From Immy to Irony Face it NFP, you were as shocked as everyone else when the 'de-politicized burgers' of LUMS of all places stood up against the General.

We get it that you have to be funny, coz that's what you do best. But mocking away the burgeoning student movement was uncalled for. And don't forget the effect of these protests from LUMS, FAST, etc. Images of western-looking boys and girls facing up to the might of the baton-weilding police, were beamed across the world to Mushy's power base AKA US. It is these small things that slowly chip away at the General's thin veneer.

True, it's just a few hundred people, but u have to applaud their nerves. As the nation sleeps through the defining moments of our destiny, students in a handful of universities are getting arrested, going on hunger strikes, getting beaten up in rallies, all the time asking nothing in return. If that is not a noble concept, what is. Pray tell me, NFP? And don't scoff this time

Review of the Book: FREAKONOMICS I totally disagree with your criticisms of Freakonomics. Your only objection to the book is that it is not what you consider to be "Economics". But so what? You probably did not like the book because you thought it would be a boring diatribe about the inner workings of the Laffer Curve or a new way to calculate the Gini Coefficient.

I bought the book because I wanted something refreshingly different. And I was thoroughly satisfied! The author states in the start that the book is all about taking the analytical tools offered by mainstream economics (like studying incentive structures, information asymmetries and game theory) and applying these to social issues. So you're right in saying the book was not strictly under the jurisdiction of economics, but I ask again, so what?

Readers will find this book refreshingly different from any other book on economics. It's also surprisingly lacking of econ-jargon, so it can be understood by a wider cross-section of society. It's primary role is to question and intrigue, not to answer.

On a side note, the reviewer's attitude is very typical of most mainstream economists, who refuse to consider anything that is remotely different from the paradigms of neo-classical economic theory. It is this attitude specifically that has made economic theory quite irrelevant in analysis and diagnosis in a rapidly changing global economic order. Almost all advances in the field of economics over the past century have built upon assumptions of perfect competition, information symmetries and theories of 'rational' behavior, assumptions that are now starkly in contrast with reality, especially in non-Western communities. The field of economics needs new blood that takes economics outside of dusty library shelves and into living, breathing markets. And I believe Steven Levitt, the author of Freakonomics, is on the right track as far as this is concerned.

Sorry Mr. Gopalakrishnan, I did not mean to single you out, but I have been simmering about this for a long time.

Book Dropper IB is absolutely right! I've been a frequent chowk visitor since 2002 and it's not often I come across articles that make me feel good.
I also felt the social pressure you talked about when I was filling in the "books i read" section at orkut, because i guess what you read defines you to a great extent. Although I sometimes like to indulge in Wilbur Smith and Stephen Fry, even Michael Moore, I felt like I need to put in some heavyweights like Chomsky, Dostoevsky and other 'sky's just for the heck of it. Good to know there are others out there