Assignment

Barefoot: worlds apart by Harsh Mander
"I accepted an invitation three years ago to teach a semester course every year on poverty and governance to the MBA students in this business school. The challenge of speaking about hunger, homelessness, want and discrimination to a classroom of some of the brightest achievers in the country — who, within months of my course, would be recruited to jobs which would easily place them in the top one per cent income bracket in the country — was daunting. But I found my students intelligent, engaged and caring, as young people anywhere are.

A different exercise

Instead of an examination at the end of the course, I asked my students every year to each find one impoverished person, in Ahmedabad or elsewhere, and try to learn about their lives, write their stories, and share these with their classmates. Their first reaction was usually one of understandable panic: how could they cross distances imposed by history, class, power, language and so much else; they were convinced that these were insurmountable. I assured them that what was required was no more than one human being reaching out to another, and if they could approach them with true respect and empathy, the people they were trying to learn from would, in all probability, reciprocate."
More about Harsh Mander. He is the author of Looking Away: Inequality, Prejudice and Indifference in New India.

Interview with Cornel West

Cornel West: 'Obama was never the revolutionary Mandela was'
“Now, Barack Obama - you have a neo-liberal black president of the most powerful empire in the world; he was never a revolutionary figure in the way Nelson Mandela was.

He has always been a neo-liberal politician. He was a black face of the American empire and he [has], in my view, commit[ted] war crimes with his drones in Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and Libya.

So, I think the people have the right to protest because you don't want Obama to come in and act as if somehow he is connected to the revolutionary Mandela. Now, on the other hand, it is also true that you want a variety of voices to be heard in these lectures."......."

Sure, there is a big difference. Barack Obama was the brilliant, poised, neo-liberal face of the American empire. Donald Trump is the know-nothing, xenophobic, white neo-fascist face of the American empire.

There are some continuities between Obama and Trump in terms of foreign policy and in terms of Wall Street friendliness, but there are some discontinuities ... Obama was never the explicit xenophobe that Trump has been since he took office.

And there is a difference between a neo-liberal and a neo-fascist. Both of them, for me, require serious critique.

But there is a difference between a neo-liberal who has some kind of concern about spectacle, some kind of concern about style, and some kind of concern about the rule of law - even if the rule of law is very tilted against the poor.

But with neo-fascists, its just his raw, crude, gangster to the core and xenophobic, and has no concern for the rule of law. That is what you get with Donald Trump.“
P.S. an exhaustive article on the topic by Paul Street:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/02/obama-a-hollow-man-filled-with-ruling-class-ideas/

The need for religion

What Religion Gives Us (That Science Can’t) By Stephen T.Asma . There have also been life long non-religious people like Bertrand Russell. It would have been interesting to compare with that group and check for any common elements that kept them going.

Survival in future

Survival of the richest : The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind by Dougla Rushkoff
“Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.”

Another inspiring story

Shepherd from Karnataka builds 14 ponds on barren hill, turns his village green

SriSri influence on an IAS officer

https://www.clipzui.com/video/l3q4b5g3q3o4f3q4c41553.html starts around 36:27
Meet Pallavi Akurathi – The Daring IAS Officer Who Is An Inspiration To All The Telugu Medium Students! also A battle I didn’t need
“Ironically, all that effort to learn English, and the humiliation faced along the way, seems ridiculous now. A majority of our daily transactions are in Kannada. I would be a miserable administrator if I were proficient in English but didn’t speak Kannada. While one’s comprehension of English is already tested in the mains, what sense does it make to exclusively ensure the English proficiency of administrators? she wonders. “Even today I cannot understand the poetry that a 6th standard ICSE student writes. How can a government school student, who studies all through only in a regional language, be asked to compete in English comprehension with those from English-medium schools? Can you imagine how unequal the battle is?”

Time investment

Time invested in the past dictates our willingness to wait for future rewards 

Exposing modern slavery

The hidden face of modern slavery by Jean Allain
“The Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines state, in part: “To determine, in law, a case of slavery, one must look for possession. While the exact form of possession might vary, in essence it supposes control over a person by another such as a person might control a thing.” The control may involve physical constraint, but control may also “be evident in attempts to withhold identity documents [as in the case of the Thai prostitutes]; or to otherwise restrict free movement or access to state authorities or legal processes; or equally in attempts to forge a new identity through compelling a new religion, language, place of residence, or forcing marriage”. 

