From Nehru To Manmohan Singh & Beyond

      The pink hydrangea in my garden has blossomed with its first flower. I had planted it two summers back, as a small sapling. After a long wait it was fascinating to see a bunch of buds unfurl into a complex flower (see below).

      While I have a passion to blog about “growth” in nature and architecture, it is interesting to learn that thousands of miles away someone has written a wonderful book on the “growth” of a nation. So now its time to tell you about the same.

Book Review of – Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation

Author: Nandan Nilekani

      It is not often that an engineer writes a book about his country. It is even rarer if that engineer is from IIT and is also the CEO of a company with over 80,000 employees. So when I first heard about this book, my reaction was the same when I saw an advertisement in which Hema Malini models for a water filter. The question that arose was does she really have to do this? Similarly I asked does Mr.Nilekani really have to do this?

      Keeping in mind the author’s illustrious background, a forward by Thomas Friedman and the backing of a “stellar team of editors”, my expectations from this book went sky high. In order to understand it, enjoy it and do full justice to it, I read this book for no more than an hour each day. If one were to sum up the essence of this book in one word, then it would be “heavy”. This book is heavy in weight, in content and full of heavy weights (i.e. experts in different fields).

      The gist of the book is that it explores the growth of India from the era of Nehru to Manmohan Singh and beyond. In 1991 economic reforms were introduced in India and with that says Mr. Nilekani “the baton for growth passed from the government to the human spirit of creativity, adventure and enterprise”. Beautiful words! The author explains this by exploring different issues. He has put in a lot of effort to study each issue, discuss it with the local experts and then write about it. For a writer it is one thing to understand a complex issue but what requires extraordinary skill is to break it into simple blocks of past, present and future and then write about it in simple words, so that the common man can fully understand it. Thomas Friedman calls Mr.Nilekani “an explainer” and I couldn’t agree with him more.

      The structure of the book is well defined by organizing these issues into four sections in the book. Richard Carlson in his book ‘ Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff’ says that the single greatest discovery by mankind is the fact that you can change the world by changing your attitude. Nothing demonstrates this better than the first section of this book which deals with issues “where attitudes have changed radically and are at the heart of Indian dynamism today”. These include family planning, acceptance of English language by masses, IT etc. I especially enjoyed reading the way Mr.Nilekani has explained how IT has brought about a revolution in banking, farming, stock market, elections, railways etc. For example he tells you about ICICI, a small and weak bank initially. It was the first to adopt IT and  then the bank was able to efficiently deal with 250,000 transactions a day, with a staff of only five employees! Its common in the west but this is what Malcolm Gladwell calls a ‘tipping point’. Another great story was about how the common man started investing in the Indian stock market once the wealth tax was eliminated and IT brought it efficiency. This is a huge attitude change for the common man, from investing in only gold to a vibrant stock market.

      The second section deals with “ideas that are still in ether” e.g. schools (government versus private) etc. The third section is about ideas  where the “biggest arguments” lie e.g. higher education, role of markets, labor laws, universities and jobs. The last section deals with “the forgotten nooks of the policy” i.e. issues like health, energy, environment etc. The first two sections are very enjoyable to read as they deal optimistically with solutions. The last two sections focus on the problems so much that a NRI will feel relieved to be not living in India. The latter half needs some serious editing.

      But what holds the book together is the narration and the choice of words. For example to explain the government’s change of attitude towards the entrepreneurs he uses the words” from red tape to red carpet” and the change in health problems is expressed with ” from hunger to heart disease”. Then there is also Mr.Nilekani’s skill in making connections between different sectors, to demonstrate change. He tells you that in the 1980s the unemployment was high hence the Bollywood movies featured stories about angry,young men e.g. Deewar, Sholay etc. But now even the common, ordinary young man wants to make a difference in India. Hence we are seeing movies like Rang de basanti and Munna Bhai.

      To a NRI like me, reading this book felt like going back home to India and an older sibling telling me, “Hey sis, this is what happened while you were away for over 20 years”. As Mr.Nilekani very aptly puts it, “to a NRI India is like a Monet painting, promising from a distance”. Thanks Mr.Nilekani, because of this book, now I also see the pixels clearly!

      As for the question I raised in the beginning, Mr.Nilekani has done a great service to India by writing this book. With his vision and phenomenal understanding of the issues pertaining to India, I would recommend him for the President’s post, in his post-Infosys years. In conclusion, this book is a keeper for NRIs and a must read for students of economics, political science and history.

Ratna

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