Accidents of Birth

I am an Indian. I felt happy seeing the news. I then read the comments here and see the pain. I feel sad.

I step back a little
I probably think I now know how it must have felt in my country, for my people, when all the cotton was brought to England and then the finished goods were shipped back to us, robbing our millions of artisans their livelihood......some eons back? Naa.... not more than a century or so only earlier.

Now I step into the future
I see my country going the same UK way in future. Breaking up into numerous small states...too small to be a strong market so that it can dictate to the tradesmen seeking entry into the market (Dejavu? yaa!)-don't worry the localism, the deep rooted regionalism, the casteism, the religionism..... will not keep us this strong forever...there are already these cracks visible in our fabric, too dependent on services rather than production (we have been converting our agricultural lands by drove into SEZs for service industries to get these outsourcing jobs and the owners of these are partly "foreign" to us as well), too dependent on foreign markets................and so on and so forth that.... some other big country/market like brazil or argentina will be the new back office country of the world....robbing us our jobs

so overall, when viewed longitudinally....we all have our merrygoround at throne, of being the golden boys of the period...albeit with different means and methods.....english, spanish, french, portugese at one time by their military and other mights, USA at one time due to its technical might, BRIC countries now by their cheap labour & economic efficiency figures, tomorrow some other group of countries with something other USP.

Yes, but the only thing that matters to all of us is what is our position in each of this periods. If we are the poor sirisilla handloom weavers loosing their livelihood to cotton mills of lancashire, if we are the poor half acre farmer in bengal loosing his livelihood to half baked not even half compensated land grab by the government to cater to IT companies, if we are the poor IT worker in the back end of Birmingham service office etc etc we cry and rise hell, if we can. If not we suffer silently.

On the other hand we are well off and can afford, we fight these intellectual battles on the cyber board.

Accidents of Birth.


in reply to the comments in
http://conservativehome.blogs.com/localgovernment/2011/06/birmingham-council-outsourcing-jobs-to-india-highlights-the-dilemma-of-whether-authorities-should-pr.html


Tried posting the comment there...got tired by the inefficient commenting mechanism and gave up. Porbably god telling me not to be too honest (foolish i.e) is what I took the sign as :)