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{A continuation of my previous post Me write pretty some day.} My obsession with fully comprehending a problem before a [...]

“So my first objective is to look frankly and as dispassionately as I can at what India is today and then describe it as best as I can. Look, here is India with all its ills. We have to face that reality and acknowledge it without shying away. Only then we may be moved to say that we don’t like it and gather sufficient resolve “to break this sorry scheme and remold it closer to our hearts’ desire.”

This is so well captured… I call this bridging the reality/ illusion gap and we suffer the same predicament in my part of the world…Africa, specifically Nigeria. This is the exact same process I have adopted in describing what needs to be done in order to bring about change.

Greatt blog Atanu and I do plan to visit with you and Rajesh.

« Bleeding the Poor

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Awaiting your followup post. Cheer up !
(Somehow you sound morose in this post)

1) Whose reality should he be cognizant of? The “India is fucked and hopeless” reality or the “Things are improving” reality? Who are you decide what that reality is, who made you the guardian?

2)”There are obvious problems?” If the problems are obvious, then why do we need to keep harping on them? If a doctor keeps telling a sick patient he has cancer, is that helping to cure the cancer? Boy am I glad you’re not my doctor, that’s for sure.

Sukumar, it’s nice to know you’re a monkey, but please don’t use that insult on my parents. For they are Indians too, and I’m pretty fucking sure they aren’t monkeys.

So apparently more sex scenes in films is a sign of moral degradation. Who the hell made you the keeper of morals for India? You’re not my fucking father. If you don’t like what you see, don’t watch it. Believe it or not, it’s a free country. Second, legalising the sale of liquor is a good thing, and the fact that you think it’s bad clearly shows just how misinformed you are about the world – please read this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition

specifically the following lines:

Over time, however, people drank illegally and money ended up in gangsters’ pockets. Gangsters would then bribe officials to ignore their illegal activities. The cost of enforcing prohibition laws thus increased. In some cases, the money likely ended up in corrupt Prohibition agencies.

Does that sound familiar to you? Banning alchohol or restricting its sale too much is the stupidest thing anybody can ever do. You need stop living in your dream world where you expect everbody to be free of “vice”.

“Now the rich in India only want to eat, drink, enjoy sex and be merry, while a large percentage of the population have no access to education or healthcare.”

Wow eating, drinking, enjoying sex and being merry are crimes? So I take it that you are a supporter of the Taliban, most likely. This is the exact attitude that has brought the country to the ground. What is your fucking problem if rich people are enjoying themselves? Why don’t you just go and take care of those who aren’t rich, and mind your own bloddy business about the rich. Clearly this is all just bitterness talking – you are just jealous that you don’t have a piece of the pie – so instead of creating a bigger pie, you want to steal the existing one.. It is true, you are a monkey, who simply continues to ape the same rubbish that communists and socialists have been brainwashing the world with since Marx.

“These selfish Indians only want to hear the sucees stories”
Yes, that’s right. Because if things went your way, all we’d hear about is how we’re just a bunch of worthless monkeys. If you would like an address to the nearest Pakistani/US/Canadian/Timbuktu embassy let me know. Since I wouldn’t want you living with so many monkeys.

“India is indeed shining for some” – So apparently since some people are actually doing well here, we should feel bitter about it, and also take away their success until each every single one of the 1 billion “monkeys” in this country are as successful. Wow, the communism is so deeply ingrained in your head, it’s amazing. And this is why our country lags behind.
Because all of you fault the people, and not the system.

“We want a change for the better and for the majority of the population, that’s why we criticise and tell the truth.”

How is this change going to come about? By teaching us all that we’re monkeys, who can’t achieve a single decent thing in life? Is that supposed to motivate and mobilise the masses into action? I can promise you telling people to NOT strive for eating, drinking and enjoying sex will definitely NOT motivate them.

“HEY MONKEYS – YOU SUCK. NOW GO DEVELOP YOUR COUNTRY, YOU BUNCH OF NO GOOD IDIOTS”

Thanks for the encouragement Sukumar, I will try that on some Indians, and let you know what the result is.

Many thanks for your interesting articles. Some people may call you an India-hater. But they are just blind and selfish people. Please ignore them. One should never hide the truth. What sort of India we have created during the last 50 years? Yes, there may be some 20-30% of Indians who have now got more material wealth. But for the majority, unemployment and povery is the daily reality. They can not make use of private education, an array of sleek imported cars, or private healthcare facilities now available to the rich.

What sort of development are we talking about and for whom ? We are indeed monkeys. We copy everything from the West. We have no brains to copy the good from them and reject the evils. I wonder where is India heading? We have now got the evils from both worlds: corruption from the East, lack of moral and ethical values from the West. We are going to be leader in both. I happened to watch a small part of a recent Hindi film. It contains more sex scenes than you will find in western films. Some state governments are now encouraging people to set up more alcohol shops to earn more revenue. All moral and ethical values are fast disappearing.

