Pedigree, past & present

India's old elite networks have lost their predominance. Today, its caravan is propelled by tens of millions whom our handful of elite institutions are too small to have produced

Sir Ivan Menezes (1959-2023), who just passed away, was a wonderful man. I might have met him socially, but did not know him personally at all. I definitely didn’t, or couldn’t have, gone to school or college with him.

About his many qualities, attributes and achievements, I read in the wonderfully touching obit by his batchmate, economist Arvind Subramanian, in this paper last Thursday. I take all of them to be true. It is just that I was momentarily intrigued by the obit writer’s concluding assertion that “Aristotle would have envied Ivan”.

Now, why would Aristotle envy Sir Ivan, who rose to be the global boss of Diageo, the big liquor company? I thought hard, and then the penny dropped. Of course, because silly Aristotle never got to go to Delhi’s St Stephen’s College. If only his parents had had the wherewithal to send Aristotle there, he might even have featured in the 1979 batch of economics honours graduates who grew to rule India and the world.

As we are reminded, that batch gave us Sir Ivan Menezes, a global corporate star aeons before Indra Nooyi, Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai. It also gave us our Chief Justice, D Y Chandrachud and one of his senior brother judges, Sanjay Kishan Kaul.

From the same batch also comes probably the most expensive lawyer to prolifically appear before them, Abhishek Manu Singhvi. World Bank boss Ajay Banga, infrastructure guru Vinayak Chatterjee and so many civil servants that if I listed their names I’d risk walking into the dangerous realm of plagiarising from the obit.

This is not a piece of satire. This is just my window to look back at what India was, where it has come from, where it has reached and where it is headed. The India that this class of 1979 walked out into looked very different from what it is now. Check out the demographics of the successive batches in the All India Services, the Indian Institutes of Management, the ranks of the top judiciary, and corporate leaders. You will struggle to see the success of that batch repeated in even a fraction of that measure by any other after, say 1989, 10 years later. That’s how India has changed.

In 2003, in a National Interest piece headlined ‘The HMT Advantage”, I had noted the rise and rise of a new kind of elite in India, those coming in from Hindi Medium Type (therefore HMT) institutions. That piece was sparked by the death of astronaut Kalpana Chawla who, we discovered, rose from modest schooling from nondescript Karnal in Haryana to become a NASA astronaut.

It had noted that already the top leadership of our politics, civil services, armed forces, corporations, judiciary, even the media, was no longer the preserve of the old, establishment elites. That it no longer mattered where you came from, how well your daddy had done, what clubs and networks your family was linked to. These had stopped mattering even 20 years ago when that piece was written.

We note now that Ivan Menezes’ father was a distinguished civil servant and chairman of the Railway Board. Therefore, the obit reminds us, he had the perfect pedigree. Pedigree, you say? Mukesh and Anil Ambani, however, went to a Gujarati-medium school near the Mumbai chawl where Dhirubhai, then a small-time trader with a humongous fire in the belly, lived. That school was so nondescript it probably doesn’t even exist anymore.

What changed in India so radically that the elite networks of the not very distant past — or say, my generation’s growing-up years — lost their predominance? They haven’t disappeared, and never will. New elites will rise too. It’s just that the network has grown so rapidly and extensively with India’s economy and society that now it is impossible to identify such golden batches from any golden institutions.

This transformation and expansion can primarily be traced to 1991, the first phase of economic reforms.

As long as the economy was small and growing slowly, the few privileged institutions sufficed to produce the talent India needed, from corporate boardrooms to the civil services and the judiciary. Now, a rapidly growing economy needed many more talented people and a much larger catchment area. St Stephen’s/Doon/Mayo/St. Columba’s/St. Xavier’s/La Martinière (I borrow these from the obit) are still great institutions — they may be India’s finest even now — but they are just too few to meet India’s need for talent.

That’s why a Tata Administrative Services equivalent today needs to go way beyond these institutions, family networks and checking the names of the candidates’ fathers. The desperate, slog 24x7 push of middle, lower middle and poor India, meanwhile, has made it much, much more competitive to crack the UPSC examinations. Track the lists of toppers and rank-holders published by IAS academies when you open our front pages now, and check if there’re any from these old institutions. It is just too hard to compete, and even in the interview process, there is no premium on pedigree. The biggest, most visible — and audible — change has been how people, especially employers, stopped bothering about how you spoke the English language. Nowhere is this change more pronounced than in that last bastion of “English” elitism, the armed forces officers’ mess. For three decades now, most new officers have come from rural, small-town and non-elite backgrounds. A very large number are children of former Other Ranks or JCOs. Listen to them talk now. They no longer sound like the old BBC.

We can see this change across the border, too. Pakistan’s current army chief drew some smirks and sniggering on social media by pronouncing “pleasure” and “measure” in a conversation with his Chinese counterpart the way that many “non-convented” Punjabis might: Plaiyyure, maiyyure. But I am sure none of his peers in the GHQ knew the difference. And do the Chinese care?

The short point is, we live in a world radically different from what it was for the 1979 economics honours batch of St Stephen’s College. Nostalgia is a beautiful thing and we old-timers are entitled to it. I am also reminded of an op-ed piece a couple of years ago by another illustrious graduate of the same college, and among our finest users of the English language, ruing how the world had changed — for the worse in his view, of course.

There were touching memories of the time when everyone wore simple jeans, had innocent jam sessions at college, when all your parents had was one Fiat (Premier Padmini) car and the family had no greed for more. How wonderful was that era, and how much better and virtuous compared to the greed-ridden, overly ambitious now.

This genteel era was one when only the hallowed, once successful generation (a few thousands, maybe) were able to send their children to India’s Etons, Oxfords and Cambridges. That was just the volume of talent that India needed. And the 30,000 cars that it produced in a year is also all that India needed. How immoral, unvirtuous and shameful these times must be if we produce four million cars and yet there are waiting lists. Why can’t cars be left to those few who deserve them?

However great those times may be to reminisce about, they aren’t coming back. You can hear it in the voice of Mukesh (jaane kahan gaye woh din) or Kishore Kumar (koyi lauta de mere beete huye din), Mohammed Rafi (Yaad na jaaye, beete dinon ki…) or better still from S D Burman (Raja gaye, taj gaye, badla jahan sara/roz magar badhta jaye kaarvan hamara).

Those supposedly wonderful old times are over. And India’s caravan is gathering pace as it moves on, looking more like a juggernaut pulled by tens of millions of supremely talented Indians whom our best old institutions are too small to have produced. I don’t believe Aristotle would have a problem with that.

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