Interesting readings

A. K. Bhattacharya in the Business Standard on how the UPA is faring well without Pranab Mukherjee.

As we ponder the fundamental challenges that India faces, it is interesting to read Boss Rail by Evan Osnos in New Yorker magazine.

India's new approach lets individual states take the lead on development by Simon Denyer in the Washington Post.

Madhavi Goradia Divan in the Indian Express on defamation law.

Towards better financial regulation and What is regulation for, by Ila Patnaik, on the big picture of the FSLRC approach paper.

One head is better than many by Ila Patnaik. Let's not repeat the mistake of the RBI Amendment Act of 2006, she says.

In the mood for reform by Ila Patnaik in the Indian Express, on the fresh push by the UPA government.

The Evolution of India's UID Program: Lessons Learned and Implications for Other Developing Countries by Frances Zelazny.

Great post-mortems of the Sahara case: Tony Munroe and Devidutta Tripathy on Reuters, and Tamal Bandhyopadhyay in Mint. These stories helped form my arguments in the recent blog post Indian capitalism is not doomed.

Most of us take a certain degree of Internet access in India for granted. But not so long ago, getting to the net in India was nightmarishly hard. A story on FirstPost tells us about the early days, with an appropriate accent on Ernet, the pioneer which made all this possible.

Don't bring your cell phone to meetings in China, you might get hacked by James McGregor on Quartz.

The difference between reality and fiction is that reality doesn't have to be plausible. I was quite gloomy about what might happen with Iran's nuclear program, but for the second time in history, it is starting to look like sanctions might work.

Quants aren't really like regular people by Izabella Kaminska in the Financial Times.

Charles Duhigg and Steve Lohr tell us, in the New York Times that In the smartphone industry alone, according to a Stanford University analysis, as much as $20 billion was spent on patent litigation and patent purchases in the last two years - an amount equal to eight Mars rover missions. Last year, for the first time, spending by Apple and Google on patent lawsuits and unusually big-dollar patent purchases exceeded spending on research and development of new products, according to public filings.

Two great stories about Barack Obama in Vanity Fair: The Hunt for `Geronimo' by Mark Bowden, and Obama's way by Michael Lewis. While on this subject, see Time magazine on Robert Gates. These three articles give us a sense of the gap that we face between governance in India today and that seen in a sophisticated country.

David Quammen has a great story about zoonoses. In it, I learned that we now know that one animal reservoir of Marburg is the Egyptian fruit bat.

Nineteen seventy three, a story by Alan Bellows that takes us back to how the world looked in the early 1970s.

Offtopic: Here is a fabulous example (best viewed on a 30" monitor) of Google Art Project.