The Elephant, The Tiger, And the Cell Phone

Program Information: Title: The Elephant, The Tiger, and the Cell Phone Location: New York, NY, Asia Society Date: Sep 17 2007 Jamie Metzl: Good evening everybody, welcome. My name is Jamie Metzl, I am the executive vice president of the Asia Society, on behalf of Yoshie Ito and all of my colleagues here at the Asia Society would like to welcome you. It's nice to be welcoming back an old friend of mine and of the Asia Society Shashi Tharoor is going to be speaking to us tonight about his new book, but because I am not the person introducing Shashi, I am only the person introducing the person introducing Shashi. I don't want to spoil all of his lines. But before I introduce our representative from the Council General of India is going to help get the ball rolling tonight. I just wanted to say a few words, I know that all of you by nature of your being here know a lot about the Asia Society, and but for those of you who don't we are an International Non Governmental Organization with 11 officers around the world, five in the US and six in Asia. We do all kinds of great programs in the fields of art, culture, policy, business and education. Some of which is local like events like this around the world and then we do major international, multinational programs. So if you are not a member of the Asia Society, we certainly would love to have you as part of our family and you can learn more about joining from the materials that are just outside the door. And with that it's my great pleasure to welcome Mr. Ganashyam who is the Deputy Council General of India here in New York. But he is in October leaving to become the Indian Ambassador in Angola which is seems like to be a very interesting in and challenging posting. And with that just one more welcome. I would like to welcome Shashi's new wife – Christa who is down their - not paying attention, that's okay. And Mr. Ganashyam please,thank you. Ganashyam: Thank you Jamie and good evening ladies and gentlemen. I heard a joke yesterday about two baseball pictures. One working for Red Sox and another one working for New York Yankees. And they were very close friends and so were their families. One of them said that we must be together for all times to come then the other one said, what happens if both of us die? We would not be able to play baseball together. The other one said, whoever dies early will find out from where he goes – hell or heaven whether they play baseball their or not. After a few months the one who was playing for Red Sox passed away and went to the heaven. Within a week he came back to the earth, and told his friend, the Yankee, “hey man, I got two news for you, one good and one bad―. What is it? He said, “the good news is, they play baseball in the heaven, the bad news is, you are scheduled to pitch next week―. In the afternoon today, the counsel general called me and said, “I have two things to tell you― I said yes madam. You are going to the Asia Society to attend the function of Shashi Tharoor's book launch. Thank you very much madam. That was nice till then, then she said, “you are also going to standing for me― that's where the problem came. It's very, very easy to introduce people who are not known, because everybody will keep their ears open. But what do I say about Shashi Tharoor. Dr. Tharoor is a well known person, a well known personality, not only for his designations which he has held, but in my personal opinion more for the books that he has written. I admire him more for his books than for anything else. In the recent times lot of books have been written about India. Everyone tries to look for one thread using which they want to weave the fabric of India. And that only gives one picture of India. India is a very complex country. It's very difficult to understand even for Indians. It needs several colorful threads to weave a fabric on India. The history of a country I can compare it to a precious stone, it could be a ruby, it could be an emerald, it could be

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a diamond but the history of India has several histories. It has several cultures, it has several languages, it has several geographies and several histories. If you explain the history of India using stones, it will be a beautiful necklace of a number of precious stones. You will find rubies in them; you will find emeralds in them. That's the difference between the history of India and the history of any other country for that matter. And that's perhaps the reason why it is difficult to understand. And it makes it easier for you to understand the history when some one like Dr. Tharoor writes about it, because there is one particular aspect about this author which is different from the others. There maybe someone who will be sitting in England and writing a book about India. And then there will be some one who is sitting in America and writing a book about India. There maybe some one who is sitting in India and writing a book about India. But this is one author who has been traveling across the world thinking about India, talking about India, learning about India all these – all this time and he puts it beautifully in his books which makes its such a beautiful reading. When I picked up the book, at 12 o'clock today, that was the time it was given to me. I couldn't read it fully obviously because I am not a fast reader, it takes time for me to understand. A good book is something which I would like to relish like a glass of wine. It must be enjoyed. It must not be drunk for the kicks of it. And this is a book which needs to be enjoyed because it's not one book, it is 68 books. It starts from one book and it goes on till the 68th one. And