The Instinct to Upgrade

As it turned out, all our apprehensions dissolved when we reached Rashmi’s house. Rashmi was warm, and her children were still awake. Dalai Lama’s given name was Varun. Yet, he still had the vaguely conical head of a Buddhist monk. His elder sister Shameeka, though only nine, was fast becoming very lady like in her demeanour. Thankfully, the children recognized me.

Rashmi cooked up a dinner, while I and Rohan took turns to shower. We were clean and fresh before the children went to sleep. It was at dinner that all our conversation took place. Rashmi enquired about our trip and the well-being of Rajani’s other friends in Bombay. I asked her whether Dalai Lama, aka Varun Rao, had started going to school. She said from this year onwards he will.

“But he did not get admission to a convent.”
“Meaning?” I prompted.

Varun was obviously a bright child. It was difficult to believe he did not make it into nursery. He spoke rudimentary English, I am sure, even before he saw the walls of his school.

“He would not speak during the interview. You know how difficult it is for children nowadays. They start their lives with interviews.”

Rashmi was being a faithful representative of the vast army of educated mothers in urban and semi-urban India who were distraught at their children being subjected to the torture of interviews by beatific, matronly teachers in new schools springing up. They were in the mid-thirties, themselves educated beyond profitable employment in their respective backwaters. Besides, many, like Rashmi, had been overwhelmed by motherhood. There were also amongst them many whose family conservativeness kept them from looking for jobs, and usually money was not a necessity.

Rashmi herself had a Masters in Microbiology. She had joined her husband Krishna in London when he was there as part time doctor and preparing for his advanced degree in maxillofacial surgery. There she had worked as a laboratory assistant with a pathology lab, to supplement the income of a student doctor. Ever since, she had wanted to do a PhD, but bringing up two young children till they were old enough to handle themselves had consumed her time. In the meantime, Krishna’s own career had zoomed as planned. Mangalore and motherhood had perhaps chipped away her earlier determination for a doctorate.

And right now, Varun’s school-entry pangs as she recalled them for us, had a tinge of disappointment.

“The convents here charge hefty donations. Besides, they clearly favour Christians.”

It was not difficult to fathom her distress. She and her sister was both alumna of St Anthony’s Convent in Chembur, a Central Bombay suburb. Later, both cherished a burning desire to head for St Xavier’s college in South Bombay, in tune with the dreams of all bright and young students of Bombay’s suburban colleges. St Xavier’s college had a deserved reputation for being a liberal arts college blessed by both tradition and individual talent.

But it was not so much an imposing academic reputation that ignited suburban collegians so much as its glamour. It was one of the oldest colleges in the metropolis. While other colleges of similar vintage went to seed, like the Elphinstone College, or Wilson College, Xavier’s flourished. It was run by the Jesuit organization, so as a minority right, it encouraged a lot of Christian, especially Catholic students. So while a lot of Catholic students made it into the hallowed portals of Xavier’s, the rest of the seats were open to competition among students of other religious faiths. This section of students got admission mostly on the merit of their academic achievement, or achievements in sports or other extracurricular activities. The regard for non-academic achievement had been a revered Xavier’s tradition. And, this was the reason that the college every year had a fresh batch of young students of various talents and strengths. Besides, the liberal attitude of the Jesuits was an added advantage for young boys and girls at that awkward age when sartorial experiments are the most preposterous.

Besides, being in affluent South Bombay, it always had a mix of rich students from privileged backgrounds, and other achievers from the suburbs. The preference for poor Catholic students added to the mixture.

For Rashmi and Rajani, there was another attraction. St Xavier’s was also a co-ed institute. Having finished schooling in an all-girls convent, they wanted to have a shot at the most happening college in the city.

As things happened, Rashmi joined another reputed college, Sophia’s. It was akin to Xavier’s, but was again a women’s college. Rajani followed her elder sister to the same college. Sophia’s was also a Christian run college, the students there too were cosmopolitan.

So, the advantages of missionary run educational institutions were already apparent to Rashmi. That was why she had wanted her youngest, Varun, in another convent school.

“You know we desperately wanted him to join Don Bosco. Krishna is also from Don Bosco, Matunga.”

