One often gets down into the debate here (apart from the helpless arguments on Indian cricket team) as to why India is so backwards vis-a-vis America, why it is the quality of life in India is so modest compared to here. And the usual argument ends up blaming it to the huge population or that India is a recent democracy when compared with the America.
I don't believe that being young has contributed to the ills that our country faces, neither is population that big a millstone around India's neck. I believe it all boils to the institutions one country inherits or builds. Those are pillars around which a modern society revolves and functions. A group of people is just a crowd or a mob unless there are rules to make it orderly. What we have in India are weak institutions or establishments just overwhelmed with the internal contradictions that we inherited from British or because of our polity and society. I say it contradictions because of the various strands and seams of culture and ideas and future dreams that has engrossed the young multi-plural nation and its people. Add 60 years to it and the consensus was that we must had figured it right by now. But the reality is far far distant. We still are facing with critical if not existential issues, and there is still no urgency to get the institutions working. The usual refrain is that we are moving in right directions slowly and steadily, but do the people have that patience. The next wave of employment seeking youth are just arriving, young and restless and be rest assured they will not take things lying down.
it is the individuals who run the 'institution' who should take the blame and not the institution. since an institution has no name, no face, no address - it would be foolish for all of us to blame the institution. instead we should be targeting the individuals who are working in that institution for all that has gone wrong..
ReplyDelete@sanchapanzo
ReplyDeleteagreed that it is the individuals who runs these institutions,but when we started sixty years back, i think we had pretty committed individuals and great minds at the helm. We started of well maybe partly due to euphoria and had that pent up desire been used meaningfully we could had achieved our place in the sun, instead rot set in really fast. mostly due to the fact that these pillars of a civil society weren't given time to mature. i believe the system that has inbuilt safety valves that keep the people who run it in check. once you have these in place people are bound to work, it shouldn't be like an initiative driven thing, that i want to be honest so i WILL be honest. instead it should be you HAVE to be honest otherwise the system just rejects you. it may sound too 1984-ish but then it is what we need.