The bigness of our smallness

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: care two hoots. It was more important for the Lalu Yadavs of this world to be seen rather than actually do something about the floods.

Take a look at what has been happening in Kashmir: yet another example of our small-mindedness: we will prefer to have a month-long violent agitation over some silly tract of land rather than peacefully resolve matters: the grand-standing that our small-mindedness encourages is baffling to say the least. There is no question in my mind that it is the same brand of small-mindedness that we can see in a Mamata Banerjee in Singur. She is not fighting for the farmers. She is fighting the communists and in the process destroying all hope of any industrial revival in that state. But do you think she cares about the state at all? Not at all: for her winning the 2011 Assembly elections is more critical.

And examples such as these are not restricted to the media or the political world alone. Corporate India, which often pretends to be as holy as the driven snow, is no exception: they would all like to dominate Rich Lists but ask even one of them for some money for charity, and they will balk. India still does not have the heart to produce a Give List where we can see examples of philanthropy and large-heartedness and one Tata or an Infosys will not change the world alone. We need corporate India out in droves in this domain.

If you take the way we think; the manner in which we plan or for that matter the way we implement things, there is an underpinning of small-mindedness. We will build an airport and by the time it is ready, it will be short of capacity. We had the Delhi-Gurgaon connector which took forever to build and today, it is a testimony to our small-mindedness: chaos reigns and the traffic is an enduring mess. The Bandra-Worli Sealink in Bombay remains incomplete to this day and that is a private venture.