WILL JUSTICE PREVAIL?

General Musharraf has come and gone. Whatever maybe the long term impact of his entertaining visit, he did achieve one thing--he made us look within ourselves, and ask once again, who we are as Indians, and how are we different from our neighbour. For the past fifty years, we have grown up with the belief that Pakistan is a monolithic, theocratic state with one religion, one language, and one mind. India is the opposite--with many religions, many languages, many communities and many minds. In the 1990s, with the ascent of the BJP, a second conception of India became popular with, perhaps, a quarter of our voters. Instead of the plural India of the first conception, it views the nation as singular and essentialist, which will be energised by Hindu nationalism. In its view, India has been victim of a thousand years of foreign invasions, and is now threatened by multinationals and particularly American culture. It wishes to restore it subliminally to a pure, pre-invasions, and eternal Hin...

Since I give my address at the bottom of this fortnightly column, I usually get a fair amount of email and snail mail. And being a diligent sort, I endeavour to read and reply most letters. However, recent events have called into question this process of civilised exchange. One outraged reader wrote recently to say that two of his articles had been rejected by the Times of India. "Why is it," he demanded, "the Times rejects my work, and publishes a fourth rate writer like Gurcharan Das?" I took his letter to a friend at the Times, and tried to sound casual, but my friend could tell that this was no ordinary fan mail. He gave me a sympathetic smile, and clearing his throat, he said, "your writing is not fourth rate--it is third rate, at least". I thought that I had misheard, but he added, "Well, third rate is better than fourth rate, and I hope your head won't get too swollen now" Another provocation came in May, from a reader in Mumbai. In el...

Contrary to what many believe the economic lives of our ancestors is a story of almost unrelieved wretchedness. Everywhere a small number lived humanely while the great majority lived in abysmal squalor. We forget their misery, in part, by the grace of literature, poetry, and legend, which celebrate those who lived well and forget those who lived in the silence of poverty. The eras of misery have been mythologised and are remembered as golden ages of pastoral simplicity. They were not. In truth, survival was the only order of business. Only recently have progress and prosperity touched the lives of somewhat more than the upper tenth of the population. In the last 200 years the West (and recently the Far East) grew fabulously rich. This miracle was based on harnessing technology and organisation to the satisfaction of human wants, while keeping their economies free from political control, ensuring that private individuals made decisions rather than bureaucrats. The striking character of...

We are a nation so disappointed with itself that we have become immune to good news. So when it does come, we either ignore it or cynically dismiss it with a shrug. The latest census is an example. It has brought the happy news that literacy in India has jumped from 52 to 65 per cent during the last decade. This means that our literacy growth rate has doubled from 0.7 per cent a year in the past to 1.4 per cent. Millions of children have been liberated in the 1990s from the bondage of ignorance, with the greatest gains having come from rural areas, the Hindi states, and among girls. How did this happen? On the demand end, it is parental motivation--parents are increasingly realising, even in the most backward villages, that education is the passport to their child's future. On the supply side, it is a combination of things. First, Literacy campaigns in some states, supported by the internationally funded District Primary Education Program (DPEP) have begun to make a difference. The...

India, truly, is a land of paradoxes. For forty years political scientists have been debating how we became a vibrant democracy despite our poverty, low literacy and ethnic violence. Adam Przeworski's empirical study of 135 countries recently concluded that, given everything, India ought to have been a dictatorship (in his "Democracy and Development"). Indeed, the late and gracious Myron Weiner of M.I.T. wrote a charming book called "The Indian Paradox", in which he wrestled with the contradiction of how democratic politics could endure in our diverse and violent society. Now, here is another paradox. By any yardstick, the 1990s have been the best years in our recent economic and social history. Yet, it was also the decade of the greatest political instability. How does one begin to explain this contradiction? Conventional wisdom says that prosperity and stability go together and economic growth needs political stability. Does this mean that our economic sphere ...

We are well into our Indian summer and for teenagers this is a time to recuperate from the slogging drudgery of tuitions, coaching crammers, computer classes, board exams and college entrance tests. The summer job has not yet arrived in India. So, what does one do for "time-pass" in desi-land? My secret recipe for the enviably happy summer is to draw the curtains, turn on the cooler, sit in a comfortable old cane chair and begin to read. Feel your youth like a nimbus, and start to create a self. You don't inherit a self; you build it. One way to do it is to read the great books. Take a break at noon with lassi. Read some more after lunch and in the evenings treat your friends to dahi chaat and gossip-in part, about the books you are reading. For you never accept a text passively; you interrogate it. Smell the jasmine at night and go to sleep reading. There is no royal road to nirvana but only the many roads large and small, the innumerable curving paths, a thousand steps ...

