 There are some exceptional cases of good growth, collective work, systematic work, etc. The ISRO, the Indian army, the election commission, many top-of-the-line hospitals, institutions like the old IITs, I don't know about the new IITs, the two recent, even places like Punjab University, the organization in which I work. They are part of this kind of breaking away from the herd, breaking away from close to everything that I've been saying till now is the generalization about Indian society. These are institutions which have broken away from that. And what is the common theme among these organizations? Number one, absolutely number one, there's a tremendous amount of pride in the work that they do. The Indian army's example is one of the most drastic examples. The Indian army, everyone around the world notices, has the highest casualty rate among officers, the highest fatality rate amongst officers. So why is there a high fatality rate? And the answer is that the Indian officer is leading from the front. Some day there's a crevice which has to be crossed and the colonel says, okay, I'm going to cross it. Sir, you are 40 years old, how can you jump over this crevice like this with a 10 kilo load on you? He says, if I can ask you to jump it, I can jump it also, and he jumps. There's a terrorist over there and the Brigadier picks up his gun and goes out to shoot the terrorist, gets injured in the process, happens in the military all the time. But there just as many occasions when he succeeds. He does not tell the soldier, you go first and test it. If you get a bullet, we'll know where the bullet came from. He doesn't say that. He says, you stay here, I'll go. And one of the off-sides of this, one of the consequences of this is this. The Indian army soldiers don't rebel. In the 60 years or more of the existence of the modern Indian army, there's been only one small rebellion. And that was the rebellion at Sukma. Indian soldiers die for their officers. They've got tremendous respect for their officers. And the only reason for that is that the officer leads from the front. The officer does everything. The latrine ditch has to be dug. The officer says, No problem. The soldier says, All these organizations, tremendous focus on merit, but not merit in that peculiar sense of That is stupid merit. Merit in the sense of the object of the organization is to perform this task. This task requires the following skills. This person has the following skills, and therefore he'll be asked to do this. I've been closely associated with many of these organizations. I've been in touch with people from up close. In ISRO, we went and there was this great rocket being made. And there was this old gentleman, great scientist, but there was a new technology which two boys were making. They'd come from our local polytechnic and they were designing it and they were working on it, and it was going to be used in the next rocket launch that was going to happen. And the old gentleman says, Nana, he'll explain it to you. I don't know much about this area. And the young boy, like he's in his mid 20s, he gets up and comes in the middle and he explains to you, you know, sir, this is how this happens. You know, this is how this happens. And the old gentleman is very happy and pleased. He made a lot of money. They take pride in it, which is in contrast to many other places where if you're going to get acolytes, the big man is going to come forward and say, give me the acolytes, not over here. Here, acolytes are shared according to how much work anyone has done on the basis of the clearly defined objectives of the organization. And everywhere in all these organizations, there's a serious effort at creating protocols, protocols which need to be followed irrespective of what your private opinion about that protocol is. And these protocols are not created in a manner in which the Sahab or the expert says that this has to be done. They're created in a self-reflexive manner. Everyone is participating in the creation of those protocols. So when everyone is participating in the creation of those protocols, everyone is also party to it. Everyone voluntarily does it. There's a sense of ownership. And just in case you think that people associated with the military are like this, I've given you two examples of the DRDO and the Ordnance Factory System. What you can do organizations. Great skills, great abilities, great facilities, not producing anything or almost not producing anything. And very fortunately for me today, I'd been thinking about this presentation of yours for the last three, four days. And today the newspaper says, the director general DRDO says that giving fraud excuses for not doing work is not going to help us anymore. This is the head of the organization. He's gone on record in this interview saying that my organization is used to giving fraud excuses to everyone around them as to why they have not performed well. He says the time has come for us to perform. Why he says that? I don't know, but that is there. The simple thing, I'll just summarize everything and shut up after this. Entrepreneurial spirit is there in Indians in great quantities. However, having an entrepreneurial skill is not good enough. It's not sufficient. It's a necessary condition. You cannot do your projects and make in India adequately. You cannot take this country forward adequately if you do not have those entrepreneurial skills. You need them, but that is not sufficient. You also need other skills. One that you should know is that gender, caste, religion, they do not play a role in keeping the society down. They create a negative image in your mind. They set up obstructions. That's what I've been talking about till now, but they do not hold you back. They are not insurmountable. Actually, in many situations, they are not even a problem. Don't get caught with this discussion of Rohit Vemula and Kanaiya, etc. Those things really don't exist. Those guys don't know what they're talking about. The important thing is to have the ability to focus on work. How to develop this? What to do about it? We know that as individuals, it's been possible for us to do it. Hundreds and thousands of Indians have been able to do it at the individual level. Question is how to do it in a collective manner so that everyone's energies are coordinated. Ability to be physically capable of work systematically is very important. One of the first persons who said that you should be physically strong was Vivekananda. But apart from Vivekananda, there was also Mao Zedong, the person who led China into a revolution. When the revolutionaries came, Mao was not a revolutionary. Mao was a librarian. Mao was a Communist Party member. He was a librarian and he was the third hierarchy. In the hierarchy, he