A few years ago, I had a fascinating interview with Sam Pitroda, who had led the work of India’s National Knowledge Commission. We spoke about India’s historic, and elusive, opportunity to “take over the world”; about the risks that an outmoded education system posed to that opportunity; about how Indian family practices are as much to blame as the educational system for stifling creativity and free thinking.

Mr. Pitroda is now, by all accounts, a contender for India’s presidency. His ideas may soon gain an enormous platform. Here is a sample of some what we spoke about in the interview.

On what restricts the creativity and innovative potential of Indian students:

“It goes all the way to child-rearing practices. It has to do with allowing your children to experiment freely. When we are raising our children, we constantly tell them: ‘Don’t do this; don’t do that. Stand here; stand there.’ It creates a feeling that if there is a boundary, you don’t cross it. You create boxes around people when we need people thinking outside the box. People don’t want to move outside the box because it will be socially unacceptable. And then schoolteachers reinforce that – ‘Sit down, stand up, don’t do this, don’t do that,’ instead of saying, ‘Experiment, fight, put your finger in your nose.’ That experimentation is not there.”

“You need to be really free. Somebody should be sitting in the window, someone on the floor. Too much regimentation in school is not good. In small towns, people wear ties to school. Who came up with this idea of wearing a tie to school – in India?”

On the consequences of India’s not reforming its massive, labyrinthine educational system:

“We can’t afford to even think about that. The fact that there is a debate, the fact that there’s open discussion, something has to happen. If nothing happens, we will lose this fantastic opportunity in history. One, this is an opportunity to leave behind the British Raj and their legacy – the old way of doing things, old methods of teaching. It’s an opportunity to say that through technology we are going to eliminate old processes and create new processes. Second, we are going to create impact in the world. If I have 550 million people who are below 25, I should not be thinking about how I can create jobs for them. I should think about how they can take over the world, because nobody else will have the kind of workforce we have. The third is how do I work backward, break all the traditional thinking and create new paradigms.”

On taking the politics out of Indian education:

“We need to depoliticize education. We need to free education. We need to allow private participation. We need to allow foreign participation. We need to create regulation instead of control, which allows everybody to play.”

On economic development worldwide:

“The last 30-40 years in the world have been spent improving productivity in the corporate sector, and all the emphasis has been on corporate productivity. The next 30-40 years needs to be spent on improving productivity of the health systems, education systems, governance.”

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

 
NEW YORK — Why do we claim things “taste like chicken”? Why do television folk frame pitches like: “Imagine ‘Mad Men’; now put it on a plane”? Why are new companies promoted as “a mash-up of Twitter, YouTube and Instagram”?

The old is so often our bridge to the new, the familiar our escort to the unknown. Sure, there is distortion involved, because frogs have a taste of their own, or else they would be chickens. But these distortions are the price of a convenience: Without translation, we would often lack the courage or wherewithal to encounter the unfamiliar.

Metaphors and similes are bridges. This is especially true for writers, filmmakers, reporters and other storytellers, who seek to interpret places for other places. They stand between an audience who feeds them, with its own reality and language and understandings, and subjects who supply them their grist, with their own version of these things.

It is a perilous endeavor, this ferrying of the subject’s reality across that gradient and into terms the audience can grasp. All too often, the subject ends up, rightly or not, feeling abused or exploited, his world translated into what he believes it is not. The social structure that seems to him to work just fine becomes someone else’s “caste system.” His religion is said to require a “Reformation.” His country, despite pulling hundreds of millions from poverty, is called a violator of human rights, by people who imprison a vast proportion of their population and regularly invade other nations to get their way.

It is a particular problem that so much of this translation is still performed by so few. To steal language from the aviation sector, the narration of the human story still works more on a hub-and-spoke model than a point-to-point one.

A handful of translators — paid by the publishing and media empires of the West — fan out around the world and send its stories home. Nigeria’s realities, and South Korea’s and Cuba’s and New Zealand’s, travel to the hub of the Western storytelling complex; and when a South Korean wants a story about Nigeria, or a Cuban about New Zealand, they are very often compelled to make do with content assembled not on their soil, nor on the subject’s, but in London or New York.

