I wake up each morning and flip through the newspaper not to know what’s happening around but for a small feel-good here and there. A news piece on the Tata - Corus deal, a 8% + growth talk, an article on the ever-escalating sensex gives me the required feel good and then I start my day, smiling. I feel proud to be an Indian and I consider myself lucky to be reaping benefits of the boom (I have no inhibitions in accepting that fact that salaries today are offsprings of the demand-supply rumble and not our exceptional performance). On the whole, I am pleased at my present condition, all the more relaxed when I look into the future. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is an old, hackneyed, oft-repeated phrase sans relevance in today’s economic upsurge when you don’t have to try really hard. If you are reasonably sensible and you know angrezi a plum offer is waiting for you.
But things have been different since I watched Parzania. I shuddered at what I thought I didn’t want to acknowledge. For the first time in years, I felt I was a part of an ashamed and crippled nation which chooses to overlook problems because they haven’t been solved in the last fifty nine years, which chooses to take a microscopic view of the country and cover up its incapabilities by campaigns like India Shining/ India Rising/ India Poised and which chooses to ban Parzania in Gandhi land for fear of violence.
There are issues in Kashmir, North east, Gujrat, Andra Pradesh, Orissa. Naxalites who were present in just one state in 1948 have now spread to seven states in India. Safety is a farce be it Mumbai local or the Parliament. The bhagwa moral police is a question mark on our very fundamental rights be it Maharashtra, UP, Bihar or Rajasthan. Our foreign policies have been a failure as we can uncomplicatedly state that our relations with all our neighbors (except Nepal) are a let-down. Then there are other problems like poverty, malnutrition, floods and draughts, infrastructure, corruption……
And yet again we choose to celebrate the fact that US decides to end fiscal aid because they think our days of penury are over or because Asian Venture Capital Journal says we are the most favored PE destination in the world. The acidic truth is, we are still very much divided as a nation. One India deliberately alienates itself from the other’s encumbrance.
India might be rising but its only some peaks we’re looking at.
India might be shining but I don’t think it’s luminous enough to enlighten those emasculated mentalities whose unpardonable acts have embittered generations to come.
