Ease of Living in India!

Ease of doing business in India is a much talked about issue in present times and rightly so – more businesses means a better economy for the good of everyone. Yet I wonder whether tackling issues that impede business is an activity more important than setting right issues that hamper living itself?

It is a fact that living in this nation as a common man bereft of power and money is no cake walk. For every single interaction with the governmental machinery is laced with graft and or pain, be it an act as simple as getting a driving license or as difficult (sic) as registering property.

A machinery that is dishonest to the core with a few exceptions of course is what makes doing business or ordinary living in India so dam complicated and difficult and therein lies the major difference between ours and the developed world. And unless and until we are able to handle the basics, progress would be confined merely to the paper or at best to rhetoric that most of us have been digesting for decades since we came on our own.

Dishonesty or simply put, endemic corruption is the biggest issue plaguing this nation.   

Being honest and that too one who does not tolerate dishonesty in his own realm is indeed a difficult preposition. And the definition of dishonesty is not confined merely to greasing of palms but extends much further. Being true to oneself is what honesty is all about. Being able to look in the mirror without finding a slimy individual in the shadows is what being honest is all about. Being prepared to pay the price for being true to oneself is what honesty is all about.

Yet in a world where the tribe of honest people is shrinking by the day, the dishonest who are apparently flourishing are in true sense not, for inside the core of their hearts they know their true self whom their own conscience detests.

Half-hearted attempts to control the dishonest only result in this tribe searching for and finding ingenious ways of going around the roadblocks. The solution indeed lies in changing the moral fabric of the society that perhaps would take lifetimes of struggle. 

The media is full everyday of reports about people in power raking in the moolah. But such reports do not touch even the fringes of the real problems plaguing the system. While occasionally a big fish lands in the net, the small fishes who throng almost every pond in the country continue with their (mis)deeds unabated. And the common man as well as productivity continues to suffer.

The present federal government has noble intentions yet there are serious misgivings about it being able to stem the prevailing rot, for the rot is miles deep and widely strewn around. In this democratic nation of ours with thousands of years of glorious history, there is no way a common citizen can interact with the system with dignity and grace. Till such time the rot is first curtailed and then cleansed, I do not see much hope for the nation in true sense, yet I pray to the almighty everyday that the present dispensation really succeeds down to the grassroots level in its pious intentions.