Only in a movie can one afford to look at a bunch of sins as just sins. But since real life is more complex, you need to be less judgmental on our collective failing than Kevin Spacey as the deadpan psychopath in the 1995 classic Seven — where he used a sledgehammer, literally, to make the point. The current interplay of greed, ostentation, ambition — and envy and anger makes for a bewildering, sometimes unnerving mix, which is both a challenge and an opportunity for an instinctive reformer. And since that definition fits the Prime Minister perfectly, it would be disappointing if, pushed around by party men of lesser intellect or commitment, or sickened by a daily dose of pink-paper triumphalism, he were to begin to unravel his post-1991 view of investment, growth, profit and the unleashing of individual and corporate enterprise.

If you’ve known Manmohan Singh long enough, you’d say chances are he is neither losing nerve nor is he making an intellectual or philosophical course-correction. He is expressing political concern at another emotion that is rising in the wake of this greed, ostentation and, I repeat again, pink-paper triumphalism — which is not confined merely to some business newspapers. One look at the faces of business-channel anchors — which are mostly watched in Mute — around 11 am on a trading day and you can tell whether the market is up or down. It is almost as if it is immoral and unfair for the markets to go any place but up, gas balloons, soft toys, high-fives, even specially printed T-shirts, all mark the scaling of each new Sensex peak. The rise in the number of India’s billionaires — all mostly notional since these are purely market-cap-based and can change as fast as the smile on the face of the anchor — is celebrated as a global conquest, as some kind of a cricket World Cup victory.

... contd.