What this is
Prof. Prasanna Tantri’s macro, in one room — the session notes, the lectures, and the papers and circulars worth your time.
The wish behind it is specific: that you walk around with a short-term working model of the economy in your head, at any point in time. So when the headlines scream “rupee at an all-time low,” you already know it should hit a low against the dollar more or less every day — our inflation is higher than theirs — and the real question is whether we’re depreciating by more than the inflation differential. That kind of thing. Useful. Not storytelling.
Why it’s closed
We tried it in the open. A handful of people did the work; everyone else watched.
There’s a better reason, though. The material here — papers, RBI circulars, draft notes — is written for people with the background to use it correctly. Without that setup, the same document misleads more than it helps. So the login is not a fee. It’s a gate, so the people reading this are the people it was written for. Not exclusivity — just not wasting your time, or mine.
And the whole point is to give you what you cannot pick up online. If ten years from now you can say “I could’ve just Googled this, why did I bother,” then it hasn’t worked. So the focus stays on what isn’t available elsewhere.
Why one session a week
Because you forget. One session a week isn’t a delivery schedule — it’s a recall device. You see the idea, sit with it, and get the next one before the last one fades.
A warning about the footnotes
This won’t read like a textbook. There are caveats on the caveats — all of it works if inflation is constant; the moment expectations move, it can turn counter-productive (see the UK). There are jokes about the Stone Age, back when MS Access roamed the earth and you couldn’t break an FD early. There is a recurring brother-in-law from IIM-A. And since nothing is quite as much fun as torturing students, expect the occasional quiz. Read the footnotes — that’s where half the useful stuff hides.
Who’s behind it
Built on Prof. Prasanna Tantri’s ISB sessions, put together by Harsh. (“Why do you need this joker in between?” Fair question.)
Think of it as a 25-year plan, not a 12-month one. It keeps expanding. Your job is to keep reading — and to push back the moment the data says something different from what’s written here. Your forty lakhs and one year are worth that much effort.