I had a neighbour in my village who owned acres of farm land. He used to cultivate rice, cereals, vegetables and also had coconut, mango, guava trees and lot of other things he needed to run his family. Flowers blossomed in his backyard. The by-products helped them fuel their kitchen and bring home oil. Cattle maintained gave them milk and also helped them get some good money along with adding nutritional values to the family. The whole family toiled in hot sun, rains and winter to make the best of every season. Songs of the ladies in the farms and bull-fights and other local games entertained them for most of the day. Peaceful life with no much of pollution or chaos made them work from dawn to dusk and have a good night sleep at the call of sunset.
This is what is called actual Self- Reliance. We do not dependent on others for the most part of our day to day activity. 70% of agricultural India was like this in pre-independence era and nearly 30% of the rural India is still the same. But today, the whole scenario changed. The transformation from a self sustained community to a global village made every one of us depend on the other person for meeting our day to day needs. Today we don't wear home spun cotton, instead buy import brands which are nothing but made in Tirupur and Erode and re-imported with a brand and price tag. Today we don't cultivate our own food, instead depend on nutritional aids with so many competing brands with actually no idea of what it is made of. Today we have hundreds of channels but actually nothing impresses us and keeps us entertained all the time. Today we don't have time to talk to our families, attend all religious and communal functions, participate in social events, and hardly interact with our neighbours. The more and more we became global, we lost what we had as a small self sustained society- the basic ingredients of life called happiness, peace and contentment. Despite knowing all this, how many of us would really dare to go back to our good old golden days of simple living. That's just next to impossible.
Then how will this new policy of Barack Obama which he calls as "International Tax Policy Reform" will work.??. India gave the world the benefit of human intelligence, hard work and perseverance and all economies of scale. People toiled forgetting day or night. The 8 hours shift was just a name-sake and people worked with commitment on deadlines. We gave the west what they wanted before their sunrise. The cost benefit of low labour cost, exchange rate, educational advantage, commitment of hardworking employees actually made the commercial markets of US flourish with prosperity as their customer service and technical support needs were taken care with low budgets and high turnover. Creation of jobs was in the Obama election promises and he is surely keeping it up thinking of where he would stand at the end of his 4 year term. This will encourage America's confidence in its leader and bring in more of opportunities within. But overall, this protectionism cannot be the way of life for a long time for any country under the global scenario. Curtailing trade opportunities world wide would in turn become counter-productive for US in the long run and only wish the end result is a win-win situation for all, especially for China, Philippines and India who have high percentage of bilateral trade relations with United States. There is no harm in Obama's ideology of making his home as described in my farmer's story, but the same time, the world has to remember that the times have changed. As an analyst, my summary of this is that here we have a leader in United States who does what he promises and we surely need to wait and watch on the results!
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