I feel like writing a book called The New India is Shit!

So much bravado, so much arrogance, so much "we are like that only" style of dismissiveness for others and adulation for self, while stewing in dis-hygiene, incapacitating poverty, rabid communal hatred, upstart warmongering by the filthily richy-rich sons and daughters of the nouveau riche, candle-light superficiality, sucking up to the hyperbolic crank-up on “India’s 9-11”, ranking segregation between men and women, caste and class, a new–found dysfunctional sense of priority towards infrastructure building (concrete and steel highways and high-rise bravado and vedic spas instead of emphasis on irrigation, rural roadways, healthcare), airports that boast "like singapore" hoardings while slums next door abound with rats that themselves shrivel away in disgust and panic, dirty diesel power for polluting mega-complexes instead of green energy for the poor for their pumps and for their childrens' schooling and a corporate class that fucks around with buzzwords instead of making the workplace neat, clean, innovative and quality workmanship oriented. We are ready for “international acquisitions” they say, while they still run the books in double, domestically, with cash transactions galore and zero corporate governance culture. Not that international companies and banking institutions have anything to be proud of when it comes to ethics and fair play given the record of the Worldcom, Junk bond resellers, Enron, Tyco variety to the Lehman, Bear Stearns ilk, but at least the bravado that goes along with India Rising and wanting to acquire “phoren” should have some erudite, ethical and dignified bearings, that is truly evocative of India’s claims to classiness?

So, then you flick on the tube. There are the zillion and one pelvic-thrust channels where horrendously un-sexy males and females throw themselves at each other with crude coital dance moves speeded-up by studio edits to camouflage alu-baigun bodymass-uncool and mass-hysteria-bound choreography. What does it do for the masses? It simply unleashes the repressed sexuality of the crude and balls-scratching, gutka-chewing bystander variety and then attacks ensue on women, followed by the acid-throwing, bride-burning, lumpen criminality, and further followed up by police cover-ups, bribes and “encounter killings” as a continuing saga of the shitty culture that has evolved in India since “liberalization.” Even the left and their darlings are not immune to such publicity seeking, gas-filled bravado in their magazines. The mainstream newspapers and media, you ask? What a horrendous litany of copy-cat journalism and repetitious official-speak churned out CNN-style with machine-gun sound accompaniment, to peddle the same ultra-nationalist claptrap. There is not a single Public Service Radio or TV forum where issues are discussed with fairness, dignity, seriousness and detailed data. Even the much projected and liberated face of NDTVs Barkha Dutt now engages in shallow all-over-the-place Christiane Amanpour- style hoity-toity icon-hugging journalism, lately. Her record on both Kargil and now the shrill jingoism from Mumbai really cuts a swathe of pathetic journalism never seen before. My generation stood dignified against war-mongering in 1962, questioned journalists when they strayed away from the truth, fought against backlashes against minority communities. Now there is very little public protest from this new upstart, horrendously spoilt, a-historical twerpy generation who hold candles in one hand and ask for Pakistan to be carpet-bombed.

Bureaucracy streamlining, facilities improvement, you ask? A little here and there, of course. The airport clearances work a little better. But a jealousy-bound inquisitiveness, scrolling through all pages (despite a long queue of people waiting behind) , asking silly geographical questions about every country visited if Arabic writing is seen on the passport, calling in an equally uninformed and untrained boss to verify mundane visa date issues that are abundantly clear, only to exercise some cranky authority. All this because culturally and infrastructurally, India has not progressed beyond the feudal stranglehold that has ruled her from the zamindari times. The culture that nurtures lack of respect for others, for propriety, for service to customers, for encouraging some semblance of order in a public place or in a public process. Chaos, bedlam, hoodlum behaviour thrives because it is the newly rich and the urban brats who promote such irreverent behaviour. Not the folks who come from the villages and rural towns. Only the city half-breeds that need this riotous process to fulfil their craving for commodity products and upscale services.
Let’s consider some services. Hospital gadgetry in private institutions and 3G technology make Indians vociferously proud, whereas the lack of land lines, broadband cable, new electrical cabling and town hospitals are not questioned and after sixty years of independence and innumerable constitutional guarantees, the sick of India lie dying, and bleeding on the floors of hospital emergency corridors. Education you say? It is a massacre for the poor and the lower and middle classes. There is no hope in hell for them to receive any semblance of a decent education, while private schools and colleges boast of Eton, UK, Australian and other board equivalences, so your child “can go global from day one.” What a slap in the face for the rest! You go to buy a data card for your wireless access and now with the Mumbai carnage you need to have an Indian address, which means an Indian document like a passport, voter card, electric bill and if you are a traveller from abroad and don’t have any of the above, they ask you to get the name of any local friend or relative to own it for you! So where is the trace on the traceability and where is the accessibility you want to create for tourists and travellers from abroad? Everything has a dodgy way out and a dodgy excuse to bypass the rules that have been instituted to ensure due process. When you go to swipe your credit card for a purchase, the modem device, hangs up on you saying- No dial tone. In a bored and irreverent voice, the sales clerk’s first reaction is “Give another card.” A second card does the same. A closer examination reveals that the telephone line from the swiper to the terminal box has been chewed up on the walls or the connectors dislodged by baby roaches living inside the box. “ It’s your card, ” he insists, until, I open the terminal and clean up the box and it works. Then the reply is, “But it was working yesterday.” Ah! So these are these intolerable NRI bastards now, you say! Always asking for NRI services. Go back to your NRI heavens! But you Resident Indians are still advertising slaving shit like “housing suitable for NRIs”, when we cannot make houses for Indians! Of course NRIs as they have been known for years are a despicable lot. Arrogant airs, a few acquired nuances from a few years abroad, which they want to heap on unsuspecting clerks at every opportunity till they either feel totally guilt-ridden and miserable or disproportionately defensive till no resolution is possible. But NRIs are part of India. Because it is the wealth and style of the NRIs, their needs, their nuances that you promote on Bollywood, on CNN-IBN, NDTV , in the Times of India and on The Telegraph in your style sections, in your culture cruises and in your aping pictorials on fashion and peddling of commodity trash. It is you, who have promoted a quest for NRI culture and then you are gasping at the indefatigable demands of the sullen NRI folks! When non-resident Canadians come back to Canada, they are not categorized and slotted and jerked around, because systems and services do exist in Canada which are somewhat acceptable and better than the services they get in the countries they live in (including Europe and of course the United States is a disaster when it comes to health services). So why don’t Resident middle-class Indians, that extraordinarily ambitious, mindlessly suffering and pathetically jingoistic mass which is so keen to take on the world, not exercise some quiet goals to really become world class in services, as the Chinese have done? The same Chinese who sixty years ago were in far worse shape than us Indians at the time of liberation.