was the third rate leader. He was not even a leader. He was just a normal fellow sitting there with his stashma in the library issuing books and reading books. Revolution is happening. Action is taking place. The first rung leadership is wiped out by the Communists, Soviet Communists. The nationalists of China with the help of the Soviet Communists, they wipe out the first rung leadership. Stalin is not happy with that either. He suggests that wipe out the second rung also. The second rung is wiped out. In a week's time, the Chinese Communist Party loses all its leaders. There's a vacuum and this librarian gets up and he says, I will do the leadership now. And this leadership basically means running away from this place where everyone is getting killed. And in the process of running away, he discovers that everyone who was physically unfit simply lost out. They died. They were captured. They were killed. What were you doing? You were walking 60 kilometers a day. You were climbing mountains. You were eating dirty food. So what was lacking? He analyzes this and he comes up with a theory of revolution. He says, before bringing about a revolution, you have to be physically fit. He comes with a phrase, physical culture. You have to be good at physical culture. The second fellow who talks about physical fitness is Mahatma Gandhi. Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa says that you have to be physically fit and he adds one more thing, something which Mao did not figure out. Gandhi says you have to be spiritually strong also. And he gives a lot of formula on how you can be fit, spiritually strong. My point at the moment is simply that there should be physical capability to do the work. If you don't have the physical capability, chemicals and such like are not going to be of help. Alcohol, cigarettes, tea, coffee, they don't work. They don't make you more efficient. They waste your time. Then there's this thing you have the ability to be passionate about the work. Passion for your work comes from two sources. One is that you're intrinsically from within you, you like to work. The second is you become passionate about anything that comes before you. In normal life, you'll discover that the occasions when you can do things which you like happen very few. If you're an extremely lucky person, maybe once or twice in your entire life, you'll get a chance to do actually what you wanted to do. But occasions when you will get work just like that will be hundreds and thousands. If you can develop an ability to be passionate about everything and everything that you're doing, that would be an absolutely marvelous thing. How to do that, what happens into it, I don't know. But what I can suggest is that there's some societies which have created a system which facilitates all these things. One of the reasons why Indians do so well in Europe and America is because the Europeans and Americans have cracked this particular puzzle. They've created a system which enables people to work. In India, we don't have that system yet. Will it be possible for us to have a system in the next generation? I don't know. But I do know that as an individual, you can create those systems around you. You don't need to bother about your government, your head of the department, your boss, your family. You can create that small environment around you. Doesn't this actually present a paradox? Because the reason that Indians are able to do so well once they go to the West is because they've grown up in a place without such a system and have learned to survive in adverse circumstances. Social conditions which are even more adverse and consequently, in Western countries which now have a system, they have all these immigrants like Indians who are triumphing there because they've grown up in a condition without a system. So isn't this system kind of paradoxical? Maybe it's paradoxical. The question is Indians who have learned how to survive in an adverse social system, adverse cultural system, when they go into those enabling systems, their efficiencies go up substantially and they're able to thrive over there. So isn't there a paradox in this saying that they should create a system and do that? I don't know whether there's a paradox or not. All that I can say is I don't see a way out because unless you create that ecosystem around you which enables everyone to work or which if everyone to work is what the society and the government will have to do. The society isn't doing it, the government isn't doing it. But does that mean that we won't do it for ourselves? My submission at that point is we could do it for ourselves. Many of us who work in universities, universities are remember not very helpful places, they are very obnoxious places to work in. You have your colleagues, you try to trip you down, you have your superiors, you try to trip you, you have your students who will try to trip you, all sorts of tripping happens and everyone is fighting for stakes which are close to non-existent. Even over there we have discovered that people who have been able to create small ecosystems around themselves, enabling ecosystems they've done well, those who have not been able to do it have not done well. The entire IT industry came up with these two, three, four business houses. Remember all these business houses actively refused to participate in the standard Indian system. The standard Indian system was giving hoos, sucking up to the government, they refused to participate in that and they did rather well for themselves. Something of that would have to be done. But that is not the only area or the only set of people who do it all the time. Let me give you the example of people who have lived in completely adverse situations, absolutely adverse situations. Meeta was asking me, why do you want to show this slide? All politicians do this. I would submit to you madam that this is not what all politicians do, this is not an example of all politicians. This is the example from the north of Mehbooba, south Jailalita, east Mamta, west Anandhi Ben. All of them have come from directions. They are women so they are supposed to be low in social hierarchy of India. They are all lower caste people so they are supposed to be low in the social hierarchy of India. None of them was rich to begin with. So they are low on everything. All of them have grown on their own. All of them are part of public life. All of them are built and all of them are tremendously successful. You could not be more successful than Jailalita, Mamta, Mehbooba or Anandhi Ben. Indians love people who are married. They seem respectable. Indians like people who are nice and kind and Indian selected fellow who is neither nice, who is neither kind, who doesn't even have a wife. I mean, a