Nandan Nilekani’s book “Imagining India” released this week. Today I went to a book reading and interaction session with Nandan himself organized by Crossword, Residency Road Bangalore. The title couldn’t have been more poignant in the backdrop of the ongoing horror in Mumbai.
Nandan began by describing his motivation behind the book – Many books have been written about Indian history as a sequence of events, or on important people. So he decided to write a book on ideas crucial for India, as he felt each civilization had grown by having a safety net of ideas to pull from. Ideas like health care, innovative energy solutions, merit vs caste etc. were crucial to our future as a nation. He mentioned that the economic reforms in 1991 had led the nation on a path of moderate growth – around 5-6 % GDP growth p.a. which had been inflated during the past 5 years due to a global liquidity bubble to around 8-9%. Now that the bubble had burst, we were falling back on the more realistic growth rate of 5%.
He was particularly caustic about the present lot of politicians, saying that at the time of independence, our leaders were ahead of the public and built institutions like democracy, justice, universal franchise, the legal system, IITs etc but the present lot had fallen way behind the public and lost sight of the larger goal. They had introduced vertical divides into our society as means of developing voting constituencies, whereas the need of the hour was to tap into the vast horizontal unity of our country – the person in a village dreams the same dreams and has the same aspirations for his loved ones as does the person living in the cities; the villages in Chattisgarh face the same terror as the hotels in Mumbai.
He ended by mentioning that the book was meant to ignite debate on the issues highlighted rather than the frivolous debates presently ongoing in public life.
Bhavish
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