This article speaks for (many of) us
In the height of summer-holiday season, bloggers face the inevitable question: to blog on break or put the blog on a break? Fearing a decline in readership, some writers opt not to take vacations. Others keep posting while on location, to the chagrin of their families. Those brave enough [...]
Apparently, to be a successful “public intellectual” one of the requirements is that one must invent a catchy tag line. The tag line must have emotional appeal through a reference to some deeply held belief or social conditioning. An example of one such is the title of the book by Thomas Friedman “The World is [...]
According to a report prepared by the National Social Watch Coalition, titled “Citizens Report on Development and Governance – 2006″, current Parliamentary expenditures are seventy two lakhs per day.
This works out to twenty thousand rupees per minute. In 1951, the costs was one hundred rupees per minute.
If this isnt stunning enough, theres more, according to [...]
Does anyone have first-hand experience of the Right To Information (RTI) Act, ie in using the Act for personal/ professional purposes? I’m trying to figure out how widespread and user-friendly the Act is in practice.
My interest has been piqued by Arvind Kejriwal’s Magsaysay Award, and the press that Parivartan has been getting. Sounds very [...]
This so called pesticide cocktail in major colas is a cocktail indeed – a cocktail of politics, psuedo science, posturing and bad economics.
The background: The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) claimed, in August 2003, that colas contained unacceptably high levels of pesticides. This caused a furore, with a major backlash against Coke and Pepsi. [...]
Voltaire’s dictum that the perfect is the enemy of the good is fascinating because of the delicious ambiguity embedded in it. The ambiguity arises from what one identifies as the “perfect” and the “good.” If perfection is by definition unattainable, and the good is defined as an attainable “optimal” (again defined suitably), then it is [...]
Is India finally improving its infrastructure?
Amidst all the hype regarding the Indian economy, the inevitable “Yes, India is doing well, but..” statement is most likely to peg India’s poor infrastructure as public enemy # 1.
For instance, Janet Yellen in a mostly optimistic essay, A Monetary Policymaker’s Passage to India says
In the view of most [...]
The World Bank’s Doing Business report drives home the need for labour reforms
According to World Bank’s new Ease of Doing Business league table (linkthanks Debashish), it was easier to do business in Maldives (#31), Nepal (#55), Pakistan (#60), Sri Lanka (#65), Russia (#79), China (#91), Bhutan (#104) and even Iran (#108), than in India. In [...]
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