Opinion Outside the box

In keeping with the spirit of times, Piysuh Goyal confidently attributed the gravitational theory to Albert Einstein, who had apparently arrived at it without getting confused by the numbers.

School students have always held that the chief utility of mathematics is to harass them. Now, they have found a friend in Piyush Goyal, commerce minister, ephemeral finance minister and whilom national treasurer of the BJP. He has been a numbers man in all three roles, and yet he discourages critics of government policy from allowing themselves to be confused by the numbers, and by the structural restrictions that formal logic has imposed upon their thought. To get out of a financial hole, he seems to suggest, you must think out of the box.

Goyal has masterfully formalised and expanded the scope of a new strain of economic thought whose spark was lit by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, when she blamed the grim downturn in the automobile sector to the unholy nexus of millennials and taxicab aggregators. The kernel of the new vision was in plain sight, but it was sectorally limited. It remained to take the spirit of the thing and run with it, right out of the box and out to the great open spaces, where the mind is without fear and speech is free.

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In keeping with the spirit of times, Goyal confidently attributed the gravitational theory to Albert Einstein, who had apparently arrived at it without getting confused by the numbers. True, there were few numbers involved in tracing the curvature of space-time. There were a lot of baffling Greek alphabets in those equations, instead. Let us set aside such confusions and concentrate on the achievement of bursting the bonds of numbers and logic that have held us hostage for so long. It is a transcendental, Promethean triumph. Let us celebrate it, but within reason. For the long tradition of Indian thought, back to Aryabhata and Brahmagupta, has been quite reasonable.