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The General's Report Card: Corruption Under Musharraf

Hard data on Pakistan is hard to come by. Where available, doubts exist as to its veracity. For example, it is widely believed that the government numbers on inflation are fudged. Since the census is used for distribution of funds, jobs, and enrollment in colleges, political considerations are thought to

The Hubris of Journalists

Nick Bryant, a correspondent covering Australian elections for the BBC, wrote the following in one of his blog posts, “My name is Nick and I fear I am in danger of becoming an Australian political junkie. I find myself boring friends with the swings needed to win obscure marginals, which,

Fomenting Cross-Class Interactions

“A bubble” is often used to describe the shielded seclusion in which students live their lives on the Stanford campus. The words seem appropriate. After all, Stanford has a three-quarters-of-a-mile-long boundary that separates it from civilization. And even that ends in a yuppy favored downtown lined with preppy shops. What’

Reducing the Nuclear Threat by Reducing Local Threat Perceptions

The drive to acquire nuclear weapons is thought to stem largely from local threat perceptions. The point becomes all the more clear when we take stock of the countries where the nuclear weapons activity is limited to. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) nuclear weapons program initially

Causality and Generalization in Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Science deals with the fundamental epistemological question of how we can claim to know something. The quality of the system, forever open to challenge, determines any claims of epistemic superiority that the scientific method may make over other competing claims of gleaning knowledge from data. The extent to which claims

Akshardham: A Spiritual Theme Park

The huge red sandstone and marble monument, visible from the nearby highway, stands alone, proud, and out of place. The local road abutting the walled complex has a few informal ‘checkpoints’ where men in plain clothes check cars. As our Maruti Zen lurches into the ‘complex’, the true enormity of

Bemoaning Delhi

Delhi doesn’t look like anything. It is amorphous, and as misshapen as only third world cities can be. It is but a mass of hutments, box-like houses built to occupy every available inch of space (and a couple more created by bribery) crammed together across narrow lanes interspersed by

Shining India: The Marvel of Marble

The Singapore Airlines flight SQ 408 landed at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi at 8:45pm, a full 15 minutes ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, there was no gate available to greet the early arrival. After waiting for about 15 minutes, a gate was found and the weary passengers

The Role of Argument in Natural Sciences, Law, and Social Sciences

The following article has been written by Chaste, who has contributed to this blog before. I will assume for the purposes of this piece that argument is the dominant form of writing in academia. This is also true of public discourse, but this piece will limit itself to academic writing,