Elephant Paradigm

Hi there,

Somewhat moved by watching a Bollywood movie, something I have done after a long while. What has impacted my mind more is the tremendous potential I have learnt that each country has. Since I can claim to know India best, having spent 24 wonderful years of my life there, I just want to put down my thoughts on it.

Over the years, I have grown from being an ignorant patriot to being a non-resident Indian (for lack of a better word). But I think i really have grown to be a more open person in terms of countires, cultures and indeed, history. It probably has been a gradual process of realizing that each country has in itself the ability to contruct progress as well as be stagnant.

First up, the elephant paradigm (borrowed from Gurcharan Das's namesake book) is a strange way of describing India. Strange, I say, because I dont think India can be classified into any one paradigm or slot. India is a chaos, I would like to think, a positive chaos. Just as most stable systems in physics are. They possess a degree of entropy. Maybe, at this point in time, India's entropy is just too much to let it be a positive energy system, but I would rather it be that then a constrained system, than with direction-aligning magnets such as communism and single rule governments.

India is truly a beautiful country. As an individual citizen, I still am enamoured by the dizzying variety of cultures, traditions, languages, practices and food. BUt there are amply evident vices of poor infrastructure, inefficient systems and underdevelopment on the large scale. Often times, I have this budding ambition to change somethings, through intelligence, through diligence, through the positive application of mind. What curbs this ambition is the selfishness in making money for myself and my family. But I still retain the interest to do something at the core of building a great nation, and that is creating wealth.

I really wanted to talk about the zillion details that come to mind, often with argumetns and counter-ones. But maybe on another day. Really wish I can meet some more intelligent and motivated people who can inspire some fire in my belly to do something. Just wonder if the many brilliant young people I am and will be friends with, have just got focused with themselves and their own happiness. I think its a fair choice, but am not so sure if people make that choice. They just practice it as a default option.

guess have written for now. Anymore, and probably I will fall asleep myself.

cheers,
Satish

P.S.: Just a trivia, India doesn't have its own term for a toast of drinks. Maybe I should set and patent one ;-)