Artemisia Gentileschi

The recent discovery of a possible  Caravaggio painting in France is bringing more attention to Artemisia Gentileschi "Until Artemisia Gentileschi picked up a paintbrush to show her violence and power (and she would paint five versions in her lifetime, according to art expert Mary Garrard), Judith could never be a champion. It took a woman to paint a woman—and it took a female art historian to resurrect Artemisia Gentileschi." from https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/the-17th-century-painter-and-rape-victim-who-specialized-in-revenge-fantasy
More at the Khanacademy https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/monarchy-enlightenment/baroque-art1/baroque-italy/a/gentileschi-judith-slaying-holofernes

Economics and Astrology

The new astrology by Alan Jay Levinovtz via Noah Smith who says:
"Levinovitz likens modern-day macroeconomics to mathematical astrology in the early Chinese empire. And in fact, the parallel sounds pretty accurate. The article is worth reading just to learn about classical Chinese astrology, actually.
....
Levinovitz, however, leaves out what I think is the most important development: theempirical revolution in econ. This has been most important in micro fields, since data is much more abundant, but it's also starting to influence macro.
....
I also think Levinovitz should have given a shout-out to the successes of applied micro theory - auction theory, matching theory, discrete choice models, and the rest. "

Obama's legacy

As far as I can see he is good intentioned had some successes but has been disappointment on the whole. Charlie Savage, in an interview here, focusses on a 'turning point'.There are many reviews of his book "Power Wars" includin one in The New York Review of Books (behind a firewall) which says ""Gradually, other points of continuity between the national security policies of Bush’s second term and the Obama administration became evident. Obama revived the military commissions charged with conducting trials of detainees. He continued to classify the struggle against al-Qaeda as a war to be fought under military rules. He also increased drone strikes, maintained the NSA’s secret surveillance programs, and prosecuted whistleblowers with greater zeal than any administration in history. What happened?

Savage offers an explanation. Obama’s supporters on the left thought he was a civil libertarian, but they were wrong. What Obama cares about, Savage argues, is not civil liberties, but the rule of law. Confusing the two is understandable, for both are central to American constitutionalism. But they are fundamentally different. Civil liberties are substantive rights; the rule of law is about legal legitimacy. What Obama’s team aimed to do was provide a firm legal foundation for his policies, including those that civil libertarians oppose—policies like preventive detention, targeted killings, and extensive surveillance."

These two indicate to me lack of strong convictions and fear of failure.

Ambedkar125

A few of the articles which appeared recently:
The fatal accident of birth by Sanjay Hegde
A dream of unsiled life by Anoo Bhuyan
Missin from the Indian news room by Robin Jeffrey (from 2012). Since then, there have been some sites like Round Table India
Many of Ambedkar's writins can be accessed from http://www.ambedkar.org/ Click on the left at Dr.B.R.Ambedkar and then Writings & Speeches.
If Facebook feed is any indication Ambedkar consciousness is still weak amon the upper castes or but it is strong amon Dalits and keeps giving them hope. Here is an excerpt and photo from the first article:
"On Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary, look closely at this year’s defining image of Dalit struggle and aspiration. It is a photograph of the late Rohith Vemula, carrying Ambedkar’s portrait out of the Hyderabad Central University hostel. Rohith, who was evicted along with his friends, spent the next fortnight on the pavement outside the university, in a makeshift tent decorated with that portrait."

Elizabeth Warren four years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htX2usfqMEs

Problem of poverty

What if the problem of poverty is that it is profitable to other people? by Katha Pollitt

Pratap Bhanu Mehta on B.R. Ambedkar

I do not remember reading a better article on Ambedkar. B.R.Ambedkar:Slayer of All Gods

LBJ's great speech

"The American Promise".LBJ's Finest Hour:

“What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”

He paused, and then, slowly, distinctly, the president uttered the words never before said by an American president: “And…we… shall… overcome.”

For a moment there was only stunned silence, as it dawned on all who listened that President Lyndon Johnson, a son of the South, had just evoked the anthem of the civil rights movement.
P.S.http://www.ibtimes.com/voting-rights-act-after-supreme-court-ruling-2016-election-could-endanger-black-2282640

Bernie Sanders in October 2011

From Independent:

"It has been revealed Clinton pushed through the Panama Free Trade Deal at the same time that Sanders vocally opposed it, citing research warning that it would strictly limit the government’s ability to clamp down on questionable or even illegal activity. Even if the Clintons remain unmentioned in future tax bombshells, Sanders can continue to exploit the narrative that Clinton is part of the demographic responsible, and has assisted in flagrant abuses of the system through trade deals."

More quotes here"

"“Panama’s entire annual economic output is only $26.7 billion a year, or about two-tenths of one percent of the U.S. economy. No one can legitimately make the claim that approving this free trade agreement will significantly increase American jobs.” Sanders then asks the Senate, “why would we be considering a standalone free trade agreement with Panama?”

