Gurcharan Das (Official Website)

To thine own self be true

When Polonius said in Hamlet, ‘to thine own self be true’, he was not thinking of Part I of the UPA government’s forthcoming Budget. Polonius was saying that integrity and success lie in being true to oneself. This Budget is expected to announce a massive give-away of rice and wheat at Rs 3/- per kilo, and the scheme is likely to fail because it fails Polonius’ test. Eighteen years of slow, incremental economic reforms have fashioned a certain kind of nation which was captured brilliantly in the film, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. If the movie caught the character of the nation’s poor, the Indian Premier League (IPL) of cricket mirrors it for the middle class. The character quite simply is of a vibrant and energetic private sector that is hemmed in by an arid eco-system of weak governance. As if to underline this, our bureaucracy has recently been rated the worst in Asia in a survey of twelve countries. Continue reading…