COUNTERPOINT: Reality check on India hype

Empty vessels make the most noise. The adage sums up India's current obsession with showcasing any bit of good news as proof of its march towards super-power status.

Sorry to play party-pooper but this is but a figment of fertile imagination. Sure, India must celebrate a Kiran Desai winning the Booker or Lakshmi Mittal and the Tatas taking on the world of steel.

But they are instances of individual excellence. They have succeeded despite the system, not because of it.

More often than not what are held up as examples of India's arrival are trivial; an Indian becoming Miss Britain becomes a chapter in its 'global success story'.

Never mind if it is of no consequence to the billion people in India. India has even found a nice-sounding phrase to massage its collective, mostly insecure, ego — 'soft power'.

There is no such thing as 'soft' or 'hard' power. You are either empowered or you are not. And the indices that make one a power to reckon with include the economic, social and political.

Whether one likes it or not, the fact is that India is still very much a Third World country. Tuck it away on the inside pages or at the back of the mind, but Indian farmers continue to commit suicide every day, driven to it by an agrarian crisis the government has failed to address.

India has not only made peace with corruption at all levels of public life but also takes perverse pride in it. In what is passed off as a metropolis, basic civic amenities are absent.

It takes candlelight vigils by citizens, not a competent criminal justice system, to force a relook at murder cases. And that only because it happened to involve people in an urban pocket.

Save for the privileged few, most still await India's tryst with destiny. The great Indian project is just about waking up from a slothful slumber.

More power to it. Only let us not get caught up with images of our own making. There are miles to go before we can pop the bubbly.

I don't know any chinese that compares himself actively against Indians - i do hear lots of Indians comparing india to china, though.

now, i did hear some of my chinese colleagues asking indian colleagues why indians don't do well in the olympics (and that was only during the summer olympics) simply because they were curious how a country with 1 billion people would do so poorly comparatively to say, Australia.

i don't think it has anything to do with nationalism - most of the time the chinese/american-chinese guys don't even get along with each other - i see far more cohesiveness within the indian community than the chinese community.

I think this thread says it all - the post is about India, and yet immediately we get comparison against China (and it's all the same argument from MSM about open v. closed society, etc.) People tend to overlook some facts about it - such as how Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, etc. all developed their economy under a dictatorship system at the time the economy was developing. Singapore today is stil ruled by a one party state (98% of all seats belongs to one party) - no one ever says Taiwan's development would fail due to Chiang Kai Shek's rule (and he did rule it with an iron hand - lots of people were jailed wrongly and executed).

The 1D is prehistoric! It belongs inside a glass box in the Nationl Museum Of Natural History ;-) If you want a 5d, it's replacement is coming in Feb so the prices might drop to the mid to upper teens by next summer. I got a used 20D some time ago, ISO 100 is butter smooth !

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.