 The challenges to the effort that might come from historical conditioning, the way forward, how to meet these challenges, how to recognize them, then there is a problem. Many times when we are dealing with new issues, we do not notice that a problem has come up. And we do not notice that there is a problem because we have been conditioned in such a manner not to notice that thing as a problem. Yet that could be a problem and it could be something that is going to create serious problems for us in executing whatever project we are working on. A quick checklist of what India has been. We've been talking about India, India's past, the kind of continuities. We told you the story of the Rupiah. We told you the manner in which the people like Akbar and Sher Shah tried to root themselves into Indian society. Basically, we said that, look, many things which you take for granted today in your life are things which have got such tremendous continuities which are coming from times before Christ. Today, we will say that some of these things could be positive, some of these behavior patterns could be negative and they could create a problem for us. Quick checklist. Individual creativity is very high in India. Individual ability to break out of the mold and the limits of the system and society is very high. You guys have just gone through an examination process and you know that cracking the examination is very difficult. Let me assure you, you fellows are at the top half percent of Indian society. Whether you like it or not, whether you believe it or not, you are actually seriously the elite of this society and most of you don't even have a background to be in this position. Most of you have struggled, worked hard towards this end and you have succeeded in the face of a large amount of serious problems. Whether you recognize them, whether you notice them, I don't know. But as a historian, as someone who professionally studies a society, I know that those problems exist and only the extraordinarily lucky person would be the one who would be past them. For one hour, we were making an effort to cross a patch of 400 yards. There's a Lal Baati on the car, there's a policeman blowing whistle, there's everything going on. But whatever you do with your courage, you can't leave that 400 gauge of pass lap ahead. You will be stuck in that. Great at Jogar, making do with little or using old things that exist and giving them a new twist. Indians do it very well. Great at adjusting to diversity, multiplicity of thought and behavior. But most of all, above all, absolutely the most important characteristic of Indian society and extremely parsimonious society, a society that till now has not learnt how to waste things. People are teaching us how to waste things. Let's take the example of drinking water. In India, people drink water like this. The Biscayri people, the Aquafida people, they cook or the Pepsi people train us to drink with their mouths closed. There's a whole story behind it. Why shouldn't we drink with our mouths closed? But today, people have forgotten that whole thing and people find it normal and routine because the moment you put a mooyah to the bottle, it means that bottle is going to be wasted irrespective of how much liquid there is in it. You can go to Bombay. In Bombay, there's a South Indian area where you get a lot of food. On the South Indian side, you go there. There's the Bombay where you drink water, there's the stall of food and there's one glass. Thousands of people drink water from one glass. Because no one puts a glass of water on it. Everyone drinks water from above. Parsimonious. Parsimonious, you parsimonious, I parsimonious, every Indian parsimonious. Look at this image. Plastic bag which has more plastic bags in it. Whether you live in a hostel, whether you live at home, you do not throw plastic. You store plastic. Every set of people don't know that Indians don't throw plastic. It's the CPCB and the Teri. Heard about these two organizations? Both organizations think that if you consume so much plastic, there will be so much plastic waste. As a consequence, you can create so much black metric tons of plastic and the waste are being used. So much power can be generated. All that you've got to do is collect the kachra, put it in a daba and it will generate power for you. Then one day we asked someone, he put in so many crores of rupees of investment in Delhi and no plastic is being generated, sorry, no power is being generated from this plant. What's the problem? He said except for the Chanakya Puri Embassy zone, no other zone generates enough waste or waste which can be converted into power. Indian waste has got extraordinarily low calorific value. You cannot extract energy out of it. Indians have consumed each and every bit of energy that was inherent in that kura. Only the experts don't know it. Everyone else does. The strong points of Indian society and people. Achievement coefficient is very high. You all know it. The kakshas are said from one. Whether it was the first or not. And it is not said from you, it is said from everyone. Just in case you think that by the time you grow older and you are comfortable in life, all of yesterday I've been fielding phone calls from my vice chancellor's office. Please tell us what is the rank of Pune University? What is the rank of Pune University? The rank of Pune University is grade is A. What is the grade of PU? That is also A. No, no, no, no, no. Tell us what are the points they have scored? Basically, it's around three years. No, no, no. Get the exact points. PU is at 3.47 and Pune is at 3.33. Oh, good. Pune is worse than us. We are a very superior university. The vice chancellor is over 60 years old. And he is not getting peace until he gets the exact rank. Just in case you think that the VC is getting hyper about it. No, the rest of the faculty is also getting hyper about it. My job is, my business is to keep track of ranks and numbers and such like. So, I am told to find that out. Indians are also very flexible. They have an ability to do anything. They have an ability to adjust to anything. And therefore, they are a highly liked people across the world. Unless, of course, there's someone who does not like you to the way you eat food or the way you sit or the way you talk. Indians are also very non-aggressive. The pacifists. The pacifism in India flows from human beings to animals, animals to human beings, nature, everything. This is a war bullock. This particular breed was bred for war. And this is a kind of scene which you would find routinely and normally in any Indian village, in any Indian situation, without much problem. Amrit Mahal was made for war. It was not meant as a drought animal. It was not meant as an animal for agriculture. It was an animal that was supposed to be used in armies. You find it all over Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kaur Bullock and on the borders of Maharashtra, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh. The Tamils are a much superior race than the rest of Deccan. Tamils are the dominant class of people who ruled over most of the Deccan, most of the Deccan, most of the history. They created a war bullock which actually is used as a war bullock. The Kangayam breed. The Kangayam breed now used for the Jallikattu experience. And here is the Jallikattu game. You must have seen pictures of this in various magazines and newspapers. Notice