Professor Allain says that “this is the essence of slavery: that one person controls another as if they owned them. So the slave no longer has a say over their life, and is forced to do the bidding of the person who controls them.””

More on Mahesh Kathi

It seems that what was used is  Telangana Prevention of Anti-Social and Hazardous Activities Act, 1930.: “Among those who are targeted specifically in these laws include “bootleggers, dacoits, drug-offenders, goondas, immoral traffic offenders, land grabbers, gamblers,” as listed by these Acts." ” The same law law was later used to stern Swami Paripoornananda who wanted to organise a march against a Mahesh Kathi. From https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/what-externment-law-telangana-cops-used-ban-mahesh-kathi-hyd-84500 

Inter caste marriages in India on the increase says The Guardian

Intercaste marriages and grooms who pay their way: welcome to the new India :
“Hitesh Dhingra, co-founder of dating app TrulyMadly, believes there are two reasons for the enlightened views expressed in the survey. One is that young Indians, as users of the internet and social media, are exposed to new ideas that challenge traditional social mores.

The other is that, as more millennials choose their partners using dating apps and websites, they are more likely to focus on personality and compatibility than caste and religion.”

Sheila Dhar on Bhimsen Joshi

From Raga’n Josh
The following video may give some indication of his performances:

A longer version here 

Pankaj Mishra reviews ‘Ants among elephants’

God’s oppressed children  “The result is a book that combines many different genres—memoir, history, ethnography, and literature—and is outstanding in the intensity and scale of its revelations......At such moments, Gidla’s book achieves the emotional power of V.S. Naipaul’s great novel A House for Mr. Biswas, which describes the solitary struggles of a descendant of indentured laborers.....Rather, “it is a battle for freedom…for the reclamation of the human personality”—an arduous, never-ending battle in which Gidla’s book represents an all too rare victory.”
I have repeatedly mentioned and quoted from the book. There has been very little response from the upper caste bloggers so far. There are lots of posts about Trump or Vedas but this book has  eenstudiously ignored by the Indian netizens. Even among the Dalits, there is resentment among ambedkarites. She seems a difficult personality if her internet comments on all kinds of issues is any indication. But the book is excellent.

Miracle in Thailand

All out of the cave
How Buddhist meditation kept the Thai boys calm in the cave
“When the 12 Thai boys who’ve been trapped in a cave and are being rescued one by one were first discovered by British divers a week ago, they were reportedly meditating.

“Look at how calm they were sitting there waiting. No one was crying or anything. It was astonishing,” the mother of one of the boys told the AP, referring to a widely shared video of the moment the boys were found.

Turns out that their coach, Ekapol Chanthawong, who led them on a hike into the cave when it flooded on June 23, trained in meditation as a Buddhist monk for a decade before becoming a soccer coach. According to multiple news sources, he taught the boys, ages 11 to 16, to meditate in the cave to keep them calm and preserve their energy through their two-week ordeal.”

Mahesh Kathi banned from Hyderabad for six months

“It all began after Kathi Mahesh allegedly made derogatory comments against Lord Rama and Sita during a debate on a regional news channel.

Mahesh was participating in a debate about a sedition case filed against rationalist Babu Gogineni, when he said, “For me, Ramayana is just another story…I believe Rama is as much a cheater (dagulbhaji) as he is ideal in that story. And I think perhaps Sita would have been better, might have gotten justice if she had stayed with Ravana. What’s wrong with that?” ” from The news minute. More about  Mahesh Kathi

• See also  Shambuka story for some of the reasons why some people may not appreciate Rama.

Some thoughts from Tyler Cowen

If technology has arrived everywhere, why has income diverged?
Informational autocrats
Theabove are links to ideas in papers which he seemed to have appreciated. Here is an article by himself Holding Up a Mirror to the Intellectuals of the Left :
“Often my best conversations are with doers and practitioners, rather than intellectuals and writers. The politics of the doers are typically difficult to discern or to boil down to simple classifications.”

More of Jim Holt

A review of his recent book When Einstein walked with Godel by Parul Sehgal. A review of his earlier book Why does the world exist? By Free an Dyson :What can you really know? Freeman Dyson links to earlier review of his of the book

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World

by David Deutsch

which is very nice but behind a firewall.

