being Indian

Being part of the 'youth' of a country that brandishes its young population as one of its assets is a heavy responsibility. It isn't an easy one, and it isn't something in which one is given a choice. You just are.

A recent dinner conversation with a friend got me very irked. In the middle of a pleasant dinner and wine, helping ourselves to the usual therapeutic bitching about work and bosses and colleagues, she made a statement that she no doubt makes very often, "This country has gone to the dogs! There's nothing worth doing here and nothing works."

Now I'm all for bashing a person or an organization that is troubling my friends and making their lives miserable, but I asked her a simple question to which she didn't have an answer. What is it about India that troubles you so much? Her answer was, "Everything!" And that is what irked me. This friend of mine has done pretty well for herself. She's in a (very) high paying job, she has a loving husband who works from home and takes care of their lovely child. They own multiple houses in a city that has the amongst the world's most expensive real estate prices. She hasn't lived abroad. She probably hasn't even lived in any other city in India. And yet, she likes to make a statement so sweeping and generic like everything is wrong with this country.. Wtf!?

Not to say that there's nothing wrong with our country. And it may sound too cliched to say it, but I still feel it needs to be said - this is 'our' country. We make it what it is. Stop nit-picking on the failures. The way I see it, we aren't in a race. Being a better country doesn't have a finish line. It's an ever evolving process. Sure, the past 5-10 years have been bad for us. But they've been bad for most of the world. A lot of people like to say we haven't achieved anything in the past 60 odd years of independent India. Well, let's do something about that. Let's not give our children the opportunity to say the same things.