Answering why I call India the greatest ‘wannabe’ nation: Part 3 - Sports

Happy Diwali friends. Time to celebrate and make merry. So having refreshed myself with a fun weekend full of food and friends, it's time to be back with the Part 3. And this time it indeed is Sports.

Part 3 - Sports

India is a sports loving country. No one can take that away from us. We love Cricket and mmmm...well...ok that's it then. We love cricket and only cricket, period. A country of 1.2 billion loves cricket and there is no harm in being a cricket crazy nation. It hasn't done us any harm in loving that sport. Until recently, we were the only country to have won all the International Cricket Council (ICC) hosted tournaments. The West Indies joined us in the same league by winning the World T20 earlier this year. We are behind Australia in terms of winning the ODI World Cup and at par with the West Indies with 2 victories. In 2010-2011, we were briefly the world's top ranked Test team. And to top it all, the world's best batsman and a legend of the sport who pretty much holds all the records that a cricket batsman can hold was born on our soil and has played for the tricolor for the past 23 years. The indomitable, Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. So, we cannot complain. Cricket has given this country all it could and all it deserves. There are many areas where we can improve but let's not get drawn into a cricket discussion here since though in India Cricket = Sports but in the world scenario, cricket is not even a Olympic sport.

So where are we in Sports, as the world knows it i.e. Well, lets begin with recent memory and an article written on The Guardian's website here in the UK raged me enough to do so. India finished a paltry 55th on the medals tally in the recently concluded Summer Olympics here in London and this was it's best ever performance with 6 medals - 2 silvers and 4 bronzes. How have we done previously then? In all the 26 summer games before the one in London, India has so far manged to win a paltry 20 medals - 9 Golds (8 of which were for Hockey) 4 Silvers and 7 Bronzes. Now, in terms of our population where are we compared to China, United States and Brazil.

	Overall Medals	London 2012
China*	473	88
United States	2400	104
Brazil	108	22
India	26	6

* China only participated regularly from the 1984 Los Angles Games onwards

Does that look good? No way. Helen Pidd, the writer of the Guardian's article is right in quoting us as habitual under-achievers. We certainly seem to be more than satisfied with mediocrity. Why else would we be happy with these stats. And though we are mighty proud of what we have achieved in Cricket all these years, we can't limit our glory to just that one sport. 

I was left wondering what other sports have India produced world champions in except Cricket and Hockey. I mean we definitely do have the talent in other sports as well, since the likes of Vishwanathan Anand, Saina Nehwal, Geet Sethi, Pankaj Advani, Leander Paes, Mahesh Bhupathi, Abhinav Bindra, Mary Kom etc grabs our attention every now and then. So, we definitely do have champion sports-persons in many sporting disciplines. But the problem is that we do not have very many of them in each of these disciplines. It's true that some sportspersons are just born to excel in their field of sports. I mean you will always have a Maradona and a Messi, a Bradman and a Tendulkar or a Federer, Sampras and a Navratilova but that's only a very few. Champions are not born champions, they are made out of sweat, hardwork and most importantly ambition. There are tremendous athletes in our country but there still isn't the same zeal and enthusiasm that cricket has achieved and thus the drive to excel in their respective sporting disciplines are not very high. This is because of the money that a cricketer earns these days. If we can bring even a quarter of that income for say a Chess, Badminton, Football, Hockey, Tennis, Athletics, Boxing or Wrestling then the attraction for young talented sports persons to get into and excel in these sports would increase. For most non-cricketing athletes coming from lesser financial backgrounds, sports is just a medium to get a secured employment with their state government or with the central government.

Digging deep into this, it's more evident that we have an bigger issue and that is with the culture of sports in this country. It is not a professional option to be a sportsperson in our nation. A young teenager excelling in a sport is often ridiculed by his/her folks and is discouraged to continue with it since that not only lessens their opportunities to shine in academics but also brings an extra financial burden on the family to sustain it. The answers to these issues does take me back to my previous posts on Economy and Infrastructure. And more simply in a country with 32.7% of the population living below the poverty line and 39% without access to primary education, how can one expect that the numbers in the vast population will directly multiply our sporting proficiency. 

But then the bigger question is, do we need to wait for India's economy to grow and the literacy rate to increase for us to make our mark in sports at the world stage? Any sensible person's answer to that question is, No. But what else then? Well, the answer in my belief rests in our success in Cricket. That to me is the best case to study for all sports administrations not only in India but also globally. 

