Retirement for Midnight's Children: India at 60

(9:30pm) At around this time exactly 60 years ago, the Parliament was filling up with the esteemed members, Jawaharlal Nehru was doing some last-minute throat clearing before his momentous "tryst with destiny", and the ruhbarb of the hall would have been quite a thing to experience. India was getting its independence, from the colonial yoke, from exploitation, from subjugation, from illiteracy, from peasant rebellions against unfair taxes....from history. Let us call the people in the Parliament that day as "midnight's fathers". There were others in school or college - the "midnight's adolescents" and others who were born as the leaders of the independence movement were taking their seats - "midnight's children" a la Rushdie. Then there were the tired grandfathers and grandmothers who never thought the day would arrive. But arrive it did.

Fast forward 60 years, that is, today. The midnight's children have just reached retirement age!! Hooray! Let us give them two cheers, because they have shepharded the country to the position it is in today. At least we have a semblance of democracy in an anarchic region, although our legislators are around 30% criminals. But criminals also have a stake in democracy, don't they? Who wants a dictator coming and cleaning up the Aegean stables of Indian democracy? So we have a nice equilibrium, where we vote, elect and curse the people in power. But no, let's put our hands together and give credit to the midnight's children for persevering. Bravo!

The midnight's adolescents and children have also guided our economy through these turbulent years. They stifled creativity and risk taking, but built educational institutions and dams - the "temples of modern India". They brought us into a peculiar position, more of brightest and the best going abroad than staying back after their engineering and medical degrees. They sought to distribute riches without creating enough, and made the middle class pay taxes at 90 percent in the highest bracket. They made India a textbook case of autarky, of centralized planning, of crony capitalism. But like our Chinese bretheren under Chairman Mao, the entrepreneurial spirit remained intact.

So here we are now...globalization, internet, social networking sites, online shopping, retail chains, private equity, inbound and outbound FDI, satellite dish antennas, online gaming, music downloads, e-chaupals, futures market, commodity trading, ATMs, and of course, cellphones. Also, 22% poverty, 50% dropout rate in schools, health indicators worse than Bangladesh, contract teachers paid Rs.500 per month, HIV/AIDS, spurious medicines, school students sitting on the floor, farmer suicides, environmental degradation, crumbling urban infrastructure, female foeticide, police firing on SEZ protestors...seems like two India-s coexisting in apparent harmony. The problem is that midnight's children and adolescents do not understand either, they don't have Orkut profiles and move around in a pampered world of wailing sirens and flashing lights, dark tinted glasses obscuring their view of social inequities.

So move over midnight's children, your time has gone. Encash that pension fund you have, buy a house by the beach and read a few novels and let the grandchildren take over. And by the way, try learning a bit of computer, midnight's grandchildren are on Skype and IM.

C. U. Happy Independence Day!