My grandfather Guruswami was one of the first civil engineers to come out of Guindy — the College of Engineering, Madras — in a generation when that meant something specific. India was being wired and bridged and tracked by a small cohort of Indian engineers working under British firms, and the work took them wherever the work was. For Guruswami through the late 1930s, the work was the Howrah Bridge. Braithwaite, Burn and Jessop Construction Company — known in the family simply as Jessop — was riveting twenty-six thousand tons of steel into a cantilever span across the Hooghly, in three eight-hour shifts, racing the war. He was on it.
That is why the four children ended up at Rajghat.
Guruswami and my grandmother Vedambal had four to raise — Jayam and Moham, the two older sisters, then Paddu, my father, then Chotu, the youngest, whose home-name simply meant little one — and a profession that placed the family in whatever remote site the bridge or the railway or the dam required. Day school was not possible. Boarding school was the only answer. They placed all four in the same hostel at Rajghat Besant School on the banks of the Ganga at Benaras, and the children came home for summers and returned to Rajghat for the rest of the year, through high school.
I learned this in pieces, the way one learns most family facts — late, by accident, when something else was being discussed. My father had mentioned Rajghat over the years the way people mention the weather, without ever explaining what it was. It was just where he went to school. The way some people went to St. Stephen’s or Doon. It took me decades to understand that Rajghat was not that kind of school at all — and longer still to understand that the choice was not really a choice. It was a logistical answer to a working engineer’s problem. The formation came afterward, as a gift no one had purchased.
There were three older children too — Cheenu, Ramu, and Vishu — who had grown past school age by the time the work travel intensified, and so were never part of the Rajghat cohort. Seven children, raised across two formations by the simple accident of when they had been born. The older three came up through the conventional south Indian route, then went into the major cities as adults — into the modern professional life that post-independence India was building, into accounting and the other services that the new institutions required. The younger four went north to the hostel. Same parents. Same household values. Same Iyer lineage. Two utterly different formations, imposed by the timing of when each child reached school age relative to the bridge work. That fact alone is worth holding onto, because it tells you that formation is something institutions deliver, not something parents transmit by intention.
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But Rajghat was the second formation, not the first.
Before the train north, the four younger children were raised in Thiruvidaimarudur, the agraharam in Thanjavur district that the family was from — Cauvery delta country, Mahalingaswamy temple, deep Chola lineage, ritual scholarship in the air. They were raised there by their grandmother. Her name was Savithri. Paati to the children. She fed them yoghurt rice that she had set the night before in a mud pot, kept cool overnight by the breath of water moving through clay walls, ready for them in the morning at exactly the temperature a child should eat in the heat of the Cauvery delta. Thayir sadam from a mann paanai — appropriate technology, in the deepest sense, before anyone had a phrase for it. Climate-responsive nourishment delivered by hand, by someone who loved them, in a village that had been doing it this way for two thousand years.
This is the formation that arrived first. Before Krishnamurti. Before the Ganga. The grandmother’s hand and the cool curd rice and the agraharam morning. The temple bells in the distance. The Tamil that was the language of food and prayer and ordinary life. The rhythm of a household where ritual marked the hours.
The village school they attended held its classes outside, in the sand, under the trees. The children carried slates. They sat on the ground. They recited multiplication tables aloud, and worked through math problems aloud, and the price of an error was a quick pinch of sand from the ground the child was sitting on, pressed onto the forearm or the thigh. A small piece of grit pushed into the skin. Then the recitation continued. The ground itself was the disciplinary instrument — the teacher reached down for what was already there. It was harsh but it was not cruel. The error was registered on the body, not on the child’s standing among the other children. There was no ranking. No comparison. No shame in front of the class. Just the pinch, the corrected answer, the next problem. Consequence without humiliation, which is something contemporary education has almost entirely lost. The body learned because the body had felt the cost of the error. By the time my father was eight or nine years old, the multiplication tables were in his fingertips. The Sanskrit recitations were in his throat. His body had been taught how to hold knowledge, even before he had been taught what to do with it.
