India the Superpower? Think again.

Plug in the words "India" and "superpower" into an Internet search engine and it's happy to oblige - with 1.3 million hits. I confess that I did not check each one, but I suspect that almost all of these entries date from the last couple of years.

This is understandable. For the first time ever, India has posted four straight years of 8 percent growth; since it cracked open its economy in 1991, it has averaged growth of 6 percent a year - not in the same league as China, but twice the derisory "Hindu rate of growth" that had marked the first 45 years of independence.

India has gone nuclear, and even gotten the United States to accept that status. Its movies are crossing over to become international hits. The recent $11.3 billion takeover of Corus by Mumbai based Tata steel was the biggest acquisition ever by an Indian firm.

No wonder the idea of India as the next superpower is fast becoming conventional wisdom. "Our Time is Now," asserts The Times of India. And in an October survey by the Chicago Council on World Affairs, Indians said they saw their country as the second most influential in the world.

Sorry: India is not a superpower, and in fact, that is probably the wrong ambition for it, anyway. Why? Let me answer in the form of some statistics.

• 47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted.
  The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan). Even this is probably overstated, as people are deemed literate who can do little more than sign their name.
• Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector.
• The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not.
• About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world's hungry live in India.
• More than a quarter of the India population lives on less than a dollar a day.
• India has more people with HIV than any other country.

You get the idea.

The 2006 UN Human Development Report, which ranks countries according to a variety of measures of human health and welfare, placed India 126th out of 177 countries. India was only a few places ahead of rival Pakistan (134th) and hapless Cambodia (129) and behind such not-about-to-be-superpowers as Equatorial Guinea (120), and Tajikistan (122).

As these and other numbers suggest, Indian triumphalism (a notable 126,000 hits on Google) is not only premature, it is misguided. Yes, growth has been brisk, and of course growth is necessary to make a dent in poverty. But as Edward Luce, author of the excellent, "In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India," noted in a recent talk, poverty in India is not falling nearly as fast as its brisk rate of growth might anticipate.

The reason for this is that Indian growth has been capital-intensive, driven by the growth in high-value services such as IT. This is a good thing, but what it does not do is create stable and reasonably paid employment for not particularly skilled people - and this matters a lot, considering eight to 10 million Indians enter the labor force every year. Luce estimates that there are 7 million Indians working in the formal manufacturing sector in India - and 100 million in China.

To look at it another way, the 1 million Indians working in IT account for less than one-half of one percent of the entire working population. This helps build reserves (and national confidence, and tax revenues) but is not the poverty buster that labor-intensive development is. As Prime Minister Singh told Luce, "Our biggest single problem is the lack of jobs for ordinary people."

The problem with India's self-proclaimed (and wildly premature) declaration of superpower status is that it reflects a complacency about both its present - which for many people is dire - and its future. Eight percent growth for four years is wonderful, but as the saying goes, past performance is no guarantee of future results. And India is not doing what it needs to in order to sustain this momentum.

Consider the postwar history of East and Southeast Asia. The comparison is appropriate because India started at about the same point, and has watched just about every country in the region get ahead of it on the economic curve. All these places developed by being relatively open to trade; by investing in primary and secondary education; and by building pretty decent infrastructure (not only roads and ports, but health clinics and water supplies). India has begun to embrace one leg of this triangle - freer trade.

Even here, though, many of the worst features of the swadeshi ("self-reliance") era remain intact, including an unreformed state banking sector; labor regulations that actively discourage hiring; abstruse land laws (and consequent lack of land titles); misshapen subsidies that hurt the poor; and corruption that is broad, deep and ubiquitous. Nothing useful is being done about any of this.

As for the other two legs of this development triangle - education and infrastructure - these are still badly broken. About a third of teachers fail to show up on any given day (and, of course, are unsackable); the supply of both water and power is expensive and unreliable.
These facts of life too often go unremarked in the current euphoria about the state of the nation. "We no longer discuss the future of India," Commerce Minister Kamal Nath told the Financial Times in a typical comment. "The future is India."

