Requiem

Why is there so much despondency with old age? An urge to go back in time and edit one’s decisions? A feeling of lack of appreciation? Of irrelevance? Or the increasing physical constraints of age?

It came to me the other day:
Were I to die, no one would say,
“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

I think, therefore I dither

Is it just me or have things taken a decided turn towards alice in wonderland-esque surrealism. Like a kaleidoscope, the events of one’s life are seemingly determined by external movements, people like bits of colored glass significant only in the patterns formed by their repeating mirror reflections. The force of events that upturn people’s lives is breathtaking, and completely beyond the scope of most to foresee, let alone control/alter. There is both absolutism and arbitrariness, and the individual is left with a galling sense of powerlessness. How do the apparent odds of absolutism and arbitrariness coexist? The answer can be traced to an ever tighter black hole of power: the capriciousness of the egocentric, yet an all encompassing influence. We see both at work in the global meltdown, and the mass hysteria that is Slumdog.

The complete disregard for reasonable risk and ethics concentrated in a few square mile area in Manhattan has wreaked havoc around the world, leading to collapse in the economies of entire countries (Iceland, Latvia) and an anticipated 50M lost jobs. No one will be spared from the aftershocks, even those who’ve never heard of CDOs. Blips on the computer screen representing ridiculous financial engineering and 30-1 leverage ratios by a bunch of men in dark suits has led to a global recession, and the leading threat to stability around the world. Slumdog vaulted its cast and crew unknowns into premier league, after narrowly escaping its own Direct to DVD demise. Everyone looks suitably overcome, esp the three slumkids on the improbable journey from tinroof to Oscar red carpet, courtesy “Danny uncle”. But what about the other thousands still under the tinroofs, yet now with hungry hearts?

About

This blog is about India, my perspective on its people (including me) and their defining motives. To me, India feels eminently bourgeois: the intoxication over rising prosperity; the single-minded pursuit of self-advancement; incongruous consumption; baffling adherence to outmoded conventions; mediocrity of mass media; and general political apathy (in the world’s largest democracy!)

Yet in its middleclass is India’s potential – we the people of India, of privileged homes and social safety nets, educated, well traveled, with firsthand experience of countries with engaged citizenry – we can actually do something to change India, the spirit-killing poverty, the corrupt and inefficient state, and woefully deficient public services.

Increasingly, I feel that the big idea is not in any private initiative, but increased government accountability and performance. Government services are more than just the prioritized distribution of tax rupees. These services are the promises the legislature makes to maximize the good intentions of the collective conscience and pockets of its people. And our administration is failing us! The cost of our public systems not working is enormous: there is of course, the cost of duplication, but more importantly the tens of thousands of discrete initiatives can never create the sea change that India needs. No one problem (poverty, illiteracy, disease, gender inequality, economic disparity) can be addressed in isolation – we need a whole mesh of symbiotic initiatives targeting social issues in parallel, the success of each feeding into the other.