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Author: Raoji
The man who would launch the building of the new Shanghai, Mayor Zhu Rongji, like all of history’s authoritarian city builders, had the mind of an engineer. As one famous anecdote has it, at a state dinner in Australia, Zhu went to the bathroom and was gone for so long that his worried hosts went to check on him. Found in his shirtsleeves tinkering with the toilet tank, Zhu embarrassingly explained that he had grown so fascinated by the Australian water-conserving commode that he couldn’t resist taking apart its dual-flush system and putting it back together again. “We must introduce this toilet to China,” Zhu gushed in his fluent English. [10] But the engineer-mayor’s ultimate passion wasn’t for minor advances in toilet hydraulics. He preferred civil engineering on a pharaonic scale.
Soon after Deng approved his Wall Street of the East plan, Zhu held a meeting with Western financial executives at the top of the Peace Hotel (formerly the Cathay) on the Bund. Zhu directed the assembled bankers to look out across the Huangpu River to Pudong. The blighted spit of land they looked down on, he explained with the calm assurance of the certifiably insane, would become the world’s leading financial center. “It was just warehouses and shacks and rice paddies,” a Wall Street executive in attendance later recalled. “And there were people living there. So I asked Zhu, ‘What are you going to do about all of those people?’ And he just said, ‘We’ll move them.’”
And move them he did. In Pudong, 300,000 residents were pushed out of their homes and relocated to high-rise apartments. [11] The repetitive rehousing slabs — just stacks of simple rooms rising 25 stories in the air — may have been a physical improvement over the shacks of the old Pudong, but many inhabitants were loath to move, fearing the destruction of their village-like neighborhoods’ sense of community. Those who failed to appreciate their government’s largesse were forcibly evicted by armed police and hired goons. Oftentimes, the authorities would cut off water and electricity to neighborhoods they were clearing to convince the hesitant. Overall, one million families were moved in the effort to remake Shanghai. [12]
-from DesignObserver
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Albert Einstein:God is a human weakness
Princeton, 3. 1. 1954
Dear Mr Gutkind,
Inspired by Brouwer’s repeated suggestion, I read a great deal in your book, and thank you very much for lending it to me. What struck me was this: with regard to the factual attitude to life and to the human community we have a great deal in common. Your personal ideal with its striving for freedom from ego-oriented desires, for making life beautiful and noble, with an emphasis on the purely human element. This unites us as having an “unAmerican attitude.”
Still, without Brouwer’s suggestion I would never have gotten myself to engage intensively with your book because it is written in a language inaccessible to me. The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can change this for me. For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong, and whose thinking I have a deep affinity for, have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything “chosen” about them.
In general I find it painful that you claim a privileged position and try to defend it by two walls of pride, an external one as a man and an internal one as a Jew. As a man you claim, so to speak, a dispensation from causality otherwise accepted, as a Jew the privilege of monotheism. But a limited causality is no longer a causality at all, as our wonderful Spinoza recognized with all incision, probably as the first one. And the animistic interpretations of the religions of nature are in principle not annulled by monopolization. With such walls we can only attain a certain self-deception, but our moral efforts are not furthered by them. On the contrary.
Now that I have quite openly stated our differences in intellectual convictions it is still clear to me that we are quite close to each other in essential things, i.e; in our evaluations of human behavior. What separates us are only intellectual “props” and “rationalization” in Freud’s language. Therefore I think that we would understand each other quite well if we talked about concrete things.
With friendly thanks and best wishes,
Yours,
A. Einstein
(Source:LettersfromNote)
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Book Review:A bank for the buck
This is in continuation of my book review series (see here)
“A bank for the buck” by Tamal Bandyopadhyay is a book on the birth and growth of HDFC Bank
I have admired Tamal for his incisive newspaper columns and he has covered the Indian financial industry for a long time (see this).
This book contains lots of interesting anecdotes (see this) which gives one a ringside view of the making of HDFC Bank.
One thing that stuck me while reading this book is how much “an old boy’s network” the Indian banking industry is.Everybody seems to know everybody else in the Indian banking sector.
Would strongly recommend this book to readers who want to know more about HDFC Bank and the Indian banking industry.
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Chidambaram’s gifts to India
Mr.Chidamabaram has presened eight union budgets, 2 short of Moraji Desai’s record 10 budgets.
In these eight budgets, Mr.Chidambaram has introduced taxes whose acronyms have become part of daily usage.Have enclosed the list below:
| Chidambaram’s Budget # | Year | New Tax/Proposal Introduced | New Acronym introduced |
| 1 | 1996-1997 | Minimum Alternate Tax | MAT |
| 2 | 1997-98 | Voluntary Disclosure Scheme | VDS |
| 3 | 2004-05 | Securities Transaction Tax | STT |
| 4 | 2005-06 | Fringe Benefits Tax | FBT |
| 4 | 2005-06 | Banking Cash Transaction Tax | BCTT |
| 7 | 2008-09 | Commodities Transaction Tax | CTT |