"Balram," Mr. Ashok asked, "how many planets are there in the sky?"

I gave the answer as best as I could.

"Balram, who was the first prime minister of India?"

And then: "Balram, what is the difference between a Hindu and a Muslim?"

And then: "What is the name of our continent?"

Mr. Ashok leaned back and asked Pinky Madam, "Did you hear his answers?"

"Was he joking?" she asked, and my heart beat faster, as it did every time she said something.

"No. That's really what he thinks the correct answers are."

She giggled when she heard this: but his face, which I saw reflected in my rearview mirror, was serious.

"The thing is, he probably has…what, two, three years of schooling in him? He can read and write, but he doesn't get what he's read. He's half-baked. The country is full of people like him, I'll tell you that. And we entrust our glorious parliamentary democracy"-he pointed at me-"to characters like these. That's the whole tragedy of this country."

He sighed.

"All right, Balram, start the car again."

That night, I was lying in bed, inside my mosquito net, thinking about his words. He was right, sir-I didn't like the way he had spoken about me, but he was right.

"The Autobiography of a Half-Baked Indian." That's what I ought to call my life's story.

Me, and thousands of others in this country like me, are half-baked, because we were never allowed to complete our schooling. Open our skulls, look in with a penlight, and you'll find an odd museum of ideas: sentences of history or mathematics remembered from school textbooks (no boy remembers his schooling like one who was taken out of school, let me assure you), sentences about politics read in a newspaper while waiting for someone to come to an office, triangles and pyramids seen on the torn pages of the old geometry textbooks which every tea shop in this country uses to wrap its snacks in, bits of All India Radio news bulletins, things that drop into your mind, like lizards from the ceiling, in the half hour before falling asleep-all these ideas, half formed and half digested and half correct, mix up with other half-cooked ideas in your head, and I guess these half-formed ideas bugger one another, and make more half-formed ideas, and this is what you act on and live with.