Great opportunity

Each time I go back to India after a travel outside the country, I rediscover India.

I am thrilled at the speed in which the country is changing. At the same time some of our villages remain the same after 50 years of my visit there. This is great about our nation. Not only we have unity in diversity, we also have unimaginable difference in our way of life between villages and cities. There are many such observations different from what I would have seen from inside. I would like to share a few here.

Demand for everything:

One morning I called a service provider to get a driver for my car. My call number was 339. I called them after an hour. They said sorry, they could not get a driver for me that day due to overbooking. (They didn’t even bother to call me and tell this until I called them). They were so busy! Then I decided to drive, though it is not a pleasant experience to drive in Chennai during peak hours.

This is the case when we ask for a cab. Many times you will not get the cab when you want it. There is great demand for electrician. You won’t get a good one even if you try for a week. You can extend this to a carpenter, plumber and so on. Maid for housekeeping tops the list of demands! Every home maker becomes terribly upset when the maid does not turn up. What does this mean? There is great opportunity everywhere. You can make millions and billions if you are able to provide the right things in India. People are ready to pay for it. IT industry has changed India so much.

It is strange that on one side there is great shortage of everything and the other side youth are searching for employment. What are we searching for? Every mother wants her son or daughter to become a salaried person in some company. Who will become entrepreneur? There is a big difference between China and India. I have seen in China and Japan many youth willing to build their own company seeing the demand in a particular field. We can eradicate poverty in today’s India if our production, distribution and service system is done properly.

If you can see differently there is money everywhere. There is opportunity in every shortage. As in the above cases, can we not have properly trained electricians, drivers, plumbers and housekeepers?
We can talk of a hundred things that are in short supply. Just a few more:
• Drinking water in can(big demand)
• Train tickets(forget it)
• Plane tickets(mostly full)
• Hotel( wait to reserve rooms)
• Good restaurants (Saravana Bhavan is always crowded)
• Good play grounds and Gyms(very few)

The list is unending. However the focus is on mobile phones, cars, TV channels etc.etc. All from the stand point of the sellers and promoters. TV serial is something eating away the time of most people in the country! (So many channels in so many languages)

Cities and villages:

Even if the Government does a good job like developing roads and bridges it cannot solve the fundamental problem of our cities. Our cities and towns are many hundred years old, small and narrow. They are not designed to take the modern traffic with so many vehicles. We waste so much of patrol with our slow moving traffic. Whatever development done to our existing infrastructure, we cannot manage the traffic. We will end up in removing all platforms and finally we have to fly to our work place. We need to think differently and do what is needed to our country. One way is to encourage public transport. ‘Share auto’ is a natural development. It is not a planned one to solve the traffic. However it is a good temporary solution. We should plan new townships.

For heaven sake we should make all efforts to preserve our villages and village life. That is where the real man lives even to-day. I am not sure how long we can preserve it. But a simple life with self sufficiency is still in our villages. We should leave them alone and provide the basic needs. Most important need is water- to drink and cultivate. This time when I visited some villages like Patteswaram and Dharasuram in Tamil Nadu I could see our ancient culture. They really looked divine, nice and simple.

We can think of a different plan for our villages. UNESCO has done a great job in preserving the temple in Dharasuram. This was the most impressive place I visited this time. There are lot more such rediscoveries…..We can see them later.

-Arasu Ramanujam