Broadband and Smelly Armpits

It is a funny day. Thanks to the miracle of modern technology of broadband and wireless and all that, I can sit in my bedroom and rest my aching back and arms. and still write this piece. As I write, I cannot escape the irony of it – for modern technology can enable me to write a piece and have it read across the world but it may not help me in many basic areas of life. You see, the reason that my back aches so is that I have been carting water puffing and panting up two flights of stairs from the water tanker that the government has so generously sent around because the taps have been dry for a week and not a drop flows through the taps. And this is no slum – it is a middle class colony where all (or most) of the constructions are authorized.

As someone who has benefited immensely from technology, I am at a loss to think rationally as to how technology should be best used. After all the advent of the Internet and especially e-commerce has changed my life and the lives of many others fundamentally – the manner in which I pay my bills, do my shopping, travel, deal with the government, obtain my visas, and many other things has changed, perhaps forever and possibly for good.

As important as broadband and IT all that is and for all the convenience that it provides, I still wonder at the bizarreness of a country’s priorities where bandwidth is available in plenty and is even subsidized so that more and more people can climb on which is fine; but the priorities seem skewed when compared to the fact that we have inadequate roads, inadequate drinking water, inadequate electricity, inadequate bus stations, train stations and airports- the real infrastructure is crumbling and life is getting more difficult by the day in the real world but you can zap up and down the virtual highway.

While rationing of a scare resource, be it electricity or power is but inevitable, it seems that we do not have the technology to be able to monitor its use and enforce some discipline. Electricity, for instance, is generated at various points in the country and transmitted through transmission lines and each state is allotted a quota. But states overdraw as often as they please and it seems that we have just enough to indicate that this is happening but not enough to put a stop to this.

While the virtual infrastructure is important; if the country has to have any future as a good place to live, the political eye needs to turn around to attend to these pressing needs too. Roads and airports are getting some attention but water supply and power generation is actually falling behind as demand continues to outstrip supply. Having inherited a little over 1,300 MW at the time of independence in 1947, the country today has an installed generating capacity of over 1, 15,000 MW and aims to increase it to 1, 00,000 MW of new installed generating capacity is planned to be added by the year 2012, along with the sprucing up of the transmission network to ferry power across the country but even that may be slow.

While power generation may eventually catch up, no one has any answers to water shortages. While we can wax eloquent about India having surplus water and one of the richest traditions of managing it, but still the water crisis has reached critical levels in the country, and with only important but minuscule measures like rain water harvesting can yield minimal results. Meanwhile, with about 20 percent of the global population, India is struggling to meet her water needs with just five percent of the world’s available water and the gap between these numbers is widening – figures that most people are perhaps unaware of. With people in most places seemingly apathetic to these figures and the gravity of the problem, it is time perhaps for nation wide Pulse Polio like movement to be started to at least sensitize people about water shortage and water conservation. For that moment, we wait with bated breath and parched throats.

We have such thin skins.....

Some months ago, I got a chance to see Deepa Mehta’s film titled “Water”. It is part of the trilogy of “Fire”, “Earth” and Water. The film had made news for two reasons- Deepa had courted controversy when “Fire” delved into lesbian relationships, and then “Water” began shooing the plight of child widows at Benares, igniting the wrath of Hindu Fundamentalists and also attracting a law suit from the noted author Sunil Gangopadhyay who claimed that the film was based on his acclaimed novel “Those Days”.

“Water” is a pale shadow of what it might have been. After shooting was disrupted at Benares, the cast as well as location got dismantled; Deepa Mehta shifted her location o Sri Lanka and recruited a new cast. She tried to recreate with very plastic success, the ghats of Benares in Sri Lanka but the artificial umbrellas and ghat props would not deceive any one who has been to Varanasi.

Of course “Water” is not the only film thus affected. Films in recent memory that have run into problems include the recently released “Jodhaa Akbar”, The Da Vinci Code, as well and of course politically tinged films like “Mangal Pandey-The Rising”, Shyam Benegal’s film – “Netaji, the Forgotten Hero”.

The Indian Express has been worrying about a growing tribe of Indians who have a thin skin and flaunt it too and is wondering as to why we are so quick off the block to take offence? It is an important question to ask ourselves. Of course the editorial speculates that perhaps the reason is that India is a democracy all right and so there is freedom of expression and which people feel free to use but society is not liberal enough and so the space for tolerance is limited.

But perhaps the issue to investigate is not so much the problem but the solution. Yes India is a democracy but we have a long way to go and to so we have learnt to take the freedom of expression that the constitution has given for ourselves but perhaps not learnt to provide the same right to others who think and act differently from us. But since India is a society which is millennia old, it can not easily shed its norm cannot be dragged by the scruff of its neck into a liberalized climate. So perhaps, while learn to accept the fact that we do indeed have a thin skin, perhaps we should also look at solutions that provide platforms for various points of view to be expressed in a way that is not so openly divisive.

Is that possible? Can we at least become thick skinned enough to at least others to speak, write and make films of their kind and at least allow them to live even if we never get to quite like them? A truly liberal society of course would allow a climate where a lot could be said and then the dissenters would also know how to express their dissent without fear of either courting or cultivating civil unrest. But we are yet far from those gates.

In school, there was a word that we learnt – xenophobia – the fear of all things foreign. In all those years since school, it seems that the word and the world in which we live today have both shrunk their borders and today the line between “them” and “us” is often as fragile as glass. Or to put it differently, if you are not with me in my opinions and it may be in the shallowest of matters, you are against me and different from me.

I have neither the time nor the inclination to look for signs of our common humanity and build on that. I would rather reach for the stone that will smash your window pane or your head, so that I can retreat to the privacy of my den and preen that I have been a bully yet one more day, ridding the world of that dreadful menace – those who do not think the way I do. Yes, Xenophobia is a frightening word, especially when it has shrunk so much that the borders are constantly closing in around us.