says Dani Rodrik in Let developing nations rule . Excerpts:
"First, they should push for new rules that make financial crises less likely and their consequences less severe. Left to their own devices, global financial markets provide too much credit at too cheap a price in good times, and too little credit in bad times. The only effective response is counter-cyclical capital-account management: discouraging foreign borrowing during economic upswings and preventing capital flight during downswings.
So, instead of frowning on capital controls and pushing for financial openness, the International Monetary Fund should be in the business of actively helping countries implement such policies. It should also enlarge its emergency credit lines to act more as a lender of last resort to developing nations hit by financial whiplash.
The crisis is an opportunity to achieve greater transparency on all fronts, including banking practices in rich countries that facilitate tax evasion in developing nations. Wealthy citizens in the developing world evade more than $100 billion worth of taxes in their home countries each year, thanks to bank accounts in Zurich, Miami, London, and elsewhere. Developing countries’ governments should request and be given information about their nationals’ accounts.
Developing nations should also push for a Tobin tax – a tax on global foreign currency transactions. Set at a low enough level – say, 0.25% – such a tax would have little adverse effect on the global economy while raising considerable revenue. At worst, the efficiency costs would be minor; at best, the tax would discourage excessive short-term speculation.
....
Developing nations also need to enshrine the notion of “policy space” in the World Trade Organization. The goal would be to ensure that developing countries can employ the kind of trade and industrial policies needed to restructure and diversify their economies and set the stage for economic growth. All countries that have successfully globalized have used such policies, many of which (e.g., subsidies, domestic-content rules, reverse engineering of patented products) are currently not allowed under WTO rules.
Policy space is also required to ensure that important social and political ends — such as food security — are compatible with international trade rules. Developing nations should argue that recognizing these economic and political realities makes the global trade regime not weaker and more susceptible to protectionism, but healthier and more sustainable.
....Developing countries should say no to obvious trade protectionism, but they should be willing to negotiate to avoid regulatory races to the bottom in such areas as labor standards or corporate taxation. This is in their long-term self-interest. Without support from the middle classes of rich nations, it will be difficult to maintain a global trade regime as open as the one we have had in recent years."
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Keynes and stimilus packages
From ROBERT SKIDELSKY's The Remedist (via Steven Hsu's postKeynes):
"Keynes created an economics whose starting point was that not all future events could be reduced to measurable risk. There was a residue of genuine uncertainty, and this made disaster an ever-present possibility, not a once-in-a-lifetime “shock.” Investment was more an act of faith than a scientific calculation of probabilities. And in this fact lay the possibility of huge systemic mistakes.
The basic question Keynes asked was: How do rational people behave under conditions of uncertainty? The answer he gave was profound and extends far beyond economics. People fall back on “conventions,” which give them the assurance that they are doing the right thing. The chief of these are the assumptions that the future will be like the past (witness all the financial models that assumed housing prices wouldn’t fall) and that current prices correctly sum up “future prospects.” Above all, we run with the crowd. A master of aphorism, Keynes wrote that a “sound banker” is one who, “when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way.” (Today, you might add a further convention — the belief that mathematics can conjure certainty out of uncertainty.)
But any view of the future based on what Keynes called “so flimsy a foundation” is liable to “sudden and violent changes” when the news changes. Investors do not process new information efficiently because they don’t know which information is relevant. Conventional behavior easily turns into herd behavior. Financial markets are punctuated by alternating currents of euphoria and panic.
Keynes’s prescriptions were guided by his conception of money, which plays a disturbing role in his economics. Most economists have seen money simply as a means of payment, an improvement on barter. Keynes emphasized its role as a “store of value.” Why, he asked, should anyone outside a lunatic asylum wish to “hold” money? The answer he gave was that “holding” money was a way of postponing transactions. The “desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. . . . The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium we require to make us part with money is a measure of the degree of our disquietude.” The same reliance on “conventional” thinking that leads investors to spend profligately at certain times leads them to be highly cautious at others. Even a relatively weak dollar may, at moments of high uncertainty, seem more “secure” than any other asset, as we are currently seeing.
It is this flight into cash that makes interest-rate policy such an uncertain agent of recovery. If the managers of banks and companies hold pessimistic views about the future, they will raise the price they charge for “giving up liquidity,” even though the central bank might be flooding the economy with cash. That is why Keynes did not think that cutting the central bank’s interest rate would necessarily — and certainly not quickly — lower the interest rates charged on different types of loans. This was his main argument for the use of government stimulus to fight a depression. There was only one sure way to get an increase in spending in the face of an extreme private-sector reluctance to spend, and that was for the government to spend the money itself. Spend on pyramids, spend on hospitals, but spend it must.
This, in a nutshell, was Keynes’s economics."
There is a discussion in Economist's View Which is Best, Monetary Policy, Government Spending, or Tax Cuts?
Several economists including Raj Chetty on The Ideal Stimulus Package for US (via V.K. Chetty).
"Keynes created an economics whose starting point was that not all future events could be reduced to measurable risk. There was a residue of genuine uncertainty, and this made disaster an ever-present possibility, not a once-in-a-lifetime “shock.” Investment was more an act of faith than a scientific calculation of probabilities. And in this fact lay the possibility of huge systemic mistakes.
