A Vision of the Twenty First Century Like that of most others, my vision of the country in the twenty-first century is also tempered by hopes of betterment in all aspects of living. Considering the progress Indian society has made so far, particularly in the period following Independence, such hopes are reasonable and certainly not unfounded. By believing in the dictum that ‘the future is merely an extension of the present’,...

Taxation Josephine, Emperor Napoleon’s wife, is reputed to have made the famous remark about the certainly of death and taxes. About two hundred years later, even in the age of tax havens and tax-free investment options, taxation is as relevant to society as it has ever been. In the tax havens of the present, though income and investments may not be taxed, the services these havens provide to the public are...

Inflation There may be many people even in the modern world who have never heard of inflation; but certainly not many among them have been able to keep clear of its influence. Economists see it or sense it in government policies and programmes and consider it with dispassionate neutrality. For them, inflation is yet another parameter of their hugely complex ‘situation models’, which they use to study the mechanics of money....

Trade vs Aid Trade, as one of the oldest and most enduring of occupations, plays a very important role in our everyday lives. It is also perhaps the most pervading of human activities, embracing in its fold, the work of an ordinary street vendor, who sells ice-cream or vegetables, and the activities of nations around the world, which exchange their goods and manufactures for the money and merchandise of others. The...

Banking Money — an ingenious creation of man-is helping him ease his dealings with his fellow men; but banking — a relatively newer concept-is revolutionising those dealings. As a practice, banking seems audacious enough even to overturn, in a way, the tenets of natural law, by delivering more than what it accepts, without any obvious effort. Just as wine matures and enriches itself with age, so money, stored in a bank,...