Category: The title of this blog “In Search of India” is an allusion to “Discovery of India” by Jawaharlal Nehru (1st Prime Minister of India). He found it but I’m still searching. This is the last of the series.
It’s been a while since Part 3 was published. Catching up on Term 3 and catching breath happened in between. But since we’re heading into China soon, thought it should be done in a hurry before I work on the “video” and other stuff in between.
There were a lot of discussions during our Term 3 residency about India’s future. But the one thing that stayed with me was the quote from Hari Rajagopalachari (who I thought was the best speaker during out Delhi Residency) saying that India is like the bumble bee in the quote:
“Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it, so it goes on flying anyway”
And Hari and Nandan Nilekani (in his book) were absolutely right in describing how India has grown despite the woeful state of the infrastructure and government inaction.
Nandan’s book articulated the thoughts of India’s future pretty well – the 4 frameworks of “Ideas” is a good way of looking at it. So far, we’ve done more in the last 20 years than we achieved in the first 40 years. So no minor achievement that. But as somebody living in India, what worries me are two things. One is the need for more intellectual property protection and the other is security (there are a lot more than that but restricting it to two for brevity).
As a naive software engineer starting his career, I had asked one of my managers why India doesn’t have any software companies of it’s own like Sun or Microsoft and he gave me a good answer about the lack of a value chain that provides incentives to do so. I now truly understand what he meant. I think the biggest advantage, the developed economies had were the strong IP protection rights that rewarded innovation – and there were strong institutions that protected them.
In India, it is the weakest – the pirated books, DVDs and rip-off music that litter every corner of the street are a manifestation of that. If only we had stronger rights – there would have been incentives to innovation rather than the culture of “trying to get around the system to get stuff done”. As Mark Twain had said:
“That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration—and it was on the first day of it, too—was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn’t travel any way but sideways or backways.”
Maybe India is a crab that turned sideways and got ahead but maybe it’s time we morphed into a frog and leapt ahead.
The other is security – Shashank made a good point in asking Nandan, during his speech, about security issues that India has. He asked about the one thing that worries a lot of us here. We’re not exactly living in a friendly neighbourhood – we’re at constant state of alert with Pakistan. Kashmir and a host of other issues (including terrorism) are always at a boiling point. Pakistan claims 1/3 of the state of Kashmir. And another 1/3 of Kashmir’s claimed by China. The map of India, as the world sees it, is riddled with lines of controls to the north and these disputes are the bane of our existence. With China, the relations are – I can never figure it out – is it friendly, acrimonious and one based on any lack trust? On the positive side, at least our current relations with Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are not so bad (touchwood!).
But as if we didn’t have to worry about Pakistan and China, we also have to deal with the (often) violent elements in the country. Religious separatism, language based disputes (state of Andhra Pradesh is still in a state of turmoil because of discussion on splitting the state into two), maoist movements – the list goes one. Again, Indians have figured out how to go on despite these but I wish that we didn’t have to work around these problems and could address them systemically.
Of course, like any Indian, I would complain a lot about everything and talk of hope in the same breath – knowing the spirit of the people here, I cannot do but that. And so I end this series of mine with a poem that captures aspirations of Indians – from the poet Rabindranath Tagore’s Nobel prize winning book Gitanjali:
WHERE the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Thank you for sharing this 4 part series, it has been really helpful to read about the development of India from the eyes of someone who is living it everyday.
If there was one thing I wish would've gone differently about the Delhi residency was that I don't think there was enough time dedicated from hearing from the Indian classmates. Certainly, all of you were very gracious in sharing your time showing us around, and your experiences. It's too bad there wasn't more time for something like a debate, or at least a spirited discussion about the Nandan book, or just issues in general.
Of course, nothing precludes us from picking up that conversation in China!
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