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
