Eternal return

The current financial crisis reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of eternal return. According to the theory matter is finite and time is infinite so everything repeats itself as only so many things can be created from matter but there is much more time. Everything has happened before and will continue to recur ad infinitumm. So as the Dow hits a 11 year low, it has hit a 11 year low i.e. repeated something that has happened before! The Mumbai attacks were labelled India's 9/11 i.e. it had happened before. Satyam is India's Enron. PwC reflects the sunk Arthur Andersen.

Shakespeare passed off  'eternal return' lightly - the more things change, the more they remain the same while the phrase ' those who forget history are condemned to repeat it' camouflages eternal return as if it were a prophecy. Milan Kundera's novel Unbearable Lightness of Being attempted an inversion of the philosophy- a married man having an affair was just that - another affair- more of the same but since everyone lives only once, his actions have very little significance on the universe - so lightness was not having to worry about eternal return, that somewhere else this will be repeated. The Hindu philosophy of Karma as a reward for actions of past life and the Egyptian philosophy of After life as something one can look forward to after death also interpret Eternal return in different ways. 

Recession 2008 resonates with Depression 1929 . Lehman bros is the new Solomon Bros, the huge investment bank that sunk in 1980s. 

As FDI and world turns to India , it could be the next superpower - just as it was before hundreds of years of colonial rule ravaged it into insignificance. Nandan Nilekani, in a recent panel discussion, said that we are about to reap a demographic dividend that can catapult us to the top of the world league of nations.

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