What happened to vote banks?

Zoya Hasan says in Disenchantment Of The Dispossessed :
"This verdict (from UP) has the first intimations of a shift away from identity politics. In this sense, the UP results could be read as a bellwether of post-identity politics taking shape in regions beyond it. But there is a challenge here that is easy to identify though difficult to address in the short term: How to combine economic development and a workable social welfare system with pluralism and equal respect."
From BBCVoters opt for middle path :
"The victory is emphatic and with the caste-based regional parties suffering setbacks in states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, India's political landscape suddenly does not look so deeply fractured."
P.S. Many more links to Indian election resultsand reactions at Nanopolitan.
See also Qalander. Some excerpts from qalander's post:
"In the end, my (tentative) inclination is to read the election results as the reward for a moderation that was not just ideological as temperamental: the principal Congress leaders generally seemed relatively calm and unruffled over the course of the campaign, as indeed they had appeared over the preceding five years. Thus, while both major parties spoke of stability, the likes of Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, seemed to exude it -- remarkably, the party didn't lose its poise even in the aftermath of Mumbai attack last year (undoubtedly aided by the fact that the urban public's disgust with the status quo was general vis-a-vis all politicians, as opposed to specific to the Congress).
.....
The second point I'd like to make concerns India's rural voters, specifically, the populist measures touted by the Congress/UPA. For the second national election in a row, the Congress has devoted more attention to the economic concerns of rural Indians than the BJP has -- and has reaped the rewards. This isn't to say that the Congress' commitment to economic liberalization is any more or less than the BJP's (there isn't much to choose between the parties on that front these days), but that the Congress is more comfortable with the realization that public support for the sort of cautious, fits-and-starts liberalization India has seen since 1991, will not endure if the rural poor do not see some immediate benefits from the political dispensations championing that liberalization. To the extent the BJP has tried to take small town and rural voters along, it has tried to do so by means of cultural issues (such as the Babri mosque/Ramjanambhoomi temple movement). Increasingly, however, that sort of bi-polar mobilization, of a Hindu identity in opposition to a Muslim other imagined to be receiving preferential treatment from the Indian state, has proven difficult in the seat-rich states of the Hindi heartland, as caste-based parties have undermined the plausibility of the BJP's narrative. The Congress has shown signs of picking up the rural baton on economic grounds, and so far appears to have profited as a result.
Perhaps the two points are not unrelated: Shekhar Gupta (editor of the Indian Express) summed it up well when he eschewed the grand narratives of "secularism" and "development" in favor of an explanation that the Indian electorate has, over the past few years, tended to vote for parties who run campaigns addressing the public's aspirations, not its resentments. While the recent history of India hardly affords room for complacency -- it was less than a year ago that large-scale communal violence in Orissa killed dozens and displaced tens of thousands; and 2008 was the worst year on record as far as terrorism was concerned, with serial blasts in cities across the country -- the political atmosphere does seem a shade less shrill than it used to be in the decade leading up to the Gujarat pogroms of 2002 and beyond. I wouldn't ascribe any permanence to this softening of the edges, nor a tendency toward ever-increasing moderation, but Gupta's comment does capture the tenor of the moment. Given where the country has been in the recent past, and where it could easily go, I'll chalk that up as a victory of sorts."

Bill Easterley likes this speech

by Hillary Clinton Remarks at the New York University Commencement Ceremony (BREAKING NEWS: Nation’s senior diplomat talks sense, inspires, is not babbling nonsense). Excerpts:
"But they can no longer be seen just as government-to-government. There is a time and an opportunity, and with the new technologies available, for us to be citizen diplomats, citizen activists, to solve problems one by one that will give in to hard work, patience, and persistence, and will then aggregate to the solutions we seek.
............
But I know that you don’t have to wait for us to create a new program. When you go home today, go online and find the website called Kiva, K-i-v-a, where you can help someone like San Ma, a mother in Vietnam who is seeking a microcredit loan to buy rice seed and fertilizer for her family farm; or log on to Heifer International’s site, and for less than the cost of a dinner out, you can donate a flock of geese to a hungry family in Asia or Africa; or help Wangari Mathai’s Green Belt movement in planting trees and offsetting carbon emissions and empowering women in Africa.

Now, supporting these projects and others like them doesn't require a lot of time or money. But for the people you help and the planet you protect, your participation can be not just a game changer, but a life changer. Global service also means promoting good governance. We need informed citizens, both here at home and around the world, to hold their governments accountable for getting results and finding solutions."
She also says "we are increasing funding for Gilman scholarships by more than 40 percent" and "I am committed to streamline the visa process – (applause) – particularly for science and technology students so that even more qualified students will come to our campuses in the future."

Some interesting articles

Benjamin Friedman reviews'Animal Spirits' in The Failure of the Economy & the Economists.
Richard C. Lewontin reviews in Why Darwin? several Darwin Books and also mentions some of the background:
"The Darwin-Wallace explanation of evolution, the theory of natural selection, is based on three principles:

1) Individuals in a population differ from each other in the form of particular characteristics (the principle of variation).
2) Offspring resemble their parents more than they resemble unrelated individuals (the principle of heritability).
3) The resources necessary for life and reproduction are limited. Individuals with different characteristics differ in their ability to acquire those resources and thus to survive and leave offspring in the next generations (the principle of natural selection).
It seems amazing that two naturalists could independently arrive at the same articulated theory of evolution from a consideration of the characteristics of some species of organisms in nature, their geographic distribution, and their similarities to other species. This amazement becomes considerably tempered, however, when one considers the social consciousness and economic milieu in which the theory arose, a milieu marked by the rise of competitive industrial capitalism in which individuals rose in the social hierarchy based, presumably, on their greater entrepreneurial fitness."

Jonah Lehrer on the secret of self-control in Don’t!The secret of self-control. Sample passage:
"Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. “I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control.”"
More discussion in Lehrer's blog The Secret of Self-Control.

Malcom GladwellHow David Beats Goliath: When underdogs break the rules.

Jonah Lehrer onHow creativity springs from a choreographed set of mental events.

The 24th sun cycle

Despite Maya warnings, the next sun cycle will be relatively mild says this report:Sun entering weakest cycle since 1928 .
And I seem to be missing most of the 100 Awesome Blogs By Some of the World’s Smartest People.

Bringing culture to the laboratory

From Birds Raised In Complete Isolation Evolve 'Normal' Species Song Over Generations:
"Biologists have discovered that zebra finches raised in isolation will, over several generations, produce a song similar to that sung by the species in the wild. The experiment provides new insights into how genetic background, learning abilities and environmental variation might influence how birds evolve "song culture" -- and provides some pointers to how human languages may evolve.
.....
"What is remarkable about this result is that even though we started out with an isolated bird that had never heard the wild-type, cultured song, that's what we ended up with after generations," explains Mitra. "So in a sense, the cultured song was already there in the genome of the bird. It just took multiple generations for it to be shaped and come about."
.....
This work, the scientists maintain, now provides a unified experimental framework for researchers studying topics as diverse as cultural evolution, neuroethology (biology of song development) and quantitative genetics. "We've provided a starting point to explore the biology of cultural transmission in the laboratory," says Mitra."
P.S. more discussion in Neurophilosophy and Culture evolving & converging due to genes.

Rahul Siddharthan on Indus script

Rahul Siddharthan has a long post Indus:What did Rao et al. really do? with plenty of discussion, comments and links. One of the comments links to Boring No More, a Trade-Savvy Indus Emerges and other articles of Andrew Lawler all of which I missed. Abstract of the article (needs subscrption):
"Long in the shadow of its sister civilizations to the west, the Indus is emerging as the powerhouse of commerce and technology in the 3rd millennium B.C.E. But political and economic troubles dog archaeologists' efforts to understand what made this vast society tick."
Rahul's post and the comments seem worth going through a few times.
P.S. A follow up post by RahulMore Indus thoughts and links
and a recent article by I. Mahadevan The Indus ‘non-script’ is a non-issue

Some Telugu related links

A nice article on film singer A.M. Raja by J.K. Mohana Rao and Paruchuri Sreenivas. It has several downloadable songs in Telugu and Tamil; it seems A.M. Raja sang more songs in Tamil films than Telugu films. Here is apage of some of Raja's Telugu film songs from
oltelugusongs. Some of my favourites, eventhiugh they are not his best, are: chEyi chEyi kalupa rAvE, vennela pamdiri lOna. jAmi cheTTu mIdanunna jAti rAmachiluka possibly because the lyricsarein simple spoken Telugu. Paruchuri links to an AIR program of Savitri. There are some songs but more interesting to me are Savitri's conversationsabout her background and work.
The Seed transcriptUnlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain has a descrption of some of the views of Daniel Levitin, the author 'This is your Brain on Music':
"When a song comes on the radio that you haven’t heard since high school, you’re right there with it. You’re singing along. You remember all the nuances. The big story of memory revealed by music is that you tend to remember those things that you care about or that you have some deep emotional connection with. It can be a positive emotion, it can be negative, but there appear to be neurochemical tags associated with memories that are highly emotional. Those are the ones that get most accurately recorded in your memory and the ones that are easiest to draw out."

