India

We decided to do a packaged tour of Kerala, “God’s own country.” The tour included round-trip flights from Delhi to Kochi, a taxi for the full journey, and all the hotel stays.

“I need the address.", the immigration official shouted at her, as she, a septuagenarian Indian woman, with her limited English, repeatedly, pointed to the paper containing the phone number of her daughter.

Getting Inside After getting misdirected once to 436 Hill St, San Francisco which is the old original address which does not exist anymore, I eventually reached 5 Wood St, San Francisco. It was the time of sunset, I knew I was late, but finally, it felt good to see a nondescript apartment marked “Gadar memorial”. Least, I expected locked doors. I did not drive 40 miles to stand in front of this locked door....

Bureaucrats take the actions which are justifiable (by book or by order of their superiors), they care less about consequences (in case there are multiple possible actions, they let the politician decide the appropriate action). Technocrats take the actions which (according to their analysis) have best (long term/short term) consequences, they care less about how harsh the action could be on certain individuals and their logical thinking usually fails to take into account the law of unintended consequences like Cobra Effect....

Let’s start with a small exercise. Trying searching for the list of Sept 2011 victims or for the list of London Bombing victims. In each case, more than half of the results on the first page lead to a list of names along with the photos and life stories of those people. Now, trying searching for the list of Hyderabad blast 2013 victims, you would get a few results like this which lists the names of the people but where are their photos and life stories?...

After the Delhi gang-rape case, there has been a sudden upsurge in traditional as well as social media over rape in India. As usual in such cases, the initial reaction is to find someone to blame. And in this case, the onus of the blame has been put on Patriarchal Indian Society - without realizing that more rapes happen in the not-so-patriarchal USA Indian masculinity - “who feel threatened by women asserting their identity” without realizing that rapes happen even with infants, senior citizens, visually challenged, mentally challenged and homely women in conservative villages of Haryana to Kerala. Indian Police - as if police officials are omniscient and should be present before the crime happens Honey Singh - I am expecting a petition against Vatsyayana next This blog post is a collection of thoughts about the same.

The first episode of Aamir Khan’s show Satyamev jayate raised the issue of female foeticide in Rajasthan. While the show asked for stringent laws, it missed a few major reasons behind the same.

The book presents a generalists view of post-independent India. Unlike India Unbound, this book focuses primarily on post-independent India and takes a more pragmatic approach towards understanding the problems of contemporary India. The best parts of the book are the interesting contradictions that the nation went through - love/hate relationship with the English language, fear of technology, and neglected urban development. Overall, the book is divided into four sets of ideas, that have arrived, that are in progress, that are still being debated, and finally, that have yet to become part of public debate. I have highlighted the best sections of the book in bold.

Internet, which initially started as a DARPA experiment is [still] under the indirect control of USA government through ICANN despite several objections from Europe as well as IBSA. This worked when most users were from the western world with the notable exception of China and few minor quirks. But in the past few decades, not only the governments around the world are putting more controls but also the internet users (as well as enterprises) are fighting back against US control. In this blog post, I will describe the main threats to the existence of (current form of) Internet.

(Following are a few notes from the talk on corruption by Harvard Professor and Janata Party leader, Dr. Subramanian Swamy held in bay area on July 29th 2011) Corruption - misuse of public office for personal gains Five impacts of corruption **