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K Ashok Vardhan ShettyWhen we look across the landscape of India’s achievers, we find giants in every field. But when we seek a true all-rounder — someone who scaled the heights in multiple, unconnected domains — few can stand shoulder to shoulder with Eric Prabhakar.He remains, without exaggeration, the finest Renaissance man modern India has produced. In the 1940s, Eric Prabhakar was India’s fastest sprinter, winning the 100m and 200m titles at every national championship between 1942 and 1948.He represented India at the 1948 London Olympics, reaching the quarterfinals of the 100m. But his brilliance was not confined to the track. He earned a BA and MA in Economics at Madras Christian College, securing the third rank in the University of Madras, while also representing his college in cricket and hockey.His all-round excellence won him one of the earliest Rhodes Scholarships awarded to an Indian. At Oxford, he won the coveted Blue, the university’s highest sporting honour.

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From Oxford, Eric Prabhakar moved to Paris to serve at Unesco, in Paris and went on to head its Asian operations for eight years in the 1970s. Post retirement, he headed the Tamil Nadu Amateur Athletic Association and served as vicepresident of its national body.He also wrote four books, including ‘The Way to Athletic Gold’, with a foreword by Roger Bannister. Yet today, his name is scarcely remembered. A nation that forgets its heroes forgets part of its own soul.To its credit, MCC organised his centenary celebration recently. But more is owed to him. To mark his centenary, Tamil Nadu should institute scholarships, trophies, and a road in his name, while the Union govt should release a commemorative stamp – modest tributes to a man who embodied the best of India. What does Eric Prabhakar’s life teach us? Above all, it exposes the poverty of our education system and the sterility of our public culture.In India, the worth of a child is still measured by marks. Parents dream not of character but of percentages. Schools worship excellence at the altar of examinations, sacrificing playfields, music halls, debating chambers, and theatres. Curricula enforce false dichotomies between science, commerce, and humanities, as though a mind curious in one domain must be starved in all others.The outcome is one-trick ponies – children with narrow knowledge and lopsided views, drilled for tests but unfit for life.They grow into adults who can recite facts but cannot think, who pass examinations but fail the greater test of citizenship. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 seemed to recognise this malaise, promising holistic education that values sports, arts and vocational training alongside academics. Yet promise without resources is empty rhetoric. Public spending on education remains low. The problem is not scarcity of funds but their misdirection – good money wasted on bad schemes.Most schools have no playgrounds, labs, or creative spaces. Teachers cling to rote methods, parents to the cult of marks. Unless priorities and values change, NEP’s lofty vision will remain a mirage. Reform will not come by awarding marks for sports, painting or music – schools will only game the system and inflate grades. True reform demands authenticity: genuine spaces for play, art, and exploration; independent evaluation through external examiners and inter-school competitions; teachers retrained to see extracurriculars as central, not peripheral.Above all, society must redefine what it means to succeed. Parents often ask: should my child specialise early or explore widely? Research suggests the latter. In ‘Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World’, David Epstein argues that while the Polgar sisters in chess, Tiger Woods in golf and Mozart in music thrived through early focus, many elites in other fields took a different path – sampling, experimenting and specialising late.Roger Federer played multiple sports before choosing tennis; Vincent van Gogh tried varied pursuits before painting; and a 2014 study of Germany’s World Cup-winning footballers found most were late specialisers who had explored other sports.Breadth, Epstein concludes, is the mother of resilience and creativity. He distinguishes between ‘kind environments’ such as chess, golf, and classical music – where rules are fixed, feedback is immediate, and repetition breeds mastery. ‘Wicked environments’ such as governance, business, and life are – where rules shift, feedback lags, and patterns rarely repeat. Specialists thrive in the former but falter in the latter. Generalists, who sample widely and connect distant dots, are better equipped to adapt and innovate. This truth lies at the heart of India’s governance debate, where the IAS remains the premier, generalist, all-India service.Critics deride it as a cadre of dabblers. But IAS officers are not subject specialists; they are specialists in governance. A health secretary is not expected to perform surgeries, but to ensure hospitals function, doctors are accountable and budgets are wisely spent. Leadership, above all, requires breadth, and the IAS’s strength is precisely that. Its officers serve in sub-divisions, districts, states, and the Union.They deal with agitations, disasters, elections, land matters, welfare schemes, development projects and many more challenges.What they acquire is not narrow expertise but the wisdom of integration. As Lord Bryce observed in ‘Modern democracies’: “Specialists cannot govern. They can advise, but the function of deciding belongs to those who see the whole field.” Prabhakar’s life reminds us that versatility is not the enemy of greatness but its ally. His story is both a rebuke to our narrowness and a summons to reform. (The writer is a Member of Tamil Nadu govt’s high-level committee on Union-state relations)Email your feedback with name and address to southpole. [email protected]