Musings on India, the law, and policy
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 20th, 2009
Tim Harford, of the Financial Times, writes in his The Undercover Economist, “Health insurance is important because illnesses are extremely unpredictable and sometimes cost a lot to treat. Not only can some medical treatment be very expensive, it is often impossible to postpone it until a more convenient moment.” Last week, Mr. Barack Obama addressed [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 16th, 2009
Jainism preaches enlightenment and salvation as the ultimate goal of human life. Pain and suffering are the hallmarks of a “diksha” life or life of a monk that every Jain is supposed to lead. Jains believe that it is only through inflicting hardships on oneself that one can wash away one’s sins of this and [...]
Posted in Constitution, Rights on Jun 15th, 2009
The Commonwealth of Australia is perhaps the only nation with a written Constitution but no Bill of Rights. It is interesting to note that the drafters of the Australian Constitution rejected the idea of a list of fundamental rights thus placing full confidence in the duly elected government to uphold and protect these rights. One [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 11th, 2009
Today’s Hindu carries an opinion piece about one Jeffrey Destovic, and his memories of Obama-nominated Justice Sonia Sotomayor. Imprisoned at the age of 16 for the killing of a high school classmate, Deskovic, now 35, filed a habeas corpus petition in 1997 in U.S. District Court contesting his conviction. The court denied the request because [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 5th, 2009
In continuation of Arun’s fantastic post, here is the Wordle graphic of the text of Obama’s speech in Cairo. For those of you unfamiliar with Wordle, what it does is basically rank a written piece in terms of the frequencies that various words appear in it, and put these frequencies into perspective by co-relating them [...]
Posted in Foreign Affairs, india, Politics, Terrorism on Jun 5th, 2009
Two historic speeches were delivered yesterday; one by Barack Obama on America’s new and renewed MidEast policy, in a keynote address at Cairo University – and the other by Pratibha Patil, in her inaugural address to the Indian Parliament. Both are of immense significance; while the former indicates a tectonic, and inevitable, shift in US [...]