The Cultural Vista

(Cartoon by RGJ --  Richard Graham Jolley)

(Written in London, 5th June 2018)

Yesterday I spent an afternoon at the (British) National Portrait Gallery just off Trafalgar Square and St-Martin-in-the-Fields. A vast collection of paintings of royalty, nobility and their hangers-on. Vile creatures, bold creatures, some ugly and some surprisingly handsome (Milton!) The collection abounded with bounders and adventurers who had built the empire. Many of those whose faces we saw hanging there had lost their heads. Literally.  
And then there was the unabashed, unapologetic portrayal of the colonists as heroes. Clive, Wellington, the whole lot of folks whom we would arraign as war criminals today. But the more redeeming part of the gallery was the large number of portraits of poets, painters, artists and scientists. The people who made the British empire much much richer than a Brutish Empire.  
Wandering around the gallery, I was reminded of my father’s dream for the Central Vista in Delhi. I think this idea had been in his head ever since the 50s, when he first visited Washington DC: after all the Vista is modelled after Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant’s plan for the Mall there.  
From what I recall, his vision grew out of a concept where the cultural heart of the nation grew around the intersection of the Raj Path and Jan Path down to India Gate. Now that the new republic had democratised the two roads from being King’s Way and Queen’s Way (*), and the (roughly west-side) area from Jan Path up to Rashtrapati Bhavan ceded to the political life of the nation, the part (roughly) to the east could be devoted to the Cultural Nation.  
The National Museum had already come up on Janpath, next to the Archaeological Survey, and from the 70s and well into the 80s, it was to grow under the vision of scholars such as Sivaramakrishnan and dynamos such as Laxmi Sihare. Nonetheless he chafed under the mealy objections of bureaucrats unwilling to give more space to a much larger museum, such as the one that Sihare had envisaged.  
On the other side of Raj Path, the National Archives had long been established, and the new parliament libraries served to record the political developments of our democracy.
My father saw the C-Hexagon as the natural location for a series of museums for the arts and sciences. The buildings were palaces of the princely kingdoms, and could be repurposed. Jaipur House had already become the National Gallery for Modern Art, though the gallery space would soon clearly become inadequate. While the buildings carried the legacy of the princely states, their very names could serve to highlight the notion that this was a national project: Hyderabad, Patiala, Jaipur, Bikaner,...
He was for pulling down the unsightly little bungalows in Prince’s Park and reclaiming the ugly barracks of Raksha Bhawan to develop a National Portrait Gallery comprising mainly photographs and a few selected paintings focussing on the great singers, artists, scholars, writers (with a slightly less important but unavoidable space devoted to politicians). On the other side, he saw the need for a National Landscape Gallery to document the extraordinary variety and beauty of the land and sea of India. The defence services of course were loth to give up any land.
My father had earlier influenced the inclusion of a larger set of exhibits documenting the various strands of the Freedom movement (from the 1750s to 1948) in Gandhi Smriti, but that exhibit had been dismantled and destroyed at the insistence of the Gandhians (during Morarji-bhai Desai's tenure as PM) who wanted it to be exclusively a museum to Gandhi. (The space has been occupied by tawdry tableaux and ersatz objects). The corresponding scholarly record in documents about the freedom movement fortunately survived in the Nehru Memorial Library (despite efforts to make it exclusively a mausoleum to Nehru). However, this is now under severe threat, but, hell, from the Other Side. 
He also talked of the need for National Centres for the Performing Arts (Dance, Music and Drama) off the central vista, each with a carefully designed auditorium suited for the particular art forms -- apart from NCPA in Bombay -- and distinct from the various auditoriums around Mandi House. The auditorium at Siri Fort, though, was to him an exemplar of what an auditorium should not be -- poor acoustics (I remarked how one could hear distinct echoes when Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic played there), and a relatively small lobby, where the entire audience could not be accommodated without jostling. And the preposterous positioning of the lavatories.  
In the 80s and early 90s, my father got to see part of his vision realised. He was involved in a very intense way in the setting up of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. This came up on the northern side of the Central Vista, and was meant to house all the folk arts, both visual and performance, as well as our rich linguistic heritage. Kapila Vatsyayan has done a stellar job in giving this project a scholarly vision, although this enterprise suffered a rather rude disruption in the late 90s-early 2000s. The building, a large and expensive project, when it did come up disappointed him for the sheer lack of large exhibition space. My father had worked with Charles and Ray Eames, and from them had learnt the importance of space and light in exhibitions and for the movement of people through them. 
There is a small group of people who want to preserve the Lutyens Bungalow Zone, seeing it as a buffer against ugly modernity. I think my father concurred only slightly with them... he did not favour “a more efficient use of the space” for large office buildings or sarkari housing, but did not think that the bungalows had any intrinsic architectural value. This view of his probably gained even greater resonance when he was delving through the papers of Edwin Lutyens when writing a book about the Rashtrapati Bhavan (Rashtrapati Bhavan: The Story of the President's House, Publications Division), where he found that Lutyens in fact detested bungalows and PWD construction, and use to refer to them as “Bungle-Oh”.
(*) A friend of mine waggishly remarks that it is somehow apposite that Rajpath and Janpath are forever at cross purposes.
Postscript 5 June 2025: With the huge "redevelopment" of the Central Vista in 2020 onwards, this vision cannot be realised. Sarkari Delhi has expanded with more government buildings coming up along both sides of what is now been renamed Kartavya Path (so now, the people and duty are at cross purposes). The old Government houses, North and South Block are supposed to become museums -- to what, one is not very sure (perhaps more officially blessed tacky-tawdry displays) ... and access will likely be harder, given that security will be reluctant to let people in so close to the Rashtrapati Bhawan.

