The Art of Forgetting

The art of forgetting is a well practiced art but quite popular in India and I have had first hand experience since I have studied one subject only form high school to my thesis: History.... When I attended the first History Honours Class in Presidency College in Calcutta, I was told that forget whatever you were taught in class 12: Aurangzeb was not a bigot, he did what was politically prudent, for example.... He was also the most honest and down to earth Mughal emperor.... Feudalism was not about knights and dames but about social processes.... OK so I forgot and moved on.... In my Masters Class in JNU I was told that forget whatever you were taught in your honours class.... history has been interpreted through narrow isms so far but it is really more complicated than that and keep your mind open... OK so I tried to follow the new guidelines and forget the old.... While doing my PhD in London [you will ask why do a PhD in Indian history in London, but that is a totally different subject for me to answer here]... I was told that PhD is the art of knowing more and more about less and less... So I had to forget larger processes that we shaping the history of the subcontinent and focus on my chosen area and time frames...

Now I see that this practice plagues most of the economists as well especially in our country and with disastrous results because economists as a lobby have more power over our lives than historians or political scientists or even physcists will ever have....

Inflation, when we were young, we were told is just a process of transferring money from one group of people to another.... in this case from fixed income groups to flexible income groups.. in our country from you to your shopkeeper.... and there is nothing inherently wrong and no one suffers during inflation if and only if there is a realtime indexed income.... so if the inflation is 7 per cent my salary automatically goes up seven per cent, so does my return on deposits, savings and everything else and the actual raise is over and above it I do not suffer at all..... so if the interest rate is 5 per cent and the inflation is 8 per cent I should get an interest of 13 per cent.... Similary if my annual salary hike is 10 per cent and the inflation is 5 per cent, I should get a salary hike of 15 per cent... But in spite of many sane economists suggesting indexation of income, savings and deposits, we have never sought this way out in our country and most of those economists probably have forgotten about their earlier solution... with the result that fixed income groups are made to suffer through indirect taxes which are passed on to them by the shopkeeper, merchant, industry, and false bank rates like 8 per cent , 7 per cent of which is eaten away by inflation.... Others are making merry and enriching themselves without moving a figer because whenever there is an indirect tax it is passed on to fixed income groups....

So the art of forgetting may be good for historians it certainly is not good for economists... for them the slogan should be back to basics...