Well, well – ‘Wanton whimsy’ was started upon a whim, and lo! It’s one year old already.
I hope a lot of you folks will say ‘Happy Birthday, and many happy returns’.
One thing I can vouch for: it’s hard work, no matter who you are, to be funny and off-beat at a stretch without being merely vulgar and fatuous. Even with help. So I need more help here. Not only by way of encouragement from my followers (may their tribe increase), but with frequent inputs of good stuff.
And also, I need more comment. In contrast to my other blog, my readers here are strangely silent. Feeling shy? … by the way, the best comments I have got in this one year are the one which was a witty rejoinder to something I had written, and the one which said this blog had completely restructured the mental image of me that the writer had built up on the basis of hearsay about my reputation.
Since this is a ‘whimsy’ blog rather than merely funny, I am also open to suggestions about new directions in which it may venture. Meanwhile, I’ll think of things on my own, rest assured. I remember Holmes telling Watson with a touch of pride in his voice, quoting Shakespeare, ‘I trust that age doth not wither, nor custom stale, my infinite variety’.
For now, I sign off with a little poem about one of the founding fathers of modern economics, Adam Smith, written by Stephen Leacock, who like me trained to be an economist, but later became a writer of humour. This has been quoted in Amartya Sen’s latest opus, The Idea of Justice:
Adam, Adam, Adam Smith
Listen what I charge you with!
Didn’t you say
In a class one day
That selfishness was bound to pay?
Of all doctrines, that was the Pith.
Wasn’t it, wasn’t it, wasn’t it, Smith?
In a rare lapse into elitism, Sen quips, paraphrasing Shakespeare from Twelfth Night, that ‘while some are born small and some achieve smallness, Adam Smith has had much smallness thrust upon him’. I leave my more erudite readers, especially the economists among them, to figure out what Sen means!
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