Water Privatization revisited

I first wrote about water privatization on this blog back in 2006. I had written that bit as part of a term paper for an infrastructure course at IIMB, and it seemed like we didn’t do too well as far as the term paper went.

I revisited the topic sometime last year when i talked about water privatization in Kundapur. I cross posted that on the Indian Economy Blog also.

My main argument there was that privatization of water would ensure an OPTION for everyone to access clean piped drinking water, and this option value would offset the higher prices faced by those who already have the connection – who are mainly the reasonably well to do.

The latest to comment on this matter is Tyler Cowen. Writing in the Forbes, he calls for unregulated privatization of water supply in developing countries. And he mentions precisely the same reasons as I did in my earlier posts.

I hope Prof. Ranga, who didn’t give us enough credit for our term paper back then, is reading this.

In the name of equality

In temple towns such as Horanadu and Sringeri, the temple has a virtual monopoly over accommodation for tourists. There have been a few private lodges springing up in both places of late, but indifferent quality means these are places of last resort for tourists. The temple accommodation, however, is well maintained and clean, and most importantly comes cheap. The undifferentiated twin bed room goes for about Rs. 100 per night in both places.

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Breaking Promises, Uncertainty and Empty Roads – The Third Bangalore Photowalk

When I thought about starting this Photo Walk thing, I had told myself “no MG Road” business. I had thought that it’s an area of Bangalore that everyone goes to and so there’s not much value added by having a Photo Walk in that area. “It’s too cliched”, I had thought. But then, about a month back, on a cloudy Sunday morning, I was walking from the Mayo Hall area to Richmond road, along Commissariat road. And I noticed a number of things that I thought are eminently photograph-able. And that this place deserves a photo walk.

I will still keep the promise. We won’t touch M G Road during the walk. However, the walk will be in this general area. We begin at the junction of Brigade Road and Residency Road at 8 am. We are moving back to the old starting time since this allows people to have a round of breakfast before the walk begins. I must mention here that this time, I haven’t made any plans for us to go for a collective breakfast after the walk.

Photo walks are much more random than I had initially thought. You get a diverse variety of characters. You have slow-moving people and fast-moving people. Shutterbugs and people who just prefer to walk. People who want to take a single building from seven angles, and those who give one look and walk on. This leads to tremendous uncertainty, uncertainty with respect to the distance covered. Given that most of us are fairly flexible with respect to distance, and not so much with respect to time (we should wind up at 10am), the solution would be to bring in more uncertainty – the route itself is uncertain to an extent.

Half the route is an area that is usually bustling with people, but you won’t find too many of them early on a Sunday morning.Hopefully traffic won’t be as heavy as it was on Nrupatunga Road a fortnight ago. There are a number of photograph-able old buildings. There are also a number of photograph-able new buildings. And enough of quirky signboard-level stuff to interest people like me. Enough of the globing now, and I’ll get to the details.

The Third Bangalore PhotoWalk

Date: 29th June 2008, Sunday
Time: 8 am to 10 am
Starting point: Intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road.
Ending point: Intersection of Brigade Road and Residency Road.

Route:
We start off by moving up along residency road, in the general direction of Mayo Hall. On the way, we take photographs of the nice Opera building, and also the large number of modern buildings that have come up in this stretch. Once we reach Mayo Hall, we do a couple of pradakshinas to the place while taking photographs. We then pay homage to the deceased Victoria Hotel, and take snaps of the ugly Bangalore Central.

Next, we move on to commissariat road, and along with some police quarters, there are a couple of nice buildings before we hit Garuda Mall. We continue walking on, and there are a lot more interesting things to photograph here, until we hit Richmond Road, near Lifestyle. We walk along Richmond Road towards Shoolay Circle, and on the way there is the Sacred Hearts Church and some school. This ends the deterministic portion of the walk.

The next part of the walk (random as of now) will be in the inner lanes of Richmond Town. Just to throw around a few names, the roads we will cover will be Pulliyar Koil street, Markham Road, Castle street, Wood street, etc. Of course, this is all probabilistic. We will be walking extensively here if we have the time. Not at all if we don’t.

We hope to emerge out of the inner lanes of Richmond town somewhere on Museum Road, and we will use that to return to Residency Road. Once back on Residency Road, we will pay homage to the non-existent Imperial cinema hall, and then walk up another hundred meters, and we will end up where we started off. I’ll conclude by telling you all the story again – I’d have told it to you right at the beginning. Maybe if people have the enthu, we could even shoot a small video.

Here is the link to the probabilistic route that we are going to take on the 29th.

We should adjust our travels through the inner lanes in a way that we conclude at 10 am.

begin{distraction}:
I’m just back from an “unofficial non-public photo walk”.

