Dear Chancellor, Vice-chancellor, Deans of Faculties, Members of the teaching staff, Governing Council members of the University, and students

I must first ask whether I deserve to give a convocation address in this great institution which the Mahatma created and remained its chancellor all his life. Now Sri Narayana Desai, whose great father could articulate what Gandhiji felt in his silence, is the Chancellor. I have read Sri Narayan Desai’s little book on his boyhood days in Gandhiji’s Ashram when he had the Mahatma for a playmate. Dr Sudarshan Iyengar who is your vice chancellor surprised me by speaking my language Kannada as well as revealing that your Chancellor Shri Narayana Desai wanted me. So am I here today to greet all of you who are graduating today.

I asked the question whether I deserve to be here for a special reason. All my life as a writer and a political activist I have been more or less a Gandhian through the influence of Jayaprakash Narayan and Dr Lohia. But in my own personal life, my tastes, my attraction to the so called good things of life materialistically speaking, I belong more to the world that Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru created after Gandhi. The fact I am speaking to you today in English rather than in Hindustani is a proof of that. But I tell myself that Mahatmaji chose Nehru as his successor even though he knew that the predilections of Nehru’s personal life and his choices were west oriented. There is an enigma here for me; the enigma of Gandhiji’s choice of Nehru as his inheritor has been politically explained and it was, according to many, an inevitable choice considering the historical moment we live in. Perhaps it was a wise choice too, for Nehru was not, emotionally speaking, anti-Gandhi. But how shall we explain the civilizational direction that we took – away from the Gandhian dream of svaraj- under the influence of the great leader Nehru? Many people of my generation who think and feel like me are products of the Nehru age in our cultural orientation and thinking and yet we feel like turning away from the ecologically disastrous American model of ‘development’ and find an anchor in Mahatma Gandhi. (Nehru too spiritually responded to Gandhiji but his agenda for the development of free India was different. It was not gram-svaraj but a strong nation state in the European model) This dichotomy of feeling within us may often result in ‘bad faith’ in Sartre’s terms—the best of us in our times of mindless development in imitation of the west have not been able to resolve this, and yet, I must admit, in moments of crisis, we have been aware of the senselessness of aping the West. This is no consolation- I know, for we are beneficiaries of the western model of development in our actual lives.

Whatever I say today in my address to you is tinged with the moral unease about the gap between what we really practice and what we profess to believe.
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These days I have often been speaking of the three urges--- I call them hungers of the soul following a great saint philosopher Simone Weil--- that animated the Gandhian era of our country. They are hunger for equality, hunger for God, and hunger for modernity.

Solution to the merely physical hunger for equality appears to be within our reach today. Enough food and shelter for all is no longer a dream, thanks to the great advance of science and technology in our times. But equality as hunger of the soul is not easily satiated unless it gets coupled, as it does in some great sages of all times—with the other hunger, the spiritual hunger. Both these hungers have their origin in the feeling that all forms of life are sacred and our routine quotidian existence in the temporal world is boring unless it glows with a transcendent meaning. Consumerist paradise can ultimately prove to be dull and tediously repetitive. Great writers of the West have shown how listless and nauseated the human person is in their civilization.

Therefore when one is deeply animated by these two hungers, as if the two hungers were the same, one becomes profoundly impatient with the existing social system, the existing structures of religion as well as the developmental dreams unleashed by science and technology, for this world doesn’t belong to man alone.