The basic question Keynes asked was: How do rational people behave under conditions of uncertainty? The answer he gave was profound and extends far beyond economics. People fall back on “conventions,” which give them the assurance that they are doing the right thing. The chief of these are the assumptions that the future will be like the past (witness all the financial models that assumed housing prices wouldn’t fall) and that current prices correctly sum up “future prospects.” Above all, we run with the crowd. A master of aphorism, Keynes wrote that a “sound banker” is one who, “when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way.” (Today, you might add a further convention — the belief that mathematics can conjure certainty out of uncertainty.)
But any view of the future based on what Keynes called “so flimsy a foundation” is liable to “sudden and violent changes” when the news changes. Investors do not process new information efficiently because they don’t know which information is relevant. Conventional behavior easily turns into herd behavior. Financial markets are punctuated by alternating currents of euphoria and panic.
Keynes’s prescriptions were guided by his conception of money, which plays a disturbing role in his economics. Most economists have seen money simply as a means of payment, an improvement on barter. Keynes emphasized its role as a “store of value.” Why, he asked, should anyone outside a lunatic asylum wish to “hold” money? The answer he gave was that “holding” money was a way of postponing transactions. The “desire to hold money as a store of wealth is a barometer of the degree of our distrust of our own calculations and conventions concerning the future. . . . The possession of actual money lulls our disquietude; and the premium we require to make us part with money is a measure of the degree of our disquietude.” The same reliance on “conventional” thinking that leads investors to spend profligately at certain times leads them to be highly cautious at others. Even a relatively weak dollar may, at moments of high uncertainty, seem more “secure” than any other asset, as we are currently seeing.
It is this flight into cash that makes interest-rate policy such an uncertain agent of recovery. If the managers of banks and companies hold pessimistic views about the future, they will raise the price they charge for “giving up liquidity,” even though the central bank might be flooding the economy with cash. That is why Keynes did not think that cutting the central bank’s interest rate would necessarily — and certainly not quickly — lower the interest rates charged on different types of loans. This was his main argument for the use of government stimulus to fight a depression. There was only one sure way to get an increase in spending in the face of an extreme private-sector reluctance to spend, and that was for the government to spend the money itself. Spend on pyramids, spend on hospitals, but spend it must.
This, in a nutshell, was Keynes’s economics."
There is a discussion in Economist's View Which is Best, Monetary Policy, Government Spending, or Tax Cuts?
Several economists including Raj Chetty on The Ideal Stimulus Package for US (via V.K. Chetty).
Friday, December 12, 2008
The next US Secretary of Energy?
From the Cosmic Variance post Steven Chu Nominated to be Secretary of Energy :
" This is fantastic news. Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics for his work in laser cooling of atoms, has been nominated to be the next Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration. This post is enormously important for science in general and physics in particular, as the DOE is responsible for much of the funding in physics and a lot of other R&D work. It’s also, needless to say, a crucial position for determining the country’s energy policy at a time when strong and imaginative leadership in this area is crucial."
From an article in in WattHead :Energy News and Commentary. A sustainable, just, and prosperous energy future is possible. We can make it happen.
"Last year, Chu was the co-chair of an InterAcademic Council Paper entitled Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future. The report proposes "best practices for a global transition to a clean, affordable and sustainable energy supply in both developing and developed countries," focusing on policies to support the development and deployment of technologies "that can transform the landscape of energy supply and demand around the globe." If Lighting the Way is reflective of Chu's understanding of the energy challenge, he clearly sees it as a technology-driven global development challenge, a good sign that Chu is the right pick to head up DOE and it's many energy RD&D programs.
Speaking at this summer's National Clean Energy Summit convened by Senator Harry Reid, Dr. Chu also evidences a keen understanding of the potentials of energy efficiency and the need for breakthrough renewable energy technologies. "Another myth is [that] we have all the technologies we need to solve the energy challenge. It's only a matter of political will," he says. "I think political will is absolutely necessary... but we need new technologies to transform the [energy] landscape." "
The comments in The Oil Drum are also enthusiastic.
" This is fantastic news. Steven Chu, director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and 1997 Nobel Laureate in Physics for his work in laser cooling of atoms, has been nominated to be the next Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration. This post is enormously important for science in general and physics in particular, as the DOE is responsible for much of the funding in physics and a lot of other R&D work. It’s also, needless to say, a crucial position for determining the country’s energy policy at a time when strong and imaginative leadership in this area is crucial."
From an article in in WattHead :Energy News and Commentary. A sustainable, just, and prosperous energy future is possible. We can make it happen.
"Last year, Chu was the co-chair of an InterAcademic Council Paper entitled Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future. The report proposes "best practices for a global transition to a clean, affordable and sustainable energy supply in both developing and developed countries," focusing on policies to support the development and deployment of technologies "that can transform the landscape of energy supply and demand around the globe." If Lighting the Way is reflective of Chu's understanding of the energy challenge, he clearly sees it as a technology-driven global development challenge, a good sign that Chu is the right pick to head up DOE and it's many energy RD&D programs.
Speaking at this summer's National Clean Energy Summit convened by Senator Harry Reid, Dr. Chu also evidences a keen understanding of the potentials of energy efficiency and the need for breakthrough renewable energy technologies. "Another myth is [that] we have all the technologies we need to solve the energy challenge. It's only a matter of political will," he says. "I think political will is absolutely necessary... but we need new technologies to transform the [energy] landscape." "
The comments in The Oil Drum are also enthusiastic.
