Last week prime minister Narendra Modi launched his economic scheme of "Make in India" with a big fan fare. In my latest economic report I disentangle this scheme.
I was recently reading Charles Mackay's famous book, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds , which discusses some of the major popular delusions like the Mississippi bubble, the tulip mania, the south sea bubble, the alchemists, the witch mania, crusades etc., of the known human history. These popular delusions exhibit a kind of madness of crowd which we see every now and then in all ages and at all places wherever human beings are present. The evolutionary brain, which has primed human nature for a kind of herd behavior, is the root cause of this phenomena, but I won't discuss this matter at length here in this post. I want to focus on one such extraordinary popular delusion and madness of crowd type of episode which is right now on-going in India. This episode is of the cult of the popular chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi. The crowd is in frenzy re his name. Many deluded people want him to be the next prime minister of India and rescue t
Karnataka high court has upheld the government’s orders on the ban on wearing hijab (headscarf) by Muslim girls in school/college etc., places. In its verdict the high court said , India’s Karnataka state has ruled that the hijab is not “essential” to Islam. The three-judge bench held that allowing Muslim women to wear the hijab in classrooms would hinder their emancipation and go against the constitutional spirit of “positive secularism”. “There is sufficient intrinsic material within the scripture itself to support the view that wearing hijab has been only recommendatory, if at all it is. What is not religiously made obligatory therefore cannot be made a quintessential aspect of the religion through public agitations or by the passionate arguments in court,” the order says. The court, however, said the order was valid, holding that the government had the right to prescribe uniforms for students. There are many delicate issues involved here. The implications of this decision are
A couple of days ago famous industrialist Ratan Tata commented about the lavish life style of another billionaire business tycoon Mukesh Ambani quoting his 27 storied Mumbai house viz., Antilla. Tata said that Mukesh Ambani's house Antilla represents the rich Indian's lack of empathy for the poor . His remarks: "The person who lives in there should be concerned about what he sees around him and [asking] can he make a difference. If he is not, then it's sad because this country needs people to allocate some of their enormous wealth to finding ways of mitigating the hardship that people have." Is Ratan Tata right in his remarks or is he misguided in his judgements? Is he aware about the role of an entrepreneur in an economy or is he ignorant of this basic economic fact? Or is his remarks has some underlying assumptions which make those remarks perfectly apt for Mukesh's lifestyle? Let me deal with these questions one by one. I take two scenarios to carr
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