F Scott Fitzgerald is renowned for being the chronicler of America's 'Gilded Age'. That was the period between the First World War and the Depression, when American plutocracy came into its own, and unabashedly celebrated its arrival on the world stage replacing a smashed, disoriented Europe.
These musings are prompted by the intensity of Delhi's intellectual and social season this winter, still only at the half-way mark. India needs a writer of Fitzgerald's skill to capture India's current 'age of excess': the weddings, the parties, the celebration of private wealth that now visibly set the tone of public rhetoric.
While I cannot claim any expertise at covering the social calendar, the intellectual calendar too has been overflowing, with extended visits by Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Sir Nicholas Stern, George Soros, Deepak Lal, Lord Meghnad Desai, and, most recently, Jagdish Bhagwati.
Delhi seems particularly spoiled by these intellectual riches. Visitors from Mumbai speak of much leaner pickings, despite the much greater wealth available there, and a much longer and more distinguished tradition of civic engagement.
Delhi, by contrast, has only over the last decade developed an ecosystem of economic chambers, think tanks, private foundations and government ministries, which are willing to host such distinguished visitors, and to provide them with a platform and an
audience.
In turn, given the celebrity status of these speakers, the Delhi-based business press has individually given them wide coverage. So it would be redundant for me to recount their individual presentations.
Instead, I would like to draw out certain themes that recurred through several of the presentations, and their potential implications for India. These themes included the now inevitable contrasts and comparisons between India and China; India's role in the management of the international economy; and the risks and rewards of rapid integration with the global financial system.
As intellectual fashions go, India-China has become the intellectual equivalent of Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, or of Margaret Thatcher: it goes on and on. Yet each year brings a new nuance and a new twist.
This year there was a greater awareness of the vulnerability and fragility of the Chinese model, and, by contrast, greater appreciation of the inner political and financial robustness of the Indian path.
This was expressed perhaps most forcefully by Deepak Lal. At his presentation at the India International Centre he argued that the Chinese financial system was in an enormous mess, and that the huge valuations being put on Chinese banks by international investors represented the triumph of hope over experience.
The same point was also made by Nicholas Lardy of the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington D.C. at a seminar co-sponsored by the Asia Society India Centre and the NCAER.
But it was Lal's additional point that really caught my attention. He expressed considerable pessimism on the prospects of significant state reform in either China or India, each with its problems of corruption and state failure in delivery of public services. Yet he felt that the consequences of such failure were likely to be much less serious for
India than for China, because of India's