Topic started by E.T. Agnosticus (@ user108.216.19.141.dsli.com) on Thu May 31 15:42:56 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.
My comments here refer to the speech posted below.
While I am not against the overall tone of the speech, the high commissioner is surely going overboard when he claims there are
3.22 million Indians in the US. The actual figure (according to the census and other info as reported in major Newspapers) is slightly more than 1.6 million. He claims 38% of doctors in the US are Indian. The figure is certainly much less, though I don't have precise figures.
Does being able to "press the electronic button as to the manner born" mean 'political literacy' ? As for Sanskrit's suitability for computer software, the claims are wildly exaggerated. Has there been any studies done since the suggested Forbes article was published in 1987? If so, what are the conclusions and what are the results?
I present this here to show how, many people in Government and the media often get their facts wrong, wittingly or unwittingly.
E.T. Agnosticus.
(Skeptical Enquirer)
>
> Excerpts from a talk given by India's High
> Commissioner Gopalkrishna Gandhi at the Colombo Club
> meeting held at the Lanka Oberoi recently
>
>
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>
> India, an idea, an ideal
>
> The title of my talk is borrowed. It was used in a
> 1994 lecture by the Nobel Laureate, Amartya Sen.
> Subsequently, a book by one of India's distinguished
> historians Sunil Khilnani appeared with the same name.
>
> Having declared my debt at the very outset, I have
> sought to give myself a sheen of frankness and
> honesty. I have also indemnified myself against the
> charge of plagiarism.
>
> But in fairness to myself, I must say that while the
> title is borrowed, the thoughts contained in this talk
> will be my own, though many of them have been
> stimulated by others, by people I admire.
>
> When a High Commissioner for India speaks on 'The Idea
> of India', he can be expected to invoke the greatness
> of India's past, her accomplishments of the day, her
> future promise. He can hardly be expected to talk
> about India's horror stories, of India's horrendous
> over-crowding of humans packed so tight in trains,
> buses, cinema houses and hospitals that you cannot
> drop a mustard seed between them. I cannot possibly
> take 25 minutes discussing India's poverty - the 350
> million of her people who live (if they do that) below
> the poverty line. How am I to say - and yet not say -
> that India is a country not just of very poor people
> but of millions upon millions of destitute - the human
> debris of an unequal society where money grows but
> only vertically. How am I to say that it is these poor
> who suffer when cyclones strike, when earthquakes
> flatten, when droughts parch our land? I would be a
> poor diplomat if I dwelt on that India.
>
> I must make it clear that my idea of India is not of
> the India reported on in the pink pages of
> multinational dailies or in the yellow pages of
> metropolitan phone books. The pages that show the fast
> track of prosperity, personal, corporate and national.
> Where the bright and the not-so-bright manage to go to
> very bright schools, very bright colleges and are, in
> hectic competition to apply for opportunities for even
> 'brighter' higher education, for higher professional
> training, for employment. For many of them the great
> goal is to reach the United States and to do
> management studies and swell the world's pool, not
> necessarily India's, of managerial and scientific
> talent.
>
> That is the India gets heard about - and why should it
> not be? - but more often than not over the voice of
> the other India.
>
> And that is not as it should be. Share holding India,
> the flagship for the Indian middle class, the target
> of the world's manufacturers, traders, investors, is
> also the India which is seized by ideological ennui.
> When it comes to the nation's political future, this
> India is silent. This is also the India which is
> mesmerized by satellite cabled world beauty contests.
> This is the India, India's middle class, that is
> targeted by the great compact of our times, the
> compact between multinationals and much of the media.
>
>
> Is this India the real India? This certainly is the
> India of plastic consumerism, where shopping debris
> litters on roads, clogs our drains, disfigures and
> pollutes the countryside.
>
> To come back, nonetheless, to the world of facts and
> rankings, India, though only the 7th largest country
> in the world, does rank 1st in the world as the
> country with the largest irrigated area in the world,
> in terms of million hectares. Some of you may be
> surprised to learn - I certainly was - that of the
> world's 250 million hectares that are irrigated, as
> many as 82.8 million hectares are in India.
