The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  There is also a less charitable explanation: that the failure to invest in basic education reflected the most pernicious effect of caste.

  Myron Weiner, an American sociologist, made this argument in an influential book called The Child and the State in India. He pointed out that several modern nations took on education as a moral and legal duty when they were as poor as India. South Korea, for instance, in the 1960s, enforced compulsory education laws and invested heavily in primary schools. The investment paid off. Industry took off. The country was transformed.15

  Today, South Korea’s adult literacy rate is 100 percent. The Indian literacy rate is 74 percent among those over the age of seven: that figure is based on the number of people who say they and their family members can read when a census field-worker asks them, and education experts say it is likely to be an overestimation. Even so, that puts India’s literacy rate slightly above Europe’s in the 1850s, before the end of the Industrial Revolution, and far below those of other countries with which it is often compared, like Brazil or China.16

  Weiner, rather provocatively for a foreigner, ascribed India’s neglect of primary education to the culture of caste. Indian elites across the ideological spectrum, he argued, feared that too much education would disrupt the social order. “The Indian position rests on deeply held beliefs that there is a division between people who work with their minds and rule and people who work with their hands and are ruled, and that education should reinforce rather than break down this division,” he wrote. “These beliefs are closely tied to religious notions and to the premises that underlie India’s hierarchical caste system.”17

  Education remained the monopoly of high-born Indians with names like Sengupta and Banerji, who sit at the very top of the heap. We have long been entitled to learn. It is expected of us. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize–winning economist, once described it as one of the most insidious legacies of caste.

  Weiner, if he were coming to India today, would no doubt notice a churning in the undersoil. Those who work with their hands are as keen to educate their children as those who work with their heads.

  School enrollment trends bear this out. In 1950, when my father was studying in a government-run neighborhood school in Calcutta, 40 percent of primary-school-age children were enrolled in school. In 2013, when my daughter entered kindergarten, enrollment had swelled to over 96 percent.

  In my daughter’s India, it is widely understood that everyone is entitled to learn—and that educating your children is key to improving their lot in life. The data bears this out, again and again. Even a bit of early childhood education improves an individual’s earning power as an adult; girls with six years of schooling are significantly more likely to seek prenatal care and immunize their children, in turn improving their children’s life chances.18

  Karthik Muralidharan, an economist at the University of California at San Diego, wanted to know who was learning what between the time they entered kindergarten and when they finished Class 5. He began to follow a cohort of ten thousand children in one hundred different schools in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh as they made their way through primary school.

  Muralidharan’s findings echoed what Banerji’s annual survey had concluded nationally. By the end of Class 5, only 60 percent of the students could perform Class 1–level work. That meant that over a period of five years, 40 percent of students had not learned what they had been expected to in the first year of school; in effect, they got nothing out of five full years of schooling.

  Muralidharan’s study revealed something else extraordinary. He found that only the top 10 percent of students could keep up with the syllabus from year to year, so that by Class 5, they were able to do Class 5 work. The bottom 10 percent seemed to stop learning after Class 2. The remaining 80 percent “muddled along,” as Muralidharan put it, making some progress but reaching nowhere near what the curriculum expected.19

  Drilling down further, he noticed that learning levels were really flattening out starting in Class 3. It was bewildering at first, but it soon made sense. Class 3 is when kids are expected to be functionally literate, when they are expected to read on their own from class texts. So, those who weren’t yet able to read couldn’t keep up at all. They would likely also fall behind in every subject—science, Hindi, history, you name it. Muralidharan’s data suggested that the school curriculum was serving only a narrow slice of students: those who could read.

  “It’s an education system that is catering to the top 10 percent of kids. The bottom 10 percent are learning nothing, absolutely nothing, even though they’re spending five years in school,” he concluded.

  A new gulf had emerged.

  “You may have reduced inequality in school enrollment,” Muralidharan said, “but that inequality has moved to massive inequality in learning outcomes.”

  The Indian School of Mines campus is a peaceful oasis in grimy Dhanbad, on the train line between Delhi and Calcutta. Built in 1926, it remains an architectural throwback to the British colonial era, with its thickets of old shade trees and red-brick buildings whose wide arcades offer respite from the heat.

  The first time his parents came to visit, Anupam took them to Dhanbad’s newest, snazziest attraction: a department store, called Big Bazaar. It was part of a national chain that modeled itself after Walmart. It pitched a vast collection of refrigerators, school bags, toys, cooking oil—you name it—to India’s aspiring middle class, and was itself a symbol of the middle class’s new wants. The loudspeaker blasted discounts. The fluorescent lights were lit bright as a wedding tent.

  Mummy was thrilled to be here. She pointed to a plywood dresser that she would one day love to have in their home. And a sofa that guests could sit on, instead of the big platform bed under which they kept their winter blankets in heavy steel trunks.

  Papa looked at the price tags and grumbled. He thought it was all a waste of money.

