Can Religions Really Reform?

On 14^th July 1960 a small group of people gathered at the base of the tallest Alpine massif, close to where engineers were carving the Mont Blanc tunnel that connects France with Italy. This group had gathered to witness the “End of the World” which would take place at precisely 1.45 PM.  As the time approached there was a great deal of crying and wailing and someone even blew the last trumpet. A one-time Milanese pediatrician, Elio Bianca, the prophet of this cult, afterwards calmly pronounced: “We made a mistake.” The New York Times carried the news under the headline: “World Fails to End.” This group was not the first, nor will it be the last, to predict the dissolution of the earth. From the time man discovered religion, prophets of all kind have populated this earth, mostly making similar predictions. Religious works have come down through the oral route until the discovery of writing, and were widely circulated following the invention of the printing press. Brilliant minds have engaged themselves in the study of these texts and have used them for making historical pronouncements like the dating of Creation by the redoubtable James Ussher (1581-1656), Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland. A student of Trinity College, Dublin, Ussher was a versatile scholar. Studying astronomy, history, and various sources of biblical chronology, Ussher determined the exact date on which his God created the Earth. His work named Annalis Veteris Testamenti, which calculated the timetable of creation, was published in 1650. It was incorporated in the authorized version of The Bible in 1701, and since then the faithful have been seeing creation through the same religious lens.

Ussher precisely dated Creation to the evening preceding Sunday, 23^rd October 4004 B.C. He also went on to assert that Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise on Monday the 10^th of November in the same year. The poor couple barely managed to stay for just a couple of weeks in the Garden of Eden. He also informs us that Noah’s ark alighted on Mount Ararat on 5^th May 1491 B.C.

It is not my purpose here to single out Judeo/Christianity for continuing to have such obscurantist views on Creation. In fact, the Judeo/Christian world has produced some of the most brilliant original thinkers and experimenters in all fields of science. Yet, in spite of an explosion in scientific investigation especially in the field of geophysics that tells us that our planet could be over 4 billion years old, and that the present configuration of the continents is only the latest of the many worlds that have formed on this earth, there is a large number of people out there who still hold on to similar beliefs as professed by the Rev. James Ussher.

Religion has been used by the powerful to keep the masses subjugated by invoking the wrath of God, filling the minds of the uneducated and the illiterate with fear. Others have been put to the sword, ostensibly for having different views, but actually out of greed for their lands and possessions. The European annihilation of the indigenous natives of the Americas was justified in the name of Christianity, but the motive behind this destruction was nothing but greed for land and gold. The Crusades were also wars fought for plunder, but disguised as holy wars to reclaim a piece of Christian real estate that had fallen into the hands of the believers of a new religion that had sprung up in the sands of Arabia. Islam too has fought its holy wars and hundreds of millions of lives have been sacrificed in its pursuit for glory and hegemony. Even before the advent of Christianity and Islam, there have been holy wars in the name of one God or another. Each one of these ambitious warlords or kings had a God in whose name his armies would march to subdue and conquer nations to satisfy their lust for worldly things.

From time to time, when atrocities in the name of a religion have reached a crescendo, there have been calls from within for a movement to reform it. Almost all religions have gone through this phase. But every reformist movement has ended in splitting a religion into numerous denominations, producing volumes of scriptural texts that lay down the rituals that an adherent needs to follow. The result was not reform but a further fragmentation of people that only gave rise to more confrontation and more violence. We saw it in the Christian world in the bloody wars between the Catholics and the Protestants. Although there is no room for violence in Buddhism and Jainism, yet both these religions have split into sects that prescribe separate rituals and paths towards salvation. Hinduism too has founded a number of philosophical systems and each one has its own defenders.

