The best way to know the self is feeling oneself at the moments of reckoning. The feeling of being alone, just with your senses, may lead you to think more consciously. More and more of such moments may sensitize ‘you towards you’, towards others. We become regular with introspection and retrospection. We get ‘the’ gradual connect to the higher self we may name Spirituality or God or just a Humane Conscious. We tend to get a rhythm again in life. We need to learn the art of being lonely in crowd while being part of the crowd. A multitude of loneliness in mosaic of relations! One needs to feel it severally, with conscience, before making it a way of life. One needs to live several such lonely moments. One needs to live severallyalone.

Saturday 15 August 2009

INDIA @ 63: NEED TO DO MUCH MORE

Its another day when Nehru’s tryst with destiny phased through its unending travesty once more thanks to the continued legacy of the post-independence India; it is yet another day when a conscious Indian needs to ponder more and escape more to the indignation he often finds herself or himself mired in; it is also a day when the soul of the father of the nation would be feeling slightly more stressed-up, for he has been made irrelevant and forgotten. His teachings and he himself are no more than ceremonial memories.

If we have some reasons to believe India is progressing, we have more reasons to believe India is stagnating somewhere on growth and development of its human asset. PM rightly said today that ‘India is on the path of glory’, for it partially represents a growth story that is there but is yet to transform itself in a development story. His vision, political compulsions and his position tells him to be positivist at most, at least in public eyes, but a poor monsoon just for one year has shown what we are incapable of and it is his sixth straight year in the office. The gap in the economy growth and growth with development can be seen in negative inflation figures and skyrocketing prices.

We continue to perform poorly on almost of human development indicators. Constitutional rights to the individual freedom continue to be more in ‘black and white’ with still ‘much much larger than India’ literacy figures and ever increasing cases of human rights violation. This is ‘Bharat’; that is ‘India’, a theme much discussed and debated on.

There is India story that a foreigner eye sees, and that is true. There is yet another India story that is basically about this ‘Bharat’, even that is true in the same essence. The India of the day being written and presented by the national and international media is more about its economic growth. True it has brought some changes but much more is needed to be done and that needs representation too. For outsiders, India of the yore was more about snake charmers, thugs, a horrible cauldron of cultures, religions and castes, antiquated industrial laws, a so-called ‘iron-curtained’ protectionist economy, its illiteracy, its poverty and burgeoning population and what not. It was the widespread perception for most who knew India somehow. We all know about George Bush’s awareness of India when he assumed office. India’s perception as spiritual guru was there but limited to some seekers of the knowledge only.

The India of the day is more talked about but it fails when it comes to the representation of the larger India that is still awaiting for its claims to be met. The represented growth story of India is about hard crunching figures, about it embracing an economy model that has put it on sustainable growth and curve and moreover that has brought it out of socialization veil. It’s a growing market and producer of goods and services and we proudly claim to be delivering the ‘cheap’ and ‘efficient’ labour. We do that in India, we do that overseas when we export our talent to work for the same output but at a much less cost. Yes but it produces growth and probably our appetite is still not mature to add ‘quality of human life’ to it. We accept the growth story here and an outsider comes to believe the ‘rosy’ India for its growth if it becomes a factor in growth of that economy.

There are many underpinning to the India growth story. If there is one aspect, we do not need to dig in more to find its counter-aspect. India @ 63 needs to find the balance between the ‘smaller but much portrayed India’ of the day and the ‘much larger but not at all portrayed India’ of the day.

Watch out this space for some incisive analysis on the same.