P.S. From the comments section in the article about A.M. Raja, there are interesting stories (from Rohiniprasad Kadavatiganti) on how A.M. Raja was chosen sing in the films 'vipranarayana' and 'missamma'. Apparently, around that time 'vipranarayana' was made Ghantasala used to smoke cigars and those days only one mike was used when recording duets. The female lead Bhanumati seems to have raised some objections. For the second film, the reasons seem to be due to prior contractual differences. In any case, A.M. Raja did a great job in both the films. I have also heard from a grandchild of Ghantasala that Ghantasala had two different families and a daughter from the second family is a bharatanatyam dancer.

Review article on the evolution of morality discussions

A wide ranging article by Jonathan Haidt & Selin Kesebir on Morality. Excerpt from the conclusion:
"The long debate over the relative roles of “emotion” and “cognition” seems to have given way to an emerging consensus on the first principle: “intuitive primacy but not dictatorship.” New discoveries about emotion, intuition, and the ways that brains respond to stories about moral violations have led to a pronounced shift away from information processing models and toward dual process models. In these models, most (but not all) of the action is in the automatic processes, which are cognitive processes that are usually affectively valenced. The second principle, “moral thinking is for social doing,” reflects the growing recognition that much of human cognition was shaped by natural selection for life in intensely social groups. Human cognition is socially situated and socially functional, and a great deal of that functionality can be captured by viewing people as intuitive politicians and prosecutors, not as intuitive scientists. The third principle, “morality binds and builds,” reflects the emergence of multi-level selection theory and of gene-culture co-evolutionary theory. Groups may not be significant units of selection for the great majority of other species, but once human beings developed the capacity for cumulative cultural learning, they invented many ways to solve the free-rider problem, increase the entitativity of their groups, and increase the importance of group-level selection pressures relative to individual-level pressures (which are always present and powerful).

Many other narratives could be told about the last century of moral psychology, and any narrative leaves out inconvenient exceptions in order to create a coherent and readable story. The particular narrative told in this chapter will probably be rejected by psychologists who were already united by a competing narrative. For example, many cognitive developmentalists believe the redemption occurred forty years ago when Lawrence Kohlberg (1969) vanquished the twin demons of behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Moral psychology, like any human endeavor, is influenced by moral psychology, which means that there is often a tribal or team aspect to it.
It remains to be seen whether the intuitionist team replaces the rationalist team and gets to write the history of moral psychology that graduate students will learn in 20 years.

For today’s young researchers, however, this chapter closes with three suggestions, each meant to be analogous to the 19th century American journalist Horace Greeley’s advice to “go west young man!” "
Jonathan Haidt's home page here.

Assorted links

Economist surveys professions of political leaders in different countries There was a lawyer, an engineer and a politician... and an
interesting comment by Stephen Morris.

Rajib in Which nationalities are trusting says:
"Reading Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational I was struck and concerned by his data which suggested that once social norms of reciprocity break down it is difficult to regenerate them. In other words, social capital can be thought of as a limited nonrenewable resource, at least proximately." and posts data from World Values Survey responses from different countries on whether most people can be trusted.

Acemoglu and colloborators on the role of institutions in development via Chris Blattman's post The secret to development Fetchez la vache.

Reviews of Jonah Lehrer's new book

From Book of the week: The Decisive Moment by Jonah Lehrer:
"One message: if you are already an expert on a subject, then trust your gut reaction when making a decision. If you know little about the subject, then find out more and make a logical decision.

By the way, one decision we can help you make. If you want to get a copy of the book, make sure you get ‘The Decisive Moment’ and not ‘How we decide’ by the same author. Turns out it’s the same book with a different title and a higher price! How rational is that???

If you haven’t got time to read the book, then check out reviews in the New Scientist (21 Feb 2009) and The Sunday Times (1 March 2009) or listen to it on BBC."


From the Nature review Decisions, decisions... by Adam Kepecs:

"Lehrer aims high by applying lessons from the neuroscience of decision-making to everyday choices. He provides valuable — if obvious — advice, such as relying on gut instinct for unimportant decisions but on reason when faced with new problems. But we were promised insights from neuroscience, not age-old wisdom.

Neuroscientists must grapple with how to communicate subtle conclusions in a world of headline-news reporting. Popular books such as this one could serve this goal of translating science for the public. But by smoothing out the rough edges of our knowledge, Lehrer leads the reader astray. Among his well-told dramatic stories the science often gets lost. Yet he is a gifted writer, so I hope for his next project he will dig deeper, embrace complexity and make it his job to report from the cutting-edge of scientific knowledge."

An Australian counter-terrorism expert

Awrite up about David Kilcullen: Fighting terror with brain power. Excerpts:
"The strategic mistake Kilcullen identifies at the heart of the immediate US-led response to September 11 was the weight given to counter-terrorism — an "enemy-centric" assumption that removing a terrorist network would remove the problem. Classical counter-insurgency, on the other hand, is "population-centric".

"It focuses on the population, seeking to protect it from harm by, or interaction with, the insurgents. It competes with the insurgents for influence and control at the grassroots level," he writes.
....
The second fault is a layer of hypocrisy he sees in Washington's new show of good faith on Afghanistan and its hand-wringing on Pakistan — American lawmakers cannot help themselves when it comes to spending hugely on resources that are inappropriate for today's wars, he says.

In campaigning for costly defence industry facilities to win jobs and votes in their electorates, lawmakers continue to replenish defence inventories with more of the conventional, shock-and-awe capability — when the wars Washington confronts are the unconventional misfortune of accidental guerillas.

He writes: "It takes factories, jobs and industrial facilities to produce battleships and bombers. But aid workers, linguists and special forces operators are vastly cheaper and do not demand the same industrial base. (Yet) shifting spending priorities … would cost jobs and votes in the congressional districts of the very people who control that spending."
....
Kilcullen proposes that new US troops bound for Afghanistan be tasked with securing population centres, allowing the people to get on with their lives and politics, while Afghan security forces, backed by small teams of US special forces, secure the areas between the centres.

"The conflict remains winnable, but the overall trend is extremely negative and a concerted long-term effort is needed — lasting 5-10 years at least — if we are to have any chance of building a resilient Afghan state and the kind of civil society that can defeat the threat.

"Extending an effective, legitimate government presence into 40,020 villages for the first time in modern Afghan history is the principal challenge, as government weakness, corruption, misrule and perceived lack of legitimacy at the village and district level allows militias, warlords and criminals to reassert themselves.""

There is also a discussion of some of Kilcullen's comments in the Chapati Mystery:
Will Pakistan Become A Theocracy? II. The first part has many interesting comments and links.

Reports of farmers suicides in Chhattisgarh

From Mass Farmer Suicide Sobering Reminder of Consequences of Water Shortages:

"In one of the more tragic stories related to water shortage in recent history, some 1,500 farmers in India’s agricultural state of Chhattisgarh committed mass suicide in response to the devastating effects of water shortages on their crop production.

The story, reported here by The Belfast Telegraph and The Independent, underscores the potentially devastating effects of water shortages to agriculture-centric regions of the globe, and to those who rely on water for not only their financial livelihoods and health, but for their hope.

“The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago….”
said Shatrughan Sahu, a villager local from a Chhattisgarh district, to India’s Down To Earth magazine. The district has been particularly devastated by farmer suicides in recent years, having recorded 206 in the past year alone. District police records indicate that many of the deaths occur due to distress over financial debt related to crop failures. In the Chhattisgarh region, water levels in the area have been reported to have been in major decline during recent years primarily due to drought, which has all but destroyed agricultural efforts in the region."
Earlier reports by Shubhranshu Choudhary:The truth about farmer suicides in Chhattisgarh and Chhattisgarh: Where Journalists get paid to keep their mouths shut.

Marx's dream?