But the world and its power equations are changing. Countries once on the margin are moving toward the center. And the technologies by which we find, publish and spread stories have broken open who gets to speak and what they might say.

Imagine the future of storytelling in a point-to-point, not a hub-and-spoke, world. What happens when hundreds of Chinese correspondents are poking around America’s prisons? And Egyptian filmmakers are investigating the situation of Muslims in Chechnya? And South Koreans are looking through the prism of their own experience at South Africa’s democratic experiment?

These notions stirred as I was reading Katherine Boo’s devastating, exhilarating first book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.” The book has already received extraordinary praise, and the goal of this column is not belatedly to add to it. Instead, it is to suggest that Ms. Boo has done something much more interesting and subversive than write a terrific book: Though a product of the Western storytelling apparatus, she has pointed toward a new world in which writing about places is not an act of writing for somebody, but an act of writing from somebody.

Forget her bullet-train narration, her vividly painted characters, her achingly sad tale. Dwell on something much simpler, and infinitely harder: her metaphors, similes — the way she seeks to move the reality of her subjects into your mind.

Writing about slum dwellers in Mumbai, she tells us of two neighbors who, for a time, lived divided only by a sheet. It is not long before she refers to this time as “the sheet days,” seeing it more from her subjects’ perspective than ours. She writes of an audacious woman’s “gold-flecked, unlowering eyes,” without the usual (tedious) foreign correspondent explanation of why women in India might lower their eyes.

“Some days the lips were orange,” Ms. Boo, a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, writes in another description, “other days purple-red, as if she’d climbed the jamun-fruit tree by the Hotel Leela and mouthed it clean.” The clause that begins “as if” is at once for our benefit and not: It explicates, or at least elaborates; and yet many of her readers will not know what jamun-fruit is.

And so January becomes “the month of treed kites and head colds.” A slum dweller with a recycling business finds “a shiny oval belt buckle of promising recyclable weight.” A canny local politician has “enough oil in his hair to fry garlic.”

My favorite of Ms. Boo’s similes is her description of the well-dressed women who work in Mumbai’s five-star hotels. She sees them “carrying handbags as big as household shrines.”

In that little simile are wondrous new possibilities for literature and storytelling of every kind. Instead of the unfamiliar bent into what we know, the familiar here is complicated. A handbag, which we understood perfectly well before this passage, becomes something we understand less. Our mind becomes, for a moment, an Indian mind; and a shrine becomes, if fleetingly, more normal to us than a giant purse.

This literature without italics may hint at the storytelling future. Translation, explication, falls away. Places become at once subject and audience. Life on the planet is chronicled from every angle — from hub to spoke, spoke to hub, from point to point to point.

The fiduciary obligation of the storyteller is no longer to us who read her translations. It is to the people whose lives she witnesses. She writes from them, not for us.

In this age of instantaneous hyperconnectedness, such wackiness can seem the very substance of a campaign. Election coverage can resemble reporting on a very long sporting event, with reporters relaying the play-by-play of gaffe, jab and unverified allegation, and the audience linking and tweeting the wackiness du jour, everyone hoping for that dopamine rush of going fleetingly viral.

This manner of watching has a price. It has led many of us to ignore that the Republicans, for all the wackiness, have put on a serious tournament of ideas this time around. On a range of issues, including perhaps the biggest big-picture question facing the United States — how it might lead in a world over which it has diminishing influence and control — we’ve been treated to a full-throated debate and meaningful choices.

If you wander among the more than 300,000 words — the equivalent of a few novels — that the Republican candidates have uttered in the debates alone this cycle, you will find more than the habitual chest-thumping, flag-waving, support-our-troops fare on the question of America in the world.

From one corner, we saw a humbler, chastened, less ambitious America. We heard that “Americans don’t want to see their young men and women going into foreign countries without a clear reason” (Governor Rick Perry of Texas). We heard that it is futile to build nations half a world away “when this nation needs to be built” (former Governor Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah). We even heard that an Iranian nuclear weapon may not be a U.S. problem: “Why would that be so strange, if the Soviets and the Chinese have nuclear weapons?” (Representative Ron Paul of Texas).

