yunus is bangladesh's MMS !!

the hindu's haroon habib reports on the tussle between mohd yunus and the bangladesh government over control of grameen bank.

the latest news states that the bangladesh supreme court has upheld the government's removal of yunus from the post of Managing Director.
good for bangladesh.

i am convinced that america+world bank+IMF and their tribe has been grooming yunus to take on senior positions on the government and then pull their yoke. just like MMS has been doing their dirty work in india along with other economic hitmen like MSA and PC.

leadership through solitude

in a brilliant piece on leadership, william deresiewicz - former Yale professor and essayist, links leadership to solitude at a lecture delivered to american army college freshers.
(if you can figure out the surname, do drop in the phonetic split)

some snippets....

who is a leader?

Does being a leader, I wondered, just mean being accomplished, being successful? Does getting straight As make you a leader? I didn’t think so. Great heart surgeons or great novelists or great shortstops may be terrific at what they do, but that doesn’t mean they’re leaders. Leadership and aptitude, leadership and achievement, leadership and even ex­cellence have to be different things, otherwise the concept of leadership has no meaning.

on the students he is seeing:

So what I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers. Any goal you set them, they could achieve. Any test you gave them, they could pass with flying colors. They were, as one of them put it herself, “excellent sheep.” I had no doubt that they would continue to jump through hoops and ace tests and go on to Harvard Business School, or Michigan Law School, or Johns Hopkins Medical School, or Goldman Sachs, or McKinsey consulting, or whatever.

america's crisis...(and very truly of the western world and the indian educated elite)

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of exper­tise. What we don’t have are leaders.

watch the resumes which mention - 'skilled at multitasking'

Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered—and this is by no means what they expected—is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

the importance of concentation:

Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?

the need for true friendship:

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.

This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

go read it and introspect in solitude.

link courtesy: charityfocus blog

the indestructible McD meal

burger and fries must be the most popular meal in the world.
fast food system at its very effective best has mastered this meal.
and people are lapping it up like there is no tomorrow.

but wait, there is something you should see.
artist sally davies' science project with the McD's happy meal.

photographed over 6 months, the happy meal lives up to its name - 'happy'.

for parents who are struggling to wean their kids (or themselves) away from fast food addictions, this is a must read/see.

this is not a fool-proof indictment of fast food, but is a fun one.

these are the ones that should carry the tag-line - "please try this at home"

ethiopia's takeover

sainath's "how to end famine" article had a note on india's strategy to access farmland overseas, especially in africa.
i still refer to this hare-brained idea 'imperialisitc'.

and quite expectedly, the locals have started to object.
tehelka reports that indian companies are being accused of land-grabbing.

but some of the information is quite staggering.

Karuturi Global Ltd runs a pilot project on 10,000 hectares now, but plans to increase its capacity to 5,00,000 hectares in the coming years. “This vast fertile land, leased to the company, would deprive local people of their livelihood and increase destitution, leading to higher crime rates in both rural and urban areas,” adds Ochalla.

Karuturi denies the charge, saying the land is leased from Ethiopia’s Agriculture and Rural Development Ministry. “There has been a reaffirmation by the government, and we have an offer of over three million hectares of additional land,” he told TEHELKA.

and this land is for growing roses for the european market.
which is an unpardonable sin - using fertile agricultural land for cash crops.

ethiopia has a farmland area of close to 32 million hectares (0.317 million square kms).

In recent months, the impoverished and chronically food-insecure nation has become one of the world’s leading agribusiness destinations after the government leased for 40-99 years one of its hottest commodities: farmland. As a result, a host of countries from South and Southeast Asia and Latin America rushed in to seize the opportunity. An estimated 50 million acres have been leased by them in the past two years, in a mad rush partly driven by last year’s global food crisis.

