The Hindu Business Line : In the dark...

IF anyone asks how India is doing it is best to refer him to the banner item in the The Indian Express dated May 17: "State swelters in the heat, Energy Minister has 10 ACs at home." The correspondent, Chitrangada Choudhury, finds out the Energy Minister Dilip Walse-Patil has 10 ACs in his bungalow and does not see his electricity bill as it "goes directly to the PWD which pays it." In January, Walse-Patil ran up a bill of Rs 28,789 going up in March to Rs 29,201. The constituency of the public servant is Ambegaon (near Pune), which is hit daily by nine-hour power cuts. Chitrangada should also look into the living styles of our sweating IAS cadre. That was the way Hindu maharajas, Mughal emperors and British colonists ruled India till 1947 and elected public servants do now in 2005.

One has not been able to finish reading Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie though this morning after perusing the Express news item, one read many times the first page of the novel. "I was born in the city of Bombay... once upon a time. No, that won't do, there's no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar's Nursing Home on August 15, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it's important to be more... On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India's arrival at Independence. I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds."

Rushdie is right. India is a Midnight Child of 1947 stuck seemingly forever in the Midnight Hour. The aged timepiece on the work desk and the old, black grandpa clock on the wall have stopped chiming for long. There is no time in India. Confirmation can be had in the interview in The Hindu of Deepak Nayyar, who retired as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Delhi. It is a depressing comment on the education system (or industry). Deepak Nayyar should know when he admits capital expenditure to be three per cent of total expenditure and worse has to retract into a past and not breathe a beckoning future.

To a question on quality leadership, Nayyar observes: "Absolutely. If you look at role models we've had. C.D. Deshmukh, Maurice Dwyer, S. Radhakrishnan, Zakir Hussain. Alas, what has happened with the passage of time is what economists call adverse selection. There are many distinguished academics, who would be excellent vice-chancellors. But they do not wish to become VCs or the system will not appoint them. And there are many who are simply not good enough and yet are appointed." Quality dare not show its face as the system will deface it.

Black out is common practice. In the 60s and 70s, when one lived in Calcutta (now Kolkata) power went off for hours and then in the 80s power flowed while industry trudged its way out of the city. This writer was born on a midnight in 1946 and could in some way qualify as a midnight child. Those days there were no power lines in my village.

One came to Mumbai in 1970. In the 80s, staying in Dombivili was sticky with electricity absent every Friday with optional shutdowns on other days (Test matches being an exception). It never made news as Dombivili is 49 km from Mumbai.

For my generation it has been a long walk in the dark as the nation broke its knees wading from one crisis into another. In my 30s, a friend of mine dissuaded me from applying for a passport. "I say, India will not be stranded forever in midnight blindness," he told me, and persuaded one from filling a thick file of application forms. One is not still sure whether one acted sensibly.

A reminder of old times is an HMT Janata wrist watch (manually operated), bought in the 80s for about Rs 300 out of pride in owning an India-made item and which one still uses.

Nehru, Shastri, Indira, Rajiv and many others came and went making little difference to anybody except history books. In the five years of Rao's captaincy one thought India could be well out of midnight being confused by flickers of lightning.

Perhaps, Shashi Tharoor in India, From Midnight to the Millennium, puts it well: "This is why the change in the public discourse about Indianness is so dangerous, and why the old ethos must be restored. An India that denies itself to some of us could end up being denied to all of us. This would be a second Partition — and a partition in the Indian soul would be as bad as a partition in the Indian soil. For my sons, the only possible idea of India is that of a nation greater than the sum of its parts. That is the only India that will allow them to continue to call themselves Indians."

This writer, like many belonging to the Midnight Generation, does not dare tell that to his kids with a straight face. That indeed is also the legacy of Dr Manmohan Singh.

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