Blinking links

• Manish Sabharwal writes "...the most articulate non-economic case for urbanisation was made by Nandan Nilekani in his book Imagining India: “It has been fashionable in our cultural commentary to refer to India’s cities as places of vice, corruption and loss of innocence. But cities are, and have historically been, a powerful catalyst for political reform. Leaders such as B.R. Ambedkar recognised this and found the Indian city liberating after the sink of localism and den of inequity that was the village. Upward mobility for the backward castes is therefore most tangible in our cities because it becomes difficult to enforce silly notions of caste purity and pollution in the forced proximity of our city buses and trains.”

• Niranjan reviews a new book Grant Pursuit..."The Industrial Revolution had shown glimpses of a better future, though there was little historical reason to believe that societies could escape the poverty trap. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engelspredicted that capitalism would inevitably push workers into penury and the entire economic system would collapse in a heap. Engels comes across better than Marx in Nasar’s book. Marx, it seems, wrote about the horrors of industrial life without even once seeing the inside of a factory. He lived in London not too far away from two outstanding thinkers: Charles Darwin and George Eliot. He never bothered to either meet or correspond with them."