Last Saturday, during a TV show, the official spokesperson for the Congress party put forth an interesting proposition. “This is a democracy”, she said. People are entitled to their views, she pointed out. “You are in public life”, she reminded Justice Santosh Hegde. So you must have a thick skin, she concluded. In other words, according to her, people in public life in a democracy must have thick skins. This is just the sort of thing that Dr Kaushik Basu, the multi-dimensional Chief Economic Advisor, likes to analyse for leaps of logic.