50 million acres = 20 million hectares = 62.5% of the total farmland.
even adjusting by a factor of 10 due to reporting error, these numbers are borderline insane.

in our 8 months here in rural TN, we have had to face this 'outsider' remark.
i can certainly understand why the ethiopian farmers are up in arms. this is 'selling out the country' lock-stock and barrel.

and of all thing ROSES - it is downright criminal.
ethiopia - situated in the horn of africa - is in the horns of a hippo-sized dilemma.

china is getting into a deeper hole

annual car sales in china is expected to be over 15 million in 2010.
and this is in a slow down year for the industry.
this is more masochism than macho as the drivers on the 10 day jam near beijing will confirm.

how can any city cope with this?
i consider this as a clear portender of china's slide. economically and environmentally.

the poor road infrastrucutre (level and quality) in india is certainly welcome. this is welcome inefficiency.

the trip of scientists

when scientists come up with discoveries like "most significant breakthrough in agricultural science since the “green revolution”", it is quite amusing.

The achievement by scientists from the universities of Liverpool and Bristol and the John Innes Centre in Norwich would “revolutionise” wheat production leading to greater food security and lower prices, experts behind the research claimed.

lower prices?? spending too much time in smoky labs could be the reason.

The data, a version of which would be placed online so that farmers around the world could have immediate access to it, would help “accelerate the speed and accuracy of plant-breeding”...

how will farmers accessing the gene sequence help them?

all this research is aimed for...

...raising the prospects of bigger and faster disease-resistant crops to meet the looming global food shortage.

the food shortage is simply related to lesser people spending their efforts in growing food. there is no other way to solve the impending crisis, but for an increase in the number of farmers.

the ability to play god is an ego trip.
the ability to control nature is the hitlerian ego trip. and many scientists seem to have booked into this trip.

and here is a beautiful piece of 'scientist news' which made me smile...
Plants can summon insects to their aid to avoid being munched to death by caterpillars, scientists have found.

a question of health

a set of Qs for those who cook...
1. will you use any of dipotassium phosphate, sodium polyphosphate, glyceryl monostearate, pantothenic acid or tricalcium phosphate in your recipe?
2. do you even know what these chemicals are? what they do?
3. will you ever be able to understand them without a Masters in Chemistry degree?

these listed items are some of the ingredients in chocolate horlicks. the pdf version of this is here. do check the label the next time you are in the supermarket or look at the bottle in your shelf.
this is horlicks, which for generations, has been consumed as a 'health drink'.

the example of horlicks is just for illustration. such questions can be thrown up for any processed food item that you pick up casually at the supermarket.

come back responses will include:
1. these items are approved by government watchdogs across the world and hence are 'acceptable'.
2. i have been drinking this for ages and nothing has happened to me.
3. this is from a very reputed MNC, which personifies quality and health.
i concede these arguments. but those who go back over 20 years ago will recall that horlicks used to be the sole approved drink for those recovering from a serious illness. it has moved from the patient bed side to the kitchen cabinet.
smart marketing and convenience has helped make this move.
horlicks has replaced the home-made kanji. which has none of the listed chemicals as ingredients!! do they?

this and many more thought provoking insights into the modern food system is michael pollan's "the omnivore's dilemma".

this is a must read.
he tracks back food-on-the-plate to its original source and the journey gives us an inside look at the dirty ugly world of modern day food processing. totally an america-centric book, but it is certainly totally applicable to the modern indian upmarket city-dweller.

i have been a keen follower of pollan for some time, but just finished his opus. he rises a notch higher.

as if on cue - save gets world award

the magnificent and legendary bhaskar save is recognised by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) with their 'One World Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2010’.

here is bhaskarbhai's profile as written by Bharat Mansata.

Bhaskar Save: The Man, his Work, Accomplishments and Impact

Bharat Mansata

“I say with conviction that only by organic farming in harmony with Nature, can India (and the world) sustainably provide abundant, wholesome food and meet every basic need of all – to live in health, dignity and peace.” -- Bhaskar Save (‘The Great Agricultural Challenge’, Earthcare Books*, 2008)

Born on 27-1-22 (and still quite active!) Bhaskar Save has over six decades of deep, personal experience in growing a wide variety of food crops, including fruit, rice, vegetables and pulses.