each one is beautiful. And I must point out three things which I like the most in this short reading that I did. The first one was the story of the elephant; elephant is actually considered a very lethargic animal, very unintelligent kind of an animal. But about 10 ten years ago, I went to a wild life reserve in Karnataka where I belong, and I was told of a story of elephants. They had domesticated elephants which used to work for the department of forests. And the department of forests also had a banana farm. And one day, they found that all the bananas had disappeared, they had become ripe and they were waiting for the moment to harvest the bananas. And the next morning, they found that the bananas were missing. They tried to find out what happened. The wild elephants wouldn't have been able to come in because they would have known, the fences were electrified. And these elephants who were domesticated, the property – assets of the forest department. They had waited for this moment and they had cleared up the bananas. And the story – what that was told to me by the chief forest officer was that these elephants had waited for the moment when the power shut down took place and brought the fence down using the log of – or one of the trunks of a tree and walked on it, went across, finished all the bananas and went back. But all the domesticated elephants, you may remember carry a bell because when the elephants come in, people know that the elephants have come in. all of them had names, but no one heard the sound of bells. Later on they found out that all these elephants had packed mud in them, in the bells so that they don't make noise. I said, “Get out of here, I don't believe this story―. He said, “No, this is true, that's the story―. And the first chapter if you read is a beautiful story of the Indian elephant. And another one which I really liked was in page 251, the story of a gentleman called Chandran Tharoor. And this man gave all his life to others. He went on giving all his life. It's perhaps giving of that man which has brought so much to Dr. Tharoor today, because he happens to be his son. The second one that I really liked most was the quotation of a poet called T. P. Rajeevan I think. He says that, “Malayalee women, when they come to Bangalore, they are very confident. But they become very timid when they go to Trichur―. I wonder the fault is of Bangalore or of Trichur. I can go on about this book, although I have not yet read it fully, that goes to say that it's a beautiful piece and it's an enjoyable reading. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much and also the Asia Society to giving – for giving me this opportunity because it was entirely the prorogate with the counsel general. She personally wanted to be here. It was a personal preference to be here today this evening. But occupational hazards are such that it's not always for us to go by our personal desires and professional requirements do take us away from where we want to go. Thank you very much once again. Dr. Shashi Tharoor:

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Thank you very much Ganashyam for that marvelous introduction. I must say that you know, these days one – maybe those quite what to expect when one is introduced. But that really something was something very special. Thank you. At least, when I was dreading and just as well that you didn't have enough time today was that you might look me up on the internet before you introduce me. That has happened. I mean the – the great mortification of finding, once I have introduced my things one hasn't actually done but which the internet or ledgers that you have. Actually I had a friend who once introduced a speaker after having looked up not just his deeds and misdeeds on the internet, but those of assorted members up and down the family treat. And he found that the speaker had an uncle who had been electrocuted at Sing Sing prison for kidnapping and armed robbery as on equally horrible. Having taken the trouble to look this up, he felt he had to use it. So he said well distinguished speaker, he said - had an uncle who occupied the chair of applied electricity in one of the nation's leading institutions. Oh, it's just by a way of saying that these introductions are usually kinder than the speaker deserves. But I do want to thank A. R. Ganashyam, has been a good friend and outstanding deputy consulate general here for having brought the blessings of his colleague – the consulate general and of himself to this evening. And thank you all for being here. I think you probably gather that the format of the evening is – I will tell you a little bit about the book and then we will engage in a conversation with Pandit Bal Chaudhry, who is sitting out the stage waiting for me. And then we hope to have an exchange with all of you in the audience on the issues and themes that we will raise. 