At a time when the BJP is talking about India Shining, it might be of some interest to look at the truly glittering aspects of the country for which the saffron lobby can take no credit. Following are extracts from an interview with Gurcharan Das. These are the views of a corporate man who poured his thoughts into a book that seems even more relevant now.


I first met him when he was pregnant. He sat on a stool, sipping nimbu-paani and talking about conception.

Once the baby was born, Gurcharan Das was not just a relieved man, but also a proud man. For, airport readers as well as academic right-wingers have heralded the birth of ‘India Unbound’. It has received the highest advance for an Indian book in the non-fiction category. And surprisingly, for a man who is a liberal, secular, free market proponent, the book is being hailed even in closed political circles, because, without thinking about it, he has given them the wherewithal to promote an India they would like the world to see.

What did Das hope to unbind? “The choice of title was between ‘India Unbound’ and ‘India Unshackled’, but the latter sounded too Marxist. I liked the idea of ‘Prometheus Unbound’, of the human being let loose.”

This, you would assume, is exactly the sort of thing a man with a well-knotted tie would say in a large hall with high ceilings and stained-glass windows. The little bit of news is that this man escaped from Harvard because, “they did not really teach sexy things like Existentialism”! It was arid stuff. He came back without a degree in philosophy but with the knowledge that he had the guts to make difficult choices. Like joining a company at a salary of Rs. 850 a month, and rising to be its boss.

It is a bit of a tragedy that today reviewers who cannot sell 500-words of any worth are deriding him as a “former Vicks Vaporub salesman”. It might be of some interest to know that he left his cushy job to research this book, which took a good five years. If it is the corporate image that must stay in our minds, then Gurcharan Das is a “venture capitalist” in more ways than one.

He has opened up the marketplace for his ideas. In that he ought to be taken more seriously than any traditional writer, for he wears varied garbs and is different people.

The writer as historian
The questions Gurcharan Das asked his grandfather are in a sense what history has meant to him. “If we were once rich, why are we now poor?” It could have been an autobiography, but it isn’t. “I am interested in us as observers as events unfold and how those events touch us. So there is the private life and the public life. I start from the moment I was born soon after the Quit India Movement up to the Reforms. “

How did he mesh the historical perspective with the contemporary? “I was from a background of free enterprise, so I have a point of view of a person who was a tremendous victim of a system which tried as hard as possible to crush entrepreneurial energy in the country. So, in many ways it is a normal history of the last 50 years.”

When he says normal, does he mean people who are marginally affected, like you and I, or the little people in little places? “Yes that and the fact that the heroes here are not the Gandhis and Nehrus but the banias. Even in the new India I think of them as banias. When we talk about the Ambanis and Birlas, we talk about suppressed growth. I don’t think any book has been written with that focus. It was not only a world I got to know but also the discovery that it is a story of wealth and poverty. It is not only about the rich people, but how the policies and events affected the common people too. It is the story of a betrayal.”

And while he was dealing with the Big Questions of capitalism, socialism, colonialism, he discovered that we have been victims of our inherent values, our ineptitude. He even used the Alexander-Porus battle to explore the caste-system. And he named his son after the defeated Indian king. He is clearly fascinated by history. For him, that is where the best lessons come from. “The BJP is not capable of learning from history. They need good historians. Hindutva is such an impoverished image of our past. Spirituality is only one strand. There is medicine, astronomy, mathematics.” And culture? “That grows out of history.”

There is always the fear that when a writer sets out to do something differently, like telling an intimate story about experiences, historical authenticity would be coloured. Das had a clear agenda. “At best I am a public intellectual. This is no work of scholarship. I had to teach myself economic history. As somebody said, all historians seek their history. I chose to deal with the side that had to do with commerce, wealth, poverty, and the changes that have been wrought by it.”

The writer as political commentator
Is it possible for a writer to be at least an objective commentator of real events? Can he fabricate the truth to suit his brief? It is all very well to select your version of history, but can you wear blinkers to ‘see’ what is happening before your eyes? How different are the lived experiences of the people from the writer’s imagination, and how would we know?

Can we go along with the writer’s idea of heroism being a waiter called Raju in a roadside eatery in a Tamil Nadu village? Das has his own take on this. “What I marveled at is that it was his summertime job, an urban and rather western concept. He earned Rs. 450 a month, which he spent on computer lessons. His dream was to run a computer company. I asked him where he got the idea from and he said he saw it on TV, about someone who he called Bill Gay.”

