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What devoured glamorous Pakistan?
By Vir Sanghvi
published here Express Buzz.
I wrote, a few weeks ago, about how much the attitude to Indians had changed in the West. Once we were regarded as losers, people who inhabited a desperately poor country, continually ravaged by famine or drought, incapable of making a single world-class product, and condemned to live forever on foreign aid. Now, we have the world’s respect and, more tellingly, the West’s envy as more and more jobs are Bangalored away from their high-cost economies and handed over to Indians who perform much better for less money.
That piece was prompted by a visit to London. This one too has been inspired by a trip abroad and by saturation coverage of the Pakistani cricket scandal in the press and on global TV channels. But my concern this week is not with how the West sees India.
It is with the transformation of the image of the global Pakistani.
I was at school and university in England in the Seventies and lived in London in the early 1980s. This was a time when Pakistan was regarded — hard as this may to believe now — as being impossibly glamorous. The star of my first term at Oxford was Benazir Bhutto. In my second term, she became president of the union and was the toast of Oxford. Her father was then prime minister of Pakistan and lucky students vied for the opportunity to visit Karachi or Islamabad as guests of the Bhuttos. They came back with stories of unbelievable hospitality and spoke knowledgeably about Pakistan’s feudal structure, about landowners like the Bhuttos, about an autocracy that had reigned for centuries etc.
Even on the other side of the ideological divide, Pakistan was all too visible. He had come down from Oxford nearly eight years before, but a former president of the union, the charismatic Trotskyite Tariq Ali was still the sort of chap who made English girls swoon. For her first debate as president of the Oxford Union, Benazir asked Tariq Ali to speak. He agreed but then, rather inconveniently, he was detained by the police on a visit to Pakistan. No matter. He phoned Benazir who spoke to daddy and — hey presto! — Tariq was out of jail and on a plane to England. Pakistan was that kind of country, the British chortled delightedly.
In those days, us poor Indians hardly ever got a look in. The Pakistanis were dashing, far richer (they spent in a week what we spent in the whole term), always going off to chic parties or nightclubs in London and charming the pants off the British (often, quite literally).
In that era, the Arabs had just emerged on the world stage (following the massive oil-price hikes of 1973/4) and the Pakistanis were almost proprietorial about them. A Pakistani graduate student at my college, even affected Arab dress from time to time and bragged that he had taught Arabs how to fly planes.
My college-mate was merely reprising Z A Bhutto’s philosophy: the Arabs were rich but they were camel drivers. They needed Pakistanis to run the world for them and to teach them Western ways. It was this sort of thinking that led to the creation of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), the first global Third World bank, run by Pakistanis with Arab money. For most of the 1980s, BCCI was staffed by sharply dressed young Pakistanis who entertained at London (and New York’s) best restaurants, hit the casinos after dinner and talked casually about multi-million dollar deals.
Their flamboyant lifestyle was matched by other rich Pakistanis. In his autobiography, Marco Pierre White, the first of the British super-chefs (he was the original bad boy and Gordon Ramsay worked for him), talks about the Pakistanis who were his first regulars. Michel Roux, then England’s top chef (three Michelin stars) would fly out to Pakistan to cook at private parties thrown by wealthy individuals. In the late 1980s, a friend of mine went to dinner in Pakistan and was startled to be asked to guess the vintages of three different bottles of Mouton Rothschild, one of the world’s most expensive wines.
In that era, Indians knew absolutely nothing about wine or French food and the few Indian millionaires who vacationed in London were vegetarians.
Pakistanis were sex symbols too. The first international cricketing stud was Imran Khan (who finished at Oxford the term before I got there) and his sex appeal was so legendary that even Benazir joked about it. Told that Gen Zia-ul-Haq called him the ‘Lion of the Punjab,” Benazir said, “Yes but Zia pronounces “Lion as ‘Loin’ and this is appropriate.” Years later when Imran spoke about his love for Pakistan, a British columnist sneered, “His heart may be in Pakistan but his loins are in the King’s Road” referring to a trendy (and expensive) London area.
Even Pakistan’s millionaires were more glamorous than ours. In the Eighties when the Hinduja brothers (“we are strictly vegetarian”) first emerged in London, the Pakistanis stole the show with such flamboyant high-profile millionaires in Mahmud Sipra who financed feature films and kept a big yacht in the South of France.
So what went wrong?
It’s hard to pin point any single reason but I can think of several contributing factors.