10 years ago on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of India's Independence. I published a book on India “From Midnight to the Millennium―. And in that I tried to see India at the cost before of the more important debates facing the world at the end of the 20th century, what I call “the bread versus freedom debate― can democracy literally deliver the goods in a country of poverty and scarcity. Or is freedom a dispensable destruction in the quest for bread. The centralization versus federalism debate, in a country the size of India - is that government best that centralizes least or does every question being asked and that have be answered in Delhi. Then the pluralism versus fundamentalism debate. The whole question of whether India like all it's neighbors should seek refuge in the assertion of it's own religious identity. Or whether the secularism established in India's constitution and derived it by so many as westernized affectation was actually indispensable to the survival of the plural district policy. And finally the coca colonization debate, the globalization versus self alliance. How India which for 40 years and practice to doctrine of economics of sufficiency which had learned in some ways the lesson from the past since the East India Company of the British had come to trade in the state and to rule that perhaps one should be suspicious of all fall for in capital as representing the fainéant of a new imperial wedge. And as a result of course we had seen India having thrown out the protection as barriers and having spent four and a half decades really trying to regulate stagnation and distribute poverty. And then we had seen the liberalization of the 1990s, just beginning as I wrote that book. and I asked whether that transformation was going to be an important fundamental new answer to that age old question on the part of India. And now 10 years after publishing that book we have some of those answers. And yet some of these debates remain fundamentally relevant as well. The collection of essays that Mr. Ganashyam has just referred to 68 essays of varying lengths, but all of them fairly short, are essays and up heads that I had published in the last half dozen years or so for the most part. About India, since I wrote “Midnight from the Millennium―, essays about various aspects of the Indian experience focusing on the contemporary reality of early 21st century India. I would say that though there are six sections in this book, there are really three broad clusters of themes around which the book deals. The first is something which those of you who have read some my earlier work know I have always cared about very much and that is sort of a professional preoccupation where the whole notion of Indian is. What is India's identity? And what does Indians – what is it constituted of? And I do this and I will talk about this in just a

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minute in a number of different ways but that one set of essays. Another is experiences of India at work and at play. Sometimes fairly light hearted, sometimes a little more portentous – about what we can understand of India, from every thing from our passion for cricket to our pension for taking too many holidays, to our faith in astrology and numerology and so on and so forth and again I will talk about that in just a minute. And a then a third set of essays dealing with what on my call - the transformation of India today, the social, political and above all economic transformation. And may be I shouldn't say above all economic, I should say perhaps above all the transformation of attitude that we are not seeing in today's youthful India and what that represents for the future. Let me perhaps powers each of these for you briefly before I sit down to talk about these issues that permit. On the question of Indian list, well, the politics of identity has been increasingly relevant in India. And we have seen this particularly since the mid 80s when political parties have reason to advance various forms of identity particularism that is regional identities, linguistic identities, caste identities and religious identities. And what this means for a democracy that has tried to enshrine and protect diversity. Those of you who know my work nearly for quite some time that I have nailed my colors to the most of what I personally don't particularly enjoy calling secularism because secularism is those of you who open a western dictionary will discover is really about the absence of religion where as in India, secularism is a term that has been applied to a profusion of religions, none of which is privileged by the state. About the notion that India stands or falls as a pluralist state and as a pluralist society one in which people of every religious or other background can find their place. That has been something that I have been deeply attached to in all my writing and you will see examples of this. There is one essay which to some degree reprises themes you have already read in India “From Midnight to the Millennium― in the interest of having a comprehensive argument on this. But there are other essays which have emerged from subsequent enquiries into this. And indeed, engagement with ordinary Indians who have reacted to my public writings that I have quoted them in the book with their points of view on this issue. Two examples really to talk about how I see the example of Indian Pluralism. One goes back to before the 50th anniversary of India's independence – the 49th in fact. When our then prime minister, H. D. Deve Gowda stood at the ramparts of Delhi's 16th century Red Fort and delivered his Independence Day address to the nation in Hindi – India's so called national language. Well, eight other prime ministers had done the same thing 48 times before him. But what was particularly interesting was that Deve Gowda who many of you know is a southerner from the state of Karnataka – Ganashyam's state, stood and made the speech in a language of which he did not know a word. Tradition in politics required a speech in Hindi, so he gave one. But the words had been written out for him in his native Kannada script. In which of course they made no sense. Now, to me this represents some of the best of the – one of the best of the oddities that make India, India because probably no where else in the world could you find the country whose national language is not understood by it's prime minister or indeed by half it's population. A country where precisely somebody whose mother tongue is so completely