This twin-hunger is what distinguishes our great saint poets of mediaeval times, Basava, Tukaram, Kabir and Akka Mahadevi. In our own times, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Ambedkar--to take some examples at random-- exemplify this hunger for equality as well as spiritual hunger. Spiritual hunger may be a better term than hunger for God because I can include a fierce critic of organized religion like Ambedkar in it. Who is not familiar with the person of Ambedkar in European clothes (symbolizing modernity) who fought an incessant battle for equality and dignity of the Dalits? But it is the same Ambedkar who in his later years embraced the compassionate Buddha, not in contradiction to his social commitment but as a continuation of his struggle on another timeless dimension. There is a moving picture of him, although not so popular, in Buddhist robes and shaven head. Those who consider both these pictures of Ambedkar as intensely connected would understand how difficult, yet how beautiful, it is to connect the hunger for equality and human dignity which seeks ruthless political action in the temporal world outside, with spiritual hunger which seeks fulfillment in an inward silent struggle. This is what makes Gandhiji and Ambedkar complementary, despite their differences. I am not able to say the same about the contradiction between the ideas of Veer Savarkar for a strong nation state, and Gandhiji’s dream of gram svaraj. They are irreconcilable, and we see enough proof of that in our troubled times in India.

It is the third hunger, the hunger for modernity which, despite philosophical differences had made Gandhiji choose Nehru as his successor. I must explain this here. Gandhiji was a critique of ‘modern western civilization’, but he was open to ‘modern’ ideas as a seeker of truth. He even loved English Literature; He had no emotional hostility to Western people. Nehru’s modernity was connected with his socialist aspiration for equality, but as he ( and more than he, his successors) moved away from the Gandhian gram svaraj ideal, we find ourselves in the end as enthusiastic globalizers—trying hard to approximate ourselves to the American way of life. The result of this has been obscene. This may sound too strong a word, but the poverty we see today while a small minority is filthily rich, is more demeaning and barbarous than what it was when Gandhiji was alive. Agriculture is systematically destroyed and everyday we hear of peasants committing suicide, paradoxically, as the sunsex indicator improves. I am not an economist but I have a feeling that the two, the rising wealth of some and appalling poverty of the many are connected. This is due to the fundamentalism of the market- which rules and guides all our political parties whatever are their ideology.

Let me put my thought more mundanely in political terms. The great leaders of our struggle for national independence combined in their personal lives as well as their political struggle these twin hungers which resulted in some of the crucial decisions we could take at the dawn of independence. One was the decision to remove untouchability and make it illegal to bar Dalits from temples. It would have been difficult perhaps to take such a decision today regarding temple entry because the obstruction to freedom of a particular religion to practice what it believes could have been raised in Law Courts. (This is my guess and I hope I am wrong). Another great decision was Adult Franchise. The English educated intelligentsia of the country as well as the orthodox pundits of those days thought, and they still think, it was a mistake to grant franchise to ignorant and pliable masses. But our democracy has proved itself to be more vigorous than American democracy, and no one can easily halt peoples’ aspiration for equality; they can only delay it or frustrate it, as, unfortunately, political parties have often been doing in recent times. Look at the lackadaisical manner in which we have handled our constitutional obligation to implement universal primary education. Another crucial decision was the creation of linguistic states, which our English educated intelligentsia bemoaned; but it has again proved to be a strong factor in strengthening our federal structure and the pluralities of our culture without which we will be spiritually poor and dull.

Both Tagore and Gandhiji were great critics of the European idea of strong nation-state, united and invincible under one language, one race and one religion. India is a civilization of many cultures, many religions and many peoples and therefore we have to be a nation with a difference. Fortunately, we still are, and one’s love for one’s language is not construed as un-Indian. I grew up reading a popular poem in my language which situates my land, Karnataka in the center of the globe. Delhi is a political centre for convenience, but the civilization of India is multi-centered.

We should go even further and decentralize power up to the village level as Gandhiji, Vinoba and Jayprakash Narayan taught us. Otherwise if the ruling class of the country is tempted by the idea of a monolithic nation-state where pluralities of our culture are ignored and undermined, we may balkanize. There is a profound truth in the phrase, ‘unity in diversity’, often used to describe the nature of our civilization, although the phrase has become a cliché. If the element of diversity is over asserted and the essential unity is undermined, then we become acutely aware of our unity. Similarly if the unity of our civilization is sought to be achieved by over-privileging either a religion or a language as the only single factor of our strength or unity, then every province of India and different peoples in every one of these provinces may clamor for separation, asserting the diversities of language and religion.

