Vinod Rai and Aruna Roy

An Outlook article says The Comptroller and Auditor General, Vinod Rai is once again in the bad books of the government for having held a mirror to the malaise in governance. Speaking at the World Economic forum in Delhi earlier this week, Rai said that RTI has succeeded in making politicians and bureaucrats more accountable and helped to reduce 'brazen' policy decisions.'"
in a wide ranging n interview Aruna Roy describes the beginning of  RTI  in India:
" a movement has to evolve from a group process and thought, it can’t just come from anywhere. Many of us felt that secrecy was terrible – we have something called the Official Secrets Act in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, wherever the British ruled. They’ve left that great gift to us, the Official Secrets Act. So every time you asked for information from the government you came up against this block. So we were all aware that that Act needed to be set aside in order for more transparency. In fact the VP Singh government had tried to enact a RTI law. So there is a history.

But what actually sharpened this was the struggle for minimum wages that MKSS was organising and fighting in rural Rajasthan. Time and again, people were told that they were liars, and the official records became terribly important both to prove their integrity, and to get a right to a livelihood, or a right to a wage, which meant food, which meant staving off hunger, which meant living a reasonable life. So at that point it became a critical issue.

But the definition of the movement actually came from many people. I’d like to refer to Sushila here. Sushila really defined it in 1996 after a forty day strike – a sit-down strike in Bijabar. We had formed the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information. We went to Delhi for a press conference, and Sushila was asked, ‘What are you doing here? You’ve only passed your fourth class, you don’t know anything about academics. It’s a big intellectual question. We’re talking about freedom of expression and Article 19 of the Indian Constitution.’ But she said to them, ‘Look, when I send my son with 10 rupees to the market place, when he comes back I ask for accounts. The government spends billions of rupees in my name. Shouldn’t I ask for my accounts?’ And she said in Hindi, ‘Hamara paisa, hamara hisab.’ So she said, ‘It’s our money, our accounts.’

So it is the simple, common-sense logic that actually defined the Right to Information movement. Then it acquired all the other various layers of the legislation, and an understanding which spread further, which spread to every aspect of governance. Today, RTI is one of the best used laws in India. But it grew from a common-sense perception of peoplehood."

The Economist on Bangladesh

From Out of the basket:
:.... in the past 20 years Bangladesh has made extraordinary improvements in almost every indicator of human welfare. The average Bangladeshi can now expect to live four years longer than the average Indian, though Indians are twice as rich. Girls’ education has soared, and the country has hugely reduced the numbers of early deaths of infants, children and mothers. Some of these changes are among the fastest social improvements ever seen. Remarkably, the country has achieved all this even though economic growth, until recently, has been sluggish and income has risen only modestly.....
Bangladesh shows what happens if you take women seriously as agents of development."
Longer article here, via Duncan Green.

Juan Cole on Obama

in Informed Comment:
"Clearly, Obama does not have progressive instincts, and prefers to rule from the center. This impulse is wrong-headed, since the center didn’t man his campaign offices or make phone calls for him. Ruling from the center means taking his base for granted while reaching out to relatively conservative constituencies. This tactic is why we don’t have a single-payer health insurance plan. It is why Wall Street reform has consisted of half-measures. It is why we are imposing a financial blockade on Iran that could easily spiral into a war. When it comes to the arch-conservatives, for the most part, Obama has never learned to just say ‘no.’

It does not help that Obama will face virtually the same, obstructionist Tea Party House of Representatives that stymied him for the past two years. Instead of going to them and asking how he could make them happy, he has to threaten to make an all-out push to turn them out of office in 2014 if they continue to say ‘no’ to everything.

Progressives will have to push Obama to the left if we are to get what we want. This situation is nothing new– FDR’s New Deal would not have amounted to much if workers hadn’t engaged in widespread wildcat strikes and if people had not resorted to civil disobedience."

More expectations in Obama wins Slate Staff
His vision "Becoming the 44th president of the United States, or even the first African-American to hold the post, had never been enough for Barack Obama. Just two years after arriving in the Senate, he spoke unabashedly of becoming one of the greatest presidents, a transformative figure like Abraham Lincoln or Franklin D. Roosevelt who would heal the country’s divisions, address its most critical problems and turn Americans in a hopeful new direction."

"I am a boy but I think very much"

from Fidel Castro's letter to FDR via Chris Blattman

Why so much blather about US elections?

Not clear to me. It always seemed that Obama would win and with country struggling with itself, it would not matter much for the rest of the world. Here are some articles vaguely related to the elections.

Aditya Chakrabortty at The Guardian America has supersized inequality. Political Gridlock was bound to follow. Both the above via Mark Thoma

Jacob Augstein at Spiegel America has already lost Tuesday's election

Fadhel Kaboub on The economic consequences of Mr. Obama
P.S. Who ever wins will try to marginalize UNCTAD. Another article in Triple Crisis says:"... the options are a slow erosion of the New Deal policies or a pretty direct attack on the same policies. Progressives should certainly vote for the lesser evil, but should prepare to fight to preserve the rights won over the last century. The election will not be not the end of the fight, but just the beginning."

