Few words of Actor Kamal Hassan

I am not a big fan of any one actor nor I am regular movie watching junki! There is something that need to be underlined in this blog as a matter of fact. So far I have posted twice only in this blog exclusively on his words of mouth. I am talking about the veteran actor Kamal Haasan. Here is a third one. Very interesting and powerful words.

I am not a big fan of Frontline magazine wherein Hassan has an interview. The following are a bit from that interview:

• "The most ridiculous thing we are fighting for now and the government has looked into is the Cinematography Act, which is 57 years old.
• And even in your publishing industry, you still have to send one copy to the government. How stupid it is. If the government wants to see it, it can see it on the Net. Why should you cut down trees? It is all changing.
• In today’s Internet-savvy world, pornography is part of everyday life. If Internet search engines have become more and more powerful, it is not due to science… it is due to flesh. Everybody does it secretly once or twice. And the number is exponential when you look at the world population. Of course, there were other factors that made it flourish. But what triggered it was the simple need to watch flesh. It is the oldest profession and nobody will be able to eradicate it. It is now digitised. Not yet legalised.
• We must treat adults like adults. I am not talking only about sex. I am talking about politics. There should be political freedom. The kind of freedom that was available in Periyar’s time is not there for Kamal Hassan. Even if you are bold, you don’t have freedom. 
• People think I am a closet communist. The fact is no “ism”—capitalism, socialism or rationalism—is a complete answer to social ills. Everything is work in progress. According to Carl Sagan, the human brain is work in progress. We have to go farther in the evolutionary process. We are not fully evolved in our brain part. I will say something that will shock people. Had Spartacus succeeded, both Mr Christ and Mr Marx would have been rendered redundant. Had his revolution succeeded, the whole point of view of the world would have changed." 

B R Ambedkar on RESERVATION

Just as only a woman can tell you what being raped or groped means, only a Dalit knows how discrimination works both overtly and subtly.

During the Constituent Assembly debates, B. R. Ambedkar pleaded that reservation be allowed for a fixed period of 40 years only, with no possibility of extension. Typical of our short-sightedness, the Constituent Assembly rejected his wise suggestion and said that it should be for ten years only, but could be extended if necessary. Sixty years have passed and there is no hope of the system coming to an end.

Others

A useful organising principle to understand innovation in the last 250 years is the sequence of three industrial revolutions.

Indians tend to have an ambivalent attitude to new technology, with initial suspicion eventually being replaced by eager acceptance. While there is much public discussion on big bang technological change, far less thought is given to the deep changes that everyday technologies can bring about in society. Be it the ATM machine, cable television, typewriters or bicycles, consumer technologies can empower ordinary people.

Moneyball vs Blink

Many people are exploring the inner wilderness. Kahneman and Tversky are like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.

Don’t Blink! The Hazards ofConfidence

Without the body

Sufferings are as universe as the happiness in the human life. It's not just that I discovered from the book "Does he know a mother's heart How suffering Refutes Religions" by Arun Shourie.  But the fact that if any one try to understand his/her actions of at least past few years, one can surely get the answers nearly for the sufferings. but always questions remain questions.

Clean up or perish should be the message

 Mr.Rekhy is one of the finest human beings. I had brief opportunity to work with him some years ago.

From Good governance creates value By Richard Rekhy

• While liberalisation paved the way for India’s success story, the cue was picked up by the corporate world and it is private enterprise and corporate leadership that has steered India towards this growth. Corporate India understands the importance of governance. Well-governed companies have always got better valuations and have inspired other entrepreneurs to follow in their footsteps. Maybe, it is time for corporate India to lead the way and infuse the country with good governance practices. Clean up or perish should be the message. Companies sho­uld make it clear through policy and action that there is zero tolerance to fraud and corruption. Let us not blame the eco system of this country for fraud and corruption to exist and thrive. There are many examples of ethical and well- governed companies in India that we can learn from.

• Governance is a state of mind, it does not need rules and regulations. While regulation and law can assist governance, the place we in India have to get to is where we follow governance in every walk of life; and ethics penetrate the heart and soul of every action that we take. As we end the year 2010, let us hope that India will move towards a culture of good governance and that the government will recognise that it will fail in its mission to build India into an economic powerhouse unless it lays down a strong foundation of ethics and values and de­monstrates that through action. What we need is enforcement and examples of the guilty being given appropriate punishment for their crimes.

