yazadjal.com

I am glad you people liked my fable. But no - laws are not complicated because lawyers write them or interpret them. They aren’t complicated because lawyers are addicted to verbiage. They are complicated because our laws tend to micromanage the real world, something they shouldn’t do. The real world being complex, the laws […]

Everybody seems to be getting on the economics Nobel bandwagon. Madsen Pirie at the Adam Smith Institute in London has this in his 2004 Almanack:
The Nobel Prize in Economics is awarded to ‘the world’s consumers’ on the grounds that they do more for economics than any academic. An Ohio housewife is chosen by lottery to […]

Shubhrangshu Roy ends the year with some hope seen through Bihari eyes.
Nothing good that’s happened to us ever happened because our government planned it that way. Everything that’s happening is despite our government being there. And it’s happening because the nation’s freed itself from the fear of living under siege, brought about by years of […]

JK thoroughly fisks our very own Resident Idiot.
Like me, are you wondering what happened to our old favorite — the globaliser of dissent — Arundhati Roy? Well, wonder no more. She’s most probably preparing for another world. Not what you thought ;-) just the mela called the World Social Forum.

Samuel Brittan adds his voice to those wanting reform in the economics Nobel prize.
If Caldwell is right then the Nobel Prize for economics was a mistake as the subject could not expect the kind of steady incremental progress achievable in the physical sciences - or for that matter in ancillary studies such as statistical theory. […]

Jivha doesn’t like the latest Maruti Zen ad because it reinforces stereotypes.
In India’s male-dominated and still-feudal society, especially up north like Delhi, Bihar, U.P, Haryana etc., we can do without reinforcing stereotypes that the male is the victor and the female the vanquished. I’m sure there are other, more meaningful and tasteful ways to sell […]

There was once a small law. So small that it consisted of only one small paragraph. When it spoke it had the clarity and simplicity of the young. Everyone understood what it meant, and they could interpret it.
The law protected property rights. It said that no one could take away anyone’s property by force, […]

Brad Edmonds at LewRockwell.com spends his Christmas Eve identifying with Ebenezer Scrooge. In this era with continual sound bites about corporate social responsibility, Edmonds suggests that “the two most charitable things you can do are start a business, and reduce government.”
Scrooge protests that Marley was a good businessman in life; and Scrooge himself is a […]

Note:
You should probably skip this. The interesting stuff, like a fisking of the Resident Idiot is below.

I think I will make a series of posts on Common Errors in Reasoning. Once I am done, I will have a handy bunch of URLs I can point people to when they make the same error for the […]

The memoirs of Luis Bunuel (1900-1983)
Guest piece by Sauvik Chakraverti
It is through sheer luck –- or should it be called serendipity -– that I came across this extract, in a book called Journeys: An Anthology edited by Robyn Davidson (Picador India: 2002). Luis Bunuel lived to the age of 83 and wrote these words towards […]

While “with us or against us” has been a staple in US foreign policy (GWB is a forceful supporter of the theme), I find it surprising that bloggers who are rabidly anti Bush also use this principle as a crutch.
Last week, I happened to comment on Jivha’s post on Uma Bharti forgetting development / […]

A friend, Zainab Bawa (zainabbawa [at] yahoo.com) has the following books on law and human rights for sale. She lives in Byculla, Bombay. Contact her directly if you are interested in buying.

1) Humanitarian Law - edited by Rose Varghese and M.K. Balachandran, Justice Krishna Iyer
Published by ICRC, New Delhi, 1999
Book in Brand New Condition
Original Price […]

Indians routinely say “alphabets” when they mean letters. Most of us don’t even know that an alphabet is the complete collection of letters of a language. Besides, this mistake is uniquely Indian. (Perhaps Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Nepalis also make the mistake, but let us leave that aside for a moment.) I once remarked to a […]

Please read this article over at the McKinsey quarterly. Free registration required, but worth it.

Spare a thought for six unemployed Iraqis, former doubles of Saddam Hussein. Opinion Journal suggests a Vegas career for them. I’d say Bollywood beckons as well. Hindi films will have new scope for double roles with these guys playing both hero and heavy. Knowing the love our peoples share this is a cracker idea!
Update from […]

I don’t call people stupid or silly, or any person’s arguments idiotic. The reason, as I’ve explained in my scrape with Jivha sometime back, is that if a person’s argument is self-evidently idiotic, then it is redundant to call him as such and it is an insult to my readers’ intelligence to explain why […]

Ankh has a piece on the Resident Idiot. Don’t know who he is? Well, we’ve fisked him here.

The Mises Daily Article features an interview of Sudha Shenoy, one of the few Indian proponents of Austrian economics. (The only other that I know is my former boss, Parth Shah of the Centre for Civil Society) Shenoy has strong words to say about the economics profession.
I’m prepared to say that nearly every economics department […]

But Anya misunderstands. The state of the Congress Party has really nothing to do with its performance in the state elections. It could have swept these elections and I’d still have predicted that it would lose in the General Elections next year.
Why do Congressmen stick on to Sonia as their leader when […]

Saltanat e Shah Alam
az Dilli ta Palam
The Sultanate of Shah Alam extends all the way from Delhi to Palam (then a village on the outskirts of Delhi.)

Shah Alam was one of the later Mughal “emperors”. I was reminded of this sher when reflecting on the state of the Congress party under Sonia Gandhi. Um.. Not […]