good reading

New socialism in India

Hazlitt’s Way to Will Power

Let the good times roll

The mainstream remains clueless about F A Hayek in India

the strongest had fenced off plots of land for themselves and forced the weak to acknowledge the right of private property. 

Prof Bibek Debroy on Speculating and hoarding and making them legal by nuuy state

Why more IITs are bad idea for Modi government

Some new ideas

Recently Dr.Ashok Desai wrote a very interesting article in the TT. The piece is must read one for all those interested in some cutting edge ides of public policies which can be pondered for debate. The following are the main points from his very insightful piece:

• "First, India should complete trade liberalization, and abolish all import restrictions — in particular, the remaining customs duties, and the negative list. It should introduce unilateral free trade.
• Second, India should become more maritime. It should construct a couple of dozen artificial ports that would take ships of draft up to 20 meters. The government should for a while subsidize ships that would provide regular passenger and cargo services, between these ports as well as to ports in Indian Ocean countries.
• Third, India should abolish the monopoly of states in electricity. The ideal is to ensure that anyone can sell electricity to anyone else. The transportation and distribution networks would have to be common, and are best owned by the government.
• Fourth, the present states should be replaced by a hundred-odd states, each centred on a city of half a million people or more. Some adjustment may be required in regions with few large cities; some states may have to be created with smaller capitals. 
• Fifth, state languages should be abolished. Every one of the hundred-odd new states will have a dominant language; but the people should be given the right to use any of the hundreds of languages spoken in India, and deprived of the pleasure of imposing their language on anyone. The language of government as well as private business should be Indian English.
• Sixth, all government schools should be privatized; instead, all qualifying schools should be subsidized. There should be a central examination that children may take after six years of schooling; children should be free to take it at any time, even if they do not go to school. It should cover only English, mathematics, and any one other Indian language; the language should be optional. The marks of all children from a school taking the central examination should be averaged. Every school should get three subsidies: one based on the number of students, another on the number completing six years and taking the examination, and a third on the average marks in the central examination.
• Seventh, the present first-past-the-post system of election should be replaced by a hybrid system: 10 per cent of the seats should be subject to the present system, and 90 per cent should be filled on the basis of proportional representation. Prime ministers and chief ministers should be replaced by presidents; they should be free to choose members of their cabinets from elected as well as unelected people.
• Eighth, the present division of taxes between the Centre, states and local authorities should be abolished. Taxes should be determined and levied by the Centre; the revenue should be distributed between various levels of government by a periodic finance commission.
• Ninth, whilst taxation must be progressive, the government must not give income subsidies as such to the poor: there are too many of them, and their identification creates uncontrollable opportunities for patronage and corruption. The government’s primary function should be to spend on infrastructure and on public goods. If it spends on people, it should be on the basis of their inability to support themselves — for instance, orphans and old people, sick and disabled people. 
• Tenth, taxes should be high both on vehicles and on transport fuels, principally petrol and diesel. 
• Finally, governments at all levels should run lotteries, races and other betting games, revenue from which should be used to finance innovation and risk taking."

Other readings:

• "It is very surprising and indeed very depressing to note that Dr. Ambedkar is always seen as a leader of untouchables. Of course, he was their messiah, the ultimate champion of human rights. We are doing great disservice to ourselves by treating Dr. Ambedkar only as a leader of Dalits or leader of untouchables. He was much more than that. Very reluctantly, he is recognised as the principal architect of the Indian Constitution. To my mind, Dr. Ambedkar was a national leader. Period." More here.

Professor CNR Rao

Professor CNR Rao is rightly in news for right time and context. Here are some good articles on his role in science in India and the world.

Tribute to a master alchemist by R. A. MASHELKAR

Limitless Ladder: Prof. C.N.R. Rao'sAutobiography

How I made it: CNR Rao,Scientist

Making of a leading scientist – C.N. R. Rao

Science as away of life

IITs, IISc. are not the best in the world, says C.N.R. Rao

Must READ blogs/websites

Google Reader (GR) is no longer exists now. All my reading fodder was GR. I regularly read GR since 2004.