We were poor, but at least we had some values. India gave birth to great people like Buddha, Vivekanada, Ramakrishna, Aurobindo……Now the rich in India only want to eat, drink, enjoy sex and be merry, while a large percentage of the population have no access to education or healthcare. These people are listening to wetern music being played in the Titanic, while the ship is sinking. These selfish Indians only want to hear the sucees stories – India is a superpower in IT, an Indian is now a Formula 1 racing driver. India is indeed shining for some. These selfish people will call you an India-hater because you expose the truth. They are least interested in facts and in the truth. But I know, like me you also love India. We want a change for the better and for the majority of the population, that’s why we criticise and tell the truth. There are many who enjoy reading your intelligent articles. Please keep on writting.
Thanks and Best Regards,
Sukumar

Thanks for voicing out your thoughts / concerns !!

But let me take a shot at clarifying few things.

you ask “so that if there is a young person in the crowd of Deeshaa sychophants, she or he can decide to absolutely give up hope on their home country”

That young person needs to be cognizant of the reality. There are obvious problems and he ought to know that. Its his tenacity which decides to give up hope or not. HIDING the reality is tantamount to CHEATING ?

Will India Shining campaign help India to automatically scale heights ?
Don’t you believe in “critical analysis” ?

I kinda feel sad when people are “foolishly patriotic”.

So…what did you understand? That things in India are mess? Ummm.. gee.. isn’t that something we already knew? Did you make any suggestions for improvement? Did you give even one word of encouragement? One flicker of hope for the generation of 20-somethings which is about to dominate the country demographically? Did you inspire them to change with your lovely analogy of seeing the dead bodies of tokyo? Did you tell them to look forward to the future? And that if they believe in a prosperous future they may go out and create one? Did you tell them what you thought the root causes of India’s troubles are? Did you give them even one concrete step on how to go about being able to allow the Great Atanu to write pretty someday? Did you inspire them with hope by saying that “India’s IT industry hasn’t even matured but it is already making headlines – imagine what the future could be like”? Or did you instead decide to denounce it, oh how grudgingly you must have pressed the buttons the keyboard, that too with the most flimsy evidence and anecdotes ever seen, so that if there is a young person in the crowd of Deeshaa sychophants, she or he can decide to absolutely give up hope on their home country, like you, and migrate to the West, to get a degree and come back and be able to pompusly denounce anybody who trys to improve their home country? Of course, you’ve already stated elsewhere that blogging can not change India, or anything. Thanks for the inspiration man. I really needed that. Now I feel ready and charged to go out there and fight the ills that bedevil my country, now that I have a western-educated academic telling me how much my country sucks, through his very unbiased, and objective eyes, which couldn’t possibly be viewing things through and American prism, or a Western Prism. Oh no, not at all. Thanks deeshaa.org, you’ve managed to re-affirm my faith in my country, because I know that the story you tell, is one of half-truths, without frames of reference, or any background, or even a remote understanding of history, or your origin country’s culture.

Interventions can be illuminating and fruitful, probably much more than pure thinking. That’s why scientists run experiments. In most cases, thinking is a poor cousin of action, particularly when it comes to understanding complex systems. Action allows us to see how the system develops over time, first-hand. No amount of thinking can approximate the insights from such an experience. This is one of the primary motivations behind doing simulation studies, which are ‘toy’ models that enact situations, thereby helping track the complex interactions between different elements over time, something the human mind is not capable of doing.

You can make a bad situation worse only if you are not willing to learn, change your ways, go back to the drawing board, and iterate. Anyone who has done any kind of implementation will tell you that there are no one-shot solutions, development involves constant learning-by-acting.

The idea of action-as-pure-execution-of-thought is old hat, and not supported by evidence. Most modern pedagogical theories emphasise learning-by-doing over learning-by-rote, and these models are based on solid psychological (and increasingly neuroscience) data.

Aside: Using Buddhism to justify pure contemplation is not a good idea, almost all models of “enacted and embodied cognition” are inspired by Buddhism. Look up The Embodied Mind by Varela, Thomson and Rosch.

Frankly speaking, you write what I would write; I dont have time. Hence the “comments”.

Dig more deeper, and your post here raises fundamental issues here. We as a nation have forgotten our Hindu roots; Hinduism in it’s pure manifest has lot to offer than anyone else. I know, I am opening a can of worms here; I am ready to defend my point of view. Till the time, India moves towards asserting it’s Hindu right, there is no way we can progress.

On the hindsight, there is a lot made out of UPA and it’s antics. Mid Term Appraisal shows that UPA inherited growth at 8% +which has slid down to less than 6%. I dont believe in numbers that can be cooked up; frankly in the name of “rebuilding this country for the aam aadmi”, there is an open loot. Oh WTF, we have been looted before. Refer to the post on Monkeys.

I just randomly browsed thru your personal blog and found this

http://are.berkeley.edu/~atanu/blog/archives/000268.html

Wonderfully inspiring.