Growing from the East
What Bengal thinks today, India thinks tomorrow. This confidence in the intellectual and enterprising abilities of the citizens of the then Bengal was reposed by Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Subsequently, this became the tagline for everything that is Bengali.
He couldn’t have been far off the mark. Think about all the achievements in science, mathematics, literature and enterprise. Accepting challenges and leading from the front was the hall mark of the Bengali ethos. This was the part of the nation that challenged ‘sati’, rose against the British, sacrificed lives to win freedom for the country.
This was also the land and language that won the first Nobel prize for Asia. And there were later. In science, the contributions of Satyendra Nath Bose, the great theoretical physicist, are still paying rich dividends in frontier technologies. Meghnad Saha, an astrophysicist known for saha ionisation equation, and a polymath of the stature of Jagadish Chandra Bose reflected the adventurous spirit of Bengalis.
The hallmark of the entire spirit was to accept challenge and continuously keep raising the bar. That is how enterprise is defined. The same spirit found reflections in industry and also in technologies. In pharmaceuticals, steel, shipping – you name it, Bengalis were there ahead or in tandem with others.
Things apparently started changing from the seventies. From an eager embracer of change, Bengal went into a cocoon and refused to stay in step with time. Case in point is computerisation. A Bengal that took pride in being a pioneer in technical education and change pushed back a frontier technology with the result that new enterprises that would one day spawn millions of jobs and wealth got seeded in other states. We refused to accept pioneering work in invitro fertilisation forcing the innovator – Subhash Mukhopadhyay — to commit suicide. And the accolades were won by Robert G Edwards. Much later the world community accepted Subhash Mukhopadhyay’s pioneering contribution in the field. But he wasn’t around to bask in it.
The same thing happened with industry. Calcutta was the headquarters for almost all the blue chip companies in the country. They were here mainly because of the local educated skill. West Bengal was the state that attracted talent and was the breeding ground for all round enterprise. But the same state that found pride in meritocracy slid into mediocracy from the seventies. The corporates shifted as did talents leaving West Bengal to bask in the glory of what it was and not in what it would be.
We therefore need restoration of the same spirit of adventure that marked our glory days. Enterprising spirit needs a collective confidence that we can. We need to accept merit and its supremacy. Without that there can be no achievement, be that in intellectual pursuits or in commercial ventures of substance. We need to change and raise our bars.