Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Muslim India
Muslim India
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:20:41 -0700 (PDT)
From:"Ghulam Muhammed"
Subject: A rejoinder to JAITHIRTH RAO's article: Naipaul's Challenge in Indian Express - June 27, 2005
To:jerryrao@expressindia.com
CC:admin@mcb.org.uk, advedit@adv.newsltd.com.au, aftnet@vsnl.com, ahramdaily@ahram.org.eg, alimnaqvi@urdutimes.net, anna_bigelow@ncsu.edu, cnn.feedback@cnn.com, comments@fareedzakaria.com, comments@foxnews.com, comments@truthout.org, dhwebeditor@alhayat.com, ed@daralhayat.net, edit@milligazette.com, editet@timesgroup.com, editor@aljazeerah.info, editor@deccanherald.co.in, editor@deccanmail.com, editor@impactnews.demon.co.uk, editor@malaysiakini.com, editor@nytimes.com, editor@onlinejournal.com, editor@the-week.com, editor@themuslimweekly.com, editor@zaman.com.tr, editors@newsweek.com, english@mehrnews.com, english_mail@xinhuanet.com, englishnews@islam-online.net, feedback04@anatolia.com, feedback@tehelka.com, fpj@vsnl.com, frontline@thehindu.co.in, india-unity@yahoogroups.com, indianmuslims@yahoogroups.com, info@siasat.com, inquilab@mid-day.com, jarallah@arabtimesonline.com, jotimes@jpf.com.jo, kteditor@emirates.net.ae, ktimes@emirates.net.ae, letter2editor@gulfnews.com, letter@globe.com, letters.editor@heraldtribune.com, letters.editor@intoday.com, letters@arabnews.com, letters@atimes.com, letters@dailytimes.com.pk, letters@dawn.com, letters@hardnewsmedia.com, letters@hindustantimes.com, letters@independent.co.uk, letters@latimes.com, letters@msnbc.com, letters@newsday.com, letters@slate.com, letters@taipeitimes.com, letters@theage.com.au, letters@thehindu.co.in, letters@thetimes.co.uk, letters@time.com, letters@tribuneindia.com, letters@washingtontimes.com, letters@washpost.com, lettertoed@thestar.ca, lucknowbureau@urdutimes.org, mailbag@mid-day.com, mailbox@robert-fisk.com, mailed@nstp.com.my, medasia@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in, muslim@ndc.vsnl.net.in, muslimwriters@yahoogroups.com, news@rediff.co.in, news@timeatlantic.com, newseditor@channelnewsasia.com, newsroom@news.com.au, oped@csps.com, opinion@japantimes.co.jp, opinion@manilatimes.net, outlook@outlookindia.com, pioneer@del2.vsnl.net.in, radianceweekly@vsnl.com, reader@guardian.co.uk, secretary@riyadhdaily.com.sa, stlocal@sph.com.sg, stoi@indiatimes.com, tft@lhr.comsats.net.pk, thawra@net.sy, thehindu@vsnl.com, thestatesman@vsnl.com, thinktank@pbs.org, tips@upi.com, toieditorial@timesgroup.com, ttedit@abpmail.com, vtr@ndf.vsnl.net.in, webmaster@dawn.com, webmaster@jang.com.pk, webmaster@tehrantimes.com, webmaster@thejakartapost.com, zik@vsnl.com
Monday, June 27, 2005
TO: Mr. Jaitirth Rao,
RE: Naipaul’s Challenge-
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=73349
Dear Mr. Rao,
You have very timely brought up the subject of a sense of renaissance in the affairs of India, which should be developed and taken up, step in step with the developments in India’s economic revival, and political and social reconstruction.
As an Indian Muslim, one of the 150 million of them, who all heartily believe India is their homeland too, I feel, I may interject in your call for a rethink, to press for some space for the Muslims too. In fact, I am amazed how narrow-sighted the Brahmanical vision of India is, that seems to slog on, without giving smallest inch of space, even in their public discussions, on the future of India. The sense of exclusive Hindu India is so deeply ingrained into our psyche, that we are oblivious to a depth and breadth that a composite, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural India could offer.
