Tuesday, November 25, 2014

This and that

Finally, after ten years of retirement, I seem to be getting some glimpses of the sort of things that I want to understand. It is probably due to the efforts that I have spent reading Piketty. Right or wrong, his lucid style seems to help thinking about economic and development problems. Two books that I am reading in this connection which I recommend are by Emmanuel Todd "The explanation of ideology" and "The causes of progress". He may be wrong but the books are stimulating and I am reading them slowly and not trying to finish quickly. I would be interested in feedback from people like Sreenivas Paruchuri.
During the morning walk, I met for the first time an aboriginal girl in our neighbourhood. She looked like a school girl, had a backpack and a sunny smile. Many of them could pass for South Indians. Sometimes Indian kids are called abos here, a term considered derogatory. Around 23 years ago, I met a fair girl in a Northcote bus stop who smiled and talked to me. I asked her "Here people at bus stops don't talk to Indians. How come you are talking to me". "I am an abo", she said. I hope that the new girl won't have problems at school. The school is full of Chinese now. I recently met a Chinese girl of around 5 months age at the shopping centre who left her mother and sat in my lap. But she refused to go to Jhansi. Her mother explained "She likes men".

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