The agreement in question, which was ultimately passed despite Sanders’ objections, is called The United States—Panama Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA).

Sanders then answerd his own question in a haunting premonition of things to come: “Well it turns out that Panama is a world leader when it comes to allowing wealthy Americans and large corporations to evade U.S. taxes by stashing their cash in offshore tax havens; and the Panama free trade agreement will make this bad situation much worse. Each and every year, the wealthiest people in our country and the largest corporations evade about $100 billion in U.S. taxes through abusive and illegal offshore tax havens in Panama and other countries...”

..........................

Hillary Clinton, Sanders’ opponent in the Democratic primary, argued vehemently for the TPA in 2011.

"The Free Trade Agreements passed by Congress tonight will make it easier for American companies to sell their products to South Korea, Colombia and Panama, which will create jobs here at home,” part of Clinton’s 13 October, 2011statement read.

Strangely enough, her full statement no longer exists on the State Department’s website."

Two Timir Baran songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YytmQfd8Eh8&feature=youtu.be
Timir Baran with S.K. Paul from 1954 film Baadbaan. Singer Geeta Dutt. The videoo is from another film. The link has the lyrics as well as translation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtpBWIf1WZY&feature=youtu.be

Bhungroo

A brief introduction here: "Bhungroo is a water management system that injects and stores excess rainfall underground and lifts it out for use in dry spells. Adoption of this technology has decreased salt deposits on soil and increased fresh water supply, saving farmers from drought."
A comprehensive video (2015) from IIT,Kanpur here and one from 2012 with some of the farmers.

Selective leaves from Panama Papers?

says Craig Murray:
"The leak is being managed by the grandly but laughably named “International Consortium of Investigative Journalists”, which is funded and organised entirely by the USA’s Center for Public Integrity. Their funders include

Ford Foundation
Carnegie Endowment
Rockefeller Family Fund
W K Kellogg Foundation
Open Society Foundation (Soros)

among many others. Do not expect a genuine expose of western capitalism. "

via Moon of Alabama

Corruption and tax havens in the news

Unaoil: The company that bribed the world
Panama papers from Wikipedia
Wikipedia on the European Commission PresidentJean-Claude Juncker
"In early November 2014, just days after becoming head of the commission, Juncker was hit by media disclosures—derived from a document leak known as LuxLeaks—that Luxembourg under his premiership had turned into a major European centre of corporate tax avoidance. With the aid of the Luxembourg government, companies transferred tax liability for many billions of euros to Luxembourg, where the income was taxed at a fraction of 1%. Juncker, who in a speech in Brussels in July 2014 promised to "try to put some morality, some ethics, into the European tax landscape", was sharply criticized following the leaks.[53] A subsequent motion of censure in the European parliament was brought against Juncker over his role in the tax avoidance schemes. The motion was defeated by a large majority.[54]"
About Jacob Zuma in 2005 who is again in the news Hard-Wired for Corruption
World's Favorite New Tax Haven Is the United States from Bloomberg
Suzanne Sadedin surveys some academic studies in corruption in Natural Police. Among tham is the study Power and Corruption by Francisco Ubeda and Edgar A. Duenez-Guzman (behind a firewall):

Abstract

Cooperation is ubiquitous in the natural world. What seems nonsensical is why natural selection favors a behavior whereby individuals would lose out by benefiting their competitor. This conundrum, for almost half a century, has puzzled scientists and remains a fundamental problem in biology, psychology, and economics. In recent years, the explanation that punishment can maintain cooperation has received much attention. Individuals who punish noncooperators thrive when punishment does not entail a cost to the punisher. However when punishment is costly, cooperation cannot be preserved. Most literature on punishment fails to consider that punishers may act corruptly by not cooperating when punishing noncooperators. No research has considered that there might be power asymmetries between punishers and nonpunishers that turn one of these type of individuals more or less susceptible to experiencing punishment. Here, we formulate a general game allowing corruption and power asymmetries between punishers and nonpunishers. We show that cooperation can persist if punishers possess power and use it to act corruptly. This result provides a new interpretation of recent data on corrupt policing in social insects and the psychology of power and hypocrisy in humans. These results suggest that corruption may play an important role in maintaining cooperation in insects and human societies. In contrast with previous research, we contend that costly punishment can be beneficial for social groups. This work allows us to identify ways in which corruption can be used to the advantage of a society.

P.S. From Where are all the Americans in the Panama Papers? "http://fusion.net/story/287671/americans-panama-papers-trove/" But some names are coming out.
From The Washington Post blogs How U.S. became one of the biggest tax havens in the world?