>
> Having given these facts as 'a good diplomat', let me
> now be a 'bad' one by a foray into frankness. Let no
> one tell you that this 'other' India is food-safe; it
> is not. The world's most irrigated country is also
> facing an alarming depletion of her ground water.
> India continues to be dependent on monsoons. We have
> had, for the last 13 years, reasonably good rains each
> year. But we allow the rain to flow away into the salt
> of the sea. We do not capture and store water as we
> should, as insurance against rain-failure. Water-use
> is for us a matter of good fortune, not skill.
>
> 'Our people' - let us look at them.
>
> At 1830 GMT of March 1, 2001, India's decennial census
> clocked the population of India at 1.02 billion - 531
> million men and 496 million women. Just consider the
> numbers. Females are supposed, biologically, to have a
> higher expectancy of life at birth than males. So why
> are there fewer women than men in India? An
> embarrassed silence answers the question. India is now
> the second country in the world after China to cross
> the one billion population mark. An achievement, no
> doubt. But with 57 more persons per square kilometre
> now as compared to the last census (273 + 57 = 330
> persons per square kilometre) a dubious achievement
> indeed.
>
> Why is India as crowded as it is? Not because the laws
> of procreation work overtime in India, giving us a
> torrent of babies. No, it is not that. Rather, because
> the laws of death and dying have stopped working
> overtime in India. When the British left India, the
> average life-expectancy at birth was less than 30
> years. Many an Adi Sankara, a Vivekananda and a
> Srinivasa Ramanujam died before reaching 40. If we are
> a billion plus today, it is not because more people
> are being born but because less people are dying. Our
> life-expectancy at birth now stands at 63 years.
>
> Health care delivery has improved and spread across
> the country in an unbelievable manner. It is still,
> let me admit, unbelievably tardy. Our primary health
> centres would not and should not pass strict tests.
> There is insufficient hygiene, nurses often substitute
> for doctors, midwives for nurses. But the fact remains
> that with the spread of pre- and post-natal care, of
> immunization, the people of India are living twice as
> long as they used to. The population of India cannot
> but increase. What are we to stop or start doing? We
> cannot and would not want to go back to the British
> Raj life-expectancy figure, nor adopt Chinese methods
> of compulsory family limitation. So we have to work
> within our own system, find our own solutions and we
> need to do it fast. But let the idea of India as a
> country bursting as its seams with its people, people,
> people be modified. Any modified not with reference to
> the whys and hows and wherefores of India alone, but
> of the whole world.
>
> More than 50 per cent of our population belong to the
> age-group of 21 and below. This age group, not
> surprisingly, has a good appetite - for food, for
> information, for work. The question of questions in
> India, today is: Will India's young - 500 million
> strong - connect to our farmlands in the same way as
> generations did? Will farming be personally,
> professionally and intellectually stimulating to this
> enormous population of the young? Will this population
> be able to see the internal challenges faced by our
> farms in terms of debased soils and depleting water
> levels and meet them? No less, will this population be
> able to see that there also are external challenges
> and threats to our agriculture and - by implication -
> to our destiny as a civilization? Our master
> agronomist, farm technologist and plant scientist Ms.
> Swaminathan has singled out among external threats
> "the unequal trade bargain inherent in the wTo
> agreement of 1994 and the rapid expansion of
> proprietary science".
>
> It is amazing that India's agricultural products, the
> result of millennia of farm practices and traditional
> knowledge, can get patented, and traded under
> protection, by multi-nationals. From rice to the leaf
> of margosa, they have placed their hands on our roots.