From another corner, we heard of a muscular, unapologetic America that remains special, with the burdens and privileges that flow from that stature. Or, as Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota congresswoman, put it, in a swipe at the Obama administration’s coalition-building: “The United States doesn’t lead from behind.”

Most striking, perhaps, has been Mr. Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, who has found in foreign policy a rare domain in which his hard-liner bona fides go mostly unquestioned. He has argued consistently that American specialness must be backed by might — that the country must strive to be simultaneously “the hope of the earth and the strongest nation in the world.”

“We place our hand over our heart during the playing of the national anthem. No other people on earth do that,” he said in Florida last year. (It was a good line about American specialness, but untrue; and YouTube videos quickly surfaced of Japanese, Brazilians and others greeting anthems with hands over heart.)

The facts aside, where Mr. Obama and his ilk might speak of America’s inner specialness as the source of its influence, Mr. Romney insists that American being be backed by doing, and specialness buttressed by force. “We simply cannot continue to cut our Department of Defense budget if we are going to remain the hope of the earth,” he has said.

This contest, in short, raised good, powerful questions: Will America’s strength in this century flow chiefly from example or force, from what it is at home or what it does abroad?

Likewise, on domestic politics, coverage of the Republican primary concentrated on vitriolic back-and-forth about capitalism, often without noting that we were witnessing something unusual: a party with a tendency to speak in unison about the wonders of the free market becoming more nuanced and complex.

Again and again, the candidates sought to draw distinctions between forms of capitalism. Mr. Paul and Mrs. Bachmann tried to distinguish “crony capitalism” — involving bailouts and tax breaks and government collusion — from Main Street capitalism. Mr. Perry, in attacking Mr. Romney, derided the “vulture capitalism” of the private-equity world, while defending the regular sort.

While Mr. Romney, a founder of the private equity firm Bain Capital, has generally stuck to the familiar Republican talking points about economic freedom as cure-all, Mr. Santorum has laced praise for the free market with less-typical talk about elevating capitalism for regular people over capitalism for the highfalutin. He appears to be the only candidate to use the word “mobility” in a debate, and even cited a study that movement among classes is now greater in Europe than in the United States, saying, “We need to change that.”

“We need a party that just doesn’t talk about high finance and cutting corporate taxes or cutting the top tax rates,” he said in one of many challenges to Republican orthodoxy.

A second question raised by this primary, then, is: Will the Republican defense of the free market remain absolute, or will cracks emerge between backers of Goldman Sachs capitalism, on one hand, and corner-store capitalism, on the other?

Whatever your views, it is hard to deny that the public has been given genuine alternatives. This primary has not been a coronation. It has instead been the kind of difficult conversation that families sometimes have, when conflicts long suppressed surface at last, but everyone speaks with the knowledge that they’ll still be family after the shouting.

By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
NEW YORK — Can two thirtysomething guys who have never been married rescue the institution of marriage?

Well, this is New York, so they might as well try.

Meet Brian Schechter and Aaron Schildkrout, creators of the online dating site HowAboutWe, which until lately targeted an obvious demographic: singles.

Since 2010, the site has invited them to pitch date ideas online and respond to dates they like. Some recent ideas: riding motorcycles around and watching Star Trek (Texas); eating steak and cuddling in the rain (Akwa Ibom, Nigeria); and showing up blindfolded at a cafe and letting “our voices & fantasies decide about a 2nd date” (Bonn, Germany).

The site has been a success, attracting more than 700,000 date ideas. But its founders quickly discovered the commercial paradox of the dating site: The better you are at finding love for a client, the faster she signs off and ceases to pay you.

“If you succeed,” Mr. Schildkrout says, “you lose.”

And so the guys asked themselves: What if a dating site didn’t stop at finding you love? What if it also helped you “date” your life partner, and, through the surprise and renewal of that dating, to stay in love?

Later this year, Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout will release their answer to these questions: a new dating portal focused on committed couples. It will seek to get them out of their routines, off their feet and on the town for frequent dates.

Even for two unlikely businessmen who began their careers as schoolteachers, the business logic is plain: There is money to be made arranging dates for 50 years instead of the six to 12 months that HowAboutWe’s single clients tend to last.

