A Dust Over India

India is land of many facets but the fact is the morbid ones rule the day. And hope is not even on the horizon for the vast majority.

Coming to the point, I forwarded this to a friend of mine and here is an excerpt what he (Kishore) had to say on the sad state of affairs

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To be perfectly honest, I have no idea how to reply, I am strangely neutral. I am ambivalent towards hating it or liking it. There was a time when I would agree wholeheartedly or feel stung to the quick and would retaliate with a diatribe of my own. These days I just feel numbed. There is a small protest from within that would have made better sense had I been able to write about it. Of course, it would look churlish and like nitpicking if I were to rip apart that article and look for all the nuances and deliver all the rebuttals. But in the end, I have to wonder, whom does this article target? Is it the Indians who already see and know what is around them and yet tend to live in a Shining India without any kind of proactive thinking? Is it for those NRIs who seem to be filled with patriotic fervour bordering on the lunatic, who berate this country at every breath but would defend it to the same stale, spent breath? Is it for generating a wink-wink with fellow expats from the US who have had similar experiences in India and have a good laugh as they recognize some of the experiences from their own firsthand travails? Or is it a warning to the other prospective visitors who have to be warned of the dire straits this country is in and how nauseating it is, and that the ardent glow in their eyes better be extinguished before they leave their shores rather than face a rude awakening here? I am confused.

Somewhere inside a voice tells me that I am opposing it in any case, with my questions above. That is not true, though. I am comfortably numb, finally. Do you see the futility of reading this and either feeling any sense of anger or empathy in this? What happens once we read this? Are we somehow inspired to change it all? Or, are we turned into holy warriors defending our honour and the glory that we never seem to have had - that is just round the corner for some reason. From the beginning, we have always had targets that were so far in the history of our glory days as to remain fossilized thoughts or so far into the future that we may never attain it ever. Look at the clamour for Shangai-ing our cities. Or the stupid defense of our past glory with regard to the Vedas, Hinduism, Guptas, Mauryas, pre-Islamic indian history. We somehow refuse to see the present - it is always the lost past or the unattainable future for us. Even the more erudite among us, or the well read, lament these things. In the last six decades all we have done is add more spices to the narrative. It is sad, but above all it is pathetic. When an outsider points out our foibles, either we are on the extremely defensive almost to seem offensive or we curl our torsos into fetal position in order to take the beating rather than stand up to it and decide to make a change.

The reason for this attitude, I think, is because of being one of the oldest civilizations. Which is a fact, and often it used as a ego-massage and as a strong point in several discussions.

The point to note is that this building was built thousands of years ago, and is in a natural state of decay.

On the other hand, a country like US being a country of migrants was forced to start everything on a relatively clean state. So sort of a natural call to action - to build their lives.

If one takes anecdotal examples of families one may know of, one will see that the best ones in the families move on to a different place. The laggards are left behind.

One idea, comes to me as I write this, is what if we just ask people from two nearby villages, to just move their huts and belongings to the other village, and vice versa. Will it bring about any change in the attitude?