Introducing: The Tandem Umbrella! (link via Kingsley on Google Reader).
Rihanna jokes have already been used by almost everything that post links to, so we’ll stick with Daisy, Daisy.
Also, this reminds me that I have to speak to my good friend Boris.
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Links, Weirder Than Fiction | Tagged: a bicycle built for two, boris bhartriraj pandey, daisy bell, hal 9000, kingsley, rihanna, tandem, umbrella, we will go tandem as man and wife | 
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Posted by Aadisht
The Wikipedian form of protest first proposed by this xkcd strip has now caught on in the real world. (via)
Leave a Comment » | Links | Tagged: citation needed, hack, wikipedia, wikipedian protester, xkcd | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
This has all the makings of another headless-chicken-gate:
Without naming Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), the Shiv Sena on Friday made a scathing attack, calling them “bird flu affected poultry, that has no market value”.
Referring to the recent trouble in Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra by MNS, the editorial in ‘Samana’, the Sena mouthpiece said, “in an attempt to project as crusaders of Mumbai, these boys behaved in a manner that is nothing but a desperate attempt to get free publicity”.
(link)
Also, the Shiv Sena as the voice of (relative) reason? Who would have thought the day would come?
Leave a Comment » | Links, MSM | Tagged: bird flu, h5n1, headless chicken, hindustan times, maharashtra, maharashtra navnirman sena, poultry, pti, raj thackeray, ronen sen, saamna, shiv sena, xenophobia | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
(Cannot… resist… virgin… joke)
Mint comes up with a perplexing paragraph:
While this will be the first time Tata Teleservices will be partnering with a brand such as Virgin, Branson has already formed two similar alliances globally.
(emphasis mine)
So, it’s not Virgin’s first time, but it is Tata Teleservices’? I’m confused.
Leave a Comment » | Links, PJs, Telecom | Tagged: first time, mint, richard branson, tata teleservices, ttsl, virgin, virgin mobile, virginity | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
Barun Mitra has a Mint oped today on why not allowing the free sale of agricultural land is a bad idea. Excerpts:
Which leads us to the question: Why is it legitimate to acquire land for industrial use, but prohibit farmers from consolidating and expanding their landholding to improve agriculture? Why shouldn’t a farmer be able to legitimately acquire a thousand acres?
Indian industry can raise capital from the global market on the basis of a prospectus, which promises performance in the future. But Indian farmers can’t raise adequate capital on the basis of the land asset which they already possess.
…
However, it is critical that the value of the land of farmers, often their only asset, is maximized, and it is made simple to capitalize. The problem facing the poor is not their poverty, but inability to capitalize their assets. Typically, agricultural land hardly fetches Rs2-3 lakh per acre. Agriculture income, even if the land is cropped twice a year, can hardly be more than Rs30,000 per acre, at current productivity levels.
…
The industry could also offer shares or bonds in lieu of land. Or even provide alternative land if the farmer decides to continue with his vocation. In an open land market, with protected property rights and security of contract, there would be a wide range of choices to meet almost every requirement.
Very much worth reading. So do read.
Leave a Comment » | Infrastructure, Links, Public Policy and Politics | Tagged: agricultural land, assured return, barun mitra, collateral, land reform, land sale, land transfer, lease, liberty institute, mint, mortgage, property, real estate, rent, securitisation, singur, tata nano | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
Four months ago, I wrote a post on how allowing the free sale of agricultural land for any use was the best possible move against agricultural distress. My logic in that post was:
I now worry that I gave the impression back in October that allowing the sale and conversion of agricultural land was a magic bullet, and that once this happened we would enter a happy agricultural paradise. It isn’t. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. You need other things too. The three most important ones I can think of are:
Happily, this week’s Swaminomics (h/t: Ravikiran) is all about rural roads. Key excerpts:
For every million rupees spent, roads raised 335 people above the poverty line, and R&D 323. Every million rupees spent on education reduced poverty by 109 people, and on irrigation by 67 people. The lowest returns came from subsidies that are the most popular with politicians – subsidies on credit (42 people), power (27 people) and fertilisers (24 people).
…
For decades, rural roads in India were neglected by most states. Besides, rural employment schemes, starting with Maharashtra’s Employment Guarantee Scheme in the 1970s, created the illusion that durable rural roads could be built with labour-intensive techniques. In practice labour-intensive roads proved not durable at all, and those built in the dry season vanished in the monsoons.
