The government of India is trying to gag people. You might object that that is as novel as the news that the Pope is Catholic. I agree. A socialist government cannot but rest on an uninformed citizenry. Truth is as welcome to the corrupt government as sunshine is reputed to be to Count Dracula. I don’t mean to imply that the government of India sucks the life’s blood out of its citizens although that may well be true.
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On Making a Difference
We all want to make a difference. That comes effortlessly when one is dissatisfied with the current order of things. As the wise old dipsomaniac Omar Khayyam put it,
“Ah love, could thou and I with fate conspire,
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire;
Would we not shatter it to bits,
And remold it nearer to our hearts’ desire!”
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Wordly Wisdom According to Charlie Munger
The web is a wonderful place where if you have the required smarts, you can get yourself a pretty decent education. Just having a lot of information at the click of a mouse would not do. You have to know what to take and in which sequence. What you get out of a book — or the web — obviously depends on you. But we can safely assume that one is reasonably well educated and can reason effectively at some level. If that is so, then the task becomes one of having to choose which bits you will focus on. With gazillions of pages of information in the web, that is not a trivial challenge.
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Astonishing Gullibility
It is hard to reconcile poor governance with a population which is reasonably smart. The basic nature of reality does not admit such contradictions. The inescapable conclusion is that the population is not smart. Evidence of it is all around us to see but I would like to present an illustrative example — with a picture below the fold. It demonstrates the stupidity of some apparently educated — well, if not educated, at least literate — people which makes them so terrifyingly gullible. Never think that we collectively do not deserve the poor governance.
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Arun Shourie on the Indian Education System
The greatest scandal and the greatest failure of the Indian governments (all of them, and practically all of them have been Congress) has been in education. A great economy and a great education system go hand in hand — though it almost always starts with the education system supplying the fuel that powers the engine of growth and development. Any dispassionate observer of the Indian education system (and I am one of many) cannot but conclude that it is one of the most distressed. It has never been very good but successive assaults on it by the government has reduced it to a wreck that cannot do anything else but act as a road block to development.
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Rajesh Jain’s Advice for the New Government
My colleague Rajesh Jain writes to the about-to-be-formed new government of India in today’s Wall Street Journal and says, “Get us Involved and Lets [sic] get going.” He advices the new government (but I guess it will be the same old guys) that the areas where they need to focus on are, among others, education, transportation, urbanization, digital infrastructure, and good governance. Naturally I agree with Rajesh because that set of interventions is what is needed for India to develop and I have been saying as much on this blog.
I quote the article below the break, for the record.
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A Country Gets the Government it Deserves, and Rightly so.
I was talking with a friend of mine in Pune about the election results, expressing my disappointment. More than the results, what struck me was his attempt at consoling me when he said, “India is a third-rate country. What do you expect — a first-rate government for a third-rate country?”
Yes, I still expect a first-rate government even through reason says that it will inevitably be a third-rate government because the people desire it to be so.
That’s unreasonable but all progress gets its start from unreasonable expectations.
The Long View of the Big Picture
For every election cycle that the Congress gets to govern India, India suffers a generation’s setback. The dozen or so elections since India’s political independence that the Congress has won the right to rule India have set back India’s development by around 200 years. In that period, hundreds of millions of Indians have lived lives of utter destitution. Today one of out every two children below five is malnourished — the implications of which are so staggering in terms of retarded mental and physical development that it makes one weep bitter tears for the utter and needless waste of human potential.
Contrast where India is now relative to where it could have been — a developed nation — and it is easy to argue that the Congress must be responsible for hundreds of millions of premature deaths and billions of human years of misery. The cycle of poverty and misery gets one more boost today, another generation worth of opportunity lost, another couple of hundred million lives forced into horrible misery whose only redeeming feature would be that thankfully they will be short.
That’s the big picture and as I argue below, a short-term big picture. But it is better to take the long-term view of the big picture and if we do that, the view is not that devastating.
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Open Thread
What’s up? Thoughts on the election results which we should be getting in today?
How’s the weather? What you find interesting? What you find boring here? What you find interesting elsewhere?
Say what you will.
Sir Ken Robinson on Creativity and Schools
I am a big fan of Sir Ken Robinson and have been so since I first came across his talk on TED of Feb 2006 (which I had blogged in September 2006). Here’s a treat for those who have not watched that performance — and I say performance advisedly as he could be a stand-up comic any day of the week.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
One of the many important point he makes is that the current school system kills creativity. In a more recent talk, he goes into how the current school paradigm needs change. That topic is of enduring interest of this blog. So below the fold, you will find the video (hat tip, Nihar G.)
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 