Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In India, people will send their kids to schools at the other end of town if that’s where the good schools are. And costs in good schools are high too. In the West, on the other hand, schooling is free provided you send your kids to the neighborhood school. That provision has led parents in the West to want to live in areas with good schools, which in turn drives up real estate prices in those areas. But I am guessing you knew all that already. That leads me to what Carl Chancellor and Richard D. Kahlenberg ask : “Which sorts of investments in education give the greatest bang for the buck?” In the West, due to the neighborhood school model I described above, the choices were: a)      Increase spending in schools; or b)      Increase economic integration in schools. Option (a) is self-explanatory, so I’ll skip that. Option (b) requires making cheap housing available even in the more affluent/middle class areas. If you did that,...

Looks like most people felt the same way as me about Kapil Sibal’s attempt to censor free speech on the Net. The ignorant moron, Sibal, hadn’t listed Twitter on the list of companies that he wanted to “filter” content (he doesn’t even know the list of the most popular sites where people voice their opinions, but hey, he wants the Net filtered!). Maybe someone should tell him to read Shobhaa De’s tweet: “Sibalsaab,such outrage 2 protect privacy of one ‘Madam’ in a country of 100 million internet users? We like our freedom and we shall have it!” Maybe he will throw De into prison for that. Because jail is the “right” place for anyone in favour of free speech as per the Emergency party, er, Congress party. Sonia is definitely Indira’s heir! And Sibal could be her Sanjay Gandhi. Then the enemies of India (no, not terrorists or corrupt politicians but the users of the Net) hacked the Congress party’s website on Sonia’s b’day and added porn messages. So Sibal, tell me, would Go...

When Kapil Sibal came up with this brainwave to demand that sites like Google, Facebook and Yahoo! pre-screen all user generated content to prevent “disparaging, inflammatory or defamatory” content from being posted, my first reaction was that Sibal is a moron: does he not understand that what he asks for is impossible? That the only “solution” is blocking out the Net altogether? Or is that what our great telecom minister wants? Is he anti-freedom of speech? I am in total agreement with Mike Masnick’s comment on this and similar directives in other parts of the world, including the West: “Seriously, we're seeing this kind of insanity more and more these days, where politicians, who clearly have absolutely no freaking clue about the technology they're regulating, are coming up with positively insane suggestions, with no comprehension about the ramifications.” But surely even Sibal couldn’t be that dumb. The real reason is sycophancy: here’s what he did at the meetin...