To begin with, we had people trying out the lucrative league concept in India and seen them fail miserably. The I-League for football though is still relatively popular though not even remotely near to its cricketing counterpart. We also had the Professional Hockey League or the PHL, which too failed to bring the glory days of Indian hockey back. So, we all know that just starting a league is not the solution. And that is more because a league is successful only when it can pull in crowds consistently.

The Indian Premier League (IPL) came into being quite late in the day for Indian Cricket. When it was started in 2008, Cricket was already a religion in tn the country and the success in the inaugural T20 Word Cup was cashed in by the cricket administrators. The master stroke however was to identify a variation of the game that could not only appeal to the masses but would also be feasible to brand. T20 was the perfect recipe for success. Similarly, other sports need to tweak their formats and create a popular version of the same to create awareness and bring in the masses. Once the crowd is there, you will have everyone from the sponsors to the media and then would be the best time to make hay. But, it would need some brainstorming and considerable effort to make the sun shine on these sports.

The government can pour in whatever amount they are into building the sports infrastructure but they won't or rather can't pay us the citizen to watch and like them. Also, in my view the India lost its biggest opportunity to make thew world take note of us when the Commonwealth games in Delhi 2010 was a shoddy affair. And I'm not getting into the corruption issue since that is a completely different topic altogether. The point I am trying to get to is the role of us, the spectators, the viewers and the lovers of sports in promoting it. For starters, India's population is 124 million and if even half of the population pays Rs. 1 each every month then we will have a sum of 744 million rupees. Now that staggering amount can run a country leave alone funding sports in India. But that sounds impractical doesn't it? Let me take the example of the UK, where I reside now and show to you why this is not and its just our perception that's stopping us from involving in this effort. The UK councils or municipalities as we know them in India collects on an average 800 million pounds per year in Council tax out of which 2% is spent in maintenance of the parks and sports facilities in the council which are free of cost to the inhabitants. Now, if we can on a macro level i.e. on a municipality or local council level collect just a rupee every month, can we not sustain these infrastructures locally? We would need good and honest governance and though corruption might spread its evil wings, I for one am hopeful with the RTI act in place for us to keep a check on this.

So the whole point is around us as sports loving citizens to create and maintain the sporting infrastructure in our country and create a professional environment for sports to have a future in this country. A flash in the pan achievement is not what our sports persons deserve and they deserve to become the legends that they can be only and only by excelling continually in their field of sports.

Answering why I call India the greatest ‘wannabe’ nation: Part 2 - Infrastructure

Thank you for reading my earlier post - Answering why I call India the greatest ‘wannabe’ nation: Part 1 - Economy. Your comments and all the conversations shall definitely not be wasted since the more we talk about these issues we'll unearth if not a resolution but at least the conscience and resolve to tackle them. Though I had promised to write about the 'wannabe' state of Sports in this post, I did realize later, that it would not be fair to leave the topic around 'Infrastructure' for later. That is because, if our nation is a tree that needs to grow healthy then economy is similar to the sunlight that is required and infrastructure is like the soil that it needs to grow. So sports can wait for some time.

Part 2 - Infrastructure

So this topic again brings me to the Q&A mode. And the question then is, when does a country prosper? And it's a simple answer, it is when it's treasury earns more and more money and it attracts more and more insiders or even visitors for a piece of that treasure. Well, that's just a very high level answer to a rather simple looking question. Now mind you, though the question looks simple it actually isn't as much simple to answer this for there are numerous reasons which accounts for a state's prosperity. But as you know my affinity towards simplicity, I shall go back to the answer we had earlier and elaborate on it. More money means a better economy and how does one get a better economy? By providing people within and outside the state with money making opportunities. Voila...and that exactly is what we know as Infrastructure.

Every aspect of life that is needed to sustain and better the standard of living in a state is referred to as infrastructure. So everything from electricity, water supply and sanitation, roadways, health, basic education and these days even the availability of adequate and widespread bandwidth can fall under infrastructure.

