Page 217 of my 300 page autobiography

Today is August the 15^th, the sixty-fifth year of India’s Independence. It is seven in the morning and I am lazing off on my giant revolving bed, on the top floor of my sea facing mansion in Mumbai. It is a luxury to be in bed at seven in the morning, a privilege I am availing after months, today being a National Holiday. I am dreaming. Dreams are not those thoughts that I get while sleeping. Dreams are those thoughts that don’t let me sleep. My bedroom follows an open plan. It is glass walled from all sides giving me a three sixty degree view of the world around me. The table in my room is studded with trophies, awards and mementos that I have received. It has been a long, tiring but very successful journey almost twenty five years since I graduated.

I look out of the window towards the east and I see the magnificent St. Andrews church, the famous Hindu temple of Mahalakshmi and the mid sea Dargha of Haji Ali. There is so much diversity in India. India is a country full of mysticism; a sea of people and myriad traditions, languages and cultures. Here there is unity in diversity. Indian culture encompasses unto itself more than 500 languages, 330 million Gods and Goddesses and festivals which outnumber the days in a year. The rice we eat, the dress our women wear and the dialect we speak, changes every hundred kilometers in this country. Uncertainty & ambiguity, curiosity & experimentation, failure & discovery, chaos & challenges peacefully coexist. Mega weddings and multiple ceremonies with few thousand attendees are organized without a rehearsal. Massive chaos in city traffic is created & dissolved through mysterious exhortations such as “thoda adjust karo (please adjust)”

 Logic and emotion, individuality and social feelings, poverty and affluence, life and lifestyle, value and indulgence and the past and the future simultaneously coexist in India. And all this paradoxes make India what it is.  The last National elections were won by an Italian women of Roman Catholic heritage who made way for a Sikh to be sworn as a Prime Minister by a Muslim President, in a nation 81% Hindu.

                        I now gaze out through my south facing window and am disturbed. There is a sea of humanity living in filthy slums. They have been in existence since eternity and I have never noticed them. Why am I bothered now? I know that India has educated the world’s second largest pool of trained scientists and engineers but 40% of the country is still illiterate. It is a place where bullock carts are still an indispensable mode of transportation; yet its rocket and satellite programs are amongst the most advanced on earth. The pizza delivery boy easily beats the lumbering Ambulance in the 30 minute dash. A fleet of swanky cars can be seen navigating a stretch with more potholes than road. There is more mobile access then toilets. Text first, Toilet next.

Lota in one hand, for the call of nature,

A cell in other, for every other call.

Four out of the top ten richest men in the world are Indians; and yet one-thirds of the world’s poor live in India. Where there is a grain glut and empty gut; food grains rot as people die of hunger. The irony is tragic, worst then the darkest inequalities of the French empire. There is no bread in one India and cake for the other. Thousands of people in the urban centers are rushing to weight loss centers. Millions of other Indians are desperately trying not to lose any more weight. Prosperity is growing faster than the rate of reduction in poverty. While we worship the female form as 'goddess', tens of millions of females, in the euphemism made popular by Amarthya Sen, are missing. Indian state is alarmingly inept when it is not corrupt. We believe in reincarnation, yet human life has little value in India. Logic and emotion, individuality and social feelings,poverty and affluence, life and lifestyle, value and indulgence and the past and the future simultaneously coexist in India. And all this paradoxes make India what it is.

                 My vision turns to the north and I visualize the vastness of the ocean. I appreciate the cultural diversity of India. But the paradoxes distress me. I have always been proud to be an Indian. India’s rich past has contributed much to the progress of civilization. The concepts of zero, the principle of magnetism, the smelting of metals, the game of chess and the weaving of cotton have their origins in India. Travelers like Megasthenes, Ptolemy, Hieun Tsang, Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta came to India and wrote about their visits and experiences. Christopher Columbus credited with discovering the Americas actually went out in search of India. Will Durant, an American historian wrote, “India was the motherland of our race and Sanskrit the mother of European languages”. Indian epics like the Bhagwat Gita and Panchtantra have been regarded as the fundamentals of moral development.

Where irrationality reigns, injustice prevails.

Ever noticed that if you laugh too hard, tears come to the eyes?

Our national sport is not Hockey or Cricket. It is cutting corners!

Gandhi is our brand ambassador; he is our logo, our patent. He is our currency. Mahatma Gandhi’s portrait adorns currency notes of every denomination. What an irony for a man who advocated austerity as a way of life. Today deeds done under his symbol might be a far cry from what the man himself stood for.

Now that we have sung, danced and celebrated our contradictions, let us go beyond the punch line. Martin Luther King in his famous speech ‘I have a dream’ had said that he dreamt of a liberal and equal America where every man was judged by his character and not by the color of his skin. He endeavored to seek the emancipation of the black man and succeeded in his mission. I too have a dream. A dream of an egalitarian India; where every man can afford two meals a day, where every child can go to school. ‘Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high’. I now want to transform my dream to reality. Up till now I have concentrated on gaining ‘Name, Fame and Money’.  I now want to be a catalyst to initiate the change that I desire to bring about. I am now on going to dedicate my energy to my dreams of an India devoid of Poverty, Hunger and Inequality.

“I am going to be the change I desire to see in my world.”