Nostalgia - Kahan Gaye Woh Din

My College, My Country
By Dilip D'Souza


Left alone in my room, suddenly the only certainties I had were the clothes in my bag and the cheque for my fees. The five years that stretched in front of me seemed endless, unknown, threatening. I got up and looked around: the expressions on the faces of the others in VK Bhavan were just as hesitant and unsure as mine must have been. Oddly, that made me feel better. I was not the only one who was scared. Here was a good lesson for a first day at college: shared trepidation is a fine stimulant.
 
We had all come to this tiny town on the edge of the Thar desert in Rajasthan, where there was the incongruously green campus of an engineering college. Many of us had left home for the first time, fresh from generally protected childhoods. Twenty-six years and change ago, I first got to know Ravinder Kichlu and Neeta Gupta and Humayun Khan and Salil Agrawal, along with dozens more from every corner of my country. I don't know about the rest, but I certainly had never run into the sheer variety of Indians I met at Pilani. My country in microcosm: that was my BITS experience.

They had come, like I had, to learn a little about science and engineering. We did not know it that first day, but we had also come, as generations before us had come to Pilani and elsewhere, to learn a little about life. Exhilarating, exasperating, but cherished: that too was our BITS experience.

All these years later, I often wonder where those friends are, what they are doing. I know many are now eminent in various fields: off the top of my head, I can think of a dotcom entrepreneur, a talked-about writer, several CEOs, and numerous fine mothers and fathers, all from my class at BITS.

I wonder if they ever stop to think what college -- this particular college -- has meant to their lives. I also wonder if they realize just how immensely privileged we were to go to Pilani. To go to college at all. To be educated at all, in my country. Nothing wrong with privilege, let's be sure. On the other hand, there is something eminently wrong when the overwhelming majority of Indians are denied the same opportunities for education as we had in Pilani. It's one thing to come by privilege by working hard for it. But when we happen upon it by default, because most of the country cannot hope for and does not even know about the aspirations we had -- that's another thing altogether.

In an era of scams of every description, possibly the greatest scam in our country goes unremarked: that something as simple as a chance at becoming educated has turned into a privilege for the few.  Our Constitution is very clear. One Directive Principle of State Policy urges the Government "to provide free and compulsory primary education within ten years of the framing of the Constitution." That is, by 1960 such primary education should have been in place. Over forty years later, you only need to look out of a window, nearly anywhere in my country, to see what we have done with this requirement. If you don't see at least one child out there who is clearly not in school and never will be, wait a few minutes. You will. More likely, several. Each of them is one more Indian who will never so much as know what or where Pilani is, let alone things far more important for their lives as Indians.

The excuses abound. Naturally.

Actually, the Constitution only says the State must "endeavor" to provide that primary education. Our leaders might choose to hide behind that loophole -- after all, whatever you do, you can always claim to be "endeavoring." But it doesn't need an education to see that not only have they not provided it, they never really endeavored either. From Nehru to Vajpayee, Azad to Joshi, Patel to Advani, for those in power or those aspiring to it, primary education has always been a distant and forgettable cousin of such other priorities as a dusty mosque in Ayodhya and buying Bofors guns. Result: primary education for all remains a dream. Then there are people who say we are still a young country, that 55 years is not enough time to have accomplished the hard task of taking education to such a huge illiterate population. I feel confident these same people, or their descendants, will be saying the same thing for the next 55 years as well. By repeating it, they prevent education becoming the national endeavor it must be.

They also ignore the example of countries around the globe -- Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Malaysia, China -- that have made education and literacy a priority over the last half-century, and are seeing the fruits today. What they also ignore is that with our literacy rate of perhaps 60%, over twice as many Indians are illiterate today than in 1947. In fact, we have more illiterates today than we had Indians in 1947. We also have the world's largest pool of illiterate humans. The world's largest pool, think of it, of wasted human talent.

If getting rid of illiteracy was hard in 1947, it's twice as hard today. It gets harder every day.

It's been said before, but it can always be said again: there's no more lasting solution to so many of the problems that hound my country than educating our people. Whether it is corruption, child labor, population or disease, a national commitment to free and rigorous primary education is the first step we must take.

What's more, it is those of us privileged enough to have got an education already who must realize this and demand it. For by depriving half my country of an education, we have also deprived it of a voice. But there's more than that at stake. If we want to live in a prosperous and secure nation, education for all is in our own interest.

All those years ago, some four hundred wide-eyed boys and girls arrived in Pilani with me. Some struggled, some sailed through the next five years. Many did not study what they had wanted to, many others did. And when we left that sandy nest, we flew off in innumerable directions, pursuing every kind of career imaginable. Today, I have lost touch with Humayun Khan and B Ravikumar and many other friends from Pilani. But nobody can take away the five years we shared pursuing something very special: an education.

Even 26 years later, how many others in my country can say the same?

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