After completing my High School in 1996, I was headed for Bangalore to study Computer Science for my graduation and hopefully masters as well. That was the dream … along with many other dreams to make it big in the IT city of India. I had chosen to uproot myself from the family roots in Howrah, a small industrial town near Kolkata, the City of Joy. My parents have been brought up there and lived their entire lives there… well for the most part. Both sets of my grandparents however migrated in their youth/ middle ages from Bangladesh around the time the country got independence. My maternal grandfather was an active freedom fighter who fought alongside Masterda Surya Sen during the Chittagong Armory Raid in 1930 and had done his share of jail time with other freedom fighters in pre-independence India. He was a very strong man at heart and had impeccable integrity. Post independence he had worked with many political outfits as advisor and later gave up the public life of sorts to concentrate on reading and writing about India and many other socially important issues. He ensured that the family had the right culture and patriotism.
Hence at this time of my voluntary uprooting, he sat me down and gave me this little notebook that was hand-written by him. He said “You are headed for a future of your own, and I hope you will grow into a virtuous human being above all else. To be that, one of the other things you need is to appreciate your roots … your country. It is not enough to love your country and respect the flag and do all the other cliched patriotic rituals. It is imperative that you spend time knowing your country, it is important in order for you to know yourself better. I have gathered some facts for you here and hope you’d enrich this knowledge yourself.”
I flipped through the notebook and saw that it started with some proverbs, from various people. Some economic statistics about India from 1991 like population, GDP, per-capita income etc. Honestly, it didn’t make much sense at that time to me, a flighty teenager more interested in how college is going to be and how the independence from family would feel like in Bangalore. So this little notebook ended up in one corner of my suitcase for the next decade or so … by then I finished college and started working. Life was more or less headed in the right direction (as it always seems to an optimist). In 2004 Dadu passed away at the age of 86 … and still this notebook remained in my suitcase (quite a worthless grandson I sometimes think).
It is extremely important I mention here that my father, a scientist and a teacher by career and a poet, a musician, a writer a photographer and an environmental activist by passion, was another equally important influence on me on the same regard. He used to always look for economic and environmental data and was very encouraged by the availability of data on the internet. He would ask me from time to time to look up research papers on Carbon emissions, plastics, water pollution etc … he himself had written a couple of books on air and water pollution with the help of his friends from the scientific community who he would approach from time to time for research data on the subjects. Sometimes I could get him some data a lot of times I couldn’t find data to his satisfaction. He was a tough customer to satisfy 🙂 … I hated and loved that about him. I would sometimes sit with him and share stuff that I found interesting on the internet and we would discuss opinions on those … and we’d disagree a lot … a lot! But with each debate (argument) I always found out another possible perspective.
In 2005 I met someone I could think of sharing a life with. I realized that this was the person with whom I would love to have a child … and the whole thought process changed. I realized I need to understand my world a lot better and be more informed as the life I now choose to pursue will look at me with a lot of questions and I haven’t really the slightest clue of what the answers could possibly be. That was the moment of truth that brought me to a point in life where I really needed to know who I was. And I remembered Dadu … ( and of course Dad was around to bounce ideas off).
I fished out this notebook from my suitcase and read through it … and suddenly it made so much more sense. I started looking up information about my country, watching speeches, interviews and debates of world affairs … I came across TED … there one of the initial speeches I watched was by Hans Rosling of the http://www.gapminder.org fame. The way he talked about data inspired me and I also came to know that not only Gapminder, but world data miners like IMF, World Bank and USA’s CIA also maintained data and that data was available for public who were interested. I quickly shared it with Dad and he loved it and it made me realize the real passion and perseverance of Dadu, who used to keep track of these data in the days of no internet. He had to write to people and organizations and look up books etc to find the data, him gathering this data for me in the little notebook would have taken 10-20 times more effort that it took me to gather all of the information these organizations had made available online. Hats off to that kind of passion.
Anyways … this is a little background to how I got interested in knowing India, my country, the scientific way … where the quest is to look for the unbiased truth, whether or not I like what I find.
This blog will be an attempt to do the same … look at India through information found from authentic sources and knowing India in the light of verifiable data in the perspective of it’s actual place in the global platform. Spoiler alert … there will be a lot of critical appreciation of our country here … as I think to be patriotic, it is important to first know the country for what it is.
India - A Reality Check 