THE INDIAN HIGHER education is in a major crisis—or, in fact, facing several crises at the same time. Over the past decade, there has been a large expansion of private providers, who now take care of about 60 per cent of the total provision. This has unbalanced higher education—by making the profile of graduating students overly focused on technical fields such as management and engineering. In order to achieve some amount of balance, public and private providers must work together to beat lack of funds. Also, most of the private institutions rely entirely on tuition fees. These institutions charge students around `60,000 to `70,000 per annum, which amounts to an annual fee income of around `7 crore (assuming that the institution has an average of about 1,000 students on its campus). What happens to all this income? About 60 per cent of this income goes in salaries, and after meeting other expenses, they save about 10 per cent to 15 per cent. That is about `70 lakh a year, which is not enough to fund any significant improvement in teaching or research standards. This surplus is therefore reinvested in expansion with very limited teaching quality and no research focus at all. This results in a crisis for private providers: they are constantly struggling to expand to meet the expectations of students, but are not able to meet them because they cannot afford to recruit good quality faculty which—in turn—comes in only where there is enough emphasis on high quality faculty development, covering both teaching and research. The situation changes when the institutional size expands to enable economies of scale. To expand properly, one needs to operate on a larger scale with 5,000 or 10,000 students. This allows the institutions to generate adequate surplus to invest in high-quality teaching and research. Such scale also allows the institution to offer a broad-based curriculum covering multiple disciplines, which is needed to attract both good students and faculty. To reach a proper scale, the only option is for large deficit funding for several years, something which is not possible for private providers. The problem in public provision is equally stark: the government does not spend enough. For instance, the best funded institutions in India are the IITs, which spend about $8,000 (`4 lakh) per student per year. That’s insufficient to build quality. Quality requires lab facilities and the sponsorship of a large doctoral student group. To provide a comparison, after taking purchasing power into account, the best Chinese universities, Beijing and Tsinghua, spend over $50,000 per student per year and MIT spends $216,000! So, top-level Indian institutions need to spend over six times of what they spend now and there is no way they can do it through tuition fees alone. Only the government can take a long-term view that education is a public good and that there is a need to invest in this. Private sector alone not responsible for expansion. The other part of the crisis that is not talked about is that the private sector was able to do well earlier because the economy was growing very fast. But now, with the slow economic growth rate, the affordability of students has peaked. Initially, when the big expansion took place, the wealthier students entered the system. In India, private institutions have mostly come in and occupied the lower niche of providing an affordable education to groups that can pay for it. But if the enrolment growth needs to continue, poorer students need to be targeted and the fees must be even lower. This in turn means that the quality of service provision would also be lower. Thus, if the expansion relies on the private sector, it may not last beyond another year and the current education model will fail. On the other hand, the public sector institutions offer much cheaper education and cater to the masses—but they are mostly in general education, not in technical education. So we have a situation where 95 per cent of the system is dependent on public institutions providing general education or the technical education providing private institutions. The private sector caters to the immediate job market and the other, the public providers are providing traditional general education in social sciences or humanities. So I will reiterate that the only way expansion can continue is if the public and private sectors work together to enable average, mass level education. India’s higher education woes similar to problems of other BRIC nations. India’s problems are not very different if you compare it to other BRIC Nations (Brazil, Russia and China). They are all beset with issues of quality, access and expansion, except for Russia. Russia has high income and near zero population growth, so it doesn’t need to expand and it already has very good teachers. Brazil, China and India have similar growth rates and affordability issues. The Chinese have laid emphasis on public education and put huge amounts of resources into creating excellent schools. They have also left the task of delivering the average education to the states, just like India has. The quality of the institutions beyond the top tier is not very good in China because, just like India, they have not pumped in enough funding there. It must be said, though, that their top tier institutions are much better than the top tier of India. Brazil has recognised that the private sector can be brought into partnership, provided there is a way of benchmarking the quality. They have devised ways for students to determine the quality of schools by investing in data availability and metrics. By contrast, India has no way of assessing the quality of its schools. Arranging funding for general education would be one to address the shortage of funds is for leaders of institutions to work at a model where funding responsibility rests upon the deans of various departments. Every dean has to be able to raise some money. It may be that the Dean of Humanities cannot raise as many funds as the Dean of Engineering. In such as case, the Dean of Engineering has to be ready to crosssubsidise the Humanities and understand that it needs to be done in order to be aligned to the long-term vision of the institution. Each Dean can then direct the faculty about the strategies for delivering the goods and give them adequate support. For example, the IITs have been moving towards a more humanities profile, but are still seen as serving the greater cause of engineering. That must change. They have been heavily supported by the government, so they need to deliver a good undergraduate education and encourage broader, multidisciplinary thinking. Getting foreign universities to come to India may not be a good strategy. Foreign institutions which come here will not be able to have the same range of courses as they do in the home country, as the costs of setting up these programmes would be really high. Indian students who want to study at a particular foreign institution would rather spend $35,000 for their tuition overseas than spend the same amount here for a narrower course offering. If these foreign institutions lower their fees it would not work out for them without a good subsidy. This model has not worked well even in other countries, despite huge subsidies to keep their fees low. In Qatar, for example, the majority of the students are women who can not get visas to go overseas and so these universities have become women’s universities. Private philanthropy could be the way to go. China has shown that you can build world class universities in 20 years if you put in the billions of dollars that are needed. In India, perhaps if the funds that are needed are put in with the help of philanthropists like Shiv Nadar, Azim Premji or Rajendra Pawar, it may be possible to build world class universities.

How does one even start to explain what Bimal Jalan is? He is one of the most important political economists that India has seen. He may be fiercely concerned about nationalism but he is not anchored in any particular ideology. He is eminently practical in his approach to issues and crises and exceedingly focused on results. Jalan is also conscious that public policy affects different sections of society differently. DW talks to one of the most important men in the country on his thoughts regarding India, its economy and civic society

