On The spot
Tavleen Singh
My trips to foreign lands are usually short ones. More often than not I am back in the motherland in less than ten days. This time the wedding of a friend’s daughter in Europe got tagged on to my annual trip to Davos and so I ended up being away for three weeks and this gave me a chance to look at our beloved Bharat Mata with some perspective and, at the risk of sounding unpatriotic, I have to say she looks very bad. For many, many reasons.
In Davos at the World Economic Forum’s meeting there was this year a dazzling array of Nobel Prize winning economists and scientists who in their sessions created an idea of new frontiers in research and knowledge that went beyond anything we ever discuss in India. The most worthy representative of the Government of India was the Finance Minister and even he got caught on the back foot by the editor of the Financial Times when in his efforts to explain his disdain for Narendra Modi he described him as a ‘Luddite’. Lionel Barber pointed out that he had been in Gujarat not long ago and had not noticed mobs tearing down factories with sledgehammers. This left P. Chidambaram at a loss for words. I mention this only as an example of how removed India is currently from the conversations of the world. At the Forum it was as if India was no longer even relevant to the world economy so although there was a lot of talk of other emerging markets India seemed not to count among them. This left the small army of Indian TV anchors who had arrived in Davos to do no more than restrict their journalistic activities to interviewing Indian businessmen and having Indian conversations that they could easily have in India.
Then there has been the endless bad news from India that has regularly made headlines in Europe’s newspapers and magazines. So there was first that shaming story from the village in West Bengal of a young girl being gang raped on the orders of the local panchayat for daring to fall in love with a man they disapproved of. Then came the horror story of the young student from Arunachal Pradesh who was beaten to death by shopkeepers in a Delhi bazaar and in between came the story of Delhi’s new Law Minister haranguing Ugandan women after a midnight raid on their home. In vain have I waited for some good news about India and Indians and when it came it was of an Indian in America, Satya Naddela, who takes over as CEO of Microsoft. This news came when I happened to be having a coffee with Indian friends and we found ourselves mulling gloomily over why Indians did so well in other countries and not so well in India.
This is something I have wondered about often in the past so I mulled gloomily longer than the others and concluded that it was because the India we have built is a country filled with the sadness of lost opportunities. During this sojourn in Europe I have done the usual touristy things like visiting museums and monuments and everywhere I have gone I have thought of the incredible riches that India has in this area and how little we have done to enjoy them or make them available for foreign tourists to enjoy. One example will suffice. In a broken down, neglected museum in Mathura magnificent sculptures from Kanishka’s time gather dust and decay. Hardly anyone knows of their existence because the Government of Uttar Pradesh could not care less.
The same is true of other Indian governments in their attitude to museums and monuments. The officials in charge of looking after these treasures are mostly there because they want to keep their government jobs and not because they have a genuine love for India’s great heritage so our museums are imbued with the ugliness and banality of government offices. In Europe it is hard to find a museum today that has not added to its allure by building fine restaurants and cafes and excellent educational centres where schoolchildren can come to discuss art and history. Why has this not been possible in India? Quite simply because we have traditionally ignored the importance of preserving the treasures we have inherited.
Sadly the same neglect can be seen in our attitude to building the infrastructure needed to attract foreign tourists. The Alps are filled with small towns and villages that become ski resorts in winter and magnets for nature lovers in summer. In the Himalayas there are thousands of villages and towns that could do the same and in doing this enrich communities that today live in desperate poverty. Ladakh alone has the potential to attract more tourists than the Alpine resorts put together but it remains neglected, forgotten and backward. And, the same can be said of thousands of other places in India. It is not even as if the importance of using tourism as a means of boosting the economy and as a means of preservation is a purely European idea. China, Japan and almost every small Southeast Asian country understood this long ago and so have gone decades ahead of India in terms of economic development. Most of these countries have less to offer than India does but by the time India wakes up to her true potential it could be too late.
A gloomy thought but it is hard to feel cheerful about India when you see her from the perspective of Europe. There seems so much work to be done and such a frightening dearth of political leaders who have understood the importance of changing the conversation if it is ever to get done. We have in the coming general election a choice between a Congress Party that offers only palliatives for those who remain in poverty, a Bharatiya Janata Party that offers us only Narendra Modi and an Aam Aadmi Party that believes it is because of corruption, and corruption alone, that things have gone wrong in India. Without political leaders with the right vision for India’s future there really is little hope of things changing soon enough for India to make up for lost time. And, it is on this gloomy note that I end this letter from Europe on a grey, winter’s day in a city that has parks, museums, libraries and all the other things that are so painfully absent in most Indian cities.
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