The posts on rural banking and agricultural finance will happen sometime in the future. Work is horrible this month.
Leave a Comment » | Finance, Infrastructure, Links, Public Policy and Politics | Tagged: agricultural distress, agricultural finance, auction, capital intensive, collateral, competition, debt service, deregulation, employment guarantee, farmland, gearing, indebtedness, labour intensive, land, land use, leverage, mortgage, poverty, real estate, rural banking, rural road, swami aiyer, swaminomics | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
This Boston Globe oped (free registration might be required) is astonishing. The author, somebody named Jeremy Kahn, has violated the Sominism-cheat-sheet and Neelakantan’s guide to writing about India left, right, and centre. He appears to have actually understood the nuances of what he’s writing about! And he doesn’t mention caste, growing inequality, pollution, or elephants on the road even once!
OK, that’s the sarcasm out of the way. Seriously, the oped is a very good read. It’s about how Third World conditions are forcing cellphone companies, banks, and Tata Motors to innovate and come up with low-cost technology, and how this means that design and innovation is now splitting up and being driven by two different things: luxury in the First World, and productivity and low costs in the Third World. In the bargain, First World and Third World innovation are both leading to high technology, and the Third World is now actually in a position to export technology to the First World.
Excerpts:
This might seem like a classic example of the Third World struggling to catch up with the First. After all, people in the United States and Europe have been using ATM cards and the Internet for years to perform the simple banking tasks Das is only now able to do. But look again: The technology used to bring slum-dwellers like Das their first bank accounts is so advanced that it isn’t available to even the most tech-savvy Americans – at least not yet.
…
This represents a stunning reversal of the traditional flow of innovation. Until recently, consumers in the Third World also had to tolerate third-rate technology. Africa, India, and Latin America were dumping grounds for antiquated products and services. In a market in which some people still rode camels, a 50-year-old car engine was good enough. Innovation remained the exclusive domain of the developed world. Everyone else got hand-me-downs.
…
And as they do, companies are confronting the unique challenge of making high-tech products cheaply enough to make a profit. In some cases, this means shifting jobs for talented designers and engineers to the developing world – not just to save labor costs, but in order to better understand the markets they are now trying to reach.
“Developing markets offer the best opportunity for global firms to discover what is likely to be ‘next practice,’ as contrasted with today’s best practice,” Prahalad has written. “The low end is a new source of innovation.”
…
In a globalized world, people in emerging markets want first-class products – but at prices they can afford. Meeting that demand, particularly in countries where basic infrastructure is weak, requires more creativity than designing a product for a more advanced, affluent market.
Read, read. It’s worth the two-minutes it takes to register.
Leave a Comment » | Business, Finance, Links, MSM, Technology, Telecom | Tagged: axis bank, basix, biometric atm, boston globe, bottom of pyramid, citibank, ck prahalad, design, first world, innovation, jeremy kahn, microfinance, mobile banking, motofone, sominism, tata nano, Technology, technology transfer, third world, transaction banking | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
I think even mommybloggers will not object if I call property broking a fraud occupation. After all, it seems to be giving Prakash Kumar Thakur far too much free time:
“It’s emotional blackmail,” declares Prakash Kumar Thakur, basking in the attention brought by his court case against the tennis star. She has been asked by a court to appear before it on March 10.
“Yes I am happy,” says the 28-year-old property broker, and adds, “the admission means she knows she is guilty”.
…
Sportspersons alone aren’t at the receiving end of Thakur’s appeal spree. He has also filed a case against a major publisher for “wrongly printing” the Tricolour in a Class VI book, and moved the court against the film Hanuman Returns. Pandey and he have made everyone from the film’s producer to Sharmila Tagore a party for joking about Hindu gods like Hanuman.
Recently, when a woman’s organisation calling itself the Lathi Brigade asked them to withdraw the case against Sania, saying the picture of her with her feet on a table that also sported a Tricolour was the result of trick photography, they too got slapped with a legal notice. Thakur’s charge is that their comment amounted to contempt of court.
(link)
Someone, file a 295A case against him. Emotionally blackmailing muscular Gult girls offends my religious sentiments.
Leave a Comment » | Links, Public Policy and Politics | Tagged: 295A, bhopal, flag code, fraud occupation, frivolous lawsuit, legal system, muscular gult girl, prakash kumar thakur, property broker, sania mirza | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
Two points:
First, Falstaff is a cheap guy. He talks about Coase and childfree-airline tickets without referencing me.
