Hari's Corner

Papa Hari News Service

Sending out a strong message in the face of high rates of inflation triggered by rising oil and food prices across the world, the Papa Hari World Government announced that a committee of eminent mathematicians has been created in order to study and discuss the issue in a more scientific and practical way. Announcing the innovatively titled "New Plan To Combat Inflation" project, the spokesperson of the Papa Hari World Government hinted that the best method to prevent inflation would be to resort to simple mathematical formulae rather than depend on wannabe Nobel-prize winning economists who spin fuzzy, impractical theories to support their dubious doctorate theses.

"The best way to contain inflation is by tackling it head on... not by resorting to confusing jargon like National Income, GDP, GNP, fiscal deficit, budget, trade deficit, foreign exchange, foreign reserve or interest rates. The man on the street just doesn't care for such terms," said the spokesperson, "Therefore, the Papa Hari World Government has decided to hand over the problem to mathematicians who are known to be much more practical and down-to-earth than economists."

Stating that the committee has already started doing good work, the spokesman added that a few excellent ideas have been floated by the committee and the Papa Hari World Government would be seriously looking at these concepts. "One of the best ideas that has been proposed by the committee is to use the formula Inflation/Inflation = 1 (which means inflation divided by itself). This would instantly lead to a steady but low rate of inflation which is excellent for the economy."

Among other formulae suggested by the mathematical committee, one of them is to use the sine or cosine of the value of inflation as the actual inflation rate. Eminent Indian mathematician, Alangaputhur Raghavachari said, "If we used the formula cos (inflation), we will always get a value of between -1 and 1. This is an excellent way to ensure that inflation and deflation values never go beyond 1% overall. And just think of the additional benefits: "Cos" sounds very much like "cause." By finding out the cos (inflation), most lay people would believe that we've found the cause of inflation. sin (inflation) was also considered as an alternative formula, but it doesn't make much sense to say "sign of inflation" when we can use cos instead." Yet another formula proposed was the square root of inflation, but it was dismissed as being ineffective with larger numbers. "What if inflation reaches 10000? The square root of 10,000 is 100. It's still a very high figure and would be unsustainable, right?" argued Raghavachari very reasonably. Mathematicians also dismissed Inflation - Inflation = 0 as being too simplistic and unrealistic.

In spite of the optimism expressed by the World Government, many remain sceptical of these ideas. "This kind of number jugglery seems to be just the kind of gimmicks that discount stores offering up to 50% off resort to," said a housewife when asked for her reaction to the measures of the government. "Everything will remain on paper... it's all an eyewash!" said a journalist while washing his blackened eye after getting into an argument with a wrestler over the issue.

Most people across the world continue crying over rising prices of food and fuel while the mathematicians work furiously towards a solution destined to change the course of the global economy forever. A prominent statistician who wished to remain anonymous, smugly assured this publication that the efforts of the committee would prove futile. "What can these mathematical geniuses do which we cannot? We've been doing the same kind of number jugglery for hundreds of years now, albeit with statistics instead of trignometry. And now, these new kids on the block think that they have the solution! How foolish!" he said with a pitying smile. Rather irrelevantly, George W. Bush assured every American that the future generation of kids would get free education and plenty of credit cards.