Sara Jahan Se Accha ?

Sounds very fairy tailish. Just give me a break. Nothing can be further from the truth. In the past it might have been, and is very much possible in the near future but surely not now. To seek any improvement, first we have to accept ground conditions, the reality. We prefer to shut eyes and pinch nostrils to avoid seeing and smelling the garbage - we should ban these anthems and irrelevant 'Swach Bharat' campaigns until we have become worthy of them.

Having stayed in 2 countries, I tend to compare - why is US well off in some ways when it comes to the basics of living standards. It’s not that they don't have any shortcomings with their biggest being the cold human and people relationship, their materialistic and capitalistic way of life. This aside, they rarely worry about the streets being dumped with unwanted trash or traffic being stopped due to a semi-political rally. While people in India still die of starvation and thirst and subsist on mango kernels, People in USA go hungry by choice. It is true that the legacy that we got at independence was not a good one. I think we started off all wrong, with 5000 years of useless baggage, to which we still hold on dearly. Keep the useful stuff and throw away the rest. Many times we ridicule the short American history and the (undue) importance paid to it. But still they have a something good going, while we stay mired in misery, and cannot even resolve a temple/mosque or a river issue amicably. What's the use of history if we cannot learn from it ? Isn't the whole point of having history is to learn from our mistakes? Is it not more fortunate not to have it? Clean slate, clean slate!

Personally, I feel the most important problem in India is population density and illiteracy. Most of the problems can be traced to this. It is a well known fact in sociology that over-crowding results in friction…its because of the basic need for survival…at any costs. Over-population results in haphazard growth and chaos…the value of human life is less when there are so many of them. In USA, children are protected such a lot... because they realize the children are the future and because of the small growth rate, a precious group, the future citizens who will be part of the economy…Only because I have a very biased view of America being a heartless capitalist country, I believe they do it because they treat even the children like an investment. That’s why they have so many rules for children. In India, you have so many children, that no one cares. If there's one less, there's more from where they came.

But the population is not going to reduce overnight…it would need investment in increasing literacy and improving the quality of life. And make sure that the children that are born have a high chance of surviving...I read somewhere that people tend to "produce" more children when there's a high child mortality rate- to make up for projected loss. This, I think, is the animal side of humans and civilization is but a thin veneer.


Bhavesh Lakhani