Anthems as Means and Ends

    Respected Supreme Court Judges,

    I use the word ‘respected’ in earnest. No one has ordered me to respect you, at the threat of arrest or punishment; yet I feel respect for you, even though I am seated and not standing or saluting. As judges, you are educated intellectuals who have accepted an important responsibility in society, and I value that. But sirs, please note this: you have earned my respect by simply being human beings, that is sufficient. Your being in important positions only strengthens my expectations from you, of responsible guidance and wise counsel. And when there is a shortage in the fulfillment of those expectations, there will naturally be letters addressed to you, and this is one such.

Black Money and Blackness of Money

    More than the quantity of Black Money, it is an understanding of the quality, or the blackness of money, which may help us to finally surmount our social-economic problems.

     Black Money refers to undeclared income, on which no taxes have been paid. By using the phrase ‘blackness of money’, I refer to the source, legitimacy and relevance of that income. Black Money can be unearthed, while Blackness of Money has to be understood. Unearthing Black Money is a mechanical exercise, and it can modify the accounting system; while understanding Blackness of Money is an exercise in comprehension, and it can help us move towards a lasting solution.

     I present here a gradient of blackness depending on the quality of the economic activity:

Black Money, White Economics

    I sometimes wonder about the colour coding of currency: why legitimate money is ‘white’ money and illegitimately acquired money is ‘black’ money, even though we Indians are legitimately brown and black, and the colonizing chaps who came here as thieves and robbers were ‘white’!

But this blog is not about racial language. What I would like to ask readers is that while there is so much noise about Black money, how come so little has been said about White economics? Because Black money is not so much our problem, fundamentally, as is White economics.

    By White economics, I am referring to the ways of business as it has evolved among European colonisers, which is now being globalised. The basics of White economics are that it is: debt-driven, profit-driven, free-trade-driven, consumption-driven, and competition-driven. Since 1991, we in India too have followed and practiced White economics, and what is the result after 25 years of this experiment?

Feminism & the Naked Empress

    In the end, it was once again the story of the naked emperor who strutted about all over his kingdom, but who had no one to tell him that he had no clothes on. Except that in today’s story, the emperor turns out to be an empress.

    Hillary Clinton was romping the American stage for a year, exposing her weaknesses for all to see: her overarching artificiality, her attempt at cleverness, her desperate ambition, her constant prevarication, her unethical deeds, they were all nakedly in sight for a full year. Even the solitary fig leaf of so-called ‘work experience’ began to slip off during the long exposure to media lights: it could be seen that she had risen to her full level of incompetence.

But that is for those who wanted to see. Unlike the naked emperor’s story where his staff did not speak out of fear, and the populace did not speak out of respect, the two categories of people here who refused to see or speak were the establishment elite, and the feminists.