Partition of Bengal back in 1905, full hundred years back, was the British perfidy to exploit the fault line between the two major communities that they could not be ignorant of. In fact, it can be safely put down that the Brahmanical idea of India was to liberate the land, both from British as well as Muslim stranglehold. Hundred years later, articulating that dream of an exclusive Brahmanical India, is more pronounced, more achievable as it seems. However, the real world is a bit different from the world of dreams. A case in point is the recent opening up to Pakistan and Advani’s visit to Jinnah’s mausoleum. Before the elections of 2004, it would have been all very unthinkable that a staunch nationalist represent an extreme jingoist movement, could even have a good word for Muslims, in any shape or form. Advani was not very far from Naipaul in thinking and even in planning for a Hindu India. However, a realization has dawned on some of the BJP’s front ranking leaders and thinkers, that India is much more than the cloistered and ghettoized world of Brahmin exclusivity. Brahmins are part and parcel of India, but they are not the whole or exclusive version of India. India, its civilization, its historical character and its modern entity is more expansive, more expanding, more inclusive.
When you call for a rethinking on the renaissance, somehow I feel that Brahmins are singularly incapable of fulfilling the destiny of India, without taking Muslims and Islam in its calculations. In the new age of globalization, we cannot partition India, into many closed nations of Muslims, Brahmins, Sikhs, Jain, Buddhists, Dravidians, Nagas, tribals, etc. A much more overarching set of relationships had to be explored to give full dimension to India’s destiny. Just as the US as a full realization of its destiny, expands its economic, security and cultural boundaries way beyond its legal national boundaries; India will have to come out with an idea of an ever expanding boundaries when our PM may not have to give out his insecurities by insisting that India’s boundaries are sacrosanct. How can a colonial power imposed boundaries become so holy and sacrosanct. Time for conquests are gone. But short of armed expansion, there are any number of measures, that give full potential to our country’s ever increasing area of influence. We have come a long way, when the idea of ‘two nation’, meant a well-defined piece of land as the starting point of our new identity. Those notions brought big tragedies in its wake.
When you write: Our discourse must cover every aspect of our emerging culture and ensure that it is a lively one embracing the outside world while seeking the well-spring of our collective unconscious …
I feel it appropriate to remind you, that both the outside world and the inside well-springs of our collective unconscious of India, have an unshakeable interwoven relationship with Muslims and Islam. I wish you would not shy away in expressly acknowledging the fact of Muslim existence and relevance into the making for future India of great potential. In fact, without Muslim and Islamic reference, the Brahmanical India will remain a ghettoized Brahmanvada, closed to all the so-called untouchables and unmentionables.
While the world is confronting with a globalized clash of civilizations scenario, but finally succumbing to a multi-cultural, multi-religious model of a peaceful co-existance, we should be ready to avoid the bloody battles within our shores or outside and set our own harmonizing example for the world to follow.
I have full sympathy for the deep scars that Hindus in general and Brahmins in particular have suffered over thousands of years, from the Mongolised version of Islamic government in India.
When President Musharraf welcomed Advani to cross over and lay the foundation stone for the renewal of an old dilapidated temple complex, he has given an open rebut to the Mehmood Gazni’s version of militarized Islam. That gesture should be noted and appreciated by those who live by constant reminder of Muslim atrocities.
A new beginning can always be made and the time has come for Indian thinkers to work in Islam and Muslims in their worldview of a New India.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
-------------
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=73349
Naipaul’s challenge
Can India ensure a new renaissance that does justice to its traditions?
JAITHIRTH RAO
Posted online: Monday, June 27, 2005 at 0000 hours IST
The year 2005 will be remembered for, among other things, V.S. Naipaul’s milestone speech in which he challenged Indians to come up with a contemporary intellectual discourse. Not since the great Bengal renaissance has there been a movement in India that does justice to our history, our social conditions, our aesthetic traditions, our literary canons and our political predicaments. The 20th century, was characterised by an excessive interest in matters political. One can date the beginning of this obsession to 1905: the partition of Bengal and the Swadeshi movement. Opposing British imperialism became an end in itself. And no movement that is solely focused on “opposition” can generate constructive, creative impulses. The best exponents of the Bengal renaissance (Rammohun Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Vivekananda, Bankim, Tagore) were concerned with awakening and building, not merely criticising and opposing. It is from this intellectual tradition that today’s India should seek inspiration.
