Let me go with the top 10 things that we need. Now, these may not seem important to you but I think these are basic things that you need to know. I’m not listing them in any order

#1 Know your president, prime-minister, CM and MLA - Alia Bhatt made a blunder but handled it well and over time changed things but this meme never got old. These are basic awareness facts that you simply cannot avoid learning.

#2 Emergency numbers - If you take America, everyone in the world knows that calling 911 will help you report an emergency. The same awareness level is not present in India. 112 adopted as India's all-in-one emergency number: Things you should know about emergency numbers in India - link to common emergency numbers

#3 Weddings are way important - Weddings are an issue of pride and a thriving industry in the country. What we forget is how much we waste in this. Also, we are the largest commercial users of gold in the world. We spend most of our weddings. Sometimes we spend more on weddings than housing.

#4 We are secular, tolerant and not insane - Don’t believe the media. They love capturing the exceptions and showing them on the front page as they sell better than the fact that everything is good. Don’t believe that. India is plenty secular, tolerant and friendly.

#5 Foreign Craze - British people treated us as slaves and oppressed us yet we are obsessed with copying them. We forgot our roots. We stopped using charcoal, neem, and cloves for brushing teeth. Our toothpaste have the same. Our own products are patented by other countries and sold back to us at high prices.

#6 Ironies in India - Religion, politicians, actors, states divide us. Terrorism and natural disasters unite us. We are not without ironies. For more, Venkat Raman's answer to What are the biggest ironies in India?

#7 Money Matters - If you have money and the right connections, you can get away with anything. You may even get a great driver who will take the blame and go to jail for you. You can commit a fraud, do a scam and then walk out like you are a saint. You can even become a chief minister of a state with zero qualification. Let me stop here. I don’t want to get into trouble.

#8 Engineering is a requirement, not a choice - We are crazy about engineering. That is partly what got us to be a huge outsourcing hub but are we having too many engineers? Everyone wants to be engineers but nobody really understands what that demands. We are creating a large number of unemployable people.

#9 Agriculture is Dying - We are importing pulses from Mozambique, farmer suicides don’t seem to be falling and we are moving more and more towards digitalization. It is safe enough to see that the backbone of our country is failing.

#10 We have bad/biased media - Media raises an issue and milks it until TRP is still high and then forgets it. Aarushi murder, Sheena bora case and even rapes are mere TRP spinning issues for the media. Once the heat is down they forget it. The other extreme is the thing like the Rohtak sisters. Our media is just shameless.

-  Venkat Raman