Next Twenty Years The People Of India example essay topic

Snakes and Ladders by Gita Mehta is a book that celebrates India and its history. The author provides many short stories that try to show how India is trying to develop as a nation. She tells about the complex religious system, as well as cultural diversity, and the corruption of India's government. She shows the reader many aspects of the experience of living in India, which Mehta clearly shows that she loves, but she attempts to remain neutral about the issues that she discusses. When the Indian nationalists were revolting against the British Empire, it changed the way of life in India.

It let women have a more active role in everyday activities. Mehta's father played a very active role in the revolutions; he used his house as a place for Indian nationalists to hide out for this he was placed in jail for several years. Her uncle was sentenced to seventeen years in a torture camp for different charges. Yet when asked what their worst memory of being under British rule was, they simply provided a simple story with not much significance. Now instead of being under British rule, the India people are under the rule of leaders that view themselves as being the person who drove the British out of India. One thing remains the same though, the people of India view their land as being their own, and that is what is important to them.

One of the major problems facing India is poverty among its people. India is one of the ten most industrialized countries in the world, they graduate around five million people from college each year, and they even have a space program more advanced than most European countries. Yet the people of India are still starving, they do not produce enough jobs for all of the college graduates, and despite the fact that they can travel into space, India has underdeveloped irrigation, and electrical grids. On the outskirts of Delhi, the author found people rummaging through garbage dumps. At first she thought that they were just homeless bums, but when she went into the dumps herself she found out that the people had been of a higher class, but tragedy landed them here. The people in the dumps were women and children searching though the dumps for scraps of iron, glass, or cloth.

They would then sell these items to a contractor for money. The reason that it was primarily women and children was because their fathers and husbands were working construction on a highway being built in Delhi, but eh pay was so little that the rest of the family was forced into working in inhumane conditions to make very little money. When Mehta questioned a Delhi sanitation official about these people, he said that he knows that they are there, but no one really knows how many of them there are, because no one really cares. HE also said that the government wastes more money of advertising about getting rid of the poverty than actually spending the money to create jobs, that will actually have and effect on the poverty.

If one takes a look at India's neighbors they can see the economical success of Malaysia, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia; these countries are referred to as the Southeast Asian Tigers. Mehta then points out that economical India is commonly referred to as a caged tiger. It is hard to figure out how a country can have twenty million millionaires, yet the poor of the country are probably the poorest people in the world, it just doesn't make sense. And in the past fifty years India's prime ministers attempts to get rid of the poverty only push more people into it. India does have one thing going for their economy though; it is proven that democracy works. India is the largest democracy in the world, so it seems that it is only a matter of time before its economy gets on its feet.

One of the major factions of the Indian government was the Indian National Congress Party. For twenty years there had been no rival to the party so its members began to grow greedy, and congressmen found themselves arguing over the spoils of being in office. The way that these politicians remained in power is by practicing what one poet referred to as "Congress Culture". By this he meant that the officials would stay in power by playing off of the fears of the minorities: the lower caste Muslims, the Buddhists, and the Christians. The poet them told Mehta that he had a tattoo of the national flag on his buttocks because, "the constitution was hardly worth wiping the national are with".

During the first half of India's democracy the elected officials primary concern was the welfare of the nation. They used the power of their offices to improve India was a nation. This new un corrupt democracy was about to change when Mrs. Gandhi got rid of elected officials at her pleasure and replaced them with trusted family members and other politicians that were obedient to her. She did this as a security measure to secure her position in government. For the next twenty years the people of India would watch as politicians formed alliances and manipulated government for their own security, which ironically usually ended up in them being killed by their rivals. This turned India from a land of non-violence, into a land of assassins, bombings, bulletproof windows, and armed police.

The criminals that politicians used to secure their positions would soon be in positions of power themselves. Soon caste system would be used against caste system, and religion against religion. The Indian army, the third largest standing army in the world, which is remarkably made up of volunteers would now be used as a political weapon. Because of corruption in government this is what became of Indian democracy.

The question still remains as to what exactly India is though it can not really be defined, Mark Twain, who visited India at the end of the nineteenth century described India as", the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and poverty, and the land all men desire to see". The one thing India definitely is, is a civilization that is constantly changing, and that defies all reason, and is completely unique. I think that Gita Mehta's book Snakes and Ladders is a very good book that provides an interesting view of India. Though the many short stories the author shows just how diverse and complex India is as a nation. Though India is in a state of poverty now, it is just a child in terms of a nation and it will eventually blossom into one of the world's dominant superpowers.