How do we go about nation-building?

Shashi Tharoor speech at PanIIT 2006 - December 23, 2006

It is an honor for me to be asked to address you today. But though Purnendu Chatterjee introduced me as a United Nations official, I should like to stress that I am speaking today purely in a personal capacity.

I am delighted to be here to address so many IIT alumni in the hope of getting you "inspired to get involved in transforming India." I am not going to cover the same ground as your other speakers today. I will try not to even mention the word "technology". Instead, I want to take literally your overall theme of nation-building. Over 59 years ago, at midnight on August 15th, 1947, independent India was born as its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, proclaimed "a tryst with destiny � a moment which comes but rarely in history, when we pass from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance". With those words he launched India on a remarkable experiment in governance. Remarkable because it�s happening at all. "India," Winston Churchill once barked, "is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator." Churchill was rarely right about India, but it is true that no other country in the world embraces the extraordinary mixture of ethnic groups, the profusion of mutually incomprehensible languages, the varieties of topography and climate, the diversity of religions and cultural practices and the range of levels of economic development that India does. So how do we go about nation-building?

Well, India is more than the sum of its contradictions. It is a country held together, in Nehru�s words, "by strong but invisible threads�. She is a myth and an idea," he wrote, [he always feminized India] "a dream and a vision, and yet very real and present and pervasive."

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