Feel Good Syndrome

I remember Mr. P. Chidambram’s statement; then finance minister immediately after the debacle of Lehman Brothers and US market collapse. He said that India is decoupled and isolated from the recession fear in US and global financial crisis, our economic will still grow at the rate of about 9%,we have our fundamentals intact and so on so forth. But we all have witnessed what happened thereafter. Indices have gone down almost by 100 %. We started the feeling the heat, slow down in industrial output, job market going down, retrenchment news started coming from different industry, talk about small industry getting into trouble, liquidity crunch. We have hardly heard any good news in the last three to four months on economy front. Was this impact not anticipated? Or it is just the feel good syndrome that we Indian have always been suffering. Even today when we listen to the experts they all still talk about the situation being better than others around the world.

We are a great country; we are a nation with great talent, great culture, great values and great history there are no two things about it. But if something is good that needs to be appraised by others; in our case we only blow our trumpet. My view may sound pessimistic but I think that there is a need to think about it. The above mentioned incidence is not an isolated case. Even recently when Satyam scam came in light, we passed immediate judgment that this is just an isolated case and then followed the news of five IT majors blacklisted by world bank. In the past also an incumbent government lost an election due to the same feel good syndrome. After Mumbai terror attacks, there were talks about resilience of people of Mumbai. We are forgetting the fact that Mumbaikar today is not resilient by choice but by force. For a Mumbaikar it is question of his bread and butter. Same is true about other terror attacks in the last two decades or so, most of the time we see that there is system failure but we are still not ready to accept that there is something wrong in the intelligence information gathering or communication between various security agencies.

I think it is good to be optimistic and we must be proud of our strengths, at the same time we need to learn to accept facts. There are lots of things that we are not good at, lot of things we need to improve. That is only possible when we start accepting things as it is and act accordingly in the best interest of the nation. If we do so the whole world will look at us as a great nation and we do not need to blow our trumpet. Let us get out this feel good syndrome.