Interesting readings

China's Pakistan Conundrum by Evan A. Feigenbaum, in Foreign Affairs.

The most important task of government is the public goods of law and order: laws, courts and judiciary. The first step towards strengthening these lies in sound measurement. Writing in Pragati, Sushant K. Singh has an excellent article on the problems of measurement of crime in India.

An independent judiciary by Ruma Pal.

Devesh Kapur, in the Business Standard, on the HR crisis in the Indian State.

Shyam Saran in the Business Standard on a more sensible approach that we should bring to intra-South-Asia logistics.

The lack of freedom of speech in India: Karan Singh Tyagi in the Hindu.

Amit Rai writes in the Times of India about the mistakes of the legal actions following the AMRI fire.

Mobis Philipose in Mint on how charges by exchanges have made a difference to the currency futures market.

Every advocate of a big spending Indian government should ponder this article about Greece by Landon Thomas in the New York Times.

Dreze and Sen on what India does right and wrong. We may not agree with most of this, but they are smart people and it's worth reading.

Hard times at UTI: Anirudh Laskar and Vyas Mohan in Mint, and Niladri Bhattacharya and N. Sundaresha Subramanian in Business Standard.

Air India and Maharashtra PSUs remind us, in interesting ways, about why government should not be in business.

Martin Feldstein explains what went wrong with the Euro.

Look at profiles of Mario Monti, who will try to fix Italy, and Loukas Papadimos, who will try to fix Greece. I guess that every now and then, the professional politicians foul up big time, and then bring in the economists to clean up. It reminds me of a perspective by C. B Bhave on urban governance in India: when things are going well, the politicians want an accomodating civil servant; when the city goes to hell, they want a tough competent one. Also see Greece and Italy Seek a Solution From Technocrats by Rachel Donadio in the New York Times.

Charles Moore looks back at the story of Maggie Thatcher, who ended Britain's long decline in the 20th century.

Read Larry Summers in the Financial Times on the problem of inequality and three things that need to be done about it.

Two important platforms for modern web development were Flash and HTML5. It now looks like Flash is dying. Looks like Steve Jobs was right on one more thing.