Went for the Bombay bloggers ...

... meet the last Sunday. Had a nice time. Here are links to a few accounts of the meet: Amit, Anthony, Solzaire, and Ravikiran.

Monday evening, I attended a talk by Fali Nariman at the Nehru centre. The talk was on the occasion of Nehru's birth anniversary, and it was titled "The Challenges to Indian Democracy". The talk went very well (except for one or two factual mistakes that Nariman made). The most appealing part of Nariman's talk was his fine sense of humour. It was poorly attended though. Perhaps because the talk was on a working day, perhaps because not many are interested in Nehru these days, as Dilip was telling me the other day. I would have loved to link to a few media reports of the talk, but unfortunately I can't find any.

On the topic of Nehru, here's a fine article by Dipankar Gupta on Nehru and his vision (link via e-mail from Pradeep). Some of the points that Fali Nariman raised are broadly in agreement with Gupta's viewpoint. Nariman was categorical that the system did not fail us. With our present standards of public morality, any system wouldn't have succeeded more than this, he said. It's quite fashionable these days to accuse our founding fathers for today's problems. According to Nariman, the problems aren't due to our founding fathers, they are rather due to the shameless sons of today!

Update (Nov 22): Excerpts from Nariman's lecture were published in yesterday's The Indian Express.