one thing. They are trying to control this bullock without the use of weapons. People get hurt. That's all right. That is the European comparison. First, you get picadories to poke spears inside the animal. Then you take a knife or a sword and you try to harm the animal, bloody it, weaken it. In India, that is not the case. In India, welcome film. This is someone called Nana Pataker. Nana Pataker says that he is his younger brother. He is his friend. You should have been nice to this man. We are Indians. We are very polite people. We also call Parle Ji Parle Ji. Remember, Indians are essentially nice kind people. Indians are also reasonably skillful. This is something that we have talked about earlier. When India comes to India, and Baba notices the large number of skillful people around, and Baba thinks this is a very nice thing to happen. Dominico Pais is a Portuguese who comes to India. Dominico Pais discovers that Indians have a large amount of food available to them. Indians are very well fed. Indians are very healthy. If you ever go to Japan or Europe, you will find that they eat very healthy. They look very healthy. They physically are very strong and physically very healthy. They are not fat and they are not thin. They are just what the right body size should be for that particular purpose. Indians are one after the other with the exception of the image of Ganesha. You will discover Indians look nice, normal, healthy. They are neither fat nor fat. Just what a normal healthy person should be. This is the king of Vijayanagara. The king of Vijayanagara, if you also notice, looks the same as King Ashoka did. He has a dhoti lapete. He has a weapon in his hand. He is walking barefoot. We had no attention on the clothes. We wore light clothes. Dominico Pais notices all this and he says that this also means that the wages in India are very low. Workers are very satisfied. And this is at a time when he compares India with Europe. Europe is undergoing a serious problem. Workers are happening, workers are writing all over and the Europeans are condemned to create new structures to deal with writing workers. In India we don't have workers' rights till the 20th century. We don't have food rights till the 18th century, till the 19th century when the colonial government is in power. That is partly because we have not tried to exploit our people to the extent that you can possibly exploit a human being. Indians routinely and normally, they stop far short of that. So then where is the problem? If all these are good things, then where is the problem residing among Indians? My submission. Now I am just... In both the cases, and it is something else too even now, Indians were ready to work at cheap rates. So why? Indians are able to work at cheap rates. Indians are ready to work at cheap rates because food in India is very cheap. Food in India is very cheap. The needs for Indians are very cheap. Housing is easily available. Clothing is easily available. There is no requirement over and above what you are normally and routinely getting. You are living in a village. All Indian workers lived in a village. Indians did not work in towns with a place where the traders lived and a handful of people lived in towns. Every Indian had a piece of land which produced food for them. It is respective of the caste. Even the Panditji had a land, Lala had a land, the workers had a land. Everyone had a piece of land. Under these circumstances, it becomes possible for a person to just ask for enough money that will help them survive. They simply don't need any more money. As for the rest, if you come to Eid, you get money to celebrate. If you come to Dashara Diwali, you get money to celebrate. If you come to Pilgrim, you get money for that. That's about all people need. There have been various studies about how much money does a person need. Today we know that we are living in a consumerist society and we are looking forward to earning more and more money. Sociologists in America in the 1960s, when consumerism had started off in a big way, it had already been in a big way for 20 years or more, they conducted empirical studies, some of the first empirical studies, and they discovered that most people needed only 10% income more. Whatever they had been earning, when they were asked, how much more money do you need? List out things that you would like to do. It turned out that everyone was happy with just 10% more. Human beings really don't need much. Needs come up when there's a serious shortage. The shortage that happened in Spain, Portugal and elsewhere, in England, they came up with a solution. In England, they came up with a solution called the Justices of Peace. In case you read English novels and stories, you will come across these characters, the ones who control the police constables, and it became their job to ensure peace and silence in the locality. So they started having meetings in every march with the workers, agricultural workers and industrial workers that they were coming up, and they started negotiating with them at what point will you stop writing? And it turned out that they would stop writing with a 10% increase in wages. So after a little while in the 16th century, around the same time that Dominico Pais is talking about, in the 16th century, the English came up with a notion which is known as increment. Today, if you are in a service, you routinely get increments. Routinely increments are 10%, something which the English people had established in the 16th century. The problem that we had was about not being able to organize. This is an image of the Kumbh Mela. The Kumbh Mela, this systematic tense and such like, was perhaps for the first time it had been done like this in Ilahabad. For the first time, hundreds of people did not die in the Kumbh Mela. Otherwise, that was a norm, routine thing to happen. Kumbh Mela had been going on for more than 2,000 years. Some people say that maybe it had been going on in times of Harappa also. I really don't know when it started, but I do know that ever since we have written history, we have the mention of the Kumbh Mela every 12 years. People assemble at various spots, sometimes at Nashayik, sometimes at Prayag, sometimes Haridwar, and they always had thousands and thousands of pilgrims coming up. And in olden times, you had to make a program almost four or five months in advance because you had to walk to the Mela. And once you reach the Mela, the span in which the puja part had to be done was very short, just about two weeks that you have for doing all your pujas. That meant there was a huge crush of people and routinely they were stampede and people died. It was just that heart in which you had to do everything and it was impossible. The first question is, how did this information was coming to people? I mean, the question is, Kumbh Mela happened so many thousands years ago. I mean, 2000 is the figure I am saying. It could have happened even before that. How did people communicate this information to each other? Scholars have not studied this thing properly in India. So a considered, sensible, reasonable answer would not be easy to give at this moment. All that one can say is that the religious spread of the religious word is something which happens quite quickly and it happens much faster than today's dark does. And we have evidence of it in 1857 when all of North India knew that a rebellion has started and the