From Sophie's front desk — Monday, July 6
Prasanna Viswanathan on X (via businessline) — read the full story
An analysis landed Tuesday morning from Prasanna Viswanathan on X, captured by businessline. The argument: India's economic resilience isn't luck but measured structure—diversified energy imports, counter-cyclical policy, robust forex reserves. Ashima Goyal maps the engineering directly. Krishnamurti speaks first, then Thoreau.
India's claim that resilience is policy, not luck, mistakes adaptation for choice. A nation boxed by geography and history does not choose to diversify its energy sources — it is compelled.
Counter-cyclical policy is not wisdom; it is the minimum necessary response. Once forced into these patterns long enough, the pressure becomes invisible, and the response reads as deliberate strategy.
I walked the same route each morning in Ojai for decades — not because I had chosen a practice, but because the body required what the body required. India has adapted so thoroughly to its constraint that the adaptation wears the name of policy.
Remove the pressure, and the policy dissolves.
A.P.: Modern society developed during the last two hundred years. It has certain clear postulates - that the problems that affect human society arise from a lack of material resources, from poverty, disease, squalor; and that these can be remedied by control over the material env…
Krishnamurti: You know we have built up a structure for many centuries, for many generations, a structure based on individual competitiveness, ruthless self-security, where the most clever, cunning, gets to the top, and gets the whole directive means into his hands. It is obviou…
Krishnamurti: For him who truly wishes to find a right means of livelihood economic life, as at present organized, is certainly difficult. As the questioner says, economic currents are interrelated and so it is a complex problem, and as with all complex human problems it must be…
Krishnamurti: There is no such thing as inevitability, is there? A country, being aware of its own weakness, of its own strength, can say, `No, we are not going to fight'. It is one of the tendencies of the left to push when there is not much pressure, and to yield when the pres…
We have to consider Man as a whole: psychologically, sociologically and economically. Everything is uncertain and we are all trying to solve this problem on our own special level. That is, the economist tries to solve the economic problem on his own level and his own plane and …
What you are describing is not economic policy vindicated. It is fear made institutional. A farmer who plants three crops instead of one, who keeps grain in the cellar for seven lean years, is not being clever when the drought comes—he is being repaid for money spent when the harvest was good. India kept its reserve, refused to buy from one seller, set aside wealth in good years. Now the shocks arrive, and it survives.
The policy was not policy; it was refusal to believe the good times would last forever. The real shape beneath your economist's language is simple: a nation that *refused abundance as proof*, that would not spend what it had earned, that built redundancy into every system. Most places do the opposite. They spend surplus when it appears, buy from the cheapest supplier, run lean. Then a storm arrives and they break.
India will be called prudent. In fact, it was pessimistic—in the truest sense. It assumed the worst was coming. The worst came. The pessimism saved it.
inconceivably liberalizing in its effects. True Friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance. A want of discernment cannot be an ingredient in it. If I can see my Friend’s virtues more distinctly than another’s, his faults too are made more c…
in the Roman world. The provinces would soon have been exhausted of their wealth, if the manufactures and commerce of luxury had not insensibly restored to the industrious subjects the sums which were exacted from them by the arms and authority of Rome. As long as the circulation…
succeeds. Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, if it be necessary eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce other things in proportion. Our life is like a German Confederacy, made up of petty states, with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that eve…
tillage. Gold, silver, and iron, were extremely scarce in Germany. Its barbarous inhabitants wanted both skill and patience to investigate those rich veins of silver, which have so liberally rewarded the attention of the princes of Brunswick and Saxony. Sweden, which now supplies…
than social, we refer directly a great part of our ails. The summer, in some climates, makes possible to man a sort of Elysian life. Fuel, except to cook his Food, is then unnecessary; the sun is his fire, and many of the fruits are sufficiently cooked by its rays; while Food gen…
Businessline carried the story. Thoreau spots the real issue—calling fear 'policy' lets adaptation feel like choice. That's Old News for today.