I went in India for a (very) short trip this week. I was literally there for only 4 days to attend a wedding. For anyone who travels between US and India, you will realize that this is a SHORT trip :). I ended up spending more time in the airports than with my family. In fact, I am writing this post from the business lounge in the Frankfurt airport. How I got into it is another story :).
I spent a lot of my time during this trip on the road travelling between cities for the various wedding ceremonies. It was a lot of fun, but pretty tiring. During my last trip to India in February, I came back with a vision of a country on the verge of moving on to the next level. It looked like there was unlimited potential everywhere you look. This euphoria certainly came down during this trip. The rural countryside has been mostly left behind from the benefits of the “Internet” explosion. This might pose a big problem to the country if there is no immediate focus on developing the infrastructure. For comparisions..travel time in the US between two cities ~200 miles apart would be ~4 hours. The same distance took me ~9 hours in India. And not to mention the numerous times you get a heartattack from vehicles parked in the center of the road without any visual signs or the cows that wander onto the road without a bother :). And every truck/bus has a “Please ~Sound Horn~ Please” printed on the back of them. Just imagine the sound pollution when everyone in the world seems to be honking at the same time. It is so bad that people seem to have stopped responding to the horns. I know that a lot of people have nostalgic feelings about this situation, but unfortunately, if we want to move from a “developing” nation to a “devloped” nation, we have to get better infrastructure.
I wanted this post to be a reflection of my nostalgic feelings of the “do as you wish” country that India was (is) and how we need to get more organized, even if it means giving up this luxury of being a laid back country. But as usual, I seem to have made a mess of expressing my thoughts :). More posts on this topic soon….
