Sharjah: Best-selling Indian author Gurcharan Das spoke about The Difficulty of Being Good at the Sharjah Indian Book Fair (SIBF) on Sunday, drawing parallels with what he described as India’s political, social and economic problems.
The title is the name of his 1999 best-seller as well as the theme of Sunday’s talk at the fair. The book turns to the Indian epic Mahabharata to explore the “elusive” concept of virtue. At SIBF, Das said he saw parallels between the themes of the Mahabharata and the trappings of modern India.
“That’s why it’s such a thick book,” he quipped during the talk.
Das, who gave up his top management career at Procter & Gamble to be a full-time author, said he realised there was also “a moral dimension to the corruption problem” in India while writing his 2000 best-seller India Unbound.
“In India Unbound, I was the first person to write that India was going to rise [economically] … We became the second biggest economy in the world. Certainly I felt that was a good thing but it didn’t make me happy because I saw a bigger problem: I realised prosperity was spreading in India but there were problems of governance. Every interaction with the state was somehow delayed, there was corruption,” Das, 72, added.
The Harvard graduate said sacking schoolteachers in India for rampant absenteeism, for instance, would force others to comply but not solve the issue of lacklustre teaching in class. His point was that dharma or virtue should be innate for it to produce results.
Das also took aim at pseudo intellectuals, saying the revered word ‘guru’, in their case, means “Good at Understanding but Relatively Useless”.
“There’s guru in my name so that presents a problem too,” he joked. The meaning of his full name Gurcharan Das means “to be the humble servant at the feet of the guru”.
The 11-day SIBF is taking place until November 14 at Expo Centre.
