L K Advani Mantra: Physical and social, that is second to none

BJP Prime Ministerial Candidate L K Advani says: 

• “India won swaraj in 1947, thanks to the struggles and sacrifices of crores of patriots. But, even after 50 years, we have not yet succeeded in transforming swaraj (self governance) into su-raj (good governance). By good governance I mean adherence to suraksha (security), samruddhi (prosperity) and shuchita (probity in public life).”  
  
• There is no better way of understanding and experiencing India than road travel. It was agonising for me to see, in large tracts of our country, the lack of the most basic necessities of economic growth and social progress. 
  
• However, every once in a while, I also saw symbols of development that radiated hope. For example, after travelling on excruciatingly bad roads for several weeks, my yatra suddenly encountered a beautifully laid highway, a 200-kilometre-long stretch from Sambhalpur to Rourkela in Orissa. Built and maintained by Larsen & Tourbo (I was struck by its corporate slogan “We make things that make India proud”), this was one of the first experiments of PPP in road construction in India. “
  

Thinking is Science and writing is Art

Friend Sunil asks “Why are you limiting your blog to smallish commentaries on what others are thinking or writing? Looking forward to forms and structures of how you create your critique.” 

There are two different things in his question which need to be understood properly. Sunil, it is not as simple as you may see it the “smallish commentaries on what others are thinking or writing?” if one wanted to understand the process of social science as an entity in a economy  must try to understand two things one is how these “smallish commentaries” arises and at what situation. Most importantly, how it got formed his or her “thinking or writing?” what were their pushback’s to believe in some time and rubbish in another time but both are in his or her life time. 

Secondly “to forms and structures of how you create your critique” is an important exercise of a persons mind as well as its relationship with the writers or thinkers mind. You can not simply ignore one and look for other one. It is something like this if the child wanted to make sense of any word or letter (mostly merely ‘told’) have to be sure that at what extant that child has thought through and in at what way. 

So don’t ignore or underestimate any sort of opinions unless you are sure that he or she is making deliberately wrong and stupidly. 

If you ignore today, tomorrow its role will be as like the present Indian communists who are terribly ruined people’s mind and still continues. 

Who are responsible for that? It is the question of the leadership that has taken place in the fifties and later period India. 

In this process the ruled socialists created a situation where people believed that there is no alternative for issues like poverty, hunger, unemployment, The State Education etc. 

 Now you look back and honestly think that who was responsible for “creating the great Indian socialist darkness”. 

No more research is needs to answer the above question than the past fifteen or eighteen year period.

Kalam's four Grids….

Kalam's four Grids….

It is very easy to come out with an idea but to validate that idea…..

Image: (Left to right) Sudha Murthy, N R Narayana Murthy, Nandan Nilekani and Rohini Nilekani, a journalist at Bombay magazine before their wedding, at a picnic near Bangalore in the early 1980s. | Photograph, courtesy: Infosys technologies and Rediff.

In the second part of his interview with Rediff Mr N R Narayana Murthy, chief mentor of Infosys Technologies says interesting and disappointing.

What do you think could be done to make higher education in India better?

To enhance the quality of our higher education, we can do five things:

One, enhance the autonomy of our higher education system;

Second, encourage them to collaborate with world-class institutions outside India, within India too, but most of them are outside India... ;

Third, bring in a sense of meritocracy in the selection of students and the appointment and promotion of faculty;

Fourth, create incentives for our faculty members to do more world-class research; and

Fifth, remove any licensing in the education system. We gave up most of industrial licensing in 1991. It is silly that we continue licensing of our educational institutions.

Talking about higher education... even the recommendations made to the Knowledge Commission have not been implemented? Why does this happen?

The Indian society is a society of ideas. It is a society that has revered talk. In this society, articulation is mistaken for accomplishment. We are quite satisfied with our voice, with our writings. This is not a society that is focussed on execution.

Frankly, the problem is due to our caste system and the dominance of Brahmins in our society for long period. The Brahminical system said my job is to think of the higher worlds. My job is to think of connecting you people with God. I don't want to do anything that has a relationship with the real world.

Now that is a problem that has played havoc with the Indian culture. So, here in this culture, if you do anything with your hands, it is considered less honourable that anything to do with your brain.

Here everybody wants to be an engineer, nobody wants to be a technician. So when a society does not value implementation, execution, what happens is you create more and more reports and nothing gets done.