Mumbai 26/11 related articles
Juan Cole Does Obama understand his biggest foreign-policy challenge?
Excerpt:
"A consensus is emerging among intelligence analysts and pundits that Pakistan may be President-elect Barack Obama's greatest policy challenge. A base for terrorist groups, the country has a fragile new civilian government and a long history of military coups. The dramatic attack on Mumbai by members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Tayiba, the continued Taliban insurgency on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the frailty of the new civilian government, and the country's status as a nuclear-armed state have all put Islamabad on the incoming administration's front burner.
But does Obama understand what he's getting into? In his "Meet the Press" interview with Tom Brokaw on Sunday, Obama said, "We need a strategic partnership with all the parties in the region -- Pakistan and India and the Afghan government -- to stamp out the kind of militant, violent, terrorist extremists that have set up base camps and that are operating in ways that threaten the security of everybody in the international community." Obama's scenario assumes that the Pakistani government is a single, undifferentiated thing, and that all parts of the government would be willing to "stamp out" terrorists. Both of those assumptions are incorrect."
Ramachandra Guhs's India's Dangerous Divide has this Nehru quote:
"a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want, go anywhere else. That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State."
The Immanent Frame has several articles in Mumbai 11/26 by Dipesh Chakraaorty, Arjun Appadurai and others.
The links are through 3quarksdaily, Anti-History / In Another Life and Chapati Mystery which have several links to articles on the topic. Suketu Mehta's "The Maximum City" also has much information.
P.S. Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not our 9/11 (via Crazyfinger)
Excerpt:
"A consensus is emerging among intelligence analysts and pundits that Pakistan may be President-elect Barack Obama's greatest policy challenge. A base for terrorist groups, the country has a fragile new civilian government and a long history of military coups. The dramatic attack on Mumbai by members of the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e Tayiba, the continued Taliban insurgency on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the frailty of the new civilian government, and the country's status as a nuclear-armed state have all put Islamabad on the incoming administration's front burner.
But does Obama understand what he's getting into? In his "Meet the Press" interview with Tom Brokaw on Sunday, Obama said, "We need a strategic partnership with all the parties in the region -- Pakistan and India and the Afghan government -- to stamp out the kind of militant, violent, terrorist extremists that have set up base camps and that are operating in ways that threaten the security of everybody in the international community." Obama's scenario assumes that the Pakistani government is a single, undifferentiated thing, and that all parts of the government would be willing to "stamp out" terrorists. Both of those assumptions are incorrect."
Ramachandra Guhs's India's Dangerous Divide has this Nehru quote:
"a Muslim minority who are so large in numbers that they cannot, even if they want, go anywhere else. That is a basic fact about which there can be no argument. Whatever the provocation from Pakistan and whatever the indignities and horrors inflicted on non-Muslims there, we have got to deal with this minority in a civilized manner. We must give them security and the rights of citizens in a democratic State."
The Immanent Frame has several articles in Mumbai 11/26 by Dipesh Chakraaorty, Arjun Appadurai and others.
The links are through 3quarksdaily, Anti-History / In Another Life and Chapati Mystery which have several links to articles on the topic. Suketu Mehta's "The Maximum City" also has much information.
P.S. Arundhati Roy: Mumbai was not our 9/11 (via Crazyfinger)
Nimble feet
Rajanala (Kalliah Naidu or Kaleswara Rao) as katikapari (also here )in Satya harischandra. For a heavy man, he seems quite nimble. See the feet movements around thirty seconds in to the video. I remember the screen lighting up when he entered but that is not too clear in this video. A Kannada version here (different actor).A few more songs from the Telugu version here .
Tuesday, December 09, 2008
Indian edition of Rahul Banerjee's book
Recovering the Lost Tongue: Memoirs of a Romantic among the Bhils is now published by
Joshi PPC,
Prachee Publications,
3-3-859/1/A, lane opp. Arya samaj,
Kachiguda,Hyderabad 500 027
Phone:(O)040-2460 2009 (11:00 a.m.to 5:00 p.m.)
mobile 093466 89306
Joshi PPC,
Prachee Publications,
3-3-859/1/A, lane opp. Arya samaj,
Kachiguda,Hyderabad 500 027
Phone:(O)040-2460 2009 (11:00 a.m.to 5:00 p.m.)
mobile 093466 89306
Monday, December 08, 2008
John Robert Stallings (1935-2008)
John R.Stallings passed away on november 24, 2008. He visited the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in 1967 and I was asked to wrote his lecture notes on 'Polyhedral Toplogy'. By that time my interests were established and I was planning to work in Algebraic Topology and Dufferential Toplogy. Before he came, I read many of his papers and during the two months of his stay, I was in contact with him almost daily discussing his lectures. Towards the end of his stay, he mentioned that Papakyriokopoulos did some great work in 3-dimensional topology, a topic which I never looked at before. After he left, I read half dozen papers in the topic and suddenly started working in that area. Working in relative isolation, I did not know what was relevant and just went on with problems that bugged me. Then over years, I found that whatever I did had some connection to Stallings' work. Perhaps, coming in to contact with a first rate mind early in my career unknowingly influenced me and I do not think that there is a single paper of mine not influenced by Stallings. Appropriately I am listed among his Ph.D. Students in the Mathematics Geneology project though I was never officially his student. My official guide was another wonderful mathematician M.S. Narasimhan who let me do whatever I liked and often entertained me with beer and insights about mathematics.