There is no use pretending that the departures of N.K. Singh and Montek Singh are not going to hurt. They are. Two very different men--Montek is an elegant economist and NK is a natty networker, who knows how to turn every screw in the government's machine. But both are reformers. N.K. Singh has been transferred from the Prime Minister's office (PMO), where he coordinated the PM's economic agenda, to the Planning Commission. Montek is leaving to head the Independent Evaluator's office for the International Monetary Fund. Earlier, he was Finance Secretary, where he had spearheaded many an economic reform ever since the summer of 1991. Both men have fallen victim to the RSS and the swadeshi lobby. Although, Muralidhar Rao and Datta Pengdi may have precipitated N.K.'s recent departure, all anti-reformers are delighted. The communists, the leftists--the Samtas and Mamtas--and the considerable forces of darkness in the Congress would rather live with inefficient and corr...

I am on a book tour of America as I write this column, and Americans sometimes ask, "Was India once really rich? Then why did it become so poor?" I remind them that Columbus had gone in quest of the riches of India but discovered America instead. Thinking he had found India, he called the natives "Indians." The name stuck and so has the linguistic confusion. It took the Portuguese five years to get over the humiliation that Spain, their enemy, had discovered America when it could have been theirs. In 1497, they sent Vasco da Gama the other way round the world. He did indeed find India's legendary wealth. He informed Portugal's King Manuel of "India's large cities, large buildings and rivers, and great populations." He spoke about spices, jewels, and mines. But he added that Indians were not interested in European trinkets and clothes. They made far better fabrics and trinkets themselves. In the European mind "Golconda" became the symb...

Last week I walked into our neighbourhood chemist's and the shop assistant gave me a look that spoke a thousand words. He looked me straight in the face and his eyes said "treat me as an equal". He sought equality based on dignity and mutual respect, and his disarming expression, it seems, had already got him in trouble. For the Punjabi woman ahead of me complained to the chemist. She used the nice Urdu word "tamiz", which roughly means "courtesy", but in her feudal mind it really meant that the shop assistant was not sufficiently servile. When she left the chemist confided in me, "this boy is good and efficient, but he is a Dalit from Bihar and his manners seem to put off my customers." Walking back I was reminded of George Orwell's description of social equality in "Homage to Catalonia." There he describes the waiters in revolutionary Barcelona "who looked you in the face and treated you as an equal." The Indian midd...

The English have been surprised by Professor James Tooley's observations that India can teach Britain something about education. This is unusual spin over the usual foreign expert who patronisingly offers us advice on how to improve ourselves. Indeed, when Tooley wrote about this in the Times Education Supplement his editor was so perplexed that he inserted a photo of an impoverished school in Bihar with a caption, "Education in India has a lot to teach the British"--implying, may be, that the good professor had lost it. The professor of education from Newcastle has been documenting a "self help" revolution in Indian towns and villages as education entrepreneurs are opening private schools and creating opportunities for the poor to rise. Most Indians would agree that private schools are indeed mushrooming across India (although they worry about their indifferent quality.) This may explain, in part, why literacy has grown at double our historic rate--1.4 per cent...

Praise has been showered on Yashwant Sinha's Budget, and deservedly so. There is much to laud and everyone has his favourite measure, but I am happiest that agriculture has finally entered the reform agenda. I am pleased because we have a comparative advantage in agriculture--something we do not enjoy in industry. By investing in agricultural reform we will get a "bigger bang for our buck" as the Americans say. The timing is good because we sit comfortably on a grain mountain, forty million tonnes high. Both domestic and international prices are down. So, no one seriously worries about food security. Agricultural reform is a big agenda and there is no point talking of globalisation or WTO when the Indian market is not free. Our farmers are victims of archaic laws that prohibit them from selling their produce freely within the country, traders face limits on how much they can buy and stock, mills face levy burdens on rice and sugar, prices are distorted by politicians. All...

Every nation must have its heroes. Having lost its stars of the Independence age, Indians have been desperately seeking new ones who can inspire them in these dispirited post-reform, post-Mandal, post-modern times. Narasimha Rao, like Deng could have been one such hero. Deng has become a hero to contemporary China and has supplanted Mao in Chinese hearts. Although Rao created an economic revolution between 1991-93, he was not a visionary; he was only a reluctant reformer. Now mired in corruption cases, he is no longer respected. V.P. Singh could have been a hero. He released a social revolution as he attempted to raise the backward castes in our society. But most Indians saw through his electoral ambitions. In the end, he divided society and seriously compromised standards. If he had genuinely cared for the backwards he would have delivered them education and health, and that would have truly lifted them over the long term. Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram are hero candidates. Indeed,...