First of all, much of the Pakistani profile was based on flash and fraud. BCCI collapsed amidst allegations that it was a scamster’s bank. Mahmud Sipra left England with the Fraud Squad in hot pursuit even as he
declared his innocence from beyond Scotland Yard’s jurisdiction. Many big-spending Paksitanis turned out to be heroin smugglers.
Secondly, Indian democracy came to our rescue. The Brits who bragged about Bhutto hospitality and the Pakistan aristocracy missed the obvious point: this was a deeply unequal and therefore unstable society. When Bhutto rigged an election, this led to his downfall.
Thirdly, Pakistan signed its own death warrant by trying to out-Arab the Arabs with a policy of Islamisation. This reached its peak under General Zia who declared a jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan and invited Arabs such as Osama bin Laden to come to Pakistan to fight the holy war. Ultimately, fundamentalist Islam devoured what was left of glamorous Pakistan.
Fourthly, the world just moved on. Flash can only get you so far. In the end it is substance that counts. And plodding, boring India came up with the substance.
It is hard to think, when you look at today’s Pakistan team, that Pakistani cricketers were such sex symbols in India in the 1980s that Imran Khan was able to brag to an interviewer “Indian actresses are chickens. They just want to get laid” (In all fairness, Imran later said he had been misquoted.)
Get laid by today’s team? You must be joking.
Even the Pakistani playboys who are still around no longer seem exciting or glamorous. Poor Imran just looks tired. And the rest look like Asif Zardari — pretty much the archetypal glamorous Pakistani of the Eighties — though perhaps not as disgustingly sleazy.
Of all these factors, two remain the most important. A nation created on the basis of Islam was destroyed by too much Islam. And a nation dedicated to democracy flourished because of too much democracy.
More at: www.virsanghvi.com. Follow him at : twitter.com/virsanghvi
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Straight-Talk,
Let me give it straight to you. I don’t care a bit about Bharti Muslims or Hindus if you settle Kashmir issue and don’t interfere in affairs of Indus Valley and its people. It is you who want spread hate all around. Just look at number of interacts on this blog and I read this to have a feel for your mental state and have a laugh. Have a good day.
“It is you who want spread hate all around. ”
If there was a case of a pot calling the kettle black then…
The more beautiful the women of a race the more likely the men (of this race) will become greedy lusty criminals. A beautiful woman is a scourge on her husband, her family and her race.
Sarmaji awesome! Happy to take any such scourge off of your hands. Unless you happen to cohabit with some with some butt-ugly chick. In which case you are blessed – and do not need my help.
Dear Aaditya:
Your understanding is wrong.
If ever I have an intention to be a do-gooder; it is to do some good for my republic; and reading your post it seems that even in that I have failed for rather than reading my (and Arjun’s) posts as a warning against complacency you seem to feel irritated that we refused to sing-along with Vir Sanghvi’s superficial piece.
Yet I am not sure what upset you for you do not seem to disagree with the substance of our posts. Here are the same words from Arjun’s post that I reproduced earlier:
“Indians should stop being so smug and self-congratulatory because it smacks of low self-confidence that one needs to beat one’s chest about such modest gains. It doesn’t suit us….”
And here is what you yourself wrote:
“There is no gem of an insight that you provide when you say that Indians should stop being smug and self-congratulatory…”
But then you wrote something that I did not find in the Vir Sanghvi’s article (and the lack of which in part, prompted my post):
“That India has a huge development backlog goes without saying – and everybody is aware of it…..”
Everybody is aware of it? Hmmm….
Vir Sanghvi for one seems blissfully unaware of it. So it seems were Kalmadi and co. the other day when he invited everyone to the CWG in India a ‘rising superpower’ or words to that effect.
I found Sanghvi’s piece especially superficial because it cherry picked anecdotes to support his bias and gloat.
Take for example his use of the nearly twenty year old BCCI bank failure as ‘evidence’. Both the Enron failure in US and the Indian Satyam scandal are recent news by comparison. No serious journalist would use these examples as a proof of failure of either US or India as a nation yet VS seemed to have no such hesitiation when it came to BCCI and Pakistan. Other examples of Pakistani ‘excesses and failures’ are similarly anecdotal.
Then he delivers his equally superficial analysis of what went wrong:
“The Brits who bragged about Bhutto hospitality and the Pakistan aristocracy missed the obvious point: this was a deeply unequal and therefore unstable society….”
