Watching the Republic Day Parade, I have a small tinge of regret about the absence of the goose-step. This magnificent mode of locomotion is slowly disappearing. There are few sights more impressively risible than perfectly-ordered ranks ceremonially locking knees and raising legs to the horizontal in unison. One can forgive the Kims of North Korea all their atrocities because they really loved the goose-step.
It was one of the highlights of visiting Wagah, where it was regularly performed until both nations laid off because of persistent knee injuries. Still, the goose step was never really part of the British military ethos. It might, therefore, strike an off-key note. After all, the Republic Day Parade is about celebrating India’s cultural and military puissance and highlighting the special genius of India.
But what exactly is the special genius that defines India? Is it our multi-coloured cultural and ethnic map? No, because other nations have more genuine cultural diversity. India is not really a melting pot; it is a union of multiple regions, each with a fiercely chauvinistic linguistic majority. You hear more languages spoken in London, New York, or Cape Town than in Delhi or Bombay.
Is it our wonderful religious and cultural heritage? Perhaps, but we spend more time in fighting about the primacy of our respective religious and linguistic prejudices than in celebrating the differences. We would on the whole prefer to use our heritage spots as improvised loos, or to turn them into revenue-generating malls, than merely cherish them as works of imperishable beauty.
I think the special genius of India lies partly in our undoubted ability to identify and motivate talent. India has some of the stiffest public examination systems in the world. Those systems actually work well in terms of Darwinian selection.
Unreal marks are required to enter the more well-known institutions of higher learning. Even the smart really need to swot to get a high rank in a public exam. Only a minuscule percentage of the vast numbers who attempt the JEE, CAT, or the UPSC actually get in.
By definition, graduates of IIT, IIM, as well as students of Presidency College, St Stephen’s, etc., must be very smart and competent. So must inductees to the central civil services. Empirically too, we know this is true. Many members of that elite have made a mark in the most competitive of environments. The upper echelons of global academia, Silicon Valley, Nasa, CERN, Fortune 500 MNCs, the UN, World Bank and IMF are over-populated with Indian achievers.
So, India does an excellent job of culling out its smartest and best. It then inculcates a spirit of self-sacrifice in them and does its best to turn them into responsible world-citizens. The most committed among them emigrate, leaving behind the comforts of home and family, and work selflessly to improve the quality of life in distant hellholes like California, Cambridge and Geneva.
Others less committed to becoming world-citizens also do their bit. They run the civil services, contribute their mite to local academia and think-tanks and enter politics. And there, we see another key aspect of India’s special genius come into play. Somehow, the nation manages to identify all these really smart folks, puts them together with their peers and helps them to create an unique environment that enables nothing.
Other nations run by ad hoc processes have somehow achieved sustained high growth, eliminated poverty, delivered 100 per cent literacy, reduced infant mortality, cut down corruption, maintained law and order and national harmony. India with its rigidly ordered, signed-in-triplicate processes and its armies of smart UPSC qualifiers has under-performed on all these counts over a period of decades. That takes real institutionalised genius.