removed philologically, lexicologically from the national language is able to stand and address his people and equally provides the country in which this particular solution was found because I remembered from the 1980s, the great Kerala singer K. J. Yesudas who came frequently to number one in the Bollywood filmi-music charts by singing songs in Hindi and I saw his song book all the lyrics had been written out for him in Malyalam for him to sing because he couldn't read Hind. And you see, that solution elevated to the prime minister who had addressed on Independence Day was for me a startling affirmation of Indian pluralism. And I have argued both in that book and in this one that of course the centrality – the central experience of India is that we are all minorities of India. I think primarily then I can talk about that a little later. The second example, that perhaps I have been guilty of overusing in recent years then one worth mentioning again was an extraordinary sight three years ago at the end of the elections of 2004, in May of 2004 of a

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Roman Catholic political leader of Italian origin, Sonia Gandhi making way for a seek Manmohan Singh to be sworn in as prime minister by a Muslim President Abdul Kalam in a country 81 percent Hindu. I mean that is again something that is extraordinarily about what India is all about and it's particularly I think resonating in a country – in this country the world's most powerful and longest lasting democracy which for 220 years hasn't managed to elect a president or a vice president whose anything other than white male in Christian. So perhaps there is something about the Indian experience that even this democracy can learn from. And that I think is the sort of Indians that I have written about in this book. To me it's essential what is – what particularly interesting about this is that it's not directed up the world, this is just India being itself. And that phenomenon of India being itself is something that I write about with feeling in a depiction of what India stands for in India and in the world. And of course there are essays about the Hindu Muslim issues that have arisen in the last decade or so. The question of Hindutwa, the place of Muslims in Indian society and in both cases with a lot of exchanges with Indian readers which I have recaptured in this book. The second cluster of essays is about Indian life. I mentioned that I have talk about the importance of cricket. This probably a little less of this in this book than in the Indian edition that's appearing in a couple of month's time, but that's still enough that passed the muster of American publishers to underscore this point when I – I will read you a couple of paragraphs that permits requests from - a couple of these, just to give you a flavor of this is a chapter which begins with somebody else's line. I have often thought, I say that cricket is really - in the sociologist Ashis Nandy's phrase “an Indian game accidentally discovered by the British―. Now, this might seem a preposterous notion and yet an entirely defensible idea. Everything about cricket seems to me ideally suited to the Indian national character. It's rich complexity, the infinite possibilities and variations that could occur with each delivery, then dozen different ways of getting out, are all pattern for a society of infinite forms and varieties. Indeed there are other like – Indian classical music, in which the basic levels are laid down, but the performer then improvises gloriously unshackled by anything so mundane as a written score. If there is a cricket cliché drilled into fan's heads by generations of commentators, it must be that of the glorious uncertainties of the game. But that too echoes ancient Indian thought, as I pointed out in the great Indian novel - my first novel. Indian fatalist instinctively understand that it's precisely when you are seeing the ball well and timing your force of the sweet of the bat, but the unplayable shooter can come along and blow you and bold you. A country where a majority of the population still consults astrologers and believes in the capricious influence of the planets can well appreciate a sport in which an ill timed cloud burst, a badly prepared pitch, a lost toss or the sun in the eyes of a fielder can transform the outcome of a game. Even the possibility that five tens exciting hotly contested and occasionally meandering days of cricketing contest could still end in a draw seems derived from ancient Indian philosophy which accepts profoundly that in life the journey is as important as the destination. So that's a little bit of cricket. But there is another essay lamenting the fact that we are so bad at every other sport. In fact I have mentioned the fact that there is rather beautiful Indian woman Madhu Sapre lost the Miss Universe contest in 1994, I think it was – or may be even earlier because she was the book maker's favorite and she came all the way to the final round when the top two or three contestants asked were asked question. And when she was asked you know, if she became the prime minister of her country, what would she do to transform it and she said, “I would build a sports stadium―. And of course every one thought that was a dumb answer and the poor girl was marked down and she lost the Miss Universe contest. But in fact the people knew what every Indian experience is every four years, the crunch making experience of going through the Olympic Medal tally and we look behind the Bahamas and beliefs for the one solitary bronze that we have picked up somewhere a billion people – now that's something that makes you sympathize with this poor young lady for her answer.

