Manu and I both respect the Economist tremendously. It was a great moment when we decided that if we love this magazine so much, we must share it with the students. And it has been Manu's dauntless energy that has made the Economist sessions a powerful reality.In a recent post, Manu wrote about the Economist's "anti-India" stance. I have a somewhat different view on the biases of the Economist with respect to India. To my mind, the slant may indeed be patronizing but it's not really anti-India.
I say that the Economist is not anti-India because India has much more coverage in it than in similar American publications. I first went to the US in 1993 and was shocked that while the Indian papers imagined that India sat at the world's top table with Russia and the US and China, no US paper appeared to think that India was at all relevant. India just never came up in class business discussions, on any serious television shows, in any geopolitical analysis; India was merely a land of snake charmers and elephants and tie-and-dye dresses and Osho. It was common for people I met to think that the language of India was Hindu.
So at a time when no one in the US would mention China and India in the same breath, the Economist dared to hope that one day India would be as important at China and offered advice, encouragement and criticism, however patronizing.
It has been a long road from then till today. When India's GDP growth briefly matched China's a few months ago, I exulted although there is a lot more to be done (just look around you).
Anyway, let me end with a few relevant remarks, a few minor ones and a few of great consequence:
- First, Britain will always have a strange relationship with its colonies (the US included, though the American Revolution was so long ago!) just as Russia will always have a strange relationship with its colonies.
- Second, we in India have gotten to where we are NOT by being self-congratulatory, self-righteous and insular (we were that way for decades) BUT by opening up to the world and facing the competition with confidence.
- Third, we are going to have to carve a delicate balance between our spirituality (Osho) and our urge for progress (Nano) . As Dr. John DeMarteau observed during the Global MDP from a very American viewpoint, they are both important.
- Fourth, it's all right to disagree without being disagreeable. :-)
7 comments:
Hi sir, but as we have seen from last 14 months economist has always shown slum & dirty areas of India in pictures. They represent india as poorest country of the world, hardly any positive picture till now. what are your views on this?
One recent article on India was a neutral/positive one on Gayatri Devi. An article on Latin America talked considerably of the Indian investments there. Some issues earlier, there was an article on how India was evolving cheap techniques in surgery that many educated Indians may not have known about.
Yet there may be an element of truth in what you say. It's a human trait to simplify and stereotype - just as we in India often stereotype, say, the USA as a country of McDonald's and Hollywood. The US is also the country of the Miranda Law and other such commitments to domestic human rights, almost zero domestic state (police) torture as compared to India, great wealth and almost zero poverty, a great equality of opportunity even now, fabulous public safety services, strong environmental laws, a tremendous work ethic, a deep engineering culture, a sacrifice of millions of lives in WWII, and so on. I also feel that most of what the US did wrong geo-politically after WWII was from an exaggerated sense of being "besieged" and seeing enemies everywhere - that we all must guard against.
fortunately, i have always presented a balanced view to my students always as far as US is concerned. Note my standard comment - "we need to learn the value of being law-abiding from the Americans".
Respected sir, apart from content economist has helped me in the transformation of my thought process.In the initial days it was difficult to adapt this newspaper.But actually these are only the bottlenecks created by our mind.If human beings can delete these 2 words viz'difficult & easy'from their dictionary then life will become quiet happy.What do you think?
Proton Richa Rai
sir this economist session really work a lot in our skills and we r sure that we can stand in front of anyone nd talk about the world either in politics or in corporate now its become our habit to read economist not jst for the quiz but it gives us a lot strength and we can also say that we know whats going globally. thanks for the economist we ill sure read the economisteven after our MBA.
Shasha, you write in very long sentences without full stops. And I thought perhaps the Shift key on your keyboard was jammed until I saw "MBA". :-)
But I'm glad you are finding the Economist useful. Keep writing here as well.
Richa, I think you mean "quite happy".
I'm glad you were able to adjust to the Economist. It's not an easy magazine to read.
But let's preserve the words "difficult" and "easy". :-) Just remember that all words - "difficult", "easy", "good", "bad", "black", "white", "young", "old" - are mere approximations. Or at least most are. Yet they're still useful.
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