the simple indian life (sun)

Blame it on Indira Gandhi.

That’s the message I got after reading today’s Sunday Times article.

On the plane to India.

According to the writer, it was Gandhi’s dishonest dealings that “stymied a huge country of great human capital and vast natural resources from becoming a genuine economic superpower.”

Gandhi’s corrupt ways started a cycle in which:

“every official - from the lowliest of peons to Cabinet ministers - began demanding their share. To submit a file to a ministry in order to set up, say, a shoe factory, you had to give baksheesh to the peon so that he could relay it to the clerk who registered that file. The clerk had to be paid to move the file to his supervisor and so on”

I will not comment on this until I do more research but here’s something interesting.

After I touched down, we went to rent some camera and lights. And so we found this guy who had a camera available for rental.

But he doesn’t have a tripod.

Apparently, he’s got to get it from his brother.

And he doesn’t have a lighting kit, so we went somewhere to see some friends of his.

We liked what we saw but he couldn’t get us the price because those friends of his needed to check with their brother.

Or brothers.

I heard another story of a cameraman who wanted to rent a light in India. But the guy who owned the light didn’t have the barndoor that usually comes with it.

Guess what?

He had to get the barndoor from his brother.

And that’s not the punch line.

The barndoor didn’t even fit the light.

(If you don’t know how this is like, imagine this. You want to rent a computer. The guy who owns the CPU needs to get the monitor from a brother. The mouse from another brother. And the keyboard from another brother. And to top it off, the mouse is the wrong sort that doesn’t connect to this CPU)

How all this relates to the Sunday Times article, I don’t know.

I just know that the sisters here are missing all the action.