Locana -- The Eye: III

A quick look at a few happening places in the Indian blogosphere.

Dilip D'Souza's post titled The Inefficiency Boost is about our infatuation with GDP. The voltage stabilizer industry and the packaged water industry do boost our GDP. But these industries thrive due to inefficiencies in the respective sectors. Check out this post, if you haven't already been there. Loads of fun stuff too: some seem to be asking Dilip to attend a Basket Weaving 101! Also check out the two well written posts by Navin here and here.

Kunal's post about a talk by a lefty professor of MICA is also attracting a lot of attention. An interesting discussion in the comments section over there. I also thought Kunal's ending remark -- I also took hope in the fact that if the left stormed to power with arguments as verifiably false as these, Classic Liberalism/Libertarianism too has a chance -- is pretty funny. Libertarians and anti-libertarians are in agreement there, I guess!

Is Noam Chomsky a capitalist pig? Yazad Jal thinks so at AnarCapLib. Lots of comments there too. Yazad's post has also prompted a long post by Ashuthosh. Let me quote a bit from Ashutosh's final para:

Men live and die, but it's their ideas which endure. If Chomsky's models endure, after a hundred years, his personal life's activities as such would be a footnote to a footnote, compared to the discussion of his ideas. Even if he does do the things noted above, the motivations could be very different from what have been assumed. Quibbling over the above-mentioned traits of Noam Chomsky, would be, I think, doing a great disservice to his work and the body of knowledge he has erected, on which we should really be spending our time. Irrespective of what Chomsky does, it would be a good idea to consult his references and read his words. The proof of the pudding is in its eating, not in the private life of the cook.

Okay, Chomsky, Arundhati Roy and Praful Bidwai are often beaten up together in the Indian blogosphere. Sometimes P. Sainath too. So I was a bit surprised that Surjit Bhalla's accusation that Sainath cooks up his stats did not find many takers. Uma of Indianwriting had a post about it, and I think that's the only post that I noticed about Bhalla's article. Bhalla wrote:

Ordinary folks do not have the knowledge, or the interest, or the time, to fact check the data spitted out by journalists. Unlike academics, journalists do not have to cite their sources — it takes too much space and affects the flow. In return for this privilege, journalists have a responsibility to not betray the trust, or at least not to betray it so blatantly.

Anyway check out this article by Sainath too, which Bhalla attacked.

Previous posts in this series: Locana -- The Eye: I, II.