The Billionaires and The Guru: How an Indian Family Burned Through $2B
bloomberg.com
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More specifically, I'd like to move back at some point and I'm not sure if I ever should.
That said, money-making opportunities are present, as they always were.
Probably the most concise and accurate summary of the situation I've read. (Particularly as someone in the UK who's doesn't want to leave!)
On the whole, the actions of both the voting public in many countries, let alone the politicians that they vote for, do seem to be displaying an increasingly aggressive level of stupidity. Or possibly, if not stupidity, one could more accurately call it apathy.
Aside from being underfunded (in comparison to global standards) there are systemic issues with IITs which make it underperform in research - first, they were designed as undergraduate institutes. The administrators constantly harangue, and block the ways of the colleagues who want to do research - for example, disallowing travel during the semester etc.
More importantly, the best PG students in India do not go to the IITs. They go to IISc or abroad. It is the PG students who do most of the research in a university, not the UG students.
Think of this: no teaching university in the US is a top-tier research university.
When faculty systematically underperform in research over 60 years, when many of them were good researchers before they join the IITs, and many of them continue to be good researchers after they leave the IIT system, we need to rethink.
Faculty must be allowed to do research 90 % of the time, travel freely, and spend very little time on teaching/administration. You can't have your legs in both the boats.
IITs are all about placements and big salary pay days. It works that way because the alumni want to preserve the value of that name on their resume, only way they can do that is continue to pay obscene salaries to their own kind. So that when they go out looking for jobs, the same thing can work in their case too.
Once you arrive here, all questions on research or doing good work et all go out of the window. You are just about marketing gas, advertising you own legend.
A few start up founders even told me they avoid hiring IITian for this very reason. They act like they are above everything, nothing you pay is enough, they always think some work is beneath them. And yeah barely stay before a project completes.
Lastly, the only thing IITians train their whole academic career is for being good at interviews and exams. That's understandable, because they only thing they ever do all life is hop jobs.
Stanford, Carnegie Mellion, Harvard, MIT, Caltech are all "teaching universities". Most professors do research along side their teaching. Courses in India are outdated everywhere. If research is encouraged the quality of education will definitely go up.
God no. This is exactly the problem that most undergraduate campuses in the US are grappling with right now. Pedagogy (you know, the purported reason for the existence of universities when they were first established) is taking a backseat to research, with students not deriving nearly the value from college that they should be. Most newly-minted PhD candidates want to create rigorous research programs, even at small liberal arts colleges, much to the detriment of those who matriculate (and who consequently accumulate ludicrous amounts of debt).
It would be much better for academia to have an honest conversation with itself and note that some people want to teach while others want to do research, and send the research-inclined to non-teaching institutes like IAS, LLNL, the Broad Institute, etc and the teaching-inclined to work with undergraduates. The outliers who fall in the middle of the Venn diagram can choose for themselves which direction they want to go.
It also would help if workshops to develop pedagogical techniques weren't almost universally optional for grad students and the ones who do engage in them get looks for wanting to do them instead of doing research... this may be just an impression on my part, but I really felt like grad students I've encountered who prioritize teaching over publications get marginalized.
It's absolutely not the case anymore, but I can definitely say that the quality of the TV production was raised significantly. Well, you know where the money goes to.
When it comes to police, ambulance or just having safe food, safe streets and competent government, there's a sea of difference, although it's easy for me to sit at a Hard Rock Cafe back home and think that this place is amazing.
The situation in Kerala right now illustrates this well.
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/in... https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/in...
Source: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/new-night-lights-m...
Scroll down to India's map and play with it for a while and then ask yourself whether India has changed for the better.
You may not feel the difference as much as India's villagers and poor.
This just shows that now there are more airconditioners there (well, lights).
Parent was explicitly trying to differentiate between more money/technical change and different mentality.
Considering electricity consumption growth rate is still same or maybe a little slower then the decade before I don't see much of an achievement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_India#De...
