The Mach III Mavericks

Attila, no mean economist herself, glared us down. As if we were precocious six-year-olds, she said sarcastically, “You can propose these ideas to a foreign university. If nothing, you may be given some bold thought award.” That did it. We began dreaming the fancy stuff: London School of Economics & Political Sciences, Harvard University, MIT...you get the drift. We didn’t believe they were bold, but what the heck. Then ‘real life’ intervened. We found other callings, shelved our ideas of “humane economics” and “real wealth” and “alternative isms” until two events happened, independent of each other, in two years: in 2009, Elinor Ostrom became the first woman economist to win the Nobel prize in economic sciences for her work on showing how common resources are successfully managed by people using them rather than by governments or private companies; and last year, the formidable Riane Eisler released her book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics, which received rave reviews from worthies such as Dr Jane Goodall and Gloria Steinem, among others. It was tempting to imagine the outcome if we had, individually or collectively, taken our economics—and our bold ideas—more seriously than we had back then; we might have done some quality research with such economists.

Boldness, whether it be in thought, action or imagination, comes rather naturally to the young. So it should, given the lack of burdens of personal and collective histories, their new-minted worldview, and a sense of daring, though, of course, the youth don’t hold a patent for boldness. As the nation gets younger—half of India’s current population is below 25 years of age and over 65 per cent below 35 years—it should presumably get bolder too. Can we safely reckon that the boldness quotient in India, had it been enumerated along with other census statistics, would be higher than it ever has been? Is this the boldest generation of young Indians—at least of young Indians living in the cities? Indeed, there are issues in ascribing characteristics or attributes to an entire set of people grouped only on the basis of their age, but boldness quotient is a broad-brush question.

From all that abounds around us, it would seem the boldness quotient is at its highest, young people playing with concepts that push the frontiers of life and life choices: wireless energy, water as fuel, trans-national research, robot-guided surgery, merging Picassos and Razas with the innumerable possibilities offered by e-design, making computers irrelevant, creating food in labs to feed the world’s burgeoning population, building holiday homes on the moon, even the ultimate idea of them all—to beat death. But it needn’t be just that one big idea: assertiveness can be shown in small actions too. For many young, upper-middle-class youths, their boldness quotient is expressed in strong personal choices, such as escaping from a hostel warden or PG landlord at 2 am for a weekend bash, indulging in rave parties, learning skydiving, walking out of their most-feared-teacher’s lecture, committing suicide, working with venomous snakes, walking confidently out of a sex-shop, ambling the city streets almost naked, raising adopted children as a single mother...the list can go on. The natural energy, ambition, innovative spirit comes through in some ideas put across at forums like TED (technology, entertainment, design), an idea-exchange conference that has quite a following online: tax systems that allow payers to decide how their money is spent, taxing stock profits at a percentage inversely proportional to the time of investment, turning jails into schools and building a world free from money of any kind.

Defying gravity A group of young people jubilates on the Mumbai seafront. (Photograph by Amit Haralkar)

A globalised economy and democratisation of information via the internet have created opportunities. Now, for many young people, especially those of the middle and lower-middle classes, boldness lies in doing what their parents did not imagine possible: Shrutika and Tejal Shitole, sisters growing up in Mumbai’s declining textile mill area, have travelled to MIT, Boston, as part of their grassroots urban research; there are those who have ventured into professions traditionally dominated by the “higher” castes; slum-dwelling young men who obtain home loans and work double shifts to pay the EMIs, and so on.

“For me, walking into a plush mall and spending a bomb on food would amount to doing something bold,” says Sushant Kadukar, an undergraduate who grew up in a Mumbai slum and whose father was a rickshaw-driver and mother a domestic help. For someone like Ruben Mascarenhas, a software engineer and coordinator of India Against Corruption in Mumbai, getting involved in the Anna Hazare campaign was a bold decision. “The boldest thing ever was that I was arrested thrice in a day,” he says. “I was afraid how my bosses would see it, but they gave me an additional two weeks off, considering the magnitude of the issue.” Across the board, choices that challenge the status quo are being made, in families and at workplaces. “In the globalised world, as cultures bang into one another, the young do get spunkier,” observes Dr Harish Shetty, one of Mumbai’s A-list psychiatrists. “Their software changes from reverence to acceptance-rejection. They move from an era of instruction to an era of dialogue.” Are they bold? They are, he says, in a limited sense.

The refreshing aspect is that many among them are aware of this limitednesss, as Ayesha D’Souza is. She made life changes that she believes are unconventional, turning vegetarian in a meat-eating family, eschewing a fat-salary job to work as national coordinator of ‘Kids for Tigers’, a programme run by Sanctuary magazine. “It’s the activists who are bold, not us, who sit in front of computer screens, but those guys of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society who go to the whaling sanctuary and use non-violent direct action to stop Japanese whalers from killing whales,” she says. “I’d like to be that fearless someday.” The boldness quotient in their big-ticket vision could be higher. Janaki Somaiya puts it well when she says, “We are a generation brought up to duplicate and multiply. Not enough of us are creators.” Not surprisingly, many admit to being comfortable when they take the safe, beaten path in choosing life partners.

Discussions in the public domain on the quality of boldness generally revolve around either of these two: corporate czars egging the government to be “bold in decision-making” or starlets who vie with one another to rid themselves of their scanty clothing to demonstrate a certain boldness. Say “bold” to the young these days, and they are most likely to ask, “9780 or 9900?” They are talking about the Blackberry handsets. Dumb you, talking about a generational attribute! Increasingly, consumption choices are being considered a measure of boldness itself, and consumption has become an index of personal—even a country’s—identity. But more choices in the marketplace, career fairs, gizmo-accessibility—all this does not necessarily make for boldness. “In fact, there are so many options and opportunities that there’s no reason for boldness,” says Dilip D’Souza, computer science professional and writer. “I think we were bolder in the past. My impression is that young people these days think of ideas and moves when, by and large, they have a safety net to fall back on.” This generation of youth is reacting against the ideologically driven approach of their parents (the youth of 1970s and 1980s) by being pragmatic, eclectic, focused and self-willed in their choices, offers Dr Kamala Ganesh, a leading sociologist. “This is not to say they are not idealistic,” she says. “They are harking back to the simple idealism of their grandparents’ generation, but without the grand cause, without the sense of history and without those notions of austerity and sacrifice.”

To approximate a boldness quotient is but an exercise in relativity; each generation fondly believes that, in its youth, it was bolder, more irreverent, more innovative, than any other. So does this generation of the young. But beyond the unconventional choices and an attitude of audaciousness lie the really bold ideas, ideas that can change the destinies of an entire people, ideas that make for a more humane and peaceful world. The boldest idea in India was, perhaps, the idea of independence. Nothing even comes close to it, as Dilip says.

The American Declaration of Independence was a bold document, as was Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man. Some would add the Constitution of India to that list too. Socrates and Plato were bold, as were Ismat Chugtai and Vijay Tendulkar. So too, all those scientists whose vision now shapes ours, from Darwin and Einstein to the string theorists and genetic engineers. The Occupy Wall Street protest is perhaps the boldest idea to come out of the US in a long time. Some truly bold ideas for India now would have to be those that make India a better place, ideas that address social and economic inequalities, poverty, and increasingly, the digital divide. And, we cannot afford that they remain ideas.