The Italian Similarity


I have been reading this travelogue, Neither Here Nor There, where Bill Bryson talks very humorously of his travels through most of Europe. His experience in Italy got me thinking: Rome, Naples, Milan and Florence.

Bryson found corruption to be rampant. People parked their cars whichever way they liked, drivers didn’t follow any rules (in fact nobody followed any rules). Beggars and pickpockets targeted tourists and cops wouldn’t register complaints. The Italians didn’t bother to maintain their museums or other tourist attractions: Bryson says (and I don’t know if he said that tongue in cheek or if it’s true) that the Colosseum isn’t the ruin that it is because of wear and tear, rather it is a ruin because people used to chip away at it with sledgehammers and take the chunks to kilns to make cement! That reminded me of a comment one of our neighbours had made decades back, “What great ruins the Italians make!” Back then, we were amused by his lack of understanding of the word “ruins”, but now I wonder if he had been right all along, albeit unwittingly! Then there’s the Italian mafia which needs no introduction. And the associated black market economy that thrives. Coalition governments are the norm. And yet, Bryson pointed out, Italy is one of the largest economies in the world.

We are repeatedly astonished by how India manages to grow despite pretty much every reason that it shouldn’t be growing. Well, we just need to read the previous paragraph: doesn’t Italy sound just like India? Hell, we even have an Italian running the country!

And yet, the Italians have been growing (until the recent Recession) inspite of being, well, just like us! So maybe we too can get to be a rich country despite being the way we are (I’m not saying that we should stay the way we are, just that we may be able to get rich despite that)! To stay rich, though, I feel we may need to ensure we don't go the Italian way on one count: of being socialist and eventually bankrupt. Keeping my fingers crossed on that count.

Comments

  1. KumarMarch 8, 2012 at 11:58 AM

    Sure. Your point will be appreciated better by those who have been to Italy. When in Rome, I felt quite at home - it was like India almost!

    They say that Italy has proved that we do not need a government to govern; and the nation can still be there!

    There are some differences though. Whatever one may say, Italy is in Europe and it is part of the European culture and mindset. That is why they align better with the material sciences, European art, dances and (the musical-dance form of drama called) the Opera. Their museums are better maintained than ours, though others Westerners find them falling short of their expectations.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more