To India

‘It would be a real injustice to bracket India within the underdeveloped world. It sure, would become a world power very soon. We have sons (and daughters of course) of our soil running things of indispensable importance world wide…’—this is what many of us people think these days…be it the IT industry or our business conglomerates procuring international giants, or the escalating stock markets. But let me have my say. Stated below are three incidents that shattered (yeah, shattered…I’m not exaggerating in any way) my ideas of India growing out of that bracket:-

1. You heard about that couple from Karnal? (Karnal, the place so famous as the hometown of the martyred Kalpana Chawla.) The guy and the girl loved each other. They belonged to the same gotra (clan). And marriage within the same gotra is considered evil. So after they got married, the panchayat got their hands and legs tied up. They were fed pesticides, and thrown away in some river. Pinch yourself, this is true. This is as barbaric as barbaric could be…

2. There was this news about a Muslim couple from somewhere; they had their twenty-third child on the twenty-third year of their marriage. And this is the way the celebrity couple tackle the intense media glare, on their tiny little happy family—children are Allah’s gifts and we don’t have the right to stop them from taking birth. He creates them; he will take care of them. Allah will make your children literate enough to sensible humans? Allah will feed them? No, dear man and woman, He wouldn’t. You should, because you are the unfortunate reason of their worthless existence. Where can ideas like these lead us in time? Only backwards…

3. The news that Lalu took the Indian Railways a long way from being a tattered organization to one profit making empire, felt good. But now they include it in their private property. There is this brother-in-law of Lalu’s. He, asked the Rajdhani Express to pick him up from the platform no.1 instead of platform no.3 because that would be more convenient for him. He delayed the departure of Rajdhani because he was not accommodated in a first class AC or something. He was heard saying “I am Parliament”, what he meant was “I am a parliamentarian”. Never mind. But what the hell was that?

People, you can say India is becoming rich. 8% growth and crap. But I have seen the poor sink into abysmal poverty. Whenever I hear about India shining, one memory comes back to me.

We had been away on a picnic. Our destination was very far. It took us through numerous villages. And just as our bus passed a village, I saw a bunch of four urchins; all of them pitch black, without a thread of fabric on their bodies, jumping in the shower created by the crack in the pipeline. They were gurgling out laughter. They were screaming out ‘bye-bye’ to us…waving to us, till we drowned below their horizon. May be they had eaten nothing since morning. They compel me to think India has a long way to go. We have a long way to go…right?