A one-sided view about India

PS : I had another post in draft that was going to be my first post for this year that i have been writing bit by bit thru' this week. I was to post it today. But then..I got this fwd this morning...n i couldnt not post it and disucss it here. So before your blood begins to boil Here is wishing each one of you and your near n dear ones a Very Very Happy 2010....One thats full of love, joy and contentment!!

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I don't disagree with all that the author has written. NOR DO I AGREE with him. India is some of what he writes..but its lots more as well. The **good** aspects about our country has conveniently been forgotten.

n "India Doesn't care" makes me want to laugh out loud at the author's ignorance!

I got this Fwd with the subject as "An Interesting Read about India". I diagreed and so changed the subject.

Ur thoughts?

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**Reflections on India**

By Sean Paul Kelley


If you are Indian, or of Indian descent, I must preface this post with a
clear warning: you are not going to like what I have to say. My criticisms
may be very hard to stomach. But consider them as the hard words and loving
advice of a good friend. Someone who's being honest with you and wants
nothing from you. These criticisms apply to all of India except Kerala and
the places I didn't visit, except that I have a feeling it applies to all of
India, except as I mentioned before, Kerala.. Lastly, before anyone accuses
me of Western Cultural Imperialism, let me say this: if this is what India
and Indians want, then hey, who am I to tell them differently. Take what you
like and leave the rest. In the end it doesn't really matter, as I get the
sense that Indians, at least many upper class Indians, don't seem to care
and the lower classes just don't know any better, what with Indian culture
being so intense and pervasive on the sub-continent. But here goes,
nonetheless.

India is a mess. It's that simple, but it's also quite complicated. I'll
start with what I think are India's four major problems--the four most
preventing India from becoming a developing nation--and then move to some of
the ancillary ones.

First, pollution. In my opinion the filth, squalor and all around pollution
indicates a marked lack of respect for India by *Indians.* I don't know how
cultural the filth is, but it's really beyond anything I have ever
encountered. At times the smells, trash, refuse and excrement are like a
garbage dump. Right
next door to the Taj Mahal was a pile of trash that smelled so bad,
was so foul as to almost ruin the entire Taj experience. Delhi, Bangalore
and Chennai to a lesser degree were so very polluted as to make me
physically ill. Sinus infections, ear infection, bowels churning was an all
to common experience in India. Dung, be it goat, cow or human fecal matter
was common *on the streets..* In major tourist areas filth was
everywhere, littering
the sidewalks, the
roadways, you name it. Toilets in the middle of the road, men
urinating
and defecating anywhere, in broad daylight. Whole villages are plastic bag
wastelands. Roadsides are choked by it. Air quality that can hardly be
called quality. Far
too much coal and far to few unleaded vehicles on the road. The
measure
should be how dangerous the air is for one's health, not how good it is.
People casually throw trash in the streets, on the roads. The only two
cities that could be considered sanitary in my journey were Trivandrum--the
capital of Kerala--and Calicut. I don't know why this is. But I can assure
you that at some point this pollution will cut into India's productivity, if
it already hasn't. The pollution will hobble India's growth path, if that
indeed is what the country wants. (Which I personally doubt, as India is far
too conservative a country, in the small 'c' sense.)

*More after the jump.*

The second issue, infrastructure, can be divided into four subcategories:
roads, rails and ports and the electrical grid. The electrical grid is a
joke. Load
shedding is all too common, everywhere in India. Wide swaths of the country
spend much of the day without the electricity they actually pay for. With
out regular electricity, productivity, again, falls. The ports are a joke.
Antiquated, out of date, hardly even appropriate for the mechanized world of
container ports, more in line with the days of longshoremen and the like.
Roads are an equal disaster. I only saw one elevated highway that would be
considered decent in Thailand, much less Western Europe or America. And I
covered fully two thirds of the country during my visit. There are so few
dual carriage way roads as to be laughable. There are no traffic laws to
speak of, and if there are, they are rarely obeyed, much less enforced. A
drive that should take an hour takes three. A drive that should take three
takes nine. The buses are at least thirty years
old, if not older. Everyone
in India, or who travels in India raves about the railway system.
Rubbish. It's awful. Now, when I was there in 2003 and then late 2004 it was
decent. But in the last five years the traffic on the rails has grown so
quickly that once again, it is threatening productivity. Waiting in line
just to ask a question now takes thirty minutes. Routes are routinely sold
out three and four days in advance now, leaving travellers stranded with
little option except to take the decrepit and dangerous buses. At least
fifty million people use the trains *a day* in India. 50 million people! Not
surprising that waitlists of 500 or more people are common now. The rails
are affordable and comprehensive but they are overcrowded and what with
budget airlines popping up in India like Sashes in an ashram the middle and
lowers classes are left to deal with the over utilized rails and quality
suffers. No one seems to give a shit. Seriously, I just never have the
impression that the Indian government really cares. Too interested in buying
weapons from Russia, Israel and the US I guess.

The last major problem in India is an old problem and can be divided into
two parts that've been two sides of the same coin since government was
invented: bureaucracy and corruption. 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 one is not likely to emerge from in a good mood,
much less satisfied with customer service. Getting train tickets is a
terrible ordeal, first you have to find the train number, which takes 30
minutes, then you have to fill in the form, which is far from easy, then you
have to wait in line to try and make a reservation, which takes 30 minutes
at least and if you made a single mistake on the form back you go to the end
of the queue, or what passes for a queue in India. The government is
notoriously uninterested in the problems of the commoners, too busy fleecing
the rich, or trying to get rich themselves in some way shape or form. Take
the trash for example, civil rubbish collection authorities are too busy
taking kickbacks from the wealthy to keep their areas clean that they don't
have the time, manpower, money or interest in doing their job. Rural
hospitals are perennially understaffed as doctors pocket the fees the
government pays them, never show up at the rural hospitals and practice in
the cities instead.

I could go on for quite some time about my perception of India and its
problems, but in all seriousness, I don't think anyone in India really
cares. And that, to me, is the biggest problem. India is too conservative a
society to want to change in any way. Mumbai, India's financial capital is
about as filthy, polluted and poor as the worst city imaginable in Vietnam,
or Indonesia--and being more polluted than Medan, in Sumatra is no easy
task. The biggest rats I have ever seen were in Medan!

One would expect a certain amount of, yes, I am going to use this word,
backwardness, in a country that hasn't produced so many Nobel Laureates,
nuclear physicists, imminent economists and entrepreneurs. But India has all
these things and what have they brought back to India with them? Nothing.
The rich still have their servants, the lower castes are still there to do
the dirty work and so the country remains in stasis. It's a shame. Indians
and India have many wonderful things to offer the world, but I'm far from
sanguine that India will amount to much in my lifetime..

Now, have at it, call me a cultural imperialist, a spoiled child of the West
and all that. But remember, I've been there. I've done it. And I've seen 50
other countries on this planet and none, not even Ethiopia, have as long and
gargantuan a laundry list of problems as India does. And the bottom line is,
I don't think India really cares. Too complacent and too conservative.