Sunday Posts

As it rolls out its National Education Policy (NEP), India is faced with the dilemma that every other post-colonial nation has to answer: Whether to 'nationalise' higher education, by privileging traditional languages and 'Indian' knowledge over liberal humanities and cosmopolitan outlook? This is not the first time India is dealing with this question. The first time, just after the Independence, the answer was a resounding endorsement of cosmopolitan science, based on a modernist view of nation-building. Nehru wanted an India that looked forward, not backwards. The second time, in the 80s, shorn of the optimism and adrift in the neoliberal world, the answer was low on nation-building aspiration and overtly focused on technological cold-start.  This road now leads us to where we are - a deja vu all over again! The country has been a major beneficiary of globalisation, but its blessings were mixed. A lot of people has been left behind, communities have been replaced by a...

It only came to me slowly, through a confusing mist of ideas: That I really never escaped the empire. I live in history. My mind is trained to see things with its submerged past, with its layered stories. The blue plaques of London - like the one on the flat near St Pancras where Shelley lived with Mary when she ran away with him - take me back in time often. But I missed the most obvious place where I should have looked for history - my mind in itself. It's hard to explain why I came to London. I did not exactly come looking for money: I left a great job and prospects of a career rather. I had no job offers in hand. I came to learn but didn't enrol in a university until several years later. I dearly loved my life in India and never gave up the plan to return. And, yet, I came. It may seem unsound but I came to see, not as a modern tourist who moves sight to sight and takes a country as a package, but rather as an ancient one who comes to wonder, to observe and to ret...

I remember this awkward dinner conversation. I was with my colleague in Northern Ireland, and a friend of his joined our table. After we were introduced, he wondered at my name and asked me what religion I belong to. I went for the simpler answer and kept my doubts aside: "I am Hindu", I said. That made him even more confused. "What's a Hindu?" he said, "Is that some kind of Muslim?" When I tell this story to my friends in India, they are usually outraged. What an ignorant person, they would say. Particularly treating Hinduism as a branch of Islam, when Hindus love to believe that everyone was originally a Hindu, upsets them. I have also reflected upon this conversation later. It may indeed be that he did not know. He was particularly ignorant, just as ignorant as the lady, who, standing inside the Irish Bar at Mumbai's ITC Grand Central hotel, asked my colleague - the same person as it happened to be - where Ireland was. But the confusion ab...

I have chosen to live outside India for more than a decade. This was my attempt to become Indian. I did not leave India because I felt constrained. Rather, I was comfortable. And, it is that comfort that I wanted to overcome. My persistent requests for transfers abroad, even to remote locations in Asia and Africa, were often met with puzzlement by my bosses, who could never figure out why I would want to go away, leaving what seemed to be a promising and safe career.  Eventually I went away, but I never really left. Most of my conversations always centred around India. All that I learnt along my way added to my perspectives and changed me. I lived in Bangladesh first, which made me cross the first boundary, that of religious stereotypes that afflicted so many conversations when I lived inside the cocoon in India. Travelling in South-East Asia opened up my mind to the value of working by hand, and challenged the deep-seated caste-based presumptions that I grew up with. And...

This morning will bring unfurling of flags, marching troops, speeches, families sitting around television, Facebook messages announcing unending love for India by Indians living all over the world, special issues and new pledges: This is India's 65th Independence Day. Our relatively new country has now come of age, the freedom's generation has truly passed: The country has now been handed over to a generation who never had to toil to earn the freedom. For most of them, as for me, 15th August is a holiday, a day to celebrate and cheer for, but mostly to sit at home and do nothing, a reminder may be of great events but something I did not have to work for. This generation, therefore, will have to invent India all over again, one on their own image and imagination, as the nation we knew in the past is slowly fading away with the liberation generation. It is our turn, a responsibility - to define the country anew. To start with, we may have to recognise that India is an experi...

As you step out of Mumbai airport, India meets you at the door. This is not the India you saw on movies, chaotic and poor; not the one you suspected it to be, from the slums you saw from the sky. But, neither it is the sleek Dubai-like feature which it should have been, if you just trusted the analysts above all else: After all, this is where the next game of Global Capitalism will be played. The experiences at the door, on both counts, are bound to be anti-climactic. With the new shiny Mumbai airport coming into being, the disorderliness of beggars and scavengers of the past are gone: In its place, now, are security barriers, taxi counters and glass doors. The noisy crowd waiting for homecoming relatives and friends are now spread over a large area rather than a tiny door front: The scenes of emotion are therefore much diffused. It is rather a quiet experience, compared to whatever you have heard about Mumbai from those who have gone there before. But, one thing will still strike y...

The world seems to be discovering India. At least, the cityboys are. The talk is that India is that 'emerging' nation now, which will put China behind. My taxi driver says so, one may assert. Besides, the Indian growth rate, compared to the anemic European and North American ones, looks stellar. There are two reasons about this excitement regarding India. The first is Demography. After all, China is ageing, and India is full of young people. Lots of commentators, Nandan Nilkeni among them, talks glowingly about the 'demographic dividend'. The idea is that with so many young hands to work, this is indeed India's moment to lose. The second factor, though a bit cliched, is democracy. Indian democracy is a crowded, chaotic circus, but it is still the country's most crucial asset against the social discord that is bound to happen when a country changes course so dramatically. While the Chinese migrant labour may have to suffer in silence, only to rebel with force and...

I discovered my identity only after I started living abroad. If I go back to India some day, which eventually I will, this will be key learning I carry with me. This reflexive construction of identity took more than one step. First, when I arrived, with all the comfort and reasonableness of modern Industrial life, I started to wonder why some of my relatives and friends did not ever think of migrating. In the cacophony of requests that I started to receive for assistance in migration, I grew a private frustration - why doesn't so and so want to come - and a feeling that the talk about ' Indianness ' is all excuses, a cover for lack of enterprise from my own folks. Then, even in the subliminal reality of the equal opportunity world, my colour of skin became more and more highlighted. Contrary to the common perception, racism, at least in Britain, is far less 'up in the face' and far more systemic. So, unless one is travelling to more 'exotic' parts of the co...

A friend has recently forwarded me a quote from Lord Macaulay's speech in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835. I reproduce the quote below: "I have traveled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them, a truly dominated nation." The email requested me to forward me to every indian I know. I was tempted, but there were two oddities about this quote. First, the language, which ...