Interesting readings

• Read this interview in the Times of India with Steve Coll, and this Congressional testimony of his. If you haven't yet read Ghost Wars, you should.
• Vijay Kelkar's recent speech on privatisation.
• The comments on this blog post are worth reading.
• Sanjeev Sanyal, in Business Standard, summarises our public policy problem: we need to build a strong (i.e. capable) State with a limited mission.
• Joe Leahy, in the Financial Times, has an article titled India: A nation develops about global quality R&D taking place in India. I'm pleased that researchers are being paid salaries large enough to make it easy to relocate to India. Also see David Brooks in the New York Times on Israel's achievements in this.
• Tamal Bandyopadhyay in Mint on the woes of foreign banks in India.
• Pratip Kar in Business Standard on competition between stock exchanges in India.
• Parth Shah debates Vinod Raina in the Business Standard on private schools.
• Nitin Pai has a response to Barbara Crossette's diatribe.
• Vikas Bajaj in the New York Times on the literature festival in Jaipur. How civilised. I have long felt that a genuine life of the mind in India is 25 years or more into the future. Maybe that's being too pessimistic.
• Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko remind us that we are in the Great Moderation.
• Shai Bernstein, Josh Lerner, Morten Sorensen and Per Stroemberg have an NBER working paper titled Private Equity and Industry Performance . They find that industries where PE funds have invested in the past five years have grown more quickly in productivity and employment.
• Michael Slackman in the New York Times, taking stock of Dubai.
• One of the best blogs that I know of, from India, is `Wanderer's Eye', by Aniruddha Dhamorikar. E.g. see his latest post, on a mother wasp. Also see: a great collection of pictures on India.
• In the Hall of Shame of the 25 dirtiest cities of the world, by Forbes magazine, Bombay is at rank 7 and Delhi is at rank 24.
• Watch me talk about the recent RBI credit policy announcement -- part 1, part 2.
• Raghuram Rajan has a careful response to the Obama's proposals, which illuminates my recent writings on this.
• Scott McNealy has a beautiful goodbye note to Sun.
• Chris Anderson has an amazing story in Wired magazine about the new world of `small batch' manufacturing.
• Miles Corwin has an inspiring story for everyone who wants to be a writer or a journalist. And, for anyone engaged in deep thinking about the media, do not miss this lecture by Alan Rusbridger.