Record keeping before literature.

"Record-keeping served as a centralized control and scheduling device long before writing became a vehicle for personal self-expression, literature or abstract philosophy" says Michael Hudson in "From sacred enclave to temple to city", one of the articles in "Urbanization and land ownership in the ancient near east" edited by Michael Hudson and Baruch Levine. I assume most places had music and songs before.

Madhukar Shukla reflects

and reposts this from 2006 today 
"Perhaps the only way to reconcile these paradoxes is to believe that the history of a nation is not a fairy-tale (with clear-cut good-evil/right-wrong), but an epic across generations which unfolds in various shades of grey...maybe"

SriSri Desa Charitralu

A translation in the first post here  https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/soc.culture.indian/a0LXa9l6OXw

Grandpatent's day in Ava's class

MGNREGS seem to have some effect

"The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS) reduced poverty by up to a third and gave a large number of women their first opportunity to earn cash income, a new research has found." from The Hindu

Soft power

India does not fare well. An earlier report from a different source

Interesting Telugu blog

మోదుగు పూలు by  రమా సుందరి , a lecturer in Ongole, Prakasam District, Andhra.
She is also on Facebook. Check this article from the blog.

An exchange about developments in Telugu poetry

Sreenivas Paruchuri comments on my wall "From a historical point of view it is a valuable debate/exchange/whatever-you-want-to-call-it. Basically VV, intentionally or unintentionally, admitted that SriSri was "hijacked". And Ranganayakamma nails that down. We have a lot of oral history but very little is documented, both in case of "SS shashTipoorti sabhalu" in Vizag and the above episode. The above story may read/sound trivial to some, but it has lots of implications on Telugu literary history."
The articles in discussion are 
చలసాని, శ్రీశ్రీ సాహిత్యంలో వర్గపోరాట సందర్భాలు  by Varavara Rao and
 ‘విప్లవం’ పరువు పోగొట్టేశారు!by Muppala Ranganayakamma

On Facebook for a few days.

Trouble with laptop and I do not know how to do cut and paste on iPad. But I post similar links to here without passages on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/anandaswarup.gadde?ref=ts&fref=ts

An article about Syriza from January 2015

Why Syriza cannot save Greece. It seems to be from an anarchist perspective. It seems interesting to me and largely correct "But they are playing with fire, promising solutions they cannot deliver. If their failure could open the door for fascism, it could also create a new phase of movements outside and against all authoritarian power."

Narayana Murthy raises interesting questions

How can you, the graduates of IISc, contribute towards a better India and a better world?:
"...let us pause and ask what the contributions of Indian institutions of higher learning particularly IISc and IITs, have been over the last 60-plus years to make our society and the world a better place. Is there one invention from India that has become a household name in the globe? Is there one technology that has transformed the productivity of global corporations? Is there one idea that has led to an earth-shaking invention to delight global citizens? Folks, the reality is that there is no such contribution from India in the last 60 years. The only two ideas that have transformed the productivity of global corporations – The Global Delivery Model and The 24-hour workday – came from a company called Infosys.
Yet, let us look at the problems that surround us here in India. We have the largest mass of illiterates in the world. We have the largest number of children with malnutrition. We have the poorest public health service in the world. We have the dirtiest rivers in the world. Our vehicles produce he highest carbon per vehicle in the world. We have the lowest per-capita usable water in the world. Our primary education is one of the lowest quality in the world. I can go on and on. The important thing ls to recognise that this country has no shortage of problems to be solved urgently."
I think that hints answers to his questions in the first paragraph are in the second paragraph and also the discriminatory systems. It is difficult to raise too much above the surroundings; slowly the outside atmosphere seeps in. Moreover, these institutes are were based on some sort of trickle down theory, but they are acting as trickle ups for those who make it there mainly from the elites.
There are some reactions "And the answer lies in State funding, institutional autonomy, quest of excellence, and a pro-people development model." To me it seems like the elites are trying to preserve and enhance their gated communities. Another reaction here.

Manholes

"The article, about five sewage workers, described what happened to them when they got into a manhole, at Mumbai's Usha Nagar Culvert on the Eastern Express Highway, to remove gunny bags from 35 feet under the sewage pipeline:

"Sameer, Rajesh and Dhaneshwar were the first to enter the chamber by means of a rope. Ravindra and Panchonan, who followed them, came out citing difficulty in breathing. After waiting for some time, site supervisor Shivanand Chavan called in the cops. By the time the fire brigade personnel entered the chamber, wearing gas masks, Sameer, Rajesh and Dhaneshwar had died."" from Bharat Ratnas: the Clean India army every Indian must meet. Another article (both via Benjamin Kaila). One of the photos:

The Iran deal

Some of the leftist blogs were skeptical that a deal would be reached. Juan Cole sugests a plausible reason:Did rise of Daesh/ISIL ensure Iran Nuclear Deal ? In another article he discusses Reagan's deals That Time Ronald Reagan Opened Iran and illegally sold Khomeini weapons : "Then Reagan had his people steal hundreds of T.O.W. anti-tank missiles from the Pentagon warehouses and illegally ship them to Khomeini’s Iran, then on the US terrorist watch-list. Let me just underline this. Reagan was prevented by law from selling US weaponry to Iran, and certainly without notifying Congress under the Arms Export Act. There was no aboveboard, legitimate way to do this. So he just had his people pilfer expensive weaponry and ship it to Iran. A notorious Israeli arms dealer was the intermediary.

