Graduating from St Xavier’s College in the late eighties was particularly traumatic for my generation. The tentacles of old world political idealism were still firmly curled around our necks, but we could easily see the shining spectre of globalised India waiting to explode.

There were two small factories of political idealism within the college. One was the Center, where the sixties remained eternal; Lennon could be worshiped with agarbattis, Che Guevara was in (as he remains, at least embossed on trendy T-shirts), and (paradoxically), Marx and Gandhi were gods.

The other was the League, which was full of hands-on, heart-on-your-sleeve, straightforward ‘do goodness’. They were ‘social workers’, as opposed to being ‘activists’. The Center loyalists were full of disdain for the League wallahs, dismissing them as pedestrian ideologues, hole-diggers (in reference to their persistent penchant for digging wells in villages) and the worst epithet of all, enemies of class struggle, which in real terms for many of us centerpedes (as we were called) was limited to fighting for rights of college canteen workers.

India’s Independence Day is just around the corner. There will be a lot of familiar stock-taking of achievements and failures, but this piece by Rahul Srivastava is a bit different, quickly presenting the divisions of a moment, already turning obsolete, and then matter-of-factly describing two “misfits.” As a reader, you want to get up and go in search of what is missing.

(Thanks, Naresh)