Delivorology

David Runciman in the review Delivorlogy of book on Blair:
"Deliverology is itself a false prospectus. It relies on the assumption that Blair gradually mastered these skills on the job and that he was forced out just when he had got on top of the government machine. Certainly that’s what he says in his memoirs, where he insists that he only worked out how to exercise power effectively towards the end of his time in office. Now he wants to help others start out with the wisdom he had to acquire through ‘bitter experience’. But political leaders always say this: that governing starts to make sense when time is running out. That’s why it’s so hard to persuade them to move on. Obama told Marc Maron earlier this year that he was finally getting the hang of it seven years in, just when he has one foot out of the door. For democratic leaders this is the tragedy of power: they only learn how to do their jobs once the public is sick of the sight of them, or the constitution is telling them they have reached their limit. But it’s an illusion: it just seems easier because the end is in sight and they have stopped worrying about what might come next. Blair felt he was really getting things done at the point when his struggle with Gordon Brown was over. But it wasn’t because he had worked out how to deal with an obstructive rival; it was because he had ultimately been defeated by him. He was liberated by having little left to lose. Obama has been increasingly willing to assert his executive authority because he no longer feels it’s worth trying to deal with Congress. Yet if his successor starts with that attitude he (or she) will be pilloried, just as any prime minister who caves before his chancellor from the outset won’t be in charge for long. Delivery depends much more on context than it does on technique. In that respect, it’s not a transferable skill."

Impressive

Check the whole picture (I am not able to get it completely here) https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1692899314257103&set=a.1384966278383743.1073741827.100006111519547&type=3&theater

And some thing to be cheerful about

'A year ago, I had no hands': an Afghan soldier's road to recovery after double hand transplant
"People have remarked to Dr Iyer, in the months following the transplant, about how this was a case in which a Hindu surgeon took a Christian man’s hands and put them on a Muslim man, he said.

“But religion, in this case, was so superficial,” Dr Iyer said. “When someone interprets it like that, you’re surprised. Of course it’s a good message. But I can tell you that, when it was all happening, no one gave it a thought. Everyone just did what they felt was right.”"

Photograph from last year http://www.thehindu.com/news/cities/Kochi/kochi-extends-a-helping-hand-to-afghan-national/article7215881.ece

Long read on Libya

Libya - Tribes, Militia, Interests And Intervention by Richard Galustian in Moon of Alabama with lots of commnts. It is complicated

Bhagat Singh and Bose on Freedom

From an article by Anurag Bhaskar:
Like Bhagat Singh, Subhas Chandra Bose was also very clear about his ideas and beliefs. While delivering the Presidential Address to the Student’s Conference held at Lahore on 19 October 1929, he clearly said, “If we are to bring about a revolution of ideas we have first to hold up before us an ideal which will galvanise our whole life. That ideal is freedom. But freedom is a word which has varied connotations and, even in our country, the conception of freedom has undergone a process of evolution. By freedom, I mean all round freedom, i.e., freedom for the individual as well as for society; freedom for the rich as well as for the poor; freedom for men as well as for women; freedom for all individuals and for all classes. This freedom implies not only emancipation from political bondage but also equal distribution of wealth, abolition of caste barriers and social iniquities and destruction of communalism and religious intolerance. This is an ideal which may appear Utopian to hard-headed men and women, but this ideal alone can appease the hunger in the soul.”

Interview with Sarnath Mukherjee, graphic novelist

The full texture of the city, interview by Ratik Asokan:

Ratik Asokan:"Indeed, I never imagined the comics would be more than a fundamentally escapist medium for me.

That all changed in 2004 with the publication of Corridor, Sarnath Banerjee’s debut graphic novel. Rendered in a mixture of photographs, drawings, and text, Corridorfollowed the lives of three ordinary men who whiled away their time in a second-hand Delhi bookstore. The world it depicted—one of roadside hustlers and garish billboards, of liberated college students and their conservative landlords, of trendy parties and shady markets—was, for the first time, entirely familiar.

Though rooted in the local textures of Delhi street life, Corridor was driven by an assured, cosmopolitan sensibility. Banerjee made it his business to gleefully make collide east and west, culture and kitsch, high and low—to make Baudrillard wash himself with the local Liril soap. His early aesthetic, in which characters drawn in a sparse western comic style are often superimposed on billboards and street photographs of Delhi, brilliantly mimicked the mentality of post-colonial urbanites who straddled different cultures."

Sarnath Mukherjee: "I want to make sense of things, to understand the world, but my work is never really instructional. I have no wisdom to impart or give, so I think my dream readers would be people who just use the book as an excuse to get into their own cycle of thoughts. The book is just like a map. It’s just a jotting-down of things that you can interpret in your own ways......