Ever happy to share his wealth of insights, Bhaskar Save – acclaimed as ‘the Gandhi of Natural farming’ – has inspired many organic farmers all over India, particularly in Gujarat and Maharashtra. His magnificent, 14 acre orchard farm, Kalpavruksha (in southernmost coastal Gujarat), is a veritable ‘food forest’. Like a natural forest, it is a net supplier of water, energy and fertility to the eco-system of its region, rather than a net consumer! Economically too, it fetches a manifold higher return than most modern farms – at minimal cost.

Masanobu Fukuoka, the globally renowned Japanese natural farmer, and author of the evergreen classic, ‘One Straw Revolution’, spent a day at Save’s farm on his last visit to India. He declared, “I have seen many farms all over the world. This is the best! It is even better than my own farm!”

Born in the Wadwal community of traditional farm-tenders, Bhaskar Save was a school teacher for about 10 years, before he became a full-time farmer. He began using chemicals in the early fifties, and was soon hailed a ‘model’ for the new technology. But by about 1960, before most farmers in India had started on chemicals, Save had already seen the pitfalls and totally stopped their use.

While Bhaskar Save gets very good yields from his two acres of organically cultivated field crops like rice, wheat, pulses and vegetables (grown in seasonal rotation), he has made outstanding pioneering contribution in natural orchard development with the simultaneous, mixed planting of alpa-jeevi (short lifespan), madhya-jeevi (medium lifespan), and deergha-jeevi (long lifespan) crops to rapidly regenerate the fertility of the soil, maximize irrigation efficiency, and provide continuity of food yield right from the first few months until the long lifespan fruit trees begin to yield abundantly.

The ecological benefits of widely adopting such integrated ‘food forest systems’ in India (or elsewhere) are enormous and far-reaching in time. With vastly increased biomass availability and microbial life in the soil, humus is regenerated. Moisture absorption, percolation and recharge of groundwater aquifers rises, aided by the passages created in the soil by the soil-dwelling creatures, micro-organisms and plant roots and fibres. Biodiversity increases, attracting birds, bees, butterflies… These, in turn, assist in the biological control of potential crop pests, or in improving pollination, and consequently, crop yields.

Save’s ‘platform and trench’ method (for irrigated fruit trees like banana, chikoo and coconut) enables a great saving in water, while the spongy soil under the canopy of the mature trees absorbs a huge amount of rain every monsoon to recharge groundwater. [See also ‘Water-efficient Trench Irrigation for Horticulture’ (on Bhaskar Save), by Bharat Mansata and Claude Alvares, published in ‘Good Practices & Innovative Experiences in the South’, Volume 2, 2001, co-published by UNDP, TWN & Zed Books.]

The extremely low-cost method of farming demonstrated by Bhaskar Save holds great promise for sustainably meeting the food and livelihood needs of millions at large. Till date, several dozen of articles have been written (in India and abroad) on Bhaskar Save and his way of natural farming – in English, Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Telugu, Malyalam, etc. Several TV channels have made and broadcast short films on him; and half a dozen or more awards have been conferred on him. A full-length book on Bhaskar Save and his way of farming, titled ‘The Vision of Natural Farming’ by Bharat Mansata is to be published by Earthcare Books.

Chemical Farming Vs Organic Farming

by Bhaskar Save

1) Chemical farming fragments the web of life; organic farming nurtures its wholeness.

2) Chemical farming depends on fossil oil; organic farming on living soil.

3) Chemical farmers see their land as a dead medium; organic farmers know theirs is teeming with life.

4) Chemical farming pollutes the air, water and soil; organic farming purifies and renews them.

5) Chemical farming uses large quantities of water and depletes aquifers; organic farming requires much less irrigation, and recharges groundwater.

6) Chemical farming is mono-cultural and destroys diversity; organic farming is poly-cultural and nurtures diversity.

7) Chemical farming produces poisoned food; organic farming yields nourishing food.

8) Chemical farming has a short history and threatens a dim future; organic farming has a long history and promises a bright future.

9) Chemical farming is an alien, imported technology; organic farming has evolved indigenously.

10) Chemical farming is propagated through schooled, institutional misinformation; organic farming learns from Nature and farmers’ experience.

11) Chemical farming benefits traders and industrialists; organic farming benefits the farmer, the environment and society as a whole.

