Bara Imambra by digging Keynesian holes

I must admit that many times, I have a problem when Facebook reminds me of my old memories posted on Facebook. The problem is that I don’t remember much about the old Facebook post including if and when I posted those pictures and where were they taken from. Perhaps, I should be happy with myself as I can now relive those moments fresh, as though they never happened.

Leaving aside this bit of senile preamble, I thought that I would read about this place Bara Imambara in the pictures from the particular memory post and see if I can find something interesting to write in a short time frame. Lo and behold, I found from Wikipedia following interesting information.

Famous economist John Maynard Keynes once said, "If the government were to pay people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them up again, it would still stimulate the economy by creating jobs and increasing aggregate demand.”

What I find is this Keynesian adage was actually carried out in real life much before Keynes’s time, in Lucknow India. In the 1780s, the Awadh region in northern India was facing famine. Asaf-ud-Daula, Nawab of Awadh, came up with the grandiose scheme to build Bara Imambara to generate employment among his subjects. As the Wikipedia story goes, “the ordinary people used to work during the day building up the edifice, while noblemen and other elite worked at night to break down anything that was raised that day”.

Long story short, just because economic ideas are put on paper, it does not mean that they are invented there first. Moreover, these ideas were repeatedly dug into the ground and excavated again long before writing on the paper. And that is how we got magnificent buildings like Bara Immambara.