Nandan Nilekani’s much-heralded first book will re-launch him, this time onto the national stage, says T N Ninan, who finds that it contains many arguments but no central narrative.
Hosting a dinner for journalists in Delhi, Nandan Nilekani exudes his usual air of benign confidence in himself and in the state of the world; if there is any nervousness in the debutante author, it doesn’t show. And his PR is as faultless as it always is with Infosys; each guest gets an autographed copy before s/he leaves, in most if not all cases with a personal note penned in.
Both before and after, there is the build-up associated with a celebrity book launch: interviews, profiles… But we don’t get a real sense of the book itself. The publisher clearly thinks this is a winner, or 40,000 copies would not have been printed (which puts this first-time author in the Amartya Sen league). But if it is about ideas, as everyone says it is, what are the big ideas that Nandan (as anyone who knows him even slightly calls him) has? The build-up doesn’t tell you.
Naturally, I have to read the book to find out. And, before I go any further, here they are. The first lot has five: demographics (our people are our strength), entrepreneurship, English, democracy, and our openness to the world — which the author categories among those “issues where our attitudes have changed radically over the years”, with those shifts in attitude being “at the heart of India’s dynamism today”.
The next lot has four: school education, urbanisation, infrastructure and an integrated all-India market, which are “widely accepted but have yet to see results on the ground”.
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The third lot comprises three of our “biggest arguments”: employment, universities, and half-done reform amidst the “state and markets” debate. The final lot has five more: information & communications technology (ICT), health, social insecurity, environment and power — ideas which Nandan feels are “largely missing from our public discourse”, which is a surprising claim.
Seventeen ideas in all, but are they “ideas” (the word in the sub-title of the book)? The author himself refers to them as “issues”, which is a more correct description. He does not have a specific proposition to make in each case, which would make it an idea, though there is of course a thread of argument.
More often than not, though, it is a discussion of the issue, its historical background, the mis-steps of the past, the debates and the current directions of thought. There isn’t always a “Nilekani view” emerging at the end, though in many cases it is obvious what he would like to see done in terms of broad direction — and there are no surprises here.
The end-product is in large part a result of the way in which Nandan says he approached the project. He tackled it the way a technocrat-manager would approach a challenge in Infosys or elsewhere: define the contours of what has to be done, break it up into manageable parts, then tackle each one in sequence.
The result, after 20 months, is what I would look at as a succession of long cover stories for a magazine. But the reporting is not first-hand (as in Ed Luce’s In Spite of the Gods with its unforgettable visits to the Dar-ul-Uloom in Deoband and to Amar Singh’s house in Lodi Estate.)
Instead of story-telling that makes a point, Nandan has conversations with people who have thought about the issues rather than experienced them, people who have worked on the problem and in some cases found solutions…academicians in the US, policy-makers at home, economists and sociologists, politicians and social entrepreneurs from the NGO world.
As he works through the issues and quotes the people he has talked to, the focus remains on the issues, so the text is discursive and didactic, neither reportorial nor strongly argumentative, and therefore does not break new ground. There also seems to be a conscious decision to avoid statistics—which can be a blessing, but also a handicap.
Some 20 such essays, and…do you have a “book”? Yes, and no. No because there are 20 arguments, but no central narrative, like tree branches that don’t have a trunk. Still, it hangs together because it is all about contemporary India, where we have come and what we need to address in order to move ahead.
They are all big issues of contemporary relevance, and in all cases the author succeeds in taking you to the heart of the informed debate — which suggests a lot of reading and a lot of intellectual discussion, and the quick absorption that the author is known for. There are 15 pages of reference notes at the end, and a long list of acknowledgements.
But there are two problems. Sometimes, a chapter or “idea” is little more than a piece of business journalism. In other cases, it works well. The ICT chapter is written by someone who has mastery of the subject; the discussion on English is another success, with a crisp retelling of the tortuous history of attitudes to the language in India and the social and economic forces that have defined the outcome.
The demographic dividend is clearly enunciated in the chapter on people. But on a deepening democracy, Nandan does not seem to have got his hands around the full contours of the debate, nor been able to do effective distilling of the ideas. If I were to be unkind about some of the less interesting chapters, I would say that they become something like essay answers to: India is not a single common market. Discuss!
The second problem is the problem with any list, for it begs the question: why this list and why not some other? In part, the choice is made by an author who sees India’s as a positive script in which is written the “language of hope”, and those who point to the country’s “deep divides” as Cassandras. Which is fine too, I suppose, because one set of choices is no less valid than any other.
While the book is interesting enough and a good half-day read, it is more easily digested by dipping into specific chapters whenever you have half an hour free. But the really interesting prospect is Nandan Nilekani himself, because this book will in a sense have re-launched him.
Here is a geek who has become a business icon who has now developed a sufficient interest in broader issues to engage with them deeply enough to write a big book (some 200,000 words) — which he deprecatingly calls the manifestation of an ex-CEO’s midlife crisis (he is 53). He sits on half a dozen policy committees and commissions: the Knowledge Commission, the National Advisory Group on e-Governance, the review committee of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, and so on.
He has also become the president of the National Council of Applied Economic Research and chaired the IT Task Force for Power. Apart from that broad range of commitments, he has been a generous philanthropist, giving financial backing to a wide arrayof ventures designed to have social impact. So we have a concerned public citizen who has given his time to many issues, and now has become a public intellectual as well.
In an important way, therefore, Nandan Nilekani is changing orbits with this book, from that of Infosys with all its proud accomplishments to the infinitely larger national one, with all its problems. The question is whether he will find a role in the new orbit that allows him to make a difference.
One thing is for certain: in our public space, we need competent managers who think and listen, empathise and understand, lead and act to bring about change, and do so with integrity and commitment. Few are as qualified as Nandan Nilekani to make a difference, and it will be a pity if the system does not give him the opportunity to make that difference.
IMAGINING INDIA
Ideas for the New Century
AUTHOR: Nandan Nilekani
PUBLISHER: Penguin/ Allen Lane
PAGES: 531
PRICE: Rs 699