The price of food, of staples has become forbidding. India’s agricultural crop warehouses are few and not properly designed. There is inadequate cold storage facilities. It is a rat’s paradise. Potatoes, rice get thrown out every year in large proportions. Yet, the emphasis on infrastructure building has no allowance for storing food for the poor. The poor and the rural folks who are still the backbone of India’s GDP do not eat well. Their lands have been usurped to build cars or converted to make breakfast cereals for the NRI-loving middle class. Who can afford the Spencers, the Reliance and other grocery chains? For sure not 90% of India’s population. So, what is this liberalization shit all about? So farmers can kill themselves in droves? So, hapless peasants can come to the towns and cities and build shanties on pavements and “disfigure” and decimate the beautification dreams of the Rotary and Lions Club types? Out of 640, 000 villages in India, seventeen percent have 60% of its wealth. In the villages there are no developed food distribution centres. Even the well to do in the villages have no access to shops. And we are building concrete super-highways, some even eight lanes with automated toll booths and flying over these villages and providing access to SEZs and other industrial hubs. Already the SEZ extravaganza seems to have dulled its shine. Because it was all shine and incorrect infrastructure anyway for growth and development.

Bengal and Kerala are the only states that allow cow slaughter. What a piece of minority consciousness, because the governments are “communist” ! A friend, an engineer who has often been asked to be consulted on the process engineering involved, says it is such a dastardly unhealthy quagmire that he cannot believe it. Blood, guts, sliced and chopped with no hygiene, no clean-ups, while crows pick away on the meat as it travels down a processor. No controls! Scanty solid waste management and despite millions spent from World Bank funds, nothing really was done and it turned out the funds were all spirited away into political coffers. And there are more illegal slaughter houses than the official ones. They slaughter and clean up before 9 am and disappear. And the arrangements are all worked out with the police and the inspectors. Even the cows that are slaughtered are not young cows, but the old and possibly diseased. And India is supposedly turning a corner. When you record all this, Resident Indians curl up in anger and deflect all issues and defend the motherland like only they have the right to do so.

Books are now being written about why India should turn the tables on the Nehru era “socialism.” About what a disaster centralized planning and nationalized critical sectors have been for India. About how it has kept India shackled and incapable of going global and how now the cult forces around the-world-is-flat ideology have shown up India for what it is truly capable of! Once again the copy cat intellectualism, lauding of a few NRI corporate heroes and heroines, speaking tours for a few Harvard and Chicago NRI professors, quoting profusely from the Boston Consulting Group and Mckinsey etc to make a case for why India is better than China, because China, even with its better developed infrastructure is hamstrung by its polity, while India with its non-existent infrastructure is “democratic” and therefore ready for more FDI. An exercise is being carried out to make a case for a understanding the “plurality in India’s diversity.” India’s brilliant capabilities, technological strength will be unleashed soon for the world to make use of. Just be patient with our lumbering and corrupt ways. Nobody mentions that all the IITs and the IIMs, whose graduates have been in heavy demand for the past several decades and who are often the bright stars that have turned around many of these upstart companies, were all the products of the “Nehruvian thinking ” that were part and parcel of the “planning” (discredited dirty word) that went into this country’s growth after the British left it in a virtual bureaucratic never-land. I never thought I would have to defend Nehru, but what else is there to do with all these Harvard-inspired gurus floating around giving lectures on how India should loosen up more and lie down and spread its arse more to be waylaid.

Mumbai Blood

Mumbai Blood.

Dec 1, 2008

Sometime ago
When left the Brits, to go home,
They left behind some towers
Some palaces, some domed houses
To become hotels of 5-star lore.
Now the press and TV
And the repeat-diseased media
Have discovered the word iconic!
Iconic, like the Plaza hotel in New York!
People who go there are the
People that matter or care.
So the Taj and Trident got the coverage
While the peasants and workers, so bucolic,
Who built Mumbai lay bleeding and bloody
On the railway platform
Which got no coverage.
Bucolic, not Iconic!
And some silly clods in black ninja duds
Rope down from an old copter
After the fact,
And play to the camera
While 10 boys with nasty eyes
Do what they had to do
Wade ashore
Mow down the gentle folks of
Of Mumbai, bloody Mumbai.

Now Obama-nation needs something
They need the peace in the Asia nation,
So he can clobber the Taliban,
The same Taliban they nurtured
Coddled and played footsy with
When the Soviets roared and rumbled.

Mumbai bloody Mumbai
Where Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, Christians
Have lived together with Hindus,
Rich, poor, builder, shopper, sailor and tradesman
Before the children of midnight were born
In 1947 dawn!

Mumbai, Bloodied Mumbai!