Dipdyuti's Blog 2017

The smiles, the tears,  Of boyhood’s years,  The words of love then spoken;  The eyes that shone,  Now dimm’d and gone,  The cheerful hearts now broken!  My mother lost her father when she was 6 years old. However, the extended family took care of her and her siblings. She took the names of certain uncles and aunts with a lot of love and respect. She told me that poverty of love is the biggest poverty and luckily she never had to face poverty of love. The old couple in the picture is Late Dr. Haranath Hazarika (Koka) and the Late Smti Swarnaprava Hazarika (Aita). Aita is my own grandmother’s younger sister. This couple was very close to my mother and her family and took great care of them. My mother used to say that as she grew, Aita in addition to being a senior Aunt was also a friend and mentor who guided her and taught her a lot of things that a girl growing up in olden times needed to know. Koka was the most handsome man in...

(This is an extreme example of my interactions in that place. All people were not like this. Please do not generalize) To understand the economics of a big country like India – you need to go to the grassroots and study things minutely. The macro level picture which we study in boardrooms with powerpoint presentations and excel sheets can never give us a feel of the ground reality. As I present my next posting on this subject, I have to admit that a solution to the real-life issue presented here eludes me. In the area allocated to me, there are a few forest villages. The geographical area stretches into Bhutan. The international border is at a distance of 10 Kilometers from this village. Only one house seemed inhabited in the village we went to. Rest of the houses in that cluster were empty. Maybe the people had gone to the church. As I walked into the sparse courtyard our LPG Distributor Mr. Dinendra Narzary said, “I will talk but you please stay with me”. T...

Behind every development statistics, there is a human story. My last post on this topic was liked by so many because I showed the human side of this exercise. Today I plan to discuss some broader issues with this exercise. India as a country experimented with both socialism and capitalism. There were positive and negative points with both these systems. The basic problem with socialism was that it curbed human initiative and the growth rate of a country suffers. People work, not for patriotic feelings, but for self-growth. When socialism takes from the successful and gives to the “Have-nots” it creates a lack of interest among the capable people to work. As such individual enterprise suffers and subsequently the growth that a country could have achieved. Capitalism, on the other hand, encourages individual initiative but it creates a massive disparity between the rich and the poor. This disparity results in social upheavals and violent revolutions. It is not that the ...