Our ability to speak is an evolutionary miracle.
At some point in our evolutionary journey, after millions of years of grunting, screaming, pointing, mating calls, warning cries, and badly timed silences, we learned to turn breath into meaning. Air rose from the lungs, passed through the larynx, vibrated sensually against the vocal cords, and emerged as language.
Because of this miraculous ability, we could talk to each other, warn each other about predators, coordinate hunts, sing lullabies to children, build civilizations, invent poetry, make fart and poop jokes, negotiate peace, start wars, create financial markets, and eventually, for reasons still not fully understood, appear on business television to predict the end of India, the world, and the universe every six months.11Cumulative accuracy of these forecasts, tracked patiently since 2011, remains statistically indistinguishable from a coin too anxious to flip.
For most of human history, this biological endowment worked as God intended.
The brain produced thought. The mouth produced speech. The ass performed other important but non-verbal functions.22Digestion, posture, the dignified act of sitting. A full and honourable job description — until recently.
But sometime around the start of this year, among a small but highly vocal subset of India’s finance commentariat, this ancient biological order appears to have collapsed.
India might be facing a macroeconomic crisis, but the far graver crisis India is facing is an anatomical crisis. Things are looking grave.
Across television studios, podcasts, newspaper columns, fund-manager letters, WhatsApp forwards, LinkedIn sermons, conference panels, and Twitter threads, a rare disorder, a disease, has begun to spread. The vocal cords of several finance experts appear to have migrated from their throats to their asses.
The result is a dangerous new condition. Highly credentialed people are now speaking entirely out of their ass. We are facing a crisis never seen before in the history of humanity. Things are bad.
This is not a mass epidemic like COVID-19. No, it’s very weird. Most people in finance remain unaffected. Many analysts, fund managers, journalists, economists, and market participants continue to speak normally using their lungs, larynx, tongue, and mouth.
This disease is affecting a small group of people. I feel sad for them.
The worst affected appear to be macro experts, former media personalities, retired crisis prophets, professional India bears, underperforming PMS managers, and financial commentators whose actual investment track records have struggled to outperform not just the Nifty but, in some cases, fixed deposits, liquid funds, and possibly a steel almirah.33The almirah, in fairness, has never charged a management fee, never appeared on a panel, and has compounded the value of its contents at the going rate for old silk saris.
To be clear, this should not be held against them.
Nobody is perfect.
Some people underperform benchmarks. Some people underperform due to inflation. Some people underperform in silence. That is not the issue.
The issue is that these people are now trying, desperately and heroically, to warn the country about the gravest economic crisis in its history. They are trying to explain that India is in a worse position than during the 1991 balance of payments crisis. They are trying to explain that the current situation is worse than the 2013 taper tantrum. They are trying to warn the finance minister, the RBI governor, SEBI, policymakers, regulators, investors, traders, citizens, children, pensioners, and stray dogs that the Indian republic is one bad current-account print away from civilizational collapse.44We have now stood one bad print away from collapse, continuously, since roughly 2013 — a remarkably stable distance from the abyss.
But we cannot hear them.
Because the words are no longer coming from their mouths.
All we hear are squeaks, farts, wet macro grunts, anal throat-clearing, rectal wisdom, and the occasional guttural bellow from somewhere deep inside the balance of payments.
This is tragic.
These are not ordinary people. These are some of the finest minds India has produced. True polymaths. Universal experts. Men and women who wake up every morning with total clarity on every problem facing humanity.
One minute they can explain why the rupee is falling. The next minute they can explain why foreign institutional investors are fleeing. Thirty seconds later, they can psychoanalyze global allocators, diagnose India’s fiscal health, fix the current account, redesign monetary policy, reform the tax system, restructure capital markets, solve unemployment, revive exports, take GDP growth from 7% to 75%, and make India great again before Zepto delivers a pack of cigarettes and condoms.55Eight minutes. The structural reforms, by contrast, are still loading.
After lunch, they can become world-class epidemiologists.
By evening, climate scientists oozing wisdom on how to survive the anthropocene.
By dinner, AI ethicists ejaculating gyaan on how to avoid a Terminator-like future.
By bedtime, historians explaining why the British Empire is underrated and misunderstood.
Their range is breathtaking.
Health, climate, geopolitics, anthropology, archaeology, psychology, sociology, civilization, artificial intelligence, green energy, trading, investing, quantitative finance, high-frequency trading, low-frequency trading, mid-frequency trading, no-frequency trading, fiscal policy, monetary policy, macroprudential policy, microprudential policy, prudence itself — there is no subject under the sun on which they do not have a fully formed opinion and a thread ready to go.
And not just under the sun.
Given adequate Wi-Fi and one podcast invitation, they can probably explain liquidity conditions in the Andromeda galaxy and why the two trillion galaxies in the observable universe are underweight India because of policy uncertainty.66Andromeda is, admittedly, about 2.5 million light-years overweight cash.