From Chris Dillow's Marx's important error :
"...there is this passage in the The German Ideology, written some 30 years before vol III:

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.
.....
He was presaging a point made 85 years later by Keynes, in his essay (pdf), Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. In this, he predicted - just as Marx did - that productivity would grow sufficiently to allow our needs to be met with very little labour:

For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem - how to use his freedom form pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Marx thought that living wisely and well would consist in working voluntarily, cultivating mind, body and garden.
This, though, raises a question. Why is it that the rise in productivity hasn’t had the effects predicted by Marx and Keynes? Why have our “needs” risen as our productive powers have, with the result that the hours we devote to employment haven’t fallen as much as Marx or Keynes forecast? Why is it that so many of us - I count myself fortunate to be a partial exception - haven’t used wealth to free ourselves from alienating labour?"

There is a suggestion in the podcast linked in the post Jonathan Wolff on Marx on Alienation that the above remark by Marx might have been an isolated statement to tease Engels.

Links, April 14th

William Easterley reviews False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World By Alan Beattie. Excerpts:
"Looking in hindsight, one can emphasise the favourable factors, minimise the unfavourable factors and produce a plausible explanation. Sometimes these explanations will be orthodox economics 101 (free trade worked!); other times they will be heterodox (government industrial policy worked!). But these “explanations” cannot really be proved or disproved; each particular bout of success or failure is special. Ultimately, they give little guidance – to other countries, or even to the same country in a future period.

Economics has a better track record explaining very long run patterns of success or failure – explaining the level of development (per capita income) more than the economic growth rate. This requires economists to swallow our professional pride and admit that many fluctuations around very long run paths are indeed surprising – they will always resist explanation or prediction.

Even the long run patterns don’t explain everything; any prescription has counter- examples. We must give up the search for the grand unified theory of short run and long run growth and development, a bitter pill indeed. But at least this would keep us from chasing the ephemeral “miracles” for their unstable “lessons”, and keep us from trying to squeeze a prescription out of every last counter-example. Instead, we’d stick with ideas that, on average, for most countries, have stood the test of time."

Mark Thoma discusses Tim Hartford's views on macroeconomics in Macroeconomic Meltdown? and Willem Buiter's views in"The Unfortunate Uselessness of Most 'State of the Art' Academic Monetary Economics".
Thoma's comment from the first discussion:
"We do not have either the theoretical models or the empirical evidence we need to understand this episode thoroughly and completely, and to provide the policy advice that will cure the problem with any degree of certainty. Without solid theoretical models and the associated empirical evidence, we really have no choice but to fall back upon older models that were "built to answer the questions that are important at the moment," i.e. the old-fashioned Keynesian model, and to rely upon loose, but solid theoretical principles rather than a tightly constructed model and vast amounts of empirical evidence. It's quite understandable that economists who have been striving to push the profession in a positive, scientific, solidly theoretical and evidence based direction would resist going backward, and resist strongly, but what choice do we have? Until we have a better mousetrap, the simple, old fashioned one will have to suffice."

Alladi Sudhir Venkatesh profiled in The Other Cicago School (via Freakonomics Blog. Excerpt:
"The underground economy includes a vast array of people providing services that are off the books but otherwise legal. Venkatesh enumerates those having a harder time in the face of the recession: office cleaners, squeegee men, informal security guards, "canners" who scavenge for recyclables (there's less consumption now, so less to recycle) and nannies whose employers have been laid off. And as business contracts, underground workers face certain problems unique to their status. They have no unemployment insurance or other benefits, and, with little protection from law enforcement, they tend to resolve disputes by physical means.

Venkatesh prefers to leave detailed prescriptions to policymakers but nevertheless ventures a few. Microcredit loans, as well as education on risk management and planning, could help shift some black market entrepreneurial zeal above ground. He heartily approves of the proposal by Barack Obama--a fellow pickup basketball player at the University of Chicago when Venkatesh studied there--to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to give a bigger break to low-income parents. Sales taxes also hit the poor hard, he says; one way to help would be to let them use prepaid cards to buy goods tax free.

Venkatesh is struck by how much the black market resembles the wider society in which it is enmeshed."

Interview with Michael Perelman in 'Politics and Culture'. Excerpt:
"In 1866, British industry could not get cotton from the Confederate states because of the American Civil War. Britain turned to it’s Indian colony for cotton, restricting rice cultivation and causing the infamous famine of 1866. Karl Marx reported that this famine cost the lives of a million people in the district of Orissa alone—a more extreme version of the recent food crisis resulting from the destructive biofuels movement I mentioned earlier. Similarly, when the potato famine hit Ireland in the 1840s, the country’s agriculture was largely geared to exporting crops to England. Local poor people relied on potatoes. When the British finally got around to sending relief, they sent wheat, but the people had no facilities for baking.

In my book, The Invention of Capitalism, I tried to show how British economists and the powerful economic and political forces that they represented went to great lengths to figure out how to make people dependent on purchased food by making it impossible for them to produce for themselves."

Some photographs

from a recent trip to India have been uploaded today. These include photographs of two of the best young mathematicians (in my opinion) from India. Both are working in Vivekananda University, located in Belur Math, Kolkata.

On books

Recently, I was interviewd by Duppala Ravikumar about books for his blog 'Meeru Chadivaara?". Apparrently he came to know of my name through a Telugu book based on "The Confessions of an Economic Hitman" which I presented to a friend.
The interview in Telugu is here:
http://chaduvu.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/interivew23/
Mr. Ravikumar is more literary than me and his translation of my answers seem better than my write up. Below are rough translations of his questions and my answers.

1.What are the books and writers that you found boring?
Many writers and books. Sometimes after a few years, I found some of the books that I could not read earlier appealing. One example Bernard Cohn's "An Anthropologist Among Historians".
2.Your latest read?
"Recovering the Lost Tongue:The Saga of Environmental Struggles in Central India" by Rahul Banerjee (Prachee Publications, Kachiguda). But I have a vested interest in this being partly responsible for the publication. Soon after on the plane, I read V.S. Naipaul's "A Million Mutinees Now".
3. How many books are there in your library?
I do not know. There are five shelves about 6 rows in each. Possibly the number of books in each row varies from 30 to hundred.
4.What are the books that you wanted to read for a long time but could not?
Too many, but I am beginning to feel that after a while just reading is not enough and one has to analyze the topics. It really does not seem to matter if we miss a few books; the same information is spread through other books and sources.
5. What are the books and authors that you liked?
In Telugu, the one I remember most is "Asamarthuni Jeevayaatra" by Gopichand. But I read very few Telugu books since 50's. Since my Telugu is not strong, I like those written in simple Telugu like Annamayya, Vemana, Gurajada, Rallapalli, Arudra, Malladi Ramakrishna Sastry.
In English, there are too many books and writers that I liked. A few recent ones are Matt Ridley (The Red Queen etc), Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Mother Nature etc) Dan Gilbert "Stumbling on Happiness"), Amitav Ghosh's "In an Antique Land", Suketu Mehta's "Maximum City", V.S. Naipaul's books, Kautilya's Arthasastra (Partly read), Bernard Cohn's books, Cynthial Talbot's book on Medieval Andhra, Sheldon Pollock's "The language of the gods in the world of men". I just started on Ramakrishna Mission's seven volumes on Indian culture and heritage but they are being shipped now.
6. How many books have you presented to friends recently and how many did you recieve?
About 15-20 books to friends. I also get quite a few from my children.
7. Which news papers and magazines do you read regularly?
None in particular. Browse through several on internet. I was told by friends in India that some of the regional language papers are better than the English news papers in India. I read EPW and OUTLOOKindia fairly regularly.
8. What are the books that many others liked but you did not?
I generally do not read best sellers. I start on a topic and try to find books on that topic. Currently I am trying to understand a bit about 'development' particularly in the Indian context. So I am trying to look at books that describe ancient India to medieval to recent developments. I must add that I understand very little of these topics.
9.What are you currently reading?
Planning to read "India: A Wounded Civilization" by V.S. Naipaul. I just finished reading a book by him.
10. What are the books that stimulated you?
Several. If I have to select one book, I would probably choose "Mother Nature" by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
P.S. I would like to thank P.P.C. Joshi of Prachee Publications and Paruchuri Sreenivas for suggesting to me several interesting books.

An old friend reviews Slumdog Millionaire

Bobby Winters' review The One Story: Slumdog Millionaire in which I make an appearance. Apart from helping with driving, I rember that Bobby was very excited then about John Stallings concept of 'binding tie' which later became 'folding' when formulated in terms of trees. I have not seen the movie or read the book yet.

