Day: October 13, 2004

Whom the Gods wish to Destroy they first make mad

Ever wondered why exactly India is an astoundingly poor overpopulated illiterate starving nation of a billion people? I do. It need not be one specific reason of course. It could be a combination of several factors. For instance, it could be due to divine decree: the gods said that India should be pathetically poor. Can’t argue with that if the gods indeed decreed it. Or it could be that aliens from Mars conspired to make India what it is. Or it could be that foreign powers and their evil agents make India poor. My favorite theory which explains why India is poor is this: plain old ignorance and stupidity.

When the degree of ignorance and stupidity exceeds a certain threshold, it slides into madness. And as Euripides warned long ago, whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. Whether or not Indian leaders have gone mad is a question that I leave for you to decide. The future of India pivots on that point. My conclusion is that madness has taken a firm hold on the leadership of India and the consequences are foretold.

Tim Worstall took the trouble of pointing me to yet another sign that the future of India is in peril. Read and weep for the beloved country.

You might be a third world country if …

To me, one of the hazards of delayed flights is that I tend to read whatever I find lying around. A few days ago I found myself reading a discarded newspaper at an airport. I should not have but morbid curiosity won. A news item proudly reported that the president of India, Mr APJ Abdul Kalam, recommended that children take an oath and forswear corruption.

There you have it. As you are well aware, children indulge in corruption like nobody’s business in India. Scams perpetrated by the scores hit the newspapers with sickening regularity. One day you hear that a bunch of children have accepted kickbacks to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in military equipment purchase. Next day you read about a couple of children who were involved in siphoning a few hundred million dollars’ worth of public monies meant for ‘fodder’. Then you read that some children were caught running a fake stamp-paper racket and the loss to the public purse was of the order of a few billion dollars.

I tell you, the corruption that children are responsible for is a crying shame. It is a matter of great urgency that they stop it immediately and the best way to do so is to force them to take an oath that they will cease and desist from ever indulging in corruption. I am very relieved that this terrible problem has been addressed at last.

Which brings me to conclude that if you figure lecturing innocent children solves the problem of institutionalized corruption by the bureaucracy and practically every politician of every party, then you might be a third world country.

A Modest Proposal — Part 5

For the past few weeks, I have been exploring what I call a modest proposal for making India 100% literate (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4). Here I will explore some aspects of my proposal.

I had proposed that for every person who is certified to have attained a certain level of literacy and numeracy (essentially, a primary education), the government should give them around $100. Here is the reasoning why this payment is necessary and why India will not attain 100 percent literacy without a payment of some sort.

Continue reading “A Modest Proposal — Part 5”