Well, now we can be assured of our security and safety from Islamic terrorism. TRAI — the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India — is taking steps to combat terrorism by securing WiFi networks.
With terrorists using unsecured wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks to shoot off emails every time they carry out bomb blasts, TRAI is examining a series of measures to have security processes in place to protect such networks. [Source]
Prof Pranab Bardhan in the Financial Times on “What does this authoritarian moment mean for developing countries?”
India’s experience suggests that democracy can also hinder development in a number of ways. Competitive populism– short-run pandering and handouts to win elections– may hurt long-run investment, particularly in physical infrastructure, which is the key bottleneck for Indian development. Such political arrangements make it difficult, for example, to charge user fees for roads, electricity, and irrigation, discouraging investment in these areas, unlike in China where infrastructure companies charge full commercial rates. Competitive populism also makes it difficult to carry out policy experimentation of the kind the Chinese excelled in: for example, it is harder to cut losses and retreat from a failed project in India, which, with its inevitable job losses and bail-out pressures, has electoral consequences that discourage leaders from carrying out policy experimentation in the first place. Finally, democracy’s slow decision-making processes can be costly in a world of fast-changing markets and technology.
Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate:
The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means “land.” In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means “land of the pure.” It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. The Afghans are Muslim but not part of Pakistan. Most of Punjab is also in India. Interestingly, too, there is no B in this cobbled-together name, despite the fact that the country originally included the eastern part of Bengal (now Bangladesh, after fighting a war of independence against genocidal Pakistani repression) and still includes Baluchistan, a restive and neglected province that has been fighting a low-level secessionist struggle for decades. The P comes first only because Pakistan is essentially the property of the Punjabi military caste (which hated Benazir Bhutto, for example, because she came from Sind). As I once wrote, the country’s name “might as easily be rendered as ‘Akpistan’ or ‘Kapistan,’ depending on whether the battle to take over Afghanistan or Kashmir is to the fore.”
For the last few days, internet service has been terrible at my end and I could not get online. Tata Indicom VSNL at its best. And when I tried to call in to their customer service, I realized how utterly miserable that company is. Not only do you get put on hold, but while on hold they have the most astonishingly irritating music that they play at an ear-shattering volume, and interrupt it every few seconds to announce, “Tata Indicom, the best way to connect to the Internet”, “We know your time is valuable and appreciate the time you have taken to call us”, “Please continue to hold as our customer service executives will be with you shortly”, and other such inane bullshit.
Tata Indicom is a pathetic, worthless, vile corporation run by a gang of stupid cretins whose head honcho must be a lobotomized comatose moron if this is the best that it can do.
They say that if you owe the bank $1,000 you cannot repay, you are in trouble; but if you owe the bank $1 billion and you cannot repay, the bank is in trouble.
Think of the rest of the world’s central banks who hold dollar reserves as the bank and the US as the creditor who is in danger of defaulting. It puts the US in a very interesting position — it can take a lot of folks down if it starts to drown. The rest have a very good incentive to keep the US afloat.
Continue reading “Keeping the US afloat”
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
— Marcus Aurelius [121 CE – 180 CE] (Emperor and stoic philosopher.)
This blog had its first post on this day in 2003. For five years, I have been expressing my opinion and perspective on a range of topics that deal with development and India. I had been writing a blog at Berkeley, “Life is a Random Draw”, for a while before I started on this one. I shut down the Berkeley blog as maintaining it was becoming a bit of a bother. It was my colleague Rajesh Jain who suggested that I should write a blog on economic development of India.
Continue reading “Five years of Opinions and Perspectives”
If you needed more convincing on the matter of why India needs to build cities (and not futz around in villages), here’s a video of a TED presentation by Jaime Lerner. A video made more delightful by the way he wanders all over the place.
http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf
Thanks to Sudipta Chatterjee for the link.
Now for some smashing news. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be firing up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It will happen at 1 PM (IST) on Wednesday.
The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). This historical event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed through the Eurovision network. See http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam for further details.
[Via Cosmic Variance.]
Watch a documentary on the LHC on the History Channel.
After 40 years of planning and construction, the biggest science experiment in history is ready to be tested. The “Large Hadron Collider” is an experiment created by the greatest minds in physics. It cost $10 billion and its resulting data has the potential to explain why we and the Universe exist. Their idea is to smash protons towards one another at the speed of light, trying to mimic what happened in the milliseconds after The Big Bang. Viewers will go on an amazing journey involving the struggles to plan and build the LHC, how it was constructed and what are its mechanics. Explore the future of what’s possible through the geniuses of today. [The History Channel]
For some absolutely stunning pictures (27 of them), go to boston.com’s The Big Picture.
To get a quick tutorial on how a particle accelerator works, play the LHC game. (Click on English, then click on the green arrow, the click on 1, 2, 3, etc.)
I missed posting on Ganesh Chaturthi this time. I was in Mumbai last Monday. Tuesday evening was when I foolishly decided to make my way to Pune from Mumbai. As a matter of practical importance, I made the proper offerings to Ganesh, the Remover of Obstacles, before I embarked on my journey. After all, Mr Ganesh was around in the vicinity seeing as it was his time for his annual visit. So what happened? Well, I’ll tell you. Shri Ganesh failed miserably in removing obstacles from my path.
{Image above stolen from some website.}
Here’s what happened. It took about 2:30 hours to get from Mumbai to the outskirts of Pune (around 150 kms) and then it took 4 hours — I kid you not — to travel the last 24 kms to my place! What happened was that there was an amazing rain storm around 5 PM in Pune which dumped gazillion amounts of water onto the Pune streets which resulted in flooding. Traffic was backed up for miles. It was a disaster.
Ganesh, as the remover of obstacles should be fired if this is what removing obstacles amounts to. Saying that his performance is below par does not even come close to it. Anyway, I am not one to hold grudges. All is forgiven. Mr Ganesh can have a nice visit but I would be very careful to do the job of removing obstacles properly the next time if I were him. It’s a matter of reputation, you know. Once your reputation is shot, it is very difficult to recover.
OK, here’s one picture of Ganesh dancing to some cool tune. Enjoy.
Have a happy Ganesh Utsav.
Previous Ganesh posts: Happy Ganesh Chaturthi 2007, and 2006.
Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning. (Filmed Feb 2006)
http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf
Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do. (Filmed Feb 2007)
http://static.videoegg.com/ted2/flash/loader.swf
[Thanks to Manish Dharod for the links.}
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 