For example, (Reliance Industries Chairman) Mr Mukesh Ambani and I gave two reports on how to improve the higher education system: one to (then prime minister) Mr Vajpayee and one to Dr Manmohan Singh.

Second, there has been the Knowledge Commission. Nothing has happened. Third, in 1998 I was a member of the IT Task Force -- which was headed by Mr Jaswant Singh -- and that task force submitted its report somewhere in 1999 0r 2000.

Nine years and I don't think even one suggestion has been implemented. And we made 108 suggestions! So that is why I am not a big fan of ideas in India.

My brother-in-law is a famous professor of physics at Caltech and he tells me it is very easy to come out with an idea. But to validate that idea he and his doctoral students will have to work hard for six months, one year... sometimes two years. That takes 20 hours of work each day for two years. So it is important to come out with new ideas, but it is even more important to execute them.

We are not a nation of doers; we are a nation which believes that our articulation is our accomplishment.

I have an innate need to write!

During my school days I was busy with either farming or sports (mainly hokey, food ball and kabaddi). But in college I turned to write what I liked but intended to do. All I wrote was in Tamil (my mother tongue). I wrote essays, poems both for competition and personal likings. I also won few awards for these works. 

Two special things is worthy to mention here: one, for an essay I have received a journal every month in free of cost as a prize, second, for an poem which I wrote on ‘Pongal’ (Tamil Nadu’s harvesting festival) won a award called “Kavi Murasu”. These two things I considered as important in my life as it influenced to learn further on diverse topics. But I always questioned me writings and why I do and the purpose: a couple of questions that I was asking myself were also asked by a literature Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk: 

I wrote an essay which won a prize and the prize distribution function was organized in central Tamil Nadu (Salem). I could not receive this prize because I was travelling for another event in Delhi. 

Pamuk interesting questions are from his Nobel lecture: 

“…..the favourite question, is; why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can't do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live, in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. 

I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. 

I write because it is exciting to turn all of life's beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can't quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy.”

Power of entrepreneurship in solving the problem of poverty in India…..

N.R. NARAYANA MURTHY writes in his book (Excerpt published in outlook 20 April 2009 from A Better India: A Better World by N. R. Narayana Murthy; Allen Lane (Penguin India), Rs 499): 

• “The enigma of India is that our progress in higher education and in science and technology has not been sufficient to take 350 million Indians out of illiteracy. It is difficult to imagine that 318 million people in the country do not have access to safe drinking water and 250 million people do not have access to basic medical care. 
  
• Why should 630 million people not have access to acceptable sanitation facilities even in 2009? When you see world-class supermarkets and food chains in our towns, and when our urban youngsters gloat over the choice of toppings on their pizzas, why should 51 per cent of the children in the country be undernourished? 
  
• When India is among the largest producers of engineers and scientists in the world, why should 52 per cent of the primary schools have only one teacher for every two classes? When our politicians and bureaucrats live in huge houses in Lutyens’ Delhi and the state capitals, our corporate leaders splurge money on mansions, yachts and planes, and our urban youth revel in their latest sports shoes, why should 300 million Indians live on hardly Rs 545 per month, barely sufficient to manage two meals a day, with little or no money left for schooling, clothes, shelter and medicine?
  
• These questions have been troubling me right from that day when I spent a lonely, hungry, cold and introspective 21 hours in the guard’s compartment on a freight train going from the historic city of Nis, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Serbia, to Istanbul, way back in 1974. I have had some success in demonstrating the power of entrepreneurship in solving the problem of poverty through my experiment of creating Infosys. Yet, when I look at the big canvas of India, I often feel confused, agitated and powerless—but also motivated to find solutions to this problem.”
  

Economics vs Physics

Economics and its history have been a limelight of economists and historians. Few economists made attempt to discover something which can be a constant action in everywhere irrespective of location but at the end nobody did to happen yet because unlike physics we are in social science. But is that the economists wanted to see economics as science like physics? Or something else they were trying to look at and say.   

There is an interesting article by T. C. A. Srinivasa-Raghavan on economics as he has been trying to understand where the subject stands and how it looks now. 

And he quotes economist Mr Solow which is more interesting than his narrative. 

The following is excerpts from a article published by Robert M. Solow in The American Economic Review, Vol. 75, No. 2, (May, 1985), pp. 328-331. 

