my duanni
- one crucial aspect very pertinent to a discourse on a subject like this, & that usually gets overlooked, but is verily central to it, is about,
'stability, for sustainability'.
any and all progress and sustained development and what-have-you, can take place only when the environment is stable and is conducive for work towards the aim(s).
this nation, right from its independence, has been continually tremendously suffering from/struggling against a hydra of destructive impairing forces with its multiple heads of tragedies, wars, insurgencies, external overt & deep state pulls 'n pushes-interventions-subversion/subversive ploys 'n tactics, identity politics, radicalisation, terrorism & its politicisation/politics over it, yearly & continuous natural calamities & disasters, greed, political tug-o'-wars, & what-not! these are some verily potent & terrible energies whose one most prominent common effect is, at the least, destabilisation. one could do well to recall the times of the 90s when jokes about the 'just came-now gone, aayi-gayi' governments were commonplace. we may keep asserting & reasserting (which MUST be done) the importance of core issues like poverty, education, employment, infrastructure, facilities (like also the internet
), etc., but these could be tackled only in a stable, steady, secure atmosphere, because when such debilitating problems keep consistently striking & impeding, you are constantly busy diverting & spending a considerable chunk of your
time, efforts, focus, resources to keep battling them.
at the time of our independence, two parts of this nation were bloodily cut away to form another nation. now it wouldn't behoove us to compare ourselves with them for obvious reasons, but just for the sake of the commonality of time of 'neo-inception' on the timeline, it could surprise some to come to know that pakistan, was quite better than us on some core economic parameters for about around 2 decades or so, and/but we saw what path it went & is on (to) now and where we have taken up to...India being a huge democracy with such humongous variety in virtually everything, (with) having a federal structure or formation with multitudes of political outfits & organisations/parties and no absolute central command for all and the nation, is bound to suffer from tussles & impediments every-now-and-then (as a small instance, FY 2016-2017 is the first time in the nation's history that the central grid is at a power surplus, as well as the country stands a good chance to become a power-surplus nation in upcoming 5-7 years; but that doesn't mean the surplus would flow down to each block, i.e., state, automatically; here is, again, where the leadership of these states come into play...this is one manner/way how developmental and other works 'percolate' to units of an enormous-more-than-just-in-size/extent body like India), but also then after all the churning, whatever 'essential oil' gets extracted out, even though yes, quite a few times unnecessarily painfully slow, is mostly a 'stable compound' with the property of exuding a sustained effect...
...India's journey thus on the macroscale is quite like that of its performing athletes on the microscale, who win accolades and earn medals, inspite of the many setbacks, lack of critical support, etc., and that is why, all the more worthy of hearty, honest appreciation and attention. similarly, despite its shortcomings, troubles, slow pace on account of the aforementioned issues & then some others, am appreciative (quite reasonably) of
OUR journey and milestones covered/achieved, and like some others here have written, quite hopeful of the much more ground that we need to cover; so as
@cellar_door wrote, I too would like to think of myself as (being) an optimist.