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The essay is also on our – on our pension for taking too many holidays and there is – slightly more serious disposition on the importance of Bollywood for Indian, for Indian pluralism, for Indian society and what it reveals – there is a somewhat sad but also talking she can say about Indian political humor or the lack of it. and I would say the lack of it because you know, we did have a Mahatma Gandhi – a nationalist hero with really puckish sense of humor who really stood up the steps of Buckingham palace in his loincloth to meet the - The King Emperor and was denounced by Churchill for doing so – so a journalist asked him, “did you feel you were dressed appropriately to meet the – the king―. And Gandhi replied with a smile “oh, his majesty had on enough cloths for the two of us―. And perhaps slightly more cuttingly in one occasion he asked by a journalist “Mahatma Gandhi, what do you think of western civilization?― and he looked very gravely and said, “I think it would be a very good idea― which but as I say in this essay, it's been Downhill from there I mean Indian politician in the last 60 years have demonstrated absolutely no sense of humor and I give up a few examples of a lame - lame attempts. I am mentioning it. There I see some various other aspects of Indian life. I have a slightly roomful account of my public lament in “The Times of India“ about the disappearance of the sari from the streets and offices of India and of the back clash that ensued when I got – metaphorically slapped across the face with a wet end of sari pallu by angry feminists who told me that I had no business telling them what to wear but of course I didn't but it's a revelation to me of how a society which in so many ways seemed ready to enter the 21st century clad in what it had worn for the previous 20. It's now transforming in ways that are so visible on the streets of India. There are essays and essay about our silly little pension for renaming cities we can talk about that if you like. – are even silly little pension for renaming people and then the fact that a major Indian politician - the chief minister of the state nevertheless could actually change the spelling of her name because a numerologist told her an extra A would be luckier for her. I mean it's inconceivable of any other society, any other democracy that a politician would do that and so we take it seriously, but she won in the election after that – she lost one too, so may be she is looking for a new numerologist. But – then there is an essay about the coexistence of different ways of looking at the world in contemporary India. And you see in which I visit the campus in Infosys in Bangalore, the great sort of green computer heaven which really would not be out of place in any hi-tech capital anywhere on the planet and in the same you will see I talk about visiting the Ashram of Sai Baba in Puttaparthi and the just the position of that Nehru had said in the 50s that the factories and temples – I beg your pardon, the factories and dams would be the new temples of modern India―. But I think he didn't fully appreciate the extend to which the old temples would still retain they hold on the Indian imagination and that mantras and software would coexist in the 21st century. And then I have at the very end of the book, some what light hearted, the occasionally serious glossary of an A to Z of being Indian and this sort of wraps up my obsession with Indians that I talked about earlier. I will just give you a couple of short extracts to give you a sense of the range of tones in the glossary, but there are some slightly sort of tongue and cheek ones for example in the ace you have got an entry on astrology which says, not only as astrology is survived, it's grown in importance as more and more important decisions are made by those who believe in it. Marriages are not arranged, flights not planned, elections not called, until astrological charts are drawn up and consulted. An Indian without a horoscope is like an American without a credit card. And he is subjected to many of the same disadvantages in life. You can't rent a car without a credit card. In India you can't get married without horoscope so you – take your pick. Well, there is also slightly more somber lines in the glossary like the one for the Taj Mahal where I would say the motive for India and countless tourist posters has probably had more camera shot as clicked at it than any other that if its on the face of this earth. How easily one forgets that this unequaled monument of love is in fact a tomb? The burial place of women who suffered 13 times the pain of child birth and died in agony at the 14th attempt. Perhaps that makes it all the more appropriate as a symbol of India – a land of beauty and grandeur, a bit suffering and death.