• “For better or worse, however, economics has gone down a different path, not the one I have in mind. One consequence, not the most important one, but the one that matters for this discussion, is that economic theory learns nothing from economic history, and economic history is as much corrupted as enriched by economic theory. I will come to that, too, later on. 
  
• To get right down to it, I suspect that the attempt to construct economics as an axiomatically based hard science is doomed to fail. There are many partially overlapping reasons for believing this; 
  
• Unfortunately, however, economics is a social science. It is subject to Damon Runyon’s Law that nothing between human beings is more than three to one. To express the point more formally, much of what we observe cannot be treated as the realization of a stationary stochastic process without straining credulity. Moreover, all narrowly economic activity is embedded in a web of social institutions, customs, beliefs, and attitudes. Concrete outcomes are indubitably affected by these background factors, some of which change slowly and gradually, others erratically. As soon as time-series get long enough to offer hope of discriminating among complex hypotheses, the likelihood that they remain stationary dwindles away, and the noise level gets correspondingly high. Under these circumstances, a little cleverness and persistence can get you almost any result you want. I think that is why so few econometricians have ever been forced by the facts to abandon a firmly held belief. Indeed, some of Fortune’s favourites have been known to write scores of empirical articles without once feeling obliged to report a result that contradicts their prior prejudices. 
  
• If we are honest with ourselves and others. It would be a useful principle that economists should actually believe the empirical assertions they make. That would require more discipline than most of us now exhibit, when many empirical papers seem more like virtuoso finger exercises than anything else. The case I am trying to make concerns the scope and ambitions of economic model building, not the intellectual and technical standards of model building. 
  
• In his own methodological writing, Court made the point explicitly that men "living as they do in different societies. ..make their decisions according to different schemes of values and according to the habits and structures of the society they find themselves living in." Therefore an economic historian should be an "observer and re-creator of the codes, loyalties and organizations which men create and which are just as real to them as physical conditions."
  

In search of the a real “Doyen”!

Delhi School of Economics Prof Pulin B Nayak writes in today’s ET that “Prof Chelliah was decidedly different. Nor did he have any propensity towards or time for political sloganeering. He wanted to employ the body of academic knowledge in the era of post-Keynesian macroeconomic and fiscal policy making to make a difference to the human condition in his home country. But for this it was vital that he must return home.”  

Except the tax reform he is not able to site a single research paper which breaks the usual thoughts of other Indian economists. I never heard (I am may be mistaken) of telling anyone that Prof Chelliah was a great Indian reform team! Even when he was alive forget about now. 

I respect him a lot as a human being but I am unable to take any of his ideas/suggestions. Of course he was not outside of socialist economists as Mr Nayak writes “He wanted to employ the body of academic knowledge in the era of post-Keynesian macroeconomic”s. 

Further, Mr Nayak says quite unconvincingly that “The only thing that ever mattered was the academic merit of an individual, regardless of region, linguistic background, sex, religion or caste.”  I guess, he perhaps never heard of what one of greatest 20^th century economists and economics Nobel laureate F A Hayek said “Differences in wealth, education, tradition, religion, language or race may today become the cause of differential treatment on the pretext of a pretended principle of social justice or of public necessity. Once such discrimination is recognised as legitimate, all the safeguards of individual freedom of the liberal tradition are gone”.

Smith third law: a theory of government

Karan Horn has quite interesting article on Adam Smith and his idea. What was interested me was:

 “We actively educate ourselves so that we can hope to be truly praiseworthy.” 

“The question has to do with the natural harmonisation of interests. Is there any way in which the interests of government are spontaneously aligned with the interests of the governed? Is political action possible without destroying the checks and balances of the spontaneous order? Smith doesn't give us an answer. Maybe he had found that there was no such way”.

Banana economists…….

T. C. A. Srinivasa-Raghavan is trained from Delhi School of Economics and he has lots of friends still over there. He says in his column in Business Line which is something interesting and questioning his friend’s works perhaps his own works also!

Take his recent column in which he says “...this is very much the case with the demand for economics courses. The best and the brightest, 90 per cent of the time, go off into the pure sciences, mathematics, and engineering. Those who can’t make it into these courses, often end up in economics.

As more students pass out of schools, and the number of seats in the pure sciences, mathematics, and engineering grows only slowly, there is a natural increase in the demand for economics. This much is simple”.

