as a world-citizen, i am quite elated about what sunita williams has achieved. her being of indian origin is a marker that is to be noted, and respected for what it is. as female minority astronaut achieving the success she did is remarkable. check out the story on rediff.
but indians rushing to confer an award reeks of a diplomatic coup and of people in high places that don’t understand the fundementals of nationalism. if ms. williams is preoccupied to respect the second best civilian award and the president of a nation, she doesn’t deserve to lay her hands on the metal she is receiving.
aside from questioning her qualifications for such a high honor, i’d have to doubt our own servile leanings. and really, how badly do we suck up to anything with white skin and accented english? sad day.
6 responses so far ↓
1 anish // Jul 7, 2008 at 4:33 am
That’s typical.. per rediff:
1. she was too busy to accept it earlier from the president herself - shows the real importance of the award for her. ‘you guys want to give me an award? yeah fine. whatever. Just leave it at my doorstep, I shall get it sometime convenient for me.’ So much for the ‘feeling honoured’ part.
2. On second thoughts, why should she attach any importance to the award? She is a US citizen, born there, and this is from a country her parents left behind for whatever reason and never went back to.
Pathetically from rediff, it reports ‘Dressed in a purple kurta and matching pleated printed salwar, she spoke briefly at the gathering and mingled freely with those present.’
dress reference okay. that ‘mingled freely’ irks me. why? was it expected that she will *not* mingle? Or does rediff feel that she came down from some pedestal to ‘ mingle freely’ with the ordinary desis who should be considering it a privilege?
I still have in my mind the Infosys National Anthem incident. That’s a place where the CEO considers the assumed wishes of some lowest level trainees in his company enough to bend common national anthem protocol - because the trainees where non-indian, and by all possibility white with an american accent? Wonder if the anthem would have been sung or not if the trainees were from, say, Kenya?
Working and mingling with a rather educated crowd of people from many nations, I have been more or less unaware of the atttitudes about /of desis in US. However, serving on the board of a desi majority condo complex in NJ has quite opened my eyes. I see now much clearly the prejudices, the desi complex, the ’servile’ attitude you mentioned, etc etc. I wonder if it is the location I live in, who knows.
2 anish // Jul 7, 2008 at 4:40 am
Oh before I forget - so there is some clause by which non-citizens can serve in US army and get some privileges for a greencard or citizenship, some kind of faster track. If it is a citizenship, it would be useful for sponsoring other relatives for greencards as well.
So some kid from Chandigarh goes and fights the iraq war for US. He was not apparently a US citizen, and had plenty family in India. His mom was in India. If the old report in rediff was to be believed, he wrote to his mom complaining about how he was ordered about by gora ncos and how he felt like their servants in chandigarh.
but he stayed on, not out of any patriotism for the US apparently, but for the immigration freebies.
The poor kid got killed in action. What was interesting was what happened next - per rediff, the relatives back in India where then petitioning to have one of the local Chandigarh streets named after him. Sorry for the kid, but *sigh*.
3 spandana // Jul 7, 2008 at 5:07 am
hear you dude. her parents leaving the country isn’t a problem. the tone and tenor of rediff isn’t an issue, they are simply reporting on the proceedings. but if it were op/ed, yes.
but the real problem is about an ingrained assumption that any/all foreigners (read:any race with fairer skin) somehow are inherently superior to us in their skills. it happens with hotels and restaurants. it happens on television, in academics, and most definitely on tourist locations.. worse yet, it happens with diplomacy - why would our prime minister meet with american foreign secretary? would Bush meet with pranab mukherjee?
but thankfully it DOESN’T happen at work in a software company
a related funny story : one of my colleagues (a chinese-american) was in india from US on work, and was visiting Mysore for the weekend. as usual, many street vendors were pestering him to buy this and that., and one time, when asked where he was from, he started speaking english with chinese accent, and declared he was from china. no one pestered him anymore. i guess we don’t suck up to the chinese yet.
4 sanjay // Aug 20, 2008 at 4:55 am
exactly! a wanna-be, sucker mentality continues. for, the avg middle-class indian sees (and is shown) only the outside glamor of america. for all practical purposes, second-gen indian-americans are americans, period. they may be of indian origin just as the white caucasian americans are of caucasian origin - btw, why do caucasian-americans need to call americans of other regional origins with prefix “indian”, “chinese” etc.
-american ? the original americans here are the natives who have been marginalized and herded into reservations! more of the rants - same vein - why do indian movies need to care all that much for the oscar? or, the vote-bank politics pandering to “minorities of all sorts” by trivializing and hurting the non-reservation categories. if all these minorities/reserved categories are indians too, why should they be any different “more equal” than the others? our motherland has long ways to go. of course, not that the fatherland has eradicated it’s own racism etc. somethings
will not change because they’re deeply ingrained in the minds of the people - true anywhere in the world.
5 spandana // Aug 20, 2008 at 10:26 am
i pretty much don’t care about how americans treat their people., shouldn’t be any of our business.
may be we desis look for external validation - may be we don’t respect our own people enough! tell me, isn’t it fashionable and generally ‘hip’ to praise english films and diss desi films? agreed, that there is tons of substandard junk that bollywood produces, but there is first-rate film making, in its own way, in Om Shanti Om.
it’s totally ridiculous the way supreme court got involved in oscar debate between Ekalaya and Dharm (both hindi films). having seen both, i can only nod my head at the farce and the sycophancy.
somewhere deep down, i wonder if the servile attitude is a british doing that is probably more damaging than taxing salt.
6 sanjay // Aug 21, 2008 at 1:16 am
@spandana - there is “mental colonization” too - e.g. the British had their successful “divide and conquer”, Macaulay Minute educational policy etc. Along the same lines, there are plenty of really bright/smart people who *choose* to be in India without going abroad. Until recently, these persons would probably be thought of as “not smart/successful” etc. There’s either a “moral” superiority or inferiority complex…
But anyway, I’ve found these writings by Dr. M. Vidyasagar enlightening http://www.atc.tcs.co.in/~sagar/
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