Having said all that, I should acknowledge that the Vikaspuri book grows out of my obsession with our country’s obsession with development. I’ve told you a lot about love and empathy and liking people, but I find it very difficult to relate to India’s new middle class. This very patriotic and neoliberal group that mixes religion and economics together. I find them very irksome. Very difficult to like. They are privileged, but they don’t want to talk about their privilege. It’s difficult to find poetry amongst these people. Some sort of hidden spirit of beauty. But I tried with this book to mock the South Delhi people. They don’t just have a caste system: they have instilled a caste system amongst their staff, from the driver to the gardener they have a caste system. It’s almost as if whatever they touch they turn into a caste system."

Tools for Skype discussion

Had a mathematics discussion with Peter Scott this mornin using Ava's whiteboard and also pen and paper

Stuck in mathemtics again

Stuck in mathematics again. Found an interesting paper while finishing a program with Peter Scott. Is is about some stuff that I did not understand 20 years ago. I though that I would quickly go through it. Due to lack of practice, it is taking much longer and it also started raising other questions. It seems that I will stuck in this stuff for a few months.
Meanwhile, I keep posting on Facebook what look interesting to me without much background checking.

Siddhartha Mukherjee on Schizophrenia

Madness runs in the family A breakthrough interweaved with stories from his famikly:
"McCarroll assigned the problem to Aswin Sekar, a twenty-four-year-old student in his lab who was working toward an M.D.-Ph.D. at Harvard. “Geneticists considered it an almost intractable problem, but Aswin wanted something substantial—a real puzzle to crack" ......
Sekar e-mailed the data to McCarroll on the evening of December 31st. “We had friends for New Year’s Eve dinner that night, and the doorbell had just rung when the e-mail popped up,” McCarroll recalled. “Of course, I barely spoke to the guests. It was an unbelievable result. A kid in his twenties walks into a lab, defines the variations in one of the most complex regions of the human genome, and shows how the variants might underlie the risk of schizophrenia. Data that had puzzled so many people for so many years suddenly seemed to make sense.””

Michael Loolo on Cyndi Lauper

How Cyndi Lauper found her voice and wrote the Tony-winning music for Kinky Boots
One her early songs Girls Just Want To Have Fun

Interview with Patrick Cockburn

The Middle East Correspondent who predicted the Rise of  ISISTells Us About His 30-Year Old Career by Yohann Koshy
A recent article by Patrick Cockburn End times for the Caliphate?

Pope Francis with refugees

From http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/03/pope-francis-washes-refugees-feet-easter-week-160324173339136.html. See also Saint Francis’ “Disastrous” Meeting With Pope Innocent III: 1210 A D

ankhiyan bhool gayi hain sona

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rKXQYyya3Q
Possibly a repeat

Cashless society?

Why we should fear a cashless society? by Dominic Frisby
 "Poor people and small businesses rely on cash. A contactless system will likely entrench poverty and pave the way for terrifying levels of surveillance"

St. Francis Before the Pope

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYH2WS3CU6A&feature=youtu.be
At 5:35 the pope kisses the foot of St. Francis and around 6:00: from the Wikipedis article Brother Sun, Sister Moon:
One of the final lines (mirroring the anti-establishment attitude of the 1970s juxtaposed to the well-established tone of the film) places the sincerity of the Pope's response in question when an unnamed cardinal, observing what the Pope has done, comments to a bishop: "Don't be alarmed, His Holiness knows what he is doing. This is the man who will speak to the poor, and bring them back to us." 

Modern Life

From Al Jazeera report In the valley of guns and roses:
"In the heart of Bulgaria's Rose Valley, Irina is desperate to give her four-year-old daughter, Stefi, a better start in life. 

"She is struggling single mother, working two jobs to put food on the table. Her main source of income comes from her dangerous work at a weapons factory where she measures and packs gunpowder into artillery shells.

Struggling to pay the rent, bills, and Stefi's kindergarten fees, she moves out of her parents' rural village to be closer to her work - despite not knowing whether she can afford it.

Her only respite is singing, a talent taught to her by her late grandfather, which she uses to sing for extra money in local restaurants.

But as the rent and bills stack up, Irina is forced to take on a third job offering high-interest loans to equally desperate friends and family.

This is an intimate story about poverty and the price a mother is prepared to pay to ensure a better life for her child."

Check also the embedded video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daAOlNBTJuI

Not so long read about a blue print for new economics

Brian Arthur, Peter Turchin have been talkin about similar things.
Traditional Economics failed. Here's is new blue print by Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer
P.S. Noah Smith in New paradigms in economic theory? Not so fast. "So I agree with about two-thirds of Hanauer and Liu's points. The others need tightening up, but not bad overall. The question is whether these ideas, together, represent a new paradigm in economic theory. Hanauer and Liu argue that they do, but I am not so sure. "

Long read: The Obama Doctrine

A sympathetic portrayal by Jeffrrey Goldberg The Obama Doctrine  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/
Despite my misgivings about Obama, I am impressed.