stupid best, does he have a wife or does he not have a wife? Even in the face of the greatest of adversity, it has been possible for this bunch of people to succeed and reach the effects of what they were doing. We have seen the example of the IT guys who have done that. We have seen the example of the doctors who do it. We have seen the example of small-time businessmen who have done it. When we were talking about the early 20th century and all those Rabindranath Tagore advertisements, those are businessmen who are facing the most adverse circumstances and still succeeding. It's possible for Indians to create those small ecosystems for themselves and work very successfully. Why not we do that? Indians are the kind of people. I should give you one image. This is an alternate image, not the kind that I wanted to show you. This is from a cave. In 700 AD, there are some boys who are making graffiti. It takes quite a long time to make graffiti on the cave floor like this and yet they have done it. The same kind of graffiti that boys and girls make in India, in architectural monuments today. Continuity is our own. The one image, however, that I want you to see is this one. This is Mahasaya Gulati. Recognize the face? Mahasaya the Hatti, MDH Garam Masala, MDH, everything's Masala, twice displaced and the leader of Masala Day and feeling rather pleased with himself. Instructing and informing all the young people on how they should spend their lives. Look at this man. This is a sad looking man but this is a young man. This was not the image that I wanted but this was the one that I had, that other image gone. This is a young man who's looking bemused at the person who's taking the photograph and the person who's taking this photograph, this is a Bombay image. The person who's taking this photograph says, when I asked him, why are you looking like this? He says, I'm just very, very amused that you want to take my picture, cleaning up your sewer of your society and I mean how much more funny can this be? This is a young man who can find some funniness even in the response of the normal society to the job that he's doing. Given an opportunity, he would rather leave this job. Not given an opportunity, he doesn't rew it too much. He doesn't complain about it too much. All that he does is, he does his wonderment and stuff. It is. We will have to get out of being in the sewer and we will have to say that it's possible for us to do something more. It's possible for us to change that sewer and just in case you think that it's only Indians who do this and this is because of caste, no, this is not how Indians do it. This is how everyone does it. People who do dirty work, work which puts them so dirty, the English, for example, had a body of people called the night men who would be doing precisely this job in the 19th and the early 20th century. Then the English came up with this notion that you should have proper sewers which can be properly managed and maintained. So why don't the engineers of India come up with proper sewers which can be properly managed and maintained? Oh, you know, Indians throw garbage all over. Of course, Indians throw garbage all over. So don't you know that Indians throw garbage all over? Why don't you sit down and use your brains and try to figure out how can you either prevent the Indians from throwing the garbage or if the garbage is coming then how to get it out? Why do you want a human being to jump into it? You need technological solutions. The moment that technological solution came in, the sewer man, the night men vanished. Not only did the night men vanish, the garbage collection system in the west changed. There was a time when the garbage collector man would come after the night, collect your garbage and take it away and dump it outside the town. Today, the garbage collector man comes early in the morning and collects your garbage. After having thrown away the garbage, he sits with you and eats a burger with you. There's no distinction between you and the garbage collector. Now that has happened because of technology. We need technologies of that variety. If only someone could sit down and think the needs of this kind of people are also very, very important and significant for us. The judges lacking and the lawyers lacking. So when the Chief Justice of India cried, Narendra Modi asked the Vidhi organization, which is run by retired judges and young lawyers. Amin is in working for Vidhi. He's a senior consultant with Vidhi today, one of my friends, a son. That says most of the delay in cases happens because Indian judges give unending stays. An average case in India takes 13 years of which six years are merely the judge giving stays. So the judges will have to stop giving stays. The judges will have to say that if the case has to be heard on such and such day, the case will be heard on such and such day. The protocol says, the law says that no adjournment will be given, no stay will be given. And yet the judges routinely do this. So someone will have to tell the judges to stop doing it, behave properly. Today the judges and the lawyers are behaving in some of the most obnoxious ways. In case you guys are on Facebook, visit my Facebook page. I've got a very special grouse against judges. I write against judges and lawyers all the time. I also write a lot of history. I've got a page called India History, where I share all such information also. But the judges need to be improved by the judges themselves, not by you and me. Because if we say that the executive should improve the judges, the judicial system, then a problem is coming up. Judges are the body of people to whom we go when we have discovered that all our other mediation mechanisms have failed. You say one thing, I say one thing, we disagree. We need a third party, an independent third party, certified the independent who is going to mediate between us. And once the third party is mediated, we will say, we will stop this juggerna. Hence we cannot interfere with the judges. Not because we are scared of the judges. We should criticize them, condemn them, everything. But we should enable the independence of the judiciary and not allow the government to interfere. The government is ready with interference. We should not allow that to happen as citizens. And China are historically different. If no, then why is it that the Chinese, what has enabled the Chinese to go so far are compared to India? A, India and China are not different. Actually, when you go into the details of Chinese history, the narrative is almost the same that we had earlier about what are the strong points of India. They are also the strong points of China. What are the weaknesses of India, including the caste system. The Chinese also have a similar caste