Chapter One

Ranting in English, Chanting in Sanskrit

I can measure the passages of my life by the nation's milestones. When I was born, we were fighting to get the British out of India. By the time I went to school, we were free and we thought we would soon enter a new paradise. During my school days in the 1950s, Nehru set about building a proud new nation based on democracy, socialism, and secularism. When I went to work in the sixties I discovered that we had become economically enslaved and socialism was leading us to statism. By the time I got married and we had children, Indira Gandhi was creating dynastic rule and leading us into a ditch. When she declared the Emergency in the mid-seventies, we knew that political freedom was gone, and paradise was lost. Mercifully, the Emergency lasted only twenty-two months, and we soon recovered our political freedom. Just before I took early retirement in the early nineties, Narasimha Rao delivered us our economic freedom. It doesn't matter who will be ruling India when I die, because democracy has got entrenched and its institutions are best run by modest men. Thanks to the reforms, we have glimpsed paradise again and are on our way to regaining it. We have climbed to a 7 percent econom ... read full excerpt from India Unbound ebook