In the past few weeks, a series of disquieting events have raised the question of trust between government and business. It brought back unhappy memories of the License Raj. Some think that getting government and business to trust each other is hopeless, like getting a pig to sing. ‘It wastes your time and annoys the pig,’ said Mark Twain. Others are wary of crony capitalism, a too cosy relationship between the two. The prosperity of Germany, United States, and Japan has been attributed to high levels of trust between business and the state.

The current protests by Punjab’s farmers hold many lessons. One of them is that politics is a short game, a T20 cricket match, while economics is a long term, five-day Test match. Punjab’s farmers are playing the former while the government is playing the latter, which makes it frustrating for the two sides and for spectators in the stands.

Paper for the Conference on Markets & Morals, New Delhi, 4-5 January 2014

Some nations seem to possess a code word which, like a key, unlocks the secrets of the country. That word is ‘liberty’ in America’s case; égalité, ‘equality’, in the case of France; for India it is ‘dharma’. Some of the best and the worst deeds in these nations can only be understood when seen through the lens of its code word.

After writing a stimulating book on India, Guy Sorman has now written a provocative one on China. China has woken and the world is trembling, but the 'idea of a powerful China submerging the rest of the world is far fetched', says Sormon. Many Western observers, who write on China or India, dwell on imagined countries of the past. Guy Sormon is different. He writes about the ordinary people of today and of 'living' nations and not about mystical fantasies of cultivated Confucian mandarins. The reality that he is sees is disturbing and depressing.  The most touching portrait in this book is that of 85 year old Madam Feng Lanrui, who sitting upright in a public cafe, reminds us that 'Democracy is a value common to all civilizations, the undivided legacy of mankind as a whole'. At a time when 'modernism' is not fashionable in the world, it is nice to be reminded about its greatest legacy. Those who confuse modernization and westernization forget that the West too was once pre-modern and pre-democratic.