On My Mind

If you are a cricket fan of my age, Cricket World Cup 2019 would be fresh in your memories, more so than 2023 maybe. We started off pretty poorly, then stabilized with Dhoni and Jadeja batting carefully. It was then that Jadeja teed off, while Dhoni continued cautiously, providing the balance to the team score. Despite their efforts, we fell short.  A significant section of Indian fans blamed Dhoni for the defeat. This, despite KL Rahul, Kohli, and Rohit scoring just one run each, Dinesh Karthik managing six, and Hardik Pandya and Rishabh Pant adding 32 each. Dhoni’s 50 off 72 balls and Jadeja’s 77 had given India a fighting chance. In a team game, blaming a single player is irrational—but even more so when that player contributed significantly to the recovery. This isn't an isolated case. The middle class is lambasted by many scholars for not taking the baton of reforms ahead in India. However, it is the same group which forms the majority of the honest tax payers who receive no a...

Some 13 billion years ago, the Big Bang occurred, and the universe started taking its present shape. Brilliant minds of ours and earlier generations have spent a considerable amount of cognitive resources to unravel this mystery. Notwithstanding the appreciable progress made in our understanding, it has been suggested by many a bureaucrat that this wastage of human capacity could have been avoided if someone had neatly prepared an office note on the big bang then. The process of documentation and record-keeping is essential in government, as in any other form of organization that grows beyond the individual. Documenting known facts of any issue, discovering more through inquiry or academic research, and then forming a well-justified conclusion forms the core of any decision that is taken. This entire exercise is colloquially known as the "paperwork". Since the stakeholders aren't just the people making the decisions, it is important that paperwork is done with due diligen...