First World, Third World

The Spectator

I don't know what this makes me, but my response to Air India's double flight disaster on Monday is not the general outpouring of shock horror — but — given its ancient fleet, its outdated infrastructure and its declining morale — a feeling that we should count ourselves lucky that there aren’t many more accidents every day.

Hundreds of Air India flights take off daily. Flights that are subject to universal Indian conditions of poor resources, corruption, archaic labour laws, and inefficiency; and instead of railing against Monday’s failures, we should be grateful that mistakes aren’t more frequent. Or should we?

At government offices, faced with mountains of dusty files, slow-moving fans and officers, I find myself not so much angry at the stupor — as admiring that any thing gets done, any file gets found, any records get retrieved at all.

At film studios, peering above at the sight of dozens of spot boys balanced precariously on planks, handling dangerous electric objects, I am constantly amazed that there are not more mishaps.

In railway stations, observing sleepy offices, moribund machinery and woefully underpaid staff, I marvel at the fact that more catastrophes don’t occur.

In our woefully under-equipped public hospitals, I find myself in awe of and sympathising with the overworked doctors not criticising them.

In our dilapidated and shabby courtrooms, I am amazed that any business gets transacted at all.

I suspect that this approach of constantly seeing the cup half full makes me not so much an optimist — as much as a defeatist, for isn’t it nothing but a defeatist’s attitude that accepts, understands and empathises with failure, rather than challenges and fights it?

This question continently perturbs me: were the commuters who went back to travelling by local trains the next morning after last year’s bomb blasts optimists or defeatists?

Did they go back confident that nothing or no one could stop them — or just resigned to the fact that since there was no other means of travel and no end to the terrorist’s reach, they might as well accept whatever fate held for them?

The more I think about it, mine is what is called a Third World approach to life: acceptance and accommodation of failure, a shrug, a sigh, a justification, and a moving on.

Fortunately for us, in the last ten years, there has been a reversal of this approach. And never has it been as apparent as in the field of IT. Today, in our country there exists an army of young men and women who expect things to be perfect: machines to work, employees to strive for excellence and infrastructure to be of the highest global standard.

Today, I can call a computer engineer in to fix a glitch and both he and I know that we will be satisfied with nothing less than a perfectly functioning machine.

And mercifully for everyone of us acutely aware of how over-populated, backward and resource — strapped we are as a nation, and who accept and accommodate failure as a consequence, with our Third World approach, there are today, enough First World-ers amongst us who will demand nothing short of perfection.

And progress happens when the First World-ers prevail.

s_malavika@dnaindia.net