Vinod Anand

APPLYING economic prescriptions to rectify instability both at the micro and macro level is not an easy task. Apart from many other hurdles like exogenous variables over which the control of the role player is negligible, quite often there occurs a paradoxical situation which requires a proper balancing and trade-off amongst the given options. This is akin to balancing the two sides of a weighing balance. Let us look at some of the examples of such paradoxical and intriguing situations:

Market equilibrium is a state in which the quantities of the product that buyers want to buy at the prevailing price is exactly matched by the amount which sellers wish to sell. If this were no so, then the price would change, as buyers try to buy more than what is available, or sellers try to sell more than buyers are willing to accept at the prevailing prices. The price is, thus, an equilibrating mechanism. If quantity demanded is more than quantity supplied, price goes up, and if quantity demanded is less than quantity supplied, price comes down. There has to be, therefore, an optimal trade-off between falling price and rising price (in a given market situation) in order to get back to equilibrium position. And, this is achieved by affecting suitable changes in quantity demanded and quantity supplied. Equilibrium is a very general concept, which can be applied to any situation which is charaterised by a set of interacting forces. But in all situations, the optimal trade-off is needed to achieve the position of equilibrium.

Work and Leisure connote another example of trade-off. In order to make the optimum use of limited time, one has to work out as to how many hours per day will be devoted to work, and how many to leisure? Work brings in wages, leisure doesn’t.

The Phillips Curve, as propounded by Alban William Housego Phillips in 1958, is based on an empirical evidence to support the view that there is a significant relation between the percentage change in money wages and the level of unemployment. The lower is unemployment; the higher is the rate of change of wages. This relationship is known as the Phillips curve. The implication of this relationship is that since a particular level of unemployment will imply a particular rate of wage increase, the aims of low unemployment and a low rate of wage increase may be inconsistent. The concerned authorities have, therefore, to choose between the feasible combinations of unemployment and inflation, e.g. 4 per cent unemployment and no inflation, or 1 per cent unemployment and 9 per cent inflation.

There is no dearth of such examples both at the micro and macro levels. For example, trade-off and balancing is required in the context of migration and unemployment, family well-being and comparative advantage, individual and group decisions,  bargaining and profit making, trade unions and production, formal and informal activities, regional development and overall growth, development and economic growth, international and domestic trade, saving and investment, economic growth and development, subsidies and agriculture, globalization and indigenous industries, disinvestment and unemployment, rationality and reality, receipts and expenditure, revenue receipts and capital receipts, tax revenue and non-tax revenue, direct and indirect taxes, plan and non-plan expenditure, capital and non-capital expenditure.

[The writer is former professor of economics Allhabad University]

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Gandhi’s last speech

The Mahatma says his peace as he feels sorry of the violence plagued the West

ON, July 1, 2008, Shankar Vedantam, a columnist with the Washington Post has helped our collective understanding of Mahatma Gandhi by revealing his historic speech which has been largely lost to the world. Here is this second speech in English which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi delivered on April 2, 1947, before his assassination by a Hindu fanatic on January 30, 1948.

We are told Gandhi gave in English have been recorded. One was from the 1930s and, as described “Saying His Peace": this second speech surfaced in -- of all places -- downtown Washington. It had been tenderly preserved for 60 years by John Cosgrove, a former President of the National Press Club. Cosgrove's copy came from Alfred Wagg, a journalist who recorded the speech in New Delhi and produced four 78-rpm LPs that included both Gandhi's voice as well as Wagg's own commentary.

Shankar Vedantam   tells Gandhi's speech -- made with the uneven diction of an elderly man who sounds as though he has lost most of his teeth -- had the same themes he visited over and over throughout his life: the importance of nonviolence, the eradication of the caste system in Hindu society, amity between South Asia's Hindus and Muslims, and a world united against violence and exploitation.

"A friend asked yesterday, did I believe in one world?" Gandhi says at one point in the speech. "Of course I believe in World One. And how can I possibly do otherwise? . . . You can redeliver that message now in this age of democracy, in the age of awakening of the poorest of the poor."

 Very few English speakers have heard Gandhi directly. That's because there were only two occasions when he was recorded speaking in English, according to his grandson and biographer Rajmohan Gandhi. One speech, about religious issues, was recorded in the 1930s.

Gandhi preferred to speak to Indian audiences in their own languages. He regularly used Hindi, although his native tongue was Gujarati. This speech was made to a gathering of Asian leaders, for whom English was a common language.

The speech is especially poignant not only because we now know Gandhi had barely 10 months left to live, but also because of something it does not explicitly note. It was made precisely one day after Gandhi had set in motion one of the most audacious political initiatives of his career.

The quiet idealism of Gandhi's speech -- along with his radical ideas about love and nonviolence are for all appreciate.

"Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West," Gandhi says at one point in the April 1947 speech, possibly referring to the violence of the recently completed Second World War and the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust. "I am sorry to have to say that, but that is my feeling . . . [the] West today is pining for wisdom. [The] West today is despairing of multiplication of atom bombs, because a multiplication of atom bombs means utter destruction, not merely of the West, but it will be a destruction of the world, as if the prophecy of the Bible is going to be fulfilled, and there is to be a perfect deluge."