Hubris, of course, is the stuff of politics everywhere. But the future will not belong to India unless it takes action to embrace it, and that means more than high-profile vanity projects like putting a man on the moon or building the world?s tallest tower. It means showing that the world's largest democracy can deliver real progress to the hundreds of millions who have never used the phone, much less the Internet. And in important ways, that just isn't happening.
India has many reasons to be proud, but considering it remains a world leader in hunger, stunting and HIV, its waxing self-satisfaction seems sadly beside the point.

-Cait Murphy, CNN Money - February 9, 2007.

Blogging, an art (?)

There you go. A new face to my blog. Change is good, change can be surprising. As I was altering my template, Arpz commented on this new look. She feels this one doesn't go with me. Maybe she is right. It might seem to have too much of a make-over, but I have tried to keep it simple. So Arpz, if you still think it doesn't go with my personality, I promise to write it on a notepad and drag that page onto here ;)

I don't exactly remember how and when did I start blogging. Interestingly, I don't even remember why. I do remember that my first blog was on rediff, the password of which I have absolutely no clue of, thus making it vanish into the world wide web.
I anchored my ship on blogger and since then I have come across numerous blogs. The experiences have been overwhelming. A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.

There are writers who brace blog-o-sphere to vent out their frustration, to pen down the agony they face in their everyday life, so much so that they seem to think that they are the only one born on this earth with ill fortune. They practically have nothing to write. All they do is sit in front of their computer, split open their vein and type the self inflicted pain. Their blog will be filled with poetries and quotes obtained after typing a search, "Sad quotes" or "Sad poems" on Google. Ofcourse, while doing copy-paste of that stuff, we have Rajesh Khanna singing 'Zindagi Ka Safar' in the background.

Then there are people who just like talking to themselves. I mean, they write in a language which only they can understand. There are two windows open. One of them shows blogger, the other dictionary.com or thesaurus.com. The role of such writers is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say. All the sentences have to be in passive voice.
"I woke up this morning and looked out of my window. It was a dull day, with snow coming down and streets frozen with ice".
Would become.......
"I bestirred this Ante Meridiem (AM), ogling out the pane. Arctic byways and glaciating rain spawned an addled time".

Some writers are good with words. But the presentation takes a hike. I might not know about the cool features other blogging websites provide, but blogger does seem to be generous in this aspect. The colors are yours for the taking and hence the combinations end up getting jacked-up. There are blogs with dark backgrounds, something like brown or navy blue, and the font is dark green. What are you guys? Jeetendra?
Then there are blogs with a dark blue background, the writing ending up in florescent colors. I read such blogs and look away from my computer and I see dark spots.
Some blogs are multicolored. Kudos to them but a big no-no to the sense of colors. You have purple, green, orange, pink (uff!), all sloshed together to create the world's worst potpourri ever.

For a blogger, writing is not an art. It is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
Most of us blog to lay the building block of our writing career. For some it is an hobby. For some it becomes a process of discovery that they couldn't wait to get to work in the morning. To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it's about, but the inner music the words make.

The beauty of reading a blog is in knowing about the person without talking to him. When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

Disclaimer: The blog examples written are entirely coincidental if you happen to be one of those.

'V' is Indian..

Sakshi's quandary and Fpr's dubiety, both circled around the same controversial topic - Premarital Sex in India, rather being virgin or not before marriage. Instead of rattling my mind on some new junk, I decided to write on the same, ofcourse from a male perspective.

Premarital, what is it? Is it a noun, so that it automatically becomes a taboo (or not), or is it an adjective which simply means an act before marriage?
Ethics, morality and culture are the aspects, we Indians are always fueled with. We have learned to respect our elders, be close to our parents throughout the year instead of only the traditional thanksgiving day visit and listen to whatever they say. The key word right there, LISTEN. We heed each and every advice they impart, no matter how prehistorical or neanderthal it might be. No offense meant, but that is when the word premarital, which in legitimate sense should be an adjective, becomes a noun.

