Go India, Go...

Manmohan Singh landed in Washington today, receiving a royal welcome the US today reserves for only a handful of world leaders. In the course of just 15 years India has graduated from being labelled pretenders,pharisees and inconsequential as a result of our dalliance with non-alignment to occupying a place of prestige and respect from world leaders all over despite no significant change in our opinions. The only difference is today we are an economic power. Just think abt it...the scientist who pioneered India's defense and nuclear research and the economist who architected India's face changing reforms is our president and premier.

Today its just not economics that draws the US closer to India. The US is slipping as a super-power...the first battle it lost was failing to rein in its multi-national conglomerates which moved to china to further their profits though the selling market was still the US....today what China did to US in the manufacturing sector India has become the hot destination for all these same MNC's, albeit in the IT and services sector. Soon more Indians rather than Americans will work in IBM and GE, for long symbols of overwhelming american economic supremacy. America's trade deficit with China has ballooned to the extent they have postponed repayment by dangling securities at the chinks who slowly but steadily have started acquiring companies in the us heartland...recently they topped the bids for a california based oil company and brazenly declared their intention of exporting the american gas to China while gas prices shoot over the roof in petrol-hungry Cal.

Bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, stumbling with the domestic economy, allies from the cold-war NATO era who have lost their bite and influence in global forums, an increasingly powerful China which went to the extent of ordering the US to cut down its fiscal deficit America's vision of a long-term unipolar world doesnt look feasible anymore. I expect any day now to see China and the US clashing headlong on some economic, political, military or diplomatic issue to signal the start of the next cold war. Then it will be neither the NATO, nor the EU...that will play centerstage....but a strong, economically and democratically vibrant neighbor to China called India will be the swing state...whoever we take sides with will win...for sure. Of course the danger to us is within...one such called CPM which even collected money for their chinese brethren during the 1962 Sino-Indian War...and who brazenly accuses Manmohan of selling Indian interests...and its a pity God's Own Country send 19 MP's to parliament to work against Mother India!!!

Indian diplomacy turned the tide in 1998 following Vajpayee's bold conduction of the Pokharan blasts and came of age by the outright rejection of foriegn aid in last years Tsunami. No more a developing country, no more a Third World Country...I find the phrase, "the other Asian Power" being used continually to refer to us here in newspapers and television...I think its just a matter of time before we get addressed as a world power...the permanent Security Council seat we now ask for will soon come seeking us...if it doesnt let us dismiss the United Nations as a forum of imperialists who lost their teeth a long time back. As for our friendly neigbour, Pakistan - they seem to have lost their zest to keep pace with us...having failed on the battlegrounds they lost another fight in the warzone of the future when their bpo firms mainly call centers suffered indescribably from a two-day telecommunications failure...they will become a power too...as the epicenter of world terrorism...a failed state ruled by a federation of militant organizations and self-styled mullahs...who will export labor(read terrorists) to other countries...blast a few bombs here and there...and maybe scare a few innocent people for a few days! Let us travel more on our buses and trains and bikes rather than our cars...importing oil is killing all the benefits we reap elsewhere...let us educate all our kids and in a better way...let us forget our fascination with our religions and castes...let us preserve our trees, water and our air for future generations...for India, greatness is ours for the taking...we are right there people...we are almost there...may god and good reason go with us...so that we get brilliant and upright men for our leaders, for an economy that will only keep growing and growing and most importantly for a people who will ask what they can do for the country and not what the country can do for them!