“I say without fear of my figures being successfully challenged that India today is more illiterate than it was before a fifty or hundred years ago, and so is Burma, because the British administrators when they came to India, instead of taking hold of things as they were, began to root them out. They scratched the soil and began to look at the root and left the root like that and the beautiful tree perished.”
Share this quote
About this quote
When you take over something that already works and rip it up to remake it from scratch — instead of understanding and building on it — you can kill the very thing you meant to improve. A living system needs tending, not uprooting; disturb its roots to inspect them and it may not survive.
When to use it
- A new manager who scraps every existing process on day one and watches output collapse.
- Renovators who gut a healthy old garden to 'start fresh' and lose decades of quiet growth.
- A reform that discards a working local curriculum for an imported one and leaves students worse off.