Worries about violence were never far from Gandhi's mind: Two spates of sectarian strife had erupted in India in the months before Gandhi's speech. The first was in the eastern province of Bengal, where Muslims killed Hindus. Weeks later, in Bihar, Hindus retaliated against Muslims. In short order, the death toll climbed into the thousands.

Gandhi saw these blood baths not just as political setbacks but as personal failings. In his mind, there was no clear line between the personal and the political. "Sins" in the public sphere reflected "personal sins" for Gandhi. Accordingly, he began to punish himself.

He cut back on his already meager supply of food and sleep. He began to conduct tests of his own chastity -- taking breaks from prayer meetings and politics to write public accounts about his experiments not just to remain chaste, but to not even think about sex, even in his dreams. A widower by now, Gandhi invited a niece to share his bed to test their mutual commitment to chastity. If he could keep his mind completely pure, Gandhi told his associates, he believed the violence would end.

Gandhi's "experiments" triggered knowing winks from skeptics and critics. And his allies were horrified that he seemed to spend as much time trying to cleanse his soul as solving political problems. Several tried to keep the Mahatma's "experiments" hush-hush. But Gandhi held that secrecy was another form of dishonesty. He announced his experiments in the press, solicited feedback, and encouraged a colleague who was critical of him to take his concerns public.

In the months before his April 1947 speech, Gandhi began rising at 4 o'clock each morning, and sometimes at 2, to pray. He was 77 years old, but he undertook a walking tour from village to blood-soaked village in Bengal, covering nearly four dozen villages in as many days. He discarded footwear as one of his self-inflicted punishments, and ignored the cuts and blisters on his feet. At each village, he sought out cobblers and farmers and spent the night in their huts. If he was to speak on behalf of the vast numbers of people who lived in poverty in India, Gandhi reasoned, he had to live like a poor person himself.

"If you really want to see India at its best, you have to find it in the Bhangi cottage, in a humble Bhangi home," Gandhi says at one point in the 1947 speech, referring to one of the lowest and poorest castes. "Of such villages, so the English historians teach us, are 700,000. A few cities, here and there; they don't hold 7 crores of people but the 700,000 villages do hold nearly 40 crores of people."

Gandhi's self-denial and tour of rural poverty was rooted in political philosophy. The central reason people turn to violence, Gandhi believed, was that they were afraid. Fear of others, fear of the unknown, fear of losing one's possessions and fortunes, fear of loss, fear of death -- these were the things that prompted people, groups and nations to seek physical protection, to seek arms and armies. Fear was the root cause of corruption and greed.

The way to destroy fear, Gandhi argued, was to give up the things that people held precious in the first place. When you have no possessions, you fear no thieves. So Gandhi gave up most of his possessions. He gave up emotional ties to family and friends. Sacrificing food, sleep and sex were only a way to show that the needs of his physical body -- and life itself -- could be held lightly.

Even more than nonviolence, courage was Gandhi's central message: During his "pilgrimage" to put an end to the sectarian strife, for example, he sought out Muslim hosts during his nightly halts to demonstrate to his fellow Hindus that most Muslims wanted to live in peace.

When grieving people caught up in the sectarian strife came to him for solace, Gandhi offered little comfort. He asked them why they were not braver, why they were not willing to welcome the blows of their tormentors. Evil and violence, he counseled, quoting Jesus, could not be overcome through resistance, but only through patient suffering -- "resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." To colleagues aghast at such coldness, Gandhi explained his job was not to give people consolation, but to show them their own hidden reserves of strength.

When Hindus retaliated against Muslims in the state of Bihar, Gandhi inflamed angry Hindus when he demanded that state leaders protect Muslims. He warned his colleagues in the Congress Party of dire political consequences -- and a fast unto death -- if they did not protect minorities.

Gandhi's interlocutors rarely enjoyed these interactions, because they knew he was not bluffing. When the old man said he planned to fast unto death, it was not a tactic. In his everyday actions, it was clear he really did value his principles above his own life.

It is Gandhi's sincerity that gives his words in the April 1947 speech their power. Many leaders have been far more articulate. If Gandhi is compelling, it is because we know he is that rare person who actually means what he says.

With the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima fresh in his mind, Gandhi talked about finding a way to help the West turn away from violence.

"What I want you to understand -- if you can -- that the message of the East, the message of Asia, is not to be learned through European spectacles, through Western spectacles, not by imitating the tension of the West, the gunpowder of the West, the atom bomb of the West," Gandhi told his listeners.

"If you want to give a message again to the West, it must be a message of love; it must be a message of truth; there must be a conquest --” Gandhi's words are cut off at this point by a rousing cheer.

Characteristically, Gandhi stops the applause: "Please, please, please," he says. "That will interfere with my speech and that will interfere with your understanding also. I want to capture your hearts, and don't want to receive your claps. Let your hearts clap in unison with what I am saying, and I think I shall have finished my work."

[Courtesy the Washington Post]

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