? landed up in Bangalore yesterday and demanded a photowalk. We walked around the MG Road-Brigade Road-Church Street- Rest House Crescent area (which anyways is taboo for official photowalks). I’ll upload the pics soon.
end{distraction}


Looking forward to your participation. Let me know regarding your participation either by leaving a comment here (along with your name and maybe some kind of contact details) or by mailing me at skthewimp [at] yahoo [dot] com. Please do the usual PR – link to this from your blog, or put this up on your site, or write about this in your newspaper, or just tell people. And ask them to RSVP. And you also please RSVP.

When two heads collide

Yesterday, after watching Radoi and Rat headbutting each other, I messaged Baada saying that it’s too funny when people from the same team get involved in an accident, despite it being very painful for the players. A moment later, I realized that I had no right to laugh about these things after I got into major trouble following this accident with

.

And Baada was right – on an average, same-team collisions have resulted in more serious injury than different-team collision. Remember Waugh-Gillespie? Now i hear Radoi needs eye surgery and has a broken nose. And I remember a couple of such incidents in the English Premier League also, last season, where injuries were fairly serious (warranting substitution at least).

The Romanians have this peculiar character that looks like a T with a tail, and is pronounced as “ts” or “tz”. So Rat is pronounced as Ratz. The coach is Pitzurca. The Czech, instead of inventing a character for this sound, use the otherwise redundant C for these purposes. So it is Rositsky and Tsech.

Letting Bear fail

This is a tubelight post. Was supposed to have written this two months back.

I sometimes wonder if the US Fed did the right thing by encouraging JP Morgan to buy out Bear Stearns rather than to just let the latter fail. I know letting it fail would have had significant negative impact on the already struggling financial sector. But wouldn’t it have sent out a nice message for the longer term? That nobody was too big to fail? Wouldn’t this have significantly improved the quality of derivatives contracts in the long term?

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Opportunity Costs

The concept of opportunity costs seems to be non-trivial, in the sense that most people don’t seem to get it. When I first learnt it as part of my Economics course at IIT Madras, I thought it was fairly common sense. However, looking around at a variety of people, it doesn’t seem to be that common.

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Photowalk and Language

Last evening, while i was going with

?to pay our last respects to Shiok before it temporarily shuts down, I got the following SMS:

Hey man, I couldn’t attend the prev photowalk. Is one planned 4 dis sunday? P$$%#$

I was upset with the language (this was from a guy with number ending with 3113) and had half a mind to tell him “K”. Then I composed this message

Dear P$$%#$, I regretfully inform you that there is no photowalk this sunday. I am, however, pleased to inform you that the next walk will happen on the morning of the 29th. I solicit your participation in the aforementioned. with warm regards, S Karthik

Anyway, the next photowalk will happen on Sunday the 29th of this month, most likely in the Ulsoor area. All are welcome to attend. There is no entry fee.

Once again, we’ll start at 730 am. I’ll let you know regarding the exact route and starting point in a couple of days.

Oily predictions

I propose a new business model. Make a seemingly outrageous long-range prediction. It could just be anything, but you might want to stick to the financial world. Once you have decided on the prediction to make, think up of about six possible reasons why this prediction could come true. Given that the prediction in itself is outrageous, it shouldn’t be hard for you to come up with six outrageous reasons to support the same.

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Pleasant Observations

This morning, on the way to the gym, i saw a pleasant and wonderful sight. In fact, it was a curious problem but the solution gave me hope that the average intelligence in India is not too low.

It was shortly passed 7 am, and the traffic lights at South End Circle had just come on. However, the intersection itself was empty as vehicles stood on all six roads waiting for the light to turn green. After half a minute of observance, I think everyone figured out that there was a problem with the lights.

Soon traffic started flowing from the Madhavan Park side. No, there was no green light. However, the fact that it was red all around must have helped to keep the traffic from the other directions quiet. In ten seconds, all traffic from the Madhavan Park side had passed the intersection, and traffic flowed from Elephant Rock road (from the direction of Elephant Rock). Note that this was the natural order at that signal – the light turns green for the Madhavan Park side followed by the elephant rock side.

In another? twenty seconds, traffic from elephant rock had ceased, and people from both sides of RV Road began to move. Together. As it always happens when there are functioning lights or a policeman. As usual, this took longer than other directions, and then traffic flowed from the Yediyur side.

It was beautiful. It was as if there were functioning lights, or a traffic policeman in his place. It was probably self-regulation at its best. The fact that the light was red all around helped I think – people thought twice before jumping the signal. I thought it was one perfect round completed successfully as I started moving my car as soon as the Yediyur side emptied. Unfortunately, one BMTC bus on RV Road (coming from Lalbagh side) happened to jump the signal at that moment, and spoilt the few moments of bliss. Thankfully no one else followed suit, and traffic from my side passed peacefully.

I’m not sure what happened next but just the fact that Bangalore traffic, which has almost gone the Delhi way thanks to massive immigration from those parts and also the presence of Tata Sumos, could regulate itself perfectly for a minute or two was inspiring. Maybe it was a skewed sample. Yes, I don’t have enough data points. But it made me feel good.??