Ok so been a long time since i blogged last, mostly because I have been lazy but also because i have been running around a lot. So anyways, has it ever happened to you that you are outside your country (India) and some one who is not from India (and who has really the IQ of a frog) comes up to you and says - "hey so do you guys in India still eat on leaves?" What do you do with such a person? I actually start out by laughing at them, on their face. And then go on to have this debate with myself whether i should start by punching them in the eye or in the stomach. Not really! But I mean for the past few days I have been meeting people who are so ignorant of the minor details and are so stuck in time and still hold on to idiotic stereotypes about us. And what is funny is that when you try to correct them - they feel they are right and we are just bullshitting them. And this is especially true of the Europeans.
Actually I guess its us who are part of the problem. I mean of course we have problems in our country, but that doesn't mean a person from Romania should come to me and ask me how in the world does your country have enough money to buy fighter jets. My reply to him would have been that not only can we buy fighter jets, we make'em and sell them also and not to stop there, we can buy your country as well which is smaller than our smaller states.
I mean i think we should start being a bit more aggressive in asserting that we dont take things sitting down anymore, not that we did this before but we had a lot more to be humble about few years ago than we have today. People of our country are working hard to make a mark for ourselves in the global arena and also for our country. We are racing ahead in terms of economic growth and prosperity. I mean you all know how well we are doing, I dont want this post to turn out like another India Shining Ad but just want to ask people out there who are abroad to start standing up against any bullshit thrown at us by people who owe a lot of their economic development to the plunder their ancestors committed in our land and people who are ignorant enough to think that we still use elephants to get to work.
And even if we do use elephants to get to work, we create a lot less pollution and keep things clean, unlike those guys who are possibly single handedly responsible for making earth a worse place to live and are bringing us closer to the brink of environment doom. Call it the brown man's burden, but today not only do we have to work to reach the level of development reached by the G-7 or something but we have to do it in a clean and green way coz the white man messed things up. (Ok, i think this is way too much criticism - i respect my american collegues a lot and dont mean any disrespect - i am sorta echoing the thoughts of Thomas Friedman when he lectured on similar issues at Stanford).
1 comment:
I guess people actually find it hard to believe that someone from India can do better than them ..so they use the age old crap to mock and try to make themselves feel better.
Instead of punching them in the eye .. hack his comp :D ! Generally it hurts people more :) !
Post a Comment