Misc. December 23

From the World Bank
Inadequate sanitation costs India the equivalent of 6.4 per cent of GDP:
"Inadequate sanitation causes India considerable economic losses, equivalent to 6.4 per cent of India’s GDP in 2006 at US$53.8[i] billion (Rs.2.4 trillion), according to The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Sanitation in India, a new report from the Water and Sanitation Program (WSP), a global partnership administered by the World Bank.

The study analyzed the evidence on the adverse economic impacts of inadequate sanitation, which include costs associated with death and disease, accessing and treating water, and losses in education, productivity, time, and tourism. The findings are based on 2006 figures, although a similar magnitude of losses is likely in later years."

Ranil Dissanayake's personal suggestion of resources that may contribute to a richer understanding of development. One of these is the 1978 book 'Black and White' by the other Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul. I thought that Shiva Naipaul's 'Fireflies' was comparable to 'A house for Mr. Biswas' but I read both before 1973 and do not remember much of either now.

I always wanted to learn Hindi. Despite listening to Hindi film songs frequently and living in North India (if Bombay can be included) for twenty years I never picked up Hindi. So as soon as I saw Dreaming in Hindi, I immediately bought and started reading it. Most of the reviews are not that great but it is reviewd favouably by Language Log Ski Hindi:
"The book in between is a charming intellectual travelogue, partly about the culture and history of India, partly about the nature of language and language learning, and also, as usual for great travel writing, very much about its author.

Ms. Rich connects her own experiences as a language learner to what she's learned by reading and talking to linguists, psychologists and anthropologists, in the same way that she connects her linguistic journey with what she learned by spinning khadi. In fact, I've never seen adult language learning connected to such an extensive set of metaphors:

"At school, I'm still dead last, too self-conscious to push myself in front of the others, but outside, I ski Hindi, have long, gleeful conversations in shops (gleeful for me, long for my interlocutors)."

Elsewhere in the book, she skis psycholinguistics, in long, gleeful conversations in university laboratories and the pages of books and articles; and just about every other language-related discipline gets at least one downhill run as well.
....
The best thing about the book, I think, is how it conveys the coming-unwrapped exhilaration of learning by immersion:

"To acquire a language, I exhort myself, you have to give up your accumulated assurances — this is how to say things, this is how it is done. Pretty soon, I give up my American pretenses that things should be any way at all."

And then the threads begin to hold."

There is also a strange discussion in Sepia Mutiny "Talk Hindi To Me", Neither the poster nor the commentors seem to have read the book. Luckily the 230th comment from somebody who read a quarter of the book ends the discussion. Possibly more of a window to the thoughts of a section of the NRI community.

Robert Reich on The Year Washington Became “Business Friendly”