Second confession: After reading The Elephant Paradigm more carefully, I ended up admiring much of what this "old-fashioned liberal" has to say.
Das’ basic raw material here is the more-than-200 columns he’s written in the years since he quit his top management job at Procter & Gamble and returned to India. He has clubbed them together according to their themes, and tried to create a seamless commentary on "the spirit of contemporary India". This technique doesn’t work all the time—there are a few jumps and breaks—but it works much better than one would expect. The topics range wide and far: from India’s software success to why and what we should read, from possible solutions to our power sector woes to the enigma of India’s constant economic underachievement. But all in simple, precise language—with not a word wasted—that should enable even a schoolboy to grasp the intricacies of global economics.
Das is also the master of the telling statistic. Nothing brings home the problem of our railways better than a mention that "railway families occupy, on the average, forty out of hundred berths in the two-tier AC sleeper class". But above all, he refuses to pull his punches in the interests of political correctness. Though no admirer of the Hindu right wing, he boldly puts his finger on why Nehruvian secularism’s failed. "It is unable to resonate with the average Indian because it lacks a reverence for the old Indian idea of undivided wholeness—that our world of distinct objects must be a manifestation of a more fundamental unity. Nehru’s secularism failed because it was too intellectual and empty of content." And later, "Today, there is an unfortunate polarisation between an influential and articulate minority of secularists and the vast majority of silent, religiously-minded Indians. Neither takes the trouble to understand the other, and what we have as a result is a dialogue of the deaf."
Many of his conclusions are hardly new. But at a time when our public discourse is rendered unintelligible by sterile jargon, Das’ simple statements often cut to the bone. "If there is one thing that holds a woman back in middle class India, it is her reluctance to face the reality of money. Very simply, money must be made. You have to earn a salary or run a business.... It is the only way you will be free in the long run." This passage is worth a tonne of studies and reports, and the countless trees destroyed to print them.
Or, "I am convinced that the world is divided into two types of people: the minority who are dedicated to happiness and the majority who are dedicated to unhappiness. Those in the happy minority...know what they want, and are content with getting on with their lives.... In contrast, those in the unhappy majority...define their identity in relation to others and believe they can only be happy by making someone else unhappy." Any sane man will know this to be true and the root of most problems facing the world today.The best things about this book are these small but vital truths—the essences of complex issues—which our opinion-makers often shy away from uttering, or, conversely, spend so much time explaining that no one gets the point anyway. Das is the first writer I’ve read who says what we all know, that Indians are too smart for their own good. Or, "In the short term, the reforms will have little impact on the poor—let’s admit this honestly."
Or, that democracy arriving in India before we had the chance to create an industrial revolution was a reversal of historical logic which we’re still suffering from: "Populist pressures for redistributing the pie built up before it was baked.... We began to think in terms of ‘welfare’ before there were welfare-generating jobs."
Reading The Elephant Paradigm has not made me an optimist about India. But if it was made required reading for every politician and bureaucrat, I’m open to changing my mind.