Reading helps you to create a sensible value in once actions and life. Reading right upfront and bold things of underneath of the prevailing political economics of India is something I did it for granted for all these years through GR. Now time to read directly visiting links like the one below, a few which one must read............   

1. Niti Central-BOLD and RIGHT
2. Centre Right India-right-wing political economics
3. Pragati-strategies of geopolitical economics

A new idea of mindset change

"...the possibility of an Indian education system that could one day be decolonised.

...need to examine how to decolonise politics and governance especially in Delhi that to this day remains the last outpost of the British imperial system of governance.

India remains colonial not just in the way it is governed but in its mindset. So in the engagement with modern ideas and modern technology what younger Indians are losing very quickly is their sense of being Indian. One of the things that depresses me most on my travels in our fair and wondrous land is the number of young Indians who speak no Indian language well and speak English so badly that it is sometimes hard to make out whether they are speaking English at all. This has not happened in countries that are proud of their identity. China’s communist rulers may have obliterated their traditional architecture and crafts but the Chinese continue to speak, read and write Chinese. In India, books in Indian languages sell in such small numbers that the publishing industry survives on books written in English. Do we need more proof of India still being colonised in its essence?

Only a new dream will restore in India a sense of who she once was and what she would like to be again one day. As things stand all we do is pay lip service to our ‘ancient civilisation’ while watching it slowly disappear under the onslaught of modern ideas and modern technology. It is hard to think of a time when we needed a new dream more than we do now. It has to be a dream that is bigger than just a new economic vision but the glorification of prosperity instead of poverty is not a bad foundation for a new dream."

Read the full article here.

1729=125 and others

The 1729 and 125 Men!

"Certainly the media paid for and bought by the Antonia Maino Congress still have to go through the motions and talk down Modi’s stock to earn their living. Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai, Vir Sanhvi, Sagarika Ghose and the rest of the loathsome bunch have to do what they have to do to earn their keep which amounts to dumping on Modi."

Of that Ideas...

Some interesting readings:

Mind you, despite such epic attention to detail, our society is still governed by the same laws as Macaulay, our Solon, gave us in 1860. The districting of our states is the same pattern as Sher Shah Suri’s in the 1530s. The administrative and reporting process of government is the one inherited from the Peshwas of the 1790s.

No longer. We are already at a stage where public services have deteriorated to such an extent that privately-arranged solutions just won’t work. We can no longer expect to survive the chaos in the public zone between the first-world oases that we call offices, shopping malls and homes.

In the US, universities such as Stanford and Michigan run public bus services absolutely free for all, but only on routes of interest to their employees and students. Should not PURA also do the same? Then, it appears best for the state to remove all taxes on public transport, including those on the vehicles that offer free services.

Never rested

"It was a fine thing said of a subaltern officer in the Peninsular campaigns, observed trudging alone through mud and mire by the side of his regiment, "There goes 15,000L. a year!" and in our own day, the bleak slopes of Sebastopol and the burning soil of India have borne witness to the like noble self-denial and devotion on the part of our gentler classes; many a gallant and noble fellow, of rank and estate, having risked his life, or lost it, in one or other of those fields of action, in the service of his country." More here.

Unknown and a culture

• "T.S. Eliot was only 29 when he wrote his greatest poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, while Robert Frost wrote one of his most anthologized poems,Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening, when he was 48. Orson Welles madeCitizen Kane when he was 26, while Alfred Hitchcock made Vertigo when he was 59. Pablo Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, his first major Cubist work, when he was 26, while Paul Cezanne painted his Château Noirwhen he was 64. Wolfgang Mozart composed The Marriage of Figaro at the age of 30, while Ludwig van Beethoven composed Symphony No. 9 at the age of 54." More here.

why liberals love "strangers"?

May be you would like to read few pieces before you ponder on what may be yours.

1. I Am a Liberal
2. Free Trade is Common
3. Why I am a liberal
4. Why liberals are liberals

Teachings of the great liberal from South India-Rajaji

STRUGGLE by C. RAJAGOPALACHARI

“I have struggled for thirty years”

Said my friend,*–

“He was preparing for a Jubilee.