“Personally, I don’t pay too much weight to whether India’s growth is 7 per cent or 8 per cent, or FDI is X or Y in volume in a particular year. Such variations are cyclical. The central issue that we need to tackle is rising fiscal deficits with decline in growth rate and lack of investment in infrastructure and such priority areas. Multiple voices in policy-making without a fixed, clear policy direction, is a question which needs to be resolved for our country to realise its full economic potential,” he said, absentmindedly looking at the door keeping the din out. “Fiscal deficits, government finances, budgetary allocations going out of hand, government spendings at will—well, there is no defence for high budget deficits and providing multiple concessions to the better-off sections and subsidies to large corporates,” he added just then to the question whether concessions to major corporations were justified. His offhand replies were just a glimpse into a complex mind of a nationalist citizen— whatever may be his leaning, Dr Jalan is one of the most balanced minds who is cautious in his replies always. As we wrote before, it was a difficult task trying to unravel a man who has been at the helm of almost all major financial offices in India’s political machinery. Because Dr Jalan has a habit of dismissing his achievements as “chance”—albeit happy ones. He laughs when one points out how fast he rose through ranks and held several administrative and advisory positions in the Government of India. Dr Jalan was the Chief Economic Adviser in the 1980s; Banking Secretary between 1985 and 1989; and Finance Secretary (Ministry of Finance). As Finance Secretary, he was also on the Central Board of Directors of the Reserve Bank of India. He has also been the Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister between January 1991 and September 1992. Jalan also served as the Executive Director representing India on the Boards of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. At the time of his appointment as the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Jalan was the Member-Secretary, Planning Commission in New Delhi. That is a long, impressive list! But he dismisses it all with a wave of the hand and quips, it is an unhealthy habit for an “old man to reminisce too much”. And then he bursts into laughter, making us join in. “I was interested in working towards my country’s development. It didn’t matter to me (when he chose his subject for higher education and then doggedly pursued it), at that time where and just how I was doing it. I joined the World Bank on a lark as an economist. I was first in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). At that time, IMF was supposed to be financing balance payment crisis providing that kind of financing relatively short-term. Within the World Bank also, there was a whole development arc which appealed to me. It was a tremendous opportunity in the World Bank. I had a mixed milieu of colleagues from Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. Though developing nations did not have a large share on the Board, and we were minor quota holders vis-a-vis European nations, and the UK and the US, but there was a transparency and clarity and people. And people were open to thinking. We had a whole group of nationalities working towards a similar goal of progress of humanity. We all knew that change, especially positive change, was difficult. But there were buzzing discussions. The Pearson Commission was appointed in the 1968 and I was also on its staff, thinking about what could be done in terms of economic reforms. I was not working on any country but we had a lot of emperical inputs on developing countries. Those of us from developing nations were trying to make people from the developed nations understand the ground reality; what was possible in an industrialised country was not possible in a developing one. We also tried to make people understand that our (India) government had a plan and that the thrust was on primary product being converted, government investment and capital investment—so times were also changing in India. The idealism was on the ground. In 1970 I decided to leave World Bank and come back to India. I had been living outside my country for a long time. I came back,” he said. To him, it seems, it is both the means and the end that matters—a tough stance to uphold, in a nation that’s being wrecked by all sorts of current ills. Also, hailing from a family of lawyers, his foray into the financial world seems happenstance. He laughs off the suggestion that he pursued developmental economics because his motherland was a priority. “When I was growing up; in that time and for the next couple of decades, the nation’s focus was on development planning and economic planning. Development economics was economics. India’s economic revolution was to shift—as a young nation we were in the throes of the first stages of industrialisation moving away from being an exporter of primary products. The focus was on being an economic power. Development and Nehruvian economics were becoming separate academic disciplines. And those of us who actually pursued the subject in our higher education were fortunate to interact with some of the pioneers in our times,” he said. So anyone who wished to contribute studied economics? Well, that and plenty of other things— depending upon a person’s interest. Knowing the period when he was in the institutions of higher learning; some of the “pioneers” who he mentions would have ranged from Bhabatosh Dutta, Tapas Majumdar and Deepak Banerjee (economists) and UN Ghosal (political scientist) in Presidency College, to Joan Robinson and Nicholas Kaldor in Cambridge. Cambridge at that time was in throes of Keynesian and post-Keynesian economic revolution. “Again in Cambridge I was blessed by a whole bunch of superb professors. As students we had access to these brilliant minds, complete access, which was a wonderful experience. It was quite a humbling experience also,” he said. Perhaps it was this exposure which led him to be most cautious and balanced while answering questions—whether on tax or on subsidies and the present trend of hiking prices and, at the same time, providing tax subsidies to exporters and corporates on pretext of increasing GDP and employment. How did that help? “There are no simple answers. Some subsidies which benefit the poor, are desirable and necessary. However, all sorts of tax concessions to the better-off sections or corporates are unjustified in a situation of rising fiscal deficits and lack of adequate public investment in priority sectors.” As he says it, the din evades the glass doors and reaches us. Dr Jalan has seen his country change—through turbulent times to stronger ones. In one of his recent commentaries he wrote—“Thus, we have had a fine combination of good economists, an operational governance structure, and a functioning democracyall working together. Yet, the results on the ground in terms of social or economic development over the long period since independence—leaving aside the most recent period—were rather disappointing. For the first fifty years after Independence, India lurched from one crisis to another. We also had low growth, low literacy, and an abundance of poverty. The vision outlined in 1956, at the beginning of the Second Plan, of a poverty-free India with full employment in 25 years, i.e. by 1981, still eludes us.” So, has contemporary India finally outgrown its socioeconomic policies? “We are very, very fortunate as a nation to have so many highly-qualified and competent economists in the government. If there is policy failure, it is not at the individual level but rather a systemic one which has with multiple voices and no accountability. It would be more productive if instead of talking, policy-makers could concentrate fully on delivering and improving public services. However, there are too many agencies at the Centre and states that are involved in the implementation of India’s socioeconomic policies. As a result, nobody takes the responsibility for failure in delivery—the Centre ends up blaming the state, while the state blames the Centre. Let us just ask ourselves: why is it that all policy parameters, irrespective of ground realities in different states, for any important programme are decided by the Centre, even though states are highly divergent in terms of poverty level, unemployment or nutrition? Why don’t we decide on the amount that Centre would reimburse per person employed under a scheme but leave actual wages or works to be covered to different states depending on local circumstances?” The public accountability for widening corruption, policy paralysis and inability to tackle poverty, to him, is a collective responsibility—to be shared between a triad comprising citizens, government and bureaucracy. “India continues to have the largest number of poor in the world despite high growth. The diversion and corruption in supply of public services for the poor, such as food, shelter and water, is also too widely known and accepted. From the public policy point of view, these are the problems which must be given the highest priority. What we need is an autonomous body (e.g. Election Commission) which does not report to a Home Ministry. There will be little hope in improving the socio-economic sectors unless public expenditure priorities are reconsidered and altered in favour of social sectors. And just as too many cooks spoil the broth, involvement of multiple agencies and ministries will generally work at crosspurposes and time would be lost in trying to dissolve those disputes.” And what he would like to see more is focus— “While I was working in the Reserve Bank of India, the most important matter was the balance of payments problems because India was perennially caught in it. But we had an incredible team and together we worked towards stability of policies. And to some extent we managed to tide several crises, including the Asian crisis.” Alongside financial reform and development of markets, according to Dr Jalan, the country’s attention must now turn to fiscal empowerment of the state and improvement in public administration. “Many state functions are inefficiently done because of financial stringency at the Centre as well in the states. The dependence on borrowings to finance even essential expenditure has been increasing year after year leading to vulnerable fiscal situation. Without adequate finance the state can’t fulfil its developmental role. So, withput a reviatlised fiscal situation and further progress in establishing a forward-looking, stable financial system, there would not be true development.”

