Unlikely Heroes
Sat, 2007-01-13 15:37 — heartcrossings
I have been reading The World Is Flat the last few days. Of the many sound bites that pepper the book, the one that will stay with me is on page 256 where Friedman talks about how young people in China hang from the rafters and scalp tickets just to hear Bill Gates speak. He says "In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears - and that is our problem"
Elsewhere he talks about how at the height of the cold war, most average 11 year olds in America dreamt of being an engineer. Today kids that age are far less likely to see engineering as a career choice. He talks about the role of parenting in enabling future generations to take on the world flattening forces of globalization - about how they need to wean kids from the many distractions of Game Boys, TV, iPods and the like and get them to work hard.
Being that there is no contest against Sputniks or a space race to be won, rallying the masses around the cause of challenged national pride is that much harder. Maybe the movement should be at the grass roots level, at dinner tables where parents do their bit to make celebrities out of Sergey Brin, Vinod Dham and Bill Gates instead of Britney Spears.
From my vantage point in American Hicksville, where J is the only non-white person in her kindergarten class, I can tell that the current dinner table discourse in the average all American family is not nearly as sophisticated. It makes Dylan tell J "I don’t play with brown skinned people". When she told me, I wondered for a minute if I had time traveled to the 60s or even earlier - I thought the sentiment was rather quaint in this day and age. I had to stop laughing before I could even begin to explain anything to J.
Clearly, that family has not heard about quiet crisis in America that Friedman is talking about.
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Comments
Balance
And if I may ask, what makes the genre of rakhi sawant less important than the genre of Bill gates?
Bill gates promotes tech, sawant promotes sexuality. There is a place for both - Man does not live by bread alone, right?
The importance of icons and symbols of sexuality must not be placed beneath the importance of technology.
It is balance that must be maintained. Excess/lack of tech is as bad excess/lack of sexuality/material-pleasure. When one starts denying one, it can create an unhealthy obsession with the object that is being denied. Or it can create repression, which is even more fundamentally damaging.
Consider how our ancestors placed Artha-moksha-kama side by side and the significance of this equation.
Long live bill gates - long live sri sri ravi shankar - long live rakhi sawant
Capn Nemo
I would tend to agree with your characterization of Indian nerdsville though having been a little out of touch the past few years I hesitate to comment on what I am not experiencing in person. Being a kid in today’s world is very tough business no matter where that kid is growing up.
HC...
What I can see from my vantage point of Indian nerdsville, Americans need not fear any competition from Indian kids… because even these kids are growing up to be moronic, fed on daily doses of television and visions of skimpily clad Britney Spears or Rakhee Sawant doing all those delicious things and pokemon and ipod shuffles and most importantly the daily newspapers like Times of India which peddles titillation on its 3rd page… I personally know some kids who are about 13 and addicted to cyberporn… they are in 12th and preparing for IIT JEE [what a laugh] and they dont know how a fountain pen works or what is the difference between a pivot and a fulcrum… I know some people would argue that it’s the marks in exams that counts and not whether the kids know any concepts… but that is where the competence comes in and I guess Indian kids are growing up unable compete with anyone… They dont know Bill Gates either, they know SRK and all the abbreviations of SRK’s last 500 movies or whatever numb-er he has acted in, hell they may even know the diameter of Bipasha or Mallika’s navel…
Tell those kids in hicksville to relax and grow up without fear of Indian kids, they can keep their Britney Spears, we have our Rakhee Sawants