Reading list:

Of Mice and Men

“Ain’t many guys travel around together. Don’t know why. Maybe ever’body in the whole damn world is scared of each other.”
- Slim, looking through George

The Inimitable Jeeves

I mean to say, the whole essence of a rescue, if you know what I mean, is that the party of the second part shall keep fairly still and in one spot. - Bertie Wooser, after pushing a kid in a river and then jumping in to save him

“How does he look, Jeeves?

“Sir?”

“What does Mr. Bassington-Bassington look like?”

“It is hardly my place, sir, to criticise the facial peculiarities of your friends.” - Jeeves

An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions (2012)

[On India’s recent record of fast economic growth] … it is extremely important to point to the fact that the societal reach of economic progress in India has been remarkably limited. - Chapter: A New India?

[On growth since independence] … so that three decades of planning brought about very little advancement in the schooling opportunities of Indian children.

In fact, the first Five Year Plan, initiated in 1951 – even though sympathetic to the need for university education which it strongly supported – argued against regular schooling [at the elementary level] favouring instead a so-called ‘basic education’ system, built on the hugely romantic and rather eccentric idea that children should learn through self-financing handicraft. - Chapter: Integrating Growth and Development

[On sustainable development] … Indeed, throughout history people have tended to take for granted the robustness of nature, and a secure place for us in it. The frailty of individual lives (including their ultimate cessation) has typically been seen as an individual predicament that did not apply to mankind in general. - Chapter: Integrating Growth and Development

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s official poverty estimates for Tamil Nadu were higher than the corresponding all-India figures … It is during that period that Tamil Nadu, much to the consternation of many economists, initiated bold social programmes [such as unversal midday meals] and started putting in place an extensive social infrastructure – schools, health centers, raods, public transport, water supply, electricity connections, and much more. - Chapter: India In Comparitive Perspective

A similar point applies again to the fertilizer subsidy … costing about 1.5 per cent of the country’s total GDP in 2008-9, when public expenditure on health was less than 1.5 per cent of GDP – a fairly transparent case of distorted priorities. - Chapter: Accountability and Corruption

[On skill progression in schools] … among children who are unable to pass a very simple test (as as a single-digit vertical addition). the proportion who are still unable to pass the same test after another year of schooling is typically somewhere between 80 and 90 per cent. - Chapter: The Centrality of Education

[On ‘priviliged excellence’ and the division between the ‘priviliged and the rest’ vis-à-vis the educational system] … The picking is done not through any organized attempt to keep anyone out (indeed far from it), but through differentiations that are driven by economic and social inequality … - Chapter: The Centrality of Education

[On school management, and absenteeism by teachers] There is something quite chilling in the thought that a large proportion (possibly as high as half) of the country’s children are sitting idly in classrooms on an average day – eager to learn, but deprived of any guidance and condemmed in many cases to leaving the schooling system without even being able to read or write. - Chapter: The Centrality of Education