yazadjal.com

In response to Slavery is Freedom? Sauvik says that in his post, he was just talking of what Nepal’s monarch should do without taking up the general question of whether monarchies are better than democracies at doing the things that a government should be doing. It doesn’t seem like that to me, but […]

I’m afraid Sauvik’s post is the most bizarre one I’ve read from someone who identifies himself as a “libertarian” So now the way to achieve our ideals of limited government is to hand over absolute power to a monarch? How convenient! If only we had received the benefit of his insight earlier, the […]

In Defence of the Youth, and the young girl in particular
Methinks the unfortunate girl from Delhi Public School whose “boyfriend” – if he deserves the title – turned out to be a real nasty piece of works, is the “victim” in the much publicized MMS case. And no one is considering how she can […]

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 These are previously unpublished excerpts from an impromptu interview with Sauvik […]

Rejoice! For I have restarted my blog.

I have been reading two books - The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker and The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins. Both are related to evolution, though they deal with different topics. A review is forthcoming in the future. (as against forthcoming in the past? -ed.)
Anyway, this post is to announce to the world that I […]

Well Yazad, congrats and all for winning the Blog Mela, but why did you buy this using your Amazon gift certificate?

Well, now that he has gone off on a jamboree to Bangalore, the average IQ of the blog has gone up. I thought I’d restore the balance a bit by putting in dumb joke I read off the DNRC newsletter
After a tragic communication mixup, Flossie Mongo devoured her husband of 30 years, Lester. […]

Can someone help me please?
I registered my domain about 2 years back with Win2000hoster.com. I was young and naive, and it seemed like a good and cheap deal at the time, but now I’ve realised that the problem is that they are both the hosting company and the domain registrar, and there doesn’t seem to […]

Quick, without googling, tell me who is Norman Borlaug?
Once again. No googling please. I’ve talked of him on my blog earlier so no looking there either, and if you know about him only from looking there earlier, you are disqualified from answering. It is supposed to be Indian tradition to be eternally grateful to […]

All those who use Movabletype, please install MT Blacklist on your site to protect against comment spam.
We can add the URLs that the spammers advertise into a blacklist. MT Blacklist will purge the comments containing those URLs from the system and prevent any further comments with those URLs. You can import the blacklists […]

If I vote in the coming Lok Sabha elections, my vote will be the least valuable in India. Where am I?

Turns out that my vote is not actually the least valuable. That honour goes to a resident of Outer Delhi, which has a constituency size of 3.1 million. My constituency - Thane comes second - […]

When I talked about legalizing corruption, I was thinking of payments to political parties. Recently the CII called upon its members to donate to political parties only by cheques and in accordance with the law.
Now whether they pay openly or on the sly, companies (or individuals or unions for that matter) are not doing it […]

Ravages asks about my argument for legalizing corruption, “And if corruption were legalized, would you have a law that says how much of corruption is within the limit?”
Actually, if I remember correctly, the Supreme Court has answered that question in atleast one case. What happened was that a company claimed the bribes it paid at […]

Ok people, I have some posts pending. I want to make a post actually defending Nehru and another post attacking Nehru. I am also not going to shy away from the challenge thrown at me by a couple of commenters, asking me What Would I Do In 1947.
This is in addition to the next post […]

Look people, Nehru’s claim to greatness is that he was supposedly a visionary. A visionary doesn’t mean “someone who saw visions”. If your visions are any different from hallucinations, then they must roughly correspond to what actually happens in the future. So if you think that Nehru was a visionary, then it is only […]

We shall now continue our quest to calculate the GDP of our economy consisting of two people, me and Yazad. I shall now answer the four questions that were asked in the previous post.

The GDP here is Rs. 260. This is how:
Ravi: 70 rupees of value-from-wheat + 30 rupees of value-from-dancer = 100
Yazad: 70 rupees […]

One Kersi Shroff makes the following comment in response to this entry of mine
Just one little point to be noted….
The IITs which are government run educational institutions giving top notch education at amazingly reasonable prizes(compared to the top western universities) were entirely a Nehruvian socialist idea. So stop critcizing Nehru when you’re just a […]

A female colleague has put up a copy of the poem If… by Rudyard Kipling in her cubicle. But she has changed the last line to “And which is more, you will be grown up my child”
Such violence to my favourite poem hit close to my heart, but I could see that she […]

Today’s Economic Times carries an editorial entitled “Democracy - receding tide?” by Bronislaw Geremek (A former Solidarity leader). The article talks about the disillusionment with democracy in many parts of the world, as highlighted by The Pew Global Attitudes Project for 2003. Though people in countries with limited democracy seem to want more freedoms, those […]