India and Bharat

From Wikipedia  "The Republic of India has two principal short names in both official and popular English usage, each of which is historically significant, India and Bharat. The first article of the Constitution of India states that "India, that is Bharat, shall be a union of states," implicitly codifying India and Bharat as equally official short names for the Republic of India. A third name, Hindustan, is a historical term for the north and northwestern subcontinent (especially during the British India period) that is now widely used as an alternative name for the region comprising most of the modern nations of the subcontinent when Indians speak among themselves. The usage ofBharat, Hindustan or India is dependent on the context and language of conversation."
So, it seems to be Bharat not 'Bharat Mata'
Sadan Jha in 2004 The life and times of Bharat Mata
A recent article in Scroll History Lesson: How Bharat Mata became a code woprd for a theocratic Hindu state by Shoaib Daniyal
From a Telugu article from 2006: "అయితే ఈ ఊహల ఆధారంగా మనకి ప్రాచీన కాలంనుంచి జాతీయతా భావం వుంది అని వాదించడం పొరపాటు......భావ కవిత్వానికి పూర్వపు రోజుల్లో “దేశం” అంటే ఒక ప్రాంతానికి చెందిన మాట – తూర్పు దేశం, పడమటి దేశం ఇలాగా. భూమి రాజుకి భార్య. అందుకే ఆయన భూపతి. ఆవిడ ఏ రాజు జయిస్తే ఆరాజుకి భార్య. భావ కవిత్వానికి పూర్వం దేశభక్తి అనే ఊహ కాని, దేశం మనకి మాత కావడం కాని ఎప్పుడూ లేదు. ఈ మాతృత్వపు ఊహ పూర్తిగా కొత్తది . భారతమాత, తెలుగుతల్లి ఇలాటి ఊహలు జాతీయవాద బలంతో భావ కవిత్వమే మనకు నేర్పింది."

Links, 18th March, 2016 mostly Todd related

No one knows why TYrumpi winning, Here's what a conitive scientist says by Geore Lakoff:
"What do social issues and the politics have to do with the family? We are first governed in our families, and so we grow up understanding governing institutions in terms of the governing systems of families."
That was via a David Brin post Political Delusions- Do we rationalize our emotional decisions?
That reminded me of Emmanuel Todd work. Here is a very recent article on Todd which has been in a preprint form for some time and linked before:
Testing Todd and matching Murdoch: Global data of historical family characteristics:
" Abstract:
This paper investigates the possibilities for the creation of a global dataset on family and household characteristics. This is done by scrutinizing and comparing two prominent data sources on family system classifications. We first focus on historical data, by comparing Emmanuel Todd's classification of countries by family systems with ethnographic data compiled in George Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas. Qualitative and quantitative tests show that the two datasets frequently agree about family traits. Nonetheless, substantial differences exist that are mostly attributable to the focus of the datasets on different regions, and the difficulties in translating local, descriptive studies to hard data. We therefore emphasize that it is important to know the strengths and weaknesses of the two datasets and emphasize that robustness checks are necessary in empirical research into family characteristics. We also compare these historical data with present-day data. This comparison suggests that family characteristics and the values associated with them can persist over long periods."
A 1995 article on Emmanuel Todd Keeping it in the family by Suzi Feay

A Kamal Dasupta song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzaDKwdLJr8&feature=youtu.be
Feroza Begum version and Manna Dey version

Job description for US president

I wonder who of the current US presidential candidates fit this description. "America did not come by that power through its own innate genius. It acquired it, as do all empires, in no small part through war, invasion, subterfuge and exploitation. Spying and lying about it comes with the job description for which Obama applied and was reappointed." From Is Obama worse than Bush? That's beside the point by Gary Younge.

Childhood hero Kotha Venkateswara Babu

I entrusted my marriage to him since I did not trust my father. Here he is with Lalita in 1975 while I was away in Zurich. Sadly, he passed away in 1990 smiling in the face of cancer.

Interesting article and a comment

Why do we work so hard? by Ryan Avent in 'The Economist'
AL comments:
"Although it terrifically dissects the "Cant live without it. Cant live with it" nature of work it rests almost entirely on a single distinction between types of labour in the post-industrial world: immersive,creative & satisfying "cognitive" labour vs physically demanding & emotionally taxing "service" labour. This is a false and politically self-serving distinction. For all of the intellectual satisfaction of cognitive wagework, is it not relevant to point out that newer forms of appropriation (e.g., licenses, royalties and rents based on copyright and patents instead of ownership of products) have been devised by employers to still extract value from the creative class? The social inequality impacts of this self-valorization of creative work are equally profound: Becoming blind to the lives of others, not contributing to social life outside of one's narrow professional class, and the outsourcing of emotional work to caregivers are all mentioned in the article but not causally linked to cognitivization. "

The rich are different

From http://gawker.com/this-photo-of-hillary-clinton-lovingly-hugging-george-w-1764758065
Fitzgerald quote here http://www.quotecounterquote.com/2009/11/rich-are-different-famous-quote.html

More on global economy

More on the political trilemna of the global economy by Dani Rodrik
A fundamental shift in the nature of trade agreements by Tim Taylor who quotes from an article of  Richard Baldwin:

"The megaregionals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership and Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, however, are not a good substitute for multilateralization inside the WTO. They will create an international trading system marked by fragmentation (because they are not harmonized among themselves) and exclusion (because emerging trade giants like China and India are not members now and may never be). Whatever the conceptual merits of moving the megaregionals into the WTO, I have argued elsewhere that the actual WTO does not seem well-suited to the task. ... 