  They rode the escalator up to the top floor, to the food court. It was nothing like the narrow lanes of Gaighat, where an ancient jeelebi maker jostled next to a food cart selling Nepali momos. No. The Big Bazaar food court had hot trays of Chinese noodles and crispy fried bhel puri, even veg burgers topped with tomato sauce. The servers wore plastic hats to keep hair from falling on the food. You got your tray and sat down at a table and chairs, instead of standing around the lane and swatting away flies.

  It was all deep-fried, starch-packed deliciousness. Who wouldn’t want it?

  Anupam took me to Big Bazaar food court too when I came to visit. He ordered the Chinese chow mein noodles, veg of course because he remained, as Mummy had raised him, a strict vegetarian. He slurped it noisily.

  I asked him about the boys who sat behind us in the food court, wearing slouchy shorts and disheveled hair, hunched over the plates, laughing. These are rich kids, Anupam said. The kind of kids who would go down to Café Coffee Day once or twice a week and drop forty-five rupees on an Americano. He would never waste his scholarship money on fancy coffee. Whatever he had left over after books and train money, he gave to his mother. She used some of it to fix the house in Gaighat. She bought a ceiling fan. Eventually, she replaced the tin roof with cement and began building rooms upstairs. This was his last year in college. He said he was doing well. He said he had made friends.

  His brother and sister were doing well too, although the IITs were not in their range. Anuj had gotten into a private engineering college in Kerala, along with a student loan to pay for it.

  His sister, Chandni, went to an expensive coaching center to prep for engineering-college entrance exams. Anupam pitched in some of his scholarship money to pay for it.

  In so many ways, Anupam was a changed man. English came easily to him now. He could look a stranger in the eye. He no longer looked down at his feet when he spoke. He laughed with delight, throwing his head back. He walked with a straight back. His shoulders no longer slouched.

  In Dhanbad, he felt it was time to give something of himself back t
o kids who were like him. Right next to the calm colonial-era campus was a higgledy-piggledy mohalla that reminded him of his own. Among its naked brick and tin houses, amid the children with matted, brassy gold hair and the piles of trash, was something that called itself a “private school,” not unlike the one that his parents could afford for him back in the day. The children were led to believe they were taught English. But they couldn’t string words together. Anupam and a few friends from college established an afterschool center. They came up with lesson plans. They tacked them on the wall. This week, it was to take a noun, and then use it in a sentence as a descriptive word, first as an adjective, then an adverb. Today’s noun was “honesty.”

  Without English, the children of slums like this would get “demotivated,” he said.

  “Without English, they’ll never get out of the slum.”

  He had come up with a catchy name for his center: English Speaking Course and Personality Enhancement. ESCAPE for short.

  English of course has nothing to do with caste, except that those who don’t speak English are increasingly seen as outcastes—so much so that a Dalit activist from Delhi once suggested erecting a temple to the goddess of English, whom he said every outcaste should worship. The hunger to learn English is hard to miss. English conversational classes sprout in slums across India. Private schools for the poor promise English-medium instruction. The satellite dish company that brings me a bouquet of television channels offers a spoken English program aimed at parents who are “embarrassed when your children’s friends’ parents speak English.”

  There was one thing that I could never get Anupam to really explain: the intensity of how much he missed being home in Gaighat. It’s not like he had friends there. It’s not like there was a cinema that he missed or a pool hall or a café or anything like that. No. All he could tell me was that he missed the taste of his mother’s food. He missed her voice. He missed the closeness of her companionship in the tiny house she had worked hard to build.

  He was the only one among his siblings who felt this way. His brother refused to come back home after college. His sister couldn’t wait to get out.

  “I can’t even step out of the house in my jeans,” Chandni scowled once, barely looking up from the television in the dark middle room of the house. There were hoodlums out there, faltu useless fellows, with nothing to do but ogle and yelp at a girl wearing jeans. Anupam didn’t contradict her assessment. He didn’t have any friends who could defend her, and he certainly wasn’t going to take them on. Chandni was anxious to get as far away from here as she could.

  Anupam told me later he was disappointed in her. He didn’t think she was applying herself as hard as she could be. She preferred to go shopping with Mummy rather than study, he said when she was out of earshot.

  As it happened, Anupam had misjudged his sister. She blossomed as soon as she left home. She aced her first year in engineering college, scoring near the top of her class. He admitted to having been wrong. Out of forty-five students, she had scored second highest. “I am feeling elated by her remarkable feat,” he wrote in an email.

  Anupam never once considered striking out on his own, without his family.

  At no point did he ever bring up whether this would complicate the life he might have with a wife one day, or in some way arrest his path to adulthood.

  Truth is, Anupam wasn’t much of a player in the ladies department. As a teenager, he was too shy to ever talk to a girl. And by the time he began to shed his fear, there were hardly any women around him. In his college, women made up barely 9 percent of his class.

