Links

1. Hari Pulakkat in The Economic Times: IITs undergoing silent revolution to create robust technical research ecosystem and governance.

2. Jordan Weissmann in The Atlantic: The Ph.D Bust: America's Awful Market for Young Scientists—in 7 Charts.

3. Gillian Tett in The Financial Times: How bankers believed their own hype.

   The results [reported in a paper by Princeton economists] were striking. Before conducting the research, the economists had expected that securitisation experts would be good at judging when to sell properties and how to avoid housing market losses; after all, they were close to the front line of the mortgage industry and supposed to know all about real estate. But in reality, the number-crunching showed “little evidence of securitisation agents’ awareness of a housing bubble and impending crash in their own home transactions”, as the paper says. The supposed experts “neither managed to time the market nor exhibited cautiousness in their home transactions”. Furthermore, they actually suffered bigger losses on housing than the random “control” group of lawyers who were not “experts” on housing at all.

4. Edward Jay Epstein in NYRB: An 'A' from Nabokov

   [Nabokov] then described his requisites for reading the assigned books [in his course on European Literature of the Nineteenth Century]. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected -— Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson —- would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.

Classic Truths

Exams are over for the kid. Obvious that for the continuance of World peace it is imperative that I should attend to her vacation needs. The first 'vacation read' book purchased was Ramayana, in English, by C. Rajagoplachari. That stirred my childhood memories and I 'borrowed' it from her for a night.

She appeared to Hanuman at once adorable and pitiful, like the holy word torn from its context by infidels, like prosperity sunk in unmerited ruin,like shattered hope and faith betrayed, like frustrated fulfillment, like intellect muddied by insanity, like blameless purity besmirched by foul slander. 

The context (p. 323) should be clear to all of us reading it from the region called India, the land of Three Hundred Ramayanas [pdf].

Such creative and original similes to explain the plight of a woman abducted from her husband. One of the several reasons we must read our (Indian) classics in our lifetime, irrespective of what 'organized education' prescribes to us.

If one ventures into the corresponding original passages of Valmiki for comparison, one would appreciate the sincerity and command of language(s) of Rajaji. Take for instance, riDHim nipathithAmiva. The English equivalent goes "like  prosperity sunk in unmerited ruin". While 'riDHim pathithAmiva = prosperity sunk in ruin', we have 'riDHim nipathithAmiva = prosperity sunk in unmerited ruin'. Even the 'ni' of the original is embellished into its English equivalent.

The last simile (in the quote above) is unbeatable, both in the original (aBUthEna apavaTHEna kIrthim nipathithAmiva)  and the English equivalent of Rajaji. I for one could never think of a sentence like that in English, even after blessed with a lifetime of a sea-turtle. Overwhelming instances that justifiably advice me to quit writing -- barring the professional necessities -- altogether in English.