Islam, a religion that is followed by nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has also split into numerous sects, each one at war with another. The cycle of bloody violence that this fragmentation has started does not appear to have run its course yet. Afghanistan, where according to M. J. Akbar, the Cold War (which he calls the Third World War) ended, has become the land where the seeds of the Fourth World War have been sown. This is a war that is now being waged by the warriors of Islam against the rest of the world. This war has been going on for a quarter of a century now, and there appear to be no signs of it abating any time soon. The unspeakable horror of the massacre of young school children in Peshawar by the Pakistani Taliban was quickly followed by the broad-daylight storming of the Charlie Hebdo office resulting in the cold-blooded murder of journalists, policemen, and civilian hostages. The Boko Haram atrocities in Nigeria and the gruesome beheadings of hostages by ISIS warlords in the Levant have brought about worldwide revulsion and repugnance. Afghanistan continues to receive its daily dose of violence through suicide bombers who think nothing of extinguishing their own lives while bringing death and destruction to hundreds of innocents around them. The ISIS takeover of Syria and the Levant resulted in a massive emigration of civilians from these countries to the West, but along with the refugees the West received a large number of fundamentalists who wanted to convert their host nations to their own culture and religion. Acts of extreme violence are almost a daily occurrence in European countries that have espoused “multiculturalism” as a new credo. Canada is the latest destination for this violence, but its political leadership continues to be like ostriches in the sand. Multiculturalism is nothing but a new form of Ghettoization. It is but natural that all immigrants to a new country seek fellow nationals and try to live side by side with them. There is a certain amount of security in a shared culture, language, race and possibly religion. Ghettoes are born from these environments when the local populations find their presence offensive or provocative and they move away leaving the space for more immigrants to occupy. This is the truth of multiculturalism. There is practically no assimilation, but instead, increased isolation.

When Indians emigrated, not as indentured labour, but for higher education and employment, first to England and then to America and other parts of the Western world, they too lived in similarly ghettoized parts of London, New York, Toronto, and similar cities. But, over a period of time, as they moved up the educational and economic ladders, they spread out over the continents and the countries they had immigrated to. Today most Indians are largely assimilated and integrated in the cultures of the host nations. Is it due to the fact that their Indic culture and civilization is “like the thousand-branched Banyan tree of the Rig Veda, assimilating thousands of diversities into one trunk”?

Recently Saudi Arabia, the official custodian of Islam, publicly executed with the sword, a young woman, Esraa Al-Ghamgham, for speaking against the government. A video depicting this gruesome act has gone viral on social media, and elsewhere. What was her crime besides speaking against the Government? It appears that she was also a Shia by faith, something that is anathema in Sunni Saudi! It is believed that her husband and father have also been taken into custody. Only time will tell what their fate will be! Esraa is not the first victim of a strident Islam that brooks no dissent and uses “extreme prejudice” to eliminate those who are trying to reform its harsh contours. Nor is she likely to be the last. Sunni Pakistan has become a graveyard for the non-Sunnis and followers of other beliefs. The blasphemy law is so drafted that an accused has practically no chance of mounting a defence, and is condemned from the moment an accusation is levelled. Even an internationally respected scientist of the stature of Dr. Abdus Salam, who shared a Noble Prize for Physics in 1979, did not escape the wrath of these obscurantists, for not being a Sunni. Born in a family of Ahmadiyaa Muslims, the headstone on his grave was defaced, erasing the word “Muslim” from it. Ahmadiyyas have been declared as non-Muslims by the Pakistan Government, as per an amendment of the Constitution of that country.

Defaced Headstone of Dr. Abdus Salam's Grave

Protests against these gruesome and inhuman acts continue to remain muted at best. Most of the outrage is found on social media, which does not have the same reach as Television and press. When the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened in Paris, Taslima Nasreen, the Bangladeshi writer living in exile in India, wrote in her blog (Times of India, 13^th January, 2015): “Will gunmen get me too? Ending terror requires that Islam is reformed, modernized.” Another Muslim writer, living under a death threat since 1989, tweeted his solidarity with the French magazine. In a condemnation of the attack Salman Rushdie wrote: “Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.” “Yes, Islam needs to reform,” is the phrase we read, but it is not gathering the momentum it requires to become an international catchphrase. Political correctness, left-liberalism, and communist ideology have aligned with Islamic extremism in the search for votes in democracies. Entrenched cabals, who use religion as a weapon to control the lives and minds of their people, rule the majority of Muslim nations.

