"I have no plans to leave India"

I recently had the pleasure of meeting and then interviewing Sir Mark Tully, a British writer and journalist, considered to be an expert on India, who lives in Delhi. In the interview the veteran former BBC correspondent, who was once very outspoken of the corporation’s restructuring, talks about why he remains in India, what he wants to see changed and why he does not consider himself an expat. Since you are my loyal blog readers, I have posted the entire interview below.

Your last book, India’s Unending Journey, was published in 2007.  Yet you seem very busy. What are you working on right now?
For the past 13 years I have been making a programme for BBC Radio Four called Something Understood. I make 30 of these a year and we make them in batches of six and I am doing six right now.  I make three in India and the rest in the UK. It’s a discussion about matters, which you cannot understand fully, such as philosophy, poetry, religion, all sorts of things, but less in the rational field and more in the intuition field. I am also writing another book on how India has changed since economic liberalisation. It’s like my book No Full Stops In India (NFSII). Next year will be 20 years since liberalisation and also approximately 20 years since NFSII was published.

So, what will that book say? How has India changed?
Well, it has changed rapidly in some respects. There has been a huge release of entrepreneurial activity, as a result of the licence permit of the Raj being lifted.
Industrial production and consumer goods increased, such as the motor car. Twenty years ago, India was still in the age of the Maruti and the Ambassador and even they were only limited to a few people then. The permits were lifted in 1991. Until then there had been a socialist system whereby all industrial expansion had to be subjected to licence processes. These are some of the positives. However, the negatives are the systems of governance and the institutions that affect them have not been tackled. The book is based on reportage, it is not academic. NFSII was about how Indian culture needs to be protected, but the issue of governance was touched on in it. I have written another book called India in Slow Motion, which is about governance in India.

Full report here Hindustan Times