A Practical Man

The eminent 20th century philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein used to cite an anecdote to illustrate the gap between reality and our powers of observation and expression:
An old lady walked up to Mr. Wittgenstein after a lecture to ask him whether he believed that the Earth actually went around the Sun. "I certainly do" Mr. Wittgenstein said " It has been proven by science Madam". "Well" the old lady sniffed "It certainly looks as if the Sun goes around the Earth". " Well Madam" replied Ludwig, "tell me what, in your thinking, should it look like if it is the Earth which is actually going around the Sun?". The old lady walked away in a huff, determined to tell her bridge club about the obnoxious Mr. Wittgenstein.
For the past three months the chatterati in India have endlessly perambulated around essentially one topic:
Is Modi the real deal or is he just the latest carpetbagger to enter the ancient nest of quintessential carpetbaggers that is Delhi?

I cannot pretend to know the truth. And when I once-in-a-while listen to the chatter on TV and at the odd cocktail party I, quietly to myself, recall Wittgenstein's anecdote on perception and observation. Those living in glass houses see only a reflection of themselves.

So is Mr. Modi the real deal? Like I said I do not know. Only time will tell.

But one aspect of him I think I have begun to grasp. Above all he is a practical man.

Only a thoroughly practical man could have given the speech that he gave on the 15th of August. No invocation of the greatness of India. No grandiose schemes. No heavy panting of ideology or idolatry.
Just an agenda setting of stuff that you and me can do: discipline our sons and value or daughters, keep not just our homes but our neighbourhood clean and rise a little bit above our self-interest.

Stuff that our primary school civic sense lessons should have taught us but alas! evidently didn't. It might seem a steep climb from being a nation striving to meet standards of basic civic sense to becoming a nation of world-beaters.

But to the super- practical entity that I think Mr. Modi is, the curve that results from learning to be  a nation of clean cities, towns and villages is steep enough to take us to greater heights. It is the smallest wheel is a geared arrangement that will set the bigger wheel moving.

Think of Modi as a practical man and his politics also falls into place. A superbly practical man will play superbly practical politics, in other words realpolitik. No pussy footing around niceties and reputation.
T
here was one other Prime Minister we had who was. I think, on par with Mr. Modi on being a practical person: Mrs. Indira Gandhi. But she carried the baggage of Fabian, socialist ideology she inherited from her father - an ideology, that like any other ideology, came in her way of being practical in managing the nation's affairs. However her practicality was in full force when it came to her politics. The realpolitik that Mrs. Gandhi played was world class by any standards.

             
                     
      

Macaulay's Children

The chaps who have give us TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) also left us the legacy of Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Lord Macaulay's lasting effect on  Indian society is captured in this extract from his infamous "Minute on Indian Education": 

 "We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population,"  

Can there be a more chilling elucidation of deep colonization?

There is a small and prosperous class of Indians who continue to benefit from Macaulay's vision. There is a Hindi phrase that is rife in India's heartland about such people: "Angrez to chale gaye. Aulad chodd gaye".

The polite translation is "The English left a long ago but left there children behind"" but the translation misses the true color and invective inherent in the Hindi phrase.

As I write this post I am acutely aware that I belong to the tribe of Macaulay's Children. People who owe their station in life partly due to their fluency and proficiency in English. 

My father's English too was good but his deepest expression was in his mother tongue Hindi which he was very good at. He was a private poet and his poetry was in Hindi.

My Hindi alas! is poor. I was schooled in the South where they had long ago decided that when it came to foreign languages they much preferred English to Hindi.
I am still ribbed by my uncles about a letter in Hindi that I, at the age of twenty five, wrote to my grandfather. A few weeks ago I asked my uncle to pull it out of his collection and read it again. Just to check. It was not just bad, it was deeply embarrassing. 

As I grow older and  perhaps wiser, I realize that in gaining all the advantages of English being the language I think in, I have lost immensely.

I had lost the ability to communicate at the deepest level. The ability to communicate to the gestalt around me and perhaps the gestalt within me. Simply put my communication channel is now confined to  a sliver of the society around me and I am condemned forever to seek literary and cultural stimulation in ethos that are in essence alien to my deepest nature.

If I could write in Hindi than perhaps I would be a good writer and go well beyond the stilted efforts that you dear reader, giving in to sporadic bouts of generosity, tolerate. If could write in Hindi than perhaps the books that have been rattling inside my brain and my computer (I am at work on two works of fiction that I have not been able to bring to any sort of satisfactory conclusion for years now) would have found expression driven by a deeper communion with the milieu I live in.
But then again, as far as my writing goes, it might be a case of "naach na jaane angaan tedha" that is "those who can't dance blame the dance floor" or to capture the essence of the saying in the somewhat more straightforward idiom of English "excuses are the last refuge of  mediocrity". Or as my friends in Bollywood would pithily put "Pappu can't dance saala".
Enough said about me.
 Do I have anything to say about the current hullabaloo about the deep set bias in the selection process for the civil services  for not just the language of English but the world view that an education in English entails? Now that is a deep one. Such indoctrination was the intent behind Macaulay's edict and  now six generation later the indoctrination still retains its potency.
I believe there are no shortcuts to producing antidote to such indoctrination. It takes time and an even deeper phenomenon.
Many of us who got into the IITs in the seventies were Macaulay's children. We deprived many a budding genius just through the fact that the Joint Entrance Exam for the IITs those days included a test of English. However despite this test in English there were geniuses who was not schooled in English but who got through because of their immense superiority when it came to maths and physics, the other two JEE subjects and the ability to quickly learn what was needed to past muster in English. And I can wager a substantial sum of money that in the decades of the sixties, seventies and the eighties most IITians who went on to make substantial hardcore contribution in the fields of science and technology were these geniuses who overcame the English handicap and nearly all of Macaulay's children went on to figuratively speaking "sell soap" laying waste our sterling education in science and technology.
A couple of decades ago English was dropped from the JEE. That has brought it it's own set of problems. Now the corridors at IIT are haunted not just by Macaulay's children but also by coaching class superstars whose ability to slog at the coaching classes falls well short of any originality of thought and action.
However the genius still get in and it is still the genius that makes true use of the education. And here to, as in all walks of life, the production and nurture of one genius is enough to justify the existence of thousands of cookie cutter carpetbaggers.
And if real merit finds its way to the IITs than I am sure it finds it way to the IIMs and the civil services.
I believe that the true antidote to any form of indoctrination and injustice is, as it has been through the ages, merit. Real, pure merit. The rest is just one form of injustice and indoctrination replacing another.