  Toward the end of his stay in Dhanbad, Anupam faced a painful reckoning. He was going to a college designed to prepare mining engineers, but this was not a career he was the least bit interested in. What he really wanted to do was to get a postgraduate degree in business management, India’s equivalent of an MBA, and that too in the country’s most prestigious business school: the Indian Institutes of Management. That would mean another two years of school for him—and another two years of rickshaw driving for his papa.

  This worried Sudha. At fifty-five, her husband was becoming frail. She could see that. But how could she thwart Anupam? She never had. She admitted to feeling stressed. There is a bit of “tension,” she said.

  The decision plagued Anupam. On the eve of his interviews for business school, he said: “My father has been working for almost thirty years without any rest or holidays. He says that he can manage for another couple of years, but I think that it’s high time for me to take the burden off his shoulders and come at the front.”

  Anupam erred on the side of his dream. He enrolled in the graduate program at the Indian Institutes of Management campus on the edge of Calcutta, which was now officially called Kolkata. He graduated in 2013, at one of the worst moments of reckoning for the Indian economy. Growth rates had plummeted to below 6 percent that year. The roaring optimism that was in the air when he entered college had faded. Now there was anger. Politicians were exposed for having stolen millions of rupees from government contracts. The death of a young woman who had been gang-raped in Delhi unleashed angry protests in cities across the country.

  Even Yadav, the once invincible chief minister of Bihar, went to jail that year, in connection with his role in the misappropriation of public funds from the state animal husbandry department. It was poetically known as the “fodder scam.”

  “So, I am getting myself prepared to strive for the best, but to face the worst,” Anupam said.

  In the final few months of business school, he dutifully attended all the job placement talks, appeared for interviews, and looked high and low for jobs in finance, which is where he wanted to be. His business school peers scooped up plum assignments before him. He was no less smart than them. He knew that. For the first time he was beginning to confront the constraints of his past.

  If recruiters were looking at his final exam scores from Class 12, he was at a clear disadvantage. His scores were lousy. He hadn’t really focused on those exams. He had single-mindedly focused on the other exam, the one to get into the IITs.

  Perhaps his extraordinary ambitions weren’t enough. His country had starved them.

  Finally, in the last round of interviews, Anupam did get a job, with an iron ore mining company based in Kolkata. It was not what he wanted. He said he felt “disheartened.”

  Nonetheless, he could not afford to turn down the job offer. He needed to work now. And anyway, his starting pay would be roughly fifteen times what his father earned after a lifetime of driving an auto-rickshaw. Papa could finally retire.

  Later that year, he read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets, which I had bought him. I thought it was a smart book on economics, and Anupam had been interested in economics.

  The book struck a chord with him. At the time, he was nursing his wounds for not getting the sought-after jobs that his friends from business school had snatched up before him. But reading Taleb prompted him to reassess where he was. Relative to so many others of his generation, he said, he had profited from a great education. He had an MBA after all, from his country’s most famous business school!

  He sent me an upbeat email. “It was a nice read,” he said, “and forced me to think about life in a different perspective altogether.”

  Reward came soon.

  By the end of the year, Anupam was hired by the state regulatory agency that controls the securities market in India. It meant he could leave mining and get into the financial sector, which excited him much more. His parents were thrilled too, but for another reason. It was a government job, which meant that it was a job for life. His parents padlocked the house in Gaighat and moved across the country to join him. He rented an apartment in Navi Mumbai, a grove of high-rises across the water from the island city of Mumbai. “Now we’ll be able to live together, after a long gap of nine years,” he said.

  Mumbai was so different from Patna.
“Wide roads, innumerable flyovers, twenty-four-hour electricity and water, and of course, huge population,” he reported.

  And it rained. Oh, how it rained. For days, sheets of rain blew off the Arabian Sea. He had never seen anything like it.

  Anupam bought a sofa for the living room and an iPad, on which his mother played Candy Crush for hours each day. By then, Sudha was batting away marriage offers for Anupam. One family approached her with a dowry of 50 lakh, or 5 million, rupees, which is a lot of money in Gaighat. Anupam told his mother to turn it down. He said he didn’t believe in dowries. And anyway, Chandni would first be set up for a match.

  Anupam is no Horatio Alger. His country is not a country of Horatio Algers. No. Anupam is a prodigy, blessed with rare talent and pluck—and equally, a mother of rare faith and pluck.

  Anupam’s is a story of audacious ambition. Equally, it is a portrait of how his country conspires to fail young people like him every step of the way—and his own gradual awakening to that knowledge.

  Likewise, he is an emblem of a profound psychic shift. There are millions just like him, who shake off the past to say, “And why not me?”

  Democracy has allowed that shift to take place. Yet India’s successive democratically elected governments have not put the fundamentals into place. Schools don’t work. Every day, 1600 children die of diarrhea and pneumonia alone. Three out of ten children are clinically malnourished.20

  Anupam is determined to be a member of his country’s elite—“ee-light,” as he pronounces it—and to cross over into their world not just by getting rich but by acquiring so much knowledge that no one will be able to put him down. No one will be able to say that he is any less capable.