The Barefoot College was featured on the BBC recently. View the photo essay. The founder of Barefoot College, Bunker Roy (125-J '61) continues to be an inspiring role model for Doscos around the world. Also read about the National Network for India, another interesting dosco volunteer effort.

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Read the August 27th edition of the Doon School Weekly (PDF). The issue includes an article about a recently held music workshop in addition to the regular features such as the editor's note, the opinion poll and unquotable quotes.

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Suhel Seth talks about Doon teachers in an article for The Indian Express.

Decades ago, Mahatma Gandhi said, India lives in her villages: I guess from a socio-economic perspective it still holds true, but where India really breathes is in its small towns, places which have neither lost their character nor their soul, and Dehra Dun is happily one such place. It is quite another matter that a large influx of Calcuttans has further embellished the spirit of Dehra Dun. I had gone to attend the ONGC 50th anniversary celebrations and was touched by the words that President Kalam uttered at the celebrations.

Words which make one proud that we have a President who actually thinks about the country and its future, and is not here to make either political capital or treating his job as a sinecure. He spoke with passion about bio-fuels and alternate fuels; he spoke with conviction about the need for India to seriously examine issues relating to the environment, especially aqua environment, and one knew instantly these were not words crafted by some speech-writer but instead passionate beliefs. Even more critical was the courage and humility of the man that shone through in all that he said and the way he behaved. Truly, a people¹s President.

I also had the opportunity to visit the Doon School: I had never been to the Doon School before, but this one trip made me realise the difference between being an elite school and an elitist school. Over lunch with the headmaster, my friend Kanti Bajpai, I discovered that even today, the Doon School has amongst the lowest fees anywhere in India for a boarding school. Whereas, from all the media hype that surrounds the Doon School, one would imagine that it is an expensive institution. Which it is not.



Thankfully, rituals such as every student eating at the same time with faculty members and religion not being either a matter of concern or discussion, still hold true in a nation increasingly wearing its religion on its sleeve. I was equally delighted that Shakespeare is still very much around and The Rose Bowl continues to be the haven for theatre: traditions that are unfortunately dying everywhere else as headmasters and headmistresses become Padmashris rather than remain just good old fashioned teachers. The buildings at the Doon School are charming to say the least, and the fact that the school is dotted with trees, makes it seem out of some Scottish highland. But I guess that is where the comparison with Scotland ends.

Dehra Dun, as far as the town is concerned, is an utter mess. It is polluted; the roads are in a mess and the civic administration is in a state of paralysis. For the affable and charming Kanchan Choudhury, the director general of police, you have an equally rude and offensive A.K. Ratauri who is the inspector general of police. I wonder why small towns have to suffer people like Ratauri! Making matters worse is the chief minister of Uttaranchal, N.D. Tiwari. For those of you with weak memories, he was the man who picked up Sanjay Gandhi¹s shoes at an airport once. The only thing Tiwari seems to be working hard at is getting favourites to become heads of state corporations and be given the rank of Cabinet ministers. The roads can go to hell, since he flies by chopper most of the time, except of course when he is going to the washroom. But the state of civic conditions is deplorable.

I also had the privilege of meeting yet another fine educationist, Dev Lahiri, at the quaint home of Anjali and Robin Roy. Dev is the headmaster of Welham¹s Boys¹ School and has lived a life that is not only unjust but also severely traumatic. A Rhodes scholar (like Bill Clinton and Girish Karnad), a sportsman par excellence, a man who left the corporate world of Unilever only so that he could give back to society in full measure by becoming a teacher, Dev was hounded out as headmaster of the Lawrence School, Lovedale, by Anjolie Ela Menon (not exactly known to be the paragon of virtue herself, given the controversy about her fake paintings) and a motley group, apparently at her behest. A group that indulged in mud slinging and defamation of the kind that is not only tragic but also very unbecoming. Dev today is all but a shattered man. He has gone through 12 critical heart surgeries and is still being deprived of his money that was owed to him when he was forced to quit his last job. So much for the fine traditions of the Lawrence School, Lovedale.

If this is the way they treat their former headmasters, I wonder what values they espouse for their students. And despite all the protestations, right from the education department to the PMO, no one has really done anything about it. So Dev continues to fight two battles with admiration and grit: one for his life, and one for his dignity. And this is where I believe we as a nation sometimes let the very best amidst us down in a manner both despicable and heinous. You only have to meet Dev and his stoic wife Indrani to know what they have suffered and how help is still so far far away.

The drive back from Dehra Dun to Delhi was frightening and at the same time very interesting. If you can find a road, then drive on it because the conditions are truly abysmal and someone needs to rap N.D. Tiwari on the knuckles. The highway project seems to be going nowhere, and in a way it is perhaps good. The longer Dehra Dun can insulate itself from the Delhiwallah (but welcome the Calcuttan), it will retain both its soul and its charm.

Posted at 9:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Decades ago, Mahatma Gandhi said, India lives in her villages: I guess from a socio-economic perspective it still holds true, but where India really breathes is in its small towns, places which have neither lost their character nor their soul, and Dehra Dun is happily one such place. It is quite another matter that a large influx of Calcuttans has further embellished the spirit of Dehra Dun.

I had gone to attend the ONGC 50th anniversary celebrations and was touched by the words that President Kalam uttered at the celebrations.

Words which make one proud that we have a President who actually thinks about the country and its future, and is not here to make either political capital or treating his job as a sinecure. He spoke with passion about bio-fuels and alternate fuels; he spoke with conviction about the need for India to seriously examine issues relating to the environment, especially aqua environment, and one knew instantly these were not words crafted by some speech-writer but instead passionate beliefs. Even more critical was the courage and humility of the man that shone through in all that he said and the way he behaved. Truly, a people¹s President.

