Walking Around the Elephant

Today’s Mint carries my opinion piece “Walking Around the Elephant” — a write-up on my conversation with Pranab Bardhan, professor of economics at UC Berkeley. The transcript of the conversation is also up on the Mint website under the title “Reforms do not address the anxieties of the general population.”

Arun Shourie on the Tectonic Shift

Go read Arun Shourie’s op-ed in today’s Indian Express. I agree with him. I think that passivity in the face of naked aggression is morally wrong. It encourages those who harm society. I have written about that in my post The Unbearable Silliness of Loving One’s Enemies. He touches on that principle.

At another point he mentions that India’s dismal economic growth pushed by socialists had been branded “the Hindu rate of growth.” I call that dismal rate of growth “the Nehru rate of growth.”

The main point is that there is a point beyond which even laid back people attacked needlessly do retaliate and are quite capable of extreme violence. He believes that a tectonic shift has been happening in the Hindu mind for the last 200 years. Go read it all.