India: Good, Bad, and Beyond

There is the good in India: wireless access is a great success story, despite the general inefficiency, nearly everyone has cellphones, they work, and they are affordable (even for data, I pay $10 for 4GB).

Then, there is the bad: the various forms that need to be filled out drive people and clerks to panic, and ultimately to a statis: what goes in these ambiguous fields, do the signatures match precisely, is the form/check/currency torn/creased somewhere, and so on.

Finally, there is the beyond bad: people wall their houses, office buildings, and keep things clean within their ``personal'' space, but discard trash just over the walls on to the ``public'' space. Often neighbors swap trash onto each others' public spaces! Forget microloans, I would love to see an economically viable model to collect and process trash in India.

In pictures: food with many dishes; "how to calculate your mortgage payment" by a local newspaper; two trees help announce the theory day.