Incredible India, incredible Indians
Business Line
B. S. Raghavan / August 23, 2010

About the incredible attractions of India as a tourist destination, there has never been any dispute.
But I am not here to talk about the incredible India of tourist literature. India is incredible in many other ways. Its complexities, its diversities, its lores and legends, myths and mysteries, the seamless blend of the old and the new and the traditional and the modern, its numerous languages, castes and communities, are all too well-known to be laboured.
The first incredible feat, unmatched by any other country within living memory, is its blundering on as a ‘functioning anarchy' to be within the reach of the status of the largest economy on par with, if not ahead of, China, Japan and the US. From one viewpoint, it can be compared to the tortoise in the famous fable of the hare and the tortoise. From another, it is more an elephant whose ponderous gait belies its innate agility and alertness.

unsung achievers

Then there are incredible stories of individual Indians. Here again, I am not thinking of those in the big league — the likes of Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, J. C. Bose, C. V. Raman or Ramanujan of yore, or the present-day colossuses of India Inc. or even of a Shakuntala, the Mathematical wizard, a Mandolin Srinivas, Sachin Tendulkar or A. R. Rahman. Any country is bound to have its share of prodigies and giants in various fields of activity. No, where incredible India scores is in its crop of unhonoured and unsung achievers and innovators.

To wit: S. R. Rao who restored Surat to pristine glory after the plague; J. Radhakrishnan who stood four square against the ravages of tsunami in Nagapattinam and so impressed Bill Clinton himself as to make him wish the young lad were in charge of Katrina; Sujatha Rangarajan who invented India's electronic voting machine which has stood up to the doubts voiced by its detractors; and many more heroes of their ilk.

But even of them I am not so very much in thrall. Rather, I am stunned by 15-year old Mohammed Aamir who is doing his Ph.D. at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

I am clean bowled by that unlettered and unkempt 17-year old genius of the Mumbai slum who fixed the Blackberry of the Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Express, Mr Shekhar Gupta, in eight minutes flat when the brand's service centre had said it would take a week just to find out what was wrong.

Topsy-turvydom

And I am absolutely knocked down by news of Mansukhbhai Prajapati, that incredible school drop-out of Rajkot in Gujarat, who has won a National Award from the hands of the President, and been hailed as a ‘true scientist' by Abdul Kalam, for his low-cost MittiCool refrigerator made of clay which can store water, fruits and vegetables for eight days and milk for one day, not to mention his other patents — water-filter, non-stick tava and pressure cooker — all made of clay and available at a tiny fraction of the price of products of multi-nationals.

There has, of course, to be a downside even in being incredible. Our scams, for instance, and the ingenuity associated with them. And the incredible 70 lakh crore of rupees said to be stashed in Swiss banks, the largest amount lying outside any country, among 180 countries of the world.

The troubling topsy-turvydom which places India near the top in Transparency International's ranking in corruption (where it should be bottom), and the bottom 128th among 159 countries in UNDP's human development index (where it should be top) and 78th among 100 countries in the Newsweek's ranking of best countries of the world based on five categories (education, health, quality of life, economic competitiveness, and political environment) of national well-being, while being reckoned as an emerging super-power!

Incredible India, incredible Indians!