Interview with Jim Holt

 Why does Jim Hilt exist? “I do in fact steer by One Big Idea, which makes me a hedgehog rather than a fox. It is this: the part of reality that we can make meaningful claims about is limited by our experience and observation. This is a Big Idea that tends to deflate other Big Ideas.”

Kalpana 1948

Martin Scorsese restored version here https://indiancine.ma/BKLU/player/EZU
This is through a comment in Richard Singer’s blog ‘Dances on the footpath’ where there is a discussion of different restored versions https://roughinhere.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/in-search-of-uday-shankars-kalpana-1948/#comment-13577
There is also one on YouTube https://youtu.be/e0U7ORtnJ78

An old post by Scott Alexander

Though I know the name, I have not really read any thing by Scott Alexander. Today, I stumbled on this old post I CAN TOLERATE ANYTHING EXCEPT THE OUTGROUP which has some very nice insights though some may be US specific like “I am saying that the underlying attitudes that produce partyism are stronger than the underlying attitudes that produce racism, with no necessary implications on their social effects.” A crucial insight which I liked and which reminded me of ‘intimate enmity’ of  D.R. Nagaraj (of The flaming feet) is the Narcissism of small differences. More about Scott Alexander and a link to some of his posts here.

An apparaisal of Tom Paine

from Jacobin, last year. Reading Paine from the left by Sean Monahan. Paine’s writings were familiar in India in the fifties through cheap editions of American books published by USIS. I remember reading some of the works of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Gundhur and others those days. It is through John Gunthur’s ‘Death be not proud’ that I first came to know about John Donne. Somewhere around that time, I came across ‘Citizen Tom Paine’ and ‘Spartacus’ by Howard Fast. Some of these books seem still influential in my case.

Refugees at Dachau

The refugees housed at Dachau: 'Where else should I live?' “Like many other German towns, Dachau has made huge efforts to help refugees. The small community of only 45,000 inhabitants is housing about 350 refugees in the communal shelter. It is planning to open another shelter for up to 100 people in the coming months, and may see numbers rise given the current influx. Faced with such pressure on the available space, the town may not rehouse the Dachau camp residents any time soon. Hammermann, the director of the memorial site, says she could accept a compromise that would still see some of the buildings used as residential space, and the rest for exhibitions and seminars. Negotiations between the town and the state of Bavaria over the future use of the herb garden will take place this winter.”
This was from three years ago. Current situation?

Why don’t Americans take more vacations?

Why Don’t Americans Take More Vacations? Blame It on Independence Day 

Persistence of practices

During a recent trip to India, I noticed that though there is less resistance to divorce and remarriage than before, some of the attitudes widows seem unchanged. Even in the cases where widows regular saree and use bindu, when they are invited to functions either there is no bindu or it is put on the entrance of the house. This was in one area. Some practices related to ceremonies have strengthened; even those which were not observed frequently before like clothing ceremonies, and several ceremonies accompany marriages. This also seems to be true with Indian diaspora practicing various ceremonies when they buy new cars to houses. I started for looking for articles about change and persistence of practices, particularly associated with religion. In an interview with The Hindu, Daud Ali showed interest in such studies. But so far I could find only articles on friendship among the articles he authored. Perhaps there are more. Also, it seems difficult for people living abroad to observe current practices which have a lot of regional variation. Here is one more on friendship take from a book on ‘Same-sex love in India’. Unlike many interpretations of Gita, it emphsizes friendship between Krishna and Arjuna Ancient Indian materials by Ruth Vanita. Any pointers are welcome. 

Dalits among Gadars

Babu Ram and probably Pridhvi Singh Azad
Found these while listening to a story from Aruna Tella:”Aruna Tella tells me that he jumped from the train near Ongole while being transported from Andamans to Rajahmundry. He was from the Gadar party. He crawled to Mukhtinuthalapadu about four miles from Ongole. There was in the village who knew Hindi( this was in early 1920s) and his shackles were broken and are still on display in the village. He was recaptured and sent to Rajahmundry. Apparently Alluri Seetharama Raju tried to free him but failed and died soon after. So this was just before 1924. The Wikipedia entry says that he was a ‘harijan’ and also a Rajput from Punjab. He was a minister in Bhimsen Sachar cabinet in 1949 and died at the age of 96. His autobiography seems available at least in libraries and the google version confirms that he was in Ongole and Rajahmundry. He also visited Russia on the advice of Chandrasekhar Azad and a book on this trip is also available from libraries. More information welcome.”

