Before making any comments on the article myself, I should first like to ask the rediff messageboard managers to screen the rejoinders to eliminate the illiterate, stupid and uncouth. Unless I am much mistaken, the author is male, not a 'she'; he is an elderly and educated man, a well-regarded and highly placed journalist, one-time editor of The Statesman. I do not think the writers of the first three messages are in ANY sense qualified to sneer at him; and anyway, are crudeness and rudeness ever justified? - now, what I believe Mr. Datta-Ray was trying to say was 1) it is both wrong and foolish for us (chiefly middle class) Indians to get hyper-excited about relatively small achievements, 2) we ought to reflect upon the costs of the said achievements borne by the society and polity at large, 3) we shall go nowhere until we get rid of our gigantic inferiority complex, which makes us go gaga over little patronizing pats on the back that sahibs from more advanced countries occasionally give us, usually to serve their own interests, 4)there is far too much that is wrong with India to preen over those relatively small achievements under discussion, 5) as long as we routinely rank among the lowest countries in the world in terms of overall human development, nobody will acknowledge us as either a developed or a significant country, 6) 50 million well-off Indians cannot make a rosy future for themselves in isolation while carrying a deadload of 300 million plus desperately poor on their backs, 7) no development is genuine and sustainable if it hurts the mass of the poor in favour of a tiny minority of the already rich. - Mr. Datta Ray was neither criticising the Tatas and similar recent achievers nor suggesting that all their work be stopped and annulled: all he was suggesting (as someone called Gandhi suggested long ago - remember the name?) was that we never lose sight of the harsh and dangerous ground realities. By hyperreacting, and that too in a most vulgar and uninformed way, the respondents have only strengthened Mr. Datta-Ray's case! - and, for the information of those respondents, I have never personally met Mr. Datta-Ray, though I have read a lot of his writing over the last ten years.
