Sunday, September 21, 2008

Dear Mr Varma,

Please stop. Your recent lack of activity had done you a lot of good. I was wondering if you really had found the good sense to not talk about stuff you don't know. But, you have risen to the occasion again.

The SEC has got it wrong time and again in this crisis. The failure of the regulator, however, is not adequate evidence for the failure of regulation, if you can make the distinction. Plus, this is finance. There is some math involved. There is some macro-economics involved. There are some accounting laws involved. Of all three things, I'm sure you have no effing clue. There are also many tenable conspiracy theories, but when one does not know the basic facts, indulging in conspiracy theories is the worst kind of arrogance that one can display.

Your interest and ideological grandstanding of policy prescriptions based on links and rhetoric (the Kashmir issue, and now this) with nearly zero knowledge of the underlying matter remind me more and more of the communists everyday. You share your predilection for ideology over issue and analysis with them. Which sort of confirms my longheld position that the world is round (yes, I translated from Hindi, I am a vernie) and the more extreme you get on either side of a divide, the closer you become to your ideological opposites in ways that you did not foresee. (You can call this Ritwik's theorem of the unintended consequences of ideology. )

The consistency with which you mange to sift out, read and link only the most half baked portions of non-representative analyses is amazing. So is your failure to perform even the most routine reserach on that which you wish to comment upon. There is Google, Bloomberg, the Yale law school online library (for Kashmir). You seem to be unaware of teh existence of these resources, and much worse, unwilling to fish them out.

I have to say - you were quite right when you said that when you try non-fiction, you end up repeating yourself. However,your diagnosis of things being cynically recurrent and non changig was not correct. Try this for an alternate hypethesis - you don't have much to say anymore. You have plateaued, stagnated. I wish you luck for the awards that you are competing in. I may even buy and read your novel, if I ever get the time. But for now, I have a sincere request. Please do stick to fiction. Invoking David Ricardo, Niranjan Rajadhyaksha and Ravikiran, that is your comparative advantage.

I must also thank you, though. For two thing. First, about three years ago, when I had just about discovered the world of blogs, you were thought provoking - infuriating at times, wonderfully insightful at others. I now realize that this was primarily because I was unexposed to the ideas that you hold, and some of them were very strong challenges to my world view. I don't know if it is result of my education in the last thre years or simply your stagnation, but you no longer have anything worthwhile to offer me as a reader. But let's give credit where it's due.

Second, I have been off the blogging scene for some 8 months now and I have a deadine to meet at 11 pm. Yet, your consistent piling up of rubbish has now broken my patience. I am back on my blog now, and I must thank you for that.

Thanks,
Ritwik

p.s I don't think I would be reading you much from now on. Ta-da. If you ever read this, you can use this as the perfect example of how the free-market system works. For a change, that will actually make sense.