system. Similarly entrained, similarly justified and similarly not followed. That example of the four women that I gave you, the example, the first day I gave you those images of people, low caste, low family, low economic class people who did so well in life. China has stories of that variety also. Where is China differing from India? China differs from India in something called philosophy. Indians have Hindu philosophy, which allows you to be completely independent in thought and everything as much independent as you want. You can decide what you want to do and that is perfectly all right. The Chinese have Confucianism in which one interpretation of Confucianism says that you need to obey your elders. That is serious business. In India, there's a small element of obeying your elders. Do you know what is Pind? Pind dhan karna. Pind dhan karna, pitro ki samman karna, India ki culture me bhi hai. Have you heard these phrases? Pind dhan karna, pitro ka samman karna, any of you? In India these phrases exist only as phrases and today only in areas where there is some conservative family or conservative person within the family. Otherwise Indians have simply forgotten about them and this is not forgetting which has happened today. This is forgetting which has happened thousands of years ago. We don't listen much to our elders. We don't respect our elders and ancestors too much. We use our ancestors once in a while. The Chinese don't. Now, one of the consequences of that is that ancestors, one of the practical and pragmatic consequences of this is that when your boss tells you to do something in China, you do it. In India, you wonder whether you should do it or not. It makes all the difference to collective work and collective efforts. That is part of that ISRO and Army story, the election commission story. Election commission said officers will be sent to the field as observers and they will look at everything and these are the protocols that they have to follow. Everything is given to them. So what did the officers do? IS, IPS officer. They went into the field. The election commission in the next election had to issue special orders. You can't take a family with you. You are going to be there in for one month, but you can't take a family with you to the election duty. So the next time they went, election commission once again stepped in and said, no, no, you can't do this also. You are an official duty. You will behave as if you are sitting in your office. This is not your home. This is not your aram gaha. This is not your pleasure house. In the meanwhile, there was a transformation in the IAS. People who were coming from St. Stephen's and great colleges and universities stopped coming. Instead, the lower colleges, second-tier colleges, started throwing up students who were very bright and making it. As anything, Stephen's boys are not applying. They are still applying. They just can't make it into the exam anymore because the boys from the smaller towns are doing much better. Those boys come and now the election commission does not address the Bala Sahab, the observers. Now the election commission addresses the collector Sahab, the fellow on the ground. And the election commission says, no facility to the Bala Sahab other than a room to stay, a secretariat to work with, a phone and a car. Nothing more. Some of the Bala Sahab's, the horror stories that I have heard personally. The Bala Sahab went and took the Gadi to Darshan Karo, some temple 500 kilometers away. He came back and the collector Sahab gave him a bill of 1000 kilometers. Sir, 1000 kilometers multiplied by Sarkari rate, 20 rupees. This you will have to pay. The observer Sahab was most upset. How can this happen? The collector said, the election commission is told to do it. They were following the protocol that was given to them. Earlier, they were not following the protocol. Following protocols is extremely important if you want to do work on a large scale. Not every protocol is correct. Protocols need changing, but you should be changing protocols only when you can discuss it amongst yourself, create a collective opinion and then change it. The taking of attendance is part of protocol. Did you people do your attendance in school? No. Did you people do all your, all your lab work as dictated by the CBSE? No, I can certify that to you. Uh, are you doing your attendance properly in college? Absolutely not. Is your teacher following your attendance protocols properly? No. Is the teacher being told by the HOD? Follow? No. Is the HOD being told by the director, the principal or the vice chancellor? Do your work properly, sir. What kind of a professor are you? No. Collectively, the answer at every layer is no. How can you expect a large system to function in a healthy manner? In China, in Japan, you do in Korea, even in Vietnam and Thailand and Burma, you don't need to do. In Sri Lanka, you don't need to do it. In Sri Lanka, if everyone agrees that this work should be done, it is done. In Burma, if they agree, it is done. In Thailand, it gets done. In Korea, Japan and China, it gets done. So why don't Indians do it? My submission is, remember, it's a collective pattern. Once it is a collective pattern, it becomes a social fact. And my submission is that this social fact is a consequence of that great freedom that we have had in the past and the culture of Hinduism. You don't have to be a Hindu. You can be a Christian, Jew, Parsi, Muslim, Sunni, Bora, Memon really doesn't matter. So long as you are in India, this is how you behave. Only India? No, no, no. They do it like this in Bangladesh also. They do it precisely like this in Pakistan also. We got a visa to Pakistan to visit Lahore. One of my friends said that he was from Pindada Purana. I want to see a village that is 300 kilometers away. He said, let's go and show it to him. He said, no, I got a visa only for Lahore. It says only for Lahore, not outside. He said, what are you talking about? Sit in the car. He went 300 kilometers. He came back 300 kilometers. He went in the morning, came back in the evening. He came back for dinner in Lahore. Breaking each and every rule. What did you do with the thief? No, I didn't do it with the thief. We were government guests. There was a police officer also. There were police officers as well. There were foreign officers as well. Everything was going on. All the rules were broken. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal. We are the same thali's chattis. Not following any rules, orders or protocols. How to learn that? I don't know. How to transform the society into a society which does these things without becoming an obedient society? The example is China. China is not an obedient society. And yet it is able to do all that. Perhaps someone will have to get down and make a comparative study. Absolutely. It's a tradeoff between freedom and being obedient. And how do we do it and where do we do it? At the moment, there are no standard answers to it. Your question is absolutely valid. And someone will have to come up and give us and correct answer to this particular question. How to go about doing these things? Why to do these things in a particular manner and not the other manner? Since we have discovered that individuals are not able to come up with answers, perhaps as we talk like this, not just in this forum, but in many other foras also between ourselves. Because remember, as soon as you grow up a little bit, you are going to be faced with the same existential problems. You are running a factory and the workers says, I'm not going to obey you. So you need to figure out how to make this fellow obey you. Small-time solutions have been possible till now. But we need large-scale solutions. Small-time solutions have produced small-time benefits. We need large-scale solutions which will produce civilizational benefits for us. How to do it? I'm at a loss. The two, three things in the Indian Army ISRO system that I would like to point out that I highlighted over there, pride in the work at hand. When we talked about the Indian workers never rebelling before the 19th century, it was not just about having enough food to eat at a good place to live in and everyone talking to them nicely. It was also that they had tremendous amount of pride in the work. If you ever go to Agra to the Taj Mahal, spend a lot of time in Taj Mahal, but retain at least 30 minutes for you, of yours, for that small village which is next to the Taj, just across the road. This is the village of the same artisans who had constructed the Taj, the rest of the people who were there, go and talk to them. And think about the amount of positivity that they feel about the work that they are doing. That positivity, the pride in the work that is being done, their ancestors worked on Sangh Marmar and Stone, they continue to do it. If you ever go to Mamallapuram, go to the village and over there visit some of the workshops. Many of the guys are still using the same techniques that their ancestors did a thousand years ago and the way they talk about their business, the craft that they are practicing tells you that they feel very nice and happy about it. That is important, feeling pride in the work that you have to do. Visit Paitan. There's a small village a little away from here, about six hours away from here. Visit Paitan. Paitan is the traditional Sadi weaving village. There's a typical family lives in a house which is about this big and most of the house is just a gaddha, the size of a Sadi, Naugaj ka gaddha hai. Aruz gaddhe no ne apna loom laga rakh hai. The whole family surrounds the place, lives over there, cooks over there, lives in this place and they are so happy about doing what they are doing. They feel pleasure because they think that they've got a unique skill which only they have and no one else has. Pride in the work that they are doing is very, very important. Today, we have lost that pride. Feeling involved in the work. Second thing, the Indian does not feel involved in the work. I had suggested earlier that develop the ability to to develop a passion for the work that you're doing. Don't bother about, the English tells us you should do what you have a passion for. A passion, if you want to play the guitar, then you should do certainly playing the guitar. You should also do the passion of singing. You should definitely do the passion of engineering. But you will discover that passion is for small things in life. There are thousands of other things to be done. The ability that you need to develop is passion for doing most of those thousands of things with great energy, great effort and great interest. And that comes from a mindset thing. You should not permit me to say so. You should not follow the western notions of how good work is done. You should follow the Indian notion of how good work is done. Those stone crafters that I'm telling you about, those potters that I showed you the images of, they all feel happy doing it. The only person who does not feel happy doing the job, I mean, who doesn't say that I will do the same thing in my next life. I will do the same thing to my son. Is that person who is inside the sewer? He says, I'm inside the sewer. The Bombay sewer man is inside the sewer because the BMC gives him a quarter for free. If you get a free delivery in South Bombay, you are the first person to get married. You get married to the girl who is bringing the largest amount of the age. You have got a property for the next 40 years from where you can leverage the rest of the family. The Indian Express had done a story on the sewer man of Bombay and this is the structure they found across in that entire building. And every family has a son or a daughter now working in Saudi or in America or in the UK. Someone is in the construction industry. Someone is an engineer. Someone is a doctor. Someone is a scientist. These are not sons and daughters of sewer men anymore. And yet, they all have been there because there was one brother in the family who was sacrificed to this job. That is a sacrifice. You cannot be passionate about being sacrificed. But for work, you can. Absolutely. You are completely correct in that. A, there is a dilemma. How much should you obey and how much should you be asking the system to be fruitful about you? There is a problem over there of obeying rebellion. And for these issues till now from the 19th century onwards, we have not had a standard good solution. There been spiritual kind of solutions, but spiritual solutions don't work in real life. There have been philosophical suggestions. One can say even needs to establish a balance, etc, etc. That also doesn't work. So at the moment, what one can suggest is every individual is going to be faced with a unique situation, a unique set of problems on how to what extent to be obedient and to at what point to disobey. Everyone will have to come up with an answer, a solution, a response, which is going to be unique to their own location at that moment. And remember when you are responding to disobeying the system, when you're trying to disobey the system, the system is going to hit back at you and hit back harshly. Try to blackball you. So you have to be very strategically placed so that you cannot allow the system to harm you. There's a friend of mine, Yogan Ryadav. Some of you might have seen him somewhere or read something from him. He's one of those guys who does election kind of stuff. So, Yogan Ryadav is a very good person. I'm also a very good person. I used to live with him. I'm a very good person. His