Date with young India

Dileep Padgaonkar

For a break from the cynics and celebrities who seem to dominate our media, you can do no better than spend time with some of the brightest young minds of the country. That opportunity came my way in Mumbai last weekend when I sat on a panel of judges for a whole day interviewing candidates for the Aditya Birla Group scholarships. They had just joined our leading institutes of management after clearing hugely-competitive entrance tests. And to qualify for this final interview stage, they had gone through a rigorous process put in place to s;elect the scholars. Here then was the creamiest of the creamy layer of India's student community.

The essays the candidates had submitted along with their application forms, and the things they said during the interviews were revealing on more than one count. Apart from their intellectual abilities, what impressed the panel was their robust sense of priorities. Time and again they extolled the virtues of grit, determination, hard work, perseverance, diligence and the tightest possible focus on the tasks at hand. These were needed to pursue excellence with the highest degree of efficacy. Lurking beneath their earnestness was a quiet confidence in themselves and, no less significant, in the future of India.

We found this confidence both in candidates who belonged to middle-class families and had grown up in big cities, as well as in those who came from lower income groups and from small towns which do not boast of public schools and even less of blue-chip colleges. The success of the latter in the face of heavy odds deserves a moment's reflection. It should leave no one in doubt that economic reforms have c;reated more possibilities of upward mobility than what the extremists on our ideological spectrum would have us believe.

The confidence was rooted in factors which came as something of a surprise to the panel since they were at such sharp variance with the MTV mind-set. Without an exception, the candidates regarded their parents as role models. Add to the filial loyalty a marked penchant for the spiritual. Some sought solace in Swami Vivekananda; some others in Sri Sri Ravi Shankar; still others in reiki. Equally significant was their claim that they drew sustenance from the country's pluralistic cultural traditions, especially music. While many practiced some sport, few cared to read books other than the texts prescribed in their curricula or spent much time browsing through newspapers or watching news on television. Also, most candidates asserted that their real ambition was to start their own enterprise some day and, after making enough money, to establish a school in their home town.

What these IIM students were saying in substance is this: we want to create wealth for society and in the process enrich ourselves. But we also want to ensure that none of this is a synonym for greed, for an ostentatious life-style or generally for a coarsening of the moral fibre. We may become global corporate citizens but we are steadfast in our commitment to India's culture, democracy and way of life.

Here then is a generation of Indians who propitiate both Laxmi, the Goddess of wealth, and Saraswati, the Goddess of learning, with equal fervour. They are firm in their belief that to favour one over the other is to invite trouble. All in all. they are neither conservative nor radical, neither high-brow nor low-brow, neither conformist nor individualist. They value achievement more than success, reputation more than celebrity and, above all, freedom to do their own thing. That is at least what they claimed. Small wonder therefore that this highly-sanitised 'correctness' left the selection panel both comforted and just a wee bit unhinged.