What did I just mean by the above rant? Let me illustrate, by giving an example which happened with me few weeks back. Me, my uncle and my aunt (who by the way is just a year older than me) were traveling. To spend time we usually debate on something. My aunt brought up this topic about premarital sex and asked me if I advocated it.
"Yes, I do".
"What? Why can't you wait till the wedding?"
"Why should I? If I know I am marrying this person anyways, what point does it make to wait?"
"What if things don't work out and you break up before the marriage? You already have had sex with her."
"You mean to say that things SHOULD work out because we are married? Just because we are legally together doesn't mean that break ups won't happen after we are married."
.....the arguement then continued on marriage which she terms as 'the social and pure institution'.
In the end, she mentioned that "I was nurtured by my grandmother till I started working. Orthodox and conservative values are deep rooted in me. I can't help it."

When I was in college, me and my best buddy had coined a term for such people. We called them ABCs, which means Aai Baba Category. People who are like,"....Aai bolte skirts aani jeans ghaalaycha nahi........Baba boltaat 8 chya nantar baaher kuthe jaaycha nahi....." (Mom says not to wear jeans and skirts....Dad says not to be outside the house after 8), are essentially ABCs. Are these people not educated? Are they not living in 2007, or are a part of the so called Gen-X? Indeed they are. However, education and the social conditions of living are not the criteria for any person to be liberal or to be unorthodox. My Aunt is a post-grad, she wears Mini skirts and tank tops. But she still thinks premarital sex is a taboo. She lives in America, works in America but she still considers the word premarital as a noun. Then why such narrow mindedness? As I addressed before, it is about how you are fostered.

Another amusing excuse of avoiding premarital sex is the enjoyment factor. It goes something like this, "Be careful about how much physical you get. You won't enjoy as much after marriage". Now they have got to be kidding me. They mean to say that my enjoyment factor or rather my libido would be endless after I get married and before I marry it tends towards zero? The first thought which would creep in your mind is, 'Is this person illiterate talking like this?' Again, as I mentioned before, education has nothing to do with being such unmindful. One of my friend, who is a doctor, is doing her medicine in the US, speaks of preserving yourself for the 'Suhaag Raat'.

I am not surprised to note that most of the time, the grumbling of premarital sex rant is bellowed by women, more so Indian women. I find that completely practical and totally logical. Indian women can't simply be put on a same scale as women from the west and then subjected to ethical arguments such as premarital sex. The most important thing which separates us from the western youth, is the development of our maturity. More than 90% of the Americans leave their parents house and try to make it on their own when they reach the age of 16. Except for asking money for their tuition, they have nothing to do with their parents including making decisions. 16 is the age when we start maturing, when we start to think about our future.
Now compare Indian women with American women, who have just turned 18. I can bet that 50% of those Indian women won't be knowing what it needs to be done to have a baby, while more than 50% of the American women might already have had sex!

How many Indian women do you see carrying that anti-pregnancy pill in their pocket books? How many of them have an EPT indicator in their homes? How many of the Indian MEN don't feel shy when buying a condom, forget about even thinking about it? Blend in all these factors and then think about why Indian women shy away from premarital sex. It is better to be safe than to be sorry, they say. In India, you can't just be sorry, you go to hell. You become a social stigma. People will be talking more about you than the new Hrithik Roshan release. No one, even the most educated one in India would want to be that. In America, the youth is careful. In India, the youth is not well advised.

Virginity - a dignity or lack of opportunity? Premarital sex or not? Ask me and I do not have a definite answer. I do not see this as a wrong, but I definitely see this as an individual's choice. If someone thinks that they want to preserve themselves for their soul mate, it is their choice, as long as they don't preach about it. For those who prefer to have it before, ofcourse with mutual consent, it is their choice as well. The only difference is that in India, the mutual consent would be hard to obtain. Either the girl is scared of social repercussions or she is sacred to her family's teachings and preachings.

So the next time when you visit your girlfriend's house and whilst watching Baywatch, you hear someone shout, "Change the channel", from some other room, you know you won't be getting it until marriage. If that's not the case, make sure you carry the 'necessities' yourself when you guys are alone. She won't do it and if you don't either, you know you won't be getting it until marriage.