What Young India Wants Quotes

“When we choose a mobile network, do we check whether Airtel or Vodafone belong to a particular caste? No, we simply choose the provider based on the best value or service. Then why do we vote for somebody simply because he belongs to the same caste as us?”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“We know we are all tarnished, so we doubt everyone else too. It is sad situation, where we need a leader but cannot really trust anyone.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“I feel everyone who has a chance should step out of India for a while to really see what it is like out there.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Societies that value excellence, innovation, entrepreneurship and integrity do well.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“done it. However, just prior to the teacher's arrival, someone had a brainwave. He planted a Diwali bomb with a”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Shocked, the teacher rushed out and brought back the headmistress. Throughout the rest of the period, both of them tried to figure out who set off the bomb and gave us lectures on our rowdy behaviour.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Many private college owners have personally admitted to me that they had to pay bribes at every stage of setting up the college—from getting land and building approval's to approving the course plan and setting fee structures. Corruption in the private education sector is such a norm that nobody in the know even raises an eyebrow anymore.

One reason for corruption is the government's no-profits-allowed policy for private institutes. Every educational institution has o be incorporated as a non-profit trust. Technically, you cannot make money from the college. The government somehow believes that there are enough people who will spend thousands of crores every year just out of the goodness of their hearts. On this flawed, stupid assumption that people are dying to run colleges without ever making money rests the higher education of our country.

Of course, none of this no-profit business ever happens. What happens is that shady methods are devised to take money out from the trust. Black money, fake payments to contractors and over-inflation of expenses are just a few ingenious methods to ensure promoters get a return on their investment.

The Bootlegging of Education, pages 124 and 125”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Real estate and faculty are often the biggest requirements in creating a university. The government has plenty of land. And any advertisement for government teaching jobs gets phenomenal responses. After this, there are running costs. However, most parents are happy to pay reasonable amounts for their child's college. With coaching classes charging crazy amounts, parents are already spending so much, anyway. Indians send $7 billion (over 30,000 crore) as outward remittance for Indian students studying abroad. Part of that money would be diverted inwards if good colleges were available here. The government can actually make money if it runs universities and add a lot more value to the country than, say, by running the embarrassing Air India which flushes crores down the drain every day.

Why can't Delhi University replicate itself, at four times the size, on the outskirts of Gurgaon? The existing professors will get more senior responsibilities, new teachers will get jobs and the area will develop. If we can have kilometre-long malls and statues that cost hundreds of crores, why not a university that will pay for itself? This is so obvious that the young generation will say: duh!?

Indian Institute of Idiots, pages 120 and 121”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“The BCCI has repeatedly shied away from disclosure, citing itself as a private entity. However, it isn't completely private either, especially since it has monopoly rights over something consumed by a large number of people. It earns from franchise owners and television networks. They, in turn, recover their money from advertisers, who ultimately pass on advertising costs to consumers, built into the price products. Thus, the consumers, we Indians, pay for the BCCI. And since it is a monopoly, we have every right to question their finances. How does the BCCI price its rights? Where is the BCCI money going?

The media and lawmakers have a chance to go after this completely feudal and archaic way of managing something as pure and simple as sport. Individuals are less important than changing the way things work. What needs to be at the forefront is sport; are we using the money to help develop it in the country?

We don't have to turn Indian cricket into a non-commercial NGO, for that is doomed to fail. It is fine to commercially harness he game. However, if you exploit a national passion, funded by the common man, it only makes sense that the money is accounted for and utilized for the best benefit of sport in the country.

For, if there is less opaqueness, there won't be any need to make influential calls or petty factors like personality clashes affecting the outcome of any bidding process. If we know where the money is going, there is less chance of murkiness entering the picture. Accountability does not mean excessive regulation or a lack of autonomy. It simply means proper audited accounts, disclosures, corporate governance practices, norms to regulate the monopoly and even specific data on the improvement in sporting standards achieved in the country.

If a young child grows up seeing cricket as yet another example of India's rich and powerful treating the country as their fiefdom, it won't be a good thing. Let's clean up the mess and treat cricket as it is supposed to be: a good sport.

Game of a Clean-up, page 50 and 51”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“In several villages in Punjab, kids have developed neurological problems and deformities as there is uranium in the water due to pollution by nearby plants. And Bhopal, the mother of all industrial disasters, serves as an example of how little our government values Indian citizen's lives.

Let there be no doubt, the government is as much a culprit in Bhopal as Union Carbide. Every plant approval, safety norm and inspection also involves government authorities. Palms are greased, relationships are made and the good Indian businessmen learn to manage government officials. After all, the skill of doing business in India lie in managing the system, not innovation or better products. The nexus between the rich and government servants is strong and you will often find one in the other's living room in the evenings.

Why do so many politicians socialize with industrialists? They bond over dinners and plan their kids' education and their wives' shopping trips. At parties, they shake hands over approvals. It all seems perfectly harmless. What's wrong with making friends? However, trouble happens when disaster strikes.The first person the politician/bureaucrat helps is the industrialist, not the suffering people. I'm sure Anderson knew the right people. And he used his contacts to make his escape. The little kid who got gassed didn't have contacts. Neither did he have a government representative who would bang his fists on the table to get him justice. Because, quite simply, people in India are cheaper than fish.

