India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (31 page)

I like the idea and tell him so. The end goal – the hope of raising awareness, of changing perspectives, of allowing others to envision the possibility of change – strikes me as similar to what he is trying to achieve through his school placement. He nods enthusiastically. ‘Exactly, exactly.’

The thought turns my mind back to the sixteen faces watching him at the blackboard. Ashish is passionate about awakening them to the possibilities that lie ahead. As a product of the New India dream himself, he firmly believes in it. But will Class Four be part of that same story?

Ashish takes a long breath. There’s an edge of sadness to his voice when he comes to speak, as if already mourning the day he has to leave them. ‘Right now, they’re so eager to learn. They are ready to take on each and every thing.’ He cites the example of the pupils experimenting with his laptop. He worries about the standard of schooling that awaits them, though. ‘The students that can study themselves might be able to sustain. But only sustain.’ As for the likes of Nilambari, Ashvaraj and Vaishnavi, he fears they will fall back.

As for life beyond the school gates, he’s equivocal. Opportunities in India may be growing, but competition remains cut-throat. ‘There’s only a little space at the top and a lot of people trying to grab it,’ says the Infosys graduate, who’d fought off thousands of eager young programmers to land his former job.

Even so, he holds out hope for the three or four brightest students in his class. ‘They are sure to go on to do something in their life.’ Like what? It’s impossible to know, he says. At a minimum, he hopes they’ll continue to further studies. And then? ‘Who can say?’ he says. He’s confident of one thing, though. ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be something better than what their parents or their relatives have ever even thought of.’

I leave Pune for Mumbai on the morning train. The journey gives me time to reflect on my time with Ashish and his volunteer colleagues. They are by no means the only young people in India who are pouring their energies into educating the next generation. I’d read in the paper about a seventeen-year-old in the Bengali village of Berthampore who ran his own free school. He currently had eight hundred students enrolled. A further two hundred are on the waiting list. He started when he was nine. The staff room is filled with his teenage friends.

Nor is Teach for India the only initiative applying innovative techniques in the classroom. Several months earlier, I’d spent a few days visiting schools on the outskirts of Bengaluru. The headmaster of one these – Indus International, an exclusive private school with state-of-the-art facilities, attended by the children of India’s elite and those of foreign expatriates – had set up a parallel community school for children from the local village. He’d instructed that the classrooms should be built with natural materials indigenous to the area, and had equipped them with the latest in multimedia gadgetry. Revenue from Indus International’s fee-paying parents ensures one hundred per cent subsidy for all the attendees. Each child is provided with his or her own laptop and studies under the rubric of the International Baccalaureate system.

On the other side of the city, at Valley School, I’d found a very different but equally innovative approach being put to the
test. Nestled into the grooves and contours of a native forest, classrooms peeked out of hillsides and dormitory blocks stood hidden in the trees. The school’s administrators took their steer from Krishnamurty, a Hindu philosopher and ardent proponent of holistic, secular education. His method for ‘dynamic living’ gives priority to two main factors: direct contact with nature, and the encouragement to question. Only then, he argued, would young people grow to live fully developed lives, free of greed and unimpeded by fear.

Valley School could not be further from the unimaginative teaching and rote learning experienced by so many of India’s schoolchildren. School uniforms are banned, rewards and punishments done away with, organic food insisted upon and ‘land work’ (cleaning, gardening, sweeping, et cetera) integrated into the timetable. Students’ creative sides were nurtured in a specially constructed ‘art village’ situated in a wooded dell. Drama classes take place in an open-air amphitheatre, with an emerald-green lake for a backdrop and an audience of curious woodland animals.

On the day I visited, the double period before lunch was given over to a concert by a folk band devoted to the ancient songs of the poet Kabir. As for the syllabus, Valley School has no tests and no curriculum until Class Eight (when students are around thirteen years old). It all sounds very hippy. The headmaster insisted it was not. Come graduation exams, its pupils do as well as or better than their conventionally educated peers. As well as lawyers, doctors and engineers, the headmaster was gratified to count the school’s first professional scuba-diving instructor among its graduates.

Ashish helped me clarify what these other examples had intimated: that the essence of change lay in exposure to new thinking and fresh perspectives. This, along with getting the educational basics in place: the ability to understand, to question, to get the full measure of things. Provided together, these two educational inputs make a powerful mix for the future. And an important one too. Because of course, it’s not only in the classroom where visionary educators are exposing India’s youth to what the future might hold. Change is there on the television, in the playground, along the High Street, at the mall.

As India opens its borders, the world is flooding in. For now, it’s fighting for the country’s wallet. But ultimately it could make a grab for its soul.

India’s future hangs in the balance. Much will depend on which influences it embraces, which it rejects, and which it takes and makes its own. The stakes are staggeringly high, too high to be left to chance or private interest. Individual Indians must choose for themselves and do so wisely. That requires the tools to decide and the courage to act. Leading from example, India’s change makers are striving to provide both.

Back at Pune’s railway station, I’d picked up the latest edition of
India Today
. The cover story of the popular weekly had caught my eye as I passed the newspaper wallah. Splayed out along the platform, amid all the other magazines, newspapers, crossword books and medical supplements, beamed a bright-eyed huddle of young go-getters. ‘HARVEST OF HOPE’, ran the headline, in yellow block letters. From the four hundred and fifty-nine million Indians aged between thirteen and thirty-five, the magazine has identified three dozen individuals that it thought captured the ‘innovation, gumption and determination’ of New India.

Towards the end of the short train ride to Mumbai, I pick up the magazine and begin reading the editorial. The piece starts with some comparative statistics that reinforce the demographic advantages that the Mahindra Lifespaces president had first brought to my attention. In 2020, the average Indian citizen will be aged twenty-seven. That’s a decade less than the predicted norm in China, and almost two decades younger than the average European.

The magazine is optimistic about what lies in store for the current generation of young Indians. The economy is growing and social attitudes are slowly shifting. Two in three literate young people, for instance, support assigned quotas for women in parliament – the subject of a legislative proposal that is presently
splitting India along fault lines of Old and New. Right now, the upbeat editorial concludes, ‘the world's largest democracy can afford to dream.’

The subsequent pages are given over to profiles of the magazine’s high achievers. So what are they dreaming about? I flick through.

Some names I recognise. There’s Sushil Kumar, for example, the Delhi-based wrestler who shot to fame after becoming world champion. And Karun Chandhok, the young racing driver who became a household name when he broke into Formula One.

The others are mostly new to me. The selection partly reflects the interests of the age. Film dominates, with a significant portion of the list devoted to rising actors and those earning reputations behind the screen as producers, film-makers, scriptwriters and music directors. The director of the dance troupe that won the reality show,
India’s Got Talent
, earns a mention. Inevitably cricket makes it in too, with the inclusion of Cheteshwar Pujara, an upcoming batsman.

Writers, dancers, poets and musicians occupy a second category. Many are contemporary champions of classical art-forms. There’s a sattriya dancer and a Carnatic vocalist, for instance. A professional historian, architectural conservationist and writer of historical fiction win a look-in as well. Evidently the powers that be at
India Today
– part of the powerful, pro-establishment
Times of India
group – have a message to plug: by all means, refresh, renew, even reinterpret, but, in the headlong rush to modernity, don’t forget India’s roots, its history and its traditions.

With thoughts of my school visit still fresh in mind, I wonder if any of today’s crop of high-flyers share backgrounds like those at Lt V. B. Gogate School. Do Class Four, I’m still wondering, really stand a chance?

From the text of the magazine, it’s not immediately obvious which have battled against the odds. At least one, Ajjay Agarwal, is a school drop-out. He’s since gone on to set up Maxx Mobile, a fast-growing mobile-phone retailer. A number of the sportsmen
and women come from humble beginnings too, further proving the role of sport as a social leveller.

One example stands out above the rest: Uttam Teron. Born in a remote hamlet in Assam to a train-driver father and an illiterate homemaker mother, he took up private teaching as a stop-gap after graduating from college. His bamboo classroom became a school. It reminded me of the teenage headmaster in West Bengal that I’d read about. Teron’s Parijat Academy now has more than five hundred pupils. Precisely half are girls. I’d like to imagine he’s the kind of person that could have been sitting in Ashish’s class.

The list includes no other schoolteachers. ‘Roboteacher’, the only other hopeful, turns out to be a mechanics whizz from the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. Not that the title is entirely disingenuous. Twenty-nine-year-old Gagan Goyal now runs a successful robotics company producing ‘hands-on education tools’. The battery-powered devices are designed to expose children to a different approach to teaching science. Ashish would, I’m sure, be impressed.

Approaching Mumbai’s city limits, I turn the page to Vivek Gilani’s profile. He occupies a third category of entrant, those explicitly committed to making New India fairer and more inclusive than the Old. Most operate in the social or developmental sectors. One, Indrani Medhi, works with Microsoft to tweak new technologies for the needs of illiterate communities – essentially doing to smartphones and netbooks what Unilever is doing to shampoos and detergents. Another, Rikin Gandhi, is a US-born aerospace engineer using basic video cameras to help farmers voice their problems and share their success stories. Vivek, on the other hand, runs a website.

MumbaiVotes.com emerged from Vivek’s confusion about who to vote for. Mumbai’s voting patterns are, generally speaking, split along caste and religious lines – much as Daniel had complained about back in Pune. It’s not uncommon to see apartment enclaves with saffron flags and bunting hung across the entrance gate, an indication of a block vote for one of the Hindu-dominated nationalist parties. For those wanting to make a more discerning choice,
however, information on individual candidates is sparse. Mumbai Votes sets out to address this by keeping tabs on all the city’s one thousand four hundred and forty-four politicians.

As with all the other individual profiles, Vivek’s magazine profile finishes with a question about his Mission. His goal is to produce an annual ‘report card’ for all elected officials. This would ‘allow room for positive debate between politicians and the civic community’. The comment makes me stop short. I’d heard the phrase before. It’s Ashish’s AwakIND idea, is it not?

I think back to our conversation in the hotel restaurant. There was something about the online idea that had confused me at the time. It wasn’t the general objective. I could see how that broadly fitted with Ashish’s hopes for Class Four. It was more the leap from classroom teacher to web-based activist. It struck me as an impossibly large one. Education and politics operate in different spheres. How did Ashish propose bridging the two?

Reading about Mumbai Votes, the answer – or the possibility of an answer – occurs to me: information. Ashish’s hope for influencing the ambitions of his students lay in exposing them to ideas, theories, facts, opinions, perspectives, life experiences. Information, in other words. Could exposure to the same shift political thinking as well? The more I think about it, the more it seems to make sense. Was access to information not the cog that whirred Indrani’s ‘tweaked’ technology? Was the same not true for Rikin’s videos? Excited by the possibility, I resolve to track down the creator of Mumbai Votes and find out if the theory holds true.

That evening, I log on to the featured website and fill in the online contact form. An answer pings back the next day. Later in the week, I find myself traveling down a residential street in a middle-class area of Juhu.

Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, Vivek’s frame is narrower and his cheekbones sharper than suggested by the
India Today
photographer. Also escaping the camera’s lens is the American inflection to some of his vowels, a hangover from years studying and then working in the United States. Where the magazine photograph of
him was spot-on, however, is in his aura of quiet, calculated intelligence.

He shows me to a seat in the main room of his family’s moderately sized flat. No sooner has he sat down than he’s up and fretting over the knotted mess of cables outside the large sliding window looking out onto the street. He’s on to the local authorities to come and remove them. He is pushing the residents in the block to join in a petition. It used to be that you could fly a kite in Mumbai, he says. Now, the clutter of electric cabling makes even a clear view of the sky difficult. ‘It seems all people care about these days is having cable TV.’

He speaks quickly and precisely, his features animated and his attention wholly absorbed by the glut of cabling – what he sees as an infringement on his basic citizen’s rights. There’s nothing theatrical about the performance. Just pure, concentrated intensity of focus – the same intensity he’s channelled into Mumbai Votes.

He returns to his seat and begins to outline how the Internet venture works. Vivek runs a detailed search of a dozen or so daily newspapers, Parliamentary sources, party manifestos, individual politicians’ websites, records of budgetary spending and whatever else is available in the public domain. He then collates the findings and publishes them in a searchable online database.

It’s all very user-friendly. Voters can click on and track the record of their elected representatives. They can see their attendance in Parliament or in the Municipal Legislative Assembly, their record of public speaking and their priorities in public spending. Mumbai Votes asks for an interview with each politician once a year, an online link to which is also provided. The end goal, as Vivek puts it, is to ensure their ‘promises remain on file’.

It’s not a one-man job. Vivek has a network of around two hundred voluntary researchers and analysts around the city. Most are students. Cleverly, he’s struck a deal with a number of universities around the city. In return for helping him, they collect credits towards their degree. Coursework activism, you could call it.

As if on cue, Sonita walks in from the neighbouring room. A journalism undergraduate and a student leader, she’s been heavily
involved in Vivek’s Web venture for several years. She is having problems getting online, she says. ‘Mind if I sit by the window?’ She finds a place on a mattress by the open sliding door, her laptop on her knees. Above her head, on the balcony side of the glass, hangs a bird feeder.

Vivek’s eye is drawn to the hanging container. His attentions briefly shift to Mumbai’s lack of bird life. He is disappointed. He’d hoped that the feeder might attract more birds to the neighbourhood. Other than the odd hungry sparrow, however, sightings have been sparse.

Mumbai Votes is a different story. I ask how he’s persuaded so many volunteers to help out. They ‘get’ the website’s objectives, he says. For the next half an hour, he lays out exactly what these are. It’s an ambitious vision of citizen-led political reform. He’s completely caught up in the idea, looking at me dead in the eye, speaking almost without pause. I’m reminded of Gopi back in Bengaluru and his infectious enthusiasm. Vivek has an activist’s passion for bringing ‘accountability’ and ‘transparency’ to the electoral process. He talks enthusiastically about the ‘polity’ reaching out to their elected representatives. He wraps up with a picture of ‘political self-cleansing’ as the electoral process moves towards becoming more genuinely democratic.

I’m impressed by his apparent lack of political ideology. Mumbai Votes has ‘absolutely no agenda’, according to Vivek. He doesn’t care whom people vote for, only that they vote ‘intelligently’. Unlike many other politically oriented movements, his isn’t driven by anger or dogma. Quantifiable data is his tool of choice, not protest banners or hunger strikes.

Ultimately, he’d like to see everyday Mumbaikers become ‘citizen lobbyists’, as he puts it. Not in the ‘khadi kurta’ sense of full-time activists. Closer to his thinking are politically engaged men and women armed with the necessary facts to hold their elected representatives to account. That’s why he’s against smart-matching – namely, websites that allow voters to plug in the issues that concern them and then automatically calculate the best-fitting candidate. In his mind, that’s just drive-thru voting.

His guiding concern is to make India the world’s most evolved democracy. Whenever he gives a presentation about Mumbai Votes, that’s the message he puts on the first slide. At the moment, India is the world’s largest democracy. That, he suggests, is nothing to boast about. ‘Being the largest is simply down to bad family planning.’

It’s a rare joke for him and it makes me laugh.

Gradually, I find myself being drawn in by Vivek’s vision. ‘Delhi’, Chennai’, ‘Telangana’, I jot down, as the Web activist lays out his hopes for a franchise model spreading across India. Dotting my notebook are other aspirations: ‘Never have to go to the electoral booth with that sense of shame again,’ ‘An end to dynastic politics,’ ‘A silent revolution, click by click.’ On the page, they read as a little clichéd, like a politician’s soundbites. There’s nothing of the sloganeer about Vivek, though. His vision comes across as sincere and heartfelt. It’s not just me who thinks so. He’s winning over others too.

Vivek talks of the website’s volunteers. As he does so, I’m struck by a related thought: the allure of a great idea. His is a generation that has grown cynical about the political process, he says. All politicians are perceived as venal. Voting is seen a choice between ‘the worst of two evils’.

He is more optimistic about the number of young Indians with a social conscience, however. A large number of his peers have a desire to ‘give something back’. (He mimics the quote signs as he says the phrase. It’s an ironic gesture that acknowledges how the sentiment itself has become saturated with cynicism.) Mumbai Votes appeals to many of these. ‘Without making a huge hue and cry, they see it as a way to revolutionise how politics is done in our country.’ Web-savvy voters are buying in as well. At election time, newspaper journalists cite the website’s candidate profiles. Supporters spread the word through their social networks. ‘People who felt there was never any hope in the way politics is done in Mumbai or in India now see in us a workable model – a way to crack the problem in some way.’

Vivek hopes to see Mumbai politics becoming cleaner. A cursory glance at the newspapers suggests the inner workings of power are as murky as ever. Political representatives still vote along party lines, not following private conscience. Party hierarchies are still lined with the brothers, sons, wives and third cousins of political potentates. Objectively, just how much difference is he making? Vivek admits that it’s early days. The website only became fully functional less than two years ago. Metrics for success are difficult to gauge as well.