Education: India’s Achilles Heel

Caught Between Elitism And Vulgarity 

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 newly 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

My Kind of Town

Springtime in Chicago

It was unseasonably cold in Chicago for the middle of May. But then I remembered snow and an ice storm in this city of broad shoulders around this time of year in the late 1980s. One evening, I got off shivering from the El (short for Elevated), the train service that ferries people back and forth from Oak Park to downtown Chicago, just nine miles apart. My car, in the parking lot, was encrusted with sheets of ice. I used my key to crack the ice and opened my car to drive home. The temperature was below freezing but I held my curses, looking forward to the scotch I would pour myself when I got home in a few minutes. The prospect was heart warming, especially because I knew my friend and distant cousin Prakash would soon join me to share in the experience.

Prakash and I were neighbors and saw each other at all times of the week. We were never confined to the American ritual of meeting on weekends. Mostly we sat in my yard or his, savoring the spring weather, munching on deli sandwiches or enjoying an after dinner drink at 8 pm, while it was still light out. We did that in the winter too, sitting indoors, chuffing pizza or hamburgers, even devouring an occasional steak. And as days grew longer and warmer, mornings we packed our cucumber sandwiches and frozen gins, put on our whites and drove 30 minutes away to suburban Oak Brook (often called New Delhi West) to play cricket on the wonderful grounds of Hamburger University (the training school for McDonald’s, which is headquartered in the suburb).

This spring was nothing like that; just cold, though the skies were blue and the sun was shining high in the sky at six in the evening. As I drove to Prakash’s house, where I was staying as I always do since I left Chicago some 20 years ago, it struck me that I didn’t miss a beat steering through familiar terrain. It was as if I never left. Despite many changes, Harlem Avenue, the main drag, was the same. In the early days, when I returned to Chicago from Delhi, I had to remember to turn left from Harlem onto Augusta Street because to get to my house I had to turn right. After two decades, I have gotten used to it and so swaying to the music on my favorite radio station, I automatically turned right. Realizing my mistake, I turned around at the corner of Woodbine Avenue, where my house was.

Cold though it was, and colder, I might add, than in Delhi at the height of winter, I had the car window open to gaze upon street corners and home gardens that were ablaze with sweet-scented lilac and to savor the wondrous aroma of barbeques amid freshly-mowed lawns. After a Chicago winter, any temperature above freezing is considered warm. People were out jogging and pottering about their gardens. The song on the radio said it all, “Heaven, I’m in heaven…”

“Why did you ever leave this gorgeous place,” my sensible self wondered. As I steered the car toward Prakash’s magnificent home, I found no answer to the question. Granted, I have a wonderful life in Delhi that is often the envy of my friends in America, I live in a nice tree-lined neighborhood, where you hear birdsongs in the morning, not that different from Oak Park and the neighboring River Forest where Prakash lives. 

Trouble is when I drive out of my compound, I am faced with the chaos of urban India. When I pull out of Prakash’s driveway to go anywhere, I deal not only with organized traffic but courteous drivers and peace with flower-bedecked beauty thrown in for good measure.

In the early days, just after we relocated to Delhi, my trips to the Oak Park-River Forest area were always laden with nostalgia. I used to drive past our house, my wife’s Montessori school, our daughter’s school and various other significant landmarks with tears in my eyes, wondering if I had done the right thing. Like Odysseus, my visits to Chicago were struggles of “memory against forgetting."

Over the years, my trips have become less nostalgic and more fun. Breakfast with my friends Suresh and Pappi Hathiwala, beer with Divyesh and Darshana Mehta, lunch at my friend Arsen’s downtown establishment Sayat Nova with my old buddies like Larry Townsend, Mike McGuire and Dan Tucker from Chicago Tribune, the daily in which I wrote regular columns, coffee with Jim and Alma, dinner at buzzing restaurants with Prakash and Alice, my hosts and drinks with Sam and Anu Pitroda. Then there’s Angad Mehta; to spend an evening with him is to be the company of Chauncey Gardner, the protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski novel, “Being There.” Played by Peter Sellers in the movie of the same name, Chauncey’s character was built around the axiom that perception creates reality.

With the nostalgia out of my system, I’ve grown to love Chicago differently…as a place to relax, engage in debate and have epicurean fun. I still wonder what it would be like to move back and partake of civilized life with an edge of sophistication. In my mind, the jury is still out. I am less convinced today than I was ten years ago that moving back is a not a good idea. But then, as my daughters unfailingly remind me, I am weird that way: left the land of opportunity at the peak of my life and am now ruminating on the possibility of spending my later years there. But then, this is the age when your intellectual powers are their peak and America is more hospitable. India, meanwhile, has become bereft; forget intellectual pursuits, there’s no room even for intelligence.