There is an increased danger of our being elitist in a superficial way in these days where globalization is seen as a cure-all mantra. There is pressure to commercialize higher education in the name of cost effectiveness. Now donation seats are available in many State universities. Good regional medium schools have almost disappeared everywhere; and if this continues our languages have no future as medium of knowledge. English as a language is sought to be empowered at the cost of our rich regional languages, and very soon for our educated classes the regional languages which are a storehouse of our cultural memory will remain at best kitchen languages. Both the hunger for equality and for spiritual richness and uniqueness are abandoned to be able to compete with the United States and Europe in an illusion of belonging to the so called global village. We will not only be losing our languages but our seeds, our bio-diversity, and even our diverse tastes of food which have sustained us and made our civilization richly textured and colorful.

Thousand years ago Latin was the language which traveled in Europe, and connected the elite of Europe. But something amazing happened and all the languages of Europe came to their own and produced a Shakespeare, a Dante, a Tolstoy and a Darwin. In India Samskruta was the language of the Cosmo polis and that too had to make way for emergence of innumerable languages and dialects. In my language, Kannada, our first great poet, Pampa, a thousand years ago, rewrites Mahabharatha by reinterpreting it, and Karnataka Rivers and even streams run through this ancient epic. Karnataka is in India, but it is also a world in itself. In our own times the Mahatma could make a Gujarati poem ‘Vaishnava janatho’ into a deeply moving national poem and Tagore writing in one of the languages of India could become a national poet and ‘Gurudev’ for the Mahatma.

I would like to conclude my convocation address by quoting a few lines I wrote to the Hindustan Times recently. I was responding to their question what India would be like after sixty years from now in the year 2067. I have taken the liberty of being a writer and given my imagination a free play in the following words:

‘Long long ago M.K.Gandhi, a vegetarian and a believer in non-violence and the possibility of change of heart of the people on this earth was asked by a journalist what he thought of Modern Western Civilization. Gandhi had ironically replied 'it is a good idea'. We need to remember now in the year 2067 his words because what went on as mindless consumption and development in the guise of modern civilization was about to bring the world to utter ruin. Even Gandhi's India and Mao's China went after imitating American civilization and ignored all caution against global warning. Although there was Islamic and Hindu fundamentalism the fundamentalism which had the sanction of all ruling elites of the world was market fundamentalism and as a result of this agriculture in India- which was a way of life, and also a preserver of cultural memories- was marginalized and killed. Everywhere the SE Zs cropped up. Modern medicine which only the very rich could afford lengthened their duration of life and not the quality of life... By the year 2037, there were fewer young people among the very rich. Food grown with chemical fertilizers in corporate farms was plenty but tasteless. There was abundance of every consumable thing with the help of more power generated with coal and nuclear energy. As a result every city began to look like any other city and what people ate and wore looked the same all over the world.

This brought about fatigue and the monotony of life itself generated in the people all over the world a spiritual and cultural need to re-examine the concept of strong nation states, and the superstitious belief of modern civilization that the earth is a cornucopia. As a result of this nearly thirty years ago India began to understand the Gandhian dream of decentralized village republics which did not need nuclear power or a strong army to defend herself; for who can dare fight a country of thousands of village republics which was like a porcupine. We are still struggling to make these village republics interdependent, and self-sufficient in their basic needs like food and clothing. The poor in India had still preserved different ways of making food with the locally available material and all these were renewed when India began to recover thirty years ago. Quality of life has become more important than just longevity and therefore the modern medicine has undergone a change in its methods of healing. More than everything, Science in 2067 is free from its bondage to nation states and to growth oriented technology and is engaged in a truly disinterested search for truth. Both Gandhi and Einstein are alive now in their spirit'