Rumi Nations

Here's a random list of things. 1.             Indians sometimes prefer to abort a fetus if they find out that it's female. (Or they just kill the new born baby after it's born.) 2.             There are more than 20 million babies born in India. EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. 3.             Child labor is so commonplace in India that few notice it or consider it out of the ordinary. Kids work as waiters or dishwashers in roadside restaurants. Sometimes, kids ferry tea to the local police station from a nearby roadside tea stall. 4.             Massive numbers of kids and younger and adult women are employed as maids in middle class to rich households. Middle class houses might pay 200 rupees to a female who comes and washes the dishes. Rich houses might employ women per...

India is a nation of meaningless rituals. Indians tend to their risible rituals with the utmost devotion so as to avoid the difficult task of having to think. Indians like to celebrate various yearly rituals ... of both happy as well as sad occasions. One such recent anniversary was that of the Bhopal gas tragedy. Not long before that, there was the anniversary of Indira Gandhi's assassination. Then, people also remembered the Babri Masjid demolition. A more recent tragedy from Mumbai a year ago was also piously observed. Even Sachin's playing for 20 years occasioned an outpouring of admiration and adulation. Sadly, I think people don't have any sense of proportion at all. Otherwise, we would not have seen the absurd eulogizing of Sachin. Public outrage about the death of a model fortunatly led to the incarceration of a playboy-turned-murderer. Similar outrage is unfortunately completely absent when the dead happen to be the ordinary people of India. This dichotomy is deepl...

That's how I would describe the phenomenal capacity of Indians to have babies. I wonder if Indians are just stupid or there is more to it than meets the eye ... something like that saying ... "the meek shall inherit the Earth." I think there are ways in which India's strength in numbers might her well. But, mostly I think India's burgeoning population is India's biggest problem rather than its biggest strength. Fast breeding nations of the third world such as India and China are plaining helping bring the standard of living down for the whole world. The key to world prosperity and the progress of human civilization lies not in being a leadeing breeder ... because then we would need to compete with other animals and they might in fact beat us hands down. The decisive advantage humans enjoy is not even brute, muscle strength which other species possess in far more abundance than us. What provides humans our unique survival advantage is our brain power and that h...

Peggy Noonan has questioned the maturity of the people in goverance in America today in a compellingly argued article here ... http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703363704574503631430926354.html?mod=djemEditorialPage She has talked about people becomeing "disenchanted" or "disheartened" with government. People do not think that the Government can make it better, she says. Also, the leaders are showing a mindless ... something akin to optimism, she continues. Fascinating perspectives indeed. I am wondering what relevance do these have for Indians. If anyone thinks they are irrelevant, well, I would beg to differ. I think all of us Indians can identify with the feeling of being "disheartened" with Government. India, of course, has never been the "hope of the world," or the "savior of mankind," or the "strongest nation of the world." But, the lesson to learn there is that we have to aspire to such things. Unfortunately...

Give me a break! Probably that's how Indians would react if they knew about this phenomenon that's described as the post-World War II Baby Boom. It's the generation of Bill Clinton and others who belong to his age group. For those interested in arcane Americana, this Baby Boom refers to the eggregious increase in the number of babies that people were having ... this increase took place in the boom years following the end of the Second World War. Those years, late 40s and all of the 50s saw Americans having more than 4 million babies a year. Of course, that's a laughable boom by Indian standards. Indians would defeat Americans in this game any day: Indians today give birth to anywhere between 20 million to 30 million babies in a year. So, what boom are Americans talking about??? It's positively a baby drought rather than a baby boom. Americans would need to do a lot more to compete with Indians in this regard. And frankly, Americnas can't even hope or dream of ma...

The Japanese have a legendary appetite for seafood — much to the misfortune of sea life. Tuna fish happen to be one of the victims of this food fancy. Of course, just as the Japanese have pretty much hunted whales almost to the point of extinction, the seas near Japan have similarly lost much of their population of tuna fish. The Japanese have such a legendary appetite for such stuff that they even import seafood (specifically, prawns) from Orissa in India which happens to be my home state. It seems somewhat astonishing or bewildering that we humans who occupy less than one-third of the planet’s surface which is land should be able to deplete resources from the oceans which occupy more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface. On a completely different note — global warming deniers claim that humans are too insignificant a presence on the planet to be able to affect something as vast as the planet’s climate as the planet is too big. As the state of marine life shows, we humans certainly...

Today the news pages report that Aamir Khan is going to have a baby. Today also marks the end of a life — Habib Tanvir. And a celebrity has been arrested for carrying declared jewellery into the country. The stock markets continue their see-saw movements. dead bodies continue to be found from the Air France plane crash. Some trifling developments from the T20 World Cup. Federer of course has equalled Pete Sampras' career Grand Slam wins. A random day in the life of India. "The Perils of Tradition" basically references the fact that Indians tend to be happy to live their everyday lives. People basically don't like upheavals in their lives. Even the young generation isn't necessarily designed to seek out revolutions. That's a sad fact that I've discovered recently. Perhaps, someone like Jawaharlal Nehru who lived almost a century ago was more progressive than most Indians who are alive today. Come to think of that!!!

Researchers have urged WHO to "publicly condemn homeopathy as a treatment for serious diseases, such as HIV/AIDS, TB, and malaria." The researchers are concerned as some patients have reportedly paid with their lives as a result of choosing homeopathy over more effective treatment options. Homeopathy may not be the only culprit of this nature — one wonders how many Indians take the nonsense propounded by sadhus/yogis and other varieties of Godmen seriously. These self-proclaimed "learned" folk don't hesitate to propound remedies to all sorts of diseases — whether it be AIDS or cancer or any other life-threatening or serious condition. These claims are never put to a scientific scrutiny — the kind of scrutiny that every drug goes through before getting to the market. These Godmen are allowed to escape scot-free no matter how many people might have died as a result of following their hair-brained advice. People of India are of course very fond of " miracle cu...

The recent 'outbreak' of 'racist' attacks against Indian students has created quite a stir in India. Indians — some of them, at least — have suddenly discovered that Australians are a racist bunch . . . I wonder what happened to all the happenings on the cricket field from years past which gave very voluminous hints that Australians were not quite a combination of Mahatma Gandhi/Nelson Mandela/Dr. Martin Luther King . . . I am completely at a loss to understand why some Indians expect to be treated as anything but 'outsiders' in a foreign land . . . I do not understand why Indians have to go to Australia . . . Oh, they apparently go there to 'study' . . . Well, I don't know that Australia boasts of many world-class universities . . . I am sure India has got many institutions of caliber . . . Somehow, I suspect the reason why some Indians like to go to Australia is not purely because of 'academic' reasons — I think these folks just want to get...

People of India have decided to go with the status quo by opting for another five years of Congress rule — not that they had any alternatives that are much better. As noted in the last blog post, India is a conundrum ... People in the United States whose jobs have been Bangalored certainly love to hate India ... People in India meanwhile love to admire America ... I am confused about Indians admiring America though ... I am confused about this whole business of India being a 'young' country ... From what I have observed about young Indians, they seem a strange blend of tradition and modernity ... Youngsters don't see any dichotomy in aspiring to all the trappings of material success and yet at the same time they don't mind keeping alive their moribund traditions and rituals ... When it's time for some critical decisions in life — such as marriage — young Indians demonstrate a remarkable resemblance in their mindsets with their ancestors. I find it odd that educated ...