rebellion should be carried forward. In 1947, we have information from Britishers who are living in... Sorry, in 1948, we have information from Britishers who were living in Pune, in isolated pockets of Pune who say that within hours we had information of Gandhiji having been assassinated. Gandhiji has been assassinated in Delhi and the news comes within hours much before it came via telegram. What was the mechanism, social mechanism of communication of communicating information of this variety? People have not studied that till such time that they study. We don't know. However, we do know that it used to happen and people used to routinely share crucial information across extremely large distances. So that's step one. Step two is getting them to sleep properly, organize in such a manner that if that ghat at Haridwar is just about 200 yards broad, then it becomes possible for everyone to bathe in the ghat according to a certain set hierarchy without crushing each other, without sending hundreds of people to death every 12 years. It happened last time. It happened the time before that. It happened the time before that. So can we not organize things in such a manner that it won't happen this time? The first time it was possible to do something like that was the latest kumbh that has happened. Now, that is what I would say is lacking. Sending of information and communication? Yes, we were very good. But in organizing things, we were reasonably bad. In systematizing things, we were reasonably bad. Even these people who assemble together, these people are not taking care to assemble in a manner that they can systematically work with each other. Everyone comes with their Borya, Bistar, Balti, Khaane ka Saman, Ration, etc., and they'll set up their small tumbu. If you look at this particular, this is a family group. This family group is sleeping on pools, dry heke jo beds hotein inode wo bichhai huye. This is an upper caste group. These are the group of upper caste women. They are sleeping against each other's leg, suggests that they really don't care. So they are a close-knit group. And the usual is that they have a small... When they make their food, usually it's kitschery that they make, and they just eat it for themselves. There's no collective eating, there's no collective meeting, there's no collective communion with the rest of the population. They have come here for their puja. They don't care what the person next door is doing. They don't care what everyone else is thinking about. So long as they are free, it's alright by them. This particular thing was first noticed and then made an effort to overcome by the gurus of the Sikhs who insisted that their food will be in the langar. Guru Nanak said, Why langar? Because langar was the example that was available to them from the Afghans. Afghans ate food in the langar. What was the Afghan langar? Afghan langar was a huge thali. You go to an Iranian restaurant over here and ask them for the Iranian thali. They give you one huge thali with a lot of food on it and everyone eats from the thali. There are no separate plates. This is a normal Indian who feels really uncomfortable. How can you eat from the same thali? But that is how food is being served over there. When Babar notices in the battle of Panipat, he notices that thousands of fires are burning in front. So he asks his spies, what are these fires doing? They say every soldier is making his own meal. Now that is something which an army cannot do or people cannot do. So that's one point. The second big point was pointed out to us by a fellow called Prakash Tandon. He is the first head of Unilever Brothers, the first Indian head of Unilever Brothers, which means he's a very, very top ranking manager in India in the 1950s and the 1960s. Tandon writes his autobiography. So we have this information from his autobiography and he notices Indians have great impatience in being trained. They all think that they know everything. They all think that they are very wise. They all think that the people who are trying to train them are very stupid. This is something which Babar had noticed. This is something which Dominico Peis had noticed in the Deccan. This is something that Nunes had noticed. The Italian Nunes who had come and come to the Gujarat region, he had noticed. So it did not matter which region you were in. Whether you were in the Delhi region, whether you were in the Gujarat region, whether you were in the Vijayanagar, South India, Karnataka region, everyone noticed this characteristic about India. They think very well of themselves. They think very highly of themselves. They are very stupid. They are very opinionated and they think very low of anyone who is trying to tell them anything. You have changed a little bit. You think so much that the person you are talking about is completely stupid. You respect a little more. Which is a nice thing. Prakash Tendon says that these Indians who have such serious impatience with training their lord from the upper castes, that he notices. He also notices that the steel mills that have been set up, the huge steel plants which have been set up in India by various great powers of those times, these steel plants are not secondhand, second rate plants. These are the state of art technology of those times which has been given by the Germans, the Russians, the British to the Indians in the hope that this new democratic country which has come up, about which everyone has great romantic ideas. In this they say that we need to help this country grow. Only the Americans doubt India's ability to grow. Europeans don't. And Prakash Tendon says, at a time when in the post-Second World War where industries are booming, steel plants are some of the most successful businesses around the only set of steel plants which are not making any money which are being run down are the ones that the Indian engineers are running. So why are the Indian engineers running down the plants? He then comments and he says, Indian engineers are running down these plants because they had not trained themselves adequately. They had ignored protocol. They had tried to do Jogar on close to everything. You can do Jogar on some things, but there are some things which you need to follow protocols properly and the guys are not doing that. Tendon is most upset with this particular experience and then Tendon says that the essential problem here is of hierarchy. These engineers are not engineers, they are sahibs. They are the people who give orders to other people. These are not people who are willing to work with their hands. These are not people who are willing to think about how things are going to happen. They want to give orders to someone. They are extremely hierarchical people. The fact that Indians are extremely hierarchical suggests how do they identify hierarchy? They identify hierarchy in terms of labour and work. Those who work, those who work with their hands, they are the lowest. Those who don't work with their hands, they are higher than that. Those who can order everyone around, they of course are the highest. Prakash Tendon is not the only one who notices this. Long, long ago Mahatma Gandhi had noticed it when he had gone to South Africa as a young man. Twenty-two, twenty-three-year-old Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi is a young lad and he suddenly notices that all the hierarchies in South Africa, among the Indians, are set