Page 178 - EW November 2023

Postscript

EWISRA blues airports, green energy, edible oils, warehousing — to
emerge as one of the few billionaire businessmen of the
21st century with real assets on the ground. According to
TAGED IN GRAND STYLE ON OCTOBER 13-14 in RaGa Adani’s success is due to the full backing of prime
New Delhi’s J.W. Marriott Hotel, the Education- minister Modi and that he is the front man of the prime
SWorld India School Rankings (EWISR) 2023-24 minister. Steeped in the mindset of licence-permit raj of
Awards Nite — proclaimed as the greatest education his ancestors, this latest scion of the dynasty evidently
felicitation and celebrations show on earth — has come believes that business success is still impossible without
and gone. The two-day event attracted over 2,000 leaders political backing. Nor despite his top job aspirations does
(and their uninvited guests who blew the budget) from he understand that it is the PM’s job to encourage and
1,200 schools across the country. It required unprec- back the country’s enterprising entrepreneurs. Years ago,
edented logistics, hotel bookings, trophy design and cer- the late public intellectual Romesh Thapar described the
tificates printing, provision of free-of-charge meals and Nehru clan as baba log — overindulged rich brats — play-
beverages on an enormous scale. And although the great ing government.
majority of award winners complimented your editors RaGa is the latest of this lot who have never got a
for the conduct of a smooth and time-bound event, along college degree or held a job, and plays high politics
with the bouquets there were some brickbats. without care or concern of who or what he knocks down.
For one, given the logistics of transporting and Adani’s fault is that like Dhirubhai Ambani before him,
arranging an estimated 1,400 trophies, certificates and he has skirted the thousands of irrational laws, rules
other encomiums from Mumbai to Delhi, and lining up and regulations designed to cabin, crib and confine the
trophies backstage to align with the order in which they entrepreneurial genius of India’s businessmen. Creation
were announced on stage, required high order event of employment and payment of taxes is the high crime
management skills. This delicate synchronization was Adani has committed against this would-be prime minis-
often disturbed by several awardees whose nears and ter steeped in the socialism mindset.
dears suddenly suffered near-fatal heart-attacks and
other illnesses which necessitated out-of-turn awards
presentation causing disruption. As a result some school Beyond Bridgerton
leaders were not awarded their trophies in time and went
away sorrowful, although they were presented interim HE APPOINTMENT OF RISHI SUNAK AS prime
facsimile/dummy trophies and certificates for all- minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and
important photo-ops. To those who went away sorrowful, This durability in office for over a year, is a reality
mea culpa. way beyond the imagination of the most inventive writers
Moreover for your editors the pain of being on-stage to of the fantasy television serial, Bridgerton. This popu-
present over 1400 awards was compounded by a lecture lar sitcom set in the 19th century which was a big hit in
delivered by a autocrat grey eminence who chose the Blighty and Anglosphere countries, featured lords, ladies
occasion to sermonise at length that one of our several and nobility — and even a queen — of colour. At the time
associates is not PLU (people like us) and this pioneer of its airing the TV serial served as catharsis for Brits who
publication is insufficiently “transformative”. He was practiced rigid apartheid in India and the colonies they
backed up by a shrill chorister who opined that EW had ruled until the mid-20th century, when their hypocrisy
become “too commercial”. Such are the crosses that one and sanctimonious humbug relating to the white man’s
has to bear even when we felicitate, celebrate and award burden was punctured by “naked fakir” Mahatma Gandhi,
the country’s best school leaders. prompting the global British empire to collapse like a
house of cards. But nobody in their wildest imagination
Unrepentant baba log could ever have forecast that the day would come when a
brown-hued practicing Hindu would rise to the position
of prime minister and rule imperial Great Britain from
OME PEOPLE NEVER LEARN. INSTEAD OF being No.10 Downing Street. And stay put there for over a year.
repentant that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which Certainly not your editor who read law in London and
Sled post-independence India down the socialist was active in British politics.
road that bankrupted the country destroying the modest Although Sunak is unlikely to remain in office af-
material aspirations of one — perhaps two — generations, ter next summer when a general election is scheduled
Rahul Gandhi, the latest scion of the dynasty, seems because the Conservative party is trailing in all opinion
determined to use the wrecking ball to destroy Gautam polls, the fact that he survived in office at No.10 for so
Adani, one of the few industrialists to survive socialism long vindicates your correspondent’s belief that native
and the devilish licence-permit-quota regimen designed Brits — the flotsam and jetsam that ruled the colonies
to strangle private enterprises at birth. were sui generis — are less race, than class prejudiced.
According to a Times of India report (November 1), Sunak with his Winchester, Oxford and Stanford educa-
Rahul, who God forbid could become yet another Nehru- tion — and most important RP (received pronunciation)
Gandhi prime minister should the opposition INDIA accent — passes the class test, the prerequisite of rising
alliance of myriad parties win General Election 2024, to the top in class-obsessed Britain. It also vindicates
has been targeting Adani, who within the short span of your editor’s opinion that of all colonial imperialists of
two decades has established massive nation-building the 18th-20th centuries — French, Dutch, Germans and
infrastructure projects — ports, power and cement plants, Belgians — the Brits were the best of a bad lot.

178 EDUCATIONWORLD NOVEMBER 2023