For knowledge or an idea to be born as a popular vehicle, it needed the public intellectual. The public intellectual choreographs intellectual connections. He weaves ideas together. He is an expert who carries expertise lightly. He is a man who popularises ideas without being populist. He makes ideas feel homely, without ever destroying their bite. He synthesises knowledge while sustaining its dissenting power and its ferocious eccentricity.

A public intellectual is a person who regardless of his location takes ideas as his focus and articulates their vision and their consequences. He transcends the university or the media though he might be located in them.

For a man who defines the problematic of modern life, he is a problem himself. His commitment to ideas alienates him from any particular group. Intellectuals are by definition suspect because they in turn suspect every idea in wrestling with it, exploring it, criticising it. They give it passion, power, vision and holism. They transform ideas into theatre.

An intelligentsia consumes ideas while intellectuals create and interpret it. Intelligentsia are bred in the university but the intellectuals often live outside. They have always been a threat to the state. America during the McCarthyite period hunted down the intellectual just as Stalinist Russia did in the Lysenko era. Other countries can benefit. The Nazi’s witch-hunt gave to America its greatest intellectuals from Herbert Marcuse to Hannah Arendt.

Where does India stand? By Independence, the debates had got too fragmented but there were still some great examples. The debates around urban planning were triggered by the French architect Le Corbusier around his notion of Chandigarh. Planning as an idea was upheld by public intellectuals like Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Michal Kalecki and Jan Tinbergen. The idea of the importance of science was enacted by Bernal, Zaheer, Blackett and Bhabha.

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