To The Country, I Love!
as i am nearing towards the beta launch of the first few products that i have been working on for a long while, i thought this might be a good time to share my intentions and motivations for the next 40-50 years or whatever is left of my working life.
there cannot be a better way to start other than by sharing my intentions, my motivations out loud in the most public way possible. because what do i really have to lose anyway. so let’s start with love itself.
love (noun)
- a strong feeling that you have when you like somebody/something very much
a human life in itself is much more like the course of a river than we imagine it to be. a river doesn’t know where she shall originate, the kind of conditions she will have to face, the paths that she will tread or the hills that she will have to rise. irrespective of the hardships, she never forgets her purpose in the world. which is to always give her last drop to the barren lands whose paths she grazed and in the end, meet her end as peacefully as possible.
the river could have originated in the gangetic plains with the best possible climate and plains for a river, or it could have been like the luni river in the thar desert that only exists for a few months in a year. either way, no river has the control of choice to be born where they would want to, or choose the conditions but they fulfill their purpose either way with utmost possible dedication.
this is all that i really have to say to define my love for my country.
if all of us could choose where we were supposed to be born, the entire world would choose europe in its current state because of the best possible working conditions, social security, chill work, majjani life. but we can’t and that’s the whole point.
i was born here. for as far back as i can trace my family’s history, both my parents and their ancestors lived here. there is nothing else i would want to do to give back every last ounce of my wealth, whether physical, financial, emotional or mental to this land and her people, to return the favour this land has done for my family and me for generations. this is all that i really want to do. i don’t seek any favours. i just want to work as hard as possible to turn things around.
i have been brought up and so were my thoughts and opinions about things that i think we ought to change and things we should continue to call our own, our traditions, our languages, our pride of how we once made up over 30% of the world economy and the reasons of our downfall - how we lost it all.
coming back to the point of love, and again based on all that i have learnt while being here so far, is that it is selfless. you never love someone or something rationally. it is never meant to be transactional. it is the only human emotion that cannot be explained in any objective manner to anyone around you. it is one of the only human emotions that pushes to become a little more than yourself. and if and when everything goes right, it is the only emotion that makes your heart smile, and always feels a lot more than just happiness.
what i have also learnt over the years is that respect is always earned. by being great at something. not just good, but by being bloody fucking great.
and here is a simple poem that explains it all: शक्ति और क्षमा / Shakti aur Kshama
to circle back to the biggest problem at hand is that we have lost our ambition, hope, drive, motivation, even arrogance to be the best in the world at anything. we are happy to win our small opinion battles at home or twitter or instagram while being objectively bad at the skills that make you bloody fucking great at anything in the world.
we have become grifters. we have started liking the peace. we have stopped producing. we are nothing more than carriers of different ideas when we need to be producers of original ideas that fit our context and execute on those ideas with the most maniacal urgency possible. we have been as an essay nation for so long that we can write the pros and cons of every single thing in the world, but we now need to stick our head out to create some of those things that people write essays about. we can’t keep complaining about everything when the simplest way to win is to build things that the world wants with some margin over the dimension of quality or cost or both, and continue doing that for a couple of decades. this is our time, our few decades. to take the maximum advantage of the demographic dividend. to make the biggest leap towards being a developed country. and if you ask me what i really want is that we don’t lose this chance.
if at all somebody important reading this can really provide me with anything at all, it is just to reduce the red tape so people who hope and want to build never have to worry about any of it.
i am starting out / starting-up as an almost 29-year-old being nothing. i am just a software engineer who did whatever he could because of being good at math, extreme support from my parents for my health and education that could have easily bankrupted them. received a lot of support from my maternal family for everything, from sponsoring education to buying me my first computer. i treat myself as a nobody because i couldn’t even crack any of the national exams that might have objectively put me ahead of anybody.
so practically, i am starting from scratch, as a nobody, with just my willpower, a lot of love for maths and physics, loads of emotional support from my family, including my wife, and an undying & selfless obsession to do my best to make india what it was always meant to be.
and as the poem that i have attached above says:
सच पूछो, तो शर में ही बसती है दीप्ति विनय की,
सन्धि-वचन संपूज्य उसी का जिसमें शक्ति विजय की।