INDIA- LAND OF TAJ MAHAL and PARADOXES…………

         What is Taj Mahal in the eyes of every Indian and the many tourists’ that come visiting our land? A motif for eternal love? Yes…it is….and I think it has more cameras clicked at it than any other monument on the face of this earth..

    But have we ever seen Taj Mahal beyond it ? think and you would find this famous monument of love is after all a tomb – the place where the beautiful Mumtaz was buried…it is the burial place of the woman who suffered the pain of child-birht 13 times and died in lacerating agony at the 14^th attempt.

     Perhaps that’s why Taj Mahal is an apt choice for symbolizing India on those countless tourists posters – the land of eternal beauty and grandeur amidst suffering and death.

   How easily one forgets that overshadowed by the ever proliferating urbanization , mollification lies the darker side of poverty , unemployment , child labour et al….

     We are a land of paradoxes.how else would you explain our 40 percent illiteracy when our country has educated the worlds second-largest pool of scientists and engineers? A country that has carved out a niche for itself as a leading nuclear power but a large chunk of Indians don’t have access to electricity , clean drinking water and power-cuts are not uncommon?

   We are the proud owners of the weapon called non-violence but our country bathed in blood to gain its independence and even after so many years of Indian independence it is soaked in blood – thanks to the all and sundry manifestations of communalism and obscurantism.

  The hindi film industry ( I hate the word bollywood!) is the largest producer of movies and makes four times as many as Hollywood does but about 150 million in our  country are devoid of the pleasure of seeing them , owing to blindness.

     We are record-holders when it comes to sales of cell-phones but we are record-holders for the highest number of farmer suicides as well.

    And the paradoxes don’t just end here……think about our mr.richie riches (be it mukesh ambani , l.n.mittal or dlf chief k.p.singh) and then think about are  population below the poverty line…..

 Jingoists may boast about are youthful human resource but does that make any less significant the fact that child-labour is still rampant nad government school drop-outs are a frequent.

          So, in our country paradoxes reign.we are replete with instances of despair and yet we have the courage to make big slogans like India rising or India shining.

 A mughal emperor once said “if on earth there be paradise of bliss , it is this, it is this, it is this….”

      Hmmmmmm….our country has its moments of glory but we have to do much more to bring bliss to majority of our countrymen.

 For the beauty of Taj Mahal to be enhanced we have to strive harder and make our country a better place to live in.

    There is no middle-ground. Either India overcomes the challenges and turns its potentialities into outcomes or it goes to pits with our people doing an ostrich and thinking all is hunky-dory.

      The ball, my friends, is in your court………….

p.s- thanks to an editorial by shashi tharoor….it inspired me to write this piece......