"What all this suggests is that world trade governance is heading towards a two-pillar system. The first pillar, the WTO, continues to govern traditional trade as it has done since it was founded in 1995. The second pillar is a system where disciplines on trade in intermediate goods and services, investment and intellectual property protection, capital flows, and the movement of key personnel are multilateralised in megaregionals. China and certain other large emerging markets may have enough economic clout to counter their exclusion from the current megaregionals. Live and let live within this two-pillar system is a very likely outcome."

The new truth about free trade by Robert Reich
An economic lab where theories to die by Noah Smith

Land of contrasts

What New Delhi's Free Clinics can teach America about fixing its broken health care system by Vivek Wadhwa in The Washington Post
"It's actually a landrab in the name of a festival": An interview with Vimalendu Jha about WCF. More at The art of not living with dissent and its discontents
Interview with lawyers evicted from Bastar

Two talks on John Nash

John Milnor on John Nash
Pradeep Dubey on John Nash

David Card

A short profile of David Card The Challener by Peter J. Walker
From an earlier interview posted before:
" I've subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole." 

Lloyd Shapley RIP

Obituary from the Economist

Corporate raiders

Michael Hudson on modern corporate raiders :The commanding heights
William Dalrymple on The East India Company: The original corporate raiders : "The East India Company no longer exists, and it has, thankfully, no exact modern equivalent. Walmart, which is the world’s largest corporation in revenue terms, does not number among its assets a fleet of nuclear submarines; neither Facebook nor Shell possesses regiments of infantry. Yet the East India Company – the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok – was the ultimate model for many of today’s joint-stock corporations. The most powerful among them do not need their own armies: they can rely on governments to protect their interests and bail them out. The East India Company remains history’s most terrifying warning about the potential for the abuse of corporate power – and the insidious means by which the interests of shareholders become those of the state. Three hundred and fifteen years after its founding, its story has never been more current."

Jeremy Harding on Castro in Angola

A fascinating long read reviewing several books on Angola.
Apartheid's Last Stand:
"The pending collapse of the Soviet Union played its part in the regional settlement, but Moscow was still pouring in arms when the Cubans took matters into their own hands, and Mandela never failed to thank them for their role. The outcome in Angola, he said, had ‘destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor’. But the price was high. Angolans paid for the shortcomings of a war administration that was slow to learn the arts of war and failed entirely to administer; the population lived under a Soviet-style economy in which the only working outposts were vast, flourishing informal markets – Roque Santeiro was the biggest in Luanda (named for a Brazilian TV soap) – and Sonangol, the state oil company, which lubricated the war effort. South Africa made good use of Savimbi and played cleverly on Washington’s anxieties, compounding the chaos, repression and heartbreak in a mismanaged country: widespread hunger and disease; dispossession and displacement; provincial towns crowded with landmine victims; hospitals full of ailing civilians but bare of medication; ANC militants jailed in pits by their leaders, Swapo fighters tortured as traitors by their commissars; hundreds of Angolan ‘fractionist’ dissidents dead or jailed. Apartheid was a creature that fumbling, self-interested democracies in the West were unwilling to slay. Only another kind of monster, with friends in Havana, could point it towards the exit."

Labour mobility in India

I am not really of this but interesting if correct.
Why is labor mobility in India so low?: "Migration from rural areas of India to the city is surprisingly low compared with other large developing countries, leaving higher paying job opportunities unexploited. This research shows that well-functioning rural insurance networks are in part responsible for this misallocation in the labor market, creating incentives that keep adult males in the village."

Imprinting

Penguin swims 5,000 miles every year for reunion with the man who saved his life
Learning who is your mother: The behaviour of imprinting

Links 11th March, 2016

Parable of the polygons
Fighting draughts
Land for ladies
'Stunning' operation regenerates eye's lens
Syntax is not unique to human language
In defence of (some) economics by Chris Dillow

Dani Rodrik's overview of current politics

The politics of anger : "If one lesson of history is the danger of globalization running amok, another is the malleability of capitalism. It was the New Deal, the welfare state, and controlled globalization (under the Bretton Woods regime) that eventually gave market-oriented societies a new lease on life and produced the post-war boom. It was not tinkering and minor modification of existing policies that produced these achievements, but radical institutional engineering.