Drunk with the recent economic success, we may fall into the trap that intellectual, moral and aesthetic discourse is not important. The Prussian model which was obsessed with technological, military and economic successes, as ends in themselves, led to a hubristic denouement in 1945. Naipaul has explicitly warned us not to be seduced by the Prussian model. No organism (society, nation, civilisation, call it what you will) of the size of India with its tortured history and rich cultural tapestry can respond to the aspirations of its citizens by putting all its eggs in the basket of economic instrumentalism. A double digit rate of GDP growth is desirable and in our case even necessary. But it is not sufficient. Intellectual activity cannot be postponed till after we have achieved economic “development”. The two processes have to be simultaneous, not sequential. A recent warning by a respected former Central banker, Bimal Jalan, that our economic growth rate could revert to proverbial Hindoo levels if the eco-system of our public policy is not fixed, should give us reason for pause. Once we have jettisoned crude violence as an option (if for no other reason than that it failed the Prussians!), “improvements” in public policy can come about only through public discourse.
The Bengali renaissance came up with definitive approaches to a range of activities that we refer to as “culture”. Literature, history, music, painting, sculpture, religion, moral philosophy, political economy and social studies were all covered and an attempt was made to address the historical predicament of not just the Bengalis, but of the people of India in a manner remarkable for its energy, its honesty and the sheer exuberance of its multi-tonal talent. The individuals behind this movement were certainly influenced by the West. But they did not succumb to lazy imitation and acceptance of ideologies that had no relevance to their own environment. They were equally influenced by ancient and medieval Indian civilisation, by Adivasi traditions and by the plain fact of deprivation of every kind which haunted their countrymen during their own lifetimes. To these influences they applied the test of their own judgments; judgments arrived at after much thought and debate. If Indians exist today as one people under one set of laws with a modicum of shared aspirations, we owe it to the Bengali “torch-bearers” of the 19th century.
To allow our national intellectual debate to be hijacked by post-modernists cocooned in exile as tenured professors in American universities or by adherents of totalitarian political traditions which have been discredited in their own homelands would be a great folly. The debate has to be in India and has to be undertaken by people with meaningful economic, political and cultural stakes in India. The vocabulary that governs this debate needs to be developed in India today. If Michael Madhusudan Dutt could create a “new” language, so must we. By reaching out to both poetry and music Tagore created something new, but he also connected back to the traditions of Jaidev and Vidyapati. Before Bankim, there was no Indian novel. But his novels were not imitation European novels. He wove into them the tradition of the “sutradhar”. Rammohun defended the Upanishads and condemned suttee. Vivekananda advocated activism as opposed to prevalent Hindoo lassitude, but he did it by harking back to Vedantic traditions, not by rejecting them. Daridra-narayana was a new contribution to a heartless caste-ridden society done with such finesse that no one notices its radical nature. Jamini Roy is the epitome of “modernism” in art and his modernism is tied up with the Adivasi aesthetic experience. Notice that none of the Bengali greats regressed into blind veneration of re-interpreted versions of India’s past! Not one embraced narrow-minded chauvinism. Rammohun pleaded for English education. Tagore was even skeptical of the Swadeshi movement as he feared (and rightly so) that it appealed to atavism.
Our intellectual forbears have set us an example. In 2005, it is time we finally say goodbye to one hundred years of obsession with politics, especially the politics of opposition and confrontation. We must completely reject the mindset of discredited totalitarian ideologies (we hope “probasi” Bengalis take the lead and, who knows, Buddha-babu may still surprise us!). The discourse must cover every aspect of our emerging culture and ensure that it is a lively one embracing the outside world while seeking the well-springs of our collective unconscious and dealing with the continued prevalence of wretchedness for so many of our fellow-citizens (“they of the thin legs”). It is not an easy task. One of our finest directors, Shekhar Kapoor, made a film on Elizabeth I. It ends with the statement that in her lifetime, England changed from an unimportant country on the periphery of the continent to become Europe’s richest country. And we all know that England’s riches included poetry and drama in the same measure as her gold and her wool. It is up to us to decide if we wish to create an Elizabethan England or a Florence of the Medicis. Hopefully, we will not settle for a false paradise of the Prussian or Leninist kind.
