I take offense!

I was reading about Fareed Zakaria on Wikipedia this morning, and then moved on to his web-site (www.fareedzakaria.com ) to read about the books written by him and then on to the reviews about his new book “The Post-American World” on Barnes and Noble and Amazon. I haven’t read the book, but after reading one of the reviews, I was furious about the stupid views this person has of India and the way he was stating them as if they were a known fact or something. I understand that every country has its flaws and so does mine, but being an Indian, I also take pride in my country and will not tolerate offensive statements about it; especially if they are totally rubbish. To give you a taste of what made me so pissed off, here’s part of the review from Amazon

“The most outlandish assumption made by the book is that the US will no longer be a dominant force in world politics, being replaced by India and China. India? With it's delapidated airports, crumbling roads, vast slums and impoverished villages. The India with containing several Nigerias within it? India, with 300 million people living on less than one dollar per day? India, home to 40% of the world's poor and the country with the second highest population of HIV-positive people? That India is going to be the country to take over the world? Huh? India, whose population goes down to a river to bathe? Yea, right, they are going to take over the world. Give me a break!

All you need to know about the author's agenda is that he is from India. That is why he proposes that India will take over the world.”


Now you get it? How can one not feel offensive about this crap? The reviewer is someone from Texas, who has this preconceived pre-independence view of a developing post-independence 21st century India. I also feel sorry for the illiterate reviewer because I have a feeling that this person has never left Texas or traveled abroad to either India or China for that matter. Either way, my response to the above review is

“Dilapidated airports of India? I agree that the airports in India are not the best, but based on a 2008 TripAdvisor survey (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/738684/Heathrow-voted-worlds-least-favourite-airport.html ), the two of the world’s least favorite airports in terms of ease of navigation, cleanliness of their restrooms and quality of their parking facilities were London’s Heathrow and Chicago’s O’Hare. Go figure! And India does not have the best roads in the world and there are still some villages that survive with dirt roads, but at least we are moving forward from no roads to roads. Do you know that American Society of Civil Engineers gave the roads in US a grade of D minus (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/us/politics/28projects.html?ref=us )? How’s that for some statistics? And did you know that based on the CIA world fact book statistics (https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2003rank.html ) both Nigeria and India had a higher GDP – real growth rate % in 2008 than US, which was ranked at 179 just below Finland, Mexico and Belgium?”

I can go on and on with these numbers and grades, but the point is it’s very easy to demean a country and its people by portraying just its flaws but if you take historic markers in to context you get a better picture of where it was 10 years ago and where it is today. So let’s not get in to this nasty game of finger pointing because it only exposes the shortcomings of our respective countries. That said, I do take offense, and will always take offense whenever anybody demeans my country by stating false information.