Inspired by one of Emerson's essays, Mathew Arnold, the English poet, wrote in the 19th century about the "seeds of godlike power". He was referring to a human being's great potential for progress, but his happy phrase fits the new miracle seeds that will help India create a "second green revolution". The seeds are a product of biotechnology. They are resistant to pests, and the farmer doesn't need to spray his crop with pesticide. Farmers love them because they don't have to spend on costly pesticides and they raise yields and income by 30 to 50 per cent. Consumers like them because the food is less toxic and more nutritious. Many seeds are also nutritionally enhanced. For example, you won't feel guilty eating the new potatoes because you will get protein in addition to starch in your diet. No wonder, the seeds cover 44.2 million hectares in 13 countries on six continents. Eight of these countries are industrialised and five are developing. In t...

For the past twenty five years we have owned a small coconut farm in a village in Maharashtra. If this does not make me a full blooded Maratha, it does make me at least an honorary Maharashtrian in my neighbours' eyes. Bhiku, our gardner,looks after our wadi, and we have seen his children grow up nicely over the years. I have always taken a special interest in his eldest boy, and when the Enron power plant came up I confidently predicted thatPrashant would have a shining future. The main obstacle to our village's prosperity is perennial shortage of power, which inhibits commercial activity. Although Enron has made Maharashtra surplus, our village still does not get power on Fridays and brown-outs define our other days. Across the harbour is Mumbai where people get plenty of power, and entrepreneurs set up industries, call centres and software companies and create thousands of jobs every day. Who is robbing Prashant's future, especially when our state now has abundant electr...

I was in Kathmandu recently, where I had gone for my nephew's wedding. It turned out to be a warm family affair with plenty of good food and good feeling. This was before the Hritik Roshan episode, and there was lots of sunshine, attractive women, and beautiful clothes. But what took my breath away was the Patan Museum, which is arguably the best museum on the subcontinent with plenty of lessons for us in India. The museum displays the traditional sacred art of Nepal in a wonderful setting. Its home is an 18th century royal palace of Kathmandu's Malla kings, restored lovingly by Gótz Hagmúller and others, with funding from Austrian and Nepali sources. Its gilded door, guarded by two ferocious bronze lions, faces one of the beautiful squares in the world. Inside is an exciting collection of 200 sculptures and objects that transport one into the rich living traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism. This in itself is not exceptional. Many Indian museums are housed in grand buildings an...

Tomorrow really is the first day of the new century, experts tell us, but it is also a second chance to sit back and look at the big picture. It is now plausible that India will solve its economic problem in the first half of the 21st century. The problem, of course, is our age-old worry that there is not enough to go around. Some parts of Asia are already affluent and others have seen the light. For the first time in history Indians will also emerge from the struggle against want, and it will not happen evenly. Some regions will get there before others-e.g. Gujarat will be twenty years ahead of Bihar. The reason this will happen is simply a matter of arithmetic. India has experienced five to seven per cent sustained annual economic growth over the past two decades, which has more than tripled the middle class. More recently, population growth has begun to slow, and in 1998 it was down to 1.7 percent compared to our historic 2.2 per cent. Literacy has also begun to climb-it had reached...

The principle of competition, Hesiod pointed out long ago, is built in the very roots of the world. There is something in the nature of things that calls for a real victory and real defeat. The competitive spirit is at the heart of a vibrant economy, and it is precisely what we have been trying to foster through our economic reforms. In the end, competition guarantees individual liberty far better than laws or regulators. Now a Competition Bill is being introduced in Parliament this winter for fostering competition, but ironically, it will result in having the opposite effect. With all good intentions, it wants to ensure that no company becomes dominant in the market and abuse its monopoly power. The bill gives a proposed Competition Commission the power to investigate any acquisition or merger between companies whose combined assets exceed Rs. 1000 crores or turnover exceeds Rs. 3000 crores. According to Omkar Goswami, 144 of our listed companies already exceed that asset limit, and a...