The writer is chairman & CEO, MphasiS. Write to him at jerryrao@expressindia.com
Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:20:41 -0700 (PDT)
From:"Ghulam Muhammed"
Subject: A rejoinder to JAITHIRTH RAO's article: Naipaul's Challenge in Indian Express - June 27, 2005
To:jerryrao@expressindia.com
CC:admin@mcb.org.uk, advedit@adv.newsltd.com.au, aftnet@vsnl.com, ahramdaily@ahram.org.eg, alimnaqvi@urdutimes.net, anna_bigelow@ncsu.edu, cnn.feedback@cnn.com, comments@fareedzakaria.com, comments@foxnews.com, comments@truthout.org, dhwebeditor@alhayat.com, ed@daralhayat.net, edit@milligazette.com, editet@timesgroup.com, editor@aljazeerah.info, editor@deccanherald.co.in, editor@deccanmail.com, editor@impactnews.demon.co.uk, editor@malaysiakini.com, editor@nytimes.com, editor@onlinejournal.com, editor@the-week.com, editor@themuslimweekly.com, editor@zaman.com.tr, editors@newsweek.com, english@mehrnews.com, english_mail@xinhuanet.com, englishnews@islam-online.net, feedback04@anatolia.com, feedback@tehelka.com, fpj@vsnl.com, frontline@thehindu.co.in, india-unity@yahoogroups.com, indianmuslims@yahoogroups.com, info@siasat.com, inquilab@mid-day.com, jarallah@arabtimesonline.com, jotimes@jpf.com.jo, kteditor@emirates.net.ae, ktimes@emirates.net.ae, letter2editor@gulfnews.com, letter@globe.com, letters.editor@heraldtribune.com, letters.editor@intoday.com, letters@arabnews.com, letters@atimes.com, letters@dailytimes.com.pk, letters@dawn.com, letters@hardnewsmedia.com, letters@hindustantimes.com, letters@independent.co.uk, letters@latimes.com, letters@msnbc.com, letters@newsday.com, letters@slate.com, letters@taipeitimes.com, letters@theage.com.au, letters@thehindu.co.in, letters@thetimes.co.uk, letters@time.com, letters@tribuneindia.com, letters@washingtontimes.com, letters@washpost.com, lettertoed@thestar.ca, lucknowbureau@urdutimes.org, mailbag@mid-day.com, mailbox@robert-fisk.com, mailed@nstp.com.my, medasia@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in, muslim@ndc.vsnl.net.in, muslimwriters@yahoogroups.com, news@rediff.co.in, news@timeatlantic.com, newseditor@channelnewsasia.com, newsroom@news.com.au, oped@csps.com, opinion@japantimes.co.jp, opinion@manilatimes.net, outlook@outlookindia.com, pioneer@del2.vsnl.net.in, radianceweekly@vsnl.com, reader@guardian.co.uk, secretary@riyadhdaily.com.sa, stlocal@sph.com.sg, stoi@indiatimes.com, tft@lhr.comsats.net.pk, thawra@net.sy, thehindu@vsnl.com, thestatesman@vsnl.com, thinktank@pbs.org, tips@upi.com, toieditorial@timesgroup.com, ttedit@abpmail.com, vtr@ndf.vsnl.net.in, webmaster@dawn.com, webmaster@jang.com.pk, webmaster@tehrantimes.com, webmaster@thejakartapost.com, zik@vsnl.com
Monday, June 27, 2005
TO: Mr. Jaitirth Rao,
RE: Naipaul’s Challenge-
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=73349
Dear Mr. Rao,
You have very timely brought up the subject of a sense of renaissance in the affairs of India, which should be developed and taken up, step in step with the developments in India’s economic revival, and political and social reconstruction.
As an Indian Muslim, one of the 150 million of them, who all heartily believe India is their homeland too, I feel, I may interject in your call for a rethink, to press for some space for the Muslims too. In fact, I am amazed how narrow-sighted the Brahmanical vision of India is, that seems to slog on, without giving smallest inch of space, even in their public discussions, on the future of India. The sense of exclusive Hindu India is so deeply ingrained into our psyche, that we are oblivious to a depth and breadth that a composite, multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-cultural India could offer.
