The End of Karma Read online

  As people know their castes since they are born, they start interpreting their status based on that. A person belonging to a higher caste feels privileged which instigates a wave of self-confidence in her. On the other hand, a person belonging to a lower caste feels deprived which fills her with inferiority complex. As a result of this, higher-caste people do well in their lives and lower-caste people become laggard, but, a person from a lower caste can also excel and even outperform higher-caste people if she does not let the feeling of inferiority complex overpower herself.

  I asked how he dealt with those feelings himself. He sent back his usual upbeat message of drive and motivation. “Yes, I also felt inferiority complex at various points of time,” he wrote. “But, I was able to overpower it because I maintained an inner drive to break my family out of the vicious cycle of poverty. I was motivated by the hardships which my parents went through and the immense hope which they had in their eyes about my bright future.”

  He was not always so upbeat. I remembered the seventeen-year-old Anupam I had first met in the spring of 2005, when he was applying to the IITs. That was the serious, coiled Anupam. Flecks of gray in his hair. “I feel a lot of pressure” is what he said then.

  Nehru regarded the IITs as a symbol of “India’s future in the making.” They represented his own faith in science and technology to guide the development of this improbable new nation.

  By the time the IITs entered Anupam’s dreams, every major Silicon Valley firm had an IIT alum: from Vinod Khosla at Sun Microsystems and Padmasree Warrior at Cisco to Sundar Pichai at Google. Anupam knew all their names.

  But how to get into the IITs? Nearly two hundred thousand students took the entrance exam for fewer than five thousand seats. A boy in his mohalla, a lot like him, had tried two years earlier. He didn’t succeed. Then he hanged himself from his ceiling fan.

  On his first try, Anupam didn’t score high enough either. But he didn’t surrender. Nor did his mother. She found a tutor who specialized in getting kids into the IITs.

  Anand Kumar was his name. Hundreds were flocking to his testprep center, paying good money. But Anand gave away his tricks for free every year to thirty very poor, very smart kids. Super 30, he called them. He did it because he was once like them. He was so poor that he had had to help his mother sell homemade papads on the streets of Patna so the family could eat. He was forced to abandon his dreams of studying math at Cambridge University.

  Anand’s prep center sat on a cracked, dry field on the outskirts of Patna with two armed guards at the gates. The gates led into a large makeshift lecture hall, open on all four sides, shielded by a sloped tin roof. There were rows of benches on bare ground.

  “Find the domain of the following function,” Anand hectored on the morning of my visit, as he scribbled digits on a blackboard. His microphone was scratchy It was hard to make out what he was saying. He repeated it several times, like an invocation. “Find the domain of the following function.” His hair flew in many directions, in urgent need of a trim. His beard was unkempt. He paced in front of the blackboard, wiping the sweat from his head with the back of his chalky hand. The tin roof inhaled the midsummer’s scorching sun. Hundreds of students sat on wooden benches, pressed tightly against one another, hunched over notebooks. Their faces glistened with sweat. They scribbled, looked up, wiped their foreheads, scribbled some more.

  There were very few girls among them.

  Anand established an enviable track record. Every year, several local kids whom he coached made it into the IITs. He drew press attention from far and wide and eventually the wrath of rivals in the coaching business. Once, a homemade bomb was hurled at his open-air compound, after which the guards were hired.

  Anupam studied like he had never studied before. For seven months, as part of the Super 30 program, he lived in Anand’s house. He slept on a mattress on the floor. He ate what Anand’s mother served. He attended Anand’s lectures every morning, studied all afternoon and evening. There was no television, no football, no marbles, not even talking to Mummy every day.

  He was an exceedingly withdrawn child. He spoke enough English to be ashamed of his lack. He did not look strangers in the eye. He looked at his feet when he spoke. His shoulders were hunched, as though they were pulled down by the weight of that amulet that held Papa’s humiliation.