His blog

Bloomberg's initiative to cut salt intake

From Public Policy That Makes Test Subjects of Us All :
"But that prediction is based on an estimate based on extrapolations based on assumptions that have yet to be demonstrated despite a half-century of efforts. No one knows how people would react to less-salty food, much less what would happen to their health.
....
In the past year, researchers led by Salvatore Paterna of the University of Palermo have reported one of the most rigorous experiments so far: a randomized clinical trial of heart patients who were put on different diets. Those on a low-sodium diet were more likely to be rehospitalized and to die, results that prompted the researchers to ask, “Is sodium an old enemy or a new friend?”"

Replicating Milgram

A whole issue of American Psychologist on the famous Stanley Milgram experiments via Chris Blattman.
See also Eric Wargo's Bad Apples or Bad Barrels? Zimbardo on ‘The Lucifer Effect’.

Adhunika Vyavahara Kosam

Prachee Publications site has made available Adhunika Vyavahara Kosam by Budaraju Radhakrishna online. Some additions prepared by Sri Budaraju will be available in due course.
Some time ago, I requested Sri P.P.C.Joshi for this favour since I felt that it may be be useful to NRIs like me to help writing in Telugu. I would like to thank Sri P.P.C.Joshi for making the dictionary available and the owners of AMdhra bhArati site for helping with the digitization.

Babbanji update

in Amitav Kumar's blog From the Page, Into Your Day .

Links, March 12th

On T.V.Raman's software for the blind :For the Blind, Technology Does What a Guide Dog Can’t .
Protecting traditional medicines: India protects traditional medicines from patents .
On Benjamin Paul KailaChange Makers Inc .
Sugata Mitra againfrom pbs.

Doing mathematics in Belur Math

I have not been doing mathematics for a while but while visiting a friend in Kolkata, I arranged to stay in Belur Math where one of the monks is is a very good mathematician. He wanted me to explain some theory which Peter Scott and I developed a few years ago and he thought that it would be useful in a problem that he has been thinking for over an year. That turned out to be the case. After a life time in mathematics, it does not seem to be hard to get back in to it even after a long gap.
In the beginning I was afraid that this may be religious place and difficult to stay for agnostics like me. But there is very little talk of religion. The Ramakrishna Mission seems to be more about service than religion. I understand that there are some some moslem and christian monks. In Bengal, apart from educational activities, they seem to be in to extensive rural development activities, running dispensaries and hospitals essentially doing what the government should be doing. I hope that similar activities spread to other states. In any case, this seems to a good place of meditation for an agnostic.

Moni Moshin on the developments in Pakistan

State of Emergency: A personal history of Pakistan on the brink (http://bostonreview.net/BR34.2/mohsin.php,via 3quraksdaily). Enlightening article, but she seems to go easy on on the Bhuttos and few others as pointed out by C.M. Naim in the comments.

Reading Arudra in Kolkata

My knowledge of Telugu writings is ver fragmentary but I knew about Arudra from his film songs (particularly Premalekhalu from around 1852) and his very impressive Samagra Andhra Sahityam. Visiting a friend's house in Kolkata, I came across a number of books by Arudra and a few about him. I have been browsing throuh some of them and find Arudra very impressive. From the biography 'Arudra' by Medipalli Ravikumar, Ifind that Arudra (original name Bhagavatula Shankara Sastry) was rebellios, scholarly and creatve from a very young age. Apparently, he refused to have a thered ceremony, dropped out of college to take part of the freedom movement, and later bcame a Marxist. But he did not seem to be like many other Marxists. As A.S. Ramman says in 'Words cast a spell'(publiahed in Arudra Abhinandana Sanchika, on the occasion of his 60th birthday in 1985):
" He is a Marxist who readily responds to the literary graces of the bourgeois West, an athesist who wrote exquisite devotional poetry, a non-conformist whom conformists find irrestible because of the authenticity of his dissent, and pacifist who advocates war for peace."
Apart several poetry books, plays, stories there are many scholarly books, some on two of my favourite poets: Vemana and Gurajada. From his two books on Vemana (Vemana Vedam and Mana Vemana), it appears that Vemana was not just a clever epigramist that I imagined but had deep knowledge of various philosophies of his time, found them unsatifactory, tried to go beyond then and expressed his thoughts in the language and idiom understandable to common people. Thus his stanzas remained in people's cosciousness, particularly after they were made available by C.F. Brown. Eventhough many pundits did not like his work (when some of his poems were prescribed by Madras Ujversity, copies of the book disappeared and there was a strike by some students and teachers, according to Narla Venkateswara Rao in his introductory articles to "vemana, Pacchatyulu"), Arudra also shows Vemana's influence on several poets. He also brings his formidable knowledge of classical works into play in his discuusons of everyday conversation pieces. Some of these are in his newspaper articles and leaves the discussion usually withe comment that the topic needs futher research. It seems that all his works are worth pursuing. Medipalli Ravikumar's "Arudra" has a comprehensive list of his writings. A book on popular science that he wrote is missing from the list. It is possible that are more works missing. From Ravikumar's book one finds that Arudra wrote under several psedonyms in his younger days. Some of the pseudonyms are Sankaram, Sankarasastry, Chotasastry, Junior Ashwini,Tingu Rangarao, Samidheni Savitri, Markandeyudu, Vamakshi, Haridasu and Konetirao. Possibly some more may be found in the old magazines and newspapers.

Book release of "Recovering the Lost Tongue"

Discussion on Fifth Schedule and Book Release
6 March 2009, 3.30 pm
The Other Media and Intercultural Resources cordially invite you for a discussion on the Fifth Schedule of the Indian Constitution and the book release of “Recovering the Lost Tongue”, written by Rahul Banerjee, an activist who has worked with adivasis in western MP for the past two decades. Prof. Manoranjan Mohanty will release the book.
Programme Details:

Discussion on Fifth Schedule and

Book Release of “Recovering the Lost Tongue”

.............
The Indian edition is published by:
Joshi PPC,
Prachee Publications,
3-3-859/1/A, lane opp. Arya samaj,
Kachiguda,Hyderabad 500 027
Phone:(O)040-2460 2009 (11:00 a.m.to 5:00 p.m.)

Long distance guidance

Here is my tribute to John Stallings on the eve of a trip to India:
I first met John Stallings in early 1967, when he visited Tata Institute of Fundamental Research to give a lecture course on Polyhedral Topology and I was asked to write up his lecture notes. I was a third year research student at that time mainly interested in Algebraic Topology and Differential Topology learnt though some unpublished notes of Samuel Eilenberg and John Milnor. I knew about John's work on Poincare conjecture and that some papers of William Browder were inspired by John's work. In prepartion for his visit, I worked through some papers of J.W. Alexander, J.H.C. Whitehead, E.C. Zeeman's notes from I.H.E.S and some papers of John on engulfing. For two months, I was in constant contact with John discussing his lectures, showing my notes, helping with shopping and a sight-seeing trip to Lonawala. He was unassuming and notes writing turned to be easy except for a couple of appendices where my reading of Whitehead helped. Most of the time, he gave me his own notes and what all I had to do was number the lemmas and add symbols on the stencils. It turned out be somewhat messy and some of the elegance of his presenation was lost in misprints. Surprisingly at the end, he offered joint authorship which I politely declined. He also gave a seminar which seemed very nice until a point when he said 'by waving hands twice, we have the result' and this was probably my introduction to Combinatorial Group Theory.. There was some correspondence soon about his lecture notes, his leaving Princeton for Berkeley and I continued to read his papers. They always seemed very elegant with neat ideas and easy to read with unpleasant technical difficulties tucked away in a half page somewhere. Slowly I found that only were his theorems useful but their generalizations too and when these did not work, one could often go back to his techniques.
Just before Stalling left Bombay, I asked whether he could suggest some problems for my thesis. I think that I wanted to prove some embedding theorems following his ideas in the lecture notes about an alternate argument in the proof of s-cobrdism theorem avoiding the Whitney trick. But what all he said was that somebody named Papakyriakopoulos did some great work. I never sudied any thing in 3-dimensional topology before and after he left, I started reading "On Dehn's lemma and Asphericity of Knots", the first paper on 3-maniflods which I read. To round it off, I read a few more papers and got stuck in 3-manifolds for a long time. Meanwhile, possibly around the end of 1967, he sent a preprint of 'Groups with infinitely many ends' which is probably my main introduction to Topological Group Theory. Though my fascination with higher dimensional topology continued, I found myself returning to Stallins papers and ideas. I do not remember any papers of mine not influenced by Stallings except possibly one on cut points which built on the impressive work of Brian Bowditch. But even here, one of Stallings students Bill Grosso, seemed to have many of the basic ideas but not proofs.
Meeting such a first rate mind at an early part of my career has inflenced me and he kept an affectionate interest in me through out my career. The acquintance with Stallings and miswriting his notes seemed to have made me a member of the Stallings community and I always felt welcomed by his students and friends.