Moderate politicians, take note."

An update on SRI

(via Shambu Prasad whose 2006 paper on adoptions of SRI in India was linked before)) SRI: A practice that transforms lives of women
See also The seeds of hope "She reaped 3,223 kilos of TRY 3 variety of paddy with just two kilos of the seed planted in 50 cents in 130 days. It was the highest yield adopting SRI method in the State for 2014-15. The award carried Rs.5 lakhs cash and a medal.....Women involved in farming activities is nothing new but there are only handful of them who are farmers. Though 75 percent of the agriculture work from sowing seeds to planting saplings, removing weeds and harvesting paddy are done by women, not many go on to become a farmer. “They find it difficult to balance between household duties and field work,” says Prasanna, “but what they miss here is just little knowledge about technical inputs in agriculture and expertise in man management. I focussed on these points and that stood me in good stead,” says Prasanna."

Back to some mathematics?

My wife Jhansi thinks that recent struggles with mathematics suited me and that I should ontinue doing some mathematics. May be I will.

Did Dayabhaga help bengali wives in the nineteenth century?

From Reflections on Kulin polygamy: Nistarini Debi's Sekeley Katha by Malavika Karlelar
"Calling it 'wholesale polygamy', H.H. Risley commented that 'several middle-aged Kulins are known to have had more than a hundred wives and to have spent their lives on a round of visits to their mothers-in-law' (Risley 1915: 166). Not unexpectedly, many of these women who were widowed or deserted found their way to the brothels of Calcutta (Banerjee 1993). According to one official estimate of the mid-nineteenth century, out of the 12,000 prostitutes in the growing metropolitan area, almost 10,000 were the wives, widows or daughters of Kulin Brahmins (Chakrabarty 1963)......
It would not be out of place to draw attention to the fact that Bengal is governed by the Dayabhaga school of law which, in the absence of a son, grandson and great grandson, gives the wife a right not only in joint family property but also in her husband's self-acquired assets. The link between sati and women's inheritance has been discussed elsewhere (Nandy 1980; Mukherjee, 1957); here, it needs to be pointed out that the more liberal law of inheritance in Bengal appeared only to harden attitudes towards wives. Unwanted widows became prostitutes and satis as Kulin wives and widows were never welcome in their husbands' homes."
Some discussion of Benali famil names and castes here.

Travancore sisters and a cousin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CqBuuIYL_0

Obscure songs from an unreleased film

by Dolly Katrak (Dolly Kwatra)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=us79cQh8Nxg&ebc=ANyPxKrDAAmaZmA7jLziPfBdekB6kPAr8Jb55Q0URg5lB2HPIr1Oe_eZ8NNfmLD1J2X3oDZbPjpOShfRBbT30Rt6gI9tidXJIA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZF6Gz3ArF5A&feature=youtu.be

India related links, March 6, 2016

Masters of their own world by Nahla Nainar :

"Ahead of International Women’s Day (March 8), we take a look at how self-help groups have raised the profile of rural women as successful entrepreneur"

Reality that stinks by Kuldeep Kumar : "..the belief that market forces operate solely on the basis of economic logic and eventually break down caste-based social structure is not borne out by the prevalent business practices and attitudes. "

Kanhaiya Kumar speech

This article from 2011 may explain some of current animosity against Sheldon Polloch in some Hindu circles Columbia Univeristy Professor broadens access to Sanskrit, the ancient language of the elite
On Mahishasura http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/jnu-smriti-irani-speech-lets-not-fight-jharkhand-tribals-say-as-they-pray-to-mahishasur/

Atiyah at 86

"The crazy part of mathematics is when an idea appears in your head. Usually when you’re asleep, because that’s when you have the fewest inhibitions. The idea floats in from heaven knows where. It floats around in the sky; you look at it, and admire its colors. It’s just there. And then at some stage, when you try to freeze it, put it into a solid frame, or make it face reality, then it vanishes, it’s gone. But it’s been replaced by a structure, capturing certain aspects, but it’s a clumsy interpretation." from 
Michael Atiyah's imaginative state of mind

Daisy Rockwell explains why she translated Tamas again

Tamas 3.0: How to retranlate novel already translated twice "Tamas is one of those rare Hindi novels that has been translated not once, but twice. The first translation, by the indefatigable translator of Hindi and Urdu, Jai Ratan, was published in 1981.

The second was undertaken by Sahni himself, who came to realise there were serious problems with the Ratan translation, and published in 2001. Ratan’s translation is marked by frequent omissions, inaccuracies and outright flights of fancy. Whilst Sahni’s translation corrects these, he was unable to resist the impulse, common among authors translating their own writing, to edit and revise the original work. Consequently, changes appear mysteriously here and there when the inspiration hit him."