How to Protect your Privacy on the Social Web

It’s the anachronism of our times, privacy on the social web. Everywhere you look, someone’s checking in their location and pictures of lunch!—each and every one leading the charge in the sharing revolution that the social web has brought upon us. And social networks are expressly meant to easily share all of this information, including your private data—stuff that was off the digital map till just a few years ago—out on the internet. There’s a reason why these services are free; they’re selling commercial access to a product, and that product is… you. Wait a minute, isn’t this your data we’re speaking of here? Ergo, shouldn’t you have a say about what is (and isn’t) visible to the average passerby? Absolutely! A few simple tweaks are all it takes to get your digital data ship right side up and keep curious eyes at bay. Bear in mind that while a lot of this directly applies to Facebook, the essence can be applied to just about any social service you use today. While Signing Up: This may be handy to keep in mind when the next big social network rolls along..err, on the side of providing less information while signing up. The rule of thumb usually tends to be—you can always provide more information to a social network, but you can’t always remove information once it’s been posted. If possible, consider creating a new email address strictly to connect with your social networking profile(s), so that your primary email address is never compromised or published in your contact information. While Posting Status Updates: Facebook may ask you “What’s on your mind”, but unless you’re prepared to let what’s really on your mind go public, head over to the Privacy settings, and restrict the audience of your posts to your Friends or a Custom subset of your friends. This way, that inane late night, possibly inebriated post won’t show up on the newsfeed of a Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) when your friend comments on it. While you’re there, change the “Who can look me up?” settings to let only your friends have access to contact information (email, phone) and not every search engine which cares to visit your Facebook profile! While Sharing Photos: More than your wall posts, be discrete about how far you share your photo albums, since they’re the easiest to copy off and can come back to haunt you later. Like with your status updates, you can use the same mechanism to control who does (or doesn’t) get to see your photo/albums. Plus, if there are photos on someone else’s albums where you’ve been tagged and you’d rather not have that show up on your timeline, you can untag yourself from any picture, which will remove it from Facebook’s ‘View Photos of Me’ pages. Once the tag is removed, you cannot be retagged on that particular photo again. If you’re really privacy paranoid, you could go one step further, click on “Timeline and Tagging” in the Privacy options, and you can choose who can tag you in their posts/photos, and turn on an additional level of protection and elect to review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline. Very handy, try it. While Sharing Location and Travel Plans: While the tech behind checking in to a new holiday spot via Facebook or Foursquare is cool, use a healthy dose of common sense while publicising your location and travel plans. A flippant public post about travel plans and some careless geo-tagging is all a smart criminal needs to know where you live, and how long you’ll be away from the house. For the same reason, be careful not to over-share your daily routine, for example when and where you go for a walk or when you’re heading home; that’s just leaving the door wide open and asking for trouble! While Using Third-party Apps: Exercise caution when you’re giving third party apps on twitter or Facebook access to your account. Some of these apps require complete access to your account, including ongoing access to all of your activities, perhaps even your friends’ information. Ask yourself; do you really need to give that joke-a-day app access to all your photos and posts and friend information? Also, be very careful when you click on shortened links, whether they take you to an authentic site or a phishing site waiting to harvest your data. But then again, this is 2013—you don’t need me to tell you this, do you? While Dealing with Friends: Facebook and LinkedIn have made it far too easy to connect us with people we haven’t stayed in touch with all these years. And sometimes, you realise exactly why you haven’t stayed in touch with these folks! What I do is prune my friends list on a regular basis, else it becomes far too easy to forget who you’ve ‘friended’ over time (and why!?), and therefore who you are sharing information with. If you’re not the ‘unfriending’ sort, at least segregate your friends into lists so that you can choose to share certain content only with close friends, and not with the Facebook friend-world-at-large! Then assign each group different levels of access to your information on Facebook, based on your reading of their loyalties or sensibilities. As with most transactions online, privacy and safety on the social web is one large serving of common sense, with a dash of caution and a healthy topping of skepticism. Stay safe!

