When I was young I developed strategies to make myself popular at school, unfortunately my paradigm of how the world worked and my place in it was sadly deficient. I believed all manner of doubtful facts including what people told me, e.g. honesty is the best policy. Making good judgements about when avoid telling the truth and when to tell white lies is the best policy. As a result I was about as popular as a loud fart in a library.

When it came time to meet with girls I had an inkling of what to expect. People are rarely outright nasty so you don’t really ever know what people truly think of you, what I do know is that for me girls were like planets; somewhere I’d really like to go but someone else, probably backed by NASA, always got there before me.

I couldn’t work out what it was that was wrong so I read ‘how to win friends and influence people’ by Dale Carnegie, written in the 1930s. I applied the rules, but you can’t change these things overnight. Now I’m not a quitter, if I start banging my head against a brick wall, I don’t give up until I’ve made a hole, so I read other books. I read about body language, confidence, positive attitudes, being myself.

You might say I should have stopped reading and got a life, but hey my folks believe in education. In fact judging by the fantastic growth of the education industry the whole world believes in education. Who knows it may be that the trillions of dollars spent on tertiary education is a good investment; personally I’d be interested to debate the topic on another day.
The thing that I really notice though is that every self help book I’ve every read has always said that what is important is staying positive. To paraphrase what they are saying is “You can achieve anything you want to if only you believe you can”. Now I have to say that for a while I believe this stuff but I’m also a trained scientist and I believe in evolution. If being positive all the time was such a sure fire winner then after natural selection had done its thing the only people left on the planet would be the ones who were positive all the time. I think you’ll agree with me that there are a lot of pissed off people out there who are not thinking positively about themselves all the time so I’d like to propose a different theory.

Being positive all the time is dangerous and we need to moderate our positive feelings. Frequently, it’s the irresponsible optimists who get everybody into trouble, just think of Neville Chamberlain He was positive about Hitler and look where that got us.
So why are so many of us negative and why has natural selection allowed so many of us miserable gits to pass on our genes to the next generation. I think it works something like this. Out in the savannahs of Africa where humans first developed there were a lot of dangers around. One bad decision and you could be dead.

So in the savannah you had to be careful, it was a bad move to go around believing you could achieve just about anything. Suppose you believed you could run faster than the lion which was hanging out near your home. You go out and challenge the lion to a race and you lose. According to the self help books this doesn’t matter because taking risks and losing occasionally is just the route to success in the end. But in my book this does matter because the lion’s not going to give you another chance to be positive. That lion’s going to chew your leg off. Having your leg chewed off is going to spoil your day not only that with only one leg it’s going to be even harder to attract girls.

To take an example from the modern world if you believe property prices are going to rise and then borrow a lot of money to buy property but the value of property then falls your going to be poorer and less successful.

Every minute of every day each one of us makes cost benefit judgements in relation to every action we take. Each time I decide to do something the benefit to me has got to outweigh the cost of doing it. Here I’m using the term cost benefit to mean more than just money. If I decide to carry on typing this article it’s because the benefit I perceive to me is greater than the cost of continuing to think and type. If you’re too positive about your chances of success or of the potential benefit of an activity then you will misallocate your resources and end up a loser just as surely as the guy who is too negative about everything and never takes any risks.

So what happened to me? Well I just sort of kept trying to improve and in the end I found a way to live my life that worked for me. As for self help books read them by all means but don’t expect any quick answers. Oh and don’t give up.

‘Raghu’s paper is squarely in that “old” political-economy tradition: it asks why countries do not reform and why underdevelopment persists as a result. His answer is a twist on the traditional story: the problem is not so much a narrow set of elites that want to maintain their rents at the expense of development, but the non-elites who want to maintain theirs. The educated non-elites do not want competition so they veto greater access to education by the non-educated. Meanwhile the non-educated do not want market reforms because this would raise the prices of many of the services they consume (so says Raghu). The result is reform paralysis. Even though Raghu does not say so explicitly, he is obviously thinking of India.’ (Dani Rodrik, 2008)

Further, traditional wisdom tells us that the major chunk of the middle class coupled with bits and pieces of the elite (Bourgeoisie) add human and intellectual power to the rage infuriating to change the status quo in a society, at any given time. However, Walden Bello who was recently crowned the public scholar of the year (2008) notes differently:

‘Among both liberals and progressives, it is common to portray the middle class as an ally of the working class and the lower classes generally and that it is by and large a force for democratization. The thesis showed that contrary to this assumption, the middle classes are not necessarily forces for democratization in developing countries. In fact, when the poorer classes are being mobilized with a revolutionary agenda, the middle classes can become a mass base for counterrevolution, as in Germany and Italy in the 1920′s, when the middle class provided the foot soldiers of the Fascist and Nazi movements. But progressives really have a hard time accepting this characterization of the middle class, and part of the subliminal reason for this is that this is oftentimes the class that they come from.’