> After Richard Attenborough's film had generated a
> global interest in Gandhi, I was not surprised that a
> restaurant in London re-named itself 'Gandhi Steak
> House'. That was just a businessman's pathetic attempt
> to make a fast buck. But for Basmati to become Texmati
> and our precious plants and herbs to become an article
> of packed sales is difficult to accept. Especially by
> a country which has been home to some of the greatest
> inventions of the world, each of them now world
> property. Imagine India wanting to patent the decimal
> system of enumeration because Vedic India used it to
> represent all integers with 9 digits and a symbol for
> zero. Imagine India laying claim to the number system
> itself or to anything that proceeds from mathematics
> because Aryabhatta I in the 15th century "developed
> techniques for extracting square roots and cube roots,
> using trigonometrical texts".
>
> My idea of India, then, is of an agrarian India that
> lives in its great rural tracts but does more than
> just live there, that thrives there, that nudges the
> promise of the present to become the accomplishment of
> tomorrow.
>
> If the 1960s changed the story of our agriculture, the
> 1970s saw another change, a difficult one, a painfuI
> one. You will recall that India had initiated in the
> 60s an ambitious programme of atomic research. The
> main aim of our nuclear programme was to produce power
> through fast-breeder reactors. But opinions differed
> then and do now, internationally, on whether nuclear
> power is appropriate. Gandhi was not alive to comment
> on the programme, initiated by Nehru. But
> Rajagopalachari was. And the wise man of Chennai was
> skeptical. He likened the creation of nuclear energy
> for power to using a bolt of lightning to fry an egg.
> But that apart, no sooner did Pokhran happen in 1974
> than the USA, Canada and many countries moved to deny
> modern technology to India. But sweet are the uses of
> adversity. With access to super computers refused,
> Indian scientists converted the crisis into an
> opportunity. P.V. Indiresan writes: "Mathematical
> algorithms were cleverly partitioned to enable a bank
> of small computers to perform tasks intended for large
> super computers. Super computers were also developed
> locally - India now has at least four different
> types".
>
> If the '70s were India's nuclear decade, the 1980s
> were India's technological decade with Sam Pitroda
> showing how India can produce a large telephone
> exchange system linking urban with rural India and
> both with the modern world.
>
> And the '90s were India's decade of globalisation with
> satellite connectivities, IT and BT coming to the
> fore, and linking on natural resources with our human
> resources in a creative encounter of millennial scale.
>
>
> But let no one tell you India's technology has grown
> flawlessly; it has not. Yet, let everyone see that the
> good parts of this curate's egg are rather
> fantastically so. They have given, especially to our
> urban young, springs to the future. They have also
> given them passports and visas to the West,
> particularly to the US. I am told there are today 3.22
> million Indians in the US. A staggering 38% of the
> doctors in America are Indian, 36% of NASA employees
> are Indian, 34% of Microsoft employees are Indian, 28%
> of IBM employees are Indian, 17% of INTEL and 13% of
> Xerox employees are Indian. And the US had denied us
> super computers! It did not know perhaps that
> Sanskrit, a source language to all European tongues,
> is particularly suitable for computer software. I am
> not saying this - Forbes magazine said this as far
> back as July 1987. And Sanskrit is lodged securely in
> the Indian brain.
>
> India may be the world's largest free market. But it
> is also something more. It is the world largest
> enterprise in the development of human resources.
> Indians may not be winning gold in the Olympics, they
> are certainly bent on earning it, making it, using it
> at home. And they are doing so not under any
> dictatorial goad, but as free agents. Only last week
> India held a mini general election, one of several
> since independence. Each election marks and reflects
> our progress under conditions of unfettered democratic
> freedom. In over 1,50,000 polling stations, 1,60,000
> electronic vending machines recorded the people's
> verdict. One candidate lost, another was victorious.
> But the real victor was the Indian voter - did someone
> call her or him illiterate? - who pressed the
> electronic button as to the manner born. He and she
> are, let us not forget, heirs to Aryabhatta and
> Varahamihira. They have a clear idea, not of the India
> of the bookstore maps. But of the India that is a
> civilization.
>
> The India where the aim of most Indians is not to get
> rich or to get to the USA, but to find contentment.
> The India where Siva is not just a deity but a concept
> - a blessed state of consciousness.
>
> India, at the end of the day, is itself an idea. And,
> I may add, an ideal.
>
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