If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts. Thanks for visiting!
Right from the title, I honestly do not know what the author of this column is trying to say. Extrapolating a teen pregnancy pact in some obscure small town to labeling one of the most productive and innovative countries as an economic burden, M R Venkatesh writes one of the most incoherent article published online. Peppering the article with names of Fukuyama, Hobbes, and Jefferson only makes us more certain that the author never understood their works. The comments on the Rediff article seem, for a change, more mature than the article itself. And in case you are thinking, the comments suddenly haven’t become more intelligent.
by Patrix | on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 10:00 pm | 
Media . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Both comments and pings are currently closed.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:58 pm reply
This is where his leap in faith falls flat on its face. “Proliferation of unfettered right” = less government in the lives of an individual. More individual rights is the government assuming less responsibility for an individual by affording the individual more. Yes, the US has a social welfare system that is an economic burden but by the author’s reasoning, most European countries which have far more elaborate social welfare systems should be in ruins by now.
As for “this led to increased and reckless spending by individuals.”, I laugh at this because the author is a CA. He of all people should know that prosperity leads to increased spending. As for reckless, that is a matter of opinion. Perhaps author of aforementioned Rediff article should stick to fudging the account books of multinationals and movie stars.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:50 am reply
So glad that you think the same about this article. When I read and reread it, I could not make head and tail of it - how could Teen pregnancy make US an economic burden to the world. I was wondering whether there was some things I lost in between lines of the article….
June 24th, 2008 at 8:57 am reply
Santosh, there are several such inconsistencies. Based on the above para, I’m not even sure if he is arguing for restraining individual choice or restricting government control. To say that the U.S government has more control over your life than the Indian government is ludicrous.
Nissidhi, if it smells like crap, it probably is.
June 24th, 2008 at 11:40 am reply
I think he wrote this piece right after reading “Freakonomics” :D
June 24th, 2008 at 11:45 am reply
Supremus,
That was my first thought. But his version of Freakonomics sucks. Maybe he read a pirated desi version :-P
June 27th, 2008 at 1:52 pm reply
I couldn’t agree more!
That rediff article a jumble of diverse ideas. Most of them wrongly interpreted.
“Individualism” was the cause?
These girl made a pact on getting pregnant together - if this does not denote the antithesis of individualism I don’t know what would.
If American society was truly “individualistic” as the writer claims then the girls couldn’t have counted on their public school daycare center to help them out in their moronic adventure. Heck, the public school system is in itself counter to claims of an apparently “individualistic”, “everyone on their own” US society.
I think this one statement by the writer,
“Responsibility is the bedrock of discipline, be it at the individual, the national, or the international level. When a society is built purely on individual rights — as the American society has been — it leads to massive indiscipline”
summaries his muddleheadedness.