The problem is that both Christianity and Islam proclaim that they are the word of God and theirs is the only way to salvation and redemption. Listening to Imran Khan taking the oath as the latest Prime Minister of Pakistan has come as a shocking revelation to many like me. It is available on YouTube and those who haven’t heard it should do so to understand how Islam overrides everything else in that country.

So how does one begin to reform what God Himself is supposed to have said? The conflicts generated by various interpretations given by humans to scripture have only fractured society in mutually exclusive segments, while retaining the core principles or beliefs of a religion. So how and where does one start with reforms? Each interpretation has been an attempt at reform, but we are nowhere near finding a solution to the problem. Various attempts at making a universal religion that would be embraced by all have met with no success. Emperor Akbar had proclaimed his universal faith “Din-e-Ilahi” without it finding any lasting traction. Even godless beliefs like Marxism and Atheism have given rise to despots whose regimes have been as violent and bloody as the followers of some ordained beliefs. Atheists and communists too can be as fanatical in their disbelief as the believers.

The only reform that will be truly meaningful is a complete renunciation of all kinds of religions. But that requires the entire humanity to become saints. Since we know that to be an impossible dream, I suppose the world will go on till the human race doesn’t wipe itself out in an orgy of violence that will extinguish all signs of life from earth. Science tells us that the earth is not cooling as fast as some other planets in the universe because of the presence of radioactive elements. The presence of tectonic plates will continue to create new continental configurations which will break up to form new mountains and oceans, and in some future age, millions or even billions of years from new, a new race of humans may evolve. A future geologist may find fossilized evidence of our existence, but we will have left no trace of our gods, our religions, and our bloody conflicts. Fortunately, for the new humans we will leave no legacy, and hopefully they will not make the same mistakes as us in discovering God and religion.

Vijaya Dar

August 21, 2018

Why Rahul Gandhi would be a greater disaster than Manmohan Singh as PM?

I begin this piece with a quote from the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset, who wrote in “The Revolt of the Masses” that was published in 1929, that “The characteristic note of our time is the dire truth that the mediocre soul, the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be mediocre, has the gall to assert its right to mediocrity, and goes on to impose itself where it can.” When the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the other so-called spokespersons of the Congress keep repeating the mantra that Rahul Gandhi has “outstanding credentials to be nominated” as the Prime Minister of India, it validates Ortega’s observation about the commonplace mind trying to impose a mediocre soul on the country.  What are these outstanding credentials that are being touted by the Congress leaders? Apart from him being born in the Family with its appurtenances of abundant wealth and privilege; as also the fortuitous circumstance of a respected surname, Rahul Gandhi “partially” typifies Ortega’s mass man who “is the self-satisfied specialist in a post-industrial society who knows expertly his own corner of the universe but is ignorant of the rest: a ‘learned ignoramus.’ The mass man is interested in automobiles, anesthetics, and all manner of sundries. And these things confirm his profound lack of interest in civilization itself. For all these things are merely products of civilization and the passion he displays for them makes more crudely obvious his insensibility to the principles which made them possible.” Why “partially?” - because he does not qualify to be called an expert knower of the corner of his own universe. The Congress has only two power centers – and he happens to be one of them. Yet, he comes up, at metronomic regularity, with absurdities that confirm his profound lack of knowledge about anything. Be it the latest allegation against the Modi government on the Rafaele deal with Dassault in France, or the ridiculous question as to why BHEL was not commissioned to manufacture mobile phones. From wanting to see Barack Obama’s bed sheet marked Made in Uttar Pradesh (“I want to see the day when bed sheet used in Barack Obama’s house will have Made in Uttar Pradesh mark,” Rahul Gandhi said in a rally in Ghaziabad during UP assembly elections) to aloo ki factory and aloo se sona, Gandhi displays complete insensibility to that corner of the universe to which he apparently belongs. He fails even by Ortega’s definition of  “a learned ignoramus.” The BHEL absurdity is so beautifully captured in this tweet:

                                           

                                            

Rahul Gandhi does not know what he is expected to do. It seems he is much more comfortable in the role of a vigilante, one of those comic-book superheroes, who suddenly appear on a scene, perform their acts, and vanish into thin air. Whenever some responsibility, like leading the election campaign in a state, has been assigned to him, he has inevitably come a cropper. His academic credentials remain shrouded in mystery and controversy. When Manmohan Singh was appointed as the Prime Minister, a series of e-mails was doing the round of the web highlighting his academic qualifications, calling him the highest qualified Prime Minister in the world. It is a different matter that this highly educated and vastly experienced bureaucrat presided over the most brazenly corrupt and inefficient government in the history of independent India. But, at least, he had a resume that could impress leaders of the international community who would find it hard to deny him an audience. On matters relating to the economy, he would be familiar with all the terminology and jargon that passes for high thinking. Rahul Gandhi, I am afraid, would find it hard to explain the difference between fiscal and revenue deficits.

The shrill Indian media continuously barrages and harangues Narendra Modi and the BJP to explain their visions for the future, deriding them on Swachh Bharat, Go-Rakhsha, Digital India, Make in India, and every other scheme that the Government announces for bringing some equity in the lives of the common people. Modi has not given them the free rides that they had become accustomed to with Manmohan Singh. English language TV channels and newspapers are especially virulent in their unveiled hatred for Modi. Some discredited celebrities have found channels for venting their spleen abroad in such papers as Washington Post and New York Times, in a post-Obama era. These newspapers are equally opposed to both Donald Trump and Modi. Every two-bit anchor feels supremely entitled to roar his or her questions at Modi and the BJP, but when it comes to asking a question of Rahul Gandhi they behave like mice in a biologist’s laboratory. And when it comes to having an audience with the Divine Mother herself, like what happened to Aroon Purie at the India Today conclave, they just curl up and die. This tribe of obnoxious and supremely opinionated news anchors has questions of all and sundry, in pompously named programs like “the nation wants to know” or “left, right, and center” but has no questions for Rahul Gandhi. The electronic media today is increasingly adopting the aspirations of the mob. The mob like the TV camera has no historical memory - it considers only what is within its immediate field of vision, not the complicating facts beyond it. The Economist, in a leading article in its 14^th December 2013 publication headlined “Would Modi save India or wreck it?” wanted “an unambiguous public demonstration that he abhors violence and discrimination against Muslims” as “a bare minimum.” “Otherwise,” the author had the audacity to add, “This newspaper will not back him.” Nowhere have I read that Narendra Modi had requested The Economist to endorse him for the Prime Minister’s post at any time.

One does not have to look too far to see how Rahul Gandhi would perform if he were to become the PM of the country. Just look at the state of Uttar Pradesh, where another scion of a political dynasty had been the Chief Minister for full five years before the people sent him packing rather unceremoniously. Both Rahul Gandhi and Akhilesh Yadav come from almost similarly privileged backgrounds, appear to have similar intellectual capabilities, and have lived lives that require no effort. The British novelist John Fowles, in his book of essays titled “Wormholes” wrote, “A life of entertainment and convenience produces ever-shallower leaders. Nor are such leaders well advised. Such shallow and childlike leaders and advisors would, by the very virtue of their lack of wisdom and experience, eventually commit the kind of ghastly miscalculation that would lead to general catastrophe of some kind.” Countries with young populations are subject to political violence. With Third World populations growing dramatically, and becoming increasingly urbanized, leaders have to become increasingly ingenious in resolving crises that are inevitable due to an ever-increasing demand for basic necessities, jobs and services. They have to have the ability to negotiate with an increasingly complex web of international corporations and markets that are becoming the real arbiters of power in the current world. Jeffrey Sachs, the well-known professor of international trade writes “good government means relative safety from corruption, from breach of contract, from property expropriation, and from bureaucratic inefficiency.” The UPA government, led by the “highest qualified Prime Minister in the World” failed in all the above criteria. What are those “outstanding credentials” that people like Manmohan Singh, Shashi Tharoor, and the rest of the rump that passes for leadership in the Congress party, see in Rahul Gandhi that are, until now, completely hidden from our view? Arthur Koestler writes, “To create innocence, one must have awareness of guilt.” But when the Congress continues to behave without any awareness of guilt, how does it expect to create innocence for its assumed leader?