Dismal Points

 «The cut-off for candidates for qualifying the JEE Main Session 2 Paper 1 is from 100 to 93.1023262»

7 significant digits! Our first class in Chem 101 at IITK ended with a quiz where we had to do some questions of the kind

7.2+0.0002= ____ .

You got it wrong if you wrote 7.2002. (BTW, Meta AI first suggested 7.20002 and then when I ignored that, suggested 7.2)

For an IIT professor who has worked there for over 3 decades (and who has headed one of the most sought-after departments), I have kept myself blissfully clear of the setting of JEE papers and the admission processes (other than -- many years ago -- being part of invigilation oversight teams).

I am not sure what the JEE really tests for these days, especially when it is conducted as a exam that employs Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs). While analytical abilities and some conceptual knowledge are tested, it is not clear whether this correlates well with the ability to synthesise good programs, proofs, or engineering systems that solve real-world problems. Negative marking only makes it harder to sift the imaginative from those who have been through a coaching process where pattern-matching skills are perfected. Even a nodding acquaintance with the Pigeon-hole Principle should convince us that the scores given to us by the JEE process would have several students earning the same marks, with ties broken using convoluted formulas so as to rank students according to a total order. (I continue to wonder why Indians are so quick to seek an immutable rank order in almost every examination process).

Perhaps one should not read too much into JEE results other than seeing the test as a filter that measures to a modest degree the preparedness of a student for engaging with undergraduate education offered in an IIT. For that purpose, no significant digits after the decimal point are really needed.

The other chief virtue of the JEE, as I see it today, is that it is competently administered, and that it has over the years largely kept itself free of the taints that afflict many of our public higher educational institutions. (I am, of course, aware of the small-minded manipulations over the selection some years ago that my whistle-blower friend Rajeev Kumar has tirelessly crusaded against). This "objectivity" enables us within the IIT system to get on with teaching our classes without having to worry about endless litigation on whether someone was unfairly denied an opportunity of studying at an IIT.

Six decades is perhaps a long enough period to develop a testing methodology, such as ETS has done over the several decades, on the basis of which one can develop a test the outcomes of which correlate well with something other than being able to perform well on such tests.

Books read in 2025

Orbital (Samantha Harvey, 2024)

I started the year finishing a book I started in the last days of 2024, the absolutely brilliant short novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey which had won the Booker Prize.   I hope I will have time to reread the book -- it is so exquisite, and has the virtue of being just 136 pages.  

