Palin lives

Sarah Palin, McCain’s photogenic running mate, may have resigned the Alaska governorship and gone into political oblivion, but she has ‘reared her head’ in India. At the NCAER-Brookings India Policy Forum lecture, Rajya Sabha MP and former RBI Governor Bimal Jalan kept referring to her. He spoke of how the seeds of the current crisis lay in the fact that, when the good times were rolling, no one had the courage to question this or to put an end to the irrational exuberance — in the case of India, he said, no policy maker seemed to be worried about how the stock markets were rising a few years ago.

The market was so hot, he said, even Sarah Palin was investing here. “She didn’t know where India was, but she was investing,” Jalan said. The policymakers, he said, didn’t do anything to prick the bubble because people would come down on them like a ton of bricks, because ‘Sarah Palin would stop investing’. NCAER Chairman Nandan Nilekani wisecracked that Jalan wasn’t quite correct, that Palin could probably see India from her window (though perhaps not Manmohan Singh ‘rearing his head’ a la Putin).