Interesting readings

A. K. Bhattacharya
in the Business Standard on how the UPA is faring well
without Pranab Mukherjee.

As we ponder the fundamental challenges that India faces, it is
interesting to
read Boss
Rail by Evan Osnos in New Yorker magazine.

India's
new approach lets individual states take the lead on
development by Simon Denyer in the Washington Post.

Madhavi
Goradia Divan in the Indian Express on defamation law.

Towards
better financial regulation
and What
is regulation for, by Ila Patnaik, on the big
picture of the FSLRC approach paper.

One
head is better than many by Ila Patnaik. Let's not
repeat the mistake of the RBI Amendment Act of 2006, she
says.

In
the mood for reform by Ila Patnaik in the Indian
Express, on the fresh push by the UPA government.

The
Evolution of India's UID Program: Lessons Learned and
Implications for Other Developing Countries by Frances
Zelazny.

Great post-mortems of the Sahara
case: Tony
Munroe and Devidutta Tripathy on Reuters,
and Tamal
Bandhyopadhyay in Mint. These stories helped form my
arguments in the recent blog
post Indian
capitalism is not doomed.

Most of us take a certain degree of Internet access in India for
granted. But not so long ago, getting to the net in India was
nightmarishly
hard. A story
on FirstPost tells us about the early days, with an appropriate
accent on Ernet, the pioneer which made all this possible.

Don't bring your cell phone to
meetings in China, you might get hacked by James
McGregor on Quartz.

The difference
between reality and fiction is that reality doesn't have to be
plausible. I was quite gloomy about what might happen with
Iran's nuclear program, but for the second time in history, it
is starting to look like sanctions might work.

Quants
aren't really like regular people by Izabella Kaminska in
the Financial Times.

Charles
Duhigg and Steve Lohr tell us, in the New York Times
that In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford
University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent
litigation and patent purchases in the last two years - an amount
equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time,
spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually
big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and
development of new products, according to public filings.

Two great stories about Barack Obama in Vanity
Fair: The
Hunt for `Geronimo' by Mark Bowden,
and Obama's
way by Michael Lewis. While on this subject, see Time
magazine
on Robert
Gates. These three articles give us a sense of the gap that we
face between governance in India today and that seen in a
sophisticated country.

David
Quammen has a great story about zoonoses. In it, I learned
that we now know that one animal reservoir of Marburg is the
Egyptian fruit bat.

Nineteen
seventy three, a story by Alan Bellows that takes us
back to how the world looked in the early 1970s.

Offtopic: Here
is a fabulous example (best viewed on a 30" monitor)
of Google Art
Project.