When a paint stroke speaks a thousand words

WHAT PEOPLE ARE willing to consider literary—or even literate—is highly variable. For instance, I hear someone casually say, “This massmarket novel is not literature”, a statement that, in addition to being inaccurate at a purely definitionbased level, also suggests an elitism that runs against the long history of art and popular culture. However, even the most broad-based definitions of literature contain the word “writing”. It is taken for granted that words, made up of those tiny shapes we call alphabets—so intimidating when we can’t decipher them and so empowering when we can—are involved. This may be why, when asked about the best Indian books I have read in the past year, I hesitate for a second before mentioning Legends of Halahala. But only for a second. This is a work of graphic fiction by the talented artist Appupen (the pen name of George Mathen), his second after the extraordinary Moonward. Like Moonward, Legends of Halahala is set on a planet that resembles our own in some ways. It employs different drawing styles to narrate five stories set in separate periods, each presenting a perspective on love and its effects. There is conventional, youthful (some might say foolish and impetuous) romance, but there is also the cutesy idea of two oddball, parasite-like creatures—from the remote “Oberian” era—being each other’s forever-companions. There is a man pining for the super-heroine he encountered as a child, and another man—a swarthy, motorbikeriding daredevil—who is the rescuer of, and then the abductor of, a supermodel’s absconding left breast (!). And in the bleakest of these tales, titled 16917P’s Masterpiece, there is the love of artistic creation as a form of self-affirmation. Intriguingly, the book is almost, completely wordless. This is not a minor achievement. Last year, the Chennai-based publishing house, Blaft, produced an anthology of visual storytelling titled The Obliterary Journal. The name came from the book’s tongue-in-cheek mission to “obliterate” conventional literature. Yet, most of the stories in that collection, though beautifully drawn, did use text; words and images worked in unison. This has been true of the majority of international graphic novels, too, even ones that do spectacular things with pictorial form. Alan Moore’s Watchmen—about an alternative America where costumed “superheroes” are becoming irrelevant in the face of the world’s biggest problems—is one of the most complex works of storytelling I have ever seen, in its use of visuals that echo each other, and an intense narrative within the main narrative. It is also a book that you read—the first time, at least—in the normal way, since the story is propelled by dialogues and by stream-ofconsciousness musings from a journal maintained by one character. Reading a narrative made up entirely of drawings involves a different mental process, but within a few pages of Legends of Halahala, I was immersed; so adept and fluid is Appupen’s artwork that these stories don’t need words. The few bursts of “dialogue” there are take the form of exclamations and are depicted in a droll, almost cheesily visual way: when a king’s servant has to announce that the royal dinner is ready, the speech bubble issuing from his mouth contains a picture of a plate and cutlery; after a dragonlike creature is instructed to stop setting things ablaze with his firebreath, we see a “no smoking” sign emanating from a thought balloon over his head as he crawls sheepishly away. But it is the true silences that are most impressive. The first story—about starcrossed lovers whose fathers rule rival kingdoms—is the most straightforward one, linear and very easy on the eye. It is also bright and vividly coloured, which is central to its purpose: the kingdoms are represented by green and dark orange respectively, and this distinguishing colour scheme runs through the story, right up to the cheeky last panel where the lovers are finally united and the picture of a heart on a flag brings the two colours together. Contrast this look with that of the next story, drawn in deliberately gloomy black and white, where a child and his parents— walking the streets of what looks like a Hollywood noir film from the 1940s—are rescued from a monster by Ghost Girl. (When we see the grown-up version of the boy years later—a depressed-looking man still haunted by the memory of his childhood heroine—the panels acquire a neon-yellow tinge.) Just as interesting as the differences, though, are the similarities—the visual motifs that subtly connect the tales. For instance, the opening illustrations for three stories involves a chasm that has to be bridged: in Stupid’s Arrow, it is the valley that divides the kingdoms, a tenuous rope bridge stretched across it; in The Saga of Ghost Girl, the skyscrapers of a metropolis are drawn in a slanted way so that the gap between them becomes a different sort of valley, and we see the small figure of the super-heroine swinging across buildings. There are many other touches that you might properly register only on a second or third read. (Isn’t the image on the opening page of the first story— the silhouette of the valley and the rocky hills—akin to the bottom half of an India map, complete with a little Sri Lanka tapering away at the bottom? And if so, could the warring kingdoms represent the politics currently associated with the western and eastern extremes of the country, Gujarat and West Bengal respectively? Or is this over-analysis? Decide for yourself.) Three of the stories in Legends of Halahala end with clear heart symbols, but if you squint at the final pages of the other two, you might see distorted heart shapes in them too: in the rings of cigarette smoke floating across a city’s dark skyline. Or in the broken pieces of a plaque on which a man banished from a dystopian kingdom has inscribed “16917P was here”, as he uses his art to battle oblivion—by building a monument to assert his presence in a world where he is an outcast. On the evidence of his two books so far, Appupen’s own bid for artistic immortality is well underway, and happily, graphic novelists are not as marginalised as they once were. (The views expressed in this column are of the author alone)

Anu Acharya, Founder of Hyderabad-based Ocimum Biosolutions, a genomics software and services company, delves deep into her past experiences to put out her formula for success

When we began Ocimum about 12 to 13 years ago, I was a Physics graduate who had started a company in biomedics. Of course, this required getting the hang of the technical expertise in the field of biomedics. But, equally importantly, it also necessitated creating a network of contacts from the ground-up in an industry I earlier had no experience in. So, I started networking—actively— from Day I understood that we even with the best product in the world we couldn’t be successful if we didn’t get to the right market, and make the right connections. So, I made a conscious effort to network, both physically in terms of attending events and conferences, and digitally. It was interesting, to say the least, people weren’t used to seeing a young woman in her 20s at all the industry conferences and forums. In fact, I had almost a regimented routine to spend a few hours a day on LinkedIN, for example. My co-founder thought it was a waste of time. But, I held on. Eventually, I began to see results. I think it’s important to be there, and to be visible. It leads to acceptance, and I had people tell me that they accepted my invite, or agreed to meet me because I seemed to know everybody they knew. These contacts helped us a lot to generate leads. Both my other cofounders who were sceptical of this approach were also convinced when we started seeing results. I’ve to say it came easily to me. I’m outgoing and very open to having a discussion. It’s a core strength I’ve brought to the company. So, yes, networking is hugely important. As a person, I’ve always been the centre point of my networks – be it friends from school and college, or former colleagues. Of course, creating a new industrynetwork is different from making sure friends meet, but I didn’t limit myself to meeting people and networking just for business, although in the beginning it began like that – to write to meet all the translational medicine professionals working in big pharma companies. But, a great network does not work one way. For example, I began a Facebook page for women in IT. These forums open dialogues. I’ve learnt early on that you don’t know what triggers off something in somebody. It’s true that most of the deals do happen at the after-conference networks, and drinks. I do believe that the difference between men and women entrepreneurs comes up here. At that stage, most women leave. There’s the challenge – you might have gone to the conference, but is that enough? How do you get the most out of the conference? Maybe, I’ve been in an industry where there are not that many women and even from that pool, I’m usually one of the few women to stay back to conference, to foster personal relationships, and talk as human beings. See, people start giving you business once they are comfortable with you, and trust you. You might have competency but the eventual sale won’t happen till they trust you. This is a vital ingredient to building a long-lasting environment. Of course, my active presence means I’ve come around many such amusing experiences. For instance, I’ve always been a furious business card-giver. And, I remember one particular professor at a conference I was sitting and talking to who refused to give me his business card. He just wouldn’t share his card with me till some other people joined in the discussion, and one of them told me I was from IIT Kharagpur. It’s only then that he began to take me seriously. It’s clear that there’s a lot of subtle bias when it comes to women, and you often need the right introduction to be able to make a big difference. I remember another time I was sitting in a stall at an exhibition we’d participated in. An older gentleman came and began talking to my male colleague who was at the stall with me, and told him how he’d met the company’s CEO at another event. My colleague was amused, and introduced me to the older gentleman. He was really taken aback. So often, I’ve witnessed that expression – that they didn’t expect to see a woman, and if they did see a woman, they didn’t expect to see such a young woman. A couple of times, these biases have been unpleasant. And, I remember losing my cool once at a gentleman. But, I’ve realised that it’s best to not get agitated by this attitude. Don’t take it personally but definitely engage in a debate and conversation that is logical, and not overtly emotional. Most importantly, continue to show up and to stay back. I’ve seen the younger women are more open to doing this, and accepting that it’s important to be around otherwise one might lose out on opportunities. Honestly, I’ve sometimes felt that I’ve lost out on certain opportunities because maybe I don’t play golf, or a round of tennis – that I’m not part of the old boys’ network. Overall, there has been some change in the number of women you see at conferences and events but the ratios are still pretty bad, in both India and the US where most of our clients are. Yes, it’s a little better in India, but it’s certainly nowhere close to being equitable. I’m hoping women can create their own girls’ network based on shared experiences and ambitions because say what you many, business also stems down to human emotions. I’ve become very conscious of this over the past. I’m trying to refuse to speak at events where younger women are not being given a chance to speak, where an effort hasn’t been made to go beyond getting the same names. I remember being quite upset at the Pan-IIT Conclave which I was involved in for the same reason. I know many women don’t want to be overtly ambitious because they think that will disturb their family life. My co-founder is like that. But, I had completely different ambitions. And, I’ve been fortunate to have fantastic support—both emotional and in raising my daughters, be it my mother, my mother-in-law or even my grandmother-in-law. Sometimes, the fear of not having this support is one of the prime reasons why people hold back. In fact, I’ve seen people get stuck at that point. Once you identify what you love doing, and have that passion for it, these challenges don’t seem insurmountable. I’ve seen the change in myself, and the way I reacted in different situations. When I had my first baby, the company I worked for gave me just a six-week maternity leave which I was extremely upset about. When I had my younger daughter, I was working for myself. Two days after having her, I was itching to use my laptop. When you love what you do, there’s a huge difference in how you react. Entrepreneurship is that passion for me. In fact, a young woman who heard me speaking at a conference in Harvard University said she wanted to be like me, and do the kind of exciting things I was doing. But, she said she was waiting to have enough money saved up before she jumped into building on her own ideas. I couldn’t help but tell her—if you want to do the kind of things I’m doing, you don’t do it for money. Entrepreneurship is about doing things with limited resources, and enjoy doing this. Just today I watched a video by British philosopher Alan Watts, the theme of which was “What Would You Do If Money Were No Object”. His point is simple – if you’re going to spend so much time doing something, it’s not possible to be good at it till you enjoy it. Some phrases get attached to women in the workplace, and work—life balance is one of them. I don't dwell on the balance much as it forces one to separate work from life. For an entrepreneur, the chosen life is of her passion and that could be construed as work by others. I do admit that my life has revolved around excesses and reaching goals that didn’t seem reachable and then resetting the goals themselves once I have reached it. Over the years, I have realised, that it is how I function. It’s the way of being and living that makes sense to me. It’s possible to build families and businesses together. It’s because there are such few women entrepreneurs out there, they get zoomed out, and their experiences aren’t visible. Today, in my new start-up, my children, 13 years and 6.5 years respectively, are as involved as I am. There’s no denying that when you follow your passion, and work hard, you carry a lot of baggage home. I come back home by 6:30-7pm, and work again after the family has gone to sleep. And, then it’s about finding the time to do things I like, such as cooking.

