The curious case of Chander Mohan and the anachronism of the sharia law in India

 

Today's Wall Street Journal reports about an Indian politician's escapade.Basically, this guy wanted to have an affair and marry his mistress and made full use of India's archaic legal system. While even many Islamic countries don't have sharia law allowing folks to marry multiple wives, India has them. One cannot believe a secular 21st century democracy, giving equal rights to both sexes still follows some archaic law that is hopelessly out of place with the march of the modern civilization.

When will India come to modern age and repeal such anachronistic laws?

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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123552228845764863.html

"Chander Mohan, deputy chief minister of the northern state of Haryana, made a shocking announcement. Mr. Mohan, whose overwhelmingly Hindu state of 23 million people is among India's most prosperous, declared that he had converted to Islam. The 43-year-old father of two added that he had also just wed a second wife, another Muslim convert....

What's happened since has all the trappings of a Bollywood plot, replete with an alleged kidnapping and mysterious disappearances. The drama's serious subtext shows how crucial religious identity remains in a country that bills itself as the world's largest secular democracy....

...A divorcee, Ms. Bali says that her affair with the politician began after the two met by chance at a juice stall in 2004. She says she yielded to Mr. Mohan's insistent messages and love letters -- some of which, she claims, were written in blood.

...Indian law, however, prohibits bigamy and makes divorce a complicated procedure. It might have been especially complicated in Mr. Mohan's case because his house and numerous other assets are registered in the name of Ms. Bishnoi and their children.

Yet, there was a loophole: India's 150 million Muslims, unlike other Indian citizens, are exempted from the secular legislation in family matters. Instead, they are governed by Islamic personal law, or sharia, which permits Muslim men to have up to four wives. "

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What do Indians search?

 

I was going through google search trends - http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2008/world.html#top and it is fascinating to see what Indians search the most J. I have not seen so many actors in the zeitgeist for any other country. And interestingly there is no male actor in the list. So, I think search in India is highly dominated by boys and I guess any search company trying for Indian market should note the demographic trend and configure the product accordingly. The overall theme fits with the fourth column.

 

Top searches on Mobile 1. orkut 2. yahoo 3. waptrick 4. gmail 5. games 6. katrina kaif 7. rediffmail 8. yahoomail 9. namitha 10. google

Fastest Rising 1. youtube 2. orkut 3. katrina kaif 4. cricket 5. irctc 6. facebook 7. genelia d'souza 8. beijing 2008 olympic games 9. sixth pay commission 10. ipl

Most Popular 1. orkut 2. gmail 3. yahoo 4. google 5. youtube 6. yahoomail 7. indian railways 8. rediff 9. cricket 10. katrina kaif

Top 'how to' searches 1. how to reduce weight 2. how to kiss 3. how to earn money 4. how to get pregnant 5. how to learn english 6. how to gain weight 7. how to play guitar 8. how to create a website 9. how to impress a girl 10. how to tie a tie

Contribution of Computers and Internet to Economic growth

 

Also appears in: http://econjournal.com/2009/02/11/contribution-of-computers-and-internet-to-economic-growth/

How come we see the computer revolution everywhere except in the [aggregate] productivity statistics?

- Robert M. Solow, Winner, 1987 Nobel Prize for Economics (Sveriges Riksbank Prize)

Computers, Internet and mobile phones have fundamentally changed our life the last 2 decades. We could do more efficient shopping, connect to a lot more people and be more productive at work. As an engineer who have been a part in developing an Operating system, a search engine and a social networking tool  - the three main products of this revolution, I feel they are great things to both build and to use. They make individuals much more productive looking at the micro level. However, looking from an economic point of view and see the Macro picture I’m bogged down with “Show me the money”. Economists of the 1980s and 90s have debated a lot about this and suggested that they may not have caused a lot of economic growth.  As this review shows, the economists of late 80s successfully argued that this paradox is due to “mismeasurement, lags, redistribution and mismanagement”.

However, over a long period of time you should see the effect in economic growth, as the indirect effect of the productivity increases reflect in the macro economy. And things have changed since the original “productivity paradox” came, as PCs came into the living room and internet connected the ordinary people to do their mundane stuff in networks originally designed to survive nuclear attacks.So in this decade, have the powerful PCs, Smartphones, Search engines, Facebook led an explosive economic growth? In reopening the debate and looking at the recent data, there still seems to be dismal evidence for the productivity growth from the modern revolution. It is possible that the economy might have reached a saturation as a $10 trillion economy cannot continue to be sprinting like a $1 trillion economy, but still 1.7% annual growth in per-capita income since WWW came seems less. There might be other small causes too. The article concludes with what might be a possible cause for this.

Where do US Universities spend their money?

 

Also appears in EconJournal

Have you ever wondered where do the money from your tuition go? How do the universities spend their money? Why does the cost of tuition grow 2X  more than the inflation rate? Why are the US universities extremely inefficient and uneconomical? I didn’t find any other study and workable stats on university spending in the net, so I just made a small exploratory study on how universities spend money.

Organization of this essay:

Part 1 concerns endowments, Part 2 contains analysis on a private University (Harvard) and Part 3 contains analysis on a public university (UW) and Part 4 is the initial conclusion. If there is enough audience interest, I will go deeper into this problem in further posts.

I started from this chart from my earlier post and started digging where the universities spend their money in.

My 2020 Wishlist

1. Economical solar power (less than $0.05/kWh)

2. Economical water desalination (less than $0.001/gallon)

3. 100% global literacy

4. Democracy and Law & Order returning to Sub-saharan Africa

5. Poorest countries of developing world getting within a factor of  ½  or more of developed world’s per-capita income (around $40K/yr)

6. Significant protection of coral reserves & tropical forests and help rebuild the damage to nature

7. Reversal of global warming using the cheap energy from #1

8. Eradication of most preventable, communicable diseases (including Polio, Malaria, Cholera, Tuberculosis and Typhoid)

9. Programmable homes, enabled by Nanomechanics, to enable changing in color, structure and other physical properties on demand, and making homes extremely cheap, mass producible and still satisfy consumer choices

10. Foldable, collapsible cars that can completely compact on demand (you can park the car in the closet) and give options to hold from 1 to 10 passengers, with adjustable sizes, and passing all the crash tests.

Header Image from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/66164549@N00/2455160742/

H1b and Innovation

Here is an interesting paper on H1b and the contribution to innovation.

http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/09-005.pdf

It’s a pretty long paper and some parts of it are too technical. So, I have reorganized into two main themes and summarized the contents below.