Are we the only country with constitutionally guaranteed Right to Privacy ?
come and build. Oh and that goes for everyone else too. We have a lot of American, Brit and Chinese founders building successful startups in India.
I can forgive the mob. Maybe things get heated and people lose their minds. They should all go to prison for life but I can forgive them once the sentences are handed. I can never forgive the police for taking a sample of the meat to check if it was beef.
Democracy doesn't mean anything without rights of the minority. Not because you like Muslims. You can totally hate Muslims and still support basic decency of life for people of that faith.
It would seem to be a crucial piece of motive for the mob crime; it's also unlikely that the man killed was solely responsible for the entire chain of killing, butchering, and transporting the finished beef product, so other people may be implicated as well, etc.
Additionally, if it was beef, there's a reason to look upstream to where the dead man got the beef and chase down those leads.
What's the external/societal cost to them taking the meat to the lab? It's not like the police not taking the beef to the lab will suddenly summon the cow back to life nor that they took the beef and tested it by eating it.
(I'm assuming from context that beef for consumption is locally illegal. That seems a safe assumption.)
It seems no different than taking any other piece of crime scene or crime-related evidence to me.
It has the same vibe as checking the skirt length of a rape victim, or checking into the sexual history of someone beaten up for being gay, just to be sure they really were gay.
I do not agree with the laws, but the police should dutifully follow the laws.
> India has a population of more than 1.3 billion and it is severely under-policed. This leads to several miscreants doing all sorts of bad stuff.
So the police is spread thin and you want them to go after dead people for allegedly eating beef? What kind of mental gymnastics do you do?
Is following the law mental gymnastics? Should I curse the police for following procedures and investigating crimes, even if I disagree with them?
What if police decided that it was spread too thin, and did not stop me being lynched?
That being said, you are wrong. It was illegal.
Lynching happened in UP. And sale, transport, and slaughter of beef is illegal there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Dadri_mob_lynching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_slaughter_in_India#Utta...
The police should take the samples for analysis as they did. It is the procedure I expect from them in this case.
If a bank robber was killed during a bank heist, you would still investigate who planned the robbery wouldn't you?
However, I don't see how that is a reason for someone "not coming back to India". Not all people from the majority religion have ganged up and decided to lynch Muslims.
India has a population of more than 1.3 billion and it is severely under-policed. This leads to several miscreants doing all sorts of bad stuff.
> Democracy doesn't mean anything without rights of the minority. Not because you like Muslims. You can totally hate Muslims and still support basic decency of life for people of that faith.
What is the rationale behind this argument? The Indian state doesn't discriminate against people based on their religion or color. I am not denying criminal acts against Muslims. Investigations are on in these cases and people are being punished as per the law.
In theory that is correct. But states have the luxury of being economical with the effort they put in. The spurt in beef related lynching is a phenomenon of the current government and has been going on in a while.
> Investigations are on in these cases and people are being punished as per the law.
I assume that statement of yours is based on some knowledge. How many convictions so far ?
I can give examples where the accused got immediate bail layed out on a red carpet.
From what I can tell from afar, access to courts in India is mixed at best. A constitutional guarantee only goes as far as its enforced/enforcable.
Things have improved in general. But it is impossible to answer this question without knowing more about your expectations.
That's entirely your decision to make.
But nothing much has changed in any real sense. Some highways have been built and there is slight change in infrastructure.
But if your question is if some huge changes have come to pass, alas nothing significant has changed in a real sense.
I had to return permanently due to my parents health, but if I really had a chance I would return to US though.
In the "old" India things like this would have gone on as a matter of course. The fact that such financial crimes are publicized and prosecuted, and that large industries are being subjected to professional management instead of capricious rule by the rich scions is definitely forward progress.
If anything is incentive not to move back at this point, it's the traffic, poor urban planning, and air quality. In that one respect, everything seems to be getting worse.
(Communalism seems to be rearing its head in nasty ways too)
Then again, one would expect that India is improving far more quickly than the US.