idea was the same and I used to completely agree with him. If you are a nice man, if you are not a corrupt man, if you do correct things, A, you cannot be stupid. You cannot be stupid and nice. You have to be very bright and be very nice. You should know what dirt the society or organization, the people around you can dish on you. Second, first be nice. Second, don't be stupid about it. Third, be extremely intelligent in overcoming the obstructions that are going to happen to you. Take the example of the election commission. The election commission at the first time, 91, 92, it told the senior officers, please go into the field, see how elections are done. Senior officers made a mess of it. 96, 97, the election commission said, go into the field, the officers went and once again made a mess of it. 2004, the commission said, did not address the senior officers. It addressed the junior officers. And the children, keep an eye on the senior officers. There were 542 districts. In those districts, only 8 or 10 children were affected. But the impact of the 8 or 10 children was that all the 542 districts were fine. And after that, everything was fine. The strategy has to be correct. When you are trying to be correct and doing correct things, the strategy has to be correct so that the other guy cannot short circuit you. Rebellion, martyrdom, nonsense. You should never be a martyr. For anything. If you have a life, you are a world. If you have a job, everything is going to be fine. You have to maintain that you have to stay away from martyrdom. And yet you have to ensure that you will be able to twist the system and do things. Come to Punjab sometime. In Punjab, we have this saying about what the gurus told you. The gurus said that be nice and humble. Because if you are standing straight and facing the wind, it will blow you off like it blows away the tree. Be nice and humble. But at the same time, be intelligent enough and wise enough to be able to train a sparrow to kill a hawk. The guru says, I know how to train a sparrow to go and kill a hawk. The hawk is the mughal. The sparrow is the farmers, the peasants and the small people in Punjab and Haryana region. That is what you need to do. Other sciences, if you go to them when they have time, they see three points directly and rate on the rate. Considering the majority of India, these three points are not valid for people who are pushed into a medical or pushed into medical sciences. So, how? Why is it that the majority of India should go into medical sciences? The question is that you say that there should be passion for the work or whatever you are doing. At the same time, you are recommending that you would suggest that the majority of India should go into these Kaliyugi kind of trainings like engineering, medical, etc. And the majority of the people who get into these courses of study, they are not happy doing that and they would rather do something else. My submission is that you expand it a little more and include the sciences also in it, include the ITIs also in it, include any kind of technical training also into it. And that is the case everywhere. Uskar, your response there, that would be at 2-3 levels. At one level, is that fellow who has gone into fine arts or the history of philosophy or history or sociology, happy doing what he is doing. And I can assure you with 30 years of experience as a teacher in diverse environments that no, they are also not happy doing what they are doing. So that's okay. Happiness is, if not engineering or medical, happiness is less, happiness is less. It is that which suggests to me that happiness is not a function of what you are studying or what you have been asked to train in. Maybe the search for happiness has to be at a different level doing something else. And therefore, this other statement, the other recommendation that we need to not be happy, but to be efficient, effective, passionate about whatever we are doing. Let's take the example of the Army once again. This is something which I tell my friends in the IS all the time. I've been associated with the Police Training Academy, with the Income Tax Training Academy and the IS Training Academy very closely. And every time I've told them to look at IS Training Academy, which is next to the Army Training Academy. The Army takes in people who are completely, in the Indian context, completely down and out. The rich, aristocratic, socially well-off person is not getting into the Army anymore. The person who thinks that there is no job available other than the military and I can run a mile in so many minutes, he's the one who's going into the Army. And not everyone is practicing to do that. What the Army does is the Army says we don't care who you were before. Once you are with us, we are going to delete your personality that existed earlier. We are going to reboot you into the Army culture and we are going to feed the Army into you. The Army, the Air Force, you go to Pune, all the boys were running around. A student of mine, she's all of 25 years old. She joined the Army. She came back and she told me, she came back and she told me, sir, it's an amazing experience. They don't even ask you to do anything. They don't ask you to think. They don't ask you to work. They don't ask you to do anything. They just give you this 20 kilo load, 40 pounds. They say, run from this point to that point. After you've run from this point to that point, they say, run from that point to this point. After you've done this three times, your mind is a total blank. You don't think of anything else and once your mind is a total blank, they feed in whatever ideology. Remember, she's a grown-up woman now. She's just about to get married and had she been a traditional kind of system, she would already be having a large number of children and she says they've emptied your mind and now they're filling it with all sorts of things that they wanted to fill and she says that's very successful in it. There are no failures in our training. Everyone does it. These are not people who are passionate. It was the organization which made them passionate and once they start succeeding in it, in case you people have ever trained dogs, cats and parrots and minors, you would know. How do you train them? First, you have to set up communication links with them. Second, you have to start repeating whatever you need that particular thing to be trained in. Repeating in a particular manner which doesn't antagonize the person. Third, you have to be nice and compassionate about it. You can't take a whip up and start whipping your animal friend. You will have to be nice and compassionate about it so that that animal is able to do it voluntarily to you all the time. I can tell you I've done it with cats. I don't eat