A good contrast

Few years ago, I read the popular book The End of Poverty by famous writer Jeffrey Sachs, and I was very impressed by the way he dealt with the subject and the hope he rekindles in the reader. In fact, I became very optimistic after reading his book about the possibility of good times. Very recently, I read another good book Everybody Loves a Good Drought by P. Sainath, who is a very famous journalist. This book also talks about poverty but in some of the remote areas of India. The picture painted by the writer is really grim but seems to be the true depiction of harsh reality.

In some sense, after reading the latter book, I got a sense of how difficult it could be for any poverty alleviation program to reach such remote places and be able to provide direct benefit to destitute people, of course, until we make drastic changes in the machinery which already is in place.

For me, the contrast which these two books present is amazing- at a high level, the first book mostly deals with data along with a good dose of positive optimism, which would make the reader believe that complete eradication of poverty is achievable and that too in our life-time. Whereas, the second book presents the harsh reality at the ground level and depicts the multitude of problems (cultural, social, economical etc) which one needs to tackle to successfully deliver any poverty eradication program. Unfortunately, such things, which have a direct influence on the outcome of any such program, do not lend themselves well to any kind of traditional data-analysis techniques, and hence, often, get neglected at the peril of the success of such programs or intentions.

Wondering how others think about it ...

(In)consistency

Somehow, writing doesn't come to me naturally :( though, I made an attempt doing so via this blogpost, but after a while, I lost interest [recently I posted after a gap of 3 yrs !!!]

I am gonna try to make it a point to keep posting once in a while. Though, I need to overcome my obsession with writing something only if it is either totally new/fresh stuff or something immensely useful for others. I think, blogging is not just about it, it is about sharing your ideas/thoughts as you see 'em.

Let me see how it goes this time ...

Campus Experience

Very recently I visited an Engg. College which is probably ranked amongst the top 15 colleges in India to hire final year students. These students currently are in their 7th semester. It was very amazing to find that lot of these students were not even aware of basics [of course, this is my perspective]. During the course of interviews, I ended up asking one of the students why people are unaware of such things, and he told me, "Sir, what is the need when you have Google?" While it can be music to Google's ears but it left me thinking whether this so-called Google approach is better than the traditional one !

Well, I don't think there is a straight answer but, I believe, it is the underlying thought process which is more important. Today, it seems, most of the students assume that since they have access to Google, they need not bother about finding out "why" something is the way it is. And, to some degree it is true, but I don't think it works when one maps the same logic to everyday living. When one is faced with a human-behavioral situation one won't have the time to check it on Google why it is so, in order to respond to it in a better way. Just wondering if the young generation is thinking about this or not :-? Or may be they think that acquiring knowledge is equivalent to building an in-memory database, which has no practical use. Humnn ...