Enter the age of technical thinking

The success of Kejriwal and Modi can be seen as a vital indicator that this is the age of left-brain technical thinking

In many ways I see Arvind Kejriwal's success as that of the triumph of technical education over that of the liberal arts.

Kejriwal, as is well known, is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, where he studied mechanical engineering.

Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and the other founding fathers of an earlier India were more or less schooled in the liberal arts. Nehru attended Trinity College, Cambridge, graduated in natural science, but also studied politics, economics, history and literature while there. His interest in literature led him to peruse the writings of George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, JM Keynes and Bertrand Russell, amongst others.

Gandhi journeyed to London, where he studied law at the University College, and then trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple; while there he came under the influence of a few members of the Theosophical Society, whom he met as a member of the Vegetarian Society, and was encouraged to study Buddhist and Hindu literature and philosophy.

Other members among the group that won the country Independence and founded India, like Sarojini Naidu, BR Ambedkar and Maulana Azad, also had artsy liberal backgounds and were linguists, writers, poets and academics.

Of course, there were great engineers and mathematicians and technocrats in those days, but the predominance of thought and impetus in that era was so skewed towards right-brain liberal arts thinking that it was these personalities that rose effortlessly to the top.

Which is why I hold the success of Kejriwal, Narendra Modi and others like them, who have seized the public imagination along with the leadership of their parties, as a vital indicator that this is the age of left-brain technical thinking. And perhaps this is why the Congress, still imbued in the legacy of a past era, has lost the opportunity to capture public sentiment and vote.

Because as is evident in ways small and big, we are a nation lunging towards technical expertise: be it in our IT behemoths, the proliferation of IT schools, our international recognition for IT successes and the way our youth has taken to the manifestations of this boom - social media, engineering services and technical education.

Of course neither bent of mind is superior or more valuable in nation building, India's arts-leaning founders served her just as well as will our technical left-brained leaders.

It's just that no one's informed the Congress just yet that there's been this paradigm shift and that those seen covered in the mantle of the economics, political science, law and literature degrees of Kapil Sibal, Shashi Tharoor, P Chidambaram and Salman Khurshid, just don't -how to put it gently - cut much ice with the young electorate.

These souls have turned their lonely eyes elsewhere to another God. And any political leader who speaks in this language has their vote.

Of course, as any one knows, an education in engineering is not only about nuts and bolts but also about a host of other values. The IT graduates of India, be they in business like Narayana Murthy or in politics like Kejriwal, stand for other intangibles: these include precise thinking, objective analysis, and a respect for fact and truth. This is what a nation of young IT-trained graduates want.

What is the ultimate irony (and tragedy for some) is the fact that the foundation of this new nation and subsequent value system was built by none other than one of the Congress's most cherished sons - Rajiv Gandhi.

When the history of the party is written, will any one record the fact that it was he who launched us on the Internet highway and accelerated us into the 21st century?

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com