But the two men, who have been best friends since kindergarten, will tell anyone who listens that their mission is deeper. They believe that dates — surprising, sexy, rejuvenating dates — are what marriage needs to survive in an era when it is becoming a choice more than a necessity for so many.

“We want to build a product that helps people find and then sustain love — and I think that the sustaining love part is harder,” Mr. Schechter said over coffee at the W hotel in Times Square.

A singles site, he said, is straightforward enough. He speaks of his new cause in far loftier terms. The goal is “figuring out how to make it so that the divorce rate goes down and that it becomes the norm for people to feel like their relationship actually satisfies their existential hope.”

Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout are hardly the first people concerned about the state of marriage and divorce in the Western world. But that concern tends to be voiced more often by religious leaders and archconservatives than by two never-married men who studied meditation in India and have offices among the artists, writers, D.I.Y. types and organic-wine-swilling hipsters of Brooklyn.

Because neither has ever married, Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout felt they needed to investigate the institution before seeking to reform it. They commissioned a study based on interviews with committed couples about their dating lives.

What they found was that the enthusiasm displayed on their singles site — people boldly proposing taco-hopping dates and prankster dates and blindfolded dates; people grasping constantly for the new — faded swiftly for the committed. Mortgages and children and budgets sapped energy. Couples changed. They began to want what was safe, not fresh.

Some excerpts from their interviews: “Very price conscious and needs to feel like she’s getting a deal.” “Is not a romantic and doesn’t plan much in advance.” “Novelty wears off.” “You’re more used to each other and are trying less.” “The usual issues with babysitters.” One subject’s last memorable date involved “going out to special German restaurant around a specific errand they had planned at Ikea.”

Outside the start-up galaxy, people might hear these interviews and say, “Well, that’s life. People age. Things change.” But if digital people have a defining conceit, it is that humans are plastic, and that there is a hack for just about everything.

Each blockage HowAboutWe found among the committed couples they studied has a corresponding feature on the new site. To overcome the inertia it detected, the site will offer fully packaged date ideas. To address logistical woes, HowAboutWe is working to make the packages available with a single click that will book your taxi, theater tickets and corner table at the Italian trattoria.

For Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout, each idea leads to another. They could arrange babysitters for couples. They could help slouchy husbands send, with one click, fancy date invitations that suggest a labor of many clicks. They could allow couples to follow the dates of other couples they admire — a digital way to keep up with the Joneses.

It is difficult in speaking to Mr. Schechter and Mr. Schildkrout to avoid the feeling that there is something personal in this quest. They built their singles site back when they were single and seeking dates. They have since each found a steady romantic partnership, and perhaps they want to improve marriage before taking its solemn vows for themselves.

“There is inertia that makes love hard to sustain, just like there is inertia that makes health hard to sustain over time,” Mr. Schildkrout said. “But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a truly noble goal — and something people want and will pay for — to try to fight that inertia, to create an upward love curve. We want an exponential love curve when we measure love against time.”

The Daily Show – Anand Giridharadas from Omar Wasow on Vimeo.

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — Like many writers, Jonathan Franzen is a serious believer in isolation. He has declared it “doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.” He has claimed to write behind soundproof walls and double-pane windows, lights off, blindfolded, earplugged and earmuffed.

This idea of the island writer — secluded, in but not of the world, aloofly authoritative — is old and enduring. And that endurance is remarkable, for in general these are dire times for remote priesthoods claiming special access to the Truth.

In field after field, the information authorities face disruption, with new equations of power replacing the old. Newspapers are learning to let readers talk back. Now that enthusiasts have made a reference work out of Wikipedia, encyclopedias are allowing their audience to write them. Companies are discovering that they must “engage” with their customers, not just advertise at them.

What do these new equations of influence — the shift from “power over” to “power with” others, as some describe it — mean for the writer? For in this and other ways, modern life challenges the picture of the writer-as-island.

For one thing, the writer is besieged by an ever more instantaneous culture. In our time, velocity has found a moral status once reserved for things like chastity. Google saves us seconds by completing our searches. Journalists must file for the Web fast, before they’ve had a minute to think. Cable pundits must respond at once to every little happening in public life.

