Taught in schools …………..

In a lunch interview to BS historian Romila Thapar says……. “Controversy is a part of the advancement of knowledge. There wouldn’t have been an advance of knowledge unless there had been controversy — look at Galileo, for example, what he propounded was hugely controversial but it led to an advance in knowledge. Questioning is essential to teaching, and we don’t have enough of that. Instead, we treat information as knowledge and the child is told, ‘Now you learn this and repeat it in the exam’.”

But did she tell her students in JNU all these things?

Underlying propagator………….

John Carney explains how the present financial crisis came in into exist in US. And he defends the Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz works. 

But what is important to note here is what Anna Schwartz said "we won't have a capitalist system . . . People are responsible for the decisions they make. If they've made wrong decisions, lost money and don't have the funds to operate, well, it's time to leave the market. And that's what the Fed's responsibility is, not to shore up firms that have no reason to continue." 

The other articles are 1 2 and Anna Schwartz interview to WSJ.

Professor Dipankar Gupta is wrong………..

It is not at all surprising me when Professor Dipankar Gupta says “The BJP's 1991 manifesto only mentioned that it would strive to "relocate the ancient structure" and build a Ram temple elsewhere. Not a word about demolishing the Babri Masjid. Read the 2004 Congress manifesto today, and what a surprise. Even the phrase "nuclear energy" is nowhere to be found; ditto for the UPA's common minimum programme too.” And he never mentioned the ugly situation of left parties and they take advantage of as “..Most people are not able to read or write without spelling a word at a time. A little over 65% may be officially literate, but for the bulk it just means substituting thumb impressions for a scrawl. As for the literates, they want action without ideology for the written word has meant so little for so long. ”

Attained Azadi………. destroy them………

I and my friend Jayakamal have attended a Nani Nani Palkhivala memorial lecture in 2002 after our undergraduate examination in economics in Madras University. The Lecture was delivered by Mr Ram Jethmalani on “Law Commission And Uniform Civil code”.

But ironically Mr Ram Jethmalani now says “…Our Finance Ministry must now study the principles of Keynesian economics which worked for the US during the 1930s and for almost all European countries during World War II.” 

 Why should a layer bend on wrong Keynesian economics?

It is a myth…….

Yes, I mean “With the launch of the republic in 1950, India’s political class had agreed to integrate Dalits into mainstream society and its economy.” 

Secondly, the recent ET editorial is an example:

• “The net result is more than 60 years after Independence less than one in 10 MPs or MLAs in India is a woman. According to PRS Legislative Research, women accounted for less than 7% the total MLAs in 28 states and two Union territories and little over 9 % of the total number of MPs in the last Lok Sabha.  
  
• But having said that, it is nothing but hypocrisy when a political class that regards reservation as an answer to social discrimination suffered by SCs, STs, and now OBCs,”
  

We do not know the actual percentage of SCs, STs MLAs, MPs from each major political party.

Professor Dani Rodrik is wrong……………

Dani Rodrik writes: 

• So is economics in need of a major shake-up? Should we burn our existing textbooks and rewrite them from scratch? 
  
• Actually, no. Without recourse to the economist’s toolkit, we cannot even begin to make sense of the current crisis.
  
• Why, for example, did China’s decision to accumulate foreign reserves result in a mortgage lender in Ohio taking excessive risks? If your answer does not use elements from behavioural economics, agency theory, information economics, and international economics, among others, it is likely to remain seriously incomplete.
  
• The fault lies not with economics, but with economists. The problem is that economists (and those who listen to them) became over-confident in their preferred models of the moment: markets are efficient, financial innovation transfers risk to those best able to bear it, self-regulation works best, and government intervention is ineffective and harmful.
  
• Economics’ richness has not been reflected in public debate because economists have taken far too much license.  
  
• When economists disagree, the world gets exposed to legitimate differences of views on how the economy operates. It is when they agree too much that the public should beware. 
  
• Sadly, in view of today’s needs, macroeconomists have made little progress on policy since John Maynard Keynes explained how economies could get stuck in unemployment due to deficient aggregate demand. Some, like Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman, would say that the field has actually regressed. 
  

It is not surprise to me when Mr Dani did not mentioned economists like F A Hayek, Mises who actually explained about how “John Maynard Keynes explained how economies” functions “in unemployment due to deficient aggregate demand.”

