The Emperor’s New Clothes

Go together,
You precious winners all; your exultation
Partake to everyone. I, an old turtle,
Will wing to some withered bough, and there
My mate, that’s never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.
- Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale
A civilization as old as India ought to measure achievement differently from shiny new ones.
Instead we want to strut on the world stage to the rhythm of other people’s drums.
The result can only be the kind of farce that Delhi has been witnessing over the past two months (some would say the past sixty three years). It would be hilarious if it was not so tragic.
What about China you would say. An old civilization that stuns the Western world in most things it does including Beijing 2008.
But China discovered itself again when it started walking, about three decades ago, to its own drums. Going beyond the labels of communism and democracy, it discovered a system and an engine of prosperity that is entirely of its own making.
India’s Westminster style of democracy is a borrowed idea. In sixty three years we have not innovated one bit in the way we govern ourselves. Indian business and the Indian people in the meantime have, with no help from the State, reinvented themselves. Today, I believe, there are extant, Indian business and cultural ethos that are original and rooted in quintessentially Indian values. And this is the principle reason why India has finally found its voice.
It is urgent that we the Indian people, use this new found voice and vigour, to find ways and means to reinvent the Indian State. Otherwise this behemoth, cannibalizing the hard-won prosperity of the Indian people, will continue to strut on the world stage, in garbs that can only disgust. And more menacingly threaten ours and the well being of our children.
The alternative is the escapism of the old, so wonderful captured in the Shakespearean verse reproduced above.