Finance Minister of Tamil Nadu, Thyagarajan, in my view, is a classic case-study example of the famous Peter Principle :
The Peter Principle is based on the paradoxical idea that competent employees will continue to be promoted, but at some point will be promoted into positions for which they are incompetent, and they will then remain in those positions because of the fact that they do not demonstrate any further competence that would get them recognized for additional promotion.
This guy was perhaps a flashy, successful performer as VP Investment Banking in Standard Chartered. It got him promoted … rather catapulted … to the Tamil Nadu FM position where he is proving himself to be a miserable performer . For all his very own ministerial ineptitude he keeps all the time blaming the Central Government as an excuse . He’s only good at basking in the brilliance of his past academic brilliance — a rather juvenile self-indulgence that gives him and his bruised self-esteem perhaps the sweet comfort of a psychological balm and which he allows himself so very frequently that it now impresses really no one else but himself.
One thing is sure though : the guy will soon prove to be an egregious exception to the working of the Peter Principle. He just won’t be able to continue holding his current position of incompetence as Finance Minister. Since CM Stalin won’t be able either to promote him anywhere else either within the Government or in the Party , Thyagarajan can only face either demotion or outright dismissal .
He could go back then to American academe and do another PhD in some university there perhaps and then for the rest of his life keep gloating about the great doctoral dissertation he wrote that was based upon the grand blueprint that he had conceived for the spectacular financial turnaround of Tamil Nadu finances that, however, never did happen … because of two evil people who conspired against it , Modi and Nirmala Sitaraman, both of course, by far his inferiors by academic qualification.
Sudarshan Madabushi