[nukkad] Ramesh Ramnathan's article in MINT

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My wife Swati and I lived overseas for several years, before returning in
1998. The regular non-resident Indian gatherings would have the usual
conversations about what ailed India. And we had all the "answers". "The
problem with India is…" was how most sentences would begin. Magic wands
being swished around, thousands of miles away, safe. On our visits to India,
we would grumble about the airports and the garbage and the traffic.

   Pretty soon though, these pontifications started feeling stale. One
particular experience was telling. We had just moved home to a new town in
Connecticut, sometime in the early 1990s. There was a flyer in the mailbox —
"Cleaning the park this Saturday. Beer after." The mailbox would invariably
be stuffed with messages like this, which we would promptly trash. Who had
the time, and weren't these the responsibility of government anyway? But we
had just moved in, and wanted to meet the neighbours. So, for purely selfish
reasons, we went.

   On Monday morning, when I reached the station to take the 6.35 commuter
train to Manhattan, I saw — in a suit, reading The Wall Street Journal — the
group leader of our park clean-up operation. We talked. Turned out he was a
banker like me. Volunteering for the local community was something he took
very seriously. There were others — in the school board, on the city budget
committee, and so on. These small acts of local engagement were related to
larger complicated ideas of democracy and government. I thought about my
life in India — I had never lifted my finger to volunteer for anything. Not
that I didn't want to, just that I didn't think it was expected of me.
  Swati and I realized that — like many middle-class Indians—we knew very
little about democracy and politics and government, besides the convenient
cardboard caricatures we carried around with us. Democracy in India was like
cricket — a spectator sport. We began to glimpse the massive shift required
in our minds to make democracy truly work in India. We felt the gnawing urge
to learn about all this, to return to India and actually make a difference.
   Since returning to India, our work has been a turbocharged daily lesson
in democracy and public change. While my experiences have increased the
respect I have for politicians, they have also reinforced the belief that we
cannot solve our country's challenges without significant citizen
participation, in ways that supplement and strengthen the system of
government.

  There are many educated Indians who wonder why this is necessary. I was
once asked by a friend: "Shouldn't the system work properly on its own, so
that I can devote all my energies to myself: being an effective person,
running my company efficiently and creatively?" She went on to say, "Each of
us could do this, isn't it? Focus on our own priorities: family, profession,
skills, etc." The question goes to the root of what we mean by democracy and
society, and whether the "system" is something independent of citizens. In
this increasingly complex world, we believe that we already have enough
responsibilities to manage; that our contribution to society happens through
the taxes we pay and the "honest citizen" lives we live.

  The relationship between individuals in a society and our government is an
unwritten social contract — we exchange some of our personal independence
for a common good in which each of us benefits. Among the political
scientists who have written about this social contract, Jean Jacques
Rousseau is arguably the most significant.

  In the past decade, the spirit of community has become a hot topic of
research, under the label "social capital". In a famous but contentious book
called Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam suggested that these community forces
representing social capital were at the root of larger political and
economic phenomena: The greater the social capital, the healthier that
society is. As Rajadhyaksha observed in his column, social capital is also
considered essential for markets to work efficiently.

  One aspect of an unwritten social contract is enforceability — a lot of
people are "free riders": not fulfilling their role, but not being noticed.
A healthy society is not some magic carpet that allows us to fly off in the
pursuit of our personal dreams, but rather a complex tapestry where each of
us has a strand to weave. At some tipping point, the weight of the free
riders overwhelms the contract and begins to tear the fabric. I believe that
urban India faces this risk.

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I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. 
-Henry David Thoreau, naturalist and author (1817-1862)
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