P.S. Photo here and more
here
My only published paper with a dedication (so far) here
P.S. Photo here and more
here
My only published paper with a dedication (so far) here
Sunday, December 07, 2008
Thursday, December 04, 2008
Reading
Sukeu Mehta's Maximum City. The first few chapters seem to give a preview of what can happen in Mumbai(sample pages 154-170. Some excerpts from later pages are here). Here is a review by Amitava Kumar and here is Suketu Mehta's site. There is an interesting review by Panjaj Mishra Bombay: The Lower Depths but it needs subscription.
P.S. Another review and an interview
P.P.S. (December 6th) Completed the first reading. I think that it is a wonderful book. Though I spent 15 years in Bombay until 1979, I saw very little of what was in this book. I guess that my interests were well determined by that time and I was not too open to much outside mathematics.
P.S. Another review and an interview
P.P.S. (December 6th) Completed the first reading. I think that it is a wonderful book. Though I spent 15 years in Bombay until 1979, I saw very little of what was in this book. I guess that my interests were well determined by that time and I was not too open to much outside mathematics.
Monday, December 01, 2008
From 'The Big Picture'
T.T. RAM MOHAN has a thoughtful post on Mumbai attack Mumbai attack and its aftermath :
"Key institutions of the state, notably the police and the judiciary, suffer from both corruption and poor governance. Strong anti-terror laws, in such a situation, will simply become weapons for persecution and extortion.
....
Without an overhaul of governance, without greater accountability, it is hard to see how terrorism can be fought effectively. It is the democratic process and the rule of law that need to be strengthened for these to happen.
''''''
The gloomy conclusion that emerges is that India will try to emulate the tough methods adopted by countries such as the US and Israel without having the commensurate governance or enforcement capability. This can only lead on to a downward spiral where terrorism is concerned."
Jo from UK forwards this article This was not global jihad. Its roots are far closer to home:
"The Mumbai attacks were not about global jihad. The attacks on foreign tourists at the Taj and the Oberoi, and on the Lubavitch centre, were designed to secure maximum publicity - a strategy that worked splendidly. Yet the roots of this nightmarish event are to be found elsewhere: in the deterioration in relations between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai and India since the late 1980s, and in regional relations between India and Pakistan.
The operational key to the Mumbai attacks, however, is almost certainly held by D-Company, the sprawling and hugely effective organised criminal syndicate that is steered from the Pakistani port city of Karachi by the most powerful figure in Mumbai's fabled underworld, Dawood Ibrahim. It is virtually impossible that Dawood was unaware of the preparation of the attack, given the D-Company's extensive intelligence network (which in several past instances has proved more effective than the Indian state's intelligence capacity).
India's security services have begun investigating Dawood's possible role in the attack because he controls most of the smuggling routes into India's great commercial centre. In 1993, he put his network at the disposal of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, to let it smuggle in huge amounts of the explosive RDX. As the Mumbai author, Hussain Zaidi, demonstrates in his extraordinary book, Black Friday, the RDX was then used for the terrorist attacks in March 1993, in which 257 people died, still the single highest death toll in any of the atrocities visited upon Mumbai in recent years. Dozens of co-conspirators have been convicted, largely thanks to the evidence of some bombers who became state witnesses, revealing the terrorist plans in minute detail."
Misha Glenny is the author of McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers reviewd here and here. There is an excellent review The International Crooks Now in Power in New York Review of Books but it needs subscription.
P.S. Another thoughtful post Thanksgiving weekend from Nomolical Net.
P.P.S. Bruce Riedel, one of Obama's policy advisors, in Terrorism in India and the Global Jihadsays " In December 2001 JeM, possibly with help from LeT, was behind an attack on the Indian parliament. This attack was designed to create a crisis between India and Pakistan by killing the senior echelon of the Indian government and legislators. It succeeded in provoking a tense standoff that would last over a year and during which more than a million Indian and Pakistani soldiers were deployed in forward positions along their border. By focusing Pakistan’s army on its eastern border with India the attack also left the western border with Afghanistan open to the retreating al Qaeda and Taliban leadership including bin Laden, Zawahiri and Mullah Omar who were fleeing the American Operation Enduring Freedom forces in Afghanistan. This was undoubtedly not a coincidence. Like LeT, Jaish has been outlawed in Pakistan but continues to operate under various cover names. The extent of its existing ties to the ISI is also much debated..... ... Al Qaeda and its allies like LeT and JeM would see this easing of tensions as a threat to their interests. They want conflict between India and Pakistan today just as they did in 2001. They thrive on the hatred the Indo-Pakistan conflict produces. If they are involved in the Mumbai attacks it would be in part to disrupt any chance at easing tensions in the subcontinent and perhaps also to divert Pakistan’s army away from the badlands along the border with Afghanistan to the border with India, again as in 2001."
"Key institutions of the state, notably the police and the judiciary, suffer from both corruption and poor governance. Strong anti-terror laws, in such a situation, will simply become weapons for persecution and extortion.
