Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Interview with J.Krishnamurthy

I found this interview in The Hindu Business Line today quite interesting. It talks about how Indians had thought of some of the leading ideas of today before the famous economists we hear about figured them out.

3 comments:

Sudhir said...

Yes indeed, this one is very interesting. While reading this article, something interesting stuck to me.

The pre-independence( and the immediate decade after independence) was a golden period for Indian intellectuals, in general.

C.V.Raman and Rabrindranath Tagore won Nobel Prizes; we had an engineering genuis in M. Visweswarayya (one of the only two engineers to get Bharat Ratna); Ramanujan also shined in the early part of this period before his demise; Homi.J Bhabha setting a wonderful direction to ISRO; also, now we are reading about economists who thought way ahead of their times; thought provoking leaders; inspiring literature etc.

The Green Revolution and White Revolution are two more events, but they occured much later, and sadly we haven't seen any of this ilk in later times.

- Sudhir

cbcnn_Pilid said...

I,me,myself,

You are absolutely right. It was indeed a golden period of intellectuals. It is hard to believe now that India actually produced so many eminent men in every field. Unfortunately, the same thing cannot be said of the present. We produce mostly mediocrities but in much larger numbers. So the focus has shifted from quality to quantity.

Xinhua Ram said...

Obsession with English cut us from our roots and from common sense, according to Madhu Kishwar, a professor of English(!) and a courageous social worker based in Delhi:

A hundred years ago our intelligentsia, even when it learnt English, still remained rooted in its respective regional languages and mother tongues. Tagore knew English but chose to write in Bengali, thereby nurturing his language as well as the overall intellectual climate of Bengal . Likewise, Mahatma Gandhi could express complex ideas in English more simply, elegantly and effectively than most British. Yet he wrote with even better grace in Gujarati and even Hindustani. However, the great-grandchildren of our Tagores, Ranades, Premchands and Gandhis are today all writing mostly in English.