I was sitting in a cafe with a couple of friends when the talk of Black coffee turned to Black Money and we ended up discussing the failed system of India. I don’t know how and why, but every time we talk about the evils meandering in the society, we end up talking of India! As the talk continued my friend said “Dude. Nothing, absolutely nothing good can happen in this god forsaken country. I bloody hate this country.” I looked at him with a wry smile and added “Well, that’s true.” I didn’t want to get into another unfruitful debate. Another friend of mine added “I don’t hate this country but I won’t live here after my graduation.” And they went into an hour long discussion of the dos and don’ts for India to become a Great Nation, the one portrayed to us by every politician. As we got ready to depart, I asked them “What do you hate exactly, India or Indians?” They looked at me with nothing to say, maybe they understood that it wasn’t a question really.
On 26 January 2012, India commemorates the date on which the Constitution of India came into force as the governing document of India, 64 years ago. It’s a day when every Indian feels a bit more patriotic. So with patriotism in my head I was wondering why would someone hate his own country. And the other half of me also wonders why do I love my country? I don’t have an answer to either of them but I do have a question, is India a bad nation or Indians the bad people?
We Indians are the biggest hypocrites. We will complain about the dirt and filth lying around in the society but will never care enough to walk a few yards to dispose of our used cola cans. On the other hand, we expect every other citizen to pick up the chocolate wrapper lying on the floor. Citizens of India, always complain about the lack of management in the country and the ill-mannered people of India who never obey the rules and regulations. We are also the people who will point out the various reasons to hate India while smoking a cigarette in a public place. We are also the people who will talk about rules and regulations while driving a bike without a helmet.
India is a very corrupt nation, agreed. In fact, India’s image on tackling corruption only worsened with the Transparency International‘s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) placing it at 94th rank out of 176 nations last year. But aren’t we Indians, the first one to break traffic rules. If we are really frustrated with the rising rate of corruption then why are we not ready to pay the proper fine to the traffic officer? Why do we tell him “Keep this 200? Let’s forget this thing ever happened?”
India gave us such a vast historical heritage. The world knows about the various monuments in India, especially the Taj Mahal.
India has such a vast scope of tourism. But did we not ourselves pollute the holy river Ganga? Aren’t we responsible for “engraving” the names of our “lovers” on the beautiful pillars of our country? Did we ever think of cleaning the pond after Ganpati Visarjan?
We are not technically advanced enough. We have very poor transport facilities. Our bridges take years to be ready – the Bandra-Worli sea link took 12 years- for use. But how will the nation improve if each one of us runs out of the country as soon as he finishes his graduation? I really find it unethical actually. You owe your life to this nation and all you are doing is helping some other country in its own development. We also have a huge population problem, but we all know it’s not INDIA sleeping with your wife.
A girlfriend of mine told me “I will run to the USA, as soon as I am done here”. And a few friends of her supported her. I asked her “Why?”
“Well, there are many reasons. Primarily, safety is the biggest issue. I am scared to wear short clothes over here. There is so much sexual harassment and danger of being raped over here. USA is much safer.”
I wanted to punch the bloody statistics on her face. USA has quadruple number of rape cases registered every year compared to India, even when it has a population quarter that of India. The UK has 15000 rape cases registered, and it has a population of 62,000,000. If you want to leave just leave don’t give stupid reasons.
You might ask me if I think India is a Great Nation. No, I don’t think ours is the greatest country in the world. But I do believe that we have the potential and strength to become great. All countries, be it Pakistan, USA, UK or India, are economically, socially and culturally different. I might sound offensive to many when I say this, but whenever we suspect losing in a comparison we clutch to our favorite refuge, culture and tradition! America is what it’s because of its strength and they do not have a bad culture at all, it’s just a different culture all together. It would be very wrong to claim that theirs is a culture inferior and ours are laudable. The biggest problem is all that we do is fight within ourselves whereas we should be fighting against illiteracy, over population and corruption. Every day in our streets we either here someone saying or are mostly the one saying “This country is going down, dude. It is on the path of destruction.” If we just keep saying this, then one day we will actually land up there. And it’s you who needs to find a remedy. Yes you, the one reading this the article right now. Not just the members of the parliament, or the police but each and every one of us. We keep blaming the government for our problems but when and if we step into their shoes we will do the same thing. The dalits blame the brahmins. The Hindus accuse the Muslims; the Muslims say the Hindus have depraved them of everything. Then in what way are we great? If we do something wrong, we point fingers to someone else and the fingers just keep on going until they reach the prime minister where the buck stops. We all just keep accusing each other. The fact is that we are all to be blamed. The problem lies in you…me…all of us.
It is WE, the people, who have to take the responsibility of change. India will not change on its own. WE have to be the change. The garbage will not fly into the dustbin; WE have to pick it up. The technology will not improve with the help of our ‘culture’; WE have to do it by working for India rather than driving taxi in New York. WE have to protect our monuments. WE have to choose ISRO over NASA, Mahindra over BMW. Mainly, WE have to choose hard-work-in-India over ease-in-Switzerland.
