Its Money, honey

Money, money and money !! However saint we may try to become, everything seems to revolve around money. Centuries ago, people wanted money for food and survival. Then they started to fight for more and more of it for "more survival". In recent times, the fight has been for power, prestige, status. This has widened the gap between different class of people and raised the expectations among the people.

Now let us observe what is happening around us. There are various well established companies which serve their customers by their services and products. In a small domain of their own, they are interacting with a set of people called customers and selling them their products and services. Now they are hiring very highly talented people like us (I mean, the IITians) who do market research, acquire the data and analyze it. They write sophisticated programs to predict the behavior of people and then make the strategies to modify customer's behavior in their profit direction. By the pressure of the stockholders, company has to show at least 20% growth in revenue and profit every quarter. Otherwise, like today, stockholders change their interest into some other company which is showing them the profit. Then, the companies try to do everything possible to make their balance sheet in positive. They hire more sophisticated (I mean, talented) people and make more complex programs, diversify into other areas, lay off people if necessary and what not. Now we can see how much choices and freedom we have as customers.

Let us put some thoughts on our government. Even after so much growth story, every time they form the policies, you will find them giving promises of employment, education, health, infrastructure. Every time, our bureaucrats would be struggling to collect taxes as much as possible and then distributing them among poors. But in this process, they are making this gap wider and wider. Leave apart corruption and system failures, our democratic parties
themselves are to blame for the present condition.

Now based on what I can see today, I will draw some conclusions about what can possibly happen in future. In India, more and more people would be demanding the basic needs like food, water, electricity. The pressure would increase for generating employment for large chunk of increasing unskilled and semi-skilled population due to poor quality of education. The service sectors like banking, insurance, IT, health care, hotels and tourism will find new ways to survive and grow and will be biggest contributors to country's economy. There would not be much change in the status of agriculture sector. Its constraints like land inequality, lack of credit, irrigation, power will keep blocking the progress in this sector as are doing for last 60 years and even before that. The industry would keep making products for the rich and the middle class with more automation and labor cutting. There would be more consultant companies than actual producing companies to advise them in devising new strategies to retain their customers in increasing cut-throat competitive markets. Problems like terrorism, communalism, security would keep diverting our attention and effort from basic goals. Our politicians would keep making alliances, alleging other party members, giving speeches about progress, development, prosperity. They would increase advertisment in the newspapers about their party agenda but more about other party's mistakes. Caste, religion would be all time favourite classifying parameters but new criterions like region, income level, profession can be used to maxmmize possiblity of getting 51% votes (I am sure, some consultancy companies would be created to advise our politicians to make their strategies in this regard). More people would be travelling larger distances.

More softwares and programs would be developed by our budding engineers to help companies generate more and more profit than the competitor. New devices would be developed to help reduce the effort of our higher class people to zero in everything they do. Everything would happen by the click of a button (Initially for only lucky rich chaps, then others can dream!). Even while sitting in an aeroplane, you would be booking movie tickets, club memebership, doing business deals via video conferencing. New brain sensors would be developed which will sense your desires and give instant solution.

I know that all my imagination mentioned above will sound very much like pessimistic, boring to many. I also know that some will say- Govt. is trying to reduce the widening gap, it can not happen in one year or one decade for that matter. The argument would further go to ask me any suggestions instead of this sharp criticism of the situation that everybody knows.

I do not have many answers or suggestions. But I know one thing- the system under which we all are living is curbing our freedoms more than what was curbed in pre-independence time: freedom to make choices, freedom to live by our methods, freedom to utilize our potential. Our leaders consider serving poor as more their moral and ethical nature than their primary duty and responsibility. They assume that poors and left-outs are selfish, unethical, powerless people who are paying for their own actions (or inactions). The rich are becoming more miserable than ever in terms of their values, in terms of their humanness. The middle class is left to be exploited by our profit minded companies. After seeing all the contemporary events, my convictions has become stronger than ever about the future that I mentioned for our country. I wish I have a single reason to believe that something will change.