The destiny of India can only be determined by its billion plus residents. I believe that Indians will continue to follow other people’s leads as somehow it seems to be our nature to walk down well-worn paths rather than trying to make a path of our own.
Whatever field of human endeavor that one might think of, whether it is environmental awareness or advances in medical sciences or nanotechnology, Indians are rarely to be found extending the envelope.
Of course, first of all, we need to clear all our lazy thinking habits and mental cobwebs and realize that neither does NASA comprise of one third Indian scientists nor is Sanskrit the best language in the world for being used as a computer programming language. Those are all myths in the mold of the famous Indian rope trick.
Sometimes we tend to get carried away by our own self-congratulations. Perhaps the most egregious example of this self-congratulation business that we often get into is to do with the myth of India becoming some sort of an economic superpower and/or a software superpower in the near future.
A nation does not become an economic superpower on the basis of its supposed strengths in having millions of English-speakers who can work in Call Centers or having low-cost shop floor employees who can help man a low-cost manufacturing economy.
As we look into the distant future, not merely a generation ahead but centuries and millennia, we will have to let go of our ancient myths … may be our nationalities will cease to be of importance then.
As we learn to journey to other planets around other stars in our galaxy and may be in other galaxies, hopefully by those distant millennia, our parochial tendencies and mindsets would long-since have disappeared.
So, perhaps the right issue to ponder is not the future of India, but the future of humanity as a whole. Do we have the technology to save humanity if an event as cataclysmic as that which led to the extinction of the dinosaurs were to occur today?
