Can we Indians, be natural leaders ?

Today is Holi - The festival of colors.  This year's holi was a little subdued one.  Not at all like the one that I had last year with my Orchid friends.  But still it was a colorful and fun filled holi.  Went to Rajpath Club for a rain dance too.

Today morning before leaving for Rajpath Club as usual, I was reading my English newspaper and there was an article from Greg Chapel on the sports page.  Greg Chapel was once the coach of Indian cricket team and was kicked out after a disastrous world cup campaign in 2007 in the West Indies.  Somehow he always keeps commenting critically on cricket in India and its national team.  This time it was after Indian cricket team's pathetic performance in the test and one day series in Australia.  He was mostly very critical about the leadership of the captain of Indian cricket team, M.S. Dhoni.  Well its a proven fact over the last few years since he became the captain of Indian team that India has won the World cup, the first T-20 World cup and has been the no. 1 test team for some time too.  A feat no other captain in the history of Indian cricket team had achieved.  But clearly in this series down under Dhoni was not the leader that he is known for.  

Greg Chapel while being critical of Dhoni's leadership, mentioned about the culture that's prevalent all over India since centuries, though its changing very rapidly.  Here's exactly what he mentioned.  

'Indian Culture Doesn't Breed Leaders'.  They lack leaders in the team because they are not trained to be leaders.  From an early age, their parents make all the decisions, their school teachers made their decisions, their cricket coaches make the decisions.  The culture of India is such that, if you put your head above the parapet someone will shoot it.  Knock your head off.  So they learn to keep their head down and not take responsibility.  The Poms (British) taught them really well to keep their head down.  For if someone was deemed to be responsible, they'd get punished.  So the Indians have learned to avoid responsibility.

Now this kept me wondering as its a kind of contradiction in how we Indians are today in the world.  Its very true that as young Indians our most important decisions in academics and in life like marriage are taken by parents or with the help of parents.  Financially we depend totally on our parents till our early twenties.  So how are we as young Indians going to develop the independent way of thinking.  On a very conservative thought, see how a nation of more than one billion people are being governed by the ruling congress party whose president is an Italian lady.  The entire ruling party has been exposed of high levels of corruption and its leaders seem to have lost their abilities to steer this huge nation to being a super power.  At present there seems no party with a strong leader who can lead the nation.  

Contrary to what Greg Chapel has mentioned look at the big corporate's in the world right now.  The CEO's of many of them are Indians brought up in India.  Like Citibank and Pepsi.  This statement by Greg Chapel is surely not something that can be ignored.  It surely has some truth in it.  That's what I believe at the moment.  

But surely these things are changing now a days very rapidly as lots of young people are becoming more and more independent, taking their own decisions for their careers and for many other life changing decisions.  But who knows how long it'll take or will it ever happen that this great land will once again breed leaders like it used to during the British rule or before that.

I believe that there are very few people born with leadership traits.  But there are lot of people out there in this country who have in them to be some kind of leaders in their life.  They need to be groomed and given the freedom to develop the confidence in them to lead people around them in some way or the other.  I firmly believe that today this country has so many complex problems that in each and every aspect of development and growth people who can lead are needed.  And unless and until leadership qualities of young ones are recognized and groomed, we cannot have true leaders.  I guess its time parents and teachers and every individual will have to understand this and start to look beyond the parenting ways being there since generations.