No new ideas, please, we are Indian

Seventeen years into the 21st century, we are still fixated by the ideas of the 20th century

The late Paul Samuelson, when I called on him 27 years ago, very insightfully said at one point, “In your country human capital depreciates very slowly.” He was referring to how we Indians show deference to older people even while differing with them.

But if you think about it, it is not just the old people we defer to. We defer even more to old socio-political ideas. The result is that old ideas have a very long half-life in India. Obviously, some very bad ones linger on and on.

What’s more, it doesn’t matter who the fount of those socio-political ideas is: