Grim harvest of failed education system

Digital India, Make in India, Clean India, Smart Cities... these are slogans supporters of embattled prime minister Narendra Modi chorus to emphasise the primacy of his “development and growth” agenda. On the other hand, ghar wapsi, love jihad, Hindu rashtra, bans on beef, books and broadcasts… these are slogans supporters of empowered prime minister Narendra Modi raise to assert the primacy of hindutva.

Numerous commentators have remarked on the lack of progress of the modernist charter while lamenting the spread of the primordial agenda. Supporters say the prime minister’s development plans are being held hostage by “fringe elements”. Opponents challenge this, saying the hindutva project is Mr. Modi’s main plank.

And thus the political debate goes on, nightly on television and in the newspapers every morning. What’s indisputable is that India is caught in a bind, with the whole world watching. There are two reasons why the world is watching: one, the prime minister is an avid traveller who basks in the company of the world’s who’s who. He is adept at showcasing his forays in the Indian media and before large and adulatory NRI audiences.

The other reason why all eyes are on India is because of reports that primordial formations are threatening to derail India’s democracy. While Modi’s global tours go unreported in the mainstream world media, the killings, bans, and bigotry are prominently displayed in pixels and print the world over.

Given such alarming reports in global media, who will take the prime minister’s invitation to build modern India seriously? Even as Mr. Modi tries to assure the world of his commitment to diversity and democracy, his partners in the saffron brotherhood blacken faces of dissenters, commit hate crimes against minorities, and talk menacingly about regulating the media.

In Mumbai, the brazen threats of the Shiv Sena, an ally of the BJP led by Mr. Modi, forced the cricket authorities to withdraw all Pakistani umpires and commentators from the remainder of the India-South Africa series. It’s the same with utterances and speeches of senior saffron sages about the need to regulate the media.

How this stand-off between economic modernisation and the authoritarian and revivalist agenda will be resolved is difficult to say. In a nation with a burgeoning middle class, the tendency would be to favour the former. This assumes that the middle class is the repository of enlightened liberal values and as such a bulwark against what the Indian press used to call “fissiparous tendencies”. I don’t think the assumption can stand scrutiny. Here’s why.

Historically, Indian policymakers have ignored elementary education and vocational training in favour of higher education and professional development. The result is an educated elite listing in the storm-tossed sea of a poorly educated majority. Even within the elite class, the emphasis is on engineering and medicine, management and accountancy. Middle class children, especially male, are encouraged, forced and nudged into the study of these streams to land steady jobs. Liberal arts disciplines such as literature, history, language and philosophy are dismissed as unworthy, okay for girls.

Despite heavily subsidised bias in its favour, the higher education system has failed miserably. It produces a vast pool of middle class graduates, ill-equipped to meet the demands of a modernising economy. Unable to find jobs, they are recruited by political parties to fight nefarious numbers wars that determine political outcomes. Easily manipulated, these youth become the foot soldiers of atavistic campaigns against change. As such, they form the bulk of illiberal forces threatening to take India back to the Stone Age.

On the other hand, the higher education system also produces some world-class scientists, engineers, lawyers and doctors, managers and technocrats. But decades of command-and-control industry policies have impaired the ability of the economy to provide jobs and business opportunities. Caught in the socialist quagmire, shiploads of the best graduates have migrated westward, contributing to India’s ‘brain drain’. True, the best middle-class graduates did well in the US and elsewhere but the disruption took its toll and they became implacably opposed to licence-permit raj and its purveyors.

Therefore, like those they left behind, they too became supporters of illiberal forces. These are the groups that turn out in huge numbers to hear Mr. Modi rant and rave against the previous regime in New York, California, Australia and elsewhere. Thus the top layer of the education system and its vast middling layer have fused into an aggrieved segment, embracing religious and cultural revivalism and chauvinist causes, harbouring vague hopes of seeing India emerge as a “global power”.

This is the whirlwind the country reaped in the 2014 election. With just 31 percent of the national vote in their favour, majoritarian political forces are poised to hack away at the carefully-nurtured edifice of constitutionalism. In the final analysis the education system bears a major share of responsibility for the growing atavism and intolerance spreading across the country.

(An edited version of this post appeared in Education World, November 2015)

It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again | The Wire

It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again | The Wire

The transformation of the NDA government from a harbinger of purposive leadership into the gang that couldn’t shoot straight is one of the fastest rides downhill in Indian politics. Not even the worst critics of Narendra Modi expected such a precipitous fall. Its crisis management has been instinctive rather than considered. First dismissing stories about the transgressions of various government ministers as trivial and then trying to brazen it out are sure signs of a rattled leadership. Ministers, party leaders, RSS workers, all have been trotted out to defend the government that nonetheless has become the butt of ridicule in the media.

Watching events unfold, I am reminded of the Watergate crisis that engulfed the Nixon administration. On June 17, 1972, five men were arrested trying to plant listening devices in the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate complex in the heart of Washington DC. As the press picked up on the story, Nixon and his aides pooh-poohed it as coverage of a “third-rate burglary.” But the story persisted and grew bigger, revealing evidence of the involvement of top White House aides in an attempted cover up. As events spiraled, it became clear that the Nixon administration had indulged in criminal attempts to influence the outcome of the impending presidential election in November 1972. The rest is history.

The way Nixon and his aides handled the Watergate crisis is instructive as we try to understand the manner in which Modi and unknown aides have dealt with recent media controversies involving senior members of his government and party. Nixon debunked the Watergate burglary coverage as not really worthy of his attention, busy as he was with his re-election campaign and the big issues of world peace. Next step was an elaborate cover up that stretched across the administration from the White House to the Department of Justice to the CIA and the FBI to Nixon’s Republican cronies. Finally, Nixon and his aides were compelled to respond. Even then, they hedged, releasing bits of information…morsels of truth, while withholding damaging material to ensure “plausible deniability.”

This “limited hangout” defence was instinctive, a play by play response and clearly not a well thought out strategy. The assumption seemed to be that it would disappear after the election, which Nixon was widely predicted to win. The Viet Nam war and the protests against it had polarized the electorate. Nixon and his aides believed this would work to their advantage and it did. Nixon won in a landslide.

At the root of this defence was the conviction that the electoral victory would overwhelm the crisis. Nixon believed he could make Watergate disappear once he became president because it was mainly the adversarial press that was responsible for the problem. His vice president, Spiro Agnew, famously coined the phrase: nattering nabobs of negativism. Nixon always held a very dim view of the press. This was evident as far back as 1962 when he blamed his loss in the California gubernatorial election on the press and told a large assemblage of reporters in Los Angeles, “You don’t have Richard Nixon to kick around any more.” His distrust of the media was matched by his visceral hatred for the liberal East Coast establishment exemplified by the Kennedy family; he lost the presidency to John Kennedy in 1960 by a very small margin.

This divisive tendency was carried over into his subsequent presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972. In the decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, America became visibly polarized: flag-waving nationalists and social conservatives on the right; liberals, the academy and a rainbow coalition of radicals, feminists and alternative lifestyle advocates on the left. The polarization was manifest in the popular culture of music, television shows, theatre, dance and films. After Nixon’s resignation in 1974 and the ignominious exit from Viet Nam in 1975, bridges began to come up over the troubled waters.

There are striking similarities between America then and India. Like Nixon, Modi seems to believe in the supremacy of an electoral victory over all matters of law and propriety; he succeeded in polarizing society wherein the “silent majority” of traditional Hindus and the muscular Hindutva minority comprise his mandate and his political strength. He has also made it his mission to spread hatred towards the secular, liberal and westernized segments of society. His distrust for and derision of the media is easily ascertained by a search on YouTube.

In the end, Modi’s assumption is that with an unassailable majority in Parliament, he can afford to ignore the swirling controversies. The “limited hangout” defence comes easy to him. He has used it in Gujarat: instead of answering for the massacre of hundreds of Muslims in 2002, he polarised the state and made it about Gujarati pride and then segued to good governance.

Modi commands an unshakable majority in Parliament but with just 31 per cent of the vote. He will have to answer to the 69 per cent for the transgressions of his minions and to the chunk of the 31 per cent that voted for his promise of development and good governance he made on the campaign trail. There will be more disclosures, more fires to put out: a Pankaja Munde here, a Smriti Irani there; a Rohini Salian, an L K Advani, a Yashwant Sinha…this is just the beginning.

Postscript: The “limited hangout” defence failed. On August 9, 1974, President Richard Milhous Nixon became the first president in the history of the United States to resign. Several of his aides went on to serve jail sentences

Rajiv Desai is Chairman and CEO, Comma Consulting, a public affairs consulting firm. He was also a member of the media advisory board of the Indian National Congress

BJP/NDA’s R.K. Puram Budget

R.K. Puram is a determinedly downmarket neighbourhood in south-west Delhi. It is chock-a-block with government colonies for middle-level bureaucrats, schooled in a cruel education system that strips young people of hope and ideals, and transformed into cynics who have held the economy to ransom.

These housing settlements are pleasant enough with shady trees and large green spaces. The apartment buildings, however, are a different story. Built by the Central Public Works Department, they are shoddy and ugly; islands of inferior design in an otherwise pleasing environment. Decent homes in the neighbourhood would sell for upward of several crores… but the colonies of R.K. Puram are free of price and value, odious abodes for dyspeptic babus who worship at the altar of mediocrity.

R.K. Puram sprang to mind as I reviewed the Union Budget 2015-16 presented on February 28 to Parliament and the nation by the absolute-majority BJP-led NDA government. In his budget speech, finance minister Arun Jaitley presented us with an economic R.K. Puram, dressed up with rhetoric and intention but tacky, grotesque and dysfunctional in content. Its bottom line: higher taxes, greater government spending and significant tax policy obfuscation to keep everyone guessing.

Not particularly known for his grasp of economics and innocent of a sense of irony, the finance minister said in his budget speech: “It is quite obvious that incremental change is not going to take us anywhere. We have to think in terms of a quantum jump.” This resolute intention apart, the rest of his speech was devoted to what might best be described as bureaucratic tinkering such as raising taxable income deductions, easing resolution of commercial disputes and what have you. All the words, sentences and paragraphs of the speech failed to obscure the reality that it’s a bureaucrat’s budget.

Claiming credit for the introduction of a constitutional amendment to facilitate a nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST), the finance minister appeared to sweep under the rug his party’s opposition to GST when the Congress-led UPA first proposed it.

Likewise in the debate over the land acquisition Bill, disingenuously protesting against the opposition’s “politics of obstruction”, Jaitley seems to have conveniently forgotten that his party had supported the UPA-sponsored land Bill while opposing everything else including permission to multinational insurance firms to increase equity in joint ventures. During the UPA’s two terms, the disruptions forced by the BJP were frequent, extended and virtually paralysed Parliament. Now the party espouses both proposals.

The finance minister’s innocence of irony was matched by his lack of grace. This was abundantly evident in his ad hominem attack on the previous government, castigating its ten-year tenure as a “scam, scandal and corruption raj”. These are not only the finance minister’s failings; almost no one in his party has the sensibility or moderation required of statesmanship.

To return to the budget proposals, several of them stand out for their potential to hurt the economy.

First, the increase in service tax from 12.23 to 14 percent. Though the increase is less than two percent, its impact on small and medium service businesses — which employ a large percentage of the country’s workforce — is likely to be huge. To deliver its promised achche din (“happy days”), the government needs to provide such businesses access to credit and tax breaks to smooth their cash flow. They are the backbone of the economy, the key to the much-hyped ‘development’ agenda. The higher service tax proposed in the budget will make it progressively harder for service businesses to function. That’s not all: the proposed increase in service tax remains in suspense because the government is yet to issue a notification.

The second damaging proposal is to allow the fiscal deficit to balloon to 3.9 percent of gross domestic product instead of restricting it to 3.6 percent as targeted by the previous government. The finance minister seems to have thrown fiscal rectitude to the winds and has, perhaps unwittingly, endorsed the waste and redundancy that are hallmarks of the bureaucracy. It entails higher government borrowing that will crowd out the private sector investment proposals — a mix of equity and crucial debt component.

Third, the assumptions trumpeted in his speech are at best fantastic. The notion that economic growth will exceed eight percent next year is simply outlandish. So is the minister’s assertion that the global economic situation has turned adverse. On the contrary, as former prime minister Manmohan Singh pointed out, external factors are favourable for India to chart a high-growth orbit once again. The global economy is steadily improving led by the US and Germany and assisted by a stable China. The hurdles are all internal and if this government was serious, the budget could have focused on addressing them. Instead, the finance minister’s speech seems to have been caught between hype and bureaucratic tinkering, a sure sign of imminent policy paralysis.

(An edited version of this post will appear in http://www.educationworld.in, April 9, 2016.)

The RK Puram Budget

RK Puram is a determinedly down-market neighborhood in southwest Delhi. It is chockablock with government colonies for middle-level bureaucrats, schooled in the cruel education system that strips young people of hope and ideals; the cynics who have held the economy to ransom.

These housing settlements are pleasant enough with lots of shady trees and large green spaces. The apartment buildings, however, are a different story: built by the Central Public Works Department, they are shoddy and ugly; islands of bad design in an otherwise nice environment.

RK Puram sprang to mind as I reviewed the 2015 budget of the absolute-majority BJP government. In his budget speech, the finance minister presented us with an economic RK Puram, dressed up in rhetoric and intention but tacky, grotesque and dysfunctional in content. Bottom line: higher taxes, higher government spending and significant tax policy obfuscation to keep everyone guessing.

This budget is especially prone to criticism because the government leadership has mindlessly hyped its sermon of happy days: a new and improved “India Shining” with gleaming highways, bullet trains, smart cities, soaring stock markets, a tsunami of foreign investment, gainful employment and “gili-gili,” a waving wand to banish the reality of blight and deprivation. Instead, as the first major government initiative, not counting all the diplomatic event management, the budget is seriously disappointing.

The finance minister, not particularly known for his grasp of economics and somewhat shorn of a sense of irony, said in his budget speech, “It is quite obvious that incremental change is not going to take us anywhere. We have to think in terms of a quantum jump.” The rest of his speech was devoted to what might best be called bureaucratic tinkering such as raising deductions in taxable income, easing resolution of commercial disputes and what have you. All the words and sentences and paragraphs of the speech could not obscure reality: it was a bureaucrat’s do-nothing budget.

Claiming credit for the introduction of a Constitutional amendment to facilitate a nationwide Goods and Services Tax (GST), the finance minister appeared to sweep under the rug, his party’s opposition to GST when the UPA first proposed it.

His was also the voice that could be heard in the recent Parliamentary debate over the land acquisition bill, proclaiming disingenuously against the Opposition’s “politics of obstruction.” He seemed to forget that his party had supported the UPA-sponsored bill while opposing everything else including the proposal to allow global retail chains to set up operations in India and the one to permit multinational insurance firms to increase stakes in their joint ventures. During the UPA’s two terms, the disruptions forced by the BJP were frequent, extended and virtually paralyzed Parliament.

The finance minister’s lack of a sense of irony was matched only by his lack of grace. This was abundantly evident in his ad hominem attack on the previous government, calling it a “scam, scandal and corruption raj.” These are not just the finance minister’s failings; almost no one in his party has the sensibility or moderation that is required of statesmanship.

To get back to the finance minister’s budget proposals, several of them of them stand out for their potential to hurt the economy:

First, the increase in service tax from 12.23 to 14 percent. Though the increase is less than two percent, its impact on small and medium service businesses is likely to be huge. In its search for “happy days,” the government needs to give such businesses access to credit and tax breaks to smooth their cash flow. They are the key to “development,” the backbone of the economy. The budget proposals will simply make it harder and harder for them to function. That’s not all: the proposed increase in service tax remains in suspense because there has been no notification by the government.

Second, the proposal to allow the fiscal deficit to balloon to 3.9 percent of Gross Domestic Product instead of the restricting it to 3.6 percent targeted by the previous government is troubling. The finance minister seems to have thrown fiscal rectitude to the winds and has, perhaps unwittingly, endorsed the waste and redundancy that are hallmarks of the bureaucracy.

Third, the assumptions trumpeted in his speech are at best fantastic. The notion that economic growth will exceed eight percent next year is simply outlandish. So is the minister’s assertion that the global economic situation has turned adverse. On the contrary, as former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pointed out, external factors are favorable for India to chart a high-growth orbit once again. The hurdles are all internal and if this government was serious, the budget could have focused on addressing them. Instead, the finance minister’s speech seems to have been caught between hype and bureaucratic tinkering, a sure sign of the policy paralysis to come.

(An edited version of this post will appear in Education World, April 2015.) 

  

BBC Storyville India's Daughter

My Friend, Prakash Desai

Too Precious to Die

Prakash Desai basically knew everything and everyone accepted this…until I came along one cold February evening in 1977. He was  a distant cousin, who staked a claim on me as an annoying older brother; a Nehruvian socialist, who believed in the commanding heights because he hated private enterprise; a member of Baroda’s famed Renaissance Club that had little do with the arts and culture but more inclined to the worldview of Lenin and Stalin. He was as amazing a mass of contradictions as his beloved higher Hinduism he wrote copiously about.

I challenged him on all counts and he patiently heard me out, only to yell at me about my capitalist mindset and, he probably died on January 6, 2015, believing I hated the poor. “Not the poor, Prakash,” I would say to him of an evening in his study or in my garden in Chicago, “but against poverty that your stupid statist system created and thrives on.” He would fly into a rage, “Mr Rajiv Desai, you are in the presence of an advocate of compassion and equity; take your goddamn capitalism and shove it.”

“OK, Prakash,” I would say, “Lighten up. Let’s just have another drink.”

For all of that, he was a bon vivant. In his bar, there were the finest wines, the choicest whiskeys and he mixed a phenomenal vodka martini. Always well dressed, perfectly trimmed beard and thinning hair ever since I knew him, he was charisma personified. He was always Olivier while I was looking at Sean Connery. He was not always but sometimes infuriated when I teased him about taking the boy out of Baroda but never the Baroda out of the boy.

Baroda was where we both went to school ten years apart; he embraced it while I was much more about Bombay, where I grew up and Surat, where I was born. It also happened he was related to me through my father’s family of traditional middle-class Gujarati Nagar Brahmins from Baroda; my Surat connections were wealthy influentials that participated in the freedom movement and had national and international connections. Plus, as I told him, our (Surat) food was French to my paternal family’s (Baroda) food that was Slavic by comparison. “And in any case, Prakash, I’m from Bombay where we were urban sophisticates.”

For 38 years Prakash and I jousted on ideology and lifestyle. He had friends who would create and spread stories about me. He even co-opted not just my wife but also my mother and her sister. “Prakash is right,” my immediate family members would say, “Rajiv is very ‘aristocratic’ in his demeanor.” He also said I was more a Christian than a Hindu. In that sense, he was a Gandhian satyagrahi because he knew how to provoke.

It took me a few years to realize that he was a keen psychiatrist because he analyzed my every response to conclude that I was alienated from my father’s family, from my Nagar Brahmin origin and from the larger Hinduism into which I was born. He also said I embraced Western thinking at a very tender age because of the Theosophists on my mother's side of the family, Surat and Bombay. And therefore married a Goan Christian woman from Ahmedabad. Gujarat.

In my view, he was a phenomenal psychiatrist with an amazing understanding both of the body and the mind. When we were not fighting ideological battles late into the evening, he laid out in crystal-clear terms the sources of my health and conduct on any given issue, personal or professional. He always had not just time but insight…he almost always hit the nail on the head.

I still remember vividly one evening four years ago when my mobile phone rang in the pub at the Delhi Golf Club. I was with friends and excused myself to walk out to the deck. It was Prakash. He told me he was diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. I was benumbed. As I went back to our table, my friends saw there was something wrong. I told them.

Fast forward to January 6 this year: my mobile phone rang; it was my friend Satu, who the world knows as Sam Pitroda. I was at a friend’s place to dinner. I walked out of the room. Satu said two words: “Prakash died.” I said I’d call him back and collapsed into a paroxysm of grief and tears. It was not unexpected, of course but nevertheless it shattered my consciousness. Just as I did four years ago, I walked back in a zombie state.

How can a friendship disappear…just two phone calls?

Prakash, as I began, knew everything…the mind, the body, the spirit. Now he’s gone and all I have from him is a millionth of his knowledge, a micron of his wisdom. What I do have is some understanding of his compassion and his mighty humanity. Everyone should be so lucky…to know Prakash was to get to know yourself and the world.

Farewell, my philosopher king!

Tata Sky Scam

Just recently, one Tata Sky connection went on the blink...the remote stopped operating the set-top box. Their service guy came and in a minute told mw the remote "is broken." He pulled out a new remote and offered to sell it to me for 600 rupees cash. I asked him if it was this was a legitimate transaction. He fled.

Next day, another guy showed with a remote and I accepted it. He said my account would be charged 250 rupees. Next day, same thing happened to aconnection in another room. The old non-HD remote simply stopped working. However, in both cases, I found the set-top box could be operated by my HD remote. I have another non-HD connection in my study with the old remote. I checked it to find it isn't working.

When I complained to Customer Care, I was given the run-around and was left holding the phone for ages.Same ol', same ol'.

What a scam! Deactivate old non-HD remotes and open up new revenue streams. 

How low can an Indian business stoop? When business strategy devolves on fleecing customers, what can a customer say?

Rote and prejudice: A broken system

The Tragedy of Higher Education

Despite its huge 1.25 billion population, India wasn’t able to win even one gold medal at the London Olympics 2012. Not a single Indian university is ranked among the Top 200 in the World University Rankings 2013-14 league tables of the highly-respected rating agencies QS and THE. Why? Because both sports and education are dominated by government. Regardless of which party is in power, government control breeds mediocrity. The legions of officials, clerks, and other functionaries who form the massive government machinery are products of the rote and prejudice system that is, was, and unless there’s radical reform, will remain in higher education. 

All talk of global success stories scripted by individuals or diasporas are about marginal phenomena. India’s 735 universities are the dysfunctional crown of an education system which starts with mass illiteracy and progresses to schools without teachers, irrational quotas, poor matriculation rates, and impossible college admissions. As such, there’s no room in the universities for the poor even if they surmount the odds against graduating high school. Those who can afford to, skip Indian universities altogether: they enroll in US, British or Australian universities on the strength of money power or skill in bagging scholarships. The plain unvarnished truth is that Indian higher education institutions simply cannot cope with 21st century demands such as innovation, creativity, ethics, and wisdom.
The current system churns out job seekers, careerists and political cannon fodder. Simultaneously, consumers — students and parents — regard education as a stepping stone to jobs, income, wealth and influence. They seldom make qualitative demands, just a ticket to rewards. They are preoccupied in the first instance with securing admission; then coping with irrelevant syllabuses; managing inadequate teachers and the gargantuan academic bureaucracy and finally confronting the uncertainty of placement.
How have things come to such a sorry pass? At the root is the firm conviction of the academic bureaucracy that higher education for the middle class is more important than universal literacy; the belief that the poor need roti, kapda, makaan and that the government’s role is to create schemes and programmes which provide these basic necessities. The provision of universal primary education could have empowered the poor, equipping them with the basic literacy, skills and tools to earn their livelihood. Instead, the bureaucracy seems to have persuaded the political leadership that paternalistic policies of handouts and subsidies are more appropriate for lifting the illiterate masses out of poverty.
In the education sector, you need only to look at the acronyms of regulators to understand how completely the bureaucracy controls it: NCERT, AICTE, NCTE, SCERT, UGC, ICCSR… and what not! These opaque organisations set syllabuses according to the flavour of the political season; oversee staff recruitment respecting quotas; conduct examinations and hand out grades based on arbitrary invigilation. The academy itself — teachers — has become a unionised anachronism and its young wards unmotivated and cynical. Campuses are dominated by the crowd and stormy wings of established political parties. The best students who discern the Potemkin nature of Indian education hold their breath until graduation and take the first flight out. The ones left behind scramble for admission into the fiercely competitive universe of engineering, medical and management studies. Others flounder, begging for jobs, beseeching influentials, and mostly end up in government employment. The vast majority join the ranks of the jobless, hanging around at street corners, or in the offices of political parties looking for trouble and opportunity.
The first flush of liberalisation presented an incredible opportunity for semi-educated youth from the country’s rundown universities and high schools. Domino’s Pizza, KFC, McDonalds, PVR and a huge universe of global consumer firms offered jobs and training to youth from families without the connections to get them government jobs. The benefits of reform also extended to upper middle class youth who found administrative and professional jobs in large international firms which established businesses here, and later in the domestic corporate sector that had to gear up to meet the competition of multinationals. But the major enemy of reform — the bureaucracy — resuscitated old colonial-era laws to halt liberalisation. The media focussed on larger issues and completely ignored the fact that bureaucratic and industry lobbies have conspired to derail reform in crucial infrastructure, financial, and other sectors. Political parties, especially of communal and casteist complexion, exploited this to their advantage.
This mess is not of today or yesterday; it harks back to the dawn of independence. An all-controlling bureaucracy, ignorant and venal politicians, and apathetic citizens combined to form a system susceptible to extremist appeals. The question has always been about leadership, never about its quality… and so any Tom, Dick, and Harry can aspire to the top slot, given a slick propaganda campaign run by global communication agencies.

This article appeared in the November 2014 issue of  Education World.

Looking Back in Anger

Bigots and busybodies looking back in anger Candidates for the Civil Service Aptitude Test (CSAT) conducted by the Union Public Service Commission rocked the national capital with vociferous protests for two weeks in July-August demanding changes in the test format. They said CSAT was biased in favor of students from English-medium schools and those who came from ‘technical’ streams of learning such as engineering. In 2011, the commission introduced CSAT to test the analytical and comprehension capabilities of aspirant civil servants rather than mere ability to memorize. The test determines whether a candidate is qualified to write the main examination. Billed as the toughest in the world, the UPSC’s civil service entrance exam attracts more than 500,000 aspirants each year of whom a mere 0.01-0.03 percent make the grade and go on to join the premier civil services such as the IAS, IFS and IPS. There is no more elite corps in the world than of the Indian civil services. The agitators’ demands were based on a simple fact: analysis and comprehension are far removed from rote learning encouraged by the school education system. As such, CSAT became a formidable obstacle for them. The ability to define, categorize and organize requires considerably greater learning than to regurgitate memorized material. In the traditional education system where the image of a Brahmin mugging slokas exerts powerful influence, cognitive testing based on reason and comprehension is a great disrupter. Fastening on the emotive language divide in the country, the agitators cleverly argued that CSAT is loaded against Hindi-belt candidates. For decades, Hindi heartland political leaders have not pushed just Hindi as the medium of instruction and government transactions, but also the end of English usage. Some states like Gujarat and West Bengal went to ridiculous lengths to make regional medium education mandatory. Millions of young Gujaratis and Bengalis suffered over the decades. Any wonder then that these two states became harbingers of the most regressive ideologies and chauvinist worldviews? Advocates of Hindi and regional languages harbor a misbegotten sense of victimhood, spilled over from the colonial experience. For them the language and culture of the minority of English-speaking people is alien to the values and practices of “the real India'” i.e Bharat. Simultaneously, this ‘alien’ culture still enjoys a colonial-style advantage six decades after the end of British rule. What’s left unsaid is that English language learning has not only remained alive but has morphed into an aspiration for India’s growing middle class, chasing jobs and career opportunities around the world. This established trend can only grow as India begins to engage more actively with the global economy. Modern history is littered with victims of the India-Bharat divide promoted by language chauvinists, bigots and busybodies. After India won independence in 1947, these elements made a virtue of denying the nation’s British heritage and looking back in anger to a pre-colonial golden age. Of late, mindsets have turned atavistic and are beginning to hallucinate about a mythical Hindu age that Muslim invaders had allegedly obliterated and subverted. John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger was a path-breaking English stage and screen production of the 1950s. It dealt with the longing in a once-mighty Britain for its glorious past. In the newly emergent post-World War II era and the loss of its colonies, some British people experienced remorse because “everything’s changed” while others rued that “everything’s remained the same.”  This syndrome is now sweeping india as various crackpots and extremists keep popping up with increasing frequency making absurd claims and bigoted statements about the glory of a mythical past on the one hand, and victimhood on the other. The inter-play between these emotions defines the current political agenda. Meanwhile important issues — education, healthcare, roads, water, transport, law and order — suffer neglect. By pandering to such agitators, governments and political parties are mindlessly promoting a culture of entitlement in which no judgments can be made about individual capability and proficiency. Like its evil twin, reservation, entitlement weakens an already frayed social fabric. Governance is too much to expect in these circumstances, and policy making is held captive in the dungeons of do-nothing. People start to believe that any achievements will result only from agitation and group solidarity, influence-peddling and corruption. What the CSAT candidates protested, political parties supported, and the government accepted the strange proposition that the entrance into the civil services is less about merit than ‘fairness’ to those who see themselves as disadvantaged. It seems self-defeating to strike at the heart of government, its civil services, with a contradictory demand to change everything and to change nothing. As such, the future looks bleak for the ‘steel frame’ services which are already at sixes and sevens, measuring up to the demands of a modernizing state and the aspirations of an increasingly assertive citizenry. This article appeared in the September 2014 issue of  Education World.

A Hard Day's Life

Not Linear but Disruptive

My Dad died, a victim of Alzheimer’s as did his Dad before that. Both lived well into their 90s. I have wondered all these years if the same thing would happen to me. I’m not sure I am condemned to Alzheimer’s; what I do know is I keep meticulous records about everything that happens in my life. I am a journalist and a journalism teacher, so I have notes…some old-style, on pen and paper, though increasingly on laptops and phones.

But that’s a digression. What I want to share is a concern that Alzheimer’s is a little understood condition. I refuse to call it a disease because there is simply no treatment. My intuitive grasp of the condition is it means you have no shared memories and therefore no friends or relatives. As such, the Alzheimer’s patient is denied nostalgia.

I am a huge fan of nostalgia and my life has been spent tracking and befriending people I knew as a child and beyond. So the initial rush was fine…we met or conversed on email and various other social media platforms…and I, for one, was delighted. In many cases, we even had several occasions to meet personally. Then reality set in…after the initial rush, the connect fizzled. Nostalgia is like a third-world currency…it fades soon enough.

After all these years, when I made it a mission to get in touch with old friends, I have come to realize a drink and dinner is great fun with people from the past…there is really nothing beyond that. So you share the old school tie, the shared neighborhood and the pranks and some old stories that can be told once, maybe twice. Beyond that, there is no connect…everyone has their own lives

So fine, nostalgia can only go far. But it’s made me think…when I was born in Surat, then lived on Juhu Beach, Warden Road, Byculla Bridge, Ahmadabad, Baroda, Athens, Cincinnati, Chicago and then finally Delhi…all these lives I have tried to understand as seamless…a temporal progression…as in the history books we were taught in schools. Perhaps they weren't.

I now have come to understand that continuum is simply a timeline construct put on our lives. Fact is in Surat, Bombay, Ahmadabad, Baroda, Athens, Cincinnati, Chicago, I lived in different worlds. Increasingly, I am beginning to challenge the connective geometry of space and time. In the end, these phases of my life may not be a natural progression. These experiences are not unified in a single historical narrative; that life may be an agglomerate of experiences that have nothing to do with each other and that you are the only common factor.

Changes that take place in a human life, both internally and externally, are huge. I. for one, seem to have nothing in common with the four-year-old growing up on Juhu Beach. As such, our lives are really not a smooth progression from birth to death.

Not to get too esoteric, the point I want to make is all of us have disjointed lives, especially those who have the chance for mobility. I can remember going to a village in Gujarat with my friend from Chicago. What was most interesting he met a friend in the bazaar, who ran a kiosk and offered us a free Coke. This is someone he grew up with; my friend went on to become an influential doctor in Chicago but his buddy, like his family before him, still ran a small shop…the past (my friend’s) running into the present (his friend’s); different as night and day; today and yesterday.

I am no philosopher but I am increasingly convinced that work needs to be done to question, if not challenge, the assumption that individual lives are a serial progression from birth to death. My life from the 1950s onward has changed so dramatically, it takes old songs, movies and photographs to make it hold together.

The idea that it is a single life, a single person that journeys from birth to death is worth questioning. The links between the various phases are man-made; there is continuity in empirical terms. Just looking at my own experiences, I can see that a linear framework does not adequately describe my life.

In the decades I have lived on this planet, I have seen changes from where I wrote on a slate with chalk to a holder dipped in ink to a fountain pen to a ballpoint pen to a typewriter to a computer to a phone; from 78 rpm records on a crank-operated record player to an Ipod; from copious “hard copy” files to cloud storage.  The changes are disruptive in the sense they presaged completely new ways of doing things.

Disruptive defines, in my mind, the new understanding of my life. Everything changes…you can say it was thus in the 1950s, 1960s et al. Aside of my own memories, I find no connect between the guy who ran around on the beach and the guy who shivered in the Chicago cold and the guy who now battles life in Delhi.

Why the Congress Party was destroyed

It’s a bit of a long story, so you will have to bear with me.

In November 1981, I met Rajiv Gandhi, who had just given up his job in Indian Airlines because he had “to help Mummy” somehow. I lived in the US then but managed to get an interview with him. On a crisp November afternoon, my first-ever trip to Delhi; I walked into One Akbar Road.

The meeting was set for 2 pm. I waited in the outer office for a few minutes. He came out wearing a blue-checked shirt and the most perfectly-tailored blue jeans I’d ever seen. Used to buying jeans from the racks of Levi stores, I was struck…what a perfect fit!

“Hi,” he said. It was the beginning of a relationship that eventually brought me back to India after spending the most part of the 1970s and 1980s in the US. We became good friends. In 1987, when he came to the US, I met him.

“So are you a millionaire?” he asked me.

“Huh?” I responded.

“Well, you come to Delhi so often. Just come back and stay,” he told me.

So we moved lock, stock and barrel to Delhi in December 1987.

He was the Prime Minister then and I was giddy at 38 years of age to have unfettered access to the Prime Minister of India. Over the years, he was good to me, taking me on trips abroad and in India on his prime ministerial plane. I saw the world and India from rarefied heights.

And there were more such amazing privileges, including meeting world leaders, being personally introduced to them by India’s dashing new Prime Minister: Ronald Reagan, Hafez Assad of Syria, big guns in Germany, France, Hungary, Pakistan, and the Soviet Union.

Heady times for a 40-year old.

Two decades later, I sit and worry that the saffron party with an absolute majority might make life difficult for me and my family. As a Gujarati, I never bought into Narendra Modi’s impressionist painting of Gujarat as some sort of an El Dorado. And have said so in the newspapers and on television.