The Land Acquisition Bill is especially controversial because of its centrality to a majority of Indians’ means of livelihood – agriculture. Moreover the Bill tries to address the undeniably complex question of who holds the right to access and profit from natural resources, including water, forests and minerals.

LAND ACQUISITION, which refers the process of a government forcibly acquiring private property for public purpose, has been the cause of over a third of the legal conflicts in India in the past decade. These range from tribal groups fighting private companies over land being acquired for mining and industrial projects to farmers and environmentalists entangled in bitter battles with state governments over their lands being taken for building highways or submerged by a proposed dam. The process of land acquisition in India has been marked by tedious legal disputes. With the increasing pace of liberalisation and privatisation, the Centre is finding it difficult to maintain the balance between stimulating growth and extending the benefits of development to multiple stakeholders. Apart from the ideological questions surrounding land acquisition, a major problem with the issue in India is that for all the contestations and disputes that arise over it, the government continues to lean on the archaic colonial-era Land Acquisition Act 1894. The 1894 Act does not provide for rehabilitation and resettlement (R&R), which is governed by a separate National Rehabilitation and Resettlement Policy, 2007. The new Bill will replace the 1984 Act and establish a process for land acquisition that involves a Social Impact Assessment survey, preliminary notification stating the intent for acquisition, a declaration of acquisition, and compensation to be given by a certain time. All acquisitions will also require rehabilitation and resettlement to be provided to the people affected by the acquisition. Ironically, the newly-introduced Bill has met with protests not only from industrialists across India, but also farmers and land activists. India Inc. is worried by the higher costs of compensation as well as the stringent R&R requirements the new Bill poses for those interested in acquiring land for industrial purposes. On the other hand, farmers and people’s movements have deemed the draft Bill “pro-corporate and pro-investors” and demanded radical changes in the Bill citing economic and food security reasons. With the 2014 national elections in sight, the provisions of the Bill will most certainly remain in the limelight and make for yet another heated debate in the Parliament. Will the Indian government be able to achieve the fine balance between promoting industrial growth and ensuring the rights of landowners through the new Land Acquisition Bill? DW spoke to experts Chakshu Roy of PRS Legislative Research and Madhuresh Kumar of the National Alliance of People’s Movements for the Issue of the Month. CHAKSHU ROY//THE Centre has a key role to play in the protection of the rights of people whose land is acquired while ensuring that land is made available for public purposes as well. However, opinion remains divided on the subject as to what constitutes public purpose. Violent protests in the past in states like Orissa, West Bengal and Maharashtra indicate that there are strong sentiments when it comes to the question of alienation of land. The solution lies in a robust legislation which maintains a balance between social good and economic development and which is effectively implemented. In its absence, like the current scenario, non-availability of adequate land will continue to be one of the reasons for delay in infrastructure projects. The Land Acquisition Bill, 2011 is quite contentious. The Parliamentary Standing Committee which scrutinised the Bill had recommended that the government should not be acquiring land for use by private companies and public private partnerships. Under the new Bill, private companies and public private partnerships require the consent of 80 percent and 70 percent of the people affected to acquire land. Moreover, no such consent is required in the case of public sector units. The most recent amendments to the Bill have also widened the scope for acquisition of land for public purpose to include mining and infrastructure projects. A few other key issues also continue to plague the new Bill. First, it is still unclear whether the Parliament has jurisdiction to impose rehabilitation and resettlement requirements on private purchase of agricultural land. Secondly, the requirement of a Social Impact Assessment for every acquisition without a minimum threshold may delay the implementation of numerous government programmes. The Bill also allows the government to temporarily acquire land for a period of three years without any provision for rehabilitation and resettlement in such cases. Finally, the compensation requirement for land acquisition also raises numerous questions. The compensation amount for land acquired under the new Bill is double the average market value of the land in urban areas, which is calculated using recently-reported transactions. The amount of compensation also increases depending on how far the said land is from urban centres, going up to four times in rural areas. A possible reason for this doubling could be to compensate for under reporting of the transacted price in registration deeds. However, this may not provide an accurate estimation of the value of land. The Bill has also left quite a few contentious issues for states to decide on their own. The government has listed this Bill for consideration and passing in its legislative agenda for the ongoing Budget Session and media reports seem to suggest that the political parties and the Centre have reached a consensus on the provisions of the Bill. At the end of the day, what is needed is a law that is beneficial to both the people and the growth of the nation. How the Bill plays out on the ground depends on a number of factors, the most important of which is quality and spirit of implementation of the law. MADHURESH KUMAR // The Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill, 2011, is the government’s effort at addressing the problems in the 1894 Land Acquisition Act, which is not only completely outdated, but has only promoted forcible land acquisition across the country. Land acquisition in India continues to take place without any resettlement and rehabilitation, drastically affecting not only people who lose their land, but also those who lose their livelihood. The National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM) feels that while the new Bill is an improvement over the 1894 Act, there remain key issues. Many of these issues were addressed by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on the Bill, but remain neglected by the government. One important recommendation made by the Standing Committee was that the government should not be acquiring land for private players. But the government has refused this recommendation, saying that it is ideologically committed to private companies playing a larger role in the development of the nation. Under the 1894 Act, the government was not legally mandated to acquire land for private corporations and PPP projects. This new Bill will legitimize that. This is our fundamental problem with the Bill: why should the government become a middle-man for private corporations? Secondly, the 1894 Act works on the principle of eminent domain, which is the power of the state to seize private property without the owners’ consent. That framework has still not been changed in the new Bill. And when you look at the current framework of development when it comes to sectors like power, roadways, railways and industrial sectors, you see that the government is handing them to private players. As the state tries to acquire more land for private companies, there will be more and more conflict. Farmers have nothing else to depend on, and even if they get some resettlement and rehabilitation, it is not enough for their future generations. Thirdly, there remains serious concern about food security in the country. Land is a critically limited resource in India. If we do not put a cap on the diversion of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes, this will very soon create severe food and water shortages in the time to come. The Parliamentary Standing Committee has clearly said that the government should not be acquiring any agricultural land, whether irrigated or not. The government is saying that it will only not acquire multi-crop land, but we are saying that it is single crop land that is most often held by marginalised farmers, who are most in need of protection for economic and food security reasons. Lastly, while the government says that the new Bill has better rehabilitation and resettlement clauses, it does not provide landlosers with sustainable livelihood options. The number of people who face a loss of livelihood because of acquisition is so huge that it cannot be accommodated within the industrial and the services sectors. On one hand, we are pushing people out of agriculture forcibly, but are we creating any educational or technical alternatives for them? The state is acquiring land in the name of public purpose and industrial growth, but we need to rethink how we define development. We have to acknowledge that India is a country of 1.2 billion people. The kind of development the government is promoting caters to only the top 20 percent of the population. The government is revising the 1894 Act after 120 years, which gives it a historic opportunity to change how acquisition takes place in the country. We should not lose this chance to create a policy that ensures that India’s citizens are made a participant in the developmentplanning of the nation.