up on the basis of who works and who does not work. And he says that Indians lack in a degree of labour. Subsequently, when he sets up his own ashram, he insists that everyone should sit down and work with their own hands. His wife is the first one to rebel. His friends rebel against him. So he says, okay, then I'll do my work. He starts working for himself and for everyone else. Everyone comes around after a while and today the situation is that if you work with your hands, you're supposed to be a great, nice Gandhian. Mohandas notices that it's possible that you may have enjoyed working with your hands. That's a more creative process. What's up is something which people ignore altogether. If working with your hand is a dirty thing, then this is something which the Europeans coming to India notice and find it most interesting. The Portuguese start using the word caste for that. Cast is not an Indian word. Cast is a Portuguese word. India did not have caste. Europe had it. However, the hierarchies that were being set up in India, these hierarchies were so strong and so visible that an outsider without any bias could notice that these hierarchies are not transmutable. You cannot override this particular hierarchy or stuck with where you are. And they start using the word caste for this. And it is the caste system that one suggests is considerably behind a large number of problems that we have. Cast system not in terms of chua chua, caste system not in terms of merit, reservation, et cetera, et cetera. Cast system mostly in the sense of creating entirely artificial hierarchies, putting pressure on everyone to follow these hierarchies, respect these hierarchies, and somehow in the process undermining everyone else who works. So if you work, you're the lowest in the rank. India is one of the few countries in the world where managers are supposed to be very superior people and people who work on the floor are supposed to be the lowest now. Everywhere else, people who work are supposed to be either equal or superior. India is one of the unique countries in this regard. Look at some of the examples that I have chosen for you. The firefighter, the school teacher, the doctor, the police constable. They are all supposed to be servants of society, not in terms of public servants. Civil servants are the same. They don't look like servants at all. They don't behave like servants at all. They are a very seriously superior human being. Very seriously superior facilities are available to them. Servant in the sense of what you would be treating a lowly person. Firefighter, constable, school teacher, to a very large extent the doctor, and of course the chaiwala, the bearer, the waiter. In a political situation, the chaiwala could become a joke. We are a political party. We don't bother about chaiwalas. The chaiwala, on which he was jibed, he made a lot of political capital out of that. The waiter, the only two sets of people to whom you talk in English, even while you're talking in your local language, is your dog, come Tommy, go Tommy, jump Tommy, sit Tommy, and the waiter. Two pizzas, one Pepsi. You're talking in your local language. You might as well talk to the waiter in your local language. And today in these places, KFC, Subway, etc., is actually from the same social class as you are. So there's not even a social class hierarchy. The problem is that hierarchies get established, hierarchies get alive, and everyone starts bothering about these hierarchies. How did the Indian society deal with such a situation? Part of the thing was emanating from the geography about which we have talked about in historical terms earlier. This is a land which is parsley populated. This is a very rich land. Rich is not being defined as that people had money. Because disposable income used to be less here. Rich is being defined in terms of food and clothes. He used to have good places to stay. This is a place where... Hierarchy? I really don't know. Indian history has a very serious problem that many of these questions which are common sensical questions for which we should have a sustained systematic understanding on the basis of detailed research, these questions have simply not been touched upon. These questions have been constantly ignored or presumed that whatever knowledge I have today is the knowledge which is a baseline, knowledge which has been true for throughout. So hierarchies, partly because in a society where you really don't need to work too much, let me suggest this is what I am taking this forward. If it is possible for you, there is a huge land you have, I mean just imagine, I am speculating now. You have a huge land mass and it is possible for you to isolate people in small groups and ask everyone to just lead their life in that small group and not bother me. You handle your social conflicts, you handle your social issues, you live the life that you want, you don't hassle us, the rest of us. Now if it turns out in functional terms, very small society. Small scale societies can function very well. Look at those North European societies, very small scale societies, a few lakh people here or a few lakh people there. They don't have the kind of social conflicts that we have in India today. It is if it becomes functionally good, then over the years there is a possibility that that particular behaviour pattern, it gets entrenched. Now added to that functional goodness that it contains the social conflict, there is a second kind of thing that happens and that is about hierarchies. A person who is superior, he is immediately given a label that you are superior. Think about the story of Sher Shah Suri. Sher Shah Suri is an Afghan who is supposed to be low in the Afghan hierarchy of things and therefore he is supposed to rotas in Bihar. Delhi, Agra, Muradabad, Rampur, these are places which are going to be in control of the big families, big Afghan families and Sher Shah spends his entire life ranting against that and the first opportunity he gets to overthrow the Afghans, he uses that opportunity, it kicks them out. Not only that, he also tries to dissociate himself from his Afghan heritage. He tries to locate himself in his Indian heritage, whatever small time Indian heritage he has at that time. He says, I am rooted into this land. So hierarchies of this variety can be harmful to a person's psyche quite a bit, especially if you are low down and if you are higher up, then it becomes in your interest to sustain these hierarchies and say, you know, I am so superior. Look at the English, the English soldier, the British Tommy, who used to come from London from a working class district, who had actually been pushed out of England to work in India because he could get a job in England, etc. He comes to India and discovers that because of his white skin, he is superior to everyone else. He is most happy with that existence. He transforms his behavior altogether. It is such a dramatic transformation that people start noticing and commenting upon it. How the English Tommy, one of the most ill-behaved, rude, boorish person in England when he comes to India, how he acquires these heirs of being a superior person, especially when he is talking to the Indians. When they are legitimately established, they can be extremely comforting. I have come across people, there is a building across the road where there is a gate and if you go in a red bati wali inside the gate, three police