Should the new dispensation seek to hound opponents, I am a sitting duck
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But what is sad, and which explains why they were destroyed, is the Congress, in the past year, has practiced what a perceptive journalist called “bad faith politics.” The leadership remained inaccessible, surrounded as they were by the palace guard.

From 1997 through 2004, I met Mrs Sonia Gandhi regularly, sometimes even every day, not for any political purpose but simply for professional inputs on how to run an election campaign. She put me in charge of the advertising campaign and at my instance, set up a media committee to address the editorial part of the print media. Later, when television came to the fore, I persuaded Mrs Gandhi to revamp the press conference room into a television-friendly venue.

We struggled through losses in 1998 and 1999. In 2004, I thought I was in the thick of things until some Congress apparatchiks orchestrated a coup to take over. In the American way of saying things, I was shafted.

Even after the 2004 verdict in favor of the Congress, I insisted that that the BJP lost not because of its “India Shining” campaign but because of abundant evidence of bad governance, including the idiotic nuclear blasts in 1998 and the Pramod Mahajan machine of corruption.

The apparatchiks convinced Mrs Gandhi that a “pro-poor” policy was the lesson learned from the 2004 victory.

After that, the Congress lost the plot. Instead of capitalizing on the gains of UPA policies in their first term, they began this errant, arrogant program brought in by Rahul Gandhi, who the apparatchiks saw as their ticket to power for the next decade or more, given he was young.

Trouble was Mr Gandhi brought into his team, bright young sparks from Ivy League universities who had a post-modern view of the world. Imposing policies such as the food security bill, the tribal rights bill, the land acquisition bill that won kudos on highfalutin campuses the world over, Mr Gandhi and his team thought India’s pre-modern voters would buy it and vote the Congress to power again.

It is true that in the West, there is growing intellectual movement against corporate capitalism and questions are being asked the motives and practices of large corporations. In bringing such post-modern issues to the election campaign against the simple message of aspiration Mr Modi purveyed, Mr Gandhi now presides over the ruins of the 130-year old Indian National Congress.

Mr Gandhi and his Ivy League acolytes have presided over the utter decimation of the Grand Old Party founded by Allan Octavian Hume in December 1885.

A New Narcissism

The Culture of Righteousness

Oh the irony! 

Delhi’s Khirkee village sprawls across the street from the Saket malls, with their seductive offerings of consumerist dreams. Khoj, an exciting arts collective, is located there and most of the artists and writers who come there share an outspoken disdain for the malls across the street.

Khoj attracts creative people from all over the world. They are as far removed from its location as the people who shop in the malls. Both are light years away; the malls, where once inside you could be in any American suburb. Equally, given its cutting edge creative sensibilities, Khoj may well have been in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.

Having known and publicized Khoj for many years and been impressed by its progress, this was my first trip to their newly refurbished quarters. In the event, many years later, we found ourselves in their edgily restored offices in Khirkee, the village where the law minister of the ill-fated government of Arvind Kejriwal, led a raid against the many Africans, who live in this disgusting arrondisement.
 

To get to Khoj, you negotiate the heart-attack traffic near the malls and finally pull into the village, where there are no roads to speak of but there are hundreds of cars, honking and worming their way in a hell-bent-for-leather approach. It has no infrastructure but has the problems of traffic and pollution,

One Wednesday evening, we found ourselves there after a trip that can best be described as appalling. The Khoj property is world class: slick and modern. It is a building that Pradip Sachdeva, a well-known Delhi architect, set up as his office in the 1990s. There’s not much left of his imprint; the Khoj office is interesting still. We learned that the redevelopment was undertaken by a Singapore architectural firm.

The irony doesn't stop there. On the way, the substitute driver, who brought us there, fielded insistent calls from his wife. I heard him say, “Ask the next door neighbor for milk and sugar.” He has a seven-month old child. After his conversation, he turned to me and said, “Please, Sir, can you give me an advance? I have a financial problem.” It made me distinctly uncomfortable to think of our destination and the event we were attending there.

Then we walked into the slick Khoj quarters, there to listen to Ryan Bromley, an academic with an undergraduate degree in international relations from a college in Warsaw, Poland, and a graduate degree from the City University in London in “food policy.”

Bromley’s presentation was titled “Spanish Conceptual Gastronomy: A Curatorial Approach.” He took off from Ferran Adria’s el Bulli restaurant in the Costa Brava region of Spain. The restaurant got varied reviews from people who ate there; many said it was  hard to get a reservation; others could not get over the experimental nature of the chef’s menu. It still started a revolution in gastronomy.

Bromley said molecular gastronomy has its roots in the application of laboratory physics and chemistry to cooking. Cutting-edge concept that it is, the extension from a post-modern science to an avant-garde art form seemed just a bit contrived; it was a bit like witnessing a caesarian birth. I suspect he had to stretch his thesis to accommodate the “artists” who were present there, with little interest in food.

Also haunting and distracting me was the driver’s conversation with his wife. It jarred every sensibility in me and made me much less responsive to the proceedings.I had read lots about molecular gastronomy and even made a laughable attempt some years ago to book a dinner table one afternoon at Alinea, the buzzy Chicago restaurant run by Grant Achatz, who worked with Ferran Adria in Spain.

Back at Khoj, Bromley was joined by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, from the Raqs Collective, a group of creative individuals that has been making waves in Delhi as the 21^st century Bohemians. Sengupta took off into philosophical areas; building on Bromley’s thesis that the Establishment including philosophers, scholars, clerics and sundry disciplinarians provided the historical obstacles to the evolution of gastronomy, referring to sacerdotal strictures against gluttony.

What Sengupta added to the conversation was a wow factor. All the young impressionables had shining eyes as he expounded on philosophy and culture, with perfect sound bites that had the audience reeling with hushed applause at the man’s sweep of western philosophy and Hindu mythology; reminded me of my friend. Ashis Nandy, the rock star of the alternative universe.

