We’re all lost in morass of mental mediocrity

In modern India, mediocrity – mostly being just average, run-of-the mill, non-decrypt, so-so – is our national emblem and signature. Trying to break out of its clutches is almost considered as a sign of arrogance and impertinence. That is why over almost everything that required people to work as a body, we stumbled and fumbled. A snapshot of that is sports. Unlike earlier times when competitive sports was played in a ‘sporting spirit’, in the modern world, it has become a symbol of national spirit and grit. The best arena for that is the Olympics. At the Paris Games (2024),we won six medals, one silver and five bronze. India won just two golds in the last three decades. In contrast, China, the only comparable country, won 91 medals, including 40 gold medals, 27 silver medals and 24 bronze medals. There are many other countries much, much smaller and much poorer than India, who have a far better record. Even in cricket, which is dubbed as a ‘religion’ with a massive, fanatical and frenzied following, and administered by the richest sports body in the world, our overall record is, at best, spottily world-class, compared, for instance, with Australia.

The problem was not wholly how we performed but how we reacted. We overreact even when we achieve modest success, and invent explanations and excuses for our dismal failures. In hockey, we once won 8 gold medals. We couldn’t qualify in 2008, and when we won a bronze, we behaved as if we had won a gold. When we won a Cricket Trophy in 2024, after a lapse of 12 years – and that too in its least truly competitive format – we really went over the top. In contrast, no tennis fans are overly upset that the last time any Indian reached the semi-final in a tennis Grand Slam was in 1960. In this sport, too, Australia is miles ahead of us. Most glaringly, no soccer enthusiast really was aghast or lost any sleep that India never even qualified to play the world’s greatest sporting event, the Soccer World Cup, and that experts say it won’t happen any time soon.

It is unfair to blame the athletes. The reality is that they live, train and compete in the same dispiriting ambience in which most of us live and struggle to survive. Above all, the bane of Indian sports is the infiltration of what seasoned politician Jaswant Singh called the ‘ugly face’ of the politician. According to one survey, of 32 presidents of sports governing bodies across the spectrum, except in athletics, every president is a politician.

Even in other walks of life like sciences, arts, literature, manufacturing, medicine, we more often than not fall short. Once upon a time, India was the knowledge hub of the world. Now, no Indian university figures in the top 100 in the world. India does not figure at the top in international design or art scenes; and there is hardly any Indian manufactured or software product that has been adopted worldwide. Of the 12 Nobel Prize winners from India since its inception, only 5 were Indian citizens, including Mother Teresa. Digital is supposed to be our forte, but India has no company in the Digital Top 30. In terms of innovation ability, India ranks 44th globally. Even in relation to movies, we top the world in quantity —an astounding 1,500-2,000 films every year in more than 20 languages — but far, far few qualitatively.

Is there a common denominator, or connecting thread or any overarching takeaway from this litany of our shortcomings? Indeed, there is ‘something’ – a negative X-factor – which is not letting us punch our full weight or fulfil our full potential. That ‘something’ is the malaise of mediocrity. Classical India was renowned for its path-breaking performances. We really cannot pin down when, why and how we lost the edge and the urge not to settle for less, about which even Sage Chanakya warned against in his classic Arthashasta. Certainly, the British capitalised on it and deepened it. It was our mental mediocrity that led to, as Leo Tolstoy (A Letter to a Hindu, 1909) said, “Thirty thousand men, not athletes but rather weak and ordinary people, have subdued two hundred million vigorous, clever, capable, and freedom-loving people?.”

The Chinese saw the white man as a barbarian; we saw them worthy of emulation. So ‘worthy that it became such an integral part of our unconscious that, even after Independence, the education, administrative, and political ecosystems remained tethered to this mindset. It was a kind of ‘Stockholm Syndrome.’

The cumulative effect of all this is that we are weak-kneed, eschew making tough choices, and we lack self-belief and like to tread the well-trodden path. It affects the way our mind turns external sensory outputs into choices, actions and behavior. It is a kind of behavior that seeks to circumvent hard work, moral means, the narrow and straight path, and prefers cutting corners, short-cuts, quick-fixes and effortless gratification. Our instinct is like to mimic, not innovate. That is why we have many top-class CEOs, and few, if any, founders. With rare exceptions, as a people we tend not to take a stand or go for the jugular when required and to prefer the plateau to the peak. Put differently, we seldom feel bad while not doing our best in what we are expected or paid to do. Its ubiquitous acceptance is symbolised by the phrase we toss around when we face any difficulty, poor performance, even sickening savagery – Chalta-hai, meaning ‘it goes’, or ‘it is okay as long as it doesn’t affect me.’ Never mind its catastrophic cost, we feel fulfilled in claiming that the Beatles song ‘Let it Be’ was inspired by this phrase. What stares us in the face is that, in a nation of 1.4 billion people, not one stands-out; nor anything Indian accepted globally as a gold-standard. Perhaps, most worrisome is that not only our performance or productivity or professionalism but even our ability to imagine and envision is average or below average caliber. And if we cannot envision a blueprint for a better future, how can we attain it? That is why, with the kind of envisioning we are indulging in, we will possibly end up as qualitatively as a middling middle-income country and a ‘premium mediocre’ society, whatever we quantitatively become as a nation by 2047.

In Brief

It is these two malaises that have thwarted all attempts to fulfill the premise and promise of India’s ‘totality’, in the words of Aristotle ‘not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts’, of being something else, and not the same, as its elements. The question is: how do we get to stop hemorrhaging from these two cardiac and cognitive wounds? Moral paralysis allows marginalisation of ethical means and to turn the Nelson’s Eye to inequity and injustice. As if that is not bad enough, our mediocre mindset finds nothing immoral about that. Like China, India, too, is titanic but not homogenous as a people. Nothing will ignite us enough for us to rise up in revolt, to rise up as one. We need to inspire a ‘critical mass’ of citizens to manifest what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called, “the will to do what is right”. To do the ‘right’ one has to be righteous. ‘Being righteous’ must be at once the true and only ‘religion’ of India and, as it were, its fashion statement. ‘Being moral’ must be made the most mundane thing, what we wear on our sleeve. And our work ethic ought to be ‘fully present’ and to give our 100 % while doing whatever – that is the way to rise above the morass of mental mediocrity.

(Writer is a retired IAS officer

of 1958 batch)

(P.S: For a fuller prescriptive analyses of the two malaises pl refer to the book India—the road to renaissance: An vision and Agenda, authored by Bhimeswara Chala ; Gyan Books, 2024)