Where it is folly to be wise …


Calvin: It’s true, Hobbes. Ignorance is bliss.


Once you know things, you start seeing problems everywhere…

And once you see problems, you feel like you ought to try to fix them…

And fixing problems always seems to require personal change…

And change means doing things that aren’t fun! I say phooey to that!

But if you are willfully stupid, you don’t know any better, so you
can keep doing whatever you like!


The secret of happiness is short-term, stupid self-interest!


Hobbes: We’re heading for that cliff!


Calvin: I don’t want to know about it.


[They go over a cliff and land in a heap at the bottom.]


Hobbes: I’m not sure I can stand so much bliss.


Calvin: Careful! We don’t want to learn anything from this.

from the incomparable comic strip
Calvin and Hobbes

Forever Trembling on the Brink (Of Numbers)

The extent of the damage and loss of life due to the tsunami has now become clear. Soumen Chakrabarti emailed me and wrote:

You recently wrote:

That is why I claim that natural disasters like the recent tsunami cannot hold a candle to the destructive power of humans.

I did a little arithmetic that adds support to your statement from unexpected quarters. This sounds very insensitive but is not really so. Each and every person destroyed by the tsunami is irreplaceable. I was trying to comprehend the enormity of the destruction through comparative numbers, when I was struck by a yet more stupendous scale that boggled the mind.
Continue reading “Forever Trembling on the Brink (Of Numbers)”

Our Commitment to Immaturity, Mendacity and Profound Gullibility

I admire John Kenneth Galbraith for the clarity of his thinking and the quality of his prose. The greatest compliment I have ever received was when Irma Adelman told me that I reminded her of John Kenneth because like him I was an old world liberal.

Here, for the record, is a quote from JKG’s book Economics, Peace and Laughter:

In a well-to-do community we cannot be much concerned over what people are persuaded to buy. The marginal utility of money is low; were it otherwise, people would not be open to persuasion. The more serious conflict is with truth and aesthetics. There is little that can be said about most economic goods. A toothbrush does little but clean teeth. Alcohol is important mostly for making people more or less drunk. An automobile can take one reliably to a destination and back, and its further features are of small consequence as compared with the traffic encountered. There being so little to be said, much must be invented. Social distinction must be associated with a house or a swimming pool, sexual fulfillment with a particular shape of automobile, social acceptance with a hair oil or mouthwash, improved health with a hand lotion or, at best, a purgative. We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable.

Re-inventing Education — Part 3 (From Teaching-centric to Learning-centric Education)

Our present education system is teacher-centric. It is easy to understand why it is so if you consider that it has historically been very expensive to gain and transmit knowledge. Information — the foundation upon which knowledge rests –was in limited supply. A teacher, together with a limited set of books, was the knowledge base which anchored the education process. The teacher was the active agent, communicating information to the students, the passive receptors of information. Learning by rote was the method most favored because the information was largely disjointed and the student was not really quite sure what the motivation behind knowing all those disparate facts was. Continue reading “Re-inventing Education — Part 3 (From Teaching-centric to Learning-centric Education)”

An Entirely Avoidable Great Tragedy

I am outraged. Yes, I not so much saddened as I am outraged.

It is a great tragedy. So many lives needlessly wasted. So many children dead, so many more with little hope of a decent human existence. Millions homeless without proper water, food, healthcare and education. Entirely preventable because we have the technology and the resources to avoid all this suffering and death. In the end it comes down to human frailty–greed, short-sightedness, ignorance, the lust for power.

And then there was an incident on Sunday when an earthquake unleashed a tsunami in the Indian Ocean and killed about 50 thousand, give or take 10 thousand. It is getting a lot of press and appeals for help on the internet are beginning to rival the pedelers of Viagra in the volume of email and the urgency of their appeal.
Continue reading “An Entirely Avoidable Great Tragedy”

Hopelessly Disorganized Immensely Selfish Mobs?

What do we want in India? If foreigners want these things, we want them twenty times more. Because…in spite of our boasted ancestry of sages, compared to many other races, I must tell you that we are weak, very weak. First of all is our physical weakness. That physical weakness is the cause of at least one-third of our miseries. We are lazy, we cannot work; we cannot combine, we do not love each other; we are intensely selfish, not three of us can come together without hating each other, without being jealous of each other. That is the state in which we are — hopelessly disorganized mobs, immensely selfish, fighting each other for centuries as to whether a certain mark is to be put on our forehead this way or that way, writing volumes and volumes upon such momentous questions as to whether the look of a man spoils my food or not! This we have been doing for the past few centuries. We cannot expect anything high from a race whose whole brain energy has been occupied in such wonderfully beautiful problems and researches!

And are we not ashamed of ourselves? Ay, sometimes we are; but though we think these things frivolous, we cannot give them up. We speak of many things parrot-like, but never do them; speaking and not doing has become a habit with us. What is the cause of that? Physical weakness. This sort of weak brain is not able to do anything; we must strengthen it.

First of all, our young men must be strong… You will understand the Gita better with your biceps, your muscles, a little stronger. You will understand the mighty genius and the mighty strength of Krishna better with a little strong blood in you. You will understand the Upanishads better and the glory of the Atman when your body stands firm upon your feet, and you feel yourselves as men.