A mosquitoe repellent

CDC lists oil of lemon eucalyptus as comparable to DEET for mosquitoes 

Devesh Kapur on social science research about India in USA

In the US, there is a rise of social science research about India – but it has little policy impact
“When asked how many of these expensive randomised control trials had moved the policy needle in India, Arvind Subramanian, chief economic advisor to the Indian government (who announced in June that he would be stepping down from the post), was hard pressed to find a single one that had helped him address the dozens of pressing policy questions that came across his table. By contrast, the compiling of just some key facts on learning outcomes by the non-governmental organisation Pratham has had a big impact on policy discussions in education, because it is backed by a degree of specific knowledge and engagement that is more credible and persuasive. One could question whether “relevance” or “timeliness” are a valid standard for good research – yes they are, when those are precisely the reasons given to funders for these projects.

One should acknowledge the wide range of social science type work in US business schools, demography, and even development economics that has been adding to a body of knowledge about India. Nonetheless, a not inconsiderable number of research articles in top journals elide facts or simply interpret them selectively, relying on reviewers’ ignorance about India. That would normally not matter, but because they are published in prestigious journals, they effectively create “new facts” and become the gatekeepers of knowledge in that area.”

Lukaku Dummy

He did not touch the ball but look what he did Romelu Lukaku Against Japan during the last moments

The monster has been with us all along

Forget it By Corey Robin

Interesting new paper by Daniel Gilbert and others

but based on relatively small samples (20-100) of Harvard graduate students:
Prevalence-induced concept change in human judgement.
Abstract:
Why do some social problems seem so intractable? In a series of experiments, we show that people often respond to decreases in the prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their concept of it. When blue dots became rare, participants began to see purple dots as blue; when threatening faces became rare, participants began to see neutral faces as threatening; and when unethical requests became rare, participants began to see innocuous requests as unethical. This “prevalence-induced concept change” occurred even when participants were forewarned about it and even when they were instructed and paid to resist it. Social problems may seem intractable in part because reductions in their prevalence lead people to see more of them.
Discussion at Sciencedaily Problem with solving problems and Marginal Revolution Why Sexism and Racism Never Diminish–Even When Everyone Becomes Less Sexist and Racist

Daniel Gilbertis the author often best seller Stumbling on Happiness which has been mentioned before a few times in this blog. See also Overton window.

An autobiographical essay (talk) from Arundhati Roy

Long read. IN WHAT LANGUAGE DOES RAIN FALL OVER TORMENTED CITIES? wonderful read. But whenever I read Roy, I am reminded of the words of caution from Leela Naidu http://gaddeswarup.blogspot.com/2012/05/while-reading-about-balraj-sahni-i-came.html

Periodic Table using AI

https://news.stanford.edu/2018/06/25/ai-recreates-chemistrys-periodic-table-elements/ 

“Zhang hopes that in the future, scientists can harness Atom2Vec’s knowledge to discover and design new materials. “For this project, the AI program was unsupervised, but you could imagine giving it a goal and directing it to find, for example, a material that is highly efficient at converting sunlight to energy,” Zhang said.

His team is already at work on version 2.0 of their AI program, which will focus on cracking an intractable problem in medical research: designing just the right antibody to attack antigens – molecules capable of inducing an immune response – that are specific to cancer cells. Currently, one of the most promising approaches to curing cancer is cancer immunotherapy, which involves harnessing the antibodies that can attack antigens on cancer cells.

But the human body can produce more than 10 million unique antibodies, each of which is made up of a different combination of about 50 genes. “If we can map these building block genes onto a mathematical vector, then we can organize all antibodies into something similar to a periodic table,” Zhang says. “Then, if you discover that one antibody is effective against an antigen but is toxic, you can look ”

Tyler Cowen and others on asylum rights

Are asylum rights misguided?  And Australia is given as an example! “You should note, by the way, that Australia has relatively tough asylum rights, but takes in a large number of legal immigrants.  The country also goes to great lengths to stop people from showing up at the border in boats and claiming asylum.  So it seems there is at least one case where this is a sustainable posture.”

