Elephant Paradigm , livre ebook
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2002
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145
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Ebook
2002
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Publié par
Date de parution
12 novembre 2002
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789351180234
Langue
English
Publié par
Date de parution
12 novembre 2002
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9789351180234
Langue
English
Gurcharan Das
The Elephant Paradigm
India Wrestles with Change
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
By the Same Author
Dedication
Introduction
Part One: The Temper of Our Times
1. Our Liberating Nineties
2. Understanding Our Times
3. What is Wrong with Our Temper
Part Two: Private Space
4. Laptops and Meditation
5. A Sentimental Education
6. Playing to Win
Part Three: Public Space
7. Learning to Live, Living to Learn
8. The Ambiguous Village
9. To Reform or Not to Reform
10. What Slows Us Down?
11. Making the Nation Competitive
Acknowledgements
Copyright
ALSO BY GURCHARAN DAS
Novel
A Fine Family (1990)
Plays
Larins Sahib: A Play in Three Acts (1970) Mira: Rito de Krishna, translated by Enrique Hett (1971) Three English Plays (2001)
Non-Fiction
India Unbound (2000)
For Manni, Bina, Tutu and Geeta
Introduction
. . . there is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success, more dangerous to carry through than initiating changes . . . The innovator makes enemies of all those who prosper under the old order, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new.
-Nicolas Machiavelli, The Prince , 1513
E ach age has a unique temper, and it seems to reflect the mood and the spirit of the people, especially the young. The mood that is most famous in recent times seems to have belonged to Europe at the end of the nineteenth century when a spirit of intense vivacity-an almost desperate joy in being alive-led to some bold experiments in the arts. That temper came to be called fin de si cle or end of the century and it was a rebellion, in part, against the Victorian middle class morality that Bernard Shaw made famous with great wit.
If I had to define the Indian temper at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and if I went by the newspaper headlines and reports, I would conclude that we lived in pretty dispirited times-a sort of post-reforms, post-Nehru, post-Mandal and post-modern menopause. Its cause seems to be the depressing state of governance in our country. But if one were to pause and reflect, and widen one s horizon beyond current events, one would see in the nineties a revolutionary decade during which we decisively broke with old dogmas and the ancien r gime in significant ways. If I had to give it a name, it would be liberation-the rallying cry of the French Revolution, as it has, not surprisingly, been of mass movements for over 200 years. The difference is that ours has been a quiet revolution-so quiet, in fact, that few have noticed it. I admit the liberating nineties does not have the same zing or style as fin de si cle , but the reality behind it has solid substance, and it is our best guide to understanding the decade.
When we think of revolution we conjure up images of the events in Paris in 1789 or in Russia in 1917, when revolutionaries seized the state in order to change the social order and destroy the existing one. These revolutions were violent and apocalyptic. In the Indian context, however, I refer to profound economic, political and social transformations both within and on the margins of the constitutional framework .
If one is to believe Eric Hobsbawm, the English historian, then the twenty-first century began in 1991 with the collapse of communism and the Soviet Union. In his book, The Age of Extremes, he calls the twentieth century short because it started late in 1914 with the beginning of the First World War and ended in 1991. In contrast to the seventy-seven years long twentieth century, the nineteenth lasted 125 years-from 1798, the year of the French Revolution, to 1914. The year 1991 was also the one that we began our economic reforms in India, and these were part of a liberal revolution that seemed to sweep the world, as country after country began to turn democratic and capitalist. Historian Francis Fukuyama described this movement in grandiose terms as the end of history , and by this he meant that the triumph of democratic capitalism had ended the battle for ideology. With only one superpower, he predicted, the world would become less violent, as people gradually became absorbed in the peaceful pursuit of the middle class life.
If one accepts Hobsbawm s formulation, then our decade of the nineties was an especially significant one, and as the first decade of the twenty-first century, it might tell us something about our future. As I have said, what happened in India in the nineties was revolutionary, although it did not make the noise that accompanied the 1919 or the 1789 upheavals. Like our struggle for Independence in the first half of the twentieth century, it was non-violent. In this silent revolution there were deep changes in our society. More important, there were mental changes as the nation s world-view began to change.
Such was our optimism in the early days following the 1991 economic reforms that many thought that our moment in history had finally arrived. We felt that we had the same sense of possibilities as our parents did in the early fifties. We believed that by dismantling the old socialist institutions we would be economically free and eventually overcome our degrading poverty in the same trusted way as the West had over the past hundred years and East Asia in the last quarter of the twentieth century. We began to look forward to the day, sometime in the first half of the twenty-first century, when half our country would turn middle class. Our cheerful confidence during this post-modern decade harked to the hopeful modernist tradition of the eighteenth century Enlightenment in Europe, which had taught us the concept of progress and the possibility of change for the better. We felt our world was turning rational as more and more countries became market-based democracies. We might not approve of globalization on aesthetic grounds, but it was unquestionably a powerful force that could lift our economy and the poorest with it.
Ten years later, at the beginning of the new century, this mood has turned sober, as the reforms are stuck and the economy has slowed. After growing at an average 6.8 per cent a year for four years after the reforms, it had slowed down to 5.4 per cent in the last four years of the decade. But what causes the greatest anxiety is the appalling state of day-to-day governance. Something has clearly gone wrong. Were we over-optimistic? Were the new ideas in themselves wrong? As the decade wore on, more and more people seemed to agree that we needed to enhance the sphere of individual freedom at the state s expense, dismantle the socialist institutions of licence and inspector raj, and re-focus the state on the basic functions of governance and building human capital. We have also realized that our biggest failure over the last fifty years has been of administrative and institutional incompetence and our inability to implement rather than of ideology.
Moreover, the growing consciousness of religious identity and the rise of aggressive nationalism in the nineties adds to our unease. We had been warned of it by Samuel Huntington, who had predicted precisely this coming de-secularization of the world in his provocative book, The Clash of Civilisations. But Jawaharlal Nehru had bequeathed us a cosmopolitan attitude-that all human beings were equal and all differences of colour, caste and religion were superficial and had little impact on the human capacity for living the good life. Now Hindu nationalism seemed to challenge these ideals. Nationalism might have had a place in the first half of the twentieth century, when we were fighting for Independence; it might even have made sense when we were building a nation in the fifties. But now, forty years later, when we should have been more confident and secure in our nationhood, its value seemed doubtful. And when that nationalism was linked with religion it seemed to have a sinister quality; when it was linked to swadeshi economics it seemed altogether bizarre and irrational.
This book has grown out of a series of thin, 800-word rectangles that I began to produce regularly in the nineties for the Times of India on Sundays (and occasional pieces for the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and other papers). I quickly realized that one cannot merely paste columns together and produce a book. It isn t fair to the reader, who expects a continuity of ideas, and needs a single argument that runs throughout the book and unfolds chapter by chapter; only then does it become an organic and wholesome experience.
Writing a newspaper column is an eternally ephemeral trade, and although last week s sensation is always forgotten by the following week, it has always looked, or was made to look, as though it was carved in stone. When I laid the raw material-the more than 200 newspaper articles-on the bright, sun-drenched veranda of my home in Delhi, I slowly realized that all of them seemed to describe in one way or another how our country was changing in the decade of the nineties. So, the idea was born to write a story of India s nineties as a series of essays.
The essay is a wonderful thing. It can refer to practically any piece of non-fiction prose-from a short newspaper column by Tavleen Singh trashing Sonia Gandhi to an 800-page formal academic treatise on local democracy. In recent times, however, young Indians in their quest for careers and obsession with information technology have lost touch with this form, as they have turned increasingly away from a liberal to a technical education. When some of them began applying to American colleges for admission and were asked to submit a personal essay with their application, they began to rediscover this form.
The word essay was introduced by a sixteenth-century French magistrate, Michel de Montaigne, who temporarily retired from official life in the 1570s and set up a room in his chateau where he began writing and publishing a series of short prose works that