Of course seldom people takes serious about the advancement of any subject, like the one now is economics on which T C A has been dewing for quite some time. And I have been taking note it. Because the only reason which I employ is ‘open mind’. 

To be precise for me it is not only interesting to read the questioning style of his writings but the way he puts things in unfolding ideas of economics. 

“Sure, there are nonsense in his writings may be occasionally” as my friend Jayakamal use to describe.   

T C A has been questioning the whole body of economics development since 1970s. His focuses has also shifted from macro economics to other area as he writes in recent column “Through clever research funding economists were persuaded to ask questions that had not only been already asked and answered but also which had no real answers. Growth theory and development economics are excellent examples of this but almost all of economics is like this.”

Private Consolidate Fund of India

It is not new when companies donate money to parties. But transformation of this idea is still not yet under way. 

There could be a Private Consolidate Fund of India (PCFI) which can fund political parties (candidates) that link practical policies that have alternative option to poster the society. 

In fact in the present funding system many people really do not know how much they spend on one non criminal candidate and a criminal candidate. 

This PCFI could be an independent bank of charity to manage funds. It should never accept money from any form of Government. 

According to Bibek many industrialist donated money to political parties. He writes in the Indian Express that: 

• “The UTVI channel has used the RTI Act to collect data on income tax returns filed by political parties. The figures are sometimes for 2007-08, sometimes for 2008-09. So we know, the largest donors have been Aditya Birla group, Torrent Power, Videocon, Salgaonkar, Dempo, Chowgule, Charitable Trust, Jubilant Enpro, Kamaljit Singh Ahluwalia, Timblo, Prime Builders and Developers, Honda Siel, Trans Indian Freight Services and United Phosphorus. 
  
• I am told some corporate boards insist donations should be evenly spread out, not necessarily equally, but perhaps in some proportion to seats in Parliament. But that’s not what this list shows. Aditya Birla prefers Congress, Kamaljit Singh Ahluwalia prefers BJP and Honda Siel prefers Samajwadi Party.”
  

Modi, Gujarat, India and a long distance of Muslim……………

Robert D. Kaplan writes in The Atlantic: 

• “……….a leader like Modi demonstrates how the century can also go very wrong when charismatic politicians use modern electoral tactics and technology to create and exploit social divisions, and then pursue their political and economic goals with cold bureaucratic efficiency. And here is why Modi is so important: although he is not his party’s standard-bearer going into this spring’s national elections, his popularity and influence in the BJP mean that he could one day be governing the world’s largest democracy. 
  
• Gujarat’s post on a frontier zone of the subcontinent exposed the state to repeated Muslim invasions. Some of the worst depredations came at the hands of the Turco-Persian ruler Mahmud of Ghazni, who swept down from eastern Afghanistan and in 1025 destroyed the seaside Hindu temple of Somnath. During a trip to India last fall, whenever I mentioned the events of 2002 to Hindu nationalists, they would lecture me about the crimes of Mahmud of Ghazni. For these Hindus, the past is alive, as if it happened yesterday. 
  
• …….the spread of education made people aware of their own histories, supplying them with grievances that they never had before. “The Hindu poor are blissfully ignorant of Mahmud of Ghazni. It is the middle class that now knows this history,” explained one local human-rights worker. That is why Hindu nationalism is strongest not among the poor and uneducated, but among the professional classes: scientists, software engineers, lawyers, and so on. In the eyes of this new, right-wing cadre of middle- and upper-middle-class Hindus, India was a civilization before it was a state, and while the state has had to compromise with minorities, the civilization originally was unpolluted (purely Hindu, that is)—even if the truth is far more complex. 
  
• At 5 p.m. sharp, I was ushered in. Modi sat behind a desk that looked over a long committee table. He wore traditional paijama pants and a long, elegant brown kurta—ironically, the traditional dress of India imported by the Mughals. A row of pens lined his pocket. Rimless glasses rested on his face. He had a clipped and distinguished salt-and-pepper beard. His was a handsome, welcoming visage. A small stack of documents lay in front of him. He thrust them at me before I even asked my first question. “I heard you were interested in development here, so here are your answers.” What he gave me was not the usual promotional brochures, but long lists of sourced statistics put together by an aide. Gujarat had experienced 10.2 percent annual GDP growth since 2002. It had eight new universities. In recent years, almost half the new jobs created in India were in Gujarat. The state ranked first in poverty alleviation, first in electricity generation. 
  