The process of morality in men

Whether one agree with Vijay Nagaswami or not for the below paragraph, I entirely agree with the conclusion.

• Lawrence Kohlberg, who described the process of moral evolution as going through six stages during the process of human growth and development. In the first stage, fear of punishment and the need for obedience guide moral development. Next, the child enters the second stage which is driven by a hedonistic orientation, where anything that satisfies self-interest is considered right. These first two stages are referred to as the Level of Pre-conventional Moral Development. As the child enters adolescence and begins to relate to peers and adults, the stage of interpersonal concordance (behaving in a manner that pleases others and increases acceptance by them) takes over. With further understanding and growth, one gets into the stage of law and order orientation, where one respects and obeys rules and regulations for the larger good, to ensure the smooth progress of society and social life. These two stages are called the Level of Conventional Moral Development, after which one enters the Level of Post-conventional Moral Development, which is predominantly an adult activity. In the latter level, the individual's approach is more principled and based on rational understanding and choices, and progresses to the fifth stage where the orientation is predominantly legalistic. Morality, in this stage, is understood by appreciating that rules and regulations are like social contracts that can be negotiated using democratic processes like compromise and consensus. Finally, one enters the sixth stage, driven more by abstract reasoning, where universal principles of justice define one's internal moral code.

• More important than whether Kohlberg was right or wrong is the understanding that higher levels of moral development take place within our minds and cannot be blamed on globalisation, Internet, television or government. Unfortunately today, by virtue of the pace of social change, our approach to our morals is dictated by fear and prejudice, and not introspection and thought. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who studied the impact of culture on morals and morality, identified five fundamental moral values that can be considered universal across cultures: care for others, fairness, loyalty, authority and purity. However, in contemporary life, we tend to be obsessed most about purity — predominantly purity of our sexuality and of Indian culture. Maybe the moral of the story is that we need to shift our focus a bit, and reflect on other parameters as well, all the time remembering that we can blame no one for our ‘ moral turpitude' but ourselves.

People who matter, not the places

From Reinventing the wheel By William Easterly

• When I worked at the World Bank, management was always checking up on us to make sure our research was relevant for real-world economic development. The standard test question was, "What would your research suggest the finance minister of country X should do?" This question reflected the standard view that has endured since the beginning of development economics six decades ago -- that all countries begin with a blank slate and that development happens when today's government leaders execute wise policies. My job was simply to tell the leaders what those wise policies were.
• Imagine the dismay of my managers if my advice to the finance minister had been, "Make sure your country was well caught up on technology -- 500 years ago." But seemingly irrelevant as that advice might be, it's actually true. If a country had the printing press and the magnetic compass in 1500, it's a pretty safe bet it has a strong national economy today. Ancient history still matters for today's development, providing unique insight into why the lights are still off in the dark corners of the world and what we might do to change that.
• Strangely, history has never figured into the equation when it comes to exploring why some countries prosper and others don't. To understand how it might relate, Diego Comin at Harvard Business School, Erick Gong at the University of California, Berkeley, and I started by compiling a list of 11 ancient technologies that were around in 1000 B.C.: Was there written language? The wheel? Agriculture and iron tools? We drew today's boundaries on the ancient world and assigned each separate technology history to the future country that would form within that territory. Then we expanded the survey to 1500 A.D., looking for the adoption of 24 technologies, including oceangoing ships, paper, printing, firearms, artillery, the magnetic compass, and steel.
• We found that there was a remarkably strong association between countries with the most advanced technology in 1500 and countries with the highest per capita income today. Europe already had steel, printed books, and oceangoing ships then, while large parts of Africa did not yet have writing or the wheel. Britain had all 24 of our sample technologies in 1500. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Papua New Guinea, and Tonga had none of them. But technology also travels. North America, Australia, and New Zealand had among the world's most backward technology in 1500; today, they are among the wealthiest regions on Earth, reflecting the principle that it's the people who matter, not the places. As migration has transformed parts of the world that were nearly empty in the Middle Ages, technology has migrated with them.