Some others A world of free movement would be $78 trillion richer  “If something seems too good to be true, it probably is not actually true. But occasionally it is. Michael Clemens, an economist at the Centre for Global Development, an anti-poverty think-tank in Washington, DC, argues that there are “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk”. One seemingly simple policy could make the world twice as rich as it is: open borders.”

Fundamental rule of brain plasticity

Study reveals how, when a synapse strengthens, its neighbors weaken.
“Our brains are famously flexible, or “plastic,” because neurons can do new things by forging new or stronger connections with other neurons. But if some connections strengthen, neuroscientists have reasoned, neurons must compensate lest they become overwhelmed with input. In a new study in Science, researchers at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT demonstrate for the first time how this balance is struck: when one connection, called a synapse, strengthens, immediately neighboring synapses weaken based on the action of a crucial protein called Arc
....
Though the rule they found was simple, the experiments that revealed it were not. As they worked to activate plasticity in the visual cortex of mice and then track how synapses changed to make that happen, lead authors Sami El-Boustani and Jacque Pak Kan Ip, postdocs in Sur’s lab, accomplished several firsts.“

India abroad

 dosa by DOSA Redefines the Fast-Casual Restaurant with Sleek Design, Bountiful Menu 

News from India

India preparing for 'cut in oil imports from Iran' from Al Jazeera
Revise relations with Iran: Nikki Haley tells Modi from The Hindu
Frequent flier Modi ‘goes missing on key issues at home’ from Asia Times
Teachers get only 10 days to comment on government’s sweeping changes to higher education regulation from Scroll.in
Funds parked by Indians in Swiss banks rose by over 50% in 2017: Report from Scroll.in

Another inspiring story from India ‘Pardada Pardadi’

How a school for poor girls cracked the patriarchy in a rural Indian town
“During his time abroad, Singh became obsessed with a perplexing question: What keeps India from excelling? Why, for instance, do Indian Americans have the highest average household income of all ethnic groups in the US, yet in India, one in four citizens still live in abject poverty?

He gradually developed a theory that his homeland was crippled by its almost total subjugation of women. “All my life I noticed the girl child being badly discriminated against,” Singh says, adding that such discrimination crosses all social strata in India. From not receiving their fair share of inheritance to being forced to marry older men as a payback for loans, women are systematically deprived of their human rights—and the country of half its potential.”

Via Madhukar Shukla

This should explain some thing but it is not clear to me

The journey of Indian rupee from 1947
I remember a time when the US dollar was worth 3 rupees and the British pound 5 rupees. I wondered about this while reading https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jun/25/americans-most-inclusive-attitude-to-immigrants-global-study-finds?

Dalit women have crafted a hit

with a little help from Aparna Krishnan from The Hindu http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-national/paalaguttapalle-bags-a-future/article24243976.ece “It all began with a lucky conversation. Aparna Krishnan, a software engineer who moved to Paalaguttapalle to become an organic farmer, was asked by one of her dealers if someone could supply cotton bags to Hyderabad. Ms. Krishnan contacted N. Annapurna, who did tailoring jobs to support her family, and gave her Rs. 1,000 to buy cloth. Once the bags were done, she had them delivered to Hyderabad. Ms. Annapurna earned Rs. 1,000 for the order.”

Water problems

“The NITI Aayog released the results of a study warning that India is facing its ‘worst’ water crisis in history and that demand for potable water will outstrip supply by 2030 if steps are not taken. Nearly 600 million Indians faced high to extreme water stress and about 2,00,000 people died every year due to inadequate access to safe water. Twenty-one cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad will run out of groundwater by 2020, affecting 100 million people, the study noted. If matters are to continue, there will be a 6% loss in the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2050, the report says.” from http://www.indiaenvironmentportal.org.in/content/456310/composite-water-management-index/ 

Himanshu Thakkar’s article on the index Muddying the waters 
Rahul Banerjee’s comments on his wall:
"Nicely written article by Himanshu Thakkar on the recently published Water Management Index Report of the Niti Aayog. Apart from the several important points raised by him, I would like to add a few points myself.
1. In the table on the quality of the data collected for the assessment, the report clearly says that most states do not have data regarding such crucial and heavily weighted parameters as groundwater recharging and for thosestates that do have this data it is unreliable. Under the circumstances the reliability of the index is highly questionable.
2. Moreover, since the report has acknowledged that there is severe water stress, it should have calculated a water stress index for each district as the data is available for such an exercise and is independent of the states' own reporting and so more reliable.
The proof of the pudding of water management is in the dishing and a water stress index would better show how naked the emperor is☺."

