The real problem with our politics and public life today is the lack of intellectual stamina. Thought leaders have gone missing. What we have instead is a bunch of parvenu, and a nation hustling to get ahead of itself.Let me start with the name of a film widely acclaimed as one of the finest ever made. Ritwick Ghatak’s Jukti, Torko, Goppo. Reason, debate, narrate a story. That was the spirit of the times I grew up in.In school, debates were a big draw. We were taught to argue and reason against each other. If we were good, we were sent off to other schools to compete against their best debating talents. And by the time we entered college, the popularity of debates had grown many times over; the issues too had become more complex, more exciting. It was the ’60s, remember? The world was changing in many amazing ways and we all felt we were a part of that change.Politics then was not about winning elections. It was about having an opinion that people respected. And opinions, in those days, was often contrarian. Be it on China’s betrayal of India or America’s war in Vietnam, or the students’ uprising in Europe where (for the first time) we saw some of the most powerful governments teeter before the might of youth power. Change was in the air and we loved dissecting and debating it. Everyone had a different perspective even on a subject where we all agreed. And every argument we had threw up new ideas. No, no one ever came to blows in those days. Of all the weapons we used against each other, the sharpest was wit. And the most convincing was passion.Political speeches also drew from the same fountainhead of ideas. While audiences for them were seldom as huge as they are today, for no one felt the need to bring in truckloads of hired spectators to rah-rah on cue, we who were young and full of hope went to listen to these speeches because they were about the new India we were dreaming of. Freedom was like a song in the air. And like all young men and women of that era, we were restless for more, more than just the freedom our fathers had fought for and won. Our dreams were also about greater social justice, more equality, a new nation being built where, we felt, all of us would have a role to play, where caste and community will yield way to equal opportunity.Those were the decades when the world was fighting over ideas, when young students could force mighty governments to take a fresh look at their unjust wars. When poets, rock stars and philosophers could persuade leaders to jettison the temptation of realpolitik and embrace a greater sense of responsibility, a more humane option. Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem called “Howl!” that became America’s youth anthem, where he asked the US to go f**k itself with its atom bomb and no, no one even for a moment thought he was being anything less than patriotic. John Lennon and Yoko Ono opted out of their music careers to become anti-war activists. No one questioned their credentials. They became even bigger stars overnight.Leftists were confounded by the new left. The right found itself too right to be right. Dissent and debate was at the heart of all politics. And young students were, so to speak, the voice of every nation. No one cast them aside as irreverent or irrelevant, as we often say today. And no, no one thought the government or its agencies were the repository of all wisdom. (That is why I find it strange when people argue today that the FTII students are being stupid and unreasonable because they have spurned a C-grade TV star as chairman of their institute. This argument stems from the ridiculous belief that the state is the sole stakeholder in an institute because it pays the bills.)Real debate today is often derailed by those who question the patriotism of their opponents. Outrage is instigated to close an argument no one has the intellectual acumen to defend or dispute. So the thinker is now an outcast. The rationalist is a soft target. And those who argue for another point of view are enemies to be shouted down because no political party has the intellectual stamina any more to defend itself. So the scholar is now a pariah. The thought leader, once feted as the toast of our society, has quietly wandered away into self imposed exile. So has the poet, the classical singer, the philosopher, the writer. They are most welcome to return their awards. Awards, in future, will be only given to those who fall in line. What we are left with today are but a bunch of parvenu, and a nation hustling to get ahead of itself at any cost.Neither Ramrajya nor Utopia is our dream any more. China is.One of the heroes of my youth passed away sometime back. He was a Hindu dharma expert, a Sanskrit and Vedic scholar, a Gandhian, a reformist, a master of logic. He led the creation of the first encyclopaedia in Marathi and a dharmakosha where he put together transliterations of Vedic hymns.But, above all, Laxmanshastri Joshi was a pragmatist who held reason and debate closest to his heart. He combined the spirit of the sixties with our current, desperate longing for our lost cultural identity. He was our last Tarkatirth. And he yearned for jukti, tarko, goppo.