Links, February 17th

On the eve of a visit to Kolkata, a disturbing report In support of Johann Hari .

The Indian Railway King (via Nanopolitan). Jeffrey Witsoe gives a quick overview of Lalu's record in Bihar Challenges and Opportunities Facing India's Poorest State.

Swat: A Critical Analysis (via Chapati Mystery)

Memorial for John Stallings

Rob Kirby from Berkeley informs:
"There will be a memorial for John on March 1, 2009, at 2-4pm in 1015 Evans. (In case you have not heard, John died on 24 Nov., 2008, see Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stallings and a NYTimes obit http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/us/19stallings.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=john%20stallings&st=cse )"

How to recognize science

A new site Understanding Science.
From the write up New resource for teachers, public on how to recognize science when you see it in physorg.com (via Evolutionary Psychology Discusion Group):
"If you think you know what science is and how science works, think again. A new University of California, Berkeley, Web site called "Understanding Science" (http://undsci.berkeley.edu/) paints an entirely new picture of what science is and how science is done, showing it to be a dynamic and creative process rather than the linear - and frequently boring - process depicted in most textbooks.
....
"The goal was to present (the concept) that testable ideas are right at the center of science, and if you don't generate testable ideas, then you are really not doing science," Kuldell said.

Testing, however, is intertwined with exploration and discovery - the "cowboy" aspect of science, in the words of one project advisor - review of hypotheses and theories by skeptical peers, and actual application of the science to real world problems.

Within the Web site, personal stories contributed by top scientists around the country illustrate the interplay of exploration, peer review and outcomes, and demonstrate the different pathways to discovery taken in different fields of science, from biology to cosmology."
P.S. Another interesting link from Evo.Psychology group:
Group decisions in humans and animals: a survey.

Informal economy to the rescue?

From The Age articleSlum economy offers hope in Delhi by Matt Wade:
"The Indian economy relies much less on exports than other developing countries and so is much less exposed to the collapse in consumer demand in the US and Europe.

Exporters have been hit much harder and there are reports that hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost.

This eventually might threaten micro-manufacturers such as Kalimuddin, as export-oriented garment makers shift their product to the domestic market and drive down prices.

Naeem and Kalimuddin operate in the vast "informal economy", meaning they are outside the purview of the tax system, corporate regulation and labour laws.

Tens of millions of informal-sector workers are vulnerable to exploitation but the economy benefits from their vague employment status.

Delhi economist Dr Kanhaiya Singh says they will help cushion Indian from the global slump. "The labour market is highly flexible in the informal sector — it can adjust very quickly," he says."

Links: February 13

How Darwin and Lincoln Shaped Us via Nag Murali's Blog.
Recent progressonTargeted reinnervationbut there are risks of recurrence of phantom limb pain and such.
Sweden may not be a model viaNaked Capitalism.
Taipei Times report from 2004 onBudhist Monks and Business Matters by Gregory Schopen.
P.S.Crooked Timber on The Mysteries of Textbook EconomicsandAre blogs ruining economic debate?with a link to a paper Deconstructing the Argument for Free Trade by Robert Driskill.

Reading

and browsing through some interesting books like Sheldon Pollock's The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Two of the reviews are
here and here. As the reviews explain, the book is concerned with "two great moments of transformation in culture and power in premodern India. The first occurred around the beginning of the Common Era, when Sanskrit, long a sacred language restricted to religious practice, was reinvented as a code for literary and political expression... The second moment occurred around the beginning of the second millennium, when local speech forms were newly dignified as literary languages and began to challenge Sanskrit for the work of both poetry and polity, and in the end replaced it."
Like the reviewers above, I find the book interesting but not convincing.
P.S. Some of the issues addressed by Sheldon Pollock are discussed in an earlier essay "Literary History, Indian History, World History in a 1995 issue Social Scientist which also has interesting articles by S. Nagaraju and Velcheru Narayana Rao on the rise of vernacular languages.
P.P.S (14th February) Having more or less finished reading the book (browsed through some pages)I think that it is a wonderful book for its stupendous scholarship, critique of many existing theories and finally for the questions that it raises.

Cheap laptops?

India unveils $10 laptop!. But Atanu Dey is skeptical.
P.S. More information at Nanopolitan:Price of hype ... .

What are the experts saying about the financial crisis?

Gulzar Natarajan in Limits of macroeconomic policy making?:
"Unfortunate as it sounds, after reading reams of analysis of the ongoing financial and economic crisis, I cannot but get a distinct sense of helplessness, even hopelessness, about our present predicament."
In a similar vein "Paul Samuelson: Financial Crisis Work of 'Fiendish Monsters'":
"Q: What should be the appropriate spending policy this time around?

A: ...I don't know whether your roads, whether your railroads are or are not in need of new things. ... If you're very foolish you will spend where the lobbyists want you to, like building bridges to nowhere. But there are plenty of things, from windmills to nuclear plants, that are useful and worth spending money on.

Spending in the direction of the poor part of the population (is important) because those are the people who are most likely to re-spend. If you primarily spend in the direction of your millionaires, that won't make any difference."
And Toxic Leaders.
Somewhat better news:
Maybe De-Coupling Isn’t Dead links to Rogoff: The Exuberance of India.
P.S.From
Blanchard roundtable: In conclusion:
"We don't sound like expert diagnosticians debating which of several potential infections could be causing a patient's trouble. We sound like witch doctors who can't agree on just where in the body the lifeforce can be found."
And Refuted Economic Doctrines #1-5.

Ruchira Paul on her book reviews

From Bland Book Reviews :-) :
"Namit draws attention to Narayan's impassioned critique of the author's style and my own descriptive plot driven approach to the review of the same novel, Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh. In response to Namit's query I will attempt to explain to our readers why my book reviews come across more as précis style presentations than literary criticisms.

Although an avid reader from early childhood, I have never been a terribly literary person. I treat books very much like meals - to be examined, consumed, deriving whatever nutrition they offer and moving on. Some are relished like gourmet treats, some approached with playful or cautious interest and others summarily rejected after the first bite. No matter how deep an imprint a book leaves on my memory and my psyche, I feel little need to dwell too long on it or to connect it to a past or future reading experience in any formally meaningful way. Although I do recall with precision how a very good book managed to touch me, I don't feel compelled to recount the details of those feelings to others who may or may not agree with my assessment. Reading seems like a very private enjoyment. Therefore the lack of ardor in public."
And more. Bloggers often write about topics about which they do not have much expertise but are not entirely aloof from the topics they discuss, like to share and exchange information with others and move on. Seems like a sensible approach to me.

Indian mathematics miscellany

Sreenivas Paruchuri, organizer of racchabanda and other sites (and one of the most learned people I know on Indology topics) informs of the arrival of Mathematics in India: 500 BCE-1800 CE by Kim Plofker . Kim Plofter did her Ph.D. in 1995 with
David Pingree and wrote several scholarly articles about Indian mathematics . Many wondered why India has not been able to keep up with these wonderful achievements(see, in particular Kerala school of astronomy and mathematicsand the work of Madhava ). Frits Staal reviews some of this work and comes up with his own speculations in Artificial Languages Across Sciences and Civilizations and the briefer reports The Generosity of Artificial Languages and The Generosity of Artificial Languages in an Asian Perspective . Some excerpts from the later report:
"An illustration of our topics of discussion is the discovery by Madhava of Kerala, Southwest India, who lived around 1400 CE, of infinite power series that are expansions of pi and the trigonometric functions sine, etc. This took place almost three centuries before these same series were re-discovered in Europe by Newton and Leibniz. In Europe, that event led to the infinitesimal calculus, which could not have been expressed without the help of an artificial mathematical language. In India, that revolution in language did not take place: Madhava and his followers continued to write in Sanskrit or Malayalam, the Dravidian language of Kerala. The accompanying illustration depicts, on top, the infinite power series that expresses the circumference of a circle with diameter D (i.e., two times the radius R) in Sanskrit, followed by a translation into English by A. K. Bag. At the bottom is the series in its modern form which is basically the same as what was written by Newton.
...
Newton's laws were not always written in an artificial form. He formulated in cumbrous Latin, later disambiguated and clarified by Euler, the law of motion that is now taught to children as f = ma.