“But who that lives struggles not?”

I asked, and he agreed.

Life is a struggle all the time

One or another sort for every one;

From when the child is pushed

Head foremost into the cold world

Each breath is a struggle

And every thought is a struggle,

For struggle is the throb of life.

Envy not, for every soul

And every breathing body struggles.

And those who live in ease

They struggle too against hated ennui.

The fatigue you feel as the years grow

It is the gentle voice of nature

That you must round your stalks

And prepare to fall away.

Spring! And Summer! Then Autumn comes

And the leaves that served the mother tree

And shone in the splendour of active life

Softly they drop with rounded stalks;

And in golden yellow quietly smile

At the leafy vanities that are over.

Ah, men!

Our foolish loves

And our more foolish hates

They also find their dropping dates,

And sometimes suddenly the date arrives,

Yet always as an unfailing friend does Death

Ring down the curtain on our follies.

* Late Sri K. Ramakotiswara Rau, Founder-Editor, Triveni.–Editor

–Reprinted from the Silver Jubilee Number of Triveni, Jan. 1955

Bolla's world

“My lifetime ambition is to become the President of India,” says Bolla, who was a member of Lead India 2020, a national movement to train youth in leadership, human values, and employment skills. The idea is that the transformed 540 million youth would lead India to become a developed nation by 2020. In 2010, Bolla received an excellence award from that organization from the former President of India."

Read more here and here.

Does left have any new idea?

A Professor says:

“……. the Left seemed to have run out of ideas or at least lost its enthusiasm for pushing new ones.”

Information vs resources

Read the below two articles before start reading the article on Ask and you shall be killed.

I really do not know how many of you have already read the Hayek’s one of the most important works the Why I Am Not a Conservative (published in The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1960). 

• Before I consider the main points on which the liberal attitude is sharply opposed to the conservative one, I ought to stress that there is much that the liberal might with advantage have learned from the work of some conservative thinkers. To their loving and reverential study of the value of grown institutions we owe (at least outside the field of economics) some profound insights which are real contributions to our understanding of a free society. However reactionary in politics such figures as Coleridge, Bonald, De Maistre, Justus Möser, or Donoso Cortès may have been, they did show an understanding of the meaning of spontaneously grown institutions such as language, law, morals, and conventions that anticipated modern scientific approaches and from which the liberals might have profited. But the admiration of the conservatives for free growth generally applies only to the past. They typically lack the courage to welcome the same undesigned change from which new tools of human endeavors will emerge.

Also read Who’s Afraid of Friedrich Hayek? The Obvious Truths and Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right by Jesse Larner. 

• A complex economy is something no person or institution can understand. But it can generate a sustainable order, with a rational allocation of resources, as individuals respond to their own circumstances and make choices as consumers and entrepreneurs, signaling the subjective value that they place on goods and capital stock through the price mechanism: One of Hayek’s most original contributions to economic theory is the insight that economic systems are based primarily on information rather than resources. To plan an outcome and to direct economic inputs and outputs toward this outcome is to stifle the emergence of a spontaneous, democratic response to the needs of the individuals who make up the community—a response that will necessarily have winners and losers, but that will not privilege the vision or depend on the limited information of a governing elite, and that will encourage further experimentation. The responsibility of a government that fosters individual freedom is to set up transparent and impartial rules so that the legal reaction to personal choices can be predicted for all, regardless of social station; to tolerate no privileged access to the law; to provide security; and to protect contracts and private property, so long as doing so does not conflict with the very small set of social assumptions on which there truly is broad consensus (arguably, Hayek’s suggestion that government should be responsible for a minimum standard of living would have fit into this consensus when Road was published.).

R.K. Narayan and ‘shop talk’

Or the talk may all centre round the sabha politics, provided there are no strong feelings in the matter, and provided all share the same dream of being about to start a rival sabha or doing something drastic to improve the existing one.

Kool, well said

“It’s easier to make people snigger than to make them think. Thoughts are dangerous. They can lead anywhere. They can get you asking uncomfortable questions. But a laugh generated by a cheap joke is here one moment, gone another. Just the right device for dealing with characters which do not fit the Bollywood norm: handsome boy, fair-skinned girl, song and dance, and candy-coloured romance.”

