Alexander the Great knocked at her door but he was forced to
come back as his army was tired of fighting with the only desire to come back home
after 10 years of battles. Cristoforo Colombo ended up in America in an attempt
to get here (may God bless the GPS). Explorers, adventures and navigators spent
their lives trying to find a passage that would have brought here without
asking permission to the Arabs. Me, without Bucephalus or the Saint Mary, without neither the support of the Macedonian
phalanx nor the Spanish Kings I am in India with just a ticket. (Modernity is
able to make ordinary man do things that extraordinary man couldn`t do but at
the same time it makes these things appear trivial and meaningless). The same
ticket who allowed me to fly over Syria and Iraq, two countries full of history
but with a precarious future. Karl Popper said that what we study in the school
is not history but just the history of political power. We learn by heart the
names of kings, battles and kingdom knowing very little about millions of
people who come before us. This is more evident once you get to India. You take
a taxi from the airport to the hotel and you see thousands of people on roads
trying to scrape a living. They are everywhere while they conduct their lives
in clouds of dust in an environment that is constantly changing without a clear
direction along an incredible number of construction sites. Houses one after the
other built without a planning, billboard that pop up occupying any free space
available. Even the roads are without rules, ready to be conquered by drivers
who impose themselves without any external power to regulate what is going on. Everything appears in a state of total anarchy
and you have the impression that the political power is something far,
irrelevant and useless to these people. You are almost frightened by the idea that
something like that is possible when you have a strong belief that politics
matter. Your hopes to see a better world through the use of rationality and
public discussion are almost crashed by realising that people live close each other,
share the same space, exchange goods without any common effort to give a
direction to their communities. Then you realise that a lot has to be done to connect
politics to the needs of people, to link politics to problems in order to find
solutions, to make sure that politics is not just a collection of name on our
history books but a tool to make our future better. This doesn’t affect only
India but also the rest of the world desperately searching a solution to the environmental
crises, an answer to the mass unemployment in Europe or a peaceful future to the
Syrians (while sleeping passengers pass over their heads). I would like to think
the IT industry for which I work will be able to reduce somehow the distance between politics to people……. A positive
thought, hopefully not an illusion but enough to help me to fall asleep and
beat the jet lag. Tomorrow is another Indian day.