I also had the opportunity to visit the Doon School: I had never been to the Doon School before, but this one trip made me realise the difference between being an elite school and an elitist school. Over lunch with the headmaster, my friend Kanti Bajpai, I discovered that even today, the Doon School has amongst the lowest fees anywhere in India for a boarding school. Whereas, from all the media hype that surrounds the Doon School, one would imagine that it is an expensive institution. Which it is not.

Thankfully, rituals such as every student eating at the same time with faculty members and religion not being either a matter of concern or discussion, still hold true in a nation increasingly wearing its religion on its sleeve. I was equally delighted that Shakespeare is still very much around and The Rose Bowl continues to be the haven for theatre: traditions that are unfortunately dying everywhere else as headmasters and headmistresses become Padmashris rather than remain just good old fashioned teachers. The buildings at the Doon School are charming to say the least, and the fact that the school is dotted with trees, makes it seem out of some Scottish highland. But I guess that is where the comparison with Scotland ends.

Dehra Dun, as far as the town is concerned, is an utter mess. It is polluted; the roads are in a mess and the civic administration is in a state of paralysis. For the affable and charming Kanchan Choudhury, the director general of police, you have an equally rude and offensive A.K. Ratauri who is the inspector general of police. I wonder why small towns have to suffer people like Ratauri! Making matters worse is the chief minister of Uttaranchal, N.D. Tiwari. For those of you with weak memories, he was the man who picked up Sanjay Gandhi¹s shoes at an airport once. The only thing Tiwari seems to be working hard at is getting favourites to become heads of state corporations and be given the rank of Cabinet ministers. The roads can go to hell, since he flies by chopper most of the time, except of course when he is going to the washroom. But the state of civic conditions is deplorable.

I also had the privilege of meeting yet another fine educationist, Dev Lahiri, at the quaint home of Anjali and Robin Roy. Dev is the headmaster of Welham¹s Boys¹ School and has lived a life that is not only unjust but also severely traumatic. A Rhodes scholar (like Bill Clinton and Girish Karnad), a sportsman par excellence, a man who left the corporate world of Unilever only so that he could give back to society in full measure by becoming a teacher, Dev was hounded out as headmaster of the Lawrence School, Lovedale, by Anjolie Ela Menon (not exactly known to be the paragon of virtue herself, given the controversy about her fake paintings) and a motley group, apparently at her behest. A group that indulged in mud slinging and defamation of the kind that is not only tragic but also very unbecoming. Dev today is all but a shattered man. He has gone through 12 critical heart surgeries and is still being deprived of his money that was owed to him when he was forced to quit his last job. So much for the fine traditions of the Lawrence School, Lovedale.

If this is the way they treat their former headmasters, I wonder what values they espouse for their students. And despite all the protestations, right from the education department to the PMO, no one has really done anything about it. So Dev continues to fight two battles with admiration and grit: one for his life, and one for his dignity. And this is where I believe we as a nation sometimes let the very best amidst us down in a manner both despicable and heinous. You only have to meet Dev and his stoic wife Indrani to know what they have suffered and how help is still so far far away.

The drive back from Dehra Dun to Delhi was frightening and at the same time very interesting. If you can find a road, then drive on it because the conditions are truly abysmal and someone needs to rap N.D. Tiwari on the knuckles. The highway project seems to be going nowhere, and in a way it is perhaps good. The longer Dehra Dun can insulate itself from the Delhiwallah (but welcome the Calcuttan), it will retain both its soul and its charm.
By Suhel Seth

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Read the August 20th edition of the Doon School Weekly (PDF). The issue includes an interview with Dr. Joshi who is an environmentalist and social worker and also a commentary on organized religion.

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Currently a partner with McKinsey & Company in New York, he is relocating to Mumbai in September 2005. In India he will continue to be part of McKinsey's global High-Technology and Telecom leadership and will assume responsibility for the Corporate Finance and Strategy practice in India. He can be reached at vivek_pandit@mckinsey.com.

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He has completed his MBA from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad and has joined Mckinsey & Co's India office. Anant can be reached at anantatal@gmail.com.

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The August 22nd, 2005 issue of BusinessWeek includes a special section on India and China. In an article titled, "Trying To Tame The Blackboard Jungle - As more Indian children flood into schools, educators struggle to boost quality," Kanti Bajpai is quoted as he talks about the impact of elections on the textbooks chosen

To understand the educational challenges facing India, pay a visit to Dharavi, a poor and densely populated Bombay neighborhood. Its lanes are so small and winding that no vehicles can traverse them. Open drains run outside the crudely built brick and corrugated metal homes, and garbage is piled high every few yards. The area, where 1 million of Bombay's poorer migrants live, is Asia's largest slum.

This is the home of the Dharavi Transit Camp School, one of two in the neighborhood run by the municipal corporation. Outside the high school gates, ragged, half-naked children play amid scattered garbage. Some run in and out of the gates, but nobody stops them. There is no school guard, and the teachers who pass through don't bother. The school, four stories high, is shorn of paint and looks grim under the monsoon clouds.

It's past noon, and schoolchildren are starting to straggle in for the afternoon shift of classes. The girls wear blue pinafores, the boys blue shorts and shirts. Many are barefoot. Like most state-run schools in Bombay, the Transit Camp School runs classes up to seventh grade, in two shifts, with each floor teaching classes in a different language, reflecting the regional origins of its 6,000 students. Blackboards, tables, and benches crowd the 12 classrooms on each floor. With 100 students per class, the sessions sometimes spill into the corridors.

