Festive season of Diwali - a time to reassess India's priorities

The entire nation is drenched in the festive and colourful spirit of Diwali - the festival of lights. It is wonderful to see how over hundreds of years, this festival has taken on contemporary hues while retaining its ancient structure, alive with legends still relevant.

So before moving ahead - here's wishing all my readers a wonderful Diwali!

The key message from Diwali is - arrival of Good, destruction of Bad, cleaning of the clutter and mess, & a renewed vigour for prosperity!

In fact, there's this amazing article on Diwali you must read!

Let me apply Diwali's lessons in a national context. As we near the end of 2016, it is a good time to see the direction our national priorities are taking, and how far we still have to go to ensure a decent quality of life to all Indians.

From the experiences gained in 25 years as an education entrepreneur working at the grassroot levels, I feel that an India aspiring for superpower status needs to urgently work on the seven priorities listed below, and Diwali is the best time to list these!

1. Rapid economic growth - India needs tonnes of investment, both internal and external, to speed up the industrial sector and overall economy and absorb the huge pool of emerging youth. Many initiatives are being pushed by the Government, with Make-in-India leading the march. Unfortunately, the speed still needs much acceleration. This single priority, if successfully achieved, can put renewed vigour in India's rejuvenation. We have a long way to go.

Can global inequality continue its present course?

Shocking reports of wealth concentration are emerging from various sources. Just a few individuals hoard wealth that's more than half the humanity's worth.

It is now well-accepted that the world has become a dangerously skewed place, and the promise of trickle-down has turned so hollow that politicians and economist alike have stopped using it.

Someone asked - Why are the socialists / communists so quiet about it? Yes, that's a good question. Here's my answer.

Socialism (and its extreme version - Communism) is about challenging societal inequality, essentially wealth-inequalities. Given that, the biggest surprise of Indian politics (and in general, world politics) is that the mainstream Communist Parties seem to have worked especially hard to lose all relevance, just when the conditions for their relevance are strikingly present everywhere! The world is more unequal than ever, and with technology taken over entire industries, inequality is about to touch historic levels.

Here is the crux of the latest Global Wealth Report.

The Richest 1% of the World (that's a royal 62 individuals) today hold the wealth equal to the poorest 50% of the world. So, 62 = 360,00,00,000 !

Source - 62 people own same as half world – Oxfam | Press releases | Oxfam GB

The sands of time

I wrote this two years ago. It's rather special, and today is the right time to share it once again with all of you!

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It was a call from my elder brother, a doctor himself, that alerted me to the possibility. It was a second call 10 minutes later that jolted me into action. I rushed to the hospital. And found my father on the ICU bed. He was no more.

On 31st of March 2002, I was on a routine visit to the Indore centre of Professional Tutorials. It was a Sunday, but an audit was overdue, and I was conducting it alongwith the entire team at the centre. Around 12:45pm, my mobile phone rang. Deep into the audit, it took me some rings before I took the call. "Come to the hospital, Dad is not well", said my brother from the other side. "Sure, I will", I said and continued with the audit, hoping to finish it in another 30 minutes. In just 10 minutes, the phone rang again and my brother, slightly more impatient this time round, said "Come NOW."

I rushed out of the office knowing fully well what that tone of voice could mean. And my worst fears were proven true when I entered the ICU of the hospital. My father was on the bed, and a doctor was desperately trying to arouse him from his sleep, pushing a big needle into his heart, with some medicine that's supposed to act as a life-safer in cardiac arrests. I realised that the time has come for me to realise what he had told me earlier on more than one occasions -"A day will come when you will have to realise that we all travel alone, and it is our duty to give happiness to as many as we can in this journey. We must give back to society much more than we take from it."

These were precisely the words I used while designing the obituary advt in next day's newspapers. I hope it gave him happiness that I remembered.