• So what does this tell us about the prognosis for bringing the world's bottom billion up from poverty? For one, it tells us that we've been doing development wrong. The traditional approach to development was as a top-down process led by great men and benevolent autocrats, advised by great experts. Former World Bank chief economist Stanley Fischer used to joke about a new grammatical tense he called the "World Bank imperative form": Country reports were long lists of things that "must be done" by the authorities, ranging from grandiose infrastructure projects to implementing detailed plans to meet health, nutrition, sanitation, and education needs. But our research shows that development is not about what you dictate, but what you discover. Little penicillin did far more to improve the world's lot than big plans conceived around a conference table.
• The World Bank imperative approach gave us Africa's stagnation, the failure of economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, and the disastrous transition from communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union. These and many other disappointments over the past half-century do not predict a cheery future for the great-men-cum-great-experts approach.
• Most importantly, what the history of technology tells us is that the blank-slate theory is a myth. Top-down development programs simply don't work. In fact, the principal beneficiaries of Western largesse today -- African autocrats and dysfunctional regimes -- are themselves the main obstacles to development. If there's anything that "must be done" to spur future development, it's to create the conditions necessary to empower the ordinary individuals who will create new and unforeseen technologies out of old ones. There's a Thomas Edison born every minute. We just have to help them turn the lights on.

Read the full article here

Blinking links

Sir Isaac Newton, the alchemist

The human brain is always democratic

Topsy-turvydom

Really worthy to read this piece and see how many are actually out of our tiny mind!

Particularly: “…I am absolutely knocked down by news of Mansukhbhai Prajapati, that incredible school drop-out of Rajkot in Gujarat, who has won a National Award from the hands of the President, and been hailed as a ‘true scientist' by Abdul Kalam, for his low-cost MittiCool refrigerator made of clay which can store water, fruits and vegetables for eight days and milk for one day, not to mention his other patents — water-filter, non-stick tava and pressure cooker — all made of clay and available at a tiny fraction of the price of products of multi-nationals.”

Basic needs and human beings

While basic needs arise for all human beings and are met by each one of us in various ways, fulfilling needs require stretch. Many of us oftentimes, therefore, lead our lives meeting basic needs but not meeting fulfilling needs.

Mr.Annadurai, former CM of Tamil Nadu on Human action

"That Capitalizm is the apotheosis of civilisation is the do*** of some. They argue that since Capitalist gives employment to the labourer, he helps society substantially. So a capitalist is not a human parasite but a benefactor and capitalism should not be concerned but ought to be welcomed. Any elementary book on economic will tell us that Land, labour, Capital and Organization are the four agents of production. It is true to say that Capital is as necessaryn for production, as labour is. But the problem is, which of these deserves more consideration. A labourer works hard but the direction comes from the Capitalist. Whether the concern gets profit or not, a labourer gets his annas and never cares for either the prosperity of the Capitalist or the comfort of the consumer. whereas, the Capitalist spends sleepless aights in devising plans, and determining the nature and quantity of the demand that is likely to arise. Failure means to him not only a risk of parting with his capital, but also a good-bye to honour. A failure means an ‘I.P.’ and it is by no means a decent degree. So when through his efforts, the Capitalist gets profit he demands a greater share in it. Or, when the Capitalist is not capable of ‘brainwork’, he hires the services of a ‘D.Com’ and shares the profit with that organiser."

MOSCOW Mob Parade: (This is the first article written by Perarignar Anna, When he was a student of the Panchaiyappa’s College, in 1933, which was published in the College Magazine)

Never figured out

….put more emphasis on our sentiments. People are born with natural desires to be admired and to be worthy of admiration. They are born with moral emotions, a sense of fair play and benevolence. They are also born with darker passions, like self-love and tribalism, which mar rationalist enterprises. We are emotional creatures first and foremost, and politics should not forget that.

“Success is a journey, not a destination.”

Arun Maira on:

• Sociologists and economists do not understand each other’s perspectives, do not talk the same language, and do not even want to talk to each other! Unfortunately science, and also education, has been advancing towards narrower specialisations, producing people who may know more and more about less and less.