On this day, Gautam Dandage, a cement spreader, has brought his 8-year-old daughter, Ujwala, to school. She is doing O.K. in class but his older son, he complains, has lost his motivation. "My son failed because of the class master. He never showed up for class all year," Dandage gripes. The deputy head teacher, Sampat Bhandare, tries to shush the worried father, explaining that the teacher in question was sick and the school could not find a replacement. Dandage isn't convinced.

A day at school in Dharavi is a vivid lesson in India's education gap. In a nation striving to be a global leader in brainpower, the Transit Camp School underscores the enormous scale of India's struggle to provide adequate education for its youth. India has the world's youngest, potentially most productive population. Nearly 500 million Indians are under age 19. In primary school alone, some 202 million students are taught by 5.5 million teachers in 1 million schools.

Yet while free and compulsory primary education became law in 2001, the quality of learning is poor and the failure rate is high. Even in fifth grade, some 35% of Indian children cannot read or write, according to Pratham, India's largest education nonprofit group. According to government statistics, just a quarter of students make it past eighth grade, and only 15% get to high school. Of the 202 million who start school, only about 7%, or 14 million, graduate. And without a fully literate population, India won't easily sustain the demands and aspirations of its people or become a global power. "The government is failing our youth," says Vimala Ramachandran, an education specialist and author of Getting Children Back to School.

Increasingly, Indian parents want their children educated, particularly in English and computing. That's not only critical for youth; it's the key to India's development. Education is a "ticket out of poverty," says New Delhi economist Surjit Bhalla. Parents understand that when India began to grow in the 1980s and 1990s, the educated got better jobs -- "even if it meant going to the Gulf states and achieving blue- collar success," Bhalla notes.

But India's state system just isn't meeting people's aspirations. "It's two decades behind the population's needs," says Madhav Chavan, founder and program director of Pratham. Poor-quality teachers, a politicized education department, outdated learning methods, and the pressures Indian children face at home are just some of the roots of India's education gap. Many girls drop out of school after fourth grade, for example, to do household chores while their parents work. Just half of India's girls are literate, vs. nearly three-fourths of boys.

TEACHER TROUBLES
Indians can't blame the government for not trying to improve the situation. The Ministry of Human Resource Development has thousands of schemes aimed at enhancing educational opportunities. The most ambitious is the 2001 Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, or universal education incentive program. Its $2.4 billion annual budget provides students with a meal a day, free textbooks, medical care, and remedial classes. The Congress Party, which returned to power in New Delhi last year, is pushing the agenda even further. The government's spending on education has gone from 3% of gross domestic product last year to 4% this year, and is expected to rise to 6% soon.

These efforts are making an impact. Almost 90% of all children are now enrolled in school -- up from 75% in 2000. Yet the growth is a strain for some schools. In the poorer regions of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, class sizes are now "too large to manage," says Venita Kaul, who oversees World Bank education projects in India. The Bank is providing $500 million for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan budget over three years until 2007.

Despite increased enrollments, graduation ratios are falling -- even in top states such as Maharashtra, where Bombay is located. This year, 57% of the 10th-grade students in Maharashtra passed their final exams -- a big drop from last year when 67% cleared the exam. "We aim for a zero dropout and failure rate," says Abasaheb Jadav, who is project director for the federal government's Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in Bombay. Good intentions aside, the experts say India's educational system faces its most serious challenges at the classroom level.

Start with the teachers. State-employed teachers earn up to $300 a month and often four times as much as private school teachers. But they are poorly trained, unmotivated, and often commandeered for other government services like election duty or overseeing polio vaccination drives. Consequently, teacher -- and hence student -- absenteeism is high. At the same time, increased enrollments -- thanks to the midday meal now required in all schools -- have caused a teacher shortage. As a result, in many schools, teachers have to handle up to four different grades at once, another blow to the quality of schooling.

Another issue is infrastructure. The government is boosting spending on schools, books, and classroom equipment, but the funding often doesn't reach the remote rural areas. In Bihar, India's poorest state, schools are crumbling buildings lacking roofs, windows, or blackboards. In Behrampur, a village about three hours away from the capital of Patna, the broken-down single-room school serves as a playground for the village's 200 children. Locals say the schoolmaster comes by every three or four days. Devbali Rai, a 30-year-old farmer, is near despair. "We want schooling. Our children must study," he says.

CURRICULUM CRISIS
Adding to the cauldron of problems is a curriculum crisis fueled by political rivalries. In 1998, when the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party won the national elections, education became the first target of revisionist historians. School textbooks were rewritten to reflect the BJP's ultra-nationalist ideology. Then the Congress government reverted to the original facts when its party defeated the BJP in national elections last year. Now parents and teachers worry that another election will mean more tinkering with the school syllabi and textbooks. "This oscillating between the orthodoxies of the right and the left, the yo-yo-like swings in curricula, is driving parents and teachers mad," says Kanti Bajpai, headmaster of the Doon School, the country's most elite school.

All these difficulties are accelerating the rush to India's 100,000-plus private schools. For decades private schools such as the Doon School, modeled after Britain's Eton, have catered to the elite. Now even poor students are enrolling in private schools, where the tuition can range from $24 a year in remote villages to $15,000 at the top end. In underdeveloped states many private schools are just single rooms in village homes. But even in cramped surroundings students learn enough to take a school-graduating exam.

Despite the proliferation of private schools, few experts believe they are the solution to India's educational challenges. True, they tend to be better than their state counterparts. But many are unregulated, and they still serve just a fraction of the population. Privatizing education, while often suggested by experts, isn't the answer either. India is too large, and many of its poorest parts are so remote that few private educators would want to teach there.

