The India of My Screams

I was looking for something to write on India's Independence Day today, when this idea just struck me...

In many schools in India students are often asked to write an essay on 'The India of My Dreams.' Having done my own share of such juvenile writing in school days, I just thought it might be time for me to put out a little writeup with a slightly twisted but perhaps more realistic title, 'The India of My Screams.' So here it goes...

We used to be a sort of sleeping giant before liberalization began in the early nineties. But ever since we've 'woken up,' we don't seem to stop screaming - for one reason or the other.

First of all, none of our geriatric leaders had the vision about how to really go about liberalizing a country as vast as ours - so they took a patchwork approach to it, doing a little here or a little there, but never enough anywhere! And I feel sorry to say that even to this day, we don't have a single leader who can pull the country out of the morass it is in (And even if there were, he or she would find it difficult to steer things their own way in the midst of coalition politics).

So while the incumbent Congress government won on the promise of doing something for the aam admi (common man), nobody knows what it is they've done. And the common man? He's screaming to be heard against rising cost of basic necessities.

Our infrastructure - be it roads, power, water, electricity or sewage - is screaming, creaking and, as we've seen during recent rains in Delhi, weeping too. We have made it a fine art of always allowing infrastructure to lag behind current needs. Lag not in number of months or a couple of years, but lag in decades - perhaps centuries! Has any of our rulers heard of the term 'town planning'? I seriously doubt it. Have they wondered at the mess they have been able to create in and around what many call the Millennium City (Gurgaon)? I have. At least one person wouldn't be complaining (Mr KP Singh of DLF, the biggest builder in the area and the country as well)! The so-called builders of modern India have 'malled' our cities but, in the process, also 'mauled' its infrastructure, the environment and, often, the local inhabitants and the underprivileged...

Our people, especially those ensconced in cars, keep on screaming, too, and they often use the machines they sit inside for several hours each day for screaming. It's called honking and it's a favorite pastime of drivers in most places in India. Never mind that the guy ahead of you is not in a position to move in the bumper-to-bumper traffic, let's honk! Or so goes the popular mood amongst motorati.

Even within the malls, people just cannot help screaming. On most Saturdays and Sundays, they shout their throats hoarse, trying to catch the attention of the cashier at the food court. Then they go to each 'cuisine' counter (the cuisine often being industrially made formula food) and again scream to be heard and served. When they have had 'a good time' hopping from counter to counter for food and are ready to head home, there's a long line of vehicles waiting impatiently to get out of the mall's cavernous clutches and onto the crowded roads. Of course, there's plenty of scope and opportunity for honking and screaming, and most people find it hard to give it a miss.

The situation is no better for those who don't - rather, cannot - go to the malls. They often wait in queues for the water tankers to come. Meanwhile, they scream at each other for breaking the queue or putting two buckets instead of one in their 'occupied' position. On other occasions, they gherao (surround a place for a demonstration) the local power distribution center, demanding that they have had enough going without electricity for the past 10 or 15 hours. There is a lot of screaming going on here, too...

That's not to say that our leaders and rulers are immune to shouting and screaming. But they are much used to it - there's so much screaming and blaming going on in the Parliament and in state legislative assemblies that nobody notices any longer. Many of our leaders are often seen sleeping or snoring amid all this din - most probably dreaming of their multi-million dollars stashed away in Swiss accounts. After all, foreign education of kids, separate lucrative businesses for kith and kin, and other desirables in life come for a cost - and a lot of screaming, apparently...

Mera Bharat Mahaan! (it's a customary salutation in India to show respect and appreciation for your country - the countrymen be damned!)