Two things over the past two weeks underline for us one of the most chronic ailments of the modern Indian mind: a fear of speed, and of scale. The prime minister talked of a 100-day agenda for his new government and Kapil Sibal was the first off the block. Almost nobody substantively disagrees with the broad thrust of his reform in education. But the reaction that cut across both the political and intellectual classes was the same, giddy nervousness: Kapil is going too fast, in India things move slowly. Kapil, of course, is unfazed and responded, in an interview with me on NDTV’s Walk the Talk, by asserting that he was, in fact, 18 years too late already. And that education reforms should have begun simultaneously with those in the economy in 1991. But as he goes along, he will have to fight the same doubts even among the believers. Because that is how we Indians have become, not merely over centuries of deprivation and calamities, but also through six decades of licence-quota-limit-everything socialist toxification.

The second evidence of the same widespread mental illness came in reactions to the Metro accident in South Delhi that claimed six lives. From newspaper columnists to TV channel talking heads to anchors who panicked as if another 26/11 had struck us, the “doubt” was the same: Sreedharan is wonderful, but is he going too fast? Is the Metro team under too much pressure to finish the project before the Commonwealth Games? Even Sreedharan’s assertion that he was six months ahead of schedule anyway, and would have no problem delivering on time in spite of this setback, was greeted with further panic. Why was the man not showing some “humility” and slowing down? Must he continue to risk the lives of workers? This in a system that is so forgiving of railways that move slowly, completing every project in double the scheduled time if not more (look at the Jammu-Srinagar rail link, for example), while still consuming hundreds of lives every year in completely ridiculous and avoidable accidents. Or, in fact, our view could be, thank God, our trains run so slowly, or so many more would die in these accidents! This also in a system where a tiny sea-bridge that took twice the scheduled time and three times the initial cost to be half-complete can still draw the entire political class to inaugurate it and celebrate it as a marvel of Indian engineering. In a more questioning system, somebody would have been working instead to figure out what kind of obstructions caused this

... contd.