The Second Jallianwala Baug
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! ...