In the end, I came away from the Khoj event, troubled. Bromley had some good insights, when it came to new school cuisine. Sengupta was impressive with Wikipedia-style knowledge.. In the "interactive session" that followed, a twenty-something artist talked about her eating only raw food, mostly because she opposed processed food and corporations.That was when we left..

Still it was a good evening. 

My take was very different from the earnest questioner. Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my generation questioned societal norms and pushed for human rights.Christopher Lasch wrote his 1979 classic “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” in which he lashed out against the transformation of  the "Boomer" generation in America into a self-obsessed constituency as it entered its 30s. He deprecated the "pathological narcissism" of young America after the protests, first against the Vietnam War and then against capitalism. Going by the back and forth at Khoj that evening, I can only conclude that we now have in India a culture of narcissism masquerading as righteousness. 

Sadly, the interesting presentation by Bromley on new trends in gastronomy was overwhelmed by the narcissistic righteousness of the audience. Adria was lost as was his concept of molecular gastronomy. Which is what we went there for in the first place.

Capital Chatter

Heard in the Capital...

"The main victim of Modi's goebbelsian propaganda is the candidate himself...his disastrous ticket distribution strategy is based on the assumption that there is a wave in his favor."

Capital Chatter

Heard in the Capital...

"Modi destroyed the BJP; the BJP destroyed his artful campaign."

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.

Read The News…

A Review Essay: India Psychedelic

Disclosure: Sidharth Bhatia, the author of the book, India Psychedelic:  the Story of a Rocking Generation, is one phenomenal friend. His celebrated book is making waves. Many of the bands he’s written about and the circumstances of India in the 1960s and early 1970s, I have a personal experience of…because I grew up in Bombay. And as he says, many of us just wanted out from a hopeless situation. I was certainly one of them: Quit India in the early 1970s to make a life in the USA.

What Sid writes about and clearly declares is about a sliver of the population in the cities he includes. Nice thing he is not apologetic about it. He simply talks about the westernized lot, a segment that was and still continues to be dismissed as somehow not Indian, out of touch with the real India. Fact is they were in touch with the world, which people in the political and bureaucratic regime recognized only in 1991, when India was forced to open up for pecuniary reasons.

Sid’s book, above all, is a story of Bombay’s cosmopolitan culture. Only in that wonderful city you had access to the global mainstream, halting and stilted though it was. Globalization first happened in Bombay. As an example, I grew up in Juhu’s Theosophical Colony, going to a school founded by Maria Montessori, the Italian educationist, whose theories on child development were very influential the world over.

Growing up in Juhu and later in Byculla Bridge, I imbibed Western music. My early memory is of the Doris Day song, “How Much is the Doggie in the Window.” Beyond that, mercifully, there was Bill Haley and The Comets…I saw the film “Rock Around the Clock” at Shree Cinema in Mahim off of Cadell Road; then Elvis and Pat Boone and Cliff Richard. And Tony Brent, the old Byculla boy of Portofino fame.

But this is before Sid’s story, which really begins in 1962 after The Beatles’ first single “Love Me Do” in 1962. I remember going to a movie in Regal Cinema in 1964. The trailer was a short film called “The Beatles Come to Town.” The music seared my teenage soul. Soon after, I went to Rhythm House and asked if they had any Beatles…they didn’t. 

  

The bands that played in Bombay through the 1960s didn't really do the Fab Four…heard more of The Rolling Stones, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Herman’s Hermits, The Animals. Doesn't surprise me…was hard to play The Beatles with their complicated chords and their incredible harmony. Tell the truth…from 1964 to 1967, I never heard a band play The Beatles.

A legendary group in Bombay that Sid mentions is Reaction. One of my drilled-in memories is a plate of “potato chips” (aka French fries) slathered with Dipy’s pumpkin ‘tomato’ sauce and a coke at Venice on any given afternoon...listening to them do The Rolling Stones. All, I may add, was a little more than rupee a piece for the four of us who shared the fries and had individual cokes. We thought we were the cool crew. In the event, as Sid’s book affirms, we were totally that…cool, except we couldn't afford shades.

There is a reference in Sid’s book also to Jimmy Dorabjee. In 1968, I went to Simla with my parents. Didn’t like to go anywhere with my parents except I had never been north and the town, I thought, was cool; it gave its name to the legendary “Beat Contest,” in which selected bands did their stuff and got prizes. Met Jimmy performing at Davico’s, Bob Dylanesque: with shades, denim jacket, a harmonica around his neck and playing Dylan on his guitar. “The Times,” he sang” “are a-changing.”

What I did not know until later was that Simla referred to the cigarette brand, not to the town. In fact, these contests, as Sid writes in his book, were held in Bombay’s Shanmukhananda Hall in the conservative neighborhood of Matunga. I was once part of the audience there and was reminded of it when in a small private university in America I attended a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert a few years later
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In Ahmedabad, in the mid 1960s, there was surprisingly a huge rock scene. Good bands, great music, sad technology. In Baroda, years later, we formed an event management company…as engineering students…that brought the bands from Ahmedabad (surprise!) and made some good money from organizing the concerts. We were four of us…it was the late sixties…and we made more money each event than we got from home in three months.

Beyond that, after I left Bombay reluctantly for Baroda, my girlfriend, now my wife, and I attended jam sessions in Havmor restaurants in Ahmedabad and in Baroda. New Year’s Eve I always went to Ahmedabad to the dance at the Rotary Club Hall where sometimes Scandal, sometimes the Xlents and most times Purple Flower sang.

Finally, for my friend Sid, who wrote this excellent book and made a thought-provoking presentation at the Oxford Book Store in Connaught Place, I want to agree the rock scene in the 1970s was ebullient but grim…peopled as it was by PLUs. My wife asked why there was no reference to Goans rockers in his book. Fact is, and she knows this, the Goans introduced rock music to Bollywood…and in the end made more money than the bands, plus gave us Hindi music to rock by.

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