Shravana brings us macro peace

The first two lines of the conclusion of RBI’s monthly bulletin for August 2021 (bit.ly/3y2mvrX) read, ‘Sravana 2021 is also a time of the year when the RBI connects with the transcendental calm within. Submersed in this inner stillness, it looked beyond the dilemmas and trade-offs in the here and now to contemplate the world of tomorrow.’ By only staring at these lines, one is bathed in an inner light that no economic downturn can dim. No matter what RBI’s comforting words earlier in the report may be — ‘aggregate demand conditions are buoyed’, ‘release of pent-up demand’, ‘reaffirming the traction that the economy is gaining’, ‘spurred by comfortable liquidity conditions’, ‘financial conditions stay benign’ — it’s this assurance that makes us put away Meghaduta, and curl up with the ‘State of the Economy’ report.

The introduction was a bit ominous, reminding the reader not so much that it’s ‘a time of sacrifice and fasting’, as much that this stretch was adapted from John Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ — something that many of us would want to forget from our schooldays when mugging up English Romantic poetry was seen as a sure sign of angrezi-style coming of age. But RBI’s inner calmness has, in turn, calmed us. To adapt the line of another angrezi Romantic shaayar, ‘If Sravana has come, can Phalguna be far behind?’