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BOOKS
Tomorrow's Time
Escaping
India's journey into the millenarian future
By
Bhaskar Ghose
The
advent of the millennium spawned a number of events; celebrations, parties,
fireworks displays and a great deal else. There was also much comment;
predictions were made about the nature of the new millennium, some dire,
some ecstatic, and there were some essays which looked back and contrasted
what had passed with what was to come. Sadly, most of the ones one read
were patchy, casually written pieces, saying very little that was original,
aspects or issues of which one was not already aware.
What marks
out this collection of essays edited by Romila Thapar is not that everything
said in all the essays is new, but that the arguments have been carefully
thought out and persuasively presented. In each one of them there is a
sense of perspective, a varying sense, true, but one that informs the
context throughout. The writers are all distinguished scholars and analysts
in their particular fields and one, N.R. Narayana Murthy, is chief executive
of a hugely successful it company; consequently, one comes to these essays
with a degree of expectation that is, happily, fulfilled more or less.
More rather than less.
Remarkable
though the collection is, its quality is rather uneven; some of the essays
sink into a bog of jargon the writer has created for himself. But only
a few. The others are lucidly and cogently argued. One wished some had
expanded a little on the issues they covered. It would have been very
interesting if Kaushik Basu had developed his essay a little further,
though it is, its brevity notwithstanding, one of the most forthright
and his irritated comment about the ways of the Delhi University branch
of the State Bank of India in the midst of the general move towards computerisation
will be diverting in its familiarity to many.
There is
a fascinating account of the growth of information technology by Narayana
Murthy, even though he is rather cautious about the directions this growth
may take in the next millennium. In fact, that is a characteristic of
every one of the essays; having reviewed the past and analysed the present,
the writers are hesitant to say anything very definite about the future.
In one sense this may be wise; visions of the future are best left to
the readers, having given them the contexts of both the past and the present.
But it tends to skew the essays, which dwell at some length on the events
and happenings in the past century and on prevalent conditions today and
then make a few, very tentative, comments about the future.
Weaving
all of these together is a luminous, enlightening introduction by Thapar.
She outlines the historical concepts of time, the cyclical and the linear,
and then places all the essays that follow in a dimension of time that
is truly millennial. In her words, "The intention of these essays
is not to present a blueprint for a utopia but to create an awareness
of the many dimensions to [the] interlocking of concerns which contribute
to the making of a better society."
This is
a book that deserves to be read, but not casually. To do that would be
to do a great injustice to the thought that has gone into the formulation
of the essays, and to the care and vision of the editor.
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