Interesting readings

Rajdeep
Sardesai on the problems of law and order in Bombay. Nothing
is more important in the priorities of the State than the police
and the courts.

In recent weeks, we're seeing fresh attention on the flaws of the
HR processes of
government. Shashi
Tharoor in the Indian Express on the IFS,
and Sundeep
Khanna in Mint.

Trampling on the individual in India:

- Sending cartoonist
Aseem Trivedi to jail is
ridiculous.

- Vijaita
Singh in the Indian Express about the government
interfering in grants to think tanks, followed
by an
editorial on this.

- As Robert Kaplan says, underdevelopment
is where the police are more dangerous than the
criminals. Here's a
story about the police in
Gurgaon.

- Meghan
Davidson Ladly writes in the New York Times about the
struggle for freedom that many women in Pakistan are facing. We
can't say we're finished with this. What fraction of India faces
this level of social backwardness?

N. Sundaresha Subramanian has
a great
first draft of history, telling the story of Sahara in
the Business Standard. This is a great vindication for
K. M. Abraham and C. B. Bhave, and a reminder of the importance of
the recruitment process in government. Also see great reportage on
Firstpost
: Sahara
will have to sell realty assets to pay off investors by
Raman
Kirpal; ROC:
The dog that did not bark when Sahara came in by
R. Jagannathan.

I recently blogged
about checks
and balances that will keep Indian capitalism safe. I guess I am
picking up ideas from the zeitgeist. On related themes,
see: The
old India is dead. Wake up, netas and business babus by
R. Jagannathan on
Firstpost; A
long way from 1984 by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian
Express and an
editorial Behind
the curve in the Business Standard.

Many people in India like to invest in gold and in real estate. I
would like to remind them that the analytical case for these is
weak. Here is
some new
evidence on gold, and here are
some older
arguments about real estate.

Sunil
S. in Pragati magazine about India's electricity grid problem.

Mobis Philipose in the Mint writes
about an
intruiging development: a `Intermediaries and Investor Welfare
Association (India)' has filed a petition in the Delhi High Court
alleging that algorithmic trading is bad. I wonder who is behind
this.

On the theme
of the
transformative impact of google maps,
see How
Google Builds Its Maps, and What It Means for the Future of
Everything by Alexis C. Madrigal.

Sebastian
Mallaby has a great response (originally in the Financial
Times) to the Apple-Samsung patent violation case. If you're
in the US, you need
to run,
not walk to buy cool Samsung equipment, or buy it when you
travel abroad.

The
Euro crisis is back from vacation by Adam Davidson, in
the New York Times magazine.

If
Xerox PARC invented the PC, Google invented the Internet
by Cade Metz in Wired magazine.

Why
sex could be history by Kira Cochrane in the Guardian, about a new book
by Aarathi Prasad.

Some of the biology that we learned in high school
is
getting overturned.