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And then not – not I am going to leave you on that note, let me share with you the entry on nepotism – as soon as I can find it – there we are – Nepotism or uncles granting jobs and favors to nephews does not exist in India. None of our prime ministers for instance had uncles of any consequence. And the third set of issues in the book I heard about the transmission of India, obviously is a great deal to do with the economic liberalization of India in the last 10 or 15 years. Mind you, I knew that it hasn't gone quite as much as people expected it might. Indian economic reform you know, Ganashyam would forgive me as they used to say about Indian diplomacy is rather like the lovemaking of an elephant. It's conducted at a very high level accompanied by much bellowing and the results are not known for two years. But nonetheless, reform has progressed fitfully. I have to say that the title is a reflection of the first essay of the book which in fact is a – a Panchatantra style of allegorical fable about an elephant that through the fable gradually starts transforming itself seemingly into a tiger. And it's obviously a failure – obvious metaphor for this ponderous lumbering elephantine country that is developing the stripes and the agility of a life sleek springing tiger which is in many ways what is happening in India. Fifth largest economy today in PPP terms - Purchasing Power Parity terms more over than 20 years likely to be the third largest we have more dollar billionaires than any other country in Asia - more dollar billionaires than Japan or China. And we are doing astonishing things and Indian company has just bought a chorus of British steel and Indian magnet has just bought a parasols of the two – of the three biggest steel makers in the on Indian hands and this is striking when you recall them in the late 19th century when Indian first set up a steel plant Jamsetji Tata in the 1890s. a senior British official in India at that time said dismissively that he would eat every ounce of steel that an Indian was capable of producing. I wish he was still around with I could try and test him on that. The third element on the title is of course “"The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone―. And that's quite deliberately because the cell phone in many ways has been to me the most striking symbol of this transformation of the elephant into the tiger. Today we are the world record holder in the number of cell phones have been sold every month. Seven million phones average every month this year and going up every month which is of course means new – more new subscribers than China gets and China of course has more cell phones in absolute terms but the momentum is with India. And what's striking about this is that I grew up in India where there were only 20 million landlines 40 years after independence and the waiting list to get a phone was eight years long. In fact when a member of parliament raises issue not just this issue but the fact that the telephones that did exist was so awful that you picked them up and you wouldn't get a dial tone or when you trying to dial, you got a wrong number more often they are not or you had a cross connection with somebody else's conversations and so on. Then the then communications minister – Mrs. Gandhi's cabinet stood up in parliament and said, “Well, if you don't like your telephone, you can return it because there is an eight year waiting list for people who want this supposedly inadequate product―. So why should we have anything better than what people got. That was the attitude and what a transformation we have seen since then. Today the number of rural cell phones exceeds the entire number of it's land lines in the country. And that's the transformation that you couldn't believe. But what's more important is who has those cell phones. The cell phones of India today are largely in the hands of people who could not have dreamt of being on that eight year waiting list and would not have qualified for those land lines. You go to India you will find a cell phone on the hand of a shopper, you will find a cell phone in the hand of a fisherman, the most astonishing example I came across was, when I was in India, in India still in many suburbs, cities, you will find a fellow with a cart with a big coal fired iron who will take in ironing for even do it very quickly and return it to you from all the houses in the neighborhood. Now in this particular suburb that I visited, the chap with the ironing cart had the cell phone so that he could take – or he could receive someone who is come and pick up cloths for ironing and then he could call people

