Imperfections cannot puncture India’s boom

[Gunner_Mania]

India is booming. It will grow at about 9 per cent this year and is likely to overtake Japan as the third-largest economy in the world in the 2020s. Along with the United States and China, India will dominate global politics for the rest of this century and may well hold the strategic balance of power. It has nuclear weapons, a rapidly growing high-tech sector, and some of the most able scientists and entrepreneurs in the world. That is quite a lot for any nation to shout about and, indeed, to be proud of. But in recent weeks, India has been ridiculed, maligned and generally scoffed at, not because of anything of geopolitical significance, but because it has not delivered a transient sporting festival quite as well as might have been expected. Well, at least it has not so far. Stories of collapsing bridges here and unhygienic rooms in the athletes’ village have created apocalyptic headlines around the world. Incidents with no logical connection to the Commonwealth Games have lent weight to the narrative of a nation in crisis. In one story, a journalist noted gravely that a medical officer had gone down with typhoid. Quite what this had to do with the organisers of the Games was not explained. Only the opening ceremony, which went off without a hitch, seems to have rescued India from the pervading sense of national humiliation. But why? Why do we judge a nation by its ability to host a sporting festival? Why do we draw such grand inferences about the potential of a country according to whether the weighing machine works in the boxing venue? Why do we suppose a nation is in crisis on the basis of an outbreak of dengue fever when India has dealt with outbreaks of the disease since time immemorial and has never allowed such things to halt its remarkable ascent? Why do we suppose that a collapsing bridge is a metaphor for a collapsing society when India’s share of industrial production continues to soar? When South Africa did a great job in putting together the World Cup, many were persuaded that a small and historically downtrodden nation had come of age. It was South Africa’s coming-out party, according to those who read deep meaning into the charade of hosting sporting events. It is a pity that the cheerleaders did not sustain their gaze on South Africa long enough to perceive that the success of the month-long footballing festival was little more than a mirage. Unemployment has reached catastrophic levels in recent weeks and is threatening to provoke social unrest in the townships. Strikes have taken place across the country, hospitals and schools have been disrupted and the army deployed. Meanwhile, the glittering stadiums, built at vast expense, stand virtually empty. At Coca-Cola Park last month, when a local team started their campaign, there were 700 supporters in a stadium that holds 60,000. We would do well to note that a sporting event tells us no more about a host nation than a website tells us about the company that set it up. Sure, a website may be all flashing images, a list of offices in New York, London and Geneva and a stunning amount of functionality, but for all we know the company behind it could be little more than a conman operating his latest scam. The only way to find out for sure is to dig into the company accounts, meet the staff and spend a little time nosing around. Similarly, a few breathtaking cathedrals of sporting extravagance tell you little about a nation. Neither does the luxuriousness of the village or the regularity of the buses shuttling athletes from A to B. To find out about a nation, go beyond the artificialities of the sporting environment and take a long, hard look at the nation at large: its cities, its businesses, its wider sense of optimism. And, using those criteria, India is booming. This is not to imply that the world’s second-most populous nation is perfect. As in many developing nations, there is a serious problem with institutionalised corruption. The roads, like much of the rest of the infrastructure, are in a shocking state. And the caste system, which continues to hold sway in much of the vast rural hinterland, is an iniquity no less abhorrent than apartheid. But these imperfections make India’s ascent all the more remarkable. The administrative and political classes, as well as the dogmas of religion, are effectively creating a huge drag on the nation, but that has not stopped it forging ahead. The capacity of ordinary Indians to endure difficulties while retaining their essential optimism is an inspiration, as anyone who has been at these Games and benefited from the marvellous hospitality of the volunteers will tell you. Of course, many will maintain that the Commonwealth Games should not have been staged in Delhi in the first place. They will argue that the funds diverted to this fleeting jamboree could have been better spent elsewhere, not least on the urban slums just a stone’s throw from the competition venues. Few would deny that they have a powerful point. But we make a serious error if we infer that a great nation is in a state of disrepair because of a few teething problems in its hosting of a multisport festival. The iron logic of India’s ascent is not going to change, whatever happens over the next two weeks.

Source - Times UK

[varun]

Food for thought. Good article

[yoda]

Yep good one.

[Sachinism]

Good points. Rich/Poor divide needs to be sorted

[Ram]

I wish I could believe all this hype over the ‘boom’, but the reality on the streets paints a much different picture. You judge a country not by seeing how the top 10% are doing, but how the bottom 10% are coping. By that yardstick, we don’t have much to shout about.

[Sir john]

First need to stop people palayn from village to cities.

[ravishingravi]

I wish I could believe all this hype over the ‘boom’, but the reality on the streets paints a much different picture. You judge a country not by seeing how the top 10% are doing, but how the bottom 10% are coping. By that yardstick, we don’t have much to shout about.

Spot on. There is still some way to go, but things are going in the right direction.

[veer]

when you have mendatory power cut backs in most port of the country, its not booming.. we need to control our population or it just going to go out of hand..

[ViruRulez]

I have always said the same.. we cannot be punctured but if the country was less corrupt and more organized and patriotic then maybe we would have grown a lot faster .. but our spirit cannot be killed and we cannot be stopped :isalute:

[goose]

nobody likes perfection.