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Lost in the Crowd

Here's David Brooks on Malcolm Galdwell's new book "Outliers"
"Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses."

Economist Video

Here's a very nice video from The Economist on money markets.

There are several other good videos on a variety of other topics

Responsibility as the best response?

Here's an article by Ramesh Ramanathan that appeared on Livemint
"We ask for a tough state, when we ourselves are a soft people. I mean it in the harshest sense: Most of us are selfish, inward-looking cowards who quaver at the slightest hint of risk to ourselves or our family."

Valid but uncomfortable questions...

Here's an editorial in the New York times.
"How can their government have ignored the warning signs? A 2007 report to Parliament warned that the country’s shores were poorly protected — and some or all of the attackers arrived by boat. Why weren’t the police and the army better prepared to respond? Sharpshooters outside the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel did not have telescopic sights, so they could not get off a shot for fear of killing hostages rather than the terrorists."

Here's an article that appeared in the WSJ on this topic
"The country's antiterrorism effort is reactive and episodic rather than proactive and sustained. Its public discourse on Islam oscillates between crude, anti-Muslim bigotry and mindless sympathy for largely unjustified Muslim grievance-mongering. Its failure to either charm or cow its Islamist-friendly neighbors -- Pakistan and Bangladesh -- reveals a limited grasp of statecraft.

Nonetheless, the reflexive Indian response to most every act of terrorism is to apportion blame rather than to seek a solution that will prevent, or at least minimize, its recurrence."

Here's an interesting article on LeT by Steve Coll of the New Yorker
"I was at a conference this morning where another panelist well-versed in these issues said he would not be surprised if it turned out that Lashkar conceived the Mumbai attacks as a way to pull Pakistani Army units and attention away from the Afghan border and into defense positions in the east, to protect the country from the possibility of military retaliation by India. In any event, if the evidence does show that uncontrolled Lashkar elements carried out the attacks, it would force India’s government to judge how to calibrate policy toward a civilian-led Pakistan government and Army command that may have little control over the very same Islamist groups that it purposefully built up and supported just a few years ago."

Perhaps, it is time to look inwards, acknowledge flaws and start developing capabilities that enhance our national security instead blaming a bad neighborhood, which grapples with its own incompetence!