You are not developing till you are developed!

Being a part of the bi-national family, I often enter nationalistic debates over one's countries. Recently I read an essay written by one of my niece for the admissions committee of Stanford, it was amusing to read it. The essay camouflaged the contents of Slumdog Millionaire in a prose like academic veil. The essence of it was to question the "growth" of India by citing examples of the marginalised. She cited an underaged house maid (we shall call her pinky) in her grandparents' Lucknow home as her point of sympathy, as to where she shall get education, how does the glitters of growth dazzle her? Ironically, this essay would propelled her to a campus, where she shall wear a magenta stanford t shirt made by NIKE in one of their sweetshops in India, China and other "third world" nations where several of such pinkys are exploited day in day out. The campus shall feed her lessons from professors who enthusiastically enrich the arsenal of Lockheed Martin, Northorp Grumann and General Dynamics [1] which produce america's largest export, weapons and arms that annihilate millions of pinkys around the world specially in Africa. In the end the education shall make her another part in the economic machine fueled by major businesses as Death (Arms), Death (Fast Food) and Death (Oil).

Does that make sense? Let me be a bit more lucid here. When we expose the underbelly of India and question the growth the subcontinent has seen, should we by induction go ahead and expose the much darker underbelly of america and lambast any claim of theirs to be worlds richest country? India has its pinkys and jamals, does that say US does not have its ghettos? When a self obsessed oppurtunist said "Change" has come, did that mean every homeless sleeping amidst vomit and excreta has become jubiliant overnight and have started performing musicals at the broadway? So why is it that when India said it's growing the first thing these poverty pornographers do is to find the poorest of the lot and speak out loud "gee! there aint' no growth here, I see poor people".

Sitting in plush american homes (which offcourse much less of wealth now) and touring India on a American passport teaches you as much about India as watching Saturday Night Fever teaches you about New York. What India is right now, America was the same not so far in the past. It takes a few generations to build a family, it takes another few to build a nation. Most of our parents rose up from poverty and marginal lives to give us that "middle class" upbringing, we take the batton to next level by taking our children either abroad or the best tier colleges in India and hence to the corporate, law, sports, technology leadership, this is how family grows in stature both financially and socially over generations. A country grows exactly the same way, a generation of its citizens burn the midnight oil and work beyond their means to make it grow and the batton is passed on to the next generation and so on, till there comes generation which enjoys the fruits of generations of hard work and curse inefficiency at its first sight. America has reached that generation a while ago, India on the other hand is in first few generation of hard workers, we enjoy what our fathers and elder brothers gave us, we added value to it by our labour and will pass it on to our sons and daughters. That does not mean one can not term this as growth and patt own's back.

I want to emphasise here that it doesnt matter whether you accept growth or not, it is the perspective you put it in. I commend this essay by my niece because Americans by and large what this gloomy snakecharmer image of India, the very fact that they ignored Lagaan and embraced Slumdog Millionaire is a standing testimony to this. Today while having paani-puri at a street side stall, I saw something that made me both proud and sad, the vendor had his family sitting behind him on the street, he had a daughter about 11 yrs old and a son about 8 yrs old. While enjoying the tasty treat, I closely observed the family. The daughter, had a humble school dress on, perhaps she was back from evening school and was very excited about new set of notebook and pencil, the son on the other hand was happily playing with a broken aquafina bottle on the drain embankment of the road, he was hitting the bottle with a wood plank as thin as his wrist, a game very similar to squash; The very precision with which he could hit the bottle again and again with that stick held him out. I asked the vendor, "bacchi school jaati hai?", he proudly replied, "saab, aajkal to padhne likhne mein hi barkat hai", the language told me he was from my home state of UP. This whole word sketch can easily be identified with Slumdog..but my perspective to it is growth, just a few years ago the poorest never realised the power of education, let alone sending a girl child to school. This realisation in the low income group that only way to enrich their coming generations is education is a strong signal of growth. This perspectice somehow eludes our elites, who would crib about global warming flying in their private jets and praising Salaam Bombay and Slumdog..as pieces of art.

No growth in the world is inclusive, economists world over have failed to establish a growth model that is practical yet inclusive, the best one can rely on is the trickle down effect (Which America has championed), and it takes time of the order of decades to trickle down. You can look at a house maid and cry foul over claims of growth, but you may be missing the picture here that 5 decades ago, being a house maid in the Delhis and the Bombays of India was considered a privileged job, we relied on import for even the most trivial needs. It's almost fashionable now to throw in that figure of $1 a day as benchmark for poverty, without considering Purchase power parity, cost of living index not only among countries but also inside the same country. Some stat says there are a chunk of people in India living below $ 1 a day, something like 36% of them. We conveniently forget that that a major portion of that 36 % lives in cities/towns/villages which have a cost of living index as low as 1/5th that of Mumbai, which itself has a purchase power parity of 1:10 over a currency exchange rate of 1:50, which means, 1 $ = 10 Rs in USA, and 1$ = 50 Rs in India, and in villages it means about 100 Rs. This entire mathematics dramatically inflates the number of those below poverty line. Having said that, it cannot be denied that India has a very large portion of population which is yet to see the light of development, but we are in the process and it shall take time. In India's case the time may be longer as we don't rely on blood and gore for development as USA, being not as belligerent as them at times hampers "growth". So if you are not a part of this process, all you can do is be a typical american and exploit this poverty in "rest of the world" [2] and launch yourself to higher life forms on the lines of World Bank which in the "business of povery" spends 80% of its budget not on the poor, but on first-class travel, fine dining, and hefty "consultancy fees"[3].

[1] : All the three major arms manufacturers of US have their establishments close to Stanford campus and they heavily use its academia for their R&D

[2] : As the joke goes, majority of americans don't know what is "rest of the world"

[3] : Reference from 1989 book about World Bank "Lords of Poverty"