Yet some experiments are taking place that could provide models for education reform. ICICI Bank has invested in organizations such as Vidya Bhavan Society that are experimenting with alternate teaching systems to replace rote memorization. One of its projects is in the state of Chattisgarh, which three years ago was carved out of the large and poor state of Madhya Pradesh with the idea that smaller states could be governed more easily. "We were new and inexperienced, we needed everyone's help," recalls Sanjay Kumar Ojha, an official whom New Delhi sent to help the state's Education Dept. Ojha and team have readied a new set of textbooks, plus teacher recruiting and training programs, in just two years. The new curriculums will be introduced in 2006. If successful, Chattisgarh could become a model.

Encouraged by such efforts, Pratham's Chavan confidently predicts "a major change in the provision of education" in the coming years. The driving force will be parents who desperately want to educate their children in English. In Kashmir, the government has already switched to an English-language-based school education from the first grade. Even in conservative, Hindi-dominated Rajasthan, English as a language is now taught from the first grade. The state of Kerala, which stood alone in India for its 99% literacy rate, is now joined by Mizoram and Himachal Pradesh in the north. Such efforts could one day help India close its education gap.

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Confronting love (Penguin, Rs 125) edited by Jerry Pinto and Arundhathi Subramaniam is a slim collection of contemporary Indo-Anglian love poems.

It talks of the thrill, as well as the mill, of love ’Äî as Cole Porter would have said. There is old love, new love, love that’Äôs fresh and still unspoiled, and love that’Äôs only slightly soiled. There is, incredibly, even a bit of true love thrown in for good measure. There is Vikram Seth and Ruth Vanita, A.K. Ramanujan and Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih. Here’Äôs Seth’Äôs ’ÄúPrandial Plaint’Äù: ’ÄúMy love, I love your breasts. I love your nose./ I love your accent and I love your toes./ I am your slave. One word, and I obey./ But please don’Äôt slurp your coffee in that way.’Äù

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From the Indian Express (July 10th, 2005) - Managing director and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Hero group, 49-year-old Sunil Munjal (180-KB '73) gets the maximum votes for his personality, his attitude and his efforts to make a better Ludhiana.

Munjal is a member on the Prime Minister’Äôs Council on Trade and Industry. He is also the chairman of the much-powerful Confederation of Indian Industry (CII). The Hero group is a name to reckon with internationally. But the beauty of being Sunil Kant Munjal is what he has done for the city. As all were wont to say, Ludhiana culture is agriculture. Munjal almost single-handedly changed that. His Ludhiana Sanskritik Samagam (LSS) has brought sophistication to the city. Courtesy LSS, die-hard drinkers have realised that an evening can be pleasantly spent appreciating live performances of artistes of national and international repute. Recently, Munjal got Nadira Babbar for a theatre workshop for students. And said that since he never got exposure to theatre in his youth, he hopes that at least today he can offer the students the opportunity he lost out on. No wonder the city loves this Ludhianvi so much."

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He graduated in physics from St. Stephen's College in 2004 and is currently pursuing an MBA from ICFAI, Hyderabad. He intends to specialize in Finance and is looking for a summer internship (of 4 months duration, beginning February, 2006) at a finance company in Delhi or Mumbai.

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In an article for the Guardian, William Darymple feels that the next generation fo Anglophone Indian writers will come from the west. Do you think The Doon School will be able to produce another Vikram Seth or Amitav Ghosh?

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A Statesman article by Christopher Rolland titled, "Footprints of the Raj" discusses the historic Eton relationship as shown in a recent exhibition at Eton in the UK. The exhibition also highlighted Doon's connection which extended beyond the fact that Doon's first headmaster A.E Foot, was an Etonian.

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Read the August 13th edition of the Doon School Weekly (PDF). The issue includes an article about Kamal Ahuja's trip to a conference of international councellors, an article by Sheel Vohra on environmental studies and an account of the Inter-House Gymnastics Competition.

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There is a wonderfully telling line in Mira Nair's movie Monsoon Wedding: as the Verma family gathers from across the globe for a marriage, the heroine announces that she has applied for a creative-writing programme in America. Her businessman uncle nods approvingly: "Lots of money in writing these days," he says sagely. "Look at that girl who won the Booker: she became a millionaire overnight."

If it was the literary merit of Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, that made the greatest impression on readers and critics in the west, it is fair to say that it was the size of her advance- more than $1 million in total - that made the most impression in Delhi. India has always had an enviable glut of talented writers; what has been much rarer, until recently, have been Indian writers who have been properly remunerated for their work (or indeed widely read outside India). The Robert Frost line - "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money" - used to be true of even the most successful South Asian authors: the letters of the greatest of all Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib, are full of endless worries as to whether he could pay his bills or afford to drink his beloved firangi wine.

Either way, Roy's international critical and commercial success in 1997 radically changed perceptions of Indian writing in English, and not just in Delhi. Roy's book was immediately recognised as a major literary achievement: it won the Booker and sat at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for several months: by the end of 1997 it had sold no less than four million copies in two dozen languages.

There quickly followed a major publishing feeding-frenzy: international literary agents and publishers descended on India from London and New York, signing up a whole tranche of authors, many of whom received major advances for outlines of novels they had barely begun. Picador launched a list exclusively devoted to Indian writing in 1998; the office was soon buried under an avalanche of unsolicited manuscripts. Throughout the late 1990s, barely a month went by without the news of some fledgling scribbler being discovered lurking as a sub-editor on the Indian Express or pushing papers in the Ministry of External Affairs.

Several other writers had of course prepared the ground for this success. Roy could not have happened without VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth: in particular Rushdie's 1981 masterpiece Midnight's Children liberated Indian writing in English from its colonial straitjacket. It also gave birth to a new voice, one that was exuberantly magical, cosmopolitan and multicultural, full of unexpected cadences, as well as forms that were new to the English novel but deeply rooted in Indian traditions of storytelling. It won the Booker, as did Nai-paul's Bend in the River. Then, in 1993, Seth produced his massive - and magnificent - A Suitable Boy. Rushdie's prediction that "Indians were in a position to conquer English literature" seemed about to be vindicated.

