The widespread publicity received by the CWG mess has drawn equally diverse responses from across the globe. A common emerging thread seems to be the loss of national pride even among those who otherwise consider nationalism a dirty word. As if it were not quaint enough, there is a palpable--though hitherto non-existent--sense of embarrassment and shame at the way soiled linens from the CWG complex were splashed across the web.
Such curiously misplaced sense of national honor and public dignity is quite baffling. Though several facile excuses have been served to reclaim spent glory, the CWG rot being a function of birth pangs seems to possess most takers. Sadly, even those more restrained and detached from the "Yippee" exuberance are nonetheless tarred by this phenomenon. Once international interest subsides and foreign teams return, court historians and Delhi sultanate's mandarins will declare victory and head home--TV studios and broadsheet pages that is. It is precisely why there now is a serious urgency to decouple national pride from the success or failure of CWG.
While the perceptive causes are 'Jugaad' and 'chalta hai,' themselves a bastard progeny of the protectionist era, the root cause is Nehruvian socialism, the lifeblood of protectionist tendencies. The dynasty's patriarch bequeathed the country with a deadly ideology and a moribund culture that wiped out the dignity attached to responsibility and enterprise. In pandering to the lowest common denominator of a newly unshackled populace, it offered a numbingly false sense of security that rested in continuation of a stolid status quo. With mediocrity thus metastasized, and then duly lionized by his daughter Indira, it was only a matter of time before the bills came due. That inception has now engulfed the nation, and will perhaps consume it, if it hasn't already.
Whatever the outside chance for salvation, lies within. The culture of grievance and sleaze will need to make way for a public hunger for merit, accomplishment, and recognition. Whoever manages to fire the imagination of a sulking public in some such way will have a wonderful job waiting for him...or her.
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