I am deliberately leaving the quote above anonymous. Who is this guy who speaks of Indians being weaklings, physically and mentally? This passage was pointed out to me by a visiting friend. (The book is in my library and like scores of others sitting there, I have all sorts of good intentions about reading them but never seem to find the time.)

Gratuitous fault-finding is silly. Looking unflinchingly at reality, on the other hand, is absolutely required if you want to have any hope of solving the problem. This I believe is the first mistake that we make in India. The Mera Bharat Mahan attitude will ensure continued poverty and irrelevancy.

We are an underdeveloped poverty-ridden over-populated nation of over a billion people. Does anyone ever ask the question: Why is India the way it is? No. If we cannot ask this question because the answers may be unpleasant, I don’t see much hope for India. If we do not ask this question and answer it honestly, we may continue to blunder as we have done at least since independence 57 years ago under the flawed policies of the Nehruvian socialism and cargo-cult democracy.

When was the last time you ever heard of a conference where serious people with lots of knowledge and understanding got together to examine that question? Here is a suggestion for the movers and shakers of the great nation of India: commission a series of lectures by accomplished sociologists, economists, historians, philosophers, etc, which will examine the causes of India’s failures and what can be done to fix them. That lecture series can form a good counterpoint to the over-optimistic, rose-colored glasses-wearing, rocket-weilding India-superpower shouting, pyramid-power cult-worshipping, internet-surfing digital village hyping craziness so much in vogue.

PS: So who do you think is the author of the opening extended quote? Fabulous prizes for the correct answer. Please don’t cheat by using google.

Choosing between WCs and PCs

Conferences can be terribly boring affairs. But for real tedium, you cannot beat a conference on ICT and development. So it was with a great deal of trepidation that I ended up in Bhopal a few days ago to attend one. All I had to look forward to was an endless series of talks on how ICT will totally transform everything and finally deliver the holy grail of development to the billions who are pathetically underdeveloped.
Continue reading “Choosing between WCs and PCs”

Re-inventing Education — Part 2 (The Imperatives of Technology)

To think of technology as know-how is immensely useful. At its core, technology is knowledge. The artifacts of technology are essentially embodied-knowledge. Some of this technology is very sophisticated and we call it “hi-tech”. Examples of technological artifacts with embodied knowledge abound such as nuclear bombs, computers, DVD players, cell phones, shoes that make irritating squeaky noises and light up, digital cameras, jet planes, drugs that help people have fun, spam and spyware, laser guided cruise missiles, satellites, search engines, triple heart-pass surgeries, and nanotechnology. Continue reading “Re-inventing Education — Part 2 (The Imperatives of Technology)”

Comparing India and China

Rajesh’s blog has an item on Amartya Sen on India and China. Of late Indians have been forced to accept unfavorable comparisons between India and China. And with good reason. But Indians find some grounds — often flimsy — to tilt the comparison in India’s favor. Sen writes:

While India has much to learn from China about economic policy and also about health care, India’s experience with public communication and democracy could still be instructive for China…With stunning success, China has become a leader of the world economy, and from this India—like many other countries—has been learning a great deal, particularly in recent years. But the achievements of democratic participation in India, including Kerala, suggest that China, for its part, may also have something to learn from India.

Let me first address the point about public communications. India does have freedom of press. You can print and publish all sorts of things, including criticism of the government and its policies. What good that freedom does in a nation of illiterates is open to debate. If only 10 percent of the population has access to books, magazines and newspapers, freedom of the press is a good idea in theory but has little practical implications. What would have had practical implications is the freedom of radio and (later on) the freedom of TV. Even illiterates can comprehend the spoken word and see video content. In the Indian context, free public communications implies freedom not just of the press but also of radio and TV. But with cynical aforethought, the Indian government did not allow the population that freedom.

I say cynical aforethought because I believe that the move was calculated to keep the population uninformed and therefore under control. Given that the population was severely handicapped informationally, the much celebrated “democracy” amounted to a sham because if one does not know what the government was up to, a vote does not amount to much. Bihar has had democracy for over 57 years. The result of that “democracy” is a government by crooks and incompetents. The outcome is not surprising given that literacy in Bihar is extremely low.

I put forth the hypothesis that India will continue to neglect making the population 100 percent literate because it will empower the population sufficiently and bring an end to the sham democracy. Those who are in power today fear 100 percent literacy because they fear losing their immunity.

What the Chinese have demonstrated is the simple fact that economic policies matter. Before 1978, China operated on a different set and was as poor — if not poorer — as India. Around ’78, they came to their senses and changed many of their policies. Twenty-five years later, they are a giant that cannot be messed around with. India’s economic policies — mostly attributable to Nehru and his progenies — have doomed India to what it is today. A balance of payment crisis forced India to change some of the policies but in general it was too little (and I pray that it is not too late.) Indian policy makers appear to be particularly impervious to reason. The two most important challenges that India faces are not being addressed. They are: the population and broad-based primary and secondary education.

Re-inventing Education in a Brave New IT World


He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils for time is the greatest innovator.


Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626)

Last week I presented a paper on ICT and education at a conference in Bhopal organized by the All India Society for Electronics and Computer Technology. In the paper I explored the opportunity the current state of the art of information technologies (IT) provides for re-inventing education. Continue reading “Re-inventing Education in a Brave New IT World”