On the other hand, India is like Circe, the nymph who kept Odysseus from returning to his beloved Ithaca of Greek mythology. It offers you pleasures of the senses that make you jettison your moral compass and corporeal senses. You live with dirt, filth, corruption and venality and forget about civilization and its comforts. The troglodyte writer, Nirad Chaudhuri, was insightful when he called India “The Continent of Circe.” And like Odysseus, I must live in this sinful Aeaea, where Circe lived, even though it is plastic and crass and spurn the pleasure of making America, the modern version of Ithaca, my home again.

copyright rajiv desai 2008

The Fall of India’s Berlin Wall

Comrades Sent Packing

"Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last."

Prakash Karat cuts a sorry figure today. His ideological posturing has cost the Left dearly. In 2004, his predecessor, Harkishan Singh Surjeet offered the UPA support and enabled the Congress-led coalition to form the government. In 2005, Karat replaced Surjeet and almost immediately the relationship between the Congress and the Left turned sour.

The dogmatic new general secretary unveiled a new era of hectoring the Congress and pushing an unreconstructed ideology that survives only in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Elsewhere in the world, the communists have been pushed to the fringes after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Between April 2005, when Karat replaced Surjeet, and Tuesday July 8, 2008, when he foolishly withdrew support to the UPA, the Indian Left enjoyed more influence over the Indian government than Israel has over various US governments. And they blew it.

Karat’s obduracy has painted the Left out of the reckoning. Beijing’s mandarins cannot be very pleased. This is abundantly clear from foreign secretary Menon’s statement that China will support the Indian application to the Nuclear Suppliers Group. His dour, immature brinkmanship cost the Left its invaluable influence over government policy. The current crisis is of Karat’s making; it has rocked the India story that the world believes is crucial both in geopolitics as well as in international economics.

What the commissars don’t understand is that the entire world in banking on India’s emergence from a regional to a global power. US President George W Bush was among the first to grasp the importance of the transformation. As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh says, the whole world is rooting for India to emerge from its poverty and its Third World victim mindset. Should India succeed, it will set an example for poor countries. It did that in the 1940s when the Indian National Congress won independence from Britain and presided over a relatively smooth transfer of power.

India’s economic transformation will send a more powerful signal to the world than China’s phenomenal growth. The only other large nation that succeeded in wiping out mass poverty is the United States more than two centuries ago. Sure, China has lifted more people out of poverty than India; at the same time, it has clamped down on political opposition. “An iron fist in a velvet glove,” a Chinese-American scholar once called it.

What China lacks is soft power. That’s what the Olympics exercise is all about. The fact is that without the fuzzier aspects of power, it will always be an outsider wanting in to the world milieu. On the other hand, between cricket, Bollywood, the increasingly competitive and aggressive business community and the English-speaking, highly accomplished emigrant community in the West, India has more global influence than China.

The charge that India’s communists are a Chinese fifth column is not lightly made. Many in the highest levels of government believe it to be true. Any rational explanation of Karat’s latest move must factor it in. If, we give Karat and his commissars the benefit of the doubt, the only conclusion left to draw is that they are irresponsible and dogmatic. Any which way, they do not deserve to have a veto on government policy. Either as Quislings or as juvenile ideologues, they should be banished to the fringes from whence they sprang.

So Karat has now wrought his masterpiece of absurd theatre. It reminds me of a scene from the acclaimed film, “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” With the forces of the law closing in on them, the duo found themselves at the edge of a cliff with a river flowing furiously below. They had no option but to jump. Sundance was hesitant because he couldn’t swim. Butch told him not to worry “because the fall will kill you anyway.”

That’s the fate of the Left today. They have pulled the plug and find they are the ones who will be flushed down the drain. The Congress is a mighty political player with over a century’s experience. It ran circles around the juvenile commissars and emerged triumphant.

City in Decline

Mumbai Sucks, Bombay Rocks

A global firm recently publicized a survey that found Bombay the second worst city to live in. It rated Zürich as the most livable. By the standard measures used in the survey, Bombay certainly ranks poorly. But those who live in the metro will not agree; they swear by the sheer intensity and vitality of urban life in the metropolis and would live in no other place. It is actually the only real city left in India. Few people in Bombay would want to live in Zürich, except those with Swiss bank accounts. The heart-stopping city is both: the hope and despair of India’s future.

I love Bombay. Juhu Beach is where I grew up. We moved to Warden Road, where I attended a quaint little Parsi school called New Model Infant School in Oomer Park, the setting in Salman Rushdie’s book, “Midnight's Children.” Later we lived in a wonderful art deco apartment house called Court Royal in Christ Church Lane, bordering the school of the same name in Byculla Bridge. Our buzzing lane was known for its gorgeous girls and its melting pot of Catholics, Parsis, Jews, Muslims, and Anglo Indians.

My old neighborhoods have changed beyond recognition. In Juhu’s Theosophical Colony, I believe there are still the bungalows and, I hope, the sense of community. The Besant Montessori School, where I attended pre-school, is presumably still around. To roam on the beach and play on the roads of the Walden-style colony was a treat then but now I realize was a huge privilege.

Walking on the beach from Juhu to Versova on a holiday morning was a treat. I felt I could be happy doing this for the rest of my life. When we said our morning prayer at the Besant Montessori school, unwittingly I replaced the phrase “thank you for the world so sweet” with “thank you for Versova.” This was long before the grim place called Lokhandwala.

