It's been a while since I've posted. In large part because I've been travelling. In small part because since I got back, I've been feeling terribly lazy. And there's such a lot I have to write about my impressions from Vienna, Frankfurt and Kochi (two world's apart, eh?). But I'll leave that for a later date. For starters, something that I read earlier today morning on Hong Kong, China and the future of freedom by Arthur Waldron.

Writes Waldron in Commentary Magazine, "FOR most of the six years since its return to Chinese control in 1997 under the rubric of “One Country, Two Systems,” Hong Kong has served as perhaps the single most important piece of evidence for three fundamental assumptions underlying our policy toward the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The first of these is that the government in Beijing is not so much ideological as pragmatic and flexible: hence its willingness to grant at least a semblance of self-government to Hong Kong, now a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic. The second is that the liberality displayed toward Hong Kong is a signal of the longer-term course that the Beijing leadership has set for China as a whole: toward more openness and increased political as well as economic freedom. The final assumption is that the reasonableness Beijing has demonstrated in Hong Kong will eventually persuade the people of Taiwan to adopt a similar model, and enter China at no cost to their democracy or freedom but with great benefit to the trust and cordiality of the relationship between Beijing and Washington. These comfortable assumptions look to have been completely overturned by the mass pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong in July." Fascinating argument indeed. Click here for the full text.

I've been in splits since the time I chanced on this. Here's a sampling.

Rand, Ayn: Hollywood screenwriter, later writer of huge thick novels, then a philosopher, but for some reason I can never find her in the philosophy reference books I look in. Maybe I have the spelling wrong.

Better still;
Darwin, Charles: Primarily an economist, who happened upon the theory of evolution after dabbling on the stock exchange. 'Darwin's whole theory of evolution by natural selection bears an uncanny resemblance to the political economic theory of early capitalism...Darwin had some knowledge of the economic survival of the fittest because he earned his living from investment in shares he followed daily in the newspapers. What Darwin did was take early-nineteenth century political economy and expand it to include all of natural economy.' [Richard Lewontin, Biology as Ideology]

Or this for that matter;
Aristotle: A famous thief. Stole all his ideas from the library at Alexandria, built after his death, which just goes to show how sneaky he was.

For more, click here :-)

Quite enjoyed this story about Pokhran published on IndoLink. What makes it all the more interesting for me is that it's written by my uncle. I wonder how does he manage to crack these stories from a small village in Kerala where access to the Internet comes on the back of a painfully slow dial up connection!!