Note, too, just for the annals of perfidy, that Reagan was at the same time militarily supporting Iraq,  and had told Baghdad they were his allies.Reagan, being a fiscal conservative, made Khomeini pay for the weaponry. Reagan then put that money in secret Swiss bank accounts and gradually sent it to the Nicaragua right wing death squads. That was how he got around the Boland Amendment. He didn’t use US government money for this purpose. It was Khomeini’s money.

In return for the American weapons, Iran agreed to pressure the Lebanese Shiites to let US hostages go, solving a PR problem for the US Republican Party."

Keynes in 1915

(via Lars P.Syll) Thanks to the departure of an arrogant negotiator, serious negotiations can begin now:

The negotiations on the Treaty of Versailles have so far been disrupted by the attitude of a British negotiator, a certain John Maynard Keynes. He has a flamboyant personality and dubious morals,[1] and has consistently employed an arrogant and professional tone to crush other negotiators with his contempt.

Ignoring the elementary lessons of economics, Mr Keynes has argued that countries running current account surpluses, and which have made significant efforts, are just as responsible as countries running deficits in creating economic imbalances. Moreover, he has asserted that in times of underemployment, the surplus countries should spend more, thereby encouraging prodigality. He has claimed that in periods of economic hardship, public spending should be increased, and has mocked officials who naturally believe that a country cannot increase its output by spending less in order to save more. He has supported the view that Germany should be allowed to reconstruct its economy by cancelling its debts, whereas crushing Germany under the weight of repayments would push the country into misery, and so encourage its far right. In fact, it is of course clear that even a partial cancellation of debts would set a dangerous precedent, and favour waste. Lastly, he has called on all countries to scrap policies decided unanimously, which support the return to gold parity at pre-war levels. Moreover, he has claimed that this objective is not only costly and unfeasible, but has also been responsible for Europe’s weak growth, while Mr Keynes has refused to accept that wages are excessive.

Mini ice age coming soon?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/van-winkles/winter-is-coming-scientis_b_7787664.html ( via Naked Capitalism links today)
Not so fast says Slate

Anatole Kaletsky on the Greek crisis

Looking at some of the recent writing on the Greek crisis, I find that Anatole Kaletsky said in February that Greece is playing to loose. He was taken to task for it but he seems essentially correct. He also wrote a book Capitalism 4.0 in 2010 reviewed here by John Kay. Interview with Kaletsky.

Coming to a school near you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=J6lyURyVz7k&app=desktop
(via Pramathnath Sastry)

Atticus Finch in the sequel

Atticus Finch is a racist in To Kill a Mockingbird's sequel from The Guardian.
Purnaprajna Bangere comments on my wall: "This is truly surreal; the parallel existence of a fictional character has brazenly intersected with the reality of our times (and perhaps all times.) The surrealism comes from the fact that he was thought of as a real life hero fighting for justice in the first place.....shows how people live and seek solace in images, sentimentalism, fiction and more OR Is this all a ploy to merely sell? Amazed by the hoopla! Phew"
My comment: "I was stuck by the parallels with the development of caste consciousness I noticed among friends over the last sixty years or so."

Instruments of old Bollywood film music

with links to several songs from Mr. and Mrs. 55

Yves Smith on Greece

"Tsipras has just destroyed Greece" :
"As MacroBusiness sums up:

This is basically the same proposal as that was just rejected by the Greek people in the referendum…This makes absolutely no sense. The Tsipras Government has just:

• renegotiated itself into the same position it was in two months ago;
• set massively false expectations with the Greek public;
• destroyed the Greek banking system, and
• destroyed what was left of Greek political capital in EU.

If this deal gets through the Greek Parliament, and it could given e veryone other than the ruling party and Golden Dawn are in favour of austerity, then Greece has just destroyed itself to no purpose."

Long read. Towards the end, there is a list of Policy Commitments and Actions to be taken in consultation with EC/ECB/IMF staff.
Germany won't spare Greek pain - it has an interest in breaking us by Yanis Varoufakis:
"Based on months of negotiation, my conviction is that the German finance minister wants Greece to be pushed out of the single currency to put the fear of God into the French and have them accept his model of a disciplinarian eurozone."

This may be a sign of how weaker countries will fare under various treaties and globalization.

Links, 10th July 2015

About basic income from Vox (via Akshay Regulagedda). Beware of simple solutions.

