Satya Nadella ascension: misleading triumphalism

The elevation of India-born and schooled Satya Narayana Nadella to chief executive officer at Microsoft Inc, USA — the world’s most well-known IT corporation (annual revenue: $77.85 billion or Rs.484,149 crore) — has been widely reported in the media. All reports were anchored by a streak of pride proclaiming it as an Indian achievement. This puffing of the collective chest is one more indication that the media responds to such stimuli in an overwrought manner, used as they are to what Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul described as “a negative way of perceiving” events and trends.

Elaborating on his construct in India: A Wounded Civilization (1976), Naipaul wrote: “In an active, busy country, full of passion and controversy, it is not an easy thing to grasp, this negative way of perceiving. Yet it is fundamental to an understanding of India’s intellectual second-rateness… (which) may be the most startling and depressing thing about the world’s second most populous country.”

Naipaul’s insightful observation is still valid in the second decade of the new millennium. After a decade of promising growth and unlocking of the nation’s unlimited potential, India’s “second-rateness” seems to have overwhelmed it. Everywhere one turns, the promise seems to be in terminal decline with the media typically blaming government. This is the essence of this “negative way of perceiving” — externalize the problem and bring in fascists or anarchists to save the day. Any option is preferable to deep thinking and introspection.

At the heart of the problems debilitating the nation and Indian society, is a dysfunctional education system. Indeed, it may not be too far off the mark to tag the Nadella ascension as a full-blown indictment of the Indian academy. The higher education system does produce world-class scientists, engineers, managers and doctors but the economy lacks the sophistication to absorb them. Consequently, these heavily-subsidised technical and professional academic institutions produce skilled manpower for more evolved global corporations.

But even as the brightest and best move on to script success stories elsewhere, Indian enterprises struggle to find the engineers, managers and doctors needed to meet the demands of a growing economy. To fill these demands, the education bureaucracy and freewheeling entrepreneurs have devised a system of selection defined by examinations and rote learning. 

The ones with the highest scores are usually recruited by global corporations; the remainder battle for survival or success in local enterprises and joint ventures which struggle to cope with the demand for marketing, supply chain, maintenance, logistics managers and the dead hand of socialism — regulation, labour laws, taxation, finance. This leaves little room for innovating new products, services, processes, and systems.

Nadella’s ascension nevertheless provides a welcome opportunity for assessment of an education system which has become a programme of elite selection rather than public empowerment and enlightenment. National pride is probably the last reaction it ought to evoke, given the fact that Nadella and a whole host of such immigrant success stories are scripted outside of India. In the end, Nadella’s achievement is an American success story, an endorsement of the American dream. It’s also a summary rejection of the Indian milieu in which conformism and mediocrity inevitably triumph over innovation and excellence.

It bears repetition that the elevation of Indian-origin executives to apex positions at Microsoft, Citibank, Pepsi and others is a grim indictment of India’s education system. It is vital not to be misled by triumphal media which adulates the success of Nadella, Vikram Pandit, Indra Nooyi and others as feathers in the nation’s cap. True, these are men and women shaped by India’s higher education system. But they went away, knowing well that opportunities for intellectual growth and pursuit of knowledge lay outside the country.

Things did change as the reforms of 1991 struck root. Admittedly, there are more jobs, larger incomes, and more choice in the market for products, services, and business options. But simultaneously our cities, towns and villages are trapped in the chaos of traffic and pollution, and lack power, water supply and sanitation. Political conflicts have been exacerbated by acrimonious public debate fanned by ignorant and self-serving media. To watch the news on television, or read newspapers and periodicals is to confront doom-and-gloom scenarios purveyed by opinionated apparatchiks of the news business.

Meanwhile, the education system offers little to help young people struggling to understand the mismatch between economic growth and civic responsibility. It’s still mired in the bogs of bureaucracy and robber-baron capital. Yes, there’s been a substantial expansion in the number of universities, colleges and professional institutes. But the end product still remains rote graduates, ill-equipped to do more than pass examinations and unable to handle the demands of a growing economy and changing society.

This article appeared in Education World magazine,  March 2014.

Can a Barack Obama rise in India?

Regrettably the answer is in the negative.

Indian politics is feudal, driven by divisive agendas of caste, ethnicity and religion. It is also nepotistic, fueled by ties of kinship. The political class has no ideology, except knee-jerk responses evoked by flawed and leftover notions of socialism, secularism and nonalignment. The system that has grown out of the cloud of an opaque democracy is chaotic and plutocratic. It exploits the twin sores of poverty and disparity. Politicians tend to be kleptomaniacs, who seek rent for providing governance by exception. Their supporters are primarily favour seekers; in this ethical morass, conformity and sycophancy are valued over innovation and competence.

