Interesting readings

• Sanjeev Sanyal in Business Standard : Building cities for 21st century India, Delhi (which leads you to delhinullahs.org), and Calcutta. Also see: The Sustainable Planet Institute.


• Why investment banks were fated to be roadkill, in Financial Express by Viral Acharya.


• On Mumbai's Streets, Cabbies Fight To Keep Passengers Uncomfortable by Eric Bellman in the Wall Street Journal. A simple emphasis on law and order would go a long way.


• Green roots of recovery, by Ila Patnaik in Indian Express.


• In Foreign Policy magazine, Steve Coll has a great article on how the US should think about its AfPak strategy. India has a lot at stake in ensuring that this works out right.


• Brian Krebs is a columnist on computer security for The Washington Post. He has recommendations for customers -- and implicitly for banks -- on how to be safe when doing Internet banking.


• Editorials in Financial Express on the confusion that arises in India owing to the pervasive use of year-on-year growth rates: 13 October and 14 October.


• Andre Beteille, in the Telegraph, on The language of rights.


• Rob Walker in the New York Times, on the frontiers of quantification of Indian music.


• An editorial in the Telegraph on the disappointing perpetuation of censorship in various aspects of the Indian government.


• In response to The museum of innocence by Orhan Pamuk: a review in the New York Times by Maureen Howard, review by Pico Iyer in The New York Review of Books, and Negar Azimi in the New York Times on the museum that goes with the book.


• In the story of Microsoft vs. Unix, Windows 7 seems to have reached the point where, in David Pogue's words: ``Microsoft employees can show up in public without avoiding eye contact''. On another front, Microsoft seems to be losing the cell phone to the two Unixes playing in that space. See Daniel Lyons look back at Microsoft's last decade, and a great Bill Gates story by Joel Spolsky.


• Baby you were born to run by Tara Parker-Pope, in the New York Times.

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A conference on Indian pension reform

IIEF Pension Policy and Business Conference, 2009.

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Recent RBI moves in financial reform

I have an article in Financial Express today where I try to interpret recent RBI announcements in financial reforms.

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Looking back at Indira Gandhi

Writing in Indian Express, Pratap Bhanu Mehta looks back at Indira Gandhi. He offers five lessons for today's Congress:

1. Leaders are more effective when they work through institutions rather than attempting to subvert them.


2. Sound economic policies are not a matter of simply projecting good intentions; they require a concerted understanding of the causal conditions that make for successful intervention.


3. Being personally secular is neither here nor there. The important thing is to fish in the treacherous waters of communal identification, from wherever it comes.


4. As the Punjab crisis demonstrated, when the state does not act impartially and in time, it sows the seeds of greater violence in the future.


5. Democracy is not just about the practice of popular authorisation. It is about a whole gamut of constitutional values that have to be zealously guarded.

India had a bad period from 1962 to 1977, of which the worst part was the Emergency. This period preceded Pakistan's worst years (Zia ul Haq's period, 1978-1988). Kamal A. Munir has an article in Financial Express about Pakistan where we see the sustained impact of those years.



India seems to have come out better from the dark period, partly because that period ended a long time ago and there has been more time for healing. In addition, in Pakistan's case, the Afghan wars and islamisation which began in Zia ul Haq's period have not yet ended. In some sense, Pakistan is not yet into the post-authoritarian post-conflict period of reconstruction of institutions, which began in India in 1977.

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Regulation vs. micro-management

Writing in Business Standard, Somasekhar Sundaresan reminds us that SEBI has greater powers than US SEC. I'm curious: Does the US SEC have the power (if it should so decide) to control what time trading should start and stop at all exchanges?

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How evil is insider trading?

I have long been a skeptic about State action against insider trading, which is believed to be widely prevalent in India. Writing in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Donald J. Boudreaux has a nice scheme which can replace the existing policy framework.

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New thinking on financial stability

I have an article in Financial Express today, where I discuss RBI's take on financial stability, which sums up to the rejection of all recent thinking in India on monetary and financial reform, in the light of recent thinking on this subject at the US Fed and the ECB.

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