James C. Scott review of 'The world until yesterday' by Jarred Diamond. He seems to go overboard in a couple of places; see the first few comments in this Savage Minds post

'We underestimated their power' says an insider from the Greek Government (via Doug Henwood): "In the beginning of February, [Dutch finance minister and Eurogroup president Jeroen] Dijsselbloem told Varoufakis "You either sign the memorandum that the others have signed too, or your economy is going to collapse”. How? “We are going to collapse your banks". He had said that. "

Critics say that porn degrades women, dulls sexual pleasure, and ruins authentic relationships - are they right?: "I heard the same refrain over and over, from every researcher and every member of the pornography industry I spoke with: pornography is to sex as Hollywood films are to real life."

Professor Madhukar Shukla in Melbourne

Pope Francis pays homage to Luis Espinal

http://www.romereports.com/2015/07/09/pope-francis-prays-where-the-body-of-spanish-missionary-luis-espinal-was-found more about Luis Espinal:
http://www.thebostonpilot.com/article.asp?ID=174188

Links July 9, 2015

80% chance China will rally...before final crash, says Pettis
Why I'am leaving London by Cory Doctorow
Greece debt crisis: China is the real elephant in the room Elizabeth Knight in The Age
Poverty, Pride, and Prejudice in Kansas by Sarah Smarsh in NewYorker
'New Speenhamland' from Naked Capitalism
New research reveals the scope of the 'British Corporate Welfare State' from Physd.org/news

A quick overview of the rise of IS

in a book review The Hijackers by Hugh Roberts:
"...US intelligence had anticipated the rise of Islamic State nearly two years before it happened. On 18 May, a document from the US Defense Intelligence Agency dated 12 August 2012 was published by a conservative watchdog organisation called Judicial Watch, which had managed to obtain this and other formerly classified documents through a federal lawsuit. The document not only anticipates the rise of IS but seems to suggest it would be a desirable development from the point of view of the international ‘coalition’ seeking regime change in Damascus...........

If Islamic State escaped whatever influence Western intelligence services may initially have sought to have on it and went its own way, this means that people have been playing with fire.

I don’t pretend to know what the truth is. But there is no need to prove malign intent on the part of the Western powers. The most charitable theory available, ‘the eternally recurring colossal cock-up’ theory of history, will do well enough. If a more sophisticated theory is required, I suggest we recall the assessment of C. Wright Mills when he spoke of US policy being made by ‘crackpot realists’, people who were entirely realistic about how to promote their careers inside the Beltway, and incorrigible crackpots when it came to formulating foreign policy. Since it is not only American folly and incompetence that is in the dock, I would also recall the assessment of Ernest Bevin, who remarked that ‘superiority is claimed by the middle class in the realms of government, when as a matter of fact their work is a monument of incompetence.’

Western policy has been a disgrace and Britain’s contribution to it should be a matter of national shame. Whatever has motivated it, it has been a disaster for Iraq, Libya and now Syria, and the fallout is killing Americans, French people and now British tourists, in addition to its uncounted victims in the Middle East. The case for changing this policy, at least where Syria is concerned, is overwhelming......

What can be done about Islamic State? As things stand, very little. As Cockburn was among the first to point out, air power will not stop it and nor will the corruption-ridden and demoralised Iraqi army; meanwhile, the much more combative but ferociously sectarian Shia militias are driving Sunni Iraqis into Islamic State’s arms. Sending in Western troops would be folly, a gift to the enemy. Training a few hundred Iraqis here or a few hundred Syrians there is obviously not a serious policy but a fatuous surrogate for one. What does this leave? The answer is that unless the Syrian army takes on Islamic State, IS will stay in business indefinitely......

But I’m not a think-tanker. And, apart from wanting an end to the war in Syria for its own sake, I want and believe that every real democrat would want Tunisia, the sole democracy in the Arab world, to be helped and defended from the depredations of all forms of terrorism. Western governments must be induced by public opinion in their own countries to drop the veto on a negotiated end to the war in Syria that the demand that Assad must go has amounted to. This stance, pre-empting the right of the Syrian people to decide the matter, has always been wrong in democratic principle and it has been catastrophic in practice. This doesn’t mean that they have to declare that Assad can stay. That too would be wrong in principle. But they could moderate their position: they could say that they believe Assad should step down before long but that they recognise it is for the Syrian people to decide. "

A new theory of the invention of agriculture

Climate-driven technological change: seasonality and the invention of agriculture by Andrea Martanga: "I propose a new theory for the Neolithic Revolution, construct a model capturing its intuition, and test the resulting implications against a panel data set of climate and adoption. I argue that the invention of agriculture was triggered by a large increase in climatic seasonality, which made it hard for hunter-gatherers to survive during part of the year. Some of the most aff ected populations responded by becoming sedentary in order to smooth their consumption through storage. While these communities were still hunter-gatherers, sedentarism and storage made it easier for them to adopt farming." 
via On the economics of the neolithic revolution which has some discussion.

Geopolitical considerations around the Greek crisis?

