Fact of the matter…
My frequency of posting something on this blog has come down exponentially over the last couple of months, as regular patrons would have noted. Yes, the six of you. Not that I lost interest in writing – but primarily because I hardly find anything to crib about in the land of opportunities. And also watching movies without a single hitch in streaming is a better way to spend quality time. I cannot write anything about India either, as I found that only Airtel was making headlines these days.
Talking about India, over the 2 months that I’ve spent in the USA, I’ve learnt a few lessons about where we stand in a global perspective. By global perspective, I am referring to how nations around the world regard India. And this had been a revelation of sorts, not because I did not find a lot of people chanting India’s greatness, but because I found that we still have not achieved enough to be considered serious contenders in a global economy.
For instance, when we consider the rate of development that has taken place over the last few decades, we are nowhere compared to Singapore, Japan and Malaysia, and absolutely nowhere near China. The last point was highlighted in a Presentation by Jim Tompkins at the Purdue University, where he remarked that India as being in the list of Top 10 countries with a high GDP was a myth – we are below even Brazil in this regard. China and Japan are the only super powers in Asia and that’s how the world views it. Sure, a lot of naysayers amongst us will argue that China could have made up all those figures about their growth rates – but the results are there for all of us to see.
Lets get the facts straight – we are not a competition to China. I’ve had this fact proven many times over the past 2 months that I’ve been here. When the world talks about globalisation, they are referring to China, not India. When the US politicians talk about moving the jobs back to the US, they are talking about the jobs lost to China, not to India. When the US says it has to boost up its space plans to compete with the world, it is referring to China’s manned mission to moon and shooting down satellites, and not India placing satellites in the orbit.
China as a nation has achieved more under a communist rule in the past couple of decades than what India has achieved under a democracy in the same period. This article about the impetus that China has given to infrastructure development drives home the point. While China has showcased to this world what it means to conduct The Olympics on a grand scale, we in India are still preventing one conglomerate from building a small car factory that can revolutionise what mobility means to the common man. While their counterparts have embraced capitalism as the means to achieve economic prosperity and improve the livelihood of their people, our communists are still intent on derailing the nuclear deal and putting us into complete darkness.
This audio post with excerpts from leading economists clears up a lot of things for us Indians. We are not what we are made to believe we are. If you are reading this post, I strongly recommend you listen to this podcast to get a sense of what I’m trying to convey.
My point here is, we still have a long way to go before we can even think about competing with China. This blog post puts things in a perspective – where we are and what we do. If you look at the comments section in that post, you can still find a few fellow Indians harping about our 3000 year old civilization and our democracy that promises freedom of everything. All these talk do not make any sense and will yield nothing in the long run. The pride that we take in our democracy might not be a great thing after all.
I firmly believe we are being lulled into a sense of false security through the mass propaganda taking place around us – that India is a global player and we are being considered seriously by the developed nations. We are not. Its high time we come to terms with the fact that we are still not the world leaders we think we are. We still have to achieve so much more to become strong global powers. To start premature celebrations on having risen to this stage is not an achievement by any means.We have to pull up our socks and work harder and revamp the whole political, educational and governance system, not to compete with China, but to improve our living standards and become a globally competent nation – for our own good.
