Random Thoughts

The votes were in and counted, the results declared, the wounds licked and the fire crackers burst but what exactly did the recent elections in India really prove! - Indian National Congress is neither Indian nor national and definitely not Congress. It epitomises corruption, inefficiency, indifference and irreverence. And they were punished for it - in states where they were in power as well as in states where they were not! Even the tragedy of 32 dead Chattisgarh congressman could not generate enough sympathy even to win an election in that state. - A clean, educated, urban face of politics was clearly rewarded in the form of AAP. Both Congress and BJP were guilty of not taking AAP seriously! Dikshit never recognised AAP as a party and NAMO questioned if Kejriwal was trustworthy having broken away from his mentor Anna. Clearly the electorate thought otherwise. While AAP may not win landslide in 2014 at a national level it is certainly a force to watch out for in 2018.  - The form...

Several years ago when I first moved abroad one of my work colleagues joked that direction a train in India is traveling can be determined by which way the people on the roof of the train are facing. It was an innocuous joke but one that left me very hurt. "How could people still think of India as a land of snake charmers and uncouth barbarians?" I thought to myself "Have they not heard about the progress being made in one of the top 4 developing economies? Give us another 10 years and our overall image in the rest of the world will improve in line with our economic progress". It's fair to say that India has changed in the last 10 yrs but in my opinion lot of the changes have been divisive and degenerative. Simply measuring up a nation on the economic scale was my folly - I took the positive elements of our culture, heritage and social diversity and clubbed it with the economic growth we were experiencing to paint a rosy picture about the shining nation! ...