I hope now people understand what the real problem is. If you still think it’s just the governments fault, then we just have to agree to disagree. But yeah the next time make sure you write “I hate Indians” rather than “I hate India.” Have the guts to write “I hate myself”, if you consider yourself an Indian at all.
A very Happy Republic Day to all the Indians out there. Take a pledge to serve the country, not leave it in distress. Take a pledge to take India forward, not leave it behind.
Remember, “No country is born perfect. We have to work to make it perfect.”
Good article!! btw one point statistics dont speak everything, In USA, more than 95% of the rapes are officially complained. But in India just 4% or less than that.
thank you, for finding it a good read.
Yeah that might be true. I am not saying India is a perfect country at all, I mean we have so many problems but running away from this place needs a much better reason.
According to me be it India, UK, Pakistan, or even the Vatican, a person must stay true to his roots.
For the number of cases reported we should encourage women to come forward and come out of the cocoon of our culture where girls, as we know, are kept a lot more inferior.
Just found your blog browsing, and this article piqued my interest. While I agree with the sentiment of the post, I disagree with a lot of what you have to say about the matter.
Firstly, what is a country if not it’s people? Any country or nation or such a collection of vast number of individuals would just be an empty shell if you took all the people out of the lands making India. The reason I think people had nothing to respond when you said do you hate India or Indians is because your question is purely rhetorical. Specifically in the case of India, electoral representatives come from the population that make up the country itself, they are not an alien lifeform so to speak disparate from our own identities, but rather their habits, their so called engagement with corruption, their laidback attitude, laziness, unprofessional conduct is nothing but a reflection of the general attitude of the Indian populace. If that is what you were trying to highlight through this article I agree. We so called “armchair intellectual class” amongst the youth love to blame the government, the bureaucrats, etc for wrong but engage in open hypocrisy of the very same ideals being applied to ourselves. This inherent doublespeek in Orwellian terms is not really uncommon and is seen as a strong symbol of deteriorating societies in general.
By the very point I made above, I would stick to the position that “India being a bad country” and “Indian’s being bad people”, in purely sociological terms would mean exactly the same thing. The idea that ties things together here is how exactly is a country judged as being good or bad? There cannot be any objective classification of such kinds, since good and bad by definition are relative terms. Thus we compare countries using some kind of index or indices, consider proper statistical analysis to normalise effects due to different cultures, economic conditions, and then we grade the countries on a relative scale. But how do we grade the countries? What are the criteria? A country is judged by it’s people, it’s representative (democratic, monarchical, oligarchic, you name it) which itself is a reflection of the people. Almost all sociological indices measure the characteristics of the people of the country and the people itself form the basis for such a comparison between countries. So to put it bluntly, if India is bad it directly implies the fault is of the people and vice versa.
A really big +1 for speaking out the truth on hypocrisy, people corruption and the related personal experiences. But here I would like to point out something very closely related, which in my personal opinion is far more germane to the root of the issue than the corruption issue. The corruption issue for one, is highly middle class driven issue. Most people are angry about black money turned white, while a majority of Indians (about 60%) who live in farms and villages face another kind of corruption. They could not care less about high fidelty government officials siphoning of crores. They are worried about the PDS system not working efficiently, about lack of water supply, electricity supply, floods. People are worried about social corruption, things that are not tied to money. Discrimination in villages and towns on the basis of caste, race, economic status, religion or lack thereof, are situations of corruption we middle class intellectuals couldn’t care less about. Black money style large scale corruption only captivates the masses because of one simple reason. Something that you hinted at in your post. We Indians are a highly self centered society. We will keep our rooms clean but wouldn’t think for a split second before throwing paper into the chowpatti. It’s also an element of hypocrisy here, but I think the root is the self centeredness. For all the grandiose claims of a superior culture, et al, we are positively inhibitive of the social divisions be it on religion, caste, economic, or any other social division so long as it benefits our personal goals. We are ready to dance around the law as long as it makes life easier for us. We frown at a lower economic class uprising for equal rights as us because it would mean competition for us middle class folks (read naxals labelled as the biggest threat to India – why exactly have they taken up guns is something no one wishes to ask). We glorify people and corporations who openly subvert basic human rights of the lesser privileged by snatching away their livelihood, their lands, leave them starving driving them to suicide, but we are not really worried about those things. After all at the cost of these people, our stock market rises by a few points, BSE rose to above certain values, Indian FDI reserves are ever increasing. Economy is vibrant!
The various monuments of India, have all been constructed on the work of thousands if not millions of slaves been dragged and forced to construct them during proverbial monarchies. While these monuments may stand in the geographical location that we now call India today, and they might be aesthetically pleasing, and architectural wonders, are they really a true emblem of the India we wish to build? Is it even a representative of the India some of us are trying to be proud of? Patriotism has never made sense to me, and I agree with Samuel Johnson’s elegant, but rather rude one line critique of patriotism, “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” While most people do not use patriotism to intentionally cause harm to one another, patriotism is what is the leading cause of war, genocide, driver of human deaths, and destruction. Patriotism is just a vastly glorified superiority complex, based on the freak of probability that decided where one was born. Same goes for religion, caste, or any such creed.
