Sri Sri the SCotU

One of the rewards of writing a blog is the occasional email expressing gratitude for something which resonated with the reader. I get those emails fairly regularly on a variety of topics. The flip side is of course the rant from some disgruntled reader who finds something objectionable about my opinion. I get these very rarely but when I do, it is always from a follower of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. I believe that the most commented post is the one titled “A Letter from a Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Worshipper” which to date has 74 comments. (One of the sites maintained by the devotees of SSRS has a link to this post. I am pretty certain they did not bother to read the post — they mistakenly think that it is a news item praising SSRS.)

Here’s an informative letter from someone who has attended SSRS’s Art of Living course, for the record. The writer wishes to remain anonymous. Continue reading “Sri Sri the SCotU”

IEEE Spectrum on the OLPC

Everything you have ever wanted to know about the One Laptop Per Child but never dared to ask has been answered in an excellent feature titled The Laptop Crusade by Tekla Perry in the April 2007 issue of the IEEE Spectrum. (Here’s a link to the print version of the article.) Continue reading “IEEE Spectrum on the OLPC”

Innumerate Reporting

ExpressIndia.com carries a Press Trust of India report titled “Rise in Number of Indian Students in US.” (Hat tip: Ashish Asgekar.) It is a brief report. Here it is in its entirety. Continue reading “Innumerate Reporting”

The Living Past

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose providence dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves but ripples of consequence echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

—William Faulkner

Unfair and Unlovely

An accident is not a crime, and a crime is not an accident. That distinction kept playing in my mind as I thought of the incident in which a drunken driver, Alistair Pereira, killed seven and injured eight pavement dwellers in Mumbai one night last November. The case against him was ruled to be one of rash driving and not one of culpable homicide by a court. Pereira was handed down a six-month prison sentence and a fine of Rs 5 lakhs (approximately US$ 11,000.)
Continue reading “Unfair and Unlovely”

OLPC and Markets

Alex Singleton, President of the Globalisation Institute, a European think tank, argues against the OLPC and says that computers should be left to the market economy. “The very worst idea in international development circles is the One Laptop Per Child scheme being fronted by academic Nicholas Negroponte. ”
Continue reading “OLPC and Markets”

India Needs Cities

Well, well, what do you know! Just as I had finished a series on why India needs to have cities for its economic growth and therefore development (see the last post in the series, Make No Little Plans), my friend Alok pointed me to a Scientific American report dated 17th April by Nikhil Swaminathan titled “If You Can Make it There… Cities Are the Greatest Generators of Innovation and Wealth.” He writes of a study that “finds increased social interaction of urban life fuels leads to a more productive populace.”

I take the risk of quoting that report in full just in case one of these days it goes behind a subscription wall.
Continue reading “India Needs Cities”

Where have all the leaders gone?

Lee Iacocca asks that question in his book.

His concern — correctly, in my opinion — is with the lack of leadership in the US. But with some substitutions in the names and a few other changes, he could as well been talking about India. At least, the US is fortunate enough that it has an 82-year old ex-CEO to tell it like it is. Where are they in India?
Continue reading “Where have all the leaders gone?”

Rambling on about Seatbelts

To get back to Pune from Mumbai on Saturday, since I had some luggage, I took a cab instead taking a bus or a train as I usually do. Later, on the expressway, I regretted not taking the bus as I feel safer in a bus on Indian roads. As the car entered the highway, I reached for the seatbelt. Yes, the seatbelt was there but the end into which to plug it in was nowhere to be found. It was trade-off time: should I continue to sit the backseat without wearing a seatbelt or move up to the front seat and be belted in. I continued to sit in the back and hoped for the best. The driver, however, promptly took off his seatbelt. I asked him why. He said that they ticket people only in Mumbai for not wearing seatbelts, not on the expressway.
Continue reading “Rambling on about Seatbelts”