My granddaughter would outsmart me

Yesterday was also a day

When I saw Akshaya,

In the full form, her academic prowess,

And playful acting skills and pranks

She has acquired all the genes effect

Bharathidasan preprimary play school environment

Has the added effect, a beneficient

Externality ofcourse

Transplanting her from another private school

The dense environoment, of concrete academic corridor

To the enchanting garden of Bharathidasan campus

Has made all the difference ,

In her talkative nature

And academic blent of mind

How can we ignore the role of a

Tution teacher in the town , a lady fond of Akshaya,

A kind of guru with a mother’s passion

To give her protective wings so as

To fly, to greater heights.

Will she evolve, outsmarting Shakthi and me ?

Yes she will ,she can, and she should. ( From My Dateless Dairy)

Macro Economics has distanced me, like my better half.

Paul Krugman’s piece has arrived

At a right time,

To rejuvenate my interest in Macroeconomics,

A branch which I embraced most.

Even at the formative years of teaching

Like my betterhalf who has

Developed a thousand and one resentment

Against me for the only mistake I have committed on Earth

That is ,to have loved her

Profusely, profoundly and more passionately

Macro too, has deserted me.

But here, the compassion is different

Difficult to understand

I did not have the environiment and also

Compulsion to read macroeconomics

At a very advanced level,

To my set of students

In my place of work.

Beter late than never,

To begin a fresh romance with my subject

Will not the providence force me

Propel me and goad me to action

To undertake the

State of the art running commentary on

Macroeconomics and a few others

For the lesser privileged people like me

I can, I will and I should. (From My Dateless Dairy)

I feel Vindicated in my infatuation with Keynes

Over a long time, for the last four decades

I feel vindicated, and amply rewarded,

Greatly honored by the Lord,of Universe

My admiration for Keynes,

My measured aggression in

Glorifying Keynesian economics,

When mainstream macro and monetary economics

Was led by Lucas and company

Discreditinig Keynesians , calling them as tellers of fairy tales

Treating it as a matter of

No consequence or significance in policy domain

Classroom on both theoretical and practical planes,

As if it is devoid of all substance and content

Like an illiterate devotee,

Getting blessed by the Lord

For his hard work and good behavior,

Or an affectionate mother handled well by her Son

All my ignorance in econometrics and quantitative tools

And my critical inability to handle

Mathematically, by sheer lack of training,

Have all proved to be a great

Blessing in disguise,

For not getting infected/ affected

By economics rooted in mathematics/Rational expectation scholars.

(From My Dateless Dairy)

An Objective self Assessment (Subjectively?)

Will yesterday’s outburst ( 9.9.2009) be

The last in the act of

My series of

Stupidities and misplaced anger and despair;

I can only pray, to the supreme sleeping in heavens

9.9.2009 will inject more serenity,

Harmony and orderliness, and

Some minimum peace in all

My veins, cells, atomic particles,

All craving for a semblance of peace, and quiet

Two hours of teaching were extremely

Satisfying, refreshing, and more rejuvenating but also more tiring

I know I must moderate ,

My speed in delivery and passion in my subject

I hope, the physical limitations

Will eventually draw limits to my boyish

Feverish and savage enthusiasm

In teaching my subject

While tasting Paul Krugman’s flavor and rigor.

Paul Krugman’s September first week paper,

A Newyork Times Treasure,

Which I will cherish for ever

Is a very great timely reminder ,and

A great moral boaster,

For all the tapas, meditation,

I have practices at a very very early stages of academic life

Operating at a modest muandane level, in a non mathematical way

Assimilating my love, and infatuation with Keynes. (From My Dateless Dairy)

One week is a long time in politics- conscience is consigned to flames.

All over the globe there is a rat race going on for power, position, titles and designations. There are petty minds with pseudo scholarship, soaked in devilish thoughts, aspire for higher positions, demonize and preach sermons. Like pre poll and post poll alliances, in politics, that is politics without any kind of ethics and morality; there are also also different permutations and combinations of groups or rather gangsters in different kinds of institutions- both academic and otherwise. while writing this, a flash news comes that DMK party- the dominant party in Tamilnadu, perturbed over the federal party bullying tactics chosen to quit from the Government but not withdrawing the support, but more sensible and responsible enough to lend issue based support .
One weak is a long time in politics. Seven years honey moon has not sustained marriage .Academics is worse than political relationship. How is life in family or high school, God alone knows them. While editing this piece , the headline appear in the press that the DMK- Congress alliance has been restored and the punctured relationship is repaired . It is clear that the both parties need each other for their survival and one does not know how this fractured relationship will workout on the ground and like any human relationship it will be tested in the next month poll and clearly expose the underlying fragility and vulnerability of the relationship.

If human relationship is so fragile, always based on cost benefit calculus, rooted on ego and self interest inflated ararogance, double speak or multiple speak , we can’t expect the Great Indian subcontinent to render greater good through its educational institutions.
When educated’fellows ( read scholars ) became a real nusenece or threat to the stability of global commons, and get soaked in their personal welfare, not bothering about their real customers, who are their real judges and ambassadors, will their conscience permit them to get good sleep ? it is futile to find answer, when conscience itself has been consigned to flames.

I give a pat on my own shoulder

In my long academic journey of forty years as college/ university teacher I spent nearly a quarter century in different colleges, which of course included four years stay at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics for M.Phil and PhD studies in Pune.That was a wonderful golden period in my academic life. Beyond the narrow confines of Ph.D. project, I had wended into an extensive reading and hence the completion and submission of PhD thesis was delayed for more than a decade.

It was only during the mid 90’s I joined the university environment and after living and laboring here for seventeen years I gave a pat on my own shoulder for having survived thus far, amidst all chaos of office politics/ campus politics; treachery and gross insensitivity towards colleagues

Indeed, a lengthy monograph on this campus politics has been under preparation and almost in a state of suspended animation for too long, given my preoccupation with academic and administrative responsibilities. The book, which is almost a collection of poems- depicting the feelings in free verse was mostly autobiographical and partly fictional and I don’t know where all those sheets are, in my academic godown.They were all written in the 90’s and also in the first half of the first decade of the millennium. At least I must locate the introductory part of that piece and post it in the blog, so that my well wishers and my beloved students would understand in what kind of emotional state, any tortured soul will find himself- be a professor or a banker, a scientist or a bureaucrat. Each sentence in that volume will echo the feeling of any persecuted and tortured soul and all the silent soliloquy that follows that would unravel the untold story of every honest and brave intellectual, locked into any unfavorable work environment but attempting to clean all the dirt and filth in the system. Any institution of higher learning, a bank or a hospital is only a miniature India, where we find petty and mean minded individuals along with some good and nobler souls, bent upon rendering wok ethics, unmindful of all kinds of unpleasant outcomes that might surface on the career graph