It may be a little bit more complicated than that for if you believe that then we too are in trouble because how equal is our society where the other day Mukesh Ambani moved into a billion dollar architectural monstrosity that he calls a home even as he can see the slums of Mumbai from his own very helipad?
VS topped off his piece with one final gloat:
‘Of all these factors, two remain the most important. A nation created on the basis of Islam was destroyed by too much Islam. And a nation dedicated to democracy flourished because of too much democracy…’
No doubt we are a democracy, but too much democracy!!
For me such statements are a case of ‘too much denial’ because several national and almost all regional political outfits in India today are nothing but semi feudal family run enterprises.
Take for example the Badals of Punjab. Papa Badal is the CM; sonny Badal is the deputy CM; daughter in law Badal is an MP; brother Badal is another MP; Badal son-in-law is a minister; sony Badal’s brother-in-law is another minister. The other day the finance minister was dropped from ministry. He too was a nephew Badal; dropped not for no other reason than for speaking up ‘against the family.’ Maybe we do have too much godfather style Mafiocracy than democracy!!
In your post, you continued VS style gloating by highlighting Pakistan’s perceived failures. Reading that it seems that for many of us Indians the world is made up only of Indians and Pakistanis with perhaps ‘The West’ playing the judge in a beauty contest between us two.
Well, I hate to burst your bubble but suggest that you read those magazines you recommended to me more carefully. While the west is busy congratulating our modest achievements, and we continue to look the wrong way, the Middle Kingdom is rising like a Leviathan in our backyard.
China’s rise defies superlatives; an economy five times ours and rising faster than ours; almost one new power station a week; first world infrastructure; shining new science laboratories that even the West envies; World’s largest dam and plans to build new ones ten times that size; a GNP that may hit a mind boggling 125 trillion by the end of the century! This is our competition; not some aging cricket players turn politicians!
Even if one were to concede that China has a 13 year lead on us in terms of reforms, we are far behind where China was then because even 13 years ago China had most of its children in school and had health care available to a vast majority of its people.
You admonished me for a lacking self respect and your tone implies that in some way I am somewhat less patriotic than you are; if so then you are wrong. We only read and draw inspiration from different set of Indian patriots. You it seems choose to read people like VS for an instant jolt of good feeling. I OTOH read the words of another Indian a while ago and decided to use them as a challenge and a road map to an India of my dreams. I will repeat his words for your benefit:
“That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over….” (JLN Aug 1947)
I too, would like to gloat some day, like you and VS but I refuse to do so till I see a majority of our children in school, healthcare for a majority and a protection of basic law and order available to all of our people.
So dear Aaditya, please don’t misunderstand my caution as a disrespect for my land; I neither lack respect for it or for myself; only I have much more pragmatism than you do. Almost millennia ago a visitor to India wrote thus about our ancestors:
“They believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no kings like theirs, no religion like theirs, no science like theirs. They are haughty, foolishly vain, self-conceited, and stolid. Their haughtiness is such that, if you tell them of any science or scholar in Khorasan and Persis, they will think you to be both an ignoramus and a liar. If they traveled and mixed with other nations, they would soon change their mind, for their ancestors were not as narrow-minded as the present generation is.”
He should know for his name was Al Beruni and he got to observe Indians of his day from close quarters. Reading VS above article today, I doubt Al Beruni would revise his opinion much….
Regards.
I know this is just a blog with not that many people with expertise writing here. However, as a (Pakistani) economist I am appalled. I feel the common Pakistani does not understand the history or the future of India’s economy. Let me lay down two facts to put it in context.
1. There is a fascinating branch of economics that studies economic trends of such things as GDP over the past 3000 years. Most scholars agree that India and China accounted for more than 70% of the world economy (each roughly a one-third) for most of human civilized existence. Except the last 3 centuries where western colonial powers dominated. So, the question is not so much whether India will dominate the world economy again. But, rather why both china and india fell out of favor the last couple of centuries.
2. Both China and India will start to dominate this century, as they did in the past. Most scholars believe that. One may say China is a bit ahead of India today. But, that is far from clear. It is expected that India will grow much faster over the next 3 decades than China for various reasons (secular democracy, society that encourages entrepreunership, more freedoms, more younger people, etc).
If you want to become more educated on it, please read some recent issues of the magazine “Economist”. It is particulary important for Pakistanis to be well aware of what the future holds for their potential superpower neighbors, so they can play their cards the right way. If we deceive ourselves into believing that we are somehow better than India, we will be in for a rude shock. Wishful thinking should not supplant true knowledge.