cat medicines. I told the cat to sit here. I'm sitting in front of you. You have to eat these medicines. You have to eat them. I sat there for 10 minutes telling the cat to eat medicines, eat medicines, eat medicines. In the end, you could see the face that she was making at me. She just jumped up and took the medicines from my palm and ate it. I said, it's okay. She didn't take it out. I have a lot of patience as a teacher. Even when I was a child, this happened when I was in school, but this is what you have to do. When Arthi, the student of mine, told me the story from the OTS, this is precisely what the Army was doing over there. This is what all good institutions would do. Prakash Tandon, please have a look at his book. Prakash Tandon says, I came to the IIM in 1971 and the immediate thing that I noticed was that the IIM boys have gone on a strike. Why have they gone on a strike? Because they've discovered that there is some social justice happening in Ahmedabad. Social injustice happening in Ahmedabad and the boys and girls of IIM Ahmedabad have gone on a strike. The government has put in all this money. The industrialists have put in all this money and the institution is not functioning. So he says, I had gone from a business background and I had gotten into this business as a person who was selling Dalda, taking Dalda from house to house to villages, asking people, I knew how people behave and why people behave the way they behave. So he said, I started looking around and I discovered that these students are supposed to work only 40 hours a week. And even in that 40 hour a week, which is the official hour, they're able to get away with working for four to five hours a week. He said, I had a detailed meeting with the faculty and I insisted that the workload should be increased to 70 hours a week. The moment the workload was increased to 70 hours a week, two things happened. One, students became passionate about the work. There's so much work to be done that everyone was focused on it. Second, their performance improved so much more. I am Hemdabad, which was merely producing lousy managers with one diploma certificate in their pocket. And the standard knowledge of those times was don't hire from these IAMs. These are just fancy colleges which don't do anything much. If you really want to hire a person as a manager, hire him like Prakash Tandon has been hired. From school, go and catch the boy. Give him a box of Dalda and tell him to go and sell it. If he succeeds in batching the Dalda Kadabba, he becomes a good manager. If he doesn't succeed, kick him out. This was the principle of those times. Prakash Tandon says, by increasing the workload to 70 hours, we ensured that the boys that were coming out of this institution were the best in the country. Once you're the best in the country coming out, then it was the best in the country who were coming in and the cycle set in and that cycle continues till now. He says it in so many words. He documents it. Unfortunately, we have not discovered how working hard helps. If you have ever participated in a marathon, if you have ever walked 30 kilometers, if you have ever carried a person like this physically for one kilometer, you will understand what I am saying. The mind goes blank by the physicality of the effort and then you can focus the mind on something. Go for a long drive if you like to drive. Don't drive at 60 kilometers. Drive at 120 kilometers. It's safer to drive at 120 because you are forced to focus on your driving. You don't see anything, but that small patch of road about 30-40 yards in front of you. Nothing else is visible. He says, I went for such a long drive and I saw the scenery. You will see the scenery and focus on the driving. Do that. Try to focus your mind or do something which Professor Arya has been telling me for such a long time. Meditate. The Indians had discovered the value of meditation long ago and close to everyone who has participated in meditation exercises well says that it brings about a transformation and it's a positive transformation. It really doesn't matter what you meditate on, how you meditate. All that you've got to do is sit down and train your mind. It's mind training. Some people hire trainers. Some people just think about a guru or a Bhagawan or a word or something like that and do it. The results are almost the same almost all the time, but you need to do it. I must study law and politics, science and medicine and my children must study science and medicine so that their children can study the arts and literature. So I suspect India is at that second stage at present. So how much time and effort do you think it will take for us as a country to get to the third stage? The second stage is what you should do and after the second stage, the third stage should be happening along with the second stage. The question is that I should study law at the military war etc. So that I can create a situation where my children can study sciences and technology and they should be studying sciences and technology so that their children can study the fine arts. My answer to that is studying the fine arts is something that goes hand in hand with all these other studies. It is these are not studying the fine arts is not something which you do independent. I'll give you my own personal private example. I never studied history. My total contact with professional history mother as a middle aged maternity woman was to write a PhD. She said I want to write a PhD in history and my father said why don't you do that? I was doing my final years of school and I had access to all the books that she used to bring. And I would read all of them in Hindi. There was no English around. Then I started reading all the history stuff that used to come in para, chanda mama, saptai, hindustan, dharmiyog. And in the course of things, it so happened that I bumped into a man who said I was not interested in studies. I mean mathematics I used to score well, but I'm not interested in mathematics. I'm not interested in ideas of the kind that my colleagues have. I'm not interested in the sciences in the sense that you need to learn a lot of things, etc, etc. My chemistry professor was working on something to do with family planning in rats and he wanted me to work with him. I said you have a topic of family planning in rats anyway. So I didn't do any of that. So this friend of the family, he said JNU chale jawa kujmi pad sakte ho. So that kujmi padne ke chakkar me JNU aagya. I never tested the history entrance exam and they chose me and they gave me very high marks in the merit list. I said I am a good historian. I have dharmyok, parang, chanda mama padne ke baad bhi if I am a good historian then maybe this is where the area where I should be. I didn't