India so Tedious and Frustrating

Rahul Gandhi has become an object of widespread criticism and mockery, and has been so for a while. And yet, he continues to stay on. And his party continues to be sycophant to the Gandhi family like before, and there is no visible change the way the Congress party works. Probably the old members of the party neither know any other way of working nor are capable of adapting and changing with the changing times, since they've learned and perfected their traits over many decades, and had once believed them to be the winning formula, and the challenges that have emerged now were unforeseen.

Let the Congress go to hell. Why should I care. We now have alternatives that seem to make better sense and seem to stand for real ideologies aimed at improving lives of common people. I want to vote for AAP, and have initiated trying to register into a voter list in Mumbai, to which I recently migrated.

Which reminds me - systems and processes for some of the most basic things in India are so complex, I find it frustrating and surprising.
A few examples:

1. Getting yourself registered in a voter list to be able to cast your vote. You are highly unlikely to be able to vote if you move around within the country very often. Remember, we are a democracy. Yet we've made it too difficult for our citizens to vote. Please don't expect each individual, especially one 18 year old or from early voting age population, to be such a strong believer in the power of his vote that he will take pains beyond a certain extent to get himself registered. Rather give him a chance to try democracy like a lot of other things the 18 year old experiment with, and create transparent and responsive systems to demonstrate the effectiveness of democracy and generate that belief in the model. We expect people to believe in flawed instances of great theoretical models like they are Hindu gods and goddesses. With that we can only end up creating temples that need dakshina for pujaari in the name of God. As this analogy struck me, I could see so clearly why bribes don't seem so terribly criminal to most of us Indians.

2. Getting a passport. Besides issues like having to pay bribes for getting police verification cleared (I had to pay Rs 2000/- last year), and many more stupid stuff, the whole deal is so tied to having an address where one has stayed for quite some time. It's all quite messy if one hasn't. Lot of people prefer giving false clean info rather than honest true info that's more a messy reality of the contemporary times but an abnormality 50 years ago. May be not. May be the rules were intentionally made absurd in the first place.

3. Vehicle registration. All vehicles are tied to a State. You move out, your vehicle doesn't belong there. And past 6 years, I've lived in 3 states, and this is not a lot of movement in the current times. And getting the vehicle registered in a 'foreign' Indian State, or at least payment of the road tax there, cannot happen without paying a huge bribe. Without getting into a lot of details, let me say it's insane. Thank God our driving licenses are nationally valid. But getting one without a bribe is another battle many don't want to fight.

4. Marriage registration. I'm yet to get married and attempt a registration, but from what I hear from everybody, this can get terribly complex and tedious. I guess bribes can get it done a bit faster. Given that marriage registration is legally compulsory in India, this should have been a simple thing to do, so that people happily adhere to the law, not get beaten down trying to follow it.

May be old ways of doing things. May be systems designed for corruption by the corrupt and powerful. But these and a lot of other things like these are because of which we Indians find it hard to comply with rules, adhere to legal requirements, participate in building the nation, and be proud of who and where we are.

Randomness of Change

One of the main tenets of modern capitalist philosophy is to let every person seek his own gains and rest assured that the whole human civilization will progress as a result. While this may be true in aggregate and average terms, there are two levels where it needs to be analyzed whether we make real progress and not aggregate material progress alone. One, is the attainment of psychological satisfaction which includes emotional and intellectual well being. In other words, the level of happiness, both at aggregate and individual levels. Two, is the nature of the competition between individuals and the human values manifested in human interactions on the ground. Since humans are such emotional species, it is necessary that human happiness and feeling of satisfaction be accounted for into economics and we have more civilized economic models.

Of course it is easier said than done. And besides, the economically powerful, sitting at the peaks of current hierarchies as defined by current models exercise all their powers to keep things in ways that best serve them. And the poor, unhappy masses are still incapable of taking them out. Coz democracy in real world is the weakest approach of extracting what one wants from the system. We've seen it fill Indian political system with criminals whom nobody likes, yet we elect them through democratic election process, where candidates get elected through simple majority albeit by getting small percentage of votes coz there are so many parties contesting, and then we have an absolute majority group of such minority voted elected representatives together forming the government, where the very reason most guys from that group get together is just so that they get to be part of the government and share the loot that's the implicit purpose of forming governments in India.

I don't know how things will change in India and elsewhere - of course different problems with different intensities in different places, mostly coz of the differences in respective prevalent cultures that define the way people think and behave. And India is doing terribly. I often conclude, although with lot of reluctance and embarrassment, that our culture sucks, specifically the cultural elements that matter most in our lives. Of course we have great temples, music, dance and cuisine, but in terms of human values, we are terrible. Aspects of culture which define how we treat each other are more important than art forms and food. And it's these cultural aspects which set the context for people with certain traits and engaging in certain kinds of actions to rise to seats of power. And it's the powerful that choose what's to be done from the options that they have. Sometimes it's with the consensus with the other powerful guys, so as to ensure the cartel is safe. By peaceful means, the common man can just make some noise and hope to be heard. By aggressive means, violent or non-violent, the common man can replace the cartel with some other cartel and hope it works for his interests. But in a society that is defined by certain values, power just differentiates between the haves and have-nots. Once a have-not becomes a have, he'll become who he always hated when he was a have-not.

Therefore, we are talking about cultural transformation. Which is impossible in the short term. And in the long term, it is impossible to transform culture in a specific direction one wants. And who is that one anyway? It is random, chaotic, yet evolving. So little, local disruptions are all one can create and hope that things fall in place in the long broad term to lead to change that one had strived for in his small lifetime and which was carried forward by other small disruptions which may or may not have culminated into large revolutions.

I could not reach a definite conclusion on how our models can be transformed to achieve what is best for the human kind. I think that is because it is not totally in our hands. We can only demand for it, may be mobilize people and resources too, and create minor local short-term impact, be optimistic that many more would see value in it and strive for similar change after our lifetime, and hope that in a few hundred years things would be different.

But that leaves me with another question - what is the incentive for a human being to strive for change of such nature which he would not experience or benefit from in his own lifetime? Why should someone screw his own life to achieve something for future generations? There are many who seem to have done that. But it's also possible that they were actually not screwing their lives but were enjoying what they were doing, and that drove them to it, and the long-term future-generations impact was not really a driving force. Or another possibility is the hope that things will change sooner than they do, the stupid mind hoping against hope. Or yet another possibility is the foolish belief that one is going to live forever. And then, there might be other guys working equally hard for another change that might be totally contradictory or nullifying what one is fighting for. Well, humans are crazy! We end up having something we never imagined and imagining something we'd never have...

Note: Masculine forms like he, his, guys, etc. have been used just for ease of writing. They apply to both men and women, without meaning any difference whatsoever.