishing unemployment.”

Mr Katju explains in subsequent comments how the scheme is supposed to work. It’s about reducing prices to increase “purchasing power”, he says. I don’t think he understands what prices or purchasing power means.

I have appended at the end of the post a few screen captures of Mr Katju’s submission to facebook and a couple of comments from his readers.

Mr Katju notes the steps the Soviet government took included the steady lowering of commodity prices, stepping up production, and the creation of jobs that abolished unemployment. He further notes that while the US was suffering the Great Depression of 1929, the Soviet economy was “rapidly expanding.” While not endorsing the Soviet method for India, he says that India should do something so “we can raise the purchasing power of the Indian masses and thereby rapidly expand the Indian economy, which is the only way of abolishing unemployment in India.”

He ends by writing, “The central point, and therefore the main problem before India, is how to raise the purchasing power of the masses? Do we follow the method of socialist countries, or some other method?” Continue reading “Mr Katju, here be dragons”

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle;
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel;
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.

Trump is the monstrous crow, as black as a tar-barrel. He will be good for the US. The system needs a bit of shaking up. The Republicans and the Democrats — Tweeledum and Tweeledee — have messed it up with their kabuki. Their staged battles, costumes, flying through the air tricks, etc., is highly entertaining. The details of the stage design are a perfect metaphor for the existing political setup.

A disruption will dislodge the status quo and perhaps push the moribund system to a different (and likely better) equilibrium. Granted that Trump is no visionary leader with wisdom oozing out of him. But he is the mild heart attack that jolts a person to take a serious look at his life and turn things around, if I may introduce another metaphor.

A friend recently quoted SS Ravi Shankar’s profound proclamation. It goes:

“There are people who are married and unhappy and there are people who are unmarried and unhappy. Then there are people who are married and happy and there are people who are unmarried and happy. You better be in the second category. Whether you are married or not, if you are happy, if you are centered, then you are close to enlightenment.”

I read it and I am forced to agree with the German historian Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759 – 1805) that against stupidity, even the gods struggle in vain. We mere mortals are powerless to resist such inanities.

On April 12th, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. The first human space flight lasted 108 minutes. He became an instant hero, as is right since it was an extremely risky voyage and he could have ended up dead. There are many unsung heroes in any such venture. I feel most for the person who was the chief designer of the space vehicle — Sergey Korolev (1907 -1966). Because of the secrecy of the Cold War, he worked without any recognition. The video below is about Gagarin’s historic flight. It recognizes the work of Korolev. Deep respect to both the heroes of the Soviet Union.

I find it remarkable how talented the people of the erstwhile Soviet Union were. Trouble was that even talent could not overcome the self-imposed handicap of communism. Remember that the Soviet Union was not a very large union — only around 200 million people around 1960. They were very successful in science and technology. But communism/socialism forges very heavy chains. Without freedom, even talented people fail. Slavery is always harmful and freedom always the key to prosperity. Too bad India continues to labor under socialist slavery.

Our descriptions of reality are necessarily based on our perception of reality. But our descriptions are not what reality is because what we can perceive given our limited faculties cannot be comprehensive or even undistorted. The world appears magical but magic does not explain the world, if and when we do attempt to explain the world. Myriad explanations have been advanced. Each points to a limited aspect of that which lies beneath it all. Looking from each of those varied viewpoints and somehow integrating them may help us approach a better appreciation of reality.

Decades ago during my engineering undergraduate days, I had read a few of Carlos Castaneda’s books about a Yaqui shaman named don Juan Matus from Sonora, Mexico. Castenada was an anthropology student at University of California at Los Angeles in the 1960s. He wrote a book The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and submitted it as his master’s thesis. It was published by the University of California Press in 1968.
Continue reading “A Path with a Heart”

The wiki page about virus says that it “is a small infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of other organisms. Viruses can infect all types of life forms . . .” Ideas are analogous to viruses because they too are infectious agents that replicate in living brains. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to mean a unit of idea that can infect a brain and get transmitted to other brains. Viruses are responsible for genetic diversity through horizontal gene transfer. Analogously, ideas are responsible for diversity of human mentality.

Viruses of biological kind are generally bad for the organism, just like the software variety are bad for computers. There are no good viruses. In contrast, ideas come in two principle varieties: the benevolent and the malevolent. The good kind leads to overall benefits, both to the individual with the idea and to the collective of individuals that have that idea. The malevolent kind inflicts great harm but they eventually die out. There are two pathways. One, they just destroy the host collective, thus resulting in the extinction of the bad idea. Or, two, they mutate into a less malevolent form that does not kill the host, or even into a benevolent idea that benefits the host. Good ideas are forever and bad ideas are never forever.
Continue reading “Viruses, Ideas and their Life Expectancy”

The transition from an agrarian to an industrial society was the great challenge that faced economies before. Much attention was paid on ways to make the transition. Of the various models of development (such as export-led growth, import-substitution industrialization, and others) used it is instructive to recall one called agricultural development led industrialization, or ADLI.

ADLI recognized that cost-reducing technological change increased agricultural productivity and therefore increased rural incomes. Increased rural incomes provided a demand boost for manufactured goods both for consumption as well as for use in agricultural production. The increased demand for domestically manufactured goods raised wages which in turn were spent on the consumption of agricultural output. On the labor side of the market, as agricultural productivity increased, labor shifted from the agricultural sector to the manufacturing sector. Thus the industrialization of the population was achieved at pace with the labor transition and was based on increased agricultural productivity attained through the use of appropriate technology.

The lesson from the ADLI model is directly relevant to the question of ICT production and use in the economic growth strategy of a large country such as India. The ICT sector in India is very small compared to the rest of the economy, as in any other developing country. While IT exports will only lead to direct gains only for the IT sector, far more gains can be realized through the use of IT in the non-ICT sector and through the production of IT for domestic consumption. The use of IT in the non-IT sector will increase productivity leading to higher incomes and greater demand for consumption goods which will increase employment, and so on.