Windfall (Desmond Bagley, 1982)

When we were teenagers, the genre my friends and I enjoyed the most were a class of thrillers written by (mainly British) authors such as Alistair MacLean and Desmond Bagley, featuring resourceful heroes pitted against villains (MacLean would use the phrase "the ungodly").  Such books were common in the lending libraries that children of professional middle-class Indians living in cities could access in the 1960s and 1970s.  Very occasionally a school library would buy them, perhaps because some teacher thought it was better that children read such thrillers rather than not read at all.  Also, each of us would also somehow manage to buy a few novels of this kind from our pocket money --  they were commonly available in bookshops in those days, certainly in Khan Market.   And especially in the bookshops or stalls at train stations, not just the Higginbothams of our times but even in those little carts that vendors plied on the platforms.  

Then there would be the usual frenetic exchange of such books within our circle of friends -- you were expected to return them within a few days, a week at the most.  Friendships could come unstuck if you broke that compact, taking too long to return a book or comic, or horror of horrors, losing it.  There was a constant fear of comics being confiscated by a parent, but not such books.   No one would anyway believe you lost it -- you were deemed unreliable thereafter.   And you would have to be a real idiot to take them to school and have them confiscated there. 

Bagley was a journalist and thriller writer who wrote books such as The Golden Keel, High Citadel, The Vivero Letter, The Tightrope Men, The Freedom Trap (which was filmed as The Mackintosh Man) and The Snow Tiger.  Windfall (1982) was the last thriller published while he was alive.  I saw this book in the library of the Delhi Gymkhana Club, a paperback that the library had had bound in a red hardback with the title and author's last name imprinted in gold lettering.  I immediately  picked it out since I was curious to revisit the kind of books I read nearly 5 decades ago, and  see whether the writers of this genre had any real quality to their writing. Beyond entertainment.   

I cannot say that this particular book by Bagley was remarkable for its writing.  The action in this novel is set mainly in Kenya, with some sequences in Los Angeles, New York and London.  Having lived in Africa, and travelling there, Bagley had some feel for that continent's terrain, vegetation and people.  He also has a good sense of geopolitics in the African context, with the characters commenting on the realities of borders. tribal and political allegiances in East and South Africa. This being the 1980s, the main baddies in the novel were the white South Africans.  The main protagonist Max Stafford (British) runs a security agency after retiring as a colonel in the British military intelligence -- there is nothing particularly charismatic about him.  Some of his collaborators and associates have capabilities that are a bit exaggerated. [There also are some odd names -- a Sikh called Nair Singh and a minor character called Natterjee, who is said to be a Parsi.  But hey, this was Kenya, and names could get transcribed differently there.]   The descriptions of the colonial clubs and colonies in Nairobi and hotels there and further into the bush sound reasonably authentic. A lot of cold beer and some gin is drunk by all (Nair Singh drinks juice or lassi though).  I got to learn a charming phrase for speed-breakers on the road: "sleeping policemen".

The Secret Hours (Mick Herron)

Mick Herron, creator of Slow Horses, is one of my favourite authors today.  Yes, yes, the comparisons with John Le Carré will be inevitable, but Herron has created some most memorable characters such as Jackson Lamb, Diana Taverner, Molly Doran and others.  He also has the ability to coin memorable phrases, not all of which can be repeated in polite company. 

The Secret Hours is a stand-alone novel, set in the present but with the past and a foreign country.  It has action happening in the present, and you can somewhat recognise a former PM.  It also has an interlaced deposition about actions from the past that cast long shadows.  I don't want to give away the plot, but characters from the Slow Horses series do appear, sometimes in the background (such as the Old Bastard). Diana Taverner as First Desk is one of the main characters in the present, together with others such as a retired academic and two civil servants.  The real story however is a remembrance of times past, a couple years after when the Wall came tumbling down.

Seeing (Jose Saramago)

An election takes place on a rainy day in the capital.

