Distraction by history

Since I have been distracted to from finishing a certain promised blog it's my turn to distract with a few quirks (or was it not-so quacks) from history.

In 1978 who wrote?

"Today the consequences of such an educational emphasis are already apparent, and while it may once have served helpfully to boost battered post-colonial egos, against this must be set the fact that it has sharpened the communal hostilities between Sinhalese and Tamils, has intensified the spirit of linguistic chauvinism, and in its generally anti-rational character has encouraged the development of a society, already astrologically obsessed, which allows itself to be ordered by planetary conjunctions and a whole calendar of endlessly pored-over auspicious dates and times."

Roger Sandall writing in 1979 about Sri Lanka's sticky future

Now that Libertarians are popping up all over the lastnnodes of the sub-continent, who was the Indian economist influenced by Hayek and the Austrian School of economics?

"After teaching in Ceylon and India, he joined the Reserve Bank of India. He was sent to Washington as the Indian representative for the World Bank and the IMF from 1951 to 1953. He could have become the governor of the RBI but he couldn't stand it anymore. So he took a cut of half his salary and went back into academic teaching. They made the mistake of leaving him on a panel of economists for the planning commission. In an appended dissenting report issued in the early 1950s, he predicted that if the Nehru plan went into effect, India would face a foreign-exchange crisis and inflation and there would have to be cuts. Nehru got very upset."

B.R.Shenoy is discussed in an interview with his economist daughter Sudha Shenoy.