1. I like it when my blog enables people to come to a consensus. I hope everyone is agreed that Chitra Singh is a horrible singer. Further discussions on this topic are welcome, but disagreement is not allowed as it will upset the consensus and hurt all our feelings.
   Also congrats to Sandeep on getting the answer.
2. It is traditional for the words of great men to be twisted beyond recognition, but it is supposed to be done after their death. I am referring to Corrector of Maladies, who says that I “lampooned” (that is the current vogue word on TEL) Gurumurthy for saying pretty much the same thing I am saying now. Sorry, but just because posts from my old blog are offline you can’t go around twisting my words. GAWD sees everything and He found me a cache of that post. Read it and judge for yourself. I wasn’t criticising for saying anything wrong. I was claiming that he was saying two contradictory things, one of them right and the other wrong.
3. On the other hand, the earlier comment by him reminds me that this is in fact a difficult case for market fundamentalists like me. This is a case where Government intervention may be justified, provided I see a valid way to make it work. That requires a post from me.
4. Then there is this comment by 7*6, posing a set of questions. That will require another post from me. Sigh. But briefly about the first question – I might have the cause and effect wrong. (Collapse of China -> Fall of dollar or the other way round? I don’t know)
5. I also want to do another post on the reforms and the poor. (Another Sigh.)
6. In the meantime, visit Lakshmi’s blog and read her post on the contrast between India and the US. Very very good. I’ve long wanted to do a similar post. (Another Big Sigh.)

Suppose that you want to learn about how the poor are doing under reforms. Without knowing anything about the reforms and how they’ve been doing, I can think of at least 3 possible inferences that I can draw from a study.
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I say that within three years it will undergo a painful collapse. I may be wrong, but the logic of the Pascal’s wager dictates that I should make a money bet on China collapsing.

(The logic is as follows. If China does well or slows down without collapsing, then I will be just fine. But if China collapses, it will take the US down with it. As a cybercoolie, I will naturally be in trouble. So I might as well make some money out of the damn mess.)

Here is a piece examining the possible mechanism of such a collapse.

Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi…

Where does the line come from? No googling.

One of these days, China will collapse, taking the US down with it. What will we do then?
Let me explain the scenario I am thinking of.

When we export something, we get dollars in return. Most people think that it is a good thing. Not really. Dollars are good only if we can actually buy something with them. You can, of course postpone the buying. That is a good strategy if the economy of the US is growing so fast that tomorrow’s dollar will buy much, much more than today’s dollar. In that case, it is worth waiting.

Now, the dollar is not like any other currency.
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The US lost the Viet Nam war, but it seems that Capitalism is winning Viet Nam. Expect to hear a continued silence from those who named the street on which the US consulate is located Ho Chi Minh Sarani, just to piss off the Americans.

Unless you are a normal person, you would know by now that I was the subject of an attempted lampooning.

I have no objection to being lampooned, but I am disappointed with the quality of lampoons that you find on the market these days. So it is an unexpected pleasure to find one that actually reminds you of the good old days when lampooning was not yet industrialised. Then lampoons were hand-crafted and each one was different. The artist actually took pride in his product. See this lampooning of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat for a good example of the dying artform. I can only dream that some day I will write as badly as Thomas Friedman so that I too can be worthy of a personalised and well-crafted lampooning rather than an off-the-shelf one.

Apparently India Today has a piece up on blogging. The article is here. But it requires a four-digit subscription number and it is not taking mine, even though I am a subscriber.

Actually, it is not taking any number I try. What are the chances of that happening? I suspect they don’t have any content online. They know that no one reads them anyway. So they’ve just put up the front page and redirected all their links to a dummy log-in page which is essentially a dead end. Anyone has a number that works? This is what the blurb says:

For long considered the Cinderellas of cyberspace, India’s army of raucous, rude and often radical bloggers is forcing the establishment to sit up and take notice, whether it is through tsunami activism or media evangelism

I am just curious to know what they mean by “Cinderellas of cyberspace”

Navin thinks that my throwaway line about it being impossible to disprove the existence of God deserves a post by itself. Not really. It is quite simple. If an omnipotent God does exist, by definition He controls everything including logic. He can create a universe where there exists irrefutable proof that there is no God. Why? God only knows, but it is certainly possible. So whatever proof you claim to have, it cannot stand up against that fundamental objection, viz “God might have created it that way”
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To this question
A: William Faulkner
B: Ernest Hemingway.

Good quote no?

The Economist* has come down rather hard on Bangalore’s crumbling infrastructure, but says that India’s IT and BPO boom is just beginning. Priceless line: “India’s advantages are so great that, however bad its aim, it will be hard-pressed to shoot itself in the foot.”

But the verdict on Bangalore is rather bleak. It does say that Bangalore’s problems are not really terminal, but a recovery is possible only if the Government actually builds all the roads and flyovers it had set out to. But from the horror stories I hear coming out of Bangalore, Dharam Singh is completely uninterested in the task. He and his cronies are only interested in making money by controlling the allotment of land at the outskirts of Bangalore.

*Incidentally, that link is subscription only, so don’t bother to click on it unless you are a subscriber.

Long back I realised that it is impossible to prove that God does not exist unless you make the assumption that He is a benevolent God. But today I have to ask all theists amoung you: If you think there is a benevolent God, why did He choose to inflict K S Sudarshan on us?