....
Without an overhaul of governance, without greater accountability, it is hard to see how terrorism can be fought effectively. It is the democratic process and the rule of law that need to be strengthened for these to happen.
''''''
The gloomy conclusion that emerges is that India will try to emulate the tough methods adopted by countries such as the US and Israel without having the commensurate governance or enforcement capability. This can only lead on to a downward spiral where terrorism is concerned."
Jo from UK forwards this article This was not global jihad. Its roots are far closer to home:
"The Mumbai attacks were not about global jihad. The attacks on foreign tourists at the Taj and the Oberoi, and on the Lubavitch centre, were designed to secure maximum publicity - a strategy that worked splendidly. Yet the roots of this nightmarish event are to be found elsewhere: in the deterioration in relations between Hindus and Muslims in Mumbai and India since the late 1980s, and in regional relations between India and Pakistan.
The operational key to the Mumbai attacks, however, is almost certainly held by D-Company, the sprawling and hugely effective organised criminal syndicate that is steered from the Pakistani port city of Karachi by the most powerful figure in Mumbai's fabled underworld, Dawood Ibrahim. It is virtually impossible that Dawood was unaware of the preparation of the attack, given the D-Company's extensive intelligence network (which in several past instances has proved more effective than the Indian state's intelligence capacity).
India's security services have begun investigating Dawood's possible role in the attack because he controls most of the smuggling routes into India's great commercial centre. In 1993, he put his network at the disposal of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service, to let it smuggle in huge amounts of the explosive RDX. As the Mumbai author, Hussain Zaidi, demonstrates in his extraordinary book, Black Friday, the RDX was then used for the terrorist attacks in March 1993, in which 257 people died, still the single highest death toll in any of the atrocities visited upon Mumbai in recent years. Dozens of co-conspirators have been convicted, largely thanks to the evidence of some bombers who became state witnesses, revealing the terrorist plans in minute detail."
Misha Glenny is the author of McMafia: Crime Without Frontiers reviewd here and here. There is an excellent review The International Crooks Now in Power in New York Review of Books but it needs subscription.
P.S. Another thoughtful post Thanksgiving weekend from Nomolical Net.
P.P.S. Bruce Riedel, one of Obama's policy advisors, in Terrorism in India and the Global Jihadsays " In December 2001 JeM, possibly with help from LeT, was behind an attack on the Indian parliament. This attack was designed to create a crisis between India and Pakistan by killing the senior echelon of the Indian government and legislators. It succeeded in provoking a tense standoff that would last over a year and during which more than a million Indian and Pakistani soldiers were deployed in forward positions along their border. By focusing Pakistan’s army on its eastern border with India the attack also left the western border with Afghanistan open to the retreating al Qaeda and Taliban leadership including bin Laden, Zawahiri and Mullah Omar who were fleeing the American Operation Enduring Freedom forces in Afghanistan. This was undoubtedly not a coincidence. Like LeT, Jaish has been outlawed in Pakistan but continues to operate under various cover names. The extent of its existing ties to the ISI is also much debated..... ... Al Qaeda and its allies like LeT and JeM would see this easing of tensions as a threat to their interests. They want conflict between India and Pakistan today just as they did in 2001. They thrive on the hatred the Indo-Pakistan conflict produces. If they are involved in the Mumbai attacks it would be in part to disrupt any chance at easing tensions in the subcontinent and perhaps also to divert Pakistan’s army away from the badlands along the border with Afghanistan to the border with India, again as in 2001."
Pankaj Mishra disagrees
in Hindi or Hinglish with Sanjay Subrahmanyam take on Adiga's 'The White Tiger' :
"Literary criticism may not be Subrahmanyam’s thing. But the ethnographic authority he invokes while describing the ‘falsity’ of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger doesn’t persuade either. He seems to think it wholly implausible that Adiga’s ‘subaltern’ narrator Balram Halwai (I would rather call him a shrewd member of globalising India’s lumpen proletariat) should know of books by James Hadley Chase, Kahlil Gibran and Hitler. He has clearly not visited Indian mofussil bookstalls where No Orchids for Miss Blandish, The Prophet and, alas, Mein Kampf have long been ubiquitous in Hindi translation, or in cheap English editions (Hadley Chase in especially lurid covers).
Subrahmanyam mocks Halwai, who cannot read Urdu, for claiming Mirza Ghalib as his favourite poet. But North Indians who cannot read Urdu have long had access to the great writers of that language in Devanagari script. According to Subrahmanyam, the expression ‘“kissing some god’s arse” . . . doesn’t exist in any North Indian language.’ How does he know? In actuality, millions of speakers of Hindi, or Hinglish, improvise such commonplace idioms daily, too prodigiously, perhaps, to be archived at the American university where Subrahmanyam teaches history."
Literary criticism is not my thing either but I read and liked 'The White Tiger'. Among several wonderful passages from Vikram Chandra's The Cult of Authenticity, I recall "Be fearless, speak fearlessly to your readers, wherever they are, and be aware that as you speak, you will inevitably be attacked by some critics for being not Indian enough, for being too Indian, too Westernized, too exoticized, too rich, for being a foreigner, an agent of the CIA. This is also wholly irrelevant."