Now for some stats for these aspects of the 5 most populous countries in the world in chronological order China, India, United States, Brazil and Indonesia. Starting with Electricity. According to a 2009 UNESCO Report published on the internet, the population % with access to electricity in these countries are China - 99.4%, India - 66.3%, United States - 100%, Brazil - 98.3% and Indonesia - 64.5%. Now the same stats for population without electricity (in millions) are China - 8.1, India - 403.7, United States - 0, Brazil - 3.3 and Indonesia - 81.6. India and Indonesia are numbers 1 & 2 in the list of population without access to electricity. And the whole of the African continent has 41.9% of its population with access to electricity leaving 586.8 million without any power. Is there anything more to say?

Lets shift to Water supply & Sanitation. Worldwater.org is a non-profit endeavor from the pacific institute to collect and disseminate information about the world's freshwater resources. I have collected some data from their databank to analyze and try and get some insight into the situation in our country. My aim is to compare 2 important stats -  a) % of population with access to safe drinking water and b) % of population with access to improved sanitation. So, as per the data the % of population with access to safe drinking water in the 5 majorly populated countries of the world are China - 89%, India - 88%, United States - 99%, Brazil - 97% and Indonesia - 80%.  The stats for the % of population with access to improved sanitation in these countries are China - 55%, India - 31%, United States - 100%, Brazil - 80% and Indonesia - 52%.

According to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme for Water Supply and Sanitation (JMP), 37% of the developing world’s population – 2.5 billion people – lack improved sanitation facilities, and over 780 million people still use unsafe drinking water sources. Inadequate access to safe water and sanitation services, coupled with poor hygiene practices, kills and sickens thousands of children every day, and leads to impoverishment and diminished opportunities for thousands more. The JMP website is a wealth of information for this and I was looking at their data bank for a comparative data set for these countries in terms of the population in numbers:

click to enlarge

So, though the earlier stats on paper are not that bad for India in i.e. w.r.t. access to safe drinking water, the situation with sanitation is really grim and this will feed in to the discussions on the health scenario.

Lets now move to arteries of a nation - the Roadways. This is one area of the infrastructure that India has lived up to with regards to its population and area. The results speak for itself. India has 3,320,410 km of roadways with just 18 vehicles per 1000 in their population. Comparing that with China which has 3,860,800 km of roadways for 83 vehicles per 1000, we are actually better placed. But what these stats do not reveal is the condition of these roads. I unearthed a report on the internet which depicts the reality of the road conditions in India. 54% of these thousands of kms of roads are unpaved which causes traffic hazards regularly. I was particularly alerted by a recent government report that has concluded that congestion in urban areas has risen, thanks to the disproportionate increase in road length and vehicular growth. The report cites while 59% of India's total road length is rural roads, urban roads account for only 9%. And in urban India, road length has increased by 3.3% in the past decade, but vehicles have risen by 10%.

Moving to the conditions of Health in India. Now this one is like digging a bagful of cans of worms out from the deepest of the graves'. There are thousands of gigs of data on the internet around health related stuff in India and I would not really go much deep into them. Instead I will leave you with the video grab of an episode of the recently concluded popular show 'Satyamev Jayate' which provides a very fine overview of this sector of the infrastructure.In an nutshell it is very very grim. Also a very good and useful source of some interesting stats would be the UNICEF website.

So, approximately 1.72 million children die each year before turning one. Shortages of healthcare providers, poor intra-partum and newborn care, diarrheal diseases and acute respiratory infections also contribute to the high infant mortality rate. 40% of the primary health centres in India are understaffed. Currently, India has approximately 860 beds per million population. This is only one-fifth of the world average, which is 3,960, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). It is estimated that 450,000 additional hospital beds will be required by 2014. The government is expected to contribute only 15-20% of the total, providing an enormous opportunity for private players to fill the gap. Also, India is ranked 3rd among the countries with the most HIV-infected.

However there are rays of hope within the system. In 2012 India was polio free for the first time in its history. This was achieved because of Pulse Polio Programme which was started in 1995-96 by the government of India.

