Expense Account, Mint
It was a particularly dense afternoon. Not only was the August humidity making the lecture theatre of the Delhi School of Economics seem like it was hanging in limbo, but the long strings of equations with tiny symbols alpha, beta, gamma and the sponge-like creature epsilon, made the lemonade stall just 50 steps away seem like a very aspirational place to be. Twenty years ago, air conditioners were for the super rich and not postgraduate Delhi University students. As I squinted dully at the board far away and frowned to open the shutting eyelids, I swore never to come back to something so far removed from reality. Here were guys who assumed a perfect world with fully rational players and then made equations that sought to solve macro problems. But the real world outside was chaotic and all the long equations (with the aspirational QED at the end) were not teaching me anything that was closely related to the real world as I saw it.