Second, a more important point about mommyblogs in general.
I’ve been discussing this point with junta, and the consensus seems to be that kids will become irritating when they are given too much attention. The more attention a kid gets from its parents, the more it thinks of itself. It becomes spoilt, throws tantrums, and eventually the Kansa Society has to be called in.
This is also probably the reason why kids in Delhi and Chennai are the worst behaved. They’re brought up in environments full of doting female relatives. Jobless doting female relatives, who do nothing but stay at home. In the case of Chennai, because they actually are unemployed, and in the case of Delhi, because employment for Delhi women usually means fraud stay-at-home stuff like garment designing. With non-stop attention lavished upon it, the kid becomes a monster. While in Bombay, both the parents are off at work, the kid has to fend for itself, and grows up a clean and sober Goregaon type personality, with excellent social skills, and a bindaas attitude. In my months in Bombay, I saw Gujew aunties abusing Landmark for stocking books. I saw people expectorating with enthusiasm. I saw Jain monks in a fistfight. But I never saw kids throwing tantrums.
I have seen this with my own nephews and nieces also. The one who curls up with a Roald Dahl and generally doesn’t talk is the one whose parents are a doctor and a physiotherapist, and who therefore hardly see him. On the other hand, the Nephew Who Bites has lived his entire life with a stay-at-home mother, a stay-at-home grandmother, a drop-in-practically-ceaselessly grandmother, and a father who is an ameer-baap-ki-bigdi-aulaad, and so doesn’t need to work. Between these extremes, I have a soft-spoken and well-behaved niece whose parents run the nine-to-five gamut. And where I’m concerned, Ma and Papa used to just leave me alone and whack me every once in a while, and I am now a model of manners, rectitude, decency and sobriety. So much so, that people refuse to believe that I’m Punjabi.
Anyway, the point of all this is that a surplus of attention turns kids into monsters, fit only for slaughter by the Kansa Society.
And when it comes to giving kids too much attention, mommyblogging is the pinnacle. Think about it. You devote an entire blog to the kid, and nothing but the kid. And while in the normal course of things, the kid forgets the attention it gets as an infant, here the attention is public, archived, and up to be accessed at will. The Little Emperor generation created by the Chinese one-child policy will be as nothing compared to the generation created by mommyblogging. Legions of spoilt brats will stalk the nation, thinking too much of themselves.
Mommybloggers have a lot to answer for.
Leave a Comment » | Blogs and Blogging, Kansa Society, Links, Racism | Tagged: airline ticket, chennai, childfree, coase, delhi, falstaff, goregaon type, Kansa Society, little emperor, mommyblogger, mommyblogging, mumbai, tantrum | Permalink
Posted by Aadisht
One of the disadvantages of making a quiz is that the people who’ll attend my quiz tend to also read my blog. So, you can’t link to really awesome stuff you find because it’ll tip them off to your questions, or at least the source of your questions.
One such awesome thing which I can reveal now that the quiz is done is a blog called Round Dice. There’re very few posts, and the author stopped blogging altogether this February, but all the posts there are most awesome.
Posts from this blog which eventually became questions include one on kolams, one on the tribhanga pose, and one on Bhaskaracharya’s Lilavati. The tribhanga post is especially awesome, because it manages to link Chalukya sculpture to structural engineering, the Vitruvian man, and Anna Nicole Smith. Read.
There was also one post which didn’t really have any question-worthy funda, but which I particularly liked. It’s on the difference between being traditional and being conservative:
As I see it, a traditionalist is someone who uses the past in his/her daily life. For a traditionalist, the past is neither dead nor inaccessible. If a particular tradition no longer works — slavery or foot-binding or burning widows — it is modified to make a new tradition. The modification is usually a series of minor changes: a sari may be exchanged for a salwar, a particular dish may no longer be cooked, a man may go to Lamaze class, a Bollywood movie may include a gay character, etc.
In contrast, a conservative’s relationship is not with the past, but with the future. The conservative does not love the past as much as he fears the future. The Shiv Sainiks flip out on Valentine’s day not because Urvashi never sent a “I heart you” to Pururava (she did), but because their version of the future only permits docile women. The actual past is quite irrelevant for a conservative.
Beautifully put.
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Posted by Aadisht