That same year Pico Iyer wrote a widely quoted Time Magazine cover story, "The Empire Writes Back", in which he noted that: "Where not long ago a student of the English novel would probably have been weaned on Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley, now he will more likely be taught Rushdie and Okri and Mo - which is fitting in an England where many students' first language is Urdu. The shelves of English bookstores are becoming as noisy and polyglot and many-hued as the English streets. The English language is being revolutionised from within. Hot spices are entering English, and tropical birds and sorcerers; readers who are increasingly familiar with sushi and samosas are now learning to live with molue buses and manuku hedges."

More than a decade later, however, it has to be said that there is a slight sense of disappointment in Delhi. According to David Davidar, the founding editor of Penguin India, who did much to kick-start the Indian publishing boom, after the excitement of the 1990s, the situation has, as he diplomatically puts it, "stabilised". There are many interesting books still being produced, many fine authors at work, and there is still the odd thrill as news breaks of another new talent being snapped up and translated into a dozen languages - most recently a civil servant named Vikas Swarup (indeed, the sheer number of Indian civil servants who appear to be working on novels might be one reason why the Indian bureaucracy still churns so slowly). As far as prizes are concerned, since Roy, we have had Anita Desai, Rohinton Mistry and Monica Ali on the Booker shortlist, Jhumpa Lahiri winning the Pulitzer; while off the prize-piste there have been two exceptionally brilliant novels by Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist and Transmission) and a fine book each from Manil Suri (The Death of Vishnu) and Nadeem Aslam (Maps for Lost Lovers

The truth is, however, that since 1997 there has been no new galaxy of stars emerging to match the stature of those of the 1980s and 90s. Many of the Indian novelists who were signed up with such excitement 10 years ago failed to repay even a fraction of their advances. The only Indian-themed book to win the Booker - The Life of Pi - was written by Yann Martel, a white Canadian. In India itself, there is no new internationally acclaimed masterpiece, no new Roy.

That said, Roy always was rather different from her contemporaries. When I interviewed her before the publication of The God of Small Things, she noted as much herself: "I don't feel part of a pack," she said. "I grew up on the banks of a river in Kerala. I spent every day from the age of three fishing, walking, thinking, always alone. If you read other Indian writers most of them are very urban: they don't have much interest in, you know, air or water. They all went from the Doon School [the Indian Eton] to St Stephen's [the Indian Oxford] and then on to Cambridge. Most of those who are called Indian writers don't even live here: Rushdie, Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Mistry: they're all abroad, while I've never lived anywhere except India."

Roy fingered what is without doubt the strangest aspect of the renaissance of Indian writing in English: the extraordinary degree to which, at least at its highest levels, it is now almost entirely written by the diaspora. As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction. It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog.

In one sense, of course, this doesn't matter: the great Dublin novel, Ulysses, was written in Trieste, and whatever problems subsequent readers have had with the book, no one has ever suggested that James Joyce's Dublin was any less authentic for having been written in Italy. Indeed, distance can be helpful for writers trying to percolate their thoughts about place: many of the most famous Australian writers now live outside Australia - Peter Carey, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes all have home addresses in London or New York; and there is a similar pattern with many of the best Arab writers - Amin Malouf and Tahar Ben Jalloun live in Paris, Hanan al-Shaykh and Ahdaf Soueif in London, Assia Djebar and (until his death last year) Edward Said in America.

It is true that in India there has been some sniping about the haute bourgeoisie origins of this literary diaspora, and some questioning as to what a bunch of Indian public schoolboys living in London and New York really know about the less romantic side of the daily struggle for life in India. A few years ago, one Indian critic, M Prabha, wrote an entire book dismissing the whole movement of Indian writing in English as The Waffle of the Toffs (as she named her silly if amusingly vitriolic book), while the writer and critic Pankaj Mishra has attacked what he called the "slickly exilic version of India", manufactured by a "cosmopolitan Third World elite ... suffused with nostalgia, interwoven with myth, and often weighed down with a kind of intellectual simplicity foreign readers are rarely equipped to notice".

There is, however, a strong suspicion of double standards inherent in this repeated charge of diaspora inauthenticity. Western writers can go off and live in self-imposed exile abroad without being called deracinated or out of touch with their countries of origin: think of Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess in Monte Carlo, Gore Vidal in Ravello, Christopher Isherwood in LA, Hemingway and many others in Paris, Nabokov in America and Switzerland, even Philip Roth for a time in London; but when an Indian writer goes away he is somehow regarded as suspect, and charged with making a living out of his exotic upbringing while actually living in the great urban centres of the west. As Rushdie once asked: Was Picasso deracinated when he drew inspiration from African masks? If not, then why should an African be regarded as deracinated when he draws inspiration from Picasso?

Nevertheless, the sheer scale of this diaspora of India does remain an odd phenomenon. From the 1890s through to the 1930s, most English-speaking readers received their notions of India through the mediation of British-based writers such as Rudyard Kipling or EM Forster. That briefly changed between the 1940s and 1970s with the rise of Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali and RK Narayan, deeply rooted writers who really lived and breathed the air of the India they wrote about. But by the 1980s, London again became the place of mediation with the rise of Rushdie and his ilk - except that New York (the residence of Ghosh, Gita Mehta and Lahiri), Toronto (Mistry and Michael Ondaatje) and even rural Wiltshire (home to Naipaul and Seth) now had to be added to the major centres of Indian writing in English.