Education in India is the next aspect to talk about. Over two-thirds of the world's 793 million illiterate adults are found in only eight countries (Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Pakistan). India now finds itself in an adult-literacy peer group that includes Afghanistan, Papua New Guinea and Yemen. The United Nations publishes a Human Development Index every year, which consists of the Education index. The Education Index is measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross education enrollment ratio (i.e. with one-third weighting). In that ranking India languishes at a poor 147 on that list with the other top 4 populous countries at positions: China - 98, United States - 13, Brazil - 65 and Indonesia - 104. What does that mean for the country then. Well, despite growing investment in education, only 15% of Indian students reach high school, and just 7%, of the 15% who make it to high school, graduate. The quality of education whether at primary or higher education is significantly poor as compared with major developing nations. As of 2008, India's post-secondary institutions offer only enough seats for 7% of India's college-age population, 25% of teaching positions nationwide are vacant, and 57% of college professors lack either a master's or PhD degree. And to cover all this up, according to the UNESCO, India has the lowest public expenditure on higher education per student in the world. Ref: image below.

Source: http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/WorldStats/

click to enlarge

 So, other than budgetary issues what plagues the education system in the country. Having a low enrollment rate does not help anyhow and to correspond we also have a very high drop out rate, being 28th in the world. The only other Asian countries having worse drop out rates are Nepal, Cambodia and Bangladesh. In fact 42% of the enrolled students are dropping out before the 5th class. Though the metrics for quality of education/ competency have received less attention in our country, I could find some interesting stats for the same. Student Performance on the Reading, Scientific and Mathematical Literacy Scales, mean score does not have India in the top 50. No Indian University is in the top 100 universities of the world. And finally we do not have enough teachers there is one teacher every 412 students in this country. And their quality is another concern. 89% of primary teachers have just studied till the 12th standard only and the average absence rate of teachers in India is 43%. So even if the kid ends up in school, almost half of the time he/she will not find a teacher around.

And finally to the newest constituent of infrastructure, the Internet or rather availability of bandwidth. Now, why suddenly has internet availability become such a necessity. A simple comparison of living conditions in developed and developing nations would tell us that the reliance on internet for proper and effective governance has been a key factor of growth off late. Though with regards to the number of internet users India ranks no. 3 in the world after China and the United States but in terms of population penetration it is way down at 163 in the world with just 10.2% of the population with access to internet. This needs to increase and be affordable especially for rural India to get the benefits of health and education programs that can be powered with the help of the internet, which I believe is the greatest scientific revolution in the 21st century.

So, where does all this leave us with? This rather long explanation of the infrastructure and its various aspects, why was it necessary? As you must have read in my earlier post, India is a rapidly growing economy, 3rd in the world infact. Well, if we are growing then where is the growth in our infrastructure? If the answer is "I don't know" then it's still better than a "I don't care". As I was writing this, I began asking myself the question, "what can I do to change this?" I mean just by writing a blog post with some facts and analysis won't help my country's infrastructure, would it? Sure, it won't. And then suddenly I realized that the country of my present residence is probably the best example of a citizen's contribution to the state's infrastructure. Let me explain. Infrastructure is the foundation or simply put it is the basis of essential commodities in the society. Now that in my IT jargon is a project which has a finite timeline to be set up and put into place. But, doesn't every project need a business as usual (BAU) process or a maintenance mode to be sustained? The answer has to be 'Yes'. So we the citizens have to take up that mantle of being the protectors and maintenance men & women of our infrastructure. If we have the government building roads, schools, hospitals, facilities for water supply and sanitation then we have to help sustain them. Else every time a budget is allocated for bettering the infrastructure, the majority of that will be spent in bringing things back to what they were. And that's sadly whats happening now, we are all pushing a wall and not a rolling stone. But, someday I'm sure, we will.

Answering why I call India the greatest ‘wannabe’ nation: Part 1 - Economy

To begin with, the definition of the word ‘wannabe’ is - a product designed to imitate the qualities or characteristics of something. Now, the important question is why? I always found simplicity to be the answer to all complexities, not within science though ;-). So, to correspond to this remark I have chosen a few aspects that shape up a nation and the perspective of its citizens.

Part 1 - Economy

Arguably, this is the most important aspect which determines the progress or otherwise for a state. In India’s case we have seen a considerable growth from the post-liberalisation period i.e. after 1991 and there has been a surge in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or the common man’s purchasing power as well.