Interesting discussions on Phoenicians

spurred probably by a recent book of Josephine Quinn. This article Phatasmic Phoenecia gives a good background discussion. Interview with Josephine Quinn and a Review of her book. An older article which includes some DNA studies.

A song from Rani Rupmati

https://youtu.be/F3ji_fIosso By Rafi, Krishnarao Chonkar and Geeta Dutt

Another review of ‘Ants among elephants’

By Sujatha Gidla in Prospect Magazine https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/ants-among-elephants-exposes-the-reality-of-caste-in-modern-india by Gaiutra Bahadur. I liked the review.

Gareth Dale on marketless trading

Browsing again "Michael Hudson and Baruch Levine, eds, Privatization in the Ancient Near East and Classical World, Cambridge MA: Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology", I found this 2013 article which discusses Karl Polanyi's ideas in conjunction with the ideas from the above seminar. This is the first of the five seminars edited by Michael Hudson and others. The last and fifth one on the origins of labour was linked earlier.
Marketless Trading in Hammurabi’s Time’: A re- appraisal
Gareth Dale’s work on Karl Polanyi reviews here by Robert Kuttner in The NewYork Review of Books TheMan from Red Vienna 

Coffee may be good for the heart

from Forbes.com Researchers Figure Out Why Coffee Is Good For The Heart “The team suggests that p27 is likely the reason why caffeine administration can help after heart attack, and that caffeine may even be protective for people at higher risk for heart disease. This will no doubt be music to some people’s ears.”

on our circadian clocks

How our body’s circadian clocks affect our health beyond sleep . One excerpt:
“Our intestines, our stomach, and our gut have circadian rhythms, too. Late at night, just like our brain goes to sleep, our stomach and gut start to shut down. Our intestines and gut don’t move food down the digestive tract, so if you eat late at night, the food just sits there. At the same time, the stomach has a buildup and starts to produce acid.

During the daytime, the circadian rhythm in our mouths actually produces saliva that neutralizes that acid. But in the evening, even our mouths shut down, which is why we don’t salivate much in our sleep. When you have a lot of acid, food isn’t going down, and acid is coming to our mouths, we get acid reflux. It’s a very simple thing, but just eating early in alignment with the gut rhythm can help. 

Another idea is in terms of exercise. Exercise has many benefits for the circadian clock and sleep cycle. So for example, taking a short walk in the morning has as huge impact on synchronizing the brain clock and improving arousal and alertness.”

Some news appears and then disappears

Reliance-Run Websites, Times Now and New Indian Express Take Down Story on Amit Shah
Presumably, it is still available in a few places like this.

Long read on Stanford prison experiment

The life span of a lie by Ben Blum
“But if Zimbardo’s work was so profoundly unscientific, how can we trust the stories it claims to tell? Many other studies, such as Soloman Asch’s famous experiment demonstrating that people will ignore the evidence of their own eyes in conforming to group judgments about line lengths, illustrate the profound effect our environments can have on us. The far more methodologically sound — but still controversial — Milgram experiment demonstrates how prone we are to obedience in certain settings. What is unique, and uniquely compelling, about Zimbardo’s narrative of the Stanford prison experiment is its suggestion that all it takes to make us enthusiastic sadists is a jumpsuit, a billy club, and the green light to dominate our fellow human beings.” From Lifespan of a lie.

Jerry Coyne review of ’She has her mother’s last laugh’

Twists and turns in the process of heredity “[carl]Zimmer’s book is an excellent way to get up to speed in these areas, but be aware that there are a couple of recent competitors that give much the same information. These include Siddhartha Mukherjee’s superbly written chronology “The Gene: An Intimate History,” and James Watson’s lavishly illustrated (and largely first-hand) account, “DNA: The Story of the Genetic Revolution.” Read at least one of the three, because this is important stuff: If the science doesn’t matter to you now, it will soon.”