All of which is, in many ways, fine: great writing is great writing wherever it is produced, and literary merit has never been dependent on your home address - except that for those of us who live in India, it is in some ways a surprisingly quiet place in terms of its English-language literary life: one tends to meet far more Indian writers in English at the literary festival of Hay-on-Wye, deep in the Welsh countryside, or Edinburgh or even Sydney, than one ever does in Delhi. For a place supposed to be at the eye of the postcolonial literary hurricane, it is all a little, well, peaceful.

This is a huge contrast to the situation during the last great literary renaissance in the city, 150 years ago. Farhatullah Baig's Dehli ki Akhri Shama, The Last Musha'irah of Dehli is a fictionalised account of what purports to be the last great mushairah or poetic symposium held in Delhi under the patronage of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar: around a courtyard sit several poet princes of the royal house, as well as 40 other Delhi poets, including Azurda, Momin, Arif, Bedil, Azad, Dagh, Sehbai, Shefta, Mir and Ghalib himself. Much of the detail of this mushairah may have been invented, but this stellar gathering of poetic talent could have happened. In a Delhi whose population was then little more 100,000, you could still find a gathering of 45 poets, at least 10 of whom are still widely read and admired today.

Nor was this just an elite pursuit: The Garden of Poetry, a collection of Urdu verse (or tazkirah) published in 1850, contains no less than 53 poets from Delhi who range from the emperor and members of his family to a poor water-seller in Chandni Chowk, a merchant in Panjabi Katra, a young wrestler, a courtesan and a barber. Seth and Lahiri may have a more international audience than Momin or Mir Taqi Mir ever did; but one can't help thinking that, at least as far as Delhi is concerned, something has been lost in the trade-off.

There is also the important question of how far Indian writers in English have to compromise if they are writing primarily for a firangi audience. After all, the market in India itself, while growing fast, is still tiny: most books sell less than 1,000 copies and even 5,000 copies can make you a bestseller; therefore to make a living as an Indian writer in English you have to crack the British and American markets and that can mean serious compromises.

Rushdie vigorously resisted all attempts to constrain the Hindi words in his novels within italics; Roy was also very brave in this respect, making it quite clear that she would not obey her foreign editors' injunctions to explain Indian words: Updike didn't explain baseball for an Indian audience, she said, and she was damned if she was going to explain the ways of Kerala to a Manhattan audience - they could take it or leave it. Other, newer writers, however, have had less leverage to resist such pressure and one often comes across tell-tale passages in Indian novels in English that explain, for example, that dal is a confection of lentils fried in garlic.

The other odd absence from the English-language literary scene in India has been the startling lack of any biography, narrative history or indeed any serious literary non-fiction of any description. Earlier this year, Suketu Mehta published what is without doubt the best travel book published by an Indian author in recent years: Maximum City, his remarkable study of Bombay. But Mehta's achievement only highlights the absence of any real competition, for with the notable exceptions of Naipaul and Pankaj Mishra, and one book each by Seth and Ghosh, there are no other Indian travel writers.

The situation with history is even more dire. Although brilliant young Indian historians such as Sanjay Subramaniam produce many excellent specialist essays and learned academic studies, it is still impossible, for example, to go into a bookshop in Delhi and buy an up-to-date and accessible biography of any of India's pre-colonial rulers, even of the most obvious ones such as Akbar or Shah Jehan, the builder of the Taj Mahal. Why is it that much the most popular biography of Mrs Gandhi was by Katherine Frank, an American living in England, and the most authoritative study of Hindu nationalism by a Frenchman, Christophe Jaffrelot? Why are there no Indian authors writing this sort of thing better than us firangi interlopers?

There is even a relative absence of genuinely accessible, well-written and balanced general histories of India. The most widely available introductions to the subject - the two Penguin Histories by Romila Thapar and Percival Spear - are both fine, scholarly works, but pretty heavy-going. This as much as anything else, I think, has allowed Hindu nationalist myths to replace history among a large part of India's middle-class, who are keen consumers of desi fiction, but still have surprisingly little home-grown history to interest them.

In India, with the exceptions of the cricket historian Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani, author of The Idea of India (who has now decamped to Washington) - there is simply nothing like that. What English language non-fiction there is seems to be written by academics for the consumption of a handful of other, rival academics.

As for the future, there is at least a lot of writing going on. The Indian superstars of the 80s and 90s - the Rushdies, the Ghoshs, the Seths and Chandras, the Mistrys - are still in their 40s or 50s and presumably have at least another 20 years of great books in them. Most are still at the height of their powers, and developing in a fascinating way: look at the spectacular way Ghosh's work has grown and matured since The Circle of Reason. Most still visit India very frequently, still think of themselves as Indian (or at least as hyphenated Indians: Indian-Americans, British-Indians and so on), and some may even move back here when they come to give up their day jobs - in contrast to previous generations of emigrants who usually left India for good.

Every year Penguin India produces nearly 100 new books, and this year there looks like being at least one major novel in the pipeline: Inheritance of Loss by New York-based Kiran Desai. And then of course there is the great Elephant in the Living Room that is so often ignored in discussion of Indian writing in English: the whole wider universe of Indian vernacular writers, especially in Hindi, Bengali and Marathi, where authors such as Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, UR Ananthmurthy and Paul Zakaria can sell tens of thousands of copies - much more than most Indian writers in English - but remain untranslated and largely unknown to readers in the west.

The big uncertainty in the years to come, however, is whether it will continue to be Indians in India mediating this country in the future - or will this increasingly come to be the preserve of the diaspora. Here a big and daily growing question mark remains. In Britain during the last four or five years, the waves have been made less by authors from south Asia, or even from the immediate south Asian diaspora, as much as British-born Asian writers such as Nadeem Aslam or Meera Syal, and particularly what Rushdie might call "chutnified" authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, in Zadie Smith's famous formulation, "children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks".

