This is something I wanted to post in August 2006, when India celebrated the 59th year of Independence. I had typed the whole thing back then, but then totally lost track and missed posting it. Around that time I received a forwarded mail about “being proud to be an Indian”… The theme was certainly a good one, and in context, it listed out the many reasons why we should be proud, and that included some facts like :
Rajiv Gupta is the GM of Hewlett Packard
Vinod Dahm is the creator of Pentium chip
Sabeer Bhatia is the founder and creator of Hotmail
38% of doctors in USA are Indians.
12% scientists in USA are Indians.
36% of NASA scientists are Indians.
34% of Microsoft employees are Indians.
28% of IBM employees are Indians.
17% of INTEL scientists are Indians.
13% of XEROX employees are! Indians.
India never invaded any country in her last 1000 years of history.
India invented the Number system. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta.
etc etc..
Am sure many of you would have already seen it many times. Anyways, I just had a few thoughts to share too, because on August 15th, 2006, when the nation was celebrating the Independence Day, NDTV decided to go around asking the “rulers” or our nation, our so called “leaders”, a few basic questions.
The questions were…
1. Who wrote out national song? (Vande mataram)
2. What colour is on top of our national flag? Saffron, white or green?
3. Where was the “wheel” in out flag taken from?
4. What’s the full name of out Bapu?
The shocking news is… NOT A SINGLE ONE COULD ANSWER ANY OF THE QUESTIONS!!!!!!
Some of the answers they got were…
“National song? Which national song?”
“So many people have written national songs…I don’t remember”
“It’s a general knowledge question. I don’t know it”
“Green is on top…on the Indian national flag”
“The ‘chakra’ was not taken from anybody”
“The ‘chakra’ was taken from the different states”
“Bapu? I just know him as Mahatma Gandhi”
“Whatever we call him, he is Mahatma”
And one guy didn’t even know who Bapu was!!!
Another lady leader had to say… “Am getting late for the Parliament. Don’t doubt me. I have read the whole Indian history. I’ll tell you the answers when am done with the Parliament”
Believe it or not… this is the “crème de la crème” of this country! Our country!!
Huh! What are we proud of here?????
True, there are Indian’s in many top and highly influential posts all around the world. We can be proud of them. The forwarded mail did have a few points worth thinking about.
India never invaded any country in her last 1000 years of history.
When that’s something we all can be proud of, the real question is, has that ensured the safety of the Indians??? We are always a target for our neighbours and the terrorists. Though war is NOT the answer, we certainly have to do more than just listen to “a condemn speech” by the great PM. So many of our soldiers are getting killed, so many civilians are massacred by those bullies. India should be doing more than simply sending the soldiers on training in out dated MiGs that crash before takeoff. This public display of erratic administration is indeed an invitation for the enemies. After losing so many innocent lives, the PM has just “harsh words”????? And for all you know, those are not even his own words, but the staff member who wrote it for him.
The world’s first University was established in Takshila in 700BC. More than 10,500 students from all over the world studied more than 60 subjects. The University of Nalanda built in the 4th century BC was one of the greatest achievements of ancient India in the field of education.
Hmm… But how many Indians would actually pick an Indian University over an American or English one today? Would you? How many Americans or Europeans come to India to do their higher education? At least half the number that goes to them to study? I didn’t think so. O’course our IITs and IIMs have made it big in the world, but Universities? Nope. How will it be? I have heard of people “take up” their MBBS final exams in a local coffee shop. Yup, an “agent” arranges everything for a small “fee” of a few lakhs and you can write the exam wherever you feel like, referring whatever you want to and be a “world class” doctor who kills the patient by his bills. Recently CNN-IBN exposed a few doctors in the capital, working in reputed hospitals and medical institutes, who were fakes. They had a pending case against them for being a fake, but they still “treat” patients and draw huge salaries from the organizations!!
A great history, but an amazingly corrupt present.
Ayurveda is the earliest school of medicine known to humans.
Yup, but more than us Indians, the foreigners have faith in it today. They spend so much on this, that for us Indians it’s now more of a business than a tradition.
Although western media portray modern images of India as poverty striken and underdeveloped through political corruption, India was once the richest empire on earth.
Well…either cling on to the glory of our past, and blame it all on the East India Company for having looted us and left us poor OR learn from countries like Japan who did everything to wake up from the grave and fight back to riches and fame. And HOW!!!
This is not something we have to be proud of, but something we Indians should be ashamed of. Something we all should be acting upon. So many Indians are in the top ring of the worlds largest corporates. But none of them ever started anything in India. None of them had the resources to build it in India. They had to go to other countries to do what they wanted to do and those countries have come out with many of the greatest inventions of our times. With the help of “imported Indian brains”.
Hotmail happened because Bhatia was in the USA. Sun Microsystems was started by a small team which included Vinod Khosla, but that happened because they were in Stanford University (SUN is Stanford University Network)… not in JNU or IGNOU. Vinod Dham did all his education in India but for his Masters degree he went to Cincinnati. And thus came the Pentium chips.
Most people think India has suddenly become the IT super power!! But the truth is, India has just become an OS super power. Well, that’s Out Sourcing super power. The best brains from the country have gone out and started companies which rule their segments in IT. But the brains still in India stick to the huge flow of works out sourced to us due to the lower labor cost here. Instead of that why don’t we concentrate on building a software giant like Microsoft or Adobe or Google or Yahoo? All those giants get a lot of works done from their developments centers in India too. They believe Indian’s are highly intelligent. And YES, we are. But why doesn’t any of the Indian companies use that intelligence to create an Indian giant that can rival these “world leaders”, instead of doing the work for the giants themselves? The head count in Infosys, Wipro, TCS etc. are so huge, most of the giants don’t have so many “brains” and a large part of our population is still not utilized. What they find intelligent is only the ones that were fortunate enough to have got the exposure. With such enormous resource in our own hands, how difficult would it be to come up with a “Windows” or a “Mac” or a “Photoshop” or a “Google” or “Yahoo” instead of being just services companies?
Why doesn’t that happen? Is it because of all the hurdles they have to cross with the Indian administration?
I guess the same would answer many other questions, like why with a population of 1 billion plus we still don’t have a world football team. Or why we still have to rejoice over winning the single bronze medal in the Olympics.
Seriously. What are we proud of?????