  The morning of the IIT entrance exam, Sudha prayed at her altar. Srikrishna went to work on his auto-rickshaw, looking for passengers. Anupam sat through six hours of mathematics, chemistry, and physics.

  He aced it.

  Instantly, he became an icon of young India’s aspiration. I wrote about him in The New York Times.9 Letters of congratulations poured in from all over the world. His picture appeared in the Patna papers: hair greased to one side, eyes shielded by square, unfashionable glasses, the face of a boy utterly baffled by having to walk along this new road he had chosen.

  A few weeks later, with Mummy at his side, Anupam rode the train to the original IIT campus built by Nehru’s government, in a town called Kharagpur, just west of Calcutta. Anupam had his eyes on studying astronomy.

  As it happened, the same year Anupam went to college, Indian democracy sprang a new surprise. In the Bihar state election, voters booted Yadav from the chief minister’s office. Shrewd as he was, he had misread the mood of the electorate. It was no longer enough to deliver dignity. Voters now wanted more. They wanted some of what they had seen in the rest of India: electricity, roads, public safety, schools that function.

  * * *

  Super 30 had prepared Anupam to get into IIT. It hadn’t quite prepared him to survive there.

  His first few months in college, Anupam stumbled. The challenges were more social than academic. It was his first time away from home. It was his first time being around kids who were not from homes made of naked bricks and tin. The lectures were all in English, which he had a hard time following. He had never really been outgoing. He felt deeply lonely.

  And like so many of us do when we are crippled by loneliness, Anupam tried standing closer to God. This disoriented him even more.

  It happened like this. One day, some older students, no doubt sensing his alienation, invited him to a lecture. They were from the Hare Krishna movement. He cannot explain exactly why he agreed to go, except that he had a hard time saying no to anyone. The Hare Krishnas told him to forget his parents. They told him to think of only their lord: Hindu mythology’s first auto-rickshaw driver, a charioteer from the Mahabharata, named Krishna.

  The Hare Krishnas chanted Krishna’s name. They held their arms aloft and danced. Anupam found it bewildering.

  “I couldn’t believe educated people, engineering students would dance like that,” Anupam said.

  More baffling, he joined the dance himself. “I suppose I wanted to feel close to God,” he said.

  He began following his Hare Krishna mentors to temple every morning and evening. It helped that they served sweet, buttery halwa at the temple, and he could eat all he wanted. All the dancing and chanting and halwa-eating made him too tired to study. He lost focus. He lost his way. He bombed his tests.

  His initiation into the movement required that he not tell his family what he was doing. “I wanted to feel something,” he said of his search for the divine. “But I didn’t.”

  Despite his best efforts at deception, his mother knew something was wrong. He was behaving strangely. He wasn’t in his dorm room when she called early mornings. He was asleep earlier than usual. On the phone once, he mentioned something about a temple, which raised her suspicions even more: The boy had never been much of a temple-goer.

  One day, without warning him, she got on a train to Kharagpur and showed up at his dorm room. One look at his face, and she knew he was in trouble. A few minutes of grilling, and the truth spilled out of him.

  God.

  Halwa.

  Loneliness.

  Sudha was furious. She wondered: Had the Hare Krishnas drugged her son? Would his haz
y spiritual quest flush away all her hard work all these years? No. She would not let that happen. She would get him out of here.

  Anupam wanted to stay. He would repeat his freshman-year courses, he said. He would shape up. His grades weren’t good enough to study astronomy, but still. This was the IIT. This was everything he had worked for.

  Sudha wasn’t having it. She wanted him to leave this college, and Anupam knew he could not defy her. He knew he had let her down. This is what felt worst of all.

  The following year, Anupam transferred to a new college, the Indian School of Mines, in a gritty coal-mining town called Dhanbad, a coveted university though one tiny notch below the prestige of the IIT. Instead of exploring the prospects of life on other planets, he would now plumb the depths of the Earth.

