A Response to Sean Paul Kelly's Reflections on India:
A good one.Straight from the gut.A more sanitised version but equally hard hitting is 'Is India a flailing State' by Lan Pritchett of Harvard,(do a simple google search and you will find it.I hope if the mail is allowed to be posted to the group,one can take the liberty of uploading it on the web and tweeting it. I wish this gets publicised well as a common experience and not because some former high and mighty has written it. India really is a tough place to travel for a backpacker and some travel here precisely for this reason.The author should read the history of his forefathers many of whom died simply because of the dirt and filth and heat of the subcontinent.
Kelley also exhibits a very good business opportunity for servicing the back packers better.There already are Internet cafes that take care of ticket booking(train/bus/air you name it).hotel booking,adventure sports, people so enamored of the white skin they will drop you at your destination if you so much as ask directions,no doubt GPS does not work here.There is no such thing as rural hospitals,we are not there yet. He forgot to talk about the awful Internet connectivity we have but did someone tell him that we have one of the world's cheapest call rates. There are public health centers though which leave a lot to be desired but at the same time we have best in the world and highly innovative models of Dr Devy shetty, Shankara netralya,Arvind Eye Care,Jaipur foot. Does Kelly know that a lot of westerners are travelling to India for high end treatment because it would cost them a bomb back home after an endless wait.
Rubbish;yes we recently made a beginning by identifying how dirty we actually are and not surprisingly we are officially dirty if not filthy.not a single city in India made the cut for the Clean in a recent survey.The filth is a problem of too much development in too small a time.Remember that at a comparative stage of development the western cities were full of filth and dirt much worse than ours.
Our Ports used to be a mess,they still are behind the global benchmarks but we have made good progress otherwise our trade wont be booming. Roads again are a function of economic activity and comparison with Thailand is unfair since their per capita income has been more than twice for far too many years.
That is not to deny that there are cultural traits unique to Indians and the delight that we get in throwing our household dirt on the street or in front of neighbours home can only be relished by us only.
By the way,is there any other country which transports 50 million people a day?There should be tourists coming to India to see just that.
Yes, we are like that only.But what the hell,we are progressing and we shall become developed in not too distant a future.Despite all its problems I would always prefer India to the best of All the 50 countries that this person has traveled to including Ethiopia.
PS: Kelly was lucky he did not leave long enough here otherwise we would have savaged the civilized like we have done to Russians in Goa
Sean Paul Kelley is a former Morgan Stanley Asset Management executive,did Marketing for Solar Wind and now a traveller,blogger and a budding writer(My impression from About Me section from his blog)
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