KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS decided afterward that those were the moments the state redefined what government could do, and it remembers the people who presided over them by name. It is not vanity to think in those terms; it is responsibility, because the scale of what is being weighed is part of what is being weighed. In 2045, historians may look back on the creation of this state’s civic capability the way they now look back on its literacy campaign and its decentralisation: as the moment the state once again showed the country, and the world, what a government could accomplish when it decided to make good citizenship visible and ordinary. That sentence may prove an overstatement. But the chance that it proves exact, and that it attaches to a particular government and a particular decision, is precisely what makes this worth more than a routine examination. Most of what crosses a desk cannot be remembered that way. A few things can. The honest task is to tell which is which, and to recognise that this one at least belongs in the second category, whatever you ultimately decide about it. IN A SENTENCE For fifty years this state exported its people; the next fifty can be about exporting its ideas, and the first government to prove that good citizenship can be made visible, rewarded, and ordinary will 14