How many of today's _Pizzahut, McDonald, Tacobell, Starbucks oriented Indian youth can relate to this
"My socialist childhood taught me that most of India is delightfully, wonderfully third class. As a child and a student, I loved the word "third class." While travelling in trains, I always felt that first class was distant, second class was prim and aspirational, but third class was a celebration of its own resilience, a miraculous space. A third-class compartment, despite scarcity, always conveyed a sense of surplus, a readiness to absorb more. If first class was exclusive, third class was socialist and hospitable. Even in school, I loved all the third-class minds in class. They huddled in the back creating a wonderfully esoteric culture of their own. Failure was a livable ecology that the first-class minds never understood. Third class as a category provided a sense of a lived democracy, popular but never populist. For me, third class captured the very idea of socialism, the Indian notion of justice that always believed that every man deserved one more "chance." The idea of justice, in fact, was captured in the notion of giving everyone that one chance. People claimed that third class emerges when people have little. Today, third class sounds like a death sentence, a denial of possibilities. In an aspirational world, a third class is an also-ran. Yet, in the socialist world, at the level of folklore, third class was an ecology of tolerance, providing a sense that most people would not succeed and yet life was worth living. Yet oddly, even the world of third class celebrated the first-class-first. An occasional success story provided a shared fraternity for all those who failed to make it. Third class was a domain of storytelling, an ArabianNights world where every struggle, every exam, every test you took to keep your neck above water acquired a heroic quality.
Third class was livable, but the idea of the third world was not. I believe economists and development experts coined the term "third world." It took the fun out of third class. Now third class was mediocre, backward, and underdeveloped. Deep down, there was a sense that an exam was not merely a sociological fact-it was also a political construct, a social way of defining success and failure. The idea of failure was not about success but whether you were a failed society. Dharampal, in his study of the British archives, showed that colonialism was an attempt to establish the epistemology of failure. For their power to be legitimate, the British had to prove that India was a defeated society. Dharampal argued that education and colonialism created totalizing fictions of examination success and failure. Charles Macaulay defined the colonial idea of examination in India (Sharp 1919). When he claimed that all the civilization of India is not worth a shelf of western books, he defined the rules of the game. By creating a "Mandarin Babu" system as the democracy of the exam, Macaulay outlined the future of Indian society. We became a nation of clerks, of exam givers, where success and failure in giving exams determined the future of our society. Macaulay's Minute, followed by Wood's Despatch of 1854 (Mahamood 1906, 84-5), created the basis of India as an examination society. A wag once called it the dictatorship of the "filariat" rather than the proletariat.
One has to realize there is not much difference between Macaulay's Minute and President Mukherjee's concern for the failure of science today. It was as if an accountant had turned epistemologist to explain the success and failure of our society. Macaulay was Mukherjee's forerunner in the rankings game."
"My socialist childhood taught me that most of India is delightfully, wonderfully third class. As a child and a student, I loved the word "third class." While travelling in trains, I always felt that first class was distant, second class was prim and aspirational, but third class was a celebration of its own resilience, a miraculous space. A third-class compartment, despite scarcity, always conveyed a sense of surplus, a readiness to absorb more. If first class was exclusive, third class was socialist and hospitable. Even in school, I loved all the third-class minds in class. They huddled in the back creating a wonderfully esoteric culture of their own. Failure was a livable ecology that the first-class minds never understood. Third class as a category provided a sense of a lived democracy, popular but never populist. For me, third class captured the very idea of socialism, the Indian notion of justice that always believed that every man deserved one more "chance." The idea of justice, in fact, was captured in the notion of giving everyone that one chance. People claimed that third class emerges when people have little. Today, third class sounds like a death sentence, a denial of possibilities. In an aspirational world, a third class is an also-ran. Yet, in the socialist world, at the level of folklore, third class was an ecology of tolerance, providing a sense that most people would not succeed and yet life was worth living. Yet oddly, even the world of third class celebrated the first-class-first. An occasional success story provided a shared fraternity for all those who failed to make it. Third class was a domain of storytelling, an ArabianNights world where every struggle, every exam, every test you took to keep your neck above water acquired a heroic quality.
Third class was livable, but the idea of the third world was not. I believe economists and development experts coined the term "third world." It took the fun out of third class. Now third class was mediocre, backward, and underdeveloped. Deep down, there was a sense that an exam was not merely a sociological fact-it was also a political construct, a social way of defining success and failure. The idea of failure was not about success but whether you were a failed society. Dharampal, in his study of the British archives, showed that colonialism was an attempt to establish the epistemology of failure. For their power to be legitimate, the British had to prove that India was a defeated society. Dharampal argued that education and colonialism created totalizing fictions of examination success and failure. Charles Macaulay defined the colonial idea of examination in India (Sharp 1919). When he claimed that all the civilization of India is not worth a shelf of western books, he defined the rules of the game. By creating a "Mandarin Babu" system as the democracy of the exam, Macaulay outlined the future of Indian society. We became a nation of clerks, of exam givers, where success and failure in giving exams determined the future of our society. Macaulay's Minute, followed by Wood's Despatch of 1854 (Mahamood 1906, 84-5), created the basis of India as an examination society. A wag once called it the dictatorship of the "filariat" rather than the proletariat.
One has to realize there is not much difference between Macaulay's Minute and President Mukherjee's concern for the failure of science today. It was as if an accountant had turned epistemologist to explain the success and failure of our society. Macaulay was Mukherjee's forerunner in the rankings game."
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