Absence of artificial notations and especially of the calculus go far towards explaining why modern science did not originate in India or China. Earlier forms of Asian mathematics inspired the algebra of the Arabs but to what extent was that an artificial language? India did develop a formal or artificial language but that was in linguistics and two millennia earlier."
From the longer paper (page 130):

"In Indian mathematics, infinite power series were discovered almost three centuries before it happened in Europe. Indian mathematics is, in this respect, as good as Newton's, but Samskrit was not artificial enough, it was not replaced by equations and the Indian development ground to a halt.
My next conclusion is more tentative. It is elicited by several questions. Indian grocers have combined the use of place value (already to known to the Babylonians) with Indian numerals including the zero that have been called the essential part of the development of civilization. But why did Indian mathematicians use cumbersome expressions derived from linguistics? Was it to add the prestige of the science of language to the humdrum activity of mathematical calculations? Was it because they thought of mathematics itself as a language, good for composing verse and telling stories and useful for doing sums? Was it for excluding outsiders? Was it for several or all of these reasons? I tend to think that India's lingustic skill may have been not merely irrelevant or superfluous, but detrimental to the development of her mathematics- brilliant as it was."
Perhaps the stupendous achievements of Panini have cast a long shadow. Similar questions about science in China (sometimes both China and India) are discussed under
titles like Needham question .

Longest Banana Cluster?

Longest Banana Cluster!via ఇంత పెద్ద "అరటి పళ్ళ గెల" ఎప్పుడయినా చూశారా? . For some reason, only the second allows enlargement.

Thinking about science

in 24 episodes how to think about science (via 3quarksdaily):
"Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.
"

Ariviyal

Arunn Narasimhan and others have started a science blog in Tamil Ariviyal (via Abi). Arunn says "Visit, bookmark, subscribe to feed, read, comment, participate, suggest, support, spread the word - particularly inside Tamil Nadu among high school students and teachers."

Month of birth and children's health in India

Summary of a recent working paper from the World Bank Month of birth and children's health in India (viaMTEF is The Bayesian Heresy .
Summary: The authors use data from three waves of the India National Family Health Survey to explore the relationship between the month of birth and the health outcomes of young children in India. They find that children born during the monsoon months have lower anthropometric scores compared with children born during the fall and winter months. The authors propose and test four hypotheses that could explain such a correlation. The results emphasize the importance of seasonal variations in affecting environmental conditions at the time of birth and determining the health outcomes of young children in India. Policy interventions that affect these conditions could effectively impact the health and achievement of these children, in a manner similar to nutrition and micronutrient supplementation programs.

Some good out of Satyam

V Chowdary Jampala reports inRacchabanda:
"I did get a chance to visit Emergency Medicine Reseach Institute (EMRI), the not-for-profit organization founded by Ramalinga Raju that operates the 108 service which is similar to the US 911 service (as it was mentioned in this forum before, my brother is part of the leadership of this organization from the very begining). Actually, I had to call 108 a few days ago myself when I witnessed a scooteraccident with minor injuries (it turned out that I was not the only one to make the call).

When my brother first discussed this concept with me exactly four years ago, I was quite skeptical about the utility and feasibility of such a service in India. Now, I find that the use of this number has become ubiquitous throughout the state. The 108 ambulances at the ready are visible at major junctions and urban sites. The service which started about August 2005, now operates about 1650 ambulances and expanded to eight states through out the nation.

EMRI Headquarters is located near Kompalli, and exurb of Hyderabad in a large campus. It houses the corporate headquarters, the Call center for AP, and the national training center for EMTs. The call center has five physicians at any given time who are available to guide the EMTs regarding medical management of these emergencies (our 911 service does not have this). The call center handles about 65,000 calls per day including medical, police and fire emergencies with automated dispatch systems. It has excellent quality control and data gathering mechanisms in place as well as a system for feedback to callers regarding what happened with the incident that was called about. I got to see operatives taking calls and dispatching
ambulances and their case-report forms. In one of the incidents I reviewed, a person that attempted suicide by ingesting acid was taken by the ambulance and handed over to a teaching hospital that was 30 kilometers away within 60 minutes of the initial call - quite impressive by any standards. Both the call center and the ambulances meet the accreditation standards of international bodies. I got to examine both the well designed and well equipped ambulances as well as the training center for the EMTs. I am quite impressed. EMRI is an excellent operation and is an example of what
we are capable of achieving with the right vision and leadership and not compromising with mediocrity.

The truth about Ramalingaraju's actions and culpability with regards to the Satyam debacle will eventually emerge and the rumors and charges floating around may eventually be proven right. However, his contributions to the Indian society with EMRI certainly deserves commendation. His family has contributed about 10 million dollars to start up this operation and keep it running. Even after the state governments began to take over 95% of the cost of maintaining the ambulances, Satyam and Ramalingaraju's foundations were funding about 5% of the costs. Besides the monetary contibution itself, it was Ramalingaraju's insistence that this has to be a state of the art operation meeting the highest international standards that everybody at EMRI credits as being the key for this operation.

Now, it is not clear how that 5% would be made up with contributions from Satyam likely to be unavailable. For the sake of every citizen and resident of India, I hope that EMRI and 108 services continue to go on at the same level of quality."

A readable book on brain plasticity

I finally completed reading The Brain That Changes Itself nearly two months after starting it. It seemed like an exciting new area with lots of real life examples and reports of actual research. Some of it seemed too good to be true and sometimes it seemed like a theory which explains everything. I thought that I should take it slowly and started googling some of the reports. Some of my misgivings are similar to those expressed in the review by Ruth Douillette:
"While it’s encouraging to realize that we do in fact have the ability to control and even manipulate brain function, it’s not quite as simple as that. The title suggests that the brain “changes itself.” It would be more accurate to say that the brain can be changed by significant intervention—therapy, self-talk, electronic devices—but left to itself most likely will continue in whatever rut it has settled into. Habits are hard to break.

Michael Merzenich, whom Doidge quotes liberally, has been studying the brain’s plasticity for nearly thirty years, according to his website. Merzenich leads a company, Posit Science, and we learn from Doidge the tremendous benefits he’s brought to his patients. What Doidge doesn’t mention, but a quick Google search discovers, is that Merzenich’s revolutionary program is quite pricey. Doidge stops just short of an infomercial."
The Wikipedia article onFast ForWord indicates that the resuts are not as consistently good as anticipated. But I still think that it is a wonderful book to explore the possibities of the power of the mind. More about brain plasticity here.
It will go on my list for rereading of some other popular science books : Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's "Mother Nature", Dan Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness", Matt Ridley's "The Red Queen", Frans de Waal's "Our Inner Ape" and of course Richard Dawkins.

Maybe he is alright

Old friends recall Obama's college years via Sepia Mutiny.
President Obama's Final Words at the Campaign Staff Ball .

Misc. links January 23rd

Abi at Nanopoitan has a series on Leelaavati's Daughters. One of the moving stories Lilavati's Daughters: 2. Dr. Anandibai Joshi .

Pakistan in Peril By William Dalrymple.

Steve Waldman has several links to nationalization (of banks) debates in Nationalize like real capitalists.

A New Meme: Blame It on Beijing (and Seoul, and Riyadh...) and Chinese Growth Plunges from Econbrowser.
How Far Can You Throw an Economist?from Mark Thoma's "Economist's View"
Global imbalances and the Triffin dilemma by John Kemp.

And a favourite topic. In The Last Professor Staney Fish reviews the book The Last Professors:The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities by Frank Donaghue. Discussion at Language Log Pure Fish (link via Abi of Nanopolitan). Strangely nobody mentions William Clark's "Academic Charisma and the origins of the Research University" reviewed in The Nutty Professorsor David Labaree's Understanding the Rise of American Higher Education....
Some speculations about future research by Freeman Dyson and David Brin.