kasipais stand up and say, salute, sir. If you walk through that gate, they say, I have come across such a large body of people who cross the road in the Lal Bati car so that the police kasipais can salute them. I suggested to some of them, why don't you do this? Just walk for a week. All the sepais will start recognizing you. They will salute you from a great distance. I do it as a professor. I know that they all recognize me. They all say nice things to me. I mean, not the salute, because professors don't get saluted, but hello, sir, how are you, sir? I am S.I.S.R. friendly conversations start. But I get to come across a single person and this is a proper example, okay? A socially experimented example. You are working here because most of India was happy because of hierarchy, right? Yeah. The people used to walk in here. Why are the hierarchies based on this? Oh, no, it isn't that. It's a complex hierarchy. That you are superior to someone else. That is so tremendous. Think about the artificial hierarchy. I'll give you one example. That these three boys, one is ranked 200, one is ranked 201, and one and one is ranked 202. The only difference between them is that the rank of the 200 boys starts with A and starts with January. The rank of the other boys starts with B and starts with February. They've all scored the same marks, but when it comes to giving them branches, selecting colleges, all these come into play. When you start creating hierarchies and you start respecting hierarchies, that's your point, right? Why do you give so much respect to hierarchies? This particular example is an example of a hierarchy going to an extreme level completely beyond all logic. It would be much easier to put all three in the place where they want and stop bothering about 200, 201, 203 and 204, and yet it is deemed to be so legitimate in our society. It is deemed to be so legitimate in our society that the people who are imposing the hierarchy, teachers, people who are accepting the hierarchy, students, they don't even raise a question ever. What if someone were to go to the court and say, what kind of nonsensical hierarchy is this? Then we would come to know what the court's opinion is. They consider logical opinion about this. But the thing is, people are comfortable establishing hierarchies. They don't disagree with hierarchy. I have a base, I have a working class. Wait a minute, don't say working class. You are going to work with your hands. India is concerned with working classes late 19th century. All Indians work because everyone needs to do some work in order to earn a living. In order to, because India also does not have a class of aristocracy. The aristocracy was a legal class. You could not take an aristocrat. You had to be born an aristocrat or you had to be declared an aristocrat legally. In India, there was no aristocracy, per se, which in turn meant that you could be close to anything. Once you were very rich, once you had killed enough people, or you had controlled enough people around you, or there were enough people to support you, or you were someone who had seven brothers with you and all seven were good with their lattes and talvars. You're the big boss. That amorphous situation continues with us today. All our kings, queens, royal families, with the exception of Rajasthan in a small way, and the Garwal Himalayas, every dynasty in India has transformed in three to four generations. All our business families, with the exception of a handful of families, historically, have existed for three to four generations. So much so that there are kahavatiha ki wo jab kaha jata ki itna kamaayenge ki saath janam tak chalega, saath purkho tak chalega, waha pe kaha jata ki kamaayega, kahaega, tisra wala, baraad karega aur chaase wale ko ferese apne liek ferese kamaana padega. It is so much. The turnover of human beings is so much. The hierarchy helps out in a completely psychological way. There's nothing logical about it other than psychological. And therefore my submission ki perhaps it gives a value to people to feel good about themselves, and therefore they accept and adopt these hierarchies rather easily without challenging them. And the ones who challenge these hierarchies, they say that we are rebels. How can you be a rebel? You are challenging a completely falter hierarchy. You are doing something completely falter in this society. How can this be a great rebellion? No, but they become rebels. And remember, even today, when we talk about the rebels, Kanhaiya travelling in business class, Sita Raim Yechuri travelling in business class. You people, if you've been reading the last one year, these episodes have been talked about again and again. The moment people get an opportunity to move forward and do something of a superior hierarchy, they do it. They can easily turn back and say, okay, everyone should have these facilities. But they don't do that. They say, we want to break hierarchies. This about this sense of superiority towards white people. So what is the historical origin for that? Because historically white people have been interior to eastern. The question is, what is the reason for this intrinsic acceptance of superiority of the white people? Because otherwise, historically, the white people have been culturally, etc., much worse than people of India. So why does this notion come in? And why does this notion get entrenched so much in our society? White people are considered to be superior partly because nowadays, partly because they're fair. But remember, all white people are not considered superior because of fairness. The Indian notion of fairness is very different from the European notion of fairness. What the Europeans deemed to be fair, Indians were deemed to be sickly. The second thing, when the white people came to India in the 17th, 18th century, they did understand that India was a very superior culture and they were looking up to it and they were trying to understand it in that manner. By the 19th century, the situation came such that a German called Maximuler, a German called Maximuler, who was a historian and a linguistic expert, who was from Germany, living in Germany at a time in the 1850s when Germany was trying to identify itself as a nation. And Germany was trying to claim that it was a very superior nation. Maximuler noticed that there were linguistic similarities between what was happening in India and the languages of India, especially Sanskrit and the German language. So he said that we are one. Germans are of the same race as Indians because they speak a language which is kinshiply related to the Indian language, Sanskrit. He said that the word Arya, Germans belong to the Aryan race. Arya in Sanskrit is the honorific for sir, gentlemen, citizen. This is about all that Arya means. Arya is not a race. Arya is not a language. Arya is nothing but sir, hey Arya. This is how it would be used. This is also the time when the Indians have their last war of the old variety. Or Indians of the traditional kind fight the British for the last time. That is the wars of 1857. And in 1857 they are soundly defeated. A defeat which is so unambiguously a defeat that you could not sit down and say give any excuses for it. You cannot explain it as a success. It was so dramatically, visibly a defeat. At this point, the Europeans start saying that Indians are lowly people. You have defeated the man completely and then you try to suppress him