Sir Mark Tully believes there is no stopping India, despite the warts, bumps and all.

It's a logical question to ask of Sir Mark: What are the big changes that he has seen in India in the 20 years since he wrote his last book, No Full Stops in India , to the one he published this year: Non-stop India ?

Both titles sound similar, I tell him, in a chat about his new book on a recent visit to Chennai in a windowless hotel room. But, he counters, this one talks about the dramatic changes the country has seen in the past two decades, more than what transformed, ever so slowly, in the preceding decades.

Tully lapses into flashback mode. “My memory goes back to the 1960s when there were so few consumer goods. It was literally true to say wives of diplomats leaving their posts could sell all their used things from lipsticks on. If you wanted an Ambassador car, there was a six-month waiting list. Now, of course, the shops are brimming with goods, a lot from China, many of which can be made in India,” he says.

The genial Sir Mark, of course, is eminently qualified to comment on the transformation of India, having been the voice of the BBC for years ever since he moved to Delhi as its India correspondent in 1964.

A keen observer, Tully's book is full of conversations and anecdotes which makes for an easy read, while making a telling point. “The fun of writing this book is not so much in the writing but in the travelling and meeting people,” he says. And, travel he did, across the length and breadth of the country, remarkable energy for a 76-year-old. From Naxal territory in Jharkhand to Bihar; from the boondocks of eastern UP and to Chennai and Arunachal Pradesh.

Non-stop India is a collection of stories that Tully has crafted from his many meetings. They capture the change or the inertia, as it were, in Indian society over the past two decades. The choice of subjects is aeclectic: from the tremendous swing towards English language education to a chapter on the Tata group which deals with its remarkable growth story and the hurdles it has faced.

There are conversations with a range of people: politicians (L. K. Advani and Arjun Singh), former Naxals, senior Tata executives in Bombay House, the group HQ. “One of the criticisms of the book is that I haven't put my views across strongly enough,” he says. But when you tell stories of people there isn't room for pontificating, he explains.

Apart from business and industry what else has changed in other walks of life such as culture, language, politics?. The most noticeable, he finds, is an overall attitude change; people are more ambitious and the poor are aspiring for better lives for their children, and hence the huge expansion in private education. “You see a tremendous swing towards English language education. Among the young there is much more of a liberal attitude. You can see many more girls and boys together.”

Hindi, from being dreaded in several parts of the country, has now become a cult language in part because of Bollywood movies. “This friend of mine who teaches in IIT, says it's not considered cool to speak in English when friends meet,” Tully adds.

There is a fascinating chapter on ‘The English Raj' where Tully writes about the growth of English — and Hindi in Tamil Nadu — in different parts of India. He says Indian English, while growing in importance, is not ‘bangaloring' other Indian languages, which are thriving, he writes, “but I should have remembered that discussions in India have no end, there are indeed no full stops in India.”

Tully had received an invitation from Dalit activist, Chandrabhan Prasad, to celebrate English Day. He writes: “Chandrabhan thinks English should ‘bangalore' all Indian languages. So fervent is his admiration that, taking a leaf out of the book of the self-respect movement in South India, he has consecrated a temple in which English is the deity. In posters, he and his supporters have distributed, the Goddess English is modelled on the Statue of Liberty, but holds a fountain pen instead of a torch in her upheld hand. A computer stands at her feet.” Prasad's opposition to Indian languages springs from the belief that they prescribed and still preserve the laws of caste which have oppressed Dalits for so long. “English has no links with Indian culture, tradition or metaphysics. You have to realise that language is not autonomous. It is linked to culture and so Indian languages are linked to caste. If English becomes the one national language, it will link India together without caste,” he tells Tully. This adds a different dimension altogether to the debate on English language.

Tully hates flying and loves travelling by trains. He engages me in a long conversation on the virtues of Indian Railways and long rail journeys when he discovers that my father had been with Indian Railways for 30 years! “It's a crying shame that you have all these brand new airports. But, what about the railway stations? They are in the same old shambles. Who travels by air, businessmen and their families but who travels by train: the aam aadmi and it's a symbol that India is not looking after the aam janata but the more opulent people,” he sighs.

Paraphrasing the title of Naipaul's famous book, does he find India still a land of a million mutinies? He's thoughtful in his response: “It has found its way forward, there are many things that are wrong, but despite all our complaints, India is still a secular society in the best sense of the word. It's a fast growing economy, though slowing down a bit now, and there are sections which are absolutely world class. It will muddle through but I think it could move a lot faster and there is a danger it could trip over itself if many more jobs are not created.”

Tully's take on the demographic dividend mentioned in Nandan Nilekani's Imagining India is that a “demographic disaster” might result if the right jobs are not created.

R. Gopalakrishnan, executive director of Tata Sons, in a long conversation with Tully, captured in a chapter on entrepreneurship, talks about the various crises that India went through: the food shortage in the 1960s when Indian was dependent on American food air. That crisis was followed by the Green Revolution which made India virtually self-sufficient in food.

Then there was the foreign exchange crisis of 1991 when India hovered on the brink of bankruptcy. The Narasimha Rao government used the crisis to ram economic reforms down the throats of politicians and bureaucrats. As Gopalakrishnan tells Tully, “I also believe there is great hope in the present crisis. In fact, I always wish India to be in a crisis. We have benefited from every crisis. We are children of a God called crisis!” Well, if we are in the midst of a political and industrial crisis, what with this slowdown, there is hope then.

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