Lambert Strether in the comments says "I’ve toyed with the notion that it’s U.S. policy to set the Mediterranean and Black Sea littoral ablaze, along with Syraqistan. This post would seem to fit right in with that." in the comments to an article by John Helmer republished in Naked Capitalism. There are various interesting comments. One by MRW:

“Having thundered for a year on the illegitimacy of the March 2014 referendum in Crimea, saying yes to accession to Russia
Effing idiots. The UKRAINIAN constitution written in 1992 gave Crimea the legal and constitutional right to determine its own future. Russian expert Matthew Crosston explains at the link:

That 1992 constitution, however, was the Ukrainian Constitution and not the Russian one. It does indeed grant the Crimean region effective independence within Ukraine and the right to determine its own path and relations with others. Ukraine wrote those words in the immediate glowing aftermath of Soviet dissolution, when, quite frankly, most in the West felt the true political and economic prosperity path shone brightest for Ukraine and not Russia. Many seem to have forgotten this but any simple source search back to the time period will reveal massive Western enthusiasm for Ukraine’s prospects while being skeptical of Russia’s size, infrastructure and historical legacy. So yes, it was quite true that the constitution recklessly gave Crimea the opportunity to pursue the very path it was now pursuing. But this flawed constitution was written by Ukrainians, not Russians. This is a reality not revealed to readers. The problem, once again, is a pervasive subconscious Cold War pathology that predetermines how readers around the world learn about the situation in Crimea and therefore how they see Russia’s role there. [emphasis in original]

So Nuland is lying to us, and the Europeans."
Another by gemini33:
"The fact that Obama kept Nuland in a position of power given Nuland’s ties to the neocon faction and her past role as Dick Cheney’s foreign policy advisor, then ambassador to NATO and CoS for Strobe Talbott under the Clinton admin (and Talbott seems to still have a hand in foreign policy in the region somehow) is really telling. If you listen to the weekly radio segment with John Batchelor and Stephen Cohen, they used to believe Obama was not in favor of this warmongering policy toward Russia but they no longer believe that because of a recent event with John Kerry.

Kerry went to Sochi in recent weeks and met with Lavrov and Putin. Kerry told them the US strongly supported the Minsk agreement, which maintains a ceasefire (mostly) between the Ukraine govt and the separatists in East Ukraine. He told them the US would like to be part of future Minsk talks, etc. At the same time Ukraine president Poroshenko was warmongering in Kiev, talking about resuming full on war and attacking the separatists. Kerry made a public, kind of scolding statement directed at Poroshenko (who is a US puppet) that it would be very unwise to do that. At this point in time it looked like the Obama admin. was changing course on Ukraine and Russia and pulling back from the brink. Given that Kerry is Obama’s Sec of State everyone thought Kerry was acting on Obama’s behalf.

But almost immediately, Nuland, from Kiev, publicly stepped all over Kerry’s statements and reversed them (to everyone’s surprise because he is supposedly her superior). Then Obama did the same. It was a massive embarrassment for Kerry and it makes no sense because there’s no way Kerry would go to Sochi without Obama’s blessing. There was talk that Kerry might step down as a result of it. But his bicycyle accident happened right after that and he was out of the picture for awhile, and then presumably he assumed his tasks with the Iran negotiations. I don’t know if he’s said anything about Ukraine or Russia since."

Many more such comments. It is difficult to know what is happening and what will happen.

"I shall wear the creditor's loathing with pride"

says Yanis Varoufakis after resigning as Finance Minister of Greece via FT Alphaville with additional comments from David Keohane.

Yves Smith on TiSA

here: "TiSA is arguably the most important – yet least well-known – of the new generation of global trade agreements. According to WikiLeaks, it “is the largest component of the United States’ strategic ‘trade’ treaty triumvirate,” which also includes the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the TransAtlantic Trade and Investment Pact (TTIP).

“Together, the three treaties form not only a new legal order shaped for transnational corporations, but a new economic ‘grand enclosure,’ which excludes China and all other BRICS countries” declared WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in a press statement. If allowed to take universal effect, this new enclosure system will impose on all our governments a rigid framework of international corporate law designed to exclusively protect the interests of corporations, relieving them of financial risk, and social and environmental responsibility.

Thanks to an innocuous-sounding provision called the Investor-State Dispute Settlement, every investment they make will effectively be backstopped by our governments (and by extension, you and me); it will be too-big-to-fail writ on an unimaginable scale.

Yet it is a system that is almost universally supported by our political leaders. In the case of TiSA, it involves more countries than TTIP and TPP combined: The United States and all 28 members of the European Union, Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, Japan, Liechtenstein, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey."