When he was in Delhi last summer launching Transmission, Kunzru surprised many Indian interviewers by emphasising that he was a British author, not an Indian one, and that he was very happy living in London with his British identity: to one interviewer, he remarked that although his books have some Indian characters and partly Indian settings, he is not "one of those expatriate Indian writers who scours the Indian landscape looking for my roots", adding that he "abhors the nostalgic writing that many writers of Indian diaspora usually indulge in. My next book will not have anything to do with India at all." For him, he said, India was a place where his cousins lived and where he came for weddings and winter holidays.

In Hong Kong, he confirmed this: "I am very careful never to describe myself as an Indian writer," he said. "I am a British-born, British-resident author. I have connections to India and I feel they inform what I do to some extent, but more than this I cannot claim. What I and Zadie are doing is British writing about British hybridity. It is a completely separate story to that strand of writing which is about Indian-born writers going somewhere else. People should not confuse the two."

Writers such as Kunzru, born in Hounslow or Edgware or Brooklyn or New Jersey, have a clear and built-in advantage over their cousins brought up in Jhansi or Patna. They have far more confidence in English, and their ethnicity and geography makes them natural bridges between cultures, able automatically to translate an Indian sensibility for the west - if that is what they want to do. Certainly, their background effortlessly puts them in a position to draw together a range of different influences, to work with ease in India and Britain and the US, and to produce art that is readily comprehensible at both ends of the globe.

If the last few years are anything to go by, I suspect that in the years ahead the main competition Indian writers aspiring to win the Booker will face will not be the Alan Hollinghursts or the AS Byatts, so much as their own cousins born and brought up in the west.

William Dalrymple's most recent book, White Mughals (Harper Perennial) won the Wolfson Prize for History. A stage version by Christopher Hampton has just been commissioned by the National Theatre.

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To understand the educational challenges facing India, pay a visit to Dharavi, a poor and densely populated Bombay neighborhood. Its lanes are so small and winding that no vehicles can traverse them. Open drains run outside the crudely built brick and corrugated metal homes, and garbage is piled high every few yards. The area, where 1 million of Bombay's poorer migrants live, is Asia's largest slum.

This is the home of the Dharavi Transit Camp School, one of two in the neighborhood run by the municipal corporation. Outside the high school gates, ragged, half-naked children play amid scattered garbage. Some run in and out of the gates, but nobody stops them. There is no school guard, and the teachers who pass through don't bother. The school, four stories high, is shorn of paint and looks grim under the monsoon clouds.

It's past noon, and schoolchildren are starting to straggle in for the afternoon shift of classes. The girls wear blue pinafores, the boys blue shorts and shirts. Many are barefoot. Like most state-run schools in Bombay, the Transit Camp School runs classes up to seventh grade, in two shifts, with each floor teaching classes in a different language, reflecting the regional origins of its 6,000 students. Blackboards, tables, and benches crowd the 12 classrooms on each floor. With 100 students per class, the sessions sometimes spill into the corridors.

On this day, Gautam Dandage, a cement spreader, has brought his 8-year-old daughter, Ujwala, to school. She is doing O.K. in class but his older son, he complains, has lost his motivation. "My son failed because of the class master. He never showed up for class all year," Dandage gripes. The deputy head teacher, Sampat Bhandare, tries to shush the worried father, explaining that the teacher in question was sick and the school could not find a replacement. Dandage isn't convinced.

A day at school in Dharavi is a vivid lesson in India's education gap. In a nation striving to be a global leader in brainpower, the Transit Camp School underscores the enormous scale of India's struggle to provide adequate education for its youth. India has the world's youngest, potentially most productive population. Nearly 500 million Indians are under age 19. In primary school alone, some 202 million students are taught by 5.5 million teachers in 1 million schools.

Yet while free and compulsory primary education became law in 2001, the quality of learning is poor and the failure rate is high. Even in fifth grade, some 35% of Indian children cannot read or write, according to Pratham, India's largest education nonprofit group. According to government statistics, just a quarter of students make it past eighth grade, and only 15% get to high school. Of the 202 million who start school, only about 7%, or 14 million, graduate. And without a fully literate population, India won't easily sustain the demands and aspirations of its people or become a global power. "The government is failing our youth," says Vimala Ramachandran, an education specialist and author of Getting Children Back to School.

Increasingly, Indian parents want their children educated, particularly in English and computing. That's not only critical for youth; it's the key to India's development. Education is a "ticket out of poverty," says New Delhi economist Surjit Bhalla. Parents understand that when India began to grow in the 1980s and 1990s, the educated got better jobs -- "even if it meant going to the Gulf states and achieving blue- collar success," Bhalla notes.

But India's state system just isn't meeting people's aspirations. "It's two decades behind the population's needs," says Madhav Chavan, founder and program director of Pratham. Poor-quality teachers, a politicized education department, outdated learning methods, and the pressures Indian children face at home are just some of the roots of India's education gap. Many girls drop out of school after fourth grade, for example, to do household chores while their parents work. Just half of India's girls are literate, vs. nearly three-fourths of boys.

TEACHER TROUBLES

Indians can't blame the government for not trying to improve the situation. The Ministry of Human Resource Development has thousands of schemes aimed at enhancing educational opportunities. The most ambitious is the 2001 Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, or universal education incentive program. Its $2.4 billion annual budget provides students with a meal a day, free textbooks, medical care, and remedial classes. The Congress Party, which returned to power in New Delhi last year, is pushing the agenda even further. The government's spending on education has gone from 3% of gross domestic product last year to 4% this year, and is expected to rise to 6% soon.