12) Chemical farming robs the self-reliance and self-respect of farmers and villages; organic farming restores and strengthens it.

13) Chemical farming leads to bankruptcy and misery; organic farming liberates from debt and woe.

14) Chemical farming is violent and entropic; organic farming is non-violent and synergistic.

15) Chemical farming is a hollow ‘green revolution’; organic farming is the true green revolution.

16) Chemical farming is crudely materialistic, with no ideological mooring; organic farming is rooted in spirituality and abiding truth.

17) Chemical farming is suicidal, moving from life to death; organic farming is the road to regeneration.

18) Chemical farming is the vehicle of commerce and oppression; organic farming is the path of culture and co-evolution.

urban transport - skewed priorities

city transport improvement is usually dominated by road expansions, flyovers, ring roads, etc.
very low impetus is given to public transport (even the famed metro railways that is coming up in many cities dont add up to any significant numbers).

it is usually a simple enough set of reasons:
1. lot of money to be pocketed in road projects and moreso in the maintenance.
2. policy makers never use public transport.
3. the influence of the car/bike manufacturers lobby.

and even less importance is given to the walkers, cyclists (pedestrian in fact means third class).

kalpana sharma details this mayhem over at infochangeindia.

The investment pattern in roads and transport in our major cities clearly illustrates the lack of prioritisation of public transport. Mumbai is probably the best example. In the 1960s, Mumbai had one of the best public transport systems. It had buses, trams and the suburban railways; only very rich individuals could afford private cars in those days. Hence, most people used public transport.

Over the years, this system has not been strengthened at the required pace. Trams were phased out as they were seen to take up too much road space, and roads have become home to the burgeoning population of private motor vehicles. Most of the investment in the last two decades has gone towards making life more comfortable for these private vehicle owners. Roads have been widened and flyovers built, including a spectacular sea link that has only recently been opened to a couple of bus routes. In other words, every effort has been made to make travel easy and smooth for those riding in private cars, even though they constitute a small minority of Mumbai’s total population.

but, there have been some inspiring examples from south america. bogota for instance has a splendid biking route network and bus rapid transit system.
recently, paris had also invested heavily in a novel biking solution.
and just now, the US is starting to make some noises talking about equality of rights between pedestrians, cyclists and motorists.

will these winds of change hit our shores?
BRTS is being tried in a few cities with some mixed but promising results - delhi, ahmedabad, pune.
every big city has their metro rail project under construction. though i suspect that the delhi success will not be replicated in other cities.
delhi did not have a public transport system at all and the metro filled up that gap admirably. chennai has a good bus system, mumbai has a great train and bus system, bangalore has a decent bus system.
instead of a new metro rail transport system, the focus should have been to strengthen these existing facilities instead of creating a competitive system.
but again, metro rail projects are big money projects and allows significant lining of pockets.

these starts have to be exponentially expanded:
1. the public investments have to be heavily in favour of mass transport systems and non-motorised systems.
2. simultaneously, private vehicle ownership should be heavily taxed (a la singapore). at least those who are buying the second and third vehicles.
3. demarcating vehicle-free zones in high volume/high density areas like t.nagar in chennai, dadar in mumbai and connnaught place in delhi is an option.

hold it.
looking at the overall scenarios, if the population of the cities continue to explode, none of the above will work. and in fact, these factors may exacerbate the explosion.
so parallel and heavier investments will need to be made to stabilise migration, aka improve our agriculture.

that is another discussion...

us military warns of serious oil shortages

from the recent guardian article...