A captive print and electronic media, a compromised academia, and a plethora of foreign-funded NGO’s that have the mandate to “Break India” along the various fault lines that they think are vulnerable, have taken it upon themselves to prop up this shadow warrior, better expressed as “Kagemusha” by the Japanese, to face the challenge of Narendra Modi and the so-called right wing. I am reminded of Erasmus who had accused the academic mediocracy of “looking in utter darkness for that, which has no existence whatsoever.”

Arthur Koestler, in a paper titled “The Poverty of Psychology” published in 1961, wrote, “The rearguard is still firmly entrenched in university chairs, the editorial offices of technical papers, and other positions of power. In the period of scholastic decline, the orthodox Aristotelians had occupied similar key positions…. ‘They are Folly’s servants,’ declared Erasmus, denouncing the sterile pedantry and grotesque academic jargon of his time.” One wonders how he would react today to the definition of the mediocracy that has taken over most of the “free” academic world.

Robert D. Kaplan”s succinct statement that “avoiding tragedy requires a sense of it, which in turn requires a sense of history” encapsulates the tragedy of the Congress party that has got itself trapped in a time warp where the beginning and the end of everything is contained in the Gandhi surname.

To conclude with another quote from Jose Ortega y Gasset: “An ‘unemployed’ existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.”

Vijaya Dar

August 12, 2018

Reclaiming India from Macaulay’s Legacy

In early 2014, a Hollywood film “The Monuments Men” was released in theatres across India. It was just before the general elections that hopefully, changed the course of Indian history. The film, as reported in the blurbs, was based on the true story of “the greatest treasure hunt in history.” An action drama narrating the heroics of a World War II platoon, headed by George Clooney as Frank Stokes that had been tasked by the US President to go to Europe and rescue the great works of art that the Nazis had stolen during their occupation of France, and shipped to unknown destinations within Germany. Stokes assembles a team of seven art experts, with no military experience: they are museum directors, curators, art historians, who can easily identify a Renoir or a Michelangelo, but will have difficulty in recognizing a weapon. With the masterpieces trapped behind enemy lines and with the Fuhrer having ordered their destruction as the German defences are crumbling, Frank Stokes and his band are involved in a race against time to save from certain destruction a thousand years of culture. With a cast including Matt Damon, Cate Blanchet, and Jean Dujardin (who had earlier won a Best Actor Oscar for “The Artist”), I was expecting a lot from the film. But, while the story held a lot of promise, somewhere George Clooney failed to get his act together as the Director of the film. The narrative is jumpy and whimsical; the pace pedestrian and lacking any sense of urgency or drama. Saving priceless works of art from an implacable enemy is no mean task, but Clooney failed to inject any sense of excitement or adventure in his narrative.

This piece, however, is not a critique of the film or of George Clooney’s rather lacklustre performance as actor-director. It is about, possibly, the only worthwhile quote from the movie’s script. When he gets his team together, Frank Stokes tells his men: “You can wipe out an entire generation, you can burn their homes to the ground and somehow they’ll still find their way back. But if you destroy their history, you destroy their achievements and it’s as if they never existed. That’s what Hitler wants and that’s exactly what we are fighting for.”

That statement, I thought, explained so completely the civilizational predicament India had been going through for over a thousand years. Throughout the history of the occupation of this land by foreign adventurers and imperial powers there have been incidents when entire generations were wiped out; where their homes were burnt to the ground; but as Frank Stokes says, they still found their way back. 800 years of Islamic rule followed by 200 years of British occupation could not destroy the ancient culture of the land, notwithstanding the Aurangzebs and the Macaulays of their times.