Fortunately, an unfinished story

Some excerpts from this year's Nobel Prize (Literature) Lecture by Mario Vargas Llosa.

• Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams and placed the universe of literature within reach of the boy I once was.

• I have been able to devote most of my time to the passion, the vice, the marvel of writing, creating a parallel life where we can take refuge against adversity, one that makes the extraordinary natural and the natural extraordinary, that dissipates chaos, beautifies ugliness, eternalizes the moment, and turns death into a passing spectacle.

• Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience.

• I discovered that there is hope even in the worst of circumstances, that living is worth the effort if only because without life we could not read or imagine stories

• ….culture was a privilege of the few

• But thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.

• Literature creates a fraternity within human diversity and eclipses the frontiers erected among men and women by ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages, and stupidity.

• Since every period has its horrors, ours is the age of fanatics, of suicide terrorists, an ancient species convinced that by killing they earn heaven, that the blood of innocents washes away collective affronts, corrects injustices, and imposes truth on false beliefs. Every day, all over the world, countless victims are sacrificed by those who feel they possess absolute truths. With the collapse of totalitarian empires, we believed that living together, peace, pluralism, and human rights would gain the ascendancy and the world would leave behind holocausts, genocides, invasions, and wars of extermination. None of that has occurred. New forms of barbarism flourish, incited by fanaticism, and with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, we cannot overlook the fact that any small faction of crazed redeemers may one day provoke a nuclear cataclysm. We have to thwart them, confront them, and defeat them. There aren’t many, although the tumult of their crimes resounds all over the planet and the nightmares they provoke overwhelm us with dread. We should not allow ourselves to be intimidated by those who want to snatch away the freedom we have been acquiring over the long course of civilization. Let us defend the liberal democracy that, with all its limitations, continues to signify political pluralism, coexistence, tolerance, human rights, respect for criticism, legality, free elections, alternation in power, everything that has been taking us out of a savage life and bringing us closer – though we will never attain it – to the beautiful, perfect life literature devises, the one we can deserve only by inventing, writing, and reading it. By confronting homicidal fanatics we defend our right to dream and to make our dreams reality.

• It is regrettable that democratic governments, instead of setting an example by making common cause with those, like the Damas de Blanco in Cuba, the Venezuelan opposition, or Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo, who courageously confront the dictatorships they endure, often show themselves complaisant not with them but with their tormenters. Those valiant people, struggling for their freedom, are also struggling for ours.

• Literature is a false representation of life that nevertheless helps us to understand life better, to orient ourselves in the labyrinth where we are born, pass by, and die. It compensates for the reverses and frustrations real life inflicts on us, and because of it we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings, principally those of us who generate more doubts than certainties and confess our perplexity before subjects like transcendence, individual and collective destiny, the soul, the sense or senselessness of history, the to and fro of rational knowledge.

The man’s nature of nature

• An attempt is found in ancient literature to describe personality by invoking an indigenous construct, the Probabilistic Orientation. A poet by the name of Kanian Poonkundranar, who lived in Tamil Nadu during 4000 BC, has rendered an account of this description in his poem and the poem is found included in an anthology of four hundred poems in Tamil titled Purananooru (Four Hundred Poems on Non-Subjective Aspects of Life).

• The construct used to differentiate people in their personality is labelled, for want of a better term, the probabilistic orientation. The term connotes a set of beliefs and convictions regarding the probable nature of events. The probability characteristics of events owe their origin to an ever evolving Nature which is set in evolution. The reality one can experience is of a transient fleet of events unfolding themselves as programmed by the evolutionary nature of Nature. Evolution determines the probability distribution of events through stochastic principles.

• An individual has neither absolute freedom nor is bound by an holistic bondage. A dynamic friction is exerted by forces within and forces without in every action of men. Individual efforts can motivate one’s action. But, the limitation of its effect is determined by the probability of success stemming from the stochastic process governing the forces involved in the action.