In Juhu, my neighbors included Balraj Sahni and Prem Dhavan (the lyricist), among others. Many of them articulated anti-American views even while their children, like me, wore preppy penny loafers and striped T-shirts. This was my first experience with Indian hypocrisy. Diagonally across from our house was Ratilal Parekh, whose daughter Asha went on to make big waves in films. Our next-door neighbor was Devendra Goel, the film-maker who made escapist films that attracted large audiences. Given their fame and wealth, it was a bit of stretch for me to reconcile the Gandhian vision of simple living, high thinking.

Juhu then looked a lot like today’s Goa: coconut groves, white sand and blue sea. We walked freely on the beach and in the neighborhood. It was a wonderful island and to many friends and relatives, a weekend resort. Juhu was especially magical in the monsoon when we had to confront the rough sea and the swaying coconut trees that imperiled our roof.

When we moved to Christ Church Lane from Warden Road, I made friends with kids from different cultural backgrounds and there learned the value of India’s diversity. My friends and I gawked at the gorgeous girls the lane was famous for. It was the time of Pat Boone’s Bernadine, Elvis Presley’s Jailhouse Rock and Cliff Richard’s Dynamite. On Friday nights, we listened transfixed to a family of troubadours who showed up in our lane every week, singing wonderful songs like Little Serenade and Traveling Light. We used to hang out in our balconies after dinner listening to them but mostly ogling the gorgeous green-eyed daughter who sang seconds.

These wonderful memories came back to me when I read about the survey that trashed the city. Bombay has a unique culture: it is decadent, down market and egalitarian; its essence is the hallmark Tapori dialect. To be fair, the survey portrayed the city as it is today: on the brink, poised on the fine line between civilization and chaos; trapped in the nexus between the chauvinism of its political class and the violence of its underworld. Mumbai is very different from the solid middle class city of Bombay I grew up in.

from daily news and analysis april 4 2007

Yesterday Came Suddenly…

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Paul McCartney's Back

Now that he’s older, losing his hair, Paul McCartney has put out a new album, Memory Almost Full, stating his point of view. The songs are full of the past that haunts him and leads him to conclude that “all we wear is vintage clothes.” It is a lilting album that leaves us Beatles fans with a sweet and sour experience. In all his songs, except for the few where he is bitter about Heather Mills, Paul is telling us, as The Beatles have for nearly 40 years that “life is very short and there’s no time for fussing and fighting.”

In one of the songs in the album, Paul expresses disbelief that the years have flown by. “Yesterday came so suddenly,” Paul seems to say in his album. There is an element of gloom in his music, which is perhaps what makes it so haunting. The final song on the album is called “The End of The End”:

On the day that I die

I'd like bells to be rung

and songs that were sung

to be hung out like blankets

That lovers have played on

and laid on while listening

to songs that were sung.

Paul’s latest album is disconcerting.. He and his friends were simple Liverpool boys, jamming and having fun at the Cavern Club. The popularity that followed was frightening. Success turned their heads: it was sex, drugs and rock and roll. Their later albums, influenced hugely by their immense popularity, like The White Album, were individual works with different musicians even while they were marketed under The Beatles label. We didn’t know it then but we still loved the good old rock and roll music. Paul’s latest album is a signal that that we should accept that The Beatles era has drawn to an end; it will, nevertheless, live forever as nostalgia that spans generations and it is up to our children to pass it on to theirs.

Paul, John, George and Ringo made their own way in the world after the split. Their fans kept the band’s myth alive with the serum of nostalgia. In his latest album, Paul seems to be saying that all they did was made good music and later on experimented with new forms of rock. The icon status was bestowed on them and they dealt with it in different ways. In his song, “Ever Present Past,” Paul sings:

I couldn't understand the words that they were saying

but still I hung around and took it all in

I wouldn't join in with the games that they were playing.

The games that Paul laments are the ones we played as fans. We took four Liverpool boys and put them on a pedestal. They represented our middle class values of rebellion without really giving up the comforts. For me as an adolescent growing up in the confusion of India, they made me a member of a global youth community in which music was the currency. Amazingly, they sang about nostalgia to their teenage and adolescent audiences. Why else would “Yesterday” become such a monster hit?

Time magazine compared the Sergeant Pepper album to the works of Brahms and Schubert. Their “Let It Be” is sung as a hymn in churches worldwide. Such superb music! While coming to grips with their huge global presence, the Fab Four continued to make great music that their fans had to admit was getting better all the time. Paul’s new album renews my faith in The Beatles while he is saying “don’t live in the past.”

The Beatles phenomenon is inexplicable. Especially if you listen to what they have said since the split…that the brand was a burden. They stopped public performances and retreated into the studio on London’s Abbey Road to produce path-breaking music. They had no idea of the impact they would make all over the world. Their music will forever remain the sound of a changing world, milestones in our journey from the teens to adulthood.

Forty-five years later, The Beatles story is told; all we have is memories and, as Paul says, the memory is almost full.

from daily news and analysis july 25 2007