India is a continent masquerading as a country. We are a de facto continent though we are de jure only a country.
Most of the world world has not figured this out or at least pretend so. Our population is more than that of Europe. It has as much arable land if not more than Europe. It has more languages than Europe. Its variety of lands and landforms make it one of the geographical diverse "country". The people and their natures, the cuisines are so varied that most foreigners who want to simplify things dont understand India much.
Even if the whole world is fooled or refuses to see India is a continent we should not be fooled and should base our geopolitical ad economic strategy of the de facto position of continent and negotiate with the world on these terms.
When we begin to thinking that we are de facto a country we begin to get many things seriously wrong.
Let me give an example.
When we compare tourist arrivals into a country say Spain which with a population of 46.4 million gets 75 millions tourists an year and then compare with India which gets about 10 million tourists a year we think Indian tourism is miniscule. But look closer and you will find this
Most of the tourists to Spain are from within Europe. The traffic count into Spain is like adding Tamilians and Kannadigas going to Tirupati as Tourist arrivals. If you consider for a moment Europe as country then arrivals from UK, France , Germany, Italy , Nederlands etc wouldn't count and would substantially reduce tourist arrivals into Spain to about 5-6 million a 90% + reduction if computed on a like to like basis.
Thus comparing foreign tourist arrivals into India is the most absurd comparison and making comments about state of Indian tourism on that basis is way off the mark. Indian tourism has many challenges and we need to work on them but we should not think our situation is abysmal. It is very healthy.
Now contrast Spain with Tirupati a small temple town with just one old temple which gets 30-40 million tourist arrivals a year. If Tirupati were a separate country, by the standards of the numerical illiterate elites it would rank very high on the list of tourist countries in the world. There are at least ten temples like this. If one temple can get ranked so high you can imagine how the rankings would be if we added Katra town - Vaishnodevi, Madurai etc as separate countries in this list.
Singapore gets 16m tourists a year. So we can safely say that Tirupati town is a bigger tourist attraction than Singapore.
Let me give one more explanation. Lets say the Eurocrats having a wet dream of Europe as a single nation get their dream fulfilled. Now they are one nation and so FIFA asks them to send one team to the World Cup and gives them money reserved for one team like say Argentina with a population of 43 million. Would it be fair way to share the revenue when Europe brings in say 800 million + audience. If FIFA share of TV rights was main source of revenue to nurture the game in Europe will a country share be enough to maintain the game in a continent ? When asked this way it is obvious that it isn't.
We should not forget this when BCCI negotiates its fair share of fees with ICC. Even if we are a de jure country we have to nurture the game on a continent basis because thats exactly what we are. Needless to say the TV rights have such high value only because we bring continent size audiences and continent sized value of TV audiences. Our share of ICC revenues thus cannot be country sized. If ICC indeed wants to take continent size audiences and pay us country sized amounts of TV rights then we should send them a team from a country sized area like say Mumbai which is bigger than Australia.
Most of the world world has not figured this out or at least pretend so. Our population is more than that of Europe. It has as much arable land if not more than Europe. It has more languages than Europe. Its variety of lands and landforms make it one of the geographical diverse "country". The people and their natures, the cuisines are so varied that most foreigners who want to simplify things dont understand India much.
Even if the whole world is fooled or refuses to see India is a continent we should not be fooled and should base our geopolitical ad economic strategy of the de facto position of continent and negotiate with the world on these terms.
When we begin to thinking that we are de facto a country we begin to get many things seriously wrong.
Let me give an example.
When we compare tourist arrivals into a country say Spain which with a population of 46.4 million gets 75 millions tourists an year and then compare with India which gets about 10 million tourists a year we think Indian tourism is miniscule. But look closer and you will find this
Most of the tourists to Spain are from within Europe. The traffic count into Spain is like adding Tamilians and Kannadigas going to Tirupati as Tourist arrivals. If you consider for a moment Europe as country then arrivals from UK, France , Germany, Italy , Nederlands etc wouldn't count and would substantially reduce tourist arrivals into Spain to about 5-6 million a 90% + reduction if computed on a like to like basis.
Thus comparing foreign tourist arrivals into India is the most absurd comparison and making comments about state of Indian tourism on that basis is way off the mark. Indian tourism has many challenges and we need to work on them but we should not think our situation is abysmal. It is very healthy.
Now contrast Spain with Tirupati a small temple town with just one old temple which gets 30-40 million tourist arrivals a year. If Tirupati were a separate country, by the standards of the numerical illiterate elites it would rank very high on the list of tourist countries in the world. There are at least ten temples like this. If one temple can get ranked so high you can imagine how the rankings would be if we added Katra town - Vaishnodevi, Madurai etc as separate countries in this list.
Singapore gets 16m tourists a year. So we can safely say that Tirupati town is a bigger tourist attraction than Singapore.
Let me give one more explanation. Lets say the Eurocrats having a wet dream of Europe as a single nation get their dream fulfilled. Now they are one nation and so FIFA asks them to send one team to the World Cup and gives them money reserved for one team like say Argentina with a population of 43 million. Would it be fair way to share the revenue when Europe brings in say 800 million + audience. If FIFA share of TV rights was main source of revenue to nurture the game in Europe will a country share be enough to maintain the game in a continent ? When asked this way it is obvious that it isn't.
We should not forget this when BCCI negotiates its fair share of fees with ICC. Even if we are a de jure country we have to nurture the game on a continent basis because thats exactly what we are. Needless to say the TV rights have such high value only because we bring continent size audiences and continent sized value of TV audiences. Our share of ICC revenues thus cannot be country sized. If ICC indeed wants to take continent size audiences and pay us country sized amounts of TV rights then we should send them a team from a country sized area like say Mumbai which is bigger than Australia.
No comments:
Post a Comment