The US military has warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear within two years and there could be serious shortages by 2015 with a significant economic and political impact.

it is interesting that this is coming to the public from the US military - which could be the largest user of oil and not from the energy think tanks across the world.
the entire report is here.
their prediction should seriously alarm a lot of people.


what this implies is that status quo in thinking about energy will lead to drastic price rises across all categories of basic items and obviously chaos will reign supreme...

and the report continues on the big security issues that will hit us in the coming decades (not that one needs the intelligence gathering abilities of the US military to come to this conclusion):

1. demographics
2. economics
3. globalisation
4. energy
5. pandemics
6. cyber
7. water
8. food
9. climate change
10. space

the 5 marked blod are, easy to see, heavily interlinked and cannot be viewed separate from each other.

the solutions may appear drastic, but is inevitable within our lifetimes itself, it is time we closely pare our consumption-led lives.

the local economy - wendell berry

inspite of all our best efforts at eating local, etc., we will never be able to fully grow 100% of all our food requirements.
we will get to a significant level (say 75%) in a year or so.
the tough ones to crack will be tea/coffee/oil/spices and suchlike.

either we could move to a diet which is very low on the above 'tough ones', or we take it from the market.
here is where i would like to pause and try to define 'market'.
and i shall fully invoke wendell berry (one of my inspirations).
his epochal 'in distrust of movements' and the 'unsettling of america: culture and agriculture' (mini presentation here) were instrumental in making the idealogical turn in my thinking.

he does another masterclass in defining the 'the idea of a local economy'.

currently we are in a total economy:

A total economy is an unrestrained taking of profits from the disintegration of nations. communities, households, landscapes, and ecosystems. It licenses symbolic or artificial wealth to “grow” by means of the destruction of the real wealth of all the world…

principles of local economy:

So far as I can see, the idea of a local economy rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. In a viable neighborhood, neighbors ask themselves what they can do or provide for one another, and they find answers that they and their place can afford. This, and nothing else, is the practice of neighborhood. This practice must be, in part, charitable, but it must also be economic, and the economic part must be equitable; there is a significant charity in just prices.

principle of trade:

Of course, everything needed locally cannot be produced locally. But a viable neighborhood is a community; and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common. This is the principle of subsistence. A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met. The economic products of a viable community are understood either as belonging to the community’s subsistence or as surplus, and only the surplus is considered to be marketable abroad.

protectionism is needed:

The principles of neighborhood and subsistence will be disparaged by the globalists as “protectionism” – and that is exactly what it is. It is a protectionism that is just and sound, because it protects local producers and is the best assurance of adequate supplies to local consumers.

1. we are already trying to buy peanuts, rice, fruits from local growers (as against from the madras market).
2. we have sown some sesame to examine the scope of extracting our own oil.

and so on in our own quest, we see berry's words play out.

haiti - torn asunder

the population of haiti is approx 9.7 million.
nearly 100,000 people are feared to have died from the massive earthquake of Jan 12.
thats 1% of the population eliminated in a few seconds (and another 3-4% rendered homeless and destitute, it is devastating).
like banda aceh from dec 2004 (5 years later, banda aceh seems to have moved on).

and when the affected include decision makers, then chaos is inevitable...

WTF news of day - weight dropping

a chilean weightlifter - elizabeth pobtele - delivered a boy.
well so what is WTF about it?

she was unaware of being pregnant (along with her coaches etc), and delivered in the middle of training.
good for her - she can now compete in lower weight categories.

i blame it on overuse of tight fitting spandex and mind-numbing steroids.

we...imperialists?

the indian corporate juggernaut is on its way to become a new form of East India Company.
says kasturirangan on indiatogether in this very interesting article - the indian mercantilist empire.

indian companies are buying/leasing vast tracts of land in africa:

Indian companies have already invested 4.2 billion dollars in Ethiopia. The land being leased out is even more mind-boggling. The smallest figure that I have read about is 30,000 acres; another article mentions a seventy-five year lease of 700,000 acres of land to a single Indian concern.

of course, this is a sophisticated form of land grab as the local farmers will be at the receiving end.
not only the indians, but a whole host of chinese and middle east companies are doing the same.

within india the land acquisition has been ongoing via SEZ and other subtle mechanisms:

The tribal regions of India are being denuded of their forests and their people dispossessed of their lands by various industrial concerns. Vedanta Resources, based in London but run by a billionaire of Indian origin, is being accused of a land-grab in Orissa. I can't get the exact figures, but just one aluminium mining project alone runs to about 1500 acres, and even that isn't the entire story. A university named Vedanta University and run by the same mining group, has been awarded 6000 acres of land in Orissa along the Puri-Konark main drive.

