Sunday Posts

This post is a reaction to Aatish Taseer's evocative obituary of secular India in the Atlantic ( read here ).  While I agree with it mostly - and share the reservations about the direction and the future of India - I differ with the author on one key aspect: I do not agree with his portrayal of a resurgent Bharat eating up a secular India.  In fact, I believe while Mr Taseer regrets the Indian elite's loss of connection with the realities of day to day life of the country, his very presentation of Bharat and India as oppositional entities stems from that incomprehension. While I understand that he is only using these categories as RSS uses them - to effectively other the English-speaking elites and non-Hindus - I believe it is a mistake to describe the profound changes in contemporary India as the ascendance of Bharat.  I grew up in Bharat. I never learnt English until late in life, when I started working. My growing-up world was one of small-town India, v...

An infographic in Indian media India's unemployment rate has reached a historical high and the government is panicking. It has rejected and suppressed the report and committed itself to inventing a new set of numbers. Members of the national statistical body have resigned, and the bad job numbers have become one of the worst kept secrets in its modern history.  As the government went down the road of obfuscation, it had also fooled itself believing that everything was fine. Once the statistical reports were questioned, the best explanation that the Head of the apex economic policy-making body could come up with was that Uber and other taxi-hailing companies have created millions of jobs in India. But then, the crisis is anything but hidden - walk on any street in any neighbourhood in any Indian city, and it is likely that you will see a few working-age people loitering, waiting or playing cards or carom in the middle of the day. IMF has recently warned that youth inactivi...

India faces a general election in 2019 and the battle lines are clearly drawn. The Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government, which came to power promising an economic miracle, has been an abject failure: Like many other administrations before them, this administration gave precedence to political imperatives ahead of economic policy. While its defenders would be quick to list out the government's various achievements, the brevity of the list would be embarrassing to all but those who are either ignorant or have a political motive. The Modi revolution was a whimpering affair, more of tinkering than of bold moves, and after four and half years, as is usually the case with a country like India, the country has gone backwards by not moving forward. Despite this, however, in the run-up to the general election, no one seems to be asking the economic question: 'Are you better off now than you were four years ago?' Rather, the big battle cry of the opposition is Secula...

Unlike the American founders, the Founders of Modern India generally get a bad press. Indeed, many people do not think of them as Founders at all - India was there for thousands of years, they say - and merely see them as political operators who negotiated Independence, a bad one, with the British, only in order to grab power for themselves. That the creation of Modern India was an act of political imagination is overlooked with purpose and intention. That the 'founding' generation had to come up with the idea of timeless India which we now take for granted - and give us the sense of History that we now have - has been completely forgotten. Besides, we are now in a destructive frenzy of an adolescent tearing down the house they built: There was never a worse time to claim the Foundership of what is being considered a great country and a failed experiment at the same time. In this era of 'unfounding', speaking about Tagore's idea of India may only have the effe...

I wrote about the origin story of the Indian Education system (See An 'Indian' Education ) to argue that 'Indianness' of Education does not necessarily have to be regressive, ritualistic or religious. The current tendency of relegating any discussion about an Indian Education to obscurantism cedes the space to Hindu Fundamentalists, who are left free to promote their particular, limited and historically inaccurate ideas. However, a culturally congruent education is much needed at a time when Indian society is at a crossroad, the pains of globalisation is hurting and the crisis of identity is real and urgent. This post is a rejoinder to the earlier one. Here, I intend to expand my argument that the Indian system of education did not break out from its earlier, imperial, mode. This is a familiar argument that the cultural nationalists make all the time, but, since I didn't think that British imperial education was necessarily English-only (rather, it promoted ...

What would an Indian Education system look like? There are many interesting conversations about this in India. The primary reason for this is indeed the ascendancy of BJP, a Hindu Nationalist party, which now controls the Union and most State governments in India. In order to secure its rule, the BJP leaders know that they have to transform the education system. And, they are at it, with a clear agenda and intent - curbing the Western influence where they see it. Most of it has come in the form of petty settling of scores - removing people favoured by earlier administrations - and mindless government meddling in curriculum and governance. However, this has put 'Indianness of Education' as an issue to reckon with. This arises primarily as much of the current Indian Education system was shaped by the British Imperial administration. The British imperial rule did not just set up an Education system in India: It, at the same time, destroyed what was there, pushing S...

In trying to explore the roots of the 'closed mind' - the inhospitable environment for new ideas in India - I concluded earlier that this has nothing to do with an unique Indian character, culture or religion; it is not, as some observers put it, a result of India's Hindu heritage, nor a throwback from the Islamic conquest and domination. It is rather a legacy of the transformation of India in the mid- to late-Nineteenth century, when India was reconfigured after the Victorian laws and ideas, and it developed a 'colonial mind'. ( See the earlier post here ) In this configuration, the ideas reside elsewhere - in the metropolitan centre in London - and India is a mere receptor and Indians are recipients of new ideas, not their originators. An Indian idea, to be accepted in India, had to be first accepted in the West; an Indian intellectual needed the blessings of the metropolis to be considered a success (hence, Swami Vivekananda's address in Chicago made a diff...