The pressure of this culture is to burp out the thought you have right now — regardless of its quality, regardless of how it connects to your other thoughts.

The best writing, of course, is often the opposite of instantaneous. The transcendent illustration of this is Walt Whitman, who published “Leaves of Grass” over 26 years, tweaking and buffing and adding new poems until the end.

Some time ago, interviewing the writer V.S. Naipaul, I struggled to get him to do what writers are often asked to do: to apply published insights to new territory — in a way, to become a pundit. I realized, the more I struggled, that Mr. Naipaul, in refusing these prompts, was defending a notion of writing that is at war with instantaneousness.

“There are two ways of talking,” he said. “One is the easy way, where you talk lightly, and the other one is the considered way. The considered way is what I have put my name to. I wouldn’t put my name to the easy thoughts, because you can often have outrageous views, passionate views, and that’s the source of your thoughts, eventually. But when they occur, they are very rough and brutal. And so a lot of writers’ time is spent in working out or refining coarse thought.”

If the instantaneous culture threatens this idea of refined thoughts, so does the prevalence of feedback. The writer now moves in a world that not only expects speed, but also floods her with data on how she’s doing as she does it — from Amazon sales ranks to most-e-mailed lists to hashtagged reviews of books by readers who have just begun to read them.

Writers, like everyone else, relish feedback. But many will tell you that their art requires sequestration from feedback, for a time, to go into the creative wilds and let their minds roam freely — and then, when it’s time, return to the world and be judged. With no judgment at all, their art would die. But with always-on judgment, it may never reach the status of art.

Feedback loops could make writing more of a meritocracy, just as YouTube makes it easier for gifted, off-the-grid singers to go viral and thus find a record deal. But if the writing world becomes just another segment of the market economy, with writers compelled, as they increasingly are, to be entrepreneurs and marketers, its essential character will change.

The digital age confronts the writer with the tyranny of numbers: you can know instantly exactly how many books you did sell, just as Web sites can measure page views and Twitter can identify trending words.

Along with this deluge of feedback is the new ethic of openness. From open-source software to OpenTable restaurant reservations to the open pastures of Creative Commons, modern life agitates against the closed-off and the exclusive.

And so writers are encouraged to open up, shed their mystique, reveal the innards of their craft. The best-selling Brazilian writer Paolo Coelho — more attuned than other writers, perhaps, to whatever is perceived as modern — has experimented by sharing glimpses of his writing life on Twitter, encouraging feedback from his readers and even broadcasting a live video of himself writing his next book.

“They used to see writers as wise men and women in an ivory tower, full of knowledge, and you cannot touch them,” Mr. Coelho recently told an interviewer. “The ivory tower does not exist anymore. If the reader doesn’t like something they’ll tell you. He’s not or she’s not someone that is isolated.”

This opening up of the process may fit the zeitgeist, but it terrifies many writers. Yet is Mr. Coelho right? Must the writer, like corporations and governments everywhere, accept a fundamental shift in what is kept open and what kept closed?

Some serious writers show a way forward. Teju Cole, the Nigerian writer and photographer, is an avid user of Twitter, using it not to expound on the Super Bowl, but to remix and rewrite Nigerian headlines in a deft, literary way. Salman Rushdie, a defender of Writing with a capital W, has found a way to balance that literary seriousness with new habits of launching tweet-wars, informing us where he is, and reviewing books in 140 characters, always with his trademark wit.

The question, perhaps, is this: As the writer surrenders to these new possibilities, what will be her role in the instantaneous, feedback-driven, open world? Will there be a place for those other, slower thoughts, ideas that take time and quiet to flower, truths that cannot be crowdsourced?

BOSTON — Not far from where Barbara Lynch is standing is an electric door.

Through it, you leave this kitchen of tattoos and beer for a room of Riesling and pearls. The waiters repeatedly line up at the door, shivering with nerves like children in a play; then a button is pressed and the electric door opens and they’re off, totally poised, even a little superior, to deliver your dish or clarify whether your allergy extends to truffle dust.

