Foundations of Misery: Part-I : India, 1947-64 (Volume 1)

"Foundations of Misery, Part-I : 1947-64" focuses on the blunders committed by India after independence during the Nehruvian era, many of which still affect and vitiate its present-in the hope that once there is an enlightened understanding of the past, free from the pervasive fiction, India would be better able to tackle its present and future. It attempts to unravel the mystery and the truth in-depth on why India remains a poor, pathetic, third-rate, third-world country of shabby and squalid urban spaces and impoverished villages-that are more like defacement of the environment and blots on the landscape, resembling a gigantic garbage bin. How's it that India got so left behind? What was it that India did, or did not do, after independence, that everything is so abysmal and pathetic. While many nations who were much behind India have long since become part of the first-world, an overwhelming majority of millions of Indians continue to be condemned to a life of unmitigated misery. What are the foundations of this misery? And why all this unmitigated misery despite the overwhelming advantage of India as a nation with first-rate people, plentiful natural resources, grand civilisational heritage, rich culture and languages, unmatched ethical and spiritual traditions, and relatively much better position in all fields-infrastructure, trained manpower, bureaucracy, army-at the time of independence compared to many east-Asian nations who have since overtaken us. Why did India fail to leverage such rich assets of a gifted country? Incidents, information and revelations that would shock common readers and would make them exclaim: 'Oh God, was this so? I didn't know! How things have been kept under covers!!' Not that the facts or revelations are new, only they are not commonly known. There are a large number of books, booklets and articles exclusively dealing with the accession of the princely states, tackling of recalcitrant states like Junagadh and Hyderabad, Kashmir problem, India-China boundary issues, India-China war, Tibet, annexation of Tibet by China, plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils, India's quest for a permanent seat in the UN, India's foreign policy after independence, disappearance of Netaji Subhash, reorganisation of states, the language issue, plight of the Dalits, incomparable contributions of Netaji Subhash, Sardar Patel and Dr Ambedkar, yet their relative neglect in the post-independence India, India's suicidal plunge into socialism, babudom and corruption resulting in wide-spread poverty, hunger and misery, and the curse of the dynacracy-dynastic democracy. Getting a hang on these diverse issues would mean plodding through thousands of pages of books and articles on these subjects, and getting a clarity on them would require studying also competing viewpoints. That's a tall order. This book, Foundations of Misery, seeks to lighten that burden for the readers interested in such subjects. In about 400 pages of this compendious book you have the gist of thousands of pages of books and articles on various relevant subjects. This book, however, is not an outline or a summary or an exercise in précis-writing. Based on the information culled from scores of books and articles and research on the web, this book seeks to present the topics in an original, logical, precise and engrossing manner, with due clarity.