These efforts are making an impact. Almost 90% of all children are now enrolled in school -- up from 75% in 2000. Yet the growth is a strain for some schools. In the poorer regions of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, class sizes are now "too large to manage," says Venita Kaul, who oversees World Bank education projects in India. The Bank is providing $500 million for the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan budget over three years until 2007.

Despite increased enrollments, graduation ratios are falling -- even in top states such as Maharashtra, where Bombay is located. This year, 57% of the 10th-grade students in Maharashtra passed their final exams -- a big drop from last year when 67% cleared the exam. "We aim for a zero dropout and failure rate," says Abasaheb Jadav, who is project director for the federal government's Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan in Bombay. Good intentions aside, the experts say India's educational system faces its most serious challenges at the classroom level.

Start with the teachers. State-employed teachers earn up to $300 a month and often four times as much as private school teachers. But they are poorly trained, unmotivated, and often commandeered for other government services like election duty or overseeing polio vaccination drives. Consequently, teacher -- and hence student -- absenteeism is high. At the same time, increased enrollments -- thanks to the midday meal now required in all schools -- have caused a teacher shortage. As a result, in many schools, teachers have to handle up to four different grades at once, another blow to the quality of schooling.

Another issue is infrastructure. The government is boosting spending on schools, books, and classroom equipment, but the funding often doesn't reach the remote rural areas. In Bihar, India's poorest state, schools are crumbling buildings lacking roofs, windows, or blackboards. In Behrampur, a village about three hours away from the capital of Patna, the broken-down single-room school serves as a playground for the village's 200 children. Locals say the schoolmaster comes by every three or four days. Devbali Rai, a 30-year-old farmer, is near despair. "We want schooling. Our children must study," he says.

CURRICULUM CRISIS

Adding to the cauldron of problems is a curriculum crisis fueled by political rivalries. In 1998, when the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party won the national elections, education became the first target of revisionist historians. School textbooks were rewritten to reflect the BJP's ultra-nationalist ideology. Then the Congress government reverted to the original facts when its party defeated the BJP in national elections last year. Now parents and teachers worry that another election will mean more tinkering with the school syllabi and textbooks. "This oscillating between the orthodoxies of the right and the left, the yo-yo-like swings in curricula, is driving parents and teachers mad," says Kanti Bajpai, headmaster of the Doon School, the country's most elite school.

All these difficulties are accelerating the rush to India's 100,000-plus private schools. For decades private schools such as the Doon School, modeled after Britain's Eton, have catered to the elite. Now even poor students are enrolling in private schools, where the tuition can range from $24 a year in remote villages to $15,000 at the top end. In underdeveloped states many private schools are just single rooms in village homes. But even in cramped surroundings students learn enough to take a school-graduating exam.

Despite the proliferation of private schools, few experts believe they are the solution to India's educational challenges. True, they tend to be better than their state counterparts. But many are unregulated, and they still serve just a fraction of the population. Privatizing education, while often suggested by experts, isn't the answer either. India is too large, and many of its poorest parts are so remote that few private educators would want to teach there.

Yet some experiments are taking place that could provide models for education reform. ICICI Bank has invested in organizations such as Vidya Bhavan Society that are experimenting with alternate teaching systems to replace rote memorization. One of its projects is in the state of Chattisgarh, which three years ago was carved out of the large and poor state of Madhya Pradesh with the idea that smaller states could be governed more easily. "We were new and inexperienced, we needed everyone's help," recalls Sanjay Kumar Ojha, an official whom New Delhi sent to help the state's Education Dept. Ojha and team have readied a new set of textbooks, plus teacher recruiting and training programs, in just two years. The new curriculums will be introduced in 2006. If successful, Chattisgarh could become a model.

Encouraged by such efforts, Pratham's Chavan confidently predicts "a major change in the provision of education" in the coming years. The driving force will be parents who desperately want to educate their children in English. In Kashmir, the government has already switched to an English-language-based school education from the first grade. Even in conservative, Hindi-dominated Rajasthan, English as a language is now taught from the first grade. The state of Kerala, which stood alone in India for its 99% literacy rate, is now joined by Mizoram and Himachal Pradesh in the north. Such efforts could one day help India close its education gap.

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Rahul Goyal (210-OB '03) is doing his computer engineering at BITS, Pilani-Dubai Campus. He is currently on his practice school program at NCR Global Holdings Ltd., Jebel Ali, Dubai.

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Amit Khandelwal (382-TA '92) and his wife Anjali were blessed with a baby boy recently. The boy has been named Aadit.

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Chandrajit "Kim" Singh (600-HA '88) is going to Vienna, Austria in September for advanced studies and is looking for advice on accomodations. Please

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In the vigil held in memory of the victims of the London bombings at Trafalgar Square in London on July 14th, a poem by Vikram Seth was read out by the Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police. The following morning BBC hosted Anish Kapoor who spoke about his forthcoming project of building the New York monument in memory of the September 11 victims.

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Ramesh Thadani (24-H '60) is currently a consultant to the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS foundation, Washington DC. Prior to that he was the EVP of Biomedical Services with the American Red Cross.

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Nimai Swaroop (11-HA '96) has joined Shell as the EMEA Marketing Manager and is looking after all Attraction & Recruitment activity for Shell in those regions. He is interested in meeting Doscos based in Europe.

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Devpreet Das (330-KA '90) has joined Moody's Investor Service as a Credit Analyst covering the North American Media and Telecommunications industry. He is based out of Toronto, Canada but will also work out of their New York office. Devpreet was earlier at RBC Capital Markets in New York working in their Telecom/Media Investment Banking division.

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Read the August 6th edition of the Doon School Weekly (PDF). The issue includes a a commentary on how terrorism is changing the world and another on the notion of "sneaking."

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