Partition of Bengal back in 1905, full hundred years back, was the British perfidy to exploit the fault line between the two major communities that they could not be ignorant of. In fact, it can be safely put down that the Brahmanical idea of India was to liberate the land, both from British as well as Muslim stranglehold. Hundred years later, articulating that dream of an exclusive Brahmanical India, is more pronounced, more achievable as it seems. However, the real world is a bit different from the world of dreams. A case in point is the recent opening up to Pakistan and Advani’s visit to Jinnah’s mausoleum. Before the elections of 2004, it would have been all very unthinkable that a staunch nationalist represent an extreme jingoist movement, could even have a good word for Muslims, in any shape or form. Advani was not very far from Naipaul in thinking and even in planning for a Hindu India. However, a realization has dawned on some of the BJP’s front ranking leaders and thinkers, that India is much more than the cloistered and ghettoized world of Brahmin exclusivity. Brahmins are part and parcel of India, but they are not the whole or exclusive version of India. India, its civilization, its historical character and its modern entity is more expansive, more expanding, more inclusive.
When you call for a rethinking on the renaissance, somehow I feel that Brahmins are singularly incapable of fulfilling the destiny of India, without taking Muslims and Islam in its calculations. In the new age of globalization, we cannot partition India, into many closed nations of Muslims, Brahmins, Sikhs, Jain, Buddhists, Dravidians, Nagas, tribals, etc. A much more overarching set of relationships had to be explored to give full dimension to India’s destiny. Just as the US as a full realization of its destiny, expands its economic, security and cultural boundaries way beyond its legal national boundaries; India will have to come out with an idea of an ever expanding boundaries when our PM may not have to give out his insecurities by insisting that India’s boundaries are sacrosanct. How can a colonial power imposed boundaries become so holy and sacrosanct. Time for conquests are gone. But short of armed expansion, there are any number of measures, that give full potential to our country’s ever increasing area of influence. We have come a long way, when the idea of ‘two nation’, meant a well-defined piece of land as the starting point of our new identity. Those notions brought big tragedies in its wake.
When you write: Our discourse must cover every aspect of our emerging culture and ensure that it is a lively one embracing the outside world while seeking the well-spring of our collective unconscious …
I feel it appropriate to remind you, that both the outside world and the inside well-springs of our collective unconscious of India, have an unshakeable interwoven relationship with Muslims and Islam. I wish you would not shy away in expressly acknowledging the fact of Muslim existence and relevance into the making for future India of great potential. In fact, without Muslim and Islamic reference, the Brahmanical India will remain a ghettoized Brahmanvada, closed to all the so-called untouchables and unmentionables.
While the world is confronting with a globalized clash of civilizations scenario, but finally succumbing to a multi-cultural, multi-religious model of a peaceful co-existance, we should be ready to avoid the bloody battles within our shores or outside and set our own harmonizing example for the world to follow.
I have full sympathy for the deep scars that Hindus in general and Brahmins in particular have suffered over thousands of years, from the Mongolised version of Islamic government in India.
When President Musharraf welcomed Advani to cross over and lay the foundation stone for the renewal of an old dilapidated temple complex, he has given an open rebut to the Mehmood Gazni’s version of militarized Islam. That gesture should be noted and appreciated by those who live by constant reminder of Muslim atrocities.
A new beginning can always be made and the time has come for Indian thinkers to work in Islam and Muslims in their worldview of a New India.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
-------------
http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.php?content_id=73349
Naipaul’s challenge
Can India ensure a new renaissance that does justice to its traditions?
JAITHIRTH RAO
Posted online: Monday, June 27, 2005 at 0000 hours IST
The year 2005 will be remembered for, among other things, V.S. Naipaul’s milestone speech in which he challenged Indians to come up with a contemporary intellectual discourse. Not since the great Bengal renaissance has there been a movement in India that does justice to our history, our social conditions, our aesthetic traditions, our literary canons and our political predicaments. The 20th century, was characterised by an excessive interest in matters political. One can date the beginning of this obsession to 1905: the partition of Bengal and the Swadeshi movement. Opposing British imperialism became an end in itself. And no movement that is solely focused on “opposition” can generate constructive, creative impulses. The best exponents of the Bengal renaissance (Rammohun Roy, Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Vivekananda, Bankim, Tagore) were concerned with awakening and building, not merely criticising and opposing. It is from this intellectual tradition that today’s India should seek inspiration.