Interesting thought

Excerpt from a comment in the post తెలుగు హిందూమతం : ఈనాటి చారిత్రిక అవసరం :
"సంస్కృతం రోజూ పావుగంట చదివితే చాలా వ్యాధులు కూడా నిరోధించబడతాయని శాస్త్రీయంగా పరిశోధనలద్వారా తెలుస్తున్నది."
Rough transation: "One learns from scientific investigations that reading Samskrit for fifteen minutes a day prevents many diseases"

An interesting book about medieval Andhra

I have read only a few history books and do not know where Precolonial India in Practice: Society, Region, and Identity in Medieval Andhra by Cynthia Talbot stands but I found it engrossing.
She chose Andhra region since she felt that its historic experience is more representative of the historic experience of the subcontinent as a whole compared to the well studied core regions like Gangetic pains and Kaveri detlta (page 10) and the medieval period (in this case 1000-1650 and more often the Kakatiya period 1175-1325) because this period corresponds to the era during which the geographic contours of the modern linguistic region was established (page 4). The 1995 article Emergence of Regional Identity and Vernacular Literature: a Case Study in Telugu by S. Nagaraju seems reated. Off and on, I was aso reminded of Peter Turchin's book "War, Peace and War".

A few of my favourite Hindi songs

After the Noor Jajan dhamaal, I started browsing the net for some of the Hindi (Urdu?) songs that I used to listen in the forties and fifties, some from my mother. Here is a variant of Meera bhajan sung by Lata from Nau Bahar AE RI MAIN TO PREM DEEWANI MERA DARD and the bhajan itself by Geeta Roy (Dutt)from Jogan AERI MAIN TO PREM DEEWANI. I still remember vividly some of the Jhoola scenes from this song in Ratan rhimjhim barse badarwa and my mother used to sing this Sawan Ke Badalo. This one from Madhosh with traces of rap(?) Meri Dil Ki Nagariya Mein Aana . And hundreds more though I do not understand Hindi well. These from Kismet Dheere Dheere Aa Re Badal - Amirbai, Dheere Dheere Aa Re Badal - duet spawned a few songs in Telugu films. Unfortunately Telugu film songs from nearly the same period are frequently removed from YouTube.

A Noor Jahan Dhamaal

I have been listening to variants of LAL MERI PAT after seeing it in Crazyfinger a few days ago.
More Noor Jahan dhamaals including Sufi dances here.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan version Laal Meri Patt Rakhi Bala Jhoole Lal. Another version by him here. I cannot get rid of it yet.

Various Ramayanas

Many Ramayanas:The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia edited by Paula Richman is available online.
From google books excerpts from Questioning Ramayanas edited by Paula Richman are available. In particular, most of Velcheru Narayana Rao's "the Politics of Telugu Ramanayas: Colonialism, Print Culture, and Literary Movements" is avaible except for references which are in the translation తెలుగు రామాయణాల రాజకీయాలు: తెలుగు రామాయణాల రాజకీయాలు: బ్రిటీష్‌ పాలన, ముద్రణ సంస్కృతి, సాహితీ ఉద్యమాలు publishhed in EemaaTa. The first book has "A Ramayana of Their Own: Women's Oral Tradition in Telugu" by Velcheru Narayana Rao.
I came across these while trying to follow a discussion on Viswanatha Satyanarayana in దీప్తి ధార . Part of the discussion was about Viswanatha's Ramayana and Velcheru's articles seem to put it in a broader context.

And another wonderful link from Chapati Mystery

NAKED LUNCH: Blow daddy from the post Zionists made me forget my Arabic. Beginning of the poem:
"Daddy?
Yes, son.
Are we going to have a war with India?
Perhaps.
Oh, goody. We will thrash them, right? Like we did in 1857!
It wasn’t in 1857, son.
Oh, okay. But whom did we thrash in 1857?
The British, son…
And the Hindus too, right?
Well…"
The comments give a link to The Nadeem F. Paracha Work(s) Archive.

Reading recommendations from Chris Blattman

I have only read bits and pieces of these. All of them look very interesting.
Science:Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper from the post What do Marx, Freud, and Adler have in common?

The Analysis of Household Surveys: A Microeconometric Approach to Development Policy by Angus Deaton from the post Only read this post if "development" and "econometrics" make you warm and tingly

New Development Economics:We Shall Experiment But How Shall We Learn by Dani Rodrik from the post So you want to be an impact evaluator? A cautionary tale

Endogeneous Presidentialism by James A. Robinson and Ragnar Torvik from the post The rise of Presidentialism

Apparently Chris Blattman spends only about half an hour a day blogging but it will take me a few monthe to learn some of this material.

Interview with Sirivennela

I found this interview, in a form of English not uncommon in Andhra, fascinating : Interview with Sirivennela Seeta Rama Sastry by Jeevi . An excerpt:
"Checkout our Telugu Samethalu (idioms). Each Sametha is like a bullet in a gun. When it comes out, it does with a force that leaves its impact. Each Sametha is a totality of an excellent poem. Can you tell me who wrote those Samethalu? Nobody knows about that! But they are all very dear to us. When you write something that is very near to the life of a common man, he would adapt it in no time. This is the secret of success of Sirivennela Seetarama Sastry. Why do people accept me? I am no way superior to any body among my contemporaries or elders. There is a touch of reality in my songs. Somebody or the other would identify themselves with the feelings in my lyrics."

Jaipur Literature Festival

from january 21st to 25th program here via Chapati Mystery.

A book on World Bank Reports

Development Economics through the Decades: A Critical Look at Thirty Years of the World Development Report by Shahid Yusuf . It seems to be available online after registration here and has comments by Angus Deaton and others.

Two on stimulus packages

From "The Big Picture" Porn Industry asks for TART Money
And Willem Buiter in FT Can the US economy afford a Keynesian stimulus? (via 3quarksdaily):

Some Telugu related material online

at leat today
Classical Telugu Poetry, An Anthology TRANSLATED, EDITED, AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman
Buddhism in Modern Andhra: Literary Representations from Telugu by Velcheru Narayana Rao:
Abstract "This essay explores the hermeneutics of modern Buddhism in colonial and post-colonial Andhra, the Telugu speaking area of India. Using four literary works in Telugu: Buddhacaritramu by Chellapilla Venkata Sastri and Divakarla Tirupati Sastri (known as the Twin Poets), Saundaranandamu by Pingali and Katuri, a play Tisyaraksita by Buccibabu, and a short poem entitled ‘A Jataka Tale’ by Viswanatha Satyanarayana, the essay attempts to interpret each of the works in view of the social, political, and cultural background in which they were written. Each writer is introduced with brief information about his life and works, and each of the works is analysed for its literary ideology and impact. None of the writers were Buddhists and their works did not lead to a revival of Buddhism as a religion either.

The essay argues that two of the above works, Buddhacaritramu and Saundaranandamu, written under the influence of Edwin Arnold and Mahatma Gandhi, create a modern version of Buddhism that blends into a modern Hinduism. The essay also describes how the Nehruvian ideology of Indian nationalism incorporates both religions as integral parts of India’s great culture. The play by Buccibabu and ‘A Jataka Tale’ by Viswanatha Satyanarayana attempt a critique of Buddhism from a modernist and Brahminic point of view respectively, but they have not made a serious difference to the general nationalist approval of Buddhism."
Notes on political Thought in medieval and early Modern South India by Velcheru Narayana rao and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (This link does not seem to work, perhaps googling directly may)

Disclaimer: I enjoy reading Velcheru narayana Rao's writings. As with much work on hisory, sociology, anthropolgy etc, I do not have the competence to judge the material and am not always covinced. Some more links to Telugu related articles in cluding one article by Velcheru are in an earlier post.
P.S. I googled "velcheru on budhist plays in telugu" and found the above article by Velcheru and Sanjay Subrahmanyam on page 3 under "Notes on Political Thought in Medieval and Early Modern South India". If I click on it, the paper appears but if I save the URL and try again, it does not appear. I wonder whether somebody knows how to give the link in this situation.
P.P.S. Sreenivas Paruchuri gives this link in Racchabanda and says that the article of Velcheru and Sanjay Subrahmanyam can be downloaded until the end of February 28.

