Excerpts from the book "Maximum City":
Long before the millennium, Indians such as the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi were talking about taking the country into the twenty first century, as if the twentieth century could just be leapfrogged. India desires modernity; it desires computers, information technology, neural networks, video on demand. But there is no guarantee of a constant supply of electricity in most places in the country. In this, as in every other area, the country is convinced it can pole-vault over the basics; develop world-class computer and management institutes without achieving basic literacy; provide advanced cardiac surgery and diagnostic imaging facilities while the most easily avoidable childhood diseases run rampant; sell washing machines that depend on a non-existent water supply from shops that are dark most hours of the day because of the power cuts; support a dozen private and public companies offering mobile phone services; drive scores of new cars that go from 0 to 60 in ten seconds without any roads where they might do this without killing everything inside and out, man and beast.
It is a very optimistic view of technological progress – that if you reach for the moon, you will somehow, automatically, span the inconvenient steps in between.
1 comment:
this is what i feel everytime i hear all my fellow indians talk about the 'new malls' and the 'new cars' as signs for india's development. it's not really people-centric development, because that would require the public, private sector, and maistream media to actually work on something instead of just chasing money like a hungry whore, and labeling all dissenting views as anti-national, maoist, or romantic.
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