This funny story of a trip to Coorg( via Gaurav) reminds me of my own disastrous trip to Coorg 3 years back. I was in Chennai at that time and as usual Karnataka had denied Tamilnadu Kaveri water. Finding it difficult to take a bath, our group of friends hired a van and decided to go to the source of the Kaveri to take a dip. (um.. not exactly true, but I just wanted to write that)
On the way one of us got conjunctivitis, and of course soon enough almost eveyone got it.

We didn’t manage to see much of Coorg’s beauty, but we succeeded in our determination to take a bath at the Talakaveri. So three years back if there was a strange increase in the number of conjunctivitis cases along the Kaveri basin in Karnataka, that was I, betraying my mother state for my then adopted state’s cause.

I always wondered what happened to the Management Book Industry. When I was doing my MBA there seemed to be a new book on a new fad every term. I haven’t heard of new books lately. I thought I was remiss in not keeping track of them.
It turns out that Management-Book writers have run out of successful ideas to construct the latest fad out of, and they are turning to historical figures like Alexander and Sun Tzu for inspiration.
I suppose the additional advantage is that with this approach there is little risk that you will choose an Enron-style company as an exemplar of your approach.

He?
or
he?

Swaminathan Aiyar claims that brain drain is a bogus concept. His economics is sound, but I think he is attacking a strawman.
His argument is that we produce talented people cheaply and export them abroad. In return we get not just money in the form of remittances, but also technology – which could not have been developed in India.

This is correct, of course. Given the circumstances it is a good thing. It is similarly true that given the mess Kerala’s industries are in, the money-order economy is good for Kerala. India would be worse off if those people who are going abroad now didn’t go, just as Kerala would be worse off if all those people who went off to the Gulf stayed in Kerala. The point is not to force people to stay, but to change the circumstances that make Swami’s analysis sound economics.

Swami is also making the case that it is actually good for India to be always behind in the technology curve? Such a case can be made. Perhaps it is better that western countries take on the costs and risks of new technology, and w? adopt the safe, tested and cost effective technologies. I don’t agree. We aren’t just competing with the west. We are also competing with a lot of other third world countries. R&D and manufacturing tend to go together, and if we miss out on one, we will miss out on both.

Another case can be made that India should go in for applied research, leaving basic research to the west. I think that there is a stronger argument for this.

But these question certainly cannot be resolved by rehashing comparative-advantage arguments the way Swami Aiyar has done.
Update: Swami Aiyar comes out with the second part where he makes the same points I did

Interesting tribute by B Raman to R N Kao, the first head of RAW.
Contains lots of nuggets of information I didn’t know about.

Remember the Searchking vs Google lawsuit? Searchking “sells” pagerank on Google. It has filed suit claiming that Google has unfairly penalised it for doing so.
Here is a report on the current status of the case.
Synopsis: The case will most probably be chucked out at the preliminary stage, but it is not certain!
Yuk. People, don’t ever sue me for providing you with a free “service”, okay? I don’t have much money.

Kiruba has won the Chennai Corporate Marathon and he has put up a pretty inspiring account on his blog.

As for me, I think if this irritating cough continues, I think I will just start smoking. Why? For my children. At least if I am a smoker, I can warn my kids against smoking right? Otherwise, they’ll just turn around and say “Papa you never smoke and still cough all the time. How much worse can smoking be?”

Sorry for the convoluted logic

*Or is it 42 miles?

O Brave New World that has such idiots in it!
Some genius at the Indian Express has written an article on cloning.
Filter Coffee sharply criticizes the article, in effect calling it fiction masquerading as an editorial. He is right.

The article is too silly even to be picked apart, but for what it is worth, the fallacy it peddles is genetic essentialism.

There are many misconceptions about human cloning. For example, some people apparently believe that cloning can bring back or replace a dead child or other loved one. They have bought into a popular but na?ve idea of genetic essentialism-that genes are a recipe for making the same person. However, considering the case of the natural clones called twins helps us think clearly about what clones produced in vitro would be like. Twins are clearly distinct individuals with different points of view because twins have two different bodies and two different brains. Individuality does not reside in our genes, but in our brains and bodies. (Ronald Bailey – Reason Online)

Suppose you know that there is a bomb about to go off which could claim thousands of victims. You have good reason to believe that a prisoner knows where it is, and that torture may force him to tell. Would you allow him to be tortured? (Economist.com)

If you would,

then how much cruelty would be permitted? Would threats against the prisoner’s family be all right? His neighbours? His country?

Spamhaus has proof that at least one spammer has been conducting a massive dictionary attack against the mail servers of both Hotmail.com and MSN.com, at the rate of three to four tries per second, 24 hours a day, continuously for the last five months. (Hotmail: A spammer’s paradise -Wired)

I find Kannada movies mostly unwatchable, for one reason. There they haven’t yet realised the difference between a movie and a play.

In a play, when two characters converse, they stand side by side. This unnatural device is adopted because the audience has to see the expressions on the faces of the characters. In a movie, you don’t face this constraint. Characters can sit face to face, and the camera can capture their expressions. Kannada movies treat the camera the same way plays treat an audience

In a play, you have to exaggerate your expressions. To show surprise, it is not enough to raise your eyebrows. You have to show it with your entire body, because the audience is far off and can’t see subtle gestures. If you have a camera, you can show a close up – and the actor can act naturally. In Kannada movies, you still see those exaggerated gestures.

In a play, when two characters have a talk, they come centre-stage, finish their discussion, and then move off back-stage, with some contrived conversation closer. In a cinema you can simply show the relevant part of the conversation and then cut to the next scene. Kannada movies still haven’t discovered editing.

You’d expect that some 70 odd years of experience would have taught Kannada directors these things They haven’t. Instead, movie makers have raised imitating drama to an art form. Everytime I see a Kannada movie, I notice this ineptness. I cannot enjoy it.

Why am I ranting on Kannada movies? Because I am forced to watch Kannada serials at dinnertime and I am expressing my frustration. Because movies are an interesting example where changing the medium changes the way in which the message is delivered.

The other example is writing. Writing for the web is different from writing for paper. Online readers don’t tolerate the same amount of rambling they’d tolerate on paper. You cannot do a post that comes to the point in the sixth paragraph after rambling incoherently about Kannada movies, to give just one example.

Then there is the relationship between photography and painting, where the change went the other way round. Introduction of photography meant that end of realism in painting, and painters started painting what could not be photographed.

Are there other examples of this phenomenon?

Someone came here looking for What Would Gandhi Say
Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn