The words we speak and the worlds we make

I was walking down a rain-whipped Bandstand with a friend at a little past twelve the other night when she asked me something.

"Tell me a good book to read?"

Perhaps it was the rain, or the ocean to our right, or the young couples we were crossing even this late at night, but the scene reminded me of the opening sequence of Manu Joseph's Serious Men, when the author manages to drop you straight into the midst of Mumbai's teeming, beaming heart.

"Have you read Serious Men?"

"No. What is it about?"

"Well, in a sense it's about Bombay. But it's also about two men, a scientist and his peon," I said. A beat, while I evaluated my statement. "Well actually, it's about a peon and his scientist."

We both laughed.

There are two aspects of this exchange worth commenting upon, both linked to how systematic and casual denigration is in our everyday language. Serious Men takes a close look at Indian society, and one of the admirable things about it is that Joseph manages in no ham-handed fashion to show India through its most ubiquitous prism, caste. Ayyan Mani, the peon, is a Dalit – Joseph's emphasis on this aspect of his identity is vital because it is his identity's most vital aspect – the determinant of his future, his present and his past, and also, crucially, the determinant of the course of his son's life. When I was recommending the book, in that brief moment we take to make these decisions before we speak, I chose not to use the word "Dalit" to describe Mani. I thought about this later and realised why: it was a night untouched by worldly concerns, and I did not want to misrepresent the book, a dark but humorous tale. In that instant, I decided "Dalit" would conjure a sense of pathos far from what I imagine was the author's intention.

Ayyan Mani, the peon, is a Dalit. The labels we use so casually, "Dalit", "chamar", "bhangi", "peon", they have all become almost interchangeable in upper-class parlance. That is how far we have sunk, or how little we have risen

But in another sense I also did not need to use the word "Dalit". Think of the peons you know, the ones that serve tea in your office, walking from desk to desk, cabin to cabin, pouring out in tiny doses the caffeine our vaunted industry surfs on. In my experience, especially if they are young men straight from the village, there is a meekness to their demeanour, eyes cast downward; too often there is surprise and suspicion when they receive the smallest kindnesses. I have never asked any peon I have worked with the caste he belongs to, but to me, in the urban life I lead, far from highway construction and jhuggis, this interaction – peon and office-worker – is the small intersection between my life and the life of the Dalit. I did not use both "Dalit" and "peon" because I did not need to.

The labels we use so casually, "Dalit", "chamar", "bhangi", "peon", they have all become almost interchangeable in upper-class parlance. That is how far we have sunk, or how little we have risen.

The second aspect relates to the reason we both laughed at that moment. We laughed because of the unusualness of the second construction I'd made. A peon and his scientist. It is not the near Nobel-winning scientist but Ayyan Mani, and his aspirations for a better life for his son, that are the central explorations of this novel (something I really liked, though a few arbiters of the caste discourse in India felt it a distasteful portrayal). I changed my statement second time around to reflect that centrality. But to reverse the possessor in the sentence that way (from scientist's peon to peon's scientist) struck our ears immediately as a great absurdity, one that provoked a short, embarrassed laughter.

In the first chapter of The Razor's Edge, Somerset Maugham writes, "It is very difficult to know people and I don't think one can ever really know any but one's own countrymen. For men and women are not only themselves; they are also the region in which they are born, the city apartment or the farm in which they learned to walk...The mess English writers make when they try to do this is only equalled by the mess American writers make when they try to reproduce English as it is spoke in English."

Maugham is pointing to one of the great problems of the novelist: capturing the cadence of a geographical space, its inherently prescribed mores and its most intimate patterning. The language we speak is always – always – the subtlest of reflections of the life that we see around us. It gives indication of basic societal understandings; those things we accept as givens. In India, it is only natural for a scientist to own a peon. But for a peon to own a scientist – now that is laughable.

Growing up with Husain

Growing up with Husain
By Prayaag Akbar

My first memory of M.F. Husain is not of the man himself, but of a story I used to delight in telling as a child to every visitor to our home. Whenever any of my parents’ friends would come over I would drag them to the room my older sister and I shared and point to a wonderful sketch Husain had made that hung adjacent to our bunk bed. As I was a particularly obnoxious little fellow, it would give me great pleasure to describe in vivid detail a mistake my sister still counts as amongst the worst she has made.

I am looking at a photograph of the sketch now. It is a simple, charming piece: two horses galloping alongside each other, their bodies in perfect tandem, only their heads at different angles. They seem, strangely, to be running in some sort of glass chamber – at least, that is what I make of the two bars that run vertically down the sketch. And then on one side, oblivious of the hoofs thundering towards her, a young girl stands proud and serene, legs slightly apart, a star-topped wand in her hand. Husain made the sketch for my sister when she was around 7. He made it while sitting in the living room of our Ballygunj apartment, using the prized Caran d’Ache colour pencil set my father had returned with from a trip abroad.

Being 7, and possessed of a simplicity that belies her Cambridgified future, my sister decided Husain had not done himself justice in the manner in which he had signed his name. So she decided to sign it for him, with black felt pen, right on top of Husain’s own rendition of his name. Now, on one side, instead of the signature that is prized the world over, in my sister’s childhood scrawl reads: “Made by Hussan. For Diy with love”. And then, mysteriously, “II, III”. My sister is still to live this one down, and not only because she managed to misspell both of their names.

I realise now that, quite apart from the opportunity to ridicule my sister, the sketch had a strange hold over me as a child. What a wonderful gift to give a young girl, and how well it illustrates the quickness of imagination and clarity of spirit great artists must possess. Husain, colour pencil in hand, constructed a tableau that could easily give a young girl nightmares; any viewer should only naturally think the girl in the picture is about to be trampled. But somehow he manages to invest in that girl a great strength. She is not worried about the beasts charging towards her. In fact, she seems to beckon them with her outstretched wand, to guide them to a canter. Well before my sister had encountered ideas like feminism and empowerment, she had a little signpost of feminine capability hanging next to her bed.

Over the years he gave her a few more sketches, though she did not quite succeed in mangling the rest. He never bothered giving me one – with an artist’s sensitivity, he could perhaps tell that I would end up selling it some day for beer money. But this did not stop me from loving his work, especially the pieces that have decorated the walls of every house I have considered home since I was born. All these were gifts from the great man himself; like Picasso, Husain was an inveterate gifter of his work, something that has caused much consternation amongst those who collect his work for its monetary value.

There was one piece in particular, a giant watercolour from the Raaj series (it featured a young, Ascot-hatted Memsahib playing polo with her brown servant) that I used to come home from school and copy in my notebook time and again. I think back to that now and can only marvel at my good fortune; indeed, if today I were a painter of note, instead of someone who can’t get stick figure drawings right, I’m sure people would count that amongst my formative experiences.

I believe M.F. Husain and my parents became friends while he lived in Calcutta. He would come over to our house sometimes, causing great pandemonium in our building. He wanted help with what I think is known as the Assassination series, a set of paintings he was doing centred on the killings of prominent political leaders from over the world. My father was supplying him with the political background to those deaths, and they would sit and have lengthy addas about political dynamics and cause and consequence. Most of this went over my head, but I would sit there with them, utterly fascinated by this shirt-pant sadhu and his undulating beard. Not knowing much of the artistic process, I cannot say how much of those discussions made it into the work he produced in that phase. But Husain had the thirst for understanding common to all intelligent people denied a formal education. He sought at every phase of his life to enrich not only his art but to challenge his very view of the world.

This is why the manner in which the screaming lunatics disposed of him is so hard to accept. It does not need repeating here that Husain loved India; it is visible in his every work. At a time when artists the world over were rejecting concepts like nationalism – and his own contemporaries had chosen the more conducive climes of Paris and New York – Husain preferred to remain amidst the sounds and smells and sharpness of the country of his birth. And in many ways, Husain’s body of work is a chronicle of contemporary India. While other artists delve into India’s past culture, Husain immersed himself in the India he saw around him, and the work he produced was always rooted to this view. I heard today that, exiled in Qatar, Husain’s final work was to return him to a city he loved dearly, Calcutta, and that it would be about the rise of Mamata.

Even his lingering obsession with Madhuri Dixit was perhaps nothing but a reflection of one of our national fixations. He was, of course, delightfully aware of the foolishness of his fancies. Many of the paintings of the Madhuri series are emblazoned with the following couplet, a rhyme I read when I was thirteen years old and that came back to me as soon as I learned of his death: “In the eighth decade of Maqbool Fida, yeh kaunsa mod hain umra ka?”

Dousing India in Kerosene

Dousing India in Kerosene
By Prayaag Akbar

In English, August, Upamanyu Chatterjee's superb novel about a year in the life of a young Stephanian who has just joined the Civil Service, there is a revealing passage where the District Collector of Madna, Ravi Srivastava, refers to a sweaty underling of theirs as "just a promotee". In the uniquely abstruse language of the Indian Adminstrative Service, a promotee is someone who joins the Service via promotion from one of the lower grades of the Administrative Services, usually State-level; an officer who has not cleared the much-hyped annual Civil Service exam but works his way up the ladder. It is testament to Chatterjee's skill as a novelist that he is able to show through a single throwaway remark the sneering disregard officers of Srivastava's ilk have for these junior officers. But, having come through the State ranks, often these junior officers are the ones who know the areas they serve best. Their knowledge of the minutiae of the political, social – and criminal – dynamic in an area can be of invaluable aid to the Collectors and Additional District Collectors who hop from posting to posting around the country. Additional Collector of Malegaon Yashwant Sonawane was one of these "promotees".

"This matter will be taken very seriously. He was a very upright officer and this probe will continue until we take all the required action." - P. Velarasu, District Collector, Malegaon.

Smack in the middle of that quote crops up another favourite word in the IAS lexicon, though their officers have less cause to use it: "upright". From the use of this adjective, the astute reader will immediately understand that Sonawane, in contrast to the wide majority of his colleagues, was impeccably honest, dilligent and guided by such foolish values as patriotic pride and right and wrong. A look at his years in government reveals that Sonawane was all that and much more; it is open to conjecture, but it is just as likely that he was not only the most "upright" officer in Malegaon, but in all of Maharashtra.


By every account Sonawane was a truly remarkable man. Born into a poverty-line poor rural Dalit family, he managed after college to get himself a job as a clerk in the Mantralaya in 1988. In 1994 he cleared the state civil services exam, where he worked dutifully for fifteen years before being promoted to the IAS rank of Additional Collector in Malegaon.

Recognising that one of the major impediments to development in Malegaon was Hindu-Muslim tension, he worked hard to reduce the faultline, campaigning hard for a branch of Aligarh Muslim University to be set up there. He was also the driving force behind a plan to set up a unit of Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation there. If his life had not been so cruelly interrupted, he would have had the chance to do a great deal of good in one of India's most troubled areas.

Read more @ Sunday Guardian

The case of the kidnapped collector

The case of the kidnapped collector
by Prayaag Akbar

The deplorable kidnapping of Malkangiri District Collector Vineel Krishna and junior engineer Pabitra Majhi by Maoists situated somewhere along the Andhra-Orissa border, and the harrowing ongoing hostage crisis that has followed, brings light to a number of the most intractable problems the Indian state faces when attempting to deal with the armed insurgency.

From the Indian state's perspective, its biggest concern is best explained by one of the fundamental problems of Game Theory (and hoary favourite of articles like these), the Prisoner's Dilemma. The Prisoner's Dilemma explains why two rational actors might not cooperate even when it is in their best interests. To cut a lot of nigh-on-indecipherable probability theory short, the logic behind it is that both sets of actors (in this case, the Indian state and the Maoists) lack complete information about the other's motivations. If both mistrust each other, each side ends up choosing the least favourable option available, because of the inherent pressure on both to renege on the agreement.

In this case, after some deliberation, the Indian state prioritised its most favourable outcome, which was to bring District Collector Krishna and junior engineer Majhi home safe. It chose to trust that the Naxalites would fulfill their end of the bargain, and so conceded to all 14 of the demands made. But the Naxals decided they would not keep their end of the bargain, and returned only the junior engineer; custody of the District Collector was their primary bargaining chip, and they chose to extract more from the state.

So how can the Indian state trust this adversary when the majority of prior dealings have ended similarly? What must it do to ensure it does not suffer for choosing the option that, given the initial conditions, would have suited both parties admirably?

It should be noted that the Prisoner's Dilemma is a theoretical tool, at best providing insight into why actors behave the way they do. It does not allow for a number of real-world complexities that cloud almost every instance of hostage-taking (if interested, see Reuben Miller's study of the 1972 Munich Olympics attack). The most urgent difference in the assumptions made above is that the Maoists are not a unitary actor. This is a nebulous collective (if that) of different groups with differing agendum. Clubbing them together can have grievous implications on life and livelihood in the heartland of India, and must be avoided

Delving into ground realities reveals a second disturbing aspect of the case, this one a sharp indictment of the role of the Government of India in this Indian heartland. Take a look at the 14 demands made by the Naxalites on the state. Apart from the (almost mandatory, in hostage situations) demand for prisoner-exchange, much of the rest are demands that have been made on behalf of marginalised communities in India. The Naxals ask for: Scheduled Tribe status for certain Andhra communities; the closure of the multi-purpose Polavaram irrigation project; pattas (record of rights) of dispossessed groups; irrigated water supply to two villages in Malkangiri; compensation to two villagers who claim to have been tortured while in state custody; compensation to farmers living in areas submerged by the Balimela reservoir; better governing laws for the out-of-control bauxite mining industry; and the minimum displacement of tribal groups – and their adequate compensation – when development projects close in on their existence.


Here, then, are the failures of the Indian state placed in sharp relief. Indian citizens are being forced to request manifesto-waving brigands to make what are entirely legitimate demands on the state. These are citizens who feel so disempowered, so disenfranchised, by the industry-state nexus that they feel they must use Naxalites, and by proxy, kidnapping, as a conduit. What is this corner that India has painted its own citizens into?

Additionally, viewing the Prisoner's Dilemma from the Naxalite perspective for a second, they could be entitled to argue that all they have received from the state is a commitment to fulfill their demands, one that might easily be reneged upon once the state functionaries were back home safe. In that case, they might argue that they would be entitled to hold onto the prisoner's until the fulfillment of the 14 demands the Indian state committed to, including long-winded processes like remedying mining laws and putting an end to Operation Green Hunt. After all, the Government of India's track record in providing social justice to the unprivileged is hardly more favourable than the Naxalites track record in keeping their end of bargains.

One final disturbing aspect of the case was the reportage that surrounded it, which could be faulted on two issues. A crude rendition of the manner in which the major national newspapers portrayed the 14 demands of the Naxalites is: "release our Naxalites cronies, plus 13 others." While Times of India did carry an edited list of the demands (on an inside page) the headlines and major chunk of the stories in the national dailies prioritised this solitary diktat. Given the nature of the full set of demands, the media's unwillingness to analyse the Indian state's failure in this regard is shocking. The Naxals ask for an end to Operation Green Hunt. Is the media not required to ask if the Home Minister has now given up on a policy he deemed of paramount importance to national security, even in the diminished form in which it exists today?

Read more @ The Sunday Guardian

Why Mother India is an orphan at the Oscars

Why Mother India is an orphan at the Oscars
Mother India (1957)
By Prayaag Akbar

The Oscars are back, with all the hysteria only languid blue sexpot aliens (or Morgan Freeman as a smoulderin' Nelson Mandela) can incite. For Indian cinemawallahs, however, this is likely to be yet another year of disappointment: one more Best Foreign Film award slides away, probably to some beret-wearing "auteur" in Spain or Eastern Europe, far from the grasp of Bollywood directors and producers.

Every year the Film Federation of India dutifully proclaims its favourite from the thunderstorm of movies that India produces. The announcement of India's Oscar nominee is greeted with great local – and perhaps localised – excitement, despite the fact that the accolade is usually meaningless. Nine times out of ten (or, to be more accurate, 58 out of the 61 times the award has been given), the Indian movie selected is deemed not good enough to compete with the other efforts on the Best Foreign Film shortlist. In effect, the best movie from India is sent to that same canister in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences where lie films from Kazakhstan, Trinidad, and all those other countries where there is no multibillion-dollar movie industry, there are no world-famous actors, no imported background dancers.

At first this might seem like a failing of the Indian movie industry. We wonder if the film critics of Los Angeles are suffering from that old colonial disease of snobbery. We wonder if they decry the ease with which we intersperse fantasy and reality, song and drama, tragedy and laughter. But things are slowly changing. Increasingly, Los Angeles is beginning to recognise that Indian movies speak to the people they are made for. Yet, the Academy Awards will not search for the best films that come out of India because that award is interested in celebrating something else: the privileged perspective of the United States.

The vast assortment of Hollywood technicians, filmmakers and actors that judge the entries seek movies that correspond with their own politics; they want movies where the noble American saves the world; and they want stories that allow them to reinforce whatever stereotypical notions they have of a foreign nation. Movies that make people think are outside the Oscar matrix.

During the ceremony, "Best Foreign Film" might sound like one of the more arty Academy Awards, but the winner is invariably the cheeseburger of non-American cinema, where every ingredient is easily discernible, and the whole is a mass of uncomplicated, fatty, stereotypical fun.
Over a brief chat, filmmaker Pankaj Butalia (from whom the cheeseburger comparison has been stolen) is extremely insightful: "The Oscars are obsessed with large-scale human drama. A foreign film must either speak of large events, or it must correspond to American political interests. The protagonist must overcome some major adversity, the lowest of the low battling the mightiest forces."

There are distinctions, of course. Films from Western Europe and Canada are allowed more leeway; because the imagery is familiar to an American audience, the cultural ties date back further, and their political interests have been mostly aligned. It is easier, then, for a Western European film to transmit a focused, genuine message without having to resort to crude stereotyping. This perhaps explains the relative success of European films: since 1947, 51 out of the 61 awards have gone to European films, five to Asian films and three to African films. Films from nations in the former Communist bloc have suffered similarly.

The Foreign Film winners from 1999 to 2001 illustrate this point well. In 1999 it was director Pedro Almodovar's classic, All About My Mother, which provides a poignant examination of AIDS, transvestitism and faith in Spain. In 2000 China won with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is a stunning, beautiful film, but fantastical in the extreme, embedded with Orientalist symbolism of flying kung-fu monks and Gengis Khan-type warlords. In 2001, Danis Tanovic's No Man's Land, a dark comedy about the Bosnian war, won, only two years after Clinton bombed the Serbs into submission. In the film, valiant United Nations representatives come to the rescue of three soldiers trapped in No Man's Land: ah yes, precisely what happened, then.

By their nature, the Awards grant Western Europe artistic license the rest of the world is not accorded.

This year, the Film Federation of India chose a delightful Marathi film called Harishchandrachi Factory, the debut film of director Paresh Mokashi. It is the story of Dadasaheb Phalke's struggle in making the first Indian film in 1913. The film is not a "small" story; it is about the birth of Indian cinema, undoubtedly a landmark cultural event, even from a global perspective. But Butalia explains that it could not hope to come close to the shortlist.

"They want caricatured versions of India," he says. "Portraying triumph from abject poverty, or sanitised representations of the anti-colonial struggle. Just like the movie that must emerge from Afghanistan is Kite Runner [in which the Afghan villain, a Talibani, of course, is interested primarily in molesting boys, and the young Hazaari boy requires the goodly Afghan-American to come to his aid] the movie that must emerge from India is the rags-to-untold-riches Slumdog Millionaire. There can be nothing in between."

Dr Arvind Rajagopal, professor of Media Studies at New York University, and an expert on the political effects of representations in popular Indian media, argues that the method of selection inherently denies any movie the opportunity to be a meaningful cultural window. In an e-mail to Guardian20 he writes, "With the Oscar shortlist, it is the U.S. that selects India's ambassador, so the films making it to this list reveal as much about the U.S. as they do about India. Poverty, misery, and the hope of redemption is the formula – and the white man's burden (of uplifting the poor and downtrodden of the world) is expressed in this formula itself, as the filmmaker Paromita Vohra has remarked."

America's privileged political status also plays a part. Dr Rajagopal continues: "Popular culture in the U.S. exhibits little interest in other cultures, except what it can get through stereotypes and clichés. Today in the U.S., Indian films are usually approached in the spirit of cultural tourism. Many Americans are happy to capture the soul of a nation in a few images – or so they may think."

But it remains a fact that almost every international filmmaker cherishes Uncle Oscar's recognition more than any other. So, for those directors in India who want to follow that route, below is a handy guide based on the three Indian films that have made it to the Academy Awards shortlist.

1. MOTHER INDIA: Mother India had unique political advantages. It was 1957, only ten years after Independence, and this tearjerker par extraordinaire was unleashed on an unsuspecting American audience of Hollywood liberals. Recognition was bound to follow for this excellent film, but only because it hit notes they could understand: landlord-peasant conflict and rural indebtedness, coupled with evocative imagery and stellar acting. "This is India," you could hear them say. As Pankaj Butalia says, "It would have won, but it was filled with songs."

Read More @ The Sunday Guardian

Ten things I've learned after 6 months on Twitter

Ten things I've learned after 6 months on Twitter
By Prayaag Akbar
(In The Sunday Guardian, 2nd January 2011)
Follow Prayaag Akbar on http://twitter.com/unessentialist

10. There are many, many clever, talented people in India. Almost all of them are on Twitter.

9. India has a lot of right-wing-religious-nut-jobs who use this forum to attack reasonable people. They also attack Deepak Chopra.

8. Approximately 125% of South India is on Twitter. They seem to think all North Indians are called Amit.

7. As Joel Stein can confirm, there is no force in Nature as powerful as a seriously outraged Indian sat at a keyboard.

6. The number of sexually charged Indians rampaging around Twitter can make it seem like a Nymphomaniac's Convention. National Unity: a girl sitting in Mumbai tweeting one sex joke a day wreaks havoc on tissue supplies in Bhopal, Shillong, Kottayam and Kashmir.

5. Great overtures towards Indo-Pak peace are made everyday (most of it involves heavy flirting). Kashmir is the hottest non-topic everyday between these folk.

4. People expect ridiculous things of celebrities. Some loon asks Amitabh Bachchan to sort out water logging in Mumbai. Newsflash: He is not a BMC plumber.

3. Your follower count is like your bank balance. And Twitter celebs are like real world celebs. They won't talk to you unless you've got some money in the bank.

2. Indians love famous people. But we hate them even more.

1. And Shashi Tharoor and Lalit Modi have one more thing in common: they both seem to have nothing to say unless it is about themselves.

2010: The Year of Complicit Corruption

2010: The Year of Complicit Corruption
By Prayaag Akbar

2010 provided India with a multitude of options in which to define the decade to come. The decade just past was about creation of opportunity and extension of influence. We learnt, much to many of our surprise, that as India’s economic importance grew, the care with which the world addressed our concerns would also grow. No other country expanded its soft power as successfully as India did these ten years. The attention the world paid to both our folly and our triumph was notable because, finally, we were globally newsworthy. If that meant Suresh Kalmadi’s name found headlines in newspapers in every corner of the world, it also meant that Slate, perhaps the most popular magazine on the Web, could now happily devote a long editorial towards examining the enigmatic, Apocalyptic charisma of Rajnikanth.

Yet 2010 came to mean something quite different to the Indian public. This was the year of Complicit Corruption. We learnt, this time not to anyone’s surprise, that almost every avenue of influence in India was open to a most endemic form of subversion. If public outrage became the leitmotif of the year, it was not unjustified. Everywhere there was power there was skullduggery, and everywhere there was influence there was silent shenanigan. The Indian public was betrayed time and again by the people they had reposed their faith in.

The Radia tapes illuminated this most clearly. It came at the end of a year beset by scandal, yet what hurt the prevailing sentiment most was the callous, casual disregard that two of Indian media’s most trusted sentinels had for the Constitution and the role of the Fourth Estate. That the powers-to-be were for sale many people have long suspected. That those who had been tasked with bringing light to political misdeeds were equally complicit was a betrayal that became too much to bear. Traditional media, already a creaking behemoth in an age demanding nimble, reactive feet, was dealt a body blow by its own collusive tendencies. But Barkha Dutt and Vir Sanghvi were only the manifest representations of a culture that has seeped into news media for years. Front page space and analysis is being purchased by telecom and oil companies and their proxies at the same time the features pages are being bought by art galleries, restaurants and nightclubs. The World Wide Web democratised the dissemination of information; 2010 was the year that much of India’s Web-savvy population decided they no longer needed to be preached to by charlatans.

Yet the media is only one theatre for our uniquely Indian way of conducting the affairs of state. Cricket, housing for war widows, the Commonwealth Games, black money in Swiss banks, Mining, telecom, even the sale of food in a desperately poor state like Uttar Pradesh: everything was available to be bought and sold in India by a gathering of fifteen percenters in khadi. Many people cite the personal probity of our Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, which even in this besmirched age has thankfully never been in doubt. Dr Singh has helped bring to pass some of the best policies India has, such as the RTI and the NREGA. Yet he sits at the helm of a system that cultivates corruption and underhandedness. Perhaps he feels it is too much for one person to revolutionise the way government works in India. But if he is honest with himself, he will know that such rampaging thievery is the most insidious virus in the country. And now, the people are watching.