Source:www.wikipedia.org, click to enlarge

Today, the economy of India is the tenth largest in the world by nominal GDP and the third largest by purchasing power parity (PPP). In the mid 2000s it recorded the highest growth rates in its history and this was because of the increase in the size of the middle class consumer, an availability of a large labour force and growth in the manufacturing sector due to rising education levels and engineering skills. Now, the fact that brings me back to answer the 'wannabe' question is, why 1991 and why not 1961? The simple answer to that is because we waited till the last drop of blood and sweat to consider a change, a change which could serve us well, a change which could have brought us growth much earlier. I mean we always had a middle class ready to buy goods, we always had a large labour pool to produce them and the little we were educating were efficiently serving global organizations bringing in innovation to the world - NASA and Microsoft to name a few.

So a quick introspection of the facts tells us, what were the incidents that brought in the so called economic reforms of 1991. During mid eighties, India started having balance of payments problems. Now with the Gulf War starting in 1990, India’s oil import bill swelled and with India's major trading partner the Soviet Union disintegrating, the exports slumped. This resulted in the credits getting dried up and in the investors taking their money out. Now, who were these investors? They were all from outside the country (foreign investors) and since the 'License raj' was still prevalent in what looked like a pre-independent India, what they were dealing with effectively was the Govt. of India, the only industrial conglomerate in the country. Such was the situation back then that in 1969, JRD Tata, the then Chairman of the Tata Group was quoted  - "I cannot decide how much to borrow, what shares to issue, at what price, what wages and bonus to pay, and what dividend to give. I even need the government's permission for the salary I pay to a senior executive". So the Indian bubble finally did burst. These graphs from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) perfectly illustrates the state of the then economy with an audit trail.

click to enlarge

India’s foreign exchange reserves were at $1.2 billion in January 1991 and depleted by half by June, barely enough to last for roughly 3 weeks of essential imports these included necessary daily commodities to sustain the population including oil, India was only weeks way from defaulting on its external balance of payment obligations. Already reeling under heavy debt the immediate response from the government of India was to secure an emergency loan of $2.2 billion. And for this the Reserve Bank of India had to airlift 47 tons of gold to the Bank of England and 20 tons of gold to the Union Bank of Switzerland to raise the money. With nothing but a sustainable approach to fall back on, in came the 'liberal' model for the economy where the flood gates were finally opened to the monetarily famine stricken nation. In reality most of these reforms came because IMF required those reforms as a condition for loaning money to India in order to overcome the crisis. Subsequently, opposition to these reforms, suggesting them as an "interference with India's autonomy" were voiced and to a certain extent they were correct. Why would the country need to wait to reach a state where they can be blackmailed to let in investors in an uncontrolled manner and encourage pockets of wealth. So from a pro-socialist economy India was thrust into a capitalist economic scenario and with that we can now boast of a growth in the country which showed with the forex reserves in the country reaching an all time high of $314.61 billion at the end of May 2008. Remember, from $1.2 billion in 1991 to $314.61 billion in 2008!

However, the bigger and more important question for us, the youth and the future of India is that, have we made it big, have we actually grown i.e.? Have we learnt from 1991? Simple questions demand simpler answers.

Yes we have made it big is the answer, but the 'we' here are a very few of us. The forbes list of billionaires suddenly had more tricolors in its country column and in 2008 (can you see it's the same year our forex reserves peaked and it is not at all co-incidental) we had as many as 4 Indians in the top 10 billionaires of the world.

So all the hullabaloo around the surging GDP, how does it include the vast Indian population. Well, it doesn't. Let's prove this by going back to the definition of GDP - it is referred to as the gross domestic product at purchasing power parity per capita or simply put this is the value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given year divided by the average (or mid-year) population for the same year. Comparing the same number with the other countries of the world, India stands at no.125 in World Bank's latest list and at no. 130 in the IMF's latest annual list. The only other G20 nation anywhere near India in that list is Indonesia at numbers 116 and 123 respectively. Now looking at the above definition you would say, "ah c'mmon its the population that is bringing the number down. Its not that bad". Ok, to answer that as well, India is 2nd in the list of most populous countries in the world. China, USA, Indonesia and Brazil make the top five and where does their GDP rank stand. China - 94&93, USA - 8&6, Brazil - 75&76 and Indonesia we have already discussed. By no means I am advocating in favor of the population burst but it's important that we don't blame this only on the population of the country. Also to be fair the population is a problem that we have created and it's biting us back.

