Deepavali Greetings to all sentient beings. May your home be blessed by Lakshmi. For Bengalis especially, may Ma Kali preserve and protect you.
Here’s a prayer for Diwali.
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Nehru was a Mean-spirited Man
Today, Oct 31st, is the 138th birth anniversary of the man who integrated the various princely states of British India into the India we have today, Shri Vallabhbhai Jhaverbhai Patel (1875 – 1950) also known as Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. He was the first “Minister of Home Affairs” and the Deputy Prime minister from 15 August 1947 until he passed away on Dec 15th 1950 at the age of 75.
He was a giant of a political leader and modern India owes him a lot. But as has unfortunately become the pattern, towering leaders of the Indian National Congress are rarely celebrated by the party; instead they elevate Nehru and his progeny — pygmies compared to the Sardar and others — to the high heavens and airbrush others out. Fortunately things are improving, thanks to the access that readers and writers have in this internet age. Now we can begin to glimpse a more accurate picture of how petty, vindictive and mean-spirited Nehru actually was; now we have something to counter-balance the hagiographic propaganda Indians have been fed for so long. Social media is a real treasure in this regard.
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Making India Clean
This is a follow up to my previous post (“A Tale of Trash“). This was published on Niti Central Oct 22nd.
A Tale of Trash
One of the most enduring impressions that visitors to India carry away with them is that Indian cities are littered with trash. This is really unfortunate since trash is something that each of us can do something about and the problem is not as intractable as the big ticket problems that require collective action such as roads, power and public transportation. I recently wrote a piece for NitiCentral.com which I reproduce below, for the record.
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Hello from the Big Apple
Last evening I came to visit my dear friends, Urvashi and Anuj Tiku. Today I woke up in the city that doesn’t sleep and found that I’m king of the hill, top of the heap. Those little town blues melted away, and I made a brand new start of it in ol’ New York . . .
I am looking forward to a dinner with another friend, Mitra Kalita, later today. Now let’s listen to Frank Sinatra sing the 1980 hit song, “New York, New York.”
Louis Brandeis on the Protection of Liberty
Today’s quote is related to liberty and freedom. It is from Louis Brandeis (1856 – 1941), an American lawyer and an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court.
In a 1928 judgement [Olmstead v. US] he wrote:
“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
Liberate the Education System
As regulars of this blog know, I advocate the liberation of education from the clutches of the government. That is not going to happen in a hurry but that means that more people have to become aware of the disaster that the Indian education system is. I wrote piece on the topic for NitiCentral recently. Here it is, for the record.
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Home Thoughts from Leuven
The Jet Airways Mumbai to Brussels flight is not too bad as far as timing goes for flights to Europe out of India. It leaves at a reasonable 2 AM (compared to flights that depart at 4 or 5 AM) and gets to Brussels at 8 AM local time (11:30 AM IST.) I caught that flight yesterday morning. A few thoughts on that flight in particular and a few on what the experience says about the Indian economy in general.
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Talk in Leuven on Sept 29th
The time has come for me to head back home to California. On the way there, I plan to take two short breaks: one in Belgium and the other in the New York-New Jersey area. I will be visiting my friend Yogananda Saripalli in Leuven Belgium.
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Alan Watts on Living in the Present
Today’s quote is from Alan Watts. Born in England in 1915, he moved to the US in 1938. He lived in the San Francisco Bay area, around Berkeley. I would have loved to meet him but he passed away in 1973, full 10 years before I got to the SF Bay area.
The wiki says, “Watts wrote more than 25 books and articles on subjects important to Eastern and Western religion, introducing the then-burgeoning youth culture to The Way of Zen (1957), one of the first bestselling books on Buddhism. In Psychotherapy East and West (1961), Watts proposed that Buddhism could be thought of as a form of psychotherapy and not a religion. He also explored human consciousness, in the essay “The New Alchemy” (1958), and in the book The Joyous Cosmology (1962).” Here’s Alan Watts on the importance of living in the present.
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 