Duncan Green visits Delhi

and comments in How change happens in India- via Supreme Court and 'judicial activism':
"At a national level, when it comes to rights and poverty, India seems to combine a sclerotic legislature, a fitfully interested government, and a hyperactive judiciary, which produces a rather unique brand of politics. Social activism in India often seems to involve getting the Supreme Court to rule that the government has to do X, then mobilizing around implementation of the ruling. Whether it’s on the Right to Food(right) or the Right to Education, the Court has been involved in some of the best known progressive legislation in India.
.......

And that culture filters down to the grassroots. Activist talk is dotted with references to PILs – public interest litigation. Women in slums told me they were bringing claims under India’s Right to Information Act to find out what their children’s schools should be providing, or to get community toilets functioning again (cutting through the bureaucratic fog – who is actually in charge of these toilets, which have been shut for the last 7 years?).According to Harsh ‘the Supreme Court is the most effective arm of government on social policy. I’d been talking to government for years on homelessness without result. I wrote a letter to the Supreme Court saying people were dying in the Delhi winter, and this is the result.’

Shailaja Chandra, ex chief secretary of Delhi says “if the Supreme Court doesn’t react and pull up the government, who can? But they can only hammer the government, they can’t do anything themselves. It’s like a dog, baring its teeth. But it’s well informed and does shame ministers into action, both centrally and at state level. PIL is effective; litigants do their homework, and come up with solutions to implement.”

Fine, but not all activists are as well connected as Harsh, and not all PILs are progressive – plenty of industry lobbyists use the tactic, leading to an overall environment that is volatile, characterized by abrupt and unpredictable changes in policy direction."

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

From Hua Hsu's 'Clotted Cream'

a review of 'Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy' by Christopher Hayes:
"Our leaders have been called worse names than “ metrosexual black Abe Lincoln.” But seldom have they come to stand in for the entire possibility of hope, change, progress, a bold reboot of the status quo—rarely do we have the opportunity to feel profoundly, soul-crushingly disappointed by them. Such a feeling now clusters around Barack Obama, the first black president and, just as recently as 2008, proof that the American meritocracy might still work. But four years feels like lifetimes ago. Back then you were in a field with millions of other true believers, waving your hands and thinking there’s nothing more beautiful-sounding than the harmony of strangers; now you’re trying to peel a sticker off the bumper of your Volvo. Better, perhaps, never to have hoped at all.

Do you believe that the political system has compromised Obama, or that he, like anyone who might scale such heights, was merely an accessory all along? Your answer traces the circumference of your imagination. This question is at the heart of Christopher Hayes’Twilight of the Elites, an attempt by the Nation editor and MSNBC host to reckon with our mounting restlessness toward the elite class, from politicians to titans of industry, spiritual leaders to baseball idols."

Will be it be any different this time?

Other reviews of 'Twilight of Elites' at The Atlantic, at Crooked Timber, Inside Higher Education and Wikipedia.

Standard & Poor hit with compensation

From The Age: "STANDARD & Poor's will pay nearly $20 million in compensation and legal costs to more than a dozen Australian councils following a landmark victory against the global ratings agency.

The case paves the way for investors around the world to take action against S&P for financial ratings that turn out to be misleading......S&P has said it will appeal."

Global mobility of scientists

Abi at Nanopolitan has several interesting links one of which is on the global mobility of scientists in Nature News by Richard van Noorden. From the conclusion:
"Science may increasingly be a globalized enterprise, but until would-be competitors boost their spending on science and facilities, it will simply give scientists even more opportunities to clump inside the countries that are already at the top of the pack."

Duncan Green visits Lucknow slums

and asks:
"The foundation also wants to counter anti-slum prejudice among Lucknow’s better-off residents by highlighting the extent to which the slum actually subsidises the city (eg by supplying cut-price domestics and street vendors, paying sales taxes, rubbish recycling). Anybody know of research on this in India or elsewhere?"

Films from Lahore, before and after partition

in six parts (but I could not find the second one). The first part above.

Some responses to Andrew Haldane speech

on 'Socially useful banking' at FT Alphaville. It also provides highlights of the speech.
Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism  says "And despite the efforts to diss it, OWS found an audience in the corridors of power. FT Alphaville chaired a discussion of socially useful banking, and the keynote speaker was Andrew Haldane, the executive director of financial stability for the Bank of England. Haldane is highly respected both among economists, who regard his work as creative and rigorous, and international banking regulators. He has the potential of being the sort of economist who leaves a lasting imprint on the profession. So his positive remarks about Occupy are a particularly powerful endorsement. "
See also Gulzar Natarajan post which focuses on the 'too-big-to-fail subsidy' 

Arvind Subramanian on why nations fail

From a review of 'Why Nations Fail' by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson ( via Chris Blattman):
"... even twenty years from now, China and India are unlikely to be adequately explained by Acemoglu and Robinson’s thesis.
..... the inability of Acemoglu and Robinson to explain the development trajectories of these two large countries is a fault not of their rich and excellent book but of the sui generis, uncooperative reality of Chinese and Indian history. "

