The Vajra Parrot Squawks!

We've all seen the pictures in the media and heard the collective British sigh of disapproval at the sight of paw prints on mattresses, filthy bathrooms and typically Indian shambolic attempts at organisation that have dogged the 2010 Commonwealth event in Delhi.

I confess, I too let out a very British sigh when I experienced first-hand the disaster which is the metro system: 40 minutes' aimless queueing followed by the ticket booths' running out of paper.

But should we really be surprised at these things?

It's too easy - and I fall into this trap often - to get angry and/or condescending about India and its seemingly febrile attempts to 'develop'. However, our reactions are conditioned by our own experience and chock-full of expectations arising from the manner in which we are accustomed to live. We don't expect, for example, to slip a policeman some cash to preempt his turning a blind eye to our crime. We expect trains and buses to run to some sort of timetable, rubbish to be collected from the streets, people to form orderly queues, blah blah blah.... These expectations, however, are not necessarily shared by those from other countries and cultures, where life is a daily battle for survival or, at best, a daily battle just to get the simplest of things done.

The intellectual/mercantile/political elites in India are so desperate to move forward and embrace 'Western' civilisation (one has only to watch the interminable and slightly wistful Nestcafe ad remakes on TV over here to gain some level of insight) that they plough forward boldly without any real sense of the reality of the country's situation or what can actually be achieved by these grand plans.

Crucially, they fail to understand that their dream will only ever be a pipe dream, or at best some kind of Western-parody, if, in their rush forwards, they don't address the issues that must precede such progress and take a step backwards to rectify them.

Poverty and a lack of concern for others cripple this country. An endemic and sickening culture of corruption, symptomatic of this, begins in the very highest strata of society and filters down through the ranks until nothing is left to be grabbed and ... surprise surprise ... there's not enough money left to complete development projects correctly. Then metro lines collapse, bridges fall down, athletes' villages are left to rabid dogs and pythons, etc. And we in the West shake our heads and tut to ourselves about these useless Indians.

In a sense they are useless - I mean the legislators, the policy makers, the politicians - because they just don't comprehend that there's no point trying to pretty up the front of your house when your back yard is full of shit and starving people; also there's little virtue in aping a Western culture that, itself, is full of absurdity and injustice and corruption and is fast becoming an unsustainable source of misery to millions.

India historically was one of the birthplaces of high culture and civilisation. It would be refreshing for this country to give birth to it again and maybe become a world-leader that the West could learn from.