James Salter

I got to know about James Salter through a post of Steven HSU. According to another author “James Salter writes American sentences better than anyone writing today.” A portrait of him The Last Book by Nick Paumgaten. HSU links to an interview (behind a firewall) but HSU quotes lot of it in another post. Here is another Why I write.

About Marxism

I stopped worrying about understanding Marx though I read about Marxism off and on. I take this to be essence of it:
“In a system where virtually all resources are available for a price, economic power can be translated into political power by channels too obvious for mention. In a capitalist society, economic power is very unequally distributed, and hence democratic government is inevitably something of a sham.”
The quote is from an article by Kenneth Arrow.

A Balasaraswati song: oke okka sari

https://youtu.be/lNNRuJOu8zsLyrics by Arudra. More can be found at https://sanskritdocuments.org/surasa/ I might have posted this before.

Interesting Telugu blog

of Bhandaru Sreenivasa Rao: “Worked as sub editor in Andhra Jyothi,  Vijayavada. Later joined Regional News Unit of AIR,Hyderabad as news reporter in 1975. Moved to Moscow, then in USSR to work as language specialist in telugu and news reader in Radio Moscow in 1987.  Returned back to India after almost five years to join in Hyderabad, Doordarshan as news editor  and finally retired from active service in December 2005”. Noticed these posts about Vijayawada in the thirties and forties అలనాటి బెజవాడ. Search the blog or google ( which seems faster) for other posts about Vijayawada.
There is another blog karpuramanjari which has several articles on personalities from Tenali.

A discussion on low llife expectancy among Dalit women ( in Telugu)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&a=&v=No_qP_Yuh2Y The presenter seems to think that since Dalits live outside the villages, they get fresh air and ‘eat home-grown vegetables and fruits’. May be there is a city-village divide; youngsters in cities may not have seen much of village life.

Michael Hudson on Chinese economy

China’s Export Competitiveness = Underpaying Women later on there is a discussion on its current ‘mixed economy’.

Negative Economics

Michal Hudson’s talk from approximately 36 minutes to 1:18. https://youtu.be/k2_OKdKm4fU
A story told by Micharl Hudson from a different source: “Consider Plato’s Republic, another product of fourth-century Athens. The book begins when Socrates visits an old friend, a wealthy arms manufacturer, at the port of Piraeus. They get into a discussion of justice, which begins when the old man proposes that money cannot be a bad thing, since it allows those who have it to be just, and that justice consists in two things: telling the truth and always paying one’s debts. The proposal is easily demolished. What, Socrates asks, if someone lent you his sword, went violently insane, and then asked for it back (presumably so he could kill someone)? Clearly, it can never be right to arm a lunatic whatever the circumstances. The old man cheerfully shrugs the problem off and heads off to attend to some ritual, leaving his son to carry on the argument.”

Interview with Daud Ali

The interview from The Hindu
“But, somehow, I stumbled onto the work of Norbert Elias and I had, of course, read Foucault who was very fashionable at the time. I made a connection between these two scholars and became interested in how one could think about the formation of what we may call “subjects”. Foucault focuses on the formation of modern subjects and looks at disciplinary practices at large. But Elias takes a more longue durée-cum-sociological approach about the development of manners, habits, mental dispositions and attitudes, linking them with behaviour. He was trying to map them onto particular sociologies.

What occurred to me, which I have been elaborating in my work ever since, is that the material from medieval India has not been looked at from this particular point of view. Everybody has been obsessed with mapping state structures and talking about either dynastic history or social history of a more empirical type, ignoring the whole question of mental dispositions, of bodies, of emotions, of these less tangible things which are incredibly important for the understanding of state structures, social relationships and the sinews of social life. There were people coming at it from the perspective of religious studies. But in terms of history, there was an indifference to these problems; they had not been explored. So most of my career has been working on what I would consider the completely virgin territory of what you could call the history of practice or mentalité.”

“The real driver of global history in the U.S. is, sadly, the opening up of Asian markets to American educational institutions. That sounds cynical but I am afraid it is the truth. And a lot of global history is simply re-washed neoliberal claptrap about the rise of capitalism, put in a more acceptable language.”