The Don Bosco school in Matunga, a Central Bombay suburb, was a popular and reputed school.

Rashmi’s conversation was part of a young mother’s angst at her son not being able to get admission into the school she and her husband desired for him. Her comment about Christian institutions was the voicing of her credible perception about religious partisanship. But she is not about to take to the streets crying wolf. She would also not withhold her vote for a Christian candidate from Mangalore, if he or she qualified otherwise. And yet, out of context, it would seem that many are overlooking the overriding good that Christian educational institutions do.

There was another buoying aspect about Rashmi’s reaction to Varun’s inability to procure admission at a convent school. Varun was the son of one of Mangalore’s most influential doctors. Krishna was already heading the biggest hospital in Mangalore. All he needed to do to douse Rashmi’s anxiety was call somebody. Anybody from among the promoters of the hospital he headed. And, Varun would instantly be granted admission in the precise school he wanted.

But the Raos did not do this. They did not think it was such a big issue. They might even now attempt to use their good offices to ensure Varun got a seat in a good engineering college or medical college, if he chose to pursue those disciplines. If he did fall a little short of the entry bar. But they were assured that a schooling in a Saraswati Vidya Mandir was not going to be such a big drawback to Varun’s future.

It is this self-assurance of the above-thirty, young parents of India that is a great cause for hope against the blanket saffronisation or religious polarization across the country. They are mostly the ones who are pushing themselves hard to swim into that mythical economic group called the middle class.

The Raos, the Tarazs, or the Sahs, are already deep into the middleclass territory. But the Ramiahs, are furiously paddling to reach the same place, though they have left poverty way behind.

And, more and more Indians have only in the past decade or two crossed over from below the poverty line into the sustained need of the poor, but with access to education their ride into the lower middleclass has been easier. These families are putting more and more money into a future, something that was not conceivable for the immediate post independence generation. India’s crushing poverty in the fifties and sixties through the seventies would never allow the birth of such hope. But, the eighties and the nineties have produced local examples and role models who left their homes, swum against the tide, and were seen by their villages and families, and communities, landing on that once forbiddingly unreachable shore where they thrived. Only relatively, but relativity only added more spectacle and depth to those who made it, by bringing their success into sharp relief.

I think that the striking out for economic betterment has quietly become a mass movement with no spokesperson, flag, emblem, or party.

What the Information Technology boom has done besides scattering business magazines with wondrous Indian names and profiles next to unimaginable billions of dollars, is that it quickened the instinct to upgrade. This instinct will be monitored and turned into figures much later.

But even till the eighties South Indians boys and girls crowded typing institutes in small towns to learn how to type. Typing, and shorthand, was considered the ultimate visa to the big city after a useless graduation from some provincial university or college.

That was the lot that belonged to the later edge of my parents’ generation. Today, the entire class of stenographer-typist is an extinct species in India’s small and big companies. It is not that the generation of young aspirants has been eliminated from the demographic map of small town India. In fact their numbers have only increased in proportion to the galloping population.

But the landscape has changed. The humble typing and shorthand institutes have reinvented themselves as computer classes. The graduates with useless degrees now learn a more upgraded skill like data entry. Typing has receded. Shorthand has faded. These data entry operators learn e-mailing very fast. They are exposed to the Internet. Many who start off as data entry operators branch off to become assistants to network engineers, some move on to assembling computers and selling them, others who sense the excitement and opportunities upgrade their computer skills further to become java programmers. Not the top end ones, but many manage to break into the big league. Especially those who started early. And this orgy of economic success is being played on Pitman’s grave, the grave of the man who was prophet to those who lost their youth to shorthand and typing.

And yet, the tribe of typists who would have ended up as secretaries to powerful men, or secretaries to innocuous employers, have now widened their options several times over. This is the instinct to upgrade that has been quickening across so many families.

This has been particularly true of the more progressive states. Among the southern states, Tamil Nadu has had a history of anti-upper caste mass movement. Kerala had a long spell of determined communism. Andhra and Karnataka have been riding the privatization of higher technical education and spearheading the current IT peaks. In Maharashtra, one of the most progressive of all Indian states, there has always been a sustained record of social and political movements by the dalits, or the lower castes. The political empowerment and constitutional laws have maximized opportunities in these states. Those seeds of created opportunities have yielded a constantly growing harvest, though still too thin to crow about.