The amorphous world of Indian politics is currently in focus because state elections are at hand. Driving around my assembly district, I see newly-established offices of the Congress, the BJP and the BSP. Just one look into them and it becomes evident that they serve as a hangout for unemployed, uneducated youth, who sit around hoping for a handout of few rupees to get them through the day. In sharp contrast, American campaign offices are a productive buzz of volunteers and party staffers, churning out voter lists, poll data and demographic profiles. Someone is in charge and the field office is responsible for getting the vote out in favor of the party candidate.

Thus, Barack Obama came out of nowhere, a young mixed-race person from a broken home, the son of an immigrant Kenyan father and a peripatetic white mother from Kansas. He has lived in Hawaii, Indonesia and Midwest USA; attended the finest universities on the East Coast and graduated with high honours in political science and law. He taught at the University of Chicago Law School and then spurned an academic career to become a community organiser in the city’s impoverished and mostly black South Side. Over the years, he rose through the ranks of city and state politics to be elected a US senator in 2004.

In 2007, he announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States and launched a superb campaign focused on the message of change. He used information technology to build a network of support groups all over the country and to raise funds, in small denominations; in the event, he accumulated the largest ever campaign treasury in the history of American presidential elections. He exudes coolness, compassion and an intellectual brilliance that won him not just votes but the deep admiration of youth, Latinos, women and blacks. Indeed Obama fired the imagination of the whole world. As such, when he is inaugurated in January 2009, he will be America’s first global president.

The stark difference between the grass-roots operations and the political aspirations of the world’s two largest democracies speaks of the difference in governance. In the US, governance tends to be positive and enlightened. Roads are well maintained; there is round-the-clock power and water (that you can drink straight from the tap). There are excellent government schools and well-stocked community libraries. Local governments operate and maintain parks and recreation services. They also provide a variety of social services for the aged and the handicapped as also efficient mass transport.

In India, there is little or no governance. Except for Lutyens Delhi, home of the power elite, most of India is rubble-strewn, unkempt and unfinished; pocked with inadequate roads, erratic power and water supply and virtually no law enforcement, let alone education or health care. The random manner in which civic authorities operate shows how kleptocracy works. Roads are patched rather than re-done; of a 10 km road approved for funding, just half gets built and the rest remains ragged and jagged. A multiplicity of bus stops is set up in some places and none at all in others. Central verges start to collapse immediately after they are finished.

Outsourced as it is to an increasingly rusty ‘steel frame’ bureaucracy, governance has very little to do with the delivery of public goods and services. Instead, it has become a muscular exercise to plunder money from the public treasury and to keep the citizenry at bay. Even a third-rate politician like Mayawati travels in an envelope of ‘Black Cat’ security cover, directed less at personal safety than at making a statement of power to her impoverished dalit supporters. In her warped understanding of politics, Mayawati seeks to impress her base with such over-the-top displays. “Look at me,” she seems to say, “I’m as powerful as upper-caste rulers, and I can do things for you.”

Meanwhile, swarms of corrupt and venal bureaucrats at all levels of government excavate age-old laws and regulations with a view to extorting money from citizens. Not too long ago, some of them visited my office and informed the manager that on the basis of something done by a long-dead former owner, the building was in violation some code and therefore illegal. We haven’t heard from them since but they may well have “opened a file,” giving them the option to harass us whenever they choose. Maybe they need to fund a wedding in the family; or send a son to an overseas university or whatever. Nobody in the political world can rein in democratic India’s marauding bureaucrats. That’s because no politician even thinks of governance. It’s all about power and pelf, unmindful of the citizenry.

No, a Barack Obama cannot rise in India. A Nero, a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mao…maybe.

an edited version of this column appeared in education world, december 2008

Opportunities in Meltdown Crisis

It is the yearning of most middle class Indians to send their sons and daughters to go to Harvard Business School. That’s not surprising, given the Indian obsession for job-oriented training rather than a liberal arts education. When your children get into elite business schools, you feel you’ve fulfilled your dharma. After that, they get lucrative jobs in Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and what have you. There they work with men and women from around the world whose Arjun-like focus is to make piles of money: an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a spectacular beach house in the Hamptons, a skiing holiday in the Alps, a summer place in the south of France, a villa in Tuscany, an apartment in Paris or a great hotel in London.

