Nobody's perfect.

In Sydenham College of Commerce & Economics, then partly resident in the now-demolished Sukhadwala Building, close to Kitab Mahal http://digbig.com/4ydja and Excelsior Cinema http://digbig.com/4ydjb, you had to climb steep rickety stairs to reach the FY Commerce lecture hall on the third floor. If you had patience, you could wait and try your luck with the rattling elevator. This was back in 1952. I had just passed my SSC exam and enrolled for the B Com course only because one of my cousins http://digbig.com/4ydjc had become a Chartered Accountant. I wanted to emulate him, I guess. Anyway, that's how I came to know of Joan Robinson. Professor Gangadhar Gadgil used to teach us Economics or Eco as we called it. He wasn't as good a teacher as he was a Marathi littérateur, I'm sorry to say. He lectured deadpan and made Eco sound a parched, scorched, desolate, harsh, coarse, grating and excessively rude discipline. Reading Joan Robinson, thanks to my ingrained habit of going to the source, made me realise how much fun it could be. She had quite a writing style all her own. She was perfectly lucid about imperfect competition. From her, I learned the "monopsony" concept, the buyer-side equivalent of monopoly. We did not hear of it in the lecture hall. It's amusing to note that the most striking latter-day example of monopsony is the government as the sole buyer of sophisticated weaponry in a national market. The entry of the terrorist buyers turns the scenario "duopsonic". By the early fifties, India was already showing clear symptoms of morphing into a state monopoly. In the automobile market, a duopoly was emerging. This reminds me of her perceptive remark about India made popular by her illustrious student, Amartya Sen: "Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is also true." It seems she lived for three years with her husband, Austin, in India before the country got its Independence. "I don't know mathematics, therefore I have to think" was her other oft-cited remark. Her ability to put into words really complex mathematical concepts was the result of this realisation on her part. Reading her and W Arthur Lewis, the first Novel Prize winner of African descent, spurred me to do research in development economics for my M Com degree. http://digbig.com/4ydkx. Unfortunately, Robinson could not get the Nobel Prize for Economics although Business Week had tipped her as the likely winner in 1975 echoing all her colleagues' expectations. Her Indian ward, Amartya Sen, did. The reason she missed the bus was, it was rumoured, her increasing leftist leanings as she aged. For instance, she openly expressed her admiration for Mao Zedong’s China and Kim Il Sung’s North Korea. In the meantime, perfect or pure competition continues to remain the neo-classical economist's ivory-tower fantasy. Maybe, he wasn't paying attention to Jerry Louis' repartee to Dean Martin when he called him a perfect fool. "You're wrong, Dean. Nobody's perfect."

The mandolino guy.

With his little mandolino
And a twinkle in his eye
Senorinas he can win
Always for another guy.

I don't quite remember when I heard this Dean Martin number for the first time. http://digbig.com/4xqnq. Apparently though, the way he crooned it, the listener was supposed to feel a twinge of pity and remorse for the poor mandolino fellow. He always won the fair senorina for another guy, capiche? http://digbig.com/4xqnr. It was very unfair, though, that the fair senorina did not feel a twinge of attraction for the guy serenading her with the mandolino. Instead, she directly transferred her affection to the suitor who was hiring the mandolino guy for the price of a cigarette and a glass of vino. I guess the world is an unfair place, always has been, always will be. If you scroll down the lyrics, you will find that, in spite of all the unfairness, the aforesaid mandolino guy was quite a happy soul. He had no woman of his own (I guess he was practical: he realized that he didn't have the wherewithal to support her expensive tastes). He continued to sing a song of sweet romance for all the lovers on the dance floor. If you continue to suspend your disbelief willingly long enough and go along with the songwriter's scheme of things, you'll discover that the mandolino guy did not lose hope for the future. While he sincerely did the job he was hired for, his eyes were always seeking his one true love whom he toasted every time he raised his glass of vino. Heaven help them, though, if they found each other unless, in the meanwhile, the mandolino guy had stumbled upon a way to earn a handsome living.

Are we like that only?

Imagine! A cursory Bollywood history (of sorts) tells you Kishore Kumar was “a relatively unknown actor” before Padosan (1968) – and banking on our willing suspension of disbelief against all hope! This sloppily written and shoddily edited paperback makes no mention whatsoever of Rajesh Khanna and V Shantaram. If memory serves, Kishore Kumar was a renowned comedian of long standing much earlier. Remember Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi released exactly a decade before Mehmood’s cult classic? The omission of Rajesh Khanna too is curious, almsot callous – especially considering his singing voice was Kishore Kumar in most of his movies. (RK scored eleven hits in a row followed by eight flops.) Shantaram’s Duniya Na Maney is considered a landmark in societal filmmaking. Could it be a case of selective amnesia, I wonder? Considering the high editorial standards of the book’s renowned publishers (after all, they’ve India’s No.1 print columnist-novelist on their marquee), it’s also irritating to come across such erratic but obvious blunders as “Dean Martin and Bing Crosby’s Road series”. Well, to err is human, I guess, and we all are like that only.