The Wikipedia article on Daud Ali

Math, girls and socialism

https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/11532/math-girls-and-socialism
“This paper argues that the socialist episode in East Germany, which constituted a radical experiment in gender equality in the labor market and other instances, has left persistent tracks on gender norms. We focus on one of the most resilient and pervasive gender gaps in modern societies: mathematics. Using the German division as a natural experiment, we show that the underperformance of girls in math is sharply reduced in the regions of the former GDR, in contrast with those of the former FRG. We show that this East-West difference is due to girls' attitudes, confidence and competitiveness in math, and not to other confounding factors, such as the difference in economic conditions or teaching styles across the former political border. We also provide illustrative evidence that the gender gap in math is smaller in European countries that used to be part of the Soviet bloc, as opposed to the rest of Europe. The lesson is twofold: (1) a large part of the pervasive gender gap in math is due to social stereotypes; (2) institutions can durably modify these stereotypes.”
Two more Sources for my New York Times Op-Ed - "Why Women had Better Sex Under Socialism" from last year and e cerpts from a 1973book (long read):
Women in Russia before and after the revolution by Sheila Rowbotham.

Lakshmi Narasimhan Ikkurthi

Lakshmi Narasimhan Ikkurthi:Back to His Roots

“Lakshmi Narasimha Ikkurthi gave up his software career to take up social initiatives in his village Yazali.”

An inspiring doctor

Why This Inspiring Doctor’s Departure from Odisha Town Moved Hundreds to Tears!

About community driven development

A bombshell Evaluation of Community Driven Development by Duncan Green. See also the comments by several experts.
“3IE cast its baleful eye over the evidence from 25 impact evaluations, covering 23 CDD programmes in 21 low- and middle-income countries and concluded.

• CDD programmes have no impact on social cohesion or governance.
• Many community members may hear about CDD programmes but not many attend meetings.
• Few people speak at the meeting and fewer still participate in decision-making.
• Women are only half as likely as men to be aware of CDD programmes and even less likely to attend or speak at community meetings.
• CDD programmes have made a substantial contribution to improving the quantity of small-scale infrastructure.
• They have a weak effect on health outcomes and mostly insignificant effects on education and other welfare outcomes.
• There is impact on improved water supply leading to time savings.”

Seven Common rules

Seven moral rules found all around the world
“Converging lines of evidence – from game theory, ethology, psychology, and anthropology – suggest that morality is a collection of tools for promoting cooperation.
.........
And, as predicted by the theory, these seven moral rules – love your family, help your group, return favors, be brave, defer to authority, be fair, and respect others’ property – appear to be universal across cultures. “

Long read on how Harvard lost Russia

via David Warsh. In News Values “There’s been a tendency in recent years to rely more heavily than before on professional economists as journalists. Paul Krugman, of The New York Times, and Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times, are the most prominent examples. There are many others, tucked away in business pages, magazines, or on websites of their own.
....

There’s a downside, though. Membership in the economics guild brings with it a natural reluctance to tangle with the leadership of the profession, on any other than strictly professional grounds. To put this slightly differently, economists who enter journalism remain economists; they are not there to police their peers.

As far as I know, neither Krugman nor Wolf has ever mentioned the Harvard-Russia story. Only The Wall Street Journal actually covered it.........

As for the “Further Reading” section of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, not even McClitick’s 25,000-word article rated a mention there – perhaps because Harvard professor Andrei Shleifer was JEP‘s editor from 2003-2008.“

Here is the article How Harvard Lost Russia by David McClitick from 2006.
A follow up from 2014 Some Russian money flows back to Harvard by an ex-dean from Harvard.

Peter Scott retiring today

My collaborator and friend  Peter Scott is retiring today. I first met him in Liverpool during 1968-69 and have been collaborating with him since 1986 and quite intensely since 1994. He moved to The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 1987. I retired in 2005 but there have been periods of collaboration even after retirement. We still have two long papers in progress but the progress is slow as the work seems essentially complete. Peter has made several basic contributions to three dimensional manifolds without mentioning his results. His first famous paper Finitely generated three manifold groups are finitely presented appeared in 1973. A note of mine written for his sixtieth birthday here. 

A biography f Lejuene Dirichlet and his work

In This volume