"Literary criticism may not be Subrahmanyam’s thing. But the ethnographic authority he invokes while describing the ‘falsity’ of Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger doesn’t persuade either. He seems to think it wholly implausible that Adiga’s ‘subaltern’ narrator Balram Halwai (I would rather call him a shrewd member of globalising India’s lumpen proletariat) should know of books by James Hadley Chase, Kahlil Gibran and Hitler. He has clearly not visited Indian mofussil bookstalls where No Orchids for Miss Blandish, The Prophet and, alas, Mein Kampf have long been ubiquitous in Hindi translation, or in cheap English editions (Hadley Chase in especially lurid covers).
Subrahmanyam mocks Halwai, who cannot read Urdu, for claiming Mirza Ghalib as his favourite poet. But North Indians who cannot read Urdu have long had access to the great writers of that language in Devanagari script. According to Subrahmanyam, the expression ‘“kissing some god’s arse” . . . doesn’t exist in any North Indian language.’ How does he know? In actuality, millions of speakers of Hindi, or Hinglish, improvise such commonplace idioms daily, too prodigiously, perhaps, to be archived at the American university where Subrahmanyam teaches history."
Literary criticism is not my thing either but I read and liked 'The White Tiger'. Among several wonderful passages from Vikram Chandra's The Cult of Authenticity, I recall "Be fearless, speak fearlessly to your readers, wherever they are, and be aware that as you speak, you will inevitably be attacked by some critics for being not Indian enough, for being too Indian, too Westernized, too exoticized, too rich, for being a foreigner, an agent of the CIA. This is also wholly irrelevant."
Amar Bhide's new book
The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World is drawing good reviews from some quarters The Austrian Economists:
"This is a brilliant work and some be on everyone's reading list for the holidays. Seriously. Bhide demonstrates through detailed examinaton of the facts how the mechanisms of innovation actually work to spread knowledged, realize the gains from trade and realize the gains from innovation throughout the globe. His work seriously challenges the policy consensus in Washington about technological innovation. To put it bluntly, economic progress is a function not of state funded basic research, but of the development of technological applications in commercial endeavors."
Here is a more critical review from The Economist A gathering storm?:
"So does the relative decline of America as a technology powerhouse really amount to a threat to its prosperity? Nonsense, insists Amar Bhidé of Columbia Business School. In “The Venturesome Economy”, a provocative new book, he explains why he thinks this gloomy thesis misunderstands innovation in several fundamental ways.
First, he argues that the obsession with the number of doctorates and technical graduates is misplaced because the “high-level” inventions and ideas such boffins come up with travel easily across national borders. Even if China spends a fortune to train more scientists, it cannot prevent America from capitalising on their inventions with better business models.
That points to his next insight, that the commercialisation, diffusion and use of inventions is of more value to companies and societies than the initial bright spark. America’s sophisticated marketing, distribution, sales and customer-service systems have long given it a decisive advantage over rivals, such as Japan in the 1980s, that began to catch up with its technological prowess. For America to retain this sort of edge, then, what the country needs is better MBAs, not more PhDs.
America also has another advantage: the extraordinary willingness of its consumers to try new things. Mr Bhidé insists that such “venturesome consumption” is a vital counterpart to the country’s entrepreneurial business culture.
Is he right? The lack of long-term data means this has become “a quasi-theological dispute”, says Robert Litan of the Kauffman Foundation, a charity that provided some funding for Mr Bhidé’s work. But the contrarian should not be dismissed out of hand. For a start, he is right to argue against making a fetish of invention. Edison did not invent the light bulb and Ford did not think up the motor car, but both came up with the business-model innovations required to profit from those marvels."
Here is Amar Bhide's webpage with more links and an interesting article by him on current financial crisis An Accident Waiting to Happen.
Yves Smith of 'Naked Capitalism' says "the author of the research, Amar Bhide, is a friend of mine, and also unfailingly smart and provocative"
"This is a brilliant work and some be on everyone's reading list for the holidays. Seriously. Bhide demonstrates through detailed examinaton of the facts how the mechanisms of innovation actually work to spread knowledged, realize the gains from trade and realize the gains from innovation throughout the globe. His work seriously challenges the policy consensus in Washington about technological innovation. To put it bluntly, economic progress is a function not of state funded basic research, but of the development of technological applications in commercial endeavors."
Here is a more critical review from The Economist A gathering storm?:
"So does the relative decline of America as a technology powerhouse really amount to a threat to its prosperity? Nonsense, insists Amar Bhidé of Columbia Business School. In “The Venturesome Economy”, a provocative new book, he explains why he thinks this gloomy thesis misunderstands innovation in several fundamental ways.
First, he argues that the obsession with the number of doctorates and technical graduates is misplaced because the “high-level” inventions and ideas such boffins come up with travel easily across national borders. Even if China spends a fortune to train more scientists, it cannot prevent America from capitalising on their inventions with better business models.
That points to his next insight, that the commercialisation, diffusion and use of inventions is of more value to companies and societies than the initial bright spark. America’s sophisticated marketing, distribution, sales and customer-service systems have long given it a decisive advantage over rivals, such as Japan in the 1980s, that began to catch up with its technological prowess. For America to retain this sort of edge, then, what the country needs is better MBAs, not more PhDs.
