silverfox sir & previous to that mr kunjuppu,
thanks indeed for your kind words.
sridhar ji,
i am bound to agree with you. i dont decry the fact that the accident happened (though i have an info on this), but i was appalled to see that we resigned ourselves to the fact that the fire couldnt be doused.
may be it is the way the oil fires are supposed to be i dont know, coz the oil wells of kuwait were aflame long after the iraqi invasion was repulsed.
somehow i got dismayed by the fact that the chief minister found that to be the right time to be calling for reports. may be i am over-reacting but something surely snapped inside me when i saw the newsheader. btw, i also need some excuse to trouble this forum with my "poems" (??) isnt it ?
(inside info i got from my business school alumunus is that leaks in the pipes were found but were ignored ; he had sent gory pictures of the raging fire also)
that apart, i find it most annoying that we have a tendency to romanticise chaos, failure and inefficiency.
900mm of rain on mumbai few years ago brought the city to a grinding halt ; agreed that even the best of cities may not have coped up with 900mm of rainfall on a single day but the fact that shouldnt be missed is that mumbai claiming to be the financial hub of south asia has a 100 year old drainage system !!!!
few days after mumbai was flooded, it was our email boxes that were flooded - with mails "praising the spirit of mumbai" and comparing "mumbai with florida (was it ?)" that was ravaged by katrina (not kaif).
the mails were singing paeans as to how no shop was lifted during the flooding and the ensuing commotion while in the US, shoplifters made most of the situation arising out from the hurricane. ( i dont know whether it is factually correct).
now if this isnt romanticism of the worst kind, what else can be ?
i mean, yes, i am quite happy (not proud for chrissake) that no one indulged in shoplifting but we cannot rest on this supposed laurel ignoring the crying need to overhaul the pathetic infrastructure.
on a slight tangential note, i am just coming off a seminar where one of the key note speakers, a head honcho from ***** spoke passionately about how IT is revolutionizing india.
it is true and as someone in the industry, i can very well relate to it. interestingly the speaker didnt dwell on the usual suspects of job creation, wealth creation et all instead focussing on how IT is making a difference to rural india ; farmers ; fishermen and the like.
he also quickly put out our beaming pride when he drew our attention to india's slipping position on network readiness. for IT to transform lives, it needs infrastructure, bandwidth infrastructure very badly. india has actually slipped on it.
it is alarming that india cannot even maintain forget improving it's advantage which it got clearly by serendipity. we were not designed to be successful in IT.
i think pannvalan-ji summed it up excellently by stating that the true measure of india's development depends on
a) how high it scores on human development index and
b) how low can it score on corruption index.
it's pretty much the nirvana of development and certainly i cant believe that it will happen in my time. rahul gandhi's son (hopefully his columbian-later-to-be-indianized-now-girlfriend-later-wife doesnt have political ambitions) has a better chance of seeing it happen.
without going to the ultimate measure of development, india should immediately increase the pace of it's development of everything viz infrastructure, education, sanitation, healthcare. just everything.
sadly there's no one in the system who has the 'fire in the belly'. we cannot just afford to change systematically, sequentially and slowly.
we need quantum change ; disruptive change ; game changing change.
speed in execution is india's greatest need of the hour, minute, second, nano second.
