Did we ever have to be bothered by a kind of discursive scheme about right & wrong, good & bad, virtue & vice, prevailing in varying degrees at any place on earth inhabited by humans and from time immemorial, which is absolutely constructed on the foundations of gender- ie; on the worst of arbitrary division of the entire humanity into men, women, transsexuals, trans gendered, eunuchs, etc.?
This is how it starts. It only gets better from here. (via Blogbharti)
Aadisht was keenly interested in the spreadsheet I referred to in the post below. It so happens that I am inordinately proud of my creation. So, as a service to society, I have uploaded it to Google and shared it with the world. But:
The last lacuna, I shall now rectify with the following treatise on how I do my investing.
As I have explained earlier, concentration of wealth at the very top is an excellent way to cut inflation. Mukesh Ambani has done his bit to fight inflation by building an expensive house. Those who are decrying this as an example of conspicuous consumption are missing the point. If, instead of building an expensive house, Ambani had distributed the money as salaries to Reliance employees or as profits to shareholders, the money would have chased goods that the poor also consume. By keeping the money for himself, he has caused a reduction in prices. The consumption of the super-rich is different from that of the rich and the middle-class. As long as the super-rich spend money on status-goods and as long as their money goes to other super-rich people – such as when they pay M F Hussain for a painting, or Hafeez Contractor to design their house, it keeps money out of circulation from the general economy. The super-rich should, as a social obligation, take utmost care to ensure that their money circulates among themselves and does not leak out.
As we all know, India’s agriculture is in deep and continuing distress and its farmers are committing suicide in large numbers because the government has reduced its investment in agriculture and R&D. While all this is happening, the media is cheering the rise of the stock market and reporting on fashion shows. Worse still, now we have the shocking spectacle of a private corporation preying off the distress of farmers by spreading its tentacles all over the country and claiming to provide what the government should be doing. Read the story of this atrocity here. (Registration may be required.)
I have an insanely complex spreadsheet that I use to manage my investments. I decided that I wanted to upload it to Google Spreadsheets so that I don’t have to depend on access to my home laptop. Ran into two problems:
The second problem is a showstopper for me. Sigh.
The May 2008 issue of Pragati is out. The focus this time is on liberal nationalism. I have an article claiming that liberals tend to ignore the need for nationalism and a need for a cultural shift before India can accept liberalism. Gautam Bastian writes of the conflict between liberal and nationalist ideals, and Raj Cherubal believes that a secular-right victory can occur through tactical alliances with the secular left. I disagree with the last view, and my view is somewhat at variance with Gautam’s so it was an interesting experience to edit the articles without injecting my own views.
The other articles are excellent too. I particularly recommend the interview with K Subrahmanyam.
Our esteemed Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, has precisely the right solution. High salaries to employees of Multinational Corporations is the cause of inflation. Giving salaries to too many people causes them to chase goods pushing up their prices. Instead, salaries at the low levels should be cut and it should be increased at the highest levels. That will reduce inflation in two ways. First, the consumption basket of the rich is different. The likes of Anil and Mukesh Ambani do not compete with the poor people as much as people like me do for their consumption basket. Second, super-rich people save more than merely rich people, putting downward pressure on prices.
Increasing income disparity is just the right approach to controlling inflation.
An expert committee set up over a year ago to study if futures trading influenced commodity prices will neither recommend a ban nor favour continuing trade in essential commodities, said a member of the panel. (AP)
When I heard this news a couple of days back, I could guess why. The panel is headed by an economist who also happens to head the planning commision. If he claims that Futures trading causes an increase in prices, his fellow economists will laugh at him. If he claims that it does not, he gets into trouble with his political masters.
Sharad Joshi, founder of Shetkari Sanghatana and the member of the panel referred to above, explains that there is more to it in a well argued article.
I am looking over the terms of my company’s medical insurance policy and there is an exclusion for venereal diseases. This seems to be standard for all providers. Any idea why? Of course, this is “self-inflicted” in the sense that you choose to have the risky sex that causes this, but then, there is no lung cancer exclusion for smokers. Is it a moral issue or is there some other reason I am missing?
I am astonished to find that Amit Varma has a less cynical view of government than I have, at least going by this post.
See, the thing is, in a corrupt Indian government organization (pardon my redundancy) there are no half measures. It is not like only Jothikumaran was corrupt. Usually, the entire organization, right from the chaprasi level to the very top, has a stake in the corruption. It is usually an open secret as to how much one has to pay whom for what. So, it is not like the organizers of the sting operation would have any reason to doubt whether Jothikumaran was corrupt or not. It would be just a case of finding the evidence. Of course, there are many ethical issues in investigative journalism and there are more when sting operations are involved, but the possibility that the person being stung is actually honest ought not to be one of them.[1]
Nilu says that I do not address a certain argument in favour of government schools. The argument has something to do with poor people having the vote. If that is supposed to mean that the poor can vote themselves better schools, Nilu should know that it is nonsense. One vote every five years is simply inadequate as an attention-getting tactic, when citizens have a hundred issues on which to draw their rulers’ attention. Presumably Nilu does know that, so he modifies the argument with something else that is still nonsensical.
Via my cousin-in-law’s twitter feed, I came across an awesome story of misunderstanding, stupidity, revenge and true love made possible only by the magic of technology.
Update: A helpful comment on the above story tells me that the innocent word in question “s?k???nca” literally means “in a squeeze”. The word reminds me of the Hindi word “shikhanja” which has a similar meaning. It is entirely possible that Hindi borrowed the word from Turkish. In that case, our failure to borrow the other word represents a huge missed opportunity to tackle our population problem.
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