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“The National Institute of Design is the only one of its kind in India; it is fabulously equipped, competition to enter is fierce, and standards should be high. But it is an imported idea, an imported institution, and it has been imported whole, just like that. In India, it has been easily divorced from its animating principle, reduced to its equipment, and has ended - admittedly after a controversial period: a new administrator had just been sent in - as a finishing school for the unacademic young, a playpen, with artisans called in to do the heavy work, like those dispirited men I saw upstairs squatting on the floor and working on somebody's chairs: India's eternal division of labour, frustrating the proclaimed social purpose of the Institute.” — V.S. Naipaul