That electric door, in an upscale Boston restaurant called Menton, stands atop an increasingly forbidding border of class in American life. Restaurants like these are among those spaces where America’s educated elite and the working class still mingle night after night in dimly lit intimacy, feigning through pleases and thank yous that they share a way of life.

Ms. Lynch — the chef and owner of Menton and several other high-end restaurants, and the grande dame of Boston’s foodscape — still wonders what allowed her to walk through fate’s electric door.

Maybe, she half-jests, it was that blood transfusion she had as a girl, lifting her while leaving her siblings to the usual South Boston fates: police officer, trucker, recovering addict. Maybe it was walking as a teenager into the St. Botolph Club, a prestigious society that John Quincy Adams once ran, to work alongside her mother, and realizing that “not everybody is Irish and working at the Post Office, construction or down on the docks or phone company or Gillette,” as she put it, referring to the Boston-based maker of razors.

Ms. Lynch is an American mobility story in times when they’re getting harder to pull off.

A spry 47-year-old with short black hair and an intense gaze, she grew up in the Mary Ellen McCormack public housing project in South Boston, more commonly known as Southie — a heavily Irish, down-on-its-luck peninsular swath of the city. Her father, a taxi driver, died of a heart attack just before she was born.

She started smoking at age 7. By middle school, she had begun her first business: a one-woman gambling enterprise in which she would place bets on horses for her schoolteachers and often pocket the money.

The idea of cooking came to Ms. Lynch, she says, from a stir-fry recipe in a Good Housekeeping magazine. She was 12 or so, and remembers marveling at the possibility of following a few written rules and ending up with a meal from another continent. As she grew, she hustled to find cooking jobs. A hastily told lie turned her into a chef on a dinner cruise ship docked on Martha’s Vineyard, an affluent island off Massachusetts.

Talent and fortune carried her to jobs with the well-known Boston chef Todd English, and at last to restaurants of her own. Today her empire spans an oyster bar, a speakeasy cocktail lounge, a butcher shop, a cookbook store, an Italian diner, an upscale American saloon and other things.

But she claims to be done with fancy restaurants. She savors her come-from-behind victory, but now she finds herself longing to make such victories less rare. She wants to attack the obesity and ill health that plague the people she grew up with, and so she is creating a new company that is, among other things, experimenting with ways to create affordable, healthy, ready-to-eat meals. To do her bit to restore the manufacturing jobs that fled Southie, she hopes to locate the factory for her new company there.

But these are small interventions. Ms. Lynch will tell you that this is becoming a harder country in which to twist your fate. Consider her line cooks. She pays them $10 to $12 an hour, what she says she can afford. That buys them less than did the $6 an hour she was making doing the same job 25 years ago. This is America’s economic reality writ small: as Ms. Lynch has thrived and Boston has become a more worldly and expensive place to eat, it has become a worse place to cook — unless you own the place.

On this particular evening, Ms. Lynch was cooking with a world-famous chef — Daniel Humm, of Eleven Madison Park in New York, who was in town to promote a book. But the company that most excited Ms. Lynch was that of a precocious 13-year-old boy whom she called her apprentice. As the line cooks toiled for their hourly wage, hoping for a flash of recognition from Chef Lynch, she mostly hung around the boy, watching as he chopped, explaining the dishes.

He was fortunate, this aspiring chef, to receive this attention. And he was talented. But he was there because his father is one of Ms. Lynch’s best customers — a man who runs an investment fund and, according to Ms. Lynch, has private jets and all the rest of it. Basically, the customer brought his kid in, and his kid likes to cook, and so he’s got the pre-eminent chef in Boston as his private tutor: the kind of stacked odds that she once knew from the other side.

For four hours that night, the kitchen was awhirl. The staff rushed back and forth through the electric door, barking at each other under the white lights of the kitchen, then assuming a different accent, a different posture, an air of restrained quiet every time they crossed the borderline into the beautiful darkness.

When it was over, the guests spilled into the street. In the kitchen, the anxieties instantly melted away. A drawer was opened, and chilled cans of Miller High Life beer pulled out. They cracked open the cans and bit into some pizza delivered hours earlier. The nightly pantomime was done, and the relief palpable.