On Nation Building – Some Comments

Here are some remarks related to nation building that may give food for thought:

For starters you might wish to go through an earlier blog of mine. Link is below. You can ignore most of the article and only read the last few paragraphs. Confucius’ succinct thoughts were implemented by the Chinese and this created a stable nation and culture that has survived for around 2,500 years and is still going strong.

The Only Sound Method of Nation Building

Some other of my remarks are as under:

1. India differs from Europe and the West in that Europe has an educated and skilled population. Most people in Europe own property and are well off compared to Indian conditions. All this means that they have something to lose and are less likely to support revolutionaries and people who might want to stir up mischief. For these reasons solutions that work in Europe may not work in Indian conditions. We need to find tailor made solutions.
2. So the advice of experts needs to be tailored to Indian conditions. At the same time it must be recognised that Europe went through a stage where its population was just as poor as India at the present time. So perhaps we need to look at what Europe did in the decades and centuries past instead of what it is doing now.
3. As to how to weigh the advice of the experts I will quote Emerson: “What you do speaks to me so loudly that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary.” When the experts tell you to do something ask them if their solution has been tried and has worked earlier. If there is some sort of track record then it might be worth trying out the solution (after tailoring it for Indian conditions).
4. Lastly you must have heard about Peter Lynch. Quoting from Wikipedia – Peter Lynch is an American investor, mutual fund manager, and philanthropist. As the manager of the Magellan Fund at Fidelity Investments between 1977 and 1990, Lynch averaged a 29.2% annual return, consistently more than double the S&P 500 stock market index and making it the best-performing mutual fund in the world. As mutual fund manager he was approached for advice by many companies. In his book, Beating the Street, he says that if you are given a choice of reaching your target growth in five years as opposed to twenty years it is better to choose to grow in twenty years. This is not an exact quote but it sums up the point I want to make.

Running a country is much more complex than running a business. Also if a business fails due to some blunder the consequences are not as severe as will be the case if the country implodes. For all these reasons it is best to make haste slowly.

Many people who want to serve society are ambitious and want results quickly. They want to know that they have made a difference. Politicians want to win elections. I frequently read in the newspapers that there are so many people unemployed and so on and so forth. But it is impossible to help everybody, right here and now, if conditions do not permit it. And it is not anybody’s fault. It is just karma or the will of God.

I’ll end here. Please share this article on WA, FB and Twitter and let me have your comments. Feedback from my readers keeps me going.

Find this handy. Buy me a coffee