Rajan’s new cameras rejected good cloth, and his best supervisor let them. The cameras did what they were trained to do. Nobody had said who could argue with them. An organisation can give a machine its work, but not its answering.

Kauṭilya said no official can handle public money without tasting it. India's older texts give hard tests for what India still gets wrong: borrowing, freebies, a narrow tax base and prisons full of people awaiting trial.