The best few lines I read today..

From Pratap Bhanu Mehta in today's Indian Express: "A sleepwalking economy"..

...The third fatalism comes from an excessive faith in deliverance by a leader. The complete abdication of responsibility by the top leaders of the Congress has sowed the seeds of confusion. It is also true that the institutional chaos in the wake of the corruption scandals has slowed down some sectors. But it does not follow that a single leader can come and fix this. For one thing, there is no evidence yet that the current opposition party has anything sensible to say on macroeconomics. And what Narendra Modi does in fact say on a range of issues of fundamental reform, from FDI to the value of the rupee, is not very reassuring. He also distinctly seems to lack control of his parliamentary party, which is busy putting its weight behind all kinds of half baked laws, including the Lokpal Bill. But it has little time to intelligently talk about the economy.
Admittedly, administrative decision-making at the top will help. But it will get you only so far. Cleaning up the institutional mess on a range of things from contracting to environmental clearances will be a huge task. The UPA's legacy of institutional corrosion is so deep in these areas that rebooting them will not just be a matter of one man's will to give orders. It will be setting new norms. Indeed, the big worry is that the system will again risk wheels getting stuck in the sand if new norms are not institutionalised. While there is some discussion of institutions to tackle corruption, there is very little about institutions to promote growth in a new context.

The Right Reasons

Over the past year, life has been busy.. Quite busy in fact.. I never thought it would be such a hectic life, that I would not get chance to blog about something.. I made a promise to myself (kinda a new year resolution) to write every day for a 1000 words at a minimum, but that promise was a resounding failure.. About 5 posts in, I gave up.. (silly, silly me).. For about the first 4 months I started feeling very guilty about not keeping up to my promise.. I think sometime around April, I posted something again.. but did not keep up..

Months went by, and the odd acquaintance who read this blog once in a while, would remind me why I had not written for a while.. And it bothered me again..

As I have written before, writing for me is somewhat of a cathartic process. I write what I feel, and more often than not, what I don't think I can say in public.. Writing has been my refuge, my comfort food, my security blanket, and everything else.. (you get the picture)..

Over the last year or so, and especially over the last few months, there have been many instances where I have had the intention to write something.. Sachin Tendulkar's retirement, for instance, was one where I had everything in my head on what I wanted to write.. The words, however, never strung together to write a constructive enough post.

And this bugged me no end..

Here was I, who loved to write, who loved to write about cricket, who loved to write about Sachin Tendulkar, and I never wrote anything when he said farewell..

Don't worry, this is not a post about SRT.. It is about me..

It has taken me the better part of a month to realize what it was that made me not do what I liked doing best..

I think, not sure, that I was afraid, that whatever I write should be so good and so constructive, that everyone should "like" what I wrote. Everyone who reads it should comment, retweet, +1, or whatever it is that people do these days.. The fear of meeting and surpassing the expectations of others was why I never ended up going beyond the first word of the post..

And that's completely against why this blog was set up in the first place..

It was set up, long years ago, to write what I felt like, good or bad, sensible or tripe.. Not to receive likes and dislikes and anything else..

So, starting today, I am disabling the auto-post capability for this blog to any social network..

Because I am not writing for others

I am writing for myself..