Time will tell whether "Digital India" initiaitive did benefit from the diplomatic visit of Indian Prime Minister to the Silicon Valley or not, but for now surely the bevereges companies have made it big as their tables continue to be engaged with argumentative Indians' voting over a cuppa their verdict on the PM.
I am a quintessential Indian and exercising my fundamental right, sharing some thoughts on this subject matter.
I have heard equally cynical and encouraging comments about the PM's Silicon Valley visit. Whilst I am in appreciation of a democratic set up where citizens need to continually feedback to the government's action, would appreciate if we can do so with empathy and compassion. There is no point being judgmental in areas we don't feel compassion...
Why do I emphasize on empathy and compassion? For this we need to go back in time a little and analyze why we are where we are.
Yesterday I was having a "Ice Breaker" session with my counter part in the US who is a Senior Technical Leader and when I introduced myself as an engineer --"Born, brought up and educated in Bangalore", he was quick to comment -- "Wow...I have worked with a lot of good engineers in my career from India and they all seem to be from Bangalore. You must be having something in Bangalore to be seeding such fantastic engineers".
I was very proud and at the same time I asked myself if can we say the same about "Government Administrative services". Do we have places in India that can seed great leaders for the nation? Not yet!
Nandan Nilekeni chronicled in his "Imagining India" that in making of a great nation, 4 pillars are foundational viz Education, Parenting, Infrastructure and Judiciary. I resonate with these thoughts and also worth highlighting that it is education and parenting which are enablers for conceptualization, construction and enforcement of a state-of-the-art infratsurcture and a sound judiciary.
As children, how many of us were inspired by our parents to work for the cause of nation and take up government administrative services? When we were in school or even today in how many schools do we educate and inspire our children to work for the cause of the nation? The intellectual lot from schools are engineers, doctors, scientists, businessmen and when I add a "etcetera" even at the end a "politican" will not find its entry to this comprehensive list. We need highly educated doctors to save the lives of our loved ones but we just don't seem to care enough about the qualifications of the ones we have to trust the entire nation with? We need highly qualified engineers to build our homes, build the phones we use but we don't care enough about the qualifications of the ones who build our roads and the ones who build our nation?
When we are consciously making these choices for ourselves and bringing up our children to stay away from the "Gutter of politics", what does it reflect of us when we pass cynical judgements on the actions of our political leaders?
A philosophical quote crosses my mind ..."Yogastha kuru karmani" -- Which essentially tries to answer the perennial question "How should I act?". The quote reads as " Establish yourself in yoga first and right action will just follow". Yoga means union. When you establish yourself first in unison with the universe's reality and see that all animate and inanimate forms around you coming from one source of creation you need not be taught morality or what a right action/wrong action is. The actions that follow from such a realization is just perfect.
The quote I just shared is from "Bhagavadgita" and it is also worth mentioning that there are umpteen groups of people discussing to such depths on Bhagavadgita sharing perspective from 6 schools of Vedanta about soul, its nature, the varnas, the abolsute reality etc but fail to get the "straight on the face" message Krishna is giving to Arjuna to fight in order to reinstate Dharma(righteousness) in his homeland, as its his primary duty. So even the scriptures we study, religions our people believe in, gods we are ready to die for claiming their supremacy --- can't seem to instill enough courage in us to make the corrective actions to the problems we see in the eye.
We all know the root of the problem in Politics (whether of India or rest of the world) and yet we can't muster enough courage to resolve this at its root of education, parenting and role modeling by entering to politics to fix it! When we like doing our bit to this nation or world by being engineers, doctors, businessmen etc --- we should also rest our "dream of a great nation" to the levels of our own contribution in making it! We cannot sow seeds of a bitter gourd and expect it to reap mangoes. Our nation is a result a cumulative result of our conscious choices...Let alone getting into politics, one third of our population doesn't even vote(in some elections its as high as half of the population doesn't turn up to vote) which is a reflection of how much we care about who leads our nation! So why gung-ho!
Having said this, I do not blame our older generations, as given the circumstances post independence where we were crippled at the level of soul and with the level of awareness at that point in time, may a lot of insistence to get a large set of population being self sufficient on physiological needs, social and security needs, emotional needs was necessary. As it is usually advised in the flights that before you put a oxygen mask to the ones beside you, you need to put it on yourself. You need to be alive with life flowing through you to awaken a life in others. So there were pragmatic choices made in the past by parents and educationists of yester years in interest of getting the families out of poverty through stable jobs and having basic human needs satisfied before the youth could be prepared holistically for larger causes. But now given a reasonable percentage of population have reached there, should we expand our consciousness from the scope of family to the level of nation ? When the consciousness is expanded, the actions will follow....
We are at an interesting crossroad where we need a revolution of a scale larger than the independence movement...When our enemies are outside us its lot easier to fight...But when our enemies are inside us the battle gets too tough! The first battle we need to fight is to beat the fear in us and muster the courage, build resilience to enter this so called Gutter of Politics to fix it! We are talking about a population of 1.3 billion...and as a starter all we need a minuscule fraction of 1.3 billion --- say 546 sensible members of into Parliament, 250 sensible members into Rajyasabha and like wise to the Legislative assemblies of just 29 states, over 250000 gram panchayats, the district bodies, police services, defence services, govenment support functions is all we need for realization of "Shining India".
