On 04-Jul-06, at 4:41 PM, Mahesh Murthy wrote:
1. I'm not sure who the "everyone" is who advised you Kiran against
drinking
the local water. My family (and about 5 million other families)
have managed
very well thank you without resorting to Bisleri in our taps.
Um, many of them do die of cholera, hepatitis, etc.
Forget "drinking water" though, in most parts of the country the
state isn't even
able to provide a "dirty water" supply with any regularity!
a stomach-filling, healthy snack (20 million people don't get ill
on it)
I do remember some truly amazing street-side kebab stands (all
private and
totally unregulated, of-course) from when I lived there for a bit.
Didn't get ill myself,
but I do suspect the overall statistics aren't going to be very
pretty. Reputations
and the market do work fairly well in this sphere, though.
I'd definitely agree with you that Bangalore sucks even more than
Bombay, and
is far more overhyped (though Bombay has more than its own fair share
of that).
doesn't. Bangalore or Chennai don't have 20,000 people a day
streaming into
the city to try their livelihood and hopefully make their millions
in this
bastion of capitalism.
While it's no "bastion of capitalism", it is quite definitely the
most capitalist
place in India, quantitatively speaking, and a place where you can
feel some
of the excitement and buzz of capitalism.
If you can "see the matrix", however, you can see very clearly that
capitalism
in Bombay (as elsewhere in India) is severely hobbled and crippled.
10. Yes, the city alone pays 42% of the country's income tax
"You are a slave, Neo".
but only 2% of the country's tax revenues come back to the city to
help build it.
Sounds like a prime candidate for secession. Then it could maybe even
become
a real bastion of capitalism, much more prosperous, and really a
world-class city.
So if
other cities and states feel good about their infra, perhaps they
could doff
a hat to who got conned into paying for it so far.
"Conned" is a polite euphemism for this kind of blatant highway
robbery. And no,
don't expect any gratitude, for that is not in the nature of
parasites. Expect only
ever-increasing demands and claims on your blood.
Best to pull the leech off before it kills the host.
11. We're wising up to this now and we've got more money now and
stuff's
getting done (like it always does in Bombay - politics or not,
stuff gets
done) and some bridges, some flyovers, some rail tracks are being
built.
It's too little, yes. But not too late.
Of-course, this is ridiculously little given how much you're paying
(or more
accurately, being extorted) for that infrastructure, and it is quite
definitely too
late for all the millions whose lives have already been spent in
conditions of
squalor and repression that defy description, for no reason other
than to
satisfy the irrational and arrogant whims of a totalitarian regime.
Bombay is India's Hollywood, India's Wall Street, India's Fleet
Street,
India's Madison Avenue and arguably India's Silicon Valley all in
one city -
a feat no other city in the world matches.
Uh, that's only because more economically free countries have plenty of
thriving cities, not just one battered, half-dissolved excuse for a
city.
This only points at the poverty and brokenness of India, rather than
implying
that Bombay is in any way better than (or even up to par with) other
world
cities.
Cheers
#!
