Econ Mom and some Potter Magic!

There’s double trouble at home.

Lil One’s going to be writing his final exams this week and the next. That’s big trouble. Oh, no, no. Not for him. He is having his usual good time. It’s big trouble for me, you see. And as if this isn’t enough, there’s this addition to the trouble…

Lil One is reading Harry Potter. Aaaarrrrgh! For the third time. The first two were not “proper readings, Mom. I wasn’t mature enough to understand it properly then!” is what he told me, to my great amusement. Further, he’s apparently decided to set a world record by reading all the Potter books inside two weeks, ummm, the same two which coincide with his exams. Help!

Quite a scene we have at home, these days. I sit patiently reading about the many wonders of the rectilinear propogation of light and tissue culture, whilst Lil One giggles at Peeves pelting chalk at Harry, calling him names such as “Potty”. While I despair the splitting of the Maratha empire between Shahu and Rajaram, Lil One is deep inside the Pensieve looking up the Prophecy connecting Harry to Voldemort. I wage the war against complex geometric problems while Lil One goes looking for Hallows. God! I never thought there’ll be a time when I start….disliking Harry Potter so much!

Yesterday, when I asked Lil One to get some water half way through our dinner, he held his spoon in the direction of the bottle and yelled “Accio Bottle!” When I threateningly made big eyes at him, he accused me of using the Imperius curse on wee kids to get my bidding done. Whenever he sees me approaching him with a textbook in hand, he yells “Dementor Attack!” and shoots the Expecto Patronum at me, with Hubby looking on with frank approval and complete admiration in his eyes. And when I asked him, for the fifth time, to sit down with me to plan how he is going to complete reading 8 Geography chapters in 2 days, he actually muttered “Langlock!”

Following are some of the sweet nothings he has shot at me over the past few days. GRRRRR!

• I am the most boring mom in the world.
• Correction. I now have the distinction of being the most boring person in the world.
• That Ron lost half his eyebrow in his apparition test is infinitely more interesting than the fact that the Marathas lost more than half of their kingdom at Panipat.
• The Marathas should have taken Katappa to Panipat with them.
• Geography is studied by girls. Boys do only Maths. In that, only Algebra. In that, only linear equations.
• Linear equations are the new cool. Everything else is “Muggle”.
• Lucky me! I am going to be cast in the movie made by Lil One on Harry Potter. So far, I have completely qualified to be Bellatrix, Kreacher and Nagini. If I learn to be dreamy mad and not my usual aggressive mad, I can even audition for the role of…hold your breath…Prof. Trelawny!
• Tenses are designed to make kids tense. “I have had it!” is present perfect and is presently perfectly designed for Mommy dearest.
• I belong to the past tense just because I happen to know that Munshi Premchand wrote “Godaan”
• Auto spell-check wands are required to solve the Hindi and Marathi papers
• Any woman who enjoys Hindi poetry cannot be in her right mind. She deserves to be immediately visiting the St. Mungo’s Centre, where they apparently treat witches and economists.
• Engineers are wizard. Economists are obviously Muggle.

“Nope!” said Econ Mom suddenly. “That last one is not okay.” How can economists be..Muggle?

Isn’t it us, who alone know the deepest secrets of magic of the societal reform. We, who are almost Goblin-like in that we imbibe all of that which strengthens us. We’ve taken principles of Maths to create models out of the most non-modelable phenomena ranging from shopping behaviour and drug trafficking to corporate incentive structures. We’ve woven principles of sociology to create HDI. We use political contraints to understand how economic equilibria may turn out to be sub-optimal in a social welfare sense. And we’re the only ones who’ve been able to make robust, significant, least error use of that crystal ball of statistics, called as forecasting. It is us, who create those models and sell them at crazy prices to a world zapped with knowing the future; and yet, we have the simplicity and enough humour to call our art, a bunch of econome-tricks.

The Elder wand of good policy intervention can certainly weave magic into comatose markets; but sometimes you do need that invisibility cloak, or well, at least invisible hands to drive animal spirits. That economic reform has been the resurrection stone for economies ranging from Brazil to China and Zimbabwe to Germany is a principle undisputed across the globe.

Make no mistake however, by going overboard in the hallowed presence of this amazing science. For every hallow that the subject has produced, there are those horcruxes; scams, currency crises, bankruptcies born out of the misuse of economics that split societies time and again, towards nothingness..

And on a lighter note, hell, we even have a Ministry of Magic! Yeah, its known as the Ministry of Finance to the more innocent. And it often has the cheek to try things out “for the greater good”; it is blinded, in Dumbledore’s words, by the love of the office it holds. But worry not, because it is precisely in order to check this, that we economists have created yet another institution, the Hog-Reserve Bank of India, headed by none other than Albus Rajan.

So all in all, Lil One, nope, your last argument is not acceptable. One day, when you are older, you may realize the power of this wonderful subject. And maybe you’ll come to love and respect it the way I do. And maybe, we’ll be able to bond on this, the way we do on Potter, and Tintin, and late night coffee, and crazy jokes and music. Till then Lil One, let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.