Going Meta

Now i have been accused recently of not writing more than a couple of lines on my blogposts. I do think that while the criticism is not completely valid but it has some merits. So in this blog post, i am trying to make amends. Ofcourse the other fairly regular criticism about my blog is that the blog lacks substance, but more on that later. Atleast this blog has more than 2 lines. It has, trust me.

Google Chrome

I am using it

The testament

How do you feel when you realise you are the smartest person in the room...tell me about it..cos i dont feel any different.. i am so used to it

Gold, Bronze and Counting

What a lovely headline. This olympic performance by India assures me that India is on a growth trajectory. Let us mark the olympic medals won as one of the indicators along with MDGs, HDI etc as signs of India shining.

Go Vijender go

Another First

Writing this blog post from inside a flight. Its not very hitech actually. Using my data card while the flight is in transit at raipur airport on my way to bhopal from hyderabad. Still worth a blog post. The connection is slow. Hope i can publish this post

The Way Out

It is a bit obvious that the BJP and its senior leadership are in a bit of a bind in opposing the nuclear deal given the fact that the deal is popular in the upper middle class of citizenry (and basically thats the only class which will make any political decision based on the deal). And currently, the argument of the BJP - is unequal partnership. I am suggesting that the BJP follows a more n position on this. Here is what i think BJP should argue.

• Concede that the deal is overall good in 'letter and spirit', but could have been better. as in specifically the deal is good in 'spirit' but bad in 'letter'. And while with the next govts in both countries, the 'spirit' will be gone, India will be stuck with the 'letter' and thus with a bad deal
• The congress should have made a concerted effort to take the mainstream parties (NDA) on board for a foregn policy deal (remind people that foreign policy deals should be consenus based)
• The failure of congress to coordinate with NDA also led to a bad deal as in the UPA failed to put in opposition from NDA as a hindrance to score a better deal

The Overreach

While it has become the established CW among the cognoscenti that this time Prakash karat overplayed his hand and thus lost his considerable influence on the polity. While i mostly agree (Mostly- cause, this close to election, and Manmohan reneging on his word, he hardly had any option). The point i want to make is, the considerable influence of karat was mostly due to the political incompetence of Mr Manmohan Singh and the congress party. In a coalition, if you are small..but vital..you get cabinet berths..but here what congress did was instead of cabinet posts, gave CPM control over the economic agenda. That was never wise as fringe ideology based party can only harm you if you allow them to set up the agenda.

So, overall it was the incompetence rather than anything else that allowed CPM to have so much influence, cause as you can see in the murky world of poltics, for political compulsions, a high brow person like Prakash karat has to anoint Mayawati as a natural PM. (That should lay to rest btw, any concept of intellectual honesty among CPM leaders....just as we have for other parties)

The Obama Model

It seems from the recent statements of Rahul Gandhi that the congress strategists are trying to use a customised Obama model of attracting votes on demographics (as in youth in this case) rather than identity (Caste or religion) or ideology (Communism etc). Add for all the failures of Rahul Gandhi as a politician, i wish that this strategy of Rahul Gandhi succeeds. I dont think the Indian polity is mature enough to arrive at the long term winning formula (ie a centrist ideology)..but the politicians are sure smart enough to copy a winning formula. So if Rahul Gandhi is successful, even though entrenched identity leaders like Mayawati or Mulayam may not change their strategy, an upstart can probably adopt the new strategy to make gains.

So best of luck Mr Gandhi.

P.S - Maybe calling this strategy ' The Obama Model' is giving Mr Obama too much credit. But i think, the success of Obama has something to do with this new strategy hence the title heading

Boycotting Pepsi

Given this news item, i think the only option left for me is to boycott pepsi. this will teach the buggers a lesson

The Perils of Outsourcing

You sort of become overly dependent, the kind of work that you want to do suffers a bit and you lose the sorta high ground that you are on..

Moral of the Story: Be a little less lazy and get to work

The utlity of Madam President

I was not really happy with the selection of Pratibha Patil as the presidential candidate. The usual reasons, career politician, nothing much achieved with a hint of nepotism..not really the stuff legends are made of, especially given Kalam's CV.

But, i had the opportunity to witness the arrival of the President in Bhopal and i must say that despite the municpal efforts to clean the city, the visit itself was quite underwhelming. Thus, you realise, getting a common person to become the president is probably just what is needed to deglamourise the office which by all accounts is mostly explained as rubber stamping

Sifting Information

“You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

I think, this concept may be wrong if we accept the fact that normally the conscious part of the brain utilizes only 10-13% of the neurons. But this theory has its own charms and can explain the focusing ability of a person and the power of deduction. As in you don't know so much that you find loopholes in almost every theory while you know enough to form theories of your own. Given the internets, it becomes even more important to have a mechanism through which one can sift through reams of information among which only few of the data points may be useful.

As Time Goes By

I have always wondered about this dichotomy, that i remember little of college days as if the time flew by but i also sense that sometimes life was really laid back and i was a bit lazy and read so many books and watched so much TV, so life wouldn't have been so fast paced. So this book review from Tim Harford really made sense.

We do not remember time as a continuum but as a series of events; that is why a fortnight recuperating in bed seems like an eternity (because we have no events to observe) but almost vanishes from the memory (because there are no events to remember). That is also why a wonderful day’s sightseeing can fly by, yet when looking back over an evening drink, that morning’s coffee can seem impossibly distant.

Its really a question of Continuous versus Discrete, where the human behaviour counts Discrete events while our physics lessons have made us to think of time asa continuum which is reinforced by the watches.

The One with the Sting

I dont think there is any doubt about the fact that Gill and Co have been a disaster for Indian Hockey. At a time when the country as a whole has grown manifold, Indian Hockey kept losing its place in the Indian consciousness.