Steve Waldman on the Greek crisis

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5965.html

Some songs from Gopinath 1948

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClS7bdORZkM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCR-rxnWixk
And there is one by Raj Kapoor himself https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYqDnKIDmOk&feature=youtu.be

Two on Greek debt

When Greece forgave Germany's debt from The Age
An Economic Hit Man Speaks Out: John Perkins on How Greece Has Fallen Victim to  "Economic Hit Men"
John Perkins book "The Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" available online
A Telugu translation came out around 2006 ఒక దళారీ పశ్చాత్తాపం.
J.M.Keynes in !933 National Self-Suifficiency

Ambedkar's pamphlet on caste

On Anu Murthy's insistence, I finally read 'The annihilation of caste' by Ambdkar. The reason I did not read it earlier is I read excerpts from it in articles by D.R.Nagaraj, Valerian Rodrigues, Ramachandra Guha and others. Also I read Kancha Ilaiah 's book on caste and found it had some good points but found it was disappointing polemic. So, I did not want to read another polemic. But Ambedkar is different. It is a pamphlet in the tradition of Tom Paine. It is a bit over cooked after section 12 . In section 9, at the beginning he observes sanskritization later attributed to M.N. Srinivas. Later on he goes against the might of scholars like S.Radhakrishnan and asserts that Hinduism was a ' missionary' religion ( later on, he says that it is not really a religion). Richard Eaton confirms this in his book on conversions in Bengal right up to eighteenth century where both Muslims and Hindus were allowed to convert in the process of extending the frontier for agriculture. Hinduism might have lost its vitality by then or the competition is stronger. About 90 percent converted to Islam. Ambedkar's undelivered talk is resounding polemic. I am glad that I read it.
I think that Sumit Guha underestimates the influence of Hinduism and reliion in eneral in his book 'Beyond caste'. There are caste differences in all religions in South Asia but as Ambedkar says, these differences are different. 

Healing plants in the garden

Growing herbs, for a healthy body, mind and spirit (via Lambert Strether). In addition, I also grow marigolds, garlic etc to repel some insects. I seem to get pleasure out of getting my hands dirty but some people have come down with fungal infection from the soil, potting mix and other stuff.

My brother Kamalakar Gadde with his grandson

Indians more prone to heart attacks?

"Most of us have heard that we should eat less fat and ghee, skip the junk food, pass on the soft drinks, and lace up our running shoes regularly to keep our hearts strong, bodies slim, and our blood sugar regulated. What you may not know is that if you are of South Asian descent (from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Maldives, or Nepal), you have an increased risk of developing heart disease, a big unhealthy gut, and type 2 diabetes, regardless of your other risk factors. That’s right—even if you are a slim, vegetarian, non-smoker with low cholesterol and average blood pressure, simply being Indian puts you at risk for these conditions." says Ranjan Sinha using a study in US. May be but I am not so sure.  Indians in US are not representative of Indians in India, I think that many tend to be from upper castes. Because of endogamy and such, it is known that there are differences in castes:
"Now, scientists have furnished genetic evidence to show that several thousand years ago, India experienced a change in ways of living, after the caste system came into being.
Marriages between different groups or communities became rarer leading to less mixing of genes between groups. Before this change, people easily married outside of their groups leading to a wider intermixing of genes, they said. 
Dr Lalji Singh, molecular biologist, vice- chancellor of Benaras Hindu University Varanasi, and one of the authors of a recent paper on the subject, said in an email to Express, “We have been able to conclude that admixture in North India had occurred approximately 2,000 years ago, while South India saw it approximately 4,000 years ago.  Earlier, we had described a mutation (change) which is responsible for sudden cardiac arrest; it originated 30,000 years ago and spread in India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia etc. We also found that the caste system in India is a more recent phenomenon.’’ Singh  said that less intermixing has led to the finding of genetically recessive disorders. “Many Indian groups contain genetic variants which account for substantial rates of recessive diseases like Pseudocholinesterase deficiency in the Vysya population of Andhra Pradesh; Familial Madras Motor Neuron Disease (FMMND) that has a unique geographic distribution in Tirupati-Chittoor, Southern India; sickle cell anaemia in some North and Northeast Indian populations, including the tribes of Chhattisgarh; Handigodu syndrome seen in Sagara taluk of Shimoga district of Karnataka; predominance of breast cancer among Parsis and occurrence of sudden cardiac arrests in South Asians.”"
From Genetic Ancestry of Indians. A new Paper is Creating Ruckus by Suvrat Kher (2009):
"3) The findings indicate that there is a larger amount of genetic variation between Indian groups than there is between say European groups. This the authors suggest is a result of a small number of individuals founding different ethnic groups that then remained endogamous and therefore genetically divergent. This has important medical value as recessive diseases may correlate with ethnic groups."
P.S. Note that the full article quoted above and the last d not agree.

