Year: 2008

Ayyo!

Ritwik Priya, having decided that he is not going to nitpicky wars with me, has decided to write a series of posts summarizing his text books. But he finds himself unable to avoid taking a swipe at me:

Thus, when Ravikiran asserts here and here that retail investors in India are stupid and hence the EMH may not hold for India, it makes me wonder if he understands the EMH at all. As long as the idiot retail investors in India (or elsewhere) are idiotic in their own randomly distributed ways, the EMH would still hold. The argument is simple – the overestimations of the positive idiots will cancel out the underestimations of the negative idiots. The only problem arises when idiocy is systemic – when idiots make mistakes that are very similar to each other.

The problem with Ritwik is that he balances his undoubtedly sound knowledge of theory with an utter lack of common sense. 

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WTF?

[Raj] Thackeray’s successes evidently left an impression on 1,900 employees of Jet Airways, who were fired last week thanks to the global financial crisis. They rushed to Thackeray’s office. He thundered that no Jet Airways flight would leave Mumbai until the employees were rehired.

If an Indian politician said that a generation ago, it might have been empty bluster. Today, the threat was taken seriously enough that the airline’s chairman, Naresh Goyal, held telephone discussions with Thackeray. After Thackeray’s and others’ lobbying, the employees were rehired the next day. (Anand Giridharadhas/IHT)

What is it about these Indian journalists joining foreign publications? Are lobotomies compulsory?

Get in Line Along With Everyone Else

OK, Aravind Adiga, author of The White Tiger, which, to go by common consensus, seems to have won an undeserved Booker, has said:

So, where’s this Shining India everyone’s talking about? It was time someone broke the myth…

The last time I checked, there is a huge queue of people waiting to bust the myth of Shining India and collect their publisher’s advance. Why does every single one of them feel the need to pretend that he is the first one to bust the myth?

The Technical Analysts

These days, one of the great joys of my life is watching the stock markets fall. I don’t get much time to watch TV, but I follow the collapse of the market through the Rediff stocks page. The advantage of this page over other choices is that I get to read the prognostications of the “technical analysts”.  Their statements have a zen-like quality to them. For example, at 9:33 AM today,  Prakash Gaba, technical analyst has said:

 “If the market falls any further, a bounce can be expected”.

How profound!

Also, going by the evidence on this page, Ashwani Gujral, technical analyst is on CNBC Awaaz all  the time. I wonder if he gets time to do his job.

Defending Modi’s Honour is Unnecessary

Ritwik’s lament is that all his arguments with me devolve into nitpicking.  My response is, he starts it.  For example, in my post about terrorism, I model Narendra Modi as being interested only in votes, not in combating terrorism. Ritwik’s response to that is that while is interested in both fighting terrorism and winning elections, and when there is a conflict between the two, winning elections takes precedence. In FitW’s formulation of the same point, Modi considers winning elections his patriotic duty to keep the evil Congress at bay, and therefore considers short term setbacks in the fight against terrorism as acceptable collateral damage. 

This is an astonishingly subtle distinction, and I took some time to grasp it. The trouble is, this distinction has very little to do with my actual argument. 

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When Free Markets Are a Bad Thing

A year back, we were visiting my wife’s relatives. The head of the family, my wife’s uncle, used to be in the police force before he drank himself to death. 

As is the norm in these cases, his eldest son was given a job in the police department.  Of course, he had to pay a bribe for the job.  He got a discount because of his late father, but he wasn’t exempted. If the son had been a graduate, the amount would have been lower, but he would still have had to pay. 

And oh – he did not get an actual policing job. That would have cost him much more. He was given a clerical job in the department, dealing with personnel matters.  That cost lower. 

“I don’t suppose you have any opportunities to make extra money in this section?” I asked him.

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The Model of Law Enforcement

It so happens that  my article in Pragati is around 200 words shorter than it should have been, because it was supposed to be one of a set of 2, and had a reduced word limit than the normal Pragati article. Neither Nitin nor I are very strict about word counts while editing. If an article is well-written, we don’t care if it goes a couple of hundred words over. But while writing I am very very conscious about word limits. I set a target, constantly check my pace, and almost always ensure that I make the limit.  When it became clear that Karthik’s article was not going to arrive, I was thinking of revising my article a bit, but then I had to rush to the hospital. So if I had given myself another 200 words, I would have been able to cover some of points I am covering now.

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Beyond Parody

Yeah, I know that I should stop picking on random people on the net and argue with more substantive points, but…

But the Indian farmers who refuse to give up their land – and thwarted plans to build the world’s cheapest car in West Bengal — know one thing. As long as they have their land, their fate depends on the weather and the harvest. Once they leave their land, they face even greater uncertainties — from the job market to the world economy. Just like Singaporeans today. (Abhijit)

I suppose certain poverty is infinitely more preferable than fluctuating prosperity.