Gabriel’s scarcity rent – it’s management stupid!

When you cannot longer recall how many times you’ve been to India

19 August, 2010 at 8:34 pm 5 comments

When you do not longer wonder by hearing the expression of “doing the needful”, when you realise that there are other ways of thinking, and by being different they are not better or worse (an easy temptation that leads to failure) but just different, when you see the order in the chaos and walking in a Mumbai slum doesn’t make you cringe anymore, when you are being told that you may have Norwegian accent (yes, me), when you use the words yaar and walla as basic words, when you learn to walk under the rain (and I mean really walk under the Monsoon with a smile), when you repeat the verbs twice and ask no at the end of the sentence, when you get used to see very simple people smiling, when they do not longer chase you for money, when you realise that being in a crowd is a different way of being alive, that’s when you start loving this country.

Because India can and should be loved. There’s a layer of dirt, a crust of inefficiency, true, but there’s more than that, much more. There’s this will to move ahead, this aim to be, this sturdy yet huge democracy, this terrible mother mistreating her children yet, somehow, still loving them.

India changes you. And does so from within. Makes you better. New connections in your brain. Not linear ones, true, but since when humanity has traveled a linear path? Never. India is as organic as a human body, as imperfect as any of us. Yet it thrives as any of us can thrive. It’s a unique opportunity of developing a diverse society without resourcing to authoritarianism. A path that many others we’ve left behind may follow.

Once you’ve been here, really here, I mean, you’re never the same. A part of you never leaves India, and a part of India comes with you.

Entry filed under: Personal, Thoughts. Tags: .