psychologically. And Indians accept that intrinsically and they say that Europeans are superior people. And just like the atmosphere that happened in the last one or two years, Indians are ill tolerant, Indian caste system is very bad, Indian cow thing is very bad. A large amount, oh Delhi is the rape capital of the world. More rapes happen in New York and South Africa than in Delhi and yet everyone is going on and on. For two years Delhi is the rape capital, Delhi is the rape capital. America, at the same time things happen, they don't even notice it. What they don't notice is that when something like this happens in India, the whole nation is gotten up and trying to oppose it and say this is very bad, this is condemnable, it should not happen. In Europe and in America, no one even gets up to condemn it. It's an amazing situation. Psychologically, something of this kind is also happening in the mid 19th century when Indians accept that whatever is being imposed upon them by the British is good because the British are intrinsically a superior race. So why are the British a superior race? Because Indians have a lot of problems. Indians have the sati system. Indians have the caste system. Indians have balivaha. Indian women are not allowed to study, et cetera, et cetera. There's a list. And that entire list is a standard list which is taught to every Indian as the topic called the Indian renaissance. It starts from class three onwards and if you are a history student then you have to read about it till your MA final year. Otherwise, you are taught it in class three or taught it in class eight, class nine, class 12, class first year, second year, third year, MA one and MA two. None of these Indians bothered except one, PC Joshi, to actually figure out what was going on. And PC Joshi did this kind of research on the kind of questions that you asked. He was one person who used to answer those questions very well and he said actually these things didn't exist on the ground. They were so small in quantity. They were located in a small pocket of Bengal. Even in Bengal, only a very, very small group of people was doing these dirty practices. They were not common to the rest of the country, whether caste, whether balivaha, whether sati, et cetera. But no one was willing to listen to him. Why was no one willing to listen to him? Because everyone had presumed that the white person is superior and the Indian person is inferior. The moment you start noticing yourself as an inferior person, this happens. The first Indian to say that no, you people are not inferior was Vivekananda. Vivekananda who says, Vivekananda doesn't praise Hinduism, Vivekananda doesn't praise Indian culture, Indian society, et cetera, et cetera. He has only one small lesson to give to everyone. He says, you are a people you should have tried in yourself. Who you are, he doesn't bother to explain that. That's for you to figure out. He only says that you are a people and you should have tried in yourself. And all of a sudden you notice that there's a transformation in the Indian mind. It becomes very popular. When you go back and look at the details of Vivekananda's life, you notice that most of the time, he's interacting with outsiders, foreigners. Indian interaction, Indian spread is very small. And yet Indians love him. My suspicion is Indians love him because the message that he's giving forward is a message which people are willing to listen to. The second thing, notice the kind of images that start coming up. That Bharatmata looks like a Kandu. Vivekananda's image is the same. Vivekananda is standing like this. Now this is the Vir pose. I am someone. I look at you. I don't care about the world. I am very confident in myself. This image becomes so commonplace that a second Indian comes up, young man Gandhi, and he says, I don't care for the British and I don't care for the leadership of the Congress. And for the first time he says that the thing to move forward, the thing to do in India is to reach out to the public, the same group of people that you are talking about, the peasants, the workers, and ask them what they want. Stop trying to figure out what is good and what is bad about India on your own. First time in Indian history, in modern Indian history, someone says, without any ranker, what was the need for the British? What was the need for the British to rebel? Gandhi is not rebelling. Gandhi is simply being uncomfortable. Don't give them superior hierarchy. And all of a sudden we notice a transformation in the interaction between Gandhi and the English. English are interacting with Gandhi on the level of friendship. They are interacting with everyone else on the level of hierarchy. So the rest of the society does not internalize Gandhi's notions and those notions about the English being superior remain so deeply embedded that it takes a lot of time for Indians to get out of them. And then of course comes this question of the English language. There comes a time in the 1960, when a large number of state governments, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, they banned the teaching of English. Why should our students be taught English? Now remember, English could be a language of superiority and hierarchy but English is also a great skill. Indians who are multilingual naturally are able to learn languages very fast. Indians are being told, don't learn this language. Now that is a response of a slave-minded people. People who are not slave-minded. Let me give you the example of Punjab. The Punjab government says when everyone else is saying Hindi or local language should be taught, English should be stopped, the Punjab government insists that every school will teach English from class first onwards. Only in kindergarten you will not be taught English. And the Punjab's evenness to say, again and again when people ask him this question, Punjab shifts in after this question. He says, we want our boys to grow. We don't want this nonsense of if Punjabi-Purli, Hindi-Purli, Sanskrit-Purli, Punjabi-Hindi-Sanskrit-Purlegi apne sampe. English ke skill hasil karna padega. That is a confident response. So the deep embeddedness is what keeps on coming up again and again and again. And it's only now that people, the example of Tommy, come here and Tommy go there and Barry ko bol, English mein baat karna is part of this whole problem. Now of course there is a slight problem also about white color. If fair hona chahiye, the fair and lavi laga chahiye. Some of it has to do with cosmetic industry. Some of it has to do with advertising. So it's a complex thing. And now today we are come out of it and I think today we are comfortable of. Yes sir. Local language. If it's possible for you to reach a level of higher education, you should also be taught a little bit of French, German, Spanish languages which will come in handy for your business. All Indians on a routine normal basis knew three to four languages. I'll give you one small example. Very top notch political scientist who was talking about hierarchies, languages, hierarchies are built in languages. He used to be my teacher at one time. We invited him to Punjab University. Now when you are living in Delhi and you are educating yourself in Delhi University, JNU, Jamia Melia, the language of communication is English. Everything is done in English. No one speaks any other language. No one uses any other language, including for research. They don't work in the local languages at all for research. So Sudipta Kaviraj comes and he's got a very revolutionary theory and he says Indians have grown monolingual. They only use English. This is an audience of Punjab University boys and prophecy. In Punjab everyone knows five languages. They know Hindi, they know Pahari, they know Punjabi, they know English, they know Laundi. They all wonder what is this great professor saying that Indians only use one language. There are five languages that we are not aware of. There are seven to eight languages that we don't know. This is the norm. And this is not just the norm in Punjab. All this is the norm in Assam. This is the norm in Maharashtra. Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Udisha. The only place where this is not a norm is Madhya Pradesh. Where unfortunately we were stuck with, I am from Madhya Pradesh. We were stuck with governments which insisted that we will only learn the local language. And that local language won't be as bad as anyone else. Language is a tool. If you were to be educated, when you go in for higher education, the level at which you are at the moment, your institution should be teaching you, apart from English and Hindi, your institution should be teaching you a foreign language. In case you finish off these studies and go to the master's level, you should be learning one more language. By the time you start doing your research, you should be learning yet another language, which is the language of your area of research, the specialized area that you have chosen for that purpose. In India that doesn't happen. Indians don't know these languages. If you go to America, Europe, anywhere else in the world, including Africa, and people can routinely communicate in five, six languages to you. If nothing else, they'll come up to you and say, I want to practice my language with you. Indians have somehow lost the game over there of languages. But why have they done it? Why were the sex so complacent? The complacency was partly because Indians, that old historical issue, Indians lived in a forgiving society. Indians lived in a society which was welcoming. Indians lived in an environment which you did not demand too much from them. Let me invite your attention to the 21st century Chandigarh behind my house. They are using the same technology that their ancestors in the Harappan valley were using. They are producing the same designs. They are doing the same work which their ancestors 5,000 years ago were doing. There's no change, absolutely zero change. It's a great technology. It works very well. Gharay, Kvelu, everything becomes very good. But no one should think about it. You wonder about it. Think whether it could be changed. See whether there are possibilities of a different variety. As far as I know, no one has bothered about this. There was an effort I am told to figure out about the Bailgadi and the Lota. And over there, they discovered that those designs were so good that they did not need to make any changes to them. But in these terracotta things, I am sure that changes are possible. A second good thing which has about any change. Making of dosa. Dosa comes to India around 680. And it's been with us since then. Everyone makes the dosa like that. Recently, if you go to the YouTube, there's this video of Rajan and this girl who's asking him a question. And Rajan explains the economic logic behind the price of dosa going up while all other prices are coming down. And he says the reason for that is that this guy is still making the dosa like this. Those of you who live in hostels and year for home food, those of you who have a small room where you can cook and you year for home food, I can assure you that you will make rotis once or twice. After that you will come down to making khichdi and eating your khichdi with a lot of ghee. Why don't you make roti? You don't make roti because it creates such a mess all around. You need a person to goon do the atta. You need a person to make the loi. Forget the round chapati. Everything else is also very difficult. You need a machine for that. It was only last year that a machine was made for that. Only last year. I am not talking about those industry-grade machines which are custom-made for hostels and gurudwaras and temples. I am talking about I want to make 6 rotis at my house. So for that, do I have a machine where you add atta, water, press the button, and rotis come from here? That machine was made only now by an Indian, not in India but in Singapore. We don't use technology because we don't need to use technology. The jhaadu. The Europeans modified that jhaadu again and again and again and came up with more and more efficient designs of jhaadu. In India, a slightly more efficient design of jhaadu came up only in the last two years, three years. And madam had to lagao the jhaadu. Or baba had to lagao the jhaadu. So long as there was a jamaadar, need to lagao a jhaadu, it really didn't matter. Go to houses which employ a person to sweep. We have something called a fool jhaadu. The fool jhaadu has lost all its fool and it's only eight or nine seek and the housewife will say, this is a kam chalao abhi. You can't clean anything with that and still that worker is being asked to clean that, use that to clean the house. Why? Because she is a low-caste person, she is untouchable, she doesn't rebel, you don't care for her and you would rather save five rupees, ten rupees on a new jhaadu than offer a new jhaadu. The moment madam had to lagao the jhaadu, the company has promptly created new jhaadus. This is a very low-end jhaadu I have shown you. The high-end jhaadu, 3M's jhaadu, 3M's pochaas, you should use them. They are marvelous. They just cost about 1200 rupees or so and they last about four months. But that's small money, no? I mean, saab ko jhaadu lagao, to saab ke li toh achachi jo na chahiye. Technology is something which we have not used. Technology is something which we have not addressed consciously. We presume that we don't need to do it because we don't give a damn about the lower person, the person low-down in the hierarchy below us. And all innovators are from superior classes, superior castes, superior education. Most of them coming from these big towns, it's the doctors who come from small towns and some of the top-notch doctors say ke dil mein humas kaam karne ki, eagerness kaam karne ki, innovate karne ki tabaati hai when he comes from a small town, small family. So if you're going to ask him to pay 1 crore rupees for his MD, this poor boy from a poor family and lower caste is never going to make it. So if you're not going to allow an opportunity to become a good doctor, you have actually lost a great human resource somewhere because it is this fellow, low caste, low income, small town, maybe a village who is going to bring about all the new innovations in medicine. And these doctors tell us that every innovation in medicine has happened because of such people, not just in India but across the world. In India, we don't bother about them. We don't bother about all these people because of hierarchies that are embedded in us. Let me draw your attention to businesses, industries, entrepreneurial efforts which have to do with such hierarchies. The first lot of businesses that were set up which were very successful, IT, media, film and television, entertainment, hotel and food, medical services, each and every one of them