Another hired troll columnist of Outlook does
her routine about trashing the positive developments that
have taken place in India in the recent years. She says there’s nothing to feel
good about the "feel good" factors in India. Instead, she wants us to
concentrate on the filth, muck, and all negative aspects of the country, and
how, compared to that these positive developments are nothing. This reminds me
of the classic Praful Bidwai Cyber
Coolie litter article.

This extract clearly depicts her attitude: 

If we are all badly off, we can all live with it. But if a section of society is lording it over, making money in heaps, revelling in all the good things of life, while the rest cannot, then the rest will not rest.

If anything, the Indian IT Prowess has brought a huge amount of untapped
talent to the fore. I’ve been in the industry for more than 5 years and I see
people from rural (read: not urbane, sophisticated, or can’t-speak-good-English
types) backgrounds carving niches for themselves in their respective domains.
These people, mainly educated in regional language mediums are now leading lives
that their fathers could not even fantasize about; the whole credit goes to
their talent. willingness to learn and adapt, among other things. And all this
has happened in how many years? And why is Ms.Pratap blind to this aspect?
Ignorance? Hardly. She compulsively wants all of us to revel equally in poverty,
lolling in our collective miseries like our earlier generation did, till the
late ’80s.

"Lording over," "making money in heaps," –sorry madam,
but this is untrue. The current democratic India, at least the "feel
good" class which she speaks about slogs its ass off and is rewarded fairly
justly. This class invests gigantic amounts of its brain power and fuels our
booming economy. The "Lording over" days were when a handful of
corrupt politicians and bureaucrats held the entire country at ransom (they
still do to a great extent), while the middle class was content with a clerical
job at a PSU or a Governmental organization or a nationalized bank: they didn’t
have other options, you see–they couldn’t venture out to invest thanks to the
draconian Licence Raj.

The feel good doesn’t end at IT alone–read
Arun Shourie’s three-part series in the Indian Express for
a more comprehensive list of India’s surge in various sectors:
manufacturing/automobile, pharmaceutical, and chemicals to name three. Ms.
Pratap is known to be a writer with left leanings, and like her Red Brethren,
she doesn’t tolerate any positive development made by a nation. She typically
rattles off, taking the usual route of caste, communal and regional flare ups,
poverty, illiteracy and other negatives as if these are the only things that we
need to recognize, while she presents no logic for her case, and worse, presents
no solutions. For one, you cannot make miracles overnight. Two, it is extremely
difficult to straighten out a 40+ year old mess. Three, India has achieved more
in the last 4 years than any "development" over the past 40. Four,
negativist focussing will only breed more negativity. Five, the mess she is
asking us not to ignore has been created in the first place by successive
Congress governments. Six, when you have a government that tries to improve
things, you get pontifications of this nature. Seven and last, the "feel
good" factor is pulsating throughout India, it’s there in the atmosphere,
and if we are able to sustain it, it’ll spread to the
"lower/poor/wretched" classes that Ms. Pratap speaks about.

By the way, the timing of this trash article intrigues me: it has arrived in
the wake of the Congress’ defeat in three states in the recent Assembly
elections. 

Coincidence?