Fareed Zakaria was on prime time TV today and he did India a big favour. It was a special called Terror in Mumbai which over the span of an hour took viewers across America through the attacks last year. He made no effort to be diplomatic and boldly proclaimed the role of Pakistani entities in the attacks. Further he emphasized the Jewish angle to the attacks in a clever attempt to mobilize public opinion. So if there were any Americans/Westerners still deep in slumber over what happened, I am pretty sure they woke up and woke up hard to certain harsh realities which even the most ignorant of them will know will impact their lives. American/Western public opinion is a very powerful tool.
Also I happened to watch a particular talk on the mythical roots of belief and behavior by Devdutt Pattanaik. In the talk he goes in to examine the basis of behavior which in turn is used to explain the attitude of the concerned peoples to business. He contrasts as an example the case of the Alexander and the Gymnosophists (the link leads to beautiful anecdotes about the encounter recorded by Plutarch in his work 'Life of Alexander'). Alexander lived his life as if it was his only one while the approach of the philosopher was from the point of view of perpetual rebirth. This led each to find the others pursuit foolish. The philosopher found Alexander's yearning to conquer the world futile while the latter found the former's ascetic existence shameful. This Pattanaik concludes was probably one of the first recorded evidences of the clash of the subjective worlds. It all made very great sense. He even went on to explain his experiments in the Future Group as their Chief Belief Officer based on these deductions of subjective worlds and how he was able to rewrite established business principles in light of what would work in the gymnosophist's world i.e. India as opposed to what was true for Alexander's west. This had gone down very well with me. I was in great awe of the man as he had for once justified jugaad quite well. Jugaad can be defined as an innovative fix. This is what Indians learn from birth almost. There are constraints and rules but make it work. And gladly Indians are good at it. We do see the country running and doing surprisingly well.
Now what's the connection? The well intentioned business talk by Pattanaik innocuously explains why Fareed Zakaria was on tv today. Innovative fixing is a specialty of the Indian but I started wondering if finishing the job was. Anywhere you see we start with good intention and pursue the objective with a definitive Indian twist but do we reach the goal. Our cricket team, our collapsing flyovers, colliding trains, failing public health system and most of all a below par Internal and National Security system.
Krishna told Arjuna, do your bit and leave the rest to me. I think somewhere along the line we have lost the essence of our philosophy. That method and result are not central to Indian philosophy is well understood. But now we have completely become non-committal to our duty towards action.
A year after the worst images of terror on ever television screen and even more pitiful images of a crippled Mumbai police and a late-Latif NSG with some face-saving action by the Naval commandos, India and its people are back to what they do best, making do. Issues in the forefront are again those of a divisive yet inconsequential nature. Reports on the NSG and the troubles being faced in implementing the many changes that the attacks necessitated are in a truly Indian manner makeshift and haphazard. Mumbaikars and their government are back to worrying more about the Thackerays and their monkeying than about Lashkar and future security threats. A year later our police forces still lack special anti-terror squads, special weapons and training and most of all institutional commitment to national security. A national investigating team was refused access by the FBI to a suspect allegedly planning more attacks in India. It is shameful. What if it were the Israelis, French or the Germans?
There are many immediate solutions. But surely our attitudes need to change. So long as an Indian life is expendable we will not get anywhere close to having a safer country. There are volumes in recommendations and reports voicing the much needed changes in every conceivable system in the country and I am no expert on these issues (yet!) but I can say that I am not going to point fingers at some imbecile sitting on a chair in a stale government office. I put him there. I am equally responsible for the tokenisms and the inability to learn from the hard lessons that followed the horror of 26/11.