Well, just as American assumptions about finance have been upturned by the dismal reality of economics, your idea of dharma is about to take a beating. The chickens have come home to roost. Twenty-eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unlamented demise of Soviet communism, we are witnessing a massive assault on the skewed capitalism unleashed by global finance. When a bunch of ambitious yuppies is given the run of the markets, you should expect immature behavior. A thousand points up, a few thousand points down: the masters of the universe thought they were invincible.

We’ve seen this in India in the first four decades of Independence. Young people with means and connections attended elite schools like Oxford and Cambridge and returned to high positions from where they pushed the intellectual ideas of the day. The result was Fabian socialism that created and favored the elite. The Leftish intellectuals who ran the country advanced distorted notions about egalitarian growth from positions of privilege. They pushed weird ideas: a ‘commanding heights’ public sector; restrictions on private enterprise; outright nationalization of ‘core’ sectors deemed vital to the country; ‘development’ banking, subsidy populism.

The entire edifice came crashing down in 1991 when the government went bankrupt. Slowly and painfully, a new structure arose in its place: a tentative reform regime frequently held hostage to mindless moffusil politics practiced by con men and goons, bigots and activists who fill party offices. One thing is obvious; the old elite have had to make way for ambitious interlopers, whether in politics or business. Their next generation largely opted out of public service and made their homes largely in the global financial community: in New York, London, Hong Kong and Singapore.

This is where the story becomes intriguing: at the intersection of the next generations of the Indian elite and the world of global finance. Once a secure and lucrative place, it is now the center of the meltdown. If the recovery is long in coming, these young men and women will most likely head home. As they pour in looking for elite perches, they will encounter the crass interlopers who now occupy such positions. It could make for an interesting political turn. In alliance with modern-minded politicians found in the Congress and in some regional parties, they could power a new equation in the country’s politics.

The global financial bust could actually re-invigorate politics. The moffusil mafia that now holds the Indian state to ransom could face a challenge. Chances of overcoming the current anarchy could improve dramatically. As things stand today, civil society (not the jholewallahs but the real thing: a middle class with civic values) is under assault. All manner of low life, including criminals, assembles under a ‘leader’ and wreaks chaos and mayhem in cities, towns and villages, without let or hindrance. You have Hindu bigots killing tribal Christians in Orissa and Karnataka; street hoods enforcing a chauvinist agenda in Bombay; Mamata Banerjee forcing the Tata Nano venture from Bengal; a regional party playing to its ethnic base by seeking to influence Indian policy in Sri Lanka; the Left playing ideological games to strap a government they were in alliance with; a BJP that is desperate for power and will go to absurd lengths as it did with displaying wads of cash during the vote of confidence in Parliament; a Congress that cannot shake off its nostalgia for Indira Gandhi and therefore remains unconvinced about economic reforms.

These distressful events are taking place at a time when the economy is notching up record growth. The minuscule middle class has grown to a critical mass and can irreversibly transform the country into a stable, modern democracy. Sadly, no political party speaks for this emergent group. Virtually all political parties are preoccupied with caste, religion and populism. It is a measure of the narrow worldview of the political leadership that no one has been able to grasp the significance of this demographic event. The closest any leader came to recognizing the growing middle class is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. This much was clear from his relentless advocacy of the Indo-US civilian nuclear agreement. He fought the odds and emerged triumphant and the middle class applauded. Can he persuade his reluctant party to solicit the support of this vital new constituency?

Meanwhile, at ground zero in the global financial markets, Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy have demonstrated their leadership by pursuing an intelligent response to the crisis. The much maligned British premier, in particular, has won plaudits in his own country and around the world. In the US, a fading George W Bush failed to rally his own party around a flawed bailout package put forward by his lightweight Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson.

Interesting possibilities lie ahead. For instance, the crisis has steered the debate in the presidential campaign to focus on crisis management capabilities of the candidates. As such, this has favored the unflappable and analytical Barack Obama, with his cool temperament and level head, over the more mercurial John McCain. In the next few weeks, US voters will have the chance to send a powerful signal by selecting their President. A President Obama has a better chance of restoring sanity in fearful and avaricious global financial system.

an edited version of this column appeared in education world, november 2008

The Rise of the Klepto State

Just Desserts for an Apathetic Citizenry

On Independence eve, as it is every day, Delhi was caught in massive traffic jams caused by incessant rain and weird security arrangements that may or may not catch terrorists but certainly hassle citizens. In most of the capital city, roads caved in, traffic signals failed and the police were nowhere to be seen because they were busy protecting VIPs.

Those who battled their way through the gridlock found the going smoother once they made it to Lutyens Delhi, the pleasant precinct of the Capital that the privilegentsia calls home. As you drive through, you can feast your eyes on blooming flowers in the traffic roundabouts and marvel at the smooth ride on perfectly surfaced roads.

