Praxeology: My Reflexions on India

Alexis de Tocqueville was a 19th century French political thinker and a historian. He is best known for his excursions in, then newly born democratic country, America (United States of America). In 1835 and 1840, he published his famous work, Democracy in America , on the basis of his observations of the American society and its democratic political state during his travels. In this book's later parts - vol 4, chapter 6, What Type of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear (Liberty Fund edition) - he warned the people of the world about the kind of possible despotism that can arrive in a democratic country. I am reproducing his warning here because his prophesy turned out to be totally correct. As Robert Nisbet, after reproducing the same paragraphs of Tocqueville in his The Quest for Community , said, here, in these paragraphs, lies one of the most astonishing prophesies to be found anywhere in political literature . Here is Tocqueville writing in 1840: "I think that th...

RBI is all set to launch its plastic rupee notes on an experimental basis in Kochi, Mysore, Jaipur, Bhubaneswar and Shimla. Initially they are going to issue one billion pieces of 10 rupee notes. RBI governor Subbarao gave this reason for his choice of plastic notes: the central bank was trying to introduce plastic currency, as they have longer shelf life . It is estimated that every year something like 20% of total paper notes (some 2 lakh crore rupees) get soiled and had to take out of circulation to dispose it off. RBI is saying, that introduction of plastic (or polymer) currency notes will help them tackle this problem of soiled notes! RBI is giving another excuse, that because other central bankers - Australia is the pioneer [sic] - are already experimenting with plastic notes, so they will also imitate them. Another reason, which seems to be the major one, is that, these notes can be produced at a faster rate than paper notes! No wonder RBI and other central planners want to use...

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...