In the entire history of corporations, has there ever been one whose CEO said something like the following to his shareholders? 

Your company is in a declining industry.  Your company is currently profitable and will remain profitable for some time. But eventually, the forces that are causing the decline of the industry will catch up with it. While we could attempt to keep the company alive by trying to make a new product or catering to a different market, we have determined that it would be exceedingly difficult to do so, and attempting it would be a waste of your money. Your interests would be much better served by liquidating the assets of the company in an orderly fashion and returning your money to you. This we will do over a period of 10-15 years. Our employee strength will decrease over time, we will make every attempt to provide for a reasonable career transition for all of them. While they are at it, our employees will be judged, not by how much they contribute to the growth of the company, but by how well they manage its decline.

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There is an incident associated with these words. How many of you knew about it? I remembered the incident yesterday and was surprised how completely I had forgotten about it.

Because of marital problems, and despite his lack of sailing experience, Bonnet decided to turn to piracy in the summer of 1717

The person in question is Stede Bonnet. The Wikipedia article on him tells us further that he was driven to piracy because of his wife Mary’s “nagging and dis comforts he found in a married State”.

One of the woeful legacies of John Maynard Keynes is that many people defend virtually any government spending in his name, saying that spending will stimulate demand, thereby cause increased production and lead to an increase in GDP.

The trouble with this claim is that this is much beyond what Keynes said.

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It is my honour to inform one and all that the Jagadguru, in His humility, is attempting to revert to the name given to Him in his poorvashrama. His true bhaktas should know that in our hearts, He shall always be our Jagadguru. Also, it is my holy duty to point out His plan for The Perfect Society.

Aadisht is right. This Boston Globe article is excellent – and no, it does not require registration. Go forth and read.

OK, so I didn’t want this point to be buried in the last post, so I will make a new post out of it.  Most newspapers have pointed out that of the 100 days of employment a year that the NREGS guarantees to anyone who asks for it, the poor get only 18 days on average.  This is not the true scope of the leakage in the system. In fact, if the government wanted to spend 100 rupees and the bureaucrats manage to spend only 18, then they have unwittingly saved 82 rupees of our money. They should get an award for this or something. The real leakage starts after that. It is anybody’s guess how much of the 18 rupees actually reaches the poor. Given that the CAG says that the system of checks and balances does not work, it is entirely possible that the actual amount reaching the real poor is negligible.

What the 18 days figure tells us is how utterly our system of governance has broken down. It has collapsed so much that our politicians and civil servants cannot even milk the government machinery for their own benefit.  That thought is really scary, and in a way gives me hope.

Jean Drèze is a real piece of work. He writes a “response”  to criticism of the NREGS, half of which involves attacking the motives of the critics, and the other  half involves admitting to everything that the critics are saying. 

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On Sunday, I and my wife were strolling along The Mall in KL when a girl grabbed my arm, applied skin cream on it and proceeded to deliver a sales pitch on the virtues of the skin cream she was peddling. We listened because we had nothing else to do – we were there to while away time before the flight and also because my wife was really interested in buying skin cream.  We eventually bought some.

It was only after the saleswoman had parted with the arm and I was poorer by forty ringgit did the libertarian in me ask the obvious question – what if the genders had been reversed? When the girl grabbed by arm, my reaction, and that of my wife was amusement. If a salesman had grabbed my wife’s arm for whatever reason, it would have probably sparked off a fight.

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I see that in my absence, a major fight has erupted in the Blogosphere over momblogging and children in public spaces. At least Aadisht is mocking people and having fun. What the hell is Falstaff’s [1, 2, 3]  excuse? Is it that he has never been in a hopeless minority in his life?

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I will spend the next few days in Mumbai, where I can blog only if Mummy lets me, and then to confirm my status as a Dhimmi, I shall be spending my wedding anniversary at a place where Hindus are oppressed, and when they protest, are subject to water cannons. Posting will be light till January 15th. I shall rejoin all those debates raging on my blog then. Remember that on The Examined Life, debates never get stale.

Some time back, Avataram had written a post on India’s economy which I had decided was the most insightful one I had read. That post disappeared in one of Nilu’s regular purges. Now, he has written a post that draws on the same idea, but fails to make sense because small rhetorical excesses add up to contribute to a large absurdity.

First, yes, there are two Indias, but $15,000 as the cut off is absurdly high.  Rounding it to 10 lakh rupees, it excludes all software developers with less than 3 years of experience and all call centre employees. Which leads to the question of who is actually included.

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