Rehman
@Parvez
“you settle Kashmir issue and don’t interfere in affairs of Indus Valley”
Dear
You still could not understood the problem of Kashmir. Here is not any……you say, I accept or I say, you accept type solution. I had told the position of India still you want to cling on your position and not satisfied with the so called Azad Kashmir then……. well you can cry anywhere in the world or on any forum or complain to any nations or send how many terrorist as you wish it will not matter to India.
It is better to understand the position of others and reconcile yourself that at least some part of Kashmir still you’ve with yourself. India somewhat reconciled itself with Azad Kashmir inline with its earlier acceptance of the partition of Bengal and Punjab.
One more thing about Indus valley civilization …… Can you please tell me the things you still owe from that civilization? Some Arabs came and occupied that place in 8th century, the people living their owe their culture from not great history of Indus valley but from Arab peninsula. But traits of Indus valley civilization still deep rooted inside the psyche of Indians and they’ve been bestowed with and carry many many culture trends of that period with them (like nature worship, worship of Shiva the Adi Deva, yogik and tantrik kriya, reverence of Bull etc).
@Parvez
“you settle Kashmir issue and don’t interfere in affairs of Indus Valley”
About Kashmir what we, for our own sake, need to know is:
“What you lose on the battle field, you cannot get on negotiating table.”
About the Indus valley:
We keep talking about Indian conspiracy in Baluchistan. When a correspondent confronted the Indian Foreign Minister in the presence of our FM, the reply was simple. The Indian FM said, “We were told Pakistan will provide us some evidence in this matter, but so far not even a shred of evidence has been produced”. Our FM kept sitting quietly like a Bheegi Billi. This is how we make fools of ourselves. Should we not make sure what we utter is true, and we can support it by solid evidence?
@Rehman
Very sensible portrayal of economic history of India and China. Question is not whether India and China will have the largest economies in the world but it is whether sometime in coming centuries they can match per capita income standards of developed world.
It is however appalling to see the crude anti-Indian and anti-Hindu feelings in this blog by some “enlightened” persons. Education can give you an access to the world but cannot remove the inherent bias which is expressed so clearly in these posts.
BTW whoever thinks that CWG resulted in a failure is living in a fool’s paradise. All events started on time and stadiums were world class. Biggest concern of the world, the looming threat of a militant attack did not materialize due to great security mechanism put in place.
Gorki,
I reread this article and to be honest, I didn’t find any sense of gloating on Vir’s part. In fact, one can argue that it reminds Pakistanis of what they have lost so quickly. Except the last line, which is quite a superficial summary, I don’t find the article objectionable per se. That summary sounds hurried and may have been prompted by the space requirements. Your other point about Vir not being critical about our failings is incorrect. In fact, he is one of the most vocal of all our critics. You just have to read his latest piece about the CWG. In that sense, quoting Al Beruni is quite out of place. He has consistently played down our idiotic meanderings about comparison with China, etc. He is, if I am correct, responsible for coining the term “mass murderer” for Modi. What he does not do is to be unnecessary unctuous when dealing with issues about Pakistan. In that he is hardly alone. He is also not shy about our achievements, meager as they may be. I don’t find anything wrong in that. Yes, agreed, we are in a pit and have a long way to go, but do we stop celebrating the gold that India secured in athletics after 58 years. We all know that our secularism is flawed but as the last 4-5 years have shown us, should we be lectured by the west on that account. I don’t think so.
Rehman,
The comparison with China is, frankly, propagated by some bored fools who have nothing to do to pass their time. For bulk of us, the reality is clear; for 40% of the population that lives on less than a dollar a day, it hardly matters that we are only 10 or 20 years behind China. I feel quite ashamed when I see our countrymen go on bleating such nonsense. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that humility used to be an essential feature of our civilization make up. In my view, it is more a reflection of our insecurity than anything else. It’s all right to dream big, but we have forgotten to keep our feet on the ground. As a concerned Indian, I would like our countrymen to learn by heart this quote from Deng Xiaoping :
“We shall cross the river by feeling the stones.”
@gorki.
Mahindra Satyam is doing quite well. pls check ur facts before a long preachy monotonous diatribe. As far as economics is concerned i am sorry to say India and Pakistan are no match (sorry to hurt your humility). Please check the currency strength for your satisfaction. or may be foreign currency debt ratings. Pakistan is junk grade fyi.
