Newswallah: Long Reads Edition

ReutersA magazine stand on a railway platform in Mumbai.

What happens if you lose your memory If you can’t remember your friends or family Where you live or what you do or who you are Charles Assisi, managing editor of Forbes India, writes a gripping tale of just that after a virus invaded his immune system and he was left with only short-term memory. He maintains a notebook to keep track of his life, but as it grows bigger and more unwieldy and he realizes he needs something else.

“Simply put, I’d have to outsource my memory, emotions and decision-making capabilities to more reliable sources,” Mr. Assisi, writes in Open magazine. (Only in print right now). So he moves to hardware and software to do the job, using such websites as quantifiedself.com, evernote.com and livescribe.com among other ingenious tools. He even studies game theory.

“Every place I visit and every individual I meet, I surreptitiously take pictures of on my Blackberry and email it right away into my Evernote account. At the end of every day, these images are tagged with names and the context in which they were taken. Everything I read online is electronically filed away into Evernote with a single click on my browser into a folder of my choice.”

Along the way, Mr. Assisi says he’s learned some lessons: Memory is elastic, he believes, and morphs to suit a person’s current reality.

“People close to me often accuse me of not being human enough. Because humans use intuition, discretion and experience to exercise choices. I use software and hardware to find my way through. Does that make me a cyborg I think not.”

Definitely something to chew on.

An article in Caravan magazine tries to answer an important question this week: Are new states vehicles for better governance

“Most new states in India have come into being â€" or failed to see the light of day â€" for political rather than administrative reasons, as the protracted Telangana imbroglio demonstrates. Yet one of the standard arguments that has been made in recent years for creating new smaller states is that they would provide improved administrative efficiency and better, more responsive governance. Despite the passion with which campaigns to create new states are contested in political life, there have been few empirical studies of the particular governance dividends that may follow from the creation of smaller states.”

Louise Tillin, a professor of politics at King’s India Institute in London and author of “Remapping India: New States and their Political Origins” writes that her research in India’s three newest states â€" Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand - reached surprising conclusions.

“Smaller states, it is argued, have the potential to reduce the size or complexity of administrative agendas; to increase the efficiency of public spending; to improve the quality of democratic representation; and to strengthen accountability,” she writes, noting that intuition would suggest that bigger states with more diversity would be more difficult to govern effectively.

Yet, Ms. Tillin writes that India’s three newest states have mixed records when it comes to improved governance.

“Smaller states are not necessarily more homogeneous or better-governed units; the administrative dividends of state creation cannot be taken for granted. It may be too early to assess the longer-term consequences of granting statehood to Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Uttarakhand; political fragmentation will not necessarily endure over time, and we have seen meaningful policy innovation in some of the new states. Yet it is also clear that political and administrative histories continue to matter in shaping how new states fare: rather than taking off along striking new paths in terms of their administrative capacity and governance, these newer states so far reflect the range of outcomes we see among existing ones.”