Of late there has been an attempt by some anglophiles at resurrecting the reputation of Lord Macaulay, and a speech, which he is supposed to have given in the British Parliament on 2nd February 1835, has gone viral on social media. Macaulay’s statement is printed on the appended clipping from an Indian newspaper that is frequently found navigating the social media currents:

                                      

Research shows that this speech is but a figment of someone’s imagination and cannot be found anywhere among the writings and speeches of Lord Macaulay. One has to just check the Internet to find scores of articles confirming this fraud on the English reading public in India. Macaulay’s contempt for the Orient and its achievements is best summed up in the statement: “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” It was Macaulay who encapsulated Imperial Britain’s policy towards education in India when he said:

“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.”

However, among the British civil servants who came to India as masters, there were quite a few who were intrigued and beguiled by this ancient civilization, and went to great lengths to recover its past that had been covered by centuries of neglect. Sir William Jones, who founded the Asiatic Society in January 1784 and James Prinsep, the decipherer of the Kharoshthi and the Brahmi scripts, (that brought Emperor Asoka’s rock and pillar edicts to life) are, to my mind, two of the most prominent of these Indophiles. Though not entirely free from the prejudices of a Colonial master, especially with reference to William Jones, the Orientalists tried to fabricate an impression that it was Jones who brought learning and letters to the pundits of India. A marble frieze in the chapel at University College, Oxford shows him sitting at a desk, writing on some paper, while three Indian pundits are sitting below at his feet as students would, looking at a closed book, or listening with great attention to what they are being taught.

                                    

The attempts to reinterpret our history that would fit preconceived colonial notions, as averred by the Macaulayists, were thwarted by other Europeans like Charles Stuart (c. 1758 – 31 March 1828) an officer in the East India Company Army, well known for being one of the few British officers to embrace Hindu culture while stationed there, earning the nickname Hindoo Stuart. Unfortunately, those who found much to admire and love in the ancient wisdom of India are not too many, though not quite negligible.

The great Nigerian writer Ben Okri explains this colonial agenda perfectly in one of his most memorable quotes. Okri says: “To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art. Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger. The best writing is not about the writer, the best writing is absolutely not about the writer, it’s about us, it’s about the reader.”

Here, in a very few words, is the entire Colonial agenda, spelt out by one of the great minds of our times.

Macaulay, however, was successful in creating “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” This class included the Nehruvian socialists consisting of Nehru and his followers and the so-called leftists who said that they took their inspiration from the Bolsheviks, but in fact were no better than any other political opportunist looking for a way to climb up the ladder of power and get aboard, what the Washington Post’s India bureau chief, Steve Coll called “The Great Indian Gravy Train.” One would easily be able to recognize these children of Macaulay even in our present times. People like Shashi Tharoor, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Ramchandra Guha, Amartya Sen, Arundhati Roy, Aruna Roy, Shekhar Gupta, etc., are just a handful of names from a passenger list that still tries to ride on this gravy train. By flogging the much-abused word “secular” in their writings these Macaulayists keep misleading the readers just like the others who are communal in concept and represent narrow, sectarian views. Similarly, leaders of political parties started using the word “socialist” while naming their outfits, spouting secular homilies, fooling the masses with soporifics while amassing huge personal fortunes. Once in power, these creations of Macaulay lost no time in “secularising” the state and the system of education. Sanskrit and the classics of Indian literature were no longer prescribed studies in schools and colleges; ancient Indian history became fair game at the hands of committed historians like Irfan Habib, Romilla Thapar, R. S. Sharma, and many more, who were ready to toe the official line in return for positions of prestige and lucrative professional assignments abroad. Education became subservient to vote-bank politics. Pressure groups of all shades came into existence promoting agendas close to one political dynasty or another. Religion and caste were exploited for personal gain while religious conversion suddenly became the chief agenda of many foreign NGO’s working in the country under humanitarian pretexts. There are many “scholars” of dubious distinction who have become willing tools in the hands of these agencies and are actively promoting their agendas. In 2011 Rajiv Malhotra and Arvind Neelakandan, published “Breaking India: Western Interventions in Dravidian and Dalit Faultlines” a book that painstakingly details the international conspiracy aimed at just that: “the breaking of India.”

