Can you please make a mess of your Presidential elections this time too? I understand that it will be painful for you if your country gets embroiled in a legal dispute over the presidency, but don’t you think you should think of me too? I am coming over to your country on the day you will vote and do you think it would be fair on your part to cheat me of the entertainment I am hoping for?

Nehru built a strong base for India by investing in heavy industry and infrastructure so that our industrial development could take off right?

You know what happens to people who develop a strong base right? They find it difficult to get off their base. That’s what seems to have happened.

Putting Nehru, Tata to shame

Lakshmi Mittal did not become No.1 by taking advantage of all that India had to offer, such as cheap iron ore, subsidised finance and protection against imports.

On the contrary, he succeeded because Nehruvian socialism forced him to go abroad, where he had to compete with the best in the world. His family started with a mini-mill in Indonesia producing 65,000 tonnes of wire rods. Next came a management contract, with the option to buy a bankrupt government steel plant in Trinidad. The Mittals turned it round instantly.

How? For starters, by replacing European managers with Indians. This saved $2 million in wages, and brought in superior skills too.

For various reasons (including, but not limited to “I feel I need a break”), posting is likely to be quite light in November. I also want to experiment with guest posting to see how it affects my readers(hip). If you think that you can fill the void I shall be leaving in my readers’ hearts with your posts, contact me.

I am looking for 4-5 people, with similar but definitely not the same views as mine. I’ll prefer it if you will blog on a different set of topics from what I normally blog on, though I understand that there will be inevitably be overlap between your set and mine.

In one respect I will want similarity. I am looking for people who will write coherently argued and opinionated posts that spark off a discussion, the way I (like to think that) I do. A sense of humour is a desirable extra, though I will certainly want a different sense of humour from mine.

Why would you want to write here? I have no definitive answer to that, but one reason could be that you want to experiment with blogging before starting one for yourself, or perhaps you want to popularise your blog (assuming of course, that my blog is more popular than yours) or perhaps you want to take a break from your own blog because you’ve got bored with the look of it. Whatever the reason, if you think you want to write here, tell me.

I reserve the right to pick whom I want for reasons I won’t tell you. So if I don’t know you, give me a brief introduction.

All this will be just for the month of November.

Swearing makes you impotent: official

Those readers who like the spoken language liberally peppered with expletives and barrack-room terminology had better clean up their act, a Russian scientist has warned, because excessive swearing causes women to turn into blokes and blokes to lose wood.
The shocking revelation comes courtesy of Gennady Cheurin’s team at the Yekaterinburg Centre for Ecological Safety and Survival. Cheurin made the discovery after conducting ground-breaking research into the effect of bad language on water. The theory goes that water can be influenced by “negative vibes”, and the team spent several hours hurling abuse at a glass of the stuff. This Devil’s liquid was then sprinkled on wheat seeds – of which just 48 per cent subsequently germinated. Seeds favoured with water from natural springs, on the other hand, enjoyed a 93 per cent germination rate.

…
he quickly turned his attentions to the effect of swearing on the perpetrators themselves: “We then looked at heavy swearers, and found whenever men use these words in their daily life, this immediately leads to sexual dysfunctions, i.e. impotence. If a woman uses these words in her daily speech, she slowly begins transforming into a man, getting more hair and muscles.”

Show us examples of their blocking free trade by lobbying with the government.

So now we have a situation where if you are a foreign company with experience in running an airline, you can’t invest in India, but a private airline in India can raise equity from abroad. How did we get into this ridiculous situation? Because Jet, Sahara, etc. want it that way of course.

I am utterly disappointed with my countless Mallu readers. If the most literate state in India cannot identify answer a question concerning its authors properly, then I don’t know what to say. You should all go drown in the Arabian sea and let the rest of your countrymen use your pristine unspoilt homeland as a holiday resort.

The connection I was talking of was this. The district where Veerappan lived and died was Dharmapuri. That should have immediately reminded you of O V Vijayan’s novel Saga of Dharmapuri. The book is a must-read for all Nehru-haters. It is an allegory about India caught between two superpowers. The treatment of Nehru and the communists has to be read to be believed. In the book, Nehru’s courtiers are depicted as eating his shit – literally! (Vijayan used to be a communist who got disillusioned by the ideology after the Soviets invaded Hungary)

If you Mallus want to redeem your honour, you can help me out by answering this question about Mallu literature that I have. This time, there is no trick, and I don’t know the answer to this one.
Continue reading →

CK, over at Yazad’s place, wants to know if we libertarians ever think that corporations are in the wrong in any single instance. Of course we do. But we do believe that in a society with just laws, criminals are in a minority, and when criminals commit crimes, they should be punished for it. Negligience by Union Carbide that resulted in 2000 of Bhopal’s citizens dying almost certainly falls into that category.

But because we believe that criminals are a minority, we don’t believe that a surveillence regime makes sense, whether against citizens or against corporations. In fact, we believe that a society that requires permissions for everything ends up benefiting criminals and hurting honest people. As the ardent capitalist Ram Manohar Lohia said, “Panditji, under your socialism, an honest man cannot become rich and a rich man cannot stay honest”
Continue reading →

And also for K R Aadisthan, to test his potential Malluness.

Connect Veerappan and a Mallu author.
This is a Quizzing type “connect” question.

The connect also involves the noble sport of Nehru bashing.

419ers take Aussie financial advisor for AU$1m | The Register

A Melbourne financial manager faces a hefty prison sentence after stealing AU$1m from his clients and handing it over to Nigerian advance fee fraudsters.
Robert Andrew Street, 58, fell for a classic 419 scam after receiving an email from the Reverend Sam Kukah offering him a cool $65m in return for relocating cash held by Nigeria’s Presidential Payment Debt Reconciliation Committee. Naturally, Street quickly learned that there were certain expenses he had to meet to oil the wheels of the illicit transfer. Accordingly, he set about fleecing clients of his financial planning business – Making Dollars & Sense – by getting them to invest in fictitious get-rich-quick schemes.

Wow. A financial manager.

Shourie gives Rs 12 crore to IIT-Kanpur!

Admirable gesture, but didn’t his dad file a PIL against the very concept of the MP Local Area Development Scheme?

An interesting article in The Economist (Link will stay free for a week) arguing that the best way to ensure a smooth and successful succession in a company is to groom an insider through a formal selection process rather than recruiting someone from outside or holding a competition among insiders (as the BJP is doing now by default).

Somewhat related Question: What is the difference between Heir Apparent and Heir Presumptive? No searching or looking at dictionaries please.

Google Desktop has been launched. When will http://conscience.google.com come out?