The Vegetarian (Han Kang)  (Translator: Deborah Smith)

An amazingly written and somewhat terrifying book about a Korean woman Yeong-hye who decides to become completely vegetarian following a bloody and brutal dream.   This abrupt and resolute decision (which follows an earlier decision to not wear a bra) and its sequelae are described in haunting prose, chronicling the protagonist's dramatic mental and physical deterioration in a series of grotesque events. The novel is organised in three parts, each from the perspectives of three people related to her and affected by this decision:  The first section is a narration by her husband Mr Cheong, with the Dream interlaced.  It culminates in Yeong-hye slashing her wrists when her bullying and violent father tries to force-feed her meat, leading to her being hospitalised. The second part (set two years later) focuses on her older sister In-hye's artist husband and his obsessive artistic project involving Yeong-hye, and its disastrous consequences.  The third part (set about a year later) focuses on In-hye and her relationship with her younger sister, now in a remote psychiatric hospital, and her own memories of her childhood, life and her young child.   This is an engrossing but deeply disquieting short novel that questions human nature and the mind. 

London Rules (Mick Herron)

The fifth novel in the Slow Horses series.   About Roddy Ho blissfully unaware of being scammed by  "his hot girl-friend" Kim, who is being played by North Korean sleeper agents.  Those young baddies had committed a massacre at Abbotsfield, then killed Penguins at the Watering Hole, left a (dud) bomb on a train, etc. Shirley Dander is managing her anger, and staying off coke for many many days at a stretch, and missing Marcus.  Louisa is still moping about Min.  Ho is hauled off to the Park, and Slough House placed under a lock-down by the Dogs, improbably only Emma Flyte there to enforce it; but she is outwitted by Lamb, and the Slow Horses escape from being locked down to track down the terrorists.

First Desk Claude Whelan had (for reasons not so clear) an ancient Park playbook op leaked sometime in the past.   Lamb protects his Slow Horses -- especially Ho (who had passed the document to Kim) and JK Coe, who accidentally knocks a paint tin from a height onto a populist pro-Brexit MP, and the others who mess up in different ways.  A Muslim politician whom the PM supports has skeletons to hide.  Di Taverner uses the opportunity to discredit Whelan and position herself in pole position for First Desk, and Lamb (with some help from Molly Doran) somehow is able to make a deal to shield his joes.   London Rules = CYA.   

Joe Country (Mick Herron)

The sixth novel in the Slow Horses series.  It's snowing in London but much more in Wales. 

Min Harper's son Lucas sees a Royal when he shouldn't and decides to cash in on it.  Except River's dad Harkness and his men are tasked (indirectly by the disgraced ex-minister  Peter Judd) with silencing him.  Louisa to the rescue, after a weird meeting with Clare Harper, now Addison.  Standish is buying bottles of wine after Di Taverner had told her (end of London Rules) how Partner really died.  Lamb tells her more details later.   River, JK Coe and Shirley rush off as support.  So does Emma.

Bad Actors (Mick Herron)

The eighth novel in the Slow Horses series.

Upstream (Mary Oliver)

Absolutely lyrical.  Poetry.

Heart Lamp (Banu Mushtaq, tr. from Kannada to English by Deepa Bhasthi)

A set of very moving short stories, focussing on the lives and seemingly small situations that loom large faced by  the muslim community in Karnataka (and mainly women).  An inch of ivory, delicately carved, captures the dilemmas they face.   (Details:)

The first story is a moving story of love and marriage, and labour in both senses of the word. 

I did not get the point of the story The Red Lungis.

The translation by Deepa Bhasthi is very deft, low-key and unselfconscious, leaving in many Kannada (and Dakkhani) words without an intrusive explication or a cack-handed English version.  This decision adds to the cultural richness of the narratives, and these terms not come across as a pretension to exoticness.  The translation reads very smoothly and there aren't moments where the reader feels let down. (There are a few places where the copy editor could have made some suggestions, but we shouldn't quibble).  

Any Calumn by Tavleen after Deleting Sentences Containing First-person Pronouns

Laxman's age

 I  am puzzled by the media reporting that RK Laxman was born in 1921 and died aged 93/94.  I attribute this to laziness and using Wikipedia as a source.  (Encyclopedia Brit says 1924, as did The Hindu, whose byline initially  had (1924-2015), but it was changed to be consistent with the obit written by Meena Menon).