  At the IIT, out of Mummy’s grasp, he had discovered something about himself. Now, at the Indian School of Mines, he would begin his discovery of India.

  His first summer internship took him to a coal-mining district in West Bengal state. Around those mines, Anupam saw an India that he didn’t know existed. Children walked around with bloated bellies that screamed hunger. Drinking water was contaminated. When the coal trucks rumbled past, you had to cover your nose from the swirls of coal dust that flew through the air. No one had toilets at home. Few sent their kids to school. It was eye-opening. Mining had done nothing for these Indians, he concluded, except pollute their water and soil. And if anyone uttered that thought aloud, he learned they were labeled a Maoist.

  Anupam was no stranger to want. He grew up in a ghetto in Patna. But the more he saw of his country, the more he was appalled. It was difficult to shut it out.

  In college, there was a lot of talk about the Maoist rebellion in India’s mining belt. He found himself sympathetic to their grievances. But he abhorred their violence. He couldn’t understand why they destroyed everything around them. The young women and men who joined the rebellion, he said, must have been “brainwashed.”

  Poverty wasn’t his only discovery.

  One year, while applying for a passport to travel to Bangladesh, where he had procured an internship with the Grameen Bank, he discovered another of his country’s ills. The passport application required a police clearance and the police clearance required an unofficial fee at the local station house: two hundred rupees, or about five dollars by the exchange rates of the time. He didn’t want to—but he paid. “It is a tradition” is how he described it. “You don’t pay. You don’t get your passport on time.”

  A few months later, he was again asked to pay a bribe, this time just to be able to file a police report for a stolen mobile phone. Anupam had wised up by now. He stared the cop in the eye and told a bald-faced lie. He claimed to know a senior Patna police officer. The cop backed down.

  This was one of the most important dividends of his education: Anupam, son of a rickshaw driver who had been pistol-whipped by the cops, could look a policeman in the eye.

  His most vital discovery came on a pilgrimage. One year, during summer holidays, Anupam took himself to Bodh Gaya, an ancient town in Bihar where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. There, he studied silent meditation, which meant that for the first time in his life, he didn’t talk to his mother for ten days straight. It was a pivotal moment. By the time he emerged from the retreat, he realized he had lost his faith in the gods. No divinity controls my destiny, he concluded. I make my own.

  From Patna, it’s a short drive along a national highway to an unremarkable town of narrow lanes and open drains called Fatwa. There sits a hothouse of dreams: a government girls’ school, with classes filled to the rafters.

  In every classroom, every bench is full of girls. Bony hips press against bony hips. Classes spill out onto the covered patio. Girls sit cross-legged on the floor.

  The headmistress is also a Class 4 teacher. Never in her twenty-two years of teaching has she seen so many children pouring into class, she says. Some of them know their letters. Some of them don’t. She is having a hard time teaching anything at all. In any case, there aren’t nearly enough teachers to go around. Right now, she says, there are four teacher vacancies, including the post of headmistress. On this morning, teachers sit at their tables, mostly hunched over papers. Students variously chat, read, stare out the windows. In the back courtyard, one girl picks through a pile of dead leaves. Another plays hopscotch with a pebble balanced on her foot. Several mill around—and it’s not recess. “Safety pins,” I write in my notebook. Safety pins hold up oversize dresses on the backs of skin-and-bones girls. Safety pins are ubiquitous in places like these.

  I’ve come here in the summer of 2009 to see what is arguably the most important school reform project in the history of independent India. It is carried out by the nonprofit group Pratham, and it is shaped by the data that it collects year after year on what kids learn when they come to school.

  Pratham has carried out an ambitious set of experiments to improve basic math and reading skills of primary-school children. It has recruited tutors, coached teachers, organized remedial sessions during the school day and after the school day. It has sought to measure what works and what doesn’t, and then buttonholed bureaucrats with data so they might be persuaded to do things differently.

  The effort is marked by a faith in evidence rather than good intentions. This makes it all the more depressing.

