India and the world

I have been in Singapore over a year now. But all through this period I have always maintained this and I believe I always will: I miss Bangalore.

But I go too far ahead....

I arrived here one year ago and one of my first impressions of the place was not of the clean streets, well-laid out boulevards and the sparkling metro rail but of the people.

They never smile. They crib.
And they are rude as hell!

I met my colleagues and heard them griping over lunch everyday. I talked to my house-mate and had him crib to me every night. Even the friends I made here took on a negative hue in their conversations with me over time. And here I am griping away on my blog!!!!

Over this past year I have thought a lot about why Singaporeans are so negative in their outlook. I lived all my life in India and met so many positive people but here after one year in Singapore I believe has shown me more negativity than I have seen in my entire life.
If one dispassionately looks at it, people in Singapore have little to crib about. They all have decent education. They all have a place to call home (And I am not kidding here. There are no slums in Singapore, no one sleeps on the streets). Even the most destitute of Singaporeans have support enough to put two meals on the table everyday.

Compare that with what I saw in India. Creaking infrastructure. Rampant poverty. Major crime and a duplicitous political class. But why are Indian among the most optimistic people in the world? (Apparently some study established that. A similar study also established how vegetarians have higher colon cancer risk!)

I believe this has to do with how the two sets of people view the world.
Indian have seen tremendous growth of late. They feel that they are more in control of their lives. With the passing of years, the government has slowly but surely started to withdraw from the strangle hold it exercised in the Indian's daily life and my compatriots are seeing that their world is changing with more opportunities for them.

Out here in Singapore, there is no such growth. Salaries rise at 5% per annum (if you are good).
Jobs are drying up because on one is investing. But all these are cyclic factors.
I believe the overwhelming reason is the fact that the government touches the life of every Singaporean everyday in myriad ways. And it functions in a fashion which looks highly arbitrary.

This colleague of mine was complaining to me the other day about how the government has valued all the trees in Singapore at SG$ 1 Million each. "Based on what?", he shouted.

The taxi companies put a 30 cent surcharge on taxi fares due to rising oil prices. "Do the 30 cents go to the Taxi driver who is actually filling up the Diesel or to the Taxi companies?" asks my colleague. No one answers that. "Who owns the Taxi companies?", I ask. He shrugs and says, "The government owns everything".

Now I as a dispassionate observer find nothing wrong per-se in any of the above decisions the government took. But what queers the entire thing is that you hear only the government line on all these things and nothing else. There is no one to ask the questions my colleague raised and no one to answer them. This gives the facade of arbitrariness to the entire system.

This to my Indian sentiments is anathema. In India we are used to discussing and arguing at length about non-essentials. This fantastic Nuclear deal that Dr. Singh got for us has got stuck in one such quagmire to my immense despair. But all said and done, you can accuse the Indian state of being slow-moving, in-efficient, bureaucratic and corrupt. But you cannot accuse it of being arbitrary and dictatorial. I sometimes think that some dictatorial streak in the Indian state would be actually good for us all but it might just end up taking away from us Indians the feeling of empowerment we have.

Enough political science funda. Good night all.
Been off blogging for a while now. I hope to be back with renewed strength now!