A country within a country

We are a country of a billion people and more.

As I make my return journey to Delhi (with my heart, I believe that it is my adopted home, I always return to it), I start to remember how easy it was to get a train ticket in France. Not only did you have the liberty of buying it on the spot, but in case you postponed your journey, you could use the same ticket to make a journey later. All thanks to a low population compared to ours. Will we ever get to that stage? I don’t think so. We will never be able to decrease our population or increase the size of our country. Hence I will never enjoy that luxury.

This makes me think about our population and its rate of growth. I think the growth is unequally divided. Men and women of my generation don’t think of having more than two kids. The urban centers and the educated are getting wiser and seem to know better now. The bulk of the growth rate can be attributed to, in my opinion, the uneducated and the poor. This is a premise. But suppose this premise is true, there are some things that come to my mind. First, if we can concentrate on the urban middle class of our generation, we might see a country within a country. This concept is not novel. When we talk of India shining, this is the country than we refer to. This country has a high average income and excludes the poor and the uneducated from the villages and the cities (slum dwellers). The population of this country will stabilize. As people get more and more ‘western’, living together and not having any kids might even become a possibility and the population might even decrease (oh I wish!). Though the overall population of the country will increase, the other half will be sidelined and become invisible as they seem to be currently are. Second, the competition that we went through for a career and jobs, and our worries for the impossible condition of our children might come to pass. This is again based on an opinion that people from one half of the poor and uneducated country, whose population is the one that is increasing, will rarely transit and become competition for the other half – the educated and the privileged. They will compete amongst themselves for land, labor-jobs, auto-driver and security guard positions. They will not know of the McKinseys, the Goldman Sachs and the Sequoias…