• Poetic expression of the construct: Given the perspective just above described, an individual is bound to develop in himself a set of behavioural consequences which shapes the perspectives that ultimately lead to the typical orientation of his personality. The poem attempts to present this orientation as follows:

All places are my abodes dear,

And every one is my kith and kin;

Good and bad are caused by none,

Sickness and convalescence are just but natural;

Nothing is new in death,

Rejoice life as sweet we do not,

Nor despise it as sour;

Since,

Convinced are we through the serene vision of the seers,

That,

Along with lightening pour down cold drops;

The Mighty river rolls down the stone

Into pebbles with constant noise, lo!

The Boat sails in the river.

Likewise precious life has it’s course

In the course of Nature.

Hence, We do not wonder at the great

Nor look down upon the small.

(The probabilistic orientation of personality by S.Narayanan and N. Annalakshmi)

But on the subject of personality my favourite and much deep in thinking is the following from Rabindranath Tagore's book Personality published in 1917.

• We are face to face with this great world and our relations to it are manifold. One of these is the necessity we have to live, to till the soil, to gather food, to clothe ourselves, to get materials from nature. And we are always making things that will satisfy our need, and we come in touch with Nature in our efforts to meet these needs. We are always in touch with this great world through hunger and thirst and all our physical needs.

• Then we have our mind; and mind seeks its own food. Mind has its necessity also. It must find out reason in things. It is faced with a multiplicity of facts, and is bewildered when it cannot find one unifying principle which simplifies the heterogeneity of things. Man's constitution is such that he must not only find facts, but also some laws which will lighten the burden of mere number and quantity.

• There is yet another man in me, not the physical, but the personal man; which has its likes and dislikes, and wants to find something to fulfil its needs of love. This personal man is found in the region where we are free from all necessity, — above the needs, both of body and mind, — above the expedient and useful. It is the highest in man, — this personal man. And it has personal relations of its own with the great world, and comes to it for something to satisfy personality.

• The world of science is not a world of reality, it is an abstract world of force. We can use it by the help of our intellect but cannot realize it by the help of our personality. It is like a swarm of mechanics who, though producing things for ourselves as personal beings, are mere shadows to us.

• But there is another world which is real to us. We see it, feel it; we deal with it with all our emotions. Its mystery is endless because we cannot analyze it or measure it. We can but say, " Here you are."

Freak Nude market!!!!!!!

After this piece I was wondering how the Freakonomics respond to the challenges faced in the Nude Market in India. Quite vulnerable in many ways that is too in Indian society!

When I think about the participants (the female side) of Nude Market I feel unbelievably threatened by all means, i.e, morally, mentally, physically, etc. Just read their comments in the article:

“When they first asked me to take off my clothes and pose, I was terrified. But over the years, I have learnt to treat it like any other job. I even like the idea that I am a work of art,”

“Initially, I felt a lot of shame in taking off my clothes in front of so many people. But after a few months, I realised it was better than rag-picking or cleaning toilets,” she says. She earns about Rs 800 a day from three sittings.

“Some of the models had day jobs as typists or supermarket attendants. I paid them well and I did not show their faces. I was looking for a particular kind of aesthetic. But other people see this differently.”

“I do not entertain any requests from men to ‘work’ at their houses. I once beat up a boy with a hockey stick because he threatened to expose me to my family,” she says.

A few months ago, a Gujarati paper ran a story claiming that the university was corrupting young Gujarati girls by making them pose nude. “For a few months, we had to discontinue nude studies,” says Indrapramit Roy, a teacher at MSU. Karishma was one of the models the paper “exposed”.

My fellow younger’s

Do not learn what is not to be learned but learn what needs to be pondered at any cost. You must read what Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his essay on “Thinking For Oneself”.

My favourite line from his essay is “Thinking must be kindled like a fire by a draught and sustained by some kind of interest in the subject.”

Indeed, the great all time Austrian economist Henry Hazlitt wrote in his book Thinking As A Science (pdf) about the Arthur’s essay that “The last is especially recommended. It is only about a dozen pages long, and is the most stimulating essay written on the subject.”