"First and foremost the economic affairs of a free society are controlled, directed and governed by truly sovereign consumers."
— B.R. Shenoy, Problems of Indian Economic Development, 1958
Bellikoth Raghunath Shenoy was the lone dissenting economist on the panel advising India's Second Five-Year Plan, at a moment when Nehru's government was committing the country to centralized industrial planning and very nearly every credentialed voice in the room agreed with it. The dissent cost him standing at home for decades — a prophet without honor in his own country.
The line on this mug is the alternative he was defending. Not an order designed in advance by the best minds available, but one directed continuously by ordinary people spending their own money on what they actually want. Those are the consumers Shenoy called sovereign, and whose sovereignty any plan must necessarily displace.
