There is something magical about the first few steps taken by a newly independent nation. It is almost like a tiger just uncaged: it looks around, adjusts to the unfamiliar feeling, then lets out a series of roars, each one sharper and more strident. That’s how the history of India looks in those first few years after independence, a series of increasingly more ambitious steps announcing its intent and laying down its markers in the new world.
What strikes you most when you look at these milestones is the vision and foresight of our early planners. An atomic reactor in 1956, the first Indian Institute of Technology by 1958 and the first Indian Institute of Management in 1961, all remind us of their pioneering work.
It seems fairly simple now but considers a nation beset by the teething problems of an infant democracy. How utterly wasteful and irrelevant all this must have seemed. Yet, in an era of enlightened chief ministers and a Jawaharlal Nehru-led government replete with a scientific temper and a progressive mindset, the seeds of the future were being sown even as current fires were being doused.
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