Best and worst jobs in US

Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs :
"The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.
...........
According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically work in favorable conditions -- indoors and in places free of toxic fumes or noise -- unlike those toward the bottom of the list like sewage-plant operator, painter and bricklayer. They also aren't expected to do any heavy lifting, crawling or crouching -- attributes associated with occupations such as firefighter, auto mechanic and plumber."
Part of the chart:
The Best The Worst
1. Mathematician 200. Lumberjack
2. Actuary 199. Dairy Farmer
3. Statistician 198. Taxi Driver
4. Biologist 197. Seaman
5. Software Engineer 196. EMT
6. Computer Systems Analyst 195. Garbage Collector
7. Historian 194. Welder
8. Sociologist 193. Roustabout
9. Industrial Designer 192. Ironworker
10. Accountant 191. Construction Worker
11. Economist 190. Mail Carrier
12. Philosopher 189. Sheet Metal Worker
13. Physicist
(via Felix Salmon )

A view from Pakistan

From Violence without limits and Pakistan's challenge (via 3quarksdaily):
"Put simply, to effectively meet the Islamist challenge, the Pakistani state must finally accept and fully exercise its responsibility to maintain peace, provide justice, foster democracy and participation, and make available in an equitable manner the resources necessary for economic and social development. Pakistan’s neighbours and the world will need to help."
P.S. (8th January) Amitav Kumar links to an article by Mohammed Hanif Ten myths about Pakistan which presents a very different picture. This does not mention any thing about Dawood's stay in Pakistan or the status of minorities. It is possible that for certain groups life is 'normal' in Pakistan like in many other countries

A Glenn Greenwald quote

More oddities in the U.S. "debate" over Israel/Gaza:
"I have little appreciation for those who believe, one way or the other, that they can reliably predict what Obama is going to do -- either on this issue or others. That requires a clairvoyance which I believe people lack."

Lazy journalism?

In The Next World Order Gurucharan Das states "The speed with which India is creating world-class companies is also a shock to the Chinese, whose corporate structure is based on state-owned and foreign companies.
I have no satisfactory explanation for all this, but I think it may have something to do with India’s much-reviled caste system. Vaishyas, members of the merchant caste, who have learned over generations how to accumulate capital, give the nation a competitive advantage. Classical liberals may be right in thinking that commerce is a natural trait, but it helps if there is a devoted group of risk-taking entrepreneurs around to take advantage of the opportunity. Not surprisingly, Vaishyas still dominate the Forbes list of Indian billionaires."
This sounds plausible but I wish that he has given some numbers, sources and more evidence instead of just a list of billionaires. One could have also said that Indian democracy unleashed entrepreneurial forces kept in check under colonialism or caste system or whatever. In any case, browsing through an old paper of John Harriss (THE GREAT TRADITION GLOBALIZES: REFLECTIONS ON TWO STUDIES OF .THE INDUSTRIAL LEADERS. OF MADRAS ), I find:
"Much in the business world of Madras/Chennai appears to be little changed. Most of the major companies of Singer's time are still important today; and the pre-eminence
of Brahman families amongst the business leaders of Chennai is as marked as it was in 19641. Amongst his 17 industrial leaders Singer found nine Tamil Brahmans(seven Smarta Brahmans, or Iyers; and two Srivaisnava Brahmans, or Iyengars); four Chettiars; one Mudaliar; one Kamma; two Muslims; one from a Gujarati merchant Hindu family; and one from a Syrian Christian family. The nineteen family or other ownership groups. which I identified amongst the 31 leading companies include: eight Tamil Brahmans (six Iyers and two Iyengars); three Chettiars; three Reddys; one Saiva Mudaliar (not the same as in 1964); one Kamma (the same family as in 1964); one Syrian Christian (the same as in 1964); one Raja and one Marwari. The Brahman-
owned family businesses of 1964 have, with only one exception (that of the ill-fated
Standard Motor Company), consolidated their positions; and they have been joined by
highly successful new companies, in software products and in chemicals, also owned
by Brahmans. The largest single group of the new software entrepreneurs is constituted by Brahmans. This new generation of Brahman entrepreneurs comes generally from a different social background, however, from that of the first
generation of Brahman industrialists. Singer referred to the fact that Four of the
Brahman families had come from such localities of Tirunelveli District as
Kallidaikkuricci and Alvarkkuricci, where Brahmans have been noted as traders and
bankers for more than 300 years, and others also came from relatively privileged backgrounds. The new generation of Brahman entrepreneurs comes, however, from families of white collar workers, minor officials, or smaller business."
This was a 2003 preprint published later. There is a more recent book by Harish damodaran India's new capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation which I have not read. From the index here, it appears to be more of study of south and west India.
Businessworld reviewhere, The Hindu review here and
The Telegraph review here. The last review was discussed in Entertaining Research.
According to the Businessworld review "The Central Statistical Organisation’s 1998 economic census (that reviewed business ownership) provides some startling data. The census itself was enormous — it covered over 30 million businesses engaged in all forms of business activity except hard-core agriculture — construction, trading, hospitality, finance and other services. Other backward castes, scheduled castes and scheduled tribes owned almost 45 per cent of all business enterprises."
An interview with Harish Damodaran here.Excerpt: "Simply put, what I saw was a diversity of ownership by caste in the South, unlike in the North where every industrialist is a Bania or Khatri. In the South, the farmer could be Gounder or a Kamma, as much an industrialist could be from these castes. All this set me thinking and, around mid-2004, I started researching and examining the database of BSE-listed companies to try and trace the caste origins of the promoters. I ended up creating a database of around 5,000 companies and all this eventually led to my writing the book." Much more in the interview.

Imamuddin Khan Babi

From Indogram article Death of a Patriot by Rupa Abdi :
"On the 24th of February, 2008, the body of a 94 year old poet prince was led to rest. He was Imamuddin Khan Babi, who wrote poetry by the pen name of Ruswa Mazloom, and was the erstwhile ruler of Pajod, a small jagir in Junagadh district of Gujarat. Few in India have heard his name, and even fewer know that in spite of being the jagirdaar of one of the smallest princely states in India he towered above the other princes of pre-independence India.
....
During the communal riots of 1947, a dargah in Pajod, was destroyed by rioters. Instead of rebuilding the dargah, Imamuddin Khan chose to build a library there. This library stands today as a lesson to every Indian who talks about destroying or rebuilding temples and mosques in disputed areas.
....
During his brief rule of twelve years, Imamuddin Khan provided his subjects with electricity, established a full fledged hospital in his mother, Zenab Bibi’s name. The doctors of this hospital would offer free services to their patients and even visit them at home. Imamuddin Khan also established a school for Harijans, started a sports club by the name of ‘Isharat’. He appointed a Harijan woman as its secretary. He also formed a volley ball team of his state and trained two Harijans to become a part of this team. At the time when the king was the owner of the entire land of his kingdom, Imamuddin Khan introduced a law whereby the farmer who tilled the land became its sole owner.
After independence, he became a member of Congress Seva Dal and continued to work for the progress of his erstwhile state."

V.S. Ramachandran on self awareness

From SELF AWARENESS: THE LAST FRONTIER:
"• Even odder is a phenomenon called "The telephone syndrome". The patient (I'll call him John) will display akinetic mutism—no visual consciousness—when seeing his (say) father in person. But if he receives a phone call from his father he suddenly becomes conscious and starts conversing with him normally. (S. Sriram and Orrin Devinsky, personal communication.) It's as if there are two Johns—the visual John who is only partially conscious and the auditory John (with his own self) who talks over the phone. This implies a degree of segregation of selves—all the way from sensory areas to motor output—that no one would have suspected.

We will now consider two aspects of self that are considered almost axiomatic. First its essentially private nature. You can empathise with someone but never to the point of experiencing her sensations or dissolving into her (except in pathological states like folie a duex and romantic love). Second, it is aware of its own existence. A self that negates itself is an oxymoron. Yet both these axioms can fall apart in disease; without affecting other aspects of self. An amputee can literally feel his phantom limb being touched when he merely watches a normal person being touched. A person with Cotard's syndrome will deny that he exists; claiming that his body is a mere empty shell. Explaining these disorders in neural terms can help illuminate how the normal self is constructed.

To account for some of these syndromes we need to invoke mirror neurons discovered by Giacomo Rizzolatti, Victorio Gallase and Marco Iacoboni."
The thesis seems to be that the problem of self can be studied empirically and mirror neurons "could be the neural basis of introspection, and of the reciprocity of self awareness and other awareness."
Readable essay and there is a discussion at the end with Marc Hauser.

Planting flowers and vegetables together

may not be such a bad idea (I have been doing this) says Buzzing bees protect plant leaves :
"In tents with bees flying over plants without fruit, caterpillars did less damage to leaves than in quiet tents, the researchers report.
.....
Whatever the history, it makes a good example of hard-to-spot indirect relationships between species in ecosystems, Tautz says.

Also, he says he can imagine that gardeners might someday take advantage of this effect. “Alternating rows of vegetables and flowers not only look beautiful, they may reduce the use of pesticides,” he says."

Book recommenations from Chapati Mystery

In State of the field, Sepoy lists significant books published since 2000 about Indian history. More recommendations in comments. I read only two of them and just planning to read Cynthia Talbot's book after reading some excerpts on the internet.