Book Review | An economist\'s cheeky jottings on bureaucracy\'s quirks, World Bank

Glory be, someone has found something good to say about Air India. According to Kaushik Basu, it has “the best collection of old Hindi film songs, dripping with romance, culturally diverse with strains of the Islamic and Persian, influenced by the music and poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, with touches of jazz and rock.” Nevertheless, he thinks India’s national carrier “is a real dismal story, guzzling money and delivering poorly” that should be privatised but can’t “for force of habit”. “Now I ask yer” that lower middle-class woman retorted contemptuously to the bewigged and berobed judge, “would yer beat yer wife in front of her own mother standing on the carpet with the tea tray!” Manmohan Singh, Amartya Sen, Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray are Basu’s heroes. The first 215-page section, “The Delhi Years 2009-2012”, presents an insider’s view of India’s governance during an exciting period of history although rumbles about the role of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are avoided as are rumours of back-biting resistance in Delhi. But it New Zealand’s Robert Muldoon warned long ago that “civil disorder is inevitable” if the Bretton Woods system isn’t revisited.