Bruce Greenwald on the death of manufacturing

via Miles Kimball

Links, July 1, 2015

The hard work of taking apart post-work fantasy by Mike Konczal
China's annual human rights report on the US by Chris Blattman
The west has normalized racist wars- but you can't solve complex problems with 1000lb bombs by Frankie Boyle: "We live in a country[UK] where posting “Let’s riot or something bruv!” on Facebook will get you a couple of years in prison, while writing a column saying we should bomb Syria is practically an entrance exam for public intellectuals." Similar phenomena in many countries. 
The crisis of non-fiction publishing by Sam Leith (via Lambert Strether): "Where 15 or 20 years ago the big trade publishers were, oddly, swamping the market with sort-of-scholarly micro-histories of salt or longitude, they now seem, with exceptions of course, to be tiptoeing away from specific, knotty, deeply researched and nuanced books about things. The sorts of book on which they tend now to rely are investigations of “big ideas”. Their lodestars or exemplars are the Malcolm Gladwells and Daniel Kahnemans and Nicholas Carrs. I do not mean to denigrate those individual authors, rather to say that they produce a particular type of work.....The university presses are turning towards the public because with the big presses not taking these risks, the stuff’s there for the taking."
The psychology of saving by Tim Harford
Inequality, the state & the left by Chris Dillow: "Rather than merely hope that the state can be grasped by good people, the left needs to think differently. What we also need are horizontalism or what Erik Olin Wright has called (pdf) interstitial transformations - self-help groups independent of the state which can grow to supplant capitalism or at least act as a counterweight to capitalistic pressures.

Sadly, though, I'm not sure that much of the British left is thinking along these lines. Perhaps, though, real progress towards socialism will occur only when the left begins to question its love of the state."

Panidars and fisherfolk of Bhagalpur

"Chief Minister Laloo Prasad has managed to accomplish one task for which at least 40,000 fishermen of Bhagalpur will remember him forever.  Though zamindari was abolished in Bihar, at least on paper, in 1952, the panidari over the water of Ganga had been left untouched.  Under this system, peculiar to Bihar, the panidars fattened and flourished, while the poor fishermen suffered.  But with the passage of an act in the Bihar
legislature in August last, the tax collecting rights over Ganga now vest with the government of Bihar." from an EPW article by Indu Bharti quoted here in 1991 (via Pradhamanath Sastry).

A 2010 report on later developments Keeping rivers alive:

"It is really tragic that Bihar, a land of three large fertile floodplains, has to import more than 60% of its fish from pond culture farms in Andhra Pradesh. This unfortunate state of affairs reminds us that strong steps are urgently needed. Fishing will have to be regulated and its intensity controlled, especially in dolphin hotspots. Having said this, we re-emphasize the need to completely curb destructive practices by fishers and mafia alike. Regulated and non-destructive fishing sustained over a long-term could itself lead to restoration of collapsed fish stocks and needs to be a long-term goal for the management of the Ganges basin fisheries. The restoration should lead to improved health, numbers and availability of native commercial carps, and preponderance of larger fish sizes and improved juvenile recruitment. Large-scale restoration would involve measures for protecting hydrological services, flooding regimes, preventing degradation of bank habitats and pollution control.

There have been many episodes of mass exodus of fisher families from the area to work as construction labourers in big cities, both because ‘nothing is left to fish’, and the perennial threat of criminal gangs. There is a pressing need to examine alternative livelihood options. Commercial gains for fishers via alternative livelihoods need not be antithetical to dolphin conservation, or ecologically sensitive riverfront management. While reducing pressure on the already depleted resource base, these options could also improve the local economy through involvement of fishers’ knowledge and enterprise. A good example that has been successful elsewhere is the creation of community based aquaculture or fishing cooperatives. Cooperatives set up by local fisher groups via microcredit initiatives could empower fishers to manage their respective stretches, and at the same time, help the sanctuary authorities in monitoring and regulating illegal, destructive fishing."

More recent reports which I have not read are in the proceedings of a symposium Rivers for Life.

Discontinuities

Where as the megaliths of Gobekli Tepe are dated around 9000 BC, the megaliths in India seem to be from around 3000 BC, with the Indus Valley civilization (Early Harappan) already beginning or in existence. From 'Megaliths in ancient India and their possible association to Astronomy' by Mayank Vahla and others.                  )

Peter Dorman on the Greek referendum

Greece: A referendum on what to do yesterday. There is also a discussion in Economist's View.

What are the beginnings of labor?

Sumit Guha and others (quoted in his book 'Beyond Caste', a good review here)) suggest that local hierarchical systems esembling caste systems existed all over South Asia and elsewhere and discount religion. A crucial part of these systems is the use of labour by lesser ranked groups in the hierarchy. So, it may be worthwhile to look at the beginnings of the uses of labour. In a preview of a recent book, Michael Hudson says "We begin the volume in 10,000 BC in Gobekli Tepe in Turkey where you have very large city-like ceremonial sites, larger than Stonehenge, huge sites that took hundreds of years to build with huge stone megaliths, even in the pre-pottery Neolithic. They didn’t yet have metal to carve these stones. They didn’t even have pottery. But they had in Gobekli all sorts of huge carvings in a seasonal site where people would come together on ceremonial occasions, like midsummer. We researched from Turkey in 10,000 BC to Sumer in the third millennium BC, Babylonia in the second millennium BC, the building of the pyramids, and we have the actual bills and accounting statements for what’s paid to labour to build the pyramids.