This is why the crisis is so serious.
Without these experts speaking clearly from their mouths, how will the RBI governor know how to manage the Indian rupee? How will he understand how to frame macroprudential policy? How will the finance minister know how to do his or her job? How will the prime minister know what to say, do, and announce? How will SEBI, IRDAI, PFRDA, and every other regulatory body in this country function? How????
Do we seriously expect policymakers to read data, consult specialists, weigh trade-offs, understand institutional constraints and human behavior, be consultative, and make decisions without being shouted at by wise men and women whose funds lose to a bank FD?
Absurd!
A modern nation cannot function like this!
Every country needs people who have never run anything at scale to explain how everything at scale should be run. It needs people who can’t explain the basics of finance or even arithmetic for that matter, even if you shredded the textbooks, blended them with the research papers and wisdom of Markowitz, Fama, French, Buffett, Munger, and Soros, and poured the resulting smoothie directly into their skulls — because, in a democracy, wisdom must come from all corners.
Including, apparently, the lower intestine.
Wisdom is not the province of only the wise!
And again, we need to be compassionate. These people are struggling, and we can’t relate to the struggles because we can still talk out of our mouths. Do you know what it is like to try and talk from your mouth, but the sounds pour out of your ass like a waterfall of diarrhea after eating too much Haldirams, street-side jalebi, a protein shake, kale salad, and Gudbud ice cream?
You can see it on podcasts. Their eyes are earnest and full of urgency. Their hands move like men trying to rescue a nation from a burning building. Their faces suggest depth, pain, patriotism, and a strong desire to interrupt.
But the sound does not cooperate.
The mouth opens. Nothing useful comes out.
Then, from below, the forecast arrives.
A squeak about FIIs. A fart about the rupee. A little grunt about valuations. A long, mournful anal sermon about how nobody in Delhi understands markets. A final rectal flourish about how this is worse than 1991.
Medical science does not yet have the vocabulary for this.
I have spoken to health experts, and I have consulted imaginary evolutionary biologists. I have asked experts who’ve spent their lives studying speech, voice, cognition, linguistics, and human communication. Everyone is stumped. Nobody has a clue about this peculiar malady.
The leading hypothesis is that excessive exposure to television panels, combined with chronic benchmark underperformance and prolonged contact with one’s own certainty, may cause the vocal apparatus to detach from the larynx and relocate to the posterior ego.77Peer review pending. The reviewers, regrettably, are also symptomatic.
There may also be a transmission mechanism.
Early evidence suggests the disease spreads through quote-tweets, panel invitations, bad charts, urgent WhatsApp forwards, phrases like “wake up India,” and any sentence beginning with “what policymakers don’t understand is…”
The most vulnerable are people who have predicted seventeen of the last zero economic crises.88A hit rate of infinity percent, if one is generous with the denominator — and they always are. I wouldn’t wish this ass-speaking disease on my worst enemies.
There is also a risk of permanent adaptation. If left untreated, these experts may become fluent in ass-speech. That would be a national disaster and an embarrassment.
Imagine meeting one of them at a conference. You ask a polite question about markets. He looks thoughtful, pauses, turns around, bends slightly, and then, with grave conviction, ass-plains the need for urgent structural reform.
This is not dignified.
Not for him. Not for you. Not for the republic.
So we must act.
We must act now with the urgency of having to take an urgent shit after eating two plates of chole bhature, three vada pavs (with extra chili), one lassi, and half a can of Diet Pepsi.
India can survive inflation. It can survive depreciation. It can survive weak exports, volatile FIIs, oil shocks, bad monsoons, heatwaves, fiscal degeneration, regulatory mistakes, bad IPOs, and even a few PMS schemes that charge two-and-twenty to underperform a savings account.99Two percent for showing up, twenty for the conviction. The savings account, charging nothing, sends its regards.
But no country can survive the permanent loss of its loudest underperforming polymaths. It cannot survive its intellectuals becoming evolutionary anomalies who talk out of their asses.
We need them whole and normal.
We need their vocal cords returned to their throats. We need their asses relieved of the burden of macro commentary. We need their mouths once again available for the noble work of telling everyone else how to do their jobs.
Because without them, who will tell the RBI governor how to manage the rupee?
Who will tell the finance minister how to run the economy?
Who will tell foreign investors why they are fleeing?
Who will tell SEBI what it does not understand?
Who will tell the prime minister how to govern?
Who will tell Warren Buffett, Eugene Fama, Ken French, George Soros, Stanley Druckenmiller, the Andromeda galaxy, and the known observable universe that they have all been thinking too small?
India needs answers.
Humanity needs answers.
But first, urgently, we need a cure.
We need our experts to speak not from their asses but from their mouths.
Before they become fluent.