February 21, 2018 Money is about accounting entries. Modern scams are all about stealing accounting entries, when the system has a ‘reconcilement’ problem. Looking back on different financial sector scandals in different countries at different times, where one has had the outlandish privilege of a microscopic view, one is struck by a distraught sense of […]
Feb 9, 2018 Niall Ferguson has emerged as one of the finest historians of recent times. His ability to avoid fashionable leftist jargon, look with equal ease upon broad patterns as well as upon individual contributions, and his humanist concerns, all lead to his emergence as a scholar and a stylish writer in the tradition […]
04 February, 2018 Chakravarti Rajagopalachari was a scholarly south Indian, and a classy writer in Tamil and in English. His sentences were short, chaste and lucid. His thoughts had a luminous integrity about them. He was the first to articulate the fact that we had a new tyranny in our fair land. The post-Avadi “Permit-License […]
Jan 12, 2018 One of the heartening features of the present government’s behavior is that there is considerable focus not only on short-term goodies, e.g. loan waivers, but on tough longer-term measures that would involve ensuring an adequate tax-GDP ratio so that India does not inexorably decay into a failed state. There is also a […]
January 04, 2018 Trump understands that the American people are very angry about aid being given to “ungrateful” recipients. The chattering classes among Indians who take their cues from the decrepit portals of the New York Times or the BBC are now in for a surprise. This so-called “buffoon” Donald Trump has started the New […]
December 23, 2017 ThePrint asks: After openly backing Israel, why is Modi’s India voting at UN like a Congress government? India continues with its pragmatic foreign policy. There is no need to vote differently from 128 countries on a sensitive matter. We have reason to be friendly with Israel and Arab countries. That tradition is […]
December 13, 2017 The Left-Liberal NYT-CNN-BBC-Guardian-Economist consensus that many Indians have bought into about Trump simply does not hold water. Either because he says and does the right things, or because he is lucky (and who can disparage fortune), Trump is presiding over the highest growth rates in recent times, the lowest inflation rates and […]
December 5, 2017 Constantly making changes to policies like GST shows that a government is responsive and open to course-correction, despite what critics say. Various experts in the pundit-republic of India have told us with supreme élan and wit that the frequent flip-flops with respect to our newest tax, the Goods and Services Tax (GST), […]
November 30, 2017 Twelve willful defaulters of corporate India attempted to buy stressed assets, prompting the government to ask banks to be vigilant. Is Modi protecting the loan-defaulting dirty dozen of India Inc., or is he calling them to account? No market economy can operate efficiently without an orderly and speedy bankruptcy process. The problem of […]
November 15, 2017 On Jawaharlal Nehru’s 128th birth anniversary, many of his political, philosophical and cultural ideas appear to be under assault. Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, is in danger of being ghettoized as merely a Congress party politician. Will Nehru’s political and philosophical vision for India endure? Jawaharlal Nehru was a successful leader […]