The Children of India

(This is a rant.) 

A couple of incidents of killings  of Indian students in America later, the expected has happened. A screaming headline on DNA asks:

Are Our Children Safe in the USA? 

Excuse me, but I don’t recall being adopted by the idiot who wrote this article. Could this moron worry about himself–why was he born without a brain for example–then declare the entire student population in India as ”our children”’. 

Anyways, if the 1.2 billion good people in India have adopted me, could you please send in a couple of hundred bucks? And buy me a ipod? There is plenty more but that’s a start.

There are 2,50,000 Indians studying in the United States at any given point of time, say estimates. Since April 2007, eight of them have been killed in separate incidents. That’s one in 31,250, or about 0.0032 per cent.

 

and

 Goswami is particularly worried about campus shootings, which seem to happen with frightening regularity and claimed 42 lives last year

 

 

This is a perfect example of spinning the statistics to advance your agenda. How many campus shootings happened last year? Two. That is not quite scary enough in a country with over 3800 college campuses. So mention the number of causalities without ever bothering to specify that 33 of them died in a single incident. Even in the case of death of Indian students, the article does a great job of hiding the facts by dismissing their deaths in ”various incidents” without bothering to specify exactly how many died due to homicide. Is the society to be blamed because people took a spin and crashed into a tree?  I did some quick googling, and as far as I can see, ”only” four Indian students have died in violent incidents in America in the last one year. (Including the one who died in the Virginia Tech tragedy.)

She attributes such incidents to a “dysfunctional society” and says she doesn’t want her son to be part of it. “He will learn in the US but earn in India.”

I read it once and then I read it again. Can you freaking believe it? ‘The ”dysfunctional society” is good enough for her son to learn from but apparently, not quite good enough to stay back and be ruined by it. And looking at the tenor of her statements, one would be forgiven for thinking that U.S of A actually kidnapped his son! It would be easy enough to dismiss it as fears of paranoid parents but it is not: It is broadly representative of what many Indians thinks about their society; their civilization. That despite the rampant corruption, crumbling infrastructure and abominable poverty, we are superior while the rest of the world with their material advancements lag behind. This nonsense has played no small role in keeping India poor; a country which can survive by hubris only never felt the need to think before the shit hit the fan. And people can be so dismissive of others ( though they want to derive advantage from them!) simply infuriates me. I want to shake this woman up and ask: what t fug explains your sense of superiority? 

And then it gets better. (Believe it or not!)

 Meanwhile, parents who plan to send their children abroad later this year are keeping their fingers crossed. “We are watching the situation,” says Shashank Haridas, whose daughter is to fly to the US for post-graduate studies. “If the situation worsens, we might have to reconsider the plan.”

 

You know, I am very curious about Mr Haridas’s lifestyle. What does he do when he wakes up? Drink the morning coffee, read the morning newspaper, make small talk with his wife and then what? Does he start doping from 7 in the morning it self? To repeat the oldest cliche in the game, I would very much like to have what he is smoking. 

Because we are not talking about Iraq or Afghanistan here. Situation worsen? WTF? And ”watching the situation? Please use approrpriate terminology: why not say we are monitoring the situation. How? Private agents scrounging the campusses of American universities looking for danger? Urgent confabulations with the White House? Whew!

And you know the funniest thing? I have never met an Indian female student in America who has claimed that she does not feel safer here. For reasons we know all too well. I wonder if Mr Haridas has actually bothered to talk to his daughter or like most Indian parents, he already knows!  

”Rant over” 

(via)