Ram on human and their action in cosmos:

• “AS HUMANS, we have a need to be successful in our own eyes and in the eyes of society. Our definition of success — or more accurately, society’s definition of success — is what drives our behaviour. If we need to change the way people think and act in the Connected Age, we need to redefine success.
• Adam Smith, the father of moderneconomics, declared that if every individual operates out of his own self-interest, an ‘invisible hand’ will ensure the good of the society as a whole. This has been the fundamental premise of free markets and capitalism for over two centuries.”
• Governments do not create wealth. People do. The role of government is to provide good education, health care, infrastructure, security, and law and order to all its citizens, thereby giving them a platform to flourish as individuals.
• As Confucius said: “In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of”.
• In Emerson’s beautiful words: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you lived; this is to have succeeded“.

“Economics is the wild card” and “The ascent of man has happened because of this continuous evolution”

Shoba Narayan The Good Life Column has interesting narrative that triggered me into think science is for The Good Life and the arts is for The Bad Life!!

But the latter is not necessary to be but its obvious now!

She writes:

• The arts are about imagery and storytelling; myth and mystique. The sciences are about the pursuit of truth. The truth is irrelevant to storytelling; and storytelling is anathema to fact-based science.
• It is not often that an object attracts equal attention of both artists and scientists. Atoms, for instance, fascinate scientists but are of little interest to poets. Ditto for global warming, biochemistry, epidemics and DNA, all of which made recent headlines in science journals, but scarcely made an appearance in the arts. Economics is the wild card as David Hare’s play, The Power of Yes, on the global financial crisis eloquently proves.

Then focuses on the holy moon.

Secondly in a recent interview the actor Kamal Haasan has said something which is not quite settled in the discipline of philosophy, economics and the law (the natural law).

So what did he said?

Are there particular political themes that you try to explore?

• I’m not a political commentator, but I’m very sure that we have not reached the “ism” that is the panacea for all evils. We may be the world’s largest democracy, but the democracy of ancient Greece, the republic of Rome, then later the founding of America—these are all different beasts. We are in the process of evolving systems: So, I ask why stick to it and make a dogma or a diktat out of it. When people dismiss an ideology, when they say, for example, “There goes communism”, I ask “Why?” Karl Marx has done his bit. It’s part of a continuous evolution. We are yet to arrive at the promised land, and I’m glad. The ascent of man has happened because of this continuous evolution, and not because of diktats that we believe are the final word. That is why you see me playing various parts: to find the logic in each argument. I’m only a spectator, not a legislator.

People feed themselves no technology of government need to handspun by Chandra

Environmentalism is good business as well. It is illusory in economics understanding that government feed people, rather other way around, through taxes. Indian liberal politician Sharad Joshi writes “There is a lot of hue and cry about climate change and global warming, though nobody is very clear what it really means”. That is true but “A couple of decades earlier, there were similar tirades against “capitalist” growth by the Communists and fellow-travellers, who argued that growth in a capitalist economy was bound to suffer from intermittent cyclical depressions and economic crises”.
As I said earlier in one post, is worth to read some ideas from well experienced people like him. “The Communists who, in their heyday, ridiculed Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi as obscurantist charlatans, have taken to professing environmentalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. When Stalin lived and ruled, these very people championed the cause of establishing a Communist global hegemony as a legitimate revolutionary aspiration. Now, they are opposed even to the establishment of a set of rules of international trade under the World Trade Organisation.
Even if the fears of the environmentalists of an impending doomsday look like materialising, human ingenuity is capable of coping with it. Already, plans are afoot to create an artificial sundial in space to soften the effect of solar radiation.
Neighbouring planets are being explored with a view to finding a congenial environment for the settlement of generations to come. In fact, human ingenuity is such that, as Ayn Rand put it, even if the Sun itself were to collapse, human beings would be able to replace it with a Sun of their own creation.Malthus predicted widespread epidemics and famines in a situation where the supply of land was constant and the population increased in geometric proportion. He was proved false by technological innovations that permitted citizens of today to eat more and better than his forefathers did.
When the evil effects of technologies start manifesting, man has usually found a way to overcome them by innovating further towards a more advanced technology. Humanity will take the problem in its stride and find ways of overcoming them. Humanity lives by its more innovative and enterprising members. Human ingenuity is limitless. There is no doubt that each innovation may create some new problems. But those problems, one can be sure, will be overcome by man’s ingenuity”.
The full article is here. It is double worth to read with open mind.