The debate on the introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops in India revolves around some of the fundamental concerns of our era: human and ecological health, food security, scientific freedom, governmental regulation and political incorruptibility. Moreover, the debate hits home our apprehensions over the salubriousness of our technological breakthroughs in the longer-run.

India is at the crossroads as far as the use of GM crops in agriculture is concerned. India’s current food sufficiency was made possible because of the Green Revolution of the 1960s. The introduction of high-yielding varieties of seeds and the use of chemical fertilisers and irrigation provided a much-needed increase in food production levels. However, in the past few decades, the overuse of pesticides and insecticides has led to increasing health hazards and depletion of overall soil quality. There is little doubt that the country needs to transform its agriculture practices—but how? While some experts believe that the way forward is to take organic farming seriously, others argue that GM crops will lead to a second agricultural revolution. Proponents of GM crops highlight an array of benefits; produce that is herbicide and pesticide resistant and modified to ward off plant viruses and fungi leading to higher crop yields. Other benefits cited are lowering of production costs due to a reduced need for machinery, fuel and chemical pesticides as well as environmental benefits associated with a reduction in the use of the same. However, there are many in India and around the world, who remain convinced that GM crops are not only unsafe for consumption, but also inappropriate for a primarily agrarian economy. Major concerns include unintended environmental and ecological hazards, unidentified effects on human and animal health, as well as the economic implications GM crops spell for small and marginal farmers forced to buy expensive seeds on a yearly basis. Following Bt cotton, the Indian government tried to introduce Bt brinjal in 2009. However, after concerns were raised on its safety, an indefinite moratorium was put on it in 2010 by the then Environment and Forests Minister, Jairam Ramesh. In August 2012, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Agriculture recommended that “for the time being, all research and development activities on transgenic crops should be carried out only in containment and the ongoing field trials in all states should be discontinued forthwith.” The Committee also pointed out that India was not as desperate as it was before the first Green Revolution. Arguing against this logic, the Science and Technology Minister S. Jaipal Reddy is of the opinion that India cannot afford to abandon GM crops. What does the debate over the introduction of GM crops in India boil down to? DW spoke to experts Devinder Sharma, Food and Trade Policy Analyst, and Dr K.K. Narayanan, Managing Director of Metahelix Life Sciences for the “Issue of the Month”. DEVINDER SHARMA// GM technology came to India in the 2000s when the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC) gave its nod to farming of transgenic cotton (Bt cotton) seeds created by Monsanto, a US biotech giant. In 2001, when Greenpeace requested for a public consultation on the introduction of Bt cotton, the GEAC granted it. I accompanied a Greenpeace team to that meeting. I was shocked to find the three years of so-called research trials conducted by Mahyco Monsanto Biotech or MMB—a joint venture between Indian seed company Mahyco and Monsanto—as erronous. In that meeting, MMB showed results in which crops were sown two months later than schedule. Yet results showed a 50 per cent higher yield. Crop sowing time is an important factor in agricultural research. If this research was real, then shouldn’t the government ask its farmers to sow crops two months later as well? I went on record to state that GM technology—promoted by MMB— was fraudulent. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) decided to postpone the commercialisation of Bt cotton until 2002. Monsanto had actually come to India in early 1990s to sell its technology for Bt Cotton to ICAR. The price it had offered then was `4 crore, which was turned down by the then Director General of ICAR. The same firm has now made profits of over `8,000 crore in the past decade in which it operated here. Their motives are clear. What we need to question is our government’s motives for propagating GM technologies—which harm farmers and citizens alike. Even when the approval for GM crops came into place, the Chairman of the then GEAC had said that the Bt cotton will be grown with buffer zones in Andhra Pradesh. A buffer zone is roughly 30 per cent of a farming land which is spared for non-Bt crops, so that pest resilience is not broken. When the GEAC Chairman was asked about who would be ensuring the creation of such buffer zones, his response was that a law would be passed, though he could not ensure its implementation. An argument that one often hears from those supporting GM crops is that genetic modification has been occurring since the beginning of evolution. While pollination between two plants occurs within species, nature does not allow inter-species pollination. Nature does not allow the gene of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)—a soil-dwelling bacterium commonly used as a biological pesticide— to get into cotton. Another argument in favour of GM technologies is that it will solve India’s hunger problems. However, our crisis is not of food production. On January 1, 2013, India had 66mn tonnes of food stock. In reality, there is no GM crop in the world that actually increases crop productivity. In fact, yields of GM corn and GM soybean, if US Department of Agriculture is to be believed, are less than the non-GM varieties. GM firms are using the transgenic technology to remove competition from the herbicide market. Instead of allowing the farmer to choose from brands of herbicides available, they have now created a monopoly of their own product. As US studies have shown, the use of pesticides is also increasing because of GM crops. The appearance of super-weeds and resistant insects associated with GM crops that is on the rise in the US is even more worrisome. A robust regulatory regime, with science-based long-term studies on the impact of GM crops on human health, soil and the environment, is desperately needed.