The constant onslaught on casteism, Indian society’s longest running and most debilitating curse, has shown its results mostly in these states.
Even in the more notorious North Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, the struggle against the caste curse has produced results. The political parties which have become the exclusive representatives of these backward castes have been crucial partners in governing the states.

Unfortunately, the political empowerment of the backwards in these two states could not directly confront the social backwardness. These two states have the most feudal and caste ridden societies, but the political clout of the backwards have not translated into social upliftment, or mainstreaming. It has remained a conduit for their leaders to benefit.

The arithmetic of electoral power has remained mostly a crude soul-corroding game of horse trading in these states. And the empowered lower castes have been morphed into a ‘vote bank,’ that mythical Indian constituency, an amorphous being that stuffs the ballot boxes for their favoured party, and then melts away. Thus, the elected representatives rarely have a constituency to serve but themselves.

These conditions has clogged society’s invisible permeable membranes that transmit certain values across the various divides, that defeats the structurally incorporated insularity.

I remembered going to attend a Maithil friend’s wedding in Bihar. A group of us from Bombay were first at my friend Pranav’s house in Punaichak locality of Patna. Pranav, being the groom was to be heading the baraat that started off from Patna and headed to a village in Dharbhanga called Loufa. The family had arranged for a bus to ferry the majority of the baraatis, and I was to join Pranav, his jeejaji, his younger brother Neerav in a private car especially arranged for the dulha. The car itself was arranged through the good offices of Neerav, whose friend Ashok was the owner and the driver of the car.

Ashok was a stocky youngster of medium built. Several hours of travel along the route, we were stopped by some people, and they demanded money to cross a stream. Once the money was paid, the group would arrange a set of wooden planks that allowed the vehicles to cross. They were the ones who controlled the “unofficial” toll for the dismantleable bridge, but the bridge itself would only materialise when their “toll” was paid. We were in Darbhanga district of North Bihar.

The elders paid, and let the bus pass. In the meantime, our friend Ashok was seething. He got out of the car, and promptly took out a police inspector’s baton from under his seat, and headed to confront the bridge gang.

Pranav’s Jeejaji, a man who headed the Communist Party of Nepal’s Birganj unit at one time or the other, and a man of extreme serenity in face of outbursts like Ashok’s, Pranav and I were the only people trying to prevent Ashok from getting into a fight in the middle of the baraat. Eventually we prevailed, because Jeejaji cited his age and Ashok demurely slunk back into the driver’s seat. He did not speak, and once the logs were arranged for the bus to cross over, the man made a dash over the bridge, before anybody could stop him.

Ashok’s maniacal move, and his obvious imperviousness to physical intimidation made me curious. Over the night’s revelries, I talked to him about him. He was a civil engineer from Nagpur. He finished his engineering course from Nagpur, and was back in Patna. He did not intend to find work, and found it easier to be a tough around the city, and kept an actual service baton under the seat of his car. His engineering degree had assured him a good match in the marriage market.

A little later into the conversation, I discovered that his father was a government servant, currently at home on forced leave thanks to the fodder scam, where his name had figured. I was trying to find any sense of shame or even discomfort in his voice, when he talked about his father’s predicament. He seemed to be similarly looking at my face for any reaction that might suggest some kind of surprise. I cloaked mine, and he remained impervious to any twitch of the conscience.

Later on I heard him tell me, that his father had made enough to marry off his two or three sisters, though he will probably lose some extra money extricating himself from the case. And that his father would have escaped being named, but for some stupidity of an office colleague, or perhaps, rivalry among them. I forget which. However, the most striking thing to me was the sheer waste of the engineering degree. Ashok’s degree will never inspire anybody in his locality, he will never be a role model for the youngsters in his neighbourhood.

This blocking of permeability is one major reason why many of the Northern states were unable to upgrade as yet, to plug into the economically booming India. It disallowed his four years experience as an engineering student in Nagpur, where he would have met a lot of other students from the rest of India, from seeping into his Patna moulded persona. And, the product of that engineering education is similarly insulated from passing on any advantage of that degree to those around him when he was home in Patna.