The Idea of progress : In which way is India a country in progress ?

The Idea of progress

I’m going to talk about the notion « The idea of progress ». How can we describe this notion ? We live in a world that is constantly changing wether in its technology or in its culture. Therefore it is possible today to choose by ourselves to do things that we think would be good for our life for example our professional career or where even we want to live in the future thanks to a really globalized world. But in some case « progress » can become a subject of debate. I studied with my school three documents about this notion. The first one is called « Another Girl » which is an extract of the novel Secret Daughter, by Somaya Gowda, the second one is Changing India from the novel « Farewell to an Indian I Hardly Knew » by Giridharadas, the last one is short bigraphy of Indira Gandhi, a Prime Minister in the sixties. I’m going to focus my study on India, a country in developpement which I think has beyond capacities to become a figure of progress.

In which way is India a country in progress ? First of all, we can say that the way of life in a lot of countries really changed over the past decades. While China is already a leader in economy but also progressively in its culture, India is also making huge progresses. We can see in the document Changing India, how the country has evolved over the past few years. The narrator in the book is a girl whose parents are Indian and moved to America, where she was born. America not like India before, is a very open-minded country where all dreams seem to come true. That’s why so many people left India to go to America in the past century. However, the girl from the novel who moved to India in her adult years says that it’s a completely new country with a new mentality : girls become breadwinners, more and more children that are even from the lower class are getting into school to get a diploma and even some religion and cultural habits are changing : Indians start eating meat if they feel like to and not by caste. Therefore, India has become a very popular country to visit but also to go and study abroad for example. Even BBC made a documentary called « The Great Indian Dream ». People from this country have no longer need to go an Western country to succeed because they now believe in their country’s power and abilities to become a developed, successful, prospere country.

However, they are still some issues remaining including gender acceptation. In fact, mostly in smaller villages and cities, girls are considered as useless because they can’t look after the family’s name. They say girls are also unreliable for the parents when they get old. That’s why India is becoming a male dominated-society. In the document Another girl, we can see how the dad is excited for the baby his wife is giving birth to, thinking that it’s a boy. He says : « Where is my little prince ? Come, come… let me see him ! » but it’s actually a girl. Even if sex-selective abortion is strictly forbidden, the number baby girls is still very low and a few of the citizens would tell what is actually happening to the new baby girls. We saw that India has changed a lot in their mentalities but it’s very interesting to see how a lot of them still considere girls as powerless because so many women in the world are iconic figures. For example in India, Indira Gandhi was the Prime

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