So, how does the control on inflation work? There are two measures to control inflation – monetary and fiscal. Monetary measures include expansion and contraction of money while fiscal measures deal with the government’s policy related to expenditures and taxes. Let us talk about the fiscal measures first.

India exports the commodities in which it has a comparative advantage (incentives provided to the country by the means of opportunity costs), like tea, coffee, iron-ore and other such products., Similarly India will import commodities from other countries which have a lower cost of production. Imports slash down the prices of the commodities in the domestic market as similar goods are produced at a higher cost within the country, providing the consumers a surplus. India imports nearly all the essential commodities like edible oil, food grains etc. from other countries.

An increase in prices in one country leads to an increase in prices in other countries as well, by the tool of exports and imports. This kind of situation is often described as ‘exported inflation’, assuming that the currency rate does not change. Likewise, India is also experiencing the same, a condition very common for the countries importing essential commodities. Encouraging imports and discouraging exports shifts the aggregate demand of the commodities towards the right, which means that the aggregate demand rises with an increase in imports. We know that India is producing below its capacity and there exists a lot of unemployment. Therefore, an increase in aggregate demand increases employment more than increase in prices. Our Finance Minister is concerned with encouraging imports and curbing exports, which also leads to currency depreciation. That is why he made the statement that he is likely to trade off economic growth in order to make the essential commodities available to the society; kudos to him for making a wise decision.

Now let us come to the monetary measures. Monetary measures are regulated by the Reserve Bank of India or the RBI. Each day, RBI buys US currency to maintain a desired level of the currency rate. The forces of demand and supply determine the currency rate. An increase in demand for a currency increases its price; the currency is tradable at a higher rate. Various factors are responsible for the change in currency rates like future expectations, interest rates for the investments, domestic prices etc.
There are three types of interest rates by the means of which the RBI sets its credit policy, along with the tools of demand and supply. First is called Repo rate. This is the rate at which the RBI lends funds to the commercial banks. It has a direct impact on the economy. Another tool is Reverse Repo Rate, the interest provided to the commercial banks for their overnight deposits at the RBI. There is also the Cash Reserve Ratio (CRR) rate, which is a percentage of the deposits that the commercial banks are impelled to keep with the RBI as reserves. An increase the CRR forces the commercial banks to squeeze the money available to lend funds. An increase in the CRR under the quarterly revision of the credit policy on April 25 is expected to suck out over Rs 9,000 crore excess funds from the banking system, while the 0.5 per cent increase in CRR announced on April 17 was aimed at squeezing out Rs 18,500 crore from the system.

Inflation is a result of increase in the demand for money. People are liquidating their savings in order to cope up with the sky rocketing prices. An increase in the demand for money has lead to an increase in the interest rates. Now, an increase in the CRR will suck out excess funds. Usually, higher interest rates encourage savings and leads consumers to defer or cut back on purchases until the rates soften. This leads to a lower demand for goods and services and in turn can squeeze inflation rates. An increase in the interest rates is generally meant to be targeted at the lives of the executives. In general, the executives substitute savings for the extra consumption they make, which brings down the demand for the goods and services leading to a lower inflation rate. Dr Yaga Venugopal Reddy assured that the home loans interest rates are not going to be changed as a large portion of the middle class families indulge in taking home loans. Following the interest rates, various supply side factors will be instilled into the system curbing the executive life and softening the inflation rates.

Besides the monetary and fiscal policies, our honourable Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has followed a method of persuasion and pressure requesting, the executives to cut back on executive life after raising the slogan ‘Simple living, high thinking’.

“INTERNET RELATIONSHIPS”, probably the most newfangled trend in today’s world where people wrap themselves in anonymity, share all their feelings for hours together behind a simple LCD monitor, least they know that the person on the other side is a genuine or not. As we all see the technology is rising to its peaks and so are the relationships, from the days of pigeons to letters; today’s world deals with E-mails and Bluetooth. CYBER LOVE, CBER SEX, CYBER MARRIGES, the world today is submerged in CYBER. If we go deep into statistics and try to analyze, 6 out of every 10 teenagers are addicted to the new type of so called “cyber drugs”. The question “WHY?” remains unanswerable; it could be due to loneliness or depression or a combination of numerous other reasons.

Studies reveal that these new age relationships help in better understanding of each other; but the question is, is it really true? Judging a person through a keyboard sounds ridiculous, but do we stop? I guess, NO. Masking one’s emotions, feelings through words proves that we are all so dependent on technology, more than we would want to.

As life evolves from metal age to electronic age, so do the relationships; from multi media messages to short messaging services, all these inventions have become a threat to the human society. So, has the time arrived where our inventions are acting as our own curse or has the age arrived where machines are, in a subtle fashion, taking over the human world?

Questions always remain as questions or probably could go down the history lane as “the world’s unanswerable questions” but ‘what is the ultimatum?’ remains another question.