Interesting readings

The top
selling Indian newspapers according to Amazon's kindle subscriptions.

India's courts may be in a slow process of reshaping India into a
liberal democracy. Here is
a Supreme
Court ruling which blocks the Maharasthra government from
interfering with the rights of a citizen to read a certain
book. Sadly, it was done on a technicality.

Manish
Sabharwal in the Financial Express on an important new
initiative of the Ministry of Labour.

Eric
Bellman in the Wall Street Journal on the rise of
Madras in automobile manufacturing. There is much strength there in
electronics manufacturing also.

Dhiraj
Nayyar in the Indian Express on the interfaces between
mobile telephony and
banking. [also
see].

Kerala
is Number 1 by Mahesh Vyas in the Business Standard.

On
the difficulties
of ULIPs and the recent ordinance,
see Dhirendra
Kumar in the Financial Express.

A
story by Steve Lohr and John Markoff in the New York
Times suggests that low end outsourcing to India could be
under attack from new technology.

B. S. Raghavan
in the Hindu Business Line on inflation targeting at RBI.

Hindustan Times and Mint have built an interesting
new web page
: The
Indian innovation revolution.

We in India are very convinced that it is good to have a world
where every single individual is numbered and trackeable. But there
are many nice things about anonymity and the creation of anonymous
personas. See this
story of _Why, a person who did some amazing things anonymously,
and then shut down this life when it looked like his anonymity was
under threat. The idea of being able to create and live multiple
anonymous invented personas has long been a meme in the hackish
community - e.g. see
True
names by Vernor Vinge.

An
interesting interview
by Samir Sachdeva with Nandan Nilekani in Governance NOW
magazine.

As I
read Lose
a general, win a war by Thomas E. Ricks in the New York
Times, I was struck by this remarkable flexibility of labour
contracts, which must work wonders for shaping incentives
correctly.

Tarun
Ramadorai on empirical analyses of the efforts at banning
short selling of recent years.

David Friedman
has released
a free pdf of the 2nd edition of his important
book The
machinery of freedom. Hmm, that's a good strategy: authors
should open source edition $n$ when they start on edition
$n+1$. Also
see: a
surge in interest in Friedrich von Hayek's The road to serfdom.

Ruuel
Marc Gerecht has some interesting ideas in the New York
Times on the use of information technology to assist the
resistance in Iran. I wonder if similar ideas can be deployed on the
problems of China as well.

Tom
Wright has an article in the Wall Street Journal about
Zeeshan-ul-hassan Usmani, a Pakistani scientist working on
explosions and suicide bombings. Also
see Pervez
Hoodbhoy on Pakistan's existential problems.

Calzolari,
Levi, Navaretti, Pozzolo, writing on voxEU, show that
multinational banks were a source of stability in the crisis. Also
see Internal
capital markets and lending by multinational bank
subsidiaries by de Haas and van Lelyveld, in the Journal
of Financial Intermediation.

Ila
Patnaik on the Chinese exchange rate regime and its
implications for India.

Inflation
targeting turns 20 by Scott Roger, in Finance &
Development, March 2010.

Edward
Glaeser reviews a book by Joel Mokyr on what made the
industrial revolution. It makes you think about the nascent
capitalism that we see in India.

Anyone interested in the world of the Internet and computer
technology must read:

The State of the Internet Operating
System by Time
O'Reilly: part
1
and part
2.

John Naughton in the Guardian.

Clive
Thompson in the New York Times on IBM's computer that
plays `Jeopardy'.

What's
the greatest software ever written? by Charles Babcock,
in Information Week

The
Steve Lohr and John Markoff story about speech recognition, and
system-building around it, mentioned above.