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back to – to tell them and when they- when they – when their shirts were ready, I mean this kind of transformation has been made possible because of course India also has the cheapest filled cell phone minutes in the world, and that too has begun to empower the poor in a way that many, many decades of status so called socialism never quite achieved so all this is extraordinary but I – I don't just and as a booster of the new India. I do have a serious discussion in the book of the dangers that India has to overcome – I have talked about pluralism, the danger of sectarian voices overcoming that democracy itself and – and – and the fact that are 113 members of our 543 member parliament today I have criminal cases pending against them, that's a pretty savage and diagonal to the quality of the politicians in our democracy. The serious challenge is the poverty we have 260 millions people in India who live on the wrong side of a poverty line that just grown this side of funeral time, for the people who live above in the poverty line who would live on less than a dollar a day so that's under the poverty line is, and – and they have to be helped because if these transformations I am talking about no change in their lives then of course all the talk of the downwards economy of India will frankly be follow. At the same time there are exciting things about India's population, 514 millions Indians are under the age of 25 which means that they will be productive for years after the rest of world is aged except in the rest of the Europe, America and china medical list of Europe and China would have aged when India is still young and as people who can contribute productively but they can only contribute if there were an opportunity to contribute the ten million people entering the work force every year from jobs would have to be found and that's a huge challenge when you realize that the whole IT revolution that ever once talked about has only really found employment for one million people in the last decade. Where do the rest of the jobs will come from and that is a very, very serious challenge for India and it something sobering to realize that there is modest in selection in a 165 of India in 600 districts and this is something which tends not to get the headlines but which is the other side of the positive dramatic economic transformation stories in area. I should mention corruption, because it's a reality that in some ways you have – you have two phenomena you have corruption becoming less salient in some aspects of Indian life, because as liberalization has occurred politicians and government officials have few and few opportunities to profit from the power to permit because in the old days it was the grant of the permissions to do this so that – that enable people to be corrupt, and yet paradoxically at this we are finding that these tentacles of corruption have spread that much more widely across Indian society and – and transparency to that national – national figures has made it very clear that India has an extremely long route to climb on that. But if I want to conclude it would still be under relatively optimistic note. I say that because I am the sorted person who defines optimism as regarding the future with uncertainty. A pessimist that India had more that fair share of foreign pessimist soon after independence tell – we will tell you that everything is bound to go around. Foreign pessimists you will use the number of articles published between 1947 and about 1970 predicting the imminent disintegration of India, the eclipse of its democracy, the ending of free elections, the imminent advent of military rule, the break up and vulcanization of the country in respectable publications and by so called experts for 20 years, an never that came true. That's being one of the great trends of India. The ability to hold the country together in a pluralist democracy, but equally as I said there are these negative so I say the pessimists tell you everything is bound to go wrong and optimists have to look things just might go right and that's about us for us unprepared to go. They might go right and they have enough indications as to why and how they can and go right and that's – that's a - the – the message that I would end with. India has to use a – 21st century metaphor to deal with both the hardware and the software development. It has to attempt to the hardware a creaky infrastructure, the – the inadequate roads, the crumbling ports and airports, all of that has to be dealt with and that require resources, but I think even more important it has to attend to the software development which is the – the

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– the educational challenges – we have more kids in India who haven't seen the inside of school than kids in any other country in the world, we have health challenges which I norm is our public health outreach is extremely – extremely disappointing and if we can invest more effectively in the human capital of our people and a company that with the unleashing of their creative energies that we see everyday and everything from Bollywood to our flourishing couple of writers, novelists, creative artists, dancers then I think we really will be able to transform India. I do by the way mention briefly the NRI's, the expatriate Indians in my – in my previous book, I ask the question is NRI's stand for Not Really Indian or Never Relinquished Indian, and in some ways we are all a bitter both, but increasingly today want much say that the NRI stands for the Now Required Indians because India requires lot NRI's have to contribute their energy, their resources of course by the way of their engagement with the problems of the motherland. And I am very excited about that, I think Premith and I will talk about that as well, so there is a lot happening in India we can be excited about. I have recently acquire the Canadian bride who is with me today, and she has never been to India. This book is dedicated to her, and I am looking for to taking her to India and showing the land that lies behind the volume. Thank you for listening to me.

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