On television and print these days we are being asked to chose the ‘greatest Indian after Gandhi’, someone who has had ‘the maximum impact’. We will be guided through this process by a jury comprising ‘some of the Greatest Indians who have shaped the nation’, including Chetan Bhagat, Arun Jaitley and Shashi Tharoor. Despite this cumulative greatness, its lasting impact is a great sense of discomfort.
The issue
is not the shortlist, though that’s clearly a problem. Why the clowning Kishore
Kumar should be greater than the beauteous Madhubala may be a difference of taste.
That BKS Iyengar or E Sreedharan should be pitted against Nehru or Ambedkar as shapers
of the nation, would seem instead a travesty of judgment. Millions remember the day that Indira Gandhi died
but Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai, valuable as their work is, are hardly
household words. Some in the list do indeed have instant name recall – like
Tata and Birla – but more as synonyms for wealth and corporate power. Certain professions like the judiciary are
conspicuous by their absence – surely some of our justices have been great ‘idea
leaders’.
