The congruencies and disparities between India and the U.S. are absolutely fascinating. When I applied for this fellowship, I said that I believe learning happens in a comparative context, but in the aftermath, I’d add that some comparative contexts are richer and yield more than others. The India/U.S. connection is proving to be a rich partnership.

India and the USA are both huge countries with large, diverse populations; both have emerged from under British colonialism, the USA in 1776; India in 1947. Both have chosen to be democracies, value freedom, and seek to design a system of free, public education for all. As a democracy, the USA is 235 years old; India 64. India is an older nation, but a younger democracy. Perhaps this is why so much of Indian culture felt to me like 1950s America: a time of hope, optimism and joy. When I went to see a Bollywood movie, expecting it to be the Indian “Hangover,” it was more like a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road movie. The actors sang, they danced (with unabashed glee that would be sneered at in the USA); it was didactic (the title, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, translates to “Won’t Get Life Back Again” or “Seize the Day”) and filled with hope and joy.

I was regularly reminded of Post WWII rhetoric. In India, one of the few growing economies in the world right now, home ownership is becoming a reality for many in the rising middle class. Sound familiar? Here, in the 1950s, as unemployment and inflation remained low, home ownership became a reality for many middle-class Americans. Even a very modest home was a point of pride for many whose grandchildren would lust after “McMansions” only several decades later. A chicken in every pot and a car in every garage became dinner at a restaurant or take-out every night and a car for everyone in the family old enough to drive.

It is not just rampant materialism that has made us into the cynical bunch we are. While I do think that capitalism has trumped democracy, our can-do attitudes were also short-circuited by a series of events, namely the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and Bobby Kennedy, the Watergate scandal, and the prolonged conflict in Vietnam. But India, too, has had to deal with the assassination of the beloved and respected Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, India Gandhi in 1984, and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991. They have lived through years of tension with Pakistan, always under the threat of nuclear war, and like the U.S. struggles with issues of race and class, and separatist movements among its many and diverse religious and ethnic groups. In the U.S., the increasingly polemical evolution of our two-party system has led to a closed narrowness that adds exponentially to current levels of frustration and cynicism. India, on the other hand, has a multi-party system with a variety of small regional parties.

And there are some fundamental differences in our histories and mythologies that I think will cause the Indian post-colonial trajectory to play out differently than ours has. As a country, we are simply young—Native American culture, to the extent we even acknowledged it, was either exterminated (I know, I know—smallpox was inadvertent) or shunted off to reservations. U.S. history more or less begins with the broad markers of Columbus, the landing of the Mayflower, the Revolutionary War, and the founding fathers signing the Constitution. So we are a very young nation—and we often behave like an ill-bred, overgrown adolescent—big, full of ourselves, arrogant, sure of our own immortality, and toying with that very mortality.

But as to the series of internal events that apparently led to our cultural disillusionment, how is it that we emerged from WWII as optimists? I still use that harrowing time as a standard to pull me up when things get dark, as in “if they could pull through that, surely we can survive this.…” But WWII events helped forge our national optimism—it was then (“No ordinary time,” according to Eleanor Roosevelt) that we bonded and faced the challenge of wars on the Atlantic and the Pacific fronts simultaneously (beginning with an already-depleted military). Perhaps it was our adolescent brashness that gave us the “gumption” (to use a 50’s word) to even take on such a herculean task. But we emerged as a super- and nuclear-power—adding initially to our optimism, and eventually to our arrogance. We’re not exactly a pampered adolescent (our history is short, but fraught; our successes are hard-earned). Perhaps what we have is the cockiness of a particularly successful high school quarterback—a youngster who feels that the effort he has exerted—which feels enormous relative to his short life– has taken him to some sort of pinnacle.

India, on the other hand, has certainly come through, and continues to struggle with some pretty cynical-making events of her own. And while her struggle to come out from under British rule, led by Mohandas Gandhi with his doctrine of non-violence, and brought to fruition by his political heir, Jawaharlal Nehru, is rightfully a source of national pride, they too, have dealt with assassinations, terrorism, and government corruption. Even the high school students I taught, when I remarked on the noticeable national pride and optimism, and the growing economy, mentioned significant government corruption as an enormously mitigating factor.