Today, when I look at the society we have evolved into, it fills me with great despair. In our wholesale adoption of a Westernized lifestyle we have completely lost touch with our traditional culture and history. We have grown into a nation-state that is ashamed of its past, and try to disown most of our traditional learning as folklore, superstition and mythology. Contact with other humans has become minimal as we become mechanized introverts. Our dependence on gadgets for entertainment has replaced field sports, making most of us spectators rather than participants. As contact becomes minimal, hostility fills the vacuum. We are immediately suspicious of strangers and like animals exude a hostile scent when we encounter one. Our tolerance for conflicting views has shrunk and we are ready to explode at the slightest provocation. There is very little sympathy for those who do not come up to our standards, be they intellectual, financial, or physical. Disputes are not resolved with the objective of reconciliation, but for revenge.

It was not so when I was a young schoolboy in Srinagar, Kashmir. Our school syllabus included a study of elementary Sanskrit and textbooks had chapters on the ancient cultural and literary heritage of India. We had teachers who, apart from teaching the prescribed texts, would also remind us of our cultural heritage and impart values consistent with that legacy. A lot of what I learnt in school has stayed with me – a lot more than what I learnt later in college and IIMC. That is not the case today. Education has become a business and profit is the only motive. Teachers have no time to go beyond the prescribed syllabus as most of them are engaged in private tuitions away from their institutions. Most of our graduates and post-graduates today would have been considered illiterate a half-century ago. Yet government statistics would have us believe that a huge pool of talent is being churned out by the system every year.

The exponential increase in crime, the daily news of rapes and murders, the abysmal decline in morals, and the failure of governance, all are indicative of the malaise that has struck the youth of India. We have lost our cultural and historical moorings and are adrift in a sea of corruption. How do we pull back from here? How do we stop the destruction of our achievements and avoid the fate of civilizations that have become extinct? I think the answer lies in the restructuring of our basic education by de-Macaulaying it and introducing young minds to the rich and glorious culture of the land. We need to regain our pride in India and not become a clone of the US. When Narendra Modi, in his first Independence Day speech from the ramparts of the Red Fort in Delhi, spoke about saving and educating the girl child and building millions of toilets, these leftovers of Macaulay’s legacy lost no time in deriding his choice of projects for a country that was supposed to be a powerhouse of youthful energy unleashed by a technology-driven consumer society. But Modi was fully aware of the real challenges that faced India – an India that was not on the screens of the TV sets in urban homes, but appeared to have fallen completely off the radar. Public health; sanitation; smokeless fuel for the millions of kitchens using coal, wood, and other organic materials to burn for cooking; crop insurance; medical insurance; cheap, easy, small loans to energise entrepreneurship; Direct Benefit Transfer eliminating the grasping hands of petty Babus; massive investments in infrastructure; and many other schemes too countless to record here, have been so transformational that four years later today India looks poised to become a 10 trillion Dollar economy in 5 years. Could anyone have even dreamt of such a figure at the end of UPA-II?

The area that appears to have escaped PM Modi’s immediate attention is reform in the education sector. Perhaps he believes that reforms in this sector can wait while the other areas need immediate and quick remedy. Education reform, especially Sonia Gandhi’s regressive RTE Act, is crying for attention, but PM Modi has not so far turned his gaze in this direction. It is possible that he thinks that reforming the education sector is a long-drawn process where results will be seen only after decades. Perhaps by fixing the economy and governance Modi believes he would have earned the right for a second term when he would turn his full attention to fixing the educational system. I hope I am right in both these assumptions!

At the end of the movie the American President asks Frank Stokes if putting one’s life in jeopardy for saving a piece of art was worth it. My answer would have been an emphatic YES!

Vijaya Dar

August 8, 2018