Is Raju the dreamer here, or Das? If you asked the writer, his riposte would be, “Just as we had midnight’s children, there will be the children of 1991.” For him life began after the liberalisation of the economy. How, then, would he define the industrial giants of old in terms of Indian capitalism? “One cannot admire them in those terms because the bottomline is that we did not create the Industrial Revolution. It bypassed us. Those business houses got their capitalism in a bureaucrat’s office, not in the market. Which is why I am interested in the conflict between old money and new money and the difference between, say, Rahul Bajaj and Narayan Murthy. There are only two countries where democracy preceded capitalism – America and India, which became truly capitalist only in 1991. Yet I think India will be the white elephant, unlike Korea and China which went and capitalised the bazaars and farms.”

As an observer, he keeps a constant vigil on politicians. And though he gives many points to Manmohan Singh and P.V.Narasimha Rao, his greatest accolades are reserved for Lal Bahadur Shastri. “He understood that the reforms would take place way back then and a License Raj would come in. So he liberated agriculture and was instrumental in bringing about the Green Revolution. Indira Gandhi, the real villain, reversed it. The 70s were the darkest period where all competition was destroyed.” Unlike Japan, which thrived due to it? “If we had been invaded by Japan, we would have followed the Japanese model,” he says matter-of-factly.

According to him, the “million negotiations of democracy” will include dealing with a whopping 650 million that will constitute the middle-class in another 20 years. This would be 50 per cent of the population as opposed to eight per cent in 1980. His concerns move from the rich countries that are 15 to 20 times richer than India to the alarming rise of Infosys from a Rs.10, 000 investment transforming into a Rs.66,000 crore company. He is disgusted that while Korea with a 40 million population has a per capita income of $10,000 ours is only $400.

But he springs back to action when he says, “India was a rich country that became poor and will become rich again.” Only a writer could say that!

The writer as trendsetter and eternal romantic
Of course, it would be foolish to expect Gurcharan Das in a torn kurta, and he would abhor the idea too. “We have this easy habit of typecasting people. That only because so-and-so is a businessman he must be a certain type of person, or, oh, another one must be a starving writer. But people are not like that.”

So, what happens to the poor Muse? A slave to a practical writer? “I am a professional who believes that you don’t wait for inspiration, you just go to work.” Would that work then qualify as just another product? “I don’t think so. Perhaps the publishers do!”

What are the constraints a creative person has to work with? “Facts,” he says cryptically, not realising that perhaps to skirt those there could be a tendency to romanticise them. “It is possible,” he agrees. “But I could not ignore what I saw. The changes were in the people’s walk, the mindset. When you focus on poverty you get poverty. In every society 15 per cent at the top succeed regardless and 15 per cent at the bottom fail, and they need to be helped. Our failure is that we suppress the rest that make up 70 per cent. I firmly believe that it is the Rajus who will soon constitute the middle class.”

Is he just an idealistic outsider? “I had to be careful. This work is non- fiction, so I’ve tried to hold back on creativity and weaved in hypotheses.” One of them being that it is our snooty attitude towards manual labour that will today produce a robust economy through the knowledge sector. If you think this is unconventional, then listen to this: He believes Mumbai is heaven and urban societies are liberating. Yes, this is the voice of somebody who headed a multinational and has been on the boards of a handful as consultant. But it is also the voice of a man who completely transformed the way we looked at the common cold. Vicks Vaporub was re-sold as an Ayurvedic product to avoid the heavy hand of bureaucracy. So he does know his way around. He also knows that he can get away with many things because he is not an academic whose work will end up in a seminar.

He hates the hypocrisy associated with money. If his son’s ambition was to be rich, he wasn’t unduly worried. He was only curious as to how he would go about it. This is the chiaroscuro of Das’ personality – a very contemporary man who is completely in thrall of history of nostalgia. I did wonder whether the Partition had affected the then young boy in so subliminal a fashion that he could not get over it. Perhaps there might have even been the fear of possible deprivation and that’s why the obsession with poverty? “For me the Partition was about elemental passions and ancient acrimonies. To understand your identity you need to go back. I am writing so that there is greater awareness. I am just passing on my experiences and observations to the reader.”

It is perhaps an irony that Gurcharan Das has probably become more aware than his readers are likely to ever be, not because his work is flawed, but because society is far too cynical. We may give the writer the time, but will we go along with him to change the tide? Perhaps he already knows what he is up against. After all, he is romancing the stones.