I will always defend a big spender like J.M. Keynes

I am an optimist. One of the reasons why I have always been a fan of the brilliant British economist John Maynard Keynes is that he too was an unashamed optimist who believed in the power of money for making things better. Unemployment, recession, deflation — if we were to believe all we see and read from the courts of the media kings, we might all be depressed into thinking there is no way out.

Born in Cambridge in the year that Karl Marx died, Keynes was a much more intriguing figure than his grey cadre of contemporaries. He brought flair and style to a dull establishment. A friend of Virginia Woolf and married to a ballerina (ballet is my passion), he became the darling of the Bloomsbury Group. Anyone who could say that the ‘economic problem is not — if we look into the future — the permanent problem of the human race’ is a human being with foresight.