We found they were not built by slaves. They were built by well-paid skilled labour. The problem in these early periods was how to get labour to work at hard tasks, if not willingly? For 10,000 years there was a labour shortage. If people didn’t want to work hard, they could just move somewhere else. The labour that built temples and big ceremonial sites had to be at least quasi-voluntary even in the Bronze Age c. 2000 BC. Otherwise, people wouldn’t have gone there.............We found that one reason why people were willing to do building work with hard manual labour was the beer parties. There were huge expenditures on beer. If you’re going to have a lot of people come voluntarily to do something like city building or constructing their own kind of national identity of a palace and walls, you’ve got to have plenty of beer. You also need plenty of meat, with many animals being sacrificed. Archaeologists have found their bones and reconstructed the diets with fair accuracy.

What they found is that the people doing the manual labour on the pyramids, the Mesopotamian temples and city walls and other sites were given a good high protein diet. There were plenty of festivals. The way of integrating these people was by public feasts. This was like creating a peer group to participate in a ceremonial creation of national identity." 

I looked at some of the articles in the book. Though the evidence is not as convincing as Michael Hudson suggests, it seems plausible that the beginnings of semi-voluntary labour are rooted in some sort of primitive religions and the chiefs or leaders who contributed to some records of natural cycles and probably predicted some seasonal and cosmological events. There is more later on about this, for example,

 "First the priesthoods, then the accountants and scribes. The calendar keepers were usually the chiefs (there may have been “sky chiefs” and “war chiefs” separately, or perhaps their roles were combined as dynastic rulers developed). Most of the religions were cosmological. They wanted to create an integrated cosmology of nature and society (“On earth, as it is in heaven”). Administration was based on the astronomical rhythms of the calendar, lunar and solar cycles. For instance, you typically find a society divided into 12 tribes, as you had in Israel and also in Greece with its amphictyonies. In a division of 12 tribes, each could take turns administering the ceremonial centre for one month out of the year."

But this is one region and it is partly speculation. Neolithic age and such came at different times to different region and possibly different kinds of societies existed at the same time. One has to look more about the Indian context to see the beginnings of labor but it seems (from the work of Kosambi and others) different local cults were present from prehistoric times.
P.S. Check also the skeptic's site and Gobekli Tepe: Fuel for crankery. There is also  https://www.facebook.com/gobeklitepe and for details without any theory  http://essayweb.net/history/ancient/gobekli.shtml

Dalits as Hindus

Recently, there have been discussions of caste and Hinduism in some circles following the IITM fracas and Mumford's letter. Here is point which Kancha Ilaiah made long ago that has not come up in the discussions.
 ".. until the twentieth century, Dalits were regarded not as Hindus but as a separate and subordinate element throughout India. They were defined as Hindu only in the context of a demographic struggle during which Hindu nationalists realized that counting them as such was critical to the project of redefining the country in Hindu-majority terms." 

Earlier I quoted from "The Telangana Movement 1944-51" by Barry Pavier. "On page 69, he quotes from Census of India 1941, Hyderabad, Vol.2, 672-674. The numbers given (rounding off, in millions)Hindus 10, Untouchables 3, Muslims 2, Tribals .7" 
The above quote is from From Village to City: Hinduism and the "Hindu Caste System" by Nathaniel Roberts.

Two books

Just finished reading 'Beyond Caste' by Sumit Guha. In spite of the rave reviews, I do not think that I understand it well or agree with some of it. But it goes beyond the book by Nicholas Dirks and probably the best book on caste that I read so far. I was planning to write a bit about it but meanwhile 'Labor in the Ancient World' edited by Piotr Steinkeller and Michael Hudson has arrived. I plan to read at least some of it before writing any thing. Michael Hudson talks about it here.
P.S. Meanwhile I am told that I should read 'The Annihilation of caste' by B. Ambedkar. I have read bits and pieces by Ambedkar on various topics earlier but not this book.

Old friends: Lowell Jones

Bombay 1974. He visited Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in early 1974. Since accommodation was not immediately available we put him for a few days. Then he refused to move and stayed on for two months and had to learn eating the Indian way. He is still teaching in SUNY, Stoney Brook.

And from Britian

Behind the Magna Carta spin, Britain's 'dictatorship of the 1%' is taking shape. Taking shape? asks Lambert Strether
And from Australia Steering corrupt cash into Australia from PNG: a how-to guide

News from my home state

No wars here but "They have travelled nearly 900 kilometres to get here, and now wait to be picked up for daily wage work. Uncertainty binds these labourers. They have come this distance switching two trains, from Puttaparthy and Kadiri, in Anantapur district, Andhra Pradesh. "There is no drought work (i.e. work under the rural employment guarantee act, or MNREGA) in the villages, and we haven’t got paid for the work we have done for weeks,” multiple farmers told me. And whatever work there is, falls to a tenth of the actual demand, over the course of the year." from No ticket, will travel

