Links April 14, 2013

Some good news A village that plants new tress for newborn girls:
"Here, villagers plant 111 trees every time a girl is born and the community ensures these trees survive, attaining fruition as the girls grow up.

Over the last six years, people here have managed to plant over a quarter million trees on the village's grazing commons- inlcuding neem, sheesham, mango, Amla among others.............

On an average 60 girls are born here every year, according to the village's former sarpanch Shyam Sundar Paliwal, who was instrumental in starting this initiative in the memory of his daughter Kiran, who died a few years ago.

In about half these cases, parents are reluctant to accept the girl children, he says.

Such families are identified by a village committee comprising the village school principal along with panchayat and Anganwadi members.Rs. 21,000 is collected from the village residents and Rs.10,000 from the girl's father and this sum of Rs. 31,000 is made into a fixed deposit for the girl, with a maturity period of 20 years.But here's the best part.“We make these parents sign an affidavit promising that they would not marry her off before the legal age, send her to school regularly and take care of the trees planted in her name,” says Mr. Paliwal.People also plant 11 trees whenever a family member dies."

Another Madras Loyola college student remembers Fr. Racine. Mine are linked in a comment. However I did not like that college and I think I went back only once, that too to visit Fr. Racine.

 Le Carre comes out of the cold (via 3quarksdaily):
" And I had absolutely no sense of transition from the one war to the other, because in the secret world there barely was one. To the hard-liners of east and west the second world war was a distraction. Now it was over, they could get on with the real war that had started with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and had been running under different flags and disguises ever since.............The merit of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, then – or its offence, depending where you stood – was not that it was authentic, but that it was credible. The bad dream turned out to be one that a lot of people in the world were sharing, since it asked the same old question that we are asking ourselves 50 years later: how far can we go in the rightful defence of our western values, without abandoning them along the way?."

Ashwin Parameswaran  thinks that some of the left and the right can combine "Neither the left nor the right is wrong. But both of them only see one side of what is the core strategy of neoliberal crony capitalism – increase the scope and reduce the scale of government intervention........But both the radical left and the radical right need to realise the misguided nature of many of their disagreements. A robust safety net is as important to maintaining an innovative free enterprise economy as the dismantling of entry barriers and free enterprise are to reducing inequality."
He also links to his essay All systems need a little disorder

Top Economic Advisers Forcast Unrest and War

A quick review of Kedar Sharma's work  Atul's blog http://atulsongaday.me/2013/04/12/dekh-hamen-muskaaye-kyun/
More about Kedar Sharma's interactions with Nehru
http://autarmota.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/rama-vaidyanathan-kedar-sharma-pandit.html
http://cfsindia.org/tag/kedar-sharma/