Earlier article by Daisy Rockwell and Jai Ratan's translation at arvindguptatoys. More on Jai Ratan's translations  and some good translations by Daisy Rockwell. Her translation does not seem currently available for purchase.

More Geeta Dutt

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6uheSnJdEw
Version song from Chori Chori
one of her best from Parneeta 1953 chand hai wohi
Another one with Meenakumari from Tamasha 1952

Manan Ahmed on the recent Sheldon Pollock controversy

Why Sheldon Pollock "This attack on Pollock has a genealogy, more precise and more general, than what is readily evident– the Hindutva Right has long targeted historical production on Indian past that was anti-caste, anti-communal or feminist, and it has long targeted Sheldon Pollock for articulating how political imagination frames historical thinking."
Some contributions of Sheldon Pollock:
Sheldon pollock's introduction to Indian Knowledge Systems on the eve of colonialism
Sanskrit Knowledge Systems Project Some more here

Virat Kohli sang this recently

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-ioONenaAQ
Lyrics and translation from Mr. and Mrs. 55

Ramarao Kanneganti on 'Pollution and Urbanization'

Pollution and Urbanization includes links and comments

Still doing mathematics

Two books ( by Shedon Pollock and Amitav Ghosh)

seem to be available online.
'In an antique land' by Amitav Ghosh and a long meditation on the first four novels of Amitav Ghosh by Jesper Hansen
'Language of Gods in the World of Men' by Sheldon Pollock and an article by the same author 'Crisis in the Classics'. Check also https://archive.org/details/LanguageOfTheGodsInTheWorldOfMen
P.S. I had doubts about fictionalized version of history in Amitav Ghosh novels. But I did not realize that Ghost started in the subaltern group and one part of 'In an antique land' first appeared there. Jesper Hansen explains
"Ghosh’s argument here is in line with the one presented by the Subaltern Studies Group and also by Spivak. Power and the making of history - even the act of writing itself - are closely intertwined, and in the novel they are closely associated with the elite (wazirs, sultans, etc.). Thus Ghosh does not have direct access to Bomma and his life; rather he has access to Ben Yiju, so Bomma’s consciousnessmbecomes what Spivak calls a “negative consciousness”: a consciousness created by a (deconstructive) interpretation of the letters of the Geniza in which they were originally found. One of the questions is thus how much interpretation - and implicit in this question how much deviation from the verifiable “truth” - should be allowed. Ghosh’s answer to the question is definitely that fiction should be
allowed to see the possibilities in the facts rather than let the facts limit the fiction, which is also suggested by Claire Chambers’ argument that Ghosh is committed
“to the view that fiction is as valid a way of explaining events as the more
prestigious authority of scientific reason.” " 

About some recent events in India

Goon's Justice, Mob's Democracy by Rajeev Dhavan (via Akshay Reulagedda)

The Age of Fracture

by Daniel T.Rodgers was mentioned in favourable terms by David Warsh recently. Here is a summary by L.D.Burnett. One passage from the summary "I glean three important points that are crucial to understanding Rodgers’s text as a whole:
1. “Intellectual history” or “the history of ideas” not only can, but must, look beyond the writings and lives of those who considered themselves to be intellectuals, or who were considered as such by others. Ronald Reagan, an actor-turned-politician, and Peggy Noonan, a political hack writer, are just as important to understanding American thought as Noam Chomsky or Judith Butler."

P{art of a review by Corey Robin is discussed at CT.

An old favourite

I have been watching videos of this performance since 1970 but did not know the background. From Rolling Stone:
"[Richie] Havens wasn't supposed to be the first act to open the festival; that slot originally was intended for the band Sweetwater, but that band wound up being stuck in traffic. Backstage, co-organizer Michael Lang approached Havens and practically begged him to go on instead. "It had to be Richie – I knew he could handle it," Lang later wrote.

After performing a half-dozen songs, Havens ran out of material – until, he later said, he remembered "that word I kept hearing while I looked over the crowd in my first moments onstage. The word was: freedom." Havens began chanting that word over and over, backed by his second guitarist and conga player, and eventually segued into the gospel song "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," which he had heard in church as a child. The combined, surging medley wasn't just a crowd-pleaser; it later became a highlight of the Woodstock movie, which also immortalized Havens' orange dashiki. (What many didn't know at the time was that Havens wore dentures, which also gave his singing voice a unique tone.) "My fondest memory was realizing that I was seeing something I never thought I'd ever see in my lifetime – an assemblage of such numbers of people who had the same spirit and consciousness," he later recalled of Woodstock to Rolling Stone."

Good Bye to Pure Mathematics

Hopefully I do not have to do any more research in pure mathematics. The remaining difficulties in the last paper seem to be sorted out. The collaborators will complete writing it and I doubt whether I will even read it. Good Bye to pure mathematics before I complete 75. Back to Price Equation.