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TAVLEEN SINGH I can remember towns and cities with beautiful, leafy avenues
and fine public buildings. I can remember my own Punjabi village as a place of
genteel, rural elegance.This week's column comes to you from
Chiva Som in Thailand where your weary columnist has come to take a break.
From Indian politics, monsoon marooning in
Mumbai
and the stresses and strains of writing three columns a week, plus doing a
weekly television programme. Do not get me wrong, I love my work and would be
bereft if I suddenly had nothing to do, but everyone needs a break, everyone
needs a chance to recover, everyone needs a few moments without stress.There is
no better place for rejuvenation and recovery than this spa by the sea in
Hua Hin, favourite
summer resort of the kings of Siam. The King and Queen happen to be here this
week and the road to Hua Hin is lined with altars of blue and purple silk on
which have been placed enormous portraits of the royal couple.
Comparing notes
More than these, though, I notice the excellent quality of the road and the
spotlessly clean towns and villages we pass on the drive from
Bangkok. I
compare these automatically with our own and find myself getting angry about the
filthy living conditions in our own towns and villages and their ugliness. This
is not, as some may think, because we are inherently a filthy people with a
culture that disdains basic hygiene. Neither is it because Indian civilization
produced no great cities. Some racist Westerners like to portray us that way but
the truth is that even I (and I am not as old as all that) can remember that the
India of my childhood was not a
place of villages that looked like cesspools and towns that looked like garbage
dumps. I can remember towns and cities with beautiful, leafy avenues and fine
public buildings. I can remember my own Punjabi village as a place of genteel,
rural elegance.
So what went wrong? Why do we now live in such appalling filth and misery?
Ask this question to our officials and politicians and the answer usually is:
population. Too many people, they say, absolving themselves of blame. Our
infrastructure simply cannot cope. Of all the lies they tell us this is among
the most barefaced.The truth is that the misguided socialism that was our creed
for far too long made everything beyond the most basic idea of living seem like
a sinful luxury. Our rulers lived in fine bungalows set in acres of manicured
lawns in Lutyens Delhi but they told us (some still do) on a daily basis that
since India was a poor country, we must learn to do without things that people
in richer countries took for granted.
Why should we build modern roads when so few Indians could afford cars?Why
should we demand aesthetically planned cities when aesthetics itself was
something only rich countries could afford?Why should our children need schools
with classrooms and desks and chairs when they should consider themselves lucky
to learn to read and write at all?
Meanwhile, countries like Thailand, unbothered by ideology, raced ahead. I
can remember Bangkok airport, when I first came here in the late seventies,
looking like one of our provincial airports. Today, we do not have a single
airport in India that is half as modern as Bangkok. I can remember Bangkok in
the eighties resembling one of Mumbai's uglier, seedier suburbs. I can remember
traffic jams so horrendous that commuters took to carrying portable WCs in their
cars. Getting into the city from the airport could take hours. Today, the drive
takes less than twenty minutes on a modern highway and the city itself is a
place of modern, glass and steel skyscrapers of a quality you do not see in our
most modern cities.Twenty years ago the Thai countryside had dirt-poor villages
that may not have been quite as dirty as our own but were certainly as poor.
Plan development
Today, when you drive from Bangkok to
Hua Hin, you see almost no signs of desperate poverty and where there is
urbanization you see evidence of careful town planning and an aesthetic that
embraces modernity without losing its Thai flavour.
Why can we not do this in our own ancient land from where Thailand gets much
of its culture, cuisine and language?
It is a question I ask myself every time I come here and to which I have
still not come up with a satisfactory answer other than that we got seduced by
an ideology (pseudo-Marxist mixed with Fabian Socialist) that on the ground
ended up reducing our aspirations to the lowest level. We were so fooled by our
rulers and their confused ideology that we allowed them to use ideology as a
shield to get away with not doing their job.It is the job of our elected
representatives and officials to make sure that urban development is planned. It
is their job to ensure public hygiene and cleanliness. Their job to ensure that
cities like Mumbai have adequate drainage and that half the city's sewage does
not wash untreated into the sea. Their job to ensure that we have modern
airports, railways and roads. Their job to ensure adequate supplies of
electricity and drinking water. It is our job to demand why they are not doing
their job.They have failed us because we have not been demanding enough. When
will things begin to change? That is a question that merits deeper thought than
I am capable of in this beautiful spa by the sea.
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