Now here is where I start having large disagreements with your article. Does the exercise of immersion of an idol make any sense whatsoever in the first place? Or burst crackers, or light up the whole area as some churches do during christmas or new year wasting electricity. Or throwing incense into the Ganga. While trying to clean up behind these traditions is in itself a good idea nonetheless, is it really tackling the root cause? What is exactly wrong, that we don’t clean the ponds after immersion or that we engage in immersion even though we know that it will harm the pond, but it’s my religious (replace with any similar social segregation) belief, toh sab chalta hai?
Now here I would like to ask something. For us as a country to become respectable, for us as people to feel the need to stay in a particular society, what exactly should our priorities be? Should it be technological advancement as you are stressing? How many people does a more quicker construction of the BWSL for example help in the overall scheme of things? What exactly are our priorities? The successive governments act at the center and states act like they are for the people but whom are they exactly considering the people? A few quick examples to highlight the issue of prioritising.
1) In the education sector, a few approximate statistics since I do not have them with me on hand. In excess of 60% of the school children cannot perform basic arithmetic operations, or spell simple words in written language (any language). In excess of 70% of all school students in the country drop out of school after 8th standard and another half drop after 10th standard.and join the unorganised sector to work. The percentage of lower caste and minority students dropout from school corresponding to their own sample population is in excess of 95% (Mandal committee report). About 10% of all the students go to college, of which the middle class (20% of the Indian population) comprises of an overwhelming majority. Now the approximate funding for education is as follows 30% for schools, 50% colleges and I’m unsure about the remaining, it’s probably research funding. Is this a justified set of priorities? It’s almost as if the government caters to the people of the Hindi and English dailies’ readers and tv news watchers.
2) Technology – India has an abysmal record of human rights preservation especially when it comes to Nuclear mining, power plants etc. Land being forcefully taken from people whose very livelihood depends on it to provide electricity to the cities. And for the great Indian Nuclear Story I just present the following link http://www.wise-uranium.org/umopjdg.html
and cite the following
———-In 2001 and 2002, Hiroaki Koide from the Research Reactor Institute at Kyoto University performed field trips to monitor environmental impacts of the Jadugoda uranium mine. He monitored external gamma dose rate, radionuclide concentrations in soil, and radon concentration in air. His results are compiled in a report available for download. The main conclusions are:
The contamination from the uranium mine has spread in Jadugoda:
The external gamma dose rate exceeds 1 mSv/y in the villages, and reaches 10 mSv/y around the tailing ponds.
The soil surrounding the tailings ponds is contaminated by uranium. Particularly high contamination levels were found in the village of Dungridih that borders tailings pond No.1. In other villages, no serious contamination was found.
Radon emanated from tailings ponds etc spreads contamination.
Waste rock from the mine used for construction material spreads contamination.
Other findings include:
The No.1 tailings pond shows contamination by cesium. This fact shows that radioactivity was brought in from a source other than an uranium mine.
Product uranium concentrate is dealt with carelessly and was found dispersed at Rakha Mine railway station.——————-
Another good infographic on this is The documentary War and Peace (Jung aur Aman) made by Anand Patwardhan.
Now I have serious problems with the next para specially with regards to the rape statistic as mentioned above by another commenter. Rape is firstly just a very particular form of gender abuse. Secondly, the extremely vast contrast in the percentage of reportage of rape crimes in the US of A and correspondingly in India are at polar opposites. Secondly, you posted the number of cases, what about the percentage of convictions? In India already only 5% cases are reported, plus conviction rate is lower than if not as low as 10% compared to much better conviction rates more of the order of 60%.in the US. There is no associated stigma of rape in the US, a victim is a victim unlike in this country where people blame the victim in public rallies, and tell her to call her potential rapists as bhaiya or to enjoy the rape. It’s the girls fault she wore short clothes here, that’s why she got raped is the standard argument given by a majority of people. There are many things that are not answered by just one linear statistic of number of rape cases. Women are not banned from going to bars post 10 (like in Andhra) in a protectionist move of absurd proportions, instead the idea is to preserve basic human rights regardless of gender. Something that we are abysmal at doing. We do not even consider rape in marriage as rape.
I wished to write more about the caste blame comment you made but I have written too long a comment already.
First of all, Thanks a lot for reading my article. I think you are one of the very few people who read it and actually had something to say about it.
The only thing that made me write this article was the hypocrisy I had seen in people, my friends especially who blame the government for everything and only ask one question “What has the nation done for me?” And I wasn’t to ask them “What have you done for the nation?”
And thank you for such a huge comment. It shows you actually read my article.
Thanks once again.