• I have met Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and both Bushes. At close range, Modi beats them all in charisma. Whenever he opened his mouth, he suddenly had real, mesmerizing presence. 
  
• I wondered if Modi felt differently behind closed doors. By all accounts, after the riots, he manically dedicated himself to development, sleeping less than four hours every night, up at 5 a.m. to check his e-mail and read the local papers, visiting about 3,000 of the 7,000 villages in the state, and empowering the lowest reaches of its bureaucracy through his slogan, “Less government, more governance.” 
  
• His words echoed through the empty room. “I have a toll-free number where callers hear my recorded voice and can make complaints against the government, and the relevant department must respond within a week.” 
  
• These forces appear sufficiently grounded either to reject Modi at the national level or to contain his worst impulses as he moves—as many expect he will—from Gandhinagar to New Delhi. After all, the churches and bastions in Diu are ruins not because they represent an idea that failed but because they represent no idea at all, whereas India has been an idea since Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930. Either Modi will fit his managerial genius to the service of that idea, or he will stay where he is. Hindus elsewhere in India are less communal-minded than those in Gujarat, and that will be his dilemma”. 
  

A article by Ashok V. Desai who writes:

• “He has reduced the leakage of government revenue that goes all over India into enrichment of politicians and bureaucrats, and diverted it to building up Gujarat’s infrastructure. And out of his own necessity, he has publicized Gujarat’s good administration. Modi’s success is more due to Gujarat than the other way round. But he is an autocrat, and has used his autocratic powers to give Gujarat a considerable competitive advantage over other states. His intellectual equipment is limited, but he has concentrated it in a remarkable manner to rebrand Gujarat, to his own collateral benefit.”
  

My learning…………….

I was not sure who will teach me what, how and why in my life in the past in even now. Why I am saying means I read an excellent piece in India-Seminar which bring some interesting questions and thoughts in “learning, edification, adult, child etc”. 

For example consider Sonia Kadyan article: 

• “Throughout my education, the only thing missing was learning. I didn’t know where its limits might start. Maybe we learn to gain praise and appreciation from adults or to show-off to fellow learners. It may include the knowledge of everything, but from an adults’ perspective. 
  
• I truly believe that the only place where one learns nothing is the school, and even if one does learn something there, it will be questioned sometime in the future,  
  
• After schooling, whenever I was at a social gatherings, I simply stood silently, waiting to be commanded because that was what I had learnt in my school, i.e., to shut my mouth, do as I was told, and not use my brain. 
  
• I don’t think that one can be such a bad learner that one fails to learn even 33 per cent of what is taught in 365 days and may fail again if given one more span of 365 days to learn it again. Surely it makes one doubt the things required to be learnt and definitely the person involved in teaching it. It is not a child’s fault if she frequently fails to learn a concept, totally alien and meaningless to her. 
  
• I was permitted by the school authorities to go and sit in room number 8, class I-B, roll number 37. I was handed over to some adults called ‘teachers’ who appeared to be mentally and physically sound. I had to call them ‘madam’ or ‘sir’ depending on their voice and the kind of clothes they wore, though they had the right to call me the way they pleased. I had to respect them no matter how much they humiliated me. 
  
• Going to school, carrying all the knowledge tools in my bag, still remains a mystery to me. I wonder why I had to go to school if all I had to learn was in my school bag itself. Teachers simply read to us from books and took tests; wasn’t this something any child can do once she masters literacy skills? As far as comprehension and implication of a concept are concerned, these were never valued by any teacher. 
  
• Everything was funny and strange at school, like eating only when the bell sounded, opening a book to read a piece of given knowledge only when the clock said or the teacher demanded. Some of my classmates would cry hard, wanting to go back home as if they had come to school at the cost of their ongoing top secret inventions. I disliked those long assemblies in the morning. I remember sweating profusely, about to faint on a hot morning, still praying, eyes closed, to someone whom I had never known and whenever I opened my eyes I found the teachers standing by as if I had just finished worshipping them. After one week, my actual class teacher came to me, held my ear and pulled me to I-B, shouting that it was there that I was supposed to sit and learn. 
  
• Then began my journey to be an ‘ideal student’. An ideal student is one who listens the most, questions the least, and never shows individuality.......... 
  