We Americans still tend to think that history is linear—and that the simple line into the future always moves along a positive trajectory. It’s the inheritance of yet another root myth of our own culture, that of manifest destiny—that 19th-century notion that the United States had the right and the duty to settle in and expand through the continent—that it was ‘God’s will.” We were not just God’s chosen people in a religious sense. We were God’s chosen people–politically. That notion fed into a sense of complacency when, as presidential scholar (and Gilmour speaker last Tuesday) Doug Brattebo pointed out,

“In the 1990s, after the Cold War had wound down, [as] the Western democracies enjoyed record economic growth, low unemployment, and a rising stock market for a period of quite some years, there developed on the part of young and middle-aged Americans, I think, a sense that this kind of dependable progress, this kind of upward spiral of reinforcing positive developments, would go on and on and on. It was as if, more than one observer has said, history went on holiday.”

So the arrogance that is the legacy of our myth of manifest destiny was overlaid with a sheen of complacency as “history took a holiday” for the nation with a storied but relatively short history. Like that high school quarterback, we had reached our goal—we thought this was the apex, our laurels were hard-earned but well deserved, and we were done.

India, on the other hand, has a long, rich history, and the wisdom that comes with that experience. Loung Ung, the author of First They Killed My Father, the story of her parents’ murder and her survival of the Cambodian genocide, says that one generation of her family was royalty, the next paupers. She knows that fortunes are transitory; that life is capricious. Loung has inherited a cultural understanding–the result of a long history and a long view of history–of the reflexive nature of human experience. The tide ebbs and flows; it does not move in one direction.

In both cultures, U.S. and India, there is a growing secularism. Their Durga Puja, the big holiday celebration in October that they have compared to our Christmas or Mardi Gras, has become secularized—widely celebrated by members of many and varied religions—it is a 6-day street festival, more a cultural event than a religious one.

The Puritanical religion of our forefathers translated into an uptight attitude and back-breaking work ethic. Their religious history is one of spirituality, even mysticism. Our fundamental myths of bootstraps and self-made men has a heavy emphasis on individualism, and is what we invoke when we sneer at the poor–—they could climb out of poverty if they only worked harder—after all schools are free…. The ethos in India is much more a communal one, and I never once felt the antagonism toward the poor that I hear articulated by the affluent in the USA ever more frequently.

So the questions I’m taking away are related to but different than those I arrived with. Is India on a trajectory toward democracy that will mirror our own? Can they learn from our mistakes? Can we borrow back some of their hope and optimism?

When I discussed this in the staff room, ABan and Sampita assured me that their students, too, are jaded and becoming cynical—but would we not have said the same thing in the 50’s or 60’s? (Oh, we did not know what cynical meant back then. Our much-more-cynical selves could teach our 1950’s selves a thing or two…naïve fools that we were.) When I expressed relief that I saw no sagging pants in India—that ubiquitous (and surprisingly long-lived) American symbol of hip-hop culture and youthful brashness–they assured me that trend had arrived from the west—I simply had not been privy to it yet. To my outside perspective, though, the cynical tone seemed mild if it was visible at all.

So I wonder which elements of our trajectory will play out in similar fashion in India. The growth of materialism is one I suspect will be hard to avoid, but I think their more communal nature and easier acceptance of the spiritual might soften their journey—maybe they will avert some of the hardness and cynicism that has crept into our culture. And maybe, through collaboration with India, we can rediscover and recapture some of the wide-eyed optimism that is a necessary component when you are eager to take on daunting tasks. A sort of deliberate naiveté is, I think, increasingly necessary for educators. No matter how dysfunctional the system, so matter how damaged the community, we must keep on—and with a seriousness of purpose and a smile. There are living, breathing children sitting in those desks right here, right now, depending on us for their future. (See—corny & naïve, but true and necessary!)