After reading Sean Paul Kelley's "reflections on India" @ http://www.seanpaulkelley.com/?p=620 I had to sit down and collect my thoughts...Thanks Sean to make me go back to the blog board after a log gap.....
Sean started with "the four most preventing India from becoming a developing nation"....When France and many others are backing India for UN SC seat.....UK's new government wants to please India for its looming economy and every American company dreams to open a office in India, to be called truly global...Sean must have faced some real tough days in India to pen this article and deny the facts....
Though I don't deny most of the observations made by Sean, but this writing is coming across more of his personal frustration of digesting the fact that ………How come a country without following the conventional western path of development of cleanliness, paranoidal hygiene, sophisticated infrastructure, discipline and the rest of it……..Is able to post 9% growth year on year, able to make billion dollar international acquisitions, able to make President Bush run around the whole globe as India’s brand ambassador for the nuclear deal, able to be the software and the back office hub for the whole of the word, including many companies in Texas, Sean’s home state….
For long, the western idea of efficiency, of order, of precision has been mouthed out loud. I agree we have garbage lying around in our cities. But that's not all that describes a society. We are helpful, tolerant, childish, innocent, religious, historical, festive, traditional, hierarchical... long list.So much more than a 40%-of-their-population-earns-less-than-a-dollar society.
Sean says…..”It take triplicates to register into a hotel. To get a SIM card for one’s phone is like wading into a jungle of red-tape and photocopies…….. Getting train tickets is a terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number…….” I really want to know the names of the hotels where Sean faced that…..If Sean found it difficult to get a SIM card in India……then He should never try the same in Switzerland….As getting a pre-paid SIM card in Switzerland (among the top 10 most developed countries as per HDI) takes more documents then a visa application….let alone dreaming for a post-paid connection….To book a train ticket, Sean should have used the internet…..I will help you in all these mundane things next time Sean ! After living in a country where a few motor companies have fooled and destroyed the whole public transport system…I can imagine that, It must be difficult for Sean…..
But having said all of that….I accept all the other observations with the great ‘Indian’ humility…..Just give us a few more years….We are only 63 years old as a independent nation…..Americans took very many years to establish the basic civil rights for its citizens, even being a free nation from more than 200+ years….Europe has seen the worst plagues in the world in the past owing to unhygienic conditions……Even today America is the worst polluter and highest in per capita emissions……Income disparity is worse in America than India (Based on GINI coefficient)…
Comments and reflections like these are surely useful for us to tighten the grip further…..I will just request author’s like Sean to do a more intelligent comparison while writing their observation…..India, which is 14 times more populated than Ethiopia, with India’s wide cultural and linguist differences may not learn much with other references…..Those comparisons will only have editorial value for the sake of a eye catching headline....
