This post is off topic.
The PAN-IIT Conclave was held from 29Oct to 31Oct at the Expo Center in Greater Noida. This was the first one that I attended. I think I was the person living the closest to the conclave site. It would have been inexcusable if I missed the opportunity to meet with some people I have not met with for four decades.
One of the sessions was on good governance. Arvind Kejriwal was a speaker. Most of what he had to say about ineffective and toothless investigating agencies, appeared in his article of 02Nov in the ToI. What is missing from the article is the passion with which he delivered his talk. Listening to him I thought he was an activist like Medha Patkar, or Arundhati Roy. Only later did I learn that he is an alumnus of IIT Kgp. Well IITs produces all sorts of people. Some even join the Indian Air Force:-).
An examle that he gave during his talk, and which does not appear in his article, is that of how Hong Kong rooted out of corruption. I doubt if anyone, other than Mr. Kejriwal, believes that solutions that can be implemented in Hong Kong (now, or pre-unification with the PRC), can be implemented in a federal, multi-party, democracy. I believe that one place to begin is to make the accounts of political parties auditable and available in the public domain. That will go a long way to break the political-mafia nexus. Chandrashekar when he was the PM, was once asked about it by a reporter. The video shows the PM dismissing it out of hand.
An interesting episode. The audience being a bunch of techies were very appreciative of Mr. Kejriwal's passion. Mr. Kejriwal, sensing the reaction, felt that he would do better by speaking in Hindi. There was an immediate uproar from a number of people. Vociferously prominent amongst them were two IIT Madras guys sitting with me - one of them my batch mate, another a couple of batches junior. Apparently the spirit of 1965 lives on:-) Arvind largely stuck to English after that. It would have been a blast had Neelakeni, who spoke after Arvind, taken a leaf out of Kanimozhi's (I hope I got the spelling right) book and addressed the audience in Kannada, or Tamil. So much for PAN-IIT guys having a PAN-Indian perspective:-(
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