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NEW DELHI -- It is a question that journalists in India are often asked without affection. Dont you have anything good to say? A positive story, a happy story?
The rebuke, when it is an e-mail or an online comment in response to an unflattering article about India, is sometimes accompanied by abuses or a general description of the journalists mother. And it is particularly passionate when it comes from the expatriate Indian whose expletives are more contemporary.
Nobody loves India like the Indian who does not live here anymore. When they were in India, they just had to emerge from their house, go onto the road, and the whole nation would assemble itself into an unambiguous pyramid of social hierarchy with them somewhere at the top. Respect came with the lottery of birth.
But in the First World, it is not so easy. This, and the natural love for home, make the expatriate so patriotic that he or she finds it hard to tolerate the often embarrassing portrayal of the nation, especially in the news media outside the country.
Among the nonresident Indians, and also the Indians who live here, there is a common view that what the Western news media want to tell their readers about India is stories that involve cows, poverty, honor killings and other exotic, depressing or weird things. But is it possible to tell a happy Indian story, an honest, complete story, that would fill Indians with pride?
Some Indian newspapers have consciously tried to make Indians feel good about themselves. So there are frequent stories about India as an emerging superpower, and India as a cultural force whose curry and music apparently have mesmerized the world, and about how alpha-male Indian companies are taking over foreign corporations.
There are commercial rewards for carrying such good news. About three years ago, the shrewd promoter of an Indian publication, a deep philosopher of sorts, explained this when he walked into an editorial meeting and smiled with sympathy at the journalists.
I know what you want, he said, You journalists want to bite. You want to write depressing stories. But you know what the advertiser wants. The advertiser wants to advertise on a happy page. Write about good things, happy things.
He then said that if Indian journalists were really desperate to be negative, they were free to criticize foreigners. Attack Greece or something.
It is not as if Indians have not had good reasons to puff their chests in recent times. But, sometimes what makes a country proud is actually a poignant indicator of how far behind it lags. For instance, when a countrys tennis doubles players are national celebrities, as they are in India, you know that there is something wrong with its general sport talent.
India did win the cricket World Cup, though, this year, probably the happiest Indian story since 1983, when it last won the Cup. Indians would argue that there are happy stories beyond cricket.
For instance, the figure 8 percent has its own triumphant character in India. It is probably the single most important source of joyous Indian stories. It is the approximate rate at which the Indian economy is growing and expected to grow. But is it an achievement?
Writing last year in The New Yorker, Steve Coll described a country whose number of poor people had fallen by almost half between 1999 and 2008, from 30 percent of the population to about 17 percent.
This extraordinary change, a result of rapid economic growth and remittances, he wrote, is not often discussed on American cable-news outlets.
He then went on to say that in 2005, the nation had attained an economic growth of 8 percent annually, and the economy has continued to expand, if more slowly, even since 2008.
It would be reasonable for Indians to think that Mr. Coll was talking about them, but he was describing Pakistan.
That Pakistan shares the same economic pattern as India points to a truth Indians may not want to easily accept: that the economic progress of India, as in most of the third world, is chiefly the consequence of the wealth of affluent countries successfully seeking markets that are so poor that they have the space to expand.
So is 8 percent as happy a story as it made out to be? It would be parsimonious not to grant India credit for making crucial policy decisions, which have resulted in a new, prosperous middle class. But the happy story of its economic growth is never complete without the grim stories of major scams, a dangerously widening gap between rich and poor and the displacement of small farmers, who are rising in revolt in several parts of the country.
Indias status as a software giant has long been a happy story. But it is an exaggeration. India is a not a software giant. In your computer, there is probably not a single piece of software whose license is held by an Indian company.
What India is, in reality, is a giant back office. There was a time when Indian software companies confidently stated that there were so many talented educated Indians available to them that they would be able to swiftly move up the value chain. That was the refrain.
But over the years, it has become evident that beneath the topsoil, Indian talent does not run deep. Hundreds of thousands of graduates are unemployable as they pass out of substandard institutions. And many of them who have begun to work in call centers cannot be trained beyond a point because their fundamentals are weak. For instance, they have never attended an English-language school.
A senior human resources executive with a call center in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi, said with a chuckle: The swanky office is to impress the foreign client. Some of our people who work inside, I know they would be happy in a cowshed.
Not surprisingly, thousands of kilometers away in the English city of Norwich, when a literary agent calls directory service for directions to a restaurant, she covers the phone and complains to a friend, with an expletive: Im connected to an Indian call center.
There are happy Indian stories. As long as they are not fully told.
Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel Serious Men.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 30, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: Searching for Something Good to Say About India.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/w...=1&sq=manu joseph&st=cse&scp=3&pagewanted=all
The rebuke, when it is an e-mail or an online comment in response to an unflattering article about India, is sometimes accompanied by abuses or a general description of the journalists mother. And it is particularly passionate when it comes from the expatriate Indian whose expletives are more contemporary.
Nobody loves India like the Indian who does not live here anymore. When they were in India, they just had to emerge from their house, go onto the road, and the whole nation would assemble itself into an unambiguous pyramid of social hierarchy with them somewhere at the top. Respect came with the lottery of birth.
But in the First World, it is not so easy. This, and the natural love for home, make the expatriate so patriotic that he or she finds it hard to tolerate the often embarrassing portrayal of the nation, especially in the news media outside the country.
Among the nonresident Indians, and also the Indians who live here, there is a common view that what the Western news media want to tell their readers about India is stories that involve cows, poverty, honor killings and other exotic, depressing or weird things. But is it possible to tell a happy Indian story, an honest, complete story, that would fill Indians with pride?
Some Indian newspapers have consciously tried to make Indians feel good about themselves. So there are frequent stories about India as an emerging superpower, and India as a cultural force whose curry and music apparently have mesmerized the world, and about how alpha-male Indian companies are taking over foreign corporations.
There are commercial rewards for carrying such good news. About three years ago, the shrewd promoter of an Indian publication, a deep philosopher of sorts, explained this when he walked into an editorial meeting and smiled with sympathy at the journalists.
I know what you want, he said, You journalists want to bite. You want to write depressing stories. But you know what the advertiser wants. The advertiser wants to advertise on a happy page. Write about good things, happy things.
He then said that if Indian journalists were really desperate to be negative, they were free to criticize foreigners. Attack Greece or something.
It is not as if Indians have not had good reasons to puff their chests in recent times. But, sometimes what makes a country proud is actually a poignant indicator of how far behind it lags. For instance, when a countrys tennis doubles players are national celebrities, as they are in India, you know that there is something wrong with its general sport talent.
India did win the cricket World Cup, though, this year, probably the happiest Indian story since 1983, when it last won the Cup. Indians would argue that there are happy stories beyond cricket.
For instance, the figure 8 percent has its own triumphant character in India. It is probably the single most important source of joyous Indian stories. It is the approximate rate at which the Indian economy is growing and expected to grow. But is it an achievement?
Writing last year in The New Yorker, Steve Coll described a country whose number of poor people had fallen by almost half between 1999 and 2008, from 30 percent of the population to about 17 percent.
This extraordinary change, a result of rapid economic growth and remittances, he wrote, is not often discussed on American cable-news outlets.
He then went on to say that in 2005, the nation had attained an economic growth of 8 percent annually, and the economy has continued to expand, if more slowly, even since 2008.
It would be reasonable for Indians to think that Mr. Coll was talking about them, but he was describing Pakistan.
That Pakistan shares the same economic pattern as India points to a truth Indians may not want to easily accept: that the economic progress of India, as in most of the third world, is chiefly the consequence of the wealth of affluent countries successfully seeking markets that are so poor that they have the space to expand.So is 8 percent as happy a story as it made out to be? It would be parsimonious not to grant India credit for making crucial policy decisions, which have resulted in a new, prosperous middle class. But the happy story of its economic growth is never complete without the grim stories of major scams, a dangerously widening gap between rich and poor and the displacement of small farmers, who are rising in revolt in several parts of the country.
Indias status as a software giant has long been a happy story. But it is an exaggeration. India is a not a software giant. In your computer, there is probably not a single piece of software whose license is held by an Indian company.
What India is, in reality, is a giant back office. There was a time when Indian software companies confidently stated that there were so many talented educated Indians available to them that they would be able to swiftly move up the value chain. That was the refrain.
But over the years, it has become evident that beneath the topsoil, Indian talent does not run deep. Hundreds of thousands of graduates are unemployable as they pass out of substandard institutions. And many of them who have begun to work in call centers cannot be trained beyond a point because their fundamentals are weak. For instance, they have never attended an English-language school.
A senior human resources executive with a call center in Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi, said with a chuckle: The swanky office is to impress the foreign client. Some of our people who work inside, I know they would be happy in a cowshed.
Not surprisingly, thousands of kilometers away in the English city of Norwich, when a literary agent calls directory service for directions to a restaurant, she covers the phone and complains to a friend, with an expletive: Im connected to an Indian call center.
There are happy Indian stories. As long as they are not fully told.
Manu Joseph is editor of the Indian newsweekly Open and author of the novel Serious Men.
A version of this article appeared in print on June 30, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune with the headline: Searching for Something Good to Say About India.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/w...=1&sq=manu joseph&st=cse&scp=3&pagewanted=all