America also has another advantage: the extraordinary willingness of its consumers to try new things. Mr Bhidé insists that such “venturesome consumption” is a vital counterpart to the country’s entrepreneurial business culture.
Is he right? The lack of long-term data means this has become “a quasi-theological dispute”, says Robert Litan of the Kauffman Foundation, a charity that provided some funding for Mr Bhidé’s work. But the contrarian should not be dismissed out of hand. For a start, he is right to argue against making a fetish of invention. Edison did not invent the light bulb and Ford did not think up the motor car, but both came up with the business-model innovations required to profit from those marvels."
Here is Amar Bhide's webpage with more links and an interesting article by him on current financial crisis An Accident Waiting to Happen.
Yves Smith of 'Naked Capitalism' says "the author of the research, Amar Bhide, is a friend of mine, and also unfailingly smart and provocative"
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Mumbai Help
Mumbai Help has lists of the diceased and injured in the the recent Mumbai trajedy and links to other resources.
Report: Pak takes U-turn; to send representative instead of ISI chief
Comment by Moshin Hamid: Bound by sorrows
P.S. Rediff: Dawood provided logistics for terror attacks
Similar news from Outlook: The Gateway Of India
P.P.S. More on Dawood from Did a Criminal Mastermind Stage the Mumbai Nightmare? and Mahalo
Report: Pak takes U-turn; to send representative instead of ISI chief
Comment by Moshin Hamid: Bound by sorrows
P.S. Rediff: Dawood provided logistics for terror attacks
Similar news from Outlook: The Gateway Of India
P.P.S. More on Dawood from Did a Criminal Mastermind Stage the Mumbai Nightmare? and Mahalo
Friday, November 28, 2008
High praise for Sehwag
Andrew Miller in Cricinfo:
"And then there were the Indians, for whom Virender Sehwag - more so even than the man of the moment, Yuvraj Singh - is a totemic influence. As Stuart MacGill once put it, after Sehwag had butchered 195 from 233 balls in the 2003 Melbourne Test, "It's not that he can't pick my bowling, it's just he doesn't care." Sehwag's last 11 Test centuries, dating back to that innings, have been gargantuan affairs: 195, 309, 155, 164, 173, 201, 254, 180, 151, 319, 201 not out, all scored at - or bloody close to - a run a ball. He deserves a place in history as the first truly postmodern cricketer, a player who has taken one tempo and extrapolated it to fit whatever length of contest is required."
And Rob Smyth in WisdenIndia’s Sehwag one of the greatest:
"Sehwag has been compared to Sachin Tendulkar, with whom he shares a bewitching little mastery, but a more relevant reference point is surely Lara. Like Lara, Sehwag scores monstrous hundreds at breakneck speed; like Lara, his form fluctuates wildly, surely a mark of the truest genius; like Lara, when the mood takes him there is absolutely nothing a bowler can do to avoid being pummeled.
In the eyes of many, those qualities elevate Lara above the other great batsmen of his generation – Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh – yet the fact that Sehwag has extended the Lara template ever so slightly seems to count against him, as if he has crossed the line between greatness and frivolousness. Quite the opposite. It is said of many sportsmen, but with Virender Sehwag it feels safe to opine that, truly, we will never see his like again. He’s not just great. He’s one of the greatest."
"And then there were the Indians, for whom Virender Sehwag - more so even than the man of the moment, Yuvraj Singh - is a totemic influence. As Stuart MacGill once put it, after Sehwag had butchered 195 from 233 balls in the 2003 Melbourne Test, "It's not that he can't pick my bowling, it's just he doesn't care." Sehwag's last 11 Test centuries, dating back to that innings, have been gargantuan affairs: 195, 309, 155, 164, 173, 201, 254, 180, 151, 319, 201 not out, all scored at - or bloody close to - a run a ball. He deserves a place in history as the first truly postmodern cricketer, a player who has taken one tempo and extrapolated it to fit whatever length of contest is required."
And Rob Smyth in WisdenIndia’s Sehwag one of the greatest:
"Sehwag has been compared to Sachin Tendulkar, with whom he shares a bewitching little mastery, but a more relevant reference point is surely Lara. Like Lara, Sehwag scores monstrous hundreds at breakneck speed; like Lara, his form fluctuates wildly, surely a mark of the truest genius; like Lara, when the mood takes him there is absolutely nothing a bowler can do to avoid being pummeled.
In the eyes of many, those qualities elevate Lara above the other great batsmen of his generation – Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh – yet the fact that Sehwag has extended the Lara template ever so slightly seems to count against him, as if he has crossed the line between greatness and frivolousness. Quite the opposite. It is said of many sportsmen, but with Virender Sehwag it feels safe to opine that, truly, we will never see his like again. He’s not just great. He’s one of the greatest."
Thursday, November 27, 2008
They came by boats
says Outlook and
"In many was, this was India's 9/11, an attack on mainland India on a scale it has never witnessed. For a nation that has dealt with armed insurgency and terrorism soon after independence, this was still an unprecedented scale of attack. It was just not prepared for anything even remotely like it. "It is one thing to plant bombs and melt into the crowd. It is another to come in from the sea and launch an attack such as this," a senior intelligence official told Outlook."