Laxman was one of my father's close friends from their teenage days in Mysore, neighbours in fact in Laxmipuram.   Laxman was a year below my father in college.   Keeping in touch over the years, they  were part of a   "gang of four" close college friends:  Kittu (the well-known filmmaker MV Krishnaswamy, b August 1923), TS Satyan (the famous photographer, b Dec 1923), Shouri (HY Sharada Prasad, b April 1924) and Laxman (b Oct 1924) -- laugh a minute conversations, often quite quite wicked about their friends and others. 

For some reason, perhaps as late as 2011, Laxman's family seems to have told a journalist that he was actually born in 1921, which makes little sense in relation to the timeline of his classmates' lives.

On the Death of Steve Jobs 2011-10-05

I was really tired, and didn’t think I had anything particularly profound to say about Steve Jobs, so I turned down a request to appear on TV to speak about him.   There was this media hype and over-the-top coverage here in India too, and I was in no mood to be party to it.  However,  I was rather amused by this great Indian middle-class need to identify in some way with  this genius who combined good taste, innovation and commercial success to an extraordinary degree  --- the CEO of the second largest company in the world, someone whose rise from the depths of commercial failure to the pinnacle of glory inspired a veritable fan following of millions.  It is perhaps some deep-seated desire in our elite to identify with success, to announce that we too are part of the world elite, that we share this experience, that some of the stardust of celebrity will rub off on us.  But watching the various shows,  I was quite disappointed since there wasn’t anything insightful in what the talking heads and the over-eager anchors had to say.    So I felt that I should perhaps put down what I might have said had I been a talking head¹.   (Some print articles have begun to appear that make more insightful points, relevant to India and to how Apple products are affecting lives.²) 

 

Steve Jobs, who can best be described as a digital impresario, certainly was charisma personified. I greatly admired (it is difficult to use the past tense, since his work lives on) his work, for it brought an elegance and a simplicity to technology. Computer technology naturally tends to manifest itself in complexity, often making complexity its badge of honour.    In the mid-late eighties, I wrote a handful of research papers during my graduate school years on a Macintosh, and greatly appreciated the intuitive interface and ease with which a newbie could get started on the machine.  I have always held that a device is well designed if you do not need a user manual to get started.   Most consumer electronic products fail on that count. I currently work on two iMacs, a Mac mini, a MacBook, having put to pasture an earlier Mac laptop, not counting an iPad on the way, and have several iPods in the house.  I abandoned the PC running the politically correct Ubuntu because of the needless complexity in installing software, which happens ^“out of a box” on an iMac, thanks to Jobs’s understanding that users will willingly install trusted software if the system is end-to-end secure.  And I had never really warmed to the lax security and bewilderingly crowded user interface of the Microsoft stable.  So count me in as an Apple addict even if I don’t sport an iPhone³.

 

Steve Jobs presented a refreshing alternative to geeky, clunky computing technology.   Yes, the man was a genius.  But let us make it clear that he wasn’t a Leonardo, the kind of polymath who comes once a millennium, an artist, scientist, inventor, and visionary whose ideas were centuries ahead of their time.  Nor was he an Edison, the other personality to whom he was being likened.  Edison’s inventions went way beyond the light bulb, extending to the entire system of electricity generation, distribution, standardisation and consumption.  All this apart from his phonographs, cameras, projectors and a thousand other inventions.  Jobs’s innovations are unlikely to affect us on such a grand scale a hundred years later.  Nor is it even accurate to say that he affected more people with his technological innovations than anyone else in our times.  Such accolades can only be given to the scientists who have multiplied our food production, through the use of nitrogen fertiliser or hybrid crops, or those who have defeated disease through vaccinations or the development of disease-combating chemicals and medicines.   

 

While Malcolm Gladwell has noted that Jobs and Gates happened to be at the right place at the right time, Steve Jobs was nonetheless someone special --- apart from seeing the potential of a technological invention, he had the farsightedness to see how a user could relate to it.    He was able to take an artistic concept, marry it with an artisan’s realisation and then produce a device with mass market appeal on a grand scale.  Not just once but over and over.  A true Modern. (Let’s not call him “post-modern”, a term which usually carries connotations of a stance where  scale, quality and precision associated with industrial-level production are deprecated in favour of the artisanal).  

