Friday, August 18, 2006

Birth Pangs!!

Has India really "Arrived"?
Hey wait...Isn't this a bit late to ask this? Everyone is talking about the about-to-boom manufacturing industry, the already booming software services industry and well, all the rest of it...

But when we're on the edge of turning a very young 60, where do we really stand?

On one side is the towering peak we have begun to scale and which has given us this heady feeling that we are really going to break into the "Big Boys' Club". Andon one side is the bottomless(?) chasm of poverty, corruption, illiteracy and what not.

Yes, this has been debated a hundred times, and yet this always remains in our psyche.

There have been some really outstanding progress. That we have started comparing iourselves with a model that is better than us in some ways (China), rather than with something inferior to us itself is a proof of the newfound confidence. And that a large population is in its youth also helps. Maybe after another 40 years, the same baby boom might be harmful for us, and I guess a nation should take about a hundred years in a development cycle. Why aren't we foreseeing that this is just the beginning, and that we haven't even hit the tip of the proverbial iceberg? We have not started shaking the world-yet!

It'd take a dedication to education, poverty eradication and grassroot level development and a re-examination and re-interpretation of the "Roti-Kapda-Makaan" concept into "Roti-Kapda-Makaan-Padhai" to lead us on a sustained development path. And well, while we're on it, let's not forget Paani(water) and Bijli (Electricity) either!!

Lets work towards a new tomorrow!!

1 comment:

Suraj said...

Thats true. We have just started. We certainly will be able to see a far more developed and stream lined India certainly in our lifetime. But I do have a feeling, we still will see poverty, caste differences, inter-racial fights for quite sometime. There is lot more scale of people need to be made litterate to overcome such hurdles. That day is not far though.