<b>Veenu Sandhu:</b> Whither the Indian dream?

Instead of being a facilitator, each political formation has only tried to be an ATM for freebies

When he was 13, one day, while dreaming about his future, my father thought how wonderful it would be to wake up every morning and find a hundred-rupee note under the pillow. “And you know what,” he said to me, laughing, “39 years later, when I retired from the army, that’s about how much I got as pension.”

He retired a colonel in October 1992, a year after the country opened up its economy, on a pension of Rs 3,700 a month. That came to nearly Rs 125 a day, just a bit more than what he had once wished