yazadjal.com

Interesting interview of Jagdish Bhagwati on “Walk the Talk.” Shekhar Gupta gets him to talk about his Cambridge days with Manmohan Singh and Amartya Sen, and about his defence of globalisation. Bhagwati is gentle on his opponents but his quietly damning putdowns are superb.
On Arundhati Roy: Arundhati Roy is unfortunately…unfortunate because she’s our […]

The new Becker Posner blog promises some rich goodies in the area of law and economics. After all, how many blogs do we have by Nobel Prize winners and judges at the US Court of Appeals?
I suspect the man to thank must be Lawrence Lessig.

The most important thing that struck me during my recent Pune trip was how much I enjoyed the scenery. The Western Ghats are beautiful, especially this time of the year, just after the monsoons. (I’m a camera klutz, so no pics. Sorry!)
But this was not the first time I’d travelled to Pune. I’ve done the […]

Fark.com is full of weird headlines and even whackier “discussions”, but once in a while something thought-provoking does indeed make an appearance. An example is this story from UK. Short version: Son finds out from mother that she was raped by their neighbour a week earlier. Son goes to confront rapist neighbour, who allegedly says […]

Parth at Spontaneous Order asks a sharp question:
My personal example: my younger brother has a house in Detroit with electricity, water, phone connections. I’ve an apartment in Delhi with similar connections. Every other month or so, the telephone linesman would knock on the door, “Kaise he SAAB?!” You know what he is asking, surely not […]

I’m on a flying visit to Pune to deliver a talk to IAS officers about Praja and e-governance. The venue is the lovely and verdant Tata Management Training Centre and it feels great to blog while hearing the koels in the garden outside.
But more interesting than the destination was the journey to Pune. I caught […]

Thank heavens for good, honest scholarship. For an Indian libertarian living in India, fighting for freedom from the centralized socialist state, Sumantra Bose’s book Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace presents strong arguments that prove that the free market solution to India’s travails - free trade, sound money, property rights and governance based on […]

Sometime today AnarCapLib would get it’s 30,000th visitor. Yay! I know it’s not too much of a landmark, but it a step towards greater things!
Of course, this blog takes about four hours to get 30,000 vistors.

I don’t much care for the Blogstreet blog rankings. (Once again, not out of any spite. This blog is currently ranked # 8 out of 1,240 Indian blogs on Blogstreet)
Blogstreet relies exclusively on blogrolling.com for the ranking. Which leads to funny results. Check out the top 100 blogs. #11 stopped blogging four months […]

I’m looking for a program that can covert basic formatting like bold and italics from MS Word to HTML. I have some stuff written in Word that I’d like to post, but it needs tedious HTML tagging. Is there any way this can be done automatically? I’d prefer free software compatible with Windows.
And no, please […]

Leon Louw is a libertarian from Africa, where state failure is the norm. He runs the Johannesburg-based Free Market Foundation and is the director of the Good Laws Project. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize along with his wife, Frances Kendall. These are previously unpublished excerpts from an impromptu interview with Sauvik […]

I’d like to welcome Sauvik Chakraverti as our new guest blogger. Sauvik is a freelance journalist and the winner of the first Frédéric Bastiat Prize for Journalism. He was for many years the Senior Assistant Editor at the Economic Times. Sauvik’s books include Antidote:Essays Against the Socialist Indian State, and a sequel, Antidote2 apart from […]

The Politician’s corpse was laid away.
While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged,
I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.
“Epitaph on the Politician” by Hilaire Belloc (1870 - 1953).
I know it’s a few days late, but that’s what I felt when Arafat died. However I only saw the quote today on Survival Arts.

Parth at Spontaneous Order has a pithy post on people who moan about “commercialisation” of festivals.
Commerce was always part of festivals–did all Indians, say 50/100 years ago, make their own fire crakers or Ganesh idols? No, they bought them. So what we see today is not a new phenomenon of commercialisation but simply the old […]

The latest Bharteeya Blog Mela is up at Nerve Endings Firing Away. Good job Patrix! And I’m happy to see Hindi blogs becoming a regular feature. The blog mela schedule is here, and next month we’ll see the mela hosted on one of the earliest Hindi blogs, Debashish’s नुक्ता चीनी Nukta Chini.
The next mela […]

I’m going to follow MadMan’s excellent example. My birthday may be five months away, but hey, you don’t need an excuse to gift me a book from my Amazon Wish List.

I’m currently reading Lynne Truss’s excellent Eats, Shoots & Leaves. After searching high and low for a paperback copy (I generally don’t like lugging hardcovers), I finally found one at Book Zone on Dadabhai Naoroji Road. I also discovered that Book Zone is run by the same friends who run the excellent Sterling […]

Wanna see some food porn? Go on, click here (and yes, it’s safe for work).
… sparing no rhetorical excess, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has denounced Hardee’s new Monster ThickBurger, a concoction that contains 2/3 lb of beef, four slices of bacon, three slices of a cheese-like substance and mayonnaise, as ‘food […]

This is just what I needed to motivate me to run a bit more.
Endurance running, unique to humans among primates and uncommon in all mammals other than dogs, horses and hyenas, apparently evolved at least two million years ago and probably let human ancestors hunt and scavenge over great distances. That was probably decisive in […]

I thought Maharashtra’s compulsory playing of the national anthem in movie theatres was outright silly (forced imposition of “respect” has always rubbed me the wrong way), but this story beats that hands down:
Mexico Fines Woman For Bungling National Anthem

A woman who fumbled a few phrases of Mexico’s national anthem while singing the song before a […]