Dear karun
“Please check the currency strength for your satisfaction. or may be foreign currency debt ratings. Pakistan is junk grade fyi….”
Good to hear from you.
I think you too miss the point.
I believe that even though Pakistan is behind India, it is no big deal (and should be of no satisfaction to Indians) who should be looking ahead for the competition and not behind.
)
(Talking of CWG, that is how Milkha Singh lost his shot at an olymplic gold medal in Rome
My concern is not Pakistani failues but Indian complacency that such comparisons risk causing.
I seriously believe we have a shot at greatness but we will have work very hard and be ready to compete (economically, scientifically etc; hopefully not militarily) with only one nation in the next century; China.
To do this we have to shake this provencial mentality of looking at Pakistan and feeling good. Besides, a little humility helps; agree with CM below:
“I feel quite ashamed when I see our countrymen go on bleating such nonsense. Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that humility used to be an essential feature of our civilization make up. In my view, it is more a reflection of our insecurity than anything else. It’s all right to dream big, but we have forgotten to keep our feet on the ground.
If time permist I will add a little bit of my own take on Deng Xiaoping.
Regards.
what humility? sorry its about hunger…its about individual hunger to get ahead, to prosper materially…how does complacency or smugness collectively against a nation come in. when i have to buy a car do i see how much money i have or do i feel smug that i have more money than an average pakistani citizen even though it does not buy me a car. Being rich is being glorious and Indians are realising in droves and hordes.
Karun,
No one is criticizing your hunger to get ahead and buy car or keep mistresses. What I am advocating is doing it a little quietly. We are not there yet when we start chest thumping. It’s much better to ‘talk softly and carry a big stick’ than the other way around, which is what we have been doing.
@CM
“Karun,
No one is criticizing your hunger to get ahead and buy car or keep mistresses. What I am advocating is doing it a little quietly.”
Quietly keeping mistresses should be criticized.
NC,
I agree, though I doubt that would be an issue with Karun Jee. He likes to blow (pun intended) his trumpet.
@ Karun
“what humility?
sorry its about hunger…its about individual hunger to get ahead, to prosper materially…
Being rich is being glorious and Indians are realising in droves and hordes….”
Dear Karun, such hubris may sound very exciting when spoken by fictional characters in the pages of Ayn Rand novels but it can be very destructive when practiced by the elite in emerging nations.
One can even argue that Pakistan’s current credibility problems discussed above had less to do with religion and a lot more with this kind of ‘greed is good’ kind of mentality that you advocate.
India can ill afford such hubris. The reason is that out task of nation building is still far from complete and we are still a very unequal society both in terms of access to resources and the availability of opportunities.
First, the ‘glorious rich’ that you mention are a very small upper crust; certainly in single digits percentage wise and secondly the glorious rich are just as likely to be unscrupulous politicians or dishonest civil servants as industrialist whiz kids.
Let me give you another aspect of the same Badals I mentioned before as one typical example. In the early seventies, papa Badal was known to be a well to do farmer, owning a few hundred acres of land; rich but like thousands of many such people in Punjab. His net worth was perhaps a few lacs rupees then.
Today, by some conservative estimates his net worth is more than 3500 crores. An astonishing increase in forty years, a fact made even more incredible given the fact that during this time by his own admission, no one was available for making a living; papa Badal was busy with the Sikh political struggle and often in and out of jail and sony Badal was away at school in boarding schools in India and USA.
And Badal is considered to be one of the less greedy ones by the political standards!
Now consider the fact that an average driver cum bodyguard employed by the Punjab govt. (that the Badal family treats like a family feifdom) makes around 8-10,000 rupees a month. This driver will have to work for 350,000 years to make the same kind of money honestly.
Also consider the fact that both the CM and his driver are well aware of how the Badals came about the kind of riches that he flouts and yet the driver is expected to lay his life for his boss in case of a terrorist attack!
Now tell me that if even well meaning and educated people like you start openly worshipping such rampant materialism, what will motivate our young men and women to embrace national causes, to join up the nation forces or to go out and provide national service to the underserved?
Who will help fulfill Nehru’s ambition for the service of India’s masses?
I am not a socialist by any stretch, and believe in making a good living but also believe that humility among our more educated and more fortunate countrymen, the ‘elite’ is a tool that can help unify the nation. Not only a lucky few but the average salaried peon, the constable, the bus driver and the school teacher who cannot indulge in such material fantasies can still feel he has a stake in the nation; that stake has to be built around an idea that is far larger than material glitter.
