yazadjal.com

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.

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 […]

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 […]

In a free society, which of the following contracts should be enforceable?

“If the contractee of the first part becomes so totally incapacitated that he can justifiably be called a living vegetable, the contractee of the second part (Dr…) agrees to administer a poison to him so as to cause his death”
“If either party to this […]

Jivha makes a post that essentially says: “If school dropout Uma Bharati can become CM of Madhya Pradesh, why can’t school dropout Sonia Gandhi become PM of India?”
Then he wants Ms. Bharati’s supporters to
‘justify why an illiterate nun is fit to lead India’s largest state instead of giving me adolescent comparative arguments along the […]

Jivha says
Pramod Mutalik, VHP organising secretary and Bajrang Dal South India convenor(not exactly the best of references I know!), says that even though the “means” adopted by Mattennavar(planting bombs) might be wrong, the purpose was “genuine”.
Such arguments are so alarmingly stupid that refuting them debase the intellect of the person doing so, but nevertheless, refuted […]

As I was saying, the unions and the government failed Mumbai.
Unions are supposed to get a good deal for their workers. Instead, they got what must be the worst possible deal.
Advocates of government planning assured us that the government could manage Mumbai’s transition from a factory city to a financial hub, with […]

I had mentioned to Yazad that I would do a post on sweatshops, but I haven’t done so. Instead, I’ve written about Ayodhya and something about mechanisms.
Now I think I will post about malls and multiplexes.

You know we have a lot of them coming up all over Mumbai. All of them are being built […]

Indira!…
This morning’s Asian Age, has an editorial by H.Y Sharada Prasad about Indira Gandhi titled “What did she do for India?”. This is quite an important question, because whether it is far flung villages or Upper Middle Class dinner parties, she is considered oddly enough as a Martyr, a Saintly governess, who took a battered […]

Note:
This was supposed to be a draft, but inadvertantly got published. I’d have changed its status, but as there is a comment already, I’ve left it as it is and only removed the unfinished sentence.
Yes CK, I had you in mind while I was composing the post, and the reason I had put this as […]

Sauvik’s suggestion (also Parth Shah’s) to auction off the Ayodhya site is a really bad one.
That’s because- I thought I’d choke before I say this - in this case, theory and practice do not match.
If the government actually conducts the auction, the bidding match will come down to a fight between a […]

Something that has been bothering me in the context of Libertarian thought and India, has been the brutal treatment in Indian society, almost exclusively reserved for Dalits. Though some comparisons maybe drawn with slavery, and colour discrimination, possibly even to the Tutsi-Hutu rivalry in Central Africa. But one thing that distinguishes it is the length […]

The Department of Philosophy at the Univ. Of Mumbai, snagged Dr. Peter Koslowski to give a couple of lectures for them, the first one was on “The EU and the end of the association of the Nation and the State”. A very promising topic indeed.

He started out by talking about the origins of the modern […]

The Socialist-Mercantilist myopia that seems to drip from almost every sentence of Mr. Bidwai’s piece Don’t Privatise Oil Companies at Rediff.com needs to be addressed not only because of the ill conceived reasoning but also because it perpetuates the very myths which got us into the Public Sector mess in the first place. This being […]

A believer and an atheist were neighbours. The believer was poor, jobless, lonely and hence completely depressed in life. On the other hand the atheist was rich, had a lovely home and was a happy person. The believer never understood this dichotomy.
Once he sat in front of the idol of god and complained. “Why, […]

I’ve found the keys to my home again and so I am out of here. As a farewell gift to Yazad, here are some cool suggestions for names to give to his daughters.

Maya
Ganga
Sheetal

Why? Figure it out yourself.

Hi this is Ravikiran here. I used to blog over at The Examined Life. But I’ve unilaterally decided to make this my home for now.
Why?
Well what happened was that yesterday in a fit of temporary insanity, I went and deleted a lot of files on my server. What I didn’t realise at […]