develop a passion for history. My total passion was I should get out of formal studies altogether. I finished my PhD because my supervisor was an American kind of fellow and he kept on insisting ki kaam samai pe hona chahiye jis samai tum ne kai ki chapter dena to chapter dena padega tum ne kai ki itna document padhoga parna padega. You have to learn three languages. Just bloody well sit down and learn your three languages. So I learnt Marathi. I learned Gujarati. I learnt Urdu and I started reading those documents completely mechanical task. I finished my PhD in three and a half years put that document on the side. I was on a very very rich fellowship in those days fellowship amounts the same fellowship amount, but in those days they were very rich. The college lectures used to get much less than what we did especially if you were in JNU. So then I spent up time roaming around the jungles going into the desert totally vela time with friends not falto ka time constructive kind of stuff. And then one day an advertisement came for Punjab University. I did not even apply for it. My friend who was already teaching in Punjab University. He sent me a letter saying Rajeev Lochand. Please apply for this. I'm leaving this job. I'm going to Shimla because that is my hometown. You can take up my job. So I went there. They took me in. I mean I was not unemployed ever. I submitted my thesis in April and may I got my job without any pull without any pressure and then I went to Chandigarh with 72 rupees in my pocket to trousers. All my Saman in JNU with a clear objective. Vapas a jana. I have stayed the 30 years simply because when you went there and you met these extremely fresh faces in front of you every time you could trade with new ideas. Something new could happen. Some new ideas were coming up a passion developed. But this passion developed as was not a consequence of wanting to develop a passion. It was a consequence of just mechanically doing a large amount of work and I used to read a lot. That was something that I did all the time and I was reading Picasso and Picasso says there's this boy who comes to him and he says I want to be a painter. So Picasso draws a circle and he says a chase me circle center point out the boy points up points out a circle Picasso takes a scale draws standard lines and says this is not the center. So the boy goes back he trains himself a little more. This time he comes to Picasso and Picasso says no what you should do is you should first draw freehand circle and then put the center in it. He's trained himself to do the center is not trained himself to do the circle. So he's failed once again. He goes back once again. He comes back a third time. This time also if he's failed. He asks a question and he's the one who reports all this. So it's not Picasso is reporting it's this fellow has been filled by Picasso who hates Picasso and who's never becoming a big big painter anywhere. He's the one who's reporting it to us and he says I failed once again. So I asked Picasso why are you asking me these silly questions? You have to be creative. You have to be sensitive. You have to be expressive because I said what nonsense if you want to draw a good painting. See this is how I do my painting and he took him into the studio and in the studio remember this is the boy whom he has rejected many times and he's not even going to take him up as a student even now and he shows him the first painting is a normal standard painting. The second version is one in which he has distorted images a little bit. Third version is more distortion is set up 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, the 15th version is the one which is actually going up on the final canvas. He says this final canvas was always there. But before this I was using my scrapbook to experiment with shapes and sizes and breaking up of images, etc, etc, etc. This is pre First World War period. This boy later on the First World War breaks out. He joins the French army and immediately there's a problem in the First World War before that people used to wear clothes which are bright and shiny and thousands and thousands of soldiers are getting killed in the war. This man suggests he tells his commanding officer, Sir, I have an idea. You know this happened with me with Picasso and he narrates the whole thing and he says in Picasso's final thing was I should break shapes in such a manner that the human eye cannot see it anymore. So the commanding officer says, how can you not see something which you can see with your eyes? I mean there's a cow. You can see it with your eyes. So there's a cow. But he says no Picasso ne kya kya? He's broken the shapes. He says that's very funny. Even after you've broken the shape, you can still see it. He says, no, give me a chance. It's possible to break shapes using lines in such a manner that the human eye cannot see it and he produces the first formal proper camouflage designs for any army in the world. Essentially he's copying Picasso. Today that you see the camouflage uniforms, they are take off on and in case you want to ever judge it. Look at a soldier wearing camouflage from a distance. Unless you know who he is, chances are that you'll notice a large number of people around him, but you'll skip the soldier because the camouflage today is so highly developed that you don't need to do was typer wala nahi kar rahi karat parati. All that you need to do is break the shape by drawing a line here, by drawing a line here, by drawing a line here. So much so when the Motor Vehicles Act was being passed, the Motor Vehicles Act has a sentence over there which says you cannot change the color and the lines of your vehicle. Putting up stickers, making extra lines, extra decorations, all that is illegal because it breaks the outline and the object ceases to be visible. Thing is, passion, value, love for your task, Mr. Picasso was saying comes as a consequence of hard work and labor for what you're doing. That seemed to match with much of what I used to think. So that narrative, I absolutely fell in love with Picasso and studied more of Picasso and stuff like that. But I think that is what every one of us needs to do. Getting educated is something which requires today society needs science and technology. It really doesn't matter who you are. You should know science and technology. You need mathematics today. So you should know mathematics. You need statistics today. You should know statistics. Do you also need to know history, society, culture, literature, etc., etc.? Yes, you do. But that is of a secondary nature. You have to be sensitive about it, but not necessary. It's not necessary knowledge. It's add on knowledge. That's what I would say. Okay. Thank you very much. Very kind of you to be here.