Such ideas have to come from those who are seen as the successful ones and yet retain a classy sense of humility.
Unless we can quickly have enough number of such high minded, successful but modest men and women in highly visible positions we risk becoming not the land from Ayn Rand’s fountainhead but Mobutu’s Zaire or a kleptocracy like Russia.
In this same context it is also very important that we compare ourselves as a nation not with nations in trouble but those that are considered a success. CWG went well in the end; thank God (and perhaps a few good men and women at the 11th hour) but is was a close call; consider that China had finished its preparations for the Olympics and had invited Olympic inspectors weeks ahead of schedule.
That is the country we should try to measure ourselves against.
The Chinese did not get there in one day or motivated purely by selfish reasons.
In 1995 I saw an interview Deng Xiaoping once gave to an American network. Looking for a sound bite, the TV anchor asked him what motivated him to become so great.
He thought for a moment and then slowly recalled his days with fellow Chinese students in 1920’s France. He said that compared to Europe they felt that ‘China was weak; it was their duty to make it strong.’
And that was that!
Each one of us has to decide how our actions and our utterances affect the future of the Republic of India that we love….
Regards.
@ Karun
“Being rich is being glorious and Indians are realising in droves and hordes.”
Yes, eventually you get the same rush for power and pursue it for it’s own sake. There is a certain predictability about it.
Gorki da i hope all the way u knew that this quote was by Deng Xiaoping
“Poverty is not socialism. To be rich is glorious.”
Deng Xiaoping
I am just asking India to follow China. China is far more capitalist than what India is and will be. Infact fortunately democracy keeps an adequate check on the one sided capital aspirations of our country.
If we are talking about corruption, well corruption is as rampant in India as in China as in the west. Captialism/socialism has nothing to do with it. Whether its Badal or a senior politburo member is quite the same thing.
Has the government overachieved in India? certainly not. who says i am praising the government. They have been rather shoddy in whatever basic things were expected out of them including infrastructure, Education, Helathcare bla bla bla.
Infact wherever govt. has excused itself those places have shown real potential and growth. I am saluting the entrepreneurial spirit of the average Indian/common Indian/not so common Indian which has brought us where we are. and Yes we need to give credit where it is due and it includes our millionaires and billionaires.
We need to worship materialism.
For generations and decades we had trapped ourselves in Karmic mumbo jumbo and spirituality which kept us on our hindu rate of growth. The hunger for prosperity in the common man has to be appreciated and congratulated and encouraged. Do you think India can do with French working hours and ethics. Sorry we dont have that luxury.
There is nothing wrong in “if i have i will flaunt”.
The checks and balances will come later. The spiritual restraint will come later. As Deng Xiaoping said.
Let some people get rich first.
btw Gorki
Doesnt boasting/chest thumping/advertising/self congatulation send some good messages to the FDI/FII and improves the investment in the country. Well dont u think we have to market ourselves to attract investments. Isn’t it a part of that exercise.
one more thing ‘comparison is everything’. you are only realtively ‘rich and poor’. I will like India to attain China’s GDP and Korea’s GDP per capita. and comparison evaluation and improvement is certainly reuqired . Whether it elicits comparison with South american block, middle-east or pakistan is a different matter.
Dear Karun:
You again misunderstand me; nobody is against India and Indians getting rich; it is only the obscene display of wealth that I find sickening. On a psychological level, experts agree that it is and a sign of low self esteem.
” I will like India to attain China’s GDP and Korea’s GDP per capita. and comparison evaluation and improvement is certainly reuqired. Whether it elicits comparison with South american block, middle-east or pakistan is a different matter.”
I agree with you here.
Regards.
@Gorki
Are you a Bingo ‘da’ or a Madrasi ‘da’?
Just curious.
@Vajra:
>>Are you a Bingo ‘da’ or a Madrasi ‘da’?
No no, you don’t understand; it is Punjab Da; as in ‘Punjab da puttar…’
Gorki, u are freakin awesome! A lot a middle class indians should learn something from your attitude; the level of hubris and denial exhibited by some of our compatriots can be pretty frustrating. The civility and maturity with which u engage in these conversations, is also something others who frequent this blog would do well to emulate.
Dear mayubelle:
Am really humbled by your compliment; thank you.
Regards