I am a "work in progress" towards expanding the consciousness...
I am a quintessential Indian and exercising my fundamental right, sharing some thoughts on this subject matter.
I have heard equally cynical and encouraging comments about the PM's Silicon Valley visit. Whilst I am in appreciation of a democratic set up where citizens need to continually feedback to the government's action, would appreciate if we can do so with empathy and compassion. There is no point being judgmental in areas we don't feel compassion...
Why do I emphasize on empathy and compassion? For this we need to go back in time a little and analyze why we are where we are.
Yesterday I was having a "Ice Breaker" session with my counter part in the US who is a Senior Technical Leader and when I introduced myself as an engineer --"Born, brought up and educated in Bangalore", he was quick to comment -- "Wow...I have worked with a lot of good engineers in my career from India and they all seem to be from Bangalore. You must be having something in Bangalore to be seeding such fantastic engineers".
I was very proud and at the same time I asked myself if can we say the same about "Government Administrative services". Do we have places in India that can seed great leaders for the nation? Not yet!
Nandan Nilekeni chronicled in his "Imagining India" that in making of a great nation, 4 pillars are foundational viz Education, Parenting, Infrastructure and Judiciary. I resonate with these thoughts and also worth highlighting that it is education and parenting which are enablers for conceptualization, construction and enforcement of a state-of-the-art infratsurcture and a sound judiciary.
As children, how many of us were inspired by our parents to work for the cause of nation and take up government administrative services? When we were in school or even today in how many schools do we educate and inspire our children to work for the cause of the nation? The intellectual lot from schools are engineers, doctors, scientists, businessmen and when I add a "etcetera" even at the end a "politican" will not find its entry to this comprehensive list. We need highly educated doctors to save the lives of our loved ones but we just don't seem to care enough about the qualifications of the ones we have to trust the entire nation with? We need highly qualified engineers to build our homes, build the phones we use but we don't care enough about the qualifications of the ones who build our roads and the ones who build our nation?
When we are consciously making these choices for ourselves and bringing up our children to stay away from the "Gutter of politics", what does it reflect of us when we pass cynical judgements on the actions of our political leaders?
A philosophical quote crosses my mind ..."Yogastha kuru karmani" -- Which essentially tries to answer the perennial question "How should I act?". The quote reads as " Establish yourself in yoga first and right action will just follow". Yoga means union. When you establish yourself first in unison with the universe's reality and see that all animate and inanimate forms around you coming from one source of creation you need not be taught morality or what a right action/wrong action is. The actions that follow from such a realization is just perfect.
The quote I just shared is from "Bhagavadgita" and it is also worth mentioning that there are umpteen groups of people discussing to such depths on Bhagavadgita sharing perspective from 6 schools of Vedanta about soul, its nature, the varnas, the abolsute reality etc but fail to get the "straight on the face" message Krishna is giving to Arjuna to fight in order to reinstate Dharma(righteousness) in his homeland, as its his primary duty. So even the scriptures we study, religions our people believe in, gods we are ready to die for claiming their supremacy --- can't seem to instill enough courage in us to make the corrective actions to the problems we see in the eye.
We all know the root of the problem in Politics (whether of India or rest of the world) and yet we can't muster enough courage to resolve this at its root of education, parenting and role modeling by entering to politics to fix it! When we like doing our bit to this nation or world by being engineers, doctors, businessmen etc --- we should also rest our "dream of a great nation" to the levels of our own contribution in making it! We cannot sow seeds of a bitter gourd and expect it to reap mangoes. Our nation is a result a cumulative result of our conscious choices...Let alone getting into politics, one third of our population doesn't even vote(in some elections its as high as half of the population doesn't turn up to vote) which is a reflection of how much we care about who leads our nation! So why gung-ho!
Having said this, I do not blame our older generations, as given the circumstances post independence where we were crippled at the level of soul and with the level of awareness at that point in time, may a lot of insistence to get a large set of population being self sufficient on physiological needs, social and security needs, emotional needs was necessary. As it is usually advised in the flights that before you put a oxygen mask to the ones beside you, you need to put it on yourself. You need to be alive with life flowing through you to awaken a life in others. So there were pragmatic choices made in the past by parents and educationists of yester years in interest of getting the families out of poverty through stable jobs and having basic human needs satisfied before the youth could be prepared holistically for larger causes. But now given a reasonable percentage of population have reached there, should we expand our consciousness from the scope of family to the level of nation ? When the consciousness is expanded, the actions will follow....
We are at an interesting crossroad where we need a revolution of a scale larger than the independence movement...When our enemies are outside us its lot easier to fight...But when our enemies are inside us the battle gets too tough! The first battle we need to fight is to beat the fear in us and muster the courage, build resilience to enter this so called Gutter of Politics to fix it! We are talking about a population of 1.3 billion...and as a starter all we need a minuscule fraction of 1.3 billion --- say 546 sensible members of into Parliament, 250 sensible members into Rajyasabha and like wise to the Legislative assemblies of just 29 states, over 250000 gram panchayats, the district bodies, police services, defence services, govenment support functions is all we need for realization of "Shining India".
I am a "work in progress" towards expanding the consciousness...
