Rumi Nations

Well, the economic philosophy of Ayn Rand as sought to be implemented by one of her chief acolytes, Mr. Greenspan, has already been shown to be a massive failure. I think. But here's the more important 'Idea of Ayn Rand.' I think it's about applying some THOUGHT to one's place or role in society and having some idea about the purpose or meaning of life. Looked in that sense, the idea that Indians (even the 'elites' coming out of those top B schools or engineering colleges) might be something of individualists or non-conformists has got to be the most hilarious idea. I mean, Indians are the most conformist, conservative kind of people/society out there. Even when they go abroad (to places such as where you live), they take their silliness with them and become Baba Ramdev devotees or Double Sri Ravi Shankar devotees. Can you think of anything more ridiculous and a more egregious example of 'non'-thinking?

On way to the US for the PM's legacy tour. Keeping up with @bdutt , multi-tasker! pic.twitter.com/4V5hFLbhrW — Suhasini Haidar (@suhasinih) September 25, 2013

This question is being raised today and it was being raised 40 years back during the Apollo era. Dr. Neil Tyson answers that question beautifully in his various popular stage lectures and in a testimony to the U.S. Congress. In 1970, Dr. Enrst Stuhlinger answered this very same question in a powerful way. "How do you justfiy spending billions on research about sending missions to Mars when there are children starving here on Earth," asked a nun from Zambia. Dr. Stuhlinger, then the Associate Director of Science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center wrote back: May 6, 1970 Dear Sister Mary Jucunda: Your letter was one of many which are reaching me every day, but it has touched me more deeply than all the others because it came so much from the depths of a searching mind and a compassionate heart. I will try to answer your question as best as I possibly can. First, however, I would like to express my great admiration for you, and for all your many brave sisters,...

While I see no reason at all why Mr. Kejriwal should not get a chance to be the CM of Delhi if he wishes to, in India's Westminster-style democracy, AAP will have to win in enough MLA constituencies to form the next government. The challenge lies in finding 30 or 35 honest and capable candidates. I can think of Mr. Kejriwal, Mr. Sisodia, Ms. Shazia Ilmi, Mr. Yogendra Yadav, and Mr. Prashant Bhusan. I am not sure if all of them are candidates. At any rate, who are the other 20 or 30 candidates? Are they as honest and purposeful as Mr. Kejriwal or just moneybags? The other challenge for honest people to make an entry into politics is campaign financing. On the one hand, the legal limit is said to be laughably low and everyone is supposed to be spending up to 20 or 40 times the artificially low limit. Even otherwise, I think a really honest person may find it tough to be able to 'splurge' 10 lakhs on an election. Do the candidates pay that out of their own pocket...

I posted this comment on this Open magazine article about that Indian-origin winner of the Miss America contest. Agree with Madhavan obviously ...  I see in the comments that the 'HIndu warriors' are out in force ... :P But that is an easy thing for me to do. I want to pause and really think about this. Of course, what matters is 'discrimination' and not whether you want to define it as 'racism' or 'caste-ism.' So, let's talk 'racism' in America. It was 'allowed' till the '60s. Then the Civil Rights movement led to enactment of 'laws' during the Johnson administration which officially 'abolished' discrimination.

While the debate about Raghuram Rajan being portrayed as a 'sex symbol' might be worth having, the thing I noted was this unnecessary sense of euphoria in the avalanche of articles that came out when Mr. Rajan assumed the office of the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. It got me thinking. Is this euphoria limited to article writers who need fodder for their articles or is more widespread? Well, certainly the stock market types need any peg they can find to 'talk up' the markets. So it serves their purpose too if the markets 'rally' on the basis of the 'pep talk' given by the new RBI Guv. But probably the larger population is not so easily driven to euphoria. Actually, if you see, there is this pattern in media reporting where they go into paroxysms of joy whenever someone new comes along. Look at these articles that came out when Mr. Chidambaram 'returned' to the Finance Ministry last year. http://www.firstpost.com/economy/will-chid...