"Too good to be true"? You're joking, right?
There's loads of people in the world with a high enough status, but who still are gullible enough because they never really had any deep relationships. Be it friends, lovers or family.
That's exactly the kind of weaknesses upon which people build religions.
About from a quirky sexual liberalism, the teachings were standard fare for a religion. The phenomenon was also unremarkable, the the grand scheme of things. The world is full of holy men, holy places, masters and devotees. It always has been. Any religion with a an origin story features a story like this. The old Hebrew/jehovist religion centred around prophet-leaders. Moses was a holy man, along with the other prophets. Jesus was such a holy man. Mohammed. Budha. Zoroaster, probably. The founders of most old catholic orders... You might even include communist "holy men" or other secular/political movements in that overall group.
Basically, we can just take it as a given that holy men with an extremely devoted group of devotees will emerge here and there.
At that point it's up to a St. Peter, or a Ma Anand Sheila to do something with it.
Just before wild wild country begins, America experienced the Jonestown bloodbath. Its definitely a history that repeats.
In India, people trust gurus and babas even for problems like pollution, water conservation, economy and healthcare. I have seen software engineers, working in top tier US product companies, who believe India had planes, nuclears 1000s of years back.
Eventually though as the guru's following explodes, big money comes into play, and money corrupts so you end up with the gurus or their followers exploiting their situations for profit or worse.
North Korea is basically propped up by China. If China would stop backing the regime, either the local citizens or intervention from South Korea could make the regime collapse overnight.
Eastern Europe had regimes enforced by the USSR. Same story. See 1989 (luckily for these countries).
Can't agree with equal responsibility. Children, for example, are not.
In any particular country, each citizen, of course, plays their own tiny part, but ultimately, its truly a tiny part.
For the vast majority of people, they make better decisions thinking about the path of a country as an impersonal force that they can react and respond to, but have functionally no actual control over
when you aggregate the political will of 800 million people, it is largely an impersonal force
Sadly, it's not even that - we don't have a popular vote, so not all votes have the same weight :(
The vast majority of elective public offices in the US are directly elected by popular vote.
And even in the House, where at least some effort is made to scale the number of representatives by population, California has only 53 representatives to Wyoming's 1, which still means each Wyoming resident has 1.5 times as much influence over the House as each California resident.
The most basic duty is participating in civic discussion; voting is secondary. One of the problems with American democracy is the idea that voting is the most fundamental mechanism of participation.
Apropos of that, I have an Indian acquaintance who is an activist, focusing on women's rights and poverty. She's told a couple of stories stories about going into tiny, remote villages in India and telling people about their basic rights under the law, only to be asked "what is India?" and having to explain that the place these people live is called "India".
"The West" "solved" a bunch of its problems as it created problems in the rest of the world.
2. The West claims to be enlightened and progressive. Essentially having a manifest moral destiny.
3. Men have been sexist through most if not all of recorded history, treating women as lessor beings if not property. Does that excuse today's men?
3. No, they haven't. Obviously, male and female roles have been socially differentiated over history, but that derived from biology. The impact of biology has been lessened with industrialization, naturally leading to new opportunities for women.
Also, their entire TOS looks like one of those shrink wrap licenses. I feel like people really don't understand how the internet works, and in the long run they are simply going to break it if the law dictates what software I have to run or not run to view a website.
EDIT: Link to TOS: https://www.bloomberg.com/notices/tos/
Really guys, this sort of stuff should not stand, the idea that they own the ability for you to link to their site is hideous. Even if they are "granting" that ability today allowing people to front like they have that power should be stopped. Otherwise next generations will just obey because "it's in the tos", "it's the law".
I believe I have to whitelist certain scripts in uMatrix before those things work (or even appear!).
edit: also the website just works for me even without scripts. I think your IP has triggered a flood warning leading the captcha and for that to work you need JS (which makes sense).
> How an Indian family lost $2 Billion
I think we're on the 3rd title.