 

For this reason, I would call Jobs a great designer.  Not just an obsessive CEO who developed good looking products that everyone aspired to own.   He was indeed one who belonged to the tradition of  American design embodied by Charles and Ray Eames.  For Jobs, as for Eames, form comes from function.  As Jobs did with the mouse and the graphical user interface and the  personal computer (none of which concepts he invented) integrating them into a system with an intuitive user appeal,  Eames (with Eero Saarinen) took the technologies for moulding plywood (pioneered by Alvar Aalto) and materials such as plastic, fibreglass, wire-meshes and applied them to chairs (which needless to say, he did not invent).  And he was able to scale this innovation to mass production levels for Herman Miller.   Charles Eames revolutionised furniture, and seating in particular, the way Jobs would later make his ding on personalised computing, communication and music.

 

In the world of mass communication and entertainment too, Jobs followed the tradition of the Eames couple.  Charles and Ray Eames produced stunning innovations such as the exhibitions “Mathematica:…”  for IBM, the Nehru exhibition, then “A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age” and “The World of Franklin and Jefferson” (1975–1977).  And  extraordinary movies such as “Powers of Ten”, “Tops” and “The Toy Toccata”.   Jobs would take the late great musician Frank Zappa’s idea of selling songs over the internet, marry it with the WebObjects technologies developed in his wilderness years at Next, and build iTunes and the Apple Store.  And Jobs innovated with Pixar, which produced some of the most durable animation films of recent days.

 

What was it about the products of Jobs and the Eames couple that so strike a chord among the masses, while not compromising on quality and beauty?  It is the way that they mercilessly applied Occam’s Razor (even as Jobs did not apply the razor to his face) to  everything they did, stripping a concept down to its basic functionality, and letting the form evolve from it, clothed in the right selection of materials.  This minimalist design paradigm comes not just from good taste but an internalised deep philosophical position of getting rid of clutter.   Even the way Jobs dressed was minimalist — simple, contemporary, modern urban.  Black mock turtle neck (St Croix), jeans (Levis 501), sneakers (New Balance 991).   All simple and mass-produced in a thoroughly modern milieu.

 

The anchors in various TV shows then got round to voicing the question why India has not produced a Steve Jobs.  The short answer is that the socio-economic environment prevailing in our country does not encourage innovation, and the investment and economic structures do not make production on a mass scale easy.  There is a great deal of risk aversion, and failures are not looked at as learning experiences but are frowned upon, and the person is labelled for life as a failure.  This is in stark contrast to Jobs’s country, where you are not branded a failure forever if one of your ideas did not succeed.  The phoenix can rise there, not here.   Indeed, for almost every one of his successes, Jobs had a failure.  But he took the good parts of the failed product or idea, and turned it into something that could drive or hold together his next innovation (for example, the important role played by WebObjects and NextSTEP in the Apple Store infrastructure).  

 

Let us look at education.  The important message in Jobs’s education is not that he was a college drop-out, but rather that he was able to “drop in” on various courses that interested him at Reed College, while officially not a student.  In his Stanford speech, he mentions the central role that typography played in shaping his sense of taste.  Would you find a single university in India where a great liberal arts education meets the world of technology⁴? Unfortunately, we in India have taken CP Snow’s Two Cultures too far, and therefore shortchange ourselves.   We have designed universities where we have over-regulated what a young person can study⁵.  So our youth cannot “drop in” on what interests them, as Jobs so eloquently spoke about in his Stanford commencement speech.   When Ashok Vajpeyi was Vice-Chancellor of the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishwavidyalaya, his liberal vision allowed my colleague Wagish Shukla to enlist my help in devising an IT curriculum for a true liberal arts programme.  That vision was sadly abandoned to the orthodoxy of keeping it a university for the propagation of Hindi.

 

Oh, and another thing we should learn from the extraordinary success of Jobs:  Apple doesn’t do market surveys, it propounds and follows a vision.  It isn’t timid in doing so.  There are some inevitable missteps, but the next version of the product is an improvement. As the company’s history teaches us, most tellingly in the years when Jobs was exiled by managers, the traditional management culture is not just pernicious, it can rob an enterprise of its soul.

