Interesting readings

China's
Pakistan Conundrum by Evan A. Feigenbaum, in Foreign Affairs.

The most important task of government is the public goods of law
and order: laws, courts and judiciary. The first step towards
strengthening these lies in sound measurement. Writing
in Pragati, Sushant
K. Singh has an excellent article on the problems of measurement
of crime in India.

An
independent judiciary by Ruma Pal.

Devesh
Kapur, in the Business Standard, on the HR crisis in
the Indian State.

Shyam
Saran in the Business Standard on a more sensible
approach that we should bring to intra-South-Asia logistics.

The lack of freedom of speech in
India: Karan
Singh Tyagi in the Hindu.

Amit
Rai writes in the Times of India about the mistakes of
the legal actions following the AMRI fire.

Mobis
Philipose in Mint on how charges by exchanges have made
a difference to the currency futures market.

Every advocate of a big spending Indian government should ponder
this
article about Greece by Landon Thomas in the New York
Times.

Dreze and
Sen on what India does right and wrong. We may not agree with
most of this, but they are smart people and it's worth reading.

Hard times at
UTI: Anirudh
Laskar and Vyas Mohan in Mint,
and Niladri
Bhattacharya and N. Sundaresha Subramanian in Business Standard.

Air
India
and Maharashtra
PSUs remind us, in interesting ways, about why government
should not be in business.

Martin
Feldstein explains what went wrong with the Euro.

Look at profiles
of Mario
Monti, who will try to fix Italy,
and Loukas
Papadimos, who will try to fix Greece. I guess that every now
and then, the professional politicians foul up big time, and then
bring in the economists to clean up. It reminds me of a perspective
by C. B Bhave on urban governance in India: when things are going
well, the politicians want an accomodating civil servant; when the
city goes to hell, they want a tough competent one. Also
see Greece
and Italy Seek a Solution From Technocrats by Rachel
Donadio in the New York Times.

Charles
Moore looks back at the story of Maggie Thatcher, who ended
Britain's long decline in the 20th century.

Read Larry
Summers in the Financial Times on the problem of
inequality and three things that need to be done about it.

Two important platforms for modern web development were Flash and
HTML5. It
now looks
like Flash
is dying. Looks
like Steve
Jobs was right on one more thing.