I was reading Vir Sanghvi's, LiveMint article on how cheesed off he gets when he sees Indian brats behave badly on Airplanes!
 
He compared Indian kids in the plane with their British peers, and then generalized the situation to conclude that the nouveau rich, shall we call them BPO boomers?,  can't make their children behave.

Well I mostly agree with him, but his views are quite literally at 30,000 feet, what's the ground reality in India?

Talking about rude behavior, how bad are  a couple of loud kids waking up Vir from his in-flight siesta? Compared to what we lesser mortals face every day at ground zero? Well lets start with the worst of the rude behaviors, urinating in public places, for example.

I am sure Vir must have noticed that many walls in Delhi have painted “please..don't wet the wall”, well thats not what they paint, but a variant of this in Hindi, only a bit ruder.

 Some of them have come up with an innovative way of dealing with it, they put gods of all religion at strategic points where people generally tend to relieve themselves.Now that's not our “Punjabi by Nature” attitude of  Delhi, its a pan Indian culture. And, I am not even talking about kids.

Now many may argue a lack of public toilets (or Loo as the Brits and Vir would perfer to call it) in India.

 I may agree partly, but what about Railway stations? There are urinals there. But why do people still pass water in the middle of a crowded platform?

 What? You don't believe me? Its true! Though it may not be in metros like Delhi, Mumbai, etc.

 But it happens in India.A couple of years ago, I was visiting Chitrakoot. Yes, the same famous place of Ramayana fame. I was helping out at JHRU (Jagat Guru Rambhadracharya Handicap University) as a guest lecturer of computer science.
On my way back, I witnessed a shocking show. An elderly women, traveling with  her full extended family, about 15 of them, stepped aside and squatted and pee-d right on the platform. As the water, rolled down towards me, my friend Vipin (he helps at JHRU quite a lot as a CA) warned me to step aside. I first thought he was kidding me, but when I looked at the scouting woman with a stream of water rolling down-under, I was shocked! I tried to protest aloud, but Vipin and the few regular lecturers from JHRU warned me not to. They feared that being an outsider I would be beaten up.

They also asked me to adjust to the reality. When I questioned them why did they not try to alter rhis so-called reality? They absolved themselves by saying, that the “Nor the Mughals  nor the Angrez could change them, so who we are to even try?” .Well, I don't agree with that position.

 Even before we try and educate the masses or provide caste based reservations in IIT and IIMs, we should educate people of basics of hygiene. Merely providing quotas in higher educational institutions and government jobs wont help Indian masses they only help crème classes among the so-called “Other Backward Classes (OBC)”, “SC” and “ST”.      Though government has many such programmes like Nirmal Gram Yojna, they are not making much difference.

I think we should have reality shows that make the yuppes meet the socially challenged people spread across Rural India and try and make difference. We could leverage the Reality TV shows and mobile Internet video Blogging.  Yes, wireless Internet is available pan India, if you were to believe the latest Reliance mobile advertisement!

Given the public greed for fame, it would be a huge success and surely can achieve what the great mughal or the angrez could not achieve.

So, if people with a media leverage like Vir Sanghvi, focus on ground zero of Bharat-varsha, rather than couple of irritating brats disturbing his high life, Bharat can one day compete with Inida. And, they would not even need any reservations.

Don't get me wrong, like Vir, I too love my India, but I would like to make a difference en-masses then Vir's en-classe. By the way, I also love to read Vir Sanghvi :)