Evolving strategies to channel India’s ‘demographic dividend’

THE PAST YEARS have seen a spurt in the levels of activism on streets, in social media and public forums. A feature of these mobilisations is how many young faces are at the centre of the action. It is as though the sensibilities captured in Rang de Basanti (2006)—in a sanitised fashion—have begun to find their earthier manifestation in the civic (and not-so-civic) youth activism. This is only to be expected in a country negotiating the challenges of managing its ‘demographic dividend’; the fact that a large proportion of India’s population is young. This ‘dividend’ is described either as a boon (when India is contrasted with China or western economies) or as a ticking time bomb—the sobering characterisation of the issue in a recent edition of Tehelka. Whichever way we look at it, the fact that India has a large and capricious population of young people has far-reaching implications for India’s future. As an acknowledgment, the Department of Economic Affairs (Ministry of Finance) has devoted a chapter to the issue in this year’s Economic Survey. No previous edition of this survey that shapes the government’s policy-making and planning processes, has accorded this sort of centrality to the issue. Entitled Seizing the Demographic Dividend, the chapter is an analysis of how best the country needs to manage its young workforce. Framed around economic matters, it recognises that more than half of India’s population is in rural areas and a part of the ‘informal’ sector. Because productive jobs are vital for growth, the central question facing us is: where will good jobs come from? The study points out that while industry is creating jobs, “too many such jobs are low-productivity, non-contractual jobs in the unorganised sector, offering low incomes, little protection, and no benefits. Service jobs are high productivity, but employment growth in services has been slow in recent years”. On the reasonable premise that “a good job is the best form of inclusion”, the study concludes: “India’s challenge is to create the conditions for faster growth of productive jobs outside of agriculture, especially in organised manufacturing and in services, even while improving productivity in agriculture.” The economic implications of India’s youth bulge are self-evident. Studies by the World Bank and the IMF have been analysing the issue for years now and all see advantages in the coming years. The fact remains, as the Economic Survey notes, that historically, India’s institutional apparatus has not always been adept at channeling the energies of her volatile population. To complicate matters further, in 2009 the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) concluded that over 85 per cent of the Indian workforce is informal and even after excluding the agricultural sector, the share of the workforce in the informal sector remains at 70 per cent. A large proportion of this group is the young, outside the welfare state’s safety net. Understandably, this has opened-up avenues for businesses in the educational sector, because entrepreneurs realise that the young workforce is also a lucrative market. Further, how the young choose to seek creative outlets will have far-reaching implications. Perceptive political parties and activists have begun to evolve methods of connecting with the young. Two questions lie at the centre of this churn: firstly, do the governmental institutions and private sector appreciate the challenges associated with harnessing the energies being unleashed—within a society in which power structures are dominated by the elderly but the entrepreneurial forces sustaining a growing India ipso facto cut across generational thinking? Second, given India’s cultural orientation (entrenched notions of respect for the elderly), how exactly do we expect institutions to understand and manage the energies of its youth? Put bluntly, how well do the elderly (who inhabit positions of authority) and the youth actually communicate? These questions have no easy answers. The first step towards finding them is to understand what the young think, want, and are inspired by; towards what end, for whom, and most fundamentally— how and why. Answers to these are being generated in forums, but they remain dispersed often drowned out by the celebratory jingoism about the dividend. An organisation, Pravah, set-up in 1993, has attempted some answers. In The Ocean in Drop: Inside-Out Youth Leadership, the NGO founders show how the young have contributed significantly to society in the past. They suggest ways in which they can take centre-stage again. The book argues that traditionally society has legitimised four ‘spaces’ for young people: family, friends, education or careers, and leisure. It goes on to state the need for the creation of a Fifth Space which focuses on three aspects of youth development: understanding the ‘self’, building meaningful relationships and impacting society. Because existing notions of volunteerism (manifest in facile forms of social service) and active citizenship (co-opted by top-heavy political organisations) have limitations, the book argues that constructive forms of youth engagement emerge when young people connect with society through an energised self of the kind that Mahatma Gandhi might have imagined when talking of swaraj. Once this happens, such self-awareness can be juxtaposed with the development of skills, values and attitudes that are necessary to positively impact the world around them. The fact is that India’s youth are already carving out spaces of autonomy for themselves. How these energies are channeled will depend on the quality of the inter-generational understanding that emerges ahead. In this conversation, the stakes are significant, and if conducted properly, so are the rewards.