• All I did was to wake up early at the cost of my wonderful dreams and thoughtful imagination, walk into a scary building, sit there, stuck to the place allotted, continuously staring at the teacher in order to convey that I was listening to the nonsense syllabus articulated by her. I would sit there for six hours, six days a week, waiting with all concentration for the last long bell that would convey the end of yet another dull part of the day. 
  
• How could I risk my life simply to know the school building fully, when every time one tried, one faced the highest probability of meeting a heartless devil given charge of keeping children inside their allotted cells?.......... 
  
• Recess used to be the most threatening time of the day when adults went out of sight, to their caves, leaving children free to be on their own. This was the time when students, who pretended to be passive, adult-operated machines became active and alive – leaders, followers, enemies, explorers and social workers. I hated recess as it required me to show off my hidden potential to amaze other children and gain entry into their world. But how could I betray the adults? I chose to follow them and preferred sitting motionless at my place. I was practicing to turn myself into a mindless robot working on their demand. 
  
• In the very first grade I was made to believe in my inability to do anything on my own. There I found out that there is one teacher while there are forty students; the teacher can’t possibly give time to all of them but all forty students must give all their time and everything to that teacher. 
  
• Once my Hindi teacher asked us if we could recall all the Hindi consonants in the right order. At once I looked at the floor, hoping that she wouldn’t see me. I was lucky as her eyes fell on a boy. What a brave boy he was; he questioned her if she herself knew all the consonants. This was enough to bring out the devil in her. All she could think of in retaliation was to shout and punishing him for having dared to question her knowledge. In the end she left us speechless by reciting all the Hindi consonants in the exact order. I wonder why it matters if one can utter the alphabets in the correct order or even know them while one is not allowed to speak one’s mind, think what one wants, or say what one feels”. 
  

PS: I have never carried a bag, water bottle, even some time the authorised books, no uniform but walked 20 Km daily up and down by side seeing the farm field, mountain, men at work, cattle field till grade 12 with my mind. But I was asking myself what is the purpose of learning, why one should learn all which are learned by adult, etc. It took another few years to understand these questions.

Nonsense of polity

Apollo Hospitals Chairman, Prathap C Reddy, says “I faced bureaucratic heat as early as the registration of Apollo Health Services. The construction of the hospital in Chennai was stalled by the state's chief minister, MGR. Refusing to pay a price for urban land clearance, I turned to then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who wrote a strong letter to MGR seeking the reason for the delay. Meanwhile, Mrs Gandhi asked Andhra Pradesh chief minister T Anjiah to set aside land for Apollo in Hyderabad. 

The bigger problem, however, was a 320% customs duty on import of medical equipment. Though Mrs Gandhi granted certain exemptions, I had to spend two days every week pushing for clearances. Hospitals at the time were ineligible for funding, but Pranab Mukherjee who was the finance minister then, allowed Apollo to borrow 50% from Indian banks and the rest as foreign currency, as a special case. It took about six months to receive clearance for an IPO. Today the Apollo group has three major projects at various stages of development. ”

Funding for Ideas

There is a book review in the American Spectator titled “Good as Goldwater” By Robert Huberty from the February 2009 issue.

The review state that: 

• “Funding Fathers is a celebration of the unheralded achievements of great donors. For instance, the names of Kansas City philanthropist William Volker (1859–1947) and his nephew Harold Luhnow (1895–1978) are forgotten. In part, that’s because they put a time limit on the life of the grant-making Volker Fund they established. Unlike a Ford Foundation or Pew Charitable Trust, which exist in perpetuity to support causes contrary to the donors who created them, the Volker Fund honored its donors’ intentions during their lifetimes. During its three decades of existence the Volker Fund achieved far more than William Volker could have imagined.  
• In a Kansas City archive Hoplin and Robinson located a scrap of paper dated May 7, 1945, on which William Volker authorized a $2,000 grant request by Friedrich Hayek to defray the travel expenses of 17 Americans to the first Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Switzerland. It was during the high tide of Keynesianism (and one day before Nazi Germany’s surrender) that Volker made it possible for American free-market economists and writers to meet their counterparts in war-torn Europe.  
• The $2,000 grant helped pay for economists Milton Friedman, Frank Knight, Ludwig von Mises, and George Stigler, writers Felix Morley, John Davenport, and Henry Hazlitt, and institution-builders Leonard Read of the Foundation for Economic Education and F. A. Harper, who would found the Institute for Humane Studies, to confer with like-minded Europeans about the fate of the postwar world. Hoplin and Robinson’s diligent research also uncovers that Volker subsequently provided teaching stipends for Hayek, Mises, Morley, and economist Murray Rothbard and sponsored lectures by Milton Friedman that would become his book Capitalism and Freedom. One wonders what grants might have a comparable impact today.  
• Funding Fathers is a timely book because it reminds conservatives that while elections come and go, good ideas prevail”.   
  

