Random Thoughts

For the first time since I landed in the US, I felt the chill – in more than more sense of the word. It is very cold here these days.

Ravi and I were driving around Austin – he was showing me places that he had stayed in while he was here. Suddenly a thought struck me – what is the fundamental difference between India and the US that US is considered a first world country, and India still a developing country. Why don’t we have the infrastructure as the US? Why are there more innovations here than in India (infact the rest of the world put together)?

Some of the common reasons given are:

1. ‘US is a young country… it had the benefit of starting on a clean slate’.
So is India? We gained independence only about 60 years back. Why couldn’t we move along as the US did some 100 years back? There are reasons like population, mindset, political will etc. etc. My question is a more fundamental one. There are humans here, and humans there. Why the disparity? It is not that some other specie lives here… it is all humans… and no animal has ever built a city! What distinguishes humans from animals is intelligence. What was it about the humans in this geography that they could make such a planned country – and make life such comfortable for everyone? No one will ever buy the argument that humans on this geography are more intelligent that the ones there – for that matter that humans here are superior to the ones there in any respect.

2. ‘We have a long history, and have been carrying a lot of legacy… which makes it difficult to implement anything’.
The example that comes to my mind is Greece – it is just as old (ok, somewhere close). And from what I gathered about Greece from the airport, and looking down from the airplane… it is no less than any developed country.

3. ‘We have so many people…’
I don’t buy the argument about the large population. More humans = more intelligence = more innovation = much more developed country. I strongly believe that a random sample of humans at any particular geography is representative of the intelligence of the species… infact, it should be a representative sample of average level of all skills. Environment determines the dominance of one attribute over the other… but really, most of the difference between the US and India is stuff that humans have created. Nature is just the same.

Even as we realize it now, that we need the basic infrastructure (soft and hard), what prevents us from going and getting it done? It may be said that we don’t have that kind of land to build as huge roads… but then that is a constraint that we need to work under… and innovate around it.

These thoughts beat me… I fail to understand.

What really bothers me is that at this point in time in life, I am exactly like India was in 1947 – at a decision node. Life is like a binary tree. At every point in time we are at a decision node. The decision that we take here will determine where we end up.

I don’t want to be looking back at my life some 50 years down the line and start asking… where did I go wrong? The silver lining is that every moment in life can be made a decision node. Waiting for a decision node to happen doesn’t take us anywhere…we are leaving too much to chance!!