a bramanical business. We talked about them earlier also. Each of them requires all amount of capital, minimal amount of formal skills, lot of experimentation and practice that includes medicine. Medicine mein parnaag ka jada nahi padtha. They are all very bramanical in which one doesn't have to get one's hand too dirty. Medicine is a unique case, but we'll talk about it some other time. Indians have traditionally been good at medicine. There are caring people, Indian doctors. I gave you the example of Kovas Ji earlier. Nasal reconstruction. We know about Susharatha and Charak thousands of years ago. Main thing was after this first flush of, it turned out that these businesses could not be leveraged for greater value. These businesses had plateaued out and there was no way in which you could make it better. TCS hires thousands of people every year to do good work, but basically very mechanical work. I mean, if you want to find a job in ECS, then think a little bit. My student also goes to TCS. And TCS guys say it really doesn't matter if he has studied history or not, he'll do our job. I'm warning the engineers, nothing else. Resorting to IT-enabled services became a big thing in India. The government took to IT-enabled staff. Institutions took to IT-enabled. You see the above there? This is an IT-enabled attendance system. So why do you have an IT-enabled attendance system? Because you cannot depend on the teacher to give you proper attendance. The student distrusts the teacher. The management distrusts the teacher. And as a teacher of long standing, I know that teachers distrust themselves. They'll give more attendance to someone. They'll give less attendance to someone. They'll give attendance to everyone or they'll not bother about attendance. They have a large number of excuses for doing that. Some of them legitimate excuses. Some of them illegitimate excuses. The point is not about excuses or whether attendance is a good thing or attendance is a bad thing. Alternatively, we have decided that attendance should be 70%, 75% or whatever. So once we have decided, should we not just follow it? Irrespective of whether you're looking at me or whether you're not looking at me or whether you're doing whatever? Thing is Indians have great resistance to following norms, principles, and orders. You can give Indians suggestions, but you cannot order Indians around. The moment you order them, their back goes up. They fight the cat. Indians are like that. You can see them bristling. How dare you tell me to do something? You give them a suggestion. You give them an idea. You let them make it their own and they'll properly do it. And they'll be happy to do it. Indians have great problem following principles. You give them a principle and rest assured that they will break it. Hierarchies, ghast. I've been telling you for the last one hour or whatever. It's very important. All Indians follow it, et cetera, et cetera. Think about the love marriage racket that goes on in India. The entire country, all the elders are in shock. Telling children to get married in their own caste. The children of another caste, the children of another caste, what will happen to these children? They don't listen. If they didn't listen to one child, they would have understood. If they didn't listen to the other child, they would have understood that one was kidnapped, the other was burnt, and the third was murdered. We have communicated the message. No, it doesn't happen like that. They routinely and regularly do this. So are they rebelling against the system? Excuse me, they're not rebelling. It's just that you have given them a principle. You've set the some norms for them and they're damned if they're going to follow it. If they personally think it's a good norm, they'll follow it. Otherwise, they will not follow it. It's as simple as that. And it happens so routinely in virtually every field that let me submit to you that this is one of the characteristics which defines India. At the moment, I would say it is close to being a thesis because I have two students who are working on this, on the women's issue at least. One in Punjab and one in Haryana. And both of them have come up with a large amount of data starting from the early 18th century, the time since we have formal data available, till the late 20th century, that is 1999, 19, 2000 or thereabouts. Japtak bhi unko data milta hai. And they've all said this is the case. They're dealing with things. They're looking at history from the point of view of women and girl child. And they both came up with marvelous things. Their stories, what their research is, are marvelous. But when you are in Chandigarh and you are coming from a government school and no one around you is doing much studies, then these young people also don't get that way. Think ki hume apna publish karna chahiye, seminaaz mein jake baat karna chahiye, et cetera. So they're hesitating. We're trying to push them in a direction to go ahead and talk in public so that it becomes good. And everyone knows about what you're doing. Okay, I'll take it one at a personal level. At a personal level, I would say I was studying mathematics and then I shifted into history just by chance. And one thing that I knew was that students who had done sciences were much better than students who had not done sciences. Over the years, I came to the broad conclusion that irrespective of what happens in this kalyug, kalyug mein haath se kaam karna zharuri hai, you should have technical knowledge first. I've got two boys. I told them, it really doesn't matter what you want to do. But unless you have these scientific technical skills, you cannot do history, philosophy, English literature, Hindi literature, et cetera, et cetera. And today, I am of a considered opinion. Yesterday, I was in a meeting in Delhi where we were talking about the same thing. And I insisted when some people over there started saying that you should promote social sciences, history, sociology, philosophy. I said, no, you should be promoting sciences. History, sociology, philosophy, they can study on their own time. Today, the situation is when someone asks crucial questions. You ask questions about hierarchy. You ask questions about deep embedded ideas of Indian culture. And I turn back and I look at the entire literature produced by social scientists in India and about India. And I discover that none of them has done a formal study on that matter. So then I can only turn back and say these guys have wasted the 60 multiplied by 3,000 years. So much time wasted is not acceptable. So who is the one who has done good research? The fellow who's coming to history from sciences, the fellow who's come to history from engineering, the fellow who is coming to history, sociology, economics from medicine. And to do all the top economic positions are being held by engineers. I don't know whether you guys know it or not. They're all engineers. They shifted to social sciences much after having done their engineering. My submission is they should do... they should first acquire Kali Yugi skills and then they can go to these Satyugi subjects like history. The thing is, the question that I'm asking here is why is there this persistent breaking of rules? You insist that there's a herd mentality. I am saying this herd mentality is a good thing. It should happen. The main thing that I'm noticing is that these guys are constantly breaking rules.