I have always believed that individuals make history rather than other way around. Our Green Revolution would not have happened without C. Subramanium's wilfulness. England would not have possessed Bengal without Clive's stubborn wish to teach Siraj a lesson. In the same way, the Lok Adalat in Chandigarh would not have cleared 20,000 court cases in 17 months without S.K. Sardana. And, the Supreme Court would not have disposed of 76,000 cases in 12 months were it not for justices Venkatachalliah and Ahmadi. We have long despaired over judicial delays, but we did not know how bad things were until Bibek Debroy, an economist, collected the data. Soon after the 1991 reforms, we began to realise that a market economy could not succeed unless contracts between buyers and sellers in a free market could be speedily enforced in the courts. Debroy headed a project in the Ministry of Finance and discovered that the backlog in our legal system is more than 25 million cases. It takes up to ...

the problem getting that, in below example, can cast mytype<t> imytype , fine. cannot cast func<mytype<t>, bool> func<imytype, bool> . that doesn't make sense , i'm wondering if there way round through perhaps different architecture? i not want use reflection. i understand why failing. code failing in .net 4.5.2. online version here - http://goo.gl/13z4xg - fails in same way. using system; using system.collections.generic; public interface imytype { string text { get; } int number { get; } } public class mytype<t> : imytype t : someothertype { public mytype() { text = "hello"; number = 99; } public string text { get; private set; } public int number { get; private set; } } public abstract class someothertype { public int id { get; set; } public string title { get; set; } } public class concretetype : someothertype { public string description { get; set; } } cla...

this question has answer here: how store extremely large numbers? 2 answers is there way store 1000 digit number in c++? tried storing unsigned long double still large type. you may find answer here how store extremely large numbers? gmp answer sounds right, ie pi digits https://gmplib.org/pi-with-gmp.html

i have set of 3 programs trying combine one. work individually, having issues when trying them work together. issue having first section of code: import os import sys contextlib import closing import colorama # $ pip install colorama import docopt # $ pip install docopt import socks # $ pip install pysocks import stem.process # $ pip install stem sockshandler import socksipyhandler # see pysocks repository stem.util import term try: import urllib2 except importerror: # python 3 import urllib.request urllib2 args = docopt.docopt(__doc__, version='0.2') colorama.init(strip=not (sys.stdout.isatty() or args['--color'])) when run program, error: traceback (most recent call last): file "cilantro.py", line 34, in <module> args = docopt.docopt(__doc__, version='0.2') file "c:\python34\lib\site-packages\docopt.py", line 558, in docopt docoptexit.usage = printable_usage(doc) file "c:\python34\lib\sit...

i'm working on project now, make easier work decided make related textbox, question how set value of textbox appears automatically? inthis case, rnol = pnol + qnol + nnol want rnol value printed automatically in tbrnol/textbox rnol when click button.. pnol = double.parse(tbpnol.text); qnol = double.parse(tbqnol.text); nnol = double.parse(tbnnol.text); rnol = pnol + qnol + nnol(tbrnol.text); //i've try wrong syntax you modify last line to: rnol = pnol + qnol + nnol; and add one: tbrnol.text = rnol.tostring();

is there way log request before building message in axis2. overhead of enabling wire logs high , need log request time, http headers, http method, request uri, etc... here cannot use axis2 handler since engage after building message. question how log request details before message builder in axis2.

i have php script pulling json file static , updates every 10 seconds. has details events happen , adds top of json file. insert them mysql database. because have pull every event every time pull file, inserting new events. easy way search event in database (primary keys not same), talking ~4000 events every day, , not want many queries see if exists. i aware of insert ignore , looks uses primary_key this. what can (preferably easily) prevent duplicates on 2 keys? example: i have table events following columns: id (irrelevant, really) event_id (that need store source) action_id (many action_ids belong 1 event_id) timestamp whatever... and data json comes out on first pull this: event_id|action_id|... 1 | 1 1 | 2 1 | 3 2 | 1 2 | 2 2 | 3 then next pull this: event_id|action_id|... 1 | 1 1 | 2 1 | 3 1** | 4** 1** | 5** 2 | 1 2 | 2 2 | 3 2** | 4...

i receive json string input need convert object of product class. product class belongs google client library 1.19.1. when converting json string product object, using object mapper, gives following error. error : exception in thread "main" java.lang.illegalargumentexception: can not set com.google.api.services.content.model.price field com.google.api.services.content.model.product.price java.util.linkedhashmap can 1 please suggest, how convert input json string code same written below : import org.codehaus.jackson.map.objectmapper; string temp = "{\"channel\":\"online\",\"contentlanguage\":\"en\",\"offerid\":\"towel\",\"targetcountry\":\"in\",\"condition\":\"refurbished\",\"link\":\" https://www.sokrati.com \",\"price\":{\"value\":\"12\",\"currency\":\"inr\"},\"title\":\...