Kishore Mahbubani calls India an 'Open Society with a Closed Mind' - in contrast with China's 'Closed Society with an Open Mind' - and he is certainly right. The apparent diversity of India, its vibrant democracy, quarrelsome TV programming and English speaking middle classes hide more than they tell: The first impression of 'everything goes' is deceptive and India presents one of the toughest environments for new ideas. This may sound counter-intuitive to those who are always afraid of the Chinese stealing their intellectual property. I am not necessarily arguing that the Chinese don't, but rather that they do because they are in the same race of creating new stuff. India is a comparatively safer environment not because Indians are more honest or they have greater regards for intellectual property in the Western sense, but because they care less about new ideas.  The other contra angle is certainly that of the great inventors and thought leadi...

Right now, India is one exciting economic story. Its population is young and its economy is growing. The government, with a strong mandate in Union and State levels, have been introducing a number of structural reforms that the previous governments, over a quarter century, could not do. With legislative reforms, private participation in infrastructure building is becoming easier, and there is hope that India's rickety ports, faltering railways and mostly potholed roads would soon appear in a different, shiny, avatar. In a lot of ways, India is at a moment like China in the early 80s: The structural changes should unlock a steep growth, quick growth of employment and a new cycle of private prosperity. This would be a reasonable expectation but for India's deficiencies in Education and Health, which may mean that India's demographic potential would never be realised. Structural reforms and infrastructure building can create the opportunities, but without corresponding g...

I came across the term, 'self-colonialization', in a news report on Arundhati Roy's recent speech in Berlin. She was speaking at the launch of her book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness in German. The news report only mentions the term cursorily: Ms Roy was speaking about the violence the Indian state unleashes on its tribal and its poor and being on the front-line of the battles for the rights of tribal and villagers, such a characterisation of the Indian state is only natural for her. Besides, coming at a time when India has drowned a few hundred villages by making Sardar Sarovar Dam operational, and fighting mini-civil wars in Central India in the name of 'Development', 'self-colonialization' sounds like an appropriate term. Surely, this would be greeted with derision in India as unnecessary bad-mouthing of India by one of the pet Hate Figures of the Indian establishment. But this has nothing to do with the validity of what Ms Roy is saying, and rath...

Indian Higher Education needs reform, and urgently. The post-Independence system of education, built on the edifice of the colonial structure, largely made of State-owned and State-supported colleges and universities, largely failed to create the publicly minded citizenry it was set up to educate. Even its elite segment, set up at great public cost and access to which were tightly controlled through nationwide aptitude tests, and which has created a large number of Silicon Valley millionaires (and some billionaires of repute), fell short in terms of the local impact: As China powers itself into Higher Education, creating not just highly ranked universities but also stealing the march on technological innovation, the shortcomings of these institutions have become as apparent as ever. But this is not all: The reform is needed because attempts at reform have failed. The wave of privatisation since 2006, encouraged by the state and the central governments in India, has created a syst...

We knew this anecdotally: That Engineering graduates can not find a job in India. Now, we have some numbers: AICTE says that 60% of the 800,000 engineering graduates every year remain unemployed. ( see story ) The story above gives out some important data points:  1. That only 15% of the programmes are accredited by the National Board of Accreditation. This means 85% of the Engineering Programmes have no effective quality control. 2. That only 1% of the Engineering Graduates participate in a summer internship. This effectively means that while, in theory, an internship is a part of the programme, in practise most Engineering graduates never participate in one. Of course, one can read more in this data. The fact that programmes are not accredited means many colleges may be offering a degree without having proper laboratory infrastructure. In a sense, it is some sort of miracle - indicating strong demand - that 40% of the graduates actually find a job, because most ...

My previous post, o n whether Hinduism is the only thing to unite India , to which my answer was negative, was based on the idea that Indian culture is quite distinct from 'Hinduism'. It is this point that needs further elaboration, as the apologists of the Hindu India, both the traditionalists and the new liberal kinds, claim that they are one and the same. I was brought up in a Brahmin family, and read Sanskrit - primarily as my grandmother was a 'Pandit' and a Sanskrit teacher - and read the epics, Ramayana and Mahabharata. For a year of my life, after I went through the 'Upanayana', I performed a puja three times a day. Later in life, I read Upanishad and Gita out of intellectual curiousity. And, yet, this still does not cover the core texts of Hinduism - most critically, the various commentaries by later Holy men, which, for many Hindus, represent the revealed religion.  But this is perhaps the key point: That someone may grow up in a Hindu milieu...

The title of this post is in quotes because someone told me this. This was some days ago, over lunch in London, something that I stayed with me since. This is one post I started writing, and then deleted, and then tried again, and again - until this moment when I resolved the question of the headline: Rather than trying the feeble 'reimagination' or 'new idea', using this quote directly was better. Indeed, there is nothing new here. This is the current conversation in India. In fact, suggesting anything else risks being shouted down in India today. However, why this made me reflect is that this was not coming from any zealot, but someone I know and regard highly for intellect. Also, this came out of no online spat or shouting match, but a reasoned conversation about India's future, and came from someone who cares about the country as deeply as anyone could. Finally, and importantly, the person telling me this was liberal and highly educated professional, lest ...