This is a hallowed arrondisement meant for those whom we elect to govern us and the bureaucrats they appoint to hold us at bay. They have their own and India's only local municipal body that keeps the streets spic and span, grows flowers and organizes concerts and yoga workshops in the magnificent parks that dot the landscape.

Amazingly, though it is the most prized real estate in the country, most of the people who live there are tenants. Most homes there are two-and-half acre lots with retinues of government-employed serfs, who live on the property and serve whichever grandee occupies it. Cooks, bearers, gardeners, security staff are at the service of the occupant. They live on the estate in slum-like conditions and are attached to the property just like doors, windows, lawns and various mod cons, except in this case they are feudal rather than modern conveniences.

Denizens of Lutyens Delhi live in this sylvan world, claiming to represent the real India. Actually, they are completely out of touch. The story is told of a senior political leader who came to a meeting at an office near Connaught Place in the late 1990s. It was early evening and as he stood in the plaza of the office building, he said, “God, how this place has changed!” He was aghast at the traffic chaos and generally run-down appearance of the place and went on to volunteer that he last visited the area with Sanjay Gandhi, who died in June 1980. And his house was no more than a couple of miles from the place.

The Delhi problem, which is unique, has to do with the governance setup. Neither the municipal corporation (MCD) nor the police nor the land grant agency, the DDA, reports to the local government. As such, none of the agencies are accountable to anyone but bureaucrats. The only agency that is on its toes is the New Delhi Municipal Committee because it has to answer to the powerful residents of the Lutyens enclave.

It doesn’t matter if it is the Congress or the BJP or any one of the subaltern political formations that have sprung up in the past decade. They live in this favored enclave and are whisked here and there in cars with flashing lights and convoys to shoo other motorists off the road. For all the years I have been involved with the political process, I was always made to feel I was not in touch with the real India because I wore suits, spoke English and harbored subversive ideas about political accountability and performance. Quite contrarily, the Lutyens lot prefers ambition and sycophancy.

Strangely, the political leaders and their apparatchiks are there because they claim to represent the less fortunate people. In their scheme of things, they have the pulse of the people; those of us non Lutyens Delhi types, who pay exorbitant amounts on taxes and on rent or purchase of property, are dubbed “middle class” and shunned by the radical chic ideologues of the Lutyens quarter.

Meanwhile, outside the favored enclave in Delhi and in other lesser ones in the various state capitals, we fight to get ahead on the roads to get to schools, colleges, offices. We give way to netas and babus but will cussedly deny right of way to others like us, including ambulances.

Only recently, government grandees have grudgingly focused on improving infrastructure. These are half-hearted efforts upended by corruption. Just consider the shiny new expressway from the Delhi airport: it is poorly designed, confused and deadly. Two- and three-wheelers are forbidden but merrily cruise the highway, slowing down traffic. If you tell the policemen to control their access, they rudely ask you to mind your own business. All they want to ensure is VIPs have a smooth passage. Unpoliced, the expressway is a dangerous nightmare because of the unlettered habits of the capital's citizenry that cause backups, accidents and death.

As such, Delhi and the rest of India are flagrant scofflaws. Most do as they please in public: drive like lunatics, spit, urinate and even defecate in public spaces. The other half of India, they trade for dowry, burn, rape or at the very least molest them in public. Is this a mahaan or mayhem Bharat.

Twenty years ago, there was hope for a breakthrough when Rajiv Gandhi appeared on the scene. Some of us even chucked comfortable lives in the US to join the revolution. We were excited by the possibility of change we glimpsed in the young leader’s vision. Indeed, there were many changes made. He opened up the closed economy to foreign investment, liberated the moribund financial sector with credit cards, mortgages and consumer loans. The Doordarshan monopoly was destroyed; the civil aviation sector was set free; the old socialist rust bucket economy was replaced by a shiny and enticingly new consumer economy.

Even the current opening to the US had its roots in Rajiv’s vision of cultural and individual exchanges as the base for improving ties with the superpower. His believed in “letting our people earn a living;” he swore by the need for voluntary community action and for arousing civic consciousness; he saw through the vested interests of politicians and bureaucrats; he played fair and square in the crooked public life of India.

All that’s happening today goes back to the Rajiv Gandhi era in the 1980s when orthodoxies were challenged and new perspectives came into play.

Seventeen years after his death, we are faced with his legacy: a growing economy that empowers people. On the other hand, we must contend with a political system that he condemned as one that seeks to plunder the wealth of the state. Our infrastructure is a mess; our education policy is criminal; our public health and welfare services are terrible and our politics divisive. The economy, which was the bright spot, is beginning to falter thanks to bureaucratic mismanagement and bleeding-heart, wasteful welfare politics.

