New Delhi, March 4 -- A stock market 'correction' implies a sobering up of investors after a heady uprun in prices that overshot its rational limits. The slump in Indian indices over the past five months, a long slide unseen since 1996, has not been as deep as what we saw after crashes triggered by the West's financial crisis of 2008 and the global outbreak of covid in 2020.

As reported by Mint, the latter were far worse. Both those scary episodes saw the NSE Nifty-50 index fall so much that more than double the investor wealth was wiped out-as a fraction of the total-than in the five months from October to February. And while those price slides left investors edgy, both eventually turned out to be perfect points of market entry.

A long...