Fine regimes in earlier days

There are precedents for Ferguson. "In eighteenth-century Bengal and Bihar under East India Company administration, fines were part of the tax toll in each district, and cases were judged and fines collected by the tax farmer or tax collector in each area. Fines varied by capacity to pay. In this region "women were appointed to discover cases of fornication and adultery, which were fined heavily on the production of the slightest evidence". More than a century later, in the division of Bakarganj (now in Barisal district of Bangladesh) J.C.Jack, a settlement officer, observed that malicious complaints were encouraged, interference in village quarrels was extensive, and fines for the most trivial offences wee enormous. Jack obtained the account book of one landlord, which closely resembles the tax farmers' accounts from eighteenth-century western India. The landlord, for example, fined one of tenants for an alleged affair with his own mother-in-law.Logically enough, state functionaries punished those who settled disputes without paying the state; so, for example, two men of mercantile castes in Jaipur kingdom who settled their own quarrel were then fined for not reporting it to the state. Community councils and pancayats were fined if local councils disliked their decision, or if they failed to notify the state. Similarly, in the Pesva's territories in 1766, an official who committed some infraction of religious law and arranged purification rituals without state sanction was fined the considerable sum of 3,000 rupees. So in addition to being s source of political power for the ruling houses, family broils and sexual misconduct also supplied important fiscal resources..............Considerable sums were also raised by interference in family affairs; the rich banker Hari Cintaman Patwardhan adopted a son in 1793-1794 and paid 22,000 rupees for permission to do so." from Chapter four, 132 of "Beyond Caste' by Sumit Guha

Working women in the family

Psoriatic arthritis since 1984. Finally getting some relief thanks to working women in the family. Lalita bought the chair for a thousand dollars a few years ago. Shanti bought the contraption today. Jhansi helped buying most of the books around.

Some Telugu folk songs

here. In a thread in Avineni Bhaskar's timeline, Sreenivas Paruchuri writes "I can't tell you the authors' names. I am also not sure if its an individual's work or a collective work - both possibilities exist. But certainly both are modern songs, from the early 20th century, with their origins in north coastal districts. Basically all "rangam paaTalu", that is with reference to Rangoon/Burma are from this time period. What is called "folk/jaanapadam" is not necessarily "old". Very idealistic notions exist here! But its another colonial legacy that we picked and glorified. See the essay http://eemaata.com/em/issues/200609/901.html"
In the linked essay, the authors write "భావ కవులు రాసిన ఈ కవిత్వమంతా పల్లెటూళ్ళలో వుండేవాళ్ళ సంస్కృతిని అందులోనూ కింది కులాల వాళ్ళ సంస్కృతిని అందంగా చిత్రించేదే అయినా వాళ్ళ కవిత్వ భాష మాత్రం యథాపూర్వంగా మధ్య తరగతి కవితా భాషే అయింది."Much more inn the article.

Just when I thought that I was getting somewhere

http://calvinanddune.tumblr.com/image/42501251740

Two songs by Hemanta kumar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThaiTWTvl2Q

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HNsAq85ju8

A post by David Mumford

'All men are created equal'? kindly sent by a reader of this blog in the previous post.
P.S.I find the article well-intentioned but does not seem useful to me. I think caste is political and about keeping economic advantages apart from various other strands. Mumford could have studied some of the institutes he is familiar with, their origin, development, composition of personnel and the powers within. He visited India several times, spent many months in various institutes and adopted an Indian child.
P.P.S. I found that our library has an electronic version of 'Beyond Cast' by Sumit Guha and started reading it. The few pages I read so far sugest that it is a very ood book to understand the political nature of caste.

Michael Pettis 'Internal and external balance'

"The Leaderless Economy makes the same point I try to make in The Great Rebalancing: the economic analysis of any country is largely useless if it ignores, or treats as a minor issue, links with the external sector – i.e. other countries – and this is even more true today than in the past. Even something as important, and as seemingly “domestic”, as the US savings rate (which for most people is assumed largely to reflect cultural preferences towards thrift among American households) is not determined primarily by American households but rather by its links with savings distortions abroad.

This might seem a profoundly counterintuitive statement, but in fact you only need to understand two or three accounting identities to be able to work logically through the explanation. " says Michael Pettis in a review of 'The Leaderless Economy' and of his own work. 

See also his response to the first comment on dark matter. An excerpt "The authors argue, like I do in my May 17 blog entry, that our accounting systems fail adequately to measure all the things they should measure, and while my entry is about the failures of GDP calculations, they focus on the failures of balance of payments calculations. They argue that countries import and export value that cannot easily be calculated or included in the B-o-P measures, which they call “dark matter”, and for this reason certain current account deficits and surpluses may be overstated while other current account deficits and surpluses may be understated.

They identify three forms of dark matter in particular that countries like the US may be exporting. First, outward FDI may come with considerable technical and technological expertise that isn’t correctly valued in the FDI numbers (on a relative basis). Second, some countries, most obviously the USA, serve an insurance function which creates a premium foreign investors effectively pay. Third. some financial markets, again most obviously the USA, serve as liquidity providers, which also creates a premium foreign investors effectively pay.

They calculate each of these and estimate that the US is a huge exporter of dark matter, followed by the UK, with Germany ranking fourth. Developing countries, especially Asian, are the biggest importers, although Russia is the largest importer."