Sunday, September 11, 2005

Is India really growing in the world arena or is it just a band of touted few?

Sachin tendulkar, Leander Paes, Narayan moorthy, Narain Karthikeyan, Sabir Bhatia, Azim Premji, Pramod Bhasin, Yogi Deveshwar, Sania Mirza (recently added)...... so many names of famous Indians who have made it big in the world arena but how many have truly contributed to team India.

I was reading this interesting article sent to me by my friend Baala on rediff.com that was talking about how India was touted as the next economic superpower by Goldman Sachs in their 2003 BRICs report. The article said "The inescapable fact is that even today India accounts for only 2 per cent of the world's GDP, less than 1 per cent of world trade, less than 1 per cent of global investment flows and an even smaller share of global technology breakthroughs - with 16 per cent of the world's people."

Well with that on my mind I was thinking about this natural tendency that all we Indians have about touting our efforts as better than all the others and having an air around ourselves. Yes it is true that Indians do everything with a lot of flair and have a natural aptitude for excellence, but it is also true that many of us live in this bubble that we (Indians including myself) are the best and everyone else follow. This bubble though glorifies the efforts of few Indians in the world arena it blurs the absence of excellence of team India - be it on a cricket field or in science.

India- be it in science, cricket, tennis or in any other performance arena have many bright stars whose achievements cannot be easily replicated but all these specs of brilliance contribute little to team India which continues to slug among the laggards. The distance to be covered between today's reality and tomorrow’s potential seems to be huge and that shows that India has a long way to go before it starts to tout its achievements.

I beleive if we (including myself) start to focus more on what we lack rather than what we have and strive towards improving ourselves we would soon reduce the gap between potential and reality.

ps: Again it is important to see the problem I am stating objectively and not by comparing our mentatility to countries like US or UK which are no better in thought but far ahead on the global economic scale.