Does there have to be a human at the apex or tip of an endeavor — a historic endeavor — for that project to register in the human imagination? Think of Apollo and it's most closely associated with Neil Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins of Apollo 11 fame. Then there are the many other well known names from that era of historic space exploration. But surely Apollo was a project that required the efforts of a million talented men and women and not a dozen or two dozen astronauts. The old explorers such as Columbus and Magellan were financed by kings and emperors of that time. They were sizable exploration efforts requiring money and many humans and yet they are associated with a few individuals. Same with the climbing of Everest and the first humans to reach the poles. Perhaps the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids are the only major achievements of humanity that are not associated with specific individuals.

Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address - May 21, 2005 (If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, ol...

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got. And at one point you'd hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like childr...

So you think you've found your soulmate -> the guy who has the exact same crazy hobbies as you and wants to spend time doing the exact same goofy things as you do. You were always looking for a partner who was into reading classic literature and now you are sooo looking forward to spending the next months, years, and the lifetime itself together reading wonderful books to each other. But what if your interests doing quite coincide? You are sure you can reconcile your differences? So you're both into Hemingway and Faulkner and not into maudlin romances. But what if one of you suddenly develops a liking for 50 Shades? No gray areas? Well, you never know. You haven't spent 30 years talking about your interests. Indeed, your interests might change as you grow older and who knows, two people might grow old differently. They might be possessed of different demons. So you're both ornithologists. But what if one of you is interested in migratory birds while the other is ...

The interesting thing about technology is that it keeps advancing at a relentless pace. While this may be disorienting for some or at times, it is better than being stuck in millenia-old ideas or concepts or technologies. High Performance Computing is the leading edge of computer science in many ways. The race to build the next fastest supercomputer continues non-stop. Here's a story about the Oak Ridge Supercomputer Facility. Will we get exaflop supercomputers by 2018? An exaflop is 1,000 petaflops. One petaflop is 1,000 teraflops. One teraflop is 1,000 gigaflops. So, an exaflop refers to one billion billion floating point operations per second. Here's a Google technical paper about large, distributed systems such as what Google uses. Here's a story about when fire threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Here's a look at the Top 10 Supercomputers at that time. Here's a look at the NYSE's data center . The Lawrence Livermore Sequoia Su...

How are we sure that India won't end up in the same chaos that Syria is experiencing today? As I read this excellent article about why the Syrian crisis is pretty much intractable, I was thinking about how India with its enormous diversity could well be a much larger version of Syria. India too can be said to be an artificial creation of a European colonial power. India is of course an 'old' civilization with a long history but does that afford any obvious advantages? Does India's long history or civilization or diversity unite or divide Indians? How many of us look at ourselves as 'Indians'? Frankly, nobody does; if only because that would be essentially ridiculous in such a diverse nation. We have certain 'roots' that tend to trace to one state or one mother tongue. While exceptions exist, mostly Indians live in self-contained communities within linguistic and state boundaries. With modernity and industrialization, migration is taking place...

I would not have written this but for the fact that I put in a comment on M. J. Akbar's article today. I came across the article in Mr. Akbar's Facebook feed although it may have been penned for his Times of India blog. All of Mr. Akbar's articles are available on his blog . There is much consternation and hand-wringing going on about India's current economic woes. So, is it entirely the fault of the UPA? Of Manmohan Singh and his co-conspirators Mr. Mukherjee, and Montek? Or Chidambaram and the ultimate Big Boss Sonia? I doubt it. For example take the currency de-valuation. It is interesting to note that while China attracts much criticism from its main business partner USA for keeping the remnimbi artificially under-valued, we see some weird nationalistic pride getting hurt when the rupee devalues. It seems almost axiomatic that the rupee's moderate de-valuation will help the export sector and India's dreams of becoming an economic superpower pr...