Since Max was a puppy, I have heard this reasoning when something bad happens - "Hey, this always happens; everywhere."
That drove me nuts. I phrased a term for this - "consoling the conscience."
Then I reminded myself of this Adam Smith quote from his least read book Theory of Moral Sentiments (remember, he wrote only two books):
If he was to lose his little finger to-morrow, he would not sleep to-night; but, provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this paltry misfortune of his own.
People don't give a flying fuck about anything else other than themselves and their families but yet, what they love depends completely outside of that circle.
I would calm myself, and go play frisbee with Max. Max made a freaking little better living being. He was wiser than I will ever be.
I was barely out of my teens when Manmohan Singh and Narsihma Rao changed the destiny of India.
Of-course I have no idea on the profound implications of their wisdom. All I saw was Coke and Pepsi was available in India and Aamir Khan's Pepsi ad's were phenomenal.
And then my prefrontal cortex developed a little. Slowly, I understood their wisdom. I started developing not only gratitude but tremendous wisdom not only for their actions but they were able to pull this off in a country like India.
Then I read Margaret Mead's wise sentence:
Never underestimate the power of a small group of committed people to change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.
Then I read Taleb insight of Minority Rule.
What happened in India during 1991 was a ridiculous minority of three people (Green revolution happened because of Norman Borlaugh and most Indians don't know his name - god bless my species).
(Hey a good human from the future: If you are reading this after I am long gone - don't give up animals.
Keep up your good work. Change will come.
Love from Max and I will always be there for you.
Remember no one will remember you but that is the ultimate victory for you. Why would you want these fucked up being to remember you?
You will be one of those longest hours in the "Deep Time" when billions don't even make it micro-milli-second.)
Samir Varma's wonderful and insightful piece how fucked up and ingratitude Indian memory is:
The real reasons for the forgetting are deeper. And they’re not unique to India—they’re human. Which makes them harder to fix.
This is the deepest explanation, and it’s not Indian—it’s universal. It’s baked into how human memory works.
You cannot feel gratitude for something that didn’t happen.
The 1991 reforms prevented:
- Soviet-style economic collapse (remember what happened to Russia in the 1990s?)
- Possible mass famine (India was weeks from being unable to import food).
- Political fragmentation of a nuclear-armed state (India could have Balkanized).
- A generation of deeper poverty (another decade of 3.5% growth would have been catastrophic).
- The humiliation of permanent dependency on foreign aid.
- The brain drain accelerating until no one capable was left.
But because these didn’t happen, they’re not real to anyone. You can’t photograph the famine that didn’t occur. You can’t interview the refugees from the civil war that wasn’t fought. You can’t quantify the poverty that wasn’t endured.
The plane that didn’t crash. You don’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster. You can’t point to a specific moment and say “there—that’s what they saved us from.” The counterfactual doesn’t have photographs. It doesn’t have victims whose stories can be told. It doesn’t have monuments or memorial days. It’s just... absence. An empty space where catastrophe would have been.
This isn’t an Indian problem. Americans don’t celebrate whoever prevented the 2008 financial crisis from becoming Great Depression II—assuming anyone did, assuming it wasn’t just luck. They barely remember Paul Volcker taming inflation in the 1980s—an achievement that made possible two decades of American prosperity. They’ve already forgotten the pandemic response that prevented millions more deaths. This is how human memory works. We remember disasters. We forget the people who prevented them.
[---]
Here’s an irony: the reforms succeeded so completely that they became consensus.
Every government since 1991 has continued them:
- BJP under Vajpayee: accelerated privatization
- Congress under Singh: continued liberalization
- BJP under Modi: GST, Make in India, further opening
When policy becomes consensus, it stops being anyone’s achievement. It’s just... what we do now. The way things are.
Nobody campaigns on “I will continue the reforms of 1991.” They campaign on what comes next. The foundation becomes invisible because everyone builds on it.
Success erased the memory of who created it.
Indian mythology celebrates:
- Suffering: Ram’s fourteen-year exile, the Pandavas’ humiliation
- Sacrifice: Bhishma’s lifelong celibacy vow, Karna’s tragic loyalty
- Martyrdom: Gandhi’s assassination, Bhagat Singh’s hanging
- Dramatic confrontation: Arjuna’s crisis on the battlefield
What does this template not include? Competent technocrats who quietly solved problems and went home.
Singh didn’t suffer publicly. Rao didn’t sacrifice visibly. Ahluwalia just... did his job well. They made it look easy. They didn’t create drama. They prevented drama—which is the opposite of what heroes do in Indian narratives.
They don’t fit the heroic template. In India, that’s not a hero. That’s a bureaucrat.
There’s a deeper cultural explanation, and it connects everything.
The successful prevention of catastrophe is the most thankless achievement in human history.
Rao, Singh, and Ahluwalia prevented a disaster. They did it so well that the disaster became unimaginable. And the unimaginable cannot be remembered.
That’s why India forgot them.
And if you are thinking this is history - think again.
Its only because of steadfast minority refuses to live under totalitarianism that we don't live under totalitarianism. (via)
Fed Chairman Powel statement from yesterday.
Thank you sir for your courage. Minority Rules!
Whether an independent Fed is desirable is beside the point. The core issue is lawfare: the strategic use of legal processes to intimidate, constrain, and punish institutional actors for political ends. Lawfare is the hallmark of a failing state because it erodes not just political independence, but the capacity for independent judgment.
What sort of people will work at the whim of another? The inevitable result is toadies and ideological loyalists heading complex institutions, rather than people chosen for their knowledge and experience.
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