Influential list?

Time Magazine's list of the most influential people in the world today has Sonia Gandhi, Indra Nooyi, Lakshmi Mittal and Osama bin Laden on it, but not President George W Bush of the United States. However much the list might warm the collective Indian cockle, it is worth asking: are the first three really more influential than him? If so, one must also agree that control over political, military and economic power does not automatically lead to influence.

That is a doubtful proposition, even though it probably holds for certain types of influence. For example, Bush's influence in matters intellectual would be negative. He is hardly the sort who would shape, say, philosophy in the 21st century. Arguably, Paul Wolfowitz as a torch-bearer for neo-con thought has exerted more influence.

So may have Robert Kagan, the man who came up with the notion of pre-emptive war as a basis for US foreign policy. If we are to de-link power from influence, it is necessary to clarify what sort of influence one is talking about""because, without Bush as president, neither Wolfowitz nor Kagan might have been very influential.

That is why it seems barely credible to suggest that Bush cannot, if he so desires, influence the economic and military policy of the US or even its politics""even if he does so only by quitting. Indeed, that sort of influence goes with the turf. Likewise, it would be silly to think that bin Laden could influence anything that is even remotely constructive""which takes us into an altogether different enquiry: can (and should) positive and negative influence be equated? Would that be morally justified?

Meanwhile, to take just a small sample, members of the Bahujan Samaj party may well ask and rightly: how influential is Sonia Gandhi in relation to Mayawati? Or, does the ability to manage a fizzy drinks company really amount to influence, however you choose to define it?

What is influence, anyway? Wikipedia defines it as "the ability to indirectly control or affect the actions of other people or things. The meaning of influence therefore depends on who or what is being affected, and to what end."

By this definition, surely Bush is more influential than everyone else on the list because when it comes to indirect influence, the president of the United States (Bush or anyone else) is by far the most influential person on earth. There can be no gainsaying that. Even the most ardent Bush-hater will have to concede the influence Bush has had on Iraqis, Afghans, American tax-payers, borrowers from the World Bank, and so on.

True influence, it might be argued, should have an inter-temporal quality; that means it is likely to be intellectual, and the ability to change the way people think about the world. Any number of examples can be cited in this regard but one will suffice: climate change. On this reckoning, none of the persons on the Time list make the cut.

The problem with a grand idea of this type is that pathbreaking thought is rarely the product of one brain. It sort of evolves until one person cracks the nut, so to speak, usually by doing not much more than giving it a crisp and catchy name.

Whether it is Gandhiji's ahimsa or Keynes' multiplier (written about first by Richard Kahn in 1931 and, indeed, practised by Roosevelt from 1933 via the New Deal), or so many other things, it is much the same story. In that sense, Time has got one person right. If we overlook the negative aspects of his influence, Osama bin Laden.