All hope is not lost, however. We can still learn our lessons and do a couple of things right. One, our laws need to be amended for corporate disasters. Corporates make a mistake, they have to pay—heavily. Two, politician-industrialist socializing should not be encouraged. While a politician making social visits to industrialists can't be banned, it should definitely be disclosed. Only then will, perhaps, an ordinary citizen's life be valued higher than a company's profit.

What's a Citizen's Life Worth?, page 42 and 43”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“The fact is that despite liberalization of the economy, benefits are not reaching everyone. Yes, they reach the top 10 per cent. However, the other 90 per cent are still untouched. In fact, these people get the worst of badly implemented capitalism—inflation kills their savings and purchasing power, their land gets stolen by corporate houses and their politician cares only about the rich guys. They are not in any advertiser's target group so the media dismisses them and they don't get a voice. Every now and then, a politician tosses cheap rice or wheat at them, keeps them alive on drip feed, and hopes to swing some votes. Our rural poor never see the benefits of liberalization. Add to this, poor education, archaic caste-based social discrimination, poorly implemented welfare policies and a general lack of job opportunities, and it leads to a kind of passive frustration that urban citizens can never understand. The leaders of these movements apparently do, and that is why a youth, with his whole life ahead of him, takes up arms against the state and becomes a rebel.

The Wrong Diagnosis, page 25 and 26”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“The corporate czars we celebrate—with some exceptions—are second or third-generation tycoons who run huge empires comprising dozens of unrelated businesses. Traditional management theory will wonder how a company can be in food, telecom, power, construction and financial sectors all at the same time. However, in India, such conglomerates thrive. The promoters of these companies have the required skill—navigating the Indian government maze. Whether it is obtaining permission to set up a power plant, or to use agricultural land for commercial purposes, or to obtain licences to open a bank or sell liquor—our top business promoters can get all this done, something ordinary Indians would never be able to. This is why they are able to make billions. We then load them with awards, rank them on lists and treat them as role models for the young.

In reality, they are hardly icons. They have milked an unfair system for their personal benefit, taking opportunities that would have belonged to the young on a level playing field.

Indian companies make money from rent-seeking behaviour, creating artificial barriers of access to regulators, thereby depriving our start-ups of wealth-generating opportunities. None of the recent technologies that have changed the world and created wealth—telecom, computers, aviation—have come out of India. Yet, our promoters have figured out a way to make money from them by bulldozing their way into their share of the pie, rationing out the technology to Indians and setting themselves up as modern-day heroes. In reality, they are no heroes. They are the opposite of cool and, despite their billions, they are what young people call 'losers'.

For if they are not losers, why have they never raised their voices against governmental corruption? Our corporate honchos don't think twice before creating a cartel to fleece customers. Yet they have never even thought about creating a cartel to take a stand against corrupt politicians.

The Great Indian Social Network, page 16 and 17”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup. There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“And sometimes in life, it is about taking the better option even if it doesn’t appear to be macho.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Your vote is an important choice for your country, not an expression of love.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Of course, critics asked what a novelist was doing on the serious editorial page. After all, I was no intellectual with grey hair. I couldn’t answer them. They were probably right at some level. However, this was destiny. This was meant to happen.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“To give it all up and write, hoping to effect change in a country like India, sounded mad from the start. However, I knew that without a streak of madness I would never do this. The”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“There you go. I’ve told you the four thunderstorms—disappointment, frustration, unfairness and isolation. You cannot avoid them, as like the monsoon, they will come into your life at regular intervals. You just need to keep the raincoat handy to not let the spark die. I”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“After all, the skill of doing business in India lies in managing the system, not innovation or better products. The nexus between the rich and government servants is strong and you will often find one in the other’s living room in the evenings.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Developed countries depend very little on rain, as this dependence creates high fluctuations in the output, year after year. Apart”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“If we place an honest, though less wealthy person on a higher pedestal than a corrupt, yet rich individual, we will have contributed to India’s progress. And”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“The third trait is divisiveness. This is often taught at our home, particularly our family and relatives, where we learn about the differences amongst people. Our”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“The second trait is our numbness to injustice. It comes from our environment. We are exposed to corruption from our childhood. Almost”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“The first trait is servility. At school, our education system hammers out our individual voices and kills our natural creativity, turning us into servile, course-material slaves. Our”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“None of the recent technologies that have changed the world and created wealth—telecom, computers, aviation—have come out of India. Yet,”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Lakshmi is wealth accumulated through honest and fair means. Money can be stolen as well, but Lakshmi brings peace and happiness to the person who earns it.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“The system we have, in which there are a few kings and lots of common people, cannot generate wealth. It”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Sadly, corruption is so widespread that opposition parties have as many corrupt members as ruling parties. Hence, today, even if we want, we can’t vote in an honest government.”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Americans may have a hundred flaws, but they are extremely protective of their system. Anyone who tries to break it to come up in life using unfair means is punished severely. Schools”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants

“Values cannot be unpredictable; they are consistent, even in volatile times. Indian”
― Chetan Bhagat, What Young India Wants