However, one point must be mentioned. Every time a politician is caught in a sting row, there are all these questions raised about the ethics of stings and all the news channels are basically told to self regulate and the specter of the Orwellian broadcasting bill is raised. Here, no questions about the ethics of Sting. No one raised a doubt on Gill, still this incident was good enough to dissolve the IHF.

How many chief of parliamentary whips were even asked to resign in the Cash for Questions sting. How many indirect parties have resigned over any sting when it comes to politicians

The Current Food "Crisis" or "Opportunity"

The Economist has a very good chart explaining the causes of the current crisis. While the food prices started rising, the market has started responding with in creasing yield in the last year. The other notable thing to note is how the yield growth has stagnated over the last 45 years.

I guess that the rise in food prices is following the natural rise of commodity prices in the last decade or so following increasing demand from India China etc, and thus food prices thus following commodities like Oil, Metals etc (While you may argue Metal prices are cyclic, i do believe the current upturn is more secular in nature. So, if we agree with the given analysis and assume that the increased food prices are here to stay, we shall come to the important question - What will be the impact on India, and thus How should the Indian policymakers respond.

Regarding the impact, i think there is a clear dichotomy exist(as it should), between the demand side and supply side. While the Indian consumers will suffer, there is tremendous scope for gains to the Indian primary sector. Let us focus on the structural changes due to higher prices which will improve the primary sector*

Government - Government will be unencumbered by the minimum support price (MSP) mechanism and then can fully focus on the market enabling measures to ensure that the gains in trade are diffused enough to prevent backlash of higher prices among general populace. Here the basic logic is that while the MSP does create a floor of prices, the given inefficiencies in the buffer system, means that the gains form trade are not passed on to the farmers in times of high prices. With the high prices, the burden of procurement will be on government and thus will have a fiscal impact, but anyway i don't expect the government to be fiscally efficient in near term.

Market - Higher floor prices means that enough incentives exist for the middlemen and traders to take advantage of India's improving road and rail connectivity to reach the hinterland leading to better price discovery across locations

Farmers- Incentives to improve productivity, and increasing disposable income.

Frankly, rising food prices can be an unmitigated blessing for a country like India with the worlds highest gross acreage and largest population in agriculture. Just imagine Oil Prices doubling for Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia on the cusp of finding more oil wells. Well for us, the oil prices have just doubled and the infrastructure and communications improvement are our new oil wells.


* Of course the glaring omission in this analysis is the effect of high prices on inflation thus leading to loss in real income for many of the populace. I still feel that the government should take a fiscal hit rather than limit the upside of the price rise for million of farmers by commodity price targeting which seems to be the current mode of thinking in the current political/bureaucrat regime.

Picture Courtesy The Economist

The Debate Starts

If you follow English soccer, football rather, you must be aware of the "club vs country" debates that rages every time the English national team under performs, which btw makes it sort of an annual debate. Now i feel Indians are going to have the taste of the debate big time with the start of IPL.
Also on a serious track, some of the celebrations was off putting for me, its alright for Shahrukh to cheer Mccullum hitting Zaheer as he is the owner, but the odd thing was that nobody mentions the of shifting loyalty from country to club and the implicit transition. It is as if the official policy of the event organisers particularly the commentators is to not to comment on the contradiction and just hope that by pretending that strong Club loyalties exist and behaving as such will make the crowd see it that way. Well i am not convinced and find it difficult to accept that i will ever cheer Zaheer getting hit for a six by Mccullum.

Also for a bit of humorous take, see my cricket fanatic friend and perennial commenter Vibhash's post

Beyond Washington Consensus

Dani Rodrik says

successful policy reform is at its core governance reform

I completely agree with this sentiment. For too long, the multilateral agencies have focussed on policy formulations and seeing it fail and blaming it on governance. While the link has been made many times, mostly in a post facto manner. The right way to go about is i think going for governance reform, enablers (Specifically MIS), and then policy reforms. While this seems self evident on reading, it must be noted that "washington consensus" which was the staple of reforms under development agencies, for long has focussed on policy reforms while treating Governance as an exogenous variable.

The unbearable longing for emptiness of being

One of the great things about my life is, i really long for these moments of emptiness...when the world sort of stops...you are not supposed to meet any deadlines...you are at peace with yourself...when i can do anything i want.. (which is basically nothing)..I i really go for pop psychoanalysis of myself, its the lazy bugger syndrome..i cant seem to handle stress and so long for escapism....but that will be the cynical approach...the solitude coupled with the belssedness really does makes you feel like nirvan is actually not a bogus concept.

The Linearity of Time in the Space Time Continuum

The signs were all there. I was being nice to people. I was not abusing my friends nearly enough. I tried to resist thinking about it, i even tried some counter measures e.g Singing frequently, extemporaneously giin dissertations about my innate qualities etc, b ut my friends i cannot ignore it anylonger, for today was the last straw. I failed to eat just half a water melon. I am sad to state that i have grwon up and my bodyt has given up on my will powers ability to turn back the clock. So from now onwards, less antics and more books. prepared to be surprised.

The Moment

There was this sweet types golf movie called 'Tin Cup' starring Kevin Costner and Rene Russo..and while the movie was the typical run of the mill underdog sports movie..one of the statements really stuck with me..it goes something like.."when the defining moment comes..either you define the moment or the moment defines you".. ..and right now, i feel like one of those defining moment are going to cross by me.. and i really wanna be an active player in this round...and hope my golf is better than roy mcavoy.

P.S - Talkin of defining moments etc- this is my 100th Post. Thanks to all of my readers....(Yes chuchu and malik u both)