Aabid Surti, with his one man brigade called Drop Dead, is fixing every leaky tap which comes his way

In a very Shah Rukh Khan movie-like moment, writer, painter, cartoonist and environmentalist, Aabid Surti declares: “When you work for the benefit of others, saari kayanath tumhe apani manzil se milane ki koshish me lag jaati hai.” (When you work for the benefit of others, the whole of creation unites to make you successful.) He also believes that both Ishwar and Allah work in tandem to assist such an effort. The conviction with which he speaks his words can make a regular atheist believe in God. And when a man of his age—he is all of 77 years now—starts doing what he does, and that too so relentlessly, one does suspect there is indeed a higher power at play here. Surti’s environmental journey began five years ago with a leaky tap at a friend’s house. When Surti asked his friend to get the tap fixed, his request was brushed aside. After all the tap was, “too small a matter to call a plumber for”. Surti, who had read in a Hindustan Times article that a tap leaks a drop of water per second and can waste upto a 1,000 litres per month if not mended, could not ignore the problem. “I grew up on a pavement dwelling fighting for every drop of water. When you live such a life you realise the value of every drop,” he says. Silently, the house guest made up his mind; he had to change things. A question remained—how would he save every drop? The chance came soon enough when the Uttar Pradesh Government decided to honour his contribution to Hindi Literature by bestowing him with the Sahitya Sanstha Award, and a cash prize of `1 lakh. “Meri toh maano lottery lag gayi,” (I had hit the jackpot) he says with a chuckle. With that money in hand Surti embarked upon an environmental journey at an age when people contemplate retirement. He hired a plumber, bought some washers and began visiting people’s homes with a request—let us fix your taps for free! However, well meaning the two might have been, at the onset they were treated with suspicion. Attitudes changed once Drop Dead— the name of the three-people brigade— recruited a woman volunteer. “People tend to trust women more than men. Ever since she has joined us, attitudes have changed toward Drop Dead,” he laughs. The beauty of Drop Dead lay in its simplicity. An elderly gentleman, a plumber and a benign lady volunteer comes knocking on your doors and offers to fix your taps; he does not lecture you on the importance of water nor do they charge you a single penny. Probably the man in charge reminds you of your grandfather— why would say no to such a man and his offer? Surti’s award saw him through three years, and just when he was to worry about the road ahead, the Gujarat Government awarded him the Gujarat Gaurav Award and gave him `50,000. “Like I said, the forces were with me.” By then the news of his work had spread—and he has gained some well-wishers. For example, an owner of a press offered to print pamphlets for free. “I asked him to not be foolish. Aap kyun mere saath shahid ho rahe hai?” (Why are you turning into a martyr along with me?) But the press proprietor was adamant. He did not know how to help his world—however, if someone else did, no one could stop him from helping such a man out. Surti says it is this love that has been the best outcome of his endeavour, and he goes on to add that not even a mother’s love could match his supporters’ affections. Slowly, corporations also came forth to take Surti’s work a step forward. One corporation offered to hire more plumbers so that Surti could spread his work over a wider geography. Recently, Surti was also invited by the Dainik Bhaskar Group in Bhopal for a two-day water conservation camp, where he, along with the many volunteers, roamed the streets of Bhopal, fixing every leaky tap that came their way. His organisation, Drop Dead (for unless you save every drop of water you might as well drop dead as you kill the planet, and generations, after you) has been active for almost six years now. Each year it grows drop by drop. The great Urdu poet Majrooh Sultanpuri had once said, “To akela hi chala tha janibe manzil magar, log saath aate gaye aur karvan banta gaya.” (I had started my journey alone, but people joined in to form my caravan...) That, in a nutshell, can sum up Surti’s story.

It is a hauntingly beautiful book written by one of the finest Indian writers of our times and is not the one to be missed

Lost Men, I was—time and again— reminded of Enrique Vila Matas’ Bartleby & Co. The novel based on “writers of No” talks of authors who abandoned flourishing careers for no apparent reason. While some started sketching (furniture!), others made use of illegible language if they ever chose to write. Could we call such men lost? Perhaps, we can. In Bartleby & Co, the narrator mentions Swiss writer Robert Walser’s quote, one which he picked up from one of Walser’s books—“Over the now darkened landscape treks a solitary figure”. Chakraborti’s lost men, like Walser’s, appear to be trekking on a similar landscape. One which was not dark to begin with, but is now bereft of light. These are lost men; those who do not know where their journeys would end. “When did I go to sleep and where have I awoken?” asks one of Chakraborti’s protagonists. The answer, however, is not sought, for lost men care not about of what lies at the end of the road—it is the journey that counts. In the first short story, the main protagonist is stuck in a meaningless bowling game with an unwarranted foe. The banker, the deliberate antagonist, wants him to join in a game where they bowl stones at each other. The banker continues to hurl stones at the protagonist, who is stuck in what can be only called a rock and a hard place. Whatever happens is as ambiguous as a dream. Standing two streets away from his house is a lost man who cannot find his way, and no matter what lane he chooses, he is bound to be hit by a stone. I was not aware of Chakraborti’s style, not having read his previous works. After reading the first few stories (such as the one mentioned above), I can only conclude that Chakraborti is an ‘absurdist’. How else can one explain the irrational behaviour of Chakraborti’s characters if not by absurdism? Take the story—The Third Behind Us—where the main protagonist lands himself in the middle of an already-commenced cricket match. There comes a point where he cannot make runs and cannot get out, much like Sunil Gavaskar who scored a painful 36 and miserably failed to get out in the 1975 World Cup Match. The protagonist, who lives and breathes each agonising moment of the match, also has forgotten about an otherworldly visit he’s been paid. When he does realise or remember, it is a little too late. Chakraborti, however, is not just an absurdist. If we read carefully, there is yet another pattern masterly woven into the stories. While they all seem tad inconclusive, in a subtle way they have all reached their ends—not the end of the saga per say, but an end of a trail of thoughts. Those looking for reason—even a plot—in this collection will be disappointed, to say the least. Chakraborti, clearly, is not interested in building a plot, or giving the stories a pace. For those who like to delve deeper and read more between the lines, there is a treasure trove of discoveries in this collection. These are cleverly-knitted tales. Tragedies, often hiding behind comic situations. The humour is always dark and witty, and it grows on you. The stories are so cleverly-knitted that they are as frustrating to the readers as they are to the protagonist. Some are delightfully nostalgic, and some seemingly optimistic. In City Lights, a man by happenstance meets his childhood physician and is taken on a bus ride round his own city, to get reintroduced to his lost childhood. The very same evening he visits another familiar scene, one whose description he had read in letters exchanged with a friend as a boy. A tale of finding oneself, perhaps? I leave the conclusion to you—the reader. There is a lot of sadness and a sense of loss hidden behind the dark, humourous layers of fine writing. Chakraborti is not afraid of exploring the grey shades of his characters. What is remarkable is the manner in which he does it—with an almost deceptively simple narrative and dark, yet subtle, humour. After finishing the book, if its characters come to haunt you, do not be surprised— for some stories live beyond the pages. And Chakraborti has created a few such stories.