Where is the State here?

T K Arun writes in the ET “The Sapiens in Homo Sapiens stands for wisdom, the ability to reason. Ideation is a defining feature of the human being. 

From stone implements, mastering fire, mastering animals and crop husbandry, smelting ore to produce metal, using the metal to create more refined tools and weapons, conquest and subjugation, migration to all corners of the planet, music and art, language and literature, war and worship, mathematics and astronomy, rebellion and revolution, missiles and missions to the moon — all milestones in man’s march from a primitive biped in a corner of Africa to the supreme species whose ambition now soars beyond the sun embody the power of thought fusing with action”. 

Who get easy access to ideas?

In there is a list of people who are influencing India in which it says that “India does not have easy points of reference for compiling a list, like a domestic Eton and Oxbridge (though Doon/Mayo and St Stephen’s might like to think otherwise), gentleman’s clubs (India International Centre may be a surrogate, but you cannot inherit membership there), and landed gentry (the only maharajahs who count are those in politics). And we used some key tests to whittle down from a long initial list, excluding those in high office today because that would be stating the obvious”.

In fact it further says “Then there are the grey eminences who have star power wherever they go, and who can help settle contentious issues (as APJ Abdul Kalam did on the nuclear deal, or Jyoti Basu). And people who wield power behind the scenes, while the Khan trio and sundry actresses traipse across the silver screen—film moghuls like Yash Chopra who would constitute the Establishment of the film world”.

College is for learning how to think

VV writes in the BS about “Elementary DNA of James Watson” 

What is interesting to me is the “College is for learning how to think”  

“From Childhood:

  Accept only advice that comes from experience, not revelation.

  Hypocrisy in search of social acceptance erodes your self-respect.

From Adolescence: 

  College is for learning how to think.

  Knowing “why” (an idea) is more important than learning “what” (a fact.)

  New ideas usually need new facts.

  Seek out bright as opposed to popular friends.

From Young Adulthood to University:

  Keep Your Intellectual curiosity much broader than your thesis objective.

  Extend yourself intellectually through courses that initially frighten you.

From Observing Leo Szilard and Max Delbruck:

  Avoid Boring People.

  Science is highly social.

  Leave a research field before it bores you.

From Postdoctoral Years at Cambridge:

  Never be the brightest person in the room.

  Work with a teammate who is your intellectual equal.

  Always have someone to save you.

From Early Years at Harvard:

  Bring your research into your lectures.

  Challenge your students’ abilities to move beyond facts.

  Academic institutions do not easily change themselves.

From Chapters relating to Teaching Experience and the Nobel Prize:

  Travel makes your science stronger.

  Exaggerations do not void basic truths.

  Controversial recommendations require political backing.

  Challenge rage through intermediaries”.

Class is like gathering sand with a sieve

When I see or meet a group of likeminded economists, policymaker and researcher I utterly deem every time what the Mint Columnist Ramesh Ramanathan says “I can honestly state that mobilizing the middle class is like gathering sand with a sieve”.

Breeding politics of politicians but people have no deliberate choice out of socialist minds

It may be interesting to read these lines of great visionary Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, on (August 14, 1947, in the Constituent Assembly) Indian “While India is attaining freedom, She is attaining it in a manner which does not produce joy in the hearts of people or a radiant smile on their faces. Some of those who were charged with the responsibility for the administration of this country, tried to accentuate communal consciousness and bring about the present result which is a logical outcome of the policies adopted by the lesser mind of Britain. But I would never ever blame them. Were we not victims, ready victims, so to say, of the separatist tendencies foisted on us? Should we not now correct our fault of character, our domestic despotism, our intolerance which has assumed the different forms of obscurantism of narrow mindedness, of superstition, bigotry? Others were able to play on our weakness because we had them. I would like, therefore, to take this opportunity to call for self examination, for a searching of heart”.

But politicians use all the Nobel ideas to brutalize the free society.