A country, a lecture, a performance.

The spell broke when my classmates started clapping and I joined in the applause. Today's 'open economy macroeconomics' class had just ended.

Evidently, thirty years before I was born had begun a reforms process in India that did not begin to fructify till around the time I had learnt to walk. Growing up, I had developed a vague sense of how the world and the world of business interacted and why it had not done well in the past and why the economy accelerated around the time when I was in high-school.The process continues, albeit with more steam, even as I come back to college after about a decade of corporate life.

While all this was happening, a set of events that several times shook a nation of a billion. There was another set of events that forced a country going in the wrong (in macroeconomics, right and wrong are opinions based on ideology) direction to do a u-turn, in the process starting an economic revolution that is only restrained by the attitude of the elected representatives and their affiliations to power and position (we get the governments we deserve? What must an economist feel if he knows what to do to correct the wrongs, but is tied down by 'the obligations of his position'? What's popular?) Overall, the events were influenced by 'who ruled independent India', what political inclinations they had, some things that are ingrained deep in a 3000 year old culture that is Hinduism, international power polarities and their subsequent realignment etc. There are several other factors that would seem superficial if explained in a hurry, but they all mattered.

In summary, today's lecture related some of the ideologies that have survived 200 years of political testing, 3000 years of cultural testing, responsibilities and constraints of central monetary authorities, 60 years of post-independence struggles, the interdependence of several macroeconomics factors that every government ought to strive to direct (with as much less interference and marginal cost as possible) with some of the known and unknown facts and political opinions that shaped India's daily life over the last six decades. Basically, everything that mattered to the development of the current fiscal and monetary policies was expertly framed in a lecture that was delivered like a story based on numbers and adjectives. The performance was spellbinding. I recall laughing out of professor's wit and admiring his rhetoric several times.

India got revealed between spoken words, a blackboard and insights of a scholar's mind. Seventy five minutes had passed by in a whiff. The cloud of my thoughts and opinions, though, had taken a definite concrete shape. Wow, so that was what they had been talking about all these years!

We have enjoyed several lectures and many more discussions. But on none of them had we conferred an applause, like as if at the end of a performance. This was a first.

I started clapping.

PS: The professor is a permanent faculty at IIMA. Among others, he has been playing the role of an expert adviser to the central government on some of the key initiatives rolled out in the recent past.