Drunk with the recent economic success, we may fall into the trap that intellectual, moral and aesthetic discourse is not important. The Prussian model which was obsessed with technological, military and economic successes, as ends in themselves, led to a hubristic denouement in 1945. Naipaul has explicitly warned us not to be seduced by the Prussian model. No organism (society, nation, civilisation, call it what you will) of the size of India with its tortured history and rich cultural tapestry can respond to the aspirations of its citizens by putting all its eggs in the basket of economic instrumentalism. A double digit rate of GDP growth is desirable and in our case even necessary. But it is not sufficient. Intellectual activity cannot be postponed till after we have achieved economic “development”. The two processes have to be simultaneous, not sequential. A recent warning by a respected former Central banker, Bimal Jalan, that our economic growth rate could revert to proverbial Hindoo levels if the eco-system of our public policy is not fixed, should give us reason for pause. Once we have jettisoned crude violence as an option (if for no other reason than that it failed the Prussians!), “improvements” in public policy can come about only through public discourse.
The Bengali renaissance came up with definitive approaches to a range of activities that we refer to as “culture”. Literature, history, music, painting, sculpture, religion, moral philosophy, political economy and social studies were all covered and an attempt was made to address the historical predicament of not just the Bengalis, but of the people of India in a manner remarkable for its energy, its honesty and the sheer exuberance of its multi-tonal talent. The individuals behind this movement were certainly influenced by the West. But they did not succumb to lazy imitation and acceptance of ideologies that had no relevance to their own environment. They were equally influenced by ancient and medieval Indian civilisation, by Adivasi traditions and by the plain fact of deprivation of every kind which haunted their countrymen during their own lifetimes. To these influences they applied the test of their own judgments; judgments arrived at after much thought and debate. If Indians exist today as one people under one set of laws with a modicum of shared aspirations, we owe it to the Bengali “torch-bearers” of the 19th century.
To allow our national intellectual debate to be hijacked by post-modernists cocooned in exile as tenured professors in American universities or by adherents of totalitarian political traditions which have been discredited in their own homelands would be a great folly. The debate has to be in India and has to be undertaken by people with meaningful economic, political and cultural stakes in India. The vocabulary that governs this debate needs to be developed in India today. If Michael Madhusudan Dutt could create a “new” language, so must we. By reaching out to both poetry and music Tagore created something new, but he also connected back to the traditions of Jaidev and Vidyapati. Before Bankim, there was no Indian novel. But his novels were not imitation European novels. He wove into them the tradition of the “sutradhar”. Rammohun defended the Upanishads and condemned suttee. Vivekananda advocated activism as opposed to prevalent Hindoo lassitude, but he did it by harking back to Vedantic traditions, not by rejecting them. Daridra-narayana was a new contribution to a heartless caste-ridden society done with such finesse that no one notices its radical nature. Jamini Roy is the epitome of “modernism” in art and his modernism is tied up with the Adivasi aesthetic experience. Notice that none of the Bengali greats regressed into blind veneration of re-interpreted versions of India’s past! Not one embraced narrow-minded chauvinism. Rammohun pleaded for English education. Tagore was even skeptical of the Swadeshi movement as he feared (and rightly so) that it appealed to atavism.
Our intellectual forbears have set us an example. In 2005, it is time we finally say goodbye to one hundred years of obsession with politics, especially the politics of opposition and confrontation. We must completely reject the mindset of discredited totalitarian ideologies (we hope “probasi” Bengalis take the lead and, who knows, Buddha-babu may still surprise us!). The discourse must cover every aspect of our emerging culture and ensure that it is a lively one embracing the outside world while seeking the well-springs of our collective unconscious and dealing with the continued prevalence of wretchedness for so many of our fellow-citizens (“they of the thin legs”). It is not an easy task. One of our finest directors, Shekhar Kapoor, made a film on Elizabeth I. It ends with the statement that in her lifetime, England changed from an unimportant country on the periphery of the continent to become Europe’s richest country. And we all know that England’s riches included poetry and drama in the same measure as her gold and her wool. It is up to us to decide if we wish to create an Elizabethan England or a Florence of the Medicis. Hopefully, we will not settle for a false paradise of the Prussian or Leninist kind.
The writer is chairman & CEO, MphasiS. Write to him at jerryrao@expressindia.com
