Amogh ArakaliFeb 6, 2023

I wrote a long, academic (ish) #blogpost again. 20 min read.

I read Nikhil Menon's 'Planning Democracy' and Arunabh Ghosh's 'Making it Count' together, to examine parallels between the two books.

Menon's book looks at India's Five-Year Planning Process in the 1950s, while Ghosh looks at attempts to national build statistical systems in the People's Republic of China around the same time.

Read on Medium: https://amogharakali.medium.com/numbers-and-plans-ea80c36394f4

Read on Substack:
https://amogh.substack.com/p/numbers-and-plans

#India #China

Numbers and Plans - Amogh Arakali - Medium

— — — — — — — #FromMyLongReadings is a new extension of my #FromMyReadings blog series. Here, I’ll write longer posts (3500 words or more) about books and research papers I’ve been reading…

Medium
Show threadAmogh ArakaliFeb 6, 2023

Links to the two books in question
(If possible, please borrow from libraries or buy from local bookstores):

Planning Democracy by Nikhil Menon:
https://penguin.co.in/book/planning-democracy/

Making It Count by Arunabh Ghosh (@guo_xuguang@twitter.com):

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691179476/making-it-count

Show threadAmogh ArakaliFeb 6, 2023

While writing this post, I also experimented with AI for illustrations.

The results were...interesting. They certainly make the post more entertaining. But I could feel limits.

Maybe I'll write about this another time.

Meanwhile, you can see my attempts for yourself.

Show threadAmogh Arakali

Speaking of AI, I was curious to see if ChatGPT could write something similar.

It did, but the results weren't too great. I feel I'm safe for the next 2 weeks.

However, I'm proud to say I broke ChatGPT the first time I tried to make it compete with me. I'm ahead. For now.

Feb 6, 2023 at 9:53amWeb
Show threadAmogh ArakaliFeb 6, 2023

Meanwhile, I had a lot of fun writing this post.

I was a topic I'm interested in, I had two solid books to read and refer to, there was lots of new learning, and most importantly, I had the time to go at my own pace.

If nothing else, it was immensely joyful.