Is India Growing?

Most of us are happy that India is among the top most countries in terms of GDP growth. Some of us sincerely believe that higher GDP growth with translate into better quality of life for the larger section of the society. Can we accept GDP growth as the only parameter to measure growth of a country? Shouldn't overall development be our prime concern? Does higher GDP growth essentially translate into better quality of life?

To be very frank, most of the popular media, politicians and contemporary discussions have conditioned our mind in such a way that we believe India will become superpower soon. It is crucial to understand the fundamental factors that make a county developed.

No doubt, ancient India used to be an advanced civilization comparable, in some cases better than the western civilization. However, with industrial revolutions, dynamics of nations evolved in a rapid pace. The most crucial revolutions could be clubbed into three broad categories:

• IR A: 1750 to 1830 (Steam engine, railroads etc.)
• IR B: 1870 to 1900 (electricity, internal combustion engine, running water, indoor toilets, communications, entertainment, chemicals, petroleum)
• IR C: 1960 onward (computers, the web, mobile phones)

Let us decode how the major inventions have impacted quality of life in the most parts of the world. IR A and B have made transportation easier and most of the works that were performed manually by human beings are now performed by machines. As a result the quality of lives of people have improved, they live their life in a more meaningful and dignified way. All these industrial revolution started in western world.

Now countries that have fully extracted the value of industrial revolution have been able to provide better life to its inhabitants. We call them developed countries.

Coming back to India, forget about IR A and IR B, we as a nation are still struggling to prevent hunger death our citizens. Though many well qualified Indian believe that we are a truly emerging superpower as we are well ahead many countries in IR C, i.e., computers, the web, mobile phones etc.

It doesn't require any complicated analysis to understand when people of India are yet deprived of the basic benefits of IR A, when many of us still carry water and other heavy things on our back; how can we claim to reach IR C. And can we shut our eyes to poor education system, poor health care, and lack of drinking water, electricity even in SEZs and growing cities?

We need to differentiate the distinction between moving on the path of developing nation and making a selected few developed. What India has managed to provide better quality of life to a selected few, purchasing power of the rest of the population remains low despite high inflation.

Many of us still don’t understand and unfortunately not exposed to poor performance of this so called emerging superpower in social parameters. Forget about China, India is lagging behind Bangladesh in most of the social parameters. Its irony that the way our media highlights GDP, IIP figures; don’t highlight social parameters. 

Hope sooner India will prioritize its activities and would start focusing in extending the benefits of Industrial Revolution to larger section. Making the rich section richer will not make us a super power, rather we will get entangled in complicated issues like the Naxalite problem. 

When Bangladesh which has poorer infrastructure, GDP growth rate, private sector can perform better than us in many social and health parameters; we need to admit our collective failure in providing better life to our people. And the example of Bangladesh is sufficient to prove that better quality of life doesn't necessarily depend upon high economic growth.

Exam time: Pressure Cooker Situation and the Parkinson's Law

Exams, especially in a country like India create a pressure cooker situation. The high degree of competition, your expectations from yourself as well your peer group contributes to an increased blood pressure. You can find lots of proponents of science and logical thinking processes making their children rush to temples before examinations, many seek blessings of all their elders.  No matters how confused you are about the importance of the exam for you, no matter how your parents and peer groups are confused about the impact of the particular exam on your career, you and all around you want you perform exceptionally good- after all an exam is an exam. The most of we Indian have been conditioned in manner as if exams are battle grounds. This adds to mental stress and pressure, in some cases, the exam taker breaks down under mental stress. 

Let me term the exam period as pressure cooker situation- you are boiling out of tremor inside, but no one outside can see you boiling. You want to move out (say, by an early exam taking), but the fixed dates would keep you in the cooker till the exam is over.  If you are not so lucky, to add to your pain the Parkinson's Law would prevail to ensure that you read, re-read, revise, re-revise the same boring topics of the book till your exam is over. 

As students, we have witnessed out Parkinson's Law- "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" adds to the pressure cooker situation of exam days. 

When I introspect some my experience of exam time, I see Parkinson's Law has proved its validity again and again. Here goes some examples and personal experiences:

• Students negotiating dates of examination seeking an extension with the hope that they would be able to finish everything only if the dates are extended. Then the same same students complain either about (1) the additional pressure due to additional days of preparation or about (2) not being able to finish the course despite the extension (due to expansion of the work to fill the time available). 
• Students peeping into a book, note till the exam bill rings, their studying expands till the last minute available to them. Subjects like communication skills are no exception. 
• Even if there is an objective type paper, where you either know the answer or don't know- most of the students keep pondering about the question till the finish bell rings. Their effort to find out an answer out of the blue expands as they know they have time.
• Some students keep on writing their answer (yes, sometimes stories) till the invigilator comes and drags their answer paper

 It's understandable when  people want to expands their time span of pleasant situation. But why on earth many students love to expand pressure cooker situations like exam duration, postponement of exams, peeping into a book till exam bill rings? 

May be there is a need to make every student understand Parkinson's law, so that at least a few of them would try to minimize pressure cooker situation despite seeking an extension of exam date or duration etc.

Are Human Beings Programmed?

Yesterday I had a short but valuable discussion with one of my friends- Hemant. Hemant was confident that most of the human beings are programmed. Are we?

Programming is a set of instructions that helps a device to perform certain task in a pre-decided way to provide a predictable outcome. Don’t we behave in a predictable way when provided with a situation, problem or issue? Yes! Most of us do. Then are we really programmed? Who has programmed us? 

We all have been groomed in a laboratory like environment- a controlled environment where all the parameters like- what food we have to eat, what dress to wear, when to sleep etc. were decided by our parents. Just like the interference of experimenter to ensure that the controlled environment is maintained, our well-wishers have always interfered to make us stick to the provided set of instructions. We were made to follow the same routine, same set of instructions so that most of our activities started becoming spontaneous. Many of us feel sleepy at the usual time we go to bed, we feel hungry at the lunch time (doesn’t matter whether we had some food just an hour before). Aren’t these examples of programming? Societal norms, rules and regulations, expected set of behaviour- all are examples of programming principles, languages that we have been encouraged to follow. And most of us follow the rules for which many times society rewards us. 

Then the next question is – aren’t we rational minds, capable of taking our own decisions? The answer to this question is YES and NO. YES- because we have the power to apply logic to learn new things, to challenge the usual programming we were exposed to, to unlearn and relearn. NO- because in order to arrive at rational decisions we need to know the right kind of information and an open mind-set. Prolonged years of controlled conditions and laboratory set-up knowingly or unknowingly choke our minds. Even when the mind is open, the desire of the experimenter to maintain controlled environment distracts her to reveal the right kind of information- she knows that an open rational mind is capable of taking rational decisions. So in order to maintain controlled environment the inputs have to be controlled, no matter how untrue the input information are. In our life though we are made to believe that we are rational minds, our leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, immediate environment and its players- all are simultaneously working to ensure that the controlled environment is maintained. 

Shall we conclude that all of us despite the potential to take decisions interpret situation without a defined programme succumb to the programme set for us by the external forces? We need to understand that the external forces evolve and make us change. Mankind has been always blessed with great souls we have fought the external forces and have applied their own mind to interpret situations. They have ensured that the usual programme is modified, debugged and reprogrammed depending on the new information, fresh learning and experience. Some of these great souls have gone ahead to ensure that the larger world realises that the old programming is out-dated, full of bugs and needs to be re-programmed. In Indian context, abolition of Sati, widow re-marriage etc. are classic examples where some great souls ensured debugging and reconfiguration of the faulty programming that the society was conditioned to.