Both were the village. Paati’s curd rice in the morning. The pinch of sand under the tree in the afternoon. The grandmother held both. The grandmother was both — the same hand that fed him cool yoghurt rice would also, when it came her turn to teach him a verse, expect it back word-perfect. The Cauvery delta had been forming children this way for two thousand years. Loved and disciplined in the same courtyard, fed and corrected by the same hands, the body enrolled as the medium of memory from the earliest age. This is the formation that arrived first. It is not the formation contemporary education would recognize as benevolent. But it produced children who, by the time they were sent north to Rajghat, had bodies that knew how to learn.
The four children were not orphans. Guruswami and Vedambal were not absent parents. They were a working engineer and his wife following the work, and the children stayed with Paati, in the village, because that is how Tamil joint families had handled this for centuries. Paati was not a substitute parent. She was the primary parent for those early years, by design, and that was understood by everyone in the household. What she gave them was warmth, food, language, ritual, and the certainty of being loved. That is the substrate. Everything else got written on top of it.
When the four eventually went north to Rajghat, they did not arrive as blank slates. They arrived as Iyer children from Thiruvidaimarudur, already carrying Paati’s curd rice in their bodies, already carrying the multiplication tables in their fingertips, already shaped by the agraharam in ways they could not have named. The Krishnamurti formation took hold of them at Rajghat because the soil had already been prepared — by a grandmother who had loved them with cool yoghurt rice from a mud pot, and by a school in the sand that had taught them the body is the seat of memory.
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Rajghat Besant School sits on land that Annie Besant chose and that Jiddu Krishnamurti — the Tamil Brahmin boy the Theosophists believed would be the next World Teacher, who later refused that role and dissolved the order built around him — turned into one of his foundation schools. The school existed for a single purpose: not to prepare children for examinations, not to credential them, not to make them employable. It existed to give them the conditions in which they could, in his phrase, flower in goodness.
He was explicit about what stood in the way. “The purpose of education is not to produce mere scholars, technicians and job hunters, but integrated men and women who are free of fear; for only between such human beings can there be enduring peace.” He believed competition was the disease, not the cure. “We are concerned with the flowering of goodness which cannot possibly flower where there is any competition.” He believed examinations and rewards cultivated jealousy and anxiety in the young. He believed the teacher had to be inwardly free before a student could be. He believed the school had to be a place where, as he put it, one learns about the totality, the wholeness of life.
I read those lines for the first time last week, on a phone, in Ohio. I recognized every one of them. Not as new ideas. As ideas I had grown up inside.
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The four were not housed together. Rajghat had a boys’ hostel and a girls’ hostel, separated by the convention of the time, and visits between them required crossing the campus. So Paddu and Chotu — the younger brothers, small enough to need supervision and old enough to resist it — would make the walk over to the girls’ hostel to see their sisters. They tended to arrive disheveled. Shirts untucked. Flies often open. Jayam and Moham would see them coming, recognize the state of them at a glance, and take them aside before they could be seen by anyone else — buttoning what needed to be buttoned, tucking what needed to be tucked, fixing the brothers so they could be returned to public view. The sisters made up for the parents in absentia.
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When my father spoke of Rajghat, which was rarely, two things came up. He swam against the current in the river. And afterward he drank large glasses of milk.
That was the school, distilled into what a boy remembered. Not examinations. Not marks. Not the names of teachers or the prize-giving days. A current and a body learning to move against it, and the simple wage the body collected for the work. The Ganga flows past Benaras toward the Bay of Bengal. He swam the other way. Then he drank the milk.
I do not think he ever told me this as instruction. He told it the way men tell river stories — for the pleasure of the water, the cold, the appetite at the end. But the image stays, because it is the only one I have of him as a boy, and because it turns out to be the whole thing in one frame. A school that teaches a child to swim against the current, and feeds him after, has already done most of what a school is for.
My father never quoted Krishnamurti to me. I do not remember him saying the name with any particular weight. He was an Iyer by birth and lineage, raised on his grandmother’s curd rice, fluent in the Tamil and the Sanskrit names of things. But he was not ritually observant in the way an orthodox south Indian Iyer of his generation would have been expected to be. He did not perform daily puja with the conviction of a man who believed the repetition mattered. He had been taught at Rajghat that ritual itself was a form of mechanical conditioning — Krishnamurti had been as explicit on this as he was on competition or fear. The constant repetition of a ritual, of a word, of a prayer, is a gratifying sensation to which a noble term is given. That was the line, and it had landed in my father somewhere in the hostel years. He kept the Tamil. He kept Paati’s food. He kept the village. He set down the daily mechanical performance of orthodoxy. He worked in coal-town Dhanbad. He read in Hindi as easily as Tamil. He sent me to a Jesuit school named for an Italian missionary who studied Sanskrit and wore saffron robes.
None of this looked like Krishnamurti from the outside. All of it was Krishnamurti, in the sense that Krishnamurti had named the surgical operation that distinguishes the living inheritance of a culture from the mechanical apparatus that calcifies it. My father had made that distinction in himself.
But what got transmitted was not vocabulary. It was temperament.
The household held achievement lightly. Marks were noted, not celebrated. Comparison to other children was almost never used as a motivator — and when it surfaced, usually from a visiting uncle, my father would let it pass without taking it up. Questions were welcome at the dinner table, including the kind that did not resolve. Silence was permitted. The credential economy that organized so many other Indian middle-class households — the IIT-or-bust pressure, the rank-as-identity reflex, the relentless ranking against cousins — did not organize ours. I did not know this was unusual until I left home.
What I now understand is that my father was carrying Rajghat into the household without naming it. The temperament was the air I breathed. By the time I encountered Drucker and Deming and Ohno as an adult — thinkers who would name competition as destructive of systems, who would insist on the dignity of the worker, who would argue that fear is the silent saboteur of any operation — the receptors were already built. Those Western thinkers did not form me. They named what was already in me.
The line runs:
Thiruvidaimarudur and Savithri Paati → Krishnamurti and Rajghat → my father → the Dhanbad household → me
Four of those five links I did not choose. I inherited them in the air of the home. The way questions were asked. The way achievement was held lightly. The way certain kinds of conformity were quietly resisted. The way food was something a grandmother prepared at the right temperature for the right hour.
*
This is the part that matters for everything I am now trying to build.
The Bloom System, the four gates, the Capability Account — none of these are inventions. They are the attempt to translate a private inheritance into a public deposit. What my father got from Rajghat because his parents had no other option, and what I got from him by accident of being his son, most children do not get. They get the household their parents could afford to assemble, in the temperament their parents inherited from theirs, inside an education system that — almost everywhere now — runs on the opposite of Krishnamurti’s principles. Fear is the curriculum. Comparison is the metric. Credentials are the deposit. Formation, if it happens at all, happens by luck.
Krishnamurti understood the diagnosis. He named the disease with a precision no one has improved on. But he refused, on principle, to specify what the school must verifiably deliver. That refusal was a luxury his eight schools could afford. They served a few thousand children. They produced a particular kind of Indian intellectual — including, in a quiet way, my father.
What I am trying to build cannot afford that refusal. If formation only transmits by family lineage and luck of enrollment, it will continue to produce people like me by accident — and continue to fail the hundred million children whose parents did not, and could not, find a Rajghat. The Capability Account is the instrument that turns Krishnamurti’s diagnosis into a societal commitment. It says: the deposit a child receives between birth and thirty does not have to depend on whether their father once boarded a train north and got off in Benaras. It can be made measurable at the home gate, verified at the school gate, compounded at the college gate, and audited at the first-employer gate. Not as a credential. As formation.
*
There is one more thing the family has to disclose before the argument closes.
