imagination dead imagine

So today one satelite launch went awry. It went up with aplomb but then somethings happened to its strap-on boosters and it came down in the flames, to be doused by the greenish-blue waters of the Bay of Bengal. In the past two days, this is the second time, that an Indian dream flight has refused to reach its destination.

This is very true of the country itself, of its people and of its history. We just refuse to fly-high as a nation. We test-fired Agni-III, which was supposed to clear out the Chinese cities like Beijing and Shanghai, instead it returned back after covering just one-third of the distance. Our Defence Minister said that it was only a minor mishap and we must learn from our mistakes and move on towards better things. Move on. Yes, move on. We must learn to move on in the peak hour traffic. We must learn to move on in the endless queues. We must learn to move on when we see someone dying on the road. We must learn to move on after killing exotic animals. We must move on with our lives when communities kill each other. We all have learned to move on.

This satelite INSAT - 4C, was supposed to boost India’s space ambitions. It was to take us into new levels of communication. Communication so that we can call our loved ones only to be disconnected because of network congestion. Communication so that just when we are about to write ‘i love you’ to a person, the internet goes off.

Things never work out the way we want them to. But still we keep trying because we have heard the spider’s tale. In our country everything keeps going wrong but our economy is still going strong. The stock market swings everyday but the fundamentals are right. We discriminate on any basis that we can but our motto remains ‘unity in diversity’. We may have the rudest city to boast of but we never fail to offer a glass of water to the plumber. We may have the worst levels of corruption but we have ‘right to information’. We may have all the criminals in the politics but we have democracy.

We may lack in flight but we have dreams to make it big.

This entry was posted by Ishan Dubey on Monday, July 10th, 2006 at 11:30 pm. It is filed under Ishan Dubey, Non-fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.