It is difficult for me to think of any thing else today. I spent some of the best years of my life in this area, some of them about 200 meters from the Taj Hotel. Some of the visiting professors to TIFR used to stay there (those days the concessional rate was 2500 rupees for a month) and we visited the hotel often. It could have been there that Grothendieck attended a formal dinner barefoot but I am not sure. We used to wander around the second hand book stalls near CST (those days Victoria Terminus) and drench ourselves in the rains near Nariman Point when the monsoon started. It was like a second home to many of us who grew up professionally in Bombay. May the metroplois recover soon.
"In many was, this was India's 9/11, an attack on mainland India on a scale it has never witnessed. For a nation that has dealt with armed insurgency and terrorism soon after independence, this was still an unprecedented scale of attack. It was just not prepared for anything even remotely like it. "It is one thing to plant bombs and melt into the crowd. It is another to come in from the sea and launch an attack such as this," a senior intelligence official told Outlook."
It is difficult for me to think of any thing else today. I spent some of the best years of my life in this area, some of them about 200 meters from the Taj Hotel. Some of the visiting professors to TIFR used to stay there (those days the concessional rate was 2500 rupees for a month) and we visited the hotel often. It could have been there that Grothendieck attended a formal dinner barefoot but I am not sure. We used to wander around the second hand book stalls near CST (those days Victoria Terminus) and drench ourselves in the rains near Nariman Point when the monsoon started. It was like a second home to many of us who grew up professionally in Bombay. May the metroplois recover soon.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Some online books in Telugu
Vizag Daily gives a link to Alpajeevi by Rachakonda Viswanatha Sastry.
I have been hoping to make diditally available Rallapalli Ananthakrishna Sharma's works. Some are already available though some pages on the first book are not too clear. Here are the links to Vemana an Shali Vahana Gatha Sapthashathi Saramu from the Digital Library of India (These were probably sent to me by Sri J.K.Mohana Rao long ago). Some four articles are in the 'vachana' section of Andhrabharati.
I read only two of his books long ago and feel that he combines deep traditional knowledge with modern scholaly approach. Another such person may be P.V. Parabrahma Sastry who studied Kotilingala coins from Satavahana period and also Kurkyala inscriptions.
See also తెలుగు పరిశోధన for links to Telugu digital books.
I have been hoping to make diditally available Rallapalli Ananthakrishna Sharma's works. Some are already available though some pages on the first book are not too clear. Here are the links to Vemana an Shali Vahana Gatha Sapthashathi Saramu from the Digital Library of India (These were probably sent to me by Sri J.K.Mohana Rao long ago). Some four articles are in the 'vachana' section of Andhrabharati.
I read only two of his books long ago and feel that he combines deep traditional knowledge with modern scholaly approach. Another such person may be P.V. Parabrahma Sastry who studied Kotilingala coins from Satavahana period and also Kurkyala inscriptions.
See also తెలుగు పరిశోధన for links to Telugu digital books.
Peter Klein on universities
After quoting from an article Peter Wood What Ails College Teaching?, Peter Klein says in Education Quote of the Day:
"That’s from Peter Wood, whose subject is actually the division of labor at many large US universities between tenured/tenure-track faculty, who do research and teach small classes to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and the specialized, non-tenured teaching specialists who handle the bulk of the undergraduate instruction, assisted by a “small army” of graduate and undergraduate TAs. Wood points out, rightly IMHO, that one day the universities may decide that the prestige and grant dollars and other bennies generated by the research faculty isn’t worth their high salaries, perhaps choosing to go the University of Phoenix route instead."
I think that there are not just two alternatives and as he says in an earlier article The University of Phoenix and the Economic Organization of Higher Education:
"Is the Phoenix model better or worse than the traditional model? Who knows. No one is compelled to attend the University of Phoenix. Why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Universities claim to promote experimentation, creativity, and diversity, but when it comes to experimentation and diversity in the production and delivery of higher education, the established universities express shock and alarm."
"That’s from Peter Wood, whose subject is actually the division of labor at many large US universities between tenured/tenure-track faculty, who do research and teach small classes to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and the specialized, non-tenured teaching specialists who handle the bulk of the undergraduate instruction, assisted by a “small army” of graduate and undergraduate TAs. Wood points out, rightly IMHO, that one day the universities may decide that the prestige and grant dollars and other bennies generated by the research faculty isn’t worth their high salaries, perhaps choosing to go the University of Phoenix route instead."
I think that there are not just two alternatives and as he says in an earlier article The University of Phoenix and the Economic Organization of Higher Education:
"Is the Phoenix model better or worse than the traditional model? Who knows. No one is compelled to attend the University of Phoenix. Why not let a thousand flowers bloom? Universities claim to promote experimentation, creativity, and diversity, but when it comes to experimentation and diversity in the production and delivery of higher education, the established universities express shock and alarm."
Monday, November 24, 2008
India Calling
From India Calling by Anand Giridharadas ( via 'Teeming Multitudes'):
"Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt.
India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.
Which just happened, for many of us, to be the frontier of our own pasts."
"Countries like India once fretted about a “brain drain.” We are learning now that “brain circulation,” as some call it, may be more apt.
India did not export brains; it invested them. It sent millions away. In the freedom of new soil, they flowered. They seeded a new generation that, having blossomed, did what humans have always done: chase the frontier of the future.
Which just happened, for many of us, to be the frontier of our own pasts."
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