  For nearly ten years, the numbers have changed very little, except a little for the worse since 2011. By 2014, the most recent year for which figures are available, among children enrolled in Class 5, 52 percent could not read sentences from a Class 2 textbook; about half could not handle a simple subtraction problem.10

  Attendance was hovering around 71 percent. Children enrolled, but they weren’t coming to school regularly. In 2011, a separate government-commissioned report found that about 40 percent of children were dropping out between Class 5 and Class 9. Among those who made it to Class 10, another 40 percent left school within a year.11

  Compared to other countries, India does not spend much of its national budget on schools. But Rukmini Banerji, Pratham’s chief executive, doubts that the abysmal state of Indian public education is not for lack of money. As India has prospered, the government has levied new taxes for the purpose of building new schools and hiring teachers. The physical infrastructure has improved. One survey found that between 2004 and 2010, the share of schools with electricity grew from 20 percent to 45 percent, while the share of schools with free lunch programs grew from 21 percent to nearly 80 percent. Even teacher-student ratios improved. In 2004, there was 1 teacher for every 47 students; in 2010, there was 1 teacher for just under 40 students.12

  Unfortunately, these teachers weren’t always teaching. Perhaps they were ordered to help with other tasks—like drives or registering voters. Or perhaps they just hadn’t bothered to come to work. Pratham found that about 15 percent of teachers were absent on the day their survey takers made their unannounced visit. Other assessments of teacher attendance have found that around 25 percent of teachers are no-shows on any given day.13

  That so many children are streaming into school reflects a profound hunger. Half of all primary-school children in government schools, Banerji has found, are born to mothers who cannot read—moms who have no idea what their kids should be learning in school. Their children are tromping off to school, after all. They must be learning something. That’s what they told Banerji when she asked.

  We were sitting in her basement office in Delhi one evening. She pushed back her chair, rose to go to the cabinet behind, and riffled through a stack of slim, brightly illustrated books Pratham has published.

  She chose a book for my daughter. Small, glossy, about a boy named Moru who loves numbers but who is discouraged at school by a mean killjoy of a teacher. Banerji had written the story herself.

  She wondered how she would feel if she had gone to school and hadn’t learned to read. “I’m going to have a huge chip on my shoulder if I’m a failure, if I amount to nothin
g,” she said. “And all because the adults—my parents and my teachers—have failed me.”

  This might surprise those of you who look at India as a bottomless well of clever, hardworking math nerds who are about to steal good jobs from Americans. Actually, fewer than 15 percent of college-age Indians even go to college. The vast majority of kids coming of age are in no shape to compete in the global economy. India’s education system is a failed promise of enormous proportions.

  How did Indian schools become what they are today? At independence, India’s founding fathers took great pains to establish toprate universities, including famously, the IITs that Anupam had worked so hard to get into. It was hoped that these universities would groom a modern technocratic national elite who in turn would pull the new nation into the modern age—an Indian equivalent of W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of the Talented Tenth.

  Nehru and his peers did not throw that same weight behind primary education. It’s not that they were blind to the need. They knew tradition conspired to keep education beyond the reach of many—including women and outcastes. At the time, more than four out of five Indians could not read. “The national leadership had realized that what the educational situation needed was a revolutionary approach,” recalled J. P. Naik, the education adviser to Prime Minister Nehru.14

  A revolutionary approach they certainly did not take. As Naik rued, Nehru’s administrations—he won elections to three consecutive terms—devoted neither the money nor the imagination to strengthen primary education. Schools remained beyond the reach of most Indian children, constitutional promise be damned.

  There are at least two theories for why this was the case.

  One is a charitable explanation. At independence, the state was too poor and too overstretched to take on the luxury of educating so many millions of children. Drought and famine loomed over the land. World War II had ravaged two continents, and India’s founding fathers were as anxious about fascism in Europe as they were about communism next door in China. At such a time, who could think of schools?