Samvaadh Explains it All

Imagining India is an ambitious book.  It aims to take an inventory of India’s successes and failures, and set the agenda for its future direction.  While the book is interesting and worth reading, I am afraid it falls well short of its ambition.

Nilekani has divided the “ideas” in the book into four sections – The first section is for ideas that have already “arrived”. The second comprises those that are “arriving”.  The third involves areas where pitched battles are being fought in the war of ideas, and the in the fourth section, Nilekani tries to give notice of ideas that are far away, but are fast approaching.

So, according to Nilekani, the idea that India’s population is a resource rather than a liability is an idea that has arrived, and is in the first section. That cities are engines for India’s growth is realization that is slowly dawning on us, which places it in the second section. Our wretched labour policies are holding back employment among India’s poor,  and we aren’t yet close to reforming them – this fact places labour reform in the third section.  The idea that we need to have sustainable social security for India’s senior citizens is, apparently an idea that hasn’t even started, but it had better arrive fast if we are to avoid the problems that the more developed nations are facing.

Nilekani devotes a chapter to each idea and devotes considerable space to trace the historical background for each one. For a collector of interesting facts, this makes the book interesting to read. For example, I am particularly interested in understanding my country’s complicated relationship with its cities, and Nilekani’s description of British attitudes and policies towards town planning was quite illuminating.

The problem with the book, however, is that it ends up as a prisoner of its structure. Because some ideas don’t fit neatly into one section, he ends up splitting them and presenting them as separate “ideas”. For example, the “deepening” of our democracy is in section 1, while in section 3, there is a chapter on the agitational nature of our politics. Both aspects are true, of course, but we’d have been better off discussing them in one chapter. Likewise, primary schooling is said to be an idea that is “arriving” while our inability to provide higher education puts it in the section for ideas in battle. The fourth section includes healthcare, which makes no sense till you realize that Nilekani is referring to lifestyle diseases that will concern us when we become a developed country. Some ideas that I think ought to be there are missing or underemphasized. For example, Nilekani has nothing to say about internal security, rule of law, the speed of our courts or our ability to enforce contracts. Given that obtaining land for setting up business is an important concern for Infosys, I would have expected a complete chapter on it. Nilekani, however, chooses to barely mention it under ICT for India. But surely, the problem with property rights on land  goes beyond just the difficulties of recording them?

The other problem is that Nilekani somehow forgot that when he writes a book, he cannot adopt a journalist’s approach. Readers will be interested in his thinking on those issues. There are just too many factoids, too many “views” from experts and too little attempt to synthesize them into coherent ideas.  If you plan to read the book, you will have to live with these limitations. You will be reading a book by Nandan the quizzing enthusiast or Nilekani the journalist, not a book by the ex-CEO of Infosys and a pioneer of the IT revolution in India. You may think that this is a good thing, and if you do, you will find the book worth reading.  It is not, however, a book that you absolutely  must read.

Update: Nilu asks me if I want to get Nilekani into a bind – if  he had expressed too much of  opinion and too little of facts and views from others, wouldn’t I (or someone else) have accused him of arguing from authority rather than from facts?  This is a valid question, but I don’t want Nilekani to argue from authority. My problem is that he does not do much of arguing at all.

Here is one example.  (I am quoting from memory as I don’t have the book handy right now) In his chapter on urbanization, he quotes Ramesh Ramanathan saying that India has an advantage in that its population is spread out in many small towns and villages, which have an opportunity to ensure equitable development of its cities. But in the chapter on healthcare, he has quoted Dr Reddy who calls for development of dense, more walkable cities so that Indians can walk more and drive less.

Let’s ignore the casual totalitarianism here. Let’s also ignore the fact that Dr Reddy is trying to solve in India what is a problem for Americans. The point here is that this is a valid debate – should we have dense cities  or sprawling ones? Remember that we do not have a suburbia like the US. We have lots of small and large villages, small towns and large cities. We can either provide urban facilities to villages and towns so that people do not migrate to large cities, or we can encourage migration to large cities. If  we go for the former option and if we also connect these small cities, we will end up with the same suburban sprawl that the US has. If we go with the latter option, we will just repeat the mistake that we have been making so far. So what should we do?

I would have liked to see this and similar such issues being debated in the book. I don’t see them. The way Nilekani frames the issues, it is almost as if the only question relates to how much they have “arrived”, i.e. to what extent they have been adopted by Indians.

Perhaps what is required is for someone to communicate those ideas clearly and forcefully? There is always a need for someone to communicate ideas and the more the better. From what I have heard, Nilekani is a great communicator, but his comparative advantage is in execution – after all, he founded Infosys and turned it into one of India’s most successful companies. With this record, it is natural for him to expect to be able to do more. But to be able to bring about actual change, it requires skills of a completely different kind, skills that he lumps under “Politics” in the preface. So his attempts to use his skills to actually execute change ends up in task forces with minimal impact. 

As I understand, the book is born out of this gap between what he has been able to achieve and what he thinks ought to be done. The answer to the question of how to close this gap is one that will require fresh ideas.

But I am happy to report that since then, I have, as a service to my readers, read that novel. This surprising turn of events came about as a result of a series of coincidences. I visited Mumbai, and there I found that my brother was in possession of a pirated copy of the book. The horrors of a long-distance flight on Northwest airlines lay ahead of me, and I wanted a book that I could finish by the time I reached Amsterdam. I asked my brother if I could borrow it. He was only too happy to lend it. I started reading it at the airport and finished it somewhere over Asia Minor. Yes the novel is utter crap and Aravind Adiga is an incompetent writer.  

For a novelist who sets out to depict the reality of the “Darkness” – his name for the India that is not shining – Adiga’s ignorance of what he sets out to depict is palpable.  

His protagonist is named Balram Halwai.  He has apparently been born into the poorest stratum of society in a district in Bihar. Schooling has been unheard of in his family and it is only due to  his father’s desire that his sons should escape poverty that Balram and his brother find themselves in school.

When I read the name Balram Halwai, it made me uneasy for some reason that I could not put my finger on. I ignored the unease, partly because I was reading quite fast and mostly because there were so many other ridiculous things in the novel to distract me. Then, when the novel moves to discuss caste for the first time, it suddenly struck me: What is a person, obviously born into a lower caste, doing with a name like Halwai?  If you know anything at all about caste, you will know that the notion of purity is most rigidly enforced in matters of food and drink. Where in India can a lower caste person also be a traditional seller of sweets? 

But wait a minute. It turns out that Balram Halwai is not a lower-caste person after all. After introducing the concept of caste, and the fact that Halwai  means seller of sweets, Adiga finds himself having to explain how instead of selling sweets, Balram’s family is working as landless labourers. Balram’s family is supposedly in this state because his grandfather suffered losses in his business. But hey, when he started off Balram’s story, didn’t he make it sound like the family has been in poverty for generations?

Now, the thing about caste, as sociologists will never tire of pointing out, is that it is different from economic class. A Brahmin family that falls on hard times is still a Brahmin family. They will continue to get support from their friends and relatives who, needless to say, happen to be Brahmins. They will socialise with others of their caste, and their social, economic and cultural aspirations will come from people of their own caste.  People’s fortunes may ebb and flow, but it is very unlikely that a family of traders turns into a family of landless labourers in the course of a generation. That is not how the caste system works, as Adiga would know if he knew the first thing about the caste system. 

There is more. A couple of pages after Balram’s caste is introduced, Balram finds himself  asking for a job from the son of the village  Zamindar.  The Zamindar is also present. The son asks  Balram whether he belongs to a lower caste or an upper caste, and Balram has the opportunity to do some complex mental gymnastics to decide on what answer to give. Again, in which village of India will you find that a person’s caste is not immediately known to everyone concerned? Or if it is not known, won’t it be possible for the Zamindar to immediately determine the caste from the name?    

This is the mess that Adiga makes of just one part of the novel. You will find such instances in every page of it.  The novel is at its worst in the areas where the author is the most ignorant. When it enters into a milieu familiar to him, it rises to the level of mediocrity.