The duty of a central banker, the old saying goes, is to remove the booze just as the party gets raucous. Pity the rbi; in the past couple of years, someone has spiked the water supply of all our major cities with whisky. How else can one explain the popular urban myth that we are or very soon going to be a superpower? It is hard not to admire the confidence of the new India, but we have quickly become an arrogant nation with much to be modest about. Kamal Nath, for instance, blithely declares, "China will be old before it is rich," a reference to its one-child policy, which means its population will eventually age rapidly. China’s infrastructure is 50 years ahead of us and our exports are still a fraction of theirs. We may be a young nation with nearly half the population under 21, but we overlook the daunting challenge of finding jobs and training these youngsters in the next couple of decades. Our disgraceful record on primary and secondary education ensures the majority of them won’t be software engineers but will fall short of the skills required for factory jobs, which in the 21st century require more numeracy than before. Among the many ills affecting agriculture, low literacy levels are partly responsible for the low productivity on India’s farms compared to other developing countries; soybean production per acre, for instance, is less than half that of Uruguay.