Neverthless, some the above questions are relavent ot ponder.

Modi, Gujarat, India and a long distance of Muslim……………

Robert D. Kaplan writes in The Atlantic: 

• “……….a leader like Modi demonstrates how the century can also go very wrong when charismatic politicians use modern electoral tactics and technology to create and exploit social divisions, and then pursue their political and economic goals with cold bureaucratic efficiency. And here is why Modi is so important: although he is not his party’s standard-bearer going into this spring’s national elections, his popularity and influence in the BJP mean that he could one day be governing the world’s largest democracy. 
  
• Gujarat’s post on a frontier zone of the subcontinent exposed the state to repeated Muslim invasions. Some of the worst depredations came at the hands of the Turco-Persian ruler Mahmud of Ghazni, who swept down from eastern Afghanistan and in 1025 destroyed the seaside Hindu temple of Somnath. During a trip to India last fall, whenever I mentioned the events of 2002 to Hindu nationalists, they would lecture me about the crimes of Mahmud of Ghazni. For these Hindus, the past is alive, as if it happened yesterday. 
  
• …….the spread of education made people aware of their own histories, supplying them with grievances that they never had before. “The Hindu poor are blissfully ignorant of Mahmud of Ghazni. It is the middle class that now knows this history,” explained one local human-rights worker. That is why Hindu nationalism is strongest not among the poor and uneducated, but among the professional classes: scientists, software engineers, lawyers, and so on. In the eyes of this new, right-wing cadre of middle- and upper-middle-class Hindus, India was a civilization before it was a state, and while the state has had to compromise with minorities, the civilization originally was unpolluted (purely Hindu, that is)—even if the truth is far more complex. 
  
• At 5 p.m. sharp, I was ushered in. Modi sat behind a desk that looked over a long committee table. He wore traditional paijama pants and a long, elegant brown kurta—ironically, the traditional dress of India imported by the Mughals. A row of pens lined his pocket. Rimless glasses rested on his face. He had a clipped and distinguished salt-and-pepper beard. His was a handsome, welcoming visage. A small stack of documents lay in front of him. He thrust them at me before I even asked my first question. “I heard you were interested in development here, so here are your answers.” What he gave me was not the usual promotional brochures, but long lists of sourced statistics put together by an aide. Gujarat had experienced 10.2 percent annual GDP growth since 2002. It had eight new universities. In recent years, almost half the new jobs created in India were in Gujarat. The state ranked first in poverty alleviation, first in electricity generation. 
  
• I have met Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and both Bushes. At close range, Modi beats them all in charisma. Whenever he opened his mouth, he suddenly had real, mesmerizing presence. 
  
• I wondered if Modi felt differently behind closed doors. By all accounts, after the riots, he manically dedicated himself to development, sleeping less than four hours every night, up at 5 a.m. to check his e-mail and read the local papers, visiting about 3,000 of the 7,000 villages in the state, and empowering the lowest reaches of its bureaucracy through his slogan, “Less government, more governance.” 
  
• His words echoed through the empty room. “I have a toll-free number where callers hear my recorded voice and can make complaints against the government, and the relevant department must respond within a week.” 
  
• These forces appear sufficiently grounded either to reject Modi at the national level or to contain his worst impulses as he moves—as many expect he will—from Gandhinagar to New Delhi. After all, the churches and bastions in Diu are ruins not because they represent an idea that failed but because they represent no idea at all, whereas India has been an idea since Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930. Either Modi will fit his managerial genius to the service of that idea, or he will stay where he is. Hindus elsewhere in India are less communal-minded than those in Gujarat, and that will be his dilemma”. 
  

A article by Ashok V. Desai who writes:

• “He has reduced the leakage of government revenue that goes all over India into enrichment of politicians and bureaucrats, and diverted it to building up Gujarat’s infrastructure. And out of his own necessity, he has publicized Gujarat’s good administration. Modi’s success is more due to Gujarat than the other way round. But he is an autocrat, and has used his autocratic powers to give Gujarat a considerable competitive advantage over other states. His intellectual equipment is limited, but he has concentrated it in a remarkable manner to rebrand Gujarat, to his own collateral benefit.”