Haritha Reddy wants to know why the price of tomatoes tripled in three days in the markets of central Uttar Pradesh recently. Aditya Rao thinks it's “downright ridiculous” that traders are asking more than 50 rupees ($1.10, ￡0.72, €0.80) for a kilo of sugar and about a hundred for a kilo of tuvar dal, a kind of split pea.

As the rest of the world worries about economic growth, or the lack of it, angry complaints from consumers like these Indian bloggers have turned Asian policymakers' minds to a different problem: rapidly rising inflation.

In many countries, the inflation genie is leaping out of the bottle at Olympic speed, generating the biggest swings in year-on-year consumer price indices in the region since the 1997-98 Asian financial -crisis.