Tag: Reform

Lets Get Real Guys : Hypocrisy about morals

We all know (especially who live in India) that this country is best described as organized chaos. Rahul Gandhi ji during his recent dialogue with Industry leaders at a FICCI summit compared India to a beehive, an apt analogy I must admit. India is not functioning at its periphery but resilient at its core. We know how to survive. We make sure that our houses are clean but we dump garbage outside our windows.  We commit sins in our personal spaces but act holy on the outside.  We watch Munni and Sheila on TV but we expect to marry a virgin. It is a sign of a deeply hypocritical polity.

As a nation India, is a civilizational state like China; very old but politically very new. Our cultural ethos and institutions are resilient and almost immune to political changes.  Politically we believe in shouting in response to Arnab on News Hour in the comfort of our air conditioned drawing rooms but do not go out to vote.  We feel good by signing an online petition at Change.Org rather than participating in an actual protest.  Most guys who drink in India have not informed their families that they do (my parents are cool) and feel uneasy to introduce their girlfriends to family. We believe in purity as a cultural virtue (remember Sita’s Agnipariksha?) but do all sins of the flesh (ask Nityanand ji :P). Incest in common, rapes is commonplace. These acts are dastardly and condemnatory. These guys deserve the harshest punishment in the shortest time.  Yet on the other Live-in relationships and single night stands are considered immoral. We are slowly turning into a nation of perverts. I am ashamed to be an Indian Man now days.

 The Indian Male has to learn to accept that woman can earn more than him, be smarter than him and can call the shots. She has a choice.  A severe attitudinal paradigm shift is needed. No amount of legislations can stop sexual crimes if the Indian ‘MCP’ does not change. If a girl rejects you, do not take the cowardly path; prove to her that you are worth her time.

Moral Duality, Sexual Perversion along with the inability to accept the weaknesses disintegrating our social fabric in the face of globalization is impairing our ability to deal with serious deep issues at a social as well as on a personal level.   The only way to start is by beginning to accept the flaws. There is a tendency to overhype sex as a sacred sacrament too. This attitude is the root of all evil.

Lets change ourselves as a polity, one household at a time. And Sex Education does not work as my 9th grade Science Teacher skipped the section in the anatomy class about the reproductive organs.

Reframing the ‘BRICS’ paradigm

BRIC’s or Brazil, Russia, India and China coined by Goldman Sachs as an acronym for the emerging markets has been institutionalized in the public imagination by the CNBC-ization of the discourse on emerging markets, where market graphs create so called value and represent the real economy more than people. I recently completed Ruchir Sharma’s book ‘ The Breakout Nations’ and it is very much a lucidly written book with crisp anecdotes, and correlated with what i had read in Parag Khanna’s ‘Second World’ and ‘How to Rule the World’ series of books again on the governance of emerging ‘breakout’ markets and a couple of insights got squeezed out of the thesis.

Russia and India do not deserve their place in the emerging economies group, Indonesia can replace India in the place of the I in the acronym.  Smaller countries in Africa and Central Asia will create more investor value than Russia which is turning in to a petro state and India is an elephantine entity which grows at its own pace bogged down by inefficiency in governance  and political log jams, India seems to be following the Filipino model sadly. I take objection with Ruchir Sharma’s analogy that stock market performance is an indicator of economic performance. In a country like India where retail investors are a tiny entity, it is an illusion of an indicator. We should be paying more emphasis on Human Development Indicators rather than Stock Market Valuations.

I would like to know how much poverty and under utilization of human talent which prevails in the emerging economies. The truth is a large proportion of the populace miss the reforms bus, because they do not have the right skill sets for the information economy,

Can someone care about building a school first rather than a convention center ?