Well now as some other critics would say, "Everybody says China is a strong economy, and if they are 94 and we are 130, that's not bad." The China vs India comparison can take a whole post by itself so I'll just ignite a thought and move away from this with a promise to provide detailed answers later. According the NationaMaster website stats 44.01% of the world's poor are from the 2nd most populous state, India and 2nd in the list is China the most populous state with 22% of the poverty share. And then just think of the state of the defense of both countries, the place in sports of both countries and then look at the state of education in both countries. Moving on with an interesting fact based on that ranked list of GDP is that a country plagued by war and political unrest for several years, Iraq is even above India on that list. So, while the GDP may increase, real incomes for the majority decline or stagnate.

Finally, what have we learnt? Have we at all learnt? I mean, did we not hear the same Manmohan Singh, the father of the reforms in 1991 and now the respected PM of India address the nation that money doesn't grow on trees and all that. Let's rephrase the question. What did he learn? The very man who is credited for bringing in the reforms to the Indian economy, what did he learn 20 years hence of which he has been a finance minister for 5 years and a PM for 9 years. And this is not trying to personally attack Mr. Singh, this is for the quality of governance in our country. What "reforms" did we again bring in 2012. We increased the price of fuel when it was already costing us more a year back and we couldn't increase it then because some regional party/ parties would topple the central government with a fistful of MPs and that the government would not be able to place their favorite son on the President's chair. Unfortunately, these have become  more important than the country and more importantly the countrymen paying more for the imports for a considerable amount of time and this comes back as a rebound. We allowed FDI in Retail when the biggest Indian corporate house moved away from the sector thereby stalling the forex source and also when inflation cannot be controlled if new markets are not set up for the produced goods in India. The largest government owned commercial entity - the Indian Railways have not hiked their passenger fares in 9 years to appease the common man who vote them to power. How can they subsidize when the costs for fuel and power are ever increasing. The same money that we have given to the government as taxes are being used for supporting these political decisions. The sad truth of our nation is that Governance in our country supports Politics and not the other way round.

The facts are that India still destroys 25 per cent of the food it produces and over 400 million Indians lack proper nutritious food. More wheat is eaten by rats in India than produced in Australia and more vegetables are wasted in India than are consumed in the UK. The World Bank, citing estimates made by the World Health Organization (WHO), states that about 49 percent of the world's underweight children, 34 percent of the world's stunted children and 46 percent of the world's wasted children, live in India. So what has changed 1991 to now, nothing much except that along with the government, the corporates are also now raking in the moolah and the middle class is now called the "aam aadmi" and not "khaas". C'mmon, isn't this proof enough of the state of the citizens in our country where we are labelled as the common man.

And if there is an answer to any of these questions that I have highlighted above, then we need to find them, pretty much now.

Next post - I promise would be a smaller one. Sports.

The Indian in me starts writing...

A year ago, I got an opportunity to come and stay in the UK. The work that brought me here was on paper quite similar to what I had been doing for the last few years. But, this was my first step outside of the comfort zone of my place, my city and even my country.

Growing up in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), West Bengal I was an ordinary boy with generic abilities in all spheres of life and had always been very interested in almost everything. Curious, yes maybe that's the correct word to describe. Like most kids of my age, I developed an acumen of having an opinion about almost everything and with the advent and growing accessibility of the internet and the evolution of the phenomenal Google, opining on any topic under the sun became one of my favorite pastimes. Though the audience sometimes (especially in the early days) was limited to just my parents who were more amazed on the very fact that their kid could speak and talk sense and they hardly ever cared about the content of my speech. Thus went past days with innumerable topics and further more such discussions among family, friends and any sundry gatherings.

As the clock ticked into my days on the desk, I found myself being a sought after analyst and a team man responsible to take care of sequentially ordered time and resources bound result oriented tasks. The curiosity had become a rewarding option and work with all it's gruesome side-effects wasn't too delirious for me.

And now, having spent 8 long years doing 80 different things at work and having traveled a bit I have settled down (for the time being) in the most cozy and efficient  city of the world, London. All these years had me a very proud national and with sports and other (don't ask me what) happenings triggering the occasional spurts of patriotism, I have become a possessive critic of my nation and more so its nationals. To me my India is the greatest wannabe country in the world.

With this introduction, I just wanted to portray the preface of my blog to help build the context. Me the Indian outside India, the professionally equipped analyst with the help of the greatest analytic tool discovered by man, internet would every week try to paint a picture of something or the other to do with our great nation with facts, numbers and quotes.

Later for this week.