Meanwhile the citizenry remains unconcerned and continues to divert itself with the consumerist joys of the new economy, buying baubles and trinkets. No wonder surveys show Indians are among the happiest people in the world.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

Education: India’s Achilles Heel

Caught between Elitism and Crassness

On a recent flight from Goa to Delhi, I was seated across the aisle from three loutish young men. Clearly newly rich, they bristled with flashy phones and watches. They did not turn off their cell phones even after the stewardess made an announcement; instead, they went right ahead playing with their toys. I asked them to switch the phones off. They stared at me insolently and went into a huddle from which emerged crude sounds that I finally understood to be mocking laughter.

This is the newly emergent middle class that an open India has thrown up: crass, belligerent and reckless. It is the polar opposite of the privileged classes that presided over closed India: snobbish, full of intrigue and cautious. There’s not much to choose between the two. The new one is vile; the other was servile. While I have been a champion of the emergent middle class, I guess my view was colored by my utter disdain for the privilegentsia of Fabian socialist India. The new middle class is just as hideous as the privilegentsia. I call them the Vulgarians.

The privilegentsia was bred on elitism: right connections, right schools, Oxford and Cambridge. The vulgarian instinct is to push and shove; and when push comes to shove, to buy their way out. On the other hand, while mouthing homilies about the rule of law, members of the privilegentsia held themselves above the law. They never waited their turn for anything and without the slightest bit of embarrassment bent rules, flouted regulations and scorned the law. The emergent class of vulgarians makes no such pretence: they seem to believe everything has a price: schools, colleges, hospitals, and more worryingly: bureaucrats, policemen and judges.

During the privilegentsia raj, India had to reckon with parasitic elites, who dominated state coffers, extorted usurious taxes and provided no public goods in return. Under their dispensation, ordinary citizens were cruelly ignored: no power, no water, no public transport, no roads, no airports, no telephones, no jobs, no primary education, no housing, no public health care and no sanitation.

The minuscule middle class was virtually targeted by privilegentsia policies and in many cases, driven into exile in the United States, Canada and Britain. Those who couldn’t emigrate saw conditions decline rapidly: famines, civil disturbances, war, scarcity, suspension of civil rights under the Emergency proclamation in 1975 and finally total bankruptcy, which the forced the government to fly out its gold reserves in secret and mortgage them to the Bank of England.

Forced to open up the shackled economy, the government scrapped industrial licensing and various other controls. In the process, it unleashed animal forces that transformed India. We went from being pitied as a “basket case” to being admired as an emerging world power with a dynamic economy. With GDP growth of nine percent and more for over the past five years, millions were lifted from poverty. From being an apostrophe in the demographic profile, the middle class burgeoned and became one of the world’s sought after market segments. Global business rushed in to cater to their needs and desires; local businesses shaped up to provide quality goods and responsive services.

Sadly, the flawed education system inhibited the transformation; it achieved less than what it should have. Under the privilegentsia raj, primary education was neglected and higher education became a screening process to weed out “people like them.” Thus, the ordained ones went on to Oxford and Cambridge to return to appointed positions in the privilegentsia. The others, who had no connections in the elite segment, either went abroad to seek their fortunes or stayed behind in an irrelevant higher education system to become rabble for political parties.

On the other hand, with the establishment of the IITs and IIMs, it produced engineers and managers whose skills were far too advanced to be accommodated in the makeshift “Ambassador Car” economy. As such these subsidized elite institutions became feeders to the global economy. All the Indian success stories in global business that are trumpeted in the pink papers are outcomes of the privilegentsia’s misbegotten priorities.

With the rise of the vulgarians, education has become a commodity; something you must have to get a job. All manner of dubious institutions have sprung up to cater to these needs. With the unprecedented growth of the economy, the need for talent has become so acute that just anyone with a degree or even a modicum of education can get a job. The three louts sitting across the aisle from on that flight from Goa to Delhi were clearly among those. They probably had some education and were snapped up by some company and enrolled in an internal training program. They were like trained circus performers.

We have three types of “education.” The first was the classic Oxbridge type where it didn’t matter because you came back to an appointed place in the elite establishment. The other was a technical sort of training where you had no place in India but found a perch in multinational corporations or universities or other institutes of higher learning in the West. Now you have the third variety: of trained personnel focused on specific cog-in-the-wheel jobs.

Whatever happened to liberal values and civil norms as crucial objectives of education? Their lack is India’s Achilles heel.

copyright rajiv desai 2008