On the perils of judging India from a biased perspective

I've just come across an apparently popular video by Karolina Goswami. Basically my brother sent it to me, asking for my thoughts. As always, I had to go overboard with it. So here it is. If you still haven't watched it, check it out (it's 11 odd minutes).

Karolina is right, the Britons left us in a worse state socially and economically, than what they arrived in. But that is the outcome of any siege or colonization in the history of humankind, and no one is immune from it. Even at the risk of over simplifying the European colonization period, one could say, on one side was the complacent south and south-east Asian and other African countries, living an easy life, enjoying the natural and climatic resources and having enough time to concentrate on the useless activities that the human brain succumbs to, when not facing any existential struggle; on the other side was the battle-worn European countries with their struggle to get themselves through in harsh conditions of cold, icy Europe, especially through the Little Ice Age and greed for an easier life. The outcome was predetermined. Soon most of the Europeans were busy enriching themselves with the resources, depleting Asia and Africa until they got comfortable enough to invest in their own selfish interests. WWI and WWII followed, and Asia and Africa was wrung out dry, the native people finally reacting back, forgetting their personal interests. The motives had turned around. 

 Again, she starts off rightly that we are misrepresented in the international media. India is still the land of tigers and mosquitoes and snake charmers and yogis to many people. And to add to that, India is now quickly becoming the rape capital of the world. We really appear to be the symbol of oddity and all things medieval and poor. But what about the way she’s handling it? Yes, all the pictures we get representing India is a dirty brick wall with an ox scavenging from a pile of rotting garbage on the open streets. And yes that’s not a true representation of India. But India is also, not the DLF towers and Infosys towers and Gurgaon metro. That is also, not the true representation of India.  Tata, Ambani and Sundar Pichhai does not represent the average Indian. Nor do the ISRO scientists. The average Indian works in the open field under the sun, under the monsoon torrents and through the dry winters wearing the same pair of over-worn cotton clothes s/he has been wearing for the last two years, eating the same meals for what seems like an eternity. So if Karolina’s idea to reverse the damages done by the wrongful, one-sided international media attention, is by showing the opposite view through a tinted glass, she is succumbing to the wrong too, and it’s not easy to undo that damage (more on that later) either.

Also, she correctly pointed out that the amount of entrepreneurial achievements of India is commendable. And the economy is indeed, growing. But how much of that growth is reaching the average population? I am convinced it’s not worth mentioning. Yes, Tata is doing all that’s being said and possibly more. Yes, India is indeed enjoying it's moment in the sun as far as the medical tourism (or at least on the way to) is concerned. Yes, India is renting itself as the launchpad for most European space missions and ISRO is doing wonderful things at the moment. But they are still treading the tested waters. There’s no new contribution. Given India’s huge human resource, India is not even producing 1% of what it is truly capable of. The average Indian is struggling to afford the basic medical facilities and yet India is offering world class medical facilities and earning from the medical tourism.


Who is gaining from all that then? The handful of Indian entrepreneurs, who are not even representative of the Indian populace. The middle class Indians are again stretched over their limits to pay their medical bills as the government health services are ripped at the seams to accommodate even the below poverty line population. As the world becomes a global village and the enterprising global citizens are ruling it, history is repeating itself again; the average Indian is again, wrung out dry, by the businessmen. Just like the East India Company. Indian pharmaceutical industry is hit, because the Indian population is the second in the world, soon to become the first. And the poor life conditions are promoting poor health conditions and thus boosting the growth. Cheap labour (afforded by large population) is aiding that growth. India is also doing a lot in terms of energy research. But it is not even ready to implement the researches, thanks to the selfish interests of the corrupt Indian administrative system. The Indian administrative system also acts as the British Raj, caring for the select few: the entrepreneurs – the East India Company replacements. How convenient. The racist/nationalist angle that worked for 1947 is not working very well either with Indian people at the helm of things.

The same arguments can be reiterated for the other instances, she so meticulously covered in her ‘documentary’. India is not only the handful few metro cities with their speedy metro-railway and flashy neon glow. That’s a special case, not the general. The actual India is where the construction workers live; where metro commuters will walk out to. The ones who have given up on fighting for their rights, for their lives; the ones who have accepted the corruption of our administrative system, accepted that to have a better life depends on tricking fellow human beings to propel yourself to riches (just like the Mallyas and the likes of them did). The ones whose pseudo-respite from the struggle of survival is the odd Bollywood item song and the ODIs and the T-20s: the near-unreal humans living the wild fantasies that the common men can only dream of. The so-called growth of India is not happening nationwide. It is concentrated in the metro-cities and soon-to-be metro-cities. And will continue to be concentrated in the same few places. And the boundary between the metro and the retro India is continuing to get starker and starker, leading to more jealousy and frustration among the repressed (and major) populace, leading to more crime around the edges of these growth-bubbles. Noida is a very good (albeit grim) example.

And on top of it, the mass-frustrations are being channelized by the political parties into political vindications, to fool people into believing they are doing something for themselves, in the guise of religious and social riots, while they are just helping one selfish politician or the other, acting as the fodder units in their political power battles. That average human beings are inherently lazy and dislike actually working on long-term goals for their improvement, is adding to it.

What this documentary will do (and is already doing) though, is, it is fuelling the impulsive, bubble-like ego that the common people possess (and are systematically injected through the mechanics of ill-informed tradition, culture and education), to keep them distracted from the actual problems, so that the selfishness of the Haves can continue uninterrupted and the Have-nots can carry on with their brainless chest-thumping of ‘their’ achievements through doing nothing at all.