Desi Tamasha

Labels: politics

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If you've ever used a database and have a few minutes to spare, please help look for Jim Gray's missing vessel via the Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Labels: jimgray, music

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According to GigaOm, Google's had some outages today. But WTF is this? "No donut for you"???
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From Gaurav: Indian Consulate in San Francisco left visa application unshredded out there. Instead of apologizing, they come up with these crazy reasons:

"As we see it, the documents are not confidential," said B.S. Prakash, the consul general. "We would see something as confidential if it has a Social Security number or a credit card number, not a passport number."

At the Indian Consulate, Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.

"In India, I would not be alarmed," he said. "We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number."

Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they're no longer able to store.

"In America, you cannot do that," he said.

From the best and brightest of India's babudom.

Labels: politics

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Pramukh Swami is the head of the main Swaminarayan sect (BAPS). As such he's an ascetic, but he's an amazing organizer and businessman too. BAPS is a thriving organization worldwide with lots of temples, including the stunning new Akshardham in New Delhi. His followers think he's God. Two thoughts about the image above:

• Isn't his asan way over-the-top, especially for an ascetic?
• He's looking really old and tired

Jai Swaminarayan!

Update: Some anonymous Swaminarayan devotee says Pramukh Swami is a sevak, das etc. I think Pramukh Swami should skip thrones and other ostentations. Doesn't behoove a das, imho. The swiftness of the response was impressive too. I'm going to now write a nasty post about Scientology one of these days and compare the response times.

Labels: swaminarayan

Jim Gray is still missing. Coast Guard will continue the search over a much larger area. But they don't want private search parties to start off since they fear they'll end up having to "rescue the rescuers." Sergey Brin wants Google engineers to look for clues in the satellite imagery. The scale of the search is massive. Some of the computer models used in the search for him surely use the database features he invented.

Labels: jimgray

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In this article on Jim Gray's disappearance, Gray's daughter Heather is quoted as saying:

Google engineers are also helping in search by looking at their Google Earth satellite photos for any signs of a boat in distress.

I didn't think that Google's satellite images got updated daily. I thought it was like a yearly process, no?

Labels: jimgray

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Amartya Sen repeatedly uses the word "heterodox" in "The Argumentative Indian". It stumped me for a while until I looked it up in the dictionary. I still can't understand why he doesn't say "unorthodox". Now Greg Mankiw's gotten into the act also.

Google comes up with 4.5M hits for unorthodox vs about 780K hits for heterodox. Wikipedia baffles with this one: "The noun heterodoxy is synonymous with unorthodoxy and heresy, while the adjective heterodox is synonymous with dissident and heretical."

I'd never use heterodox - I honestly don't think I need it. If I want to say unorthodox, I'll say unorthodox. If I want to say heretical, I'll say heretical.
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Let's say you consider yourself to be pretty smart, like in the top quartile of humanity. Let's say you know that some (all?) of your friends fall into that bracket too. Let's also say that you like stock-picking as a hobby (who doesn't have silly loss-making hobbies?).

Then here is a useful Hewitt report for you. It says that flow of top-quartile performers is correlated with shareholder value of a company.

Buy shares of companies you and your star-performer friends are going into and sell shares in those they are leaving.

From Prem Panicker's report on the 4th ODI between India and W. Indies:

PostScript: An unlooked for moment came early in the West Indies chase. Sachin Tendulkar was off the field; Rahul Dravid pulled up with a knee niggle of some kind and, for a very brief while, the clock turned right back as Sourav Ganguly marshaled the field as default captain.

Tendulkar walked back onto the field shortly thereafter; Dravid was back an over later, too. But the roars that greeted Ganguly as he directed traffic spoke to the fact that in public perception, he is if anything larger today than when he was last seen in action.

Absence: nothing like it to soften the heart.

Funny. No "hai-hai"s for Dada this time.

Labels: cricket

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I read it, so that you don't have to.

Pankaj Mishra is an Indian fiction and non-fiction writer. This article was published in the London Review of Books.

Summary:
Most of this article is a comparison between China and India with some historical perspective but mostly a comparison of India and China today, from a sociopolitical angle. Some random notes:
* India and China were friendly during the first 10 years after Independence (trying to counter the US influence, according to the author)
* Indian actions led to the 1962 war between India and China which India lost
* Some Chinese regard Nehru and Gandhi as greater than Mao
* China went through much better land reforms than India and has less feudal baggage, while India manages diverse opinions better and
* Both India and China have undergone reforms, but they only tend to support the elite
* There is an emerging New Left in China that is opposed to rampant capitalism

My opinion:
* The article does not deliver on its promise. He doesn't seem to have spent enough time in China. He keeps referring to the "New Left" in China and lays out what it does not stanford for, without really defining what it does stand for.

2 stars out of 5
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