Old gramaphone songs

Several at Archives of Indian Music. Found it while looking for Amirbai Karanataki's 'vaishnav jan to'
http://soundcloud.com/archive-of-indian-music/amirbai-karnatki-vaishnav-jan, supposed to be a favourite of Mahatma Gandhi. Another well-known bhajan by Amirbai

Links, October 29

Review of 'Behind the curatin: Making music in Mumbai film studios' by Gregory Booth
Introductory part of 'Unearthing gender:Folk songs of North India' by Smitha Tewari Jessal. A review from the World Bank blogs.
Freeman Dyson reviews a book on philosophy, an excerpt: "I found the book enlightening and liberating. It said that philosophy is simple and has limited scope. Philosophy is concerned with logic and the correct use of language. All speculations outside this limited area are mysticism."
Australia targets Asia again: "EVERY school will be made to teach at least one priority Asian language under a national Asian studies curriculum, as part of a comprehensive embrace of the region aimed at exploiting its rapidly growing wealth over the next decade-and-a-half." From the Hindu "All Australian schools would engage with at least one school in Asia to support the teaching of a priority Asian language — Mandarin, Hindi, Indonesian or Japanese, she said."
'The /Real/Club of Rome turns Forty, in Vienna' by David Warsh
From a speech by John Ashton: "The struggle between incumbency elites and those who see the need for change will be the defining struggle of our times." via ihe Global Dashboard.
Guy Standing on 'precariat'.
'Academic precariat' by Mark Brown.

An Onion piece on the presidential debates

Before the second debate Nation tunes in to see which sociopath more likable this time
Gary Younge in The Guardian after the third debate:
"If the world could vote on 6 November, Barack Obama would win by a landslide. A global poll for the BBC World Service revealed that 20 out of 21 countries preferred the president to his challenger. But when you watched the presidential debate on foreign policy on Monday night you had to wonder why. Not because Mitt Romney was better, but because on matters of policy, Obama was almost as bad. It takes a friend to reveal the harsh truth to the global community, so here it is: "Obama's just not that into you."

No one could love Israel more, care less about the Palestinians, put more pressure on Iran or be a greater fan of drone attacks or invading Libya. Both candidates agreed that America's task was to spread freedom around the world: nobody mentioned Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib or rendition. "Governor, you're saying the same things as us, but you'd say them louder," said Obama. It was a good line. The trouble was it condemned them both."

Ed Yong on dung beetle's air-conditioning unit

here: "By filming dung beetles with a heat-sensitive camera, Jochen Smolka from Lund University has found that their dung balls aren’t just take-away meals—they’re also portable coolers."
At one stage, the article says "On hotter ground, their front feet can heat up by as much as 10°C, and that triggers them to climb onto their balls. Here’s where the adorable green mitts come in—if Smolka placed these on the beetles, their front feet didn’t heat up, and they were less likely to climb onto their balls."
An ealier study suggests that climbing onto the balls may be to orient themselves:

Ed Yong's post has quite convincing videos. Perhaps the dance on the top has at least two purposes.

Interview with Joseph Stiglitz about India

in Outlook India. An excerpt:
"India is an unusual country and different from many other developing and emerging markets. It has a large entrepreneurial class and has lots of savings, wealth. And this entrepreneurial class is very talented. So that raises the question as to why India needs foreign entrepreneurs in any sector, particularly the retail or the financial sectors."
There is also an interview with The German ambassador in the same issue of Outlook.

Links, October 22

Mukhtar Mai Interview
From the article Merkel& Co should look at the 'H' factor:
"...since the financial crisis erupted, “humiliation has returned to Europe on a large scale”.

Inside nations, weak groups have suffered economic pain, and across the eurozone, weaker countries are being humiliated in a way that was taboo in the postwar post-humiliation period. Even more striking than this turnabout, Prof Smith argues, is the variety of responses from countries such as Greece and Ireland, as they reel from that humbling."

via Globaln Dashboard post How much humiliation can Spain cope with?

From FT again China's currency rises in the US backyard:

"East Asia is now a renminbi bloc because the currencies of seven out of 10 countries in the region – including South Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand – track the renminbi more closely than the US dollar."

British engineers create petrol out of air and water

Fasting hormone helps mice live longer

From The postracial elite:

"America's capacity for integration is one of its greatest strengths, politically and economically. Europe has allowed great waves of immigrants into its cities without integration, and the result is the dangerous combination of marginalized communities within national borders and rising neofascism. Japan, which has basically locked the door on outsiders, is now the world's first geriatric nation: a nation of old Japanese men and women, with nobody left to care for them or to work. They are a warning to the world. The future — where we all will live whether we like it or not — is not closed. It is an amalgamated mix. Anyone too prejudiced or too stupid to deal with this fact will be left behind..................We're just too stupid to improve ourselves by thinking. Only lust can save us."

varuna varuna from Balaraju 1948

This was the first film that I watched. Quite a few of the songs were uploaded recently including the more popular 'o balaja jaali leda' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5k4mGgPaew, Yevarine nenevarine' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIhD99JVhu0, 'raja rara' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zexya1lbIM all by S.Varalakshmi. There is also a sort of folk tune
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6GiT0JhqSc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOMtUhE2sqI