A padyatri who was not pedestrian (Remembering Dinesh Mohan)

“Every university needs a crazy professor,” my uncle Prof. Mohan Ram used to say (referring to his colleagues Prof. JPS Uberoi and Prof. CR Babu).  In my first year at IIT Delhi, when I was biking on campus, helmet on head and child-seat behind me, I was flagged down by a khadi-clad gentleman with a Mahishasura-style moustache, who proceeded to examine the child-seat and helmet carefully before voicing his approval and letting me go on my way. 

The next several encounters with Dinesh Mohan were of a very mixed nature, where I’d either be intrigued or totally put off by a contrarian view he would voice, or a peculiarly aggressive challenge to what I regarded as a completely rational opinion.   He could almost always be counted on to throw in something “from left field”.  His pronouncements could exasperate and shock (“I am a scientist, so therefore what I do is science”).   Over those next few years, I heard more views about this person, from friends and others,  some very positive, many very negative.  Here was a man about whom no one did not have an opinion.

The BRT project amplified those opinions.  Every driver in Delhi had an opinion on the project and on those who were the brains behind it.  The experiment was eventually wound up and branded a failure, but is a reminder that urban planning, transport, safety and environmental policy need far more expertise and inclusive processes in their conception and execution than they are accorded in this country.  I personally was unconvinced by some of the traffic models that Dinesh and his colleagues had studied because of limitations in the lane-driving model underlying the simulation software package they had used.  Or the idea of placing the bus lane in the middle of the road (I called it “a very dangerous place”).  It took several discussions over cups of tea for me to understand that we had important lessons to learn from Bogota and elsewhere.  I don’t know if Dinesh came to terms with the reality that while it helped the residents of Ambedkar Nagar and Khanpur (and at a cost far lower than the metro could), the BRT system was not aspirational; it would not transform Delhi’s real estate equations.

It was over the years that I got to know him better through my senior colleague Sachin Maheshwari and others. I had my father’s wariness of people around whom “like-minded intellectuals” congregated.  It’s only when I found that Dinesh’s circle included very independent-minded people from diverse walks of life, and for whom I had a lot of respect, that I could see he was not the usual guru figure with acolytes.  I saw beyond his gruff exterior.  He guffawed loudly when I told him of a four-year-old’s reaction on seeing the effigies at the Dassehra maidan:  “They look like Dinesh Uncle”.  A couple of years ago, Dinesh and Peggy invited me for dinner with a few common friends.  The invitation was typical: “Thought we’d have a few anti-nationals get together.”

I found that there was a set of offices with very tasteful decor (very unusual!) atop IIT’s main building where one could always drop in for an enlightening and entertaining chat over a cup of chai.   On many occasions, he would recall what he learnt from my uncle when serving on many committees: to encourage young scientists and fund their research, not the well-connected senior professors.   His understanding of academia and public education systems was well beyond that of most of our colleagues.  He would cite practices at not only MIT, Stanford, Harvard or Oxford, but also those of large successful state schools (his alma mater Michigan), European public universities, those in Japan and Singapore, and most importantly those of China and Latin America.    He loved an argument, to provoke you out of your comfortable cocoon, and hopefully provoke you into thinking about important questions on technology and society from perspectives you had not considered.

Some years ago, Dinesh made an observation about the real cost that the country (and Delhi as a city) would pay for the direction it was taking.  He quite correctly foresaw the devaluation of science while outwardly embracing new shiny technologies.  “Expertise has no value for these people”. We have lost the ability to understand things from viewpoints that one cannot immediately appreciate, but which are ultimately in the supreme interest of the common people.  Perhaps Dinesh’s forceful personality distracted people, and perhaps his perceptions might have been more palatable had they been packaged differently.  But that would have meant a pallid character quite alien to his nature. 

Every university needs its crazy professor, my uncle had said.  It also needs a maverick, who is able to speak truth to power, who questions authority, and shakes the institution out of its complacency in settling for self-congratulatory mediocrity. Do we have someone to fill Dinesh’s shoes… or should I say sandals?

[We got to meet them socially too.  His wife Peggy on meeting me exclaimed  mock-accusingly, “You’re the one who knew that Brahui was a Dravidian language spoken in Balochistan, and upended my image of IIT students!”, referring to my appearance on a TV quiz show in the mid 80s.]