Yehuda Bhumi 2011 – Lessons Learnt

Seems as if I have logged in after almost a decade. Came across this offline blog I had written during my not so recent visit to Israel; here it goes…

It’s my first visit to the land that embodies the survivor spirit – Yisrael or Israel as it is officially known as. My apartment is located in Tel Aviv and every day (barring the Sabbath days), I travel to my office in Sderot which is small town located quite close to the Gaza strip. So many things immediately grab your attention:

• The infrastructure here is simply audacious. Well organized towns/cities located at distant points on the huge desert that Israel is, connected together by highways/roadways that are decorated by monstrous power transmission towers.

• People respect the traffic rules. The zebra crossing and the traffic signals mean something to the people here (we seem to have forgotten those things back in nursery itself).

• The term “work life balance” seems to have been coined in this country. People are cool here. Reaching office at 9, starting actual work at 11 and leaving before 6:30 is the norm. This attitude unfortunately becomes a major disadvantage for them as their jobs get outsourced to us Asians for whom “work=life”. But they don’t seem to care.

Makes you wonder – why?

The answer is clear – the people here love their country as well as themselves and are proud of their roots. Is this possible in India? I guess not. We Indians have something that we are so proud of, but which I think is unfortunately pulling down on our legs. It’s called SECULARISM. And something we aren’t so proud of – CORRUPTION.

And that is the reason why …

• We focus on fighting for Telanganas rather than developing our Hindustan.
• We put our efforts in shooing off some Bhaiyyas and Bhabhis back to where they are ‘mass produced’.
• We make sure that the ‘upcoming’ bridge in Chembur ‘comes up’ at a snail’s pace, making even the existing traffic conditions worse.
• We are always in a hurry to get somewhere and strongly believe that all roads are indeed our pop’s property.

The need of the hour for every Indian is to cultivate that love for the nation and our fellow brethren (and their ‘sistren’) and foster the development spirit of the nation and lead it towards the ‘Pinnacle of Perfection’ (that’s the marketing phrase of a Std. 12 coaching institute popular in southern-central Mumbai 🙂 ).

See this thing below?

No, it’s not an Indian orange. It’s an Israeli sweet lime. And I swear it was sweeter than the sweetest Indian sweet lime.

This has got more to do with technology than patriotism? Think again.

Shalom,

CS