I am not building the Capability Account alone. Among the founding principals of the Capability Capital Institute is Sridhar Ramamoorti, an accounting professor at the University of Dayton, and Sridhar is my first cousin. His father was Ramu, my father’s older brother — the second of the three older siblings who had grown past school age before Guruswami’s work travel intensified, and who therefore never went to Rajghat. Ramu became an accountant. He raised Sridhar mostly in Bombay, the city where post-independence India was learning how to measure itself — where charter accountancy was professionalizing, where the stock exchange and the auditing firms and the Reserve Bank were building the modern apparatus of how a country counts. Sridhar grew up inside that apparatus. He became one of the country’s serious thinkers on forensic accounting, governance, and how institutions measure what they claim to value. He was born in 1963. So was I.
We work as peer equals — which in Tamil Brahmin terms is itself a small refusal, because Sridhar is the elder cousin in the eldest brother’s line, and tradition would assign him deference rather than partnership. We have set that aside in order to build the work properly.
This matters because of what the Capability Account actually is. It is measurement applied to formation. You cannot build it from formation alone — that is what Krishnamurti tried, and his beautiful refusal to specify what the school must verifiably deliver is exactly why his vision served only a few thousand children. You cannot build it from accounting alone — that is what the credential economy has done, applying measurement to the wrong things and producing a world that audits examinations and ignores flowering. You build the Capability Account by combining the two formations. Which is what is happening now, between Wooster and Dayton, between a manufacturing executive who came up through Paddu’s Rajghat formation and an accountant who came up through Ramu’s Bombay one.
The two cousins inherited not just two different childhoods but the two main trajectories that post-independence Tamil Brahmin families produced for their sons: the professional services route — finance, accounting, law — built in the major cities, oriented toward institutions and the modern bureaucracy of capital; and the industrial route — plant floors, manufacturing, the actual making of things — that built the country’s productive base. The accountants saw what was wrong with how value gets measured. The industrialists saw what was wrong with how capability gets formed. The Capability Account requires both diagnoses fused into a single instrument. Bombay needs Wooster. Wooster needs Bombay. Both need Thiruvidaimarudur as the substrate.
One generation late, two of those children’s sons — born the same year, raised in different cities, separated by the accident of when their fathers had reached school age — are bringing what each lineage carried back together. The accountant from Bombay and the manufacturing executive from the hostel on the Ganga. Both of them grandsons of Savithri Paati, even though only one cohort of cousins was old enough to remember her hands. The Capability Account is what their two fathers’ formations make possible when they meet again in their sons.
This is not a sentimental fact. It is a structural one. The argument the book is making about how formation must be measured rests on the proof that measurement and formation can be brought together — and the proof, in the first instance, is the collaboration of two cousins who inherited the two halves of the same household.
*
I never saw the schoolhouse on the Ganga. I have not been to Rajghat. The four who slept in the hostel through the late 1950s are all gone now — Chotu the youngest first, then Jayam, then my father Paddu, and Moham the last of them. The school today is no longer the place it was when they were boys and girls there. But I have been formed by it, through one remove, in a coal town a thousand miles south. And the thing I owe Krishnamurti — and owe Guruswami and Vedambal for placing their four younger children at the only school the working life of an early Guindy engineer permitted, and owe Savithri Paati who fed them curd rice from a mud pot, and owe the village school that taught them under the trees with slates and sand — is not the language of his books. It is the recognition that what I am trying to do is not original. It is an attempt to make available, by design, to children who will never see the Ganga or the Cauvery, what a village and a school once made available to my father by sheer good fortune.
That is the whole project, stated as plainly as I know how.
Formation is not a curriculum. It is what the household, the school, the college, and the first employer either deposit in a child or extract from them. It transmits across generations even when the institution does not. And what an accident of geography did for one Iyer family in Benaras seventy years ago, a Capability Account can do — must do — for a country.
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Published on 19 August, my father’s birthday. Paddu — G. Padmanabhan — Rajghat 1950s, Indian Railways, Dhanbad.
Venki Padmanabhan is a co-founder of the Capability Capital Institute and the author of the forthcoming Built to Extract and Already Paid For (Capability Capital Press). He writes at thelonggameforall.substack.com.
Written with AI assistance. The argument, the judgments, and the floor testimony are the author’s own.
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