One could opine and muse all day long about the problems in India, particularly when it comes to infrastructure. Let’s face it — India’s infrastructure is a mess. One cannot even classify it as being in disrepair —– because that implies that it worked properly once upon a time. But the problems are and will get better over time. But still, each time I visit India, it’s apparent how chaotic things are here because of it.
“Load shedding” happens frequently. It’s a way of forcing people off the electrical grid when it needs to, well, shed some load. A very small, lightweight storm came through Pune a few days ago. We lost power at the house for a brief period. I lost Blackberry data service for the rest of the evening. It was the sort of storm that would be a blip on the radar in the States in terms of fear of power loss. But small storms can amount to large disruptions here because of the infrastructure.
But, just before the storm was starting to set in, I was wandering around on foot (getting a break from my startup) and realized that democracies are chaotic by definition. Competing interests, capital markets, free flow of information and ideas all have a mysterious way of being chaotic yet somehow manage to work out in seemingly the most challenging situations.
As people continue to describe India as the “counter-weight” to China, I am reminded that infrastructure in Shanghai is brilliant, but at the cost of slave labor, censorship and basic freedoms. Give me poor, ailing infrastructure any day along with the ability to speak my mind, read from the free press, and travel freely —– compared to living under a merciless regime with well paved roads.
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