Who needs that much land for a university? The Indian Institute of Science is 400 acres. Currently, the largest university in India (by area) is the University of Hyderabad, which has 2300 acres, much of which is not being used for academic purposes. Why would anyone want two and a half times that amount for a university in Orissa, unless that the university is a pretext for a larger acquisition of land?

never imagined a scenario where we are the 'imperialists'.

public confessions

andre agassi has made life rosy for the media and other retired tennis players/commentators.
with his autobiographical (titled "Open") confession on drug use etc, he has put the australians among the indians.
he has been berated by a lot of people for:
1. the drug abuse and here.
2. the sensationalisation to enable marketing his autobiography.

but i beg to differ.
i am completely in favour of public confessions.
gandhi set a lovely trend over 80 years ago with My Experiments With Truth.

we should all do it.
go agassi.
i forgive the wig.
you beat sampras often enough for me to like you...

sustsainable living in cities - the remarkable dervaes

a medium sized home in pasadena, california houses the incredible Dervaes' family.
growing nearly 3000 kgs of fruits and vegetables in around 4000 sq ft of urban space is just mind-blowing.

their experiments with simple and sustainable urban living is now an award winning documentary - Homegrown Revolution.



met them at an interactive session in mumbai last evening.
a truly amazing experience to hear their experiences and the underlying philosophies.
almost a modern day fukuoka.
one thing that strongly resonated is their strong anti-monsanto slant :-)

please check their other website, Path to freedom.

narural disaster week

8th Sep - 10 Sep - Flash floods sweep across turkey.
22nd Sep - massive floods in georgia, USA.
29th Sep - Undersea earthquake spawns tsunami and hots the samoan islands.
30th Sep and 1st Oct - earthquakes rock indonesian islands.
26th Sep - 4th Oct - typhoons ketsana and parma slams philippines, vietnam, cambodia and laos.
1ct Oct - 6th Oct - torrential rains drown large parts of AP and Karnataka in South india.

of course, they are all related.

crazy - is saar cozy in his suit?

the french are known to be impetuous, imperious, and recently... imbecilious.
the ban on burqas is bumbling, baseless and bacchanalian.

i think it stems from the fact the the hijab was not designed by yves st laurent.

the corporate approach to education

treats children and education...

based on management, input, measurement, and manipulation.
courtesy - schoolsmatter

this is the core mindset with which corporate philanthropies approach education reform.
bill gates and the gates foundation are at the forefront of this approach.
considering the influence of the man and the sheer amount of money that is being pumped in, it is sad that there is a sore lack of thought and intellect.

in telling critiques of the plans of the gates foundation (as evidenced from a recent Washington Post enclave on education), deborah meier and jim horn bring out the obvious and misplaced thinking towards improving education.

What is intriguing is that neither Gates nor Hiatt stop to wonder if the absence of correlation might indict the tool for measuring the impact of teaching: standardized test scores.

while this is, of course, all happening in the US, india is not immune to such thinking.
already the dell foundation is an active player in the indian education space and clearly with the forecast that india will be the labour force of the world in the coming generation, we shall see more misplaced reform.
in this mess, i think azim premji is likely to be the saving grace.

story of the month

the meaning of "Obama" and the history of friendship is my pick for the most fantastic story on the web this month.
the connection from the controversial 1968 olympics' black salute to the current day optimism with Obama becoming POTUS is just spectacular.

What the election of Obama signifies, the energies it can generate, the solidarities it can create, the transformations that can be effected under its sign, cannot be understood simply in terms of a charismatic man of mixed race becoming President of the most powerful nation today. It is only those who cannot see beyond these mere “facts” who are cynical and mocking, for whatever Obama’s actual record in office will prove to be, we must mark this moment.

It is a moment that every struggle against power and authority anywhere in the world has claimed for itself. Centuries of racism and two decades of Empire later, every edifice of power in every part of the globe has, in one sudden ray of light, revealed its vulnerability. Anything seems possible, not least of all, a Dalit woman Prime Minister of India.

“Obama” is bigger than the man.

i fully agree.